The summary tries to paint this study bad because it "downsides" the amount of filesharers
I presume by "downsides" you mean "reduces"? Well the summary says "That 11.6% was adjusted upwards to 16.3% 'to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it.'" So they actually UPPED the number of filesharers. This is objection #1 to "good research":
1. You do a survey to objectively measure the support of your hypothesis
2. The survey of a tiny sample indicates that filesharers are a pretty low percentage
3. You "adjust" this number -- otherwise known as "fudging the data" -- to better reflect your own hypothesis.
The same tactics in any scientific endeavor would get your papers retracted, your funding canceled, some sort of disciplinary action initiated, etc.
The second objection, and this applies to other studies too that try to make grand claims from small samples, is that it's A SMALL SAMPLE. For your survey to be representative, your sample has to be representative. It's also difficult to choose people independently at random, and without that assumption, all your basic statistics fall apart. Perhaps they went through a list of BT subscribers and pulled names at random -- but what if downloaders are overrepresented amongst BT subscribers? What if they only polled home internet users, but then used the "total number of internet users" -- which includes corporate subscribers -- to come up with their 11mil number? There are other possible, non-numerical issues too. What if the respondents confused downloading from bittorent with downloading from iTunes?
If you want many other examples of "bad science", read Ben Goldacre's blog
I was just about to suggest the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.
That, and the view of the city from Adler Planetarium is one of the two best views of Lake Michigan and Chicago (the other being from the Signature Lounge on the 95th floor of the John Hancock Tower). You can park in the Field's Museum Lot, and then stroll down to Adler Planetarium, where you can literally sit on the perch along Lake Michigan and see the entire coast and skyline of Chicago curving around the horizon. It's really beautiful; plus points for dawn and sunset.
This format won't add anything new to the software world, it's just a new complication. There's absolutely nothing new or exciting about this format, we can get the same effect with folders and multiple files -- or just cramming a few files together and splitting them apart when needed.
While I agree in principle with what you say, it's actually much easier than that. My crappy Winamp will auto-tag songs based on a lossy hash, grab the album cover art from some mysterious server, and display some sort of music website with the latest news about the artist, etc. You can install a free plugin that downloads the lyrics to the song, if you want, or you could get off your lazy ass and just Google it.
What these people don't seem to understand about albums is that they were a very physical thing (yes, past tense). You touched it on the shelf at the record store, turned it over to see if you knew any of the songs, then had a little (or big for vinyl) booklet to browse too.
When you put the album in your music playing device, you made a conscious decision to listen to at least a few songs from it. Nobody switched out albums like crazy playing one song after the other. Any sort of "digital album" will necessarily have that functionality, negating the whole album concept. Those who would listen to all the songs would just buy them individually, and those who would not won't.
Unless, they intend on killing the single by forcing albums down our throat. Helllooo, bittorrent...
Why not wait another day before submitting the improvement? All they did now was giving the other team one day to respond, and if they succeed, I doubt they will be able to submit yet another improvement. So why not simply wait until an hour or so before the deadline, or am I missing something about the rules, e.g. any submitted improvements prolong the deadline by one day?
For the grand prize, there was a final 30-day countdown from the time the first entry that achieved greater than 10% was received, which was a month ago. So it seems like this will indeed come down to an ebay-like sniping situation in the last few hours.
I wouldn't feel too sorry for BellKor/KorBell though -- they've got many, many best paper awards at conferences and a huge degree of publicity out of the whole endeavor. In fact, in KDD 2009, they detailed most of the methods that most likely got them to the top -- i.e. they incorporated the fact that tastes and preferences drift over time. Simple, in retrospect of course. If you have an ACM subscription, you can read the 2009 paper here.
Plus, since they work for AT&T/Yahoo Research, I remember Yehuda Koren stating that the money wouldn't have gone to them anyway -- possibly a large bonus, but I think they're entitled to that anyway. So I wouldn't feel too sorry for them.
the unlawful detentions without trial, the wire-taps, the cronyism, the pointless foreign warmongering & gunboat diplomacy, the war on drugs, the denial of gay rights, the staged Q&A sessions, etc. etc. etc.... all chug along with as much momentum as ever.
