WTF are you talking about? How does the lack of a pretty decompiler imply the impossibility of facial recognition?
For one, several different samples of source code could compile down to identical assembly code. Variable names and comments are lost during compilation, so those can't be rebuilt. And different constructs in the high-level language could also boil down to identical machine code during optimization. Still, you can certainly decompile assembly code to express it in a high-level language, but it's going to look like machine-generated code without some human intervention.
With decompilation for translation you also have the problem of certain concepts being easily expressed in one language but not another. For example, Babel Fish can convert a French poem into English, but the literal translation will be awkward in meaning and totally destroyed in rhyme and rhythm. Trying to convert between BASIC and C++ will produce a similar result: a literal translation (which must exist if both languages are Turing complete), but a real mess for a human to read and use.
But that's all irrelevant to facial recognition. That system just needs to compile and compare condensed data (vertices, surfaces, brightnesses) from the face it sees now with the face it's seen before. If the data matches within some tolerance then the ATM can accept that as partial verification of your identity. It doesn't need to construct a full replica of you that your mother would mistake for her own son.
I don't imagine that a static facial image alone will grant a person full access to their account. There needs to be additional verification: a PIN, a credit card, a smart card, a dynamic biometric, and/or a challenge/response. If access were based on face alone then a twin or a thief with a plaster bust could impersonate you. Probably a smart card would be sufficient -- a smart card plus facial recognition is certainly harder to fake then a simple magnetic card plus four digits.
You can jump to a possibly more dangerous height without the extra mass/weight, but you'll quickly learn not to.
Can you? Wouldn't you just land with whatever force you applied at the beginning of the jump? On Earth, I can jump a certain height unloaded and a lesser height while carrying a backpack full of rocks. I'll have farther to fall from the higher jump, but I'll have more mass getting attracted by gravity on the shorter jump. I think they would cancel each other out.
Or, actually, there might be less force during the unloaded jump. When loaded I will achieve a lower velocity than when unloaded. Therefore I will have more time to push against the ground and put more energy into my jump.
You think it's going to take 5-10 years for a high definition disc to become relevant? I have an HDTV right now. I would spend $200 tomorrow if there were just one HD format. But there are two, and I don't know which is going to die, so I'm waiting.
I don't care about the copy protection on movies. I get all my movies from Netflix -- I don't buy them. I watch them once and send them back. The only thing stopping HD discs from becoming a huge success right now is existence of an incompatible competitor.
It's fine with me if HD over Internet becomes the norm in five years. But my DSL and magnetic storage can't handle it today, and I don't want to wait that long to start enjoying HD movies.
I've read that a hundred years ago most people never traveled more than thirty miles from their birthplace. Now it's commonplace to at least cross your own continent and there is a segment of the population that circles the globe many times a year.
And technological progress is accelerating. For one thing, there are a lot more human brains at work now than a hundred years ago: something like 6 billion versus 1 billion. And those brains have far more interconnection and speed of communication.
I am a scientist. A hundred years ago (hell, even twenty) scientific communication was conducted by publication of paper journals. If you wanted to research a topic you had to walk to a library and leaf through card catalogs and indexes. Now we do days worth of searching in just seconds. And publication of new research can take days rather than months.
I'm not a fan of manned space exploration today, but it takes a major lack of imagination to think it can't happen in the coming centuries.
I have Verizon telephone and DSL service in Washington, DC. My DSL connection was crapping out a couple weeks ago and I was thinking about switching to Comcast cable. I decided to call tech support and give Verizon a chance to fix the problem.
The first tech support person I got was Indian, clearly working from a script, and not listening to what I (as a pretty knowledgeable computer person) was saying. He said he couldn't help me because he was a Windows support person (even though I booted my MacBook Pro into Windows and knew that the problem was with the modem or line, not the computer) and transferred me to a Mac support person.
The Mac support guy was great. He tested my line remotely and said that it looked fine, but since my complaint was about intermittent connection problems he would monitor it throughout the day. He called back an hour later and said he saw the connection drop repeatedly and would send out a technician.
The technician was thorough. He checked the modem, checked the phone jack, checked the wiring in my apartment, and checked the main box where the line comes into the building. He disconnected an old unused jack (really old, with a big round four-pronged connector) and seems to have cleaned up whatever noise was causing my problems.
I've had lots of memory trouble lately as a symptom of chemobrain. I get chemotherapy two weeks per month and develop lots of holes in my memory of those chemo days. I also received intensive chemotherapy two years ago and have whole weeks missing from my memory.
But lately I've been getting lots of flashbacks. A scent or a sound associated with the missing memories will make them all come flooding back. And it's very powerful -- I recall all of the sights, smells, sounds, conversations, weather, even internal thoughts that I had experienced and forgotten.
