I'm hesitant to criticize a group that is breaking so much new ground so quickly, but this sounds like some really amateurish mistakes when it comes to electrical engineering. Basically they added new sensors to detect when the craft impacts the ground. The computer monitoring the sensors was expecting a signal of a certain strength to indicate it had touched the ground, however the value the computer was expecting was higher than what the sensors could physically produce. So it sounds like they either engineered the electronics wrong making it impossible for the sensor to produce a meaningful response, or they misread the sensor datasheet which resulted in flawed software.
Now it's one thing to make an engineering mistake, but it couldn't have taken them an hour to rig up a simple test rig they that they could drop onto the ground, or tap with a mallet, or something similarly simple, to see if the computer could register a landing.
I just can't imagine strapping something new onto an entire rocket assembly, going to all the risk and expense to actually launch the thing and fly it around, hoping that all the new circuitry and software will work perfectly the first time.
It makes me wonder about the whole process NASA has in place with these contests. Even if a craft can meet various flight goals, does it result in anything of worth to NASA? For example, take a piece of software. Say there is this program that really does something impressive (game engines come to mind). So you take a look at the source, and find it is a total and complete mess. Maybe it is full of memory leaks and other bugs, so it just can perform a specific task right, but given other scenarios it crashes. Maybe the code is insecure, or is not scalable, or cannot be extended, or is not maintainable, or is not portable to other platforms. Any of those things could practically render the sources useless. But yet the program does a specific task and does it really well. For some reason I feel that NASA is going to end up with crafts with similar engineering caveats.
Not only the corrupters, but the marketplace also, agree that Blu-ray is better.
If that's the case, and consumers choose what's best, then why did VHS beat out Betamax, which had better video and audio quality across the board? Why is Windows the de-facto operating system for home computers?
You make it sound like the majority of consumers actually make informed decisions when they go out and buy electronics. I can only assume your post was written tongue in cheek, because it appears you infer that people actually go out and research the underlying technology of various products before they make their purchase.
Personally, I give Blu-Ray an automatic 25% edge in the market over HD-DVD because Blu-Ray sounds cooler, and "HD-DVD" has a sort of legacy sound to it. Seriously. I think that, to the average consumer, the name would have more bearing on their purchase than any technical aspects.
That makes no sense whatsoever. I assume that by "line" you are talking about a row of texels. If so, then the orientation of the texture, relative to the view frustum, would have to align perfectly for a single line of texels to be of any use. If the frustum were merely rotated 90 degrees, then you need a column of texels, requiring fetching a single texel per line, resulting in massive cache misses. That is the whole point of breaking textures into squares, so that you don't loose efficiency due to orientation, which of course in a generic 3D engine will vary constantly. If the frustum were at say 45 degrees, then a line of texels looses all meaning, because they would be interpolated diagonally. What about filtering, like bilinear filtering? Texels never map 1:1 to screen space (excluding 2D rendering, like HUDs and the like), so the hardware averages multiple texels together. How many lines of texels should you pass in so the GPU can filter them? How do you handle mipmapping one line at a time?
The whole point of the article is to have a single massive texture for the entire map. In that case, a "line" of texels would be the width of the texture, which would be unbelievably massive. I can't think of any situation where feeding a line of texels would make any sense at all from a performance standpoint, unless we're talking about some sort of vertical scrolling shooter, where the terrain is always revealed in the same direction and orientation, but that is hardly the type of 6DoF type engine Carmack produces.
"Speakers included patent lawyers from Google, IBM, and Apple."
Um, doesn't it go without saying that a bunch of patent lawyers, who are undoubtedly extremely well paid for working and exploiting the existing convoluted patent system, wouldn't want anything to change? If software patents go away, a certain percentage of patent lawyers go away. If the patent system was better designed, easier to understand, simpler for individuals to work with, then another percentage of patent lawyers would go away.
If you've built up an entire career understanding and working within the confines of a complex system, you wouldn't exactly want the system to be made to work without requiring your professional qualifications, would you?
