But it has taken some of the most advanced technology of the 21st century to decipher during the past year the most advanced technology of the 1st century B.C.
To pull out the old quote, "It is twice as difficult to debug a program as to write it. Therefore, if you put all of your creativity and effort into writing the program, you are not smart enough to debug it."
Without any information even about what it's supposed to do, beyond being a series of gears, without knowing if it's even a fragment of a larger whole - or even knowing if it actually worked for the intended process (or was the ancient equivalent of a buggy program), that makes for quite a challenge.
I'm guessing, in the future, a massively advanced civilization that came across the ones and zeroes of Internet Explorer, without the O.S., without info about HTTP, without Windows or a computer based off that comical silicon technology they've only found fragments of, they wouldn't be able to figure it out either.
there are things that are good for humans (water) and things that are bad for humans (radiation)
Being a fan of light and heat but not drowning, does that make me a weird human?
As the old saying goes: all things in moderation. Radiation's pretty useful, just as water is. Overwhelm my body with either though and things start to go wrong. In the history of humanity though, I'm guessing more people have died from too much water than too much radiation - if only due to the convenience of access to excess of one and not the other.
But they said, "Of current design" - conveniently ignoring people solving the problem.
Of course they're also missing the simple fact the radiation belt is of absolutely no threat to passengers travelling the mighty couple of inches "of current design" space elevators have achieved.
These are likely the same people that freaked over the dangers of di-hydrous oxygen.
I assume this is intended to only play power chords and on top of that there is no way the machine can determine if you intend the third to be major or minor in the chord. Which is interesting because in the video, the chord changes from major to minor with no change in the performer.
The basic chords for any major scale are always the same:
I, IIm, IIIm, IV, V, VIm, VIIo.
The vast majority of pop/rock is written in D or G:
All the system has to do is know what key you're in and it can modify each chord to major or minor based on its relationshop to the root.
Of course that takes a degree of letting the system know what key you're in. Even easier is simply assuming the majority of music is in D or G and so G and D will always be major, E and B will always be minor A can easily be fudged with a power chord (dropping the third that would resolve it either way) and the same can just about be done with C and F although less well given their augmented forms. Take the assumption to a single key and you don't even need to fudge with power chords - you know exactly what every chord's relationship is, you're just stuck in one key (put on the red T shirt for D, the green T shirt for G and the blue T shirt for Dm, the saddest of all the keys (OK, so they should all be black for proper air guitarists but you get the point)).
Sure, this doesn't accomodate all of the modifications like add9s, aug2s, etc. but it is just air guitar afterall. The whole point of air guitar is that if you were really good enough to understand and control the complex interactions of an instrument you wouldn't be pretending for friends, you'd be doing it.
You sound like a Windows XP user bragging about how long he can go without rebooting.:)
And you sound like a ZX-81 user bragging about how stupid XP users are.;)
Granted, we have to reboot/change batteries more often but it's still less frequently than you have to clear your entire memory to load a new program/change film and we rarely have to worry about our 16K ram pack falling out/mistreating rolls of film and having them ruined.
DSLRs will take ~200 shots per battery charge. Film cameras give you, what, 24-36 shots per roll? Standby modes with 1/10th second startups ensure that the ~200 shots lasts just as well for infrequent users as those shooting bursts. So, we have an apples to apples comparison of ~200 shots/battery or 24-36 shots/roll. If you can show me a roll of film that takes 1/8th the volume and weights 1/8th the weight of a modern lithium battery, I'll conceed the point (with the exception of 8 film changes plus the inflexibility of being stuck to a single ISO is still pretty annoying). I'll even be generous and conceed if there's a decent quality standard 35mm film that takes 200 exposures.
Yes, DSLRs use more batteries. No, that's not even close to an inconvenience when compared to the film that Film SLRs get through and you have to lug. Plus recharging my battery is [almost] free vs. the cost of a new roll of film.
It's true, if you overlook all of the other issues and focus on just one tiny aspect, you can make an argument (DSLRs use more and heavier batteries) but it kind of requires ignoring all other related issues for the point to stand up.
As for compact vs SLR, that's a debate that's just as true for film as digital. Even I own both and take the right tool for each situation. But, like the steam engine still has some advantages over internal combustion, its time has long past in almost every situation save for enthusiasts just as film's has.
The simple solution, as you say, is to lock the shutter up and then capture from the sensor just as a compact does (using a subset of pixels for bandwidth reasons).
There's another interesting technique that's been discussed - using a translucent mirror/prism that's locked in position with a separate shutter behind it. By doing so, x% of the light can be sent up to the eye piece while the other y% can be sent to the sensor.
If you then pull this out of the way and use the old method for stills, you still get the light sensitivity of a traditional DSLR design but gain the ability to do through the lens monitoring of video as well.
No idea if anyone's put this in to use yet or not. I remember reading about it a couple of years ago on various photography forums.
the rather lovely Lumix range from Panasonic/Leica, one of which I am lucky enough to own
Leica have always been a quality based brand for the minority who appreciate them. They are not however, even close to common.
The statement remains true that, for the majority of consumer compact digital cameras, construction is generally cheap plastic that's liable to break if dropped or at least have zoom mechanisms lose alignment.
It is true to say, "Most people are not that well educated in advanced physics." Retorting with, "When you say something like that, you can tell you don't know what you're talking about. Newton, Einstein, Liebnitz... See, I've named three already. I could name another twenty great physicists if you want!" really doesn't prove anything. A few rare exceptions don't disprove an otherwise true generality.
You're very lucky to own a Leica. You probably paid more than many entry level DSLR owners did too. Just because it's a wonderful exception, that doesn't lift all other far cheaper digicams up to its standard.
In answer to 1 through 8, wait a week. Rumor has it that Nikkon's about to anounce the D40 (leaked images all over - check out dpreview.com).
By dropping the sensor resolution way down and ditching the bells and whistles you wouldn't find in similarly priced compacts either, they're looking at launching the first sub $500 DSLR.
For digital compact users who think DSLRs are too expensive - it's no around the price of a decent digital compact, no more.
For film SLR users who think DSLRs are too expensive, it's down to a few dozen rolls of film price difference and far less than the cost of a single great lens. Shoot clear of about a thousand shots, you'll save money with a DSLR.
As for power consumption, I'm not sure what's holding you back?
