Yes, happy, shiny, flashy commercials will almost certainly be more effective on the unwashed masses. However, marketing to 2 million critical thinkers is still the better choice, but it requires a different mentality in advertising. PhDs aren't going to buy a Ford truck because some washed up country star is singing about it on TV (though the unwashed masses will). If the commercial is creative, informational, and presents a logical case for buying a product (all in 30 seconds), it would work. It's up to the advertisers and networks to figure that one out though.
If you want to learn the concepts behind the filters, pick up a book on digital image processing. But be prepared to be in waaaay over your head. And having fundamental knowledge of the inner workings of these filters won't make them any easier to understand when it comes to applying them to an image. Play around with them and see what they do, and then use them accordingly.
Assume each CD is 1 hour, and he means 160kbps encoding (which isn't really that high, but you'll see why I make that assumption). 350 CDs * 1 hour/cd * 3600 sec/hour * 160kbps * 1/8 bytes/bit * 1/1048576 GB/KB = 24.03GB. 128kbps would make it 19.2GB. 192kbps would make it 28.8GB. 256kbps would make it 38.4GB (close enough.)
There's a few features I wish iTunes would add. First, it should remember what music I've purchased and somehow indicate that while I'm shopping (so you don't make the mistake of buying something twice, although that's unlikely anyway). Secondly, I should be able to re-download those tracks in the event of a hard drive crash or if I'm on the road and forgot to grab a song while I was home. The biggest thing I'd like to see them add is song purchases count towards a credit on buying the album. In other words, if I buy two songs on an album, and then later decide I wish to purchase the album, I shouldn't have to re-purchase those two songs as part of the album. They should offer the album for a lower price (possibly even $1 off per song, or as a percentage). That would really spur album sales on iTunes.
Thank you, Captain Obvious, for doing what you do best. That was my entire point. Apple is going to use the same hardware everyone else does, slap their logo on it, make everything prettier, shinier and more "upscale," and sell it at a premium. The only real difference is the OS (so it'd be like a diesel Audi vs. a gas VW).
No, it's more like trying to put Audi parts in your VW. It's the same underlying hardware, unless you're at the very cheap end of the spectrum, then it's like trying to put Bentley parts in your VW. You can do it, and most of it will work, but occasionally something won't and then you're on your own.
Let's just say there's a reason that mag isn't called Professional Photographer. They're dead wrong. Trust me, I'm going for my PhD in Imaging Science.
I sincerely hope that someone, somewhere, takes him to court over this. It would publically shed light on how ridiculous the DMCA really is, and we'd have a better chance at fighting it. Or we'd at least have a precedent set that allows us to crack things we legally own.
Yes, according to the DMCA, you are not allowed to be in possession of a tool that circumvents copy protection technologies, let alone use it. It does not matter who owns the file in the eyes of the law.
The debacle is that there's a ton of bugs in the in-game server browser, and it was released without third-party browser support. Plus, EA had oversold their servers and there was a ton of lag (it's not quite as bad now). In order to have a ranked server, you have to pay EA. The patch broke a lot of installations and caused gigantic memory leaks on servers. Great ideas in BF2 (though many that were promised didn't show up in the release), horrible execution.
I remember being a young tyke back in the 80s and seeing a copy of the Elements of Style on my parents' bookshelf. I always thought it was a book on fashion and the like, because it had a plaid border on the cover. When I finally dared to look inside, I was sorely disappointed.
Proposed reforms for college English curricula
on
Improving Education?
