You're right about that (just like SCSI is a luxury... or even a PC, to some extent.)
But within the next year, a PS2 will not be so far fetched (at least in the average US household), and a scanner at $180 is not too bad either. As a FireWire HD is only about 10% or so more expensive, their value add is pretty decent, for the flexibility. A camcorder, at about $1k, is still a little rich for most of America, but if Sony and Apple had their way, I'm pretty sure a FireWire'd household isn't too far off in the future.
Hey, in the same store I found the FireWire drives, an 80GB 100/ATA is $320.
Yeah, I needed to get another controller... but let me see you chain a scanner, camcorder, PS2(whatever good that is), an 6 hard disks to your built in controller? That's the limitation of your puny built in controller ^^
I own Ender's Shadow. I've read the 5 online chapters...
It seems to me that there is entirely too much self exposition by the character towards the readers. It makes it entirely too dry, to analytical, too heavy handed.
The first book had this way of grabbing you, of making you feel for Ender, of making you feel like you could be Ender.
I didn't have any such feelings for Bean (though he is admittedly difficult to relate to, given his nature), and no such feelings for Petra.
I don't feel any synergestic sympathy for the characters.
In fact, the person I felt the most for/with in the online chapters was Peter; if he becomes the main character in this book, perhaps we can recapture the same energies as the original Ender's Game.
What was the point in researching electricity, 200 years ago? Nothing useful was built of it... for almost 200 years.
Yet if that research were not done, we would not have, in the intervening years, radio, speakers, solenoids, TVs, CPUs, etc.
So what will we have from C60 and buckyball research? No one knows... and that's all that can be said.
Do you want speculation? How about a different class of material? In one state superconducting, in another insulative, and in another, conducting? Different strength and material properties, maybe? How about a new class of allows using C60 instead of straight carbon? Or new optical devices using crystals doped with C60? It's sci fi, for now.
From dictionary.com, a definition of solipsism...
1.The theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified.
2.The theory or view that the self is the only reality.
As far as I understand it, this 3 dimensional world you speak of is a construct of the self called Cuthalion. Your statement then, that it is an excellent model for explaining everything, is the point of solipsism. That everything we know is just a model of reality, and that reality itself cannot be be known without our senses.
If I understand solipsism correctly, each person can only ascertain their own reality (by assuming that they trust their senses).
To share their reality with other people is another trust exchange. Once we have shared realities, we can construct another reality, a second level of reality, that we both believe because it fits with the first level personal model of reality.
Perhaps you can be more clear; what about solipsism don't you believe in?
You're right that you can't make a mathematical proof, but you can make some reasonable/logical guesses...
Take bunch of digital data that represents a audio file. call it <A>.
Add a watermark to it, inaudible, but still detectable (we don't care how it's encoded, but in essence the data should be visible in the digital range. It'd be nice if speakers could not play it, but it's irrelevent.)
So now we have file <A+B>.
Let's now do something clever. We apply the latest, best, and tightest audio compression. Choose whatever you want, mp3, ogg, wma, etc.
We know that these algorithms work by throwing away data that cannot be heard. Frequency masking, volumetric masking, time phased masking, etc.
So we have that <B> is inaudible, already. Regardless of whether the <B> component is output by the speakers... MP3(<A+B>) => MP3(A)
So now we have a file that is, arguably, indistinguishable, from the original file <A>, and now no longer has watermark <B>
The conclusion? Watermarks can be removed without destroying the audible data. That's just how MP3 and such work. If one cannot remove watermarks, then the MP3 encoder must think the watermark is, well, audible!
The only way to build more trust (not build trust, just more) into the system is if the digital signature captures the info of where it was created, when it was created, and what program it was created on. Timestamps and logs, essentially.
This just boils down into the whole trust issue, however. Someone somewhere must place trust into the system. For the signer, that the system works as it is proposed. For the unsigner, that the signer packaged and signed the parcel in good faith, and that no tampering was done. In the digital world, it's possible to forge and copy with much better fidelity than it is in the real world. In the real world, it takes masterful manipulation of real things.
In the digital world, it is only bits. Which can be hacked, copied, and played around with.
Which means that digital solutions have to be created to make hacking, copying, and forging that much harder. Not that it will be impossible, just that it will be more of a deterrent.
