epsilondelta

Anyone who knows anything about the Chinese mobile phone market would not be surprised about something like the Xiaomi phone being labeled "innovative." As much as Chinese companies have a reputation for making cheap knockoffs and cloning anything from baby food to Apple stores, there's a significant and competitive domestic Chinese market for cell phones which does reward innovation. Not necessarily YC-caliber innovation, but cell phones became prevalent and dominant in China faster than in the West, because of the large domestic market, low regulations, and international manufacturers eager to jumpstart the market. For example, Motorola was for a while the largest foreign business in China and was the market leader in mobile devices. Cheap operating costs and a rising affluent middle class = lots of cell phones sold.

You want an anecdote? I remember when I was in China in 2003. (Or 2004. Around that time.) Back here in the US, Motorola RAZRs were sorta popular. Here's an image for comparison of scale:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2331/2498240940_80a83f70e9.jp...

In China, the popular phones were very different. They were much smaller, they had more varied ringtones, they were more colorful. And they were not all Motorola phones either, Chinese domestic manufacturers were all trying to make their phones as thin, sleek, and minimalist as possible. (Sound familiar?) Since then Motorola has lost a lot of market share to Chinese manufacturers who mostly are not delivering tasteless clones. Part of it is that expensive cell phones become a status symbol, and the people who can afford those phones take them seriously. I couldn't find any pictures by Googling combinations of "china," "cell phone," "2003," etc. So take my word on it or not, but that was the case. (Of course, the Xiaomi device looks like an iPhone. But then everything looks like an Apple product these days.)

What's the moral of the story? Don't be like Motorola, don't throw away your Chinese market share, and don't force Google to acquire you just for your overpriced IP.

It sms tht omttng crtn vwls mks ths tlgrph-spk. (Does one hve to typ lss thn 140 chrctrs?)

That's true. The brain has billions of neurons, and trillions of synapses. Parallel doesn't even come close to describing the density of connections, or the method of "computation" done by the brain. But it was an easy analogy. Don't look too hard into it :)

A lot of the challenges in making driverless cars has been in visual object recognition, which is probably the "visual post-processing" you mean.

It is important to note that humans, and other mammals, are very hard-wired to process vision and other inputs. For example, the retina is more than just an organic lens; it also encodes information about the motion of objects seen within its field of vision:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627307...

So in addition to post-processing, there is probably significant pre-processing done by the sensory extensions of our brain. Similarly, the physicist Georg Zweig studied the cochlea and found how it mechanically separates sound into its frequency distribution. Zweig's research on the cochlea also resulted in the discovery of the continuous wavelet transform, whose discrete version may be familiar through its use in JPEG2000.

http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Zweig.html

100 ms / 10 ms = 10 steps

But that's a straw man argument. The brain is a massively parallel net of neurons connected by synapses. Saying that it takes "10 steps" to respond to a stimulus is like saying that a GPU only applies a few pixel shaders on a scene per frame. Perhaps, but that's over millions of pixels.

Also, human DNA is unique from that of close mammals on a set of base pairs of size the order of 1-5 percent of our genome. So that means 10-50 MB. That's actually a pretty substantial size: it can even store a small operating system kernel (Linux can be compiled to under 10 MB).

Edit: The 1 GB figure comes from the fact that the human genome size is almost 3 billion base pairs, where each base pair exactly encodes 2 bits. So, (3x10^9)*2/8=750 MB which rounds up.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v431/n7011/abs/nature03...

Hurd is still using Mach? I don't see the point if it's just going to cheat around the IPC problem like OS X did.

And in the past decade, there have been more promising microkernels, like L4. Unless I missed something and there's still a good reason for Hurd to still be using Mach.

Related to the idea of a "freedom zone" is that of a university "bubble," where the institution's endowment and funding allows the needs and interests of research to ignore what's beyond its walls. But while scientists may want to publish in Nature so they can get offered good faculty positions, and while the bubble may make it easy for them to exercise freedom in research, I think a lot of them are seeing and believing in the benefits of open publications, if not yet open data. The success of the arxiv and PLoS as well as the NIH's new rule of delayed public paper release are exemplary of the trend toward open academic publications.

And so the Clone War drags on and on. These days, who knows what "willing to negotiate" means anymore? Hint: It's not limited to patent licensing.

It's not my startup :) One of my friends worked with them during the prototyping phase a few years ago. I guess it's good to see the site active. Anyway, you should email the right people w/ your suggestions, I'm just an observer.

Red Hat is pretty close to being a billion dollar business:

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110323006450/en/Red-...

Two photons interfering is just two photons interfering; that's not measurement. More precisely, the wavelike photon, which is the "cause" of the interference pattern, hits a component of a photodetector, which generates a voltage and sends an electron current through a cable, that feeds into a computer which is running a program that displays photon counts. On the other hand, if you isolate parts of the setup, for example if the interference pattern of the photon hits just a very thin slice of photosensitive material that would otherwise be part of the photodetector, I'm sure you may very well observe an electron interference pattern, for example (and a non-rigorous one, at that).

In "real life" (meaning in the laboratory), measurement isn't some discrete process that can be isolated at a specific point in an experimental setup. Otherwise, there would be much better explanations for measurement in undergraduate physics curriculums.

In fact, even in top physics curriculums, the problem of measurement is barely treated at all, since the interpretation of measurement in quantum mechanics is a "philosophical" problem that apparently has no place in real physics, which instead must concern itself with mathematics that is phenomenologically accurate.

It seems to me that this news misses a more fundamental point about game balance and the player base in EVE Online.

To those unfamiliar with EVE Online: EVE is a "skill-based" spaceship MMO where instead of gaining XP by completing missions or killing NPCs, you gradually and constantly accumulate points in skills that directly affect your available ships, combat attributes, and market trading efficiency, for example.

This means that veteran players have an enormous advantage over newer players by being able to fly the highest tiered ships, fitting the highest tiered weapons, and using their items with maxed efficiency. While competent players can make great use of low-skill characters, there is an effective initial skill barrier between 10-20 million SP, which corresponds to about 6-12 months of training/subscription time. Beyond that initial barrier, players with 40-50 million+ SP can be more or less maxed in several categories of skills, allowing them to fly certain classes of ships at near-100% skill efficiency.

The skill barriers in EVE provide an obstacle to new players that requires at least a year of training to reach a comfortable SP level, and at least 2 years to max out the SP for a given "class". This is a barrier in the sense that the new player base can still make effective use of lower-tiered ships, but this usually limits their options in PvP and PvE to areas like Faction War, or level 3 missions. There are still ways to participate in richer aspects of the game, like in 0.0 fleet battles by flying cheap Drakes, but e.g. small-mid sized warfare in advanced ships (armor HAC gangs, shield gangs) is completely inaccessible.

What does this have to do with selling in-game items for RL money? Doing such a thing provides an easy path for lower-SP characters to become competitive with veteran characters. Judging from the response on community sites like FHC, it seems that it is the veteran players who are not too keen on the idea. Possibly because, you know, these RL money items could screw up veterans' SP advantage, i.e. their investment in terms of years of EVE subscription.

But if CCP cannot retain new players, then perhaps it doesn't make sense for them to alienate their veteran player base by releasing RL money items. So this episode raises deep problems in EVE's player base composition and the difficulty which CCP has always had in retaining new players.