And you can tell it was engraved by a Slashdot Editor because it has no fewer than 2 spelling errors which were actually carved in the stone! >:)
Kintanon
Re:Yeah, too bad we can't prove Macro-Gravity eith
on
Shapes of Time
·
· Score: 2
BLASPHEMER!! ALL know that it is the MIGHTY THUMB OF THOR which keeps us solidly in place upon this earth! His mighty Thumb also keeps the many planets in their correct orbits via gently correction (And/Or smashing them really hard with his mjollinor in the guise of meteor impacts) if you continue to blaspheme against him I warn you! He might remove the protection granted by his thumb and allow you to be fling off into cold and heartless space!
I always find it odd that a lot of creationists equate the biblical list of names and their timeline with the age of the earth. I imagine most people would agree that 6000 years is a pretty good age estimate for human civilization beyond the level of very simple tool users, right? So why would that biblical age refer SPECIFICALLY and ONLY to that? It could just as well refer to the first members of a specific species of human which had arisen. There is nothing in the bible which implies that the earth is young. In the original language a word which comes closer to meaning "eon" than "day" is used for the time period God used when creating the universe. If I had to make a guess for the earths age based solely on biblical wording I'd guess 6 billion and change years, this being the 7th "eon" in which God is resting.>:) It just annoys me to see other christians latch on to ideas that have NO support even within the text they are referencing and try to bludgeon their faulty premise into everyone elses head.
Yes. When you see another guy with a beard, or walking around barefoot, you know you have an instant friend. (Have mercy on me, moderators...)
How odd, I always assume people walking barefoot on asphault, concrete, broken glass, etc... are martial artists of some kind, not linux users. Where does the distinction of being barefoot come into play with linux use? I thought it was mac users who were all barefoot hippy treehuggers? >:)
Performance hit? Lesse, a 2.4ghz machine with 1gb of RAM shouldn't really CARE if the game is written in Java. It just shouldn't matter. Radeon 9700 or GeForce4 Ti in it and a 10krpm HD. That's a gaming rig, and it's a relatively common gaming rig. You could run an all Java version of every game that came out this year on that thing and I SERIOUSLY doubt you would notice the performance hit... And even if you would... how about someone redoing a bunch of semi-classic games in Java just to see it done? Quake II, Warcraft II, SimCity 2000, stuff like that. Just rewrite it all in Java!
I was wondering if anyone would mention these... I picked up the whole lensman series for 25 cents (total) at some garage sale and I LOVE them. I've never heard of the Skylark series, but now I'll have to go find it too. The books take me maybe 45 minutes apiece to read. So I can go through the whole series in an afternoon. It's like watching 70's scifi all afternoon or something. Absolutely fun without being too brainstraining and always with a bit of humour and silliness to show that it's not taking itself too seriously. E.E. "Doc" Smith was a damned fun writer!
KEY difference here, you are putting RELEVANT banners targeted at your audience on your site. A lot of places just throw up banners that no one cares about. OR worse yet, bombard you with popups for unrelated material, scams, etc... I don't block banner ads. I don't pay them any attention unless they are really cool or witty, but I don't block them. I *DO* block popups though. Everywhere. For every site. They are intrusive, irrelevant and annoying. Make a creative ad, put it in a place where I can see it, and make it RELEVANT to the page I'm looking at. Then maybe you'll get my business. You've got the relevant thing down, so you're fine. But not many sites are that bright. I even get fsckin' CASINO ads from my banks website!
The other thing I was thinking about was that the lipreading could be part of the understanding process. A good number of people (most?) who are legally deaf are not truly 100% deaf. If a person is able to get a bit of auditory information, plus this lipsynching information, it might be enough to make things a lot easier for these people, even if the lip-reading by itself were too simplistic.
This is true too, but frequently it won't apply to this particular application simply because cellphone sound quality tends to suck, and there tends to be a lot of louder interference around that can muffle out the peaks that the partially deaf use to differentiate sound cues. So I don't know how helpful the sound from this cellphone will be in helping to interprate their images... Unfortunately I haven't been able to run their little demo yet so I haven't seen the example. I'll try again when I get home later. Maybe I can get it to work in Phoenix....
