Spam is more than just a small nuisance. I don't know how anyone would defend that practice. Spam in all forms, email, snail, phone -- it's a constant grating deluge of noise that costs time and effort to deal with. If that's not already the case, imagine if your phone was ringing every five minutes with prerecorded commercial messages and a quickie radio ad disclaimer voice near the end of the tape with 'removal instructions' involving dialing a 900 number to get taken off the list that you never wanted to be on in the first place. This is exactly how spam email works! Your channel of communication is cluttered by ruthless mail bombers and it becomes YOUR chore to tidy up the mess and extract the trickle of signal from all the noise. How is this reasonable? It's just as unreasonable that US postal service permits their system to violate our mailboxes with junk mail that threatens important signal (bills, personal communication) from being drowned in noise (spam, junk mail). Is this reasonable? I think not. Also, usenet has been reduced from a once healthy and significant forum for the exchange of ideas to little more than a shooting range where those foolish enough to post a message without cautious stealth and cloak and dagger games, will be BLASTED out of the sky with spammers culling email addresses from the forum. This is a detriment to free public communication. It should be possible to post your email address and only have those with a legit reason to contact you, use it. The honor system is obviously a joke these days, so let's have the law help us get rid of these unsavory scammers and spammers ruining the net. Hang all spammers! Hang em good.
The complaint is that the Dulux thing don't
have COMPONENT video out, which is the preferred
way to get the DVD Y/Cr/Cb NTSC signals to your
TV/monitor via three separate shielded wires. COMPOSITE video is where all the signals are carried on one wire, with nowhere near as good picture quality. The step in between is S-video - to carry the NTSC signals on two wires, Y and C. This is typically used on S-VHS and Hi8 camcorders.
Don't call people names if you don't have your own facts straight.
I'll often BOOKMARK a site I DON'T like, but that don't make it a FAVOURITE. I despise that whole microsoft attitude to serious computing of reducing everything to a peppy shopping experience. I refuse to be patronized by a damn browser. Netscape is the professional choice for thinking individuals with any shred of self respect. The obnoxious but pretty looking IE works only on Mac and Windoze, and so it don't really matter that it is 'compatible' with itself. Plus, IE is so full of security holes and it's much too integrated with the desktop filesystem browser so you can't make clear distinctions between web content and local information, and all these script holes walk all over that nonexisting barrier. Netscape is safe, smart, simple and it is distinctly different from local filesystem tools. I design all my sites to work with Netscape; then they work in IE as well. I could wish for greater 'standards compliance', but then again overdoing a site with flaky design is poor practice in my book. The net is about INFORMATION.
Did Gonterman write this? Who gives a flying crap about Sonic the goddam hedgehog or the rest of the obnoxious characters? I know David does, but then again he's a demented old loser fanboy too.:)
On topic - The Dreamcast is a nice console. The few games I have for it run nice and smooth, looks good and renders without noticable jaggies, and the hardware itself is well designed, the controls are good and there seems to be no particular shortcomings obscuring gameplay. I can't see why the Dreamcast isn't more popular... Sega just haven't pushed advertising for it at all. When did you last see a dreamcast ad on TV?
I have a bunch of old Playstation games, but frankly the flickery, crappy low-rez vector rendering of those give me a headache when I play them on the aging Playstation. I hope BLEEM for DC will be out soon! That should add a bunch of vintage titles to the currently not very impressive catalog of Dreamcast compatible software.
How ironic that the PS2 itself didn't include better rendering and performance for the old games.:)
DLP video projectors have a real nice and bright picture, with rich colors. They use a spinning color wheel so you only see one primary color at the time, but the cycle is sufficiently fast that there's no perceptible flicker - except if you try to catch the retina burn of the projector lens, you can see the sequence of colors projected one by one. I forget the manufacturer, but one of the tiniest DLP things I've seen has full SVGA resolution and is about the size of a fat laptop, with a snazzy brushed aluminum case. Great for watching DVDs, btw.:)
The White LED lights I've seen generally have a fairly harsh and cold color. It's nowhere as comfortable for work environment illumination as full spectrum halogens. I'd consider using white LEDs for all utility light, if the price was right. In the long run, you could probably save a lot on electricity for 24/7 illuminated areas.
