One of the biggest complaints I hear from 'discerning' gamers is how few and far between well-written games are. Titles like Mass Effect and the Black Isle series just appear far too rarely. Writing and storyboarding are aspects of the industry that have always appealed to me -- I'm an enthusiastic hobby gamer with a real passion for well-developed games. But there's very little guidance out there on getting exposure as a writer in this world. I'm interested in working in the field, freelance/part time initially as I break in, then with an eye to professional employ after a time. My questions to you are: How can I get involved in writing for the game industry? Are there any game startups out there with good design but weak story that could use writing help from a college graduate? How do the big guys get people to write for them -- am I just going to the wrong booths at the job fairs? What kind of degrees or relevant experience in the field are they looking for? Should I just put on my Planescape t-shirt and stand outside in the rain?"
You don't write well enough. Go re-read Strunk. You should be writing at least this well:
Well-written games are few and far between. Mass Effect and the Black Isle series do have good writing, but they're exceptions, not the rule.
Writing and storyboarding appeal to me. I'm an hobby gamer with a passion for well-developed games. But there's little guidance on getting into the game world as a writer. I'm interested in freelance/part time work as I break in, then professional employ.
How can I get into writing for the game industry? Are there game startups with good design but weak story? How do the big guys find writers? Am I going to the wrong booths at the job fairs? What degrees or experience are game companies looking for? Should I just put on my Planescape T-shirt and stand outside in the rain?
You need a tough English teacher, or a tough editor, to make you tighten up your prose.
If you want to get clean water from non-clean water, there are plenty of systems available. Here's a small watermaker that runs on salt water. It's a reverse osmosis device, with the prefilters needed to get rid of the solid crud. Here's a simpler one for non-salt water. The U.S. military uses reverse osmosis units heavily. They work fine. They scale down to straw-sized things for survival use, and scale up to city-sized desalinization plants.
So why is Kamen's system better? Lower power consumption? Lower initial cost? Fewer consumables? The article doesn't tell us that. It's not like he's the first person to build a packaged water purifier.
All downhill since Snow Crash
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 1
It's all been downhill for him since Snow Crash.
Snow Crash should have been a movie, but now it's too dated.
Under Bush, the Federal Trade Commission, like many of the other regulatory agencies, has been more or less out to lunch. Obama is probably going to put someone more consumer-oriented in charge there. That's bad news for companies shipping intrusive DRM systems that damage computers, are hard to uninstall, or come with deceptive EULAs.
I tend to think of individual search personalization as a pain. It's another piece of state the user has to manage. But it's harmless, and some people might like it.
The trouble with sharing information about search results is that the most interested parties are, inevitably, going to be in the "search engine optimization" business. Unless Google figures out some way to prevent people from establishing huge numbers of accounts, something they've dramatically failed to do with GMail, any shared information from users will be gamed and spammed.
Does anybody use Wikia search? Unfortunately, because it's folded into Wikia.com, (the fan site wiki hosting service), Alexa doesn't produce useful stats. Wikia in total has about 10% of the traffic of "ask.com", and under 1% of Google.com. Wikia's trend is downward.
Sorts have been parallelized and distributed for decades. It would be interesting to benchmark Google's approach against SyncSort. SyncSort is parallel and distributed, and has been heavily optimized for exactly such jobs. Using map/reduce will work, but there are better approaches to sorting.
This is a classic manufacturing issue.
The killer point is when an expensive item becomes cheap due to mass production. The makers of expensive items seldom survive that transition.
Historically, this has happened time and again. It happened to basic watches around 1890, when Ingersoll introduced the $1 pocket watch. The watch industry got hit again in the 1980s, when quartz crystal watches became both cheaper and more accurate than mechanical ones. (Neuchatel, Switzerland was hit hard by that.)
One strategy is to position a product as a luxury item. Rolex took that route in watches. Their CEO actually says "We are not in the watch business, we are in the luxury business. Apple positions themselves that way in computers and audio/video gadgets.
If that doesn't work, you're toast. There used to be a high-end graphics hardware business, with companies like Evans and Sutherland, Dynamic Pictures, Matrox, and SGI. They all got clobbered when gamer graphics cards got good enough to take over pro jobs. I visited Sony Pictures Imageworks around 1997, when all their animators had SGI workstations, with a few PCs being tried out. When I went back in 2001, everybody had a PC, with a few SGI machines still around to run legacy stuff. SGI went bankrupt in 2006.
