So I have DirecTV and was watching a DVRed show on ComedyCentral last night and noticed that Viacom had added a scrolling message to the bottom of the screen where they published the DirecTV customer service number and told everyone to call DirecTV to protest the removal of Viacom channels. So DirecTV allows that to stand, but shrunk the actual broadcast channel subtly, so they could fit their own scrolling message below the Viacom one telling subscribers that Viacom are greedy bastards that want to charge DirecTV a billion extra dollars for their channels.
Hilarious. Then it went black at 9pm PDT and switched to one of those generic channel selector guide channels.
Whatever... I guess I'll have to browse Youtube to get my fill of Tosh.0-style Internet video idiocy for a couple weeks until the babies work out an agreement.
1. He was young. 2. Being honest in a private conversation. 3. This conversation has become a meme that's regularly used to assassinate his entire character. Largely I imagine, because out of some hard work and a lot of luck, he became successful. 4. It's really just one moment in his life and he probably said it in a geeky-sarcastic manner to get a reaction. I don't necessarily interpret it to mean that he's admitting (at that point at least) to not be trustworthy with others data, just that he was amazed to discover that people become blithering idiots when it comes to exchanging their personal information for "shiny". I don't think the rest of us truly made that connection until several years later, so I imagine it would have been quite a revelation to him just how much people trust words on a computer screen.
Sure, he started Facebook and they're hardly corporate role models when it comes to privacy, but it's no different than what dozens of other corps want to do or are doing with your data, so go burn their CEOs in effigy.
I dunno... As long as I have an out, if other people don't know or don't care about their security/privacy enough to protect it, I don't feel any special obligation to punish a company that exploits their ignorance.
Yup. Currently running Shibby's latest (095) All-In-One build on my Cisco E4200v1. It's a good N router and Shibby's firmware is super stable with support for IPv6, USB & VPN among other things.
can someone explain to me why every generation, like changing from 45nm to 32nm lithography or changing wafer size from 300mm to 450mm or whatever takes building a brand new multi-billion dollar fab when you'd think they'd build the machinery and everything that goes along with it to um, 'scale' to some extent? Certainly there must be machines in these fabs that can be re-programmed to handle changing requirements.
Even without computer simulations, I imagine they'd compare dinosaur skeletons to that of elephants, horses, giraffes, rhinos and even birds (which are supposed to be descended from the dinosaurs) to develop some reasonable bone mass or skeletal girth to weight ratios, no? Off by a factor of 3 1/2 seems ridiculous, even if we're talking research that was done in the 60s.
And in response to myself... According to the article (which I just skimmed), a common method was to take an artist’s reconstruction sculpture of the animal, measure its volume and multiply by the density to get its weight.
So rather than using animals we know as a guideline and performing some basic math, they let an artiste eyeball it by building some completely arbitrary model that happened to envelop the skeleton and then used that model as a guide to dinosaur weight, which in turn had sweeping impacts on virtually every aspect of our understanding of dinosaurs.
Rather than complain about Yuppies, why not support the construction of more housing units, so that supply meets demand and prices come down? And don't give me any crap about low income housing versus market rate units. If you build enough market rate units to meet the massive pent-up demand, then housing will become more affordable for everyone.
It's not the Slashdot community's purpose to show you evidence for evolution. Go get an education. That's right, go to a University, take a class on evolution and engage a PhD who's life work has been tracking the genetic changes in flower species up a hillside or insects across a desert. I assure you that whatever evidence you're looking for will become stark and obvious. Then you will understand why so many people are bloody well angry with your brand of skepticism.
There's already overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution. The people who don't believe in evolution will not believe in evolution no matter what evidence you show them. They're either idiots, religious fundamentalists or those who stand to gain by deceiving the latter two groups. Move along.
You shouldn't. Join me and thousands of other 'Bogleheads' http://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Getting_Started who simply and effectively beat 90% of investors long-term by passively indexing and reaping the rewards of Capitalism without the added risks of middle-men who are there for no reason other than to take your money in both subtle and not so subtle ways. The philosophy is simple and rewarding:
1. Allocate your assets in a diversified fashion according to your need to take risk. 2. Use passive indexed investments because most major markets/stocks are highly efficient (can not be reliably predicted.) 3. Mind fees and taxes. 4. Enjoy your life with all the time you save not having to learn how to win the IPO game, pick stocks, mutual funds or their managers.
