I've got a GP2X and I have just started developing with it. It's a nice piece of kit. The hardware is pretty nice and the software coming out of the GP2X community is amazing. But I'd caution anyone who was thinking of buying it. It is not a PSP or a DS. It will never have super-fancy commercial titles released for it.
If you are a gamer, buy a DS or a PSP. You'll get better games and have more fun. If you want to program games/apps for an embedded system, buy a GP2X. We have good down-to-earth programmers who write games/apps for the love of it, and not because they think they'll "break in" to the games industry. You can test out new games ideas, port currently existing games and apps or write your own. It's very fun, but it isn't for everybody.
So if you are thinking of buying a GP2X, please consider if you really want it. It's a great machine but it's not for everybody. You might be better off with a DS or a PSP.
If you have 5 notepad windows open, click number 1, then 5, then close 5 - you expect number 1 to be below it.
No, I don't. Eclipse does this too and I find it incredibly annoying. If I'm flipping through a few dozen different tabs I won't remember what the previous tab was. When I close the tab and it goes to the previous one it is basically doing something that from my perspective is non-deterministic.
Call me old fashioned but I prefer the straight-forward tab closing of Firefox to the non-deterministic tab closing of Opera.
Lucene is a pretty amazing piece of software. Lucene is to text indexing what postgres is to relational databases. The API is simple, and though many people have reservations about java it is very, very fast. I've written lucene apps that could perform queries in 40-60ms that would take a relational database up to 20 minutes to perform on the same hardware. I've found it to be even a few orders of magnitude faster than Oracle text indexing.
And you can index pretty much anything you want, so long as you can get it into a string. Everyone knows you can index documents in XML, HTML, etc, but you can also index objects with strings, integers and dates, hash tables and lists. Just put a primary key value and a table name and you can retrieve the full object from your database. Very cool indeed.
Every programmer out there with skills in relational databases should take a look at a information retrieval library like lucene. It's a completely different field from relational databases and it will change how you think about storing and searching data. It's not a replacement for relational databases, but it does complement them very well and allows you to do things that you wouldn't normally be able to do, like allowing for results that partially match the search query, and being able to rank them by relevance.
I've found that python works really well as a beginning language. Python (and many other interpreted languages) let you write fully functional programs with very few programming concepts. It's really easy to introduce one concept at a time, focus on it, and then use that to introduce the next.
You can start small by using the interpreter as a calculator, then move the caculations to a script and executing that. After a while you can gradually introduce variables, comments, functions and modules. After that, you could introduce the standard library and show how to print the contents of a file or download a web page. Or you could introduce the OO concepts of classes, encapsulation, polymorphism and inheritance. It's really up to you and how well your students are going.
Advanced students should also be able to create simple GUI or command line interfaces. Python has a great base class for command line programs that takes away most of the tedious parts. It also has some simple and easy database modules if you want to teach relational databases and SQL as well as programming.
But don't forget that the most important thing to do is to teach them how to teach themselves. Show how to look through the standard library for something new, or how to find and install new modules from the net.
When everyone has become comfortable with the language (and if you have the time) you can introduce a similar language for contrast. I've found that people who have experience with a wider variety of languages tend to be able to "grok" programs a bit easier than those who haven't.
I think HP applied for the patent just to say that they have a patent. It's actually a pretty smart tactic, in a way. I'll express it in a format that slashdotters are familiar with.
1. Obtain useless patent. 2. Give patent some arbitrary value (say $125,000). 3. Add $125,000 to company assets under "Intangibles". 4. Profit!
The bottom line increases though in reality nothing has changed.
Couldn't the game itself be considered a law unto itself?
Look at it this way, the game was created by code, a set of rules, which defines what can and cannot be done. When you play the game you are saying that you wish to obey these rules. You are saying that you want to play a character that can beat or be beaten by other players or NPCs. It's kind of like a contract between you and the game company.
