This is not very impressive for 3 years in production for what other comments are saying is a 5-8 minute film. From the few seconds I could see some things like hair and eyeballs were rendered quite beautifully, but when motion started to happen it just looked weird, jumpy, and crappy. Nice textures and lighting, bad animation.
According to this the over 50 crowd is the fastest growing sales group for video games:
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Story?id=4132153.
So maybe the average age of internet users is also closer to 50? The most likely thing we're seeing here is that the whole country is just getting old.
As i see it there is the classic problem of lazy professors assigning the same tasks to students year after decade, and then there is the problem of real time student collaboration.
For the first category, what sounds like the more costly option? : 1. The prof saves time by asking the same questions every year, but memorizes every prior response that was given and constantly scans the net for prior students posting their answers. This can get particularly time consuming if the prof borrowed the questions from their own undergraduate education/adviser/someone else. 2. The prof has to spend a little time every semester coming up with a slightly original idea or a variation on an idea, then grades all the papers that come in with the same level of scrutiny as the papers that would have come in if the idea was the same as last semester.
The second category: Realtime sharing (collaboration) is a bit more tricky, and actually has a lot of social twists and turns depending on the situation. Like most good folk i come from a software background academically--where you are regularly assigned to write working software to some spec. Out in the real world you are also assigned problems like this, but you have to interface and work with a whole bunch of people (and not just other programmers) to actually get anything done. At least as far as my universe seems to work, the ability for people to work as independent little islands seems completely pointless. It really doesn't matter how unfucking believably brilliant your solution to the problems of the universe are if you can't express them meaningfully to others in a way they can use. Unfortunately people that fall into this brilliant but essentially useless classification commonly end up teaching.
Academia should continue to hold high standards about outright plagairism from unrelated sources, but it should be much more open to original collaboration among groups of students. This is how the real world works. If there is fear that dipshits will slip through because of the effort of others, than the ante just needs to be raised by asking questions to collaborative groups that no single individual could reasonably answer in time.
The images are already pretty out of date. I live in portland so i did a virtual stroll up broadway to see if i could spot anybody i knew. There were some businesses shown that i thought went out of business last year. I went up Harrison and it showed the street like it was before it was torn up for a light rail extension, which had to have begun at least a year ago.
Anyone else remember Rupert Sheldrake's "Seven Experiments that could change the world"? Sheldrake has a lot of odd probably crackpot theories, but one of his better ones was the idea of a morphogenetic field theory, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphogenetic_field to explain both the shapes and behaviors of organisms, a sort of subatomic field effect that worked in conjunction with DNA. The best evidence he had involved the creation of new synthetic compounds that would be extremely unlikely to ever occur naturally. It turned out that the more often people created the compounds over time the molecules would appear to form more quickly. Most people had written this off as anomolous, or just a side effect of more experience in creating the compound. Sheldrake made the conclusion that the universe was building a "memory" of the atomic state of the new compound and was more prone to falling into such a state after it had been observed previously as it had "learned" the shape previously. Now this subatomic darwinism business is sure sounding a lot like these people are inferring a "memory" to the universe, so maybe the morphogenetic field theory isn't quite so odd as it sounds.
Yeah, i'm going to have to go with a lot of the other posts on this one, weather prediction is really pretty useless. I live in the pacific northwest, our weather isn't just rain every day, our weather changes rapidly due mostly to ocean conditions. The weather predictions over here are just terrible, almost completely useless. The only thing all of this satellite weather data seems to be good for is making fancy graphics for the weather man to stand in front of and make his false predictions.
Knowing where a hurricane might hit land is a good thing, but its such a large and obvious weather pattern i'm highly doubtful that any human interference could hide it. Other than that is there any sort of weather prediction that people find "vital", and is this prediction only possible through satellite data (i.e. just looking outside won't tip you)?
now if only all the object database folks weren't going bankrupt, or being mismanaged into the ground...
Just about any example you can think of can probably be solved with an rdbms (and maybe some code interacting with it), it just might be really slow and overly complex because you're trying to smash your "real world" model into tables. Slow because the optimizer is most likely pretty stupid and can't make a good plan that has more than a handful of joins (which you'll end up having with a complex design) and it can't do a damned thing about outside code that fiddles with SQL results.
