1Meter resolution isn't enough to identify humans, even if they're laying flat on the ground.
Umm, I can make out lines on the highways. People laying on the ground have a bigger profile than a highway line. You may not be able to recognize them, but you'll be able to see some of them. The JPEG compression on these images is terrible, too.
The press-release says that the atellite is in sun-synchronous orbit, so it stays between the earth and the sun. But it also says that it orbits the earth every 98 minutes. How can this be, if the earth spins once a day?
I'm guessing that half the time it's noon and half the time it's midnight. Would this mean that the camera can only take pictures of a given place twice a day? Doesn't sound too useful for tracking a person. Somebody check the shadow on the Washington Monument and figure out what time it is.
This thing could make for some really neat time-lapse animations of building constructions, tides, etc...
Way back when, you developed some pretty sophisticated calculus in order to map a bitmap onto a 3D polygon in real time. What other areas besides 3D gaming can these fundamentals be applied to?
In my first CS course, we had to crack a 32-bit RSA-encoded message given nothing but the underlying theory. Easily half the class didn't show up after the first week. As long as universities don't become programmer-in-a-box factories, we'll be ok.
You have to have some differentiated cells in order to seed the culture. If you don't have a liver/kidney/... to begin with, you have nothing to work with.
You'd still have to piece an organ together, one tissue at a time. Just think of how many components are in the heart: valves, neural wiring (building a pacemaker from scratch'll be easy), and a nightmare of a vascular network...
What this does let us do is build individual components from scratch. Hole in your heart? This could make a patch for it (provided you're still alive). But certainly nothing more complex.
The Macmillan distro outsells RH 2-to-1 during the month of July. I'd be interested in seeing the statistics for Feb/March, when Red Hat 6.0 hit the market. Kinda like everybody who really wanted the boxed Red Hat bought it a few months earlier.
A few years later, kids will reach that funny age where they try and act very grown up -- imagine their embarassment when their friends see a toy PC...
Throw the $600 computer away?
Spray-paint it white and remove the kiddie software bundle?
The more practical application is to place the sphere in a high location and then use it to direct laser beams onto people's foreheads. They'll never know where you're coming from.
Seriously, this is terribly limited by the 1) line-of-sight requirement and 2) weak IR beams. I'm want my own communications satellite.
Besides the whole contraption looking pretty ugly...
Fresnel lenses features concentric rings of angled plastic. The problem is that at the edge of each ring, there must be a compensating drop in the plastic.
Your RGB monitor still constructs pixels by putting red, green, and blue phosphor triads adjacent to each other. If a fresnel edge falls across these triads at an angle, you'll get uneven magnification of the given color (i.e. for a white background, you'll see red, green, and blue patterns at the fresnel edge). Put a drop of water on your screen -- same icky effect.
You bash technology, but you're still checking Slashdot, suggesting that you 1) have an internet connection, and 2) use it regularly. Ironic, no?
Tools shouldn't be used for the sake of using tools. But they shouldn't be avoided because they're new either. That's the sort of mentality that left people saying "my 1200 baud modem works fast enough for me..."
If a given instrument can help solve a problem faster, why shouldn't you use it?
Some of these things may just be toys too. I sat next to a guy on an airplane who used a PII 400mhz laptop with a 15" screen to play solitaire. But if technology has potential value, it will quickly be adapted to meet the needs of the workplace.
IBM is just flaunting their ViaVoice technology again. They just had to build a wearable computer to accomplish this.
Take a look at other input devices such as the Twiddler, which fits around the palm of your hand and simulates a full-sized keyboard through simultaneous combinations of 4 (or 5?) keystrokes.
Then again, it'd be a lot easier if it'd just read your mind...
It may be a bit bulky, but it's still important. Once a major company introduces a product onto the market, other companies will try and refine the concept in order to steal some of the action. So it's a matter of time before someone ups the ante by slimming it down, turning up the power, and using the body to network wireless components (CPU in shoes, HD in wallet,)
We're getting there quickly. Timex's new Beepwear Pro has combined the features of both the Beepwear watches (alphanumeric nationwide paging) and the Timex DataLink. The thing is a bit bulky, isn't too waterproof, and can only display one line of text at a time, but it does allow for data to be paged directly to your watch.
But it is still very important. Once a major company introduces a product onto the market, other companies will try and refine the concept in order to steal some of the action. So it's a matter of time before someone slims it down, adds a color screen, and throws in a cellular modem and TCP/IP layer [drool, drool....]
If this really were an "intelligent human being" innocently trying to install Linux in an average environment, it'd be a decent piece of journalism.
But it isn't.
First, the reporter demonstrates a nasty bias against Linux in the first place. The fdisk comment has no place in professional journalism.
Second, his goals don't represent the "common man". We can assume that a person who decides to install Linux, no matter how unskilled, probably has a reason for doing so. This guy can't even name the distribution correctly.
Third, his approach is far from scientific. He "accidentally" unplugs his computer during the installation, and then wonders why things don't boot smoothly. He presses Alt+F8 and complains that it does nothing. He tries to network the machine without getting help first (I believe that the "common man" would). He lies when asked questions, prevents an error by opening and closing the CD-ROM drive (how would he know anyway?).
And despite all of this, he still succeeds in getting a login prompt. Disgusting.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like a bus is making an illegal turn at 11th and Pennsylvania Ave.
The next generation of photoradar?
North is to the right of the monument.
1Meter resolution isn't enough to identify humans, even if they're laying flat on the ground.
Umm, I can make out lines on the highways. People laying on the ground have a bigger profile than a highway line. You may not be able to recognize them, but you'll be able to see some of them. The JPEG compression on these images is terrible, too.
