hopefully now you have more insight into how seriously we treat end user data
How seriously you treat our data doesn't matter; if the government and its legal apparatus wants to get our data from you, they will. You shouldn't be collecting our data to begin with. Google has no better policies than Microsoft in that regard.
I would wager that Nvidia and ATI are somewhat concerned about ray tracing finally becoming a viable interactive 3D graphics technology. Ray tracing is inherently much simpler than rasterization and can be accelerated simply by adding more CPU cores, memory, and faster clocks.
Intel is all over this because this allows them to compete with the major GPU vendors without developing expensive and highly complex GPU hardware and drivers. They just need to throw more cores into the system, and they're getting good at that.
APIs such as OpenGL and D3D are also hugely encumbered by the current rasterization model for 3D graphics. A ray tracing API doesn't need geometry broken down into triangles and vertices; it can work right off of high-level mathematical descriptions of surfaces such as spheres and NURBS. The only pieces relevant to ray tracing in an API such as OpenGL are the viewing model and the frame buffer management mechanisms.
The only role for a GPU in such a system is to accelerate the compositing of image sources for window managers and things like font glyphs. I suspect we'll see most of the 3D functions stripped out of future GPUs once they can be replaced by generic CPU cores running ray tracing algorithms.
An acquaintance of mine had carbon fiber bicycle frame made to his specifications, and apparently it was somewhat off. He hit a small pothole on the road, and instead of deforming, the frame literally disintegrated in a cloud of dust and fiber. Suddenly the bike he was riding wasn't there anymore. He hit the pavement face first, lost his front teeth and broke his jaw. I have to think that a conventional frame would have failed in such a way that he would have at least had something to hold onto and break his fall somewhat.
More importantly, this would nearly eliminate reasons for developing software for mac altogether for third party developers - they'll get practically the same penetration if they code just for windows and have Mac users just use Parallels.
This reminds me... Anybody remember IBM's OS/2 Warp? One of its most touted features was that it ran Windows better than Windows. Developers realized that they could get the most bang for the buck by focusing exclusively on Windows apps instead of OS/2 apps, and they could still get OS/2 users to buy their software. The end result was that the development of native OS/2 apps stalled. Microsoft then only had to deny IBM the necessary information to continue to support newer versions of Windows in order to kill OS/2.
Apple is in a much better position in that it has an established base of applications and doesn't rely on Windows compatibility to survive. But these new developments seem somewhat disturbing in their similarity to the OS/2 debacle.
aggregation and availability are the problems
on
Google Privacy Quickies
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
People are pointing out that it's perfectly legal for someone to go down a public street and photograph anybody's front door and window, and are using that as a justification for some of Google's problematic privacy policies.
As a recent victim of a burglary in San Francisco, I've come to a different point of view. Sure, it's understandable that an individual should be able to walk down my street and photograph all the property there, especially if it's for some personal project, but when a corporation comes around and systematically photographs every house of a huge portion of San Francisco, and then organizes it into a easily accessable database, and all for profit, then that becomes a issue of a different nature.
In the pre-Google world if a burglar wanted to case a street he or she would have to physically go to that street and take photographs and notes. There is a tangible cost to getting that information that balances out its public availability. Now, all that person has to do is go to Google's street views and get exposed to some ads in order to case out the most vulnerable homes on practically every street in San Francisco. Google's aggregation and packaging of that public information vastly increases the potential for the abuse of privacy, even if the source of that information is public to begin with.
Most recording studios these days use, at the very least, 24bit audio at between 96-196+ khz.
That's because recording studios often subject the raw 24-bit 196khz tracks to extensive digital audio processing and mixing, which tend to lose bits. For example, you can do much more accurate mixing by adding 24-bit numbers and then dithering the sums to 16-bit resolution to make the master to be pressed into CD's.
You raise an interesting question. What is it about cell phone conversations that are so much more annoying than the ambient conversations between the actual people around oneself? I personally don't mind most of the conversation around me in a crowded public area; in fact, much of the time it adds to the positive ambience of a public event or gathering. But add some idiot blabbing into a cell phone and it turns into an annoyance. Everybody I know feels the same way.
I think the thing is that a one-sided cell phone conversation feels like an intrusion into an established social situation. One can always hear the conversations of the actual people around you, but most of the time if feels like it belongs: the people are right there with you, you can hear both sides of the conversation, you can even join in if you feel like it. You don't feel excluded, unless it's some passionate couple total oblivious to everybody else around them.
