Check out the list of Newberry Honor and Newberry Award books. Even today I will happily sit down with one of these--shorter, simpler prose combined with incredibly powerful stories.
Since you asked for sci-fi in particular, here are a few Newberry suggestions that may suit:
The Giver by Lois Lowry (Houghton) A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle (Farrar The High King by Lloyd Alexander (Holt)
Specifically, the Lifebook P-1120 or similar. These run a transmeta processor (and so won't be the fastest kids on the block), but they come with wireless and are easily powerful enough to browse the web, run Doom, etc. I used one of these as my main computer for a couple years.
Its certainly true that OLPC could provide a huge incentive to improve education in some of the world's poorest and least economically stable countries. I'll use West Africa as an example. Friends of mine in the Peace Corps over there tell me that the average male is lucky to get through middle school, whereas females are married around age 15, with kids soon after.
However, OLPC, while laudable, is a case of skewed priorities. Ask someone who has done relief work over there and they'll tell you that in order for things to change, folks in W. Africa need to get healthier first, educated second. In Mali, the average life expectancy is in the mid-40s! There is a reason why the Gates Foundation is spending so much money on medical research for diseases like malaria. To make things worse, international donations are for the most part prodigiously misspent--as an example, one town with no refugees was mystified to suddenly receive a shipment of tents from the UN, and promptly turned a good portion of them into a giant bar.
Dvorak is a bombast and a demagogue, but he has a point. The motivation behind OLPC is great, but throwing money at a problem is not necessarily going to solve it. Instead of one laptop per child, how about one VACCINATION per child? That kind of investment would yield measurable, tangible results almost immediately.
This is a Berkeley research lab funded by various sources. There are plenty of labs with similar funding. My academic research lab is funded by IBM, Sun, and Intel. Whoopee! Absolutely does not mean there is any kind of alliance.
Absolutely right. I've been to and presented at several of the RAD retreats. This is just the successor to the ROC (Recovery-Oriented Computing) intiative, which is now being retired.
The Berkeley systems groups have some great industry support. This does not mean 'selling out'--this means a good source of funding for new research, and more importantly, industry feedback. Along with grad students/faculty from Berkeley and Stanford, the participants at these retreats always include some great folks from a wide variety of companies who, aside from being interested in neat new ideas, help keep things grounded from a practical point of view.
This announcement is likely the result of some good discussions recently (including representatives from the companies named by the submitter) on the state of Computer Science research funding--which, I gotta say, is pretty sad right now. Hopefully, more corporations can help fill the gap in the way that these three are.
Students: work an internship!
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NYT on EA Games
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Before I toss my two pennies in, let me say that I too once wanted nothing more than to make video games. So, to see what it was like in the industry, I took an internship with everyone's favorite whipping boy these days, EA.
With that in mind, let me say that this whole "EA is using young kids" schtick is one of the three major reasons why I think all computer science students should get out and work an internship or two for a company they might be interested in before graduating.
The experience of having been in the trenches will make you more a much more desirable hire after graduation.
You will know more about what you want out of your eventual job in industry, which means. ..
You will have a far better idea exactly what's important to you, what questions to ask, and what to look for when interviewing for the job that will claim the majority of your waking hours for the next few years.
Why am I saying this, and how does it apply to EA? I have no regrets about working there: the people there were by and large excellent and I learned a lot. However, I also saw EXACTLY what was expected of their new engineers, witnessed the turnover and the new college hires wandering around like zombies with keyboard marks on their faces, and returned to school a much wiser person for my experience. I assure you that I now take an entirely different spin on the "do you have any questions for us?" ending to your standard technical interview.
So, in sum: empower your resume, your outlook on what your degree is preparing you for, and yourself by getting some experience before rushing into a job based on its outer sex appeal. Trust me when I say you will be thankful for it.
I too have seen Randy Pausch lecture and met with him when deciding on which phd program to attend. In his defense:
He is an excellent speaker; I can see why he gets tapped to give recruitment talks.
The students (mostly undergrad) I chatted with around his lab liked him a lot and his classes on virtual worlds, etc seem to be popular; while I was there the interactions I saw with students were pretty positive.
He runs a program geared entirely towards (and I would bet at least partially funded by) the high-tech entertainment industry, of which EA is a huge part. Obviously he needs to maintain good relations with them, especially in light of recent court cases, etc.