·
· Score: 1
After graduating from college, and seeing how useful certain classes are (and how useless others are), I'd like to propose a fundamental change in the way English is taught at the collegiate level. My system is comprised of a three-course sequence, which would only mean one extra class for most colleges. Before arriving at school (perhaps at orientation), each student will be forced to sit through an oral exam. A professor or proctor would recite sentences and phrases that use homophones (to/too/two, your/you're, their/there/they're, etc) and plurals. Students who fail to correctly write at least 85% (or something over 75% at least) would be forced to take a remedial class in homophones, apostrophes, and other basic essentials of the English language. After they pass that class (they'd be forced to take it over and over until they pass), they would join the students who passed the exam in a one semester intro to writing and literature class. Students would get the chance to learn to enjoy literature, write a basic research paper, and generally sharpen their writing skills. The second class would be a technical and professional writing class, so students can learn how to function in scientific, engineering, and office environments. It would cover such things as scientific proposals and research papers, business proposals, office memos, and good product documentation. The third and final class would be public speaking. Students would learn how to give effective presentations, how to tailor presentations to their audience, and how to control their posture and body language to maximize their message. Upper level classes in almost all subjects would put these skills to the test, and would be graded accordingly. This three-course sequence would successfully prepare students for both academia and the real world.
Put yourself in their shoes. You've just taken an amazing picture, and you want to make copies to put in an album, on your wall, etc. You go to WalMart (first mistake, but I digress) to get your pictures printed. They tell you they won't print them, because it looks too good. You stand there and argue with them for a minute or two, and if they still refuse, what do you do?
Do you: A) Spend over an hour running home and finding and filling out a generic copyright release online (or finding other proof), then head back to WalMart to give them your business?
-or-
B) Take your business elsewhere, like a rational human being would.
If you're like all but one of the people mentioned in these articles (one lady went home and printed it out on her home printer instead), you probably picked option A, like an idiot. If you had half a brain, you picked option B. Taking your business elsewhere doesn't necessarily mean going to another WalMart location, or a Target or some other megachain. It could also mean going online and getting a better print for less money.
Does anybody have a spine anymore? Why don't people stand up to companies who treat them like second class citizens and take their business elsewhere?
Here's a radical idea for the federal government. If an agency comes in under budget one year, take the surplus, invest it, and give the principal back to the agency the following year. Use the interest to pay down the national debt, keep the agency's budget in pace with inflation, or offer bonuses to the employees.
Or, take half of the surplus (or some other fraction) and split it up amongst all agency employees as a bonus. Psychologically, workers will see the bonus as a motivation for spending less money. If the agency comes in $100M under budget, and $50M is distributed in bonuses to 50k employees, each employee gets $1k or so, and the feds still save $50M. Then, give that agency a $50M smaller budget next year. If they still spend the same amount of money, each employee still nets a $500 bonus, and so on and so forth. That way, there's a continuous desire to lower expenses, but the budget won't be cut by the full amount of the surplus.
There are clear limitations with deconvolution. First off, it results in a non-unique solution for all but the simplest cases. That means that if you have two point sources in an image that now overlap due to the size of the PSF (basically, all normal images except for a few star fields), you can't really determine where the energy actually belongs. Plus, any noise in the image throws off the deconvolution. There's also a number of different methods, and you need to pick the right one for the job. Also, you need a very accurate model of the spread function to even get close, but you'll never really get the original image back.
JPEG and MPEG use the Discrete Cosine Transform, which is somewhat similar in concept to the Fourier Transform, but they aren't the same thing. The DCT will always produce a real-valued function when it's fed a real-valued function, unlike the FFT. It's just better for images.
What if your next door neighbor went completely psycho and painted his house fluorescent green, put a hundred pink flamingoes in his front yard, and wanted to hold loud outdoor rock concerts in his back yard? What if he wanted a million dollars a year to not do it? What if you wanted to sell your house, and it's now worth a pittance because nobody wants to live next to a psycho?
There are limits to property rights because what you do on your own property can directly impact the properties around you. You might as well demand the right to shout Fire! in a crowded theater.
Having actually been close enough to a windmill generator to try and hug it (hah... those things are like 15 feet wide), I'll admit that they do make some noise. It's really not audible at all from a distance of even a few hundred feet. Certainly less than a highway or a busy road.
