The ISS lifeboat idea is impossible on non-ISS missions, because the shuttle orbit has to match the ISS in order for docking to occur. All ISS missions are planned from the beginning to launch the shuttle in an ISS-matching. Although an attached Progress module could in theory push the ISS down instead of up, it could do nothing of significance to shift the orbit.
STS-107 orbit was quite different from the ISS, so even if you used the Shuttle's OMS to boost the shuttle as high as it could go, and you used one or several Progress modules to lower the ISS to a matching altitude, the two craft would either never meet (space is big, rendez-vous requires a lot of effort and planning and advance preparation of mission launch parameters and packing sufficient fuel for orbital maneuvering), or the two craft would devastatingly impact one another at thousands of miles per hour since they travel along different orbits. Just forget it, the idea is silly!
I think it's dumb and misguided bringing up 'First Amendment' in a debate related to the despicable practice of spamming. A person's email in-box is not a public free-for-all forum. Freedom of speech is fine and well but your freedom stops where my rights to privacy begins, and that's my doorstep and its electronic equivalents. First Amendment has nothing to do with this, and it's a completely misunderstood phrase abused over and over by ignorant cretins. The correct interpretation is that anyone is FREE to express an idea (commercial, or otherwise) in a PUBLIC forum. No-one is OBLIGATED to facilitate your expression of your idea, and no-one is OBLIGATED to listen to what you have to say.
A commercial operator's internet infrastructure (network, mail servers, etc) is not in any way a PUBLIC commons, you, cretin spammer, have NO RIGHTS to use this facility for the expression of your ideas if neither the commercial operator of the service, nor it users, desires to hear your noxious ideas./redundant
Microsoft is much too greedy - they won't ever come just close to Google's good reputation for untainted results. Microsoft stealthily places the 'paid results' in a manner so as to camouflage them and blend them in with the 'normal' hits. Then there's the cheezy ads and popups and generally skewed results nowhere near as relevant as Google's.
Try searching for scientology : Google's #2 and #4 hits goes to critics of that criminal organisation. MSN has operation clambake listed only as #6.
The spec says contrast is 14:1, which is not particularly good. Ordinary bilboards are printed with contrast ratios as much as ten times better than that. Refresh time of two seconds is about 140 times slower than what was claimed in the slashdork post, though probably still better than the mechanical types with little pivoting squares. 4096 colors means just 16 shades of gray like in the old Amiga days -- with 5mm pixels expect quite substantial minimum viewing distance before dithering eliminates visible banding. The thing dies if the active thermal control systems fail. The website looks like a bad flashback to 1997, and it is littered with obvious spelling mistakes. Not a single close-up photo is provided of the product. Golly, I guess I'm such a grouch today but this just looks like a dud.
If that's really a problem for you, too bad. I have a USB memory thingy with green/red alternating indicator colors representing idle/busy states. A red cellophane filter would make just the busy indicator light up.
The Toynbee tiles are common vinyl floor tiles with the letters carved out using a stencil of sorts. This explains the awkward angles and other design features typical of papercut letters in children's construction paper projects.
As for how they're baked into the street, this is simple also. You'll notice most of the Toynbee Tiles are placed in busy inner city intersections with plenty traffic. In [U.S.] cities streets are often fixed with small patches of asphalt covering just the worst cracks and potholes. Who notices a new black patch on the road? Well, the Toynbee feller knows nobody does.
So his secret is this. He carves the tiles, then wraps them neatly in a parcel of layers of tar paper and wood glue with the tile at the very bottom. This slim dark parcel can be fairly inconspicously placed on the street in the dark of night. It'll resemble just another patch of road repair.
It's important that the parcel be placed about as far from the curb so as to get run over by the street traffic as often as possible, because the 'baking' process is actually just the combination of pressure and weather over a period of a couple of weeks where the combined forces of pressure, weather and sun erodes the paper until just some of the tar remains, which is forced into the street and around the spaces between the tile letters, which are gradually revealed as the tar above wears away. The finished impression a couple of weeks later is that just the letters themselves remains, forced thoroughly into the street.
The tile by itself would have cracked and never survived if it had been just left there on the surface. The tar paper sandwich is quite ingenious and simple to make, though it probably takes a few tries to get the formula just right.
Won't work. Ronbots have already created tens of thousands of fake 'homepages' for their victims, sorry - members - on which script generated Success Stories(tm) and links to every conceivable front and incarnation of the criminal organization are automatically posted. Here's a small sample, note the inconspicous domain name -- the whole site is in fact owned by Ronbots.
http://www.oursites.org/andreazastawny/ Now check out the 'contact me' part: http://www.oursites.org/andreazastawny/cont act.htm The form goes straight to the Scientology main organisation's lead generation department -- without as much as a hidden form field designating the pretend-person whom you were 'contacting'. But you can be ever so sure somebody WILL reply.
These tens of thousands of bogus and completely identical sites are designed precisely to spam the search engines, and regrettably it seems to have worked at least on Google.
Sony's Click-to-DVD stuff is swamped with DRM crud. You can't do anything with the stuff you record other than play it on [a limited selection of] Sony hardware + software. Further, the stuff won't play anything that wasn't recorded and encoded with Sony's tech so forget about watching movies you downloaded off the net on your TV using the recorder's network connection. It's proprietary junk that should be avoided.
If you do the math on the bitrates, the 342 hours on 500 gigabytes works out to 3.3 Mbits/sec and that's supposed to be the 'low quality' mode. The 'high quality mode' is close to 10 Mbits/sec which means it's almost certainly yesterday's MPEG2 technology.
