Had a friend who had to take that stuff on a month's trip to Kenya. He said they almost got caught by a flash flood because he was absolutely sure that the whole thing was a dream. Only way they got him to pack up was to convince him that since it was a dream, he might as well go along with it.
Another guy swore for a couple days that he didn't actually exist. He said later that it made perfect sense at the time.
Basically, it sounds like they're adding a more realistic lighting to their rendered scenes, and doing a real-time tone-mapping process. I'm currently working on a lab for graphics class on this process:)
In short, any scene in the real world can have luminance (basically, brightness) values anywhere from.000001 to 10,000,000. You monitor can show values basically from 0 to 255. This has long been a problem in computer graphics, and was a problem in film beforehand. the giant real-life values are HDR. Tone-mapping is the process of algorithmically mapping those large values into the tiny luminance space of your monitor in a way that looks good, hopefully. If you do a straight linear mapping, it looks like crap.
The traditional real-time graphics approach has been to render a scene with luminance values already in the 0 to 255 range, and send it straight to the scene. This works ok, but runs into limits of how to represent really dark or light scenes, or scenes that *should* technically have a very high range of luminance to them. What they are doing here is some form of rendering the scene to produce more realistically high-range lighting values, and then mapping the values for the individual image down to what can be seen on the screen in a smart way. It should theoretically result in much more viewable low-light areas and much more realistically blinding bright areas.
Being nerdy is really about one thing - enjoying the use of your mind. It's why nerd humor tends to focus on sarcasm and wit. They require that extra bit of use of your head. Same for programming and role playing games - nerds gravitate toward them because they have fun playing with their minds.
I think the only true link is that 'nerdyness'. Programmers tend to be nerdy, and nerds - for the reasons above - like RPGs. Nerdy physics majors like RPGs too, but programming has few appeals other than it's nerdy ones, so tends to have a higher nerd-density, leading to the appearance of a direct, rather than indirect correlation.
Dell wasn't a "close second." I think they were on the order of 1-2 years behind apple, at least, with these.
I haven't seen the Dell's in person. I know I was considering paying the apple tax on their LCD's because they look really darn nice. I don't know if no one in pc retail can set up a monitor to be calibrated correctly, whereas the mac people can, or what, but looking at them side by side with all the 21" inch panels I could find and they just looked stunningly better. There was no comparison. Everything was just much cleaner, much easier to look at.
I've also heard Jobs mention that their selection process on the panels is ridiculously rigorous - he claims that companies buy the ones that fail their inspections. Dunno if Dell does that or not, but I'm curious.
Not saying that the Dell panels aren't a great deal, either. But there was at one point a very good reason to pay the extra for an apple monitor, even if now the quality of the competition has risen.
The line drawn by what you cite is that the creation of the video requires a criminal act. Having sex with a three-year-old is illegal, therefor encouraging people to make such videos by buying them is illegal.
Not to say this isn't without its own issues - technically, if you download a picture that you then find out is child pornography, delete it, and then someone finds it in your cache, it's a felony offense. But the general concept for creation of such items is at least decently clear-cut.
The difference is the same as with the itunes music stores - low cost of entry and low commitment.
If I want VOD, I have to sign up for cable service ($35 a month) with VOD (probably digital cable, so more like $45), and THEN pay for the individual shows I want to download, right? Even if I don't have to pay for those shows, there's still a ~$40 a month commitment to WATCHING TELEVISION. I *never* watch that much television.
But hey, if there's one good show on once a week, that's only $8 a month from iTunes, with no commitment to continue paying for the thing I get bored with the show or they kill off my favorite character or something.
I remember when I started in Engineering at college, they asked how many people's parents were engineers... I think I was the only person who didn't raise his hand.
Ask a random five-year-old what an engineer is, and they'll probably say he drives a train. Most kids grow up with no idea what engineering is, unless they're from a family of engineers. Every little kid knows what a doctor is.
Most of the tech jobs people actually do can't be explained to kids, because most people outside of the profession have no idea what they're doing. So few kids think of them as viable careers, don't develop an interest, whatever.
I know when I was five, I wanted to be an "inventor."
And there was always the "star metal," or meteoric iron. There has been a lot of speculation that many famous swords were iron weapons made from found meteors, which would have been intimidating in a world of bronze weapons.
