Seems like the optical camouflage is a dupe though. I remember reading about that a few months ago.
At least if it's about the japanese researcher who used image processing to "camoflage" an object by over-drawing it. So it didn't work IRL and while neat didn't seem to have all that many practical uses.
You know RT doesn't really give a rating to any movie. They just coordinate all the other sites.
And a movie is considered fresh at 3/5 or similar IIRC. So it's not an average value, but an estimate on how many liked it. (Not how much they liked it.)
I think a 98% at rotten tomatoes is a pretty good indication of what this movie goes for.
It has (as others have pointed out) all the makings of a really classic movie. It seems like a child movie at first as it tells the story from a childs perspective, but it's a lot more complex than anything you'll see from Disney et al. For starters there are no truly evil characters in the movie. And most characters who are nice are just purely nice either, they have motives for what they do. (Not just "it says so in the script".)
If it's available on Region 1 do pick it up, or at least rent it. And while you're at it check out other works by Miyazaki like Princess Mononoke.
Although anime in general isn't geared towards children there's a lot of stuff that children can appreciate as well. And they are probably going to do a better job of adapting to the sometimes very different ideas in the movies. (Compared to western animations and normal movies.)
That's interesting. David Fincher is one of my favourite current directors. Although I haven't seen Panic Room (it doesn't seem all that good to me) both Se7en and Fight Club rank very high on my list of favourite movies.
If you'd bothered to read the rest of my post you would have seen that I already adressed that issue. Even following the sentence you quoted I wrote that "this is only true for the bitwise case". Now if you have an idea for how to represent -1, 0 and 1 in one bit of information then pray tell me, I'm sure a lot of other academics would be interested as well.
And I also pointed out that it assumed that the value was unsigned. And for a lot of applications/this is a valid assumption/. And not only for direct computer purposes but also for most parts of information theory such as crypto, compression and coding. When you work with these problems you virtually/always/ do it with in Galoir fields, and then there is no need for negative numbers. Because each negative number is equal to a positive number.
And 65536+2=1 is not at all an absurdity, it's just done modulous 65537. (You probably intended to write 65535+2=1, since 2^16 is 65536.)
If you haven't studied abstract algebra you probably feel that counting somthing modulous is "incorrect" but the fact is that it is a more fundamental branch of mathematics than what you do in Z or R. The idea that there is an infinite number of numbers is more complex than having a limited amount. And in many applications it is more useful to work with only a subset of numbers.
It seems "obvious" that language controls thought and it is also wrong. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been shown to be incorrect, but it is also quite easy to test yourself as well.
When it comes to foreign languages the best way to learn is to train it a lot. Preferably go to a country where it is spoken and live there for a few months/years and you will find yourself thinking in that language i no-time. (Or after a few months at least.)
Furthermore, if you speak a language which has only one word for snow does that mean that you can't differ between different types of snow? (Wet, dry, with hard layer on top etc.) Of course not! You only need experience.
If you train in computer science/engineering (which I do) you will quickly develop your ability to count in number systems other than decimal. (Binary also has the bonus that addition and subtraction are the same thing.;-) If you had been taught to count binary/hex whatnot from the beginning you wouldn't find it harder than learning to count in dec. It's all aquired skills.
Re:guilty about killing "true AI badguys"?
on
Infinite Games?
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· Score: 1
I eat once living things everyday, and anything born or grown is always going to have a greater inherent value to me than something I whipped out of thin air and coded. No matter how life-like it seems, it's not.
Yes but the premise was that the AI construct WAS self aware. And I doubt that the things you eat are self aware. (AFAIK no research has demonstrated this in animals.)
OTOH it may be that the characters in the game are self aware in the sense that a player character in a MMORPG is. Ie it's not the character per se which is self aware, but the intelligence behind it. (So you'd essentially have AIs playing characters in games.)
But the question if it would be morally defendable to kill a character in a game, if that killed that consiousness, is rather intereresting. (And for the record I'd say that it's not morally right to do so.)
Just look for info on Markov processes, Markov chains and stochastic processes. You might want to look up some info on general statistics as well. Unforunately all literature I've read has been in Swedish, so I can't really give any useful hints there.
Basically a Markov/stochastic process is a group of probabilities. Eg probability deal with the prob. of one person making a phone call or not. Markon/stochastic processes deal with a thousand people doing something.
