I've blogged about tech stuff, like the digital cinema spec when it went version 1.0.
A lot of readers didn't pick up much on the technical detail. Not only is it only interesting to a narrow audience (cinema fans who are also interested in digital video) but because it's reasonably boring even to a hardened geek who just doesn't happen to have gotten into MPEG standards.
Even outside of the technical field, journalists dumb everything down to a lowest common denominator. If they're in a specialised field, that denominator might be a bit more technical than the regular press, but that's life.
Heck, even an article with a wide vocabulary in the general press brings readership way down. A lot of people only read headlines...
I for one cannot wait for full digital cinema based on the spec released last summer.
You are quite right about most prints for movie theaters these days too: they're pretty awful. Most films I've seen recently have been poorly projected (bad focus and not enough / too much cropped from the actual print via poor screen size ratio compared to the print) and the print quality was mediocre at best. Having to make sure you get to one of the first showings at any given cinema is probably the best bet, but who wants to do that?
Given the choice between a good projection of a DVD at someone's home with a good setup (including excellent sound) and going to a cinema, there is no contest. Even in an empty local cinema I have been subject to projector / aircon noise, rubbish in the aisles, cold draughts, you name it.
I think home cinema and DVDs are popular because the cinema experience has really started to lose momentum. The only reason I ever go is to get "out of the house" and see something recent. Simultaneous DVD release would kill the movie theater, but who cares?
As somebody else has already commented, cases have been brought.
Google also outright bans, or refuses payment, to people who seem to have an exceptionnaly high click rate, especially bloggers (go to any blog exchange to find people moaning about it).
I had a PI with 32M RAM running a lightweight Linux server setup. It had Apache, PHP, MySQL, Postfix and DJBDNS. Ran 50 mailboxes without ever having problems.
I have to admit though that everything was custom compiled for the box to run properly, and no way would it have come close as a desktop. That means specific kernel compile, apache tweak and compile, MySQL compile and Postfix/DJBDNS tweaks and compile. I even compiled PERL for it. Before, it was a desktop and ran Win98 - it sucked.
The sad parallel I would have to draw is that if new high spec servers were configured with the same care, then they would fly. The reason they still seem almost as sluggish as before is because there's bloat everywhere, and it's not getting any better.
My current work desktop has 256M of RAM and a reasonable processor (2GHz or so). It sucks worse than older desktops I have had, because WinXP can't do the business on that kind of machine. The tweaks I can make I have, and they've all taken longer than a simple kernel compile and choice of light window manager.
Linux wins if you know what you're doing, but sadly people who really do know what they are doing are in the minority. The majority think they're good if they can follow an install CD. So comparing apples for apples : latest RedHat/Fedora vs. latest Windows, most admins (the ignorant majority) probably prefer XP because the boxes they buy are "configured" for it, and the install is familiar to them.
"The So Enormously Large that Gosh We're All Really Impressed Telescope" sounds like it just might be accepted, were it not for the fact that the acronym SELGWARIT is a little difficult to remember, and lacks punch or reference to an animal with good eyesight (or a large animal, perhaps).
You could however, with minor adjustments, get it sounding just nice with a good acronym to boot, viz : ELEPHANT Enormously Large Exceedingly imPressive Huge Array mind-Numbing Telescope".
A tough part of any agreement like this is, just like the article states, to actually get people to work together and provide access. There is an interesting perspective on how it might need a radical group who do it for kicks in Cory Doctorow's novel "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town" to get things moving.
Personally, I think a time will come when WiFi access is very common, and some kind of roaming agreement between providers will cause your access to be metered by your ISP wherever you are.
Trivia: Did you know that practically the entire Internet infrastructure in Haiti is wireless?
Somebody already sold me some Martian Grass. It's already available.
Or maybe the guy was so wasted he said "Martian" but really mean "Moroccan". In which case it was Freudian, because the market for Moroccan is decidedly bad since the police started running after anything vaguely arabic...
I'm with you on this : Plucker is the way to go, and it can pull in regular HTML with small images : try finding the mobile content for PDAs which is HTML with small images and otherwise text only. For example the BBC PDA site. Works like a charm with Plucker, and no RSS parsing needed.
