The Freescape engine from 1987 was the first time I came across the explicit concept of a 3D game engine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driller_(game) They even advertised it on the packaging!
thanks for that: what you say sounds believable, but a little spooky. The way you frame it Google's strategy is primarily about weakening competitors (specifically Microsoft). Where does this strategy end? Who does Google intend to target after Microsoft? What is the actual value of this?
What you're describing sounds like a corporate sociopath...
"Apple may have the edge in ease of use, but they never had an edge in anything else"
If you took apart two phones and compared how they were designed, you'd see Apple's mechanical design is more considerably more advanced, some could say unnecessarily complex. Their manufacturing sophistication is a pretty sizable leap ahead of any other company making consumer products, bar none.
You simply can't make an iPhone using plastic molded parts and paint. It just can't be done.
I just choked on my sandwich. I can't let that go unchallenged: I have been suffering from Ribbons since they came out - I'm a reasonably heavy user of Office and came at this with a pretty open mind. I gave it a few months to 'settle in' and I pretty much expected to like it.
IMO it is an abysmal interface.
The most obvious failing (to me) is that you work in different applications in different ways. In Word, I do tend to type, then format, then print. Ribbons might work. In Powerpoint, I work in a totally different way, completing and formatting each slide as I go, meaning I have to hunt endlessly around ribbons to find Grid Settings (WHERE!), Send Backwards (etc, etc...) The only solution I've found is to create a mini menu on the tiny customizable toolbar.
Why would it be such a crime to let me customize menus? Or even tear off the ones I'm using a lot?
The Register has a decent analysis of this making similar points: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/16/subs_crash/ Lewis Page consistently seems to write insightfully about nuclear submarines - I look forward to seeing how well he can rant about Wikipedia.
It did, but I decided to go look for it in Word 2007 and found one of the dangers of allowing user-generated content. Turns out MS doesn't really get sarcasm:
1.Open Word 2007 (though it's the same in any Office 2007 app, I think). Click on the help icon in the top right (?)
2.Type in "Office Assistant"
3. 7th link down is "What happened to Office Assistant?" Click here.
4. Read the *first* community tip for some mean-spirited hilarity.
"And given the the amazingness(I know it's not a real word) that is Vista, you (Microsoft) could even creat an overall Vista Mascot that could hang out on our desktop, even while no MS Office programs are open."
'Where did the development $ come from?'... as usual, it came from you and me.
(no, really - from http://www.sncorp.com/about/ataglance.shtml "SNC (The Sierra Nevada Corporation) is a Privately Held Corporation and is considered the Top Woman Owned Federal Contractor in the US based upon the capabilities and resources to deliver high-technology systems and integration programs at the $1 Billion level")
I'll pass by most of that comment, but you might be interested to know that, amongst many others, NASA's Deep Space 1 probe is in space right now using an (older design of) ion drive.
I think it's even worse than that. Eventually, in order to authenticate that your biometric data is correct, your fingerprint (or iris scan or whatever) is compared with known data. Despite what it looks like on CSI, surely is effectively comparing two hashes for a 'good-enough' match? The image has to be reduced to some (long) code for storage and transmission by some repeatable (and perfectly crackable) method. Think CSS.
Effectively, it's not just about someone stealing your fingerprint - this fingerprint is just data. It all boils down to regular database security, protecting one long (but unchangable) code. And as everyone says, once security has been breached, it's gone forever.
Every single database that uses your biometrics will have to be 100% secure, or they all fail, because there can't be an infinite number of ways of encoding this info.
- the bodysnatchers changed his age on his death certificate from 95 to 85 (presumably to bump up his value), and ignored the fact that his cancerous bones would have been useless for transplant. Caveat emptor indeed.
nah, man - I think you missed something. I'm no programmer, but he makes the point that what he's doing here is a different type of programming. It allows him to lay out his program structure in two dimensions. Most (all?) code is laid out as a vertical thread of logical progressive statements, so this does seem different: Excel allows you to visually lay out the relationships between variable in a spatial way.
