Well, lets not forget that it used to be *the* browser to use. I guess that doesn't say much about the state of our browsers at the time, especially since css wasn't around and the web was much simpler.
This new twist on the experiment (where the subject can very easily tell that the pain they are 'inflicting' is virtual) is interesting. One would naturally assume that the emotional repercussions would be non-existant in such a case, yet this research shows that people nevertheless feel some amount of stress. Interesting indeed. Anyone that has played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic knows that you, as the player, can choose the way of the light or dark side depending on your reactions to certain circumstances. Although I'm fully aware it's just a game, replaying the game in the role of the dark side and making all the "nasty" decisions gave me genuine feelings of guilt or discomfort in a few of the circumstances presented.
This came as a complete surprise to me, having spent large portions of my gaming life shooted and hacking my way through various FPS. But KOTOR is seriously immersive - definitely recommended for anyone that wants to pit their logical mind again their emotional responses.
The problem? For most people, the real 3d effect is disturbing and causes headache. I think the theory goes that the effect is too good for the poor brain, which now expects the sensation of physical motion to be coming along with the visual image. Also there's no focal depth, unlike real life. Every pixel is in focus regardless of whether its close or far in the 3D scene. And even if areas of image could be made out of focus depending on where the eye looks, there would be no parallax effects.
In addition (as anyone with binoculars knows), even with just one flat plane its difficult to get the focal depth right for each eye, not to mention matching the x,y positions exactly so that the eyes don't have to look apart/together/one-up-one-down more than they normally would.
With prescription glasses, a new pair takes a little getting used to; even when each lens is very closely matched to the eye it is rarely perfect and the differences are uncomfortable until the brain and eyes adjust. And that's just a small imperfection in the focal depth (no x,y misalignment).
So there is waaaay more to VR than just "slap a couple of LCDs in front of your face with a different picture on each one".
I think it'll be a very long time before it is possible to do all of the above with cheap consumer hardware.
I do enjoy playing with something inflatable but it's a bit different shape and you play with it in a different fashion and well....I've already said too much:P Put down that bicycle pump - they have drugs to help with "inflation" issues these days. And I don't even want to know what you've got projected onto it - you're not fooling me with that "come see my art project" line again!
A few weeks ago Fox threatened Quicksilverscreen (and Quicksilverscreen's ISP) with a takedown notice. Not because Quicksilverscreen served any infringing material, but because it linked to it on YouTube (amongst others).
I don't know if I would consider a year as "long-term." I would view that more as short to medium-term (at most). 5-10 years would be the beginnings of "long-term," and I'm sure we don't really know what sort of effects living in zero gravity for that long would have. Lack of gravity aside, high energy solar particles may have serious effects with longer term exposure.
Astronauts have reported seeing this solar radiation with there eyes closed, as particles whiz through their eyeballs inducing Cherenkov radiation (flashs of light).
On earth, our atmosphere and magnetosphere protect us from these solar particles, but for extended stays in space the story is different. Maybe the effects of zero-g can be countered by excercise or centripetal force, but all that solar radiation might be harder to contend with.
I know slashdot is for nerds (and I happen to use mysql databases myself), but honestly - an old article comparing databases? Must... keep... eyelids.. open...
I think you're missing the point a bit. Much like asteroids, where if you go off one side of the screen your ship appears on the other, the article descibes a universe where as you go out one side, you enter the other side. The difference is that as you enter the other side, the universe is effectively rotated by 36 degrees. So its possible you could see yourself if you looked far enough into the distance, but your view of yourself would be rotated.
So, there is no outside, as such, at least in the dimensions we understand.
I didn't say Flash is perfect for *All* applications. I said it's not a practical concern for most workloads. I'm sure you can construct perverse usage-scenarios where it's not. Well, absolutely.:) I'm sure we could speculate on this endlessly too. What would be interesting, however, is for someone to come up with a profile of typical disk usage for common operating systems in normal circumstances. That could be used as a model to estimate flash endurance and see what effect blocksize and filesystem optimisations have on flash lifetime.
