"Wow, how soon before we get transformers as planes? Allright! How about a bus/plane combination? That would be sweet!"
Err. If they did that, wouldn't both the bus mode and the flight mode really really suffer from it? The reason why this particular project can work is that we're not talking a huge transformation here. Just an expansion of wing length.
... but I hope this lights a fire under Nintendo to give us a peek soon at the DS system. Wish I could say something about Sony, but I'm not a PS2 owner. heh.
" I find it rather ironic that Doom 3 is being used as an example. People had to upgrade their hardware (ie purchase a 3d card) to play Quake 3. id has always been ahead of others in the area of requirements, this should be no surprise to PC gamers."
What bugs me about the headline (sorry, din't RTFA, flame away) is the assumption that all games are like Doom 3 or other 'break the mold' type games. The general complaint I hear about PC gaming is that the developers tend to aim too low to reach a broader audience. Graphics suffer as a result. Maybe things have changed in the last year that I've been out of the gaming loop, but I wonder. My laptop with it's crappy Geforce 4 MX card still plays games today.
"Students learn to repeat the program's motto: ''If you don't pay for it, you've stolen it."
That is so incredibly wrong I don't even know where to start.
Hold on guys, this isn't the argument to put forth. The response will simply be "we're talking about downloading of copyrighted content, not stuff that's given away."
Focus on this instead: The MPAA (or the RIAA for that matter) does not have the proper view of when something is paid for. For example, they equate the increase in CDRs sold as an increase in piracy. This motto sounds righteous in favor of being morally sound, but the reality is that it can still get you into deep doo doo.
"In Vegas you can witness the the same behaviour around slot machines. Maybe they know something the rest of don't?"
Not so surprising. I think the rationale is along the lines of "This machine has to spew out a lot of money at SOME point in its existence. So the longer I stay with this one, the more my odds go up that I'll be the one who pulls the lever at the right time." They feel that if they go around to other machines, they'll catch them at different points in their lives and have lower risk of winning.
I'd like to think that people are stupid about this, but I have to be honest, it's exactly the strategy I'd employ.
"this is not the case, JPEG produces visible artefacts in almost every case(if they really are undetectable in an image it's either very noisy to start with, or an insanely high quality setting has been used), i think the most important factor is just how sensitive you are to them."
This is not true. Want proof? Okay, open Photoshop. Take an image, save a duplicate of it as a jpeg with reasonably high quality. (say.. 8, for example.) Then, open that new image so you've got the original and the re-saved JPEG image open. Take the one you just saved, copy and paste it into a new layer above the original image. Set its transfer mode to 'Difference'. You'll get an image that's black. If you levels adjust it up, you'll see the noise eventually, but the closer to black that difference image is, the less damage that JPEG did to the image. (Of course, your results will be different if you resave that image as quality 3 or something...)
"Despite warnings every year people get blinded because they wanted to see a partial eclipse or some other solar event directly. Use a telescope or binoculars and project the image onto a piece of white cardboard or paper."
Man I got in trouble in high school over something like this once. We had a solar eclipse. It's a rare event! Unfortunately my English teacher has seen 5 or 6 of them in her ancient life time. So she just couldn't understand why we were all running to the window. So after she barked at us to sit down, I caught a reflection of the sun with my watch and reflected the eclipse onto the chalkboard. Unfortunately, it made the class laugh. The principal, at least, was more understanding about what happened.
"he proposition that a 1980 Yemenite meteorite originated from the martian moon, Phobos. It would be the first moon rock from another planet."
1.) Isn't Phobos a moon, not a planet?
2.) Aren't pretty much all meteorites extra-terrestrial in nature?
I don't mean to be nitpicky about the phrase itself, but it doesn't seem like a big deal to call it that. Maybe if it had said "First meteorite to hit our planet from another planet in our own solar system that we can positively identify..." I'd be more enthused. Afterall, it is a huge challenge to get our instruments over to other planets. If they'd send chunks to us it'd be a heck of a lot easier to study those worlds.
"Yes, other studies have found any stimulating (fast) music works. Certain people still like to pretend it's an endorcement of classical music."
Not a big fan of classical music myself, but I can sort of see it working. Classical music has more of a pattern to it than modern dance music. Memorizing it takes a little more mental resources, depending on the song that is. I remember listening to a well made techno remake of Beethoven's 5th. (It's from the Jaguar Game Defender 2000, you can find it here, it's Trak 8 Bonus level..) I remember listening to it and thinking about how rich it felt. I never cared for the original orchestral version but the techno one was done very artistically. It felt like it had more artistic patterns to it than my typical library of techno music.
I really can't rationalize this on a a scientific level, but there's far more to this song to appreciate than I normally run across. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if more of my neurons were firing off pulses as a result of it.