Do I think this is a valuable document? Hell no. Its basically free and highly valuable advertising for EA on how to make more cogs for their machine. It might also be an attempt to address the disturbing questions being asked by potential hires in light of all this newfound bad publicity.
I happen to have interned at EA as an dev a few years ago and I know exactly what goes on there. The reasons for increasing college hires are obvious and have been mentioned already: why hire older folk with wives and lives when you can get smart, young, exploitable, eager-beaver new grads who will work until their eyeballs bleed for a spot on the credits? The fact that Randy and profs like him are trying to tailor academic programs towards what EA wants is icing on the cake and (to me) a disturbing trend. Many departments get donations from industrial affiliates; I would bet that EA's donatations to his program are handsome.
Where did they get their facts? Looking at my two alma maters (Berkeley and the University of Washington), their charts have a number of glaring inaccuracies.
As an example, UW does offer discount computers at their student computer store. Several courses are streamed online. There is a campus news server where several classes have groups--and often courses use an even easier online news-like service through the Catalyst (www.catalyst.washington.edu) services. There are labs stuffed with multimedia machines for students to edit video on (and these are NICE systems too), and free courses are offered throughout the quarter on a variety of cool technology topics for anyone who wants to take them (http://depts.washington.edu/sacg/).
So hey Forbes, instead of sending out an idiot with a clipboard to these schools who gets out his car, turns a 360, checks some things off, and heads out to the next campus, how about doing a little bit of research?
From a former owner of a 5mx. . .
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Palmtop Nirvana?
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· Score: 1
. ..I kinda wonder what exactly the author's needs were. The 5mx was slow, had so-so battery life, and is BIG. It has little memory and a screen that (at least on the unit I owned) has contrast issues. Whats not to like?
To be fair, the sliding keyboard IS a nifty trick, even if it is utterly unusable except for hunt-and-peck. But I got it, tried it for notetaking, and ended up selling the sucker a month later. Next, please.
My ideal palmtop gadget? I want a cell phone thats very small/thin/light with decent speech-to-text, a great color screen, *maybe* a videophone, and a battery life that outlasts my own. But, in the near term, I'll settle for the great screen, small form factor, and extendible storage in one nice package; I'd love to watch mpeg'd simpsons episodes while riding the train to work. I'd rather not pay for a smartphone when I don't care to use outlook, etc. The new Sony 700i seems close, but it looks pretty big. How much longer do I have to wait?
. . . Ignore this guy and check out Fujitsu's Lifebook P Series.. Very small form factor, but included CD burner/DVD player. Also, I would bet its a lot zippier than this Sharp.
I first owned one of the P Series right after they came out and were equipped with transmetas. The performance was a shade up on terrible, and the battery life merely ok. Since then, they've shifted to Intel chips. My brother bought one recently, and the machine is easily capable of running multiple adobe applications, and he is able to get design work done anywhere with his pressure-sensitive drawing pad attached.
This new machine is smaller, yes, but are the sacrifices in functionality worth shedding the extra pound?
The G5 is a nice processor and apple's dualie a great machine, but these "tests" are not exactly conclusive by any means. They're freakishly amateurish.
Its nice that the machine is more reponsive (given the author's configuration) than his older machines (also given the author's configuration), but there are faaaaaaaar too many variables left unaccounted for these numbers to be good for anything except a group hug.
Having just said that, there really needs to be a universal cross-architecture testing benchmark for user-oriented statistics! Spec doesn't quite cut it, since you can cheat and your average user has no idea what the score means anyways. Lmbench is nice, but I think linux/unix/solaris-only, and for your average joe the OS he/she is going to be using with the machine should be part of the test.
I had thought this form factor had died out? It is DAMN hard to type on those little keyboards!! If you want more input functionality than a handheld, get a subnotebook like the Sony Picturebook or Fujitsu's Lifebook P-series. If you want more computing power in a handheld, get a tablet pc.
I had a Psion Series 5 for a while, which also feature a keyboard plus pen input. Despite how dated it is, I still consider it a great little machine--responsive, neat software, worked well with windows, etc. But that keyboard made my hands scream. Eventually, that became the key factor why I gave up using the thing.
I guess one caveat is that I haven't tried the new thumb-boards that are on the zaurus and the new palms, but at least they don't even pretend to be for real typing--and I can see how they'd be useful for passwords, etc.
Honestly, I'd love to see anyone try and ssh anywhere with just ink for input!
