I'd love to have a phone with WIFI VOIP. In the last two places I've lived in, I cannot get cellular reception in my apartment. If I go outside, it works fine. But once the door is shut, no phone. To deal with this problem, I've subscribed to Vonage. Though I love this solution, it'd be nice to shave off $25/mo. and just use my wireless router.
"If you want to describe the importance to a non-techie audience, the best idea is to use the simile of describing closed formats like betamax. Although it had its advantages there are problems getting the information back out. Yet "open standards" such as cine film can still be viewed or transcribed more easily"
Your heart is in the right place, but this doesn't strike me as a great example just on the grounds that somebody (like me..) would go "huh? Betamax works on all betamax players!" A better example would be one that most people would have dealt with at one time or another. "Have you ever tried to get your check-engine diagnosed outside of your dealer?" Or: "Have you ever tried to use your old cell phone with your new provider?" Okay, admittedly I haven't hit the PERFECT example, but in those cases anybody who has answered yes to those questions would have a lightbulb appear over their heads.
Anyway, this isn't a rebuttal, just a suggestion of a better example. I was a little lost the first time I read your post.
"Of course, the answer is easy; Package the CO2 and send it to mars. Then have 2 for the price of one."
Would this work? I mean, if a bunch of the atmosphere from Venus were magically sent to Mars, would that potentially raise the air pressure high enough to be, more or less, what we have on earth? (Yes, I realize this won't be oxygen, just curious if Mars is big enough or if that would open the floodgates for other sorts of problems...)
"Navigate to the page that interests you to have available offline, select "Favorites" -> "Add to Favorites..." -> Check "Make Available Offline" -> Click the "Customize..." button -> Choose how many pages deep you want to download."
a. There's a limit of 3 pages deep. b. That only works if you actually go to those pages. If you're offline and it strikes you to look for something else... oops. c. You'll spend a hell of a lot of time trying to make this into a useful library.
Instead of arguing, try using your imagination a little bit. It's just a little too easy to rationalize why something won't work.
"However, I find it unlikely that Webaroo will gain currency, precisely because we have become dependent on an interactive and living Internet. When I use the Net, I want to be able to read and respond to my emails, to check my bank balance, shop online, and read the latest news. Why on earth would I want to have a static Internet on my laptop?"
I can't believe somebody on Slashdot is actually asking "Why would I want a vast amount like Wikipedia on my laptop? My laptop right now has a bunch of music and dvd rips on it. The idea is that if I take my laptop somewhere, I have plenty of entertainment avialable on it. I *know* I'm not the only one who does this. If, for a reasonable price, I could buy a snapshot of the net, I could build onto that little library. I often end up in places where getting on the net isn't so practical. Right this second, Wikipedia, IMDB, and Snopes have a LOT of things I haven't read yet. Okay, it wouldn't be up to date, who cares? I can get the up to date stuff when I return. BFD.
Will this project work? Eh, I dunno. I could see them pricing it too high or making it too difficult to reasonably acquire. Sure, that'd kill it. But because the internet is a living breathing organism that needs regular water and sunlight? Give me a break! There's more to the internet than just news.
"Car alarms are useless enough. Do any of you run to see if a theft is in progress when you hear one? Neither do I, because we've all heard too many of them."
That's a bit of a simplistic view. If my car alarm goes off, I go check on it and make sure somebody hasn't broken a window or something. I've seen others around the complex do this, too. Even if somebody did break into my car and I didn't hear it, they still wouldn't easily be able to start it. When the alarm goes off, it kills the ignition.
All that said, I can't imagine a would-be car thief trying to steal a car while the alarm's going off. Besides being annoying, I'd be afraid of Mr. Owner showing up with a baseball bat.
"And people can't even remember to turn off their cell phone ringers. What makes you think they're going to remember to turn off their laptop theft alarms?"