IMO, Web 1.0 was about what was on the internet (grocery shopping online, etc), Web 2.0 is about how things are on the internet (ie AJAX). Web 2.0 is primarily a maturing of what we already have. It's the result of bandwidth for the masses, new browser features due to the rejuvenation (thanks to Mozilla) of a stale market (thanks to Microsoft), PCs with lots of CPU cycles and RAM to spare, high resolution displays, and the fact that such a large percentage of society is online.
A lot of what he talks about in the article is copy-catting. Youtube is extremely popular, thus a lot of other copy-cat video sites are popping up, often targeting more specific markets that are less social in nature. Social networking and user-generated content is pretty much the same thing. When people get tired of it they will stop doing it. Big deal.
I really don't understand what bubble he's talking about that is going to burst. The sites that comprise the internet will come and go and change according to traffic. Just as fads, hair length and clothing styles come and go, so will various movements on the internet as it matures.
I'm sure the usefulness of this technology in other areas has been considered as well. Specifically, things like bricking a device because a subscription has run out, or disabling it because DRM rights have been violated. After all, once the hardware is in place, it can be used for other purposes by simple software "upgrades".
What exactly are the police going to do? Start raiding random people's homes looking for the tapes? Perhaps notifying the FBI, since it is a federal crime involving federal information, would be appropriate. They could start watching various channels to see if the information comes up for sale, and they are used to operating covertly.
But, I still say don't tell the police. Or at most, give them a blank tape and tell them some of these were stolen too, but they weren't very important.
It makes sense not to report the loss for a while. 5 cars were broken into that night, and the thieves certainly grabbed anything that looked half valuable. They most likely had no idea that the tapes contained potentially valuable information, and almost without any doubt had no means to actually read the data.
If a news report came out the next day "20,000 SSNs stolen" then they would know what they had, and try to find a buyer. Otherwise the tapes would likely have been trashed so the criminals wouldn't have incriminating evidence sitting around their house.
Map designer: "Hey, check out this really cool Gothic arch I made in worldcraft!" Lead designer: "Nice, that really looks like a gateway to hell. I like the guys chained to the stone walls suspended above a pit of lava too. It looks like their souls have been sucked right out of them." Resulting game story: "You must pass the gateway to hell, and descend into the depths to save the damned before their souls are harvested."
I thought about modding your post down, thus martyring your post by censoring it. It would prove your point in a very ironic way. But then someone else would post and say that Slashdot should add an "Ironic" moderation. If that existed then your post would be modded back up as Ironic, making it no longer ironic since your post's score would be high. An astute moderator would observe your post is without irony, and would moderate it overrated. Thus would begin a vicious circle consuming Slashdot Moderation points, until none were left to moderate other posts in other stories. First Post posts, spam and trolling would go unchecked without moderator points to hide them, and Slashdot would lose readers because the signal to noise ratio would be so low.
So I thought it best to avoid the entire fiasco by making this post instead, thus removing the lingering temptation to mod the parent down.
The enemy of our enemy is still our enemy. In this case let them fight it out, and hopefully in the future all parties involved (content producers, technology developers, etc) will be too scared of financial damages to do something this stupid again.
This is actually a very good thing, because no-one involved will be immune to the consequences.
It was during my college days that I truly recognized the usefulness of mainframes. I can remember numerous occasions when mainframe terminal rooms were at capacity - full of students chatting on IRC, because the PC rooms were full of people playing Doom.
The only people doing real work were on X Terminals in the Unix labs.:)
That's the countdown until we see a slew of applications for Windows Mobile smartphones and Pocket PCs containing the exact same feature set and interface as the iPhone's software. The multi-touch screen is really the only major hardware component the iPhone has over existing devices, so its primarily a matter of software, which we'll see shortly.
Faraday cage large enough to encompass a shipping container... Check. Honking-big wirecutters... Check. Rollback flatbed truck with 20' bed and winch... Check.
Can someone please tell me how Apple pulls this off? I mean the frigging phone isn't even on the market yet, and we have Slashdot stories talking about redesigning the web to work on this thing. Give me a break. It appears "multitouch" is the next buzzword. The issues the article discuses, like mouse over events and hovering, isn't even specific to a multitouch panel in the first place. These are issues that have surfaced decades ago, and are typically addressed by a tap-hold style action.
