Well, the key as I see it is that "home automation" is something only the geekiest of geeks would ever be involved with, but most people in America are currently frustrated with needing a pile of remotes.
Find a great solution to the "pile of remotes" problem (clearly programmable remotes weren't the answer, or at least not as currently implemented) and you can use that to drive a single unified future by market dominance.
Personally, I think the right answer will allow you to easily use any of the popular video game console controllers as a universal remote - as well as more normal controls of course.
My water bill is 80% fixed infrastructure cost (and/or PUC graft) and 20% usage. There's no reason not to do electrical billing the same way. Pay a fixed monthly amount to cover infrastructure (based on the size of the bribes to whoever decides the amount), then a usage amount on top of that. That way folks on solar with net 0 usage, but who depend on the grid for power at night, would still pay.
Thanks for a post that reminds me of why/. used to be great.
There is a lot of sweetening, a lot of one-off lighting tricks in post and in the render which only look great from the one angle. Games have to look good from every angle.
I think games have some room here. You can do useful stuff to a 2D frame after it's been created in the GPU (like good FSAA of course). Of course, I'd suspect many of the algorithms used for film aren't yet public.
Back when it was a struggle getting framerate, you would get an amazing improvement by rendering hi-rez textures at 800x600, pixel doubling to 1600x1200, then doing good FSAA. (As opposed to turning off all the chrome or using low-rez textures, then rendering at 1600x1200, to get the same framerate.) I suspect more modern and impressive 2D clean up tricks could be done in a game today, as long as they didn't take per-scene human judgment of course, and wouldn't be competing with the 3D rendering engine for compute power.
If you're in the US (or have products also sold in the US), look on the back of, well, anything with a plug and you'll see the "UL" logo. It stands for Underwriters Laboratories and they do safety testing (mostly fire safety, and not just electronics). It's an great example of a non-governmental safely solution that actually works.
I've been involved in making products that need to be UL tested, and they're great to work with for such a big organization. They're test quickly, and tell you exactly what failed. An company like this that tested software - sort of a non-scummy counterpart to the virus scanner guys - and had a reputation that meant something would change the industry, IMO.
We only get good enough framerate at 1920x1200 (the One True Resolution) because of a lot of shortcuts. Improved computing power could allow games to make the transition to better lighting models (whatever they call the new ray0tracing stuff) that are both easier for artists/world builders and look better and more natural. It would also be nice to stop thinking of everything in polygons, but there's so much tooling there beyond the GPU (and if you push the poly-count high enough it doesn't matter visually).
The Decline of Japanese Consumer Electronics Continues...
As a consumer I'm fine with that - I just bought a great new plasma TV form a Korean manufacturer. As long as someone, somewhere, keeps pushing the state of the art. Longterm though I think Japan has deeper issues, with its ongoing demographic implosion (and the same thing would be happening in the US without immigration).
More on-topic: plasma is great, and remains great, if you're not shopping for the cheapest model line. Great color accuracy (not just the great blacks), no problems off-angle, and no problems with fast motion. I've yet to see an LCD as good at a similar price-point.
Still, OLED is the future (combines the picture quality of plasma with the lower power and weight of LCD), and has finally made it to top-end TVs as a consumer product. Absurdly expensive, but everything starts that way. (OLED was "the cool new technology sure to be in TVs soon" when Slashdot was new). Give it another 5 years, and merely "expensive" TVs should be OLED.
MS doesn't care either way about open source. What they'd likely object to is small publishers (much like the current "infrequently downloaded").
What we really need, no joke, is "UL for software". Some 3rd party company who's only business is rating software as "not malware", and who is in turn kept honest by the big distros. Then as the little guy you could pay them to test your software, and even the most paranoid could trust that. (That's how it works today with UL and most things in your home, and UL's fees are quite reasonable.)
Is there any easy way to clean dubious PDFs? I'm bothered by the number of PDFs I have than might contain exploits if I ever accidentally had an Adobe product installed on some system. Any open source "PDF cleaner" or somesuch?
Yes, that's the intention, and software always works as intended, so we have nothing to worry about. Automatically installing software from whatever server that googleupdate.exe thinks is the mothership has no potential security problems of any kind.
Yep - because Samsung was smart about it, and "turning it off" involves pointing it directly up (I guess sliding a shield in front of it to turn it off would have been more certain, but would have looked odd).
Yeah, that's a good point. What I would call "medium-sized" black holes - at least moon-sized, but smaller than can form through stellar collapse, would be stable and nearly undetectable. That was one of the MACHO candidates, and I don't know why they'd be excluded by the CMBR data, except perhaps that there wasn't a theory with a quantitative prediction at the time.
