"Efficiency" is the wrong term. You should be thinking in terms of absolute energy amounts. Which one gets you more power: 10W of input harnessed at 90% efficiency, or 100W of input harnessed at 10% efficiency?
Yes, there are parasitic losses. IIRC, solar panels themselves are slightly less efficient in space (but I wasn't able to quickly track down a reference), and then you have beam and collector losses. The gain is that you automatically get almost double the energy from not being in the Earth's shadow for roughly 12 out of 24 hours, then add in energy otherwise absorbed or reflected by the atmosphere.
This. During the first stage, people come up with all sorts of ideas and start putting them together. If management asks when it will be done, they reply "when it's finished". That answer is fine at that point.
But if you've gotten to the second stage and you're still saying that, something is wrong. If your people are sufficiently creative, they'll be coming up with more ideas than they possibly have time to implement. You need to pick the features that are really necessary and concentrate on those.
You can see this in pretty much any software project, not just games. If you look at Parrot's development cycle, you'll see a long time when developers are coming up new ideas, getting them half-implemented, and then thinking of something else and repeating the cycle. When they finally decided on a short list of things they needed to get done for a full release (in late 2008), version 1.0 was done within a few months.
IIRC, the "paid add on" idea has been more or less dropped because people hated it. I'm sure there will still be downloadable content, but that's not a big deal if the shrink-wrapped game is reasonably complete.
It ain't my job to Google you up your own argument.
What you have there are a few links about people being prosecuted for stealing Wi-Fi (not for providing WiFi where someone did something illegal), an opinion piece, a paper in a law journal speculating about liability for wireless networks in general, and a two year old bill in the House that never went to the Senate (and which is so broad that the Supreme Court would probably kill it with fire).
In fact, the peer-reviewed article doesn't help your point at all:
As
demonstrated in the A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc decision,
which involved vicarious copyright infringement liability of a peer-to-
peer network provider, courts limit such liability to cases where the
peer-to-peer network has "the right and ability to supervise the
infringing activity and also has a direct financial interest in such
activities." Regarding the right and ability to supervise, home-based
WAPs typically do not come packaged with monitoring mechanisms
that would facilitate the tracking of potentially infringing activity
(assuming operators have a right to supervise such activity). In
addition, although WAPs typically feature technology that allows the
operator to block certain users, these types of functions usually require the operator to implement security options that the average
user would probably avoid due to complexity and lack of
automation. Regarding direct financial interest, given that those
who deploy Wi-Fi residentially do so primarily to make the Internet
more accessible within their own homes, it seems unlikely that home-
based WAP operators would have any financial interest in infringing
activities. Commercial HotSpot operators may have some indirect
financial interest to the extent that infringing users may run up more
access fees in their attempts to download infringing media files. Still,
prevailing reluctance to impose responsibility on ISPs for harmful
conduct committed by end users would probably protect these parties
from contributory liability in this context.
It also mentions that you might violate your ISP's ToS by opening your WiFi, and that this may have legal penalties in some states (not mine, AFAIK, and I go out of my way to avoid that sort of ToS, anyway). But I guess making sure your links actually support your point was too much.
None of what you gave argues against my main point: that it's very unlikely that you'll actually be prosecuted for someone else doing something over your open WiFi connection, and this tiny risk is not worth the costs. Bruce Schneier agrees with this risk assessment.
The risk assessment works out something like this:
There are a whole lot of open (or easily broken) WiFi connections, and some handful of people who want to use them without permission.
Of the people who do, most will just want to check their email/facebook/whatever.
Of the portion who will actually do something illegal, most will be downloading movies or music.
The RIAA/MPAA doesn't have enough lawyers to prosecute even 1% of these people, so it's unlikely you'll be caught in the crossfire
A tiny percentage will then do something dangerously illegal, like child porn.
The last one get's all the headlines, but that's precisely because it's so rare. The consequences may be large, but the chances of that actually happening are minuscule.
If you can provide an actual argument against that, then I'm happy to read it. Preferably in the form of an actual decision against an open WiFi operator for something an uninvited user did. If you can't find such a case, that in itself is evidence that the risk assessment above is correct.
