That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen. There's no way a shark could aim a laser mounted like that. It needs it on its head so the shark can properly sight down the beam and destroy the commanded target.
Several years ago I did a project where I interfaced a Playstation controller to a Pocket PC using a PIC microcontroller that hosted the controller and bit banged IrDA out an infrared LED to the PPC. To exactly match the PS IO timing I rigged up a 4 channel logic analyzer using the raw parallel port of my PC (in other words it was basically software I wrote and hardware consisting of a parallel cable that had one end lopped off exposing bare wires). That worked great, and so did the PS adapter I created.
As a side note, that is one of the appealing things about the Raspberry Pi, is that it provides a fully modern OS and even onboard development environment, but still provides low GPIO hardware access. Fun fun fun.
Okay, so in addition to this not involving NASA and the data being 5 years old, the biblical references are wrong too. Heston played Moses, who parted the Red Sea. "raise sea levels on a biblical scale" would refer to the great flood, and that involved Noah (and even then he didn't cause the flood). So I have no idea what Charlton Heston has to do with this in even the most convoluted possible way.
I don't fully agree. Dragon requires extensive training and gets better over time the more you use it and as you actively configure macros, correct misinterpreted words, etc. Siri, google voice search, etc are speaker agnostic. That's a huge difference in technology.
The next time you're playing a free solitaire game online, and your CPU fan is going wide open, your gpu fan is wide open, the room feels hot and stuffy all of a sudden, and the lights dim, just seek solace in the fact that you're making someone else fake money.
There are limits to what will be demanded, and we have reached them in some areas already. Audio is a good example of this. The storage and bandwidth requirements for good (as in good enough for 99% of the population) audio is now a very small drop in the bucket. How many songs can you fit on a 16 GB micro SD card the size of your fingernail? How many songs can you stream real-time at once on a typical broadband connection? We have surpassed the technical requirements for audio by such a massive margin that it isn't even a consideration when purchasing hardware or bandwidth.
There are limits to video too. These so-called "retina" displays are a good example of the resolution limit of the human eye (we passed the color depth perception limit a good decade ago). The eye cannot discern individual pixels within the normal focal range (by the time you bring it close enough to the eye to make out individual pixels, the eye can no longer keep it in focus). We have a long ways to go to be able to store and stream video at such high resolution. However we will reach it before too long. Then it's a matter of how many hours / days of video do you need to store on how small of a device, and how many video streams do you need at one time over your internet connection.
One day we'll be moving and storing movie-length retina-resolution video with the same flippant ease as MP3s today. When we've reached that point, what would we need more bandwidth and storage for? Not for anything by human consumption - and that is the key factor.
I think there's a significant problem in the way this software is being used in this case. It is one thing to say that, based on samples of an individual's voice, that there is X probability that some other voice sample could be from the same person. However, there isn't any way the software can do the opposite and prove a negative. For example, you can take hours of recordings of my voice from phone conversations and train the software. Now, if I make my voice sound like Donald Duck, or if I sing in falsetto, which are two types of sounds that would not be in the sampling of my normal voice, what probability would the software return that the silly voice matches my normal voice? It would be very low, at is should be.
In this case we have a sample of someone's NOT NORMAL VOICE. They are screaming and yelling. What voice samples of Zimmerman's were used to train the software? Was it recordings of him screaming and yelling? If not then of course the software will return a low probability. Actually, I'm surprised it returned as high of a probability as it did.
Now, as a side note, I think the news is really trying to inflame this whole deal. I think Zimmerman is likely in the wrong here, however, the media is running rampant with speculation. A good example are the video clips of Zimmerman at the police station, and them (news media) saying it doesn't look like his nose is broken, or that there doesn't appear to be blood all over him. That sort of thing is completely impossible to determine from the crappy, low resolution security video. Again, yes, if there was that much blood and it could be seen in the video, then a positive could be "proven", but just because it doesn't show up in the video doesn't mean he has significant injuries or a broken nose, etc.
