Incidentally, Epic Games' games, like Unreal Tournament and Unreal Tournament 2003 don't require additional fees for being used in a game house setting. All you need is a legal copy of the game for each PC it is running on:
A few years ago, working on Unrealty (an Unreal-engine based 3D walkthrough app), things like this came up. Adding solid modelling, so you could cut through character and other models and have an "inside" to work with (I think the suggestion was for dentistry simulation). Integrating a physics engine for basic engineering tests.
Now, the latest Unreal engine tech is extremely powerful, with great physics available via MathEngine'sKarma engine. Modifications and custom code and maps is anecdotally easier than with Quake * thanks to better editing tools and the UnrealScript interpreted language (and the recent fact that subtractive geometry is no longer the dominant design tool).
I wonder, then, if an Unrealty-esque system, with better level and physics design docs, aimed at engineers and such, would garner interest? I wouldn't expect the engineers to have enough time and artistic skills both to create their own content from scratch; but they could modify physical properties of existing objects easily enough. What would have to be part of the package, both documentation- and content-wise, to make it usable? Assuming it's not much more than the stock game engine, made suitable for education use by the removal of the "game" portions.
Try a Google search for virtual heritage. This is the term commonly used for digitally preserving historical sites, usually in some sort of interactive or 3D form.
The Virtual Heritage Network was founded through some of the work done at and people of VSMM98 and VSMM99, at the latter of which I presented my paper on Unrealty, which used the Unreal engine for business visualization. This is relevant, because from the Florida Everglades to ancient Japanese temples, the Unreal engine continues to find applications like these, through inventive and forward-looking historians and researchers wanting the best combination of visually enticing and widely accessible heritage presentations.
Wow. This post is one of the saddest, most disheartening things I've ever read. And the worst part is that you're pinning your own disillusionment and bitterness over your own life choices onto someone else, whose situation is entirely different. Don't deny someone the ability to, yes, indeed, change their life for the better, just because you took the road most travelled.
Most young people attend college expecting one of two things:
That they will find some sort of miraculous passion to define them as a person, lead them into a fulfilling career, and thereby achieve happiness.
That they get a piece of paper that will get them a job that pays more than flipping burgers, but may not suck less.
Snap judgements say you wanted the first, and ended up with the second.
When I graduated high school, I didn't want to go to college. So what that it was what you were supposed to do? So what that most jobs require that piece of paper? I don't want a job anyway. And yes, I got tons of criticism from everyone I knew for my choice. Screw them, I said!
It came down to the fact that I didn't have the foggiest clue what I wanted to do with myself. Do the same job in the same field for 40 years? Or even different jobs in the same field? Bor-ing. And what's that? You can't just take any arbitrary classes at college? You have to pick a "major," and that ties you into a certain giant batch of required courses, most of which are dull and perfunctory? No, thanks! No time for drama courses for CS majors? No ability to take advanced EE courses without actually being an EE major? Lame! I think I'll go the library intsead, thank you. I wanted to go to university to LEARN THINGS. Not to "prepare myself for the outside world." What bullshit. College is as close to the outside world as McDonalds chicken nuggets are to actual chickens.
So after high school, I said, "To hell with school," and got myself a job as a consultant for a well-connected local firm, doing work for IBM and Lotus, as well as large local companies creating Notes/Domino "solutions." It helped that I enjoyed 60-80 hour work weeks, and was a stereotypical whiz kid, as I'm sure most of Slashdot was/is.
A couple years in, I quit and started my own business, entirely self-funded (yay saving money), moved into a large, expensive apartment, and proceeded to drive the company into the ground in about two years. Notes to self: do not take on projects larger than you can handle, and always have good communication between your employees and your clients.
After another ~two years, I'm now completely debt-free (I didn't declare bankruptcy, and helped out my ex-employees as much as was possible), and attending classes full-time at the University of Texas at Austin. I'm a liberal arts student with no declared major, looking for a classic liberal arts education, and taking sixteen hours of very different courses. I'm working on a documentary, auditioning for theatre productions, taking dance classes, and working 20+ hours a week part-time doing consulting. And I hang out with friends, go out on dates, attend parties, bar-hop, etc. And getting 6-8 hours of sleep a night. Nothing is suffering thanks to careful time management and a serious desire to actually be able to do all of these things at the expense of none. It's a lot of work to make it all fit, and spur-of-the-moment plans often require much mental jockeying, but I do it, and I'm damn happy about it.
Note: Replies intent on making jokes with punchlines similar to "Liberal arts students ask, 'Would you like fries with that?'" should Google for the definition of a classic liberal arts education beforehand.
So, yes, I'm a college student. I think attending school now was the best decision I've made, because now I want to be here, and I know what I want to study (even if it is just "anything and everything"), and I'm savvy enough to be able to make everything fit. I'm not doing it to please my parents, or because it's what you're "supposed" to do, but because I want to learn new things, broaden my horizons, give myself a strong cultural and historical base upon which to better understand the world around me. I want to learn new languages and religions in an environment that will help me foster that desire, surrounded by people who want to do the same. I want to study art and architecture so I can go to a museum and be able to know why other people think painting X is so important, even if I think it still looks like crap. I want to learn to write better than using huge run-on sentences, so people will mod me up just because I'm grammatically correct. I want to do all of these things because I think they'll make me a better person, better able to appreciate and understand the world, people and events around me.
A lot of my friends graduated college over the past few years. All of them took the "career" path, but only a single one is happy with it. The rest all have the same vague, lost, unsure, slightly disillusioned look in their eyes that they had when they graduated high school, and that saddens me. People here tell me it's amazing how much I enjoy all of this, even though I have no idea what I want to do. I tell them, that's the best part.
The poster wants to go back to school. Perhaps it's for the same reasons that I have. Perhaps it's because he feels like less of a man without that piece of paper. The point is that when you're in our shoes, it's not a decision you come to lightly. Don't tear someone down because you weren't able to say "No, thanks" after high school. Just like it's never too late to save some money and start your company if you really want to, it's never too late to go back to school and make it work.
To the poster, I say, go back, and take something else. Don't take courses directly related to what your company does, because you already know most of it through practical application. Dollars to donuts says this is why you're getting bored. Instead, take things that will broaden your horizons and give you new insights into your personal universe. Don't take self-paced or online courses; get into the classroom, sit at the front, and interact with the professor and other students. Learn something new.
