I heard the ad for this week's episode and thought that the voices - especially lisa's - sounded off. But, they must have already dubbed that episode, right? Or was Fox just trying to show that they were willing to use other actors by starting with a substitution in the commercial?
Re:Much better picture...
on
Robosaurus
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· Score: 1
I can see that the base is some sort of wheeled vehicle (far right of picture)... I guess they don't get too many tailgaters when driving robosaurus from show to show. Do they drive around with him grasping half a car?
Sorry, not feasible. I played around with IR-sensitive film, and it's sensitive to the range that's just beyond red, not heat which is well beyond. I tried taking pictures of a stove burner, and it didn't look too much different. This does make sense-- if the film was sensitive to heat, then the ambient temperature of the camera will expose the film (it's only 70 degrees, but has an exposure time of a week). To avoid self-exposure, you'd need to cool the camera to a temperature well below what you're trying to take a picture of.
I'd suggest IR LEDs which emit only the near-IR and not waste their energy emiting the far-IR (heat).
I doubt it's pure infrared cameras - that would be expensive. It's probably a normal camera that is panchromatic and is illuminated with IR light - the advantage there is that it is also sensitive to what the eye sees, while not blinding drivers at night.
One solution is to take advantage of the limited exposure range of the camera by illuminating your license plate with lots and lots of infrared light - it'll look normal to people, but not the camera. Hopefully you can make it appear to be just a white blob. Actually, you don't even need to do the whole plate, just a letter or two.
NetworkZone has a product review with some more insight. A good quote:
...the [300 MHz] Stretch even beats the Intrinsity FastMath processor running at 2 GHz
Of course, there is no such thing as a universal solution and the Stretch processor does have its limits. One significant area is in "low touch" operations such as network processors. While it can certainly do the relatively simple packet inspection and transformation that switch fabrics and network processors normally handle, it is really much better suited to the heavy-duty calculation- and manipulation-intensive tasks found in "high touch" applications such as video compression. For example, H.263/264 motion estimation is capable of producing very high-quality video from a relatively small bit stream, but requires lots (and lots) of raw processing horsepower. Happily, the Stretch processor is only too happy to oblige, churning out a SAD (sum-absolute difference) operation on a tile-full of pixels for H.263 video in 43 ns (H.264 takes 83 ns).
Actually, the Saturn processor is a lot more complicated than that. Just about everything in it is a different size:
- 4-bit addressable word size - variable instruction sizes (very cisc) - 20-bit address - four 64-bit registers that can be addressed in a number of ways (example: you can manipulate just the exponent portion of the register, not the mantissa) - Physically, the HP48 interfaced to 8-bit-wide memory, but this is invisible to the programmer
I'd be tempted to call it a 64-bit processor because that's the register size, but that is a generalization. It is fundamently a low-power design specifically for BCD math.
Re:1 mp camera on Spirit
on
Beyond Megapixels
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· Score: 3, Informative
I wouldn't want this in my pocket. The secret isn't in the camera; it's in the tripod. Being able to hold it still (and the fact that the subjects aren't moving) allows merging different pictures -- to get color resolution (using the color wheels) or spatial resolution (by merging into a panorama).
The lens is nice, and being fixed-focus and fixed-zoom helps with the quality over a consumer-grade camera, but the tripod is more important.
The people arrested were actualy laying on the interesctions of various country borders in order to make their arrest harder. A very clever tactic.
One guy was on the Franco-Sweedish-Hungarian-Israeli border, another one was on the German-Belgium-Danish-Netherlands border, and the purpored ring leader (aka "Long Larry") was sprawled out along the US-UK-Singapore border.
B&W improved those speakers a couple of years ago... They now look like this. It's now curved in the back to make it harder to resonate - it's already braced internally with a cool matrix of locking-togther wood, so there is little non-controlled sound. Now, if I could afford a place that the floors didn't vibrate!
They also seriously jacked up the price (now $8K), so the new ones are out of my league.
The electrostatics are really appealing to me, too -- I'd love to listen to them, but haven't found a place that carries them. They are usually weak on bass, so people add subwoofers -- if you don't, then you and your neighbors will get along just fine.
me & my neighbors? Well, I'll just say my roommate started a small band and complaints from either the deaf lady or the guy who runs his buzz saw.:-)
Projectors are pretty bright... what I'm saying is that my phone, when lit the same way they are trying light their panel in the illustration, is pretty dark and I don't think it'll be nearly bright enough to project on the wall with any visibility.