I did a lot of research on this before Christmas for gifts for my kids. The best deal I could find is Virgin's LG Optimus V Android phone. Walmart sells these phones for $99, no contract. For $99 you get a heck of a lot - all the standard smartphone stuff - GPS, Wifi, accelerometer, capacitive multi touch screen, 3 megapixel camera, SD slot, etc. Now just as-is, with no service, you essentially have an Android equivalent to the iPod Touch. Netflix, youtube, pandora, etc, all play great over Wifi. My Walmart hasn't been able to keep these in stock for months. They'll get several in, and they are gone the next day.
Then on top of that you can get service for $35 for 30 days, no contract. Unlimited data, unlimited texting, and 300 minutes of talk time. For my kids that is perfect. They mainly text and consume data. No standard carrier can come close to touching that with any contract plans. Literally, you're looking at DOUBLE monthly rates for the same plan (and you're going to have a data cap). For $50 a month you also get unlimited talk time.
So this is the route I went for my two children that are old enough to need / use a cellphone, and it's worked out great.
One note is that last week texting stopped working for almost a full 24 hours on all Virgin phones in my area. Neither sending or receiving would work. Then suddenly all the texting flooded both in and out when it started working again. I've never seen that happen with a contract carrier before.
(even though they have not made nukes or the missiles to carry them)
Are you sure about that? You know they are working very hard towards both ends, right? You did see the news the last couple days about Iran launching another "satellite" into orbit next month?
It's actually somewhat ironic, because if the device was that easy to work on, then iFixit wouldn't have a purpose either. So I guess what they're wanting is consumer electronics not specifically designed for an end user to service, but easy enough that an end user does have a chance of repairing them with good enough instructions.
I think the problem is that even if you're careful and know what you're doing, there's still a decent change of randomly breaking the glass. According to the video in the story, iFixit originally gave the iPad 2 a score of 4 out of 10 for repairability. However they downgraded it to a 2 out of 10, which is the score they also gave the new iPad, because of the number of failed repairs over the last year.
Yes, that video is much higher quality, especially when he zooms in on the anomaly. However the part at the end where he suggests the sun is "giving birth" to a new planet is just totally out there.
...good thing! The mines that were shut down will eventually come back on line when it is profitable to do so again. In the meantime: 1) Rare earth materials can be purchased cheaper because China was undercutting everyone (even if they were used for manufacturing within china, the goods were still being sold abroad). 2) Less pollution generated in my home country (USA) because that mining was put on hold. 3) Non-Chinese resources are preserved and will last longer while China burns through theirs.
What we're seeing is an eventuality. Eventually China is going to wise up and realize they are going through a very valuable resource at an unsustainable rate.
In this case there is a reason for it. You see, if your profession is astronomy in Norway, it is customary to replace all the O's in your name with Ø so they look like planets with orbits.
Norwegian Nuclear Physicists do the same thing, although the astronomers claim they came up with the idea first. Considering that astronomy is the older profession of the two, they may indeed have prior art.
I would assume that if a person can take a few minutes out of one day a year to travel to a voting station and place a vote, that they will at least have some idea of what is on the ballet and what they are voting for. If a person can vote online without having to even bother going to the effort to leave their house, then I think there's a good chance more "random" voting will occur, or at least votes placed with even less consideration of the issues or actual candidate.
I'm not saying that sort of totally uninformed voting isn't going on already, but that it would get even worse.
Well, you can look at existing physics engines, like Box2D, but it won't do what you want by default. Games of the type you're talking about simulate motion in discrete steps - usually once per frame. However, you can also decouple your motion (physics) from the rendering, but you usually only need to do that for very precise physics simulations that need to be reproducible time after time (when you decouple physics then the physics engine can always run at some fixed time interval, like 1/60th of a second, which is how realistic physics engine like Box2D function best).
Essentially you have a simulation going, in which each object has a position in floating point precision. Each frame you calculate the duration of the previous frame in milliseconds, then you move all your objects the appropriate amount over that discrete time step. So if your frame is 10 milliseconds, and an object has an X velocity of 1 unit per second, then you increment its X value.01 units. The next frame might take twice as long to render at 20 milliseconds (maybe you have more objects, or some other multitasking app used some CPU time) so you have to move your objects twice as far -.02 units. The math is very simple. Then after moving all the objects you render them into screen space.
