Actually, PAL is usually 50fps. Films on PAL are shown in 25fps, slightly faster than in a theatre, but not enough to notice unless there's a side by side comparison.
This also means that movies on DVD differ in runtimes depending on the zone.
Some high end TVs can be set to detect motion vectors between frames and create new in-between frames.
This doesn't work perfectly however, and may in some cases cause disturbing artifacts. Sony calls their technology MotionFlow and I usually turn it on when playing PS3-games.
MotionFlow does a few other things aswell like reverse 3-2 pulldown, but that's pretty irrelevant for me since we have 50Hz TVs over here.
The economics of virtual worlds are driven by synthetic scarcity. Indeed, any digital product is subject to imposed scarcity as an infinite amount of copies could be created at practically no cost.
A big difference is that with virtual worlds, copy control and usage control can be enforced more rigorously to drive up prices. This is why you see people paying for virtual gifts on Facebook. $1 for the right to give a worthless icon to a friend. Here, the value of the product is not the product's uniqueness, but the product in conjunction with the limitations of use. You are buying back a freedom that was taken away from you by the implementation.
Second Life allows users to create and sellp roducts and take advantage of the imposed scarcity, but will skim profits by controlling the conversion rate between linden dollars and USD. It looks like a real economy, but it's more like a pyramid scheme, as the profits will inevitably trickle up. It's like a casino. The house cannot lose as long as people keep coming.
I suppose the positive side of this is that if people are happy spending real money on virtual objects, then they probably have enough money.
Sigh. You are of course correct. I was imagining the spacetime as an optical system, forgetting about the time the light had to spend traveling while the system keeps changing. If I could remove my original post, I would.
If the galaxies look aligned from our perspective, they will look aligned from theirs. The inverse path of the light will be exactly the same since the path is dictated by the perturbation of spacetime.
Programmers who think bitrot is bad should have a look at the "asset rot" of 3d models. The deprecation of graphics assets is so fast that it's a stretch to use the word "asset" to refer to them at all. A character model from a AAA title from six months ago has some value, to B quality games, but mostly none of them are reused.
It's getting more and more common to create a very detailed model and convert that into a low-poly version with the lost geometry converted to bumpmaps. Especially useful when you want to scale your game to different HW capability, or LOD scaling for distant models. This also means that models are more reusable for future titles. One day we'll most likely have photo-realistic models which may be reused almost infinitely. How many different models of WW2 weaponry do we really need?
One of the problem with 3D cinema is that it sometimes provides counter-intuitive cues to the viewer. When you see a 2D film, there is nothing in the film telling you the size of the objects. Large objects may be large because they are close to you, and small objects may be small because they are far away. You don't break suspension of disbelief when an actors face covers half the screen, because it's similar to standing close to a person.
When 3D is added, all this breaks down. An actor in close up suddenly becomes a giant. Everything changes size radically from shot to shot. 3D might be great for large vistas, but if you just insert 3D into a normal film, then you detract much from the visual language of film that we've gotten used to, as many of the shots become so disturbing.
Another drawback with 3D is that your eyes will attempt to focus at out of focus areas because the depth cues are there, but of course the focus is fixed and cannot be changed and fatigue is the result. In a 3D generated film, it's possible to keep everything in focus at the same time, but for live action this is simply not practical.
At least the global warming skeptics have become "global warming is man made"-skeptics. During the 90ies, the dispute was about weither there actually was any warming going on at all.
No matter what the contributing causes for global warming is, it is very real, and we're going to have to deal with it one way or another or suffer massive global consequences. Now that we have consensus on that global warming is happening, the naysayers should find another strategy than "business as ususal", or else making money may become really difficult in the future.
Sure, you have a lower energy level than the "baseline" of the universe, but a vacuum has to be created, and that takes energy. It's like digging a deep hole and getting energy by filling it. There's no net gain.
Try telling that to anyone using Microsoft Word. The way it tries to guess what I want to do and how it changes behavior when I backspace to remove Word's mistaken guesses and type the same thing again, it does something else is seriously disturbing.
Trying to trick Word into doing what it is you want is taxing and will eventually condition the user into doing seemingly random, illogical, and unintuitive choices which eventually lead you to what you want. Kinda like running a maze trying to find the cheese.
Most casual users are exposed to Word. You cannot blame them for becoming a bit confused. The computer is deterministic, but the software might not be.
If I want to use a control key shortcut, I either have to twist my wrist in order to use a thumb, or move one hand off of its position in order to use a pinky.
Getting a bit OT here, but: I've always used my palm, the part just below the little finger to hit control. Not exactly touch-type, but it works for me.
Because you can get a picture of M82 from the ground just as well as the Hubble does.
