Once the iPad is released, I bet we'll have an "iPad killer" announced once a month. After about a week, everyone will forget about it, until next month's "iPad killer"....
You jest, but had my car trunk half-full of games for several years. A couple of tackle boxes filled with games, and a half dozen in boxes. No, they weren't mint-condition, tradable quality after that, but when you're talking beer & snacks party games, they don't stay in mint condition long either.
By dollar value, they'd have come in at about a base iPad price. But they didn't have any upkeep cost, and I could replace them piecemeal. And I wouldn't set my iPad on a table surrounded with drinks and snacks.
I love the iPhone - it's slick. iPods piss me off a little, because I want a USB storage device that plays music. Mac Books are fantastic. I have a netbook, and it's fairly functional and portable.
Where does this leave me? Well, this is bigger and less functional than my netbook. It's far slicker, however. If you offered me a Mac Book the same size, for the same price, I'd be all over it. If I didn't have a netbook, and wanted something like that, I wouldn't go for this.
I don't see this having anywhere near the same success as the iPod and iPhone, nor Mac Books. However, I think there is a niche for this product. It's not me, and it's not you, but I bet they can sell a million of them. I hate to call up the stereotypical caricature of a Mac user, as none of the ones I know fit it, but I can see this working well for someone wearing dockers and drinking a latte.
I think this will be a coffee table gracer. I think it will be another shiny toy for people with a fair bit of cash, and a lot of other Apple products kicking around. I think it will end up on bedside tables. It will get used for Sunday morning crosswords. You'll find one on the arm of a chair near a fireplace on a cold evening.
In short, I think this will become THE stereotype Apple product. It will be for those with too much money to buy for a stupid purpose, when the traditional things which filled that niche all work better. But it will be shiny. And Apple will sell lots of them.
Oh, I know. My cousins live in Delaware. Same goes even there, as mid-US as it is. We were there once when they got all of 1/4" of snow, and pretty much had the roads to ourselves, as all the other cars were in the ditch. It was truly amazing. The best part was that we were cruising around in a Plymouth Acclaim, without snows on it, while all the 4WD vehicles were stuck on flat surfaces.
Northern US here: It took 50 cm to shut down the city where I live for a day. And people felt that it was ridiculous, and called for an investigation into the highway department. Most people felt that the plows should have been able to keep up with the snowfall, and keep everything open. 5 cm of snow is barely reason to break the plows out!
It's mind-boggling to me how many issues snow and ice can cause in areas not used to it. I grew up sliding backwards down hills in cars because they were too slippery to drive up. We'd just park at the bottom, and walk up. The extremes of what's drivable through in different regions is really amazing to me.
Well said. EA has been off my purchase list for 7-8 years now because of this. It looks like Ubisoft will be as well. I just don't get why so many people put up with shit like this.
You're modded up, so I'll just add a +1 comment to your observation on the case. For the last decade or so, the most expensive part of my systems has usually been the case. Of course, there were only about 3 of them in that decade. A good case is a must.
So far, I've been a loyal Antec fan. Roomy, rolled edges, rails for everything, good ventilation...I have no complaints about their cases. They are damn well built.
I'm not in any way a lawyer, but I can't understand how ANYONE would sign a contract for work without #1 and #4 spelled out clearly. Yet we see this over and over and over and over....
I was watching TV for the first time in about a year (outside of sports) with a friend of mine the other day. I couldn't believe how bad cable now is. I had been considering hooking my TV back up, but a couple hours at her house, and I was well convinced not to.
The internet TV I watch isn't much worse quality, and it's mostly content. I can't fathom how it would be worth paying $50 a month for that. I'm much more inclined to hook a spare system up to my TV now, and watch TV that way. It has the benefit of the couch and distance from screen, combined with the ability to check email and surf. The only downside is that I'd trade a remote for a wireless keyboard and mouse.
Last I knew, the theory held that 2 RPM was about the limit where humans didn't really notice the apparent motion. 10 RPM is pretty high - one rotation per six seconds. That's the difference between the "scenery" drifting lazily by, and whizzing by. Your estimation of 9m at 10 RPM is very, very bad. The difference in acceleration between your head and your feet at that scale would be very noticeable. I'd be willing to bet that it would be very, very unpleasant.
