On the serial id number, there has to be a way to program the device once it is assembled, so that means that it is probably done with a special sequence through the connector. Maybe even by typing in a special code!.
Barcode scanners are nearly always programmed by reading in some special barcodes. This makes sense because you've already got a perfectly good input mechanism on the device (the scanner head), and you save the cost of an additional interface. For commercially sold programmable scanners the sheet of codes will be included with the device. Generally there will be an especially obscure code that puts the device in programming mode, a state-based sequence of codes that change whatever settings are available (including a set of numerics or alphanumerics if one is to software-set something like a serial number), and another code to return it to the regular operating mode.
However, I doubt that these scanners have programmable serial numbers - as others have suggested, the number is probably burned into the EPROM when it's manufactured. Having them individually programmed would just be way too labour-intensive for an extremely mass-produced device that's to be given away free (and probably worth about 50 otherwise).
Unfortunately that sort of growin' up is usually as rate-limited a process as the biological kind. The asshole syndrome you describe usually comes from insecurity and defensiveness (they don't call them dick-measuring contests for nothing), and while it is possible for a careful friend or manager to coach and nurture someone past that when they're only borderline (ie. ready), it's nigh impossible to tell the unreachable cases (like Sokolov) from those that would act differently if they could only see their buttheadedness (like the former you). I suspect that like a lot of things, if you accelerated the process it just wouldn't be worth as much. Kind of like trying to bake a cake quickly by using the microwave.
I'm curious though, is your/. username a reference to this self-describe epiphany & rebirth (as well as the obvious literary references)? Might be a wee bit cult-of-thyself if so.;)
Perhaps the US govt should sell the.us namespace to the highest bidder, based on the convenient presence of the English word "us". That toy company with the weird Cyrillic name would pay a pretty penny for starters, but there are endless possibilities in the "with" second-level alone...
Perhaps the CDIndex (soon to be musicbrainz.org) people can answer this: would it be possible to merge the efforts of FreeDB and Musicbrainz? It seems very wasteful to duplicate the effort for a free CDDB replacement, not just for the project developers but for the end users typing in track info for both. I'm specifically wondering whether
the licences are compatible - CDIndex has its own licence which might conflict with the GPL
the underlying structure is compatible.
The second question strikes me as particularly important - CDIndex is moving to a completely track-based design that should be media independent and make up for the limitations of the CDDB formula. The problem with this is that temporary backward compatibility with the CDDB would be a real asset in allowing people to use CDDB-enabled clients of various kinds and simply point them at a different server. It also better allows for the quiet updating people have been doing with clients like grip, where the CDDB info is re-uploaded from the client machine to FreeDB, slowly mirroring the database. To my knowledge, CDIndex has never been compatible with the CDDB format (even before switching to the track-based musicbrainz format).
There aren't really many more details - the FSF simply granted a special dispensation. This is also mentioned in the preamble of the bison.simple file. I believe it only applies to that file and the contained yyparse() function - if you use bison.hairy, the output must be GPLed.
/* As a special exception, when this file is copied by Bison into a
Bison output file, you may use that output file without restriction.
This special exception was added by the Free Software Foundation
in version 1.24 of Bison. */
This is really a separate issue than the Forth one, which runs much deeper than just copying over part of a provided (and thus licenced) input file. Bison mainly came across this issue because it's a free replacement for yacc, so it needs to implement a parser generator in the same way as yacc. If it somehow generated a parser completely dynamically (which in a sense would make it more similar to gcc), there wouldn't be a problem. I suppose that's why flex never had the same problem with the yylex() lexical scanner function.
The most interesting thing about that:CueCat page is the way it repeatedly seems to assume that the only thing you use the web (or indeed, your computer) for is to look up product information. "You'll probably find you barely need your mouse" or "your keyboard and mouse will still work, but you'll probably find yourself using them a lot less 'cause this way is just so much more mindnumbingly easy".
The sentiment is even more pronounced in the idea of the:CRQ software that listens to TV broadcasts and sends your web browser on some merry (and no doubt Javascript + Flash infested) chase everytime a commercial or product placement spot goes by, presumably in case swiping a UPC code still required too much mental effort. It frankly worries me a bit that there might be people out there who would actually want that to happen on a regular basis. Hopefully there aren't, and it'll turn out that this company's economic theory makes no sense.
I think the coolest thing I came across on Google was the way the "related sites" feature will, when fed Google itself, return a bevy of their own competitors. That went a fair ways to convincing me that they really are in this with the intention of doing the best job possible.
