I don't understand why these hyper-cheap hardware soloutions are only planned for the developing world. There are still huge price-limited markets in the developed world for hardware, which could potentially create still lower costs for the developing world.
You know, this kind of thinking is why some people in the world distrust Western culture. We are so obsessed with insuring that any development benefits us that we can't comprehend that some initiatives would only make sense in desparate circumstances. This sub-$100 notebook would likely be underpowered and of limited utility to Western tastes, yet it would be miraculous to those who haven't seen a computer in the first place.
Bill Maher wrote it best in one of his post-Politically Incorrect books: "[We would] rather go from 10 to 11, then helping another country go from 0 to 1."
But I was pleased to find it's just as funny if you choose "shortest."
No kidding. It looks like MSN's mapping system doesn't assign a time or distance cost for ferry trips, so the path finding algorithm thinks they are instant jumps. Microsoft really needs to fix such edges between vertices in their mapping database as being MAXINT or something instead of zero....
Based on personal recollections reenforced by a quick Wiki'ing, MMX's problem wasn't the concept itself, but Intel's braindead constraints placed on x86 support for vectors. MMX recycled the same registers as used for floating point math, causing expensive context switches between each mode and only allowing integer math to be vectorized. Intel eventually developed SSE to work around some of the bottlenecks, but the eventual dominance of GPUs on the PC platform reduced the development priority for vector math in the CPU.
You might want to replace "creatives" with "people under the illusion that they're creative".
"Creatives" is a catch-all term used by management and executives in various media industries to describe the artists, writers and other talent who make the text, images, and sounds in ads and other forms of commercial communication. It's not my buzzword; I guess it just sounds better than "labor" or "employee" to PHB ears.
I smell a statistic pulled from someone's backside.
I was alluding to the 97% mentioned in the original article; it's not my statistic.
The stat isn't about percentage of software, but percentage of typical tasks imaginable for a computer to be used for. "Games" is just one use a computer can be used for, but it's over-represented in development effort since the market sector is dependant on novelty.
Secure the network, not the computer and you wont have this problem.
To Ma and Pa Kettle and most of the rest of America (and probably the rest of the world), your advice is neither "common" nor "sense." Your typical consumer who buys a PC off the shelf isn't going to have the MCSE certification or the forewarning to know how to set up a home network in the first place. It's not stupidity on the part of users, but arrogance on the part of engineers who expect end users to know as much about computers as them. It's not like people are taking "Computer's Ed" courses and getting "User's Licenses" from the DCD (Department of Computing Devices), after all.
As a long time Mac user and developer, I'd have to agree. While the original article mentions that 97% of tasks can be performed by Macs just fine, it's that confounded 3% that Microsoft has been able to exploit in the marketplace. Games, enterprise business apps, and obscure in-house projects have pretty much sustained the Windows platform up to this point. Creatives, home users, and students (the Mac's historical user base) have not had the financial or political clout to compete with the technological preferences many IT organizations have.
I've got the DVD version. While it didn't have the "special edition" edits made for the final VHS release, it had all sorts of extra material, like commentaries and a "Director's cut" of real outtakes from the original filming. Really wierd... especially since the DVD I have is marked Region 5 even thought it's a Region 1 (or regionless) disc.
We live in an age where most of the popular music sucks, the art is derivative, the churches are shills for either the GOP or NAMBLA, and people don't care what kind of horseshit the politicians shove down their throats, so long as they can buy it at Chipotle while dowloading ringtones.
First off, I'm a long time Mac user and software developer, so by rights I should feels some kind of satisifaction from seeing Apple "transcendant" again. That said, for all you people talking about iPods as if it was the greatest thing since sliced bread and how the Mac mini can usher in a new age of media convergence...
SHUT UP!
I'm getting sick of this... the Mini was the "iCheap" that people wanted just to be, well, cheap. It's not a flying car or a Mr. Fusion; it's just a computer. And the iPod is just about music, not science or medicine. The fawning idolitry I'm seeing here lately towards Apple is making me sick, even if it is making easier for me to get a paycheck nowadays. I can't believe the excessive rumors and pie-in-sky conjecture around Macs that I've seen over the last few months...
