Posts by Cryo

Re: "Google has not been able to dredge up anything really useful for a long time now"

It's not just the results either. The interfaces of their sites are going through the floor. For everything they improve, something else gets made worse. And recently, they've been forcing unwanted Google+ integration into all their sites. Google has long since abandoned the simplicity and usability that made them popular to begin with in favor of coercing people into using their services to further their goals of monopolizing the connected world.

Re: Bit spooky

It's been like this for years, on all platforms. How do you think achievements are tracked? If a game has an achievement for killing X number of enemies or using an item a certain number of times, those stats are constantly getting uploaded while you are playing the game. It doesn't matter if its Sony, Microsoft or Valve, if you're playing games on a system that's online, they're recording the exact time periods when you are playing each game, along with all sorts of stats about how you play those games. If your user profile is publicly viewable, much of this data is available to anyone wanting to monitor and catalog it for themselves.

Re: No thanks....

But if it doesn't go through their server, how are they supposed to record all your sound data, perform voice recognition on it and index the results for quick retrieval by interested parties? Without that, what good would this product be?

In case you didn't notice, much of the Register's headlines and articles use bits of language intended to be mildly amusing. And who are you to say that their typical readers are " technically illiterate"? It's a long-running technology news site, so I suspect that most of their regular visitor's level of scientific knowledge is above average. Think of it more as a somewhat nerdy person calling their friend a nerd in good humor, than someone doing so in a demeaning way.

Re: And a lovely player it was

I skipped version 3 of Winamp, as it performed poorly and had some functionality issues. Thankfully, Nullsoft abandoned it as well, and the following year released Winamp 5 based off version 2's codebase, but with most of version 3's additions replicated. There's also since been a "Winamp Lite" released, that cuts out many of the side features added over the years.

As for the other bundled garbage that can get installed with it, that just requires going through a custom install to avoid those things getting added. That can be a bit more tedious, but it's not like you really need to reinstall Winamp frequently. Many people get along fine using versions of the software that are years old. Existing versions of Winamp will continue to function fine for many years to come, so I expect it to continue to be used for quite some time into the future, even if it is no longer actively developed.

Re: Hmmm....

So, Apple made a smartphone that looked nice, so no one else is allowed to make a smartphone that looks nice? The iPhone was little more than a PDA with a phone built in, which had been done before. They just packaged it up to look nice and be a bit more consumer-friendly. If we get into their claims that aspects of their user interface were "stolen" by their competitors, it should be noted that Apple's own company was largely built on copying OS features "borrowed" from others. If it were some small company having their product design copied by a big company, I could see, but an industry-leading corporation should expect their competitors to iterate off of their product designs. It makes for a healthy, competitive market in which the consumer wins.

Re: 36 cameras

I was thinking the same thing. Using wide fisheye lenses, this could technically be accomplished with as few as six cameras. You would need high quality lenses to avoid blurriness at the edges though, which would increase the cost, and such lenses would need to protrude from the surface of the device, making them likely to get broken. 12, or maybe 16 cameras with just moderately-wide lenses would be more practical. However, I suspect the creators of the device were looking to keep costs down, and as such, they appear to be using lower-end off-the-shelf cell phone cameras, which tend to have a rather narrow field of view. In bulk, such cameras might only cost a few dollars or so each, so using 36 of them may actually cost less than using fewer cameras with wide-angle lenses added.

This is a neat idea, though the image quality doesn't seem particularly great. The combined resolution is good, but the images appear prone to exhibiting blown highlights and color casts. I also suspect that most tosses will result in unusably blurry images, and that the "tough clear plastic case" won't survive a missed catch over a hard surface. They really should have made the areas between lenses out of a soft foam or rubberized honeycomb material, seeing as the device is intended to be thrown. It does provide an interesting view with minimal effort though, so I'm sure many will be willing to overlook the fact that it's a $500+ camera with mediocre image quality. If one were willing to do some manual editing in an image stitching program, better results could be achievable with multiple shots from a regular camera on a tripod, though of course getting a top-down view would be harder, and you wouldn't be able to capture an instantaneous moments in all directions.

