Posts by 142
102 posts • joined Tuesday 26th October 2010 07:39 GMT
Re: Why legs.
"If there were a better way to get around, something would have evolved it."
That doesn't stand to reason. Animals have evolved dozens of ways to get around. Flying, bouncing, jumping, slithering, jet propulsion(-ing), swimming, wading, squirming, crawling, hitchhiking...
Some animals that have evolved "wheel" type mechanisms for use during escapes, as it's the quickest way to get down a hill, with zero energy use.
However the reason it hasn't evolved as a means of movement is that, in situations other than these gravity propelled systems (where the entire animal rotates), the wheels would have to turn independent of the body of the animal. That would mean the animals evolving a completely different anatomy, and the intermediate stages of this evolution would not offer any advantages to the animal, and instead huge disadvantages.
Posted in Oz chap blows his own Google Glass
Re: You'd never want to
...ah but you see, Glass must have a collision avoidance / human-direction-control system! This is why they've been doing all this is playing about with robotic cars.
meh...
meh, I think people will just take them off when they're not appropriate, like most people do when they are wearing bluetooth headsets, ipod headphones, or sunglasses. It's not the big issue people are making it out to be...
Re: @ Annihilator
Yep. They were certainly designed as bunker-busters, so they needed a high level of accuracy. It surprised me too. Perhaps the sheer density of it means its momentum over rules the aerodynamics? But I remember reading about its accuracy from a reliable source*
*a google search is throwing up plenty of questionable sources saying 25ft, but I can't find this reliable source. Don't purchase an Orbital Kinetic Bombardment system without doing your own due diligence.
Re: Catching up
"Almost every other way"?
Your curious use of the word "almost" here raises more questions than your disclaimer answers...
a solid telegraph pole
...is a lot of tungsten.
I just ran the figures...
If *every single* lightbulb created worldwide in a year was an incandescent bulb, they'd use about 10% less tungsten than one of those poles!
@ Annihilator
Nope. You're wrong. Satellite parts routinely survive reentry, and they're flimsy compared to a solid tungsten telegraph pole.
This technique isn't merely a thought experiment - they would impact with the severity of a tactical nuclear missile, with accuracy measured in feet with existing technology, and have been considered for deployment by the US military - The only reason they haven't been is that it's too.expensive to get that amount of mass into space.
Re: Monster? audiophool. 12-gauge speaker wires: audiophile
And yip. Heavy, single core mains cable's what most speaker manufacturers use when demoing their speakers to customers!
Re: Monster? audiophool. 12-gauge speaker wires: audiophile
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Plated-Digital-Optical-Cable-Mountain/dp/B001ANDV2A
.........
Re: Hard to know where to start...
Ah yes... the beautiful sound of every mouse movement signal bleeding over from the USB input on the motherboard, onto the on-board audio headphone output...
Given the quality of Bose systems in the last decade, Beats Audio is probably an order of magnitude upgrade!
Re: I'm less convinced than I sound that all DACs are created equal
Heheh, yeah, I don't think you'd need to be a professional to hear the differences - you can hear the difference a mile off even between professional converters - this is mostly due to the manufacturers being idiots with their AA-filters, though. If you're interested in this topic, Dan Lavry has some outstanding white papers on the subject. http://www.lavryengineering.com/lavry-white-papers/
Interestingly, by far the most blatant of this i've ever seen was on the old Sound Blaster Live series of soundcards by Creative - they were one of the first generation of mutli-IO computer based soundcards. They used different converters for the front L/R and surround L/R outputs. Plug your speakers into the front ones, and play a song - the sound was OK. Plug them into the surround output instead, and set that as your main output in Windows.... And it sounded STUNNING - like someone removed a blanket from over your head!
Re: "The term "audio quality" just isn't applicable"
True: profit's the goal - But why the hell would they waste money on an engineer if audio quality doesn't matter?They pay them those prices because of the quality of the results.
Re: @Lee D
" you can often easily detect artifacts on HF sounds like cymbals"
http://xkcd.com/1015/ comes to mind on this topic.
Re: Er... how?
"Changes the audio wave? Er... how? In ways the human ear can't register? Nobody cares about the things in the audio that they *can't* hear.""
Heh... fair point, but it depends on the sound system and the size of the room it's being listened to in.
To take it to extremes - if you play an MP3 out of a top level PA or club sound system, it turns into an incoherent mush. It's striking - like someone faxing in the song.
I guess the nature at which the frequencies arrive at the ear in those sorts of environments is so different that the assumptions about which "sounds the human ear can't register" are wrong.