Well, if Hawking radiation is real (and it's the best current theory) then small black holes have very short lifespans. However, AFAIK we've never actually observed Hawking radiation, and people are still looking for evidence of small black holes.
Thanks for the detailed reply. I'd still quibble a bit here - you seem to be conflating "observational evidence" with "experimental evidence". There are many scientific fields where we can't ever do experiments, after all, yet the observational data is conclusive. I take your point, however and I think we're merely arguing semantics - have we directly detected dinosaurs? (Err, non-avian dinosaurs, not the kind I had for lunch, dang paleontologists changing everything). Have we directly measured the age of the fossils? I'd say so to both, but I could understand a definition that excluded one.
But that isn't the only solution, because the only evidence we have is through gravity, and there is absolutely no reason at all (and it would be a mild form of intellectual blindeness) to prematurely declare that "dark matter" is definitely particulate and not, say, a sign that gravity does not behave on kpc scales the way it does on AU scales, let alone on Mpc and Gpc
Sure, it could also be the result of the FSMs many tentacles pushing down on each of us, but I haven't heard of a "gravity is different" theory that made accurate quantitative predictions of the CMBR data, where the dark matter theory did. Maybe I just didn't hear about it?
Well, both companies offer their mail services with your company's URL (I don't know about Yahoo). On the MS side, there's little difference between outlook talking to exchange and outlook talking to O365 in the cloud, other than latency. You can't really tell the difference in the web clients. I haven't seen gmail used for company email yet, but I assume you'd choose that because you liked the web client in the first place.
But all we ever detect is indirect signals about something, no? And anything detected by any instrument could always be some new, previously unknown effect that just happens to look like what we expect from theory - but that's not very helpful to say. I'd say we detected dark matter in the same way we detected the Higgs boson - a theory made some specific predictions about what we'd see under the circumstance, and we saw something nicely matching the prediction.
The fact that the same theory quantitatively describes both the anomaly in galactic rotation and the CMBR stuff is as convincing to me as anything we must deduce from measurements because our own senses can't ever observe.
Sure, we didn't detect a specific species of particle, no argument there, nor anything that even gave us order-or-magnitude of mass of any such particle, or confirm even that "particle" is the right description here, but I don't see why you say we didn't detect the presence of something with mass but not photon/EM interaction?
There were many such theories, both differing kinds of dark matter and different things that might be "wrong with gravity", and no way to choose between them without new observations. Then we got new observations, and the WIMP version of dark matter predicted those new observations (from the cosmic microwave background radiation) quite well, while the others were falsified.
I use email for a lot of stuff (I avoid "social" sites entirely), and I hate continuing "improvements" to email clients - both web and otherwise. I loved gmail when it was new, and had the same "simple, clean" UI approach as the search page. Now it's such a mess that I'm moving to outlook.com, which I've been quite surprised to discover is, well, clean and simple.
The thing is: instruments did detect the presence of something that was * Matter * Not interacting with electrons or photons * At the ratio to normal matter (quite accurately) predicted by a dark matter theory for galaxy rotation
Many theories were invented "to make the math work out" for galaxy rotation, and one of them made a quite accurate prediction of what we eventually measured about the early universe. Now we're trying to make additional measurements, because while we've measured dark matter at a large scale, that only tells us a little.
Well, science is about what the data points to, not just what sort of fun stories we can tell. The data points to some kind of matter that doesn't interact with electrons or photons, and that doesn't have some alternative way to clump due to friction (and I guess we know more about what it's not from TFA).
There were many explanations floated for galactic rotation rates, but one specific dark matter theory predicted the CMBR results with great accuracy, so the scientific method says we go with that until something make better predictions of newer data.
No for dark matter, because the strong evidence is from the early universe. Yes for "dark energy", because the term (like "cosmological constant") is just a placeholder for "there's something we don't know yet about how gravity and spacetime works at really large scales". Also, there's something we barely understand about it at very small scales - postulating "faster than light expansion of the early universe" explains a lot of data, but not much progress on a mechanism for it, or whether it's the same as "dark energy" or (more likely) unrelated.
We can certainly detect dark matter. The CMBR studies have show it fairly directly (we've "observed" dark matter as much as we "observe" things with an electron microscope or radio telescope). The ratio of "normal" matter to "dark" matter in the early universe has been measured to 2 significant digits (perhaps more since last I looked into it).
The unknown part is what dark matter is made of. We know it's there, we just don't know what it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the key as I see it is that "home automation" is something only the geekiest of geeks would ever be involved with, but most people in America are currently frustrated with needing a pile of remotes.