That's the funny thing about "momentum"...it takes quite a while to overcome. Or did you really expect that he would change each and every thing you're complaining about overnight. It's been less than half a year, of a very very bad year, give the man a break. I'm not saying he's going to reverse the "momentum" on everything you mentioned, but really (and realistically) would you rather have mccain in there?
If you are good with technology, why stick around in a country where half of households don't even have toilets?
Because it doesn't really matter as long as *your* house has one. Metaphorically speaking, if you have the option of making $40k in India -- which goes a LONG way -- and staying at home, living like a king, keeping your social support system, etc. vs. migrating to the states and starting anew for $80k., then a lot of perfectly rational and obscenely talented people will choose to stay there. Money really isn't everything.
While Bozeman's government's actions aren't kosher, can we really defend against it? Records are records, and if they decide that they absolutely must have it for such and such, it's not something you can completely prevent
This is nothing but the typical "if you don't have anything to hide, then you should be OK giving up your information" defense, slightly rephrased. Please read Daniel Solove's excellent evisceration of this argument here in PDF, and stop accepting the blanket "interests of national security" line without questioning on a case-by-case basis if it is reasonable.
Someone needs to create a privacy argument checklist for/. like the "why your spam solution won't work" checklist.
So again, what was Linux hoping to achieve by dropping old "obsolete" OSS in favor of increasingly complex solutions?
As far as Ubuntu is concerned, its the same inane neophyte behavior that "obsoleted" Xmms and BMPx in Jaunty in favor of the iTunes wannabe Amarok, which I find much less stable and cumbersome to use. There was absolutely nothing wrong with Xmms as a Winamp-style media player that was quick, efficient and could handle Internet radio and almost all the popular DRM-free formats, yet it was automatically removed with other "obsolete" software. Yes, I can compile it again from source, but it just seems a bit obnoxious. BMPx was another simple media player that was quite nice, albeit with the occassional bug, and it too has been "obsoleted".
For all the evangelism of the Ubuntu community, why are we being driven towards solutions that mimic the proprietary soup-du-jour (iTunes in this case)?
I don't see the point of very small cars like this. If I don't need to carry anything I will ride my bike. If I do then I use my big, inefficient van. A small car wouldn't be much use to me because it can't carry much.
Yes, it certainly is a total piece of crap because it doesn't suit your lifestyle.
Many countries are full of tiny cars, where they serve as the primary (and inexpensive) vehicle for many people, some of who either can't afford a full-size car or are moving up from scooters and motorcycles. It might sound strange to you, but there are many countries where automobiles are not a religion, and paying a fixed lump sum a month to own a car is an attractive option. Plus, if you've ever seen the tiny winding streets of many European cities, you'll realize that this car isn't all that impractical in the right setting.
Of course, forget about it in the US, except maybe in Oregon.
In principle, i.e. in theory, sure, but in reality? There are too many constantly changing variables to calculate. Unless you're both omnipotent and omniscient, it won't work.
The purpose of a mathematical model is to simplify reality so that it becomes tractable to analyze while still being a good approximation, i.e. so that you don't need to be omnipotent and omniscient. Almost all of modern science is based on this principle, so I'd say we're doing pretty good. If you're saying that reality can't be modeled in general, then that's a different debate and the evidence isn't too favorable in that direction.
First off, I don't think fuzzy logic has anything to do with Google's innards. What you're referring to is more generally called word sense disambiguation, and as far as I know, you can force a literal search by putting it in quotes. You'll also get "fuzzy" results, but if you don't see your literal at the top of the results, it probably doesn't exist and I'm guessing the Goog is trying to be helpful by breaking up the terms. Of course, you could Bing it to verify...:)
where the variables are assumed to exist without any rational basis, empirical history is disregarded as being a nuisance to the desired results, and past mistakes in the model are ignored or covered up.