Their house brand enclosures have been based on Oxford 911 from day one, and have good build quality. Got one for my sister a year ago and so far no problems. Moreover, their support is great - seems like a decently small outfit committed to actually serving tech-oriented customers. Most of their do-it-yourself stuff has a video download link and print-out instruction on how to do the install right. They also tend to be some of the first to do things like put both USB 2.0 and firewire on an enclosure, or firewire 800, usb 2.0, and firewire 400 on the same enclosure so you can use your drive as fast as possible anywhere.
Not affiliated with them at all, just a satisfied returning customer.
It's been my experience that you need some sort of spec, otherwise the behavior of your program is defined by what features are easy to implement, not that which are easy to use. Anything that needs to be written for has to have a clear theoretical specification that the code adheres to rigorously, or anyone using your program will waste more time than the darn program's worth.
However, having more than just a general design when you haven't started fixing the problem and have no idea what the actual hangups you're going to run into are generally ends up with a program that isn't what you actually needed in the first place.
Biggest problem with this is that all of these names have been butchered into English when you read them. Indian ones maybe aren't so bad, but Chinese? I have a friend named Hsieh - pronounced "Shay." How the heck did they decide on that spelling when they translated it? Or some of the Russian names whose Anglicization obeys entirely different rules from every native English word.
If we're going to translate something into English, it really should be just phonetic, but unfortunately it often isn't.
I've been considering getting one to switch keyboard/mouse but not video.
I like being able to see what my second machine is doing (and really, it's less cost effective but much more time effective to multi-task on two systems) but I do accidentally grab the wrong keyboard all the time. Being able to just have one and switch back and forth between systems sounds as though it might be a lot nicer, once I got used to it.
If your kid is home alone for 3.5 hours a day and you have no idea where he's going during that time, YOU AREN'T FUCKING DOING YOUR JOB AS A PARENT.
I'm not talking about a teenager who's earned some responsibility - if the kid can make enough money to go buy GTA on his own, he's probably responsible enough to handle it. But if he's young enough that you don't want him playing it BE AROUND FOR THE FUCKING KID.
How many years did our society survive with a single wage-earner per household? Heck, the kid's even in school, you don't NEED a stay-at-home mom, just one parent willing to let their career and their SUV go to work part time and raise their goddamn kid when he gets home.
If you aren't willing to commit to even that, don't have kids.
I've always assumed that was what Norton was doing when it randomly stole half my CPU to not scan anything. I mean, it makes a lot more sense for them to *steal* my processor cycles than just *waste* them, right?
Honestly? This is exactly what I expected. It's actually a bit better - so far, we're only at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, not the entire Arab world.
I don't know how anyone who's studied world history could listen to Bush's first speech after the attack and not feel a big lump of dread settle to the bottom of their gut.
The USS Maine, the Lusitania, the burning of the Reichstag... look where they got us, then ask how the Patriot Act and the every bit of this mess following 9/11 is any different.
Yes, a government elected under a constitution largely written by the US, which specifically forbids military build up? And these troups are apparently quite unpopular with much of the populace? I was also under the impression that the newly elected government of Iraq did not particularly want to kick the US troups out immediately, either.
Japan is probably the best example of where the US administrators are HOPING Iraq will end up. I doubt it'll happen, but it's still worth some sort of comparison.
I was merely pointing out that the presence of US troups does not necessarily imply a lack of sovereignty, just a lack of adequate military force internally.
I ran into this on my first interview "Why do you want to be a programmer?"
I blanked out and sat for five minutes trying to think of why I liked programming, because the answer of "Umm... I like it?" didn't seem to actually answer anything.
No, I haven't used Vista. I was arguing a statement made in the article, the direct quote at the beginning of my post. If that isn't even how Vista works, then the author is even more wrong.
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Had a friend who had to take that stuff on a month's trip to Kenya. He said they almost got caught by a flash flood because he was absolutely sure that the whole thing was a dream. Only way they got him to pack up was to convince him that since it was a dream, he might as well go along with it.
Another guy swore for a couple days that he didn't actually exist. He said later that it made perfect sense at the time.
Basically, it sounds like they're adding a more realistic lighting to their rendered scenes, and doing a real-time tone-mapping process. I'm currently working on a lab for graphics class on this process :)
.000001 to 10,000,000. You monitor can show values basically from 0 to 255. This has long been a problem in computer graphics, and was a problem in film beforehand. the giant real-life values are HDR. Tone-mapping is the process of algorithmically mapping those large values into the tiny luminance space of your monitor in a way that looks good, hopefully. If you do a straight linear mapping, it looks like crap.
