Re:remember that silly 3d hologram game
on
The Future of Holograms
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I remember that it seemed rigged. It never played quite the same way twice despite being totally linear like their other rigged game Dragon's Lair. Those things were quarter eating monsters.
The games flashed when you need to press the button or move the stick, and even if you could do a particular sequnce perfectly, after three or so successful sequences you would always die in the next one no matter what. When you went to do it again it would work fine. You would loose all your lives pretty quickly and have to put in more quarters to continue the game.
Did anyone else find that was the case, or is there some geek out there who was actually able to play one of these games all the way through without paying out repeatedly?
Based on scientific realism and the quality of the show in general:
CSI: 8 Miami: 4 (maybe 5) NY: 6 (too early to tell).
Overall I think CSI is generally accurate with it's science but obviously makes it seem like things happen a lot faster and easier than in reality. They also seem to have a horseshoe up their ass when it comes to finding evidence.
Interestingly enough I have a friend in forensics in Vancouver who tells me the LV private lab the show is about is, in fact, a real lab and one of the best in the world. People from Canada go there for courses and seminars (and probably to gamble).
As for Miami, what a stink fest. A wining combination of bad overacting, bad science and nice boobs. They should rename it CSI: Baywatch.
NY is ok but still not as good as the original. Personally I could do without NY or Miami but I do like CSI a lot.
3) The Rebuplicans voting didn't actually have any problems and so there were no voters to interview abotu it and the woman they interviewed simply defended the machines by saying people were making the mistakes and that it was happening to everyone.
I love how Bush supporters call any news that could possibly be construed as negative towards Bush or the Republicans 'propaganda', but their candidate lying to the country and the world is just a 'mistake'.
Fair enough, I'll buy that. I did hear about the internet copying going on, didn't know it was these stations though.
It was a change from the formulaic music advertising going on pretty much everywhere.
Personally I don't listen to any crappy Canadian radio stations. I listen to Virgin Radio UK and Virgin Classics on the internet. Personally internet radio is the best thing around, but sometimes like a little DJ talk.
Oh yeah I know royalties are paid for all music played. The article refers to the practice of music companies paying radio stations to get their new hits played, thus making them new hits.
So all I am saying is that no music company is paying to get 70's and 80's music played, but the radio stations do pay to play those songs of course.
I have to agree with that. I didn't actually know there was a law against this (and for all I know there isn't where I live in Canada) but I noticed this happening about 2 or 3 years ago in Canada.
Radio stations I used to like to listen to were playing top 40 hits non-stop during the day, and often two stations would be playing exactly the same song at the same time. I said to myself, that isn't music it's advertising space.
In Canada there was a backlash against it by a number of top DJ's who got sick of playing this crap and the left to join a group of radio stations that were formed across the country (by a big corporation mind you) that lets them play whatever the hell they want. It ain't always in my taste but I guaruntee no one paid to get Whitesnake or Genisis played;-).
Hopefully this means the Rock/Classic Rock stations I was listening to can stop playing top 40 music.
Ahhh, well thanks for that enlightenment mav. Seems like that guy didn't read the book very carefully.
Someone mod this guy up and the other guy down. I swear Slashdotters mod up anything that 'seems' to be information without actually checking if it is accurate information.
Can't say I have read that book, but it is flat out wrong. Paul and Bill met in high school. He was not a friend of Gates' mother. I suppose that is why that inacurate biography is 'unnofficial'. The guy was 2 years older than him, how could he have been doing charity work with Gates' mother?
Allen was also a interested programmer and worked with Gates during the entire period, from meeting in highschool until they created Microsoft.
Heck, any Google on this will turn up tons of results explaining just that (including Encarta)
Basic was co-authored with Allen, it was not just Gates' creation.
Finally Allen is generally credited with spearheading the QDOS deal that got MS started (even by the IBM 'geeks' who worked with him acknowledge this).
Why can't anyone get their facts straight before posting on SD?
Actually Bill Gates was not a Negotiator. I don't know where you got that from. The people at IBM would not even have agreed to work with him because he was so arrogant if it wasn't for how convincing Paul Allen was.
Paul Allen was pretty much the brains and the charm behind getting Dos into the PC. Bill was just his friend.
I would still like to see a box that has the capabilities for a TIVO like device for under $300. The need for a "TV Tuner" seems to be dying off as many people (In fact most in Canada) have either Digital Cable or Satellite, meaning a separte box in necessary for tuning anyways.
It would need VIVO, an MPEG2 decoder, DVD-Rom(RW?), large IDE harddrive, reasonable processor (1GHz?), a serial port for interacting with RS-232 connectors on cable and sattelite boxes, and a small form factor (ITX).
