It turns out that the ticket is issued by a 3rd party that operates the cameras, and not by the city police.
It seems like the city is shirking the responsibility. They should issue the tickets if they really care about enforcing the law. Or, the law should be changed to allow the 3rd-party to enforce the ticket.
They do that. Most lights have a few seconds where it is red in all directions, to allow time for people in the intersection to exit it. This is especially true in lights involving left turns.
Didn't help for the motion blurred scenes though. I don't like motion blurring.
Fact is 24 fps sucks. It's way too low a frame rate.
I think the motion blurring is to compensate for the 24fps issue. I have always found movies to look stuttery, but I was assured that I could not possibly be seeing it because of the motion blur. I've recently discovered why that is wrong: In a typical camera, the shutter is only open for 1/2 of the frame. So 24fps + blur still has 24 "holes" where there is no motion. So yes, I really am seeing the stutter, and no, blurring does not compensate it!
I'd love to see 30fps or 60fps movies. It especially matters when the camera swings around quickly, pans across a scene with objects close to the camera, or in action shots.
I won't agree or disagree with your sentiment, but I do think the analogy is misdirected.
Wikileaks they are the Nation Enquirer of the internet. They present the data in the most inflammatory way possible and it is often incorrect, incomplete, and biased.
As far as I know, The National Enquirer does not present incorrect, incomplete, or biased information in an inflammatory way. They just make shit up. That's a pretty big difference. I could learn a lot from Wikileaks, but I can learn nothing from the Enquirer.
The benefit I found from the new themes thing is that I was able to pick a theme that shaved about 5 pixels off the top by eliminating some of the horizontal lines between the menu bar, address bar, and bookmarks toolbar.
I think subversion works great for this. If they are Windows users, give them TortoiseSVN. They just edit files that look like they are on a network share. The only extra work is that they must check-in documents when they are done with them. And click an option to get the latest before they start working.
Sharepoint is garbage. Document management over AJAX is just a terrible idea. It isn't just that it only works on IE. It's that it only works if your workstation is exactly perfectly right. That means:
- Make sure everyone has the same exact version of office. Service pack and all. - Don't have 2 versions of office installed. - That includes any 3rd-party software that installs office components - Don't upgrade from an old version of office -- just reformat. - Don't even have another browser installed. - Don't have developer tools installed unless you want the user to get popups about debugging.
Sharepoint uses AJAX + ActiveX to try and hand files off from a server to Microsoft Office. It's a bad mish-mash of technologies and it just doesn't work. Microsoft Office was not meant to operate in this way. Neither was IE.
Some other observations about it: - Don't publish forms to Sharepoint. Word is a terrible form-filler anyway. But it won't work if someone else is filling out the same form as you are. - Half the time when someone saves a document, it goes to their local machine and they don't know it. Maybe their sharepoint session timed out while Word was open. Or maybe some permissions problem happened on the server. Who knows. Word does what it does best - saves local documents.
I just now realized that you thought I meant "crackpot" was referring to the article. I was suggesting that my own post get +1 Crackpot. The whole comment was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek.
GDI calls actually used to be hardware accelerated. Even so far back as Windows 3.1. I had a Diamond video card with hardware line drawing and filling routines. I had some benchmarks that were off the chart when running on the card. So yes, GDI could be accelerated in the past.
In Windows Vista, the driver model was changed so GDI cannot be accelerated any longer. In Windows 7, a driver can provide some optional acceleration, but it is still limited.
But to understand why it can't be accelerated now, you have to look at the rendering pipeline. Today, if you want to draw lines and fill shapes, you need to first allocate memory on the card, then send all the texture information to the video card. You want to cram as many textures into one to avoid context switches. Then upload the shaders. Then send all the geometry information, sorted to minimize context changes. To really optimize, you want to batch the geometry information into ideal sized chunks for the card.
A GDI application won't do this. Imagine a GDI application that wants to draw a button: it might start with smoe gray lines, then fill a blue rounded rectangle. Then it could draw some text over that, then maybe draw an image.
This would be so bad on a modern video card you might be better-off to do it in software. This is because each of those operations involved a context switch on the video card. By "context" we mean changing the texture, color, shader, blending, transparency, type of shape (lines -vs- triangles).
