I have the Logitex wireless keyboard and trackball FX (the big marble), and would gladly have paid twice what I gave for them.
None of the issues you mention are issues. Range isn't great (6ish feet), so anyone eavesdropping is pretty damn good, batteries last pretty much forever (several months, at least), utterly reliable, and while there is some performance loss towards the end of the battery lifetime, with modern batteries, that's when they're completely dead anyway.
In return, I can easily clear my desk when I need writing space, move the keyboard to a different table and type standing up when I'm walking around, and generally not have any cables snaking from behind the computer.
milage will vary, but I HIGHLY recommend going wireless.
Well, there are limits to how well jpg can do, even at the highest setting. The setting only controls how the DCT co-efficients are quantized. Out of your control is 1) the Chroma subsampling (color is a half the rez, both h and v, of intensity) 2) the DCT coefficients are rounded to integer values, 3) (I think, long time ago) there are hardcoded quantization tables as a first pass.
So even if you turn it all the way up, there will be significant loss. Of course, for some images, that is ok: a flat color will be losslessly compressed even at high compression.
While I don't know the details, you can bet your last dollar that someone has already invented, and been slapped down, for this sort of dodge. "I wasn't selling liquor on a sunday! They bought a $30 lighter and I GAVE them a handle of vodka!"
Same thing for prostitution: "I freely gave her $50 and she freely decided to fellate me." (remember, you can't say blowjob in court)
I'd expect that to hold about a sieve's worth of water in court.
While I'm here, let me clarify the bit you quoted: once you've legally imported for personal use a CD, DVD, or whatever, you can then resell it. That's first sale, and holds true for individuals. It does not apply, however, when the REASON for import is resale.
Perhaps. However, in our society, the line between losing your fingers and losing your life is probably fairly slim; if you're outside in the cold, you're either completely fucked or outside by choice.
Ie you're not risking much to keep comfortable: if you end up needing that extra heat, you're likely in the fucked category.
That was not so back in the bad old days, when curling into a ball and huddling behind a tree was state-of-the-art thermal protection.
[ob disclaimer: I had this explained convincingly to me by an EFF lawyer for the case of HKFlicks, which applies to US laws, not UK]
The law says that the copyright holder gets to control how copyrighted items are imported. You and I can still bring in for personal consumption, but not sale (tho we may need to pay duties on it if is new). Even if you bought the Kung Fu DVDs legally in Asia, you could not import them for resale into the US w/o asking the producers permission.
So the copyright holder will typically negotiate an exclusive import relationship, thus denying you such permission. I'm guessing that this often involves giving the importer proxy powers to sue other illegal importers, as you saw Miramax, not the honglong production agency go after HKflicks.
So if CD Wow had a legal presence in the UK, their business model was based on illegal import: they were not allowed by the record companies to import into the UK. I had understood this to be the case.
If CD Wow was completely based in HK, I'm not sure what british courts would be able to do about it. I'd imagine that international trade agreements come into it; the sort of thing that regulates what can and cannot be sent internationally via mail.
That was my first job (part time) involving computers. They hired me promising that the smalltalk development environment was going to be in soon; instead we coded rpg-3. You programmed by filling in virtual punchcards.
I'm a bit confused as to what they are measuring, when they say it is the least dense: is it the total volume of the cube divided by the mass, or merely the volume of the gel matrix within the cube?
If it is the former, it would seem to be easy to make a less dense solid: make a big cube of aluminium foil. Since the volume rises as the cube of the side length, but the surface area, and hence mass, rises as the square, you can give it an arbitrarily low density.
I've noticed again and again in myself and others that we (ie, western consumers) would rather have a flat rate than a metered rate, even if the flat rate is slightly higher, on average.
Think about your cellphone, your broadband... this is because 1) we hate (and thus notice) the spikes in consumption rather than billing more than the higher average, and 2) we hate having to constantly think about how much hot water we're using during the shower. Showers are much nicer when you can't see the water and oil bills ticking.
Commercials are basially a flat rate, as is cable. Pay per view is not.