In short, any scene in the real world can have luminance (basically, brightness) values anywhere from
The traditional real-time graphics approach has been to render a scene with luminance values already in the 0 to 255 range, and send it straight to the scene. This works ok, but runs into limits of how to represent really dark or light scenes, or scenes that *should* technically have a very high range of luminance to them. What they are doing here is some form of rendering the scene to produce more realistically high-range lighting values, and then mapping the values for the individual image down to what can be seen on the screen in a smart way. It should theoretically result in much more viewable low-light areas and much more realistically blinding bright areas.
Being nerdy is really about one thing - enjoying the use of your mind. It's why nerd humor tends to focus on sarcasm and wit. They require that extra bit of use of your head. Same for programming and role playing games - nerds gravitate toward them because they have fun playing with their minds.
I think the only true link is that 'nerdyness'. Programmers tend to be nerdy, and nerds - for the reasons above - like RPGs. Nerdy physics majors like RPGs too, but programming has few appeals other than it's nerdy ones, so tends to have a higher nerd-density, leading to the appearance of a direct, rather than indirect correlation.
Dell wasn't a "close second." I think they were on the order of 1-2 years behind apple, at least, with these.
I haven't seen the Dell's in person. I know I was considering paying the apple tax on their LCD's because they look really darn nice. I don't know if no one in pc retail can set up a monitor to be calibrated correctly, whereas the mac people can, or what, but looking at them side by side with all the 21" inch panels I could find and they just looked stunningly better. There was no comparison. Everything was just much cleaner, much easier to look at.
I've also heard Jobs mention that their selection process on the panels is ridiculously rigorous - he claims that companies buy the ones that fail their inspections. Dunno if Dell does that or not, but I'm curious.
Not saying that the Dell panels aren't a great deal, either. But there was at one point a very good reason to pay the extra for an apple monitor, even if now the quality of the competition has risen.
The line drawn by what you cite is that the creation of the video requires a criminal act. Having sex with a three-year-old is illegal, therefor encouraging people to make such videos by buying them is illegal.
Not to say this isn't without its own issues - technically, if you download a picture that you then find out is child pornography, delete it, and then someone finds it in your cache, it's a felony offense. But the general concept for creation of such items is at least decently clear-cut.
The difference is the same as with the itunes music stores - low cost of entry and low commitment.
If I want VOD, I have to sign up for cable service ($35 a month) with VOD (probably digital cable, so more like $45), and THEN pay for the individual shows I want to download, right? Even if I don't have to pay for those shows, there's still a ~$40 a month commitment to WATCHING TELEVISION. I *never* watch that much television.
But hey, if there's one good show on once a week, that's only $8 a month from iTunes, with no commitment to continue paying for the thing I get bored with the show or they kill off my favorite character or something.
*That's* the difference.
I remember when I started in Engineering at college, they asked how many people's parents were engineers... I think I was the only person who didn't raise his hand.
Ask a random five-year-old what an engineer is, and they'll probably say he drives a train. Most kids grow up with no idea what engineering is, unless they're from a family of engineers. Every little kid knows what a doctor is.
Most of the tech jobs people actually do can't be explained to kids, because most people outside of the profession have no idea what they're doing. So few kids think of them as viable careers, don't develop an interest, whatever.
I know when I was five, I wanted to be an "inventor."
And there was always the "star metal," or meteoric iron. There has been a lot of speculation that many famous swords were iron weapons made from found meteors, which would have been intimidating in a world of bronze weapons.
Their house brand enclosures have been based on Oxford 911 from day one, and have good build quality. Got one for my sister a year ago and so far no problems. Moreover, their support is great - seems like a decently small outfit committed to actually serving tech-oriented customers. Most of their do-it-yourself stuff has a video download link and print-out instruction on how to do the install right. They also tend to be some of the first to do things like put both USB 2.0 and firewire on an enclosure, or firewire 800, usb 2.0, and firewire 400 on the same enclosure so you can use your drive as fast as possible anywhere.
Not affiliated with them at all, just a satisfied returning customer.
Yes, but so were the tapes that the music industry was selling 15 years ago.
