"Beat" as in win. I'm not into discussing how they do it... someone else raised that point too.
I'm responding to yours because you were funnier.
The issue was originally "is it morally right for a business to crush all the competitors? Isn't what what businesses are supposed to do?" The answer is that whether it's morally right to crush or not, it's stupid, and MS rarely does it. Netscape is still around, Apple is still around... Microsoft can take the best of their ideas and run with it.
It occurs to me that the word for this is hegemony. Empires don't work because they collapse. Hegemonies work better. it's the American Way. See current foreign policy regarding the cost of pacifying Iraq.
Competition also opens up new markets. The whole online music thing was really kicked off by Apple, right? There were others first, but Apple made it a daily reality.
If Microsoft had CRUSHED Apple years ago, that wide-open market wouldn't be there for Microsoft to grab... they'd have to have thought of it themselves, implemented it, gotten it to sell.
The advantage of competitors is that your competitors do some of the foot-work for you, take some of the risks for you. What you want to do is wait until the copmetitor has made a new product work, then beat their product.
On the contrary, in many Commonwealth countries an organization is treated as a plural. Microsoft are doing this, the Air Ministry are doing that... It's just a dialect difference.
Right.... but these are downloadable demos to sell cards to individuals and developers, not integrated solutions sold to large companies. You'd need millions of identical skilled salesmen to sell to each GPU customer.
In the absence of Sludge Vohaul's phone number, developing a good demo is the best choice.
Well there's your problem. You may not be aware that the MX 440 is essentially a GeForce 2 MX with a few extra features. It is NOT a direct relative of the GeForce 4. Nasty trick on their part... but you really can't run modern games on the MX without trouble.
Running at 1600x1200 can be painful for the eyes on some games.... Morrowind springs to mind. It doesn't scale the menu text to match the resolution. Bethesda expected it to be played between 640x480 and 1280x1024....
Up to that point, having more text on screen is useful. After that it should start scaling, but doesn't.
There are many game that don't scale well, so your surprise is a function of which games you play.
The virtual boy had two major problems. The first was that it was trying to approximate a focal distance of, say, five metres, but with poor quality optics, housing, and a wide range of users.
Something that's supposed to go on the eyes of kids and adults? Very difficult to make. You have to make it very easy to adjust the width of the spacing of the screens, you have to be able to hold that, and you have to have good calibration techniques.
This is an entirely different thing. Though it is a monocle, if a binocular version were made, it would be far easier to adjust properly than the virtual boy, because you can see through to the real world.
"Put test pattern poster on wall. Stand five metres from wall. The test pattern projected in the HUD will appear to move closer to you and farther away. Push the button when it appears to be the same distance away as the test pattern."
That's just engineering. There are plenty of HMD now that don't give the user a headache from stereo issues, though you DO get a headache from the weight.
The second problem the virtual boy had was that the image was only red and was on a very dark background. If you stare at a red line for a long period of time, when you look away the spot where the line was will be cyan... the brain says "This spot is much less red than expected."
You can see this with a line on a card... better yet, you're in front of a computer now. Pop up an image editor, draw something in red on black, view full screen, and just stare for a few minutes. Then look at a white piece of paper.
The virtual boy was really bad for this because the eyes were almost entirely enclosed. It's not dangerous at all, but it freaked people out....they thought this prosaic optical illusion was "damage" to their eyes that would build up.
That issue shouldn't be such a big problem here because the subjective brightness of the red line will be about the same as the background you can see behind it. I'd expect the same incidence of green afterimages that I'd expect with normal red lines in the real world. It will happen, but that's just eyes for you.
Oh, I lied. Third problem.... there was just no good way to hold the virtual boy in front of the eyes. Even if it were calibrated properly, craning the neck forward to look into the viewer caused more headaches than the stereo issues.
"Grab a pen, a piece of paper, and a stopwatch. Now, start the timer and begin drawing mature granny lesbian bondage with piercings and anal penetration. Go. How long did that take?"
Just under two minutes... but then, I play a lot of iSketch. The main bottleneck was coming back to make sure I hadn't missed any terms from your description.
