My niece is autistic. My personal belief is it's a signal processing problem. I think they have a hard time seperating things both sights and sounds.
I think this because somethings do get through. My niece responds to certain things (like "Elmo") by sight and sound. I notice most of those things tend to stand out visually and audibly.
There's been a few things I've been meaning to experiemnt with but just haven't gotten around to.
One is I'd like to try a pair of headphones (the trick would be getting her to wear them) driven by 3 microphones.
One on each headphone to allow sound in. Another that is wireless that when used mutes the microphones internal to the headphones to make that sound stand out.
The other is a way of visually being able to highlight various elements in a pic or video. The idea that it would help training the brain into seperating scene elements visually.
It's such a mystifying condition. Most of the time I can't even get her attention. (She knows some words but rarely uses them). Then on occasion I'll say something like "Say the alphabet" and instead of ignoring me, she'll rattle it off.
No, it wasn't a matter of research, I researched it quite well. I got the phone for it's bluetooth connectivity and the ability to subtrovert the unlimited "vision" plan.
The fact that it had a camera was incidental, but one day I had it on me and took a couple pictures and to my chagrin, couldn't get them. It was aggrevating and very deceptive as it was no way stated the camera was useless without it "Picture Mail". I don't know if it applies to all phones, but the phone I bought, I bought it knowing it was missing the bluetooth file transfer abilities.
Though if I had bought it for the camera in mind, I'd be furious and would have demanded a refund.
I have a small Olympus I usually have on me. Only 3MP, but small and takes decent shots. Pretty much every pair of jeans I have have the same leg pocket which conviently can fit a camera || Zaurus || mp3 player.
I could certainly see the convienence for some people (like the people Halley Berry sideswiped, ca-ching!), but for me, I've got one one video camera permanently mounted in the rear and another going in facing forward shortly hooked up to a security vcr (but that is another story)
Another thing that irks me with the complexity is that my phone needed to "boot". Turning it on could take a bit and on more than one occasion it locked up while using it requiring a battery pull.
Good point. I think I used my DVD player once to play a CD (my stereo was apart).
Maybe at some point convergence works, but right now you get things that are so-so at a lot of things and excellent at none. Cell phones are a good example.
I don't want or need a shitty camera built in. What's the point? The quality sucks, bad resolution, bad picture quality, maybe an LED for a shitty flash. I rather carry my small digital camera instead. Having one company as your gate keeper is perilous too. Take the cell phone example. I got a LG PM-325 from Sprint. I used the camera twice before realizing unless I paid X dollars a month for "Picture Mail", there was absolutely no way to retrieve them from the phone.
The future downside is that if they every do make the ultimate device that does everything, you're fscked if it get's stolen. There goes your media, your pictures and probably tons of other stuff that you wouldn't want other people to have access to. Carrying your life in your pocket might be convienent, but also dangerous.
But I think for most people, settling for a "free" DVD quality movie is more than passable. So instead of people trying to rip HD, they just rip DVD instead. They are still out the 20 bucks. DVDs aren't going anywhere for awhile.
By the time DVD isn't an option, I'd be very suprised if the newer encryption schemes aren't broken.
My brother is like that. Mega memory for the finest details. I had to bash him constantly when we were teens for going on and on. Every time he go on, I'd just say "TMI" or Too Much Information.
While it still surfaces from time to time (occasionally if we're out drinking), he's learned to keep recollections to the minimum when talking to people. It certainly doesn't hinder him socially (or anymore anyways)
One time, we saw this girl he went to grade school with. They started talking about it and before you know it, the conversation turns to the school photo day and then he rambles off what she was wearing, including the color of her shoes.
Excuse me if I go on for a bit, but the subject of memory is something that I spend quite a bit of time thinking about for various reasons. Mainly because in some aspects, mine is so incomplete. I've thought about posting an Ask Slashdot on the subject for some time.
I can't remember yesterday half the time. Actually, that's not quite accurate. Some things I can remember quite well and photographic. Tech stuff, movies and television in particular, ridiculous stuff that doesn't really matter. (Well not the tech..)
You know how sometimes they have several editions of a movie? (Not current movies were they all have "editions", but older ones). Any additional shots that weren't in it the first time around, even very subtle ones that don't change any context of the movie, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Even if I haven't seen it in 20 yrs.
Actors too. First time I watched "Snatch", I recognized Bricktop as the cab driver in American Werewolf in London when they were driving around to find David at the end. I hadn't seen AWIL in ages either. Such a useless "talent".
Though personal recollections, they are often like reading a summary of a book. It's really quite frustrating. Though on occasion, whiffs of the past come to, like a movie in my head. Unfortunately, it's not often.
