I would think that if more companies did this, we might see a lower turnover rate of technical employees. By forming groups, with comfortable and enjoyable work situtations, it would raise the 'cost' for a person to change jobs... they'd be leaving behind their comfortable work environment for a likely far less enjoyable one.
Peopld don't switch jobs when they're satisfied.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
My largest difficulty with these pieces of equipment is that they are unable to control the channel of a digital box... they can access the 'lower' (ie, normal) channels in my cable area, but the high channels (all premiums, and many of the better channels like Discovery, Noggin, etc) are digital only, and cannot be accessed unless the cable-co provided Digital Box is on that station.
This means that two of the major benefits of these systems... the ability to automatically record stuff you want to see, and the ability to record one thing while you watch another... are simply not possible.
However, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Charter (my local cableco, owned by one of the bigwig Microsoft rats that fled the sinking ship) is building and testing integrated Digital/TiVo Boxes that perform the dual task of acting as a complete TiVo system along with being a digital decoding box. The TiVo service fees may even be non-existent, as the TiVo data may be fed directly over the digital cable instead of accessed via dialup. Test systems are expected Spring 2001, with full rollout by Summer. So I wait.
I hate waiting.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Hype on consoles are always overblown. PC hardware will always meet or exceed the console within six months of the console being released... this MUST happen, because the console manufacturers cannot put experimental hardware into their systems, they must put in hardware that is at least THREE MONTHS OLD when it's integrated. Within six months the PC manufacturers have surpassed the console in every respect.
However, what many console detractors fail to realize is that despite the fact that the hype focuses on the features, it is not the feature list which competes directly with computers... it is the stability of the platform.
Stability is something computers lack. They are constantly changing, constantly in flux, with new drivers, new features, new hardware, new software every month, every year. Writing software for the computer is much more difficult to keep up with... it's hard to become (and remain) an expert in game programming because the target changes so rapidly. Not so for console development. Your platform does not change significantly from the day it's released in Japan for the next five years of its life. That is five years in which you can refine, explore, and exploit every feature and grain of performance from the platform. Five years in which to have a stable technology base to work from.
It's hard to explain to those who have never developed a game from start to finish, but having a stable platform is a MASSIVE benefit. You have a uniform interface, a stable display system, a fixed output spec... no need to support dozens of controllers, dozens of graphics chips, and millions of various computer setups. One spec to rule them all, one spec to bind them, etc.
You can focus on making the game, not learning the hardware. And it shows. Consoles have a different style of gameplay, in general, than PCs, but it's not 'worse' or 'better'. Just different. And very, very lucrative.
So ignore the specs. Ignore the hype. But don't ignore the consoles, because they are a force to be reconed with. They will NEVER outstrip the sheer power of a computer, but they WILL produce games that are just as stunning, just as fun, and just as rich as a PC game even when their hardware is technically inferior.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
It is the cost of entry to forgery that is the basis by which we can judge any signature method. Creating a well forged signature is difficult... you must know the person well, or have lots of practice forging their signature (or all handwriting). Bribing a notary republic is expensive, can can blow up in your face. And for all of these activities, they are not what most people consider 'fun and involving', or practicing the skills required a particularly safe thing to be caught doing.
However, with digital signatures anyone who has access to a computer lab has access to the tools required. There is a large society of hackers who enjoy trying to take apart encryption methods, and exploits are often posted publicly up for all to see. Well known exploits have programs written specifically to take advantage of them, allowing barely skilled users to utilize the security flaws. Thus, the cost of entry for digital forgery is lower than the cost of entry for physical forgery. The chances of detection are lower, and the ability to hide your tracks is greater.
This is why digital signatures must have a much GREATER security level than normal ones, and the differences inherent in how they are, and are not, secure from written signatures should be well documented and publicised.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
As a side note... remember that the article (which you obviously did not read) created a lamp using WHITE LEDs. Not Red, Green, and Blue, but WHITE, because the RGB PN junctions are inside the LED itself. Each one costs about $20.
Power usage is rated at 120mw maximum, and unless you're watching a pure white screen you will never use that much for every LED, so let's assume 1/2 that power under normal operating circumstances. That totals up to (I believe) only 28.8kW... about 1/3 less than you estimated for a full color screen. And the total to watch that for an hour is only $1.72 for a full color screen.
As for construction, this wouldn't be a hobby project. With a premade backplane designed for these, probably build in 32x32 chunks, the cost and complexity could be minimised.
Overall you end up with a super high resolution, full color, full animation billboard that puts all others to shame and has an extremely low maintenance cost... for a mere 10 million at worst.:-)
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Beowulf clusters would NOT improve the rendering speed of the movie, because the managing of the shared processing is completely unnecessary... if you have 200 machines, EACH machine can render a SEPARATE frame all on its own, wasting no time with the beowulf overhead. There is no need to render the frames sequentially.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Just as a note, I'd like to point out that even if they used the inaccurate version of GPS (+- 500 meters), it would still be very accurate for keeping planes from hitting each other, because all the inaccuracies in an area are the same... all the planes would be off by the same amount, because they are using the same (inaccurate) GPS satellite signals.
