Well, books can be typed in braille, the kindle cannot...
You aren't typing a fucking kindle. Sorry but this kind of bullshit is nonsense. If you have a blind student, print out a one-off Braille book.
You could probably print blind books for every damned blind student in the US for the next hundred years with the money that was wasted on even investigating this whole thing.
Just stop the show and resume where you left off, it seems recalibrate the network speed every time you start a show.
That isn't really a solution to his problem. He wants high-quality, uninterrupted playback. Having a show suddenly stop and stutter because the bandwidth gets thin partway through playyback won't be fixed by stopping the show and hoping it selects a faster network speed. His issue is that the buffers are too small to allow playback at a high resolution on a slow connection.
Unless the buffer issue is fixed, he will run into the same problem even if he resumes playback. (and it is annoying stopping and starting playback)
Not at all. Cellphones need something like 100mW...2W RF output to cut though background static and get a signal to the cell tower. And by conservation of energy that means even if nothing at all besides the RF emitter consumes energy, the power consumption will be at least 100mW...2W.
I may be missing something here, but can't you use this power to trickle charge a battery? You don't necessarily need to collect the exact amount you are expending at the same time, you only need to collect at a rate which equals the average amount you use in the same amount of time. (assuming you start with a dead battery)
Who is to say that a 100m wide object could not conceivably travel at 3/4 the speed of light?
Lack of any supernovas in our immediate corner of the galaxy. 3/4 the speed of light? I'd be surprised to know of anything that wasn't plasma capable of being accelerated to that velocity.
If our systems are sensitive enough to pick up asteroids much smaller than the minimal threat level, that is a good sign that we can pick up asteroids that are a threat to us.
I just hope that 'better than 2 days' with respect to larger objects is exponentially better.
"What, I told you we could do better, I gave you 3 days warning on that rogue planet from the Oort cloud"
sounds like a recipe for carnage if the projected impact zone is a highly populated area. hey everyone in new york city - you have two days to clear the city - ready,steady,go!
A healthy person can easily walk 20 miles in a day. At a distance of 5 miles from a Hiroshima sized explosion, you would very likely (+99%) survive.
As long as it doesn't hit a nuclear reactor directly, there will be little to no radiation. It would be like a giant TNT bomb, so calculating projected casualties using PSI measurements is possible.
That reminds me... at Cape Lisburne, we had a really old navy Beacon for the airstrip which gave off enough EMI to light a florescent tube (no really, there was one on the wall). I swear, you really could feel it when you were in the shack. So I think it is highly possible that some people could detect being under high tension lines (I think lower frequency is easier to detect). High tension lines are also known to be able to light up florescent bulbs at a distance. I think sitting him next to the router and seeing if he can tell when it is off or on would be a much better test
Obviously this isn't a wifi router, but as a kid I used to be able to walk under a transformer near my house and 'see' something weird. Like a wavy black at the edge of my vision.
It wasn't discomforting or anything, but sometimes I would just be walking around, and notice it, then I'd look around and find a rather large transformer or other piece of power equipment. Typically those that were just about to fail. This particular transformer had a consistent buzzing as well, and if you looked up you could see electricity arcing. I'm doubting it was in spec, but the effect on my vision was real.
But again, a transformer with arcing electricity is a slight bit more extreme than a wifi router.
You know what? You are right. Lets give that the Slashdot treatment.
faraday cages do not block elecromagnetic waves. Depends on the meaning of the word block.
antimatter cannot be transported in a suitcase. Of course it can, just not transported very far. And it has the side benefit of transporting everything around it immediately afterward.
homeopathy has no scientific evidence. Of course it has scientific evidence. The evidence suggests that Homeopathy is bunk, but there is plenty of evidence.
earth is not flat. You just need to look at it on the right scale.
So it's a game for pussies? Thanks, I'll stick with Eve Online. Let me know when they grow some balls and make it reasonably realistic. If you want safety, park your ass in a station and go play WoW.
