Freeman Dyson is a very smart guy with a lot of good, difficult and original work under his belt as well as the ability to write for the general public. Dawkins is just a tactless popularizer of other people's theories.
An easy to use interactive log of what global state changes there have been. If a plugin has installed itself it should appear in the log. I should be able to click on the relevant line in the log and then uncheck a box to indicate I want it removed. As it is, if a state change happens, even one that I might have done myself, it can be hard to find the relevant menu options (not to mention DLLs snuck into directories) to undo it.
The market, ie. the millions of people around you, is full of people with different needs and desires. This means that there are different niches in which you can sell products. If one company sells a generic product that doesn't satisfy a niche market then another company can fill the gap with something that does. In this way lots of different companies sell different products keeping people in different niches happy. It's in the interest of companies to fill niches - they provide new sources of revenue. It's interest of customers who get what they want even if the specification seems obscure to those outside the niche. It's a cool system and it works well.
So why, when Sony and its competitors, already sell laptops, shouldn't Sony sell to this niche?
It happens. There's all kinds of curious non-standard work out there that uses large procedurally built flowgraphs. But I'd agree 100s is more common.
tiling as you describe is rarely used in motion picture image processing work, regardless of the number of layers
False. Cineon did it. Shake does it. The ImageVision library from SGI, upon which a number of visual effects houses built code, used tiles. Many people use tiled code. But also many people don't.
DPX and Cineon do not support tiled image packing
My mistake. IFF, another popular choice in the visual effects world, does support tiling.
Also, it's not just on input that tiles are useful. Many 3D renderers generate tiled output from buckets because that provides better coherence than scan line order. It's much more convenient to do this with a tiled image format.
It's worth noting that even if the final render is only at 3k by 2k there may still be much higher res intermediate files that need processing.
As I say - it's not a show-stopper. But it's nice to have.
Actually it's 10 bit uncompressed. (Even better internally and you can get limited access to that too.) Although terabyte disk is cheap for a production company Lucas chose to use compressed data going to tape. My my! You should have seen the fun they had rotoscoping images with compression artifacts!
Movie making required heavy duty image processing. Often thousands of layers need to be processed together with very complex operations. In order to do this at film res you need to break the image up into tiles. A package like Apple's shake works with 128x128 or 256x256 tiles I can't remember exactly. For maximum efficiency the image files need to be stored as tiles too. So popular file formats used such as Kodak's DPX/Cineon or TIFF support tiling. Without tiling you end up with major cache thrashing as the entire image needs to be read in any time a single tile gets dropped from the cache. (I'm talking about the application cache - not the CPU or memory cache.) Even if you do low quality work at low res (eg. ILM do much of their work at hi def resolution) you can still suffer from this.
It's not a show-stopper but tiling really ought to be there. This format doesn't really add much to already existing formats and subtracts something important.
But have you watched any movies with ILM effects lately? The dynamic range sucks! Episode II was basically characters jumping between matte paintings and each painting looked like it had been painted with an 8 bit paint package. Unless you actually bother to collect data on set that is high dynamic range having the file format is as good as useless.
Evidence we've been damaging the environment
on
Starshine 3 is Toast
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
The sun doesn't normally double peak in its 11 year sunspot cycle but this time it has. This is an unusual event - sunspot activity should have died right down by now. It seems to me that even if some people don't accept this as hard proof people ought to at least be considering the possibility that this, like global warming, and the ozone hole, is a result of man's harmful ongoing activities on Earth. The sun is important for life on Earth. If we mess that up we don't get a second chance.
About time people raised this subject. After all these years I finally had the courage to install Doom on my PC a few days ago. Oh my God! I was pretty disturbed. The sounds were really creepy. And I stayed up late to play. I really felt like I was there and that there were really horrible things lurking in the shadows. And the art in the game is just horrible. I think at one point you see the mangled innards of a corpse. How can this be legal? I haven't slept since. I really can't imagine that there'll ever be a time when I recover. How can I forget what I saw and heard? You can't just choose to forget.
