I've found I like the light enough that its been worth buying them again. My old ones have either been moved into places where I want cooler light (garage, basement) or been given away to friends.
No you can still get the cooler ones. They actually come in a big range now, warmer ones like the 2700 degree ones, to 6k skylight sort of ones. I actually use 2700 degree bulbs in most of the house, 4500k or something in my basement (cheap-o ikea ones, I think they're about that). My kitchen has 2700 degree can lights over the work surfaces, but the "main" light fixture has two 200w (equivalent) 6k "daylight" bulbs for when I want LIGHT.
Look on the package for the color temperature of the bulb. You want 2700 degree ones (which match incandescent bulbs so closely, if you didn't know it was CFL you wouldn't guess it).
Up until recently (ie, the last six months or so) most of the bulbs you'd find in the typical discount stores were 4000-5000 degree.
Is for the big box stores to start carrying the dimmable CFL bulbs.
My house is almost entirely on dimmers. Its a ten year old rennovation of a 70 year old house. Modern McMansions are almost entirely on dimmers as well.
With all these dimmers out there, you'd think you'd be able to get dimmable CFL bulbs places other than the very occasional lighting shop or online.
I've switched essentially everything else in my house over at this point, except for the ones on dimmers.
Thats for antialiasing... and yes, it will consume more rays but there are other ways to handle antialiasing that don't need to cast another entire sequence of rays... especially if what you were looking for in a game was the sort of reflective and refractive effects you can't get with shaders. You don't need true RT accuracy, you just need a fast way of doing things you can't do with existing technology.
Plus, as I said in my first post on this, you just don't need that level of accuracy or detail if you're ray tracing something a user will see for 1/30th of a second. You can smooth jaggies algorithmically, since those edges will be moving anyway.
What really needs to be done is to track motion the way you would encoding for mpeg, and focus more ray casts in areas of low motion... do true RT antialiasing in still parts of the scene, do interpolated AA in the moving parts...
Thats because a reflection creates another ray segment, and a refraction creates two.
Considering a non-reflective ray traced world at 800x600 needs 320,000 rays to be cast to calculate an image, so 9,600,000 at 30fps, the claim of 450 million ray segments makes sense... thats 45+ per pixel at 800x600, which is a lot of reflections. Usually you'd limit the number to a fairly low because 100 deep reflections don't add noticable detail, especially in motion. Thats a lot of room for both refractive and reflective objects to be in the scenes.
I spent probably a total of 10-15 hours playing Cloning Clyde.
I've spent probably at least the same playing Bejeweled...
I bitch when I pay $10 to see a movie, but that only lasts 90 minutes. $10 for 10-15 hours of gameplay is a steal, in my book. Thats a far better deal than $60 for 20 or so (Tomb Raider, which was still fun, or Kameo which I got stuck in)
Hell, I think $10 for a game, and another $10 halfway through is GREAT, if I like the game. If it holds my attention I'm out $20. If not, I'm out $10.
The people at MS making decisions about Live know what they're doing. The loud cry of a few people on Slashdot doesn't map well to reality. You may not pay $10 for a legacy game, but someone who really liked it might. I know someone who bought Street Fighter on there. $10 is a pretty good deal for a few hours of entertainment in his mind. Just because YOU don't like it doesn't mean thats not a viable market. Just because YOU won't buy the game for $10 doesn't mean YOU will buy it for five, nor does it mean twice as many people will.
Contrary to popular belief on/., those decisions are not made by scribbing options on the floor of the conference room and having Ballmer toss a chair and see where it lands. Not many companies spend billions without a little bit of thought or market understanding.
The problem with the position you described in your reply is that its not really applicable to software development.
An engineer with 20 years experience knows a few things:
1) He hasn't had to reverse a linked list in 23 years. 2) There are framework functions to reverse a linked list. Who cares how they work.
Questions like that are VERY age-biased. Because only someone right out of school, or someone with their head so buried in the code would remember that on the spot. Experienced engineers will tell you how to manage the development process, how to write code that is engineered to be testable, can actually explain software architecture and will do a FAR better job solving real world problems.
Why? Even if you DO need to reverse a linked list in a situation where you can't use framework functions to do it, an experienced engineer can pretty easily punch in a few google keywords.
No amount of googling will give a kid out of school an understanding of how you really engineer software in the real world.
The only time I would consider asking questions like that to an experienced engineer (and I ripped off a similar one I got asked at Microsoft way back when during an interview today) is if I've already decided someone isn't a fit for some totally unrelated reason and I need a quick way to quantify that.
Anyone who has interviewed at that "online retailer" knows exactly what you're talking about. In fact, it leaves no doubt among those who have who you're talking about.
