With 1nm photons you don't need negative refraction to get 1nm resolution. You can get that with traditional methods. 1nm is in the soft x-ray area, which seriously limits what you can look at.
TV Networks sell eyeballs to the advertisers. Eyeballs which are attracted by content. The contract is between the advertiser and the network. People mistakingly assume that they are the network's customers. They are not, they are the merchandise. This should be a self-stabilizing system but apparently the audience accepts ever increasing amounts of ads.
If we accept to eat gruel, then gruel is all what we get. (Or rather Krusty-brand imitation gruel)
What I'm missing is a system where the tables are turned, where I can make a deal with an advertiser, selling my eyeballs directly if they supply quality programs, or simply pay for the program and avoid any advertising. This seems like a natural evolution as broadcasting becomes ever more irrelevant. An episode of your favorite show shouldn't cost more for a single viewer than the advertisers have to pay the network, which divided by the number of _actual_ viewers, is not much. Having me voluntarily accept an ad for a product that is relevant for me, instead of female hygiene articles or cialis, is worth a lot more for the advertiser.
There used to be a web site that had an archive of TV commercials; I can't remember the name of it. Sadly the site was taken down a few years ago due to huge bandwidth costs, but it was quite popular at the time, and showed that there are definitely entertaining commercials out there,
You're probably thinking of http://www.adcritic.com/. They didn't disappear, they turned into a paysite(!). Something is definitely wrong with your business model when people are willing to watch ads voluntarily and you still have to charge them for it to make ends meet. I recently visited the side and it kinda looks like they're back to being free as in beer, sponsored by Yahoo, but the site froze my firefox so I didn't examine it too closely.
I'm wondering how the Ark was wired. In a normal electric fence energizer one end is hooked to a fence and a the other to a grounding system which is placed in the ground. A person standing on the ground will close the circuit if he touches the fence.
How painful this is is pretty proportional to how well connected you are to the ground. If you think an electric fence just delivers an annoying tickle, try touching it while barefoot.
I wonder if Adam was tricked into touching the poles of the electric fence energizer directly closing the circuit across his heart which is what appeared to happen on the show. Seems dangerous to me.
What was the range of this (or a similar) device? Could you focus the light to set a moving ship on fire lets say 100 yards away?
The range is fixed to the focal point of the paraboloid. With a less curved paraboloid the range increases to whatever you want it to be, but the accuracy requirements will go up quite considerably. Or failing to improve on accurracy, increase the size of the reflector.
I'm on the fence about whether Archimedes could pull this off. He certainly had the knowledge, but I doubt if the technology was there. What I am certain of is that mythbusters messed this one up, using far too few flat, or flat mirrors. If you're using flat mirrors, you need a lot. They should try again with a bigger budget, with more focus on the mirrors (pun indended) and less on the boat.
Well, let's see, there IS the question of when life begins. You can't have seen any discussion of embryonic stem cell research without encountered that aspect.
The Bush government is pro in-vitro fertilization, a practice which by design produces large amounts of unwanted embryos, blastocysts really, which are frozen down and eventually thrown away, since they can only survive for so long in a frozen state.
If your position is that human life begins at conception then I fail to understand how this practice is morally sound whilst abortion is not. It's better to put these cells to good use methinks.
The ghosting issue is such a holdover of 1999, and every half-wit, still trying to defend why they can't affort a new LCD display,
You're being silly. The ghosting is there for all to see, but you'll probably never notice it unless you're a gamer. I see it even on top of the line displays, although the problem is much better than it was only a few years ago.
Are you claiming that Philips is creating a strobing LCD for no reason?
I'd rather deal with ghosting than have to go back to the days of CRT eyestrain.
There are many reasons why CRTs cause eyestrain, and I'm not convinced flickering is one of them, especially today when most screens can refresh at 85Hz at 1600x1200, and even higher at lower resolutions.
Another problem is the cathode ray tube which by design creates a static electric field on the screen. This field will first attract dust particles in the air, which are then charged with the same polarity as the screen and as a result, they are shot from it, directly at the viewer, something which causes dry eyes. LCDs do not suffer from this problem.