Of course, each to their own. Perhaps you're the exception that proves the rule, or perhaps my rule is wrong.
This is often done in X-ray radiology (one of those words may be redundant...). You take three Xrays simultaneously, which capture the image at slightly different sizes because they are different distances away. Scan them, resize them, and then you "register" them. Registration finds how each must be rotated and translated (basically a... erm, this was several years ago... 4x4 translation matrix).
We did this using a hierarchical least squares: start with a low res version of the picture. When you get a good registration, double the resolution, and do it again.
You can get subpixel accuracy if you're good about your interpolation.
None of this was novel: we merely implemented the work titled "subpixel registration for x-ray images" or somesuch. That paper wasn't too novel either, and I think it was published in a lesser journal (that's pure speculation, btw).
I've been trying to switch to thunderbird, or even mozilla mail, but frankly, both just suck ass.
It could be the IMAP server I'm connecting against, but there seems to be no way to tell it to just give up, don't look for more folders, and resync NOW.
Instead, it tries to keep some stateful prediction of how the IMAP account will look, and when it's wrong (often, as I use multiple MUAs against the same account) there seems to be no way to make it re-sync.
That, and the editing engine is ass. Thunderbird moreso than Mozilla, but neither is very good. They should just implement a shell and fire up jed.
Lastly, mozilla 1.5 has been crashy as well.
I WANT mozilla not to suck, but frankly, it aint so. Unfortunately, seems there is no other alternative. Perhaps I'll look into the galeon / the other gnome browser / opera.
huh? To get stereo, you need separation. You could do this with a couple of prisms, or maybe the biggest fresnel lens you ever saw, but why not just move the camera sideways between shots?
If your camera can take several pix in a row, use that, and simply move the camera laterally during the shooting (assumes you have fast shutter time).
Lastly, no. As I understand it, a CMOS sensor cut into 1000x1000 pixels will give you "better" pixels than the same die at 2000x2000 pixels, and coupling the pixels 2x2. This has several causes:
1) you can only average your combined pixels after sampling: thus you get quantisation noise (and hypothetically phase interferernce, although I've never heard anyone comment on this)
2) if you couple 2x2 pixels, you will get 1xR + 2xG + 1B pixels. Most pixels will be predominantly one of these colors, removing the other 3(2 for G) from the picture. This also means that a blue photon heading towards the 2x2 metapixel must hit the 1/4 area which can see it, else it is lost.
3) (I don't quite get this one. As close as I understand it:) The size of the sensor feature size is coming close to the wavelength of light: Sony's new 8mp sensor is 0.008 m long, with 3000 pixels. That makes each pixel 2.6e-6 m. Compare with Red light, at a wavelength of 0.7e-7 m. Each sensor is three wavelengths wide(!). This apparently means that you can't usefully use an fstop higher than 11ish on the new sony f828. Search photo.net for a technical discussion.
4) I guess that we also get effects from the fact that each pixel sensor is basically in a well, and the smaller the pixel becomes, the harder it becomes for a photon to hit the sensor, rather than the well wall. I never hear this discussed either
Lay out your website in xml/html/xml: dynamically generated, fully featured.
Now, it is easy to offer front-ends to this.
1) plain 2) laid out using CCS 3) re-written in the browser using javascript (this is a really neat hack) 4) flash, using meta-data to add "user experience"
Since the flash will need this info from the middle tier servers anyway, you might as well export it in a format which can be used directly, or adorned with more information.
And no, I have never seen a website that does this.
unfortunately, 9 out of 10 people like blinky things. Or at least act as if they do. The number may actually be 8 or 7, but the swing vote isn't convicteded enough to actively avoid blinky.
Have you ever bought a stereo? NAD are like the only company that does not charge you more for a face-plate that doesn't animate. Car stereos are even worse.
I had a good friend recently revamp his one-man-company's website: he could not understand why I counseled (ranted, actually) against flash. He wanted a "user experience", with animations and voice-overs and ad-hoc animation. I wanted easy access to services, hyper-linkable navigation, and most of all, control over the "experience".
