On a more on topic note, I didn't really understand what all the complaining was about on releasing multiple versions. But your comment clarified the issue, it isn't so much releasing multiple versions, it's letting people know you are planning on doing that.
Did anybody else notice that they didn't spell DRAGON correctly even once on their website? Is this a joke or pun that I'm just not getting? Perhaps they are really that stupid.
On a side note, you could build one of these yourself for about $200.
Hollywood is so crapping mad about this because they don't make movies for entertainment. They make movies to deliver their message (pick a topic, war, welfare, whatever...). It is appalling to them that their message might not get out, or could even be changed by end user editing.
Check this quote from the article, quoting Sun: "With so many cooks, Linux is destined to splinter into incompatible versions, Sun says"
What the hell does a cook have to do with a version of software? They only stuck with half the analogy.
If linux hackers are Cooks, then the kitchen must be Computer Science, the computer would be the cooking equipment, and the software would be the meal.
Well, the kitchen is infinitely large, so it isn't possible to have too many cooks in the kitchen. The vast number of resources--cooking equipment--assures that none of the cooks will be forced idle, and the sheer number of cooks ensures a vast variety of dishes will be served. Not to mention the fact that the more cooks you have, the more likely you are to have one or two really good cooks that can in turn improve your average cooks.
If you go to a restaurant, and all they serve are variations on a tuna sandwich, then the restaurant will quickly get boring--no matter how much you like tuna.
Now we have anonymous fools. My vision is 20/300 in my right eye, 20/400 in my left, and with glasses I see just fine. So quit this cry-baby shit about 20/120 vision being some kind of handicap.
On a side note, I think the tendency here in america is to measure vision in diopters.
I saw a show about an experiment where they had a person wear strange glasses that through the use of mirrors made everything appear upside down.
It took about a week for the person to completely adapt to perceiving everything upside-down. I imagine it would be the same for rendering the view for each eye as being greater than the normal distance.
Besides, not everyone's eyes are the same distance apart, yet the brain has coped quite well.
Hey listen, all you said was that you were "partially sighted", which doesn't mean squat, and that your vision was 20/120. Maybe you meant something else, but 20/120 in the US means you can almost get by without glasses at all.
"You can say what you want, and you can Mod this post all the way to oblivion, but you cannot change how anyone else sees the world"...nor can you enlighten a fool.
Re:41 hz ... ouch!
on
IBM's Deep View
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I've gotta call bullshit there. The only case where lighting would have any effect on the perception of a CRT would be its intensity, and even then its effect would be indirect.
Your eyes are much more sensitive to flicker in the periphery than looking dead on. If the room is very bright, your eyes will be less dialated, and you'll be less sensitive to the flicker of your monitor.
Artificial light does have it's own flicker component, but that won't interfere with a crt because it doesn't depend on the reflection of that light for its operation. Now if you take an HP48 calculator, you will probably notice some flicker in rooms lit mostly with flourescent lights. The refresh on flourescents (in the US anyway) are close to the refresh of the reflective lcd on the HP48, hence the banding.
Another big factor on flicker is the rate of decay of the phospher elements in your monitor. The slower the glow decay, the less likley you are to see a flicker--the pixel is still glowing from the last time it was hit, when it is struck again. The longer this decay, the lower refresh rate you can get away with from a flicker point of view.
However, now you suffer from smearing or stuttering (sometimes called ghosting). The optimal setup would be a phospher coating with nearly infinite decay rate, operating with an infinite refresh rate.
Television, here in the US is refreshed at something like 30Hz (non hdtv). The reasons you don't see the flicker are: 1) slow decay rate of the phospher. 2) you are usually 5 or 6 feet away from a tv when you are watching--so it isn't in your peripheral vision. 3) While big screen tv's are getting more common, most people are still below the 36 inch mark, which also means it is mostly in your non-peripheral vision.
Try this: Go up to like a 13 inch tv or something small like that, turn it on to some show that has a lot of white to it. Stand about 1 foot or so away, and look just above the TV. I guarantee that you will see flicker. Some people are more sensitve to flicker than others, and it will depend a little on the TV, but at 30hz, I imagine everyone in the world can see it.
LCD--I think all of the consumer LCDs out today suck as far as pixel decay. I don't know the reason, capacitance maybe, but they suck. Much slower decay than CRTs. On many LCDs today, you still can't tell if you have "mouse trails" turned on or off (in ms windows). So that is why you don't see flicker as much at such low refresh rates on LCDs. There may be other reasons too... I don't know.
