As is well known in all film car chases, vehicles have a higher chance of survival (especially when wrecked beyond usual driveability) if they are being chased.
A load of drone cars should be driven behind these competitors with models of druglords with machine guns, outlaws, corrupt police officers, and people to whom the teams own money.
That way, they should be able to defy gravity enough to land from a great height at a mere 30 degrees to the horizontal without breaking their suspension or driveshafts, and continue to turn even after front side collisions which would leave bushes and pinions bent (or wheels set to cambers which would normally cause them to no longer turn). They might even get speed boosts beyond the maximum engineering speed expected for the motor, gas and gearbox actually installed.
For an added bonus, they could have critically wounded people in the back, and an accomplice who absolutely has to jump out at 40mph somewhere mid course in order to continue some secret mission.
It's a British newspaper article. Companies in it are there because they have been heard of in Britain, because they're British, or had operations in the UK.
And lastminute.com happens to be the major player in online travel in Europe. Just not in the US, because Travelocity and Expedia already have that market quite well covered. That doesn't mean you can't make money in uros just as well as you can in Dollar$.
"$6,000 for the Sony monitor, $3,500 for the Bose Lifestyle Audio System, $1,000 for custom installations, cables, etc. $135/month for the "all you can eat" TW cable television service and the picture is about 1/2 as good as the $2,000 36" Sony WEGA SD set it replaced."
got up this morning, had breakfast, went out of the front door.
That's...
Woke up this mornin' da da da da dum
Got out of bed
Ate me some breakfast da da da da dum
Went out in the street
Yeah right thru' the front door
Oh yeah baby
And I did it all... da da da da dum
Fortheblues thankyou very much
Moving the washer fillup point to the rear of the car near the petrol filler cap is totally logical. Welding the bonnet shut is not. You can solve the problem described in the article - women not wanting to open a huge bonnet (hood) - by moving the washer filler place, heck even the expansion tank.
But... welding the hood shut sure sounds like a way to seal in warranty stuff, stop you changing your own oil, and so on. Especially if you need some kind of rig to get the front part off to get at the engine.
Mechanics will hate this kind of car. PITA to have to do complex stuff just to get at a connector for engine computer interface or something! You can't move all those everywhere, much more logical to have those accessible near the engine itself...
I would argue that Word can probably do your Table of contents stuff. Just that the secretary doesn't know Word like the old WordPerfect legal secretaries knew WP... You can give sections names, styles, and then generate a table of contents automatically.
I wish you hadn't blatently stated that your time is worth $350 an hour. It looks awfully bigheaded next to the statement that your secretary's time is worth one fourteenth of yours. In the same sentence show that s/he can use the tool in half the time you would need. And probably someone like her/him wrote the macro that makes the generate button work *just so*.
Where Linux is competing is in the server farm space. There, it doesn't matter too much about binary drivers for nVidia and Centrino, because there are desktop/laptop technologies. Servers are always going to have copper or fibre going into their NICs, and bought specced up for the OS they are going to use. Sure, some servers might migrate but most have supported hardware. Most good SCSI cards, NICs and chipsets are supported, anything else is cruft in the server world. VESA support is more than you need for a console, and great if you have it.
Wireless, 3D, all that stuff... is end user high margin hardware. Therefore, it's the hardest thing for the big manufacturers to open. Personally, I don't care. Desktop Linux for me means using VESA but gaming and all that will come much later, I couldn't care less. Energy should be used consolidating server based Linux and efficient corporate desktop stuff. Anything else, right now, is a bonus as far as I'm concerned. At least nVidia have realised that there are some gamers who like Linux who will buy their cards (and rave about them even to Windows gamers) at high profit margins because there is a binary driver.
Everyone else is more interested in where Open Office is going, quite frankly... and when there will be a proper CMS toolset for Linux.
The business paradigm didn't change overnight, bad business didn't become good because of a web site, and you still had to make more money than you were spending in the reasonably short term...
The whole phenomenon was down to greed. I worked on a big project, and it happened like this:
A good idea started
Good people got hired
Investors dumped in a load of money
Stuff got too big too quick
People on stupid salaries started thinking they had to change stuff all over the place, new logo new this new that
The web visitors just said no thanks had enough - it wasn't working like it used to
The site that is left is no more, but you can see the changes here:
The idea was OK, but by the time a load of stupid shit like free email, instant messaging and all that was tacked on, it just didn't work any more, cost way too much money...