What parts of the world will the descent/burn be visible?
What parts of the world promise the best view? Will this be a nighttime thing, or a daytime thing?
Does anyone know?
The nick is a joke! Really!
Dunno why no one has mentioned this yet...
on
Keyless Keyboard
·
· Score: 3
This kind of setup would *rock* for Quake and FPS!
Can you imagine remapping it for gameplay?
Left hand controls direction movement; strafe left/right, move forward/backward
Right hand would be aiming; turn left/right, aim up/down
Or you could do the meta control, I guess;
If you could match this with a decent set of pedals; pedals would do forward/backward, left hand would be strafe left/right and 2 meta controls(weapon switching and jump/crouch?) while right hand would be freelook|weapon select/mode|jump/swim/crouch/duck/fly?
From browsing the web, quickly, it would seem that they can range from a few inches for a stamp sized 'reflector' to several feet for something the size of a sheet of paper.
I don't know how they plan to scan, though. Saturating a building with EM energy doesn't seem to smart. Perhaps a wand that directs energy towards the package would work, and just read the reflected energy.
"Where's Louis? Activate the building wide EM field generator!"
"Sir, the sensors indicate a response in location F12"
"Where is that?"
"He's in his cube, sir!"
Alternatively:
"Sir, sensors indicate his shirt is in location F4 and his pants are in location F7, and that his shoes are in location E1"
"What?!"
The nick is a joke! Really!
Process problem, not language problem!
on
Perl 6 Showcase
·
· Score: 2
I think you're maintainability problem is one that process fixes, not one that language fixes.
With this in place, you could literally design your own style guide, and code the way your group wants, the way it needs, without any problems, because Perl is so flexible.
Right now coders all over the world don't adhere to the same conventions. Everyone has their own styles, naming conventions, etc. This won't change that. What it does mean, though, is that because Perl would be a meta language, it could convceivably spit out clean code from various diverse code, as long as it could parse it properly!
It's a nickname, no more or less juvenile than Rico_Suave(Weird Al, maybe?) or 2nd Post! as our respective nicks.
I don't disagree that most games today will run on older hardware, but that cements the concept and idea that a console is a useful device. It is cheaper than a PC, and it will not be upgraded, and the games that come out 5 years from now will still be fun, because it is the game, and not the hardware, that is the gating factor in 'fun'.
Why is it nothing attacking the paper itself has been moderated up?
There was nothing scientific about how the 72+fps limit was calculated! As far a I can tell, the author judged by how much flicker he could perceive in the refresh of his monitor, to determine how much detail.
That's crap.
The refresh rate will only tell us about our persistence of vision effects. A refresh below a certain threshold does not trigger the POV to kick in, so that we can see the flashes of the monitor, whereas a refresh above that rate means our POV will start to blend the frames together.
The argument of 72fps doesn't limit the human visual system from seeing a fast moving object; if something traveling at a certain speed gets drawn on screen twice at 72fps, it will get drawn 4 times 140fps, and with a decent monitor at the right resolutions, those four frames should be seen on screen. The real argument, then, is whether the human reflex is fast enough to react to those 4 images (whether the visual system is fast enough to see all four frames, or just blur them together into one image, is irrelevant, I think). Can a person dodge a railgun?
Whether intentional or not, you have some bad information here.
Consoles have a very different mindset than a PC, where an analogy can be made with the difference between an oven and a microwave. There are superficial similarities, there are some overlaps, but mainly they fill two different functions in a household. Not a perfect analogy, but useful, I think.
A console is $200. For 5 or 6 years. That's it. PS2 will probably by $300. Add $40 for another controller, maybe $60 for some specialized add ons, and you've made an investment of $400 for 5 years.
A gaming PC, to be fair, costs about $800 today. I won't count a monitor into that cost, but hey, a 32" tv isn't a cheap thing either.
Across 5 years, lets say you upgrade memory, once, cuz M$ releases their next OS which requires twice the memory. And you up the HD, for similar reasons. Lets use today's prices, but cut in half, due to Moore's Law. That means 128mb will cost you $70, and a decent HD will cost you $150(I'm assuming disk size doubles, rather than price falling). Then let's say you upgrade your vid card once, to keep up with the M$ upgrade trend. Say another $200. That means in 5 years you can casually spend $1230, already twice what a console offers.
