This is true although in the past I guess I've managed to buy at the right time. The cards are back compatible: I used a PCIe3 card (GTX750) in a PCIe2 slot and didn't have any problems running games at 1080p a couple of years ago. You'll just miss out on the extra bandwidth and possibly you can get away with it. PCIe2 isn't that much slower than PCIe3 (5 vs 8 GB/s)- at least compared to the doubling from v3 to v4. PCIe3 has been around for 6 years (2010), nobody is using PCIe3.1 yet and the specification for PCIe4 isn't even being released until next year. On top of that most games shouldn't require higher bandwidth cards for a least a year after the standard trickles down to new motherboards so I peg that at around 8 years lifespan (since the new cards will still work, but at 8GB/s vs 16GB/s).
Hypothetically if you bought a new rig in 2010 the motherboard would still be good until 2017.
A Core2Duo or Quad is plenty good enough for a modern AAA title combined with a modern graphics card like the GTX960. This means that you can get away with spending $200 every few years to keep up to date. Every now and again you might need a new processor, an SSD, or some more RAM, but it averages out. The big plus is that any game (pretty much ever) will run on the latest PC. And of course that it's a PC so it can do other things.
The latest and greatest console costs $400-500 (here at least) and you'd need to buy one every few years to avoid back-compatibility problems. The main advantage of a console is that it's self contained and should just work. You also have guarantees on whether a game is playable. This is similar to how Apple has been so successful with iOS because they know exactly what it's being run on vs Android which is fine on new phones, but progressively crap on older ones.
Why not link that in the summary instead of Gizmag's nonsense article ?
Also I'm confused. The paper says the lens thickness is 200nm. So where did the "1 billionth of a metre" come into it? From the paper: "a large size 200-nm-thick GO thin film is prepared on a glass substrate".
To address your question they show focused spots in wavelengths from the VIS-NIR (400-1000nm ish). The focus performance is pretty much constant throughout.
Could you multiplex several ports? Skylake is capable of driving 3x4k monitors at 60Hz. In principle there's no reason why you couldn't treat each quadrant of the display as a separate screen and send the relevant pixels to it (assuming rendering at that speed isn't a problem).
At that point you should be considering battery swaps. Wasn't one of Tesla's early demos that their automated battery exchanger could replace batteries faster than a human could pump gas?
Obviously a problem if you drain the battery to get to the middle of nowhere (need those charging stations), but that's probably "the future".
I don't play games and it's still a problem, the Office suite takes up about half a gig per app on my iPad. Compared to Android, iOS app sizes are obscene.
On the other hand the Retina Mini 2 is excellent. It's incredibly snappy - I was frankly amazed when I looked back at all the Android phones I've used. The only downside is that Apple really screws you over with their walled garden. Security is nice, but it's irritating that none of the storage is truly accessible, you can't download arbitrary things like MP3 files from the browser and if you want anything useful like a Gameboy emulator you need to jailbreak. I love it and I hate it at the same time.
That's pretty standard for all aviation training. Flying is easy, much easier than driving in a lot of ways. Not killing yourself is a lot harder. That's why pilots have reams and reams of checklists covering pretty much every conceivable problem that can happen. Similarly when training in a simulator, the operators can pretty much throw the book at you to see how you react to losing all your instruments and a wing while flying through a thunderstorm.
NASA's generic rulebook is over 2000 pages long and is well worth a flick through if you're a space geek http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/news/c...
It's risk analysis. Password managers are essentially making a bet that the risk of your hard drive being compromised is far less likely than a website being compromised. Most people can't remember more than 5 (strong) passwords at best and they get lazy and reuse them everywhere. Password managers let you eliminate password reuse so even if your Amazon account gets hacked, the attackers won't suddenly have the keys to the castle.
It is one place to attack, true, but how likely is it that someone targets your password database? I would argue it's pretty remote, even if your machine was compromised or stolen. Assuming your master password is strong, the attacker either needs to crack it (difficult) or know you well enough to guess it. What's far more likely is that the drive the database is on fails and you lose access to all your randomised passwords. However in that scenario, you might have printed backup keys for your email account (Gmail will let you do this) and no worries.
For the truly paranoid, good old wetware suffices or a pencil and paper; again, you're weighing the risk of your house (or mind) being broken into vs some script kiddies attacking a website.
