You misread the post you replied to. In his situation he paid $12 for shipping an item that arrived with $1 postage on it. I.e. he paid shipping "costs" of 1200% of the actual cost of shipping. He did not mention the price of the item at all (and it is irrelevant, as you rightly point out).
Why is it that this "advantage" is so wrong when every single bidder on an auction can defeat it simply by bidding their maximum? You don't want to buy by auction at all. You want to buy by tender. I suggest you find a site that lets you do that rather than trying to justify tactics that let you convert an auction into a tender.
That's the catch. Decent upscaling DVD player isn't necessarily any cheaper at all. I don't think we're at that point yet, though we may get there as HD-DVD continue to drop. At the moment you can get reasonable upscaling DVD players (e.g. from Philips) for about $60 and HD-DVD is still more like double that.
And if you put off purchasing BD player for a year or two you probably get a BETTER player for spending less money for the HD + BD players together than if you got BD today. If, probably. Certainly you'll get a better player for the same or less money by waiting but that's always true. If you don't by the HD-DVD you can get the BD player sooner and since that's looking like the long term option that's going to be the preferable option for most people.
Assuming the DRM-laden region-coding crap is prevailing in the long view (2-3 years, not 1 week sales) Ah, now you're showing a bit of bias. The majority of people claiming that HD-DVD isn't done yet seem to have something against Blu-ray. I suspect much of what they say is wishful thinking rather than reasoned analysis.
Except that by buying HD-DVD player you get cheap upscaling DVD player that can play HD discs as a bonus. Unless you're never going to buy a Blu-ray player it's still not worth it because you're just going to duplicate that functionality when you buy the Blu-ray player. You might as well put the money towards that in the first place. And if you're not interested in HD then you might as well just buy an even cheaper upscaling DVD player which doesn't play HD discs.
Whether all the press has been orchestrated or not is largely irrelevant. What is relevant is that Blu-ray has the majority of the studio support and has the higher market share. An undecided buyer would have to be pretty brave to bet on HD-DVD at this point.
That being said, I don't think raytracing will completely replace rasterization, at least not right away. Eventually, some games may incorporate a hybrid approach like most commercial renderers do today (scanline rendering for geometry, add raytracing for reflections and shadows). The article's argument is that the hybrid approach makes no sense. If you're doing shadows and reflections via raytracing then you're probably going to have at least one ray per pixel anyway so all you're saving is the primary rays at the cost of doing the whole rasterization routine. It might be the best option in some cases but the article's author expects people will find that it'll generally be better just to cut over to raytracing entirely.
Whoopty do, 15fps @ 256x256 on a quad core processor. You realize that 30fps @ 1024x768, which is the BARE BONES MINIMUM for a PC game (seriously, dipping below either one of those numbers in 2008 is goddamn embarassing) would require *96* processors running at that speed (12x for the resolution, 2x for the framerate) According to TFA they are up to 90fps @ 1280x720 with 8 cores. Perhaps you should read the whole article next time?
Higher polygon counts, sure nice to have, but again not really all that important, slap on a few normal maps and you can have your 5'000'000 reduced to a 5'000 polygon model without noticeable detail loss. There is still a long way to go before adding polygons won't improve the image. We're nowhere near the limit yet.
The majority of quality improvement these days seems to come from post processing effect and clever textures and programmable shader use. All of which are largely techniques to get around the limitations of rasterization. They provide approximations of higher polygon counts. But if it's possible to just use the higher polygon counts why would you not do so? It kind of reminds me of the CISC v RISC phase processor development went through. Processor architecture got more and more complex until eventually a radical change was the best way forward.
If you want to get fur on an animal via polygons you will have to spend a load of rendering time, but if you fake it with textures you can get pretty good results on todays hardware. Same with shadows and a lot of other stuff. Doing it 'right' takes a load of computing power, faking it works in realtime. Raytracing will be superior in the long run - it scales better. That's pretty much the whole point of the article. You're comparing real time raytracing using only general purpose CPUs to rasterization using dedicated GPUs and concluding that the rasterization looks good enough and performs better. That's true, but not really a valid comparison - you should be looking a pure software rendering for the rasterization as well. If you do that you find that realtime raytracing already looks better and as soon as it gets any traction with the game developers you'll start seeing hardware for it too.
Apple tends to back away when it gets demonstrated to them that such restrictions don't work. The dual-monitor hack detailed above; They used to artificially restrict you to Apple-branded wifi cards in OS X even when other cards of the same chipset would have worked--they backed down when people kept hacking the OS to use whatever brand Wifi card they wanted; People kept jailbreaking the iPhone, so soon we're going to get an official dev kit. They may back away when the restrictions don't work, but it doesn't seem to encourage them to stop implementing them in the first place. The company is no longer in the situation where they need to pull this sort of stunt and yet they continue to do so. That's something that annoys me about Apple.