RSS is for syndication. Aggregators are useful for those kinds of people who like "My Yahoo!" and similar, and it looks like RSS will be the tech of choice for this kind of site in the future. That's the point of RSS, it's not supposed to replace the browser but it sure makes customisation easier. Reading multiple blogs is much easier with an RSS aggregator too, and RSS search engines for blogs will be useful too.
To be honest it's not that clear from your post, and I'd say that in my defense in the article that I linked is taken from a professional perspective.
35mm high quality emulsion film may continue to be used in studios ahead of digital. But if you're really interested in quality you'll either be using other film formats (esp. in portraiture) like 4x5 and you'll still probably use digital for some work where quality is less important than efficiency in getting work to somewhere else that wants digital quality.
Average point and shoot resolution on average 400ASA film is nowhere near 22MP, except under ideal conditions, which you won't get with point and shoot cameras in the first place. Above about 4-6MP seems to me to be a good enough compromise for anything below A4 size prints or serious art exhibitions, according to the site linked previously whose author seems to sound like he knows what he's talking about.
The big advantage of digital is that you can take multiple exposures on a tripod and blend them very easily indeed : Max Lyons has some impressive images on his site of digital panoramics using stitching, and multiple exposures blended in Photoshop to give high contrast scenes a lower contrast rendering and the results look very nice indeed.
Being caught precisely still requires removing that kinetic energy. If you stop the ball dead, the energy either dents the robot hand, dents the ball, or is converted to heat or sound.
So yes, you can catch it "precisely", which means stopping it dead, but you'll have to dent the ball or take the energy away in some kind of spring mechanism.
That's why it's harder. The sponge absorbs some of the energy in the sponge compressing and then re-expanding to use the energy, which is already less due to reduced mass.
Picking up an imprecise, reasonably fast throw to a particular area doesn't need catching ability : think of those coin collectors on toll gates which are just a funnel down to a small coin slot.
"The system is yet not sturdy enough to catch a real baseball and was only tested with soft balls. But, in other tests, it proved adept at grasping objects of various shapes, including cylinders."
So it's really a display of fast reacting robotic actuators and a pretty cool photo detection in order to time the reaction correctly. As the guy quoted in the article says "It's an engineering feat really"
Real catching, in my opinion, can only be acheived if you can follow through with your hands to "take the speed off the ball" at least for hard objects. I think that a fast moving real baseball would be incredibly hard to catch robotically. A mitt is really useful because it allows the momentum to be absorbed into a wide area. In cricket, all fielders know they have to bring the ball in to their chest or follow its trajectory after catching impact to not lose the ball - they don't have a mitt. This robot couldn't catch a moving hardball no matter how fast its actuators are, because the kinetic energy has to be disspated properly, and with a heavy ball this energy is very high.
Pretty cool demo though. I think its applications will be rather more in the picking up of (reasonably slow) moving objects realm than any useful rôle in catching. If you want to catch soft balls all day long might as well just breed dogs.
What a terrible memory I have. Yes, 1 in 8 seems much more reasonable. It was certainly consumer high street spending, and not anything to do with GDP which includes exports and so on.
The local Tesco store near where my parents live has killed most local commerce and the next town (5 miles away) suffered greatly until a supermarket was given permission to build a large store on a town centre site there.
It is more correct to say that the hypermarket has changed Britain, but Tesco happens to be by far the most successful example. IIRC the statistic is that 1 out of every 3 GBP spent in the UK is spent at Tesco.
In their defense they say "Tesco tries to see off criticism by arguing that it gives customers what they want and keeps staff happy." You could easily turn that around any say that they reinforce customer habits by offering them offers on their usually consumed high value items. You rarely see offers on bread, milk and sugar. Rather more on your favourite desserts and higher margin goods. By suggesting that others purchased Turkey Twizzlers with Claret and then offering other Turkey Twizzlers offers on Claret rather sounds like moving everyone towards a common denominator to me. But one thing is for sure, it sure sells product! So if your goal is to survive in the continual drive to make consumers consume more and more (and at credit too - with the Tesco credit card, Tesco loans and with a Tesco banking service) then you're onto a winner by being just like Tesco.
The technique involves dipping your chips into a purified solution of ketchup, rather than the conventional method of throwing the ketchup directly onto the chips.
So, are you a dipper or do you cover them with sauce first? Science have proved that the dippers are using a superior technique...
chips: n. [British] Fried potatoes cut into thick rectangular strips. see fries [American].