Technical mumbo jumbo sauce (you are reading Slashdot, by the way) is exactly the reason that fingerprint scanning used for usernames on a specific system isn't a privacy concern, because the data are useless when taken out of context. Unless you take a full ink/digital copy of the fingerprint, the data collected by the system is worthless because you can't use it anywhere else. The other point is that your fingerprints should not be considered secret. They are trivial to steal simply by following you to a café and swiping your glass once you're finished, unless you insist on wearing latex gloves everywhere?
In terms of tracking, the issue is not so much "why are they tracking students", but whether biometric tracking offers a significant improvement over standard RFID cards without added risk of private data being leaked everywhere. The problem people seem to have here is that the food data is being linked to people (via census data) and then shared with the authorities. In this case they actually seem to be interested in tracking what kids eat in order to improve school meals.
Your argument boils down to: "I'm too lazy to consider how the system actually works, but it must be bad, right? Oh noes, the gubmint has the data too!"
Let's play devil's advocate here. I've given up my fingerprints to Japan upon entry as a tourist. I did the same for the USA. Oh well. Fingerprinting is so routine nowadays that anyone who travels internationally will fall foul of it eventually. Like it or not, sooner or later it'll happen to you. Does it have to be bad?
This sort of scheme has been done in the UK too, for secondary schools. The biometric systems replace ID cards which get lost, stolen and so on. There is another argument that biometrics hides who gets free school meals which prevents bullying. The key point here is that these systems do not record your fingerprint in the same way that law enforcement do. They take a temporary image, create something like a hash (it's not a hash, but it's a similar concept) from some characteristic features and then compare that to whatever is in the database. While that certainly identifies you and you're now explicitly linked to the food you bought, it's not something that could then be used to forge a national ID card. Is the 'hash' from this system interoperable with a competing system? Who knows, probably not. At most you could forge an input to that particular biometric system.
So they feed back this data to the government. What is the data? Is it a scan of the finger that would hold up in court? Or is it just some hash identifier, linked to the student's name and the food they bought. In which case the privacy risks are questionable, but the scheme is opt-in for now and the same issues would be there if a standard RFID card was used instead.
Phones and laptops are also subject to relatively harsher environments. They're not cooled adequately and they're normally fully cycled every single day. An EV's battery pack could feasibly last a week or two for someone with a short commute.
No, the building stays the same colour. Very simply, consider a particular feature on the building. The location of that feature will shift between adjacent pixels in the image if the building moves relative to the camera. When this happens the pixels change colour (e.g. a 'sky' pixel might now be a 'building' pixel).
The technique can be exploited for other things like blood flow, but in general things don't change colour as they move - unless they're travelling really fast
And I've noticed this a lot on recent submissions, tons of second or third hand sources that aren't terribly useful.
http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/vidmag/: Original source for Eulerian video magnification
I'm pretty sure any distributed solution is going to need to be connected to a computer. The computer is probably going to be much less than the board itself, those things are pricey.
Well for a stereo system you can't claim 98% accuracy between two distances! I found a presentation where the baseline is given as 75mm: https://intel.lanyonevents.com....
We still don't know what the cameras are, or the focal length, but I'm sure we'll find out eventually. For now we can use: relative accuracy = (Z/(75e-3*900). Note that 900 represents the minimum measurable disparity divided by the focal length in pixels. This turns out to be almost exactly right with respect to Dell's numbers.
So at 3 feet = 0.91cm, we expect around 98.5%. At 15 feet we get around 93%, 20 feet 90% and so on from there. At 30m we're at around 50% precision, not good enough for mapping, but maybe good enough for background segmentation.
I think it was poorly advertised. Stereo imaging is great for high density 3D measurement, but it sucks at long distances unless you have huge baselines. In case you're wondering, satellites use different orbits to get wide enough distances between the shots (kilometer scale baselines). RealSense works well for doing things like background detection - you look for any pixel which has zero parallax or close up work, e.g. face scanning or augmented reality on a tabletop.
Unfortunately what happens when this sort of thing gets released is everyone, rightly, assumes that they can do stuff like measure buildings. In reality, the technology simply doesn't work like that.