A Star Trek MMO deserves more than this.
QQ More?
I'd say that any community deserves someone who is able to articulate their point without resorting to juvenile name calling and cries of 'if you don't like it leave'.
In this case, your method of play is one that the makers of this game have chosen not to support, and not without good reason. The PvP gameplay in a game can result in a black hole of developer time in which vast amounts of effort are spent tweaking and redefining roles and balance.
Keeping it mostly PvE results in a hell of a lot less pressure to appease a community who calls for 'Nerfs and Buffs'. There will still be all sorts of cries for that, but in a PvE realm, it is a LOT easier to manage.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with a PvP style game, in fact, I've always played on full PvP MMOs. But to attack it in that manner simply on this press release is childish.
I'm just suprised you'd need to pay for acting talent when all you want is voice- I'd have thought you could get voice actors cheaper than you could get physical and voice actors. Similarly, although I agree you wouldn't want to just use any old joe for it, I'd have thought there are plenty of low end voice actors that are perfectly good enough for a game well below hollywood rates.
But all you want isn't just a voice, what you want is someone who can take someone else's movements and do a voice so well that even without a human body, you can still pick up on things like, emotions, fears, desires, interest, etc. A good voice actor is what takes your character beyond: "Wow, that villian sounds like a villain" and brings you to "I really despise that villain".
And to put the proper emotion into a character's dialog, you have to understand how that character behaves and acts. Thus selecting a standard actor isn't such a bad idea given how much they do know about the total package of human behavior.
The voice actor is the bridge over the uncanny valley.
Life goes on and there is no reason to freak if you get a B- when you did your best
You know who whines about their best.
In all seriousness though, it's very easy to make the statement "This is how we will raise our kids" and point fingers at parents who have even the slightest difficulty raising their children. I think that is unfair. If there was some magic formula that you could follow and end up with perfect children and no problems, we would have figured it out millenia ago. Reality is never so simple that you can say with any confidence that you will raise your children the 'correct' way, as there are so many things that can cause things to go off the rails.
Even if I had 100% of my time to devote to my children, there is no guarantee that they will turn out the way we expect them to, and while bad parenting may be the root cause for a lot of issues that we see in children, it isn't some blame catch-all for every problem we see.
If Avatar can't do facial non-realtime in a perfect environment with the best tech. There is no way that Natal can do body realtime with cheap tech in a million different lighting environments. Obvious to anyone with a brain and not blinded by HYPE.
An Olympic athlete can't sprint 40 mph under the best of conditions and with the best trainers. There is no way an amateur can train to run a marathon without sponsors. Obvious to anyone with a brain.
The fact that the team that produced Avatar was unable to do a VERY difficult task has no correlation with another product attempting to do a very different task. Tracking of facial movements IS orders of magnitude more difficult than realtime tracking of limbs.
Look, 10 years ago in college I could develop a real time motion tracking algorithm with acceptable lag (Enough to prove the concept) It was a simple program that tracked the positioning of a person's hands. I managed to trim it down to a 1 second delay. I'm quite certain that tracking giant freaking rays with a very limited set of movements is a hell of a lot easier when compared with the near infinite details of the face which our minds and eyes have had millions of years to evolve to even notice the most minute variations.
Then I got a job, and began working in real time detection of aerial hazards like powerlines, tree limbs, etc. Talk about trying to deal with something in a million different lighting conditions. Yet running a set of algorithms to warn pilots of approaching dangers with nearly non-existent false positives was possible 6 years ago on very limited airborne processing potential.
Now we look at something with more options to view an object than we had available to us for military helicopters and you suggest that because one group of people couldn't do something completely different, this is impossible? Sorry, but while their implementation may leave us wanting (at least now) the ability to track the objects like they say is not that difficult. It's making that sort of tracking mesh into a game in a way that is fun.
