To be fair, the article didn't claim to really 'break' Brooke's Law. The submission did. TFA just pointed out that it doesn't always hold. And that they've totally lucked out and have a perfect situation where it doesn't hold. Infact, I saw this article on Hacker News first. The discussion there is way more interesting, even if half of it is just people arguing about the legality of 'unpaid interns', cause they're not spending their whole time going "OMG NO THEY DIDN'T". It's a fucked up submission.
I doubt the GP would deny your point. You're arguing two different things. We've incorporated a ridiculous amount of viral material over the course of human (or any) evolution. That said, when you get infected by HIV or any other retrovirus, it's not like every single cell in your body all gets brand new retroviral goodness injected into the nucleus. All that viral material in our DNA is from viruses infecting gametes that managed to go on and produce a viable reproducing human being (which now has the viral goodness in EVERY cell because the gametes had it too). Over and over and over again over a shit load of generations. Two related... but also completely different things.
A whole bunch of Pixel Qi running devices were demoed at CES this year. We'll probably never see half of them again, but the rest are all presumably coming out sometime. This shit is friggin NEW. Hasn't really been time to integrate into most laptop lines yet. My bet is that the high-end laptops will start offering this as an option soon enough.
And there are a few downsides. I'm assuming that they are still more expensive than a plain LCD screen. But from what I can remember from the CES videos, there's a distinct yellowish tint to the display (in color/video mode). It was very much as if it was all printed on newsprint. Now, nothing wrong with that for what the screen does, but I cannot see manufacturers pushing out a yellow tinted display across all their lines. There would be... backlash.
They're probably repeating exactly what their supplier told them. Yeah, sure it sounds fishy to Newegg. But until they have actual proof of what happened, its not very nice to go about accusing a long time partner of naughty deeds (or broadcasting that to the whole world... they're probably sending some really angry emails and phone calls right now). Remember, when you have long term suppliers and buyers like this, you actually create a real relationship, and that relationship is worth more than just the money and product changing hands. You don't want to terminate or damage that relationship more than you have to.
When subs (at least US subs) surface to talk, they use highly directional satellite links. You pretty much have to position yourself between the sub and the satellite to pick up the transmission. They also like to use burst transmission for as much stuff as they can. Being short in time makes it pretty tough to pick out too.
There are missiles between the Stinger and the Patriot. The current stock of US radar guided missiles cost anything between 150k to half a million per round. Sure, probably not cheap enough yet, but getting there. And really this all comes down to range/capability. The current stock of missiles are designed to shoot down other missiles or aircraft, meaning they have to be really high-performance. For example, the AMRAAM has to fly out maybe 20-30 miles and then still have enough energy to chase down a maneuvering plane.
When you're dealing with a swarm of "cheap" drones, you won't need all that performance. It's cheap, so it probably wont be able to pull off those high G maneuvers fighter jets try. If it has a small engine (thus small IR), then it probably can't go very fast either. And it's range of its weapons is probably small too. So now you can build a missile with semi-active radar (like the Sea Sparrow), give it 10 miles (or even less). It probably doesn't even have to be supersonic (even cheaper!). So now may have a missile that's as cheap, or cheaper than most drones you're trying to shoot down.
Or, we might just see the return of large caliber AAA. Computer guided 88s. Yum.
Well, as much as desired goes, this also affects how a lot of filters and effects work. For example, it causes most Gaussian blur implementations to 'flare' brights into darks more than they should. And that's been happening for so long, that that's now the expected/wanted behavior out of 'Gaussian Blurs'. If you changed that, you would have some confused/annoyed users.
There was kind of a big splash back in December about this Broadcom chip... Crystal HD or something. Basically, it's a $2 (or some other absurdly low price) video decoder chip that'll take pretty much the full load for decoding most common codecs in use today. It was certified by Intel as well. Wonder why we aren't seeing more netbooks out there being announced with this bugger. I mean, it'll cost next to nothing, and put plain-ass Atoms at par with Ion powered netbooks (well, for 90% of users who only needed/wanted Ion for the video to begin with).
