Yes and no. I agree that most worthwhile things can not be explained in 30 seconds. What you should do is be able to tell enough in 30 seconds to make the recipient interested in hearing more. Kind of like an abstract for a written text.
That it's being misused in the age of 6 second attention span isn't much of a surprise though.
Paul and Eric Raymond recommend learning Lisp. It's an eye-openining experience. Some languages expose you to more ideas than others.
I'd go with that. Or at least that you should learn a functional language. It seems to me that learning functional programming after knowing standard procedural/object oriented is going to be a lot more rewarding that learning "yet another scripting language" which I would have to classify Python as. I really like Python though and it's pretty much my favourite scripting language.
I just got back from a summer in Japan and the Sony models (U-50 and U-70) were all over the place there. I never did see anyone actually using one though.
But as a PDA/Laptop thingy they pose a good compromise. For some reason they (Sony) failed to put in Bluetooth in them which seems like a failiure of biblical proportions. Not only can I then not use it with my phone I can also not use wireless mouse and keyboard with it. For me that made it easy to decide against getting one. (Not sure if I would have otherwise, but I did get a PDA there so it's not unthinkable.)
They are wonderful bits of technology though, I'd love to get my hands on one.
Re:1950's Kodacolor, trolls and new techniques
on
Photon Soup Update
·
· Score: 2, Informative
No, this is not a very useable way of rendering images. And he says so in the readme.
Tracing photons is already used with the technique of photon mapping which you can look up on the net, there is a load of information available on the topic, as well as example numerous images.
It is a pity that he did not use one of the standard scenes available to test renderers because then it would have been easier to compare the results with already existing renderers.
The thing is, while this method has a very accurate way of simulating a scene it has a very simple scene. If you add effects used by normal photon mapping today such as sub-surface scattering (used to create realistic skin on eg Gollum) or hair/fur renderers the computational time increases to something rediculous. Since modern rendering farms struggling with less accurate simulations today it is doubtful that this particular technique is useful.
If fact I doubt that this technique produces a result which is significantly more accurate than eg photon mapping. (Which is, again, why the lack of a standard scene is regrettable.)
But I do agree with you that there are a lot of less than clued in people here at Slashdot who ridicule ideas they have no grasp on how they work. (And as such make fools out of themselves.) And while that may sound as a thinly veiled attack on you it isn't ment as such. If you have some spare time I recommend that you play around with coding rendering software, it's quite easy to produce a working system. And in my experience it is very rewarding.
A problem is that the different distros have very different definitions of "stable". Unstable is about as unstable as a version x.0 release of another distro. Ie it should work but there may be some bugs or misses in there and if you are unlucky you will run into some of them. Use it if you want an excuse every now and then to learn how to handle the system manually.
Testing is where most other distros and OSs are. Sure there is the occational problem but it is rare. Stable is what most other distros and OSs do not even have. I guess BSD is the best comparison. You use stable when you can not afford it to crash due to software.
If you run mission critical stuff on Windows or other distros you can just as well run it on Debian Testing. Naturally you should take the precaution of havning a separate server you can use to test significant updates on first, but that is true for any mission critical stuff. And Debians apt-get system makes it easy to do this quite painlessly. (More so than many other distros and much more than Windows systems.)
Not that you have to switch to Debian, but your understanding of the issues involved is not quite complete. BTW you can do your own compilations with Debian as with Gentoo, you use use "apt-get source" instead of "apt-get install".
The biggest differance between Debian and RH etc is that the other big distros have a company behind them. That tend to make people calmer about dealing with them for some reason. (I can not really see why, AFAIK no company has been successfully sued for distributing buggy software.)
Try Knoppix! You burn a bootable CD and can run the entire OS from CD. This will let you play a lot with Linux so you can decide on if you want to use it in the future. Knoppix is based on Debian and can play basically any file (except RealVideo and Quicktime sorenson, but that is due to legalities). Standard Debian is not that easy for the beginner, not sure if Gentoo is better. The new installer for Debian is good though, and it makes installing pretty much painless.
