Am I the only one who read this and instantly imagined this jump-suit that you'd wear that could maybe read your arm and leg positions to put you directly control your PS2?
Instead we get details of some bogus lawsuit about bogus stuff that we really don't care about.
Matching your true FOV to the game's FOV is a good idea from a point of view of minimising 'simulator-sickness' (yes, that's the proper name for this nausea - it comes from the flight simulation business) - but it's not always 'reasonable' to do that with video games.
I'm currently sitting 70cm from my 35cm (width) monitor screen - this gives me a true FOV of just 28 degrees!
FYI: Measure the distance between your eyes and the screen - measure the screen width and set the FOV to 2*arctan(screen_width/(2*eye_distance)).
You'd have to be sitting VERY close or have an enormous screen to warrant a 120 degree FOV! At such short distances, I'd bet that eyestrain would be a problem. OTOH, if you are sitting further back from a big screen TV then insufficient display resolution would result in a blurry image - which could be a contributory factor.
Generally games push the FOV out to 90 degrees (which is much larger than most real world monitor FOV's) because it's just too hard to play the game with a narrow FOV. 90 is the best compromise between being able to see things you need to know about and minimising the 'fish bowl' effect you get from artificially wide FOV's.
However, playing video games with a 'correct' FOV would be hard - so nausea is a common problem.
Elsewhere, someone suggested Ginger as a nausea suppressant - if you follow Mythbusters (who did a pretty good amateur study of this) you'll know that's true. Ginger was the only thing that worked for them - except pharmacological solutions such as dramamine that made them either drowsy or disoriented and 'out of it'.
Re:Jupiter a better choice than Saturn in 2001
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Alien Rain Over India
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· Score: 1
Panspermia offers the possiblility that if we ever DID find a way to prove that live could not possibly have spontaneously arisen on the early earth - then there is a scientifically plausible way for some other set of initial conditions (or perhaps a much longer timescale) to provide the necessary kick-start.
However, as things look now, it seems that the conditions on early Earth were EXTREMELY good for spontaneous assembly of the necessary building block - which means that panspermia is out the door (by Occams razor) until someone can prove it actually happen (which would be tricky).
You can't easily prove panspermia - because even if you find some far distant rock whizzing around with Earth-like bacteria on it, you'll not be able to prove whether it was kicked off our planet in the first place via the same mechanism as the infamous Mars meteorite. If you find a rock with some non-Earthlike bugs on it (as is allegedly the case in the article) - it's hard to show that Earth life could have arisen from it.
One is that I often dive into an article, change two words here, three words there, add a comma - change one misspelling. Do you really want boxes inside boxes inside boxes - some with just one comma in them?
Secondly, much vandalism is simply deletion. How do you show that? Grey out a deleted section? That doesn't work because you'd see things like:
Radius of Planet earth is 63,780.135 [6,378.135] km...is the radius 6,378km or 63,378km ? You have no idea because you don't know whether the last edit was vandalism or repairing of vandalism.
The solution (which already exists) is to use the HISTORY tab. Now, you can see what changed and when - and EASILY diff the versions and furthermore, see comments explaining WHY things changed. So as Wikipedia is now, and you REALLY need to be certain about the radius of the earth - look at the history. If the edit that changed from 6,378 km to 63,780 km is unlabelled, recent and added by someone with just an IP address and no commit comment - then pretty much for sure it's vandalism. Probably, if you go to the person's Wiki page, you'll find a bunch of "WARNING - THIS GUY IS A VANDAL" messages.
But if you see that the article only said 63,780 km briefly - and before that it said 6,378 km and now someone has just changed it back to 6,378 *with* a comment that says "Reverting vandalism" *and* that person has an actual Wiki account *and* looking at his Wiki page reveals that he's created dozens of great articles - then you can be pretty much certain that this is correction of vandalism.
I can't imagine any time when it isn't obvious from the HISTORY.
For the very casual reader who doesn't check this stuff then there is a VERY slim chance that they are looking at vandalised content - but that's gonna be spectacularly rare.
My main piece of work on Wiki is the 'Mini' article (it's hard to type it without square brackets around it!) - which is inching towards 'Featured Article' status - it's currently rated 'Good' - which means it's in the top 800 or so articles on the site.
What I've noticed is this pattern:
* Someone writes an eloquent paragraph about something. * 10 people notice teeny tiny additional bits of information that could be added to it (parenthetically), between commas - with hyphens. And just dumped in on the end of other sentences. * The paragraph now reads like crap. * Sometime later, someone cleans it up and makes it nice prose again.
This cycle often repeats itself.
There is also a terrible tendancy for "owners" of pages to 'tweak' the wording - that happens a lot too and I think the article tends to become 'stale' after a lot of that.
The competition to make 'Featured Article' is a huge thing for quality. The process goes through many stages and the degree of intelligent critique you get at each stage is really good - invariably polite - always for the good. I plan to push everything I write until it at least gets a shot at that honored position.
Vandalism is almost 100% restricted to 'big name' articles such as 'Computer', 'Lego', 'George Bush', etc which each end up being de-vandalised a couple of times every day. Fortunately, these all have hundreds of sets of eyes on them - so the 'revert' typically comes within just a few minutes of the vandalism. The actual probability of someone coming along at random and seeing a vandalised page are actually quite small.