Sorry, upgraded Wordpress recently and new moderation flag set by default. Have approved your comment and unset the flag, see the site for my reply.
Thanks for your interest in the site.
This post points out a problem which is covered in other posts, but perhaps in the best way.
I haven't seen any Slashdot coverage of the digital cinema spec, the loss of celluloid will change the movie industry I think. If anyone is interested in the full tech spec you can see it here.
I'm always interested by these routers that give better ping times - if the ping is indeed an ICMP echo packet, then these can easily be prioritised by the router.
I've often thought that shaving 50ms off a ping time probably doesn't make that much difference especially if you're actually trying to shape non ICMP traffic. Unless of course the "pings" are traces of packet time for actual ingame packets over UDP or TCP, in which case I'd appreciate knowing a bit more about that.
Note : a quicker ICMP response from a given host may indicate that the same host will be quicker at replying generally, of course. But really these routers just seem to make sure that the home network works properly. If you're losing 100ms of latency on your home network, you probably have too much shit running on your PC in the first place.
Strictly speaking, you don't need a monitor on a box that isn't going to be used for anything other than routing. As long as you can set the BIOS to not error on no monitor, you can set the box up initially using a video card and then power down after first successful boot, remove the card, and reboot.
Just remember to run an SSH daemon for remote admin, and perhaps stick something like Webmin on there if you're not too good with the command line, so that you can modify what the box does without even needing to reconnect the screen.
That solution would give you 0 watts for the video card;-)
You seem to talk as if you're reasonably knowledgeable about UI elements and colours. You also realise that different icon sets exist and use them.
But my question is how involved you have got with the development process in Gnome? Whining on Slashdot is easy; making educated argument to the Gnome dev team is harder, but you sound like you have the mettle, so is there money where your mouth is?
It's at 88 mph not 80.
"As long as you hit that wire with the connecting hook at precisely eighty-eight miles per hour the instant the lightning strikes the tower... everything will be fine."
in BTTF III it would have been a bit easier to get the train up to 80mph than 88mph...
I think you're miscalculating. The set which includes all other browsers has risen more than the single browser Firefox, but as long as that set has even share in growth, that means Firefox is still very much the leader.
Slashdot Mirror
If you RTFA you'll see it's got a list of "honorable mentions" including those games you have chosen...
I've blogged about tech stuff, like the digital cinema spec when it went version 1.0.
A lot of readers didn't pick up much on the technical detail. Not only is it only interesting to a narrow audience (cinema fans who are also interested in digital video) but because it's reasonably boring even to a hardened geek who just doesn't happen to have gotten into MPEG standards.
Even outside of the technical field, journalists dumb everything down to a lowest common denominator. If they're in a specialised field, that denominator might be a bit more technical than the regular press, but that's life.
Heck, even an article with a wide vocabulary in the general press brings readership way down. A lot of people only read headlines...
I for one cannot wait for full digital cinema based on the spec released last summer.
You are quite right about most prints for movie theaters these days too: they're pretty awful. Most films I've seen recently have been poorly projected (bad focus and not enough / too much cropped from the actual print via poor screen size ratio compared to the print) and the print quality was mediocre at best. Having to make sure you get to one of the first showings at any given cinema is probably the best bet, but who wants to do that?
Given the choice between a good projection of a DVD at someone's home with a good setup (including excellent sound) and going to a cinema, there is no contest. Even in an empty local cinema I have been subject to projector / aircon noise, rubbish in the aisles, cold draughts, you name it.
I think home cinema and DVDs are popular because the cinema experience has really started to lose momentum. The only reason I ever go is to get "out of the house" and see something recent. Simultaneous DVD release would kill the movie theater, but who cares?
As somebody else has already commented, cases have been brought.
Google also outright bans, or refuses payment, to people who seem to have an exceptionnaly high click rate, especially bloggers (go to any blog exchange to find people moaning about it).
I had a PI with 32M RAM running a lightweight Linux server setup. It had Apache, PHP, MySQL, Postfix and DJBDNS. Ran 50 mailboxes without ever having problems.
I have to admit though that everything was custom compiled for the box to run properly, and no way would it have come close as a desktop. That means specific kernel compile, apache tweak and compile, MySQL compile and Postfix/DJBDNS tweaks and compile. I even compiled PERL for it. Before, it was a desktop and ran Win98 - it sucked.
