If they're going to be making an announcement in August, then why not wait until August to post the article?! There is no product and no information. It doesn't even say whether it records only the UK terrestrial TV channels (just 5) or the UK digitial ("Freeview") channels (MUCH more than 5).
I can understand how you could feasibly mock up a machine that recorded the 5 main channels to a RAID array or something, but I fail to belive that you can actually record "the entire UK channel multiplex" of ~30 digital channels in anything of a sensible size or price. It would have to save out 30 high quality(ish) feeds to very very large hard drives permanently. I can't see how you could do that with less than a few thousand pounds of disks and capture cards.
> where's the calculation of how much time we all spend > answer work e-mail at home?
Err probably zero.
How many companies... 1. Bother to set up their email systems so that the employees can use it from home. 2. Then train their employees on how to set it up on their home machine or use the webmail. 3. Have employees which actually DO check their mail from home AND reply even when someone's set it all up for them?
I'm guessing a single digit percentage at most.
On the other hand, how many employees surf the web for non work purposes while at work? Probably the vast majority.
> what slows down SMS typing is the situation when the next letter > is on the same button as the previous was
Nope... All phones I've come across have a button which you can press which skips to the next letter (usually just the right arrow). If you can get used to using this without thinking about it, then you can often text faster than T9. T9 is really slow if the word it suggests is not the one you want... It all depends on how difficult it is on your particular phone to switch to the word you do want. Some short words with only 3 characters can be typed with 3 keypresses without T9 but need 10 keypresses with T9 + some reaction time while you notice which words are being cycled though so you know when to stop pressing the cycle button. Just one word like that in a short message will probably make the whole message slower to send with T9 overall.
> no one but some goofball on./ would call them 'morse coders'.
I referred to them as hams in my later posts. I called them morse coders because I wasn't sure everyone ELSE would know what a ham was. I wasn't even sure if "ham" was UK slang.
> Morse isn't a code, it's a cipher.
Search for "morse cipher" on google - 16 hits. Search for "morse code" on google - 918,000 hits.
I think everyone else in the world knew what I meant...
> Now, crawl back in your hole, curl up in the fetal position, rock back > and forth, and meditate on the difference between entertainment and > real science while sucking your thumb.
Let me guess... 10-14, male, probably achieving mainly C-E grades in class? It's amazing what you can tell about someone from how they insult someone on slashdot:)
> meditate on the difference between entertainment and > real science
My entire point was that it wasn't real science! FFS, read the post!
> The two hams who won are certainly not the fastest morse operators.
Well on Leno they said they were - and that was all I had to go on. The sender was way faster than 40wpm, so I don't know where you got that figure from. Most of the delay occured with the guy that was writing it down with a pencil IIRC.
> So really you're just agreeing with the results of the test
I can't dispute the results of the test - I was just saying that they're probably wrong for the general case.
My main point was that unless the two operators are using the same device (a phone keypad) the test is totally unfair. It's like comparing texting to typing on a qwerty keyboard - you know which is faster, but the latter won't be faster by the time you've put the input device on a 3x3 cm space at the bottom of a phone.
The context of the article, don't forget, is trying to find a faster text input method than normal texting. I was just saying that morsing probably isn't faster by the time you've implemented it on a real world phone, because a phone keypad doesn't suit morsing (if you know anything at all about morsing).
> What did you expect them to to, cripple the key and use an untrained > operator to prove that text messaging is faster?
What's important and interesting is real world tests. Ie whether an "average" HAM can beat an "average" texter. Not whether a very experienced expert HAM can beat a teenager.
They should have got two people the same age who have both been morsing/texting since the same age for a fair test. Most importantly, they should have had more than one candidate from each test group. All I was trying to point out was that the test was so incredibly unscientific (and possibly even biassed) that you can't draw any conclusions from it. You could easily form a test where it always went the other way if you picked two different individuals.