Its a silly process... they pride themselves on Google-esque hiring practices, but miss the boat. It was the one and only place with a process more rediculous than the Evil Empire(tm).
My suggestion? Laugh at the guys giving it who imagine themselves big fish in a big pond, leave confident you've got more experience then them, and go work at a company with a better corporate culture. They're a struggling company stuck in the dot-com mentality. Unless you like that (and I'd have to guess with 20 years experience, you've outgrown sardine can working conditions and ego trips), you'll be far happier not working through interviews like that... use them as a sign of how the company works, and look elsewhere.
Its also a useless MythTV post... as MythTV (as it will forever be) doesn't compare to this box, since it neither does DirecTV SD, MPEG2 or MPEG4 programming.
Its comparing apples to... um... a loaf of bread. Both might be food, but not even close to the same thing.
Its just like everyone who mentions MythTV when Tivo S3 comes up -- not applicable. MythTV is great if you live in a city, have limited channels you watch or don't own an HD set. But its pretty much worthless if you need digital cable, satellite or get your HD anywhere but OTA. Which is, of course, virtually everyone.
Silly, a LoC is a unit of informational quantity, not mass.
What we really need to know is how many clown-laden Bugs is that?
Re:Pipe Dream/Free Beer
on
Tibet's Mesh
·
· Score: 1
Hop in a car and drive across the country.
Its a great way to learn about the US, it makes for a beautiful vacation, and an excellent way to really get a sense what the population densitity of the US really is.
Then ask yourself what the practicality of a "free" mesh network is. Its a noble idea, but the US is a pretty sparse place, and its a lot more densely populated than most of the world.
If you don't want it to, don't log in. I personally LOVE that it does it. I find it a HUGE benefit that I can search among just my previous searches and previous search results. I can't tell you how many times thats allowed me to find something I saw in another search days, weeks or months ago. Its a lot easier to hunt for the right keywords among my personal result set than the entire internet.
If you don't log into your google account, it won't track anything personally identifiable.
If they don't do that, then Microsoft could legally set up "google.microsoft.com" and run all their searches through there.
IE could say "Google: " and point the query at MSN.
Google is a business. If they don't protect their trademark, they're committing suicide. If the management doesn't, they're going to be sued into oblivion by their shareholders.
Evil? Just because you don't understand an action doesn't make it evil.
You, and the other first reply to my post basically said the same thing, so I'll only reply to one of them.
The problem with what you both are talking about (a password typed in 100 times, eventually you have enough data to pull it out of the noise) is that you have no context when the only thing that can be seen is packet jitter in encrypted packets. Anyone monitoring that has no way of knowing (especially over RDP when authentication happens at a non-determined point after the connection starts) when I'm actually typing my password. There are hundreds of strings I type repeatedly all day long. Without some software context to know where those keystrokes are going, there isn't much benefit to even tracking the keystrokes. Without context, if I type 200,000 keystrokes a day and 1/10th of 1% of them are password related, you'd have a hell of a time picking them out of the noise if you weren't 100% sure you had all the keystrokes. This is why software keyloggers typically watch the application they are targeted at.
Add two factor in, and there'd be no way you could get enough data in time to do anything useful with it.
There are certainly ways to pass data "stenographically" across a network, but this keyboard solution is too far out from the point where someone would be monitoring... you've got 1000 reasons timing can change, zero context of what keystrokes are actually passwords, etc.
On a risk scale, this is so far down field, it shouldn't even be on the radar of anyone who hasn't taken hundreds of other steps to secure their systems... and one should ask why they're giving remote access to an application over a non-secure tunnel with single factor authentication at that point.
This is like worrying that someone could send a remote control robot from the street, up your sewer pipe, out your toilet, across the floor to your front door to turn the deadbolt to break in, in a house with no alarm, no locks on the windows, and the owner on vacation.
Who uses telnet? And if they are, sniff the damn packets directly.
And RDP is not a keystroke-per-packet, 100% of the time. Neither is SSH. Without that, you couldn't make any assumptions about the data you may have missed.
Encryption latency, packet retransmissions upon collisions at routing equipement... there are 1000 reasons outside the lab this wouldn't be even remotely useful for tracking activity off the desktop, and there's way easier ways of doing it on the desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
And damn near everything in windows is changable by Hitting Start->Run and typing "regedit" and hitting enter.
The windows registry is no more obtuse than Firefox' about:config stuff.
And I'd bet like everything else in Windows, this feature will be easy to disable in the registry.
Karma, I bet he didn't refer to it as GNU/Linux.
Laserdiscs of the 21st century?
You do know Laserdiscs had a successful 20 year run in the videophile market, only usurped by DVDs less than ten years ago?
A 20 year run for a technology is pretty good, even if joe six pack doesn't use it.