I realized that this means that my ability to store memories is still good, I just have a hard time retrieving them at will. The recall is either involuntary (triggered by a related sense) or aided by a reminder from somebody else who was there.
I'd say that this is a situation where forgetting can be a very useful process. By forgetting most of my worst chemo days I can enjoy the good days in ignorant bliss. But, boy, time travels fast when 50% of your days don't register.
Also, as they were built by PhD students, they are probably not very expensive to manufacture.....especially if you were looking at mass-production.
What a strange statement. You do know that PhD students don't pay for their research projects out of their own pockets. The funding comes mainly from grants via the professor. So it's not a matter of what the student can afford, but of how much money the professor can bring in.
For example, my first doctoral project involved building and maintaining a molecular beam epitaxy chamber. That's a meter-diameter, thick metal sphere with a series of chambers attached so that silicon wafers can be loaded and pumped down to a billionth of atmospheric pressure. The central system cost around $250,000. We spent at least another $100,000 on updates and replacements for my project. We eventually abandoned that research, mainly due to the difficulty and cost of safety when handling the extremely poisonous and flammable gases used in epitaxy. I switched to theoretical research which is an incredible bargain, just $3,000 for a new workstation, as long as you have a student with the appropriate intellect for that kind of work.
But even then a PhD research project is not cheap. My professor had to pay about $30,000 a year for my stipend and tuition. Double that to add in overhead and travel. Considering that an experimentalist PhD student might need two years to build one device for their research, that's still at least $100,000 for that first device. I sure hope that mass production isn't going to be done by a Beowulf cluster of PhD students.
Nice story about the frogs -- I haven't heard it in a while.
But you misinterpreted the part about DRM being the only value. They're saying that their subjects aren't sure that 256 Kb/s sounds better than 128 Kb/s. Therefore if there's any advantage to the new tracks it's not a difference in sound quality. They're just easier to copy, burn, and transcode.
The big difference that the 256 Kb/s + DRM-free option makes for me is that now I'll buy albums from iTunes Store. Previously I would use iTunes to buy one to three tracks if there was some artist I liked but didn't want a whole album from. But usually I order the CDs online for $8 to $14, rip them to AAC at 192 Kb/s, and put the disc away to collect dust on my overflowing CD rack. Now I can get higher quality cheaper and faster.
Yes, ideally I would rip all my music to a lossless format. And ideally everything would be available on SACD at 2822 KHz rather than 44.1 KHz CDs. But that's just not practical with my 500+ album collection. It'd fill up my laptop's hard drive real quick and allow me to put only a fraction onto my iPod.
I'm also disappointed that the article only tested the tracks on iPods with earbuds. Most of my listening is on a decent stereo system fed from my laptop. Ripping is about convenience, not portability. I only use my iPod when riding the Metro or an airplane. With all the outside noise the bitrate doesn't matter.
And being DRM-free isn't just a matter of idealism. I get frustrated when I go to burn an MP3 CD for my car and discover that one of the tracks I selected is DRMed. Sure there are ways to get around it, but it's just not worth the bother.
Yes, Starcraft is a PPC executable running under Rosetta. But what Blizzard did do was release an OS X version of Starcraft some years ago which is what allows it to continue running under Rosetta today. Diablo II might be based on OS 9 which is not supported on Intel Macs.
Still, I wish they would release an updated Starcraft executable for Intel Macs. It runs ok, but it's a little laggy and makes the laptop run hot and drain the battery.
Monkeyball on the Wii is a big stinking pile of digested bananas. Half the minigames have terrible controls. Some of the minigames last thirty seconds and some grind on for twenty minutes. You can't select enough rounds of the good games to have a worthwhile match -- they're limited to something like best 3 out of 5. That game was clearly rushed for launch and is unworthy of the Monkeyball name. Maybe if they release a proper sequel then it'll be more fun.
My impression is that Wii is a great console for parties and fun for two players with comparable skill. But the controls feel sloppy to me and for single-player games I'd rather be on my Nintendo DS or my Mac.
1) I have been battling cancer for three years; I'm pretty familiar with the methods and mechanisms of treatment.
2) I've read that it's a myth that cancer cells divide more quickly than healthy cells. The defect is that they continue dividing when they should sense that it's time to stop dividing. It's a matter of duration rather than rate.
3) There are many different kinds of chemotherapy. Some make hair fall out, some cause diarrhea, some cause nausea, some damage skin, some make nerves go whacky. I've had all of those side effects from one drug or another. There are BIG differences between chemotherapies which must mean there are differences in their effect on cells.
4) Brain cancers are particulary troublesome because many drugs can't crossing the blood-brain barrier. Electromagnetism could be very useful where chemotherapy is ineffective.