And that's the thing with cell phone conversations in a public space: it's an exclusive conversation, and the person blabbing into the phone is mostly oblivious to the people around him or her. It feels rude and exclusionary. Normally, people who need a private space for conversation will move themselves to a private space, but cell phone users will instead take that private space from the others around them, and that feels like a violation.
If I start an instance of Mozilla on:0.0, then starting another instance on:0.1 causes Mozilla to demand that I use another profile. Similarly, if I logon to another host where my home directory has been mounted and start Mozilla without closing down the instance running on the previous host, Mozilla again demands that I use another profile.
Because of this, I have a total of 4 personal profiles that I have to maintain in my home directory. Most of the contents are now symlinked to the default profile, but this is still a hassle to set up. Does Seamonkey solve this problem?
Most of us have never sat in the middle of an orchestra or even in a band, so we have no point of reference to hear violins at our right, drums behind up, wind instruments off to the rear left, etc, etc. Most of us would find that cacophony of music to be distracting and distasteful.
On the contrary, I think most people would find the experience exhilarating. Your post reminded me of why I enjoyed singing in a chorus so much, or playing in a drum circle: the total immersion in the sound. It's really a shame that most people have never had that kind of experience.
Reproducing such an experience doesn't require more than two channels of sound though. It only requires the individualized transfer function of your head and pinnae. I can imagine in a future market that audio consumers will have their head transfer functions measured and encoded in a chip that they will use in conjunction with their personal music players in order to reproduce immersive auditory environments -- a new art form that could encompass and extend what we now know as music.
Anybody know if StegFS described in http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ih99-stegfs.pdf/ is actually available? Plausibility deniability of the knowledge of keys to unlock deeper levels of encyryption is an explicit goal of the project.
I'm still using the Palm V I got new years ago and it still does everything I need it to do. The greatest thing is its battery life -- I recharge the thing every couple of months or so, while my wife has to recharge her Zire or whatever it's called every other day.
If the selection is non-random and can be observed, then a committed terrorist can deduce who is most likely to be searched, and then arrange for a person that doesn't fit that profile to actually commit the deed.
The safest and only non-hackable search criteria is random.
If Google could show snippets from books without first copying the
entire book, and if they did this without any commercial interest or
intent, then I think they might have a fair-use argument.
This is the core issue, and suggests an ethical way for Google to
proceed. Google should not be be scanning and copying the text
themselves. Libraries and other public, non-commercial institutions
should perform the scans, put them into their own searchable
databases, and then allow Google to index them if they choose do so.
I just can't imagine allowing a for-profit corporate behemoth like
Google to be responsible for warehousing potentially millions of
scanned books, with nothing but their promise to "do no evil" as a
deterent to abuse.
In the late 60s/early 70s there wasn't much choice; P.A. systems were primitive and oriented toward vocals, and guitar players basically had to crank up their on-stage amplifiers in order to be heard in large venues. The sound was generally atrocious.
These days we have modern sound reinforcement gear, guitar amplifiers are mic'ed or directly injected into the system, and most venues have good audio setups and repeaters with delays so that everybody can theoretically hear the performance everywhere. Yet we still have bands that play so loudly that their fans have to wear earplugs.
It gets really strange when you're enjoying a performance and you notice that everybody around you is wearing ear protection just like you are. Why don't they just turn down the volume?
I just had a wonderful cinematic experience at the Roxie in the Mission district of San Francisco. My wife and I went to "11:14" starring Hilary Swank and Patrick Swayze. We bought tickets for the 8PM show ($8 each), but our walk to the theatre took a little longer than we thought, so we asked the ticket guy if we could go to the 9:40 show instead so we could catch dinner. He said OK, so we walk around the corner and have a great dinner at Yum Yum.
We arrived back at the Roxie at 9:35 and there's no line. My wife and I flirt with the pretty boys and girls running the concession, get our popcorn and bottled water, and find our seats. The theatre is clean, a little small, but there are plenty of seats.
The movie starts promptly at 9:40. No commercials or trailers! The audience settles down and we totally forget they're there except for the more dramatic or funny segments of the film where we all collectively gasp or laugh. The film itself is an excellent, extremely well crafted little dark comedy. My wife and I have a drink on our walk back home and talk about how good the movie was.