The only thing I've heard about project Natal came from Penny-arcade's comic. So it can't be hype. Notice I never said that what they implement will be any good from a gaming perspective, only that it is technically possible.
buy a fishtape and run the cable in the wall, under the floor or through the ceiling.
Everyone seems to be missing the point here.
I want 0 wires running to this display. It doesn't help me if the wires are routed to 1000 ports all over the building. If my requirement was "No Wires" I fail to see how any possible configuration which involves wires avoids that issue.
The tax on fast cars would probably go to police, hospitals, courts, and other people that may be involved when fast cars are driven unsafely. This would finance enforcement, emergency response, and litigation. In other words, by paying a fast car tax, I would again benefit society, helping to prevent and resolve a potentially deadly situation.
You just killed your own arguement. You are suggesting that because people are doing something wrong, everyone must be punished, and someone must be compensated.
Look at your post again, with only a few words changed.
The tax on internet connections would probably go to artists, and other people that may be involved when connnections are used to rip off their labor. This would finance enforcement, public awareness, provide a safety net for artists thereby encouraging them, and litigation. In other words, by paying an internet tax, I would again benefit society, helping to promote the arts and ensure their continued production.
In the end, a fast car tax is just as wrong as a piracy tax. You are punishing the whole for the actions of a few.
You can get crazy long HDMI cables to transmit video and [digital] audio. I bought a 25 footer to go across a room, and that's not the top end, either. This is really useless for non-mobile devices.
This is what I used to do, but wives tend to dislike cables dragging all over the place and while it might be fun to watch your child go flying across the room once or twice, eventually it gets distracting. At least with the HDMI cables when someone trips over it, they pop out of the display instead of yanking it out of my hands.
Removing cords is a big thing for me, since I will often be in several locations in my room and hate always draping the wires behind the couch, or running it under the coffee table. I like to use my eliptical, but that damned thing is easy to get bored on. I'd love to have a lightweight thin-computer up there without worrying about the cost, or worse wires.
I know that a lot of you are fine with your setup. But I want a wireless display that doesn't require normal computing equipment internally to run it.
If you're legitimately trying to prevent access, putting a weak WEP password on your AP is almost worse then leaving it open because it generates a false sense of security for your network. Now if you had a low-timer rotating WPA-PSK key, MAC filtered, and didn't advert SSID, then that's a reasonable amount of security (but still not full proof, but the amount of effort goes up to breach it).
WEP is a bit like locking the door to your house. This stops the casual person from walking into the house with no restrictions, but it will not stop anyone who WANTS to enter your house.
I used the same premise for my house in the country. I had a 1/2 mile long drive way with 2 switch backs and it was dirt/rocks and pretty washed out. I figured that anyone coming up there had already made their decision and using deadbolts was not going to matter much if I wasn't home.
So this is the solution for people who don't want to run cable to a device which is moved only when it breaks. What other benefit is there
You build your over the top game crushing machine and stick it in your server closet. It does all the hard crunching and sends the preprocessed video to your Thin client like terminal. Your mouse/gamepad/keyboard controls are transmitted back via a simple low bandwidth link that requires little processing overhead.
You effectively have a hand-held gaming device with the power of a desktop sized computer. Imagine PS3 graphics and games on a hand-held device that only uses enough power to run the display the transceiver and the buttons.
Slashdot Mirror
Aren't border crossings an exception to the Fourth Amendment, or rather, a circumstance where any search is considered "reasonable" by default?
Says who? No really, consider the source of that claim.
Just because the government says something, or even when the government DOES something, that doesn't mean what they say or do is Constitutional.
Well, books can be typed in braille, the kindle cannot...
You aren't typing a fucking kindle. Sorry but this kind of bullshit is nonsense. If you have a blind student, print out a one-off Braille book.
You could probably print blind books for every damned blind student in the US for the next hundred years with the money that was wasted on even investigating this whole thing.
One would hope that you could control the photosynthesis to keep from getting too fat, though.
