>> ^dag:
What causes all the radio signals from gas giants?
How are they translated from radio into sound? Is it kind of an arbitrary sampling where they pick a range?


http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-072505.html
"The high-resolution measurements allow scientists to convert the radio waves into audio recordings by shifting the frequencies down into the audio frequency range."

I think he is close to been dead on. He may be a decade or so off because of the high resolution exponent graphs are non-smooth. But besides that he is correct.

Whether there is a technology out there that could be promising for uploading our minds. I think there are a bunch of them but not in the form of uploading anything yet. But the seeds are there.

Whether there will be a machine that will be smarter than humans. God I hope so because lets face it we suck. I must rather have as a president a machine which its hold mission is to make sure that the country prosper than a human with god knows how many golds he/she has.

Yeah, let's just shoot the messenger. IGN said it was HD, so I relayed the info. turns out you can DOWNLOAD a 720p version, but they're streaming a ~480p one. And yeah, I now what HD means (720p/1080p+); this time I just didn't verify whether they were streaming as advertised (not that I think it's a criminal offense - I don't think a lot of sifters browse videosift on FullHD displays).

>> ^joedirt:
STOP using "HD" if you don't know what it means.
This is not HD, it is high quality or 640x360 High-Resolution which is just marginally as good as NTSC. (or 40 year old technology).

STOP using "HD" if you don't know what it means.

This is not HD, it is high quality or 640x360 High-Resolution which is just marginally as good as NTSC. (or 40 year old technology).

>> ^EDD:
Anybody that hasn't realized iPhone's success is only a matter of branding and thinks iPhone is technologically superior than any other average smartphone in the market needs their brain examined.


Allot of things about the iphone suck - including obnoxious marketing and intentional handicaps BUT until very recently it is definitely not like any other average smartphone.

The big difference is high resolution screen and touchscreen. Without those things you don't have a real full fledged usable web browser, the ability to intelligently zoom in on areas of interest or usable google maps. The average smartphone has a resolution of 320x240 with a very very crude web browser and not enough resolution to make navigation very practical IME.

Beyond that yeah it's the same old stuff and in many cases not done as well as the average smart phone - but a usable web browser and navigation are really important to most people.

I hope future android phones or the palm don't cripple things like disallowing stereo bluetooth and allowing alternate media players etc like the iphone and apparently the g1 do.

Below is a couple paragraphs about Christopher Booker, taken from an article titled "The patron saint of charlatans is again spreading dangerous misinformation".


For several years he has been waging a similar war against "warmist alarmists", by which he means climate scientists. Nine days ago, for instance, he attacked Michael Mann for publishing a paper that shows (alongside scores of other studies) that global temperatures do indeed follow the famous hockey-stick pattern: a moderate long-term cooling trend terminating in a sudden upward bend. Mann, Booker told his readers, had been "selective ... in his new data, excluding anything which confirmed the Medieval Warming". But Mann's paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses every uncluttered high-resolution proxy temperature record in the public domain. How did Booker trip up so badly? By using the claims of unqualified bloggers to refute peer-reviewed studies.

Under their guidance he routinely mistakes weather for climate and makes claims about the temperature record that bear no relation to the studies he cites. My favourite Booker column is the piece he wrote in February, titled "So it appears that Arctic ice isn't vanishing after all". In September 2007, he reported, "sea ice cover had shrunk to the lowest level ever recorded. But for some reason the warmists are less keen on the latest satellite findings, reported by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ... Its graph of northern hemisphere sea ice area, which shows the ice shrinking from 13,000 million sq km to just 4 million from the start of 2007 to October, also shows it now almost back to 13 million sq km". To reinforce this point, he helpfully republished the graph, showing that the ice had indeed expanded between September and January. The Sunday Telegraph continues to employ a man who cannot tell the difference between summer and winter.

But for the Wikipedia Professor of Gibberish, this patron saint of charlatans, even the seasons are negotiable. Booker remains right, whatever the evidence says. It is hard to think of any journalist - Melanie Phillips included - who has spread more misinformation. The world becomes even harder to navigate. You cannot trust the people who tell you whom to trust.

Full article can be found here.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/23/controversiesinscience.health

This was on a very old Discovery Channel documentary about early CGI, the part with the flying Levis logos at the end is CGI.

Robert Able and his team used high resolution vector monitors with colour filters and multiple passes for that and other CGI they did at the time (along with the sequence that was in TRON). "Solid" graphics were simply lots and lots vectors since it was film scanned and not realtime, which would have been impossible on systems back then.

if we're having a retro session.. i remember getting to art college and being proudly shown some shiny new macintoshes which "can open a high resolution photoshop file in only one minute!"

>> ^SaNdMaN:
^ What the heck are you talking about? The whole point is to surprise people that the person they've just seen explaining the technology is actually CGI. Did you think that the CGI demonstration was just the face turning red and black? That would be stupid and pointless.


The demonstration was showing that THE FACE was CG for the whole video.

