Actually, I really wish they didn't send me most of those paper bills. I pay almost all of mine online and never open most of the envelopes stuffed with bleached and printed printed dead trees.
Can someone help me, im trying to find out how to send a "written" letter using email?
Elementary Watson. The site indiatimes.com via a partnership with Overnight Express as USPS is all geared up to have people in america use email to send printed letters to people back in India. Read about it here.
Perhaps we should send these guys a few copies of David Brin's wonderful novel "Earth", 1990.
For those of you who haven't read it, its a story about a group of scientists accidentally dropping a lab-made black hole into the center of the earth. Whoops! Quite a good deal more goes on which and it all makes quite a good read.
Right you are. And ActiveWorlds demonstrates that making your software "goal-free" reduces your "game" to a glorified chat room.
Wrong.
ActiveWorlds demonstrates that slapping a 3D interface on a chatroom gives you glorified chatroom.
If ActiveWorlds (or something similar to it) were to instead create a world in which you have physics modeling, ability to perform meaningful actions on objects (rather than just jump, wave and do a round-house kick that kicks nothing), and the ability to program or script new behaviors, then you'll see something more than a glorified chatroom. That will provide enough power to start working on a 3D MOO/MUD/MUSH. And those are excellent examples of successful "goal-free" gaming environments.
Real Time Rendering by Mo:ller and Haines Advanced Animation and Rendering Techinques by Alan Watt and Mark Watt Making them Move: Mechanics, Control and Animation of Articulated Figures edited by Badler, Barsky and Zeltzer
Getting back to basics: Interactive Computer Graphics by Angel is a good Intro to Graphics textbook aimed at Undergrads and it is grounded in OpenGL
And then you need the OpenGL reference manuals (the red, blue, green and alpha books)
(Red) OpenGL: A Programmers Guide
(Blue) OpenGL: Reference Manual
(Green) OpenGL: Programming for the X Windows System
(Alpha) OpenGL: Programming for the Windows95/NT
For serious graphics fun, consider: Jim Blinn's Corner: A trip down the graphics pipeline, by Jim Blinn
The popular books are a great suggestion, I'd also recommend most of those. The Society of the Mind, btw, is really quite a serious book hidden in the cloak of approachability.;-)
Now, I know it goes against time honored/. tradition to actually know about a subject before you post.... but I'm going to waste my breath anyway and say it: RTFM!!
If you read.NET documentation you will clearly see that.NET is a general pupose programming platform for creating all kinds of applications. Whether or not you use passport for an ecommerce app is an architectural decision that you get to make. You can use.NET for non-ecommerce apps. You can use.NET for ecommerce but use something other than passport.
Brian Jepson is right on the money.
...And I posted a similar comment to this in the last/. discussion on.NET and a swear only one person read it....
(C'mon folks, we are all making Microsoft look like FUD amateurs with the level of unresearched anti-.NET FUD that's coming out of our collective community's mouth....)
My problem with the FF characters was that they delivered their lines like stiff amateur actors. In fact, they appeared(for the most part) just like REAL human actors with no talent (and no direction, and no script).
In that sense, they can already compete with a good portion of Hollywood...
It has already been noted by people in the graphics industry that graphics cards have been undergoing a 100x speed-up over the past 3 years. That blows moore's law away and if the pace keeps up, you will have real time pimples pretty soon.
Just what microsoft internal memo did you happen to read??
The OS half of the company does quite well with regard to bringing in revenues. I can tell you that they don't plan on killing that off any time soon.
.NET is Microsoft's strategy for leveraging the new age of the networked computer. Period. Just like when Bill G. suddenly decided that "The Internet is Good" back in the mid-90s, they have now decided that the new age of the networked computer is good. Very very g$$d, in fact.
In short,.NET is Microsoft's answer to the entire Java platform, and then some.
What I found interesting was that he seemed to be in the process of making arrows and a bow. He had 12 unfinished arrow shafts and 2 arrows ready to be shot. Also, he carried a bow that was still being worked and not yet strung.
That he was off on a hunting trip was the original hypothesis. But between the murder and the fact that he was still making his weaponry, I would suspect some other (social?) situation brought him into the mountains, and to his untimely demise.
Wow. They couldn't get anywhere near that detailed in the OJ Simpson case, but they can list point-for-point the assault on a dude frozen for 53 centuries.:-)
...and that's the difference between a case that is socio-politically a hot button topic vs. a case where any emotions of the public involved has been long long long dead...
Is this the end of the world? No. If scientists are having trouble publishing their research to a rapt audience (journal readers), then they can simply seek a new environment (corporation) where they can publish their research to an equally important and rapt audience (fellow corporate team members). They will still have all the benefits of publishing (social status, royalties) but without the legal hassle (corporations protect their own) and for significantly greater salaries (let's face it, universities can't afford to pay good salaries anymore).