Find a great solution to the "pile of remotes" problem (clearly programmable remotes weren't the answer, or at least not as currently implemented) and you can use that to drive a single unified future by market dominance.
Personally, I think the right answer will allow you to easily use any of the popular video game console controllers as a universal remote - as well as more normal controls of course.
My water bill is 80% fixed infrastructure cost (and/or PUC graft) and 20% usage. There's no reason not to do electrical billing the same way. Pay a fixed monthly amount to cover infrastructure (based on the size of the bribes to whoever decides the amount), then a usage amount on top of that. That way folks on solar with net 0 usage, but who depend on the grid for power at night, would still pay.
Thanks for a post that reminds me of why /. used to be great.
There is a lot of sweetening, a lot of one-off lighting tricks in post and in the render which only look great from the one angle. Games have to look good from every angle.
I think games have some room here. You can do useful stuff to a 2D frame after it's been created in the GPU (like good FSAA of course). Of course, I'd suspect many of the algorithms used for film aren't yet public.
Back when it was a struggle getting framerate, you would get an amazing improvement by rendering hi-rez textures at 800x600, pixel doubling to 1600x1200, then doing good FSAA. (As opposed to turning off all the chrome or using low-rez textures, then rendering at 1600x1200, to get the same framerate.) I suspect more modern and impressive 2D clean up tricks could be done in a game today, as long as they didn't take per-scene human judgment of course, and wouldn't be competing with the 3D rendering engine for compute power.
If you're in the US (or have products also sold in the US), look on the back of, well, anything with a plug and you'll see the "UL" logo. It stands for Underwriters Laboratories and they do safety testing (mostly fire safety, and not just electronics). It's an great example of a non-governmental safely solution that actually works.
I've been involved in making products that need to be UL tested, and they're great to work with for such a big organization. They're test quickly, and tell you exactly what failed. An company like this that tested software - sort of a non-scummy counterpart to the virus scanner guys - and had a reputation that meant something would change the industry, IMO.
We only get good enough framerate at 1920x1200 (the One True Resolution) because of a lot of shortcuts. Improved computing power could allow games to make the transition to better lighting models (whatever they call the new ray0tracing stuff) that are both easier for artists/world builders and look better and more natural. It would also be nice to stop thinking of everything in polygons, but there's so much tooling there beyond the GPU (and if you push the poly-count high enough it doesn't matter visually).
The Decline of Japanese Consumer Electronics Continues...
As a consumer I'm fine with that - I just bought a great new plasma TV form a Korean manufacturer. As long as someone, somewhere, keeps pushing the state of the art. Longterm though I think Japan has deeper issues, with its ongoing demographic implosion (and the same thing would be happening in the US without immigration).
More on-topic: plasma is great, and remains great, if you're not shopping for the cheapest model line. Great color accuracy (not just the great blacks), no problems off-angle, and no problems with fast motion. I've yet to see an LCD as good at a similar price-point.
Still, OLED is the future (combines the picture quality of plasma with the lower power and weight of LCD), and has finally made it to top-end TVs as a consumer product. Absurdly expensive, but everything starts that way. (OLED was "the cool new technology sure to be in TVs soon" when Slashdot was new). Give it another 5 years, and merely "expensive" TVs should be OLED.
MS doesn't care either way about open source. What they'd likely object to is small publishers (much like the current "infrequently downloaded").
What we really need, no joke, is "UL for software". Some 3rd party company who's only business is rating software as "not malware", and who is in turn kept honest by the big distros. Then as the little guy you could pay them to test your software, and even the most paranoid could trust that. (That's how it works today with UL and most things in your home, and UL's fees are quite reasonable.)
Is there any easy way to clean dubious PDFs? I'm bothered by the number of PDFs I have than might contain exploits if I ever accidentally had an Adobe product installed on some system. Any open source "PDF cleaner" or somesuch?
Sure, that's one workaround. He found an easier workaround - switch to a less arrogant browser.
Yes, that's the intention, and software always works as intended, so we have nothing to worry about. Automatically installing software from whatever server that googleupdate.exe thinks is the mothership has no potential security problems of any kind.
Yep - because Samsung was smart about it, and "turning it off" involves pointing it directly up (I guess sliding a shield in front of it to turn it off would have been more certain, but would have looked odd).
Yeah, that's a good point. What I would call "medium-sized" black holes - at least moon-sized, but smaller than can form through stellar collapse, would be stable and nearly undetectable. That was one of the MACHO candidates, and I don't know why they'd be excluded by the CMBR data, except perhaps that there wasn't a theory with a quantitative prediction at the time.
Well, if Hawking radiation is real (and it's the best current theory) then small black holes have very short lifespans. However, AFAIK we've never actually observed Hawking radiation, and people are still looking for evidence of small black holes.