Then you also have to worry about drivers every 3 months(random period), about OS updates every year, and game patches every other week for the first 2 months of it's existence.
Whereas a console, you buy, plug in, and pop a game in, and you're set. Is that worth saving $600? I think so. I own both a PC and a console.
As for game price; Most PC games are about $40-$60, that I know of. Surprise, a 3cd set for the PSX is only $50! Year old games are $30, and 'classics' are $10-$20 (classics in the PC sense would be Civ, Doom, Quake, Alone in the Dark, etc)
Then there are used games ^^
Dunno, just a rebuttal, that even if a console isn't for the curmudgeon like you, it fits into the lifestyle of many (another analogy would be a boombox single unit CD player/stereo, and a component built audio system. Why buy a boombox for $200 when you can apply it to buying a better reciever, or a cd unit, or an amp, or speakers, etc?)
All your information will be stored in a cookie somewhere, all correlated, cross-referenced, and catalogued, so that when they need to do something, all they have to do is load your profile, and... click.
Of course, I'm not creative to actually list out what they would do to use or abuse this info. Of course, it's also late, and I'm not feeling particularly paranoid or creative, either...
I think what I was intending was that algorithms will eat all available CPU processes/resources, so that as CPUs double in speed, computation algorithms will also double in complexity, meaning a 1 minute video will take the same amount of time/memory/hardware price, regardless of how fast the CPU gets.
400MHz PowerPC vs 400MHz x86 is really irrelevant. It's the software written and optimized under each platform. Linux, for example, on a 400MHz x86 will blow away a 400MHz MacOS8 system trying to run Apache, for example.
It's the limitations of the OS; There are other limitations, too, of course, such as APIs, support, etc. Forget USB under NT, for example, or Firewire, unless you use Win2k. Linux doesn't do the game thing all that hot, not quite yet.
The x86 design, despite being crappy, kludgy, and non-embedded, is still winning due to engineering, marketing, and distribution ^^
They fall into the 'satisfies the consumer' and doesn't play the pissing game.
Not out of choice, mind you. I'm sure Apple would love to be able to out-piss Compaq, but for now, they are *forced* to settle for 400MHz, ATI video cards, etc.
And for that, we get fanless, floppyless, serialless systems at 1/3 premium prices.
What we have is an editor then that is not using it's available resources wisely.
Rendering will always be a time consuming process. It won't get faster. Rendering a fixed format, fixed resolution, fixed framerate video will get faster of course... but as CPUs get faster, more CPU intensive algorithms will appear, to get better resolution, higher quality, more effects, etc.
So upping CPU speed will gain you nothing, in the end. As for the 5GHz need to get a responsive app; then the app is probably going about it incorrectly. Any video app should probably be approaching the app as if everything were a proxy for the final, and none of the 'sources' get touched until a 'render' cycle is committed. That way you are only working with low memory, low resolution, fast, responsive interfaces. And when you go sleep, the rendering takes place, at infinite resolution, infinite quality, etc. At least, until you wake up!
We have Jon Katz for editorials, and Jamie for privacy/rights issues, and a handful of other regulars.
Likewise, despite the very grassroots-adhoc nature of the postings, they are too a form of publication, albeit communal in nature. It seems to work, but can improve, and by viewing it in this light more insight or changes/improvements may fall out.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right about that (just like SCSI is a luxury... or even a PC, to some extent.)
But within the next year, a PS2 will not be so far fetched (at least in the average US household), and a scanner at $180 is not too bad either. As a FireWire HD is only about 10% or so more expensive, their value add is pretty decent, for the flexibility. A camcorder, at about $1k, is still a little rich for most of America, but if Sony and Apple had their way, I'm pretty sure a FireWire'd household isn't too far off in the future.
The nick is a joke! Really!
63 devices, I think... maybe a repeater could allow for more devices?
The nick is a joke! Really!
Hey, in the same store I found the FireWire drives, an 80GB 100/ATA is $320.
