Actually, this is more like "Apple Complies with Electronic Waste Recycling Act of 2003". This has just become a big deal because, as of two weeks ago, you can't dispose of computers in the trash in California.
The big push behind this is because of the phaseout of CRTs. Until recently, the leaded glass in CRTs could be recycled into new CRTs, and there was some value in used monitors. Now nobody wants the things, and CRTs are being discarded at a huge rate. So keeping all that lead out of landfills is a real problem.
It's always amusing to post a story that reveals something negative about Apple and watch the Apple fanatics mod it down. It consistently takes about four hours.
As telephony moves to voice over IP, this will mean that phone calls, too, will be recorded.
This will be extremely useful in proving political corruption. Examining all calls between K Street, Capitol Hill, and the White House should provide enough information to put quite a number of politicians in jail.
Microsoft's "Home and Entertainment" business unit is a money drain. It's never made money. At some point, Microsoft may have to sell that business off and focus on their core business, business computing.
The stockholders are getting impatient. Microsoft stock has been flat for five years now. It's definitely not a growth company any more. Trying to grow into the entertainment sector has been a financial disaster. Microsoft is a high-margin company trying to grow in a low-margin area, and that almost never works.
Works compatibly on most browsers - IE, Firefox, Mozilla, and Safari represent the bulk of our traffic. Ideally a winning candidate works on these platforms, but also degrades nicely to the less popular browsers. We'll test winners against whatever we have access to. We're not expecting everyone's entry to work perfectly and identically on every platform that exists, but if your whole design hangs on CSS trickery that only works under 1 browser, you will lose!
Right. Not because we have to. But because we're l33t!.
Slashdot would work just great in HTML 3.2, after all.
The first idea in that direction was "Violet Ray", a chain of laundromats in the 1950s. Every washing machine had a UV lamp. There's still a Violet Ray laundromat running in Baltimore.
We have Angelina Jolie to thank for turning the video game movie genre around. Almost all the video game movies before "Tomb Raider" were horrible duds. ("Super Mario Brothers" was actually funny, but that's as good as it got. Few people could sit through all of "Wing Commander".) After "Tomb Raider", most video game movies were successful. It's as big a milestone in film as the first Batman movie, which demonstrated that you can make a good drama out of a comic book.
It speaks well of Jolie as an actress that she was able to bring off the role without it being a joke.
I've been trying my own papers and articles from Wikipedia. My own papers all score around 90%. Wikipedia articles that I consider good ones seem to score in the 80% range. Badly written fancruft scores very low.
Some variant on this thing might be useful as a new article filter in Wikipedia. We need more automation over there to stem the flow of incoming dreck.
Aeronautical engineering - the last civilian transport to be built in California, a Boeing 717, rolled out of the last factory last week. Of course there's NASA. Right.
Electrical engineering - all the volume manufacturing and most of the design is in China. Salaries are lower than 30 years ago, according to the IEEE.
Industrial engineering - as if manufacturing were a growth area in the US.
Mechanical engineering - in better shape than electrical.
Enviromental engineering - under the Bush Administration, who needs it?
Civil engineering - OK, if you like construction sites.
Petroleum engineering - all the work is in Outer Nowhere, or worse, a war zone.
Of the two best young computer scientists I know, one is running a hedge fund and the other is working for a derivatives firm in New York. The young Stanford students I talk to are going into finance, law or bio.
Xbox 360 prices on eBay settled down months ago to about $25-$50 above the retail price, or about breakeven for the reseller. So that's what it's worth. There were thousands of those things for sale on eBay for months, and there are still 801 for sale today.
The real losers in all this is are the retailers who tied up whole aisles at Xmas with unsaleable Xbox-related accessories based on Microsoft's promises. Microsoft will have more trouble getting shelf space in future.
What's needed is video surveillance of any place where a Catholic priest is alone with a child. There's a proven track record of molestation and coverups in that area. That might actually save some children.
Spam filtering technology is now working pretty well. That's what's driving this new "sender pays to bypass the filters" stuff. The spam filters don't care if there's some excuse under CAN-SPAM to let it through; they just recognize it as bulk mail selling something and delete it. Sellers hate that. Which is a good reason to keep the filters honest.
The real effect of CAN-SPAM has been that most spam either gets deleted by filters, or involves a felony by the sender. The remaining spammers are either selling drugs illegally, trying to manipulate the stock market, or running a scam. That's ordinary law enforcement work, and it's now routine to hear of spammer arrests and convictions. We used to just have ineffective civil suits. That's over. Now they're doing hard time. It's not a safe business to be in any more.
SpecialHam.com is still up, and the usual suspects are still at it: "Looking for people with botnets to run ads! pm me for more details". But it's clearly a board for the clueless now.
HVAC installation and repair. That's a popular career change in Silicon Valley. Somebody has to go there to install and fix the ductwork, the fans, the chillers, and the controls.