So basically, unless Ford is also a calendar company, they have no possibility of a case, and even if they do, they would still have to show that someone would have a reasonable chance of confusing your calendar with theirs. I'm fairly certain that calling it something like "Black Mustang Club Calendar 2008" would be sufficient to eliminate any possibility of such confusion. They certainly are a calendar company and they sell Mustang calendars. Whether the BMC calendar would cause confusion is probably a question for the courts.
Re:Enema Within: How is it qualified for a "Darwin
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2007 Darwin Award Winners
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· Score: 5, Informative
First of all, it could have been murder. The authorities certainly thought so initially. They since dropped the charges, however.
There's 200-400 billion stars in the milky way for example but most are bigger than our sun I think. So 18 billion solar masses is A LOT of stars to suck up in one galaxy. And the Milky Way is a relatively large galaxy with an estimated mass of 580 billion solar masses. It's probably the 2nd largest in the Local Group. The dwarf galaxy mentioned in yesterday's article about the discovery of a double Einstein ring is only a billion solar masses - this black hole is more massive than some galaxies.
So while this is incredibly neat-looking, I don't think the tubes would last very long... What makes you think that those issues haven't been dealt with? Just because you couldn't tell how they were dealt with from the video?
Re:We need this type of thing done in the classroo
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Hand-Made Vacuum Tubes
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· Score: 1
In agriculture, understanding the differences in how pigs (well, cows) were fed 100 years ago versus today is pretty fundamental to understanding prion diseases, as is the "useless, esoteric" story about the disease of "kuru" among the cannibals of New Zealand. That story about kuru and the cannibals of New Zealand certainly is useless and esoteric as it was the cannibals of Papua New Guinea that had kuru.
Exactly. C is best thought of as a very powerful assembly preprocessor. I know that sounds harsh but when I look at a chunk of C code I have a pretty good idea of the assembly language the compiler is going to emit. Even with C++ that works to a certain extent.
With Java and most other 'friendly' languages you have literally no way of knowing what is going on under the hood unless you are prepared to invest a lot more time and effort than is available to the average comp-sci student.
With C that's as close as a single flag on your compile line and you can study the generated code until you're tired of it. I don't see the distinction. Between the language spec, the virtual machine spec, and the fact that Java comes with a disassembler it is no more difficult to find out what Java does under the hood than it is to find out what C does under the hood. If anything it's easier as the Java VM and bytecode is relatively simple compared to most modern processor architectures and assembly languages.
Given they both use the same encoding, really, I seriously doubt that you've noticed any quality improvement Blu-ray has over HD-DVD watching the same movie on the same screen. Blu-ray disc can have almost twice the capacity of HD-DVD. Even with the same codec doubling the bitrate can make a substantial difference in quality. Or are you suggesting that a 64kbps MP3 is indistinguishable from a 128kbps MP3?
Yes, it is a denial. The FT report is that they plan to switch to Blu-ray. A denial would be a statement that they were not going to Blu-ray. They have not made such a statement.
As to the movie transfer thing - what do they do for NTSC, which is 30 fps and which would require movies to be sped up *even more* to match the frame rate. Obviously they don't do that - so whatever they do for NTSC, why didn't they do the same thing for PAL instead of speeding movies up for PAL? Converting film to video is called telecine. What they do for converting 24fps film to NTSC specifically is called 3:2 pulldown. Film is 24 frames per second and NTSC is 30 frames per second. To convert from film to NTSC you take 4 frames from the film and make 5 frames (10 fields) of video out of them. With PAL the two frame rates (24 and 25 fps) are relatively prime which makes this sort of scheme less attractive. You can do it by taking 12 frames of film and converting those to 25 fields of video (12.5 frames), but that can cause noticeable jerkiness. A 4% speed increase is generally less noticeable, at least if you perform pitch correction on the soundtrack.
To be fair, a number of collections *can* be put together illegally for sale (or legally not for sale once purchased in other ways) that simply cannot possibly be legally put together by any single record company. Let's say for example, you liked for whatever reason, a handful of tracks by Green Day and The Offspring. Your 'dream' in this case could be a compilation of Greatest Hits between those two groups. However, according to Wikipedia, Green Day is under a label called Reprise, and Columbia Records has The Offspring currently. If either company didn't want the other to release such a thing, no matter what, it wouldn't happen. There may be licensing issues but they can be resolved. Look at the film industry - movie studios are constantly doing deals to acquire rights they need from their competitors and often co-produce films. The Hobbit movies will be produced by both New Line and MGM. It still boils down to the music industry being able to provide a product customers want and yet choosing not to do it.