Not that this whole thing isn't absurd for the reasons already discussed above, but what no one bloody well seems to understand it that an audio stream is not a godamn bitmap picture. You can't improve audio quality of *audible frequencies* by increasing resolution of the horizontal axis (sampling frequency) beyond a rate which surpasses the Nyquist frequency for human hearing. Assuming a high quality anti-aliasing filter is used and excellent quality recording and playback equipment, audio sampled at 48kHz can be unambiguously represented up to about 24kHz. 96kHz is a waste of bits.
Vertical resolution (# of bits) is the only theoretical way to improve actual audio quality further... and beyond about 16-18 bits, it's also beyond the ability of even the most diehard audiophiles to discern (in properly conducted experiments.)
Yeah the Bold 9000 was decent in its day because of the keyboard, but the browser was atrocious. The new Bold 9900 with OS 7.1 fixes pretty much everything that sucked on the original Bold, adds a high rez touchscreen and puts the Torch to shame. It even has a halfway decent browser that can complete the SunSpider benchmark in about 2500ms. It's no iPhone 4S, but web browsing is an 'ok' experience for the first time on a BB device.
If RIM wasn't constantly 18-24 months behind Apple with comparable generation hardware, they might have had a chance. It's gonna be a real uphill battle from here even with OS10 and their strategy to pay developers to write apps.
I recently had an opportunity to change phones from the absolutely disastrous experience I was having with my BB Torch 9800 (keyboard too small, unbalanced when slid open, crashy and laggy OS, battery sucking bugs, etc...)
My only choices at work were BB Bold 9900 or an iPhone 4S. My wife owns an iPhone 4, so I'm very familiar with both platforms. What it came down to for me was that after all the gee-whiz novelty of apps, games and fancy touch screen gestures wears off, what I need my phone to do is handle email, texts, phone calls and some light RSS news feeds without pissing me off. The iPhone blows Blackberry away in almost every way, but the physical keyboard is just that good on the Bold, so I went with (possibly my last?) Blackberry.
At this late juncture, for RIM's sake, they either better have a lot of people like me still out there or they'll need to need to play the consumer catchup game seriously, which means equaling or surpassing Apple on the hardware and OS fronts and building an ecosystem that doesn't completely suck. Microsoft looks poised to become #3 as it stands, and you don't want to know what happens to the #4 player in this space.
TSMC's yield on 28nm has been really low. They priced it sky high because they simply don't have enough chips to make many of these monsters -- supply and demand I suppose.
The real story in my mind is how the tech press will go gaga over a part that few will ever own and how that will inevitably help frame the entire nVidia 6xx product line and sell parts that are not the GTX 690. I guess it's no different than Chevrolet building a high performance sportscar to improve the perception of the bowtie logo.
Yup. For all the bluster I hear about the constitution and the institution of democracy in the US, I just can't bring myself to trust the system. The way things are going, it looks to me like in the next say 50 years we'll be essentially stuck in a 1984-style surveillance dictatorship in all but label. Kind of like China or Iran or Russia where they may let you vote in a new leader from time to time, but he's really part of the same machine that brought you the last one.
He single-handedly did the Instagram deal without outside involvement. He was 14 years old when the last bubble crashed, and he probably didn't learn a whole lot from it.
Then again, with Facebook now worth upwards of $100B, he can afford to overpay for companies by 10x and get away with it.
Since you're so self-righteously against scientific research on animals, perhaps you should consider making a stand and refusing to use therapies that were tested on animals.
That's funny because for me, with Win7/Firefox 11 on a Core i5 CPU with a recent Nvidia GPU, for a 2000 particle run I get 40fps in Flash and about 45fps using canvas.
I've been using DuckDuckGo for about 3 months... Sometimes, I find the top results, while good, are still not up to Google's quality and I'll cheat and hit up google.com from time to time. Also, DDG is slow as hell, but it's a small price to pay for some semblance of privacy I suppose.