Of course, since the US is no longer encrypting the last digits of the signal, even ordinary cheapo handhelds are accurate to within a few meters now.
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Who cares if traffic grows quadratically if Cu is far enough above Tu that we can get several thousand servants in the network.
Gnutella does NOT scale infinitely... what it does is AUTOMATICALLY, because of TTL, prune the visible hosts so that every servant sees about the same number of other hosts, but each sees a slightly different view of the network... each sees a DIFFERENT selection of servers.
This is possible because (I do thank you for your formula by the way) the number of viable hosts, N, is equal to average Cu/Tu... if the average servant only creates about 1/5000th of the bandwidth it is capable of serving, then we can have 5000 hosts visible in the local 'neighborhood' of each client on the GNet.
And, if the client apps were written properly and everyone on the GNet had a well written and well behaved client, this would ALREADY be working now.
The problems with the GNet are not theoretical... they are practical. Practically, current client software is substandard and has many problems that drastically reduce the efficiency of the network.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Dinosaur had great rocks and vegetation because that was not CGI! The creatures were the only CGI elements of Dinosaur... almost 100% of the scenery was real, filmed in the real world, with the CGI Dinosaurs inserted in. I think the technique is excellent, and it will help create very realistic 'cartoons' in the future.
The movie was still typical Disney pablum though.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
512Kbit up/down will be the minimum 'low end' connection for the average urban user, and will hover between 1 and 3MBits on average. Modems will NEVER completely die off. I predict at least 10% of all world users, and 3% of US users will still be on analog connections in 2010.
The Internet will slowly commercialize farther and farther. Directories and search engines will continue to improve, but not fast enough to keep up with all the content of the 'Net. Content quantity will increase faster than bandwidth will rise, leading to more and more content uncategorized by search engines, though smarter search and scan algorithms will largely offset this.
Processors will continue to follow Moore's law. Computers as such will continue to exist far past 2010, but Appliances and PDAs will gain market share until they significantly overshadow that of pure PCs. PCs will NEVER become 'user friendly'. They will remain crash prone, obfuscated, and a major hassle to administer. I believe that some force will rise to combat this, but I do not know what form it will take.
Monitors will change slowly... but by 2005 flat panels displays will have overtaken CRTs, and by 2010 LCD screens with HDTV resolutions will be considered the minimum. Color depth will stay at 32bit for most consumer machines, but we will have 64bit color depths for graphics workstations, printing, movie production, etc.
Wearable computers, home networks and such will become a reality, but they'll still be somewhat 'fringe' in 2010. Some appliances will be 'obvious' targets for connection, such as your Phone, TV, and VCR (can anyone say Networked TiVo?), but others will not. Networking will be a extra cost feature, much like ice makers on Refrigerators today.
IPv6 will be used, but it will STILL have legacy IPv4 compatibility in use. Linux will be very common, but not as the 'Linux OS' (ie Redhat, Slackware) but as the common backend to much Appliance hardware. Linux desktop usage will be more prevalent than it is today, but Windows will remain the dominant consumer OS. Some big company will make a strong attempt to create an OS that competes with Linux for the same target demographic, and may even succeed... whether they create it largely from scratch (like BeOS) or revamp an aging contender (MaxOS X) I don't know.
We will run into a new problem... electromagnetic pollution. We'll have so many wireless devices on so many different frequency bands that it will become harder and harder to find free spectrum to communicate on. How this will be solved I don't know.
The Internet will still be running over much the same protocols as today. MUDs will still exist... they will not be graphical. HTTP will still be in use as the primary web protocol, though some new web protocol will also be used and supported by a significant number of sites and browsers. XML will be in wide use, as will the successor to CSS, but HTML will continue to be the primary content platform.
Business to Business transactions will rapidly increase. Phone and Personal service will be a luxury by 2010. Internet cash services like PayPal will continue and thrive... I wouldn't be surprised if PayPal itself became the next 'Yahoo', as commerce transactions become more and more common on the Internet.
The Internet will NEVER lose its 'free as you come' tone, though commerce sites will continue to thrive. Internet advertising will get smarter, but how I don't know. The banners will become more and more fancy as time goes on... 3D renderings may become commonplace as CPUs become able to support it effortlessly.
Some new Interface paradigm will gain major acceptance in vertical markets, but it will not supplant the keyboard and mouse in consumer systems. Eye tracking is what I'm hoping for, but it might be voice recognition.
Computer and console games will continue to be a driving force behind the manufacturers, urging them to keep up with Moore's Law. Games will continue to increase in realism and eye candy. By 2005 we will finally have games that support complete terrain deformation (ie, shoot holes in walls, burn houses down, dig tunnels in ground, demolish buildings with explosives), and it will be standard by 2010, much as 3D is standard now. Virtual reality may finally have arrived as well, due to the advances made in LCD technology allowing ultra-light, ultra-small 'glasses' offering stereo picture, but it will not be pervasive... many 3D games will support it, in the same way they support Force Feedback joysticks, but the average gamer will still use normal monitors to play games. There is a slight chance that LCD glasses will allow nifty uber-PDA HUD systems... I can dream, but I won't hold my breath.