It not like he's claiming to have discovered this: this is the fundamental reason why spreadsheets have been used for well over a decade - they give you a logical map. You could lay out a spreadsheet as a single list of mathematical operations, but it would obviously suck in comparison to a a spreadsheet. He's just pointing out this is interesting to think of in terms of a programming paradigm.
(YAY! I used 'paradigm' and didn't sprout horns or anything!)
Apparently not even. From the document linked in the story: From: Mike Ybarra To: Jim Allchin "We are caving to Intel...[and] really burning HP - who are committed to work with us to drive the UI experience across platforms and have already made significant investments."
well, I don't imagine Apple are too concerned about this, apart from.looking. concerned for the benefit of AT&T. I can't imagine that the future Apple want to live in is being trapped in the ghetto of AT&T. I bet that was just the only way into a deeply entrenched market.
Remember MusicMatch Jukebox? (The music player supplied with the first Wintel version of the iPod) The same deal - a tactical alliance, dumped the moment that they could stand on their own two feet. Portalplayer anyone? Logitech?
The presence of a grey market for iPhones proves that there's a pent-up demand ready for the day Apple have the strength to roll this thing out under their own banner. Apple.hate. being beholden to anyone else's marketing. HP & iPod? bah. Their whole deal is about owning the.experience. not the product.
They're making plenty enough money to justify the investment and keep the alliance with AT&T alive for now. All this does is make Apple stronger.
This makes up for all the times I've been wrong! 2 years ago...
"i think people are a little confused about what Sony are trying to achieve with the PS3. Sure, it's going to be up against the Wii and XB360, but I'm guessing that's a secondary concern to Mr Stringer.
The PS2 sold 105million units. Let's say the PS3 is a disaster - how bad could it be? 50million? 25million?
Those are all Blu-ray devices. At least an installed base of 25million Blu-ray players sold in a few years time. Versus how many HD-DVD players? How can HD-DVD compete with that kind of a headstart?
Owning the next-gen DVD format is the prize here. HD-DVD is only 33% ahead of Blu-ray today, before the PS3 even hits the market. I think that's more precious to Sony than losing a bit of ground to Microsoft. Maybe they calculated on losing gaming market share this time round."
Sapper is an interesting guy - no industrial design training, just picked it up and got world famous.
Since then, IBM/Lenovo seem to have diluted the original design intent until now all you've got is the fact that it's black and boxy. I don't think they really understood the design language they inherited, and most of the stuff in the ThinkPad line is just darn hideous. Lines and edges all over the place, arbitrarily mixed with curves (NO curves in the original). The fact they claim lineage in that he 'influences' their current design doesn't convince me he actually creates it.
whoah there! 'fraid you've been misled by the lousy headline. If you'd got to the story synopsis, you'd see it was a *European* mission, which Russia is contributing to. It's called 'Laplace' (a curiously French name for a 'Russian mission', huh?) and will be launched by the ESA - European Space Agency in 2015ish.
Now how much you trust those dirty Europeans is a different matter...
"Uh, yeah, except it is a reactor. If they want to emphasize how safe it is, that's great, but renaming products to get rid of words people don't like is just dumb."
um, remember "Nuclear Magnetic Resonance"?
"In its early years MRI was referred to as nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (NMRI), but the word nuclear has been associated with ionizing radiation exposure, which is not used in an MRI, so to prevent patients from making a negative association between MRI and ionizing radiation, the word has been almost universally removed. Scientists still use the term NMR when discussing non-medical devices operating on the same principles."
Whoah people. Burst didn't win this one by my reckoning. $10m is a tiny fraction of what they hoped to get by enforcing their patents across the 100 gazillion iPods that Apple is 'infringing' their patents with.
