in the article it says that (due to the long exposures & mars' rotation) the photos needed to be post-processed to make them sharp: does anybody know more about the techniques used for this? I can't quite think of a method that one can use to accomplish this...
Just yesterday I was looking for a karaoke player for linux and there are NONE! there is kmid (which outputs only to external midi devices and hangs all the time) kmidi (which doesn't give you the words until they are due, so what's the point!) and that's about it....
Tried using vanbasco's windows karaoke player under wine, but no dice either, the program worked but wine didn't seem to want to play nice with midi (arts driver doesn't have it, OSS driver didn't work either)
wget has a nice switch '-c' which is supported by the time-warner server, my download got reset probably 20 times, but nice little wget always restarted it right from where it got reset and I d/loaded the trailer at an average of about 120KB/sec (it was doing 270KB/sec often before timing out)
my bad, that's what I get for not double-checking, I was -SURE- the 10D had a 1.4 focus multiplier, not 1.6... so I guess the 20-40 is out of the question and you really have to mortgage your arm & leg to get the 16/17-35.
Canon should come up with a lenses line for digicams (like Nikon, I think it's the DX line, not sure) where you can go very wide without having to invest in a full-frame camera...
BTW, while obviously for noise reasons the bigger the sensor, the better, I wonder why digicam manufacturers don't standardize on, say, a 1.4 multiplier and -all- offer a line of lenses targeted to that: I mean, why have digital cameras with 1x, 1.4x and 1.6x (like Canon), just offer a 1x (for people with big glass investments) and 1.4x (or 1.5x, or 1.6x).
nyah, nyah, don't forget the focus multiplier (the 10D is not a full frame camera) so in order to go down to 28mm you have to get a 20-40mm (reasonable price, discontinued and hard to find) a 17-35 (discontinued, still very expensive) or a 16-35 (in production, prepare yourself to take a loan).
The Zeiss 28-200 equiv on the sony seems to be a really nice lens (even if I'd like to wait for Phil's full review with tests etc.) and there's no way you could get that range on the 10D without buying a 28-135 + an extra wide zoom.
BTW, I wonder if hell has frozen over, as this is the first time Sony put a CF slot in one of their cameras (hooray, as a 1GB CF card is 1/2 the price of a 1GB memorystick).
bs, the hubble routinely gets pointed towards the earth (mostly towards clouds) for calibration purposes (look for 'Earth flats' or 'Streak flats' on google)
I really wish they could agree about this re-release, I would LOOOOVE to have Elite on my palm and have been checking your site quite a few times during the past year (I have fond memories of playing Elite on my MSX1 so many years ago)
I loved Bosconian but the only game I really wasted TOO MUCH MONEY on growing up (and lied about it to my parents) was definitely Gyruss, I still remember the first time I was able to finally beat the Earth level and how I was totally floored that the game didn't end but just restarted from scratch (at a higher speed obv.) from Pluto...
I once saw on TV a guy attempting a world record playing gyruss for like 24 hours straight or something... also have fond memories about trying to get the frog/time/petrification glitch in Ghosts'n'Goblins:)
do you find these games better than anything from a gameplay perspective because that's the case or because you have the whole 'happy memories while growing up' angle?
For every revolutionary game (think Robotron, tempest, bosconian, pacman) there were many others that we remember fondly only because we have other memories associated with them (like summers growing up, friends etc. etc.)
anybody else read this as 'I only stare for about 45 minutes'? I mean, with all those eye movements (up, down, up, down) you sure must burn quite some calories:)
why would you use +R for archiving vs -R? +R media is definitely more expensive around here BTW
I don't mean to sound negative...
on
DVD Burner Round-up
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
but this review was lame: first of all it's reviewing the Pioneer A05 when the A06 has been available for quite a while (bought one last week, actually) and secondly it does seem quite short on content.
Things that should have been there if this was a decent review:
- speed/performance tests with DVD-RW/DVD+RW media (both, for drives that support both like the A06)
- compatibility tests with DVD+R/DVD-R media (aka burn in one burner, check that it's readable in the others)
- speed tests with CDR/CDRW media
- linux compatibility test (optional, but mentioning xcdroast/prodvd for burning data DVDs and the chain needed to encode video DVDs would've been nice)
- more drives! (LG, LiteOn, Sony + various off-brand ones)
I originally thought the same, but have a look at slide 15, the researcher says:
'Access to templates OR match scores implies access to biometric sample image' (emphasis mine)
I originally thought that you needed both, but after re-reading the presentation a few times it seems the researcher has -TWO- different exploits, one which regenerates things from the biometric data (samples not shown) and the other which takes arbitrary pics and by using the match percentage iterates a few times until it finds something that passes.
