I hear this argument a lot. "We don't intend to enforce this patent -- it's just the current business climate that forces us to build up a huge patent profile".
Maybe one way to start changing things is to make this type of "defensive" patent an explicitly separate type. Create a category of patents that it's not possibile to sue anyone for infringing, unless they sue you over IP first. And this provision would remain attached to the patent no matter who bought the rights.
Then we'll see who really is just pattenting nonsense because they "have to."
Of course it'll never work. No company is going to volutarily give up the power to sue the living daylights out of a competitor just because they can.
On the other hand, maybe there could be some incentive for filing the "no-offense" type of patent, like shorter turn-around time or cheaper filing fees.
The Japanese information page on DS contains some good info.
Like it says the DS will have two slots: one for the new compact and slim DS media, and one for GBA media. The thing will play GBA games! Neat! Was that widely known? I sure didn't know it.
Also it will have two CPUs and ARM7 and an ARM9. Doesn't say anything else about them though.
16 channel sound w/stereo headphone jack. 3D graphics better than N64.
Connect up to 16 players (in a 10 meter range) using wireless network. Using either IEEE802.11 or a proprietary protocol. Or connect to the internet over WLAN and you can game with people farther away.
Includes a microphone with which it says you may be able to play games in the future soley with voice commands. Also allows for voice chat during internet gaming. The most interesting thing to me is it says it can detect the direction from which sound is coming and you can use that to direct a character on screen, say by snapping your fingers in the direction you want the character to go.
Other stuff is pretty well known. Double screen, and lower screen is a touch screen, and that will allow for exciting creative new games yada yada...
Oooh. IF and CASE... Are those patented technologies? Do I have to license them from someone?
Seriously though, what's your definition of CSV formatted data?
My definition is N lines of text, each line containing M values, each separated by a comma. I'm not a data processing person, so if there are some accepted conventions beyond that I'm not aware of them. That was the main reason I asked.
Now obviously you could encode any semantic content you want in those data values. Heck, you could stuff a little perl script in each one that the receiving application should execute, and say "look at the incredible power of the CSV format!" but at that point you're not really talking about features of the CSV file any more. The CSV format has exactly two features: 1) carriage returns for separating records 2) commas for separating fields. That's it (AFAIK). The format does not give you any way to specify hierarchy. Yeh you can define your own n different "special" records that should be interpreted differently, but that's got nothing to do with CSV, and everything to do with your particular receiving application.
Let's not talk about CSV but instead about a hypothetical data format called OBUV.. stands for One Big Unseparated Value. It consists of just a series of records (one per row) each with one big value. You say to me now "That's a lame format, how do you encode multiple fields in an OBUV record?" I say patronizingly, "Duh! I define a special kind of OBUV record in which the COMMA has a special meaning, and the receiving application makes use of a very advanced technique called 'strchr' or 'regexp'".
The thing is, with XML, any off-the-shelf parser can hand you back a hierarchical data structure representing the XML data you fed it, without any domain specific knowledge of what the tags mean or anything. Just based on the specification of the XML format.
If you take an off the shelf CSV parser, the best it can do if you hand it a CSV file is to hand you back a data structure containing something isomorphic to a 2D array. It won't know that it should interpret your n different records differently, because that's not part of the definition of the CSV format. That's extra semantics you've overlayed on top of CSV.
So when I said "how do you represent hierarchy in CSV" I wasn't asking for junior programmer's ideas for how to augment CSV with hierarchical information, I was asking if there are there any accepted conventions in CSV files that are generally supported by applications that import data in CSV format.
No you're right. I wouldn't really make the mistake I said I would either. In truth I would just think my boss was a total nincompoop for saying the exact opposite of what he meant. Just like I do when I hear people say "I could care less". Imagine if people did that for everything. "Are you full yet?" "Oh yeh, I could eat another bite!" or "Did you sleep well last night?" "Naw, I could sleep a wink." Or "You aren't listening to me! You have heard a single thing I've said". Or... oh I give up. I could care less at this point.
"Don't know what you don't know" -- David Gristwood
I don't know about you, but to me, if you say "Don't know what you don't know", it sounds like you mean "Be blissfully unaware of the things which you do not know".
Whereas what he means is apparantly that you should know very clearly which things are unknowns. Not that you should be unaware of them. To me, the proper way to express that concept in English is "Know what you don't know". And I'm pretty sure I've heard people say that exact thing before in other contexts.
