The entire videogame industry stores source code, art assets, and documents in source control repositories, and it's absolutely indispensable to them.
When some people talk about how binaries shouldn't be stored in source control, many mistakenly believe that refers to all binary formats. In truth, what is often meant by this is that binary executables created from the source that's being stored shouldn't be in the repository as well, since it can obviously be generated from the source itself.
Binary documents and art assets, however, ARE source data as well, and so can equally benefit from version control. I'm curious why you would think that text source code documents should use version control, but binary documents should not. Disk space is stupidly cheap nowadays, so it's worthwhile even if you're simply storing the binary data side by side.
America = The United States of America The Americas = The entire continent
Yes, it's perhaps a little unfair that we took the name of the continent for ourselves, but we call ourselves "Americans" because it's in our name. Every very other country has a very specific method of referring to their citizens (Canadians, Mexicans, Brazilians, etc), so there's no real ambiguity. And I'd posit that it's fairly rare to have to refer to the citizens of every country on the American continent(s)* - far more common is referring to "North Americans or South Americans".
Washingtonians have to deal with this as well. If you just say "Washington", most typically assume you're talking about the capitol city of the US. So, everyone's gotten used to simply saying "Washington State" to disambiguate. No other state has to bother with this, but I've never heard anyone complain about it.
Sorry for the off-topic post, but I've heard this complaint often enough that I wanted to address it.
* While the USA views North and South America as two continents, many other countries view it as a single continent.
I disagree. Perforce is widely used in the videogame industry for saving both code AND art assets. If decidedly non-technical-minded artists, designers, managers, and QA personnel can use it, normal office workers can also use it. The Perforce clients, once set up properly by IT, are not hard to use at all - only slightly harder than browsing a file using File Explorer in Windows. Or, you can use the perforce plugin for MS Office, so they may not even need anything else if they're only sharing Office documents. Granted, you need a professional IT person to manage it, but I'm assuming they already have such a person employed who can deal with setting up the Perforce server.
Frankly, once they start using it, they'll probably love it for the security it gives them if they ever need to back out changes, or look for previous versions. It has a number of advantages for binary files over distributed version controls systems, such as being able to control the number versions a particular file type will save, or how far back the versions will be allowed to go. For binary files, it's often not necessary to save the entire history of the document in perpetuity. Of course, it will still do that by default.
Obviously this doesn't solve the issue of merging, but from what I'm reading, that's largely only a problem because people are picking different documents to edit because they don't know which one is actually the latest. As such, they don't really need merging, they need to know they're working on the latest version. A version control system would solve this for them.
Yep, I'd totally agree with you there. Small business owners and large corporations are two entirely different entities, and have very different issues to deal with.
One of the big issues is that while small businesses employ a huge number of people, it's hard to to collectively represent their interests, since by nature, the power of large corporations is more easily concentrated and directed.
Regarding political power by large corporations... An argument many conservatives would probably make is that the more power you give government, the more power a bribe to a government official has. It's a tough balancing act, because giving the government the power to regulate an industry also means that a bureaucrat technically now has the power to favor one business over another in very crucial ways, and so may be more susceptible to bribery or corruption. The reason politicians or bureaucrats are bribed is because they have *power*.
Nearly anything becomes economical if you can automate it and scale it up large enough. We'll have to see how the testing process goes first, I'd think. Civil engineering is a pretty conservative field, for very good reasons. At the scale we're making things nowadays, you need to be really, really certain about the properties of your building materials, and how it will hold up for the next fifty years under stress. I'd imagine they'll go through many years of testing and deploying in relatively small scales to prove it's worth, then start working their way up as everyone grows more confident of it's long-term viability.
Hulu Plus is losing customers like me because of their incessant advertising. I'd be willing to pay more for an ad-free service, but they don't offer it. On the other hand, I pay for two different streaming services, both ad-free. I'm actually fine with letting the market decide whether or not most services are ad-free or ad-supplemented.
However, in the case of ISPs, I don't believe they should be be able to extract information from you for advertising purposes. That's pretty much equivalent to listening in on private conversation and scanning electronically for specific key words, then sending relevant advertising to you based on what you're saying in your private conversation. People would be outraged if this was happening. I fail to see how an ISP is fundamentally different, other than we're simply getting used to this sort of intrusion.
Moreover, ISPs are granted spectrum and access rights for what amount to more-or-less natural monopolies, and I feel that imposes some additional burdens on them. This is nothing more than a money grab, and they couldn't get away with it if they had some real competition.
