As an example of how complicated AI (which you all know stands for Algorithmic Interaction of NPC's;-) can be, I once read a really lengthy article about the AI efforts put into NPC/bot aiming in one of the Quake engines. Basically, you can trivially create a bot that has flawless aim. This will create about the worst gaming experience ever, you see it you die. Take that back, you didn't even see it yet..and die. So, you go about creating an aiming algorithm that needs to mimic human style aiming taking into account reaction times, distance, NPC viewing direction, lead time when characters are moving, reloading times, weapon switching choices, etc. Really, you can spend weeks just tweaking this and still feel like you are playing a bot.
Look, I love to hate Windows as much as anyone else (here on slashdot), but I happened to have worked on OS/2 drivers in the mid 90's and just thinking back at those make me cringe. OS/2 was a pile of crap when it died. Anyone thinking that IBM was on the verge of launching a flawless operating system is smoking something significantly stronger then I ever have (and I'm from The Netherlands)
last I read the Yellowstone Super Volcano becomes active every 600000 years or so. Sure it has been about 650000 years since that happened last so we are in for a good one soon...but relative to human time scale this is not likely to be tomorrow...or next month...or anytime in the next several millennia for that matter.
I can see that our genetic makeup includes a "gullible" sequence. Evidence is all around us. More cynical is considering that the human being has genetic material that makes them abuse another's gullibility. Wherever there is a group of people 'believing' in something that doesn't exist, there is a group of people making them believe and using that to their advantage.
Problem with being an atheist is that we see through the make believe story and recognize the mischief. We have shown ourselves to be a pretty nasty race at times. Now that it is making more sense that this behavior is part genetic I don't think that is going to change anytime soon.
Slightly misleading headline. Looks like some of the schools in question are talking about reducing (not eliminating) homework at the elementary school level. This seems to fit a study (see article) that claims that homework at elementary level doesn't particularly benefit students.
They are kids at that age for crying out loud, not students. Now if the parents can guarantee that the kids get to play outside and socialize during the "homework" hours then I am all for this plan.
I for one never had much homework all through elementary, middle and most of highschool. My school was a little different then other schools in the Netherlands. Look how I turned out: Masters in Computer Science, Manager and Staff Engineer at a respectable large Tech company. Living the good life in San Diego CA with wife and kid.
We started our kids education really early. Our son is almost 2 years old and he already knows how to type letters and numbers, he is skilled in construction and logic. His social skills are progressing rapidly and he is well traveled. All this means is that he has a kids laptop that he plays with and just happened to figure out how to follow the visual and verbal instructions by trial and error. His construction skills come from playing with Lego, his logic comes from experimenting with asking and whining to get his parents to do as he wishes (he wishes). The social and travel is just us dragging him all over the place to meet other kids, friends, family and explore as many playgrounds as we can. Yeah, all of this is called "playing" rather then homework.
I'm guessing that while performance might suck for large images, anyone doing real graphic design and photography will have a real version of Photoshop. This is probably intended for people who want to be able to quickly design some small graphics for use on their website.
To illustrate that you are most likely correct consider that the lead artist that works on professional photo restoration at YellowCatDesign typically works with files many gigabytes in size. A simple 8x11 inch at 600dpi and 8bit per color clocks in at 100MB. Most images are scanned at higher resolutions at higher bitdepth (and I think in CMYK rather then RGB). Also I've seen our professionals use tons of layers (10-100) which can add significantly to the filesize. I just don't see that amount of data beeing transferred between a web-based client and a remote server in real time.
Still, for smaller images having photoshop available online would be great.
"But you wouldn't mind having it ran as well as US interstate system, would you? For all it's troubles it's better than the roads in any country in the world (with the possible exception of Germany)."
The US is a big country. It might just be that your little stretch of freeway has been recently repaved, but I can assure you that if you take just the west of US into account (primarily California where I live) then you will never come to the conclusion that the interstate system is all that wonderful. The road conditions just plain suck compared to most western European countries. They are a hazard to drive on due to the lack of maintenance. The planning for new roads takes forever. The actual building of them even longer. Why are Americans unaware that it can be better and that it will take money to do so. Are our holy dollars really that much better of in our wallets?
Why should we have to opt out from being cached, why can't we opt in instead? I think the phone calls made by marketers are a perfect example of this. Bad analogy. Marketing calls are interrupting my privacy. Web pages are posted to the public for everyone to see (on the interweb).
If they found something in the law books that contradicts the use of new technology, why can't they extend the law to cover this new innovative use rather then flexing legislative muscle?
I expect several people to come up with the "thats what you get for using a free service" reply. I'm wondering what advise those people have when someone considers using a free operating system?