I'll wait and get a MPEG4 harddisk recorder, thank you all the same. It doesn't even need a DVD burner. On the same harddisk capacity I'd expect to have at least 600 hours of content. My money goes to the first supplier of a device recording MPEG4 encoded content from television, or any video source, onto a networked harddisk recorder in which a recorded show receives a garden variety DivX/AVI wrapper you can later watch on your PC or burn to a CD if you wanna keep the show.
I'm presently reworking my site. I'll be sure that the next version has the images being served from a script so the script can return amusing decoys from alien referrer domains. Thanks for the suggestion.:}
Ten bucks... provided there's no copy protection. I want to be able to listen to it in my car or rip the music @ 160kbps for my iPod if I choose to.
Ten bucks... provided it's not a fluff "album" with just one good track. I might on occasion have bad enough taste to like a song even if the 'artist' is some kind of prefab one-hit wonder propped up on studio sound, but if the artist really only HAS one song, I don't wanna pay for 9 other padding tracks squeezed out no good reason. In this case, sell me instead a compilation album of only good and new stuff, for ten bucks, or a single with a few good remixes, for about buck-fifty.
Ten bucks... provided it's stuff I've already checked out on Kazaa and listend to on my iPod for a couple of weeks and determined it was all good.
I think it'll be a while before I set foot in a record store again.
I'd really like to get back into listening to uncompressed music again sometime. MP3 is just a matter of convenience and freedom; its sound quality has always been just a compromise. On a nice sound system or a good set of cans you can really hear the compression... live music on mp3 with hissing hi-hats and alien sizzling crowd noises can be really dull.
I like the Super Audio sound quality but I'm not buying into that proprietary platform. Sony DRM is just too nasty to deal with...
The specs sound really poor. I don't see what the fuss is about! 80x80 pixels 'quality picture'...
I've made some 160x160 pixel movies (in color, using TealMovie) for my antique palm IIIc, and even that resolution, with four times as many pixels as the VideoNOW toy, was worthless for video.)
Fifty bucks for the basic VideoNOW unit seems pretty steep considering how little you actually get and how much they're gouging the kids for the content discs - 'collect them all!'
Judging from photographs of this unit, it's just a very basic (non-backlit) LCD screen with crappy contrast and slow refresh. Throw in awful resolution, 15fps and 8-bit sound technology from the 90s, there's just nothing in this worth much effort - the novelty value won't last long, and the actual content enjoyment will be nearly nil.
You might compare this with the antique PixelVision thing from Fisher-Price, which is pretty cool and has a sustained cult following even to this day, but I think mostly because it's a capture system with a unique 'lens' (plastic bubble with nil-to-infinite fixed 'focus' range) and very very strange image processing. Even that thing, 15 year old mostly analog toy, has much better resolution than the VideoNOW.
I dunno, maybe I'm just getting old, but this stuff doesn't seem very exciting to me. I can't imagine my 5-year-old nephew would be very impressed either, since he has one of those GBAs with bright backlit color screens.
At least it doesn't seem too heavily infected by DRM.
Really, I can't say I'm surprised that AOL would want to block image inline image traffic from blog sites, as that shit eats your bandwidth like nobody's business.
I "run" a (dormant) photo website on a commercial hosting service. I pay about twenty bucks a month for the diskspace and capped bandwidth - a reasonable amount, I think, which allows me to serve my users without garish adbanner detritus.
The ordinary site traffic is reasonably stable and keeps well below my bandwidth cap, but parasitic inline traffic comes on top of that, drawing close to redline.
I'm very seriously considering blocking livejournal and any other blog site I can think of, as their users frequently inline my images, eating a little of my bandwidth each time one of their blog pages are loaded. I have some car photos which about fifty retarded pimply teens have inlined on their pages for apparently decorative purposes.
I'm much too busy to go out and chase down every offender, but at the same time I've been reluctant to activate a simple block rule to get rid of the inline traffic once and for all. I guess I should follow AOL's example, eh?
Your body is a structure of pumps and motors and filters and sensors and other fairly explicable things for each of which artificial substitutes can be conceived and may already exist to varying degrees of perfection, albeit none remotely as good or practical as the original part.
In the near future we can expect to see credible artificial hearts, lungs, livers and kidneys, which may allow some tremendously wealthy individuals a cybernetic life extension beyond the finite lifespan of the flesh.
Perhaps artificial muscle tissue powered by blood sugar and oxygen will one day allow us to build organs and substitute limbs comparable in elegance, efficiency and longevity to the real thing, and our future artificial bodies will be much more than a crude forgery. But can we build a substitute for our brains? They too fail at alarming regularity!
Already our lifespan into the 70s are apparently pushing the age limit for brains. Only very few octogenarians have their wits with them when they get that far. We've made only very little progress in preserving working brains in people who get that old. We know that as the brain ages, it slows down and we progressively lose our capacity for adaptation and learning new things.
What of a brain, then?
Is it not composed of knowable parts? We understand how neurons and synapses work individually, and how they interact with one another. We've succesfully simulated them digitally. Their state changes happens at fairly low frequencies, and there is nothing magical or unknowable about the electrochemical processes taking place in each network 'node'. The digitally similated networks work quite well with discrete quantized timesteps, and I am not convinced a digitally simulated neural network could not function as well as the original wetware, on any scale.
Sci-fi scenario. Author claims no scientific knowledge of structural wetware nodes.
Imagine for a second if a swarm of billions of individually numbered, hypothetical nanorobots could be injected into someone's brain. The very capable and semi-intelligent nanorobots should attach themselves to the individual neurons and begin analyzing and mapping the whole of the synaptical interconnects. A huge task! But each nanorobot would be responsible only for mapping the limited number of neurons whose attached nanobots it could 'see' and talk to through high-frequency modulated electrical signals traveling along the synapses (assuming such could be done without disturbing the low-frequency electrochemical signals normally traveling through them).