Batteries are rechargable so there's no real cost.
They last a reasonable length of time. A battery grip like the "big ED" holds a pair of batteries so it's down to one change every couple of hours.
Changing batteries is no more painful than changing film. If you shoot at any kind of speed you'll have to change rolls of film far more frequently than you'll have to change batteries. If you don't shoot that fast, your camera will go to idle mode and you'll get many hours of use out of a single battery.
Finally, yes, great film is still great. But, aside from its price, there are two main arguments against it:
1) No instant feedback. Say you're using ISO 3200 film to capture fast falling water droplets. Until you develop the film, you've no idea if you actually caught the instant. With digital, the proof's right there for review. It kind of sucks to finally develop film only to realize you didn't catch what you thought you did and have no way to practically recreate the shoot.
2) OK, you've loaded your camera with ISO 3200 film for a specific shot. The building rumbles, a plane has crashed outside. You spend the next couple of minutes trying to wind your film through, get it out without ruining your existing shots, searching for the ISO 200 that you didn't think to bring with you anyway. By the time you're ready to shoot, the drama of the once in a lifetime shot has long since past. Your buddy with a DSLR slides the dial to ISO 200, steps outside and gets the award winning shot. Sure, planes crashing are extreme examples - but life's filled with amazing unexpected moments that DSLRs let you get whilst changing film will miss many of them.
The world's moved on. Those arguments were fair enough for the first couple of generations of DSLRs. Honestly, it's now reached the point where it's like saying, "Steam gives better torque than internal combustion engines. I'm not going to buy one of those new fangled cars when my stanley steamer car works just fine." If you're determined to reinforce your preconceptions, you can probably just about find justification - but the rest of the world's moved on and for good reason.
Copying substantive plot elements? Someone's life isn't a series of plot elements they had to think up. There's no notion of carefully structuring it to have maximum value as entertainment. Whilst, "Guy with an ego is in the TopGun problem, guy's buddy dies, guy questions ego, guy comes out stronger." is a plot someone went to trouble to think up and is protected, simply having lived a certain way, even if you're a media whore and many actions were deliberate, isn't protected in the same way.
Defamation? Parody is protected speach. Plus, once you've received free trips and made money off the fact everyone regards you as a joke, you can hardly claim damages for subsequently being made to look like a joke.
Bush can't sue the makers of Wag The Dog 2: Iraqi Bugaloo, Nixon can't sue the makers of Dick, Clinton can't sue over Primary Colors. If none of those people can sue over direct satirization - and they have a hell of a lot more money to hire lawyers to do so - then a failing wannabe celebutard is unlikely to get a competent lawyer to take the case simply for a percentage of what might be won.
MS has made programming insanely simple. DLL's and other forms of COM objects make code reuse very, very simple.
It's hard to beat the pipe | for insane simplicity.
By definition, command line unix reuses the output of one small program as the input of the next on all text based code. It's simpler than any dll linking and has been around since long before DLLs in Windows, Window itself or the MS DOS Windows initially sat upon (and then spent years trying to pretend it didn't).
This has always been Windows' strength and weakness. Unless an outright coder, you have no way of chaining one program to another. Power users resent having to code to do something that's just right there in CLI systems. On the flip side, with it being so much less accessible, the average user doesn't feel forced to learn the more complex process (sorry linux users but the average grandmother doesn't want to hear "Oh, you just need to grep the output of your find for..." and isn't going to adopt your platform while she assumes she has to do so to get anything done).
Seventeen year olds, rightly or wrongly, get a bad rep: They're perceived as needing a lot of supervision and as not very hard workers.
The question you've got to answer is why a manager would first want an intern rather than an employee (OK, the unpaid bit is nice), why they would choose a seventeen year old (when they could have a more qualified student who likely needs less supervision and gets more done) and why they'd choose you out of all the other seventeen year olds out there?
The easiest way is to have a parent with connections already established. I heard there were SGI machines at my local university, my dad knew a guy who used them, he offered my time for free, I worked a one week vacation and managed to prove myself enough that I got asked back every vacation afterwards.
If that avenue isn't open to you, it becomes a case of finding a way to prove yourself so you can get a potential employer's interest. The huge advantage you have here is that most of the tools you need to get started in a variety of tech fields are totally (or near) free:
Game level design: Get Unreal, Doom, Half Life, any of the games that are built on major engines. They tend to have toolsets shipped with them. Join the mod community, get good at building interesting level designs. Then test the hell out of them. Present that well and you'll likely get a start on game QA.
3D Art: Sadly photoshop will cost you and it really does make life a lot easier. Still, paint shop pro is an option as is gimp (though you'll likely want a second PC if your 3D packages are all on Windows). 3D packages themselves have a tendency to have free trial/learning versions. If you can't find downloads, watch the cover of ComputerArts and 3D World (both British imports to the states but pretty widely available) as they tend to have a lot of complete older versions of software on their covers. Get really good with them and a resume can handle the watermark "Demo Version" over all of your images. One note for 3D graphics - focus on one area (be that IK chains, lighting scenes, texturing, animation or the models in the first place). Most graphics shops dedicate people to specific areas and being great at one tends to be more valuable than decent all around. Burn your work on the CD (or pay to get some really good quality prints) and mail it to every studio you admire along with why you admire them. With luck, it'll lead to getting the interest of at least one or two of them.
Web Development: Again, Photoshop's your burden here. You don't need Dreamweaver (though the 30 day trial is free, as is PhotoShop's and, if you're willing to reinstall your OS every month, that can be an option). Again, focus on one aspect (I'm a director of web development for an agency and I'd rather hire a great designer or a great HTML coder than someone who does both passably). I can speak more to coding: learn standards, clean code structure, to write logical comments, to use CSS efficiently over the latest DHTML trick (I swear I'll never hire anyone whose resume includes making text chase the mouse). Remember that one of the first things someone like me will do is view the source code - your end result may be impressive but if I don't think you can write something the rest of my team can use quickly, it's of little use. Once you have the basic skillset and personal pages down, volunteer to redo your school, a local charity, etc. If you can show evidence of how you gathered requirements, itterated designs with the client and came out with what they want rather than what you thought they wanted, that's another great skill to show. Once you have a list of sites you can be proud of, check the Monster.coms and Dice.coms of the world and look for local (as no one will pay to relocate a kid) internships. Send a resume over, listing each project as work experience and make sure links to all of that portfolio are present.