Two minutes is a long time, but if the search engine could work off my picture then I would get the pose in it, instead of just ANY picture of lesbian grannies tied up and penetrated. It's a trade-off. The time I saved with a good sketching engine would come in not having to look at so many pictures to find the right one. With the description you gave, I'd like to look at as few as possible.
Personally, I doubt it would pick up on the granny bit, because it would have to ignore wrinkles in case the artist is just shaky. The Gary Larson granny glasses were a nice touch, though.
Of course the real search engine in the article is for 3-D mechanical parts, not 2-D pictures of human parts.
Now the question is... do you want the picture? *wink*
Ce n'est pas la science.
on
Listen to the Sky
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Science had known to occasionally be funded by someone for one reason or another. "
This is clearly not science, it is art. There are no untested hypotheses, there is no rigorous data being collected that may tell us more about EM in a deductive way...
It is no more science than a painting of a cat is a cat. Ceci n'est pas une pipe, right?
This is a moving demonstration of how complex the sky's environment is, and how much we can't see. Since people still have no clue about radiation, it will be a little educational... but mainly it will create an emotional response to an ordinarily invisible phenomenon.
Oh, and the funding is provided by the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, which ends the discussion about whether it's worth the money. Daniel Langlois thinks art about science is important, and it's his money.
Also, Graphires are dead cheap. The software price will put the cost of the hardware to shame. Though this particular system seems to be, as you say, based on 3-D approximations, there's no reason you couldn't use an interface similar to that in Magic Pengel, The Quest for Color.
Draw a shape with a tablet, have it automatically converted to reasonably similar 3-D primitives, use this as the basis for the search. No problem. The sytem doesn't seem to work this way now, but it could.
As for being unable to draw at all, this is a system for design engineers. As I understand it, design engineers take mechanical drawing. Computers are great for final plans, but you still need drawing skills for the concept sketches, yes? No?
Disclaimer... I am not an engineer, I am a graphic artist. I'm sure in the reverse situation an engineer might be saying "it really isn't that hard for an artist to calculate deal with concrete density mathematics in an approximate way. You people deal with clay and marble all the time, right? An understanding of material physics is necessary for an artist." I may be suffering from occupational chauvinism.
"Bah, don't worry, It's only the foreigners who are having civil liberties violated. But they're not citizens, so it doesn't matter, right?"
But seriously, what about immigrants? One more way to marginalize that group. They already face language and cultural barriers, stereotypes, and a host of other problems... now they'll be printed, even if they become citizens later.
When the government starts printing people who have committed no crime and may later be citizens, it's clear that we're on the very edge of having full prints taken for something like a marriage license, then for a driver's license, and then at birth.
Even if our government doesn't start printing us for these things, there will be reciprocal arrangements with other countries. Cross any national border into a developed country, get printed, have that shared worldwide.
We already do have footprints taken at birth, so remember not to walk barefoot around the house of your murder victims.
"the nerd factor of riding any sci-fi reproduction pretty much means you will never get laid again...Ever.;P"
If all you do is ride a sci-fi reproduction, the girl has to know something about either motorcycles or sci-fi to suss you out.
Where the nerd factor comes in is the nasal bragging about the animation director's signature on the cowling. That keeps you from getting laid. Also not showering for days before or after riding in your reproduction sci-fi leather riding suit. Ewwww....
The NASA test vehicle flew 400 miles on 2 pounds of hydrogen fuel. This costs about $3.00 at today's market prices.
Admittedly, the rocket fuel to boost the plane to Mach 6, where the scramjet can take over, may balance out those cost savings on short trips. But if you are travelling From Britain to Australia, the bulk of the travelling will be done on scramjet power alone. Using on the order of a hundred pounds of hydrogen to make that flight is a big deal.
You may not fly that long a trip by yourself, but you'll certainly appreciate the lower cost of fuel and the lower pollution level.
You'll also appreciate the way that this cuts down on traffic at your local airport. As you said, most of your travel time is spent waiting in airports. When a plane can fly from New York to Tokyo primarily on fifty pounds of hydrogen fuel, plus initial booster fuel and landing fuel, it makes little sense for that flight to stop in Seattle first. It would waste booster and landing fuel. Fewer long haul flights being broken up into short connected flights should lead to less airport congestion.
