A DTMF decoder, PIC microcontroller, and a couple dozen lines of assembly code and you could secure the system by requiring a code be entered on the calling phone.
Tabs can be represented by as many "virtual" space characters in the editor as desired by the programmer, allowing them to work with the amount of indentation they prefer without forcing that representation as spaces in the sources. Plus it saves a lot of bytes for those that still save their source code on floppies.
That's silly. How many times must a movie play on 1,628 screens before it can be captured? One time on one screen is all it takes. Trying to link this with the MPAA is absolutely ridiculous. Do you know how much money the producer, distributor, and MPAA looses when people can't pay to watch a movie on that many screens? A hell of a lot of money.
Decoupling physics and rendering
on
Framerates Matter
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Most physics engines simulate best when the timestep is the same every update - larger timesteps result in less accuracy of the simulation, to name just one issue. Rendering time varies every frame depending on the number of polys rendered, etc. So it is standard practice to decouple the physics engine from rendering, which allows the physics engine to run at whatever fixed timestep is desired. Multiple physics updates can occur for a single rendered frame and vice versa. Interpolation of position is used so objects still appear to move smoothly even though the rendering update is seldom, if ever, exactly in sync with a physics update.
So while the parent's post is right in theory, in practice rendering and physics update rates typically have nothing to do with one another.
Anyway, the so-called iSlate is probably a real product, but it might just be a larger version of the iPhone.
The real question is will the iSlate be a MacBook in tablet form, or an iPod Touch in tablet form. My guess is the former, because I don't think a totally locked down tablet would succeed, and applications written for iPhone / iPod Touch are designed around a specific display size and ratio, and thus would not be conducive to a larger display. However, standard OSX apps would be right at home on a tablet PC.
So my bet is an x86 based super-thin tablet version of the MacBook sporting multitouch support, some custom shell for streamlined app launching (which will look very similar to iPhone), and an open architecture supporting existing OSX apps, and extension of the existing iPhone app store to support these apps and allow Apple to make money off of 3rd party software. This will directly push consumers into the full OSX / Macintosh experience, which is not something the iPhone achieved (besides generic Apple brand exposure).
For his age, that was a pretty powerful first computer. I'm a few years younger than Linus, and my first computer was a TI-99/4A, followed by an Amiga 1000 (512K RAM, no HDD). I think many people of our generation started with floppy-based computers (Apple II, TRS-80, VIC-20, C64, Amiga) with less than 1 MB RAM. I saved up for and purchased the Amiga from my job as a bagger at a grocery store. Paid $750 for it used, and it came with a monitor and an external floppy drive (really saved on the disc swapping having two drives!). That was right when the Amiga 500 was released.
The GP meant exactly what he said: Amazon looses money from the pockets of the purchaser with each ebook sale. Isn't that the goal of every retailer? To loose the consumer's money?
Of course this doesn't directly correlate to the "crappiness" of the movie, but Phantom Menace did just shy of $1 billion in worldwide sales, and it is currently the #10 top grossing movie of all time (placing just below LOTR-TTT). It was the #2 top grossing film of all time until the first Harry Potter movie came out in 2001.
Regardless of the hype, or the previous success of a franchise, a movie cannot be so popular without being liked or enjoyable to at least a very significant portion of the population. That seems to go against TFA's opening line of "Chances are you probably didn’t like Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace."
Could Episode 1 have been better? Absolutely, in so many ways. But it was an incontrovertible success on many levels too. For me personally, various aspects of the movie was too childish (for starters).
I saw this "live" when first broadcast. I was 6. I had the Star Wars movie soundtrack on LP record which I listened to many, many times, because we had no way of watching the actual movie unless it was playing at a theater.
So the TV show was just a dose of that universe for me at that age, like throwing a puppy a bone. So of course I liked it - I just wanted to see those characters, regardless of what they were doing.
But here's the odd part. Where I was so young when I saw that, and only saw it once, I would have these vague memories about watching Star Wars on TV. I knew that couldn't be, because Star Wars was never on TV, and because there were specific scenes I remembered that weren't even from the movie. Fairly recently (like in the last 5 years or so) I saw a reference to that special (probably here on Slashdot) and then it all fell in place.