Heh. Not a great comparison. Everywhere I've worked, especially in cubicle environments, you learn pretty quickly to not be obnoxious with your phone. Maybe people are too polite to raise a fuss when a cell phone goes off in a restaraunt, but coworkers won't tolerate being annoyed on a daily basis. I've seen this happen. The chairman of the board at one place I worked actually had a group of people approach him and say "turn that damn thing down." Why would a laptop alarm be any different?
Just to be clear, though, I'm picking on your analogies, not on your point. I agree that this is probably a pretty useless technology, at least for wide-spread use. The stupid thing about it is that it probably has no real way of knowing who the rightful owner is. I suppose it could be password protected, that's a start I guess. I actually think that a remote (not unlike the ones used with a car alarm) would be a little bit more useful. It's a specific device that, at least in theory, only the owner would have. If it's 'armed', the computer won't do jack shit until the remote deactivates the security system. A system like that could POTENTIALLY work if it's developed correctly, but... well if you're shaking your head I can't say I'd blame you. Personal computers are a little too easy to rearrange for this sort of system to work well. Okay, you win, I don't have a great solution to the problem either.
"Embarassed when someone bumps my table and I'm caught with my pants down."
Look on the bright side: If you keep pulling your pants down while browsing the web at a coffee shop, sooner or later you'll see a rise in available bandwidth.
"Essentially what I'm asking you is, "Would a Democratic president be doing anything differently?" That's hard to decide--both sides are all talk and no action on this subject."
Global Warming for some, miniature American flags for others!
As I understand it, they have several keys that contain elements of symbols. Enter a few keystrokes and you've got a complete symbol. Conceptually speaking, it's not all that different from how we assemble letters to make words.
What I'd like to know is how bad can a japanese typo get?
"That's the problem: its an easily defeatable system that makes it too easy to lull parents into a false sense of security."
Any system is 'easily defeatable', especially by an out-of-sight kid. "You're not allowed to watch this show." "Okay! Can I go over to Billy's where you cannot see what I'm watching there?" "Sure, have fun." Parents still have to be parents. If they call their kid once in a while, then the Billy's doorstep approach isn't as useful.
Then there's the matter of kidnapping. We recently had a case here in LA where a woman left her child in the car and somebody stole it. Sprint refused to hand over information about where the GPS locator was blipping until they recieved a court order. I'm sorry, I don't know how that turned out (other than the child is safely at home) but people were PISSED at Sprint for not lending a hand when they could have. Anyway, the point here isn't that Sprint sucks. The point is that there is one solid case where a missing child could have been located with a phone like this. The car thief would only needed have thrown the phone out the window. Easily defeatable. Yet, it didn't happen.
I agree with you to an extent about the false sense of security, but I don't see 'easily defeatable' as a strong reason to avoid it.
I do want to reply to your comment, but for the next few hours I'm pretty busy. I did, however, want to apologize for my "I know what I'm talking about" comment in my last post. It was an arrogant and condescending thing to say and I'm sorry. I appreciate you keeping your cool.
Ah... now I get exactly where you're coming from. Hehe. I tried to get a previous job to provide training for me so I could find a better/higher paying job. So yeah, that example spoke right to me.:)
That's sort of like saying "If I had a computer to do my homework on, I'd save lots of time because I wouldn't have to clean up my messy handwriting!"
A humanoid CG character has anywhere from 100 to 200 bones in it's body for posing. Each of these bones has 9 motion curves attached to it to describe its position in 3D space. (Position, Rotation, Scaling. In most cases, Rotation is all that's used. That's still 3 motion curves per bone.) All of these bones are connected to a heirarchy. This heirarchy has to be observed when posing the character. Imagine drawing a character reaching for a glass of water. You just draw it. To pose this character in 3D requires moving or rotating a number of his bones. To animate this character reaching for this glass of water, you have to co-ordinate the rotation of all of these bones. That means moving each of the bones the right distance at the right frame to provide a convincing arc. You won't have to move every bone in every frame, but you would be surprised at what bones you will have to move just to make your character do something simple.