I monitor the 'Computer' page - and looking back at the HISTORY, I'd say we see three vandalisms a day fixed within 5 minutes (on the average). This means that the page is typically trashed for a total of 15 minutes a day - so you maybe only have about a 1% chance of seeing it when it's disrupted - and typically the distruption is VERY obvious - idiotic name calling and obscenity mostly.
It's important to use the right units to make a point.
The parent makes a point in a literary rather than scientific sense...it was a JOKE...not a scientific statement. The original article reads something like 'An ungodly huge explosion happened nearby at 440 blah, blah, blah' - which most people hear as "nearby". When you put down a 2 and 21 zeroes, people are gonna say "What d'ya mean 'nearby'? That's not nearby at all!".
People don't have a grasp of how far a lightyear is - to make my point, I picked probably the largest unit that people have actually, personally experienced.
They made a pretty OK server thingy - with a UNIX kinda thing - and they were black and purple with sexy blue lights...but in the end, the only thing that was truly, utterly, unique was blindingly fast realtime 3D graphics.
The very day the 3Dfx Voodoo and the TNT and their ilk appeared, you could get fast-ish 3D for $300 instead of $500,000. You just can't sustain a market in that environment. SGI's hardware was quite a bit better than the PC cards of the day - but not enough better to keep enough of their market share. That was the defining moment - from that point, SGI were doomed. The day we started to see hardware transform and lighting in the GeForce-256 card - SGI died. The corpse is still cooling off - but it's been dead for quite a while.
What they should have done was to see the writing on the wall and become nVidia.
They had the super-intelligent graphics engineers (who saw the writing on the wall and now work for nVidia) - and they had the name - and at the time, they had the money to fund the research. nVidia wouldn't exist now if SGI had switched gears in time.
But they kept thinking that somehow there would be still be a high end market - and there never was.
The annoying thing about the colour depth issues is that there IS a version of GIMP that supports large colour depths - there is an entire fork of the GIMP tree called 'FilmGIMP' - and then, later: 'CinePaint' that's been developed with really comprehensive deep colour support.
The problem is at the core of the GIMP developer team's culture. If you hang out on the GIMP mailing list for any amount of time, you'll find it's an unbelievably hostile list. The members of the team seem to hate each other with a passion! There is constant bickering and any questions that are even a shade off-topic (or even on-topic but in the mailing list archives) will be flamed mercilessly.
It is that innate hostility that drove a wedge between the GIMP team and the consortium of movie art teams that put together FilmGIMP/CinePaint. That the project had to be forked in order to get such a basic feature done is just criminal.
GIMP is great - yes - but it could have been so much greater. It's amazing that it's done as well as it has.
Many of their predictions are wrong because we realised we didn't WANT these things.
I could certainly rather easily build a system to print me a custom newspaper from the web - but who actually wants that. Most people's reaction would be "What a waste of Fax paper". If we want news - on any conceivable topic - at any time of day or night - it's right there on the web.
We could have voice-operated devices - but most people either feel embarassed by them - or they realise that the damned things won't work when there is a lot of other noise around - or that you'd say: "I don't think much of the format of this web site"...only to find their laptop saying "Format started....Format complete". Voice commands only work in the human world because we maintain eye contact - or have a lot of personal context surrounding a command. In a busy 'cube farm' type of office, having everyone issuing voice commands would *suck*. We have pretty good voice recognition - but we USE it mostly only for automated telephone response services and such.
We do have large screen TV's - but we prefer to reserve that screen for entertainment because it's got a big comfey sofa in front of it - and use a smaller screen with an ergonomic office chair, a keyboard and mouse for doing computing stuff. If one part of the family is watching TV, they don't want an inset view of me buying stuff on eBay distracting them in one corner of the screen.
The problem wasn't that they misjudged the technological capabilities of the year 2001 - they basically applied Moores Law kinds of prediction and nailed that pretty accurately. It was that they failed to think through the consequences of those technologies in terms of what people actually WANT out of their lives.
I don't think direct-to-retina laser displays are likely.
A few flight simulators from back in the late 1980's projected laser imagery directly onto the pilot's retina. It was pretty tricky technology though.
In order to create a bright enough image while scanning the entire retina, you needed a laser that would damage the retina if it ever STOPPED scanning and just sat in one place for a while. (Imagine a 1000 scan-line display that would be bright enough to look good...now imagine the vertical scanning device breaks and draws all of those thousand lines on top of each other on the retina. You'd have a thousand times more average brightness - and within a very short space of time, a permenant black line across your vision).
So it was necessary to implement layers of safety into the system that would be impossible in a consumer-grade device.
Astronomers and their ilk simply need to abandon terms like 'planet', 'moon' and possibly even 'star' and invent new words with precise meanings. It's not uncommon to have to do this in science when the meaning of old words becomes impossibly difficult to deal with.
Non-scientists have words like 'butterfly' and 'moth' - which have no clear scientific distinction - we also make distinctions where there are none. In common parlance, we orbit a "Sun" - not a "Star". Stars are little dots in the sky - but a sun is a huge nearby thing....until we imagine ourselves ourselves are close by a distant star - when we'll want to call it a 'Sun' again. When we sit on a sunny day on some extrasolar planet, we'll still say "What a nice day it is, the sun is shining"...no matter how much the astronomers complain about it.
So scientific rigor can only be satisfied by making new words with rigerous definitions - rather than trying to pin down arbitary non-scientific historical usage of existing words.
