Upon further consideration, I believe you're right. The sound itself travelling through the lighter medium doesn't raise the pitch. It's the fact that the speakers are driving a lighter medium that would do the trick. F=ma, and the force would be the same, moving regular air or lighter air. The decrease in mass would increase the acceleration -> higher velocity (v=at). This assumes that things like throw, etc. are the same.
This is why you sound higher when you inhale helium also. Your lungs = speakers in this example, moving lighter air.
Way back in the day there was a reason or two to visit a.mil site. Or to use a.mil address, like if you were archie'ing or something. I can't even remember the last time I typed in.mil. When you think about it, that's really weird, since it's one of the few valid TLDs. There's.com,.net,.edu,.mil, and.org. (Before the new.biz, etc.) Whatever. I think it's weird, OK?:)
So, they want to set up an intranet for the government. Why is this a bad thing? Should all corporations be required to use the internet for any and all communications between employees/remote sites/customers?
This is not a bad thing. It's a redundant thing. If you read up on DARPA and the creation of the Internet, you'll see that all that's being proposed has already been proposed some forty years ago or something. So commercial entities have the majority of sites on the Internet now. Big deal. The Internet was initially created just to handle this sort of thing.
Yes, if they want to do videoconferencing, etc., they'd need to beef up the bandwidth. You'd need something like an Internet2 or something like that. Oops. That's already in the works, isn't it?
(As an aside, when's the last time anyone used a.mil address? They're still valid TLDs, right?)
It seems that alot of criticism is being directed at the choppy video feeds. There will always be a trade-off of quality and compression that is limited by bandwidth. I really don't see the bandwidth problem being solved in the near future. But, who says that these feeds really need to be in real-time? Yes, there are certain instances where having a real-time feed is useful, but it would also be good if they could capture some high quality feeds then "squirt" them to the receving stations. It wouldn't be instantaneous, but you could get a better quality feed.
How about if you could figure a way to work this with a PDA? The resolution and lack of color would seem to work well with a Palm OS guy. You'd have to work on the interface a bit, but it'd be relatively cool to have your address book handy right where you could see it. You could scribble notes to yourself while walking down the street and what not. HMD+PDA+Expedia = easy navigation, or a quick car crash. (You get my point, though.) Combine your HMD with the black and white Clie's with the jog dial, and you may be able to sell some. Especially to those tech-crazy Japanese.
Does anyone here actually read the link before they start yammering away about fires, etc.?
Compaq received 5 reports of fire that were contained to the cases of the AC adapters. None of these reported incidents involved personal injury. Compaq and its AC adapter manufacturer consider this a potential risk due to the possibility of fire, and are taking these proactive measures to ensure the safety of our customers.
5 cases of fire out of 1.4 million units, and none of them were really all that bad. So don't worry about the fire too much. If it really pains you to go without power to your laptop for several days, which is entirely probable, just don't return it. Then if it does catch fire, you're still pretty safe because Compaq already admitted to a defect.
(As an aside, I could almost have one of these, but it's not the correct series. Woo hoo!)
Re:What are you gonna do with it?
on
Webpads, Anyone?
·
· Score: 2
I would use the 802.11 connection and grab my.mp3's one at a time through my network. You'd have your home server sitting somewhere else, and THAT guy would hold your gigs and gigs of songs for you.
I'm also thinking that you would use the home server to cache web pages on if you wanted to. You may also want to stream in some video too. You could also use it to sync your calendar, email, etc.
I'd use one and carry it around the house with me so I could actually be productive from my couch, my bed, the throne, wherever. It'll add additonal freedom for the telecommuters.
Look, NSync is about a million times more popular than that first case that got posted here a couple of weeks back. (See? I can't even remember the name of that artist.) If this CD gets out there and there isn't alot of blowback, it will open the door for more copy protected CDs.
What can you do about it? Offer to make copies of CDs for people who already have them. Tell them, "well, you have more than one CD player, right? Like one in your car, a portable one you walk around with, and maybe even one in your bathroom. Wouldn't it be more convenient to just have multiple copies of something you already own?.... Hmmm... my computer can't read it. Must be broken or something. Take it back!"
Or... "Hey, let me try and listen to that in my computer." (since most of us must have at least decent sounding rigs) "WTF? This thing doesn't work at all! Take it back!"
This is the opportunity to let Joe (or Jane) Public learn about copy protection and how it infringes on THEIR rights.