Yeah, I needed to get another controller... but let me see you chain a scanner, camcorder, PS2(whatever good that is), an 6 hard disks to your built in controller? That's the limitation of your puny built in controller ^^
The nick is a joke! Really!
A 80gb FireWire drive is $369... A 45gb drive is $250
A FireWire controller is only $100...
Why aren't you using FireWire drives yet?
The nick is a joke! Really!
I own Ender's Shadow. I've read the 5 online chapters...
It seems to me that there is entirely too much self exposition by the character towards the readers. It makes it entirely too dry, to analytical, too heavy handed.
The first book had this way of grabbing you, of making you feel for Ender, of making you feel like you could be Ender.
I didn't have any such feelings for Bean (though he is admittedly difficult to relate to, given his nature), and no such feelings for Petra.
I don't feel any synergestic sympathy for the characters.
In fact, the person I felt the most for/with in the online chapters was Peter; if he becomes the main character in this book, perhaps we can recapture the same energies as the original Ender's Game.
The nick is a joke! Really!
What does this *research* offer us, you mean?
What was the point in researching electricity, 200 years ago? Nothing useful was built of it... for almost 200 years.
Yet if that research were not done, we would not have, in the intervening years, radio, speakers, solenoids, TVs, CPUs, etc.
So what will we have from C60 and buckyball research? No one knows... and that's all that can be said.
Do you want speculation? How about a different class of material? In one state superconducting, in another insulative, and in another, conducting? Different strength and material properties, maybe? How about a new class of allows using C60 instead of straight carbon? Or new optical devices using crystals doped with C60? It's sci fi, for now.
The nick is a joke! Really!
From dictionary.com, a definition of solipsism...
1.The theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified.
2.The theory or view that the self is the only reality.
As far as I understand it, this 3 dimensional world you speak of is a construct of the self called Cuthalion. Your statement then, that it is an excellent model for explaining everything, is the point of solipsism. That everything we know is just a model of reality, and that reality itself cannot be be known without our senses.
If I understand solipsism correctly, each person can only ascertain their own reality (by assuming that they trust their senses).
To share their reality with other people is another trust exchange. Once we have shared realities, we can construct another reality, a second level of reality, that we both believe because it fits with the first level personal model of reality.
Perhaps you can be more clear; what about solipsism don't you believe in?
The nick is a joke! Really!
How about some pointless speculation?
You're right that you can't make a mathematical proof, but you can make some reasonable/logical guesses...
Take bunch of digital data that represents a audio file. call it <A>.
Add a watermark to it, inaudible, but still detectable (we don't care how it's encoded, but in essence the data should be visible in the digital range. It'd be nice if speakers could not play it, but it's irrelevent.)
So now we have file <A+B>.
Let's now do something clever. We apply the latest, best, and tightest audio compression. Choose whatever you want, mp3, ogg, wma, etc.
We know that these algorithms work by throwing away data that cannot be heard. Frequency masking, volumetric masking, time phased masking, etc.
So we have that <B> is inaudible, already. Regardless of whether the <B> component is output by the speakers... MP3(<A+B>) => MP3(A)
So now we have a file that is, arguably, indistinguishable, from the original file <A>, and now no longer has watermark <B>
The conclusion? Watermarks can be removed without destroying the audible data. That's just how MP3 and such work. If one cannot remove watermarks, then the MP3 encoder must think the watermark is, well, audible!
We can always try to invert this 'proof',
The nick is a joke! Really!
I liked the comment on solipsism.
The only way to build more trust (not build trust, just more) into the system is if the digital signature captures the info of where it was created, when it was created, and what program it was created on. Timestamps and logs, essentially.
This just boils down into the whole trust issue, however. Someone somewhere must place trust into the system. For the signer, that the system works as it is proposed. For the unsigner, that the signer packaged and signed the parcel in good faith, and that no tampering was done. In the digital world, it's possible to forge and copy with much better fidelity than it is in the real world. In the real world, it takes masterful manipulation of real things.
In the digital world, it is only bits. Which can be hacked, copied, and played around with.
Which means that digital solutions have to be created to make hacking, copying, and forging that much harder. Not that it will be impossible, just that it will be more of a deterrent.
The nick is a joke! Really!
Other than, say Hawaii or Australia...
What parts of the world will the descent/burn be visible?