Barring a genetic or hormonal issue, when you eat, you're taking in calories. Your body burns off some doing its normal metabolic processes, some goes out when you piss and crap, and the rest takes up residence in your fat ass.
The trick is, then, to only consume what you need. Or, less than you need, and your body will eventually relent and burn off some of that fat, and you'll lose weight.
Ladies and gentlemen, time to run up John Walker's(1) bandwidth bill some more, get his name in the papers again, and introduce some more people to The Hacker's Diet.
Available in both North American and European mirrors, The Hacker's Diet takes a practical, pragmatic, engineer's approach to losing weight, and more importantly, maintaining that new weight, both stably and comfortably.
In fact, it even has a section on basic excercise to get you somewhat fit. Not to get you starring in a Bally's Total Fitness commercial. Just able to run up a flight of stairs without passing out. Fit, as in, healthy, instead of fat, as in unhealthy. Gosh, what a concept.
Now we'll do the webblog plug, too. Mark Pilgrim(2) wrote a great writeup of The Hacker's Diet twice, last August and an extended, much more blunt version last October. Here's the October version. Go read it.
Then get off your ass, sit outside, and read the book. Download the PalmOS apps to your Visor, your Clio, or your Zaurus with POSE. And do something about that Mr. Fatty-Fat-Fat nickname.
(1) John Walker, founder of AutoDesk. (2) Mark Pilgrim, that guy who got fired because of his weblog, and who wrote Dive into Python. (3) And why does Slashcode strip out superscript and underscores? Weak.
Anyway, as brought up in the last Ask Slashdot remotely similar to this one (Archiving DVD's with Linux), dvd::rip, which is a Perl+GTK front-end to transcode, has a fairly insecure cluster mode, whereby it will split up the video transcoding task among however many machines you can coerce into doing it, and rip and mux the audio with the video on the host machine.
Sounds like just what the doctor ordered. Now someone go mod up that other answer of mine. Please?
I'm sure you can poke around and find out where I'm coming from, but where you're lucky enough to have actual support for the technologies you use in your games, the companies doing the support have this giant, perpetually unfulfilled need for capable, interested coders doing documentation and tools.
I say perpetually unfulfilled because most people who come into these positions aspire to be game programmers, and eventually game designers, and so they come in to learn the ropes, punch out a few really high-quality, in-depth docs to get themselves noticed, and then get poached by game companies to do in-house tech. And sure, they contribute back to the support team for a little while, but after they feel they've repaid their debt, they're gone. They start out doing in-house tools and cleanup/robustness stuff, and maybe they contribute a neat gameplay feature or effect here and there, and by the time the next project comes around, they're doing much more programming because they end up knowing the tech better than anyone else. It's not far from lead programmer to lead designer in some circles.
But as other people have posted, game programming is probably not where you want to be. Gaming is the Hollywood of this industry, which means a few people are rich and famous, and (in most places) everyone else gets paid 1/4 to 1/3 of the normal salary everywhere else, and is fully expected to work 16 and 18 hour days until crunch time, when you should start sleeping at the office. You're perpetually indebted to your publisher, you have nothing but unrealistic deadlines and overwhelming pressure to perform, and someone coming from a cushy IT jockey job would probably realize they don't have to put up with that kind of shit.
And they don't.
If you want to get into the game industry because you want your work to be fun, because you're winding down your wage slave responsibilities, but don't want to stop working, because you want to do cool shit again, get into support and tools.
It's the best of both worlds. Every game company using the tech you're supporting will see your work, read your documentation like the Bible, and ask you questions as if you were their priest. Every new tool and feature you make gets praised to the heavens. You get to write sample code -- mini game demos -- to show off new features and functionality, providing you with 100% of the fun with 0% of the pressure or workload. There's always something new to work on, and you never have to dote on the old stuff (except to keep it updated with new versions of the technology).
A lot of you might be saying that you still have to write documentation, and documentation sucks. Well, I agree. That's the drawback, but that's also what you're getting paid for. You get to screw around with expensive technology, work on video games all day, and all you have to do is write down how you did it when you're done. That's it. Small price in my book.
So if that sounds interesting to you, ask around, see what companies support their tech, and see what kind of turnover they have. If you've got a solid C/C++ background, have done Visual Studio or CodeWarrior plugins, scripted Max or Maya, worked with COM or debugged drivers under Linux, and you have absolutely no aspirations to be the next Warren Spector or Shigeru Miyamoto, but just want to do fun code and cool shit without the pressure of actually publishing a game, try support and tools.
I know I've posted aboutthis before, but quite possibly your ideal laptop would be the Transmeta Crusoe-based NEC Versa DayLite. They're wonderful machines, with a transflective display, backlight you can switch on and off, and something ridiculous like eight hours of battery life if you're using it outside.
I have it's more normal brother, the NEC Ultralite, which has a normal TFT LCD, and it gets five full hours under hard usage, with the screen brightness up all the way, and the hard drive never spinning down, constantly writing, and the 802.11b card going and online. Under normal usage it does even better.
And of course, I'm dumping it once I can find a DayLite that won't cost me US$2500.:)
As a followup, this definitely "brightens" the already vibrant homebrew development scene.
The Visoly flash linker and carts are great, and available from (your friends and mine) Lik-Sang, GameGizmo and Easy Buy 2000 (all no-referral URLs).
The multi-boot cables (for downloading small apps to your GBA without needing to flash a cart) are cool, too, and have been exploited to turn your GBA into a handheld terminal. Check out the PDF on that last link; much nicer than reading the page, with pictures. Wish there was someplace within the continental US to order a couple non-ugly ones from, though. Those MBV2s are just too unweildly to use in sexy handheld terminal demonstrations.
Or at least, I believe it is. It's been mentioned herebefore.
The Xybernaut Poma is their OEM version of the direct-from-Hitachi model. Fifteen hundred bucks US gets you delivery before the end of Q1 2002.
It runs Windows CE, has no audio inputs, and I don't think anyone on the wearables mailing list has actually gotten one yet to see what development will be like, but it's very interesting, at least.
The US versions of the two Crusoe portables I was looking at in my previous Slashdot post about this, the Casio Cassiopiea Fiva MPC-205E and 206E, and the NEC Versa DayLite, are both available online, direct from Casio and the NEC from CDW or PC Connection.
Geez, I'm almost miffed that I had to plug my own project myself.