M/S processes are also found a lot in queue theory.
So, just get the advanced AV pack for $30 and be done with it. Then you have RGB out as well as SPDIF out for sound. The TVout on my Geforce4 Ti4200 looks really crappy compared to the XBox. (RGB on a 32" Sony Wega.) I don't think I've ever seen a PC card with RGB out even.
And if you want cheap there are 3rd party audio/video converters on the market as well for about $10.
Personally I did a price comparison when I got the XBox. I really wanted a computer for showing movies on my TV, Divx and DVD alike. First I considered to get a VIA EPIA board, but just that board w/o memory is $150 or more. And it has a hard time playing movies as it's based on a less powerful processor family.
I seriously doubt that you'll be able to put together a cheaper machine for movie viewing than an XBox+ mod chip + DVD kit (for remote)+ advanced AV. That should put you around $300.
If you only want a webbrowser then it's overkill, and not really all that practical. But as a audio/video machine it's probably best you can get right now.
"Zen and the art..." and the following book "Lila" are two books that simply left me stunned after I had read them. Particularly after reading "Zen and the art..." I walked around the house the rest of the evening going over what I had read. For "Lila" the effect was not so strong as I was a prepared for it. (But it's a really good book as well.)
For even less fiction oriented books check out Douglas Hofstadters books. "Gödel, Echer, Bach" is probably his most know book. And it will blow your mind. As a bonus you have a given conversation topic with anyone who has read GEB or his other books.
The idea is naturally to bring the "art" to as many people as possible. Just like how paintings are often reproduced in art books so that you don't actually have to travel to Paris to see Mona Lisa.
Now you might argue that the point of demos is not at all to "show pretty colours" but to do weird shit with your hardware. You can also argue that there are a lot of old demos which are more or less not worthy of being reproduced.
I could in the same manner argue that the point of a painting is not to "show pretty colours" or "show pretty images". The point of paintings is to show what wonderful things a master painter can do with just a faint brush stroke. Since these details are not seen in a print reproduction of the painting such reproductions are a waste of time. Any art magazine which cover reviews of such literature are obviously getting kickbacks from the authors who have produced them.
Or for me to put it in a slightly less satirical way: Apparently a lot of people liked the idea (they were Slashdotted mere minutes after the post). So if you feel it's pointless then go ahead and don't get a copy.
Personally I think it's a commendable effort to save some modern history.
Current CCDs only collect one waveband of light at one area. To simulate colour, they collect three different wavebands in adjacent areas on the surface of the CCD. Hence the funky moire patterns you that you see in tightly patterned cloth on the sample piccies on the site.
Well you don't have to do it like that. High end video cameras use optics to split the incoming image into three identical images. A separate CCD is then used for each of the RGB values. In this case you also get three values in each point.
The drawback is that you loose some sharpness in the image due to the splitting. (This can be complensated naturally.) The idea is to take a normal Cassegrain telescope and split the mirror in multiple parts. You then change the angle of these parts a little to get the same image in different locations. (You can also shift it and use only one CCD. Or use wavebands other than RGB.)
True, but then what changes it from piracy, really?
I just thought about that not too long ago when I was in a store and saw Arcanum for sale. I tried the game out for a little bit before, but I never got anywhere with it. But I really did like it. So I was considering to buy it to support the makers, and because it's nicer to actually own it. Now I could get it used for less then half the price new. (Since it's rather old it's in the bargin bin.) But then I knew that the producers wouldn't get anything from it.
So really, if I had copied the game and sent money (say half of the buying price for the used copy) to the makers wouldn't that have been a better way to show my appriciation?
Now I don't try to claim that it's unetical to sell used games, or that it's the same to buy used games as to pirate games. I guess it's just dependent on what you want to do 1) own the product or 2) benefit the producers.
They also have to do new network code (The XBox version is only playable over low latency LAN). And they are supposedly redisigning some of the later levels. Because they are a bit too flat for mouse+keyboard use.
Yes but he wrote it before they developed micro-electronics. His proposal was supposed to be "do-able" using tech they could then develop. (Getting stuff into space wouldn't be easy, but it was at least possible to do something about that.)
If he had used "micro electronics" it would just have been fiction. That was about as easy to predict before it happened as the development of current airplanes and cars. (For someone living when airplanes and cars didn't exist.)