5) Immunotherapy can be useful at slowing tumor growth or making cancer cells more susceptible to chemotherapy. But immunotherapy alone often isn't enough, and immunotherapy can have very nasty side effects. I suffered much pain and scarring from Erbitux, a drug that blocks epithelial growth factor, but it didn't do a lick of good for my colon cancer.
6) A trial on ten patients won't be the basis for widespread application of this method. But positive results in a human trial is far ahead of many of the supposed breakthroughs that we read about on Slashdot.
Yes, they can. You see, Mac users do not all speak with a single Borgified voice. There are some Mac users that believe the scarcity of exploits is due to the better design of a Unix base. And there are actually other Mac users that believe the smaller market share makes Macs a less attractive target. Amazingly, there might even be Mac users who change their beliefs according to argument and observation. What chaos!
This seems to be a very common practice on LCD screens, not just a trick used by Apple. I'm still not clear whether most LCDs use spatial or temporal dithering. It seems like temporal dithering would work very well with an LCD. They're known for their sluggish response times, so sending "80-84-80-84" at 60 Hz should result in a nice smearing into "82-82-82-82" over time.
I didn't see any dithering artifacts on my MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo). Either it doesn't dither (unlikely) or the dithering is better than my eyes can see.
We all know that screens are actually made of red, green, and blue (RGB) dots that combine to make the apparent color of each pixel. An 8-bit screen would have 256 levels of brighness for each of those subpixels, yielding 256 x 256 x 256 = 16.8 million mixed colors. But if you wanted to be really technical you could say that the screen can actually show only 256 + 256 + 256 = 768 colors; the mixed colors are an illusion. Likewise a 6-bit screen can generate only 262 thousand colors in a given pixel at a given instant, but it can simulate many more colors over time or space.
The argument depends on how many pixels the manufacturer claims to have. If they say their screen is 1024 x 768 with 16.8 million colors then we would expect to have 786,000 independently addressable pixels, each of which comprises three RGB subpixels. If in fact it takes four RGB subpixels (1-1/3 of each 6-bit subpixel to get 8 bits) to yield 16.8 million colors then they should really only claim a resolution of 768 x 576. If, however, they do the dithering temporally and the pulsation is unnoticeable then I think continuing to call the resolution 1024 x 768 is fair.
In the movie Thank You for Smoking the lobbyist goes to Hollywood to talk to an agent about placing cigarettes in movies. The agent mentions a screenplay set on a space station and suggests a scene with the main characters smoking cigarettes after sex.
The lobbyist says: "Sounds great! But wouldn't smoking in an all oxygen environment be dangerous?"
The agent responds: "I guess so. But it's an easy fix. Just one line of dialogue, 'Thank God they invented the whatchamacallit device.'"
Did you actually watch the gameplay video? The ramps are inclined and debris from air units slides down the ramps into piles at the base. I didn't see whether the debris hampers movement but the narrator hinted that it would. There were also big freaking craters in the ground after the nuclear strike. I'll be surprised if those don't have more than a cosmetic effect.
And yes, there were only two noticeable levels of terrain shown, but there might be more possible on different maps. Heck, even original Starcraft actually has at least three levels for certain terrain types. Most people just choose to play on maps like Big Game Hunters and Lost Temple that only use two of them.
Starcraft may run at 640 x 480 but it still looks nice even on a much higher resolution monitor. The artists did an amazing job with that game. I reinstalled it a couple years ago and was surprised that it still looks pretty good compared to modern games. Some old games (like Diablo II) look very pixelated, but Starcraft has great anti-aliasing, animation, and structure that looks nice despite the relatively primitive technology. It's a lot like a well-designed font that's readable even when it's scaled too small for a simplistic vector-to-pixel translation to work.
Brilliantly written and edited. I was enlightened by the part that says fair use is not a right, it's a legally defensible position. It is legal to copy a copyrighted work for the fair use purposes such as critique and satire. But the author has no responsiblity to make that copying convenient.
Movie studios have every right to make copying video discs difficult. They're not obligated to sell unencrypted data; they sell bits and we voluntarily buy bits. But it must not be made illegal for purchasers to circumvent that copy protection if they are able.
And I truly wish that the creators and Congress would remember that there are two parts to the bargain of copyright: an unnatural protection of creative works from copying and a reasonable, limited duration for that protection. Congress might have the right to extend the copyright duration to forever and a day, but it's a stupid move because it stifles the creativity that copyright is meant to promote.
The first thing I thought when I saw the screenshots of Starcraft II was: "The units look just like they did on the box for the original Starcraft."
I remember after playing Starcraft for a while looking at the box and thinking: "That's not how the game actually looks! Those units all have extra spiky parts and the buildings have more attachments and who the hell sends a command center into battle?!" I figured that the shots were from many months before release and they simplified the graphics and abilities as they polished the game.