When I told him I disable Java and have no speakers plugged into my computer, he couldn't fathom how I could surf the web; he LIKES websites with sound and animations.
Bascially, it comes down to this: marketers think users primarily want pretty (and I'm willing to accept that many do), but a large group of us want control. We are the ones with bookmarklets for searching amazon and ebay, and if we had more time on our hands would likely use SOAP and bypass their UI entirely.
In a perfect world, websites would offer both. Since websites are thinner and thinner shells around middle-tier services, offering a less adorned access to those services shouldn't be too hard.
ha you ARE right about the filler. (Think De La Soul, but less annoying)
If De La Soul were RnB rap, then prefuse 73 is IDM rap. Not bad at all, and likely to have appeal outside the IDM community, but if you hate blips and plops, not for you.
Good Recommendation. I've made mine above (Nightmares on Wax).
Unless you like IDM, I would NOT get autechre or aphex twin. You will likely love them or hate them, and if you liked that sort of music, you would know them by now.
Instead go for BoC (as already suggested) or Nightmares on Wax. Both are more downtempo dance music than IDM. BoC is very ambient (calling it dance music is a big strech), with beats taking a back-seat to soundscape on most songs. NoW is more beat driven, and is HIGHLY listenable. NoW's Mind Elevation is one of my favorite albumns, and A Word of Science is not bad at all.
There's already an SF novel with that idea! (Sorry, no spoilers.)
I rather suspect that the orginal poster was aware. See, it's often humorous to feign ignorance of some concept, and then pretend to derive it from insufficient data. It's tricky tho, because you have to provide enough clues that the feigned ignorance is actually only feigned. Else you get these people trying to point out that this or that has actually already been invented. This is where delivery comes in, which is tricky in text, and even trickier in online fora which mix people of very varied insight.
Why don't they have nuclear propelled submarines? Bascially suck water in from the front, boil it (this is where the nuclear bit comes in), shoot it out the back?
Or something similar with planes, perhaps producing plasma?
hrm. I seem to recall that space elevators needed tensile strength/weight ratios that could basically only be made monomol. And that ringworld required entirely new physics to work.
However, a space elevator on mars might be more feasible, (the moon would be the first option, but it spins too slowly for geosynch to work).
I think Charles Sheffield is probably closer to a workable idea.
For example, not an elevator, but stairs: big rotating disk satelites in orbit (where plane of rotation is along orbit and gravity well). You have to get to orbit yourself, but once there, you can gain altitude by grabbing a rotating disk, and riding it up. if you need delta v, start by grabbing the disk closer to the center, and then move outwards until you have the tangential velocity you need. Likewise, to descend, grab the disk on the outside, climb inward as you descend, and let go at the bottom.
In likelyhood, these would not be disks, but semirigid tethers, like gigantic bolas in space. As long as there is as much going up as down, it should run perpetually. Put several at different altitudes, and blast into space without using a rocket.
He also suggests having these in very LEO, so that tethers dip into the upper atmosphere. Minimize the air-resistance by having the tethers rotate as if they were gears wrt the atmosphere. This might let you use a ram-jet to rendezvous with the tether, skipping the whole "riding a stick of dynamite into orbit" aspect. However, the G forces would be a bitch: probably infeasable for humans w/o getting fancy (basically, you hop tether-spokes, getting just a little push from each one).
Slashdot Mirror
I have the Logitex wireless keyboard and trackball FX (the big marble), and would gladly have paid twice what I gave for them.
None of the issues you mention are issues. Range isn't great (6ish feet), so anyone eavesdropping is pretty damn good, batteries last pretty much forever (several months, at least), utterly reliable, and while there is some performance loss towards the end of the battery lifetime, with modern batteries, that's when they're completely dead anyway.
In return, I can easily clear my desk when I need writing space, move the keyboard to a different table and type standing up when I'm walking around, and generally not have any cables snaking from behind the computer.
milage will vary, but I HIGHLY recommend going wireless.