Re: The music itself is the problem
I used to think that, but I've realised there's no reason for it to be true, except carelessness.
The problem happens if you take an old recording that was designed around having tons of dynamics, and then remaster it to be loud as hell, then it sounds disastrous. Case in point being the remasters of Zeppelin's Immigrant Song, where there's zero impact when the scream comes in anymore.
But if you work from the start trying to make sure the arrangement is ok, and built around loudness from the start, with space for several sounds to come through and be loud simultaneously without fighting, and without overloading the mix, then you're ok - a lot of Foo Fighters stuff shows this very well.
Re: "The term "audio quality" just isn't applicable"
LOL... You do know the people mix-engineering the top tracks in those genres are making £20,000 per track at a minimum? Do you honestly think record companies would pay that much if the results wen't good? You're just letting the artist's "image" dictate what your ears think they hear.
Re: unfair burdens?
"... to over 9,600 state, regional, city and town tax authorities ..."
aye, yeah, missed that somehow - I'd been under the impression since this was first mooted that it just applied to state taxes.
Re: Could anybody explain...
@Schultz The trouble with using small mics with a high maximum amplitude is that they either have a very high noise floor (i.e. they generate a lot of noise themselves, drowning out someone whispering, for example), or they simply don't respond to low level sounds because they're too heavy.
What nokia have done, it appears, is have a "high dynamic range" - that means it can capture both quiet and loud sounds. All whilst presumably not draining the battery by powering power hungry preamps, or by having to supply a massive phantom power voltage to the mic.
I'd like to see the patents actually - anyone got any links to the ones being argued about?
unfair burdens?
Eh? What is hard about adding a percentage to a sale based on the delivery address, and keeping a record of it?
Re: western blinkerism
The South Koreans are shrugging it off, saying they're crying wolf as usual. Much more so than the US or Europeans. All my friends there are relaying that message back. But I can't help but think that blanking them like that just goads the North on.
The ideal would be if NK could have a burma-esque style volte-face... maybe someday it'll happen.
Re: Mutually assured dullness
If they all go to war, and it ends up with a division again along the 38th parallel, with the Chinese taking responsibility for repairing the north, and the US taking responsibility for rebuilding the south...... :-(
I really wish that was more unimaginable than it is...
Re: Mutually assured dullness
Fair point.
Re: Mutually assured dullness
Yep. The danger here is that if it does go nuclear, something could wrong, causing China and/or Russia to get involved against the US. It doesn't strike me as at all impossible that an ICBM from the US could accidentally hit either of those countries instead of NK. Then what would happen? Something as a bad as this: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html ? Half as bad? Quarter as bad? Does it make a difference?
I, for one, don't want to find out.
Re: "partly because these don't exist"
Hmmm... unfortunately it's a safe bet that these "don't exist" in the same way Israel's nukes "don't exist".
But you're right there's no chance that China would be that stupid. The scenario is so idiotic on so many levels it baffles me how our liveleaker could have come up with it even as a piss take!
Re: Hit Counters
ha! looking at this 4 hours later, it's 150, then 369.... what spanner designed a hit counter that rolls over!?
not a chance
of him getting the death penalty, or even being charged with something that could potentially lead to that. That's all just hysteria from either assange's people or politicians in the states who have zero authority in the matter
Re: Trying to catch up with the Leap
The guy writing that Leap article doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. He's gauging everything off the stock visualiser app's behaviour, but that's just one crude interpretation of the information from the sensors. It's up to Devs to make the best use of the device. It's akin to saying you can never do proper photo-editing on Windows, and basing that opinion on MSPaint, whilst making no attempt to install Photoshop.
Re: Why? - Sometimes because...
I'm quite surprised that no one's mentioned this, but often DDOS attacks are launched as a distraction, to allow someone to infiltrate the network whilst the admins are looking the other way. A major example of this recently was, unless I'm mistaking, the huge Sony/PSN hack.
Re: no one is asking...
Open source, community driven.
Re: they all laughed alright...
Having said this... it does lead me to wonder... Google's trying to find a better way to sell ads (Mr C's better route to India) ...... so what is going to be Google's New World, I wonder...
darkening can be done
Have semi transparent mirror. You could make something with adjustable transparency either...
they all laughed alright...
But about what? It was his claim that he could create a cheaper trade route to India by sailing west.
They're still laughing, Derek! ;-)
Posted in AMD: Star Trek holodecks within reach
Re: Holodecks aren't just about processing power
Actually, just thinking, to be specific here: it wasn't simply the act of sitting on the sofa, it was the feeling that someone had sat down right beside them on the next cushion! they actually felt the sofa move and adjust beneath their backside, as the other person's weight moved the cushion on their left hand side. When in fact they were in the room, on their own. The illusion even worked when their eyes were open!