Those are my predictions.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
I pre-registered for GenCon, and spent all four days there. I also spent about two thirds of my total time at the Con volunteering at the front Help Desk.
I can understand and appreciate all the complaints and problems people had with this years GenCon. Events were double booked into rooms, moved, and rescheduled... often without telling the person who was running the event! Game Masters and other exhibitors were given no extra help at all, in large part because there was no extra help to give. Changes and reschedulings were done ad-hoc, with no central reporting at all. The only vaguely reliable method for determining what was going on where was the Event Team walkie talkies.
Another immense problem was housing. There was NO documentation on the availability of transportation to the various hotels. To compound matters, the housing situation was fubar, with people getting shuffled left and right, people who were promised housing that was not provided... the list is endless.
Events were another problem. On the second day, the event database started hosing itself... it got corrupted, and I don't know what they did to fix it, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had to restore from an earlier backup. I talked for a while with a couple who had had all their events simply 'lost'... listed nowhere, and with no method available to announce unlisted events.
Overall, this years GenCon was a disorganized mess. The GenCon webpage was a discrace, with poor information, and complete lack of updates. I'm hoping they do better next year... I still had fun, but the people who do all the work... the exhibitors, the game masters, etc... are being royally screwed over. Hell... volunteers were treated better than the people who make the Con happen... I was able to get my ticket refund Saturday afternoon.
I had fun. I enjoyed it, and so did most of the people who went there. But WotC is very quickly alienating the people who create the content that brings people back every year. Not smart.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
There WAS warning... every summer, NVIDIA releases faster versions of its existing '2' flavor. This is the third summer they've done this so far, from what I understand.
NVIDIA has a very predictable product cycle...
New chip hype -> Late Summer, early fall
New chip -> Christmas
New Chip Mk II -> Spring
New Chip Mk II Ultra -> Summer
Rinse, lather, repeat. A very successful formula for NVIDIA, that leaves their product line shiny, healthy, and with no split ends.
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
... so how apple thinks they can get a computer to read my writing is beyond me. I've ALWAYS been shitty at writing... crabbed, cramped writing, sloppy, painful. But I type at 70wpm. No way I'm going to use a pentop. Hell... I TAP-TYPE faster than I write (on my Palm).
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
This has a problem, known as 'the best script wins'. As an example, take a look at Earth 2150... a mediocre strategy game with some true innovations, including the ability to write your own scripts for the unit AI. This is great... except that the default scripts are poor/generic, you cannot edit the scripts in the game itself, and the skillset which makes for a good RTS gamer is not the same skillset which makes for a good script writer.
Thus, an advantage is given to players who invest more time outside the game engine completely; downloading external scripts or writing their own based on an obscure readme.txt helpfile. This does not make for good competetive play.
A better example (or at least, more well known) are Quake scripts... using the internal Quake script engine to create automated actions for repetetive tasks that require instant or extremely fast timing... the most well known being the 'rocket jump' script. The primary difference between quake scripts and those used in Earth 2150 is that Quake scripts do not make DECISIONS. They react, but they cannot choose, thus reactions remain in the control of the player.
A similar example is that of Starseige: Tribes. The scripts for that game are not the tiny playthings for Quake... they are massive programattic things which have full access to the client side information, and can change your view, control your player, and even interperet and edit text you see. This allows major enhancements and alterations to the players interface... scripts that auto-buy from stalls, unless you don't have enough cash in which case they'll buy a lesser suite of equipment, unless the flag is in danger in which case they'll equip you for high speed chases, unless you've died five times with the last set of equipment in which case it'll try a different set, unless... the point is that Tribes supports the 'broken' style of scripting, in which your programming talent (or dedication to reading online pages and downloading new scripts) makes a significant alteration to the ability of a player to compete.
In my opinion, the best approach is that used by Valve (Half Life, Team Fortress Classic)... support scripting, and when you have an update later, take the best features that people have 'added' via scripting and make them standard to the game. That way avid scriptwriters will have a significant, but only temporary advantage over that of the average player.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
The issue is removing any TRACE that viable life forms have ever TOUCHED that probe. Proteans, Complex amino acids, earthly hydrocarbons, viruses, DNA. We must remove as much of that as possible, all of it if we can (not likely) so that there is as little chance to contaminate our findings as possible.
We're not talking about creating growing cultures of earth bacteria on Titan. We're looking for any existence of life, however fragmentary, and the littlest spec of earthly organisms will essentially destroy that aspect of the mission.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
I was considering adding the RBL to the mail server I administer. Unfortunately, while I like the stated policies of RBL (including that of explicit opt-in lists), I agree that the above choices by the RBL are not conscionable.
Thank you.
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Of course there is a performance hit. Every time we add abstraction there is some level of performance loss.