You're thinking of the Apollo scenario where you have a high velocity inbound vehicle coming from outer space and having to penetrate the Earth's atmosphere at precisely the right angle so as to slow down safely but not skip off the atmosphere or plunge too steep like a meteor. Forget all that! The Mir isn't in outer space. It isn't coming in at an angle. It's in low earth orbit. The Mir is moving nowhere as fast as the inbound Apollo vehicles used to, though it will of course still burn prettily like an Iridium satellite as it falls out of the sky.;)
Friend, with what fuel and which rocket engines do you propose boosting the Mir to a solar impact trajectory? Do you know how heavy the Mir is?:)
This is a ludicrous suggestion. They bring the effing thing down while they still can do so in a controlled manner. I don't like the idea of all the toxic crud that ends up in earth's atmosphere while the Mir burns up, but then again there's probably just as much unsavory space crud coming down from meteors. And I think I'd rather have the Mir burn up and be dumped somewhere reasonably safe, than under uncontrolled circumstances where big burning lumps of it could fall in populated areas.
The Mir (and the ISS, and the Orbiters) are technically not really in Space. They're in orbit, in the uttermost fringest of the outer layers of the Earth's atmosphere. (The last time any manned vessel really went into space was Apollo 17 in 1972.)
The Mir is in an unstable low-altitude orbit that decays over time with the gentle drag of the ultrathin atmosphere excerts its force. Over time, the Mir will slow down, and lose altitude, and ultimately burn up. To prevent this from happening and keep the Mir in orbit in the operating years, they sent up supply ships every few months, which would dock with the Mir, and use the supply ship rocket engine to speed the Mir up a bit and nudge it up towards the intended orbit. This is expensive, and appearently the commercial venture that tried to save Mir, couldn't come up with enough cash to pay for such a supply ship. Add to that, the Mir's gyrodyne attitude control systems will fail eventually, so it's better to dump the Mir while there's still a few systems working on it.
All the people-carrying space junk we got cycling around up there today, is firmly stuck in Earth's gravity well, and it would require massive boosters to toss any of them out into deep space. Add to that, none of the space station hardware was designed to get accelerated with such force in a connected and installed configuration. To lob Mir into space, you'd have to disassemble it and strap a separate booster onto each segment, which is a prohibitively expensive and utterly pointless idea.
To get the CSM+CM+LM Apollo stacks sent from earth orbit into the lunar approach trajectory, they used the massive Saturn V third stage booster. The Space Shuttle and the Mir are a lot heavier than that old Apollo stack, and we have no such booster engines today to send into orbit.
That's why the Mir will be dumped now that commercial funding of its upkeep failed. There simply isn't any safe alternative.
Well, there's ways... a white Nichia don't have to cost that much.
See if the LED Museum's purchasing information page has pointers to better prices for the LEDs you want. I very much recommend checking out Craig Johnson's LED Museum.
The super-highbright white LEDs from Nichia uses a blue LED for the base light, with a coating of yellow phosphor at the base that responds to the ultra violet wavelengths to create a somewhat cold-looking but highly power efficient white light. Like the other guy said, the resulting light spectrum is spotty, there's big peaks on blue and yellow and very little else. The light
is great for utility light and display backlight, but it's somewhat antiseptic and unpleasant for room illumination. Like an old-type fluorescent tube. I fit ten of these in the hood of my car, for light at night in the event of an engine failure. And they use virtually no power at all.
Interestingly, the blue Nichias has quite a lot of UV output, which can be used for blacklight applications with a filter.
Unfiltered CCD cameras hate the blue Nichia
light, probably because of the UV stuff. They
think the (rather pretty) deep blue light is
tinted magenta or cyan.
Actually, anything you shoot at 1000fps or more, even handheld, will look pretty damn smooth and rock steady. Even if your camera POV moved a little or changed direction a few degrees during a five-second timelapse shoot, at 5,000 frames - that motion would at 30 frames per second take nearly 3 minutes to play back, with virtually imperceptible change from frame to frame. It would be sort of like trying to determine the sky darkening near dusk by staring at it continuously. A stable tripod is nice, but not all that important in HS photography. Lighting is an entirely different matter. If the camera is to record so many frames per second, and the CCD or whatever is used, has to clear and re-acquire each in turn, a lot of light must be available on the scene to ensure each of those frames get enough exposure. On my Sony camera, I can only reliably use 1/1000 shutterspeed in bright unfiltered daylight. And we're talking something ten times faster.
W/r/t tripods and stability, you may be thinking of timelapse photography, where the opposite applies. Tripods are absolutely required for timelapse photography.
All this talk about micromirrors.. mechanical stuff, seems like an inelegant solution, don't it?