Sorry, but this is just getting to me. It's like there is a certain percentage of the population (and press), that is willing to give Apple a wink and a nod, and pretend that every last freaking thing the iPhone encompasses was just invented by Apple. Wee! It can browse the web (never mind that its display has 1/2 the pixels of a VGA Pocket PC). Wow! It can play MP3s (boy the music sounds extra special somehow on an iPhone). Neat! It has a soft input panel (lets ignore that there is no tactile feedback, thus typing requires visual stimuli to make sure you're pressing the right areas). Yeehaw! What battery life (even though you can't swap batteries, preventing the user from purchasing as many extra batteries as necessary to meet their usage needs).
For every true innovation there's three caveats. Maybe once this thing actually hits the market we can get at least a small dose of reality.
The press release fails the mention that Fujifilm felt there was an ample stock of film across Europe, but suddenly hundreds of boxes - enough to last a photographer for at least 30 years - disappeared from stores and warehouses. Fujuifilm was then inundated with requests from photographers, prompting them to resume production.
6 months into the future... FUJIFILM U.S.A., Inc. is sad to announce that they are ceasing production of Velvia II after massive stocks of surplus first-generation Velvia film - enough to supply a photographer for 30 years - inundated the market. The film's sensitivity to cosmic radiation severely limits its shelf life, forcing Fujifilm to stop production so existing stores could be consumed before radiation damage occurs.
Unfortunately, the type of computer user that would download and evaluate different web browsers are the type of users that have likely already switched to Firefox. So if these people stick with Safari then it will be mostly at the expense of Firefox.
The majority of people I know that use Firefox do so because I either told them to download it, or I downloaded and installed it for them. They will use whatever program gives them internet access that has a convenient shortcut on their desktop or quick launch menu, and as long as webpages and stuff appear when they click on things then that's what they will use until they replace their computer.
How did this flamebait get modded up? PCMCIA came first, thus that was the type of storage we had to purchase for HPCs of that era. Next came CF along with the Windows CE PSPC devices, thus we had to use the CF form factor. Finally we are using SD, which is a small enough form factor that size isn't an issue. We don't go out and by legacy hardware - it was the only usable hardware at the time. My post simply states that at this point we don't need a change in standards just for the sake of change. Due to miniaturization there has been a legitimate need for change - until now. My concern is that now artificial excuses will be created for a new standard, requiring another round of upgrades.
We don't need another standard. A few days ago at Wal Mart I saw Wii-branded product that is really slick. It is an SD card, but the back of the card has been notched out so that the last few millimeters are the width of the little PCB that is in the connector part of USB. So the card fits in SD slots as normal, and the back side can be directly plugged into a USB slot.
Here is a similar product with a slide on sleeve. I assume that might be needed for physical compatibility with some SD slots?
Here is a SanDisk combo SD / USB memory card, but I don't like it as well because it has moving parts which can break.
These products are pure genius. Personally, I think the SD standard should be updated to increase supported capacity, so we can use a ubiquitous form factor long into the future. I don't know about the rest of you, but I have these worthless PCMCIA memory cards lying around, which I replaced with now worthless CF memory cards, which I've now replaced with SD. I don't want another change, and we don't need anything smaller than Micro-SD. So only bandwidth and capacity need to increase, which the SD standard can be modified to support (while maintaining backwards compatibility) as the technology improves.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm hesitant to criticize a group that is breaking so much new ground so quickly, but this sounds like some really amateurish mistakes when it comes to electrical engineering. Basically they added new sensors to detect when the craft impacts the ground. The computer monitoring the sensors was expecting a signal of a certain strength to indicate it had touched the ground, however the value the computer was expecting was higher than what the sensors could physically produce. So it sounds like they either engineered the electronics wrong making it impossible for the sensor to produce a meaningful response, or they misread the sensor datasheet which resulted in flawed software.