If they allow new solar-orbiting bodies to be called planets then whatever cutoff they choose will be utterly arbitary. If they define Pluto to not be a planet then a few billion people will have learned the wrong thing in school and a similar number of books will now be *WRONG* for no other reason than we decided to make them wrong. You can't easily change what people believe to be a fact - and you certainly can't re-publish a billion text books.
So: Pluto is a "Planet" because it always was one. Astronomers should not care a damn about whether the 10th 'thing' is a planet or not because the word 'planet' and 'asteroid' carry about as much distinction as 'butterfly' and 'moth' or 'sun' and 'star'.
They just need new words.
We can do this - and it's easier than arguing about definitions of commonplace words that do not have (and never have had) a formal definition.
Re:Pixar != Sequel-makers - Do the math.
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Disney Buys Pixar
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· Score: 1
Yes - just look at the *AWFUL* 2D Buzz-Lightyear cartoon series they did...Urgh!
The log2(earnings/costs) equation only has predictive value if you spend as lavishly on the sequels as you did on the original movie. If you make really cheap knock-offs then each one can make *far* less money and still be profitable.
The annoying thing (as always) is that there are enough people who will watch anything to keep low budget crap profitable - and enough smart people will fail to watch even very good stuff to make it unprofitable no matter how high quality it is.
We've all been talking about the feature-length movies - but IMHO, they are not Pixar's best work.
Pixar's best work was undoubtedly the 5 minute shorts they did for SigGraph audiences every year: The Adventures of Andre and Wally B, Luxo Jr (now seen in the intro to all Pixar movies), Red's Dream, Tin Toy, KnickKnack...to name but a few. Those are little gems of movies. The full length stuff they have done since with Disney has been pretty good - but sustaining the quality and humor for that amount of time is hard.
Luxo Jr was nominated for an Oscar in '86 - Tin toy won "Best animated short" in '88
If you havn't seen these yet, there is a collection of them under the title "Tiny Toy Stories" - although I've only seen it on VHS (Amazon has it on sale for $0.50!) - I highly recommend them.
Pixar != Sequel-makers - Do the math.
on
Disney Buys Pixar
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· Score: 1
I read somewhere that a rule-of-thumb for sequels is that each sequel makes approximately half the money of the one before it. Hence, you can estimate the number of viable sequels for a movie as:
log-to-base-2 ( takings / costs )
(That's the total number of movies made - including the original).
Toy Story made seven times as much as it cost: log2($356 million / $50 million) which is log2(7) - which falls a little short of 3. Toy Story 2 did about what the rule of thumb would suggest. It made three and a half times what it cost (grossed $485M and cost $125M) - almost exactly half of what Toy Story 1 made. Hence a third movie ought to make about 1.75 times what it costs to make - which is just about a reasonable decision - financially speaking.
This is something a big business like Disney can understand. Another sequel is a sure fire "limited success". It's not going to be amazing - but it won't flop disasterously either. They'll probably make a couple of hundred million out of it. If their own creative teams were to spend the production money on something else, it would be risky...lots of Disney movies are total flops.
But given Pixar's 100% track record (not one box office flop so far) - it would OBVIOUSLY be better to have their creative team make something new than to churn out sequels because a new concept can earn seven times what it costs (eg Toy Story), a sequel only three times and a second sequel only one and a half times.
Therefore, having Pixar turn out sequels is a STUPID idea. If they can make another new concept and earn 7x their costs - then Disney stand to make half a gigabuck more than they can get from a sequel with similar investment.
Please, Disney realise that the very best you can do with your new investment is LEAVE IT ALONE. Let Pixar be Pixar - don't exert any corporate influence whatever. It's what the public wants - but it make sound financial sense too.
All this hype about how vastly much paper you get if you print it all out misses the wonder of the thing.
The wonder isn't how BIG the human genome is - the amazing thing is how *TINY* it is.
The human genome is 3 billion base pairs...each base pair is one of only four possibilities - so two bits each. 750 Megabytes...that's one CD-ROM. There is a lot of redundancy in it too - many of those base pairs are never 'expressed' as proteins, many are replicated redundantly dozens of times. So with compression, or even just deleting the junk - you'd get it down to maybe 100 to 200 megs - tops.
I find it utterly amazing that all that complexity is so amazingly compactly encoded.
Yeah - that's a lot of bits of paper - or 600 floppy disks or some other bullshit - but by the standards of modern media, it's MICROSCOPIC.
Announcements like this would do better to explain how LITTLE data this really is - that's the wonder of the thing.
Why on earth use something as complex as a robot? What's wrong with using ultra-cheap computer graphics instead? Surely the effect must be identical for the viewer. Anything with that many motors has got to be expensive and unreliable.
Whilst this certainly is a case of plagiarism, it's slightly unusual in that the material involved was CopyLeft'ed.
Usually, the problem with plagiarism is that copying the material was illegal.
But Wikipedia ALLOWS people to copy articles, parts of articles - or even the whole darned encyclopedia. That's just fine so long as you follow the CopyLeft license in classic OpenSource style. So in this case the problem ISN'T that the material was copied - it was that the reporter didn't provide the required attribution and pass on the CopyLeft agreement to his readership.
It's a subtle distinction - but an important one.
Wikipedia tends to deliberately down-play who the original authors were. The only way to find out who originally wrote the work is to trawl through the history of the document...and in some cases, that's a major undertaking in itself. So the attribution that we're looking for isn't "Thanks to Joe Shmoe who wrote this paragraph" - it's something like "Go to Wikipedia to read the full text of this article".
