I had to learn about the light wheel while mixing finger paints.
Alas, like many of the things I was taught in grade school, when it came to this, at least at the school I went to, the information they taught me was quite false. Rather than get into the nitty gritty physics of color, they presented a "simplified" (read: blatantly false) picture of how color works. Which is really odd because the reality isn't that difficult -- but for some reason teachers assume students will be lost if you teach them words like "cyan" and "magenta" (two words you cannot possibly avoid if you're going to teach someone how to mix paint to achieve accurate colors).
While film used in cinema contains pigments that can create an infinitely large number of color variations, TV sets combine discrete amounts of red, green, and blue light to create a much more limited color range.
This isn't true: color slide film uses three layers, just like monitors do: http://www.imx.nl/photosite/technical/E100G/E100G. html
Actually, the statement you quoted is perfectly true. The fact that color slide film uses three layers does not in any way contradict the statement you quoted. The word you appear to have overlooked in your quote is discrete. Because three layer color slide film is nondiscrete, it had precisely the ability the quoted text says: it can create an infinitely large number of color variations. Since TV sets vary these three colors over a discrete range, they have an infinitely more limited color range.
Re:Biologically speaking, how...
on
RGB to become RGBCMY
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Nothing. This just provides a better way to stimulate them.
If one had the technology to vary the intensity of red, green, and blue over an infinite set of real values, then RGB would be able to perfectly replicate any color.
In reality, the RGB color model used in displays today varies these values over a finite set of integers. One gets the best ability to reproduce colors that are red, green, or blue. Colors between these on the spectrum can be simulated by mixing these, thanks to the three types of cones we used to process color on the retina, but if in order to reproduce a particular color, we need 255 parts red to 41 parts green, we simply cannot increase the intensity of this color without distorting it (shifting towards green, because we've already maxed red).
Thus, any RGB color model is going to more accurately and vibrantly display reds, greens, and blues, and simpler blends of these (where all values are equal, e.g. cyan), anything else is going to be limited in the range, grosser in steps between intensity, and less vibrant at the max.
Adding pixels that display actual yellow (light of precisely that wavelength, rather than a blend of red and green wavelenght light exploiting the trick to stimulate our red and green cones to the same levels that actual yellow-wavelength light would), adding these pixels would increase the ability to accurately display these between colors, despite the fact that, in theory, only RGB is necessary. It's easier to add more between color pixels than to up the intensity range and lower the steps between intensities.
Because their computer is connected to the internet it doesn't make it public property any more than your house is public property because it's congruent to a public street.
No, but there's nothing wrong with my entering your house if you've put a sign in your front yard saying "Open House". And there's nothing wrong with me looking in your front yard to see any signs posted as I drive by. The fact that your house doesn't become public property is irrelevant to the question at hand.
You connect to the public Internet, you open a port to a service, and you allow anyone anywhere to connect to it. Turning around and claiming someone is doing something wrong by merely scanning to see if you've got the online equivalent of an "Open House" sign in your yard is silly.
Unfortunately, not in your face enough -- Windows users have gotten too used to closing any window that opens unrequested without even reading what it says. I finally went around and set Windows Update to just automatically install the updates for people, as they would never do it themselves no matter how many times I urged them to stay on top of their updates.
Also, unlike the audiences of the past who had an optimistic, childlike view of the future, most people today are extremely cynical of technology and it's impacts on our future.
Now I'm getting nostalgic. Anyone else want to see a retread of "Max Headroom: 20 minutes into the future"?
A lot of interesting things have happened on October 4. Among other things, it's the birthday of the modern (Gregorian) calendar! I assume, though, you're refering to the 1957 one...
Heh. I'm afraid I can't say -- my last Macintosh ran System 7.5. I do know that Systems 6 & 7 were quite usable, having many features I find lacking in most "modern" operating systems. I'm told by a friend who uses OS X on a daily basis that it still has some catching up to do in the usability department. Having peeked a bit under the hood of his OS X machine, I do note that behind the pretty interface they appear to have replaced the very logical and organized filesystem layout of classic MacOS with the horrible file spew that characterizes most Windows or Unix-alike systems (ala the File Hierarchy Standard).
