On my Meta Quest I am positively begging for decent content worth viewing in 3d. Here we have a bookful of 3d astronomy. Can I not get something like this in VR? Why is VR languishing? How is it that paper and eye-crossing are still the leading technologies for displaying this 3d content?
Hi there! If you have a Quest 3/3S you should look up "Space Explorers Ultimate Edition", it's free and within it the experience labeled "The ISS Experience" is a beautiful documentary series filmed with 360 cameras sent to film aboard the International Space Station. Some episodes even feature footage filmed outside the station for real, with gorgeous shots of the Earth actually filmed in real outer space attached to the Canadarm robot arm for maneuvering. It's all stereoscopic (3D) video also.
If you have a Quest 2 or 1, I'm very sorry that you can't enjoy that. (Borrow a friend's Quest3 for a weekend I guess.)
ps: I worked for the studio that made the series and was a dev for the custom camera control software webapp that ran on an astronaut's laptop. Crazy fun project.
Yes, but if a chicken and a half laid an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long would it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick all the seeds off a dill pickle?
Quote: “ Inspired by the concept of ‘a piece of cloth.’” Is this some kind of joke? If it were April 1st I’d assume the whole article is meant for comedic effect.
Absolutely. In the 2000s the Unreal Engine had a price tag of half a million dollars up-front plus royalties (I don't remember the percentage) on the back end. That these companies are giving their engines—even their source code—away essentially for free indicates either that (1) engine sales was never a very lucrative line of business or that (2) the promise of establishing your technology as a defacto game engine standard—the Panavision of games—is even more appealing than immediate revenue.
Licensing engines was insanely lucrative, until Unity. Then everything changed -- you could go out and get a good engine with decent framework tools for a few hundred bucks. Why pay six figures up front and X% of revenue when a few hundred bucks for Unity did the job just fine?
I suppose once you've done all the big sells then not that many come along and gradually scaling the price down to increase base of users comes naturally one way or another in whatever market. This and competition gradually edge each down.
Still, it takes one company of note to make that big move and the rest end up following in the same direction.
But today it is not all about having great tools, it is about users knowing how to use those tools that drive demand and establish standards.
As for Steam, well, most games will also be sold upon there store, so win win.
Either way, maybe schools can now expose students in tools that are not just for games but have users and functionality that transcend many fields from modeling, CAD like mock up's and a level of detail and control a bit more than the popular Minecraft, which is in many ways a much simpler form of what these game-engines are today.
So demand is there and opportunity as well. Be interesting how this pans out for game prices long term. As with anything, when supply at a comparable quality hits a level then the only way to stand out is price and lower running costs to get started and investment. Impact upon established studio's could be interesting, if anything it makes what they do more competitive and beyond franchise work, which your cheap startup is not going to be grabbing, then not much will make them stand-out if they stay as is. I see many opportunities for consultancy work and also a increase in the talent pool. Solely due to increased numbers of people able to learn the tools and sue them.
As for which one becomes a standard, well, once we settle down upon one operating system for everything is when such matters are close, but far from today on so many levels that there will always be competition for a long time to come.
Engine sales used to be lucrative, quite a few companies have been based solely on that business model for years. But just like most things, the market changed over the years. High quality alternatives started to appear, big publishers started making or buying their own tech, and easier entry to market are among some of the reasons.
In my mind, the biggest contributor is simply competition.
This is a very good point. In all honesty, id Software really moved from 'making games' to 'making tech demos' with Quake 2 and Quake 3: Arena. The same is pretty much true for Epic and the Unreal Tournament games.
This is an unusually political post to have risen so high on Hacker News. Is that because of the significance of email to the story? The use of email in this case is not very technically interesting. Or is there some other attraction?
A hacker discovers a secret email account and server being run in violation of the law that could bring down the leading Democratic presidential candidate? That's Hacker News.
It's kind of a well-known phenomenon that if you give it any opening, sites will fill up with American-presidential-race news for about 1 out of every 4 years, regardless of the nominal subject of the site. Seems to have expanded to 1.5 now? Requires active efforts from the management to keep the flood out, and most sites don't.
The HN discussion is useful because the news media accounts skip all the tech detail. For example, what provider was used, and what are their security procedures?
"We will significantly reduce preloaded applications." As a primary Mac and Linux user, it is absolutely incredible to me that any PC that isn't given to customers for free would have more than zero preloaded so-called applications by default. I accept that my television, or Google, or Facebook dumps advertising on me, because otherwise how would they monetize? But since when did it become okay to load multi-hundred- or thousand-dollar devices, for which customers have paid dearly, with advertising and bloatware that benefits only the manufacturer? Are you guys paying for this crap?
