even a wearable device that could provide safe, continuous cancer treatment.
Because, after demonstrating they could use personal firearms safely and only in the recommended manner, it was deemed reasonable to give Americans personal nukes.
E=MC^2 is far more important as a statement about the relationship between the components than saying Total Energy = [some number for some specific item] x 89875517873681764m/s.
Similarly, for all the made up numbers, the point illustrates a relationship. I could have written:
A company is worth X where X = (Value of key franchise)Y + (Value of other franchises) Z. Now, due to stock market fluctuation, X may vary to be either temporarily greater or smaller than Y+Z, over-reacting to fluctuations in Z. Thus you may briefly get an incorrect market valuation of X = Y+20%*Z whilst, in fact Z hasn't really devalued by more than 40% - but people are mistakenly associating a devaluing of Z as a partial devaluing of Y too (they're mistakenly valuing it as X=80%*Y+40%*Z). Accordingly, if you buy the whole, separate out Y which is actually still worth 100% of its amount, you have Y in one company and X-Y =40%*Z in another. You have effectively created value by paying X=Y+20%*Z and actually getting X=Y+40%*Z once you break it up.
I could, similarly, replace the 20% as n1, 40% as n2 and 80% as n3 which a simple statement of "n1 n2".
But you see how that just obfuscates an issue that can be perfectly well explained to normal people without needing to resort to algebra.
Those who modded up got that. Those who complained apparently assumed numbers must be exact rather than exemplary.
CMOS and CCD have been around since something like the 60s. That's long enough to be well out of any restrictive patents - save for optimizations.
Foveon was patented in something like '99. As a result, were they to invest heavily, they'd then have a different company take a huge chunk of the profits from their spending.
Elevation doesn't seem to be afraid of investing in troubled companies.
So long as you've done a thorough due dilligence and are confident you've uncovered all of the problems, the main thing further fraud announcements do is confirm what you already knew, scare stockholders in to selling cheap, and let you get the same company for even less money.
Pulling numbers from my rear end:
Say GTA is worth $100m. The company as a whole is worth $200m.
Say news about fraud devalues the company down to $120m - really $140m but it swings lower before it normalizes.
If you can buy it out for $120m, spin off GTA in to something you own, then sell the remainder back for $40m, you've just bought the $100m company you wanted anyway and got it for $20m less.
Even if you can't offload the remainder for over $30m, that's still a $10m savings.
Absolute worst case, you get a second company that's currently worth $20m but more like $40m in real assets (just less, right now, due to its reputation hit) and you can break off the remaining pieces and sell them out piecemeal too.
So, in short, a company nose diving in value doesn't necessarily make it any less appealing to buy.
They have the Sigma SD9 and SD10, the Polaroid x530 and Hanvision HVDUO-5M and -10M. Polaroid's in bankrupcy hearings and Sigma's SD10 was a late 2003 model.
Their website has nothing more advanced than their 10.2MP Foveon - which appears to be the same one used in the early 2002 Sigma SD9. They also have no recent press releases that I can find.
Patent protection isn't designed to give you protection for all eternity. Patents are about a balance: Encouraging people to innovate by giving them a protected period during which they can capitalize on their own invention before, ultimately, handing the benefits of that encouraged innovation to society at large.
25 years, in the modern world, is arguably far longer than necessary. It'll be the 2020s by the time anyone else can start using that tech. That made sense when it could take many years to build machining tools, build production lines, market in your home town before slowly moving wider, etc. In today's business world, that's no longer true. Even fifty years ago, you could assume that most of the techs discovered today would be valid in 25 years - that's just not true anymore.
Given you can take an idea through to IPO within five years and then build that business to significant dominance within another five, given that you can use that time to develop your tech, adding new patents on the advances, I would argue that ten years - given the pace of modern business - is plenty.
I thought we were pushing the theoretical limit for that - there are only so many photons impacting the sensor surface, and it's not possible to catch many more with much more accuracy than we already are.
Actually, even if you had a theoretically "perfect" CCD or CMOS, you can catch about two-to-four times as many photons.
The problem lies in the way the photosites capture light. Most designs are variants of the every other location is green with red and blue alternating the others. Something like:
RG GB
Green gets twice the representation as human eyes are more sensitive to green and thus more detail in that part of the spectrum is considered desirable.
A recent trick to squeeze out more is to turn the photosites at 45 degrees to the grid you actually capture. You're then forced to interpolate more but the theory is that you get a smoother response.
Regardless though, any given location can catch red OR green OR blue parts of the spectrum. If green falls, 50% of it is lost. If red falls, 75% is lost - same with blue. You're always throwing away half to three quarters of your photons simply by having photosites dedicated to individual colors.
With Foveon they try tackling things differently. By exploiting the fact that different wavelengths can penetrate silicon to different depths, they figured you can have a three layer deep photosite that captures red AND green AND blue - none of this ignoring chunks of the spectrum and throwing away data.
Of course, for all it's a cool idea, it's proprietary, has only made it in to a few cameras and doesn't seem to be hitting its full potential yet. My guess is there's still quite a bit left that can be squeezed out of CMOS (Canon's 10D got noisy at-or-just-after 400 ISO wherease the 20D, 18 months later, could handle 800) and we'll see them follow that technology for a while whilst waiting for Foveon to move out of patent protection.
Still, in the future, I'd imagine we'll see Foveon or something different but exploiting some similar concepts replace individual colored photosites. Until that point, no matter how good things get, there's always a full stop of light's worth of extra quality sitting and waiting.
What we'd need is a videocard/monitor manufacturer 'alliance' sponsoring game devs to support proper dual monitor setups
From the imaginary future review, "Doom 5 plays terribly on ATi's BajillionX900. Across the 5x3 1600x1200 setup we have in the Gamespy offices, it can barely crank out three frames per second."