I've found I like the light enough that its been worth buying them again. My old ones have either been moved into places where I want cooler light (garage, basement) or been given away to friends.
No you can still get the cooler ones. They actually come in a big range now, warmer ones like the 2700 degree ones, to 6k skylight sort of ones. I actually use 2700 degree bulbs in most of the house, 4500k or something in my basement (cheap-o ikea ones, I think they're about that). My kitchen has 2700 degree can lights over the work surfaces, but the "main" light fixture has two 200w (equivalent) 6k "daylight" bulbs for when I want LIGHT.
Look on the package for the color temperature of the bulb. You want 2700 degree ones (which match incandescent bulbs so closely, if you didn't know it was CFL you wouldn't guess it).
Up until recently (ie, the last six months or so) most of the bulbs you'd find in the typical discount stores were 4000-5000 degree.
Is for the big box stores to start carrying the dimmable CFL bulbs.
My house is almost entirely on dimmers. Its a ten year old rennovation of a 70 year old house. Modern McMansions are almost entirely on dimmers as well.
With all these dimmers out there, you'd think you'd be able to get dimmable CFL bulbs places other than the very occasional lighting shop or online.
I've switched essentially everything else in my house over at this point, except for the ones on dimmers.
Thats for antialiasing... and yes, it will consume more rays but there are other ways to handle antialiasing that don't need to cast another entire sequence of rays... especially if what you were looking for in a game was the sort of reflective and refractive effects you can't get with shaders. You don't need true RT accuracy, you just need a fast way of doing things you can't do with existing technology.
Plus, as I said in my first post on this, you just don't need that level of accuracy or detail if you're ray tracing something a user will see for 1/30th of a second. You can smooth jaggies algorithmically, since those edges will be moving anyway.
What really needs to be done is to track motion the way you would encoding for mpeg, and focus more ray casts in areas of low motion... do true RT antialiasing in still parts of the scene, do interpolated AA in the moving parts...
Thats because a reflection creates another ray segment, and a refraction creates two.
Considering a non-reflective ray traced world at 800x600 needs 320,000 rays to be cast to calculate an image, so 9,600,000 at 30fps, the claim of 450 million ray segments makes sense... thats 45+ per pixel at 800x600, which is a lot of reflections. Usually you'd limit the number to a fairly low because 100 deep reflections don't add noticable detail, especially in motion. Thats a lot of room for both refractive and reflective objects to be in the scenes.
How little is your entertainment worth?
/., those decisions are not made by scribbing options on the floor of the conference room and having Ballmer toss a chair and see where it lands. Not many companies spend billions without a little bit of thought or market understanding.
I spent probably a total of 10-15 hours playing Cloning Clyde.
I've spent probably at least the same playing Bejeweled...
I bitch when I pay $10 to see a movie, but that only lasts 90 minutes. $10 for 10-15 hours of gameplay is a steal, in my book. Thats a far better deal than $60 for 20 or so (Tomb Raider, which was still fun, or Kameo which I got stuck in)
Hell, I think $10 for a game, and another $10 halfway through is GREAT, if I like the game. If it holds my attention I'm out $20. If not, I'm out $10.
The people at MS making decisions about Live know what they're doing. The loud cry of a few people on Slashdot doesn't map well to reality. You may not pay $10 for a legacy game, but someone who really liked it might. I know someone who bought Street Fighter on there. $10 is a pretty good deal for a few hours of entertainment in his mind. Just because YOU don't like it doesn't mean thats not a viable market. Just because YOU won't buy the game for $10 doesn't mean YOU will buy it for five, nor does it mean twice as many people will.
Contrary to popular belief on
The problem with the position you described in your reply is that its not really applicable to software development.
An engineer with 20 years experience knows a few things:
1) He hasn't had to reverse a linked list in 23 years.
2) There are framework functions to reverse a linked list. Who cares how they work.
Questions like that are VERY age-biased. Because only someone right out of school, or someone with their head so buried in the code would remember that on the spot. Experienced engineers will tell you how to manage the development process, how to write code that is engineered to be testable, can actually explain software architecture and will do a FAR better job solving real world problems.
Why? Even if you DO need to reverse a linked list in a situation where you can't use framework functions to do it, an experienced engineer can pretty easily punch in a few google keywords.
No amount of googling will give a kid out of school an understanding of how you really engineer software in the real world.
The only time I would consider asking questions like that to an experienced engineer (and I ripped off a similar one I got asked at Microsoft way back when during an interview today) is if I've already decided someone isn't a fit for some totally unrelated reason and I need a quick way to quantify that.
Anyone who has interviewed at that "online retailer" knows exactly what you're talking about. In fact, it leaves no doubt among those who have who you're talking about.
Its a silly process... they pride themselves on Google-esque hiring practices, but miss the boat. It was the one and only place with a process more rediculous than the Evil Empire(tm).