You know you can't just pick up some tool and press 10 buttons to get a game; that's what beginners want to do. 3D Game Construction Kit doesn't exist because the dynamics of a 3D game are so HUGE.
Except that Blender actually does have such a thing. You actually can build a game from scratch by pointing and clicking. It's not easy, but it's quite possible. Get the Blender Game Kit book with sample games and start from there. It's relatively easy to do something at the Marble Madness level, and a good driving game is possible.
Altamont Pass needs new windmills
on
Tilting At Windmills
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Altamont Pass was the first really big wind farm. It has 6000 windmills in successive rows, all in a relatively narrow pass. It really is something of a veg-e-matic for birds. It's tough for a bird to fly through that pass and avoid all those windmills, and because it's a mountain pass on a major bird migration route, the birds can't go around it. The Altamont Pass windmills are mostly in the 50KW to 100KW range.
The current generation of wind turbines are huge machines in the 1MW to 3MW range. They're up higher and more visible to birds, and there are fewer of them per unit area. The older turbines at Altamont are being replaced by bigger machines, which apparently kill fewer birds.
I can't take seriously a robotics award that mixes fictional and real robots.
Back when the Computer Museum was in Boston, there was a robot exhibit. And, up there on a platform, were most of the early famous robots. Shakey. The Hopkins Beast. The Stanford Arm. Those are real winners. Gort is a costume. This "award" is an embarassment to the field.
This is an old idea, and it's been tried before. I think it was first tried by Jerry Popek at UCLA in the 1980s, and it was tried in Mach.
The basic idea is to fake some memory to memory copying operations by using the virtual memory hardware. More specificially, the idea is that when you do a big "write", the space just written becomes read-only to the writing process, rather than being actually copied. When the write is complete, read-only mode is turned off. This eliminates one copy.
The trouble with this is that when you manipulate the page table to do that, you have to do some cache invalidation. That usually results in cache misses, which outweigh the cost of the copy. So this usually is a lose. Linus points out that it looks good on benchmarks, because benchmarks typically aren't using data for anything and thus don't experience the cache misses.
Actually, copying is a relatively cheap operation in modern CPUs unless the copy is huge, since most of the work is done in the caches. The mania for "zero copy" complicates systems considerably, makes them less reliable, and, in the end, usually doesn't speed up real work by much.
Some of this mania comes from Microsoft FUD. At one time, Microsoft was claiming that an "enterprise OS" must be able to serve web pages from inside the kernel. This led to more Linux interest in "zero copy" approaches to be "competitive".
And then Tiger uses two drivers in one game
on
Golf's Digital Divide
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· Score: 2, Insightful
A few days ago, Tiger Woods used two different drivers in one game. Golf equipment manufacturers are now salivating over the opportunity to sell every golfer on having two different drivers handy at all times.
Silicon Valley started to go downhill when executives started playing golf instead of raquetball and tennis.
RFID takes terrorism to the next level. The next step, of course, is the land mine that only blows up when someone from the US is near it.
And yes, some terrorist groups do have the capability to build custom electronics. You can see examples of IRA custom circuit boards in the Imperial War Museum, London.
You don't really want realistic physics in your combat games. You don't have enough control to use it. If game combat had real physics, game players would have to have real martial arts skills. "No, no, your lead knee must be slightly bent before you start that throw". "Yes, sensi". Few gamers put in the dojo time to get those skills. You can't express them through a game pad, anyway. (A DDR pad and full VR gear, maybe. But even then you lack physical feedback, which is about 5x faster than eye/hand coordination.) Then you need an AI good enough to do real martial arts, a tough problem in itself.
Just insisting that swords actually hit a vulnerable point with enough force to cause damage makes play too hard. Guns, yes; we can do guns.
(Basic problem of video games: players can shoot well and move adequately; little else can be done well through a game pad or keyboard.)
We know how to do much better game physics. What we're actually getting, though, is mediocre physics for everything in the environment. Which is all Ageia delivers; it's not better, you can just use it on more objects at the same time.
Question: If we had a first-person combat game that took two real joysticks to play, and considerable practice to learn, but let you do real martial arts, would you play it?
Slashdot Mirror
The big push behind this is because of the phaseout of CRTs. Until recently, the leaded glass in CRTs could be recycled into new CRTs, and there was some value in used monitors. Now nobody wants the things, and CRTs are being discarded at a huge rate. So keeping all that lead out of landfills is a real problem.
If you want to understand the legal issues, here's an article from the Yale Law Journal that covers the background.
It's always amusing to post a story that reveals something negative about Apple and watch the Apple fanatics mod it down. It consistently takes about four hours.
This will be extremely useful in proving political corruption. Examining all calls between K Street, Capitol Hill, and the White House should provide enough information to put quite a number of politicians in jail.