C is slower than Assembly Linux is slower than DOS Windows NT is slower than Windows 95 X is slower than Windows
In every case, the slower version is more flexible, powerful, and is generally regarded as better for most situations. It's quite acceptable to trade some performance for a lot of flexibility. Computers are getting faster every year, and adding flexibility and power to the underlying technologies of our system is one way in which we 'spend' that power.
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Re:About Quake3's serial numbers....
on
Copyrant
·
· Score: 1
The point is to prevent casual copying during the primary selling period of the game... the first six months. After the retail channel outlet for the game has died down, then they'll let you play without the CD in the drive because the casual copying (hey bob, can you install that on my hard drive too?) will have died down too. Those who were gonna buy the game have already done so... those who were not going to, are probably not gonna care enough to buy one in the future either.
It makes perfect sense. I am fully in favor of Quake 3's protection scheme. I *would* have been perfectly happy with Half-Life's scheme too, except that they were stupid, and had too small of a keyspace (only 10 trillion possible numbers, about 44 bits) that was relatively easy to search using brute force methods. Quake's keyspace is closer to 512 bits! Nobody is going to be making a keygen for that, the only way you can get a valid key is by stealing it from someone else.
The Raven And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Current day DNA analysis can identify the fingerprint of DNA (it's signature, similar to a hash value) to come close to proving that DNA A = DNA B, but it that hash value cannot be reversed to give you the complete DNA code.
Not that anyone can test DNA in 30 seconds like they depict, but every spy movie advances technology 5-10 years before filming. And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
... in real world benchmarks. If you're talking pure CPU measurements, the AMD *can* be *up to* 40% faster, but it's not usually... they're about even with Intel, a little faster. But because of their 1/3 speed level 2 cache, they get bogged down in most real-world tests, falling slightly behind an Intel chip of the same speed.
Overall, the two chips are just about equivalent... there is no real major advantage that either has over the other, other than price and availability. That is where AMD really hits its stride, because they are far easier to find than Intel chips.
I find it a little difficult to believe that you think there is not useful as an informational resource. Quite the opposite, for new and rapidly changing fields, the Internet is the ONLY resource easily available.
Six years ago, when I first used the Internet, I had an avid interest in Artificial Life. Every time I went to the library, I would try another search in some new area trying to find good resources on this topic. I was depressingly unsuccessful... the articles I could find were on vertical magazines not carried by the library (and I could not afford the copying fees to have them sent to me from other libraries) and only a single book was represented (which I had now read three or four times).
Within my first 10 minutes on the Internet, I had found more concrete resources on Artificial Life than in all the previous years combined. I was in heaven. I spent over two hours skimming articles, printing articles, and looking longingly at software demonstrations that I couldn't download (I had no computer of my own).
This is no isolated incident... there is millions of pages of real content on the internet, mixed in with all the other stuff that you put down so easily. The Internet is the quickest, most powerful research tool currently available... it's not perfect, no more than any other tool is, but it far from useless as you seem to state.
Your are correct that at least one OS tops Windows in every single category.
What you leave out is that Microsoft comes in second or third in most of those categories. It's not best at anything, but it's pretty good at most. The only major failings of Windows are stability and reputation. The GUI for Windows is good, the software for it is good, NT's suitability for a server is good (though it is better as a LAN server than an Inet server). It's not BEST at any of these, but it's GOOD at most of them.
If you must standardize on a single OS for everything in your company, there is NO better choice then Windows. If you have the freedom (and IT staff to deal with) to install multiple OS, then you can get a good solution by using BSD for your servers and Macs, some *nix, or WindowsNT Workstation for your user boxes (95/98 isn't stable enough).
Of course, so many geeks blindly hate Microsoft that they never even look at what the MS OSs do well.
I can't point out a book, but I can say that lambda calculus is essentially the math of programming (function programming). Another related book is called the "Theory of Objects". In it, the authors proposes a new calculus system based on Object oriented programming (instead of procedural like lambda calculus) in which they have many proofs on how and why object oriented approaches work or do not work. Very interesting reading, but extremely dense... they assume you know lambda calculus (which I do not) and they never repeat an assertion. Get confused once, and you're lost for the rest of the book.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
I agree. I find it silly that people attempt to justify their theft to ease their conscience.
Napster is doing nothing illegal (IMO), in the same way that the warehouse that rents out space to black market operators is also doing nothing illegal. They both simply provide a legal service that happens to be home to many smaller illegal operations.
Fair use does not allow downloading complete songs... fair use specificially states that only small portions of the original work may be used... for example, fair use allows radio DJs to use samples of songs in their ads and shows without having to pay a royalty for that small clip. Burning a complete, near perfect copy of a song is not covered under fair use unless you have already purchased the copyrighted song on CD.
Use of Napster, for 95% or more of the users on it, is illegal. This is not to say that it is necessarily HARMFUL to the artists or record labels... studies regarding music sales and mp3 use have been ambiguous at best. But just because something is not harmful, does not mean it is LEGAL. Downloading and using MP3s you do not own is illegal, period. No ifs, ands, or buts. Should the laws be changed? Maybe. Does that make it legal to use MP3s until the laws are changed? No. It's still illegal. Will people keep doing it? Of course they will. And so will I.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Slashdot Mirror
I would think that if more companies did this, we might see a lower turnover rate of technical employees. By forming groups, with comfortable and enjoyable work situtations, it would raise the 'cost' for a person to change jobs... they'd be leaving behind their comfortable work environment for a likely far less enjoyable one.
