Meanwhile, the average Slashdot user simply sees a grey box, red "X", broken link icon, or grey-and-white checkerboard, unaware of which link in the chain of tracking networks, ad servers, or regular expressions in his adblocking proxy prevented it from showing up.
Very true. I'm barely aware that the Web still has ads. I hear that Slashdot has ads, but I've never seen one.
Intel has a new x86 CPU coming out. It's basically an improved version of their last few CPUs, but because fabs have improved, they can fit more execution units in.
The wide "vector"-like instructions now have real 128 bit execution units.
There's a new branch prediction scheme for loop exit, which seems clever.
Hoisting of loads from an unknown address is now performed more speculatively than it used to be, at the cost of some complexity in the retirement unit.
The author of the article has no clue that the retirement unit is the hard part. That's where all the hard cases end up being unwound.
Is this one of those "we're not making money with it so we're going to GPL it and abandon it" deals, or is it real progress.
Eiffel is kind of dated. Even its successor, Sather, didn't catch on, even though Sather has been out under the GPL since 1999. There are some great ideas in there, but the language was a bit too clunky. It's kind of like Ada and Modula in that respect; the concepts are sound but the syntax is too bulky to become popular.
On the other hand, all the languages listed here protect against buffer overflows without requiring an interpretive run-time system.
The action in third world countries seems to be in adding features to cell phones, not trimming down PCs. A cell phone is inherently useful; you can make calls. Adding on extra features doesn't run the manufacturing cost up all that much. The niche Negroponte sees will probably be filled by some cell phone based product that looks like a Blackberry or a Game Boy or a Palm Pilot.
Despite all the hype from de Beers, diamonds are cheap. Look on eBay under "loose diamonds". Yes, you'll see big asking prices, but watch what prices auctions actually finish at, as people try to unload unwanted diamonds. The resale market for diamonds is incredibly weak.
This is really a reaction to retail counter clutter, an annoying problem to retailers. There's not just a cash register and maybe a scale. There's the point of sale terminal, the credit card terminal, the customer PIN pad, the money order terminal, the lottery terminal, the cell phone activation terminal, the value card recharging terminal... And then you have to train minimum wage people to run all this stuff.
Other countries have had the One Big ATM for some time, but the US has so many competing companies in the same fields that folding all this stuff into one unit hasn't happened. That's also why stored-value cards never really caught on in the USA - there are hundreds of different ones, all with limited utility. That's capitalism.
Then there's a security issue. Especially in the gambling industry, where companies are routinely, by contract, held financially responsible for their errors.
If law enforcement had had the power and technology in the 1960s they have today, the black and gay revolutions would have smashed flat before they even started.
They didn't even have SWAT teams back then. There were several critical occasions on which cops backed off in confrontations (the Black Panthers, Stonewall, big demonstrations). Today, they'd bring in SWAT, bring out the armored personnel carriers, use the rubber bullets, arrest everyone, identify them all, sort out the ringleaders, and over time, prosecute everyone involved.
My point on this is that some key components went from being expensive one-offs to commercial products in a year, because Grand Challenge entrants pushed on the vendors. That, for DARPA, was a big win. In a few years, the hardware side of automatic driving will be a total non-problem. That's a big help for researchers; you spend too much time on necessary but mundane stuff.
Most of the successful teams had significant numbers of paid employees. Stanford had about sixty people back at Volkswagen working on the hardware. CMU had a huge headcount; they had more than fifty people on site at the Speedway, including people on the payrolls of Lockheed, Caterpillar, and other vendors. Oshkosh Truck was all paid employees.
Didn't talk to the Grey Team much, but they were paid by some Insurance company.
The big breakthrough was Stanford's texture vision system. I was very impressed with that. Computer vision in unstructured environments has a terrible track record, yet they made it work. Everything else was basically integration of off the shelf gear.
One accomplishment not oftened mentioned is that, by year two, many of the components that weren't available in year one were available off the shelf. In year one, getting an integrated GPS/INS/compass/odometer system was very tough. Applanix had one that cost $70K, took up a 4U rack, and required air conditioning. (CMU used it.) By year two, you could get something comparable from any of three vendors for about $20-$30K, ruggedized and able to run on 12VDC. All the successful teams had one, usually from Trimble or Novatel. Once you have one of those, just staying on course is straightforward.