I was with you till here. Plenty of people build bad models, such as the recent admissions by all-knowing Physicists at Northwestern and Indiana that their swine flu models were bogus. For heaven's sake, they based their models on movement data from WheresGeorge.com -- real scientific.
On the other hand, you lose a bit of credibility with a trollish sounding statement like the following, which seems to imply that we can't in principle build complex computational models of reality.
I have no problems with computer modeling in designing, say, a car, airplane, or bridge.
The example graphs don't look so pleasant though. The (default?) colour scheme is excellent for a semi-lit astronomical dome (doesn't ruin your night vision) but I put those in front a business board without a fair bit of work on the aesthetics
Agreed. When it comes to your papers, you really want the best looking plots, and the examples on the PLPlot site don't even use anti aliasing! Check out the commercial competition. Mathematica generates pretty plots too, and some amazing mathematical graphics. Hell, even a recent Gnuplot seem to do a better job at plotting.
There is a serious flaw in thinking that computers can accurately model macroeconomics, or predict systematic collapses, any better than commonsense and basic logic can
It might not be an accurate descriptive model (one that describes reality), but discriminative models are very useful -- not to predict systematic collapses, but to discriminate irrational behavior. Computers step in when your response time has to beat efficient markets. You could be a common sense and logic genius, but you can only apply those rules and react in so much time, and computers will always beat you for speed at applying your own rules. So it's a different kind of crutch, and just like a crutch, it can help you walk better, not walk for you.
They probably have another paper ready "Detecting RSTEG use through resent packets frequency statistical analysis"...
Parent is correct. arXiv is full of papers that have really poor methodology, and quite often the authors "improve" upon their earlier papers. This is also common in the field of data mining, where crap is initially packaged to look shiny and then Crap++ is sold as an improvement, all the while racking up the author's publication count. And that, unfortunately, is the currency of research in computer science.
Doesn't anyone think it might be a bit obvious if your system suddenly starts re-requesting/re-sending a large number of its packets?
And, would your bandwidth not also double, if you use this and re-send one secret packet for every 'normal' packet?
Sigh....at least read TFS?!?
As long as the system is not over-used
In other words, this falls in the category of "probably not practical, but it can be done and its pretty nifty." If they didn't invent it, someone else would have, and not too many other people would give a damn. I doubt that it's of interest to crypto-geeks either, since it's so easily detected and just steganography at the end of the day.
Expect a whole bunch more to be added to that great spreadsheet in the sky. Then again, I find it pretty funny that DRM, which is quite likely to introduce bug and crippling functionality, is packaged as an "experience update". From TFA (bold mine):
Operating system experience updates
* SP2 improves Windows Media Center (WMC) in the area of content protection for TV.
reedom without restraint is chaos, and if we don't figure out some way to prevent online chaos, the quantity, quality and availability of the kinds of entertainment, literature, art and scholarship we need to have a healthy, vibrant culture will suffer.
As a scholar, I attest that this is absolutely true (boldface mine). If we put our scholarship up for free, the following will happen:
Almost everyone will have access to it! Then my ideas will reach a wider audience, and might make a difference. This is not why I signed up to be a scholar.
The publisher, which makes money on journal subscriptions with my papers, will lose money. Although I will not personally be affected one bit, I can't stand the thought of those nice folks at Elsevier, Wiley and Springer losing money they make off my back, for little to no investment.
So, to hell with this unrestricted Internet thing.
If it's 2 hydrogen bonded to 1 oxygen in the right form it's "real water" Honestly, the Astronauts should be some that would not have the silly reaction to drinking treated water.
Certainly, but 2 hydrogen bonded to 1 oxygen exists in ripe form in your toilet as well, it's more a question of the additives. And if we did NOT feel an instinctive revulsion towards our own excrement, we would have been wiped out as a species a long time ago after eating our own toxic feces (that rhymes, too). So give those space monkey a break, eh?
But then you missed the funny, funny irony! From TFA:
Back when I was in high school in the '80's the computer was often referred to as "the CPU" which wasn't strictly accurate either, but was certainly more correct than "the hard drive" which is a single physical component used for data storage and does not in any way perform calculations, accept keyboard or mouse input, and it definitely does not emit output to a display device.