I have to admit I was one of those turned off by the first still I saw: the awful looking Marvin that looked like a pokemon.
Am I the only one who immediately thought that the movie's portrayal was right on the money? Marvin was built to be a "little plastic pal who's fun to be with" and had only the depressing sounding voice to betray his inner ennui. (Read: malfunctioning Genuine People Personality) Remember, he was built by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, the same people who made those cheerful elevator doors and way too helpful vending machines. Even the various leftover parts he was evenually built out of didn't occur until the later novels; he's just "out of the plastic wrap" at the start of this film.
Really, this must be the sickest dept line troll i've ever read.
You are hereby ordered to surrended your Geek license to your local authorities. The fact you didn't recognize a relevent novelty recording is grounds for dismissal from Geekdom.
22 megabytes for a little 300x200 video that's mostly 4 minutes of still scenes?
This movie was encoded using Sorenson Video and QDesign Music. They are both poorish choices for downloadable video nowadays, with MPEG-4 being preferred. The codecs used date back to the tail end of the era when QuickTime was mostly used for CD kiosks and presentations, and just when QT was starting to develop towards Internet streaming applications.
My atmoshperic physics may be wrong, but doesn't this kind of event increase the likelihood of seeing northern lights or aurora borealis? (The season's wrong for aurora australis, I think...) I live in Illinois, and I missed the last time where aurora appeared over the "lower 48."
For the most part, it is... CV is the abbreviation for the latin phrase curricula vitae. The term is more commonly used in Europe (especially the UK), rather than the more pedestrian (and French) sounding resumé.
This Game Is Not About Emotions...
on
Farklempt!
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Sad, Happy, Angry, and Anxious make about as much sense for the navigation controls in this game as Top, Bottom, Up, Down, Strange, and Charm do to describe the real world properties of quarks.
The whole "emotion" angle is just hot air for a "rapid click to control" UI for moving the player's vehicle while it tries to collide with other players in the game arena.
The connotative concept behind vector and raster images has changed much in 20 years. I think of something completely different when I see the word "vector" than I did when Asteroids was still in the arcades.
Vectors were used long before sprites came into use.
Oops, my bad. I didn't mean vectors as in "Asteroids" but more in terms of later games like "I, Robot." I should have said something like "polygon" or "face shading." The current mind set of most graphics programmers now-a-days is segregated into "3-D vectors vs. 2-D rasters" and completely overlooks the history of 2-D vector imaging.
Though, at the time, 2-D vector images required their own separate display technology. Attempting vectors on a standard CRT wasn't possible at the time, the control circutry for the light guns in standard raster displays were just too low resoution. You needed special hardware to change the light gun behavior from scanning to directional placement. This was similar to the old distinction between plotters and dot matrix printers.
Tron was a movie about religion and just used the setting of inside a computer as a device to tell the story. It can basically be described as a tale of the coming of Jesus.
You've nailed the underlying metaphor of the movie (the champion or messiah myth) almost spot on. There was a novelization of the movie released at that time that included more explict content related to the programs' religion. The only real difference between the user/program relationship and the god/worshipper relationship in Christianity is that Tron's world is explictly polytheistic. As such, a user is more of a "guardian angel" than a "god." This is actually closer to older forms of Judism that existed prior to Zorastranism, the ancient faith that heavily influenced the Christian duality of good and evil.
Due to budgetary and technical constraints, the day-to-day life of programs in the Tron universe was only touched upon. The "live ones" that Flynn met in an online "city" was supposed to suggest the idea of a full-blown cyberciviliation that mirrored our own. The movie's producers even shot a bedroom love scene that had to be left out because it felt out of place given the superficial pacing of how the movie ended up. Also, the "derez" concept originally wasn't supposed to represent death per se, but resource deprevation, as the MCP drew most of the system's resources. Most programs had to do without energy and subroutines under the enforced "rationing." Flynn's absorbing of "red" energy from a warrior elite and the lighting up of the cyberworld at the very end of the film were a couple of the things remaining in the movie from this original concept.
