Or maybe the pedestrian crossings rest on red too. If you cross on a red man and get squished, it's your fault.
I'd like similar tech employed for elevators. It's a huge time waste to have to approach the elevator, then signal it, then wait. I guess a low-tech solution would be to place additional elevator call buttons on approach.
Thank you for making that point - all photography has focus artifacts from depth of field, unless you use a pinhole camera.
And of course it's disconnected from how your eyes focus on the screen or page - otherwise scenic photos would always be blurry unless you viewed them on a huge screen at a distance of (I guess) 10m or more. Hardly something to complain about.
In 2D films, depth-of-field serves (at least) two purposes - to give a sense of distance, and to guide the viewer's attention. In 3D films the situation is really just the same. The depth-of-field distance cues are consistent with the stereoscopy unless the 3D is poorly executed. And if the director really wants to allow the viewer to look at whatever they like (which is far from a given), they can still configure their cameras to give deeper focus.
Besides this, good 3D stays behind the screen rather than coming out at the audience, which largely eliminates any weirdness with the viewers eyes trying to focus at the wrong depth. That's provided the viewer is a comfortable difference away from the screen. Again, no real difference from 2D.
Keeping one backup drive at your place of work is very good advice, I might just start doing that. But rather than misappropriate work equipment, I'll just store it and take it home once a month for catch-up.
The main concern then becomes snoopy co-workers, so encryption would be a good idea.
A bit off-topic, but another concern I have about relying on harddrives for backups is, what if the drive loses blocks, or a virus starts sneakily replacing valuable files with garbage. Verifying the backup occasionally against a database of files and hashes would help, as would manually giving the OK before overwriting or deleting any files in the backup.
Could well be that the viral infections causing the common cold are really just a good excuse to rev up our immune systems. Take that away and we could be ill-prepared to cope with occasional contact with real nasty viruses.
Maybe sleep is a similar phenomenon - it's a mild inconvience, you/can/ medicate around it, but it's really not a good idea.
And although a holographic universe would answer many questions about black hole physics and other paradoxes, it clashes with classical geometry, which demands a universe of smooth, continuous paths in space and time.
Since when has not 'clashing with classical geometry' been a criterion for a physical theory? In the last 100 years?
Slightly off-topic, but I'd like an iPhone app to do time-lapse of my kids as they grow up. Does anyone know of one?
I've already been playing around with some stop-motion apps (iMotion and StopMotion Record), and they'll certainly do it. But I'd prefer something with really good correction for lighting and placement, and with a workflow optimized for taking a single photo per app launch.
If not I'll write my own and race you to the app store;-}
When you trade in the stock market, you are paying off people who hold stock, not putting your money into the company whose shares you are buying.
True, but:
Buying the shares bolsters the market cap of the company. Very often the increase in market cap is more than the value of the shares purchased.
On average, some of the seller's capital freed up will be used to purchase new shares from IPOs and share issues. (Hard to say if there's a bias towards reinvesting in the same company though.)
I coincidentally watched some of 'The Deathbed Vigil' in the weekend, Dave Haynie's home vid about the company's demise, leading me to ponder what could've been done differently in order for the Amiga to have emerged as (IMO rightfully) a dominant computing platform.
Suggestions for the 1980's:
Include a ROM catridge port on all models. Actually, make that several ports, with two reserved for kickstart and workbench, and at least two more for apps and games (hot-swappable). This would've gone a long way to curbing piracy, as well as slashing boot and program load times, reducing disk swaps, and reducing pressure on chip mem (both space and bandwidth). Don't just think games - in the era of floppies, cartridges would've been great for apps as well.
Release something akin to the A1200 before the end of the decade
Suggestions for the 1990's:
Release an 'Amiga on a card' for the PC, which acts as an sound and graphics card for the PC, as well as providing Amiga compatibility. Not sure how technically feasible this would've been, but it could've been an easy sell to families who already owned PCs (at the right price point of course). Even if the Amiga platform died, they could've stayed in the graphics card market for years.
