Using liquid nitrogen, while expensive, will certainly save money. Our current power grid can lose twenty percent or more power in transit. Keeping a constant flow of liquid nitrogen is pittances compared to the enormous savings of a 25% increase in power distribution. That's a LOT of power. Granted, we won't reap the benefits of this until after much of the United States has better power cabling, but this is just a start. |JH|
I wonder though. The article says 1200 feet...one would think the vast majority of your "twenty percent" (although it surprises me that it could really be so high) is either in the megawatt long-distance things (what you drive next to and oooh at), or else power loss in house wiring or in downstepping the current to it. Between the two, relatively little of the length of wire that's in our power grid is over distances of 1200 feet...and if you started doing ALL wiring with this system, it would get really expensive. The way to do the estimation right is to figure out:
Over which "type" of wiring are we looking at the most significant power loss?
How much of this is convertible to superconducting?
What is the percent loss in power?
What is the current cost of power?
What is the current 'marginal' (ie. minus base overhead, looking at what "one more foot" would cost) cost/foot of carrying the power?
What is the 'marginal' "superconducting" cost/foot of carrying the power?
What is the base cost to setting up an area with superconducting?
What is the running cost of superconducting? (In this case keeping a flow of liquid nitrogen).
Give me these data and I'll tell you whether it's worth it -- or even remotely feasible. If it's something like "damn-near break even" then it's probably a good sign -- this is first-generation stuff. From what I know about silver-clad HTS ceramic ribbons, though (ha!), I would guess that this is unreasonable expensive technology. ~
I've XP beta 2 and Mandrake 8.0 on one harddrive, and both boot fine, using the nice mandrake bootmenu. So where's the beef?
Well, you missed what was said about only the sixty-four bit versions of XP having a problem. Read above posts. But I'm very interested in what you as a linuxer (ie computer god) think about XP. Will you reply with some thoughts? ~
The serial connection is required to activate the stereoscopic view, syncing and activating the illumination plane. Without the serial connection, or communications on your COM port with the DTI software, you won't get 3D.
and
However, the most important expectation that the 2015XLS places on the user is that it requires you to keep an eye on a small red light positioned on the bottom right hand corner of the display. This light cues you whether you are sitting in the right position for 3D viewing or not. If you can see the light then you are not, and the most frustrating thing about the display is constantly having to be aware of this.
Don't do it! Think about it people!!!
They're practically saying:
"Don't worry, you can continue using the monitor just fine. In exchange for the 3D effect, though, you'll need to agree to sit in the exact center in front of your monitor -- yes, that's right -- and a red dot will become visible if you move out of the way, just as a "friendly reminder". The monitor also needs to be able to interface with our software through the serial port. You might notice a slight drop in bandwidth, but don't mind the mpg files being uploaded to carnivore.fbi.com...it's just syncing with our central servers to accomodate for the, uh, curvature of the Earth or whatever. Anyway, look at this cool sample picture! Isn't it 3D-y?"
...This article[1] posted today.
Monster.com is very visa-friendly, and the article should give you good tips on how to search for H-1B visas (and others) on it.
I know here in Boston monster.com is a wonderful resource -- found me my job at least.
I've frequently thought about how cool it would be if we could think of a "legitimate" use for the Gnutella network
If you've had the software around as long as Gnutella's been around and you're still trying to come up with a legitimate use for it, it's my opinion that you've already lost.
Legitimate: wholly legal. Tell me: what content do you share on Gnutella that is in the public domain or freely distributable? Open source stuff is faster to download from their servers. Same with most other "legitimate" things: the reason we use Gnutella is because servers serving illegal stuff get shut down. I really am interested in hearing what examples you might be thinking of. ~
Sure this thing runs off rotting organic waste but a tank full of a certain ex-girlfriend's hash brown casserole would kill it like sugar in the tank of a gas powered car.
Yes Susan, I only said I liked it to get you in the sack:)
Gord
Dear Susan,
I just want you to know I'm thinking of you. A few minutes ago I was reminded once more of our many lovely weeks together, as I digested the last of what I can only conclude must have been your hash brown casserole from March of 97. I hope you are enjoying the fresh spring air, I know I am: all windows here are now open until the memory of you dissipates a little.
Love,
John. ~
The software, which is due to be unveiled in July, uses a combination of encryption and a Gnutella-like network...'