I read the article about Nikon saying we don't need Photoshop. Thanks, I needed a laugh. Can anyone guess how much RAM Nikon Capture uses to store and display a 6MP raw NEF file, which is compressed to about a 5-6MB file? Anyone? Anyone?
Around 400MB. For a single image!
Not to mention that Nikon Capture is generally slow as molasses, even on my A64 3500+ w/ 1GB RAM. Who do they think they're fooling?
I have a VW New Beetle, and putting in an aftermarket head unit would make it look really ugly since the sides are rounded. And I don't want an aftermarket head unit that plays MP3s on CDs, I want a hard-drive based unit that I could take with me wherever I go, just like an iPod.
As a Sirius subscriber, what I REALLY want is a Sirius unit for my car that also plays MP3s. Think satellite radio unit with built-in iPod, not the other way around. That way, when there's nothing good on (which happens from time to time) or I want to listen to something specific, I could have thousands (or at least hundreds) of MP3s at my disposal. Of course, I'd also like a receiver that's much closer in size to the iPod, and isn't hot enough to fry an egg. Sirius, are you listening?
It just occured to me that perhaps the true reason for download caps might not be stinginess on the part of cable companies at all. It certainly isn't a quality-of-service issue. Most broadband users can attest to unstable connections and awful customer service.
If you're downloading hundreds of gigabytes of data each month, what are you realistically downloading? Sorry, nobody really downloads more than a handful of different linux distros. Warez, perhaps, but over 50GB? And who's going to download over 50GB of music in a month in compressed form? That leaves porn and movies. Both of which are offered as pay services by cable companies. Let that sink in for a minute.
If the cable companies let you get hooked on free downloads of decent quality movies and porno rips now, it will be far more difficult for them to sell it to you later. They're simply trying to block a free (but almost always illegal) alternative to one of their paid services.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, happy, shiny, flashy commercials will almost certainly be more effective on the unwashed masses. However, marketing to 2 million critical thinkers is still the better choice, but it requires a different mentality in advertising. PhDs aren't going to buy a Ford truck because some washed up country star is singing about it on TV (though the unwashed masses will). If the commercial is creative, informational, and presents a logical case for buying a product (all in 30 seconds), it would work. It's up to the advertisers and networks to figure that one out though.
If you want to learn the concepts behind the filters, pick up a book on digital image processing. But be prepared to be in waaaay over your head. And having fundamental knowledge of the inner workings of these filters won't make them any easier to understand when it comes to applying them to an image. Play around with them and see what they do, and then use them accordingly.
5x faster than an Athlon X2 4800+. RTFA.
I wish DiVX et al had a "useTFGPU" checkbox that'd speed up encoding.
Nikon uses Sony CCDs in most of their cameras, so don't start jumping for joy just yet...
Assume each CD is 1 hour, and he means 160kbps encoding (which isn't really that high, but you'll see why I make that assumption). 350 CDs * 1 hour/cd * 3600 sec/hour * 160kbps * 1/8 bytes/bit * 1/1048576 GB/KB = 24.03GB. 128kbps would make it 19.2GB. 192kbps would make it 28.8GB. 256kbps would make it 38.4GB (close enough.)
There's a few features I wish iTunes would add. First, it should remember what music I've purchased and somehow indicate that while I'm shopping (so you don't make the mistake of buying something twice, although that's unlikely anyway). Secondly, I should be able to re-download those tracks in the event of a hard drive crash or if I'm on the road and forgot to grab a song while I was home. The biggest thing I'd like to see them add is song purchases count towards a credit on buying the album. In other words, if I buy two songs on an album, and then later decide I wish to purchase the album, I shouldn't have to re-purchase those two songs as part of the album. They should offer the album for a lower price (possibly even $1 off per song, or as a percentage). That would really spur album sales on iTunes.