If you really must do a console in 1993, plan ahead to competing with the Sony Playstation, not the Sega Genesis.
Still, I don't regret getting the A1200, or the A500 before that. Once we had the A1200 upgraded to a multisync monitor, 68060, 1GB harddrive and 24MB RAM, it was quite a nice machine;-)
I still want to believe that Nokia is the company to turn to for a reliable basic phone. One that lasts for a week on one charge, and can be dropped on the pavement without breaking. One that can be picked up by anyone to make calls on, without getting distracted by gimmicks.
But after seeing several Nokia phones either fail within two years of normal usage (yes, including some drops), or suffer from unnecessarily slow and counter-intuitive UI. So in future I'll be shopping elsewhere, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
There's a huge market for the sort of phone I want Nokia to focus on producing, and will be for a long time. There's no shortage of customers who either can't afford a high-end smartphone, or genuinely don't want one. Getting entrenched in a battle with Apple &co for the smartphone $$$ may well be a mistake unless Nokia already has something seriously awesome in the pipeline.
I'm calling bullshit on this one, provided that the viewer is a reasonable distance from the screen - let's say 5m as a first approximation.
In terms of muscle control, there's very little difference between focussing on distant objects. Consider looking at a starry sky - all the stars are in focus simultaneously despite the huge range of distances.
If the screen is 'distant' and all the on-screen objects appear 'distant', then I really doubt there's an issue here - it's just like real life to within a small margin of error.
The situation for VR goggles is quite different. Here the actual focal distance is near and fixed, while the apparent distance will tend to be distant. This is likely to cause eye-strain at the very least, and quite plausibly developmental problems with frequent use.
Even with VR goggles, I suspect the problem is with the near focus, not the stereoscopy. Whether 2D or 3D, just don't let kids sit too close to the screen.
Can anyone tell me if there are similar problems with under-7's watching regular TV and movies?
Of course even in 2D, scenes can have apparent depth-of-field, usually with blurring due to the optics of the camera, despite the viewer's eyes being focussed on the screen.
Seems to me 2D is even more abnormal than 3D - not only are your eyes not focussing naturally, they're not diverging/converging naturally either.
My point is that when you're developing stuff for the web (as Google most definitely do), you really do need access to various browser platforms to test against.
The most important platforms to test against are Windows/IE because:
they have the largest userbase (yes, still)
they frequently have issues with non-standard behaviour
Being denied access to Windows is therefore a major PITA for anyone doing web development.
Now what happens to Google's quality control once they're unable to develop and test against their #1 target platform? (being collectively some version of IE on some version of Windows)
I believe this kind of 'THOU SHALT NOT' bullying by IT overlords tends to backfire somewhere down the line, particularly when there are techies and power users having their capabilities trimmed, particularly when those techies and power users are of the caliber that Google no doubt employs.
Please, please, don't skimp on memory. The only question should be 3GB or 4GB. If you really want to save money, get a cheaper processor instead.
Too little memory and you either get thrashing or waste time closing and opening apps and docs all the time. Too much memory and you have a nice disk cache and room to grow.
We mightn't be there yet price-wise, but the same thing will soon apply to SSDs. Just don't go cheap on hardware if it slows the user down.
Get a pivoting display mounting arm, anchor it to your desk and off you go. Most LCDs support VESA-compliant mounts, so it doesn't matter what sort of stand the screen is bundled with.
In portrait orientation, a 16:9 (e.g. 1080p) widescreen is great for document work since you can see an entire page on-screen, and surprisingly good for a lot of other applications too.
You get much better use of screen real-estate, partly on account of window titlebars and toolbars being narrower. ClearType doesn't work as designed but I still like to have it enabled.
All an environmental movement needs to do is get all the major political parties in all the major countries on-side, and then 'democracy' as we know it becomes irrelevant.
