if you bought a house in the last 2 years, you're going to look worse than this guy after the bubble bursts in the housing market.
I bought a house last year... in a city where the housing market had already been depressed by massive layoffs. The market has gone way up since I bought it, but even if it falls back to where it had been or below, my mortgage payment is still $100 less than the rent had been on my apartment before I moved here.
(The apartment was in Cleveland, not New York or Seattle or the Bay Area or anywhere that apartments are exorbitant.)
...and all of its inhabitants are named "John."
And the shuttle would take less than 25 years to get there if they'd just install an oscillation overthruster....
If I want to print an 8x10 color picture with zero artifacts and aliasing problems on a high quality color printer, how many MPs do I really need?
My day job involves writing code to make the
film scanner go for one-hour photolab equipment.
Most of our scanners use 2000 x 3000 area array
CCDs (6 MP or "16*base"), with the same sensor from the Kodak Professional DCS 760 camera. The
scanner scans at full resolution for enlargements, or at 1000 x 1500 (1.6 MP, or "4*base") for ordinary 4x6 service prints.
However, not all MPs are created equal.
Our scanners expose the entire array three times, yielding 6 MP per color plane. Most 6 MP digital cameras out there use filter masks that give 2 MP of data per color plane. Foveon supposedly has a way to get 6 MP per plane out of a 6 MP sensor; I'd guess that when cameras equipped with a 6 MP Foveon sensor hit the market, you'd be set.
Another variable is the die size of the CCD. One of the nice features of the 11, 13.8, and 22 MP sensors mentioned in the article is that they have a 35mm form factor, so you can use 35mm wide-angle lenses with them without being forced into telephoto mode.
And then there's the printer and paper. A continuous-tone printer (especially a dye-sublimation printer) printing on inkjet photo paper will give you much better results at lower resolutions. 200 dpi has been batted around as the standard at which you can't detect artifacts without magnification; a 3.1 MP camera would meet this standard for an 8x10 enlargement.
In fact, one of our lower-priced lab systems uses
a 3.1 MP ("8*base") sensor. You can get a reasonably priced 3.1 MP point-and-shoot camera right now, which is what I'm using until my under-$1000 6 MP per plane SLR dream camera hits the market.
Finally, don't forget about film! A $15 cheap point-and-shoot camera or $7 one-time-use camera (or an old $50 SLR from eBay) gives you that 6 MP-per-plane performance today, without a big capital investment, and the pictures that you shoot today will increase in resolution as future film scanners hit the market. And film is a very cheap archival storage medium for all that image data. If you don't take a lot of pictures, it can actually be cheaper to shoot film, and the image processing software built in to digital photo lab systems (Kodak DLS, Perfect Touch, and similar systems from other vendors) can overcome many of the performance limitations of cheap film cameras.
...it's interesting to note that "BOMBS THESE FUCKERS BACK TO THE STONE AGE" got modded up to +5, Insightful, but a riveting eyewitness account of the WTC collapse only merited a +4.
The only game framework I could imagine that could really capture the essence of the best modules and campaigns is an Infocom-style framework - where the textual descriptions are so rich and your range of actions so potentially large that the solutions to the problems - and even the problems themselves - aren't painfully obvious.
Then what you want isn't Neverwinter Nights -- it's Inform, which lets you do
precisely that. And it's free, and it's available for just about any OS you might possibly name (including Linux).
But sadly, this framework is almost completely incompatible - almost by definition - with Baldur's Gate-style graphics.
Not necessarily -- Version 6 of the Z-Machine, HTML TADS, and Glulx all allow graphics and sound. The problem, I think, is that designers of many graphical multimedia games worry too much about pretty pictures and sound, and not enough about good plot, good characters, good writing, et cetera. It's getting better, though.
Yes, the Phallic Phountain is still there, and Prestis is still going, still yummy, and still
just as fattening. As is Tommy's. (I lived in
Lakewood until last summer, and still get back to
town for Rockers games once in a while.)
My guess is these 16000 computers will actually get gigabit copper NICs and the backbone will be fiber.
No, the campus is already wired with fiber -- presumably, the change is just new network adapters and hubs. It'll be interesting to see how the network topology changes; when I was a student there, the entire network was implemented using just bridges, which simplified many things, but made network storms a real nightmare....
It's possible that they got beta hardware from
some manufacturer in exchange for testing and
a good customer story/endorsement, either free
or at a steep discount. That's exactly what
happened with the previous generation of CWRUnet
hardware....
The big question: will CWRU spend the money to
decently support the new version of CWRUnet?
I both attended CWRU and worked for the department
responsible for network administration (which has
changed acronyms several times), and we were
constantly plagued by the administration's
willingness to spend lots of money for hardware,
but not for staff.
The network administration folks at CWRU have
some very clueful geeks (used bash lately?), but
when I left, there were never enough of them.
