Completely agree. As soon as I heard the news, I knew that people would immediately start complaining, even though this is a great deal. For 30 cents a day, you can stream on-demand from a (presumably) huge library of shows to any of your devices. The ads are around 5-10% of your total viewing time, as opposed to somewhere around 25% for a typical TV broadcast. This is NOT some conspiracy to ripoff customers - honestly I'll be surprised they can even make much of a profit from this.
Has anyone online ever done any of the following? -paid for cable TV: $40/month, with ~25% commercial time -gone to the movies: $5/hour, with ~20 minutes of commercials at the beginning -rented a movie (brick&mortar): $5/movie These are all orders of magnitude more expensive and inconvenient than what Hulu is proposing. (This also highlights how great a deal the current free Hulu service is.)
My only caveat to this is the "presumably" above - if the catalog being offered for $10/month is only marginally larger than the free catalog, then it might not be worth it. Still, to dismiss this as a money grab seems unbelievably narrowminded. This is exactly how I want the future of media to be: low cost, large number of choices, control over when I watch, minimal advertising, access from all my devices, etc.
I think Livescribe's model is much better than IOGear's for taking notes - you don't have to deal with moving the receiver around during class, just turn the pen on to get started (takes ~4 seconds to boot up) and then forget about it. The audio recording is also much more helpful than I expected, especially since you can archive your notebooks for posterity. Last week I wanted to review something I learned last year, so I just typed in the search and got to hear a five-minute lecture about it:)
If you're just interested in organization and searching, I'd highly recommend the LiveScribe Pulse smartpen - all the smarts are in the pen, which isn't too expensive compared to a tablet, and you can buy the compatible notebooks cheaply. All your notes get backed up to your computer when you dock your pen, it does a great job searching for a specific piece of text. My handwriting is a disaster, and I have never seen a search fail so far - I believe that it actually uses the sequence of pen motions (not just OCR on the final result) and it can tolerate some of the letters being unreadable.
It has other features as well, such as recording audio (the mic has a decent gain) and syncing it with your notes. They also have an SDK and are launching an app store, so in the future you should be able to make good use of the ARM processor in the pen.
I was thinking the same thing - could they really have been serious about the 10-day DRM? It wasn't as if people's reactions were unpredictable, so I find it hard to believe that they honestly thought people wouldn't complain. As you pointed out, this seems more like a conscious "Door-in-the-face" technique than a legitimate retraction.
Factorization - as you mentioned, code breaking is a big deal.
Quantum cryptography - the article I linked to isn't quite right about quantum teleportation (it can't, by itself, be used to send information) but quantum cryptography is a very interesting field. Essentially you can guarantee that there are no eavesdroppers on a certain line, since measurements by these eavesdroppers would necessarily mess up the quantum states.
Quantum mechanics simulations - it may sound a bit circular, but one problem that doesn't scale well on classical computers is simulating quantum mechanics. Quantum computers would be inherently better at this, allowing for better simulations of complex chemical or physical processes.
Random number generators - certain algorithms require a source of random numbers, which can only be approximated by a classical computer. You could imagine having a small quantum unit on a classical chip that acts as a random source.
Quantum computing is still in its infancy, so it's likely that more and more applications will be found as the theory and experiments mature. Things like quantum teleportation are also quite interesting from a theoretical and philosophical point of view, so there will be interest in this field for a number of years.
A lot of cosmology is non-intuitive, but that's what makes it cool:) I'm not an expert myself, but I can point you in the right direction:
Could you conceivably see the big bang with Hubble if the universe is only 13.5 billion years old? Essentially, yes! You can't see quite back to the big bang itself because at the very beginning the temperatures were too high to allow photons to move freely, but you can get pretty close by observing the Cosmic Microwave Background which was released when the universe became transparent.
Does this mean they know roughly where the universe began and are looking in that direction? If they looked in the other direction, would they run out of things to see because nothing in the universe has traveled out that far yet? This is always a sticking point of understanding, but the answer is simple - the universe began right where you are sitting right now! And, of course, every other point in space. Every observer sees the universe as expanding outward from themselves, which is usually explained by imagining pennies glued to an expanding balloon (every penny sees the other pennies moving away) or by this neat demonstration.
To connect these two answers, the CMB is in all directions around us (which is what made it so interesting in the first place - see the wikipedia link) so every direction is looking "back in time".
Check out the Deus Ex 3 teaser trailer at EA's website. It's pretty vague, but I'm hopeful that they can turn it into an interesting game. There's a nice analysis of the series of images flashed in the trailer over on wikipedia - notice "Lament for Icarus," a reference to a cool part of DX1.
