I don't see why so many people on slashdot not in this situation are sue happy. Perhaps because the advice here is usually worth the amount you pay for it? The lawsuit angle is unlikely to get you any more money than just signing the paper, taking the money they will give you and going elsewhere.
I agree with what the previous poster said. Take the money and run - lawsuits take time and energy and one against a failing company may yield little more than a micro-thin slice of the bankruptcy settlement.
Depending on your financial situation, you may be able to write off the other half of the money as a loss or bad debt allowing you to recover 25% or more of it in reduced tax obligation.
Both Canon and Sony produce prosumer 3CCD digital video cameras of exceptional quality.
The Canon GL1 is a 3CCD video camera that will cost you about $2K to get on the domestic market or $1750 on the grey market. (I bought one of these a couple months ago and it had a mechanical failure two weeks after I got it... I'm glad I didn't buy it on the grey market! I just exchanged it for a new one.) Its quality is superb. It shoots MiniDV format giving you 500 lines of digital goodness. Has a firewire port built in so that you can stream the digital video feed directly to your computer.
The GL1's bigger brother - the XL1 - starts at about $3500 and you can reasonably expect to spend another $3000 on attachments for it. However the XL1 is a broadcast quality video camera.
The CCD cameras for telescopes generally cost more than your average digital camera for a reason: They are specifically designed for high sensitivity long exposure operations. In order to achieve their sensitivity requirements, nearly all of them have a large Peltier effect thermo electric cooling device. Without being very cold the images they take would be completely overwhelmed by dark current. They're a little more than just a CCD, casing and cord.
The blades of grass are out of focus probably because he wasn't shooting at F64 and the grass is outside the depth of field. Since the grass is often green, it would show less fringing even if there were a breeze.
If you *still* think it's polarization, explain which polarization effect would explain this. The little girl on the far left has a full ghost image of herself consistent with what you'd expect to see if these images were taken in succession and she did, as children tend to do, a pitch forward to get herself up after she got bored of staying in one place for so long.
Have you even looked at the pictures?! Is there color separation of moving subjects? He may have had one lens, but he didn't trip all three shutters at once! Doesn't take a genius to figure this out.
I have one of those 3-CCD video cameras which uses optics to split the light 3 ways, and it is a very complicated process. You can't just use a simple prism to do this, because prisms tend to bend different wavelengths different amounts. And you don't just want to split the image into three identical images because you'll end up with three very dim identical images. You have to mix shape and materials of prisms to get the desired results. I don't think this was necessarily practical at this time.
I think his "using optics" meant that he could internally adjust which emulsion plate the light would fall on. Then he would "rotate" the mirror/prism/whatever do change which plate is getting exposed and re-cock the shutter spring between shots.
When these photos were taken, it was new. Although I'm not sure that this qualifies as "news for nerds" I think those photos are the most culturally significant photographs I've seen in the last 10 years.
Looking carefully at the photos, it does look like he took a rapid succession of B&W photos and didn't trip three shutters simultaneously.
If you look at this picture you'll see that the little girl on the far left was in motion during the photo and you can see her different positions as a color separation. All the images with motion in them (water, smoke, people in the background) show this same effect.
After reading that page, I have to wonder if there is some language barrier that is being argued. Case in point:
Last, the contestant will send me a decompressor and a compressed file, which will together total in size less than the original
data file, and which will be able to restore the compressed file to the
original state.
According to the wording of the challenge, in order to "complete" the challenge you had to produce "a compressed file". Note the singular specific article. The person performing the challenge did not meet this requirement. He produced 218 uncompressed files.
I always dislike speeches like this because some of the fallacies in it are so blatant I have difficulty determining if the author meant what he said, or simply failed to think through his argument:
Of course, my kids eat, and that takes some time--not much because they've lost the tradition of family dining, but if we allot 3 hours a week to evening meals we arrive at a net amount of private time for each child of 9 hours.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I live on a quiet street in a suburb with about 20 kids on the street. I see them playing every day after school and most of the day on weekends. The ages range from about 7 to 13.
Are they really out playing with portable T.V.'s so that they can get those hours in? What is the obvious point that I'm missing here?
I was where these kids were in the 80's and I remember spending the entire weekend out with my friends exploring our fantasy worlds... Pretending to be an elite squad of heroes who were single handedly winning a war, or champion BMX bicycle racers, stunt men of top caliber, fighter pilots... How did my friends and I manage this on 9 hours / week?