The calculations I had a physics class do on this once showed a practical lower limit of a 500m radius station. This is fucking huge, but not impossible to build. We're talking 5x the size of a football stadium! The major issue would just be getting that much stuff into space in the first place. It'd be the ISS, but 5x longer and 10x wider, with the corresponding increase in structural elements needed to tie it all together.
While it would be pretty hard to build, I'd LOVE to be able to look up and see something like that!
Yes, that's a simplistic argument. But it's the easiest way to start to get really ignorant people considering the difference between weather and climate. To use the highly-localized, short-term variability of weather as "proof" that we can't model climate is a fallacy.
I'm well aware of how complicated climate is - I'm doing climate modeling at the moment. The issue is how to begin to explain to someone who's so ignorant about the two concepts what the differences are. I've still not figured that out completely.
Protip: Don't rely on sketchy, unaccredited blogs for your science. Go take a look and see how well surfacestations.org's publications have fared before you quote them as some part of a rational argument. If you want to talk science, you have to do it in the framework of science.
Please man, don't argue things you're clueless about. It really makes you look stupid. Weather does not scale up to climate, and climate doesn't scale down to weather. You really are in need of learning some of the basic fundamentals of each before you try arguing points related to them.
I've been through several careers now, including IT, teaching, and now climate science. It's so stupidly complicated that I have a hard time even beginning to explain it on a forum like/., which has a higher percentage of intelligent people than most general forums.
I trust the science, by and large, because I've done small parts of it, and those confirm what's been published. I trust what's published, because I can make a major name for myself if I can prove it's crap. So far, nobody knows me....
simplistic i know but it has to make you think maybe they have it wrong?
I wish I had mod points to mod you fucking ignorant.
Modeling weather and climate are completely different. To suggest that you can model both similarly is the height of ignorance. If I ask you to model a coin flip, you'll get it wrong 50% of the time. If I ask you to model the net outcome of 100 coin flips, I bet you can get within 5% of the number of heads and tails.
Climate and weather are much the same. Weather is random and chaotic, and climate is more like a net average of a shitton of weather. It's far easier, and far more accurate to model the net accumulation of random processes than it is to model those processes themselves.
As an additional data point, the data that we're using to model climate is....climate data. Not weather data. The model output we're analyzing is...climate output, not weather output. The fact that you seem to think there is some major amount of crossover suggests that you might really need to learn a bit about weather and climate before spouting off...
"The damage was that IPCC had, or I think still has, such a stellar reputation that people view it as an authority -- as indeed they should -- and so they see a bullet that says Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035 and they take that as a fact," he said.
Kargel is one of four scientists who addressed the issue in a letter that will be published in the Jan. 29 issue of the journal Science. "These errors could have been avoided had the norms of scientific publication including peer review and concentration upon peer-reviewed work, been respected," write the researchers.
Scientists fuck up. They are human. They don't do their jobs correctly all the time. They miss-read graphs, miss-interpret data, they allow their own personal biases to interfere with their work.
But their work isn't the Ten Commandments. It's not the Ultimate Truth. It's not set in stone, the word of god, never able to be questioned or overturned.
Four scientists looked at it and realized it was wrong. What did they do? They researched it. They looked into it. They dug up research, and came closer to the truth. Then what did they do? They collected all this information, organized it, and submitted it to a peer-reviewed publication, to be looked over by others, and, if viable, distributed around the world.
That's why you should trust it. Not because god said that it's correct now, but because over time, should it not be correct, someone will figure it out, and get their name in print because of it. Science is hostile, competitive, and dog-eat-dog. Publishing shit is scary, because if you screw up badly enough, a fuckup may be NAMED after you!
Science, by and large, is like a new version of an OS. Don't trust it until SP1. By SP2, it should be pretty damn solid.
Why should you trust the IPCC? Because 95% of what it's put out is correct. The other 5% gets discovered as crap, proved to be crap, and articles are peer-reviewed and published proclaiming it's crap. You don't get that level of scrutiny and openness elsewhere very often.
There are a bunch of places that have missed out on my money because they only took PayPal. Free online games which rely on donations, websites like slashdot, places that do micropayments, charities, businesses, etc.
I will NOT do business with PayPal. Period. I don't care what it's for, or how much it may potentially benefit me. I don't even care if it's just paying by credit card through them.
PayPal is not a bank, is not accredited, can't be trusted, and will NEVER EVER touch any of my money or other financial assets. Should they decide to do ANYTHING, my only recompense is to try to sue a corporation with deep pockets.