I've frequently thought about how cool it would be if we could think of a "legitimate" use for the Gnutella network, so that
an ISP can't possibly feel itself justified in shutting down anyone shoving gigabits through the Gnutella port (you've already heard about this probably...), and
so the Government can't try to stop Gnutella (company?) from distributing Gnutella software (it wouldn't matter if it did: Gnutella's already out there and since it's P2P the government can't do anything to get gnutella company to shut down the service, but:)
Or worse, to try to go after the users and to make it illegal to use gnutella! (Which isn't so farfetched...)
The government or RIAA can say today, "Look, there's no justification for using gnutella since it's basically only used for piracy, so anyone that's shoving data over it has every reason to be denied that right."
But if we could say: "Uh, actually, it's just a distributed internet surfing system with encryption, which also happens to work as file-sharing as part of its distribution scheme, since it doesn't differentiate between html documents and binary documents, which isn't a meaningful distinction anyway since you can MIME encode anything into html if you want,"
THEN the government will be forced to say: "well hot-damn. We can't have ISPs shutting down distributed information sharing, which is the only thing WEB-SURFING can be construed as, since it would be a denial of freedom of speech (denial of right to know. Freeedom of speech, although IANAL, only is a meaningful right as long as those who want to listen to you have the right to listen to you.)
There's little the Government or any ISP could say against "It must be encrypted so that the information becomes available to users under a totalitarian regime. It must be distributed so that that regime cannot shut down a web server and cause the source of the information to cease."
The upshot: the government, your ISP, the RIAA, etc, etc, will have NO way of keeping the ENCRYPTED, DISTRIBUTED, "stuff" that you share from happening to be pirated. They can shut down Gnutella of today to some extent by making the software illegal to own, since they would be fairly justified in saying that it is used almost exclusively for illegal purposes. If you started doing web surfing over it, there is no such argument.
For this reason alone, all of us should start doing all of our surfing through this new system as soon as it's featurey enough.
Besides, at the very least, if we started doing that, then whatever we do websurf will be hidden from our ISP by being encrypted, and documents will probably come over much faster under a distributed system. Well, static documents would at least. Maybe this system would also serve to route you around faster, mimicking IPV6, so we could still do better to use it than surf straight. There's no limit to how much good we could get from doing all of our surfing through a distributed, encrypted system, and since the fact that it would make piracy easy is an inherent but small side-effect, it would mean that no one could stop it.
Long Live the Freeedom to Rip Artists Off!
(Which I happen to disagree with, but to a far less extent than I do with the RIAA's trying to force us not to share our files. If artists included an address to send money to in the extended descriptions fields of their MP3's [yes, artists should distribute their own mp3s], I know that I for one would take advantage of it and give them their due. As it is, it's far too much trouble and far too much of what I would pay would go straight to the record industry's pocket. That reminds me of a joke, which is actually a good analogy for why we share name-brand artists instead of no-name artists, even though name-brand artists are being whored out by the record industry.) ~
The past month on Slashdot, a disportionate number of posts have been marked +5 Interesting. In the past, +5 Interesting has been reserved for especially well written and clued in posts. Slashdot needs to change either the number of people receiving moderation points or increase the maximum a post can be rated to 10. If this were to take effect, I could simply read the 5-6 best written or insightful comments instead of the posts people feel they have to waste their mod points on.
(just my drunken rambling)
Well, I don't know about you, but I've been getting mod points like every two or three days lately. I think The Gods (TM) decided that moderation would work better if everone always got to moderate. Think of it this way: moderation USED to work pretty well on slashdot, and that was when you only had mod points occasionally! Why, if you give EVERYONE mod points ALWAYS, it's bound to work even BETTER, no? The more moderation, the more thoroughly moderated the discussion. And thoroughly moderated discussions are Good Things.
The other possibility I can think of is that within the past month a shipload of fake accounts came into fruition (you know how you can't moderate for a long time while your account is "new"?) I've always thought it would be cool to set up some scripts to generate a few hundred accounts and to actually make them intelligently enough spoofed so that slashdot can't tell they're not people. Then, as soon as they can start to moderate, five to ten are guaranteed to be moderators at any given time and then I can find some old threads of mine no one will look at and moderate them up to hell. Of course, usually this thirty-second daydream ends with the thought: "and then what? get fifty karma? Dude, you're such a loser!":) (Especially because I already have 22 and that's just because I'm lazy. It really doesn't take a lot to get mod points. One easy way is to go to the less-visited parts, like ask slashdot, and just spend fifteen minutes with google and in formulating a very obvious opinion that you can linkage to death. You're guaranteeed to get +5. At least the three times I did it. Gets boring after awhile.)