Peopld don't switch jobs when they're satisfied.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
'Best Programmers' are few and far between. Fewer, and farther between, than most people like to admit I think.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
My largest difficulty with these pieces of equipment is that they are unable to control the channel of a digital box... they can access the 'lower' (ie, normal) channels in my cable area, but the high channels (all premiums, and many of the better channels like Discovery, Noggin, etc) are digital only, and cannot be accessed unless the cable-co provided Digital Box is on that station.
This means that two of the major benefits of these systems... the ability to automatically record stuff you want to see, and the ability to record one thing while you watch another... are simply not possible.
However, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Charter (my local cableco, owned by one of the bigwig Microsoft rats that fled the sinking ship) is building and testing integrated Digital/TiVo Boxes that perform the dual task of acting as a complete TiVo system along with being a digital decoding box. The TiVo service fees may even be non-existent, as the TiVo data may be fed directly over the digital cable instead of accessed via dialup. Test systems are expected Spring 2001, with full rollout by Summer. So I wait.
I hate waiting.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Hype on consoles are always overblown. PC hardware will always meet or exceed the console within six months of the console being released... this MUST happen, because the console manufacturers cannot put experimental hardware into their systems, they must put in hardware that is at least THREE MONTHS OLD when it's integrated. Within six months the PC manufacturers have surpassed the console in every respect.
However, what many console detractors fail to realize is that despite the fact that the hype focuses on the features, it is not the feature list which competes directly with computers... it is the stability of the platform.
Stability is something computers lack. They are constantly changing, constantly in flux, with new drivers, new features, new hardware, new software every month, every year. Writing software for the computer is much more difficult to keep up with... it's hard to become (and remain) an expert in game programming because the target changes so rapidly. Not so for console development. Your platform does not change significantly from the day it's released in Japan for the next five years of its life. That is five years in which you can refine, explore, and exploit every feature and grain of performance from the platform. Five years in which to have a stable technology base to work from.
It's hard to explain to those who have never developed a game from start to finish, but having a stable platform is a MASSIVE benefit. You have a uniform interface, a stable display system, a fixed output spec... no need to support dozens of controllers, dozens of graphics chips, and millions of various computer setups. One spec to rule them all, one spec to bind them, etc.
You can focus on making the game, not learning the hardware. And it shows. Consoles have a different style of gameplay, in general, than PCs, but it's not 'worse' or 'better'. Just different. And very, very lucrative.
So ignore the specs. Ignore the hype. But don't ignore the consoles, because they are a force to be reconed with. They will NEVER outstrip the sheer power of a computer, but they WILL produce games that are just as stunning, just as fun, and just as rich as a PC game even when their hardware is technically inferior.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
It is the cost of entry to forgery that is the basis by which we can judge any signature method. Creating a well forged signature is difficult... you must know the person well, or have lots of practice forging their signature (or all handwriting). Bribing a notary republic is expensive, can can blow up in your face. And for all of these activities, they are not what most people consider 'fun and involving', or practicing the skills required a particularly safe thing to be caught doing. However, with digital signatures anyone who has access to a computer lab has access to the tools required. There is a large society of hackers who enjoy trying to take apart encryption methods, and exploits are often posted publicly up for all to see. Well known exploits have programs written specifically to take advantage of them, allowing barely skilled users to utilize the security flaws. Thus, the cost of entry for digital forgery is lower than the cost of entry for physical forgery. The chances of detection are lower, and the ability to hide your tracks is greater. This is why digital signatures must have a much GREATER security level than normal ones, and the differences inherent in how they are, and are not, secure from written signatures should be well documented and publicised. Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
As a side note... remember that the article (which you obviously did not read) created a lamp using WHITE LEDs. Not Red, Green, and Blue, but WHITE, because the RGB PN junctions are inside the LED itself. Each one costs about $20. Power usage is rated at 120mw maximum, and unless you're watching a pure white screen you will never use that much for every LED, so let's assume 1/2 that power under normal operating circumstances. That totals up to (I believe) only 28.8kW... about 1/3 less than you estimated for a full color screen. And the total to watch that for an hour is only $1.72 for a full color screen. As for construction, this wouldn't be a hobby project. With a premade backplane designed for these, probably build in 32x32 chunks, the cost and complexity could be minimised. Overall you end up with a super high resolution, full color, full animation billboard that puts all others to shame and has an extremely low maintenance cost... for a mere 10 million at worst. :-)
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Beowulf clusters would NOT improve the rendering speed of the movie, because the managing of the shared processing is completely unnecessary... if you have 200 machines, EACH machine can render a SEPARATE frame all on its own, wasting no time with the beowulf overhead. There is no need to render the frames sequentially.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Just as a note, I'd like to point out that even if they used the inaccurate version of GPS (+- 500 meters), it would still be very accurate for keeping planes from hitting each other, because all the inaccuracies in an area are the same... all the planes would be off by the same amount, because they are using the same (inaccurate) GPS satellite signals.
