This is news? Anyone else run a NES on those dozen or so emulators that already has pixel-smoothing options?
One suspects that if/. posted an article about a new engineering method that will allow us to finally build a cheap, working space elevator, you'd post, "This is news? Haven't we had ways of making cables for centuries?"
Apparently not. Ever since William Shakespeare made a career out of it, people have thought it a wonderful thing to follow suit.
(Not that Shakespeare was the first to regurgitate older material by any means... I believe the Greeks were busy copying earlier Greek tragedies and comedies long before Shakespeare started doing it.)
I thought I did, but upon reading OP's description, I can safely say I knew in the same sense at someone who knows an "internal combustion engine" is what makes cars go (i.e. knows that it does), rather than knowing in the sense of someone who knows what it actually is (engine that works by sparks igniting fuel, pushing pistons in cylinders, turning the crank shaft, etc.). I knew that a Geiger counter is a device that detects radiation and makes that clicky-noise. I knew what it does, but not, really, what it is. Most of what the posted paragraph contains was new information to me.
Troubleshooting is easier on equipment you control.
There is no substitute for knowledge and experience.
Once it is running smoothly, if the expected traffic actually happens, decide where to go from there.
All this is true. It's also a hassle. I'm fully competent to do all these things, in fact, that used to be my old job. Nevertheless, these days, I just pay someone else to do it. Doing it yourself doesn't really save you any money, not when you consider the people who do this large-scale can exploit the economies of scale, and frankly if you value your time at all, it'll cost you more to do it yourself. Now, perhaps, if you enjoy that sort of thing, that's okay. I used to, but it gets old. These days, I'd rather just pay someone else to do it...
They are claiming they can reconstruct the missing k-vectors. they can't.
That's not what they're claiming.
If you know something about the source...
They do, after the "first pass", and adjust the lasers accordingly.
That cannot be done if the thing you are imaging is arbitrary.
It can, it just can't be done instantaneously.
You have to know something to make up the missing information.
...and you can determine information in the "first pass". Since this is essentially a kind of adaptive optics, you can start with something arbitrary, but end up knowing a lot about what you're imaging, and using that information to adjust the lens or light to reveal further information.
On a large desktop screen, killing the URL bar approach may be pointless, even if this is a clear move toward a full screen view to benefit web apps. It is mobile device that are the target and the true beneficiary of this technology...
It's amazing what you can learn if you ever manage to learn to read. Good luck with that...
"So downloading a game is bad, but apparently stopping by a second-hand store to pick up a licensed physical copy of the game ends up hurting them even more"
No, they're saying that more people buy it second-hand than pirate it. It's equally bad for them if you do either one.
Um, no. It's not equally bad when someone who wasn't going to buy your game no matter what downloads it, costing you no sales at all, vs. someone who buys it second-hand, costing you a new game sale.
The other thing that Japan is known for is going from cheap, low quality cars to having some of the highest quality cars in the world. Was there a "shock" event that caused that as well? Genuinely curious.
Probably not. I'd point out that all generalizations have counter-examples, but in this case, I think you're more or less misunderstanding OP's point if you think that would be one. I don't think improvements in existing activities count as "change" in the sense that was meant -- certainly not a major change.
I know it's bad but I like to repost and ponder in insight over the content of one the very first comment that was posted about the disaster:
It's funny because what is happening in Japan is exactly why Nuclear Power is SAFE!
An earthquake 7 times more powerful than the biggest it was built for hit, and all that happened to the reactors that didn't shut down cleanly was a small amount of radioactive noble gases, which decay within minutes. Even if the cores DO melt, they're safely contained in... wait for it... containment chambers!
People don't realize the amount of engineering that goes into nuclear to make it safe.
As I always say: containment chambers indeed!
Indeed. Radiation levels around the plant prove beyond any doubt that the amount of radiation release was neither small, nor did it decay within minutes, nor was it contained in any containment chambers. It's amazing how very confidently people can be so extremely wrong.
