I had a fraudulent item shipped to me from China (the seller did not note his geographic location). I filed a complaint on paypal to get a refund. Paypal gave me a lot of hassle and would only refund the money if I returned the item to the seller. I returned the item with tracking info but they gave me a fake address in China and the package came back to the US. Since Paypal couldn't verify that the seller received the item back, they wouldn't give me a refund. I was out both my initial payment plus my return shipping to a fraudulent address in China and a lot of my time and hassle.
Basically, Paypal completely sucks if anything goes wrong and it didn't seem like anyone there gave a rat's ass whether I had been ripped off by a foreign fraud.
4) At best, this is a new compression scheme for storing pictures - but certainly not a way to display them (see 2))
Yes, basically it's a lossy compressed storage format. In the article he takes a high resolution image and downsamples it to normal square pixels and to variable pixels. For a given amount of "pixel" information, using pixels of various sizes, shapes, and orientations yields an image much closer to the original than the simple square pixels. The variable pixels algorithm does splits across lines of contrasts so it generates edges that more closely follow the contrast curves of the original than the square pixel downsample.
To display the image, you have to convert from the variable pixels back to an upsampled image where each "stored pixel" is converted into a number of "display pixels".
So basically this is a way of downsampling images to be later displayed upsampled that reduces the amount of error due to the downsampling-upsampling process over naive square downsampling.
However, if the storage format is simple enough to allow for on-the-fly hardware decompression (like DXT formats), it may be useful for storing large texture maps with more detail than other available formats.
eSATA is probably more of a niche product. Probably no one has this on their must-have!!1! list. It's marginally faster than USB2 for external drives only and few drives can steadily saturate a USB2 link at all. Until I'm not saying 480Mbps are enough for everyone, but enough to stop caring *that* much until SSDs become cheap enough to be an external commodity drive.
A correction on your remarks. You obviously have not tried the difference between eSATA and USB2. eSATA is orders of magnitude faster. USB2 tops out at about 25-30MB/s for reads and writes. With an SSD, you can hit 280MB/s on eSATA which is around 10X faster. Even with a fast HD, you can hit 120MB/s on eSATA which is 4X faster (2 binary orders of magnitude faster than USB2.0). Plus USB2.0 seems to chew up CPU time and drive operations can't be queued so using USB2.0 for large drive operations brings your system to a crawl while eSATA works pretty much as fast as an internal drive.
I could support your remark if you compared USB3.0 to eSATA. There are already reviews of USB3.0 external cases which show performance similar to eSATA plus actual support for "removing" the drives. eSATA hot swap support sucks -- usually requiring you to have the drive connected at boot -- hot plugging eSATA is a very "iffy" combination of controller, drive, and OS all behaving according to nice and magically rare parameters.
Not really. Anti-aliasing allows for you to display sub-pixel image contributions. This does not necessarily compromise resolution. In fact many AA schemes actually render at a higher resolution and downsample to your final display resolution. The result is MORE information in the picture, not LESS.
Anti-aliasing makes a high-res picture look even better.. especially for thin lines or fonts (text is lots of thin curved lines). When you have a subpixel width, you might not be able to see the pixels but the eye can tell the difference in brightness between a 2 pixel wide line and one that should be 1.5 pixels wide if it's not anti-aliased. Plus it's necessary if you want screen shots to look good when zoomed up or you want the software to work well at similar resolutions on a device with a larger display (i.e. iPad).
Like the human eye, older cameras had the wiring in front of the sensor elements. Back-illuminated ones have the wiring in the back. That gets you about 45% more light, because it doesn't have to make it past the wiring and transistors.
Been around for a while, but only making its way into the consumer space recently.
FWIW, Squids evolved this technology millions of years ago.
Camera sensor size is much more important than megapixels for how many photons you can actually capture. More megapixels on the same size sensor can actually lead to reduced quality and increased noise. Likewise, sensor type affects quality. The iPhone 4G has a back-illuminated sensor -- which means the photons do not have to travel through the wiring layers on the silicon. This means more photons captures and better image quality and better low-light sensitivity.
Which makes me laugh when I read, "This ordinance prevents restaurants from preying on children's love of toys' to sell high-calorie, unhealthful toys..."
Slight misquote there... it should say "food" not "toys" - I doubt that kids eating the toys makes them fat - LOL.
But if they really wanted to be consistent they should ban sugary breakfast cereals with toys and or with cartoon characters on the box and other items like Cracker Jacks that have a toy in the box. After all, that's preying on children's love of toys and cartoons to sell sugar-loaded unhealthy items.
