An efuse can sometimes be cleared by drilling a hole through the chip casing and exposing it to uv. Needless to say, this isn't something a home user can do. It takes a chip analysis lab.
Any competent effuse based system blows the fuse inside a critical chip, rather than in a separate authentication chip, so no. You probably can't just short out a couple of pins.
Well, let's see. 2.4 GHz would be the 40 millionth harmonic of 60Hz. Not too much energy up there.
The reason your television doesn't work well when your vacuum is on is that the vacuum motor's load seriously disrupts the AC power circuit in your house. The television's power supply is designed to turn fairly clean 60Hz power into DC at a couple of voltages. If you get crazy transients going from a heavy load, you're going to have ripple in your television's circuits.
If your television doesn't work when your next house neighbor uses his vacuum cleaner something is *seriously* wrong. The OP is talking about trouble that affects several houses, so it has to be something that originates in these microwave bands.
What people are grasping for here is that these are CGI models moving in 3-D, but they were based on Genndy Tartakovsky's stylized TWO dimensional designs.
For two-dimensional design, all those angles and swoopy bits add drama and impact. They're shape and composition aids.
In 3-D, the characters just look like retarded monkeybots. It's perfectly possible to do stylized 3-D well (The Incredibles) but you have to focus on the nature of the medium. You need round characters that still look like themselves when rotated and minimal textures that enhance the idea of materials rather than looking like a coat of matte spraypaint on a tuna can.
This kind of bad design is distracting in a way that CG held back by technical limitations is not. When we were all playing games like the Ocarina of time or FF7, it was easy to accept people with claw-hands and triangle shoulders because everything looked that way. It was the nature of the medium.
Here Lucasfilms could clearly have designed any character models they liked, but because their deisgn team has been trained to be "spam in front of a can", they just blindly copied Genndy's designs and moved on to coordinating space battles, as usual.
McDonald's knew their coffee was served too hot for the cups that they served it in.
-Their coffee was prepared under pressure, allowing it to reach temperatures above boiling. It was served directly from the hot chamber into the cups. -Their cups were at that time pretty flimsy. The heat would weaken the cups and the lids. I've seen many people spill their old-style McDonald's coffee because of lid failure. -McDonald's serves its coffee at drive-throughs. It is their responsibility to design the packaging so that it is at least moderately safe in an ordinary moving vehicle. The driver must, at the very least, drive a few metres further to park. -Many cars on the road at that time did not have effective cup-holders. Good cup holders were a dealer option. Again, a market circumstance McDonald's is responsible to evaluate.
As the drive-through became a primary part of McDonald's business, their management evaluated all these factors. They looked at the cost to retrofit 2,500 locations with new coffee machines and cups which would better suit a drive-through business. Management decided it would be cheaper to settle any suits that came up.
The plaintiff's lawyer asked the jury to make it cheaper for companies to fix their damn cups (sockets/glue/seatbelts/whatever). The jury did.
A student film typically runs about 45 seconds to 2 minutes. It takes one person about four months to storyboard, do layout, animate, clean up and colour. You need a 12-field scanner, which isn't cheap. You need thousands of dollars worth of proprietary software licenses if you want to actually distribute your film. Student films also tend to be simple... 20 cuts at most.
Now, you can knock out a flash film in much less time, but Futurama it won't be. Futurama had very high-quality traditional animation. It's about as close to feature quality as you'll see made for TV. The jokes relied on surprisingly subtle and complicated staging. The cost of making it was huge.
You might do Family Guy in flash without losing much. The scenes in Family Guy that have the most action are often the least entertaining.
Live action is much easier for an amateur. You roll cameras. Anywhere you invest less time or effort will reduce the quality, but it won't prevent the footage from getting made. You can make a film in a weekend. It won't be good, but it will exist.
In animation, if you don't put in the effort, the footage doesn't get made.
Animated characters can move much faster than real life characters and still stay convincing. The timing on the original Simpsons intro is breakneck. Characters whirl all over the place.
Most of the details people are mentioning as missing simply couldn't be done in live action. They are already running the video at about 1.4 times normal speed, and the humans still move too slowly to work it. Run at a high enough speed to match, things would jerk all over the place, Keystone Cops style.
Part of that is storyboarding cheats, though, which the filmmakers could have done had they known a little more about animation. One of the rules of cartoon storyboarding is that as soon as a character is out of shot, they can move infinitely fast. For example, in the saxophone scene Lisa is out of shot for a moment, and when she comes back she's moved further than a human can. The filmmakers tried to approximate this, but they ended up with a jump cut.
Other times, it just doesn't work because live action takes longer to read than animation. The shot that is supposed to look like Maggie is driving the car is just confusing. Car, baby, car in different place, car turns over the storyboarding axis. Unpleasant. The English countryside doesn't help. It's so detailed and lush that the car seems like a minor part of that last shot.
The whip-pan from Homer tossing his rod to Bart skating is odd.
On the whole, I think they concentrated too hard on trying to match the actual shots, and not enough on trying to match the intent of the shots.
How much did a PC with that cost?
on
Flashback NES
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· Score: 1
Motherboards for the 386 were as dear as dragon's teeth in 1986. It had only just been released.
I talked about a 286 selling for $4,000. Adjusted for inflation, this is something like $7,000. A 386 would have been significantly more. Let's say $8,000 of today's dollars. That's conservative.
