The new chip will be designed for the broadband era, allowing the games machines and other "intelligent" devices to communicate with each other or connect to the internet.
The three companies aim to design a "super-computer on a chip" with a wide variety of consumer applications, they said in a joint statement.
The chip will also be capable of massive parallel processing - dividing up complex or time-consuming processing tasks among many chips - and could eventually be used in computer products.
Lately, C|Net has been more and more favorable to the Windows OSes over Mac and *nix in its individual reviews. It's nice to see them take a head-to-head between Mac and Windows as honestly and democratically as possible.
That said, they need to do it again when Windows XP arrives (and Mac OS X has a few more *nix software offerings available). There will be enough improvements in the interface and usability that the results should be significantly different.
I think even if I did the research mentioned above, it would be a total waste of money because if those people don't believe in the testimonials, they won't believe in the research at all. They would say that I made it all up.
True enough. I hope that the "some doctor in New York" he also mentions is tied to a somewhat more reputable organization.
Smart tags can be easily turned off by a page author. There is a META tag that does this.
Still a pain, but at least they're recognizing some Web sites might not want this "feature". The best part is that with modern template-generated Web sites, you only need to add the META tag in one place to de-Smart Tag your entire site.
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
...the easiest way to get everyone to use e-mail encryption is for Microsoft and/or AOL to pick a standard and integrate it into AOLmail, Hotmail and Outlook Express.
In other words, start petitioning those developers to include PGP or some other, better encryption into the next version of their products. Only by convincing them that there's a high demand for such a thing will it ever happen.
A perfectly obvious way to shorten wire lengths using basic geometry, resuling in a mere 10% improvement in performance, qualifies as "a semiconductor breakthrough as significant as copper interconnects"?
According to Moore's Law, I could have gotten the same improvement simply by postponing my purchase for two months.
And since patent offices are unable to distinguish between 'difficult' things like codecs and trivial things like one-click (the criterion of 'obviousness' is not something a patent examiner understands very well), you have to ask whether we wouldn't be better off without patents on any field of software.
Did you know that the safety pin was patented? A ridiculously simple device, a metal coil with a protective clasp at one end. Mindlessly obvious. But it's an invention, and patentable, and very profitable (at least, for the guy who owned it.)
It's mostly subjective whether a software patent is obvious or not, and what's obvious to a technical employee may not be to a patent worker.
The article wasn't blaming the game makers for the violence that was taking place. If it was blaming anyone, it would be the unique Korean culture that leads to this sort of blurring between online and offline gang behavior.
Besides, who said the parents are the only ones responsible for teaching their kids right and wrong? Whatever happened to the individual's own responsibility to learn it?
I think the main advantage to continued progress with CGI movies would be the simplification of special effects-heavy movies. Imagine if "The Matrix" could have been shot without all the elaborate bullet-time setups or training wires to help actors jump twenty feet and run up walls. Experienced martial artists could be motion-captured, saving months of training the actors.
I don't doubt it takes millions of dollars to create a CGI actor, but that's only with present-day technology. In ten years I'm sure I'll be able to do it on my home computer, and popular CGI "actors" and "actresses" will be re-used for movie after movie, bought and sold and licensed between companies with only their voice needing to change.
"One of the world's major manufacturers of LCDs, Toshiba announced on Wednesday its first prototype of a polymer OLED display that supports 260,000 colors. The 2.85-inch display is targeted for production in portable devices, such as cell phones and handheld computers, in April 2002."
I would think there would be several advantages to being able to keep your launchpad inside the USA -- convenience for your customers, for one, not to mention the lack of gun-toting warlords. And moving away from "United States legal BS" only means that you have to move to some other country's legal BS instead.
The HalfKeyboard Web site shows the most brain-dead way to use this thing I can imagine. Lay a half-keyboard on a huge desk, lay your Palm Pilot down flat, and proceed to type with your left hand while doing nothing with your right. Why? If you have that much space, get a folding keyboard.
The wearable keyboard implementation could work well, but looks way too bizarre to market to business professionals. If you own a handheld and want to type faster, Fitaly is IMO the best way to go.