I maintain that creating complex graphics out of sound is more difficult that creating text out of sound. However if they have some kind of simplified symbol library with a few hundred stick figure style representations of each sound then I think it would work. But at that point it's no longer "lipreading" it's phonetic representation, essentially creating a new alphabet of symbols that are written phoneticly. Come to think of it, that's not a bad idea.... It would require that the person using it spend some time learning it, perhaps having someone near them speak through the phone so they could get used to the correlations between a live person saying something and the cellphone representation... But true lipreading relies on cues in the throat, cheeks, eyes, eyebrows, nostrils, the entire face. It's not just a matter of watching two lips move around. I find it very hard to believe that a cellphone will be able to display enough detail for this to be feasible at a lower resource level than speech to text.
You may be right, but I've SEEN speech to text. The stuff we use at work for converting news broadcasts to text is around 95% accurate. And it wasn't THAT expensive (I think 90$ for our copy) and it doesn't seem to take up much in the way of processing power. So I still have to put my vote in on the side of speech to text. There are too many subtleties to lipreading for me to believe a CELLPHONE will be able to display an image well enough for it using less resources than than speech to text takes. Plus, speech to text could theoretically be taken care of at some point between the two phones as far as the processing goes and then sent in final form to the recipient. The face HAS to be done on the cellphone itself...
I have a weird problem with Mozilla on my home machine that no one has been able to give me a reason for. I've installed and uninstalled it a few times just to make sure nothing broke during the install (everything looked smooth) and whenever I start Mozilla or Mozilla mail half of the buttoms are blurred over, the address bar is a bunch of rainbow colored lines, the screen for it doesn't redraw properly... It's crazy broken. Other browsers work ok (Except that with Opera all of the text is broken, odd sizing that doesn't work on most websites and continually breaks things) and Mozilla mail has the same set of problems as the browser. It works fine on my box at work which is the exact same OS configuration (RH 8.0 fully patched) so I can't figure out WHY mozilla won't run properly... Sigh, maybe I can upgrade when a new version comes out...
Simple Math: 25 Slashdotters skip 5 movies (or the equivelant)that's about $1250 worth of lost revenue. So they only need 125 subscribers to make back that "lost" revenue. (if it's 10$ per year or something close to that). If they charge more, they need fewer. So I think they are looking at it from the perspective of making a HELL of a lot more money then they might lose.
Eh? How is this different from the jackass with his stereo on full volume so loud that I can't hear the stereo in MY car driving? He sure as hell can't hear it if someone beeps a horn at him or tires start squeling....
Blind people driving though... That would be scary.
How the hell do you draw that conclusion? How could speech to text be MORE processor intensive than converting speech to MOVEMENT on a face?! It's orders of magnitude harder to translate a sound into a muscle group movement on a computer generated face than it is to turn it into a group of characters representing that sound.
There was (might still be) a building where the type of glass they used was fit for skyscrapers, so when the building swayed sometimes the windows would pop out and fall 15 or 20 stories to shatter on the sidewalk. Great stuff that...>:) Also, my dad was construction foreman on a school down here and he came in one morning after the masons had been in over the weekend and found out that there was a 1 inch gap between the two halves of his building. And the entire foundation and a bunch of the bricks had already been laid. You could SEE THROUGH the building! >:) His bosses told him to have the masons fill the gaps in somehow... hehehe.
Don't you mean "excluding FFVIII" ?!?! X wasn't that bad. VIII was a steaming pile of monkey shit! The story collapsed halfway through the game, the magic and levelling system SUCKED... Ugh. The only good thing in the game was that card game subgame thing... I just CRINGE thinking about it...
No no, I was agreeing with him. Hence the thing about "no offense to you personally" I was making sure I mentioned that my diatribe was not directed at him, but at the people who noticed stuff like that and harped on it enough that he probably found out about it.
What kind of anal retentive dick head even NOTICES this shit?! No offense to you personally since I doubt you noticed these during the movie, but looked them up later. But WHO sees the movie the first time through and sees shit like this without having purposely looking for it?! My GOODNESS people! You're complaining that a FUCKING ELF didn't have as many arrows in his quiver as you think he shot, and that HOBBITS aren't 100% fixed in size (WTF did you do? Get a fucking ruler and measure the size of everything on the screen and calculate?!) get a fucking LIFE!!
