Or two, you have to prove the yellow light you were photographed at wasn't 4 seconds. State law mandates that the yellow lights must be at least 4 seconds long, so if the yellow light was say 3, the light was malfunctioning and you weren't at fault. This of course means you have to go out there with a video camera and get the light being yellow for less than 4 seconds.
I read about these ticketing-lights in a Car & Driver editorial a few months ago. It seems that they are not installed to improve safety, but to generate more income for the state. They cost much less per ticket than a patrol car and policeman would.
The problem is that many states use the four-second-yellow-light rule regardless of speed limit. If I'm driving 25MPH, it's likely that I will have sufficient time to decide whether to safely stop or continue through the light. However, at 55MPH (eg on an expressway), four seconds is not enough time for a driver to decided whether or not they should stop (safely) or run the light.
If states were honestly interested in improving public safety at traffic lights, they would study the situation and vary yellow-light duration based on speed limit (and weather conditions).
So, if I go to protest an automated ticket, what will happen? Will the judge simply look at the printout and the photo and say, "No, the system's perfect. You're guilty. Pay up."
There's a new Tom Cruise movie comming out where he's a cop in D.C. sometime in the future. Apparently, they've figured out a way to see things that haven't happened yet, and arrest people before they commit the crime. "The system is perfect."
This is a scary step in that direction.
Re:Discs of Tron
on
Tron 2.0 Game
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You can get Discs of Trom on MAME from classicgaming.com.
It's amazing how well the twisting joystick transfers to mouse/keybord controls.
The reason I check sites like gamespot are so I don't spend $40-50 bucks on garbage games. I don't blame them for moving to a subscription model, but I'm wondering whether fronting the money for reviews (to save me the time/money of buying a lousy game) is worth it. It might be.
Rabelais said "We always want that which is forbidden us."
and
"Well-raised and educated children have a natural force that pushes them from evil to good. They call it 'honor'."
I attend a religious university with whose honor code I do not entirely agree. The biggest issue for me is how it's enforced. There is nothing 'honorable' about a code that is policed by the administration.
I saw an iMac on display at my university's bookstore last year running a 'demo' of OSX. It was a self-guided tour with 5 main sections explaining the new features of OSX. The only one which Unix has not had for years was Aqua. (The others were stuff like SMP and Memory Management.)
Pics like this one show off the great HO-looking gameplay. This is actualy why I did a little model train stuff as a kid (never got into it seriously). It was so I could pretend to blow things up, fight wars, etc.
We've been waiting forever for QuickTime 6, which supports MPEG4. That's not what really interests me (the MPEG2 controls do), Apple had planned to roll out QuickTime 6 at their developers' conference last month. However, because of the MPEG4 restrictions, they had to delay the ship.
Now, MS sits on the board for MPEG4, and they have their own version, which, because it is not standards-compliant, does not fall under this pricing routine, so they can roll theirs without a problem.
I'm the tech guy on a project to put some Arabic courses on the web. While I understand why our design people (I used to be one... back in the day) want to use Flash for EVERYTHING, it just doesn not fit our needs.
Yes, it looks better than HTML. Yes, it can be integreated with JavaScript, PHP, XML. But two big problems still linger (for us, anyway):
No Unicode support. No, I am not going to convert every separate, initital, medial, and final script character to an image. Plus, this kills our DB/XML integration.
It is still closed-source, and support for the features we use could be dead tomorrow. The story on/. yesterday about the laser disc archive being obsolete happens to use all the time. It would do us little good (and waste US taxpayers' dollars - we are on a DOD grant) to code our courses in Flash.
What we do use Flash for is display of certain animated graphics. For example, I wrote an XML/JavaScript activity that can teach how to tell time in any language. Basically, the script chooses a random time and then passes it to the XML for translation into the foreign language, and also into a function that displays an analog clock with that same time.
For now, that clock is displayed in Flash. Perhaps later we will use XML SVC, or something like that. But the key is that we are using Flash as a removable part.
Someone already mentioned braille access, etc. I'll just echo that concern.
Microsoft needs to make a new version more or less from scratch
I agree to a point.
What MSFT need to do is migrate to a more modular structure. If they just rewrite their entire codebase, they may wind up with better security in that iteration, but they will still need to rewrite for their next version, possibly opening up new holes.