If televisions don't fit the bill, and there is a need, then alternatives will be found. Maybe the broadcasters aren't jumping on this bandwagon because it's not worth jumping on.
The broadcasters will do anything to give themselves a competitive advantage. Obviously high definition TV isn't giving an advantage at all. Sure they say the reason it isn't advantageous is because most people don't have high def capable TVs. Why is that? Is there a standard for these hi-def tuners yet? There are probably 16 standards, which is exactly as bad as none at all.
I don't buy that argument that the tuners are too expensive. $200 is cheap. So what if there aren't many hi-def broadcasts, if hi-def is what you want you'll buy a tuner. I bought my dvd player pretty early in the game, and I can guarantee you I paid more than $200 for it. And there were like 6 movies available. But it was cool, and I shucked out the cash. I still use that same dvd player too.
The problem with hi-def is that it just isn't that great of an improvement. It isn't worth all the ass-clowning required to make it happen, so it doesn't, and it shouldn't. Except now the Big Gov is coming in to force it happen. Once the Big Gov starts taking control of something, they never ever relinquish that control. It's like a cancer, and if you don't fight it diligently, it will get wildly out of control. So now we are going to be stuck with a bunch of lame ass broadcasters pumping out hi-def, and when someone invents the better/cheaper/cooler solution, none of the broadcasters are going to jump on that because they have too much frickin cash layed into their crappy hi-def broadcasts.
We might get new broadcast startups if the cost of entry were reduced, except now the cost of entry is increased because you've got to have this craptacular high-def technology.
The problem with the file cabinet analogy is that it only works for one level deep.
file cabinets aren't recursive. Maybe someone should come up with a better analogy... a manager that divides items into "MyWorld-> buildings-> rooms-> cabinets-> folders-> files"
All files would exist at exactly the same depth level. I kind of like that, although I'm sure many of you would hate it.
Or maybe take it to a much more extreme level: Universe-> Galaxy-> Solar System-> MyWorld (or someone elses) -> etc...
If you want to use a file on my computer, it could be located at a different planet (a lot of people seem to think this is actually true of me), or country or whatever.
We could have a program that functions like MapQuest to find out how to locate something.
Ah, but this is an even greater challenge. Hacking your everyday network is like sneaking out of the house when you were a kid, or spying on your neighbor through the window.
Honeypots are a whole different story. It's more like a game of chess. You can see all the past moves your opponent has made, but you don't necessarily know where they are going to go next. You can lay traps for your opponent, but if they are good enough they can turn the trap around on you.
Honeypots are nearly irresistable to an ego and the desire for an adrenaline rush.
It's great to see some real competition in the video card market again, but in all fairness I don't think it is accurate to say ATI is 6 months ahead here. I haven't seen any 9700s on the shelves.
I don't recall the exact resolution of the cameras lucas used, but I believe their resolution was quite a bit higher than that of the theatre projectors. I believe the projecters were doing the downsizing "real time", but that is just my speculation.
If the resolution of the cameras and projectors are both sufficiently high, it seems like a worthwhile effor to me.
All the benefits this article touts about asynchronous designs are almost totally bogus, except the claim about power consumption.
As it stands now, it is more difficult to keep things happening in the right order in an asynch circuit than to route a clock.
The idea that clock has to operate only as fast as the slowest component--Well this is true, but it doesn't matter. The last design I did had numerous clocks in it. The fastest being in the tens of MHz (I know, not that fast), the slowest being less than 1KHz. The portions of my design that were able to run at high speed did. The portions that needed a slower clock got one.
And has anyone heard of a multi-cycle path? Just because a circuit can't complete its objective in one clock cycle doesn't mean you have to slow down the whole boat. If it needs more than one, give it two.
There are a lot of other aspects to be concerned about too... design validation (on paper, before building it), static timing analysis, fault coverage...
The numbers might not be right, but I didn't make them up. I got them from the article:
"Microsoft's thunder-stealing activity also is, in part, a warning that Apple, which has less than 5 percent market share compared with Windows PC makers, needs to understand its place, said sources familiar with the strategy."
"Schiller estimated that about 2.5 million of the 25 million Mac users have switched to OS X"
Right now Mac OS X isn't competition. From articles I've read, Apple has about 5% of the home compute market.