Group projects are fun, exciting, and provide education outside of just the regular academic assignment. I feel that they're extremely useful for people to begin to understand group dynamics. They also provide the opportunity to assign harder than average work because a group works "smarter" than a single person in that you get to bounce ideas off of one another.
What about freeloaders? Well, what about them? In case you didn't notice, they exist in the "real world" also. But if a person (or their parents) is going to be spending thousands of dollars for an education and then cheat themselves out of it, who's really losing here? Are people really considered that immature that they won't learn the material? If you "cheat" and don't benefit yourself, will I, as an instructor, really care? You're only hurting yourself.
As an instructor, there is also the safeguard in that people get to choose who they'll be working with. By the end of the semester, the freeloaders will probably have loafed themselves out of any of the elite groups. People will still tend to be loyal to their friends, but being able to forge friendships is also a valuable lesson, don't you think?
People are asking why go all the way to Mars and then bring stuff back when we can analyze it there? I think people are missing part of the point. If you're going to send people there eventually, you'd like for them to have a way to get back. There are all kinds of tricky things involved with leaving a planet. Heck, landing on the moon and reaching lunar escape velocity was hard enough!
Part of the goal is to examine rocks from Mars so that we get a better understanding of Mars, our solar system, and space in general. I think another part of the goal is to actually land a craft on Mars and then bring it back. Carrying all that extra fuel to reach Martian escape velocity is going to be expensive, but we need to know that kind of stuff.
I thought they were going to bluetooth everything together? You'd bluetooth for your LAN with your phone, PDA, and laptop, and the phone would go 3G out to the outside world to provide access to all of your devices.
I wonder what kind of statistics you could gather from this data... You could see which gender spends more time on the can. (I vote men) Simple statistical analysis would be neat. I'd like to know the arithmetic, geometric, and Gaussian means for duration. If you really applied yourself, you could probably differentiate between number one and number two, as that would most likely produce some sort of binodal distribution!
Does it also differentiate between riding the saddle and driving the porcelain bus? Those would make some interesting stats as well. OK, now I'm just being gross. It's late.
Didn't Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke) use digital animation in it as well? There are a couple of scenes with that super-clean look that you get from mixing traditional animation with computer animation. Heck, Futurama uses that blend all the time!
What's the power usage of an LCD screen? I mean, it's great that we're cutting power usage to extend battery life, but I always thought that the hard drive and CD/DVD drives sucked up the most juice. Around where does the processor power usage fall into place?
I'm just wondering if power saving in the LCD is really all that worth it. "You can leave your power adapters at home because your screen is more efficient!" Ummm... OK.
In other news, at least they're getting the lead out.
Black Oil
on
SIGGRAPH 2001
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Mechanical trick? Alien virus? Nope, the black oil is a ferrofluid, a suspension of regular oil and magnetic micropowder.
A quick glance at the site was rather informative. Hey! Do an article on ferrofluids or something. They look like they'd be incredibly fun to play with.
Did anyone else notice the little blurb on the sidebar at Anandtech? It mentions how nVidia Quadro workstation(s?) were able to render FF:TSW in real-time.
Does anyone else think that that's more of the bee's knees than a new card from Radeon?
So what? Sometimes it's very important to popularize space exploration. Who cares if all it would have done was to take pictures of the Earth? Maybe that would get some children to be more interested in the Earth? Maybe over the span of a decade, we could see any climactic and atmospheric changes that may have occured? Never mind the exploration of a LaGrange point. Weather satellites are situated in geosynchronous orbits, so they're like 30,000 miles away or so? Triana would have been 1,000,000 miles away. That would have been a VERY different vantage point.
The fact of the matter is, it would have been good for space exploration. It would have contributed to some public interest, which is good, because that's where the money comes from. The satellite is already done, and they've invested over $100 million in it. Yes, I know it's quite expensive to launch satellites, also. I do not advocate throwing good money after bad, but from the looks of things, Triana wasn't all bad.
Bandwidth is cheap now, but it may not be forever. Yes, we'll most likely continue to see order of magnitude increases for years and decades to come, but it'll slow down sometime.
Also, consider wireless devices. Their bandwidth isn't there right now, and maybe with 3G we'll see a nice increase, but I can see that as a practical application for this type of compression.
Let's also not forget that even though it's compressed, you can always uncompress it into regular old XML to actually read it and understand it, for you human folks that actually need like LETTERS and stuff! That's it. I'm just going to start writing everything in integers soon. Time to change my.sig!
Re:The three most important reasons for seeing RH2
on
Review: Rush Hour 2
·
· Score: 1
Really? Am I the only person who thought Roselyn Sanchez was absolutely hot? I'm getting to be a big Roselyn Sanchez fan now. Now if I could only find out more information about her... oh well.
