What's the point of making it work properly?!?!? Surely you have mis-spoken here.
Another poster already made a clarification on this. I didn't "mis-speak" I was just a bit obscure with my meaning. Point being, if you code in C/C++ you'll spend a lot of time making the program work correctly. If you write in eg Java or Python you can get the program working correctly in a fraction of the time. This means you can add polish or move on to new stuff.
Point being, you are more productive in other languages as you don't have to mess with the details so much.
Whether you are trying to run a realtime application like desktop video conferencing or create a document in a word processor, it doesn't really matter. What ever it is that you try will be a struggle because the system's resources (CPU cycles, memory, swap space) are consumed by all those "noncritical" apps and their inefficiencies
First off, I'm willing to bet that virtually none of the little apps you currently have running are written in Java/Python whatnot. A sloppy coder can leak memeory in any language. (In fact I'd say it's a lot easier to leak memory in a language without a GC.) So moving to C/C++ doesn't really fix the memory issue.
That they consume enourmous amounts of CPU is also not really true. Those processes I have running on my machine all go in at 0% CPU time. If you add them together they might reach a few percent. Not really something which will stop you from typing in Word.
The fix for this "problem" is to get an OS with a descent scheduler so you can prioritise processes properly. That way your real-time applications won't suffer because your little application wants to check for new mail.
What's the point of such a powerful system? Speed! That's the point. Speed is important.
No, bragging to your friends that you can get 180 FPS in Doom3 is important. Very few people actually need a 3GHz 64-bit CPU with 2GB memory, I have one and I sure as hell don't need it.
And while code has become more bloated and unoptimised by the years a lot of that is because today a computer can do quite a hell of a lot more than say 10 years ago. Is all of that necessary stuff? Hell no! Is it more fun? Hell yes!
Finally there is one specific area of consumer software that actually demands better computers. That is games. Interestingly enough that area also have many of the best coders.
The same goes for poorly written C++ programs. Sure they may be a bit more responsive at times than a poorly written application in Java or Python but OTOH it has a lot more maintenence issues and the potential severity of the bugs are higher (ie buffer overflow vulnerabilities).
When I code for fun I seldom do that in C/C++ anymore. At least not I know that the application won't need "that extra juice". What's the point in spending several times the develeopment effort on making it work properly instead of adding polish or just doing new stuff?
True, but I think that the potential buyers of a PSP are quite capable of using english. Other than that it's mainly just that they need to release games with different languages. And that's not really Sony's problem.
Or they could just re-flash the US ones. It's not like it's a hardware limitation.
And they'd have to do that anyways most likely unless they have all of the localisation already in place. (Which I doubt since at least my japanese PSP doesn't have any other languages than japanese and english.)
I have actually done something like this as an exercise as part of course in computer vision.
The point of that excerise what to use the fact that the distances between 4 points on a line has the same ratio independently of the location of the viewer. IIRC given points a, b, c, d then (b-a)/(d-c) will always be the same (it was a while since I looked at this and the math isn't my strong point anyways).
This was used in a system where goups of 4 marks were placed on the walls of room. A vehicle which moved in the room had a laser mounted on it which swept across the walls (this was mounted on the same hight as the marks, so it was only a 1D scan really) and recorded when it found marks.
Using this data it was then possible to determine which data marks the laser had detected. It did a best fit method so it worked even if it didn't see all 4 marks on a specific group. This information was then used to determine the location of the camera and thus the vehicle.
A big benefit with this method compared to other optical systems is that it is not dependent on high resolution cameras and it's not very hard to ensure that the marks are detectable. (Just ensure that the 4 marks in a group are still visible. Or just replace them routinely.)
Now this does take quite a bit of work to get right, so unless you know what you're doing it's probably best to see if you can find a solution you can buy. That I don't know anything about unfortunately.
Re:PSP is not a DVD player.
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Inside the PSP
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· Score: 1
DVDdecrypter + PSPvideo9 (or any other similar tool) and you have a re-code in about an hour or so.
I bet you'll start seeing torrents with re-encoded movies as well.
Yet another reason why I'll never again buy a branded mobile phone. I'd rather pay another $100 or so upfront and get a phone that actually works like it should.
Transferring the MIDP program is hard? I just drag and drop it to the root in the Bluetooth folder and it is uploaded. I'd think you can do the same thing over IrDA or USB, but I don't know as I've never tried.