Obviously if you're willing to spend that much money on what is essentially development hardware you're going to get more power than is in a mass-market console worth a couple of hundred bucks. That's not a reasonable comparison. Twenty years from now will you talk about quad-processor Opteron systems with 8 gigabytes of RAM and whatever nVidia spits out by Christmas, and say that was the condition of the PC gaming market in 2006?
I do think this is a big part of the issue at hand. Some of the people in 1986 were lucky enough to have many thousands of dollars available to spend on this, or parents who had the money. These people were, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, tasting the future. The 1986 Amiga was in many ways a little slice of everyone else's 1993.
What's important to note is that the content was not being written for these bleeding edge systems. There were a few games, but mostly not. It's probably instructive to look at something like Space Quest 3, a big PC seller in 1989, but with graphics that certainly didn't compare on an aesthetic basis to Super Mario 2 or 3. That was the state of the PC gaming market in the late 80s. Blurry, unreliable graphics written for EGA long after VGA had come out. Even if you had the newest hardware, IRQ conflicts and DOS memory limitations meant you probably couldn't write for it and game companies sure weren't going to bet on it. Don't forget how long it took for sound cards to be widely available. I knew people who didn't have them even in 1992.
If you want to define PC gaming in a restricted way, I'm there too. I had a IIgs. I was enveloped in the beautiful strains of Ancient Land of Ys coming out of my custom Ensoniq DSP chip while high-resolution graphics whizzed by. The version of Wolfenstein for my IIgs was nicer than the one for PCs, even though the PCs it was running on were five years newer. I just don't think my $9,000 setup defined the market. I wish it had.
Are we remembering the same 1986?
on
Flashback NES
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· Score: 3, Insightful
In the 1986 I remember, PCs had more memory than consoles but pathetic video hardware with no accelerated blitting or pageflipping, making them unsuitable for any gaming that didn't involve a mostly static screen or vector graphics. Sure, the Amiga and the IIgs could do more, but a PC? Never.
At that time, hardware specifically designed for *gaming* allowed a number of gametypes that simply could not be done on the PC. When the original Commander Keen came out, in 1990, people were stunned that you could do a Mario-type full screen scroller on the PC.
Even the hardware details you're quoting are iffy. IBM PCs certainly didn't have 32 bit processors in 1986.
"1986: September - IBM announces the IBM PC-XT Model 286, with 640KB RAM, 1.2MB floppy drive, 20MB hard drive, serial/parallel ports, and keyboard for US$4000."
Action gaming on a 286 compared to an NES? No contest. NES wins. Particularly with that $4000 price tag on the 286. Yes, there were deeper and more complex games on the PC, but mostly because of the keyboard and mouse. Just like today. Not so much the mouse on the 286, but it was starting to pick up.
The balance shifted around Doom... The general purpose nature of PCs meant they could handle 3-D decently, where the SNES and Genesis hadn't been designed for this kind of thing and their lack of pure horsepower held them back. By Quake, PCs started to have hardware acceleration for gaming, and so the consoles couldn't pull that trick any more.
Don't get me wrong, I liked PC gaming back then a lot, but I also programmed games starting around 1994. Even with hand-coded ASM I could see I was never going to keep up with an SNES in 2-D, which was a three-year old system. Compare Jill of the Jungle or the later Keens, which ran on 1991 PCs, to Earthworm Jim. The disparity is ridiculous, even with the legendary Carmack writing the engine on Keen.
It's hard enough getting students through the concepts in one program. Trying to simultaneously teach students how to do 3-D modeling or print illustration while each one is using a different program would be like trying to teach students who are each speaking only their native language how to, say, build a giant tower to usurp the heavenly power of the gods.
What school doesn't "force" you to do certain things on your property? At your school you can write your papers about whatever you want, in whatever format, language, font, and tone you'd like? Can you hand in a cocktail napkin with a drawing of your teacher as a nazi for your final project? Maybe at a few of the weirder art schools.
At any post-secondary school in a non-socialized country, you're paying them to teach you concepts. It's not high school, where the state is forcing your parents to pay it to babysit you and the law mandates your attendance. You're an an adult in a consensual situation and you've already placed an enormous amount of control in their hands by signing up. This is not an issue of freedom.
When I was at Waterloo it wasn't acceptable to simply choose to code an entire assignment in a different language in many of the lower-level courses. That definitely wasn't because Waterloo was a vocational college teaching us how to monkey with Java. Waterloo is about as abstract and conceptual as it gets, but they insisted on a certain language because spending the time to try to mark your assignment done in WeirdLanguage++ would take away resources from students who were willing to just do the damn thing, learn the concept, get the grade and then throw the source code in the trash, where most assignments end up.
Any assignment, any course, any major has requirements. If you don't like that schools require things of you, you learn in your basement. If you're getting bent out of shape over something as minor as whether you get to use open source, you need to grow up.
You've linked to a review of the R700. The R700 is a monochrome unit.
This is the R800. The R800 is a colour unit with higher resolution. They also claim to have improved the tracking system and software so it isn't so fiddly.
The difference in utility is pretty major. I wouldn't bother with a monochrome pen scanner, but I would love to be able to quickly scan visual reference material out of art books quickly. They tend to be expensive and have low print runs, but photocopying for reference when doing a painting is fair use.