Having built Tablet PC apps, I can say that there are a number of reasons why the platform just ain't there yet, and a good number of these are because its really *really* hard to design an operating system that runs in an intuitive manner with nothing but ink input. As things stand now, you can't even log into XP TE with ink. ..you have to peck out a username and password. Same with saving documents and creating folders. I should note that updates to the platform are coming soon to address problems like these.
Anyways, its great to see alternatives for the tablet, but unless some serious dev effort is put into making Linux work with an entirely different input profile, I can't see it as real useful here.
Hey, not to troll, but has anyone actually *used* a transmeta-based computer? To summarize:
They suck. Hard.
I love the design goals of the crusoe, and the idea/engineering behind it is great. But after using a transmeta crusoe based laptop as my primary computer for around a year, I have come to the conclusion that they are just not in the same class as AMD and Intel offerings. Response is extremely sluggish, power efficiency (admittedly more of a function of the unit then the processor alone) isn't that great, and the overall computing experience is extremely frustrating at times--even after the cache warms up.
Again, not to knock transmeta, but I think these chips will thrive in the handheld/smart display/specialized computing arena. I don't think they belong in regular user pcs, including tablet pcs. The lag is just too great.
So you know where I'm coming from, this post was typed on a Fujitsu P2040, which has a transmeta crusoe 866mhz cpu, 256 megs ram, 30gig hdd, cd burner/dvd drive, etc. Average main battery life is around 2 hours, while the extended battery gives around 4. If you're thinking about buying a transmeta unit, feel free to drop me a line with any questions.
The plan is to set up a numerical system that categorizes and groups system levels, and when this goes into effect in 2005 or so, a level-1 system might represent the current or year-old value-priced PC configurations, while level 2 and level 3 group systems that define the mainstream and high-end performance of the time.
This strikes me as bad solution to an already sticky problem. Whats to stop a studio from saying a game that runs at 10fps on a system considered a "1" from slapping a "1" rating on it in order to maximize their possible audience? Its all about sales, right? In addition, I wonder if in 2005 the hardware change-rate will be any different, limitations of silicon or no.
Somewhat more straightforward features include adding sophisticated matchmaking into Microsoft Messenger . ..[Microsoft is] also looking into making it possible to run Windows games directly from the CD without installation. . ..Microsoft is working on a standard PC controller, which would allow a more seamless conversion of cross-platform titles and generally simplify the use of PC gamepads.
Great, I've got a computer with a standard Microsoft controller, great graphics, that plays my DVDs, music, etc, and has matchmaking for me at no extra cost outside of bandwidth. Tell me again why I'd want an X-box?
Sure, there are other reasons for owning one, but it does seem that Microsoft, in working to console-ize the PC, might be somewhat shooting themselves in the foot. . . ? I'm sure they've thought of/discussed this, but it still strikes me as counter productive when they remain dedicated to the console industry.
Great post. I once thought of working in this industry, but an internship with a large game company cured that quickly. Some thoughts based on my experience:
1) Avoid Technical Risk -- don't develop new game engines. Use an existing engine and plug new content into it.
The use of 'middleware' is an increasing trend. Even larger companies that don't use middleware will do an engine rewrite for each new console and then spend the rest of the time recycling. Yeah, maybe this is a great idea from the business side of things, but usually doesn't lead to terribly innovative games. Whats interesting is how the middleware industry is growing based on this fact. I have no stats to back this up, but even with notable exceptions it seems that its rare that a game house develops their own engine anymore.
2) Avoid Financial Risk -- sequels do better than new titles, so invest in sequels.
This is true, but even more so its liscences that are becoming the investment of choice. Games based on movies/TV shows/etc can be outsourced to a starving studio on a ridiculous deadline, stuffed into a middleware engine, and released as quickly as possible. Some aren't too bad, but the majority make a quick buck then die fast, glutting the market with crap.
4) Spend as much on promotion as development. The key is to sell a lot of copies at full price really soon after release, because if you don't, people will figure out how unoriginal your game really is and you'll be selling at a tiny margin.
Absolutely true. Example: EA spends serious money on adverts on ESPN, etc. Aside from the usual print ads, commercials with atheletes, etc, they also paid ABC to have Monday Night Football use Madden 2003 for instant replays. The amount of money spent in marketing was staggering, and for this reason it blew its competitor--NFL 2K3--out of the water sales-wise, even tho 2K3 was in many ways a more solid product.