The "googlet" javascript you can store as a bookmark is also very handy, and saves you having to go to the main page before entering your search text (tailored to the scripting quirks of your browser, too).
Exactly what I thought when I looked at the site. They're just expensive RC toys with game geeks controlling them. If one toy tears another to shreds, it's just meanspiritedness on the part of the human controller, making up for his (it will invariably be a he) lack of endowment by bashing some other goof's toy to smithereens, all for the benefit of WWF-descended network execs.
By contrast, when a well-written program in MUSE Robotwar or one of it's many successors (like Robowar) wins by a landslide, you feel a sense of fait accompli. But the people making real-life robots that can actually make their own decisions have better things to do than try and one-up someone else's work.
No hatred whatsoever; you certainly are a pseudointellectual nitwit, but you're in exactly the right place for that sort of thing so I wouldn't moderate you down on that basis. I only spent one lonely moderation point on an overrated +5 posting of yours, however, so there must be some leftover annoyance in other folks if you saw more than that. Did they fix the 50 point barrier bug finally? I had the point, couldn't find anything more interesting than Emily Dickinson in new threads, and was reading some of your old posts anyway - I moderate whatever I'm reading, up or down. I'd actually moderate down my own overrated +5's if I could (feel free, but I suspect you may post a wee bit too much to get many moderation tokens).
I doubt that even someone with as bad a case of lastworditis as you appear to have would use moderation in anger, and it's likely that even past occurences were mostly coincidence added to your almost feline perception that everything notable that happens is related to some boring thing you did recently. So no, I didn't declare war your karma; Slashdot is bad enough as it is without wasting more of my points that way.
Yes, my first reply was pompous (I freely admitted that), but I did manage to avoid an outright ad hominem response. You didn't, but I'll reply anyway.
Yes, neurons fire or don't fire. How they get into that state depends on a whole lot more voodoo, depending on the stimuli feeding into them (neurotransmitters and their reuse, or photons, for this argument we really don't care). There are certainly limits to the speed with which an axon can transmit such a response, but since we're talking about a continuously developed perception that really doesn't matter much here (it would matter if we were talking about a minimal perceptible signal, but that kinda thing only happens in psych experiments). Any such limit is lost in the processing noise as your moving picture is built and rebuilt.
Rods and cones aren't pixels any more than CPU registers are (though I deplore the whole analogy). Visual perception - especially time-based scene perception such as you're describing - takes place throughout the eye and brain, and it isn't swayed by what happens in one rod or cone. The digital computer model of perceptual and cognitive processing went out of style in the late seventies, and for good reason.
Motion blur isn't a psychological effect. It's a filmic effect, and you've assumed that you can argue from what a camera does that you understand something about what the mind does. You can perhaps make a useful abstract model that way, but you've extrapolated from it too far. So says this minimally adequate mind. Likewise, a camera acts like a human eye as far as the retina / film / CCD / whatever, but that's as far as it goes. Knowing that tells you nothing about the bizarre equipment that interprets all that information in the visual cortex and beyond, and you cannot pronounce on what it does or doesn't require without knowing that.
You already know that recorded video actually varies at 60fps, so that can be left alone. More importantly, 24fps film and 30fps/60 fieldps recordings *aren't* sufficient for a lot of people. I know people who don't go to movie theatres precisely because a 24fps quantised image pisses them off. I also know people who get a headache from watching TV, though I suspect many more than that are bothered and never make the connection. For me (and presumably you) it works fine, but for them it doesn't. So clearly Eternal Truth isn't what I'm looking for here - but the Pragmatic Truth you were aiming for with "just fine" really had the same ring. The point isn't that some new test may "disprove" something, it's that *no test* is sufficient to make such pronouncements, because all such tests are more an expression of the current state of cleverness in testing than the thing they seek to test.
That said, I am sufficiently pragmatic to avoid "we can know nothing". But I tend to aim a hell of a lot higher to avoid our own ignorance, especially where digital media are concerned.
The real world is not motion-blurred. Film and video (and any other quantised visual media) record blurred frames from continuously varying fields of focus. Think about that for three seconds now.
The rods and cones in your eye don't know what a second is, much less 1/30th of one. They're part of the same real world they're reacting to, and thus not quantised either. They can even be affected by what comes before or after a particular bit of interesting (to you, the scientific after-the-fact observer) data. Think about that for oh, let's say two seconds. Then realise that there aren't any pixels, or any sort of quantifiable matrix in your visual cortex that you can currently define or understand. The one thing that you can guarantee is that it's capable of detecting and using information that no clever psychologist has yet devised a test for. Some people used to think they knew all about the limits of human visual acuity, then someone came up with a neat-o test for vernier acuity, and those limits went out of the window. You receive and usefully process much information that your conscious awareness doesn't trouble itself with, but which still has an effect. Leibniz knew this when he stood on the shore and failed to hear the individual droplets in a crashing wave, but somewhere along the way people forgot about that.
