Whatever problems you saw with Iron Man are due entirely to crappy CG effects. There is no way to move an actor fast enough that they just "appear" somewhere in the next frame - film is based on motion blur, at 24fps, a single frame shows 1/24th of a second's worth of motion, not a discreet instant.
I've heard how many can tell the difference between 100 and say, 160fps on CRT monitors. Do you have a reference?
I'm going to guess you're thinking of 3D games? That fps measure is not all that similar to film frames.
I bet if you saw a very fast motion scene, you'd be able to tell the difference between 100 and 200fps, and even between 200 and 500fps.
Based on what?
I've heard just once in my life that about 500fps is the true perceptible limit. I think that figure is more realistic.
Well, ok, but based on what? At a certain point, all you see in a very fast motion scene is a blur, it doesn't really matter how many frames are used to show you that blur.
Simple solution - fire the 80 incompetent ones, the other 20 will be able to get a lot more done. Heck, also give them 1/4 of the money you were wasting on the dead weight.
I expected to see a bunch of pictures of random wiring cabinets, and I did see a bunch of pictures of random wiring cabinets, and somehow failed to get excited about it.
What on Earth are you ranting about? Who said anything about "safety"?
For the last 15 years or so, the main goal in language design has been programmer productivity. That whole "we shouldn't be using systems programming languages for application development" thing was solved a long time ago. Because it was a stupid argument to begin with.
Not to mention that Mirah has the exact same feature set as Java, so I'm not really sure what's being dumbed-down here.
As a hive race, they might have a different threat model than we do.
Right, because why would their thread model include the civilization they are planning to conquer?
Now combine that with an alien species that might not have the mindset needed for security
Right, because an advanced, military-based race that subsists on destroying other civilizations would not have a "mindset for security". Makes perfect sense.
It actually gets back to the main problem with the movie (well, main plot-related problem, at least): that idea that we could mount some kind of defense against a species capable of interstellar travel is just plain silly - they could wipe out all life on Earth, or any specific subset of life they wish, within minutes.
A) They couldn't even power up the alien tech until the invasion.
B) It's a warship in an invasion of a modestly technically competent race
C) See B
D) Damn unlikely (and doesn't address the problem)
The main complaint was that apparently Jeff Goldblum only needed a couple of hours to slap together a virus that can completely shut down an alien civilization. Even if he spent years doing nothing else, it's still ridiculous. That he apparently didn't even need to think about how to interface his MacBook with the alien ship is pretty secondary (but no less ridiculous).
NASA is making the unpopular but correct call of killing this "ancient" (compare 20+ years of flights to Apollo) program and moving on.
Seems pretty arbitrary to call it "ancient"; both the Soyuz and Proton programs, for example, have been going on since the mid-60s, and are doing quite well.
"The Life Jacket Detection (LJD) enhances Kestrel Maritime EO (KMEO) capability to automatically detect (CAD) small, high visibility objects (SHVOs) whilst searching (WS) wide maritime areas (WMAs)."
I know the popular thing is to constantly cry about our precious privacy, but I'm more worried about my medical records not showing up when they are needed, not the other way around. I'm thinking of allergies, drug interaction, and relevant medical history during emergencies, and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't the frame rate that's going to be the problem with The Hobbit, it's Peter Jackson's altering Tolkien's story and characters.
No, the real problem is going to be ceaseless whining from Tolkien nerds. Preemptive whining, in some cases.
Whatever problems you saw with Iron Man are due entirely to crappy CG effects. There is no way to move an actor fast enough that they just "appear" somewhere in the next frame - film is based on motion blur, at 24fps, a single frame shows 1/24th of a second's worth of motion, not a discreet instant.
I've heard how many can tell the difference between 100 and say, 160fps on CRT monitors. Do you have a reference?
I'm going to guess you're thinking of 3D games? That fps measure is not all that similar to film frames.
I bet if you saw a very fast motion scene, you'd be able to tell the difference between 100 and 200fps, and even between 200 and 500fps.
Based on what?
I've heard just once in my life that about 500fps is the true perceptible limit. I think that figure is more realistic.
Well, ok, but based on what? At a certain point, all you see in a very fast motion scene is a blur, it doesn't really matter how many frames are used to show you that blur.
Well, #3 and #4 happen to be true, so there's that at least.
Winklevi
Don't see how. It seems to be Germanic, so "Winklevossen" or "Winklevosse", but could be any number of other things.
Or are we just assuming that all words have second declension Latin roots?