If I misunderstood and you need both things, please correct me.
You don't understand what the article is talking about. When you enroll in a biometric system, the system itself -doesn't- match based on your picture, but on a 'template' which is created by taking your standard data and performing certain destructive operations to arrive to a much smaller 'template' which can still be used to identify you.
This is very similar to the one-way hashing that happens with unix passwords, only that in this case the hashing is 'lossier' so you have 'confidence scores' instead of a black/white answer.
The article shows that given this 'hashed' value you can recreate an image that has a good chance of not only being authenticated by the same system/algorithm (which already should be very hard, given the one-way nature of the templatization) =BUT= also by different systems!
It also is really interesting how if you have access to the 'confidence score' outputted by the recognizer, you can take arbitrary images and blending/averaging them again come up with an image that works.
This is definitely not useless news and will have quite some implications.
1mm is -HUGE- I mean, come on, the human eye can see the difference between text printed at 300dpi and 1200 dpi: a gap of even a 10th of a mm would be extremely irritating (at least for me)
If the 'high performance' malloc that was used is not thread safe (as it seems from reading about this issue) I strongly doubt it will be the default in the shipping system...
Personally I don't care very much about synthetic benchmarks, day-to-day apps are a much better test: OTOH if it comes out that this 'tweaked' malloc library was used for PhotoShop (with, say, side effects of making PS taking up 2 gigs of RAM and it crashing every 2 hours) then my feelings of this would change...
I like linux quite a bit (it's been my primary OS since the 1.2 kernel days, and have been dabbling with it for quite a bit before then) but there's no way that you can honestly compare the user experience of linux and macs.
Linux: still needs sysadmin-level tinkering every now and then (RH9 is nice, but if I wasn't as experienced as I am I'd have had some problems with it), has very few, if any, 'pro' applications available, interoperability with Office is still not very good (yeah, I can open Office docs, but they don't look right most of the time unless they're totally trivial) etc. etc.
Mac: extremely user friendly (too much so, IMHO, re: single button mouse) all the pro apps you can want (office, photoshop, cubase,...) etc. etc.
The only thing against macs is price at this point, and for a lot of users the 'apple user experience' is definitely worth paying for.
This is like the emperor's new clothes: in my opinion this is probably what happened:
- NVIDIA for some reason decides to pull out of the FutureMark tax program (aka, 'development program' or whatever the heck they call it)
- FM threatens NVIDIA that either they come back onboard or FM will 'leak' a devel version of FM that can be used to portray NVIDIA in a bad light (and probably -only- NVIDIA, the 8% ATI loss was incidental)
- NVIDIA doesn't budge
- FM leaks it and some 'review sites' go all gung-ho over it
- NVIDIA threatens to sue FM out of existance (presumably they think they have a solid case) and ask for damages due to reputation loss etc. etc. etc.
- FM caves and does some creative spin doctoring about the word 'cheating'.
-every- video card manufacturer cheats on benchmarks, come on, if you were the CEO of ATI/NVIDIA wouldn't you do everything in your power to make your hardware look better than your competitor's?
It should be the benchmark sites that should earn their keep and do 'real' benchmarking of the cards instead of spending 5 minutes setting up a test environment with the usual demos and going back to sleep or something.
When a new card comes out, a reputable test site, instead of using demo001 which can be special-cased in drivers for example, should connect online to a crowded q3/ut2k3 server, play there for 15-20 minutes while recording a demo and using -THAT- demo to benchmark the new card =and= re-benchmark the competing card(s). The site should also obviously take screenshots and compare them to make sure that the drivers aren't cheating by lowering visual quality etc. etc. etc.
Obv. one can't go back and rebenchmark all the way to the TNT, but -at least- the current generation cards should be done, for comparisons to older models then, yeah, the older benchmarks should be used (but still not the canned demo001, but the 'online benchmarks' recorded when the older cards came out).
Slashdot Mirror
in the article it says that (due to the long exposures & mars' rotation) the photos needed to be post-processed to make them sharp: does anybody know more about the techniques used for this? I can't quite think of a method that one can use to accomplish this...
Just yesterday I was looking for a karaoke player for linux and there are NONE! there is kmid (which outputs only to external midi devices and hangs all the time) kmidi (which doesn't give you the words until they are due, so what's the point!) and that's about it....