I checked out hardware available to do this from a local store and was about to get it down to about ~$500CDN ~$400US with one of those VIA boards.
Am I mistaken in what happened. It was my understanding that this was unamplified.
The dishes were simply used to improve the focus of the tranmission and the reception on the other end. The dish both focuses the out going signal and collects more of the incomming signal than a regular antenna.
There was a documentry done by the CBC in Canada called 'Dark Side of the Moon' that addressed this although I don't know where you are going to get it. You can probably bittorrent the *cough* FOX documentary on it, though I don't know how honest you can rely on FOX to be.
There are some websites (just Goggle for them you lazy bastard;-)) on the topic but I would have to say I don't find many of them (for both sides) terribly reputable. Reputable people don't tend to spend time maintaining websites to support or deny conspiracies.
It is not simply that it was too convenient. It is for a host of other reasons. NASA did quite clearly fake or modify a number of pictures. This doesn't mean they didn't go to the moon but NASA doesn't want to explain it either. NASA regularly doctors photos of space today. Hubble telescope pictures are a good example of this, where an artist is hired to make it look more exciting. This is a well known practice, so I don't see anything conspirtorical about it except that with the moon they don't want to say anything.
I would say that based on the evidence from both sides that we did probably go to the moon at least on some of the trips. Although whether or not the first moon landing happened is a bit of a question for me.
My problem is that both sides like to make up facts and both sides like to ignore each others facts.
Actually at my university they have a group within the school of business that is completely responsible for patents. They provice a free service to help develop the IP rights for the professor or professors who developed the work. They will take care of forming a company if necessary or the licensing of the rights to others.
This has allowed Queen's (Kingston Ontario) to form a couple of phamaceutical businesses around pharmaceuticals developed here. There have also been other non-medical examples too. The money goes mostly to the researchers and to pay the expenses, like any employees. Also, some goes to pay the patent and business guys of course. Almost none goes directly to the University.
As for software, I think many who do develop software as part of their research (myself included) like to be able to share their work and prefer open source to private patents. But, point well made. Even open source should make sure they get a patent to ensure it remains open source.
Sorry to double post, but I just checked your sig link and I suppose the question one might ask is if and when YOU might port your freeBSD update tool to one of the binary distributions;-).
Ok before I get berated by the karma (whoring) police I do realize these are not binary diffs. But, seriously, linux has been using diff's as a way to save bandwidth before Windows even offered 'updates'. Another example of Windows 'innovation' I guess.
Yes, I see how it is neat that there is a binary version of this process with Windows but linux is primarily a source based operating system. It is that way becuase the software is designed to be compiled for a variety of systems and setups and work with all of them.
I do understand the authors question though, but it really should be reworded. Linux is not a OS in the sense that Windows is an OS. He should perhaps be more correctly asking when one of the 'binary' distributions of Linux (or of a Linux 'based' OS to be exact) will plan on offering this. Binary packages are really only offered on a per distribution basis with the binaries not being very compatible between distro's and systems (although some basic compatibility is generally there). As to that question who knows and who cares I use Gentoo, and after trying almost every one of the binary distro's
Those-who-are-not-with-us-are-against-us? I don't know what you are referring to. Honestly.
For starters I am Canadian not American. And these days, believe me I do not count myself 'with' the American government or corporations in general (particularly the policies of George Bush's and his Christian fanatic regieme). That said, I do not ignorantly despise them for no reason either, like many Europeans have chosen to do recently.
I clearly stated in my comment that I agreed with the need to go after MS for bad business practices, but the EU's ruling is poorly considered and will in all likelyhood be defeated on that basis. A lot of good that does them.
My point still stands it is just my opinion of what is happening in the EU. What I am tired of is cliche and poorly thought out counter arguments like yours. Just because they fine EU corps has nothing to do with what motivated this ruling. There is nothing black and white about my comment. In the least. I slammed the EU's method of attack while supporting the battle in general.
I am not at all surprised MS is making progress on this appeal. The ruling was really a piss poor way for the EU to flex its collective muscle against a US corporate giant. Not that MS doesn't deserve to be investigated for anit-competitive business practices. In particular the recent (or not so recent for some) revelations that MS has been funding nearly all of the so called independant studies showning MS products as better, faster, safer and even cheaper than open source.
The problem here is much like the problem with the Kyoto protocal. It's the right idea but so poorly drafted that it renders it completely meaningless.
It is about time someone put MS in its place, but if you are going to use bull**** allegations to do it then you are going to fail in the end.