That's not going to be cheap, but it's going to be a lot cheaper and I daresay more effective than bribing all the voters. A few well-meaning individuals with deep pockets and questionable morals could probably pull it off.
I wonder what Bill Gates has on his to-do list this week?
Problem is, touch-and-drag scrolls on the iPhone, and that's fundamental to the iPhone interface.
I'd rather see touch-and-hold switch to a mouse movement interface with a magnifying glass and a cross-hair, similar to the way text field editing works already. Tapping with a second finger during the hold would click the mouse. Releasing the hold without moving the cross-hair would bring up a select all/copy menu.
The biggest problem I see with human-level AI is that it's largely pointless.
We're approaching seven billion people and an epidemic of unemployment. Human intelligence is in massive oversupply. So why is anyone going to fork out the necessary billions on R&D over the coming decades to develop something that's going to be worthless?
From my perspective, the iPhone really is a revolution in easy-to-use, intuitive user interface design.
At 20 months old my son could pick up an iPhone, unlock it, start apps, browse videos and play games.
Six months later, I'm still trying to explain to him the relationship between the touchpad and a little arrow on the screen - before we even get to clicking things, opening the 'Start' menu, etc, etc, etc.
I'll go a step further and say that drag-and-drop is a misfeature. It's sometimes OK as sugaring, but it should never be the only way to perform a given function.
A big issue is that you lose the use of the mouse button while you're dragging. That makes it painful to navigate between or within windows to find the drop target. Especially if you're using a touchpad.
Another issue is obscurity - it's often not obvious what elements of the UI are draggable, and what their possible drop targets are. Even the best implementations don't tell you about possible drop targets in windows you don't have open, or what drag sources are available for a selected target.
Case in point - a 'handy' feature in Windows XP is that you can get the path to a file by dragging and dropping from Explorer into the 'Run...' dialog. Now try that with Explorer maximized, I dare you...
(hint: mid-drag, use a keyboard shortcut to open or expose the dialog)
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe the pedestrian crossings rest on red too. If you cross on a red man and get squished, it's your fault.
I'd like similar tech employed for elevators. It's a huge time waste to have to approach the elevator, then signal it, then wait. I guess a low-tech solution would be to place additional elevator call buttons on approach.
Thank you for making that point - all photography has focus artifacts from depth of field, unless you use a pinhole camera.
And of course it's disconnected from how your eyes focus on the screen or page - otherwise scenic photos would always be blurry unless you viewed them on a huge screen at a distance of (I guess) 10m or more. Hardly something to complain about.
In 2D films, depth-of-field serves (at least) two purposes - to give a sense of distance, and to guide the viewer's attention. In 3D films the situation is really just the same. The depth-of-field distance cues are consistent with the stereoscopy unless the 3D is poorly executed. And if the director really wants to allow the viewer to look at whatever they like (which is far from a given), they can still configure their cameras to give deeper focus.
Besides this, good 3D stays behind the screen rather than coming out at the audience, which largely eliminates any weirdness with the viewers eyes trying to focus at the wrong depth. That's provided the viewer is a comfortable difference away from the screen. Again, no real difference from 2D.
Keeping one backup drive at your place of work is very good advice, I might just start doing that. But rather than misappropriate work equipment, I'll just store it and take it home once a month for catch-up.
The main concern then becomes snoopy co-workers, so encryption would be a good idea.
A bit off-topic, but another concern I have about relying on harddrives for backups is, what if the drive loses blocks, or a virus starts sneakily replacing valuable files with garbage. Verifying the backup occasionally against a database of files and hashes would help, as would manually giving the OK before overwriting or deleting any files in the backup.
Sorry AC, no mod points but thanks for the link!
Could well be that the viral infections causing the common cold are really just a good excuse to rev up our immune systems. Take that away and we could be ill-prepared to cope with occasional contact with real nasty viruses.