Another problem of the CRT are the analog pixels, which are not perfectly sharp. They are smeared, because the graphics card cannot make abrupt enough changes between colours, and the neighbouring pixels are further smeared as they travel along the VGA cable. (Becomes really noticable at high resolutions and high refresh rates. The signal is pushing the bandwidth limit of the cable). They are also smeared because the electron beam used to paint the pixels is slightly fuzzy. As CRT-screens age, they may increasingly loose focus. Depending on your type of CRT age/price), the image may be blurred further by coatings put on to reduce reflections.
Our vision really dislikes not being able to focus on things perfectly. It puts a strain on the small muscles used to contract the lense inside our eyes.
LCD-pixels are perfect rectangles and does not suffer from these problems as long as a digital interface is used.
Today CRT-screens are superior when it comes to color reproduction, dynamic range. They are also superior when displaying moving images, because of their strobing nature. These new strobing LCDs may change this, something I'm excited about.
I disagree. 7800 gtx clearly is MUCH faster than the 6800 Ultra, especially when a lot of pixel effects are used. Look at the benchmarks for Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, where 7800GTX even beats 6800 Ultra SLI by a large margin. The problem is that this card is CPU-limited in all older games and most of the new ones.
Wouldn't it be interesting if tiny little islands in the Carribean and South Pacific become the Saudi Arabias of the future.
Don't forget geothermal energy. Iceland is already investing heavilly into hydrogen production. Also, having cars run on hydrogen means not only that you've moved the pollution problem. You've centralized it. It'd be easier to build very efficient and relatively low polluting large plants than increase the effectiveness of every siingle car.
In my experience, all wireless mice have a nasty habit of drifting as if not all motion signals are registered. This makes aiming harder. The mouse feels like it's "understeered". Sort of a reverse acceleration.
Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer v4 is totally unusable for gaming, not only because of it's wildly irregular sampling rate, but also for it's notch-less wheel which makes changing weapons difficult. The last decent mouse Microsoft made was Intellimouse Explorer v3 which is hard to get hold of.
Only in your limited view of how to perform reflection / refraction / diffraction effects. There are actually quite effective techniques that allow someone to perform fairly accurate reflections and refractions through an arbitrary object at an arbitrary location. It's all about cube-map lookups and scene management.
This is as far away from "robust and flexible" as you can come. Add more than one reflecting/refracting object and you'll have problems. Add a dozen and it's insurmountable.
Whereas typical 3-D rendering techniques are marginally dependent on viewport size (depending on their specific data set), raytracing is *completely* bound by the number of pixels that have to be displayed.
You seem to be conveniently ignoring all forms of adaptive sampling tricks raytracers can use. Also: The reason why conventional graphics cards do not scale exactly the same way is because they are fast enough to be cpu-bound. My initial statement still stands. If you keep adding polygons sooner or later raytracing them will be quicker than rendering.
Of course, raytracing produces beautiful results compared to the other methods of 3d graphics, but it is MUCH more expensive in terms of CPU cycles on today's CPUs
This may not be true for very long. The complexity of a scene in a traditional polygon renderer like nvidia's chips scales fairly linearly with the number of polygons in view. Not so with raytracers. They have hierarchical structures to test for which group of triagles a ray may intersect and scales more like O(n log n). They also render _only_ viewable pixels, while overdraw is a major hurdle for traditional 3d cards.
What this means is that as scenes get increasingly more complex, there is a crossover point where ray-tracing will overtake traditional rendering, and dedicated raytracing hardware ensures that this happens sooner. If you add this to the fact that raytracing lets you have perfectly smooth non-polygonized objects, perfect reflections and other features not easilly replicated by traditional rendering you'll see the incentive.
A case in point: prman, the renderer used by Pixar is a traditional polygon rasterizer, but Pixar has on occation used BMRT (A renderman compliant ray-tracer) for scenes that require ray-tracing for realism.
Specifically a scene in A bug's life depicting a glass bottle filled with nuts was renedered using BMRT. Flexible and robust realistic reflection and refraction is solely in the domain of ray tracing. What you saw in Half Life was only cheap tricks which would fail miserably in less constrained scenes.
It's inaccurate because suicide bomber is at least descriptive. You know that the bomber took out himself in the explosion. A homicide bomber usually only blows up other people.
I also think mixing these terms tend to slant the terrorist attack from politically motivated to random act of insane violence. The first kind of attack requires diplomacy, while the second only needs to be snuffed out with an iron fist.