I'd call this: Burst: Pay us $1bn dollars, or we'll take a license off every iPod that you ever sell. Apple: FOAD. We'll send our lawyer hoards after your patents, dumbasses. Burst: Pay us! Pay us now!
Apple: OK, how many more of your patents do you want us to wipe off the face of the earth? Burst: erm, how about $10m? Apple: Since that's less than our lawyers fees, ok. Don't EVER try that again.
I can't be the only one who clicked on the link and was astonished to see: "On the Possibility of a Back Door in the NIST SP800-90 Dual Ec Prng - by Dan Shumow, Niels Ferguson, Microsoft"
Microsoft are exposing this? Are they funding the group making these kind of claims? If this was true, wouldn't this intensely annoy the NSA to have this exposed? Am I missing something here? .
- I see the disclaimer ("What we are NOT saying") where they seem to be saying - "No way did the NSA intentionally make this broken - maybe it was an errant developer and maybe they knew what they were doing", but it amounts to the same thing, surely?
Cheers. Slack of me to not go right to the 'pedia. OK - well, Wikipedia does reference stuff that I have seen in the press before...
"Promotion of abortion rights and contraception"
uh-huh. Sure. Terrible.
"Investment in oil companies and drug companies" The BMGF have $34b. It doesn't just sit around in a sack in Bill's house waiting to be given away. In fact, to try and make sure that that pile o' cash doesn't get ravaged by inflation, and to hopefully give more away, they invest it, just like (I hope) you do with your pension savings.
Ever looked at what your 401k pension savings are invested in? Got any S&P500 funds? "American Growth" funds? Anything like that? If so, you too are investing in Exxon and Abbott and any number of companies that are responsible for "spills", "pollution" and all kinds of nasty things. Heck, you'd even be investing in Philip Morris (now "Altria") and Microsoft.
The difference between me and the BMGF is that they have a commitment to give every cent they make from these investments to the poor, hungry and under-represented people in the world. My pension is just for me and my family. How about your savings? The LA Times the other reply cites (Cheers!) makes about half a decent point and them smothers it in innuendo, weak connections and then implies that BMGF should be regulating the oil industry.
It's so easy to throw muck, and Microsoft thoroughly deserves a ton o' muck. But this isn't Microsoft and Bill Gates isn't frickin' Satan. Yep, I do wish the Foundation would confine themselves to 'ethical' investments, but I think they don't want to get distracted by navigating that minefield (define ethical for me?) when there's work to be done. Just one single investment company (Vanguard) holds over $125b in the S&P500, so on the scale of the investment market even Bill's $34b starts to look small.
This holy-than-thou tone about a charitable organization that is doing its level best to tackle some of the biggest problems in the world and is making some actual headway on some of them (did you read the rest of the Wikipedia article? - "the approximately US$800 million that the foundation gives every year for global health approaches the annual budget of the United Nations' World Health Organization (192 nations)") is pretty weak. I don't work for Bill, or his Foundation, but I do admire the Foundation, I'll admit it. I think there's some things in this world worth being positive about, and enormous generosity and a will to improve the world is one of them.
Care to back up that casual slander of the Gates Foundation with any reference? I'm genuinely curious about what you've read that I missed. Otherwise, don't blame me if I assume that you're trolling.
Slashdot Mirror
The Freescape engine from 1987 was the first time I came across the explicit concept of a 3D game engine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driller_(game)
They even advertised it on the packaging!
thanks for that: what you say sounds believable, but a little spooky. The way you frame it Google's strategy is primarily about weakening competitors (specifically Microsoft). Where does this strategy end? Who does Google intend to target after Microsoft? What is the actual value of this?
What you're describing sounds like a corporate sociopath...
"Apple may have the edge in ease of use, but they never had an edge in anything else"
If you took apart two phones and compared how they were designed, you'd see Apple's mechanical design is more considerably more advanced, some could say unnecessarily complex. Their manufacturing sophistication is a pretty sizable leap ahead of any other company making consumer products, bar none.
