Were you signing up for your cold fission with a sock and a cup of water when that was announced? Sorry but the premise just seems questionable given that computer screens usually have P22 phosphor, which has a decay of, or so I've heard, about 100 usecs for the blue and green, and up to 1000 usec for the red, yet this paper shows their test case shows a 90% decline (to 10%) in about 0.55 usecs...I don't know if they have either a super-short persistence monitor, or they sanded it down, but it doesn't sound comparable to the average monitor that the average person has (and their monitor would give you one hell of a headache at less than about a 500Hz refresh rate...:-)).
Again, my doubt is regarding non-trivial test cases with a normal computer monitor : Yeah if the raster gun was drawing a line on the opposing wall then it could be read, but it's a question about realistic implementation with real hardware.
Wow, you wanna buy a bridge? I have a couple for sale.
Those fingers weren't even in the 4Mhz butterworth filter one (or do you believe it when you see movies when 4 pixels are "processed" into a complex, intricate document), and personally my trusting guess was that it just happened to be on the screen when he did a screenshot for the last two. However, again, I'd believe it if in an uncontrolled situation with a standard wall (you know: one that isn't a mirror) it could be read.
Obviously the content of the paper is beyond (without a serious time investment) about 99.999% of the Slashdot population (definitely including myself), however scanning through it it simply sounds like an absurd premise : A computer monitor is not a flashlight, but is rather an ambient source of light whose net effect on any section of an opposing wall would not, in my opinion, be a "image" but a composite of all of the pixels put together. The timing of the scanlines is a consideration, however given the phosphor decay with the unknown intensity of the drawn pixels (i.e. pixels in the middle of the screen may still be brighter than the pixels being drawn at the top) make the idea of reading from diffuse reflection seemingly absurd for anything other than extremely high contrast test cases.
As far as the examples given: Let's just say that I'd like to see it in action before believing it...
Re:there's always a deal to be found...
on
Low-end Laptops?
·
· Score: 2
Up here in Ontario a major retailer is the [insert company who has been in Canada for over 300 years], and this company hires some of the most blatantly conspicuous, poorly trained (at least this is my opinion) floorwalkers on the planet (you know: Middle of winter and the guy is walking around with a t-shirt, no cart or bags, always in the same area as you). While I hardly fit the profile of your average shoplifer, these stores are often so empty that these weenies have nothing better than to tail you around, and to say it's offensive is a gross understatement: On top of that it's especially funny knowing that the gross majority of retail theft is by the employees themselves.
I'd love to see someone put this into practice as a proof of concept, because other than having a mirror that can be monitored, the composite merged colour of a room couldn't remotely be decoded into what was actually on the screen.
What does the commercial success of PGP under NAI, with universally acknowledged horrid marketing, have to do with the adoption of PGP and variants in the marketplace? There are millions of people out there using either the free version available from http://www.pgpi.com, or the many open standard PGP variants. PGP is an incredibly valuable piece of software and it will live on regardless of what NAI does.
So are you really advocating that all software should be forced to be open source? The prior post, and most others, seem to be talking about proprietary protocols, not closed-source programs.
If you are really saying that this should carry through to forcing all software to be open source then I think you may find some opposition. I dislike Microsoft's attempt to own protocols and standards (just as much as I hate when Sun does it), but I'd never advocate forced open sourcing.
Secondly, there are very few things (especially in the academic fields) that are "useful" to the general public. The same argument could be made about art, music, or basically anything else other than food production, medicine, etc. . .
Well, medicine does have an impact upon our lives, so when I see a report that they've found a protein that makes rats live 60% longer, that is much closer to relevance to me than if they found that the universe is actually X years old, versus the previously believed Y (versus the previously believed Z...repeat perpetually: As others have said: Someone will use a better CCD and find that the universe is actually a light red, etc).
However, my point is that every new astronomy "breakthrough" is reported in all major media, while breakthroughs in other sciences are ignored : I mean, really, how many people are employed worldwide gawking at stars an unbelievable distance away, while at the same time we're not even close to getting a person on the nearest planet, barely even accomplishing keeping them in a tin can in near-orbit? And every couple of weeks there's the standard "Astronomers have found a twin-star X light years away that spins faster than they've ever found one spin before!". Now, when a giant asteroid is headed towards Earth, I care, but when they find that prior knowledge was ignorant (which is a constant theme for "Breakthroughs"), I don't.