Much of the error is obvious... You can watch TV while eating, and while getting ready for school (and the study that concluded 55 hours was biased to exaggerate their figure to demonize broadcast media). But the argument had a major thrust implying that our children's lives are so proscribed that they don't have enough time to become individuals and I maintain that I myself had more than 9 hours a week to go out and play and so does every kid on my street.
So if we can find other countries that accept the "international airspace" concept, your argument falls apart, right? I mean, like if the soviet union didn't argue the point and even sent its own aircraft down our border in "international airspace", that would sort of imply their understanding of it, yes?
The plane was there listening in on radiant energy that China was sending out. If China doesn't like it, they can stop sending the signals out. If China is so "innocent", why are they stripping the plane? If spying is so abhorrent to them, why not just leave the plane sit where it is and not touch it? You don't think that it is maybe a golden opportunity for China to improve its own intelligence gathering abilities do you?
I don't really care if china strips the plane and returns it in boxes to the U.S.. Historically each side having approximately equal technology prevents big wars from creeping up.
But they need to return our service men and women. It's hard to exercise international diplomacy when the other side is holding hostages.
Was Stream tokenizer the right Java tool for the job? Your implication is nebulous. Stream Tokenizer is only good for tokenizing streams (i.e. files, or sockets). You mentioned charAt(), which when coupled to my previous statement demonstrates either your example is bad or you're pretty clueless. I'll be sure not to hire either one of you.
I've been programming java for about 3 years now and I've interviewed several "I learned Java in 14 days 'cuz I already know C & C++" people. What you probably already know, and a lot of those not yet doing Java don't, is that Java is about knowing the API. You don't come out of a C++ class claiming to know Windows programming. Java and its API are linked at the hip, knowing the syntax is not enough.
I have seen what happens when someone new to Java needs to edit text strings... They convert the string to a char array and go through it with a for loop... that's not programming in java.
There is an easy way to enable tab completion in windows (I know this works in NT/2K, dunno about 98):
Open up regedit, search for "CompletionChar", change its value from "0" to "9". Open up a dos prompt type "cd " and start hitting the tab key.
It isn't anywhere near as good as bash, but works with long filenames.
You can also do something similar to grep from the any explorer windows using the right click menu. Do a find, use the advanced tab and you can put in text to search for within documents (again, not as good as grep, doesn't do regex)
I'd have to ask for a reference on that one. I've seen several arguments, including Bell's Inequality, but none which make so broad and definitive a statement. (ex: this)
We put "randomness" in all things quantum because the set of equations we have come up with to describe events on that scale work out with the mathematics of statistics. Whether these things are truly random or simply so complex that we do not have a good model for them is anybody's guess.
Even Einstein didn't much like the statistical models that Planck and others were coming up with... But the quantum universe wasn't exactly his field.
Besides, having true randomness in the universe gives us a warm fuzzy feeling... there really is free will! Our fates are not predestined.
The software mentioned does allow the user to use a database other than CDDB, which violates gracenote's "free" license:
Requires that you use the Gracenote CDDB Database and Gracenote CDDB Client in your Licensed Application as your sole source of Data
from the Internet that is based on reading the TOC Data of any CD, Enhanced CD, CD-ROM, Tag ID or DVD media with your Licensed
Application;
The information in their database is "a list of facts" and as such has very weak copyright protections. This is the same thing that covers phone books and dictionaries. If there is some thing that CDDB has done to make its data "unique" then the information in that unique format may be protected by copyright but the underlying facts (CD "foo" has these songs on these tracks) are not protected.
Same goes for your submissions. You don't really own it and neither do they. All you've done is communicated an easily discoverable fact.
Application of the communications decency act to protect ISPs as safe harbors is news for nerds. It is important to us that the government not force ISPs to become big brothers.
Person who has been dumped by Mr. X provides the same report with falsified evidence. Is AOL supposed to remove their account?
The testimony of a single person does not generally warrant invading that persons privacy.
This is exactly what happened with the "report a classmate who has been talking suspiciously" anonymous phone numbers.
What the plaintiff should have done is report the actions to the police who could then take appropriate legal measures. The whole point here is that AOL does not want to become big brother, eaves dropping on its members at the slightest whim. And moreover that the safe harbor clause of the CDA should protect an ISP from having to do this just because some user said so.
Computer Science covers the research and application of computers to solve and study problems in the real world.
Computer Engineering covers the research and design of computers.
A computer scientist is more likely to spend time programming. A computer engineer is going to spend time building computers. A wise company looking to fill a programming position would accept a CS, CE or EE major.
The rule is that they will not issue a patent for a perpetual motion machine without a working model.
So everyone get out their hammer and saw and start building a machine that runs forever. You need more than just an "idea"... You actually have to be able to produce one and show it to them.
