The Podmaster took a small case out of his shirt. He opened it, and held something that glittered in the lowering sun. It was a small square, a tile. There were flecks of light that might have been cheap mica, except that the colors swept in coordinated iridescence. "This is one of the cladding tiles from the satellite. There was also a layer of low-power LEDs, but we've stripped those off. Chemically, what is left is diamond fragments bound in epoxy. Watch." He set the square down on the table and shined a hand light on it. And they all watched....And after a moment the little square of iridescence floated upward. At first, the motion looked like a commonplace of the microgravity environment, a loose paperweight wafting on an air current. But the air in the room was still. And as the seconds passed, the tile moved faster, tumbling, falling...straight up. It hit the ceiling with an audible clink-and remained there.
If I had a newfangled TV with motion interpolation I would probably turn it off too, but not because I don't like smooth motion! The ones I've looked at in stores seem to produce inconsistent results which I find distracting - they are good at interpolating camera pans but not much else.
This is because in general you can't recover information that's been thrown away (or not captured in the first place), and interpolating motion is always going to give slightly dodgy results, especially when your processing is limited to what you can do in real time.
I hate interlace for the same reason. In the days of analog transmission it was a good compromise between resolution, frame rate and bandwidth. In the era of digital however, it can be thought of as the worst lossy codec ever, assuming the source is 50 or 60 FPS. 25/30 FPS material isn't harmed if decoded correctly, but interlace seems to have a unique ability to confuse programmers / hardware designers, resulting in anything from "combing", to horrible jittering caused by displaying the fields in the wrong order.
How about "high frame rate"? (whether that is 48, 50, 60 or higher)
If you want video to look "life-like" you need a better frame rate than 24 FPS. Every gamer knows it (and I wish that every movie-goer knew it too).
Is this new format going to support higher frame rates? Each of color depth, frame rate, resolution and 3D independently multiplies the required bandwidth, so current blu-ray can't even do full-HD @ 60p, never mind 3D at the same time.
It would be nice if there was a format compatible with the Hobbit trilogy as it is meant to be seen (and hopefully more films like it in future).
(and BTW, a motion-interpolating TV is *not* the answer!)
It's the damn auto-refresh on the main page. It was bad enough when it used AJAX to load new content - any new story would push down the one I was reading the summary of, causing me to lose my place. But for a while now it's been reloading the whole page (http://slashdot.org/?source=autorefresh), which is even worse.
I've found no way to disable this "feature".
You are correct. Even though in infinite time the bubble would expand to infinite volume, this would only affect a volume that was initially finite, if very large. The "edges" (cosmological horizon) of the affected volume would always outpace the bubble's expansion. (This is assuming the expansion of the universe continues. Its apparent acceleration might be just an artifact)
However, there doesn't have to be just one bubble, nor does it have to arise in "billions of years". Nowhere and nowhen is safe... unless the Many-Worlds Interpretation is true. (to see why the MWI helps, see quantum suicide and quantum immortality)
not to sue / prosecute you - if they conclude that your disclosure respects and meets all their guidelines.
Oh and the program is "subject to change or to cancellation at any point without notice".
I've had my computer-illiterate parents on a non-admin account for 20 years now
I'd love to know what operating system you were using on home computers 20 years ago that supported limited user accounts and was usable by "computer-illiterate parents".
In fact, all plugins should be click to play with a white list of auto play sites that the user can configure.
That's exactly what Chrome does for me since I enabled it.
Go to chrome://flags/ and enable Click to play, then go to chrome://settings/content and set Plug-ins to Click to Play. There's also a blacklist / whitelist you can configure.
Why this option is "experimental" I have no idea.
The people doing the searching probably know from experience that they will get more results for an English search term than for its local translation. Also, searching for images, they are less likely to care what language the accompanying text is in.
Every time I use Thunderbird to access fastmail via IMAP I get an annoying warning dialog:
Security Error: Domain Name Mismatch
You have attempted to establish a connection with "imap.fastmail.fm". However, the security certificate presented belongs to [long list of hosts ending in.messagingengine.com]...
If you suspect the certificate shown does not belong to "imap.fastmail.fm", please cancel the connection and notify the site administrator.
...which I haven't done - it seems more productive to bitch about it on slashdot. (over the years I've put quite a lot of effort into bug reports for various products and the rate of response is pretty discouraging)
Never mind Star Trek, this reminds me of the Emergents' "Focus" mental enslavement technology from Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. From wikipedia:
An active MRI-type device triggers changes [...] manipulating the brain in this way, Emergent managers induce obsession with a single idea or specialty, which they call Focus, essentially turning them into brilliant [information] appliances.
24 hours (or even 24 seconds!) to render 20k of HTML should be considered a bug. Did you submit it to bugzilla? Does it still take a long time on a current version of Firefox?
I don't understand their QA process
on
Mozilla 1.6 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
On 2003-06-01 I submitted a bug report (see my mirror if bugzilla doesn't let you follow a link from slashdot). I read the bug reporting guidelines and did all the right things. I created a stripped-down test case and attached it, adding the keyword "testcase". I set the Severity to Major since I think it's somewhat serious (see for yourself). The bug got confirmed by a QA person... and then ignored. There have been several releases since then (final, non-beta releases), and my bug has remained.
