I like those 'Best viewed with X' tags that people put on their sites. It lets me know imediately that the designer is a total tool, and that I should probably just browse elsewhere, because the site is going to be total crap.
It saves me the trouble of having to make the distinction myself...
Moderation ratings are ok for/., as its deals with topic oriented discussions. For one off video fieds, it would be pointles.
A better way of doing things would be stricly property oriented ratings. Each person can rate the clip with descriptions such as 'News', 'advertising', 'political', 'Local', 'Editoral', 'adult', etc. It would allow DB searches too...
SELECT * FROM VIDEOFEEDS WHERE PROPERTY IN ('Bukaki','Tentacle','Lesbian','alien','Nun','Dan Rather','pr0n')
Just based off the number of companies that the plaintiff is filling against, this doesn't look to me like a case of someone deliberately stealing another's patented idea. It looks like a squatter sitting on an idea, and trying to extort money off of whoever happens to try to inovate.
I'm all for the idea of patents, but this sort of thing just leaves a bad taste in your mouth...
There is a public access cable station where I live, so my first thought was why bother? Do we really need to have that funny guy that lives by the old slaughter house broadcasting world wide his theories about alien brian implants?
From the standpoint of news broadcasting, this could be really big, though. Set up a/. type site with a moderation system, and let people submit their own footage of local news stories. You would get excellent coverage (OSS though: many eyes is a good thing), and it would be hard to censor stories. Localization/Translation might be tricky, though...
"I HAVE IN MY HAND, A LIST OF 12 CARD HOLDING COMMUNIST PARTY MEMBERS, THAT WORK IN THE STATE DEPARTMENT..."
Yeah, we are so much wiser now, we would never fall for that old, 'red scare' paranoia that was rampant in the 1950s. What silly, foolish people our grandparents were to fall for such an obvious paranoid delusion. The real sad thing is, unlike the 1950's, there is no single vocal Joe McCarthy type to debunk. If compairing the current political situation to the 'Red Scare' is accurate, we will have to put up with this for a good ten years.
(because we all know that NASA engineers hang out at/. for ideas to dump garbage...)
There are 2 ways you are going to get rid of trash from the space station. Carry it home in the space shuttle, or launch it somewhere.
The Russian ships don't have room to carry stuff back, but here is the thing, you don't have to carry it ALL the way home. Grab a hefty bag, stuff it with trash, and tie it to the back of the capsul as you head back to Earth. You can either release it once it has enough momentum to quickly leave orbit, or drag it in behind you and let it seperate as it burns up.
Alternately, if you go with the 'Dump the trash before entering hyperspace' Imperial method, you have to have a way to get it clear of anywhere you might want to travel. Since we don't know WHERE we might want to travel, just launching it into space to float around for a few billion years seems...shortsighted. So, either a) burn it up by shooting it at the sun, or drop it on a planet.
So how do we do that, cheaply? There was a solar sail technology developed a year or two back, which involved a magnetically generated sail. Would it be cost effective to put a small power source on your trash, and fire it off at a target? I recall that the technology didn't seem too complicated, and the speeds that it could attain were fairly large. Just don't use one of those nuclear batteries mentioned a few days ago on/. to power it if you plan to drop it on Earth. While the ammount of radioactive material that was burned up would be inconsequential, the Luddites would go berserk...
I get to fuck with them to no end, and waste their time.
Last one I got was from Earthlink, trying to sell me high speed internet service. Some Indian guy who only spoke b+ level English tried to sell me something I already have:
Indian: Do you have a computer?
Me: (yelling) Dear, do we have a computer? (pause) yes, we have a TRS-80. Will your Internet work with that?
Indian: What operating system do you use?
Me: Apple Basic.
Indian: Oh yes, no problem. Would you like out anti-virus, spam blocker, and popup blocker for $10 extra?
Me: No, I like SPAM(tm), it's great cooked. And I've already had my flu shot this year.
(After 10 minuets of this sort of sillyness)
Me:By the way, what is this 'Internet' thing you keep mentioning?