Now it's one thing to make an engineering mistake, but it couldn't have taken them an hour to rig up a simple test rig they that they could drop onto the ground, or tap with a mallet, or something similarly simple, to see if the computer could register a landing.
I just can't imagine strapping something new onto an entire rocket assembly, going to all the risk and expense to actually launch the thing and fly it around, hoping that all the new circuitry and software will work perfectly the first time.
It makes me wonder about the whole process NASA has in place with these contests. Even if a craft can meet various flight goals, does it result in anything of worth to NASA? For example, take a piece of software. Say there is this program that really does something impressive (game engines come to mind). So you take a look at the source, and find it is a total and complete mess. Maybe it is full of memory leaks and other bugs, so it just can perform a specific task right, but given other scenarios it crashes. Maybe the code is insecure, or is not scalable, or cannot be extended, or is not maintainable, or is not portable to other platforms. Any of those things could practically render the sources useless. But yet the program does a specific task and does it really well. For some reason I feel that NASA is going to end up with crafts with similar engineering caveats.
Dan East
Maybe we could get Con Kolivas to take over kernel stewardship?
You have to consider the real issues with such a handover. Kolivax. That has a decent ring to it, although it sort of sounds like a disease.
Dan East
Not only the corrupters, but the marketplace also, agree that Blu-ray is better.
If that's the case, and consumers choose what's best, then why did VHS beat out Betamax, which had better video and audio quality across the board? Why is Windows the de-facto operating system for home computers?
You make it sound like the majority of consumers actually make informed decisions when they go out and buy electronics. I can only assume your post was written tongue in cheek, because it appears you infer that people actually go out and research the underlying technology of various products before they make their purchase.
Personally, I give Blu-Ray an automatic 25% edge in the market over HD-DVD because Blu-Ray sounds cooler, and "HD-DVD" has a sort of legacy sound to it. Seriously. I think that, to the average consumer, the name would have more bearing on their purchase than any technical aspects.
Dan East
That makes no sense whatsoever. I assume that by "line" you are talking about a row of texels. If so, then the orientation of the texture, relative to the view frustum, would have to align perfectly for a single line of texels to be of any use. If the frustum were merely rotated 90 degrees, then you need a column of texels, requiring fetching a single texel per line, resulting in massive cache misses. That is the whole point of breaking textures into squares, so that you don't loose efficiency due to orientation, which of course in a generic 3D engine will vary constantly. If the frustum were at say 45 degrees, then a line of texels looses all meaning, because they would be interpolated diagonally. What about filtering, like bilinear filtering? Texels never map 1:1 to screen space (excluding 2D rendering, like HUDs and the like), so the hardware averages multiple texels together. How many lines of texels should you pass in so the GPU can filter them? How do you handle mipmapping one line at a time?
The whole point of the article is to have a single massive texture for the entire map. In that case, a "line" of texels would be the width of the texture, which would be unbelievably massive. I can't think of any situation where feeding a line of texels would make any sense at all from a performance standpoint, unless we're talking about some sort of vertical scrolling shooter, where the terrain is always revealed in the same direction and orientation, but that is hardly the type of 6DoF type engine Carmack produces.
Dan East
"Speakers included patent lawyers from Google, IBM, and Apple."
Um, doesn't it go without saying that a bunch of patent lawyers, who are undoubtedly extremely well paid for working and exploiting the existing convoluted patent system, wouldn't want anything to change? If software patents go away, a certain percentage of patent lawyers go away. If the patent system was better designed, easier to understand, simpler for individuals to work with, then another percentage of patent lawyers would go away.
If you've built up an entire career understanding and working within the confines of a complex system, you wouldn't exactly want the system to be made to work without requiring your professional qualifications, would you?
Dan East
IMO, Web 1.0 was about what was on the internet (grocery shopping online, etc), Web 2.0 is about how things are on the internet (ie AJAX). Web 2.0 is primarily a maturing of what we already have. It's the result of bandwidth for the masses, new browser features due to the rejuvenation (thanks to Mozilla) of a stale market (thanks to Microsoft), PCs with lots of CPU cycles and RAM to spare, high resolution displays, and the fact that such a large percentage of society is online.