So...the CPU accepts keyboard and mouse input and emits output to a display device. This, in an article that's whining about over-simplifying the innards of a computer, from a person who claims to know the "difference between a CPU and a GPU".
You might be confusing with OLE...Pretty much the only people that ever used it seriously were Microsoft, and I don't think even they do it any more
Actually, it's the underlying foundation of the clipboard and drag/drop, among other things, so yes OLE is still very much alive. That said, I completely agree about the messy and unintuitive API when it was a new and magical thing, and when computers could just barely support pasting a spreadsheet inside a word document. If you want to see an example of an OLE-like concept that's more narrow in scope, but widely adopted, check out Steinberg's VST, which is used in many audio applications.
It locks in on her face and when she moves around it follows her face so that she is never out of frame. It is actually quite accurate and rarely loses track of her.
From a video processing point of view, this is not too hard when pretty much the full frame is filled with one prominent face, which is looking head on at the camera and usually not too far from it. Playing video games is a whole different cup of tea, and some of the reasons why this might not work so well are:
You're usually very far from the screen, so the face/body is less evident in the scene, although this isn't a huge problem.
There are usually people sitting next to you on the couch, so the algorithm has to keep track of multiple faces/bodies and track only the relevant one (or track as many people as are playing). This is much harder to do accurately and continuously.
Well then again, it might work well on that massive, 8-core Cell proces---oh wait, that's the PS3.
Sidekick, a DOS-based terminate-and-stay-resident personal productivity application
Aaah good old terminate-and-stay-resident programs, from the heydays of non-multitasking OSs. Anyone else remember Int 27h and the magic of hooking a subroutine to make it appear like your OS was actually multitasking? Hmph...kids these days..
This is exactly what the original google algorithm was using: number of times someone found an information useful / reliable as a measure of how relevant / important / interesting this information is
Just had to correct a few things. Google's original algorithm is a variant of what is sometimes called an eigenvalue problem. It's not quite the "number of times someone found an information useful" -- rather, it analyzes the linking patterns between webpages in terms of a recursive-sounding definition: "an important page links to other important pages".
In science, there is an ongoing attempt to reform the use of impact factors, which are easily abused. Check out well-formed eigenfactor as an example.
Slashdot Mirror
The summary tries to paint this study bad because it "downsides" the amount of filesharers
I presume by "downsides" you mean "reduces"? Well the summary says "That 11.6% was adjusted upwards to 16.3% 'to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it.'" So they actually UPPED the number of filesharers. This is objection #1 to "good research":
1. You do a survey to objectively measure the support of your hypothesis
2. The survey of a tiny sample indicates that filesharers are a pretty low percentage
3. You "adjust" this number -- otherwise known as "fudging the data" -- to better reflect your own hypothesis.
The same tactics in any scientific endeavor would get your papers retracted, your funding canceled, some sort of disciplinary action initiated, etc.
The second objection, and this applies to other studies too that try to make grand claims from small samples, is that it's A SMALL SAMPLE. For your survey to be representative, your sample has to be representative. It's also difficult to choose people independently at random, and without that assumption, all your basic statistics fall apart. Perhaps they went through a list of BT subscribers and pulled names at random -- but what if downloaders are overrepresented amongst BT subscribers? What if they only polled home internet users, but then used the "total number of internet users" -- which includes corporate subscribers -- to come up with their 11mil number? There are other possible, non-numerical issues too. What if the respondents confused downloading from bittorent with downloading from iTunes?
If you want many other examples of "bad science", read Ben Goldacre's blog
I was just about to suggest the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.
That, and the view of the city from Adler Planetarium is one of the two best views of Lake Michigan and Chicago (the other being from the Signature Lounge on the 95th floor of the John Hancock Tower). You can park in the Field's Museum Lot, and then stroll down to Adler Planetarium, where you can literally sit on the perch along Lake Michigan and see the entire coast and skyline of Chicago curving around the horizon. It's really beautiful; plus points for dawn and sunset.