As for the attractors / repulsors, you also store a velocity value for each moving object. Then each frame you calculate the distance to each attractor / repulsor, and modify the velocity based on the strength of the attractor / repulsor attenuated by (divided by ) its distance from your object. You can make it as simple or complex as you'd like. You can factor in mass, use linear or exponential repulsive effects, etc. Now if you start getting into collision detection and resolution, then things can get very complex if you're dealing with objects more complex than circles or really, really fast moving objects. For example, say you have a bullet traveling really fast, and it is heading towards a thin barrier (wall). One frame the bullet could be on one side of the barrier, and the next frame it moved so far that it is on the other side. In other words, there wasn't a frame in which the bullet was exactly in contact with the barrier. Those things can get complex to simulate, and it gets even worse when both objects are moving at the same time.
The key thing is grasping the concept of discrete time steps, and moving objects a variable distance each frame depending on how long the previous frame took to render. You can't just hardcode the game to run at, say, 1/60th a second, because if it is running on a slower device than you tested on, or if the device is multitasking and can't spend as much processing time on your app, then things will seem to run in slow motion and be herky-jerky. The other key thing is the idea that the positions of your objects do not (and should not) correspond directly to screen coordinates. Say your world is 100x100 units. Well, when you render it, you simply scale it so that the 100 is the width of the display (if you're using something like OpenGL to do your drawing, then you just set the matrix scale appropriately). So the "real" position of the objects, and all that simulation, occurs at some arbitrary coordinate system, and then is scaled appropriately when the objects are drawn.
As for languages, personally I recommend C++ and use OpenGL ES for rendering. Then the vast majority of your code can be used on Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, OSX, etc, but is not conducive to web-based like Flash or Java.
I have only dabbled in electronics, but I don't care for the term "magnetics" (nor I have ever heard it before). I would think "inductor" would be a better term. Anyone who actually knows what they're talking about care to illuminate what the difference is between "magnetics" and inductors?
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Sounds to me like some whiny babies shouldn't be investing in the stock market.
That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen. There's no way a shark could aim a laser mounted like that. It needs it on its head so the shark can properly sight down the beam and destroy the commanded target.
Several years ago I did a project where I interfaced a Playstation controller to a Pocket PC using a PIC microcontroller that hosted the controller and bit banged IrDA out an infrared LED to the PPC. To exactly match the PS IO timing I rigged up a 4 channel logic analyzer using the raw parallel port of my PC (in other words it was basically software I wrote and hardware consisting of a parallel cable that had one end lopped off exposing bare wires). That worked great, and so did the PS adapter I created.
As a side note, that is one of the appealing things about the Raspberry Pi, is that it provides a fully modern OS and even onboard development environment, but still provides low GPIO hardware access. Fun fun fun.
Did the 2nd recipient get it at a discount?
Okay, so in addition to this not involving NASA and the data being 5 years old, the biblical references are wrong too. Heston played Moses, who parted the Red Sea. "raise sea levels on a biblical scale" would refer to the great flood, and that involved Noah (and even then he didn't cause the flood). So I have no idea what Charlton Heston has to do with this in even the most convoluted possible way.
I don't fully agree. Dragon requires extensive training and gets better over time the more you use it and as you actively configure macros, correct misinterpreted words, etc. Siri, google voice search, etc are speaker agnostic. That's a huge difference in technology.
The next time you're playing a free solitaire game online, and your CPU fan is going wide open, your gpu fan is wide open, the room feels hot and stuffy all of a sudden, and the lights dim, just seek solace in the fact that you're making someone else fake money.
The difference is in the EULA.
I just experienced the effect firsthand. I was confused before I even read the summary.
Zip discs one of the most successful storage mediums of all time? Is that a joke?
There are limits to what will be demanded, and we have reached them in some areas already. Audio is a good example of this. The storage and bandwidth requirements for good (as in good enough for 99% of the population) audio is now a very small drop in the bucket. How many songs can you fit on a 16 GB micro SD card the size of your fingernail? How many songs can you stream real-time at once on a typical broadband connection? We have surpassed the technical requirements for audio by such a massive margin that it isn't even a consideration when purchasing hardware or bandwidth.