Yes, it kills the engine and doesn't allow it to be restarted until the brake is released. This was always something we had to be aware of, since we relied on the engine to power the battery (and therefore all of our equipment) so if we left the system e-braked for a few minutes everything would lose power (good for safety, I suppose, but bad for testing).
True, software failsafes would help us save face and should be implemented, but in terms of safety issues ("anything that might have a remote chance of harming someone") we were in the clear.
As someone on Princeton's team, I can tell you that we did have a failsafe mechanical braking system (independent of the the computers that could be messing up). Whenever the car was running without an operator, an pneumatic brake was controlled by radio - if the receiver ever lost signal (went out of range of the transmitter) or received a disable command, it would fire the pneumatic brake to stop the car regardless of whether or not the computers were responding to commands.
Geez guys - real world engineering 101: Do not let a computer control anything that might have a remote chance of harming someone without appropriate safety mechanisms. Agreed. Believe me, the first test DARPA does at each stage of the competition is make sure that the emergency systems work.
Your choice: pull out and definitely have egg on your face, or go for it and maybe have egg. As someone on Princeton's team, I can definitely confirm that this was the case, for both the 2005 and 2007 challenges. The DARPA competition is an extracurricular activity we participate in on top of being full-time students, so our available time for writing and testing code is always an order of magnitude smaller than we would like. There are very stringent safety regulations set down by DARPA, so putting something not fully tested in the competition was unlikely to be a danger to humans (there is a redundant emergency braking system that operates mechanically, independently from the computers).
P.P.S. Red Gate (who wrote this article) has been a great sponsor of ours, but I agree that it's unfortunate that our Slashdot debut comes in the form of a slashvertisement rather than a technical paper.
Same here. Running a dual-boot system with XP, but 95% of the time I prefer being in Vista. I agree that the advantages aren't massive, especially considering the development time for Vista, but the windowing system runs at least as fast even if Aero's on and the new Start menu is great. There are a number of other little tweaks over XP - for example, when updates are installed you have much more control over the "Restart Now or Later" dialog box. In XP, you have no choice but to click "Restart Later" every five minutes if you're doing something important, while is Vista you can tell the box to go away until tomorrow.
Vista isn't a revolution in Windows, but all the moronic comments in other threads like
The only use for multiple cores and 4 gigs of RAM is if 80% of your CPU cycles are given over to DRM and Norton 360. are just nonsensical. What is this new form of DRM that is run continuously on every file?
It seems from the article that the cold spot has a non-gaussian peak, so by our usual Big Bang models it couldn't have been produced by the Big Bang itself. These researchers argue that the spot could be caused by the CMB photons traveling through a large void on the way to our telescopes, shifting the perceived temperature due to the Sachs-Wolfe effect.
I should note that this doesn't mean the universe is infinite, as the universe can have a finite size without having a center. For an analogy, think of the surface of a sphere - it has a finite area, but no point on the surface is the "center."
Completely agree. As explained succinctly by xkcd (Science: It works, bitches!) the Big Bang theorists did an incredible job predicting the spectrum of the CMB before it was even shown to exist. Slightly offtopic: There's a great story about the accidental discovery of the CMB by engineers just 40 miles from where it was being predicted.
Thanks for the paper! Reading for myself, it seems that most of the articles on this paper are misrepresenting the authors' findings. What is stated in the paper is this:
Any non-gaussianity of the WMAP cold spot therefore would then have a local origin. A 140 Mpc radius, completely empty void at z<1 is sufficient to create the magnitude and angular size of the cold spot through the late integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect. Voids this large currently seem improbable in the concordance cosmology, adding to the anomalies associated with the CMB. They're not necessarily saying that a void exists (although they did find some supporting evidence from the NVSS survey). They're saying that a local cause for the WMAP cold spot seems to be the only reasonable explanation, but that this local cause would have to be a larger-than-predicted void.
This is going to be a great building point for some new cosmology to come up with a consistent explanation for this. The astrophysics department at my school is really into the CMB (cosmic microwave background, mapped by WMAP) so I'm sure they'll be looking into this too.
Unfortunately, the "hilarious" joke is on you, since spin actually does refer to angular momentum. It can even be interchanged with "orbital" (extrinsic) angular momentum while obeying momentum conservation, and (as the article mentions) can be measured using a magnetic field.
A quick look at wikipedia before posting is usually helpful.
I would agree as well - the only noticeable problem I've had that could be DRM-related is that I can no longer watch 24 online due to incompatibilities with Fox's Video on Demand software. Anyone have any guesses as to what the problem is?
While this is venturing into areas where I'm much less experienced, I believe that the antiparticle is related to the particle through charge conjugation, which inverts all the internal properties of the particle (e.g. quarks->antiquarks). The site I linked has some more detailed info if you're interested.