Maybe this is where all the problems come from in Microsoft software. The top guys are all saying fervently "Don't know what you don't know!" and the developers are all thinking that means they are supposed to stick their heads in the sand and ignore the completely undeveloped specification, ignore bugs that haven't been found, and proceed full speed ahead with coding.
At least that's what I would think if my boss was always prancing around saying "Don't know what you don't know".
But still I suspect that their filters probably filter out some of the visible light coming out of the projectors, making this black screen not quite as bright as a comparable white reflective screen. After all it has to be easier to make a material with close to 100% diffuse reflectance across the whole spectrum than to create something that's near 0% everywhere except for three narrow notches which are near 100%. But I'm no expert on light
So I'm thinking it's highly unlikely that the the filters come anywhere near 100% black in the non-reflected parts of the spectrum. No doubt this is the blackest projection screen you've ever seen, but I really doubt it will be the blackest thing you've ever seen. Especially if you've seen Undercover Brother
Still it's a pretty neat trick. Anyone know how they make passive filters with such sharp tuning to specific frequencies. Is it some kind of diffraction thing?
As others have pointed out this is a new solution to a classic computer graphics problem. The first technique I know of to automatically reduce the poly count of meshes, while preserving the overall appearance was Garland and Heckbert's QSLIM algorithm. This was first published in SIGGRAPH 97. Or actually, hmmm, no, it looks like Hoppe's work on mesh optimization came a good bit earlier (1993).
Anyway, it's a pretty old problem in graphics. The USC press release that prompted this slashdot story is simply advertising Cohen-Steiner, Alliez, and Desbrun's paper which will appear at SIGGRAPH 2004 later this summer. That's all it is. They have a new way to do automatic poly reduction. Now it could be that it's vastly superior to anything else that's been done in the area, but even if so, this isn't likely to cause any revolutions. Why? Because the existing poly reduction algorithms already work pretty well. They work well enough that they're already in production use (as others have pointed out there are plugins for most major 3D packages already, and most game engines have had "continuous level of detail" systems for a good long while). So at best this is going to make life easier for some 3D content creators who won't have to do so much hand-tweaking of LODs (levels-of-detail, aka "optimized" meshes). So don't expect to see any huge changes in the games you play or movies or whatever because of this. Mesh optimization/LOD techniques are already being used pretty much everywhere it make sense to do so.
But here's an idea for all you Karma Whores out there: go to the list of papers on the SIGGRAPH 2004 web site (or go to Tim Rowley's easier to browse version of the list), pick something that looks interesting, and send the story to slashdot! There's at least 50 more slashdot stories there just waiting to burst! Happy hunting! There's enough Karma for everyone, so don't be greedy now.
Since there are tetrachromats, anomalyous dichromats etc., it's hard to see how any RGB device could ever cover the full range of colors which human visual system can perceive.
I'm not sure what those words mean, but who says the output device has to be RGB? For printers, for instance some newer models use 5 or 6 inks to achieve better gamut than can be reproduced with just the standard 4-ink CMYK.
And even for RGB monitors, if the chromaticities of the phosphors were wider separated, then you could get better gammut. In the article I linked to you can see a proposal for a scRGB color standard based on 3 chromaticity values that completely contain the human visual range. The downside is you waste bits encoding things humans can't see, but at least you encode everything that can be seen.
Now it probably isn't physically possible to create phosphors that correspond to the scRGB but that doesn't mean we can't do better than current standard sRGB. The current sRGB system is akin to a digital music format which clips high frequencies at 5KHz because "you don't really need anything above that to make pretty good sounding music". No audiophile would stand for that. They demand that music be recorded beyond the range of human hearing just to make sure all the audible range is captured.
Thanks to the various folks for mentioning cameras that do allow you to get at better color information. Glad to hear some camera companies are thinking about it. I just wich more people who write about digital photography would discuss such things. Most of them seem to believe that sRGB is the best we can hope for, and there's no reason to look any further or push the companies that make the products to look any further.
One more comment -- I was looking into the Kodak PhotoCD tech at one point to see how they encoded color. They actually use a special wider gamut encoding scheme so that they can capture the color detail present in the film they scan. I forget what it was exactly, but I believe it's some sort of YIQ type thing where luminance and chrominance is separated so that more bits can be used to encode what people are better at seeing. (They also of course provide plain old JPEG -- or some conversion path to JPEG -- so grandma can look at her pictures easily on the computer). But it's cool that they actually also encode more color info than is in the JPEG for archival purposes.