When it comes to my money, that's a risk I flatly refuse to take.
The image is definitely not all about the computer processing. In fact, that's a minor part.
It all comes down to the telescope and CCD you're using.
I've got a fair number of unprocessed images from my time doing astronomy which are FANTASTIC! Why? Good scope, clear night, long exposure, and a good CCD. I could make them a bit better with some processing, but I've never seen the need. Processing can never add data to a picture. The only thing that can do that is a longer exposure, better scope, or better CCD.
That being said, what this guy did is pretty nice work. I'm not overly surprised, as you can get a decent CCD for less and less as times goes on, and mainstream digital photography gets bigger. A decade or two ago, and you'd have spent a good fraction of his setup cost on a 1MP CCD!
Astronomy already has a standard way to take care of CCD noise. You always take a dark-frame before your exposure. Some people also do one after. That's the same exposure, but with the lens closed. You then subtract the dark frame from the image you took.
Not only does it remove stuck pixels, but it can pick up on heat bleeding into the CCD from the rest of the instrumentation.
1) Take a dark frame. Lens on, potentially the same duration of your planned exposure. This captures all the non-responsive/stuck pixels on your camera, and captures any heat noise caused by the rest of the instrument. 2) Take the image. 3) Subtract #1 from #2.
There might be additional post-processing, but that depends on the quality of your setup, and how into it you are. Most astronomers that I know of use custom written scripts in IDL or MATLAB to do such processing, although there is a bit of a trickle to move to things like R and Python, due to their being more full-fledged programming environments.
When I was doing astronomy, we'd set our exposure up, then go play video games for a half hour. Ten minutes of dark-frame, ten minutes of exposure, couple seconds of automated transfer over the nextwork, a button push, and a minute or so of processing. Then we'd have to pause our game, and move to the next target.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
It's like helping your uncle Jack off a horse...
Ooooohhh! I know this one!
Social problem: Corrupt government
Technological solution: Revolution
Result: Gradual slide towards a corrupt government
Once the iPad is released, I bet we'll have an "iPad killer" announced once a month. After about a week, everyone will forget about it, until next month's "iPad killer"....
Is there some UID that's not some multiple of a prime...?
You jest, but had my car trunk half-full of games for several years. A couple of tackle boxes filled with games, and a half dozen in boxes. No, they weren't mint-condition, tradable quality after that, but when you're talking beer & snacks party games, they don't stay in mint condition long either.
By dollar value, they'd have come in at about a base iPad price. But they didn't have any upkeep cost, and I could replace them piecemeal. And I wouldn't set my iPad on a table surrounded with drinks and snacks.
I love the iPhone - it's slick. iPods piss me off a little, because I want a USB storage device that plays music. Mac Books are fantastic. I have a netbook, and it's fairly functional and portable.
Where does this leave me? Well, this is bigger and less functional than my netbook. It's far slicker, however. If you offered me a Mac Book the same size, for the same price, I'd be all over it. If I didn't have a netbook, and wanted something like that, I wouldn't go for this.
I don't see this having anywhere near the same success as the iPod and iPhone, nor Mac Books. However, I think there is a niche for this product. It's not me, and it's not you, but I bet they can sell a million of them. I hate to call up the stereotypical caricature of a Mac user, as none of the ones I know fit it, but I can see this working well for someone wearing dockers and drinking a latte.
I think this will be a coffee table gracer. I think it will be another shiny toy for people with a fair bit of cash, and a lot of other Apple products kicking around. I think it will end up on bedside tables. It will get used for Sunday morning crosswords. You'll find one on the arm of a chair near a fireplace on a cold evening.
In short, I think this will become THE stereotype Apple product. It will be for those with too much money to buy for a stupid purpose, when the traditional things which filled that niche all work better. But it will be shiny. And Apple will sell lots of them.
Oh, I know. My cousins live in Delaware. Same goes even there, as mid-US as it is. We were there once when they got all of 1/4" of snow, and pretty much had the roads to ourselves, as all the other cars were in the ditch. It was truly amazing. The best part was that we were cruising around in a Plymouth Acclaim, without snows on it, while all the 4WD vehicles were stuck on flat surfaces.