Additionally, there is such a thing as "interactive art" in which the observer is invited to interact with the art work in various ways. How is this different from a video game?
Exactly!!!
We had a story mode in MK vs DC Univers where we have authored two separate entwined plots spanning hundreds of pages of original written material. We have story boards, cinematic capture, 3D modeling, texture art, sound and music generation, voice actors, etc that are all rendered into the final movies. Pretty much everything that goes into making a movie like "Toy Story". The only difference is that at the points in the story where the characters fight, you fight as one of the characters and need to win to continue.
By Ebert's definition of a movie being "art", our game would qualify as "art" if you took out the interactive fighting and just watched our movies back to back.
But does that mean adding interactivity to "art" means it is no longer "art". The way he describes "art", a Choose-your-own-adventure book is not "art" either. Neither would be an exhibit at a museum where you could interact with it.
I think he's mistaken in his definition. When you interact with art, you are not necessarily destroying the artistic value of the original work -- rather you are creating new art with your input or even adding your personal value to existing art.
Yup... Ironically, many Slashdotters will be saying how great Opera Mini is without even trying it. I tried it today and your comment is exactly how everything got rendered. It's even worse if you "sign in" because then the main page gets squeezed as well. Also, Opera Mini was unable to load some other nerdy sites I use like StackOverflow. Mini is fast but Safari looks better and is usable on a much broader range of websites.
I wonder if they actually support SATA II (3GB/s). There was an issue with using G1 Intel 1.8" SSD's in some Mac laptops because the 1.8" Intel SSD's only ran in SATA II mode (no SATA I mode fallback). The incompatibility stemmed from the fact that the controllers on the Mac Laptops ran all drives in SATA I mode (I heard it might have been hardcoded in the BIOS to save power since they had a physical SATA II controller but SATA I mode takes less power).
Just wondering because I have two 1.8" 80 GB Intel drives that I picked up for $150 each from Newegg (in the Dane-Elec kits).
I remember one slashdot post where the guy claimed he had written a million lines of code without a single bug. However, he had about twenty spelling errors in his post. When I pointed that out though, I was down-modded for being a grammar troll but I think it was relevant to point out the ridiculousness of someone who claims to write a million lines of perfect code who couldn't even get through a sentence without spelling and grammar errors.
Well, he did use honeycomb but basically said that hexagons came out of behavior (animal created structures where animals == bees or people) so you're right, I shouldn't have used the honeycomb example.
However, the other examples show that structures that were not created by deliberate animal behavior and refute his point.
Yeah, HoneyComb, SnowFlakes, Hexagonnaly symmetric Invertebrates (i.e. 6 Legged SeaStars), and Six-Sided Crystals (Rubies, sapphires, emeralds, etc) are all very rare in nature.
I suppose simply unfriending her would not be feasible. (Maybe she'd take away his computer if he tried or punish him or something)
If you RTFA, the mother actually hacked into his account (guessed his password?), changed the password, and made posts as him.
In a document from the Clark County prosecutor, he alleges she hacked his account, changed his password and posted things that involve slander about his personal life.
A lot of activities and mental states which do not harm people are considered morally wrong. For example, homosexuality, coveting and envy, pride, "thoughtcrime" in the novel, 1984, etc.
If you RTFA, the experiment is very different. It wasn't about "subjective" moralities like the ones you are mentioning where there may not even be a risk of physical harm.
Allowing someone to do things you know to be dangerous was not considered wrong unless the person was actually hurt. For example, someone with their brain scrambled might think it was OK if kids were playing Russian Roulette as long as no one actually died.
Basically, it made people make judgements only on the outcomes rather than on the whole act itself. If a person came out of the situation OK, then it wasn't "wrong".
It has "holes" in the letters to save ink. So instead of 30% less ink usage this college would have about 45% less ink usage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofont
Big problem though -- reading this font, the holes line up and cause banding which makes it look like the printer is running out of ink or that the printer is broken at a quick glance. Also the banding causes eyestrain... even if they move the holes around randomly (which would be hard to do right), the font is not as easy to read as a filled in font.
No need for an arms race... right now they coexist quite well. Get a small SSD just big enough for your boot drive and a large HD for your data drive. It's the best of both worlds. They are already offering laptops with hybrids and the new SSD's have the potential to be very small so they could easily fit in most laptops with a second normal HD if they introduce a smaller SATA format.
Price / GB compared to performance == not so good.
I just bought a drive from Newegg.com. They were selling the Dane-Elec repackaged Intel 80 GB drive (with a USB upgrade kit) for $150 -- under $2/GB.
It's a G1 Intel drive but it can do 35,000 read IOPS per second (only 3,300 write IOPS though). Still much better random performance than anything other than the G2 Intel.