Yes, things like this have been done before, and even featured on Slashdot. That article is about NASA doing a virtual tour of the International Space Station using Unrealty, which is a stripped-down version of the same Unreal engine used in Unreal Tournament, targeted at architects and real estate developers. Even won an award for a research paper I did on the concept.
While it never really caught on, perhaps the next go at, using the next-generation Unreal technologies, will. Structure Studios is one such competitor, using next-generation engines to produce even more realistic representations. And you can check out some of the work of a licensed Unrealty locale developer at 3dx3.
I'm currently planning on replacing my six pound Gateway Solo 9300 laptop (P3/800, 160mb, 20gb, 15.1") with one of these two Transmeta Crusoe-based laptops. Mostly because they're uber-light, and with all-day staying power. I'll take offers on the laptop, btw.:)
The first is the Casio MPC-206E Cassiopeia FIVA. It runs the Crusoe TM5600 at 600MHz, which means it's probably comparable to a 400MHz P2/P3. 8.4" TFT LCD, 800x600. Max 192mb RAM, comes with a 20gb HD. Cool toys include onboard 56k softmodem, 10/100 ethernet, 1 Type II PCMCIA slot, sound, VGA out, video out, FireWire, CompactFlash, USB, and an included dual-boot Linux partition. However it's also A5 sized (8.7" x 7.7" x 0.83"), and some people have found it too small to type well on. Nine hours of battery life with the extended life (heavier) battery, and it only weighs 2.18 pounds without.
The other option is the NEC LaVie MX or MX2. Another Crusoe laptop, this one boasts a larger 10.4" 1024x768 reflective LCD (so it's daylight readable) with a backlight you can turn on indoors, and is larger overall. 10/100 is with a dongle, two USB, no FireWire, VGA out is with a dongle, and no video out. Battery life is 8-11 hours standard (no additional batteries to switch in), it's 10.4" x 8.3" x.83~1.16" (?), and weighs 3.27lbs. Battery life is reportedly around half that if the backlight is turned on the whole time.
Dynamism has a neat comparison engine, linked to there showing the LaVie MX2 and the Fiva.
Also, NEC has the Versa DayLite, which is the US model of the LaVie MX, so you don't necessarily have to find an importer like Dynamism for it.
That's funny. Last I checked, Rob Malda disliked the original Slashdot PQA because it didn't show ads. Does this one? Incidentally, a lot of other people liked it, for lots of other reasons (first third-party PQA, demonstrated at Palm's NYC rollout of the VII, it was pretty to look at, etc.) and I got lots of emails when I retired it a few months ago.
IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit: this manual, also copyrighted 1997, is documentation for using IBM's Java-based toolkit for writing automated agents, say, page-comparing and caching agents. Conveniently enough, they provide the following function: CheckMonitoredPagesForChanges, which states, "This effector will check all the web pages on the monitored-pages list for changes in the page... This function uses a checksum method against the content of the HTTP request to 'compare' the page content. Any difference in the checksums, or any change in the Last-Modified date in the HTTP header (if it exists), will cause a 'change' to be detected."
WebGUIDE: Querying and Navigating Changes in Web Repositories: This is an AT"T research paper. "The AIDE version repository is a centralized service that archives versions of pages... AIDE maintains a relational database containing meta-data about each page, each user, and the relationships between them. For each URL, it stores the following (among other information):
Last modification date: This is used to find pages that have been modified since a user saw them...
Checksum: This is used in case the last modification date is unavailable." This document is copyright 1993, 1994.
Another interesting note, is that Puma started out making synching software. They didn't acquire NetMind, what I'd gather would be the impetus for this patent, until 2000, over six years after that last AT"T URL, and PumaTech was founded.
Especially this one, that uses normal SDRAM. What in that card costs so much? It's certainly not the RAM. Can the chipset that manages the writing to and from the RAM really cost so much? Shouldn't it be possible to hack something like this together for a couple hundred bucks, much like people do with MP3 players now?
Finally, someone who wants to put a PC in their living room, without it actually looking like a PC in their living room. Someone with taste has posted to Slashdot at last.
First, the Qbex isn't what you want. From that shot, it looks like a standard black NLX formfactor box. Which means it's got room for a slim CD/DVD, room for a couple HDs, room for a slim floppy, onboard everything, and usually one or two PCI slots in the back. That's it. No upgradeable AGP, and because of the formfactor, it still looks like a PC. Bleagh.
The Gateway Destination set-top unit is one of these, too.
Unfortunately, that's as close as you can come to a decent PC in a decent case, with much upgradeability at all. Rackmount cases are 19" wide, which is wider than some shelves or TVs, and usually also onboard everything, but they don't look back as set-top boxes, and 1U units can have a single PCI slot, and 2U units can have 2, maybe three?
Then there's "real" set-top boxes. Units like this offer a very non-threatening non-PC look, while still supporting a single PCI slot. Click on the "HTPC" link at the top of the page to see where Qbex probably gets their chassis from.:)
There's also a nice iDVD offering from GCT-Allwell with an integrated DVD player and PCI MPEG2 decoder... unfortunately it's not upgradeable at all, since the MPEG2 decoder takes up the only available PCI slot.
So in otherwords, you're pretty much stuck. I'd just LOVE to be proven wrong on this, but I think the only real choice you have is to have a chassis custom-built for you. Then get it FCC approved, and sell it online, and have a tidy little side business.;)
Wow. Talk about posting to Slashdot from the hip. It's like his brain wasn't at all engaged.
For starters, the Personal Jukebox does not run Linux. It uses a Motorola DSP and some microcode in flash memory.
Furthermore, as it very clearly states on Compaq's site:
"This software is a starting point for a complete Jukebox Manager. It documents the API to the PJB-100 so that Linux developers can add features such as a graphical user interface and music capture from CD."
I'm not sure it gets any clearer than that. The software is not the Linux kernel. The software is not under the GPL. The software doesn't even do anything on it's own! It's an API!
Children, please. Just because something runs under Linux does not mean it must be GPLd! And if you happen to find a statement about a product's software ambiguous, that does not mean they've violated the GPL! It means you need to learn to read better, or ask the product's manufacturer. Not Slashdot.
Could CmdrTaco please update the story posting with the facts rather than just some random hoser crying wolf... for the umpteenth time?
With the new "I-Opener 2001 Membership" charging you $299 for the I-Opener plus $21.95 a month with no commitment, you can get the unit for $320.95 plus shipping and handling.
