Hasselblad makes a system like that. Naturally they used to have a system for analog film too, so they are basically just adding to their old idea. I'm not sure if you can use a digital "back end" on the old equipment though.
FPGAs are not static. They can even be reconfigured during runtime. (Though it takes a lot of time, from the chips point of view.)
Search around for reconfigureable FPGA and you'll find that there is several projects which does this. I know of three such projects of the top of my head (Stargate, RAW, Mitrion) so I would exactly call the idea new.
Well it seems rather similar to the Virtex 2 Pro, those have PowerPCs integrated on them. Although they are rather expensive. And while the individual chips may not be all that expensive the boards are.
All in all it seems like these have a developer environment which helps the user port C/C++ programs to this platform. There has been quite a few of those chips / systems before though. It will be interesting to see if this one can take off the ground where the others have failed.
I also used to think that. Then I started college and have since had to learn to do basic algebra without calculators. Turns out you actually understand it quite a bit better when you're not instantly going off to "punsh in the numbers" instead of thinking of the problem first.
Granted that's not really a problem with calculators it's just that it's faster to do an attempt on a calculator and check the answer than to take the time to analyse the problem first and then do the calculation. When you do the calculation by hand you are less likely to try doing the calculations before you are decently sure the thinking is done.
Actually it's pretty much that HS level math is completely useless. It's just stupid reharshes of the same problem 50 billion times. Perfect for a calculator, useless for understanding. (Perhaps Casio, TI et al are sponsoring the makers of math books?) I live in Sweden BTW, so it's not a problem only in the states.
And before you ask, the secret to solving trigonometry by heart is that the problems are set up correctly. The problems we got routinely had answers like 1/sqrt(3) and such, that's the answer. Noone is interested in the approximation a standard calculator will give you. (Noone is interested in the answer at all really, it's the thinking that got you there which is interesting.)
Re:Five facts from a professional photographer
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Beyond Megapixels
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· Score: 1
As with everything 90% of the pictures you take will bad bad. Of those left perhaps 10% will be really good. (So 1 out of 100 is really good.) If you use film then that really good photo is going to cost you quite a lot in term of paying for those other 99 images out of which 9 are good and the rest not really worth it.
There is a second really big benefit of digital and that is that you right off can see if a image was poor and retake it. Otherwise you'll have to "waste" even more film with bracketing. (Taking additional shots at different f/stop to make sure you get at least one good picture.)
Re:spatial resolution vs. temporal resolution
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Beyond Megapixels
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· Score: 1
He probably used techniques for "super resolution". Unfortunately I have no idea what that is called in Photoshop nor if it's standard or requires additional plug-ins.
Some googling for super resolution and photoshop did turn up some suggestions though. Try looking at those and you might find something.
Leonardo (had he come to America) would have felt free to publish and comment without fear
Though I think he would have had to fear the general public instead. When the patent system was passed by congress Leonardo had been dead for over 200 years. Him coming to America and walking around then would probably have caused quite a stir.;-)
It is however true that the idea of patents are a good thing. Encouraging people to freely share their ideas is good. However in the current implementations patent systems are not good. Mainly they make it very difficult and expensive for "little people" to get patents. And when they have them there is little they can do if a bigger company would want to infringe. Since the big companies have patented a shitload of little things they'll just counter sue you. You'll be bancrupt before you can get any money.
Of course it's probably harder than with eg P2P protocols. But it can still be done. And I bet they use some standard protocols for audio and video coding. It's too much work to implement otherwise.
Job experience is typically very good to have. As long as it's relevant and you can show some results it may even be better than a typical degree. However, I doubt that you'll be able to find a job which gives you an impressive resume today if you don't have an academic degree to back you up.
But I agree that being flexible and willing to do new things and new areas are very important. It's hard to put that on your resume though.
Yes, one of the big points with having a Unix based system is that you don't need root privilages to use a computer. You can install programs in user space and run them from there just fine.
If you had been paying attention you would have realized that value for labour was heading towards 0 IF you don't have controls in place to protect the rights of the working people.
Since such regulations and groups (unions) exist this would mean that the payment is not on the way down. That's the entire point.