They shouldn't grant a patent that gaurantees compression by at least 1 bit without a working program which should be run on itself once for each bit it has so that they can prove to us that every piece of data in the world can be reduced to 1 very random bit.
Linear algebra is the mathematics of points, lines and vectors in n-space. Generally for games you are looking to manipulate points (the vertices of polygons) in 3space. Thus what you need is a fairly small subset of your average first term linear algebra course.
When I finally took Linear I had read *all* the graphics books on the subject and just had trouble "getting it". Taking the class cleared it all up. Just be warned: there is a *lot* of material in Linear that is probably not going to help you out writing a 3D game engine.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with what the previous poster said. Take the money and run - lawsuits take time and energy and one against a failing company may yield little more than a micro-thin slice of the bankruptcy settlement.
Depending on your financial situation, you may be able to write off the other half of the money as a loss or bad debt allowing you to recover 25% or more of it in reduced tax obligation.
The Canon GL1 is a 3CCD video camera that will cost you about $2K to get on the domestic market or $1750 on the grey market. (I bought one of these a couple months ago and it had a mechanical failure two weeks after I got it... I'm glad I didn't buy it on the grey market! I just exchanged it for a new one.) Its quality is superb. It shoots MiniDV format giving you 500 lines of digital goodness. Has a firewire port built in so that you can stream the digital video feed directly to your computer.
The GL1's bigger brother - the XL1 - starts at about $3500 and you can reasonably expect to spend another $3000 on attachments for it. However the XL1 is a broadcast quality video camera.
The CCD cameras for telescopes generally cost more than your average digital camera for a reason: They are specifically designed for high sensitivity long exposure operations. In order to achieve their sensitivity requirements, nearly all of them have a large Peltier effect thermo electric cooling device. Without being very cold the images they take would be completely overwhelmed by dark current. They're a little more than just a CCD, casing and cord.
The blades of grass are out of focus probably because he wasn't shooting at F64 and the grass is outside the depth of field. Since the grass is often green, it would show less fringing even if there were a breeze.
If you *still* think it's polarization, explain which polarization effect would explain this. The little girl on the far left has a full ghost image of herself consistent with what you'd expect to see if these images were taken in succession and she did, as children tend to do, a pitch forward to get herself up after she got bored of staying in one place for so long.
I have one of those 3-CCD video cameras which uses optics to split the light 3 ways, and it is a very complicated process. You can't just use a simple prism to do this, because prisms tend to bend different wavelengths different amounts. And you don't just want to split the image into three identical images because you'll end up with three very dim identical images. You have to mix shape and materials of prisms to get the desired results. I don't think this was necessarily practical at this time.
I think his "using optics" meant that he could internally adjust which emulsion plate the light would fall on. Then he would "rotate" the mirror/prism/whatever do change which plate is getting exposed and re-cock the shutter spring between shots.
When these photos were taken, it was new. Although I'm not sure that this qualifies as "news for nerds" I think those photos are the most culturally significant photographs I've seen in the last 10 years.
If you look at this picture you'll see that the little girl on the far left was in motion during the photo and you can see her different positions as a color separation. All the images with motion in them (water, smoke, people in the background) show this same effect.
After reading that page, I have to wonder if there is some language barrier that is being argued. Case in point:
Last, the contestant will send me a decompressor and a compressed file, which will together total in size less than the original data file, and which will be able to restore the compressed file to the original state.
According to the wording of the challenge, in order to "complete" the challenge you had to produce "a compressed file". Note the singular specific article. The person performing the challenge did not meet this requirement. He produced 218 uncompressed files.
1.7GHz? That's really pushing the speed limit, I wonder how often it has to cut down to 850MHz because it gets too hot.
I always dislike speeches like this because some of the fallacies in it are so blatant I have difficulty determining if the author meant what he said, or simply failed to think through his argument:
Of course, my kids eat, and that takes some time--not much because they've lost the tradition of family dining, but if we allot 3 hours a week to evening meals we arrive at a net amount of private time for each child of 9 hours.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I live on a quiet street in a suburb with about 20 kids on the street. I see them playing every day after school and most of the day on weekends. The ages range from about 7 to 13.
Are they really out playing with portable T.V.'s so that they can get those hours in? What is the obvious point that I'm missing here?
I was where these kids were in the 80's and I remember spending the entire weekend out with my friends exploring our fantasy worlds... Pretending to be an elite squad of heroes who were single handedly winning a war, or champion BMX bicycle racers, stunt men of top caliber, fighter pilots... How did my friends and I manage this on 9 hours / week?