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. If you follow some of the links it seems that JPEG is a standard that happens to be the same as this technology, but it was not based on the technology. Again, I can't tell for sure. The articles are vague. But I was hoping someone here could shed some light on this. I didn't say they didn't invent what they patented, but I thought JPEG was meant to be a public domain standard unlike say GIF.
Sorry, you are right they are different in the specifics of their implementation. Also, sorry about the blocks thing. However, from a source coding theory perspective they are both very similar transform coding techniques.
The image is transformed into the frequency domain, threshold coding is done (throwing away the perceptually 'insignificant' components) and the remaining coefficients are then losslessly compressed.
I keep forgetting that/. is patrolled by the nitpicking police;-).
Basically they are the same concept with the advantage that the wavelet transform is much better at transforming non-stationary signals like images.
Mostly I was curious about the IP stuff and no one seems to have a detailed answer for that yet. Just because it doesn't use any of the JPEG standard doesn't mean it isn't already patented in some form.
It seems to be, based on the links here that they don't own JPEG, but have patented a technology that is identical to JPEG. JPEG developed the same technology seperate from them (correct me if I am wrong).
What I am wondering about is the new JPEG2000 standard. Do they own that?
Just FYI JPEG2000 is very similar to JPEG in design except it uses the Discrete Wavelet Transform instead of the Discrete Cosine Transform to transform the 8x8 pixel blocks. It is less blocky than JPEG in general.
Seems to me this is a little stupid as neither company invented DCT or even the Huffman and run-length coding that make up the components of this scheme, and all of the components are public domain intellectual property.
This litigation seems like a cash grab more than protecting there IP. They wait until everyone is freely using it (and for the most part believing it is a free technology) and then they sue the largest companies using it (hey why arn't they sueing Microsoft?).
Well as Wally pointed out once on Dilbert he didn't have porn on his computer, he simply had sequences of 1's and 0's, which the people who found the porn caused to form pornographic images on the screen. So truthfully they were the ones responsible for the pornography.
Similarly if the FBI or RIAA finds.mp3's on my computer and they play them to find out what song they are, they are in effect reproducing the music themselves. So I guess unless they actually catch me listening to said music I havn't done anything wrong by simply storing harmless sequences of 1's and 0's on my computer.;-)
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I remember that it seemed rigged. It never played quite the same way twice despite being totally linear like their other rigged game Dragon's Lair. Those things were quarter eating monsters.
The games flashed when you need to press the button or move the stick, and even if you could do a particular sequnce perfectly, after three or so successful sequences you would always die in the next one no matter what. When you went to do it again it would work fine. You would loose all your lives pretty quickly and have to put in more quarters to continue the game.
Did anyone else find that was the case, or is there some geek out there who was actually able to play one of these games all the way through without paying out repeatedly?
Based on scientific realism and the quality of the show in general:
CSI: 8
Miami: 4 (maybe 5)
NY: 6 (too early to tell).
Overall I think CSI is generally accurate with it's science but obviously makes it seem like things happen a lot faster and easier than in reality. They also seem to have a horseshoe up their ass when it comes to finding evidence.
Interestingly enough I have a friend in forensics in Vancouver who tells me the LV private lab the show is about is, in fact, a real lab and one of the best in the world. People from Canada go there for courses and seminars (and probably to gamble).
As for Miami, what a stink fest. A wining combination of bad overacting, bad science and nice boobs. They should rename it CSI: Baywatch.
NY is ok but still not as good as the original. Personally I could do without NY or Miami but I do like CSI a lot.
3) The Rebuplicans voting didn't actually have any problems and so there were no voters to interview abotu it and the woman they interviewed simply defended the machines by saying people were making the mistakes and that it was happening to everyone. I love how Bush supporters call any news that could possibly be construed as negative towards Bush or the Republicans 'propaganda', but their candidate lying to the country and the world is just a 'mistake'.
Fair enough, I'll buy that. I did hear about the internet copying going on, didn't know it was these stations though. It was a change from the formulaic music advertising going on pretty much everywhere. Personally I don't listen to any crappy Canadian radio stations. I listen to Virgin Radio UK and Virgin Classics on the internet. Personally internet radio is the best thing around, but sometimes like a little DJ talk.
Oh yeah I know royalties are paid for all music played. The article refers to the practice of music companies paying radio stations to get their new hits played, thus making them new hits.
So all I am saying is that no music company is paying to get 70's and 80's music played, but the radio stations do pay to play those songs of course.
I have to agree with that. I didn't actually know there was a law against this (and for all I know there isn't where I live in Canada) but I noticed this happening about 2 or 3 years ago in Canada.
;-).