The 9-foot-high, 12-foot-wide screen can project images more than 20 times better than the typical computer monitor. The display surface--a screen divided into 20 sections--can display images of 4,096 x 3,840 pixels either as one large, high-resolution image or as several side-by-side images and information nodes.
OK, let's do some simple math. Let's say I run 1024x768, so this wall is going to be 4x as wide and 4x as tall, pixel-wise, correct? Now, if the screen is 9 feet tall and 12 feet wide, we get a diagonal of 15 feet (thank you, Pythagoras). The resolution is up about 4x, but it's spread over an area that is maybe 12x as large? (I'm using a simple 15" screen to keep the math simple.) We're talking about 1/3 reduction in dot pitch, aren't we? What's going on here?
I guess the application is for use a video wall to be seen from far away. Contrast this with that other enormous high-res display from that other article. It's clear that this wall will be more for public viewing, and not real "work," like medical imaging or whatever.
Nonetheless, though, I think it'd be cool to watch my DVD's on....
People are correct in saying that robotic arms would be able to move bigger objects and is probably a cheaper solution. Apparently, UPM allows movement of more than one object at a time in a small area. If you have a robot arm, let's face it: you need room for it to move. This may be room that you don't have.
Having said all that, I still don't know exactly what real world applications this may have. Would it be used to sort drugs? Maybe someone can think of a good reason to move multiple pieces of something at the same time. This is somewhat exciting, but we're years away from any practical application, especially since I can't even begin to think of one.:)
(Science) fiction is generally more accessible than technical manuals. Why not put some "fun" computer-related books in the library, as well? Cryptonomicon (sp?) comes to mind, of course. Maybe The Difference Engine, also? What I'm trying to point out here is that most technical manuals will not be fun reads and will probably be outdated fairly quickly. When an author of fiction pens a book, he knows it should have a good shelf life, and writes accordingly. Some concepts may be lost along the way, but it would be good to get the basics in there, as well as to help foster a burgeoning interest.
Slashdot Mirror
Upon further consideration, I believe you're right. The sound itself travelling through the lighter medium doesn't raise the pitch. It's the fact that the speakers are driving a lighter medium that would do the trick. F=ma, and the force would be the same, moving regular air or lighter air. The decrease in mass would increase the acceleration -> higher velocity (v=at). This assumes that things like throw, etc. are the same.
This is why you sound higher when you inhale helium also. Your lungs = speakers in this example, moving lighter air.
If you fill them with helium, will your music sound like the chipmonks?
Surprisingly enough, yes it will. Helium is lighter than air - less dense. The reduced density would raise the pitch accordingly.
Way back in the day there was a reason or two to visit a .mil site. Or to use a .mil address, like if you were archie'ing or something. I can't even remember the last time I typed in .mil. When you think about it, that's really weird, since it's one of the few valid TLDs. There's .com, .net, .edu, .mil, and .org. (Before the new .biz, etc.) Whatever. I think it's weird, OK? :)
So, they want to set up an intranet for the government. Why is this a bad thing? Should all corporations be required to use the internet for any and all communications between employees/remote sites/customers?
This is not a bad thing. It's a redundant thing. If you read up on DARPA and the creation of the Internet, you'll see that all that's being proposed has already been proposed some forty years ago or something. So commercial entities have the majority of sites on the Internet now. Big deal. The Internet was initially created just to handle this sort of thing.
Yes, if they want to do videoconferencing, etc., they'd need to beef up the bandwidth. You'd need something like an Internet2 or something like that. Oops. That's already in the works, isn't it?
(As an aside, when's the last time anyone used a .mil address? They're still valid TLDs, right?)
It seems that alot of criticism is being directed at the choppy video feeds. There will always be a trade-off of quality and compression that is limited by bandwidth. I really don't see the bandwidth problem being solved in the near future. But, who says that these feeds really need to be in real-time? Yes, there are certain instances where having a real-time feed is useful, but it would also be good if they could capture some high quality feeds then "squirt" them to the receving stations. It wouldn't be instantaneous, but you could get a better quality feed.
How about if you could figure a way to work this with a PDA? The resolution and lack of color would seem to work well with a Palm OS guy. You'd have to work on the interface a bit, but it'd be relatively cool to have your address book handy right where you could see it. You could scribble notes to yourself while walking down the street and what not. HMD+PDA+Expedia = easy navigation, or a quick car crash. (You get my point, though.) Combine your HMD with the black and white Clie's with the jog dial, and you may be able to sell some. Especially to those tech-crazy Japanese.