Server side coding: Apache is free, tomcat is free, mod-php and mod-perl are free. Pretty much so long as you're not hu
It appears artists and labels will have the choice when digging into Google's pockets either through a business deal or lawsuit.
Generally, in business, it depends on who's doing the choosing.
Sadly, any CEO in a publically traded company knows they have to trade for the fast buck, not the long term one (despite their constant assurances to anyone listening that that's exactly the opposite of what they're doing).
Why? Because shareholders generally aren't in it for the long term. They want a buttload of money to come in today, that'll temporarily massively jack up the share price, and then let them get out (or at least reap the dividends). The way the system works, they don't (and arguably shouldn't) care about long term earnings anywhere near as much as the short term ones. As a result, the CEO knows he'll be replaced if he's ever foolish enough to choose long term profits over payouts for investors today.
It's for exactly this reason that the Google guys refused to sell a controlling interest in Google and awarded their own stock 10 times the voting rights of everyone else's - it allows them to make the right decisions for the company rather than the right decisions for the guys who want to take a profit and then move their money to take a profit from the next company.
Long term, successfully killing music videos on YouTube is a horrible idea. The people there today get rich from the infringement lawsuit, the next generation of artists get no ongoing royalties. A much better solution would be to take 20% of the money you could get from a lawsuit every year and keep getting it long past 5 years' time.
So, if artists vote, they'd take the long term rewards. If TimeWarner's CEO votes, he has no choice but to take the massive payout today or get replaced by his shareholders. If TimeWarner execs vote, they have to do the same or deal with a seriously pissed CEO. If the RIAA votes... Who knows. They're supposed to represent the artists, they really represent the companies and they're mostly interested in the souls of babies.
I don't dispute a long term royalty structure is vastly more profitable. But long term profits aren't necessarily what motivate modern business.
X1900 - 48 pixel shader processors plus 8 vertex shaders. Assuming you manage to run them all equally in parallel: 56 processors.
Standard CPU - 1 core (assuming dual cores get read as 2 CPUs).
448 GPUs x 56 = 25,088 effective processors all with on card memory.
25,050 CPUs x 1 core = 25,050 effective processors all dealing with system busses etc.
In short, if you're performing one simple task trillions of times, many very simple, highly optimized processors with dedicated memory do the job better than even a similar number of much more capable processors that have to play nice across a whole system.
And this ignores the number of old couple of hundred megahertz systems that people don't use anymore so hand over to the task vs. X1900s being the very high end of ATIs most recent line.
For massively parallel tasks like rendering pixels, folding proteins, compressing frames of a movie, etc. I'd absolutely love large quantities of a simple processor. For most other tasks, given present technology, I'd still side with fewer more able processors. Either way comparing 448 of something with 56 processors within it to 25,000 single processors and saying, "But 448 is SO much less than 25,000!" is an unfair comparrison.
Grad Level Thesis: Facts Not Hunches
on
IT and Divorce?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
For my graduate thesis I am writing a paper about Dads who work in the computer industry, divorce and custody. I think our industry causes a high rate of divorce but I need some help from the Slashdot community.
I realize this may come across as a cheap shot but...
If you're writing a graduate level paper, shouldn't you actually do some, you know, statistical analysis to support your core hypothesis rather than go with, "I have a feeling and asked some other nerds."?
You're far more likely to get results with, "Statistics show that while divorce is at n%, n+y% of male IT workers experience divorce. This thesis looks at prime causes for that y% and performs a statistical breakdown of their effects." than "I got divorced, I work in IT, it sucked. This paper's about how I'm pretty sure IT made it happen. I asked some other nerds what they think."
Gears 'only' cost $10 Million to make. While that's still a lot, it's much lower than the $30 Million some companies are claiming is required for next-gen gamemaking.
The justification for needing to charge $60/game rather than the more normal ~$40 for the last generation was that games had got so much more expensive to make.
If this game only costs a third as much as these allegedly super-expensive next gen games, will that be passed on to the consumer at one third the price, too? At $20/copy, the increased volume should ensure stores, distributors, etc. can more than make up for the decrease in per unit profits.
Unless, of course, $60 has next to nothing to do with actual costs of making a game and everything to do with carefully calculating what you can gouge consumers for in exchange for the promise of "next gen". Now why exactly was Lego StarWars II, exactly the same game as on other consoles, suddenly $10 more on a 360?
but if they want to alienate some customers because for them, that's less expensive than a big IT project, that should be their call. Not a lawyers. I can't believe that any business not in the mood to do this doesn't have competition that is.
So, the rule of thumb is: If a business doesn't give a crap about alienating a customer, that's their right?
Ergo, if the disabled can't use a site, the business has the right to alienate them if they want to.
How about say wheelchair access to their brick and mortar site? If a business doesn't give a crap about disabled people, they shouldn't have to worry about disabled access and should have every right to exclude them and lose their business?
Hell, why worry about physical infirmities. If Capt'n Kracker's Army Surplus store doesn't like those damn darkies, towel heads and jews, why shouldn't be allowed to refuse them business? In a free market, they can take their business elsewhere and all he does is harm himself.
And the golf club. If they dislike negroes and women at some of the best golf clubs in the country, that should be there right. After all, if they think they can cater better to rich bigots and make more money that way, shouldn't they have the right to refuse membership to undersirables who, a free market states, can go elsewhere and support other businesses?
Then, finally, there's the Montgomery bus service. If they think black women should give up their seats for white people, they should damned well be allowed to do it. The uppity black woman should go find another bus service, start her own, walk, buy a car or any of plenty of other options. There's absolutely no reason to let something like that inspire any kind of law changing.
Every one of those situations has argued the "free market" line. In just about all of them, the United States has ultimately said we'd rather not permit exclusion, even at the cost to free market ideals.
Sure, you can decide to draw a line. You can state that "Well, the south's the south. Government shouldn't interfere." and draw the line just before black people on buses. You can state that "Golf clubs are private institutions" and draw the line just before forcing them to be open. You can state that "Stores shouldn't be forced to remodel" and draw it just before adding disabled access. And you can state "Websites shouldn't be forced to be inclusive either" and draw the line there.
The thing is, whilst people may get outraged at the time, the fact that the U.S. tends not to accept drawing that line (albeit after painful wrangling each time) is one of the things most Americans are most proud of.
