The result is that a movie that lost all of the really INTERESTING stuff that the book had; from political debate, full-body battle armor, to vicious bipedal aliens..
If you liked Starship Troopers (the book) you should check out Armor by John Steakley. It borrows heavily from Starship Troopers, but updates it interestingly and is a great read. It's kind of a cult classic (at least among my friends).
I find that most shows I watch do just fine on the "medium" Tivo quality setting. However, there are some shows that just beg for more. For example, "The Simpsons" looks like complete crap at "medium" with all sorts of JPEG artifacts when things move too quickly. The nice thing is that you can select different quality modes for different shows when you set up a "season pass." Thus I can set up Simpsons on a higher quality mode, but leave my wife's "Trading Spaces" show (which she records about three episodes a day!!!) on a lower quality mode so it takes up less space.
> 99.8% accuracy is fine for a proof-of-concept demo
There are a host of applications where that kind of accuracy would be great. Think about 3D rendering for games. Do you care that an occational pixel is slightly off color if it means you can render the entire scene in MUCH greater detail? There are also many applications in things like simulation. Lastly, with calcuation power to burn you can always run a given calculation multiple times and then use standard statistical techniques to get arbitrary levels of certainly about the accuracy.
> Who knows, it might take several years
> to develop a really usable version of this
Of course it will. I don't think anyone claimed you'd see this replacing your Pentium. However, think big! Things like DNA computers and Qauntum computers will eventually make our current silicon chips look like toys.
If you haven't eaten at Roy's you're really missing out. He specializes in a fabulous Hawaian Fusion dishes. I've eaten at his resturants on Maui and in Carmel. Also, the desserts are incredible.
The Iron Chef show is fun, but we American's would rarely have the opportunity to sample food from one of the "Iron Chef's". You should check out one of Roy's locations in the US for a great meal.
GAs are really cool. They can solve really hard problems with complex non-linear relationships that are hard to express for other techniques. For anyone who's interested I'd suggest the following books:
The amount of movement varied with the mass of the pendulums, but not the distance or the materials (they mention metal, glass, ceramics, wood, rubber, plastic). Pendulums 6 meters and 150 meters away in a different building, separated by brick walls and an inch of steel, showed identical effects. Even with "trace amounts of iron" a magnetic effect would vary with the square of the distance. But what do I know?
I'm sorry, but if the above claim is made by the paper, then it's obvious crap. If the effect isn't related to distance then why don't all pendulums in the world move by this amount when he turns on his machine?
-Steve
There's a prioritzing going on that seems backwards in espousing that mobile phones and tamagotchi count for more . . .
Yup, you completely missed the point. PCs and wired connections are the internet today. Things like the Docomo i-Mode phones point to what the future of the internet will look like. A store about a bunch of pale/. geeks playing with their DSL lines sounds boring (altough that is part of today's internet). A bizaar sub-culture of 11-year-old Japanese girls who are jacked into the net 24 hours a day, and communicate through strange codes they construct with a cell-phone 10-key -- now that sounds like sci-fi!
And lets hope they keep the sportscaster crap to a minimum, and give us more mechanical bits
Those sportscaster guys are half the fun of the show. Have you never watched Sportscenter on ESPN? The announcers on Battlebots are a great parody of the Sportscenter guys -- that whole thing is obviously toung-in-cheek and it's funny!
It's Hillary in the article not Heidi. You're probably confusing this with Heidi Roizen who was a VP at Apple and moderately famous Silicon Valley entrepeneur (and generally nice person). Only the name is similar.
GIF and PNG are both lossless formats. JPEG is lossy. This means you don't get exactly the same bits back out when you compress and then decompress a JPEG. This works find for many applications (photos being a prime example), but works poorly for other things (line art, icons, etc). In places where you can deal with some information loss, you're going to see better compression with JPEG.