Then if your character has it's loot stolen it's not their fault. You decided to play a game which has rules for crime. You agreed to play a game where this could happen, and so it's your own fault for getting so emotionally attached.
If you and your family were to become say, stick figures, then you could store the pictures with a lossless vector format. The file size wouldn't even be smaller than with jpegs, and you will have no problems with pixellation!
What is it with this world, people haven't even heard of rechargable batteries!
There are some good reasons why devices still use alkaline batteries instead of rechargable:
Are you saying that alkaline and rechargable batteries have a different form factor? They don't. There are rechargable versions of all the common sizes (AA, AAA, etc.)
- It's cheaper. Making the user buy AAA cells is cheaper than an expensive built-in rechargable. Be angry if you want, but the same shoppers that gripe are the ones that will pick the AAA model because it's $10 cheaper.:)
That doesn't mean the AAA cell has to be alkaline. You can use rechargable AAAs.
- Charger required. more $$$, bigger packaging, more travelling weight, country-specific voltage, UL Listing, the works.
I don't know about you but I've been using rechargable AAAs for my palm and I haven't had a problem with the packaging, and having a recharger means I can also recharge AAs so I don't have to buy a new pack every week.
- Alkalines last longer (per charge) than rechargables. On a device may go weeks without seeing a charger, this counts.
It barely matters. You can get two rechargable AAAs with 700mAh per charge each. I don't even know what the alkaline AAAs do nowadays because they don't want to show how crappy their batteries actually are against rechargables. On a palm this means that you have to change the batteries about a day earlier, big deal - you save money after the second charge!
- Rechargable cells die. What do you do with a PalmV that no longer charges well? LiIon cells only last a year or two before they start to degrade quickly.
You buy another pair of rechargable AAAs. LiIon may only last a year, but NiMH AAAs last by the recharge (around 1000). How long do you think that would last you?
I'm not saying that these are valid reasons to require disposable batteries, but these are factors that manufacturers look at in deciding which way to go.
AAA DOES NOT MEAN ALKALINE! Go to your local hardware store and buy some rechargable AAAs. They work, they save you money and help stop the flood of disposable batteries.
In fact this is what I do now. I don't have the proper hardware to directly rip cds, so I record off of my playstation. The sound path is playstation -> vcr -> stereo -> SB PCI 64. If have never noticed any loss in quality so far, and if you are using lossy compression you really should be worrying about a few extra dB background noise when you are generating artifacts all over the place anyway.
All you need is something like gnoise (sourceforge.net) to split the tracks and a bash script for encoding and you are set. Recording is in real time, but you can record whilst splitting and encoding other cds at the same time. If you really want you can put all the info into a script and have it automatically record, split and encode music.
The cool thing about this setup though is that you can the record anything audible - cds, television, radio, etc. May not be that useful in the U.S. but here in Australia we have some really good live radio. In fact, I am recording tonights Gatecrasher in Sydney which is 8 hours long. Can you do that with a cd ripper?
It seems that most of your time and effort will be going into graphics and real-time crap. Have you considered writing a roguelike? For an example, see ADOM. Roguelikes don't have fancy graphics, all calculations and algorithms are very cool and the focus can be a lot more on design than graphics.
Robber: Out of my way you little robot. Marvin: I'm afraid I have been left here to stop you. Robber: You? Stop me? Go on. Marvin: No, really I have. Robber: What are you armed with? Marvin: Guess Robber: Guess? Marvin: Yes, go on, you'll never guess. Robber: Errmm... laser beam? Marvin: No Robber: No, too obvious I suppose. Anti-matter ray? Marvin: Far too obvious Robber: Yes... Er... how about an electron ram? Marvin: No, not one of those Robber: I know, you must have one of those new Xanthic Re-Struction Destabilised Zenon Emitters. Marvin: Nice, aren't they? Robber: That what you got? Marvin: No. ...
I've never been able to understand how it is that anyone would WANT censorship of anything.
