It's just a way to make Google more useful, meaning you're more likely to use Google instead of, say, MSN Search (if you happened to be an idiot who couldn't tell that Google is way better anyway).
The military already has plenty of high explosive. On the other hand, they use lots of fuel and are just as interested in improving efficiency as the rest of us, if not more. I don't see any reason why the military would fund research into using this as an explosive over using it as a fuel. But don't let me spoil your conspiracy theories...
It's actually kind of cool. Bungie is basically releasing an audio book piece by piece as part of the ilovebees game. I'm not playing the game, I'm just listening along to the audio clips people have compiled. Listen to it here.
Actually, a human-controlled but self-balancing walking robot is almost as huge an advance for the field of robotics as an autonomous one. That said, I haven't been hugely impressed by Sony's demos so far. This one was interesting at the beginning as the robot balanced on the ramp and through the turn, but when rollerskating on its own power, it was basically just walking on rollerskates. Its walking demos haven't been too impressive either; it always keeps its center of gravity above the foot that's on the ground, meaning that its steps are tiny and walking is slow. It's almost as bad as those walking wind-up toys with the huge feet. Wake me when it's taking huge strides and running with full leg extension forward and back.
Yeah, this guy's criticism of Google News is just sour grapes over lost viewers. News sites are so hungry for viewers that they use stupid tactics like not providing relevant links so you won't leave their site, even when the links are practically the whole point of the story (like stories about websites). The quality of the copy at smaller news sites may be slightly worse, but maybe Google News's success is showing that good copywriting isn't as important as journalists would like to think.
This guy comes off sounding pretty arrogant: "It's clear to a journalist that this system was designed by someone who has no idea what's important in the news." If people are reading Google news, it's because it has the news they want to read. That's what's important in the news. Not some editor's idea of what's important, but what readers think is important.
The *other* problem with Flash is that it's way more expensive than hard drives. It would take $18,000 for me to buy enough Flash cards to replace my 120 GB hard drive (rough estimate of course). Unless this technology is two orders of magnitude cheaper, it can't compete with hard drives except in special low-power niches. This technology might replace Flash for use in mobile devices, but the article didn't compare it to Flash, and I'm wondering why since that seems the logical comparison to make.
Re:Halo, over rated to the extreme.
on
Halo 2 Ready to Ship
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Well of course not everybody will like it, but multiplayer Halo is a LOT of fun in the right company, especially with 8 or more players over System Link. You don't run as fast as in Counter-Strike, but that doesn't make it bad, just different. Multiplayer is the main reason Halo has such a large following today. The single player game was OK; it was the best thing out on the XBox for a while at the beginning, so it's what people played. The repetition is bad, but the combat itself is fun and has a lot of depth because good variety and balance in the weaponry. Bungie is specifically avoiding repetition in Halo 2 levels, so that particular problem of Halo 1 has been addressed. I'm hoping the story is better too; Halo 1's story was good for an FPS but there's so much more potential there. With Halo 2's xbox live support, 8-16 player games will be available 24 hours a day in your living room, so it won't be a big deal involving transporting XBoxes and TVs to experience the coolness of larger Halo games.
Throughout that article they keep talking about how amazing this technology is because it's so much better than hard drives. But they never compare it to regular DRAM or Flash memory, which is probably what it would compete with in the marketplace, unless it is much cheaper to manufacture than DRAM or Flash, which seems unlikely seeing as it's based on silicon fabrication techniques.
If you submitted this article earlier and got rejected, then you may have a valid complaint against this Roland guy. However, whether he is violating any IPR is questionable, especially since he credits his sources, unlike many Slashdot news posts. Furthermore, finding a few pictures and hosting them to survive the Slashdot effect is *way* more than what any other article poster does, plus he provides links to primary sources and relevant research. I'd say he added a lot of interesting material to the New Scientist article, and I'm willing to bet that his submission is better than yours was because of it.
Look people. If Roland whatsisname consistently submits interesting stories about interesting technology, which are researched on his own time and given to Slashdot for free, why should Slashdot reject every story just because they link to his blog as well as other news sources? There is not a single good reason to have a grudge against this guy. You all could do exactly the same by starting a technology blog, finding interesting stories, and posting them to Slashdot daily. So stop whining! This story is interesting and relevant to nerds like me, and I'm glad Roland used his time instead of mine to filter the news sources and bring it to me via Slashdot.
