I just finished the 'Whipping Star' and am in the middle of 'The Dosadi Experiment'. It's odd how when you learn of something new, you keep noticing it everywhere.
I worked in the school library for the last 2 years of undergrad and am now a research assistant at the reference desk. That assistantship pays for my tuition plus a stipend that covers rent+utilities. Oddly, this is less then what I was making when I was in undergrad. I work more now(20hrs grad/12hours undergrad) and make about $500 less per semester. There are some awesome grants available to undergrads.
There are quite a few problems with operator overloading.
No language that I know of currently allows you to change precedence or associativity of operators. Math with matrices requires different operator precedence. This is a HUGE omission/bug in every language I know of. You can fully parenthesize everything and get past this bug, but that is a kludgy solution at best and fraught with errors.
Limited number of symbols, Ideally you should be able to use any group of chars as an operator. I think something like "x=1... 9;" would be REALLY handy, but alas, I don't know a language that lets you make up your own operators.
Besides the above; it's nice to know you are working purely with primitives when you see +, -, *, etc. This has been partly been destroyed by Java 1.5's autoboxing, but only partially.
Just wondering, why are you an HD-DVD supporter. Personally, BluRay won me with its better specification.
HD-DVD: 2 layer today: 3 layers in spec/lab: 15GB/layer
BluRay: 2 layer today: 8 layers in spec/lab: 25GB/layer
All drives in both formats are SUPPOSED to support all 3 or 8 layers when those discs ship.
Pretty much everybody uses either inches or cm as a unit. I don't think any serious word processors still fit layout to pixels.
Open up OpenOffice and type "aaaaa"; then use a magnification tool to look at the pixels that make up the letters, all of the 'a' chars will all be different. The same thing should apply for all Office suites. Most everyday programs still fit letters to pixels because it's faster, but it's trivial to make letters straddle pixels on 100Mhz+ computers.
It's rare to see a printer that doesn't do 300dpi, so even if a printer can't straddle a pixel the placement will look perfect to humans.
A monitor today is usually ~100dpi, and with sub-pixel rendering you bump that up to 300dpi * 100dpi for LCDs. When you add in the extra perceived resolution you get from anti-aliasing you have enough precision to not have any blurriness/unevenness.
My school switched from giving degrees in "Computer Science" to "Computing" just before I graduated... pisses me off my transcript says "Computing". Anyhoo, for undergrad I dual concentrated in IT and Information Systems(INSS) with a minor in Accountancy. I'm currently getting my Master's of Computer Science, so I'll end up with degrees in CS, IT, and IS with a little business.
At my School the average IT student is... well... not well equipped to... talk.
Megatexturing is ID's newest rendering thingy. Actually Megatexuring looks to be identical to SGI's cliptexture technique ( http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/getdoc .cgi?coll=0650&db=bks&srch=&fname=/SGI_Developer/P erf_PG/sgi_html/ch15.html ).
Anyhoo, cliptexturing doesn't use repeating textures throughout a level, it arranges the textures on the disc so that they can be streamed in to memory as needed. This gives you worlds where you don't have to repeat textures/objects as often and makes everything more dynamic. The 360 or PS3 will be using at least 300MB or RAM for textures, so it's easy to see how this will eat up drive space. Both consoles natively use compressed textures so you can't save much drive space by trying to compress the textures on the disc further. It looks like cliptexturing really only works well for landscapes, but that is still a large chunk of the textures.
Games using cliptexturing are due out for all consoles and Mac/Win sometime in 2008.
Not that it really matters, but evidently 4-layer(100GB) Blu-Ray discs are very manufacturable(there just isn't any reason), and all Blu-Ray drives "should" support discs of at least 8 layers(200GB).
I doubt GTA IV will be multi-DVD9, but it is possible.
In this case he is talking about resizing an HFS+ disk so that you can create a NTFS partition for Windows. I ran into trouble with bootcamp's resizer and had to use GNU Parted to shrink my Mac's disk. GNU Parted supports shrinking just about every file system, although it can't enlarge HFS partitions while bootcamp's resizer can.
Well a cursory glance over the patent looks like you are right.
Each claim of the patent either says "an output signal emitter affixable to the housing and responsive to output signals provided by the electronic circuit to wirelessly emit the output signals for reception by the electronically responsive system." or is a dependent claim that references a claim that has that phrase.