It's painful enough for them when people want to switch up from 1024x768 to 1280x1024 to 1600x1200 or turn FSAA up to 16x etc. Imagine if they were getting benchmarked on multiple monitors all trying to pull that off.
Right now, they pump out a ton of heat trying to power a single monitor with everything turned on and still don't have instanced geometry, proper displacement maps, real vs environment reflections, or do much with HDR - and Dell and NVidia are already teaming up to produce four $500 parts, across two boards, to get the frame rate even higher.
You think they really want a setup where people benchmark them against something that takes three times the power (plus any additional overheads that come in) for triple head - or, worse, 15x when someone decides a 5x3 setup would be even more immersive?
I require this memory to be installed in my server so I can properly host a massive Natalie Portman gallery. I will, of course, provide you with URLs when it's done.
But your Honour... I didn't copy these Britney Spears albums, I made them!
Don't sweat too much about it. So long as you didn't burn copies of her first few videos to CD, from before she turned 18, this case doesn't affect you.
If, on the other hand, you have copies of the school girl video, there're simply no two ways about it: You're a sick paedophile and deserve hard time in a pound me in the ass institution. Just because it was on MTV, it doesn't make it OK.
I think you are misreading the article. By "regardless of the legality of the file", what they mean is that you're not permitted to share a file you have a legal right to a personal copy of but no legal right to share.
If you author a file and the content within it, you can do anything you like with it.
If you make a fair use copy of a song, then put the song in a shared location, they are arguing it's the same as burning a whole stack of "fair use" copies of a CD to CD-R and then leaving them on your doorstep for anyone to take. Yes, you have a right to fair use copies - you don't have a right to "oops, how careless of me" allow others to take copies.
However, if it continues to grow, it could potentially starve us of the funds necessary for research and development, and therefore, developers will be less willing to take a risk on new and genre-diversifying titles.
OK, I'll call bull.
1) How much of the cost is really in research and development?
A typical game studio has a very small team working on a game until they have the core concept down and decide they want to progress. At which point it ramps up from 3-5 guys (a producer, an artist, a couple of coders) to 30-50 peopls (several more coders, lots more artists, a ton of level designers, sound guys, QA, etc.).
Staffing costs for an innovation phase are minimal. As for other costs, an innovative game likely doesn't use that much more unique coding on top of a game engine than any other title, doesn't somehow need more art assets, doesn't somehow need more "new" levels as every game requires new level design, etc.
2) If the costs of production for a new idea are much the same as the costs of production for a proven idea, perhaps they're meaning that innovative games are less profitable: with a clone, you always make 20-30% profit but a new concept crashes and burns 9 times out of 10 with the tenth being Doom or Worms or whatever and making several hundred percent.
OK, so if that's the case, just because profit margins go up, businesses will suddenly stop going for the safest and largest profit generators and will now suddenly become altruistic and make the innovative titles that now don't lose so much money but still don't make anywhere near as much as the clones that now make even bigger profits? Of course not, they're businesses with shareholders and will always do what makes the best return.
That's why I'm calling bull. Sure, a few indie companies may make more innovative games because they're not in it for the money and now those guys can afford to stay in business longer. The thing is, with a modern game costing $5-10m to make, how many indie shops can really enter the market anyway? Everyone else are just big producers - run as businesses - and, rightly so for businesses, they just chase profits not innovation.
And, if you don't believe me, check EA, a company famed for saying, "Our goal is to release around 20 titles a year. We try and ensure one of them is a new IP." We can mock them but they're the most successful publisher out there - what does that tell you about how economics work for big shops? Think it'll change just because profit margins increase for everything, not just innovative titles?
I wonder how much we would have to pay to bribe - uh, "lobby" - a senator to slip "The content industry may only produce new legislation and digital rights management that secures their customary historic rights." in to some defense spending bill.
After all, the basic system appears to be that you pay to have your law hidden in a spending bill. The EFF searches these things because the RIAA/MPAA keeps trying to pull that shady crap but you've got to wonder if the RIAA/MPAA searches them on the off chance the EFF pulls something similar.
It would be entertaining to see them beaten at their own game and no longer allowed to introduce dubious laws due to, well, someone using their own dubious tactics.
Whilst direct return on investment is useful, there's one thing no one seems to be mentioning...
What else could you be doing with your resources (time, money, etc.)?
To take the earlier example: $50/hr total costs x 5hr would tell you that anything that earns you over $250 is a good investment - you make a profit.
On the other hand, most people work in a very dynamic environment without the ability to respond as fluidly. In an ideal world, you'd scale up and down, constantly maintaining the resource levels to do all the tasks that make a profit. In the real world, you'll have times when your department is understaffed and times when it's overstaffed and there's only so much you can do to change that as scaling up and down also carry costs.
Thus, assuming you're already doing the best you can to maintain correct staffing levels, the real question is how do you best utilize those resources?
The above theory tells you to do 5 hrs of $50/hr support if it makes you $250. But...
If you are briefly overstaffed, this is the time to do it anyway. Even if you only make $50 in extra sales, if you're paying a salaries employee $50/hr for those five hours anyway, at least you're now only losing $200, not $250.
Similarly, if you're understaffed, that $252 profit vs. $250 cost may tell you to do it - but there may well be another project that could also take those resources and would return an even higher return on investment. Just because you can earn $252 in extra sales by adding five hours of support for older browsers, you may be able to add $1000 of extra sales by adding five hours of work for more modern browsers.
So, overall, you should be looking at whether you can turn a profit with the work invested. The thing is, accepting that no business is perfectly responsive on resourcing, it's also always worth considering what else you could spend the resources on and whether that would return even better profits.
For example, I work in gaming...
Say I could draw an extra $10,000 in sales by supporting I.E. 4+ with a "light" site that'd take $8,000 in dev costs. Now say I could continue to support I.E. 6+, ignoring the older browsers, add a really cool new feature, and gain an extra $15,000 in sales.