Well, Starcraft 2 doesn't look exactly like those old screenshots. It's more like a beautiful, glowing, high definition revisit to the original concepts. I wonder how much Starcraft 2 is based on their original vision for Starcraft but with ten times as much computer power and a hundred times as much cash available.
Actually, that sounds like the Star Wars prequels -- an old idea returned to with new technology. Except I have some faith that Blizzard can remake an old idea without adding annoying characters, terrible acting, and boring storylines. Then again, they might add a fourth race....
You, sir, are insane (as well as inane). I'm a little bit annoyed by the remote that came with my new HDTV; it's big and clunky. I can change channels, switch inputs, and control volume with my cable remote, but I need the HDTV remote to change view mode (zoom/no zoom), menu options, and set the sleep timer. I thought it'd be nice to get a universal remote that could handle everything.
So I looked up the MX-900 you recommended. $399 ?! And the MX-3000 is $599 ?! Wow. You can get 720p HDTVs for $800. Those remotes are cRrAaAzZy.
I just got an HDTV two weeks ago. Before I even ordered the set I shopped around for whatever cables I might need. Lots of people said: "Expensive HDMI cables are for suckers! It's a digital signal, not analog. It won't degrade due to connections or material, so any old HDMI cable is as good as the best." So I felt comfortable buying a couple of no-name cables for $3.00 each.
Does the analysis in this article mean that cable quality actually does matter? It doesn't make a difference to me right now -- my TV has two HDMI inputs but I don't have any HDMI sources. To my surprise the new HD cable box only has component, S-Video, and Firewire outputs. I'm still using a regular DVD player connected by S-Video, and my HD antenna is regular old rabbit ears and coaxial cable.
I'd love to be able use the TV as a second display for my MacBook Pro, but it only has DVI output. I think there are DVI to HDMI converters (seems simple, according to the article), but DVI doesn't carry audio. So I'd need to plug in another cable for audio, run it along with the DVI cable to a DVI+audio to HDMI converter box, and then run HDMI across the room. Yuk.
There are certainly ways to make money off of a ten-year-old game. For one thing, I've bought Starcraft three times in those ten years: once when it was first released for the PC, again when I got a Mac and realized that my first copy was too old to be a hybrid disc, and a third time to run it on a second computer for testing my multiplayer maps.
Also, online Starcraft is played through Battle.net which has banner ads on the chat and game-forming screens. As long as players keep playing they can keep selling adspace.
The submitter left out a very important word in his summary. This article is about console games. The first sentence in the article is:
Valve Software's Doug Lombardi stresses the importance of user-created content in home videogame consoles.
He's saying that consoles are way behind general purpose computers in online play. One of the big advantages that computers have always had is customizability and user-generated maps and mods. The online experience of consoles will remain a poor shadow of the computer game ecosystem until they enable and allow the players to share in the extension of their games.
This is a big reason why I haven't bought a full-size console since the Atari 2600. Two years after I got the Atari I also got a Texas Instruments 99/4A. I loved the ability to do wild things like save games, download levels from online bulletin boards, and even program simple games myself. Nowadays I enjoy playing Use Map Settings games in Starcraft and have created several maps of my own. That game is ten years old but still megafun due to the user-generated maps.
My cat got very sick a few years ago after being bitten by a raccoon. When the local vet couldn't diagnose the problem we took him to the College of Veterinary Medicine at Michigan State University. The cat couldn't even stand up and was fading fast so they wanted to give him a transfusion. But when they tried to match his blood type the samples reacted against every donor they checked. So they offered to try an experimental artificial blood.
The artificial blood kept him alive long enough to identify a parasite infection, start him on treatment for the parasites, and let him recover until a natural blood donor could be found and infused. He was hospitalized for over a week but finally recovered and is perfectly healthy now. The interesting side effect is that he bulked up massively since the illness. He's over twenty pounds and extremely muscular. I don't know which artificial blood they used and what other side effects it had, but it seems like it might have more applications beyond just blood replacement for emergencies.
The example image is not very convincing. The before sample is written in italics and suffers from JPEG compression. Italic print is very bad for more than a highlighted word or simple sentence. And the poetry-esque after sample is a little prettier but I would wear out my scroll wheel in an hour if I had to read more than a paragraph.
If the human eye sees as if through a straw wouldn't we be better at processing text in a continuous line? One super long line of text on ticker tape might be ideal. That wouldn't fit on a computer screen in a straight line, but maybe a spiral would work. How does the brain do at reading slanted and upside-down text?
Or maybe crawling text could be displayed on the screen and some peripheral could sense where the reader's eyes are looking. The farther the reader advances toward the right side of the text line the faster the new text would scroll in. That way the crawl would speed up or slow down according to how fast the reader is consuming it. That'd be a lot faster than watching the crawling text on the news channel or in Times Square. But it'd make it hard to skip over uninteresting sections or to scan a document as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
WTF are you talking about? How does the lack of a pretty decompiler imply the impossibility of facial recognition?