Can you please explain to my anybody would want floating point for the frame buffer
For the buffer you're looking at, floating point would be overkill, at least until we can get our hands on high dynamic range displays.
For the offscreen buffer being rendered on, floating point becomes neccessary because the the pixels you're rendering on become paramateres in pretty complex pixel shader functions. Having only 256 distinct values quickly becomes large rounding errors after a couple of divides, multiplications or trigonometric functions.
We can use this to get a dithered 32bit image to the screen, which should eliminate any banding. However high dynamic range displays may be closer than you think...
The article says: "three times the power of existing Lithium Ion batteries at the same price"
Which could just mean that they cost a third to produce compared to older batteries, which isn't quite as exciting as 3x more oomph in the same package.
Also, a PSU is often the only fan blowing air out of the case. Remove that and you'll soon overheat everything inside, which makes things a lot hotter for the PSU also.
This means that if you buy a fanless PSU you'll need to install another fan to replace the one you've removed. Money is better spent on a PSU with a better fan than the one you have.
Re:Can someone
on
SHA-1 Broken
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If the hash reduces the possible files which match it by 99.999% then shouldn't it be possible to send that much less data?
Yes, but that's not what the hash does. It only makes it much harder to find files that hash to the same value because the hash values are randomly distributed. If you have a 160-bit hash then (ideally) every 2^160th file will have the same hash.
This means basically that there are an infinite number of files that hash to the same value. For this to be used for compression there must be a 1:1 relation between inputs files and outputs hashes. In other words, the algorithm must be reversible, something which cryptographic hashes are not. When a file is hashed, data is thrown away, data which can never be recovered.
Slashdot Mirror
With 1nm photons you don't need negative refraction to get 1nm resolution. You can get
that with traditional methods. 1nm is in the soft x-ray area, which seriously limits what you can
look at.
From where do you intend to get the hydrogen?
From places with an energy surplus of course.
Iceland is investing heavilly into hydrogen production plants powered by geothermal energy.
They'll be the new oil Sheiks. Buy your stocks now.
TV Networks sell eyeballs to the advertisers. Eyeballs which are attracted by content. The contract is between the advertiser and the network. People mistakingly assume that they are the network's customers. They are not, they are the merchandise. This should be a self-stabilizing system but apparently the audience accepts ever increasing amounts of ads.
If we accept to eat gruel, then gruel is all what we get. (Or rather Krusty-brand imitation gruel)
What I'm missing is a system where the tables are turned, where I can make a deal with an advertiser, selling my eyeballs directly if they supply quality programs, or simply pay for the program and avoid any advertising. This seems like a natural evolution as broadcasting becomes ever more irrelevant. An episode of your favorite show shouldn't cost more for a single viewer than the advertisers have to pay the network, which divided by the number of _actual_ viewers, is not much. Having me voluntarily accept an ad for a product that is relevant for me, instead of female hygiene articles or cialis, is worth a lot more
for the advertiser.
There used to be a web site that had an archive of TV commercials; I can't remember the name of it. Sadly the site was taken down a few years ago due to huge bandwidth costs, but it was quite popular at the time, and showed that there are definitely entertaining commercials out there,
You're probably thinking of http://www.adcritic.com/. They didn't disappear, they turned into a paysite(!). Something is definitely wrong with your business model when people are willing to watch ads voluntarily and you still have to charge them for it to make ends meet. I recently visited the side and it kinda looks like they're back to being free as in beer, sponsored by Yahoo, but the site froze my firefox so I didn't examine it too closely.
I'm wondering how the Ark was wired. In a normal electric fence energizer one end is hooked to a fence and a the other to a grounding system which is placed in the ground. A person standing on the ground will close the circuit if he touches the fence.
How painful this is is pretty proportional to how well connected you are to the ground. If you think an electric fence just delivers an annoying tickle, try touching it while barefoot.
I wonder if Adam was tricked into touching the poles of the electric fence energizer directly closing the circuit across his heart which is what appeared to happen on the show. Seems dangerous to me.
What was the range of this (or a similar) device? Could you focus the light to set a moving ship on fire lets say 100 yards away?