I really don't think, though, it's because it's classical music specifically. I think it just has more to do with the way the composers had to make the music back then. Writing notes down on paper. One can imagine how, during the creation of that song, they'd make the notes themselves as artistic as possible. These days, I don't think music is quite made like that. Seems to be more about making the lyrics work and attaching a few loops and beats to it to chain the words together. I think the more 'engaging' music could easily be made today, it's a matter of focusing the artist down to making art from the patterns of notes.
Or maybe I'm just on crack. I just couldn't help remembering how much I appreciated hearing that techno remix of that song after reading the article today. Lots of ideas about that.
Actually, that movie illustrates exactly why video game to movie doesn't really work. Those numbnuts in Hollywood would try to film it as live-action. Can you imagine how ridiculous that whole movie would be starring live actors? We could never accept that they were that one dimensional, and the jokes wouldn't be that funny.
That really is part of the problem, they never make these movies animated when they should. The rules change considerably when the characters are, in essence, just cartoons.
"The "undetectable degredation" is sometimes detectable, or might become detectable if repeatedly applied."
A decent JPEG encoder just adds a slight amount of noise (rarely more than 2 values in either direction..) to the image, and cameras aren't exactly crystal clear to begin with. Re-encoding can cause these effects to multiply. The simple answer is to save the JPEG as a lossless image (like.PNG) if you're going to modify/remodify it. Then save it as JPEG again when you're ready for the final output. Okay, that's two JPEG saves instead of just one, but again it's not noticable degradation. If the image needs to be resaved after that, call up the lossless version earlier and work from that. That's how a lot of us artists work, anyway. We don't haveta deal with crummy digital camera images.
"Images on (some) web pages probably don't need to be very high quality (applies to both, I guess)."
Given that we're still getting wireless (i.e. celllular, not wifi) off the ground and that PDAs only have so much storage, hopping over to.PNG is not going to do anything but hurt that situation.
"Lossy compression feels dirty (like mp3 vs. flac)."
Comparing JPG to MP3 is not really fair. Granted, some sites do compress their jpegs down so far that the artifacts are quite noticable. However,for stuff like showing digital photos on the web, you just can't see the artifacts unless somebody was just a bad pilot with the software they were using. I know this because I've run a difference filter on various images compressed with JPEG. The difference is so subtle. It's not like MP3 which is compressed enough that you can hear the degradation in it. It'd be more like comparing Mp3 at 500kbits to Flac. At that point, man it'd be hard (not impossible, I suppose) to see the difference.
JPEG is quite useful, even with today's broadband availability.
"When patents are doing nothing but preventing a good (or in the case of jpeg, fair) technology from being fully utilized, they are complety useless."
Except that's not what's happening. That's just what Slashdot is reporting. Slashdot's not going to post a story saying "Patent used in a good way!"
My previous company was a small under-funded startup. They developed a cool technology and panented it. If patents were 'abolished', then they would easily have been wiped out by a pet project of Microsoft or Sony or somebody who likes fiddling around with technology and seeing who's interested in it.
Sorry, I don't see the value in removing patents from the mix. Rather, I think they need to get a checks and balances system going.
"At nearly $400, I don't see the ePaper providing a noticable savings over a comparable B&W LCD display, which could easily be used in a similar device."
Yeah I really hate how prices never go down in the technology world.
"I am talking purely about the memory bus and the speed gains from that, not the 32bit vs 64bit nature."
I apologize, I was running two ideas together and communicated them poorly. I don't think the memory bus is making that significant of difference with rendering. If it was, there would (potentially...) be a larger difference between the P4's and the Athlons when rendering. True, lots of data has to be pulled from RAM to the processor to perform calculations on, but the big bottleneck seems to be in getting on those numbers crunched as opposed to how fast they can be retrieved.
Or maybe I'm full of shit. I'll be honest with you, I don't really know. The reason I'm even coming up to suggest this is that I've performed rendering comparisons between P4 and AMD and the results suggested that instruction cache and FSB weren't the big bottlenecks. Why? Because the older generation AMD was keeping up with the most recent generation of P4.
"We definitely have the means to cause large-scale climate changes, means which have not been present on earth in all but the last few of those billions of years."
Eh I think the Earth is more resilient than it is given credit for. I mean, if the planet can remain habitable after ginormous asteroids smack it around, then how much damage can man really cause?
Slashdot Mirror
"Wow, how soon before we get transformers as planes? Allright! How about a bus/plane combination? That would be sweet!"
Err. If they did that, wouldn't both the bus mode and the flight mode really really suffer from it? The reason why this particular project can work is that we're not talking a huge transformation here. Just an expansion of wing length.
... but I hope this lights a fire under Nintendo to give us a peek soon at the DS system. Wish I could say something about Sony, but I'm not a PS2 owner. heh.