Anyway, even though the Karma isn't worth it for me, nor the power especially of being able to bitch-slap whoever, I bet some other people did that a few months back and we're starting to see the fruit of their loins, or something.
Off-topic: the quote on the bottom of my page says now, "There is one way to find out if a man is honest -- ask him. If he says "Yes" you know he is crooked. -- Groucho Marx". A more mathematical way to arrive at a (more guaranteed-correct) answer is to ask the man whether he WOULD say he's honest IF you asked him. Then his answer is in fact the truth.:) ~
I mod'd you up on a different thread just for answering me. I hate typing something long out and only getting one reply, even if I/do/ get mod'd to 5:). ~
Our company is developing software for true "gesture recognition". Basically, it takes a number of arbitrary points of view (from higher-quality [not "web"] cameras) and calculates the location of three-space objects from them. The only "set-up" hardware-wise is holding up a calibrator (a scepter-like) device by its handle and pressing a button to mechanically (the mechanics so far are just toy-like, the important aspect to the calibrater is its gradations, a proprietary system serving the purpose of interlocking rulers) turn it 360 degrees a couple of times. It doesn't even matter if you move it while you do it, as long as you don't move it too fast to have distinct, clear frames. As long as there is a line of sight between the cameras and the calibrator, the software will be able to calculate their positions relative to the calibrator. Afterward, our software is able to keep a running matrix of all three-space that is visible to at least two cameras. Using five cameras, it's possible to have more or less a total view (well, total opaque view) of the three-space in front of your monitor, for instance, and the one out of the five cameras is only necessary when you happen to be blocking one of the other necessary ones. All this is very processor-intensive, but so far it's very straight-forward. Basically, simple trigonometry. We haven't been working on optimizing tricks, since our 800 quad xeon test server already does 30 frames per second with five cameras at 800 by 600. So our process looks like this:
Synchronize a "frame" from the point of view of every camera. You must already know their "absolute" positions, which is relative to some zero-point. (Determined by the original location of the calibrator).
For each pixel that a given camera sees:
Assume that you are seeing a pixel at the nearest point that the second camera in your stereo set could also see. To draw a human comparison, bring your finger closer and closer to your eye, until with your other eye it passes the line of your nose and you can't see it anymore. This is the "closest point".
Calculate where this point would appear in the other camera, as well as the sorrounding blocks of pixels, and see whether it matches what the other camera in the stero pair actually sees.
If it doesn't match, assume that it must be farther than you initially assume. Repeat process.
Repeat until you "converge"...ie, get images where many pixels in the area "line up" as calculated by the assumption that they are at absolute point x,y,z. This process actually is very similar to what your eye does if you ever notice when it's scanning for how far away something is. At first it assumes it's close, then keeps looking farther and farther away until the two images are brought together. Your brain is the only thing bringing the two images together! Your eyes are still an inch point five apart, silly.:) In the same way, for each pixel (or rather, group of pixels large enough to identify a small area on an object), our software's "brain" converges the image for various distances until it finds a match.
If you cannot find a match, assume that the other camera in the pair is not seeing that particular pixel, either because something near you is blocking the nearest area that the other camera is seeing, or because something near the other camera is blocking the line of sight that goes to what you're seeing, or because it's outside the line of sight of another camera entirely. This last is easiest because you don't even need to scan the pixels you know only one camera sees.
Repeat this process for each stereo pair.
Assemble every picture you have an absolute coordinate from (that a stereo pair can see) into a three-space.
