Well, working out of your garage is quite a good idea which has been largely abandoned during the dotcom era. If you want to keep costs down as you do R&D then it's one of the few sane ways of developing IMHO.
From reading the articles at HardOCP it doesn't look good. (Developing in you garage is fine, supplying a false adress is at best suspicious.
And the entire thing seems like a new version of the DivX DVD-player standard.
There are probably computers out there with enough horsepower (stop looking at me like that, you may not borrow the dual G5, my precioussss...) to take 2 typical little video streams from webcams and do something with them in real time.
Most modern computers today have 3D accelerators in them. Those cards are basically built to do image processing in hardware. (Naturally they are made to transform 3D -> 2D, but the math is largely the same so it doesn't matter.)
I've only seen stuff about this in academic papers though, so it may be some more time before you see actual applications which use 3D cards for image processing / computer vision accelerations.
So, here's the crazy logic I alluded to. We use oil to make plastic. We dig oil up from the ground. When you recycle plastic it means we have more oil to burn because we don't have to use it to make more plastic.
But, if you throw plastic away the oil goes back into the ground (hopefully) and we have less oil to pollute the atmosphere with. So recycling plastic leads to air pollution.
(Emphasis mine.) I do hope that was ment as an ironic statement. Otherwise it's just pretty sad.
Looking at their site I'd say that considering the number of buzzwords and made up words (SuperBIOS, isn't that an oxymoron?) I'd be surprised if they're not already on "FuckedCompany.com".
Any company which not only has a slogan "Like no other" but also copyrights it as well as has a press release for when they made it up are in more trouble than the nameless company that Dilbert works for.
But do read the market speak for their workstation. It's quite funny.
Now you just have to put them so far apart that one person can't reach both at the same time. They wire it to a key circuit and make a small board which requires both "buttons" to be pressed at the same time.
After that you just have to find a room mate who'll put up with helping you turn the keys each time you want to turn you computer on.
(Though your idea was pretty clever, I've had that problem sometimes with the reset switch. I have my current MB set so I have to press and hold the power button for 4 seconds before it shuts down, so it's not much of a problem.)
Thing is, most people who are "un-technical" enough that they don't know that turning a computer off can typically be very creative in their ways of turning it off.
If they don't see a power button on the front they simply jank the power cord. (And that's most likely worse, since the power button can be wired to give your computer a shutdown command.)
And there's always the good ol' circuit breaker in case the previous plans fail.
In my experience a good lecturer can make the topic seem a lot more interesting than it might really be. Such lecturers can pull you through boring material much easier than if you just studied it yourself.
Unfortunately it's more common to have a lecturer who's so boring that he turns an interesting topic into torture.
A good lecturer will also tell you things that are not in the book. Or in a different way from how it's told in a book. And the biggest benefit is that if you don't understand something you can ask the lecturer to go over a particular part once more.
Yes I found this very confusing too. I think it has something to do with quantum mechanics. Kind of like how you can't know the state and position of a quantum particle since that changes it.
In the same vein if at any time the opinion of Slashdot is expressed it may also change. I can't say that I really understand this (or QM) fully, but it seems rather reasonable.
Johnny Mnemonic was just a film version of the short story with the same name. (Found in Burning Crome.) The short story take place in the same universe as Neuromancer, and IIRC the female character is or is very similar to Molly in the Neuromancer triology.
Well there's always "languages" like Matlab which IMHO are a lot nicer than Fortran. Though my experience with Fortran was charred by converting VAX programs to Win32 and Unix. And the original coder was apparently unaware that there were such a thing as commenting and that "three-way goto" could be a bad idea for readability.
Most engineering places I've seen have used tools like Matlab, Matematica and Maple for computational stuff. And in my experience it's a lot nicer to do it in Matlab. (Though that language suffers from it's share of braindeadness as well: Begin arrays on 1 when all matemathics and engineering disiplines begin at 0?)
Re:Lies, statistics, and analysts
on
Java vs .NET
·
· Score: 1
Java Community Process?
And feel free to use SWT and include it in your programs. It's free after all.
The most important difference is that when you choose.Net you lock yourself into both software and hardware vendors. With Java you at least have flexibility in OS and hardware. (And sure, Mono is on the way. It's not here yet though.)
You can use Bitcollider instead. It allows you to make lookups to a database using the hash of a file. (Several different hashes are available.) You can also make comments on the file regarding quality and descriptions, which are then available online.