My suggestion? Laugh at the guys giving it who imagine themselves big fish in a big pond, leave confident you've got more experience then them, and go work at a company with a better corporate culture. They're a struggling company stuck in the dot-com mentality. Unless you like that (and I'd have to guess with 20 years experience, you've outgrown sardine can working conditions and ego trips), you'll be far happier not working through interviews like that... use them as a sign of how the company works, and look elsewhere.
There are FAR better places to work.
Its also a useless MythTV post... as MythTV (as it will forever be) doesn't compare to this box, since it neither does DirecTV SD, MPEG2 or MPEG4 programming.
Its comparing apples to... um... a loaf of bread. Both might be food, but not even close to the same thing.
Its just like everyone who mentions MythTV when Tivo S3 comes up -- not applicable. MythTV is great if you live in a city, have limited channels you watch or don't own an HD set. But its pretty much worthless if you need digital cable, satellite or get your HD anywhere but OTA. Which is, of course, virtually everyone.
Jeez, maybe NASA can help us with this.
Silly, a LoC is a unit of informational quantity, not mass.
What we really need to know is how many clown-laden Bugs is that?
Hop in a car and drive across the country.
Its a great way to learn about the US, it makes for a beautiful vacation, and an excellent way to really get a sense what the population densitity of the US really is.
Then ask yourself what the practicality of a "free" mesh network is. Its a noble idea, but the US is a pretty sparse place, and its a lot more densely populated than most of the world.
How about because people want it?
If you don't want it to, don't log in. I personally LOVE that it does it. I find it a HUGE benefit that I can search among just my previous searches and previous search results. I can't tell you how many times thats allowed me to find something I saw in another search days, weeks or months ago. Its a lot easier to hunt for the right keywords among my personal result set than the entire internet.
If you don't log into your google account, it won't track anything personally identifiable.
No, just leave the soundtrack out.
I could watch Sporty Spice all day.
This isn't that complicated. If I could post an MP3 I'd say it very slowly for you, but instead just read it slowly:
1) The law REQUIRES google to defend the use of a trademark
2) The law does NOT require anyone to sue dead people.
Sadly, all evidence points to that group being the substantial majority in the US, these days.
The law says that you must protect the use of your trademark to keep the trademark.
So which part is evil? The ownership of the trademark, or the obeying of the law?
How is protection of a trademark evil?
If they don't do that, then Microsoft could legally set up "google.microsoft.com" and run all their searches through there.
IE could say "Google: " and point the query at MSN.
Google is a business. If they don't protect their trademark, they're committing suicide. If the management doesn't, they're going to be sued into oblivion by their shareholders.
Evil? Just because you don't understand an action doesn't make it evil.
More importantly they sell virtualization products that do not support VT, and their primary competitor does.
You, and the other first reply to my post basically said the same thing, so I'll only reply to one of them.
The problem with what you both are talking about (a password typed in 100 times, eventually you have enough data to pull it out of the noise) is that you have no context when the only thing that can be seen is packet jitter in encrypted packets. Anyone monitoring that has no way of knowing (especially over RDP when authentication happens at a non-determined point after the connection starts) when I'm actually typing my password. There are hundreds of strings I type repeatedly all day long. Without some software context to know where those keystrokes are going, there isn't much benefit to even tracking the keystrokes. Without context, if I type 200,000 keystrokes a day and 1/10th of 1% of them are password related, you'd have a hell of a time picking them out of the noise if you weren't 100% sure you had all the keystrokes. This is why software keyloggers typically watch the application they are targeted at.
Add two factor in, and there'd be no way you could get enough data in time to do anything useful with it.
There are certainly ways to pass data "stenographically" across a network, but this keyboard solution is too far out from the point where someone would be monitoring... you've got 1000 reasons timing can change, zero context of what keystrokes are actually passwords, etc.
On a risk scale, this is so far down field, it shouldn't even be on the radar of anyone who hasn't taken hundreds of other steps to secure their systems... and one should ask why they're giving remote access to an application over a non-secure tunnel with single factor authentication at that point.
This is like worrying that someone could send a remote control robot from the street, up your sewer pipe, out your toilet, across the floor to your front door to turn the deadbolt to break in, in a house with no alarm, no locks on the windows, and the owner on vacation.
Its just silly.
Who uses telnet? And if they are, sniff the damn packets directly.
And RDP is not a keystroke-per-packet, 100% of the time. Neither is SSH. Without that, you couldn't make any assumptions about the data you may have missed.
Encryption latency, packet retransmissions upon collisions at routing equipement... there are 1000 reasons outside the lab this wouldn't be even remotely useful for tracking activity off the desktop, and there's way easier ways of doing it on the desktop.