Of that 5%, only 10% are using OS X. I suspect their are more people running DOS 6.2 than OS X.
Re:I went and was minority report a few days ago
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 2
So, turn it around. If you can know the future and can change it, then pre-cog is invalid under many circumstances. If you can know the future and not change it, then trying to act on it will inevitably create self-fulfilling prophecies, predicated on knowing the outcome!
What if the pre-cogs work like predicting weather. We can forecast the near future of weather pretty well... as the event approaches, the prediction becomes more accurate.
However, if it is predicted to be cloudy tomorrow, and somebody takes advantage of that information and seeds the clouds--then it'll rain tomorrow instead of just be cloudy.
Re:I went and was minority report a few days ago
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 2
Personally I think it was a fuck up.
However, I'll post a counter just because. You stated "but the question is why did the prophecy happen in the first place?"
solution 1) Because there was no first place. We experience time sequentially, but maybe everything has already happened, and happened at once.
Or how about this: Cruise wasn't present when the vision initially happened, he only found out when he got to work that day and watched the recorded images. So lets say Max Von Sydow finds out that there is going to be a pre-meditated murder commited by some third party before Cruise doees, and Crowe is the victim. So Sydow contacts Crowe, plants the evidence before cruise goes to stop the murder. Cruise then finds the evidence as he is trying to stop the original third party crime and kills the guy himself. When cruise is viewing the vision of all this happening, the precogs show himself killing the guy first, which changes the future before they have given the complete vision, and the vision is updated on the fly. You see, seeing himself commiting a crime changed the nature of it. It would have been different if the vision had been better organized and showed him preventing the third party crime before shooting Crowe, but it didn't work out that way.
That is all pretty contrived, and audience members should have to invent elaborate solutions to fix a plot goof. I think spielberg could have cleaned up that aspect if he tried. Maybe it just got edited out.
Slashdot Mirror
What's wrong with Blockbuster?
On a more on topic note, I didn't really understand what all the complaining was about on releasing multiple versions. But your comment clarified the issue, it isn't so much releasing multiple versions, it's letting people know you are planning on doing that.
Did anybody else notice that they didn't spell DRAGON correctly even once on their website? Is this a joke or pun that I'm just not getting? Perhaps they are really that stupid.
On a side note, you could build one of these yourself for about $200.
Hollywood is so crapping mad about this because they don't make movies for entertainment. They make movies to deliver their message (pick a topic, war, welfare, whatever...). It is appalling to them that their message might not get out, or could even be changed by end user editing.
I can't believe that was moderated as a troll.
Check this quote from the article, quoting Sun: "With so many cooks, Linux is destined to splinter into incompatible versions, Sun says"
What the hell does a cook have to do with a version of software? They only stuck with half the analogy.
If linux hackers are Cooks, then the kitchen must be Computer Science, the computer would be the cooking equipment, and the software would be the meal.
Well, the kitchen is infinitely large, so it isn't possible to have too many cooks in the kitchen. The vast number of resources--cooking equipment--assures that none of the cooks will be forced idle, and the sheer number of cooks ensures a vast variety of dishes will be served. Not to mention the fact that the more cooks you have, the more likely you are to have one or two really good cooks that can in turn improve your average cooks.
If you go to a restaurant, and all they serve are variations on a tuna sandwich, then the restaurant will quickly get boring--no matter how much you like tuna.
--Cheese
Now we have anonymous fools. My vision is 20/300 in my right eye, 20/400 in my left, and with glasses I see just fine. So quit this cry-baby shit about 20/120 vision being some kind of handicap.
On a side note, I think the tendency here in america is to measure vision in diopters.
I saw a show about an experiment where they had a person wear strange glasses that through the use of mirrors made everything appear upside down.
It took about a week for the person to completely adapt to perceiving everything upside-down. I imagine it would be the same for rendering the view for each eye as being greater than the normal distance.
Besides, not everyone's eyes are the same distance apart, yet the brain has coped quite well.
Hey listen, all you said was that you were "partially sighted", which doesn't mean squat, and that your vision was 20/120. Maybe you meant something else, but 20/120 in the US means you can almost get by without glasses at all.
...nor can you enlighten a fool.