Your example (866x972) hardly compares to the massive 9500x7400 pixel hubble image, which has fewer artefacts and far more background detail, but I agree that the ultra deep field image is way cooler, and also quite impossible to take without a space telescope.
RTFA. The knocks are different each time. Recording the knocks would not help you. I'm guessing they generate the knocks by using a pseudorandom generator with the current time, and your pincode as seed.
Now imagine, REALLY high-quality positional audio in a theater making it sound to everyone in the theater that the 6th guy in the 5th row just farted really loudly.
That would be cool, but impossible with current cinema tech. You'll need more than 7.1 to get any kind of positioning which is not purely subjective. You get relative positioning for each listener, but they won't agree on where the sound is coming from.
With large arrays of speakers and wavefront synthesis, things like that become possible. Then you're basically creating sound holograms.
Games need hardware that do 3D positional audio because the scene is unpredictable. It needs to be calculated on the fly. Any 3D positional effects in a movie would be static, added when the movie is mixed, or else you'd have to include all the seperate audio tracks.
Such effects are difficult to pull off in a large area like a movie theatre, and would be very dependent on the speaker configuration, which is probably why you don't see a lot of this.
Yet when I just checked the specs on my monitors, one is 3-10W in standby mode, and the other doesn't even bother listing power consumption in standby mode. I don't get it. What on earth could they be doing that needs to draw that much power?
Heating the electron gun. It has to be heated to get the electrons moving. This is why it takes longer for the image to appear on the monitor when it's switched on cold.
LCDs are better here, but they often have a transformer which eats a fair amount of power even when the screen is switched off.
Remember the mars rover was hamstrung for awhile with a flash problem.
It's true that the mars rovers uses flash, but the problem one of the rovers suffered can hardly be called a "flash problem". It was a file system problem. The FAT they used on the flash had a limit to how many files it can hold in one single directory. http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressrelea ses/20040201a.html.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, PAL is usually 50fps. Films on PAL are shown in 25fps, slightly faster than in a theatre, but not enough to notice unless there's a side by side comparison.
This also means that movies on DVD differ in runtimes depending on the zone.
Some high end TVs can be set to detect motion vectors between frames and create new in-between frames.
This doesn't work perfectly however, and may in some cases cause disturbing artifacts. Sony calls their technology MotionFlow and I usually turn it on when playing PS3-games.
MotionFlow does a few other things aswell like reverse 3-2 pulldown, but that's pretty irrelevant for me since we have 50Hz TVs over here.
The economics of virtual worlds are driven by synthetic scarcity. Indeed, any digital product is subject to imposed scarcity as an infinite amount of copies could be created at practically no cost.
A big difference is that with virtual worlds, copy control and usage control can be enforced more rigorously to drive up prices. This is why you see people paying for virtual gifts on Facebook. $1 for the right to give a worthless icon to a friend. Here, the value of the product is not the product's uniqueness, but the product in conjunction with the limitations of use. You are buying back a freedom that was taken away from you by the implementation.
Second Life allows users to create and sellp roducts and take advantage of the imposed scarcity, but will skim profits by controlling the
conversion rate between linden dollars and USD. It looks like a real economy, but it's more like a pyramid scheme, as the profits will inevitably trickle up. It's like a casino. The house cannot lose as long as people keep coming.
I suppose the positive side of this is that if people are happy spending real money on virtual objects, then they probably have enough money.
Max Headroom was just Matt Frewer in makeup. Only the background was computer generated.
Sigh.
You are of course correct. I was imagining the spacetime as an optical system, forgetting about the time the light had to spend traveling while the system keeps changing. If I could remove my original post, I would.
If the galaxies look aligned from our perspective, they will look aligned from theirs. The inverse path
of the light will be exactly the same since the path is dictated by the perturbation of spacetime.
Programmers who think bitrot is bad should have a look at the "asset rot" of 3d models. The deprecation of graphics assets is so fast that it's a stretch to use the word "asset" to refer to them at all. A character model from a AAA title from six months ago has some value, to B quality games, but mostly none of them are reused.
It's getting more and more common to create a very detailed model and convert that into a low-poly version with the lost geometry converted to bumpmaps. Especially useful when you want to scale your game to different HW capability, or LOD scaling for distant models. This also means that models are more reusable for future titles. One day we'll most likely have photo-realistic models
which may be reused almost infinitely. How many different models of WW2 weaponry do we really need?
One of the problem with 3D cinema is that it sometimes provides counter-intuitive cues to the viewer. When you see a 2D film, there is nothing in the film telling you the size of the objects. Large objects may be large because they are close to you, and small objects may be small because they are far away. You don't break suspension of disbelief when an actors face covers half the screen, because it's similar to standing close to a person.