Drawing the gray line is one set of geometry and color info. Then the blue square with rounded edges means new geometry and shader/color info. Those are context switches. Then the text is probably a texture, with a particular blending mode. Another switch. Then the background is an image that is not on the video card's memory so it needs to be uploaded now. That is a context switch, and GDI would probably uploads the image each time since it doesn't know if that image was static, or might be modified by the app, or if it will even be used again, or when to deallocate the video memory.
You can't reorder the GDI calls to optimize them for the card, since order determines what draws over other things. I can speculate on hacks to get around that, but what if the video card or driver decided to reorder those calls again? That probably would break certain GDI rendering.
It is definitely possible to do this. Microsoft decided to cut that out in favor of a more modern rendering pipeline in the hopes that applications that really need the performance will move to newer APIs are are more easily accelerated on modern hardware. This should make it easier on video card manufacturers.
I agree with your statement about the ruling yesterday and the corporate personhood stuff. However:
Say goodbye to the free and open internet. Say hello to the tiered-pricing model, and the metered-usage model.
Those things are not in conflict. We have have a free (as in speech) and open (as in open standards) internet regardless of how the pricing and metering is done. We have metered pricing on water, electricity, gasoline, food, etc. It works just fine. Nobody tells me what I can do with my water, or what kind of glasses I can put it in. Freedom and tiered pricing are totally compatible.
The ISPs and cell providers are in a bind: they charged fixed prices while claiming "unlimited" which was simply impossible. (Can you imagine a gas station offering "unlimited" gas for a fixed price as part of their model? That would be silly.) They were wrong to do it, and they must fix it. But that alone does not mean the end of the internet. It is likely inevitable, and it might even be a good thing.
I don't think that is a Slasdot-only phenomenon. I know people who have never used Apple computers who think that they are better for "music and mp3s and YouTube." The only way they get this impression is from marketing. They have listened to MP3s on their generic MP3 player, browsed YouTube on Internet Explorer, and not had any problems. Yet there is some mythos that makes them think that Apples would just somehow do it better. Yet they are picking it for the most mundane things where Apple really isn't any different. It's all perception and marketing.
Apple was better for usability 20 years ago, when it was Mac Classic -vs- Windows 2.0. That kept pace for a little bit, but at this point Operating Systems have matured for the most part, and the average task isn't a whole heck of a lot different on a Mac -vs- Windows. But the stigma still persists.
I think the problem is that most applications use older APIs that aren't compatible with a hardware-accelerated rendering pipeline. They don't double buffer, they update parts of the screen at random, and they may even use controls that plot individual pixels. Those things are nearly impossible to accelerate.
WPF applications (and GDI+?) applications get acceleration provided by the OS. I suspect that IE uses good old Windows GDI, which has some bottlenecks on Vista and Windows 7 since it has to go through an extra layer now that the OS isn't using GDI under the hood.
LWARCDR did not complain. He asked a technical question: should this acceleration be handled by the OS, or the browser? His question applies to IE, Firefox, and Chrome as well. There was no MS bashing in the post: the author includes XWindows as an example.
This phenomenon isn't specific to Japanese. For example, I can eat at Taco Bell 5 out of 7 days of the week, while most people are making a run for the bathroom after just one burrito. I probably have special enzymes to handle it. Also, I read that most Americans can eat 57% more McDonald's cheeseburgers than the average European, and we all know that those are mostly made of seaweed (the cheeseburgers, not the Europeans).
I've always wanted to do that, but with Pac Man. I actually am now inheriting an industrial robot and I am trying to decide what to do with it. I'll count your vote in with this. If I succeed, I'll let you know.
Slashdot Mirror
True. However...
It turns out that the ticket is issued by a 3rd party that operates the cameras, and not by the city police.
It seems like the city is shirking the responsibility. They should issue the tickets if they really care about enforcing the law. Or, the law should be changed to allow the 3rd-party to enforce the ticket.
They do that. Most lights have a few seconds where it is red in all directions, to allow time for people in the intersection to exit it. This is especially true in lights involving left turns.
FYI: The cameras have an additional sensor so that they only take the picture if something enters the intersection.