"You can say what you want, and you can Mod this post all the way to oblivion, but you cannot change how anyone else sees the world"
I've gotta call bullshit there. The only case where lighting would have any effect on the perception of a CRT would be its intensity, and even then its effect would be indirect.
Your eyes are much more sensitive to flicker in the periphery than looking dead on. If the room is very bright, your eyes will be less dialated, and you'll be less sensitive to the flicker of your monitor.
Artificial light does have it's own flicker component, but that won't interfere with a crt because it doesn't depend on the reflection of that light for its operation. Now if you take an HP48 calculator, you will probably notice some flicker in rooms lit mostly with flourescent lights. The refresh on flourescents (in the US anyway) are close to the refresh of the reflective lcd on the HP48, hence the banding.
Another big factor on flicker is the rate of decay of the phospher elements in your monitor. The slower the glow decay, the less likley you are to see a flicker--the pixel is still glowing from the last time it was hit, when it is struck again. The longer this decay, the lower refresh rate you can get away with from a flicker point of view.
However, now you suffer from smearing or stuttering (sometimes called ghosting). The optimal setup would be a phospher coating with nearly infinite decay rate, operating with an infinite refresh rate.
Television, here in the US is refreshed at something like 30Hz (non hdtv). The reasons you don't see the flicker are: 1) slow decay rate of the phospher. 2) you are usually 5 or 6 feet away from a tv when you are watching--so it isn't in your peripheral vision. 3) While big screen tv's are getting more common, most people are still below the 36 inch mark, which also means it is mostly in your non-peripheral vision.
Try this: Go up to like a 13 inch tv or something small like that, turn it on to some show that has a lot of white to it. Stand about 1 foot or so away, and look just above the TV. I guarantee that you will see flicker. Some people are more sensitve to flicker than others, and it will depend a little on the TV, but at 30hz, I imagine everyone in the world can see it.
LCD--I think all of the consumer LCDs out today suck as far as pixel decay. I don't know the reason, capacitance maybe, but they suck. Much slower decay than CRTs. On many LCDs today, you still can't tell if you have "mouse trails" turned on or off (in ms windows). So that is why you don't see flicker as much at such low refresh rates on LCDs. There may be other reasons too... I don't know.
yeah, but hi-def on a 19" tv is pointless anyway.
That's funny because the Ars Technica gives several examples of web pages that work in mozilla but not in IE (due to IE flaws).
Sounds to me like you guys should be using the w3c browser.
If televisions don't fit the bill, and there is a need, then alternatives will be found. Maybe the broadcasters aren't jumping on this bandwagon because it's not worth jumping on.
The broadcasters will do anything to give themselves a competitive advantage. Obviously high definition TV isn't giving an advantage at all. Sure they say the reason it isn't advantageous is because most people don't have high def capable TVs. Why is that? Is there a standard for these hi-def tuners yet? There are probably 16 standards, which is exactly as bad as none at all.
I don't buy that argument that the tuners are too expensive. $200 is cheap. So what if there aren't many hi-def broadcasts, if hi-def is what you want you'll buy a tuner. I bought my dvd player pretty early in the game, and I can guarantee you I paid more than $200 for it. And there were like 6 movies available. But it was cool, and I shucked out the cash. I still use that same dvd player too.
The problem with hi-def is that it just isn't that great of an improvement. It isn't worth all the ass-clowning required to make it happen, so it doesn't, and it shouldn't. Except now the Big Gov is coming in to force it happen. Once the Big Gov starts taking control of something, they never ever relinquish that control. It's like a cancer, and if you don't fight it diligently, it will get wildly out of control. So now we are going to be stuck with a bunch of lame ass broadcasters pumping out hi-def, and when someone invents the better/cheaper/cooler solution, none of the broadcasters are going to jump on that because they have too much frickin cash layed into their crappy hi-def broadcasts.
We might get new broadcast startups if the cost of entry were reduced, except now the cost of entry is increased because you've got to have this craptacular high-def technology.
The problem with the file cabinet analogy is that it only works for one level deep.
file cabinets aren't recursive. Maybe someone should come up with a better analogy... a manager that divides items into "MyWorld-> buildings-> rooms-> cabinets-> folders-> files"
All files would exist at exactly the same depth level. I kind of like that, although I'm sure many of you would hate it.
Or maybe take it to a much more extreme level:
Universe-> Galaxy-> Solar System-> MyWorld (or someone elses) -> etc...