The problem is compounded when people complain that it only works in good lighting. Well sure, but how do you think this system works? Intel recently bought TYZX, a 3D imaging company. What was their main product? An ASIC that performs stereo correlation in real time without any drain on the host processor. So we can be 90% sure that this is what's inside RealSense. It's not like the Kinect or the other RealSense camera that projects an IR pattern into the scene. The point here is that stereo matchers require strong signals in order to get good matching accuracy (which pixel in the other image does this pixel correspond to?). If you take a picture with your crappy tablet cameras, it's going to have shot noise, JPEG artifacts (maybe), dark noise and probably the gain is through the roof. All this means it's almost impossible to accurately match pixels between the images so you can't measure distances accurately either.
There's a reason why all the promo shots are taken on bright sunny days!
The reviewer should be embarrassed, and so should you for not reading up on RealSense, but it's probably unintentional.
The error is because stereo depth accuracy is quadratic, it degrades as the square of the distance to the sensors. The distance (baseline) between the cameras in a RealSense unit is so small that any distance measured beyond a few metres is inaccurate. It was a stupid thing to demonstrate, but it shows that many reviewers (and users it seems) don't understand the limitations of 3D measurement systems. For this reason, Intel clearly states that RealSense is only good up to 10m (and even then I would be sceptical that it works well beyond 5).
This is easily verifiable with your eyes. As an object gets further away, it becomes harder and harder to determine its distance because the optical parallax of the object tends to zero (i.e. it appears in the same x-position on each of your 'sensors'). Try it next time you're in a car or on a train, we all know that nearby objects appear to whizz past while background features like mountains/hills remain stationary.
Specifically the error equation is dZ = Z^2/bf (the distance measurement is is Z = bf/d where d is the disparity (parallax) in pixels)
Where dZ is the distance error, Z is the target distance, b is the baseline and f is the focal length in pixels. I've assumed that you can detect correspondences to within one pixel, realistically it'll be better than that for a competent stereo matching algorithm. Now in this case Z is several hundred metres, b is order 100mm and f order 1000px.
Do the maths: 100^2/(100e-3 * 1000) = around 100m error. At 5m? It's around 25cm and 1m it's 1mm. The actual numbers will be different because I don't know the exact baseline, or the focal length. I can tell you for sure that the cameras aren't high enough resolution for that to make a significant difference to the accuracy.
How does that compare to commercial DVDs that you've bought? I have movie DVDs, PS1 games and PS2 games that still play perfectly. My Dad's CD collection is older than me and it's still fine. It seems that it's the quality of the disc and the way it's burned that makes a difference rather than the medium itself. That may not help much for home backups, but there is plenty of evidence (my house is full of it) that disc based media lasts for decades. On the other hand I too have tried to read discs that I've burned maybe 10 years ago and all are corrupt.
In the case of NGTS and SuperWASP most of the time the telescopes aren't looking at the same target. The purpose of this array is to observe large swathes of the sky simultaneously so each camera has a distinct field of view of around 8x8 degrees which can be mosaiced together. In principle they could also observe a target simultaneously in different filter bands, but I think normally they would pass that duty over to the VLT to gather much more light.
Also there are plenty of telescopes in the 1-2m class that do not have adaptive optics, if your location is good enough then you can get close to the atmospheric diffraction limit (about half an arcsecond) which is still nice. Adaptive optics lets you get down to the diffraction limit of your optics (which is many times greater usually). Most people observe near sea level where the atmosphere is nice and thick so the seeing is awful. If you go up a mountain things get a lot better!
Exposure times on SuperWASP are around 30 seconds according to them. The sensor quantum efficiency is 90% so it's close to counting photons (don't quote me!), I think in practice it's a bit more complex. They're multi-stage-Peltier cooled, backthinned, e2v, blah blah blah. Plus other amazing things like 1% linearity over the whole dynamic range, around 20 electrons readout noise and so on.
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/...
