An animated overview of the Solar System showing the last 30 years of asteroid discoveries and their orbits. It's to scale, created from real data. Pretty awesome.
We've arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it?
Pitch something completely ridiculous and unacceptable instead of what you actually want. Tone it down gradually. Congratulations, now your awful idea is a compromise and a relief rather than an outrage.
It reminds me of drama-documentary writing. If you removed all the breathless amazement and hyperbole the article would be reduced to one-tenth of its original size.
Since I'm busy procrastinating, I made the article as boring and uninformative as possible:
With Kinect, Microsoft plans to improve how we interact with consoles. But first they had to solve a few problems.
'Kinect', Microsoft’s new motion-sensing system for the Xbox 360, does away with the game controller in favour of the player’s own body. It can track your body in real time, recognise who in the room is playing and respond to voice commands. Its creators call it a "natural user interface" or NUI.
Reliably decoding human movements and voices is quite difficult. But they managed it in the end.
The Xbox team contracted PrimeSense to provide Kinect’s depth sensor chip and reference design. Impressed with the depth-sensing capability, a small team quickly prototyped around 70 minigames. The possibilities quickly became clear, impressing executives.
Kinect Sports is currently undergoing playtesting in Warwickshire.
Decrapifying a computer at least requires some specialised knowledge. This is pressing a button when prompted.
The prompt appears automatically when required. The process is automatic. The updates are bundled with games that require them. No Internet connection needed.
[Here is the part where I insert a dubious analogy to conceal my poor reasoning skills]
There are a lot of smart people in the world who are computer illiterates. I have one customer who just paid me 2 hours labour to press a button on his new laptop. The usual - sit there for a couple of minutes and do nothing. He's not comfortable doing it himself [...]
There is a point at which a task becomes so easy and so simple that the only reason to avoid it is psychological. That's about where I start classifying things as idiotic.
It's not a matter of knowledge or intelligence but attitude. Fear of technology. Unwillingness to learn.
Do you honestly think they walk in and pay for this informed?
A process which requires: - no knowledge. - no attention. - no effort.
Even the old 'time is valuable' chestnut doesn't apply here, since going to a shop takes many times longer than doing it yourself.
Smaller but not less important are developers and graphic designers who would like work with graphics at a pixel level.
That's what the zoom tool is for.
I've been doing that all my life and believe me, there's no advantage. I went from 320x256 to 1920x1200 and I'll be damned if I ever take even one step backwards.
Monitors are shrinking vertically BECAUSE they make so many of these panels for TVs. Economies of scale mean it's cheaper to use them in monitors as well, rather than making specialised panels.
Display marketing is a non-stop parade of exaggerations, but outright lying about the resolution of the panel in the specifications? No.
Analogies... The final frontier. These are the voyages of the Slashdot BAGerprise. Its five year mission: to explore strange new concepts, to seek out new interelationships and new inferences; to boldly go where no mind has gone before.
"Dynamic range, abbreviated DR or DNR, is the ratio between the smallest and largest possible values of a changeable quantity, such as in sound and light."
I remember getting into it with trolls here who said the commercials were not any louder it was just a perception caused by the average loudness being higher.
They were right. The perception of loudness is created by dynamic range compression. Ever heard of the 'loudness wars' in pop music? Same thing.
Ask any audio guy, they'll tell you the very same.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha ha ha!
Check out this video.
An animated overview of the Solar System showing the last 30 years of asteroid discoveries and their orbits. It's to scale, created from real data. Pretty awesome.
We've arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it?
Carl Sagan
Pitch something completely ridiculous and unacceptable instead of what you actually want. Tone it down gradually. Congratulations, now your awful idea is a compromise and a relief rather than an outrage.
Kinect has no mouth, but it must scream.
It reminds me of drama-documentary writing. If you removed all the breathless amazement and hyperbole the article would be reduced to one-tenth of its original size.
Since I'm busy procrastinating, I made the article as boring and uninformative as possible:
With Kinect, Microsoft plans to improve how we interact with consoles. But first they had to solve a few problems.
'Kinect', Microsoft’s new motion-sensing system for the Xbox 360, does away with the game controller in favour of the player’s own body. It can track your body in real time, recognise who in the room is playing and respond to voice commands. Its creators call it a "natural user interface" or NUI.
