I don't completely agree that image scaling sucks.... well it's not perfect, but it does work.
I have the problem that I own an 18 inch CRT; I usually run it in 1600x1200 mode. The problem is that a lot of the features of the web images are barely visible, they are so tiny.
Now, I claim that scaling up the image by 2x so that it covers more pixels is the right thing to do in that case- the angle subtended on my eye would be the same on the 1600x1200 mode as in 800x600 mode on the same CRT and the rendered writing around the images would look much better.
I call this 'right sizing'; because it preserves the size of the image.
Ok, sure, the resolution of the image is going to be no better than if I ran at 800x600- but it's still going to look better. The overall user experience is noticeably improved.
Note that right sizing is not a panacea- scaling an image from 800x600 to 1024x768 would look ridiculous for digitally generated images in many cases. Going from 800x600 to 1600x1200 would look fine though.
I just think that we are going to see more of this kind of thing in browsers; since CRT technology is advancing faster than standards are likely to change. I'm wondering when Mozilla will start providing optional scaling up of images to suit the CRT resolution. I'm also wondering whether HTML needs (or has?) some sort of resolution hints to tell browsers how it was supposed to be viewed.
Alternatives to Hydrogen an Liquid Oxygen chemical rockets exist, but they either don't have as much power,
It's not about power or even exhaust velocity (Isp). It's about delta-v. Kerosene and LOX chemical rockets have as much delta-v as Hydrogen and Liquid Oxygen and are much cheaper to build.
Their opinion was that what will make getting into orbit cheaper will be reducing the "standing army" of people required to maintain the launch vehicle.
That's essentially correct. The fuel for a rocket is less than 1 percent of the cost of launch- the other 99% is the wage cost of designing, building and launching the rocket.
Interestingly the Russians make the cheapest rockets around- even allowing for their vastly lower wages; their rockets are estimated to be 2-10x cheaper than American ones (that's after allowing for the lower wages- the Russians just use less manpower to do the same thing), although the Americans have learnt some of the tricks the Russians have found and are catching up.
Yes, that kind of thing is partly why it is slow:-)
Most surfaces scatter the light, so you can bounce off in any direction chosen at random. You generally have to do quite a few bounces before you bounce into a light source or the sky.
Incidentally, perfectly parallel mirrors can be the worst case; imagine a beam of light at a small angle- how many times would it bounce between them before making it out the other end?
You are right though- generally a mixture of forwards and backwards techniques are used. There's also a matrix technique for precalculating the reflectivity of surfaces. If you use raytracing for the first few bounces, and the reflectivity after that, scenes are going to generally look pretty darn realistic.
Oh yeah; there is one problem with raytracing- it can't usually handle refraction (prisms and lenses) of colours very well... one or two experts claim that this is a bug in reality, and that raytracing is perfect:-)
For each pixel (little dot) on the screen they projected a ray into the scene until it hit something. Then they bounced off at the appropriate angle until they hit something else, and so on until they hit a light. This can take quite a few reflections.
And they did this for every pixel on each scene, 20 times per second.
It's a slow technique but it gives good results. They managed to do this fast by using hardware and 20 computers all running in parallel and transfering the results over the network in realtime; 20 times per second.
Previously used techniques to draw the graphics for Quake III involve drawing little perspective adjusted triangles on the screen; with stuck-on texturing and they use some clever techniques to approximate lighting and shadow; but these techniques generally aren't as good as ray tracing; but they are easy to design graphics cards to do quickly.
Yeah, but Sahami et all didn't get it to work; they were still letting through an embarrasingly large amount of spam. Graham achieved 98+% accuracy which makes it practical. His is really the key insight IMO; with his overall scheme you get almost no spam at all.
She lost! Re:Just be sure to turn your camera off
on
LA to Oregon at Mach 9
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· Score: 3, Funny
+4 insightful when she lost the case and had to pay legal fees? One word: precedent
Or assuming that there isn't some backdoor into your OS, either by design, or by virus, worm or hacking. Once the OS is subverted, 4096000 bit key length doesn't help.
segregation Re:No more swap!
on
Is Swap Necessary?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The aforementioned problem is true of all accurate garbage collectors.
Whilst that's strictly true, some modern languages use generational garbage collectors that segregate objects in memory according to age. Only when an age group gets full do they sweep through an age group, and move any surviving objects up to the next age group.
This heuristic works exceptionally well, and runs fantastically quickly, and triggers significant swapping hardly ever.
There are some circumstances where it runs slowly, but in the worst case the performance is similar to simply doing a full garbage collection. These situations are pretty rare; objects generally segregate very well into young/old or young/middle aged/old categories- the vast majority of objects die very young.