Slashdot Mirror
Qualcomm have visual recognition networks that will run offline on their tablets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This is true although in the past I guess I've managed to buy at the right time. The cards are back compatible: I used a PCIe3 card (GTX750) in a PCIe2 slot and didn't have any problems running games at 1080p a couple of years ago. You'll just miss out on the extra bandwidth and possibly you can get away with it. PCIe2 isn't that much slower than PCIe3 (5 vs 8 GB/s)- at least compared to the doubling from v3 to v4. PCIe3 has been around for 6 years (2010), nobody is using PCIe3.1 yet and the specification for PCIe4 isn't even being released until next year. On top of that most games shouldn't require higher bandwidth cards for a least a year after the standard trickles down to new motherboards so I peg that at around 8 years lifespan (since the new cards will still work, but at 8GB/s vs 16GB/s).
Hypothetically if you bought a new rig in 2010 the motherboard would still be good until 2017.
It's much of a muchness.
A Core2Duo or Quad is plenty good enough for a modern AAA title combined with a modern graphics card like the GTX960. This means that you can get away with spending $200 every few years to keep up to date. Every now and again you might need a new processor, an SSD, or some more RAM, but it averages out. The big plus is that any game (pretty much ever) will run on the latest PC. And of course that it's a PC so it can do other things.
The latest and greatest console costs $400-500 (here at least) and you'd need to buy one every few years to avoid back-compatibility problems. The main advantage of a console is that it's self contained and should just work. You also have guarantees on whether a game is playable. This is similar to how Apple has been so successful with iOS because they know exactly what it's being run on vs Android which is fine on new phones, but progressively crap on older ones.
I guess calling it W-FIST would have been a bit edgy?
Given that the paper is in fact open access: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2... ...
Why not link that in the summary instead of Gizmag's nonsense article ?
Also I'm confused. The paper says the lens thickness is 200nm. So where did the "1 billionth of a metre" come into it? From the paper: "a large size 200-nm-thick GO thin film is prepared on a glass substrate".
To address your question they show focused spots in wavelengths from the VIS-NIR (400-1000nm ish). The focus performance is pretty much constant throughout.
Could you multiplex several ports? Skylake is capable of driving 3x4k monitors at 60Hz. In principle there's no reason why you couldn't treat each quadrant of the display as a separate screen and send the relevant pixels to it (assuming rendering at that speed isn't a problem).
At that point you should be considering battery swaps. Wasn't one of Tesla's early demos that their automated battery exchanger could replace batteries faster than a human could pump gas?
Obviously a problem if you drain the battery to get to the middle of nowhere (need those charging stations), but that's probably "the future".
I don't play games and it's still a problem, the Office suite takes up about half a gig per app on my iPad. Compared to Android, iOS app sizes are obscene.
Google already has science fairs https://www.googlesciencefair....
On the other hand the Retina Mini 2 is excellent. It's incredibly snappy - I was frankly amazed when I looked back at all the Android phones I've used. The only downside is that Apple really screws you over with their walled garden. Security is nice, but it's irritating that none of the storage is truly accessible, you can't download arbitrary things like MP3 files from the browser and if you want anything useful like a Gameboy emulator you need to jailbreak. I love it and I hate it at the same time.
That's pretty standard for all aviation training. Flying is easy, much easier than driving in a lot of ways. Not killing yourself is a lot harder. That's why pilots have reams and reams of checklists covering pretty much every conceivable problem that can happen. Similarly when training in a simulator, the operators can pretty much throw the book at you to see how you react to losing all your instruments and a wing while flying through a thunderstorm.
NASA's generic rulebook is over 2000 pages long and is well worth a flick through if you're a space geek http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/news/c...
I think you meant publish, publicising is exactly what they're doing! ;)
It's risk analysis. Password managers are essentially making a bet that the risk of your hard drive being compromised is far less likely than a website being compromised. Most people can't remember more than 5 (strong) passwords at best and they get lazy and reuse them everywhere. Password managers let you eliminate password reuse so even if your Amazon account gets hacked, the attackers won't suddenly have the keys to the castle.
It is one place to attack, true, but how likely is it that someone targets your password database? I would argue it's pretty remote, even if your machine was compromised or stolen. Assuming your master password is strong, the attacker either needs to crack it (difficult) or know you well enough to guess it. What's far more likely is that the drive the database is on fails and you lose access to all your randomised passwords. However in that scenario, you might have printed backup keys for your email account (Gmail will let you do this) and no worries.
For the truly paranoid, good old wetware suffices or a pencil and paper; again, you're weighing the risk of your house (or mind) being broken into vs some script kiddies attacking a website.