That's nice-- it basically links back to the slashdotted geocities website (and has a few pictures of it). It also has a lot more pictures of another design... but it looks pretty scary.
First off, the fans blow air downward instead of up and out. Second, the LCD monitor is supposedly lit from the front by two bulbs and that is supposed to work. Whenever I take my color lcd phone out in bright sunlight, the result is a dark screen, not a brighter one. Maybe they replaced the screen's backlight with a reflector, but then the light will be going through the LCD twice, and from two different angles (since there are two bulbs) - I'd think you'd get some awful ghosts if you ever got a picture.
Thanks for the link, though, but like all things on the internet, things need to be taken with a grain of salt.
wow, that's quite a compliment you got -- as there are only 6 billion living people now, apparently 4 billion dead people must have realized this before you:-)
my speakers do this automatically - notice the tweeter on top is spaced further back, adding a slight delay. The midrange is back a bit from the bass, too.
Thanks, that's what I was trying to imply but didn't say. I should have said that because it appeared that they were going after only copyrights, IP was too broad because it implied that they were also going to go after patent infringement.
... most... aggressive enforcement action ever undertaken against organizations involved in illegal intellectual property piracy over the Internet.
They sure do use a lot of words. illegal is redundant. Intellectual property is wrong because I think they are going after copyrights and not also patents. Piracy is cute and coloquial, but it doesn't refer to sea-faring attacks, then the DoJ shouldn't use it. This would be much better:
... most... aggressive enforcement action ever undertaken against organizations involved in copyright infringement over the Internet.
And the third-to-the-last paragraph is great, too:
...contain the most highly coveted and valuable "new releases," many of which were distributed to the warez scene before they are commercially available to the general public. Conservative estimates of the value of the pirated works seized easily exceed $50 million.
If these programs are not for sale, then how do they arrive at the $ figure? You can't use the retail value of the final package; no one would pay that much for an unwarrantied, probably time-limited beta. In fact, very rarely do even legitimate users pay for a beta version.
I also like the word "seized" used with "pirated works" because it makes it seem like it's physical property. It's just another attempt to make infringement equal to theft. I expect better from my DoJ.
They had mentioned it was a hardware-based solution, so I didn't know if the BIOS was doing the timesharing -- if so, then it might be possible to run one Windows XP terminal and one Linux terminal, but that's not the case.
Install guide has some more details...
on
Dual User Windows PC
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· Score: 3, Informative
We can only guarantee that the program will properly run on a completely reinstalled Windows XP system, using the latest hardware drivers and system requirements,
without third-party software and hardware.
.. so as long as you don't try to run any applications on it, you'll be fine! The software is fully tied to Windows XP, so no chance of running other operating systems. It looks like there is only one copy of Windows XP running, but then Page 13 has this quote:
Microsoft Windows License Request: After you have read and accept the Microsoft license terms, the MagicTwin software will explicitly ask you, the licensee, whether you have obtained a sufficient number of Windows licenses. If your choice is "NO" then at every restart the software will notify you of this issue.
Page 8 tells you to turn off the system standby in XP's power management. Guess they don't have that working well. But they do warn the second user if the first user decides to shut down the system.
The lesson really is "stay out of movie theaters" if they are going to treat you like a criminal.
The theater in my little university town was in financial trouble (they were paying too much rent), and then 9/11 came along, and they saw $$. All of the sudden, you couldn't bring in backpacks because of "security". This is a town I specifically moved to because I could walk to where I wanted to go -- and that often involved my backpack. (remember, this is a college town). It's pretty funny that they were trying to pass off their fear that someone might bring in outside food as a more justifyable fear that someone might blow up the place. People would be safer if the theater didn't pile their trash up against the emergency exit doors.
Anyway, the place was hostile to customers. I took my business down the block where they allowed backpacks. And I bought a lot of their popcorn.
The maps *are* procedural, but more interesting is that all the characters are, too.
The initialization is pretty simple. It starts off with a few cells dividing and mutating, and pretty soon simple creatures are evolved. These keep evolving and then they discovery metalurgy, and eventually they make some cool guns. Then the program introduces another alien race that was running in a different simulation, and gets them to try to fight. At about the right time, it'll stop the whole simulation and put you in the game.
Incidently, that's how the maps are made prodedurally. The cool thing is that every time you play, the creatures and maps are totally different.
Slashdot Mirror
I heard the ad for this week's episode and thought that the voices - especially lisa's - sounded off. But, they must have already dubbed that episode, right? Or was Fox just trying to show that they were willing to use other actors by starting with a substitution in the commercial?
I can see that the base is some sort of wheeled vehicle (far right of picture)... I guess they don't get too many tailgaters when driving robosaurus from show to show. Do they drive around with him grasping half a car?
that'll do it!
If you've got a volkswagen beetle, you could just attach the plate to the exhaust manifold.
Sorry, not feasible. I played around with IR-sensitive film, and it's sensitive to the range that's just beyond red, not heat which is well beyond. I tried taking pictures of a stove burner, and it didn't look too much different. This does make sense-- if the film was sensitive to heat, then the ambient temperature of the camera will expose the film (it's only 70 degrees, but has an exposure time of a week). To avoid self-exposure, you'd need to cool the camera to a temperature well below what you're trying to take a picture of.
I'd suggest IR LEDs which emit only the near-IR and not waste their energy emiting the far-IR (heat).
I doubt it's pure infrared cameras - that would be expensive. It's probably a normal camera that is panchromatic and is illuminated with IR light - the advantage there is that it is also sensitive to what the eye sees, while not blinding drivers at night.
One solution is to take advantage of the limited exposure range of the camera by illuminating your license plate with lots and lots of infrared light - it'll look normal to people, but not the camera. Hopefully you can make it appear to be just a white blob. Actually, you don't even need to do the whole plate, just a letter or two.
Of course, there is no such thing as a universal solution and the Stretch processor does have its limits. One significant area is in "low touch" operations such as network processors. While it can certainly do the relatively simple packet inspection and transformation that switch fabrics and network processors normally handle, it is really much better suited to the heavy-duty calculation- and manipulation-intensive tasks found in "high touch" applications such as video compression. For example, H.263/264 motion estimation is capable of producing very high-quality video from a relatively small bit stream, but requires lots (and lots) of raw processing horsepower. Happily, the Stretch processor is only too happy to oblige, churning out a SAD (sum-absolute difference) operation on a tile-full of pixels for H.263 video in 43 ns (H.264 takes 83 ns).
4-bit bus
Actually, the Saturn processor is a lot more complicated than that. Just about everything in it is a different size:
- 4-bit addressable word size
- variable instruction sizes (very cisc)
- 20-bit address
- four 64-bit registers that can be addressed in a number of ways (example: you can manipulate just the exponent portion of the register, not the mantissa)
- Physically, the HP48 interfaced to 8-bit-wide memory, but this is invisible to the programmer
I'd be tempted to call it a 64-bit processor because that's the register size, but that is a generalization. It is fundamently a low-power design specifically for BCD math.
I wouldn't want this in my pocket. The secret isn't in the camera; it's in the tripod. Being able to hold it still (and the fact that the subjects aren't moving) allows merging different pictures -- to get color resolution (using the color wheels) or spatial resolution (by merging into a panorama).
The lens is nice, and being fixed-focus and fixed-zoom helps with the quality over a consumer-grade camera, but the tripod is more important.
The people arrested were actualy laying on the interesctions of various country borders in order to make their arrest harder. A very clever tactic.
One guy was on the Franco-Sweedish-Hungarian-Israeli border, another one was on the German-Belgium-Danish-Netherlands border, and the purpored ring leader (aka "Long Larry") was sprawled out along the US-UK-Singapore border.
B&W improved those speakers a couple of years ago... They now look like this. It's now curved in the back to make it harder to resonate - it's already braced internally with a cool matrix of locking-togther wood, so there is little non-controlled sound. Now, if I could afford a place that the floors didn't vibrate!
:-)
They also seriously jacked up the price (now $8K), so the new ones are out of my league.
The electrostatics are really appealing to me, too -- I'd love to listen to them, but haven't found a place that carries them. They are usually weak on bass, so people add subwoofers -- if you don't, then you and your neighbors will get along just fine.
me & my neighbors? Well, I'll just say my roommate started a small band and complaints from either the deaf lady or the guy who runs his buzz saw.
Projectors are pretty bright... what I'm saying is that my phone, when lit the same way they are trying light their panel in the illustration, is pretty dark and I don't think it'll be nearly bright enough to project on the wall with any visibility.