Sorry, you still owe me another four seconds pondering that point (no more, no less;).
Running extra frames doesn't really create any sort of motion blur unless you specifically render that motion blur (I have seen this mentioned in an otherwise excellent article on the subject, and I strongly disagreed with it then too). Oni is reputed to do this; it's the first game 3D engine I've heard of that does (but I could be wrong about that, and note that the Oni engine is unremarkable in other ways). Running extra unblurred frames does have an effect, but this isn't quite it. I do see what you're getting at here, however.
The bottom line is that 30FPS isn't just fine. Did you really think such a round number would be? No number is likely to be just fine when you're simulating smooth motion with still frames, but even for postmodern western cortexes that have agreed to be fooled, a suitable number is going to be much higher.
(please forgive the pomposity in the above paragraphs, the writer is testing a new brand of oatmeal stout...)
Makes sense. You wouldn't show an R-rated violent movie in that public space, so those games don't belong there either. What some people seem to miss, perhaps because they've lost the ability to distinguish 3D rendering from reality, is that video games are motion pictures. Thus they're subject to the same ratings scheme. If you don't like the scheme, protest that, but there is nothing intrinsic that distinguishes a violent game from a violent film. And I say this even though my own introduction to addictive quarter-sucking video games occurred on a BC Ferry about twenty years ago (Space Wars, arguably violent for the time;).
I was glad when they took the last of the pinball games off the ferries, anyway - trying to play while the boat was on rough water was just no fun. And yet I always kept trying. Now I'm a little wiser, so I sit outside and watch the scenery.
One thing I've seen briefly alluded to (such as at the EDTN link - "no exotic materials") but not well discussed is that manufacturing MRAM may be less environmentally damaging than making DRAM. Current DRAM-building practices are pretty vile, which is one reason they tend to be done in export processing zones where poisoning the local flora, fauna and human population is considered acceptable to keep the cost down. Anyone know whether MRAM is really any better in terms of manufacturing process and the effluents thereof? I'd be much more likely to buy into it if it's a more sustainable technology; some of the kind of stuff we've got now in computer production has got to go.
I don't get it. People know not to reply to "opt-out" spam. Why would I want to put an opt-out cookie in my browser? I just don't trust Doubleclick.com or Preferences.com that much.
Uh, because it's a completely different issue? I don't trust them any more than you, but you don't need to because you can see the contents of the only cookie you'll get from the domain in question (a literal "opt-out" or something similar), see that it's not capable of identifying anyone uniquely, and see that once it's set you receive no other cookies from that site (not even session cookies). At least you can with a browser that allows you to easily see the current in-core cookie set, like Mac IE or iCab (and perhaps Opera). Cookies are a darn useful tool if they're not abused, and this at least allows you to prevent that abuse from these sites. The only real criticism is that the default should be no tracking at all, and those who want "personalised" ads should have to opt in, but that's a pipe dream for the foreseeable future and this will have to do. In fact I manually lengthen the expiry date of some opt-out cookies, since they're sometimes designed to require periodic reopt-out and that sucks - the whole point is to not have to deal with cookie dialogs and other wasted time.
Indeed, I did, and the term is used in far more places than that. It's applied as a general derogative.
Yes, those contract terms are abhorrent, and frankly a more important reason than mere performance for avoiding those software packages. Unfortunately the companies who actually pay to licence them couldn't care less about publishing benchmarks one day.
Has anyone noticed that some open-source marketeers are beginning to really resemble their closed-source peers? This press release just reeks of FUD; how many times is the word "proprietary" snidely used? If it were "innovat*" this could have been written by a Micros~1 lackey - there aren't a lot of other differences.
I'm as big an open-source and free software proponent as anyone I know, just as opposed to proprietary code, and I've even specifically used and recommended Postgres in the past. And still I think that adopting these methods is not the way, because they represent a lot of what was wrong with the proprietary model. The MBAs who put this little exercise together have no idea what they're selling or why - they just want to sell it now, through any means and at any cost to the truth. The real virtues of Postgres, open-source, or anything else get lost in the hype.
I personally fell asleep halfway through reading that mess. I've only just now woken up, and dammit, I'm cranky.