Lower-end PCs typically have something like 5% margin, compared to substantially more on a mac. And that's assuming you configured the hardware in a way that someone wanted to buy it before it became semi-obsolete on the store shelf and has to be sold for even less.
The manufacturers have to make up the money somewhere. With a complex product at commodity rates, with customers mostly having no idea what the differences are between them (and for good reason, it's all just a set of nasty price/perf/quality tradeoffs that I wouldn't want to look at), you compete on very basic features and the price that they dominate.
That might well be true for many PCs, but the ThinkPad range is pretty high end and comparable to Macs in both specs and price. As far as I can tell, it's not just the low-end crap that's affected by this issue?
It's hardly the only area where a paid-for experience includes obviously unwanted advertising.
Further, I don't see that consumers have much choice if they don't want to reinstall a fresh OS -- every major brand of PC I know of includes similar bloat. Also remember laptops don't come with a nice fresh Windows CD you can install from -- they come with a branded recovery disc (or partition) which "recovers" it to factory condition.
>It's hardly the only area where a paid-for experience includes obviously unwanted advertising.
True, but we shouldn't pretend that this isn't a product of very recent history. When cable television channels started running ads, and when movie theaters began running commercials before the feature, it was really shocking to people. Most were enraged at the time.
I'm a Linux user paying for good hardware. I don't use Windows, so I don't have to deal with its issues. It wouldn't help me at all to buy hardware that doesn't support my uses, so I'll continue to buy what works best for me.
Yea I agree with you on the pre-loaded applications, but how is it different from a Samsung TV coming pre-loaded with their applications? I'm not sure why you assume the TV is ok but the computer isn't. Both are pretty expensive appliances.
Yeah, I'm not buying it. I have two complains about this article in particular and this kind of "science" in general.
1. Their conclusion is unverifiable. Science is about hypothesis, experiment, and falsification in a reproducible context. When someone says, "I can look at these tree rings and tell you whether rats or marmots spread the plague," I say, "Cool! Show me the results." And when they say, "What do you mean results? I just mean that we infer from the rings to the marmots," then I say, "Okay, well I just infer from planetary alignments to mood swings." Speculation is part of science. Speculation is not science.
2. An extremely strong inference is, by definition, acceptable without further evidence. You don't have to show me an experimental result if you can show me a strong logical case, with very strong causal or inferential links from one piece of evidence to the next. Although you can't reproduce for me a precise result showing that the Grand Canyon was the result of many, many millennia of erosion, you can show me over observable spans of time the general erosion rates in soil of that type with rainfall of that type and I'll accept your inference that many millennia were involved in the Grand Canyon. But tree rings in Asia to disease vectors in Europe? Give me a break.
Err, that's explicitly covered in the last paragraph; I've included a bit more for context:
[...] Moreover, their results challenge the long-standing, but poorly substantiated view that Yersinia pestis must have had a permanent wildlife reservoir in Europe, such as the urban black rat. Instead, new strains of the disease may have been frequently imported from Asia.
Nevertheless, an ultimate confirmation of this hypothesis depends on the availability of appropriate genetic material of ancient plague victims not only from different periods throughout time but also from different parts of Eurasia. The advent of aDNA techniques and international research collaboration across disciplinary boundaries will most likely be able to shed new light on this fascinating topic at the interface of human history and environmental variability.
We've already reconstructed Yersinia pestis strains from victims of the Black Death and the 6th Century Plague of Justinian....
I have an iPad 3, and I bought my father last year's iPad air. The speed difference is large. 802.11ac wifi is also a big deal. With the new one, it's even faster, and touchID is nice. Plus it has the iPhone 6 camera which is truly one of the best mobile device cameras out there.
I find this frankly implausible. What percentage of people you know have been arrested? I'm guessing very small (even assuming that many hide it and so you're knowledge is substantially skewed). So maybe that's because of your high/squeaky-clean socio-economic class? No: imagine yourself in any class you care to. Unless that class is much, much larger than your "real" class, then it would have to have an astronomical arrest rate (80%?) to compensate.
> I find this frankly implausible. What percentage of people you know have been arrested?
The narrow-mindedness of this is breathtaking. An article about a peer-reviewed paper containing basic survey results asserts something about the entire US and your response is: "Well, that doesn't line up with my circle of friends so it must be bullshit?"
> Unless that class is much, much larger than your "real" class, then it would have to have an astronomical arrest rate (80%?) to compensate.
Assuming you're in a "high/squeaky-clean socio-economic", then, yes, that class is much larger than yours. If you live in the US and make $100k or more (which is likely true for many HN readers), there are four times as many people who make less than you.
> I wanna see the data.
The article links to the paper (behind a paywall). If you want to see the data, get off your butt and look at the data.