In an ideal world, I'd spend $16,000 and return $25,000. Except I only have $8,000 in resources. Hiring costs me $5,000 and then the same $8,000 in salary again. Thus it makes no sense to hire extra staff for this short period, paying $13,000 to make $10,000 more.
So, with my $8,000 in resources, I'm going to accept that the "light" site would be a good investment too - but that the cool new feature is an even better investment and so that's what I go with.
At some point in the future, if I'm overstaffed, laying off and rehiring when we need the staff doesn't make financial sense either so I'm likely to be briefly overstaffed. At that point, if I have the $8,000 in resources again, I'll invest in the "light" project. Even if that project has missed its moment and can only return $5,000, I'll still invest that $8,000 if there's no better investment - losing $3,000 is still better than losing all $8,000 because I have no "profitable" projects.
In most web departments, the total budget likely isn't decided within the department itself - it's set from on high. So, accept that, accept you can't do every profitable project, and always ask the simple question, "Is this the best use of my resources right now." If the best answer is to support right the way back to Mosaic, go for it. If the best answer is only the beta releases of IE 7, given your company's business, do that instead.
Game A on the Xbox 1 uses <1 DVD and Game A's sequel also for the Xbox 1 uses <1 DVD.
The same is true for games B, C, D, and E. So clearly we can state that games don't require more than one DVD, right?
Wrong.
Game A also used 32mb of ram, as did its sequel. Game A ran on a single cored 733mhz processor, as did its sequel. Game A's sequel even managed to run on the same graphics chipset as Game A. The same is again true for games B, C, D and E.
So, by this logic, we can establish that newer games don't need the wasteful 512mb of next gen systems, sure as hell don't need multiple core processors that run at several ghz, and really don't need a better graphics engine. After all, each sequel ran on the same hardware as its predecessor. In fact, everyone who's bought a 360 is clearly an idiot by this reasoning.
That's utterly flawed logic. As disc swapping kills games, developers do everything they possibly can to avoid it, including culling content. So, when CD-ROM was the best anyone had, sure, most people managed to release sequels on a single CD-ROM. When DVD turned up, they quickly stepped up and used the five times as much space - not because they were wasteful but because they'd been holding back previous games to keep them on a single disc.
When a game like Oblivion comes out, sure, you can cram it on to one DVD but think how much more freedom the designers would have had to use unique textures if they had the space of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. Sure, they can cram everything in to one DVD and we can tell ourselves that a single DVD is still plenty but the truth is, they're making decisions based on limited space and having to choose things to cut. Given the choice, I'd rather my game had the extra textures, additional music scores, more unique pre-recorded dialogs, etc. than have to keep reusing them to fit a single disc. Can they squeeze it in to a single disc? Sure. But that doesn't mean they aren't making trades to do so and it certainly doesn't mean games wouldn't get larger if they possibly could.
Designers use whatever they have access to. If you have a single DVD, you'll only use a single DVD and keep cutting back your vision. When that option doesn't change for a whole generation, games won't up their requirements much during that generation - because they're hitting the same ceiling, not because they don't want or couldn't use the extra space.
And, even assuming quantities of content don't change... From Xbox 1 to Xbox 360, you've swapped from FD to HD. That means full screen videos are ~7x the resolution and thus, to use it, require ~7x the storage. That means textures need to scale up just as much as you can see that much more detail in each one. Even if there're no more levels, no more textures used per level, no more cinematics, the same quantity of resources still takes up several times the space if you want it to fully use HD.
Thus an appropriately textured Splinter Cell for the 360 should likely take 20gb of disk space - which just isn't going to happen as the publishers know five disks would kill the game. Without that as an option, they're forced to use the same resolution textures and console owners finally see the crap PC users have been putting up with, playing ports of console games: just how bad FD textures look when displayed on an HD screen with HD res polygons.
The human body has been doing remarkably well at powering itself, without batteries, for millenia (with the one exception on Monday mornings).
Why do we need "nano" batteries? If we're down to the point of building things at an atomic level, shouldn't we be at the point where we a) build things with the same (or at least similar) efficiency as the body had in the first place and b) thus use the same power supply the part we're replacing used?
Whilst it's really cool we're building nano-batteries, it sounds more like a lab cashing in on the exciting buzz technology of the moment to solve a problem rather than looking at the problem that actually needs solving and finding the right solution for it.
It makes me wonder, did people 150 years ago try getting seed captial for equally ridiculous concepts involving the new buzz tech of steam? Actually, thinking about it, I know they did - and we laugh at the craziness of the inventors who anounced they were going to invent steam powered underpants or whatever back then. Makes me wonder how much the people of 150 years in the future will smack their heads and laugh at the ridiculous concepts for exploiting nano-tech we're coming up with now, when far more obvious solutions were staring us in the face.
1) Find a couple of companies that were essential to the organization in the past but have long since gone bankrupt.
2) Buy up the rights to those companies' names and trademarks.
3) Tell the MLB they no longer have the right to use them.
Laugh as they now have to ammend their records to "So and so scored X at some stadium we can't mention anymore, as part of a now defunct team we can't mention either, on such and such a date."
I wonder how many cities are pissed at some major league team dumping the venue they built at immense cost to tax payers only for the team to get a better deal elsewhere. Can their mayors revoke the MLB's right to use the name of the city in any of their statistics? Imagine, "The all time record for [whatever] was scored on [date] but we can't tell you where."
It kind of makes one wonder what exactly was accomplished in 1989 when 100,000 protesters marched in Beijing.
From the article: "'How can I do my thesis now?' a university student asked on another Chinese website."
Nothing was achieved in 1989. They didn't have the Wikipedia back. Apparently, without it, all work in China grinds to a halt.
Or, it might, you know, be an incredibly lazy student bitching because he has to consult a whole second source to complete his degree thesis. I wasn't aware DeVry had a Chinese campus.