Take the I-Opener off it's stand and build a light plastic stand for it, and you've got a nice 10" dual-scan LCD, for less than the Ceiva with a year of service.
Now, you'll apparently need to buy a new BIOS chip from a place like BadFlash before you can hack it and install Jailbait, the 16mb distro for the onboard flash disk, but you can gut Netscape off it and save yourself 8mb, write a custom image displayer, and have the unit either dial out to any one of the myriad free ISPs, or plug in a USB ethernet adapter to download images off of Grandma's DSL or cable connection.
--Vito
Details on what's already do-able and available
on
Software-Based TIVO?
·
· Score: 5
Since we're going entirely software-based, e.g. you're sitting a normal, icky PC in your stereo rack, or you're just using your PC as normal, you probably don't have a hardware MPEG encoder. The best you've probably got is a Matrox card with onboard MJPEG compression, and I don't think the Linux drivers support that.
Now, assuming you already know how capture a video stream and pipe it to an MPEG encoder (and trust that your system is fast enough to not drop too many frames; think P3/500 or better), the only thing you really need to do is add in TV listings, and integrate them into channel changing and record functionality.
Copy and pasted from my previous post, channel guides are easy. Just have a Perl script rip and reformat any of the listings from the online providers, including Excite TV, Ultimate TV, GIST TV (which also provides the Yahoo TV listings), Ask TV (in the UK), Click TV (what TiVo uses), TV Quest, TV Grid or TV Guide Online.
As for integration, a lot of this work has already been done, at least for satellite TV streams. Klaus Schmidinger produced his Video Disk Recorder which performs channel guides and VCR functionality on his Linux PC, for his satellite TV using a PCI card. All GPL'd, so feel free to port it over to plain old TV cards, too.
Think about what porting an open BSD or Linux over to a closed, proprietary console system does:
It opens the console.
All of a sudden, you've got an open, cheap, extensible platform. It's got sound, it's got video output to TV or VGA, it's got a CD-ROM drive, it's got a modem, it's got a keyboard, and it's got the possibility for further expansion through the serial port, as well as swapping out the modem for an ethernet card in the future.
You could port VNC to it under GGI or SVGALIB or even plain old X, and turn any TV into a desktop, you don't even need a VGA monitor.
Take it one step further, and now it's a cheap network computer or thin client, with a light word processing app, web browser, and solitaire game on a free ISP like NetZero or whatever.
Or maybe it's an MP3 player stereo component with an on-screen interface and cool visualization options. Hell, it'd fit great in your car.
Or let's take this as far as you can go. Why not port something really massive to it? Say, something like the Unreal engine. There are projects out there like Digitalo's Virtual Reality Notre Dame Project, where you can tour giant heritage structures like the Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral in full 3D, led around by a virtual tour guide, and teach kids things they'd never otherwise learn. Porting the engine to the Dreamcast (there's already an x86 Linux and PSX2 port) would give you a $199 learning console that plugs right into the TVs most schools already have (moreso than computers), and suddenly gives them classroom access to more power and technology than any PC initiative ever did. From light web browsing to 3D learning applications, a BSD port to the Dreamcast could make dreams of computers in the classroom real.
Disclaimer: Yeah, I'm an engine licensee, producing 3D tours using the engine with my Unrealty product. But I want to see a cheap platform for them as much as any teacher who's seen the potential for such a thing.
Remember, kids: Google is your friend. Try there before you Ask Slashdot.
First, there's ISBN.nu. It's actually a really sweet portal/price comparison site, and it only searches ISBNs through the bookstores it's affiliated with (not all ISBNs in general), but it's a neat trick.:)
Now, since they assign the ISBN numbers, they'd be in a great position to produce the Books in Print and Books Out-of-Print series of reference books, wouldn't they? And, lo and behold, they do!
Bowker's Books in Print website allows you to search all the ISBN numbers of books currently in print -- for a fee. That's right, it's not free, although there is a free trial available. Annual subscription rates range from US$1850 for single site/single user/no reviews, to US$3375 for single site/multiple user/with reviews.
Bowker also has their Books Out-of-Print site online. It's also non-free, with single-user subscriptions ranging from US$29 for one week of unlimited searching to US$699 for one year of unlimited searching.
Well, there's always the ever-trusty Linux Router Project single-floppy distribution. That's exactly what it's designed for: a single-floppy that can do NAT/IP masq/routing etc. Unfortunately, Dave Cinege, the maintainer of the official distribution recently suffered a major systems failure, so the website might not be up. Might want to try the catch-all info site, lrp.c0wz.com for mirrors and better information, as the main site is outdated, anyway.
Also, there's a spinoff distribution using 2.2.x, and named after mountains. Previously there was Materhorn, and now it's Eiger, I think. It's maintained by Matthew Grant and is located at lrp.plain.co.nz.
There's also a commercial LRP spinoff called Coyote Linux. Looks pretty easy to use, but it costs money if you want a Windows-based disk creator (the free one is Linux based).
Trevor Marshall at Byte did a series of articles on using LRP as a home router. You can find them starting here to see how to have just a modem and your 10bT NICs set up. They continue here to add in DHCPd and 100bT cards, which teaches you all about LRP modules. Not sure there are any more in the series, but you can look around Byte's site.
Coincidentally enough, I'm actually looking to do this with 2+ analog cell phones with modems attached, so I can transmit a live voice Ogg Vorbis stream in the field to a relay station at high quality.;)
How about setting up Multilink PPP? That's what it's designed for. Have two or more modems at your new office dial into your current office using the MP patch to pppd, and poof, instant channel bonding type stuff.
The other suggestion someone had (on the linux-router mailing list, actually) was to use BGP to split up your data between two or more links (multi-homing). I don't know how that works, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Incidentally, Epic Games' games, like Unreal Tournament and Unreal Tournament 2003 don't require additional fees for being used in a game house setting. All you need is a legal copy of the game for each PC it is running on:
www.epicgames.com/faq.html
A few years ago, working on Unrealty (an Unreal-engine based 3D walkthrough app), things like this came up. Adding solid modelling, so you could cut through character and other models and have an "inside" to work with (I think the suggestion was for dentistry simulation). Integrating a physics engine for basic engineering tests.
