I have to say that's one of the best-written reviews (of any kind) I've read on Slashdot. Makes you realize just how bad the Zonk reviews really are...
Yeah I was in Beijing about a year ago. They had started many of the air-quality programs already, such as banning scooters on the innermost two ring-roads that encircle Beijing and limiting new-construction permits.
This (poor-quality) snapshot of the Bird's Nest from a moving taxi: Bird's Nest might give you an idea of what visibility was like while I was there.
When I was there I really came the conclusion that:
a) there was no conceivable way they could really improve the air quality enough in a year b) Beijing was not going to be remembered as a "great Olympic venue."
I applaud their effort, for sure. They can't be faulted for trying, and try hard they did. But I think it's a little difficult to undo millennia of environmental neglect in a few years.
BTW, I still think Beijing is a very interesting place and I look forward to visiting it again. I'm just glad I'm not going to be doing any 100-m dashes while I'm there.
You know, back in the old days we only had linear keystrokes, and they worked fine for us. Now it's all about the log keystrokes with the kids these days.
In case the name's not familiar, John Knoll's brother, Tom Knoll, wrote the original version of Photoshop. John has always been more the artist, and Tom more the signal processing geek, although there's plenty of overlap between their sets of skills. A talented duo.
Good point. I guess one difference is that Caller ID can be blocked on the caller's end, but you can't use the phone without using a voice. A boon for those providing voice-obfuscation technology? (Never worked when I tried to call the office to get out of school back in the day;-) )
...it's done 'without alerting the caller during the call that the caller is being identified.
...Sometimes...when the phone rings... ...I answer it...and just listen... ...I hear the caller's voice and identify them by their voice... ...Then hang up without saying anything.
How insidious!
What. Is. The. Difference.
Re:Does anyone have an actual video of the demo?
on
Photosynth Demo
·
· Score: 1
This page at University of Washington has a link to the original SIGGRAPH paper (PDF) which describes in rather general terms the mechansim by which Photo Tourism (the first shot at Photosynth) works. That paper (and its references should get you started.)
Microsoft didn't buy Photosynth. It bought Seadragon. The Photosynth client is indeed built on Seadragon's client, but the idea behind Photosynth (which was a joint University of Washington/Microsoft Research project called PhotoTourism) significantly predated the Seadragon acquisition, and there was a working client. When Microsoft decided to reimplement the client as a technology preview, that's when the Seadragon team and client came into the picture.
That said, Seadragon's technology is great. It's a fantastically smooth way to browse arbitrarily large images or collections of images, and it was a good acquisition indeed.
(I was on engineer on the Photosynth team.)
Re:Does anyone have an actual video of the demo?
on
Photosynth Demo
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I was one of thee engineers that worked on the first release Photosynth. It's a great team, and it was a super fun project.
I can tell you that we did not tweak any camera positions by hand. The only real "editing" we did was to eliminate pictures that just didn't correlate well, generally because they didn't have enough feature points in common with the rest of the photos. We didn't tweak any camera positions, but the camera positions (i.e. the locations of the orange camera frusta when you have frusta turned on) are a best estimate, which is subject to some error. Same goes for the projection planes.
What's great about Photosynth is that from the perspective of anyone outside the computer vision community, it appears to be magic. Enough so that lots of the blogosphere was convinced that we somehow "authored" the 3D point clouds. Nope. It's more or less an automatic (albeit somewhat prolonged) process. The hard work is done as a big preproceess, then the client consumes largely precomputed data.
It'll be cool to see Photosynth in action in BBC's upcoming How We Built Britain piece that was announced on Live Labs today.
I did a video interview about Photosynth a while back which is targeted at a non-technical audience but still might be of interest. (And I wrote the music for the original video at Live Labs.)
I have some information, that if known to God, would have a severe negative impact on my potential Salvation. I need an encryption mechanism that is so secure that not even GOD can crack it.
When I saw this article I was really excited - I thought this might finally solve my problem! Then I read that it's based on "random" emissions by quasars. Dammit! That's not random! God controls those emissions...too predictable!
So I'm still searching. My current line of research is the creation of pads based on the behavior of women.
Admittedly OT, but yesterday I was pricing hard drives on Pricewatch and I made a graph of $/GB vs GB to see where the best value was (which, by the way, is at 320 GB).
...then I read TFA, and the OP copied verbatim the first couple of the article's grammatical blunders. There used to be editors, fact checking...it's sad when this kind of article is called journalism.
I was in the original @Home cable modem beta, one of the first cable modem broadband rollouts in the country (SF Bay area). I had sub-250 ping to pretty much any server in the US, which was pretty damn good for those days.
There was something magical about the Quake multiplayer experience that, as you alluded to, wasn't quite preserved in subsequent Quake releases. Also, the general pace of the game wasn't as frenetic, which for me at least, probably made it more enjoyable.
I'll always remember one Sunday morning, playing on a server that ran a fun mod that, among other things made the double-barrel shotgun fire five rounds at once, so at close range it was a sure gib. I have a screenshot of my score that morning, when I got over 100 kills in just a few minutes. Wow that was fun.
And you had to love the old Quake gib sound effect too:-)
Travelling to the moon ain't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations they could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, and that would end their trip real quick, wouldn't it!
Slashdot Mirror
I have to say that's one of the best-written reviews (of any kind) I've read on Slashdot. Makes you realize just how bad the Zonk reviews really are...