You mean The Daystar? Nobody believes in that anymore. I mean it's so improbable- a large blob of radioactive hydrogen emitting deadly ultraviolet radiation.
I mean, if it existed the environmentalists, they atleast must have gone outside once or twice; they would be up in arms about it, but nary a peep from them- get real; it doesn't exist.
your loud speaker can't be heard fifty miles away,
Well, I don't like to brag:-)
and your whispering can't be intercepted
Large parabolic dishes do work fairly well for sonics as well as radio waves actually; the dishes have to be pretty big though. In World War II the UK had large concrete parabolic dishes hundreds of feet across with observers listening for the sounds of aeroplanes as they crossed the channel, they were able to hear them at a considerable distance- 10s of miles.
or interefere with everyone within a few blocks of your location.
My teachers always disagreed with this at school: "have you anything to contribute with the class?"
The space plane program is taking forever because the technology isn't there. The kinds of weight-to-thrust ratio to take off without boosters isn't possible without a lot more development of our engine technologies.
Well, there's always Skylon. The technology seems to be basically there; it's mostly just R&D needed. And money, lots and lots of money ($10 billion- not too bad as space goes actually).
You're wrong, as is anyone who conflates "spectrum" anI wasn't- youd "bandwidth".
I wasn't, but in any case available bandwidth to the users is the important measure; not spectrum use.
If you're suggesting a fairly high level of technology be mandatory for every radio, then that is just a different approach to advocating for government regulation.
It's a different approach- one where everyone gets plenty of bandwidth. Most people consider that a good thing. Apparently you would prefer everyone to have little/no bandwidth and a few companies paying tax money so they can continue to use the whole radio spectrum extremely inefficiently. And we're supposed to agree that that's a good thing?
Still, the world is rarely either/or. Setting aside bands for different uses, some licensed, some freely used, this seems to be a very reasonable way to go about things.
Um, wrong actually. The latest research shows that in networks of smart transmitters/receivers, if you use all the available tricks, the total bandwidth of all the participants goes up proportional to the number of nodes in the network- in other words- total network bandwidth each node sees is constant.
2. This is slashdot, where the average poster is marginally qualified to discuss complex computer issues, I really doubt any sort of serious discussion would be possible on a subject so outside the average user's area of expertise. (Since the more ignorant the poster the greater the urge to post.)
I don't know about the US (hah!), but in the UK, the emergency services don't get their own highways; they simply use big signs and sirens on their vehicles and the other traffic gets out of the way. There's no reason the same can't happen on the airwaves.
Your problem isn't with English per se, it is with what linguists call pragmatics
No, the only problem here is that you screwed up, and I pointed it out, and it upset you being proved wrong. Your feeble attempts at ad-hominen attacks and pathetic attempts of diagnoses of mental illnesses are very transparent; and frankly says more about your mental state.
My point is, and remains, that electric cars do not produce any CO2 during their operation. Whether or not the power plant that charges them produces some is an entirely separate question.
This compares sharply with conventional vehicles which inevitably produce CO2 during their operation; a point you were deliberately, but should not be, blurred.
Biomass is fuel produced by growing stuff, usually plants. (Fossil fuels, including methane deposits, are *not* classed as biomass).
Because the plants absorb CO2 as they grow- there is *no* net increase in the CO2 in the atmosphere when this matter is burnt; CO2 went down as it grew, it came back when it was burnt.
But know what you're talking about before you open your pie hole
But since understanding English in context seems difficult for you,
No, it's very easy. Actually, I understand it exceptionally well, being my first language.
"If you live in the US..."
Ah! Now I understand you're an American. You have my condolences; clearly if you had learnt English in England, as I, then you would have been able to express yourself more clearly.
Electric cars will not be exclusively deployed in the USA, and power station technology varies temporally/spatially even there.
and you charge the electric vehicle through the public power grid, with high probability, you will increase the amount of CO2 that you generate
Not if you live near a hydroelectric plant, for example Vegas or Niagara; but I wouldn't expect an ignorant American such as yourself to know that kind of detail.
It costs something to drive to the local supermarket. The way petroleum is going up in price, this may well be a cheaper way to go in the long run. (n.b. the delivery service can use electric vehicles and/or can preplan their route to go past each customer once and hence minimise the total distance).
He could have used ZoneAlarm. It's free; and doesn't take very long to download and install; and he could have downloaded it on a different computer, stuck it on a CD, and installed it before ever going online.
If you think universe splitting occurs whenever a measurement is made,
That's not the many worlds theory- the splitting happens whether or not a measurement is made in the MWI.
then I believe that you have a very poor understanding of what measurement is. First of all collapse is not some special/magical process and secondly you can't arbitrarily seperate the universe into observed and observer.