WinXp can give you the same problems. We had to install XP on some machines at work and half of the CD writers broke. And turns out they are no longer supported. So the issues are there for both OSes. Just show up a bit more often on Linux for some people. But I've NEVER had a hardware problem with linux on any of the machines I've installed it on. Not since RH 6.2.
WTF kinda CD-RW do you have? I've thrown random hardware at RedHat 8.0 and never had a problem with it. Burning CDs was just a matter of using XCDRoast, which came with my OS. And it just worked. No muss, no fuss. In fact, I've only downloaded like 3 apps, a MUD client, a little prog called XZGV that I like to use as an image viewer (not needed, I just prefer it), and Opera. Everything else I use came with the OS.
Well, yeah, assuming I can get to a server that's not super crowded, or can even find anything worth downloading in the first place I get great speeds. But I hardly ever get those speeds with commercial sites. I think that there is plenty of speed around, just no one wants to use it.
Broadband has caught on to a large degree, but not as large as anyone thought it would, and certainly not enough for the huge streaming video boom that was supposed to happen.
Uhh, if Broadband had caught on anymore it wouldn't be broadband anymore! The infrastructure as it stands can barely support the user load it has. If there were many more people on it we'd all be crawling along at a snails pace. How much more caught on do you want it?! There are still hundreds of places where people want broadband and can't get it due to lack of infrastructure! The demand for broadband is not the problem here, the supply is.
Are you sure it isn't the radiation cooking his little baby brain that puts him to sleep so quickly? You might want to invest in tinfoil hats for the little carpet shark to keep his brain from leaking out his little baby head.
You're factoring in research cost spread across the console production amounts. The individual machines did NOT cost more to produce (without the research and development cost) than sony sold them for.
Slashdot Mirror
And you can tell it was engraved by a Slashdot Editor because it has no fewer than 2 spelling errors which were actually carved in the stone! >:)
Kintanon
BLASPHEMER!! ALL know that it is the MIGHTY THUMB OF THOR which keeps us solidly in place upon this earth! His mighty Thumb also keeps the many planets in their correct orbits via gently correction (And/Or smashing them really hard with his mjollinor in the guise of meteor impacts) if you continue to blaspheme against him I warn you! He might remove the protection granted by his thumb and allow you to be fling off into cold and heartless space!
Kintanon
I always find it odd that a lot of creationists equate the biblical list of names and their timeline with the age of the earth. I imagine most people would agree that 6000 years is a pretty good age estimate for human civilization beyond the level of very simple tool users, right? So why would that biblical age refer SPECIFICALLY and ONLY to that? It could just as well refer to the first members of a specific species of human which had arisen. There is nothing in the bible which implies that the earth is young. In the original language a word which comes closer to meaning "eon" than "day" is used for the time period God used when creating the universe. If I had to make a guess for the earths age based solely on biblical wording I'd guess 6 billion and change years, this being the 7th "eon" in which God is resting.>:)
It just annoys me to see other christians latch on to ideas that have NO support even within the text they are referencing and try to bludgeon their faulty premise into everyone elses head.
Argh.
Kintanon
Yes. When you see another guy with a beard, or walking around barefoot, you know you have an instant friend. (Have mercy on me, moderators...)
How odd, I always assume people walking barefoot on asphault, concrete, broken glass, etc... are martial artists of some kind, not linux users.
Where does the distinction of being barefoot come into play with linux use? I thought it was mac users who were all barefoot hippy treehuggers? >:)
Kintanon
Performance hit? Lesse, a 2.4ghz machine with 1gb of RAM shouldn't really CARE if the game is written in Java. It just shouldn't matter. Radeon 9700 or GeForce4 Ti in it and a 10krpm HD. That's a gaming rig, and it's a relatively common gaming rig. You could run an all Java version of every game that came out this year on that thing and I SERIOUSLY doubt you would notice the performance hit...
And even if you would... how about someone redoing a bunch of semi-classic games in Java just to see it done? Quake II, Warcraft II, SimCity 2000, stuff like that. Just rewrite it all in Java!