I better stop now; my geekiness over this movie is starting to frighten me.
Have we come full circle now? 2-D was how gaming began, since vector/geometry based imaging wasn't really feasible in the 70's and 80's. While 2-D had a brief renaissance in the late 90's thanks to the fighting genre and games with photographic imaging, is there something in 3-D gaming that's "hit the wall" with regards to gaming evolution I don't know about?
Slashdot Mirror
You know, this kind of thinking is why some people in the world distrust Western culture. We are so obsessed with insuring that any development benefits us that we can't comprehend that some initiatives would only make sense in desparate circumstances. This sub-$100 notebook would likely be underpowered and of limited utility to Western tastes, yet it would be miraculous to those who haven't seen a computer in the first place.
Bill Maher wrote it best in one of his post-Politically Incorrect books: "[We would] rather go from 10 to 11, then helping another country go from 0 to 1."
No kidding. It looks like MSN's mapping system doesn't assign a time or distance cost for ferry trips, so the path finding algorithm thinks they are instant jumps. Microsoft really needs to fix such edges between vertices in their mapping database as being MAXINT or something instead of zero....
Since the modded 2600 is using Mac hardware internally, the paddles probably ended up looking like this...
Based on personal recollections reenforced by a quick Wiki'ing, MMX's problem wasn't the concept itself, but Intel's braindead constraints placed on x86 support for vectors. MMX recycled the same registers as used for floating point math, causing expensive context switches between each mode and only allowing integer math to be vectorized. Intel eventually developed SSE to work around some of the bottlenecks, but the eventual dominance of GPUs on the PC platform reduced the development priority for vector math in the CPU.
"Creatives" is a catch-all term used by management and executives in various media industries to describe the artists, writers and other talent who make the text, images, and sounds in ads and other forms of commercial communication. It's not my buzzword; I guess it just sounds better than "labor" or "employee" to PHB ears.
I know! I know! How about this one?
Have you?
To Ma and Pa Kettle and most of the rest of America (and probably the rest of the world), your advice is neither "common" nor "sense." Your typical consumer who buys a PC off the shelf isn't going to have the MCSE certification or the forewarning to know how to set up a home network in the first place. It's not stupidity on the part of users, but arrogance on the part of engineers who expect end users to know as much about computers as them. It's not like people are taking "Computer's Ed" courses and getting "User's Licenses" from the DCD (Department of Computing Devices), after all.
As a long time Mac user and developer, I'd have to agree. While the original article mentions that 97% of tasks can be performed by Macs just fine, it's that confounded 3% that Microsoft has been able to exploit in the marketplace. Games, enterprise business apps, and obscure in-house projects have pretty much sustained the Windows platform up to this point. Creatives, home users, and students (the Mac's historical user base) have not had the financial or political clout to compete with the technological preferences many IT organizations have.
I've got the DVD version. While it didn't have the "special edition" edits made for the final VHS release, it had all sorts of extra material, like commentaries and a "Director's cut" of real outtakes from the original filming. Really wierd... especially since the DVD I have is marked Region 5 even thought it's a Region 1 (or regionless) disc.
First off, I'm a long time Mac user and software developer, so by rights I should feels some kind of satisifaction from seeing Apple "transcendant" again. That said, for all you people talking about iPods as if it was the greatest thing since sliced bread and how the Mac mini can usher in a new age of media convergence...
SHUT UP!
I'm getting sick of this... the Mini was the "iCheap" that people wanted just to be, well, cheap. It's not a flying car or a Mr. Fusion; it's just a computer. And the iPod is just about music, not science or medicine. The fawning idolitry I'm seeing here lately towards Apple is making me sick, even if it is making easier for me to get a paycheck nowadays. I can't believe the excessive rumors and pie-in-sky conjecture around Macs that I've seen over the last few months...