But we had a great launch party for Orientation Morocco, let me tell you!
What's amazing about the piano, is that electric current is used to warm the strings in order to get them into tune. The guitar tunes itself mechanically, but the piano is tuned electrically (not electronically, although there are electronics to determine the pitch of the strings).
The self tuning guitar is really for people who play alternate tunings, like open D, open G, that sort of thing. Regular guitar tuning is easy enough to maintain with a good ear, but automatically tuning to some nice open tuning could give the guitar more tonal and harmonic depth onstage in a live situation, without having to pick up a separate guitar... this is what it's all about.
It would have suited Jimi Hendrix too. He couldn't seem to keep his guitar in tune. If he wasn't up the fretboard (where he'd sort of compensate) but playing open notes it would sound awful.
This is modded funny, but there's many a true word spoken in jest.
Half the time, having a good backup of valuable files means precisely not losing hours to recover your machine. I've lost countless hours bringing my machine back purely because my backup set was too old and I wanted files back.
Sorry, but if you only code the difference between pictures, then you are lossless, because you can recreate the original stream perfectly.
Psychovisual means a couple of things to me: using colour information in a different way, as you said... also making choices about luminosity in the same way (very dark areas have little detail to the eye, but to the computer there could be a lot of noise or whatever). This is why you get blockiness in areas of dark colours in badly encoded films, even on DVD.
Motion estimation is there to predict changes, encode the prediction, and then make corrections where necessary I guess. But I take on board that some pyschovisual enhancements as stated in the codec settings are pretty much fine tuning, there are other more general psychovisual things happening, like you correctly said and as I have added to.
In other words, transmitting colours onto an exponential scale is a psychovisual change, often the human eye doesn't feel the difference. Same as for what XviD calls 'lumi masking' and all sorts of other things which are trying to make us feel that much, much less data represents the same moving image, at least psychologically!
Incidentally this whole thing is why JPEG handles gradual changes from one colour to another so badly, always if you make a graduation from light blue to dark blue over 255 steps in Photoshop then encode in JPEG you have blockiness, even at high quality encoding settings.
"why not use comrpession (sic) to remove unvisible (sic) information"
That's what it does. "Psycho-visual" and "psycho-acoustic" modelling removes stuff that you can't really see or hear respectively, that's what MPEG compression schemes are all about! Any lossy format has to remove something from the data stream.
Well DVD movies are only 720x576, but "projectable movie" resolution is going to be at least double in both width and height, leaving your max 2mbps to become around 8mbps which fits perfectly with the 7.5mbps, minimum quantiser and max number of I frames.
DVD encoding is around the 9mbps mark IIRC... it maxes out before 10mbps (9800kbps?) in the official standard.
OK so I was wrong about the MHz, because as a matter of fact it looked a lot like this
Now I was pretty young at the time, so I don't remember exact specs. Quoted from the web page above
Ericsson PC :
4.77 Mhz. RAM: 128 kB., ROM: 8kB., OS:
MS DOS 3.0 Hard disk: 10 Mb. Floppy disk: 5.25 inch 360 kB
My particular version did not have a hard disk, but 10MiB sounds about right for a more expensive model that shipped with hard drive the time. The next PC we had was an Amstrad 1512 and that got retrofitted with a 30MiB hard drive.
I said I was probably wrong about the DOS version. The clock speed was a total guess.
That GEM desktop link is cool. It's the first thing I've read that proves that the desktop that shipped with my Amstrad PC1512 and my Atari ST was indeed the same product.
Yes, you can argue that PC history would look similar without Bill Gates. But would your Grandma be using a multimedia machine today (and not tomorrow) without Microsoft's massive "marketing before secure, bug free computing" campaign?
Apple gave us "the Grandma can use it" interface, yes, but Microsoft sold it to her bundled with her new PC.
Intel and IBM shipped home PCs running which OS? Anyone? MS-DOS? What did the MS stand for?
I wasn't talking about BSOD errors, which don't mean anything (I have frequently said to clients that those error numbers don't mean anything, even to MS developers, I'm pretty sure it's an "in" joke where they put random memory register references converted to decimal). I was talking about stuff where disks and whatnot aren't readable. Try it in Linux, you'll get something complex like 'cannot mount/dev/fd0, unrecognized file system' which says more to me, but less to Grandma.
Oh, I am older than 25. I do remember my first PC. It was ~2MHz I think, a single 5.25" floppy, single density 360KiB formatted disks. MSDOS v5 or so, and 128KiB of RAM. Monochrome CGA display. Something along those lines, anyway, don't have exact spec. and I may be wrong about MSDOS version.