Hint: if you need something like InstallShield to install a program, you've screwed up already. A program should be installable by copying a single folder onto your harddrive, and uninstalled by simply deleting that folder. (I hear there's a project called ROX working on introducing sane, usable file system structure to Unix-alike systems.)
Driver installation. In Linux, mess around compiling your kernel and/or modprobing modules and editing/etc/conf.modules. In Syllable, just copy the driver into a directory.
I'm reminded of the good old days, when installing a driver was as simple as clicking on the driver's icon and dragging it into the System:Extensions folder. Alas, most modern operating systems aren't anywhere near as usable as MacOS was in 1989...
Nice to see some are at least starting to get a clue...
Sort of. I don't believe they were originally written as such, and if you read any of them written before the 80's, you'll find they really don't have any hint of being the same "storyverse". It was around then IIRC that he started trying to tie them all together, producing what I think are some of his weakest novels in the process (e.g. "Robots and Empire" and "Foundation and Earth"). He even manages to tie in "The End of Eternity" in "Foundation's Edge", which I'm quite sure he never had in mind when he wrote either "The End of Eternity" or "Foundation".
Heinlein did the same thing towards the end of his career, and similarly produced some sub-par books compared with some of his previous works (although I think "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" is a heck of a lot better than "Foundation and Earth"...)
I know Olivaw talked about the Zeroeth law in "Foundation and Earth", but this was, um, how many tens of thousands of years in the future? Was it mentioned in any other Asimov stories? When did this law come about?
No, the point being exactly what I said previously: sometimes it's quite a bit cheaper, sometimes it's quite a bit more expensive. Cost of a hard drive and it's enclosure comes to under $100 per 120GB. Nobody wants to keep just one backup, regardless of how much data they have, so figure at least three. The drive itself can hold daily, weekly, monthy, and yearly snapshots for 95% of the businesses in America.
Real world example: local company I contract with has 20 employees, making them over twice the size of 90% of American businesses. Their central fileserver has 40GB on its main drive. The 120GB backup drives can hold a full backup and several years worth (remains to be seen how many) of incremental backups, that users can easily dig through if they want to find a file they may have had a few months ago (just add the backup drive to the Samba shares). Swap them every day and keep the other offsite.
In addition to being way cheaper than tapes, it's WAY more convenient for both users and the owner who's swapping drives.
Point being, sometimes (as in this is the case for most businesses) hard drives are a much cheaper alternative to tapes.
You're forgetting to figure in the cost of the tape drive itself. Depending on your backup needs, tapes can be anywhere from insanely cheap to more than 10 times more expensive. All depends on what you need...
However, if Eidos have to re-call xBox thief 3 it could be disasterous for them and Ion Storm. Should we really be happy that an absolutely brilliant game could lose people jobs because of one bug?
If it puts Eidos or Ion Storm out of business, we should be unhappy. If it convinces them that the risks of working with the X-Box platform are not worth the rewards, I'll be jumping for joy. Virtually every stupid little problem with DX2 and a lot of the changes for the worse between T2 and T3 ('scuse me, T:DS) are due to the dumbing down of the game for X-box. This would have been a much better game if it had been PC only. It does the claustrophobic side well, but count on no more agoraphobic levels (like the rooftop mission in T2) while X-box compatibility is an issue. It is my profound and feverent hope that the X-box version loses money. Just not enough to put the company under...
I wouldn't recommend them in this day for a good experience
Agreed for Thief I, disagree strongly for Thief II. If you see Thief II: The Metal Age around, grab it, it's worth it. At $49.99, it'd be a better buy than most games on the shelf today with that cost or more, the fact that it's likely to be heavily discounted as an older game only makes it an even better value. Within the FPS genre, no better games have been produced to date (don't know about Deadly Shadows yet...)
...the majority of people reading the article have absolutely no interest in
You must be new to Slashdot if you think what you say here has the slightest bit of relevance towards the selection of a story.
First of all, Slashdot has always selected stories based on what interests the editors of Slashdot. This is how it is, always has been, and always will be. People read Slashdot to the degree that their interests coincide. But story selection has never taken reader interest into account.