Note that I've left out such things as massaging the image from different cameras in various ways (color, brightness, etc) to get them near, using more or less fuzzy "matches" depending on how much you might expect an object to differ at different angles, and calculating lighting sources based on the calibrator. While these are serious issues, they're really basic math stuff that's well-explored in the field of optical recognition, and it's basically a cut-and-paste of components, and, like I said, a $5,000 server can do thirty frames per second without having any graphics hardware specifically enabled for this stuff. The number of three-space "pixels" it ends up getting varies with conditions, but you can always do well enough to read standard braille that's reasonably close in proximity (1.5 feet) to a stereo pair of cameras. Needless to say, there are more useful applications to these kinds of technology than reading braille on your computer screen:). This leads me to the real area we're flinging resources at: Developing a gesture recognition system. I did not mean to outline everything I did above, but it really is not involved, and a lot more viable than some people think. Anyway, the interesting thing about the three-space that you develop from the process above is that it is very easily analyzable. Not only do you have a solid "block" of where pixels are, but it's easy to tell lines that separate, for instance, individual fingers that overlap. In fact, the human brain uses more picture analysis than stereoscopic analysis, and our system is actually more precise than the human brain at finding the exact location of a point two or three feet away relative to a point near it, compared with the human brain, if you are given no color clues! When looking at a hand, therefore, we can pretty take the basic shape of a hand and (here is where we get tricky) apply a very fuzzy algorithm for fitting it to the hand that we actually see. It is "fuzzy" almost to the extent of being neural-netty (although we control it very much), since it not only needs to choose between an infinite number of ways that two hands can contort themselves, but also learn the size of individual aspects of it (which changes slightly), and their shape, and for this purpose also takes into account where the hand "used" to be in the previous frame, how fast it was moving over the previous few frames, and how likely it is to move in a certain way, with respect to speed and with respect to what positions are unnatural. All this is necessary to get 30 frames per second, because we aren't just interested in the "position" of the hand, but its important aspects (the relative bend in each joint). To test, we have another application that is ONLY given the absolute position of hands and the relative joints we are measuring, and then reconstructs the hands visually. You can therefore have all three programs running, the stereoscopic analyzer feeding the hand-position recognizer data, and the hand-position recognizer feeding the renderer data, so that your screen shows how the renderer is getting the info about where your hands are. Mostly, however you move your hands will be reflected on the screen, but if you move it very quickly and unusually you can still confuse the hand-position analyzer and get an image that's out of sync with what your hand actually is doing. This is independent of the stereoscopic anaylzer, which comes up with the correct data, which if you feed directly to the renderer you see always matches what your hand is doing, at 30 fps.
So now I've outlined how we get the position of joints, which includes quite a bit of fuzziness. But by far the most fuzziness is not in this, but in the actual "recognition" of a GESTURE. We've already gotten the first-generation information about what a gesture is by spending several hours each in front of a test server set up for it, already equipped with a popular voice command system, and agreeing to surf the web and do various other tasks the voice command system is equipped for (we didn't make that, it's just purchased off the floor somewhere) while also doing the gesture we have set up for each command. So we end up with "sample" gestures to analyze, and have already manually looked at the major indicators and drawn them up and programmed them. The way we have done the first time is very crude, however, eyeing as we have each sample ourselves, but we are now in the process of collecting second-generation information, so that when a user successfully uses a gesture and doesn't complain that it wasn't what he wanted, that particular instance of gesturing gets put into the database of gesturing instances associated with a gesture, and we are developing fuzzy logic to link these gestures more closely and reliably. The gestures make sense for the most part, such as having your right thumb open to the left with your other fingers closed, in a quick leftward motion to go back, or up and with a quick rightward motion to be right. Stopping is pushing your palm forward toward the screen, closed a window is putting your finger and thumb together and drawing your hand back, as if you're flicking the window away, and refresh is a sweeping gesture with your palm toward you, from bottom left toward top-right (only a small part of the way). The software recognizes a "gesture" because you perform it particularly fast and deliberately, so if you playing with your hands slowly, it doesn't misrecognize any of these.
Anyway I'm getting really tired of typing all this, and even though there is much, much, more, I'm just kidding. Wouldn't all this be cool though?
Dude, that's my whole point. None of the things I pointed out made any sense, and I purposefully left in some things in my reply that a grammarian could point to and say "could be better". it's a fucking joke:)) ~
The article begins "One way to learn to deployment Tomcat web applications is to explain fully the steps required to deploy a Tomcat web application manually."
What kind of English is that? I don't usually nitpick over grammar, but when there is stuff like that going on in the first paragraph I have to wonder if the rest is worth reading.
Grammatical errors in original:
The article says "deployment" whereas it means "deploy."
That is all.
Grammatical errors in your reply:
What kind of English is that?: You mean "sort", not "kind". You are not referring to its formal classifications.
I don't usually nitpick over grammar: It is incorrect to split your verb from its auxiliary by more words than "not".
The idiom "to nitpick" properly takes "about", not "over" as its preposition. You mean "Usually, I don't nitpick about grammar".
when there is stuff like that going on : "Stuff" doesn't "go on". If you were clear in your thinking you would not conclude that one error in the original is worth a rant on your part. If you did continue to believe it, however, you should write: "when there are mistakes of such a severity in the first paragraph alone".
I have to wonder if the rest is worth reading. Whether, not if. Say: "I have to wonder whether the rest is worth reading."
Hypocrite, take first the beam out of thine own eye, and then
thou shalt see clearly to take out the mote that [is] in thy brother's eye.
Humph. ~
However, this is not off-topic, since I do mention that this accelorator was originally planned to be 2.4 miles longer in circumference, but then the economy went down and they couldn't hire enough carpenters.