They added that for the sole purpose of attempting to humanize their business venture. In reality though, they are cold, hard mimetic poly-alloy robots, sent back in time from the future to kill the leader of the human resistance.

Re: Helium is a finite resource

Helium is a finite resource just as natural gas is a finite resource. And aside from a small portion of natural gas deposits with elevated concentrations of Helium, it typically only appears in relatively trace amounts. Once it escapes from containment, it rises to the upper atmosphere and is lost into space. Creating Helium in a laboratory environment is prohibitively expensive for large-scale use. Sure, Helium might not become rare enough in the next couple decades to be an immediate issue, but eventually its price is bound to rise to a level that will impede its use for many scientific and industrial purposes.

Re: do they get paid?

"would they be entitled to a slice of the pie?"

Yes, they are entitled to one slice of pie every other Tuesday, as provisioned by their meal-scheduling program.

Re: Now our Mars missions can look forward to on-demand 3D porn!!

Depending on the alignment of the planets, the ping time to Mars and back ranges between roughly 10 and 40 minutes at the speed of light, averaging around 30, so that wouldn't make for a particularly comfortable web browsing experience. Sure, you might be able to download a Blu-ray in 5 minutes, but you'll be waiting far longer than that for the video to start. "On-demand" will typically mean waiting half an hour from when you click play to when the stream starts on your end. Plus, you'll undoubtedly be sharing the connection with a bunch of filthy Mars-men, so expect your share of the bandwidth to be a fraction of that. Of course, there would likely be a colony-side datacenter that would continually download and cache videos, web sites and so on, but if you want anything that's not cached, expect to wait quite a while for it. And that's assuming whoever's in charge even lets you have a say in what gets downloaded.

Even if it had been a $25 extra, it could have been a killer feature. According to a teardown analysis, the component cost of the Touch Cover was just around $16, making its $120 price tag almost pure profit. Or at least, it would have been, had the Surface actually sold. The cost to manufacture the Surface RT itself was estimated to be well under $300, so Microsoft could have priced it far more aggressively than they had. You can't expect to charge the same premium for a new product that the established leaders in the field with rabid fanbases are charging, especially when your platform has a significant lack of software compared to the competition. Had Microsoft priced the surface RT around $400 from the start, with the Touch Cover either bundled or an inexpensive extra, they could have established themselves as a major contender in the field. The platform would have sold itself. Instead, they spent more on advertising the product than they made on sales.

Re: Unfortunately, there's nobody to trust right now

Of course, even if the standards are "thoroughly tested", that doesn't mean that governments won't be able to invest billions of dollars into finding vulnerabilities in the code that they keep secret to themselves, perhaps found through the assistance of quantum supercomputers or other technology that the non-governmental organizations won't have access to, or might not even know exists. And who is to say that these organizations aren't secretly working with one government or another? And even if the encryption standards are seemingly "secure", what if the hardware manufacturers are doing things within their chipsets to purposely circumvent or weaken the encryption in a particular way?

Re: Steam OS for games, Google Docs / something else for the office work

I have doubts that Steam OS will be a suitable one-stop replacement for gaming on Windows any time soon. The big issue here is with backward compatibility, which has been a big draw of PC gaming over the years. Most existing games are simply unlikely to ever get ported to Linux, and hence, won't be running natively on Steam OS any time soon. The vast majority of new games are still only getting released on Windows, with a portion getting Mac support, but very few see a Linux release. When Steam OS launches, this is likely to improve for new releases, but publishers are not likely to invest in porting their existing games to the OS.

Those with large Steam Libraries will likely find that 90% of their games won't run natively in Steam OS, and those games that do will be mostly limited to a subset of indie titles. Steam OS is slated to offer streaming capability that will allow you to run Windows Games on another system and play them over a network, but this still requires you to be running a copy of Windows on the one, and have both systems running the game at once. Perhaps they'll eventually add an OnLive-like cloud service for game streaming, but again, such services have their limitations. And of course, until Steam OS (and desktop Linux in general) gets a decent install-base compared to Windows among gamers, things like graphics card driver support are bound to be substandard, even if the OS is designed to run games more efficiently. Steam OS might be a decent solution for playing some of your PC games in the living room, and for doubling as a home theater PC, but I think it will be some time before most gamers will be willing to give up access to their Windows game libraries to switch to it exclusively.