I while ago I was thinking about picking up a netbook versus a used X61. What I found while digging around is that, as a rough guide, any Pentium M of the same clockspeed of a a given Atom chip will kick that Atom's ass in terms of performance. As for your battery life expencancy, my experience with Lenovo Thinkpads (I'm using a T400 right now), is whatever they advertise, lob 10-20% off it and you'll get a fairly representative number. A lot of it has to do with how low you're willing to turn down the backlight. In those terms, the newer thinkpads are really better, cause they're the only ones that have LED backlight option.
Basically, if your current X31 has maxed out RAM and anything but the slowest CPU option, it's at least at parity, if not better than pretty much any Atom powered netbook out there. It also has a much nicer keyboard.
Uh. Safari 1.0 was released in June 2003. Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004. I think it's safe to say that Safari was released before Firefox was mature.
I read about this once. Basically the shape of a snowflake is determined by the exact conditions over the course of the formation of the snowflake. This is why finding two identical snowflakes is so unlikely. That being said, apparently the vast majority of snow flakes aren't symmetrical. It's just that they aren't pretty so no one posts pictures of them. According to this site (run by a Caltech physics prof, its got amazing info and pictures of snowflakes), "The most common snow crystals by far are the irregular crystals. These are small, usually clumped together, and show little of the symmetry seen in stellar or columnar crystals."
In any case, the reason for the "perfect" symmetry that you can find it, "As the crystal becomes larger, however, branches begin to sprout from the six corners of the hexagon (this is the third stage in the diagram at right). Since the atmospheric conditions (e. g. temperature and humidity) are nearly constant across the small crystal, the six budding arms all grow out at roughly the same rate.".
Presumably if we ever get around to colonizing different star systems, each star system will call that star in the middle of the system "the sun" instead of whatever astronomical name we give it now. I would find it retardedly annoying to constantly go "Man, Tau Ceti is sure bright today, better stay inside or else you'll get Tau Ceti-burn", and just use sun instead. Which leaves us with what the fuck do we call the Sun that the homeplanet orbits? So we take huge ass hint from science fiction and call it Sol.
Just going to comment on the ELPE itself. Currently (at least for Engineering students), you just have to pass the ELPE before you graduate. You're allowed one rewrite per year. The ELPE itself is a fairly standard "standardized essay" similar to the essay section of the SAT. You just walk in and pick a topic from a list, and start writing. That being said, among my friends and fellow students, we're all fairly sure that your ELPE score has little to do with your actual English proficiency. Genuinely good writers have scraped by with just barely passes, while incomplete essays with middle school vocabulary have passed with 80s or higher. In other words, its just like the SAT essay section. It doesn't test your essay writing abilities. It tests your ability to write standardized essays.
Now, that's not to say that there isn't a problem with the english proficiency of Waterloo students. While looking over my friends' resumes, and editing work from groupmates, I have found myself dismayed at what sat in front of me. Now, strictly speaking, most of the writing wasn't "wrong". Just bad. I'm sure part of this comes from being in the engineering program. It's a fairly widespread belief that many engineering students are in engineering partly because they suck at writing, and didn't want to deal with long essays to get through university. And to their dismay, engineering programs are full of writing. I can remember a classmate yelling in dismay when we were assigned to write a full technical report. "BUT THEY TOLD ME I WOULDN'T NEED TO WRITE IN ENGINEERING!". And Waterloo has a LOT of engineers. And math students. Who are also more or less in the same boat.
They've had supersonic ejection seats for quite a while now. Pretty much every modern fighter jet has them. There was a successful ejection out of a modified SR-71 back in the 60s. They were flying at over mach 3. Pilot survived, the copilot drowned when after he landed in the water.
I have a T400 as well, but I can usually (like 98% of the time) switch between cards without a reboot. Are you sure you got the right drivers and stuff? I think if you remove all of the default Lenovo software, you end up with some problems. You need to keep the Lenovo battery/power management software (sweet! two battery gauges).
Actually, cap screens work with any conductor. I mean, hell, a hot dog works on a iPhone. You could use that in your mechanical device. Though a giant metal probe would also work. But the hot dog is more fun, and probably gives better results... a lot more like a finger.