" I find it rather ironic that Doom 3 is being used as an example. People had to upgrade their hardware (ie purchase a 3d card) to play Quake 3. id has always been ahead of others in the area of requirements, this should be no surprise to PC gamers."
What bugs me about the headline (sorry, din't RTFA, flame away) is the assumption that all games are like Doom 3 or other 'break the mold' type games. The general complaint I hear about PC gaming is that the developers tend to aim too low to reach a broader audience. Graphics suffer as a result. Maybe things have changed in the last year that I've been out of the gaming loop, but I wonder. My laptop with it's crappy Geforce 4 MX card still plays games today.
"Ahem, if I *tried* to pay my gf for sex she'd more more than a little P.O.ed. ;-)"
"Yes dear!" -- You haven't paid for it?
Hold on guys, this isn't the argument to put forth. The response will simply be "we're talking about downloading of copyrighted content, not stuff that's given away."
Focus on this instead: The MPAA (or the RIAA for that matter) does not have the proper view of when something is paid for. For example, they equate the increase in CDRs sold as an increase in piracy. This motto sounds righteous in favor of being morally sound, but the reality is that it can still get you into deep doo doo.
"....now Microsoft is making deals with Universities for students to soley use their software and follow the Microsoft way of life."
So you'd rather they teach you stuff that isn't very practical in a career?
"Too bad those words are copyrighted..."
In that limited respect, fair use still exists.
"In Vegas you can witness the the same behaviour around slot machines. Maybe they know something the rest of don't?"
Not so surprising. I think the rationale is along the lines of "This machine has to spew out a lot of money at SOME point in its existence. So the longer I stay with this one, the more my odds go up that I'll be the one who pulls the lever at the right time." They feel that if they go around to other machines, they'll catch them at different points in their lives and have lower risk of winning.
I'd like to think that people are stupid about this, but I have to be honest, it's exactly the strategy I'd employ.
"this is not the case, JPEG produces visible artefacts in almost every case(if they really are undetectable in an image it's either very noisy to start with, or an insanely high quality setting has been used), i think the most important factor is just how sensitive you are to them."
This is not true. Want proof? Okay, open Photoshop. Take an image, save a duplicate of it as a jpeg with reasonably high quality. (say.. 8, for example.) Then, open that new image so you've got the original and the re-saved JPEG image open. Take the one you just saved, copy and paste it into a new layer above the original image. Set its transfer mode to 'Difference'. You'll get an image that's black. If you levels adjust it up, you'll see the noise eventually, but the closer to black that difference image is, the less damage that JPEG did to the image. (Of course, your results will be different if you resave that image as quality 3 or something...)
"Despite warnings every year people get blinded because they wanted to see a partial eclipse or some other solar event directly.
Use a telescope or binoculars and project the image onto a piece of white cardboard or paper."
Man I got in trouble in high school over something like this once. We had a solar eclipse. It's a rare event! Unfortunately my English teacher has seen 5 or 6 of them in her ancient life time. So she just couldn't understand why we were all running to the window. So after she barked at us to sit down, I caught a reflection of the sun with my watch and reflected the eclipse onto the chalkboard. Unfortunately, it made the class laugh. The principal, at least, was more understanding about what happened.
"he proposition that a 1980 Yemenite meteorite originated from the martian moon, Phobos. It would be the first moon rock from another planet."
1.) Isn't Phobos a moon, not a planet?
2.) Aren't pretty much all meteorites extra-terrestrial in nature?
I don't mean to be nitpicky about the phrase itself, but it doesn't seem like a big deal to call it that. Maybe if it had said "First meteorite to hit our planet from another planet in our own solar system that we can positively identify..." I'd be more enthused. Afterall, it is a huge challenge to get our instruments over to other planets. If they'd send chunks to us it'd be a heck of a lot easier to study those worlds.
"Yes, other studies have found any stimulating (fast) music works. Certain people still like to pretend it's an endorcement of classical music."
Not a big fan of classical music myself, but I can sort of see it working. Classical music has more of a pattern to it than modern dance music. Memorizing it takes a little more mental resources, depending on the song that is. I remember listening to a well made techno remake of Beethoven's 5th. (It's from the Jaguar Game Defender 2000, you can find it here, it's Trak 8 Bonus level..) I remember listening to it and thinking about how rich it felt. I never cared for the original orchestral version but the techno one was done very artistically. It felt like it had more artistic patterns to it than my typical library of techno music.
I really can't rationalize this on a a scientific level, but there's far more to this song to appreciate than I normally run across. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if more of my neurons were firing off pulses as a result of it.
I really don't think, though, it's because it's classical music specifically. I think it just has more to do with the way the composers had to make the music back then. Writing notes down on paper. One can imagine how, during the creation of that song, they'd make the notes themselves as artistic as possible. These days, I don't think music is quite made like that. Seems to be more about making the lyrics work and attaching a few loops and beats to it to chain the words together. I think the more 'engaging' music could easily be made today, it's a matter of focusing the artist down to making art from the patterns of notes.