Those are pretty much true for any other form of martial art/sport too. So if TKD puts up too much of a challenge with high kicks go for a style with less kicks. I've tried a couple of different MA's by now and I really like the idea that you practice with the same people each time as compared to the gym where you typically don't learn to know new people.
One thing though. Check the teacher to make sure he/she is ok in the head. There are quite a lot of "McDojos" out there which are more interested in getting students (and cash) than teaching. Also keep in mind that as soon as a teacher begins comparing their own style with other styles they are typically blowing things out their rectum. Those that spend a lot time on pointing out how much better their (your MAs) way is than any other MA are typically not worth the time and effort. Might as well go to a place with a bit humbler attitude.
Seriously, I was considering to put together a system like this (mobile image blogging) but it allways annoyed me that sending data from a standard phone (over the telephone operators networks) is such a big bother. Furthermore I hear that many operators will perform multiple convertions of images in order to compensate for their broken software systems. (For MMS and similar services that is.)
I had even considered doing a Java program in order to transfer the data from the phone. Naturally sending a simple email is loads better.
And Doh! I just can't even express how stupid I feel for not looking for an attachment option in the email. I just tried it and it works perfectly. (Well as perfect as you'd expect from the camera on a T630, but still.) Thanks again!
I have never done any Ogg development but I have been part of a project where we did a hardware implementation of MP3. Does Ogg correct some of the/really/ stupid errors in MP3 such as 18 frequency lines? I remember when we were reading up on the theory and basically all of the clever and fast algorithms for DCT (or any D*T for that matter) requires the frequency lines are a power of two. There were many issues in that same area, particularly for the for the two really heavy parts of the decoder (filter bank and iDCT).
Standard Bluetooth has a range of 30 feet (10 meters) and the class 1 devices has a range of 100 meters. So I doubt you'll find yourself in a situation were BT is out of range but IR works. (Unless you have a really large room.)
Not sure how much more power a BT keyboard draws compared to IR though. IR certainly is cheaper though. But for products with $50+ prices I doubt it matters much. (Besides that they stamp Bluetooth on the box and charge double the amount. The actual components aren't that much more expensive.)
Really? I've never cared for it much. Sure you can waste a few minutes with it but I'd rather read something on The Onion while I'm in the crapper (or whotnot) than play Tetris. (On my phone that is.)
And I doubt I'm alone in that. Seriously I can't say that any of the "golden oldies" games are anything that I'd actually sit down and play today. Nethack is one of the few old games I actually enjoy, but that's not in that category IMHO since most people don't know about it. (Compared to eg Pac Man, Space Invaders etc.)
Don't buy pre-ground coffee! Seriously, that's the best trick to get coffee that doesn't taste like bitter crap. I have gradually moved my own coffee consumtion from pre-ground to self-ground and now a French press. The press did do some added good I think, but it's no-where near the increase in quality from going to self-ground.
And while I haven't actually had coffee from Starbucks I do believe you can get quite a bit better coffee in the states. Look around some and you'll discover that most places serve complete crap as far as coffee is concerned.
My pet-peeve is when they have electric heaters for the pots, why don't they use a thermos? Everyone with a sense of taste knows that after half an hour on a hot plate a pot of coffee will taste extremely vile. I can keep coffee in a termos for a long time before it starts going really bad. (Of course it's better new, but that's not the point.)
One can of coke has IIRC much less than one cup of coffees worth of caffeine. Basically you shouldn't notice the effect. Particularly if you do it routinely.
If you want to have an easier time to fall asleep try going for a walk a few hours before you want to sleep. (Doesn't have to be for very long but you shouldn't do it right before bedtime since it will temporarily boost your energy.)