It doesn't matter if a finger isn't "precise" enough. The purpose of the testing is to determine real life performance. So you should be testing with something as precise as you would use in real life. What does it matter if a phone can detect the exact position of a pen point, when it goes nuts trying to find the center of your fingertip. What matters is consistency. In that case, the methodology is wrong. A single human isn't not consistent enough, even over the number of repetitions shown.
They are testing a first generation iPhone. This test is interesting, but not really useful. As some of the comments point out, diagonal lines really aren't the best indicator for accuracy when hitting links or whatever. As usual, the lack of consistency that comes from using a single human being comes into play. While you don't need a machine that always draws perfectly straight lines, you need a machine (or guide) that draws the same lines for each phone.
Some extra detail from the story. The iPhone has poor detection along the edges (basically flattens out diagonals into vertical or horizontal lines), the Nexus One has the best. Not that important as most UI elements aren't right at the edge anyways. The waviness in some of the tests suggests that the sensors or algorithms may be biased into vertical/horizontal motions (makes sense from a gesturing point of view).
If they really wanted to test how well the touchscreen reacts to hitting links and stuff, I don't see why they just don't go test that. Load up the same sites and keep track of how well it reacts to you hitting links. At the very least, if they wanted to do the drawing program test, it would make more sense to test what happens when you try to hit points, instead of drawing lines. So you could put some magic marker dots on the screen, and have the user hit them and look for the overlap or something.
All in all... shows off some interesting stuff. Suggests some interesting things about the behavior of the different touchscreens, but really not all too conclusive, and really points to further testing/refinement of procedure.
The University of Toyko's version is demo'd using a manga... go figure. The high-speed camera approach is also really cool. Reminds me of that TNG episode (yeah yeah, I know) where the aliens built that casino/hotel based on a book for that astronaut... Picard hands the novel over to Data and asks him to summarize. Data just flips through all the pages in like 3 seconds and spews out the madness.
Eh, just replying here to a bunch of other sibling responses. Newer spy-sats can indeed do a lot of things the Blackbird could do, as well as some stuff that the Blackbird couldn't do. But to claim that they could completely replace the Blackbird is a bit much. Spy sats all follow known orbits. It is possible to compute those orbits and avoid/hide from spy sats. Both sides of the cold war did that a lot, which is part of the reason why the U2 and Blackbird were so useful. Does that mean that we NEED the Blackbird (taking its costs and other stuff into account)? Not necessarily. But I'm sure there have been cases since its retirement where government or military leaders sat back and went "if only we still had a Blackbird". Assuming they haven't been duping us the whole time, and they actually did replace it with something better.
And on that note, the U-2 is still in active use (they call it the TR-1 now). So one of the ironies there is that the U-2 outlasted its replacement.. by a lot. If anything, it shows that there's still use for long range human recon planes (compared to spy sats). Though I guess UAVs are gonna completely take over that role soon enough.
Apparently a lot of the ERVs (that 8% of our DNA made from retrovirus pieces) get expressed during pregnancy by the fetus. One of the results is that the mother's immune system gets depressed (apparently a lot of HIV-like stuff going on there) that prevents the mother's immune system from killing the fetus. There's probably lots of other fun stuff going on that we don't know about yet. It's actually really cool when you think about it... mammalian childbirth being possible because some immunodepressent virus infected some reptile a long long time ago.
There still will be hundreds of Chinese mad rip-offs in months. You just won't see them in North America. They'll have cool names like "Ne><us 1" or something. Or even better, "Nexus Two-plus". Go google Nokla for a nice example of this. It's kind of funny. Engadget has an entire series on this (they're over two hundred).
This is really cool stuff. It reminded me of some stuff I read before of locust swarms migrating across the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas. But in that case, evidence (a shit load of dead locust washing onto shore) suggested that locust kept dying and the rest of the swarm ate their corpses for fuel and/or used their dead bodies as 'islands'. Just remember that the largest locust swarms are in the billions and cover hundreds of square kilometers on land...
Anyhow, here's a linky to a National Geographic article (it also suggests the original American populations of locusts were immigrants from across the ocean). http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/12/1228_051228_locusts.html
One thing about the wide frames is that it makes it easier to hold without touching the screen. Which kinda seems important when you're dealing with touchscreens.