$250 is expensive now? God, these kind of article posts really show the juvenile nature of this site. Think of what $250 really means, if you have employees making ~$80k a year (which is a fairly good estimate, at least where i live) then this costs less than paying 1 person 1 day. If 1 employee manages to save over 6 hours in wasted time over the lifetime of the product, hey it just paid for itself! You're not just buying a kernel here, you're getting a whole "enterprise solution". People don't buy into solaris because its the fastest or the most reliable unix, but because you can solve problems with it in less time (which equals less $) using reliable bundled software.
bored geeks mercilessly devouring the download limit of free sites...I can't help but find it amusing that this guys decay information has just decayed.
I didn't mean to imply that a direction at any one point implied a "grand plan". That might imply i had some sort of religious belief, something i don't want to imply while arguing against evolution, heh heh.
But a species can't evolve to be selectively fit against "some random bad thing", it has to be "some bad thing that happens fairly frequently and usually comes in this form". People are breeding like crazy across the whole planet, and freely traveling across the whole planet, in order to have any statistical effect on what favored the passing of genes there would have to some test of fitness that was common and consistent for humans across the whole planet. Something that consistently kills us off before we can successfully breed. I can think of no such situation, at least not one that would stand up to even rudimentary medical technology. Because there is hardly any difference one way or the other what your genetics are in terms of your ability to reproduce, the vector of the species genetic change is isotropic. So even though selective pressure may not have stopped, the variance between what allows one individual to survive and what allows another to survive is great enough to not effect the species as a whole.
Whats required to evolve is something that would give a good test of fitness:
something like a natural disaster of extinction level proportions, or some global plague with a bit more bite than AIDs (ebola?).
aww, its too early to think about this kind of stuff on a sunday morning! Its all just wild conjecture anyways, not like we can check who's right for a really, really long time.
this really isn't that silly of an article.
Its not unimaginable that the 3rd world of today, in a century or so, will have the same benefits of medical technology that developed countries have today. It starts with simple things--cheap glasses mean you don't die if your eyesight is very poor, thats one less test of fitness for passing on your genes. If we slowly but surely remove all tests of fitness (even infertility!) then there is no particular direction the species is going, which would be the same as the end of evolution.
The only sort of thing that will return us to an evolutionary path is something that reintroduces live-or-die tests of genetic fitness. This would be something like a natural disaster of extinction level proportions, or some global plague with a bit more bite than AIDs (ebola?). Some people have mentioned possible evolution in isolated space colonies, call me a pessimist, but i think something like the 2 possibilities i mentioned are more likely...
this just means that they have a compiler on their target platform that can compile the source code to the compiler. To compile something just means to put the high level language into a form that the metal+OS can deal with it. SO, by compiling the compiler on the target platform they are demonstrating that they have an effective compiler for at least that subset of the language that is used to write the compiler.
how do you think new versions of gcc get compiled anyway?
Believing that acadamec experiments with fpga's and genetic algorithms are going to produce commercially viable consumer products is the sure sign of a crackpot:
"Martin predicts that in as little as 10 years, what he calls breeding factories-- vast buildings as big as a General Motors assembly plant filled with parallel-processing supercomputers-- will dot the Earth. Such factories will breed software and field-programmable chips capable of astounding feats, then spread their products worldwide via the Internet."
the problem with this is, most people like to have assurances of correctness for products, not "gee, guess it works. Don't really know how or why, but who cares, right?" I'll make my own bold prediction, instead of breeding software that behaves in unpredictable ways we'll continue the trend in creating more higher level languages that abstract away dependence on knowledge of hardware and focus more on expressing correct solutions.
oh yeah, CASE sucks...
http://www.emsl.pnl.gov:2080/docs/collab/
i worked on this as undergrad, its been along going steadily for years. There are other DOE notebook projects at Berkeley and Oak Ridge--they all supposedly can share data with each other.
...in the post preview section slashdot seems to be peeling off the:2080 in my URL for some unknown reason. If you can't get to the site paste the link in and it should work.
I'm not quite as quick as most here to completely dismiss this stuff as impossible. They might be eggarating a bit, but more likely than not they've got some pretty clever ways of storing a lot of data on a small area over at Keele. People have proposed gee-whiz storage stuff for years, gotten working prototypes in the lab, but have yet to produce something which has the combo of cheapness and speed of the trusty harddrive. If they have figured out a way to get storage anywhere near what they are talking about, at anywhere near $50, conventional wisdom leads me to guess that the read speed has got to be abysmal. I'm not ready to throw out my harddrives quite yet...
Yeah, i know what you are talking about, about training the mind to see colors better. Over the years i've become much more adept at differentiating colors. When i was a little kid i could only vaguely tell the difference between the primary colors, but over time i've learned to notice the subtle shading differences (how bright or dark they seem from red, blue, green) between colors, so now i can "see" color, almost. If an object is of a good enough size that i can see light reflecting from it from different angles i can judge its shade, and i can tell you its color--but those damn little dots on color test are too small so i can't tell there shade well enough. Interestingly enough, if someone points out to me the pattern i'm supposed to see i can stare at it a little while and finally see the color difference and the pattern appears.
I was always told that color blindness was caused by some sort of difficiency in the rods and cones of the eyes, but i never really believed it--i always thought it was a defect of the brain and still do (at least for partial color blindness). If it were simply an ailment of the eye, how come i can see more colors now than i could 20+ years ago? I've also seen the odd effect that when looking at a convex bicycle mirror i can see not only a slightly distorted image, but damn near perfect color (as far as i could tell)--the mirror seemed to stretch out the differences in shades somehow and i could interpret the colors properly. I doubt that a defect in the hardware of the eye that differentiates colors could be cured by such a thing, but a tweak like that could work if it was the software of the brain that was misinterpreting a signal from the eye.
Yeah, you probably are. I'm color blind too, and this color modeling crap always bothered me since i first saw it. It doesn't take a genius to figure out most coders are male, and that a good number of males (more than female) are color blind. I've been subscribing to the Coad Letter for a while, which finally sprang back to life a couple of months ago, full of these color diagrams. If they just made a damn bit of effort to do things like use a dark green instead of a bright yellow-green i could probably tell the difference between their choices of yellow and green just by shade, but noooooooo! There is probably other colors that are too close to each other in shade for me to differentiate, but how the hell could i know, i'm frigging color blind! Damned Coad letter....
heh heh couldn't resist, its my fav language--and apparently pretty well liked by corporate america as well. Now if only the damn gui's worked as well as the servlets...(and no, jdk1.3's client hotspot did NOT fix the speed problem).
i always do the right-click-open-in-new-window thingy because slashdot takes so damn long to load, so i didn't notice that there is a problem with going back (i was looking for the fly-ups of doom). Easily solved of course if you just hold the back button down and get a little list of where you want to go back to...I don't believe that this was done as a malicious act though, just stupidity. They're using this tiny little script they got off the net somewhere "detect_flash.js" (52 lines including comments and extra carriage returns) that quickly redirects you to different pages if you have(n't) flash, which is why you can't get back from that page. Classic case of a webpage hobbled together by danged artist-types using flash...
not only that, but there only appeared to be "benign" java scripts, at least that i encountered. There were no repeatedly popping up windows that wouldn't go away, just a script to figure out what browser you had and then pop up ONE window to make it easier to navigate. Didn't seem very rude to me. Not nearly as annoying as those ugly geocities fly up ads, for example.
where i'm from we actually get our electricity from hydroelectric dams (and a few oh-so-safe nuclear reactors, but not much from them anymore) so there would be no fossil fuel burning to get the power for electric cars here. Electric cars are a "good thing" because you are not locked in to one source of generating electricity. You mentioned corn, well you could use corn to generate electricity--as could hydro, hydrogen, good 'ol petrol, solar, wind, dog powered tread mills, and eventually fusion. All you have to do is refine the electric motor and electric storage technology to make it a more viable platform for transport (or whatever), then it is irrelevant where you get your fuel source from. You can make electricity from hydro dams--but environmentalists want the dams taken down to save salmon--switch to making electricity from corn--drought or famine or something skyrockets the price of corn--quick, try to switch over to making electricity from hydrogen--etc. etc.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not very impressive for 3 years in production for what other comments are saying is a 5-8 minute film. From the few seconds I could see some things like hair and eyeballs were rendered quite beautifully, but when motion started to happen it just looked weird, jumpy, and crappy. Nice textures and lighting, bad animation.
According to this the over 50 crowd is the fastest growing sales group for video games:
http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Story?id=4132153.
So maybe the average age of internet users is also closer to 50? The most likely thing we're seeing here is that the whole country is just getting old.
Salsa Picante Shrimp
I'm simmering a fresh Cup Noodles right now to mark the passing. So, any other favorites?
As i see it there is the classic problem of lazy professors assigning the same tasks to students year after decade, and then there is the problem of real time student collaboration.
For the first category, what sounds like the more costly option? :
1. The prof saves time by asking the same questions every year, but memorizes every prior response that was given and constantly scans the net for prior students posting their answers. This can get particularly time consuming if the prof borrowed the questions from their own undergraduate education/adviser/someone else.
2. The prof has to spend a little time every semester coming up with a slightly original idea or a variation on an idea, then grades all the papers that come in with the same level of scrutiny as the papers that would have come in if the idea was the same as last semester.
The second category:
Realtime sharing (collaboration) is a bit more tricky, and actually has a lot of social twists and turns depending on the situation. Like most good folk i come from a software background academically--where you are regularly assigned to write working software to some spec. Out in the real world you are also assigned problems like this, but you have to interface and work with a whole bunch of people (and not just other programmers) to actually get anything done. At least as far as my universe seems to work, the ability for people to work as independent little islands seems completely pointless. It really doesn't matter how unfucking believably brilliant your solution to the problems of the universe are if you can't express them meaningfully to others in a way they can use. Unfortunately people that fall into this brilliant but essentially useless classification commonly end up teaching.
Academia should continue to hold high standards about outright plagairism from unrelated sources, but it should be much more open to original collaboration among groups of students. This is how the real world works. If there is fear that dipshits will slip through because of the effort of others, than the ante just needs to be raised by asking questions to collaborative groups that no single individual could reasonably answer in time.
The images are already pretty out of date. I live in portland so i did a virtual stroll up broadway to see if i could spot anybody i knew. There were some businesses shown that i thought went out of business last year. I went up Harrison and it showed the street like it was before it was torn up for a light rail extension, which had to have begun at least a year ago.
Anyone else remember Rupert Sheldrake's "Seven Experiments that could change the world"? Sheldrake has a lot of odd probably crackpot theories, but one of his better ones was the idea of a morphogenetic field theory, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphogenetic_field to explain both the shapes and behaviors of organisms, a sort of subatomic field effect that worked in conjunction with DNA. The best evidence he had involved the creation of new synthetic compounds that would be extremely unlikely to ever occur naturally. It turned out that the more often people created the compounds over time the molecules would appear to form more quickly. Most people had written this off as anomolous, or just a side effect of more experience in creating the compound. Sheldrake made the conclusion that the universe was building a "memory" of the atomic state of the new compound and was more prone to falling into such a state after it had been observed previously as it had "learned" the shape previously. Now this subatomic darwinism business is sure sounding a lot like these people are inferring a "memory" to the universe, so maybe the morphogenetic field theory isn't quite so odd as it sounds.
Yeah, i'm going to have to go with a lot of the other posts on this one, weather prediction is really pretty useless. I live in the pacific northwest, our weather isn't just rain every day, our weather changes rapidly due mostly to ocean conditions. The weather predictions over here are just terrible, almost completely useless. The only thing all of this satellite weather data seems to be good for is making fancy graphics for the weather man to stand in front of and make his false predictions.
Knowing where a hurricane might hit land is a good thing, but its such a large and obvious weather pattern i'm highly doubtful that any human interference could hide it. Other than that is there any sort of weather prediction that people find "vital", and is this prediction only possible through satellite data (i.e. just looking outside won't tip you)?
Bruce Eckel's "Thinking in Java" can be added as a java book.
now if only all the object database folks weren't going bankrupt, or being mismanaged into the ground...
Just about any example you can think of can probably be solved with an rdbms (and maybe some code interacting with it), it just might be really slow and overly complex because you're trying to smash your "real world" model into tables. Slow because the optimizer is most likely pretty stupid and can't make a good plan that has more than a handful of joins (which you'll end up having with a complex design) and it can't do a damned thing about outside code that fiddles with SQL results.
$250 is expensive now? God, these kind of article posts really show the juvenile nature of this site. Think of what $250 really means, if you have employees making ~$80k a year (which is a fairly good estimate, at least where i live) then this costs less than paying 1 person 1 day. If 1 employee manages to save over 6 hours in wasted time over the lifetime of the product, hey it just paid for itself! You're not just buying a kernel here, you're getting a whole "enterprise solution". People don't buy into solaris because its the fastest or the most reliable unix, but because you can solve problems with it in less time (which equals less $) using reliable bundled software.
bored geeks mercilessly devouring the download limit of free sites...I can't help but find it amusing that this guys decay information has just decayed.
yeah, but heres the good pic.
But a species can't evolve to be selectively fit against "some random bad thing", it has to be "some bad thing that happens fairly frequently and usually comes in this form". People are breeding like crazy across the whole planet, and freely traveling across the whole planet, in order to have any statistical effect on what favored the passing of genes there would have to some test of fitness that was common and consistent for humans across the whole planet. Something that consistently kills us off before we can successfully breed. I can think of no such situation, at least not one that would stand up to even rudimentary medical technology. Because there is hardly any difference one way or the other what your genetics are in terms of your ability to reproduce, the vector of the species genetic change is isotropic. So even though selective pressure may not have stopped, the variance between what allows one individual to survive and what allows another to survive is great enough to not effect the species as a whole.
Whats required to evolve is something that would give a good test of fitness:
something like a natural disaster of extinction level proportions, or some global plague with a bit more bite than AIDs (ebola?).
aww, its too early to think about this kind of stuff on a sunday morning! Its all just wild conjecture anyways, not like we can check who's right for a really, really long time.
this really isn't that silly of an article.
Its not unimaginable that the 3rd world of today, in a century or so, will have the same benefits of medical technology that developed countries have today. It starts with simple things--cheap glasses mean you don't die if your eyesight is very poor, thats one less test of fitness for passing on your genes. If we slowly but surely remove all tests of fitness (even infertility!) then there is no particular direction the species is going, which would be the same as the end of evolution.
The only sort of thing that will return us to an evolutionary path is something that reintroduces live-or-die tests of genetic fitness. This would be something like a natural disaster of extinction level proportions, or some global plague with a bit more bite than AIDs (ebola?). Some people have mentioned possible evolution in isolated space colonies, call me a pessimist, but i think something like the 2 possibilities i mentioned are more likely...
I've never had a problem once using hibernate on win2k, i'll hibernate out my laptop everynight for a month or two and never actually reboot.
The funniest thing i ever noticed was when i hibernated while a CD was playing in winamp. When i restarted the CD started playing before i logged in.
this just means that they have a compiler on their target platform that can compile the source code to the compiler. To compile something just means to put the high level language into a form that the metal+OS can deal with it. SO, by compiling the compiler on the target platform they are demonstrating that they have an effective compiler for at least that subset of the language that is used to write the compiler.
how do you think new versions of gcc get compiled anyway?
Believing that acadamec experiments with fpga's and genetic algorithms are going to produce commercially viable consumer products is the sure sign of a crackpot:
"Martin predicts that in as little as 10 years, what he calls breeding factories-- vast buildings as big as a General Motors assembly plant filled with parallel-processing supercomputers-- will dot the Earth. Such factories will breed software and field-programmable chips capable of astounding feats, then spread their products worldwide via the Internet."
the problem with this is, most people like to have assurances of correctness for products, not "gee, guess it works. Don't really know how or why, but who cares, right?" I'll make my own bold prediction, instead of breeding software that behaves in unpredictable ways we'll continue the trend in creating more higher level languages that abstract away dependence on knowledge of hardware and focus more on expressing correct solutions.
oh yeah, CASE sucks...
http://www.emsl.pnl.gov:2080/docs/collab/
...in the post preview section slashdot seems to be peeling off the :2080 in my URL for some unknown reason. If you can't get to the site paste the link in and it should work.
i worked on this as undergrad, its been along going steadily for years. There are other DOE notebook projects at Berkeley and Oak Ridge--they all supposedly can share data with each other.
I'm not quite as quick as most here to completely dismiss this stuff as impossible. They might be eggarating a bit, but more likely than not they've got some pretty clever ways of storing a lot of data on a small area over at Keele. People have proposed gee-whiz storage stuff for years, gotten working prototypes in the lab, but have yet to produce something which has the combo of cheapness and speed of the trusty harddrive. If they have figured out a way to get storage anywhere near what they are talking about, at anywhere near $50, conventional wisdom leads me to guess that the read speed has got to be abysmal. I'm not ready to throw out my harddrives quite yet...
Yeah, i know what you are talking about, about training the mind to see colors better. Over the years i've become much more adept at differentiating colors. When i was a little kid i could only vaguely tell the difference between the primary colors, but over time i've learned to notice the subtle shading differences (how bright or dark they seem from red, blue, green) between colors, so now i can "see" color, almost. If an object is of a good enough size that i can see light reflecting from it from different angles i can judge its shade, and i can tell you its color--but those damn little dots on color test are too small so i can't tell there shade well enough. Interestingly enough, if someone points out to me the pattern i'm supposed to see i can stare at it a little while and finally see the color difference and the pattern appears.
I was always told that color blindness was caused by some sort of difficiency in the rods and cones of the eyes, but i never really believed it--i always thought it was a defect of the brain and still do (at least for partial color blindness). If it were simply an ailment of the eye, how come i can see more colors now than i could 20+ years ago? I've also seen the odd effect that when looking at a convex bicycle mirror i can see not only a slightly distorted image, but damn near perfect color (as far as i could tell)--the mirror seemed to stretch out the differences in shades somehow and i could interpret the colors properly. I doubt that a defect in the hardware of the eye that differentiates colors could be cured by such a thing, but a tweak like that could work if it was the software of the brain that was misinterpreting a signal from the eye.
Yeah, you probably are. I'm color blind too, and this color modeling crap always bothered me since i first saw it. It doesn't take a genius to figure out most coders are male, and that a good number of males (more than female) are color blind. I've been subscribing to the Coad Letter for a while, which finally sprang back to life a couple of months ago, full of these color diagrams. If they just made a damn bit of effort to do things like use a dark green instead of a bright yellow-green i could probably tell the difference between their choices of yellow and green just by shade, but noooooooo! There is probably other colors that are too close to each other in shade for me to differentiate, but how the hell could i know, i'm frigging color blind! Damned Coad letter....
heh heh couldn't resist, its my fav language--and apparently pretty well liked by corporate america as well. Now if only the damn gui's worked as well as the servlets...(and no, jdk1.3's client hotspot did NOT fix the speed problem).
i always do the right-click-open-in-new-window thingy because slashdot takes so damn long to load, so i didn't notice that there is a problem with going back (i was looking for the fly-ups of doom). Easily solved of course if you just hold the back button down and get a little list of where you want to go back to...I don't believe that this was done as a malicious act though, just stupidity. They're using this tiny little script they got off the net somewhere "detect_flash.js" (52 lines including comments and extra carriage returns) that quickly redirects you to different pages if you have(n't) flash, which is why you can't get back from that page. Classic case of a webpage hobbled together by danged artist-types using flash...
not only that, but there only appeared to be "benign" java scripts, at least that i encountered. There were no repeatedly popping up windows that wouldn't go away, just a script to figure out what browser you had and then pop up ONE window to make it easier to navigate. Didn't seem very rude to me. Not nearly as annoying as those ugly geocities fly up ads, for example.
where i'm from we actually get our electricity from hydroelectric dams (and a few oh-so-safe nuclear reactors, but not much from them anymore) so there would be no fossil fuel burning to get the power for electric cars here.
Electric cars are a "good thing" because you are not locked in to one source of generating electricity. You mentioned corn, well you could use corn to generate electricity--as could hydro, hydrogen, good 'ol petrol, solar, wind, dog powered tread mills, and eventually fusion. All you have to do is refine the electric motor and electric storage technology to make it a more viable platform for transport (or whatever), then it is irrelevant where you get your fuel source from.
You can make electricity from hydro dams--but environmentalists want the dams taken down to save salmon--switch to making electricity from corn--drought or famine or something skyrockets the price of corn--quick, try to switch over to making electricity from hydrogen--etc. etc.