The range is fixed to the focal point of the paraboloid. With a less curved paraboloid the
range increases to whatever you want it to be, but the accuracy requirements will go up quite considerably. Or failing to improve on accurracy, increase the size of the reflector.
I'm on the fence about whether Archimedes could pull this off. He certainly had the knowledge, but I doubt if the technology was there. What I am certain of is that mythbusters messed this one up, using far too few flat, or flat mirrors. If you're using flat mirrors, you need a lot.
They should try again with a bigger budget, with more focus on the mirrors (pun indended) and less on the boat.
Well, let's see, there IS the question of when life begins. You can't have seen any discussion of embryonic stem cell research without encountered that aspect.
The Bush government is pro in-vitro fertilization, a practice which by design produces large amounts of unwanted embryos, blastocysts really, which are frozen down and eventually thrown away, since they can only survive for so long in a frozen state.
If your position is that human life begins at conception then I fail to understand how this practice is morally sound whilst abortion is not.
It's better to put these cells to good use methinks.
The ghosting issue is such a holdover of 1999, and every half-wit, still trying to defend why they can't affort a new LCD display,
You're being silly. The ghosting is there for all to see, but you'll probably never notice it unless you're a gamer. I see it even on top of the line displays, although the problem is much better than it was only a few years ago.
Are you claiming that Philips is creating a strobing LCD for no reason?
I'd rather deal with ghosting than have to go back to the days of CRT eyestrain.
There are many reasons why CRTs cause eyestrain, and I'm not convinced flickering is one of them, especially today when most screens can refresh at 85Hz at 1600x1200, and even higher at lower resolutions.
Another problem is the cathode ray tube which by design creates a static electric field on the screen. This field will first attract dust particles in the air, which are then charged with the same polarity as the screen and as a result, they are shot from it, directly at the viewer, something which causes dry eyes. LCDs do not suffer from this problem.
Another problem of the CRT are the analog pixels, which are not perfectly sharp. They are smeared, because the graphics card cannot make abrupt enough changes between colours, and the neighbouring pixels are further smeared as they travel along the VGA cable. (Becomes really noticable at high resolutions and high refresh rates. The signal is pushing the bandwidth limit of the cable). They are also smeared because the electron beam used to paint the pixels is slightly fuzzy. As CRT-screens age, they may increasingly loose focus. Depending on your type of CRT age/price), the image may be blurred further by coatings put on to reduce reflections.
Our vision really dislikes not being able to focus on things perfectly. It puts a strain on the small muscles used to contract the lense inside our eyes.
LCD-pixels are perfect rectangles and does not suffer from these problems as long as a digital interface is used.
Today CRT-screens are superior when it comes to color reproduction, dynamic range. They are also superior when displaying moving images, because of their strobing nature. These new strobing LCDs may change this, something I'm excited about.
I disagree. 7800 gtx clearly is MUCH faster than the 6800 Ultra, especially when a lot of pixel effects are used. Look at the benchmarks for Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, where 7800GTX even beats 6800 Ultra SLI by a large margin. The problem is that this card is CPU-limited in all older games and most of the new ones.
Wouldn't it be interesting if tiny little islands in the Carribean and South Pacific become the Saudi Arabias of the future.
Don't forget geothermal energy. Iceland is already investing heavilly into hydrogen production. Also, having cars run on hydrogen means not only that you've moved the pollution problem. You've centralized it. It'd be easier to build very efficient and relatively low polluting large plants than increase the effectiveness of every siingle car.
In my experience, all wireless mice have a nasty habit of drifting as if not all motion signals are registered. This makes aiming harder. The mouse feels like it's "understeered". Sort of a reverse acceleration.
Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer v4 is totally unusable for gaming, not only because of it's wildly irregular sampling rate, but also for it's notch-less wheel which makes changing weapons difficult. The last decent mouse Microsoft made was Intellimouse Explorer v3 which is hard to get hold of.
That's a REAL useful invention!
So, could you do something useful with a structured light source and a structured receiver? Or would you just get redundant information?
You get redundancy or rather parallelism which is used to speed up the process.
Use langnese.nvg.ntnu.no
What about the Loebner Prize? It's a yearly event for crying out loud! I'm pretty sure A.L.I.C.E have been a competitor even.
The discussion was regarding the practicality of using ray tracing in games, not the implementation details of prman.