If you were a scientist, you'd know better than this, and sorry, it doesn't work that way.
The difference between working as an academic researcher vs. a corporate researcher is academic freedom. Furthermore, your predicted corporatization of all research is more likely to slow down scientific advancement. Directly, this slow down will happen by hindering the sharing of work with others (thus stiffling outside innovation) and by ending peer review (thus quality suffers). It will also happen indirectly by limiting the ability of students studying an advanced science to have access to the latest work in the field. Finally, in its ultimate form, corporate research creates a highly decentralized atmosphere for discovering scientific advancements and inovations which in turn fosters a corporate version of "the ivory tower." When that occurs, a single company can easily get a lock on controlling an area of "scientific advancement." Now when would a slashdoter want this? (Are you a troll or something?!)
Academic freedom means that as an academic researcher, you pursue topics that you are interested in and then you share your results with the world-wide academic community in your field (and occasionally related fields). You meet with other scientists doing work in your area or in areas that can benefit from your work. Together as a large group you insire each other and move the field forward. This sharing is motivated directly by your desire for (among other things) job advancement as your raises, tenure, grants, etc. depends mostly on your ability to produce good quality research and publish (share!) it with the academic community at large.
As a corporate researcher, your situation depends on the business plan of your company w.r.t. research and innovation. If your company, like many who hire PhDs for research (particularlly in biotech and also in some fields of comp sci), regards patents as the important measure of your advancement, the atmosphere changes completely. You're motivation (and possibly even your ability) to publish your work in a timely fashion plummets and you cease to share your findings with the greater community of research scientist. This means that (1) the world wide research community no longer knows what you are doing and (2) your work stops being peer reviewed by that community. (I can tell you from a decade of personal experience that when I have been involved in something with commercial potential, we have stopped or watered down our publications.)
The first thing -- lack of community-wide knowledge about your work -- is a major problem for the overall advancement of science. This causes scientific advancement to slow down. If other scientists do not find out about your work and understand your work, then they won't be (a) competitively inspired to do one better, (b) experimentally inspired to reproduce your results to show validity, or (c) think of new ways in which your work and their work fit together into a greater whole. Even worse, students who are training to become tomorrow's scientists are not able to read about the work, study it, and thus give themselves a leg-up to stand on the shoulders of giants.
The second problem -- lack of peer review -- is critical for the advancement of quality work in science. In academia, you share your findings by publishing and in order to be published, your work must be peer reviewed -- reviewed by a panel of peers who don't work directly with you.
Peer review is typically pretty tough and this is a good thing. You, as a scientist, receive valuable critique on your work and suggestions for improvement. Often you must implement those improvements before your work is published. This is a good thing. Why? Without peer review scientists tend to communicate only with their coworkers -- the few other scientists in their area at their home institution. A sort of unchallenge intellectual inbreeding occurs because you all work together on the same project or on intertangled projects. Outsiders are very important for challenging the validity of your work, inspiring new ideas, and pointing out mistaken assuptions (among other things).
As an aside, I am quite sure that our fellow slashdot readers are extremely capable of finding parallels between my discussion of scientific research and the software industry regarding corporate monopoly, suppression of innovation, and the marketting of outdated memes as "the hot new thing."...
As enrollment has dropped and employment opportunities that do not require degrees have grown, the university experience is about to wink out.
What planet are you on? Let me guess: you aren't on university planning commities, working in the dean's or provost's office, nor are you even reading the NYTimes.
College applications for admissions are going through the roof. Major universities are trying to figure out how in heck they can properly service and educate all of the people who want take college classes. Some of the U Cal and U Virginia campuses (among others) are looking into distance education as a possible solution. Many departments with popular majors, such as computer science, are finding themselves overrun with way more students than they can handle. Many of these departments can't hire new faculty fast enough. And although the pay is not quite as good as corporate, the pay is very competative....And if you have a hot idea, you rather than the corporate entity that owns your brain will profit from it.
Oh, and where are all of these students coming from? Well, the world today requires skilled, educated workers. I don't think the university experience is going to "wink out."
-The Weasel
Former researcher in academica biotech-gone-corporate
Current research in computer graphics, animation, and virtual environments
This particular joint effort is for biomedical data mining, not bioweapons.
The US Department of Energy (funding the folks at Sandia) has funded many *purely* biological research projects that are not at all connected with bioweapons research.
For another story on this project, see:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010119/bs/health _genome_dc_3.html
Apple sells hardware, full and complete computers, now in pretty candy colors. That is where their revenue comes from and that why they can give away their OS for free. You need to buy their hardware first before you can run their OS. Cha-ching. Sale made.
Microsoft sells software. That is where their revenue comes from and that is why they can't give away their OS for free. You can buy any hardware you want, within the bounds of what is supported (and that is quite a lot of choices right now), and then you pay for the operating system as a seperate component, assuming that you actually pay for it.