Then it's all about obstacle avoidance.
There's a much simpler solution from about thirty years ago. The patient is given polarized glasses with different polarization axes for each eye, and a matching screen with two polarizers to be placed in front of a TV. This turns TV viewing into an eye exercise. Cheap and simple.
I used to go to San Francisco art events with stuff like that.
I once went to an event where some guy was blasting away with a bunch of noise generators and effects boxes, in what was then called "power electronics" and is now called "noise music". Most of the audience left. I didn't quite want to leave the poor guy playing to an empty room, so I waited until a woman walked in, and told her "You're the audience. Take over". Then I walked out.
There's Spam Radio, where incoming spam goes through a text to speech converter.
Remember when Internet dating was cool? Now it's a bottom-feeder thing.
That may well happen to blithering your life story out on Myspace. Craiglist is already collapsing under the weight of spam.
The "hey, if we give it away, we'll get eyeballs and mind share" concept is very 1999.
There's only so much advertising revenue possible, since sellers have finite advertising budgets which are some fraction of their sales. An increase in one area means a decrease somewhere else. Or, more likely, lower advertising prices. Look what happened to banner ad pricing. And now Microsoft wants in. The only thing that makes this work is if the users are doing all the work and the infrastructure is cheap to run.
The eBay model and the Yahoo Store model work, because they're involved in the transaction and do some of the work of making it happen, in exchange for a cut. They have a real revenue model.
List of "terrorist" websites is mostly Palestinian
on
Al-Qaeda Hacker Caught
·
· Score: 1
If you actually look at the list of "terrorist" web sites that the author of the original article posted, it turns out that most of them are Palestinian or related to the Palestine-Israel conflict. There's a link to some group calling itself the Islamic Army of Iraq, but most of the rest are just Hamas or Hizballah web sites.
This site is really just PR for the Israeli side of that conflict. It's run by Rita Katz, "a graduate of the Middle Eastern Studies program at Tel Aviv University".
Most recently in Serenity (the docking clamp on Beaumonde and the final crash sequence both made the ship look far too light.)
Yes, and you can also see a helicopter bounce badly in Charley's Angels.
Interesting. So (speaking as a physics illiterate), what is it that's not being modelled by impulse-constraint engines? Compression?
Yes. If you do strict rigid-body physics, bounces take zero time. That's not realistic. There's always some compression. To look right, some compression needs to be simulated. Deforming the visual geometry is optional (we didn't do that in 1997, but one would today, since the GPU can do most of that work), but some degree of springyness in collision simulation is essential.
This is even more important when you try to simulate sliding contact.
Impulse-constraint sliding contact has fundamental problems, like static indeterminacy.
We used to sell a physics plug-in for Softimage, but figured that about twenty copies would service all of Hollywood. We sold about that many. That's not a viable business. Then Softimage tanked. (Microsoft sold them to Avid, which really wanted Softimage's 2D "Digital Studio" system to prevent them from underpricing Avid's 2D compositing market. Avid had no clue what to do with 3D, and eventually spun off the 3D operation. By then, Softimage's 3D line was no longer dominant in high-end animation.)
So we licensed the technology to a well-known middleware company. But then the PS2, with no double precision floating point, took over. Our approach requires double precision to correctly handle the huge forces that appear when heavy objects hit. So most game code has to use an impulse-constraint method, which works OK with 32-bit floats.
Financially, we did fine, but not many people are using our approach. Yet.
The web site tries to install executable code, in the form of a plug-in to Shockwave. Their own private plug-in, too, not one of Macromedia's. That's suspicious. They shouldn't need to do that for their little "test". It's a big plug-in, too. Even more suspicious.
I've seen a few sites lately trying to install code via Shockwave. Since everybody with a clue has Active-X turned off, this may be the new attack vector.
Here's their SEC filing.. Remember, lies here are felonies.
On August 18, 2005, the Company acquired D2Fusion Inc. ("D2Fusion"), as a wholly owned subsidiary in exchange for a five (5) year convertible debenture in the amount of two million dollars ($2,000,000) and an agreement to advance up to two million two hundred thousand ($2,200,000) in the form of loans over the next twelve (12) months to capitalize D2Fusion' initial business plan. The stock purchase agreement further commits the Company to assist D2Fusion to have direct access to public markets within the next six (6) months for the purpose of raising additional funds in excess of those committed by the Company.