Watch what you say there, because the shuttle's software code is some of the best stuff out there, given that it is multiply redundant, and hasn't had a major failure that I know of, ever. The shuttle software team is known for doing code reviews at a level that most companies I know of can only dream of -- I remember an article several years ago that showed their code to be provably bug free at a something like 3-4 bugs per 500,0000 lines of code. I think the article you're referring to is They Write the Right Stuff.
Her salary is a proxy for the value she creates for the company. For her salary to make economic sense, the value of her labor to the company has to be at least what they're paying her. Of course. But this is a very specific case: she can work 3 extra hours by flying Concorde compared to 747. The additional cost of gaining those extra hours has to be justified by the work she can actually do in those exact hours. Her average performance (as indicated by salary) is irrelevant. From the companies point of view this is really no different to a standard overtime situation: the company bears a cost (the increased ticket price) in order to have an employee work additional time (the three hours saved by the shorter trip).
The mother of a friend of mine was a top executive at Dow Chemical, at the time the company's highest-paid woman. She always flew Concorde when she could because the company was paying her salary during her flight.
Being able to get across the ocean with time left in the work day meant that Dow actually saved money paying for a Concorde ticket.
Her salary is irrelevant. As it's a salary the company pays the same amount which ever flight she takes. To justify the Concorde she has to use those extra work hours to earn the company at least the difference in price. Totally different thing.
I presume a splash of of highly reflective metal (or metallic heat-resistant plastic) will work wonders for defence against these things. There are some problems with that plan:
You'd need to know where the beam was coming from in order to avoid accidentally hitting nearby allies with reflected beams.
It might not protect you for long, depending on the power and frequency of the laser and the condition of the mirror.
A nice reflective mirror could well make you highly visible.
In the past when the reactor has been down, the company that supplies the isotopes (Atomic Energy Canada Ltd runs the place, but another company produces the isotopes) buys isotopes from reactors in australia, south africa or Europe (holand I think). The Australian reactor (OPAL) is also shut down at this time and will remain so into 2008.
They serve a page which contains the original page embedded in a frame, unchanged. If using frames is copyright infringement, the whole internet is guilty. They may change some HTTP headers but I doubt that can be copyrighted. If it's done with frames then I agree it's unlikely to be considered copyright infringement. I didn't RTFA, but this is Slashdot - what did you expect?
Slashdot Mirror
You misread the post you replied to. In his situation he paid $12 for shipping an item that arrived with $1 postage on it. I.e. he paid shipping "costs" of 1200% of the actual cost of shipping. He did not mention the price of the item at all (and it is irrelevant, as you rightly point out).
Unless you're never going to buy a Blu-ray player it's still not worth it because you're just going to duplicate that functionality when you buy the Blu-ray player. You might as well put the money towards that in the first place. And if you're not interested in HD then you might as well just buy an even cheaper upscaling DVD player which doesn't play HD discs.
Whether all the press has been orchestrated or not is largely irrelevant. What is relevant is that Blu-ray has the majority of the studio support and has the higher market share. An undecided buyer would have to be pretty brave to bet on HD-DVD at this point.
The authorities certainly thought so initially. They since dropped the charges, however.
With Java and most other 'friendly' languages you have literally no way of knowing what is going on under the hood unless you are prepared to invest a lot more time and effort than is available to the average comp-sci student.
With C that's as close as a single flag on your compile line and you can study the generated code until you're tired of it.
I don't see the distinction. Between the language spec, the virtual machine spec, and the fact that Java comes with a disassembler it is no more difficult to find out what Java does under the hood than it is to find out what C does under the hood. If anything it's easier as the Java VM and bytecode is relatively simple compared to most modern processor architectures and assembly languages.
Converting film to video is called telecine. What they do for converting 24fps film to NTSC specifically is called 3:2 pulldown. Film is 24 frames per second and NTSC is 30 frames per second. To convert from film to NTSC you take 4 frames from the film and make 5 frames (10 fields) of video out of them. With PAL the two frame rates (24 and 25 fps) are relatively prime which makes this sort of scheme less attractive. You can do it by taking 12 frames of film and converting those to 25 fields of video (12.5 frames), but that can cause noticeable jerkiness. A 4% speed increase is generally less noticeable, at least if you perform pitch correction on the soundtrack.
Being able to get across the ocean with time left in the work day meant that Dow actually saved money paying for a Concorde ticket.
Her salary is irrelevant. As it's a salary the company pays the same amount which ever flight she takes. To justify the Concorde she has to use those extra work hours to earn the company at least the difference in price. Totally different thing.