Didn't help for the motion blurred scenes though. I don't like motion blurring.
Fact is 24 fps sucks. It's way too low a frame rate.
I think the motion blurring is to compensate for the 24fps issue. I have always found movies to look stuttery, but I was assured that I could not possibly be seeing it because of the motion blur. I've recently discovered why that is wrong: In a typical camera, the shutter is only open for 1/2 of the frame. So 24fps + blur still has 24 "holes" where there is no motion. So yes, I really am seeing the stutter, and no, blurring does not compensate it!
I'd love to see 30fps or 60fps movies. It especially matters when the camera swings around quickly, pans across a scene with objects close to the camera, or in action shots.
I won't agree or disagree with your sentiment, but I do think the analogy is misdirected.
Wikileaks they are the Nation Enquirer of the internet. They present the data in the most inflammatory way possible and it is often incorrect, incomplete, and biased.
As far as I know, The National Enquirer does not present incorrect, incomplete, or biased information in an inflammatory way. They just make shit up. That's a pretty big difference. I could learn a lot from Wikileaks, but I can learn nothing from the Enquirer.
The benefit I found from the new themes thing is that I was able to pick a theme that shaved about 5 pixels off the top by eliminating some of the horizontal lines between the menu bar, address bar, and bookmarks toolbar.
The cheese is a lie!
I think subversion works great for this. If they are Windows users, give them TortoiseSVN. They just edit files that look like they are on a network share. The only extra work is that they must check-in documents when they are done with them. And click an option to get the latest before they start working.
Sharepoint is garbage. Document management over AJAX is just a terrible idea. It isn't just that it only works on IE. It's that it only works if your workstation is exactly perfectly right. That means:
- Make sure everyone has the same exact version of office. Service pack and all.
- Don't have 2 versions of office installed.
- That includes any 3rd-party software that installs office components
- Don't upgrade from an old version of office -- just reformat.
- Don't even have another browser installed.
- Don't have developer tools installed unless you want the user to get popups about debugging.
Sharepoint uses AJAX + ActiveX to try and hand files off from a server to Microsoft Office. It's a bad mish-mash of technologies and it just doesn't work. Microsoft Office was not meant to operate in this way. Neither was IE.
Some other observations about it:
- Don't publish forms to Sharepoint. Word is a terrible form-filler anyway. But it won't work if someone else is filling out the same form as you are.
- Half the time when someone saves a document, it goes to their local machine and they don't know it. Maybe their sharepoint session timed out while Word was open. Or maybe some permissions problem happened on the server. Who knows. Word does what it does best - saves local documents.
We just come with better software for it.
We also come with better hardware for it. For now...
I just now realized that you thought I meant "crackpot" was referring to the article. I was suggesting that my own post get +1 Crackpot. The whole comment was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek.
Well, let's go back a bit in history.
GDI calls actually used to be hardware accelerated. Even so far back as Windows 3.1. I had a Diamond video card with hardware line drawing and filling routines. I had some benchmarks that were off the chart when running on the card. So yes, GDI could be accelerated in the past.
In Windows Vista, the driver model was changed so GDI cannot be accelerated any longer. In Windows 7, a driver can provide some optional acceleration, but it is still limited.
But to understand why it can't be accelerated now, you have to look at the rendering pipeline. Today, if you want to draw lines and fill shapes, you need to first allocate memory on the card, then send all the texture information to the video card. You want to cram as many textures into one to avoid context switches. Then upload the shaders. Then send all the geometry information, sorted to minimize context changes. To really optimize, you want to batch the geometry information into ideal sized chunks for the card.
A GDI application won't do this. Imagine a GDI application that wants to draw a button: it might start with smoe gray lines, then fill a blue rounded rectangle. Then it could draw some text over that, then maybe draw an image.
This would be so bad on a modern video card you might be better-off to do it in software. This is because each of those operations involved a context switch on the video card. By "context" we mean changing the texture, color, shader, blending, transparency, type of shape (lines -vs- triangles).
Drawing the gray line is one set of geometry and color info. Then the blue square with rounded edges means new geometry and shader/color info. Those are context switches. Then the text is probably a texture, with a particular blending mode. Another switch. Then the background is an image that is not on the video card's memory so it needs to be uploaded now. That is a context switch, and GDI would probably uploads the image each time since it doesn't know if that image was static, or might be modified by the app, or if it will even be used again, or when to deallocate the video memory.