Uploading new data files can be a lot more of a bother though I guess. I've never tried that.
I remember a time when scamming your customers wasn't a common business strategy.
Actually I don't, but wouldn't it be nice if people tried to do things in order to make a good job instead of just ripping people off? Ah well, I can always dream I guess.
I believe that many non-GSM phones have this problem, I've never really experienced it with a GSM phone though. And most phones here in Europe don't have microphones that go all the way to the mouth (some clam-shells do).
So it's more a problem with a crappy phone or crappy encoding scheme than a problem with where the microphone is.
The phone must have been designed for midgets. I am 18 years old and hardly a giant. Unless you're mashing the phone hard against your cheek there is no way in hell your mouth will be on the level of the microphone. This is terribly annoying. Just to point one thing out here. Hardly any modern phones go all the way to the mouth, they don't have to.
Modern cell-phones don't work like the analog things you have at home. They don't actually send the sound that's coming out of your mouth, it is instead coded in a much more compact fasion and recreated using signal processing.
As such it doesn't have to record the sounds coming out of your moth and pressing it against your cheek (or even picking it up through your skull bone) works as well.
On the other areas I'm not surprised. I have never been particularly impressed with Motorola's phones. (Besides the old "StarTac", that was pretty neat for it's day.)
You know that you can convert movies to a format more suitable for the PSP pretty much automatically right? There was even a Slashdot article about one such program (there are several) a week ago.
And only an idiot would buy Memory Sticks to hold all their data. You get one decent sized one and then you can add or remove stuff from it as you see fit.
When you say "field and matter" to you mean physical field and matter, as in electrical field and physical matter; or do you mean some more abstract idea?
You can convert matter into energy, but you can't convert matter into making pi=4. And? If I yell "Pink Elephants!" at the top of my voice that doesn't mean that cute little pink elephants materialise.
If I hear someone claiming they can make pink elephants appear then I won't believe them until they prove it. In that way I'm a natural sceptic. As such when I hear that you can make water have special powerers not determined by the actual contents of the water then I won't believe it until it is proven.
It's important to keep an open mind; but at the same time you should ensure that your brain doesn't fall out completely.
You feed a modern processor (assuming x86 compatible) x86 assembly, but internally it executes it's own format of operations. During the fetch/decode stage the x86 operations are "translated" into the internal micro-ops format.
As such one x86 op may correspond to many internal micro-ops. This is done for several reasons, one of the more fundamental being that x86 asm is now a horrible mess that is not suitable to feed into an extremely optimised processor core.
Say what? Not to be rude but since your version is short on details I can't really make out if it's really smart or just bollox. Particularly the bit about By Cartesian geometry, I don't mean just the grid, but the metaphysical distinction between field and matter, a metaphysical distinction held so closely to that it can't even be thought about. to me that just sounds like philosphical nonsense. But you have made me interested so if you read this please follow up some links to more detailed stuff as my quick trip to Wikipedia and Google didn't turn out that much.
Specifically it'd be nice to see how things like quantum theory and string theory relates to cartesian geometry, I can't quite grasp that. Then again I don't understand what you mean by cartesian geometry as my own idea of it is pretty much limited to the coordinate system related view.
Other than that I'd say that the entire point of science is that if you have an observable fact that you can't fit into your model then you change the model so that the fact fits. Naturally if you have "facts" that don't fit at all scientist will be quite reluctant to change their model just to make it fit unless they are convinced that it is a fact and not something else.
Windows 9x was not a true multiuser OS, but Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 is, and always has been, a multiuser OS. It was designed to be so from the start.
A multi-user OS means that I can log in several times on the same computer at the same time. And that multiple users can log on at the same time from different places.
To the best of my knowledge you really can't do this properly in WinXP with utils such as Remote Desktop. It may very well be possible but they haven't exactly gone out of their way to draw attention to it.
Computer have a very important role in education. Eg learning about physics, math etc can become a lot easier if you have a computer with software that allows you to experiment freely.
I bet teaching grammar can be a lot more interesting if you use programs which can parse sentences and give you "language trees" and allow you to play with it more.
Simply put, computers are good when you want to get the result quickly instead of spending a lot of time on the process. Personally I think a big problem is that in math you typically only learn the boring process of tedious calculations. You don't learn how to use it or see any point in doing it.
But I will agree that computers typically don't do any good for most students. Mainly because teachers and books seldom use them to their full potential (or really any potential).