One day when the phone rang, it was someone from the CIBC head office. (CIBC is a big bank here in Canada)
"We just phoned you up so you won't be worried," they said. "Worried about what?" "Well, we accidentally withdrew $250,000 from your checking account. We've just told the computer to put it back."
Nice. I looked at my online account balance, and indeed, I was nearly a quarter million in the red. Ouch. Would have been worse if I hadn't been staying in all weekend programming... at least I didn't find out myself at the mall. They fixed it quickly, but it was unnerving. I thought it was over.
At the end of the month, they suspended my account.
"Why have you suspended my account?" "You owe us $17,000 in overdraft charges."
Ah, of course. Borrowing a quarter million for three days... that's serious interest. It took nearly two weeks to get this one straightened out because I was the one bringing it up.
I hardly need to say I cancelled my account the day after everything had been straightened out.
"Yes, but you have millions of years of evolution that have weeded out mistakes and orders-of-magnitude errors in your nervous system.
Furthermore, a mistake in your look-up table would be as deadly as a mistake in doing the calculus."
It would be as deadly, and it often is as deadly. The point is that it wouldn't look the same. A mistake in doing calculus on paper leads to results which are nothing like the correct results. They're way, way off. If you get better at doing calculus, you start getting answers that are way off less often. When they're right, they're *bang on*.
This is completely different than the way humans make mistakes. When we move incorrectly, we move almost correctly. Then we move closer to correctly, and so on.
"Do you have any references for your 'lookup table' theory, or is this just a pet theory?"
It's not a theory, it's an image used to describe the process. Neural nets are very well understood. How they do their calculations is also well understood. The question is what imagery you want to use to simplify that for normal life. My contention is that "doing calculus" is a poorly chosen image.
Neural nets
Wikipedia is hardly authoritative, but it is a good source if what you need is a basic grounding.
The idea is that if you have some function f(x), you don't have to know what f(x) or do any analysis on it for a neural net to get used to what's coming out. For example,
A 25,000 neuron machine with no instinctive programming at all was able to control this simulated jet. If you'd like to suggest those neurons, randomly clumped on a dish, taught themselves calculus first and then figured out the horrendously complex fluid dynamics equations used to simulate the jet's movement, then started calculating using them... Well, I guess you can suggest that. It's pretty silly.
This is an important point. It's conceptually simple to suggest that your brain is doing the calculus to catch a ball. That's not a particularly tough math problem. It's conceptually complex to suggest that the brains of jet pilots are doing the calculus involved in moving a jet.
"I'm not good with math, but isn't the idea of calculus so you can sum *infinite series*? How are you going to have a look-up table for an infinite series?"
Sigh. Clearly, you aren't good with math. I don't think you have a good grasp of what you even mean by doing calculus. My strong suspicion would be that you read Douglas Adams and that his enticing picture of the powers the mind has which we don't have access to caught your imagination. He's a great writer, but a lot of his scientific speculation lacks rigor. He doesn't have to define what he means by what he says. It's just an image in a story.
What does "doing calculus" mean? If you mean analyzing a function and running the calculation through, then your brain isn't doing that.
I think what you mean is "fitting curves." You've got your function which describes the path of the ball. You observe that you are able to extrapolate that curve until it hits your hand, and that you can fit that curve to how hard the ball was thrown. You can then throw a ball similarly.
You've been taught in school that one way to do this is to figure out the function which describes the movement of the ball, then twiddle the variables. There are other ways to do this calculation. Many of them are highly accurate. Neural nets are one way. There are methods with bits of string or elastic. They used to have big machines that did it using cogs and cams of different shapes and sizes, back before the advent of electronic computers.
Think about what doing calculus means to you and sharpen up your claim. By the time you've done that, you'll probably be saying something true.
The neurons in your hand are reacting according to finely tuned lookup tables. If they were doing math, they wouldn't get better through practice. Practice is adjusting the lookup tables.
Not that there are really tables stored in memory. The neurons themselves are the table elements. If you miss the ball because you moved your hand too fast, your body tells the neurons to move slower next time.
This is called "approximation."
Think also about this: When you do calculus in the normal way that we speak of doing calculus, what does a mistake do? A misplaced sign or a confusion about division gives you a terribly inaccurate answer. You can end up with the wrong answer by orders of magnitude.
Your body almost never does that. You rarely reach up to catch a ball that's a foot above your hand and accidentally throw yourself across the room. Even slashdotters aren't that bad.
Does your car do calculus when its automatic transmission shifts over at the precise right moment to match the torque of the higher gear with the speed the wheels are currently going and get a smooth shift? No. It's just been adjusted that way. Engineers did the math, but your engine just does it. Conversely, do you do the math when you shift in a manual? No. You just know how the engine sounds when it's time to shift. Stimulus response, honed by trial and error.
"Finding your way home is solving a 2 dimensional problem, and animals have amazing ability to do that, even if dropped of somewhere they have never been."
Birds have an amazing ability to do that. Maybe not so amazing, because a bird sees everything from above and doesn't have to worry about finding a traversable route.
Cats and dogs? Nope. There are some amazing documented cases of cats and dogs finding their way home. There are about seventeen million documented cases of cats and dogs not finding their way home even without being dropped somewhere. These are animals that just wandered off and got lost.
If we could rely on dogs and cats to just go home we wouldn't have pounds.
I'd drop $3000 on such a thing if I had it available. This thing has a Wacom pressure sensitive stylus, it's comparable in size to a CD player, and it is powerful enough to decently run Photoshop, or better in this case, Alias Sketchbook.
It's a real pain in the rear having to carry around a watercolour or marker set for colour sketching. Heavy, clunky, and a bit of a special effort. This I could get used to just having with me all the time. Clip it on my belt and go. The fact that it's a solid, if not amazing, laptop is just a bonus.
"More importantly, we have found that people forget she is an android while interacting with her. Consciously, it is easy to see that she is an android, but unconsciously, we react to the android as if she were a woman."
So, regardless of the old research into the Uncanny Valley, we have here some fellows who have made such a robot. It doesn't really look human, but it's very, very close. It should be smack in the middle of the valley, but look! People forget it's a robot and start interacting with it as if it were a person.
This has always seemed more likely to me. We don't respond to monkeys as if they were repulsive. We adore them. Monkeys are very cute.
I think maybe the issue with the uncanny valley is that if certain specific things are wrong, the simalucrum looks like it's an individual with a disease. Many computer animations of human faces look like people with some sort of brain damage. The animators try to push the puppets harder than pupptery will accept.
This is often because the animator is trying to push the entire illusion of lipsync and emotion through facial expressions. In life, people don't really move their lips all that much. A good animator knows to keep the body moving so that the face doesn't have to do all the acting. A bad animator works out the lipsync and sticks it on a relatively still model, then starts overdriving it when it isn't convincing.
Puppets can be startingly human without being repulsive to more than a small portion of the population. Granted, there are people with an irrational fear of marionettes, but there are people who are afraid of balloons too.
In the end, the issues involved are so subtle, I'm more ready to blame the artistry of Mori's robots for having been repulsive than accept the idea that models which are similar to humans, but not quite there, are *inherently* repusive.
Concluding that his research proves the existence of the uncanny valley is rather like looking at the response to Anime fanart and concluding that the more stylized a representation is, the more horrible it is. In point of fact, most fanartists just aren't very good. I think Mori's research just shows there weren't any good Robotic Face Designers yet.
Could you reasonably be expected, as part of your job, to purchase something and then be reimbursed by the company? For example, might you have a business lunch?
In order to pay for that business lunch, might you have to log into your bank account?
In the perfomance of this work-related duty, is it fair that the network admin for your company now has your bank id and password, which would allow him, if he liked, to take your life savings and those of fellow employees who did the same, then run to Aruba?
Keystroke logging records passwords. No matter how scrupulous you are about not discussing your sex life on work time, any non-work passwords must remain sacrosanct. Keystroke logging goes over the line.
"If the movie is well made with an entertaining story line, the gratuitous scenes are not necessary."
You're probably right about that. I wonder, though... what if the point of the movie isn't to entertain?
Your argument can be applied to any part of a movie that someone would like to censor. An entertaining movie can be made without using the word "fuck." Such a movie can be made without depicting criminals who do not pay for their crimes, which never implies that anybody has sex, and which shows no drug use or behaviour disrespectful to those in authority.
The fact that a good movie can be made without these elements is no justification for removing them. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is an excellent example, because it is chock full from start to finish of unpleasant scenes with bad people doing ugly things. A bowdlerized version that has any of the value of the original simply cannot be made, because it is portrait of the real consequences of terrible behaviour. It is also a brilliant film.
If a brilliant film can be made which cannot be reasonable censored, then the artist should have the right to ensure that piece is not distributed in a mangled version.
Particularly dangerous is the subject of rape. If a rape scene is edited to be implied, rather than explicit and challenging, a significant change has been made to the message of a movie. The sanitized media environment of the 50s is part of the reason that women of the time had so little recourse when raped. It was as shameful thing to be hidden from, not an evil to be confronted.
Talking of "entertainment" when discussing film censorship is specious. Entertainment is rarely the primary aim of truly great films, even if said films are entertaining.
It's hard to find a well designed collaborative chat program.
OpenCanvas was completely changed in later versions. The early betas that can network are riddled with bugs, particularly in multiple monitor support. The later versions don't network.
Paintchat is built around a message board concept, which isn't my cup of tea for the same reason I prefer an IM program to a Java chat applet badly translated from Japanese.
Unfortunately, the IM program drawing functions are primitive at best. MSN's whiteboard is pathetic and Yahoo's shared drawing is fun, but has a tiny canvas and a limited UI.
Finally, googling for programs involves wading through the enormous amounts of information on OpenCanvas, Paintchat, and "collaborative art education initiatives" at elementary schools. I've been looking for months, and it seems like word of mouth is the way to go.
"Just a reminder: If it sounds to good to be true, it is."
I'm very pleased to know that my sense of the goodness of something and its likelihood is 100% reliable. On your recommendation, I plan to hire myself out for feasibility studies ordinarily done by corporations and governments.
With my preternatural ability to tell whether something is possible purely based on my own limited life experience, I can make a lot of money! Feasibility studies usually cost millions of dollars because of the amount of research involved to determine the chances of success. I can charge just 10% of the usual fee and still be one of the richest people on the planet.
Wait... this ability sounds too good to be true...
Slashdot Mirror
An efuse can sometimes be cleared by drilling a hole through the chip casing and exposing it to uv. Needless to say, this isn't something a home user can do. It takes a chip analysis lab.
Any competent effuse based system blows the fuse inside a critical chip, rather than in a separate authentication chip, so no. You probably can't just short out a couple of pins.