Really, eh? This is one of those "completely asinine" type stories that astronomers seem to somehow manage to fill the newspapers with. I truly think that astronomers, as a group, must have a fantastic PR department, because every completely irrelevant (at least for the next 2000 years) "re-thinking of the origins of mankind!" breakthrough that has no bearing on 99.999999999999%+ of the population is somehow given front page coverage.
Of course now I've gone and offended astronomers (no intent to. I just find it odd how many of these "discoveries" are treated as if they change life as we know it: As if realizing something alters the past).
You excluded cut-scenes from your scenario when you explicitly said online games in your original post: Online, multiplayer games don't have cutscenes.
Having said that almost all modern games right use the same 3D engine for cutscenes as for the actual game (which is more legit anyways: How many times do commercials or magazines show wonderfully rendered cutscenes when the actual game itself is a POS) : In Operation Flashpoint it can lead to some hilarious situations, because sometimes it will kick into a cutscene but the AI is still active and the physics model is still going -> I've had my helicopter crash during the cut scene because my rate of descent was too fast, and have heard of people getting shot by AI enemies during cut scenes.
Of course, even if you're talking of cutscenes the overwhelming majority don't even use MPEG2 for the cutscenes, much less MPEG4. Instead they use faster to decompress (i.e. no decompression hardware or steep system requirements for a movie) like AVI.
Hehe, I'm a commie by advocating against piracy?
However, I have zero doubt that there are a lot of students out there who are living a meager existence, but by the same token there are a lot of students who AREN'T : I know a couple of students doing coop terms who somehow manage new cars, all the while having probably never purchased a piece of software in their life. Then again my point is not so much about students, but just the general population, where there is an attitude that software should be free, but paying $70 for a piece of chicken stuck on a grill with $0.02 of spices on it is a great deal.
Online surveys are a complete waste of the bits that they are based on : They don't have equal representation of the cross-section of users (i.e. Ask what you favourite OS and the Linux users tend towards being more motivated than the Windows users), and even non-trolls regularly enter false information.
Thanks for the lecture, Freud. Your argument is the classic, ignorant repressionist argument of trying to turn the tables to keep people quiet, and it's as pathetic today as it was in the middle ages. It's the sort of argument put forth by the average 7th grader.
It's especially funny given that it's so hard to find people justifying or encouraging piracy on Slashdot: Boy, you really have to look far!
Actually it's a search of '"Accompli 009" review' (not too hard to figure that one out), and the first link provides about as much info as the DesignTechnica "review", and the second provides even more. The sixth link clearly states "read my review of the Accompli 009" with a review posted far in advance of the DesignTechnica review. I could continue but what's the point: If you spent more than a split-second you would see that it is full of reviews specifically for that one product.
Software companies didn't want people trying before they bought.
I don't know if that's really a fair statement: Most software companies now offer trial or crippleware of their software if you want to try it out. There was a place (I think called "The Software Library") around these parts and it was well known as the best Warez source around : Rent it and dupe it (or just install it) and return (and you didn't even have to spend hours downloading).
Well I'm not really putting pirates into black and white categories (indeed I've said little about pirates themselves, but rather have talked about the fact that as a proportion of the importance to quality of life in today's world that tremendously little personal income is spent on software yearly), however to respond to your comment regarding piracy benefitting companies: The marketing and distribution of their software should be for them to decide (i.e. A car thief could say that by stealing that nice Ferrari he's helping to advertise it)-> If it REALLY works to encourage intro use of their software then they have the option of releasing lite versions, time-expired versions, etc, and a lot of software companies do do this when it makes sense. Piracy is never an effective marketing solution, just as trading songs on Napster can't reasonably be explained away as helping out the artist (who have the ability to put their songs on MP3 or to release "freeware" versions if they wanted that).
To graphics professionals, or aspiring graphics professionals, Photoshop is like surveying equipment is to a surveyor : It is an absolutely critical foundation for the career, so it does seem fair that it isn't a dime a dozen. Having said that, which I do see it being a problem that courses require $300 software purchases, I see people much more acceptingly pay out thousands of dollars for course `textbooks', many of which are poorly written photocopied professor created copy/pasters.
I truly believe that people pirate because life is a competition (whether acknowledged or not. Satisfaction for most people is not in achieving some standard of living, but rather in achieving a BETTER standard of living than the next guy), and piracy is one of the easiest ways to level the playing field (albeit unfairly): The goal is to have the most and do the most spending the least. Contrary to the Slashdot article's contention that software has achieved higher rates by incentives and non-RIAA tactics, I would say the reverse is true: Almost every game CD-ROM now either has advanced copy protection (ex. Operation Flashpoint), or it uses online verification that discourages serial number sharing and piracy (ex. Quake3). Many commercial application are hardware keyed and require internet authentication. On the warez scene the law has come down hard so formerly bustling IRC channels are ghost towns. Many of the people I know who formerly claimed to be able to get anything at anytime now have sources that have dried up. The spread of trojans and viruses has most people nervous about touching cracks, pirated software, etc. Indeed, I'd say "incentives" has absolutely nothing to do with the drop in piracy.