And yes, it really sucked bad. Like a bad blend of taking fictional characters and pulling them into a contemporary environment (1978). It totally destroyed the illusion that so many movie exist to create. Like watching R2D2's top removed and see some little guy lifted out.
Doesn't anyone ever think of the children? What about Easy Bake Ovens? Have you ever tried to bake a tiny little cake from the heat emitted by LED bulb? No adult, let alone child, has that sort of patience.
Light has properties. Polarization, intensity, wavelength, etc, which are all affected by reflection. Even then, before the creation of mirrors, reflection was primarily diffuse, with the exception of the surface of very smooth and dark water. Simply put, there is an unbelievably vast difference in the property of the light emitted from an LCD panel compared to anything ever generated by nature before. Nothing was ever so pure and homogeneous in its precisely controlled variance.
My point is that the human eye is optimized for viewing light with certain properties. Other animals can see light with different properties (less intensity, different spectrum, etc) better or worse than us. When you throw in the visual processing of the human brain, and how it processes and interprets images, they all play a factor in how well we can see "light", and what the visual system as a whole is optimized for.
If a person was forced from infancy to wear goggles containing LCD / LED panels which displayed the world around them with the same FOV and perceivable resolution as the naked eye would see, would their visual system - sensors in the eye and processing in the brain - change or adapt to the pureness of that light? What would happen if, after 10 years of only seeing that light, they were shown the rawness and variability of the light of the natural world directly?
My expectation is that their vision would have become deficient in some way. There would be subtleties of the natural world that would fail to stimulate the light sensors in their eyes or that would be discarded during visual processing.
Those are the kinds of questions inferred in my original post.
Yeah, I've always wondered about that. If you go back a mere 130 years, the only sources of emitted light a person would ever see (off the top of my head) were:
Sun Fire Stars Lightening Auroras Lightening bugs, etc Foxfire, etc Fish (or were they too deep then?)
So everything the human eye ever saw was reflected light. Since the advent of the television, people began watching and focusing on emitted light directly, and computers, cell phones, etc have taken that even further.
So what, if anything, does that mean to human vision?
This Logitech mouse combines the best of both worlds (2D touch-sensitive scrolling but with actual buttons for tactile feedback). It's been around for half a decade (since 2004).
I'm sure they've released better models since then, but that is one I've actually used.
It would have made more sense for the article to compare the Magic Mouse against against the Logitech mouse since it actually exists, instead of Microsoft's prototypes.
I've had no problems with approvals. In fact, my last updates were approved in less than a week (for both the full and free versions).
What has surprised me is that sales have not been as good as expected, considering the app was featured on the first page of the "What's Hot" in iTunes Games for weeks, and peaked at #6 in Adventure in the USA (for a comparison, The Secret of Monkey Island peaked at #4 in Adventure).
We've placed better than many well established franchises. So assuming there is any correlation whatsoever between the top 100 charts and sales then a lot of big publishers are losing money.
So if developers are leaving the platform it is because: * Competition is so fierce that the pie is cut very thin, resulting in low sales for the vast majority of apps. * Piracy is rampant, and Apple is not doing anything to resolve the issue. Google search results for our app was showing 4-5 hits on the first page of pirate sites providing cracked versions of our app. I've never seen piracy so prevalent and mainstream as it is for iPhone. Back in the Pocket PC days we had to search very thoroughly to find pirated versions of our apps - usually in the.ru TLDs. Now they are front and center. * Free. A typical end user could "live" off of free apps alone and satisfy months of gaming just playing the free / lite versions of apps. I have around 60 games on my development iPod. All are free versions except for 1, because it was the only game that I wanted to purchase after playing the free levels. So the current market scenario of the iPhone is resulting in such a tremendous amount of free content that instead of users buying full versions, they seem to simply seek out other free games when they tire of or have played through a lite version. * Platform is limited. There is only so much that can be done without a D-Pad. This is why Carmack produced Doom on rails instead of an actual FPS type game. I have yet to play any game originally built around physical controls that transferred to iPhone in an acceptable manner. The really good games for iPhone are games designed around a touch screen, and not a port or modification of a game to try and make it use multitouch, accelerometer, etc. * 95% of the foreign markets are a joke. We were the #1 Paid App, #1 Paid Game, and #1 in the sub categories for a number of foreign markets and only sold around a dozen copies a day in those markets. Totally pointless, especially considering you have to have $250 in commission in a single country for Apple to pay out the developer's share.