"The market will find a way" is a reasonable truism, but I'm not convinced that people really know what it means. What many people misunderstand, I feel, is that the market is as viciously Darwinian as biological evolution is. That is, "the market will find a way" may bankrupt companies, or even entire industries, leaving many people out of work. It's not a promise of a positive outcome, but if given a chance, people *may* find new markets and opportunities for themselves. Note that, in fairness, there's no reasonable way to answer your question, because that's like trying to predict future inventions or trends - just like it would be impossible to predict what evolutionary trends would be successful until they're tried out.
Anyone who has any sort of understanding how cruel nature is can also understand why we can't leave *everything* to the tender mercies of the market, because it values profit and efficiency above everything else. That's fine, so long as we understand that capitalism is exclusively an economic system, and doesn't really concern itself with humanitarian or other non-economic issues.
As such, we have to put reasonable rules, limits, and restraints on the market, in order to make sure things we value aren't sacrificed on the alter of profit. The trick is to find the proper balance between over and under regulation. Over-regulate, and you quash innovation and genuine enterprising spirits that would otherwise generate wealth and prosperity. Or, you can simply price yourself entirely out of global markets that choose not to regulate as you do. Under-regulate, and you allow exploitation and shady practices to flourish, because cheaters have an inherent advantage against those who don't choose to cheat.
I think that many conservatives, having grown up in an era with fairly strict government regulation over most of industry, tend to see many areas of over-regulation that comes from the natural growth and spread of nearly any large bureaucracy like the government, and see what harm it causes in massive waste and inefficiency. This is especially true if you run your own business, or are involved in the running of a business. It's no real surprise that small business owners tend to be politically conservative. However, they probably haven't really seen first-hand what businesses would do without fairly strict governmental oversight, as has happened in the past here in the US, or still happens in other parts of the world.
I guess your experience in the anechoic chamber was similar to most people then. I'd like to try it myself someday, but based on my time in very quiet studios, I'm sure I'd find it as uncomfortable as anyone else.
As far as the difference with outdoor environments, nature often tends to have a lot of diffuse and absorptive surfaces compared to our very unnatural flat and reflective indoor surfaces. Flat-sided, boxy rooms tend to create a lot of harsh and unnatural sounding echo and reverberation unless special precautions are taken like you see in high quality recording studios or music halls.
You can immediately tell from the difference in ambient reflections when you step from an indoor to an outdoor environment - first, because half of the sound waves never come back (going skyward), and from those that do bounce back, they're all nicely diffused from a wide variety of irregular surfaces, unlike what we typically have indoors. I'd guess that may help to create the pleasant aural experience we have outside in nature, where even if it's not perfectly quiet, the background diffused pleasantly into patterns of easily ignorable pink or brown noise.
I pay attention to stuff like this because I'm a videogame programmer that has previously specialized in audio programming. Part of the work I did was with DSP algorithms that would help differentiate between those two environments without necessarily baking those effects into the source material, generating artificial reverberation and echo effects on demand. The videogame industry has long had standardized hardware with some of these systems built in (EAX & I3DL2) , but the more recent trends are doing this all in software, which actually gives us some more flexibility in tweaking how they work. So, I spent a lot of time looking at the relationship between environmental structures and materials, and how that contributed to the overall aural scene using these DSP algorithms. It was pretty interesting and challenging work.
If recording studios aren't quieter than nature, then it seems like perhaps they haven't been built correctly. I've been in recording studios before at work, and the lack of any ambient sound in the booths is almost disturbing in their deep, dead silence. Granted, it sounds like you have more sensitive ears than most, though, so perhaps you can pick up on stuff I couldn't.
Nature actually has quite a bit of low-level ambient noise from the wind blowing though plants and trees, flowing water or surf, not to mention insects, and various animals that sing, cry, chirp, and howl on occasion. There's a reason modern films often can't use sound directly captured from shoots on location. However, I can perhaps understand what you mean, in that these noises seem to be much more soothing than cityscapes or other man-made sounds. It always seems easier for my brain to filter these noises out than a loud ticking of a clock, the hum and rattling of an air conditioner, or vehicles driving on a nearby freeway.
You should try to visit an anechoic chamber sometime. The near absolute silence drives some people nuts, but I'll bet you'd love it! I've heard that after a time, you can actually even your own heart and the sound of blood pumping through your body, since there's nothing else to cover up such faint sounds.
Really? The average private, with a grenade launcher and night vision? Do you read what you're typing?
Argue all you want with me, but it's the Canadian military that will be handing our these weapons to its infantrymen. Besides, I'd guess these weapons are probably simpler to handle in the field than your average 18th century flintlock musket. Those average soldiers will do just fine.