Of course, since the US is no longer encrypting the last digits of the signal, even ordinary cheapo handhelds are accurate to within a few meters now.
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Who cares if traffic grows quadratically if Cu is far enough above Tu that we can get several thousand servants in the network.
Gnutella does NOT scale infinitely... what it does is AUTOMATICALLY, because of TTL, prune the visible hosts so that every servant sees about the same number of other hosts, but each sees a slightly different view of the network... each sees a DIFFERENT selection of servers.
This is possible because (I do thank you for your formula by the way) the number of viable hosts, N, is equal to average Cu/Tu... if the average servant only creates about 1/5000th of the bandwidth it is capable of serving, then we can have 5000 hosts visible in the local 'neighborhood' of each client on the GNet.
And, if the client apps were written properly and everyone on the GNet had a well written and well behaved client, this would ALREADY be working now.
The problems with the GNet are not theoretical... they are practical. Practically, current client software is substandard and has many problems that drastically reduce the efficiency of the network.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Dinosaur had great rocks and vegetation because that was not CGI! The creatures were the only CGI elements of Dinosaur... almost 100% of the scenery was real, filmed in the real world, with the CGI Dinosaurs inserted in. I think the technique is excellent, and it will help create very realistic 'cartoons' in the future.
The movie was still typical Disney pablum though.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
512Kbit up/down will be the minimum 'low end' connection for the average urban user, and will hover between 1 and 3MBits on average. Modems will NEVER completely die off. I predict at least 10% of all world users, and 3% of US users will still be on analog connections in 2010.
The Internet will slowly commercialize farther and farther. Directories and search engines will continue to improve, but not fast enough to keep up with all the content of the 'Net. Content quantity will increase faster than bandwidth will rise, leading to more and more content uncategorized by search engines, though smarter search and scan algorithms will largely offset this.
Processors will continue to follow Moore's law. Computers as such will continue to exist far past 2010, but Appliances and PDAs will gain market share until they significantly overshadow that of pure PCs. PCs will NEVER become 'user friendly'. They will remain crash prone, obfuscated, and a major hassle to administer. I believe that some force will rise to combat this, but I do not know what form it will take.
Monitors will change slowly... but by 2005 flat panels displays will have overtaken CRTs, and by 2010 LCD screens with HDTV resolutions will be considered the minimum. Color depth will stay at 32bit for most consumer machines, but we will have 64bit color depths for graphics workstations, printing, movie production, etc.
Wearable computers, home networks and such will become a reality, but they'll still be somewhat 'fringe' in 2010. Some appliances will be 'obvious' targets for connection, such as your Phone, TV, and VCR (can anyone say Networked TiVo?), but others will not. Networking will be a extra cost feature, much like ice makers on Refrigerators today.
IPv6 will be used, but it will STILL have legacy IPv4 compatibility in use. Linux will be very common, but not as the 'Linux OS' (ie Redhat, Slackware) but as the common backend to much Appliance hardware. Linux desktop usage will be more prevalent than it is today, but Windows will remain the dominant consumer OS. Some big company will make a strong attempt to create an OS that competes with Linux for the same target demographic, and may even succeed... whether they create it largely from scratch (like BeOS) or revamp an aging contender (MaxOS X) I don't know.
We will run into a new problem... electromagnetic pollution. We'll have so many wireless devices on so many different frequency bands that it will become harder and harder to find free spectrum to communicate on. How this will be solved I don't know.
The Internet will still be running over much the same protocols as today. MUDs will still exist... they will not be graphical. HTTP will still be in use as the primary web protocol, though some new web protocol will also be used and supported by a significant number of sites and browsers. XML will be in wide use, as will the successor to CSS, but HTML will continue to be the primary content platform.
Business to Business transactions will rapidly increase. Phone and Personal service will be a luxury by 2010. Internet cash services like PayPal will continue and thrive... I wouldn't be surprised if PayPal itself became the next 'Yahoo', as commerce transactions become more and more common on the Internet.
The Internet will NEVER lose its 'free as you come' tone, though commerce sites will continue to thrive. Internet advertising will get smarter, but how I don't know. The banners will become more and more fancy as time goes on... 3D renderings may become commonplace as CPUs become able to support it effortlessly.
Some new Interface paradigm will gain major acceptance in vertical markets, but it will not supplant the keyboard and mouse in consumer systems. Eye tracking is what I'm hoping for, but it might be voice recognition.
Computer and console games will continue to be a driving force behind the manufacturers, urging them to keep up with Moore's Law. Games will continue to increase in realism and eye candy. By 2005 we will finally have games that support complete terrain deformation (ie, shoot holes in walls, burn houses down, dig tunnels in ground, demolish buildings with explosives), and it will be standard by 2010, much as 3D is standard now. Virtual reality may finally have arrived as well, due to the advances made in LCD technology allowing ultra-light, ultra-small 'glasses' offering stereo picture, but it will not be pervasive... many 3D games will support it, in the same way they support Force Feedback joysticks, but the average gamer will still use normal monitors to play games. There is a slight chance that LCD glasses will allow nifty uber-PDA HUD systems... I can dream, but I won't hold my breath.