I wouldn't be surprised if the HD manufacturers already have this kind of information, and it'd be very interesting to see it.
the availability of energy and water, both of which are increasingly rare Eh? What about that huge nuclear furnace in the sky? And the ones we'll be building on Earth? What about two thirds of the planet's surface? That's not runny cheese you know!
What everyone fails to factor in is in flash block size. That one million cycles is a per block maximum.
Flash memory is organised into blocks varying from 64 KiB to 256 KiB.
To change a single byte in a block, the whole block has to be erased and re-written with the old content (but including the changed byte).
So you can't claim 1 GiB x 1 x 10^6 writes = 1.1 x 10^15 writes, because each location is not individually erasable and writable. This would be the very best case usage scenario, where you get the maximum number of writes out of the device.
Worst case using the 1 GiB Flash drive example is having blocks of 256KiB. This potentially reduces the amount of data you can write to a minimum of (1GiB / 256KiB) x 1 x 10^6 writes = 4.1 x 10^9 writes, assuming you only wrote one byte at the same location in each block.
Doing this at 10MiB/s continuously, that'd be 390 seconds to exceed the 1 million write cycles.
Both our synarios are extremely unlikely to occur in the real world, so the actual lifetime would sit nicely between the two.
Flash = very good for storing lots of big things (like digital photos), very bad for storing lots of little things that change frequently (like some filesystems).
Anyone that thinks that life is quiet for hard-disks should run filemon from sysinternals.com under XP. There's a hell of a lot chattering away in the background.
So the durability of flash I still find a bit questionable as a universal hard-disk replacement. Maybe with careful changes to the operating systems and software to prevent regular writing it wouldn't be a problem, but at the moment I figure it's still a bit borderline.
Hmm. I actually quite like some of the wires. They're effective tethers to prevent my young children running off with aforementioned mouse, keyboard etc.
Arguably, this is the important part, and one reason why Flash would never have been a good replacement for a HD even if the speed issues were resolved:
Flash memory is popular because it retains data without a constant electric charge. Such chips aren't usually used in place of disk drives, because of their higher cost and because there are limits on how many times data can be written. Phase-change memory doesn't have that problem (emphasis mine)
In the days that followed, much of the speculation and analysis was misleading, inaccurate or just plain outlandish. Sounds just like the speculation that used to exist over the hardware in the console.
Summary of TFA: We don't really know what's going on, but we've got a few clues so we'll wildly extrapolate forward from those.
In other news, no tea in the vending machine this morning - this probably means that Asia is now underwater and establishing a subsea uber-race.
You want to condemn your daughter to a life of excessive working hours and poverty? What kind of parent are you? A pretty good parent if you ask me!
It's not all about money and free time. Many people (myself included) prefer longer hours and lower pay to do something they love, rather than sitting bored in an office or doing something they hate.
The best we can do as a parents is encourage our children to do what they enjoy, and leave the decisions about what they do up to them. Given the amount of our lives spent at work, it's pretty important to either enjoy it, or feel you're doing something worthwhile.
Mind you, the lucky ones have money, free time, and enjoy what they do.:)
1,000 cans of the neon-colored plastic goop are packed into Shriver's one-car garage in this town outside Philadelphia Just needs one unstable can, and BOOM! One explosion in a spaghetti factory.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, lets not forget that it used to be *the* browser to use. I guess that doesn't say much about the state of our browsers at the time, especially since css wasn't around and the web was much simpler.
Finally we can make our own chocolate teapots. :)
This came as a complete surprise to me, having spent large portions of my gaming life shooted and hacking my way through various FPS. But KOTOR is seriously immersive - definitely recommended for anyone that wants to pit their logical mind again their emotional responses.
And even if areas of image could be made out of focus depending on where the eye looks, there would be no parallax effects.
In addition (as anyone with binoculars knows), even with just one flat plane its difficult to get the focal depth right for each eye, not to mention matching the x,y positions exactly so that the eyes don't have to look apart/together/one-up-one-down more than they normally would.
With prescription glasses, a new pair takes a little getting used to; even when each lens is very closely matched to the eye it is rarely perfect and the differences are uncomfortable until the brain and eyes adjust. And that's just a small imperfection in the focal depth (no x,y misalignment).
So there is waaaay more to VR than just "slap a couple of LCDs in front of your face with a different picture on each one".