The linear performance of the Intel drives isn't so great (movie ripping / etc) but if you know you're doing linear work, storing the linear data files on a Velociraptor (or even a fast 7200 RPM drive) turns out to be way more effective $$$/GB for your budget than any SSD.
Our society seems bent on passing laws to continually "protect the children". But 99% of these laws seem to really be some way of either intruding on our privacy or a curtailing of the rights of people under 18 (or under 21 for alcohol). Some of these are totally ridiculous, such as the whole idea of a single "sexting" message being passed around a high school causing half the kids in the school to be registered as sex offenders and child pornographers for the rest of their lives.
At some point, people have to become adults within our society and suspending all their rights and "protecting" them from the real world until they hit a magic age isn't a good way to prepare them for adulthood. Neither is it the gov'ts job to raise our children -- rather it is parent's who should "protect" their own children, not the gov't.
FWIW, the FusionIO product is not a simple drive replacement the way a SSD is. It doesn't boot and requires drivers to operate, plus the "control logic" is not self-contained but rather part of the driver. It uses your System CPU and system RAM to help handle bookkeeping rather than just the controller and cache on the drive itself.
Nature or nurture? We really have no way of knowing. I suspect that we find 19 year olds becoming adults precisely because we expect that to be the case. Not too long ago, 14 was a marrying age, and I don't recall anyone of that time period thinking that this was odd or 'too much for them to handle'.
In 1776, the average life expectancy for surviving infants was 35 years. If you didn't get married at age 14, chances were pretty high you wouldn't live to see your grandchildren.
Insuring cars, yes, especially gap insurance. Nothing sucks more than crashing a two year old car and realizing you have to finish off payments for it plus the replacement.
Gap insurance is a scam... typically you end up paying about $500 for $2000 of insurance coverage - that rapidly decreases over time. Not to mention it doesn't necessarily cover your deductible of $500-$1000 anyhow. Put the extra $500-$1000 towards the downpayment or find a decent auto insurance company whose auto insurance policy pays for the full price of the replacement cost. (Quite a few policies have a new car provision for the first two years).
Slashdot Mirror
I had a fraudulent item shipped to me from China (the seller did not note his geographic location). I filed a complaint on paypal to get a refund. Paypal gave me a lot of hassle and would only refund the money if I returned the item to the seller. I returned the item with tracking info but they gave me a fake address in China and the package came back to the US. Since Paypal couldn't verify that the seller received the item back, they wouldn't give me a refund. I was out both my initial payment plus my return shipping to a fraudulent address in China and a lot of my time and hassle.
Basically, Paypal completely sucks if anything goes wrong and it didn't seem like anyone there gave a rat's ass whether I had been ripped off by a foreign fraud.
4) At best, this is a new compression scheme for storing pictures - but certainly not a way to display them (see 2))
Yes, basically it's a lossy compressed storage format. In the article he takes a high resolution image and downsamples it to normal square pixels and to variable pixels. For a given amount of "pixel" information, using pixels of various sizes, shapes, and orientations yields an image much closer to the original than the simple square pixels. The variable pixels algorithm does splits across lines of contrasts so it generates edges that more closely follow the contrast curves of the original than the square pixel downsample.
To display the image, you have to convert from the variable pixels back to an upsampled image where each "stored pixel" is converted into a number of "display pixels".
So basically this is a way of downsampling images to be later displayed upsampled that reduces the amount of error due to the downsampling-upsampling process over naive square downsampling.
However, if the storage format is simple enough to allow for on-the-fly hardware decompression (like DXT formats), it may be useful for storing large texture maps with more detail than other available formats.
eSATA is probably more of a niche product. Probably no one has this on their must-have!!1! list. It's marginally faster than USB2 for external drives only and few drives can steadily saturate a USB2 link at all. Until I'm not saying 480Mbps are enough for everyone, but enough to stop caring *that* much until SSDs become cheap enough to be an external commodity drive.
A correction on your remarks. You obviously have not tried the difference between eSATA and USB2. eSATA is orders of magnitude faster. USB2 tops out at about 25-30MB/s for reads and writes. With an SSD, you can hit 280MB/s on eSATA which is around 10X faster. Even with a fast HD, you can hit 120MB/s on eSATA which is 4X faster (2 binary orders of magnitude faster than USB2.0). Plus USB2.0 seems to chew up CPU time and drive operations can't be queued so using USB2.0 for large drive operations brings your system to a crawl while eSATA works pretty much as fast as an internal drive.