The sad parallel I would have to draw is that if new high spec servers were configured with the same care, then they would fly. The reason they still seem almost as sluggish as before is because there's bloat everywhere, and it's not getting any better.
My current work desktop has 256M of RAM and a reasonable processor (2GHz or so). It sucks worse than older desktops I have had, because WinXP can't do the business on that kind of machine. The tweaks I can make I have, and they've all taken longer than a simple kernel compile and choice of light window manager.
Linux wins if you know what you're doing, but sadly people who really do know what they are doing are in the minority. The majority think they're good if they can follow an install CD. So comparing apples for apples : latest RedHat/Fedora vs. latest Windows, most admins (the ignorant majority) probably prefer XP because the boxes they buy are "configured" for it, and the install is familiar to them.
"The So Enormously Large that Gosh We're All Really Impressed Telescope" sounds like it just might be accepted, were it not for the fact that the acronym SELGWARIT is a little difficult to remember, and lacks punch or reference to an animal with good eyesight (or a large animal, perhaps).
You could however, with minor adjustments, get it sounding just nice with a good acronym to boot, viz : ELEPHANT Enormously Large Exceedingly imPressive Huge Array mind-Numbing Telescope".
A tough part of any agreement like this is, just like the article states, to actually get people to work together and provide access. There is an interesting perspective on how it might need a radical group who do it for kicks in Cory Doctorow's novel "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town" to get things moving.
Personally, I think a time will come when WiFi access is very common, and some kind of roaming agreement between providers will cause your access to be metered by your ISP wherever you are.
Trivia: Did you know that practically the entire Internet infrastructure in Haiti is wireless?
Somebody already sold me some Martian Grass. It's already available. Or maybe the guy was so wasted he said "Martian" but really mean "Moroccan". In which case it was Freudian, because the market for Moroccan is decidedly bad since the police started running after anything vaguely arabic...
I'm with you on this : Plucker is the way to go, and it can pull in regular HTML with small images : try finding the mobile content for PDAs which is HTML with small images and otherwise text only. For example the BBC PDA site. Works like a charm with Plucker, and no RSS parsing needed.
RSS is for syndication. Aggregators are useful for those kinds of people who like "My Yahoo!" and similar, and it looks like RSS will be the tech of choice for this kind of site in the future. That's the point of RSS, it's not supposed to replace the browser but it sure makes customisation easier. Reading multiple blogs is much easier with an RSS aggregator too, and RSS search engines for blogs will be useful too.
I love this page, and it seems to be an opportune moment.
Land the shuttle yourself you macho.
To be honest it's not that clear from your post, and I'd say that in my defense in the article that I linked is taken from a professional perspective.
35mm high quality emulsion film may continue to be used in studios ahead of digital. But if you're really interested in quality you'll either be using other film formats (esp. in portraiture) like 4x5 and you'll still probably use digital for some work where quality is less important than efficiency in getting work to somewhere else that wants digital quality.
Average point and shoot resolution on average 400ASA film is nowhere near 22MP, except under ideal conditions, which you won't get with point and shoot cameras in the first place. Above about 4-6MP seems to me to be a good enough compromise for anything below A4 size prints or serious art exhibitions, according to the site linked previously whose author seems to sound like he knows what he's talking about.
The big advantage of digital is that you can take multiple exposures on a tripod and blend them very easily indeed : Max Lyons has some impressive images on his site of digital panoramics using stitching, and multiple exposures blended in Photoshop to give high contrast scenes a lower contrast rendering and the results look very nice indeed.
Being caught precisely still requires removing that kinetic energy. If you stop the ball dead, the energy either dents the robot hand, dents the ball, or is converted to heat or sound.
So yes, you can catch it "precisely", which means stopping it dead, but you'll have to dent the ball or take the energy away in some kind of spring mechanism.
That's why it's harder. The sponge absorbs some of the energy in the sponge compressing and then re-expanding to use the energy, which is already less due to reduced mass.
Picking up an imprecise, reasonably fast throw to a particular area doesn't need catching ability : think of those coin collectors on toll gates which are just a funnel down to a small coin slot.