Well, let's see. 2.4 GHz would be the 40 millionth harmonic of 60Hz. Not too much energy up there.
The reason your television doesn't work well when your vacuum is on is that the vacuum motor's load seriously disrupts the AC power circuit in your house. The television's power supply is designed to turn fairly clean 60Hz power into DC at a couple of voltages. If you get crazy transients going from a heavy load, you're going to have ripple in your television's circuits.
If your television doesn't work when your next house neighbor uses his vacuum cleaner something is *seriously* wrong. The OP is talking about trouble that affects several houses, so it has to be something that originates in these microwave bands.
What people are grasping for here is that these are CGI models moving in 3-D, but they were based on Genndy Tartakovsky's stylized TWO dimensional designs.
For two-dimensional design, all those angles and swoopy bits add drama and impact. They're shape and composition aids.
In 3-D, the characters just look like retarded monkeybots. It's perfectly possible to do stylized 3-D well (The Incredibles) but you have to focus on the nature of the medium. You need round characters that still look like themselves when rotated and minimal textures that enhance the idea of materials rather than looking like a coat of matte spraypaint on a tuna can.
This kind of bad design is distracting in a way that CG held back by technical limitations is not. When we were all playing games like the Ocarina of time or FF7, it was easy to accept people with claw-hands and triangle shoulders because everything looked that way. It was the nature of the medium.
Here Lucasfilms could clearly have designed any character models they liked, but because their deisgn team has been trained to be "spam in front of a can", they just blindly copied Genndy's designs and moved on to coordinating space battles, as usual.
McDonald's knew their coffee was served too hot for the cups that they served it in.
-Their coffee was prepared under pressure, allowing it to reach temperatures above boiling. It was served directly from the hot chamber into the cups.
-Their cups were at that time pretty flimsy. The heat would weaken the cups and the lids. I've seen many people spill their old-style McDonald's coffee because of lid failure.
-McDonald's serves its coffee at drive-throughs. It is their responsibility to design the packaging so that it is at least moderately safe in an ordinary moving vehicle. The driver must, at the very least, drive a few metres further to park.
-Many cars on the road at that time did not have effective cup-holders. Good cup holders were a dealer option. Again, a market circumstance McDonald's is responsible to evaluate.
As the drive-through became a primary part of McDonald's business, their management evaluated all these factors. They looked at the cost to retrofit 2,500 locations with new coffee machines and cups which would better suit a drive-through business. Management decided it would be cheaper to settle any suits that came up.
The plaintiff's lawyer asked the jury to make it cheaper for companies to fix their damn cups (sockets/glue/seatbelts/whatever). The jury did.
You:
"For the amount of money that Bill has at his disposal, he could just hire Bob Ross to generate his presentations on the fly. ^_^"
Wikipedia:
"Bob Ross (October 29, 1942 in Daytona Beach, Florida - July 4, 1995)"
I don't think Bill has enough.
Waterproof Music
Looks like they have it all covered.
No way.
A student film typically runs about 45 seconds to 2 minutes. It takes one person about four months to storyboard, do layout, animate, clean up and colour. You need a 12-field scanner, which isn't cheap. You need thousands of dollars worth of proprietary software licenses if you want to actually distribute your film. Student films also tend to be simple... 20 cuts at most.
Now, you can knock out a flash film in much less time, but Futurama it won't be. Futurama had very high-quality traditional animation. It's about as close to feature quality as you'll see made for TV. The jokes relied on surprisingly subtle and complicated staging. The cost of making it was huge.
You might do Family Guy in flash without losing much. The scenes in Family Guy that have the most action are often the least entertaining.
Live action is much easier for an amateur. You roll cameras. Anywhere you invest less time or effort will reduce the quality, but it won't prevent the footage from getting made. You can make a film in a weekend. It won't be good, but it will exist.
In animation, if you don't put in the effort, the footage doesn't get made.
Animated characters can move much faster than real life characters and still stay convincing. The timing on the original Simpsons intro is breakneck. Characters whirl all over the place.
Most of the details people are mentioning as missing simply couldn't be done in live action. They are already running the video at about 1.4 times normal speed, and the humans still move too slowly to work it. Run at a high enough speed to match, things would jerk all over the place, Keystone Cops style.
Part of that is storyboarding cheats, though, which the filmmakers could have done had they known a little more about animation. One of the rules of cartoon storyboarding is that as soon as a character is out of shot, they can move infinitely fast. For example, in the saxophone scene Lisa is out of shot for a moment, and when she comes back she's moved further than a human can. The filmmakers tried to approximate this, but they ended up with a jump cut.
Other times, it just doesn't work because live action takes longer to read than animation. The shot that is supposed to look like Maggie is driving the car is just confusing. Car, baby, car in different place, car turns over the storyboarding axis. Unpleasant. The English countryside doesn't help. It's so detailed and lush that the car seems like a minor part of that last shot.
The whip-pan from Homer tossing his rod to Bart skating is odd.
On the whole, I think they concentrated too hard on trying to match the actual shots, and not enough on trying to match the intent of the shots.
You may finish a race, but Finnish is not a race.
Motherboards for the 386 were as dear as dragon's teeth in 1986. It had only just been released.
I talked about a 286 selling for $4,000. Adjusted for inflation, this is something like $7,000. A 386 would have been significantly more. Let's say $8,000 of today's dollars. That's conservative.