Well, there are limits to how well jpg can do, even at the highest setting. The setting only controls how the DCT co-efficients are quantized. Out of your control is 1) the Chroma subsampling (color is a half the rez, both h and v, of intensity) 2) the DCT coefficients are rounded to integer values, 3) (I think, long time ago) there are hardcoded quantization tables as a first pass.
So even if you turn it all the way up, there will be significant loss. Of course, for some images, that is ok: a flat color will be losslessly compressed even at high compression.
Lawyers are pretty smart people.
While I don't know the details, you can bet your last dollar that someone has already invented, and been slapped down, for this sort of dodge. "I wasn't selling liquor on a sunday! They bought a $30 lighter and I GAVE them a handle of vodka!"
Same thing for prostitution: "I freely gave her $50 and she freely decided to fellate me." (remember, you can't say blowjob in court)
I'd expect that to hold about a sieve's worth of water in court.
While I'm here, let me clarify the bit you quoted: once you've legally imported for personal use a CD, DVD, or whatever, you can then resell it. That's first sale, and holds true for individuals. It does not apply, however, when the REASON for import is resale.
AFAI understand, that is.
Perhaps. However, in our society, the line between losing your fingers and losing your life is probably fairly slim; if you're outside in the cold, you're either completely fucked or outside by choice.
Ie you're not risking much to keep comfortable: if you end up needing that extra heat, you're likely in the fucked category.
That was not so back in the bad old days, when curling into a ball and huddling behind a tree was state-of-the-art thermal protection.
complex.
[ob disclaimer: I had this explained convincingly to me by an EFF lawyer for the case of HKFlicks, which applies to US laws, not UK]
The law says that the copyright holder gets to control how copyrighted items are imported. You and I can still bring in for personal consumption, but not sale (tho we may need to pay duties on it if is new). Even if you bought the Kung Fu DVDs legally in Asia, you could not import them for resale into the US w/o asking the producers permission.
So the copyright holder will typically negotiate an exclusive import relationship, thus denying you such permission. I'm guessing that this often involves giving the importer proxy powers to sue other illegal importers, as you saw Miramax, not the honglong production agency go after HKflicks.
So if CD Wow had a legal presence in the UK, their business model was based on illegal import: they were not allowed by the record companies to import into the UK. I had understood this to be the case.
If CD Wow was completely based in HK, I'm not sure what british courts would be able to do about it. I'd imagine that international trade agreements come into it; the sort of thing that regulates what can and cannot be sent internationally via mail.
hah.
That was my first job (part time) involving computers. They hired me promising that the smalltalk development environment was going to be in soon; instead we coded rpg-3. You programmed by filling in virtual punchcards.
amazing.
What is the sustained write speed of one of those little harddrives?
Given how crap speed I get from my new seagate w/ 8MB cache and 7200rpm, I'd imagine that the wire speed is the least of your worries.
So...
I'm a bit confused as to what they are measuring, when they say it is the least dense: is it the total volume of the cube divided by the mass, or merely the volume of the gel matrix within the cube?
If it is the former, it would seem to be easy to make a less dense solid: make a big cube of aluminium foil. Since the volume rises as the cube of the side length, but the surface area, and hence mass, rises as the square, you can give it an arbitrarily low density.
consumption rather than billing
should be
"consumption and hence billing"
not true.
I've noticed again and again in myself and others that we (ie, western consumers) would rather have a flat rate than a metered rate, even if the flat rate is slightly higher, on average.
Think about your cellphone, your broadband... this is because 1) we hate (and thus notice) the spikes in consumption rather than billing more than the higher average, and 2) we hate having to constantly think about how much hot water we're using during the shower. Showers are much nicer when you can't see the water and oil bills ticking.
Commercials are basially a flat rate, as is cable. Pay per view is not.
Of course, each to their own. Perhaps you're the exception that proves the rule, or perhaps my rule is wrong.