The ADA has provisions written in about relative cost, about size of business affected, about reduced compliance for expensive retrofitting vs. building inclusively when new projects come up. The cost generally isn't anywhere near as bad as initial kneejerk fears tend to tout and the ultimate benefit, for the kind of nation it helps promote, is what ultimately makes most Americans damned proud.
The product, from a company called AIseek, seeks to do for NPC performance what the PhysX processor does for in-game physics.
Damn. And I hoped it'd actually be useful for AI.
The problem with PhysX is it costs similarly to a mid range graphics card and yet adds kind of performance gains of a first gen graphics card. Whilst GPUs are massively evolved compared to first gen offerings, PhysX in its first gen state is a really expensive nice little add on.
Don't get me wrong, when physics processors and AI processors make the kind of difference that having or not having a GPU makes now, that'll be an amazing thing. It's just that, in first gen form, with no competition yet pushing the market forward, PhysX has been met with a deafening yawn and saying this chip hopes to do the same doesn't really promise much.
It's amazing, isn't it? How you, as a "game developer" are more concerned about disk space than about gameplay?
In a discussion about format size, an observation about format size is simply an on topic discussion. It has nothing to do with priorities and nor does it imply priority.
It's kind of like saying, in a discussion about dogs getting loose, "The thought of getting bitten is a real concern for me." and having someone leap forward with, "How can you worry about being bitten when babies are dying in Africa!"
I work for a games company too. I think more capacity, more power, more everything is a good thing. If you pay attention, you'll note I didn't say add "at the expense of gameplay" or "more so than gameplay." Gameplay remains a primary concern but it doesn't stop capacity from still being a good thing as an additional way to push the genre forward.
How many CDs did Pac Man fill?
And, given that Pacman is still released semi regularly for the Gameboy, as part of "classic" collections for the PS2/Xbox, etc., how much do people still play it?
Yeah, it was a great game for its time. Yeah, for its time it sucked in far more of our time than most modern games do. But, standing against modern games like say Oblivion with its wealth of content, it captures maybe half an hour of a modern gamer's interest. Now compare it to World Of Warcraft. Even in its heyday, did its median player play for anywhere near the amount of time the median player of a modern classic plays for?
At the end of the day, whilst gameplay is core, there's a reason why most gamers, exposed to what a whole DVD full of content can be like, play older games and quickly get bored, realizing PacMan is nothing more than repetition of the same concept, requiring four or five core strategies, repeated for 255 levels.
Were you frustrated when you scratched the disk of your Super Mario Brothers 3 cartridge?
No, we were frustrated when dust got in to it and no amount of blowing would get it to work again.
Gameplay has stagnated in the past 10 years - since the Playstation era. There have been no new innovations in gameplay in that time, only improved graphics.
To name the first few the immediately come to mind...
Tomb Raider (and its clones) - a genre of gaming that didn't exist before the PS1.
Massively Multiplayer online worlds with human to human interaction on a level of accessibility that text based systems never had.
Sandbox games like the Grand Theft Auto series (that, curiously, only become possible with enough depth of content that relies on the large storage you disdain).
The only games which come to mind with innovative gameplay are games like Guitar Hero with its specialty hardware.
Unlike the classic arcade games of yore. None of which required trackballs instead of joysticks, afterburner cabinets that turned upside down, VR headsets or lightguns.
Of course, Wii is looking to change all that.
The Wii is, by definition, specialty hardware. It introduces a new class of, admittedly more reusable than many, peripheral.
If you're determined to look at a single aspect of any given argument, you can confirm your beliefs. If one only looks at numbers of children killed, guns are bad. If one only looks at numbers of crimes stopped, guns are good. Neither is that impressive of an argument to more open minded people.
Similarly, you saw a game dev comment on storage with no mention of gameplay either way and saw it simply as a confirmation of your beliefs that tech is more important to him than gameplay - despite absolutely no supporting evidence. You complain about how easy modern discs may be to scratch, ignoring how easy cartridges were to get dust in to (I for one have had far less frustration with scratched discs than I ever had with 5.25" floppies that got fingerprints on them or 16K ram packs that fell out of the back of ZX81s everytime I typed hard). You lament
Sorry, didn't bother to read the article but I hear it's about some country with a repressive regime that keeps quashing citizens' rights?
With luck, the United States will soon invade, deposing that corrupt regime and give those cowed citizens the same constitutionally protected liberties Americans experience every day. Tony Blair has already pledged his support.
Do they have oil? Weapons of mass destruction? Are they trying to advance their knowledge of nuclear weapons? Do they have large chemical weapon stockpiles? Do they frequently piss off the U.N.? Can we allege they have a "School Of The [Whatever Region]" terrorist training camp? Can we accuse them of trying to destabilize entire regions? Do they "kidnap" citizens of other nations, holding them for torture and interrogation rather than uphold international law and conventions?
If we can answer yes to two or three of the above, I'm pretty sure we have grounds to invade.
I have a wonderful and, thus far, apparently foolproof system: I'm from another culture.
Them: "We think you interacted inappropriately with that female."
Me: "In my culture, that's entirely appropriate. Is this a race thing? Are you singling out my very respectful 'English' behavior as inappropriate in your American workplace?"
Them: "Oh, shit. We could get sued for that, couldn't we? Pretend we said nothing."
It's much like patent law. Companies patent stupid crap they don't really need to patent simply so that when the next company sues them, they have something they could counter sue over and they know they'll both agree to back off in exchange for shared patents.
As I am of a different race, so long as I'm basically polite, cases where fear-of-getting-sued prompts people to freak out over my being male and talking to females can be just as quickly quashed by their equally over inflated fear of an English employee suing over cultural insensitivity and racism.
99% of sexual harassment stupidity isn't motivated by actual lawsuits so much as fear of lawsuits. If I genuinely commit sexual harassment, I expect to get disciplined for it. On the other hand, if people want to freak out about possibilities, I'll give them other possibilities that are just as scary to push them back the other way.
Slashdot Mirror
But it has taken some of the most advanced technology of the 21st century to decipher during the past year the most advanced technology of the 1st century B.C.
To pull out the old quote, "It is twice as difficult to debug a program as to write it. Therefore, if you put all of your creativity and effort into writing the program, you are not smart enough to debug it."