The study appears to be using "arrested" to mean "convicted of a crime for which the person could have been arrested (taken in to police custody)"? Example: I have never been arrested/taken in to police custody but, I was convicted of providing alcohol to minors at a college party and, had I not willingly taken the citation from the officer or, had I been belligerent and uncooperative, I could have been arrested. Technically, you could argue while the officer was issuing me the citation I was under some sort of arrest, but that does not comport with either the legal notion of being under arrest or what most people think of as being under arrest.*
Given the journal, that seems like an odd error to make. I could have that wrong, but it would make sense given that article specifically mentions truancy and underage drinking, two charges which seldom result in arrest.
Maybe that makes the statistic a little less shocking to those surprised by the number? Again, I certainly could be wrong, but it really would be surprising if the 40% refers to people actually having been read Miranda rights, hand cuffed, placed in a police car, etcetera. Even for other common crimes for that age group, like possession (generally marijuana), usually a citation is issued and the drugs are seized but no arrest is made. This is all said from the perspective of a judicial clerk in Portland, Oregon, who works a lot with the dockets related to citations related to minor misdemeanor offenses. Perhaps it is different in other states.
Anecdotally: almost everyone I know well has been convicted of a misdemeanor of some sort for which they could have been arrested but only one person I know has ever been taken in to police custody.
> The study appears to be using "arrested" to mean "convicted of a crime for which the person could have been arrested (taken in to police custody)"?
No, it uses it to mean arrested.
> Example: I have never been arrested/taken in to police custody but, I was convicted of providing alcohol to minors at a college party and, had I not willingly taken the citation from the officer or, had I been belligerent and uncooperative, I could have been arrested.
Legally, a citation issued for a crime is a non-custodial arrest. [1]
> Technically, you could argue while the officer was issuing me the citation I was under some sort of arrest, but that does not comport with either the legal notion of being under arrest or what most people think of as being under arrest.
No, it comports quite exactly with the legal notion of arrest, which can either be non-custodial (the type you report having experienced) or custodial (the type which tends to involve handcuffs.) To the extent the Wikipedia article you cite is inconsistent with that (and you seem to have linked to an irrelevant section of the article, though I do so material earlier which, though it is inaccurate, supports your presentation), it is simply wrong.
I just skimmed the article and found no (re-?)definition of 'arrest'. If it's 40% for the general population and the arrest rate is a function of economic class, the rate for the lower class would have to account for the significantly smaller rate that I perceive in my middle-class peer group.
Either that or my peers are statistical outliers. I don't think there's any other form of selection going on that would prevent them from being a representative sample of their economic class, though.
The article possibly indicated a loose definition of 'arrest' here, though:
> ...arrested or taken into custody for a nontraffic offense by age 23.
For my definitions of 'arrest' and 'custody', being arrested implies being taken into custody.
I would say you're is the most insightful comment in this thread. I am biased towards thinking you are correct in that when one publishes a paper, there are incentives towards a more dramatic interpretation/presentation of the data. So, a study that said 10% of all males have been arrested, would not have gotten as much notice as the current presentation.
Anecdotally, at my Ivy League college that has recently gotten some lovely press in Rolling Stone, I would estimate that at least 40% of male students have been arrested at one point or another for underage drinking. There are a couple of law firms in that town that do a thriving business in defending underage possession and disorderly conduct cases.
I'm probably in the squeaky clean category. On a day of a meteor shower, I went with some friends to take pictures of the sky. A park ranger arrested us, for being in a national park after dark. After arresting us, he spent 5 mins talking on the radio with some other ranger, then spent 5 mins writing a citation. Paid it in the mail a few weeks later, never heard of it again.
It doesn't take much to be arrested. 40% is a bit high, but then again my group of friends at the time was Harvard/Princeton/Stanford/Berkeley students. The socioeconomic status of the population really doesn't matter.
edit just to make it clear: This is not my opinion. This is the legal definition. The study includes citations as arrests. This is why they make sure to point out that they do not include minor traffic offenses.
There is a such thing as a non-custodial address, but that does not make every detention encounter with the police that doesn't result in you being taken into custody a "non-custodial arrest". By way of example: if you're issued a speeding ticket, the police do not gain the right to search your vehicle. But they do have that right if they arrest you.
Not every detention encounter with the police results in a citation. If it does result in a citation, they have preformed a non-custodial arrest. If they want to search you, they can perform a full-custody arrest even if it's for a misdemeanor that is only punishable by a fine(Atwater v. Lago Vista).
> the police do not gain the right to search your vehicle.
Depends. Just need probable cause. Motor vehicle exception.
>But they do have that right if they arrest you.