He he, reminds me of when we had a market guy from Sony-Ericsson visiting our school to talk about Bluetooth. (Sending a market guy to talk to a bunch of CE/EE is quite annoying.)
It didn't take long before someone printed a greeting using the BT enabled printer he had brought.
Just because I want 500 "nekkid chicks" in my room right now doesn't mean that there are any products like this. (But an entrepreuner/farmer could make a fortune with the idea.)
Re:Well I certainly have no objection to this "fly
on
Wi-Fi From The Sky
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· Score: 2
Since they are supposed to be pretty much autonomous I recon you could handle all or at least several of them at once. Probably you'd have a couple of bases around the US for instance and let them maintain 3-4. And have one or so as a "hot backup" and use for replacement.
But yeah, of course it's stupid to trust the guys behind the project right out. Naturally they're biased. But I do think that satellites are a bit too expensive for the purpose. Irridium would seem to provide good support for that theory at any rate. And there was another similar project called Skystation going as well. That one has backing from Lockheed Martin. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more projects in the same genre.
And regarding the middle of the Atlantic I think what is really needed is better interoperability between systems. So when you're at home or in a city you use a very high speed link. The more rural areas you go to the lower speeds you get. But you should still be able to have one box that does it all. (Although it might need several different technologies implemented.)
But yeah, fast wireless on a remote island would be neat. I'd rather have it out in a park nearby though.;-)
He he, yeah that was a pretty funny link. I like his hovership ideas the first one using firing guns the second a hoolahoop.
I don't think the "ideas" are intended to be serious though. As the second I linked to there was written two years after he finished a postgrad in physics. And you only need a small helping of common sense to see that they wouldn't work.
OTOH he might want to apply for a US patent. It'd probably get granted if he just wrote it up in legaleze and made it span a 100 pages or so.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Seems like the optical camouflage is a dupe though. I remember reading about that a few months ago.
At least if it's about the japanese researcher who used image processing to "camoflage" an object by over-drawing it. So it didn't work IRL and while neat didn't seem to have all that many practical uses.
You know RT doesn't really give a rating to any movie. They just coordinate all the other sites.
And a movie is considered fresh at 3/5 or similar IIRC. So it's not an average value, but an estimate on how many liked it. (Not how much they liked it.)
I think a 98% at rotten tomatoes is a pretty good indication of what this movie goes for.
It has (as others have pointed out) all the makings of a really classic movie. It seems like a child movie at first as it tells the story from a childs perspective, but it's a lot more complex than anything you'll see from Disney et al. For starters there are no truly evil characters in the movie. And most characters who are nice are just purely nice either, they have motives for what they do. (Not just "it says so in the script".)
If it's available on Region 1 do pick it up, or at least rent it. And while you're at it check out other works by Miyazaki like Princess Mononoke.
Although anime in general isn't geared towards children there's a lot of stuff that children can appreciate as well. And they are probably going to do a better job of adapting to the sometimes very different ideas in the movies. (Compared to western animations and normal movies.)
That's interesting. David Fincher is one of my favourite current directors. Although I haven't seen Panic Room (it doesn't seem all that good to me) both Se7en and Fight Club rank very high on my list of favourite movies.
You also need to consider how much time is "wasted" if he instead of ordering spends the rest of the day worrying about it.
So it might very well be that if he spends 10 minutes ordering the thing then he can be more productive during the following hours.
Sure he "should" have though of it before, but perhaps he wasn't sure what to get the kid. Or he had the "wish-list email" at work.
If you'd bothered to read the rest of my post you would have seen that I already adressed that issue. Even following the sentence you quoted I wrote that "this is only true for the bitwise case". Now if you have an idea for how to represent -1, 0 and 1 in one bit of information then pray tell me, I'm sure a lot of other academics would be interested as well.
/this is a valid assumption/. And not only for direct computer purposes but also for most parts of information theory such as crypto, compression and coding. When you work with these problems you virtually /always/ do it with in Galoir fields, and then there is no need for negative numbers. Because each negative number is equal to a positive number.
And I also pointed out that it assumed that the value was unsigned. And for a lot of applications
And 65536+2=1 is not at all an absurdity, it's just done modulous 65537. (You probably intended to write 65535+2=1, since 2^16 is 65536.)
