martinpw

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421.
by martinpw 11y ago
Here is a 2015 paper with a detailed technical analysis. The first author on this paper is the Iraqi engineer interviewed in this Guardian article. http://pure.ltu.se/portal/files/102425643/Vol_5_3_8.pdf
422.
by martinpw 11y ago
> Sometimes (though rarely) the bus stop is such that the bus can pull out of the traffic lane and become less of an obstruction It is actually a deliberate policy in many cases not to have the buses pull out of the traffic lane, because
423.
by martinpw 11y ago
> Of course nobody's really concerned about 3.2 cm in a century. You mean 32cm in a century at the current rate of 3.2mm/year. I think people are concerned about even that number, although the real value is likely to be signifi
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by martinpw 11y ago
Speaking of science on MIR, I was working in a space research department that was involved in building an X-ray telescope that was attached to MIR. It actually at one point got repaired in flight with a spacewalk to install a replacement de
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by martinpw 11y ago
It looks like there are even earlier ones than this current one. There is one here from 1963: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RocLdMyUG-4 and this wikipedia page lists a Swedish animation from 1961: https://en.wi
426.
by martinpw 11y ago
Fortunately for servers things are still cranking along with Moore's Law for now, going into increasing core counts which have roughly doubled every two years since Nehalem, with the result that now we have 18 core Haswell EP parts, wi
427.
by martinpw 11y ago
Thing is, studios will use tools like Maya if they meet their needs, and if not they develop internal proprietary software that does exactly what they need. Often they use both in different parts of the pipeline. It is not obvious that ther
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by martinpw 11y ago
Media and entertainment has never been their cash cow. It is a small and not very profitable part of the business. The money rolls in from products like AutoCAD and Inventor.
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by martinpw 11y ago
I had a colleague who used to have very long pauses, but only after saying a few words very quickly first in a way that ensured he held the conversational baton. So he would say something like "I don't agree because..." follo
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by martinpw 11y ago
One thing I would miss is visiting someone's house and getting a very quick but quite profound insight into their life history and interests by browsing their bookshelves. A lot harder to do with an ebook collection. The same in revers
431.
by martinpw 11y ago
I don't know of any explicit details of progress, but everyone I've mentioned it to in the VR space nods knowingly when I mention it, so I take that to mean that it is an area of active research and development.
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by martinpw 11y ago
Small anecdote on the parking requirement - in the LA suburb I live in one of the local coffee shops has a large 'seating' area which is nearly devoid of actual seating. Asking the staff why they didn't install more chairs an
433.
by martinpw 11y ago
In a previous life, back in the pre-CCD days I worked at an observatory searching for new asteroids. Used to be the way it was done you would point a telescope at the part of the sky directly opposite the sun (min r^4 so best chance of dete
434.
by martinpw 11y ago
The graphs here show that in 2015 every month was warmer than 2014 apart from April. http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/hottest-year-on-record/ So the question is when did the effects of El Niño start having an imp
435.
by martinpw 11y ago
One thing that is not discussed in the book is how to clear a memory palace for reuse. Any suggestions? I read the book a few years ago, and to this day I still see a large jar of pickled onions outside my parent's garage, cottage chee
436.
by martinpw 11y ago
Interesting that the cure for scurvy is used as the example of the first clinical trial. The story is an instructive one, since the real reason for the cure was not understood, leading to the cure being lost for ~150 years, due to a variety
437.
by martinpw 11y ago
I got a live demo of this at a conference a few years back. There was a line to see the demo, so I first waited while others did it. They first showed the full resolution image, then enabled the foveated rendering. The latter looked terribl
438.
by martinpw 11y ago
Thanks for the summary. Quick question on video encoding & transcoding - what is the best bang for the buck hardware for encoding or transcoding large numbers of of video streams? In the past when researching it, I got the impression th
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by martinpw 11y ago
Marshall Mcluhan said obsolete technologies survive as art forms. With ever quickening technology cycles, it may be that some will never go out of production.
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by martinpw 11y ago
> Drives many of us crazy that concentrated urbanites in one region want to boss around country folk living very different lifestyles/values/history, and do so due to sheer concentrated numbers Strange that you pick that exampl
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by martinpw 11y ago
And one of the interesting things about that is the paper was written in 1978 but the technology was not really used until 20 years later (Geri's Game, 1997) when hardware was finally fast enough to evaluate the algorithm in a reasonab
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by martinpw 11y ago
I think it is a very valid option. At my previous neighborhood mainstream church (Methodist) which I attended for a while, many attendees did not really believe in most of what was preached. For them it was mostly a social gathering, an opp
443.
by martinpw 12y ago
It would be interesting to see the performance of TBB malloc included in the mix. For our application (parallel graph evaluation) we found the TBB allocator outperformed jemalloc. The margin was not huge, but enough to make it worthwhile us
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by martinpw 12y ago
There is a project called 5dwm which was an attempt to get an IRIX-like UI on Linux. I tried it once and it got me all nostalgic. I don't think it is being maintained or updated though
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by martinpw 12y ago
I was at SGI via a software subsidiary from 1996-2004 so just at the peak and then riding down the long decline. I remember going to Siggraph in I think 1998 and seeing nothing but SGI machines in every booth on the show floor. One thing I
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by martinpw 13y ago
No, it is still not there. First thing I tried. :-(
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by martinpw 14y ago
Since the original data includes the year of publication, it would be interesting to see trends in these datasets over time, eg which words are becoming more/less popular, is average word length reducing over time, is the variety of words i