I mentioned the motion curves before. These curves have to be shaped properly in order to provide the right ease in and ease out events. Easier said than done. If you change the velocity of the top bone of the heirarchy, you've affected every single bone down the chain. Oops. (even with automation like IK, this is still a nasty problem.) These curves also have to be adjusted to prevent the character from penetrating itself. In CG, it's super easy to make a character's hand pass through his body. You have to prevent this from happening. If you want the character to smash his face up against a window, you have to set up a rig to do this. If you want to make your character walk on his finger tips, this is a special scenario that may even require a new rig/skeleton. All of this, and I STILL haven't gotten to facial expressions.
Sure CG does perfect in-betweens, but that in and of itself isn't even a real time savings. If we were talking about animating a bouncing ball, sure, you'd win. However, even the most stylized simplified cartoon character is far more sophisticated than that. These studios aren't jumping on the 3D Movie bandwagon because it's easier to do. Many more are AVOIDING doing it because it's so fricken hard.
Your original statement is not true. I do computer animation for a living, I know what I'm talking about.
"Actually, the reason for the move to CGI in animation is that its cheaper and faster to do a CGI animation film than a conventional frame by frame hand drawn."
If this were even close to true the saturday morning cartoons aired today would be CG. CG is a much bigger endeavour than a hand-drawn movie. Sure, the animators have to draw a lot of frames by hand. But for a CG shot to work you need people to build the models, generate and apply textures, rigging, animation, compositing, FX (i.e. smoke, fire, etc), and rendering. It's pretty specialized, to boot. The guy who does the FX isn't necessarily the guy who does the animation. That's a big team of people there. That's a data network with lots of storage and asset management. That's a lot of technical challenges to overcome. It's a lot of work. This is an apples to oranges comparison, but I'll throw it out anyway: Curious George was made for $40 million, Finding Nemo was $94 million.
Your statement just plain isn't true. It may one day become true, but that day isn't today. The reason for the move to CGI is because the audience stopped watching 2D and started watching 3D. Pixar made a couple of hits, Treasure Island tanked, everybody got in line to make the next Toy Story Killer.
One interesting thing about the DS when it comes to GBA games: The battery lasts a hell of a lot longer than playing a DS game on the system. I'm guessing this is because it only uses one of the screens and it disables the faster processor. In any event, there's still life to those ol GBA games.:)
"no console has sold for more then $199.99 (I might be mistaken on the ones that came with a game, but back in the 80's with the NES my parents got my sister and me the NES with Mario, Duck Hunt & Track & Field (or whatever it was called) with the light gun and power pad for $199.99, same with the SNES when it was released with 2 controllers & Super Mario World)"
Sorry man, just not seeing it this way. The thing is, though, I'm not trying to 'win', I'm just not convinced and it's probably due to the thickness of my skull. Agree to disagree?
"If they teacher has information they want, then they'll listen. If it's preaching (ethics is usually a form of preaching), then they'll ignore it as they see fit."
So basically what you're saying is that these hackers are going to spend $4,300 to ignore what the teacher is saying. I thought these guys were smart. Heh.
" 24 hours * 7 days * 8 weeks = 1344 hours 5062.56 miles / 1344 hours = 3.77 miles/hour You honestly think you're gonna average almost 4mph for a full 8 weeks?!"
You honestly think he's gonna ride his bike for an average of 24 hours a day??!?!?!?
"If someone has the intelligence and skill to be able to hack effectively, it's very unlikely that they'll be terribly influenced by a "teacher" that they more than likely don't respect."
I still don't understand this rationale. Some dude spends $4,300 a week to join this course hoping to become skilled enough to get a job, but then he completely ignores everything the teacher says? DOES NOT COMPUTE.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to have a phone with WIFI VOIP. In the last two places I've lived in, I cannot get cellular reception in my apartment. If I go outside, it works fine. But once the door is shut, no phone. To deal with this problem, I've subscribed to Vonage. Though I love this solution, it'd be nice to shave off $25/mo. and just use my wireless router.