Secondly, your comment here is contradictory -- obviously anyone reading the article has some interest in it, the action of reading rather than skipping it proves they either do, or they're no more intelligent than wild monkeys clicking links at random. Of course, judging by some comments...
Indeed. That's from a discussion on the divisibility of tasks. If certain parts of a project are easily divisible, it makes sense to assign multiple people to that part of the project. If a task is not divisible, it makes no sense to assign more than one person to it -- it cannot benefit from parallelism. A car can be more quickly build if many people are working on it, since people can be building the engine while others are building the frame, but some takes (like having a baby) can't be effectively divided. In the ideal case, it has no impact on the time it takes. In the more common case, is slows things down as people try to divide the indivisible task.
Actually I think this similarities make the differences more noticable.
that's a good point.
And precisely what the article says.
i think my main issue with the article is that it claims that we think of animations/robots that are less human-looking as more human, when there is no evidence to support that idea.
There's plenty of evidence to support exactly what the article says. Whether it says what you're saying here depends on what you mean by "more human". We're certainly not fooled into thinking something is human by a lack of realistic details. On the other hand, we're less distracted by the inhumanity of something when it has less detail. We're not constantly being reminded "it's not human" because our brains don't make an issue out of it. Perhaps "more life-like" would be a better term. We more easily project into something we see as living than into something inanimate (it's more easy to anthropomorphize a car than a picnic table, for example -- easier still to anthropomorphize the pet dog). My pet cat seems "more human" in this sense than the animated characters in a modern video game. And, indeed, she is "more human". At least she's a warm-blooded mammal rather than a pattern of dots on a CRT. Anything that an animated character does to draw my attention to the fact that it's not flesh and blood drags me away from the illusion.
The more details you throw in, unless you get them precisely perfect, the more opportunities you get to spoil the illusion. I've seen perfectly realistic seeming characters in a game suddenly become jokes when they start walking in some scene. Real people can walk, so a sprite that can walk is more realistic than one that stands perfectly still throughout a scene, right? Technically, yes, this is true, but if it hadn't started walking, I wouldn't have been suddently and jarringly reminded of how unreal it actually is. I was buying it until it started walking.
The most realistic, more believable, "most human" characters I've seen were in books, and they were nothing but words on paper. They seem a lot less real when you can recognize them as Brad Pitt on the screen. Am I saying words on paper are "more human" than Brad Pitt? Well, in the sense of "more human" that this article is talking about, yes, precisely.
It boils down to this -- if your brain is better at filling in the details than the animators, the animation will be less jarring with less detail, and the less often you are jarred by the animation, the less often the illusion is spoiled. OTOH, if the animators can capture detail better than your brain and recall every last detail of a thing, then the reverse will be true, and you'll actually appreciate the quality of the animation. In our minds, we may have only a sketchy idea of what a picnic table looks like, so a fine bit of texturing and bump-mapping will knock our socks off with it's realism. But our minds are extremely well tuned for noticing details about human beings, so the same quality of animation that seems so damned real for the picnic table is jarringly unrealistic for the character.
And the more unrealistic detail you throw in, the more often you jar the viewer's senses. More (in quantity) accurate details will improve the realism. More (in quantity) inaccurate details will take away from ther realism. If you agree with these two statements, it follows that an animation with less detail, assuming the missing details would have been inaccurate, is "more human" than the one with more (but inaccurate) details. Adding inaccurate details, whether it's adding eyebrows that don't move properly or adding extra arms, doing this makes something seem less human, not more. Both leaving off the eyebrows and leaving off the extra arms will make the character seem more human, and for the same reason. However, if you're really good at drawing and animating arms, the character will the extra arms will seem more lifelike and be easier to swallow...
the article is very self-contradictory in the sense that it continues to claim that as graphics get more humanlike, they get more creepy, but the creepiness is due to the differences, not the similarities.
Err, yes, that's precisely the point of the article. Good summary. However, why you think the article is contradicting itself in stating this is obscure. The closer the graphics get to perfect, the more jarring the imperfections become. How is this a contradiction? It's ironic that improving something makes the imperfections more glaring, but not actually contradictory...
