I have RSI problems in my hands and forearms and elbows. Not carpal tunnel syndrome- various inflammations that never seem to completely heal. Doctors have been little use, medical science doesn't seem to have caught up with RSI.
Anyway I tried a vertical mouse (from evoluent) for several months. Eventually I started to find it uncomfortable and switched back to a normal mouse. I never found it to make much of a difference one way or another.
I also use a Kinesis Essential keyboard, which I've also not found to make a big difference one way or another.
The correct analogy is this- I have this diner. Anyone is allowed to eat there, we welcome all races and sexual preferences. However, if either a white supremacist or a civil rights worker starts inviting people to their table based on their views, we'll ask them to leave. This is a place to eat, and interacting with our patrons concerning a potentially divisive issue is not welcome, regardless of which side of the issue people fall on.
I totally agree. Why can't the end game be as much fun as leveling up? WoW didn't feel like a grind at all, it was fun getting to 60. But once I hit 60 things got boring real fast. I really don't enjoy doing the same content more than a few times.
Specifically how do the HDR engines in modern games work? Internally they render in high-dynamic range? Are they just setting a global gain for each scene based on the maximum and minimum intensities? The game industry seems to throw around a lot of HDR terms without being precise about what they're doing. The computer graphics research community has thorougly studied the task of compressing dynamic range while maintaining the maximum perceived contrast.
To do a decent job at compressing dynamic range and maintaining local contrast, you need a non-global operator (a non-spatially uniform intensity adjustment). This has been observed since at least 1972 (STOCKHAM, T. 1972. Image processing in the context of a visual model. Proc. IEEE 60, 828-842.). But these operations typically aren't suited for real time rendering.
I watched the half life 2 HDR demo and it was the least impressive thing I'd ever seen. I honestly couldn't tell which side of the screen (hdr versus normal) looked better. I guessed that they were simply doing some global gain adjustment on each frame, like auto-gain on a video camera.
It's not clear video games should be internally rendering to very high dynamic range, since they will have to range compress that down to a common display device. If they're only trying to get halo's around light sources there is probably a more direct way to do so. A proper, non-uniform, non-linear tone-map operator is pretty expensive. I guess some simple ones might be feasible with todays pixel shaders, but they'd probably have artifacts. Check out http://web.mit.edu/yzli/www/hdr05.pdf for a good, recent SIGGRAPH paper on dynamic range compression.
to summarize- getting HDR images or renderings is very easy. Getting them onto a normal display device with maximum perceived quality and contrast is hard.
I'm no expert, but one can imagine how it is possible for them to end up as two neutron stars relativly close to each other such that gravitational drag can pull them together within the lifespan of the universe-
First, they don't go supernova at the same time. One becomes a neutron star, and then the other. When the relationship is asymmetrical, one neutron one star, I think they have more interaction with each other. No shockwave keeping most of their materials apart. Instead material will be spiraling onto the neutron star from the other one, and that probably has the effect of imparting drag and bringing them together. Also I don't think the supernovae necessarily impart their forces symmetrically. They might have the effect of countering a lot of the momentum of one of the stars (or rather ejected material goes one direction, neutron core goes the other)
This is somewhat conjecture. But your point is a good one, I think. Surely their is some minimum distance at which large, supernova proned binary stars can form. And surely gravitational drag is a very slow phenomena.
By adhering to UN sources the ISO 3166/MA stays politically neutral.
But clearly it is not politically neutral to have Taiwan excluded from the UN. I'm not saying that it's right or wrong, but it's certainly not neutral.
I think it's a cop out to say that you're just following the U.N. standards. I think the right thing to do for this any many other situations is to have the maps reflect the political reality- that there is disagreement. Of course China will act like a petulant child if google were to do this, but it would be the right thing to do. The evil thing to do would be to bow to the pressures of the larger, more profitable nation.
The entire right side of that picture seems to be "out of focus". Clearly that's not what actually happened since it's all more or less infinite focus, but I wonder why the resolution is so different.
Well this isn't quite a fair comparison. You're comparing the cost of the first ever optical space telescope to the 1,000th ever research class terrestrial telescopes. The hubble price also has all sorts of NASA budget bloat included.