So, no one should ever put more work into a game than the $59.99 initial price warrants? Or are you saying that they make $200 games and then don't "lop parts off" but insist everyone pay $200 up front?
No relevant analogy? Please. A very simple car analogy is right at hand. You seriously believe no one ever buys anything but a base model car, or never pays to have additional features installed after?
Than the system you just described? Obviously. It's easy to design a system that's less fair. The challenge is to design one that's more fair. Just because you aren't up to the challenge doesn't mean it's a bad idea...
Oh wow. Just wow. You really are as ignorant as the other comment I replied to seemed to indicate you might be.
We can build modern designs. Sometimes we do. Generally we don't, because it's expensive. It's expensive because materials and labor aren't free, and significant amounts of both and requires to build and operate one. We can build modern designs, we just don't without public subsidy for the same reason we don't build solar and wind power without public subsidy: you can't make a profit doing it.
Coal plants release more radiation because they release so little radiation that we don't even bother to try to contain it. If a nuclear power plant were operated along the same principles, there's no question it would eclipse the coal plant in terms of released radiation by half a dozen orders of magnitude.
Yes, those two elements are released more in coal burning than in nuclear power incidents. This is irrelevant, doubly-so since neither are elements your body will try to chemically incorporate, both of which are naturally occurring and found in the environment anyhow, long before the industrial era, and neither of which poses anywhere close to the health risk as things with much lower half-lives (those things don't stay around as long, but they're far, far, FAR more dangerous while they're still present).
Thanks to the insane selective fear of physics that some people have, it's far too expensive (in the short term) to test and build the new reactors.
Yes, it's not the cost of the materials or the labor involved in building something as large and intricate as a nuclear power plant that make it expensive. Or maybe it is. Both concrete and engineering costs sky-rocket if people fear the result. The cement just won't set because it's shivering in fear...
Honestly? Really? You think building a nuclear power plant would be cheap if people didn't care what kind of plant you built? You think it's fear that multiplying the cost? And it has to be multiplying significantly, or the argument that fear is the reason for the overwhelming expense falls flat. Can you quantify this? How much would the plant cost if people didn't fear it? Is the cost of securing a permit that much more expensive that just building the plant? Is there completely unnecessary safety equipment that could be eliminated, and that equipment alone costs more than the plant? I'd love to see the numbers here...
It's too bad we can't actually build the newer, safer designs. People might protest. It reminds me of the protests when the Cassini probe was launched, all because it had a plutonium RTG on it.
And did they stop the launch?
We can build the newer, safer designs. We don't want to. It ain't protests that are keeping new plants from being built. It's the cost of building them. Much cheaper to keep the existing plants running, and if you must build a new plant, build one that will actually eventually pay for itself and turn a profit without subsidies, aka a coal plant.
Wind is not cheap, nor is solar. The only cheaper source of power compare to Nuclear is hydro. Wind and Solar are actually very expensive and unreliable, solar only works if theres sunlight (so no power at night, overcast, snow storms, etc.) and wind of course only works if there is wind, and there isnt enough of either to meet the power needs of the world. Sea wave is also not as cheap as either hydro or Nuclear, and it presents impact to the marine environment and only about 1/5th of the possible power could be captured with current technology.
Both wind and solar are delightful, but there are red herrings, they do not solve the power problem as they can not create enough power (and only at certain times). Wave generation is interesting, but it too suffers from inconsistent power generation yield, its not capable of producing enough power and its inconsistent. At most wave generation is considered to be able to produce maybe 5-10% of the total power needs of the US, so if it works its not a solution.
Wow. I'd go point by point, but it'd be boring and repetitive, so I'll just note that almost every single declarative statement here is false.