What I'd like to know is: why are releases made with known Major bugs, and what does it take for a bug to get seen to and not sit in Bugzilla, ignored? It has certainly made me feel that there is little point in reporting any further bugs.
Could someone explain Mozilla's QA process to me?
This bug is easily reproduced. Hold down the middle button (left+right doesn't work, if you have a 2-button mouse) to depress an area of squares and click the left button. The squares stay depressed.
Mind you, I'm using the Win2k version, and haven't tested this with other versions. The Win2k version also has a "feature" which I would call a bug: pressing Esc stops the clock but lets you play on, allowing you to fake any time you want! The help file describes a more complicated series of actions to do this, but pressing Esc is in fact sufficient. What drugs were M$ on when they implemented this??
Slashdot Mirror
1. We do have workable fusion reactors.
That's a pretty big claim. Can you provide any info or links to back it up?
Could you elaborate on what didn't suck about the cinema you went to?
I'd like to know where to find this?
If I had a newfangled TV with motion interpolation I would probably turn it off too, but not because I don't like smooth motion! The ones I've looked at in stores seem to produce inconsistent results which I find distracting - they are good at interpolating camera pans but not much else.
This is because in general you can't recover information that's been thrown away (or not captured in the first place), and interpolating motion is always going to give slightly dodgy results, especially when your processing is limited to what you can do in real time.
I hate interlace for the same reason. In the days of analog transmission it was a good compromise between resolution, frame rate and bandwidth. In the era of digital however, it can be thought of as the worst lossy codec ever, assuming the source is 50 or 60 FPS. 25/30 FPS material isn't harmed if decoded correctly, but interlace seems to have a unique ability to confuse programmers / hardware designers, resulting in anything from "combing", to horrible jittering caused by displaying the fields in the wrong order.
How about "high frame rate"? (whether that is 48, 50, 60 or higher)
If you want video to look "life-like" you need a better frame rate than 24 FPS. Every gamer knows it (and I wish that every movie-goer knew it too).
Is this new format going to support higher frame rates? Each of color depth, frame rate, resolution and 3D independently multiplies the required bandwidth, so current blu-ray can't even do full-HD @ 60p, never mind 3D at the same time.
It would be nice if there was a format compatible with the Hobbit trilogy as it is meant to be seen (and hopefully more films like it in future).
(and BTW, a motion-interpolating TV is *not* the answer!)
It's the damn auto-refresh on the main page. It was bad enough when it used AJAX to load new content - any new story would push down the one I was reading the summary of, causing me to lose my place. But for a while now it's been reloading the whole page (http://slashdot.org/?source=autorefresh), which is even worse. I've found no way to disable this "feature".
A crippled cipher can be used to read your private data. A crippled hash function can be used to substitute bad data for good.
Actually that part was humor. You might want to look that up.
My feeling, as a non-cosmologist, is that we don't even know the correct model. What was the nature of the inflationary epoch, for example?
...is known to 3 significant figures, I'll sell you a bridge.
You are correct. Even though in infinite time the bubble would expand to infinite volume, this would only affect a volume that was initially finite, if very large. The "edges" (cosmological horizon) of the affected volume would always outpace the bubble's expansion. (This is assuming the expansion of the universe continues. Its apparent acceleration might be just an artifact) However, there doesn't have to be just one bubble, nor does it have to arise in "billions of years". Nowhere and nowhen is safe... unless the Many-Worlds Interpretation is true. (to see why the MWI helps, see quantum suicide and quantum immortality)
not to sue / prosecute you - if they conclude that your disclosure respects and meets all their guidelines. Oh and the program is "subject to change or to cancellation at any point without notice".
PayPal security team will determine the bounty amount and all decisions are final.
Would you trust Paypal to reward you fairly?
I've had my computer-illiterate parents on a non-admin account for 20 years now
I'd love to know what operating system you were using on home computers 20 years ago that supported limited user accounts and was usable by "computer-illiterate parents".
APANA isn't an ISP, and only offers broadband internet service through commercial ISPs (at no discount to those ISP's standard rates).
That's exactly what Chrome does for me since I enabled it. Go to chrome://flags/ and enable Click to play, then go to chrome://settings/content and set Plug-ins to Click to Play. There's also a blacklist / whitelist you can configure. Why this option is "experimental" I have no idea.
The people doing the searching probably know from experience that they will get more results for an English search term than for its local translation. Also, searching for images, they are less likely to care what language the accompanying text is in.
24 hours (or even 24 seconds!) to render 20k of HTML should be considered a bug. Did you submit it to bugzilla? Does it still take a long time on a current version of Firefox?
What I'd like to know is: why are releases made with known Major bugs, and what does it take for a bug to get seen to and not sit in Bugzilla, ignored? It has certainly made me feel that there is little point in reporting any further bugs. Could someone explain Mozilla's QA process to me?
This bug is easily reproduced. Hold down the middle button (left+right doesn't work, if you have a 2-button mouse) to depress an area of squares and click the left button. The squares stay depressed.
Mind you, I'm using the Win2k version, and haven't tested this with other versions. The Win2k version also has a "feature" which I would call a bug: pressing Esc stops the clock but lets you play on, allowing you to fake any time you want! The help file describes a more complicated series of actions to do this, but pressing Esc is in fact sufficient. What drugs were M$ on when they implemented this??