For every flippant point I make, there may be a counter argument. But the fact remains, love it or hate it, Microsoft can take some credit (even if that means admitting they were the schoolyard bully) for where computing is today.
Bill Gates has done more to retard the computer industry than any man alive !
You are so wrong about that. What Bill Gates (or at least Microsoft) did was to give computing to the masses. The PC revolution was completely Microsoft driven. They made stuff simple. They took away all the beauty of a real computer system, but they made it dead easy. They gave us:
CTRL-ALT-DEL... Abort, Retry or Fail?... OK, Cancel... Press any key to reboot...
That's all rubbish compared to proper error messages, but the upshot is that your Grandma can use a computer because Microsoft dumbed it all down enough and made it easy to work with PCs.
Sure, they gained a monopoly too, and such a position of power as to exclude others... but their time will come, and their contribution will rise from the ashes as being a real, tangible one. Even if it was copied from elsewhere! It certainly didn't "retard" anything. Dubious business practices maybe, but you don't get to the top without stepping on a few people.
Disclaimer: I prefer to run Linux, but I'm interested enough to work it all out, and fascinated by the intricacies. But it's not ready for your Grandmother yet.
SCO's spreading of FUD has already set a precedent for their lack of integrity.
In my mind, the prime candidate for releasing the virus is SCO themselves, in a bid to disgrace the Linux community.
That the story has been picked up by the BBC in such a way rather suggests that there is a hidden agenda - Politici(s|z)ing the Open Source movement.
Friends, it is time to organise. Never before has there been a time to be more together and united against such tales. Bodies that truly represents the Open Source philosophy already exists, and I suggest we all get behind them.
The BBC must learn not to refer to a bunch of loosely knit hackers around the globe in terms more rightly applied to terrorist movements and political agitators. It's not good to rant as an individual with loosely knit backing around the globe. It must be done from a united front. So get with your LUGs and your websites and make sure we're all linking to the same places.
My opinions are not necessarily those of my employer.
Talking about his
# 30% reduction in tube length
# 50% reduction in eye piece height
# 4x more back focus
Compared to, of course, smaller secondaries...
It's a semi interesting page but frankly doesn't do it for me. Great for telescope geeks no doubt. But the key question he surely missed... if you point it at some interesting bedroom or bathroom windows... is it able to see better through slightly opaque curtains?
And not in the Apple section (even as a subsection?)
Kudos to the fact it was indeed the iPod, but it would be cheaper to use a generic portable hard drive, since this is movie footage and not soundtrack data. The iPod wasn't used for what it was designed for.
The laptop needn't have been a G4 either, and they stuck in iSight as well. What they SHOULD be telling us is whether these things were purchased at RRP, at big discount, or given away for free by Apple...
Threads on Slashdot about this predicted this. I cannot believe this experiment was even carried out. Other posts have already said that better than me.
Whoever led this experiment and set a price of $7 ought to get sacked. Children love to watch Disney films over and over again, and Disney should know that. This whole fiasco suggests they didn't.
The only disposable things that would work for Disney are nappies (diapers).
Slashdot Mirror
A load of drone cars should be driven behind these competitors with models of druglords with machine guns, outlaws, corrupt police officers, and people to whom the teams own money.
That way, they should be able to defy gravity enough to land from a great height at a mere 30 degrees to the horizontal without breaking their suspension or driveshafts, and continue to turn even after front side collisions which would leave bushes and pinions bent (or wheels set to cambers which would normally cause them to no longer turn). They might even get speed boosts beyond the maximum engineering speed expected for the motor, gas and gearbox actually installed.
For an added bonus, they could have critically wounded people in the back, and an accomplice who absolutely has to jump out at 40mph somewhere mid course in order to continue some secret mission.
And lastminute.com happens to be the major player in online travel in Europe. Just not in the US, because Travelocity and Expedia already have that market quite well covered. That doesn't mean you can't make money in uros just as well as you can in Dollar$.
The pain of early adoption at its purest.
That's ...
Woke up this mornin' da da da da dum
Got out of bed
Ate me some breakfast da da da da dum
Went out in the street
Yeah right thru' the front door
Oh yeah baby
And I did it all... da da da da dum
Fortheblues thankyou very much
Moving the washer fillup point to the rear of the car near the petrol filler cap is totally logical. Welding the bonnet shut is not. You can solve the problem described in the article - women not wanting to open a huge bonnet (hood) - by moving the washer filler place, heck even the expansion tank.