I'm going to guess the average private will appreciate being able to, say, accurately see and target things in the dark, or have a handy grenade launcher available. The reason a lot of this high-tech weaponry costs so much is (in what I'd guess is the order of importance):
a) Making it absolutely reliable under any field conditions b) Making it "private-proof" (nearly unbreakable) c) Making it as light as possible
Naturally, only time (and soldiers in the field) will tell whether they've succeeded, but given that they've been testing and refining the system for so long, and under actual combat conditions, I'm think it has a pretty good chance of actually being useful in the field.
People tend to think of "lobbying" as a dirty word, but keep in mind that lobbying also works on behalf of ideals and organizations you believe in. The EFF is involved in lobbying, for instance, and organization that many of us here appreciate and support. Or, pick an organization you care about, and you can bet they're doing some lobbying of their own. That's not inherently a bad thing.
The word essentially has it's roots in ordinary citizens waiting in the capitol lobby to bend the ear of their representative, telling them how they felt about specific topics. Eventually, it was understood that it's more efficient to hire someone to collectively represent your interested and present them to your representatives, because it's impractical for a politician to meet individually with every single citizen of their district.
The corruption comes in, of course, in the wining and dining of said politicians - when it moves beyond simply trying to convince them and instead giving them subtle or even outright monetary rewards, such as promises of lucrative employment after a term of office is served, etc. That's not lobbying - that's just bribery. I'd be curious to see what exactly all that "lobbying" money is spent on.
My understanding is that the military does have a completely isolated network for critical combat communication, but like any other global-scale organization, they're still probably reliant on the now-civilian internet because of the efficient communication it provides. For instance, communication with contractors, other countries' military forces, and so on are all vital for day to day operations, and probably can't be accomplished with a military-only system because of the sheer scale and scope it would require.
I just don't think it's as simple as saying "the military should not be on the internet". They either have to try to use it safely and securely, build a completely separate and parallel internet, or go without it. Granted, there's obviously a percentage of material that should always be air-gapped for maximum security, but the bulk of bureaucratic day to day communication and coordination only needs to be reasonably secure, and can probably safely live on the standard internet given reasonable precautions.
Until someone removes the salt from the ocean it will be difficult to remote-control submarine drones. Training dolphins or creating a new breed of soldiers that can breath, eat and drink underwater is probably less ambitious.
You think so? We're already seeing ocean-going robots now. It's not going to be too long before these things are both cheap and impressively capable. Both our military and others will, I'm sure, find lots of interesting uses for this technology.
Water-breathing humans will be a bit longer off, I'd predict.
How much credibility does this article lose once you put "Big Data" in there?
Just about as much as when he declares them "the backbone of the US Navy". Anyone who knows anything about the navy understands that our nuclear carriers are the backbone of the US Navy. Just about everything the navy does revolves around those carrier groups.
Submarines may someday become obsolete. Not in the foreseeable future though. Eventually, we'll probably have massive swarms of small, cheap, robotic drones that can swarm the oceans and search for them with active methods (not caring if they get detected themselves). That will probably signal the end of practical, stealthy submarines.
16" guns were what we used, and they are expensive to maintain (along with the entire ship, of course), but relatively cheap to fire compared to a cruise missile - probably in the order of hundreds of times less expensive (I haven't run the numbers - just a guess). Given, however, that we can expect to maintain air supremacy for the foreseeable future, we can expect our apparently immortal B-52 fleet (also a system whose demise has been predicted time and time again) to perform our ground saturation missions with massive loads of dumb bombs.
So, probably no need for big gun platforms, as we don't have a foreseeable need for shore bombardment, and they're far too vulnerable to air and missile attack anyhow. No matter, they make awesome floating museums. I really hope to be able to see one someday.
I'd vote for the humble DVD - although obviously even now it's a legacy format. It's reached such critical mass that there will likely still be some working DVD readers out there 100 years from now, if for no other reason than to transfer old DVD-based archives and videos.
Even today you can buy floppy disk readers, for example. 100 years from now, you'll probably be able to buy external DVD/Blu-Ray/Whatever readers that plug into your USB 8.0 ports for $20 or so.
I think many institutions have pretty much already settled on Javascript as a "first language". Whatever you may think of it, there are some good reasons for using it. It's completely ubiquitous, having a runtime environment in every web browser on every major platform. You don't really even need advanced tools or worry about setting up a particular environment. And, best of all, it's what actually gets used out in the real world. It's easy enough to teach a simple, clean subset of a language initially, and later delve into the messier, more complex topics.
One solution to the "everyone should learn to code" dilemma is to integrate early coding into classes where kids can choose among a variety of roles in creating multimedia projects. Some students will naturally be more technically-oriented, some will be more artistic, creating art and music for the project. Others may be able to write a story script. Still others may be best at coordinating the project with organizational skills.