Unix has been tested through time, and not rewritten from scratch every version. Because of its modular nature, only the effected pieces must be rewritten each revision, in theory, keeping the security form on generation to the next.
Apple's move to OSX has created this modularity and MSFT would benefit more from that than from just totally re-creating their code.
I loved Gnome two years ago when I first got into Linux. I run it on my RedHat file server at home, but otherwise, I was stuck in windows world. It just wasn't ready for full time desktop use. I tried KDE, but found it felt clunky.
Fast forward two years to last month, and I set up a new server at work. I talked the boss into giving Linux a try, and installed SuSE after a recommendation of a friend.
Well, having not seen anything in two years, I was blown away by the strides made by both Gnome and KDE. However, it is apparent that KDE has lapped Gnome in (desktop) usability. The themes are cool (my Mac buddy even thinks so), Nautalis rocks, and the whole thing is extremely configurable, even for a non-CS major.
I even placed SuSE with KDE 2.0 on my laptop. There are still times I need to boot to windows (Flash, QuickTime, etc.), but I hate doing it.
I sincerely hope that Gnome 2.0 will be the light-year jump that KDE 2.0 was because competition is a good thing(tm).
I've found that KWord and Abiword both did a fine job of reading Word files - it's the being able to Save As Word where things get messy.
That's just the opposite of my experience with StarOffice. I've opened.doc files from the network, with "track changes" enabled, edited them in StarOffice Writer, and then saved them. None of my coworkers were ever the wiser.
I also print a lot of homework at work. I've saved my files as Word 2000 files, opened them on Word 2000, and printed without a problem.
You should hear my co-workers who were convinced the new G5 was going to be announced. Now they're offended that Apple is upgrading the iMac, of all things, to a G4, while the power users' tools remain the same.
I borrowed the little Epson LCD projector from work a couple of weeks ago, hooked up my DVD player, and projected it onto a blank wall. I had an 8-foot screen at 720 resolution (the highest by DVD standards), and I was playing games off my laptop at 1024. (If you ever want to make someone motion sick, try EPI Racer on a HUGE screen with the view set to first person.)
My question is at $2500-$3500, I can carry this projector with me, vary the screen size, and get a very clear picture. So, what does HDTV offer for 10X the price? I know that projector bulbs burn out after 1000 hours or something, but at $200 a pop, I can take that over a $30K TV set.
In my opinion, the most difficult aspect of writing a good 3D game is coding complex physics
IMNSHO, getting good human motion is the hardest. Sure, EA does great motion capture for their sports sims, but where else do you see this in the industry? Download the Wolfenstien single player demo and see how stiff the models look (especially in the intro).
I think getting realistic physics is important, but, since most of it can be reduced to math anyway, GHz machines and loads of memory, combined with good programming, should be able to get it right. Making motion look good is far more important to my enjoying the game, and much more difficult.
On a side note....
Has anyone else noticed how this seems to be what sets WETA's effect in LOTR apart from the rest? Instead of generating a digital army, they film a bunch of guys walking in armor, then copy/paste/randomize to make a realistic hoard of warriors.
The cave troll, while the rendering was supurb, was entirly motion-captured. They had some actor plodding around with a big stick and ping-pong balls taped to his joints. They seem to understand that they can make everything look perfect in a still image, but the motion will still look fake.
GMR made the substrate the bottleneck
on
The Story Of GMR Heads
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
My family's been in MR tech (well, magnetic storage) for over 30 years now. I worked 3 years in IBM's MR head manufacturing facility in San Jose (Cottle Rd.). It used to be that the substrate people (the ones who made the actual disks) didn't have much to do because the MR heads could not write small enough to pressure them.
GMR heads caused quite the stir because they could write smaller than the substrate had resolution.
Now IBM's "pixie dust" has swung the pendulum the other way, as the head is once again the bottleneck.
An interesting tid-bit is how many production managers were hired away from IBM soon after GMR heads were released.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Best played Jar-Jar on rehersal. The film was shot without him there.
Or two, you have to prove the yellow light you were photographed at wasn't 4 seconds. State law mandates that the yellow lights must be at least 4 seconds long, so if the yellow light was say 3, the light was malfunctioning and you weren't at fault. This of course means you have to go out there with a video camera and get the light being yellow for less than 4 seconds.