I haven't seen StarBlazers in a really long time, but I did see several episodes of Robotech (aired on my local PBS station) about a year ago. I still liked it a lot. As soon as the opening theme music started playing I almost got teary eyed. Sometimes these things are almost as good as you remember them to be.
My friends and I have a running joke about the wave motion gun. You see it really could destroy whole planets (I think it even detroyed a small star during one episode), but only when the plot allowed for it. If Deslok's ship was hit with the wave motion gun it would merely be damaged (because we couldn't kill off the main villian so easily). When the Comet Empire was hit with dozens of blast from Wave motion guns at once it wasn't even damaged! Now whenever we see a movie or a TV show that has inconsistencies like this we refer to the Wave Motion Gun Effect.
I like Lain. Lain is not only great anime, it's some of the best cyberpunk ever put on film. With the exception of the Matrix (and a few other Anime features like Ghost in the Shell) it's the only good Cyberpunk available (BladeRunner had punk, but no cyber). I haven't finished watching the whole thing yet (I just ordered the thrid disk) but I'm still enthralled. If you haven't seen it you should get it. The pacing is a little show at first, but it's deep, challenging and fun!
Although it is hard to come by the original Robotech series, Robotech was based on a Japanese series called Macross (at least the first part). There are two "sequels" to Macross you can get on DVD. The better set is called Macross Plus. Well worth checking out. The animation for Macross Plus is far better than the original Robotech stuff, although the plot isn't quite as compelling.
Slashdot Mirror
If you liked Starship Troopers (the book) you should check out Armor by John Steakley. It borrows heavily from Starship Troopers, but updates it interestingly and is a great read. It's kind of a cult classic (at least among my friends).
-Steve
I find that most shows I watch do just fine on the "medium" Tivo quality setting. However, there are some shows that just beg for more. For example, "The Simpsons" looks like complete crap at "medium" with all sorts of JPEG artifacts when things move too quickly. The nice thing is that you can select different quality modes for different shows when you set up a "season pass." Thus I can set up Simpsons on a higher quality mode, but leave my wife's "Trading Spaces" show (which she records about three episodes a day!!!) on a lower quality mode so it takes up less space.
-Steve
> 99.8% accuracy is fine for a proof-of-concept demo
There are a host of applications where that kind of accuracy would be great. Think about 3D rendering for games. Do you care that an occational pixel is slightly off color if it means you can render the entire scene in MUCH greater detail? There are also many applications in things like simulation. Lastly, with calcuation power to burn you can always run a given calculation multiple times and then use standard statistical techniques to get arbitrary levels of certainly about the accuracy.
> Who knows, it might take several years
> to develop a really usable version of this
Of course it will. I don't think anyone claimed you'd see this replacing your Pentium. However, think big! Things like DNA computers and Qauntum computers will eventually make our current silicon chips look like toys.
Steve
Roy Yamaguchi is Iron Chef Asian
If you haven't eaten at Roy's you're really missing out. He specializes in a fabulous Hawaian Fusion dishes. I've eaten at his resturants on Maui and in Carmel. Also, the desserts are incredible.
The Iron Chef show is fun, but we American's would rarely have the opportunity to sample food from one of the "Iron Chef's". You should check out one of Roy's locations in the US for a great meal.
-Steve
David Goldberg's "Genetic Algorithms" is a classic.
John Koza's Genetic Programming represents the next step in adaptive computing.
You know that a Sun Fire 4800 is quite a machine. You say that you'd require 25 Gig of RAM. That's fine, the 4800 can hold up to 96.
Sun Fire 4800 Product DescriptionThis is in fact the fastest Java server in the world. Check out:
f lash.20010925.3.html
http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2001-09/sun
-Steve
Can't write an FPS in Java, eh?
http://www.javagaming.org/News/news.html
I'm sorry, but if the above claim is made by the paper, then it's obvious crap. If the effect isn't related to distance then why don't all pendulums in the world move by this amount when he turns on his machine? -Steve
...Java's biggest drawback as a language (speed).
