Every company I've worked for had me sign something similar and I had a lawyer friend who specialised in IT intellectual property who confirmed such clauses are not binding in Australia. It's basically designed to scare people.
I did know a guy who jumped ship from a company to work for the opposition and was told they would take him to court as he'd signed the agreement when he started working for the initial company to say he wouldn't work in the same field for two years. He told his old boss to f&#k off and he never heard from them.
Likewise a friend who was leaving a trech company I was at was asked to sign a "termination of employment contract" (though he quit, wasn't fired) and he told them where to go and there never was any fuss made.
These were not hugely senior people though. I imagine if you were a senior technologist in a company that depended largely on it's IP then the departed company might make more effort to pursue. I know this happened when a bunch of guys left SGI to form the company that did the Playstation One chipset (which possibly used SGI know how, it was remoured legal proceedings against this company - Magic Carpet? - scared Sony faway from using them for the PS2), and also when many people left SGI to go to nVidia (an even more direct threat to SGI business.
The truth is your average programmer or whatever leaving a large company isn't likely to be a commercial threat/competition butkey/senior techs going to set up a competitor is a problem. People are constantly moving between Sun, HP, IBM, SGI etc and generally it's seen as good that they have "experience of the opposition" and know their hardware. I know people that have worked for 30+ yrs moving back and forth. Look at all the senior management types who jump between similar companies. It's the real IP tech heads at the top who you don't see moving.
This isn't about clusters vs single memory architectures. The main issue as mentioned elsewhere in comments is that the market for high end computing is being partly filled by cheap clusters so *US* manufacturers are not focusing on those kinds of systems as it's less commercially viable.
Non-US copanies like NEC are still focusing on and winning the non-cluster high end market race. Notice how the US govt was so protectionistic a few years back (97 I think) when NEC won a major contract over a US supplier (SGI) because the NEC was cheaper. The US govt overturned the sale saying NEC unfairly discounted.
Well in this battle the US companies are slipping behind so now the US govt is injecting funds to help prop up these less competitive US companies. I'm sure this money will be spent on purchasing "classified" systems that non-US manufacturers wont be allowed to compete for "security reasons".
At the end of the day it's just another form of protectionism.
rifle bullet breaks the sound barrier - one reason it is loud (the other being expansion of gases in the barrel) - hence silencers only really work on subsonic bullets. Artillery from ships is loud when fired for two reasons as well, expansion of propellant gas and the sonic boom. I'm fairly sure a sonic boom is the same volume if the projectile breaks the sound barrier a bit or by a lot. So overal rail guns are much quieter. My experience of building one in the shed at home when I was younger still proved them to be v v loud, but that was partly because of the target hitting the metal wall of the shed!:-)
Which is different again to a Doctor of Science (DSc) which is earnt by compiling 30 or so more papers that you have written for prestigious peer reviewed journals and showing the common thread and how you have made a significant contribution to science. It's a small thesis consisting mostly of reprints and some glue text. They're not really common (eg at the local university with some 800 academic staff about 20 have DSCs). My dad got his a while ago saying it was because they get to wear a funny floppy black felt hat and an orange, yellow and black robe that looks kinda freaky.
Did a bit of scrounging on the net and it looks like you're right. I find reference at http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/system/ to X10r4 whilst the oldest system I recall was X11r4 which I downloaded over a 2400 baud modem (it took 5 days!) to build for a military project I was working on at the time. Back then Sun had just come out with workstations with X11 or SunView(?) (I think it was) as the GUI.
Whilst Apple did a good job with the Lisa then Mac it wasn't until the Amiga with windows structure very similar to X11 (or identical much of the time, if you look at the code) that things really took off for X.
Good UI for programming started when I saw Compass Pascal under CP/M in 1982 and used it for several projects controlling laboratory equipment (on an AppleII with an 8080 card). Compass (a German comany I think) was bought out by an unknown (at the time) US company called Borland and re-released as pretty much the identical product call Turbo Pascal and suddenly it was easier for every man and his dog to code - largely because edit/debugging/run was so much faster. It was text based but very well done.
Back to the X name though - I'd love someone from the original project to give some insight into the origin of the name. Clearly the story I read 15+ years ago was incorrect.
X11 was X11 right from the start as far as I remember. The 11 stands for one megapixel (as in a display 1000x1000) and one MIP (million instructions per second). At the time X11 was conceived this theoretical platform spec was thought to be about 5-10 in the future (ie mid 1980s) but actually such a machine was available in only 2 yrs.