You really don't understand about democracy do you? People vote for things that are important to them. That's our prerogative as a voters. If a president does dumb shit and some other stuff that's good you weigh it up. If you have to take the shit with the good - so be it. What's your problem with that?
The people who are dumb are the ones who will vote for a guy because he tells them what they want to hear.
Hello? Where have you been for the history of humanity? When was the last time someone voted for someone because they told them what they didn't want to hear? Or even voted for someone who didn't say what they wanted to hear?
And I'm under no illusions about how good a C-in-C he'll be.
There's also another reason why I dislike Dollo's law. As anyone who understands biology knows: biology isn't really like physics, say, and there really aren't fixed laws. Unfortunately the general public don't know this. So when a 'law' like Dollo's is found to be broken it's fodder for Creationists who can use it as 'proof' of the inconsistency of evolution science. Biologists really need to be very careful when they declare something to be a law.
Dollo's Law is a bit silly. It's like saying that there are no triangles in architecture where one of the angles is 57.138 degrees. It's probably true. Go out and find a triangle and measure its angles with enough accuracy and you'll probably not find one that has an angle of 57.138 degrees to three decimal places. Occasionally you will find such a triangle. You can just put those down as a rare exception to the law that doesn't fully invalidate it. This is obviously a pretty silly law. So is Dollo's, for similar reasons.
In case you don't quite get the analogy: at any moment in time there are multiple directions a population may take. Just as there are many angles besides 57.138 there are many directions for the population. In almost all cases it won't go back the way it came. But it might. Just as you might find a 57.138 degree angle.
The idea is this: establish a protocol whereby if a certain signal is received by a phone it suppresses the ring. Theaters and other public places could then install small short range transmitters to broadcast this signal. It wouldn't have to cost more that a few $. Nobody would be forced to do anything. Phone users would be glad that they don't need to remember to switch off so they'd buy these phones. Theaters would buy them because they'd become more attractive if they're likely to have fewer phones ringing in them. The only catch would be that you'd have to license the transmitters so you couldn't have just anyone transmitting the suppression signal whenever they wanted. But that's no big deal, you already have to get licenses for many kinds of transmitter.
Re:Whats special about israelis being in space?
on
First Israeli in Space
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
No it's not. It's interesting to Americans (ie. much of/.'s audience) when the first person from an American colony goes into space.
Well that's science for you. It allows you to make wide sweeping claims and quite often be right. To people who don't know science it looks all very mysterious but as AC Clarke said, the science of any sufficiently advanced civilization look like magic.
Duke Magazine need a course in perception
on
Vision is a 'Reflex'
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· Score: 3, Informative
Didn't anyone tell them that having a vertical grey bar through black text on a white background is painful to read? It seems any idiot can be hired to do graphic design these days.
Look, IP rights were originally introduced to promote innovation. But today many people see them as fundamental rights. The fact that they are a means to an end, not an end in themselves, has been long forgotten.
But this is true of other rights. Capitalism is a succesful mechanism that generates great wealth all round (though maybe not for everyone). Capitalism rests on property rights. So do we have property rights because they actually make most people better off, or are they fundamental rights - an end in themselves. In fact the truth is the latter. Where property rights impinge on the common good (whatever that is) we have to sacrifice them - even though the Constitution might suggest otherwise. So, for example, we pay taxes.
Even freedom of speech has two sides. You can see it as a fundamental right but it's also a means to an end. A society which doesn't repress free speech is one in which good ideas that benefit all eventually see the light and in which bad ones can be argued away.
Slashdot Mirror
Freeman Dyson is a very smart guy with a lot of good, difficult and original work under his belt as well as the ability to write for the general public. Dawkins is just a tactless popularizer of other people's theories.
An easy to use interactive log of what global state changes there have been. If a plugin has installed itself it should appear in the log. I should be able to click on the relevant line in the log and then uncheck a box to indicate I want it removed. As it is, if a state change happens, even one that I might have done myself, it can be hard to find the relevant menu options (not to mention DLLs snuck into directories) to undo it.
So why, when Sony and its competitors, already sell laptops, shouldn't Sony sell to this niche?
