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Comment Why is nobody talking about neural networks? (Score 1) 230

Wow, these comments are horrific. Zero creativity or imagination. And the flames! Relax, guys!

Here's something to think about: When you visualize a scene in your mind's eye, how is your brain representing and rendering the geometry? Is it using triangles? NURBs? Or is it using something novel that you haven't thought about yet?

Nvidia is currently using neural nets to enhance rendering ( https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2017/07/31/nvidia-research-brings-ai-to-computer-graphics/ ), and so is deep mind ( https://deepmind.com/blog/neural-scene-representation-and-rendering/ ).

One thing that NURBS and trinagles are bad at capturing is the fractal forms that you see in nature, like trees. Those never look realistic in games. What if we could program neural networks to create compressed holographic representations of their fractal structure, so that they could be stored and rendered efficiently, while looking more treelike?

Comment Re:Non-metric units easier for humans (Score 1) 909

by Epitaph (#42443273) Attached to: USMA: Going the Extra Kilometer For Metrication

I agree -- imperial units are generally better for human perception and estimation. One of the worst metric units is pressure, which is measured in kilopascals (newtons per meter). Who the hell knows how big a newton is?? :) Pounds-per-inch is way easier to wrap your head around.

I think the exception is Fahrenheit, which is not only annoying to spell, but nonlinear, and calibrated quite absurdly. (-10F is actually 22F! WTF! :)

I also find gallons and miles a bit unwieldy, but I suppose they are "chunkier", making it easier to do rough estimates.
Businesses

Dell Says 90% of Recorded Business Data Is Never Read 224

Posted by timothy from the sounds-lowball-no-matter-the-methodology dept.
Barence writes "According to a Dell briefing given to PC Pro, 90% of company data is written once and never read again. If Dell's observation about dead weight is right, then it could easily turn out that splitting your data between live and old, fast and slow, work-in-progress versus archive, will become the dominant way to price and specify your servers and network architectures in the future. 'The only remaining question will then be: why on earth did we squander so much money by not thinking this way until now?'" As the writer points out, the "90 percent" figure is ambiguous, to put it lightly.
Government

Alleged Russian Spy Ring Exposed In US 279

Posted by kdawson from the bad-enough dept.
Several readers sent in the story of an alleged Russian spy ring busted yesterday by the FBI after a decade-long investigation. The FBI says that Moscow trained and planted long-term "moles" in the US in order to infiltrate the upper echelons of US government and business circles and pass back intelligence to the Russians. Twelve people have been charged; ten were arrested in the US (one is at large) and one in Cyprus. Wired and the New York Post have colorful coverage. Wired's leans on the tradecraft and discusses steganography, while the Post favors the femme fatale angle (alleged spy Anna Chapman). The Russian Foreign Ministry said that the US actions were unfounded and pursued "unseemly" goals. One of many choice quotes from copious coverage: "They couldn't have been spies. Look what she did with the hydrangeas." From the WSJ report: "Officials said no secrets were compromised or revealed in the alleged plot, and the spy operation seems to have yielded little of value given some of the elaborate methods deployed. None of the 11 charged by US prosecutors was accused of accessing any classified or sensitive US government information."
Transportation

Tesla IPO Raises $226 Million 274

Posted by kdawson from the ok-fine-but-when-will-they-fly dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Tesla, which will trade under TSLA on Nasdaq, has been priced at $17 per share, allowing the electric car start-up to raise more than $226 million in its IPO. Investors were expecting the share price target range to be between $14 and $16 but the overflow of excitement saw Tesla increase the number of shares it plans to offer to 13.3 million, nearly 20 percent more than originally planned." Reader hlovy contributes a link from Xconomy.com summarizing the skepticism among some analysts as to how much staying power TSLA will demonstrate.
Google

Why Google, Bing, Yahoo Should Fear ACTA 290

Posted by kdawson from the reason-enough-to-keep-it-secret dept.
littlekorea writes "US intellectual property law expert Jonathan Band has warned that Silicon Valley's search engines, hosting companies, and e-commerce giants have much to fear from the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, negotiations for which continued in Switzerland today. The fear for search engines in particular is the erosion of 'fair use' protections and introduction of statutory damages, both of which could lead to more copyright claims from rights holders." The article links a marked-up ACTA draft (PDF) that Band and a coalition of library organizations and rights groups believe is more balanced. Quoting Band: "Our high-level concern is that ACTA does not reflect the balance in US IP law, [which] contains strong protections and strong exceptions. ACTA exports only the strong protections, but not the strong exceptions."
Image