Without any information even about what it's supposed to do, beyond being a series of gears, without knowing if it's even a fragment of a larger whole - or even knowing if it actually worked for the intended process (or was the ancient equivalent of a buggy program), that makes for quite a challenge.
I'm guessing, in the future, a massively advanced civilization that came across the ones and zeroes of Internet Explorer, without the O.S., without info about HTTP, without Windows or a computer based off that comical silicon technology they've only found fragments of, they wouldn't be able to figure it out either.
there are things that are good for humans (water) and things that are bad for humans (radiation)
Being a fan of light and heat but not drowning, does that make me a weird human?
As the old saying goes: all things in moderation. Radiation's pretty useful, just as water is. Overwhelm my body with either though and things start to go wrong. In the history of humanity though, I'm guessing more people have died from too much water than too much radiation - if only due to the convenience of access to excess of one and not the other.
But they said, "Of current design" - conveniently ignoring people solving the problem.
Of course they're also missing the simple fact the radiation belt is of absolutely no threat to passengers travelling the mighty couple of inches "of current design" space elevators have achieved.
These are likely the same people that freaked over the dangers of di-hydrous oxygen.
I assume this is intended to only play power chords and on top of that there is no way the machine can determine if you intend the third to be major or minor in the chord. Which is interesting because in the video, the chord changes from major to minor with no change in the performer.
The basic chords for any major scale are always the same:
I, IIm, IIIm, IV, V, VIm, VIIo.
The vast majority of pop/rock is written in D or G:
D, Em, F#m, G, A, Bm, C#o.
G, Am, Bm, C, D, Em, F#o.
All the system has to do is know what key you're in and it can modify each chord to major or minor based on its relationshop to the root.
Of course that takes a degree of letting the system know what key you're in. Even easier is simply assuming the majority of music is in D or G and so G and D will always be major, E and B will always be minor A can easily be fudged with a power chord (dropping the third that would resolve it either way) and the same can just about be done with C and F although less well given their augmented forms. Take the assumption to a single key and you don't even need to fudge with power chords - you know exactly what every chord's relationship is, you're just stuck in one key (put on the red T shirt for D, the green T shirt for G and the blue T shirt for Dm, the saddest of all the keys (OK, so they should all be black for proper air guitarists but you get the point)).
Sure, this doesn't accomodate all of the modifications like add9s, aug2s, etc. but it is just air guitar afterall. The whole point of air guitar is that if you were really good enough to understand and control the complex interactions of an instrument you wouldn't be pretending for friends, you'd be doing it.
inable to configure/run a server (Tomcat)
How uncompetent of them!
You sound like a Windows XP user bragging about how long he can go without rebooting. :)
;)
And you sound like a ZX-81 user bragging about how stupid XP users are.
Granted, we have to reboot/change batteries more often but it's still less frequently than you have to clear your entire memory to load a new program/change film and we rarely have to worry about our 16K ram pack falling out/mistreating rolls of film and having them ruined.
DSLRs will take ~200 shots per battery charge. Film cameras give you, what, 24-36 shots per roll? Standby modes with 1/10th second startups ensure that the ~200 shots lasts just as well for infrequent users as those shooting bursts. So, we have an apples to apples comparison of ~200 shots/battery or 24-36 shots/roll. If you can show me a roll of film that takes 1/8th the volume and weights 1/8th the weight of a modern lithium battery, I'll conceed the point (with the exception of 8 film changes plus the inflexibility of being stuck to a single ISO is still pretty annoying). I'll even be generous and conceed if there's a decent quality standard 35mm film that takes 200 exposures.
Yes, DSLRs use more batteries. No, that's not even close to an inconvenience when compared to the film that Film SLRs get through and you have to lug. Plus recharging my battery is [almost] free vs. the cost of a new roll of film.
It's true, if you overlook all of the other issues and focus on just one tiny aspect, you can make an argument (DSLRs use more and heavier batteries) but it kind of requires ignoring all other related issues for the point to stand up.
As for compact vs SLR, that's a debate that's just as true for film as digital. Even I own both and take the right tool for each situation. But, like the steam engine still has some advantages over internal combustion, its time has long past in almost every situation save for enthusiasts just as film's has.
The simple solution, as you say, is to lock the shutter up and then capture from the sensor just as a compact does (using a subset of pixels for bandwidth reasons).
There's another interesting technique that's been discussed - using a translucent mirror/prism that's locked in position with a separate shutter behind it. By doing so, x% of the light can be sent up to the eye piece while the other y% can be sent to the sensor.
If you then pull this out of the way and use the old method for stills, you still get the light sensitivity of a traditional DSLR design but gain the ability to do through the lens monitoring of video as well.
No idea if anyone's put this in to use yet or not. I remember reading about it a couple of years ago on various photography forums.
>> Most digicams...
the rather lovely Lumix range from Panasonic/Leica, one of which I am lucky enough to own
Leica have always been a quality based brand for the minority who appreciate them. They are not however, even close to common.
The statement remains true that, for the majority of consumer compact digital cameras, construction is generally cheap plastic that's liable to break if dropped or at least have zoom mechanisms lose alignment.
It is true to say, "Most people are not that well educated in advanced physics." Retorting with, "When you say something like that, you can tell you don't know what you're talking about. Newton, Einstein, Liebnitz... See, I've named three already. I could name another twenty great physicists if you want!" really doesn't prove anything. A few rare exceptions don't disprove an otherwise true generality.
You're very lucky to own a Leica. You probably paid more than many entry level DSLR owners did too. Just because it's a wonderful exception, that doesn't lift all other far cheaper digicams up to its standard.
In answer to 1 through 8, wait a week. Rumor has it that Nikkon's about to anounce the D40 (leaked images all over - check out dpreview.com).
By dropping the sensor resolution way down and ditching the bells and whistles you wouldn't find in similarly priced compacts either, they're looking at launching the first sub $500 DSLR.
For digital compact users who think DSLRs are too expensive - it's no around the price of a decent digital compact, no more.
For film SLR users who think DSLRs are too expensive, it's down to a few dozen rolls of film price difference and far less than the cost of a single great lens. Shoot clear of about a thousand shots, you'll save money with a DSLR.
As for power consumption, I'm not sure what's holding you back?
Batteries are rechargable so there's no real cost.