I am not a professional sys-admin, but I run anti-spyware and anti-adware programs regularly (weekly) and have anti-virus sofware (AVG) running on my computers . I got firewalls (hardware and software) and keep my machines patched. I use firefox rather then explorer and use web-based gmail instead of outlook.
Am I still in obvious danger of being infected by bots? How would I find out if any of my machines is infected? All the precautions I take seemed reasonable enough a few years back. How do I continue safe internetting?
Still, it would be nice to see a direct link to googlenasa.com from either nasa.gov or google.com. Nasa might have announced cooperation with google, but that announcement didn't mention the googlenasa.com website.
Just because a site is registered under a well known name doesn't mean much now does it.
http://www.googlenasa.com/ just went down. If it was slashdotted it seems that it was neither hosted by Google or Nasa.
Years after SGI's failure to commercialize their invention they try to coin in using their patent portfolio. The main reason why I think this is wrong is that SGI isn't competing in this space (anymore) and thus is not loosing any money.
Personally, I'm not convinced that SGI invented the floating point display buffer. But they did patent it before anyone else did. Even if they did invent (as in "first to be there") this technology, they never managed to make a commercial product out of it. They tried and failed due to their own incompetence, slipping schedules and eventually dropping that product all together. This was years ago.
Now they twist patent law to make a dishonest living. Yet another example of why the US Patent system is flawed.
Gootube? You mean Yougle! Has a neat ring to it:-)
/me checks if that domain name is available
Re:I'm surprised I haven't...
on
A GUI For Books
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Mendo: lmao there's a wicked lookign spider on my monitor and if i move the mouse around he chases after it spitfire: haha mendo spitfire: take a screen shot spitfire: wait spitfire: that made no sense
If you turn that phrase around it becomes easier to answer I think. "Should companies rush products to market even though they are not complete?". This happends all to often and we don't like it. A few incomplete products from the same brand and consumers will start noticing.
"I am not sure where he pulls that super-exponential growth figure from." Ever heard of Moore's Law? The exponential growth of processing power that has been ongoing since the 60's. In his book "The Age of Spiritual Machines" Ray Kurzweil points out that this exponential growth can also be found in many more technological developments. He doesn't make this stuff up, it is pretty common knowledge. What Kurzweil does is point out that most of our prediction-of-the-future models are still based on industrial age linear growth models.
"Better not" does not qualify as an argument. We live in a world where you pay for magazines that have advertisements, you pay for TV which has advertisements, etc. I would argue that we, as a collective "feed us"-species have come to embrace this advertisement model as a norm to shave of a few $$ with which we can buy more advertisement ladden services.
Given that you got "+5 insightfull" hints that there is at least a certain group of us, I would say "market", that is willing to pay for advertisement-free content. Yes, I am one of those. But I at least recognize that our 'freedom-means-you-are-allowed-to-make -money-no-matter-what' attitude isn't as grandiose as is advertised by the overlords.
Advertisement = $$. This simply equates to the fact that we will have to shell out extra $$ to allow the games to be how we want them to be. So be it.
I thought the recent competition to make music based on the sounds of failing hard drives was a lot more fun. The competition was won by a song that was made entirely out of dying harddrive sound samples.
I hate marketing guys too, but suggesting that Google should have a Chief Marketing Officer to officialy lie to the public about what they do is laying it on pretty thick as to what that position is really all about.
As far as I am concerned the people at Google should continue to do the best they can without the help of trained professionals in the art of making stuff sound better then it is.
I haven't signed the back of my card in over 10 years. What's funny is when a cashier actually looks at the back of the card and then just procedes on even though there's no signature. Let's face it though, even if they did check, it's a worthless security measure anyway. Any crook with even a primitive grouping of nerve endings in their skull can take the few minutes to come "close enough" to the signature on the back of the credit card they just stole.
On the back of my credit card I wrote "PLEASE ASK FOR PHOTO ID". In my experience this has worked really well. At those places where they at least glance at the back of your credit card they now find themselves forced to ask for my photo ID. This happends in about 1 in 3-ish stores. Unless a thief is going to white out what I wrote and replace it with a fake signature I somehow doubt he will try to use my credit cards in a store with the chance of beeing asked for name-matching photo ID.
Not ever did anybody whine about that my signature wasn't on the back of my cards. Even the biggest moron in a store figured that providing name-matching photo ID seemed like a good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
As an example of how complicated AI (which you all know stands for Algorithmic Interaction of NPC's ;-) can be, I once read a really lengthy article about the AI efforts put into NPC/bot aiming in one of the Quake engines. Basically, you can trivially create a bot that has flawless aim. This will create about the worst gaming experience ever, you see it you die. Take that back, you didn't even see it yet..and die. So, you go about creating an aiming algorithm that needs to mimic human style aiming taking into account reaction times, distance, NPC viewing direction, lead time when characters are moving, reloading times, weapon switching choices, etc. Really, you can spend weeks just tweaking this and still feel like you are playing a bot.