It seems like gameplay innovation in the industry is such a huge gamble that its just not worth it to most studios. There was an article in PCGamer a while back about how Dungeon Seige got funding originally. The programmers were getting paid off the founders credit cards for a while until Microsoft picked the project up. God, the faith it would take to pull a gamble like that off. ..
. ..on an intel machine, nothing beats intel's Math Kernel Libraries. You can get a free trial version off the intel website (link here). The syntax can be somewhat cryptic, but the 1000+ page manual is very nice and they are BLAZING fast for matrix and vector operations.
However, for quick alogorithm prototyping, matlab is the tool of choice around these parts.:) I've also done some of that in python.
HP may be one of the first, but many of the big electronic brands are developing home av components around wireless networking. I'm surprised its taking them this long to make good on the possibilities of this!
Actually, I just recieved some spam-like email this morning inviting me to sign up to betatest philips new 'Streamium' wireless network boombox. The betatest signups are open for a bit longer and can be reached here if you'd also like to sign up. The whole idea of wireless networked multimedia appliances sounds interesting, and I wouldn't mind being able to try one out. (No, I don't work for these guys, yadda yadda. ..just commenting.:)
Its great that these rumors of the PS3 are leaking out to get people excited, but we certainly won't be seeing the unit for a good while yet.
Console development is damn expensive (and getting worse each time around), and there is a *lot* of life left in the PS2. Hell, they're still selling PSOnes at a good clip!
I would expect Sony to milk the PS2 for all its worth before updating the hardware (and forcing updates from those developing for it, always a hassle). The only thing that would make them move more quickly is to one-up an opponent. And even then, they may wait; its the games that make money, and there are some pretty damn good games for the PS2.
This article reminds me of my parents' first experience with GPS in a rental car a few weeks ago. For some reason, they got some kind of bonus on their rental, and the car they recieved came equipped with a full navigation system. All they had to do was punch in their destination, and it would give them spoken directions.
I'm poor and have never seen one of these, but the idea sounds great. My parents decided to test it out while driving around Phoenix, Arizona. Unfortunately, the unit had slightly dated maps, and the freeways in Phoenix are a perpetually changing work of art. They ended up going off the map pretty quick, and the poor GPS unit soon showed them driving around freewheeling out in the middle of the desert. For about a half hour it kept repeating "please make a legal u-turn. . . please make a legal u-turn. .." until they got disgusted with it and turned it off.
If the GPS units in Oregon work as well as that one did, I don't think there'll be too many problems with this law after all.;)
I actually first heard of this the other night from some friends of mine who are Oregon residents. They're pissed to all hell about this idea.
Still, if they *must* tax drivers for driving, I'm wondering why in gods name the legislators are bothering with GPS? Why not take the route the East went and implement toll roads to increase revenue for the department of transportation? Hell, they could even get creative about it and charge more for road-damaging SUV's, which some other posters have mentioned.
Yeah, this new law seems on the outside that it would raise all kinds of crazy cash, but it would seem to me to be far more expensive to set up and maintain. And then there will no doubt be legal challenges against it. All in all, far more trouble than its worth.
If they really need to levy funds for transportation costs, it would make more sense to me (at least in the near future) to go the Jersey Turnpike route. Make drivers pay tolls every so many miles. The eastern states have been doing this for years, and it seems to work pretty well--i.e. it helps support their highway system, and people there don't mind it too much.
Although I'm not sure if any cross-platform windowing package is going to be robust and stable enough for your needs, were I you I'd take a *serious* look at FLTK and FLUID.
The main reason for this is that it sounds like your project will consist more or less of a UI wrapped around a rendering engine. It is really, really easy to use FLTK to create quick GUIs to work with an existing codebase. As an example, all of the skeleton code we've developed and distributed while teaching graphics courses to undergraduates uses this package; its easy for the students to build on, lots of documentation exists, it has a lot of prebuilt functionality, and its pretty flexible. Since the focus is on *graphics* instead of the *applications*, FLTK fit perfectly for what we needed windowing-wise. And yeah, those who want to work on their projects under linux or OS X can do so without a whole lot of fuss.
Just $.02 from someone who's administered projects that are along the lines of what you're doing (on a much smaller scale). Good luck, looking forward to seeing your work!:)
Slashdot Mirror
Check out the list of Newberry Honor and Newberry Award books. Even today I will happily sit down with one of these--shorter, simpler prose combined with incredibly powerful stories.