Windows 8 will undoubtedly cause Microsoft to lose some users, but it's hardly going to be anywhere close to a majority, so Windows can't even remotely be considered 'dead'. It's more of a shot to the foot than a head shot. I do suspect Windows will lose more of its usage share in the years to come, but it's difficult to say how new management could affect that. The biggest advantage of Windows over its competitors is its backward-compatibility and the familiarity of its interface, which is an area where Microsoft clearly messed up with Windows 8. Even if drastic changes to the interface were to make for an improved experience, if you're forcing users to relearn how to use their systems, you've brought yourself down on par with the competition on that front. At the very least, Microsoft should have provided native 'classic interface' options to keep power users happy. They might make up a minority, but are vocal, resulting in a lot of bad press that is bound to turn off a lot of the more casual users. Of course, Microsoft might still turn this around with the next major release of Windows, as they did with Windows 7.

Re: HL3? What's the point?

"In fairness, you've got to compare it to other shooters at the time, and on that basis I think it holds up well." -Steve Crook

This is exactly what people need to keep in mind. Half-Life 2 came out nearly NINE years ago at this point, and had spent around five years in development prior to that, so of course parts of it are going to look dated by today's standards. When it came out though, it was a lot more open and interactive than most other shooters. Sure, the level layouts were rather linear, but Valve provided lots of interesting things to play with within those environments to give players unique ways to approach situations.

One of Half-Life 2's biggest selling points was the relatively large number of physics objects within the world, and your ability to interact with them using the gravity gun, explosives, and so on. Previously, furniture and other clutter within games was mostly static, while in Half-life 2 it made for a dynamic source of cover, obstacles and improvised weapons. The game also brought interesting drivable vehicle segments into its gameplay, which was relatively rare among shooters at the time. And then there were friendly NPCs tied into the actual gameplay, which was something else that was pretty much unheard of in shooters. Sure, they lacked any sort of advanced AI or anything, but they were much better than anything else seen in comparable games at the time.

Another thing the game did well was that it made the most of its linearity to provide a highly "cinematic" experience, more so than any other games I can think of from the time, expanding on what the original Half-Life had done before it. Since then, many other games have done the same, and it's become something of the norm, but this was rather innovative at the time.

"But after playing the Fallout series, I definitely don't want to bother with Halflife again!" -Brian Miller

Aside from the obvious fact that Fallout 3 came out four years after Half-Life 2, they're arguably not even in the same genre. As has been said, Fallout 3 is more an RPG (or rather CRPG, if you want to get technical), where the focus is much more on placing people in a sandbox environment and letting them do what they want, than on providing a cohesive story with careful pacing. Sandbox-style games can be great, but that doesn't mean there's no room for games that tell stories in a more controlled fashion. Both provide different kinds of experiences.

I suspect Half-Life 3 will contain more open environments, but will continue to be much more linear than something like Fallout. Fans of the Half-Life series aren't looking for such an open, non-story-centric experience where you could spend dozens of hours crafting thimbles and taking quests from locals, instead of saving the world or whatever it is Gordon Freeman is doing. That kind of gameplay simply doesn't fit what most people want from a Half-Life experience. I do think Half-Life 3 will again try to be best in its class at various aspects of gameplay though, but it's difficult to tell what those might be at this point.

Re: By the time kids today are old enough to be pilots

"SA comes from high-end equipment as long as your target is out of sight. When it comes close to you, all your high-tech equipment becomes almost useless - and you would need a fairly complex 360° 3D system to remote fight in such a situation. Same when engagement rules ask you to identify your target visually."