Northern US here: It took 50 cm to shut down the city where I live for a day. And people felt that it was ridiculous, and called for an investigation into the highway department. Most people felt that the plows should have been able to keep up with the snowfall, and keep everything open. 5 cm of snow is barely reason to break the plows out!
It's mind-boggling to me how many issues snow and ice can cause in areas not used to it. I grew up sliding backwards down hills in cars because they were too slippery to drive up. We'd just park at the bottom, and walk up. The extremes of what's drivable through in different regions is really amazing to me.
Well said. EA has been off my purchase list for 7-8 years now because of this. It looks like Ubisoft will be as well. I just don't get why so many people put up with shit like this.
You're modded up, so I'll just add a +1 comment to your observation on the case. For the last decade or so, the most expensive part of my systems has usually been the case. Of course, there were only about 3 of them in that decade. A good case is a must.
So far, I've been a loyal Antec fan. Roomy, rolled edges, rails for everything, good ventilation...I have no complaints about their cases. They are damn well built.
I'm not in any way a lawyer, but I can't understand how ANYONE would sign a contract for work without #1 and #4 spelled out clearly. Yet we see this over and over and over and over....
The smart folk are ditching cable and going to Hulu and the like.
That's while Nielsen isn't bothering counting Hulu views. It's very hard to sell useless products to smart people...
I was watching TV for the first time in about a year (outside of sports) with a friend of mine the other day. I couldn't believe how bad cable now is. I had been considering hooking my TV back up, but a couple hours at her house, and I was well convinced not to.
The internet TV I watch isn't much worse quality, and it's mostly content. I can't fathom how it would be worth paying $50 a month for that. I'm much more inclined to hook a spare system up to my TV now, and watch TV that way. It has the benefit of the couch and distance from screen, combined with the ability to check email and surf. The only downside is that I'd trade a remote for a wireless keyboard and mouse.
Last I knew, the theory held that 2 RPM was about the limit where humans didn't really notice the apparent motion. 10 RPM is pretty high - one rotation per six seconds. That's the difference between the "scenery" drifting lazily by, and whizzing by. Your estimation of 9m at 10 RPM is very, very bad. The difference in acceleration between your head and your feet at that scale would be very noticeable. I'd be willing to bet that it would be very, very unpleasant.
The calculations I had a physics class do on this once showed a practical lower limit of a 500m radius station. This is fucking huge, but not impossible to build. We're talking 5x the size of a football stadium! The major issue would just be getting that much stuff into space in the first place. It'd be the ISS, but 5x longer and 10x wider, with the corresponding increase in structural elements needed to tie it all together.
While it would be pretty hard to build, I'd LOVE to be able to look up and see something like that!
Yeah, but we were here first! Everything else is just a derivative of God's Chosen Country.
Yes, that's a simplistic argument. But it's the easiest way to start to get really ignorant people considering the difference between weather and climate. To use the highly-localized, short-term variability of weather as "proof" that we can't model climate is a fallacy.
I'm well aware of how complicated climate is - I'm doing climate modeling at the moment. The issue is how to begin to explain to someone who's so ignorant about the two concepts what the differences are. I've still not figured that out completely.
Protip: Don't rely on sketchy, unaccredited blogs for your science. Go take a look and see how well surfacestations.org's publications have fared before you quote them as some part of a rational argument. If you want to talk science, you have to do it in the framework of science.
Please man, don't argue things you're clueless about. It really makes you look stupid. Weather does not scale up to climate, and climate doesn't scale down to weather. You really are in need of learning some of the basic fundamentals of each before you try arguing points related to them.
Thanks.
/., which has a higher percentage of intelligent people than most general forums.
I've been through several careers now, including IT, teaching, and now climate science. It's so stupidly complicated that I have a hard time even beginning to explain it on a forum like
I trust the science, by and large, because I've done small parts of it, and those confirm what's been published. I trust what's published, because I can make a major name for myself if I can prove it's crap. So far, nobody knows me....
simplistic i know but it has to make you think maybe they have it wrong?
I wish I had mod points to mod you fucking ignorant.
Modeling weather and climate are completely different. To suggest that you can model both similarly is the height of ignorance.
If I ask you to model a coin flip, you'll get it wrong 50% of the time. If I ask you to model the net outcome of 100 coin flips, I bet you can get within 5% of the number of heads and tails.