On the other hand, they could market this as a software add-on for PC/Mac/Linux very easily, now that they (I hope) have the patent on the idea. If I could buy that and use my existing keyboard with only one hand, freeing up the other one for the mouse while still having access to all my keyboard shortcuts, I'd spring a nominal fee for the shareware. But I can't see enough good reasons to replace my existing hardware with that dinky thing.
1. It's made for lefties. A lot more people are right handed than left.
The idea is to free your right hand for mousing, which most right-handed people do. Anyways, they already type the most common half of the alphabet with their left hand, including a, e, r, s, and t.
2. You have to fundamentally change the way you type.
Well, no-@#$%ing-duh. Every non-QWERTY keyboard would naturally require a fundamental change in how you type. It doesn't mean it can't be done; the question is how steep the learning curve is.
3. Using the space bar as the shift will lead to more errors.
That's like saying using the semicolon key for the colon will lead to more errors.
4. The competition from folding keyboards will keep it down.
Why would you use a folding keyboard for gaming? That's what this link is about, after all.
This thing is going to bomb.
Perhaps, but not for any of the reasons you've listed.
If you do any Flash development at all, this book is wonderful. I know that O'Reilly can put out either good or bad stuff, depending on what the subject matter is. So I was hesitant about this book, but the preview chapter on O'Reilly's site looked good.
I told my officemate, the other scripting guy who had already told me to start learning ActionScript for Flash 5, that this book existed. He ordered it online not long after. I borrowed it to look at while I was doing a little coding practice/toy-building of my own.
I was trying to figure out why I was importing XML data and it wasn't parsing the correct number of nodes; Macromedia's shipping ActionScript book wasn't that useful. I opened O'Reilly's, looked for the XML object, and before it even got to the methods and properties I was treated to a short introduction of how to use the XML object, through a short function that would take any XML it was given and parse out the whitespace. Turned out that was my problem all along; ActionScript was reading the linebreaks as empty text nodes.
The book not only gave me two functions to solve this problem, it told me which one was faster, why, what built-in ActionScript method would do the job, why that method wasn't documented, and how I could detect whether that method would be available to my end-users.
All that, and I only cracked the book for two pages worth of help. I can't wait to read the rest of it.
Problem: American Pratchett covers. Everyone knows they suck, because they just plain lack imagination and fail to convey that "there's humor inside here" feeling.
Solution: buy your copies from amazon.co.uk instead. The shipping's a bugger, of course, but a Pratchett purist will appreciate the trouble spent.
You call *that* a review?
on
Thief of Time
·
· Score: 4
Thief of Time is the twenty-sixth book in the seemingly neverending Discworld series of books by Terry Pratchett. Initially, these books were a parody of "Conan the Barbarian"-style fantasy, then evolved into satires about pop culture and contemporary politics, and eventually developed a peculiar knack for murder mysteries and cosmic crises of metaphysical proportions. Thief of Time is about one of these crises.
Susan Sto Helit, granddaughter (by adoption) of the anthropomorphic personification Death, has been trying to preserve her sense of humanity ever since she discovered her family history. Previously, in Hogfather, she was a governess; she's now taken the next logical step into elementary school teaching. But Death hasn't forgotten her, nor her usefullness in situations involving the Auditors.
The Auditors are grey, shapeless, nameless beings who have been harassing Death for some time now. Their self-appointed job is to keep things neat and tidy in the universe, and life in all its shapes and forms is exactly the opposite of that--unpredictable, nondeterministic, and full of intangible things like love and hope. They want to do away with it, but can't through direct intervention. And Death likes life, because without it he's out of a job. But he can't directly intervene, either. So he calls on Susan to help out.
This time, the Auditors are attempting to re-create a special clock--one that can measure the "cosmic tick" of the universe and trap Time herself within it. Stop time, and you stop change, preserving the universe in a tidy and calculable form that the Auditors can enjoy. There's even a clockmaker in exile from his Guild, a man by the name of Jeremy, who's uniquely suited to building such a device.
Susan's not the only one trying to find Jeremy before he can build the clock, though. The Monks of History, last seen behind the scenes of Small Gods, have been taking care of time for... well, it doesn't matter how long, shuttling time away from where it's not needed and adding it to where it is, all across the Disc. They were responsible for restoring history the last time a clock like this was built (and broke), and they're determined to keep it from happening again. The trouble is, it's hard to find a clock that can stop time before it's even built, and it's harder to stop it after it's started working....