Look, I love to hate Windows as much as anyone else (here on slashdot), but I happened to have worked on OS/2 drivers in the mid 90's and just thinking back at those make me cringe. OS/2 was a pile of crap when it died. Anyone thinking that IBM was on the verge of launching a flawless operating system is smoking something significantly stronger then I ever have (and I'm from The Netherlands)
...To be absolutely honest, I still don't know exactly what dysentery is...
;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysentery
You feel any better now that you know what you made 500 virtual people go through?
last I read the Yellowstone Super Volcano becomes active every 600000 years or so. Sure it has been about 650000 years since that happened last so we are in for a good one soon...but relative to human time scale this is not likely to be tomorrow...or next month...or anytime in the next several millennia for that matter.
*cough* sensationalist media *cough*
I can see that our genetic makeup includes a "gullible" sequence. Evidence is all around us. More cynical is considering that the human being has genetic material that makes them abuse another's gullibility. Wherever there is a group of people 'believing' in something that doesn't exist, there is a group of people making them believe and using that to their advantage.
Problem with being an atheist is that we see through the make believe story and recognize the mischief. We have shown ourselves to be a pretty nasty race at times. Now that it is making more sense that this behavior is part genetic I don't think that is going to change anytime soon.
Slightly misleading headline. Looks like some of the schools in question are talking about reducing (not eliminating) homework at the elementary school level. This seems to fit a study (see article) that claims that homework at elementary level doesn't particularly benefit students.
They are kids at that age for crying out loud, not students. Now if the parents can guarantee that the kids get to play outside and socialize during the "homework" hours then I am all for this plan.
I for one never had much homework all through elementary, middle and most of highschool. My school was a little different then other schools in the Netherlands. Look how I turned out: Masters in Computer Science, Manager and Staff Engineer at a respectable large Tech company. Living the good life in San Diego CA with wife and kid.
We started our kids education really early. Our son is almost 2 years old and he already knows how to type letters and numbers, he is skilled in construction and logic. His social skills are progressing rapidly and he is well traveled. All this means is that he has a kids laptop that he plays with and just happened to figure out how to follow the visual and verbal instructions by trial and error. His construction skills come from playing with Lego, his logic comes from experimenting with asking and whining to get his parents to do as he wishes (he wishes). The social and travel is just us dragging him all over the place to meet other kids, friends, family and explore as many playgrounds as we can. Yeah, all of this is called "playing" rather then homework.
I'm guessing that while performance might suck for large images, anyone doing real graphic design and photography will have a real version of Photoshop. This is probably intended for people who want to be able to quickly design some small graphics for use on their website.
To illustrate that you are most likely correct consider that the lead artist that works on professional photo restoration at YellowCatDesign typically works with files many gigabytes in size. A simple 8x11 inch at 600dpi and 8bit per color clocks in at 100MB. Most images are scanned at higher resolutions at higher bitdepth (and I think in CMYK rather then RGB). Also I've seen our professionals use tons of layers (10-100) which can add significantly to the filesize. I just don't see that amount of data beeing transferred between a web-based client and a remote server in real time.
Still, for smaller images having photoshop available online would be great.
"But you wouldn't mind having it ran as well as US interstate system, would you? For all it's troubles it's better than the roads in any country in the world (with the possible exception of Germany)."
The US is a big country. It might just be that your little stretch of freeway has been recently repaved, but I can assure you that if you take just the west of US into account (primarily California where I live) then you will never come to the conclusion that the interstate system is all that wonderful. The road conditions just plain suck compared to most western European countries. They are a hazard to drive on due to the lack of maintenance. The planning for new roads takes forever. The actual building of them even longer. Why are Americans unaware that it can be better and that it will take money to do so. Are our holy dollars really that much better of in our wallets?
Why should we have to opt out from being cached, why can't we opt in instead? I think the phone calls made by marketers are a perfect example of this.
Bad analogy. Marketing calls are interrupting my privacy. Web pages are posted to the public for everyone to see (on the interweb).
If they found something in the law books that contradicts the use of new technology, why can't they extend the law to cover this new innovative use rather then flexing legislative muscle?
I expect several people to come up with the "thats what you get for using a free service" reply. I'm wondering what advise those people have when someone considers using a free operating system?
I just wish more of my development apps ran under Linux.