Those are my predictions.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
I pre-registered for GenCon, and spent all four days there. I also spent about two thirds of my total time at the Con volunteering at the front Help Desk.
I can understand and appreciate all the complaints and problems people had with this years GenCon. Events were double booked into rooms, moved, and rescheduled... often without telling the person who was running the event! Game Masters and other exhibitors were given no extra help at all, in large part because there was no extra help to give. Changes and reschedulings were done ad-hoc, with no central reporting at all. The only vaguely reliable method for determining what was going on where was the Event Team walkie talkies.
Another immense problem was housing. There was NO documentation on the availability of transportation to the various hotels. To compound matters, the housing situation was fubar, with people getting shuffled left and right, people who were promised housing that was not provided... the list is endless.
Events were another problem. On the second day, the event database started hosing itself... it got corrupted, and I don't know what they did to fix it, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had to restore from an earlier backup. I talked for a while with a couple who had had all their events simply 'lost'... listed nowhere, and with no method available to announce unlisted events.
Overall, this years GenCon was a disorganized mess. The GenCon webpage was a discrace, with poor information, and complete lack of updates. I'm hoping they do better next year... I still had fun, but the people who do all the work... the exhibitors, the game masters, etc... are being royally screwed over. Hell... volunteers were treated better than the people who make the Con happen... I was able to get my ticket refund Saturday afternoon.
I had fun. I enjoyed it, and so did most of the people who went there. But WotC is very quickly alienating the people who create the content that brings people back every year. Not smart.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
There WAS warning... every summer, NVIDIA releases faster versions of its existing '2' flavor. This is the third summer they've done this so far, from what I understand.
NVIDIA has a very predictable product cycle...
Rinse, lather, repeat. A very successful formula for NVIDIA, that leaves their product line shiny, healthy, and with no split ends.
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
... so how apple thinks they can get a computer to read my writing is beyond me. I've ALWAYS been shitty at writing... crabbed, cramped writing, sloppy, painful. But I type at 70wpm. No way I'm going to use a pentop. Hell... I TAP-TYPE faster than I write (on my Palm).
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
This has a problem, known as 'the best script wins'. As an example, take a look at Earth 2150... a mediocre strategy game with some true innovations, including the ability to write your own scripts for the unit AI. This is great... except that the default scripts are poor/generic, you cannot edit the scripts in the game itself, and the skillset which makes for a good RTS gamer is not the same skillset which makes for a good script writer.
Thus, an advantage is given to players who invest more time outside the game engine completely; downloading external scripts or writing their own based on an obscure readme.txt helpfile. This does not make for good competetive play.
A better example (or at least, more well known) are Quake scripts... using the internal Quake script engine to create automated actions for repetetive tasks that require instant or extremely fast timing... the most well known being the 'rocket jump' script. The primary difference between quake scripts and those used in Earth 2150 is that Quake scripts do not make DECISIONS. They react, but they cannot choose, thus reactions remain in the control of the player.
A similar example is that of Starseige: Tribes. The scripts for that game are not the tiny playthings for Quake... they are massive programattic things which have full access to the client side information, and can change your view, control your player, and even interperet and edit text you see. This allows major enhancements and alterations to the players interface... scripts that auto-buy from stalls, unless you don't have enough cash in which case they'll buy a lesser suite of equipment, unless the flag is in danger in which case they'll equip you for high speed chases, unless you've died five times with the last set of equipment in which case it'll try a different set, unless... the point is that Tribes supports the 'broken' style of scripting, in which your programming talent (or dedication to reading online pages and downloading new scripts) makes a significant alteration to the ability of a player to compete.
In my opinion, the best approach is that used by Valve (Half Life, Team Fortress Classic)... support scripting, and when you have an update later, take the best features that people have 'added' via scripting and make them standard to the game. That way avid scriptwriters will have a significant, but only temporary advantage over that of the average player.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
The issue is not just removing viable life forms.
The issue is removing any TRACE that viable life forms have ever TOUCHED that probe. Proteans, Complex amino acids, earthly hydrocarbons, viruses, DNA. We must remove as much of that as possible, all of it if we can (not likely) so that there is as little chance to contaminate our findings as possible.
We're not talking about creating growing cultures of earth bacteria on Titan. We're looking for any existence of life, however fragmentary, and the littlest spec of earthly organisms will essentially destroy that aspect of the mission.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
I was considering adding the RBL to the mail server I administer. Unfortunately, while I like the stated policies of RBL (including that of explicit opt-in lists), I agree that the above choices by the RBL are not conscionable.
Thank you.
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Of course there is a performance hit. Every time we add abstraction there is some level of performance loss.