Tried using vanbasco's windows karaoke player under wine, but no dice either, the program worked but wine didn't seem to want to play nice with midi (arts driver doesn't have it, OSS driver didn't work either)
this assumes that the people who are going to go see these would have gotten some had they stayed at home *rimshot*
nobody ever got fired for making jokes about slashdot's readers' lack of female companions (including me!)
never tried mplayer without the win32 codepack :)
wget has a nice switch '-c' which is supported by the time-warner server, my download got reset probably 20 times, but nice little wget always restarted it right from where it got reset and I d/loaded the trailer at an average of about 120KB/sec (it was doing 270KB/sec often before timing out)
what version of mplayer do you have? what codecs versions do you have? I have the mplayer from shrike.freshrpms.net and it played the clip flawlessly.
wget -c is your friend
my bad, that's what I get for not double-checking, I was -SURE- the 10D had a 1.4 focus multiplier, not 1.6... so I guess the 20-40 is out of the question and you really have to mortgage your arm & leg to get the 16/17-35.
Canon should come up with a lenses line for digicams (like Nikon, I think it's the DX line, not sure) where you can go very wide without having to invest in a full-frame camera...
BTW, while obviously for noise reasons the bigger the sensor, the better, I wonder why digicam manufacturers don't standardize on, say, a 1.4 multiplier and -all- offer a line of lenses targeted to that: I mean, why have digital cameras with 1x, 1.4x and 1.6x (like Canon), just offer a 1x (for people with big glass investments) and 1.4x (or 1.5x, or 1.6x).
nyah, nyah, don't forget the focus multiplier (the 10D is not a full frame camera) so in order to go down to 28mm you have to get a 20-40mm (reasonable price, discontinued and hard to find) a 17-35 (discontinued, still very expensive) or a 16-35 (in production, prepare yourself to take a loan).
The Zeiss 28-200 equiv on the sony seems to be a really nice lens (even if I'd like to wait for Phil's full review with tests etc.) and there's no way you could get that range on the 10D without buying a 28-135 + an extra wide zoom.
BTW, I wonder if hell has frozen over, as this is the first time Sony put a CF slot in one of their cameras (hooray, as a 1GB CF card is 1/2 the price of a 1GB memorystick).
bs, the hubble routinely gets pointed towards the earth (mostly towards clouds) for calibration purposes (look for 'Earth flats' or 'Streak flats' on google)
I really wish they could agree about this re-release, I would LOOOOVE to have Elite on my palm and have been checking your site quite a few times during the past year (I have fond memories of playing Elite on my MSX1 so many years ago)
:(
It's so sad that this won't happen
I loved Bosconian but the only game I really wasted TOO MUCH MONEY on growing up (and lied about it to my parents) was definitely Gyruss, I still remember the first time I was able to finally beat the Earth level and how I was totally floored that the game didn't end but just restarted from scratch (at a higher speed obv.) from Pluto...
:)
I once saw on TV a guy attempting a world record playing gyruss for like 24 hours straight or something... also have fond memories about trying to get the frog/time/petrification glitch in Ghosts'n'Goblins
do you find these games better than anything from a gameplay perspective because that's the case or because you have the whole 'happy memories while growing up' angle?
For every revolutionary game (think Robotron, tempest, bosconian, pacman) there were many others that we remember fondly only because we have other memories associated with them (like summers growing up, friends etc. etc.)
hey, I was just kidding around, maybe I should've added a few more smileys? :)
anybody else read this as 'I only stare for about 45 minutes'? I mean, with all those eye movements (up, down, up, down) you sure must burn quite some calories :)
why would you use +R for archiving vs -R? +R media is definitely more expensive around here BTW
but this review was lame: first of all it's reviewing the Pioneer A05 when the A06 has been available for quite a while (bought one last week, actually) and secondly it does seem quite short on content.
Things that should have been there if this was a decent review:
- speed/performance tests with DVD-RW/DVD+RW media (both, for drives that support both like the A06)
- compatibility tests with DVD+R/DVD-R media (aka burn in one burner, check that it's readable in the others)
- speed tests with CDR/CDRW media
- linux compatibility test (optional, but mentioning xcdroast/prodvd for burning data DVDs and the chain needed to encode video DVDs would've been nice)
- more drives! (LG, LiteOn, Sony + various off-brand ones)
etc. etc. etc.