This format won't add anything new to the software world, it's just a new complication. There's absolutely nothing new or exciting about this format, we can get the same effect with folders and multiple files -- or just cramming a few files together and splitting them apart when needed.
While I agree in principle with what you say, it's actually much easier than that. My crappy Winamp will auto-tag songs based on a lossy hash, grab the album cover art from some mysterious server, and display some sort of music website with the latest news about the artist, etc. You can install a free plugin that downloads the lyrics to the song, if you want, or you could get off your lazy ass and just Google it.
What these people don't seem to understand about albums is that they were a very physical thing (yes, past tense). You touched it on the shelf at the record store, turned it over to see if you knew any of the songs, then had a little (or big for vinyl) booklet to browse too.
When you put the album in your music playing device, you made a conscious decision to listen to at least a few songs from it. Nobody switched out albums like crazy playing one song after the other. Any sort of "digital album" will necessarily have that functionality, negating the whole album concept. Those who would listen to all the songs would just buy them individually, and those who would not won't.
Unless, they intend on killing the single by forcing albums down our throat. Helllooo, bittorrent...
Why not wait another day before submitting the improvement? All they did now was giving the other team one day to respond, and if they succeed, I doubt they will be able to submit yet another improvement. So why not simply wait until an hour or so before the deadline, or am I missing something about the rules, e.g. any submitted improvements prolong the deadline by one day?
For the grand prize, there was a final 30-day countdown from the time the first entry that achieved greater than 10% was received, which was a month ago. So it seems like this will indeed come down to an ebay-like sniping situation in the last few hours.
I wouldn't feel too sorry for BellKor/KorBell though -- they've got many, many best paper awards at conferences and a huge degree of publicity out of the whole endeavor. In fact, in KDD 2009, they detailed most of the methods that most likely got them to the top -- i.e. they incorporated the fact that tastes and preferences drift over time. Simple, in retrospect of course. If you have an ACM subscription, you can read the 2009 paper here.
Plus, since they work for AT&T/Yahoo Research, I remember Yehuda Koren stating that the money wouldn't have gone to them anyway -- possibly a large bonus, but I think they're entitled to that anyway. So I wouldn't feel too sorry for them.
the unlawful detentions without trial, the wire-taps, the cronyism, the pointless foreign warmongering & gunboat diplomacy, the war on drugs, the denial of gay rights, the staged Q&A sessions, etc. etc. etc. ... all chug along with as much momentum as ever.
That's the funny thing about "momentum"...it takes quite a while to overcome. Or did you really expect that he would change each and every thing you're complaining about overnight. It's been less than half a year, of a very very bad year, give the man a break. I'm not saying he's going to reverse the "momentum" on everything you mentioned, but really (and realistically) would you rather have mccain in there?
If you are good with technology, why stick around in a country where half of households don't even have toilets?
Because it doesn't really matter as long as *your* house has one. Metaphorically speaking, if you have the option of making $40k in India -- which goes a LONG way -- and staying at home, living like a king, keeping your social support system, etc. vs. migrating to the states and starting anew for $80k., then a lot of perfectly rational and obscenely talented people will choose to stay there. Money really isn't everything.
While Bozeman's government's actions aren't kosher, can we really defend against it? Records are records, and if they decide that they absolutely must have it for such and such, it's not something you can completely prevent
This is nothing but the typical "if you don't have anything to hide, then you should be OK giving up your information" defense, slightly rephrased. Please read Daniel Solove's excellent evisceration of this argument here in PDF, and stop accepting the blanket "interests of national security" line without questioning on a case-by-case basis if it is reasonable.
Someone needs to create a privacy argument checklist for /. like the "why your spam solution won't work" checklist.
So again, what was Linux hoping to achieve by dropping old "obsolete" OSS in favor of increasingly complex solutions?