I'm not going to run out and replace my $100 2TB external backup with one of these any time soon.
And I'm probably not going to replace my RAM with a tape drive; what's your point?
I think you're giving yourself too much credit, a complete bastard wouldn't have asked about backups - that way, it's two lessons in one.
100 engineers, for mysql.com?
Simple solution - fire the 80 incompetent ones, the other 20 will be able to get a lot more done. Heck, also give them 1/4 of the money you were wasting on the dead weight.
The fact that the company which produces and sells MySQL wasn't using SQL correctly is indeed ironic.
Having used MySQL, I don't see anything unexpected here.
SQL injection attacks? What, is it 1998 again all of a sudden?
Are there really still people out there mashing user input together into a string that they then feed to the database?
Why would you even do this - it's not easier, the performance is worse, and it certainly doesn't make for more readable code.
This level of ineptitude is just shocking.
I expected to see a bunch of pictures of random wiring cabinets, and I did see a bunch of pictures of random wiring cabinets, and somehow failed to get excited about it.
Well, 89.12 trillion once Limewire pays up.
It's bad enough that thousands are spoiling electricity to run seti@home
Just so we're clear, to "spoil" electricity means to use it for something you personally don't approve of?
How much electricity are you spoiling by posting here?
after all, you have lots of machines around the world pretending to be creating money, but they may just as well be sending spam
Ah, ok, you think computers are magic, don't you?
What on Earth are you ranting about? Who said anything about "safety"?
For the last 15 years or so, the main goal in language design has been programmer productivity. That whole "we shouldn't be using systems programming languages for application development" thing was solved a long time ago. Because it was a stupid argument to begin with.
Not to mention that Mirah has the exact same feature set as Java, so I'm not really sure what's being dumbed-down here.
Doesn't Groovy and Grails already do that?
They are not all that similar; for one thing, Groovy is dynamically typed and Mirah is static (with possible dynamic extensions coming in the future).
would make filtering slightly simpler in the future by blocking the entire TLD (as well as existing .com porn sites)
How does blocking something new, in addition to what you're blocking already, make filtering easier?
As a hive race, they might have a different threat model than we do.
Right, because why would their thread model include the civilization they are planning to conquer?
Now combine that with an alien species that might not have the mindset needed for security
Right, because an advanced, military-based race that subsists on destroying other civilizations would not have a "mindset for security". Makes perfect sense.
It actually gets back to the main problem with the movie (well, main plot-related problem, at least): that idea that we could mount some kind of defense against a species capable of interstellar travel is just plain silly - they could wipe out all life on Earth, or any specific subset of life they wish, within minutes.
It was only a real file browser in the sense that it actually existed, not that anyone would actually use it.
Sort of like Doom is a real process manager.
A) They couldn't even power up the alien tech until the invasion.
B) It's a warship in an invasion of a modestly technically competent race
C) See B
D) Damn unlikely (and doesn't address the problem)
The main complaint was that apparently Jeff Goldblum only needed a couple of hours to slap together a virus that can completely shut down an alien civilization. Even if he spent years doing nothing else, it's still ridiculous. That he apparently didn't even need to think about how to interface his MacBook with the alien ship is pretty secondary (but no less ridiculous).
I don't mean to pick on you, but I'm not surprised that a reader of "SlashDot" enjoyed the summary that felt the need to explain who Alan Turing is.
And yeah, "Turing Award" would've been a hell of a lot more informative than "Nobel Prize of Computing", whatever the hell that is.
NASA is making the unpopular but correct call of killing this "ancient" (compare 20+ years of flights to Apollo) program and moving on.
Seems pretty arbitrary to call it "ancient"; both the Soyuz and Proton programs, for example, have been going on since the mid-60s, and are doing quite well.
If you are ever in a situation where there are other people around, it will be totally fucking annoying.
Notice that that's not a "isn't ready yet" problem, it will always be true.
Here, I'll fix it:
"The Life Jacket Detection (LJD) enhances Kestrel Maritime EO (KMEO) capability to automatically detect (CAD) small, high visibility objects (SHVOs) whilst searching (WS) wide maritime areas (WMAs)."
That should do it (TSDI).
I know the popular thing is to constantly cry about our precious privacy, but I'm more worried about my medical records not showing up when they are needed, not the other way around. I'm thinking of allergies, drug interaction, and relevant medical history during emergencies, and the like.
Yes, because the police usually collect "DNA sequences" from a crime scene. Using teeny-tiny tweezers, I imagine.
(Never mind that SNPs aren't used in forensic DNA analysis)