And when, precisely, did wild poodles roam the Earth?
Nearly all the food you eat is from GMOs. The pets you keep are GMOs. Humans have been using various techniques to modify the life forms around them, improving their genetics in various ways, since before the start of recorded history. Why all of the sudden a new technique for GM makes everyone freaked out about GMOs is beyond me. They're no more or less dangerous than they ever were, we just have a quicker way of making them now...
Slashdot Mirror
I had to learn about the light wheel while mixing finger paints.
Alas, like many of the things I was taught in grade school, when it came to this, at least at the school I went to, the information they taught me was quite false. Rather than get into the nitty gritty physics of color, they presented a "simplified" (read: blatantly false) picture of how color works. Which is really odd because the reality isn't that difficult -- but for some reason teachers assume students will be lost if you teach them words like "cyan" and "magenta" (two words you cannot possibly avoid if you're going to teach someone how to mix paint to achieve accurate colors).
While film used in cinema contains pigments that can create an infinitely large number of color variations, TV sets combine discrete amounts of red, green, and blue light to create a much more limited color range.
This isn't true: color slide film uses three layers, just like monitors do: http://www.imx.nl/photosite/technical/E100G/E100G. html
Actually, the statement you quoted is perfectly true. The fact that color slide film uses three layers does not in any way contradict the statement you quoted. The word you appear to have overlooked in your quote is discrete. Because three layer color slide film is nondiscrete, it had precisely the ability the quoted text says: it can create an infinitely large number of color variations. Since TV sets vary these three colors over a discrete range, they have an infinitely more limited color range.
Nothing. This just provides a better way to stimulate them. If one had the technology to vary the intensity of red, green, and blue over an infinite set of real values, then RGB would be able to perfectly replicate any color. In reality, the RGB color model used in displays today varies these values over a finite set of integers. One gets the best ability to reproduce colors that are red, green, or blue. Colors between these on the spectrum can be simulated by mixing these, thanks to the three types of cones we used to process color on the retina, but if in order to reproduce a particular color, we need 255 parts red to 41 parts green, we simply cannot increase the intensity of this color without distorting it (shifting towards green, because we've already maxed red). Thus, any RGB color model is going to more accurately and vibrantly display reds, greens, and blues, and simpler blends of these (where all values are equal, e.g. cyan), anything else is going to be limited in the range, grosser in steps between intensity, and less vibrant at the max. Adding pixels that display actual yellow (light of precisely that wavelength, rather than a blend of red and green wavelenght light exploiting the trick to stimulate our red and green cones to the same levels that actual yellow-wavelength light would), adding these pixels would increase the ability to accurately display these between colors, despite the fact that, in theory, only RGB is necessary. It's easier to add more between color pixels than to up the intensity range and lower the steps between intensities.
No, but there's nothing wrong with my entering your house if you've put a sign in your front yard saying "Open House". And there's nothing wrong with me looking in your front yard to see any signs posted as I drive by. The fact that your house doesn't become public property is irrelevant to the question at hand.
You connect to the public Internet, you open a port to a service, and you allow anyone anywhere to connect to it. Turning around and claiming someone is doing something wrong by merely scanning to see if you've got the online equivalent of an "Open House" sign in your yard is silly.
Unfortunately, not in your face enough -- Windows users have gotten too used to closing any window that opens unrequested without even reading what it says. I finally went around and set Windows Update to just automatically install the updates for people, as they would never do it themselves no matter how many times I urged them to stay on top of their updates.
Now I'm getting nostalgic. Anyone else want to see a retread of "Max Headroom: 20 minutes into the future"?
A lot of interesting things have happened on October 4. Among other things, it's the birthday of the modern (Gregorian) calendar! I assume, though, you're refering to the 1957 one...
Hint: if you need something like InstallShield to install a program, you've screwed up already. A program should be installable by copying a single folder onto your harddrive, and uninstalled by simply deleting that folder. (I hear there's a project called ROX working on introducing sane, usable file system structure to Unix-alike systems.)