"If you want to describe the importance to a non-techie audience, the best idea is to use the simile of describing closed formats like betamax. Although it had its advantages there are problems getting the information back out. Yet "open standards" such as cine film can still be viewed or transcribed more easily"
Your heart is in the right place, but this doesn't strike me as a great example just on the grounds that somebody (like me..) would go "huh? Betamax works on all betamax players!" A better example would be one that most people would have dealt with at one time or another. "Have you ever tried to get your check-engine diagnosed outside of your dealer?" Or: "Have you ever tried to use your old cell phone with your new provider?" Okay, admittedly I haven't hit the PERFECT example, but in those cases anybody who has answered yes to those questions would have a lightbulb appear over their heads.
Anyway, this isn't a rebuttal, just a suggestion of a better example. I was a little lost the first time I read your post.
"Of course, the answer is easy; Package the CO2 and send it to mars. Then have 2 for the price of one."
Would this work? I mean, if a bunch of the atmosphere from Venus were magically sent to Mars, would that potentially raise the air pressure high enough to be, more or less, what we have on earth? (Yes, I realize this won't be oxygen, just curious if Mars is big enough or if that would open the floodgates for other sorts of problems...)
"Navigate to the page that interests you to have available offline, select "Favorites" -> "Add to Favorites..." -> Check "Make Available Offline" -> Click the "Customize..." button -> Choose how many pages deep you want to download."
a. There's a limit of 3 pages deep.
b. That only works if you actually go to those pages. If you're offline and it strikes you to look for something else... oops.
c. You'll spend a hell of a lot of time trying to make this into a useful library.
Instead of arguing, try using your imagination a little bit. It's just a little too easy to rationalize why something won't work.
"However, I find it unlikely that Webaroo will gain currency, precisely because we have become dependent on an interactive and living Internet. When I use the Net, I want to be able to read and respond to my emails, to check my bank balance, shop online, and read the latest news. Why on earth would I want to have a static Internet on my laptop?"
I can't believe somebody on Slashdot is actually asking "Why would I want a vast amount like Wikipedia on my laptop? My laptop right now has a bunch of music and dvd rips on it. The idea is that if I take my laptop somewhere, I have plenty of entertainment avialable on it. I *know* I'm not the only one who does this. If, for a reasonable price, I could buy a snapshot of the net, I could build onto that little library. I often end up in places where getting on the net isn't so practical. Right this second, Wikipedia, IMDB, and Snopes have a LOT of things I haven't read yet. Okay, it wouldn't be up to date, who cares? I can get the up to date stuff when I return. BFD.
Will this project work? Eh, I dunno. I could see them pricing it too high or making it too difficult to reasonably acquire. Sure, that'd kill it. But because the internet is a living breathing organism that needs regular water and sunlight? Give me a break! There's more to the internet than just news.
"Car alarms are useless enough. Do any of you run to see if a theft is in progress when you hear one? Neither do I, because we've all heard too many of them."
... well if you're shaking your head I can't say I'd blame you. Personal computers are a little too easy to rearrange for this sort of system to work well. Okay, you win, I don't have a great solution to the problem either.
That's a bit of a simplistic view. If my car alarm goes off, I go check on it and make sure somebody hasn't broken a window or something. I've seen others around the complex do this, too. Even if somebody did break into my car and I didn't hear it, they still wouldn't easily be able to start it. When the alarm goes off, it kills the ignition.
All that said, I can't imagine a would-be car thief trying to steal a car while the alarm's going off. Besides being annoying, I'd be afraid of Mr. Owner showing up with a baseball bat.
"And people can't even remember to turn off their cell phone ringers. What makes you think they're going to remember to turn off their laptop theft alarms?"
Heh. Not a great comparison. Everywhere I've worked, especially in cubicle environments, you learn pretty quickly to not be obnoxious with your phone. Maybe people are too polite to raise a fuss when a cell phone goes off in a restaraunt, but coworkers won't tolerate being annoyed on a daily basis. I've seen this happen. The chairman of the board at one place I worked actually had a group of people approach him and say "turn that damn thing down." Why would a laptop alarm be any different?