This is actually how real life works in my profession, the videogame industry. Many other tech businesses have a mix of creative and technical people working together as well. Not everyone is really suited for the intensely logical world of coding, so I think this would be a great way of letting students try to explore where their strengths are, and learn how to work collaboratively with a number of other students with different skills to create a common project.
Of course, this may not work well with the current "girls must code" narrative, since many of the young ladies will likely choose to make art, music, or write interesting script. Obviously, we can't have that now, right? Ok, nevermind. Just force them all to code, whether they like it or not.
Any and all other methods of encryption are subject to at least brute-force attack, which means they can be broken almost instantly, given sufficient computing power.
I think you may be underestimating how much computing power is required to brute-force attack modern encryption, especially when using a sufficiently long key. At the moment, we're talking about a modern PC operating until the heat death of the universe timeframe to break the encryption of a 2048-bit SSL certificate. Many of the early encryption schemes were broken because of flaws in the algorithms which allowed massive shortcuts to be taken or were weakened with very short keys (remember 48-bit keys?). Remember, with every bit added to the key, we double the inherent strength of the encryption, and cryptologists have gotten much, much better at creating incredibly secure algorithms as well.
It really isn't just a matter of waiting for hardware to catch up. Even with exponential speed increases in computing power (which isn't happening anymore, btw), in 30 years, we'll still be nowhere close to breaking today's state of the art encryption unless breakthroughs have been made that allow us to shorten the compute time via a weakness in the algorithms. It would take an unbelievable leap in computational efficiency (say, quantum computing) before we can even dream of brute forcing keywords of today's most secure algorithms, even within our lifetimes.
After reading the title, I was trying to figure out what they'd be showing of computer evolution in five years - especially considering it was of Sun computers. At second glance, I realized "Oh, that sun." Sigh...
Anyhow, great video. The description makes it sound like it was a series of still images in video format, but it was very dynamic (maybe series of stills were turned into video or something - I have no idea). Total space pr0n, if you swing that way. I especially enjoyed the shots where the silhouette of what I presume was Mercury passed in front, which gave a fantastic idea of the scale involved. Seems worth five minutes of your life, so give it a watch.
Cute, but a flawed analogy. TVs and monitor resolutions are upper-bounded in terms of useful resolution because of the inherently limited resolution of our own Mark I Eyeballs.
Here's a handy chart so you can see whether you or you wife should win the argument of whether to get a 4K set. As an example, if you're sitting about eight feet away from your TV, you'll need about a 70 inch TV to even start to see the difference between 1080p and 4K displays, and you'd need to jump up to 120 inches to get the full benefit of that resolution. If your TV is any smaller, you're sitting farther away, or you have worse eyesight, then you won't actually see any improvement.
Don't let me stop you from buying a new 60 inch 4K TV that you sit eight feet away from, but don't get annoyed at your wife when she tells you that she can't see any difference between this TV and the old one.
How could you tell it's clearly superior? Did they have side by side demos? I'm also wondering at what size it actually matters - or perhaps more accurately, the size to viewing distance ratio. Very often, these demos have you watching a very large TV from a relatively short distance away which makes it very easy to see the improved quality.
I've got a 60" LCD TV at home, and I'd guess I watch TV from about eight feet away or so. I can more or less discern the difference between 720p and 1080p content in most cases. I did a quick bit of research, and according to one chart I saw, for 1080p screens at 60 inches, I'm just at the inner edge of the optimum viewing distance for that size TV at eight feet. Assuming the same viewing distance, in order to see any significant difference in picture quality at 4K, I'd need a 70 or 80 inch screen. I'm guessing I'd probably need at least a 90 inch screen at 8K!
I sort of have a feeling that the industry will simply standardized on 4K largely because it's costlier to manufacture multiple models. A 4K 60 inch is only a couple hundred dollars more than the 1080 TV I bought just a couple of years ago. It's hard to say now if 8K will catch on at all, though. My guess is that only a fraction of the population will ever be able to appreciate the difference, because most people don't have giant TVs that they sit relatively close to, and so will never be able to see the difference.
Nomm is also accused of watching at least one copy of a pirated TV-show.
“On or about December 5, 2008, NOMM sent VAN DER KOLK an e-mail, which included a screenshot of NOMM’s account using Megavideo.com to watch an infringing episode of the copyrighted television show Chuck,” the indictment reads.
This sounds like going after Al Capone for tax evasion. Actually, more like going after one of his henchmen for tax evasion. It's likely they only are after Dotcom, and are using this guy as leverage to get to him. I mean, seriously? Watching one pirated TV show? At this point, they're just throwing whatever they think can stick at him.
Slashdot Mirror
The entire videogame industry stores source code, art assets, and documents in source control repositories, and it's absolutely indispensable to them.