1. Every eighteen months, the technology that you support will double in capacity.
2. Every eighteen months, the technology that you are supporting it over will do nothing.
Ergo, given that average notebook hard drives are currently around 60gb, rather than 30gb, Moore's Law (as opposed to Mooreon's Law) allows us to deduce he began applying Mooreon's Law 18 months ago - the doubling of average disk space since then has been ignored by him as it's a competing technology (and covered under part II of Mooreon's Law) - it has just taken him this long to get anyone to take him seriously.
Applying Mooreon's law from that point we can deduce:
1. 1GB flash 18 months ago translates to 2GB today, translates to 4GB in 18 months, 8GB in 3 years, 16GB in 4.5 years, 32GB in 6 years.
2. 30GB of traditional 2.5 inch HDD 18 months ago should still be 30GB today and will be 30GB in 6 years.
Therefore, 32GB > 30GB in six years - hence 5-6 years is an accurate figure for when flash should overtake 2.5inch HDDs.
Connection: Planet Of The Apes - Social Commentary. Martin Luther King - Import changer of society.
Were you to be a glass is half full kind of person, that sounds like a connection. I could entirely accept that enough customers to trigger a connection algorithm are interested in social commentary to the degree that both titles appeal.
Were you to be a glass is half empty kind of person, clearly the system is racist.
Fortunately, we have a media that's only interested in postive and uplifting stories so they'd never focus purely on the negative, for shock value, without considering other possible alternatives.
And, for added amusement, type "Civ 4" in to Amazon and see what recommendations come up further down the list. It may too be racist. It may be a deeply humorous commentary on lonely guys playing Civ 4. Or it may be some other connection that we haven't figured out yet.
But then that's the whole point of data mining... Finding connections that humans tend to be entirely too preoccupied by their assumptions to be able to see beyond.
I never thought I knew what was happening...
on
Rounding Algorithms
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It's a good read, especially if you *think* you know what your programs are doing.
I gave up assuming I knew exactly what my programs were doing right around the time I gave up writing assembly code. Actually, I gave up a little prior to that when I realised I wasn't very good as assembly code but that kind of clouds the point.
For any given high level language, the moment concepts start getting abstracted out, all kinds of false assumptions start getting made based on those assumptions.
Before you run it, what do you figure you'll get? Please tell me you didn't honestly think you'd get 1?
If you can't even rely on floating point numbers being accurate when well within their perceived range (+/- 2^1023 to 2^-52 is not actually the same as every possible number to that degree of accuracy, despite most assumptions) then, odds are, rounding isn't going to matter that much either.
That said, at least 0.5 has the decency to fit really nicely in to binary as 2^-1 and so you can argue, with certainty, that the number you have is 0.5 before getting in to arguments about whether to round such a number up or down.
Here's one for you though...
double a=0.001; double b=0; for (int i=0; i
Except what should be 0.5 has now wandered off to 0.5000000000000003 and even if you do try rounding point fives down, it's now greater than 0.5 anyway - so you'll get one instead of zero...
Which raises the argument - just because you happen to be passing 0.5 in to your rounding function and are arguing which way it should go, what on earth makes you think 0.5 is the correct value of whatever you were working with anyway?
The point of all of this being that these things are cool concepts to know to show off at nerd cocktail parties (OK, over a D&D game is more likely) but open a whole can of worms if you actually want to get authoratative on the subject as one assumption getting questioned leads to another and another. For a very few, it's worth discovering all of the many variants - which likely requires an indepth knowledge of how the compiler works and you're back at assembler anyway. For everyone else, beyond the nerd show off, it's about degrees of comfort and, in most cases, that degree is... leave the lid on the can and back away slowly.
And that leaves me where I am. I'm aware that there're concepts like which way rounding goes, what happens with small decimals, etc. and, luckily for me, I'm in a field where thorough testing is considered accurate enough. Actually freaking out about such issues just feels like coder OCD.
this transition -- which will render about 70 million TV sets obsolete
It's a curious definition of obsolescence.
The CRT still works, the RCA inputs that most TVs have had for years still work, the coaxial input that every TV gets still works, the tuner still works and the remote still works.
It's like arguing that DVD made cheap TVs without RCA obsolete. Well, save for a $15 RCA-to-Coaxial adaptor - at which point they ran just fine.
Similarly, the obsolete analog TV, when digital switches over, will remain perfectly compatible with an external digital tuner for over the air signals, just as it's already compatible with satelite and cable boxes that convert digital to analog for you.
Yes, the digital to analog tuners are currently pricey due to basic economies of scale:
Who in their right mind would pay money to get a digital signal and degrade it to the exact same analog signal they can already receive for free? You can't even claim better reception because digital drops to artefacts and then nothing, far before analog drops to pure static, in most poor reception areas - some analog static is better than no digital picture.
But, when 70m TVs suddenly only work with DVD players and VCRs but no TV anymore, that's going to be a pretty big market to either buy new TVs or these tuners. Assuming they've been cheap enough to continue this long, they aren't likely to want to drop hundreds if not thousands on a new TV - so we can expect tens of millions interested in the digital-to-analog external tuners.
And when you shift from a few misguided early adopters to tens of millions, what happens to economies of scale? I'm guessing $20-30 parts at your local Radio Shack and nice expensive brand name ones at Best Buy.
In the purest sense, sure, they're obsolete exactly how they are for over the air TV signals. But the simple addition of a $20-30 part that every last one of them can accept hardly sounds like obsolesence to me.
With the government fronting $1.5b (or roughly $50/TV if we assume half of the 70m won't bother to claim, will upgrade the whole TV, etc.), that'll more than cover the $20-30 part and, besides: "loss of news and weather"? A cheap $5 AM/FM radio will give you that back - I know it's scary America but you don't need pictures for it to be true.
So, no real obsolesence, no real cost to those who need a cheap part to upgrade and no massive loss to those who completely ignored the warnings for ten years (accepting that for some reason we felt sorry for those who ignored the warnings about Katrina despite even greater potential cost)... why are we worrying about this?