The point I have is that everything has "spin". So does the anti-everything. If an electron has a spin of 1/2, then a positron would have the opposite of that -- or a spin of -1/2. Re-read the "spin direction" section of the wikipedia article - although an electron is a "spin 1/2" particle, it can have either spin up (+1/2) or spin down (-1/2). This is seen in basic chemistry, when electrons fill the orbital shells: two electrons can be at each level, one with each spin.
So no, the difference between matter and antimatter is not related the spin.
even the most mature and responsible adult makes mistakes, and all of this is only human. I, for one, would prefer not to live in a world where everyone's dirty laundry was aired in public, with full search features. This reminds me of Judge James Rosenbaum's article In Defense of the Delete Key [PDF Warning]. Some notable quotes:
Sometimes people just have bad ideas, or
might just pass an idle - if imperfect -
thought. This does not mean the person is
vile. Mere evidence that a person who has
done "A," but once expressed "B," does not
prove that the person is lying or deceitful. The
fallacy in the "truth" of the recovered e-mail or
computer file is that it might just have been a
bad idea, properly rejected, and consigned to
an imperfectly labeled wastebasket. The problem
is that on the computer's hard drive, it
looks like more.
Into this classic legal environment comes
the computer. It never forgets, and never forgives.
An idle thought "jotted" onto a calendar,
a tasteless joke passed to a once-trusted friend,
a suggestive invitation directed at an uninterested
recipient, if done electronically, will last
forever. Years later, it can subject its author to
liability.
Video DRM has been my main complaint with Vista as well. For example, I can no longer watch 24 online due to incompatibilities with Fox's Video on Demand software.
I've actually found Vista to be quite stable (zero crashes or BSODs since installation about a month ago) and I haven't run into other major compatibility problems, but this specific case is worrying to me - what kind of DRM system is Vista using that would lock out streaming video that is allowed to run on XP?
Slashdot Mirror
Completely agree. As soon as I heard the news, I knew that people would immediately start complaining, even though this is a great deal. For 30 cents a day, you can stream on-demand from a (presumably) huge library of shows to any of your devices. The ads are around 5-10% of your total viewing time, as opposed to somewhere around 25% for a typical TV broadcast. This is NOT some conspiracy to ripoff customers - honestly I'll be surprised they can even make much of a profit from this.
Has anyone online ever done any of the following?
-paid for cable TV: $40/month, with ~25% commercial time
-gone to the movies: $5/hour, with ~20 minutes of commercials at the beginning
-rented a movie (brick&mortar): $5/movie
These are all orders of magnitude more expensive and inconvenient than what Hulu is proposing. (This also highlights how great a deal the current free Hulu service is.)
My only caveat to this is the "presumably" above - if the catalog being offered for $10/month is only marginally larger than the free catalog, then it might not be worth it. Still, to dismiss this as a money grab seems unbelievably narrowminded. This is exactly how I want the future of media to be: low cost, large number of choices, control over when I watch, minimal advertising, access from all my devices, etc.
I think Livescribe's model is much better than IOGear's for taking notes - you don't have to deal with moving the receiver around during class, just turn the pen on to get started (takes ~4 seconds to boot up) and then forget about it. The audio recording is also much more helpful than I expected, especially since you can archive your notebooks for posterity. Last week I wanted to review something I learned last year, so I just typed in the search and got to hear a five-minute lecture about it :)
If you're just interested in organization and searching, I'd highly recommend the LiveScribe Pulse smartpen - all the smarts are in the pen, which isn't too expensive compared to a tablet, and you can buy the compatible notebooks cheaply. All your notes get backed up to your computer when you dock your pen, it does a great job searching for a specific piece of text. My handwriting is a disaster, and I have never seen a search fail so far - I believe that it actually uses the sequence of pen motions (not just OCR on the final result) and it can tolerate some of the letters being unreadable. It has other features as well, such as recording audio (the mic has a decent gain) and syncing it with your notes. They also have an SDK and are launching an app store, so in the future you should be able to make good use of the ARM processor in the pen.
I was thinking the same thing - could they really have been serious about the 10-day DRM? It wasn't as if people's reactions were unpredictable, so I find it hard to believe that they honestly thought people wouldn't complain. As you pointed out, this seems more like a conscious "Door-in-the-face" technique than a legitimate retraction.
- Factorization - as you mentioned, code breaking is a big deal.
- Quantum cryptography - the article I linked to isn't quite right about quantum teleportation (it can't, by itself, be used to send information) but quantum cryptography is a very interesting field. Essentially you can guarantee that there are no eavesdroppers on a certain line, since measurements by these eavesdroppers would necessarily mess up the quantum states.