An odd observation, percodan seems to help. I had a small surgery and they gave me a few percs to get me through the first couple days. The first night, I started recalling my house as it was when I was a kid. Every detail, walking around the house in my memory, it was as if I were there. No detail was missing. (No I wasn't tripping, I was barely effected). I could just bring up any part of the house as if I were there. I had similar experiences the next two times. Normally, I might get some recollection like that, but it will be a fragment, as if it is only tuned in for seconds then it fuzzes out. While I wish my memory was more "accessible", I'm not going to take percs to do so.:)
So the good news is it's still all there apparently, the bad news is how the f*ck to I fetch it?
If anyone is experienced in the subject or could recommend any good books, resources, etc I'd be most appreciative.
I dunno. My mother and brother were diagnosed two weeks apart. My mother only lasted 3 months, my brother a long, hard fought 10 months. (My father has it as well, actually before they did, but it was misdiagnosed for years but that's another rant)
I pretty much stopped my life to take care of my mother in hospice. I think I left her side 2 or 3 times to reboot a server. Luckily, almost all the people I work for were great about it. Putting off their plans while I took care of my family.
I'm actually in the process of tidying up things at the moment so if God forbid something happens to me, they won't be in a lurch. I can tell you if I found I had three months left to live tomorrow, I would spend some time setting those things in order. Sometimes work is just work, sometimes it's more than that. The clients that stuck by me, I consider friends. I'd try really hard not to fuck them on the way out.
Plus, sometimes you need something to throw yourself into to keep your head straight.
Car makers have less labor too so less cost. I don't believe for a minute that their margins are less nowadays. A nice car in the 70s could be had for probably for $4000-5000. Now today, more like $20-30K.
Almost everything is like that these days. When my parents bought their home in the early 70s for around 20K my dad was making about $330 a week. If he wasn't retired, he'd be making probably about $800-$900.
The house on the other hand today would sell for between $400,000 to $500,000 thousand.
If he had gone through "official" channels, he most likely wouldn't have been coerced right there into silence and most likely, nothing would have been changed on diebold's side
Some truth there. But the MS sentiment goes back further (plus as I don't buy much sony stuff otherwise, they haven't had much opportunity to piss me off personally).
Like having to buy all thos "Undocumented DOS" books;)
Have to agree with you there. I'm skipping the 360 (like I did the xbox), because
1. I don't like MS all that much 2. GTA5 will be exclusive on PS3, at least for awhile.
I'm not a PS fanboy, but you could say I'm pro PS, or more Anti-MS, whatever.. still these stupid bullshit vaporware press releases are annoying me. Show me something, or shut up until you're at least near where you need to be.
The point is, it did take them awhile to come up with a replacment, and not just because it was low priority.
At the time Viaweb was aquired, Y! wasn't really developing software outside of the core search for long at all. They weren't some development powerhouse. Yahoo Pager! (now Messenger) was brand new.
I don't think they had the development power to roll their own in-house at the time.
Remember Intel's iCat and all the other similar solutions that were out at the time? There's a reason Viaweb/Y! Store won. It had the best feature set for the intended audience (far from perfect, but better than the others) and it also had critical mass. I'm not saying it wasn't possible for Y! to catch up, but it would have been a big disadvantage.
No, as it took them over 5 years to come up with a new platform. They eventually rewrote it in C++/Perl, but some accounts still use the LISP editors.
I headed the outsourced support for Viaweb, (Which was all the support LOL), when Y! bought it and I headed it for them until I left that company. Eventually they brought support it in-house, then out-house again.
Hell I was Y! store for the two weeks after the purchase as everyone was driving across country to California. There was no one to call at all which with all the press and increased volume was a bit much. We had no advanced warning. So I just made up policy and answers as best I could. Luckily, Yahoo! and myself thought along similar lines;)
They liked what I did so much, that they offered me the chance to manage a Y! property, they didn't tell me which one (I suspect it was the relatively new Pager/Messenger), but due to family concerns, moving was out of the question so I had to turn them down flat. Though I was always curious which one they had in mind.
Funny, but inaccurate. Yahoo! Store aka Viaweb actually was very profitable (after a few years of course).
I don't think at the time Y! appreciated it at all. People paying lot's of hard cash every month. Too busy with overinflated ads revenues from about to burst dot-coms. "I'll trade you a million impressions for 10,000 shares"
Then ads went to shit with everything else. Then I think it was appreciated a bit more.;)
Bullshit. Not sure about your specific chroot example (I've never encountered it), but what are all these other apps of which you speak?