A realistic test would be to train a group of ten or more 20something's to use morse on their phones, and then compare them to their peers after a year or two's experience.
> What you are saying is "cars would be not faster than bicycles, > if it weren't for the combustion engines".
Well they wouldn't! I'm not sure what your point is here - you seem to be arguing my point for me.
To use your rather misfitting analogy, this guy is saying that on our peddle bikes, instead of peddling in circles, we can just press the right peddle and we'll go much faster just like you can in a car (but somehow achieving this without the engine). I'm saying that we can't. It won't work. And I'm pretty sure you would agree. I hardly see why that's "unfair" unless you're suggesting that we fit a $200 morsing bug to every cell phone (which is NOT what the article author was suggesting). Are you saying that you really think morsing is faster if it requires the same keypresses on the same keypad but *MUCH MORE OF THEM*? There's no way you can morse on a phone keypad at the speed the guy was doing it on Leno (and don't try and claim you can unless you've tried morsing (I have)).
> it is only your assumption that the morse guy wouldn't have won using the keypad
Yes.. in the same way I make the assumption that a car is faster when racing a bike.
The supposed "showdown" on Jay Leno was a highly unscientific and inaccurate test which pitted the world's fasted morse coder using very expensive morse equipment against a teenager using a cheap cell phone with a membrane keypad.
If the pro-morser had been forced to enter morse on a phone keypad instead of his $200 morsing 'bug' then I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have won. It takes several keypresses to send a single character in morse and just because it's morse, it doesn't mean that you can press the keys any quicker. He could only key quicker because of the equipment he was using.
Add to that the fact that it takes ages to learn morse and only a few minutes to learn standard texting or T9 predictive text, I think you'll find that the take up on morse on phones would be pretty much zero.
I think anyone's efforts would be better spent designing better keypads or improving predictive text rather than wasting time trying to put morse code (designed for carrier wave) onto a phone (designed for voice and data).
The only part of his idea that I think is sensible is the idea that you can answer and redirect calls without having to look for the key to press (not that I find that hard after I've had my phone a few days, because you know where the main green and red buttons are without having to look). Having said that, most phones have any key answer if you enable it, and on a lot of bluetooth handsfree kits you can answer and make calls using a single button and voice tags (obviously requires phone support).
Also, the reason morse is as fast as it is is because you hardly have to move your finger at all. The article author is suggesting that you use your fingernail for a "dit" and the flat of your finger for a "dah". This would be ridiculously slow and very painful after the first few characters as it would be a very unnatural movement!
If you want to type seriously fast on your phone, then you need a way to plug in a standard sized keyboard (preferably Dvorak!).
I've always had this idea that you could install massive mirrors in deserts made out of reflective foil to bounce a lot of sunlight back into space and thus reduce the total energy that heats up the earth.
OK you'd probably need a LOT of shiny foil, but it would probably be cheaper than installing some kind of space sunglasses which is what the article is suggesting.
Or, instead of reflecting it out into space, how about using the energy to desalinate water in desert or 3rd world countries? The energy is used up AND you get infinite free water too. Cunning huh? But probably totally impossible to build?
You know in films when they get a really burry satellite image, and some hero guy goes "can we enhaance thaaat?". So some geek clicks a button and it goes a lot sharper, and you're thinking, "if only that worked in real life". Well it does and you can try it yourself. Here is some free software that allows you to have a play and "enhance" all those blurry pics you have lying around.
I've tried this myself and it works quite well. I tried it on a picture I took of the moon with a 400mm lens and it made quite an impressive difference.
The link is here. And it was Pandas (see bottom of page):)
I've downloaded this FREE software myself and had a play. It's quite impressive. It seems to work even better than the expensive FocusFixer plugin that's available for Photoshop.
They've fixed it now.. but oddly, when I refresh, it sometimes changes back to welch! Maybe not all nodes in the cluster have the new page yet...
Re:You don't understand color bit depth
on
Are CRTs History?