Yeah I was in Beijing about a year ago. They had started many of the air-quality programs already, such as banning scooters on the innermost two ring-roads that encircle Beijing and limiting new-construction permits.
This (poor-quality) snapshot of the Bird's Nest from a moving taxi: Bird's Nest might give you an idea of what visibility was like while I was there.
When I was there I really came the conclusion that:
a) there was no conceivable way they could really improve the air quality enough in a year
b) Beijing was not going to be remembered as a "great Olympic venue."
I applaud their effort, for sure. They can't be faulted for trying, and try hard they did. But I think it's a little difficult to undo millennia of environmental neglect in a few years.
BTW, I still think Beijing is a very interesting place and I look forward to visiting it again. I'm just glad I'm not going to be doing any 100-m dashes while I'm there.
...and in other news, The Register just now notices that there's superfluous punctuation in Yahoo's name, and decides to make fun of it.
Refreshingly original!
...let's at least get the transliteration correct.
It's Tiananmen Square. There's an "n" in there. I walked through through that very square on Saturday.
What were they smoking?
You know, back in the old days we only had linear keystrokes, and they worked fine for us. Now it's all about the log keystrokes with the kids these days.
World's going to hell.
In case the name's not familiar, John Knoll's brother, Tom Knoll, wrote the original version of Photoshop. John has always been more the artist, and Tom more the signal processing geek, although there's plenty of overlap between their sets of skills. A talented duo.
Good point. I guess one difference is that Caller ID can be blocked on the caller's end, but you can't use the phone without using a voice. A boon for those providing voice-obfuscation technology? (Never worked when I tried to call the office to get out of school back in the day ;-) )
...it's done 'without alerting the caller during the call that the caller is being identified.
...Sometimes...when the phone rings...
...I answer it...and just listen...
...I hear the caller's voice and identify them by their voice...
...Then hang up without saying anything.
How insidious!
What. Is. The. Difference.
This page at University of Washington has a link to the original SIGGRAPH paper (PDF) which describes in rather general terms the mechansim by which Photo Tourism (the first shot at Photosynth) works. That paper (and its references should get you started.)
Microsoft didn't buy Photosynth. It bought Seadragon. The Photosynth client is indeed built on Seadragon's client, but the idea behind Photosynth (which was a joint University of Washington/Microsoft Research project called PhotoTourism) significantly predated the Seadragon acquisition, and there was a working client. When Microsoft decided to reimplement the client as a technology preview, that's when the Seadragon team and client came into the picture.
That said, Seadragon's technology is great. It's a fantastically smooth way to browse arbitrarily large images or collections of images, and it was a good acquisition indeed.
(I was on engineer on the Photosynth team.)
I was one of thee engineers that worked on the first release Photosynth. It's a great team, and it was a super fun project.
I can tell you that we did not tweak any camera positions by hand. The only real "editing" we did was to eliminate pictures that just didn't correlate well, generally because they didn't have enough feature points in common with the rest of the photos. We didn't tweak any camera positions, but the camera positions (i.e. the locations of the orange camera frusta when you have frusta turned on) are a best estimate, which is subject to some error. Same goes for the projection planes.
What's great about Photosynth is that from the perspective of anyone outside the computer vision community, it appears to be magic. Enough so that lots of the blogosphere was convinced that we somehow "authored" the 3D point clouds. Nope. It's more or less an automatic (albeit somewhat prolonged) process. The hard work is done as a big preproceess, then the client consumes largely precomputed data.
It'll be cool to see Photosynth in action in BBC's upcoming How We Built Britain piece that was announced on Live Labs today.
I did a video interview about Photosynth a while back which is targeted at a non-technical audience but still might be of interest. (And I wrote the music for the original video at Live Labs.)
Dr. Peter Venkman: I'm fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, "bad"?
NASA: "This is the LAST TIME I'm gonna fix you!"
Hubble: "OK honey I promise I won't absorb any more gamma radiation!"
NASA and Hubble. Clearly codependent.
Better to be the content than to be teh ghey.
When I saw this article I was really excited - I thought this might finally solve my problem! Then I read that it's based on "random" emissions by quasars. Dammit! That's not random! God controls those emissions...too predictable!
So I'm still searching. My current line of research is the creation of pads based on the behavior of women.
The raw data were:
So today we pay as little as $0.36 per GB. The drive in the Parent's Break.com advertisement represents $166,333 per GB.
How times have changed :-)
...then I read TFA, and the OP copied verbatim the first couple of the article's grammatical blunders. There used to be editors, fact checking...it's sad when this kind of article is called journalism.
There was something magical about the Quake multiplayer experience that, as you alluded to, wasn't quite preserved in subsequent Quake releases. Also, the general pace of the game wasn't as frenetic, which for me at least, probably made it more enjoyable.
I'll always remember one Sunday morning, playing on a server that ran a fun mod that, among other things made the double-barrel shotgun fire five rounds at once, so at close range it was a sure gib. I have a screenshot of my score that morning, when I got over 100 kills in just a few minutes. Wow that was fun.
And you had to love the old Quake gib sound effect too :-)
Travelling to the moon ain't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations they could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, and that would end their trip real quick, wouldn't it!
Ack!! The unclosed parenthesis at the end of the OP is compelling me to wash my hands over and over. And it's not helping.
...or it gets the hose again.
All their data can be recovered by reinstalling from the game CDs. ;-)
A refreshing change.
Ahhh the irony of asking Slashdot how to build a grammar checker!