So I think you're wrong when you say that we could build 40 terrestrial telescopes of 4x diameter of a space telescope.
I think I could build a hubble class space telescope, and have it launched, for much less than a billion. And a space shuttle wouldn't be the launch platform. I know that might impact the design of the telescope, but we can be creative.
Your impressions of WoW, and MMORPGs in general mirrow mine almost exactly. After I got done with level progression and did the high end raids a few times each, I completely lost interest. I'd come back after a new expansion and enjoy the new content, but I can't put up with raiding the same place twice a week forever.
Personally I think that MMORPGs need to "think outside the box" a little more. WoW took the everquest style mmorpg and polished it to perfection, but it still has the same fundamental flaws. What we need are worlds that are truly persistent, changeable, ownable by players, etc... But after doing the same raid 5 times you realize how utterly pointless your actions are. You're not some great hero. You're clearly having no impact at all on the world. Everything respawns in a week. (or much less). You might have shiny_shoulder_piece_019 now, though.
While leveling up, WoW was a true pleasure. New lands and new quests constantly, not much feeling of grinding. You could suspend disbelief and convince yourself that your actions had meaning, at least.
Here's what high end content needs to be - you have money which you can use to buy land, and build things on it. If you're buying and developing land near an established kingdom, it is a crime for other people to damage it. They'll have bounties placed on their heads if they do. You can build in some unknown wilderness, as well, but that might be beyond the reach of the law. That's fine if you've got a guild willing to defend it, or buy defensive fortifications and pay NPC soldiers.
You need to be able to start research institutes to improve magic. Create new magical technologies and sell the intellectual property to other guilds, if you so wish.
You need to be able to change the terrain. Fell a forest if you need building supplies. Build a bridge across a lake, dig a moat around your base. You need a world gigantic enough that players can do this without ruining the world. The world needs to fight all of these manmade changes, of course, just like our own real world. Given enough time our stuff decays and nature takes it back.
All these things I just thought of off the top of my head. I don't think that they're impossible to implement. I don't think they necessarily demand players to be unreasonably addicted to a game to have fun with them. I think that it will lead to all sorts of interesting social phenomena. Towns being formed by people who want to live together and share the cost of defense, etc...
I agree. And the commercials making fun of the name made it even worse! They had 20 different people guessing how to pronounce it, and then at the very end the announce said it correctly. But I sure as heck can't remember which one is correct after being bombarded with 20 mispronounciations.
homebrew hydroelectric? Like daming up the creek in your back yard? That sounds like about the coolest thing ever. Do people actually do that? That would be so fun.
This is a really fascinating article. Power generation is an interesting concept but I've never really seen a detailed explanation of how a generator is built, what engineering trade-offs go into such a construction, etc. I consider myself pretty well educated by I'd be at a complete loss to do this on my own. It's really neat to see the engineering that goes into making power. Suddenly this seems so much more accessible- like something I really could do myself.
Umm... it does work if your friend put crack in your glove department. Sure the burden of proof might be on you at that point, but that IS a valid excuse.
Anyway, that's a bad analogy.
The key question here is- does the fact that someone has browser caching on instead of off make something drastically more illegal.
1. CMU won the American open 2. Germany was there as an exhibition team 3. Germany played several of the American teams, including CMU, and beat them, as was expected
Germany has been strong recently. They put far more resources into their team than any US university.
Robocup will be in Japan this summer. Then we'll get to see real international competition.
Sure, for a lot of shots it won't make a difference... I can accept that. But at the same time I don't see any harm in it. It's twice as much space. Big deal, so I can take 130 pictures instead of 260. Memory is cheap even for my 8 megapixel camera. Also it's not any trouble to convert them. A couple of clicks in a raw conversion program and it will batch convert them all to jpegs.
But the beauty is in the exposure control. You can't expect your camera to properly meter all scenes. It's an AI-hard problem. Where to clip the highlights and the shadows depends on your subject matter. It's so nice to be able to take some time and think about it later.
It's not entirely different from the considerable amount of skill that can go into developing a negative (versus using a polaroid).
That guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Well, most of what he says isn't factually wrong, it's just very misleading. He makes it sound like it's a bad thing to process your RAW files later instead of having your camera apply some half-baked conversion on the fly. It's like arguing that film camera's are crap because polaroids can do the conversion for you on the fly.