A lot of what he talks about in the article is copy-catting. Youtube is extremely popular, thus a lot of other copy-cat video sites are popping up, often targeting more specific markets that are less social in nature. Social networking and user-generated content is pretty much the same thing. When people get tired of it they will stop doing it. Big deal.
I really don't understand what bubble he's talking about that is going to burst. The sites that comprise the internet will come and go and change according to traffic. Just as fads, hair length and clothing styles come and go, so will various movements on the internet as it matures.
Dan East
I'm sure the usefulness of this technology in other areas has been considered as well. Specifically, things like bricking a device because a subscription has run out, or disabling it because DRM rights have been violated. After all, once the hardware is in place, it can be used for other purposes by simple software "upgrades".
Dan East
What exactly are the police going to do? Start raiding random people's homes looking for the tapes? Perhaps notifying the FBI, since it is a federal crime involving federal information, would be appropriate. They could start watching various channels to see if the information comes up for sale, and they are used to operating covertly.
But, I still say don't tell the police. Or at most, give them a blank tape and tell them some of these were stolen too, but they weren't very important.
Dan East
It makes sense not to report the loss for a while. 5 cars were broken into that night, and the thieves certainly grabbed anything that looked half valuable. They most likely had no idea that the tapes contained potentially valuable information, and almost without any doubt had no means to actually read the data.
If a news report came out the next day "20,000 SSNs stolen" then they would know what they had, and try to find a buyer. Otherwise the tapes would likely have been trashed so the criminals wouldn't have incriminating evidence sitting around their house.
Dan East
Map designer: "Hey, check out this really cool Gothic arch I made in worldcraft!"
Lead designer: "Nice, that really looks like a gateway to hell. I like the guys chained to the stone walls suspended above a pit of lava too. It looks like their souls have been sucked right out of them."
Resulting game story: "You must pass the gateway to hell, and descend into the depths to save the damned before their souls are harvested."
Dan East
I thought about modding your post down, thus martyring your post by censoring it. It would prove your point in a very ironic way. But then someone else would post and say that Slashdot should add an "Ironic" moderation. If that existed then your post would be modded back up as Ironic, making it no longer ironic since your post's score would be high. An astute moderator would observe your post is without irony, and would moderate it overrated. Thus would begin a vicious circle consuming Slashdot Moderation points, until none were left to moderate other posts in other stories. First Post posts, spam and trolling would go unchecked without moderator points to hide them, and Slashdot would lose readers because the signal to noise ratio would be so low.
So I thought it best to avoid the entire fiasco by making this post instead, thus removing the lingering temptation to mod the parent down.
Dan East
The enemy of our enemy is still our enemy. In this case let them fight it out, and hopefully in the future all parties involved (content producers, technology developers, etc) will be too scared of financial damages to do something this stupid again.
This is actually a very good thing, because no-one involved will be immune to the consequences.
Dan East
It was during my college days that I truly recognized the usefulness of mainframes. I can remember numerous occasions when mainframe terminal rooms were at capacity - full of students chatting on IRC, because the PC rooms were full of people playing Doom.
:)
The only people doing real work were on X Terminals in the Unix labs.
Dan East
There's one thing you can be certain of. There will be people subscribing to these RSS feeds as a source for ideas to patent.
Dan East
You know what also is funny? The way he rolls up one of his pant legs to be 'in style.' Real original, is he an MIT gangsta?
Actually, the bike pulls to the right. So by rolling up his right pant leg that side creates less drag, which helps trim the bike back to the left.
Dan East
That's the countdown until we see a slew of applications for Windows Mobile smartphones and Pocket PCs containing the exact same feature set and interface as the iPhone's software. The multi-touch screen is really the only major hardware component the iPhone has over existing devices, so its primarily a matter of software, which we'll see shortly.
Dan East
I've always wanted to give the CIA a good kick in the family jewels. So where can I find these things anyway?
Dan East
Faraday cage large enough to encompass a shipping container... Check.
Honking-big wirecutters... Check.