When I first read the headline "CPUC Tells Northpoint To Restart Network" (as opposed to "Re-start"), I thought that it literally said 'restart', as in like: "reboot already!"
That's pretty funny: "CPUC Tells Northpoint to Reboot, Please".
No? Well maybe that's why I'm not a moderator. (At least not on this thread anymore:])
Seems to me some days the only way we can justify the things we do against a living being that feels pain, in the case specifically of animal agriculture that puts animals into visible agony (still existant if not so prevalent as in the days of Sinclair Lewis's [whose btw was the quote-of-the-day when I was looking at this page (Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless. -- Sinclair Lewis )] "The Jungle"), is by saying that "we are human, you are not." This reasoning illuminates two important considerations:
The moral positions of the majority of us hinge intimately on condoning "human bigotry", and would have to be re-evaluated if we come into contact with another race that we must accept as having the same rights. (As some of us have already accepted that it is the right of any animal that can feel pain not to be made to feel pain).
The above reasoning can be the result only of an inveterate programmer, who alone are able to parse such sentences--the kind no self-respecting English teacher could so much as look at without becoming violently sick.
I'd like to see an actual 3D image with no glass case and no rotating display screen. Now that would be something. This just makes me yawn. A neat toy... big deal.
Let me ask you this. Are you in front of a CRT monitor right now? Well re-read this when you are.
Now look at your CRT monitor carefully. Pretty big, isn't it? A lot deeper than the < one millimeter of actual image that you see, isn't it? Basically, if you imagine this same box with the 600rpm spinning-type thing, you would get the same image you get now, only actually 3D. And you could view it from six sides. Dude, you cannot even imagine what this would mean for a gui. Go ahead. Stare at your CRT and imagine what it would be like to have this kind of resolution in true "snow-globe" depth. If you're on windows, imagine dragging your mouse over a button, and using your scroll wheel to make it literally move back, staying in the same 2d space. Then, in the 2-D space it was before, (be looking at a button now), imagine seeing in the recess four long sides drawing backwards toward it, and those sides being filled with information. A single button (stare at one now!) could hold as much information as a half-screen JPEG. Only there is not just a single button. There is a whole screen's worth. And side views to boot.
When you say jaded, you are not thinking.
Listen to me very carefully: there is no technical limitation that keeps us from rotating a relatively small number of concurrent pixels, small and close, into filling all of a given 3-dimensional space. Hell, Moron, the same thing is happening unmechanically in your CRT right now! A laser is painting one and only one pixel at a time. Now imagine the laser painting not just the edge of your monitor, but every pixel within it, via a physically moving apparatus that is at that location to pick up the laser. Nothing says it can't be done. The implications are vast and illimitable. Shut the fuck up.
Slashdot Mirror
- Over which "type" of wiring are we looking at the most significant power loss?
- How much of this is convertible to superconducting?
- What is the percent loss in power?
- What is the current cost of power?
- What is the current 'marginal' (ie. minus base overhead, looking at what "one more foot" would cost) cost/foot of carrying the power?
- What is the 'marginal' "superconducting" cost/foot of carrying the power?
- What is the base cost to setting up an area with superconducting?
- What is the running cost of superconducting? (In this case keeping a flow of liquid nitrogen).
Give me these data and I'll tell you whether it's worth it -- or even remotely feasible. If it's something like "damn-near break even" then it's probably a good sign -- this is first-generation stuff. From what I know about silver-clad HTS ceramic ribbons, though (ha!), I would guess that this is unreasonable expensive technology.~
Thanks. I was thinking something along the lines of http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/guide/featu res.asp though, to see what the big deal is. From that, it doesn't seem worth beans.
~
I've XP beta 2 and Mandrake 8.0 on one harddrive, and both boot fine, using the nice mandrake bootmenu. So where's the beef?
Well, you missed what was said about only the sixty-four bit versions of XP having a problem. Read above posts. But I'm very interested in what you as a linuxer (ie computer god) think about XP. Will you reply with some thoughts?
~
It's a joke.
~
They're practically saying:
"Don't worry, you can continue using the monitor just fine. In exchange for the 3D effect, though, you'll need to agree to sit in the exact center in front of your monitor -- yes, that's right -- and a red dot will become visible if you move out of the way, just as a "friendly reminder". The monitor also needs to be able to interface with our software through the serial port. You might notice a slight drop in bandwidth, but don't mind the mpg files being uploaded to carnivore.fbi.com...it's just syncing with our central servers to accomodate for the, uh, curvature of the Earth or whatever. Anyway, look at this cool sample picture! Isn't it 3D-y?"