I'm guessing by "LoS" you mean "Location of Service", which is just another way of saying the Wii-Mote triangulates its X,Y,Z position in space via infra-red. While it's not confirmed I doubt the Wii-mote also has accelerometers for XYZ because they would get interference by the rumble feature (one of them would have to be anyway). Triangulating the position of the remote via an infra-red bar is one way to counter putting rumble in the remote, but it does have the drawback of needing to have line-of-site to the sensor bar, which to me is a pretty big drawback.
I have the same type of accelerometers in my laptop that they are going to be using in these new controllers and they don't drift much if at all over time. I have left a carpenters level program running on my computer for weeks and it gives the same readings the whole time. Ask around about this program and you will find there is almost no drift on Apple's accelerometers.
Software filtering seems like it might work, but it would have to screw with the precision. The cost of rumble doesn't just include the cost of fixing the problem but also the actual mechanisms that rumble, like a higher capacity battery, motors, and weights. I wouldn't doubt that a rumbling controller with similar battery life would cost twice as much to make.
The SIXAXIS seems like the best controller for the next-gen consoles. The 360' controller is just boring and the rechargeable batteries cost extra. The WiiMote looks really neat, but it doesn't come with rechargeable batteries either and it will require line-of-site to get it's X,Y,Z positional info. The PS3 has a standard rechargeable battery and works completely on bluetooth(no Infra-Red). Even if I don't end up getting a PS3 I'll probably pick up a SIXAXIS for my laptop.
Early adopters are always cheated, you either need to have some patients or you need to have disposable money. If you just recently bought your 360 then get ready to feel even more cheated since the 360 is due for a price drop.
The flaw announced by SecureWorks was supposedly in a third-party wireless driver for MacOS, not Airport. The article says SecureWorks never gave any proof of a flaw in Apple's drivers, but that they audited them because of SecureWorks announcement and that these patches are the result.
Apple is still adamant that SecureWorks didn't find any flaws.
Novell still has a lot of great software. I think they have the best webmail interface, although it's free Hula is a free version of Novell's NetMail. If I was implementing a webmail solution right now I would definately lean towards Novell's NetMail w/ eDirectory.
Do you watch "HD" TV through a pair of VHF rabbit ears on top of your TV? Upscaling with a good filter can make some standard def stuff look better, but it falls on it's face compared to 720p and isn't even comparable to 1080. I usually watch DVDs on a DLP projector upscaling them to the 1024x768 screen and they look really really good, but it's still not comparable to the quality of the Blu-Ray 1080p demo units I've seen in Best Buy.
Re:before people complain
on
The Wii Takes NYC
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I think the $250 is the right price. If it was priced under $200 it wouldn't seem next-gen at all, but looking at the specs they couldn't charge much more than $200 with a straight face. Bundling a game makes the Wii seem like a good value when it's sitting next to the still more expensive yet stupidly stripped down 360 core and $500 PS3. If your kid decides he wants a 360 you have a minimum of $450(premium + game) and I doubt many parents will even have the option to pick up a PS3.
Personally I don't see what the big fuss about a $100 difference between the 360 and PS3 is all about, and I don't think the buying public will think it's a big deal either. The 360 and PS3 are both in the "damn pricey for a toy" category, while the Wii falls into the "pricey for a toy" category. If you already have a HD TV I think the $600 PS3 looks like a deal since you can use it to watch HD movies.
Don't bring those damn statistics and facts in here. Slashdot belongs to the blogosphere and in the blogosphere the 360 ROCKS and the PS3 is Sony's greatest failure.
Bose may be insanely priced, but at least they have products that are actually superior to the competition. The Bose Wave is stupidly expensive, but it does sound wonderful. My parents own one of those high-end Wave systems and it is a REALLY AWESOME system. You can put together a system that sounds as good for half the price, but it will be at least twice as big and much harder to setup. Monster cables offer no value whatsoever.
Ya, and $400 is also way too much. Only crazy people will be buying a 360 or a PS3 anytime soon($300 is the sweet spot). If you were in the market for a High-Def player the PS3 would be a good deal and anyone crazy enough to shell out $400 for a 360 you would probably shell out $100-$200 more for a high-def movie player which retail for $500+.
Slashdot Mirror
Weird...
I just finished the 'Whipping Star' and am in the middle of 'The Dosadi Experiment'. It's odd how when you learn of something new, you keep noticing it everywhere.
I have just started my MS in CSCI.