·
· Score: 1
I think you'll find that 32bit colour mode also has 16 million colours - not 4 billion as you state. The extra bits are used for alpha (transparency) information - not colour.
Can anyone think of a reason why you need more than one of these cards? Currently my machine runs the most complex game I can think of (HalfLife 2) at 1280x960 at more frames per second than my monitor even scans at.
Why would you need it to be 4 times faster than that?
OK, I can see that a handful of people might want to play at 1600x1200 if they have a decent monitor, but usually, running at resolutions higher than that is fairly pointless unless you have a 21" or bigger monitor. The average monitor can't do resolutions that large without blurring the pixels together from what I've seen.
It's been a fair few years since I heard someone use the term "Wintel". Has this guy not heard of AMD?
Also, why does he claim to be a 22 year old programmer, yet at the top of the article page, there's a picture of a guy that looks about 40-50 with a moustache?
> I do not want my browser to eat up all of my memory.
Don't use Firefox then. Firefox is the most memory hungry program I've ever used. With the exception of Thunderbird of course (if you don't agree, look at your own task manager). Currenty my Firefox is using 50MB of virtual memory (turn on the VM column in Task Manager with View > Select Columns)). Is Safari any better on the Mac?
You're confused. You should take your staff to Lord of the Rings. You should take your *light sabre* to Star Wars. They don't have staffs in Star Wars so you'll look *really* uncool.
Slashdot Mirror
30 actually:
http://freeview.co.uk/whatson/index.html
I doubt you'd bother making something that recorded from an analogue source - too much CPU power.
If they're going to be making an announcement in August, then why not wait until August to post the article?! There is no product and no information. It doesn't even say whether it records only the UK terrestrial TV channels (just 5) or the UK digitial ("Freeview") channels (MUCH more than 5).
I can understand how you could feasibly mock up a machine that recorded the 5 main channels to a RAID array or something, but I fail to belive that you can actually record "the entire UK channel multiplex" of ~30 digital channels in anything of a sensible size or price. It would have to save out 30 high quality(ish) feeds to very very large hard drives permanently. I can't see how you could do that with less than a few thousand pounds of disks and capture cards.
> where's the calculation of how much time we all spend
> answer work e-mail at home?
Err probably zero.
How many companies...
1. Bother to set up their email systems so that the employees can use it from home.
2. Then train their employees on how to set it up on their home machine or use the webmail.
3. Have employees which actually DO check their mail from home AND reply even when someone's set it all up for them?
I'm guessing a single digit percentage at most.
On the other hand, how many employees surf the web for non work purposes while at work? Probably the vast majority.
Is that supposed to be funny?
> I'm scared that all of the heavy anti-terrorist legislation appears to have had no effect
Quite obviously, the anti-terrorist legislation was not put in place to prevent terrorism, but to make it easier to detain and prosecute terrorists.
Law never stops terrorists.
Looks like there have been explosions at five London tube stations and on at least one bus:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4659093.stm
> It takes less then 8 clicks of the mouse to turn it on.
:)
It's not 8 clicks.
Start > Control Panel > Windows Firewall (double click) > "On" > "OK"
That's 5 clicks. Or 6 if you count a double as two.
No clicks:
Ctrl-Esc > "C" > "W" > Enter > "O" > Enter
> what slows down SMS typing is the situation when the next letter
> is on the same button as the previous was
Nope... All phones I've come across have a button which you can press which skips to the next letter (usually just the right arrow). If you can get used to using this without thinking about it, then you can often text faster than T9. T9 is really slow if the word it suggests is not the one you want... It all depends on how difficult it is on your particular phone to switch to the word you do want. Some short words with only 3 characters can be typed with 3 keypresses without T9 but need 10 keypresses with T9 + some reaction time while you notice which words are being cycled though so you know when to stop pressing the cycle button. Just one word like that in a short message will probably make the whole message slower to send with T9 overall.