Re:After conversion....How do you get it on the PS
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PSPCasting
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· Score: 1
IIRC it's the same format used for mobile phones or Sony Clie devices. It uses the same converter programs at any rate.
This program is more or less just a stream-lined front-end for those other programs.
Predicting result before you do something is pretty fundamental in science. It's one of the big points with science after all, model things so we can understand them.
Homepathy goes against what our current model of "how things work" would predict. That is why it is predicted to be false.
If it can be scientifically proven that it does in fact work then we'll end up with a new model for how molecular biology and medicine works.
On second thought it may be possible to avoid some of the problems with miniature detection.
If you can detect objects on the screen (not which one, just that there is one) you would only need to keep track of which object moved and then remember which character that is. This could possibly make the problem quite a bit easier to solve.
In order to detect objects you could make the screen completely white and look for non-white parts. But finding a webcam with desent optics is probably quite hard. Using a dv camera or digital camera hooked up to the computer may work better.
There is quite a lot of research on the lines of physical object + UI going on. And I have wanted to try something along the lines you describe as well.
I have long wanted to have the time to try something like you describe (but without the miniatures and other "real life features" like using cards for action). The biggest problems (besides time) is that anything Computer Vision is alsways a lot harder than you think and that all web-cams I have seen absolutely suck. (Which makes the vision problems even harder.)
It would be a really neat thing to combine physical items with a computer game. (In fact I saw arcade games in Japan which did this in form of Soccer management games combined with trading cards for the players.)
If you compare the actual processing capability of a high-end GPU and a high-end FPGA you will find that the FPGA is extremely slow in comparison.
A FPGA is on orders of magnitude slower than ASIC and also orders of magnitude more expensive.
The main reason you don't find FPGAs in PCs and such today is because there's no need for them. Most things a CPU can do "good enough" that it doesn't matter, and otherwise you can get special ASICs to do the job better and more economically.
And you will find that things like place and route takes a hideous amount of time which makes it even less useful for common applications. It certainly is a facinating prospect but it is still on the research level.
FPGAs are certainly neat and fun though. If you want to play with them you can get development boards for a couple of $100 which are useful for playing around.
I would recommend that you look at Hugin (http://hugin.sourceforge.net/) which is a frontend for Panorama tools. Also Autopano (http://autopano.kolor.com/) is a great tool for panorama creations. It does the stitching automatically, and Hugin can be used with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Another poster already made a clarification on this. I didn't "mis-speak" I was just a bit obscure with my meaning. Point being, if you code in C/C++ you'll spend a lot of time making the program work correctly. If you write in eg Java or Python you can get the program working correctly in a fraction of the time. This means you can add polish or move on to new stuff.
Point being, you are more productive in other languages as you don't have to mess with the details so much.
First off, I'm willing to bet that virtually none of the little apps you currently have running are written in Java/Python whatnot. A sloppy coder can leak memeory in any language. (In fact I'd say it's a lot easier to leak memory in a language without a GC.) So moving to C/C++ doesn't really fix the memory issue.
That they consume enourmous amounts of CPU is also not really true. Those processes I have running on my machine all go in at 0% CPU time. If you add them together they might reach a few percent. Not really something which will stop you from typing in Word.
The fix for this "problem" is to get an OS with a descent scheduler so you can prioritise processes properly. That way your real-time applications won't suffer because your little application wants to check for new mail.
No, bragging to your friends that you can get 180 FPS in Doom3 is important. Very few people actually need a 3GHz 64-bit CPU with 2GB memory, I have one and I sure as hell don't need it.
And while code has become more bloated and unoptimised by the years a lot of that is because today a computer can do quite a hell of a lot more than say 10 years ago. Is all of that necessary stuff? Hell no! Is it more fun? Hell yes!
Finally there is one specific area of consumer software that actually demands better computers. That is games. Interestingly enough that area also have many of the best coders.
The same goes for poorly written C++ programs. Sure they may be a bit more responsive at times than a poorly written application in Java or Python but OTOH it has a lot more maintenence issues and the potential severity of the bugs are higher (ie buffer overflow vulnerabilities).
When I code for fun I seldom do that in C/C++ anymore. At least not I know that the application won't need "that extra juice". What's the point in spending several times the develeopment effort on making it work properly instead of adding polish or just doing new stuff?
Nice attempt at a flamebait, but quite boring.
Please try to say something new instead of just parroting others.