What parts of the world promise the best view? Will this be a nighttime thing, or a daytime thing?
Does anyone know?
The nick is a joke! Really!
This kind of setup would *rock* for Quake and FPS!
Can you imagine remapping it for gameplay?
Left hand controls direction movement; strafe left/right, move forward/backward
Right hand would be aiming; turn left/right, aim up/down
Or you could do the meta control, I guess;
If you could match this with a decent set of pedals; pedals would do forward/backward, left hand would be strafe left/right and 2 meta controls(weapon switching and jump/crouch?) while right hand would be freelook|weapon select/mode|jump/swim/crouch/duck/fly?
The nick is a joke! Really!
I've heard this said really well, eloquent and all, before:
A vote for Nader (or Browne or Buchanen) is not a vote for Bush.
If Gore wanted our votes, he should have championed our issues!
Likewise, if Bush wanted our votes.
It just so happens that our votes were for our consciences and our ideals, and not for Bush or Gore.
The nick is a joke! Really!
From browsing the web, quickly, it would seem that they can range from a few inches for a stamp sized 'reflector' to several feet for something the size of a sheet of paper.
I don't know how they plan to scan, though. Saturating a building with EM energy doesn't seem to smart. Perhaps a wand that directs energy towards the package would work, and just read the reflected energy.
The nick is a joke! Really!
My boss could find me anywhere he wanted?
"Where's Louis? Activate the building wide EM field generator!"
"Sir, the sensors indicate a response in location F12"
"Where is that?"
"He's in his cube, sir!"
Alternatively:
"Sir, sensors indicate his shirt is in location F4 and his pants are in location F7, and that his shoes are in location E1"
"What?!"
The nick is a joke! Really!
I think you're maintainability problem is one that process fixes, not one that language fixes.
With this in place, you could literally design your own style guide, and code the way your group wants, the way it needs, without any problems, because Perl is so flexible.
Right now coders all over the world don't adhere to the same conventions. Everyone has their own styles, naming conventions, etc. This won't change that. What it does mean, though, is that because Perl would be a meta language, it could convceivably spit out clean code from various diverse code, as long as it could parse it properly!
The nick is a joke! Really!
It's a nickname, no more or less juvenile than Rico_Suave(Weird Al, maybe?) or 2nd Post! as our respective nicks.
I don't disagree that most games today will run on older hardware, but that cements the concept and idea that a console is a useful device. It is cheaper than a PC, and it will not be upgraded, and the games that come out 5 years from now will still be fun, because it is the game, and not the hardware, that is the gating factor in 'fun'.
The nick is a joke! Really!
Why is it nothing attacking the paper itself has been moderated up?
There was nothing scientific about how the 72+fps limit was calculated! As far a I can tell, the author judged by how much flicker he could perceive in the refresh of his monitor, to determine how much detail.
That's crap.
The refresh rate will only tell us about our persistence of vision effects. A refresh below a certain threshold does not trigger the POV to kick in, so that we can see the flashes of the monitor, whereas a refresh above that rate means our POV will start to blend the frames together.
The argument of 72fps doesn't limit the human visual system from seeing a fast moving object; if something traveling at a certain speed gets drawn on screen twice at 72fps, it will get drawn 4 times 140fps, and with a decent monitor at the right resolutions, those four frames should be seen on screen. The real argument, then, is whether the human reflex is fast enough to react to those 4 images (whether the visual system is fast enough to see all four frames, or just blur them together into one image, is irrelevant, I think). Can a person dodge a railgun?
Well, at least that's my 2cents
The nick is a joke! Really!
Whether intentional or not, you have some bad information here.
Consoles have a very different mindset than a PC, where an analogy can be made with the difference between an oven and a microwave. There are superficial similarities, there are some overlaps, but mainly they fill two different functions in a household. Not a perfect analogy, but useful, I think.
A console is $200. For 5 or 6 years. That's it. PS2 will probably by $300. Add $40 for another controller, maybe $60 for some specialized add ons, and you've made an investment of $400 for 5 years.
A gaming PC, to be fair, costs about $800 today. I won't count a monitor into that cost, but hey, a 32" tv isn't a cheap thing either.
