Posted by timothy on 2011-01-01 1:02
from the ends-justify-the-means dept.
schwit1 writes "With New Year's Eve only days away,

Are you joking? The whole point is to be able to see when he moves. It's a special effect to show a sci-fi kind of "cloaking". Sure you could implement something similar with a standard webcam, but the novelty here is that he seems to use the Kinect's depth information to work out how much distortion/lensing effect to apply. Hence when he stands against the bookshelf in the background, he disappears completely.

Yep, it's old news. Here's an article from 2004, about some research done in the UK: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040412.html

Here's the summary of the paper at ACM.org: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=993187

You can find also find the PDF.

You do realise that Britain is not part of the United States, don't you?

From http://www.clickymedia.co.uk/2009/07/uk-social-network-statistics-july-2009/ :

Apparently the audio in/out ports are also combined on the MacBook now.

From http://www.apple.com/macbook/specs.html:

The line-in functionality could be easily missed though, as the symbol next to the socket is just the headphones symbol.

It's not much of a problem for video/audio calls (e.g. Skype) as there's a microphone, video camera and speakers built in to the MacBook, and they work very well.

I just hope they never remove the optical out, as I use that all the time to connect to my amp, in preference to the analogue line-out.

You must have missed the requirements list when you bought it. It requires iTunes to work, that's the way it's designed to work.

The word "pod" has always meant something detachable, long before Apple existed. It's designed to detach from your main system so you can take part of your stuff with you. It's not meant to be a computer in it's own right. For most people this works better than having entirely separate devices because synchronisation is automatic and straightforward.. you're not duplicating the management effort.

You ignored the requirements and bought the wrong product, I'm afraid.

I'm not sure if you've really missed the point, or are just trolling (making me an idiot for replying..).

The idea of putting the "most popular" tracks on SSD is to make it more efficient to stream the tracks that are more likely to be requested.

It's optimising the efficient use of their hardware. It doesn't have anything to do with last.fm's suggestions algorithms and does not at all mean last.fm will force these tracks on you.

You're amusingly uninformed considering you're throwing around terms like "sheeple".

Yep the submitter got it wrong. Given that he is posting in English, to an American website, it makes no sense to use the comma as the decimal separator and the period as the thousands separator (unless the idea was to intentionally cause confusion to prove the point).

With a few exceptions (e.g. South Africa), the rule of thumb seems to be that if you're using English, you use "." as the decimal separator.

Wikipedia has a very long article on these things http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator, but most interesting is the diagram showing which countries use which. I found it surprising how many use "," as the decimal point. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DecimalSeparator.png

Absolutely, I did this for my brother's machine, compared to my parents machine it's remained extremely tidy and worry free!

The only issue is Firefox updating. On Windows XP, Firefox cannot update itself when running in a non-admin account. (Bugzilla:407875) Probably means my brother is running a months-old Firefox..

Makes me wonder if Internet Explorer would actually be safer for him, at least it would get updated automatically.

Have you missed the point?

The greater number of comments against the BBC's plans which are included in the BBC article represents the greater number of comments/arguments against the BBC's plans, and goes some way to explaining why its plans were rejected.

Darn kids! Get off my lawn!

On topic... I hate those stickers. They end up stuck to random things. Some people seem to stick them to things (e.g. in a line around the edge of their monitor). I find them a bit disgusting, in a similar way to chewing gum that gets stuck everywhere. Weird and irrational, I know. :)

I was quite entertained once when I noticed this happen to me. Not a sugar pill, just a regular aspirin. I chased the pill with a glug of water, and noticed my headache had disappeared by the time I'd swallowed the water - obviously impossible that it had actually done anything physical to my headache in this time. I was amused that I'd fixed the headache so easily but felt slightly foolish for "unnecessarily" scoffing an aspirin!

tl;dr

;)