I didn't want to be awake for getting my wisdom teeth taken out. Why would you? So you can learn about recent movements in your doctor's mutual fund account?
Your chances of actually getting caught are not that great. You're a needle in a haystack. It get's better if everyone is doing it--then you're a needle in a stack of needles. Why should they seek you out when there are so many other choices?
Encryption is not worth the inconvenience, incompatibility with certain hardware, and loss of throughput just to defend against random miscreants.
This. For a local wireless network, what exactly are you worried about? People driving by and using a bit of free access to check email is no big deal. Even if they're making mischief trying to frame random people for child porn, it's unlikely they'll hit you up when they have to be physically near your place to pull it off. It's not like general perimeter security, where you have to be worried about automated scripts even if nobody is directly targeting you.
If somebody is really abusing your bandwidth, then handle that on a case-by-case basis. Otherwise, WEP/WPA just cuts into your local throughput and makes it inconvenient for guests to connect.
Jupiter will be low in the southwest (in the Northern Hemisphere) after sunset this evening — nothing else around it is as bright, so you can't miss it.
I can miss it, because I'm living in the middle of a snow storm. Insensitive clod, etc.
Cell phones are not actually known to cause any health problems by any valid study . . .
Not quite right, but this fact shouldn't be abused by those claiming a health risk. If something is sufficiently studied, then there will always be outlier studies that got everything right but show the opposite results all the others. There are, in fact, a few well-run studies that show a correlation between health risks and cell phones, but these can be simply discounted against the overwhelming number of studies against.
Taking a purely practical bent, you can get pretty far without Calculus. We're talking about enough knowledge to understand the statistics you commonly encounter in news articles, or to analyze the probability in dice and card games.
For instance, take a look at the Soccer Power Index Nate Silver made for ESPN. The math there is very simple, but it's derived from careful observations to figure out which of the available statistics give you the best predictive power.
Yes, that's entirely possible if it's programmed so that you fall x meters for each frame rendered. What should be done is to say you fall x meters per second, taking into account how long it's been since you last calculated the value.
(I'm simplifying the effect of acceleration above--many games could get along without it and produce a decent result, though it's not hard to factor in if you want.)
It ultimately depends on the kinds of problems you're going to end up working on. Any sort of graphics programming is going to require a solid understanding of geometry. Designing games requires probability/statistics, where the actual math could often be understood by a bright junior high student, but gets combined in complicated ways.
Calculus is overrated for anyone not going into Physics or Engineering. I wish schools would put more emphasis on statistics instead, since that's useful for anyone who picks up a news report and sees that there's a 2% spread of support for a pair of political candidates.
More importantly than any of that, IMHO, is being able to see how the program fits together on an abstract level. This can be described as a form of math, but it's well outside of what most people think of as math. Which is fine, because what most people think of as math has nothing to do with what mathematicians do all day. Just the same, it's not necessarily anything that gets taught by formal math courses, either, at least not directly. Rather, more advanced math leads to better abstract thought in general. So just take more math, whatever it is, and you'll be indirectly learning how to be a good programmer.
It could just be hardware differences. Poor quality control in what memory they put in could easily make seemingly identical machines have drastic performance differences.
One caveat: U-233 will inevitably get you some U-232 as well, which is much more radioactive stuff compared to Pu-239 (the stuff most bombs are made of), so it's easier to detect, which in turn makes weapons inspections easier and less invasive. Given that it's inevitable that any country that really wants to make a nuke will be able to do it (if N. Korea can do it, anyone can), a country that's using Thorium reactors for power can be considered operating with a measure of good faith.
In the office, every spam message that pops up has to be checked by the worker and deleted. This is a small cost for each individual message, but when you receive thousands per day (which you easily can) it all adds up to a whole lot of people-hours.
Plus, there's the administrative and hardware cost of the extra traffic, which is a significant percentage IP traffic these days.
Not so much being out of your right mind, but rather, having sufficiently flexible ethics and keeping a clear image of your goal in mind. Kind of like what Lelouch vi Britannia would do if he ran a security company rather than trying to take over the world.
Slashdot Mirror
"Efficiency" is the wrong term. You should be thinking in terms of absolute energy amounts. Which one gets you more power: 10W of input harnessed at 90% efficiency, or 100W of input harnessed at 10% efficiency?