Thief of Time will delight geeks because of its well-disguised references to chaos theory (the "Mandala" is clearly derived from the Mandelbrot set), quantum mechanics (the "tick of the cosmos" = Planck's constant), and the movie "The Matrix" (the monks can "slice time" to move ultra-fast, and know more wacky-sounding martial arts than an entire Jackie Chan film festival). You don't have to know the references, fortunately, because Pratchett has to explain them in such a way that his own mythology can interact with it. But knowing where his ideas come from makes the book that much more fun.
The book didn't conclude as well as I'd liked, because a few of the minor characters weren't really tied up. But the major characters were all great. Lu Tze, the monk that played the important part in Small Gods, should be a character we'll enjoy seeing again in future books. Susan is spot-on her usual personality, harassing the mortals she's forced to interact with on a daily basis. Death spends some time chasing down his fellow Horsemen. And the Death of Rats is there mainly because (a) he's how Death always contacts Susan, and (b) to make a not-too-subtle "hickory dickory dock" joke halfway through the book.
Susan's first apperance in Soul Music was a bit of a disappointment, but her role here, like in Hogfather previously, is perfectly suited to her. Death is a fun character, but he lacks personality by his very nature. Susan acting on his behalf is much more enjoyable. More books with her will be welcome in the Pratchett audience, and this one's worth the purchase.
The main advantages to Iomega's new idea are (a) the drive is physically sealed, containing its own read/write heads and thus preventing contamination; (b) you can drop it some thirty feet without damaging it, and (c) you can connect it via USB, FireWire, or SCSI, making it compatible with just about any computer you own and (if Iomega has their way) several non-PC machines you might get in the future.
Yeah, it's costly and incompatible with your DVD/CD players. But it's not like it doesn't have any advantages.
...is readily available from this link on their Web site. Text follows:
We at Vidomi respect licenses and copyrights. From the beginning, we evaluated the GPL license to determine how to be in compliance. We have been explicit about how Vidomi can have increased functionality using GPL code, any revisions Vidomi made to GPL code have been licensed under the GPL and the source code for this GPL code is available for free at Vidomi (opensourcerelease.zip at
http://www.vidomi.com/download.php).
The following language from paragraph 2 of the GPL explicitly concludes that it is possible for a program to in some way interact with GPL code and yet the proprietary independent and separate work not have to be licensed under the GPL:
"If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works....Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program."
We believe we are in compliance with these terms of the GPL (as well as others).
At the same time, we are interested in constructive feedback as to interpretation of the GPL license and Vidomi's approach to compliance with the license. We have been in on-going discussions with Avery Lee, author of Virtual Dub, for about a month, and just two days ago received from Avery more constructive feedback which we are now evaluating and will respond to soon. We welcome the community's input on this issue and will evaluate feedback to determine if we should make any adjustments to how Vidomi interacts with GPL code.
It's the dearth of women, among other things, that consigns games to their geek ghetto, with no genuine celebrities, or pop-cult recognition outside its narrow subculture.
Not entirely true; The Sims is a lone example of how computer games can attract a huge female fanbase (nearly 50%, IIRC) provided it's something they're interested in. But computers in general are still perceived as a "guy" thing, and it'll take several more Sims-scale hits to make the rest of the male-created gaming industry sit up and take notice.
This is actually not new; most DVD players can play "Video CD" discs, which are simply CD-R media with MPEG video encoded on it. The lower data density of a CD-R means much less video, but it's still possible. Toast 5 Titanium also offers VCD burning.
Slashdot Mirror
The new chip will be designed for the broadband era, allowing the games machines and other "intelligent" devices to communicate with each other or connect to the internet.
The three companies aim to design a "super-computer on a chip" with a wide variety of consumer applications, they said in a joint statement.
The chip will also be capable of massive parallel processing - dividing up complex or time-consuming processing tasks among many chips - and could eventually be used in computer products.
Oh, yeah, it'll play video games, too.
That said, they need to do it again when Windows XP arrives (and Mac OS X has a few more *nix software offerings available). There will be enough improvements in the interface and usability that the results should be significantly different.
True enough. I hope that the "some doctor in New York" he also mentions is tied to a somewhat more reputable organization.