I found this series to be a pretty big let down. I guess I was expecting too much, but I was hoping the author would go down the list of where digital doesn't live up to film as a call to action for camera makers and consumers. But no, the series for the most part just talks about existing digital camera features like autofocus and zoom lenses. Oh well.
I want to see some serious discussion about things like color gamut. The gamut of film (especially slide film) is much better than that of digital cameras. Is anyone working to improve the situation for digicams? There's a interesting looking article at extreme tech that talks about gamuts here.
Basically current sRGB devices don't cover the full range of colors which the human visual system can percieve (nor does film, but film comes closer than digital). Think of deep violet for instance. You simply can't get those hues on a monitor, and so today's digital cameras just don't record those colors. However, it is likely that some day we will have monitors and hardcopy ouptut devices that perform as well as the human visual system. So ideally the pictures I take today would have the full range of color information, even if they're forced to display only a subset of those colors on current display devices. That way, in the future when "uberdisplays" are available, my pictures from 2000 will still look nice, and not washed out and cheesy like color photographs from the 60's do today.
If you widen the gamut of CCDs, you'll probably want to add a few bits to each color channel as well -- use 12 bit color instead of 8 bit for instance.
And as long as you're adding bits, the other thing it seems like digital cameras could possibly offer some day is point-and-click high dynamic range (HDR) images, say in EXR format. Couldn't one build CDD sensors with automatic gain control (ISO) on a per-pixel basis, and then assemble the results into a HDR image? Currently the way to make HDR images is by taking several photos of the same scene and carefully merging them together, but that's pretty cumbersome.
With HDR images, you have much more flexibility to adjust the exposure and reveal detail in the shadows after taking the image.
What other cool things could digital cameras offer that would take us beyond simply replacing film cameras?
It requires an image to be project on the material.
Actually it's worse than that. It requires the image be projected from the onlooker's point of view. That's what they mean by HMP (==head-mounted projector) So for army dudes to use this, they'd have to actually run up to the enemy, and surreptitiously slap a projector on the head of each bad guy they wanted to hide from, then run back and go about their business of avoiding detection. There's probably a greater liklihood of success basing your military tactics on lethally funny jokes.
But think about it. If he had set up a bunch of separate auctions, would he have gotten all this free publicity on Slashdot? I think not. It was the sheer massiveness that made it interesting enough for Slashdot to post. And Slashdot is probably one of his best shots at finding someone actually willing to pay that much money for a bunch of outdated consoles. So all in all, I think putting it all together into one massive auction worked out quite nicely for him.
By "refresh the desktop" do you mean that thing when all the icons disappear momentarily and then come back, possibly showing the generic icon for a moment before the actual icons appear?
If that's what you mean by "refresh", then that's actually Windows Explorer (which the desktop is an instance of) crashing followed by a background process realizing it died and starting it back up.
If that happens to you a lot then maybe you've installed some unstable shell extensions? Or maybe you're talking about something else. If it's specific to the XP theme I wouldn't know because I always revert to the "Classic" look first thing. The XP theme just looks like a cheap plastic toy.
"'Here may be found the last words of kpansky. He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find a crash-free browsing experience in the Microsoft Internet Expl-aaaaaagggh'"
"What?"
"Internet Expl-aaaaagggh"
"What is that?"
"His browser must have died while typing it."
"Oh, come on!"
"Well, that's what it says."
"Look, if his browser was dying, it wouldn't bother to transmit 'aaaaaggh'. It'd just pop up one of those ridiculous 'Do you want to report this to Microsoft' dialogs."
" Well, that's what's typed in the Slashdot posting!"
"Perhaps he was dictating to someone using Mozilla."
Rather than Logo, how about Alice? Ok, so I know it's based on Python which you said was too complicated, but the subset you need for doing neat things in Alice is not so bad I think. Plus you get the exciting visual feedback of seeing your characters move around the screen and do stuff. Sort of like the same fun you might get from logo, but there's only so much drama you can get out of a few geometric squiggles on the screen.
With Alice you can make little 3D movies in your spare time that actually tell a story.
Well I guess it depends on how creative your mom is whether this would be interesting to her. I don't think my mom would get too far with it. She'd be more interested in something that would let her do geneology things or family history stuff.