Now, the latest Unreal engine tech is extremely powerful, with great physics available via MathEngine's Karma engine. Modifications and custom code and maps is anecdotally easier than with Quake * thanks to better editing tools and the UnrealScript interpreted language (and the recent fact that subtractive geometry is no longer the dominant design tool).
I wonder, then, if an Unrealty-esque system, with better level and physics design docs, aimed at engineers and such, would garner interest? I wouldn't expect the engineers to have enough time and artistic skills both to create their own content from scratch; but they could modify physical properties of existing objects easily enough. What would have to be part of the package, both documentation- and content-wise, to make it usable? Assuming it's not much more than the stock game engine, made suitable for education use by the removal of the "game" portions.
Try a Google search for virtual heritage. This is the term commonly used for digitally preserving historical sites, usually in some sort of interactive or 3D form.
The Virtual Heritage Network was founded through some of the work done at and people of VSMM98 and VSMM99, at the latter of which I presented my paper on Unrealty, which used the Unreal engine for business visualization. This is relevant, because from the Florida Everglades to ancient Japanese temples, the Unreal engine continues to find applications like these, through inventive and forward-looking historians and researchers wanting the best combination of visually enticing and widely accessible heritage presentations.
Wow. This post is one of the saddest, most disheartening things I've ever read. And the worst part is that you're pinning your own disillusionment and bitterness over your own life choices onto someone else, whose situation is entirely different. Don't deny someone the ability to, yes, indeed, change their life for the better, just because you took the road most travelled.
Most young people attend college expecting one of two things:
Snap judgements say you wanted the first, and ended up with the second.
When I graduated high school, I didn't want to go to college. So what that it was what you were supposed to do? So what that most jobs require that piece of paper? I don't want a job anyway. And yes, I got tons of criticism from everyone I knew for my choice. Screw them, I said!
It came down to the fact that I didn't have the foggiest clue what I wanted to do with myself. Do the same job in the same field for 40 years? Or even different jobs in the same field? Bor-ing. And what's that? You can't just take any arbitrary classes at college? You have to pick a "major," and that ties you into a certain giant batch of required courses, most of which are dull and perfunctory? No, thanks! No time for drama courses for CS majors? No ability to take advanced EE courses without actually being an EE major? Lame! I think I'll go the library intsead, thank you. I wanted to go to university to LEARN THINGS. Not to "prepare myself for the outside world." What bullshit. College is as close to the outside world as McDonalds chicken nuggets are to actual chickens.
So after high school, I said, "To hell with school," and got myself a job as a consultant for a well-connected local firm, doing work for IBM and Lotus, as well as large local companies creating Notes/Domino "solutions." It helped that I enjoyed 60-80 hour work weeks, and was a stereotypical whiz kid, as I'm sure most of Slashdot was/is.
A couple years in, I quit and started my own business, entirely self-funded (yay saving money), moved into a large, expensive apartment, and proceeded to drive the company into the ground in about two years. Notes to self: do not take on projects larger than you can handle, and always have good communication between your employees and your clients.
After another ~two years, I'm now completely debt-free (I didn't declare bankruptcy, and helped out my ex-employees as much as was possible), and attending classes full-time at the University of Texas at Austin. I'm a liberal arts student with no declared major, looking for a classic liberal arts education, and taking sixteen hours of very different courses. I'm working on a documentary, auditioning for theatre productions, taking dance classes, and working 20+ hours a week part-time doing consulting. And I hang out with friends, go out on dates, attend parties, bar-hop, etc. And getting 6-8 hours of sleep a night. Nothing is suffering thanks to careful time management and a serious desire to actually be able to do all of these things at the expense of none. It's a lot of work to make it all fit, and spur-of-the-moment plans often require much mental jockeying, but I do it, and I'm damn happy about it.
Note: Replies intent on making jokes with punchlines similar to "Liberal arts students ask, 'Would you like fries with that?'" should Google for the definition of a classic liberal arts education beforehand.
So, yes, I'm a college student. I think attending school now was the best decision I've made, because now I want to be here, and I know what I want to study (even if it is just "anything and everything"), and I'm savvy enough to be able to make everything fit. I'm not doing it to please my parents, or because it's what you're "supposed" to do, but because I want to learn new things, broaden my horizons, give myself a strong cultural and historical base upon which to better understand the world around me. I want to learn new languages and religions in an environment that will help me foster that desire, surrounded by people who want to do the same. I want to study art and architecture so I can go to a museum and be able to know why other people think painting X is so important, even if I think it still looks like crap. I want to learn to write better than using huge run-on sentences, so people will mod me up just because I'm grammatically correct. I want to do all of these things because I think they'll make me a better person, better able to appreciate and understand the world, people and events around me.
A lot of my friends graduated college over the past few years. All of them took the "career" path, but only a single one is happy with it. The rest all have the same vague, lost, unsure, slightly disillusioned look in their eyes that they had when they graduated high school, and that saddens me. People here tell me it's amazing how much I enjoy all of this, even though I have no idea what I want to do. I tell them, that's the best part.
The poster wants to go back to school. Perhaps it's for the same reasons that I have. Perhaps it's because he feels like less of a man without that piece of paper. The point is that when you're in our shoes, it's not a decision you come to lightly. Don't tear someone down because you weren't able to say "No, thanks" after high school. Just like it's never too late to save some money and start your company if you really want to, it's never too late to go back to school and make it work.
To the poster, I say, go back, and take something else. Don't take courses directly related to what your company does, because you already know most of it through practical application. Dollars to donuts says this is why you're getting bored. Instead, take things that will broaden your horizons and give you new insights into your personal universe. Don't take self-paced or online courses; get into the classroom, sit at the front, and interact with the professor and other students. Learn something new.
Barring a genetic or hormonal issue, when you eat, you're taking in calories. Your body burns off some doing its normal metabolic processes, some goes out when you piss and crap, and the rest takes up residence in your fat ass.
The trick is, then, to only consume what you need. Or, less than you need, and your body will eventually relent and burn off some of that fat, and you'll lose weight.
Ladies and gentlemen, time to run up John Walker's(1) bandwidth bill some more, get his name in the papers again, and introduce some more people to The Hacker's Diet.
Available in both North American and European mirrors, The Hacker's Diet takes a practical, pragmatic, engineer's approach to losing weight, and more importantly, maintaining that new weight, both stably and comfortably.