Some of them don't even make sense. Not enough sunlight or wind to meet the power needs of the world? How many plants (panels/turbines) are you basing that estimate on, and what percentage of the need does it meet? 10%? Okay, redo your estimate, but build 10 times as many. Unless you're asserting that if you covered every square mile of usable land with them, it still wouldn't be enough, in which case, I just need to laugh at the depth of your ignorance. A sufficiently large array of solar panels in an unused patch of desert in New Mexico would be sufficient to provide power to the entire US (granted, you'd need to seriously upgrade the power grid if you wanted to centralize the power generation to that extent -- but you don't need to put them all in one place). And yes, it could easily provide the power 24/7, regardless of whether the sun was up or not. "Inconsistent" is the biggest red-herring argument in the world -- there are millions of ways to store and release power to even out spikes, some of which we've known since prehistoric times. Rocket science it ain't...
This should be concern for the company, there should be no limits set by governments on liability (like the few tens of millions of dollars liability cap they had or have in USA for deep water oil drilling).
It's really the company's problem - they have to figure out how to take that and store it or reuse, whatever.
The problem, of course, is that this theory of how markets operate has been proven wrong so many times it's not even funny anyone's stupid enough to still fall for it. Allow people to sue for unlimited amounts, giving companies a huge financial incentive to prevent problems, and what they do instead is roll the dice and count on the fact that if the dice come up favorably while their competition actually spends money trying to be safer, they'll score a huge competitive win. Theories based on markets solving problems like this rely on humans that are always rational and never gamble, or a world where gambling never pays off. None of these assumptions are anything less than patently absurd. The only practical solution that works with real humans is to have the government regulate the shit out of it to prevent companies from gambling on safety in the first place, and even that doesn't work all that well. It's the worst possible solution, except for all the others. In reality, it's a huge concern for everyone, regardless of the fact that, in principle at least, you're right, it should be a concern for the company, which should deal with effectively on its own. Too bad the real world has never resembled anything like this rational utopia...
So is pollution from coal power, which estimates say kills between 10,000 and 30,000 people per year (depending on which sources you want to believe).
Yet there are no news stories about that.
There aren't? Interesting. How did you learn this, then? I'm aware of it as well, but I don't work for the coal industry, so it's not insider knowledge. Personally, I heard about it on the news (thank you, NPR).
Indeed. In theory, nuclear power can be safe in practice. In practice, it never will be. Not as long as fallible humans are in charge of building and running the plants, at least.
Sounds like the sort of person who can give a good report on this issue.
The internet is media. Someone who studies Anonymous is necessarily engaging in "media studies". Are you saying someone whose academic focus is media studies isn't qualified to engage in media studies? Who would you suggest, then? A biologist?
You could, perhaps, actually read the story to find out what the story is. Silly idea, I know... so much easier to just go off on one particular sentence from the summary...
Google can do this and get away with it because it has better lawyers and more influential friends than you do. Every other not-so-non-evil entity that wishes it, too, could simply ignore open source licenses will be watching and quietly cheering Google on from the sidelines.
Just like you can read/. and post what you did because you have better lawyers, right?
(Hint: You don't need better lawyers to do something that's perfectly legal. You also don't need a license to software you own -- licenses are what enable others to do stuff with your code -- you can never, ever even possibly be in violation of any software license to your own code, since the license doesn't apply to you at all. A license is permission to others, not to yourself.)
Yeah, I'm getting pretty tired of random blogs "reporting" stories they steal from a major outlet and getting credited by Slashdot as the source, scoring a huge number of hits for their plaigiarism, and not infrequently, misrepresenting the story into the bargain..
Not that I necessarily disagree with the overall sentiment, but it has to be pointed out they can't be both plagiarizing the story and misrepresenting the story (in that case, they're merely misrepresenting their own part in its creation). If they're misrepresenting it, they must be reporting on it rather than simply copying it, since the copy would be the story itself, and thus couldn't be a misrepresentation of it. At least something original must be being added by them in order for it to be a misrepresentation of what the story said.
Slashdot Mirror
This is news? Anyone else run a NES on those dozen or so emulators that already has pixel-smoothing options?
One suspects that if /. posted an article about a new engineering method that will allow us to finally build a cheap, working space elevator, you'd post, "This is news? Haven't we had ways of making cables for centuries?"