Uh, yeah. That would be the Copenhagen interpretation or something.
And assuming there is no unsplitting
Are you nuts? Unsplitting is implicit in the double slit experiment- the fact that the photon went through two different slits in two different universes, before the universes joined is the whole point. MWI inevitably has joining.
Slashdot Mirror
I have the problem that I own an 18 inch CRT; I usually run it in 1600x1200 mode. The problem is that a lot of the features of the web images are barely visible, they are so tiny.
Now, I claim that scaling up the image by 2x so that it covers more pixels is the right thing to do in that case- the angle subtended on my eye would be the same on the 1600x1200 mode as in 800x600 mode on the same CRT and the rendered writing around the images would look much better.
I call this 'right sizing'; because it preserves the size of the image.
Ok, sure, the resolution of the image is going to be no better than if I ran at 800x600- but it's still going to look better. The overall user experience is noticeably improved.
Note that right sizing is not a panacea- scaling an image from 800x600 to 1024x768 would look ridiculous for digitally generated images in many cases. Going from 800x600 to 1600x1200 would look fine though.
I just think that we are going to see more of this kind of thing in browsers; since CRT technology is advancing faster than standards are likely to change. I'm wondering when Mozilla will start providing optional scaling up of images to suit the CRT resolution. I'm also wondering whether HTML needs (or has?) some sort of resolution hints to tell browsers how it was supposed to be viewed.
It's not about power or even exhaust velocity (Isp). It's about delta-v. Kerosene and LOX chemical rockets have as much delta-v as Hydrogen and Liquid Oxygen and are much cheaper to build.
Their opinion was that what will make getting into orbit cheaper will be reducing the "standing army" of people required to maintain the launch vehicle.
That's essentially correct. The fuel for a rocket is less than 1 percent of the cost of launch- the other 99% is the wage cost of designing, building and launching the rocket.
Interestingly the Russians make the cheapest rockets around- even allowing for their vastly lower wages; their rockets are estimated to be 2-10x cheaper than American ones (that's after allowing for the lower wages- the Russians just use less manpower to do the same thing), although the Americans have learnt some of the tricks the Russians have found and are catching up.
Most surfaces scatter the light, so you can bounce off in any direction chosen at random. You generally have to do quite a few bounces before you bounce into a light source or the sky.
Incidentally, perfectly parallel mirrors can be the worst case; imagine a beam of light at a small angle- how many times would it bounce between them before making it out the other end?
You are right though- generally a mixture of forwards and backwards techniques are used. There's also a matrix technique for precalculating the reflectivity of surfaces. If you use raytracing for the first few bounces, and the reflectivity after that, scenes are going to generally look pretty darn realistic.
Oh yeah; there is one problem with raytracing- it can't usually handle refraction (prisms and lenses) of colours very well... one or two experts claim that this is a bug in reality, and that raytracing is perfect :-)
And they did this for every pixel on each scene, 20 times per second.
It's a slow technique but it gives good results. They managed to do this fast by using hardware and 20 computers all running in parallel and transfering the results over the network in realtime; 20 times per second.
Previously used techniques to draw the graphics for Quake III involve drawing little perspective adjusted triangles on the screen; with stuck-on texturing and they use some clever techniques to approximate lighting and shadow; but these techniques generally aren't as good as ray tracing; but they are easy to design graphics cards to do quickly.
Yeah, why can't Quake players just get along?
Yeah, but Sahami et all didn't get it to work; they were still letting through an embarrasingly large amount of spam. Graham achieved 98+% accuracy which makes it practical. His is really the key insight IMO; with his overall scheme you get almost no spam at all.
+4 insightful when she lost the case and had to pay legal fees? One word: precedent
Or assuming that there isn't some backdoor into your OS, either by design, or by virus, worm or hacking. Once the OS is subverted, 4096000 bit key length doesn't help.
Whilst that's strictly true, some modern languages use generational garbage collectors that segregate objects in memory according to age. Only when an age group gets full do they sweep through an age group, and move any surviving objects up to the next age group.
This heuristic works exceptionally well, and runs fantastically quickly, and triggers significant swapping hardly ever.
There are some circumstances where it runs slowly, but in the worst case the performance is similar to simply doing a full garbage collection. These situations are pretty rare; objects generally segregate very well into young/old or young/middle aged/old categories- the vast majority of objects die very young.
Sad isn't it.
You mean The Daystar? Nobody believes in that anymore. I mean it's so improbable- a large blob of radioactive hydrogen emitting deadly ultraviolet radiation.