Or maybe I'm just on crack. I just couldn't help remembering how much I appreciated hearing that techno remix of that song after reading the article today. Lots of ideas about that.
"Do you think that patent would stop MS or any other large company?"
Yes, because it did.
"Did you mean this?"
Actually, that movie illustrates exactly why video game to movie doesn't really work. Those numbnuts in Hollywood would try to film it as live-action. Can you imagine how ridiculous that whole movie would be starring live actors? We could never accept that they were that one dimensional, and the jokes wouldn't be that funny.
That really is part of the problem, they never make these movies animated when they should. The rules change considerably when the characters are, in essence, just cartoons.
"The "undetectable degredation" is sometimes detectable, or might become detectable if repeatedly applied."
.PNG) if you're going to modify/remodify it. Then save it as JPEG again when you're ready for the final output. Okay, that's two JPEG saves instead of just one, but again it's not noticable degradation. If the image needs to be resaved after that, call up the lossless version earlier and work from that. That's how a lot of us artists work, anyway. We don't haveta deal with crummy digital camera images.
.PNG is not going to do anything but hurt that situation.
A decent JPEG encoder just adds a slight amount of noise (rarely more than 2 values in either direction..) to the image, and cameras aren't exactly crystal clear to begin with. Re-encoding can cause these effects to multiply. The simple answer is to save the JPEG as a lossless image (like
"Images on (some) web pages probably don't need to be very high quality (applies to both, I guess)."
Given that we're still getting wireless (i.e. celllular, not wifi) off the ground and that PDAs only have so much storage, hopping over to
"Lossy compression feels dirty (like mp3 vs. flac)."
Comparing JPG to MP3 is not really fair. Granted, some sites do compress their jpegs down so far that the artifacts are quite noticable. However,for stuff like showing digital photos on the web, you just can't see the artifacts unless somebody was just a bad pilot with the software they were using. I know this because I've run a difference filter on various images compressed with JPEG. The difference is so subtle. It's not like MP3 which is compressed enough that you can hear the degradation in it. It'd be more like comparing Mp3 at 500kbits to Flac. At that point, man it'd be hard (not impossible, I suppose) to see the difference.
JPEG is quite useful, even with today's broadband availability.
"If PNGs are too huge, why not reduce the color bit depth or scale it down? (for internet transfer)"
Uh, why are either of these options better than an undetectable degredation of an image in the form of noise?
"When patents are doing nothing but preventing a good (or in the case of jpeg, fair) technology from being fully utilized, they are complety useless."
Except that's not what's happening. That's just what Slashdot is reporting. Slashdot's not going to post a story saying "Patent used in a good way!"
My previous company was a small under-funded startup. They developed a cool technology and panented it. If patents were 'abolished', then they would easily have been wiped out by a pet project of Microsoft or Sony or somebody who likes fiddling around with technology and seeing who's interested in it.
Sorry, I don't see the value in removing patents from the mix. Rather, I think they need to get a checks and balances system going.
" but has anyone noticed that this is also just using /. to advertise the ebay auction to the target audience?"
So?
"At nearly $400, I don't see the ePaper providing a noticable savings over a comparable B&W LCD display, which could easily be used in a similar device."
Yeah I really hate how prices never go down in the technology world.
"This stuff will help bring about the end of history."
Yeah because people will print stuff to epaper without burning a CD along the line.
" while alot of paper has vanished. "books" in electronic only form will vanish even faster than paper."
In the digital world? Oh I don't think so.
"I am talking purely about the memory bus and the speed gains from that, not the 32bit vs 64bit nature."
I apologize, I was running two ideas together and communicated them poorly. I don't think the memory bus is making that significant of difference with rendering. If it was, there would (potentially...) be a larger difference between the P4's and the Athlons when rendering. True, lots of data has to be pulled from RAM to the processor to perform calculations on, but the big bottleneck seems to be in getting on those numbers crunched as opposed to how fast they can be retrieved.
Or maybe I'm full of shit. I'll be honest with you, I don't really know. The reason I'm even coming up to suggest this is that I've performed rendering comparisons between P4 and AMD and the results suggested that instruction cache and FSB weren't the big bottlenecks. Why? Because the older generation AMD was keeping up with the most recent generation of P4.
"that is exactly the parent's point. If its stab resistant how can it also be sewable?"
Ever notice that you can't really stab somebody with an in-tact baseball bat?
"And is used as a major component of both cough syrup and paintballs..." ... and flaming Moe's!
"We definitely have the means to cause large-scale climate changes, means which have not been present on earth in all but the last few of those billions of years."
Eh I think the Earth is more resilient than it is given credit for. I mean, if the planet can remain habitable after ginormous asteroids smack it around, then how much damage can man really cause?