Kintanon
I was wondering if anyone would mention these... I picked up the whole lensman series for 25 cents (total) at some garage sale and I LOVE them. I've never heard of the Skylark series, but now I'll have to go find it too.
The books take me maybe 45 minutes apiece to read. So I can go through the whole series in an afternoon. It's like watching 70's scifi all afternoon or something. Absolutely fun without being too brainstraining and always with a bit of humour and silliness to show that it's not taking itself too seriously. E.E. "Doc" Smith was a damned fun writer!
Kintanon
KEY difference here, you are putting RELEVANT banners targeted at your audience on your site. A lot of places just throw up banners that no one cares about. OR worse yet, bombard you with popups for unrelated material, scams, etc... I don't block banner ads. I don't pay them any attention unless they are really cool or witty, but I don't block them. I *DO* block popups though. Everywhere. For every site. They are intrusive, irrelevant and annoying. Make a creative ad, put it in a place where I can see it, and make it RELEVANT to the page I'm looking at. Then maybe you'll get my business. You've got the relevant thing down, so you're fine. But not many sites are that bright. I even get fsckin' CASINO ads from my banks website!
Kintanon
The other thing I was thinking about was that the lipreading could be part of the understanding process. A good number of people (most?) who are legally deaf are not truly 100% deaf. If a person is able to get a bit of auditory information, plus this lipsynching information, it might be enough to make things a lot easier for these people, even if the lip-reading by itself were too simplistic.
This is true too, but frequently it won't apply to this particular application simply because cellphone sound quality tends to suck, and there tends to be a lot of louder interference around that can muffle out the peaks that the partially deaf use to differentiate sound cues. So I don't know how helpful the sound from this cellphone will be in helping to interprate their images... Unfortunately I haven't been able to run their little demo yet so I haven't seen the example. I'll try again when I get home later. Maybe I can get it to work in Phoenix....
Kintanon
I maintain that creating complex graphics out of sound is more difficult that creating text out of sound. However if they have some kind of simplified symbol library with a few hundred stick figure style representations of each sound then I think it would work. But at that point it's no longer "lipreading" it's phonetic representation, essentially creating a new alphabet of symbols that are written phoneticly.
Come to think of it, that's not a bad idea.... It would require that the person using it spend some time learning it, perhaps having someone near them speak through the phone so they could get used to the correlations between a live person saying something and the cellphone representation...
But true lipreading relies on cues in the throat, cheeks, eyes, eyebrows, nostrils, the entire face. It's not just a matter of watching two lips move around. I find it very hard to believe that a cellphone will be able to display enough detail for this to be feasible at a lower resource level than speech to text.
Kintanon
You may be right, but I've SEEN speech to text. The stuff we use at work for converting news broadcasts to text is around 95% accurate. And it wasn't THAT expensive (I think 90$ for our copy) and it doesn't seem to take up much in the way of processing power.
So I still have to put my vote in on the side of speech to text. There are too many subtleties to lipreading for me to believe a CELLPHONE will be able to display an image well enough for it using less resources than than speech to text takes. Plus, speech to text could theoretically be taken care of at some point between the two phones as far as the processing goes and then sent in final form to the recipient. The face HAS to be done on the cellphone itself...
Kintanon
I have a weird problem with Mozilla on my home machine that no one has been able to give me a reason for. I've installed and uninstalled it a few times just to make sure nothing broke during the install (everything looked smooth) and whenever I start Mozilla or Mozilla mail half of the buttoms are blurred over, the address bar is a bunch of rainbow colored lines, the screen for it doesn't redraw properly... It's crazy broken.
Other browsers work ok (Except that with Opera all of the text is broken, odd sizing that doesn't work on most websites and continually breaks things) and Mozilla mail has the same set of problems as the browser. It works fine on my box at work which is the exact same OS configuration (RH 8.0 fully patched) so I can't figure out WHY mozilla won't run properly... Sigh, maybe I can upgrade when a new version comes out...