Does anyone here actually read the link before they start yammering away about fires, etc.?
Compaq received 5 reports of fire that were contained to the cases of the AC adapters. None of these reported incidents involved personal injury. Compaq and its AC adapter manufacturer consider this a potential risk due to the possibility of fire, and are taking these proactive measures to ensure the safety of our customers.
5 cases of fire out of 1.4 million units, and none of them were really all that bad. So don't worry about the fire too much. If it really pains you to go without power to your laptop for several days, which is entirely probable, just don't return it. Then if it does catch fire, you're still pretty safe because Compaq already admitted to a defect.
(As an aside, I could almost have one of these, but it's not the correct series. Woo hoo!)
I would use the 802.11 connection and grab my .mp3's one at a time through my network. You'd have your home server sitting somewhere else, and THAT guy would hold your gigs and gigs of songs for you.
I'm also thinking that you would use the home server to cache web pages on if you wanted to. You may also want to stream in some video too. You could also use it to sync your calendar, email, etc.
I'd use one and carry it around the house with me so I could actually be productive from my couch, my bed, the throne, wherever. It'll add additonal freedom for the telecommuters.
I still want the uber-remote, for it, though.
Look, NSync is about a million times more popular than that first case that got posted here a couple of weeks back. (See? I can't even remember the name of that artist.) If this CD gets out there and there isn't alot of blowback, it will open the door for more copy protected CDs.
What can you do about it? Offer to make copies of CDs for people who already have them. Tell them, "well, you have more than one CD player, right? Like one in your car, a portable one you walk around with, and maybe even one in your bathroom. Wouldn't it be more convenient to just have multiple copies of something you already own? .... Hmmm... my computer can't read it. Must be broken or something. Take it back!"
Or... "Hey, let me try and listen to that in my computer." (since most of us must have at least decent sounding rigs) "WTF? This thing doesn't work at all! Take it back!"
This is the opportunity to let Joe (or Jane) Public learn about copy protection and how it infringes on THEIR rights.
Group projects are fun, exciting, and provide education outside of just the regular academic assignment. I feel that they're extremely useful for people to begin to understand group dynamics. They also provide the opportunity to assign harder than average work because a group works "smarter" than a single person in that you get to bounce ideas off of one another.
What about freeloaders? Well, what about them? In case you didn't notice, they exist in the "real world" also. But if a person (or their parents) is going to be spending thousands of dollars for an education and then cheat themselves out of it, who's really losing here? Are people really considered that immature that they won't learn the material? If you "cheat" and don't benefit yourself, will I, as an instructor, really care? You're only hurting yourself.
As an instructor, there is also the safeguard in that people get to choose who they'll be working with. By the end of the semester, the freeloaders will probably have loafed themselves out of any of the elite groups. People will still tend to be loyal to their friends, but being able to forge friendships is also a valuable lesson, don't you think?
People are asking why go all the way to Mars and then bring stuff back when we can analyze it there? I think people are missing part of the point. If you're going to send people there eventually, you'd like for them to have a way to get back. There are all kinds of tricky things involved with leaving a planet. Heck, landing on the moon and reaching lunar escape velocity was hard enough!
Part of the goal is to examine rocks from Mars so that we get a better understanding of Mars, our solar system, and space in general. I think another part of the goal is to actually land a craft on Mars and then bring it back. Carrying all that extra fuel to reach Martian escape velocity is going to be expensive, but we need to know that kind of stuff.
I thought they were going to bluetooth everything together? You'd bluetooth for your LAN with your phone, PDA, and laptop, and the phone would go 3G out to the outside world to provide access to all of your devices.
I wonder what kind of statistics you could gather from this data... You could see which gender spends more time on the can. (I vote men) Simple statistical analysis would be neat. I'd like to know the arithmetic, geometric, and Gaussian means for duration. If you really applied yourself, you could probably differentiate between number one and number two, as that would most likely produce some sort of binodal distribution!
Does it also differentiate between riding the saddle and driving the porcelain bus? Those would make some interesting stats as well. OK, now I'm just being gross. It's late.
Didn't Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke) use digital animation in it as well? There are a couple of scenes with that super-clean look that you get from mixing traditional animation with computer animation. Heck, Futurama uses that blend all the time!
What's the power usage of an LCD screen? I mean, it's great that we're cutting power usage to extend battery life, but I always thought that the hard drive and CD/DVD drives sucked up the most juice. Around where does the processor power usage fall into place?