Now there is a painfully honest line that explains a lot.
I am not a professional sys-admin, but I run anti-spyware and anti-adware programs regularly (weekly) and have anti-virus sofware (AVG) running on my computers . I got firewalls (hardware and software) and keep my machines patched. I use firefox rather then explorer and use web-based gmail instead of outlook.
Am I still in obvious danger of being infected by bots? How would I find out if any of my machines is infected? All the precautions I take seemed reasonable enough a few years back. How do I continue safe internetting?
Any practical advise would be welcome.
Still, it would be nice to see a direct link to googlenasa.com from either nasa.gov or google.com. Nasa might have announced cooperation with google, but that announcement didn't mention the googlenasa.com website.
Just because a site is registered under a well known name doesn't mean much now does it.
http://www.googlenasa.com/ just went down. If it was slashdotted it seems that it was neither hosted by Google or Nasa.
To be slightly more correct, the Government paid bottom dollar. The space shuttle components have been subcontracted out to the lowest bidders.
Years after SGI's failure to commercialize their invention they try to coin in using their patent portfolio. The main reason why I think this is wrong is that SGI isn't competing in this space (anymore) and thus is not loosing any money.
Personally, I'm not convinced that SGI invented the floating point display buffer. But they did patent it before anyone else did. Even if they did invent (as in "first to be there") this technology, they never managed to make a commercial product out of it. They tried and failed due to their own incompetence, slipping schedules and eventually dropping that product all together. This was years ago.
Now they twist patent law to make a dishonest living. Yet another example of why the US Patent system is flawed.
Gootube? You mean Yougle! Has a neat ring to it :-)
/me checks if that domain name is available
I thought you guys got rid of that "ß" thingy (eszett?) a while back?
I know that Yahoo is still popular with lots of folks, but I gave up on then after they repeatedly reset my 'marketing preferences'.
I set them to "please don't email me ever", and from time to time they then reset them to their default "we will spam you as much as we can".
No thanks.
If you turn that phrase around it becomes easier to answer I think. "Should companies rush products to market even though they are not complete?". This happends all to often and we don't like it. A few incomplete products from the same brand and consumers will start noticing.
"I am not sure where he pulls that super-exponential growth figure from."
Ever heard of Moore's Law? The exponential growth of processing power that has been ongoing since the 60's. In his book "The Age of Spiritual Machines" Ray Kurzweil points out that this exponential growth can also be found in many more technological developments. He doesn't make this stuff up, it is pretty common knowledge. What Kurzweil does is point out that most of our prediction-of-the-future models are still based on industrial age linear growth models.
"Better not" does not qualify as an argument. We live in a world where you pay for magazines that have advertisements, you pay for TV which has advertisements, etc. I would argue that we, as a collective "feed us"-species have come to embrace this advertisement model as a norm to shave of a few $$ with which we can buy more advertisement ladden services.
Given that you got "+5 insightfull" hints that there is at least a certain group of us, I would say "market", that is willing to pay for advertisement-free content. Yes, I am one of those. But I at least recognize that our 'freedom-means-you-are-allowed-to-make -money-no-matter-what' attitude isn't as grandiose as is advertised by the overlords.
Advertisement = $$. This simply equates to the fact that we will have to shell out extra $$ to allow the games to be how we want them to be. So be it.
I thought the recent competition to make music based on the sounds of failing hard drives was a lot more fun. The competition was won by a song that was made entirely out of dying harddrive sound samples.
I hate marketing guys too, but suggesting that Google should have a Chief Marketing Officer to officialy lie to the public about what they do is laying it on pretty thick as to what that position is really all about.
As far as I am concerned the people at Google should continue to do the best they can without the help of trained professionals in the art of making stuff sound better then it is.
I haven't signed the back of my card in over 10 years. What's funny is when a cashier actually looks at the back of the card and then just procedes on even though there's no signature. Let's face it though, even if they did check, it's a worthless security measure anyway. Any crook with even a primitive grouping of nerve endings in their skull can take the few minutes to come "close enough" to the signature on the back of the credit card they just stole.
On the back of my credit card I wrote "PLEASE ASK FOR PHOTO ID". In my experience this has worked really well. At those places where they at least glance at the back of your credit card they now find themselves forced to ask for my photo ID. This happends in about 1 in 3-ish stores. Unless a thief is going to white out what I wrote and replace it with a fake signature I somehow doubt he will try to use my credit cards in a store with the chance of beeing asked for name-matching photo ID.
Not ever did anybody whine about that my signature wasn't on the back of my cards. Even the biggest moron in a store figured that providing name-matching photo ID seemed like a good idea.