Besides, having some job security mandated by law is a good way to increase productivity. People don't have to waste time on ass kissing and have less incentive to make "job security" style code.
Just a note to the other comment. If you use binary files you can include them but they won't be properly managed. So you can't do diffs and such on them. Binary files includes Excel and Word files. I'd recommend that you keep you documentation in pure text files (or Latex/HTML if you want to have markups).
As someone pointed out before a GPU is pretty close to a processor or co-processor. Basically it's a really big, really fast vector processor. Your argument is not too far from claiming that you shouldn't use SSE2 for Intel chips or Altivec for G5 processors. Compared to those a new GPU has a shitload of performance though.
Perhaps you could even use a render box with a bunch of PCI-X cards in it (not sure if PCI-X allows that, I sure hope it does). Give it a few months and the current top of the line cards will have halved in price and you can actually put together such a render machine for a reasonable amount of money.
Then you naturally have to build a Beowulf cluster of those.;-)
Play around some with pixel/vertex shaders, they are quite easy to get the hang of and plenty powerful. (Even if you don't have the latest and greatest gfx cards.)
Could make a nice addition to GIMP (if there isn't one already).
I've toyed with shaders some and implemented a system for image processing on GPUs. Quite a lot of fun really, though we didn't do any comparisons with CPU to see how much faster it was. (That project isn't published anywhere though.)
True, but the sound for the Japanese R is somewhere between western L and R. So when you listen to it sometimes sounds like a L. Same thing with single N and M (N is the only single consonant in the Japanese language) as well as B And V/W.
I have never seen these magnetic sticks which you talk about, but check if my understanding of the "engine" is correct. Basically what happens is that you have a rotor with 5 points. On each of these points there are two magnets and the sides of the points are of different polarity. By holding a magnet of a single polarity close to the edge of the rotor you use the interacting magnetic forces to alternatingly pull (as the point of the rotor approaches the single polarity magnet) and push (as the point has passed and thus has a different polarity) the rotor.
I think if you look for that in some online library of "perpetuum mobile" you will find other examples of it and why it doesn't work.
Bright kid though! Give him a bonus on his allowence.:-)
Probably hard to run something like this on low power device like PDA though. I would assume it requires a pretty high end graphics card to create it's magic.
But I agree with you that it's a neat thing to do however. You can run this first as a "wait while we load" game for some other games I've tried.;-)
You guys do see what I'm saying--the servos use energy, but not to push the rotor, they just drop the magnet at the right time to impart a force tangent to the circumference of rotation (like steam hitting the edge of a turbine.)
If you use permanent magnets on the rim to "push" the permanent magnet on the rotor then you would need to apply the same force to pull them back which they could apply to the push.
That is, in order to push and retract you'd need to put the outside magnets on springs or something like that, when you pull the magnets back to "reload" them you apply the same force. Naturally this is disregarding friction and such, so in reality you always get a little less energy out than you put in.
In the article the guy uses electro magnets to "push". However the same is true for them. You can't make them push "harder" than the energy you put into them.
It's nice to know that someone else read the article.;-)
Personally I think this is a non-issue though. You can just as well present the user with a map over their area and then have them orient themselves after that. Since you can get the general area the person is in from base station triangulation the user would get only a relevant part of the map. I'd say it's quite easy for a normally giften person to orient themselves using an overhead view and find a corresponding traffic light (or whatever) which you can see in real life.
However, I do think that something like this can be used as a "virtual tourguide" or something like that. Then you could just send a photo of a building and get a bunch of info on what it is and why you should be interested.
One of the premises for the solution is that you are in a large city where tall buildings interfere with the signal from a GPS. Furthermore they use basic cellphone positioning using the mobile network to find a "target" to search around.
I still find it a bit hard to believe that you could make this work on a large scale though. Computer vision seems to be one of those stupid hard things to get right. It's really fun though.
Personally I think their suggestion for use is a bit off though. If you want to find your way you don't need a good resolution on where you are. Just get an approximate (which you can from normal mobile phone network positioning) and then give a map of the area. A human will be able to orient themselves with that, it's not necessary to pinpoint where you are to a meters precision.