That doesn't seem like something that would be a problem at all with existing technology. A "360° 3D system" is not something that would be prohibitively complex. It would simply involve taking multiple camera inputs and piecing them together into a single surround image. With multiple sensor domes on top of and below the aircraft, you could obtain a view in literally any direction from a virtual cockpit, unrestricted by the aircraft's body. This same unrestricted surround view could be transmitted in multiple vision modes as well, such as near-infrared and thermal imaging to see clearly in situations that a pilot's "eagle eye" would be completely blind to.

On the controller's end, the remote pilot could view the surround image using a high-resolution head-mounted stereoscopic display, with motion tracking to enable them to look in any direction just by turning their head. Resolution should not be a problem with such a system, and if the camera feeds provide a higher resolution than the display, they would have the ability to seamlessly zoom their view, effectively giving them telescopic vision. The pilot would likewise have the ability to view a zoomed out, ultra-wide field view as well. There could additionally be one or more co-pilots viewing the same feed and able to look in any direction independently at will, assigning targets and so on. Each could have their view overlayed with a custom HUD providing them with relevant info.

As for transmission lag, computer-assisted aiming and flight assists could largely make up for it, allowing the aircraft to automatically start reacting to a situation instantaneously. Of course, if the plane is doing something that it shouldn't, the remote pilot will still be able to correct it a fraction of a second later. Autonomous control of vehicles has come a long way in recent years, and it stands to reason that it should continue improving in the years to come. Even if an enemy managed to completely jam a remote-controlled aircraft's transmissions to its pilot, we're getting to the point where that aircraft could still fend for itself, or at least make a quick escape.

Of course, this would mainly apply to aircraft purpose-built with remote and autonomous piloting in mind, although systems could be experimented with on existing aircraft as well. I have little doubt that such systems are already being worked on and experimented with for eventual wide-scale use, and that we'll see those systems in place in the coming decades.

I believe I found the article you're referencing, but the guy didn't include a total estimated cost, just that he estimated it might cost around $1 more to produce than some comparable chargers for competing products, which sell for around $6 to $10. At the time, Apple was selling their charger for around $30. They still likely cost under $5 to produce, and even selling them at $10 Apple is making a decent profit. If they really were concerned about people using third-party chargers, they would make $10 the normal price for them.

The guy also did a followup article comparing the performance of a variety of different chargers...

http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-apple-is.html

While the Apple charger fared well, so did all of the official chargers from competing products. They each performed better at some things and worse at others. The only ones that performed poorly all-around were the "counterfit" Apple chargers, made to look like the official ones, but with the bare minimum hardware inside needed to convert voltages.

Also worth noting in the article is how Apple (and some other manufacturers) use non-standard voltages on the data lines of the USB connector to prevent many otherwise-compatible chargers from working with their devices. Of course, this doesn't do much to block the poorly made counterfit chargers from working, since they simply copy that as well. It does make for an array incompatible signals sent from chargers to devices though, making it less likely that you will be able to use one charger for multiple devices.

From the sound of it, all the Windows hardware is in the keyboard base. It's likely built like a standard laptop, only the screen is detachable and includes additional tablet hardware for use on its own. Seeing as the tablet runs Android, I don't suspect they would make it a Windows tablet as well, or else they might as well have left Android out entirely.

Re: £252!

When I first started reading the article, I thought this was a really good idea, until I got to the price. As a cheap no-frills phone, it could actually make for a nice ultra-compact communication device. A price like this puts it in the smartphone range though, making it significantly less attractive.

Re: multimillionaire seeks funding?

"Sorta like a very long pre-order, IOW, so they just get your money a little early and use it to help actually develop the game. Less of a gamble that way, and both sides win. They get an advance on the production and you help to ensure the end product actually appears."