But on your other point of trying to do everything, as someone who started off programming (games) with Watcom C & assembler and recently spent a lot of time with Perl/SDL (digital dash for my car), I can tell you, Perl is not a bad fit.
It's not a perfect fit for everything of course, but I think for many games it would be fine. I knocked out a good deal of my app (parsing images,files, skins, attributes,the renderer) in about 20hrs. It works. It's fast (even on a 466mhz), and flexible.
What's the problem with that?
Would writing it in C be better? No. It may be marginally faster, but it would have taken 10 times (at least) as long. So what's the benefit to using C/C++ in this application?
What the hell does that even mean? That you think it would be somehow coded poorly (which an end user wouldn't care as long as it performed well enough) or that Perl programmers would write bad, as in boring games?
Personally, I started off in programming writing games in x86 asm and C targeting the 268-486. (yeah! mode X and self optimizing code)
The last 6 years have been Perl almost exclusively. Started off as mostly web related stuff then to general programming.
Last few months, I've been working with Perl/SDL for a digital dashboard replacement for my car. (The hardware side is PIC based)
Granted there's no 3D (yet), mostly lot's of animated sprites and text, but Perl/SDL has been more than up to the challenge, especially considering the target platform is an old 466mhz celeron I had laying around. Performance is way past satisfactory.
And excruciating sparse documentation aside, it's been pretty easy. Especially comparing it to my early experiences.
You're not going to write Doom3 in it, but I think once the changes stop and it settles a bit, I think it will be a nice platform for making games.
Slashdot Mirror
My niece is autistic. My personal belief is it's a signal processing problem. I think they have a hard time seperating things both sights and sounds.
I think this because somethings do get through. My niece responds to certain things (like "Elmo") by sight and sound. I notice most of those things tend to stand out visually and audibly.
There's been a few things I've been meaning to experiemnt with but just haven't gotten around to.
One is I'd like to try a pair of headphones (the trick would be getting her to wear them) driven by 3 microphones.
One on each headphone to allow sound in. Another that is wireless that when used mutes the microphones internal to the headphones to make that sound stand out.
The other is a way of visually being able to highlight various elements in a pic or video. The idea that it would help training the brain into seperating scene elements visually.
It's such a mystifying condition. Most of the time I can't even get her attention. (She knows some words but rarely uses them). Then on occasion I'll say something like "Say the alphabet" and instead of ignoring me, she'll rattle it off.
No, it wasn't a matter of research, I researched it quite well. I got the phone for it's bluetooth connectivity and the ability to subtrovert the unlimited "vision" plan.
The fact that it had a camera was incidental, but one day I had it on me and took a couple pictures and to my chagrin, couldn't get them. It was aggrevating and very deceptive as it was no way stated the camera was useless without it "Picture Mail". I don't know if it applies to all phones, but the phone I bought, I bought it knowing it was missing the bluetooth file transfer abilities.
Though if I had bought it for the camera in mind, I'd be furious and would have demanded a refund.
I have a small Olympus I usually have on me. Only 3MP, but small and takes decent shots. Pretty much every pair of jeans I have have the same leg pocket which conviently can fit a camera || Zaurus || mp3 player.
I could certainly see the convienence for some people (like the people Halley Berry sideswiped, ca-ching!), but for me, I've got one one video camera permanently mounted in the rear and another going in facing forward shortly hooked up to a security vcr (but that is another story)
Another thing that irks me with the complexity is that my phone needed to "boot". Turning it on could take a bit and on more than one occasion it locked up while using it requiring a battery pull.
Good point. I think I used my DVD player once to play a CD (my stereo was apart).
Maybe at some point convergence works, but right now you get things that are so-so at a lot of things and excellent at none. Cell phones are a good example.
I don't want or need a shitty camera built in. What's the point? The quality sucks, bad resolution, bad picture quality, maybe an LED for a shitty flash. I rather carry my small digital camera instead. Having one company as your gate keeper is perilous too. Take the cell phone example. I got a LG PM-325 from Sprint. I used the camera twice before realizing unless I paid X dollars a month for "Picture Mail", there was absolutely no way to retrieve them from the phone.
The future downside is that if they every do make the ultimate device that does everything, you're fscked if it get's stolen. There goes your media, your pictures and probably tons of other stuff that you wouldn't want other people to have access to. Carrying your life in your pocket might be convienent, but also dangerous.
But I think for most people, settling for a "free" DVD quality movie is more than passable. So instead of people trying to rip HD, they just rip DVD instead. They are still out the 20 bucks. DVDs aren't going anywhere for awhile.