D2Fusion is a research and development company staffed by scientists and engineers working toward the delivery of proprietary solid-state fusion aimed at entry level heat and energy applications for homes and industry. Solid-state fusion is a technology more widely recognized under the name "cold-fusion." Unlike the reactions in "cold-fusion," D2Fusion technology uses much simpler and more reliable solid state processes more akin to high temperature super-conductor physics to produce and control radiation-free fusion reactions. In this simplest form of fusion two deterium atoms which are contained and constrained under solid state conditions fuse to form a single helium atom. Each new helium atom created is accompanied by an enormous energy release. Under ideal conditions, one gram of hydrogen fuel is equivalent to billions of watts of energy. Russ George and Dr. Tom Passell, who head the Palo Alto based company, have been involved with solid state fusion research since 1989. Successful experimental prototypes have been tested at Stanford Research Institute. The immediate intention of D2Fusion is to produce kilowatt scale thermal prototypes which will be further tested and refined by collaborating research groups in the Silicon Valley, Los Alamos, the US Navy, and Frascati, Italy. D2Fusion's ultimate goal is to produce heat and electricity at a fraction of today's cost with no emissions. The Company is well aware of the controversy surrounding "cold fusion" technology. However, the Company believes that there is sufficient global evidence that the risk/reward ratio merits investment. Should D2Fusion's prototype technology be scaled to commercial size it will help solve much of the world's energy, water, and pollution problems.
That "successful experimental prototypes have been tested at Stanford Research Institute" line looks very suspicious. For one thing, there is no "Stanford Research Institute" today. It's been "SRI International" since 1970.
Also object weights tended to be too light IMO. I really felt that objects' fall rates and throw trajectories reflected not enough weight.
If motion in free flight looks wrong, that's probably intentional.
But if big objects bounce as if they're very light, that's a fundamental limitation of impulse-constraint physics engines. All bounces occur instantaneously in such systems. (That's what an "impulse" means; an infinite force applied for zero time with finite energy, leading to an instantaneous change in velocity.) So big objects don't appear to have "weight".
We call this the "boink" problem.
We solved that problem in 1996-1997, but it takes more compute power to do it right, so most physics engines take the cheap approach. This is the main reason physics in games consistently looks unrealistic.
When our ragdolls fall down, it looks like they're hurting. (Then again, do you want that level of realism in death scenes?)
Remember There?. The original concept of There was a seamless planet-sized world where you could play. Technically, that was achieved. But it turned out not to be much fun.
"There" does, though, try to have areas with different styles. A "Renaissance Faire" is going on right now. So at least one system mixes styles. Not too well; you can buy a "chain mail dune buggy" and drive it to the Renaissance Faire.
"There" had business model problems. At one point, the big thing was buying real-world designer brand clothing for your avatar. With real money. That wasn't a big success. The company has been resold twice.
For a while, it was owned by Foreterra Systems, which used the technology to build military training sims.
I was briefly involved with There in its early days. I tried to convince them that it should be broadband only, but they were hypnotized by dreams of being "the next AOL", back when AOL was a leading dialup provider, and insisted that There work over dialup. As a result, it's a rather low-rez environment.
Right. So Google isn't "replacing Burlington Resources", A slot opened up because Burlington Resources was acquired. It's not like Burlington Industries dropped from 500th place to 501st place.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, maybe college Freshman English. No justification, all opinion.
What happened after they sold out to Harman International?
Very true. I'm barely aware that the Web still has ads. I hear that Slashdot has ads, but I've never seen one.
That's what's in there.
Eiffel is kind of dated. Even its successor, Sather, didn't catch on, even though Sather has been out under the GPL since 1999. There are some great ideas in there, but the language was a bit too clunky. It's kind of like Ada and Modula in that respect; the concepts are sound but the syntax is too bulky to become popular.
On the other hand, all the languages listed here protect against buffer overflows without requiring an interpretive run-time system.
But you don't have to wind the crank as often.
And the investigation just started.