When 3D is added, all this breaks down. An actor in close up suddenly becomes a giant. Everything changes size radically from shot to shot.
3D might be great for large vistas, but if you just insert 3D into a normal film, then you detract much from the visual language of film that we've gotten used to, as many of the shots become so disturbing.
Another drawback with 3D is that your eyes will attempt to focus at out of focus areas because the depth cues are there, but of course the focus is fixed
and cannot be changed and fatigue is the result. In a 3D generated film, it's possible to keep everything in focus at the same time, but for live action this is simply not practical.
At least the global warming skeptics have become "global warming is man made"-skeptics. During the 90ies, the dispute was about weither there actually was any warming going on at all.
No matter what the contributing causes for global warming is, it is very real, and we're going to have to deal with it one way or another or suffer massive global consequences. Now that we have consensus on that global warming is happening, the naysayers should find another strategy than "business as ususal", or else making money may become really difficult in the future.
Sure, you have a lower energy level than the "baseline" of the universe, but a vacuum
has to be created, and that takes energy. It's like digging a deep hole and getting energy
by filling it. There's no net gain.
The computer is a 100% deterministic machine.
Try telling that to anyone using Microsoft Word. The way it tries to guess what I want to do and how it changes behavior when I backspace to remove Word's mistaken guesses and type the same thing again, it does something else is seriously disturbing.
Trying to trick Word into doing what it is you want is taxing and will eventually condition the user into doing seemingly random, illogical, and unintuitive choices which eventually lead you to what you want. Kinda like running a maze trying to find the cheese.
Most casual users are exposed to Word. You cannot blame them for becoming a bit confused. The computer is deterministic, but the software might not be.
Is it going to be OK to breath microsopic bits of that stuff?
Probably not, but I guess it would depend on the shape of the glass fragments and the amount.
If I want to use a control key shortcut, I either have to twist my wrist in order to use a thumb, or move one hand off of its position in order to use a pinky.
Getting a bit OT here, but:
I've always used my palm, the part just below the little finger to hit control. Not exactly touch-type, but it works for me.
Because you can get a picture of M82 from the ground just as well as the Hubble does.
Your example (866x972) hardly compares to the massive 9500x7400 pixel hubble image, which has fewer artefacts and far more background detail, but I agree that the ultra deep field image is way cooler, and also quite impossible to take without a space telescope.
Your part of the universe will no longer be able to sustain life.
Bummer.
RTFA. The knocks are different each time. Recording the knocks would not help you. I'm guessing they generate the knocks by
using a pseudorandom generator with the current time, and your pincode as seed.
Now imagine, REALLY high-quality positional audio in a theater making it sound to everyone in the theater that the 6th guy in the 5th row just farted really loudly.
That would be cool, but impossible with current cinema tech. You'll need more than 7.1 to get any kind of positioning which is not purely subjective. You get relative positioning for each listener, but they won't agree on where the sound is coming from.
With large arrays of speakers and wavefront synthesis, things like that become possible. Then you're basically creating sound holograms.
Games need hardware that do 3D positional audio because the scene is unpredictable. It needs to be calculated on the fly. Any 3D positional effects in a movie would be static, added when
the movie is mixed, or else you'd have to include all the seperate audio tracks.
Such effects are difficult to pull off in a large area like a movie theatre, and would be
very dependent on the speaker configuration, which is probably why you don't see a lot of this.
I thought logging Sequoias was illegal?!
Fear supports soft shadows, but they are prohibitly expensive on all but the most powerful 3d-cards.
Yet when I just checked the specs on my monitors, one is 3-10W in standby mode, and the other doesn't even bother listing power consumption in standby mode. I don't get it. What on earth could they be doing that needs to draw that much power?
Heating the electron gun. It has to be heated to get the electrons moving. This is why it takes
longer for the image to appear on the monitor when it's switched on cold.
LCDs are better here, but they often have a transformer which eats a fair amount of power even when the screen is switched off.
It won't be the next big thing but I seen far worse. That norwegian star trek/babylon 5 "comedy" for one.
If you're referring to http://www.starwreck.com/, it's Finnish, not Norwegian.
Even the second tallest building in Oslo, Norway has a similar system,
and has had it for a while.
Remember the mars rover was hamstrung for awhile with a flash problem.
a ses/20040201a.html.
It's true that the mars rovers uses flash, but the problem one of the rovers suffered can hardly be called
a "flash problem". It was a file system problem. The FAT they used on the flash had a limit to how many files it
can hold in one single directory. http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressrele
That's why the mice where Anaesthetized first.