The Wiki license actually says explicitly that a 'link' back to the original article is all that is required to fulfill the license terms. So all a newspaper has to do is to add a little box somewhere with a list of Wikipedia URL's used in this edition - and they are good to go.
Seen this way, if you believe in the Wikipedian's ideal of improving the world by disseminating truth and well written prose, then you should be very happy that newspapers are printing large chunks of Wikipedia since it can only improve on the quality of newspaper articles which very often are full of small factual errors. If reporters use Wikipedia material instead of writing new stuff, their reports will presumably be more accurate and better written.
So let's not discourage this by firing reporters - instead lets just educate newspapers about the backwards link requirement and positively encourage them to copy as much material as they feel they need.
I'd *FAR* rather they did that than to have them read well written articles in Wikipedia and rewrite them in their own words (making mistakes in the process). In the cases where the Wiki article isn't well written, I'd strongly encourage them to fix the Wikipedia and THEN publish the results.
You know - it's possible that all the math books were checked out by fascinated readers, yet all the UFO books are of little interest and therefore sitting on the library shelves.
We all know that advancements in technology can cost people their jobs. However, in the case of the building industry in Texas, the effect of introducing new technology can often be somewhat delayed.
Back in 1997, my new house was in the slow process of changing from plans on paper into bricks on concrete. One of the tasks that has to be done early on is to lay out the shape of the house accurately onto the land. My builder uses a sub-contractor to do that - and I had occasion to watch him work. He arrived in a beat up old pickup truck with four 'migrant workers' sitting in the back. In order to lay out the initial 'bounding rectangle' of the building, they follow this algorithm:
* Measure a baseline for the long edge of the rectangle. Mark it with two stakes hammered into the ground and tie a length of nylon string between them.
* Tie a second piece of string to one of the stakes and measure out the width of the rectangle along it. Eyeball the angle between the new edge and the baseline so it's roughly 90 degrees and you have an 'L' shape. One guy holds the string there.
* Do the same at the other end of the baseline. Now you have a 'U' shape and two guys are holding the open ends of the strings.
* Take a third piece of string - equal in length to the length of the rectangle. Give one end to each of the two guys who are already holding string. 'jiggle' them until all three strings are tight. You now have a parallelogram made of string, staked out at two corners.
* Now take two long tape measures and with one guy standing at each corner of our parallelogram, position the tape measures along the two diagonals of the parallelogram. With two guys holding the tapes on the baseline stakes and the other two holding onto the strings and shouting out the lengths of the diagonals, they jiggle the two free points until all of the strings are tight and the two diagonals tape measures are reading the same lengths. This requires a lot of shouting, cursing and everyone telling everyone else which way to move.
* Now they have a rectangle - so they bash in two more stakes and then level the whole thing with a really impressive-looking laser contraption.
Well, I watched this with some amusement - and asked why they didn't just calculate the length of the diagonal. The boss guy said that you couldn't do that - "It's impossible". I told him about Pythagoras' theorem. With the aid of a calculator (he didn't know what that funny 'square-root' key was for), I was able to show him how easy it is to calculate the length of the diagonal and do away with all the ugly 'jiggling'.
"Wow!" he said. Then he thought for a moment - "Now I'll only need three guys to hold the string!"...and fired one of them on the spot! I thought he was kidding - but the next day when they were measuring out the place for the garage, there was one less guy holding the string.
So, a 2,500 year old technological advance cost some poor guy his job....sigh...
This certainly sounds like a potato-battery. You've got two dissimilar metals (aluminum nail, copper earthing spike) - and an electrolyte (water in the ground turning into sap in the tree). So, as expected, you get a small voltage - and it's certainly going to be something less than two volts.
How much current you get depends on a bunch of stuff - but it won't be much. There is no new science here - he could have done the same thing much more easily with a row of potatoes - and for SURE you won't be generating any useful amount of power from doing this.
However, cranking this up to 12v per tree isn't gonna happen unless you put a bunch of trees in series.
The guy is a crackpot - have nothing more to do with him!
There is a good argument for P2P systems in general in that there are MANY uses for them other than stealing music - and yet many P2P systems have been taken down by hoards of ravening *AA lawyers. But it's quite a bit harder to come up with ways in which this device could be used legally. It's a music player - so people aren't likely to be using it for copying photos they've taken or software they've written - such as is the case with P2P on the Internet. How many people do you think you'll just naturally happen to bump into who:
a) Have a compatible player...and... b) Have OpenSourced music on offer...and... c) Actually want to recommend it to you.
I would be quite utterly amazed if I got one interesting and legal track in a year of use.
Furthermore, if the owners of these machines don't actively send the files, it's likely that there is a good case for suing the manufacturers for causing copyrights to be breached.
They are gonna get their asses sued unless they weigh this thing down with so much in the way of DRM that it'll be useless in practice.
The article links to the manufacturer says that this is for sending "Recommendations" - so perhaps it is intended that one only ships a short recommendation in the form of a brief clip.
Another possibility is that you'd have to be signed up to a music service based on the 'subscription' model...in that case, this is music you could just have easily downloaded for yourself - so the 'recommendation' thing would really be the only reason to use it.
Slashdot Mirror
A PS2 Controller Suit - neato!
Am I the only one who read this and instantly imagined this jump-suit that you'd wear that could maybe read your arm and leg positions to put you directly control your PS2?
Instead we get details of some bogus lawsuit about bogus stuff that we really don't care about.