You can't reorder the GDI calls to optimize them for the card, since order determines what draws over other things. I can speculate on hacks to get around that, but what if the video card or driver decided to reorder those calls again? That probably would break certain GDI rendering.
It is definitely possible to do this. Microsoft decided to cut that out in favor of a more modern rendering pipeline in the hopes that applications that really need the performance will move to newer APIs are are more easily accelerated on modern hardware. This should make it easier on video card manufacturers.
Fair enough. So yes, your question is valid. FYI: I addressed that in another branch of the thread.
That is equally good to know. I will no longer discount the images and commentary. Thanks.
I agree with your statement about the ruling yesterday and the corporate personhood stuff. However:
Say goodbye to the free and open internet. Say hello to the tiered-pricing model, and the metered-usage model.
Those things are not in conflict. We have have a free (as in speech) and open (as in open standards) internet regardless of how the pricing and metering is done. We have metered pricing on water, electricity, gasoline, food, etc. It works just fine. Nobody tells me what I can do with my water, or what kind of glasses I can put it in. Freedom and tiered pricing are totally compatible.
The ISPs and cell providers are in a bind: they charged fixed prices while claiming "unlimited" which was simply impossible. (Can you imagine a gas station offering "unlimited" gas for a fixed price as part of their model? That would be silly.) They were wrong to do it, and they must fix it. But that alone does not mean the end of the internet. It is likely inevitable, and it might even be a good thing.
I don't think that is a Slasdot-only phenomenon. I know people who have never used Apple computers who think that they are better for "music and mp3s and YouTube." The only way they get this impression is from marketing. They have listened to MP3s on their generic MP3 player, browsed YouTube on Internet Explorer, and not had any problems. Yet there is some mythos that makes them think that Apples would just somehow do it better. Yet they are picking it for the most mundane things where Apple really isn't any different. It's all perception and marketing.
Apple was better for usability 20 years ago, when it was Mac Classic -vs- Windows 2.0. That kept pace for a little bit, but at this point Operating Systems have matured for the most part, and the average task isn't a whole heck of a lot different on a Mac -vs- Windows. But the stigma still persists.
Don't UAVs make even MORE sense in space than in the air, where taking a meatbag up there is far more expensive than something unmanned?
I think the problem is that most applications use older APIs that aren't compatible with a hardware-accelerated rendering pipeline. They don't double buffer, they update parts of the screen at random, and they may even use controls that plot individual pixels. Those things are nearly impossible to accelerate.
WPF applications (and GDI+?) applications get acceleration provided by the OS. I suspect that IE uses good old Windows GDI, which has some bottlenecks on Vista and Windows 7 since it has to go through an extra layer now that the OS isn't using GDI under the hood.
LWARCDR did not complain. He asked a technical question: should this acceleration be handled by the OS, or the browser? His question applies to IE, Firefox, and Chrome as well. There was no MS bashing in the post: the author includes XWindows as an example.
This phenomenon isn't specific to Japanese. For example, I can eat at Taco Bell 5 out of 7 days of the week, while most people are making a run for the bathroom after just one burrito. I probably have special enzymes to handle it. Also, I read that most Americans can eat 57% more McDonald's cheeseburgers than the average European, and we all know that those are mostly made of seaweed (the cheeseburgers, not the Europeans).
MOD UP.
A good reply, and me with no mod points. :-(
MOD UP!
This hoax reappears on Slashdot periodically. People need to be aware of it.
The measurements which claimed to show that the speed of light was changing were *based* on looking at slight changes in pulsar frequencies
Quasars, not pulsars.
Yes.
Most pulsars are around 3000 light-years away. Since the speed of light changes over time those pulsars emitted light when it was traveling at a different speed than it is today. So the timing between the pulses will drift.
(At times like this, Slashdot needs a +1 Crackpot moderation.)
I've always wanted to do that, but with Pac Man. I actually am now inheriting an industrial robot and I am trying to decide what to do with it. I'll count your vote in with this. If I succeed, I'll let you know.