Sunscreen.
SPF: Diet
Just stop the show and resume where you left off, it seems recalibrate the network speed every time you start a show.
That isn't really a solution to his problem. He wants high-quality, uninterrupted playback. Having a show suddenly stop and stutter because the bandwidth gets thin partway through playyback won't be fixed by stopping the show and hoping it selects a faster network speed. His issue is that the buffers are too small to allow playback at a high resolution on a slow connection.
Unless the buffer issue is fixed, he will run into the same problem even if he resumes playback. (and it is annoying stopping and starting playback)
Not at all. Cellphones need something like 100mW...2W RF output to cut though background static and get a signal to the cell tower. And by conservation of energy that means even if nothing at all besides the RF emitter consumes energy, the power consumption will be at least 100mW...2W.
I may be missing something here, but can't you use this power to trickle charge a battery? You don't necessarily need to collect the exact amount you are expending at the same time, you only need to collect at a rate which equals the average amount you use in the same amount of time. (assuming you start with a dead battery)
Who is to say that a 100m wide object could not conceivably travel at 3/4 the speed of light?
Lack of any supernovas in our immediate corner of the galaxy. 3/4 the speed of light? I'd be surprised to know of anything that wasn't plasma capable of being accelerated to that velocity.
If our systems are sensitive enough to pick up asteroids much smaller than the minimal threat level, that is a good sign that we can pick up asteroids that are a threat to us.
I just hope that 'better than 2 days' with respect to larger objects is exponentially better.
"What, I told you we could do better, I gave you 3 days warning on that rogue planet from the Oort cloud"
or cricket bat, depending on location.
Unidentified objects coming from space? A cricket bat might either be insanely insensitive or insanely suicidal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Krikkiters
sounds like a recipe for carnage if the projected impact zone is a highly populated area. hey everyone in new york city - you have two days to clear the city - ready,steady,go!
A healthy person can easily walk 20 miles in a day. At a distance of 5 miles from a Hiroshima sized explosion, you would very likely (+99%) survive.
As long as it doesn't hit a nuclear reactor directly, there will be little to no radiation. It would be like a giant TNT bomb, so calculating projected casualties using PSI measurements is possible.
Scotch has to be made in Scotland, otherwise it can't be called "Scotch". See here [wikipedia.org]
In the UK.
That reminds me... at Cape Lisburne, we had a really old navy Beacon for the airstrip which gave off enough EMI to light a florescent tube (no really, there was one on the wall). I swear, you really could feel it when you were in the shack. So I think it is highly possible that some people could detect being under high tension lines (I think lower frequency is easier to detect). High tension lines are also known to be able to light up florescent bulbs at a distance. I think sitting him next to the router and seeing if he can tell when it is off or on would be a much better test
Obviously this isn't a wifi router, but as a kid I used to be able to walk under a transformer near my house and 'see' something weird. Like a wavy black at the edge of my vision.
It wasn't discomforting or anything, but sometimes I would just be walking around, and notice it, then I'd look around and find a rather large transformer or other piece of power equipment. Typically those that were just about to fail. This particular transformer had a consistent buzzing as well, and if you looked up you could see electricity arcing. I'm doubting it was in spec, but the effect on my vision was real.
But again, a transformer with arcing electricity is a slight bit more extreme than a wifi router.
Your neighbor's dog doesn't radiate through the walls though. :P
He is very good at using tunneling to get past them though. ;)
we are on slashdot for god's sake!
You know what? You are right. Lets give that the Slashdot treatment.
faraday cages do not block elecromagnetic waves.
Depends on the meaning of the word block.
antimatter cannot be transported in a suitcase. Of course it can, just not transported very far. And it has the side benefit of transporting everything around it immediately afterward.
homeopathy has no scientific evidence. Of course it has scientific evidence. The evidence suggests that Homeopathy is bunk, but there is plenty of evidence.
earth is not flat.