In fact, it even has a section on basic excercise to get you somewhat fit. Not to get you starring in a Bally's Total Fitness commercial. Just able to run up a flight of stairs without passing out. Fit, as in, healthy, instead of fat, as in unhealthy. Gosh, what a concept.
Now we'll do the webblog plug, too. Mark Pilgrim(2) wrote a great writeup of The Hacker's Diet twice, last August and an extended, much more blunt version last October. Here's the October version. Go read it.
Then get off your ass, sit outside, and read the book. Download the PalmOS apps to your Visor, your Clio, or your Zaurus with POSE. And do something about that Mr. Fatty-Fat-Fat nickname.
(1) John Walker, founder of AutoDesk. (2) Mark Pilgrim, that guy who got fired because of his weblog, and who wrote Dive into Python. (3) And why does Slashcode strip out superscript and underscores? Weak.
Watch this post get modded up, and not my qualified response to the From Coder to Game Designer question. Humbug!
Anyway, as brought up in the last Ask Slashdot remotely similar to this one (Archiving DVD's with Linux), dvd::rip, which is a Perl+GTK front-end to transcode, has a fairly insecure cluster mode, whereby it will split up the video transcoding task among however many machines you can coerce into doing it, and rip and mux the audio with the video on the host machine.
Sounds like just what the doctor ordered. Now someone go mod up that other answer of mine. Please?
I'm sure you can poke around and find out where I'm coming from, but where you're lucky enough to have actual support for the technologies you use in your games, the companies doing the support have this giant, perpetually unfulfilled need for capable, interested coders doing documentation and tools.
I say perpetually unfulfilled because most people who come into these positions aspire to be game programmers, and eventually game designers, and so they come in to learn the ropes, punch out a few really high-quality, in-depth docs to get themselves noticed, and then get poached by game companies to do in-house tech. And sure, they contribute back to the support team for a little while, but after they feel they've repaid their debt, they're gone. They start out doing in-house tools and cleanup/robustness stuff, and maybe they contribute a neat gameplay feature or effect here and there, and by the time the next project comes around, they're doing much more programming because they end up knowing the tech better than anyone else. It's not far from lead programmer to lead designer in some circles.
But as other people have posted, game programming is probably not where you want to be. Gaming is the Hollywood of this industry, which means a few people are rich and famous, and (in most places) everyone else gets paid 1/4 to 1/3 of the normal salary everywhere else, and is fully expected to work 16 and 18 hour days until crunch time, when you should start sleeping at the office. You're perpetually indebted to your publisher, you have nothing but unrealistic deadlines and overwhelming pressure to perform, and someone coming from a cushy IT jockey job would probably realize they don't have to put up with that kind of shit.
And they don't.
If you want to get into the game industry because you want your work to be fun, because you're winding down your wage slave responsibilities, but don't want to stop working, because you want to do cool shit again, get into support and tools.
It's the best of both worlds. Every game company using the tech you're supporting will see your work, read your documentation like the Bible, and ask you questions as if you were their priest. Every new tool and feature you make gets praised to the heavens. You get to write sample code -- mini game demos -- to show off new features and functionality, providing you with 100% of the fun with 0% of the pressure or workload. There's always something new to work on, and you never have to dote on the old stuff (except to keep it updated with new versions of the technology).
A lot of you might be saying that you still have to write documentation, and documentation sucks. Well, I agree. That's the drawback, but that's also what you're getting paid for. You get to screw around with expensive technology, work on video games all day, and all you have to do is write down how you did it when you're done. That's it. Small price in my book.
So if that sounds interesting to you, ask around, see what companies support their tech, and see what kind of turnover they have. If you've got a solid C/C++ background, have done Visual Studio or CodeWarrior plugins, scripted Max or Maya, worked with COM or debugged drivers under Linux, and you have absolutely no aspirations to be the next Warren Spector or Shigeru Miyamoto, but just want to do fun code and cool shit without the pressure of actually publishing a game, try support and tools.
I know I've posted about this before, but quite possibly your ideal laptop would be the Transmeta Crusoe-based NEC Versa DayLite. They're wonderful machines, with a transflective display, backlight you can switch on and off, and something ridiculous like eight hours of battery life if you're using it outside.
I have it's more normal brother, the NEC Ultralite, which has a normal TFT LCD, and it gets five full hours under hard usage, with the screen brightness up all the way, and the hard drive never spinning down, constantly writing, and the 802.11b card going and online. Under normal usage it does even better.
And of course, I'm dumping it once I can find a DayLite that won't cost me US$2500. :)
As a followup, this definitely "brightens" the already vibrant homebrew development scene.
The Visoly flash linker and carts are great, and available from (your friends and mine) Lik-Sang, GameGizmo and Easy Buy 2000 (all no-referral URLs).
The multi-boot cables (for downloading small apps to your GBA without needing to flash a cart) are cool, too, and have been exploited to turn your GBA into a handheld terminal. Check out the PDF on that last link; much nicer than reading the page, with pictures. Wish there was someplace within the continental US to order a couple non-ugly ones from, though. Those MBV2s are just too unweildly to use in sexy handheld terminal demonstrations.
Or at least, I believe it is. It's been mentioned here before.
The Xybernaut Poma is their OEM version of the direct-from-Hitachi model. Fifteen hundred bucks US gets you delivery before the end of Q1 2002.
It runs Windows CE, has no audio inputs, and I don't think anyone on the wearables mailing list has actually gotten one yet to see what development will be like, but it's very interesting, at least.
The US versions of the two Crusoe portables I was looking at in my previous Slashdot post about this, the Casio Cassiopiea Fiva MPC-205E and 206E, and the NEC Versa DayLite, are both available online, direct from Casio and the NEC from CDW or PC Connection.
The Transmeta ultralight noteboooks page also has "How to Buy" links for all the listed US-market notebooks.
Geez, I'm almost miffed that I had to plug my own project myself.
Yes, things like this have been done before, and even featured on Slashdot. That article is about NASA doing a virtual tour of the International Space Station using Unrealty, which is a stripped-down version of the same Unreal engine used in Unreal Tournament, targeted at architects and real estate developers. Even won an award for a research paper I did on the concept.
While it never really caught on, perhaps the next go at, using the next-generation Unreal technologies, will. Structure Studios is one such competitor, using next-generation engines to produce even more realistic representations. And you can check out some of the work of a licensed Unrealty locale developer at 3dx3.