Radio stations I used to like to listen to were playing top 40 hits non-stop during the day, and often two stations would be playing exactly the same song at the same time. I said to myself, that isn't music it's advertising space.
In Canada there was a backlash against it by a number of top DJ's who got sick of playing this crap and the left to join a group of radio stations that were formed across the country (by a big corporation mind you) that lets them play whatever the hell they want. It ain't always in my taste but I guaruntee no one paid to get Whitesnake or Genisis played
Hopefully this means the Rock/Classic Rock stations I was listening to can stop playing top 40 music.
Crap, and I didn't check it out. You caught me ;-). But I suppose I don't have any mod points either so doesn't much matter.
Ahhh, well thanks for that enlightenment mav. Seems like that guy didn't read the book very carefully.
Someone mod this guy up and the other guy down. I swear Slashdotters mod up anything that 'seems' to be information without actually checking if it is accurate information.
Can't say I have read that book, but it is flat out wrong. Paul and Bill met in high school. He was not a friend of Gates' mother. I suppose that is why that inacurate biography is 'unnofficial'. The guy was 2 years older than him, how could he have been doing charity work with Gates' mother? Allen was also a interested programmer and worked with Gates during the entire period, from meeting in highschool until they created Microsoft. Heck, any Google on this will turn up tons of results explaining just that (including Encarta) Basic was co-authored with Allen, it was not just Gates' creation. Finally Allen is generally credited with spearheading the QDOS deal that got MS started (even by the IBM 'geeks' who worked with him acknowledge this). Why can't anyone get their facts straight before posting on SD?
Actually Bill Gates was not a Negotiator. I don't know where you got that from. The people at IBM would not even have agreed to work with him because he was so arrogant if it wasn't for how convincing Paul Allen was.
Paul Allen was pretty much the brains and the charm behind getting Dos into the PC. Bill was just his friend.
IMHO: He got lucky.
I would still like to see a box that has the capabilities for a TIVO like device for under $300. The need for a "TV Tuner" seems to be dying off as many people (In fact most in Canada) have either Digital Cable or Satellite, meaning a separte box in necessary for tuning anyways.
It would need VIVO, an MPEG2 decoder, DVD-Rom(RW?), large IDE harddrive, reasonable processor (1GHz?), a serial port for interacting with RS-232 connectors on cable and sattelite boxes, and a small form factor (ITX).
I checked out hardware available to do this from a local store and was about to get it down to about ~$500CDN ~$400US with one of those VIA boards.
Am I mistaken in what happened. It was my understanding that this was unamplified.
The dishes were simply used to improve the focus of the tranmission and the reception on the other end. The dish both focuses the out going signal and collects more of the incomming signal than a regular antenna.
They did not violate the power limits did they?
There was a documentry done by the CBC in Canada called 'Dark Side of the Moon' that addressed this although I don't know where you are going to get it. You can probably bittorrent the *cough* FOX documentary on it, though I don't know how honest you can rely on FOX to be. There are some websites (just Goggle for them you lazy bastard ;-)) on the topic but I would have to say I don't find many of them (for both sides) terribly reputable. Reputable people don't tend to spend time maintaining websites to support or deny conspiracies.
It is not simply that it was too convenient. It is for a host of other reasons. NASA did quite clearly fake or modify a number of pictures. This doesn't mean they didn't go to the moon but NASA doesn't want to explain it either. NASA regularly doctors photos of space today. Hubble telescope pictures are a good example of this, where an artist is hired to make it look more exciting. This is a well known practice, so I don't see anything conspirtorical about it except that with the moon they don't want to say anything.
I would say that based on the evidence from both sides that we did probably go to the moon at least on some of the trips. Although whether or not the first moon landing happened is a bit of a question for me.
My problem is that both sides like to make up facts and both sides like to ignore each others facts.
Actually at my university they have a group within the school of business that is completely responsible for patents. They provice a free service to help develop the IP rights for the professor or professors who developed the work. They will take care of forming a company if necessary or the licensing of the rights to others.
This has allowed Queen's (Kingston Ontario) to form a couple of phamaceutical businesses around pharmaceuticals developed here. There have also been other non-medical examples too. The money goes mostly to the researchers and to pay the expenses, like any employees. Also, some goes to pay the patent and business guys of course. Almost none goes directly to the University.
As for software, I think many who do develop software as part of their research (myself included) like to be able to share their work and prefer open source to private patents. But, point well made. Even open source should make sure they get a patent to ensure it remains open source.
Sorry to double post, but I just checked your sig link and I suppose the question one might ask is if and when YOU might port your freeBSD update tool to one of the binary distributions ;-).