Then, as the nanobot was satisfied that its host neuron functions and interconnects were fully mapped to other nanobots, it would begin to detach the synapses one by one and substitute them with digital, electronic links, emulated at either end to talk to the original neurons as if the synapses were still attached. At some point the nanorobot would assume the role of the now fully-detached neuron, talking only to other emulated neurons through digital synaptical links. The brain should still function at this point. When the digitizing process is complete, a radio link signal freezes all the emulated neurons and their states. Connection data is then slowly downloaded wirelessly by polling each digital neuron using its serial number. The downloaded data is then combined to form the initial state of a complete emulated solid-state brain which may then optionally be fitted into its former host body through a suitable central nervous system interface, or connected to a wholly artificial new body built to last forever. Post-organic immortality would then be achieved./alex chiu impersonator
I dunno how this article can possibly be construed as 'news'. These devices have been out for years. They're virtually interchangeable with mostly identical featuresets. Tons of anonymous OEM badge jobs in this market, and this looks like just another one.
I had a solid state mp3 players much like this, but I gave it away a month or so later. Much too little capacity... you find your player repeating the same songs over and over until end of battery life. It takes several minutes to upload so you don't wanna do it very often. It's a dumb little ritual, often you choose to encode with crappier bitrates just to squeeze in a few extra songs. I dunno how anyone can stand these limitations.
I'm much happier with my 10gig iPod - the only Apple product in the house - beautiful little device, great mp3 database browser, lots of buffer memory so no skip. Great battery life, last a whole working day. It's the size of a deck of cards and weighs so little I can carry it everywhere, and it hooks up nicely to the car stereo with a cassette adapter. Looking for a better solution, but very few in-dash radios have input jacks. The sound is okay!
At home it doubles as my stereo while it's charging : it's just hooked up to an amplifier as the single input device (what good is radio or tape? I don't watch the TV either.) All my 900+ music CDs have been ripped to 160kbps mp3s stored on the house media server (takes up just about 60 gigs).
With my ipod I can take almost a sixth of my total music collection with me everywhere; a 128 gig memory stick would allow me to take approximately 0.2 percent. =)
Every week or so I zap a few dozen CDs from the iPod and put in some different ones. Or try out stuff I scooped online; sometimes, very rarely, it's so good I want to go buy the CD!
Current track - Lords of Acid / Deep Sexy Space
ethnic cable programming sound clipped too
on
Is Louder Better?
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· Score: 1
While channel hopping I often notice on the ethnic selections that the sound on programming from India and the middle East often are clipped and distorted like crazy. This is so persistent I began to wonder if this only happened on the U.S. cable rebroadcasts, of if this is how the programs appeared originally. Then I saw a BBC program from somewhere in India -- the voice of the presenter and street sounds appeared perfectly clear and well-recorded, but then the program showed a family watching a television program with people singing ; the same intense clipping and distortion of the sound again. I now wonder if this is a cultural thing -- do people in those parts LIKE that clipped sound? Just wondering.
Many corporations for whom the 'evil' label is well and truly earned from inflicted worker abuse and pollution of environment, take to spinning big PR to-do on their tax-free donations to a few select charities of a few fractions of a percent of their profits. This is not so much out of goodwill as it is a defensive PR measure meant to blur the otherwise unambigous 'evil' case against the corporation. Since the donations are tax free and in McDonald's case collected from their customers anyway, this is a cheap investment in a little positive spin: "Oh the lefties complain about how EVIL McDonald's are but look they give to charities! They must be nice people! Think of the CHILDREN'S HOSPITALS!"
I'd like to see a device such as this silly 'geiger counter' concept piece implemented as a GPS-aware PDA application. When you're near (or worse, inside) a McDonald's it'll present for the curious a scorecard itemizing a FACTUAL representation of the enormous environmental impact caused by this organization and other ugly things pertaining to their business practice in general and specific to this business location.
Just for fun, try and assess the immense annual cost and death toll of clogged arteries, heart attacks and other ailments attributable to the 'food' products sold by this corporation. Then for good show, present their PR spinsters' "nice" side of the corporation with the tax-deductible donations and whatever else the ghouls claim they're doing which in any way is beneficial to anybody. Decide for yourself if one outweighs the other, or in anyway are related.
Most corporations have an 'evil' karma score, but with such a database you could elect to find the 'least evil' corporation. It's probably the closest thing to a clear conscience you can get as a consumer! Of course these devices and applications are obscure and have neglible impact... It's mostly a matter of personal choice.
I'm pretty cool with the naysayers and repugnant pro-business types panning the idea of 'karma scorecard' databases - it appears that they'd rather have you form your opinion based on the clear blur skies painted by corporate PR than let you have an informed opinion based on facts obtained from such a database contributed by individuals.
Yeah, there's nearly always an agenda. If you're concerned about your health, worker's rights or the environment, would you trust a glossy flyer from McDonald's? Or a fact sheet compiled by other concerned individuals and organizations citing the specific factual data on the issue without a PR gloss blurring the case?
For that matter, do these high end SLRs encode information about shutter speed, aperature, focal length, etc into the image somehow? It would be cool to be able to examine the photos later and say "ahh okay, the ones I liked best all seem to have been shot at f/5.6 & 1/250, with the zoom lens at around 120mm -- I'll have to keep those settings in mind next time out...".
Actually, yes - they do. The EXIF fields on a Nikon D1 recorded image are loaded with data about the shot, including lens type used. On my half-baked photo website I have extracted these data and displayed them below the photos, in a simulated LCD display, for precisely the reason you mention.