I'm currently planning on replacing my six pound Gateway Solo 9300 laptop (P3/800, 160mb, 20gb, 15.1") with one of these two Transmeta Crusoe-based laptops. Mostly because they're uber-light, and with all-day staying power. I'll take offers on the laptop, btw. :)
.83~1.16" (?), and weighs 3.27lbs. Battery life is reportedly around half that if the backlight is turned on the whole time.
The first is the Casio MPC-206E Cassiopeia FIVA. It runs the Crusoe TM5600 at 600MHz, which means it's probably comparable to a 400MHz P2/P3. 8.4" TFT LCD, 800x600. Max 192mb RAM, comes with a 20gb HD. Cool toys include onboard 56k softmodem, 10/100 ethernet, 1 Type II PCMCIA slot, sound, VGA out, video out, FireWire, CompactFlash, USB, and an included dual-boot Linux partition. However it's also A5 sized (8.7" x 7.7" x 0.83"), and some people have found it too small to type well on. Nine hours of battery life with the extended life (heavier) battery, and it only weighs 2.18 pounds without.
The other option is the NEC LaVie MX or MX2. Another Crusoe laptop, this one boasts a larger 10.4" 1024x768 reflective LCD (so it's daylight readable) with a backlight you can turn on indoors, and is larger overall. 10/100 is with a dongle, two USB, no FireWire, VGA out is with a dongle, and no video out. Battery life is 8-11 hours standard (no additional batteries to switch in), it's 10.4" x 8.3" x
Dynamism has a neat comparison engine, linked to there showing the LaVie MX2 and the Fiva.
Also, NEC has the Versa DayLite, which is the US model of the LaVie MX, so you don't necessarily have to find an importer like Dynamism for it.
One way to go might be an inexpensive, but not underpowered PC, with a PCI Firewir-- er, IEEE-1394 card.
Buy a bunch of cheap, identical IDE HDs, and put them in IEEE-1394 cases (~$150/ea.). Compile yourself some bleeding-edge Linux-1394 support, plug in your HDs, run XFS as the filesystem, and use software RAID. Because you said this is just for storage and media access, you probably don't need the currently limited FireWire hot-plug support and possibly still currently limited RAID hot-swap support.
For more on software RAID, IBM has a nice two-part article (1, 2) on it.
That's funny. Last I checked, Rob Malda disliked the original Slashdot PQA because it didn't show ads. Does this one? Incidentally, a lot of other people liked it, for lots of other reasons (first third-party PQA, demonstrated at Palm's NYC rollout of the VII, it was pretty to look at, etc.) and I got lots of emails when I retired it a few months ago.
You know, retired it because Slashdot has their own official Slashdot PQA.
I'm confused.
--Vito
Now, I'm no expert, but a quick Google search turned up the following things, which may or may not be of any use as prior art.
'It was here a minute ago!' - Archiving on the Net - Part 1 of 2: "The Internet Archive [http://www.archive.org/] ... also uses an 'MD5 checksum' to compare new pages with old ones." The article is copyright 1997, and the Archive has been crawling since 1996.
IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit: this manual, also copyrighted 1997, is documentation for using IBM's Java-based toolkit for writing automated agents, say, page-comparing and caching agents. Conveniently enough, they provide the following function: CheckMonitoredPagesForChanges, which states, "This effector will check all the web pages on the monitored-pages list for changes in the page... This function uses a checksum method against the content of the HTTP request to 'compare' the page content. Any difference in the checksums, or any change in the Last-Modified date in the HTTP header (if it exists), will cause a 'change' to be detected."
WebGUIDE: Querying and Navigating Changes in Web Repositories: This is an AT"T research paper. "The AIDE version repository is a centralized service that archives versions of pages... AIDE maintains a relational database containing meta-data about each page, each user, and the relationships between them. For each URL, it stores the following (among other information): Last modification date: This is used to find pages that have been modified since a user saw them... Checksum: This is used in case the last modification date is unavailable." This document is copyright 1993, 1994.
Another interesting note, is that Puma started out making synching software. They didn't acquire NetMind, what I'd gather would be the impetus for this patent, until 2000, over six years after that last AT"T URL, and PumaTech was founded.
--Vito
In fact, why are any SSD devices so expensive?
Especially this one, that uses normal SDRAM. What in that card costs so much? It's certainly not the RAM. Can the chipset that manages the writing to and from the RAM really cost so much? Shouldn't it be possible to hack something like this together for a couple hundred bucks, much like people do with MP3 players now?
Finally, someone who wants to put a PC in their living room, without it actually looking like a PC in their living room. Someone with taste has posted to Slashdot at last.
:)
;)
First, the Qbex isn't what you want. From that shot, it looks like a standard black NLX formfactor box. Which means it's got room for a slim CD/DVD, room for a couple HDs, room for a slim floppy, onboard everything, and usually one or two PCI slots in the back. That's it. No upgradeable AGP, and because of the formfactor, it still looks like a PC. Bleagh.
The Gateway Destination set-top unit is one of these, too.
Unfortunately, that's as close as you can come to a decent PC in a decent case, with much upgradeability at all. Rackmount cases are 19" wide, which is wider than some shelves or TVs, and usually also onboard everything, but they don't look back as set-top boxes, and 1U units can have a single PCI slot, and 2U units can have 2, maybe three?
Then there's "real" set-top boxes. Units like this offer a very non-threatening non-PC look, while still supporting a single PCI slot. Click on the "HTPC" link at the top of the page to see where Qbex probably gets their chassis from.
There's also a nice iDVD offering from GCT-Allwell with an integrated DVD player and PCI MPEG2 decoder... unfortunately it's not upgradeable at all, since the MPEG2 decoder takes up the only available PCI slot.
So in otherwords, you're pretty much stuck. I'd just LOVE to be proven wrong on this, but I think the only real choice you have is to have a chassis custom-built for you. Then get it FCC approved, and sell it online, and have a tidy little side business.
--Vito
For starters, the Personal Jukebox does not run Linux. It uses a Motorola DSP and some microcode in flash memory.
Furthermore, as it very clearly states on Compaq's site: I'm not sure it gets any clearer than that. The software is not the Linux kernel. The software is not under the GPL. The software doesn't even do anything on it's own! It's an API!
Children, please. Just because something runs under Linux does not mean it must be GPLd! And if you happen to find a statement about a product's software ambiguous, that does not mean they've violated the GPL! It means you need to learn to read better, or ask the product's manufacturer. Not Slashdot.