Since you asked for sci-fi in particular, here are a few Newberry suggestions that may suit:
The Giver by Lois Lowry (Houghton)
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle (Farrar
The High King by Lloyd Alexander (Holt)
Full list can be found here:
http://www.ala.org/ala/alsc/awardsscholarships/literaryawds/newberymedal/newberyhonors/newberymedal.cfm
Check them out, you wont be sorry. :)
Specifically, the Lifebook P-1120 or similar. These run a transmeta processor (and so won't be the fastest kids on the block), but they come with wireless and are easily powerful enough to browse the web, run Doom, etc. I used one of these as my main computer for a couple years.
Review of the P-1120:
http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/fujitsu-lifebook-p1120-crusoe/4505-3121_7-7589509.html
You can get them on Ebay for under $200:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Fujitsu-Lifebook-P1120-w%2F-Spare-Battery_W0QQitemZ110253486087QQcmdZViewItem?IMSfp=TL0805171070a18304
The machine was pretty durable in my experience--it survived a lot of rough handling in a college student's backpack.
Its certainly true that OLPC could provide a huge incentive to improve education in some of the world's poorest and least economically stable countries. I'll use West Africa as an example. Friends of mine in the Peace Corps over there tell me that the average male is lucky to get through middle school, whereas females are married around age 15, with kids soon after.
However, OLPC, while laudable, is a case of skewed priorities. Ask someone who has done relief work over there and they'll tell you that in order for things to change, folks in W. Africa need to get healthier first, educated second. In Mali, the average life expectancy is in the mid-40s! There is a reason why the Gates Foundation is spending so much money on medical research for diseases like malaria. To make things worse, international donations are for the most part prodigiously misspent--as an example, one town with no refugees was mystified to suddenly receive a shipment of tents from the UN, and promptly turned a good portion of them into a giant bar.
Dvorak is a bombast and a demagogue, but he has a point. The motivation behind OLPC is great, but throwing money at a problem is not necessarily going to solve it. Instead of one laptop per child, how about one VACCINATION per child? That kind of investment would yield measurable, tangible results almost immediately.
It scored quite high on the "Heatmeter" scale at the end of the article. Two geforce chips? I imagine this baby would absolutely roast your lap.
This is a Berkeley research lab funded by various sources. There are plenty of labs with similar funding. My academic research lab is funded by IBM, Sun, and Intel. Whoopee! Absolutely does not mean there is any kind of alliance.
Absolutely right. I've been to and presented at several of the RAD retreats. This is just the successor to the ROC (Recovery-Oriented Computing) intiative, which is now being retired.
The Berkeley systems groups have some great industry support. This does not mean 'selling out'--this means a good source of funding for new research, and more importantly, industry feedback. Along with grad students/faculty from Berkeley and Stanford, the participants at these retreats always include some great folks from a wide variety of companies who, aside from being interested in neat new ideas, help keep things grounded from a practical point of view.
This announcement is likely the result of some good discussions recently (including representatives from the companies named by the submitter) on the state of Computer Science research funding--which, I gotta say, is pretty sad right now. Hopefully, more corporations can help fill the gap in the way that these three are.
With that in mind, let me say that this whole "EA is using young kids" schtick is one of the three major reasons why I think all computer science students should get out and work an internship or two for a company they might be interested in before graduating.
Why am I saying this, and how does it apply to EA? I have no regrets about working there: the people there were by and large excellent and I learned a lot. However, I also saw EXACTLY what was expected of their new engineers, witnessed the turnover and the new college hires wandering around like zombies with keyboard marks on their faces, and returned to school a much wiser person for my experience. I assure you that I now take an entirely different spin on the "do you have any questions for us?" ending to your standard technical interview.
So, in sum: empower your resume, your outlook on what your degree is preparing you for, and yourself by getting some experience before rushing into a job based on its outer sex appeal. Trust me when I say you will be thankful for it.
Do I think this is a valuable document? Hell no. Its basically free and highly valuable advertising for EA on how to make more cogs for their machine. It might also be an attempt to address the disturbing questions being asked by potential hires in light of all this newfound bad publicity.