The reason why I stressed polygons is because this is the only type of geometry primitive available to traditional graphics cards.
Only in your limited view of how to perform reflection / refraction / diffraction effects. There are actually quite effective techniques that allow someone to perform fairly accurate reflections and refractions through an arbitrary object at an arbitrary location. It's all about cube-map lookups and scene management.
This is as far away from "robust and flexible" as you can come. Add more than one reflecting/refracting object and you'll have problems. Add a dozen and it's insurmountable.
Whereas typical 3-D rendering techniques are marginally dependent on viewport size (depending on their specific data set), raytracing is *completely* bound by the number of pixels that have to be displayed.
You seem to be conveniently ignoring all forms of adaptive sampling tricks raytracers can use. Also: The reason why conventional graphics cards do not scale exactly the same way is because they are fast enough to be cpu-bound. My initial statement still stands. If you keep adding polygons sooner or later raytracing them will be quicker than rendering.
Of course, raytracing produces beautiful results compared to the other methods of 3d graphics, but it is MUCH more expensive in terms of CPU cycles on today's CPUs
This may not be true for very long. The complexity of a scene in a traditional polygon renderer like nvidia's chips scales fairly linearly with the number of polygons in view. Not so with raytracers. They have hierarchical structures to test for which group of triagles a ray may intersect and scales more like O(n log n). They also render _only_ viewable pixels, while overdraw is a major hurdle for traditional 3d cards.
What this means is that as scenes get increasingly more complex, there is a crossover point where ray-tracing will overtake traditional rendering, and dedicated raytracing hardware ensures that this happens sooner. If you add this to the fact that raytracing lets you have perfectly smooth non-polygonized objects, perfect reflections and other features not easilly replicated by traditional rendering you'll see the incentive.
A case in point: prman, the renderer used by Pixar is a traditional polygon rasterizer, but Pixar has on occation used BMRT (A renderman compliant ray-tracer) for scenes that require ray-tracing for realism.
Specifically a scene in A bug's life depicting a glass bottle filled with nuts was renedered using BMRT. Flexible and robust realistic reflection and refraction is solely in the domain of ray tracing. What you saw in Half Life was only cheap tricks which would fail miserably in less constrained scenes.
It's inaccurate because suicide bomber is at least descriptive. You know that the bomber took out himself in the explosion. A homicide bomber usually only blows up other people.
I also think mixing these terms tend to slant the terrorist attack from politically motivated to random act of insane violence. The first kind of attack requires diplomacy, while the second only needs to be snuffed out with an iron fist.
Can you please explain to my anybody would want floating point for the frame buffer
For the buffer you're looking at, floating point would be overkill, at least until we can get our hands on high dynamic range displays.
For the offscreen buffer being rendered on, floating point becomes neccessary because the the pixels you're rendering on become paramateres in pretty complex pixel shader functions. Having only 256 distinct values quickly becomes large rounding errors after a couple of divides, multiplications or trigonometric functions.
We can use this to get a dithered 32bit image to the screen, which should eliminate any banding. However high dynamic range displays may be closer than you think...
Any one else interpret it the same way?
The article says:
"three times the power of existing Lithium Ion batteries at the same price"
Which could just mean that they cost a third to produce compared to older batteries, which isn't quite as exciting as 3x more oomph in the same package.
So what if it clogs up the heads? Most heads are part of the cartridge. Epson and Canon are exceptions I think.
Also, a PSU is often the only fan blowing air out of the case. Remove that and you'll soon overheat everything inside, which makes things a lot hotter
for the PSU also.
This means that if you buy a fanless PSU you'll need to install another fan to replace the one you've removed. Money is better spent on a PSU with a better fan than the one you have.
If the hash reduces the possible files which match it by 99.999% then shouldn't it be possible to send that much less data?
Yes, but that's not what the hash does. It only makes it much harder to find files that hash to the same value because the hash values are randomly distributed. If you have a 160-bit hash then (ideally) every 2^160th file will have the same hash.
This means basically that there are an infinite number of files that hash to the same value. For this to be used for compression there must be a 1:1 relation between inputs files and outputs hashes. In other words, the algorithm must be reversible, something which cryptographic hashes are not. When a file is hashed, data is thrown away, data which can never be recovered.