It's been my experience that you need some sort of spec, otherwise the behavior of your program is defined by what features are easy to implement, not that which are easy to use. Anything that needs to be written for has to have a clear theoretical specification that the code adheres to rigorously, or anyone using your program will waste more time than the darn program's worth.
However, having more than just a general design when you haven't started fixing the problem and have no idea what the actual hangups you're going to run into are generally ends up with a program that isn't what you actually needed in the first place.
Biggest problem with this is that all of these names have been butchered into English when you read them. Indian ones maybe aren't so bad, but Chinese? I have a friend named Hsieh - pronounced "Shay." How the heck did they decide on that spelling when they translated it? Or some of the Russian names whose Anglicization obeys entirely different rules from every native English word.
If we're going to translate something into English, it really should be just phonetic, but unfortunately it often isn't.
I've been considering getting one to switch keyboard/mouse but not video.
I like being able to see what my second machine is doing (and really, it's less cost effective but much more time effective to multi-task on two systems) but I do accidentally grab the wrong keyboard all the time. Being able to just have one and switch back and forth between systems sounds as though it might be a lot nicer, once I got used to it.
If your kid is home alone for 3.5 hours a day and you have no idea where he's going during that time, YOU AREN'T FUCKING DOING YOUR JOB AS A PARENT.
I'm not talking about a teenager who's earned some responsibility - if the kid can make enough money to go buy GTA on his own, he's probably responsible enough to handle it. But if he's young enough that you don't want him playing it BE AROUND FOR THE FUCKING KID.
How many years did our society survive with a single wage-earner per household? Heck, the kid's even in school, you don't NEED a stay-at-home mom, just one parent willing to let their career and their SUV go to work part time and raise their goddamn kid when he gets home.
If you aren't willing to commit to even that, don't have kids.
I've always assumed that was what Norton was doing when it randomly stole half my CPU to not scan anything. I mean, it makes a lot more sense for them to *steal* my processor cycles than just *waste* them, right?
I want to know who actually modded that *insightful*. Can we meta-moderate +5 Funny?
Honestly? This is exactly what I expected. It's actually a bit better - so far, we're only at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, not the entire Arab world.
I don't know how anyone who's studied world history could listen to Bush's first speech after the attack and not feel a big lump of dread settle to the bottom of their gut.
The USS Maine, the Lusitania, the burning of the Reichstag... look where they got us, then ask how the Patriot Act and the every bit of this mess following 9/11 is any different.
I think that's the best-worded comment I've ever read on the realities of the intellectual-religious divide. Well said.
Yes, a government elected under a constitution largely written by the US, which specifically forbids military build up? And these troups are apparently quite unpopular with much of the populace? I was also under the impression that the newly elected government of Iraq did not particularly want to kick the US troups out immediately, either.
Japan is probably the best example of where the US administrators are HOPING Iraq will end up. I doubt it'll happen, but it's still worth some sort of comparison.
I was merely pointing out that the presence of US troups does not necessarily imply a lack of sovereignty, just a lack of adequate military force internally.
So Japan isn't sovereign either, then?
I get your point, but there are US troops in a lot more places than Iraq.
I ran into this on my first interview "Why do you want to be a programmer?"
I blanked out and sat for five minutes trying to think of why I liked programming, because the answer of "Umm... I like it?" didn't seem to actually answer anything.
Got the job anyway. Still not sure how.
If I were actually trying to use it to prove that Vista sucks, perhaps. I was arguing that the method outlined by the article was bad.
Thanks for correcting me that Vista *isn't* as retarded as the author. *I* don't have access to the beta, not being a developer or a warezer.
It's been my impression that it waited until either
A) You entered two or three characters
or
B) a few micro-seconds passed.
So if you type "P" and then wait, it'll search, but it generally doesn't do the lookup until you've passed a few characters.
I'm still not running this at home, just tried it on a few demo machines, but that's what I remember.
No, I haven't used Vista. I was arguing a statement made in the article, the direct quote at the beginning of my post. If that isn't even how Vista works, then the author is even more wrong.
Yes, because I want my hard drive shown as web page links, instead of, you know, the files and folders actually on it that I can do stuff with.
And it's only instant if you don't count the time to load the web browser, which, much as I love firefox, is quite a bit more than instant.
Google find is still great, and I use it on my windows systems, but I've used spotlight and there are definite advantages to integrating with the OS.