BTW you shouldn't have any problem going cold turkey either. I do that every once in a while when I just don't have coffee and can't be bothered to get any. You'll have a bit of a headache for a few days, nothing worth worrying about.
Part of that process is learning a bunch of stuff that you probably would never learn otherwise because it just didn't seem interesting. Sure, 1% of my class mates may still have learned that because they are just really bright. But the rest of us wouldn't. And while all may not be the best developers in the world they are still very useful and can at the very least earn enough to pay back what it cost to educate them.
Now if we relied on auto-didacts then only 1% of those people would have developed the skills needed to do really well. Now that the rest of us are thought perhaps a total of 30% reach that level. Naturally those that were bright from the get to devop even further. No education seems like an awful lot of waste to me.
(This assumes that you have a pretty good school though. Not that it needs a good name, but the teachers must be good.)
Bill Gates already was rich when he was born. He has a "the third" in his name for crying out loud. And considering he dropped out of Harward that's even more of a sign that he had more money than he could spend.
Once you have a lot of money making more seems to be a lot easier than when you start from scratch.
But hey, look at the GWB. Even if you are a C student you can become president. Well at least if your daddy is the president.
I understand why some people got defensive. Mr. Langa should CLEARLY state that the comparision is *not* with Linux or F/OSS, but with particular distributions or support organizations.
That's the way I feel too.
Unfortunately I doubt that he, or most common users of Linux, know the difference between a distribution or Linux. As far as I can tell he never mentions the distro he is complaining about, and I'm sure that is pissing people off. While his complaints about that distro apparently are correct (since he didn't get what he wanted) they sure are not correct regarding Linux per se.
I would just recommend him to try a couple of distros and see if one can't make his soundcard work. I'd recommend Knoppix since it's a pretty neat thing to use an entire OS and program suit directly from CD. It impressed me and played numerous video files and DVDs directly OOTB, which Windows won't do.
And it could be a problem with his soundcard. There are some that are just plain more work then it's worth to get working. Particularly since you can pick up one that works for a $40 or something.
It's a console game, and MP hasn't been as big with consoles as with PCs historically. So it's not very strange at all that they didn't foresee the large MP rush.
It takes an amateur 15 minutes to install a solderless modchip (not counting the time to open the box). And you can play on Live, you just have to disable the chip.
In a computer design course I took one exercise was to come up with patentable ideas in a normal CPU. Ie ideas that could have been patented but weren't.
It was pretty easy to come up with a long list of items and if they had been patented we'd still be on 486 level as far as CPUs go.
Actually the Vodaphone network in Japan has some compatability with GSM. They have a couple of phones that are "world phones" and can be used with any GSM network. However no-one has managed to unlock one of these phones yet, so you can't use it outside Japan. (Unless you have a japanese mobile phone account, which would be expensive.)
Besides you can't really blame Clinton that Japan has their own mobile phone system. They are actually worse than the american system because they have multiple phone systems which are incompatible with each other as well as the rest of the world.
Now that Vodaphone is on the japanese market that may help the situation though. I certainly hope so because I'd much rather get a phone in Japan than here in Europe. I like stupid features like described in this article.
No they are not. But you can access the stuff you need through the shader units which are documented. Eg if you use ARB_2 for OpenGL you can use the programs for both ATI and nVidia cards (which support shaders 2.0 or higher).
To confuse things a bit more the newest 3D cards from nVidia actually has some flow control. It's not quite as flexible as that found on a CPU though.
The thing is that there are not all that many standard programs which would benefit from using the GPU. Requirements are basically that you should have large data sets and do repetetive calculations. Good examples are scientific calculations and graphics.
I think the a good common use would be image programs such as Photoshop.
I read about test someone posted on Slashdot perhaps half a year ago about this. His conclusion was that there were significant differences in speed between DirectX and OpenGL. IIRC DirectX could put data to the card fast, but had very slow read back. OpenGL had slightly lower to card speed but the read-back was almost identical.