With a few years of practice you may get good at flamebaiting.
True, but I think that the potential buyers of a PSP are quite capable of using english. Other than that it's mainly just that they need to release games with different languages. And that's not really Sony's problem.
Or they could just re-flash the US ones. It's not like it's a hardware limitation.
And they'd have to do that anyways most likely unless they have all of the localisation already in place. (Which I doubt since at least my japanese PSP doesn't have any other languages than japanese and english.)
I have actually done something like this as an exercise as part of course in computer vision.
The point of that excerise what to use the fact that the distances between 4 points on a line has the same ratio independently of the location of the viewer. IIRC given points a, b, c, d then (b-a)/(d-c) will always be the same (it was a while since I looked at this and the math isn't my strong point anyways).
This was used in a system where goups of 4 marks were placed on the walls of room. A vehicle which moved in the room had a laser mounted on it which swept across the walls (this was mounted on the same hight as the marks, so it was only a 1D scan really) and recorded when it found marks.
Using this data it was then possible to determine which data marks the laser had detected. It did a best fit method so it worked even if it didn't see all 4 marks on a specific group. This information was then used to determine the location of the camera and thus the vehicle.
A big benefit with this method compared to other optical systems is that it is not dependent on high resolution cameras and it's not very hard to ensure that the marks are detectable. (Just ensure that the 4 marks in a group are still visible. Or just replace them routinely.)
Now this does take quite a bit of work to get right, so unless you know what you're doing it's probably best to see if you can find a solution you can buy. That I don't know anything about unfortunately.
DVDdecrypter + PSPvideo9 (or any other similar tool) and you have a re-code in about an hour or so.
I bet you'll start seeing torrents with re-encoded movies as well.
Ok, I can see that.
Yet another reason why I'll never again buy a branded mobile phone. I'd rather pay another $100 or so upfront and get a phone that actually works like it should.
Transferring the MIDP program is hard? I just drag and drop it to the root in the Bluetooth folder and it is uploaded. I'd think you can do the same thing over IrDA or USB, but I don't know as I've never tried.
Uploading new data files can be a lot more of a bother though I guess. I've never tried that.
I remember a time when scamming your customers wasn't a common business strategy.
Actually I don't, but wouldn't it be nice if people tried to do things in order to make a good job instead of just ripping people off? Ah well, I can always dream I guess.
I believe that many non-GSM phones have this problem, I've never really experienced it with a GSM phone though. And most phones here in Europe don't have microphones that go all the way to the mouth (some clam-shells do).
So it's more a problem with a crappy phone or crappy encoding scheme than a problem with where the microphone is.
The phone must have been designed for midgets. I am 18 years old and hardly a giant. Unless you're mashing the phone hard against your cheek there is no way in hell your mouth will be on the level of the microphone. This is terribly annoying.
Just to point one thing out here. Hardly any modern phones go all the way to the mouth, they don't have to.
Modern cell-phones don't work like the analog things you have at home. They don't actually send the sound that's coming out of your mouth, it is instead coded in a much more compact fasion and recreated using signal processing.
As such it doesn't have to record the sounds coming out of your moth and pressing it against your cheek (or even picking it up through your skull bone) works as well.
On the other areas I'm not surprised. I have never been particularly impressed with Motorola's phones. (Besides the old "StarTac", that was pretty neat for it's day.)
You know that you can convert movies to a format more suitable for the PSP pretty much automatically right? There was even a Slashdot article about one such program (there are several) a week ago.
And only an idiot would buy Memory Sticks to hold all their data. You get one decent sized one and then you can add or remove stuff from it as you see fit.
When you say "field and matter" to you mean physical field and matter, as in electrical field and physical matter; or do you mean some more abstract idea?
You can convert matter into energy, but you can't convert matter into making pi=4.
And? If I yell "Pink Elephants!" at the top of my voice that doesn't mean that cute little pink elephants materialise.
If I hear someone claiming they can make pink elephants appear then I won't believe them until they prove it. In that way I'm a natural sceptic. As such when I hear that you can make water have special powerers not determined by the actual contents of the water then I won't believe it until it is proven.
It's important to keep an open mind; but at the same time you should ensure that your brain doesn't fall out completely.
To clarify this post a bit.
You feed a modern processor (assuming x86 compatible) x86 assembly, but internally it executes it's own format of operations. During the fetch/decode stage the x86 operations are "translated" into the internal micro-ops format.