The action in third world countries seems to be in adding features to cell phones, not trimming down PCs. A cell phone is inherently useful; you can make calls. Adding on extra features doesn't run the manufacturing cost up all that much. The niche Negroponte sees will probably be filled by some cell phone based product that looks like a Blackberry or a Game Boy or a Palm Pilot.
Despite all the hype from de Beers, diamonds are cheap. Look on eBay under "loose diamonds". Yes, you'll see big asking prices, but watch what prices auctions actually finish at, as people try to unload unwanted diamonds. The resale market for diamonds is incredibly weak.
Other countries have had the One Big ATM for some time, but the US has so many competing companies in the same fields that folding all this stuff into one unit hasn't happened. That's also why stored-value cards never really caught on in the USA - there are hundreds of different ones, all with limited utility. That's capitalism.
Then there's a security issue. Especially in the gambling industry, where companies are routinely, by contract, held financially responsible for their errors.
They didn't even have SWAT teams back then. There were several critical occasions on which cops backed off in confrontations (the Black Panthers, Stonewall, big demonstrations). Today, they'd bring in SWAT, bring out the armored personnel carriers, use the rubber bullets, arrest everyone, identify them all, sort out the ringleaders, and over time, prosecute everyone involved.
My point on this is that some key components went from being expensive one-offs to commercial products in a year, because Grand Challenge entrants pushed on the vendors. That, for DARPA, was a big win. In a few years, the hardware side of automatic driving will be a total non-problem. That's a big help for researchers; you spend too much time on necessary but mundane stuff.
The big breakthrough was Stanford's texture vision system. I was very impressed with that. Computer vision in unstructured environments has a terrible track record, yet they made it work. Everything else was basically integration of off the shelf gear.
One accomplishment not oftened mentioned is that, by year two, many of the components that weren't available in year one were available off the shelf. In year one, getting an integrated GPS/INS/compass/odometer system was very tough. Applanix had one that cost $70K, took up a 4U rack, and required air conditioning. (CMU used it.) By year two, you could get something comparable from any of three vendors for about $20-$30K, ruggedized and able to run on 12VDC. All the successful teams had one, usually from Trimble or Novatel. Once you have one of those, just staying on course is straightforward. Then it's all about obstacle avoidance.
There's a much simpler solution from about thirty years ago. The patient is given polarized glasses with different polarization axes for each eye, and a matching screen with two polarizers to be placed in front of a TV. This turns TV viewing into an eye exercise. Cheap and simple.
I once went to an event where some guy was blasting away with a bunch of noise generators and effects boxes, in what was then called "power electronics" and is now called "noise music". Most of the audience left. I didn't quite want to leave the poor guy playing to an empty room, so I waited until a woman walked in, and told her "You're the audience. Take over". Then I walked out.
There's Spam Radio, where incoming spam goes through a text to speech converter.
The copier may be trying to raise his karma. See his posting history.
Look who posted this. Sigh. He's just trying to drive traffic to his blog again.
The "hey, if we give it away, we'll get eyeballs and mind share" concept is very 1999. There's only so much advertising revenue possible, since sellers have finite advertising budgets which are some fraction of their sales. An increase in one area means a decrease somewhere else. Or, more likely, lower advertising prices. Look what happened to banner ad pricing. And now Microsoft wants in. The only thing that makes this work is if the users are doing all the work and the infrastructure is cheap to run.
The eBay model and the Yahoo Store model work, because they're involved in the transaction and do some of the work of making it happen, in exchange for a cut. They have a real revenue model.
This site is really just PR for the Israeli side of that conflict. It's run by Rita Katz, "a graduate of the Middle Eastern Studies program at Tel Aviv University".
Yes, and you can also see a helicopter bounce badly in Charley's Angels.
Interesting. So (speaking as a physics illiterate), what is it that's not being modelled by impulse-constraint engines? Compression?
Yes. If you do strict rigid-body physics, bounces take zero time. That's not realistic. There's always some compression. To look right, some compression needs to be simulated. Deforming the visual geometry is optional (we didn't do that in 1997, but one would today, since the GPU can do most of that work), but some degree of springyness in collision simulation is essential.
This is even more important when you try to simulate sliding contact. Impulse-constraint sliding contact has fundamental problems, like static indeterminacy.