Let's list some of the significant drawbacks of this first version which we can realistically chalk up as a technology demo: * Camera is shaped weird and appears awkward to use. If form follows function, I'm not sure what the function is. * Cheap last-gen LCD display. * Output is only 1MP (1024x1024). * Sensor is really small * Lens is cheap * Limited depth of field * Raw light fields have to be sent to Lytro server for processing * Only a handful of focus points can be chosen * In focus range is limited * Photos are converted into lame Flash animations
Now, let's re-imagine this as a serious photographers tool a few years down the road: * It's a DSLR with real interchanegable lenses and huge hi-rez LCD display * Let's say the camera can even magically switch from "classic" to light field mode with a toggle switch. * Huge full frame sensor allowing light field output at 6+MP with high dynamic range and low noise at high ISOs * Depth of field choices much broader and limited only by lens chosen * Effective focus range is much improved * Raw lightfield processing can be done on your local computer, allowing precise control over number and position of focus layers. Alternately, assuming processing speed is available, perhaps focusing points can be chosen in real-time within the finished image blob. * Output as multiple jpegs, flash or HTML5, etc.
Now what? Well, you still have these limitations if you use light fields: * You're basically giving up some amount of image resolution for the ability to focus after the fact. DSLRs and even consumer cameras already have excellent auto-focus modes that when used properly generally nail focus in decent light. It's not the biggest or even second biggest problem I see in photos online. Bad composition and inadequate lighting are generally much bigger problems. * If you chose the wrong focus point when shooting, sure you can fix your mistake, but if focus is off due to camera shake or motion blur, you're SOL. * It's basically useless in images with large depths of field (think large landscapes where everything is essentially in focus) * Makes no difference on a printed page, except you have one more tweak available during editing. * Still gimmicky. After everyone has played around with a few of these photos interactively, they're bored and move on.
Slashdot Mirror
For your viewing pleasure, here are the top 20 passwords by number of occurrences in the Yahoo hacked set. Enjoy!
Password Count
123456 1673
password 804
welcome 439
ninja 333
abc123 255
123456789 226
princess 216
sunshine 213
12345678 208
qwerty 177
michael 167
writer 166
monkey 165
freedom 164
password1 162
111111 160
iloveyou 142
tigger 136
baseball 136
shadow 134
So I have DirecTV and was watching a DVRed show on ComedyCentral last night and noticed that Viacom had added a scrolling message to the bottom of the screen where they published the DirecTV customer service number and told everyone to call DirecTV to protest the removal of Viacom channels. So DirecTV allows that to stand, but shrunk the actual broadcast channel subtly, so they could fit their own scrolling message below the Viacom one telling subscribers that Viacom are greedy bastards that want to charge DirecTV a billion extra dollars for their channels.
Hilarious. Then it went black at 9pm PDT and switched to one of those generic channel selector guide channels.
Whatever... I guess I'll have to browse Youtube to get my fill of Tosh.0-style Internet video idiocy for a couple weeks until the babies work out an agreement.
What!? How dare you speak of the God particle that way!
1. He was young.
2. Being honest in a private conversation.
3. This conversation has become a meme that's regularly used to assassinate his entire character. Largely I imagine, because out of some hard work and a lot of luck, he became successful.
4. It's really just one moment in his life and he probably said it in a geeky-sarcastic manner to get a reaction. I don't necessarily interpret it to mean that he's admitting (at that point at least) to not be trustworthy with others data, just that he was amazed to discover that people become blithering idiots when it comes to exchanging their personal information for "shiny". I don't think the rest of us truly made that connection until several years later, so I imagine it would have been quite a revelation to him just how much people trust words on a computer screen.
Sure, he started Facebook and they're hardly corporate role models when it comes to privacy, but it's no different than what dozens of other corps want to do or are doing with your data, so go burn their CEOs in effigy.
Make sure to get the RT-N build to get working 5GHz band:
http://tomato.groov.pl/download/K26RT-N/build5x-095-EN/Linksys%20E4200/tomato-E4200USB-NVRAM60K-1.28.RT-N5x-MIPSR2-095-AIO.bin
I dunno... As long as I have an out, if other people don't know or don't care about their security/privacy enough to protect it, I don't feel any special obligation to punish a company that exploits their ignorance.
Yup. Currently running Shibby's latest (095) All-In-One build on my Cisco E4200v1. It's a good N router and Shibby's firmware is super stable with support for IPv6, USB & VPN among other things.
Check it out:
http://tomato.groov.pl/
can someone explain to me why every generation, like changing from 45nm to 32nm lithography or changing wafer size from 300mm to 450mm or whatever takes building a brand new multi-billion dollar fab when you'd think they'd build the machinery and everything that goes along with it to um, 'scale' to some extent? Certainly there must be machines in these fabs that can be re-programmed to handle changing requirements.
I dunno, could we see a renaissance in local computer shops as a result?
Even without computer simulations, I imagine they'd compare dinosaur skeletons to that of elephants, horses, giraffes, rhinos and even birds (which are supposed to be descended from the dinosaurs) to develop some reasonable bone mass or skeletal girth to weight ratios, no? Off by a factor of 3 1/2 seems ridiculous, even if we're talking research that was done in the 60s.
And in response to myself... According to the article (which I just skimmed), a common method was to take an artist’s reconstruction sculpture of the animal, measure its volume and multiply by the density to get its weight.
So rather than using animals we know as a guideline and performing some basic math, they let an artiste eyeball it by building some completely arbitrary model that happened to envelop the skeleton and then used that model as a guide to dinosaur weight, which in turn had sweeping impacts on virtually every aspect of our understanding of dinosaurs.
And you wonder why people don't trust science...
Everyone in SF gets to have their say over new building developments (witness the nastiness over 8 Washington http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/18/BAHR1M13A6.DTL), so virtually nothing gets built, which acts to ensure housing prices stay sky high.
Rather than complain about Yuppies, why not support the construction of more housing units, so that supply meets demand and prices come down? And don't give me any crap about low income housing versus market rate units. If you build enough market rate units to meet the massive pent-up demand, then housing will become more affordable for everyone.
It's not the Slashdot community's purpose to show you evidence for evolution. Go get an education. That's right, go to a University, take a class on evolution and engage a PhD who's life work has been tracking the genetic changes in flower species up a hillside or insects across a desert. I assure you that whatever evidence you're looking for will become stark and obvious. Then you will understand why so many people are bloody well angry with your brand of skepticism.
There's already overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution. The people who don't believe in evolution will not believe in evolution no matter what evidence you show them. They're either idiots, religious fundamentalists or those who stand to gain by deceiving the latter two groups. Move along.
You shouldn't. Join me and thousands of other 'Bogleheads' http://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Getting_Started who simply and effectively beat 90% of investors long-term by passively indexing and reaping the rewards of Capitalism without the added risks of middle-men who are there for no reason other than to take your money in both subtle and not so subtle ways. The philosophy is simple and rewarding:
1. Allocate your assets in a diversified fashion according to your need to take risk.
2. Use passive indexed investments because most major markets/stocks are highly efficient (can not be reliably predicted.)
3. Mind fees and taxes.
4. Enjoy your life with all the time you save not having to learn how to win the IPO game, pick stocks, mutual funds or their managers.
Not that this whole thing isn't absurd for the reasons already discussed above, but what no one bloody well seems to understand it that an audio stream is not a godamn bitmap picture. You can't improve audio quality of *audible frequencies* by increasing resolution of the horizontal axis (sampling frequency) beyond a rate which surpasses the Nyquist frequency for human hearing. Assuming a high quality anti-aliasing filter is used and excellent quality recording and playback equipment, audio sampled at 48kHz can be unambiguously represented up to about 24kHz. 96kHz is a waste of bits.
Vertical resolution (# of bits) is the only theoretical way to improve actual audio quality further... and beyond about 16-18 bits, it's also beyond the ability of even the most diehard audiophiles to discern (in properly conducted experiments.)
Yeah the Bold 9000 was decent in its day because of the keyboard, but the browser was atrocious. The new Bold 9900 with OS 7.1 fixes pretty much everything that sucked on the original Bold, adds a high rez touchscreen and puts the Torch to shame. It even has a halfway decent browser that can complete the SunSpider benchmark in about 2500ms. It's no iPhone 4S, but web browsing is an 'ok' experience for the first time on a BB device.
If RIM wasn't constantly 18-24 months behind Apple with comparable generation hardware, they might have had a chance. It's gonna be a real uphill battle from here even with OS10 and their strategy to pay developers to write apps.
I recently had an opportunity to change phones from the absolutely disastrous experience I was having with my BB Torch 9800 (keyboard too small, unbalanced when slid open, crashy and laggy OS, battery sucking bugs, etc...)
My only choices at work were BB Bold 9900 or an iPhone 4S. My wife owns an iPhone 4, so I'm very familiar with both platforms. What it came down to for me was that after all the gee-whiz novelty of apps, games and fancy touch screen gestures wears off, what I need my phone to do is handle email, texts, phone calls and some light RSS news feeds without pissing me off. The iPhone blows Blackberry away in almost every way, but the physical keyboard is just that good on the Bold, so I went with (possibly my last?) Blackberry.