Big Brother is watching.
~
Monster.com is very visa-friendly, and the article should give you good tips on how to search for H-1B visas (and others) on it.
I know here in Boston monster.com is a wonderful resource -- found me my job at least.
[1] http://technology.monster.com/articles/us.
~
A penny to anyone that finds out the proposed street price for the media on this thing. And I'm not kidding.
~
~
I just want you to know I'm thinking of you. A few minutes ago I was reminded once more of our many lovely weeks together, as I digested the last of what I can only conclude must have been your hash brown casserole from March of 97. I hope you are enjoying the fresh spring air, I know I am: all windows here are now open until the memory of you dissipates a little.
Love,
John.
~
~
- an ISP can't possibly feel itself justified in shutting down anyone shoving gigabits through the Gnutella port (you've already heard about this probably...), and
- so the Government can't try to stop Gnutella (company?) from distributing Gnutella software (it wouldn't matter if it did: Gnutella's already out there and since it's P2P the government can't do anything to get gnutella company to shut down the service, but:)
- Or worse, to try to go after the users and to make it illegal to use gnutella! (Which isn't so farfetched...)
The government or RIAA can say today, "Look, there's no justification for using gnutella since it's basically only used for piracy, so anyone that's shoving data over it has every reason to be denied that right."But if we could say: "Uh, actually, it's just a distributed internet surfing system with encryption, which also happens to work as file-sharing as part of its distribution scheme, since it doesn't differentiate between html documents and binary documents, which isn't a meaningful distinction anyway since you can MIME encode anything into html if you want,"
THEN the government will be forced to say: "well hot-damn. We can't have ISPs shutting down distributed information sharing, which is the only thing WEB-SURFING can be construed as, since it would be a denial of freedom of speech (denial of right to know. Freeedom of speech, although IANAL, only is a meaningful right as long as those who want to listen to you have the right to listen to you.)
There's little the Government or any ISP could say against "It must be encrypted so that the information becomes available to users under a totalitarian regime. It must be distributed so that that regime cannot shut down a web server and cause the source of the information to cease."
The upshot: the government, your ISP, the RIAA, etc, etc, will have NO way of keeping the ENCRYPTED, DISTRIBUTED, "stuff" that you share from happening to be pirated. They can shut down Gnutella of today to some extent by making the software illegal to own, since they would be fairly justified in saying that it is used almost exclusively for illegal purposes. If you started doing web surfing over it, there is no such argument.
For this reason alone, all of us should start doing all of our surfing through this new system as soon as it's featurey enough.
Besides, at the very least, if we started doing that, then whatever we do websurf will be hidden from our ISP by being encrypted, and documents will probably come over much faster under a distributed system. Well, static documents would at least. Maybe this system would also serve to route you around faster, mimicking IPV6, so we could still do better to use it than surf straight. There's no limit to how much good we could get from doing all of our surfing through a distributed, encrypted system, and since the fact that it would make piracy easy is an inherent but small side-effect, it would mean that no one could stop it.
Long Live the Freeedom to Rip Artists Off!
(Which I happen to disagree with, but to a far less extent than I do with the RIAA's trying to force us not to share our files. If artists included an address to send money to in the extended descriptions fields of their MP3's [yes, artists should distribute their own mp3s], I know that I for one would take advantage of it and give them their due. As it is, it's far too much trouble and far too much of what I would pay would go straight to the record industry's pocket. That reminds me of a joke, which is actually a good analogy for why we share name-brand artists instead of no-name artists, even though name-brand artists are being whored out by the record industry.)
~
The other possibility I can think of is that within the past month a shipload of fake accounts came into fruition (you know how you can't moderate for a long time while your account is "new"?) I've always thought it would be cool to set up some scripts to generate a few hundred accounts and to actually make them intelligently enough spoofed so that slashdot can't tell they're not people. Then, as soon as they can start to moderate, five to ten are guaranteed to be moderators at any given time and then I can find some old threads of mine no one will look at and moderate them up to hell. Of course, usually this thirty-second daydream ends with the thought: "and then what? get fifty karma? Dude, you're such a loser!"
Anyway, even though the Karma isn't worth it for me, nor the power especially of being able to bitch-slap whoever, I bet some other people did that a few months back and we're starting to see the fruit of their loins, or something.