I though Snowcrash was pretty bad from a literary standpoint. I much prefered Cryptonomicon to it. IMHO it just felt like too much of a rip off of standard cyberpunk. But there certainly are some good ideas in there, the suburbs and stuff like that and it's worth readin. And "I bet they will listen to Reason (tm)" is one good line.:-)
Yeah but as adult fiction it is really poor. After reading the HP books I do think that the fourth book is the best. (It's better than the fifth as well.) But compared to other literature, even fantasy literature which contains an alarmingly high portion of pulp it comes up short IMHO.
And while it has all of the above it doesn't have enough drama for me to care about the characters. And the longer you get the more obvious the severe lackings of the adult characters become. You get a feeling that Harry is running around in a world of at most 2D characters. There's no depth to any on them. And it's only the special characters that are actually 2D, most of them are at most 1D.
Generally I just get annoyed that all the characters are walking around being so stupid all the time. Although it's not nearly as bad as in Robert Jordan's stories. If you want new and good fantasy try Robin Hobbs, she should have gotten awards instead.
One such physics engine is Havok which is featured in games such as Half Life 2, Grand theft auto 3 and Deus Ex 2. Though they often use eg only the physics engine most parts of a standard game engine are present in Havok. (Graphics, sound, physics and AI at least.)
Considering how powerful computers and consoles are getting there is less need to have everything custom made for a game. Often you can buy or licence an existing engine and save a lot of development time and effort. (And money.)
Id software and other companies have been making quite a lot on licensing engines. And when you think about it the entire mod community is based on the idea.
So I wouldn't say that the idea is a bad one, I'd just say that it's already been done for quite a while.;-)
It also uses the same system for modelling skin. The old man has a lot of wrinkes and it's done in the automatic subdivision of surfaces. So the animator gives parameters and the program figues out how the clothing and skin should wrinkle and stretch.
It also has some pretty nice mirror effects with his glasses.
Even cooler than image based lighting is photon mapping. You get pretty much the same result but it's a lot faster. And you more or less just continue to add new physical models on top of existing systems to create even better effects. One of the latest additions is subsurface scattering which is used to recreate the effect of light penetrating eg skin and lighting it up from within. This effect is used in The two towers (Gollum) and Harry Potter 2 (Dobby).
In a big corporation one brilliant programmer doesn't make a difference. In fact I bet that even if 10% of their programmers were brilliant they could easily dissapear in the machinery of a big corporation like Microsoft.
I don't know what the problem is at Microsoft, but considering the amount of holes in their software (And more importantly the amount of stupid default settings.) something is.
I'm often bothered by plot holes and mistakes because I take it as an insult that a script writer and producer can't manage to produce a story which is coherent for 2 hours.
Instead we see movies which contradict themselves and adjust the "rules of the universe" in order to make a nice shot. (Case in point: the walking around the mall shot in Minority Report.)
I don't have anything against stories which have unbelieveable ideas as long as they are well produced. But don't allow the robot boy who 5 minutes ago got a short circuit for eating food suddenly spend several minutes in water without damage. (A.I., and yes, I have a bone to pick with Spielberg.)
Personally I rather liked Matrix 2. While it wasn't perfect I still felt that the central ideas were interesting enough and the fundamental rules of that universe were upheld.
When I get out of the cinema and feel like I've just been robbed of 2 hours of my life I will however find an almost perverse pleasure in ripping it to shreds. That way I can get at least some satisfaction out of it.
I think the point is that the underlying idea or universe should be interesting enough by itself. And if you can't think of any movies where this criteria is fulfilled then it's because most "SciFi" movies are pure shit.
SF literature is often that way that the ideas are more interesting than the characters/plot. Naturally that's a bit sad, but I often enjoy that more in a book than one which has no interesting ideas.
Examples of this would be Gullivers Travels, which at least I would classify as SF. The characters and plot are really quite dull. The world and political commentary are top notch.
Another would be Brave New World, while it's not all that interesting as a literary work the ideas are discussed almost daily today (eg cloning).
Some books have both ideas and plot, but they are farther in between. And then someone makes a really crappy movie out of it.;-)
I know the feeling. Though if the person is bottom posting and hasn't snipped stuff in the text then his/her opinion is probably not worth much in any case.;-)
Though I don't really care. I prefer it the way it is on eg Slashdot where you have to make an effort to actually quote stuff. Keeps the noise down a lot.
I've talked to companies which make these types of tools and asked the same question. The simple answer is that a normal CDRom is just not built for advanced testing. Testing drives have specific hardware to detect errors that a normal CD can't. Naturally these errors don't influence the percieved quality of the product, since they can't be measured by standard hardware. However it can demonstrate problems with the manufacturing process.