I recently bought my fist D-SLR (D-rebel XT). I started out shooting jpeg and it worked just fine, but after trying raw a few times I just couldn't go back. The after-the-fact exposure controls are just too fabulous. They're also not terribly large files. About twice as big as a jpeg on fine quality. So for scenes where I might want to exposure bracket with.jpegs, I generally don't have to bother with raws. You can trust that the camera got all of the photons, and you can interpret them correctly when you get home.
I think they're only about twice as large as jpeg's because they're not de-mosaiced. They have 12 bits per pixel, instead of an RGB value per pixel.
TIFF isn't necessarily compressed, but it's not as good as raw. Raw is before de-mosaicing, before white balance, etc. It is the "raw" signal returned from the CCD or CMOS. (I imagine that's not entirely true, but it's close). And because Raw is only one value per pixel instead of 3, they tend to be much smaller than 16 bit tiffs.
Well Memento was based on a short story written by one of the brothers. And I heard that the short story wasn't so great, in actuality. But the movie is one of my favorites.
Stop ruining??? Frakes directed First Contact http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117731/combined which I think was the finest Star Trek movie. Now let me put on my flame retardant suit as the TOS fans come out.
No way, I loved Riker. I prefer his character over Troi, Jordi, Wesley and probably even Dr. Crusher. Even Worf's contribution to the show is sometimes lacking, but he makes up for it with some shining moments. Of course the show just couldn't work without Data and Picard.
I'm glad they killed off a certain character early in the series... she had a negative screen presence.
Call me uninformed, but don't ALL toasters use infrared beams? Heat some high resistance metal up with electrical current, blackbody radiation puts its peak output in the infrared range?
Slashdot Mirror
I have RSI problems in my hands and forearms and elbows. Not carpal tunnel syndrome- various inflammations that never seem to completely heal. Doctors have been little use, medical science doesn't seem to have caught up with RSI.
Anyway I tried a vertical mouse (from evoluent) for several months. Eventually I started to find it uncomfortable and switched back to a normal mouse. I never found it to make much of a difference one way or another.
I also use a Kinesis Essential keyboard, which I've also not found to make a big difference one way or another.
That's a terrible analogy.
The correct analogy is this- I have this diner. Anyone is allowed to eat there, we welcome all races and sexual preferences. However, if either a white supremacist or a civil rights worker starts inviting people to their table based on their views, we'll ask them to leave. This is a place to eat, and interacting with our patrons concerning a potentially divisive issue is not welcome, regardless of which side of the issue people fall on.
I totally agree. Why can't the end game be as much fun as leveling up? WoW didn't feel like a grind at all, it was fun getting to 60. But once I hit 60 things got boring real fast. I really don't enjoy doing the same content more than a few times.
But the takedown notice references xenu.net, which is in fact the first result that google gives.
I don't understand what was filtered out, if anything.
Specifically how do the HDR engines in modern games work? Internally they render in high-dynamic range? Are they just setting a global gain for each scene based on the maximum and minimum intensities? The game industry seems to throw around a lot of HDR terms without being precise about what they're doing. The computer graphics research community has thorougly studied the task of compressing dynamic range while maintaining the maximum perceived contrast.
To do a decent job at compressing dynamic range and maintaining local contrast, you need a non-global operator (a non-spatially uniform intensity adjustment). This has been observed since at least 1972 (STOCKHAM, T. 1972. Image processing in the context of a visual model. Proc. IEEE 60, 828-842.). But these operations typically aren't suited for real time rendering.
I watched the half life 2 HDR demo and it was the least impressive thing I'd ever seen. I honestly couldn't tell which side of the screen (hdr versus normal) looked better. I guessed that they were simply doing some global gain adjustment on each frame, like auto-gain on a video camera.
It's not clear video games should be internally rendering to very high dynamic range, since they will have to range compress that down to a common display device. If they're only trying to get halo's around light sources there is probably a more direct way to do so. A proper, non-uniform, non-linear tone-map operator is pretty expensive. I guess some simple ones might be feasible with todays pixel shaders, but they'd probably have artifacts. Check out http://web.mit.edu/yzli/www/hdr05.pdf for a good, recent SIGGRAPH paper on dynamic range compression.
to summarize- getting HDR images or renderings is very easy. Getting them onto a normal display device with maximum perceived quality and contrast is hard.