Off-topic: the quote on the bottom of my page says now, "There is one way to find out if a man is honest -- ask him. If he says "Yes" you know he is crooked. -- Groucho Marx". A more mathematical way to arrive at a (more guaranteed-correct) answer is to ask the man whether he WOULD say he's honest IF you asked him. Then his answer is in fact the truth. :)
~
In fact, every symmetric encyryption algorithm's sole purpose is to assist napster, right? We should already be suing them!
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I mod'd you up on a different thread just for answering me. I hate typing something long out and only getting one reply, even if I /do/ get mod'd to 5 :).
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- Synchronize a "frame" from the point of view of every camera. You must already know their "absolute" positions, which is relative to some zero-point. (Determined by the original location of the calibrator).
- For each pixel that a given camera sees:
- Assume that you are seeing a pixel at the nearest point that the second camera in your stereo set could also see. To draw a human comparison, bring your finger closer and closer to your eye, until with your other eye it passes the line of your nose and you can't see it anymore. This is the "closest point".
- Calculate where this point would appear in the other camera, as well as the sorrounding blocks of pixels, and see whether it matches what the other camera in the stero pair actually sees.
- If it doesn't match, assume that it must be farther than you initially assume. Repeat process.
- Repeat until you "converge"...ie, get images where many pixels in the area "line up" as calculated by the assumption that they are at absolute point x,y,z. This process actually is very similar to what your eye does if you ever notice when it's scanning for how far away something is. At first it assumes it's close, then keeps looking farther and farther away until the two images are brought together. Your brain is the only thing bringing the two images together! Your eyes are still an inch point five apart, silly.
:) In the same way, for each pixel (or rather, group of pixels large enough to identify a small area on an object), our software's "brain" converges the image for various distances until it finds a match.
- If you cannot find a match, assume that the other camera in the pair is not seeing that particular pixel, either because something near you is blocking the nearest area that the other camera is seeing, or because something near the other camera is blocking the line of sight that goes to what you're seeing, or because it's outside the line of sight of another camera entirely. This last is easiest because you don't even need to scan the pixels you know only one camera sees.
- Repeat this process for each stereo pair.
- Assemble every picture you have an absolute coordinate from (that a stereo pair can see) into a three-space.
Note that I've left out such things as massaging the image from different cameras in various ways (color, brightness, etc) to get them near, using more or less fuzzy "matches" depending on how much you might expect an object to differ at different angles, and calculating lighting sources based on the calibrator. While these are serious issues, they're really basic math stuff that's well-explored in the field of optical recognition, and it's basically a cut-and-paste of components, and, like I said, a $5,000 server can do thirty frames per second without having any graphics hardware specifically enabled for this stuff. The number of three-space "pixels" it ends up getting varies with conditions, but you can always do well enough to read standard braille that's reasonably close in proximity (1.5 feet) to a stereo pair of cameras. Needless to say, there are more useful applications to these kinds of technology than reading braille on your computer screenDeveloping a gesture recognition system. I did not mean to outline everything I did above, but it really is not involved, and a lot more viable than some people think. Anyway, the interesting thing about the three-space that you develop from the process above is that it is very easily analyzable. Not only do you have a solid "block" of where pixels are, but it's easy to tell lines that separate, for instance, individual fingers that overlap. In fact, the human brain uses more picture analysis than stereoscopic analysis, and our system is actually more precise than the human brain at finding the exact location of a point two or three feet away relative to a point near it, compared with the human brain, if you are given no color clues! When looking at a hand, therefore, we can pretty take the basic shape of a hand and (here is where we get tricky) apply a very fuzzy algorithm for fitting it to the hand that we actually see. It is "fuzzy" almost to the extent of being neural-netty (although we control it very much), since it not only needs to choose between an infinite number of ways that two hands can contort themselves, but also learn the size of individual aspects of it (which changes slightly), and their shape, and for this purpose also takes into account where the hand "used" to be in the previous frame, how fast it was moving over the previous few frames, and how likely it is to move in a certain way, with respect to speed and with respect to what positions are unnatural. All this is necessary to get 30 frames per second, because we aren't just interested in the "position" of the hand, but its important aspects (the relative bend in each joint). To test, we have another application that is ONLY given the absolute position of hands and the relative joints we are measuring, and then reconstructs the hands visually. You can therefore have all three programs running, the stereoscopic analyzer feeding the hand-position recognizer data, and the hand-position recognizer feeding the renderer data, so that your screen shows how the renderer is getting the info about where your hands are. Mostly, however you move your hands will be reflected on the screen, but if you move it very quickly and unusually you can still confuse the hand-position analyzer and get an image that's out of sync with what your hand actually is doing. This is independent of the stereoscopic anaylzer, which comes up with the correct data, which if you feed directly to the renderer you see always matches what your hand is doing, at 30 fps.
