Take for instance edge enhancement filters..... Do you understand how image filters work? In order to enhance detail, one needs more pixels for the array to work on.
It seems that you don't understand how image filters work. Edge enhancement doesn't need a higher pixel count, as it is usually just a change of color contrast to trick the brain into thinking it sees more sharply. It's quite effective actually, as you do tend to see better edges, but it's just a trick. No information was added to the image.
What you're referring to is interpolation, which is different.
The problem with a train is that you need high population desnity along that route. This isn't all that common in the US, which is sparsely populated compared to much of the world.
Hmm, yes but surely the "autopilot" system the article talks about is being investigated as a solution to traffic jams on heavily used roads. Since I don't subscribe to the author's tinfoil vision of the world, why else would such a system be required?
So therefore we're talking about the same thing: no need for this kludge when good public money could be spent on developing nice, fast and efficient public transportation networks alongside the congested roads, enticing commuters to use the train instead of the road, therefore relieving the roadways.
What happens in rural America isn't particularly germane to the issue here: people there can (and should) keep driving their automobiles, as I certainly wouldn't want my tax dollars to fund public transit systems for a few farmers in the middle of nowhere:-)
U.S. Department of Transportation working on Intelligent Transportation Systems, a long-range plan to build various sorts of intelligence into the national road system.
Translation for the car industry lobby-unaware: Many roads are filled to capacity. Most people don't have the physical ability to react quickly enough if they were asked to drive closer to each other, to cram more cars per mile and more car passages per hour. As a result, we auto-makers have lobbied the powers that be to start a program to develop a system to take away control of their vehicles from their human owners/drivers and into the hands of the car computers, or the USDOT's central computer.
Of course, this will be ruinously expensive both to the government, to equip thousands of miles of thoroughfare with computer trackers (or whatever it'll be) and to the consumer, to equip their new "auto-autos" with the right tech wizardry, not to mention new raised roadtaxes etc... BUT BUT... we get to manufacture more cars, which means keeping jobs in the US and keeping the economy going (yeah, right...) and, more importantly, keeping the cash flow in our auto industry CEOs going.
Hint: cars that drive very very close to each other, and follow a road to a tee, and consume very little compared to today's automobiles, and don't need a parking spot, and bring you right into most major cities, already exist: they're called a train, and they've been around forever.
Europe, and most of the world proves that moving people by train is convenient, ubiquitous, and quite livable. The United States proves that lobbying from powerful industries can kill viable, more sustainable transportation solutions very effectively.
Remember how in the go-go Internet days of three to four years ago, we used to talk about "disintermediation?" That was using technology to remove middle men from transactions. Well, what Andrew Greig is doing is dis-intermediating both the telephone and TV cable companies. And he'd like to dis-intermediate the Internet Service Providers, too.
Wrong: Andrew Greig isn't "disintermediating" anybody, he's "alter-mediating", meaning in plain english that he's cutting the grass under some other middlemen's feet and setting himself up as the sole replacement middleman for all the people he serves. Likewise, if he wanted to get rid of the internet providers, he's go into the business himself.
His business is that of a concentrator of services, no more no less. Cheaper, more friendly perhaps, but nothing so glamorous as what Cringely portrays him to be. If he's clever and maintains his services, he should make money out of it too.
CCTV cameras have been around in numbers in the UK for a long time. Did it stop the IRA from bombing London some years ago? of course not.
A perfect proof, if one was needed, that putting a country under surveilance may have a little effect on petty high street thieves, but most certainly has nothing to offer to curtail terrorism, and everything to do with controlling the populace.
That's beside the point. There aren't many users of MS-DOS 1.0 either, yet one may easily argue that WinXP still carries flaws from that old "OS" today. Modern Unices are even more tied to their past than Microsoft OSes.
Actually their hardware division makes products that are as good as their software division's products are bad, and it isn't new.
The Microsoft "natural feel" keyboard (or whatever its name is) is well build and many people I know swear by it. It's unusable to me, but I recognize a good product there. Same for the optical mouse: if memory serves right, Microsoft was the first to introduce that technology, pretty much to go around Logitech's patent on roller-less trackball and mouse balls.
So, hating Microsoft's software is a healthy attitude, hating their hardware product isn't.
On almost every news outlet, everyone is talking about the price of oil, both foreign and domestic.
Do they mention that the US setting the middle-east ablaze causes this? I can understand the US economy going into recession as a result of oil price hikes due to *our* war, but it's causing nice recession episodes in many other countries as well. I bet those countries, supposedly our allies, must love the heck out of us too.
Oh well, if this is what it takes to finally entice the country to switch to something more ecological than SUVs and full-size 8-cylinder sedans, then I guess we'll have gotten a little something good out of all this mess...
