You can stitch the feeds together to get a panorama, but due to the optical situation with using two cameras, the images will only mesh properly for objects at a certain distance. Stuff that's closer or further away will have "pencil in a glass of water" type discontinuities.
At my current job, we use dual FireWire cameras to capture simultaneous images in order to get two concurrent views of moving objects.
Hooking two cameras to a computer is standard practise in computer vision (not what my current employer does, just another example). It's a really good way to get binocular views of a scene for passive stereo systems.
Besides, you don't need goofy red/blue glasses to look at stereo pairs of images. Just cross your eyes, for goodness sakes!
There are a number of computer vision devices composed of a pair of cameras that are treated as a single device. (They must be treated as such in some applications because the cameras must grab images in lockstep.)
I've never seen something that uses one USB and one Firewire camera, though. To me, it makes just as much sense to use two FireWire cameras or two USB 2.0 cameras since the bandwidth of USB 1.2 is so small. I did some computer vision work as an undergrad with a single Logitech Quickcam Express. The camera grabbed 24 bit 320x244 images at a rather low framerate - something like 10 or 15 fps. This took up 90% of the USB's bandwidth!
If you want to, you might be able to write a driver that allows you to treat the two as a single TWAIN device, but I imagine the possibility of such a task is highly OS-dependent. I haven't taken a good look to check, but it seems like it would be possible to do so under the Video4Linux framework. MacOS and Windows, I have no idea.
An HDTV is a waste-of-money DVD viewing platform. Considering that a DVD can only carry about 30 minutes of HDTV signal, I doubt anyone will be releasing HDTV movies on DVD anytime soon.
Maybe you meant a digital TV is a fine DVD viewing platform?
Except that you really can't compare transistors and neurons. I don't have much of a reference for estimate, but I imagine it would take a silicon wafer with a transistor count roughly equivalent to that of the Intel 4004 (~2,300 transistors) to get something that could do the same job as an artifical neuron of the type used in simple feedforward networks.
But a feedforward network is a very poor analogue to a real biological neural system. You could take a step closer and use a neuron of the type used in spiking neural networks. But those are quite a bit more complex, and my uninformed guess would be that the transistor count would have to at least double. On top of that, the infrastructure needed to emulate certain features of a biological brain such as the ability to form new pathways between distant neurons would be massive.
And then you still don't have an analogue to many of the chemical processes that contribute to a brain's functioning. ..
The real problem is that AI researchers still don't have the foggiest idea what intelligence even is. I have yet to see a good definition for 'intelligence' as it is used in AI, although I can think of some things that it must include. Symbolic thought and abstract reasoning come to mind, as well as the ability to deal with completely novel inputs and to assign them to categories or archetypes, as well as the ability to create entirely new categories and archetypes if necessary.
AI research is so far from this that most research doesn't even deal with the issue. It's hard enough to get a computer to recognize cars without getting it to look at a dump truck and realize that that is basically a car, too.
A lot of Animes are made with a philosophy of minimal cell count, so they will drop the frame rate at which the film is made in spots where they can get away with it. For stuff like this you could probably save a lot of space using variable frame rates.
But what if your mobile phone explodes in the wreck resulting from you failing to notice the light changing because you're dictating a shopping list to your spouse on the phone, resulting in you rear-ending the person in front of you at full speed?
At least for certain genres. . . For some games, things like mood and storyline matter a hell of a lot, for others not so much. For example, lots of people still say Final Fantasy 6/3 is the best one in the series, but it's far, far, far behind 7 on technical merit. Why do people love it so? The storyline.
The same goes for the adventure game genre - I've played adventure games with bad graphics and terrible game mechanics that were still fun to play because they were funny, or the storyline was interesting, or somesuch.
Even the Quake games didn't escape from this. Sure, on a technical level Quake 2 and 3 were far better than Quake 1. The graphics are better, the control is tighter, the weapons are more balanced. . . but there are diehards who still say the first one is the most fun to play, because it is the one that succeeded in creating a mood.
Heck, there's a subgenre that's entirely based on creating a mood - survival horror games. Some of these games (Silent Hill 2 comes to mind) would never have been good games had it not been for some excellent artists and 'scriptwriters' behind that game.
So yeah, I'd say that asking whether there's merit to rating games based on conceptual grounds is pretty asinine, considering that it's pretty well accepted as an important part of many games even if that doesn't make it into the itemized star ratings you see in a lot of magazines.
But then again, I'm not too sure that the concept behind a game and execution thereof should be rated in such a manner, because what one person likes conceptually another person will dislike. Such aspects of games deserve to be reviewed in prose, the way books are. Of course they already are, so I have no idea why I'm even bothering to talk.
If you can't wear cargo pants because you're worried about your appearance (whether it's for dress code or otherwise), you should really put some thought into putting things on your belt at all. It's true that in many situations a person who dresses shabbily will often find themselves spending 10 minutes to earn a level of respect that someone who takes care of their apperance will be granted automatically.
This is also true for people who wear things on their belts versus people who don't. Maybe cheat on a cellphone, but I'd advise against it. Definitely lose the PDA; that belongs in a briefcase or bag of some sort. Lose the leatherman. Tools belong in desk drawers, car trunks, workshops, bicycle saddlebags. With the exception of pocketknives, the only reason you should need a letherman on your belt is if you are a contractor or a techie for a theatre company. Drop the game boy and get a game boy emulator for your PDA. Keep the iPod in your bag. Clip it to your belt _ONLY_ when you're using it.
I'm not so sure that the standard version of Murphy's Law really delegates our fuck-ups to the hostile hand of fate. I've always thought of it as a reminder of just how much attention it takes to succeed in our responsibility to make systems work properly.
A program, for example, should be able to handle every possible strange situation or user input that can be thrown at it, even the ones the programmer would never have expected, and at least be able to generate an error and stop executing rather than exhibiting unexpected behavior. The responsibility is entirely on the programming team - nobody's going to cut them any slack if that ICBM launch detecting system sets off all the alarms because it thought a DC-10 with all four engines burning was really a missile launch.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, security isn't exactly their strength
I dunno... the 8-bit XOR model used for the password encryption on Win95 was pretty impressive.
I still remember the day I decrypted the passwords on my computer in a few minutes using a pencil and paper. I thought to myself, "Damn, THAT's the company I want to trust with keeping MY important and often confidential business information safe!"
Agreed that it's the employee's responsibility to abide by these rules.
But still, that's some !%!@$! bad business to start taking action against employees who are one minute late a few times in a quarter. I know employers want their employees to be on time, but this is because of a deeper want to have their employees be productive. An employee who starts their day with a big panic because they hit some bad traffic and are going to come realllly close to the magic 7:30 is/not/ going to be in top form that day.
Didn't you hear? Democracy is dead. Individual agency is dead. The cathode ray tube is a mind control device, and your only source of identity and self-actualization.
Now go buy a Playstation and a pair of Nikes and shut the fuck up.
Forget the video game. Imagine what NFL football will do to your kids - not only is it full of burly men in super-tight pants, but they also spend half the game rolling around in the mud with each other!!
At an old job I had it was easy to get away with fucking off by just milling around the building randomly as long as you have a clipboard in your hand.
yeah, the English Languate Fatheads are annoying, but they're a hell of a lot better than the French Language Fatheads, who seem to think that 'board with wheels' (translated, of course) sounds more sophisticated/intelligent than 'skateboard'
First, it doesn't work on my computer, which is running Jaguar. Given that the person was talking about AppleScreenSaver and not Screen Effects, I think that they were talking about screen savers for OS 9, not OS X. (Then again, it may just be that the vulnerability is for OS X 10.0 or 10.1, but not Jaguar). If it is OS 9, that makes sense - OS 9 is _NOT_ a multiuser operating system, and there's not sense in even pretending it has any security - kind of like how having a login to a Win95 machine gives you access to all files.
Second, OS X doesn't have a BSD layer. OS X is a flavor of BSD called Darwin with a separate GUI called Aqua thrown on top. Granted, some things are handled in a very un-unixy way (anyone who has tried to edit their own default login shell via the password file on OS X has probably noticed this), but it still Unix, and if you don't like Aqua you can configure OS X to not load Aqua and use XFree86 instead, or just boot to a text terminal.
Re:how completely and totally ordinary
on
Isn't It Ironic?
·
· Score: 1
Sarcasm is very frequently just irony with teeth. Witty sarcasm is almost always irony with teeth. I don't think one is necessarily confusing sarcasm with irony when calling a sarcastic statement irony, because the two are most definitely not mutually exclusive.
Slashdot posts an article on how frequently the term irony is misused, ostensibly to get at least a few more people to realize what irony really is. But all it leads to is a whole shitload of people saying something is ironic when it isn't and getting modded +5 for it.
"PM4RK5, master of the inability to discern syntax from semantics, claims that an article about a word's definition is an article about grammar. Yawning ensues."
Slashdot Mirror
You can stitch the feeds together to get a panorama, but due to the optical situation with using two cameras, the images will only mesh properly for objects at a certain distance. Stuff that's closer or further away will have "pencil in a glass of water" type discontinuities.