There's a new version of the site in the works with GPS and map coordinates to go with the shots. On my photo journeys I've used a palmpilot to record a GPS trail with timestamps - these timestamps, when matched to the EXIF timestamps, produces an adequate shooting location marker.
I've been shooting with DSLR gear for 3 years now, and I've tried a bunch of high-end cameras including the Nikon D1X and Canon 1DS.
My analysis of this new Nikon based only on the dpreview article, is that it seems fine for sports and news photography where framerates matter, but outside of that market it is difficult to see the how the improved features addresses the things that have been missing on the Nikon family of DSLR's.
The big thing that's been missing is a full-frame sensor. Why is this important? Well, all Nikon DSLRs to date, including this one, have used an imager that is 1.5 times smaller than a normal 35mm film frame. This means the sensor only sees the middle part of what would have been exposed on a normal film frame, which in turn means the camera suffers from slight myopia. All attached lenses have a virtual magnification factor of 1.5x over stated spec. As such, a nice 20mm wideangle lens becomes a dull 30mm lens, which produces a constricted view. Landscape and indoor photography generally suffers from this lack of wideangle support.
Canon addressed this problem with their (very expensive) 1DS camera which has a full-sized imager chip, but this doesn't help photographers with a gear bag full of Nikon lenses - they don't fit on a Canon. I think many photographers would have liked to see Nikon come up with a full-sized imager on their D2 series.
There are far cheaper DSLR's with high-rez sensors. Take the very affordable Fujifilm Finepix S2, for example - a handsome 6 megapixel sensor and fully Nikon lens compatible. Same magnification factor as the D2H, at 1/4 the price. Some photographers would probably find the flimsy Fujifilm body and awkward ergonomics unsuitable for pro work, but I know many photographers who'd rather save their money and buy one of those, or an old battered D1X, and then wait for Nikon to come out with the full-frame unit they have been waiting for.
It's also disappointing to see that Nikon apparently have dropped IEEE1394 and GPS support. USB2 is cheaper, dumber, slower and less reliable than firewire, and the GPS thing was a neat 'gimmick' that could have had many useful applications. The beautiful photos on the California Coastal Records Project were all shot on a D1X with a GPS attached - this permitted the photographers an exact shooting record of where the pictures were taken.
The rest of the improved features just don't justify the cost unless those 8fps are crucial to your line of business. The wi-fi stuff looks like a gimmick - consider the limited range of 802.11b - but it is conceivable to imagine an assistant photoshopping the pics you shoot from a nearby laptop. Nothing I'd pay extra for, though.
The shading and lighting tech used at Pixar is nice and certainly serves their purpos, but you could argue that the tech itself is nothing special compared to the rendering employed elsewhere in photorealistic CG F/X. The Final Fantasy flick had fine rendering and great tech, but sank like a lead balloon in the box office because of a dumb story and marginal direction. If IBM wants to compete in this market, they have to provide much more than a render farm.
Look at the IMDB top 50 animation features. Pixar and Studio Ghibli combined share most of the top ten popular user votes. Disney is further down the ladder, their new stuff fails to captivate the audiences the way the other two studios mentioned do. This is no coincidence -- these studios wins out against their competition because of creative talents and skillful directors, the technology employed is not the answer.
Studio Ghibli and Pixar are masters at production design and storytelling, and their works have appeal to children and adults alike. You could argue that Pixar has put out a few 'buddy' pictures following a very safe and mainstream formula, but generally both Ghibli and Pixar pursues original works that aren't derivative.
Disney on the other hand, is content with stealing from other sources and perpetually rehashing their own tired 'success' formulas, often compromising style, pace and adult interest with jarring diversions and noisy, needless extra characters crammed in by accountants and suits in order to sell a few more McDonald's toy tie-ins.
Ghibli and Pixar's stuff is immensely marketable, but that seems like an emergent property, something coincidental rather than the very reason for the production to exist. Compared to Disney, Ghibli and Pixar's studio structures seem to have much thinner strata of lawyers, accountants and other suits for ideas to percolate through, which means more direct creative control from directors and production designers.
This produces richer and much more satisfying features than the bland and safe works that always result from too many suits in a creative design process.
The secret weapon of Studio Ghibli is Hayao Miyazaki. The secret weapon of Pixar is John Lasseter. Tech doesn't have anything to do with it.
Find out who put these clowns in charge of voting. No big surprises there, as corrupt as everything else republicans come near. Perhaps you'd be surprised to learn that some western countries insist that the essential democratic act of voting and having the votes counted fairly, are sacred enough that they should NOT be turned over to some shady private organization such as Diebold, accountable not to the general public but heavily influenced by neocon money. The United States is now a banana republic. All votes processed by the inbred brother in law of El Presidente - how can it possibly go wrong?
Casino-type spy cams are typically very IR sensitive. If you're concerned about your in-flight privacy, you could wear a superbright IR light source and point it at the camera which should be blinded. You can modify a cheap bicycle light for a couple bucks worth of IR superbrites and wear it in a shirt pocket. Some designs allow battery life up to 24 hours or better of continous use. If the shirt fabric is thin and plain white, the light will shine through, but it won't be visible to the crew. Video review won't take place until later, so you shouldn't be hassled in-flight.
However, even if they can't see your face, they still got your seat number, so they'll know who is trying to evade the benevolent all-seeing glare of Big Brother; these refuseniks will be put on the dubious-behavior terror-suspect list and may risk being denied future flight privileges (don't worry, you'll be in good company with thousands of peaceful human rights and anti-war activists.)
People downplaying this new privacy threat as analogous to existing store surveillance cameras are simply ignorant of the potential future data-mining abuse of extended video facial footage matched to confirmed ID. Cash machine cameras only capture a few single frames in bad backlight, and few bank teller cam systems register transaction data or client IDs on the tapes. It usually takes some effort to infer from timestamps who is actually on the picture.