As far as Ubuntu is concerned, its the same inane neophyte behavior that "obsoleted" Xmms and BMPx in Jaunty in favor of the iTunes wannabe Amarok, which I find much less stable and cumbersome to use. There was absolutely nothing wrong with Xmms as a Winamp-style media player that was quick, efficient and could handle Internet radio and almost all the popular DRM-free formats, yet it was automatically removed with other "obsolete" software. Yes, I can compile it again from source, but it just seems a bit obnoxious. BMPx was another simple media player that was quite nice, albeit with the occassional bug, and it too has been "obsoleted".
For all the evangelism of the Ubuntu community, why are we being driven towards solutions that mimic the proprietary soup-du-jour (iTunes in this case)?
I don't see the point of very small cars like this. If I don't need to carry anything I will ride my bike. If I do then I use my big, inefficient van. A small car wouldn't be much use to me because it can't carry much.
Yes, it certainly is a total piece of crap because it doesn't suit your lifestyle.
Many countries are full of tiny cars, where they serve as the primary (and inexpensive) vehicle for many people, some of who either can't afford a full-size car or are moving up from scooters and motorcycles. It might sound strange to you, but there are many countries where automobiles are not a religion, and paying a fixed lump sum a month to own a car is an attractive option. Plus, if you've ever seen the tiny winding streets of many European cities, you'll realize that this car isn't all that impractical in the right setting.
Of course, forget about it in the US, except maybe in Oregon.
In principle, i.e. in theory, sure, but in reality? There are too many constantly changing variables to calculate. Unless you're both omnipotent and omniscient, it won't work.
The purpose of a mathematical model is to simplify reality so that it becomes tractable to analyze while still being a good approximation, i.e. so that you don't need to be omnipotent and omniscient. Almost all of modern science is based on this principle, so I'd say we're doing pretty good. If you're saying that reality can't be modeled in general, then that's a different debate and the evidence isn't too favorable in that direction.
Everything is fuzzified now
First off, I don't think fuzzy logic has anything to do with Google's innards. What you're referring to is more generally called word sense disambiguation, and as far as I know, you can force a literal search by putting it in quotes. You'll also get "fuzzy" results, but if you don't see your literal at the top of the results, it probably doesn't exist and I'm guessing the Goog is trying to be helpful by breaking up the terms. Of course, you could Bing it to verify... :)
where the variables are assumed to exist without any rational basis, empirical history is disregarded as being a nuisance to the desired results, and past mistakes in the model are ignored or covered up.
I was with you till here. Plenty of people build bad models, such as the recent admissions by all-knowing Physicists at Northwestern and Indiana that their swine flu models were bogus. For heaven's sake, they based their models on movement data from WheresGeorge.com -- real scientific.
On the other hand, you lose a bit of credibility with a trollish sounding statement like the following, which seems to imply that we can't in principle build complex computational models of reality.
I have no problems with computer modeling in designing, say, a car, airplane, or bridge.
The example graphs don't look so pleasant though. The (default?) colour scheme is excellent for a semi-lit astronomical dome (doesn't ruin your night vision) but I put those in front a business board without a fair bit of work on the aesthetics
Agreed. When it comes to your papers, you really want the best looking plots, and the examples on the PLPlot site don't even use anti aliasing! Check out the commercial competition. Mathematica generates pretty plots too, and some amazing mathematical graphics. Hell, even a recent Gnuplot seem to do a better job at plotting.
There is a serious flaw in thinking that computers can accurately model macroeconomics, or predict systematic collapses, any better than commonsense and basic logic can
It might not be an accurate descriptive model (one that describes reality), but discriminative models are very useful -- not to predict systematic collapses, but to discriminate irrational behavior. Computers step in when your response time has to beat efficient markets. You could be a common sense and logic genius, but you can only apply those rules and react in so much time, and computers will always beat you for speed at applying your own rules. So it's a different kind of crutch, and just like a crutch, it can help you walk better, not walk for you.
I might have digressed from TFA, but this is /.
They probably have another paper ready "Detecting RSTEG use through resent packets frequency statistical analysis"...