Across 5 years, lets say you upgrade memory, once, cuz M$ releases their next OS which requires twice the memory. And you up the HD, for similar reasons. Lets use today's prices, but cut in half, due to Moore's Law. That means 128mb will cost you $70, and a decent HD will cost you $150(I'm assuming disk size doubles, rather than price falling). Then let's say you upgrade your vid card once, to keep up with the M$ upgrade trend. Say another $200. That means in 5 years you can casually spend $1230, already twice what a console offers.
Then you also have to worry about drivers every 3 months(random period), about OS updates every year, and game patches every other week for the first 2 months of it's existence.
Whereas a console, you buy, plug in, and pop a game in, and you're set. Is that worth saving $600? I think so. I own both a PC and a console.
As for game price; Most PC games are about $40-$60, that I know of. Surprise, a 3cd set for the PSX is only $50! Year old games are $30, and 'classics' are $10-$20 (classics in the PC sense would be Civ, Doom, Quake, Alone in the Dark, etc)
Then there are used games ^^
Dunno, just a rebuttal, that even if a console isn't for the curmudgeon like you, it fits into the lifestyle of many (another analogy would be a boombox single unit CD player/stereo, and a component built audio system. Why buy a boombox for $200 when you can apply it to buying a better reciever, or a cd unit, or an amp, or speakers, etc?)
The nick is a joke! Really!
Though the definition isn't something I can explain, it's an mpeg format.
I sorta thought the context of the article made that pretty clear?
<em>and multicast live in h.261, mpeg-1 and mpeg-2</em>
Though I guess it isn't obvious.
The nick is a joke! Really!
One-click govt!
All your information will be stored in a cookie somewhere, all correlated, cross-referenced, and catalogued, so that when they need to do something, all they have to do is load your profile, and... click.
Of course, I'm not creative to actually list out what they would do to use or abuse this info. Of course, it's also late, and I'm not feeling particularly paranoid or creative, either...
The nick is a joke! Really!
I think what I was intending was that algorithms will eat all available CPU processes/resources, so that as CPUs double in speed, computation algorithms will also double in complexity, meaning a 1 minute video will take the same amount of time/memory/hardware price, regardless of how fast the CPU gets.
The nick is a joke! Really!
400MHz PowerPC vs 400MHz x86 is really irrelevant. It's the software written and optimized under each platform. Linux, for example, on a 400MHz x86 will blow away a 400MHz MacOS8 system trying to run Apache, for example.
It's the limitations of the OS; There are other limitations, too, of course, such as APIs, support, etc. Forget USB under NT, for example, or Firewire, unless you use Win2k. Linux doesn't do the game thing all that hot, not quite yet.
The x86 design, despite being crappy, kludgy, and non-embedded, is still winning due to engineering, marketing, and distribution ^^
The nick is a joke! Really!
They fall into the 'satisfies the consumer' and doesn't play the pissing game.
Not out of choice, mind you. I'm sure Apple would love to be able to out-piss Compaq, but for now, they are *forced* to settle for 400MHz, ATI video cards, etc.
And for that, we get fanless, floppyless, serialless systems at 1/3 premium prices.
The nick is a joke! Really!
What we have is an editor then that is not using it's available resources wisely.
Rendering will always be a time consuming process. It won't get faster. Rendering a fixed format, fixed resolution, fixed framerate video will get faster of course... but as CPUs get faster, more CPU intensive algorithms will appear, to get better resolution, higher quality, more effects, etc.
So upping CPU speed will gain you nothing, in the end. As for the 5GHz need to get a responsive app; then the app is probably going about it incorrectly. Any video app should probably be approaching the app as if everything were a proxy for the final, and none of the 'sources' get touched until a 'render' cycle is committed. That way you are only working with low memory, low resolution, fast, responsive interfaces. And when you go sleep, the rendering takes place, at infinite resolution, infinite quality, etc. At least, until you wake up!
The nick is a joke! Really!
We have Jon Katz for editorials, and Jamie for privacy/rights issues, and a handful of other regulars.
Likewise, despite the very grassroots-adhoc nature of the postings, they are too a form of publication, albeit communal in nature. It seems to work, but can improve, and by viewing it in this light more insight or changes/improvements may fall out.
The nick is a joke! Really!