A 2048x1536 wearable display with a 3-foot-wide projected image is cheaper than a 3-foot-wide 2048x1536 LCD screen.
Wearable computers don't currently have that kind of resolution, but when they do, notebooks will get a whole lot nicer. No power-hungry flat panel, and a better-looking display to boot.
IMO, this will be one of the big selling points.
I have personally spent way too many hours using my airline seat and laptop-on-tray-table as my office. My 15" screen does a good job sharing my work with up to a half dozen of my nearest airline seat neighbors. Not a good time or place to proceed with sensitive work.
As computing becomes more ubiquitous in our daily environment, we will require devices that allow greater I/O privacy while computing. A wearable personal display screen with an earphone and a twiddler (or other chording keyboard, or other simplified input device) will create a much more personal and private experience when computing beyond one's desk.
The future of the wearable computer could very well be the point where our current palm pilots (etc.) and laptops merge.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I really wish they didn't send me most of those paper bills. I pay almost all of mine online and never open most of the envelopes stuffed with bleached and printed printed dead trees.
Elementary Watson. The site indiatimes.com via a partnership with Overnight Express as USPS is all geared up to have people in america use email to send printed letters to people back in India. Read about it here.
For those of you who haven't read it, its a story about a group of scientists accidentally dropping a lab-made black hole into the center of the earth. Whoops! Quite a good deal more goes on which and it all makes quite a good read.
Wrong.
ActiveWorlds demonstrates that slapping a 3D interface on a chatroom gives you glorified chatroom.
If ActiveWorlds (or something similar to it) were to instead create a world in which you have physics modeling, ability to perform meaningful actions on objects (rather than just jump, wave and do a round-house kick that kicks nothing), and the ability to program or script new behaviors, then you'll see something more than a glorified chatroom. That will provide enough power to start working on a 3D MOO/MUD/MUSH. And those are excellent examples of successful "goal-free" gaming environments.
Real Time Rendering by Mo:ller and Haines
Advanced Animation and Rendering Techinques by Alan Watt and Mark Watt
Making them Move: Mechanics, Control and Animation of Articulated Figures edited by Badler, Barsky and Zeltzer
Getting back to basics:
Interactive Computer Graphics by Angel is a good Intro to Graphics textbook aimed at Undergrads and it is grounded in OpenGL
And then you need the OpenGL reference manuals (the red, blue, green and alpha books)
(Red) OpenGL: A Programmers Guide
(Blue) OpenGL: Reference Manual
(Green) OpenGL: Programming for the X Windows System
(Alpha) OpenGL: Programming for the Windows95/NT
For serious graphics fun, consider:
Jim Blinn's Corner: A trip down the graphics pipeline, by Jim Blinn
If you read .NET documentation you will clearly see that .NET is a general pupose programming platform for creating all kinds of applications. Whether or not you use passport for an ecommerce app is an architectural decision that you get to make. You can use .NET for non-ecommerce apps. You can use .NET for ecommerce but use something other than passport.
Brian Jepson is right on the money.
(C'mon folks, we are all making Microsoft look like FUD amateurs with the level of unresearched anti-.NET FUD that's coming out of our collective community's mouth....)
In that sense, they can already compete with a good portion of Hollywood...
-The Weasel of Pixels
And FIFTH. You can choose NOT to use passport and still program with .NET/Mono for ecommerce or kinds of software solutions.
The OS half of the company does quite well with regard to bringing in revenues. I can tell you that they don't plan on killing that off any time soon.
In short, .NET is Microsoft's answer to the entire Java platform, and then some.
-The Pixel Weasel, writing from Redmond, WA
What I found interesting was that he seemed to be in the process of making arrows and a bow. He had 12 unfinished arrow shafts and 2 arrows ready to be shot. Also, he carried a bow that was still being worked and not yet strung.
That he was off on a hunting trip was the original hypothesis. But between the murder and the fact that he was still making his weaponry, I would suspect some other (social?) situation brought him into the mountains, and to his untimely demise.
If you were a scientist, you'd know better than this, and sorry, it doesn't work that way.
The difference between working as an academic researcher vs. a corporate researcher is academic freedom. Furthermore, your predicted corporatization of all research is more likely to slow down scientific advancement. Directly, this slow down will happen by hindering the sharing of work with others (thus stiffling outside innovation) and by ending peer review (thus quality suffers). It will also happen indirectly by limiting the ability of students studying an advanced science to have access to the latest work in the field. Finally, in its ultimate form, corporate research creates a highly decentralized atmosphere for discovering scientific advancements and inovations which in turn fosters a corporate version of "the ivory tower." When that occurs, a single company can easily get a lock on controlling an area of "scientific advancement." Now when would a slashdoter want this? (Are you a troll or something?!)