I read about these ticketing-lights in a Car & Driver editorial a few months ago. It seems that they are not installed to improve safety, but to generate more income for the state. They cost much less per ticket than a patrol car and policeman would.
The problem is that many states use the four-second-yellow-light rule regardless of speed limit. If I'm driving 25MPH, it's likely that I will have sufficient time to decide whether to safely stop or continue through the light. However, at 55MPH (eg on an expressway), four seconds is not enough time for a driver to decided whether or not they should stop (safely) or run the light.
If states were honestly interested in improving public safety at traffic lights, they would study the situation and vary yellow-light duration based on speed limit (and weather conditions).
So, if I go to protest an automated ticket, what will happen? Will the judge simply look at the printout and the photo and say, "No, the system's perfect. You're guilty. Pay up."
There's a new Tom Cruise movie comming out where he's a cop in D.C. sometime in the future. Apparently, they've figured out a way to see things that haven't happened yet, and arrest people before they commit the crime. "The system is perfect."
This is a scary step in that direction.
You can get Discs of Trom on MAME from classicgaming.com.
It's amazing how well the twisting joystick transfers to mouse/keybord controls.
And yes, it's still fun.
M$ did the same to Logitech ~to yrs ago. IT worked for them.
The reason I check sites like gamespot are so I don't spend $40-50 bucks on garbage games. I don't blame them for moving to a subscription model, but I'm wondering whether fronting the money for reviews (to save me the time/money of buying a lousy game) is worth it. It might be.
Rabelais said "We always want that which is forbidden us."
and
"Well-raised and educated children have a natural force that pushes them from evil to good. They call it 'honor'."
I attend a religious university with whose honor code I do not entirely agree. The biggest issue for me is how it's enforced. There is nothing 'honorable' about a code that is policed by the administration.
I saw an iMac on display at my university's bookstore last year running a 'demo' of OSX. It was a self-guided tour with 5 main sections explaining the new features of OSX. The only one which Unix has not had for years was Aqua. (The others were stuff like SMP and Memory Management.)
Pics like this one show off the great HO-looking gameplay. This is actualy why I did a little model train stuff as a kid (never got into it seriously). It was so I could pretend to blow things up, fight wars, etc.
We've been waiting forever for QuickTime 6, which supports MPEG4. That's not what really interests me (the MPEG2 controls do), Apple had planned to roll out QuickTime 6 at their developers' conference last month. However, because of the MPEG4 restrictions, they had to delay the ship.
Now, MS sits on the board for MPEG4, and they have their own version, which, because it is not standards-compliant, does not fall under this pricing routine, so they can roll theirs without a problem.
Put two and two together...
Steven Levy so far is the only person in the mainstream press to pick up on the the travesty of the SSSCA hearings.
Not true. Dan Gilmour of the San Jose Mercury News has been talking about it.
Check it out.
2002-02-28 20:27:33 Intel backs consumers over Hollywood (articles,news) (rejected)
I'm the tech guy on a project to put some Arabic courses on the web. While I understand why our design people (I used to be one... back in the day) want to use Flash for EVERYTHING, it just doesn not fit our needs.
Yes, it looks better than HTML. Yes, it can be integreated with JavaScript, PHP, XML. But two big problems still linger (for us, anyway):
What we do use Flash for is display of certain animated graphics. For example, I wrote an XML/JavaScript activity that can teach how to tell time in any language. Basically, the script chooses a random time and then passes it to the XML for translation into the foreign language, and also into a function that displays an analog clock with that same time.
For now, that clock is displayed in Flash. Perhaps later we will use XML SVC, or something like that. But the key is that we are using Flash as a removable part.
Someone already mentioned braille access, etc. I'll just echo that concern.
Hey, let's get a list of places we can move going.
In order of number of patents held:
Matsushita (Panasonic)
Sony
Pioneer
Toshiba
Philips
Hitachi
Thompson
Others (Mitsubishi, JVC, TW/AOL)
(From "DVD Demystified" by Jim Taylor)
Someone at my university got funding to do a survey into why more married-with-children students don't go on foreign studies semesters.
I'm thinking about applying to do a survey into why there aren't many high school students at universities.
