If you read the NYT article it makes it sound more like those Africans would be sitting around starving or something if it wasn't for the coltan mining jobs. I mean god forbid someone should do manual labor in the outdoors... it's just horrid!
I'm not saying that people should be digging in animal preserves, but that is 'illegal' over there.
If you read the article, the author seems to think that self-righteous bans on material from certain countries, as well as the tech slump are causing more harm to people then the mining system.
Emacs, vim - I agree. Except for that without vim, many Unices wouldn't come with an editor and every admin should know to use it - if he doesn't, I'd fire him.
And only at 1000p HTDV resolution. That might look nice on your TV at home, and it might look nice in a standard movie theater, but the fact is that's pretty low res for movies. It's lower then regular 35 millimeter film.
OTOH, all they had to do was re-render the digital graphics at a higher resolution, which as someone else who's also seen it, seems to think they did.
If they had filmed this on regular film, or at, say 5 or 6 megapixles, you wouldn't have felt that way.
I was never really a fan of ICQ. The interface was horrible, and way, way over designed. The company's business model was 'give away the software, charge for the manual' and I think it affected their design decisions. You shouldn't need a 450 page manual for IM software.
The UI design was atrocious, and the system itself was pretty insecure, even by windows user standards.
Anyway, that's beside the point. People still used it, and it can take a long time for people to migrate from crappy software to software that doesn't suck. (just look at how long people used MacOS 6-9. Look how many people still use Netscape 4)
But by AOL buying ICQ they locked up the IM market, and killed innovation in ICQ. I don't think ICQ would have ever innovated, but they could have. And by AOL purchasing it they were able to get a strangle hold on the market... Until M$ decided to bundle MSN...
So it made business sense, although it didn't really benefit the world.
Personally, I really wish some open standard would replace AIM/MSN so that we can use any software we like.
"flicker" like you see with A CRT or (I guess) movie is caused by the screen going from black to colored over and over again. You notice the change.
You don't notice flicker on things like LCDs because there is none. There is a 'frame rate' but the screen doesn't go black between each image.
Interestingly, I've never really noticed flicker at the movies even though the screen blanks only 48 times a second. 24hz flicker would be really obnoxious though.
Also, I can see flicker on a 72hz screen while moving images on it seem silky smooth.
One interesting effect of having a high enough frame rate is that you can actually see 'motion blur' with static images, for example with my old monitor I could do 640x480 at 120hz. Some 3d graphics would appear to blur as they moved, just like objects in the real world. You could probably produce some cool visual effects that at 120-200fps in a film. would be impossible at lower speeds.
I'm a bit partial to Nokia, as most of their phones are pretty cool compared to sprint "branded" phones from Samsung and others. But most of these Nokias seem to be only available in Europe, Africa and Asia, not the US. Are there any cool, color J2ME supporting phones out there from Nokia that will work in the US? (having a camera is a big plus:)
Other then that, does anyone have experience with these java supporting phones? Can you write your own games and upload them to the phone? Are there APIs for interacting with your phonebook, calendar, etc?
IMO, having a phone that's programmable to do whatever I want is far cooler then being able to download little games from the phone company.
My first reaction every time that I hear this is "isn't there lag in between when a user moves his eye and the computer adjusts?"
How often do you move you're head while sitting in front of the computer? Besides, the system only needs to know where you're eyes are down to the distance between you're eyes. On a system with a lag of 10ms, for example, you would need to move you're head 4 inches in 10ms before you would notice any distortion. That's 227 miles per hour. If you're head's moving that fast, you've got other things to worry about.
Even with a 100ms delay, you've still got to move you're head side to side at 23 miles an hour to lose the holographic display.
As far as eye tracking, if the software/hardware can produce images for 4 points of view, then just track four eyes with the camera, otherwise it's not an issue anyway. Repeat with more sets of eyes.
Sculpture, however has been around for quite a while, as have true holograms. I think the idea here is that you can have a holographic image that moves
There really isn't any compelling difference between the two formats from a normal user perspective. One comes with license fees, the other doesn't.
Oggs require more hardware to decode, There is an integer engine out, but I'm not sure how well it works, or how much CPU it needs compared to other codecs.