For one, several different samples of source code could compile down to identical assembly code. Variable names and comments are lost during compilation, so those can't be rebuilt. And different constructs in the high-level language could also boil down to identical machine code during optimization. Still, you can certainly decompile assembly code to express it in a high-level language, but it's going to look like machine-generated code without some human intervention.
With decompilation for translation you also have the problem of certain concepts being easily expressed in one language but not another. For example, Babel Fish can convert a French poem into English, but the literal translation will be awkward in meaning and totally destroyed in rhyme and rhythm. Trying to convert between BASIC and C++ will produce a similar result: a literal translation (which must exist if both languages are Turing complete), but a real mess for a human to read and use.
But that's all irrelevant to facial recognition. That system just needs to compile and compare condensed data (vertices, surfaces, brightnesses) from the face it sees now with the face it's seen before. If the data matches within some tolerance then the ATM can accept that as partial verification of your identity. It doesn't need to construct a full replica of you that your mother would mistake for her own son.
I don't imagine that a static facial image alone will grant a person full access to their account. There needs to be additional verification: a PIN, a credit card, a smart card, a dynamic biometric, and/or a challenge/response. If access were based on face alone then a twin or a thief with a plaster bust could impersonate you. Probably a smart card would be sufficient -- a smart card plus facial recognition is certainly harder to fake then a simple magnetic card plus four digits.
Can you? Wouldn't you just land with whatever force you applied at the beginning of the jump? On Earth, I can jump a certain height unloaded and a lesser height while carrying a backpack full of rocks. I'll have farther to fall from the higher jump, but I'll have more mass getting attracted by gravity on the shorter jump. I think they would cancel each other out.
Or, actually, there might be less force during the unloaded jump. When loaded I will achieve a lower velocity than when unloaded. Therefore I will have more time to push against the ground and put more energy into my jump.
You think it's going to take 5-10 years for a high definition disc to become relevant? I have an HDTV right now. I would spend $200 tomorrow if there were just one HD format. But there are two, and I don't know which is going to die, so I'm waiting.
I don't care about the copy protection on movies. I get all my movies from Netflix -- I don't buy them. I watch them once and send them back. The only thing stopping HD discs from becoming a huge success right now is existence of an incompatible competitor.
It's fine with me if HD over Internet becomes the norm in five years. But my DSL and magnetic storage can't handle it today, and I don't want to wait that long to start enjoying HD movies.
I've read that a hundred years ago most people never traveled more than thirty miles from their birthplace. Now it's commonplace to at least cross your own continent and there is a segment of the population that circles the globe many times a year.
And technological progress is accelerating. For one thing, there are a lot more human brains at work now than a hundred years ago: something like 6 billion versus 1 billion. And those brains have far more interconnection and speed of communication.
I am a scientist. A hundred years ago (hell, even twenty) scientific communication was conducted by publication of paper journals. If you wanted to research a topic you had to walk to a library and leaf through card catalogs and indexes. Now we do days worth of searching in just seconds. And publication of new research can take days rather than months.
I'm not a fan of manned space exploration today, but it takes a major lack of imagination to think it can't happen in the coming centuries.
I have Verizon telephone and DSL service in Washington, DC. My DSL connection was crapping out a couple weeks ago and I was thinking about switching to Comcast cable. I decided to call tech support and give Verizon a chance to fix the problem.
The first tech support person I got was Indian, clearly working from a script, and not listening to what I (as a pretty knowledgeable computer person) was saying. He said he couldn't help me because he was a Windows support person (even though I booted my MacBook Pro into Windows and knew that the problem was with the modem or line, not the computer) and transferred me to a Mac support person.
The Mac support guy was great. He tested my line remotely and said that it looked fine, but since my complaint was about intermittent connection problems he would monitor it throughout the day. He called back an hour later and said he saw the connection drop repeatedly and would send out a technician.
The technician was thorough. He checked the modem, checked the phone jack, checked the wiring in my apartment, and checked the main box where the line comes into the building. He disconnected an old unused jack (really old, with a big round four-pronged connector) and seems to have cleaned up whatever noise was causing my problems.
I've had lots of memory trouble lately as a symptom of chemobrain. I get chemotherapy two weeks per month and develop lots of holes in my memory of those chemo days. I also received intensive chemotherapy two years ago and have whole weeks missing from my memory.
But lately I've been getting lots of flashbacks. A scent or a sound associated with the missing memories will make them all come flooding back. And it's very powerful -- I recall all of the sights, smells, sounds, conversations, weather, even internal thoughts that I had experienced and forgotten.
I realized that this means that my ability to store memories is still good, I just have a hard time retrieving them at will. The recall is either involuntary (triggered by a related sense) or aided by a reminder from somebody else who was there.