You just need to look at it on the right scale.
There... are... 4chan... LIGHTS!
LOL
My kingdom for a mod point
So it's a game for pussies? Thanks, I'll stick with Eve Online. Let me know when they grow some balls and make it reasonably realistic. If you want safety, park your ass in a station and go play WoW.
A Star Trek MMO deserves more than this.
QQ More?
I'd say that any community deserves someone who is able to articulate their point without resorting to juvenile name calling and cries of 'if you don't like it leave'.
In this case, your method of play is one that the makers of this game have chosen not to support, and not without good reason. The PvP gameplay in a game can result in a black hole of developer time in which vast amounts of effort are spent tweaking and redefining roles and balance.
Keeping it mostly PvE results in a hell of a lot less pressure to appease a community who calls for 'Nerfs and Buffs'. There will still be all sorts of cries for that, but in a PvE realm, it is a LOT easier to manage.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with a PvP style game, in fact, I've always played on full PvP MMOs. But to attack it in that manner simply on this press release is childish.
I'm just suprised you'd need to pay for acting talent when all you want is voice- I'd have thought you could get voice actors cheaper than you could get physical and voice actors. Similarly, although I agree you wouldn't want to just use any old joe for it, I'd have thought there are plenty of low end voice actors that are perfectly good enough for a game well below hollywood rates.
But all you want isn't just a voice, what you want is someone who can take someone else's movements and do a voice so well that even without a human body, you can still pick up on things like, emotions, fears, desires, interest, etc. A good voice actor is what takes your character beyond: "Wow, that villian sounds like a villain" and brings you to "I really despise that villain".
And to put the proper emotion into a character's dialog, you have to understand how that character behaves and acts. Thus selecting a standard actor isn't such a bad idea given how much they do know about the total package of human behavior.
The voice actor is the bridge over the uncanny valley.
Life goes on and there is no reason to freak if you get a B- when you did your best
You know who whines about their best.
In all seriousness though, it's very easy to make the statement "This is how we will raise our kids" and point fingers at parents who have even the slightest difficulty raising their children. I think that is unfair. If there was some magic formula that you could follow and end up with perfect children and no problems, we would have figured it out millenia ago. Reality is never so simple that you can say with any confidence that you will raise your children the 'correct' way, as there are so many things that can cause things to go off the rails.
Even if I had 100% of my time to devote to my children, there is no guarantee that they will turn out the way we expect them to, and while bad parenting may be the root cause for a lot of issues that we see in children, it isn't some blame catch-all for every problem we see.
If Avatar can't do facial non-realtime in a perfect environment with the best tech. There is no way that Natal can do body realtime with cheap tech in a million different lighting environments. Obvious to anyone with a brain and not blinded by HYPE.
An Olympic athlete can't sprint 40 mph under the best of conditions and with the best trainers. There is no way an amateur can train to run a marathon without sponsors. Obvious to anyone with a brain.
The fact that the team that produced Avatar was unable to do a VERY difficult task has no correlation with another product attempting to do a very different task. Tracking of facial movements IS orders of magnitude more difficult than realtime tracking of limbs.
Look, 10 years ago in college I could develop a real time motion tracking algorithm with acceptable lag (Enough to prove the concept) It was a simple program that tracked the positioning of a person's hands. I managed to trim it down to a 1 second delay. I'm quite certain that tracking giant freaking rays with a very limited set of movements is a hell of a lot easier when compared with the near infinite details of the face which our minds and eyes have had millions of years to evolve to even notice the most minute variations.
Then I got a job, and began working in real time detection of aerial hazards like powerlines, tree limbs, etc. Talk about trying to deal with something in a million different lighting conditions. Yet running a set of algorithms to warn pilots of approaching dangers with nearly non-existent false positives was possible 6 years ago on very limited airborne processing potential.