All in all, it was the perfect cinematic experience. So I say if you're not happy with the theater you usually go to, and you're lucky enough to live in SF or NYC areas, check out the smaller cinemas running independent films instead of wasting your money on the chains.
I think one of the reasons there's so much resistance to the metric system is that it's not usually human-oriented. The most egregious example of this is using degrees Celsius for temperature.
The Farenheit scale was reasonably designed to encompass, within a range of 0 to 100 degrees, the extremes of temperature across the temperate regions of the world: relatively few places go below 0 degrees F or above 100 degrees F.
The metric world instead insists on reporting the weather using a scale based on the freezing and boiling points of water. That's appropriate for chemists and physicists, but it's ridiculous for describing the weather, where the temperate range for most of the world is approximately -17.8 to 37.8 degrees C.
Slashdot Mirror
I would wager that Nvidia and ATI are somewhat concerned about ray tracing finally becoming a viable interactive 3D graphics technology. Ray tracing is inherently much simpler than rasterization and can be accelerated simply by adding more CPU cores, memory, and faster clocks.
Intel is all over this because this allows them to compete with the major GPU vendors without developing expensive and highly complex GPU hardware and drivers. They just need to throw more cores into the system, and they're getting good at that.
APIs such as OpenGL and D3D are also hugely encumbered by the current rasterization model for 3D graphics. A ray tracing API doesn't need geometry broken down into triangles and vertices; it can work right off of high-level mathematical descriptions of surfaces such as spheres and NURBS. The only pieces relevant to ray tracing in an API such as OpenGL are the viewing model and the frame buffer management mechanisms.
The only role for a GPU in such a system is to accelerate the compositing of image sources for window managers and things like font glyphs. I suspect we'll see most of the 3D functions stripped out of future GPUs once they can be replaced by generic CPU cores running ray tracing algorithms.
An acquaintance of mine had carbon fiber bicycle frame made to his specifications, and apparently it was somewhat off. He hit a small pothole on the road, and instead of deforming, the frame literally disintegrated in a cloud of dust and fiber. Suddenly the bike he was riding wasn't there anymore. He hit the pavement face first, lost his front teeth and broke his jaw. I have to think that a conventional frame would have failed in such a way that he would have at least had something to hold onto and break his fall somewhat.
This reminds me... Anybody remember IBM's OS/2 Warp? One of its most touted features was that it ran Windows better than Windows. Developers realized that they could get the most bang for the buck by focusing exclusively on Windows apps instead of OS/2 apps, and they could still get OS/2 users to buy their software. The end result was that the development of native OS/2 apps stalled. Microsoft then only had to deny IBM the necessary information to continue to support newer versions of Windows in order to kill OS/2.
Apple is in a much better position in that it has an established base of applications and doesn't rely on Windows compatibility to survive. But these new developments seem somewhat disturbing in their similarity to the OS/2 debacle.
People are pointing out that it's perfectly legal for someone to go down a public street and photograph anybody's front door and window, and are using that as a justification for some of Google's problematic privacy policies.
As a recent victim of a burglary in San Francisco, I've come to a different point of view. Sure, it's understandable that an individual should be able to walk down my street and photograph all the property there, especially if it's for some personal project, but when a corporation comes around and systematically photographs every house of a huge portion of San Francisco, and then organizes it into a easily accessable database, and all for profit, then that becomes a issue of a different nature.
In the pre-Google world if a burglar wanted to case a street he or she would have to physically go to that street and take photographs and notes. There is a tangible cost to getting that information that balances out its public availability. Now, all that person has to do is go to Google's street views and get exposed to some ads in order to case out the most vulnerable homes on practically every street in San Francisco. Google's aggregation and packaging of that public information vastly increases the potential for the abuse of privacy, even if the source of that information is public to begin with.
I think the thing is that a one-sided cell phone conversation feels like an intrusion into an established social situation. One can always hear the conversations of the actual people around you, but most of the time if feels like it belongs: the people are right there with you, you can hear both sides of the conversation, you can even join in if you feel like it. You don't feel excluded, unless it's some passionate couple total oblivious to everybody else around them.
And that's the thing with cell phone conversations in a public space: it's an exclusive conversation, and the person blabbing into the phone is mostly oblivious to the people around him or her. It feels rude and exclusionary. Normally, people who need a private space for conversation will move themselves to a private space, but cell phone users will instead take that private space from the others around them, and that feels like a violation.