Yes, there are parasitic losses. IIRC, solar panels themselves are slightly less efficient in space (but I wasn't able to quickly track down a reference), and then you have beam and collector losses. The gain is that you automatically get almost double the energy from not being in the Earth's shadow for roughly 12 out of 24 hours, then add in energy otherwise absorbed or reflected by the atmosphere.
It's good to know that technology will be helping my car mechanic replace my headlight fluid and reinforce the pushrods on my overhead cams.
This. During the first stage, people come up with all sorts of ideas and start putting them together. If management asks when it will be done, they reply "when it's finished". That answer is fine at that point.
But if you've gotten to the second stage and you're still saying that, something is wrong. If your people are sufficiently creative, they'll be coming up with more ideas than they possibly have time to implement. You need to pick the features that are really necessary and concentrate on those.
You can see this in pretty much any software project, not just games. If you look at Parrot's development cycle, you'll see a long time when developers are coming up new ideas, getting them half-implemented, and then thinking of something else and repeating the cycle. When they finally decided on a short list of things they needed to get done for a full release (in late 2008), version 1.0 was done within a few months.
IIRC, the "paid add on" idea has been more or less dropped because people hated it. I'm sure there will still be downloadable content, but that's not a big deal if the shrink-wrapped game is reasonably complete.
They only kill the children worth killing.
It ain't my job to Google you up your own argument.
What you have there are a few links about people being prosecuted for stealing Wi-Fi (not for providing WiFi where someone did something illegal), an opinion piece, a paper in a law journal speculating about liability for wireless networks in general, and a two year old bill in the House that never went to the Senate (and which is so broad that the Supreme Court would probably kill it with fire).
In fact, the peer-reviewed article doesn't help your point at all:
As demonstrated in the A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc decision, which involved vicarious copyright infringement liability of a peer-to- peer network provider, courts limit such liability to cases where the peer-to-peer network has "the right and ability to supervise the infringing activity and also has a direct financial interest in such activities." Regarding the right and ability to supervise, home-based WAPs typically do not come packaged with monitoring mechanisms that would facilitate the tracking of potentially infringing activity (assuming operators have a right to supervise such activity). In addition, although WAPs typically feature technology that allows the operator to block certain users, these types of functions usually require the operator to implement security options that the average user would probably avoid due to complexity and lack of automation. Regarding direct financial interest, given that those who deploy Wi-Fi residentially do so primarily to make the Internet more accessible within their own homes, it seems unlikely that home- based WAP operators would have any financial interest in infringing activities. Commercial HotSpot operators may have some indirect financial interest to the extent that infringing users may run up more access fees in their attempts to download infringing media files. Still, prevailing reluctance to impose responsibility on ISPs for harmful conduct committed by end users would probably protect these parties from contributory liability in this context.
It also mentions that you might violate your ISP's ToS by opening your WiFi, and that this may have legal penalties in some states (not mine, AFAIK, and I go out of my way to avoid that sort of ToS, anyway). But I guess making sure your links actually support your point was too much.
None of what you gave argues against my main point: that it's very unlikely that you'll actually be prosecuted for someone else doing something over your open WiFi connection, and this tiny risk is not worth the costs. Bruce Schneier agrees with this risk assessment.
The risk assessment works out something like this:
The last one get's all the headlines, but that's precisely because it's so rare. The consequences may be large, but the chances of that actually happening are minuscule.
If you can provide an actual argument against that, then I'm happy to read it. Preferably in the form of an actual decision against an open WiFi operator for something an uninvited user did. If you can't find such a case, that in itself is evidence that the risk assessment above is correct.
You're every security salesman's dream: someone they can scare with random stuff that never really happens to get you to buy shoddy products.
The Swiss hate cars, even more than nanny-state California does. A 210+ mph ticket on a Veyron there had a max fine of $500.
Or die in a car accident. Which is probably more likely.
I bet Spongebob is awesome on morphine.
I didn't want to be awake for getting my wisdom teeth taken out. Why would you? So you can learn about recent movements in your doctor's mutual fund account?
