I'm a physicist and I agree. Inner electronics contributing to interactions is not new or suprising.
That it could happen with any meaninful probability at the core of the earth is suprising only so far as most of us haven't done detailed pressure calculations to have any sense of how much pressure there is to impact an atom. There were high and low pressure chemical physics labs 10 years ago when I was an undergrad.
That goes to an interesting question. I live in Canada and am half (east) indian. Is the probability of my DNA matching someone from India the same 1/113 billion as it is matching someone from Africa, or not?
I'm betting that politicing has crept into science so they don't want to specify genetic differences based on 'race' or other quantities.
It also asks an interesting question about what could (potentially) you learn from DNA. I'm 197cm tall, which is in part determined genetically, and in part by diet/environmental factors.
So if the RCMP or FBI etc. was looking at my DNA would they in future profile that I'm a tall, thin, half indian guy, and if so does that increase my odds of matching a particular set of people in the database. I think that poses problems for 'communities' of minorities for example.
Another option is to use [sic correction?], which I see a lot when reading quotes of translated material.
In that case it's not always clear whether the translation is at fault, the original text, or neither becuase the translator maybe translating literally what was said, which tends to not be gramatically correct in english.
In the case of something on forums which could contain a great deal of material I'd be inclined to put the original in a footnote and the author's attempt at translation in text.
Women aren't excluded from hard sciences (chemistry, math, physics, comp sci) now becasue they aren't limited enrollment. If a woman has the marks, and lets face it, the marks requirement isn't high, they can get in.
Engineering is a different challenge since they're inherently limited enrollment. Forcing the programmes to take women probably wouldn't dramatically reduce the overall quality of graduates but it would push out a lot of competent interested people, enough of whom are already left out by limited enrollment.
Just my experience here at 3 different institutions (as a student, staff and grad student, lecturer/TA) women in hard sciences tend to be top of the class, or non existent. Where men seem content to be average engineers or scientists women seem to feel if they aren't the best they shouldn't be there. Though in truth at every opportunity programs bend over backwards to attract women students and staff. Admittedly all the women I've seen have to deal with a horde of drooling classmates who can't (and generally don't want) non geek women.
the 4870 with 512 MiB of DDR5 ram is probably still better.
So long as the scene fits in ram, extra ram is a marketting gimmick and nothing more, and at the moment AMD seems to have found 512 is sufficient for the high end. After than what matters is data throughput from RAM to the gpu itself. nVIDIA went with a wide memory bus and slower ram, AMD in the 4870 went with a narrow bus, fast ram, and in the 4850, of which this card is a variant is the same size bus as the 4870 but with the same old DDR3 ram. Given the choice, buy a 4870 with 512 DDR5 and not a 4850 with 2GiB DDR3.
N.B. the 4850 and 4870 are similar but the 4870 is clocked faster and has faster ram. The 4850 is bandwidth limited at high resolutions, not memory limited.
He's not saying games will be 'free' so much as games will be forced online pay model for anything interesting. Sucks to be on a bad net connection and sucks even more if you don't want your computer phoning EA, Activision-blizzard, Valve, Ubisoft, Nintento, Sony etc. with a list of what games you played today.
Under his model there's no reason you can't continue to sell the same sorts of products now, just without the retail outlet (like steam/gamersgate etc).
Nothing here is particularly insightful. If every game released from today on had the same business model as WoW that would mostly end piracy (and so long as your servers keep offering up better content than the fake ones you're in business). But MMO games or microtransactions isn't what everyone wants (think horse armour from oblivion). People also don't want to rely entirely on a subscription service for what could otherwise be a boxed product. If I had bought from the (fictional) interplay online store baldurs gate, NWN and Fallout, I'd be SOL when it came to trying to play those games today since interplay is, for all practical purposes out of business.
The main attempts at solutions to piracy all revolve around online authentication, either immediately upon install or repeated online phone home systems. Disc duplication is largely solved by this system of online variants of the CD-key. However in the age of online piracy the solution seems to be moving towards Steam/Gamersgate (etc) type 'accounts' where you pray the company you bought from stays in business, isn't selling your information, and is keeping your data secure, for you to use your product whenever you want. No more than Samsung should be able to say 'well we don't want your TV to work anymore' or 'we're out of business your TV won't work anymore' should EA be able to do the same thing to ones game collection.
The other solution to piracy is consoles, which are basically expensive DRM boxes with some PC-type components. I'd personally be much happier if they'd charge me half as much for the DRM box (say a custom formatted disk drive for which you cannot buy burners) but have it run on my PC. Won't happen of course because they make more money on consoles and consoles have certain other advantages (like mostly standardized capabilities for developers).
For the moment it looks like the PC market is pushing the revenue sources online (even if the product is the same as in a box), either from advertising, which we don't want, or forcing online dependency for the product, which we also, don't want. Without substantial cooperation between game companies, microsoft, and hardware manufacturers to implement an affordable hardware based solution to disc verification which also adds something for consumers (say the capacity of blu-ray, or more likely video card related) we're going to see the PC market continue to struggle to adapt to new revenue modes which their customers don't want.
Oh and if you're going to make a game like crysis, you need to remember that not everyone who pirated your game could run your game, which was why they pirated it: as a benchmark, not for the game.
It depends a bit on what you're arguing about here. Printed journals have largely gone the way of the dodo bird, but the content and process of journals has moved online. Admittedly I only read chemistry, physics and comp sci journals so I might be a bit biased here but just about every article published in the last 30 years is online, or is in the process of being put online already. Other fields may have different luck, essepcially if you're looking for works more than about 30 or 40 years old where works were published in english, french, german, russian and earlier latin, all of which is a pain to move online in any usable form (there's no nice PDF to work with).
Getting access to journals does cost. I have a membership in the canadian association of physics, the asscoiation of computing machinery and will need to get an IEEE membership as well. Most universities have subscriptions and you can directly access the articles from the web as long as you're logged in on an university machine or if you go the round about route of logging into your library web site or via your professional society membership site.
I'd be interested to know which journals take 2 years to print anything? If you have an article that takes 2 years to print it's usually because it isn't any good, that could be that the content isn't good, or the writing style isn't good but either way if it takes that long to get anything published the problem is with the person trying to publish (when in doubt, try a different journal because yes, some journals are a bit dickish about who they'll accept articles from).
There are a lot of benefits of journal content presentation sytles. While journal articles are written for 'experts' in a field, they still need to be accessable to people in the process of becomming an expert. That forces papers to dumb down the first part of their presentation so that an undergrad can understand it, and establishes a standard form for presentation of results so that other experts can understand it.
The big advantage of print journals is the easy of which I can 'browse'. The web certainly does this better for young people like myself, but for people in there late 30's and older who still get a magazine and read it on the couch or in their office, journals work well. I've never been an astrophysicist, but as a physical scientist I should probably have some vague clue what the major work in that field is, and I should also have some attention to what goes on in say, biology. Browsing/. style condensed headers is ok but flipping through a full article and results has it's advantages too.
Comp sci seems to live and breathe on conferences far more than journals (there are journals but I think it's difficult to establish a journal for a field that won't exist in 5 years and didn't exist last year). After spending two years trying to do research in comp sci (after 6 years doing research in physics), I prefer the electronic journal system of physics better. Conference proceedings vary wildly in their quality and conference attendance is far more expensive than a decent journal.
I'm not really sure there's a much better measure of a researchers quality. As with any profession, periodically you document the work that you've done, someone who ought to understand the work looks it over and gives either a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Journals are a means of both disseminating that information in consistent form, and assessing quality by other people who would understand it. It's never quite that simple but the system really works reasonably well.
More support calls from people who want to play Wow on crappy computers, and will then complain about framerates.
Don't get me wrong, cheap computers certainly have an important place. My notebook was cheap, my desktop wasn't, but I don't seriously expect to play Crysis on my laptop.
These Eeepc's are bit like cheap indian cars that have no AC, no radio and cap out at 70Km/h. They have a place: People who can't afford better and/or aren't going to need to go on highways, and people who try just make life difficult for the rest of us.
Lets think about what you at least theoretically can do with an Eeepc: You can skype, edit documents, browse the web, and play a bit of music. Sounds good to me, it's cheap enough a student (public, high school, even some university students) can carry it around with them and not be in any major trouble if it gets lost or broken as long as they use some sort usb drive backup. Want to plug in your iPod though? Not enough storage space for it to be worthwhile. Want to play nearly any game based on a franchise, not going to happen (except maybe flash?). Need to load something from CD, not going to happen.