I'd say that this is a situation where forgetting can be a very useful process. By forgetting most of my worst chemo days I can enjoy the good days in ignorant bliss. But, boy, time travels fast when 50% of your days don't register.
AlpineR
What a strange statement. You do know that PhD students don't pay for their research projects out of their own pockets. The funding comes mainly from grants via the professor. So it's not a matter of what the student can afford, but of how much money the professor can bring in.
For example, my first doctoral project involved building and maintaining a molecular beam epitaxy chamber. That's a meter-diameter, thick metal sphere with a series of chambers attached so that silicon wafers can be loaded and pumped down to a billionth of atmospheric pressure. The central system cost around $250,000. We spent at least another $100,000 on updates and replacements for my project. We eventually abandoned that research, mainly due to the difficulty and cost of safety when handling the extremely poisonous and flammable gases used in epitaxy. I switched to theoretical research which is an incredible bargain, just $3,000 for a new workstation, as long as you have a student with the appropriate intellect for that kind of work.
But even then a PhD research project is not cheap. My professor had to pay about $30,000 a year for my stipend and tuition. Double that to add in overhead and travel. Considering that an experimentalist PhD student might need two years to build one device for their research, that's still at least $100,000 for that first device. I sure hope that mass production isn't going to be done by a Beowulf cluster of PhD students.
AlpineR
Nice story about the frogs -- I haven't heard it in a while.
But you misinterpreted the part about DRM being the only value. They're saying that their subjects aren't sure that 256 Kb/s sounds better than 128 Kb/s. Therefore if there's any advantage to the new tracks it's not a difference in sound quality. They're just easier to copy, burn, and transcode.
The big difference that the 256 Kb/s + DRM-free option makes for me is that now I'll buy albums from iTunes Store. Previously I would use iTunes to buy one to three tracks if there was some artist I liked but didn't want a whole album from. But usually I order the CDs online for $8 to $14, rip them to AAC at 192 Kb/s, and put the disc away to collect dust on my overflowing CD rack. Now I can get higher quality cheaper and faster.
Yes, ideally I would rip all my music to a lossless format. And ideally everything would be available on SACD at 2822 KHz rather than 44.1 KHz CDs. But that's just not practical with my 500+ album collection. It'd fill up my laptop's hard drive real quick and allow me to put only a fraction onto my iPod.
I'm also disappointed that the article only tested the tracks on iPods with earbuds. Most of my listening is on a decent stereo system fed from my laptop. Ripping is about convenience, not portability. I only use my iPod when riding the Metro or an airplane. With all the outside noise the bitrate doesn't matter.
And being DRM-free isn't just a matter of idealism. I get frustrated when I go to burn an MP3 CD for my car and discover that one of the tracks I selected is DRMed. Sure there are ways to get around it, but it's just not worth the bother.
AlpineR
Yes, Starcraft is a PPC executable running under Rosetta. But what Blizzard did do was release an OS X version of Starcraft some years ago which is what allows it to continue running under Rosetta today. Diablo II might be based on OS 9 which is not supported on Intel Macs.
Still, I wish they would release an updated Starcraft executable for Intel Macs. It runs ok, but it's a little laggy and makes the laptop run hot and drain the battery.
Monkeyball on the Wii is a big stinking pile of digested bananas. Half the minigames have terrible controls. Some of the minigames last thirty seconds and some grind on for twenty minutes. You can't select enough rounds of the good games to have a worthwhile match -- they're limited to something like best 3 out of 5. That game was clearly rushed for launch and is unworthy of the Monkeyball name. Maybe if they release a proper sequel then it'll be more fun.
My impression is that Wii is a great console for parties and fun for two players with comparable skill. But the controls feel sloppy to me and for single-player games I'd rather be on my Nintendo DS or my Mac.
1) I have been battling cancer for three years; I'm pretty familiar with the methods and mechanisms of treatment.
2) I've read that it's a myth that cancer cells divide more quickly than healthy cells. The defect is that they continue dividing when they should sense that it's time to stop dividing. It's a matter of duration rather than rate.
3) There are many different kinds of chemotherapy. Some make hair fall out, some cause diarrhea, some cause nausea, some damage skin, some make nerves go whacky. I've had all of those side effects from one drug or another. There are BIG differences between chemotherapies which must mean there are differences in their effect on cells.
4) Brain cancers are particulary troublesome because many drugs can't crossing the blood-brain barrier. Electromagnetism could be very useful where chemotherapy is ineffective.
5) Immunotherapy can be useful at slowing tumor growth or making cancer cells more susceptible to chemotherapy. But immunotherapy alone often isn't enough, and immunotherapy can have very nasty side effects. I suffered much pain and scarring from Erbitux, a drug that blocks epithelial growth factor, but it didn't do a lick of good for my colon cancer.