"The conclusion that this mutation was responsible for the divergence of humans and apes is just plain wrong."
It's just plain wrong in another way. Humans are both apes and primates. The divergence is rather far down the taxonomic tree. We and our proto-human relatives are in sub-family Homininae, as distinct from the other members of Hominidae. The Hylobatidae are also apes.
Upright refrigerators allow one to stare and gape at the food inside. "I can't believe I jut went shopping and there's nothing good to eat."
More reasonably, short people, old people, and children cannot reach into a chest refrigerator easily. A chest refrigerator takes up twice as much precious floor space. A chest refrigerator is the sort in which a child can be easily trapped.
If you really want to save cold air in a refrigerator, produce one with a second clear door inside. This would keep all the safety and convenience features of an upright fridge, and remove the major cause of air loss, which is choosing what to take out.
On of the great health threats facing North Americans today is that we overload our childrens' backpacks. They fardles bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life.
That is, the enormous weight of all their books is too much for their tiny frames. With more and more other crap being shoved in there, kids can barely take it. There was once a time that kids could leave their textbooks either at home or school. The kid could take one book home for the homework that night.
Now, every class assigns twenty minutes of homework every day, even for elementary school kids, and most of the teaching is done directly out of textbooks. That means having all the books in both places. Insanity.
This sort of thing could change all that. Instead of four thick textbooks, the kid would have a single nice little device... textbook manufacturers won't want to make their books available electronically, but at least the assignments can be sent home this way. All those photocopied sheets and such.
Many copyright barriers, but luckily, one of the few things that can break through even the most entrenched laws is a serious threat to the health of children.
"Not something you are usually told when you get Chicken Pox as a kid."
It's a strange thing that this is still the present tense.
There's a chicken pox vaccine... kids don't have to get chicken pox anymore. Hundreds of kids die of encephalitis due to chiken pox every year. There's also the school time lost, the scrring, and the eventual possibility of shingles.
Nonetheless, parents still "vaccinate" their kids by exposing them to other kids who have chicken pox at a convenient time, like summer vacation. Insanity.
I guess this is one of those "spay or neuter your pet" announcements. Get the issue out there.
"Secure data would be physically secure. It's not like you can just walk in a building and get that stuff that is locked up. It's pretty tough."
You need to read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feyman." Feyman raids the safes that contain the plans for the atomic bomb repeatedly, both for entertainment and to get work done faster. He walks through a hole in the fence around Los Alamos repeatedly, always exiting through the gate. The guard doesn't catch on until he's done it many times.
I was able to get almost anywhere in my university dorms with a penknife, despite locked doors at the end of every hall.
The problem with locks and guard and secure areas is that they're so visually impressive, it's easy to assume that they will work. With bicycle couriers and janitors moving around all the time, workers get used to unfamiliar faces and forget to check ID.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm responding to yours because you were funnier.
The issue was originally "is it morally right for a business to crush all the competitors? Isn't what what businesses are supposed to do?" The answer is that whether it's morally right to crush or not, it's stupid, and MS rarely does it. Netscape is still around, Apple is still around... Microsoft can take the best of their ideas and run with it.
It occurs to me that the word for this is hegemony. Empires don't work because they collapse. Hegemonies work better. it's the American Way. See current foreign policy regarding the cost of pacifying Iraq.
If Microsoft had CRUSHED Apple years ago, that wide-open market wouldn't be there for Microsoft to grab... they'd have to have thought of it themselves, implemented it, gotten it to sell.
The advantage of competitors is that your competitors do some of the foot-work for you, take some of the risks for you. What you want to do is wait until the copmetitor has made a new product work, then beat their product.
Of course, that's what Microsoft is so good at...
On the contrary, in many Commonwealth countries an organization is treated as a plural. Microsoft are doing this, the Air Ministry are doing that... It's just a dialect difference.
In the absence of Sludge Vohaul's phone number, developing a good demo is the best choice.
Well there's your problem. You may not be aware that the MX 440 is essentially a GeForce 2 MX with a few extra features. It is NOT a direct relative of the GeForce 4. Nasty trick on their part... but you really can't run modern games on the MX without trouble.