Obviously if you're willing to spend that much money on what is essentially development hardware you're going to get more power than is in a mass-market console worth a couple of hundred bucks. That's not a reasonable comparison. Twenty years from now will you talk about quad-processor Opteron systems with 8 gigabytes of RAM and whatever nVidia spits out by Christmas, and say that was the condition of the PC gaming market in 2006?
I do think this is a big part of the issue at hand. Some of the people in 1986 were lucky enough to have many thousands of dollars available to spend on this, or parents who had the money. These people were, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, tasting the future. The 1986 Amiga was in many ways a little slice of everyone else's 1993.
What's important to note is that the content was not being written for these bleeding edge systems. There were a few games, but mostly not. It's probably instructive to look at something like Space Quest 3, a big PC seller in 1989, but with graphics that certainly didn't compare on an aesthetic basis to Super Mario 2 or 3. That was the state of the PC gaming market in the late 80s. Blurry, unreliable graphics written for EGA long after VGA had come out. Even if you had the newest hardware, IRQ conflicts and DOS memory limitations meant you probably couldn't write for it and game companies sure weren't going to bet on it. Don't forget how long it took for sound cards to be widely available. I knew people who didn't have them even in 1992.
If you want to define PC gaming in a restricted way, I'm there too. I had a IIgs. I was enveloped in the beautiful strains of Ancient Land of Ys coming out of my custom Ensoniq DSP chip while high-resolution graphics whizzed by. The version of Wolfenstein for my IIgs was nicer than the one for PCs, even though the PCs it was running on were five years newer. I just don't think my $9,000 setup defined the market. I wish it had.
In the 1986 I remember, PCs had more memory than consoles but pathetic video hardware with no accelerated blitting or pageflipping, making them unsuitable for any gaming that didn't involve a mostly static screen or vector graphics. Sure, the Amiga and the IIgs could do more, but a PC? Never.
At that time, hardware specifically designed for *gaming* allowed a number of gametypes that simply could not be done on the PC. When the original Commander Keen came out, in 1990, people were stunned that you could do a Mario-type full screen scroller on the PC.
Even the hardware details you're quoting are iffy. IBM PCs certainly didn't have 32 bit processors in 1986.
"1986: September - IBM announces the IBM PC-XT Model 286, with 640KB RAM, 1.2MB floppy drive, 20MB hard drive, serial/parallel ports, and keyboard for US$4000."
Action gaming on a 286 compared to an NES? No contest. NES wins. Particularly with that $4000 price tag on the 286. Yes, there were deeper and more complex games on the PC, but mostly because of the keyboard and mouse. Just like today. Not so much the mouse on the 286, but it was starting to pick up.
The balance shifted around Doom... The general purpose nature of PCs meant they could handle 3-D decently, where the SNES and Genesis hadn't been designed for this kind of thing and their lack of pure horsepower held them back. By Quake, PCs started to have hardware acceleration for gaming, and so the consoles couldn't pull that trick any more.
Don't get me wrong, I liked PC gaming back then a lot, but I also programmed games starting around 1994. Even with hand-coded ASM I could see I was never going to keep up with an SNES in 2-D, which was a three-year old system. Compare Jill of the Jungle or the later Keens, which ran on 1991 PCs, to Earthworm Jim. The disparity is ridiculous, even with the legendary Carmack writing the engine on Keen.
It's hard enough getting students through the concepts in one program. Trying to simultaneously teach students how to do 3-D modeling or print illustration while each one is using a different program would be like trying to teach students who are each speaking only their native language how to, say, build a giant tower to usurp the heavenly power of the gods.
What school doesn't "force" you to do certain things on your property? At your school you can write your papers about whatever you want, in whatever format, language, font, and tone you'd like? Can you hand in a cocktail napkin with a drawing of your teacher as a nazi for your final project? Maybe at a few of the weirder art schools.
At any post-secondary school in a non-socialized country, you're paying them to teach you concepts. It's not high school, where the state is forcing your parents to pay it to babysit you and the law mandates your attendance. You're an an adult in a consensual situation and you've already placed an enormous amount of control in their hands by signing up. This is not an issue of freedom.
When I was at Waterloo it wasn't acceptable to simply choose to code an entire assignment in a different language in many of the lower-level courses. That definitely wasn't because Waterloo was a vocational college teaching us how to monkey with Java. Waterloo is about as abstract and conceptual as it gets, but they insisted on a certain language because spending the time to try to mark your assignment done in WeirdLanguage++ would take away resources from students who were willing to just do the damn thing, learn the concept, get the grade and then throw the source code in the trash, where most assignments end up.
Any assignment, any course, any major has requirements. If you don't like that schools require things of you, you learn in your basement. If you're getting bent out of shape over something as minor as whether you get to use open source, you need to grow up.
You've linked to a review of the R700. The R700 is a monochrome unit.
This is the R800. The R800 is a colour unit with higher resolution. They also claim to have improved the tracking system and software so it isn't so fiddly.
The difference in utility is pretty major. I wouldn't bother with a monochrome pen scanner, but I would love to be able to quickly scan visual reference material out of art books quickly. They tend to be expensive and have low print runs, but photocopying for reference when doing a painting is fair use.
One day when the phone rang, it was someone from the CIBC head office. (CIBC is a big bank here in Canada)
"We just phoned you up so you won't be worried," they said.
"Worried about what?"