This is often done in X-ray radiology (one of those words may be redundant...). You take three Xrays simultaneously, which capture the image at slightly different sizes because they are different distances away. Scan them, resize them, and then you "register" them. Registration finds how each must be rotated and translated (basically a ... erm, this was several years ago ... 4x4 translation matrix).
We did this using a hierarchical least squares: start with a low res version of the picture. When you get a good registration, double the resolution, and do it again.
You can get subpixel accuracy if you're good about your interpolation.
None of this was novel: we merely implemented the work titled "subpixel registration for x-ray images" or somesuch. That paper wasn't too novel either, and I think it was published in a lesser journal (that's pure speculation, btw).
I've been trying to switch to thunderbird, or even mozilla mail, but frankly, both just suck ass.
It could be the IMAP server I'm connecting against, but there seems to be no way to tell it to just give up, don't look for more folders, and resync NOW.
Instead, it tries to keep some stateful prediction of how the IMAP account will look, and when it's wrong (often, as I use multiple MUAs against the same account) there seems to be no way to make it re-sync.
That, and the editing engine is ass. Thunderbird moreso than Mozilla, but neither is very good. They should just implement a shell and fire up jed.
Lastly, mozilla 1.5 has been crashy as well.
I WANT mozilla not to suck, but frankly, it aint so. Unfortunately, seems there is no other alternative. Perhaps I'll look into the galeon / the other gnome browser / opera.
I stitched a couple of panoramas of the grand canyon with panorama tools (I used the hugin front-end, else would be a bitch and a half to set up).
Of course, I just cared about it looking good, not about accuracy, but I had few to no visible artefacts of stitching.
Both tools are somewhat poorly documented, but work very well once set up.
huh? To get stereo, you need separation. You could do this with a couple of prisms, or maybe the biggest fresnel lens you ever saw, but why not just move the camera sideways between shots?
If your camera can take several pix in a row, use that, and simply move the camera laterally during the shooting (assumes you have fast shutter time).
Lastly, no. As I understand it, a CMOS sensor cut into 1000x1000 pixels will give you "better" pixels than the same die at 2000x2000 pixels, and coupling the pixels 2x2. This has several causes:
1) you can only average your combined pixels after sampling: thus you get quantisation noise (and hypothetically phase interferernce, although I've never heard anyone comment on this)
2) if you couple 2x2 pixels, you will get 1xR + 2xG + 1B pixels. Most pixels will be predominantly one of these colors, removing the other 3(2 for G) from the picture. This also means that a blue photon heading towards the 2x2 metapixel must hit the 1/4 area which can see it, else it is lost.
3) (I don't quite get this one. As close as I understand it:) The size of the sensor feature size is coming close to the wavelength of light: Sony's new 8mp sensor is 0.008 m long, with 3000 pixels. That makes each pixel 2.6e-6 m. Compare with Red light, at a wavelength of 0.7e-7 m. Each sensor is three wavelengths wide(!). This apparently means that you can't usefully use an fstop higher than 11ish on the new sony f828. Search photo.net for a technical discussion.
4) I guess that we also get effects from the fact that each pixel sensor is basically in a well, and the smaller the pixel becomes, the harder it becomes for a photon to hit the sensor, rather than the well wall. I never hear this discussed either
Here's a design:
Lay out your website in xml/html/xml: dynamically generated, fully featured.
Now, it is easy to offer front-ends to this.
1) plain
2) laid out using CCS
3) re-written in the browser using javascript (this is a really neat hack)
4) flash, using meta-data to add "user experience"
Since the flash will need this info from the middle tier servers anyway, you might as well export it in a format which can be used directly, or adorned with more information.
And no, I have never seen a website that does this.
yes!
unfortunately, 9 out of 10 people like blinky things. Or at least act as if they do. The number may actually be 8 or 7, but the swing vote isn't convicteded enough to actively avoid blinky.
Have you ever bought a stereo? NAD are like the only company that does not charge you more for a face-plate that doesn't animate. Car stereos are even worse.