The drive to the bottom in cost is in many ways bad for people who develop software, games or otherwise. People can go out and spend 1500 dollars on a computer and it doesn't do even basic things like play games (Intel integraged graphics!), but other people can get a very good system for 1500 bucks, that's a problem with requirements analysis and companies selling crap which consumers clearly don't understand and it just alienates them from the whole process. If you start cutting away at storage space, memory etc... you start to seriously limit what we can allow consumers to do. How many years after DVD's were in every new machine sold did software developers have to keep selling stuff on CD (and waste that corresponding money) so they didn't get support calls from the 1% of users who think the machine they bought in 2002 should still run everything fine? What good is an 8GiB iPod when your computer only has 4 GiB of disk space? What do we do for all those people that openoffice simply doesn't cut it for (esspecially relatively sophisticated excel spreadsheets don't work well in OO)?
If anything we should be making sensible moves in the other direction: Computers that (may) cost more but aren't crap, which then can synchronize with these little sub-notebooks so that the kids can have something to take to school with relatively little risk. But actually using these as a primary machine is best limited to those who really cannot afford anything else, and even then as others have stated above, there are probably better deals.
I got a copy of their book as part of our multimedia research group. The first half is a reasonably approachable treatment of networked application type security issues, sure it's constantly making reference to games and gambling but in an era where most of our students in Comp Sci have played, or do play online games it makes for an understandable example. I would say we pulled a bunch of stuff out of that for our web apps course and some of it for our general software engineering courses. The latter half, with a rather extensive focus on world of warcraft, and it's security from warden (which now transmits encrypted so an 'out of the box' view of the book and their software governor won't do you much good) is insightful, if somewhat traumatic to try and read. Unless you're really inclined to go disassembling your online game much of the benefits of this book can be found elsewhere, but for any game developer it's probably worth reading over a couple of hours to get an appreciation for the sort of attacks you'll face and someone elses take on the same problem in case there's something you've missed.
First: Take your concerns to professor patrick, we all read/., the article you mentioned has ended up electronically and in print on his desk, not that this is the first time those concerns have been raised. They were even raised (by me and others) before and after our curriculum change. Second: Ignore EVERYTHING stephen says, his rare occasions of usefulness are not worth his 99% complete cluelessness. Ditch the business side of things. No this does not apply in general, it does apply at Trent. Do not aim to be a manager, aim to be useful and get promoted into management because you have skills.
Lastly: The most useful people we have, in order, Are Jamie, Brian H. And Jim. Talk to them. They know what's going on and what will get you directed towards useful, employable skills. Jamie's course work is by far the most directly employable, but both Brian H and Jim have years of industry experience, and know what's going on.
If it makes you feel better (and it should) our graduating class from last year are mostly (90% of them, literally) doing quite well with respectable jobs and prospects for advancement, the ones who aren't doing well tried to do things they weren't really interested in, and that's a matter of personal growth.
If you were to consider total medical isotopes by the kilo then true, chalk river is a small player, which is sort of like considering the total amount of fossil fuels used in the world when half the worlds oil production has stopped for 4 months.
If you look at Tc99 production worldwide (in terms of the commericalized amounts) chalk river is somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3rds of production. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less depending on who you ask.
Any sort of functional imaging probably involves Tc99, blood pool organ imaging etc... There are lots of reasons why Tc99 is the choice, but in short, that's what we use, so that's what detectors are designed for so changing to something else is impractical.
The isopotes produced in 'hot labs' at cancer centers etc... are for different kinds of imaging (e.g. PET scans). These can still be done of course, but they aren't the same kind of imaging as Tc99 tends to provide.
In short, yes, they load it on planes and fly it all over north america and Asia, from chalk river.
The guys at bethesda were quite pleased with themselves when they broke their reputation of wiping all the.exe's from your hdd when they released morrowwind. I never encountered the bug they were referring too, but it was presumably in TES I or II.
I'm not sure there is much you can do to improve overall vista performance say in games etc... If you look at the benchmarks it is whatever it is compared to equivalent settings on XP, and new stuff (DX10) is pitifully slow cause it's pitifully slow, there's not much a service pack can do about that. However if you look at a lot of applications performance in Vista vs Xp is not much different, if different at all (think FEAR), however any exception is a glaring exception and frustrating. Looking at the numbers I bet a 1-2% performance increase in Vista is probably bringing it to the same level as XP using the latest drivers for a lot of apps.
More relevantly are some of the general scheduling algorithm problems in vista which need to be addressed. Why does playing audio with a network running cause glitches? Anyone playing an MMO with VOIP (essepcially in game voip like tabula rasa and POTBS beta) can tell you this is a problem. When my backup is running, why are 3 of my cores idle, no matter what I'm doing and 1 nearly crippled? Why does it take so damn long to start a program? Now some of that is application level, not OS scheduler, but the time for an app to gain reasonable access to performance is strangely poor. Startup is the same sort of thing.
Ok so windows Vista has a transactional file system. Am I actually getting anything out of that I will ever use? Well truth be told probably, if it prevents partial writes to the system registry which leave it unstable (or any file leaving the OS or app unstable) then I guess it's good. But I'm not sure it's worth the cost, i guess that's a matter of opinion. Ok so supporting parallelism at an OS level is an odd balancing act, between trying to do it at the OS level and exposing cores to the app level. Sony's PS3 has probably the simplest idea, which is 1 cell core for the system processes and 6 cores up to the application to manage, but the PS3 has a limited set of programs it runs at once, Vista has at my count 78 running processes (including backup, excel, task manager and opera atm, with trillian, the NCsoft launcher, AlienFX for case lights, desktop icon manager (DIM), my palm pilot software and logitech mouse drivers), can't it load balance some of that crap around between cores?
If you want to start thinking about the not too distant future then there is definately something to say which is XP64 vs Vista64. Basically nothing works on XP64, and it's a nightmare, less of a nightmare than it was, but still a nightmare, whereas Vista64 seems a dramatic (if incomplete) improvement. I'm not sure it's even reasonable to compare these OS's since hardware vendors basically ignored XP64 when it came to life, whereas they're kinda forced to pay attention to vista64. The transition to windows 7, vienna or whatever the hell it's called is going to be painful when it's 64 bit only.
I think vista FEELs slow because of a poor scheduling algorithm for tasks getting control of the system and having a transactional file system. One of those things is fixable with a patch, one not, and the one that isn't fixable is probably not a bad idea, it's just an expensive one performance wise. That's a painful tradeoff between performance and reliablity, but most of us who've had to manage servers with virtualization and mission critical data understand the tradeoff all too well, as time goes on and the desktop PC begins to incorporate more and more of the HPC world of parallel machines with complicated interconnections and the database space of storing critical data (and while it may not seem like it is critical, no one wants to lose the last 5 years of pictures because of a bad file copy algorithm), it's going to slow the OS down. Autosave is a good example of this sort of tradeoff in the application world, and while the benefits are more obvious I'm not sure that a transactional file system is a bad thing really.
The other serious criticisms of (aside from file copy and game performance and general scheduling) such as too many versions, PIT
This is a good warning for that tiny fraction of the population who think the EA acquisition of bioware/Pandemic might be a good thing.
This is the EA future: Take a promising product from well reputed developers and infect it with garbage the end user doesn't need, want, and definately should not have to pay for.
I don't care who thought this up, whether it was Namco-Bandai, EA, Flaship or someone else, it shouldn't happen.
As a side note I don't as such object to developers looking into what hardware I'm running on like Steam (not that I actually use steam so this feature may have changed). Knowing what users can handle and what they will be able to handle in future is important, esspecially for MMO or otherwise lasting products, but the manner of collection matters.
Unfortunately a lot of stuff with Securom is good, and yet insists on trying to break my computer. E.G. I have two DVD drives on my machine (lets call them E, and F). E drive, is from where I installed bioshock. If I have the Bioshock disk in the drive, I have to reboot my computer for the drive to recognize any other disk I might wish to replace it with. Then I bought Medieval II: Total War, Kingdoms. Good game, but wouldn't install from E drive at all. So I installed it from F drive. Now, if the MEII:TWK is in F drive, I have to reboot my computer for it to read any other disk. NWN2 Mask of the betrayer (expansion to NWN2). Managed to install from E drive, must reboot to read any other disk.