Depends. Search incident to arrest exception with automobile caveats. After Gant, if the arrestee no longer has access, or no reason to believe that evidence of the arrest offense will be found, not ok. (But still maybe ok to impound and inventory.)
Right, but the "probable cause" is technically different -- for a search without arrest, they need probable cause to believe that there is contraband in the car, for arrest they need probable cause to believe you have committed a crime. Given that possession of contraband is itself a crime (though generally one with a mental state requirement), there is quite a lot of overlap between the two kinds of "probable cause", but they aren't equivalent.
I won't repeat dragonwriter, but I wasn't criticizing, just pointing out that your statements aren't absolute rules. They just tend to be the simplest statements of the rules that exist.
Also with arrest, lower standard for if they think evidence will be found. It's the RAS-like "reasonable to believe" that evidence of the crime will be discovered.
ok, that's a little weird. I got a ticket once for cutting through a park after dark. I would never have considered that being arrested, but hurray, today I learned I'm part of the 40%. I have also received a ticket for speeding, which all things considered, was a more serious offense/penalty. It's weird that the speeding ticket is excluded but not the walking ticket.
Are you sure you were arrested? It sounds like you were not actually placed into custody, eg cuffed and in the back of a police car. You may have been detained rather than arrested, not withstanding the issuance of a ticket.
I remember tons of people getting arrested for underage drinking in college - much more so than in high school where getting caught by parents was a bigger concern than cops.
I know plenty who sat in the drunk tank in college, or were busted on minor drug or shoplifting offenses or other teenage nonsense. I feel that the number is plausible.
> I find this frankly implausible. What percentage of people you know have been arrested?
The group of people I know is irrelevant. The group of people I currently know is but a small subset of the US population. Upper-middle class, white suburbia. Double income household, with both in the six figures. Yeah, we're just a slice of typical Americana right there. (Though I have been arrested...several times. I was a bad boy once.)
But, hey, if you want to talk anecdotes then we can talk about the group of people I used to know. Lower class, much higher percentage of blacks (I currently have no black friends, and barely a few acquaintances). Though it's been a few decades, there were plenty from that group that had been arrested (some of whom I bailed out). Notice how I mention black folk? Yeah, in Indianapolis at the time that was important because the county prosecutor decided that a car full of young black males was probable cause for a traffic stop (swear to $DEITY, that's all that was needed for a stop). So race might skew those numbers a bit through no fault of the folks involved (other than the fact that they were young, male, and "driving while black").
And hence we render anecdotal data useless, which is why we use peer-reviews studies with much larger data sets. Because when you take data just from a redneck city with a redneck prosecutor, race might just make a teensy bit of difference. Or maybe the environment of that particular city. Or maybe it was just the ne'er-do-well friends I hung out with.
> I wanna see the data.
And you're not looking at those data with your own eyes because...? Platter's not silver enough? Have to hold the spoon yourself?
I grew up in a mostly white, rural, middle class setting, and I would estimate that at least 25% of my male friends have been arrested. There are probably enough "other classes" (e.g. non-white, urban, or poor) that are sufficiently populous with sufficiently higher arrest rates that I don't have much difficulty believing the statistic.
Actually, you should generally expect that ANY statistical analysis will give significantly different results than what you'd see of people around you.
Many of such parameters exhibit clustering; so if 50% people are X; then you'd expect most people to say "hey, that's wrong, that's not what I see" - since there would be many people that would see that 80+% of their friends would be X; and there would be many people that would see that 20-% of their friends are X, but virtually noone would have a circle of friends that would have the "true" 50/50 split.
I have a lot of friends that have been arrested. So for me this number is very believable. It's actually not a very hard thing to get arrested. I had friend go to jail for not neutering his cat.
That being said.. It's always nice to see the data.
I agree. I come from a nice area, but I know maybe 10 people out of 2000 who have ever been arrested. And it was just underage drinking for them. Perhaps I live in a bubble, but this is suspiciously high
Yes, but there are vasts swaths of the country were arrest rates are much much higher than 10 out of 2000 people (not that they would all tell you anyway).
I understand living in a bubble.... but you are not at least aware of the vast scale of these areas? If not, you should drive around more in my opinion.
This is, among other things, a terribly confusing situation. Who's to blame? The person who asks to have results expunged? The law that requires Google to comply? Google for complying? Or no one—is the right thing being done, the "pen" of the Internet being dulled back into a pencil?
No! How can you blame a company for doing something they are legally compelled to do?
> Or no one—is the right thing being done, the "pen" of the Internet being dulled back into a pencil?
The Internet has always been written in pencil. Pages stop being served all the time. The only difference is that now the index of the Internet is written in pencil, and every EU citizen has been given an eraser.