Just to be clear, though, I'm picking on your analogies, not on your point. I agree that this is probably a pretty useless technology, at least for wide-spread use. The stupid thing about it is that it probably has no real way of knowing who the rightful owner is. I suppose it could be password protected, that's a start I guess. I actually think that a remote (not unlike the ones used with a car alarm) would be a little bit more useful. It's a specific device that, at least in theory, only the owner would have. If it's 'armed', the computer won't do jack shit until the remote deactivates the security system. A system like that could POTENTIALLY work if it's developed correctly, but
"Embarassed when someone bumps my table and I'm caught with my pants down."
Look on the bright side: If you keep pulling your pants down while browsing the web at a coffee shop, sooner or later you'll see a rise in available bandwidth.
"The author was insuccessful in spelling "successful."
Thanks for Choo-Choo-Choosing to post that, Ralph.
"Turn off your cell phone. :-)"
Informative?
"Essentially what I'm asking you is, "Would a Democratic president be doing anything differently?" That's hard to decide--both sides are all talk and no action on this subject."
Global Warming for some, miniature American flags for others!
South Park is made in under a week. It happens. You'll notice, however, that those CG shows are vastly outnumbered by hand-drawn.
"How do people type on a computer with Japanese?"
As I understand it, they have several keys that contain elements of symbols. Enter a few keystrokes and you've got a complete symbol. Conceptually speaking, it's not all that different from how we assemble letters to make words.
What I'd like to know is how bad can a japanese typo get?
"That's the problem: its an easily defeatable system that makes it too easy to lull parents into a false sense of security."
Any system is 'easily defeatable', especially by an out-of-sight kid. "You're not allowed to watch this show." "Okay! Can I go over to Billy's where you cannot see what I'm watching there?" "Sure, have fun." Parents still have to be parents. If they call their kid once in a while, then the Billy's doorstep approach isn't as useful.
Then there's the matter of kidnapping. We recently had a case here in LA where a woman left her child in the car and somebody stole it. Sprint refused to hand over information about where the GPS locator was blipping until they recieved a court order. I'm sorry, I don't know how that turned out (other than the child is safely at home) but people were PISSED at Sprint for not lending a hand when they could have. Anyway, the point here isn't that Sprint sucks. The point is that there is one solid case where a missing child could have been located with a phone like this. The car thief would only needed have thrown the phone out the window. Easily defeatable. Yet, it didn't happen.
I agree with you to an extent about the false sense of security, but I don't see 'easily defeatable' as a strong reason to avoid it.
"so, at what time do those legs open? :D" ... It'll be the best prom EVER!!
I do want to reply to your comment, but for the next few hours I'm pretty busy. I did, however, want to apologize for my "I know what I'm talking about" comment in my last post. It was an arrogant and condescending thing to say and I'm sorry. I appreciate you keeping your cool.
Ah... now I get exactly where you're coming from. Hehe. I tried to get a previous job to provide training for me so I could find a better/higher paying job. So yeah, that example spoke right to me. :)
"With CG you simply do this all in one go."
That's sort of like saying "If I had a computer to do my homework on, I'd save lots of time because I wouldn't have to clean up my messy handwriting!"
A humanoid CG character has anywhere from 100 to 200 bones in it's body for posing. Each of these bones has 9 motion curves attached to it to describe its position in 3D space. (Position, Rotation, Scaling. In most cases, Rotation is all that's used. That's still 3 motion curves per bone.) All of these bones are connected to a heirarchy. This heirarchy has to be observed when posing the character. Imagine drawing a character reaching for a glass of water. You just draw it. To pose this character in 3D requires moving or rotating a number of his bones. To animate this character reaching for this glass of water, you have to co-ordinate the rotation of all of these bones. That means moving each of the bones the right distance at the right frame to provide a convincing arc. You won't have to move every bone in every frame, but you would be surprised at what bones you will have to move just to make your character do something simple.