All 3 use securom. While I've had minor inconveniences with securom before, nothing that requires I reboot my damn machine all the time so I can read DVD's/CD's. I'd hate to have to go the starforce route and boycott anything with securom but that's more and more looking like what I'll have to do. Which is too bad, because the 3 aforementioned games are all really good, when securom lets me play them.
I have a Wii, I have a 360, and a PS3. In order of use, PS3>>>>Wii>>360. Why? Well in short, games I play. The PS3 has backwards compat for a lot of PS1, PS2 titles I never played and a tiny handful of new stuff that was fun. The Wii has Zelda, Metroid, and some mario stuff, the VC is good, but really some of that stuff is just too old for my taste (and I think for the common gamer). Not a bad showing to be sure, but not the huge obsessive products like GTA, FF, etc... The 360 is a piece of shit that runs Halo. Granted, Halo will sell a lot of green coloured pieces of shit, but they're still pieces of shit. Or maybe the new versions aren't, either way, now that Mass effect has gone the way of EA I don't see much keep the 360 for.
I certainly do regret the Wii360 purchase. Though fortunately I had the financial resources to buy all 3.
The 360 is a piece of shit. It's loud, and sounds like it is in constant risk of dying merely because I pushed a button on the controller. It is garbage completely. No retailer should be selling these things to consumers and as a software guy (in academia), I cannot figure out why or how anyone would develop anything for these pieces of crap when odds are it won't work next time you try to compile your code.
The wii: Amusing party gimmick. Not much actual substance for a more serious gamer (yet). Don't get me wrong, there is a tiny bit (zelda!). The virtual console is nice, but not nearly as useful as I would have anticipated. I already have those games, and played those games. There are others available which offer something new (game mechanics, story line whatever). Not that there isn't hope for the Wii, quite the contrary, the Wii has great potential for another year or two. Obviously games need to be made for normal controllers and not the goofy nunchuck as well. If you think that's a selling point of the system, you clearly haven't played a game for a week or two. Yes, it looks amusing and makes a great party gimmick, but for any sort of serious gaming the controller is a huge detractor for the system.
The PS3 has reasonably good hardware (not enough RAM though obviously), silent as a tomb etc... For those people who care (i.e. not me, but people who play driving games) the rumble comming back will be critical. Sony has that sorted out it seems, it is just a matter of time before they are buyable. But overall the rest of the software library is decidedly weak. Sure there are some cross platform titles (and really, if you have the choice there is no reason to even consider the 360 version of anything), but those don't sell consoles. Ninja gaiden sigma, while quite a lot of fun is a rehash of previous ninja gaidens and probably not a huge selling point unless you haven't played them. RFOM as everyone has ever said is a reasonably good game but not earth shatteringly good.
Given the choice right now of Wii360 or a PS3, I wouldn't advise buying anything. Definately not a 360, we can only hope someone in microsoft comes to their senses and gives up on the console market and recalls all the 360s so they can stop wasting shareholder value and gamers time. In some months (probably by the end of this calendar year) we will see if the PS3 or Wii can really deliver on games. If I had to guess, which given the circumstances I do, I would bet the Wii will remain the gimmicky casual style games that cater more towared kids or people looking for short play sessions, some of that is fixable by developing games for a sensible controller as well as or in lieu of the nunchuk. That's a good market for nintendo, it's probably on a Euro/Yen/Dollar basis the biggest share of the market. The PS3 can pick up the (for want of a better phrase), premium market, that is people with High def TV's looking for a more serious, technically complex/ai challenging experience. There really is room for them both, and if you can find them for sale the madcatz system stackers allow them to sit nicely on top of each other. Sony's problem is fixable if they start cleaning up the dev tools and open up the coffers to get exclusives and some decent software product on the shelves.
well to that extent benchmarks matter to show it's only 3 fps. The difference between and 8800 Ultra and a 2900 XT is pretty substantial. No, that isn't an apples to apples comparison, but it clearly demonstrates that for decidedly more money, you get a better card. If that degree of betterness is worth the extra cost to anyone in their given circumstances then they can make an informed choice.
By that same token, if the difference is 3fps, and otherwise virtually identical, then you know that too, and you can make your informed choice (to buy on linux drivers, general driver quality, which I might note for nvidia is less than stellar on vista so far, cost, colour, lenght of card or whatever else).
These benchmarks, are however, useless IMO. Benchmarks in general are not, because if you can text enough things against a broad collection of hardware you can get a good idea of relative performance. These benchmarks however, being in the clearly unoptimized and relatively unfinished state that they are, are not. Synthetic benchmarks have uses (3d mark for example), because those are completed software suites that have gone through optimization, testing etc... The lost planet demo however, still makes references to pushing 360 controller buttons not keys. No that doesn't impact performance as such, but it's a good indicator to me that the demo is not representative of the final state of the game. It's useful internally, load it up, test it out, and see what optimizations you can make. But for an average consumer these benchmarks only show the performance on one card or another most of the way through development before the ever critical tuning stage happens. The final version of lost planet (and a demo created from it) would however be a good piece of the benchmarking puzzle imo.
1. Both AMD/ATi and Nvidia drivers give crappy performance, and the newest hardware generation of G80's BSOD'd in XP, and slows down (granted not a huge amount, but it slows down) in vista. Yes, I have a G80. 2. Creative sound card drivers are virtually non existant. What good is my 7.1 surround sound if it doesn't work? 3. What does vista do for 'me'? (actually quite a lot but that's beside the point). People don't know why their computer is slow when it has 500 different pieces of spyware and half a dozen viruses, why on earth would they conclude a more secure operating system with help them (or one advertised as such)? Without a minimal ability to diagnose existing problems (hmm my car is on fire kind of problems, not there's a crack in an O-ring kind of problem) people don't appreciate what, if anything vista would do for them. 4. Deserved bad press. UAC is braindead. I can buy UAC as a firewall style app (first time you click on an app is yay or nays it, if it changes it yay or nays it). As it is, it's unnecessarily annoying. Yes, I really did click on control panel. 5. If I'm going to buy vista which version is right for me? What's the difference between 32 and 64 bit? Why don't my 4 Gigs of ram work? It's too damn confusing. Vista should have two versions: Home, and Corporate. Home should more or less be vista ultimate. Corporate should be well, corporate, enterprise licenses, no media center that sort of stuff. Oh and they should only come in a 64 bit flavour, or only a 32 bit flavour, not this crazy half and half. 6. People who have vista have no great reason to be happy. Lots of apps don't work. If I show vista (I have vista on two machines) to people the first thing they notice as a bad idea is the start menu-> programs is all compacted. Exact oppposite of what should have happened compared to XP. Critical interface design flaw. 7. Do I give a shit about wigits or whatever they're called? No. 8. Upgrading. Given all of the above, and the bunch of backwards compatability issues (related mostly to 16 bit installers, and popular apps like itunes), why would I want to necessarily replace my system, with whatever flaws it has, at least those I know something about. There's no sense intentionally breaking applications I already use. 9. Critical apps (ie antivirus, which people usually don't bother to update or use properly but know enough to purchase, thinking that will help, even if they don't install it), don't all come in working vista versions off the same shelf.
I think the critical points are more hardware vendors than MS's fault (and to some extent this applies to any OS), without useful drivers the hardware just doesn't work. Some of that stuff is just 'well on a new system you get vista' kinda thing. And some of it will be rectified with time, installers compatability etc... XP had some backwards compatability issues, it apparently still has some driver issues etc... and it still rules the roost, Vista will likely get there, but MS could have made this a lot easier on themselves and everyone else.
OpenGl is good because it's multiplatform and runs basically equally well on everything, that was at least, until vista. It isn't bad under vista but it isn't great. How much that can improve via drivers I don't know.
Directx, being windows only and reasonably easy to use has been a good tool for people making windows only apps. WoW being the only major exception, most games are windows apps first, and then, if they're lucky, ported to another OS.
The big selling point of shader model 4.0 is the geometry shader. Directx seems to be first out the door with useful geometry shader development tools, which more or less locks people into having vista for early adoption, at that point, why bother with OpenGl which may not run as well on vista etc... etc...? I'm not writing a D3D path and an OpenGl path in my engines, and nor would anyone else. That and most game developers already know D3D for the above 'it's what we use' reason, adding in geometry shaders is relatively trivial. Not that learning OpenGl is hard, I started with OpenGl and I think overall (largely the multiplatformness) makes it a superior product to DX9. But DX10 does stuff OpenGl 2.0 doesn't yet, and that's a problem. The apparently reduced performance of OpenGl under Vista, if not corrected/correctable is going to be a rather painful blow to any further OpenGl adoption. As much as it's nice to support a broad base, if 90% of my customers are using windows, I'm not going to sacrifice 10% performance for them to pick up that 10% of linux/mac users, since that will disenfranchise much of the windows base, and they'll buy games from someone who optimized for them. Nor do I want to disenfranchise the 10% of my base that uses vista (as compared to 80% using XP) since they're the 'bleeding edge' type people to begin with, and if they have bad things to say about my game compared to others, that's going to be bad in the long run.