"Well, we accidentally withdrew $250,000 from your checking account. We've just told the computer to put it back."
Nice. I looked at my online account balance, and indeed, I was nearly a quarter million in the red. Ouch. Would have been worse if I hadn't been staying in all weekend programming... at least I didn't find out myself at the mall. They fixed it quickly, but it was unnerving. I thought it was over.
At the end of the month, they suspended my account.
"Why have you suspended my account?"
"You owe us $17,000 in overdraft charges."
Ah, of course. Borrowing a quarter million for three days... that's serious interest. It took nearly two weeks to get this one straightened out because I was the one bringing it up.
I hardly need to say I cancelled my account the day after everything had been straightened out.
"Yes, but you have millions of years of evolution that have weeded out mistakes and orders-of-magnitude errors in your nervous system.
Furthermore, a mistake in your look-up table would be as deadly as a mistake in doing the calculus."
It would be as deadly, and it often is as deadly. The point is that it wouldn't look the same. A mistake in doing calculus on paper leads to results which are nothing like the correct results. They're way, way off. If you get better at doing calculus, you start getting answers that are way off less often. When they're right, they're *bang on*.
This is completely different than the way humans make mistakes. When we move incorrectly, we move almost correctly. Then we move closer to correctly, and so on.
"Do you have any references for your 'lookup table' theory, or is this just a pet theory?"
It's not a theory, it's an image used to describe the process. Neural nets are very well understood. How they do their calculations is also well understood. The question is what imagery you want to use to simplify that for normal life. My contention is that "doing calculus" is a poorly chosen image.
Neural nets
Wikipedia is hardly authoritative, but it is a good source if what you need is a basic grounding.
The idea is that if you have some function f(x), you don't have to know what f(x) or do any analysis on it for a neural net to get used to what's coming out. For example,
Rat brain flies plane
A 25,000 neuron machine with no instinctive programming at all was able to control this simulated jet. If you'd like to suggest those neurons, randomly clumped on a dish, taught themselves calculus first and then figured out the horrendously complex fluid dynamics equations used to simulate the jet's movement, then started calculating using them... Well, I guess you can suggest that. It's pretty silly.
This is an important point. It's conceptually simple to suggest that your brain is doing the calculus to catch a ball. That's not a particularly tough math problem. It's conceptually complex to suggest that the brains of jet pilots are doing the calculus involved in moving a jet.
"I'm not good with math, but isn't the idea of calculus so you can sum *infinite series*? How are you going to have a look-up table for an infinite series?"
Sigh. Clearly, you aren't good with math. I don't think you have a good grasp of what you even mean by doing calculus. My strong suspicion would be that you read Douglas Adams and that his enticing picture of the powers the mind has which we don't have access to caught your imagination. He's a great writer, but a lot of his scientific speculation lacks rigor. He doesn't have to define what he means by what he says. It's just an image in a story.
What does "doing calculus" mean? If you mean analyzing a function and running the calculation through, then your brain isn't doing that.
I think what you mean is "fitting curves." You've got your function which describes the path of the ball. You observe that you are able to extrapolate that curve until it hits your hand, and that you can fit that curve to how hard the ball was thrown. You can then throw a ball similarly.
You've been taught in school that one way to do this is to figure out the function which describes the movement of the ball, then twiddle the variables. There are other ways to do this calculation. Many of them are highly accurate. Neural nets are one way. There are methods with bits of string or elastic. They used to have big machines that did it using cogs and cams of different shapes and sizes, back before the advent of electronic computers.
Think about what doing calculus means to you and sharpen up your claim. By the time you've done that, you'll probably be saying something true.
The neurons in your hand are reacting according to finely tuned lookup tables. If they were doing math, they wouldn't get better through practice. Practice is adjusting the lookup tables.
Not that there are really tables stored in memory. The neurons themselves are the table elements. If you miss the ball because you moved your hand too fast, your body tells the neurons to move slower next time.
This is called "approximation."
Think also about this: When you do calculus in the normal way that we speak of doing calculus, what does a mistake do? A misplaced sign or a confusion about division gives you a terribly inaccurate answer. You can end up with the wrong answer by orders of magnitude.
Your body almost never does that. You rarely reach up to catch a ball that's a foot above your hand and accidentally throw yourself across the room. Even slashdotters aren't that bad.
Does your car do calculus when its automatic transmission shifts over at the precise right moment to match the torque of the higher gear with the speed the wheels are currently going and get a smooth shift? No. It's just been adjusted that way. Engineers did the math, but your engine just does it. Conversely, do you do the math when you shift in a manual? No. You just know how the engine sounds when it's time to shift. Stimulus response, honed by trial and error.
"Finding your way home is solving a 2 dimensional problem, and animals have amazing ability to do that, even if dropped of somewhere they have never been."
Birds have an amazing ability to do that. Maybe not so amazing, because a bird sees everything from above and doesn't have to worry about finding a traversable route.
Cats and dogs? Nope. There are some amazing documented cases of cats and dogs finding their way home. There are about seventeen million documented cases of cats and dogs not finding their way home even without being dropped somewhere. These are animals that just wandered off and got lost.
If we could rely on dogs and cats to just go home we wouldn't have pounds.
>> A Modern Salvador Dali
>> (Score:3, Funny) by CarnivorousCoder (872609)
>> Salvador Dali meets a camera. Brilliant stuff!