Halo doesn't have handicapping, unfortunately. It's one of my most wanted features; hopefully Halo 2 will have it. Playing 3-on-1 capture-the-flag is the only way inexperienced players will ever have a chance against very good players, and even then it's not much fun since the inexperienced players just keep dying over and over. It's a real problem to introduce new people to Halo multiplayer.
The mouse isn't where the difference is; the difference is what happens to the signal inside the computer. For PS/2, the signal gets processed in a tiny bit of hardware, then goes straight to the CPU via its own high-priority interrupt, and gets handed to the mouse driver. For USB, the signal must be wrapped in the USB protocol, must wait for the shared USB line to be clear to send, gets processed in a larger bit of hardware, then goes to the CPU in an interrupt shared with every other USB device on the system and possibly other things besides, then goes through the USB driver's protocol stack, and only then gets sent to the mouse driver. There are a lot more opportunities to introduce latency in a USB signal.
No. You are confused. USB mice have faster *sampling rates* by default than PS/2 mice. However, since PS/2 mice already sample at 60 Hz, any benefit from the increased sampling rate is marginal (what use is sampling the mouse more frequently than your monitor displays frames?). The *response time* is different. It's the difference between bandwidth and latency. USB mice have higher bandwidth but higher latency as well because more processing is involved in sampling the mouse. I imagine the difference is negligable in most cases, however in my case either the USB hardware or driver is low quality, causing a noticable delay in mouse movement.
The definition of main is invalid in C99, but the reason it is accepted by compilers is that it is valid K&R C (which was amazingly lenient about function definitions; originally it didn't even check the types of function parameters, or convert them if they were wrong!). In fact, the old C89 standard included a lot of compatibility with K&R so it may be valid C89 as well (I can't find a copy of the C89 standard to check; stupid standards organizations). In K&R C function return values default to int if not specified, and parameters default to int too. Calling printf without a prototype I'm not so sure about; however it works on every C compiler I've tried. It appears that printf is built in to most compilers.
You missed a modifying expression;-) The value of c is set after the ? too, in "c=!r--" (not "c!=r--", which would be a whole different kettle of fish). You're still quite right though, the C is valid due to the sequence point at ?.
Yes, but the Dell 2001 FP has the lowest response time available in a consumer LCD on the market today (16 ms, which is less than the time one frame is displayed at 60 FPS). So if a 2001 FP can't do it, no LCD can. Besides, LCD ghosting results in a blurry picture, not lag in a clear picture.
I have this monitor, and it causes no lag on my machine. Dragging windows is just as instant as it is on a CRT, and most games are quite responsive. I'll admit I haven't put it side-by-side with a CRT, but I am quite sensitive to mouse lag (I refuse to use a USB mouse on my machine because for some reason it causes noticable lag, perhaps due to dodgy USB hardware/drivers).
P.S. This monitor is awesome and I would recommend it to anybody. Great for gaming, watching movies, anything.
Preach on, brutha, preach ON! At least somebody out there's got it right. Somebody should start a "Best of KDE" project that takes all the good options and hardcodes them, reducing bloat and clutter. Kind of like what they did to Mozilla when they made Firefox.
Why did you reply to my post with this? I am aware of MEncoder. Are you saying that it converts H.264 to Dirac? I have no doubt that it will eventually. However, it could hardly be called "easy". It is not incredibly complex, but it is a command line program, which immediately eliminates the possibility of it becoming very popular with nontechnical users. And I have no doubt that if Dirac threatens to surpass H.264 in popularity, and MEncoder is a popular way to transcode H.264 to Dirac, then the MPlayer team will get sued, or at least the distributors of MEncoder will get sued.
Almost all call boxes exist where cell phones work perfectly. In fact, the kind I'm talking about use the cellular phone system to make their calls. Your juvenile slander is uncalled for.
Maybe they had more of a point 15 years ago when most of them were being installed (at great expense I'm sure due to the newness of the technology), but they are hardly a necessary service, and now they're practically useless. All I'm asking is, were they really worth the money?
They already make those. They're called "call boxes" and they are placed every mile or so along many California freeways outside of cities, in case you get stranded. Pretty neat actually, though with cellphones being so common now they're sorta useless, and I'll bet they cost a lot of money that California shouldn't have spent.