At this late juncture, for RIM's sake, they either better have a lot of people like me still out there or they'll need to need to play the consumer catchup game seriously, which means equaling or surpassing Apple on the hardware and OS fronts and building an ecosystem that doesn't completely suck. Microsoft looks poised to become #3 as it stands, and you don't want to know what happens to the #4 player in this space.
TSMC's yield on 28nm has been really low. They priced it sky high because they simply don't have enough chips to make many of these monsters -- supply and demand I suppose.
The real story in my mind is how the tech press will go gaga over a part that few will ever own and how that will inevitably help frame the entire nVidia 6xx product line and sell parts that are not the GTX 690. I guess it's no different than Chevrolet building a high performance sportscar to improve the perception of the bowtie logo.
Yup. For all the bluster I hear about the constitution and the institution of democracy in the US, I just can't bring myself to trust the system. The way things are going, it looks to me like in the next say 50 years we'll be essentially stuck in a 1984-style surveillance dictatorship in all but label. Kind of like China or Iran or Russia where they may let you vote in a new leader from time to time, but he's really part of the same machine that brought you the last one.
He single-handedly did the Instagram deal without outside involvement. He was 14 years old when the last bubble crashed, and he probably didn't learn a whole lot from it.
Then again, with Facebook now worth upwards of $100B, he can afford to overpay for companies by 10x and get away with it.
Now that I pledged $15, I don't feel so bad about pirating it using the dual 5 1/4" floppy drives on my Tandy 1000.
It's interesting that they measured piracy based on the difference between the number of actual copies of the software they sold versus game guides.
Since you're so self-righteously against scientific research on animals, perhaps you should consider making a stand and refusing to use therapies that were tested on animals.
That's funny because for me, with Win7/Firefox 11 on a Core i5 CPU with a recent Nvidia GPU, for a 2000 particle run I get 40fps in Flash and about 45fps using canvas.
http://themaninblue.com/experiment/AnimationBenchmark/flash/?particles=2000
http://themaninblue.com/experiment/AnimationBenchmark/canvas/?particles=2000
So I guess YMMV.
I've been using DuckDuckGo for about 3 months... Sometimes, I find the top results, while good, are still not up to Google's quality and I'll cheat and hit up google.com from time to time. Also, DDG is slow as hell, but it's a small price to pay for some semblance of privacy I suppose.
Let's list some of the significant drawbacks of this first version which we can realistically chalk up as a technology demo:
* Camera is shaped weird and appears awkward to use. If form follows function, I'm not sure what the function is.
* Cheap last-gen LCD display.
* Output is only 1MP (1024x1024).
* Sensor is really small
* Lens is cheap
* Limited depth of field
* Raw light fields have to be sent to Lytro server for processing
* Only a handful of focus points can be chosen
* In focus range is limited
* Photos are converted into lame Flash animations
Now, let's re-imagine this as a serious photographers tool a few years down the road:
* It's a DSLR with real interchanegable lenses and huge hi-rez LCD display
* Let's say the camera can even magically switch from "classic" to light field mode with a toggle switch.
* Huge full frame sensor allowing light field output at 6+MP with high dynamic range and low noise at high ISOs
* Depth of field choices much broader and limited only by lens chosen
* Effective focus range is much improved
* Raw lightfield processing can be done on your local computer, allowing precise control over number and position of focus layers. Alternately, assuming processing speed is available, perhaps focusing points can be chosen in real-time within the finished image blob.
* Output as multiple jpegs, flash or HTML5, etc.
Now what?
Well, you still have these limitations if you use light fields:
* You're basically giving up some amount of image resolution for the ability to focus after the fact. DSLRs and even consumer cameras already have excellent auto-focus modes that when used properly generally nail focus in decent light. It's not the biggest or even second biggest problem I see in photos online. Bad composition and inadequate lighting are generally much bigger problems.
* If you chose the wrong focus point when shooting, sure you can fix your mistake, but if focus is off due to camera shake or motion blur, you're SOL.
* It's basically useless in images with large depths of field (think large landscapes where everything is essentially in focus)
* Makes no difference on a printed page, except you have one more tweak available during editing.
* Still gimmicky. After everyone has played around with a few of these photos interactively, they're bored and move on.