If you want to use a file on my computer, it could be located at a different planet (a lot of people seem to think this is actually true of me), or country or whatever.
We could have a program that functions like MapQuest to find out how to locate something.
Laugh all you want. I think it is cool.
You took the words out of my mouth.
Ah, but this is an even greater challenge. Hacking your everyday network is like sneaking out of the house when you were a kid, or spying on your neighbor through the window.
Honeypots are a whole different story. It's more like a game of chess. You can see all the past moves your opponent has made, but you don't necessarily know where they are going to go next. You can lay traps for your opponent, but if they are good enough they can turn the trap around on you.
Honeypots are nearly irresistable to an ego and the desire for an adrenaline rush.
What we need is an encryption system that isn't based on math.
It's great to see some real competition in the video card market again, but in all fairness I don't think it is accurate to say ATI is 6 months ahead here. I haven't seen any 9700s on the shelves.
I don't recall the exact resolution of the cameras lucas used, but I believe their resolution was quite a bit higher than that of the theatre projectors. I believe the projecters were doing the downsizing "real time", but that is just my speculation.
If the resolution of the cameras and projectors are both sufficiently high, it seems like a worthwhile effor to me.
All the benefits this article touts about asynchronous designs are almost totally bogus, except the claim about power consumption.
As it stands now, it is more difficult to keep things happening in the right order in an asynch circuit than to route a clock.
The idea that clock has to operate only as fast as the slowest component--Well this is true, but it doesn't matter. The last design I did had numerous clocks in it. The fastest being in the tens of MHz (I know, not that fast), the slowest being less than 1KHz. The portions of my design that were able to run at high speed did. The portions that needed a slower clock got one.
And has anyone heard of a multi-cycle path? Just because a circuit can't complete its objective in one clock cycle doesn't mean you have to slow down the whole boat. If it needs more than one, give it two.
There are a lot of other aspects to be concerned about too... design validation (on paper, before building it), static timing analysis, fault coverage...
I'd like to send out a big FUCK YOU to the moderators out there.
The numbers might not be right, but I didn't make them up. I got them from the article:
"Microsoft's thunder-stealing activity also is, in part, a warning that Apple, which has less than 5 percent market share compared with Windows PC makers, needs to understand its place, said sources familiar with the strategy."
"Schiller estimated that about 2.5 million of the 25 million Mac users have switched to OS X"
Right now Mac OS X isn't competition. From articles I've read, Apple has about 5% of the home compute market.
Of that 5%, only 10% are using OS X. I suspect their are more people running DOS 6.2 than OS X.
So, turn it around. If you can know the future and can change it, then pre-cog is invalid under many circumstances. If you can know the future and not change it, then trying to act on it will inevitably create self-fulfilling prophecies, predicated on knowing the outcome!
What if the pre-cogs work like predicting weather. We can forecast the near future of weather pretty well... as the event approaches, the prediction becomes more accurate.
However, if it is predicted to be cloudy tomorrow, and somebody takes advantage of that information and seeds the clouds--then it'll rain tomorrow instead of just be cloudy.
Personally I think it was a fuck up.
However, I'll post a counter just because. You stated "but the question is why did the prophecy happen in the first place?"
solution 1) Because there was no first place. We experience time sequentially, but maybe everything has already happened, and happened at once.
Or how about this: Cruise wasn't present when the vision initially happened, he only found out when he got to work that day and watched the recorded images. So lets say Max Von Sydow finds out that there is going to be a pre-meditated murder commited by some third party before Cruise doees, and Crowe is the victim. So Sydow contacts Crowe, plants the evidence before cruise goes to stop the murder. Cruise then finds the evidence as he is trying to stop the original third party crime and kills the guy himself. When cruise is viewing the vision of all this happening, the precogs show himself killing the guy first, which changes the future before they have given the complete vision, and the vision is updated on the fly. You see, seeing himself commiting a crime changed the nature of it. It would have been different if the vision had been better organized and showed him preventing the third party crime before shooting Crowe, but it didn't work out that way.
That is all pretty contrived, and audience members should have to invent elaborate solutions to fix a plot goof. I think spielberg could have cleaned up that aspect if he tried. Maybe it just got edited out.
"everyone keeps saying that this is a REAL site for REAL journalism."
I've never heard/read anyone make that claim. Usually it is quite the opposite.