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even a wearable device that could provide safe, continuous cancer treatment.
Because, after demonstrating they could use personal firearms safely and only in the recommended manner, it was deemed reasonable to give Americans personal nukes.
Algebra is "made up numbers" too.
E=MC^2 is far more important as a statement about the relationship between the components than saying Total Energy = [some number for some specific item] x 89875517873681764m/s.
Similarly, for all the made up numbers, the point illustrates a relationship. I could have written:
A company is worth X where X = (Value of key franchise)Y + (Value of other franchises) Z. Now, due to stock market fluctuation, X may vary to be either temporarily greater or smaller than Y+Z, over-reacting to fluctuations in Z. Thus you may briefly get an incorrect market valuation of X = Y+20%*Z whilst, in fact Z hasn't really devalued by more than 40% - but people are mistakenly associating a devaluing of Z as a partial devaluing of Y too (they're mistakenly valuing it as X=80%*Y+40%*Z). Accordingly, if you buy the whole, separate out Y which is actually still worth 100% of its amount, you have Y in one company and X-Y =40%*Z in another. You have effectively created value by paying X=Y+20%*Z and actually getting X=Y+40%*Z once you break it up.
I could, similarly, replace the 20% as n1, 40% as n2 and 80% as n3 which a simple statement of "n1 n2".
But you see how that just obfuscates an issue that can be perfectly well explained to normal people without needing to resort to algebra.
Those who modded up got that. Those who complained apparently assumed numbers must be exact rather than exemplary.
CMOS and CCD have been around since something like the 60s. That's long enough to be well out of any restrictive patents - save for optimizations.
Foveon was patented in something like '99. As a result, were they to invest heavily, they'd then have a different company take a huge chunk of the profits from their spending.
Elevation doesn't seem to be afraid of investing in troubled companies.
So long as you've done a thorough due dilligence and are confident you've uncovered all of the problems, the main thing further fraud announcements do is confirm what you already knew, scare stockholders in to selling cheap, and let you get the same company for even less money.
Pulling numbers from my rear end:
Say GTA is worth $100m. The company as a whole is worth $200m.
Say news about fraud devalues the company down to $120m - really $140m but it swings lower before it normalizes.
If you can buy it out for $120m, spin off GTA in to something you own, then sell the remainder back for $40m, you've just bought the $100m company you wanted anyway and got it for $20m less.
Even if you can't offload the remainder for over $30m, that's still a $10m savings.
Absolute worst case, you get a second company that's currently worth $20m but more like $40m in real assets (just less, right now, due to its reputation hit) and you can break off the remaining pieces and sell them out piecemeal too.
So, in short, a company nose diving in value doesn't necessarily make it any less appealing to buy.
Not a huge amount:
They have the Sigma SD9 and SD10, the Polaroid x530 and Hanvision HVDUO-5M and -10M. Polaroid's in bankrupcy hearings and Sigma's SD10 was a late 2003 model.
Their website has nothing more advanced than their 10.2MP Foveon - which appears to be the same one used in the early 2002 Sigma SD9. They also have no recent press releases that I can find.
So, in short, nothing much for two years.
Patent protection isn't designed to give you protection for all eternity. Patents are about a balance: Encouraging people to innovate by giving them a protected period during which they can capitalize on their own invention before, ultimately, handing the benefits of that encouraged innovation to society at large.
25 years, in the modern world, is arguably far longer than necessary. It'll be the 2020s by the time anyone else can start using that tech. That made sense when it could take many years to build machining tools, build production lines, market in your home town before slowly moving wider, etc. In today's business world, that's no longer true. Even fifty years ago, you could assume that most of the techs discovered today would be valid in 25 years - that's just not true anymore.
Given you can take an idea through to IPO within five years and then build that business to significant dominance within another five, given that you can use that time to develop your tech, adding new patents on the advances, I would argue that ten years - given the pace of modern business - is plenty.
I thought we were pushing the theoretical limit for that - there are only so many photons impacting the sensor surface, and it's not possible to catch many more with much more accuracy than we already are.
Actually, even if you had a theoretically "perfect" CCD or CMOS, you can catch about two-to-four times as many photons.
The problem lies in the way the photosites capture light. Most designs are variants of the every other location is green with red and blue alternating the others. Something like:
RG
GB
Green gets twice the representation as human eyes are more sensitive to green and thus more detail in that part of the spectrum is considered desirable.
A recent trick to squeeze out more is to turn the photosites at 45 degrees to the grid you actually capture. You're then forced to interpolate more but the theory is that you get a smoother response.
Regardless though, any given location can catch red OR green OR blue parts of the spectrum. If green falls, 50% of it is lost. If red falls, 75% is lost - same with blue. You're always throwing away half to three quarters of your photons simply by having photosites dedicated to individual colors.
With Foveon they try tackling things differently. By exploiting the fact that different wavelengths can penetrate silicon to different depths, they figured you can have a three layer deep photosite that captures red AND green AND blue - none of this ignoring chunks of the spectrum and throwing away data.
Of course, for all it's a cool idea, it's proprietary, has only made it in to a few cameras and doesn't seem to be hitting its full potential yet. My guess is there's still quite a bit left that can be squeezed out of CMOS (Canon's 10D got noisy at-or-just-after 400 ISO wherease the 20D, 18 months later, could handle 800) and we'll see them follow that technology for a while whilst waiting for Foveon to move out of patent protection.
Still, in the future, I'd imagine we'll see Foveon or something different but exploiting some similar concepts replace individual colored photosites. Until that point, no matter how good things get, there's always a full stop of light's worth of extra quality sitting and waiting.
What we'd need is a videocard/monitor manufacturer 'alliance' sponsoring game devs to support proper dual monitor setups
From the imaginary future review, "Doom 5 plays terribly on ATi's BajillionX900. Across the 5x3 1600x1200 setup we have in the Gamespy offices, it can barely crank out three frames per second."