I've seen old Amigas with toaster cards that can do some interesting stuff with combining two video streams in realtime.
At my current job, we use dual FireWire cameras to capture simultaneous images in order to get two concurrent views of moving objects.
Hooking two cameras to a computer is standard practise in computer vision (not what my current employer does, just another example). It's a really good way to get binocular views of a scene for passive stereo systems.
Besides, you don't need goofy red/blue glasses to look at stereo pairs of images. Just cross your eyes, for goodness sakes!
There are a number of computer vision devices composed of a pair of cameras that are treated as a single device. (They must be treated as such in some applications because the cameras must grab images in lockstep.)
I've never seen something that uses one USB and one Firewire camera, though. To me, it makes just as much sense to use two FireWire cameras or two USB 2.0 cameras since the bandwidth of USB 1.2 is so small. I did some computer vision work as an undergrad with a single Logitech Quickcam Express. The camera grabbed 24 bit 320x244 images at a rather low framerate - something like 10 or 15 fps. This took up 90% of the USB's bandwidth!
If you want to, you might be able to write a driver that allows you to treat the two as a single TWAIN device, but I imagine the possibility of such a task is highly OS-dependent. I haven't taken a good look to check, but it seems like it would be possible to do so under the Video4Linux framework. MacOS and Windows, I have no idea.
An HDTV is a waste-of-money DVD viewing platform. Considering that a DVD can only carry about 30 minutes of HDTV signal, I doubt anyone will be releasing HDTV movies on DVD anytime soon.
Maybe you meant a digital TV is a fine DVD viewing platform?
Except that you really can't compare transistors and neurons. I don't have much of a reference for estimate, but I imagine it would take a silicon wafer with a transistor count roughly equivalent to that of the Intel 4004 (~2,300 transistors) to get something that could do the same job as an artifical neuron of the type used in simple feedforward networks.
.
But a feedforward network is a very poor analogue to a real biological neural system. You could take a step closer and use a neuron of the type used in spiking neural networks. But those are quite a bit more complex, and my uninformed guess would be that the transistor count would have to at least double. On top of that, the infrastructure needed to emulate certain features of a biological brain such as the ability to form new pathways between distant neurons would be massive.
And then you still don't have an analogue to many of the chemical processes that contribute to a brain's functioning. .
The real problem is that AI researchers still don't have the foggiest idea what intelligence even is. I have yet to see a good definition for 'intelligence' as it is used in AI, although I can think of some things that it must include. Symbolic thought and abstract reasoning come to mind, as well as the ability to deal with completely novel inputs and to assign them to categories or archetypes, as well as the ability to create entirely new categories and archetypes if necessary.
AI research is so far from this that most research doesn't even deal with the issue. It's hard enough to get a computer to recognize cars without getting it to look at a dump truck and realize that that is basically a car, too.
A lot of Animes are made with a philosophy of minimal cell count, so they will drop the frame rate at which the film is made in spots where they can get away with it. For stuff like this you could probably save a lot of space using variable frame rates.
And Darl is already planning on suing to have his name put in the number 1 position.
But what if your mobile phone explodes in the wreck resulting from you failing to notice the light changing because you're dictating a shopping list to your spouse on the phone, resulting in you rear-ending the person in front of you at full speed?
At least for certain genres. . . For some games, things like mood and storyline matter a hell of a lot, for others not so much. For example, lots of people still say Final Fantasy 6/3 is the best one in the series, but it's far, far, far behind 7 on technical merit. Why do people love it so? The storyline.
The same goes for the adventure game genre - I've played adventure games with bad graphics and terrible game mechanics that were still fun to play because they were funny, or the storyline was interesting, or somesuch.
Even the Quake games didn't escape from this. Sure, on a technical level Quake 2 and 3 were far better than Quake 1. The graphics are better, the control is tighter, the weapons are more balanced. . . but there are diehards who still say the first one is the most fun to play, because it is the one that succeeded in creating a mood.
Heck, there's a subgenre that's entirely based on creating a mood - survival horror games. Some of these games (Silent Hill 2 comes to mind) would never have been good games had it not been for some excellent artists and 'scriptwriters' behind that game.
So yeah, I'd say that asking whether there's merit to rating games based on conceptual grounds is pretty asinine, considering that it's pretty well accepted as an important part of many games even if that doesn't make it into the itemized star ratings you see in a lot of magazines.
But then again, I'm not too sure that the concept behind a game and execution thereof should be rated in such a manner, because what one person likes conceptually another person will dislike. Such aspects of games deserve to be reviewed in prose, the way books are. Of course they already are, so I have no idea why I'm even bothering to talk.