When some people talk about how binaries shouldn't be stored in source control, many mistakenly believe that refers to all binary formats. In truth, what is often meant by this is that binary executables created from the source that's being stored shouldn't be in the repository as well, since it can obviously be generated from the source itself.
Binary documents and art assets, however, ARE source data as well, and so can equally benefit from version control. I'm curious why you would think that text source code documents should use version control, but binary documents should not. Disk space is stupidly cheap nowadays, so it's worthwhile even if you're simply storing the binary data side by side.
America = The United States of America
The Americas = The entire continent
Yes, it's perhaps a little unfair that we took the name of the continent for ourselves, but we call ourselves "Americans" because it's in our name. Every very other country has a very specific method of referring to their citizens (Canadians, Mexicans, Brazilians, etc), so there's no real ambiguity. And I'd posit that it's fairly rare to have to refer to the citizens of every country on the American continent(s)* - far more common is referring to "North Americans or South Americans".
Washingtonians have to deal with this as well. If you just say "Washington", most typically assume you're talking about the capitol city of the US. So, everyone's gotten used to simply saying "Washington State" to disambiguate. No other state has to bother with this, but I've never heard anyone complain about it.
Sorry for the off-topic post, but I've heard this complaint often enough that I wanted to address it.
* While the USA views North and South America as two continents, many other countries view it as a single continent.
I disagree. Perforce is widely used in the videogame industry for saving both code AND art assets. If decidedly non-technical-minded artists, designers, managers, and QA personnel can use it, normal office workers can also use it. The Perforce clients, once set up properly by IT, are not hard to use at all - only slightly harder than browsing a file using File Explorer in Windows. Or, you can use the perforce plugin for MS Office, so they may not even need anything else if they're only sharing Office documents. Granted, you need a professional IT person to manage it, but I'm assuming they already have such a person employed who can deal with setting up the Perforce server.
Frankly, once they start using it, they'll probably love it for the security it gives them if they ever need to back out changes, or look for previous versions. It has a number of advantages for binary files over distributed version controls systems, such as being able to control the number versions a particular file type will save, or how far back the versions will be allowed to go. For binary files, it's often not necessary to save the entire history of the document in perpetuity. Of course, it will still do that by default.
Obviously this doesn't solve the issue of merging, but from what I'm reading, that's largely only a problem because people are picking different documents to edit because they don't know which one is actually the latest. As such, they don't really need merging, they need to know they're working on the latest version. A version control system would solve this for them.
Yep, I'd totally agree with you there. Small business owners and large corporations are two entirely different entities, and have very different issues to deal with.
One of the big issues is that while small businesses employ a huge number of people, it's hard to to collectively represent their interests, since by nature, the power of large corporations is more easily concentrated and directed.
Regarding political power by large corporations... An argument many conservatives would probably make is that the more power you give government, the more power a bribe to a government official has. It's a tough balancing act, because giving the government the power to regulate an industry also means that a bureaucrat technically now has the power to favor one business over another in very crucial ways, and so may be more susceptible to bribery or corruption. The reason politicians or bureaucrats are bribed is because they have *power*.
Nearly anything becomes economical if you can automate it and scale it up large enough. We'll have to see how the testing process goes first, I'd think. Civil engineering is a pretty conservative field, for very good reasons. At the scale we're making things nowadays, you need to be really, really certain about the properties of your building materials, and how it will hold up for the next fifty years under stress. I'd imagine they'll go through many years of testing and deploying in relatively small scales to prove it's worth, then start working their way up as everyone grows more confident of it's long-term viability.
Hulu Plus is losing customers like me because of their incessant advertising. I'd be willing to pay more for an ad-free service, but they don't offer it. On the other hand, I pay for two different streaming services, both ad-free. I'm actually fine with letting the market decide whether or not most services are ad-free or ad-supplemented.
However, in the case of ISPs, I don't believe they should be be able to extract information from you for advertising purposes. That's pretty much equivalent to listening in on private conversation and scanning electronically for specific key words, then sending relevant advertising to you based on what you're saying in your private conversation. People would be outraged if this was happening. I fail to see how an ISP is fundamentally different, other than we're simply getting used to this sort of intrusion.
Moreover, ISPs are granted spectrum and access rights for what amount to more-or-less natural monopolies, and I feel that imposes some additional burdens on them. This is nothing more than a money grab, and they couldn't get away with it if they had some real competition.
"The market will find a way" is a reasonable truism, but I'm not convinced that people really know what it means. What many people misunderstand, I feel, is that the market is as viciously Darwinian as biological evolution is. That is, "the market will find a way" may bankrupt companies, or even entire industries, leaving many people out of work. It's not a promise of a positive outcome, but if given a chance, people *may* find new markets and opportunities for themselves. Note that, in fairness, there's no reasonable way to answer your question, because that's like trying to predict future inventions or trends - just like it would be impossible to predict what evolutionary trends would be successful until they're tried out.