Open source is just another form of commoditization. Most open source software isn't very original. There's usually some predecessor commercial product that did roughly the same thing. Open source is the same kind of competitive threat as white-box generic hardware.
People keep doing building these "robot heads with emotional features", as if it would somehow get closer to AI. Rod Brooks spent a lot of time going down this road; remember Cyc? There have been many animated talking heads; remember Ananova? (That used to work; then they broke it and put up that "under development" page, which has been up for, what, five years now?)
And who could forget Microsoft Barney for Windows? Microsoft hasn't. I went to RoboDevelopment last Tuesday, and there was a new animated furry character in the Microsoft Robotics booth, a large teddy bear. Microsoft never gives up. At least the new version isn't purple.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with doing this, but it's something that should be done by Disney and Hollywood as entertainment, not by universities as "research".
No.... or that superscalar RISC chips don't count as RISC?
The problem is that going superscalar means enormous additional complexity. Pure RISC CPUs are simple; they're just executing the instructions as they come along. Going superscalar means translating the incoming instruction scheme into a different internal format using a different register system and pumping it through a set of pipelines, each doing different things, with a complex "retirement unit" at the end to deal with any conflicts after the fact.
The amazing thing is that a working retirement unit for x86 is even possible. There are so many awful cases. In x86, unlike almost all RISC machines, you're allowed to store into the code you're executing. There's old code that does this. (Does DLL binding still store into code?) You can even store into the instruction just ahead of the one you're executing. Think about what a machine with lookahead has to do to handle that correctly. The old instruction has already been decoded and probably executed before the store of the new one commits. So the whole pipeline system has to shut down and flush, the instruction decoder has to restart, and much work has to be redone. This isn't fast on modern CPUs; it costs like a synchronous exception. But it works. I feel sorry for all those poor guys in the huge rooms of beige cubicles in Santa Clara struggling with this.
A cleaner architecture, like PowerPC, has a simpler retirement unit, which cuts down the design effort, but the pipelines are roughly comparable to those for x86.
RISC machines made sense before Intel figured out to make x86 go faster than one instruction per clock. That happened with the Pentium Pro, which came out in 1995. (The Pentium II and III were basically Pentium Pro architecture, shrunk down to a single die in a newer fab.) Transmeta didn't announce a product until 2000.
Before the Pentium Pro, RISC architectures seemed to be the way forward. The RISC designs could get down to one instruction per clock, and they weren't that hard to design, because all the hard cases were prohibited. I met the design team for one of the MIPS CPU parts, and it was about 15 people.
Intel took on the insanely hard problem of making a superscalar x86 CPU. All the awful things that can happen in x86 code had to be handled, and not only handled, handled fast. The internal complexity of the Pentium Pro/II/III is huge. It took a design team of 3000 people at peak to bring it off, and a huge transistor count in the CPU. Yet they did it. With that architecture, they could beat one instruction per clock, which blew away the whole rationale for nice, simple RISC machines. Transistors on the chip had become cheap enough that a CPU with 5.5 million transistors was commercially feasible.
Along with blowing away RISC, that technology blew away Transmeta. Transmeta had an OK idea, but they were five years too late.
now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope.
Control by hand-waving was a popular idea in science fiction from the 1930s or so. It probably first appeared in Wells' "Things to Come". The concept came from the early "electric eye" systems (just photocells) and the theremin. A theremin really is played by waving your hands around; one hand controls pitch, and the other hand controls volume. Anybody can make screeching noises with one, but it's very difficult to play one well.
Autodesk put considerable effort into virtual reality in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The hope was that it would make it easier to design 3D objects. It didn't. The fundamental problem is that positioning your hands precisely in free space by eye, not touch, is slow and inaccurate. It looks really cool, but it's like trying to do precision work wearing mittens. Humans are much more precise when they have a surface to work against.
This is a classic issue. The Federal Portal to Portal Act does not favor the employee, but California has slightly more favorable regulations.