If you haven't studied abstract algebra you probably feel that counting somthing modulous is "incorrect" but the fact is that it is a more fundamental branch of mathematics than what you do in Z or R. The idea that there is an infinite number of numbers is more complex than having a limited amount. And in many applications it is more useful to work with only a subset of numbers.
First off your example is not correct. It should be
1-0=1; 0-1=-1=1
Because in a binary system -1 is not a valid number. This is only correct for bitwise operations though.
And my point was that in GF(2^n) ie boolean algebra:
a+b=a-b
This is true as long as you have unsigned values. (Which you often have when doing binary calculations.)
It's lame to reply to oneself but I found a reference discrediting Sapir-Whorf: Steven Pinker.
It seems "obvious" that language controls thought and it is also wrong. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been shown to be incorrect, but it is also quite easy to test yourself as well.
;-) If you had been taught to count binary/hex whatnot from the beginning you wouldn't find it harder than learning to count in dec. It's all aquired skills.
When it comes to foreign languages the best way to learn is to train it a lot. Preferably go to a country where it is spoken and live there for a few months/years and you will find yourself thinking in that language i no-time. (Or after a few months at least.)
Furthermore, if you speak a language which has only one word for snow does that mean that you can't differ between different types of snow? (Wet, dry, with hard layer on top etc.) Of course not! You only need experience.
If you train in computer science/engineering (which I do) you will quickly develop your ability to count in number systems other than decimal. (Binary also has the bonus that addition and subtraction are the same thing.
Yes but the premise was that the AI construct WAS self aware. And I doubt that the things you eat are self aware. (AFAIK no research has demonstrated this in animals.)
OTOH it may be that the characters in the game are self aware in the sense that a player character in a MMORPG is. Ie it's not the character per se which is self aware, but the intelligence behind it. (So you'd essentially have AIs playing characters in games.)
But the question if it would be morally defendable to kill a character in a game, if that killed that consiousness, is rather intereresting. (And for the record I'd say that it's not morally right to do so.)
Just look for info on Markov processes, Markov chains and stochastic processes. You might want to look up some info on general statistics as well. Unforunately all literature I've read has been in Swedish, so I can't really give any useful hints there.
Basically a Markov/stochastic process is a group of probabilities. Eg probability deal with the prob. of one person making a phone call or not. Markon/stochastic processes deal with a thousand people doing something.
M/S processes are also found a lot in queue theory.
So, just get the advanced AV pack for $30 and be done with it. Then you have RGB out as well as SPDIF out for sound. The TVout on my Geforce4 Ti4200 looks really crappy compared to the XBox. (RGB on a 32" Sony Wega.) I don't think I've ever seen a PC card with RGB out even.
And if you want cheap there are 3rd party audio/video converters on the market as well for about $10.
Personally I did a price comparison when I got the XBox. I really wanted a computer for showing movies on my TV, Divx and DVD alike. First I considered to get a VIA EPIA board, but just that board w/o memory is $150 or more. And it has a hard time playing movies as it's based on a less powerful processor family.
I seriously doubt that you'll be able to put together a cheaper machine for movie viewing than an XBox+ mod chip + DVD kit (for remote)+ advanced AV. That should put you around $300.
If you only want a webbrowser then it's overkill, and not really all that practical. But as a audio/video machine it's probably best you can get right now.
There was an article not too long ago on slashdot about it. In short it uses the fastest connection there is on the XBox, the ethernet jack.
I'm not sure if the capture box is capable of buffering data or if it requires the XBox to work.
"Zen and the art ..." and the following book "Lila" are two books that simply left me stunned after I had read them. Particularly after reading "Zen and the art..." I walked around the house the rest of the evening going over what I had read. For "Lila" the effect was not so strong as I was a prepared for it. (But it's a really good book as well.)
For even less fiction oriented books check out Douglas Hofstadters books. "Gödel, Echer, Bach" is probably his most know book. And it will blow your mind. As a bonus you have a given conversation topic with anyone who has read GEB or his other books.
The idea is naturally to bring the "art" to as many people as possible. Just like how paintings are often reproduced in art books so that you don't actually have to travel to Paris to see Mona Lisa.
Now you might argue that the point of demos is not at all to "show pretty colours" but to do weird shit with your hardware. You can also argue that there are a lot of old demos which are more or less not worthy of being reproduced.