You shouldn't actually need to shut down Netscape. Just make the file writeable, cause the cookie (or any cookie) to be set, and make it read-only again. Opening and closing the preferences dialog may also cause the persistent cookie store to be rewritten, though I haven't tested that.
I've been advising concerned people to lock their cookie files/resources for at least three years; glad to see it's finally catching on.;)
Preferences.com now has an opt-out (the cookie name is "PreferencesID" and the value is "OPT-OUT" in the root path, if you want to set it manually).
There's no secret Javascript method required to change a cookie - the ad server could change the opt-out one into something else on any connection. If you do want to prevent these cookies from being changed without your consent, just edit your cookie file to contain those few cookies you actually want (probably the opt-outs, plus a few auto-login cookies like your slashdot one), then make the file read-only. Session cookies will still work fine, since they're only ever set in memory anyway. When you want to set a new persistent cookie just make the file temporarily writeable. Note that you can also do this without ever setting any opt-out cookies and get more-or-less the same result that the Ask Slashdot question is looking for, since you'll then get a new "persistent" cookie for each new browser session, and Doubleclick et al will get a very inflated database full of distinctively uninformative microusers. I prefer the opt-out since it should prevent them from ever tying those microusers to any real-world identifying info, in case I ever let some leak.
This works on any version of Netscape (Unix, Mac, Windows) and with some Resedit shenanigans ("Lock" & "Protect" the cookies resource in the Internet Preferences file) on the Mac version of MSIE. Dunno if there's a registry hack to do it under Windows IE, probably not.
Sorry this reply is so late coming...slashdot's really not the best venue for vaguely interactive commentary. I wouldn't bother for many posters, actually, but this one deserves a response.
Double-clicking in a properly-designed GUI is done when activating one or more elements from a list. Single-clicking selects, double-clicking "does more".
Whoa there, Tex. Let's take a moment for a reality check. A user interface is a mode of communication, and in the case of GUI's, it's a largely gestural mode of communication. [...] If, for some reason, you feel compelled to let other people dictate the details of your life for you[...]
You're right of course - I didn't intend my little diatribe to intend that this particular received canon was The One True Mouse Click (or, um, Two True...er...Double-Click...;). Perhaps something like "in this one well-designed GUI". My point was simply that double-clicking itself is not evil, and nor is any other bit of technical trivia. The problems arise when people incorporate those bits into larger poor designs and then leave a situation where other people end up having to try and use them on the other side of the Real Life line. And I do think those things are important, because they actually lead to increased stress in people's lives, and that hurts everyone.
It's the same instinct that has spawned wars over languages and custom since the dawn of time, but reduced to the level of infinitesimal trivia.
I wonder if mouse clicks are really any more infinitesmally trivial than all those other bits of useless abstract crap people have died over in the past. Ah well. But I would note that seeing someone emphatically assert a narrow point in a discussion board thread of argument doesn't tell you all there is about that person's views, or life.;)
What's wrong with walking along a corridor trying all the doors you see?
There are two points here:
Actually, nothing, especially when you know you're explicitly allowed to be in the corridor in the first place. What else would be the point of having corridors, or doors? However, note that I'm not talking about LANs and the Internet and the many varied ways people can receive the right to operate there, because...
More importantly, port scanning is not trying doors, and a network is not a corridor. Just because those two abstractions happen to resemble each other in your banana-eating head doesn't mean they do or should have anything to do with each other in the real world. If you can't consider a question on its own terms without committing a logical fallacy and erroneously redefining it as something else you happen to like and be familiar with, refrain from comment on the damn thing.
So far I fail to see how the local, not global distinction is going to save Freenet from a tyranny of mediocrity. I think it underestimates two quantities:
the number of requests there will be for porn vids and Britney Spears MP3s, and the number of directions those requests originate from, especially relative to requests for other material
the amount of relative space required per item for porn vids and Britney Spears MP3s, vs. that for fascinating treatises on the human condition.
As a past (and somewhat present) Usenet administrator, I've seen this effect in action before, where I've had to mark down expiry times on binaries groups again and again, and where newer caching news servers still spend nearly all of their time keeping track of binaries groups because that's where the reader demand is. Freenet will take over this task itself and automate it completely, but that will make the effect even more pronounced because just as the designer notes, it can't tell the difference. It only judges on one dimension - demand.
The system can be tweaked, certainly - large objects can be penalised for instance - but in the end I suspect we'll find that 90% of the demand and 99.9% of the storage requirement is for recordings of Ms. Spears music and pictures of her navel. Whether this is really a failing depends on your goals going in.