There are limits to video too. These so-called "retina" displays are a good example of the resolution limit of the human eye (we passed the color depth perception limit a good decade ago). The eye cannot discern individual pixels within the normal focal range (by the time you bring it close enough to the eye to make out individual pixels, the eye can no longer keep it in focus). We have a long ways to go to be able to store and stream video at such high resolution. However we will reach it before too long. Then it's a matter of how many hours / days of video do you need to store on how small of a device, and how many video streams do you need at one time over your internet connection.
One day we'll be moving and storing movie-length retina-resolution video with the same flippant ease as MP3s today. When we've reached that point, what would we need more bandwidth and storage for? Not for anything by human consumption - and that is the key factor.
Numerous news sites are reporting that the launch failed - it broke apart shortly after launch.
I think there's a significant problem in the way this software is being used in this case. It is one thing to say that, based on samples of an individual's voice, that there is X probability that some other voice sample could be from the same person. However, there isn't any way the software can do the opposite and prove a negative. For example, you can take hours of recordings of my voice from phone conversations and train the software. Now, if I make my voice sound like Donald Duck, or if I sing in falsetto, which are two types of sounds that would not be in the sampling of my normal voice, what probability would the software return that the silly voice matches my normal voice? It would be very low, at is should be.
In this case we have a sample of someone's NOT NORMAL VOICE. They are screaming and yelling. What voice samples of Zimmerman's were used to train the software? Was it recordings of him screaming and yelling? If not then of course the software will return a low probability. Actually, I'm surprised it returned as high of a probability as it did.
Now, as a side note, I think the news is really trying to inflame this whole deal. I think Zimmerman is likely in the wrong here, however, the media is running rampant with speculation. A good example are the video clips of Zimmerman at the police station, and them (news media) saying it doesn't look like his nose is broken, or that there doesn't appear to be blood all over him. That sort of thing is completely impossible to determine from the crappy, low resolution security video. Again, yes, if there was that much blood and it could be seen in the video, then a positive could be "proven", but just because it doesn't show up in the video doesn't mean he has significant injuries or a broken nose, etc.
I did a lot of research on this before Christmas for gifts for my kids. The best deal I could find is Virgin's LG Optimus V Android phone. Walmart sells these phones for $99, no contract. For $99 you get a heck of a lot - all the standard smartphone stuff - GPS, Wifi, accelerometer, capacitive multi touch screen, 3 megapixel camera, SD slot, etc. Now just as-is, with no service, you essentially have an Android equivalent to the iPod Touch. Netflix, youtube, pandora, etc, all play great over Wifi. My Walmart hasn't been able to keep these in stock for months. They'll get several in, and they are gone the next day.
Then on top of that you can get service for $35 for 30 days, no contract. Unlimited data, unlimited texting, and 300 minutes of talk time. For my kids that is perfect. They mainly text and consume data. No standard carrier can come close to touching that with any contract plans. Literally, you're looking at DOUBLE monthly rates for the same plan (and you're going to have a data cap). For $50 a month you also get unlimited talk time.
So this is the route I went for my two children that are old enough to need / use a cellphone, and it's worked out great.
One note is that last week texting stopped working for almost a full 24 hours on all Virgin phones in my area. Neither sending or receiving would work. Then suddenly all the texting flooded both in and out when it started working again. I've never seen that happen with a contract carrier before.
(even though they have not made nukes or the missiles to carry them)
Are you sure about that? You know they are working very hard towards both ends, right? You did see the news the last couple days about Iran launching another "satellite" into orbit next month?
It's actually somewhat ironic, because if the device was that easy to work on, then iFixit wouldn't have a purpose either. So I guess what they're wanting is consumer electronics not specifically designed for an end user to service, but easy enough that an end user does have a chance of repairing them with good enough instructions.
I think the problem is that even if you're careful and know what you're doing, there's still a decent change of randomly breaking the glass. According to the video in the story, iFixit originally gave the iPad 2 a score of 4 out of 10 for repairability. However they downgraded it to a 2 out of 10, which is the score they also gave the new iPad, because of the number of failed repairs over the last year.
My wife must communicate with neutrinos already. Her communications pass right through me, completely unhindered and unreceived.
90 million people will buy the book, skim through it over the course of a day or two, and never open it again.