Whatever happened to cool stuff?
Matching your true FOV to the game's FOV is a good idea from a point of view of minimising 'simulator-sickness' (yes, that's the proper name for this nausea - it comes from the flight simulation business) - but it's not always 'reasonable' to do that with video games.
I'm currently sitting 70cm from my 35cm (width) monitor screen - this gives me a true FOV of just 28 degrees!
FYI: Measure the distance between your eyes and the screen - measure the screen width and set the FOV to 2*arctan(screen_width/(2*eye_distance)).
You'd have to be sitting VERY close or have an enormous screen to warrant a 120 degree FOV! At such short distances, I'd bet that eyestrain would be a problem. OTOH, if you are sitting further back from a big screen TV then insufficient display resolution would result in a blurry image - which could be a contributory factor.
Generally games push the FOV out to 90 degrees (which is much larger than most real world monitor FOV's) because it's just too hard to play the game with a narrow FOV. 90 is the best compromise between being able to see things you need to know about and minimising the 'fish bowl' effect you get from artificially wide FOV's.
However, playing video games with a 'correct' FOV would be hard - so nausea is a common problem.
Elsewhere, someone suggested Ginger as a nausea suppressant - if you follow Mythbusters (who did a pretty good amateur study of this) you'll know that's true. Ginger was the only thing that worked for them - except pharmacological solutions such as dramamine that made them either drowsy or disoriented and 'out of it'.
Panspermia offers the possiblility that if we ever DID find a way to prove that live could not possibly have spontaneously arisen on the early earth - then there is a scientifically plausible way for some other set of initial conditions (or perhaps a much longer timescale) to provide the necessary kick-start.
However, as things look now, it seems that the conditions on early Earth were EXTREMELY good for spontaneous assembly of the necessary building block - which means that panspermia is out the door (by Occams razor) until someone can prove it actually happen (which would be tricky).
You can't easily prove panspermia - because even if you find some far distant rock whizzing around with Earth-like bacteria on it, you'll not be able to prove whether it was kicked off our planet in the first place via the same mechanism as the infamous Mars meteorite. If you find a rock with some non-Earthlike bugs on it (as is allegedly the case in the article) - it's hard to show that Earth life could have arisen from it.
This is interesting stuff though.
Did you also spot what looks like a live-action Krusty in the TV's in the store window? But he has orange hair...weird.
Darn - now I have to find a Simpsons video so I can step through it a frame at a time!
There are a couple of problems with that.
...is the radius 6,378km or 63,378km ? You have no idea because you don't know whether the last edit was vandalism or repairing of vandalism.
One is that I often dive into an article, change two words here, three words there, add a comma - change one misspelling. Do you really want boxes inside boxes inside boxes - some with just one comma in them?
Secondly, much vandalism is simply deletion. How do you show that? Grey out a deleted section? That doesn't work because you'd see things like:
Radius of Planet earth is 63,780.135 [6,378.135] km
The solution (which already exists) is to use the HISTORY tab. Now, you can see what changed and when - and EASILY diff the versions and furthermore, see comments explaining WHY things changed. So as Wikipedia is now, and you REALLY need to be certain about the radius of the earth - look at the history. If the edit that changed from 6,378 km to 63,780 km is unlabelled, recent and added by someone with just an IP address and no commit comment - then pretty much for sure it's vandalism. Probably, if you go to the person's Wiki page, you'll find a bunch of "WARNING - THIS GUY IS A VANDAL" messages.
But if you see that the article only said 63,780 km briefly - and before that it said 6,378 km and now someone has just changed it back to 6,378 *with* a comment that says "Reverting vandalism" *and* that person has an actual Wiki account *and* looking at his Wiki page reveals that he's created dozens of great articles - then you can be pretty much certain that this is correction of vandalism.
I can't imagine any time when it isn't obvious from the HISTORY.
For the very casual reader who doesn't check this stuff then there is a VERY slim chance that they are looking at vandalised content - but that's gonna be spectacularly rare.
There is some sense in which that's true.
My main piece of work on Wiki is the 'Mini' article (it's hard to type it without square brackets around it!) - which is inching towards 'Featured Article' status - it's currently rated 'Good' - which means it's in the top 800 or so articles on the site.
What I've noticed is this pattern:
* Someone writes an eloquent paragraph about something.
* 10 people notice teeny tiny additional bits of information that could be added to it (parenthetically), between commas - with hyphens. And just dumped in on the end of other sentences.
* The paragraph now reads like crap.
* Sometime later, someone cleans it up and makes it nice prose again.
This cycle often repeats itself.
There is also a terrible tendancy for "owners" of pages to 'tweak' the wording - that happens a lot too and I think the article tends to become 'stale' after a lot of that.
The competition to make 'Featured Article' is a huge thing for quality. The process goes through many stages and the degree of intelligent critique you get at each stage is really good - invariably polite - always for the good. I plan to push everything I write until it at least gets a shot at that honored position.
Vandalism is almost 100% restricted to 'big name' articles such as 'Computer', 'Lego', 'George Bush', etc which each end up being de-vandalised a couple of times every day. Fortunately, these all have hundreds of sets of eyes on them - so the 'revert' typically comes within just a few minutes of the vandalism. The actual probability of someone coming along at random and seeing a vandalised page are actually quite small.