> Why is parent modded funny ?
Dali died in 1989.
I'd drop $3000 on such a thing if I had it available. This thing has a Wacom pressure sensitive stylus, it's comparable in size to a CD player, and it is powerful enough to decently run Photoshop, or better in this case, Alias Sketchbook.
It's a real pain in the rear having to carry around a watercolour or marker set for colour sketching. Heavy, clunky, and a bit of a special effort. This I could get used to just having with me all the time. Clip it on my belt and go. The fact that it's a solid, if not amazing, laptop is just a bonus.
"More importantly, we have found that people forget she is an android while interacting with her. Consciously, it is easy to see that she is an android, but unconsciously, we react to the android as if she were a woman."
So, regardless of the old research into the Uncanny Valley, we have here some fellows who have made such a robot. It doesn't really look human, but it's very, very close. It should be smack in the middle of the valley, but look! People forget it's a robot and start interacting with it as if it were a person.
This has always seemed more likely to me. We don't respond to monkeys as if they were repulsive. We adore them. Monkeys are very cute.
I think maybe the issue with the uncanny valley is that if certain specific things are wrong, the simalucrum looks like it's an individual with a disease. Many computer animations of human faces look like people with some sort of brain damage. The animators try to push the puppets harder than pupptery will accept.
This is often because the animator is trying to push the entire illusion of lipsync and emotion through facial expressions. In life, people don't really move their lips all that much. A good animator knows to keep the body moving so that the face doesn't have to do all the acting. A bad animator works out the lipsync and sticks it on a relatively still model, then starts overdriving it when it isn't convincing.
Puppets can be startingly human without being repulsive to more than a small portion of the population. Granted, there are people with an irrational fear of marionettes, but there are people who are afraid of balloons too.
In the end, the issues involved are so subtle, I'm more ready to blame the artistry of Mori's robots for having been repulsive than accept the idea that models which are similar to humans, but not quite there, are *inherently* repusive.
Concluding that his research proves the existence of the uncanny valley is rather like looking at the response to Anime fanart and concluding that the more stylized a representation is, the more horrible it is. In point of fact, most fanartists just aren't very good. I think Mori's research just shows there weren't any good Robotic Face Designers yet.
Could you reasonably be expected, as part of your job, to purchase something and then be reimbursed by the company? For example, might you have a business lunch?
In order to pay for that business lunch, might you have to log into your bank account?
In the perfomance of this work-related duty, is it fair that the network admin for your company now has your bank id and password, which would allow him, if he liked, to take your life savings and those of fellow employees who did the same, then run to Aruba?
Keystroke logging records passwords. No matter how scrupulous you are about not discussing your sex life on work time, any non-work passwords must remain sacrosanct. Keystroke logging goes over the line.
"If the movie is well made with an entertaining story line, the gratuitous scenes are not necessary." You're probably right about that. I wonder, though... what if the point of the movie isn't to entertain? Your argument can be applied to any part of a movie that someone would like to censor. An entertaining movie can be made without using the word "fuck." Such a movie can be made without depicting criminals who do not pay for their crimes, which never implies that anybody has sex, and which shows no drug use or behaviour disrespectful to those in authority. The fact that a good movie can be made without these elements is no justification for removing them. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is an excellent example, because it is chock full from start to finish of unpleasant scenes with bad people doing ugly things. A bowdlerized version that has any of the value of the original simply cannot be made, because it is portrait of the real consequences of terrible behaviour. It is also a brilliant film. If a brilliant film can be made which cannot be reasonable censored, then the artist should have the right to ensure that piece is not distributed in a mangled version. Particularly dangerous is the subject of rape. If a rape scene is edited to be implied, rather than explicit and challenging, a significant change has been made to the message of a movie. The sanitized media environment of the 50s is part of the reason that women of the time had so little recourse when raped. It was as shameful thing to be hidden from, not an evil to be confronted. Talking of "entertainment" when discussing film censorship is specious. Entertainment is rarely the primary aim of truly great films, even if said films are entertaining.
It's hard to find a well designed collaborative chat program.
OpenCanvas was completely changed in later versions. The early betas that can network are riddled with bugs, particularly in multiple monitor support. The later versions don't network.
Paintchat is built around a message board concept, which isn't my cup of tea for the same reason I prefer an IM program to a Java chat applet badly translated from Japanese.
Unfortunately, the IM program drawing functions are primitive at best. MSN's whiteboard is pathetic and Yahoo's shared drawing is fun, but has a tiny canvas and a limited UI.
Finally, googling for programs involves wading through the enormous amounts of information on OpenCanvas, Paintchat, and "collaborative art education initiatives" at elementary schools. I've been looking for months, and it seems like word of mouth is the way to go.
So.... any suggestions?
"Just a reminder: If it sounds to good to be true, it is."
I'm very pleased to know that my sense of the goodness of something and its likelihood is 100% reliable. On your recommendation, I plan to hire myself out for feasibility studies ordinarily done by corporations and governments.
With my preternatural ability to tell whether something is possible purely based on my own limited life experience, I can make a lot of money! Feasibility studies usually cost millions of dollars because of the amount of research involved to determine the chances of success. I can charge just 10% of the usual fee and still be one of the richest people on the planet.
Wait... this ability sounds too good to be true...
If an asteroid hits the Earth, the red states will be completely paralyzed by the pre-apocalyptic hysteria.