No, Gonzo like Gonzo journalism.
Does that mean that the game will manually disable any stereo LCD glasses or stereo displays you may have?
Up to that point, having more text on screen is useful. After that it should start scaling, but doesn't.
There are many game that don't scale well, so your surprise is a function of which games you play.
Something that's supposed to go on the eyes of kids and adults? Very difficult to make. You have to make it very easy to adjust the width of the spacing of the screens, you have to be able to hold that, and you have to have good calibration techniques.
This is an entirely different thing. Though it is a monocle, if a binocular version were made, it would be far easier to adjust properly than the virtual boy, because you can see through to the real world.
"Put test pattern poster on wall. Stand five metres from wall. The test pattern projected in the HUD will appear to move closer to you and farther away. Push the button when it appears to be the same distance away as the test pattern."
That's just engineering. There are plenty of HMD now that don't give the user a headache from stereo issues, though you DO get a headache from the weight.
The second problem the virtual boy had was that the image was only red and was on a very dark background. If you stare at a red line for a long period of time, when you look away the spot where the line was will be cyan... the brain says "This spot is much less red than expected."
You can see this with a line on a card... better yet, you're in front of a computer now. Pop up an image editor, draw something in red on black, view full screen, and just stare for a few minutes. Then look at a white piece of paper.
The virtual boy was really bad for this because the eyes were almost entirely enclosed. It's not dangerous at all, but it freaked people out... .they thought this prosaic optical illusion was "damage" to their eyes that would build up.
That issue shouldn't be such a big problem here because the subjective brightness of the red line will be about the same as the background you can see behind it. I'd expect the same incidence of green afterimages that I'd expect with normal red lines in the real world. It will happen, but that's just eyes for you.
Oh, I lied. Third problem.... there was just no good way to hold the virtual boy in front of the eyes. Even if it were calibrated properly, craning the neck forward to look into the viewer caused more headaches than the stereo issues.
Just under two minutes... but then, I play a lot of iSketch. The main bottleneck was coming back to make sure I hadn't missed any terms from your description.
Two minutes is a long time, but if the search engine could work off my picture then I would get the pose in it, instead of just ANY picture of lesbian grannies tied up and penetrated. It's a trade-off. The time I saved with a good sketching engine would come in not having to look at so many pictures to find the right one. With the description you gave, I'd like to look at as few as possible.
Personally, I doubt it would pick up on the granny bit, because it would have to ignore wrinkles in case the artist is just shaky. The Gary Larson granny glasses were a nice touch, though.
Of course the real search engine in the article is for 3-D mechanical parts, not 2-D pictures of human parts.
Now the question is... do you want the picture? *wink*
Someone's been reading Reinventing Comics, by Scott McCleod... Just look at this Particularly page 9.
This is clearly not science, it is art. There are no untested hypotheses, there is no rigorous data being collected that may tell us more about EM in a deductive way...
It is no more science than a painting of a cat is a cat. Ceci n'est pas une pipe, right?
This is a moving demonstration of how complex the sky's environment is, and how much we can't see. Since people still have no clue about radiation, it will be a little educational... but mainly it will create an emotional response to an ordinarily invisible phenomenon.
Oh, and the funding is provided by the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, which ends the discussion about whether it's worth the money. Daniel Langlois thinks art about science is important, and it's his money.
Draw a shape with a tablet, have it automatically converted to reasonably similar 3-D primitives, use this as the basis for the search. No problem. The sytem doesn't seem to work this way now, but it could.
As for being unable to draw at all, this is a system for design engineers. As I understand it, design engineers take mechanical drawing. Computers are great for final plans, but you still need drawing skills for the concept sketches, yes? No?
Disclaimer... I am not an engineer, I am a graphic artist. I'm sure in the reverse situation an engineer might be saying "it really isn't that hard for an artist to calculate deal with concrete density mathematics in an approximate way. You people deal with clay and marble all the time, right? An understanding of material physics is necessary for an artist." I may be suffering from occupational chauvinism.
But seriously, what about immigrants? One more way to marginalize that group. They already face language and cultural barriers, stereotypes, and a host of other problems... now they'll be printed, even if they become citizens later.