</RANT>
Am I the only one who immediately thought that the movie's portrayal was right on the money? Marvin was built to be a "little plastic pal who's fun to be with" and had only the depressing sounding voice to betray his inner ennui. (Read: malfunctioning Genuine People Personality) Remember, he was built by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, the same people who made those cheerful elevator doors and way too helpful vending machines. Even the various leftover parts he was evenually built out of didn't occur until the later novels; he's just "out of the plastic wrap" at the start of this film.
You are hereby ordered to surrended your Geek license to your local authorities. The fact you didn't recognize a relevent novelty recording is grounds for dismissal from Geekdom.
"Did you feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced?"
"No, it's just a little headache."
And the original reference was just three bucks... Inflation, ya know...
Ugh. That should be "where". That's what I get for copy/pasting quote text...
And the one were they say "MEGAWEAPON! MEGAWEAPON!"
And the one were they sing "They tried to kill him with a forklift..."
I'm sure we can keep this thread going...
This movie was encoded using Sorenson Video and QDesign Music. They are both poorish choices for downloadable video nowadays, with MPEG-4 being preferred. The codecs used date back to the tail end of the era when QuickTime was mostly used for CD kiosks and presentations, and just when QT was starting to develop towards Internet streaming applications.
At least it wasn't done in Cinepak and MACE...
My atmoshperic physics may be wrong, but doesn't this kind of event increase the likelihood of seeing northern lights or aurora borealis? (The season's wrong for aurora australis, I think...) I live in Illinois, and I missed the last time where aurora appeared over the "lower 48."
For the most part, it is... CV is the abbreviation for the latin phrase curricula vitae. The term is more commonly used in Europe (especially the UK), rather than the more pedestrian (and French) sounding resumé.
The whole "emotion" angle is just hot air for a "rapid click to control" UI for moving the player's vehicle while it tries to collide with other players in the game arena.
The connotative concept behind vector and raster images has changed much in 20 years. I think of something completely different when I see the word "vector" than I did when Asteroids was still in the arcades.
Oops, my bad. I didn't mean vectors as in "Asteroids" but more in terms of later games like "I, Robot." I should have said something like "polygon" or "face shading." The current mind set of most graphics programmers now-a-days is segregated into "3-D vectors vs. 2-D rasters" and completely overlooks the history of 2-D vector imaging.
Though, at the time, 2-D vector images required their own separate display technology. Attempting vectors on a standard CRT wasn't possible at the time, the control circutry for the light guns in standard raster displays were just too low resoution. You needed special hardware to change the light gun behavior from scanning to directional placement. This was similar to the old distinction between plotters and dot matrix printers.
You've nailed the underlying metaphor of the movie (the champion or messiah myth) almost spot on. There was a novelization of the movie released at that time that included more explict content related to the programs' religion. The only real difference between the user/program relationship and the god/worshipper relationship in Christianity is that Tron's world is explictly polytheistic. As such, a user is more of a "guardian angel" than a "god." This is actually closer to older forms of Judism that existed prior to Zorastranism, the ancient faith that heavily influenced the Christian duality of good and evil.
Due to budgetary and technical constraints, the day-to-day life of programs in the Tron universe was only touched upon. The "live ones" that Flynn met in an online "city" was supposed to suggest the idea of a full-blown cyberciviliation that mirrored our own. The movie's producers even shot a bedroom love scene that had to be left out because it felt out of place given the superficial pacing of how the movie ended up. Also, the "derez" concept originally wasn't supposed to represent death per se, but resource deprevation, as the MCP drew most of the system's resources. Most programs had to do without energy and subroutines under the enforced "rationing." Flynn's absorbing of "red" energy from a warrior elite and the lighting up of the cyberworld at the very end of the film were a couple of the things remaining in the movie from this original concept.
I better stop now; my geekiness over this movie is starting to frighten me.
Have we come full circle now? 2-D was how gaming began, since vector/geometry based imaging wasn't really feasible in the 70's and 80's. While 2-D had a brief renaissance in the late 90's thanks to the fighting genre and games with photographic imaging, is there something in 3-D gaming that's "hit the wall" with regards to gaming evolution I don't know about?