Could CmdrTaco please update the story posting with the facts rather than just some random hoser crying wolf... for the umpteenth time?
--Vito
With the new "I-Opener 2001 Membership" charging you $299 for the I-Opener plus $21.95 a month with no commitment, you can get the unit for $320.95 plus shipping and handling.
Take the I-Opener off it's stand and build a light plastic stand for it, and you've got a nice 10" dual-scan LCD, for less than the Ceiva with a year of service.
Now, you'll apparently need to buy a new BIOS chip from a place like BadFlash before you can hack it and install Jailbait, the 16mb distro for the onboard flash disk, but you can gut Netscape off it and save yourself 8mb, write a custom image displayer, and have the unit either dial out to any one of the myriad free ISPs, or plug in a USB ethernet adapter to download images off of Grandma's DSL or cable connection.
--Vito
This question has been asked no fewer than two times before, and one time, I even answered in +3 detail on exactly what would be needed to make a PC-based TiVo.
But that's okay, let's rehash.
Since we're going entirely software-based, e.g. you're sitting a normal, icky PC in your stereo rack, or you're just using your PC as normal, you probably don't have a hardware MPEG encoder. The best you've probably got is a Matrox card with onboard MJPEG compression, and I don't think the Linux drivers support that.
Now, assuming you already know how capture a video stream and pipe it to an MPEG encoder (and trust that your system is fast enough to not drop too many frames; think P3/500 or better), the only thing you really need to do is add in TV listings, and integrate them into channel changing and record functionality.
Copy and pasted from my previous post, channel guides are easy. Just have a Perl script rip and reformat any of the listings from the online providers, including Excite TV, Ultimate TV, GIST TV (which also provides the Yahoo TV listings), Ask TV (in the UK), Click TV (what TiVo uses), TV Quest, TV Grid or TV Guide Online.
As for integration, a lot of this work has already been done, at least for satellite TV streams. Klaus Schmidinger produced his Video Disk Recorder which performs channel guides and VCR functionality on his Linux PC, for his satellite TV using a PCI card. All GPL'd, so feel free to port it over to plain old TV cards, too.
--Vito
Think about what porting an open BSD or Linux over to a closed, proprietary console system does:
It opens the console.
All of a sudden, you've got an open, cheap, extensible platform. It's got sound, it's got video output to TV or VGA, it's got a CD-ROM drive, it's got a modem, it's got a keyboard, and it's got the possibility for further expansion through the serial port, as well as swapping out the modem for an ethernet card in the future.
You could port VNC to it under GGI or SVGALIB or even plain old X, and turn any TV into a desktop, you don't even need a VGA monitor.
Take it one step further, and now it's a cheap network computer or thin client, with a light word processing app, web browser, and solitaire game on a free ISP like NetZero or whatever.
Or maybe it's an MP3 player stereo component with an on-screen interface and cool visualization options. Hell, it'd fit great in your car.
Or let's take this as far as you can go. Why not port something really massive to it? Say, something like the Unreal engine. There are projects out there like Digitalo's Virtual Reality Notre Dame Project, where you can tour giant heritage structures like the Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral in full 3D, led around by a virtual tour guide, and teach kids things they'd never otherwise learn. Porting the engine to the Dreamcast (there's already an x86 Linux and PSX2 port) would give you a $199 learning console that plugs right into the TVs most schools already have (moreso than computers), and suddenly gives them classroom access to more power and technology than any PC initiative ever did. From light web browsing to 3D learning applications, a BSD port to the Dreamcast could make dreams of computers in the classroom real.
Disclaimer: Yeah, I'm an engine licensee, producing 3D tours using the engine with my Unrealty product. But I want to see a cheap platform for them as much as any teacher who's seen the potential for such a thing.
--Vito
Remember, kids: Google is your friend. Try there before you Ask Slashdot.
First, there's ISBN.nu. It's actually a really sweet portal/price comparison site, and it only searches ISBNs through the bookstores it's affiliated with (not all ISBNs in general), but it's a neat trick.
Now, following the "About ISBN" link takes you to R. R. Bowker, which is the agency that assigns ISBN numbers in the US (not in other countries! Other agencies do that!).
Now, since they assign the ISBN numbers, they'd be in a great position to produce the Books in Print and Books Out-of-Print series of reference books, wouldn't they? And, lo and behold, they do!
Bowker's Books in Print website allows you to search all the ISBN numbers of books currently in print -- for a fee. That's right, it's not free, although there is a free trial available. Annual subscription rates range from US$1850 for single site/single user/no reviews, to US$3375 for single site/multiple user/with reviews.
Bowker also has their Books Out-of-Print site online. It's also non-free, with single-user subscriptions ranging from US$29 for one week of unlimited searching to US$699 for one year of unlimited searching.
--Vito
Well, there's always the ever-trusty Linux Router Project single-floppy distribution. That's exactly what it's designed for: a single-floppy that can do NAT/IP masq/routing etc. Unfortunately, Dave Cinege, the maintainer of the official distribution recently suffered a major systems failure, so the website might not be up. Might want to try the catch-all info site, lrp.c0wz.com for mirrors and better information, as the main site is outdated, anyway.
Also, there's a spinoff distribution using 2.2.x, and named after mountains. Previously there was Materhorn, and now it's Eiger, I think. It's maintained by Matthew Grant and is located at lrp.plain.co.nz.
There's also a commercial LRP spinoff called Coyote Linux. Looks pretty easy to use, but it costs money if you want a Windows-based disk creator (the free one is Linux based).
Trevor Marshall at Byte did a series of articles on using LRP as a home router. You can find them starting here to see how to have just a modem and your 10bT NICs set up. They continue here to add in DHCPd and 100bT cards, which teaches you all about LRP modules. Not sure there are any more in the series, but you can look around Byte's site.
--VitoCoincidentally enough, I'm actually looking to do this with 2+ analog cell phones with modems attached, so I can transmit a live voice Ogg Vorbis stream in the field to a relay station at high quality. ;)
How about setting up Multilink PPP? That's what it's designed for. Have two or more modems at your new office dial into your current office using the MP patch to pppd, and poof, instant channel bonding type stuff.
The other suggestion someone had (on the linux-router mailing list, actually) was to use BGP to split up your data between two or more links (multi-homing). I don't know how that works, though.
--Vito