Climate and weather are much the same. Weather is random and chaotic, and climate is more like a net average of a shitton of weather. It's far easier, and far more accurate to model the net accumulation of random processes than it is to model those processes themselves.
As an additional data point, the data that we're using to model climate is....climate data. Not weather data. The model output we're analyzing is...climate output, not weather output. The fact that you seem to think there is some major amount of crossover suggests that you might really need to learn a bit about weather and climate before spouting off...
Because of this:
"The damage was that IPCC had, or I think still has, such a stellar reputation that people view it as an authority -- as indeed they should -- and so they see a bullet that says Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035 and they take that as a fact," he said.
Kargel is one of four scientists who addressed the issue in a letter that will be published in the Jan. 29 issue of the journal Science. "These errors could have been avoided had the norms of scientific publication including peer review and concentration upon peer-reviewed work, been respected," write the researchers.
(From here)
Scientists fuck up. They are human. They don't do their jobs correctly all the time. They miss-read graphs, miss-interpret data, they allow their own personal biases to interfere with their work.
But their work isn't the Ten Commandments. It's not the Ultimate Truth. It's not set in stone, the word of god, never able to be questioned or overturned.
Four scientists looked at it and realized it was wrong. What did they do? They researched it. They looked into it. They dug up research, and came closer to the truth. Then what did they do? They collected all this information, organized it, and submitted it to a peer-reviewed publication, to be looked over by others, and, if viable, distributed around the world.
That's why you should trust it. Not because god said that it's correct now, but because over time, should it not be correct, someone will figure it out, and get their name in print because of it. Science is hostile, competitive, and dog-eat-dog. Publishing shit is scary, because if you screw up badly enough, a fuckup may be NAMED after you!
Science, by and large, is like a new version of an OS. Don't trust it until SP1. By SP2, it should be pretty damn solid.
Why should you trust the IPCC? Because 95% of what it's put out is correct. The other 5% gets discovered as crap, proved to be crap, and articles are peer-reviewed and published proclaiming it's crap. You don't get that level of scrutiny and openness elsewhere very often.
You're not.
There are a bunch of places that have missed out on my money because they only took PayPal. Free online games which rely on donations, websites like slashdot, places that do micropayments, charities, businesses, etc.
I will NOT do business with PayPal. Period. I don't care what it's for, or how much it may potentially benefit me. I don't even care if it's just paying by credit card through them.
PayPal is not a bank, is not accredited, can't be trusted, and will NEVER EVER touch any of my money or other financial assets. Should they decide to do ANYTHING, my only recompense is to try to sue a corporation with deep pockets.
When it comes to my money, that's a risk I flatly refuse to take.
The image is definitely not all about the computer processing. In fact, that's a minor part.
It all comes down to the telescope and CCD you're using.
I've got a fair number of unprocessed images from my time doing astronomy which are FANTASTIC! Why? Good scope, clear night, long exposure, and a good CCD. I could make them a bit better with some processing, but I've never seen the need. Processing can never add data to a picture. The only thing that can do that is a longer exposure, better scope, or better CCD.
That being said, what this guy did is pretty nice work. I'm not overly surprised, as you can get a decent CCD for less and less as times goes on, and mainstream digital photography gets bigger. A decade or two ago, and you'd have spent a good fraction of his setup cost on a 1MP CCD!
Astronomy already has a standard way to take care of CCD noise. You always take a dark-frame before your exposure. Some people also do one after. That's the same exposure, but with the lens closed. You then subtract the dark frame from the image you took.
Not only does it remove stuck pixels, but it can pick up on heat bleeding into the CCD from the rest of the instrumentation.
That part isn't hard. As a former astronomer:
:-)
1) Take a dark frame. Lens on, potentially the same duration of your planned exposure. This captures all the non-responsive/stuck pixels on your camera, and captures any heat noise caused by the rest of the instrument.
2) Take the image.
3) Subtract #1 from #2.
There might be additional post-processing, but that depends on the quality of your setup, and how into it you are. Most astronomers that I know of use custom written scripts in IDL or MATLAB to do such processing, although there is a bit of a trickle to move to things like R and Python, due to their being more full-fledged programming environments.
When I was doing astronomy, we'd set our exposure up, then go play video games for a half hour. Ten minutes of dark-frame, ten minutes of exposure, couple seconds of automated transfer over the nextwork, a button push, and a minute or so of processing. Then we'd have to pause our game, and move to the next target.