If I start an instance of Mozilla on :0.0, then starting another instance on :0.1 causes Mozilla to demand that I use another profile. Similarly, if I logon to another host where my home directory has been mounted and start Mozilla without closing down the instance running on the previous host, Mozilla again demands that I use another profile.
Because of this, I have a total of 4 personal profiles that I have to maintain in my home directory. Most of the contents are now symlinked to the default profile, but this is still a hassle to set up. Does Seamonkey solve this problem?
There is the Soundbridge Radio by Roku: http://www.rokulabs.com./ I don't own one, but I have the M500, M1000, and M2000, and they're good devices.
There are non-Apple products that do what you want -- check the Roku WiFi Radio at http://www.rokulabs.com/
Reproducing such an experience doesn't require more than two channels of sound though. It only requires the individualized transfer function of your head and pinnae. I can imagine in a future market that audio consumers will have their head transfer functions measured and encoded in a chip that they will use in conjunction with their personal music players in order to reproduce immersive auditory environments -- a new art form that could encompass and extend what we now know as music.
Anybody know if StegFS described in http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ih99-stegfs.pdf/ is actually available? Plausibility deniability of the knowledge of keys to unlock deeper levels of encyryption is an explicit goal of the project.
I'm still using the Palm V I got new years ago and it still does everything I need it to do. The greatest thing is its battery life -- I recharge the thing every couple of months or so, while my wife has to recharge her Zire or whatever it's called every other day.
If the selection is non-random and can be observed, then a committed terrorist can deduce who is most likely to be searched, and then arrange for a person that doesn't fit that profile to actually commit the deed.
The safest and only non-hackable search criteria is random.
I just can't imagine allowing a for-profit corporate behemoth like Google to be responsible for warehousing potentially millions of scanned books, with nothing but their promise to "do no evil" as a deterent to abuse.
Why are concerts played at such high volume?
In the late 60s/early 70s there wasn't much choice; P.A. systems were primitive and oriented toward vocals, and guitar players basically had to crank up their on-stage amplifiers in order to be heard in large venues. The sound was generally atrocious.
These days we have modern sound reinforcement gear, guitar amplifiers are mic'ed or directly injected into the system, and most venues have good audio setups and repeaters with delays so that everybody can theoretically hear the performance everywhere. Yet we still have bands that play so loudly that their fans have to wear earplugs.
It gets really strange when you're enjoying a performance and you notice that everybody around you is wearing ear protection just like you are. Why don't they just turn down the volume?
You have to find the right movie theatre I guess.
I just had a wonderful cinematic experience at the Roxie in the Mission district of San Francisco. My wife and I went to "11:14" starring Hilary Swank and Patrick Swayze. We bought tickets for the 8PM show ($8 each), but our walk to the theatre took a little longer than we thought, so we asked the ticket guy if we could go to the 9:40 show instead so we could catch dinner. He said OK, so we walk around the corner and have a great dinner at Yum Yum.
We arrived back at the Roxie at 9:35 and there's no line. My wife and I flirt with the pretty boys and girls running the concession, get our popcorn and bottled water, and find our seats. The theatre is clean, a little small, but there are plenty of seats.
The movie starts promptly at 9:40. No commercials or trailers! The audience settles down and we totally forget they're there except for the more dramatic or funny segments of the film where we all collectively gasp or laugh. The film itself is an excellent, extremely well crafted little dark comedy. My wife and I have a drink on our walk back home and talk about how good the movie was.
All in all, it was the perfect cinematic experience. So I say if you're not happy with the theater you usually go to, and you're lucky enough to live in SF or NYC areas, check out the smaller cinemas running independent films instead of wasting your money on the chains.
I think one of the reasons there's so much resistance to the metric system is that it's not usually human-oriented. The most egregious example of this is using degrees Celsius for temperature. The Farenheit scale was reasonably designed to encompass, within a range of 0 to 100 degrees, the extremes of temperature across the temperate regions of the world: relatively few places go below 0 degrees F or above 100 degrees F. The metric world instead insists on reporting the weather using a scale based on the freezing and boiling points of water. That's appropriate for chemists and physicists, but it's ridiculous for describing the weather, where the temperate range for most of the world is approximately -17.8 to 37.8 degrees C.