I've often wondered what a 21st century version of Minecraft would look like...
Because we haven't strip-mined the past enough.
Apparently not. Ever since William Shakespeare made a career out of it, people have thought it a wonderful thing to follow suit.
(Not that Shakespeare was the first to regurgitate older material by any means... I believe the Greeks were busy copying earlier Greek tragedies and comedies long before Shakespeare started doing it.)
Kill it! Kill it with fire! It must be stopped! Don't let it take our caffeine!
You didn't know? Really?!
I thought I did, but upon reading OP's description, I can safely say I knew in the same sense at someone who knows an "internal combustion engine" is what makes cars go (i.e. knows that it does), rather than knowing in the sense of someone who knows what it actually is (engine that works by sparks igniting fuel, pushing pistons in cylinders, turning the crank shaft, etc.). I knew that a Geiger counter is a device that detects radiation and makes that clicky-noise. I knew what it does, but not, really, what it is. Most of what the posted paragraph contains was new information to me.
Learn to do it yourself.
Get it running reliably.
Troubleshooting is easier on equipment you control.
There is no substitute for knowledge and experience.
Once it is running smoothly, if the expected traffic actually happens, decide where to go from there.
All this is true. It's also a hassle. I'm fully competent to do all these things, in fact, that used to be my old job. Nevertheless, these days, I just pay someone else to do it. Doing it yourself doesn't really save you any money, not when you consider the people who do this large-scale can exploit the economies of scale, and frankly if you value your time at all, it'll cost you more to do it yourself. Now, perhaps, if you enjoy that sort of thing, that's okay. I used to, but it gets old. These days, I'd rather just pay someone else to do it...
They are claiming they can reconstruct the missing k-vectors. they can't.
That's not what they're claiming.
If you know something about the source...
They do, after the "first pass", and adjust the lasers accordingly.
That cannot be done if the thing you are imaging is arbitrary.
It can, it just can't be done instantaneously.
You have to know something to make up the missing information.
...and you can determine information in the "first pass". Since this is essentially a kind of adaptive optics, you can start with something arbitrary, but end up knowing a lot about what you're imaging, and using that information to adjust the lens or light to reveal further information.
And all this is being done for what?
TFA:
On a large desktop screen, killing the URL bar approach may be pointless, even if this is a clear move toward a full screen view to benefit web apps. It is mobile device that are the target and the true beneficiary of this technology...
It's amazing what you can learn if you ever manage to learn to read. Good luck with that...
"So downloading a game is bad, but apparently stopping by a second-hand store to pick up a licensed physical copy of the game ends up hurting them even more"
No, they're saying that more people buy it second-hand than pirate it. It's equally bad for them if you do either one.
Um, no. It's not equally bad when someone who wasn't going to buy your game no matter what downloads it, costing you no sales at all, vs. someone who buys it second-hand, costing you a new game sale.
The other thing that Japan is known for is going from cheap, low quality cars to having some of the highest quality cars in the world. Was there a "shock" event that caused that as well? Genuinely curious.
Probably not. I'd point out that all generalizations have counter-examples, but in this case, I think you're more or less misunderstanding OP's point if you think that would be one. I don't think improvements in existing activities count as "change" in the sense that was meant -- certainly not a major change.
I know it's bad but I like to repost and ponder in insight over the content of one the very first comment that was posted about the disaster:
It's funny because what is happening in Japan is exactly why Nuclear Power is SAFE!
An earthquake 7 times more powerful than the biggest it was built for hit, and all that happened to the reactors that didn't shut down cleanly was a small amount of radioactive noble gases, which decay within minutes. Even if the cores DO melt, they're safely contained in ... wait for it... containment chambers!
People don't realize the amount of engineering that goes into nuclear to make it safe.
As I always say: containment chambers indeed!
Indeed. Radiation levels around the plant prove beyond any doubt that the amount of radiation release was neither small, nor did it decay within minutes, nor was it contained in any containment chambers. It's amazing how very confidently people can be so extremely wrong.