These guys, as always happens when you put an economist on a technical problem, missed the point.
The main value in DST at all is not a reduction in energy consumption (in fact as anyone notes that's relatively minimal at best, and non existant at worst) is to reduce the PEAK of the power consumption curve. Politicians will jump up and down and dance around about reducing energy consumption but that's just a game, and shouldn't be taken seriously, it is easy for the general public to understand and is close enough to the truth for their purposes (assuming they understand the real issues, which is doubtful). The problem with electricity production is that you need capacity to produce power for 100% of your peak load during the year. If you reduce the peak consumption by 1% you reduce the required capacity in electricity generation by 1%. That doesn't mean you'll save 1%, in fact quite the contrary if you could use 1% more power overall, but still reduce peak by 1% that is a good tradeoff (at least at the moment), you need less plants operating essentially (say close 4 nuclear plants for example), since for parts of the year a good chunck of capacity remains idle (normally we use hydroelectric for this since hydroelectric plants can be turned off and on quickly, remotely and cheaply, usually adapting to new load within about 15 minutes, whereas nuclear is on 24/7, and coal etc... take a few hours to fire up). Ideally we want to use more hydroelectric power on baseload and less on chasing after peak capacity, since it's well the best choice, and at best that is where the 'energy' savings comes from. If you can close one fossil fuel plant but keep 4 (or 10 or whatever number it is) hydroelectric stations running 24/7, that's good for everyone except the guys working at the fossil fuels side of things.
For people to whom that doesn't make a lot of sense, traffic planning is the same issue. You want to do everything you can to reduce the peak number of cars on the road, and roads have to designed for the peak number of users, or else you have gridlock. If everyone left for work at 8am, and came home at 5pm, commutes would be a disaster, by staggering some consumption of that road by up to an hour in each direction (between 7 and 9 am, and between 4 and 6pm) you can reduce the peak road useage. Obviously with roads you can (and do) accept some gridlock, but, being one of those poor buggers in canada, I'll tell you right off I don't want to be without power for an hour a day in the middle of winter.
I'm not convinced the percieved savings will materialize with this shift however. I've been out of the actual power production business long enough I'm not sure I can speak intelligently about what effect it actually will have, but I'm reasonably confident in the desired effect. If I have to guess (and this is more rambling thinking than any sort of informed mathematical formalism), businesses are now 24/7 entities, at least the ones that use a lot of power (manufacturing, chemicals that sort of thing), and since those factories are largely enclosed the lights are on either way. People get to work in the morning, which is now (partly as a result of the aforementioned traffic situation) in a somewhat staggered way so computers don't all light up at exactly 8:15. When the stove was the highest power consumption appliance used daily that was the deciding factor for peak power (people got home from work and turned on the stove sort of thing) but I suspect computers operating 8 hours a day or more now are a much bigger impact than stoves, I dunno though. So when does that make peak power? When air conditioners and office computers are running full bore at noonish? In the evening, people come home, turn on their computer, TV, entertainment set, and then start to cook? How about a quick e-mail check in the morning while cooking breakfast on the stove? What about microwaves? I'm sure there are figures availalbe for this, but I'm too lazy to hunt for them. I would have thought peak power is now at the
I take the attidude that universities should teach students both. In CS we should be teaching students real world job skills, from basic cable monkeying and system setup/maintenance to programming, while at the same time teaching them to use those skills to solve novel problems.
It isn't that the situation is either or. Universities have to teach students real job skills, as the minimum standards of education go up, and employee training time goes down universities have to give their students something they can demonstratably do that is useful before they graduate. But that's first and second year, there are still 2 more years. The university students should be going through the same material faster than their college/tradeschool counterparts and secondly they are at school longer, and that extra time is where you differentiate your programme by giving them more novel problem solving problems.
As another poster said, who do you want doing your wiring an electrician or an electrical engineer. Comming straight out of school they ought to both know HOW to do it, the electrical engineer should also know why the house wiring code is the way it is, and be able to apply that to making a space shuttle, rail gun or lighting in a bridge, whereas the electrician is focused soley on the skill of house wiring (or whichever type of wiring they care about).
Depends on how you define 'useful'. Governments spent billions of dollars, risked many dozens if not millions (as in all of our) lives, to get information of lower quality than google earth in the 50s, 60's and 70's. Most military installations are built/used with this in mind now. Something you want other satellite holders to see you put out there, stuff you don't you spend oodles of time effort and money to hide, and anything you don't care about (like where the US army parks its old aircraft), you put wherever is convenient or cheap. In that regard I doubt the occupation forces in Iraq are so braindead as to have anything particularly useful of theirs show up on google earth now.
However, buildings don't move, and the insurgency in iraq, while predominatly made of Iraqi nationals, is most certainly far more mobile than any previous insurgency in recent memory. Simply put the iraqi's have cars. If you're an insurgent in one town, you can look at google earth, plot out where you want to go, set up, position, coordinate based on GPS locations etc.. with other people in another. I was thinking loosely about this problem where I live. I live in one city (~70K people), but really I don't know my way around any of the smaller towns that surround us, nor do I know my way around the biggest city near me (which is toronto nearly 150Km away). But, moving from place A to B is fairly easy, at least when I'm not crawling through the jungles of borneo or riding my camel through the middle of the desert. The resistance in Iraq can use GE just the same as any of us can use google earth to figure out where we're going.
With respect to the article specifically. The parking lots of Iraq's military installations, now in use by the British, probably haven't moved too far, nor have the suitable places for housing since those photos were taken. Given how long the occupation has been going on, those bases haven't moved and I somehow doubt the british army has been able to magically conjure up new places within the bases to put their tents, and even if google pictures are a year or two old those things are likely not all that much different.
With Google Earth a resistance fighter can see their way around rooftops, so long as the buildings are still standing, target things that don't move, or things that are consistently moved to and from the same place (like vehicles), and generally get a feel for what the terrain they are going to operate in looks like, and the layout. The fact that google earth might be somewhat out of date is less of a problem, if your information is wrong, you get killed, but it was better than nothing. Whereas the US/UK/FR/PRC/RUS would demand up the day satellite info to ensure maximum survivability of their soldiers, resistance movements tend to be more willing to make sacrificies.
In a broader sense, I think militaries and goverments will have to adapt their organization around satellite imagery. Right now they're all used to thinking only other people with spy satellites can see these things. Sure everyone has maps, but maps are no where near as useful as a satellite photo, even a crappy one. This probably means a lot more things in semi portable or easy to construct bunkers like they use for jet fighters.
One shouldn't confuse consumption with waste, he's talking about total consumption here. A dryer running constantly with no clothes in it is wasted power. Yet no one sensible would do that.
Most newer computers can ramp down power consumption when not in use, but they're still using some power. Lights left on when no one around is wasted energy (and bulbs), just as a computer running at full tilt with no one around is usually wasted. But if you're google using however many thousands of computers that they are running constantly isn't a waste.
Wasted power are things you don't see any benefit from. Yes, I could air dry all my clothes, though I live in canada, so 6 (now thanks to global warming 4) months of the year I could air freeze my clothes. So a dryer is an inefficient use of power at least part of the year but it isn't wasted as such. Leaving the refrigerator open 24/7 is wasting power. Running the dryer 20 minutes longer to make sure your clothes are extra dry is wasting power. Leaving a computer running full bore when no one is using it is wasting power. Inefficient power use is when you don't insulate your house (or open air it depending on your climate and house) but they obviously don't work for everyone. Incandescent bulbs are inefficient in terms of power, but total cost of ownership is harder to quantify. I find fluorescents burn out as fast or faster than regular ones, and the fluorescents cost more, that may be a matter of tolerance to humidity, electrical fluctuations and air temperature but I don't know. It would be nice to reduce power consumption but not if it costs me 30 or 40 bucks a month in replacement bulbs to save 10 bucks on my power bill.
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I'm on Vista 64 ultimate and no BSOD here with the iPhone.
My speakers makes a wierd sort of distorted gurgling sound when the phone is connected, and then the phone does it's characteristic beep. But no BSOD.