All-solid-state nonelectric optical computing (OC) with photon-controlled fast-acting logic gates must be part of the equation of tomorrow's terabit speed network nodes. They got stuff in the OC labs like special polymer material that acts like transistors but switches state faster - and conducts streams of photons instead of current - the stuff changes light transmission properties when a control photon source is applied. Nothing electrical in sight. You can build logic circuitry faster than anything electronic and certainly anything mechanical with this stuff.
It'll likely be 'commercially available' eventually, in some form - it's nowhere near practical for use or miniaturization yet, but in the long run it may replace the electronic processors in our computers and move the OEO barrier so that the all-electronic components are used only for less-critical photon-source, I/O and storage systems, and then only swift photons move about inside and connecting the crystalline hearts of all things fast and digital.
Sorta off topic, and much much slower 'technology', does anyone have any pointers to projects dabbling in fluid logic gates, using only the dynamics of liquids in ducts and valves to set logic states and act on them? The experiments with water 'transistors' I've heard mentioned used a control source of liquid to nudge a stream from one fork in the flow path to another.
Slashdot Mirror
Spam is more than just a small nuisance. I don't know how anyone would defend that practice. Spam in all forms, email, snail, phone -- it's a constant grating deluge of noise that costs time and effort to deal with. If that's not already the case, imagine if your phone was ringing every five minutes with prerecorded commercial messages and a quickie radio ad disclaimer voice near the end of the tape with 'removal instructions' involving dialing a 900 number to get taken off the list that you never wanted to be on in the first place. This is exactly how spam email works! Your channel of communication is cluttered by ruthless mail bombers and it becomes YOUR chore to tidy up the mess and extract the trickle of signal from all the noise. How is this reasonable? It's just as unreasonable that US postal service permits their system to violate our mailboxes with junk mail that threatens important signal (bills, personal communication) from being drowned in noise (spam, junk mail). Is this reasonable? I think not. Also, usenet has been reduced from a once healthy and significant forum for the exchange of ideas to little more than a shooting range where those foolish enough to post a message without cautious stealth and cloak and dagger games, will be BLASTED out of the sky with spammers culling email addresses from the forum. This is a detriment to free public communication. It should be possible to post your email address and only have those with a legit reason to contact you, use it. The honor system is obviously a joke these days, so let's have the law help us get rid of these unsavory scammers and spammers ruining the net. Hang all spammers! Hang em good.
...you mean, as opposed to the phony counter-culture of over-zealous PS2 advocates defending Sony's honor? :)
..and Pioneer 10's ping time would be more than 10 1/2 hours. Wow! Talk about lag.
Why don't you send that question to ASK SLASHDOT! ;)
Composite Video != Component Video.
The complaint is that the Dulux thing don't have COMPONENT video out, which is the preferred way to get the DVD Y/Cr/Cb NTSC signals to your TV/monitor via three separate shielded wires. COMPOSITE video is where all the signals are carried on one wire, with nowhere near as good picture quality. The step in between is S-video - to carry the NTSC signals on two wires, Y and C. This is typically used on S-VHS and Hi8 camcorders.
Don't call people names if you don't have your own facts straight.
I'll often BOOKMARK a site I DON'T like, but that don't make it a FAVOURITE. I despise that whole microsoft attitude to serious computing of reducing everything to a peppy shopping experience. I refuse to be patronized by a damn browser. Netscape is the professional choice for thinking individuals with any shred of self respect. The obnoxious but pretty looking IE works only on Mac and Windoze, and so it don't really matter that it is 'compatible' with itself. Plus, IE is so full of security holes and it's much too integrated with the desktop filesystem browser so you can't make clear distinctions between web content and local information, and all these script holes walk all over that nonexisting barrier. Netscape is safe, smart, simple and it is distinctly different from local filesystem tools. I design all my sites to work with Netscape; then they work in IE as well. I could wish for greater 'standards compliance', but then again overdoing a site with flaky design is poor practice in my book. The net is about INFORMATION.
I have a bunch of old Playstation games, but frankly the flickery, crappy low-rez vector rendering of those give me a headache when I play them on the aging Playstation. I hope BLEEM for DC will be out soon! That should add a bunch of vintage titles to the currently not very impressive catalog of Dreamcast compatible software.
How ironic that the PS2 itself didn't include better rendering and performance for the old games. :)
DLP video projectors have a real nice and bright picture, with rich colors. They use a spinning color wheel so you only see one primary color at the time, but the cycle is sufficiently fast that there's no perceptible flicker - except if you try to catch the retina burn of the projector lens, you can see the sequence of colors projected one by one. I forget the manufacturer, but one of the tiniest DLP things I've seen has full SVGA resolution and is about the size of a fat laptop, with a snazzy brushed aluminum case. Great for watching DVDs, btw. :)
The White LED lights I've seen generally have a fairly harsh and cold color. It's nowhere as comfortable for work environment illumination as full spectrum halogens. I'd consider using white LEDs for all utility light, if the price was right. In the long run, you could probably save a lot on electricity for 24/7 illuminated areas.