Finally, the article doesn't actually bash the approval process, as far as being opaque, or taking too long, or the developer having any difficulty getting apps approved. The developer states "I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process. I am very concerned that they are setting a horrible precedent for other software platforms, and soon gatekeepers will start infesting the lives of every software developer.". In other words he wants all platforms to be open, like Windows, Linux, OS X, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, etc. I tend to agree, but it is also true that most platforms have certification processes in place to brand, promote or sell applications within certain market spaces. Essentially all iPhone Apps are represented by Apple and sold in iTunes, whereas with other platforms (like Blackberry) only developers that specifically submit their apps for the "official" store have to go through an approval process.
So again, I don't think this is as much about the difficulty of getting an app approved, but simply that the developer has to seek approval in the first place.
"Free Software For All Russian Schools In Jeopardy"
What sort of jeopardy does a Russian School have to be in to qualify to receive free software? Like academic jeopardy or financial jeopardy? Sounds like a good idea to me!;)
Slashdot Mirror
A DTMF decoder, PIC microcontroller, and a couple dozen lines of assembly code and you could secure the system by requiring a code be entered on the calling phone.
Tabs can be represented by as many "virtual" space characters in the editor as desired by the programmer, allowing them to work with the amount of indentation they prefer without forcing that representation as spaces in the sources. Plus it saves a lot of bytes for those that still save their source code on floppies.
I shed not a tear for you.
That's silly. How many times must a movie play on 1,628 screens before it can be captured? One time on one screen is all it takes. Trying to link this with the MPAA is absolutely ridiculous. Do you know how much money the producer, distributor, and MPAA looses when people can't pay to watch a movie on that many screens? A hell of a lot of money.
Most physics engines simulate best when the timestep is the same every update - larger timesteps result in less accuracy of the simulation, to name just one issue. Rendering time varies every frame depending on the number of polys rendered, etc. So it is standard practice to decouple the physics engine from rendering, which allows the physics engine to run at whatever fixed timestep is desired. Multiple physics updates can occur for a single rendered frame and vice versa. Interpolation of position is used so objects still appear to move smoothly even though the rendering update is seldom, if ever, exactly in sync with a physics update.
So while the parent's post is right in theory, in practice rendering and physics update rates typically have nothing to do with one another.
More info here on implementation details:
http://gafferongames.com/game-physics/fix-your-timestep/
Anyway, the so-called iSlate is probably a real product, but it might just be a larger version of the iPhone.
The real question is will the iSlate be a MacBook in tablet form, or an iPod Touch in tablet form. My guess is the former, because I don't think a totally locked down tablet would succeed, and applications written for iPhone / iPod Touch are designed around a specific display size and ratio, and thus would not be conducive to a larger display. However, standard OSX apps would be right at home on a tablet PC.
So my bet is an x86 based super-thin tablet version of the MacBook sporting multitouch support, some custom shell for streamlined app launching (which will look very similar to iPhone), and an open architecture supporting existing OSX apps, and extension of the existing iPhone app store to support these apps and allow Apple to make money off of 3rd party software. This will directly push consumers into the full OSX / Macintosh experience, which is not something the iPhone achieved (besides generic Apple brand exposure).
For his age, that was a pretty powerful first computer. I'm a few years younger than Linus, and my first computer was a TI-99/4A, followed by an Amiga 1000 (512K RAM, no HDD). I think many people of our generation started with floppy-based computers (Apple II, TRS-80, VIC-20, C64, Amiga) with less than 1 MB RAM. I saved up for and purchased the Amiga from my job as a bagger at a grocery store. Paid $750 for it used, and it came with a monitor and an external floppy drive (really saved on the disc swapping having two drives!). That was right when the Amiga 500 was released.