By the time DVD isn't an option, I'd be very suprised if the newer encryption schemes aren't broken.
Star Control in Melee mode, human to human.
With two good players, fights can go on for hours, especially when they are evenly matched (Syreen vs Spathi comes to mind.)
Not sure what you're getting at.
I've pointing my camera at screens and haven't had it turn off. Not sure what that has to do with firewire or the original comment.
Are you saying it's on the software side or something?
I got my sony handycam about two years ago and contains no such feature that I can tell.
A bit different. Twenty years from now, they'll still show the "Viagra Orbiter Express" disaster on the news/
What about the Salt Lake Flats? I'm planning on migrating out there for a week or hopefully this August
My brother is like that. Mega memory for the finest details. I had to bash him constantly when we were teens for going on and on. Every time he go on, I'd just say "TMI" or Too Much Information.
:)
While it still surfaces from time to time (occasionally if we're out drinking), he's learned to keep recollections to the minimum when talking to people. It certainly doesn't hinder him socially (or anymore anyways)
One time, we saw this girl he went to grade school with. They started talking about it and before you know it, the conversation turns to the school photo day and then he rambles off what she was wearing, including the color of her shoes.
Excuse me if I go on for a bit, but the subject of memory is something that I spend quite a bit of time thinking about for various reasons. Mainly because in some aspects, mine is so incomplete. I've thought about posting an Ask Slashdot on the subject for some time.
I can't remember yesterday half the time. Actually, that's not quite accurate. Some things I can remember quite well and photographic. Tech stuff, movies and television in particular, ridiculous stuff that doesn't really matter. (Well not the tech..)
You know how sometimes they have several editions of a movie? (Not current movies were they all have "editions", but older ones). Any additional shots that weren't in it the first time around, even very subtle ones that don't change any context of the movie, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Even if I haven't seen it in 20 yrs.
Actors too. First time I watched "Snatch", I recognized Bricktop as the cab driver in American Werewolf in London when they were driving around to find David at the end. I hadn't seen AWIL in ages either. Such a useless "talent".
Though personal recollections, they are often like reading a summary of a book. It's really quite frustrating. Though on occasion, whiffs of the past come to, like a movie in my head. Unfortunately, it's not often.
An odd observation, percodan seems to help. I had a small surgery and they gave me a few percs to get me through the first couple days. The first night, I started recalling my house as it was when I was a kid. Every detail, walking around the house in my memory, it was as if I were there. No detail was missing. (No I wasn't tripping, I was barely effected). I could just bring up any part of the house as if I were there. I had similar experiences the next two times. Normally, I might get some recollection like that, but it will be a fragment, as if it is only tuned in for seconds then it fuzzes out. While I wish my memory was more "accessible", I'm not going to take percs to do so.
So the good news is it's still all there apparently, the bad news is how the f*ck to I fetch it?
If anyone is experienced in the subject or could recommend any good books, resources, etc I'd be most appreciative.
I recently went to load up Quake III Arena on my game machine. I can find everything (box,receipt,instructions), except the fucking CD key.
I dunno. My mother and brother were diagnosed two weeks apart. My mother only lasted 3 months, my brother a long, hard fought 10 months. (My father has it as well, actually before they did, but it was misdiagnosed for years but that's another rant)
I pretty much stopped my life to take care of my mother in hospice. I think I left her side 2 or 3 times to reboot a server. Luckily, almost all the people I work for were great about it. Putting off their plans while I took care of my family.
I'm actually in the process of tidying up things at the moment so if God forbid something happens to me, they won't be in a lurch. I can tell you if I found I had three months left to live tomorrow, I would spend some time setting those things in order. Sometimes work is just work, sometimes it's more than that. The clients that stuck by me, I consider friends. I'd try really hard not to fuck them on the way out.
Plus, sometimes you need something to throw yourself into to keep your head straight.
Car makers have less labor too so less cost. I don't believe for a minute that their margins are less nowadays. A nice car in the 70s could be had for probably for $4000-5000. Now today, more like $20-30K.
Almost everything is like that these days. When my parents bought their home in the early 70s for around 20K my dad was making about $330 a week. If he wasn't retired, he'd be making probably about $800-$900.
The house on the other hand today would sell for between $400,000 to $500,000 thousand.
The bolts look kind of puny for it. But I'd be worried about lightning too.
Conspiracy, yeah right.
Things like that never happen. That's why the guy is looking at jail time now.
Not really.
If he had gone through "official" channels, he most likely wouldn't have been coerced right there into silence and most likely, nothing would have been changed on diebold's side
Some truth there. But the MS sentiment goes back further (plus as I don't buy much sony stuff otherwise, they haven't had much opportunity to piss me off personally).