You simply can't make an iPhone using plastic molded parts and paint. It just can't be done.
I just choked on my sandwich. I can't let that go unchallenged:
I have been suffering from Ribbons since they came out - I'm a reasonably heavy user of Office and came at this with a pretty open mind. I gave it a few months to 'settle in' and I pretty much expected to like it.
IMO it is an abysmal interface.
The most obvious failing (to me) is that you work in different applications in different ways. In Word, I do tend to type, then format, then print. Ribbons might work. In Powerpoint, I work in a totally different way, completing and formatting each slide as I go, meaning I have to hunt endlessly around ribbons to find Grid Settings (WHERE!), Send Backwards (etc, etc...) The only solution I've found is to create a mini menu on the tiny customizable toolbar.
Why would it be such a crime to let me customize menus? Or even tear off the ones I'm using a lot?
The Register has a decent analysis of this making similar points:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/16/subs_crash/
Lewis Page consistently seems to write insightfully about nuclear submarines - I look forward to seeing how well he can rant about Wikipedia.
It did, but I decided to go look for it in Word 2007 and found one of the dangers of allowing user-generated content. Turns out MS doesn't really get sarcasm:
1.Open Word 2007 (though it's the same in any Office 2007 app, I think). Click on the help icon in the top right (?)
2.Type in "Office Assistant"
3. 7th link down is "What happened to Office Assistant?" Click here.
4. Read the *first* community tip for some mean-spirited hilarity.
"And given the the amazingness(I know it's not a real word) that is Vista, you (Microsoft) could even creat an overall Vista Mascot that could hang out on our desktop, even while no MS Office programs are open."
Kudos to the submitter.
To add to this list, I found this a well-edited list of notable legal free music downloads, with a great variety from Butthole Surfers to Beethoven:
http://freealbums.blogsome.com/album-directory-a-z
enjoy!
I have to assume you never played Warcraft I/II
"I love blowing things up!"
-I always resented the move aware from goofiness to serious fantasy "dungeons and dragons"-style.
"For the KING!"
For heaven's sake: even Diablo II had a secret cow level!
Hooray! This finally puts Linux right up there with "Deer Hunter 7"!
'Where did the development $ come from?' ... as usual, it came from you and me.
(no, really - from http://www.sncorp.com/about/ataglance.shtml
"SNC (The Sierra Nevada Corporation) is a Privately Held Corporation and is considered the Top Woman Owned Federal Contractor in the US based upon the capabilities and resources to deliver high-technology systems and integration programs at the $1 Billion level")
-still, I like their beer...
I'll pass by most of that comment, but you might be interested to know that, amongst many others, NASA's Deep Space 1 probe is in space right now using an (older design of) ion drive.
It uses Xenon atoms
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_engine#Deep_Space_1
I think it's even worse than that. Eventually, in order to authenticate that your biometric data is correct, your fingerprint (or iris scan or whatever) is compared with known data. Despite what it looks like on CSI, surely is effectively comparing two hashes for a 'good-enough' match? The image has to be reduced to some (long) code for storage and transmission by some repeatable (and perfectly crackable) method. Think CSS.
Effectively, it's not just about someone stealing your fingerprint - this fingerprint is just data. It all boils down to regular database security, protecting one long (but unchangable) code. And as everyone says, once security has been breached, it's gone forever.
Every single database that uses your biometrics will have to be 100% secure, or they all fail, because there can't be an infinite number of ways of encoding this info.
I'm so convinced biometrics are a terrible idea.
I came across this when noted (and lovable) BBC radio journalist and Masterpiece Theater presenter Alastair Cooke's body bits were stolen after his death:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alastair_Cooke#Later_Life_and_Death
- the bodysnatchers changed his age on his death certificate from 95 to 85 (presumably to bump up his value), and ignored the fact that his cancerous bones would have been useless for transplant. Caveat emptor indeed.
nah, man - I think you missed something. I'm no programmer, but he makes the point that what he's doing here is a different type of programming. It allows him to lay out his program structure in two dimensions. Most (all?) code is laid out as a vertical thread of logical progressive statements, so this does seem different: Excel allows you to visually lay out the relationships between variable in a spatial way.