Maybe sleep is a similar phenomenon - it's a mild inconvience, you /can/ medicate around it, but it's really not a good idea.
More nonsense from TFA:
And although a holographic universe would answer many questions about black hole physics and other paradoxes, it clashes with classical geometry, which demands a universe of smooth, continuous paths in space and time.
Since when has not 'clashing with classical geometry' been a criterion for a physical theory? In the last 100 years?
Slightly off-topic, but I'd like an iPhone app to do time-lapse of my kids as they grow up. Does anyone know of one?
I've already been playing around with some stop-motion apps (iMotion and StopMotion Record), and they'll certainly do it. But I'd prefer something with really good correction for lighting and placement, and with a workflow optimized for taking a single photo per app launch.
If not I'll write my own and race you to the app store ;-}
When you trade in the stock market, you are paying off people who hold stock, not putting your money into the company whose shares you are buying.
True, but:
I coincidentally watched some of 'The Deathbed Vigil' in the weekend, Dave Haynie's home vid about the company's demise, leading me to ponder what could've been done differently in order for the Amiga to have emerged as (IMO rightfully) a dominant computing platform.
Suggestions for the 1980's:
Suggestions for the 1990's:
Still, I don't regret getting the A1200, or the A500 before that. Once we had the A1200 upgraded to a multisync monitor, 68060, 1GB harddrive and 24MB RAM, it was quite a nice machine ;-)
I still want to believe that Nokia is the company to turn to for a reliable basic phone. One that lasts for a week on one charge, and can be dropped on the pavement without breaking. One that can be picked up by anyone to make calls on, without getting distracted by gimmicks.
But after seeing several Nokia phones either fail within two years of normal usage (yes, including some drops), or suffer from unnecessarily slow and counter-intuitive UI. So in future I'll be shopping elsewhere, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
There's a huge market for the sort of phone I want Nokia to focus on producing, and will be for a long time. There's no shortage of customers who either can't afford a high-end smartphone, or genuinely don't want one. Getting entrenched in a battle with Apple &co for the smartphone $$$ may well be a mistake unless Nokia already has something seriously awesome in the pipeline.
I'm calling bullshit on this one, provided that the viewer is a reasonable distance from the screen - let's say 5m as a first approximation.
In terms of muscle control, there's very little difference between focussing on distant objects. Consider looking at a starry sky - all the stars are in focus simultaneously despite the huge range of distances.
If the screen is 'distant' and all the on-screen objects appear 'distant', then I really doubt there's an issue here - it's just like real life to within a small margin of error.
The situation for VR goggles is quite different. Here the actual focal distance is near and fixed, while the apparent distance will tend to be distant. This is likely to cause eye-strain at the very least, and quite plausibly developmental problems with frequent use.
Even with VR goggles, I suspect the problem is with the near focus, not the stereoscopy. Whether 2D or 3D, just don't let kids sit too close to the screen.
Can anyone tell me if there are similar problems with under-7's watching regular TV and movies?
Of course even in 2D, scenes can have apparent depth-of-field, usually with blurring due to the optics of the camera, despite the viewer's eyes being focussed on the screen.
Seems to me 2D is even more abnormal than 3D - not only are your eyes not focussing naturally, they're not diverging/converging naturally either.
No fair modding my comment as Troll.
My point is that when you're developing stuff for the web (as Google most definitely do), you really do need access to various browser platforms to test against.
The most important platforms to test against are Windows/IE because:
Being denied access to Windows is therefore a major PITA for anyone doing web development.
Now what happens to Google's quality control once they're unable to develop and test against their #1 target platform? (being collectively some version of IE on some version of Windows)
I believe this kind of 'THOU SHALT NOT' bullying by IT overlords tends to backfire somewhere down the line, particularly when there are techies and power users having their capabilities trimmed, particularly when those techies and power users are of the caliber that Google no doubt employs.