They last a reasonable length of time. A battery grip like the "big ED" holds a pair of batteries so it's down to one change every couple of hours.
Changing batteries is no more painful than changing film. If you shoot at any kind of speed you'll have to change rolls of film far more frequently than you'll have to change batteries. If you don't shoot that fast, your camera will go to idle mode and you'll get many hours of use out of a single battery.
Finally, yes, great film is still great. But, aside from its price, there are two main arguments against it:
1) No instant feedback. Say you're using ISO 3200 film to capture fast falling water droplets. Until you develop the film, you've no idea if you actually caught the instant. With digital, the proof's right there for review. It kind of sucks to finally develop film only to realize you didn't catch what you thought you did and have no way to practically recreate the shoot.
2) OK, you've loaded your camera with ISO 3200 film for a specific shot. The building rumbles, a plane has crashed outside. You spend the next couple of minutes trying to wind your film through, get it out without ruining your existing shots, searching for the ISO 200 that you didn't think to bring with you anyway. By the time you're ready to shoot, the drama of the once in a lifetime shot has long since past. Your buddy with a DSLR slides the dial to ISO 200, steps outside and gets the award winning shot. Sure, planes crashing are extreme examples - but life's filled with amazing unexpected moments that DSLRs let you get whilst changing film will miss many of them.
The world's moved on. Those arguments were fair enough for the first couple of generations of DSLRs. Honestly, it's now reached the point where it's like saying, "Steam gives better torque than internal combustion engines. I'm not going to buy one of those new fangled cars when my stanley steamer car works just fine." If you're determined to reinforce your preconceptions, you can probably just about find justification - but the rest of the world's moved on and for good reason.
At least in the U.S...
Copying substantive plot elements? Someone's life isn't a series of plot elements they had to think up. There's no notion of carefully structuring it to have maximum value as entertainment. Whilst, "Guy with an ego is in the TopGun problem, guy's buddy dies, guy questions ego, guy comes out stronger." is a plot someone went to trouble to think up and is protected, simply having lived a certain way, even if you're a media whore and many actions were deliberate, isn't protected in the same way.
Defamation? Parody is protected speach. Plus, once you've received free trips and made money off the fact everyone regards you as a joke, you can hardly claim damages for subsequently being made to look like a joke.
Bush can't sue the makers of Wag The Dog 2: Iraqi Bugaloo, Nixon can't sue the makers of Dick, Clinton can't sue over Primary Colors. If none of those people can sue over direct satirization - and they have a hell of a lot more money to hire lawyers to do so - then a failing wannabe celebutard is unlikely to get a competent lawyer to take the case simply for a percentage of what might be won.
MS has made programming insanely simple. DLL's and other forms of COM objects make code reuse very, very simple.
It's hard to beat the pipe | for insane simplicity.
By definition, command line unix reuses the output of one small program as the input of the next on all text based code. It's simpler than any dll linking and has been around since long before DLLs in Windows, Window itself or the MS DOS Windows initially sat upon (and then spent years trying to pretend it didn't).
This has always been Windows' strength and weakness. Unless an outright coder, you have no way of chaining one program to another. Power users resent having to code to do something that's just right there in CLI systems. On the flip side, with it being so much less accessible, the average user doesn't feel forced to learn the more complex process (sorry linux users but the average grandmother doesn't want to hear "Oh, you just need to grep the output of your find for..." and isn't going to adopt your platform while she assumes she has to do so to get anything done).
Seventeen year olds, rightly or wrongly, get a bad rep: They're perceived as needing a lot of supervision and as not very hard workers.
The question you've got to answer is why a manager would first want an intern rather than an employee (OK, the unpaid bit is nice), why they would choose a seventeen year old (when they could have a more qualified student who likely needs less supervision and gets more done) and why they'd choose you out of all the other seventeen year olds out there?
The easiest way is to have a parent with connections already established. I heard there were SGI machines at my local university, my dad knew a guy who used them, he offered my time for free, I worked a one week vacation and managed to prove myself enough that I got asked back every vacation afterwards.
If that avenue isn't open to you, it becomes a case of finding a way to prove yourself so you can get a potential employer's interest. The huge advantage you have here is that most of the tools you need to get started in a variety of tech fields are totally (or near) free:
Game level design: Get Unreal, Doom, Half Life, any of the games that are built on major engines. They tend to have toolsets shipped with them. Join the mod community, get good at building interesting level designs. Then test the hell out of them. Present that well and you'll likely get a start on game QA.
3D Art: Sadly photoshop will cost you and it really does make life a lot easier. Still, paint shop pro is an option as is gimp (though you'll likely want a second PC if your 3D packages are all on Windows). 3D packages themselves have a tendency to have free trial/learning versions. If you can't find downloads, watch the cover of ComputerArts and 3D World (both British imports to the states but pretty widely available) as they tend to have a lot of complete older versions of software on their covers. Get really good with them and a resume can handle the watermark "Demo Version" over all of your images. One note for 3D graphics - focus on one area (be that IK chains, lighting scenes, texturing, animation or the models in the first place). Most graphics shops dedicate people to specific areas and being great at one tends to be more valuable than decent all around. Burn your work on the CD (or pay to get some really good quality prints) and mail it to every studio you admire along with why you admire them. With luck, it'll lead to getting the interest of at least one or two of them.
Web Development: Again, Photoshop's your burden here. You don't need Dreamweaver (though the 30 day trial is free, as is PhotoShop's and, if you're willing to reinstall your OS every month, that can be an option). Again, focus on one aspect (I'm a director of web development for an agency and I'd rather hire a great designer or a great HTML coder than someone who does both passably). I can speak more to coding: learn standards, clean code structure, to write logical comments, to use CSS efficiently over the latest DHTML trick (I swear I'll never hire anyone whose resume includes making text chase the mouse). Remember that one of the first things someone like me will do is view the source code - your end result may be impressive but if I don't think you can write something the rest of my team can use quickly, it's of little use. Once you have the basic skillset and personal pages down, volunteer to redo your school, a local charity, etc. If you can show evidence of how you gathered requirements, itterated designs with the client and came out with what they want rather than what you thought they wanted, that's another great skill to show. Once you have a list of sites you can be proud of, check the Monster.coms and Dice.coms of the world and look for local (as no one will pay to relocate a kid) internships. Send a resume over, listing each project as work experience and make sure links to all of that portfolio are present.