I could in the same manner argue that the point of a painting is not to "show pretty colours" or "show pretty images". The point of paintings is to show what wonderful things a master painter can do with just a faint brush stroke. Since these details are not seen in a print reproduction of the painting such reproductions are a waste of time. Any art magazine which cover reviews of such literature are obviously getting kickbacks from the authors who have produced them.
Or for me to put it in a slightly less satirical way: Apparently a lot of people liked the idea (they were Slashdotted mere minutes after the post). So if you feel it's pointless then go ahead and don't get a copy.
Personally I think it's a commendable effort to save some modern history.
Well you don't have to do it like that. High end video cameras use optics to split the incoming image into three identical images. A separate CCD is then used for each of the RGB values. In this case you also get three values in each point.
The drawback is that you loose some sharpness in the image due to the splitting. (This can be complensated naturally.) The idea is to take a normal Cassegrain telescope and split the mirror in multiple parts. You then change the angle of these parts a little to get the same image in different locations. (You can also shift it and use only one CCD. Or use wavebands other than RGB.)
True, but then what changes it from piracy, really?
I just thought about that not too long ago when I was in a store and saw Arcanum for sale. I tried the game out for a little bit before, but I never got anywhere with it. But I really did like it. So I was considering to buy it to support the makers, and because it's nicer to actually own it. Now I could get it used for less then half the price new. (Since it's rather old it's in the bargin bin.) But then I knew that the producers wouldn't get anything from it.
So really, if I had copied the game and sent money (say half of the buying price for the used copy) to the makers wouldn't that have been a better way to show my appriciation?
Now I don't try to claim that it's unetical to sell used games, or that it's the same to buy used games as to pirate games. I guess it's just dependent on what you want to do 1) own the product or 2) benefit the producers.
Sorry, too much prior art.
No wait, your plan has a "release" part as well.
Yeah I though about that too. OTOH I don't think anyone expects it to be shipped anylonger.
Much like "Into the shadows" and a bunch of other games from that time.
They also have to do new network code (The XBox version is only playable over low latency LAN). And they are supposedly redisigning some of the later levels. Because they are a bit too flat for mouse+keyboard use.
Yes but he wrote it before they developed micro-electronics. His proposal was supposed to be "do-able" using tech they could then develop. (Getting stuff into space wouldn't be easy, but it was at least possible to do something about that.)
If he had used "micro electronics" it would just have been fiction. That was about as easy to predict before it happened as the development of current airplanes and cars. (For someone living when airplanes and cars didn't exist.)
He he, reminds me of when we had a market guy from Sony-Ericsson visiting our school to talk about Bluetooth. (Sending a market guy to talk to a bunch of CE/EE is quite annoying.)
It didn't take long before someone printed a greeting using the BT enabled printer he had brought.
And it's also bollox.
Just because I want 500 "nekkid chicks" in my room right now doesn't mean that there are any products like this. (But an entrepreuner/farmer could make a fortune with the idea.)
Since they are supposed to be pretty much autonomous I recon you could handle all or at least several of them at once. Probably you'd have a couple of bases around the US for instance and let them maintain 3-4. And have one or so as a "hot backup" and use for replacement.
;-)
But yeah, of course it's stupid to trust the guys behind the project right out. Naturally they're biased. But I do think that satellites are a bit too expensive for the purpose. Irridium would seem to provide good support for that theory at any rate. And there was another similar project called
Skystation going as well. That one has backing from Lockheed Martin. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more projects in the same genre.
And regarding the middle of the Atlantic I think what is really needed is better interoperability between systems. So when you're at home or in a city you use a very high speed link. The more rural areas you go to the lower speeds you get. But you should still be able to have one box that does it all. (Although it might need several different technologies implemented.)
But yeah, fast wireless on a remote island would be neat. I'd rather have it out in a park nearby though.
He he, yeah that was a pretty funny link. I like his hovership ideas the first one using firing guns the second a hoolahoop.
;-)
I don't think the "ideas" are intended to be serious though. As the second I linked to there was written two years after he finished a postgrad in physics. And you only need a small helping of common sense to see that they wouldn't work.
OTOH he might want to apply for a US patent. It'd probably get granted if he just wrote it up in legaleze and made it span a 100 pages or so.