So now I've outlined how we get the position of joints, which includes quite a bit of fuzziness. But by far the most fuzziness is not in this, but in the actual "recognition" of a GESTURE. We've already gotten the first-generation information about what a gesture is by spending several hours each in front of a test server set up for it, already equipped with a popular voice command system, and agreeing to surf the web and do various other tasks the voice command system is equipped for (we didn't make that, it's just purchased off the floor somewhere) while also doing the gesture we have set up for each command. So we end up with "sample" gestures to analyze, and have already manually looked at the major indicators and drawn them up and programmed them. The way we have done the first time is very crude, however, eyeing as we have each sample ourselves, but we are now in the process of collecting second-generation information, so that when a user successfully uses a gesture and doesn't complain that it wasn't what he wanted, that particular instance of gesturing gets put into the database of gesturing instances associated with a gesture, and we are developing fuzzy logic to link these gestures more closely and reliably. The gestures make sense for the most part, such as having your right thumb open to the left with your other fingers closed, in a quick leftward motion to go back, or up and with a quick rightward motion to be right. Stopping is pushing your palm forward toward the screen, closed a window is putting your finger and thumb together and drawing your hand back, as if you're flicking the window away, and refresh is a sweeping gesture with your palm toward you, from bottom left toward top-right (only a small part of the way). The software recognizes a "gesture" because you perform it particularly fast and deliberately, so if you playing with your hands slowly, it doesn't misrecognize any of these.
Anyway I'm getting really tired of typing all this, and even though there is much, much, more, I'm just kidding. Wouldn't all this be cool though?
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Last post. This is what the IT industry is coming to! I'm raking in dough doing this now :).
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Dude, that's my whole point. None of the things I pointed out made any sense, and I purposefully left in some things in my reply that a grammarian could point to and say "could be better". it's a fucking joke :))
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- The article says "deployment" whereas it means "deploy."
That is all.Grammatical errors in your reply:
Hypocrite, take first the beam out of thine own eye, and then thou shalt see clearly to take out the mote that [is] in thy brother's eye.
Humph.
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This is a test to see whether annielaurie (User #257735) reads her replies.
However, this is not off-topic, since I do mention that this accelorator was originally planned to be 2.4 miles longer in circumference, but then the economy went down and they couldn't hire enough carpenters.
That's pretty funny: "CPUC Tells Northpoint to Reboot, Please".
No? Well maybe that's why I'm not a moderator. (At least not on this thread anymore :])
- The moral positions of the majority of us hinge intimately on condoning "human bigotry", and would have to be re-evaluated if we come into contact with another race that we must accept as having the same rights. (As some of us have already accepted that it is the right of any animal that can feel pain not to be made to feel pain).
- The above reasoning can be the result only of an inveterate programmer, who alone are able to parse such sentences--the kind no self-respecting English teacher could so much as look at without becoming violently sick.
This has been a public service.Now look at your CRT monitor carefully. Pretty big, isn't it? A lot deeper than the < one millimeter of actual image that you see, isn't it? Basically, if you imagine this same box with the 600rpm spinning-type thing, you would get the same image you get now, only actually 3D. And you could view it from six sides. Dude, you cannot even imagine what this would mean for a gui. Go ahead. Stare at your CRT and imagine what it would be like to have this kind of resolution in true "snow-globe" depth. If you're on windows, imagine dragging your mouse over a button, and using your scroll wheel to make it literally move back, staying in the same 2d space. Then, in the 2-D space it was before, (be looking at a button now), imagine seeing in the recess four long sides drawing backwards toward it, and those sides being filled with information. A single button (stare at one now!) could hold as much information as a half-screen JPEG. Only there is not just a single button. There is a whole screen's worth. And side views to boot.
When you say jaded, you are not thinking.
Listen to me very carefully: there is no technical limitation that keeps us from rotating a relatively small number of concurrent pixels, small and close, into filling all of a given 3-dimensional space. Hell, Moron, the same thing is happening unmechanically in your CRT right now! A laser is painting one and only one pixel at a time. Now imagine the laser painting not just the edge of your monitor, but every pixel within it, via a physically moving apparatus that is at that location to pick up the laser. Nothing says it can't be done. The implications are vast and illimitable. Shut the fuck up.
/. must be low
on articles--or (maybe)
conserving bandwidth
/. must be low on articles--or (maybe?) conserving bandwidth