I guess the key is to try to find some programming related things that tie into your mom's interests. Like maybe she'd enjoy learning to use video editing software so she can put together some nicely edited family videos, or maybe she might want to learn html and put together a family website. That's more the kind of stuff I think my mom might like. You'll have to think about what might be fun for your mom. I only know the kind of fun she likes to have in the sack.;-)
I don't know it's the same one, but a couple of summers ago a company came to the place where I was working and gave a demo of their "revolutionary technology to turn 2D movies into 3D movies". I went to see it. I was spectacularly unimpressed. They were doing something to the edges of moving objects, but whatever it was it wasn't 3D. If you've ever looked at two slightly different images with your two eyes, then you know that sort of shimmery effect where there are differences in the images? Your brain sort of wants to interpret those differences as 3D somehow even if they aren't really. I think that's what they were taking advantage of, and hoping that if things looked "funky" in that way people would jump up and down and say "ooh ahh it's 3D!". But anyone who has a fair amount of technical savvy would not be impressed by the system I saw.
But that was a few years ago, maybe they've made progress. But I doubt it. I'm guessing the only breakthroughs they've had are with their marketing department. Most serious depth extraction algorithms still barely crawl on multi-GHz machines, and they still don't do a very good job. If they can do this in real time then they definitely aren't extracting any sort of real depth. Just playing mind games.
Slashdot Mirror
> (IMAD) I am a doctor.
;-)
Good thing your patients' lives don't depend on your ability to create acronyms.
I hear this argument a lot. "We don't intend to enforce this patent -- it's just the current business climate that forces us to build up a huge patent profile".
Maybe one way to start changing things is to make this type of "defensive" patent an explicitly separate type. Create a category of patents that it's not possibile to sue anyone for infringing, unless they sue you over IP first. And this provision would remain attached to the patent no matter who bought the rights.
Then we'll see who really is just pattenting nonsense because they "have to."
Of course it'll never work. No company is going to volutarily give up the power to sue the living daylights out of a competitor just because they can.
On the other hand, maybe there could be some incentive for filing the "no-offense" type of patent, like shorter turn-around time or cheaper filing fees.
My favorite thing about GBA -- that in my mind makes it even better than the consoles -- is this: no freaking region code crap.
I can walk into a store in Akihabara and buy me a game and it plays just fine on my US purchased unit, no modding necessary.
I wonder if DS will continue the region free practice. I just have this sneaking suspicition that Sony is planning to use region codes on PSP.
Nope I didn't make it up. It says
"Also, if you connect the DS to the internet using wireless LAN, it is possible to play together with a great many people from far away."
You can see the gibberish translation of the same thing in the next post down.
... oh and it says both screens are fully 3D capable, and back-lit, "enabling you to play comfortably in any lighting environment".
The Japanese information page on DS contains some good info.
Like it says the DS will have two slots: one for the new compact and slim DS media, and one for GBA media. The thing will play GBA games! Neat! Was that widely known? I sure didn't know it.
Also it will have two CPUs and ARM7 and an ARM9. Doesn't say anything else about them though.
16 channel sound w/stereo headphone jack. 3D graphics better than N64.
Connect up to 16 players (in a 10 meter range) using wireless network. Using either IEEE802.11 or a proprietary protocol. Or connect to the internet over WLAN and you can game with people farther away.
Includes a microphone with which it says you may be able to play games in the future soley with voice commands. Also allows for voice chat during internet gaming. The most interesting thing to me is it says it can detect the direction from which sound is coming and you can use that to direct a character on screen, say by snapping your fingers in the direction you want the character to go.
Other stuff is pretty well known. Double screen, and lower screen is a touch screen, and that will allow for exciting creative new games yada yada...
Oooh. IF and CASE... Are those patented technologies? Do I have to license them from someone?
.. stands for One Big Unseparated Value. It consists of just a series of records (one per row) each with one big value. You say to me now "That's a lame format, how do you encode multiple fields in an OBUV record?" I say patronizingly, "Duh! I define a special kind of OBUV record in which the COMMA has a special meaning, and the receiving application makes use of a very advanced technique called 'strchr' or 'regexp'".
Seriously though, what's your definition of CSV formatted data?
My definition is N lines of text, each line containing M values, each separated by a comma. I'm not a data processing person, so if there are some accepted conventions beyond that I'm not aware of them. That was the main reason I asked.