I mentioned the motion curves before. These curves have to be shaped properly in order to provide the right ease in and ease out events. Easier said than done. If you change the velocity of the top bone of the heirarchy, you've affected every single bone down the chain. Oops. (even with automation like IK, this is still a nasty problem.) These curves also have to be adjusted to prevent the character from penetrating itself. In CG, it's super easy to make a character's hand pass through his body. You have to prevent this from happening. If you want the character to smash his face up against a window, you have to set up a rig to do this. If you want to make your character walk on his finger tips, this is a special scenario that may even require a new rig/skeleton. All of this, and I STILL haven't gotten to facial expressions.
Sure CG does perfect in-betweens, but that in and of itself isn't even a real time savings. If we were talking about animating a bouncing ball, sure, you'd win. However, even the most stylized simplified cartoon character is far more sophisticated than that. These studios aren't jumping on the 3D Movie bandwagon because it's easier to do. Many more are AVOIDING doing it because it's so fricken hard.
Your original statement is not true. I do computer animation for a living, I know what I'm talking about.
"Actually, the reason for the move to CGI in animation is that its cheaper and faster to do a CGI animation film than a conventional frame by frame hand drawn."
If this were even close to true the saturday morning cartoons aired today would be CG. CG is a much bigger endeavour than a hand-drawn movie. Sure, the animators have to draw a lot of frames by hand. But for a CG shot to work you need people to build the models, generate and apply textures, rigging, animation, compositing, FX (i.e. smoke, fire, etc), and rendering. It's pretty specialized, to boot. The guy who does the FX isn't necessarily the guy who does the animation. That's a big team of people there. That's a data network with lots of storage and asset management. That's a lot of technical challenges to overcome. It's a lot of work. This is an apples to oranges comparison, but I'll throw it out anyway: Curious George was made for $40 million, Finding Nemo was $94 million.
Your statement just plain isn't true. It may one day become true, but that day isn't today. The reason for the move to CGI is because the audience stopped watching 2D and started watching 3D. Pixar made a couple of hits, Treasure Island tanked, everybody got in line to make the next Toy Story Killer.
"Does the DS Lite play GBA games?"
:)
One interesting thing about the DS when it comes to GBA games: The battery lasts a hell of a lot longer than playing a DS game on the system. I'm guessing this is because it only uses one of the screens and it disables the faster processor. In any event, there's still life to those ol GBA games.
"no console has sold for more then $199.99 (I might be mistaken on the ones that came with a game, but back in the 80's with the NES my parents got my sister and me the NES with Mario, Duck Hunt & Track & Field (or whatever it was called) with the light gun and power pad for $199.99, same with the SNES when it was released with 2 controllers & Super Mario World)"
:)
The Nintendo 64 was $249 sans game.
Sorry man, just not seeing it this way. The thing is, though, I'm not trying to 'win', I'm just not convinced and it's probably due to the thickness of my skull. Agree to disagree?
"Does anyone else remember this car? Any footage or info online?"
I remember seeing that, too. If I had to guess, I'd say it came from Newton's Apple.
"If they teacher has information they want, then they'll listen. If it's preaching (ethics is usually a form of preaching), then they'll ignore it as they see fit."
So basically what you're saying is that these hackers are going to spend $4,300 to ignore what the teacher is saying. I thought these guys were smart. Heh.
"
24 hours * 7 days * 8 weeks = 1344 hours
5062.56 miles / 1344 hours = 3.77 miles/hour
You honestly think you're gonna average almost 4mph for a full 8 weeks?!"
You honestly think he's gonna ride his bike for an average of 24 hours a day??!?!?!?
"If someone has the intelligence and skill to be able to hack effectively, it's very unlikely that they'll be terribly influenced by a "teacher" that they more than likely don't respect."
I still don't understand this rationale. Some dude spends $4,300 a week to join this course hoping to become skilled enough to get a job, but then he completely ignores everything the teacher says? DOES NOT COMPUTE.