I monitor the 'Computer' page - and looking back at the HISTORY, I'd say we see three vandalisms a day fixed within 5 minutes (on the average). This means that the page is typically trashed for a total of 15 minutes a day - so you maybe only have about a 1% chance of seeing it when it's disrupted - and typically the distruption is VERY obvious - idiotic name calling and obscenity mostly.
> It's meaningless in imperial measurements.
It's important to use the right units to make a point.
The parent makes a point in a literary rather than scientific sense...it was a JOKE...not a scientific statement. The original article reads something like 'An ungodly huge explosion happened nearby at 440 blah, blah, blah' - which most people hear as "nearby". When you put down a 2 and 21 zeroes, people are gonna say "What d'ya mean 'nearby'? That's not nearby at all!".
People don't have a grasp of how far a lightyear is - to make my point, I picked probably the largest unit that people have actually, personally experienced.
> 2,896 trillion pints.
Is that US pints or British pints?
2,586,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away is 'nearby' ?!
Silicon **GRAPHICS** Inc.
Yeah - GRAPHICS.
They made a pretty OK server thingy - with a UNIX kinda thing - and they were black and purple with sexy blue lights...but in the end, the only thing that was truly, utterly, unique was blindingly fast realtime 3D graphics.
The very day the 3Dfx Voodoo and the TNT and their ilk appeared, you could get fast-ish 3D for $300 instead of $500,000. You just can't sustain a market in that environment. SGI's hardware was quite a bit better than the PC cards of the day - but not enough better to keep enough of their market share. That was the defining moment - from that point, SGI were doomed. The day we started to see hardware transform and lighting in the GeForce-256 card - SGI died. The corpse is still cooling off - but it's been dead for quite a while.
What they should have done was to see the writing on the wall and become nVidia.
They had the super-intelligent graphics engineers (who saw the writing on the wall and now work for nVidia) - and they had the name - and at the time, they had the money to fund the research. nVidia wouldn't exist now if SGI had switched gears in time.
But they kept thinking that somehow there would be still be a high end market - and there never was.
nVidia *is* SGI.
The annoying thing about the colour depth issues is that there IS a version of GIMP that supports large colour depths - there is an entire fork of the GIMP tree called 'FilmGIMP' - and then, later: 'CinePaint' that's been developed with really comprehensive deep colour support.
The problem is at the core of the GIMP developer team's culture. If you hang out on the GIMP mailing list for any amount of time, you'll find it's an unbelievably hostile list. The members of the team seem to hate each other with a passion! There is constant bickering and any questions that are even a shade off-topic (or even on-topic but in the mailing list archives) will be flamed mercilessly.
It is that innate hostility that drove a wedge between the GIMP team and the consortium of movie art teams that put together FilmGIMP/CinePaint. That the project had to be forked in order to get such a basic feature done is just criminal.
GIMP is great - yes - but it could have been so much greater. It's amazing that it's done as well as it has.
We had usenet and bulletin boards - for news delivery, they could approximate the Internet pretty well.
Many of their predictions are wrong because we realised we didn't WANT these things.
I could certainly rather easily build a system to print me a custom newspaper from the web - but who actually wants that. Most people's reaction would be "What a waste of Fax paper". If we want news - on any conceivable topic - at any time of day or night - it's right there on the web.
We could have voice-operated devices - but most people either feel embarassed by them - or they realise that the damned things won't work when there is a lot of other noise around - or that you'd say: "I don't think much of the format of this web site"...only to find their laptop saying "Format started....Format complete". Voice commands only work in the human world because we maintain eye contact - or have a lot of personal context surrounding a command. In a busy 'cube farm' type of office, having everyone issuing voice commands would *suck*. We have pretty good voice recognition - but we USE it mostly only for automated telephone response services and such.
We do have large screen TV's - but we prefer to reserve that screen for entertainment because it's got a big comfey sofa in front of it - and use a smaller screen with an ergonomic office chair, a keyboard and mouse for doing computing stuff. If one part of the family is watching TV, they don't want an inset view of me buying stuff on eBay distracting them in one corner of the screen.
The problem wasn't that they misjudged the technological capabilities of the year 2001 - they basically applied Moores Law kinds of prediction and nailed that pretty accurately. It was that they failed to think through the consequences of those technologies in terms of what people actually WANT out of their lives.
I don't think direct-to-retina laser displays are likely.
A few flight simulators from back in the late 1980's projected laser imagery directly onto the pilot's retina. It was pretty tricky technology though.
In order to create a bright enough image while scanning the entire retina, you needed a laser that would damage the retina if it ever STOPPED scanning and just sat in one place for a while. (Imagine a 1000 scan-line display that would be bright enough to look good...now imagine the vertical scanning device breaks and draws all of those thousand lines on top of each other on the retina. You'd have a thousand times more average brightness - and within a very short space of time, a permenant black line across your vision).
So it was necessary to implement layers of safety into the system that would be impossible in a consumer-grade device.
Astronomers and their ilk simply need to abandon terms like 'planet', 'moon' and possibly even 'star' and invent new words with precise meanings. It's not uncommon to have to do this in science when the meaning of old words becomes impossibly difficult to deal with.
...until we imagine ourselves ourselves are close by a distant star - when we'll want to call it a 'Sun' again. When we sit on a sunny day on some extrasolar planet, we'll still say "What a nice day it is, the sun is shining"...no matter how much the astronomers complain about it.
Non-scientists have words like 'butterfly' and 'moth' - which have no clear scientific distinction - we also make distinctions where there are none. In common parlance, we orbit a "Sun" - not a "Star". Stars are little dots in the sky - but a sun is a huge nearby thing.