So, no one should ever put more work into a game than the $59.99 initial price warrants? Or are you saying that they make $200 games and then don't "lop parts off" but insist everyone pay $200 up front?
No relevant analogy? Please. A very simple car analogy is right at hand. You seriously believe no one ever buys anything but a base model car, or never pays to have additional features installed after?
Somehow, one price for all, seems more fair.
Than the system you just described? Obviously. It's easy to design a system that's less fair. The challenge is to design one that's more fair. Just because you aren't up to the challenge doesn't mean it's a bad idea...
Oh wow. Just wow. You really are as ignorant as the other comment I replied to seemed to indicate you might be.
We can build modern designs. Sometimes we do. Generally we don't, because it's expensive. It's expensive because materials and labor aren't free, and significant amounts of both and requires to build and operate one. We can build modern designs, we just don't without public subsidy for the same reason we don't build solar and wind power without public subsidy: you can't make a profit doing it.
Coal plants release more radiation because they release so little radiation that we don't even bother to try to contain it. If a nuclear power plant were operated along the same principles, there's no question it would eclipse the coal plant in terms of released radiation by half a dozen orders of magnitude.
Yes, those two elements are released more in coal burning than in nuclear power incidents. This is irrelevant, doubly-so since neither are elements your body will try to chemically incorporate, both of which are naturally occurring and found in the environment anyhow, long before the industrial era, and neither of which poses anywhere close to the health risk as things with much lower half-lives (those things don't stay around as long, but they're far, far, FAR more dangerous while they're still present).
Thanks to the insane selective fear of physics that some people have, it's far too expensive (in the short term) to test and build the new reactors.
Yes, it's not the cost of the materials or the labor involved in building something as large and intricate as a nuclear power plant that make it expensive. Or maybe it is. Both concrete and engineering costs sky-rocket if people fear the result. The cement just won't set because it's shivering in fear...
Honestly? Really? You think building a nuclear power plant would be cheap if people didn't care what kind of plant you built? You think it's fear that multiplying the cost? And it has to be multiplying significantly, or the argument that fear is the reason for the overwhelming expense falls flat. Can you quantify this? How much would the plant cost if people didn't fear it? Is the cost of securing a permit that much more expensive that just building the plant? Is there completely unnecessary safety equipment that could be eliminated, and that equipment alone costs more than the plant? I'd love to see the numbers here...
It's too bad we can't actually build the newer, safer designs. People might protest. It reminds me of the protests when the Cassini probe was launched, all because it had a plutonium RTG on it.
And did they stop the launch?
We can build the newer, safer designs. We don't want to. It ain't protests that are keeping new plants from being built. It's the cost of building them. Much cheaper to keep the existing plants running, and if you must build a new plant, build one that will actually eventually pay for itself and turn a profit without subsidies, aka a coal plant.
Wind is not cheap, nor is solar. The only cheaper source of power compare to Nuclear is hydro. Wind and Solar are actually very expensive and unreliable, solar only works if theres sunlight (so no power at night, overcast, snow storms, etc.) and wind of course only works if there is wind, and there isnt enough of either to meet the power needs of the world. Sea wave is also not as cheap as either hydro or Nuclear, and it presents impact to the marine environment and only about 1/5th of the possible power could be captured with current technology.
Both wind and solar are delightful, but there are red herrings, they do not solve the power problem as they can not create enough power (and only at certain times). Wave generation is interesting, but it too suffers from inconsistent power generation yield, its not capable of producing enough power and its inconsistent. At most wave generation is considered to be able to produce maybe 5-10% of the total power needs of the US, so if it works its not a solution.
Wow. I'd go point by point, but it'd be boring and repetitive, so I'll just note that almost every single declarative statement here is false.