It not like he's claiming to have discovered this: this is the fundamental reason why spreadsheets have been used for well over a decade - they give you a logical map. You could lay out a spreadsheet as a single list of mathematical operations, but it would obviously suck in comparison to a a spreadsheet. He's just pointing out this is interesting to think of in terms of a programming paradigm.
(YAY! I used 'paradigm' and didn't sprout horns or anything!)
Cheers!
Apparently not even. From the document linked in the story:
From: Mike Ybarra
To: Jim Allchin
"We are caving to Intel...[and] really burning HP - who are committed to work with us to drive the UI experience across platforms and have already made significant investments."
well, I don't imagine Apple are too concerned about this, apart from .looking. concerned for the benefit of AT&T. I can't imagine that the future Apple want to live in is being trapped in the ghetto of AT&T. I bet that was just the only way into a deeply entrenched market.
.hate. being beholden to anyone else's marketing. HP & iPod? bah. Their whole deal is about owning the .experience. not the product.
Remember MusicMatch Jukebox? (The music player supplied with the first Wintel version of the iPod) The same deal - a tactical alliance, dumped the moment that they could stand on their own two feet. Portalplayer anyone? Logitech?
The presence of a grey market for iPhones proves that there's a pent-up demand ready for the day Apple have the strength to roll this thing out under their own banner. Apple
They're making plenty enough money to justify the investment and keep the alliance with AT&T alive for now. All this does is make Apple stronger.
This makes up for all the times I've been wrong! 2 years ago...
"i think people are a little confused about what Sony are trying to achieve with the PS3. Sure, it's going to be up against the Wii and XB360, but I'm guessing that's a secondary concern to Mr Stringer.
The PS2 sold 105million units. Let's say the PS3 is a disaster - how bad could it be? 50million? 25million?
Those are all Blu-ray devices. At least an installed base of 25million Blu-ray players sold in a few years time. Versus how many HD-DVD players? How can HD-DVD compete with that kind of a headstart?
Owning the next-gen DVD format is the prize here. HD-DVD is only 33% ahead of Blu-ray today, before the PS3 even hits the market. I think that's more precious to Sony than losing a bit of ground to Microsoft. Maybe they calculated on losing gaming market share this time round."
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=206006&cid=16798816
I thank you!
...so many cool words in one story... wow ...
The original old ThinkPad design is the one in MOMA - designed by Richard Sapper.
http://images.businessweek.com/ss/05/10/richard_sapper/index_01.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad
It's a nicely detailed design. His most famous design would be the Tizio lamp, as seen in flash offices in movies from the 80's:
http://land.liquid-light.org/tizio/tizio-treff.jpg
You can kinda see the same aesthetic carrying over: simple, straight lines, technical, precise.
Sapper is an interesting guy - no industrial design training, just picked it up and got world famous.
Since then, IBM/Lenovo seem to have diluted the original design intent until now all you've got is the fact that it's black and boxy. I don't think they really understood the design language they inherited, and most of the stuff in the ThinkPad line is just darn hideous. Lines and edges all over the place, arbitrarily mixed with curves (NO curves in the original). The fact they claim lineage in that he 'influences' their current design doesn't convince me he actually creates it.
mod (-1): pretentious - go ahead...
whoah there! 'fraid you've been misled by the lousy headline. If you'd got to the story synopsis, you'd see it was a *European* mission, which Russia is contributing to. It's called 'Laplace' (a curiously French name for a 'Russian mission', huh?) and will be launched by the ESA - European Space Agency in 2015ish.
Now how much you trust those dirty Europeans is a different matter...