I'm a physicist and I agree. Inner electronics contributing to interactions is not new or suprising.
That it could happen with any meaninful probability at the core of the earth is suprising only so far as most of us haven't done detailed pressure calculations to have any sense of how much pressure there is to impact an atom. There were high and low pressure chemical physics labs 10 years ago when I was an undergrad.
That goes to an interesting question. I live in Canada and am half (east) indian. Is the probability of my DNA matching someone from India the same 1/113 billion as it is matching someone from Africa, or not?
I'm betting that politicing has crept into science so they don't want to specify genetic differences based on 'race' or other quantities.
It also asks an interesting question about what could (potentially) you learn from DNA. I'm 197cm tall, which is in part determined genetically, and in part by diet/environmental factors.
So if the RCMP or FBI etc. was looking at my DNA would they in future profile that I'm a tall, thin, half indian guy, and if so does that increase my odds of matching a particular set of people in the database. I think that poses problems for 'communities' of minorities for example.
Another option is to use [sic correction?], which I see a lot when reading quotes of translated material.
In that case it's not always clear whether the translation is at fault, the original text, or neither becuase the translator maybe translating literally what was said, which tends to not be gramatically correct in english.
In the case of something on forums which could contain a great deal of material I'd be inclined to put the original in a footnote and the author's attempt at translation in text.
Women aren't excluded from hard sciences (chemistry, math, physics, comp sci) now becasue they aren't limited enrollment. If a woman has the marks, and lets face it, the marks requirement isn't high, they can get in.
Engineering is a different challenge since they're inherently limited enrollment. Forcing the programmes to take women probably wouldn't dramatically reduce the overall quality of graduates but it would push out a lot of competent interested people, enough of whom are already left out by limited enrollment.
Just my experience here at 3 different institutions (as a student, staff and grad student, lecturer/TA) women in hard sciences tend to be top of the class, or non existent. Where men seem content to be average engineers or scientists women seem to feel if they aren't the best they shouldn't be there. Though in truth at every opportunity programs bend over backwards to attract women students and staff. Admittedly all the women I've seen have to deal with a horde of drooling classmates who can't (and generally don't want) non geek women.
the 4870 with 512 MiB of DDR5 ram is probably still better.
So long as the scene fits in ram, extra ram is a marketting gimmick and nothing more, and at the moment AMD seems to have found 512 is sufficient for the high end. After than what matters is data throughput from RAM to the gpu itself. nVIDIA went with a wide memory bus and slower ram, AMD in the 4870 went with a narrow bus, fast ram, and in the 4850, of which this card is a variant is the same size bus as the 4870 but with the same old DDR3 ram. Given the choice, buy a 4870 with 512 DDR5 and not a 4850 with 2GiB DDR3.
N.B. the 4850 and 4870 are similar but the 4870 is clocked faster and has faster ram. The 4850 is bandwidth limited at high resolutions, not memory limited.
He's not saying games will be 'free' so much as games will be forced online pay model for anything interesting. Sucks to be on a bad net connection and sucks even more if you don't want your computer phoning EA, Activision-blizzard, Valve, Ubisoft, Nintento, Sony etc. with a list of what games you played today.
Under his model there's no reason you can't continue to sell the same sorts of products now, just without the retail outlet (like steam/gamersgate etc).
Nothing here is particularly insightful. If every game released from today on had the same business model as WoW that would mostly end piracy (and so long as your servers keep offering up better content than the fake ones you're in business). But MMO games or microtransactions isn't what everyone wants (think horse armour from oblivion). People also don't want to rely entirely on a subscription service for what could otherwise be a boxed product. If I had bought from the (fictional) interplay online store baldurs gate, NWN and Fallout, I'd be SOL when it came to trying to play those games today since interplay is, for all practical purposes out of business.
The main attempts at solutions to piracy all revolve around online authentication, either immediately upon install or repeated online phone home systems. Disc duplication is largely solved by this system of online variants of the CD-key. However in the age of online piracy the solution seems to be moving towards Steam/Gamersgate (etc) type 'accounts' where you pray the company you bought from stays in business, isn't selling your information, and is keeping your data secure, for you to use your product whenever you want. No more than Samsung should be able to say 'well we don't want your TV to work anymore' or 'we're out of business your TV won't work anymore' should EA be able to do the same thing to ones game collection.
The other solution to piracy is consoles, which are basically expensive DRM boxes with some PC-type components. I'd personally be much happier if they'd charge me half as much for the DRM box (say a custom formatted disk drive for which you cannot buy burners) but have it run on my PC. Won't happen of course because they make more money on consoles and consoles have certain other advantages (like mostly standardized capabilities for developers).
For the moment it looks like the PC market is pushing the revenue sources online (even if the product is the same as in a box), either from advertising, which we don't want, or forcing online dependency for the product, which we also, don't want. Without substantial cooperation between game companies, microsoft, and hardware manufacturers to implement an affordable hardware based solution to disc verification which also adds something for consumers (say the capacity of blu-ray, or more likely video card related) we're going to see the PC market continue to struggle to adapt to new revenue modes which their customers don't want.
Oh and if you're going to make a game like crysis, you need to remember that not everyone who pirated your game could run your game, which was why they pirated it: as a benchmark, not for the game.
It depends a bit on what you're arguing about here. Printed journals have largely gone the way of the dodo bird, but the content and process of journals has moved online. Admittedly I only read chemistry, physics and comp sci journals so I might be a bit biased here but just about every article published in the last 30 years is online, or is in the process of being put online already. Other fields may have different luck, essepcially if you're looking for works more than about 30 or 40 years old where works were published in english, french, german, russian and earlier latin, all of which is a pain to move online in any usable form (there's no nice PDF to work with).
/. style condensed headers is ok but flipping through a full article and results has it's advantages too.
Getting access to journals does cost. I have a membership in the canadian association of physics, the asscoiation of computing machinery and will need to get an IEEE membership as well. Most universities have subscriptions and you can directly access the articles from the web as long as you're logged in on an university machine or if you go the round about route of logging into your library web site or via your professional society membership site.
I'd be interested to know which journals take 2 years to print anything? If you have an article that takes 2 years to print it's usually because it isn't any good, that could be that the content isn't good, or the writing style isn't good but either way if it takes that long to get anything published the problem is with the person trying to publish (when in doubt, try a different journal because yes, some journals are a bit dickish about who they'll accept articles from).
There are a lot of benefits of journal content presentation sytles. While journal articles are written for 'experts' in a field, they still need to be accessable to people in the process of becomming an expert. That forces papers to dumb down the first part of their presentation so that an undergrad can understand it, and establishes a standard form for presentation of results so that other experts can understand it.
The big advantage of print journals is the easy of which I can 'browse'. The web certainly does this better for young people like myself, but for people in there late 30's and older who still get a magazine and read it on the couch or in their office, journals work well. I've never been an astrophysicist, but as a physical scientist I should probably have some vague clue what the major work in that field is, and I should also have some attention to what goes on in say, biology. Browsing
Comp sci seems to live and breathe on conferences far more than journals (there are journals but I think it's difficult to establish a journal for a field that won't exist in 5 years and didn't exist last year). After spending two years trying to do research in comp sci (after 6 years doing research in physics), I prefer the electronic journal system of physics better. Conference proceedings vary wildly in their quality and conference attendance is far more expensive than a decent journal.
I'm not really sure there's a much better measure of a researchers quality. As with any profession, periodically you document the work that you've done, someone who ought to understand the work looks it over and gives either a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Journals are a means of both disseminating that information in consistent form, and assessing quality by other people who would understand it. It's never quite that simple but the system really works reasonably well.
More support calls from people who want to play Wow on crappy computers, and will then complain about framerates.
Don't get me wrong, cheap computers certainly have an important place. My notebook was cheap, my desktop wasn't, but I don't seriously expect to play Crysis on my laptop.
These Eeepc's are bit like cheap indian cars that have no AC, no radio and cap out at 70Km/h. They have a place: People who can't afford better and/or aren't going to need to go on highways, and people who try just make life difficult for the rest of us.
Lets think about what you at least theoretically can do with an Eeepc: You can skype, edit documents, browse the web, and play a bit of music. Sounds good to me, it's cheap enough a student (public, high school, even some university students) can carry it around with them and not be in any major trouble if it gets lost or broken as long as they use some sort usb drive backup. Want to plug in your iPod though? Not enough storage space for it to be worthwhile. Want to play nearly any game based on a franchise, not going to happen (except maybe flash?). Need to load something from CD, not going to happen.