Reliably decoding human movements and voices is quite difficult. But they managed it in the end.
The Xbox team contracted PrimeSense to provide Kinect’s depth sensor chip and reference design. Impressed with the depth-sensing capability, a small team quickly prototyped around 70 minigames. The possibilities quickly became clear, impressing executives.
Kinect Sports is currently undergoing playtesting in Warwickshire.
It's awesome: I got Metro 2033 + Red Faction Guerilla for 15 euros.
Between AUK and Steam sales, I can't remember the last time I paid more than 20 euros for a game.
If the process of making dinner was, in its entirety "Press X when prompted, once" then your analogy would make sense.
Of course it would be pretty dumb to pay for it then, wouldn't it.
Decrapifying a computer at least requires some specialised knowledge. This is pressing a button when prompted.
The prompt appears automatically when required. The process is automatic. The updates are bundled with games that require them. No Internet connection needed.
[Here is the part where I insert a dubious analogy to conceal my poor reasoning skills]
There are a lot of smart people in the world who are computer illiterates. I have one customer who just paid me 2 hours labour to press a button on his new laptop. The usual - sit there for a couple of minutes and do nothing. He's not comfortable doing it himself [...]
There is a point at which a task becomes so easy and so simple that the only reason to avoid it is psychological. That's about where I start classifying things as idiotic.
It's not a matter of knowledge or intelligence but attitude. Fear of technology. Unwillingness to learn.
Do you honestly think they walk in and pay for this informed?
A process which requires:
- no knowledge.
- no attention.
- no effort.
Even the old 'time is valuable' chestnut doesn't apply here, since going to a shop takes many times longer than doing it yourself.
You don't need to download them. They come with the goddamn games!
Here's the process for installing a PS3 firmware update: Press X.
Why exactly do you need to explain this with an analogy? Is it too complicated or something?
Games include firmware updates. No connection is needed. Nothing is needed. The entire process is automatic save for pressing X at a prompt.
It's greedy for BB to be charging so much but if there wasn't a need they wouldn't bother to provide the service.
LMAO.
Go outside.
My favourite layout is a weighted three-way split on a 1920x1200 screen.
1x 1024x1200 main area (work)
1x 896x768 secondary (browser, reference docs, etc)
1x 896x432 tertiary (IM, Youtube, etc)
So goddamn handy.
Smaller but not less important are developers and graphic designers who would like work with graphics at a pixel level.
That's what the zoom tool is for.
I've been doing that all my life and believe me, there's no advantage. I went from 320x256 to 1920x1200 and I'll be damned if I ever take even one step backwards.
I have a 24" monitor, it's at the limit of practicality for me. 30" is unusably large.
I mean, I could use the resolution but I need smaller pixels too.
All of them?
Monitors are shrinking vertically BECAUSE they make so many of these panels for TVs. Economies of scale mean it's cheaper to use them in monitors as well, rather than making specialised panels.
Display marketing is a non-stop parade of exaggerations, but outright lying about the resolution of the panel in the specifications? No.
Did I really just pay $10 to watch 10 minutes of commercials before the 15 minutes of movie trailers?
Not to mention the piracy warnings. Offensively disingenuous bullshit directed at your paying customers, what a clever idea.
I stopped going.
Analogies... The final frontier. These are the voyages of the Slashdot BAGerprise. Its five year mission: to explore strange new concepts, to seek out new interelationships and new inferences; to boldly go where no mind has gone before.
[Klingons are car analogies]
No combination of RBG values will give you brown.
Let me guess: you've never played Gears of War.
Apparently it also makes severed heads look like pussies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range
"Dynamic range, abbreviated DR or DNR, is the ratio between the smallest and largest possible values of a changeable quantity, such as in sound and light."
What. "Range compression" is just a shorter way of saying "dynamic range compression". That's what the range is: the dynamic range.
The regulation is about apparent loudness, so yes.
I remember getting into it with trolls here who said the commercials were not any louder it was just a perception caused by the average loudness being higher.
They were right. The perception of loudness is created by dynamic range compression. Ever heard of the 'loudness wars' in pop music? Same thing.
Ask any audio guy, they'll tell you the very same.