What next? Newspapers and other news agencies printing press releases from corporations verbatim and claiming they are news?
5 years after everyone else...
Actually it's 10 bit uncompressed. (Even better internally and you can get limited access to that too.) Although terabyte disk is cheap for a production company Lucas chose to use compressed data going to tape. My my! You should have seen the fun they had rotoscoping images with compression artifacts!
100 years from now the colonists on Mars couldn't care less about the microdetails of Bush's policy today.
It's not a show-stopper but tiling really ought to be there. This format doesn't really add much to already existing formats and subtracts something important.
But have you watched any movies with ILM effects lately? The dynamic range sucks! Episode II was basically characters jumping between matte paintings and each painting looked like it had been painted with an 8 bit paint package. Unless you actually bother to collect data on set that is high dynamic range having the file format is as good as useless.
The sun doesn't normally double peak in its 11 year sunspot cycle but this time it has. This is an unusual event - sunspot activity should have died right down by now. It seems to me that even if some people don't accept this as hard proof people ought to at least be considering the possibility that this, like global warming, and the ozone hole, is a result of man's harmful ongoing activities on Earth. The sun is important for life on Earth. If we mess that up we don't get a second chance.
I'm glad that you had the courage to speak up!
Slow glass of the 17 year variety to be precise if it allows you to view classic 1986 entertainment. That stuff is highly sought after.
And I'm under no illusions about how good a C-in-C he'll be.
I don't care how dumb Bush is. If I'd known he was going to announce this I'd have voted for him.
Ooops! Replied in the wrong tab :-)
There's also another reason why I dislike Dollo's law. As anyone who understands biology knows: biology isn't really like physics, say, and there really aren't fixed laws. Unfortunately the general public don't know this. So when a 'law' like Dollo's is found to be broken it's fodder for Creationists who can use it as 'proof' of the inconsistency of evolution science. Biologists really need to be very careful when they declare something to be a law.
In case you don't quite get the analogy: at any moment in time there are multiple directions a population may take. Just as there are many angles besides 57.138 there are many directions for the population. In almost all cases it won't go back the way it came. But it might. Just as you might find a 57.138 degree angle.
The idea is this: establish a protocol whereby if a certain signal is received by a phone it suppresses the ring. Theaters and other public places could then install small short range transmitters to broadcast this signal. It wouldn't have to cost more that a few $. Nobody would be forced to do anything. Phone users would be glad that they don't need to remember to switch off so they'd buy these phones. Theaters would buy them because they'd become more attractive if they're likely to have fewer phones ringing in them. The only catch would be that you'd have to license the transmitters so you couldn't have just anyone transmitting the suppression signal whenever they wanted. But that's no big deal, you already have to get licenses for many kinds of transmitter.
No it's not. It's interesting to Americans (ie. much of /.'s audience) when the first person from an American colony goes into space.
Well that's science for you. It allows you to make wide sweeping claims and quite often be right. To people who don't know science it looks all very mysterious but as AC Clarke said, the science of any sufficiently advanced civilization look like magic.
Didn't anyone tell them that having a vertical grey bar through black text on a white background is painful to read? It seems any idiot can be hired to do graphic design these days.
Thanx
Look, IP rights were originally introduced to promote innovation. But today many people see them as fundamental rights. The fact that they are a means to an end, not an end in themselves, has been long forgotten.
But this is true of other rights. Capitalism is a succesful mechanism that generates great wealth all round (though maybe not for everyone). Capitalism rests on property rights. So do we have property rights because they actually make most people better off, or are they fundamental rights - an end in themselves. In fact the truth is the latter. Where property rights impinge on the common good (whatever that is) we have to sacrifice them - even though the Constitution might suggest otherwise. So, for example, we pay taxes.
Even freedom of speech has two sides. You can see it as a fundamental right but it's also a means to an end. A society which doesn't repress free speech is one in which good ideas that benefit all eventually see the light and in which bad ones can be argued away.
Why do I need to look at the table. I know what Apple graphics APSs fit togther. There is no OO for Aqua fuckwit.