I had a good friend recently revamp his one-man-company's website: he could not understand why I counseled (ranted, actually) against flash. He wanted a "user experience", with animations and voice-overs and ad-hoc animation. I wanted easy access to services, hyper-linkable navigation, and most of all, control over the "experience".
When I told him I disable Java and have no speakers plugged into my computer, he couldn't fathom how I could surf the web; he LIKES websites with sound and animations.
Bascially, it comes down to this: marketers think users primarily want pretty (and I'm willing to accept that many do), but a large group of us want control. We are the ones with bookmarklets for searching amazon and ebay, and if we had more time on our hands would likely use SOAP and bypass their UI entirely.
In a perfect world, websites would offer both. Since websites are thinner and thinner shells around middle-tier services, offering a less adorned access to those services shouldn't be too hard.
ha you ARE right about the filler. (Think De La Soul, but less annoying)
If De La Soul were RnB rap, then prefuse 73 is IDM rap. Not bad at all, and likely to have appeal outside the IDM community, but if you hate blips and plops, not for you.
Good Recommendation. I've made mine above (Nightmares on Wax).
Unless you like IDM, I would NOT get autechre or aphex twin. You will likely love them or hate them, and if you liked that sort of music, you would know them by now.
Instead go for BoC (as already suggested) or Nightmares on Wax. Both are more downtempo dance music than IDM. BoC is very ambient (calling it dance music is a big strech), with beats taking a back-seat to soundscape on most songs. NoW is more beat driven, and is HIGHLY listenable. NoW's Mind Elevation is one of my favorite albumns, and A Word of Science is not bad at all.
Nightmares on Wax ...
(only one so far, but NoW kick serious ass)
Now, if Morr music were to do this, I would have _no_ money left.
hrm.
Boston's big dig has cost more than that (or at least in that range), and that was just a big hole in the ground.
There's already an SF novel with that idea! (Sorry, no spoilers.)
I rather suspect that the orginal poster was aware. See, it's often humorous to feign ignorance of some concept, and then pretend to derive it from insufficient data. It's tricky tho, because you have to provide enough clues that the feigned ignorance is actually only feigned. Else you get these people trying to point out that this or that has actually already been invented. This is where delivery comes in, which is tricky in text, and even trickier in online fora which mix people of very varied insight.
add to that the fact that the black box is effectively shielded by the rest of the plane. The plane is basically one big airbag.
ya. I was wondering about that.
Why don't they have nuclear propelled submarines? Bascially suck water in from the front, boil it (this is where the nuclear bit comes in), shoot it out the back?
Or something similar with planes, perhaps producing plasma?
hrm. I seem to recall that space elevators needed tensile strength/weight ratios that could basically only be made monomol. And that ringworld required entirely new physics to work.
However, a space elevator on mars might be more feasible, (the moon would be the first option, but it spins too slowly for geosynch to work).
I think Charles Sheffield is probably closer to a workable idea.
For example, not an elevator, but stairs: big rotating disk satelites in orbit (where plane of rotation is along orbit and gravity well). You have to get to orbit yourself, but once there, you can gain altitude by grabbing a rotating disk, and riding it up. if you need delta v, start by grabbing the disk closer to the center, and then move outwards until you have the tangential velocity you need. Likewise, to descend, grab the disk on the outside, climb inward as you descend, and let go at the bottom.
In likelyhood, these would not be disks, but semirigid tethers, like gigantic bolas in space. As long as there is as much going up as down, it should run perpetually. Put several at different altitudes, and blast into space without using a rocket.
He also suggests having these in very LEO, so that tethers dip into the upper atmosphere. Minimize the air-resistance by having the tethers rotate as if they were gears wrt the atmosphere. This might let you use a ram-jet to rendezvous with the tether, skipping the whole "riding a stick of dynamite into orbit" aspect. However, the G forces would be a bitch: probably infeasable for humans w/o getting fancy (basically, you hop tether-spokes, getting just a little push from each one).
A moose once bit my sister.
no really! She was carving her initials into it with the sharpened end of an electric toothbrush...