Offtopic, but I'm curious: Could you seriously have a car without insurance? (do some states allow that?) Here in Ontario if you have a plated car then you have insurance (there is no way around it), and for even a $50 junker you'd be paying $300+/month as a male student.
Ughh...firstly, Slashdot hasn't been a "site devoted to free software" in a long long time (a very wise direction change). Yes it has champions and advocates for free software, but it is a "news for nerds. stuff that matters." site, which means quite a bit more than "all software should be free".
Secondly, I'm not going to go into whether stealing software impacts the author because that same argument could be used to claim that conterfeiting is a victimless crime : Both are absolutely absurd and treat the "crime" in an isolated manner that doesn't take into account the whole.
Everytime someone claims that they "didn't have the money", I'd love to see an honest analysis of their lifestyle : Almost always there is beer, movies, electronics, new computer hardware, a car with insurance, gas, and upkeep, etc, but people feel fine paying for those, but that new game or image editing app isn't worth $39.
Piracy has seriously undermined the software industry for years: Something that has such an incredibly ramification on people's lives (i.e. consider the number of hours that people spend using computers these days), yet in a yearly % of consumer income I doubt you'd see it hit 1% per year. Hrmmm, this would be a really interesting foundation for a study actually : What is the net value of software (in entertainment/productivity terms) versus the net payout per year -> I would wager that it is incredibly low, and people pirate not because it is just, or because of their subsistence lifestyle, but rather just because they CAN and they see it as a way of winning at the perceived zero-sum game of life.
I'm always a little surprized whenever anyone claims that something is the first on the net: Did they exhaustively seek out ever niche and crevice of the net to prove if this is true? It just seems so rural to claim something is the first among millions of possible hosts, with billions if not trillions of pages out there.
Of course you could hardly call the two page snippet on designtechnica a "full review" anyways, and that's ignoring the easy to find obvious fact that there are dozens of other easy to find (disproving the first claim) reviews out there, possibly themselves earning the illustrious "first on the net" title.
Oh goody, an AC Slashdot grammar cop/stalker!
While I will agree that perhaps I misused "irony" (though actually it's a debatable point), I would love to hear how I misued "rife". You apparently missed that I also said "their" instead of "there". In any case, these brilliant observations have clearly refuted my points, as this AC grammar cop/stalker has demonstrated.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, my doubt is regarding non-trivial test cases with a normal computer monitor : Yeah if the raster gun was drawing a line on the opposing wall then it could be read, but it's a question about realistic implementation with real hardware.
Whoops, missed a "pre" there: I meant to say that they weren't in the pre-4Mhz filter one.
Wow, you wanna buy a bridge? I have a couple for sale. Those fingers weren't even in the 4Mhz butterworth filter one (or do you believe it when you see movies when 4 pixels are "processed" into a complex, intricate document), and personally my trusting guess was that it just happened to be on the screen when he did a screenshot for the last two. However, again, I'd believe it if in an uncontrolled situation with a standard wall (you know: one that isn't a mirror) it could be read.
Obviously the content of the paper is beyond (without a serious time investment) about 99.999% of the Slashdot population (definitely including myself), however scanning through it it simply sounds like an absurd premise : A computer monitor is not a flashlight, but is rather an ambient source of light whose net effect on any section of an opposing wall would not, in my opinion, be a "image" but a composite of all of the pixels put together. The timing of the scanlines is a consideration, however given the phosphor decay with the unknown intensity of the drawn pixels (i.e. pixels in the middle of the screen may still be brighter than the pixels being drawn at the top) make the idea of reading from diffuse reflection seemingly absurd for anything other than extremely high contrast test cases.
As far as the examples given: Let's just say that I'd like to see it in action before believing it...
Up here in Ontario a major retailer is the [insert company who has been in Canada for over 300 years], and this company hires some of the most blatantly conspicuous, poorly trained (at least this is my opinion) floorwalkers on the planet (you know: Middle of winter and the guy is walking around with a t-shirt, no cart or bags, always in the same area as you). While I hardly fit the profile of your average shoplifer, these stores are often so empty that these weenies have nothing better than to tail you around, and to say it's offensive is a gross understatement: On top of that it's especially funny knowing that the gross majority of retail theft is by the employees themselves.