The "King of All Computer Mice" Finally Ships 207

Posted by samzenpus from the there's-a-button-for-that dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The much-anticipated, much-mocked 18-button joystick mouse from WarMouse is now shipping. The press release features an impressive set of user quotes from game designer Chris Taylor, new SFWA president John Scalzi, and a doctor who runs a medical software company. Crazy or not, it's obviously more than just a gaming mouse."
Businesses

Independent Programmers' No-Win Scenario 552

Posted by timothy from the barriers-to-entry dept.
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister writes about the no-win scenario facing today's independent programmers: 'In a knowledge economy, programmers rank among our most valuable workers, yet the current legal and regulatory climate makes a career as an independent software developer virtually a dead-end prospect.' Section 1706 of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, the hurdles and costs of obtaining health care for one's own family, a hostile legal climate in search of accountability for any defects in code — these harsh realities make it 'easy to see why software developers would give up on entrepreneurship. For many, the risks simply don't match the potential rewards. Better to keep their heads down, not rock the boat, and hope they can hang onto their jobs until retirement.' Great news for big software vendors, which will be 'ensured an endless supply of programmers desperate for the safe haven of a steady paycheck, predictable taxation, health benefits, and a shield from civil prosecution when their code turns up buggy. But where will the next Microsoft come from? A field that discourages self-reliance sends the message that the status quo is the highest goal.'"
Science

Beliefs Conform To Cultural Identities 629

Posted by samzenpus from the I-know-what-I-know dept.
DallasMay writes "This article describes an experiment that demonstrates that people don't put as much weight on facts as they do their own belief about how the world is supposed to work. From the article: 'In one experiment, Braman queried subjects about something unfamiliar to them: nanotechnology — new research into tiny, molecule-sized objects that could lead to novel products. "These two groups start to polarize as soon as you start to describe some of the potential benefits and harms," Braman says. The individualists tended to like nanotechnology. The communitarians generally viewed it as dangerous. Both groups made their decisions based on the same information. "It doesn't matter whether you show them negative or positive information, they reject the information that is contrary to what they would like to believe, and they glom onto the positive information," Braman says.'"
NASA

Saturn Moon Could Be Hospitable To Life 153

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the it's-life-but-not-as-we-know-it dept.
shmG writes to share that recent imagery from Saturn's moon Enceladus indicate that it may be hospitable to life. "NASA said on Tuesday that a flyby of planet's Enceladus moon showed small jets of water spewing from the southern hemisphere, while infrared mapping of the surface revealed temperatures warmer than previously expected. 'The huge amount of heat pouring out of the tiger stripe fractures may be enough to melt the ice underground,' said John Spencer, a composite infrared spectrometer team member based at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. 'Results like this make Enceladus one of the most exciting places we've found in the solar system.'"
Science

RHIC Finds Symmetry Transformations In Quark Soup 140

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the better-than-mom's dept.
eldavojohn writes "Today scientists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in Brookhaven National Laboratory revealed new observations after creating a 'quark soup' that revealed hints of profound symmetry transformations when collisions create conditions in which temperatures reach four trillion degrees Celsius. A researcher explains the implications, 'RHIC's collisions of heavy nuclei at nearly light speed are designed to re-create, on a tiny scale, the conditions of the early universe. These new results thus suggest that RHIC may have a unique opportunity to test in the laboratory some crucial features of symmetry-altering bubbles speculated to have played important roles in the evolution of the infant universe.' These new findings hint at violations of mirror symmetry or parity by witnessing asymmetric charge separation in these collisions."
Data Storage

Toshiba Developing High-Density 1TB SSD 149

Posted by timothy from the valentine's-day-is-over dept.
MojoKid writes "A new partnership between Toshiba and Tokyo's Keio University has led to the creation of a new technology that could allow SSDs up to 1TB in size to be made 'with a footprint no larger than a postage stamp.' The report states that the two have been able to integrate 128GB NAND Flash chips and a single controller into a stamp-sized form factor. They've even made it operational with a transfer rates of 2Gbps (or about 250MB/sec) with data transfer that relies on radio communication."
Encryption

How To Replace FileVault With EncFS 65

Posted by timothy from the for-secretive-tweakers dept.
agoston.horvath writes "I've written a HOWTO on replacing Mac OS X's built-in encryption (FileVault) with the well-known FUSE-based EncFS. It worked well for me, and most importantly: it is a lot handier than what Apple has put together. This is especially useful if you are using a backup solution like Time Machine. Includes Whys, Why Nots, and step-by-step instructions."

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