I mean, if it existed the environmentalists, they atleast must have gone outside once or twice; they would be up in arms about it, but nary a peep from them- get real; it doesn't exist.
Well, I don't like to brag :-)
and your whispering can't be intercepted
Large parabolic dishes do work fairly well for sonics as well as radio waves actually; the dishes have to be pretty big though. In World War II the UK had large concrete parabolic dishes hundreds of feet across with observers listening for the sounds of aeroplanes as they crossed the channel, they were able to hear them at a considerable distance- 10s of miles.
or interefere with everyone within a few blocks of your location.
My teachers always disagreed with this at school: "have you anything to contribute with the class?"
Well, there's always Skylon. The technology seems to be basically there; it's mostly just R&D needed. And money, lots and lots of money ($10 billion- not too bad as space goes actually).
I wasn't, but in any case available bandwidth to the users is the important measure; not spectrum use.
If you're suggesting a fairly high level of technology be mandatory for every radio, then that is just a different approach to advocating for government regulation.
It's a different approach- one where everyone gets plenty of bandwidth. Most people consider that a good thing. Apparently you would prefer everyone to have little/no bandwidth and a few companies paying tax money so they can continue to use the whole radio spectrum extremely inefficiently. And we're supposed to agree that that's a good thing?
Still, the world is rarely either/or. Setting aside bands for different uses, some licensed, some freely used, this seems to be a very reasonable way to go about things.
Um, wrong actually. The latest research shows that in networks of smart transmitters/receivers, if you use all the available tricks, the total bandwidth of all the participants goes up proportional to the number of nodes in the network- in other words- total network bandwidth each node sees is constant.
2. This is slashdot, where the average poster is marginally qualified to discuss complex computer issues, I really doubt any sort of serious discussion would be possible on a subject so outside the average user's area of expertise. (Since the more ignorant the poster the greater the urge to post.)
I agree- you posted.
I don't know about the US (hah!), but in the UK, the emergency services don't get their own highways; they simply use big signs and sirens on their vehicles and the other traffic gets out of the way. There's no reason the same can't happen on the airwaves.
Well, 3com could.
Ok, so it's a small company now though :-)
No, the only problem here is that you screwed up, and I pointed it out, and it upset you being proved wrong. Your feeble attempts at ad-hominen attacks and pathetic attempts of diagnoses of mental illnesses are very transparent; and frankly says more about your mental state.
My point is, and remains, that electric cars do not produce any CO2 during their operation. Whether or not the power plant that charges them produces some is an entirely separate question. This compares sharply with conventional vehicles which inevitably produce CO2 during their operation; a point you were deliberately, but should not be, blurred.
Biomass is fuel produced by growing stuff, usually plants. (Fossil fuels, including methane deposits, are *not* classed as biomass).
Because the plants absorb CO2 as they grow- there is *no* net increase in the CO2 in the atmosphere when this matter is burnt; CO2 went down as it grew, it came back when it was burnt.
But know what you're talking about before you open your pie hole
Always good advice, right back at you.
No, it's very easy. Actually, I understand it exceptionally well, being my first language.
"If you live in the US ..."
Ah! Now I understand you're an American. You have my condolences; clearly if you had learnt English in England, as I, then you would have been able to express yourself more clearly.
Electric cars will not be exclusively deployed in the USA, and power station technology varies temporally/spatially even there.
and you charge the electric vehicle through the public power grid, with high probability, you will increase the amount of CO2 that you generate
Not if you live near a hydroelectric plant, for example Vegas or Niagara; but I wouldn't expect an ignorant American such as yourself to know that kind of detail.
Bzzzzz. Actually, no, they don't. The powerplants may or may not; nuclear powerplants don't. Solar doesn't. Biomass fuelled powerplants don't.
It costs something to drive to the local supermarket. The way petroleum is going up in price, this may well be a cheaper way to go in the long run. (n.b. the delivery service can use electric vehicles and/or can preplan their route to go past each customer once and hence minimise the total distance).
Um. The business case was for-fee not for-free
He could have used ZoneAlarm. It's free; and doesn't take very long to download and install; and he could have downloaded it on a different computer, stuck it on a CD, and installed it before ever going online.
This is a good thing.
That's not the many worlds theory- the splitting happens whether or not a measurement is made in the MWI.
then I believe that you have a very poor understanding of what measurement is. First of all collapse is not some special/magical process and secondly you can't arbitrarily seperate the universe into observed and observer.
Uh, yeah. That would be the Copenhagen interpretation or something.
And assuming there is no unsplitting
Are you nuts? Unsplitting is implicit in the double slit experiment- the fact that the photon went through two different slits in two different universes, before the universes joined is the whole point. MWI inevitably has joining.