I'd love to see someone put this into practice as a proof of concept, because other than having a mirror that can be monitored, the composite merged colour of a room couldn't remotely be decoded into what was actually on the screen.
What does the commercial success of PGP under NAI, with universally acknowledged horrid marketing, have to do with the adoption of PGP and variants in the marketplace? There are millions of people out there using either the free version available from http://www.pgpi.com, or the many open standard PGP variants. PGP is an incredibly valuable piece of software and it will live on regardless of what NAI does.
So are you really advocating that all software should be forced to be open source? The prior post, and most others, seem to be talking about proprietary protocols, not closed-source programs.
If you are really saying that this should carry through to forcing all software to be open source then I think you may find some opposition. I dislike Microsoft's attempt to own protocols and standards (just as much as I hate when Sun does it), but I'd never advocate forced open sourcing.
Secondly, there are very few things (especially in the academic fields) that are "useful" to the general public. The same argument could be made about art, music, or basically anything else other than food production, medicine, etc. . .
Well, medicine does have an impact upon our lives, so when I see a report that they've found a protein that makes rats live 60% longer, that is much closer to relevance to me than if they found that the universe is actually X years old, versus the previously believed Y (versus the previously believed Z...repeat perpetually: As others have said: Someone will use a better CCD and find that the universe is actually a light red, etc).
However, my point is that every new astronomy "breakthrough" is reported in all major media, while breakthroughs in other sciences are ignored : I mean, really, how many people are employed worldwide gawking at stars an unbelievable distance away, while at the same time we're not even close to getting a person on the nearest planet, barely even accomplishing keeping them in a tin can in near-orbit? And every couple of weeks there's the standard "Astronomers have found a twin-star X light years away that spins faster than they've ever found one spin before!". Now, when a giant asteroid is headed towards Earth, I care, but when they find that prior knowledge was ignorant (which is a constant theme for "Breakthroughs"), I don't.
Of course now I've gone and offended astronomers (no intent to. I just find it odd how many of these "discoveries" are treated as if they change life as we know it: As if realizing something alters the past).
You excluded cut-scenes from your scenario when you explicitly said online games in your original post: Online, multiplayer games don't have cutscenes.
Having said that almost all modern games right use the same 3D engine for cutscenes as for the actual game (which is more legit anyways: How many times do commercials or magazines show wonderfully rendered cutscenes when the actual game itself is a POS) : In Operation Flashpoint it can lead to some hilarious situations, because sometimes it will kick into a cutscene but the AI is still active and the physics model is still going -> I've had my helicopter crash during the cut scene because my rate of descent was too fast, and have heard of people getting shot by AI enemies during cut scenes.
Of course, even if you're talking of cutscenes the overwhelming majority don't even use MPEG2 for the cutscenes, much less MPEG4. Instead they use faster to decompress (i.e. no decompression hardware or steep system requirements for a movie) like AVI.
Hehe, I'm a commie by advocating against piracy? However, I have zero doubt that there are a lot of students out there who are living a meager existence, but by the same token there are a lot of students who AREN'T : I know a couple of students doing coop terms who somehow manage new cars, all the while having probably never purchased a piece of software in their life. Then again my point is not so much about students, but just the general population, where there is an attitude that software should be free, but paying $70 for a piece of chicken stuck on a grill with $0.02 of spices on it is a great deal.
Online surveys are a complete waste of the bits that they are based on : They don't have equal representation of the cross-section of users (i.e. Ask what you favourite OS and the Linux users tend towards being more motivated than the Windows users), and even non-trolls regularly enter false information.
Thanks for the lecture, Freud. Your argument is the classic, ignorant repressionist argument of trying to turn the tables to keep people quiet, and it's as pathetic today as it was in the middle ages. It's the sort of argument put forth by the average 7th grader. It's especially funny given that it's so hard to find people justifying or encouraging piracy on Slashdot: Boy, you really have to look far!
Actually it's a search of '"Accompli 009" review' (not too hard to figure that one out), and the first link provides about as much info as the DesignTechnica "review", and the second provides even more. The sixth link clearly states "read my review of the Accompli 009" with a review posted far in advance of the DesignTechnica review. I could continue but what's the point: If you spent more than a split-second you would see that it is full of reviews specifically for that one product.
Software companies didn't want people trying before they bought.
I don't know if that's really a fair statement: Most software companies now offer trial or crippleware of their software if you want to try it out. There was a place (I think called "The Software Library") around these parts and it was well known as the best Warez source around : Rent it and dupe it (or just install it) and return (and you didn't even have to spend hours downloading).