The drive to the bottom in cost is in many ways bad for people who develop software, games or otherwise. People can go out and spend 1500 dollars on a computer and it doesn't do even basic things like play games (Intel integraged graphics!), but other people can get a very good system for 1500 bucks, that's a problem with requirements analysis and companies selling crap which consumers clearly don't understand and it just alienates them from the whole process. If you start cutting away at storage space, memory etc... you start to seriously limit what we can allow consumers to do. How many years after DVD's were in every new machine sold did software developers have to keep selling stuff on CD (and waste that corresponding money) so they didn't get support calls from the 1% of users who think the machine they bought in 2002 should still run everything fine? What good is an 8GiB iPod when your computer only has 4 GiB of disk space? What do we do for all those people that openoffice simply doesn't cut it for (esspecially relatively sophisticated excel spreadsheets don't work well in OO)?
If anything we should be making sensible moves in the other direction: Computers that (may) cost more but aren't crap, which then can synchronize with these little sub-notebooks so that the kids can have something to take to school with relatively little risk. But actually using these as a primary machine is best limited to those who really cannot afford anything else, and even then as others have stated above, there are probably better deals.
I got a copy of their book as part of our multimedia research group. The first half is a reasonably approachable treatment of networked application type security issues, sure it's constantly making reference to games and gambling but in an era where most of our students in Comp Sci have played, or do play online games it makes for an understandable example. I would say we pulled a bunch of stuff out of that for our web apps course and some of it for our general software engineering courses. The latter half, with a rather extensive focus on world of warcraft, and it's security from warden (which now transmits encrypted so an 'out of the box' view of the book and their software governor won't do you much good) is insightful, if somewhat traumatic to try and read. Unless you're really inclined to go disassembling your online game much of the benefits of this book can be found elsewhere, but for any game developer it's probably worth reading over a couple of hours to get an appreciation for the sort of attacks you'll face and someone elses take on the same problem in case there's something you've missed.
It sounds to me like you're at Trent.
/., the article you mentioned has ended up electronically and in print on his desk, not that this is the first time those concerns have been raised. They were even raised (by me and others) before and after our curriculum change. Second: Ignore EVERYTHING stephen says, his rare occasions of usefulness are not worth his 99% complete cluelessness. Ditch the business side of things. No this does not apply in general, it does apply at Trent. Do not aim to be a manager, aim to be useful and get promoted into management because you have skills.
First: Take your concerns to professor patrick, we all read
Lastly: The most useful people we have, in order, Are Jamie, Brian H. And Jim. Talk to them. They know what's going on and what will get you directed towards useful, employable skills. Jamie's course work is by far the most directly employable, but both Brian H and Jim have years of industry experience, and know what's going on.
If it makes you feel better (and it should) our graduating class from last year are mostly (90% of them, literally) doing quite well with respectable jobs and prospects for advancement, the ones who aren't doing well tried to do things they weren't really interested in, and that's a matter of personal growth.
Completely missing the point.
If you were to consider total medical isotopes by the kilo then true, chalk river is a small player, which is sort of like considering the total amount of fossil fuels used in the world when half the worlds oil production has stopped for 4 months.
If you look at Tc99 production worldwide (in terms of the commericalized amounts) chalk river is somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3rds of production. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less depending on who you ask.
Any sort of functional imaging probably involves Tc99, blood pool organ imaging etc... There are lots of reasons why Tc99 is the choice, but in short, that's what we use, so that's what detectors are designed for so changing to something else is impractical.
The isopotes produced in 'hot labs' at cancer centers etc... are for different kinds of imaging (e.g. PET scans). These can still be done of course, but they aren't the same kind of imaging as Tc99 tends to provide.
In short, yes, they load it on planes and fly it all over north america and Asia, from chalk river.
The guys at bethesda were quite pleased with themselves when they broke their reputation of wiping all the .exe's from your hdd when they released morrowwind. I never encountered the bug they were referring too, but it was presumably in TES I or II.
I'm not sure there is much you can do to improve overall vista performance say in games etc... If you look at the benchmarks it is whatever it is compared to equivalent settings on XP, and new stuff (DX10) is pitifully slow cause it's pitifully slow, there's not much a service pack can do about that. However if you look at a lot of applications performance in Vista vs Xp is not much different, if different at all (think FEAR), however any exception is a glaring exception and frustrating. Looking at the numbers I bet a 1-2% performance increase in Vista is probably bringing it to the same level as XP using the latest drivers for a lot of apps.
More relevantly are some of the general scheduling algorithm problems in vista which need to be addressed. Why does playing audio with a network running cause glitches? Anyone playing an MMO with VOIP (essepcially in game voip like tabula rasa and POTBS beta) can tell you this is a problem. When my backup is running, why are 3 of my cores idle, no matter what I'm doing and 1 nearly crippled? Why does it take so damn long to start a program? Now some of that is application level, not OS scheduler, but the time for an app to gain reasonable access to performance is strangely poor. Startup is the same sort of thing.
Ok so windows Vista has a transactional file system. Am I actually getting anything out of that I will ever use? Well truth be told probably, if it prevents partial writes to the system registry which leave it unstable (or any file leaving the OS or app unstable) then I guess it's good. But I'm not sure it's worth the cost, i guess that's a matter of opinion. Ok so supporting parallelism at an OS level is an odd balancing act, between trying to do it at the OS level and exposing cores to the app level. Sony's PS3 has probably the simplest idea, which is 1 cell core for the system processes and 6 cores up to the application to manage, but the PS3 has a limited set of programs it runs at once, Vista has at my count 78 running processes (including backup, excel, task manager and opera atm, with trillian, the NCsoft launcher, AlienFX for case lights, desktop icon manager (DIM), my palm pilot software and logitech mouse drivers), can't it load balance some of that crap around between cores?
If you want to start thinking about the not too distant future then there is definately something to say which is XP64 vs Vista64. Basically nothing works on XP64, and it's a nightmare, less of a nightmare than it was, but still a nightmare, whereas Vista64 seems a dramatic (if incomplete) improvement. I'm not sure it's even reasonable to compare these OS's since hardware vendors basically ignored XP64 when it came to life, whereas they're kinda forced to pay attention to vista64. The transition to windows 7, vienna or whatever the hell it's called is going to be painful when it's 64 bit only.
I think vista FEELs slow because of a poor scheduling algorithm for tasks getting control of the system and having a transactional file system. One of those things is fixable with a patch, one not, and the one that isn't fixable is probably not a bad idea, it's just an expensive one performance wise. That's a painful tradeoff between performance and reliablity, but most of us who've had to manage servers with virtualization and mission critical data understand the tradeoff all too well, as time goes on and the desktop PC begins to incorporate more and more of the HPC world of parallel machines with complicated interconnections and the database space of storing critical data (and while it may not seem like it is critical, no one wants to lose the last 5 years of pictures because of a bad file copy algorithm), it's going to slow the OS down. Autosave is a good example of this sort of tradeoff in the application world, and while the benefits are more obvious I'm not sure that a transactional file system is a bad thing really.
The other serious criticisms of (aside from file copy and game performance and general scheduling) such as too many versions, PIT
This is a good warning for that tiny fraction of the population who think the EA acquisition of bioware/Pandemic might be a good thing.
This is the EA future: Take a promising product from well reputed developers and infect it with garbage the end user doesn't need, want, and definately should not have to pay for.
I don't care who thought this up, whether it was Namco-Bandai, EA, Flaship or someone else, it shouldn't happen.
As a side note I don't as such object to developers looking into what hardware I'm running on like Steam (not that I actually use steam so this feature may have changed). Knowing what users can handle and what they will be able to handle in future is important, esspecially for MMO or otherwise lasting products, but the manner of collection matters.
Unfortunately a lot of stuff with Securom is good, and yet insists on trying to break my computer.
E.G. I have two DVD drives on my machine (lets call them E, and F).
E drive, is from where I installed bioshock. If I have the Bioshock disk in the drive, I have to reboot my computer for the drive to recognize any other disk I might wish to replace it with.
Then I bought Medieval II: Total War, Kingdoms. Good game, but wouldn't install from E drive at all. So I installed it from F drive. Now, if the MEII:TWK is in F drive, I have to reboot my computer for it to read any other disk.
NWN2 Mask of the betrayer (expansion to NWN2). Managed to install from E drive, must reboot to read any other disk.