Some current active issues in this area include whether employees who work in places with elaborate security checkpoints should be compensated for delays in getting through security. This came up in the context of a nuclear power plant. The current court decision is that such time need not be compensated. It's also been held that time in line at a time clock isn't compensated either. (But that tends to even out; the delay in clocking in costs the employee, but delay in clocking out pays the employee.)
The "boot time" issue is interesting. Historically, big plants handled "clocking in" at centralized locations near the plant entrance, so, by default, employees were paid for time in the building. With more elaborate timekeeping systems, it's tempting for employers to start timing when the employee reaches their work location and performs some action like a login or a card swipe.
Many union agreements cover this. It's a classic issue in coal mining, which is where the term comes from. The United Mine Workers negotiated "portal to portal pay" in the late 1940s. Previously, miners were paid only for time at the working face (where digging takes place) in the mine. It can take an hour in a big mine to get from the mine portal to the working face, so this is a big deal.
McColo doesn't seem to have been a real ISP. Or even a real company. They don't have a valid corporate registration in California or New Jersey. They were apparently a front for the spam operation, buying services from Hurricane Electric.
Their web site was designed by Vane, in Russia. They still have some connection to McColo. Go to the Vane site (preferably not using IE on Windows) and look at the icons of the various companies with which they are affiliated. Go to the row of vertical bars at the center right, second row. Mouse over the blank area just above the bars. You'll get some Cyrillic with "McColo" in Latin text. Click on the hidden link. This will take you to an animation which brings up an image of the McColo site. Items within that animation are clickable.
A bit of work will get you to the number of McColo's "sales manager". But there's no way to order hosting on line; they were never really selling ordinary hosting services.
What "military space know-how"? No US weapons system uses liquid hydrogen tanks.
The Saturn V used liquid hydrogen, and the Shuttle does, but those are NASA programs. Unmanned boosters are usually solids, or the old standard, liquid oxygen and kerosene, like the V2 from WWII. ICBMs have been all solid-fuel since the 1970s. And according to the Outer Space Treaty, the US isn't supposed to have weapons in space.
There's no military threat.
The only reason to limit the export of liquid hydrogen tank technology is to slow down the Chinese manned space program.
Yahoo's problem is that they can't sell ads. Few companies want to buy ads on #2 or #3 when they're so far behind. That's the killer. Yahoo outsourced most of their ad operation to Google, which, over time, dooms them to irrelevance. Even Google's ad operation is in trouble. Online advertising is flat and has probably peaked. Google is no longer a growth stock.
Once you reach a certain level, search quality doesn't seem to affect market share much.
Yahoo's search engine is fairly good. For about half of 2007, it was better than Google's. Yahoo had added all those specialized subengines (weather, stocks, celebrities, etc.) and Google had to catch up, which they did by late 2007. Yahoo's market share did not improve while they were better than Google. Search quality does matter if it's awful (see Cuil and Rushmore Drive), but once over the entry threshold, further improvements don't seem to affect the bottom line much. Advertising targeting matters more.
Yahoo still tries to be a "portal", but does anybody still use Yahoo as a home page other than people who somehow got it installed with their browser and doesn't know how to change?
The trouble with "portals" is that the targeting is terrible; when the ads are displayed on the home page, the portal has no idea what the user wants yet.
Stallman is useful. He's probably the most successful anarchist of all time. Anarchists are usually destructive or a joke, but Stallman figured out how to make anarchy work. His big success was in devising the GPL, which was a major breakthrough in contract and copyright law. If all we had were BSD-type license or dedication into the public domain, we'd have too many forks of the code, as with, well, Unix.
The GPL maintains focus, because you can't add something and declare the result proprietary. That was clever.
Is the EEEpc coming preloaded with crapware, like Dell and HP products? If so, I take his point.
I'm not a Stallman fan personally; I've met him. Despite that, it's good that he's around.
Red Sonja has been done. With Brigitte Nielsen and Arnold Schwarzenegger. It will be hard to beat that pair. A remake will probably have worse casting, but, inevitably, better effects.
First of all, "partial differential equations" should not be capitalized.
The general idea is straightforward. Partial derivatives are just the concept of a derivative generalized to higher dimensions. Just as a derivative is a tangent to a curve, a partial derivative is is a tangent plane to a surface.