Now we look at something with more options to view an object than we had available to us for military helicopters and you suggest that because one group of people couldn't do something completely different, this is impossible? Sorry, but while their implementation may leave us wanting (at least now) the ability to track the objects like they say is not that difficult. It's making that sort of tracking mesh into a game in a way that is fun.
The only thing I've heard about project Natal came from Penny-arcade's comic. So it can't be hype. Notice I never said that what they implement will be any good from a gaming perspective, only that it is technically possible.
buy a fishtape and run the cable in the wall, under the floor or through the ceiling.
Everyone seems to be missing the point here.
I want 0 wires running to this display. It doesn't help me if the wires are routed to 1000 ports all over the building. If my requirement was "No Wires" I fail to see how any possible configuration which involves wires avoids that issue.
The tax on fast cars would probably go to police, hospitals, courts, and other people that may be involved when fast cars are driven unsafely. This would finance enforcement, emergency response, and litigation. In other words, by paying a fast car tax, I would again benefit society, helping to prevent and resolve a potentially deadly situation.
You just killed your own arguement. You are suggesting that because people are doing something wrong, everyone must be punished, and someone must be compensated.
Look at your post again, with only a few words changed.
The tax on internet connections would probably go to artists, and other people that may be involved when connnections are used to rip off their labor. This would finance enforcement, public awareness, provide a safety net for artists thereby encouraging them, and litigation. In other words, by paying an internet tax, I would again benefit society, helping to promote the arts and ensure their continued production.
In the end, a fast car tax is just as wrong as a piracy tax. You are punishing the whole for the actions of a few.
So, if you pay someone to kill your wife, you must have the right to do it. 'Cuz you paid, right? Murder is illegal only when it is pro bono.
If the government pays an executioner to kill the BTK serial killer, then I expect BTK to be killed.
I think the comparison is apt.
The government gave money to an entity, a service must be rendered.
You can get crazy long HDMI cables to transmit video and [digital] audio. I bought a 25 footer to go across a room, and that's not the top end, either. This is really useless for non-mobile devices.
This is what I used to do, but wives tend to dislike cables dragging all over the place and while it might be fun to watch your child go flying across the room once or twice, eventually it gets distracting. At least with the HDMI cables when someone trips over it, they pop out of the display instead of yanking it out of my hands.
Removing cords is a big thing for me, since I will often be in several locations in my room and hate always draping the wires behind the couch, or running it under the coffee table. I like to use my eliptical, but that damned thing is easy to get bored on. I'd love to have a lightweight thin-computer up there without worrying about the cost, or worse wires.
I know that a lot of you are fine with your setup. But I want a wireless display that doesn't require normal computing equipment internally to run it.
If you're legitimately trying to prevent access, putting a weak WEP password on your AP is almost worse then leaving it open because it generates a false sense of security for your network. Now if you had a low-timer rotating WPA-PSK key, MAC filtered, and didn't advert SSID, then that's a reasonable amount of security (but still not full proof, but the amount of effort goes up to breach it).
WEP is a bit like locking the door to your house. This stops the casual person from walking into the house with no restrictions, but it will not stop anyone who WANTS to enter your house.
I used the same premise for my house in the country. I had a 1/2 mile long drive way with 2 switch backs and it was dirt/rocks and pretty washed out. I figured that anyone coming up there had already made their decision and using deadbolts was not going to matter much if I wasn't home.
So this is the solution for people who don't want to run cable to a device which is moved only when it breaks.
What other benefit is there
You build your over the top game crushing machine and stick it in your server closet. It does all the hard crunching and sends the preprocessed video to your Thin client like terminal. Your mouse/gamepad/keyboard controls are transmitted back via a simple low bandwidth link that requires little processing overhead.
You effectively have a hand-held gaming device with the power of a desktop sized computer. Imagine PS3 graphics and games on a hand-held device that only uses enough power to run the display the transceiver and the buttons.
That's just one of the options.
Laws of the USA tend to apply in the USA
So, the USA won the Battle of the Alamo?