;)
Like having to buy all thos "Undocumented DOS" books
Have to agree with you there. I'm skipping the 360 (like I did the xbox), because
1. I don't like MS all that much
2. GTA5 will be exclusive on PS3, at least for awhile.
I'm not a PS fanboy, but you could say I'm pro PS, or more Anti-MS, whatever.. still these stupid bullshit vaporware press releases are annoying me. Show me something, or shut up until you're at least near where you need to be.
The point is, it did take them awhile to come up with a replacment, and not just because it was low priority.
At the time Viaweb was aquired, Y! wasn't really developing software outside of the core search for long at all. They weren't some development powerhouse. Yahoo Pager! (now Messenger) was brand new.
I don't think they had the development power to roll their own in-house at the time.
Remember Intel's iCat and all the other similar solutions that were out at the time? There's a reason Viaweb/Y! Store won. It had the best feature set for the intended audience (far from perfect, but better than the others) and it also had critical mass. I'm not saying it wasn't possible for Y! to catch up, but it would have been a big disadvantage.
No, as it took them over 5 years to come up with a new platform. They eventually rewrote it in C++/Perl, but some accounts still use the LISP editors.
;)
I headed the outsourced support for Viaweb, (Which was all the support LOL), when Y! bought it and I headed it for them until I left that company. Eventually they brought support it in-house, then out-house again.
Hell I was Y! store for the two weeks after the purchase as everyone was driving across country to California. There was no one to call at all which with all the press and increased volume was a bit much. We had no advanced warning. So I just made up policy and answers as best I could. Luckily, Yahoo! and myself thought along similar lines
They liked what I did so much, that they offered me the chance to manage a Y! property, they didn't tell me which one (I suspect it was the relatively new Pager/Messenger), but due to family concerns, moving was out of the question so I had to turn them down flat. Though I was always curious which one they had in mind.
Ummm, no.
They did rewrite it a few years ago with Perl & C++ (Note the RTML.pm error messages in the template editor). So they got about 5 years out of it.
Though some accounts still use the original LISP editors.
The sale of Viaweb wasn't luck. It was a smart idea, implemented well.
Y! Picked it up for $49 million. It brought in a ton of cash.
Let's look at it today. The cheapest package is $29.96
They have well over 20,000 merchants.
So at the minimum (20,000 x $29.96), it generates $599,200 a month just for hosting and minus the transactions.
I'd guess the number is at least 4 times that with larger merchants and transaction fees factored in.
Funny, but inaccurate. Yahoo! Store aka Viaweb actually was very profitable (after a few years of course).
;)
I don't think at the time Y! appreciated it at all. People paying lot's of hard cash every month. Too busy with overinflated ads revenues from about to burst dot-coms. "I'll trade you a million impressions for 10,000 shares"
Then ads went to shit with everything else. Then I think it was appreciated a bit more.
Bullshit. Not sure about your specific chroot example (I've never encountered it), but what are all these other apps of which you speak?
But on your other point of trying to do everything, as someone who started off programming (games) with Watcom C & assembler and recently spent a lot of time with Perl/SDL (digital dash for my car), I can tell you, Perl is not a bad fit.
It's not a perfect fit for everything of course, but I think for many games it would be fine. I knocked out a good deal of my app (parsing images,files, skins, attributes,the renderer) in about 20hrs. It works. It's fast (even on a 466mhz), and flexible.
What's the problem with that?
Would writing it in C be better? No. It may be marginally faster, but it would have taken 10 times (at least) as long. So what's the benefit to using C/C++ in this application?
What the hell does that even mean? That you think it would be somehow coded poorly (which an end user wouldn't care as long as it performed well enough) or that Perl programmers would write bad, as in boring games?
Personally, I started off in programming writing games in x86 asm and C targeting the 268-486. (yeah! mode X and self optimizing code)
The last 6 years have been Perl almost exclusively. Started off as mostly web related stuff then to general programming.
Last few months, I've been working with Perl/SDL for a digital dashboard replacement for my car. (The hardware side is PIC based)
Granted there's no 3D (yet), mostly lot's of animated sprites and text, but Perl/SDL has been more than up to the challenge, especially considering the target platform is an old 466mhz celeron I had laying around.
Performance is way past satisfactory.
And excruciating sparse documentation aside, it's been pretty easy. Especially comparing it to my early experiences.
You're not going to write Doom3 in it, but I think once the changes stop and it settles a bit, I think it will be a nice platform for making games.