I happen to have interned at EA as an dev a few years ago and I know exactly what goes on there. The reasons for increasing college hires are obvious and have been mentioned already: why hire older folk with wives and lives when you can get smart, young, exploitable, eager-beaver new grads who will work until their eyeballs bleed for a spot on the credits? The fact that Randy and profs like him are trying to tailor academic programs towards what EA wants is icing on the cake and (to me) a disturbing trend. Many departments get donations from industrial affiliates; I would bet that EA's donatations to his program are handsome.
Where did they get their facts? Looking at my two alma maters (Berkeley and the University of Washington), their charts have a number of glaring inaccuracies.
As an example, UW does offer discount computers at their student computer store. Several courses are streamed online. There is a campus news server where several classes have groups--and often courses use an even easier online news-like service through the Catalyst (www.catalyst.washington.edu) services. There are labs stuffed with multimedia machines for students to edit video on (and these are NICE systems too), and free courses are offered throughout the quarter on a variety of cool technology topics for anyone who wants to take them (http://depts.washington.edu/sacg/).
So hey Forbes, instead of sending out an idiot with a clipboard to these schools who gets out his car, turns a 360, checks some things off, and heads out to the next campus, how about doing a little bit of research?
. . .I kinda wonder what exactly the author's needs were. The 5mx was slow, had so-so battery life, and is BIG. It has little memory and a screen that (at least on the unit I owned) has contrast issues. Whats not to like?
To be fair, the sliding keyboard IS a nifty trick, even if it is utterly unusable except for hunt-and-peck. But I got it, tried it for notetaking, and ended up selling the sucker a month later. Next, please.
My ideal palmtop gadget? I want a cell phone thats very small/thin/light with decent speech-to-text, a great color screen, *maybe* a videophone, and a battery life that outlasts my own. But, in the near term, I'll settle for the great screen, small form factor, and extendible storage in one nice package; I'd love to watch mpeg'd simpsons episodes while riding the train to work. I'd rather not pay for a smartphone when I don't care to use outlook, etc. The new Sony 700i seems close, but it looks pretty big. How much longer do I have to wait?
. . . Ignore this guy and check out Fujitsu's Lifebook P Series.. Very small form factor, but included CD burner/DVD player. Also, I would bet its a lot zippier than this Sharp.
I first owned one of the P Series right after they came out and were equipped with transmetas. The performance was a shade up on terrible, and the battery life merely ok. Since then, they've shifted to Intel chips. My brother bought one recently, and the machine is easily capable of running multiple adobe applications, and he is able to get design work done anywhere with his pressure-sensitive drawing pad attached.
This new machine is smaller, yes, but are the sacrifices in functionality worth shedding the extra pound?
The G5 is a nice processor and apple's dualie a great machine, but these "tests" are not exactly conclusive by any means. They're freakishly amateurish.
Its nice that the machine is more reponsive (given the author's configuration) than his older machines (also given the author's configuration), but there are faaaaaaaar too many variables left unaccounted for these numbers to be good for anything except a group hug.
Having just said that, there really needs to be a universal cross-architecture testing benchmark for user-oriented statistics! Spec doesn't quite cut it, since you can cheat and your average user has no idea what the score means anyways. Lmbench is nice, but I think linux/unix/solaris-only, and for your average joe the OS he/she is going to be using with the machine should be part of the test.
I had thought this form factor had died out? It is DAMN hard to type on those little keyboards!! If you want more input functionality than a handheld, get a subnotebook like the Sony Picturebook or Fujitsu's Lifebook P-series. If you want more computing power in a handheld, get a tablet pc.
I had a Psion Series 5 for a while, which also feature a keyboard plus pen input. Despite how dated it is, I still consider it a great little machine--responsive, neat software, worked well with windows, etc. But that keyboard made my hands scream. Eventually, that became the key factor why I gave up using the thing.
I guess one caveat is that I haven't tried the new thumb-boards that are on the zaurus and the new palms, but at least they don't even pretend to be for real typing--and I can see how they'd be useful for passwords, etc.
Honestly, I'd love to see anyone try and ssh anywhere with just ink for input!
.you have to peck out a username and password. Same with saving documents and creating folders. I should note that updates to the platform are coming soon to address problems like these.
Having built Tablet PC apps, I can say that there are a number of reasons why the platform just ain't there yet, and a good number of these are because its really *really* hard to design an operating system that runs in an intuitive manner with nothing but ink input. As things stand now, you can't even log into XP TE with ink. .