Well I'm not really putting pirates into black and white categories (indeed I've said little about pirates themselves, but rather have talked about the fact that as a proportion of the importance to quality of life in today's world that tremendously little personal income is spent on software yearly), however to respond to your comment regarding piracy benefitting companies: The marketing and distribution of their software should be for them to decide (i.e. A car thief could say that by stealing that nice Ferrari he's helping to advertise it)-> If it REALLY works to encourage intro use of their software then they have the option of releasing lite versions, time-expired versions, etc, and a lot of software companies do do this when it makes sense. Piracy is never an effective marketing solution, just as trading songs on Napster can't reasonably be explained away as helping out the artist (who have the ability to put their songs on MP3 or to release "freeware" versions if they wanted that).
To graphics professionals, or aspiring graphics professionals, Photoshop is like surveying equipment is to a surveyor : It is an absolutely critical foundation for the career, so it does seem fair that it isn't a dime a dozen. Having said that, which I do see it being a problem that courses require $300 software purchases, I see people much more acceptingly pay out thousands of dollars for course `textbooks', many of which are poorly written photocopied professor created copy/pasters.
I truly believe that people pirate because life is a competition (whether acknowledged or not. Satisfaction for most people is not in achieving some standard of living, but rather in achieving a BETTER standard of living than the next guy), and piracy is one of the easiest ways to level the playing field (albeit unfairly): The goal is to have the most and do the most spending the least. Contrary to the Slashdot article's contention that software has achieved higher rates by incentives and non-RIAA tactics, I would say the reverse is true: Almost every game CD-ROM now either has advanced copy protection (ex. Operation Flashpoint), or it uses online verification that discourages serial number sharing and piracy (ex. Quake3). Many commercial application are hardware keyed and require internet authentication. On the warez scene the law has come down hard so formerly bustling IRC channels are ghost towns. Many of the people I know who formerly claimed to be able to get anything at anytime now have sources that have dried up. The spread of trojans and viruses has most people nervous about touching cracks, pirated software, etc. Indeed, I'd say "incentives" has absolutely nothing to do with the drop in piracy.
Offtopic, but I'm curious: Could you seriously have a car without insurance? (do some states allow that?) Here in Ontario if you have a plated car then you have insurance (there is no way around it), and for even a $50 junker you'd be paying $300+/month as a male student.
Ughh...firstly, Slashdot hasn't been a "site devoted to free software" in a long long time (a very wise direction change). Yes it has champions and advocates for free software, but it is a "news for nerds. stuff that matters." site, which means quite a bit more than "all software should be free".
Secondly, I'm not going to go into whether stealing software impacts the author because that same argument could be used to claim that conterfeiting is a victimless crime : Both are absolutely absurd and treat the "crime" in an isolated manner that doesn't take into account the whole.
Everytime someone claims that they "didn't have the money", I'd love to see an honest analysis of their lifestyle : Almost always there is beer, movies, electronics, new computer hardware, a car with insurance, gas, and upkeep, etc, but people feel fine paying for those, but that new game or image editing app isn't worth $39.
Piracy has seriously undermined the software industry for years: Something that has such an incredibly ramification on people's lives (i.e. consider the number of hours that people spend using computers these days), yet in a yearly % of consumer income I doubt you'd see it hit 1% per year. Hrmmm, this would be a really interesting foundation for a study actually : What is the net value of software (in entertainment/productivity terms) versus the net payout per year -> I would wager that it is incredibly low, and people pirate not because it is just, or because of their subsistence lifestyle, but rather just because they CAN and they see it as a way of winning at the perceived zero-sum game of life.
I'm always a little surprized whenever anyone claims that something is the first on the net: Did they exhaustively seek out ever niche and crevice of the net to prove if this is true? It just seems so rural to claim something is the first among millions of possible hosts, with billions if not trillions of pages out there.
Of course you could hardly call the two page snippet on designtechnica a "full review" anyways, and that's ignoring the easy to find obvious fact that there are dozens of other easy to find (disproving the first claim) reviews out there, possibly themselves earning the illustrious "first on the net" title.
I'd say that you are both trolling, and really stupid.
Oh goody, an AC Slashdot grammar cop/stalker! While I will agree that perhaps I misused "irony" (though actually it's a debatable point), I would love to hear how I misued "rife". You apparently missed that I also said "their" instead of "there". In any case, these brilliant observations have clearly refuted my points, as this AC grammar cop/stalker has demonstrated.