Now obviously you could encode any semantic content you want in those data values. Heck, you could stuff a little perl script in each one that the receiving application should execute, and say "look at the incredible power of the CSV format!" but at that point you're not really talking about features of the CSV file any more. The CSV format has exactly two features: 1) carriage returns for separating records 2) commas for separating fields. That's it (AFAIK). The format does not give you any way to specify hierarchy. Yeh you can define your own n different "special" records that should be interpreted differently, but that's got nothing to do with CSV, and everything to do with your particular receiving application.
Let's not talk about CSV but instead about a hypothetical data format called OBUV
The thing is, with XML, any off-the-shelf parser can hand you back a hierarchical data structure representing the XML data you fed it, without any domain specific knowledge of what the tags mean or anything. Just based on the specification of the XML format.
If you take an off the shelf CSV parser, the best it can do if you hand it a CSV file is to hand you back a data structure containing something isomorphic to a 2D array. It won't know that it should interpret your n different records differently, because that's not part of the definition of the CSV format. That's extra semantics you've overlayed on top of CSV.
So when I said "how do you represent hierarchy in CSV" I wasn't asking for junior programmer's ideas for how to augment CSV with hierarchical information, I was asking if there are there any accepted conventions in CSV files that are generally supported by applications that import data in CSV format.
Exactly! Thank you Mr. Rumsfeld. You may proceed with your press briefing, now.
No you're right. I wouldn't really make the mistake I said I would either. In truth I would just think my boss was a total nincompoop for saying the exact opposite of what he meant. Just like I do when I hear people say "I could care less". Imagine if people did that for everything. "Are you full yet?" "Oh yeh, I could eat another bite!" or "Did you sleep well last night?" "Naw, I could sleep a wink." Or "You aren't listening to me! You have heard a single thing I've said". Or ... oh I give up. I could care less at this point.
I agree XML is overhyped, and too verbose, and just plain ugly, but how do you describe a hierarchical data structure in CSV?
.ini files, or lisp expressions, or C++ struct syntax, or any other plain ASCII nested data format might be more apropos.
Maybe a comparison with
CSV may be the only commonly used data format that XML is superior to.
"Don't know what you don't know" -- David Gristwood
I don't know about you, but to me, if you say "Don't know what you don't know", it sounds like you mean "Be blissfully unaware of the things which you do not know".
Whereas what he means is apparantly that you should know very clearly which things are unknowns. Not that you should be unaware of them. To me, the proper way to express that concept in English is "Know what you don't know". And I'm pretty sure I've heard people say that exact thing before in other contexts.
Maybe this is where all the problems come from in Microsoft software. The top guys are all saying fervently "Don't know what you don't know!" and the developers are all thinking that means they are supposed to stick their heads in the sand and ignore the completely undeveloped specification, ignore bugs that haven't been found, and proceed full speed ahead with coding.
At least that's what I would think if my boss was always prancing around saying "Don't know what you don't know".
No core dumps here, just a bunch of leaks.
Resistance isn't futile. It's V/I.
The red green and blue of projectors or monitors or whatever are not a single frequency of light. LEDs don't give you pure frequencies either. Lasers are the only thing that give you light at a pure, single frequency I think. On the other hand, this page seems to indicate that DLP light consists of sharper spectral peaks than either LCD or CRT (3rd paragraph).
But still I suspect that their filters probably filter out some of the visible light coming out of the projectors, making this black screen not quite as bright as a comparable white reflective screen. After all it has to be easier to make a material with close to 100% diffuse reflectance across the whole spectrum than to create something that's near 0% everywhere except for three narrow notches which are near 100%. But I'm no expert on light
So I'm thinking it's highly unlikely that the the filters come anywhere near 100% black in the non-reflected parts of the spectrum. No doubt this is the blackest projection screen you've ever seen, but I really doubt it will be the blackest thing you've ever seen. Especially if you've seen Undercover Brother
Still it's a pretty neat trick. Anyone know how they make passive filters with such sharp tuning to specific frequencies. Is it some kind of diffraction thing?
As others have pointed out this is a new solution to a classic computer graphics problem. The first technique I know of to automatically reduce the poly count of meshes, while preserving the overall appearance was Garland and Heckbert's QSLIM algorithm. This was first published in SIGGRAPH 97. Or actually, hmmm, no, it looks like Hoppe's work on mesh optimization came a good bit earlier (1993).