Rollback flatbed truck with 20' bed and winch... Check.
Dan East
Can someone please tell me how Apple pulls this off? I mean the frigging phone isn't even on the market yet, and we have Slashdot stories talking about redesigning the web to work on this thing. Give me a break. It appears "multitouch" is the next buzzword. The issues the article discuses, like mouse over events and hovering, isn't even specific to a multitouch panel in the first place. These are issues that have surfaced decades ago, and are typically addressed by a tap-hold style action.
Sorry, but this is just getting to me. It's like there is a certain percentage of the population (and press), that is willing to give Apple a wink and a nod, and pretend that every last freaking thing the iPhone encompasses was just invented by Apple. Wee! It can browse the web (never mind that its display has 1/2 the pixels of a VGA Pocket PC). Wow! It can play MP3s (boy the music sounds extra special somehow on an iPhone). Neat! It has a soft input panel (lets ignore that there is no tactile feedback, thus typing requires visual stimuli to make sure you're pressing the right areas). Yeehaw! What battery life (even though you can't swap batteries, preventing the user from purchasing as many extra batteries as necessary to meet their usage needs).
For every true innovation there's three caveats. Maybe once this thing actually hits the market we can get at least a small dose of reality.
Dan East
The press release fails the mention that Fujifilm felt there was an ample stock of film across Europe, but suddenly hundreds of boxes - enough to last a photographer for at least 30 years - disappeared from stores and warehouses. Fujuifilm was then inundated with requests from photographers, prompting them to resume production.
6 months into the future...
FUJIFILM U.S.A., Inc. is sad to announce that they are ceasing production of Velvia II after massive stocks of surplus first-generation Velvia film - enough to supply a photographer for 30 years - inundated the market. The film's sensitivity to cosmic radiation severely limits its shelf life, forcing Fujifilm to stop production so existing stores could be consumed before radiation damage occurs.
Dan East
Even if the container were waterproof the car would still rust if the humidity wasn't controlled.
Dan East
Unfortunately, the type of computer user that would download and evaluate different web browsers are the type of users that have likely already switched to Firefox. So if these people stick with Safari then it will be mostly at the expense of Firefox.
The majority of people I know that use Firefox do so because I either told them to download it, or I downloaded and installed it for them. They will use whatever program gives them internet access that has a convenient shortcut on their desktop or quick launch menu, and as long as webpages and stuff appear when they click on things then that's what they will use until they replace their computer.
Dan East
A perfect sphere, down to the atom, of 1 kg silicon would require pi to what precision?
Dan East
How did this flamebait get modded up? PCMCIA came first, thus that was the type of storage we had to purchase for HPCs of that era. Next came CF along with the Windows CE PSPC devices, thus we had to use the CF form factor. Finally we are using SD, which is a small enough form factor that size isn't an issue. We don't go out and by legacy hardware - it was the only usable hardware at the time. My post simply states that at this point we don't need a change in standards just for the sake of change. Due to miniaturization there has been a legitimate need for change - until now. My concern is that now artificial excuses will be created for a new standard, requiring another round of upgrades.
Dan East
We don't need another standard. A few days ago at Wal Mart I saw Wii-branded product that is really slick. It is an SD card, but the back of the card has been notched out so that the last few millimeters are the width of the little PCB that is in the connector part of USB. So the card fits in SD slots as normal, and the back side can be directly plugged into a USB slot.
Here it is.
Here is a similar product with a slide on sleeve. I assume that might be needed for physical compatibility with some SD slots?
Here is a SanDisk combo SD / USB memory card, but I don't like it as well because it has moving parts which can break.
These products are pure genius. Personally, I think the SD standard should be updated to increase supported capacity, so we can use a ubiquitous form factor long into the future. I don't know about the rest of you, but I have these worthless PCMCIA memory cards lying around, which I replaced with now worthless CF memory cards, which I've now replaced with SD. I don't want another change, and we don't need anything smaller than Micro-SD. So only bandwidth and capacity need to increase, which the SD standard can be modified to support (while maintaining backwards compatibility) as the technology improves.
Dan East