Slashdot Mirror
Hasselblad makes a system like that. Naturally they used to have a system for analog film too, so they are basically just adding to their old idea. I'm not sure if you can use a digital "back end" on the old equipment though.
FPGAs are not static. They can even be reconfigured during runtime. (Though it takes a lot of time, from the chips point of view.)
Search around for reconfigureable FPGA and you'll find that there is several projects which does this. I know of three such projects of the top of my head (Stargate, RAW, Mitrion) so I would exactly call the idea new.
Well it seems rather similar to the Virtex 2 Pro, those have PowerPCs integrated on them. Although they are rather expensive. And while the individual chips may not be all that expensive the boards are.
All in all it seems like these have a developer environment which helps the user port C/C++ programs to this platform. There has been quite a few of those chips / systems before though. It will be interesting to see if this one can take off the ground where the others have failed.
I also used to think that. Then I started college and have since had to learn to do basic algebra without calculators. Turns out you actually understand it quite a bit better when you're not instantly going off to "punsh in the numbers" instead of thinking of the problem first.
Granted that's not really a problem with calculators it's just that it's faster to do an attempt on a calculator and check the answer than to take the time to analyse the problem first and then do the calculation. When you do the calculation by hand you are less likely to try doing the calculations before you are decently sure the thinking is done.
Actually it's pretty much that HS level math is completely useless. It's just stupid reharshes of the same problem 50 billion times. Perfect for a calculator, useless for understanding. (Perhaps Casio, TI et al are sponsoring the makers of math books?) I live in Sweden BTW, so it's not a problem only in the states.
And before you ask, the secret to solving trigonometry by heart is that the problems are set up correctly. The problems we got routinely had answers like 1/sqrt(3) and such, that's the answer. Noone is interested in the approximation a standard calculator will give you. (Noone is interested in the answer at all really, it's the thinking that got you there which is interesting.)
As with everything 90% of the pictures you take will bad bad. Of those left perhaps 10% will be really good. (So 1 out of 100 is really good.) If you use film then that really good photo is going to cost you quite a lot in term of paying for those other 99 images out of which 9 are good and the rest not really worth it.
There is a second really big benefit of digital and that is that you right off can see if a image was poor and retake it. Otherwise you'll have to "waste" even more film with bracketing. (Taking additional shots at different f/stop to make sure you get at least one good picture.)
He probably used techniques for "super resolution". Unfortunately I have no idea what that is called in Photoshop nor if it's standard or requires additional plug-ins.
Some googling for super resolution and photoshop did turn up some suggestions though. Try looking at those and you might find something.
Though I think he would have had to fear the general public instead. When the patent system was passed by congress Leonardo had been dead for over 200 years. Him coming to America and walking around then would probably have caused quite a stir.
It is however true that the idea of patents are a good thing. Encouraging people to freely share their ideas is good. However in the current implementations patent systems are not good. Mainly they make it very difficult and expensive for "little people" to get patents. And when they have them there is little they can do if a bigger company would want to infringe. Since the big companies have patented a shitload of little things they'll just counter sue you. You'll be bancrupt before you can get any money.
Reverse engineering?
Of course it's probably harder than with eg P2P protocols. But it can still be done. And I bet they use some standard protocols for audio and video coding. It's too much work to implement otherwise.
Job experience is typically very good to have. As long as it's relevant and you can show some results it may even be better than a typical degree. However, I doubt that you'll be able to find a job which gives you an impressive resume today if you don't have an academic degree to back you up.
But I agree that being flexible and willing to do new things and new areas are very important. It's hard to put that on your resume though.
Yes, one of the big points with having a Unix based system is that you don't need root privilages to use a computer. You can install programs in user space and run them from there just fine.
If you had been paying attention you would have realized that value for labour was heading towards 0 IF you don't have controls in place to protect the rights of the working people.
Since such regulations and groups (unions) exist this would mean that the payment is not on the way down. That's the entire point.
Besides, having some job security mandated by law is a good way to increase productivity. People don't have to waste time on ass kissing and have less incentive to make "job security" style code.