I worked in the school library for the last 2 years of undergrad and am now a research assistant at the reference desk. That assistantship pays for my tuition plus a stipend that covers rent+utilities. Oddly, this is less then what I was making when I was in undergrad. I work more now(20hrs grad/12hours undergrad) and make about $500 less per semester. There are some awesome grants available to undergrads.
- No language that I know of currently allows you to change precedence or associativity of operators. Math with matrices requires different operator precedence. This is a HUGE omission/bug in every language I know of. You can fully parenthesize everything and get past this bug, but that is a kludgy solution at best and fraught with errors.
- Limited number of symbols, Ideally you should be able to use any group of chars as an operator. I think something like "x=1
... 9;" would be REALLY handy, but alas, I don't know a language that lets you make up your own operators.
- Abuse; It does get abused
Besides the above; it's nice to know you are working purely with primitives when you see +, -, *, etc. This has been partly been destroyed by Java 1.5's autoboxing, but only partially.Just wondering, why are you an HD-DVD supporter. Personally, BluRay won me with its better specification. HD-DVD: 2 layer today: 3 layers in spec/lab: 15GB/layer BluRay: 2 layer today: 8 layers in spec/lab: 25GB/layer All drives in both formats are SUPPOSED to support all 3 or 8 layers when those discs ship.
Pretty much everybody uses either inches or cm as a unit. I don't think any serious word processors still fit layout to pixels.
Open up OpenOffice and type "aaaaa"; then use a magnification tool to look at the pixels that make up the letters, all of the 'a' chars will all be different. The same thing should apply for all Office suites. Most everyday programs still fit letters to pixels because it's faster, but it's trivial to make letters straddle pixels on 100Mhz+ computers.
It's rare to see a printer that doesn't do 300dpi, so even if a printer can't straddle a pixel the placement will look perfect to humans.
A monitor today is usually ~100dpi, and with sub-pixel rendering you bump that up to 300dpi * 100dpi for LCDs. When you add in the extra perceived resolution you get from anti-aliasing you have enough precision to not have any blurriness/unevenness.
My school switched from giving degrees in "Computer Science" to "Computing" just before I graduated... pisses me off my transcript says "Computing". Anyhoo, for undergrad I dual concentrated in IT and Information Systems(INSS) with a minor in Accountancy. I'm currently getting my Master's of Computer Science, so I'll end up with degrees in CS, IT, and IS with a little business.
At my School the average IT student is... well... not well equipped to... talk.
Megatexturing is ID's newest rendering thingy. Actually Megatexuring looks to be identical to SGI's cliptexture technique ( http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/getdoc .cgi?coll=0650&db=bks&srch=&fname=/SGI_Developer/P erf_PG/sgi_html/ch15.html ).
Anyhoo, cliptexturing doesn't use repeating textures throughout a level, it arranges the textures on the disc so that they can be streamed in to memory as needed. This gives you worlds where you don't have to repeat textures/objects as often and makes everything more dynamic. The 360 or PS3 will be using at least 300MB or RAM for textures, so it's easy to see how this will eat up drive space. Both consoles natively use compressed textures so you can't save much drive space by trying to compress the textures on the disc further. It looks like cliptexturing really only works well for landscapes, but that is still a large chunk of the textures.
Games using cliptexturing are due out for all consoles and Mac/Win sometime in 2008.
Not that it really matters, but evidently 4-layer(100GB) Blu-Ray discs are very manufacturable(there just isn't any reason), and all Blu-Ray drives "should" support discs of at least 8 layers(200GB). I doubt GTA IV will be multi-DVD9, but it is possible.
Looks like iBar? http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6509090414 611358862&q=bar+projectors&hl=en
This stuff has been around for awhile...
In this case he is talking about resizing an HFS+ disk so that you can create a NTFS partition for Windows. I ran into trouble with bootcamp's resizer and had to use GNU Parted to shrink my Mac's disk. GNU Parted supports shrinking just about every file system, although it can't enlarge HFS partitions while bootcamp's resizer can.
Well a cursory glance over the patent looks like you are right.
Each claim of the patent either says "an output signal emitter affixable to the housing and responsive to output signals provided by the electronic circuit to wirelessly emit the output signals for reception by the electronically responsive system." or is a dependent claim that references a claim that has that phrase.