I could support your remark if you compared USB3.0 to eSATA. There are already reviews of USB3.0 external cases which show performance similar to eSATA plus actual support for "removing" the drives. eSATA hot swap support sucks -- usually requiring you to have the drive connected at boot -- hot plugging eSATA is a very "iffy" combination of controller, drive, and OS all behaving according to nice and magically rare parameters.
Not really. Anti-aliasing allows for you to display sub-pixel image contributions. This does not necessarily compromise resolution. In fact many AA schemes actually render at a higher resolution and downsample to your final display resolution. The result is MORE information in the picture, not LESS.
Anti-aliasing makes a high-res picture look even better.. especially for thin lines or fonts (text is lots of thin curved lines). When you have a subpixel width, you might not be able to see the pixels but the eye can tell the difference in brightness between a 2 pixel wide line and one that should be 1.5 pixels wide if it's not anti-aliased. Plus it's necessary if you want screen shots to look good when zoomed up or you want the software to work well at similar resolutions on a device with a larger display (i.e. iPad).
Like the human eye, older cameras had the wiring in front of the sensor elements. Back-illuminated ones have the wiring in the back. That gets you about 45% more light, because it doesn't have to make it past the wiring and transistors.
Been around for a while, but only making its way into the consumer space recently.
FWIW, Squids evolved this technology millions of years ago.
Camera sensor size is much more important than megapixels for how many photons you can actually capture. More megapixels on the same size sensor can actually lead to reduced quality and increased noise. Likewise, sensor type affects quality. The iPhone 4G has a back-illuminated sensor -- which means the photons do not have to travel through the wiring layers on the silicon. This means more photons captures and better image quality and better low-light sensitivity.
That datacenter is loud as hell. I wonder how much faster their disks would perform if they could get the datacenter quieter.
Which makes me laugh when I read, "This ordinance prevents restaurants from preying on children's love of toys' to sell high-calorie, unhealthful toys..."
Slight misquote there... it should say "food" not "toys" - I doubt that kids eating the toys makes them fat - LOL.
But if they really wanted to be consistent they should ban sugary breakfast cereals with toys and or with cartoon characters on the box and other items like Cracker Jacks that have a toy in the box. After all, that's preying on children's love of toys and cartoons to sell sugar-loaded unhealthy items.
Additionally, there is such a thing as "interactive art" in which the observer is invited to interact with the art work in various ways. How is this different from a video game?
Exactly!!!
We had a story mode in MK vs DC Univers where we have authored two separate entwined plots spanning hundreds of pages of original written material. We have story boards, cinematic capture, 3D modeling, texture art, sound and music generation, voice actors, etc that are all rendered into the final movies. Pretty much everything that goes into making a movie like "Toy Story". The only difference is that at the points in the story where the characters fight, you fight as one of the characters and need to win to continue.
By Ebert's definition of a movie being "art", our game would qualify as "art" if you took out the interactive fighting and just watched our movies back to back.
But does that mean adding interactivity to "art" means it is no longer "art". The way he describes "art", a Choose-your-own-adventure book is not "art" either. Neither would be an exhibit at a museum where you could interact with it.
I think he's mistaken in his definition. When you interact with art, you are not necessarily destroying the artistic value of the original work -- rather you are creating new art with your input or even adding your personal value to existing art.
Yup... Ironically, many Slashdotters will be saying how great Opera Mini is without even trying it. I tried it today and your comment is exactly how everything got rendered. It's even worse if you "sign in" because then the main page gets squeezed as well. Also, Opera Mini was unable to load some other nerdy sites I use like StackOverflow. Mini is fast but Safari looks better and is usable on a much broader range of websites.
No SATA III (6GB/s).
I wonder if they actually support SATA II (3GB/s). There was an issue with using G1 Intel 1.8" SSD's in some Mac laptops because the 1.8" Intel SSD's only ran in SATA II mode (no SATA I mode fallback). The incompatibility stemmed from the fact that the controllers on the Mac Laptops ran all drives in SATA I mode (I heard it might have been hardcoded in the BIOS to save power since they had a physical SATA II controller but SATA I mode takes less power).
Just wondering because I have two 1.8" 80 GB Intel drives that I picked up for $150 each from Newegg (in the Dane-Elec kits).
I remember one slashdot post where the guy claimed he had written a million lines of code without a single bug. However, he had about twenty spelling errors in his post. When I pointed that out though, I was down-modded for being a grammar troll but I think it was relevant to point out the ridiculousness of someone who claims to write a million lines of perfect code who couldn't even get through a sentence without spelling and grammar errors.
Well, he did use honeycomb but basically said that hexagons came out of behavior (animal created structures where animals == bees or people) so you're right, I shouldn't have used the honeycomb example.