"Uh, yeah, except it is a reactor. If they want to emphasize how safe it is, that's great, but renaming products to get rid of words people don't like is just dumb."
um, remember "Nuclear Magnetic Resonance"?
"In its early years MRI was referred to as nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (NMRI), but the word nuclear has been associated with ionizing radiation exposure, which is not used in an MRI, so to prevent patients from making a negative association between MRI and ionizing radiation, the word has been almost universally removed. Scientists still use the term NMR when discussing non-medical devices operating on the same principles."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRI
Whoah people. Burst didn't win this one by my reckoning. $10m is a tiny fraction of what they hoped to get by enforcing their patents across the 100 gazillion iPods that Apple is 'infringing' their patents with.
I'd call this:
Burst: Pay us $1bn dollars, or we'll take a license off every iPod that you ever sell.
Apple: FOAD. We'll send our lawyer hoards after your patents, dumbasses.
Burst: Pay us! Pay us now!
Apple: OK, how many more of your patents do you want us to wipe off the face of the earth?
Burst: erm, how about $10m?
Apple: Since that's less than our lawyers fees, ok. Don't EVER try that again.
I can't be the only one who clicked on the link and was astonished to see:
"On the Possibility of a Back Door in the NIST SP800-90 Dual Ec Prng - by Dan Shumow, Niels Ferguson, Microsoft"
Microsoft are exposing this? Are they funding the group making these kind of claims? If this was true, wouldn't this intensely annoy the NSA to have this exposed? Am I missing something here? .
- I see the disclaimer ("What we are NOT saying") where they seem to be saying - "No way did the NSA intentionally make this broken - maybe it was an errant developer and maybe they knew what they were doing", but it amounts to the same thing, surely?
Cheers. Slack of me to not go right to the 'pedia. OK - well, Wikipedia does reference stuff that I have seen in the press before...
"Promotion of abortion rights and contraception"
uh-huh. Sure. Terrible.
"Investment in oil companies and drug companies"
The BMGF have $34b. It doesn't just sit around in a sack in Bill's house waiting to be given away. In fact, to try and make sure that that pile o' cash doesn't get ravaged by inflation, and to hopefully give more away, they invest it, just like (I hope) you do with your pension savings.
Ever looked at what your 401k pension savings are invested in? Got any S&P500 funds? "American Growth" funds? Anything like that? If so, you too are investing in Exxon and Abbott and any number of companies that are responsible for "spills", "pollution" and all kinds of nasty things. Heck, you'd even be investing in Philip Morris (now "Altria") and Microsoft.
The difference between me and the BMGF is that they have a commitment to give every cent they make from these investments to the poor, hungry and under-represented people in the world. My pension is just for me and my family. How about your savings? The LA Times the other reply cites (Cheers!) makes about half a decent point and them smothers it in innuendo, weak connections and then implies that BMGF should be regulating the oil industry.
It's so easy to throw muck, and Microsoft thoroughly deserves a ton o' muck. But this isn't Microsoft and Bill Gates isn't frickin' Satan. Yep, I do wish the Foundation would confine themselves to 'ethical' investments, but I think they don't want to get distracted by navigating that minefield (define ethical for me?) when there's work to be done. Just one single investment company (Vanguard) holds over $125b in the S&P500, so on the scale of the investment market even Bill's $34b starts to look small.
This holy-than-thou tone about a charitable organization that is doing its level best to tackle some of the biggest problems in the world and is making some actual headway on some of them (did you read the rest of the Wikipedia article? - "the approximately US$800 million that the foundation gives every year for global health approaches the annual budget of the United Nations' World Health Organization (192 nations)") is pretty weak. I don't work for Bill, or his Foundation, but I do admire the Foundation, I'll admit it. I think there's some things in this world worth being positive about, and enormous generosity and a will to improve the world is one of them.
Care to back up that casual slander of the Gates Foundation with any reference? I'm genuinely curious about what you've read that I missed.
Otherwise, don't blame me if I assume that you're trolling.