Microsoft needs to make a new version more or less from scratch
I agree to a point.
What MSFT need to do is migrate to a more modular structure. If they just rewrite their entire codebase, they may wind up with better security in that iteration, but they will still need to rewrite for their next version, possibly opening up new holes.
Unix has been tested through time, and not rewritten from scratch every version. Because of its modular nature, only the effected pieces must be rewritten each revision, in theory, keeping the security form on generation to the next.
Apple's move to OSX has created this modularity and MSFT would benefit more from that than from just totally re-creating their code.
I can share my experience.
I loved Gnome two years ago when I first got into Linux. I run it on my RedHat file server at home, but otherwise, I was stuck in windows world. It just wasn't ready for full time desktop use. I tried KDE, but found it felt clunky.
Fast forward two years to last month, and I set up a new server at work. I talked the boss into giving Linux a try, and installed SuSE after a recommendation of a friend.
Well, having not seen anything in two years, I was blown away by the strides made by both Gnome and KDE. However, it is apparent that KDE has lapped Gnome in (desktop) usability. The themes are cool (my Mac buddy even thinks so), Nautalis rocks, and the whole thing is extremely configurable, even for a non-CS major.
I even placed SuSE with KDE 2.0 on my laptop. There are still times I need to boot to windows (Flash, QuickTime, etc.), but I hate doing it.
I sincerely hope that Gnome 2.0 will be the light-year jump that KDE 2.0 was because competition is a good thing(tm).
And we very light on verbs.
That's just the opposite of my experience with StarOffice. I've opened .doc files from the network, with "track changes" enabled, edited them in StarOffice Writer, and then saved them. None of my coworkers were ever the wiser.
I also print a lot of homework at work. I've saved my files as Word 2000 files, opened them on Word 2000, and printed without a problem.
You should hear my co-workers who were convinced the new G5 was going to be announced. Now they're offended that Apple is upgrading the iMac, of all things, to a G4, while the power users' tools remain the same.
The cave trolls motion was captured from a human actor.... Not generated by computer.
AMEN.
'K, I'm a newbie at AV stuff...
I borrowed the little Epson LCD projector from work a couple of weeks ago, hooked up my DVD player, and projected it onto a blank wall. I had an 8-foot screen at 720 resolution (the highest by DVD standards), and I was playing games off my laptop at 1024. (If you ever want to make someone motion sick, try EPI Racer on a HUGE screen with the view set to first person.)
My question is at $2500-$3500, I can carry this projector with me, vary the screen size, and get a very clear picture. So, what does HDTV offer for 10X the price? I know that projector bulbs burn out after 1000 hours or something, but at $200 a pop, I can take that over a $30K TV set.
I'm not flaming here, I really want to know.
In my opinion, the most difficult aspect of writing a good 3D game is coding complex physics
IMNSHO, getting good human motion is the hardest. Sure, EA does great motion capture for their sports sims, but where else do you see this in the industry? Download the Wolfenstien single player demo and see how stiff the models look (especially in the intro).
I think getting realistic physics is important, but, since most of it can be reduced to math anyway, GHz machines and loads of memory, combined with good programming, should be able to get it right. Making motion look good is far more important to my enjoying the game, and much more difficult.
On a side note....
Has anyone else noticed how this seems to be what sets WETA's effect in LOTR apart from the rest? Instead of generating a digital army, they film a bunch of guys walking in armor, then copy/paste/randomize to make a realistic hoard of warriors.
The cave troll, while the rendering was supurb, was entirly motion-captured. They had some actor plodding around with a big stick and ping-pong balls taped to his joints. They seem to understand that they can make everything look perfect in a still image, but the motion will still look fake.
My family's been in MR tech (well, magnetic storage) for over 30 years now. I worked 3 years in IBM's MR head manufacturing facility in San Jose (Cottle Rd.). It used to be that the substrate people (the ones who made the actual disks) didn't have much to do because the MR heads could not write small enough to pressure them.
GMR heads caused quite the stir because they could write smaller than the substrate had resolution.
Now IBM's "pixie dust" has swung the pendulum the other way, as the head is once again the bottleneck.
An interesting tid-bit is how many production managers were hired away from IBM soon after GMR heads were released.