I'm reminded of the good old days, when installing a driver was as simple as clicking on the driver's icon and dragging it into the System:Extensions folder. Alas, most modern operating systems aren't anywhere near as usable as MacOS was in 1989...
Nice to see some are at least starting to get a clue...
Sort of. I don't believe they were originally written as such, and if you read any of them written before the 80's, you'll find they really don't have any hint of being the same "storyverse". It was around then IIRC that he started trying to tie them all together, producing what I think are some of his weakest novels in the process (e.g. "Robots and Empire" and "Foundation and Earth"). He even manages to tie in "The End of Eternity" in "Foundation's Edge", which I'm quite sure he never had in mind when he wrote either "The End of Eternity" or "Foundation". Heinlein did the same thing towards the end of his career, and similarly produced some sub-par books compared with some of his previous works (although I think "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" is a heck of a lot better than "Foundation and Earth"...)
I know Olivaw talked about the Zeroeth law in "Foundation and Earth", but this was, um, how many tens of thousands of years in the future? Was it mentioned in any other Asimov stories? When did this law come about?
No, the point being exactly what I said previously: sometimes it's quite a bit cheaper, sometimes it's quite a bit more expensive. Cost of a hard drive and it's enclosure comes to under $100 per 120GB. Nobody wants to keep just one backup, regardless of how much data they have, so figure at least three. The drive itself can hold daily, weekly, monthy, and yearly snapshots for 95% of the businesses in America.
Real world example: local company I contract with has 20 employees, making them over twice the size of 90% of American businesses. Their central fileserver has 40GB on its main drive. The 120GB backup drives can hold a full backup and several years worth (remains to be seen how many) of incremental backups, that users can easily dig through if they want to find a file they may have had a few months ago (just add the backup drive to the Samba shares). Swap them every day and keep the other offsite.
In addition to being way cheaper than tapes, it's WAY more convenient for both users and the owner who's swapping drives.
Point being, sometimes (as in this is the case for most businesses) hard drives are a much cheaper alternative to tapes.
Oh, I agree entirely. I just don't have a TB of data to back up, nor do any of my customers (heck, nor do all of my customers combined, I suspect).
Yup, gotta get one of those bays for swapping drives, and a few trays. The bays cost around $50 IIRC, and the trays about $15 per drive.
You're forgetting to figure in the cost of the tape drive itself. Depending on your backup needs, tapes can be anywhere from insanely cheap to more than 10 times more expensive. All depends on what you need...
Neither do I. I post on Slashdot because ranting is fun... ;)
If it puts Eidos or Ion Storm out of business, we should be unhappy. If it convinces them that the risks of working with the X-Box platform are not worth the rewards, I'll be jumping for joy. Virtually every stupid little problem with DX2 and a lot of the changes for the worse between T2 and T3 ('scuse me, T:DS) are due to the dumbing down of the game for X-box. This would have been a much better game if it had been PC only. It does the claustrophobic side well, but count on no more agoraphobic levels (like the rooftop mission in T2) while X-box compatibility is an issue. It is my profound and feverent hope that the X-box version loses money. Just not enough to put the company under...
Ah yes, you're one of those rational types who doesn't really have knowledge of (or at least doesn't admit to) real human nature...
Agreed for Thief I, disagree strongly for Thief II. If you see Thief II: The Metal Age around, grab it, it's worth it. At $49.99, it'd be a better buy than most games on the shelf today with that cost or more, the fact that it's likely to be heavily discounted as an older game only makes it an even better value. Within the FPS genre, no better games have been produced to date (don't know about Deadly Shadows yet...)
You must be new to Slashdot if you think what you say here has the slightest bit of relevance towards the selection of a story.
First of all, Slashdot has always selected stories based on what interests the editors of Slashdot. This is how it is, always has been, and always will be. People read Slashdot to the degree that their interests coincide. But story selection has never taken reader interest into account.
Secondly, your comment here is contradictory -- obviously anyone reading the article has some interest in it, the action of reading rather than skipping it proves they either do, or they're no more intelligent than wild monkeys clicking links at random. Of course, judging by some comments...