As such one x86 op may correspond to many internal micro-ops. This is done for several reasons, one of the more fundamental being that x86 asm is now a horrible mess that is not suitable to feed into an extremely optimised processor core.
Say what? Not to be rude but since your version is short on details I can't really make out if it's really smart or just bollox. Particularly the bit about By Cartesian geometry, I don't mean just the grid, but the metaphysical distinction between field and matter, a metaphysical distinction held so closely to that it can't even be thought about. to me that just sounds like philosphical nonsense. But you have made me interested so if you read this please follow up some links to more detailed stuff as my quick trip to Wikipedia and Google didn't turn out that much.
Specifically it'd be nice to see how things like quantum theory and string theory relates to cartesian geometry, I can't quite grasp that. Then again I don't understand what you mean by cartesian geometry as my own idea of it is pretty much limited to the coordinate system related view.
Other than that I'd say that the entire point of science is that if you have an observable fact that you can't fit into your model then you change the model so that the fact fits. Naturally if you have "facts" that don't fit at all scientist will be quite reluctant to change their model just to make it fit unless they are convinced that it is a fact and not something else.
A multi-user OS means that I can log in several times on the same computer at the same time. And that multiple users can log on at the same time from different places.
To the best of my knowledge you really can't do this properly in WinXP with utils such as Remote Desktop. It may very well be possible but they haven't exactly gone out of their way to draw attention to it.
Computer have a very important role in education. Eg learning about physics, math etc can become a lot easier if you have a computer with software that allows you to experiment freely.
I bet teaching grammar can be a lot more interesting if you use programs which can parse sentences and give you "language trees" and allow you to play with it more.
Simply put, computers are good when you want to get the result quickly instead of spending a lot of time on the process. Personally I think a big problem is that in math you typically only learn the boring process of tedious calculations. You don't learn how to use it or see any point in doing it.
But I will agree that computers typically don't do any good for most students. Mainly because teachers and books seldom use them to their full potential (or really any potential).
IIRC it's the same format used for mobile phones or Sony Clie devices. It uses the same converter programs at any rate.
This program is more or less just a stream-lined front-end for those other programs.
Predicting result before you do something is pretty fundamental in science. It's one of the big points with science after all, model things so we can understand them.
Homepathy goes against what our current model of "how things work" would predict. That is why it is predicted to be false.
If it can be scientifically proven that it does in fact work then we'll end up with a new model for how molecular biology and medicine works.
On second thought it may be possible to avoid some of the problems with miniature detection.
If you can detect objects on the screen (not which one, just that there is one) you would only need to keep track of which object moved and then remember which character that is. This could possibly make the problem quite a bit easier to solve.
In order to detect objects you could make the screen completely white and look for non-white parts. But finding a webcam with desent optics is probably quite hard. Using a dv camera or digital camera hooked up to the computer may work better.
There is quite a lot of research on the lines of physical object + UI going on. And I have wanted to try something along the lines you describe as well.
I have long wanted to have the time to try something like you describe (but without the miniatures and other "real life features" like using cards for action). The biggest problems (besides time) is that anything Computer Vision is alsways a lot harder than you think and that all web-cams I have seen absolutely suck. (Which makes the vision problems even harder.)
It would be a really neat thing to combine physical items with a computer game. (In fact I saw arcade games in Japan which did this in form of Soccer management games combined with trading cards for the players.)
If you compare the actual processing capability of a high-end GPU and a high-end FPGA you will find that the FPGA is extremely slow in comparison.
A FPGA is on orders of magnitude slower than ASIC and also orders of magnitude more expensive.
The main reason you don't find FPGAs in PCs and such today is because there's no need for them. Most things a CPU can do "good enough" that it doesn't matter, and otherwise you can get special ASICs to do the job better and more economically.
And you will find that things like place and route takes a hideous amount of time which makes it even less useful for common applications. It certainly is a facinating prospect but it is still on the research level.
FPGAs are certainly neat and fun though. If you want to play with them you can get development boards for a couple of $100 which are useful for playing around.
PSP isn't region coded at all. Perhaps the movies will be but who cares about that?
I would recommend that you look at Hugin (http://hugin.sourceforge.net/) which is a frontend for Panorama tools. Also Autopano (http://autopano.kolor.com/) is a great tool for panorama creations. It does the stitching automatically, and Hugin can be used with it.
Available for Linux/Win32 and OSX.