We used to sell a physics plug-in for Softimage, but figured that about twenty copies would service all of Hollywood. We sold about that many. That's not a viable business. Then Softimage tanked. (Microsoft sold them to Avid, which really wanted Softimage's 2D "Digital Studio" system to prevent them from underpricing Avid's 2D compositing market. Avid had no clue what to do with 3D, and eventually spun off the 3D operation. By then, Softimage's 3D line was no longer dominant in high-end animation.)
So we licensed the technology to a well-known middleware company. But then the PS2, with no double precision floating point, took over. Our approach requires double precision to correctly handle the huge forces that appear when heavy objects hit. So most game code has to use an impulse-constraint method, which works OK with 32-bit floats.
Financially, we did fine, but not many people are using our approach. Yet.
I've seen a few sites lately trying to install code via Shockwave. Since everybody with a clue has Active-X turned off, this may be the new attack vector.
On August 18, 2005, the Company acquired D2Fusion Inc. ("D2Fusion"), as a wholly owned subsidiary in exchange for a five (5) year convertible debenture in the amount of two million dollars ($2,000,000) and an agreement to advance up to two million two hundred thousand ($2,200,000) in the form of loans over the next twelve (12) months to capitalize D2Fusion' initial business plan. The stock purchase agreement further commits the Company to assist D2Fusion to have direct access to public markets within the next six (6) months for the purpose of raising additional funds in excess of those committed by the Company. D2Fusion is a research and development company staffed by scientists and engineers working toward the delivery of proprietary solid-state fusion aimed at entry level heat and energy applications for homes and industry. Solid-state fusion is a technology more widely recognized under the name "cold-fusion." Unlike the reactions in "cold-fusion," D2Fusion technology uses much simpler and more reliable solid state processes more akin to high temperature super-conductor physics to produce and control radiation-free fusion reactions. In this simplest form of fusion two deterium atoms which are contained and constrained under solid state conditions fuse to form a single helium atom. Each new helium atom created is accompanied by an enormous energy release. Under ideal conditions, one gram of hydrogen fuel is equivalent to billions of watts of energy. Russ George and Dr. Tom Passell, who head the Palo Alto based company, have been involved with solid state fusion research since 1989. Successful experimental prototypes have been tested at Stanford Research Institute. The immediate intention of D2Fusion is to produce kilowatt scale thermal prototypes which will be further tested and refined by collaborating research groups in the Silicon Valley, Los Alamos, the US Navy, and Frascati, Italy. D2Fusion's ultimate goal is to produce heat and electricity at a fraction of today's cost with no emissions. The Company is well aware of the controversy surrounding "cold fusion" technology. However, the Company believes that there is sufficient global evidence that the risk/reward ratio merits investment. Should D2Fusion's prototype technology be scaled to commercial size it will help solve much of the world's energy, water, and pollution problems.
That "successful experimental prototypes have been tested at Stanford Research Institute" line looks very suspicious. For one thing, there is no "Stanford Research Institute" today. It's been "SRI International" since 1970.
If motion in free flight looks wrong, that's probably intentional.
But if big objects bounce as if they're very light, that's a fundamental limitation of impulse-constraint physics engines. All bounces occur instantaneously in such systems. (That's what an "impulse" means; an infinite force applied for zero time with finite energy, leading to an instantaneous change in velocity.) So big objects don't appear to have "weight". We call this the "boink" problem.
We solved that problem in 1996-1997, but it takes more compute power to do it right, so most physics engines take the cheap approach. This is the main reason physics in games consistently looks unrealistic.
When our ragdolls fall down, it looks like they're hurting. (Then again, do you want that level of realism in death scenes?)
"There" had business model problems. At one point, the big thing was buying real-world designer brand clothing for your avatar. With real money. That wasn't a big success. The company has been resold twice. For a while, it was owned by Foreterra Systems, which used the technology to build military training sims.
I was briefly involved with There in its early days. I tried to convince them that it should be broadband only, but they were hypnotized by dreams of being "the next AOL", back when AOL was a leading dialup provider, and insisted that There work over dialup. As a result, it's a rather low-rez environment.
Right. So Google isn't "replacing Burlington Resources", A slot opened up because Burlington Resources was acquired. It's not like Burlington Industries dropped from 500th place to 501st place.