You can look at the patent at http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6850221.html
The PS3 comes with a one year warranty from Sony
I'm guessing by "LoS" you mean "Location of Service", which is just another way of saying the Wii-Mote triangulates its X,Y,Z position in space via infra-red. While it's not confirmed I doubt the Wii-mote also has accelerometers for XYZ because they would get interference by the rumble feature (one of them would have to be anyway). Triangulating the position of the remote via an infra-red bar is one way to counter putting rumble in the remote, but it does have the drawback of needing to have line-of-site to the sensor bar, which to me is a pretty big drawback. I have the same type of accelerometers in my laptop that they are going to be using in these new controllers and they don't drift much if at all over time. I have left a carpenters level program running on my computer for weeks and it gives the same readings the whole time. Ask around about this program and you will find there is almost no drift on Apple's accelerometers.
Software filtering seems like it might work, but it would have to screw with the precision. The cost of rumble doesn't just include the cost of fixing the problem but also the actual mechanisms that rumble, like a higher capacity battery, motors, and weights. I wouldn't doubt that a rumbling controller with similar battery life would cost twice as much to make. The SIXAXIS seems like the best controller for the next-gen consoles. The 360' controller is just boring and the rechargeable batteries cost extra. The WiiMote looks really neat, but it doesn't come with rechargeable batteries either and it will require line-of-site to get it's X,Y,Z positional info. The PS3 has a standard rechargeable battery and works completely on bluetooth(no Infra-Red). Even if I don't end up getting a PS3 I'll probably pick up a SIXAXIS for my laptop.
oops, all well, I really wish there was a way to make revisions sometimes...
Early adopters are always cheated, you either need to have some patients or you need to have disposable money. If you just recently bought your 360 then get ready to feel even more cheated since the 360 is due for a price drop.
3 rotational axes(pitch, roll, and yaw) and and the 3 regular axes(x, y, z).
The Wii has 2 gamecube memory slots on the console, so yes and no.
The flaw announced by SecureWorks was supposedly in a third-party wireless driver for MacOS, not Airport. The article says SecureWorks never gave any proof of a flaw in Apple's drivers, but that they audited them because of SecureWorks announcement and that these patches are the result.
Apple is still adamant that SecureWorks didn't find any flaws.
Novell still has a lot of great software. I think they have the best webmail interface, although it's free Hula is a free version of Novell's NetMail. If I was implementing a webmail solution right now I would definately lean towards Novell's NetMail w/ eDirectory.
Do you watch "HD" TV through a pair of VHF rabbit ears on top of your TV? Upscaling with a good filter can make some standard def stuff look better, but it falls on it's face compared to 720p and isn't even comparable to 1080. I usually watch DVDs on a DLP projector upscaling them to the 1024x768 screen and they look really really good, but it's still not comparable to the quality of the Blu-Ray 1080p demo units I've seen in Best Buy.
I think the $250 is the right price. If it was priced under $200 it wouldn't seem next-gen at all, but looking at the specs they couldn't charge much more than $200 with a straight face. Bundling a game makes the Wii seem like a good value when it's sitting next to the still more expensive yet stupidly stripped down 360 core and $500 PS3. If your kid decides he wants a 360 you have a minimum of $450(premium + game) and I doubt many parents will even have the option to pick up a PS3.
Personally I don't see what the big fuss about a $100 difference between the 360 and PS3 is all about, and I don't think the buying public will think it's a big deal either. The 360 and PS3 are both in the "damn pricey for a toy" category, while the Wii falls into the "pricey for a toy" category. If you already have a HD TV I think the $600 PS3 looks like a deal since you can use it to watch HD movies.
Don't bring those damn statistics and facts in here. Slashdot belongs to the blogosphere and in the blogosphere the 360 ROCKS and the PS3 is Sony's greatest failure.
Bose may be insanely priced, but at least they have products that are actually superior to the competition. The Bose Wave is stupidly expensive, but it does sound wonderful. My parents own one of those high-end Wave systems and it is a REALLY AWESOME system. You can put together a system that sounds as good for half the price, but it will be at least twice as big and much harder to setup. Monster cables offer no value whatsoever.
Ya, and $400 is also way too much. Only crazy people will be buying a 360 or a PS3 anytime soon($300 is the sweet spot). If you were in the market for a High-Def player the PS3 would be a good deal and anyone crazy enough to shell out $400 for a 360 you would probably shell out $100-$200 more for a high-def movie player which retail for $500+.