If only it were actually Dmail, that would make the whole premise a lot more interesting. Do they also build microwaves?
HIV is explicitly screened for. http://www.blood.co.uk/resourc...
Technical mumbo jumbo sauce (you are reading Slashdot, by the way) is exactly the reason that fingerprint scanning used for usernames on a specific system isn't a privacy concern, because the data are useless when taken out of context. Unless you take a full ink/digital copy of the fingerprint, the data collected by the system is worthless because you can't use it anywhere else. The other point is that your fingerprints should not be considered secret. They are trivial to steal simply by following you to a café and swiping your glass once you're finished, unless you insist on wearing latex gloves everywhere?
In terms of tracking, the issue is not so much "why are they tracking students", but whether biometric tracking offers a significant improvement over standard RFID cards without added risk of private data being leaked everywhere. The problem people seem to have here is that the food data is being linked to people (via census data) and then shared with the authorities. In this case they actually seem to be interested in tracking what kids eat in order to improve school meals.
Your argument boils down to: "I'm too lazy to consider how the system actually works, but it must be bad, right? Oh noes, the gubmint has the data too!"
Let's play devil's advocate here. I've given up my fingerprints to Japan upon entry as a tourist. I did the same for the USA. Oh well. Fingerprinting is so routine nowadays that anyone who travels internationally will fall foul of it eventually. Like it or not, sooner or later it'll happen to you. Does it have to be bad?
This sort of scheme has been done in the UK too, for secondary schools. The biometric systems replace ID cards which get lost, stolen and so on. There is another argument that biometrics hides who gets free school meals which prevents bullying. The key point here is that these systems do not record your fingerprint in the same way that law enforcement do. They take a temporary image, create something like a hash (it's not a hash, but it's a similar concept) from some characteristic features and then compare that to whatever is in the database. While that certainly identifies you and you're now explicitly linked to the food you bought, it's not something that could then be used to forge a national ID card. Is the 'hash' from this system interoperable with a competing system? Who knows, probably not. At most you could forge an input to that particular biometric system.
So they feed back this data to the government. What is the data? Is it a scan of the finger that would hold up in court? Or is it just some hash identifier, linked to the student's name and the food they bought. In which case the privacy risks are questionable, but the scheme is opt-in for now and the same issues would be there if a standard RFID card was used instead.
Phones and laptops are also subject to relatively harsher environments. They're not cooled adequately and they're normally fully cycled every single day. An EV's battery pack could feasibly last a week or two for someone with a short commute.
No, the building stays the same colour. Very simply, consider a particular feature on the building. The location of that feature will shift between adjacent pixels in the image if the building moves relative to the camera. When this happens the pixels change colour (e.g. a 'sky' pixel might now be a 'building' pixel).
The technique can be exploited for other things like blood flow, but in general things don't change colour as they move - unless they're travelling really fast
And I've noticed this a lot on recent submissions, tons of second or third hand sources that aren't terribly useful.
http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/vidmag/: Original source for Eulerian video magnification
I'm pretty sure any distributed solution is going to need to be connected to a computer. The computer is probably going to be much less than the board itself, those things are pricey.
http://smarttech.com/Home+Page/Solutions/~/link.aspx?_id=BCF4121A410B48A79C89A8700775DC8B&_z=z
Seems like this is exactly what the OP needs, although it's not clear if they all work at home which would make it a lot more expensive.
Well for a stereo system you can't claim 98% accuracy between two distances! I found a presentation where the baseline is given as 75mm: https://intel.lanyonevents.com....
We still don't know what the cameras are, or the focal length, but I'm sure we'll find out eventually. For now we can use: relative accuracy = (Z/(75e-3*900). Note that 900 represents the minimum measurable disparity divided by the focal length in pixels. This turns out to be almost exactly right with respect to Dell's numbers.
So at 3 feet = 0.91cm, we expect around 98.5%. At 15 feet we get around 93%, 20 feet 90% and so on from there. At 30m we're at around 50% precision, not good enough for mapping, but maybe good enough for background segmentation.
I think it was poorly advertised. Stereo imaging is great for high density 3D measurement, but it sucks at long distances unless you have huge baselines. In case you're wondering, satellites use different orbits to get wide enough distances between the shots (kilometer scale baselines). RealSense works well for doing things like background detection - you look for any pixel which has zero parallax or close up work, e.g. face scanning or augmented reality on a tabletop.