X11 is a great example of designing for a theortical platform in the future so you're not tied to hardware constraints which results in sw with good longevity as it is to some extent, future proof (hence X11 last 20yrs beyond it's original design). Games designers have to do this all the time - MS Windows didn't do this in the past hence had to be rewritten from the ground up several times while X11 is (design wise) largely unchanged. MS Windows advantage is better performance generally (because it's is designed each time with the hardware more in mind) but much shorter life between rewrites.
This has also been a drawback of X11 requiring to take advantage of hw technology especially in the last 5-8 years - starting with SGIs GLX extensions and many more since then - some done nicely and some not.
when I read the part in the contract I was to sign about "anything you develop is ours" I told my prospective boss (at the multi billion dollar Silicon Valley computer vendor) that I thought it was unreasonable as they knew I was working on a hobby that was in conflict with the vendor (one reason they wanted to hire me, because of my knowledge). They said it was fine to come up with my own words (which I got a lawyer friend to do - converted two sentences into 11 pages to clarify that in my own time what I develop is mine). It took 3 months for the employers lawyers to ok it (it was a low priority for them) but I got the job and the company lawyers asked if they could use the new statement for future contracts. Sure they might have told me to piss off but they didn't.
What about the trucks of soldiers escorting the tanker? Maybe 10 soldiers and their vehicles and the maintenance costs (where spares parts have to be flown in from the US) and the truck was flown in from the US and the mechanics to fix the truck were flown in from the US. Then there's the fuel cost for the escorting trucks and the food costs for the soldiers and their training costs and their uniform and weapons costs (all done over several years in the US and shipped to Iraq). How much do you think it costs to train 10 soldiers? Then all they do is drive next to a tanker - but they still had to be trained anyway just-in-case. This all adds up to a lot! There's the cost of the logistics guys planning the operation, the cooks, the tents/accomodation etc etc. The list just goes on and on. I read somewhere the cost to the US to get a trained soldier kitted up an on the ground in Iraq is over $US1m. So once they're there it'd be nice if the fuel some of them protect can do twice as much work!
Back in the 80's Dr Morton Shatzman (a London psychologist/doctor) did a series of articles in New Scientist on this. In the first he talked about it then posed a number of puzzles and asked readers to sleep on it and if they solved them then to write in. Subsequent articles docuemnted the responses.
I recall three of the problems.
The first asked how do you make four equilateral triangles with 6 matches. Someone had a dream where they walked past a weatherboard building and ran their hand down it and all the wood fell off the side into a pile that made a triangular pyramid (the answer).
The second was a rather gruesome sentence of about ten words - I only recall the word "slaughter". You were meant to solve this (though no problem was stated). Someone reported a dream where she had the sentence on a piece of paper and knocked on a door and gave the paper to the man who answered. He read the sentence then laughed so hard his head fell off (literally). The next morning the woman couln't work out what this meant until many hours later when she realised if you took the first letter of every word in the sentence it made a humorous pun. (an example of our unconscious having trouble communicating with our conscious minds and only able to do so through metaphores)
The third was "What fraction between 0.5 and 1.0, when inverted is still between 0.5 and 1.0 This had me stumped (as all the others did). I went to bed and dreamt of two people having sex (typical teenage dream!) Then the next day I was baffled as to if that had anything to do with the problem then realised the people in the dream were 69ing and the answer came to me immediately: 6/9! Write it on a price of paper and turn it upside down ("inverted") and it's still 6/9. I wrote in and this was indeed the correct answer.
I've been out of the scene for a little (didn't get to E3 last year) but I remember the Microsoft guys telling me the year before that the Xbox user DirectX 8.0 and if you code specifically for the nVidia card in the Xbox you get about a 2x increase in performance. These days the Xbox graphics is barely on par with current new PCs so there will need to be hand tailoring of the graphics pipe for the dual floating point units on the Xbox nVidia chip. You can get code speedups knowing exactly what the graphics card is. They could port DoomIII quickly I'm sure - but I suspect id and Micosoft would like the code optimised for the Xbox to make it look as good as possible. This may take 3-6 months I'd guess. It wouldn't look good if D3 is released and the Xbox version runs half the speed of the latest PCs!! It might end up running 80% of the speed even with customisation though and that's as good as it gets. id may have to reduce their geometry to fewer polygons and smaller textures to speed things up - that can take a lot of tweaking too.