I'm just wondering if power saving in the LCD is really all that worth it. "You can leave your power adapters at home because your screen is more efficient!" Ummm... OK.
In other news, at least they're getting the lead out.
Mechanical trick? Alien virus? Nope, the black oil is a ferrofluid, a suspension of regular oil and magnetic micropowder.
A quick glance at the site was rather informative. Hey! Do an article on ferrofluids or something. They look like they'd be incredibly fun to play with.
Actually I think it's more along the lines of July 23, but this is old news. Sorry.
In other Blizzard news, they're supposed to make not one, but two announcements at ECTS this year. So we'll see how that works out.
Did anyone else notice the little blurb on the sidebar at Anandtech? It mentions how nVidia Quadro workstation(s?) were able to render FF:TSW in real-time.
Does anyone else think that that's more of the bee's knees than a new card from Radeon?
So what? Sometimes it's very important to popularize space exploration. Who cares if all it would have done was to take pictures of the Earth? Maybe that would get some children to be more interested in the Earth? Maybe over the span of a decade, we could see any climactic and atmospheric changes that may have occured? Never mind the exploration of a LaGrange point. Weather satellites are situated in geosynchronous orbits, so they're like 30,000 miles away or so? Triana would have been 1,000,000 miles away. That would have been a VERY different vantage point.
The fact of the matter is, it would have been good for space exploration. It would have contributed to some public interest, which is good, because that's where the money comes from. The satellite is already done, and they've invested over $100 million in it. Yes, I know it's quite expensive to launch satellites, also. I do not advocate throwing good money after bad, but from the looks of things, Triana wasn't all bad.
Bandwidth is cheap now, but it may not be forever. Yes, we'll most likely continue to see order of magnitude increases for years and decades to come, but it'll slow down sometime.
Also, consider wireless devices. Their bandwidth isn't there right now, and maybe with 3G we'll see a nice increase, but I can see that as a practical application for this type of compression.
Let's also not forget that even though it's compressed, you can always uncompress it into regular old XML to actually read it and understand it, for you human folks that actually need like LETTERS and stuff! That's it. I'm just going to start writing everything in integers soon. Time to change my .sig!
Really? Am I the only person who thought Roselyn Sanchez was absolutely hot? I'm getting to be a big Roselyn Sanchez fan now. Now if I could only find out more information about her... oh well.
Give it to Mikey... he'll eat anything! I guess it beats sifting to make sure that quarter you swallowed came out.
Hey... I resemble that remark. Or parts of it, anyway. I'll let you figure out which parts.
The 9-foot-high, 12-foot-wide screen can project images more than 20 times better than the typical computer monitor. The display surface--a screen divided into 20 sections--can display images of 4,096 x 3,840 pixels either as one large, high-resolution image or as several side-by-side images and information nodes.
OK, let's do some simple math. Let's say I run 1024x768, so this wall is going to be 4x as wide and 4x as tall, pixel-wise, correct? Now, if the screen is 9 feet tall and 12 feet wide, we get a diagonal of 15 feet (thank you, Pythagoras). The resolution is up about 4x, but it's spread over an area that is maybe 12x as large? (I'm using a simple 15" screen to keep the math simple.) We're talking about 1/3 reduction in dot pitch, aren't we? What's going on here?
I guess the application is for use a video wall to be seen from far away. Contrast this with that other enormous high-res display from that other article. It's clear that this wall will be more for public viewing, and not real "work," like medical imaging or whatever.
Nonetheless, though, I think it'd be cool to watch my DVD's on....
People are correct in saying that robotic arms would be able to move bigger objects and is probably a cheaper solution. Apparently, UPM allows movement of more than one object at a time in a small area. If you have a robot arm, let's face it: you need room for it to move. This may be room that you don't have.
Having said all that, I still don't know exactly what real world applications this may have. Would it be used to sort drugs? Maybe someone can think of a good reason to move multiple pieces of something at the same time. This is somewhat exciting, but we're years away from any practical application, especially since I can't even begin to think of one. :)
(Science) fiction is generally more accessible than technical manuals. Why not put some "fun" computer-related books in the library, as well? Cryptonomicon (sp?) comes to mind, of course. Maybe The Difference Engine, also? What I'm trying to point out here is that most technical manuals will not be fun reads and will probably be outdated fairly quickly. When an author of fiction pens a book, he knows it should have a good shelf life, and writes accordingly. Some concepts may be lost along the way, but it would be good to get the basics in there, as well as to help foster a burgeoning interest.