Geebus.

They are showing that their motion tracking system is really great at FACES.

The rest is REAL.

You want proof? how about this?:

Using (USC's) Institute for Creative Technologies' special scanning system that can capture facial details down to the individual pore, the face of actress Emily O'Brien was transformed into a digital representation of herself, which could then be entirely machine-manipulated. A special spherical lighting rig captured O'Brien in 35 reference facial poses using a pair of high resolution digital cameras. The facial maps were then converted into 3D data using Image Metrics' proprietary markerless motion capture technology.

spoco, does the demo go online? only reason I can think of requiring any 3d hardware is if its rendering localy in which case its demoing content, not the actual application.

And again, server processing multiple users; the tricky part is what will render the graphics.. I could possibly see an engine optimised for rendering 320x240 windows.. or maybe use actual 3d hardware and copy the frame buffer out (The video card wold ultimatly need to performe fast enough to handle multiple users.. one user for one video card is not even close to economical), how ever other then that you just need alot of memory because you will have multiple users calling high resolution textures from all over. CPU wise aside from video rendering, it will not be stressed by the number of users in anyway. Aside from tracking the user, no computations really need to be made for things like AI (there is no AI), and server sided collision detection (walking through walls ftw), any non video use of the server cpu is very minimal.

Well those numbers are surprisingly good. I wonder if that's the one-way trip they're timing. The user experiences latency as both the outbound and return trip. Anyway 12-17ms you'd hardly feel, 100ms would be annoying but maybe survivable, 200ms I couldn't tolerate at all but maybe some people could.

Remember this isn't like latency in World of Warcraft. If you have a 500ms ping in WoW (which I frequently do), your client still responds instantly to character movement, inventory browsing and many other things. If you're playing two characters side by side it's surprising how far the clients can be out of sync with the server, but it works for the most part.

I don't really believe those numbers, I must say. The internet alone, in the best case scenario, will cause that much latency. Streaming video would have to have more latency.

I mean the most important element of video compression is motion estimation - taking advantage of temporally redundant data. That's not possible here. You don't know how quickly the client will be rotating their camera for the next frame. It seems like the compression would be pretty poor because of this (nearly as inefficient as single image compression, with some gained efficiency for re-using codebooks/palettes from previous frames where possible), and the bandwidth required very high, and that's just more opportunity for stuttering because of dropped or delayed frames. And each frame has to travel independently. You can't group them and compress them together or you're adding huge amounts of latency.

I'll believe it when I see it working with low latency and high resolution in a large scale deployment.

Good research BicycleRepairMan, sounds plausible.

And about the bandwidth, I can already stream HD video from sites like Gametrailers. Granted it's not as high resolution as some people play their games, but still quite impressive.
I'm more worried that they won't have enough computing power any time soon to render all these images to users.

Missed the other thread so I'll catch up here:

My hate/love top 5 in no particular order:
-(non)contextualized videos
-low/high resolution videos with(out) branding of the videohost
-members sifting more of what is here already/members sifting new stuff
-(un)responsive members
-community breaking/building website features

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numa_Numa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_Coke_and_Mentos_eruption
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate_rain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_Banana
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_wars_kid
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_prairie_dog#Dramatic_Prairie_Dog
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIvWASpK9aQ nunchuck guy
http://www.myspace.com/chriscrocker britney spears girl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww Ms South Carolina
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDdYvf-Wimk guy dancing on stage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2cYWfq--Nw daft hands, and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLYD_-A_X5E&feature=related daft bodies
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6tlw-oPDBM tshirt guy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCF3ywukQYA red shoes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPONTneuaF4 candy mountain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_azQmHSIXs will it blend
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NE5elL30w4 ryan vs dorkman
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ogEtfIdgjpY 8:10 Gi joe

Questionables..

The girl with the rainbow colored leggings. I know of one or two high resolution pictures (one of them has been turned into a inspirational poster) of a model wearing them, but recall no such video or animated gif of this girl.
http://208.116.9.205/10/graphics/pics/pictures_skittles.jpg

In the massive collage at the end, theres a pair of 3 animated CG models. They don't look like anything I recognize, but the distorted form and copied animation dance reminds me of the dancing baby, or the Japanese music player that allowed user loadable models that then made them dance to music (if any of you have seen the dancing spider man, that was from this program).
http://www.speeding.co.uk/acatalog/gay_spiderman.gif
http://www.monsterdesign.co.kr/image/spiderman_dancing.gif

There is also what appears to be a floating metal star with a circular grill that rings no bells in the same collage.

And the 3 dancing idiots. I spent most of the time trying to find these guys with no luck. They use the same stage as the numa guy though, so maybe its not a meme?

Bonus: Check out the will it blend link.

Check out the Gametrailers video, you can download a high resolution video that runs about 11 minutes. http://www.gametrailers.com/player/33327.html

I can't wait till it gets released for the PC. I don't see myself buying a console for one game. I don't even know anyone that owns a console.