That said, the only way to find out if it works is to try it, and (as has been noted) there are other models being developed that you can inject your great novel into as well. So bring it on.:)
Yup. But while this might have made some amount of sense when "trade secret" meant paper documentation of some syrup and cocaine-derivative recipes in a locked and booby-trapped briefcase locked to some Coca-Cola idiot's wrist, it makes less and less sense when former trade secrets are infinitely and almost instantly copyable all over the globe, and no sense at all when the very use of those secrets for their original business purpose *requires* such copying (as is the case with software and data used by computers).
The difference between a RISC/CISC processor and a VLIW processor is the fact that RISC/CISC processors have a decoder on the front end for an outdated instruction set. we should buffer against the changing requirment the hardware has of the instruction set, by a adopting a 3 tier approach to execution - in the same way that databases buffer against change in the way data is stored. That means a intermediate, step, such as bytecode.
Yes. I've felt for a while that a future direction will be CPUs designed to run some intermediate bytecode that's explicitly designed for runtime optimisation. If you look at what HP is doing with Dynamo (which dynamically recompiles HP-PA instructions back into HP-PA instructions before execution by the hardware, typically gaining 10-15% execution speed), it's clear that a split static/dynamic compilation scheme is a win - there are simply too many things in a modern superscalar design that can't be known at static compile time, and thus need to be put off until runtime, a sort of "lazy compilation". One can only imagine that it'd be a bigger win if instead of originally compiling to some legacy instruction set architecture (like HP-PA, PPC, or the old groaning x86), code was first compiled to a bytecode architecture that was specifically designed to mesh with a final dynamic compilation implemented in microcode (or even pure hardware, though I imagine acting on the amount of metainfo needed to do this well would make the design too complex for that).
When (hopefully not if) someone does pursue this idea, it's reasonable to postulate that some programming languages or even paradigms might be better suited than others to the first-stage static compilation to bytecode. So I guess that's what my own answer to "what is the future of programming languages" depends on. One thing I'll say is that I'm not sure it's Java, which means Sun's MAJC design for the purposes outlined above.
There's another nice article (companion to the one linked above) at Ars Technica that talks about some of this, though it actually ends up being a sort of review of CPU evolution from hardware lock-in though ISAs through microcode emulation of ISAs. It doesn't really talk about a bytecode-oriented-CPU, but it sure seems a natural next step to me. It's an idea in many ways similar to Crusoe or even (shudder) EPIC, but doing things at different times and in different places.
Slashdot Mirror
However, I doubt that these scanners have programmable serial numbers - as others have suggested, the number is probably burned into the EPROM when it's manufactured. Having them individually programmed would just be way too labour-intensive for an extremely mass-produced device that's to be given away free (and probably worth about 50 otherwise).
Unfortunately that sort of growin' up is usually as rate-limited a process as the biological kind. The asshole syndrome you describe usually comes from insecurity and defensiveness (they don't call them dick-measuring contests for nothing), and while it is possible for a careful friend or manager to coach and nurture someone past that when they're only borderline (ie. ready), it's nigh impossible to tell the unreachable cases (like Sokolov) from those that would act differently if they could only see their buttheadedness (like the former you). I suspect that like a lot of things, if you accelerated the process it just wouldn't be worth as much. Kind of like trying to bake a cake quickly by using the microwave.
/. username a reference to this self-describe epiphany & rebirth (as well as the obvious literary references)? Might be a wee bit cult-of-thyself if so. ;)
I'm curious though, is your
Perhaps the US govt should sell the .us namespace to the highest bidder, based on the convenient presence of the English word "us". That toy company with the weird Cyrillic name would pay a pretty penny for starters, but there are endless possibilities in the "with" second-level alone...
The odd thing is that I'm only half-joking.
Perhaps the CDIndex (soon to be musicbrainz.org) people can answer this: would it be possible to merge the efforts of FreeDB and Musicbrainz? It seems very wasteful to duplicate the effort for a free CDDB replacement, not just for the project developers but for the end users typing in track info for both. I'm specifically wondering whether
The second question strikes me as particularly important - CDIndex is moving to a completely track-based design that should be media independent and make up for the limitations of the CDDB formula. The problem with this is that temporary backward compatibility with the CDDB would be a real asset in allowing people to use CDDB-enabled clients of various kinds and simply point them at a different server. It also better allows for the quiet updating people have been doing with clients like grip, where the CDDB info is re-uploaded from the client machine to FreeDB, slowly mirroring the database. To my knowledge, CDIndex has never been compatible with the CDDB format (even before switching to the track-based musicbrainz format).
