Elise From Scratch

For your practice (if you need it:), here are only the first five notes from Beethoven's Für Elise, played by Detlef Kraus (BTW, my piano teacher's teacher): either for download e.g. into iTunes here, or to listen to in the web browser in a separate tab or window (just click on the link).

E, D#, E, D#, E

Here are four more bars a bit further down, again either for iTunes or to listen to directly in the browser.



Further more, love this improvised version by Yoke Wong:

Fur Elise Piano Demo By Yoke Wong -Watch Beethoven Fur Elise



This is also a wonderful visualisation and way to learn music, IMHO this application alone is worth getting an iPad!

Magic Piano for iPad [Fur Elise]



Last, not least, Artur Schnabel, Ivo Pogorelich, and also Detlef Kraus:

Beethoven - Fur Elise - Schnabel


Beethoven - Fur elise


Ludwig van Beethoven: Für Elise

Google - Translating

BTW, if the article is not accessible directly, goto Google News, search for the title, and go from there. At the moment most pay per view articles are free for Google users.

BTW BTW, this will be an area very difficult for Apple to compete in. Thought Apple has the cash reserves now, they don't have the expertise and no synergies to other areas of their business. They try already to catch up for maps.

BTW BTW BTW, the biggest progress in terms of artificial intelligence (well, since the invention of AI, whatever) is IMHO the Google Search database/engine. It is maybe not much more than a big big memory, but memory IS a VERY big part of intelligence! And every further software/module/engine/project can be build on top of that, with whatever new results and effects that might bring! However, and here is the problem with any further global progress and with Google itself, you better work for Google if you want to have the means and to have access to the goodies. Google has a treasure with nothing comparable in human history (gold, oil, land, resources, money, people, armies, you name it). And as you can see below, they intend on using it.

NY Times article: Google’s Computing Power Betters Translation Tool

Creating a translation machine has long been seen as one of the toughest challenges in artificial intelligence. For decades, computer scientists tried using a rules-based approach — teaching the computer the linguistic rules of two languages and giving it the necessary dictionaries.

But in the mid-1990s, researchers began favoring a so-called statistical approach. They found that if they fed the computer thousands or millions of passages and their human-generated translations, it could learn to make accurate guesses about how to translate new texts.

It turns out that this technique, which requires huge amounts of data and lots of computing horsepower, is right up Google’s alley.

“Our infrastructure is very well-suited to this,” Vic Gundotra, a vice president for engineering at Google, said. “We can take approaches that others can’t even dream of.”

...

“This technology can make the language barrier go away,” said Franz Och, a principal scientist at Google who leads the company’s machine translation team. “It would allow anyone to communicate with anyone else.”

Mr. Och, a German researcher who previously worked at the University of Southern California, said he was initially reluctant to join Google, fearing it would treat translation as a side project. Larry Page, Google’s other founder, called to reassure him.

“He basically said that this is something that is very important for Google,” Mr. Och recalled recently. Mr. Och signed on in 2004 and was soon able to put Mr. Page’s promise to the test.

While many translation systems like Google’s use up to a billion words of text to create a model of a language, Google went much bigger: a few hundred billion English words. “The models become better and better the more text you process,” Mr. Och said.

No Mouse

Oh yeah!!!

Inside Apple's iPad: iPhone OS vs Mac OS X

The thing that makes me frustrated is that so many users think that using the desktop version of os X is the way to go, and as you guys pointed out, doesn't work. What I think people are failing to see is that apple has finally figured out a way to make an OS that doesn't use a mouse. They designed it for the finger and they have done it very well. I think that apple should continue in this direction, and perhaps what they are looking to do is to eliminate the use of mice all together in favor of multi touch, and a keyboard. Could apple be using the iPhone/iPod touch OS as their map for mac OS 11? If that's the case then I'd say they are moving in the right direction.

I think the reason they don't allow for multi tasking on their mobile devices is because they are still seeing the iPhone OS as a beta for OS 11. They don't want to introduce multi tasking untill it is perfected, and can be done better then it has ever been done before. I hope other companies finally get the picture, and create finger friendly OSs.

I also beleive that there is more then enough evidence for OS 11 to be multi touch ONLY: apple has been moving their devices more and more towards multi touch, starting with the two finger scroll in their ibooks and ending on the computer end with the Magic Mouse and current macbook trackpads, and on the other side the ipad. If apple continues in this way, I beleive that the next step they have to take is to start making the iPad start eating the sales from their Macbooks when they come out with the iPad 2. If they can do this then we may see OS 11 be made just for multi touch and we will no longer need a mouse.....

But a keyboard still would be nice...