Yes, that video is much higher quality, especially when he zooms in on the anomaly. However the part at the end where he suggests the sun is "giving birth" to a new planet is just totally out there.
...good thing! The mines that were shut down will eventually come back on line when it is profitable to do so again. In the meantime:
1) Rare earth materials can be purchased cheaper because China was undercutting everyone (even if they were used for manufacturing within china, the goods were still being sold abroad).
2) Less pollution generated in my home country (USA) because that mining was put on hold.
3) Non-Chinese resources are preserved and will last longer while China burns through theirs.
What we're seeing is an eventuality. Eventually China is going to wise up and realize they are going through a very valuable resource at an unsustainable rate.
In this case there is a reason for it. You see, if your profession is astronomy in Norway, it is customary to replace all the O's in your name with Ø so they look like planets with orbits.
Norwegian Nuclear Physicists do the same thing, although the astronomers claim they came up with the idea first. Considering that astronomy is the older profession of the two, they may indeed have prior art.
I would assume that if a person can take a few minutes out of one day a year to travel to a voting station and place a vote, that they will at least have some idea of what is on the ballet and what they are voting for. If a person can vote online without having to even bother going to the effort to leave their house, then I think there's a good chance more "random" voting will occur, or at least votes placed with even less consideration of the issues or actual candidate.
I'm not saying that sort of totally uninformed voting isn't going on already, but that it would get even worse.
Well, you can look at existing physics engines, like Box2D, but it won't do what you want by default. Games of the type you're talking about simulate motion in discrete steps - usually once per frame. However, you can also decouple your motion (physics) from the rendering, but you usually only need to do that for very precise physics simulations that need to be reproducible time after time (when you decouple physics then the physics engine can always run at some fixed time interval, like 1/60th of a second, which is how realistic physics engine like Box2D function best).
Essentially you have a simulation going, in which each object has a position in floating point precision. Each frame you calculate the duration of the previous frame in milliseconds, then you move all your objects the appropriate amount over that discrete time step. So if your frame is 10 milliseconds, and an object has an X velocity of 1 unit per second, then you increment its X value .01 units. The next frame might take twice as long to render at 20 milliseconds (maybe you have more objects, or some other multitasking app used some CPU time) so you have to move your objects twice as far - .02 units. The math is very simple. Then after moving all the objects you render them into screen space.
As for the attractors / repulsors, you also store a velocity value for each moving object. Then each frame you calculate the distance to each attractor / repulsor, and modify the velocity based on the strength of the attractor / repulsor attenuated by (divided by ) its distance from your object. You can make it as simple or complex as you'd like. You can factor in mass, use linear or exponential repulsive effects, etc. Now if you start getting into collision detection and resolution, then things can get very complex if you're dealing with objects more complex than circles or really, really fast moving objects. For example, say you have a bullet traveling really fast, and it is heading towards a thin barrier (wall). One frame the bullet could be on one side of the barrier, and the next frame it moved so far that it is on the other side. In other words, there wasn't a frame in which the bullet was exactly in contact with the barrier. Those things can get complex to simulate, and it gets even worse when both objects are moving at the same time.
The key thing is grasping the concept of discrete time steps, and moving objects a variable distance each frame depending on how long the previous frame took to render. You can't just hardcode the game to run at, say, 1/60th a second, because if it is running on a slower device than you tested on, or if the device is multitasking and can't spend as much processing time on your app, then things will seem to run in slow motion and be herky-jerky. The other key thing is the idea that the positions of your objects do not (and should not) correspond directly to screen coordinates. Say your world is 100x100 units. Well, when you render it, you simply scale it so that the 100 is the width of the display (if you're using something like OpenGL to do your drawing, then you just set the matrix scale appropriately). So the "real" position of the objects, and all that simulation, occurs at some arbitrary coordinate system, and then is scaled appropriately when the objects are drawn.
As for languages, personally I recommend C++ and use OpenGL ES for rendering. Then the vast majority of your code can be used on Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, OSX, etc, but is not conducive to web-based like Flash or Java.
I have only dabbled in electronics, but I don't care for the term "magnetics" (nor I have ever heard it before). I would think "inductor" would be a better term. Anyone who actually knows what they're talking about care to illuminate what the difference is between "magnetics" and inductors?