There aren't really many more details - the FSF simply granted a special dispensation. This is also mentioned in the preamble of the bison.simple file. I believe it only applies to that file and the contained yyparse() function - if you use bison.hairy, the output must be GPLed.
This is really a separate issue than the Forth one, which runs much deeper than just copying over part of a provided (and thus licenced) input file. Bison mainly came across this issue because it's a free replacement for yacc, so it needs to implement a parser generator in the same way as yacc. If it somehow generated a parser completely dynamically (which in a sense would make it more similar to gcc), there wouldn't be a problem. I suppose that's why flex never had the same problem with the yylex() lexical scanner function.
The most interesting thing about that :CueCat page is the way it repeatedly seems to assume that the only thing you use the web (or indeed, your computer) for is to look up product information. "You'll probably find you barely need your mouse" or "your keyboard and mouse will still work, but you'll probably find yourself using them a lot less 'cause this way is just so much more mindnumbingly easy".
The sentiment is even more pronounced in the idea of the :CRQ software that listens to TV broadcasts and sends your web browser on some merry (and no doubt Javascript + Flash infested) chase everytime a commercial or product placement spot goes by, presumably in case swiping a UPC code still required too much mental effort. It frankly worries me a bit that there might be people out there who would actually want that to happen on a regular basis. Hopefully there aren't, and it'll turn out that this company's economic theory makes no sense.
I think the coolest thing I came across on Google was the way the "related sites" feature will, when fed Google itself, return a bevy of their own competitors. That went a fair ways to convincing me that they really are in this with the intention of doing the best job possible.
The "googlet" javascript you can store as a bookmark is also very handy, and saves you having to go to the main page before entering your search text (tailored to the scripting quirks of your browser, too).
Exactly what I thought when I looked at the site. They're just expensive RC toys with game geeks controlling them. If one toy tears another to shreds, it's just meanspiritedness on the part of the human controller, making up for his (it will invariably be a he) lack of endowment by bashing some other goof's toy to smithereens, all for the benefit of WWF-descended network execs.
By contrast, when a well-written program in MUSE Robotwar or one of it's many successors (like Robowar) wins by a landslide, you feel a sense of fait accompli. But the people making real-life robots that can actually make their own decisions have better things to do than try and one-up someone else's work.
No hatred whatsoever; you certainly are a pseudointellectual nitwit, but you're in exactly the right place for that sort of thing so I wouldn't moderate you down on that basis. I only spent one lonely moderation point on an overrated +5 posting of yours, however, so there must be some leftover annoyance in other folks if you saw more than that. Did they fix the 50 point barrier bug finally? I had the point, couldn't find anything more interesting than Emily Dickinson in new threads, and was reading some of your old posts anyway - I moderate whatever I'm reading, up or down. I'd actually moderate down my own overrated +5's if I could (feel free, but I suspect you may post a wee bit too much to get many moderation tokens).
I doubt that even someone with as bad a case of lastworditis as you appear to have would use moderation in anger, and it's likely that even past occurences were mostly coincidence added to your almost feline perception that everything notable that happens is related to some boring thing you did recently. So no, I didn't declare war your karma; Slashdot is bad enough as it is without wasting more of my points that way.
Still got a couple left, though. ;)
Yes, my first reply was pompous (I freely admitted that), but I did manage to avoid an outright ad hominem response. You didn't, but I'll reply anyway.
Yes, neurons fire or don't fire. How they get into that state depends on a whole lot more voodoo, depending on the stimuli feeding into them (neurotransmitters and their reuse, or photons, for this argument we really don't care). There are certainly limits to the speed with which an axon can transmit such a response, but since we're talking about a continuously developed perception that really doesn't matter much here (it would matter if we were talking about a minimal perceptible signal, but that kinda thing only happens in psych experiments). Any such limit is lost in the processing noise as your moving picture is built and rebuilt.
Rods and cones aren't pixels any more than CPU registers are (though I deplore the whole analogy). Visual perception - especially time-based scene perception such as you're describing - takes place throughout the eye and brain, and it isn't swayed by what happens in one rod or cone. The digital computer model of perceptual and cognitive processing went out of style in the late seventies, and for good reason.
Motion blur isn't a psychological effect. It's a filmic effect, and you've assumed that you can argue from what a camera does that you understand something about what the mind does. You can perhaps make a useful abstract model that way, but you've extrapolated from it too far. So says this minimally adequate mind. Likewise, a camera acts like a human eye as far as the retina / film / CCD / whatever, but that's as far as it goes. Knowing that tells you nothing about the bizarre equipment that interprets all that information in the visual cortex and beyond, and you cannot pronounce on what it does or doesn't require without knowing that.