Still a pain, but at least they're recognizing some Web sites might not want this "feature". The best part is that with modern template-generated Web sites, you only need to add the META tag in one place to de-Smart Tag your entire site.
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias" (1818)
In other words, start petitioning those developers to include PGP or some other, better encryption into the next version of their products. Only by convincing them that there's a high demand for such a thing will it ever happen.
I doubt it. "The result is a...20 percent reduction in power consumption," according to the article. Less power means less heat.
A perfectly obvious way to shorten wire lengths using basic geometry, resuling in a mere 10% improvement in performance, qualifies as "a semiconductor breakthrough as significant as copper interconnects"?
According to Moore's Law, I could have gotten the same improvement simply by postponing my purchase for two months.
Did you know that the safety pin was patented? A ridiculously simple device, a metal coil with a protective clasp at one end. Mindlessly obvious. But it's an invention, and patentable, and very profitable (at least, for the guy who owned it.)
It's mostly subjective whether a software patent is obvious or not, and what's obvious to a technical employee may not be to a patent worker.
The article wasn't blaming the game makers for the violence that was taking place. If it was blaming anyone, it would be the unique Korean culture that leads to this sort of blurring between online and offline gang behavior.
Besides, who said the parents are the only ones responsible for teaching their kids right and wrong? Whatever happened to the individual's own responsibility to learn it?
I don't doubt it takes millions of dollars to create a CGI actor, but that's only with present-day technology. In ten years I'm sure I'll be able to do it on my home computer, and popular CGI "actors" and "actresses" will be re-used for movie after movie, bought and sold and licensed between companies with only their voice needing to change.
"One of the world's major manufacturers of LCDs, Toshiba announced on Wednesday its first prototype of a polymer OLED display that supports 260,000 colors. The 2.85-inch display is targeted for production in portable devices, such as cell phones and handheld computers, in April 2002."
I would think there would be several advantages to being able to keep your launchpad inside the USA -- convenience for your customers, for one, not to mention the lack of gun-toting warlords. And moving away from "United States legal BS" only means that you have to move to some other country's legal BS instead.
On a Palm Pilot?
The wearable keyboard implementation could work well, but looks way too bizarre to market to business professionals. If you own a handheld and want to type faster, Fitaly is IMO the best way to go.
On the other hand, they could market this as a software add-on for PC/Mac/Linux very easily, now that they (I hope) have the patent on the idea. If I could buy that and use my existing keyboard with only one hand, freeing up the other one for the mouse while still having access to all my keyboard shortcuts, I'd spring a nominal fee for the shareware. But I can't see enough good reasons to replace my existing hardware with that dinky thing.
1. It's made for lefties. A lot more people are right handed than left.
The idea is to free your right hand for mousing, which most right-handed people do. Anyways, they already type the most common half of the alphabet with their left hand, including a, e, r, s, and t.
2. You have to fundamentally change the way you type.
Well, no-@#$%ing-duh. Every non-QWERTY keyboard would naturally require a fundamental change in how you type. It doesn't mean it can't be done; the question is how steep the learning curve is.
3. Using the space bar as the shift will lead to more errors.
That's like saying using the semicolon key for the colon will lead to more errors.
4. The competition from folding keyboards will keep it down.
Why would you use a folding keyboard for gaming? That's what this link is about, after all.
This thing is going to bomb.
Perhaps, but not for any of the reasons you've listed.
All I got from this particular essay is:
Unfortunately, he forgot to offer any constructive solutions, making the entire thing little more than a misdirected troll.
If you do any Flash development at all, this book is wonderful. I know that O'Reilly can put out either good or bad stuff, depending on what the subject matter is. So I was hesitant about this book, but the preview chapter on O'Reilly's site looked good.
I told my officemate, the other scripting guy who had already told me to start learning ActionScript for Flash 5, that this book existed. He ordered it online not long after. I borrowed it to look at while I was doing a little coding practice/toy-building of my own.
I was trying to figure out why I was importing XML data and it wasn't parsing the correct number of nodes; Macromedia's shipping ActionScript book wasn't that useful. I opened O'Reilly's, looked for the XML object, and before it even got to the methods and properties I was treated to a short introduction of how to use the XML object, through a short function that would take any XML it was given and parse out the whitespace. Turned out that was my problem all along; ActionScript was reading the linebreaks as empty text nodes.