Building good and reliable face tracking metrics requires a broad sample of angles and facial expressions. For this reason the extended duration video capture, matched to seat number and confirmed ID, is of grave concern to those concerne about privacy. I expect this shit to go down well in CCTV-happy Britain, which already employs face trackers extensively.
Does anybody really believe this will prevent terrorism?
Your new mail system is all set up and ready, mister President. No, of course you won't be bothered any more by emails flagged as tainted with 'opposing viewpoint', they will instead be routed directly to Admiral Poindexter, and a bunch of three-letter agencies.
Slashdot Mirror
The ISS lifeboat idea is impossible on non-ISS missions, because the shuttle orbit has to match the ISS in order for docking to occur. All ISS missions are planned from the beginning to launch the shuttle in an ISS-matching. Although an attached Progress module could in theory push the ISS down instead of up, it could do nothing of significance to shift the orbit.
STS-107 orbit was quite different from the ISS, so even if you used the Shuttle's OMS to boost the shuttle as high as it could go, and you used one or several Progress modules to lower the ISS to a matching altitude, the two craft would either never meet (space is big, rendez-vous requires a lot of effort and planning and advance preparation of mission launch parameters and packing sufficient fuel for orbital maneuvering), or the two craft would devastatingly impact one another at thousands of miles per hour since they travel along different orbits. Just forget it, the idea is silly!
I think it's dumb and misguided bringing up 'First Amendment' in a debate related to the despicable practice of spamming. A person's email in-box is not a public free-for-all forum. Freedom of speech is fine and well but your freedom stops where my rights to privacy begins, and that's my doorstep and its electronic equivalents. First Amendment has nothing to do with this, and it's a completely misunderstood phrase abused over and over by ignorant cretins. The correct interpretation is that anyone is FREE to express an idea (commercial, or otherwise) in a PUBLIC forum. No-one is OBLIGATED to facilitate your expression of your idea, and no-one is OBLIGATED to listen to what you have to say.
/redundant
A commercial operator's internet infrastructure (network, mail servers, etc) is not in any way a PUBLIC commons, you, cretin spammer, have NO RIGHTS to use this facility for the expression of your ideas if neither the commercial operator of the service, nor it users, desires to hear your noxious ideas.
Google vs. MSN Search : Fight!
Microsoft is much too greedy - they won't ever come just close to Google's good reputation for untainted results. Microsoft stealthily places the 'paid results' in a manner so as to camouflage them and blend them in with the 'normal' hits. Then there's the cheezy ads and popups and generally skewed results nowhere near as relevant as Google's.
Try searching for scientology : Google's #2 and #4 hits goes to critics of that criminal organisation. MSN has operation clambake listed only as #6.
Read the spec. The slashdot poster is a crackhead, the display refresh rate is 2 secs, not 1/70 sec.
The spec says contrast is 14:1, which is not particularly good. Ordinary bilboards are printed with contrast ratios as much as ten times better than that. Refresh time of two seconds is about 140 times slower than what was claimed in the slashdork post, though probably still better than the mechanical types with little pivoting squares. 4096 colors means just 16 shades of gray like in the old Amiga days -- with 5mm pixels expect quite substantial minimum viewing distance before dithering eliminates visible banding. The thing dies if the active thermal control systems fail. The website looks like a bad flashback to 1997, and it is littered with obvious spelling mistakes. Not a single close-up photo is provided of the product. Golly, I guess I'm such a grouch today but this just looks like a dud.
If that's really a problem for you, too bad. I have a USB memory thingy with green/red alternating indicator colors representing idle/busy states. A red cellophane filter would make just the busy indicator light up.
Try it. Go to a hardware store and check out the tiles. There are many different kinds.
The Toynbee tiles are common vinyl floor tiles with the letters carved out using a stencil of sorts. This explains the awkward angles and other design features typical of papercut letters in children's construction paper projects.
As for how they're baked into the street, this is simple also. You'll notice most of the Toynbee Tiles are placed in busy inner city intersections with plenty traffic. In [U.S.] cities streets are often fixed with small patches of asphalt covering just the worst cracks and potholes. Who notices a new black patch on the road? Well, the Toynbee feller knows nobody does.
So his secret is this. He carves the tiles, then wraps them neatly in a parcel of layers of tar paper and wood glue with the tile at the very bottom. This slim dark parcel can be fairly inconspicously placed on the street in the dark of night. It'll resemble just another patch of road repair.
It's important that the parcel be placed about as far from the curb so as to get run over by the street traffic as often as possible, because the 'baking' process is actually just the combination of pressure and weather over a period of a couple of weeks where the combined forces of pressure, weather and sun erodes the paper until just some of the tar remains, which is forced into the street and around the spaces between the tile letters, which are gradually revealed as the tar above wears away. The finished impression a couple of weeks later is that just the letters themselves remains, forced thoroughly into the street.
The tile by itself would have cracked and never survived if it had been just left there on the surface. The tar paper sandwich is quite ingenious and simple to make, though it probably takes a few tries to get the formula just right.
Won't work. Ronbots have already created tens of thousands of fake 'homepages' for their victims, sorry - members - on which script generated Success Stories(tm) and links to every conceivable front and incarnation of the criminal organization are automatically posted. Here's a small sample, note the inconspicous domain name -- the whole site is in fact owned by Ronbots.
t act.htm
http://www.oursites.org/andreazastawny/
Now check out the 'contact me' part:
http://www.oursites.org/andreazastawny/con
The form goes straight to the Scientology main organisation's lead generation department -- without as much as a hidden form field designating the pretend-person whom you were 'contacting'. But you can be ever so sure somebody WILL reply.