One of my favorite Chris Mason quotes comes from that memo, "Since human beings themselves are not fully debugged yet, there will be bugs in your code no matter what you do."
Then it would seem humans working at Microsoft are less debugged than everybody else. Because *boy*, at some point Microsoft was a bug factory.
To their credit though, this is changing fast. Microsoft is a huge company that can turn on a dime, and they've understood that having shite engineers onboard won't do much good to their latest "trustworthy computing" PR stunt. Not to mention, they actually have a nice R&D shop now, not just the pretense of one anymore.
Sorry! Your request for "www.icann.org" was not successful. The domain may not exist or may be a bunch of jerks that won't let us get away with world dominations.
Spielberg had the brilliant idea of adding a sub-rating to a 2-level rating system (making *gasp!* 3 levels), told it to his buddy Jack Valenti, who then asked their opinion to theater owners (who, as everybody knows, are reknown experts in pedopsychology) and implemented it.
The new sub-level then quickly became a marketting tool to capture more teenager money, effectively turning the whole rating system into a 2-level system again, since no filmmaker wants a PG rating anymore.
Find out by 2010? That's a loser of a bet. Unless Huygens crashes into a Titanian Giraffe, we won't know anything definitive by 2010.
What if it's a very large giraffe that has an equally large flashlight and happens to be shining it in our direction? Then we'd know with earth-bound intruments...
Slashdot Mirror
And other blindingly obvious statements:
Bears shit in the woods
I resent that remark.
-- Yours truly, Teddy the constipated grizzly
Just glancing at the PDF, I don't any plans for the aftermath.
Apparently they're already started to blast verbs out of grammar books nationwide. Run for cover!
Take for instance edge enhancement filters..... Do you understand how image filters work? In order to enhance detail, one needs more pixels for the array to work on.
It seems that you don't understand how image filters work. Edge enhancement doesn't need a higher pixel count, as it is usually just a change of color contrast to trick the brain into thinking it sees more sharply. It's quite effective actually, as you do tend to see better edges, but it's just a trick. No information was added to the image.
What you're referring to is interpolation, which is different.
prosthetic visual aids (ie implants) are developed (which should be well within his lifetime, given that they have had some success already.)
Hopefully he'll get better implants than those prototypes: with a resolution of 25x25, the only map he'd see accurately is the map of Utah...
Most people in the US can see just fine and know jack squat about geography anyway.
The problem with a train is that you need high population desnity along that route. This isn't all that common in the US, which is sparsely populated compared to much of the world.
:-)
Hmm, yes but surely the "autopilot" system the article talks about is being investigated as a solution to traffic jams on heavily used roads. Since I don't subscribe to the author's tinfoil vision of the world, why else would such a system be required?
So therefore we're talking about the same thing: no need for this kludge when good public money could be spent on developing nice, fast and efficient public transportation networks alongside the congested roads, enticing commuters to use the train instead of the road, therefore relieving the roadways.
What happens in rural America isn't particularly germane to the issue here: people there can (and should) keep driving their automobiles, as I certainly wouldn't want my tax dollars to fund public transit systems for a few farmers in the middle of nowhere
U.S. Department of Transportation working on Intelligent Transportation Systems, a long-range plan to build various sorts of intelligence into the national road system.
Translation for the car industry lobby-unaware:
Many roads are filled to capacity. Most people don't have the physical ability to react quickly enough if they were asked to drive closer to each other, to cram more cars per mile and more car passages per hour. As a result, we auto-makers have lobbied the powers that be to start a program to develop a system to take away control of their vehicles from their human owners/drivers and into the hands of the car computers, or the USDOT's central computer.
Of course, this will be ruinously expensive both to the government, to equip thousands of miles of thoroughfare with computer trackers (or whatever it'll be) and to the consumer, to equip their new "auto-autos" with the right tech wizardry, not to mention new raised roadtaxes etc... BUT BUT... we get to manufacture more cars, which means keeping jobs in the US and keeping the economy going (yeah, right...) and, more importantly, keeping the cash flow in our auto industry CEOs going.
Hint: cars that drive very very close to each other, and follow a road to a tee, and consume very little compared to today's automobiles, and don't need a parking spot, and bring you right into most major cities, already exist: they're called a train, and they've been around forever.
Europe, and most of the world proves that moving people by train is convenient, ubiquitous, and quite livable. The United States proves that lobbying from powerful industries can kill viable, more sustainable transportation solutions very effectively.
Remember how in the go-go Internet days of three to four years ago, we used to talk about "disintermediation?" That was using technology to remove middle men from transactions. Well, what Andrew Greig is doing is dis-intermediating both the telephone and TV cable companies. And he'd like to dis-intermediate the Internet Service Providers, too.