I haven't been able to find it since then however.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes and no. I agree that most worthwhile things can not be explained in 30 seconds. What you should do is be able to tell enough in 30 seconds to make the recipient interested in hearing more. Kind of like an abstract for a written text.
That it's being misused in the age of 6 second attention span isn't much of a surprise though.
I'd go with that. Or at least that you should learn a functional language. It seems to me that learning functional programming after knowing standard procedural/object oriented is going to be a lot more rewarding that learning "yet another scripting language" which I would have to classify Python as. I really like Python though and it's pretty much my favourite scripting language.
I wouldn't use it to code 3d engines though.
Because since they don't post anything it's quite obvious that there's nothing to reply to?
Damn, forgot to take my smart-arse medication again...
I just got back from a summer in Japan and the Sony models (U-50 and U-70) were all over the place there. I never did see anyone actually using one though.
But as a PDA/Laptop thingy they pose a good compromise. For some reason they (Sony) failed to put in Bluetooth in them which seems like a failiure of biblical proportions. Not only can I then not use it with my phone I can also not use wireless mouse and keyboard with it. For me that made it easy to decide against getting one. (Not sure if I would have otherwise, but I did get a PDA there so it's not unthinkable.)
They are wonderful bits of technology though, I'd love to get my hands on one.
No, this is not a very useable way of rendering images. And he says so in the readme.
Tracing photons is already used with the technique of photon mapping which you can look up on the net, there is a load of information available on the topic, as well as example numerous images.
It is a pity that he did not use one of the standard scenes available to test renderers because then it would have been easier to compare the results with already existing renderers.
The thing is, while this method has a very accurate way of simulating a scene it has a very simple scene. If you add effects used by normal photon mapping today such as sub-surface scattering (used to create realistic skin on eg Gollum) or hair/fur renderers the computational time increases to something rediculous. Since modern rendering farms struggling with less accurate simulations today it is doubtful that this particular technique is useful.
If fact I doubt that this technique produces a result which is significantly more accurate than eg photon mapping. (Which is, again, why the lack of a standard scene is regrettable.)
But I do agree with you that there are a lot of less than clued in people here at Slashdot who ridicule ideas they have no grasp on how they work. (And as such make fools out of themselves.) And while that may sound as a thinly veiled attack on you it isn't ment as such. If you have some spare time I recommend that you play around with coding rendering software, it's quite easy to produce a working system. And in my experience it is very rewarding.
A problem is that the different distros have very different definitions of "stable". Unstable is about as unstable as a version x.0 release of another distro. Ie it should work but there may be some bugs or misses in there and if you are unlucky you will run into some of them. Use it if you want an excuse every now and then to learn how to handle the system manually.
Testing is where most other distros and OSs are. Sure there is the occational problem but it is rare. Stable is what most other distros and OSs do not even have. I guess BSD is the best comparison. You use stable when you can not afford it to crash due to software.
If you run mission critical stuff on Windows or other distros you can just as well run it on Debian Testing. Naturally you should take the precaution of havning a separate server you can use to test significant updates on first, but that is true for any mission critical stuff. And Debians apt-get system makes it easy to do this quite painlessly. (More so than many other distros and much more than Windows systems.)
Not that you have to switch to Debian, but your understanding of the issues involved is not quite complete. BTW you can do your own compilations with Debian as with Gentoo, you use use "apt-get source" instead of "apt-get install".
The biggest differance between Debian and RH etc is that the other big distros have a company behind them. That tend to make people calmer about dealing with them for some reason. (I can not really see why, AFAIK no company has been successfully sued for distributing buggy software.)
Try Knoppix! You burn a bootable CD and can run the entire OS from CD. This will let you play a lot with Linux so you can decide on if you want to use it in the future. Knoppix is based on Debian and can play basically any file (except RealVideo and Quicktime sorenson, but that is due to legalities). Standard Debian is not that easy for the beginner, not sure if Gentoo is better. The new installer for Debian is good though, and it makes installing pretty much painless.