Posted in AMD: Star Trek holodecks within reach
Re: Holodecks aren't just about processing power
Surprisingly, roughness / solidity isn't the most difficult thing to simulate. Bizarrely our ears over-rule our fingertips in this context! Blindfold someone with headphones on, and have them scrape their hands over a piece of glass, and they'll be completely convinced it's wood, metal, sandpaper, or marble they're touching depending on what sound you feed into the headphones.
I've done experiments that have listeners utterly convinced they've just sat down into a plush fabric sofa, when in fact, they've sat onto something solid. It's amazing what careful sound design can do to fool people! :-)
Also - in a somewhat similar phenomenon, our sense of touch works determines the texture of material by detecting vibrations, and there's been a lot of progess in this field: http://www.science20.com/news_articles/sense_touch_uses_vibrations_just_hearing-98781
Re: Assume it was an auto box.
I've driven vans where the steering lock engages when the engine stalls. Terrifying if it happens just as you're pulling out across traffic from a side road!
reminds me...
Reminds me of my brother logging into a Starseige Tribes server many years ago with the number 666 after his player name... and getting kicked because it made the admin uncomfortable! Once he switched it to 13 he was ok!!
Re: To cut The Register some slack?
I'm inclined to agree... what the hell are they doing? The app is huge, and all it has to do download and display text. El Reg is the least visually complex online news site on the web - zero graphs in the articles, feck-all pictures, and no fancy fonts. All it needs for an app is a glorified RSS reader, with the ability to submit comments, something that's been done 20 million times before!
What is so special about El Reg that makes it so hard? Are they trying to do everything from scratch from first principles? The %20 bugs people are getting when commenting suggests they are...
It's as though they've reinvented the wheel and decided the best shape was a square.
Re: "all-signing, all-dancing" and "comnent stream"
See my post above... the songwriters are registered with GEMA. Therefore it cannot be used without paying GEMA a royalty, which then gets passed to the songwriters after GEMA take a cut. It doesn't matter who owns the recording. If the songwriters don't like that, they can feel free not to register with the rights agency.
Re: rights collections agencies are right
Apologies for the garbled edit on the first line! "Asking them to collect"..
rights collections agencies are right
If you, as an artist sign up with a rights organisation, you're askng them the right to collect all income for your songs, and paying them by givng them a cut of the statutory royalties due. You no longer have the power to waive royalties except by agreement with your collection agency....
Re: Reg hack uses site to raise beef with BT?
I'm going to second this. I was encountering similar intermittent .1Mbps performance on ADSL, roughly the same distance from a population centre as the author, with zero help from the ISP, In the end, I picked up one of the phones, and what do you know, I could hear light crackle when I moved the cable. So I threw the phone in the bin, and retested, and I ended up at a very stable 3meg. A quick call to the ISP demanding that they give me something closer to the 8 meg plan I'm supposedly on, and rather than getting the "that's the best the line can take" response, I was told - "your line can take 7.2meg"! Upgraded on the spot. .1 to 7.2 in a single day. It can be done. Just make absolutely bloody sure your internal wiring and router are flawless.
Btw, if there is any noise on the phone line and it's not to do with your phone, but instead is bt's cables. THIS is what's screwing the connection. Report the noise with their phone department. NOT the broadband department. Say you need crystal clear phone calls. They take any noise on phone calls seriously. But mention broadband, and you get thrown into offshore hell.
Re: NO
What? and no knuckle rapping for "automagically"!?
Re: What about...
yep... just another case of a huge tech company deciding it can do what it wants without sorting things out with the rights-holders first... :-/
Re: Good gods, Donald!
I may have been a tad harsh last night, lol - I've heard people the same tales about digital audio and phase before - but the reality is that unless you're building a crude ADC yourself, you'll only encounter phase issues right at the nyquist frequency.
Re: In Audacity you can easily add a dehum filter
Yip. The trouble being though, of course, when you notch out that many harmonically related frequencies from a human voice, makes it sound like they're talking in a 10 foot diameter plastic pipe...
(Sherlock for his pipe fondness, not his sarcasm! ;-) )
Re: Good gods, Donald!
And about phase - If I set a signal generator to give me a 50Hz sawtooth wave, and I record that 50Hz sawtooth wave, I will get a phase-perfect 50Hz facsimile of the sawtooth wave. NOT, as you seem to be implying, a phase shifted mess of a waveform.