Thank you, Captain Obvious, for doing what you do best. That was my entire point. Apple is going to use the same hardware everyone else does, slap their logo on it, make everything prettier, shinier and more "upscale," and sell it at a premium. The only real difference is the OS (so it'd be like a diesel Audi vs. a gas VW).
No, it's more like trying to put Audi parts in your VW. It's the same underlying hardware, unless you're at the very cheap end of the spectrum, then it's like trying to put Bentley parts in your VW. You can do it, and most of it will work, but occasionally something won't and then you're on your own.
Let's just say there's a reason that mag isn't called Professional Photographer. They're dead wrong. Trust me, I'm going for my PhD in Imaging Science.
I sincerely hope that someone, somewhere, takes him to court over this. It would publically shed light on how ridiculous the DMCA really is, and we'd have a better chance at fighting it. Or we'd at least have a precedent set that allows us to crack things we legally own.
Yes, according to the DMCA, you are not allowed to be in possession of a tool that circumvents copy protection technologies, let alone use it. It does not matter who owns the file in the eyes of the law.
The debacle is that there's a ton of bugs in the in-game server browser, and it was released without third-party browser support. Plus, EA had oversold their servers and there was a ton of lag (it's not quite as bad now). In order to have a ranked server, you have to pay EA. The patch broke a lot of installations and caused gigantic memory leaks on servers. Great ideas in BF2 (though many that were promised didn't show up in the release), horrible execution.
I remember being a young tyke back in the 80s and seeing a copy of the Elements of Style on my parents' bookshelf. I always thought it was a book on fashion and the like, because it had a plaid border on the cover. When I finally dared to look inside, I was sorely disappointed.
After graduating from college, and seeing how useful certain classes are (and how useless others are), I'd like to propose a fundamental change in the way English is taught at the collegiate level. My system is comprised of a three-course sequence, which would only mean one extra class for most colleges. Before arriving at school (perhaps at orientation), each student will be forced to sit through an oral exam. A professor or proctor would recite sentences and phrases that use homophones (to/too/two, your/you're, their/there/they're, etc) and plurals. Students who fail to correctly write at least 85% (or something over 75% at least) would be forced to take a remedial class in homophones, apostrophes, and other basic essentials of the English language. After they pass that class (they'd be forced to take it over and over until they pass), they would join the students who passed the exam in a one semester intro to writing and literature class. Students would get the chance to learn to enjoy literature, write a basic research paper, and generally sharpen their writing skills. The second class would be a technical and professional writing class, so students can learn how to function in scientific, engineering, and office environments. It would cover such things as scientific proposals and research papers, business proposals, office memos, and good product documentation. The third and final class would be public speaking. Students would learn how to give effective presentations, how to tailor presentations to their audience, and how to control their posture and body language to maximize their message. Upper level classes in almost all subjects would put these skills to the test, and would be graded accordingly. This three-course sequence would successfully prepare students for both academia and the real world.
Put yourself in their shoes. You've just taken an amazing picture, and you want to make copies to put in an album, on your wall, etc. You go to WalMart (first mistake, but I digress) to get your pictures printed. They tell you they won't print them, because it looks too good. You stand there and argue with them for a minute or two, and if they still refuse, what do you do?
Do you:
A) Spend over an hour running home and finding and filling out a generic copyright release online (or finding other proof), then head back to WalMart to give them your business?
-or-
B) Take your business elsewhere, like a rational human being would.
If you're like all but one of the people mentioned in these articles (one lady went home and printed it out on her home printer instead), you probably picked option A, like an idiot. If you had half a brain, you picked option B. Taking your business elsewhere doesn't necessarily mean going to another WalMart location, or a Target or some other megachain. It could also mean going online and getting a better print for less money.
Does anybody have a spine anymore? Why don't people stand up to companies who treat them like second class citizens and take their business elsewhere?