But the fact of the matter is, it does cost money to support ogg files on small devices, probably more then the licensing requirements for Mp3. It's not like they can just slap ogg support onto a device that might not have enough CPU power as an afterthought.
I was talking about putting Ogg support into portable players where CPU power is an issue. Any desktop computer made in the last 5 years should be able to play oggs files, I would assume.
In other words, since apple provided a plug in architecture for QuickTime, you can't really bitch about it not supporting OGG, since you can write one yourself (as these people did)
The other point was that supporting OGG in small devices requires more CPU usage, which might be more expensive then paying for MP3 or WMA licensing costs.
It's not like you can't play Oggs on a Mac, it's just that you can't play 'em in iTunes. You really have no right to bitch that they didn't write their own plug in, especially when they have a plug in architecture that you can extend.
Ogg is *shock* not really all that important right now. It might be free to put in hardware, but it's an open question as to wether the licensing costs for mp3 or WMA is more then the cost of the CPU power needed to decode oggs.
99% of voters were absolutely certain that the 2nd round would bring the good old traditional Center-Left vs Center-Right showdown (Jospin-Chirac in that case), so many people didn't even care to vote.
Yet, france had a 70% voter turn out, Far higher then any US elections:P
The ability to use it as a mouse by pointing it at a screen. For $200 I figured they ought to be able to do it, I mean how much did the NES Zapper cost back in the day? $25?
I guess I read that wrong. In that case, he's full of shit. For one thing, incandescent lights don't flicker, and for another, two signals at the same frequency won't cause other patterns.
It also wouldn't explain why monitors would flicker with the lights off, either.
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Someone should tell that to the bottled water folks!
If you read the NYT article it makes it sound more like those Africans would be sitting around starving or something if it wasn't for the coltan mining jobs. I mean god forbid someone should do manual labor in the outdoors... it's just horrid!
I'm not saying that people should be digging in animal preserves, but that is 'illegal' over there.
If you read the article, the author seems to think that self-righteous bans on material from certain countries, as well as the tech slump are causing more harm to people then the mining system.
And not only that, their waisting our precious "chemicals"!
Emacs, vim - I agree. Except for that without vim, many Unices wouldn't come with an editor and every admin should know to use it - if he doesn't, I'd fire him.
PICO FOREVER!!!!
Whats wrong with text protocols? Seems to work fine for http, smtp, ftp and everything else on the 'net these days, except telnet.
Ease of implementation == good. we have tons of bandwidth, and chatting dosn't take much of it.
And only at 1000p HTDV resolution. That might look nice on your TV at home, and it might look nice in a standard movie theater, but the fact is that's pretty low res for movies. It's lower then regular 35 millimeter film.
OTOH, all they had to do was re-render the digital graphics at a higher resolution, which as someone else who's also seen it, seems to think they did.
If they had filmed this on regular film, or at, say 5 or 6 megapixles, you wouldn't have felt that way.
They killed it.
I was never really a fan of ICQ. The interface was horrible, and way, way over designed. The company's business model was 'give away the software, charge for the manual' and I think it affected their design decisions. You shouldn't need a 450 page manual for IM software.
The UI design was atrocious, and the system itself was pretty insecure, even by windows user standards.
Anyway, that's beside the point. People still used it, and it can take a long time for people to migrate from crappy software to software that doesn't suck. (just look at how long people used MacOS 6-9. Look how many people still use Netscape 4)
But by AOL buying ICQ they locked up the IM market, and killed innovation in ICQ. I don't think ICQ would have ever innovated, but they could have. And by AOL purchasing it they were able to get a strangle hold on the market... Until M$ decided to bundle MSN...
So it made business sense, although it didn't really benefit the world.
Personally, I really wish some open standard would replace AIM/MSN so that we can use any software we like.
"flicker" like you see with A CRT or (I guess) movie is caused by the screen going from black to colored over and over again. You notice the change.
You don't notice flicker on things like LCDs because there is none. There is a 'frame rate' but the screen doesn't go black between each image.
Interestingly, I've never really noticed flicker at the movies even though the screen blanks only 48 times a second. 24hz flicker would be really obnoxious though.
Also, I can see flicker on a 72hz screen while moving images on it seem silky smooth.