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To be fair, the article didn't claim to really 'break' Brooke's Law. The submission did. TFA just pointed out that it doesn't always hold. And that they've totally lucked out and have a perfect situation where it doesn't hold. Infact, I saw this article on Hacker News first. The discussion there is way more interesting, even if half of it is just people arguing about the legality of 'unpaid interns', cause they're not spending their whole time going "OMG NO THEY DIDN'T". It's a fucked up submission.
I doubt the GP would deny your point. You're arguing two different things. We've incorporated a ridiculous amount of viral material over the course of human (or any) evolution. That said, when you get infected by HIV or any other retrovirus, it's not like every single cell in your body all gets brand new retroviral goodness injected into the nucleus. All that viral material in our DNA is from viruses infecting gametes that managed to go on and produce a viable reproducing human being (which now has the viral goodness in EVERY cell because the gametes had it too). Over and over and over again over a shit load of generations. Two related... but also completely different things.
A whole bunch of Pixel Qi running devices were demoed at CES this year. We'll probably never see half of them again, but the rest are all presumably coming out sometime. This shit is friggin NEW. Hasn't really been time to integrate into most laptop lines yet. My bet is that the high-end laptops will start offering this as an option soon enough.
And there are a few downsides. I'm assuming that they are still more expensive than a plain LCD screen. But from what I can remember from the CES videos, there's a distinct yellowish tint to the display (in color/video mode). It was very much as if it was all printed on newsprint. Now, nothing wrong with that for what the screen does, but I cannot see manufacturers pushing out a yellow tinted display across all their lines. There would be... backlash.
They're probably repeating exactly what their supplier told them. Yeah, sure it sounds fishy to Newegg. But until they have actual proof of what happened, its not very nice to go about accusing a long time partner of naughty deeds (or broadcasting that to the whole world... they're probably sending some really angry emails and phone calls right now). Remember, when you have long term suppliers and buyers like this, you actually create a real relationship, and that relationship is worth more than just the money and product changing hands. You don't want to terminate or damage that relationship more than you have to.
When subs (at least US subs) surface to talk, they use highly directional satellite links. You pretty much have to position yourself between the sub and the satellite to pick up the transmission. They also like to use burst transmission for as much stuff as they can. Being short in time makes it pretty tough to pick out too.
There are missiles between the Stinger and the Patriot. The current stock of US radar guided missiles cost anything between 150k to half a million per round. Sure, probably not cheap enough yet, but getting there. And really this all comes down to range/capability. The current stock of missiles are designed to shoot down other missiles or aircraft, meaning they have to be really high-performance. For example, the AMRAAM has to fly out maybe 20-30 miles and then still have enough energy to chase down a maneuvering plane.
When you're dealing with a swarm of "cheap" drones, you won't need all that performance. It's cheap, so it probably wont be able to pull off those high G maneuvers fighter jets try. If it has a small engine (thus small IR), then it probably can't go very fast either. And it's range of its weapons is probably small too. So now you can build a missile with semi-active radar (like the Sea Sparrow), give it 10 miles (or even less). It probably doesn't even have to be supersonic (even cheaper!). So now may have a missile that's as cheap, or cheaper than most drones you're trying to shoot down.
Or, we might just see the return of large caliber AAA. Computer guided 88s. Yum.
Well, as much as desired goes, this also affects how a lot of filters and effects work. For example, it causes most Gaussian blur implementations to 'flare' brights into darks more than they should. And that's been happening for so long, that that's now the expected/wanted behavior out of 'Gaussian Blurs'. If you changed that, you would have some confused/annoyed users.
There was kind of a big splash back in December about this Broadcom chip... Crystal HD or something. Basically, it's a $2 (or some other absurdly low price) video decoder chip that'll take pretty much the full load for decoding most common codecs in use today. It was certified by Intel as well. Wonder why we aren't seeing more netbooks out there being announced with this bugger. I mean, it'll cost next to nothing, and put plain-ass Atoms at par with Ion powered netbooks (well, for 90% of users who only needed/wanted Ion for the video to begin with).