Those are pretty much true for any other form of martial art/sport too. So if TKD puts up too much of a challenge with high kicks go for a style with less kicks. I've tried a couple of different MA's by now and I really like the idea that you practice with the same people each time as compared to the gym where you typically don't learn to know new people.
One thing though. Check the teacher to make sure he/she is ok in the head. There are quite a lot of "McDojos" out there which are more interested in getting students (and cash) than teaching. Also keep in mind that as soon as a teacher begins comparing their own style with other styles they are typically blowing things out their rectum. Those that spend a lot time on pointing out how much better their (your MAs) way is than any other MA are typically not worth the time and effort. Might as well go to a place with a bit humbler attitude.
Damn why didn't I think of that?
Seriously, I was considering to put together a system like this (mobile image blogging) but it allways annoyed me that sending data from a standard phone (over the telephone operators networks) is such a big bother. Furthermore I hear that many operators will perform multiple convertions of images in order to compensate for their broken software systems. (For MMS and similar services that is.)
I had even considered doing a Java program in order to transfer the data from the phone. Naturally sending a simple email is loads better.
And Doh! I just can't even express how stupid I feel for not looking for an attachment option in the email. I just tried it and it works perfectly. (Well as perfect as you'd expect from the camera on a T630, but still.) Thanks again!
I have never done any Ogg development but I have been part of a project where we did a hardware implementation of MP3. Does Ogg correct some of the /really/ stupid errors in MP3 such as 18 frequency lines? I remember when we were reading up on the theory and basically all of the clever and fast algorithms for DCT (or any D*T for that matter) requires the frequency lines are a power of two. There were many issues in that same area, particularly for the for the two really heavy parts of the decoder (filter bank and iDCT).
So is that better in Ogg?
Standard Bluetooth has a range of 30 feet (10 meters) and the class 1 devices has a range of 100 meters. So I doubt you'll find yourself in a situation were BT is out of range but IR works. (Unless you have a really large room.)
Not sure how much more power a BT keyboard draws compared to IR though. IR certainly is cheaper though. But for products with $50+ prices I doubt it matters much. (Besides that they stamp Bluetooth on the box and charge double the amount. The actual components aren't that much more expensive.)
Really? I've never cared for it much. Sure you can waste a few minutes with it but I'd rather read something on The Onion while I'm in the crapper (or whotnot) than play Tetris. (On my phone that is.)
And I doubt I'm alone in that. Seriously I can't say that any of the "golden oldies" games are anything that I'd actually sit down and play today. Nethack is one of the few old games I actually enjoy, but that's not in that category IMHO since most people don't know about it. (Compared to eg Pac Man, Space Invaders etc.)
Don't buy pre-ground coffee! Seriously, that's the best trick to get coffee that doesn't taste like bitter crap. I have gradually moved my own coffee consumtion from pre-ground to self-ground and now a French press. The press did do some added good I think, but it's no-where near the increase in quality from going to self-ground.
And while I haven't actually had coffee from Starbucks I do believe you can get quite a bit better coffee in the states. Look around some and you'll discover that most places serve complete crap as far as coffee is concerned.
My pet-peeve is when they have electric heaters for the pots, why don't they use a thermos? Everyone with a sense of taste knows that after half an hour on a hot plate a pot of coffee will taste extremely vile. I can keep coffee in a termos for a long time before it starts going really bad. (Of course it's better new, but that's not the point.)
One can of coke has IIRC much less than one cup of coffees worth of caffeine. Basically you shouldn't notice the effect. Particularly if you do it routinely.
If you want to have an easier time to fall asleep try going for a walk a few hours before you want to sleep. (Doesn't have to be for very long but you shouldn't do it right before bedtime since it will temporarily boost your energy.)