Actually, I lied. I just googled for that picture - I don't know who took it. And I've got the (I'm guessing newer) version with the kevlar midrange.
That's nice-- it basically links back to the slashdotted geocities website (and has a few pictures of it). It also has a lot more pictures of another design... but it looks pretty scary.
First off, the fans blow air downward instead of up and out. Second, the LCD monitor is supposedly lit from the front by two bulbs and that is supposed to work. Whenever I take my color lcd phone out in bright sunlight, the result is a dark screen, not a brighter one. Maybe they replaced the screen's backlight with a reflector, but then the light will be going through the LCD twice, and from two different angles (since there are two bulbs) - I'd think you'd get some awful ghosts if you ever got a picture.
Thanks for the link, though, but like all things on the internet, things need to be taken with a grain of salt.
wow, that's quite a compliment you got -- as there are only 6 billion living people now, apparently 4 billion dead people must have realized this before you :-)
No, seriously, the mini is much smaller than the ipod:
ipod = 6.1 cubic inches
mini = 3.6 cubic inches
or about 60% of the size of the ipod. It's also about 60% of the weight, too.
it seems people value size over gigabytes. I know I never even considered any of the 2.5" drive-based models and instead waited for the 1.8" drives.
my speakers do this automatically - notice the tweeter on top is spaced further back, adding a slight delay. The midrange is back a bit from the bass, too.
Thanks, that's what I was trying to imply but didn't say. I should have said that because it appeared that they were going after only copyrights, IP was too broad because it implied that they were also going to go after patent infringement.
I left trademarks out of it because I assumed that they may actually charge copyright violators with this just for good measure. Kinda like throwing WMD charges at illegal drug manufacturers.
They sure do use a lot of words. illegal is redundant. Intellectual property is wrong because I think they are going after copyrights and not also patents. Piracy is cute and coloquial, but it doesn't refer to sea-faring attacks, then the DoJ shouldn't use it. This would be much better:
And the third-to-the-last paragraph is great, too:
If these programs are not for sale, then how do they arrive at the $ figure? You can't use the retail value of the final package; no one would pay that much for an unwarrantied, probably time-limited beta. In fact, very rarely do even legitimate users pay for a beta version.
I also like the word "seized" used with "pirated works" because it makes it seem like it's physical property. It's just another attempt to make infringement equal to theft. I expect better from my DoJ.
Hookerbot to the rescue!
(from this article)
Spymac already offers 1Gig Email for free. Gmail's conversations sound like the most useful feature of their service. beta review
Brazil Nuts are naturally high in barium (0.3% by weight) and radium -- making it one of the most radioactive foods.
I wonder if plants can be used to extract waste pharmaceuticals out of the ground, too, such as destruxol and THC.
They had mentioned it was a hardware-based solution, so I didn't know if the BIOS was doing the timesharing -- if so, then it might be possible to run one Windows XP terminal and one Linux terminal, but that's not the case.
Page 8 tells you to turn off the system standby in XP's power management. Guess they don't have that working well. But they do warn the second user if the first user decides to shut down the system.
Here's a picture of the 25GB disc. It's a little big right now, but once they up the density, I'm sure you'll see it in more consumer products.
The lesson really is "stay out of movie theaters" if they are going to treat you like a criminal.
The theater in my little university town was in financial trouble (they were paying too much rent), and then 9/11 came along, and they saw $$. All of the sudden, you couldn't bring in backpacks because of "security". This is a town I specifically moved to because I could walk to where I wanted to go -- and that often involved my backpack. (remember, this is a college town). It's pretty funny that they were trying to pass off their fear that someone might bring in outside food as a more justifyable fear that someone might blow up the place. People would be safer if the theater didn't pile their trash up against the emergency exit doors.
Anyway, the place was hostile to customers. I took my business down the block where they allowed backpacks. And I bought a lot of their popcorn.
The maps *are* procedural, but more interesting is that all the characters are, too.
The initialization is pretty simple. It starts off with a few cells dividing and mutating, and pretty soon simple creatures are evolved. These keep evolving and then they discovery metalurgy, and eventually they make some cool guns. Then the program introduces another alien race that was running in a different simulation, and gets them to try to fight. At about the right time, it'll stop the whole simulation and put you in the game.
Incidently, that's how the maps are made prodedurally. The cool thing is that every time you play, the creatures and maps are totally different.