All this fancy new hardware will do the university little good unless they
give the people running it enough budget to do
a first-rate job.
Er....maybe. Most color prints unless sealed under glass don't age well. Maybe ten to twenty years. Better then most inkjet prints, but still not great. The negitaves last longer...normally.
It hasn't gotten much attention, because few
people seem to pay much attention to silver halide
any more, but recent generations of color papers
(Kodak Edge 8 et al) have much better long-term image stability -- on the order of 50-100 years.
The only arcival color process is Kodachrome...and Kodachrome is rapidly vanishing. I think all pro speeds have been discontinued, and the mature speeds are going. Either that, or at least all pro speeds below ISO 100 are gone. No more Kodachrome 25.
Kodachrome 64 is still available, as is 200. Both are pro films; consumer K-14 is dead.
Modded clients and cheating aren't a new phenomenon -- Netrek had to deal with this problem a long time ago. The solution (locked clients with periodic challenges requiring a properly encrypted response) doesn't require the Netrek world to be closed and proprietary -- and this problem doesn't, either. Netrek solves this problem on assorted *nix, Windows, and Mac boxen where the players have powerful tools available to hack things; consoles by contrast tend to run code in a shell-less environment from read-only DVD's.
The Sony world being "open" to a degree means that it's possible for a company to be stupid about how it goes about verifying that the code on the console is the same that was shipped from the factory (using a mechanism that's vulnerable to playback attacks, for example), or to leave debugging "cheat" codes turned on -- but that's the fault of the individual company, and not the overall model.
Bottom line: simplicity breeds robustness. There just isn't enough "there" there on a console to exploit.
Re:He deserves praise either way despite his arrog
on
Wolframania
·
· Score: 1
Well, Wolfram had a team of PhDs working under
him, so it did go through some nomimal review
and quite a rigorous check for accuracy. That
is certainly comparable to the "peer review"
that one sees in publishing scientific papers
in scientific journals, and is arguably better
than much of the "peer review" that takes place
prior to such publications.
"Arguably better" how? The "team of PhDs" were
Wolfram's employees, and beholden to him. Real
peer review means independent peer
review, sans the conflict of interest inherent in
checking the boss' work....
Every Friday evening was "student night" on our
PDP-11; we had a special drive that got mounted,
with a multiplayer adventure game set on our
campus, had "JOBKIL wars" where we tried to boot
each other off or otherwise hack up the system,
et cetera. Granted, not every school back then
had a computer lab, and our "network" was a bunch
of 9600 baud serial lines running to several
terminal rooms, but still.
More recently, there's a lab on a local campus that a group of local geeks our age (and some actual students, too) take over for massive Netrek sessions on Fridays.
Hmm. There's an idea for a game -- set up a Linux box and some clients, and play Netrek! Or roll your own network game as a project for the AP CS class....
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a house last year... in a city where the housing market had already been depressed by massive layoffs. The market has gone way up since I bought it, but even if it falls back to where it had been or below, my mortgage payment is still $100 less than the rent had been on my apartment before I moved here.
(The apartment was in Cleveland, not New York or Seattle or the Bay Area or anywhere that apartments are exorbitant.)
...and all of its inhabitants are named "John." And the shuttle would take less than 25 years to get there if they'd just install an oscillation overthruster....
If I want to print an 8x10 color picture with zero artifacts and aliasing problems on a high quality color printer, how many MPs do I really need?
My day job involves writing code to make the film scanner go for one-hour photolab equipment. Most of our scanners use 2000 x 3000 area array CCDs (6 MP or "16*base"), with the same sensor from the Kodak Professional DCS 760 camera. The scanner scans at full resolution for enlargements, or at 1000 x 1500 (1.6 MP, or "4*base") for ordinary 4x6 service prints.
However, not all MPs are created equal. Our scanners expose the entire array three times, yielding 6 MP per color plane. Most 6 MP digital cameras out there use filter masks that give 2 MP of data per color plane. Foveon supposedly has a way to get 6 MP per plane out of a 6 MP sensor; I'd guess that when cameras equipped with a 6 MP Foveon sensor hit the market, you'd be set.
Another variable is the die size of the CCD. One of the nice features of the 11, 13.8, and 22 MP sensors mentioned in the article is that they have a 35mm form factor, so you can use 35mm wide-angle lenses with them without being forced into telephoto mode.
And then there's the printer and paper. A continuous-tone printer (especially a dye-sublimation printer) printing on inkjet photo paper will give you much better results at lower resolutions. 200 dpi has been batted around as the standard at which you can't detect artifacts without magnification; a 3.1 MP camera would meet this standard for an 8x10 enlargement.
In fact, one of our lower-priced lab systems uses a 3.1 MP ("8*base") sensor. You can get a reasonably priced 3.1 MP point-and-shoot camera right now, which is what I'm using until my under-$1000 6 MP per plane SLR dream camera hits the market.