It's painful enough for them when people want to switch up from 1024x768 to 1280x1024 to 1600x1200 or turn FSAA up to 16x etc. Imagine if they were getting benchmarked on multiple monitors all trying to pull that off.
Right now, they pump out a ton of heat trying to power a single monitor with everything turned on and still don't have instanced geometry, proper displacement maps, real vs environment reflections, or do much with HDR - and Dell and NVidia are already teaming up to produce four $500 parts, across two boards, to get the frame rate even higher.
You think they really want a setup where people benchmark them against something that takes three times the power (plus any additional overheads that come in) for triple head - or, worse, 15x when someone decides a 5x3 setup would be even more immersive?
Dear IT department,
I require this memory to be installed in my server so I can properly host a massive Natalie Portman gallery. I will, of course, provide you with URLs when it's done.
But your Honour... I didn't copy these Britney Spears albums, I made them!
Don't sweat too much about it. So long as you didn't burn copies of her first few videos to CD, from before she turned 18, this case doesn't affect you.
If, on the other hand, you have copies of the school girl video, there're simply no two ways about it: You're a sick paedophile and deserve hard time in a pound me in the ass institution. Just because it was on MTV, it doesn't make it OK.
I think you are misreading the article. By "regardless of the legality of the file", what they mean is that you're not permitted to share a file you have a legal right to a personal copy of but no legal right to share.
If you author a file and the content within it, you can do anything you like with it.
If you make a fair use copy of a song, then put the song in a shared location, they are arguing it's the same as burning a whole stack of "fair use" copies of a CD to CD-R and then leaving them on your doorstep for anyone to take. Yes, you have a right to fair use copies - you don't have a right to "oops, how careless of me" allow others to take copies.
However, if it continues to grow, it could potentially starve us of the funds necessary for research and development, and therefore, developers will be less willing to take a risk on new and genre-diversifying titles.
OK, I'll call bull.
1) How much of the cost is really in research and development?
A typical game studio has a very small team working on a game until they have the core concept down and decide they want to progress. At which point it ramps up from 3-5 guys (a producer, an artist, a couple of coders) to 30-50 peopls (several more coders, lots more artists, a ton of level designers, sound guys, QA, etc.).
Staffing costs for an innovation phase are minimal. As for other costs, an innovative game likely doesn't use that much more unique coding on top of a game engine than any other title, doesn't somehow need more art assets, doesn't somehow need more "new" levels as every game requires new level design, etc.
2) If the costs of production for a new idea are much the same as the costs of production for a proven idea, perhaps they're meaning that innovative games are less profitable: with a clone, you always make 20-30% profit but a new concept crashes and burns 9 times out of 10 with the tenth being Doom or Worms or whatever and making several hundred percent.
OK, so if that's the case, just because profit margins go up, businesses will suddenly stop going for the safest and largest profit generators and will now suddenly become altruistic and make the innovative titles that now don't lose so much money but still don't make anywhere near as much as the clones that now make even bigger profits? Of course not, they're businesses with shareholders and will always do what makes the best return.
That's why I'm calling bull. Sure, a few indie companies may make more innovative games because they're not in it for the money and now those guys can afford to stay in business longer. The thing is, with a modern game costing $5-10m to make, how many indie shops can really enter the market anyway? Everyone else are just big producers - run as businesses - and, rightly so for businesses, they just chase profits not innovation.
And, if you don't believe me, check EA, a company famed for saying, "Our goal is to release around 20 titles a year. We try and ensure one of them is a new IP." We can mock them but they're the most successful publisher out there - what does that tell you about how economics work for big shops? Think it'll change just because profit margins increase for everything, not just innovative titles?
I wonder how much we would have to pay to bribe - uh, "lobby" - a senator to slip "The content industry may only produce new legislation and digital rights management that secures their customary historic rights." in to some defense spending bill.
After all, the basic system appears to be that you pay to have your law hidden in a spending bill. The EFF searches these things because the RIAA/MPAA keeps trying to pull that shady crap but you've got to wonder if the RIAA/MPAA searches them on the off chance the EFF pulls something similar.
It would be entertaining to see them beaten at their own game and no longer allowed to introduce dubious laws due to, well, someone using their own dubious tactics.
Whilst direct return on investment is useful, there's one thing no one seems to be mentioning...
What else could you be doing with your resources (time, money, etc.)?
To take the earlier example: $50/hr total costs x 5hr would tell you that anything that earns you over $250 is a good investment - you make a profit.
On the other hand, most people work in a very dynamic environment without the ability to respond as fluidly. In an ideal world, you'd scale up and down, constantly maintaining the resource levels to do all the tasks that make a profit. In the real world, you'll have times when your department is understaffed and times when it's overstaffed and there's only so much you can do to change that as scaling up and down also carry costs.
Thus, assuming you're already doing the best you can to maintain correct staffing levels, the real question is how do you best utilize those resources?
The above theory tells you to do 5 hrs of $50/hr support if it makes you $250. But...
If you are briefly overstaffed, this is the time to do it anyway. Even if you only make $50 in extra sales, if you're paying a salaries employee $50/hr for those five hours anyway, at least you're now only losing $200, not $250.
Similarly, if you're understaffed, that $252 profit vs. $250 cost may tell you to do it - but there may well be another project that could also take those resources and would return an even higher return on investment. Just because you can earn $252 in extra sales by adding five hours of support for older browsers, you may be able to add $1000 of extra sales by adding five hours of work for more modern browsers.
So, overall, you should be looking at whether you can turn a profit with the work invested. The thing is, accepting that no business is perfectly responsive on resourcing, it's also always worth considering what else you could spend the resources on and whether that would return even better profits.
For example, I work in gaming...