Sorry about that, you are correct, you did. My own impatience has foiled me again.
Ok before I get berated by the karma (whoring) police I do realize these are not binary diffs. But, seriously, linux has been using diff's as a way to save bandwidth before Windows even offered 'updates'. Another example of Windows 'innovation' I guess.
Yes, I see how it is neat that there is a binary version of this process with Windows but linux is primarily a source based operating system. It is that way becuase the software is designed to be compiled for a variety of systems and setups and work with all of them.
I do understand the authors question though, but it really should be reworded. Linux is not a OS in the sense that Windows is an OS. He should perhaps be more correctly asking when one of the 'binary' distributions of Linux (or of a Linux 'based' OS to be exact) will plan on offering this. Binary packages are really only offered on a per distribution basis with the binaries not being very compatible between distro's and systems (although some basic compatibility is generally there). As to that question who knows and who cares I use Gentoo, and after trying almost every one of the binary distro's
Those-who-are-not-with-us-are-against-us? I don't know what you are referring to. Honestly.
For starters I am Canadian not American. And these days, believe me I do not count myself 'with' the American government or corporations in general (particularly the policies of George Bush's and his Christian fanatic regieme). That said, I do not ignorantly despise them for no reason either, like many Europeans have chosen to do recently.
I clearly stated in my comment that I agreed with the need to go after MS for bad business practices, but the EU's ruling is poorly considered and will in all likelyhood be defeated on that basis. A lot of good that does them.
My point still stands it is just my opinion of what is happening in the EU. What I am tired of is cliche and poorly thought out counter arguments like yours. Just because they fine EU corps has nothing to do with what motivated this ruling. There is nothing black and white about my comment. In the least. I slammed the EU's method of attack while supporting the battle in general.
I am not at all surprised MS is making progress on this appeal. The ruling was really a piss poor way for the EU to flex its collective muscle against a US corporate giant. Not that MS doesn't deserve to be investigated for anit-competitive business practices. In particular the recent (or not so recent for some) revelations that MS has been funding nearly all of the so called independant studies showning MS products as better, faster, safer and even cheaper than open source. The problem here is much like the problem with the Kyoto protocal. It's the right idea but so poorly drafted that it renders it completely meaningless. It is about time someone put MS in its place, but if you are going to use bull**** allegations to do it then you are going to fail in the end.
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. If you follow some of the links it seems that JPEG is a standard that happens to be the same as this technology, but it was not based on the technology. Again, I can't tell for sure. The articles are vague. But I was hoping someone here could shed some light on this. I didn't say they didn't invent what they patented, but I thought JPEG was meant to be a public domain standard unlike say GIF.
Just out of curiousity, what was your point?
Sorry, you are right they are different in the specifics of their implementation. Also, sorry about the blocks thing. However, from a source coding theory perspective they are both very similar transform coding techniques.
The image is transformed into the frequency domain, threshold coding is done (throwing away the perceptually 'insignificant' components) and the remaining coefficients are then losslessly compressed.
I keep forgetting that /. is patrolled by the nitpicking police ;-).
Basically they are the same concept with the advantage that the wavelet transform is much better at transforming non-stationary signals like images.
Mostly I was curious about the IP stuff and no one seems to have a detailed answer for that yet. Just because it doesn't use any of the JPEG standard doesn't mean it isn't already patented in some form.
It seems to be, based on the links here that they don't own JPEG, but have patented a technology that is identical to JPEG. JPEG developed the same technology seperate from them (correct me if I am wrong).
What I am wondering about is the new JPEG2000 standard. Do they own that?
Just FYI JPEG2000 is very similar to JPEG in design except it uses the Discrete Wavelet Transform instead of the Discrete Cosine Transform to transform the 8x8 pixel blocks. It is less blocky than JPEG in general.
Seems to me this is a little stupid as neither company invented DCT or even the Huffman and run-length coding that make up the components of this scheme, and all of the components are public domain intellectual property.
This litigation seems like a cash grab more than protecting there IP. They wait until everyone is freely using it (and for the most part believing it is a free technology) and then they sue the largest companies using it (hey why arn't they sueing Microsoft?).
Woah man, take a joke, jeez.
Well as Wally pointed out once on Dilbert he didn't have porn on his computer, he simply had sequences of 1's and 0's, which the people who found the porn caused to form pornographic images on the screen. So truthfully they were the ones responsible for the pornography.
Similarly if the FBI or RIAA finds .mp3's on my computer and they play them to find out what song they are, they are in effect reproducing the music themselves. So I guess unless they actually catch me listening to said music I havn't done anything wrong by simply storing harmless sequences of 1's and 0's on my computer.;-)