All 3 use securom. While I've had minor inconveniences with securom before, nothing that requires I reboot my damn machine all the time so I can read DVD's/CD's. I'd hate to have to go the starforce route and boycott anything with securom but that's more and more looking like what I'll have to do. Which is too bad, because the 3 aforementioned games are all really good, when securom lets me play them.
I have a Wii, I have a 360, and a PS3. In order of use, PS3>>>>Wii>>360. Why? Well in short, games I play. The PS3 has backwards compat for a lot of PS1, PS2 titles I never played and a tiny handful of new stuff that was fun. The Wii has Zelda, Metroid, and some mario stuff, the VC is good, but really some of that stuff is just too old for my taste (and I think for the common gamer). Not a bad showing to be sure, but not the huge obsessive products like GTA, FF, etc... The 360 is a piece of shit that runs Halo. Granted, Halo will sell a lot of green coloured pieces of shit, but they're still pieces of shit. Or maybe the new versions aren't, either way, now that Mass effect has gone the way of EA I don't see much keep the 360 for.
I certainly do regret the Wii360 purchase. Though fortunately I had the financial resources to buy all 3.
The 360 is a piece of shit. It's loud, and sounds like it is in constant risk of dying merely because I pushed a button on the controller. It is garbage completely. No retailer should be selling these things to consumers and as a software guy (in academia), I cannot figure out why or how anyone would develop anything for these pieces of crap when odds are it won't work next time you try to compile your code.
The wii: Amusing party gimmick. Not much actual substance for a more serious gamer (yet). Don't get me wrong, there is a tiny bit (zelda!). The virtual console is nice, but not nearly as useful as I would have anticipated. I already have those games, and played those games. There are others available which offer something new (game mechanics, story line whatever). Not that there isn't hope for the Wii, quite the contrary, the Wii has great potential for another year or two. Obviously games need to be made for normal controllers and not the goofy nunchuck as well. If you think that's a selling point of the system, you clearly haven't played a game for a week or two. Yes, it looks amusing and makes a great party gimmick, but for any sort of serious gaming the controller is a huge detractor for the system.
The PS3 has reasonably good hardware (not enough RAM though obviously), silent as a tomb etc... For those people who care (i.e. not me, but people who play driving games) the rumble comming back will be critical. Sony has that sorted out it seems, it is just a matter of time before they are buyable. But overall the rest of the software library is decidedly weak. Sure there are some cross platform titles (and really, if you have the choice there is no reason to even consider the 360 version of anything), but those don't sell consoles. Ninja gaiden sigma, while quite a lot of fun is a rehash of previous ninja gaidens and probably not a huge selling point unless you haven't played them. RFOM as everyone has ever said is a reasonably good game but not earth shatteringly good.
Given the choice right now of Wii360 or a PS3, I wouldn't advise buying anything. Definately not a 360, we can only hope someone in microsoft comes to their senses and gives up on the console market and recalls all the 360s so they can stop wasting shareholder value and gamers time. In some months (probably by the end of this calendar year) we will see if the PS3 or Wii can really deliver on games. If I had to guess, which given the circumstances I do, I would bet the Wii will remain the gimmicky casual style games that cater more towared kids or people looking for short play sessions, some of that is fixable by developing games for a sensible controller as well as or in lieu of the nunchuk. That's a good market for nintendo, it's probably on a Euro/Yen/Dollar basis the biggest share of the market. The PS3 can pick up the (for want of a better phrase), premium market, that is people with High def TV's looking for a more serious, technically complex/ai challenging experience. There really is room for them both, and if you can find them for sale the madcatz system stackers allow them to sit nicely on top of each other. Sony's problem is fixable if they start cleaning up the dev tools and open up the coffers to get exclusives and some decent software product on the shelves.
well to that extent benchmarks matter to show it's only 3 fps. The difference between and 8800 Ultra and a 2900 XT is pretty substantial. No, that isn't an apples to apples comparison, but it clearly demonstrates that for decidedly more money, you get a better card. If that degree of betterness is worth the extra cost to anyone in their given circumstances then they can make an informed choice.
By that same token, if the difference is 3fps, and otherwise virtually identical, then you know that too, and you can make your informed choice (to buy on linux drivers, general driver quality, which I might note for nvidia is less than stellar on vista so far, cost, colour, lenght of card or whatever else).
These benchmarks, are however, useless IMO. Benchmarks in general are not, because if you can text enough things against a broad collection of hardware you can get a good idea of relative performance. These benchmarks however, being in the clearly unoptimized and relatively unfinished state that they are, are not. Synthetic benchmarks have uses (3d mark for example), because those are completed software suites that have gone through optimization, testing etc... The lost planet demo however, still makes references to pushing 360 controller buttons not keys. No that doesn't impact performance as such, but it's a good indicator to me that the demo is not representative of the final state of the game. It's useful internally, load it up, test it out, and see what optimizations you can make. But for an average consumer these benchmarks only show the performance on one card or another most of the way through development before the ever critical tuning stage happens. The final version of lost planet (and a demo created from it) would however be a good piece of the benchmarking puzzle imo.
Lets see why no vista adoption?
1. Both AMD/ATi and Nvidia drivers give crappy performance, and the newest hardware generation of G80's BSOD'd in XP, and slows down (granted not a huge amount, but it slows down) in vista. Yes, I have a G80.
2. Creative sound card drivers are virtually non existant. What good is my 7.1 surround sound if it doesn't work?
3. What does vista do for 'me'? (actually quite a lot but that's beside the point). People don't know why their computer is slow when it has 500 different pieces of spyware and half a dozen viruses, why on earth would they conclude a more secure operating system with help them (or one advertised as such)? Without a minimal ability to diagnose existing problems (hmm my car is on fire kind of problems, not there's a crack in an O-ring kind of problem) people don't appreciate what, if anything vista would do for them.
4. Deserved bad press. UAC is braindead. I can buy UAC as a firewall style app (first time you click on an app is yay or nays it, if it changes it yay or nays it). As it is, it's unnecessarily annoying. Yes, I really did click on control panel.
5. If I'm going to buy vista which version is right for me? What's the difference between 32 and 64 bit? Why don't my 4 Gigs of ram work? It's too damn confusing. Vista should have two versions: Home, and Corporate. Home should more or less be vista ultimate. Corporate should be well, corporate, enterprise licenses, no media center that sort of stuff. Oh and they should only come in a 64 bit flavour, or only a 32 bit flavour, not this crazy half and half.
6. People who have vista have no great reason to be happy. Lots of apps don't work. If I show vista (I have vista on two machines) to people the first thing they notice as a bad idea is the start menu-> programs is all compacted. Exact oppposite of what should have happened compared to XP. Critical interface design flaw.
7. Do I give a shit about wigits or whatever they're called? No.
8. Upgrading. Given all of the above, and the bunch of backwards compatability issues (related mostly to 16 bit installers, and popular apps like itunes), why would I want to necessarily replace my system, with whatever flaws it has, at least those I know something about. There's no sense intentionally breaking applications I already use.
9. Critical apps (ie antivirus, which people usually don't bother to update or use properly but know enough to purchase, thinking that will help, even if they don't install it), don't all come in working vista versions off the same shelf.
I think the critical points are more hardware vendors than MS's fault (and to some extent this applies to any OS), without useful drivers the hardware just doesn't work. Some of that stuff is just 'well on a new system you get vista' kinda thing. And some of it will be rectified with time, installers compatability etc... XP had some backwards compatability issues, it apparently still has some driver issues etc... and it still rules the roost, Vista will likely get there, but MS could have made this a lot easier on themselves and everyone else.
OpenGl is good because it's multiplatform and runs basically equally well on everything, that was at least, until vista. It isn't bad under vista but it isn't great. How much that can improve via drivers I don't know.
Directx, being windows only and reasonably easy to use has been a good tool for people making windows only apps. WoW being the only major exception, most games are windows apps first, and then, if they're lucky, ported to another OS.