Anyone who has any sort of understanding how cruel nature is can also understand why we can't leave *everything* to the tender mercies of the market, because it values profit and efficiency above everything else. That's fine, so long as we understand that capitalism is exclusively an economic system, and doesn't really concern itself with humanitarian or other non-economic issues.
As such, we have to put reasonable rules, limits, and restraints on the market, in order to make sure things we value aren't sacrificed on the alter of profit. The trick is to find the proper balance between over and under regulation. Over-regulate, and you quash innovation and genuine enterprising spirits that would otherwise generate wealth and prosperity. Or, you can simply price yourself entirely out of global markets that choose not to regulate as you do. Under-regulate, and you allow exploitation and shady practices to flourish, because cheaters have an inherent advantage against those who don't choose to cheat.
I think that many conservatives, having grown up in an era with fairly strict government regulation over most of industry, tend to see many areas of over-regulation that comes from the natural growth and spread of nearly any large bureaucracy like the government, and see what harm it causes in massive waste and inefficiency. This is especially true if you run your own business, or are involved in the running of a business. It's no real surprise that small business owners tend to be politically conservative. However, they probably haven't really seen first-hand what businesses would do without fairly strict governmental oversight, as has happened in the past here in the US, or still happens in other parts of the world.
I guess your experience in the anechoic chamber was similar to most people then. I'd like to try it myself someday, but based on my time in very quiet studios, I'm sure I'd find it as uncomfortable as anyone else.
As far as the difference with outdoor environments, nature often tends to have a lot of diffuse and absorptive surfaces compared to our very unnatural flat and reflective indoor surfaces. Flat-sided, boxy rooms tend to create a lot of harsh and unnatural sounding echo and reverberation unless special precautions are taken like you see in high quality recording studios or music halls.
You can immediately tell from the difference in ambient reflections when you step from an indoor to an outdoor environment - first, because half of the sound waves never come back (going skyward), and from those that do bounce back, they're all nicely diffused from a wide variety of irregular surfaces, unlike what we typically have indoors. I'd guess that may help to create the pleasant aural experience we have outside in nature, where even if it's not perfectly quiet, the background diffused pleasantly into patterns of easily ignorable pink or brown noise.
I pay attention to stuff like this because I'm a videogame programmer that has previously specialized in audio programming. Part of the work I did was with DSP algorithms that would help differentiate between those two environments without necessarily baking those effects into the source material, generating artificial reverberation and echo effects on demand. The videogame industry has long had standardized hardware with some of these systems built in (EAX & I3DL2) , but the more recent trends are doing this all in software, which actually gives us some more flexibility in tweaking how they work. So, I spent a lot of time looking at the relationship between environmental structures and materials, and how that contributed to the overall aural scene using these DSP algorithms. It was pretty interesting and challenging work.
If recording studios aren't quieter than nature, then it seems like perhaps they haven't been built correctly. I've been in recording studios before at work, and the lack of any ambient sound in the booths is almost disturbing in their deep, dead silence. Granted, it sounds like you have more sensitive ears than most, though, so perhaps you can pick up on stuff I couldn't.
Nature actually has quite a bit of low-level ambient noise from the wind blowing though plants and trees, flowing water or surf, not to mention insects, and various animals that sing, cry, chirp, and howl on occasion. There's a reason modern films often can't use sound directly captured from shoots on location. However, I can perhaps understand what you mean, in that these noises seem to be much more soothing than cityscapes or other man-made sounds. It always seems easier for my brain to filter these noises out than a loud ticking of a clock, the hum and rattling of an air conditioner, or vehicles driving on a nearby freeway.
You should try to visit an anechoic chamber sometime. The near absolute silence drives some people nuts, but I'll bet you'd love it! I've heard that after a time, you can actually even your own heart and the sound of blood pumping through your body, since there's nothing else to cover up such faint sounds.
Really? The average private, with a grenade launcher and night vision? Do you read what you're typing?
Argue all you want with me, but it's the Canadian military that will be handing our these weapons to its infantrymen. Besides, I'd guess these weapons are probably simpler to handle in the field than your average 18th century flintlock musket. Those average soldiers will do just fine.
I'm going to guess the average private will appreciate being able to, say, accurately see and target things in the dark, or have a handy grenade launcher available. The reason a lot of this high-tech weaponry costs so much is (in what I'd guess is the order of importance):
a) Making it absolutely reliable under any field conditions
b) Making it "private-proof" (nearly unbreakable)
c) Making it as light as possible
Naturally, only time (and soldiers in the field) will tell whether they've succeeded, but given that they've been testing and refining the system for so long, and under actual combat conditions, I'm think it has a pretty good chance of actually being useful in the field.