> Retard
./ would call them 'morse coders'.
:)
Mature aren't you?
> no one but some goofball on
I referred to them as hams in my later posts. I called them morse coders because I wasn't sure everyone ELSE would know what a ham was. I wasn't even sure if "ham" was UK slang.
> Morse isn't a code, it's a cipher.
Search for "morse cipher" on google - 16 hits.
Search for "morse code" on google - 918,000 hits.
I think everyone else in the world knew what I meant...
> Now, crawl back in your hole, curl up in the fetal position, rock back
> and forth, and meditate on the difference between entertainment and
> real science while sucking your thumb.
Let me guess... 10-14, male, probably achieving mainly C-E grades in class? It's amazing what you can tell about someone from how they insult someone on slashdot
> meditate on the difference between entertainment and
> real science
My entire point was that it wasn't real science! FFS, read the post!
> The two hams who won are certainly not the fastest morse operators.
Well on Leno they said they were - and that was all I had to go on. The sender was way faster than 40wpm, so I don't know where you got that figure from. Most of the delay occured with the guy that was writing it down with a pencil IIRC.
> So really you're just agreeing with the results of the test
I can't dispute the results of the test - I was just saying that they're probably wrong for the general case.
My main point was that unless the two operators are using the same device (a phone keypad) the test is totally unfair. It's like comparing texting to typing on a qwerty keyboard - you know which is faster, but the latter won't be faster by the time you've put the input device on a 3x3 cm space at the bottom of a phone.
The context of the article, don't forget, is trying to find a faster text input method than normal texting. I was just saying that morsing probably isn't faster by the time you've implemented it on a real world phone, because a phone keypad doesn't suit morsing (if you know anything at all about morsing).
> What did you expect them to to, cripple the key and use an untrained
> operator to prove that text messaging is faster?
What's important and interesting is real world tests. Ie whether an "average" HAM can beat an "average" texter. Not whether a very experienced expert HAM can beat a teenager.
They should have got two people the same age who have both been morsing/texting since the same age for a fair test. Most importantly, they should have had more than one candidate from each test group. All I was trying to point out was that the test was so incredibly unscientific (and possibly even biassed) that you can't draw any conclusions from it. You could easily form a test where it always went the other way if you picked two different individuals.
A realistic test would be to train a group of ten or more 20something's to use morse on their phones, and then compare them to their peers after a year or two's experience.
> What you are saying is "cars would be not faster than bicycles,
> if it weren't for the combustion engines".
Well they wouldn't! I'm not sure what your point is here - you seem to be arguing my point for me.
To use your rather misfitting analogy, this guy is saying that on our peddle bikes, instead of peddling in circles, we can just press the right peddle and we'll go much faster just like you can in a car (but somehow achieving this without the engine). I'm saying that we can't. It won't work. And I'm pretty sure you would agree. I hardly see why that's "unfair" unless you're suggesting that we fit a $200 morsing bug to every cell phone (which is NOT what the article author was suggesting). Are you saying that you really think morsing is faster if it requires the same keypresses on the same keypad but *MUCH MORE OF THEM*? There's no way you can morse on a phone keypad at the speed the guy was doing it on Leno (and don't try and claim you can unless you've tried morsing (I have)).
> it is only your assumption that the morse guy wouldn't have won using the keypad
Yes.. in the same way I make the assumption that a car is faster when racing a bike.
The supposed "showdown" on Jay Leno was a highly unscientific and inaccurate test which pitted the world's fasted morse coder using very expensive morse equipment against a teenager using a cheap cell phone with a membrane keypad.
If the pro-morser had been forced to enter morse on a phone keypad instead of his $200 morsing 'bug' then I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have won. It takes several keypresses to send a single character in morse and just because it's morse, it doesn't mean that you can press the keys any quicker. He could only key quicker because of the equipment he was using.