I while ago I was thinking about picking up a netbook versus a used X61. What I found while digging around is that, as a rough guide, any Pentium M of the same clockspeed of a a given Atom chip will kick that Atom's ass in terms of performance. As for your battery life expencancy, my experience with Lenovo Thinkpads (I'm using a T400 right now), is whatever they advertise, lob 10-20% off it and you'll get a fairly representative number. A lot of it has to do with how low you're willing to turn down the backlight. In those terms, the newer thinkpads are really better, cause they're the only ones that have LED backlight option.
Basically, if your current X31 has maxed out RAM and anything but the slowest CPU option, it's at least at parity, if not better than pretty much any Atom powered netbook out there. It also has a much nicer keyboard.
Uh. Safari 1.0 was released in June 2003. Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004. I think it's safe to say that Safari was released before Firefox was mature.
I read about this once. Basically the shape of a snowflake is determined by the exact conditions over the course of the formation of the snowflake. This is why finding two identical snowflakes is so unlikely. That being said, apparently the vast majority of snow flakes aren't symmetrical. It's just that they aren't pretty so no one posts pictures of them. According to this site (run by a Caltech physics prof, its got amazing info and pictures of snowflakes), "The most common snow crystals by far are the irregular crystals. These are small, usually clumped together, and show little of the symmetry seen in stellar or columnar crystals."
In any case, the reason for the "perfect" symmetry that you can find it, "As the crystal becomes larger, however, branches begin to sprout from the six corners of the hexagon (this is the third stage in the diagram at right). Since the atmospheric conditions (e. g. temperature and humidity) are nearly constant across the small crystal, the six budding arms all grow out at roughly the same rate.".
Presumably if we ever get around to colonizing different star systems, each star system will call that star in the middle of the system "the sun" instead of whatever astronomical name we give it now. I would find it retardedly annoying to constantly go "Man, Tau Ceti is sure bright today, better stay inside or else you'll get Tau Ceti-burn", and just use sun instead. Which leaves us with what the fuck do we call the Sun that the homeplanet orbits? So we take huge ass hint from science fiction and call it Sol.
Just going to comment on the ELPE itself. Currently (at least for Engineering students), you just have to pass the ELPE before you graduate. You're allowed one rewrite per year. The ELPE itself is a fairly standard "standardized essay" similar to the essay section of the SAT. You just walk in and pick a topic from a list, and start writing. That being said, among my friends and fellow students, we're all fairly sure that your ELPE score has little to do with your actual English proficiency. Genuinely good writers have scraped by with just barely passes, while incomplete essays with middle school vocabulary have passed with 80s or higher. In other words, its just like the SAT essay section. It doesn't test your essay writing abilities. It tests your ability to write standardized essays.
Now, that's not to say that there isn't a problem with the english proficiency of Waterloo students. While looking over my friends' resumes, and editing work from groupmates, I have found myself dismayed at what sat in front of me. Now, strictly speaking, most of the writing wasn't "wrong". Just bad. I'm sure part of this comes from being in the engineering program. It's a fairly widespread belief that many engineering students are in engineering partly because they suck at writing, and didn't want to deal with long essays to get through university. And to their dismay, engineering programs are full of writing. I can remember a classmate yelling in dismay when we were assigned to write a full technical report. "BUT THEY TOLD ME I WOULDN'T NEED TO WRITE IN ENGINEERING!". And Waterloo has a LOT of engineers. And math students. Who are also more or less in the same boat.
No. It was one of the SR-71s modified to be a mothership for a D-21 drone. They had some problems and launch and yeah.. ejected.
They've had supersonic ejection seats for quite a while now. Pretty much every modern fighter jet has them. There was a successful ejection out of a modified SR-71 back in the 60s. They were flying at over mach 3. Pilot survived, the copilot drowned when after he landed in the water.
I have a T400 as well, but I can usually (like 98% of the time) switch between cards without a reboot. Are you sure you got the right drivers and stuff? I think if you remove all of the default Lenovo software, you end up with some problems. You need to keep the Lenovo battery/power management software (sweet! two battery gauges).
Actually, cap screens work with any conductor. I mean, hell, a hot dog works on a iPhone. You could use that in your mechanical device. Though a giant metal probe would also work. But the hot dog is more fun, and probably gives better results... a lot more like a finger.