The GP meant exactly what he said: Amazon looses money from the pockets of the purchaser with each ebook sale. Isn't that the goal of every retailer? To loose the consumer's money?
Of course this doesn't directly correlate to the "crappiness" of the movie, but Phantom Menace did just shy of $1 billion in worldwide sales, and it is currently the #10 top grossing movie of all time (placing just below LOTR-TTT). It was the #2 top grossing film of all time until the first Harry Potter movie came out in 2001.
Regardless of the hype, or the previous success of a franchise, a movie cannot be so popular without being liked or enjoyable to at least a very significant portion of the population. That seems to go against TFA's opening line of "Chances are you probably didn’t like Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace."
Could Episode 1 have been better? Absolutely, in so many ways. But it was an incontrovertible success on many levels too. For me personally, various aspects of the movie was too childish (for starters).
That will be enough to pay for one superstar to sit on a stool and be filmed for 90 minutes.
Windows is on around 90% of general-purpose computing devices, so I would expect at least 90% of compromised machines would be running Windows.
I saw this "live" when first broadcast. I was 6. I had the Star Wars movie soundtrack on LP record which I listened to many, many times, because we had no way of watching the actual movie unless it was playing at a theater.
So the TV show was just a dose of that universe for me at that age, like throwing a puppy a bone. So of course I liked it - I just wanted to see those characters, regardless of what they were doing.
But here's the odd part. Where I was so young when I saw that, and only saw it once, I would have these vague memories about watching Star Wars on TV. I knew that couldn't be, because Star Wars was never on TV, and because there were specific scenes I remembered that weren't even from the movie. Fairly recently (like in the last 5 years or so) I saw a reference to that special (probably here on Slashdot) and then it all fell in place.
And yes, it really sucked bad. Like a bad blend of taking fictional characters and pulling them into a contemporary environment (1978). It totally destroyed the illusion that so many movie exist to create. Like watching R2D2's top removed and see some little guy lifted out.
Idiots. They should have changed the text color to white for the stuff they wanted to hide.
Fingerprint both hands. With digital scanning it's not that big of a deal.
Doesn't anyone ever think of the children? What about Easy Bake Ovens? Have you ever tried to bake a tiny little cake from the heat emitted by LED bulb? No adult, let alone child, has that sort of patience.
At least the batteries will last for 50 hours.
Not all boats have propellers. This won't work against jet boats.
Thank you, Einstein.
Light has properties. Polarization, intensity, wavelength, etc, which are all affected by reflection. Even then, before the creation of mirrors, reflection was primarily diffuse, with the exception of the surface of very smooth and dark water. Simply put, there is an unbelievably vast difference in the property of the light emitted from an LCD panel compared to anything ever generated by nature before. Nothing was ever so pure and homogeneous in its precisely controlled variance.
My point is that the human eye is optimized for viewing light with certain properties. Other animals can see light with different properties (less intensity, different spectrum, etc) better or worse than us. When you throw in the visual processing of the human brain, and how it processes and interprets images, they all play a factor in how well we can see "light", and what the visual system as a whole is optimized for.
If a person was forced from infancy to wear goggles containing LCD / LED panels which displayed the world around them with the same FOV and perceivable resolution as the naked eye would see, would their visual system - sensors in the eye and processing in the brain - change or adapt to the pureness of that light? What would happen if, after 10 years of only seeing that light, they were shown the rawness and variability of the light of the natural world directly?
My expectation is that their vision would have become deficient in some way. There would be subtleties of the natural world that would fail to stimulate the light sensors in their eyes or that would be discarded during visual processing.
Those are the kinds of questions inferred in my original post.
Yeah, I've always wondered about that. If you go back a mere 130 years, the only sources of emitted light a person would ever see (off the top of my head) were:
Sun
Fire
Stars
Lightening
Auroras
Lightening bugs, etc
Foxfire, etc
Fish (or were they too deep then?)