A good reason for consumers to not buy pirated anime (or other HK stuff) is that the quality is often abysmal. I'd rather not pay for stuff that is lower quality than stuff you can download.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, working out of your garage is quite a good idea which has been largely abandoned during the dotcom era. If you want to keep costs down as you do R&D then it's one of the few sane ways of developing IMHO.
From reading the articles at HardOCP it doesn't look good. (Developing in you garage is fine, supplying a false adress is at best suspicious.
And the entire thing seems like a new version of the DivX DVD-player standard.
Most modern computers today have 3D accelerators in them. Those cards are basically built to do image processing in hardware. (Naturally they are made to transform 3D -> 2D, but the math is largely the same so it doesn't matter.)
I've only seen stuff about this in academic papers though, so it may be some more time before you see actual applications which use 3D cards for image processing / computer vision accelerations.
(Emphasis mine.)
I do hope that was ment as an ironic statement. Otherwise it's just pretty sad.
Looking at their site I'd say that considering the number of buzzwords and made up words (SuperBIOS, isn't that an oxymoron?) I'd be surprised if they're not already on "FuckedCompany.com".
Any company which not only has a slogan "Like no other" but also copyrights it as well as has a press release for when they made it up are in more trouble than the nameless company that Dilbert works for.
But do read the market speak for their workstation. It's quite funny.
Now you just have to put them so far apart that one person can't reach both at the same time. They wire it to a key circuit and make a small board which requires both "buttons" to be pressed at the same time.
After that you just have to find a room mate who'll put up with helping you turn the keys each time you want to turn you computer on.
(Though your idea was pretty clever, I've had that problem sometimes with the reset switch. I have my current MB set so I have to press and hold the power button for 4 seconds before it shuts down, so it's not much of a problem.)
Thing is, most people who are "un-technical" enough that they don't know that turning a computer off can typically be very creative in their ways of turning it off.
If they don't see a power button on the front they simply jank the power cord. (And that's most likely worse, since the power button can be wired to give your computer a shutdown command.)
And there's always the good ol' circuit breaker in case the previous plans fail.
In my experience a good lecturer can make the topic seem a lot more interesting than it might really be. Such lecturers can pull you through boring material much easier than if you just studied it yourself.
Unfortunately it's more common to have a lecturer who's so boring that he turns an interesting topic into torture.
A good lecturer will also tell you things that are not in the book. Or in a different way from how it's told in a book. And the biggest benefit is that if you don't understand something you can ask the lecturer to go over a particular part once more.
Yes I found this very confusing too. I think it has something to do with quantum mechanics. Kind of like how you can't know the state and position of a quantum particle since that changes it.
In the same vein if at any time the opinion of Slashdot is expressed it may also change. I can't say that I really understand this (or QM) fully, but it seems rather reasonable.
So which connection won? Did the T3 fight the winner or something?
Johnny Mnemonic was just a film version of the short story with the same name. (Found in Burning Crome.) The short story take place in the same universe as Neuromancer, and IIRC the female character is or is very similar to Molly in the Neuromancer triology.
Well there's always "languages" like Matlab which IMHO are a lot nicer than Fortran. Though my experience with Fortran was charred by converting VAX programs to Win32 and Unix. And the original coder was apparently unaware that there were such a thing as commenting and that "three-way goto" could be a bad idea for readability.
Most engineering places I've seen have used tools like Matlab, Matematica and Maple for computational stuff. And in my experience it's a lot nicer to do it in Matlab. (Though that language suffers from it's share of braindeadness as well: Begin arrays on 1 when all matemathics and engineering disiplines begin at 0?)
Java Community Process?
.Net you lock yourself into both software and hardware vendors. With Java you at least have flexibility in OS and hardware. (And sure, Mono is on the way. It's not here yet though.)
And feel free to use SWT and include it in your programs. It's free after all.
The most important difference is that when you choose
You can use Bitcollider instead. It allows you to make lookups to a database using the hash of a file. (Several different hashes are available.) You can also make comments on the file regarding quality and descriptions, which are then available online.
I though Snowcrash was pretty bad from a literary standpoint. I much prefered Cryptonomicon to it. IMHO it just felt like too much of a rip off of standard cyberpunk. But there certainly are some good ideas in there, the suburbs and stuff like that and it's worth readin. And "I bet they will listen to Reason (tm)" is one good line. :-)
Yeah but as adult fiction it is really poor. After reading the HP books I do think that the fourth book is the best. (It's better than the fifth as well.) But compared to other literature, even fantasy literature which contains an alarmingly high portion of pulp it comes up short IMHO.