I think it'll be a very long time before it is possible to do all of the above with cheap consumer hardware.
A few weeks ago Fox threatened Quicksilverscreen (and Quicksilverscreen's ISP) with a takedown notice. Not because Quicksilverscreen served any infringing material, but because it linked to it on YouTube (amongst others).
http://quicksilverscreen.com/is-linking-illegal/
So is Australia setting the precident for the US? I hope not.
Astronauts have reported seeing this solar radiation with there eyes closed, as particles whiz through their eyeballs inducing Cherenkov radiation (flashs of light).
On earth, our atmosphere and magnetosphere protect us from these solar particles, but for extended stays in space the story is different. Maybe the effects of zero-g can be countered by excercise or centripetal force, but all that solar radiation might be harder to contend with.
I know slashdot is for nerds (and I happen to use mysql databases myself), but honestly - an old article comparing databases? Must... keep... eyelids.. open...
http://video.on.nytimes.com/ifr_main.jsp?nsid=a71
I think you're missing the point a bit. Much like asteroids, where if you go off one side of the screen your ship appears on the other, the article descibes a universe where as you go out one side, you enter the other side. The difference is that as you enter the other side, the universe is effectively rotated by 36 degrees. So its possible you could see yourself if you looked far enough into the distance, but your view of yourself would be rotated.
So, there is no outside, as such, at least in the dimensions we understand.
We like complex stuff.
Complex stuff is sometimes too complicated.
Simple stuff is easy.
Draw your own conclusions.
What everyone fails to factor in is in flash block size. That one million cycles is a per block maximum.
Flash memory is organised into blocks varying from 64 KiB to 256 KiB.
To change a single byte in a block, the whole block has to be erased and re-written with the old content (but including the changed byte).
So you can't claim 1 GiB x 1 x 10^6 writes = 1.1 x 10^15 writes, because each location is not individually erasable and writable. This would be the very best case usage scenario, where you get the maximum number of writes out of the device.
Worst case using the 1 GiB Flash drive example is having blocks of 256KiB. This potentially reduces the amount of data you can write to a minimum of (1GiB / 256KiB) x 1 x 10^6 writes = 4.1 x 10^9 writes, assuming you only wrote one byte at the same location in each block.
Doing this at 10MiB/s continuously, that'd be 390 seconds to exceed the 1 million write cycles.
Both our synarios are extremely unlikely to occur in the real world, so the actual lifetime would sit nicely between the two.
Flash = very good for storing lots of big things (like digital photos), very bad for storing lots of little things that change frequently (like some filesystems).
Anyone that thinks that life is quiet for hard-disks should run filemon from sysinternals.com under XP. There's a hell of a lot chattering away in the background.
So the durability of flash I still find a bit questionable as a universal hard-disk replacement. Maybe with careful changes to the operating systems and software to prevent regular writing it wouldn't be a problem, but at the moment I figure it's still a bit borderline.
Hmm. I actually quite like some of the wires. They're effective tethers to prevent my young children running off with aforementioned mouse, keyboard etc.
Slashdot readers long ago mutated a tolerance to dupes, trolls and reading TFA...
Summary of TFA: We don't really know what's going on, but we've got a few clues so we'll wildly extrapolate forward from those.
In other news, no tea in the vending machine this morning - this probably means that Asia is now underwater and establishing a subsea uber-race.
You're stuck with pie, and all your cake belong to me.
BWAHAHAHAHAAHAAaaaa!
It's not all about money and free time. Many people (myself included) prefer longer hours and lower pay to do something they love, rather than sitting bored in an office or doing something they hate.
The best we can do as a parents is encourage our children to do what they enjoy, and leave the decisions about what they do up to them. Given the amount of our lives spent at work, it's pretty important to either enjoy it, or feel you're doing something worthwhile.
Mind you, the lucky ones have money, free time, and enjoy what they do.
Well, where there was allofmp3, I guess others will pop up.
...have all been mentioned recently, but how trustworthy they are is another question.
http://www.mp3sale.ru/
http://www.gomusic.ru/
http://mp3stor.ru/
For those that want more detail than the videos provide:
/ acisp.05.pdf
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~melanie/rfid_guardian/papers