When the government starts printing people who have committed no crime and may later be citizens, it's clear that we're on the very edge of having full prints taken for something like a marriage license, then for a driver's license, and then at birth.
Even if our government doesn't start printing us for these things, there will be reciprocal arrangements with other countries. Cross any national border into a developed country, get printed, have that shared worldwide.
We already do have footprints taken at birth, so remember not to walk barefoot around the house of your murder victims.
If all you do is ride a sci-fi reproduction, the girl has to know something about either motorcycles or sci-fi to suss you out.
Where the nerd factor comes in is the nasal bragging about the animation director's signature on the cowling. That keeps you from getting laid. Also not showering for days before or after riding in your reproduction sci-fi leather riding suit. Ewwww....
Admittedly, the rocket fuel to boost the plane to Mach 6, where the scramjet can take over, may balance out those cost savings on short trips. But if you are travelling From Britain to Australia, the bulk of the travelling will be done on scramjet power alone. Using on the order of a hundred pounds of hydrogen to make that flight is a big deal.
You may not fly that long a trip by yourself, but you'll certainly appreciate the lower cost of fuel and the lower pollution level.
You'll also appreciate the way that this cuts down on traffic at your local airport. As you said, most of your travel time is spent waiting in airports. When a plane can fly from New York to Tokyo primarily on fifty pounds of hydrogen fuel, plus initial booster fuel and landing fuel, it makes little sense for that flight to stop in Seattle first. It would waste booster and landing fuel. Fewer long haul flights being broken up into short connected flights should lead to less airport congestion.
It's just plain wrong in another way. Humans are both apes and primates. The divergence is rather far down the taxonomic tree. We and our proto-human relatives are in sub-family Homininae, as distinct from the other members of Hominidae. The Hylobatidae are also apes.
More reasonably, short people, old people, and children cannot reach into a chest refrigerator easily. A chest refrigerator takes up twice as much precious floor space. A chest refrigerator is the sort in which a child can be easily trapped.
If you really want to save cold air in a refrigerator, produce one with a second clear door inside. This would keep all the safety and convenience features of an upright fridge, and remove the major cause of air loss, which is choosing what to take out.
That is, the enormous weight of all their books is too much for their tiny frames. With more and more other crap being shoved in there, kids can barely take it. There was once a time that kids could leave their textbooks either at home or school. The kid could take one book home for the homework that night.
Now, every class assigns twenty minutes of homework every day, even for elementary school kids, and most of the teaching is done directly out of textbooks. That means having all the books in both places. Insanity.
This sort of thing could change all that. Instead of four thick textbooks, the kid would have a single nice little device... textbook manufacturers won't want to make their books available electronically, but at least the assignments can be sent home this way. All those photocopied sheets and such.
Many copyright barriers, but luckily, one of the few things that can break through even the most entrenched laws is a serious threat to the health of children.
You don't have to read fast, because the display doesn't disappear when you turn the device off. The energy is only expended in changing pixel states.
Use plain text mode or
Formatting tags to end lines
Else, look like a fool
Enter ends paragraphs The text box will wrap for you Knowledge is power
It's a strange thing that this is still the present tense.
There's a chicken pox vaccine... kids don't have to get chicken pox anymore. Hundreds of kids die of encephalitis due to chiken pox every year. There's also the school time lost, the scrring, and the eventual possibility of shingles.
Nonetheless, parents still "vaccinate" their kids by exposing them to other kids who have chicken pox at a convenient time, like summer vacation. Insanity.
I guess this is one of those "spay or neuter your pet" announcements. Get the issue out there.
It's true... camera phones are really useful for looking up the noughties.
You need to read "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feyman." Feyman raids the safes that contain the plans for the atomic bomb repeatedly, both for entertainment and to get work done faster. He walks through a hole in the fence around Los Alamos repeatedly, always exiting through the gate. The guard doesn't catch on until he's done it many times.
I was able to get almost anywhere in my university dorms with a penknife, despite locked doors at the end of every hall.
The problem with locks and guard and secure areas is that they're so visually impressive, it's easy to assume that they will work. With bicycle couriers and janitors moving around all the time, workers get used to unfamiliar faces and forget to check ID.