So it's really a display of fast reacting robotic actuators and a pretty cool photo detection in order to time the reaction correctly. As the guy quoted in the article says "It's an engineering feat really"
Real catching, in my opinion, can only be acheived if you can follow through with your hands to "take the speed off the ball" at least for hard objects. I think that a fast moving real baseball would be incredibly hard to catch robotically. A mitt is really useful because it allows the momentum to be absorbed into a wide area. In cricket, all fielders know they have to bring the ball in to their chest or follow its trajectory after catching impact to not lose the ball - they don't have a mitt. This robot couldn't catch a moving hardball no matter how fast its actuators are, because the kinetic energy has to be disspated properly, and with a heavy ball this energy is very high.
Pretty cool demo though. I think its applications will be rather more in the picking up of (reasonably slow) moving objects realm than any useful rôle in catching. If you want to catch soft balls all day long might as well just breed dogs.
What a terrible memory I have. Yes, 1 in 8 seems much more reasonable. It was certainly consumer high street spending, and not anything to do with GDP which includes exports and so on.
The local Tesco store near where my parents live has killed most local commerce and the next town (5 miles away) suffered greatly until a supermarket was given permission to build a large store on a town centre site there.
It is more correct to say that the hypermarket has changed Britain, but Tesco happens to be by far the most successful example. IIRC the statistic is that 1 out of every 3 GBP spent in the UK is spent at Tesco.
In their defense they say "Tesco tries to see off criticism by arguing that it gives customers what they want and keeps staff happy." You could easily turn that around any say that they reinforce customer habits by offering them offers on their usually consumed high value items. You rarely see offers on bread, milk and sugar. Rather more on your favourite desserts and higher margin goods. By suggesting that others purchased Turkey Twizzlers with Claret and then offering other Turkey Twizzlers offers on Claret rather sounds like moving everyone towards a common denominator to me. But one thing is for sure, it sure sells product! So if your goal is to survive in the continual drive to make consumers consume more and more (and at credit too - with the Tesco credit card, Tesco loans and with a Tesco banking service) then you're onto a winner by being just like Tesco.
Good point about the poor dictionary definition.
So, are you a dipper or do you cover them with sauce first? Science have proved that the dippers are using a superior technique...
chips: n. [British] Fried potatoes cut into thick rectangular strips. see fries [American].
Sorry, upgraded Wordpress recently and new moderation flag set by default. Have approved your comment and unset the flag, see the site for my reply. Thanks for your interest in the site.
This post points out a problem which is covered in other posts, but perhaps in the best way.
I haven't seen any Slashdot coverage of the digital cinema spec, the loss of celluloid will change the movie industry I think. If anyone is interested in the full tech spec you can see it here.
I've often thought that shaving 50ms off a ping time probably doesn't make that much difference especially if you're actually trying to shape non ICMP traffic. Unless of course the "pings" are traces of packet time for actual ingame packets over UDP or TCP, in which case I'd appreciate knowing a bit more about that.
Note : a quicker ICMP response from a given host may indicate that the same host will be quicker at replying generally, of course. But really these routers just seem to make sure that the home network works properly. If you're losing 100ms of latency on your home network, you probably have too much shit running on your PC in the first place.
Strictly speaking, you don't need a monitor on a box that isn't going to be used for anything other than routing. As long as you can set the BIOS to not error on no monitor, you can set the box up initially using a video card and then power down after first successful boot, remove the card, and reboot.
Just remember to run an SSH daemon for remote admin, and perhaps stick something like Webmin on there if you're not too good with the command line, so that you can modify what the box does without even needing to reconnect the screen.
That solution would give you 0 watts for the video card ;-)
You seem to talk as if you're reasonably knowledgeable about UI elements and colours. You also realise that different icon sets exist and use them. But my question is how involved you have got with the development process in Gnome? Whining on Slashdot is easy; making educated argument to the Gnome dev team is harder, but you sound like you have the mettle, so is there money where your mouth is?
It's at 88 mph not 80. "As long as you hit that wire with the connecting hook at precisely eighty-eight miles per hour the instant the lightning strikes the tower... everything will be fine." in BTTF III it would have been a bit easier to get the train up to 80mph than 88mph...
I think you're miscalculating. The set which includes all other browsers has risen more than the single browser Firefox, but as long as that set has even share in growth, that means Firefox is still very much the leader.