BTW you shouldn't have any problem going cold turkey either. I do that every once in a while when I just don't have coffee and can't be bothered to get any. You'll have a bit of a headache for a few days, nothing worth worrying about.
Have you even gone to college?
Part of that process is learning a bunch of stuff that you probably would never learn otherwise because it just didn't seem interesting. Sure, 1% of my class mates may still have learned that because they are just really bright. But the rest of us wouldn't. And while all may not be the best developers in the world they are still very useful and can at the very least earn enough to pay back what it cost to educate them.
Now if we relied on auto-didacts then only 1% of those people would have developed the skills needed to do really well. Now that the rest of us are thought perhaps a total of 30% reach that level. Naturally those that were bright from the get to devop even further. No education seems like an awful lot of waste to me.
(This assumes that you have a pretty good school though. Not that it needs a good name, but the teachers must be good.)
Bill Gates already was rich when he was born. He has a "the third" in his name for crying out loud. And considering he dropped out of Harward that's even more of a sign that he had more money than he could spend.
Once you have a lot of money making more seems to be a lot easier than when you start from scratch.
But hey, look at the GWB. Even if you are a C student you can become president. Well at least if your daddy is the president.
That's the way I feel too.
Unfortunately I doubt that he, or most common users of Linux, know the difference between a distribution or Linux. As far as I can tell he never mentions the distro he is complaining about, and I'm sure that is pissing people off. While his complaints about that distro apparently are correct (since he didn't get what he wanted) they sure are not correct regarding Linux per se.
I would just recommend him to try a couple of distros and see if one can't make his soundcard work. I'd recommend Knoppix since it's a pretty neat thing to use an entire OS and program suit directly from CD. It impressed me and played numerous video files and DVDs directly OOTB, which Windows won't do.
And it could be a problem with his soundcard. There are some that are just plain more work then it's worth to get working. Particularly since you can pick up one that works for a $40 or something.
It's a console game, and MP hasn't been as big with consoles as with PCs historically. So it's not very strange at all that they didn't foresee the large MP rush.
It takes an amateur 15 minutes to install a solderless modchip (not counting the time to open the box). And you can play on Live, you just have to disable the chip.
You can use an XBox as a MythTV frontend. There is even a bootlable CD with it IIRC.
In a computer design course I took one exercise was to come up with patentable ideas in a normal CPU. Ie ideas that could have been patented but weren't.
It was pretty easy to come up with a long list of items and if they had been patented we'd still be on 486 level as far as CPUs go.
Actually the Vodaphone network in Japan has some compatability with GSM. They have a couple of phones that are "world phones" and can be used with any GSM network. However no-one has managed to unlock one of these phones yet, so you can't use it outside Japan. (Unless you have a japanese mobile phone account, which would be expensive.)
Besides you can't really blame Clinton that Japan has their own mobile phone system. They are actually worse than the american system because they have multiple phone systems which are incompatible with each other as well as the rest of the world.
Now that Vodaphone is on the japanese market that may help the situation though. I certainly hope so because I'd much rather get a phone in Japan than here in Europe. I like stupid features like described in this article.
No they are not. But you can access the stuff you need through the shader units which are documented. Eg if you use ARB_2 for OpenGL you can use the programs for both ATI and nVidia cards (which support shaders 2.0 or higher).
To confuse things a bit more the newest 3D cards from nVidia actually has some flow control. It's not quite as flexible as that found on a CPU though.
The thing is that there are not all that many standard programs which would benefit from using the GPU. Requirements are basically that you should have large data sets and do repetetive calculations. Good examples are scientific calculations and graphics.
I think the a good common use would be image programs such as Photoshop.
I read about test someone posted on Slashdot perhaps half a year ago about this. His conclusion was that there were significant differences in speed between DirectX and OpenGL. IIRC DirectX could put data to the card fast, but had very slow read back. OpenGL had slightly lower to card speed but the read-back was almost identical.
I haven't been able to find it since then however.