Your chances of actually getting caught are not that great. You're a needle in a haystack. It get's better if everyone is doing it--then you're a needle in a stack of needles. Why should they seek you out when there are so many other choices?
Encryption is not worth the inconvenience, incompatibility with certain hardware, and loss of throughput just to defend against random miscreants.
This. For a local wireless network, what exactly are you worried about? People driving by and using a bit of free access to check email is no big deal. Even if they're making mischief trying to frame random people for child porn, it's unlikely they'll hit you up when they have to be physically near your place to pull it off. It's not like general perimeter security, where you have to be worried about automated scripts even if nobody is directly targeting you.
If somebody is really abusing your bandwidth, then handle that on a case-by-case basis. Otherwise, WEP/WPA just cuts into your local throughput and makes it inconvenient for guests to connect.
Jupiter will be low in the southwest (in the Northern Hemisphere) after sunset this evening — nothing else around it is as bright, so you can't miss it.
I can miss it, because I'm living in the middle of a snow storm. Insensitive clod, etc.
Galileo!
Cell phones are not actually known to cause any health problems by any valid study . . .
Not quite right, but this fact shouldn't be abused by those claiming a health risk. If something is sufficiently studied, then there will always be outlier studies that got everything right but show the opposite results all the others. There are, in fact, a few well-run studies that show a correlation between health risks and cell phones, but these can be simply discounted against the overwhelming number of studies against.
Taking a purely practical bent, you can get pretty far without Calculus. We're talking about enough knowledge to understand the statistics you commonly encounter in news articles, or to analyze the probability in dice and card games.
For instance, take a look at the Soccer Power Index Nate Silver made for ESPN. The math there is very simple, but it's derived from careful observations to figure out which of the available statistics give you the best predictive power.
Yes, that's entirely possible if it's programmed so that you fall x meters for each frame rendered. What should be done is to say you fall x meters per second, taking into account how long it's been since you last calculated the value.
(I'm simplifying the effect of acceleration above--many games could get along without it and produce a decent result, though it's not hard to factor in if you want.)
Doom 2 was the same engine, just with new levels. If the engine was changed at all, I doubt it was to put in a poor-mans motion blur.
It ultimately depends on the kinds of problems you're going to end up working on. Any sort of graphics programming is going to require a solid understanding of geometry. Designing games requires probability/statistics, where the actual math could often be understood by a bright junior high student, but gets combined in complicated ways.
Calculus is overrated for anyone not going into Physics or Engineering. I wish schools would put more emphasis on statistics instead, since that's useful for anyone who picks up a news report and sees that there's a 2% spread of support for a pair of political candidates.
More importantly than any of that, IMHO, is being able to see how the program fits together on an abstract level. This can be described as a form of math, but it's well outside of what most people think of as math. Which is fine, because what most people think of as math has nothing to do with what mathematicians do all day. Just the same, it's not necessarily anything that gets taught by formal math courses, either, at least not directly. Rather, more advanced math leads to better abstract thought in general. So just take more math, whatever it is, and you'll be indirectly learning how to be a good programmer.
It could just be hardware differences. Poor quality control in what memory they put in could easily make seemingly identical machines have drastic performance differences.
One caveat: U-233 will inevitably get you some U-232 as well, which is much more radioactive stuff compared to Pu-239 (the stuff most bombs are made of), so it's easier to detect, which in turn makes weapons inspections easier and less invasive. Given that it's inevitable that any country that really wants to make a nuke will be able to do it (if N. Korea can do it, anyone can), a country that's using Thorium reactors for power can be considered operating with a measure of good faith.
In the office, every spam message that pops up has to be checked by the worker and deleted. This is a small cost for each individual message, but when you receive thousands per day (which you easily can) it all adds up to a whole lot of people-hours.
Plus, there's the administrative and hardware cost of the extra traffic, which is a significant percentage IP traffic these days.
Not so much being out of your right mind, but rather, having sufficiently flexible ethics and keeping a clear image of your goal in mind. Kind of like what Lelouch vi Britannia would do if he ran a security company rather than trying to take over the world.
They haven't, to anyone. Regional resource shortages are the result of political/bureaucratic problems, not technical ability to grow enough food.