And while it has all of the above it doesn't have enough drama for me to care about the characters. And the longer you get the more obvious the severe lackings of the adult characters become. You get a feeling that Harry is running around in a world of at most 2D characters. There's no depth to any on them. And it's only the special characters that are actually 2D, most of them are at most 1D.
Generally I just get annoyed that all the characters are walking around being so stupid all the time. Although it's not nearly as bad as in Robert Jordan's stories. If you want new and good fantasy try Robin Hobbs, she should have gotten awards instead.
That's correct, I got my engines confused. OTOH it helps to prove my point. That creating and selling engines is already quite common.
One such physics engine is Havok which is featured in games such as Half Life 2, Grand theft auto 3 and Deus Ex 2. Though they often use eg only the physics engine most parts of a standard game engine are present in Havok. (Graphics, sound, physics and AI at least.)
;-)
Considering how powerful computers and consoles are getting there is less need to have everything custom made for a game. Often you can buy or licence an existing engine and save a lot of development time and effort. (And money.)
Id software and other companies have been making quite a lot on licensing engines. And when you think about it the entire mod community is based on the idea.
So I wouldn't say that the idea is a bad one, I'd just say that it's already been done for quite a while.
It also uses the same system for modelling skin. The old man has a lot of wrinkes and it's done in the automatic subdivision of surfaces. So the animator gives parameters and the program figues out how the clothing and skin should wrinkle and stretch.
It also has some pretty nice mirror effects with his glasses.
Even cooler than image based lighting is photon mapping. You get pretty much the same result but it's a lot faster. And you more or less just continue to add new physical models on top of existing systems to create even better effects. One of the latest additions is subsurface scattering which is used to recreate the effect of light penetrating eg skin and lighting it up from within. This effect is used in The two towers (Gollum) and Harry Potter 2 (Dobby).
In a big corporation one brilliant programmer doesn't make a difference. In fact I bet that even if 10% of their programmers were brilliant they could easily dissapear in the machinery of a big corporation like Microsoft.
I don't know what the problem is at Microsoft, but considering the amount of holes in their software (And more importantly the amount of stupid default settings.) something is.
I'm often bothered by plot holes and mistakes because I take it as an insult that a script writer and producer can't manage to produce a story which is coherent for 2 hours.
Instead we see movies which contradict themselves and adjust the "rules of the universe" in order to make a nice shot. (Case in point: the walking around the mall shot in Minority Report.)
I don't have anything against stories which have unbelieveable ideas as long as they are well produced. But don't allow the robot boy who 5 minutes ago got a short circuit for eating food suddenly spend several minutes in water without damage. (A.I., and yes, I have a bone to pick with Spielberg.)
Personally I rather liked Matrix 2. While it wasn't perfect I still felt that the central ideas were interesting enough and the fundamental rules of that universe were upheld.
When I get out of the cinema and feel like I've just been robbed of 2 hours of my life I will however find an almost perverse pleasure in ripping it to shreds. That way I can get at least some satisfaction out of it.
I think the point is that the underlying idea or universe should be interesting enough by itself. And if you can't think of any movies where this criteria is fulfilled then it's because most "SciFi" movies are pure shit.
;-)
SF literature is often that way that the ideas are more interesting than the characters/plot. Naturally that's a bit sad, but I often enjoy that more in a book than one which has no interesting ideas.
Examples of this would be Gullivers Travels, which at least I would classify as SF. The characters and plot are really quite dull. The world and political commentary are top notch.
Another would be Brave New World, while it's not all that interesting as a literary work the ideas are discussed almost daily today (eg cloning).
Some books have both ideas and plot, but they are farther in between. And then someone makes a really crappy movie out of it.
I know the feeling. Though if the person is bottom posting and hasn't snipped stuff in the text then his/her opinion is probably not worth much in any case. ;-)
Though I don't really care. I prefer it the way it is on eg Slashdot where you have to make an effort to actually quote stuff. Keeps the noise down a lot.
I've talked to companies which make these types of tools and asked the same question. The simple answer is that a normal CDRom is just not built for advanced testing. Testing drives have specific hardware to detect errors that a normal CD can't. Naturally these errors don't influence the percieved quality of the product, since they can't be measured by standard hardware. However it can demonstrate problems with the manufacturing process.
A good reason for consumers to not buy pirated anime (or other HK stuff) is that the quality is often abysmal. I'd rather not pay for stuff that is lower quality than stuff you can download.