Apple's desktop market share is only 3.1%. That's lower than five years ago. Apple's "quest to desktop dominance" is not going anywhere.
The stockholders are getting impatient. Microsoft stock has been flat for five years now. It's definitely not a growth company any more. Trying to grow into the entertainment sector has been a financial disaster. Microsoft is a high-margin company trying to grow in a low-margin area, and that almost never works.
Right. Not because we have to. But because we're l33t!.
Slashdot would work just great in HTML 3.2, after all.
Here's a picture of Nokia's all-in-one product.
The first idea in that direction was "Violet Ray", a chain of laundromats in the 1950s. Every washing machine had a UV lamp. There's still a Violet Ray laundromat running in Baltimore.
It speaks well of Jolie as an actress that she was able to bring off the role without it being a joke.
Some variant on this thing might be useful as a new article filter in Wikipedia. We need more automation over there to stem the flow of incoming dreck.
Of the two best young computer scientists I know, one is running a hedge fund and the other is working for a derivatives firm in New York. The young Stanford students I talk to are going into finance, law or bio.
The real losers in all this is are the retailers who tied up whole aisles at Xmas with unsaleable Xbox-related accessories based on Microsoft's promises. Microsoft will have more trouble getting shelf space in future.
What's needed is video surveillance of any place where a Catholic priest is alone with a child. There's a proven track record of molestation and coverups in that area. That might actually save some children.
The real effect of CAN-SPAM has been that most spam either gets deleted by filters, or involves a felony by the sender. The remaining spammers are either selling drugs illegally, trying to manipulate the stock market, or running a scam. That's ordinary law enforcement work, and it's now routine to hear of spammer arrests and convictions. We used to just have ineffective civil suits. That's over. Now they're doing hard time. It's not a safe business to be in any more.
SpecialHam.com is still up, and the usual suspects are still at it: "Looking for people with botnets to run ads! pm me for more details". But it's clearly a board for the clueless now.
HVAC installation and repair. That's a popular career change in Silicon Valley. Somebody has to go there to install and fix the ductwork, the fans, the chillers, and the controls.
Now here's a good Flash animation. Try doing that with "Web 2.0".
Except that Blender actually does have such a thing. You actually can build a game from scratch by pointing and clicking. It's not easy, but it's quite possible. Get the Blender Game Kit book with sample games and start from there. It's relatively easy to do something at the Marble Madness level, and a good driving game is possible.
The current generation of wind turbines are huge machines in the 1MW to 3MW range. They're up higher and more visible to birds, and there are fewer of them per unit area. The older turbines at Altamont are being replaced by bigger machines, which apparently kill fewer birds.
But nobody is happy with the current arrangement.
Back when the Computer Museum was in Boston, there was a robot exhibit. And, up there on a platform, were most of the early famous robots. Shakey. The Hopkins Beast. The Stanford Arm. Those are real winners. Gort is a costume. This "award" is an embarassment to the field.
This eliminates one copy operation without changing the semantics of "write" as seen by the user.
This is distinct from copy-on-write when forking, a more common feature.
The basic idea is to fake some memory to memory copying operations by using the virtual memory hardware. More specificially, the idea is that when you do a big "write", the space just written becomes read-only to the writing process, rather than being actually copied. When the write is complete, read-only mode is turned off. This eliminates one copy.
The trouble with this is that when you manipulate the page table to do that, you have to do some cache invalidation. That usually results in cache misses, which outweigh the cost of the copy. So this usually is a lose. Linus points out that it looks good on benchmarks, because benchmarks typically aren't using data for anything and thus don't experience the cache misses.
Actually, copying is a relatively cheap operation in modern CPUs unless the copy is huge, since most of the work is done in the caches. The mania for "zero copy" complicates systems considerably, makes them less reliable, and, in the end, usually doesn't speed up real work by much.
Some of this mania comes from Microsoft FUD. At one time, Microsoft was claiming that an "enterprise OS" must be able to serve web pages from inside the kernel. This led to more Linux interest in "zero copy" approaches to be "competitive".
Silicon Valley started to go downhill when executives started playing golf instead of raquetball and tennis.
And yes, some terrorist groups do have the capability to build custom electronics. You can see examples of IRA custom circuit boards in the Imperial War Museum, London.
Just insisting that swords actually hit a vulnerable point with enough force to cause damage makes play too hard. Guns, yes; we can do guns. (Basic problem of video games: players can shoot well and move adequately; little else can be done well through a game pad or keyboard.)
We know how to do much better game physics. What we're actually getting, though, is mediocre physics for everything in the environment. Which is all Ageia delivers; it's not better, you can just use it on more objects at the same time.
Question: If we had a first-person combat game that took two real joysticks to play, and considerable practice to learn, but let you do real martial arts, would you play it?