If you're interested in writing fast Java GUIs you should check out Java Platform Performance. Free chapters are available online.
There's a prioritzing going on that seems backwards in espousing that mobile phones and tamagotchi count for more . . .
/. geeks playing with their DSL lines sounds boring (altough that is part of today's internet). A bizaar sub-culture of 11-year-old Japanese girls who are jacked into the net 24 hours a day, and communicate through strange codes they construct with a cell-phone 10-key -- now that sounds like sci-fi!
Yup, you completely missed the point. PCs and wired connections are the internet today. Things like the Docomo i-Mode phones point to what the future of the internet will look like. A store about a bunch of pale
-Steve
And lets hope they keep the sportscaster crap to a minimum, and give us more mechanical bits
Those sportscaster guys are half the fun of the show. Have you never watched Sportscenter on ESPN? The announcers on Battlebots are a great parody of the Sportscenter guys -- that whole thing is obviously toung-in-cheek and it's funny!
-Steve
It's Hillary in the article not Heidi. You're probably confusing this with Heidi Roizen who was a VP at Apple and moderately famous Silicon Valley entrepeneur (and generally nice person). Only the name is similar.
I have a website I'm working on that has reviews of Anime DVDs. People might find it interesting. It's at:
http://www.xalien.com/anime/
Hope you like it.
I've been putting together a web-site with information and reviews on DVD Anime. You can find it here:
http://www.xalien.com/anime/
Let me know what you think.
-Steve
steve@xalien.com
I've been putting together a web-site with information and reviews on DVD Anime. You can find it here:
http://www.xalien.com/anime/
Let me know what you think.
-Steve
steve@xalien.com
GIF and PNG are both lossless formats. JPEG is lossy. This means you don't get exactly the same bits back out when you compress and then decompress a JPEG. This works find for many applications (photos being a prime example), but works poorly for other things (line art, icons, etc). In places where you can deal with some information loss, you're going to see better compression with JPEG.
-Stevehttp://www.xalien.com/anime
Sci-fi Anime is great, but there is also cool Swords and Scorcery stuff. You might want to check out some of the following as well:
* Record of Lodoss War (ala Tolkien)* Ninja Scroll (Supernatural mideval Japan)
-Steve
www.xalien.com/anime
I haven't seen StarBlazers in a really long time, but I did see several episodes of Robotech (aired on my local PBS station) about a year ago. I still liked it a lot. As soon as the opening theme music started playing I almost got teary eyed. Sometimes these things are almost as good as you remember them to be.
-Stevewww.xalien.com/anime
My friends and I have a running joke about the wave motion gun. You see it really could destroy whole planets (I think it even detroyed a small star during one episode), but only when the plot allowed for it. If Deslok's ship was hit with the wave motion gun it would merely be damaged (because we couldn't kill off the main villian so easily). When the Comet Empire was hit with dozens of blast from Wave motion guns at once it wasn't even damaged! Now whenever we see a movie or a TV show that has inconsistencies like this we refer to the Wave Motion Gun Effect.
-Stevewww.xalien.com/anime
I like Lain. Lain is not only great anime, it's some of the best cyberpunk ever put on film. With the exception of the Matrix (and a few other Anime features like Ghost in the Shell) it's the only good Cyberpunk available (BladeRunner had punk, but no cyber). I haven't finished watching the whole thing yet (I just ordered the thrid disk) but I'm still enthralled. If you haven't seen it you should get it. The pacing is a little show at first, but it's deep, challenging and fun!
-Stevewww.xalien.com/anime
Although it is hard to come by the original Robotech series, Robotech was based on a Japanese series called Macross (at least the first part). There are two "sequels" to Macross you can get on DVD. The better set is called Macross Plus. Well worth checking out. The animation for Macross Plus is far better than the original Robotech stuff, although the plot isn't quite as compelling.
-Stevewww.xalien.com/anime
What does OAV mean? I see this term all the time in association with anime. Is it an acronym?
-Stevewww.xalien.com/anime