You already know that recorded video actually varies at 60fps, so that can be left alone. More importantly, 24fps film and 30fps/60 fieldps recordings *aren't* sufficient for a lot of people. I know people who don't go to movie theatres precisely because a 24fps quantised image pisses them off. I also know people who get a headache from watching TV, though I suspect many more than that are bothered and never make the connection. For me (and presumably you) it works fine, but for them it doesn't. So clearly Eternal Truth isn't what I'm looking for here - but the Pragmatic Truth you were aiming for with "just fine" really had the same ring. The point isn't that some new test may "disprove" something, it's that *no test* is sufficient to make such pronouncements, because all such tests are more an expression of the current state of cleverness in testing than the thing they seek to test.
That said, I am sufficiently pragmatic to avoid "we can know nothing". But I tend to aim a hell of a lot higher to avoid our own ignorance, especially where digital media are concerned.
Shoulda just had another oatmeal stout.
Sigh.
The real world is not motion-blurred. Film and video (and any other quantised visual media) record blurred frames from continuously varying fields of focus. Think about that for three seconds now.
The rods and cones in your eye don't know what a second is, much less 1/30th of one. They're part of the same real world they're reacting to, and thus not quantised either. They can even be affected by what comes before or after a particular bit of interesting (to you, the scientific after-the-fact observer) data. Think about that for oh, let's say two seconds. Then realise that there aren't any pixels, or any sort of quantifiable matrix in your visual cortex that you can currently define or understand. The one thing that you can guarantee is that it's capable of detecting and using information that no clever psychologist has yet devised a test for. Some people used to think they knew all about the limits of human visual acuity, then someone came up with a neat-o test for vernier acuity, and those limits went out of the window. You receive and usefully process much information that your conscious awareness doesn't trouble itself with, but which still has an effect. Leibniz knew this when he stood on the shore and failed to hear the individual droplets in a crashing wave, but somewhere along the way people forgot about that.
Sorry, you still owe me another four seconds pondering that point (no more, no less ;).
Running extra frames doesn't really create any sort of motion blur unless you specifically render that motion blur (I have seen this mentioned in an otherwise excellent article on the subject, and I strongly disagreed with it then too). Oni is reputed to do this; it's the first game 3D engine I've heard of that does (but I could be wrong about that, and note that the Oni engine is unremarkable in other ways). Running extra unblurred frames does have an effect, but this isn't quite it. I do see what you're getting at here, however.
The bottom line is that 30FPS isn't just fine. Did you really think such a round number would be? No number is likely to be just fine when you're simulating smooth motion with still frames, but even for postmodern western cortexes that have agreed to be fooled, a suitable number is going to be much higher.
(please forgive the pomposity in the above paragraphs, the writer is testing a new brand of oatmeal stout...)
Makes sense. You wouldn't show an R-rated violent movie in that public space, so those games don't belong there either. What some people seem to miss, perhaps because they've lost the ability to distinguish 3D rendering from reality, is that video games are motion pictures. Thus they're subject to the same ratings scheme. If you don't like the scheme, protest that, but there is nothing intrinsic that distinguishes a violent game from a violent film. And I say this even though my own introduction to addictive quarter-sucking video games occurred on a BC Ferry about twenty years ago (Space Wars, arguably violent for the time ;).
I was glad when they took the last of the pinball games off the ferries, anyway - trying to play while the boat was on rough water was just no fun. And yet I always kept trying. Now I'm a little wiser, so I sit outside and watch the scenery.
One thing I've seen briefly alluded to (such as at the EDTN link - "no exotic materials") but not well discussed is that manufacturing MRAM may be less environmentally damaging than making DRAM. Current DRAM-building practices are pretty vile, which is one reason they tend to be done in export processing zones where poisoning the local flora, fauna and human population is considered acceptable to keep the cost down. Anyone know whether MRAM is really any better in terms of manufacturing process and the effluents thereof? I'd be much more likely to buy into it if it's a more sustainable technology; some of the kind of stuff we've got now in computer production has got to go.
Indeed, I did, and the term is used in far more places than that. It's applied as a general derogative.
Yes, those contract terms are abhorrent, and frankly a more important reason than mere performance for avoiding those software packages. Unfortunately the companies who actually pay to licence them couldn't care less about publishing benchmarks one day.
Has anyone noticed that some open-source marketeers are beginning to really resemble their closed-source peers? This press release just reeks of FUD; how many times is the word "proprietary" snidely used? If it were "innovat*" this could have been written by a Micros~1 lackey - there aren't a lot of other differences.