Academic freedom means that as an academic researcher, you pursue topics that you are interested in and then you share your results with the world-wide academic community in your field (and occasionally related fields). You meet with other scientists doing work in your area or in areas that can benefit from your work. Together as a large group you insire each other and move the field forward. This sharing is motivated directly by your desire for (among other things) job advancement as your raises, tenure, grants, etc. depends mostly on your ability to produce good quality research and publish (share!) it with the academic community at large.
As a corporate researcher, your situation depends on the business plan of your company w.r.t. research and innovation. If your company, like many who hire PhDs for research (particularlly in biotech and also in some fields of comp sci), regards patents as the important measure of your advancement, the atmosphere changes completely. You're motivation (and possibly even your ability) to publish your work in a timely fashion plummets and you cease to share your findings with the greater community of research scientist. This means that (1) the world wide research community no longer knows what you are doing and (2) your work stops being peer reviewed by that community. (I can tell you from a decade of personal experience that when I have been involved in something with commercial potential, we have stopped or watered down our publications.)
The first thing -- lack of community-wide knowledge about your work -- is a major problem for the overall advancement of science. This causes scientific advancement to slow down. If other scientists do not find out about your work and understand your work, then they won't be (a) competitively inspired to do one better, (b) experimentally inspired to reproduce your results to show validity, or (c) think of new ways in which your work and their work fit together into a greater whole. Even worse, students who are training to become tomorrow's scientists are not able to read about the work, study it, and thus give themselves a leg-up to stand on the shoulders of giants.
The second problem -- lack of peer review -- is critical for the advancement of quality work in science. In academia, you share your findings by publishing and in order to be published, your work must be peer reviewed -- reviewed by a panel of peers who don't work directly with you.
Peer review is typically pretty tough and this is a good thing. You, as a scientist, receive valuable critique on your work and suggestions for improvement. Often you must implement those improvements before your work is published. This is a good thing. Why? Without peer review scientists tend to communicate only with their coworkers -- the few other scientists in their area at their home institution. A sort of unchallenge intellectual inbreeding occurs because you all work together on the same project or on intertangled projects. Outsiders are very important for challenging the validity of your work, inspiring new ideas, and pointing out mistaken assuptions (among other things).
As an aside, I am quite sure that our fellow slashdot readers are extremely capable of finding parallels between my discussion of scientific research and the software industry regarding corporate monopoly, suppression of innovation, and the marketting of outdated memes as "the hot new thing." ...
What planet are you on? Let me guess: you aren't on university planning commities, working in the dean's or provost's office, nor are you even reading the NYTimes.College applications for admissions are going through the roof. Major universities are trying to figure out how in heck they can properly service and educate all of the people who want take college classes. Some of the U Cal and U Virginia campuses (among others) are looking into distance education as a possible solution. Many departments with popular majors, such as computer science, are finding themselves overrun with way more students than they can handle. Many of these departments can't hire new faculty fast enough. And although the pay is not quite as good as corporate, the pay is very competative. ...And if you have a hot idea, you rather than the corporate entity that owns your brain will profit from it.
Oh, and where are all of these students coming from? Well, the world today requires skilled, educated workers. I don't think the university experience is going to "wink out."
-The Weasel
Former researcher in academica biotech-gone-corporate
Current research in computer graphics, animation, and virtual environments
This particular joint effort is for biomedical data mining, not bioweapons. The US Department of Energy (funding the folks at Sandia) has funded many *purely* biological research projects that are not at all connected with bioweapons research. For another story on this project, see: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010119/bs/health _genome_dc_3.html
Apple sells hardware, full and complete computers, now in pretty candy colors. That is where their revenue comes from and that why they can give away their OS for free. You need to buy their hardware first before you can run their OS. Cha-ching. Sale made.
Microsoft sells software. That is where their revenue comes from and that is why they can't give away their OS for free. You can buy any hardware you want, within the bounds of what is supported (and that is quite a lot of choices right now), and then you pay for the operating system as a seperate component, assuming that you actually pay for it.
Wearable computers don't currently have that kind of resolution, but when they do, notebooks will get a whole lot nicer. No power-hungry flat panel, and a better-looking display to boot.
IMO, this will be one of the big selling points.
I have personally spent way too many hours using my airline seat and laptop-on-tray-table as my office. My 15" screen does a good job sharing my work with up to a half dozen of my nearest airline seat neighbors. Not a good time or place to proceed with sensitive work.
As computing becomes more ubiquitous in our daily environment, we will require devices that allow greater I/O privacy while computing. A wearable personal display screen with an earphone and a twiddler (or other chording keyboard, or other simplified input device) will create a much more personal and private experience when computing beyond one's desk.
The future of the wearable computer could very well be the point where our current palm pilots (etc.) and laptops merge.