Some of them don't even make sense. Not enough sunlight or wind to meet the power needs of the world? How many plants (panels/turbines) are you basing that estimate on, and what percentage of the need does it meet? 10%? Okay, redo your estimate, but build 10 times as many. Unless you're asserting that if you covered every square mile of usable land with them, it still wouldn't be enough, in which case, I just need to laugh at the depth of your ignorance. A sufficiently large array of solar panels in an unused patch of desert in New Mexico would be sufficient to provide power to the entire US (granted, you'd need to seriously upgrade the power grid if you wanted to centralize the power generation to that extent -- but you don't need to put them all in one place). And yes, it could easily provide the power 24/7, regardless of whether the sun was up or not. "Inconsistent" is the biggest red-herring argument in the world -- there are millions of ways to store and release power to even out spikes, some of which we've known since prehistoric times. Rocket science it ain't...
This should be concern for the company, there should be no limits set by governments on liability (like the few tens of millions of dollars liability cap they had or have in USA for deep water oil drilling).
It's really the company's problem - they have to figure out how to take that and store it or reuse, whatever.
The problem, of course, is that this theory of how markets operate has been proven wrong so many times it's not even funny anyone's stupid enough to still fall for it. Allow people to sue for unlimited amounts, giving companies a huge financial incentive to prevent problems, and what they do instead is roll the dice and count on the fact that if the dice come up favorably while their competition actually spends money trying to be safer, they'll score a huge competitive win. Theories based on markets solving problems like this rely on humans that are always rational and never gamble, or a world where gambling never pays off. None of these assumptions are anything less than patently absurd. The only practical solution that works with real humans is to have the government regulate the shit out of it to prevent companies from gambling on safety in the first place, and even that doesn't work all that well. It's the worst possible solution, except for all the others. In reality, it's a huge concern for everyone, regardless of the fact that, in principle at least, you're right, it should be a concern for the company, which should deal with effectively on its own. Too bad the real world has never resembled anything like this rational utopia...
So is pollution from coal power, which estimates say kills between 10,000 and 30,000 people per year (depending on which sources you want to believe).
Yet there are no news stories about that.
There aren't? Interesting. How did you learn this, then? I'm aware of it as well, but I don't work for the coal industry, so it's not insider knowledge. Personally, I heard about it on the news (thank you, NPR).
Nuclear can be safe, but never will be.
Indeed. In theory, nuclear power can be safe in practice. In practice, it never will be. Not as long as fallible humans are in charge of building and running the plants, at least.
Sounds like the sort of person who can give a good report on this issue.
The internet is media. Someone who studies Anonymous is necessarily engaging in "media studies". Are you saying someone whose academic focus is media studies isn't qualified to engage in media studies? Who would you suggest, then? A biologist?
But not to anyone else, is that the story?
You could, perhaps, actually read the story to find out what the story is. Silly idea, I know... so much easier to just go off on one particular sentence from the summary...
Google can do this and get away with it because it has better lawyers and more influential friends than you do. Every other not-so-non-evil entity that wishes it, too, could simply ignore open source licenses will be watching and quietly cheering Google on from the sidelines.
Just like you can read /. and post what you did because you have better lawyers, right?
(Hint: You don't need better lawyers to do something that's perfectly legal. You also don't need a license to software you own -- licenses are what enable others to do stuff with your code -- you can never, ever even possibly be in violation of any software license to your own code, since the license doesn't apply to you at all. A license is permission to others, not to yourself.)
Yeah, I'm getting pretty tired of random blogs "reporting" stories they steal from a major outlet and getting credited by Slashdot as the source, scoring a huge number of hits for their plaigiarism, and not infrequently, misrepresenting the story into the bargain..
Not that I necessarily disagree with the overall sentiment, but it has to be pointed out they can't be both plagiarizing the story and misrepresenting the story (in that case, they're merely misrepresenting their own part in its creation). If they're misrepresenting it, they must be reporting on it rather than simply copying it, since the copy would be the story itself, and thus couldn't be a misrepresentation of it. At least something original must be being added by them in order for it to be a misrepresentation of what the story said.
That should read "OP said what you do, ..."