People tend to think of "lobbying" as a dirty word, but keep in mind that lobbying also works on behalf of ideals and organizations you believe in. The EFF is involved in lobbying, for instance, and organization that many of us here appreciate and support. Or, pick an organization you care about, and you can bet they're doing some lobbying of their own. That's not inherently a bad thing.
The word essentially has it's roots in ordinary citizens waiting in the capitol lobby to bend the ear of their representative, telling them how they felt about specific topics. Eventually, it was understood that it's more efficient to hire someone to collectively represent your interested and present them to your representatives, because it's impractical for a politician to meet individually with every single citizen of their district.
The corruption comes in, of course, in the wining and dining of said politicians - when it moves beyond simply trying to convince them and instead giving them subtle or even outright monetary rewards, such as promises of lucrative employment after a term of office is served, etc. That's not lobbying - that's just bribery. I'd be curious to see what exactly all that "lobbying" money is spent on.
My understanding is that the military does have a completely isolated network for critical combat communication, but like any other global-scale organization, they're still probably reliant on the now-civilian internet because of the efficient communication it provides. For instance, communication with contractors, other countries' military forces, and so on are all vital for day to day operations, and probably can't be accomplished with a military-only system because of the sheer scale and scope it would require.
I just don't think it's as simple as saying "the military should not be on the internet". They either have to try to use it safely and securely, build a completely separate and parallel internet, or go without it. Granted, there's obviously a percentage of material that should always be air-gapped for maximum security, but the bulk of bureaucratic day to day communication and coordination only needs to be reasonably secure, and can probably safely live on the standard internet given reasonable precautions.
Until someone removes the salt from the ocean it will be difficult to remote-control submarine drones. Training dolphins or creating a new breed of soldiers that can breath, eat and drink underwater is probably less ambitious.
You think so? We're already seeing ocean-going robots now . It's not going to be too long before these things are both cheap and impressively capable. Both our military and others will, I'm sure, find lots of interesting uses for this technology.
Water-breathing humans will be a bit longer off, I'd predict.
How much credibility does this article lose once you put "Big Data" in there?
Just about as much as when he declares them "the backbone of the US Navy". Anyone who knows anything about the navy understands that our nuclear carriers are the backbone of the US Navy. Just about everything the navy does revolves around those carrier groups.
Submarines may someday become obsolete. Not in the foreseeable future though. Eventually, we'll probably have massive swarms of small, cheap, robotic drones that can swarm the oceans and search for them with active methods (not caring if they get detected themselves). That will probably signal the end of practical, stealthy submarines.
21" guns are amazingly expensive to fire.
16" guns were what we used, and they are expensive to maintain (along with the entire ship, of course), but relatively cheap to fire compared to a cruise missile - probably in the order of hundreds of times less expensive (I haven't run the numbers - just a guess). Given, however, that we can expect to maintain air supremacy for the foreseeable future, we can expect our apparently immortal B-52 fleet (also a system whose demise has been predicted time and time again) to perform our ground saturation missions with massive loads of dumb bombs.
So, probably no need for big gun platforms, as we don't have a foreseeable need for shore bombardment, and they're far too vulnerable to air and missile attack anyhow. No matter, they make awesome floating museums. I really hope to be able to see one someday.
I'd vote for the humble DVD - although obviously even now it's a legacy format. It's reached such critical mass that there will likely still be some working DVD readers out there 100 years from now, if for no other reason than to transfer old DVD-based archives and videos.
Even today you can buy floppy disk readers, for example. 100 years from now, you'll probably be able to buy external DVD/Blu-Ray/Whatever readers that plug into your USB 8.0 ports for $20 or so.
I think many institutions have pretty much already settled on Javascript as a "first language". Whatever you may think of it, there are some good reasons for using it. It's completely ubiquitous, having a runtime environment in every web browser on every major platform. You don't really even need advanced tools or worry about setting up a particular environment. And, best of all, it's what actually gets used out in the real world. It's easy enough to teach a simple, clean subset of a language initially, and later delve into the messier, more complex topics.
One solution to the "everyone should learn to code" dilemma is to integrate early coding into classes where kids can choose among a variety of roles in creating multimedia projects. Some students will naturally be more technically-oriented, some will be more artistic, creating art and music for the project. Others may be able to write a story script. Still others may be best at coordinating the project with organizational skills.