Add to that the fact that it takes ages to learn morse and only a few minutes to learn standard texting or T9 predictive text, I think you'll find that the take up on morse on phones would be pretty much zero.
I think anyone's efforts would be better spent designing better keypads or improving predictive text rather than wasting time trying to put morse code (designed for carrier wave) onto a phone (designed for voice and data).
The only part of his idea that I think is sensible is the idea that you can answer and redirect calls without having to look for the key to press (not that I find that hard after I've had my phone a few days, because you know where the main green and red buttons are without having to look). Having said that, most phones have any key answer if you enable it, and on a lot of bluetooth handsfree kits you can answer and make calls using a single button and voice tags (obviously requires phone support).
Also, the reason morse is as fast as it is is because you hardly have to move your finger at all. The article author is suggesting that you use your fingernail for a "dit" and the flat of your finger for a "dah". This would be ridiculously slow and very painful after the first few characters as it would be a very unnatural movement!
If you want to type seriously fast on your phone, then you need a way to plug in a standard sized keyboard (preferably Dvorak!).
I've always had this idea that you could install massive mirrors in deserts made out of reflective foil to bounce a lot of sunlight back into space and thus reduce the total energy that heats up the earth.
OK you'd probably need a LOT of shiny foil, but it would probably be cheaper than installing some kind of space sunglasses which is what the article is suggesting.
Or, instead of reflecting it out into space, how about using the energy to desalinate water in desert or 3rd world countries? The energy is used up AND you get infinite free water too. Cunning huh? But probably totally impossible to build?
You know in films when they get a really burry satellite image, and some hero guy goes "can we enhaance thaaat?". So some geek clicks a button and it goes a lot sharper, and you're thinking, "if only that worked in real life". Well it does and you can try it yourself. Here is some free software that allows you to have a play and "enhance" all those blurry pics you have lying around.
I've tried this myself and it works quite well. I tried it on a picture I took of the moon with a 400mm lens and it made quite an impressive difference.
The link is here. And it was Pandas (see bottom of page) :)
I've downloaded this FREE software myself and had a play. It's quite impressive. It seems to work even better than the expensive FocusFixer plugin that's available for Photoshop.
If you need two buttons then it's not Morse. Morse uses one button.
They did. Which is how the receipient read out the message to Leno.
They've fixed it now.. but oddly, when I refresh, it sometimes changes back to welch! Maybe not all nodes in the cluster have the new page yet...
I think you'll find that 32bit colour mode also has 16 million colours - not 4 billion as you state. The extra bits are used for alpha (transparency) information - not colour.
Can anyone think of a reason why you need more than one of these cards? Currently my machine runs the most complex game I can think of (HalfLife 2) at 1280x960 at more frames per second than my monitor even scans at.
Why would you need it to be 4 times faster than that?
OK, I can see that a handful of people might want to play at 1600x1200 if they have a decent monitor, but usually, running at resolutions higher than that is fairly pointless unless you have a 21" or bigger monitor. The average monitor can't do resolutions that large without blurring the pixels together from what I've seen.
It's been a fair few years since I heard someone use the term "Wintel". Has this guy not heard of AMD?
Also, why does he claim to be a 22 year old programmer, yet at the top of the article page, there's a picture of a guy that looks about 40-50 with a moustache?
> I do not want my browser to eat up all of my memory.
Don't use Firefox then. Firefox is the most memory hungry program I've ever used. With the exception of Thunderbird of course (if you don't agree, look at your own task manager). Currenty my Firefox is using 50MB of virtual memory (turn on the VM column in Task Manager with View > Select Columns)). Is Safari any better on the Mac?
You're confused.
You should take your staff to Lord of the Rings.
You should take your *light sabre* to Star Wars.
They don't have staffs in Star Wars so you'll look *really* uncool.
Have you ever *heard* the word "slashdotted"? It happens to ALL servers - no matter who wrote them.
At least you're getting an error message telling you what's wrong instead of just no response.
You're new here aren't you?