The big selling point of shader model 4.0 is the geometry shader. Directx seems to be first out the door with useful geometry shader development tools, which more or less locks people into having vista for early adoption, at that point, why bother with OpenGl which may not run as well on vista etc... etc...? I'm not writing a D3D path and an OpenGl path in my engines, and nor would anyone else. That and most game developers already know D3D for the above 'it's what we use' reason, adding in geometry shaders is relatively trivial. Not that learning OpenGl is hard, I started with OpenGl and I think overall (largely the multiplatformness) makes it a superior product to DX9. But DX10 does stuff OpenGl 2.0 doesn't yet, and that's a problem. The apparently reduced performance of OpenGl under Vista, if not corrected/correctable is going to be a rather painful blow to any further OpenGl adoption. As much as it's nice to support a broad base, if 90% of my customers are using windows, I'm not going to sacrifice 10% performance for them to pick up that 10% of linux/mac users, since that will disenfranchise much of the windows base, and they'll buy games from someone who optimized for them. Nor do I want to disenfranchise the 10% of my base that uses vista (as compared to 80% using XP) since they're the 'bleeding edge' type people to begin with, and if they have bad things to say about my game compared to others, that's going to be bad in the long run.
These guys, as always happens when you put an economist on a technical problem, missed the point.
The main value in DST at all is not a reduction in energy consumption (in fact as anyone notes that's relatively minimal at best, and non existant at worst) is to reduce the PEAK of the power consumption curve. Politicians will jump up and down and dance around about reducing energy consumption but that's just a game, and shouldn't be taken seriously, it is easy for the general public to understand and is close enough to the truth for their purposes (assuming they understand the real issues, which is doubtful). The problem with electricity production is that you need capacity to produce power for 100% of your peak load during the year. If you reduce the peak consumption by 1% you reduce the required capacity in electricity generation by 1%. That doesn't mean you'll save 1%, in fact quite the contrary if you could use 1% more power overall, but still reduce peak by 1% that is a good tradeoff (at least at the moment), you need less plants operating essentially (say close 4 nuclear plants for example), since for parts of the year a good chunck of capacity remains idle (normally we use hydroelectric for this since hydroelectric plants can be turned off and on quickly, remotely and cheaply, usually adapting to new load within about 15 minutes, whereas nuclear is on 24/7, and coal etc... take a few hours to fire up). Ideally we want to use more hydroelectric power on baseload and less on chasing after peak capacity, since it's well the best choice, and at best that is where the 'energy' savings comes from. If you can close one fossil fuel plant but keep 4 (or 10 or whatever number it is) hydroelectric stations running 24/7, that's good for everyone except the guys working at the fossil fuels side of things.
For people to whom that doesn't make a lot of sense, traffic planning is the same issue. You want to do everything you can to reduce the peak number of cars on the road, and roads have to designed for the peak number of users, or else you have gridlock. If everyone left for work at 8am, and came home at 5pm, commutes would be a disaster, by staggering some consumption of that road by up to an hour in each direction (between 7 and 9 am, and between 4 and 6pm) you can reduce the peak road useage. Obviously with roads you can (and do) accept some gridlock, but, being one of those poor buggers in canada, I'll tell you right off I don't want to be without power for an hour a day in the middle of winter.
I'm not convinced the percieved savings will materialize with this shift however. I've been out of the actual power production business long enough I'm not sure I can speak intelligently about what effect it actually will have, but I'm reasonably confident in the desired effect. If I have to guess (and this is more rambling thinking than any sort of informed mathematical formalism), businesses are now 24/7 entities, at least the ones that use a lot of power (manufacturing, chemicals that sort of thing), and since those factories are largely enclosed the lights are on either way. People get to work in the morning, which is now (partly as a result of the aforementioned traffic situation) in a somewhat staggered way so computers don't all light up at exactly 8:15. When the stove was the highest power consumption appliance used daily that was the deciding factor for peak power (people got home from work and turned on the stove sort of thing) but I suspect computers operating 8 hours a day or more now are a much bigger impact than stoves, I dunno though. So when does that make peak power? When air conditioners and office computers are running full bore at noonish? In the evening, people come home, turn on their computer, TV, entertainment set, and then start to cook? How about a quick e-mail check in the morning while cooking breakfast on the stove? What about microwaves? I'm sure there are figures availalbe for this, but I'm too lazy to hunt for them. I would have thought peak power is now at the
I take the attidude that universities should teach students both. In CS we should be teaching students real world job skills, from basic cable monkeying and system setup/maintenance to programming, while at the same time teaching them to use those skills to solve novel problems.
It isn't that the situation is either or. Universities have to teach students real job skills, as the minimum standards of education go up, and employee training time goes down universities have to give their students something they can demonstratably do that is useful before they graduate. But that's first and second year, there are still 2 more years. The university students should be going through the same material faster than their college/tradeschool counterparts and secondly they are at school longer, and that extra time is where you differentiate your programme by giving them more novel problem solving problems.
As another poster said, who do you want doing your wiring an electrician or an electrical engineer. Comming straight out of school they ought to both know HOW to do it, the electrical engineer should also know why the house wiring code is the way it is, and be able to apply that to making a space shuttle, rail gun or lighting in a bridge, whereas the electrician is focused soley on the skill of house wiring (or whichever type of wiring they care about).
Depends on how you define 'useful'. Governments spent billions of dollars, risked many dozens if not millions (as in all of our) lives, to get information of lower quality than google earth in the 50s, 60's and 70's. Most military installations are built/used with this in mind now. Something you want other satellite holders to see you put out there, stuff you don't you spend oodles of time effort and money to hide, and anything you don't care about (like where the US army parks its old aircraft), you put wherever is convenient or cheap. In that regard I doubt the occupation forces in Iraq are so braindead as to have anything particularly useful of theirs show up on google earth now.
However, buildings don't move, and the insurgency in iraq, while predominatly made of Iraqi nationals, is most certainly far more mobile than any previous insurgency in recent memory. Simply put the iraqi's have cars. If you're an insurgent in one town, you can look at google earth, plot out where you want to go, set up, position, coordinate based on GPS locations etc.. with other people in another. I was thinking loosely about this problem where I live. I live in one city (~70K people), but really I don't know my way around any of the smaller towns that surround us, nor do I know my way around the biggest city near me (which is toronto nearly 150Km away). But, moving from place A to B is fairly easy, at least when I'm not crawling through the jungles of borneo or riding my camel through the middle of the desert. The resistance in Iraq can use GE just the same as any of us can use google earth to figure out where we're going.
With respect to the article specifically. The parking lots of Iraq's military installations, now in use by the British, probably haven't moved too far, nor have the suitable places for housing since those photos were taken. Given how long the occupation has been going on, those bases haven't moved and I somehow doubt the british army has been able to magically conjure up new places within the bases to put their tents, and even if google pictures are a year or two old those things are likely not all that much different.
With Google Earth a resistance fighter can see their way around rooftops, so long as the buildings are still standing, target things that don't move, or things that are consistently moved to and from the same place (like vehicles), and generally get a feel for what the terrain they are going to operate in looks like, and the layout. The fact that google earth might be somewhat out of date is less of a problem, if your information is wrong, you get killed, but it was better than nothing. Whereas the US/UK/FR/PRC/RUS would demand up the day satellite info to ensure maximum survivability of their soldiers, resistance movements tend to be more willing to make sacrificies.
In a broader sense, I think militaries and goverments will have to adapt their organization around satellite imagery. Right now they're all used to thinking only other people with spy satellites can see these things. Sure everyone has maps, but maps are no where near as useful as a satellite photo, even a crappy one. This probably means a lot more things in semi portable or easy to construct bunkers like they use for jet fighters.
One shouldn't confuse consumption with waste, he's talking about total consumption here. A dryer running constantly with no clothes in it is wasted power. Yet no one sensible would do that.
Most newer computers can ramp down power consumption when not in use, but they're still using some power. Lights left on when no one around is wasted energy (and bulbs), just as a computer running at full tilt with no one around is usually wasted. But if you're google using however many thousands of computers that they are running constantly isn't a waste.
Wasted power are things you don't see any benefit from. Yes, I could air dry all my clothes, though I live in canada, so 6 (now thanks to global warming 4) months of the year I could air freeze my clothes. So a dryer is an inefficient use of power at least part of the year but it isn't wasted as such. Leaving the refrigerator open 24/7 is wasting power. Running the dryer 20 minutes longer to make sure your clothes are extra dry is wasting power. Leaving a computer running full bore when no one is using it is wasting power. Inefficient power use is when you don't insulate your house (or open air it depending on your climate and house) but they obviously don't work for everyone. Incandescent bulbs are inefficient in terms of power, but total cost of ownership is harder to quantify. I find fluorescents burn out as fast or faster than regular ones, and the fluorescents cost more, that may be a matter of tolerance to humidity, electrical fluctuations and air temperature but I don't know. It would be nice to reduce power consumption but not if it costs me 30 or 40 bucks a month in replacement bulbs to save 10 bucks on my power bill.