These tens of thousands of bogus and completely identical sites are designed precisely to spam the search engines, and regrettably it seems to have worked at least on Google.
http://www.xenu.net/
Sony's Click-to-DVD stuff is swamped with DRM crud. You can't do anything with the stuff you record other than play it on [a limited selection of] Sony hardware + software. Further, the stuff won't play anything that wasn't recorded and encoded with Sony's tech so forget about watching movies you downloaded off the net on your TV using the recorder's network connection. It's proprietary junk that should be avoided.
If you do the math on the bitrates, the 342 hours on 500 gigabytes works out to 3.3 Mbits/sec and that's supposed to be the 'low quality' mode. The 'high quality mode' is close to 10 Mbits/sec which means it's almost certainly yesterday's MPEG2 technology.
I'll wait and get a MPEG4 harddisk recorder, thank you all the same. It doesn't even need a DVD burner. On the same harddisk capacity I'd expect to have at least 600 hours of content. My money goes to the first supplier of a device recording MPEG4 encoded content from television, or any video source, onto a networked harddisk recorder in which a recorded show receives a garden variety DivX/AVI wrapper you can later watch on your PC or burn to a CD if you wanna keep the show.
I'm presently reworking my site. I'll be sure that the next version has the images being served from a script so the script can return amusing decoys from alien referrer domains. Thanks for the suggestion. :}
Ten bucks ... provided there's no copy protection. I want to be able to listen to it in my car or rip the music @ 160kbps for my iPod if I choose to.
... provided it's not a fluff "album" with just one good track. I might on occasion have bad enough taste to like a song even if the 'artist' is some kind of prefab one-hit wonder propped up on studio sound, but if the artist really only HAS one song, I don't wanna pay for 9 other padding tracks squeezed out no good reason. In this case, sell me instead a compilation album of only good and new stuff, for ten bucks, or a single with a few good remixes, for about buck-fifty.
... provided it's stuff I've already checked out on Kazaa and listend to on my iPod for a couple of weeks and determined it was all good.
... live music on mp3 with hissing hi-hats and alien sizzling crowd noises can be really dull.
Ten bucks
Ten bucks
I think it'll be a while before I set foot in a record store again.
I'd really like to get back into listening to uncompressed music again sometime. MP3 is just a matter of convenience and freedom; its sound quality has always been just a compromise. On a nice sound system or a good set of cans you can really hear the compression
I like the Super Audio sound quality but I'm not buying into that proprietary platform. Sony DRM is just too nasty to deal with...
The specs sound really poor. I don't see what the fuss is about! 80x80 pixels 'quality picture' ...
I've made some 160x160 pixel movies (in color, using TealMovie) for my antique palm IIIc, and even that resolution, with four times as many pixels as the VideoNOW toy, was worthless for video.)
Fifty bucks for the basic VideoNOW unit seems pretty steep considering how little you actually get and how much they're gouging the kids for the content discs - 'collect them all!'
Judging from photographs of this unit, it's just a very basic (non-backlit) LCD screen with crappy contrast and slow refresh. Throw in awful resolution, 15fps and 8-bit sound technology from the 90s, there's just nothing in this worth much effort - the novelty value won't last long, and the actual content enjoyment will be nearly nil.
You might compare this with the antique PixelVision thing from Fisher-Price, which is pretty cool and has a sustained cult following even to this day, but I think mostly because it's a capture system with a unique 'lens' (plastic bubble with nil-to-infinite fixed 'focus' range) and very very strange image processing. Even that thing, 15 year old mostly analog toy, has much better resolution than the VideoNOW.
I dunno, maybe I'm just getting old, but this stuff doesn't seem very exciting to me. I can't imagine my 5-year-old nephew would be very impressed either, since he has one of those GBAs with bright backlit color screens.
At least it doesn't seem too heavily infected by DRM.
Really, I can't say I'm surprised that AOL would want to block image inline image traffic from blog sites, as that shit eats your bandwidth like nobody's business.
I "run" a (dormant) photo website on a commercial hosting service. I pay about twenty bucks a month for the diskspace and capped bandwidth - a reasonable amount, I think, which allows me to serve my users without garish adbanner detritus.
The ordinary site traffic is reasonably stable and keeps well below my bandwidth cap, but parasitic inline traffic comes on top of that, drawing close to redline.
I'm very seriously considering blocking livejournal and any other blog site I can think of, as their users frequently inline my images, eating a little of my bandwidth each time one of their blog pages are loaded. I have some car photos which about fifty retarded pimply teens have inlined on their pages for apparently decorative purposes.
I'm much too busy to go out and chase down every offender, but at the same time I've been reluctant to activate a simple block rule to get rid of the inline traffic once and for all. I guess I should follow AOL's example, eh?
Your body is a structure of pumps and motors and filters and sensors and other fairly explicable things for each of which artificial substitutes can be conceived and may already exist to varying degrees of perfection, albeit none remotely as good or practical as the original part.
/alex chiu impersonator
In the near future we can expect to see credible artificial hearts, lungs, livers and kidneys, which may allow some tremendously wealthy individuals a cybernetic life extension beyond the finite lifespan of the flesh.
Perhaps artificial muscle tissue powered by blood sugar and oxygen will one day allow us to build organs and substitute limbs comparable in elegance, efficiency and longevity to the real thing, and our future artificial bodies will be much more than a crude forgery. But can we build a substitute for our brains? They too fail at alarming regularity!
Already our lifespan into the 70s are apparently pushing the age limit for brains. Only very few octogenarians have their wits with them when they get that far. We've made only very little progress in preserving working brains in people who get that old. We know that as the brain ages, it slows down and we progressively lose our capacity for adaptation and learning new things.