You can try to pick up telemarketers who call (guy or girl, doesn't really matter), act like an idiot, act interested and accidentally drop the phoe a lot, accuse the caller of racial slander, etc. This accomplishes two ends. You get to have a great time messing with people's heads and you waste their time, lowering the profitability of telemarketing overall. I *highly* reccomend it...
Hey I have a better argument. Suppose there is a secret 'back door' in windows for the CIA/FBI/NSA to come in and spy on you in your parent's basement downloading Brittney Spears pr0n. Given that fact, why would they them use it themselves? Most government agencys use some flavor of Windows. Do you really think that the NSA, for example, is going to use an OS that is known to have a backdoor built into it?
I work at a certain EVIL company, and there have been some rumors that Google has been sniffing around, looking for good employees (yes, yes, obligatory MS joke here...) to bring over.
It looks like they are agressively trying to make sure that they keep on top of the talent curve. MS has always made an effort to grab up all the most talented engineers coming out of school. Google might try to give them a run for the money.
First off, I am not a hawk, and I think that warfare should only be used as a last resort. However, I am not some sort of peacnik idealist that thinks love solves every problem. The unfortunate truth is there are some people that need to be made dead to make the world a better place.
I think it's great that the military is writing documents like this. Sure, there is a treaty in place to keep space de-militarized. But, I pay taxes to have the military keep me safe. It they aren't trying to think of ways to keep me safe from every concieveable eventuality, I'd be pretty annoyed. The only thing I find suprising is that this paper wasn't dated 1957. I'm sure as soon as NASA figured out that we can shoot monkeys in space, the air force was working on ways to keep us safe from Russian space monkeys.
Just because people are thinking about solutions to potential problems doesn't mean we are planning on conquering space in the name of Emperor Dubyah. This article strikes me as a bit reactionist and alarming. To the thinkers in the military who spent time to start working out solutions to potential problems before they are occuring: Good work guys, thanks.
All the suggestions are decent ideas, but I wonder if the solution might be to change the problem.
If a person has such problems reading maps, that simple image enlargement techniques don't help then why try teaching geography visually? It is unlikely that that skill (Being able to find the Mississippi on a map) whill ever be a useful one to a person who is severly visually impaired. You can visually describe geography to someone and achieve the same end.
Tell the teacher to stop wasting time teaching skills that aren't ever going to be of use. Just because a standardized skill test has a question like that doesn't mean that it will be applicable to every child that takes the test...
I live a very close to the Mountain, and I went out walking with my digital camera this afternoon. As it started to erupt, I caught this spectacular shot. You should have been there!
Somebody will have to put down their beer, float over to the hole and slap on a peel-n-stick patch.
Hopefully, they wont take too long to do it, as that escaping air will be acting as a thruster, creating what Newton called an equal and opposite reaction. That could start the module spinning (in the wrong way) or alter it's orbit. Of course, the more massive the module is, the more resistant it will be to accelerations.
Yes, it's actually the legendary 'purple haze' that Jimi Hendrix sings about in the so named song. Jimi is from Washington, and it is a little known fact that the song, 'Purple Haze' isn't about a psychadelic experience, but rather his secret yearnings to become a vulanologist and study the strange purple fog of Mount St. Helens.
Who knows what sucess and fame he might have achieved if he had only followed his dream...?
Sure programming is a form of math, and math shouldn't be able to be patented, as doing so could really stiffle innovation in many fields. But, here is the really odd thing. A patent protects a process, not an idea. And math is really a lot of processes combined with rules. So there is this wierd sort of exemption. You can patent a process, unless you can put it into numbers.
I personally think that the goal of patents is a worthy idea, you grant a limited monopoly and in return when it expires, society as a whole benefits. The other option a company has it keeping an invention a trade sceret. The coke formula is a trade secret, for example. Coke could patent it, but then they would have to tell everyone exactly how they make it.
My complaint about software patents is they are really cheating. They patent some process, but then when it eventually expires, they don't give anything back. I woudl have no problem with software patents if ALL the source code that they were used in was released open source after the patent expired. (The length would have to be shortened to something like 5 years, too.) As it stands, Amazon.com will have it's one-click shopping patent, and when it expires, it will have given nothing back to society in return for it's temporary monopoly. So it gets the benefit of having a trade sceret and a patent at the same time.