I'm no expert, but one can imagine how it is possible for them to end up as two neutron stars relativly close to each other such that gravitational drag can pull them together within the lifespan of the universe-
First, they don't go supernova at the same time. One becomes a neutron star, and then the other. When the relationship is asymmetrical, one neutron one star, I think they have more interaction with each other. No shockwave keeping most of their materials apart. Instead material will be spiraling onto the neutron star from the other one, and that probably has the effect of imparting drag and bringing them together. Also I don't think the supernovae necessarily impart their forces symmetrically. They might have the effect of countering a lot of the momentum of one of the stars (or rather ejected material goes one direction, neutron core goes the other)
This is somewhat conjecture. But your point is a good one, I think. Surely their is some minimum distance at which large, supernova proned binary stars can form. And surely gravitational drag is a very slow phenomena.
By adhering to UN sources the ISO 3166/MA stays politically neutral.
But clearly it is not politically neutral to have Taiwan excluded from the UN. I'm not saying that it's right or wrong, but it's certainly not neutral.
I think it's a cop out to say that you're just following the U.N. standards. I think the right thing to do for this any many other situations is to have the maps reflect the political reality- that there is disagreement. Of course China will act like a petulant child if google were to do this, but it would be the right thing to do. The evil thing to do would be to bow to the pressures of the larger, more profitable nation.
The entire right side of that picture seems to be "out of focus". Clearly that's not what actually happened since it's all more or less infinite focus, but I wonder why the resolution is so different.
Well this isn't quite a fair comparison. You're comparing the cost of the first ever optical space telescope to the 1,000th ever research class terrestrial telescopes. The hubble price also has all sorts of NASA budget bloat included.
So I think you're wrong when you say that we could build 40 terrestrial telescopes of 4x diameter of a space telescope.
I think I could build a hubble class space telescope, and have it launched, for much less than a billion. And a space shuttle wouldn't be the launch platform. I know that might impact the design of the telescope, but we can be creative.
Your impressions of WoW, and MMORPGs in general mirrow mine almost exactly. After I got done with level progression and did the high end raids a few times each, I completely lost interest. I'd come back after a new expansion and enjoy the new content, but I can't put up with raiding the same place twice a week forever.
Personally I think that MMORPGs need to "think outside the box" a little more. WoW took the everquest style mmorpg and polished it to perfection, but it still has the same fundamental flaws. What we need are worlds that are truly persistent, changeable, ownable by players, etc... But after doing the same raid 5 times you realize how utterly pointless your actions are. You're not some great hero. You're clearly having no impact at all on the world. Everything respawns in a week. (or much less). You might have shiny_shoulder_piece_019 now, though.
While leveling up, WoW was a true pleasure. New lands and new quests constantly, not much feeling of grinding. You could suspend disbelief and convince yourself that your actions had meaning, at least.
Here's what high end content needs to be - you have money which you can use to buy land, and build things on it. If you're buying and developing land near an established kingdom, it is a crime for other people to damage it. They'll have bounties placed on their heads if they do. You can build in some unknown wilderness, as well, but that might be beyond the reach of the law. That's fine if you've got a guild willing to defend it, or buy defensive fortifications and pay NPC soldiers.
You need to be able to start research institutes to improve magic. Create new magical technologies and sell the intellectual property to other guilds, if you so wish.
You need to be able to change the terrain. Fell a forest if you need building supplies. Build a bridge across a lake, dig a moat around your base. You need a world gigantic enough that players can do this without ruining the world. The world needs to fight all of these manmade changes, of course, just like our own real world. Given enough time our stuff decays and nature takes it back.
All these things I just thought of off the top of my head. I don't think that they're impossible to implement. I don't think they necessarily demand players to be unreasonably addicted to a game to have fun with them. I think that it will lead to all sorts of interesting social phenomena. Towns being formed by people who want to live together and share the cost of defense, etc...