TerraServer uses low-res USGS EROS photos, some of which are 10+ years old.
The press-release says that the atellite is in sun-synchronous orbit, so it stays between the earth and the sun. But it also says that it orbits the earth every 98 minutes. How can this be, if the earth spins once a day?
I'm guessing that half the time it's noon and half the time it's midnight. Would this mean that the camera can only take pictures of a given place twice a day? Doesn't sound too useful for tracking a person. Somebody check the shadow on the Washington Monument and figure out what time it is.
This thing could make for some really neat time-lapse animations of building constructions, tides, etc...
china will becoming king of the world again
Again?
Way back when, you developed some pretty sophisticated calculus in order to map a bitmap onto a 3D polygon in real time. What other areas besides 3D gaming can these fundamentals be applied to?
In my first CS course, we had to crack a 32-bit RSA-encoded message given nothing but the underlying theory. Easily half the class didn't show up after the first week. As long as universities don't become programmer-in-a-box factories, we'll be ok.
First, Hugh Loebner is the one that is supplying the $100,000 for the Grand Prize not Dartmouth.
That's a relief!
And I wonder why tuition is so high...
This is a tissue culture that grows in a mold.
This doesn't let us grow organs from scratch.
You have to have some differentiated cells in order to seed the culture. If you don't have a liver/kidney/... to begin with, you have nothing to work with.
You'd still have to piece an organ together, one tissue at a time. Just think of how many components are in the heart: valves, neural wiring (building a pacemaker from scratch'll be easy), and a nightmare of a vascular network...
What this does let us do is build individual components from scratch. Hole in your heart? This could make a patch for it (provided you're still alive). But certainly nothing more complex.
The Macmillan distro outsells RH 2-to-1 during the month of July. I'd be interested in seeing the statistics for Feb/March, when Red Hat 6.0 hit the market. Kinda like everybody who really wanted the boxed Red Hat bought it a few months earlier.
For the average household, two years doesn't render hardware WAAAY obsolete.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Doom;
A few years later, kids will reach that funny age where they try and act very grown up -- imagine their embarassment when their friends see a toy PC...
Throw the $600 computer away?
Spray-paint it white and remove the kiddie software bundle?
The more practical application is to place the sphere in a high location and then use it to direct laser beams onto people's foreheads. They'll never know where you're coming from.
Seriously, this is terribly limited by the 1) line-of-sight requirement and 2) weak IR beams. I'm want my own communications satellite.
first of all, she...
oops.. <blush>
That's what I had in mind, but I wasn't gonna say it ;)
Besides the whole contraption looking pretty ugly...
Fresnel lenses features concentric rings of angled plastic. The problem is that at the edge of each ring, there must be a compensating drop in the plastic.
Your RGB monitor still constructs pixels by putting red, green, and blue phosphor triads adjacent to each other. If a fresnel edge falls across these triads at an angle, you'll get uneven magnification of the given color (i.e. for a white background, you'll see red, green, and blue patterns at the fresnel edge). Put a drop of water on your screen -- same icky effect.
Not too good.
In other words, it focuses for you...
You bash technology, but you're still checking Slashdot, suggesting that you 1) have an internet connection, and 2) use it regularly. Ironic, no?
Tools shouldn't be used for the sake of using tools. But they shouldn't be avoided because they're new either. That's the sort of mentality that left people saying "my 1200 baud modem works fast enough for me..."
If a given instrument can help solve a problem faster, why shouldn't you use it?
Some of these things may just be toys too. I sat next to a guy on an airplane who used a PII 400mhz laptop with a 15" screen to play solitaire. But if technology has potential value, it will quickly be adapted to meet the needs of the workplace.
IBM is just flaunting their ViaVoice technology again. They just had to build a wearable computer to accomplish this.
Take a look at other input devices such as the Twiddler, which fits around the palm of your hand and simulates a full-sized keyboard through simultaneous combinations of 4 (or 5?) keystrokes.
Then again, it'd be a lot easier if it'd just read your mind...
It may be a bit bulky, but it's still important. Once a major company introduces a product onto the market, other companies will try and refine the concept in order to steal some of the action. So it's a matter of time before someone ups the ante by slimming it down, turning up the power, and using the body to network wireless components (CPU in shoes, HD in wallet,)
[drool, drool....]
We're getting there quickly. Timex's new Beepwear Pro has combined the features of both the Beepwear watches (alphanumeric nationwide paging) and the Timex DataLink. The thing is a bit bulky, isn't too waterproof, and can only display one line of text at a time, but it does allow for data to be paged directly to your watch.
But it is still very important. Once a major company introduces a product onto the market, other companies will try and refine the concept in order to steal some of the action. So it's a matter of time before someone slims it down, adds a color screen, and throws in a cellular modem and TCP/IP layer [drool, drool....]
If this really were an "intelligent human being" innocently trying to install Linux in an average environment, it'd be a decent piece of journalism.
But it isn't.
First, the reporter demonstrates a nasty bias against Linux in the first place. The fdisk comment has no place in professional journalism.
Second, his goals don't represent the "common man". We can assume that a person who decides to install Linux, no matter how unskilled, probably has a reason for doing so. This guy can't even name the distribution correctly.
Third, his approach is far from scientific. He "accidentally" unplugs his computer during the installation, and then wonders why things don't boot smoothly. He presses Alt+F8 and complains that it does nothing. He tries to network the machine without getting help first (I believe that the "common man" would). He lies when asked questions, prevents an error by opening and closing the CD-ROM drive (how would he know anyway?).
And despite all of this, he still succeeds in getting a login prompt. Disgusting.