Yeah, it's all fine for now. But building free software on a proprietary base will bite you in the ass in the long run (which is why we have the Debian project, but that's a topic for another time). Eventually someone will make a program that the MPEG people don't like (such as an easy converter to Dirac), and they will get sued into next week. Or, if the open-source codecs are sucessful and become the de-facto standard for multimedia, THEN they'll start being pricks about the royalties. The MPEG consortium can come in at any time they like and destroy any open-source project using their standards, or leech off their hard work by charging everybody royalties. I wouldn't work on a project that had that hanging over its head, even if the MPEG people have been okay so far.
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It's just a way to make Google more useful, meaning you're more likely to use Google instead of, say, MSN Search (if you happened to be an idiot who couldn't tell that Google is way better anyway).
Can't help you if you're using OS X though...
The military already has plenty of high explosive. On the other hand, they use lots of fuel and are just as interested in improving efficiency as the rest of us, if not more. I don't see any reason why the military would fund research into using this as an explosive over using it as a fuel. But don't let me spoil your conspiracy theories...
When the autonomous humanoid robot is invented, then the future of leisure will be upon us, and not before.
It's actually kind of cool. Bungie is basically releasing an audio book piece by piece as part of the ilovebees game. I'm not playing the game, I'm just listening along to the audio clips people have compiled. Listen to it here.
Actually, a human-controlled but self-balancing walking robot is almost as huge an advance for the field of robotics as an autonomous one. That said, I haven't been hugely impressed by Sony's demos so far. This one was interesting at the beginning as the robot balanced on the ramp and through the turn, but when rollerskating on its own power, it was basically just walking on rollerskates. Its walking demos haven't been too impressive either; it always keeps its center of gravity above the foot that's on the ground, meaning that its steps are tiny and walking is slow. It's almost as bad as those walking wind-up toys with the huge feet. Wake me when it's taking huge strides and running with full leg extension forward and back.
This guy comes off sounding pretty arrogant: "It's clear to a journalist that this system was designed by someone who has no idea what's important in the news." If people are reading Google news, it's because it has the news they want to read. That's what's important in the news. Not some editor's idea of what's important, but what readers think is important.
The *other* problem with Flash is that it's way more expensive than hard drives. It would take $18,000 for me to buy enough Flash cards to replace my 120 GB hard drive (rough estimate of course). Unless this technology is two orders of magnitude cheaper, it can't compete with hard drives except in special low-power niches. This technology might replace Flash for use in mobile devices, but the article didn't compare it to Flash, and I'm wondering why since that seems the logical comparison to make.
Well of course not everybody will like it, but multiplayer Halo is a LOT of fun in the right company, especially with 8 or more players over System Link. You don't run as fast as in Counter-Strike, but that doesn't make it bad, just different. Multiplayer is the main reason Halo has such a large following today. The single player game was OK; it was the best thing out on the XBox for a while at the beginning, so it's what people played. The repetition is bad, but the combat itself is fun and has a lot of depth because good variety and balance in the weaponry. Bungie is specifically avoiding repetition in Halo 2 levels, so that particular problem of Halo 1 has been addressed. I'm hoping the story is better too; Halo 1's story was good for an FPS but there's so much more potential there. With Halo 2's xbox live support, 8-16 player games will be available 24 hours a day in your living room, so it won't be a big deal involving transporting XBoxes and TVs to experience the coolness of larger Halo games.
Throughout that article they keep talking about how amazing this technology is because it's so much better than hard drives. But they never compare it to regular DRAM or Flash memory, which is probably what it would compete with in the marketplace, unless it is much cheaper to manufacture than DRAM or Flash, which seems unlikely seeing as it's based on silicon fabrication techniques.
multiplayer.
If you submitted this article earlier and got rejected, then you may have a valid complaint against this Roland guy. However, whether he is violating any IPR is questionable, especially since he credits his sources, unlike many Slashdot news posts. Furthermore, finding a few pictures and hosting them to survive the Slashdot effect is *way* more than what any other article poster does, plus he provides links to primary sources and relevant research. I'd say he added a lot of interesting material to the New Scientist article, and I'm willing to bet that his submission is better than yours was because of it.
Look people. If Roland whatsisname consistently submits interesting stories about interesting technology, which are researched on his own time and given to Slashdot for free, why should Slashdot reject every story just because they link to his blog as well as other news sources? There is not a single good reason to have a grudge against this guy. You all could do exactly the same by starting a technology blog, finding interesting stories, and posting them to Slashdot daily. So stop whining! This story is interesting and relevant to nerds like me, and I'm glad Roland used his time instead of mine to filter the news sources and bring it to me via Slashdot.