But... welding the hood shut sure sounds like a way to seal in warranty stuff, stop you changing your own oil, and so on. Especially if you need some kind of rig to get the front part off to get at the engine.
Mechanics will hate this kind of car. PITA to have to do complex stuff just to get at a connector for engine computer interface or something! You can't move all those everywhere, much more logical to have those accessible near the engine itself...
I would argue that Word can probably do your Table of contents stuff. Just that the secretary doesn't know Word like the old WordPerfect legal secretaries knew WP... You can give sections names, styles, and then generate a table of contents automatically. I wish you hadn't blatently stated that your time is worth $350 an hour. It looks awfully bigheaded next to the statement that your secretary's time is worth one fourteenth of yours. In the same sentence show that s/he can use the tool in half the time you would need. And probably someone like her/him wrote the macro that makes the generate button work *just so*.
Wireless, 3D, all that stuff... is end user high margin hardware. Therefore, it's the hardest thing for the big manufacturers to open. Personally, I don't care. Desktop Linux for me means using VESA but gaming and all that will come much later, I couldn't care less. Energy should be used consolidating server based Linux and efficient corporate desktop stuff. Anything else, right now, is a bonus as far as I'm concerned. At least nVidia have realised that there are some gamers who like Linux who will buy their cards (and rave about them even to Windows gamers) at high profit margins because there is a binary driver.
Everyone else is more interested in where Open Office is going, quite frankly... and when there will be a proper CMS toolset for Linux.
The whole phenomenon was down to greed. I worked on a big project, and it happened like this:
- A good idea started
- Good people got hired
- Investors dumped in a load of money
- Stuff got too big too quick
- People on stupid salaries started thinking they had to change stuff all over the place, new logo new this new that
- The web visitors just said no thanks had enough - it wasn't working like it used to
- The site that is left is no more, but you can see the changes here:
Links: what was left The new look The old look country siteThe idea was OK, but by the time a load of stupid shit like free email, instant messaging and all that was tacked on, it just didn't work any more, cost way too much money...
But we had a great launch party for Orientation Morocco, let me tell you!
The self tuning guitar is really for people who play alternate tunings, like open D, open G, that sort of thing. Regular guitar tuning is easy enough to maintain with a good ear, but automatically tuning to some nice open tuning could give the guitar more tonal and harmonic depth onstage in a live situation, without having to pick up a separate guitar... this is what it's all about.
It would have suited Jimi Hendrix too. He couldn't seem to keep his guitar in tune. If he wasn't up the fretboard (where he'd sort of compensate) but playing open notes it would sound awful.
This is modded funny, but there's many a true word spoken in jest. Half the time, having a good backup of valuable files means precisely not losing hours to recover your machine. I've lost countless hours bringing my machine back purely because my backup set was too old and I wanted files back.
Psychovisual means a couple of things to me: using colour information in a different way, as you said... also making choices about luminosity in the same way (very dark areas have little detail to the eye, but to the computer there could be a lot of noise or whatever). This is why you get blockiness in areas of dark colours in badly encoded films, even on DVD.
Motion estimation is there to predict changes, encode the prediction, and then make corrections where necessary I guess. But I take on board that some pyschovisual enhancements as stated in the codec settings are pretty much fine tuning, there are other more general psychovisual things happening, like you correctly said and as I have added to.
In other words, transmitting colours onto an exponential scale is a psychovisual change, often the human eye doesn't feel the difference. Same as for what XviD calls 'lumi masking' and all sorts of other things which are trying to make us feel that much, much less data represents the same moving image, at least psychologically!
Incidentally this whole thing is why JPEG handles gradual changes from one colour to another so badly, always if you make a graduation from light blue to dark blue over 255 steps in Photoshop then encode in JPEG you have blockiness, even at high quality encoding settings.
That's what it does. "Psycho-visual" and "psycho-acoustic" modelling removes stuff that you can't really see or hear respectively, that's what MPEG compression schemes are all about! Any lossy format has to remove something from the data stream.
Well DVD movies are only 720x576, but "projectable movie" resolution is going to be at least double in both width and height, leaving your max 2mbps to become around 8mbps which fits perfectly with the 7.5mbps, minimum quantiser and max number of I frames. DVD encoding is around the 9mbps mark IIRC... it maxes out before 10mbps (9800kbps?) in the official standard.