Wrong: Andrew Greig isn't "disintermediating" anybody, he's "alter-mediating", meaning in plain english that he's cutting the grass under some other middlemen's feet and setting himself up as the sole replacement middleman for all the people he serves. Likewise, if he wanted to get rid of the internet providers, he's go into the business himself.
His business is that of a concentrator of services, no more no less. Cheaper, more friendly perhaps, but nothing so glamorous as what Cringely portrays him to be. If he's clever and maintains his services, he should make money out of it too.
CCTV cameras have been around in numbers in the UK for a long time. Did it stop the IRA from bombing London some years ago? of course not.
A perfect proof, if one was needed, that putting a country under surveilance may have a little effect on petty high street thieves, but most certainly has nothing to offer to curtail terrorism, and everything to do with controlling the populace.
Orwell.......grave........spinning
the MNG decoder is so large that the likes of Mozilla refuse to include it
Yeah, and a damn good thing too, otherwise we'd have a browser that's so huge and bloated that...
Nevermind...
That's beside the point. There aren't many users of MS-DOS 1.0 either, yet one may easily argue that WinXP still carries flaws from that old "OS" today. Modern Unices are even more tied to their past than Microsoft OSes.
Only the maker of antequated operating systems would make a "museum quality" mouse.
You do realize Unix (and thus Linux in a sense) is a lot older than any Microsoft product, right?
Did his parents have major spelling problems or something?
I don't know, maybe we should ask Prince's opinion...
Who knew Microsoft would turn into Apple?
Actually their hardware division makes products that are as good as their software division's products are bad, and it isn't new.
The Microsoft "natural feel" keyboard (or whatever its name is) is well build and many people I know swear by it. It's unusable to me, but I recognize a good product there. Same for the optical mouse: if memory serves right, Microsoft was the first to introduce that technology, pretty much to go around Logitech's patent on roller-less trackball and mouse balls.
So, hating Microsoft's software is a healthy attitude, hating their hardware product isn't.
A quick inspection also shows that a PDP8 weighs as much as the Saturn V rocket, and weight is the last thing they needed to haul stuff on the moon...
On almost every news outlet, everyone is talking about the price of oil, both foreign and domestic.
Do they mention that the US setting the middle-east ablaze causes this? I can understand the US economy going into recession as a result of oil price hikes due to *our* war, but it's causing nice recession episodes in many other countries as well. I bet those countries, supposedly our allies, must love the heck out of us too.
Oh well, if this is what it takes to finally entice the country to switch to something more ecological than SUVs and full-size 8-cylinder sedans, then I guess we'll have gotten a little something good out of all this mess...
GNU/Linux POS project
POS is such a great acronym : when the equipment is new, it means Point-Of-Sale, and when it's old and obsolete, it doesn't need to change acronym.
Kind of like "PC", come to think of it...
You forgot a step!
Wait for it, wait for it....
.
.
One of my favorite Chris Mason quotes comes from that memo, "Since human beings themselves are not fully debugged yet, there will be bugs in your code no matter what you do."
Then it would seem humans working at Microsoft are less debugged than everybody else. Because *boy*, at some point Microsoft was a bug factory.
To their credit though, this is changing fast. Microsoft is a huge company that can turn on a dime, and they've understood that having shite engineers onboard won't do much good to their latest "trustworthy computing" PR stunt. Not to mention, they actually have a nice R&D shop now, not just the pretense of one anymore.
Sorry! Your request for "www.icann.org" was not successful. The domain may not exist or may be a bunch of jerks that won't let us get away with world dominations.
Coming soon: VeriSign to rename itself "ICANT".
Would it work with badgers?
Spielberg had the brilliant idea of adding a sub-rating to a 2-level rating system (making *gasp!* 3 levels), told it to his buddy Jack Valenti, who then asked their opinion to theater owners (who, as everybody knows, are reknown experts in pedopsychology) and implemented it.
The new sub-level then quickly became a marketting tool to capture more teenager money, effectively turning the whole rating system into a 2-level system again, since no filmmaker wants a PG rating anymore.
In short: *yawn*
Find out by 2010? That's a loser of a bet. Unless Huygens crashes into a Titanian Giraffe, we won't know anything definitive by 2010.
What if it's a very large giraffe that has an equally large flashlight and happens to be shining it in our direction? Then we'd know with earth-bound intruments...
10000000:1
My personal apologies to 10000000 slashdot readers. It is strictly numbers folks.
You should apologize to the frightened-looking "1" woman at the right of the colon...
10,000,000 : 1
Chances of me understanding how they achieve any of those benchmarks.
1.2:1
Chances of me rightly guessing that you slept through the lesson about probabilities in math class...