Halo doesn't have handicapping, unfortunately. It's one of my most wanted features; hopefully Halo 2 will have it. Playing 3-on-1 capture-the-flag is the only way inexperienced players will ever have a chance against very good players, and even then it's not much fun since the inexperienced players just keep dying over and over. It's a real problem to introduce new people to Halo multiplayer.
The mouse isn't where the difference is; the difference is what happens to the signal inside the computer. For PS/2, the signal gets processed in a tiny bit of hardware, then goes straight to the CPU via its own high-priority interrupt, and gets handed to the mouse driver. For USB, the signal must be wrapped in the USB protocol, must wait for the shared USB line to be clear to send, gets processed in a larger bit of hardware, then goes to the CPU in an interrupt shared with every other USB device on the system and possibly other things besides, then goes through the USB driver's protocol stack, and only then gets sent to the mouse driver. There are a lot more opportunities to introduce latency in a USB signal.
No. You are confused. USB mice have faster *sampling rates* by default than PS/2 mice. However, since PS/2 mice already sample at 60 Hz, any benefit from the increased sampling rate is marginal (what use is sampling the mouse more frequently than your monitor displays frames?). The *response time* is different. It's the difference between bandwidth and latency. USB mice have higher bandwidth but higher latency as well because more processing is involved in sampling the mouse. I imagine the difference is negligable in most cases, however in my case either the USB hardware or driver is low quality, causing a noticable delay in mouse movement.
The definition of main is invalid in C99, but the reason it is accepted by compilers is that it is valid K&R C (which was amazingly lenient about function definitions; originally it didn't even check the types of function parameters, or convert them if they were wrong!). In fact, the old C89 standard included a lot of compatibility with K&R so it may be valid C89 as well (I can't find a copy of the C89 standard to check; stupid standards organizations). In K&R C function return values default to int if not specified, and parameters default to int too. Calling printf without a prototype I'm not so sure about; however it works on every C compiler I've tried. It appears that printf is built in to most compilers.
You missed a modifying expression ;-) The value of c is set after the ? too, in "c=!r--" (not "c!=r--", which would be a whole different kettle of fish). You're still quite right though, the C is valid due to the sequence point at ?.
Yes, but the Dell 2001 FP has the lowest response time available in a consumer LCD on the market today (16 ms, which is less than the time one frame is displayed at 60 FPS). So if a 2001 FP can't do it, no LCD can. Besides, LCD ghosting results in a blurry picture, not lag in a clear picture.
P.S. This monitor is awesome and I would recommend it to anybody. Great for gaming, watching movies, anything.
Preach on, brutha, preach ON! At least somebody out there's got it right. Somebody should start a "Best of KDE" project that takes all the good options and hardcodes them, reducing bloat and clutter. Kind of like what they did to Mozilla when they made Firefox.
Why did you reply to my post with this? I am aware of MEncoder. Are you saying that it converts H.264 to Dirac? I have no doubt that it will eventually. However, it could hardly be called "easy". It is not incredibly complex, but it is a command line program, which immediately eliminates the possibility of it becoming very popular with nontechnical users. And I have no doubt that if Dirac threatens to surpass H.264 in popularity, and MEncoder is a popular way to transcode H.264 to Dirac, then the MPlayer team will get sued, or at least the distributors of MEncoder will get sued.
Maybe they had more of a point 15 years ago when most of them were being installed (at great expense I'm sure due to the newness of the technology), but they are hardly a necessary service, and now they're practically useless. All I'm asking is, were they really worth the money?
They already make those. They're called "call boxes" and they are placed every mile or so along many California freeways outside of cities, in case you get stranded. Pretty neat actually, though with cellphones being so common now they're sorta useless, and I'll bet they cost a lot of money that California shouldn't have spent.
Yeah, it's all fine for now. But building free software on a proprietary base will bite you in the ass in the long run (which is why we have the Debian project, but that's a topic for another time). Eventually someone will make a program that the MPEG people don't like (such as an easy converter to Dirac), and they will get sued into next week. Or, if the open-source codecs are sucessful and become the de-facto standard for multimedia, THEN they'll start being pricks about the royalties. The MPEG consortium can come in at any time they like and destroy any open-source project using their standards, or leech off their hard work by charging everybody royalties. I wouldn't work on a project that had that hanging over its head, even if the MPEG people have been okay so far.