This is actually how real life works in my profession, the videogame industry. Many other tech businesses have a mix of creative and technical people working together as well. Not everyone is really suited for the intensely logical world of coding, so I think this would be a great way of letting students try to explore where their strengths are, and learn how to work collaboratively with a number of other students with different skills to create a common project.
Of course, this may not work well with the current "girls must code" narrative, since many of the young ladies will likely choose to make art, music, or write interesting script. Obviously, we can't have that now, right? Ok, nevermind. Just force them all to code, whether they like it or not.
Any and all other methods of encryption are subject to at least brute-force attack, which means they can be broken almost instantly, given sufficient computing power.
I think you may be underestimating how much computing power is required to brute-force attack modern encryption, especially when using a sufficiently long key. At the moment, we're talking about a modern PC operating until the heat death of the universe timeframe to break the encryption of a 2048-bit SSL certificate. Many of the early encryption schemes were broken because of flaws in the algorithms which allowed massive shortcuts to be taken or were weakened with very short keys (remember 48-bit keys?). Remember, with every bit added to the key, we double the inherent strength of the encryption, and cryptologists have gotten much, much better at creating incredibly secure algorithms as well.
It really isn't just a matter of waiting for hardware to catch up. Even with exponential speed increases in computing power (which isn't happening anymore, btw), in 30 years, we'll still be nowhere close to breaking today's state of the art encryption unless breakthroughs have been made that allow us to shorten the compute time via a weakness in the algorithms. It would take an unbelievable leap in computational efficiency (say, quantum computing) before we can even dream of brute forcing keywords of today's most secure algorithms, even within our lifetimes.
Apparently, you'd have to sit closer than 3 feet away to a 96 inch 8K screen to be able to see any pixelation. Close indeed.
After reading the title, I was trying to figure out what they'd be showing of computer evolution in five years - especially considering it was of Sun computers. At second glance, I realized "Oh, that sun." Sigh...
Anyhow, great video. The description makes it sound like it was a series of still images in video format, but it was very dynamic (maybe series of stills were turned into video or something - I have no idea). Total space pr0n, if you swing that way. I especially enjoyed the shots where the silhouette of what I presume was Mercury passed in front, which gave a fantastic idea of the scale involved. Seems worth five minutes of your life, so give it a watch.
Cute, but a flawed analogy. TVs and monitor resolutions are upper-bounded in terms of useful resolution because of the inherently limited resolution of our own Mark I Eyeballs.
Here's a handy chart so you can see whether you or you wife should win the argument of whether to get a 4K set. As an example, if you're sitting about eight feet away from your TV, you'll need about a 70 inch TV to even start to see the difference between 1080p and 4K displays, and you'd need to jump up to 120 inches to get the full benefit of that resolution. If your TV is any smaller, you're sitting farther away, or you have worse eyesight, then you won't actually see any improvement.
Don't let me stop you from buying a new 60 inch 4K TV that you sit eight feet away from, but don't get annoyed at your wife when she tells you that she can't see any difference between this TV and the old one.
It's clearly superior to 4K.
How could you tell it's clearly superior? Did they have side by side demos? I'm also wondering at what size it actually matters - or perhaps more accurately, the size to viewing distance ratio. Very often, these demos have you watching a very large TV from a relatively short distance away which makes it very easy to see the improved quality.
I've got a 60" LCD TV at home, and I'd guess I watch TV from about eight feet away or so. I can more or less discern the difference between 720p and 1080p content in most cases. I did a quick bit of research, and according to one chart I saw, for 1080p screens at 60 inches, I'm just at the inner edge of the optimum viewing distance for that size TV at eight feet. Assuming the same viewing distance, in order to see any significant difference in picture quality at 4K, I'd need a 70 or 80 inch screen. I'm guessing I'd probably need at least a 90 inch screen at 8K!
I sort of have a feeling that the industry will simply standardized on 4K largely because it's costlier to manufacture multiple models. A 4K 60 inch is only a couple hundred dollars more than the 1080 TV I bought just a couple of years ago. It's hard to say now if 8K will catch on at all, though. My guess is that only a fraction of the population will ever be able to appreciate the difference, because most people don't have giant TVs that they sit relatively close to, and so will never be able to see the difference.
Nomm is also accused of watching at least one copy of a pirated TV-show.
“On or about December 5, 2008, NOMM sent VAN DER KOLK an e-mail, which included a screenshot of NOMM’s account using Megavideo.com to watch an infringing episode of the copyrighted television show Chuck,” the indictment reads.
This sounds like going after Al Capone for tax evasion. Actually, more like going after one of his henchmen for tax evasion. It's likely they only are after Dotcom, and are using this guy as leverage to get to him. I mean, seriously? Watching one pirated TV show? At this point, they're just throwing whatever they think can stick at him.