The book not only gave me two functions to solve this problem, it told me which one was faster, why, what built-in ActionScript method would do the job, why that method wasn't documented, and how I could detect whether that method would be available to my end-users.
All that, and I only cracked the book for two pages worth of help. I can't wait to read the rest of it.
Solution: buy your copies from amazon.co.uk instead. The shipping's a bugger, of course, but a Pratchett purist will appreciate the trouble spent.
Thief of Time is the twenty-sixth book in the seemingly neverending Discworld series of books by Terry Pratchett. Initially, these books were a parody of "Conan the Barbarian"-style fantasy, then evolved into satires about pop culture and contemporary politics, and eventually developed a peculiar knack for murder mysteries and cosmic crises of metaphysical proportions. Thief of Time is about one of these crises.
Susan Sto Helit, granddaughter (by adoption) of the anthropomorphic personification Death, has been trying to preserve her sense of humanity ever since she discovered her family history. Previously, in Hogfather, she was a governess; she's now taken the next logical step into elementary school teaching. But Death hasn't forgotten her, nor her usefullness in situations involving the Auditors.
The Auditors are grey, shapeless, nameless beings who have been harassing Death for some time now. Their self-appointed job is to keep things neat and tidy in the universe, and life in all its shapes and forms is exactly the opposite of that--unpredictable, nondeterministic, and full of intangible things like love and hope. They want to do away with it, but can't through direct intervention. And Death likes life, because without it he's out of a job. But he can't directly intervene, either. So he calls on Susan to help out.
This time, the Auditors are attempting to re-create a special clock--one that can measure the "cosmic tick" of the universe and trap Time herself within it. Stop time, and you stop change, preserving the universe in a tidy and calculable form that the Auditors can enjoy. There's even a clockmaker in exile from his Guild, a man by the name of Jeremy, who's uniquely suited to building such a device.
Susan's not the only one trying to find Jeremy before he can build the clock, though. The Monks of History, last seen behind the scenes of Small Gods, have been taking care of time for... well, it doesn't matter how long, shuttling time away from where it's not needed and adding it to where it is, all across the Disc. They were responsible for restoring history the last time a clock like this was built (and broke), and they're determined to keep it from happening again. The trouble is, it's hard to find a clock that can stop time before it's even built, and it's harder to stop it after it's started working....
Thief of Time will delight geeks because of its well-disguised references to chaos theory (the "Mandala" is clearly derived from the Mandelbrot set), quantum mechanics (the "tick of the cosmos" = Planck's constant), and the movie "The Matrix" (the monks can "slice time" to move ultra-fast, and know more wacky-sounding martial arts than an entire Jackie Chan film festival). You don't have to know the references, fortunately, because Pratchett has to explain them in such a way that his own mythology can interact with it. But knowing where his ideas come from makes the book that much more fun.
The book didn't conclude as well as I'd liked, because a few of the minor characters weren't really tied up. But the major characters were all great. Lu Tze, the monk that played the important part in Small Gods, should be a character we'll enjoy seeing again in future books. Susan is spot-on her usual personality, harassing the mortals she's forced to interact with on a daily basis. Death spends some time chasing down his fellow Horsemen. And the Death of Rats is there mainly because (a) he's how Death always contacts Susan, and (b) to make a not-too-subtle "hickory dickory dock" joke halfway through the book.
Susan's first apperance in Soul Music was a bit of a disappointment, but her role here, like in Hogfather previously, is perfectly suited to her. Death is a fun character, but he lacks personality by his very nature. Susan acting on his behalf is much more enjoyable. More books with her will be welcome in the Pratchett audience, and this one's worth the purchase.
Yeah, it's costly and incompatible with your DVD/CD players. But it's not like it doesn't have any advantages.
Not entirely true; The Sims is a lone example of how computer games can attract a huge female fanbase (nearly 50%, IIRC) provided it's something they're interested in. But computers in general are still perceived as a "guy" thing, and it'll take several more Sims-scale hits to make the rest of the male-created gaming industry sit up and take notice.
This is actually not new; most DVD players can play "Video CD" discs, which are simply CD-R media with MPEG video encoded on it. The lower data density of a CD-R means much less video, but it's still possible. Toast 5 Titanium also offers VCD burning.