Here's a radical idea for the federal government. If an agency comes in under budget one year, take the surplus, invest it, and give the principal back to the agency the following year. Use the interest to pay down the national debt, keep the agency's budget in pace with inflation, or offer bonuses to the employees.
Or, take half of the surplus (or some other fraction) and split it up amongst all agency employees as a bonus. Psychologically, workers will see the bonus as a motivation for spending less money. If the agency comes in $100M under budget, and $50M is distributed in bonuses to 50k employees, each employee gets $1k or so, and the feds still save $50M. Then, give that agency a $50M smaller budget next year. If they still spend the same amount of money, each employee still nets a $500 bonus, and so on and so forth. That way, there's a continuous desire to lower expenses, but the budget won't be cut by the full amount of the surplus.
There are clear limitations with deconvolution. First off, it results in a non-unique solution for all but the simplest cases. That means that if you have two point sources in an image that now overlap due to the size of the PSF (basically, all normal images except for a few star fields), you can't really determine where the energy actually belongs. Plus, any noise in the image throws off the deconvolution. There's also a number of different methods, and you need to pick the right one for the job. Also, you need a very accurate model of the spread function to even get close, but you'll never really get the original image back.
And when I'm done with school... I'll be the ripe old age of 58. ;)
JPEG and MPEG use the Discrete Cosine Transform, which is somewhat similar in concept to the Fourier Transform, but they aren't the same thing. The DCT will always produce a real-valued function when it's fed a real-valued function, unlike the FFT. It's just better for images.
What if your next door neighbor went completely psycho and painted his house fluorescent green, put a hundred pink flamingoes in his front yard, and wanted to hold loud outdoor rock concerts in his back yard? What if he wanted a million dollars a year to not do it? What if you wanted to sell your house, and it's now worth a pittance because nobody wants to live next to a psycho?
There are limits to property rights because what you do on your own property can directly impact the properties around you. You might as well demand the right to shout Fire! in a crowded theater.
Having actually been close enough to a windmill generator to try and hug it (hah... those things are like 15 feet wide), I'll admit that they do make some noise. It's really not audible at all from a distance of even a few hundred feet. Certainly less than a highway or a busy road.
I read the article about Nikon saying we don't need Photoshop. Thanks, I needed a laugh. Can anyone guess how much RAM Nikon Capture uses to store and display a 6MP raw NEF file, which is compressed to about a 5-6MB file? Anyone? Anyone?
Around 400MB. For a single image!
Not to mention that Nikon Capture is generally slow as molasses, even on my A64 3500+ w/ 1GB RAM. Who do they think they're fooling?
I have a VW New Beetle, and putting in an aftermarket head unit would make it look really ugly since the sides are rounded. And I don't want an aftermarket head unit that plays MP3s on CDs, I want a hard-drive based unit that I could take with me wherever I go, just like an iPod.
As a Sirius subscriber, what I REALLY want is a Sirius unit for my car that also plays MP3s. Think satellite radio unit with built-in iPod, not the other way around. That way, when there's nothing good on (which happens from time to time) or I want to listen to something specific, I could have thousands (or at least hundreds) of MP3s at my disposal. Of course, I'd also like a receiver that's much closer in size to the iPod, and isn't hot enough to fry an egg. Sirius, are you listening?
It just occured to me that perhaps the true reason for download caps might not be stinginess on the part of cable companies at all. It certainly isn't a quality-of-service issue. Most broadband users can attest to unstable connections and awful customer service.
If you're downloading hundreds of gigabytes of data each month, what are you realistically downloading? Sorry, nobody really downloads more than a handful of different linux distros. Warez, perhaps, but over 50GB? And who's going to download over 50GB of music in a month in compressed form? That leaves porn and movies. Both of which are offered as pay services by cable companies. Let that sink in for a minute.
If the cable companies let you get hooked on free downloads of decent quality movies and porno rips now, it will be far more difficult for them to sell it to you later. They're simply trying to block a free (but almost always illegal) alternative to one of their paid services.