Anyway, it's a pretty old problem in graphics. The USC press release that prompted this slashdot story is simply advertising Cohen-Steiner, Alliez, and Desbrun's paper which will appear at SIGGRAPH 2004 later this summer. That's all it is. They have a new way to do automatic poly reduction. Now it could be that it's vastly superior to anything else that's been done in the area, but even if so, this isn't likely to cause any revolutions. Why? Because the existing poly reduction algorithms already work pretty well. They work well enough that they're already in production use (as others have pointed out there are plugins for most major 3D packages already, and most game engines have had "continuous level of detail" systems for a good long while). So at best this is going to make life easier for some 3D content creators who won't have to do so much hand-tweaking of LODs (levels-of-detail, aka "optimized" meshes). So don't expect to see any huge changes in the games you play or movies or whatever because of this. Mesh optimization/LOD techniques are already being used pretty much everywhere it make sense to do so.
But here's an idea for all you Karma Whores out there: go to the list of papers on the SIGGRAPH 2004 web site (or go to Tim Rowley's easier to browse version of the list), pick something that looks interesting, and send the story to slashdot! There's at least 50 more slashdot stories there just waiting to burst! Happy hunting! There's enough Karma for everyone, so don't be greedy now.
Since there are tetrachromats, anomalyous dichromats etc., it's hard to see how any RGB device could ever cover the full range of colors which human visual system can perceive.
I'm not sure what those words mean, but who says the output device has to be RGB? For printers, for instance some newer models use 5 or 6 inks to achieve better gamut than can be reproduced with just the standard 4-ink CMYK.
And even for RGB monitors, if the chromaticities of the phosphors were wider separated, then you could get better gammut. In the article I linked to you can see a proposal for a scRGB color standard based on 3 chromaticity values that completely contain the human visual range. The downside is you waste bits encoding things humans can't see, but at least you encode everything that can be seen.
Now it probably isn't physically possible to create phosphors that correspond to the scRGB but that doesn't mean we can't do better than current standard sRGB. The current sRGB system is akin to a digital music format which clips high frequencies at 5KHz because "you don't really need anything above that to make pretty good sounding music". No audiophile would stand for that. They demand that music be recorded beyond the range of human hearing just to make sure all the audible range is captured.
Thanks to the various folks for mentioning cameras that do allow you to get at better color information. Glad to hear some camera companies are thinking about it. I just wich more people who write about digital photography would discuss such things. Most of them seem to believe that sRGB is the best we can hope for, and there's no reason to look any further or push the companies that make the products to look any further.
One more comment -- I was looking into the Kodak PhotoCD tech at one point to see how they encoded color. They actually use a special wider gamut encoding scheme so that they can capture the color detail present in the film they scan. I forget what it was exactly, but I believe it's some sort of YIQ type thing where luminance and chrominance is separated so that more bits can be used to encode what people are better at seeing. (They also of course provide plain old JPEG -- or some conversion path to JPEG -- so grandma can look at her pictures easily on the computer). But it's cool that they actually also encode more color info than is in the JPEG for archival purposes.
I found this series to be a pretty big let down. I guess I was expecting too much, but I was hoping the author would go down the list of where digital doesn't live up to film as a call to action for camera makers and consumers. But no, the series for the most part just talks about existing digital camera features like autofocus and zoom lenses. Oh well.
I want to see some serious discussion about things like color gamut. The gamut of film (especially slide film) is much better than that of digital cameras. Is anyone working to improve the situation for digicams? There's a interesting looking article at extreme tech that talks about gamuts here.
Basically current sRGB devices don't cover the full range of colors which the human visual system can percieve (nor does film, but film comes closer than digital). Think of deep violet for instance. You simply can't get those hues on a monitor, and so today's digital cameras just don't record those colors. However, it is likely that some day we will have monitors and hardcopy ouptut devices that perform as well as the human visual system. So ideally the pictures I take today would have the full range of color information, even if they're forced to display only a subset of those colors on current display devices. That way, in the future when "uberdisplays" are available, my pictures from 2000 will still look nice, and not washed out and cheesy like color photographs from the 60's do today.
If you widen the gamut of CCDs, you'll probably want to add a few bits to each color channel as well -- use 12 bit color instead of 8 bit for instance.
And as long as you're adding bits, the other thing it seems like digital cameras could possibly offer some day is point-and-click high dynamic range (HDR) images, say in EXR format. Couldn't one build CDD sensors with automatic gain control (ISO) on a per-pixel basis, and then assemble the results into a HDR image? Currently the way to make HDR images is by taking several photos of the same scene and carefully merging them together, but that's pretty cumbersome.