Say I could draw an extra $10,000 in sales by supporting I.E. 4+ with a "light" site that'd take $8,000 in dev costs. Now say I could continue to support I.E. 6+, ignoring the older browsers, add a really cool new feature, and gain an extra $15,000 in sales.
In an ideal world, I'd spend $16,000 and return $25,000. Except I only have $8,000 in resources. Hiring costs me $5,000 and then the same $8,000 in salary again. Thus it makes no sense to hire extra staff for this short period, paying $13,000 to make $10,000 more.
So, with my $8,000 in resources, I'm going to accept that the "light" site would be a good investment too - but that the cool new feature is an even better investment and so that's what I go with.
At some point in the future, if I'm overstaffed, laying off and rehiring when we need the staff doesn't make financial sense either so I'm likely to be briefly overstaffed. At that point, if I have the $8,000 in resources again, I'll invest in the "light" project. Even if that project has missed its moment and can only return $5,000, I'll still invest that $8,000 if there's no better investment - losing $3,000 is still better than losing all $8,000 because I have no "profitable" projects.
In most web departments, the total budget likely isn't decided within the department itself - it's set from on high. So, accept that, accept you can't do every profitable project, and always ask the simple question, "Is this the best use of my resources right now." If the best answer is to support right the way back to Mosaic, go for it. If the best answer is only the beta releases of IE 7, given your company's business, do that instead.
It's true:
Game A on the Xbox 1 uses <1 DVD and Game A's sequel also for the Xbox 1 uses <1 DVD.
The same is true for games B, C, D, and E. So clearly we can state that games don't require more than one DVD, right?
Wrong.
Game A also used 32mb of ram, as did its sequel. Game A ran on a single cored 733mhz processor, as did its sequel. Game A's sequel even managed to run on the same graphics chipset as Game A. The same is again true for games B, C, D and E.
So, by this logic, we can establish that newer games don't need the wasteful 512mb of next gen systems, sure as hell don't need multiple core processors that run at several ghz, and really don't need a better graphics engine. After all, each sequel ran on the same hardware as its predecessor. In fact, everyone who's bought a 360 is clearly an idiot by this reasoning.
That's utterly flawed logic. As disc swapping kills games, developers do everything they possibly can to avoid it, including culling content. So, when CD-ROM was the best anyone had, sure, most people managed to release sequels on a single CD-ROM. When DVD turned up, they quickly stepped up and used the five times as much space - not because they were wasteful but because they'd been holding back previous games to keep them on a single disc.
When a game like Oblivion comes out, sure, you can cram it on to one DVD but think how much more freedom the designers would have had to use unique textures if they had the space of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. Sure, they can cram everything in to one DVD and we can tell ourselves that a single DVD is still plenty but the truth is, they're making decisions based on limited space and having to choose things to cut. Given the choice, I'd rather my game had the extra textures, additional music scores, more unique pre-recorded dialogs, etc. than have to keep reusing them to fit a single disc. Can they squeeze it in to a single disc? Sure. But that doesn't mean they aren't making trades to do so and it certainly doesn't mean games wouldn't get larger if they possibly could.
Designers use whatever they have access to. If you have a single DVD, you'll only use a single DVD and keep cutting back your vision. When that option doesn't change for a whole generation, games won't up their requirements much during that generation - because they're hitting the same ceiling, not because they don't want or couldn't use the extra space.
And, even assuming quantities of content don't change... From Xbox 1 to Xbox 360, you've swapped from FD to HD. That means full screen videos are ~7x the resolution and thus, to use it, require ~7x the storage. That means textures need to scale up just as much as you can see that much more detail in each one. Even if there're no more levels, no more textures used per level, no more cinematics, the same quantity of resources still takes up several times the space if you want it to fully use HD.
Thus an appropriately textured Splinter Cell for the 360 should likely take 20gb of disk space - which just isn't going to happen as the publishers know five disks would kill the game. Without that as an option, they're forced to use the same resolution textures and console owners finally see the crap PC users have been putting up with, playing ports of console games: just how bad FD textures look when displayed on an HD screen with HD res polygons.
I can't decide if its pure genius or just ridiculous.
Traditionally, in a review, it helps if you decide whether the thing you're reviewing is good or bad.
This may be what I wanted to reply, or it may not. Still, I'll call it a reply and then leave it up to others to figure it out for me later.
OK, so my first thought, upon reading this...
The human body has been doing remarkably well at powering itself, without batteries, for millenia (with the one exception on Monday mornings).
Why do we need "nano" batteries? If we're down to the point of building things at an atomic level, shouldn't we be at the point where we a) build things with the same (or at least similar) efficiency as the body had in the first place and b) thus use the same power supply the part we're replacing used?
Whilst it's really cool we're building nano-batteries, it sounds more like a lab cashing in on the exciting buzz technology of the moment to solve a problem rather than looking at the problem that actually needs solving and finding the right solution for it.
It makes me wonder, did people 150 years ago try getting seed captial for equally ridiculous concepts involving the new buzz tech of steam? Actually, thinking about it, I know they did - and we laugh at the craziness of the inventors who anounced they were going to invent steam powered underpants or whatever back then. Makes me wonder how much the people of 150 years in the future will smack their heads and laugh at the ridiculous concepts for exploiting nano-tech we're coming up with now, when far more obvious solutions were staring us in the face.
1) Find a couple of companies that were essential to the organization in the past but have long since gone bankrupt.
2) Buy up the rights to those companies' names and trademarks.
3) Tell the MLB they no longer have the right to use them.
Laugh as they now have to ammend their records to "So and so scored X at some stadium we can't mention anymore, as part of a now defunct team we can't mention either, on such and such a date."
I wonder how many cities are pissed at some major league team dumping the venue they built at immense cost to tax payers only for the team to get a better deal elsewhere. Can their mayors revoke the MLB's right to use the name of the city in any of their statistics? Imagine, "The all time record for [whatever] was scored on [date] but we can't tell you where."