There are many physical situations in which the physics gives you the partial derivative in the current situation, and if you want to predict what happens next, you have to integrate the partial derivative. For most real-world problems, this has to be done numerically, although for some special situations, like planetary orbits, there are analytical solutions.
Unless you're an employee of the school, or use their equipment, you should own anything you do.
Graduate students may be employees if they have an assistantship, but undergraduates usually are not.
I had some minor difficulties with Stanford over a similar issue in the mid-1980s. I was a Stanford student, wasn't using any Stanford equipment, and wasn't a Stanford employee. There was some huffing and puffing from the Stanford side, but they knew they had an unwinnable case. It worked out fine for me in the end. Stanford later changed their policy in that area, and I was told years later by a faculty member that I was partly responsible for that. The new policy is in some ways worse and in some ways better; Stanford wants a cut, but they'll help market the technology, and if they don't, the inventor gets it back. This is often a win for students. Stanford has very close connections with the Silicon Valley venture community and a track record in licensing technology. Stanford owns a piece of Sun, Cisco, Yahoo, and Google under this deal.
It's much worse if you're arguing over IP rights with some school that doesn't routinely do IP deals. The school administration is likely to be both overbearing and clueless.
This has potential for a door lock. A cute application would be something that opens the door when the dog wants to go out.
But scratch recognition without location information is going to be very limited in application.
With some positional information, it could be more useful.
The speed of sound in wood is high, so you're going to have to correlate waveforms, not just time events. But that's not hard to do. I have no idea how much accuracy you could get, but it's not an expensive experiment to find out. Try four microphones at the corners of a table and correlate to line up the waveforms. (Three are enough for position, but with four, you get redundancy and
can eliminate totally bogus position results.) Multi-touch is going to be hard, though.
It might be fun to set up a DJ mixing rig this way. No turntables, just a flat surface, maybe with outlines of turntables and faders to guide navigation.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the biggest complaints I hear from 'discerning' gamers is how few and far between well-written games are. Titles like Mass Effect and the Black Isle series just appear far too rarely. Writing and storyboarding are aspects of the industry that have always appealed to me -- I'm an enthusiastic hobby gamer with a real passion for well-developed games. But there's very little guidance out there on getting exposure as a writer in this world. I'm interested in working in the field, freelance/part time initially as I break in, then with an eye to professional employ after a time. My questions to you are: How can I get involved in writing for the game industry? Are there any game startups out there with good design but weak story that could use writing help from a college graduate? How do the big guys get people to write for them -- am I just going to the wrong booths at the job fairs? What kind of degrees or relevant experience in the field are they looking for? Should I just put on my Planescape t-shirt and stand outside in the rain?"
You don't write well enough. Go re-read Strunk. You should be writing at least this well:
Well-written games are few and far between. Mass Effect and the Black Isle series do have good writing, but they're exceptions, not the rule.
Writing and storyboarding appeal to me. I'm an hobby gamer with a passion for well-developed games. But there's little guidance on getting into the game world as a writer. I'm interested in freelance/part time work as I break in, then professional employ.
How can I get into writing for the game industry? Are there game startups with good design but weak story? How do the big guys find writers? Am I going to the wrong booths at the job fairs? What degrees or experience are game companies looking for? Should I just put on my Planescape T-shirt and stand outside in the rain?
You need a tough English teacher, or a tough editor, to make you tighten up your prose.
If you want to get clean water from non-clean water, there are plenty of systems available. Here's a small watermaker that runs on salt water. It's a reverse osmosis device, with the prefilters needed to get rid of the solid crud. Here's a simpler one for non-salt water. The U.S. military uses reverse osmosis units heavily. They work fine. They scale down to straw-sized things for survival use, and scale up to city-sized desalinization plants.
So why is Kamen's system better? Lower power consumption? Lower initial cost? Fewer consumables? The article doesn't tell us that. It's not like he's the first person to build a packaged water purifier.
It's all been downhill for him since Snow Crash.
Snow Crash should have been a movie, but now it's too dated.
Under Bush, the Federal Trade Commission, like many of the other regulatory agencies, has been more or less out to lunch. Obama is probably going to put someone more consumer-oriented in charge there. That's bad news for companies shipping intrusive DRM systems that damage computers, are hard to uninstall, or come with deceptive EULAs.