So everything the human eye ever saw was reflected light. Since the advent of the television, people began watching and focusing on emitted light directly, and computers, cell phones, etc have taken that even further.
So what, if anything, does that mean to human vision?
This Logitech mouse combines the best of both worlds (2D touch-sensitive scrolling but with actual buttons for tactile feedback). It's been around for half a decade (since 2004).
http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Cordless-Optical-Notebook-Mouse/dp/B0002SAF3M
I'm sure they've released better models since then, but that is one I've actually used.
It would have made more sense for the article to compare the Magic Mouse against against the Logitech mouse since it actually exists, instead of Microsoft's prototypes.
Taking showers is legal too, but that doesn't mean Apple has to fix it under warranty if you try to use your Mac while taking a shower.
Good idea! Hmm, for some reason javac keeps giving errors when I try feeding it the Objective C code from my iPhone game engine. Boy that's weird...
I've had no problems with approvals. In fact, my last updates were approved in less than a week (for both the full and free versions).
What has surprised me is that sales have not been as good as expected, considering the app was featured on the first page of the "What's Hot" in iTunes Games for weeks, and peaked at #6 in Adventure in the USA (for a comparison, The Secret of Monkey Island peaked at #4 in Adventure).
We've placed better than many well established franchises. So assuming there is any correlation whatsoever between the top 100 charts and sales then a lot of big publishers are losing money.
So if developers are leaving the platform it is because: .ru TLDs. Now they are front and center.
* Competition is so fierce that the pie is cut very thin, resulting in low sales for the vast majority of apps.
* Piracy is rampant, and Apple is not doing anything to resolve the issue. Google search results for our app was showing 4-5 hits on the first page of pirate sites providing cracked versions of our app. I've never seen piracy so prevalent and mainstream as it is for iPhone. Back in the Pocket PC days we had to search very thoroughly to find pirated versions of our apps - usually in the
* Free. A typical end user could "live" off of free apps alone and satisfy months of gaming just playing the free / lite versions of apps. I have around 60 games on my development iPod. All are free versions except for 1, because it was the only game that I wanted to purchase after playing the free levels. So the current market scenario of the iPhone is resulting in such a tremendous amount of free content that instead of users buying full versions, they seem to simply seek out other free games when they tire of or have played through a lite version.
* Platform is limited. There is only so much that can be done without a D-Pad. This is why Carmack produced Doom on rails instead of an actual FPS type game. I have yet to play any game originally built around physical controls that transferred to iPhone in an acceptable manner. The really good games for iPhone are games designed around a touch screen, and not a port or modification of a game to try and make it use multitouch, accelerometer, etc.
* 95% of the foreign markets are a joke. We were the #1 Paid App, #1 Paid Game, and #1 in the sub categories for a number of foreign markets and only sold around a dozen copies a day in those markets. Totally pointless, especially considering you have to have $250 in commission in a single country for Apple to pay out the developer's share.
Finally, the article doesn't actually bash the approval process, as far as being opaque, or taking too long, or the developer having any difficulty getting apps approved. The developer states "I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process. I am very concerned that they are setting a horrible precedent for other software platforms, and soon gatekeepers will start infesting the lives of every software developer.". In other words he wants all platforms to be open, like Windows, Linux, OS X, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, etc. I tend to agree, but it is also true that most platforms have certification processes in place to brand, promote or sell applications within certain market spaces. Essentially all iPhone Apps are represented by Apple and sold in iTunes, whereas with other platforms (like Blackberry) only developers that specifically submit their apps for the "official" store have to go through an approval process.
So again, I don't think this is as much about the difficulty of getting an app approved, but simply that the developer has to seek approval in the first place.
Alright, now I can play Doom 3 on my Razr cell phone! 0.2 FPS here I come!
"Free Software For All Russian Schools In Jeopardy"
What sort of jeopardy does a Russian School have to be in to qualify to receive free software? Like academic jeopardy or financial jeopardy? Sounds like a good idea to me! ;)