So scientific rigor can only be satisfied by making new words with rigerous definitions - rather than trying to pin down arbitary non-scientific historical usage of existing words.
If they allow new solar-orbiting bodies to be called planets then whatever cutoff they choose will be utterly arbitary. If they define Pluto to not be a planet then a few billion people will have learned the wrong thing in school and a similar number of books will now be *WRONG* for no other reason than we decided to make them wrong. You can't easily change what people believe to be a fact - and you certainly can't re-publish a billion text books.
So: Pluto is a "Planet" because it always was one. Astronomers should not care a damn about whether the 10th 'thing' is a planet or not because the word 'planet' and 'asteroid' carry about as much distinction as 'butterfly' and 'moth' or 'sun' and 'star'.
They just need new words.
We can do this - and it's easier than arguing about definitions of commonplace words that do not have (and never have had) a formal definition.
Yes - just look at the *AWFUL* 2D Buzz-Lightyear cartoon series they did...Urgh!
The log2(earnings/costs) equation only has predictive value if you spend as lavishly on the sequels as you did on the original movie. If you make really cheap knock-offs then each one can make *far* less money and still be profitable.
The annoying thing (as always) is that there are enough people who will watch anything to keep low budget crap profitable - and enough smart people will fail to watch even very good stuff to make it unprofitable no matter how high quality it is.
We're doomed.
We've all been talking about the feature-length movies - but IMHO, they are not Pixar's best work.
Pixar's best work was undoubtedly the 5 minute shorts they did for SigGraph audiences every year: The Adventures of Andre and Wally B, Luxo Jr (now seen in the intro to all Pixar movies), Red's Dream, Tin Toy, KnickKnack...to name but a few. Those are little gems of movies. The full length stuff they have done since with Disney has been pretty good - but sustaining the quality and humor for that amount of time is hard.
Luxo Jr was nominated for an Oscar in '86 - Tin toy won "Best animated short" in '88
If you havn't seen these yet, there is a collection of them under the title "Tiny Toy Stories" - although I've only seen it on VHS (Amazon has it on sale for $0.50!) - I highly recommend them.
I read somewhere that a rule-of-thumb for sequels is that each sequel makes approximately half the money of the one before it. Hence, you can estimate the number of viable sequels for a movie as:
log-to-base-2 ( takings / costs )
(That's the total number of movies made - including the original).
Toy Story made seven times as much as it cost: log2($356 million / $50 million) which is log2(7) - which falls a little short of 3. Toy Story 2 did about what the rule of thumb would suggest. It made three and a half times what it cost (grossed $485M and cost $125M) - almost exactly half of what Toy Story 1 made. Hence a third movie ought to make about 1.75 times what it costs to make - which is just about a reasonable decision - financially speaking.
This is something a big business like Disney can understand. Another sequel is a sure fire "limited success". It's not going to be amazing - but it won't flop disasterously either. They'll probably make a couple of hundred million out of it. If their own creative teams were to spend the production money on something else, it would be risky...lots of Disney movies are total flops.
But given Pixar's 100% track record (not one box office flop so far) - it would OBVIOUSLY be better to have their creative team make something new than to churn out sequels because a new concept can earn seven times what it costs (eg Toy Story), a sequel only three times and a second sequel only one and a half times.
Therefore, having Pixar turn out sequels is a STUPID idea. If they can make another new concept and earn 7x their costs - then Disney stand to make half a gigabuck more than they can get from a sequel with similar investment.
Please, Disney realise that the very best you can do with your new investment is LEAVE IT ALONE. Let Pixar be Pixar - don't exert any corporate influence whatever. It's what the public wants - but it make sound financial sense too.
All this hype about how vastly much paper you get if you print it all out misses the wonder of the thing.
The wonder isn't how BIG the human genome is - the amazing thing is how *TINY* it is.
The human genome is 3 billion base pairs...each base pair is one of only four possibilities - so two bits each. 750 Megabytes...that's one CD-ROM. There is a lot of redundancy in it too - many of those base pairs are never 'expressed' as proteins, many are replicated redundantly dozens of times. So with compression, or even just deleting the junk - you'd get it down to maybe 100 to 200 megs - tops.
I find it utterly amazing that all that complexity is so amazingly compactly encoded.
Yeah - that's a lot of bits of paper - or 600 floppy disks or some other bullshit - but by the standards of modern media, it's MICROSCOPIC.
Announcements like this would do better to explain how LITTLE data this really is - that's the wonder of the thing.
Why on earth use something as complex as a robot? What's wrong with using ultra-cheap computer graphics instead? Surely the effect must be identical for the viewer. Anything with that many motors has got to be expensive and unreliable.
Whilst this certainly is a case of plagiarism, it's slightly unusual in that the material involved was CopyLeft'ed.
Usually, the problem with plagiarism is that copying the material was illegal.
But Wikipedia ALLOWS people to copy articles, parts of articles - or even the whole darned encyclopedia. That's just fine so long as you follow the CopyLeft license in classic OpenSource style. So in this case the problem ISN'T that the material was copied - it was that the reporter didn't provide the required attribution and pass on the CopyLeft agreement to his readership.
It's a subtle distinction - but an important one.