I originally thought the same, but have a look at slide 15, the researcher says:
'Access to templates OR match scores implies access to biometric sample image' (emphasis mine)
I originally thought that you needed both, but after re-reading the presentation a few times it seems the researcher has -TWO- different exploits, one which regenerates things from the biometric data (samples not shown) and the other which takes arbitrary pics and by using the match percentage iterates a few times until it finds something that passes.
If I misunderstood and you need both things, please correct me.
You don't understand what the article is talking about. When you enroll in a biometric system, the system itself -doesn't- match based on your picture, but on a 'template' which is created by taking your standard data and performing certain destructive operations to arrive to a much smaller 'template' which can still be used to identify you.
This is very similar to the one-way hashing that happens with unix passwords, only that in this case the hashing is 'lossier' so you have 'confidence scores' instead of a black/white answer.
The article shows that given this 'hashed' value you can recreate an image that has a good chance of not only being authenticated by the same system/algorithm (which already should be very hard, given the one-way nature of the templatization) =BUT= also by different systems!
It also is really interesting how if you have access to the 'confidence score' outputted by the recognizer, you can take arbitrary images and blending/averaging them again come up with an image that works.
This is definitely not useless news and will have quite some implications.
1mm is -HUGE- I mean, come on, the human eye can see the difference between text printed at 300dpi and 1200 dpi: a gap of even a 10th of a mm would be extremely irritating (at least for me)
If the 'high performance' malloc that was used is not thread safe (as it seems from reading about this issue) I strongly doubt it will be the default in the shipping system...
Personally I don't care very much about synthetic benchmarks, day-to-day apps are a much better test: OTOH if it comes out that this 'tweaked' malloc library was used for PhotoShop (with, say, side effects of making PS taking up 2 gigs of RAM and it crashing every 2 hours) then my feelings of this would change...
I like linux quite a bit (it's been my primary OS since the 1.2 kernel days, and have been dabbling with it for quite a bit before then) but there's no way that you can honestly compare the user experience of linux and macs.
...) etc. etc.
Linux: still needs sysadmin-level tinkering every now and then (RH9 is nice, but if I wasn't as experienced as I am I'd have had some problems with it), has very few, if any, 'pro' applications available, interoperability with Office is still not very good (yeah, I can open Office docs, but they don't look right most of the time unless they're totally trivial) etc. etc.
Mac: extremely user friendly (too much so, IMHO, re: single button mouse) all the pro apps you can want (office, photoshop, cubase,
The only thing against macs is price at this point, and for a lot of users the 'apple user experience' is definitely worth paying for.
google is your friend, searching for one of the phrases in the article with "" this was the first link returned:
0 20325_001.html
http://it.asia1.com.sg/specials/phones/thumbgen20
This is like the emperor's new clothes: in my opinion this is probably what happened:
- NVIDIA for some reason decides to pull out of the FutureMark tax program (aka, 'development program' or whatever the heck they call it)
- FM threatens NVIDIA that either they come back onboard or FM will 'leak' a devel version of FM that can be used to portray NVIDIA in a bad light (and probably -only- NVIDIA, the 8% ATI loss was incidental)
- NVIDIA doesn't budge
- FM leaks it and some 'review sites' go all gung-ho over it
- NVIDIA threatens to sue FM out of existance (presumably they think they have a solid case) and ask for damages due to reputation loss etc. etc. etc.
- FM caves and does some creative spin doctoring about the word 'cheating'.
-every- video card manufacturer cheats on benchmarks, come on, if you were the CEO of ATI/NVIDIA wouldn't you do everything in your power to make your hardware look better than your competitor's?
It should be the benchmark sites that should earn their keep and do 'real' benchmarking of the cards instead of spending 5 minutes setting up a test environment with the usual demos and going back to sleep or something.
When a new card comes out, a reputable test site, instead of using demo001 which can be special-cased in drivers for example, should connect online to a crowded q3/ut2k3 server, play there for 15-20 minutes while recording a demo and using -THAT- demo to benchmark the new card =and= re-benchmark the competing card(s). The site should also obviously take screenshots and compare them to make sure that the drivers aren't cheating by lowering visual quality etc. etc. etc.
Obv. one can't go back and rebenchmark all the way to the TNT, but -at least- the current generation cards should be done, for comparisons to older models then, yeah, the older benchmarks should be used (but still not the canned demo001, but the 'online benchmarks' recorded when the older cards came out).
Just my 2c
where are my mod points where I need them! thanks John for the (as usual) insightful post...