Posts by T.Omoto 20 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jan 2010
In particular the latest LX7 one, they are actual pocketable cameras, rather rugged (metal built), and a fast (very fast) lens that will always deliver a nice image even in the murky, dubiously illuminated areas of IT reporting... and can open into a rather wide FoV that works wonders in rooms. Also RAW and manual settings are present that let you fiddle with stuff a bit more. They aren't cheap, but they sit nicely in the Micro Four Thirds and the mid-range DSLR price range...
I've been using the classic LX3 for 5 years now, took it all over the world. I can attest it will be a camper on the hottest days of Budapest and the dampest nights of Shanghai, and a "point and click" setting is always on hand that will provide at least a decent, if not fantastic picture. If I have to state the downside, is the poor zoom ability, albeit the "4x" magnification you get with the latest models is rather the maximum you should use without a tripod anyway.
Booted perfectly, holds a 6-8 hour battery life, and connects to my wireless with a PCMIA wifi card, once I restored the backup from a recent 2Gb(!) CF card - well, almost, the concept of WPA is a mystery to the drivers. The only thing I really missed back then was a headphone jack, as it was one of the very first portable devices with enough grunt and storage to churn MP3 audio. Well, and that Microsoft could have provided a complete office solution, instead of strategically limited versions of Word/Excel/Powerpoint.
Everquest II has the facial recognition thing going on, actually. Of course, the problem is that unlike cartoon ponies, human face uses hundreds of muscles to express themselves and mapping them realistically to a seamless avatar is pretty complicated, let alone doing it in real time, with a camera without smoothing. But EQII still does it fine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG6GK6Oo58c
On the other hand you can check LA Noire for some very realistic face motion capture (that, of course, is also pretty uncanny valley-like):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBYlRD-Hk8k
(i haven't checked the links since I'm at work, but they should be fine)
Well, now you can call the things you knew it already did directly, instead of calling OpenGL or the remaining interfaces. It will also be easier to implement video in other OS as it's a rogh guideline to what the fimware can do. But as they say, it's really no better than reverse engineering, right down to the magic numbers.
If you wanted to implement something that used the hardware resources of the card in some other way, like say, parallel computing using OpenCL, no luck here.
iOS and Android cannot do anything about Skype, as it's an app they have no control over it. However, Microsoft owns the Skype brand so operators see here a way to actively deliver phones that do not have Skype on it. Microsoft (obviously) refuses this, and so there are more levels to this discussion that might be aparent (including trying to sell a "convenience" package where Windows Phones with Skype are sold with a more expensive data plan). So it actively hurts device sellers makers to use Windows Phone when deailing with the operators. Just ask Elop (on last April Nokia stockholder meeting):
Stephen Elop: So, thank you for your question about Skype. Indeed, Microsoft did buy the Skype company as part of the ecosystem that comes with Windows Phone and Windows and so forth, so that’s quite correct. The feedback from operators is they don’t like Skype, of course, because for those operators who have a traditional wire-line business, traditional telephone business, it could take away from revenues.
And, so what MSFT has done – and we’ve been part of these conversations as well with operators – is as you correctly say, if operator doesn’t want Skype installed on a Windows Phone from Nokia or any other company, then the operator can make that decision.
Now, you’re right: it can be circumvented. But of course it’s on all Android devices, it’s on iPhone devices, it’s on iPad, it’s on all of those devices. So in fact what we’re doing with the operators is turning it around into an advantage. Instead of them just complaining about Skype on Android or Skype on iPhone, with Microsoft and Nokia, we can have a conversation that says “ok there, is this Skype thing, is there a different type of partnership we can do that recognizes that voice over IP like Skype is coming no matter what, but maybe we can do something creative that generates incremental revenue for you.” Some operators are looking at bundling Lumia, Skype and their own services with higher-bandwidth allotments to actually charge the consumer more and generate more revenue for them. So by actually controlling the Skype asset, we can begin a conversation about how we can have a better Skype-based relationship, which was impossible for operators to do before. So it’s actually quite a bit more advanced than whether operators like or don’t like Skype; they actually want to engage in a conversation about what does this mean and how could we do something that we couldn’t do before. Thank you.
Around November, a patch was released that wouldn't bluescreen, but also put certain combinations of PC's in the never ending boot condition, making me a very busy person. Many people thought a "virus" broke their computers, and I'm somewhat tempted to agree. Haven't found a way out other than to revert the patch and stop windows updates altogether.
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