Anyways, its great to see alternatives for the tablet, but unless some serious dev effort is put into making Linux work with an entirely different input profile, I can't see it as real useful here.
Hey, not to troll, but has anyone actually *used* a transmeta-based computer? To summarize:
They suck. Hard.
I love the design goals of the crusoe, and the idea/engineering behind it is great. But after using a transmeta crusoe based laptop as my primary computer for around a year, I have come to the conclusion that they are just not in the same class as AMD and Intel offerings. Response is extremely sluggish, power efficiency (admittedly more of a function of the unit then the processor alone) isn't that great, and the overall computing experience is extremely frustrating at times--even after the cache warms up.
Again, not to knock transmeta, but I think these chips will thrive in the handheld/smart display/specialized computing arena. I don't think they belong in regular user pcs, including tablet pcs. The lag is just too great.
So you know where I'm coming from, this post was typed on a Fujitsu P2040, which has a transmeta crusoe 866mhz cpu, 256 megs ram, 30gig hdd, cd burner/dvd drive, etc. Average main battery life is around 2 hours, while the extended battery gives around 4. If you're thinking about buying a transmeta unit, feel free to drop me a line with any questions.
I can hardly wait to see where Liv Tyler going to be patched in this time around.
Oh, and how about rewriting the plot too--why not make Kong a giant hamster instead?
ugh.
From the article:
.[Microsoft is] also looking into making it possible to run Windows games directly from the CD without installation. . . .Microsoft is working on a standard PC controller, which would allow a more seamless conversion of cross-platform titles and generally simplify the use of PC gamepads.
The plan is to set up a numerical system that categorizes and groups system levels, and when this goes into effect in 2005 or so, a level-1 system might represent the current or year-old value-priced PC configurations, while level 2 and level 3 group systems that define the mainstream and high-end performance of the time.
This strikes me as bad solution to an already sticky problem. Whats to stop a studio from saying a game that runs at 10fps on a system considered a "1" from slapping a "1" rating on it in order to maximize their possible audience? Its all about sales, right? In addition, I wonder if in 2005 the hardware change-rate will be any different, limitations of silicon or no.
Somewhat more straightforward features include adding sophisticated matchmaking into Microsoft Messenger . .
Great, I've got a computer with a standard Microsoft controller, great graphics, that plays my DVDs, music, etc, and has matchmaking for me at no extra cost outside of bandwidth. Tell me again why I'd want an X-box?
Sure, there are other reasons for owning one, but it does seem that Microsoft, in working to console-ize the PC, might be somewhat shooting themselves in the foot. . . ? I'm sure they've thought of/discussed this, but it still strikes me as counter productive when they remain dedicated to the console industry.
Great post. I once thought of working in this industry, but an internship with a large game company cured that quickly. Some thoughts based on my experience:
.
.02!
1) Avoid Technical Risk -- don't develop new game engines. Use an existing engine and plug new content into it.
The use of 'middleware' is an increasing trend. Even larger companies that don't use middleware will do an engine rewrite for each new console and then spend the rest of the time recycling. Yeah, maybe this is a great idea from the business side of things, but usually doesn't lead to terribly innovative games. Whats interesting is how the middleware industry is growing based on this fact. I have no stats to back this up, but even with notable exceptions it seems that its rare that a game house develops their own engine anymore.
2) Avoid Financial Risk -- sequels do better than new titles, so invest in sequels.
This is true, but even more so its liscences that are becoming the investment of choice. Games based on movies/TV shows/etc can be outsourced to a starving studio on a ridiculous deadline, stuffed into a middleware engine, and released as quickly as possible. Some aren't too bad, but the majority make a quick buck then die fast, glutting the market with crap.
4) Spend as much on promotion as development. The key is to sell a lot of copies at full price really soon after release, because if you don't, people will figure out how unoriginal your game really is and you'll be selling at a tiny margin.
Absolutely true. Example: EA spends serious money on adverts on ESPN, etc. Aside from the usual print ads, commercials with atheletes, etc, they also paid ABC to have Monday Night Football use Madden 2003 for instant replays. The amount of money spent in marketing was staggering, and for this reason it blew its competitor--NFL 2K3--out of the water sales-wise, even tho 2K3 was in many ways a more solid product.
It seems like gameplay innovation in the industry is such a huge gamble that its just not worth it to most studios. There was an article in PCGamer a while back about how Dungeon Seige got funding originally. The programmers were getting paid off the founders credit cards for a while until Microsoft picked the project up. God, the faith it would take to pull a gamble like that off. .