One of the Apollo astronauts once remarked that what they really think about is "Please let me not fuck up.".
I tend to think of individual search personalization as a pain. It's another piece of state the user has to manage. But it's harmless, and some people might like it.
The trouble with sharing information about search results is that the most interested parties are, inevitably, going to be in the "search engine optimization" business. Unless Google figures out some way to prevent people from establishing huge numbers of accounts, something they've dramatically failed to do with GMail, any shared information from users will be gamed and spammed.
Does anybody use Wikia search? Unfortunately, because it's folded into Wikia.com, (the fan site wiki hosting service), Alexa doesn't produce useful stats. Wikia in total has about 10% of the traffic of "ask.com", and under 1% of Google.com. Wikia's trend is downward.
Sorts have been parallelized and distributed for decades. It would be interesting to benchmark Google's approach against SyncSort. SyncSort is parallel and distributed, and has been heavily optimized for exactly such jobs. Using map/reduce will work, but there are better approaches to sorting.
This is a classic manufacturing issue. The killer point is when an expensive item becomes cheap due to mass production. The makers of expensive items seldom survive that transition.
Historically, this has happened time and again. It happened to basic watches around 1890, when Ingersoll introduced the $1 pocket watch. The watch industry got hit again in the 1980s, when quartz crystal watches became both cheaper and more accurate than mechanical ones. (Neuchatel, Switzerland was hit hard by that.)
One strategy is to position a product as a luxury item. Rolex took that route in watches. Their CEO actually says "We are not in the watch business, we are in the luxury business. Apple positions themselves that way in computers and audio/video gadgets.
If that doesn't work, you're toast. There used to be a high-end graphics hardware business, with companies like Evans and Sutherland, Dynamic Pictures, Matrox, and SGI. They all got clobbered when gamer graphics cards got good enough to take over pro jobs. I visited Sony Pictures Imageworks around 1997, when all their animators had SGI workstations, with a few PCs being tried out. When I went back in 2001, everybody had a PC, with a few SGI machines still around to run legacy stuff. SGI went bankrupt in 2006.
Open source is just another form of commoditization. Most open source software isn't very original. There's usually some predecessor commercial product that did roughly the same thing. Open source is the same kind of competitive threat as white-box generic hardware.
People keep doing building these "robot heads with emotional features", as if it would somehow get closer to AI. Rod Brooks spent a lot of time going down this road; remember Cyc? There have been many animated talking heads; remember Ananova? (That used to work; then they broke it and put up that "under development" page, which has been up for, what, five years now?)
And who could forget Microsoft Barney for Windows? Microsoft hasn't. I went to RoboDevelopment last Tuesday, and there was a new animated furry character in the Microsoft Robotics booth, a large teddy bear. Microsoft never gives up. At least the new version isn't purple.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with doing this, but it's something that should be done by Disney and Hollywood as entertainment, not by universities as "research".
Just ship copies of the raw files to the Internet Archive. 140TB isn't that much; they put a petabyte in a rack.
Once the file formats have been translated, just point Google at the starting URL and wait a day while it indexes everything.
No. ... or that superscalar RISC chips don't count as RISC?
The problem is that going superscalar means enormous additional complexity. Pure RISC CPUs are simple; they're just executing the instructions as they come along. Going superscalar means translating the incoming instruction scheme into a different internal format using a different register system and pumping it through a set of pipelines, each doing different things, with a complex "retirement unit" at the end to deal with any conflicts after the fact.
The amazing thing is that a working retirement unit for x86 is even possible. There are so many awful cases. In x86, unlike almost all RISC machines, you're allowed to store into the code you're executing. There's old code that does this. (Does DLL binding still store into code?) You can even store into the instruction just ahead of the one you're executing. Think about what a machine with lookahead has to do to handle that correctly. The old instruction has already been decoded and probably executed before the store of the new one commits. So the whole pipeline system has to shut down and flush, the instruction decoder has to restart, and much work has to be redone. This isn't fast on modern CPUs; it costs like a synchronous exception. But it works. I feel sorry for all those poor guys in the huge rooms of beige cubicles in Santa Clara struggling with this.
A cleaner architecture, like PowerPC, has a simpler retirement unit, which cuts down the design effort, but the pipelines are roughly comparable to those for x86.