Server side coding: Apache is free, tomcat is free, mod-php and mod-perl are free. Pretty much so long as you're not hu
It appears artists and labels will have the choice when digging into Google's pockets either through a business deal or lawsuit.
Generally, in business, it depends on who's doing the choosing.
Sadly, any CEO in a publically traded company knows they have to trade for the fast buck, not the long term one (despite their constant assurances to anyone listening that that's exactly the opposite of what they're doing).
Why? Because shareholders generally aren't in it for the long term. They want a buttload of money to come in today, that'll temporarily massively jack up the share price, and then let them get out (or at least reap the dividends). The way the system works, they don't (and arguably shouldn't) care about long term earnings anywhere near as much as the short term ones. As a result, the CEO knows he'll be replaced if he's ever foolish enough to choose long term profits over payouts for investors today.
It's for exactly this reason that the Google guys refused to sell a controlling interest in Google and awarded their own stock 10 times the voting rights of everyone else's - it allows them to make the right decisions for the company rather than the right decisions for the guys who want to take a profit and then move their money to take a profit from the next company.
Long term, successfully killing music videos on YouTube is a horrible idea. The people there today get rich from the infringement lawsuit, the next generation of artists get no ongoing royalties. A much better solution would be to take 20% of the money you could get from a lawsuit every year and keep getting it long past 5 years' time.
So, if artists vote, they'd take the long term rewards. If TimeWarner's CEO votes, he has no choice but to take the massive payout today or get replaced by his shareholders. If TimeWarner execs vote, they have to do the same or deal with a seriously pissed CEO. If the RIAA votes... Who knows. They're supposed to represent the artists, they really represent the companies and they're mostly interested in the souls of babies.
I don't dispute a long term royalty structure is vastly more profitable. But long term profits aren't necessarily what motivate modern business.
X1900 - 48 pixel shader processors plus 8 vertex shaders. Assuming you manage to run them all equally in parallel: 56 processors.
Standard CPU - 1 core (assuming dual cores get read as 2 CPUs).
448 GPUs x 56 = 25,088 effective processors all with on card memory.
25,050 CPUs x 1 core = 25,050 effective processors all dealing with system busses etc.
In short, if you're performing one simple task trillions of times, many very simple, highly optimized processors with dedicated memory do the job better than even a similar number of much more capable processors that have to play nice across a whole system.
And this ignores the number of old couple of hundred megahertz systems that people don't use anymore so hand over to the task vs. X1900s being the very high end of ATIs most recent line.
For massively parallel tasks like rendering pixels, folding proteins, compressing frames of a movie, etc. I'd absolutely love large quantities of a simple processor. For most other tasks, given present technology, I'd still side with fewer more able processors. Either way comparing 448 of something with 56 processors within it to 25,000 single processors and saying, "But 448 is SO much less than 25,000!" is an unfair comparrison.
For my graduate thesis I am writing a paper about Dads who work in the computer industry, divorce and custody. I think our industry causes a high rate of divorce but I need some help from the Slashdot community.
I realize this may come across as a cheap shot but...
If you're writing a graduate level paper, shouldn't you actually do some, you know, statistical analysis to support your core hypothesis rather than go with, "I have a feeling and asked some other nerds."?
You're far more likely to get results with, "Statistics show that while divorce is at n%, n+y% of male IT workers experience divorce. This thesis looks at prime causes for that y% and performs a statistical breakdown of their effects." than "I got divorced, I work in IT, it sucked. This paper's about how I'm pretty sure IT made it happen. I asked some other nerds what they think."
Gears 'only' cost $10 Million to make. While that's still a lot, it's much lower than the $30 Million some companies are claiming is required for next-gen gamemaking.
The justification for needing to charge $60/game rather than the more normal ~$40 for the last generation was that games had got so much more expensive to make.
If this game only costs a third as much as these allegedly super-expensive next gen games, will that be passed on to the consumer at one third the price, too? At $20/copy, the increased volume should ensure stores, distributors, etc. can more than make up for the decrease in per unit profits.
Unless, of course, $60 has next to nothing to do with actual costs of making a game and everything to do with carefully calculating what you can gouge consumers for in exchange for the promise of "next gen". Now why exactly was Lego StarWars II, exactly the same game as on other consoles, suddenly $10 more on a 360?
A weakness in the binary format? OK, who's to blame here, the ones or the zeroes?
You'd have thought they'd have caught this sooner. It's not like it's that long of a list to exhaustively test.
Dude, I can't believe how wrong you are.
You're off my friends list!
Tomatoes were originally used but congress cancelled funding for what was obviously a communist energy source.
but if they want to alienate some customers because for them, that's less expensive than a big IT project, that should be their call. Not a lawyers. I can't believe that any business not in the mood to do this doesn't have competition that is.
So, the rule of thumb is: If a business doesn't give a crap about alienating a customer, that's their right?
Ergo, if the disabled can't use a site, the business has the right to alienate them if they want to.
How about say wheelchair access to their brick and mortar site? If a business doesn't give a crap about disabled people, they shouldn't have to worry about disabled access and should have every right to exclude them and lose their business?
Hell, why worry about physical infirmities. If Capt'n Kracker's Army Surplus store doesn't like those damn darkies, towel heads and jews, why shouldn't be allowed to refuse them business? In a free market, they can take their business elsewhere and all he does is harm himself.
And the golf club. If they dislike negroes and women at some of the best golf clubs in the country, that should be there right. After all, if they think they can cater better to rich bigots and make more money that way, shouldn't they have the right to refuse membership to undersirables who, a free market states, can go elsewhere and support other businesses?
Then, finally, there's the Montgomery bus service. If they think black women should give up their seats for white people, they should damned well be allowed to do it. The uppity black woman should go find another bus service, start her own, walk, buy a car or any of plenty of other options. There's absolutely no reason to let something like that inspire any kind of law changing.
Every one of those situations has argued the "free market" line. In just about all of them, the United States has ultimately said we'd rather not permit exclusion, even at the cost to free market ideals.
Sure, you can decide to draw a line. You can state that "Well, the south's the south. Government shouldn't interfere." and draw the line just before black people on buses. You can state that "Golf clubs are private institutions" and draw the line just before forcing them to be open. You can state that "Stores shouldn't be forced to remodel" and draw it just before adding disabled access. And you can state "Websites shouldn't be forced to be inclusive either" and draw the line there.