Just where do you draw the line?
Now I was pretty young at the time, so I don't remember exact specs. Quoted from the web page above
My particular version did not have a hard disk, but 10MiB sounds about right for a more expensive model that shipped with hard drive the time. The next PC we had was an Amstrad 1512 and that got retrofitted with a 30MiB hard drive.
I said I was probably wrong about the DOS version. The clock speed was a total guess.
Yes, you can argue that PC history would look similar without Bill Gates. But would your Grandma be using a multimedia machine today (and not tomorrow) without Microsoft's massive "marketing before secure, bug free computing" campaign?
Intel and IBM shipped home PCs running which OS? Anyone? MS-DOS? What did the MS stand for?
I wasn't talking about BSOD errors, which don't mean anything (I have frequently said to clients that those error numbers don't mean anything, even to MS developers, I'm pretty sure it's an "in" joke where they put random memory register references converted to decimal). I was talking about stuff where disks and whatnot aren't readable. Try it in Linux, you'll get something complex like 'cannot mount /dev/fd0, unrecognized file system' which says more to me, but less to Grandma.
Oh, I am older than 25. I do remember my first PC. It was ~2MHz I think, a single 5.25" floppy, single density 360KiB formatted disks. MSDOS v5 or so, and 128KiB of RAM. Monochrome CGA display. Something along those lines, anyway, don't have exact spec. and I may be wrong about MSDOS version.
For every flippant point I make, there may be a counter argument. But the fact remains, love it or hate it, Microsoft can take some credit (even if that means admitting they were the schoolyard bully) for where computing is today.
You are so wrong about that. What Bill Gates (or at least Microsoft) did was to give computing to the masses. The PC revolution was completely Microsoft driven. They made stuff simple. They took away all the beauty of a real computer system, but they made it dead easy. They gave us:
CTRL-ALT-DEL... Abort, Retry or Fail?... OK, Cancel... Press any key to reboot...
That's all rubbish compared to proper error messages, but the upshot is that your Grandma can use a computer because Microsoft dumbed it all down enough and made it easy to work with PCs.
Sure, they gained a monopoly too, and such a position of power as to exclude others... but their time will come, and their contribution will rise from the ashes as being a real, tangible one. Even if it was copied from elsewhere! It certainly didn't "retard" anything. Dubious business practices maybe, but you don't get to the top without stepping on a few people.
Disclaimer: I prefer to run Linux, but I'm interested enough to work it all out, and fascinated by the intricacies. But it's not ready for your Grandmother yet.
I now have to explain a second name change to all those people asking "so what's that browser you use called?"
In my mind, the prime candidate for releasing the virus is SCO themselves, in a bid to disgrace the Linux community.
That the story has been picked up by the BBC in such a way rather suggests that there is a hidden agenda - Politici(s|z)ing the Open Source movement.
Friends, it is time to organise. Never before has there been a time to be more together and united against such tales. Bodies that truly represents the Open Source philosophy already exists, and I suggest we all get behind them.
The FSF particularly here
The OSDL particularly here
The BBC must learn not to refer to a bunch of loosely knit hackers around the globe in terms more rightly applied to terrorist movements and political agitators. It's not good to rant as an individual with loosely knit backing around the globe. It must be done from a united front. So get with your LUGs and your websites and make sure we're all linking to the same places.
My opinions are not necessarily those of my employer.
What is this guy smoking?
Shame on you BBC, shame on you.
# 30% reduction in tube length
# 50% reduction in eye piece height
# 4x more back focus
Compared to, of course, smaller secondaries...
It's a semi interesting page but frankly doesn't do it for me. Great for telescope geeks no doubt. But the key question he surely missed... if you point it at some interesting bedroom or bathroom windows... is it able to see better through slightly opaque curtains?
Kudos to the fact it was indeed the iPod, but it would be cheaper to use a generic portable hard drive, since this is movie footage and not soundtrack data. The iPod wasn't used for what it was designed for.
The laptop needn't have been a G4 either, and they stuck in iSight as well. What they SHOULD be telling us is whether these things were purchased at RRP, at big discount, or given away for free by Apple...
Whoever led this experiment and set a price of $7 ought to get sacked. Children love to watch Disney films over and over again, and Disney should know that. This whole fiasco suggests they didn't.
The only disposable things that would work for Disney are nappies (diapers).
Duh! So it should be even easier to fix than I anticipated...