RISC machines made sense before Intel figured out to make x86 go faster than one instruction per clock. That happened with the Pentium Pro, which came out in 1995. (The Pentium II and III were basically Pentium Pro architecture, shrunk down to a single die in a newer fab.) Transmeta didn't announce a product until 2000.
Before the Pentium Pro, RISC architectures seemed to be the way forward. The RISC designs could get down to one instruction per clock, and they weren't that hard to design, because all the hard cases were prohibited. I met the design team for one of the MIPS CPU parts, and it was about 15 people.
Intel took on the insanely hard problem of making a superscalar x86 CPU. All the awful things that can happen in x86 code had to be handled, and not only handled, handled fast. The internal complexity of the Pentium Pro/II/III is huge. It took a design team of 3000 people at peak to bring it off, and a huge transistor count in the CPU. Yet they did it. With that architecture, they could beat one instruction per clock, which blew away the whole rationale for nice, simple RISC machines. Transistors on the chip had become cheap enough that a CPU with 5.5 million transistors was commercially feasible.
Along with blowing away RISC, that technology blew away Transmeta. Transmeta had an OK idea, but they were five years too late.
now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope.
Control by hand-waving was a popular idea in science fiction from the 1930s or so. It probably first appeared in Wells' "Things to Come". The concept came from the early "electric eye" systems (just photocells) and the theremin. A theremin really is played by waving your hands around; one hand controls pitch, and the other hand controls volume. Anybody can make screeching noises with one, but it's very difficult to play one well.
Actually, that idea first appeared in film in Johnny Mnemonic.
Autodesk put considerable effort into virtual reality in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The hope was that it would make it easier to design 3D objects. It didn't. The fundamental problem is that positioning your hands precisely in free space by eye, not touch, is slow and inaccurate. It looks really cool, but it's like trying to do precision work wearing mittens. Humans are much more precise when they have a surface to work against.
It's not a technology problem.
This is a classic issue. The Federal Portal to Portal Act does not favor the employee, but California has slightly more favorable regulations.
Some current active issues in this area include whether employees who work in places with elaborate security checkpoints should be compensated for delays in getting through security. This came up in the context of a nuclear power plant. The current court decision is that such time need not be compensated. It's also been held that time in line at a time clock isn't compensated either. (But that tends to even out; the delay in clocking in costs the employee, but delay in clocking out pays the employee.)
The "boot time" issue is interesting. Historically, big plants handled "clocking in" at centralized locations near the plant entrance, so, by default, employees were paid for time in the building. With more elaborate timekeeping systems, it's tempting for employers to start timing when the employee reaches their work location and performs some action like a login or a card swipe.
Many union agreements cover this. It's a classic issue in coal mining, which is where the term comes from. The United Mine Workers negotiated "portal to portal pay" in the late 1940s. Previously, miners were paid only for time at the working face (where digging takes place) in the mine. It can take an hour in a big mine to get from the mine portal to the working face, so this is a big deal.
McColo doesn't seem to have been a real ISP. Or even a real company. They don't have a valid corporate registration in California or New Jersey. They were apparently a front for the spam operation, buying services from Hurricane Electric.
Their web site was designed by Vane, in Russia. They still have some connection to McColo. Go to the Vane site (preferably not using IE on Windows) and look at the icons of the various companies with which they are affiliated. Go to the row of vertical bars at the center right, second row. Mouse over the blank area just above the bars. You'll get some Cyrillic with "McColo" in Latin text. Click on the hidden link. This will take you to an animation which brings up an image of the McColo site. Items within that animation are clickable. A bit of work will get you to the number of McColo's "sales manager". But there's no way to order hosting on line; they were never really selling ordinary hosting services.
What "military space know-how"? No US weapons system uses liquid hydrogen tanks.
The Saturn V used liquid hydrogen, and the Shuttle does, but those are NASA programs. Unmanned boosters are usually solids, or the old standard, liquid oxygen and kerosene, like the V2 from WWII. ICBMs have been all solid-fuel since the 1970s. And according to the Outer Space Treaty, the US isn't supposed to have weapons in space.
There's no military threat. The only reason to limit the export of liquid hydrogen tank technology is to slow down the Chinese manned space program.