Just a note to the other comment. If you use binary files you can include them but they won't be properly managed. So you can't do diffs and such on them. Binary files includes Excel and Word files. I'd recommend that you keep you documentation in pure text files (or Latex/HTML if you want to have markups).
I'd just give up one of my old ones. I remember several that I don't use any longer.
You can do that now.
Check the GPGPU links.
As someone pointed out before a GPU is pretty close to a processor or co-processor. Basically it's a really big, really fast vector processor. Your argument is not too far from claiming that you shouldn't use SSE2 for Intel chips or Altivec for G5 processors. Compared to those a new GPU has a shitload of performance though.
Perhaps you could even use a render box with a bunch of PCI-X cards in it (not sure if PCI-X allows that, I sure hope it does). Give it a few months and the current top of the line cards will have halved in price and you can actually put together such a render machine for a reasonable amount of money.
;-)
Then you naturally have to build a Beowulf cluster of those.
Play around some with pixel/vertex shaders, they are quite easy to get the hang of and plenty powerful. (Even if you don't have the latest and greatest gfx cards.)
Could make a nice addition to GIMP (if there isn't one already).
Probably something you can find on the General Purpose GPU site.
I've toyed with shaders some and implemented a system for image processing on GPUs. Quite a lot of fun really, though we didn't do any comparisons with CPU to see how much faster it was. (That project isn't published anywhere though.)
True, but the sound for the Japanese R is somewhere between western L and R. So when you listen to it sometimes sounds like a L. Same thing with single N and M (N is the only single consonant in the Japanese language) as well as B And V/W.
I have never seen these magnetic sticks which you talk about, but check if my understanding of the "engine" is correct. Basically what happens is that you have a rotor with 5 points. On each of these points there are two magnets and the sides of the points are of different polarity. By holding a magnet of a single polarity close to the edge of the rotor you use the interacting magnetic forces to alternatingly pull (as the point of the rotor approaches the single polarity magnet) and push (as the point has passed and thus has a different polarity) the rotor.
:-)
I think if you look for that in some online library of "perpetuum mobile" you will find other examples of it and why it doesn't work.
Bright kid though! Give him a bonus on his allowence.
Probably hard to run something like this on low power device like PDA though. I would assume it requires a pretty high end graphics card to create it's magic.
;-)
But I agree with you that it's a neat thing to do however. You can run this first as a "wait while we load" game for some other games I've tried.
If you use permanent magnets on the rim to "push" the permanent magnet on the rotor then you would need to apply the same force to pull them back which they could apply to the push.
That is, in order to push and retract you'd need to put the outside magnets on springs or something like that, when you pull the magnets back to "reload" them you apply the same force. Naturally this is disregarding friction and such, so in reality you always get a little less energy out than you put in.
In the article the guy uses electro magnets to "push". However the same is true for them. You can't make them push "harder" than the energy you put into them.
Don't forget loudly. Foreigners are typically slightliy deaf so as long as you speak slowly and loudly they will understand.
It's nice to know that someone else read the article. ;-)
Personally I think this is a non-issue though. You can just as well present the user with a map over their area and then have them orient themselves after that. Since you can get the general area the person is in from base station triangulation the user would get only a relevant part of the map. I'd say it's quite easy for a normally giften person to orient themselves using an overhead view and find a corresponding traffic light (or whatever) which you can see in real life.
However, I do think that something like this can be used as a "virtual tourguide" or something like that. Then you could just send a photo of a building and get a bunch of info on what it is and why you should be interested.
Read the article!
One of the premises for the solution is that you are in a large city where tall buildings interfere with the signal from a GPS. Furthermore they use basic cellphone positioning using the mobile network to find a "target" to search around.
I still find it a bit hard to believe that you could make this work on a large scale though. Computer vision seems to be one of those stupid hard things to get right. It's really fun though.
Personally I think their suggestion for use is a bit off though. If you want to find your way you don't need a good resolution on where you are. Just get an approximate (which you can from normal mobile phone network positioning) and then give a map of the area. A human will be able to orient themselves with that, it's not necessary to pinpoint where you are to a meters precision.