Thanks for the detailed reply. I'd still quibble a bit here - you seem to be conflating "observational evidence" with "experimental evidence". There are many scientific fields where we can't ever do experiments, after all, yet the observational data is conclusive. I take your point, however and I think we're merely arguing semantics - have we directly detected dinosaurs? (Err, non-avian dinosaurs, not the kind I had for lunch, dang paleontologists changing everything). Have we directly measured the age of the fossils? I'd say so to both, but I could understand a definition that excluded one.
But that isn't the only solution, because the only evidence we have is through gravity, and there is absolutely no reason at all (and it would be a mild form of intellectual blindeness) to prematurely declare that "dark matter" is definitely particulate and not, say, a sign that gravity does not behave on kpc scales the way it does on AU scales, let alone on Mpc and Gpc
Sure, it could also be the result of the FSMs many tentacles pushing down on each of us, but I haven't heard of a "gravity is different" theory that made accurate quantitative predictions of the CMBR data, where the dark matter theory did. Maybe I just didn't hear about it?
Wait, there's still a Norrath? Now that is scary. Or is the "next" one out yet?
My new TV came with an integrated webcam, but I must have gotten one of the upper-class versions, because I can turn it off.
Good luck finding a job without a FB account. Virtually every employer will ask for the ID.
I wasn't even asked about my Facebook account when I interviewed with Facebook. What industry do you work in?
Well, both companies offer their mail services with your company's URL (I don't know about Yahoo). On the MS side, there's little difference between outlook talking to exchange and outlook talking to O365 in the cloud, other than latency. You can't really tell the difference in the web clients. I haven't seen gmail used for company email yet, but I assume you'd choose that because you liked the web client in the first place.
But all we ever detect is indirect signals about something, no? And anything detected by any instrument could always be some new, previously unknown effect that just happens to look like what we expect from theory - but that's not very helpful to say. I'd say we detected dark matter in the same way we detected the Higgs boson - a theory made some specific predictions about what we'd see under the circumstance, and we saw something nicely matching the prediction.
The fact that the same theory quantitatively describes both the anomaly in galactic rotation and the CMBR stuff is as convincing to me as anything we must deduce from measurements because our own senses can't ever observe.
Sure, we didn't detect a specific species of particle, no argument there, nor anything that even gave us order-or-magnitude of mass of any such particle, or confirm even that "particle" is the right description here, but I don't see why you say we didn't detect the presence of something with mass but not photon/EM interaction?
There were many such theories, both differing kinds of dark matter and different things that might be "wrong with gravity", and no way to choose between them without new observations. Then we got new observations, and the WIMP version of dark matter predicted those new observations (from the cosmic microwave background radiation) quite well, while the others were falsified.
I use email for a lot of stuff (I avoid "social" sites entirely), and I hate continuing "improvements" to email clients - both web and otherwise. I loved gmail when it was new, and had the same "simple, clean" UI approach as the search page. Now it's such a mess that I'm moving to outlook.com, which I've been quite surprised to discover is, well, clean and simple.
The thing is: instruments did detect the presence of something that was
* Matter
* Not interacting with electrons or photons
* At the ratio to normal matter (quite accurately) predicted by a dark matter theory for galaxy rotation
Many theories were invented "to make the math work out" for galaxy rotation, and one of them made a quite accurate prediction of what we eventually measured about the early universe. Now we're trying to make additional measurements, because while we've measured dark matter at a large scale, that only tells us a little.
Well, science is about what the data points to, not just what sort of fun stories we can tell. The data points to some kind of matter that doesn't interact with electrons or photons, and that doesn't have some alternative way to clump due to friction (and I guess we know more about what it's not from TFA).
There were many explanations floated for galactic rotation rates, but one specific dark matter theory predicted the CMBR results with great accuracy, so the scientific method says we go with that until something make better predictions of newer data.
No for dark matter, because the strong evidence is from the early universe. Yes for "dark energy", because the term (like "cosmological constant") is just a placeholder for "there's something we don't know yet about how gravity and spacetime works at really large scales". Also, there's something we barely understand about it at very small scales - postulating "faster than light expansion of the early universe" explains a lot of data, but not much progress on a mechanism for it, or whether it's the same as "dark energy" or (more likely) unrelated.
We can certainly detect dark matter. The CMBR studies have show it fairly directly (we've "observed" dark matter as much as we "observe" things with an electron microscope or radio telescope). The ratio of "normal" matter to "dark" matter in the early universe has been measured to 2 significant digits (perhaps more since last I looked into it).
The unknown part is what dark matter is made of. We know it's there, we just don't know what it is.