The problem with the 48fps solution that Peter Jackson went with is that it is using a 48fps 360° shutter. Let me quickly explain.
Traditional film production uses 24fps with a 180° shutter: a film frame gets exposed for half of 1/24th of a second, and then during the other half of that 1/24th of a second, nothing is exposed. We learned to associate the motion artifacts produced that way as looking "film-like".
With digital camera, you can easily crank that up to a 360° shutter: each frame gets exposed for a full 1/24th of a second. Some films used 24fps 360° for selected scenes, and people immediately said that it looked "like TV". A fair response, since TV always had similar motion artifacts.
Now when PJ moved to a higher frame rate, he could have said "let's make sure we get a 180° degree shutter look for both 24fps and 48fps by filming at 96fps, then for every 4 frames, combining frames 1+2 to get traditional 24fps 180° footage, and using frames 1+3 to get a comfortable 24fps 180° (frame 4 would get thrown away in the process). PJ mainly uses Red Epic cameras that go up to 120fps, so this would have been no problem.
Instead, PJ went with filming at 48fps and a 360° shutter. This resulted in normal looking 24fps 180° footage, and very TV-like looking 48fps 360° footage for those cinemas that support 48fps. For me, this whole mess is just an unfortunate lack of good testing in pre-production.
Let's hope that James Cameron recognizes these issues and shows everybody how it's done properly by using the 96fps solution while filming Avatar 2.
Buckyballs are just magnets of a certain material, shape, and size. There are countless shops on- and offline that sell the exactly same product, among other types, shapes and sizes, to consumers and professionals, sometimes to both.
How is the CPSC planning to implement this ban? Prohibit this exact combination? Or ban everybody that sells them in a package that looks vaguely toy-like? Are they ok if the packaging looks boring and industrial? Where do they draw the line? The CPSC is going to have a lot of explaining to do.
It's not complicated. It will simply become unlawful to sell "aggregations of separable, permanent, magnetic objects intended or marketed by the manufacturer primarily as a manipulative or construction desk toy for general entertainment, such as puzzle working, sculpture building, mental stimulation, or stress relief."
Contrary to knee-jerk Internet opinion, the CPSC is not out to rid the country of small round magnets.
Where do you draw the line at intrusive? A lot of the apps in my list fell into the category "used once, forgot it was installed." I don't think it's necessarily intrusive, but I removed a bunch of them none-the-less; I just don't want them to have permission _anymore_.
A great feature from Facebook would be time-limited access; i.e. Quora can access my Facebook info for 24 hours and then all permissions are revoked. Although, unless the app is using long-lived access tokens, they can only access your FB info for a few hours after an active session -- so if you haven't logged in recently, the app can't grab your data.
Well, they're defining "intrusive" to include things that Facebook supports on purpose, so they have different opinions about what should be permitted on the platform. For example, this scanner considers apps that have permission to post in your name as intrusive, while Facebook not only allows that, but even spent time implementing that functionality.
As far as I know, there are a lot of Facebook apps that ask for more privileges than they need. The question is, why doesn't facebook look at the app, its requested privileges and reject them if they ask for too much? This would prevent the most egregious problems, and make MyPermissions unnecessary.
Since the speed of light doesn't change in real life, and there is no answer at what speed a changing speed of light would propagate in real life, does it really matter how it's implemented in this game? My guess is that they took the easiest route and made it change instantaneously for the whole world.
The various visual effects seem to be render-time transforms, so I suspect the speed change is propagating instantly across the gameworld.
Can you think of a way to model a non-instantaneous propagation of this change that doesn't involve simulating oodles of photons wandering around the world?
Light from source A travels at the speed determined by the last speed-wavefront that passed it. This can be modeled by storing the speed on the sources, or by calculating from all gathered orbs in the world, and selecting the most-recent, when the time is calculated by (<time picked up> at <distance when picked up> at <speed of light before picked up>).
All such waves will be entirely contained within the previous wave because you cannot go faster than light and the speed only decreases, so all that matters is the speed before it was picked up, which is the speed the wave-front moves at (or does it move at the new speed? eh, pick either one, it doesn't matter.)
Then, for each orb picked up since the most-recent that affected the source, the time for the light to reach the observer is based on <distance to orb N> at speed <before orb N> until <distance to orb N-1>. Then repeat for orb N-1 until you run out of orbs. In this case, N would be the oldest orb whose wavefront has not yet passed the source.
It's a piece-wise calculation (the reverse of what's described), so it would be slower than instantaneous changes, but there's no need to model photons. And I would guess there's a reasonably-efficient way to calculate this on a GPU, so it could probably be real-time. Or it will be in a year or two.
A year ago, Apple was asked whether the iPhone 4 or even the 3GS will get Siri. They said no, to do good voice search, you need advanced tech - several microphones, special noice canceling DSPs, fast processors - so get out and buy a new iPhone.
Well, I just did the test. Google voice search on a 40 month old iPhone 3GS is more responsive and much more precise than Siri on the latest and best 1 month old iPhone 5.
Google hasn't always been great in this area. Google dictation search is borderline unusable on my HTC android phone. All this will do is force Apple to improve. Great for everybody.
I tested on an iPhone 5, Nexus S and an iPad 2. Most things worked well across the board but there is some weirdness. Eg "what's 2 + 2" returned the correct result on the iPhone 5, worked on the iPad 2 after several tries and just failed every time on the Nexus S.
Some times the failed was result was just weird, but most often it was "what's to plus 2".
Did you use it with a headset or via device microphone?
The noise-correction on the older device microphones aren't as good as the newer ones (ie, anything that's Siri compatible has at least 2 microphones for noise-reduction).
So perhaps Apple does have a legitimate (although self-serving) reason not to deploy Siri on older tech - it may suck if you have lots of ambient noise or distortion.
I also have a very poor experience with my Nexus S when using Google Now and voice search. Unfortunately, I don't believe that the Nexus S was speced to be able to run 4.x. I get the impression 4.x was designed for newer devices.