The thing is, whilst people may get outraged at the time, the fact that the U.S. tends not to accept drawing that line (albeit after painful wrangling each time) is one of the things most Americans are most proud of.
The ADA has provisions written in about relative cost, about size of business affected, about reduced compliance for expensive retrofitting vs. building inclusively when new projects come up. The cost generally isn't anywhere near as bad as initial kneejerk fears tend to tout and the ultimate benefit, for the kind of nation it helps promote, is what ultimately makes most Americans damned proud.
The product, from a company called AIseek, seeks to do for NPC performance what the PhysX processor does for in-game physics.
Damn. And I hoped it'd actually be useful for AI.
The problem with PhysX is it costs similarly to a mid range graphics card and yet adds kind of performance gains of a first gen graphics card. Whilst GPUs are massively evolved compared to first gen offerings, PhysX in its first gen state is a really expensive nice little add on.
Don't get me wrong, when physics processors and AI processors make the kind of difference that having or not having a GPU makes now, that'll be an amazing thing. It's just that, in first gen form, with no competition yet pushing the market forward, PhysX has been met with a deafening yawn and saying this chip hopes to do the same doesn't really promise much.
It's amazing, isn't it? How you, as a "game developer" are more concerned about disk space than about gameplay?
In a discussion about format size, an observation about format size is simply an on topic discussion. It has nothing to do with priorities and nor does it imply priority.
It's kind of like saying, in a discussion about dogs getting loose, "The thought of getting bitten is a real concern for me." and having someone leap forward with, "How can you worry about being bitten when babies are dying in Africa!"
I work for a games company too. I think more capacity, more power, more everything is a good thing. If you pay attention, you'll note I didn't say add "at the expense of gameplay" or "more so than gameplay." Gameplay remains a primary concern but it doesn't stop capacity from still being a good thing as an additional way to push the genre forward.
How many CDs did Pac Man fill?
And, given that Pacman is still released semi regularly for the Gameboy, as part of "classic" collections for the PS2/Xbox, etc., how much do people still play it?
Yeah, it was a great game for its time. Yeah, for its time it sucked in far more of our time than most modern games do. But, standing against modern games like say Oblivion with its wealth of content, it captures maybe half an hour of a modern gamer's interest. Now compare it to World Of Warcraft. Even in its heyday, did its median player play for anywhere near the amount of time the median player of a modern classic plays for?
At the end of the day, whilst gameplay is core, there's a reason why most gamers, exposed to what a whole DVD full of content can be like, play older games and quickly get bored, realizing PacMan is nothing more than repetition of the same concept, requiring four or five core strategies, repeated for 255 levels.
Were you frustrated when you scratched the disk of your Super Mario Brothers 3 cartridge?
No, we were frustrated when dust got in to it and no amount of blowing would get it to work again.
Gameplay has stagnated in the past 10 years - since the Playstation era. There have been no new innovations in gameplay in that time, only improved graphics.
To name the first few the immediately come to mind...
Tomb Raider (and its clones) - a genre of gaming that didn't exist before the PS1.
Massively Multiplayer online worlds with human to human interaction on a level of accessibility that text based systems never had.
Sandbox games like the Grand Theft Auto series (that, curiously, only become possible with enough depth of content that relies on the large storage you disdain).
The only games which come to mind with innovative gameplay are games like Guitar Hero with its specialty hardware.
Unlike the classic arcade games of yore. None of which required trackballs instead of joysticks, afterburner cabinets that turned upside down, VR headsets or lightguns.
Of course, Wii is looking to change all that.
The Wii is, by definition, specialty hardware. It introduces a new class of, admittedly more reusable than many, peripheral.
If you're determined to look at a single aspect of any given argument, you can confirm your beliefs. If one only looks at numbers of children killed, guns are bad. If one only looks at numbers of crimes stopped, guns are good. Neither is that impressive of an argument to more open minded people.
Similarly, you saw a game dev comment on storage with no mention of gameplay either way and saw it simply as a confirmation of your beliefs that tech is more important to him than gameplay - despite absolutely no supporting evidence. You complain about how easy modern discs may be to scratch, ignoring how easy cartridges were to get dust in to (I for one have had far less frustration with scratched discs than I ever had with 5.25" floppies that got fingerprints on them or 16K ram packs that fell out of the back of ZX81s everytime I typed hard). You lament
Sorry, didn't bother to read the article but I hear it's about some country with a repressive regime that keeps quashing citizens' rights?
With luck, the United States will soon invade, deposing that corrupt regime and give those cowed citizens the same constitutionally protected liberties Americans experience every day. Tony Blair has already pledged his support.
Do they have oil? Weapons of mass destruction? Are they trying to advance their knowledge of nuclear weapons? Do they have large chemical weapon stockpiles? Do they frequently piss off the U.N.? Can we allege they have a "School Of The [Whatever Region]" terrorist training camp? Can we accuse them of trying to destabilize entire regions? Do they "kidnap" citizens of other nations, holding them for torture and interrogation rather than uphold international law and conventions?
If we can answer yes to two or three of the above, I'm pretty sure we have grounds to invade.
Now who was it again?
I have a wonderful and, thus far, apparently foolproof system: I'm from another culture.
Them: "We think you interacted inappropriately with that female."
Me: "In my culture, that's entirely appropriate. Is this a race thing? Are you singling out my very respectful 'English' behavior as inappropriate in your American workplace?"
Them: "Oh, shit. We could get sued for that, couldn't we? Pretend we said nothing."
It's much like patent law. Companies patent stupid crap they don't really need to patent simply so that when the next company sues them, they have something they could counter sue over and they know they'll both agree to back off in exchange for shared patents.
As I am of a different race, so long as I'm basically polite, cases where fear-of-getting-sued prompts people to freak out over my being male and talking to females can be just as quickly quashed by their equally over inflated fear of an English employee suing over cultural insensitivity and racism.
99% of sexual harassment stupidity isn't motivated by actual lawsuits so much as fear of lawsuits. If I genuinely commit sexual harassment, I expect to get disciplined for it. On the other hand, if people want to freak out about possibilities, I'll give them other possibilities that are just as scary to push them back the other way.
In other news...
"Are gamers ready for something more complex than Pong?"