However, the other examples show that structures that were not created by deliberate animal behavior and refute his point.
But hexagons are very rare in nature.
Yeah, HoneyComb, SnowFlakes, Hexagonnaly symmetric Invertebrates (i.e. 6 Legged SeaStars), and Six-Sided Crystals (Rubies, sapphires, emeralds, etc) are all very rare in nature.
I suppose simply unfriending her would not be feasible. (Maybe she'd take away his computer if he tried or punish him or something)
If you RTFA, the mother actually hacked into his account (guessed his password?), changed the password, and made posts as him.
In a document from the Clark County prosecutor, he alleges she hacked his account, changed his password and posted things that involve slander about his personal life.
A lot of activities and mental states which do not harm people are considered morally wrong. For example, homosexuality, coveting and envy, pride, "thoughtcrime" in the novel, 1984, etc.
If you RTFA, the experiment is very different. It wasn't about "subjective" moralities like the ones you are mentioning where there may not even be a risk of physical harm.
Allowing someone to do things you know to be dangerous was not considered wrong unless the person was actually hurt. For example, someone with their brain scrambled might think it was OK if kids were playing Russian Roulette as long as no one actually died.
Basically, it made people make judgements only on the outcomes rather than on the whole act itself. If a person came out of the situation OK, then it wasn't "wrong".
SATs over 750 each Certified Mensa IQ High metablosim
Can you explain to me what a metablosim is? I must not be the genius you are since I've never heard of that word.
It has "holes" in the letters to save ink. So instead of 30% less ink usage this college would have about 45% less ink usage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecofont
Big problem though -- reading this font, the holes line up and cause banding which makes it look like the printer is running out of ink or that the printer is broken at a quick glance. Also the banding causes eyestrain... even if they move the holes around randomly (which would be hard to do right), the font is not as easy to read as a filled in font.
No need for an arms race... right now they coexist quite well. Get a small SSD just big enough for your boot drive and a large HD for your data drive. It's the best of both worlds. They are already offering laptops with hybrids and the new SSD's have the potential to be very small so they could easily fit in most laptops with a second normal HD if they introduce a smaller SATA format.
Price / GB compared to performance == not so good.
I just bought a drive from Newegg.com. They were selling the Dane-Elec repackaged Intel 80 GB drive (with a USB upgrade kit) for $150 -- under $2/GB.
It's a G1 Intel drive but it can do 35,000 read IOPS per second (only 3,300 write IOPS though). Still much better random performance than anything other than the G2 Intel.
The linear performance of the Intel drives isn't so great (movie ripping / etc) but if you know you're doing linear work, storing the linear data files on a Velociraptor (or even a fast 7200 RPM drive) turns out to be way more effective $$$/GB for your budget than any SSD.
Our society seems bent on passing laws to continually "protect the children". But 99% of these laws seem to really be some way of either intruding on our privacy or a curtailing of the rights of people under 18 (or under 21 for alcohol). Some of these are totally ridiculous, such as the whole idea of a single "sexting" message being passed around a high school causing half the kids in the school to be registered as sex offenders and child pornographers for the rest of their lives.
At some point, people have to become adults within our society and suspending all their rights and "protecting" them from the real world until they hit a magic age isn't a good way to prepare them for adulthood. Neither is it the gov'ts job to raise our children -- rather it is parent's who should "protect" their own children, not the gov't.
FWIW, the FusionIO product is not a simple drive replacement the way a SSD is. It doesn't boot and requires drivers to operate, plus the "control logic" is not self-contained but rather part of the driver. It uses your System CPU and system RAM to help handle bookkeeping rather than just the controller and cache on the drive itself.
Nature or nurture? We really have no way of knowing. I suspect that we find 19 year olds becoming adults precisely because we expect that to be the case. Not too long ago, 14 was a marrying age, and I don't recall anyone of that time period thinking that this was odd or 'too much for them to handle'.
In 1776, the average life expectancy for surviving infants was 35 years. If you didn't get married at age 14, chances were pretty high you wouldn't live to see your grandchildren.
Insuring cars, yes, especially gap insurance. Nothing sucks more than crashing a two year old car and realizing you have to finish off payments for it plus the replacement.
Gap insurance is a scam... typically you end up paying about $500 for $2000 of insurance coverage - that rapidly decreases over time. Not to mention it doesn't necessarily cover your deductible of $500-$1000 anyhow. Put the extra $500-$1000 towards the downpayment or find a decent auto insurance company whose auto insurance policy pays for the full price of the replacement cost. (Quite a few policies have a new car provision for the first two years).