Well I do. I cannot stand advertisements. Every time I hear a football stadium named after a huge corporation, every time I saw an ad for a local business in my high school, everytime I hear any PR fluff (be it Windows, Linux, whatever) I just want them to SHUT THE HELL UP! If I want to buy a car from you I'll find you, if I want to look at your product I want FACTS. If censorship removed all the PR crap from this world then believe me there wont be many people piping up for their right to spew their crap on the rest of the world.
First of all, illegal in US != illegal everywhere else. Secondly, why would a person care if DeCSS is illegal if they are distributing music illegally anyway?
Some of our code has already been optimised to use the SSE instruction extensions of the Intel Pentium III processors, so we were initially baised in this direction. We looked at using the PowerPC G4 processor and determined (with tests performed by Paul Mackerras of Linuxcare) that a 350Mhz G4 can attain 1.6GFLOPS in single-precision using the Altivec instruction extensions making this a very attractive alternative, however the cost of these machines at the time made them less attractive.
We were also looked keenly at the AMD Athlon processor with the 3DNow instruction extensions, but could not get these with a dual-CPU motherboard at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a GP2X and I have just started developing with it. It's a nice piece of kit. The hardware is pretty nice and the software coming out of the GP2X community is amazing. But I'd caution anyone who was thinking of buying it. It is not a PSP or a DS. It will never have super-fancy commercial titles released for it.
If you are a gamer, buy a DS or a PSP. You'll get better games and have more fun. If you want to program games/apps for an embedded system, buy a GP2X. We have good down-to-earth programmers who write games/apps for the love of it, and not because they think they'll "break in" to the games industry. You can test out new games ideas, port currently existing games and apps or write your own. It's very fun, but it isn't for everybody.
So if you are thinking of buying a GP2X, please consider if you really want it. It's a great machine but it's not for everybody. You might be better off with a DS or a PSP.
Just think of the performance increase from putting the page file into RAM!
Lucene is a pretty amazing piece of software. Lucene is to text indexing what postgres is to relational databases. The API is simple, and though many people have reservations about java it is very, very fast. I've written lucene apps that could perform queries in 40-60ms that would take a relational database up to 20 minutes to perform on the same hardware. I've found it to be even a few orders of magnitude faster than Oracle text indexing.
And you can index pretty much anything you want, so long as you can get it into a string. Everyone knows you can index documents in XML, HTML, etc, but you can also index objects with strings, integers and dates, hash tables and lists. Just put a primary key value and a table name and you can retrieve the full object from your database. Very cool indeed.
Every programmer out there with skills in relational databases should take a look at a information retrieval library like lucene. It's a completely different field from relational databases and it will change how you think about storing and searching data. It's not a replacement for relational databases, but it does complement them very well and allows you to do things that you wouldn't normally be able to do, like allowing for results that partially match the search query, and being able to rank them by relevance.
I've found that python works really well as a beginning language. Python (and many other interpreted languages) let you write fully functional programs with very few programming concepts. It's really easy to introduce one concept at a time, focus on it, and then use that to introduce the next.
You can start small by using the interpreter as a calculator, then move the caculations to a script and executing that. After a while you can gradually introduce variables, comments, functions and modules. After that, you could introduce the standard library and show how to print the contents of a file or download a web page. Or you could introduce the OO concepts of classes, encapsulation, polymorphism and inheritance. It's really up to you and how well your students are going.
Advanced students should also be able to create simple GUI or command line interfaces. Python has a great base class for command line programs that takes away most of the tedious parts. It also has some simple and easy database modules if you want to teach relational databases and SQL as well as programming.
But don't forget that the most important thing to do is to teach them how to teach themselves. Show how to look through the standard library for something new, or how to find and install new modules from the net.
When everyone has become comfortable with the language (and if you have the time) you can introduce a similar language for contrast. I've found that people who have experience with a wider variety of languages tend to be able to "grok" programs a bit easier than those who haven't.
Actually, slashdot is at number 35.
Password Gorilla is also a very good Password Safe compatible client that runs on Windows, OS X and Linux.
I think HP applied for the patent just to say that they have a patent. It's actually a pretty smart tactic, in a way. I'll express it in a format that slashdotters are familiar with.
1. Obtain useless patent.
2. Give patent some arbitrary value (say $125,000).
3. Add $125,000 to company assets under "Intangibles".
4. Profit!
The bottom line increases though in reality nothing has changed.
I think you may be in for a bit of a surprise.
Couldn't the game itself be considered a law unto itself?
Look at it this way, the game was created by code, a set of rules, which defines what can and cannot be done. When you play the game you are saying that you wish to obey these rules. You are saying that you want to play a character that can beat or be beaten by other players or NPCs. It's kind of like a contract between you and the game company.
Then if your character has it's loot stolen it's not their fault. You decided to play a game which has rules for crime. You agreed to play a game where this could happen, and so it's your own fault for getting so emotionally attached.
Verbalizing Weirds Language -- Calvin
but you need a copy of subversion to do it!
a single one of these!!!!
If you and your family were to become say, stick figures, then you could store the pictures with a lossless vector format. The file size wouldn't even be smaller than with jpegs, and you will have no problems with pixellation!
plz do my market reserch 4 me. thanx!
In fact this is what I do now. I don't have the proper hardware to directly rip cds, so I record off of my playstation. The sound path is playstation -> vcr -> stereo -> SB PCI 64. If have never noticed any loss in quality so far, and if you are using lossy compression you really should be worrying about a few extra dB background noise when you are generating artifacts all over the place anyway.
All you need is something like gnoise (sourceforge.net) to split the tracks and a bash script for encoding and you are set. Recording is in real time, but you can record whilst splitting and encoding other cds at the same time. If you really want you can put all the info into a script and have it automatically record, split and encode music.
The cool thing about this setup though is that you can the record anything audible - cds, television, radio, etc. May not be that useful in the U.S. but here in Australia we have some really good live radio. In fact, I am recording tonights Gatecrasher in Sydney which is 8 hours long. Can you do that with a cd ripper?
That's absolute bull. What's the difference between 10ms at 10% cpu load and 10ms at 20% cpu load
?
I sure hope you're also this guy.
It seems that most of your time and effort will be going into graphics and real-time crap. Have you considered writing a roguelike? For an example, see ADOM. Roguelikes don't have fancy graphics, all calculations and algorithms are very cool and the focus can be a lot more on design than graphics.
Marvin: I'm afraid I have been left here to stop you.
Robber: You? Stop me? Go on.
Marvin: No, really I have.
Robber: What are you armed with?
Marvin: Guess
Robber: Guess?
Marvin: Yes, go on, you'll never guess.
Robber: Errmm... laser beam?
Marvin: No
Robber: No, too obvious I suppose. Anti-matter ray?
Marvin: Far too obvious
Robber: Yes... Er... how about an electron ram?
Marvin: No, not one of those
Robber: I know, you must have one of those new Xanthic Re-Struction Destabilised Zenon Emitters.
Marvin: Nice, aren't they?
Robber: That what you got?
Marvin: No.
...
And so on until the police arrive.
Credit to Douglas Adams.
I am sure I could replicate the exact same effect by applying sandpaper to my genitals.
First of all, illegal in US != illegal everywhere else.
Secondly, why would a person care if DeCSS is illegal if they are distributing music illegally anyway?
Well, from the Bunyip FAQ:
Why did we choose Intel Pentium III processors?
Some of our code has already been optimised to use the SSE instruction extensions of the Intel Pentium III processors, so we were initially baised in this direction. We looked at using the PowerPC G4 processor and determined (with tests performed by Paul Mackerras of Linuxcare) that a 350Mhz G4 can attain 1.6GFLOPS in single-precision using the Altivec instruction extensions making this a very attractive alternative, however the cost of these machines at the time made them less attractive.
We were also looked keenly at the AMD Athlon processor with the 3DNow instruction extensions, but could not get these with a dual-CPU motherboard at the time.