6) A trial on ten patients won't be the basis for widespread application of this method. But positive results in a human trial is far ahead of many of the supposed breakthroughs that we read about on Slashdot.
AlpineR
Yes, they can. You see, Mac users do not all speak with a single Borgified voice. There are some Mac users that believe the scarcity of exploits is due to the better design of a Unix base. And there are actually other Mac users that believe the smaller market share makes Macs a less attractive target. Amazingly, there might even be Mac users who change their beliefs according to argument and observation. What chaos!
I never heard of this LCD dithering before. A little bit of Googling found a simple explanation of what it is, a simple test to look for it, and a detailed explanation and test.
This seems to be a very common practice on LCD screens, not just a trick used by Apple. I'm still not clear whether most LCDs use spatial or temporal dithering. It seems like temporal dithering would work very well with an LCD. They're known for their sluggish response times, so sending "80-84-80-84" at 60 Hz should result in a nice smearing into "82-82-82-82" over time.
I didn't see any dithering artifacts on my MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo). Either it doesn't dither (unlikely) or the dithering is better than my eyes can see.
We all know that screens are actually made of red, green, and blue (RGB) dots that combine to make the apparent color of each pixel. An 8-bit screen would have 256 levels of brighness for each of those subpixels, yielding 256 x 256 x 256 = 16.8 million mixed colors. But if you wanted to be really technical you could say that the screen can actually show only 256 + 256 + 256 = 768 colors; the mixed colors are an illusion. Likewise a 6-bit screen can generate only 262 thousand colors in a given pixel at a given instant, but it can simulate many more colors over time or space.
The argument depends on how many pixels the manufacturer claims to have. If they say their screen is 1024 x 768 with 16.8 million colors then we would expect to have 786,000 independently addressable pixels, each of which comprises three RGB subpixels. If in fact it takes four RGB subpixels (1-1/3 of each 6-bit subpixel to get 8 bits) to yield 16.8 million colors then they should really only claim a resolution of 768 x 576. If, however, they do the dithering temporally and the pulsation is unnoticeable then I think continuing to call the resolution 1024 x 768 is fair.
AlpineR
In the movie Thank You for Smoking the lobbyist goes to Hollywood to talk to an agent about placing cigarettes in movies. The agent mentions a screenplay set on a space station and suggests a scene with the main characters smoking cigarettes after sex.
The lobbyist says: "Sounds great! But wouldn't smoking in an all oxygen environment be dangerous?"
The agent responds: "I guess so. But it's an easy fix. Just one line of dialogue, 'Thank God they invented the whatchamacallit device.'"
Did you actually watch the gameplay video? The ramps are inclined and debris from air units slides down the ramps into piles at the base. I didn't see whether the debris hampers movement but the narrator hinted that it would. There were also big freaking craters in the ground after the nuclear strike. I'll be surprised if those don't have more than a cosmetic effect.
And yes, there were only two noticeable levels of terrain shown, but there might be more possible on different maps. Heck, even original Starcraft actually has at least three levels for certain terrain types. Most people just choose to play on maps like Big Game Hunters and Lost Temple that only use two of them.
Starcraft may run at 640 x 480 but it still looks nice even on a much higher resolution monitor. The artists did an amazing job with that game. I reinstalled it a couple years ago and was surprised that it still looks pretty good compared to modern games. Some old games (like Diablo II) look very pixelated, but Starcraft has great anti-aliasing, animation, and structure that looks nice despite the relatively primitive technology. It's a lot like a well-designed font that's readable even when it's scaled too small for a simplistic vector-to-pixel translation to work.
Brilliantly written and edited. I was enlightened by the part that says fair use is not a right, it's a legally defensible position. It is legal to copy a copyrighted work for the fair use purposes such as critique and satire. But the author has no responsiblity to make that copying convenient.
Movie studios have every right to make copying video discs difficult. They're not obligated to sell unencrypted data; they sell bits and we voluntarily buy bits. But it must not be made illegal for purchasers to circumvent that copy protection if they are able.
And I truly wish that the creators and Congress would remember that there are two parts to the bargain of copyright: an unnatural protection of creative works from copying and a reasonable, limited duration for that protection. Congress might have the right to extend the copyright duration to forever and a day, but it's a stupid move because it stifles the creativity that copyright is meant to promote.
AlpineR
The first thing I thought when I saw the screenshots of Starcraft II was: "The units look just like they did on the box for the original Starcraft."
I remember after playing Starcraft for a while looking at the box and thinking: "That's not how the game actually looks! Those units all have extra spiky parts and the buildings have more attachments and who the hell sends a command center into battle?!" I figured that the shots were from many months before release and they simplified the graphics and abilities as they polished the game.