Except with a pre-order, you typically know the product is going to be completed, and have materials in advance (trailers, screenshots, etc.) to get an idea of what state the product is in prior to paying for it. If the game somehow doesn't work out and gets canceled, you won't have to pay for it. Even if you change your mind for whatever reason, pre-orders can be canceled from most retailers. Even so, pre-ordering games itself encourages poor development practices, as developers and publishers know they can push a game out in an unfinished state, and still profit off of it. The same goes for kickstarter, but there you don't even have that minimal protection against getting an unfinished game, or even no game at all. There's certainly less of a gamble for the developer, as they profit no matter what they do. The consumer is in a much worse position though, and its a complete gamble for them.

Re: Invention

@Loan - The reason it's absurd is because these interfaces, along with many programming algorithms in general, are built almost entirely upon the work of others. What if drag and drop, copy and paste, and clicking icons had been patented, and those owning the rights (rarely the actual developer) only allowed their use in their own company's software? Would the digital world be better off?

By the way, if you're going to take the time to point out my one typo, at least make some attempt at using proper capitalization and sentence structure in your own post. I'm seeing at least seventeen words that should have been capitalized, but weren't. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt though, and assume English isn't your native language, and that you're stuck typing on an iPhone in some Dutch courtroom.

Re: Re Bah#

"Alright, Mr. President, after months data harvesting, we've devised some surefire tactics to ensure your re-election. First up is wardrobe. The suit has to go. We've found that bloggers who wear low-cut shirts or no shirts at all in their user photos get the most friends, so we recommend doing the same. Perhaps a beach appearance in a mankini right before elections might help boost voter confidence as well."

Being 'politically correct' on this is kind of silly. The term simply refers to one being at a disadvantage in a particular situation. If one wasn't at a disadvantage related to making their way into a business from their parked car, then they wouldn't need a closer parking space.

Really, If you think about it, the term 'disabled' sounds worse, implying the person is broken and nonfunctional, rather than just at a disadvantage.

We already have...

DUN DUN DUNNNN!

I think looking for "artificial" light on other planets is a reasonable prospect, probably more so than radio transmissions, at least once the hardware exists for it.

I do think a civilization could go quite far toward optimizing its light usage as it advances though. While you're not going to make outdoor lighting completely efficient, it would certainly be possible to greatly reduce the amount of light pollution, even using technology we have on hand today. Most streetlights are left on all night, even those that are only being used 1% of the time. If they were designed to operate only when needed, they could be far more efficient. Imagine a city with a "smart" lighting system, where the lights would detect whether someone was in range by means of an RFID tag, or similar. Also, mass transit like trains, trams, subways and so on, could potentially replace the need for most lighted roads. Looking into the future, it's even possible that most city-dwellers might have light-amplification implants installed in their eyes centuries down the line.

I also think there's a potential for false-positives. Who is to say that there isn't some abundant plant-like organism on the planet naturally creating bioluminescence at night with a similar spectrum to what we would expect to be artificial light sources. Or perhaps a chemical reaction caused by some specific oddity of the planet's surface. It would definitely require lots of other observations to verify, though it could provide targets to focus those on.

When Google was becoming popular a decade or so ago, one of the things that helped them stand out from many other sites was that they were using a clean, simple interface. Lately though, they've been adding all these dynamic features which just convolute the search process. Having search suggestions pop up while typing is a reasonably useful feature, but having the entire page repeatedly update to show the suggested results while typing is cumbersome and distracting. Clear the search field, and you get a blank page until you type something new. The same goes for having to load a preview image of a site to see links to cached and similar page links. Often, the preview images will pop up when just scrolling through the results. Having the search engine constantly assuming that I mistyped one search term in place of another, and sending me to the results for that other term is not particularly helpful either. Sometimes they don't even tell you that they replaced a word, but you see another similarly-spelled word highlighted in the results instead of what you typed, and eventually a small notice at the bottom of the results letting you know that they decided you really wanted to search for 'wood' when you typed 'woof'. Then, they customize results based on past searches, so your results for a particular search may be quite different from someone else's, or from one day to the next.

For years, Google focused on providing search results in a simple, direct manner, and it worked well for them, as they've more or less become 'the' Internet search engine. Now though, they seem more interested in keeping up with the gimmicks of competitors who barely even compete against them, and in managing every aspect of one's Internet experience.