C is slower than Assembly
Linux is slower than DOS
Windows NT is slower than Windows 95
X is slower than Windows
In every case, the slower version is more flexible, powerful, and is generally regarded as better for most situations. It's quite acceptable to trade some performance for a lot of flexibility. Computers are getting faster every year, and adding flexibility and power to the underlying technologies of our system is one way in which we 'spend' that power.
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
The point is to prevent casual copying during the primary selling period of the game... the first six months. After the retail channel outlet for the game has died down, then they'll let you play without the CD in the drive because the casual copying (hey bob, can you install that on my hard drive too?) will have died down too. Those who were gonna buy the game have already done so... those who were not going to, are probably not gonna care enough to buy one in the future either.
It makes perfect sense. I am fully in favor of Quake 3's protection scheme. I *would* have been perfectly happy with Half-Life's scheme too, except that they were stupid, and had too small of a keyspace (only 10 trillion possible numbers, about 44 bits) that was relatively easy to search using brute force methods. Quake's keyspace is closer to 512 bits! Nobody is going to be making a keygen for that, the only way you can get a valid key is by stealing it from someone else.
The Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Current day DNA analysis can identify the fingerprint of DNA (it's signature, similar to a hash value) to come close to proving that DNA A = DNA B, but it that hash value cannot be reversed to give you the complete DNA code.
Not that anyone can test DNA in 30 seconds like they depict, but every spy movie advances technology 5-10 years before filming.
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
... in real world benchmarks. If you're talking pure CPU measurements, the AMD *can* be *up to* 40% faster, but it's not usually... they're about even with Intel, a little faster. But because of their 1/3 speed level 2 cache, they get bogged down in most real-world tests, falling slightly behind an Intel chip of the same speed.
Overall, the two chips are just about equivalent... there is no real major advantage that either has over the other, other than price and availability. That is where AMD really hits its stride, because they are far easier to find than Intel chips.
I find it a little difficult to believe that you think there is not useful as an informational resource. Quite the opposite, for new and rapidly changing fields, the Internet is the ONLY resource easily available.
Six years ago, when I first used the Internet, I had an avid interest in Artificial Life. Every time I went to the library, I would try another search in some new area trying to find good resources on this topic. I was depressingly unsuccessful... the articles I could find were on vertical magazines not carried by the library (and I could not afford the copying fees to have them sent to me from other libraries) and only a single book was represented (which I had now read three or four times).
Within my first 10 minutes on the Internet, I had found more concrete resources on Artificial Life than in all the previous years combined. I was in heaven. I spent over two hours skimming articles, printing articles, and looking longingly at software demonstrations that I couldn't download (I had no computer of my own).
This is no isolated incident... there is millions of pages of real content on the internet, mixed in with all the other stuff that you put down so easily. The Internet is the quickest, most powerful research tool currently available... it's not perfect, no more than any other tool is, but it far from useless as you seem to state.
Your are correct that at least one OS tops Windows in every single category.
What you leave out is that Microsoft comes in second or third in most of those categories. It's not best at anything, but it's pretty good at most. The only major failings of Windows are stability and reputation. The GUI for Windows is good, the software for it is good, NT's suitability for a server is good (though it is better as a LAN server than an Inet server). It's not BEST at any of these, but it's GOOD at most of them.
If you must standardize on a single OS for everything in your company, there is NO better choice then Windows. If you have the freedom (and IT staff to deal with) to install multiple OS, then you can get a good solution by using BSD for your servers and Macs, some *nix, or WindowsNT Workstation for your user boxes (95/98 isn't stable enough).
Of course, so many geeks blindly hate Microsoft that they never even look at what the MS OSs do well.
I can't point out a book, but I can say that lambda calculus is essentially the math of programming (function programming). Another related book is called the "Theory of Objects". In it, the authors proposes a new calculus system based on Object oriented programming (instead of procedural like lambda calculus) in which they have many proofs on how and why object oriented approaches work or do not work. Very interesting reading, but extremely dense... they assume you know lambda calculus (which I do not) and they never repeat an assertion. Get confused once, and you're lost for the rest of the book.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
I agree. I find it silly that people attempt to justify their theft to ease their conscience.
Napster is doing nothing illegal (IMO), in the same way that the warehouse that rents out space to black market operators is also doing nothing illegal. They both simply provide a legal service that happens to be home to many smaller illegal operations.
Fair use does not allow downloading complete songs... fair use specificially states that only small portions of the original work may be used... for example, fair use allows radio DJs to use samples of songs in their ads and shows without having to pay a royalty for that small clip. Burning a complete, near perfect copy of a song is not covered under fair use unless you have already purchased the copyrighted song on CD.
Use of Napster, for 95% or more of the users on it, is illegal. This is not to say that it is necessarily HARMFUL to the artists or record labels... studies regarding music sales and mp3 use have been ambiguous at best. But just because something is not harmful, does not mean it is LEGAL. Downloading and using MP3s you do not own is illegal, period. No ifs, ands, or buts. Should the laws be changed? Maybe. Does that make it legal to use MP3s until the laws are changed? No. It's still illegal. Will people keep doing it? Of course they will. And so will I.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor