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Comment Re:Sickening (Score 1) 134

Copyright is enough to cover software from being stolen by another company.

Right now we are in de ridicules situations that a single piece of software is covered by three different property rights:
- Copyright, which covers the original source code and binary as a work of art/craft.
- Trade secret, because most software is only released in binary form.
- Patent, which oddly for software does not break the trade secret because they mostly cover ideas instead of implementation or are written in such a way that one skilled in the art can't recreate the implementation from the patent.

In other fields you have to choose one, and only one, of these rights.
- The formula for Coca Cola cannot be copyrighted, they don't want to patent it because it only last for a few years, so they have a trade secret they protect.
- The song Happy Birthday is copyrighted, there are no patents for the order of notes in the music, nor can it be a trade secret on how to sing Happy Birthday.
- The cap of a shampoo bottle, can't be copyrighted, a trade secret is useless because everyone can see it, so they opted for a patent.

Comment Re:Full sized laptop key style (Score 1) 310

I know what you mean, I also like notebook keyboards. Somehow they never use the dome switches, and have much more of a click feel compared to normal keyboards. Although the Apple unibody notebook keyboards look odd they feel quite good for typing, and crums don't seem to get underneath the keys like they do on other notebooks.

The Apple keyboards are the same ones used on their notebooks, so you may want to check those out.
        http://www.apple.com/keyboard/

They used to also have wired keyboards, not sure if you can still buy those.

Comment Re:What the article doesn't mention (Score 2, Insightful) 312

Their first Beta had lots of colors, their windows has a light blue pin stripe. Then the graphic artists told Apple that all their graphics became off-color, because their eyes compensated against the slight blue tint (our eyes' automatic white balance).

Ever since then each version removed more color from the themes and from their applications. Personally I think they went overboard with iTunes, but it may also be that they want everyone to adopt the gray icons in a list for other applications as well. Don't forget that Apple applications are often used by programmers as example applications on how to visually design their own. For programmers making application that are used in any way during (not just for) Image and Video editing it is wise to reduce the amount of colors in their application. Just like most applications shouldn't make any kind of sound when people want to do sound editing.

Comment Re:Why do the complicated expensive solution? (Score 1) 870

When you are dyslexic it is very hard to remember information like telephone numbers, list of words or formulas. Luckily technical schools mostly allow you to bring a formula book with you on exams.

However on the occasion I forgot to bring a book, I had to recreate the formulas. Which took more time to figure out, but I often got more points because the teacher read the notes and thus knows I understand the material. But in that particular school the teachers are more interested in if you know how to solve the problem than if you got the correct answer (I once had every answer wrong on a test and I still got an 8 because they way I got to the answer was different (not how it was thought) and correct).

Comment Re:HDR? (Score 1) 287

HDR means you use more bits when recording the image. More than the usual 8 bits per color component. One can already do a bit of HDR when you take the raw image from most photo cameras that have 10 to 14 bits of depth. However these 10 to 14 bits are linear light (as opposed to gamma corrected for the display, so their dynamic range is not much better).

The real improvement comes from taking multiple exposures of different lengths of the same subject. Then combine these exposures into a single image; basically you would try to use the pixels from the long exposure (more accurate measurement) unless the pixel is over exposed, then you would use the same pixel from the short exposure; in reality you would use a weighted average to smooth it out a bit more. The more exposures you have the more range of accurate measurements you have.

In this case they took two cameras, set to a different exposure speed, then later they combined the two videos into a HDR image.

Now comes the interesting part, displaying the HDR image/video. You can now simply choose a virtual exposure time to show the image in a normal way, but more convenient than having to select the exposure during filming.

Or you use a special algorithm that changes the exposure of an image on a per pixel basis based on the surrounding pixels, in sort of the same way as a human eye would interpret the real world. This would show a picture with both dark a light patches very clearly, and more lively. However such algorithms always make it look fake, but it may just be conditioning that we have had looking at normal photographs (like a transistor amp compared to the valve amp).

Also from the video it looks like the algorithm used here causes flickering in the image (unless the flickering was caused by the cameras themselves), I guess the algorithm needs to be modified to take into account moving images.

Comment Re:Problem (Score 1) 347

I do not know exactly what the blind grenade does, but if the purpose to make the enemy invisible, then maybe the game server should not send update to the client for this enemy.

For looking through walls, it is the same thing, don't update persons that are not visible. This is not super simple, because you may not want to do accurate visibility culling on the server. But maybe there is a happy median.

I don't really have a solution for aimbots, nor can an anti cheat program help against this very well. If one makes one that no one has one, then the anti cheat software may not find the signature for it. Or the aimbot may be build completely outside of the computer; capture video and emulate a keyboard and mouse (I've seen eve online bots that could use this method).

I can see the problem for the games you guys mentioned, with a high twitch element and where the fog-of-war is hard to calculate by the server. I am actually much more puzzled about the aggressive use of anti-cheat software for games like world of warcraft.

Comment Re:Problem (Score 1) 347

I find anti-cheating software an unnecessary evil.

It is very basic software engineering: "never trust input from a user". As the client software of game is in the hands of the user this extends to the client itself. In fact this also extends to the anti-cheating software itself.

Like DRM, anti-cheating software is a mathematical impossibility.

It is far easier to just design your game so that you do not trust the client code, run the simulation/game on the server and let the client be a dumb terminal. Dumb being a relative term, as you do want to implement some sort of prediction in the game to what the game server will do, to make it a smooth user experience.

Comment Re:I have a household robot (Score 1) 102

The Roomba has a quite small bin inside, which you open by pushing a button and sliding it out. The bin has two parts, one for large parts like hairs and a part for dust.

The large part has tooth which you need to clean with for example your finger. The small part you open up to show the filter, you can open this inside the trashcan and shake it out by tapping the filter.

There is also a compartment with two brushes, The two brushes need also to be cleaned from hairs getting stuck at the ends.

Comment Re:I have a household robot (Score 2, Informative) 102

I have one (a 500) it works very well. It may not be as powerful as a normal vacuum cleaner, but it makes up for it by vacuuming longer and more often (you can run it daily). In fact it cleans better than I do myself, it also can go easily underneath the couch and bed.

It runs at my home on carpet and wood floor, and I know someone who has the scooba which cleans a wood floor using a water based solution as well. You do need to be sure there are no cable on the floor that it can suck up and get entangled with, also small objects on the floor can be dragged by it across the house, with mobile phones ending up in a corner behind the couch.

It can follow the sides of the room, but it can not reach deep into a corner, it also follows table legs. Also if it finds a lot of dirt it will make a small circle to try and clean it up.

When you run the roomba daily you need to empty it once every three days (but I get a lot of dust because I live across a park).

Comment Re:Pfah. (Score 1) 272

Oh, did he forgot to tell you that the family tree goes all the way back to Adam and Eve and includes every person who ever lived and died on earth? In other words the size of the tree is quite a few gigabytes in size.

In that case you may want to look at a graph database with its own query language that is designed for this kind of data. Not everything that can be stored in a RDBMS should be stored in one.

To be honest, I have not found a perfect graph database yet, but I have a feeling that one will be created quite soon.

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