Yahoo's problem is that they can't sell ads. Few companies want to buy ads on #2 or #3 when they're so far behind. That's the killer. Yahoo outsourced most of their ad operation to Google, which, over time, dooms them to irrelevance. Even Google's ad operation is in trouble. Online advertising is flat and has probably peaked. Google is no longer a growth stock.
Once you reach a certain level, search quality doesn't seem to affect market share much. Yahoo's search engine is fairly good. For about half of 2007, it was better than Google's. Yahoo had added all those specialized subengines (weather, stocks, celebrities, etc.) and Google had to catch up, which they did by late 2007. Yahoo's market share did not improve while they were better than Google. Search quality does matter if it's awful (see Cuil and Rushmore Drive), but once over the entry threshold, further improvements don't seem to affect the bottom line much. Advertising targeting matters more.
Yahoo still tries to be a "portal", but does anybody still use Yahoo as a home page other than people who somehow got it installed with their browser and doesn't know how to change? The trouble with "portals" is that the targeting is terrible; when the ads are displayed on the home page, the portal has no idea what the user wants yet.
If they just sold the thing for $200, they might get enough volume to get down to the $100 laptop.
The real problem with the OLPC, though, is that it's now a 3 year old design. The OLPC is being overtaken by commercial products.
Stallman is useful. He's probably the most successful anarchist of all time. Anarchists are usually destructive or a joke, but Stallman figured out how to make anarchy work. His big success was in devising the GPL, which was a major breakthrough in contract and copyright law. If all we had were BSD-type license or dedication into the public domain, we'd have too many forks of the code, as with, well, Unix. The GPL maintains focus, because you can't add something and declare the result proprietary. That was clever.
Is the EEEpc coming preloaded with crapware, like Dell and HP products? If so, I take his point.
I'm not a Stallman fan personally; I've met him. Despite that, it's good that he's around.
Red Sonja has been done. With Brigitte Nielsen and Arnold Schwarzenegger. It will be hard to beat that pair. A remake will probably have worse casting, but, inevitably, better effects.
First of all, "partial differential equations" should not be capitalized.
The general idea is straightforward. Partial derivatives are just the concept of a derivative generalized to higher dimensions. Just as a derivative is a tangent to a curve, a partial derivative is is a tangent plane to a surface.
There are many physical situations in which the physics gives you the partial derivative in the current situation, and if you want to predict what happens next, you have to integrate the partial derivative. For most real-world problems, this has to be done numerically, although for some special situations, like planetary orbits, there are analytical solutions.
Unless you're an employee of the school, or use their equipment, you should own anything you do. Graduate students may be employees if they have an assistantship, but undergraduates usually are not.
I had some minor difficulties with Stanford over a similar issue in the mid-1980s. I was a Stanford student, wasn't using any Stanford equipment, and wasn't a Stanford employee. There was some huffing and puffing from the Stanford side, but they knew they had an unwinnable case. It worked out fine for me in the end. Stanford later changed their policy in that area, and I was told years later by a faculty member that I was partly responsible for that. The new policy is in some ways worse and in some ways better; Stanford wants a cut, but they'll help market the technology, and if they don't, the inventor gets it back. This is often a win for students. Stanford has very close connections with the Silicon Valley venture community and a track record in licensing technology. Stanford owns a piece of Sun, Cisco, Yahoo, and Google under this deal.
It's much worse if you're arguing over IP rights with some school that doesn't routinely do IP deals. The school administration is likely to be both overbearing and clueless.
how about power? wind, solar
Well, I know someone who has a Solar Universe franchise, but you have to be comfortable climbing on roofs.
This has potential for a door lock. A cute application would be something that opens the door when the dog wants to go out. But scratch recognition without location information is going to be very limited in application.
With some positional information, it could be more useful. The speed of sound in wood is high, so you're going to have to correlate waveforms, not just time events. But that's not hard to do. I have no idea how much accuracy you could get, but it's not an expensive experiment to find out. Try four microphones at the corners of a table and correlate to line up the waveforms. (Three are enough for position, but with four, you get redundancy and can eliminate totally bogus position results.) Multi-touch is going to be hard, though.
It might be fun to set up a DJ mixing rig this way. No turntables, just a flat surface, maybe with outlines of turntables and faders to guide navigation.