What of a brain, then?
Is it not composed of knowable parts?
We understand how neurons and synapses work individually, and how they interact with one another. We've succesfully simulated them digitally. Their state changes happens at fairly low frequencies, and there is nothing magical or unknowable about the electrochemical processes taking place in each network 'node'. The digitally similated networks work quite well with discrete quantized timesteps, and I am not convinced a digitally simulated neural network could not function as well as the original wetware, on any scale.
Sci-fi scenario. Author claims no scientific knowledge of structural wetware nodes.
Imagine for a second if a swarm of billions of individually numbered, hypothetical nanorobots could be injected into someone's brain. The very capable and semi-intelligent nanorobots should attach themselves to the individual neurons and begin analyzing and mapping the whole of the synaptical interconnects. A huge task! But each nanorobot would be responsible only for mapping the limited number of neurons whose attached nanobots it could 'see' and talk to through high-frequency modulated electrical signals traveling along the synapses (assuming such could be done without disturbing the low-frequency electrochemical signals normally traveling through them).
Then, as the nanobot was satisfied that its host neuron functions and interconnects were fully mapped to other nanobots, it would begin to detach the synapses one by one and substitute them with digital, electronic links, emulated at either end to talk to the original neurons as if the synapses were still attached. At some point the nanorobot would assume the role of the now fully-detached neuron, talking only to other emulated neurons through digital synaptical links. The brain should still function at this point. When the digitizing process is complete, a radio link signal freezes all the emulated neurons and their states. Connection data is then slowly downloaded wirelessly by polling each digital neuron using its serial number. The downloaded data is then combined to form the initial state of a complete emulated solid-state brain which may then optionally be fitted into its former host body through a suitable central nervous system interface, or connected to a wholly artificial new body built to last forever. Post-organic immortality would then be achieved.
I dunno how this article can possibly be construed as 'news'. These devices have been out for years. They're virtually interchangeable with mostly identical featuresets. Tons of anonymous OEM badge jobs in this market, and this looks like just another one.
... you find your player repeating the same songs over and over until end of battery life. It takes several minutes to upload so you don't wanna do it very often. It's a dumb little ritual, often you choose to encode with crappier bitrates just to squeeze in a few extra songs. I dunno how anyone can stand these limitations.
I had a solid state mp3 players much like this, but I gave it away a month or so later. Much too little capacity
I'm much happier with my 10gig iPod - the only Apple product in the house - beautiful little device, great mp3 database browser, lots of buffer memory so no skip. Great battery life, last a whole working day. It's the size of a deck of cards and weighs so little I can carry it everywhere, and it hooks up nicely to the car stereo with a cassette adapter. Looking for a better solution, but very few in-dash radios have input jacks. The sound is okay!
At home it doubles as my stereo while it's charging : it's just hooked up to an amplifier as the single input device (what good is radio or tape? I don't watch the TV either.) All my 900+ music CDs have been ripped to 160kbps mp3s stored on the house media server (takes up just about 60 gigs).
With my ipod I can take almost a sixth of my total music collection with me everywhere; a 128 gig memory stick would allow me to take approximately 0.2 percent. =)
Every week or so I zap a few dozen CDs from the iPod and put in some different ones. Or try out stuff I scooped online; sometimes, very rarely, it's so good I want to go buy the CD!
Current track - Lords of Acid / Deep Sexy Space
While channel hopping I often notice on the ethnic selections that the sound on programming from India and the middle East often are clipped and distorted like crazy. This is so persistent I began to wonder if this only happened on the U.S. cable rebroadcasts, of if this is how the programs appeared originally. Then I saw a BBC program from somewhere in India -- the voice of the presenter and street sounds appeared perfectly clear and well-recorded, but then the program showed a family watching a television program with people singing ; the same intense clipping and distortion of the sound again. I now wonder if this is a cultural thing -- do people in those parts LIKE that clipped sound? Just wondering.
http://www.kobotica.com/inline/taco-shirt.jpg
I'd like a statement from Taco explaining those contest [in]eligibility rules.
I'd like to see a device such as this silly 'geiger counter' concept piece implemented as a GPS-aware PDA application. When you're near (or worse, inside) a McDonald's it'll present for the curious a scorecard itemizing a FACTUAL representation of the enormous environmental impact caused by this organization and other ugly things pertaining to their business practice in general and specific to this business location. Just for fun, try and assess the immense annual cost and death toll of clogged arteries, heart attacks and other ailments attributable to the 'food' products sold by this corporation. Then for good show, present their PR spinsters' "nice" side of the corporation with the tax-deductible donations and whatever else the ghouls claim they're doing which in any way is beneficial to anybody. Decide for yourself if one outweighs the other, or in anyway are related.
Most corporations have an 'evil' karma score, but with such a database you could elect to find the 'least evil' corporation. It's probably the closest thing to a clear conscience you can get as a consumer! Of course these devices and applications are obscure and have neglible impact. .. It's mostly a matter of personal choice.
I'm pretty cool with the naysayers and repugnant pro-business types panning the idea of 'karma scorecard' databases - it appears that they'd rather have you form your opinion based on the clear blur skies painted by corporate PR than let you have an informed opinion based on facts obtained from such a database contributed by individuals.
Yeah, there's nearly always an agenda. If you're concerned about your health, worker's rights or the environment, would you trust a glossy flyer from McDonald's? Or a fact sheet compiled by other concerned individuals and organizations citing the specific factual data on the issue without a PR gloss blurring the case?
Actually, yes - they do. The EXIF fields on a Nikon D1 recorded image are loaded with data about the shot, including lens type used. On my half-baked photo website I have extracted these data and displayed them below the photos, in a simulated LCD display, for precisely the reason you mention.