Well, Starcraft 2 doesn't look exactly like those old screenshots. It's more like a beautiful, glowing, high definition revisit to the original concepts. I wonder how much Starcraft 2 is based on their original vision for Starcraft but with ten times as much computer power and a hundred times as much cash available.
Actually, that sounds like the Star Wars prequels -- an old idea returned to with new technology. Except I have some faith that Blizzard can remake an old idea without adding annoying characters, terrible acting, and boring storylines. Then again, they might add a fourth race....
AlpineR
You, sir, are insane (as well as inane). I'm a little bit annoyed by the remote that came with my new HDTV; it's big and clunky. I can change channels, switch inputs, and control volume with my cable remote, but I need the HDTV remote to change view mode (zoom/no zoom), menu options, and set the sleep timer. I thought it'd be nice to get a universal remote that could handle everything.
So I looked up the MX-900 you recommended. $399 ?! And the MX-3000 is $599 ?! Wow. You can get 720p HDTVs for $800. Those remotes are cRrAaAzZy.
I just got an HDTV two weeks ago. Before I even ordered the set I shopped around for whatever cables I might need. Lots of people said: "Expensive HDMI cables are for suckers! It's a digital signal, not analog. It won't degrade due to connections or material, so any old HDMI cable is as good as the best." So I felt comfortable buying a couple of no-name cables for $3.00 each.
Does the analysis in this article mean that cable quality actually does matter? It doesn't make a difference to me right now -- my TV has two HDMI inputs but I don't have any HDMI sources. To my surprise the new HD cable box only has component, S-Video, and Firewire outputs. I'm still using a regular DVD player connected by S-Video, and my HD antenna is regular old rabbit ears and coaxial cable.
I'd love to be able use the TV as a second display for my MacBook Pro, but it only has DVI output. I think there are DVI to HDMI converters (seems simple, according to the article), but DVI doesn't carry audio. So I'd need to plug in another cable for audio, run it along with the DVI cable to a DVI+audio to HDMI converter box, and then run HDMI across the room. Yuk.
AlpineR
There are certainly ways to make money off of a ten-year-old game. For one thing, I've bought Starcraft three times in those ten years: once when it was first released for the PC, again when I got a Mac and realized that my first copy was too old to be a hybrid disc, and a third time to run it on a second computer for testing my multiplayer maps.
Also, online Starcraft is played through Battle.net which has banner ads on the chat and game-forming screens. As long as players keep playing they can keep selling adspace.
The submitter left out a very important word in his summary. This article is about console games. The first sentence in the article is:
He's saying that consoles are way behind general purpose computers in online play. One of the big advantages that computers have always had is customizability and user-generated maps and mods. The online experience of consoles will remain a poor shadow of the computer game ecosystem until they enable and allow the players to share in the extension of their games.
This is a big reason why I haven't bought a full-size console since the Atari 2600. Two years after I got the Atari I also got a Texas Instruments 99/4A. I loved the ability to do wild things like save games, download levels from online bulletin boards, and even program simple games myself. Nowadays I enjoy playing Use Map Settings games in Starcraft and have created several maps of my own. That game is ten years old but still megafun due to the user-generated maps.
AlpineR
My cat got very sick a few years ago after being bitten by a raccoon. When the local vet couldn't diagnose the problem we took him to the College of Veterinary Medicine at Michigan State University. The cat couldn't even stand up and was fading fast so they wanted to give him a transfusion. But when they tried to match his blood type the samples reacted against every donor they checked. So they offered to try an experimental artificial blood.
The artificial blood kept him alive long enough to identify a parasite infection, start him on treatment for the parasites, and let him recover until a natural blood donor could be found and infused. He was hospitalized for over a week but finally recovered and is perfectly healthy now. The interesting side effect is that he bulked up massively since the illness. He's over twenty pounds and extremely muscular. I don't know which artificial blood they used and what other side effects it had, but it seems like it might have more applications beyond just blood replacement for emergencies.
AlpineR
The example image is not very convincing. The before sample is written in italics and suffers from JPEG compression. Italic print is very bad for more than a highlighted word or simple sentence. And the poetry-esque after sample is a little prettier but I would wear out my scroll wheel in an hour if I had to read more than a paragraph.
If the human eye sees as if through a straw wouldn't we be better at processing text in a continuous line? One super long line of text on ticker tape might be ideal. That wouldn't fit on a computer screen in a straight line, but maybe a spiral would work. How does the brain do at reading slanted and upside-down text?
Or maybe crawling text could be displayed on the screen and some peripheral could sense where the reader's eyes are looking. The farther the reader advances toward the right side of the text line the faster the new text would scroll in. That way the crawl would speed up or slow down according to how fast the reader is consuming it. That'd be a lot faster than watching the crawling text on the news channel or in Times Square. But it'd make it hard to skip over uninteresting sections or to scan a document as a whole.
AlpineR