You're thinking of the Apollo scenario where you have a high velocity inbound vehicle coming from outer space and having to penetrate the Earth's atmosphere at precisely the right angle so as to slow down safely but not skip off the atmosphere or plunge too steep like a meteor. Forget all that! The Mir isn't in outer space. It isn't coming in at an angle. It's in low earth orbit. The Mir is moving nowhere as fast as the inbound Apollo vehicles used to, though it will of course still burn prettily like an Iridium satellite as it falls out of the sky. ;)
This is a ludicrous suggestion. They bring the effing thing down while they still can do so in a controlled manner. I don't like the idea of all the toxic crud that ends up in earth's atmosphere while the Mir burns up, but then again there's probably just as much unsavory space crud coming down from meteors. And I think I'd rather have the Mir burn up and be dumped somewhere reasonably safe, than under uncontrolled circumstances where big burning lumps of it could fall in populated areas.
The Mir (and the ISS, and the Orbiters) are technically not really in Space. They're in orbit, in the uttermost fringest of the outer layers of the Earth's atmosphere. (The last time any manned vessel really went into space was Apollo 17 in 1972.)
The Mir is in an unstable low-altitude orbit that decays over time with the gentle drag of the ultrathin atmosphere excerts its force. Over time, the Mir will slow down, and lose altitude, and ultimately burn up. To prevent this from happening and keep the Mir in orbit in the operating years, they sent up supply ships every few months, which would dock with the Mir, and use the supply ship rocket engine to speed the Mir up a bit and nudge it up towards the intended orbit. This is expensive, and appearently the commercial venture that tried to save Mir, couldn't come up with enough cash to pay for such a supply ship. Add to that, the Mir's gyrodyne attitude control systems will fail eventually, so it's better to dump the Mir while there's still a few systems working on it.
All the people-carrying space junk we got cycling around up there today, is firmly stuck in Earth's gravity well, and it would require massive boosters to toss any of them out into deep space. Add to that, none of the space station hardware was designed to get accelerated with such force in a connected and installed configuration. To lob Mir into space, you'd have to disassemble it and strap a separate booster onto each segment, which is a prohibitively expensive and utterly pointless idea.
To get the CSM+CM+LM Apollo stacks sent from earth orbit into the lunar approach trajectory, they used the massive Saturn V third stage booster. The Space Shuttle and the Mir are a lot heavier than that old Apollo stack, and we have no such booster engines today to send into orbit.
That's why the Mir will be dumped now that commercial funding of its upkeep failed. There simply isn't any safe alternative.
See if the LED Museum's purchasing information page has pointers to better prices for the LEDs you want. I very much recommend checking out Craig Johnson's LED Museum.
Interestingly, the blue Nichias has quite a lot of UV output, which can be used for blacklight applications with a filter.
Unfiltered CCD cameras hate the blue Nichia light, probably because of the UV stuff. They think the (rather pretty) deep blue light is tinted magenta or cyan.
W/r/t tripods and stability, you may be thinking of timelapse photography, where the opposite applies. Tripods are absolutely required for timelapse photography.
All-solid-state nonelectric optical computing (OC) with photon-controlled fast-acting logic gates must be part of the equation of tomorrow's terabit speed network nodes. They got stuff in the OC labs like special polymer material that acts like transistors but switches state faster - and conducts streams of photons instead of current - the stuff changes light transmission properties when a control photon source is applied. Nothing electrical in sight. You can build logic circuitry faster than anything electronic and certainly anything mechanical with this stuff.
It'll likely be 'commercially available' eventually, in some form - it's nowhere near practical for use or miniaturization yet, but in the long run it may replace the electronic processors in our computers and move the OEO barrier so that the all-electronic components are used only for less-critical photon-source, I/O and storage systems, and then only swift photons move about inside and connecting the crystalline hearts of all things fast and digital.
Sorta off topic, and much much slower 'technology', does anyone have any pointers to projects dabbling in fluid logic gates, using only the dynamics of liquids in ducts and valves to set logic states and act on them? The experiments with water 'transistors' I've heard mentioned used a control source of liquid to nudge a stream from one fork in the flow path to another.