Let a company decide: Trade secret and keep the source code as long as they want, or Patent for five and open source the program afterwards.
That means that there is a 50/50 chance of a particular particle decaying in one half-life. So, there is only a high probability of this stuff breaking down in a certain time. Is the sample small enough for some of them to completely die before the end of it's expected life?
Any given particle will decay at a 'random' time, but there are so many particles that because you are sampling a large set, it becomes statistically deterministic.
NEWS CAMERA FOCUSES ON GROUP OF BEARDED MEN WEARING DIRTY CAMOFLAGE JUMPSUITS. THEY ARE STANDING BEYOUND A FENCE AT THE END OF AN AIRPORT RUNWAY.
REPORTER: Thanks, Dan. I am here at the end of runway 4, where we are seeing a shift in Al-Queda's tactics today. They seem to be employing some sort of revolutionary new tactic...
CAMERA SHOWS A TERRORIST HEAVE A BRICK IN THE AIR AS A JET TAKES OFF, ROARING OVERHEAD. THE BRICK FLYS ABOUT 20 FEET UP, BEFORE FALLING TO THE GROUND NEXT TO THE VISIBLY UPSET TERRORIST.
The problem with the game industry is that it gets distracted by pretty pictures. The parent compaired the Torque engine with 5 other engines. What was their common thread? They are all newer and prettier. How are these engines 'better'? More realistic physics models? Curved surfaces? Support for DX9 shaders? How do any of these things make a game more fun? The only way an engine is truly better is if it simplifies development with a better API than other engines, or allows you to do more with the same system resources than other competing engines. And if an engine does everything your design calls for, who cares if it is modern?
A good game is one that will be enjoyable, regardless of how it is rendered. For the last week, I have been playing all the MAME pac-man games, and it's amazing how well designed the original pac-man game was. (it really shows because a lot of the later variations were horrible. You can't improve much on a great design.)
I expect that some people will blow indy games off as 'crap to the masses', but then, the masses also seem to enjoy Brittney Spears and the Third Matrix movie, so what do they know.
What they are saying is this: They take three pictures. On a camera there is a point somewhere in front of the lens that is the 'focus point'. The distance it is away from the camera will vary by the lenses and their distance apart, but it is basically a fixed distance for any given setting. The first picture that point is set too far behind the subject, the second right on the subject (In focus) and the third in front of the subject. Because you know how the lenses were made, you can do some math and figure out how far away each element in the picture is by how the focus changes between the shots, and get a (quasi) 3d model of everything in the picture. The concept is simple enough, although having a proc that can do that in real time could be a challenge.
The real challenge is this: You are building a 3d model by interpolating data from a scene, but you are only doing it in one dimension. I bet a 3d picture would look like a scene from Doom1. You can create flat sprites and position them, but you can't capture any depth information without paralax interpolation either via lateral movement and reshooting or additional cameras.
Everybody seems to either be telling D&D jokes or flaming the idea. Keep in mind that most people that use computers are dumb as dirt on the topic. I worked at ChimpUSA in college, and it really opened my eyes. A very common question would involve someone shoving a new game at me and saying, 'I have a dell. Will this run?'.
While several people have pointed out that a L8 video card will not make a L3 system into a L8 system, at least you have a baseline language to work with.
I suspect they want this so software vendors can slap a sticker on a box that says 'Level 8' system required. It's not a perfect system, but it beats having ignorant sales people try to explain video card ram and HD seek times to Ma and Pa Kettle.
Slashdot Mirror
I like those 'Best viewed with X' tags that people put on their sites. It lets me know imediately that the designer is a total tool, and that I should probably just browse elsewhere, because the site is going to be total crap. It saves me the trouble of having to make the distinction myself...
Moderation ratings are ok for /., as its deals with topic oriented discussions. For one off video fieds, it would be pointles.
A better way of doing things would be stricly property oriented ratings. Each person can rate the clip with descriptions such as 'News', 'advertising', 'political', 'Local', 'Editoral', 'adult', etc. It would allow DB searches too...