Finally, don't forget about film! A $15 cheap point-and-shoot camera or $7 one-time-use camera (or an old $50 SLR from eBay) gives you that 6 MP-per-plane performance today, without a big capital investment, and the pictures that you shoot today will increase in resolution as future film scanners hit the market. And film is a very cheap archival storage medium for all that image data. If you don't take a lot of pictures, it can actually be cheaper to shoot film, and the image processing software built in to digital photo lab systems (Kodak DLS, Perfect Touch, and similar systems from other vendors) can overcome many of the performance limitations of cheap film cameras.
...it's interesting to note that "BOMBS THESE FUCKERS BACK TO THE STONE AGE" got modded up to +5, Insightful, but a riveting eyewitness account of the WTC collapse only merited a +4.
What happens when I open slashdot
and I don't know what the hell
you are talking about?
No, no, no! Always
five-seven-five, and never
nine-five-six. Baka!
Saddam was rumored to buy some to control missles or something?
Well, it can control an entire squadron of Metal Gear RAYs....
Then what you want isn't Neverwinter Nights -- it's Inform, which lets you do precisely that. And it's free, and it's available for just about any OS you might possibly name (including Linux).
But sadly, this framework is almost completely incompatible - almost by definition - with Baldur's Gate-style graphics.
Not necessarily -- Version 6 of the Z-Machine, HTML TADS, and Glulx all allow graphics and sound. The problem, I think, is that designers of many graphical multimedia games worry too much about pretty pictures and sound, and not enough about good plot, good characters, good writing, et cetera. It's getting better, though.
See rec.arts.int-fiction for more about all this....
No, wait -- on second thought, it is the size.
...when will we be getting the associated personal teleportation devices?
Why does the animated GIF show two asteroids slamming into the Earth (!) if you play it long enough?
Actually, non-disparagement clauses are fairly common in certain types of contracts/agreements....
2) How do you intercept one that has been hijacked?
...then can we send Jeff Goldblum to infect them with an Exchange virus?
Yes, the Phallic Phountain is still there, and Prestis is still going, still yummy, and still just as fattening. As is Tommy's. (I lived in Lakewood until last summer, and still get back to town for Rockers games once in a while.)
No, the campus is already wired with fiber -- presumably, the change is just new network adapters and hubs. It'll be interesting to see how the network topology changes; when I was a student there, the entire network was implemented using just bridges, which simplified many things, but made network storms a real nightmare....
It's possible that they got beta hardware from some manufacturer in exchange for testing and a good customer story/endorsement, either free or at a steep discount. That's exactly what happened with the previous generation of CWRUnet hardware....
The network administration folks at CWRU have some very clueful geeks (used bash lately?), but when I left, there were never enough of them. All this fancy new hardware will do the university little good unless they give the people running it enough budget to do a first-rate job.
Anyone who sweltered through last week's heat wave... or any other July/August in the region.
Terminal Velocity: the speed of a VT-100 sailing out an open window....
Er....maybe. Most color prints unless sealed under glass don't age well. Maybe ten to twenty years. Better then most inkjet prints, but still not great. The negitaves last longer...normally. It hasn't gotten much attention, because few people seem to pay much attention to silver halide any more, but recent generations of color papers (Kodak Edge 8 et al) have much better long-term image stability -- on the order of 50-100 years. The only arcival color process is Kodachrome...and Kodachrome is rapidly vanishing. I think all pro speeds have been discontinued, and the mature speeds are going. Either that, or at least all pro speeds below ISO 100 are gone. No more Kodachrome 25. Kodachrome 64 is still available, as is 200. Both are pro films; consumer K-14 is dead.
Well, if they want to be Africa's answer to Silicon Valley, at least they have the rolling blackouts....
The Sony world being "open" to a degree means that it's possible for a company to be stupid about how it goes about verifying that the code on the console is the same that was shipped from the factory (using a mechanism that's vulnerable to playback attacks, for example), or to leave debugging "cheat" codes turned on -- but that's the fault of the individual company, and not the overall model.
Bottom line: simplicity breeds robustness. There just isn't enough "there" there on a console to exploit.
"Arguably better" how? The "team of PhDs" were Wolfram's employees, and beholden to him. Real peer review means independent peer review, sans the conflict of interest inherent in checking the boss' work....
Looks like a MUD, frankly. A peer-to-peer graphical MUD, but a MUD nonetheless. Is this really the first peer-to-peer MUD?
More recently, there's a lab on a local campus that a group of local geeks our age (and some actual students, too) take over for massive Netrek sessions on Fridays.
Hmm. There's an idea for a game -- set up a Linux box and some clients, and play Netrek! Or roll your own network game as a project for the AP CS class....