I'm as big an open-source and free software proponent as anyone I know, just as opposed to proprietary code, and I've even specifically used and recommended Postgres in the past. And still I think that adopting these methods is not the way, because they represent a lot of what was wrong with the proprietary model. The MBAs who put this little exercise together have no idea what they're selling or why - they just want to sell it now, through any means and at any cost to the truth. The real virtues of Postgres, open-source, or anything else get lost in the hype.
I personally fell asleep halfway through reading that mess. I've only just now woken up, and dammit, I'm cranky.
You shouldn't actually need to shut down Netscape. Just make the file writeable, cause the cookie (or any cookie) to be set, and make it read-only again. Opening and closing the preferences dialog may also cause the persistent cookie store to be rewritten, though I haven't tested that.
;)
I've been advising concerned people to lock their cookie files/resources for at least three years; glad to see it's finally catching on.
Preferences.com now has an opt-out (the cookie name is "PreferencesID" and the value is "OPT-OUT" in the root path, if you want to set it manually).
There's no secret Javascript method required to change a cookie - the ad server could change the opt-out one into something else on any connection. If you do want to prevent these cookies from being changed without your consent, just edit your cookie file to contain those few cookies you actually want (probably the opt-outs, plus a few auto-login cookies like your slashdot one), then make the file read-only. Session cookies will still work fine, since they're only ever set in memory anyway. When you want to set a new persistent cookie just make the file temporarily writeable. Note that you can also do this without ever setting any opt-out cookies and get more-or-less the same result that the Ask Slashdot question is looking for, since you'll then get a new "persistent" cookie for each new browser session, and Doubleclick et al will get a very inflated database full of distinctively uninformative microusers. I prefer the opt-out since it should prevent them from ever tying those microusers to any real-world identifying info, in case I ever let some leak.
This works on any version of Netscape (Unix, Mac, Windows) and with some Resedit shenanigans ("Lock" & "Protect" the cookies resource in the Internet Preferences file) on the Mac version of MSIE. Dunno if there's a registry hack to do it under Windows IE, probably not.
- the number of requests there will be for porn vids and Britney Spears MP3s, and the number of directions those requests originate from, especially relative to requests for other material
- the amount of relative space required per item for porn vids and Britney Spears MP3s, vs. that for fascinating treatises on the human condition.
As a past (and somewhat present) Usenet administrator, I've seen this effect in action before, where I've had to mark down expiry times on binaries groups again and again, and where newer caching news servers still spend nearly all of their time keeping track of binaries groups because that's where the reader demand is. Freenet will take over this task itself and automate it completely, but that will make the effect even more pronounced because just as the designer notes, it can't tell the difference. It only judges on one dimension - demand.The system can be tweaked, certainly - large objects can be penalised for instance - but in the end I suspect we'll find that 90% of the demand and 99.9% of the storage requirement is for recordings of Ms. Spears music and pictures of her navel. Whether this is really a failing depends on your goals going in.
That said, the only way to find out if it works is to try it, and (as has been noted) there are other models being developed that you can inject your great novel into as well. So bring it on. :)
Wouldn't the real challenge be an UnObfuscated Perl contest?
;)
(disclaimer: I like and use perl for many things...but it still looks like a doctor's handwriting
Yup. But while this might have made some amount of sense when "trade secret" meant paper documentation of some syrup and cocaine-derivative recipes in a locked and booby-trapped briefcase locked to some Coca-Cola idiot's wrist, it makes less and less sense when former trade secrets are infinitely and almost instantly copyable all over the globe, and no sense at all when the very use of those secrets for their original business purpose *requires* such copying (as is the case with software and data used by computers).
When (hopefully not if) someone does pursue this idea, it's reasonable to postulate that some programming languages or even paradigms might be better suited than others to the first-stage static compilation to bytecode. So I guess that's what my own answer to "what is the future of programming languages" depends on. One thing I'll say is that I'm not sure it's Java, which means Sun's MAJC design for the purposes outlined above.
There's another nice article (companion to the one linked above) at Ars Technica that talks about some of this, though it actually ends up being a sort of review of CPU evolution from hardware lock-in though ISAs through microcode emulation of ISAs. It doesn't really talk about a bytecode-oriented-CPU, but it sure seems a natural next step to me. It's an idea in many ways similar to Crusoe or even (shudder) EPIC, but doing things at different times and in different places.
This is what happens when you take C and try to pound it into submission. You just end up making a hash of things.