There's a new version of the site in the works with GPS and map coordinates to go with the shots. On my photo journeys I've used a palmpilot to record a GPS trail with timestamps - these timestamps, when matched to the EXIF timestamps, produces an adequate shooting location marker.
I've been shooting with DSLR gear for 3 years now, and I've tried a bunch of high-end cameras including the Nikon D1X and Canon 1DS.
My analysis of this new Nikon based only on the dpreview article, is that it seems fine for sports and news photography where framerates matter, but outside of that market it is difficult to see the how the improved features addresses the things that have been missing on the Nikon family of DSLR's.
The big thing that's been missing is a full-frame sensor. Why is this important? Well, all Nikon DSLRs to date, including this one, have used an imager that is 1.5 times smaller than a normal 35mm film frame. This means the sensor only sees the middle part of what would have been exposed on a normal film frame, which in turn means the camera suffers from slight myopia. All attached lenses have a virtual magnification factor of 1.5x over stated spec. As such, a nice 20mm wideangle lens becomes a dull 30mm lens, which produces a constricted view. Landscape and indoor photography generally suffers from this lack of wideangle support.
Canon addressed this problem with their (very expensive) 1DS camera which has a full-sized imager chip, but this doesn't help photographers with a gear bag full of Nikon lenses - they don't fit on a Canon. I think many photographers would have liked to see Nikon come up with a full-sized imager on their D2 series.
There are far cheaper DSLR's with high-rez sensors. Take the very affordable Fujifilm Finepix S2, for example - a handsome 6 megapixel sensor and fully Nikon lens compatible. Same magnification factor as the D2H, at 1/4 the price. Some photographers would probably find the flimsy Fujifilm body and awkward ergonomics unsuitable for pro work, but I know many photographers who'd rather save their money and buy one of those, or an old battered D1X, and then wait for Nikon to come out with the full-frame unit they have been waiting for.
It's also disappointing to see that Nikon apparently have dropped IEEE1394 and GPS support. USB2 is cheaper, dumber, slower and less reliable than firewire, and the GPS thing was a neat 'gimmick' that could have had many useful applications. The beautiful photos on the California Coastal Records Project were all shot on a D1X with a GPS attached - this permitted the photographers an exact shooting record of where the pictures were taken.
The rest of the improved features just don't justify the cost unless those 8fps are crucial to your line of business. The wi-fi stuff looks like a gimmick - consider the limited range of 802.11b - but it is conceivable to imagine an assistant photoshopping the pics you shoot from a nearby laptop. Nothing I'd pay extra for, though.
Look at the IMDB top 50 animation features. Pixar and Studio Ghibli combined share most of the top ten popular user votes. Disney is further down the ladder, their new stuff fails to captivate the audiences the way the other two studios mentioned do. This is no coincidence -- these studios wins out against their competition because of creative talents and skillful directors, the technology employed is not the answer.
Studio Ghibli and Pixar are masters at production design and storytelling, and their works have appeal to children and adults alike. You could argue that Pixar has put out a few 'buddy' pictures following a very safe and mainstream formula, but generally both Ghibli and Pixar pursues original works that aren't derivative.
Disney on the other hand, is content with stealing from other sources and perpetually rehashing their own tired 'success' formulas, often compromising style, pace and adult interest with jarring diversions and noisy, needless extra characters crammed in by accountants and suits in order to sell a few more McDonald's toy tie-ins.
Ghibli and Pixar's stuff is immensely marketable, but that seems like an emergent property, something coincidental rather than the very reason for the production to exist. Compared to Disney, Ghibli and Pixar's studio structures seem to have much thinner strata of lawyers, accountants and other suits for ideas to percolate through, which means more direct creative control from directors and production designers.
This produces richer and much more satisfying features than the bland and safe works that always result from too many suits in a creative design process.
The secret weapon of Studio Ghibli is Hayao Miyazaki. The secret weapon of Pixar is John Lasseter. Tech doesn't have anything to do with it.
Find out who put these clowns in charge of voting. No big surprises there, as corrupt as everything else republicans come near. Perhaps you'd be surprised to learn that some western countries insist that the essential democratic act of voting and having the votes counted fairly, are sacred enough that they should NOT be turned over to some shady private organization such as Diebold, accountable not to the general public but heavily influenced by neocon money. The United States is now a banana republic. All votes processed by the inbred brother in law of El Presidente - how can it possibly go wrong?
However, even if they can't see your face, they still got your seat number, so they'll know who is trying to evade the benevolent all-seeing glare of Big Brother; these refuseniks will be put on the dubious-behavior terror-suspect list and may risk being denied future flight privileges (don't worry, you'll be in good company with thousands of peaceful human rights and anti-war activists.)
People downplaying this new privacy threat as analogous to existing store surveillance cameras are simply ignorant of the potential future data-mining abuse of extended video facial footage matched to confirmed ID. Cash machine cameras only capture a few single frames in bad backlight, and few bank teller cam systems register transaction data or client IDs on the tapes. It usually takes some effort to infer from timestamps who is actually on the picture.
Building good and reliable face tracking metrics requires a broad sample of angles and facial expressions. For this reason the extended duration video capture, matched to seat number and confirmed ID, is of grave concern to those concerne about privacy. I expect this shit to go down well in CCTV-happy Britain, which already employs face trackers extensively.
Does anybody really believe this will prevent terrorism?
Your new mail system is all set up and ready, mister President. No, of course you won't be bothered any more by emails flagged as tainted with 'opposing viewpoint', they will instead be routed directly to Admiral Poindexter, and a bunch of three-letter agencies.