- Quantum mechanics simulations - it may sound a bit circular, but one problem that doesn't scale well on classical computers is simulating quantum mechanics. Quantum computers would be inherently better at this, allowing for better simulations of complex chemical or physical processes.
- Random number generators - certain algorithms require a source of random numbers, which can only be approximated by a classical computer. You could imagine having a small quantum unit on a classical chip that acts as a random source.
Quantum computing is still in its infancy, so it's likely that more and more applications will be found as the theory and experiments mature. Things like quantum teleportation are also quite interesting from a theoretical and philosophical point of view, so there will be interest in this field for a number of years.Clearly he's not a member of the Apostrophe Protection Society.
To connect these two answers, the CMB is in all directions around us (which is what made it so interesting in the first place - see the wikipedia link) so every direction is looking "back in time".
Check out the Deus Ex 3 teaser trailer at EA's website. It's pretty vague, but I'm hopeful that they can turn it into an interesting game. There's a nice analysis of the series of images flashed in the trailer over on wikipedia - notice "Lament for Icarus," a reference to a cool part of DX1.
Yes, it kills the engine and doesn't allow it to be restarted until the brake is released. This was always something we had to be aware of, since we relied on the engine to power the battery (and therefore all of our equipment) so if we left the system e-braked for a few minutes everything would lose power (good for safety, I suppose, but bad for testing).
True, software failsafes would help us save face and should be implemented, but in terms of safety issues ("anything that might have a remote chance of harming someone") we were in the clear.
P.S. If you're interested in what we were working on for this year's challenge, check out our video from the summer or other videos on our website
P.P.S. Red Gate (who wrote this article) has been a great sponsor of ours, but I agree that it's unfortunate that our Slashdot debut comes in the form of a slashvertisement rather than a technical paper.
Vista isn't a revolution in Windows, but all the moronic comments in other threads like The only use for multiple cores and 4 gigs of RAM is if 80% of your CPU cycles are given over to DRM and Norton 360. are just nonsensical. What is this new form of DRM that is run continuously on every file?
The bug shows up for me. I'm running on Vista, and my About box gives the Excel version as 12.0.6024.5000 (MSO 12.0.6017.5000).
It seems from the article that the cold spot has a non-gaussian peak, so by our usual Big Bang models it couldn't have been produced by the Big Bang itself. These researchers argue that the spot could be caused by the CMB photons traveling through a large void on the way to our telescopes, shifting the perceived temperature due to the Sachs-Wolfe effect.
Well, according to modern cosmology, there ISN'T a center of the universe. A good explanation and cool little flash demonstration are here: http://www.exploratorium.edu/hubble/tools/center.h tml
I should note that this doesn't mean the universe is infinite, as the universe can have a finite size without having a center. For an analogy, think of the surface of a sphere - it has a finite area, but no point on the surface is the "center."
Completely agree. As explained succinctly by xkcd (Science: It works, bitches!) the Big Bang theorists did an incredible job predicting the spectrum of the CMB before it was even shown to exist. Slightly offtopic: There's a great story about the accidental discovery of the CMB by engineers just 40 miles from where it was being predicted.
This is going to be a great building point for some new cosmology to come up with a consistent explanation for this. The astrophysics department at my school is really into the CMB (cosmic microwave background, mapped by WMAP) so I'm sure they'll be looking into this too.
Agreed - I didn't even think that I HAD 10 major points of entry.
Unfortunately, the "hilarious" joke is on you, since spin actually does refer to angular momentum. It can even be interchanged with "orbital" (extrinsic) angular momentum while obeying momentum conservation, and (as the article mentions) can be measured using a magnetic field.
A quick look at wikipedia before posting is usually helpful.
I would agree as well - the only noticeable problem I've had that could be DRM-related is that I can no longer watch 24 online due to incompatibilities with Fox's Video on Demand software. Anyone have any guesses as to what the problem is?
While this is venturing into areas where I'm much less experienced, I believe that the antiparticle is related to the particle through charge conjugation, which inverts all the internal properties of the particle (e.g. quarks->antiquarks). The site I linked has some more detailed info if you're interested.
So no, the difference between matter and antimatter is not related the spin.
Video DRM has been my main complaint with Vista as well. For example, I can no longer watch 24 online due to incompatibilities with Fox's Video on Demand software.
I've actually found Vista to be quite stable (zero crashes or BSODs since installation about a month ago) and I haven't run into other major compatibility problems, but this specific case is worrying to me - what kind of DRM system is Vista using that would lock out streaming video that is allowed to run on XP?