With HDR images, you have much more flexibility to adjust the exposure and reveal detail in the shadows after taking the image.
What other cool things could digital cameras offer that would take us beyond simply replacing film cameras?
It requires an image to be project on the material.
Actually it's worse than that. It requires the image be projected from the onlooker's point of view. That's what they mean by HMP (==head-mounted projector) So for army dudes to use this, they'd have to actually run up to the enemy, and surreptitiously slap a projector on the head of each bad guy they wanted to hide from, then run back and go about their business of avoiding detection. There's probably a greater liklihood of success basing your military tactics on lethally funny jokes.
But think about it. If he had set up a bunch of separate auctions, would he have gotten all this free publicity on Slashdot? I think not. It was the sheer massiveness that made it interesting enough for Slashdot to post. And Slashdot is probably one of his best shots at finding someone actually willing to pay that much money for a bunch of outdated consoles. So all in all, I think putting it all together into one massive auction worked out quite nicely for him.
By "refresh the desktop" do you mean that thing when all the icons disappear momentarily and then come back, possibly showing the generic icon for a moment before the actual icons appear?
If that's what you mean by "refresh", then that's actually Windows Explorer (which the desktop is an instance of) crashing followed by a background process realizing it died and starting it back up.
If that happens to you a lot then maybe you've installed some unstable shell extensions? Or maybe you're talking about something else. If it's specific to the XP theme I wouldn't know because I always revert to the "Classic" look first thing. The XP theme just looks like a cheap plastic toy.
"'Here may be found the last words of kpansky. He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find a crash-free browsing experience in the Microsoft Internet Expl-aaaaaagggh'"
"What?"
"Internet Expl-aaaaagggh"
"What is that?"
"His browser must have died while typing it."
"Oh, come on!"
"Well, that's what it says."
"Look, if his browser was dying, it wouldn't bother to transmit 'aaaaaggh'. It'd just pop up one of those ridiculous 'Do you want to report this to Microsoft' dialogs."
" Well, that's what's typed in the Slashdot posting!"
"Perhaps he was dictating to someone using Mozilla."
Rather than Logo, how about Alice?
;-)
Ok, so I know it's based on Python which you said was too complicated, but the subset you need for doing neat things in Alice is not so bad I think. Plus you get the exciting visual feedback of seeing your characters move around the screen and do stuff. Sort of like the same fun you might get from logo, but there's only so much drama you can get out of a few geometric squiggles on the screen.
With Alice you can make little 3D movies in your spare time that actually tell a story.
Well I guess it depends on how creative your mom is whether this would be interesting to her. I don't think my mom would get too far with it. She'd be more interested in something that would let her do geneology things or family history stuff.
I guess the key is to try to find some programming related things that tie into your mom's interests. Like maybe she'd enjoy learning to use video editing software so she can put together some nicely edited family videos, or maybe she might want to learn html and put together a family website. That's more the kind of stuff I think my mom might like. You'll have to think about what might be fun for your mom. I only know the kind of fun she likes to have in the sack.
So were you shot and stabbed by muggers? If so, then remind again me why we should listen to you about how to avoid being mugged?
Or is it a "don't make the same mistakes I made, sonny" kind of a thing?
I love the fact that the top hit in that google link you posted is a story about a time delay lock COMPLETELY FAILING TO DETER A CRIMINAL. :-)
I don't know it's the same one, but a couple of summers ago a company came to the place where I was working and gave a demo of their "revolutionary technology to turn 2D movies into 3D movies". I went to see it. I was spectacularly unimpressed. They were doing something to the edges of moving objects, but whatever it was it wasn't 3D. If you've ever looked at two slightly different images with your two eyes, then you know that sort of shimmery effect where there are differences in the images? Your brain sort of wants to interpret those differences as 3D somehow even if they aren't really. I think that's what they were taking advantage of, and hoping that if things looked "funky" in that way people would jump up and down and say "ooh ahh it's 3D!". But anyone who has a fair amount of technical savvy would not be impressed by the system I saw.
But that was a few years ago, maybe they've made progress. But I doubt it. I'm guessing the only breakthroughs they've had are with their marketing department. Most serious depth extraction algorithms still barely crawl on multi-GHz machines, and they still don't do a very good job. If they can do this in real time then they definitely aren't extracting any sort of real depth. Just playing mind games.