If you can't wear cargo pants because you're worried about your appearance (whether it's for dress code or otherwise), you should really put some thought into putting things on your belt at all. It's true that in many situations a person who dresses shabbily will often find themselves spending 10 minutes to earn a level of respect that someone who takes care of their apperance will be granted automatically.
This is also true for people who wear things on their belts versus people who don't. Maybe cheat on a cellphone, but I'd advise against it. Definitely lose the PDA; that belongs in a briefcase or bag of some sort. Lose the leatherman. Tools belong in desk drawers, car trunks, workshops, bicycle saddlebags. With the exception of pocketknives, the only reason you should need a letherman on your belt is if you are a contractor or a techie for a theatre company. Drop the game boy and get a game boy emulator for your PDA. Keep the iPod in your bag. Clip it to your belt _ONLY_ when you're using it.
I'm not so sure that the standard version of Murphy's Law really delegates our fuck-ups to the hostile hand of fate. I've always thought of it as a reminder of just how much attention it takes to succeed in our responsibility to make systems work properly.
A program, for example, should be able to handle every possible strange situation or user input that can be thrown at it, even the ones the programmer would never have expected, and at least be able to generate an error and stop executing rather than exhibiting unexpected behavior. The responsibility is entirely on the programming team - nobody's going to cut them any slack if that ICBM launch detecting system sets off all the alarms because it thought a DC-10 with all four engines burning was really a missile launch.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, security isn't exactly their strength
.. the 8-bit XOR model used for the password encryption on Win95 was pretty impressive.
I dunno.
I still remember the day I decrypted the passwords on my computer in a few minutes using a pencil and paper. I thought to myself, "Damn, THAT's the company I want to trust with keeping MY important and often confidential business information safe!"
Agreed that it's the employee's responsibility to abide by these rules.
/not/ going to be in top form that day.
But still, that's some !%!@$! bad business to start taking action against employees who are one minute late a few times in a quarter. I know employers want their employees to be on time, but this is because of a deeper want to have their employees be productive. An employee who starts their day with a big panic because they hit some bad traffic and are going to come realllly close to the magic 7:30 is
Didn't you hear? Democracy is dead. Individual agency is dead. The cathode ray tube is a mind control device, and your only source of identity and self-actualization.
Now go buy a Playstation and a pair of Nikes and shut the fuck up.
Forget the video game. Imagine what NFL football will do to your kids - not only is it full of burly men in super-tight pants, but they also spend half the game rolling around in the mud with each other!!
That or several terabytes of pr0n.
At an old job I had it was easy to get away with fucking off by just milling around the building randomly as long as you have a clipboard in your hand.
I swear, those things are a license to kill.
I'm glad that the good people at Windex were kind enough to remind me that Windex should not be used for the cleaning of contact lenses.
yeah, the English Languate Fatheads are annoying, but they're a hell of a lot better than the French Language Fatheads, who seem to think that 'board with wheels' (translated, of course) sounds more sophisticated/intelligent than 'skateboard'
Haven't seen their laptops, but their desktops are all right.
As long as you don't mind paying twice the reasonable price for a computer they will take a year to deliver.
Two things:
First, it doesn't work on my computer, which is running Jaguar. Given that the person was talking about AppleScreenSaver and not Screen Effects, I think that they were talking about screen savers for OS 9, not OS X. (Then again, it may just be that the vulnerability is for OS X 10.0 or 10.1, but not Jaguar). If it is OS 9, that makes sense - OS 9 is _NOT_ a multiuser operating system, and there's not sense in even pretending it has any security - kind of like how having a login to a Win95 machine gives you access to all files.
Second, OS X doesn't have a BSD layer. OS X is a flavor of BSD called Darwin with a separate GUI called Aqua thrown on top. Granted, some things are handled in a very un-unixy way (anyone who has tried to edit their own default login shell via the password file on OS X has probably noticed this), but it still Unix, and if you don't like Aqua you can configure OS X to not load Aqua and use XFree86 instead, or just boot to a text terminal.
Sarcasm is very frequently just irony with teeth. Witty sarcasm is almost always irony with teeth. I don't think one is necessarily confusing sarcasm with irony when calling a sarcastic statement irony, because the two are most definitely not mutually exclusive.
Slashdot posts an article on how frequently the term irony is misused, ostensibly to get at least a few more people to realize what irony really is. But all it leads to is a whole shitload of people saying something is ironic when it isn't and getting modded +5 for it.
Headline:
"PM4RK5, master of the inability to discern syntax from semantics, claims that an article about a word's definition is an article about grammar. Yawning ensues."