Kintanon
Simple Math:
25 Slashdotters skip 5 movies (or the equivelant)that's about $1250 worth of lost revenue.
So they only need 125 subscribers to make back that "lost" revenue. (if it's 10$ per year or something close to that). If they charge more, they need fewer. So I think they are looking at it from the perspective of making a HELL of a lot more money then they might lose.
Kintanon
Eh? How is this different from the jackass with his stereo on full volume so loud that I can't hear the stereo in MY car driving? He sure as hell can't hear it if someone beeps a horn at him or tires start squeling....
Blind people driving though... That would be scary.
Kintanon
How the hell do you draw that conclusion? How could speech to text be MORE processor intensive than converting speech to MOVEMENT on a face?! It's orders of magnitude harder to translate a sound into a muscle group movement on a computer generated face than it is to turn it into a group of characters representing that sound.
Kintanon
There was (might still be) a building where the type of glass they used was fit for skyscrapers, so when the building swayed sometimes the windows would pop out and fall 15 or 20 stories to shatter on the sidewalk. Great stuff that...>:)
Also, my dad was construction foreman on a school down here and he came in one morning after the masons had been in over the weekend and found out that there was a 1 inch gap between the two halves of his building. And the entire foundation and a bunch of the bricks had already been laid. You could SEE THROUGH the building! >:) His bosses told him to have the masons fill the gaps in somehow... hehehe.
Kintanon
Don't you mean "excluding FFVIII" ?!?! X wasn't that bad. VIII was a steaming pile of monkey shit! The story collapsed halfway through the game, the magic and levelling system SUCKED... Ugh. The only good thing in the game was that card game subgame thing... I just CRINGE thinking about it...
Kintanon
No no, I was agreeing with him. Hence the thing about "no offense to you personally" I was making sure I mentioned that my diatribe was not directed at him, but at the people who noticed stuff like that and harped on it enough that he probably found out about it.
Kintanon
What kind of anal retentive dick head even NOTICES this shit?! No offense to you personally since I doubt you noticed these during the movie, but looked them up later. But WHO sees the movie the first time through and sees shit like this without having purposely looking for it?! My GOODNESS people! You're complaining that a FUCKING ELF didn't have as many arrows in his quiver as you think he shot, and that HOBBITS aren't 100% fixed in size (WTF did you do? Get a fucking ruler and measure the size of everything on the screen and calculate?!) get a fucking LIFE!!
Kintanon
WinXp can give you the same problems. We had to install XP on some machines at work and half of the CD writers broke. And turns out they are no longer supported. So the issues are there for both OSes. Just show up a bit more often on Linux for some people. But I've NEVER had a hardware problem with linux on any of the machines I've installed it on. Not since RH 6.2.
Kintanon
WTF kinda CD-RW do you have? I've thrown random hardware at RedHat 8.0 and never had a problem with it. Burning CDs was just a matter of using XCDRoast, which came with my OS. And it just worked. No muss, no fuss. In fact, I've only downloaded like 3 apps, a MUD client, a little prog called XZGV that I like to use as an image viewer (not needed, I just prefer it), and Opera. Everything else I use came with the OS.
Kintanon
Well, yeah, assuming I can get to a server that's not super crowded, or can even find anything worth downloading in the first place I get great speeds.
But I hardly ever get those speeds with commercial sites. I think that there is plenty of speed around, just no one wants to use it.
Kintanon
Broadband has caught on to a large degree, but not as large as anyone thought it would, and certainly not enough for the huge streaming video boom that was supposed to happen.
Uhh, if Broadband had caught on anymore it wouldn't be broadband anymore! The infrastructure as it stands can barely support the user load it has. If there were many more people on it we'd all be crawling along at a snails pace.
How much more caught on do you want it?! There are still hundreds of places where people want broadband and can't get it due to lack of infrastructure! The demand for broadband is not the problem here, the supply is.
Kintanon
Are you sure it isn't the radiation cooking his little baby brain that puts him to sleep so quickly?
You might want to invest in tinfoil hats for the little carpet shark to keep his brain from leaking out his little baby head.
Kintanon
The term is ChildFREE not childless.>:)
And I agree 100%.
Kintanon
You're factoring in research cost spread across the console production amounts. The individual machines did NOT cost more to produce (without the research and development cost) than sony sold them for.
Kintanon