It doesn't matter if a finger isn't "precise" enough. The purpose of the testing is to determine real life performance. So you should be testing with something as precise as you would use in real life. What does it matter if a phone can detect the exact position of a pen point, when it goes nuts trying to find the center of your fingertip. What matters is consistency. In that case, the methodology is wrong. A single human isn't not consistent enough, even over the number of repetitions shown.
They are testing a first generation iPhone. This test is interesting, but not really useful. As some of the comments point out, diagonal lines really aren't the best indicator for accuracy when hitting links or whatever. As usual, the lack of consistency that comes from using a single human being comes into play. While you don't need a machine that always draws perfectly straight lines, you need a machine (or guide) that draws the same lines for each phone.
Some extra detail from the story. The iPhone has poor detection along the edges (basically flattens out diagonals into vertical or horizontal lines), the Nexus One has the best. Not that important as most UI elements aren't right at the edge anyways. The waviness in some of the tests suggests that the sensors or algorithms may be biased into vertical/horizontal motions (makes sense from a gesturing point of view).
If they really wanted to test how well the touchscreen reacts to hitting links and stuff, I don't see why they just don't go test that. Load up the same sites and keep track of how well it reacts to you hitting links. At the very least, if they wanted to do the drawing program test, it would make more sense to test what happens when you try to hit points, instead of drawing lines. So you could put some magic marker dots on the screen, and have the user hit them and look for the overlap or something.
All in all... shows off some interesting stuff. Suggests some interesting things about the behavior of the different touchscreens, but really not all too conclusive, and really points to further testing/refinement of procedure.
The University of Toyko's version is demo'd using a manga... go figure. The high-speed camera approach is also really cool. Reminds me of that TNG episode (yeah yeah, I know) where the aliens built that casino/hotel based on a book for that astronaut... Picard hands the novel over to Data and asks him to summarize. Data just flips through all the pages in like 3 seconds and spews out the madness.
Eh, just replying here to a bunch of other sibling responses. Newer spy-sats can indeed do a lot of things the Blackbird could do, as well as some stuff that the Blackbird couldn't do. But to claim that they could completely replace the Blackbird is a bit much. Spy sats all follow known orbits. It is possible to compute those orbits and avoid/hide from spy sats. Both sides of the cold war did that a lot, which is part of the reason why the U2 and Blackbird were so useful. Does that mean that we NEED the Blackbird (taking its costs and other stuff into account)? Not necessarily. But I'm sure there have been cases since its retirement where government or military leaders sat back and went "if only we still had a Blackbird". Assuming they haven't been duping us the whole time, and they actually did replace it with something better.
And on that note, the U-2 is still in active use (they call it the TR-1 now). So one of the ironies there is that the U-2 outlasted its replacement.. by a lot. If anything, it shows that there's still use for long range human recon planes (compared to spy sats). Though I guess UAVs are gonna completely take over that role soon enough.
Apparently a lot of the ERVs (that 8% of our DNA made from retrovirus pieces) get expressed during pregnancy by the fetus. One of the results is that the mother's immune system gets depressed (apparently a lot of HIV-like stuff going on there) that prevents the mother's immune system from killing the fetus. There's probably lots of other fun stuff going on that we don't know about yet. It's actually really cool when you think about it... mammalian childbirth being possible because some immunodepressent virus infected some reptile a long long time ago.
There still will be hundreds of Chinese mad rip-offs in months. You just won't see them in North America. They'll have cool names like "Ne><us 1" or something. Or even better, "Nexus Two-plus". Go google Nokla for a nice example of this. It's kind of funny. Engadget has an entire series on this (they're over two hundred).
This is really cool stuff. It reminded me of some stuff I read before of locust swarms migrating across the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas. But in that case, evidence (a shit load of dead locust washing onto shore) suggested that locust kept dying and the rest of the swarm ate their corpses for fuel and/or used their dead bodies as 'islands'. Just remember that the largest locust swarms are in the billions and cover hundreds of square kilometers on land...
Anyhow, here's a linky to a National Geographic article (it also suggests the original American populations of locusts were immigrants from across the ocean).
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/12/1228_051228_locusts.html
One thing about the wide frames is that it makes it easier to hold without touching the screen. Which kinda seems important when you're dealing with touchscreens.