Parent is correct. arXiv is full of papers that have really poor methodology, and quite often the authors "improve" upon their earlier papers. This is also common in the field of data mining, where crap is initially packaged to look shiny and then Crap++ is sold as an improvement, all the while racking up the author's publication count. And that, unfortunately, is the currency of research in computer science.
Doesn't anyone think it might be a bit obvious if your system suddenly starts re-requesting/re-sending a large number of its packets? And, would your bandwidth not also double, if you use this and re-send one secret packet for every 'normal' packet?
Sigh....at least read TFS?!?
As long as the system is not over-used
In other words, this falls in the category of "probably not practical, but it can be done and its pretty nifty." If they didn't invent it, someone else would have, and not too many other people would give a damn. I doubt that it's of interest to crypto-geeks either, since it's so easily detected and just steganography at the end of the day.
Operating system experience updates
* SP2 improves Windows Media Center (WMC) in the area of content protection for TV.
reedom without restraint is chaos, and if we don't figure out some way to prevent online chaos, the quantity, quality and availability of the kinds of entertainment, literature, art and scholarship we need to have a healthy, vibrant culture will suffer.
As a scholar, I attest that this is absolutely true (boldface mine). If we put our scholarship up for free, the following will happen:
So, to hell with this unrestricted Internet thing.
If it's 2 hydrogen bonded to 1 oxygen in the right form it's "real water" Honestly, the Astronauts should be some that would not have the silly reaction to drinking treated water.
Certainly, but 2 hydrogen bonded to 1 oxygen exists in ripe form in your toilet as well, it's more a question of the additives. And if we did NOT feel an instinctive revulsion towards our own excrement, we would have been wiped out as a species a long time ago after eating our own toxic feces (that rhymes, too). So give those space monkey a break, eh?
Back when I was in high school in the '80's the computer was often referred to as "the CPU" which wasn't strictly accurate either, but was certainly more correct than "the hard drive" which is a single physical component used for data storage and does not in any way perform calculations, accept keyboard or mouse input, and it definitely does not emit output to a display device.
So...the CPU accepts keyboard and mouse input and emits output to a display device. This, in an article that's whining about over-simplifying the innards of a computer, from a person who claims to know the "difference between a CPU and a GPU".
You might be confusing with OLE...Pretty much the only people that ever used it seriously were Microsoft, and I don't think even they do it any more
Actually, it's the underlying foundation of the clipboard and drag/drop, among other things, so yes OLE is still very much alive. That said, I completely agree about the messy and unintuitive API when it was a new and magical thing, and when computers could just barely support pasting a spreadsheet inside a word document. If you want to see an example of an OLE-like concept that's more narrow in scope, but widely adopted, check out Steinberg's VST, which is used in many audio applications.
It locks in on her face and when she moves around it follows her face so that she is never out of frame. It is actually quite accurate and rarely loses track of her.
From a video processing point of view, this is not too hard when pretty much the full frame is filled with one prominent face, which is looking head on at the camera and usually not too far from it. Playing video games is a whole different cup of tea, and some of the reasons why this might not work so well are:
Well then again, it might work well on that massive, 8-core Cell proces---oh wait, that's the PS3.
How often does a story on the Morning Call get posted to slashdot?
That just what I was thinking! One would imagine it would be on the Express Times. Wow...so /. has more Lehigh Valley folk than I thought.
Sidekick, a DOS-based terminate-and-stay-resident personal productivity application
Aaah good old terminate-and-stay-resident programs, from the heydays of non-multitasking OSs. Anyone else remember Int 27h and the magic of hooking a subroutine to make it appear like your OS was actually multitasking? Hmph...kids these days..
This is exactly what the original google algorithm was using: number of times someone found an information useful / reliable as a measure of how relevant / important / interesting this information is
Just had to correct a few things. Google's original algorithm is a variant of what is sometimes called an eigenvalue problem. It's not quite the "number of times someone found an information useful" -- rather, it analyzes the linking patterns between webpages in terms of a recursive-sounding definition: "an important page links to other important pages".
In science, there is an ongoing attempt to reform the use of impact factors, which are easily abused. Check out well-formed eigenfactor as an example.