SELECT * FROM VIDEOFEEDS WHERE PROPERTY IN ('Bukaki','Tentacle','Lesbian','alien','Nun','Dan Rather','pr0n')
Just based off the number of companies that the plaintiff is filling against, this doesn't look to me like a case of someone deliberately stealing another's patented idea. It looks like a squatter sitting on an idea, and trying to extort money off of whoever happens to try to inovate.
I'm all for the idea of patents, but this sort of thing just leaves a bad taste in your mouth...
This is an excellent point, but I would hazard a guess that using a open source viewer and file format would pretty much aleviate this problem.
There is a public access cable station where I live, so my first thought was why bother? Do we really need to have that funny guy that lives by the old slaughter house broadcasting world wide his theories about alien brian implants?
/. type site with a moderation system, and let people submit their own footage of local news stories. You would get excellent coverage (OSS though: many eyes is a good thing), and it would be hard to censor stories. Localization/Translation might be tricky, though...
From the standpoint of news broadcasting, this could be really big, though. Set up a
This might have a really interesting application for fast travel in a few years. New York to Japan in under an hour anyone?
Do something like that, and CEOs will be lining up to give you money.
"I HAVE IN MY HAND, A LIST OF 12 CARD HOLDING COMMUNIST PARTY MEMBERS, THAT WORK IN THE STATE DEPARTMENT..."
Yeah, we are so much wiser now, we would never fall for that old, 'red scare' paranoia that was rampant in the 1950s. What silly, foolish people our grandparents were to fall for such an obvious paranoid delusion. The real sad thing is, unlike the 1950's, there is no single vocal Joe McCarthy type to debunk. If compairing the current political situation to the 'Red Scare' is accurate, we will have to put up with this for a good ten years.
(because we all know that NASA engineers hang out at /. for ideas to dump garbage...)
/. to power it if you plan to drop it on Earth. While the ammount of radioactive material that was burned up would be inconsequential, the Luddites would go berserk...
There are 2 ways you are going to get rid of trash from the space station. Carry it home in the space shuttle, or launch it somewhere.
The Russian ships don't have room to carry stuff back, but here is the thing, you don't have to carry it ALL the way home. Grab a hefty bag, stuff it with trash, and tie it to the back of the capsul as you head back to Earth. You can either release it once it has enough momentum to quickly leave orbit, or drag it in behind you and let it seperate as it burns up.
Alternately, if you go with the 'Dump the trash before entering hyperspace' Imperial method, you have to have a way to get it clear of anywhere you might want to travel. Since we don't know WHERE we might want to travel, just launching it into space to float around for a few billion years seems...shortsighted. So, either a) burn it up by shooting it at the sun, or drop it on a planet.
So how do we do that, cheaply? There was a solar sail technology developed a year or two back, which involved a magnetically generated sail. Would it be cost effective to put a small power source on your trash, and fire it off at a target? I recall that the technology didn't seem too complicated, and the speeds that it could attain were fairly large. Just don't use one of those nuclear batteries mentioned a few days ago on
I get to fuck with them to no end, and waste their time.
Last one I got was from Earthlink, trying to sell me high speed internet service. Some Indian guy who only spoke b+ level English tried to sell me something I already have:
Indian: Do you have a computer?
Me: (yelling) Dear, do we have a computer? (pause)
yes, we have a TRS-80. Will your Internet work with that?
Indian: What operating system do you use?
Me: Apple Basic.
Indian: Oh yes, no problem. Would you like out anti-virus, spam blocker, and popup blocker for $10 extra?
Me: No, I like SPAM(tm), it's great cooked. And I've already had my flu shot this year.
(After 10 minuets of this sort of sillyness)
Me:By the way, what is this 'Internet' thing you keep mentioning?
You can try to pick up telemarketers who call (guy or girl, doesn't really matter), act like an idiot, act interested and accidentally drop the phoe a lot, accuse the caller of racial slander, etc. This accomplishes two ends. You get to have a great time messing with people's heads and you waste their time, lowering the profitability of telemarketing overall. I *highly* reccomend it...