I agree. And the commercials making fun of the name made it even worse! They had 20 different people guessing how to pronounce it, and then at the very end the announce said it correctly. But I sure as heck can't remember which one is correct after being bombarded with 20 mispronounciations.
homebrew hydroelectric? Like daming up the creek in your back yard? That sounds like about the coolest thing ever. Do people actually do that? That would be so fun.
This is a really fascinating article. Power generation is an interesting concept but I've never really seen a detailed explanation of how a generator is built, what engineering trade-offs go into such a construction, etc. I consider myself pretty well educated by I'd be at a complete loss to do this on my own. It's really neat to see the engineering that goes into making power. Suddenly this seems so much more accessible- like something I really could do myself.
Umm... it does work if your friend put crack in your glove department. Sure the burden of proof might be on you at that point, but that IS a valid excuse.
Anyway, that's a bad analogy.
The key question here is- does the fact that someone has browser caching on instead of off make something drastically more illegal.
I disagree with you. I think universities are a shelter for free speech.
Just have a look at Dave Touretzky's Page
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/
I don't see anyone outside of academia with the bravery to publish those things.
1. CMU won the American open
2. Germany was there as an exhibition team
3. Germany played several of the American teams, including CMU, and beat them, as was expected
Germany has been strong recently. They put far more resources into their team than any US university.
Robocup will be in Japan this summer. Then we'll get to see real international competition.
Sure, for a lot of shots it won't make a difference... I can accept that. But at the same time I don't see any harm in it. It's twice as much space. Big deal, so I can take 130 pictures instead of 260. Memory is cheap even for my 8 megapixel camera. Also it's not any trouble to convert them. A couple of clicks in a raw conversion program and it will batch convert them all to jpegs.
But the beauty is in the exposure control. You can't expect your camera to properly meter all scenes. It's an AI-hard problem. Where to clip the highlights and the shadows depends on your subject matter. It's so nice to be able to take some time and think about it later.
It's not entirely different from the considerable amount of skill that can go into developing a negative (versus using a polaroid).
That guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Well, most of what he says isn't factually wrong, it's just very misleading. He makes it sound like it's a bad thing to process your RAW files later instead of having your camera apply some half-baked conversion on the fly. It's like arguing that film camera's are crap because polaroids can do the conversion for you on the fly.
Shooting in RAW is very powerful.
Wow, you're quite anti-raw it seems.
.jpegs, I generally don't have to bother with raws. You can trust that the camera got all of the photons, and you can interpret them correctly when you get home.
I recently bought my fist D-SLR (D-rebel XT). I started out shooting jpeg and it worked just fine, but after trying raw a few times I just couldn't go back. The after-the-fact exposure controls are just too fabulous. They're also not terribly large files. About twice as big as a jpeg on fine quality. So for scenes where I might want to exposure bracket with
I think they're only about twice as large as jpeg's because they're not de-mosaiced. They have 12 bits per pixel, instead of an RGB value per pixel.
I'm pretty sure TIFF's can be 16 bit, but I don't know what the camera gives you if you ask for TIFFs. Probably 8, as you say?
RawShooter essentials lets me save as 16 bit TIFF after I fidget with my raw files. They're freaking huge, though. 48 megabytes or something.
TIFF isn't necessarily compressed, but it's not as good as raw. Raw is before de-mosaicing, before white balance, etc. It is the "raw" signal returned from the CCD or CMOS. (I imagine that's not entirely true, but it's close). And because Raw is only one value per pixel instead of 3, they tend to be much smaller than 16 bit tiffs.
Well Memento was based on a short story written by one of the brothers. And I heard that the short story wasn't so great, in actuality. But the movie is one of my favorites.
Stop ruining??? Frakes directed First Contact http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117731/combined which I think was the finest Star Trek movie. Now let me put on my flame retardant suit as the TOS fans come out.
No way, I loved Riker. I prefer his character over Troi, Jordi, Wesley and probably even Dr. Crusher. Even Worf's contribution to the show is sometimes lacking, but he makes up for it with some shining moments. Of course the show just couldn't work without Data and Picard.
I'm glad they killed off a certain character early in the series... she had a negative screen presence.
Call me uninformed, but don't ALL toasters use infrared beams? Heat some high resistance metal up with electrical current, blackbody radiation puts its peak output in the infrared range?