It kind of makes one wonder what exactly was accomplished in 1989 when 100,000 protesters marched in Beijing.
From the article: "'How can I do my thesis now?' a university student asked on another Chinese website."
Nothing was achieved in 1989. They didn't have the Wikipedia back. Apparently, without it, all work in China grinds to a halt.
Or, it might, you know, be an incredibly lazy student bitching because he has to consult a whole second source to complete his degree thesis. I wasn't aware DeVry had a Chinese campus.
Mood sensors are nice and all. But I want an integrated breath tester.
"I'm sorry.. I have detected you're blind drunk. No, I am not going to let you send an email to your ex-girlfriend."
"No, nor your boss."
"You really think I'm going to let you log in to [MMO here] and screw up that character you've just spent the last six months building up?"
He was quoting Mooreon's Law...
1. Every eighteen months, the technology that you support will double in capacity.
2. Every eighteen months, the technology that you are supporting it over will do nothing.
Ergo, given that average notebook hard drives are currently around 60gb, rather than 30gb, Moore's Law (as opposed to Mooreon's Law) allows us to deduce he began applying Mooreon's Law 18 months ago - the doubling of average disk space since then has been ignored by him as it's a competing technology (and covered under part II of Mooreon's Law) - it has just taken him this long to get anyone to take him seriously.
Applying Mooreon's law from that point we can deduce:
1. 1GB flash 18 months ago translates to 2GB today, translates to 4GB in 18 months, 8GB in 3 years, 16GB in 4.5 years, 32GB in 6 years.
2. 30GB of traditional 2.5 inch HDD 18 months ago should still be 30GB today and will be 30GB in 6 years.
Therefore, 32GB > 30GB in six years - hence 5-6 years is an accurate figure for when flash should overtake 2.5inch HDDs.
If, you know, Mooreon's Law wasn't for Mooreons.
Connection:
Planet Of The Apes - Social Commentary.
Martin Luther King - Import changer of society.
Were you to be a glass is half full kind of person, that sounds like a connection. I could entirely accept that enough customers to trigger a connection algorithm are interested in social commentary to the degree that both titles appeal.
Were you to be a glass is half empty kind of person, clearly the system is racist.
Fortunately, we have a media that's only interested in postive and uplifting stories so they'd never focus purely on the negative, for shock value, without considering other possible alternatives.
And, for added amusement, type "Civ 4" in to Amazon and see what recommendations come up further down the list. It may too be racist. It may be a deeply humorous commentary on lonely guys playing Civ 4. Or it may be some other connection that we haven't figured out yet.
But then that's the whole point of data mining... Finding connections that humans tend to be entirely too preoccupied by their assumptions to be able to see beyond.
I gave up assuming I knew exactly what my programs were doing right around the time I gave up writing assembly code. Actually, I gave up a little prior to that when I realised I wasn't very good as assembly code but that kind of clouds the point.
For any given high level language, the moment concepts start getting abstracted out, all kinds of false assumptions start getting made based on those assumptions.
Here's one:
Try
Before you run it, what do you figure you'll get? Please tell me you didn't honestly think you'd get 1?
If you can't even rely on floating point numbers being accurate when well within their perceived range (+/- 2^1023 to 2^-52 is not actually the same as every possible number to that degree of accuracy, despite most assumptions) then, odds are, rounding isn't going to matter that much either.
That said, at least 0.5 has the decency to fit really nicely in to binary as 2^-1 and so you can argue, with certainty, that the number you have is 0.5 before getting in to arguments about whether to round such a number up or down.
Here's one for you though...
Create "negative" refraction of light, which literally means steering it in the opposite direction of that found in the natural world.
You mean back in to the asses of arrogant people who are convinced the sun already shines out of their asses?
How much would this hurt?
How much would I have to pay to get one?
How soon can you have it ready?
this transition -- which will render about 70 million TV sets obsolete
It's a curious definition of obsolescence.
The CRT still works, the RCA inputs that most TVs have had for years still work, the coaxial input that every TV gets still works, the tuner still works and the remote still works.
It's like arguing that DVD made cheap TVs without RCA obsolete. Well, save for a $15 RCA-to-Coaxial adaptor - at which point they ran just fine.
Similarly, the obsolete analog TV, when digital switches over, will remain perfectly compatible with an external digital tuner for over the air signals, just as it's already compatible with satelite and cable boxes that convert digital to analog for you.
Yes, the digital to analog tuners are currently pricey due to basic economies of scale:
Who in their right mind would pay money to get a digital signal and degrade it to the exact same analog signal they can already receive for free? You can't even claim better reception because digital drops to artefacts and then nothing, far before analog drops to pure static, in most poor reception areas - some analog static is better than no digital picture.
But, when 70m TVs suddenly only work with DVD players and VCRs but no TV anymore, that's going to be a pretty big market to either buy new TVs or these tuners. Assuming they've been cheap enough to continue this long, they aren't likely to want to drop hundreds if not thousands on a new TV - so we can expect tens of millions interested in the digital-to-analog external tuners.
And when you shift from a few misguided early adopters to tens of millions, what happens to economies of scale? I'm guessing $20-30 parts at your local Radio Shack and nice expensive brand name ones at Best Buy.
In the purest sense, sure, they're obsolete exactly how they are for over the air TV signals. But the simple addition of a $20-30 part that every last one of them can accept hardly sounds like obsolesence to me.
With the government fronting $1.5b (or roughly $50/TV if we assume half of the 70m won't bother to claim, will upgrade the whole TV, etc.), that'll more than cover the $20-30 part and, besides: "loss of news and weather"? A cheap $5 AM/FM radio will give you that back - I know it's scary America but you don't need pictures for it to be true.
So, no real obsolesence, no real cost to those who need a cheap part to upgrade and no massive loss to those who completely ignored the warnings for ten years (accepting that for some reason we felt sorry for those who ignored the warnings about Katrina despite even greater potential cost)... why are we worrying about this?