Much of the error is obvious... You can watch TV while eating, and while getting ready for school (and the study that concluded 55 hours was biased to exaggerate their figure to demonize broadcast media). But the argument had a major thrust implying that our children's lives are so proscribed that they don't have enough time to become individuals and I maintain that I myself had more than 9 hours a week to go out and play and so does every kid on my street.
So if we can find other countries that accept the "international airspace" concept, your argument falls apart, right? I mean, like if the soviet union didn't argue the point and even sent its own aircraft down our border in "international airspace", that would sort of imply their understanding of it, yes?
The plane was there listening in on radiant energy that China was sending out. If China doesn't like it, they can stop sending the signals out. If China is so "innocent", why are they stripping the plane? If spying is so abhorrent to them, why not just leave the plane sit where it is and not touch it? You don't think that it is maybe a golden opportunity for China to improve its own intelligence gathering abilities do you?
I don't really care if china strips the plane and returns it in boxes to the U.S.. Historically each side having approximately equal technology prevents big wars from creeping up.
But they need to return our service men and women. It's hard to exercise international diplomacy when the other side is holding hostages.
Was Stream tokenizer the right Java tool for the job? Your implication is nebulous. Stream Tokenizer is only good for tokenizing streams (i.e. files, or sockets). You mentioned charAt(), which when coupled to my previous statement demonstrates either your example is bad or you're pretty clueless. I'll be sure not to hire either one of you.
I have seen what happens when someone new to Java needs to edit text strings... They convert the string to a char array and go through it with a for loop... that's not programming in java.
Open up regedit, search for "CompletionChar", change its value from "0" to "9". Open up a dos prompt type "cd " and start hitting the tab key.
It isn't anywhere near as good as bash, but works with long filenames.
You can also do something similar to grep from the any explorer windows using the right click menu. Do a find, use the advanced tab and you can put in text to search for within documents (again, not as good as grep, doesn't do regex)
This must be a troll... You didn't even read the article did you?
I'd have to ask for a reference on that one. I've seen several arguments, including Bell's Inequality, but none which make so broad and definitive a statement. (ex: this)
Even Einstein didn't much like the statistical models that Planck and others were coming up with... But the quantum universe wasn't exactly his field.
Besides, having true randomness in the universe gives us a warm fuzzy feeling... there really is free will! Our fates are not predestined.
Requires that you use the Gracenote CDDB Database and Gracenote CDDB Client in your Licensed Application as your sole source of Data from the Internet that is based on reading the TOC Data of any CD, Enhanced CD, CD-ROM, Tag ID or DVD media with your Licensed Application;
Same copyright issues as exist with a phonebook... You cannot copyright a collection of facts - only the presentation of them. That data is fair game.
Same goes for your submissions. You don't really own it and neither do they. All you've done is communicated an easily discoverable fact.
Application of the communications decency act to protect ISPs as safe harbors is news for nerds. It is important to us that the government not force ISPs to become big brothers.
Person who has been dumped by Mr. X provides the same report with falsified evidence. Is AOL supposed to remove their account?
The testimony of a single person does not generally warrant invading that persons privacy.
This is exactly what happened with the "report a classmate who has been talking suspiciously" anonymous phone numbers.
What the plaintiff should have done is report the actions to the police who could then take appropriate legal measures. The whole point here is that AOL does not want to become big brother, eaves dropping on its members at the slightest whim. And moreover that the safe harbor clause of the CDA should protect an ISP from having to do this just because some user said so.
Computer Science covers the research and application of computers to solve and study problems in the real world.
Computer Engineering covers the research and design of computers.
A computer scientist is more likely to spend time programming. A computer engineer is going to spend time building computers. A wise company looking to fill a programming position would accept a CS, CE or EE major.
The rule is that they will not issue a patent for a perpetual motion machine without a working model .
So everyone get out their hammer and saw and start building a machine that runs forever. You need more than just an "idea"... You actually have to be able to produce one and show it to them.
They shouldn't grant a patent that gaurantees compression by at least 1 bit without a working program which should be run on itself once for each bit it has so that they can prove to us that every piece of data in the world can be reduced to 1 very random bit.
Linear algebra is the mathematics of points, lines and vectors in n-space. Generally for games you are looking to manipulate points (the vertices of polygons) in 3space. Thus what you need is a fairly small subset of your average first term linear algebra course.
When I finally took Linear I had read *all* the graphics books on the subject and just had trouble "getting it". Taking the class cleared it all up. Just be warned: there is a *lot* of material in Linear that is probably not going to help you out writing a 3D game engine.