Hey I have a better argument. Suppose there is a secret 'back door' in windows for the CIA/FBI/NSA to come in and spy on you in your parent's basement downloading Brittney Spears pr0n. Given that fact, why would they them use it themselves? Most government agencys use some flavor of Windows. Do you really think that the NSA, for example, is going to use an OS that is known to have a backdoor built into it?
I work at a certain EVIL company, and there have been some rumors that Google has been sniffing around, looking for good employees (yes, yes, obligatory MS joke here...) to bring over.
It looks like they are agressively trying to make sure that they keep on top of the talent curve. MS has always made an effort to grab up all the most talented engineers coming out of school. Google might try to give them a run for the money.
First off, I am not a hawk, and I think that warfare should only be used as a last resort. However, I am not some sort of peacnik idealist that thinks love solves every problem. The unfortunate truth is there are some people that need to be made dead to make the world a better place.
I think it's great that the military is writing documents like this. Sure, there is a treaty in place to keep space de-militarized. But, I pay taxes to have the military keep me safe. It they aren't trying to think of ways to keep me safe from every concieveable eventuality, I'd be pretty annoyed. The only thing I find suprising is that this paper wasn't dated 1957. I'm sure as soon as NASA figured out that we can shoot monkeys in space, the air force was working on ways to keep us safe from Russian space monkeys.
Just because people are thinking about solutions to potential problems doesn't mean we are planning on conquering space in the name of Emperor Dubyah. This article strikes me as a bit reactionist and alarming. To the thinkers in the military who spent time to start working out solutions to potential problems before they are occuring: Good work guys, thanks.
All the suggestions are decent ideas, but I wonder if the solution might be to change the problem.
If a person has such problems reading maps, that simple image enlargement techniques don't help then why try teaching geography visually? It is unlikely that that skill (Being able to find the Mississippi on a map) whill ever be a useful one to a person who is severly visually impaired. You can visually describe geography to someone and achieve the same end.
Tell the teacher to stop wasting time teaching skills that aren't ever going to be of use. Just because a standardized skill test has a question like that doesn't mean that it will be applicable to every child that takes the test...
I live a very close to the Mountain, and I went out walking with my digital camera this afternoon. As it started to erupt, I caught this spectacular shot. You should have been there!
o hawk.jpg
http://www.atomicarchive.com/Photos/LANL/images/m
Somebody will have to put down their beer, float over to the hole and slap on a peel-n-stick patch.
Hopefully, they wont take too long to do it, as that escaping air will be acting as a thruster, creating what Newton called an equal and opposite reaction. That could start the module spinning (in the wrong way) or alter it's orbit. Of course, the more massive the module is, the more resistant it will be to accelerations.
Yes, it's actually the legendary 'purple haze' that Jimi Hendrix sings about in the so named song. Jimi is from Washington, and it is a little known fact that the song, 'Purple Haze' isn't about a psychadelic experience, but rather his secret yearnings to become a vulanologist and study the strange purple fog of Mount St. Helens. Who knows what sucess and fame he might have achieved if he had only followed his dream...?
Parent statemen could't be further from the truth. At all the LAN parties I've run for example, there wasn't one single instance of software piracy.
We were too busy copying Mp3s and movies...
THANKS, FOLKS! I'LL BE HERE ALL WEEK!
Sure programming is a form of math, and math shouldn't be able to be patented, as doing so could really stiffle innovation in many fields. But, here is the really odd thing. A patent protects a process, not an idea. And math is really a lot of processes combined with rules. So there is this wierd sort of exemption. You can patent a process, unless you can put it into numbers.
I personally think that the goal of patents is a worthy idea, you grant a limited monopoly and in return when it expires, society as a whole benefits. The other option a company has it keeping an invention a trade sceret. The coke formula is a trade secret, for example. Coke could patent it, but then they would have to tell everyone exactly how they make it.