One interesting effect of having a high enough frame rate is that you can actually see 'motion blur' with static images, for example with my old monitor I could do 640x480 at 120hz. Some 3d graphics would appear to blur as they moved, just like objects in the real world. You could probably produce some cool visual effects that at 120-200fps in a film. would be impossible at lower speeds.
Just sit on your ass and wait a day. Duh.
Oh, haha. I forgot, apple dosn't need to pay anyone to promote their crap, since you're all brainwashed.
and they don't throttle back the processor because of poor processor engineering.
Yeah, they just run at half speed all the time.
Macs already run at half speed.
I'm a bit partial to Nokia, as most of their phones are pretty cool compared to sprint "branded" phones from Samsung and others. But most of these Nokias seem to be only available in Europe, Africa and Asia, not the US. Are there any cool, color J2ME supporting phones out there from Nokia that will work in the US? (having a camera is a big plus :)
Other then that, does anyone have experience with these java supporting phones? Can you write your own games and upload them to the phone? Are there APIs for interacting with your phonebook, calendar, etc?
IMO, having a phone that's programmable to do whatever I want is far cooler then being able to download little games from the phone company.
How often do you move your head or eyes side to side 227 miles an hour while sitting at the computer?
Anyway, it doesn't matter where you're eyes are pointing, just where they are. Duh.
My first reaction every time that I hear this is "isn't there lag in between when a user moves his eye and the computer adjusts?"
How often do you move you're head while sitting in front of the computer? Besides, the system only needs to know where you're eyes are down to the distance between you're eyes. On a system with a lag of 10ms, for example, you would need to move you're head 4 inches in 10ms before you would notice any distortion. That's 227 miles per hour. If you're head's moving that fast, you've got other things to worry about.
Even with a 100ms delay, you've still got to move you're head side to side at 23 miles an hour to lose the holographic display.
As far as eye tracking, if the software/hardware can produce images for 4 points of view, then just track four eyes with the camera, otherwise it's not an issue anyway. Repeat with more sets of eyes.
The Viewmaster *is* glasses.
Sculpture, however has been around for quite a while, as have true holograms. I think the idea here is that you can have a holographic image that moves
If you can run 10 billion ops per second, the time to decode dosn't really matter that much. If you can only run a few million, it starts to matter.
Sony for example, is in tight with Microsoft.
Those two companies hate each other.
There really isn't any compelling difference between the two formats from a normal user perspective. One comes with license fees, the other doesn't.
Oggs require more hardware to decode, There is an integer engine out, but I'm not sure how well it works, or how much CPU it needs compared to other codecs.
But the fact of the matter is, it does cost money to support ogg files on small devices, probably more then the licensing requirements for Mp3. It's not like they can just slap ogg support onto a device that might not have enough CPU power as an afterthought.
I was talking about putting Ogg support into portable players where CPU power is an issue. Any desktop computer made in the last 5 years should be able to play oggs files, I would assume.
In other words, since apple provided a plug in architecture for QuickTime, you can't really bitch about it not supporting OGG, since you can write one yourself (as these people did)
The other point was that supporting OGG in small devices requires more CPU usage, which might be more expensive then paying for MP3 or WMA licensing costs.
It's not like you can't play Oggs on a Mac, it's just that you can't play 'em in iTunes. You really have no right to bitch that they didn't write their own plug in, especially when they have a plug in architecture that you can extend.
Ogg is *shock* not really all that important right now. It might be free to put in hardware, but it's an open question as to wether the licensing costs for mp3 or WMA is more then the cost of the CPU power needed to decode oggs.
Duh.
Also I would like to voice my objection to slashdot's 20 second rule. It is teh suk.
99% of voters were absolutely certain that the 2nd round would bring the good old traditional Center-Left vs Center-Right showdown (Jospin-Chirac in that case), so many people didn't even care to vote.
:P
Yet, france had a 70% voter turn out, Far higher then any US elections
The ability to use it as a mouse by pointing it at a screen. For $200 I figured they ought to be able to do it, I mean how much did the NES Zapper cost back in the day? $25?
I guess I read that wrong. In that case, he's full of shit. For one thing, incandescent lights don't flicker, and for another, two signals at the same frequency won't cause other patterns.
It also wouldn't explain why monitors would flicker with the lights off, either.