Unfortunately what happens when this sort of thing gets released is everyone, rightly, assumes that they can do stuff like measure buildings. In reality, the technology simply doesn't work like that.
The problem is compounded when people complain that it only works in good lighting. Well sure, but how do you think this system works? Intel recently bought TYZX, a 3D imaging company. What was their main product? An ASIC that performs stereo correlation in real time without any drain on the host processor. So we can be 90% sure that this is what's inside RealSense. It's not like the Kinect or the other RealSense camera that projects an IR pattern into the scene. The point here is that stereo matchers require strong signals in order to get good matching accuracy (which pixel in the other image does this pixel correspond to?). If you take a picture with your crappy tablet cameras, it's going to have shot noise, JPEG artifacts (maybe), dark noise and probably the gain is through the roof. All this means it's almost impossible to accurately match pixels between the images so you can't measure distances accurately either.
There's a reason why all the promo shots are taken on bright sunny days!
The reviewer should be embarrassed, and so should you for not reading up on RealSense, but it's probably unintentional.
The error is because stereo depth accuracy is quadratic, it degrades as the square of the distance to the sensors. The distance (baseline) between the cameras in a RealSense unit is so small that any distance measured beyond a few metres is inaccurate. It was a stupid thing to demonstrate, but it shows that many reviewers (and users it seems) don't understand the limitations of 3D measurement systems. For this reason, Intel clearly states that RealSense is only good up to 10m (and even then I would be sceptical that it works well beyond 5).
This is easily verifiable with your eyes. As an object gets further away, it becomes harder and harder to determine its distance because the optical parallax of the object tends to zero (i.e. it appears in the same x-position on each of your 'sensors'). Try it next time you're in a car or on a train, we all know that nearby objects appear to whizz past while background features like mountains/hills remain stationary.
Specifically the error equation is dZ = Z^2/bf (the distance measurement is is Z = bf/d where d is the disparity (parallax) in pixels)
Where dZ is the distance error, Z is the target distance, b is the baseline and f is the focal length in pixels. I've assumed that you can detect correspondences to within one pixel, realistically it'll be better than that for a competent stereo matching algorithm. Now in this case Z is several hundred metres, b is order 100mm and f order 1000px.
Do the maths: 100^2/(100e-3 * 1000) = around 100m error. At 5m? It's around 25cm and 1m it's 1mm. The actual numbers will be different because I don't know the exact baseline, or the focal length. I can tell you for sure that the cameras aren't high enough resolution for that to make a significant difference to the accuracy.
How does that compare to commercial DVDs that you've bought? I have movie DVDs, PS1 games and PS2 games that still play perfectly. My Dad's CD collection is older than me and it's still fine. It seems that it's the quality of the disc and the way it's burned that makes a difference rather than the medium itself. That may not help much for home backups, but there is plenty of evidence (my house is full of it) that disc based media lasts for decades. On the other hand I too have tried to read discs that I've burned maybe 10 years ago and all are corrupt.
In the case of NGTS and SuperWASP most of the time the telescopes aren't looking at the same target. The purpose of this array is to observe large swathes of the sky simultaneously so each camera has a distinct field of view of around 8x8 degrees which can be mosaiced together. In principle they could also observe a target simultaneously in different filter bands, but I think normally they would pass that duty over to the VLT to gather much more light.
Also there are plenty of telescopes in the 1-2m class that do not have adaptive optics, if your location is good enough then you can get close to the atmospheric diffraction limit (about half an arcsecond) which is still nice. Adaptive optics lets you get down to the diffraction limit of your optics (which is many times greater usually). Most people observe near sea level where the atmosphere is nice and thick so the seeing is awful. If you go up a mountain things get a lot better!
Exposure times on SuperWASP are around 30 seconds according to them. The sensor quantum efficiency is 90% so it's close to counting photons (don't quote me!), I think in practice it's a bit more complex. They're multi-stage-Peltier cooled, backthinned, e2v, blah blah blah. Plus other amazing things like 1% linearity over the whole dynamic range, around 20 electrons readout noise and so on. http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/...