Indeed. That's from a discussion on the divisibility of tasks. If certain parts of a project are easily divisible, it makes sense to assign multiple people to that part of the project. If a task is not divisible, it makes no sense to assign more than one person to it -- it cannot benefit from parallelism. A car can be more quickly build if many people are working on it, since people can be building the engine while others are building the frame, but some takes (like having a baby) can't be effectively divided. In the ideal case, it has no impact on the time it takes. In the more common case, is slows things down as people try to divide the indivisible task.
that's a good point.
And precisely what the article says.
i think my main issue with the article is that it claims that we think of animations/robots that are less human-looking as more human, when there is no evidence to support that idea.
There's plenty of evidence to support exactly what the article says. Whether it says what you're saying here depends on what you mean by "more human". We're certainly not fooled into thinking something is human by a lack of realistic details. On the other hand, we're less distracted by the inhumanity of something when it has less detail. We're not constantly being reminded "it's not human" because our brains don't make an issue out of it. Perhaps "more life-like" would be a better term. We more easily project into something we see as living than into something inanimate (it's more easy to anthropomorphize a car than a picnic table, for example -- easier still to anthropomorphize the pet dog). My pet cat seems "more human" in this sense than the animated characters in a modern video game. And, indeed, she is "more human". At least she's a warm-blooded mammal rather than a pattern of dots on a CRT. Anything that an animated character does to draw my attention to the fact that it's not flesh and blood drags me away from the illusion.
The more details you throw in, unless you get them precisely perfect, the more opportunities you get to spoil the illusion. I've seen perfectly realistic seeming characters in a game suddenly become jokes when they start walking in some scene. Real people can walk, so a sprite that can walk is more realistic than one that stands perfectly still throughout a scene, right? Technically, yes, this is true, but if it hadn't started walking, I wouldn't have been suddently and jarringly reminded of how unreal it actually is. I was buying it until it started walking.
The most realistic, more believable, "most human" characters I've seen were in books, and they were nothing but words on paper. They seem a lot less real when you can recognize them as Brad Pitt on the screen. Am I saying words on paper are "more human" than Brad Pitt? Well, in the sense of "more human" that this article is talking about, yes, precisely.
It boils down to this -- if your brain is better at filling in the details than the animators, the animation will be less jarring with less detail, and the less often you are jarred by the animation, the less often the illusion is spoiled. OTOH, if the animators can capture detail better than your brain and recall every last detail of a thing, then the reverse will be true, and you'll actually appreciate the quality of the animation. In our minds, we may have only a sketchy idea of what a picnic table looks like, so a fine bit of texturing and bump-mapping will knock our socks off with it's realism. But our minds are extremely well tuned for noticing details about human beings, so the same quality of animation that seems so damned real for the picnic table is jarringly unrealistic for the character.
And the more unrealistic detail you throw in, the more often you jar the viewer's senses. More (in quantity) accurate details will improve the realism. More (in quantity) inaccurate details will take away from ther realism. If you agree with these two statements, it follows that an animation with less detail, assuming the missing details would have been inaccurate, is "more human" than the one with more (but inaccurate) details. Adding inaccurate details, whether it's adding eyebrows that don't move properly or adding extra arms, doing this makes something seem less human, not more. Both leaving off the eyebrows and leaving off the extra arms will make the character seem more human, and for the same reason. However, if you're really good at drawing and animating arms, the character will the extra arms will seem more lifelike and be easier to swallow...
Err, yes, that's precisely the point of the article. Good summary. However, why you think the article is contradicting itself in stating this is obscure. The closer the graphics get to perfect, the more jarring the imperfections become. How is this a contradiction? It's ironic that improving something makes the imperfections more glaring, but not actually contradictory...
Could be, I've never seen it. I installed sid on a machine this weekend the way I've done my last several Debian installs: using debootstrap.
Nice thing about Debian -- there's more than one way to do it...
Nearly all the food you eat is from GMOs. The pets you keep are GMOs. Humans have been using various techniques to modify the life forms around them, improving their genetics in various ways, since before the start of recorded history. Why all of the sudden a new technique for GM makes everyone freaked out about GMOs is beyond me. They're no more or less dangerous than they ever were, we just have a quicker way of making them now...