My complaint about software patents is they are really cheating. They patent some process, but then when it eventually expires, they don't give anything back. I woudl have no problem with software patents if ALL the source code that they were used in was released open source after the patent expired. (The length would have to be shortened to something like 5 years, too.) As it stands, Amazon.com will have it's one-click shopping patent, and when it expires, it will have given nothing back to society in return for it's temporary monopoly. So it gets the benefit of having a trade sceret and a patent at the same time.
Let a company decide: Trade secret and keep the source code as long as they want, or Patent for five and open source the program afterwards.
That means that there is a 50/50 chance of a particular particle decaying in one half-life. So, there is only a high probability of this stuff breaking down in a certain time. Is the sample small enough for some of them to completely die before the end of it's expected life?
Any given particle will decay at a 'random' time, but there are so many particles that because you are sampling a large set, it becomes statistically deterministic.
NEWS CAMERA FOCUSES ON GROUP OF BEARDED MEN WEARING DIRTY CAMOFLAGE JUMPSUITS. THEY ARE STANDING BEYOUND A FENCE AT THE END OF AN AIRPORT RUNWAY.
REPORTER: Thanks, Dan. I am here at the end of runway 4, where we are seeing a shift in Al-Queda's tactics today. They seem to be employing some sort of revolutionary new tactic...
CAMERA SHOWS A TERRORIST HEAVE A BRICK IN THE AIR AS A JET TAKES OFF, ROARING OVERHEAD. THE BRICK FLYS ABOUT 20 FEET UP, BEFORE FALLING TO THE GROUND NEXT TO THE VISIBLY UPSET TERRORIST.
Reporter: Back to you, Dan.
The problem with the game industry is that it gets distracted by pretty pictures. The parent compaired the Torque engine with 5 other engines. What was their common thread? They are all newer and prettier. How are these engines 'better'? More realistic physics models? Curved surfaces? Support for DX9 shaders? How do any of these things make a game more fun? The only way an engine is truly better is if it simplifies development with a better API than other engines, or allows you to do more with the same system resources than other competing engines. And if an engine does everything your design calls for, who cares if it is modern?
A good game is one that will be enjoyable, regardless of how it is rendered. For the last week, I have been playing all the MAME pac-man games, and it's amazing how well designed the original pac-man game was. (it really shows because a lot of the later variations were horrible. You can't improve much on a great design.)
I expect that some people will blow indy games off as 'crap to the masses', but then, the masses also seem to enjoy Brittney Spears and the Third Matrix movie, so what do they know.
Yeah, he's right. I think that 'proper' ANSI C also requires you to actuall return something to main()
What they are saying is this: They take three pictures. On a camera there is a point somewhere in front of the lens that is the 'focus point'. The distance it is away from the camera will vary by the lenses and their distance apart, but it is basically a fixed distance for any given setting. The first picture that point is set too far behind the subject, the second right on the subject (In focus) and the third in front of the subject. Because you know how the lenses were made, you can do some math and figure out how far away each element in the picture is by how the focus changes between the shots, and get a (quasi) 3d model of everything in the picture. The concept is simple enough, although having a proc that can do that in real time could be a challenge.
The real challenge is this: You are building a 3d model by interpolating data from a scene, but you are only doing it in one dimension. I bet a 3d picture would look like a scene from Doom1. You can create flat sprites and position them, but you can't capture any depth information without paralax interpolation either via lateral movement and reshooting or additional cameras.
Well seeing through Smoke, fog dust, amd such is nice and all, but when are they going to invent something that will REALLY benefit humanity?
You know, like a camera that sees through girl's clothing...
Er, I mean, like cure cancer!
Everybody seems to either be telling D&D jokes or flaming the idea. Keep in mind that most people that use computers are dumb as dirt on the topic. I worked at ChimpUSA in college, and it really opened my eyes. A very common question would involve someone shoving a new game at me and saying, 'I have a dell. Will this run?'.
While several people have pointed out that a L8 video card will not make a L3 system into a L8 system, at least you have a baseline language to work with.
I suspect they want this so software vendors can slap a sticker on a box that says 'Level 8' system required. It's not a perfect system, but it beats having ignorant sales people try to explain video card ram and HD seek times to Ma and Pa Kettle.