My
. . .on an intel machine, nothing beats intel's Math Kernel Libraries. You can get a free trial version off the intel website (link here). The syntax can be somewhat cryptic, but the 1000+ page manual is very nice and they are BLAZING fast for matrix and vector operations.
:) I've also done some of that in python.
However, for quick alogorithm prototyping, matlab is the tool of choice around these parts.
"How cool, a video card with what looks like a trojan stretched over it for safe gaming."
How apt!
HP may be one of the first, but many of the big electronic brands are developing home av components around wireless networking. I'm surprised its taking them this long to make good on the possibilities of this!
.just commenting. :)
Actually, I just recieved some spam-like email this morning inviting me to sign up to betatest philips new 'Streamium' wireless network boombox. The betatest signups are open for a bit longer and can be reached here if you'd also like to sign up. The whole idea of wireless networked multimedia appliances sounds interesting, and I wouldn't mind being able to try one out. (No, I don't work for these guys, yadda yadda. .
Its great that these rumors of the PS3 are leaking out to get people excited, but we certainly won't be seeing the unit for a good while yet.
Console development is damn expensive (and getting worse each time around), and there is a *lot* of life left in the PS2. Hell, they're still selling PSOnes at a good clip!
I would expect Sony to milk the PS2 for all its worth before updating the hardware (and forcing updates from those developing for it, always a hassle). The only thing that would make them move more quickly is to one-up an opponent. And even then, they may wait; its the games that make money, and there are some pretty damn good games for the PS2.
"The damn thing, dubbed "The Savage Empire," is actually watchable."
Boy, with rave reviews like that, I bet these guys are damn glad they spent seven years of their life doing this.
This article reminds me of my parents' first experience with GPS in a rental car a few weeks ago. For some reason, they got some kind of bonus on their rental, and the car they recieved came equipped with a full navigation system. All they had to do was punch in their destination, and it would give them spoken directions.
." until they got disgusted with it and turned it off.
;)
I'm poor and have never seen one of these, but the idea sounds great. My parents decided to test it out while driving around Phoenix, Arizona. Unfortunately, the unit had slightly dated maps, and the freeways in Phoenix are a perpetually changing work of art. They ended up going off the map pretty quick, and the poor GPS unit soon showed them driving around freewheeling out in the middle of the desert. For about a half hour it kept repeating "please make a legal u-turn. . . please make a legal u-turn. .
If the GPS units in Oregon work as well as that one did, I don't think there'll be too many problems with this law after all.
I actually first heard of this the other night from some friends of mine who are Oregon residents. They're pissed to all hell about this idea.
Still, if they *must* tax drivers for driving, I'm wondering why in gods name the legislators are bothering with GPS? Why not take the route the East went and implement toll roads to increase revenue for the department of transportation? Hell, they could even get creative about it and charge more for road-damaging SUV's, which some other posters have mentioned.
Yeah, this new law seems on the outside that it would raise all kinds of crazy cash, but it would seem to me to be far more expensive to set up and maintain. And then there will no doubt be legal challenges against it. All in all, far more trouble than its worth.
If they really need to levy funds for transportation costs, it would make more sense to me (at least in the near future) to go the Jersey Turnpike route. Make drivers pay tolls every so many miles. The eastern states have been doing this for years, and it seems to work pretty well--i.e. it helps support their highway system, and people there don't mind it too much.
Just a thought!
Although I'm not sure if any cross-platform windowing package is going to be robust and stable enough for your needs, were I you I'd take a *serious* look at FLTK and FLUID.
:)
The main reason for this is that it sounds like your project will consist more or less of a UI wrapped around a rendering engine. It is really, really easy to use FLTK to create quick GUIs to work with an existing codebase. As an example, all of the skeleton code we've developed and distributed while teaching graphics courses to undergraduates uses this package; its easy for the students to build on, lots of documentation exists, it has a lot of prebuilt functionality, and its pretty flexible. Since the focus is on *graphics* instead of the *applications*, FLTK fit perfectly for what we needed windowing-wise. And yeah, those who want to work on their projects under linux or OS X can do so without a whole lot of fuss.
Just $.02 from someone who's administered projects that are along the lines of what you're doing (on a much smaller scale). Good luck, looking forward to seeing your work!