Please, please, don't skimp on memory. The only question should be 3GB or 4GB. If you really want to save money, get a cheaper processor instead.
Too little memory and you either get thrashing or waste time closing and opening apps and docs all the time. Too much memory and you have a nice disk cache and room to grow.
We mightn't be there yet price-wise, but the same thing will soon apply to SSDs. Just don't go cheap on hardware if it slows the user down.
Pivot!
Get a pivoting display mounting arm, anchor it to your desk and off you go. Most LCDs support VESA-compliant mounts, so it doesn't matter what sort of stand the screen is bundled with.
In portrait orientation, a 16:9 (e.g. 1080p) widescreen is great for document work since you can see an entire page on-screen, and surprisingly good for a lot of other applications too.
You get much better use of screen real-estate, partly on account of window titlebars and toolbars being narrower. ClearType doesn't work as designed but I still like to have it enabled.
But was Dual N-Back in the study?
That's not a rhetorical question - I'd really like to know.
Stating the bleeding obvious but apparently overlooked fact - the results of the study only apply to games included in the study.
What's more, IIRC Dual N-Back is claimed to improve creative intelligence, not necessarily IQ. I suspect the study was based on IQ-style tests.
Forget e-cigs, I want whatever the ALA is smoking ;-}
I was going to make a similar point.
All an environmental movement needs to do is get all the major political parties in all the major countries on-side, and then 'democracy' as we know it becomes irrelevant.
That's not going to be cheap, but it's going to be a lot cheaper and I daresay more effective than bribing all the voters. A few well-meaning individuals with deep pockets and questionable morals could probably pull it off.
I wonder what Bill Gates has on his to-do list this week?
Problem is, touch-and-drag scrolls on the iPhone, and that's fundamental to the iPhone interface.
I'd rather see touch-and-hold switch to a mouse movement interface with a magnifying glass and a cross-hair, similar to the way text field editing works already. Tapping with a second finger during the hold would click the mouse. Releasing the hold without moving the cross-hair would bring up a select all/copy menu.
The biggest problem I see with human-level AI is that it's largely pointless.
We're approaching seven billion people and an epidemic of unemployment. Human intelligence is in massive oversupply. So why is anyone going to fork out the necessary billions on R&D over the coming decades to develop something that's going to be worthless?
I don't use my brain most days, and I have a job.
And also on the minus side, won't this thing rock, in a bad way?
The iPhone isn't stable when rested on a table, due to the curved back and thin edges. From the photos it looks like the iPad will be unstable too.
From my perspective, the iPhone really is a revolution in easy-to-use, intuitive user interface design.
At 20 months old my son could pick up an iPhone, unlock it, start apps, browse videos and play games.
Six months later, I'm still trying to explain to him the relationship between the touchpad and a little arrow on the screen - before we even get to clicking things, opening the 'Start' menu, etc, etc, etc.
I'll go a step further and say that drag-and-drop is a misfeature. It's sometimes OK as sugaring, but it should never be the only way to perform a given function.
A big issue is that you lose the use of the mouse button while you're dragging. That makes it painful to navigate between or within windows to find the drop target. Especially if you're using a touchpad.
Another issue is obscurity - it's often not obvious what elements of the UI are draggable, and what their possible drop targets are. Even the best implementations don't tell you about possible drop targets in windows you don't have open, or what drag sources are available for a selected target.
Case in point - a 'handy' feature in Windows XP is that you can get the path to a file by dragging and dropping from Explorer into the 'Run...' dialog. Now try that with Explorer maximized, I dare you...
(hint: mid-drag, use a keyboard shortcut to open or expose the dialog)
Snap out of it. You're anthropomorphizing a very large and diverse group of people.
That mode of thinking has led to all sorts of discrimination and unnecessary suffering throughout history.
To help you get a clue, the individuals in that society that perpetrate IP infringements need not be the same ones that make and enforce the IP laws.