Wikipedia tends to deliberately down-play who the original authors were. The only way to find out who originally wrote the work is to trawl through the history of the document...and in some cases, that's a major undertaking in itself. So the attribution that we're looking for isn't "Thanks to Joe Shmoe who wrote this paragraph" - it's something like "Go to Wikipedia to read the full text of this article".
The Wiki license actually says explicitly that a 'link' back to the original article is all that is required to fulfill the license terms. So all a newspaper has to do is to add a little box somewhere with a list of Wikipedia URL's used in this edition - and they are good to go.
Seen this way, if you believe in the Wikipedian's ideal of improving the world by disseminating truth and well written prose, then you should be very happy that newspapers are printing large chunks of Wikipedia since it can only improve on the quality of newspaper articles which very often are full of small factual errors. If reporters use Wikipedia material instead of writing new stuff, their reports will presumably be more accurate and better written.
So let's not discourage this by firing reporters - instead lets just educate newspapers about the backwards link requirement and positively encourage them to copy as much material as they feel they need.
I'd *FAR* rather they did that than to have them read well written articles in Wikipedia and rewrite them in their own words (making mistakes in the process). In the cases where the Wiki article isn't well written, I'd strongly encourage them to fix the Wikipedia and THEN publish the results.
But attribution is a necessary part of that deal.
You know - it's possible that all the math books were checked out by fascinated readers, yet all the UFO books are of little interest and therefore sitting on the library shelves.
Hey! It's *possible*.
OK - well at least I tried.
We all know that advancements in technology can cost people their jobs. However, in the case of the building industry in Texas, the effect of introducing new technology can often be somewhat delayed.
...sigh...
Back in 1997, my new house was in the slow process of changing from plans on paper into bricks on concrete. One of the tasks that has to be done early on is to lay out the shape of the house accurately onto the land. My builder uses a sub-contractor to do that - and I had occasion to watch him work. He arrived in a beat up old pickup truck with four 'migrant workers' sitting in the back. In order to lay out the initial 'bounding rectangle' of the building, they follow this algorithm:
* Measure a baseline for the long edge of the rectangle. Mark it with two stakes hammered into the ground and tie a length of nylon string between them.
* Tie a second piece of string to one of the stakes and measure out the width of the rectangle along it. Eyeball the angle between the new edge and the baseline so it's roughly 90 degrees and you have an 'L' shape. One guy holds the string there.
* Do the same at the other end of the baseline. Now you have a 'U' shape and two guys are holding the open ends of the strings.
* Take a third piece of string - equal in length to the length of the rectangle. Give one end to each of the two guys who are already holding string. 'jiggle' them until all three strings are tight. You now have a parallelogram made of string, staked out at two corners.
* Now take two long tape measures and with one guy standing at each corner of our parallelogram, position the tape measures along the two diagonals of the parallelogram. With two guys holding the tapes on the baseline stakes and the other two holding onto the strings and shouting out the lengths of the diagonals, they jiggle the two free points until all of the strings are tight and the two diagonals tape measures are reading the same lengths. This requires a lot of shouting, cursing and everyone telling everyone else which way to move.
* Now they have a rectangle - so they bash in two more stakes and then level the whole thing with a really impressive-looking laser contraption.
Well, I watched this with some amusement - and asked why they didn't just calculate the length of the diagonal. The boss guy said that you couldn't do that - "It's impossible". I told him about Pythagoras' theorem. With the aid of a calculator (he didn't know what that funny 'square-root' key was for), I was able to show him how easy it is to calculate the length of the diagonal and do away with all the ugly 'jiggling'.
"Wow!" he said. Then he thought for a moment - "Now I'll only need three guys to hold the string!"...and fired one of them on the spot! I thought he was kidding - but the next day when they were measuring out the place for the garage, there was one less guy holding the string.
So, a 2,500 year old technological advance cost some poor guy his job.
This certainly sounds like a potato-battery. You've got two dissimilar metals (aluminum nail, copper earthing spike) - and an electrolyte (water in the ground turning into sap in the tree). So, as expected, you get a small voltage - and it's certainly going to be something less than two volts.
How much current you get depends on a bunch of stuff - but it won't be much. There is no new science here - he could have done the same thing much more easily with a row of potatoes - and for SURE you won't be generating any useful amount of power from doing this.
However, cranking this up to 12v per tree isn't gonna happen unless you put a bunch of trees in series.
The guy is a crackpot - have nothing more to do with him!
There is a good argument for P2P systems in general in that there are MANY uses for them other than stealing music - and yet many P2P systems have been taken down by hoards of ravening *AA lawyers. But it's quite a bit harder to come up with ways in which this device could be used legally. It's a music player - so people aren't likely to be using it for copying photos they've taken or software they've written - such as is the case with P2P on the Internet. How many people do you think you'll just naturally happen to bump into who:
a) Have a compatible player...and...
b) Have OpenSourced music on offer...and...
c) Actually want to recommend it to you.
I would be quite utterly amazed if I got one interesting and legal track in a year of use.
Furthermore, if the owners of these machines don't actively send the files, it's likely that there is a good case for suing the manufacturers for causing copyrights to be breached.
They are gonna get their asses sued unless they weigh this thing down with so much in the way of DRM that it'll be useless in practice.
The article links to the manufacturer says that this is for sending "Recommendations" - so perhaps it is intended that one only ships a short recommendation in the form of a brief clip.
Another possibility is that you'd have to be signed up to a music service based on the 'subscription' model...in that case, this is music you could just have easily downloaded for yourself - so the 'recommendation' thing would really be the only reason to use it.