Actually I used the word "partner" as she is not my wife (ie we're not married) but we've been living together for some years with kids from my marriage and her's. I'm a little too old to have a "girlfriend"! I just used a term that everyone here understands. If I'd referred to her as my "mate" then out here that means it's a male friend! If it makes you feel more comfortable, think about her as my wife:-)
I had to drag and con my 4 kids into seeing this film. They'd never heard of it, or seen ads or anything and they really did not want to go, nor did my partner. In the end we went (I used a pointed stick:-) and they all absolutely loved it and went and told all their friends by which time they movie was pulled from all local cinemas. My daughter (10) especially loved the movie, as did my partner. Wonderful stuff!
Just discussing this at work yesterday and we all agreed the stunning realism of Feathers McGraw just as he walked into the house for the first time and looked at Grommit was a pivotal moment. How they make a lump of plasticine (clay) act so lifelike is a true art. There's a lot to do with the timing, camera angle, script, etc etc that's missing from things like FF (movie, cutscenes etc).
I've worked on many projects in the last 20years, some went very badly, some really well, some big military projects some small for commercial industry, some hobby, some finance some realtime etc etc.
I think at this point I can safely say I see people who thinks they're software developers and those who *know* they're software developers. I've worked with both types. I'd say the "real" ones are those who've worked on a largish project (say a few man years) at least once from initial specification to design to coding to testing to deployment to maintenance/support - and done this all successfully. I'm staggered at the number of people who somehow think that if they coded someone else's design then they too can design code, or who wrote function specs who then think they can design code, or who can write wonderful design docs but can't code. Some people bullshit very well to cover their asses and get high pay and more senior positions, but the real software developers see through the crap. If you're in doubt look at something they did themselves from the ground up, look at how it works and look at the code. I don't care if it was written on weekends or took 2 weeks to do what should take 2 days (or visa versa). The truth is in the src code *and* the final running software (because I've seen programs that run that are a nightmare under the hood).
And then some (many?) people think they're good and they're not. What can I say? That's the way in all industries. I was lucky enough to have my first programming job at a company called Software Craftsmen Pty Ltd back in the early 80s and they lived by the craftsmen ethic. In my general experience maybe one in 10 software developers is a craftsman and maybe 6 or 7 out of 10 think they are. The coders in a project with the courage perceive the truth and know who does the real work and who's opinion is worth seeking can still do good work themselves, but chances are they'll be in the same job and company in 5 years whereas the real developers would have moved on or up.
I read recently tha there will be more people in China earning above the average US wage in 5 years and this point will be reached in India in 3 years. Give these countries 10-15 years and the US will be the "has been" that the UK is already becoming. I'm sure historians will see the current US recession as a turning point towards this end.
I have several friends with polyphonic ring tone phone and they're really cheesy. Much better is Samsung phones (and a few others) that allow you to record *any* audio and use it as your ring tone. This way you can have proper music or sound effects as your ring tone. The first I saw this feature was about 18 months ago here in Australia so surely it's available elsewhere.
I can realte to this stuff. I've been in the IT field for nearly 20 years and it's all starting to look very much the same these days.
Last year I decided to go back to uni and study counselling (psychotherapy) and you know what? I love it! Not only that but I find I'm very good at it. So in another year I'll start working on te side of my day job (a software development manager at world's #2 defense company) then go full time. On average maybe I'll earn half the wage (and no, I don't have much cash or a house paid off or anything like that as I got separated a few years back and lost it all mostly). If I do well maybe eventually I'll earn what I do now (in 5-10 years time).
The thing for me (and I stress, as others here have, that this is for me) the money isn't the goal. In fact I've gone from being a big time planner and strategist for my life to realising that happiness isn't a goal I'm trying to reach, but something I do on the way. Now I am sooo much happier than I was 5 years ago, only then I didn't think I was unhappy!!
It seems to me a lot of people get into computers because they're really smart, it's interesting (to many people) and you can (although perhaps, less importantly at first) make good money. The downfall I see with the people I work with is that relating to a computer all day is not good experience for relating to people. It doesn't mean geeks don't have skills at relating, just that they don't practice it as much as in many other professions.
There are many other jobs (not in the hard sciences) that need smart people. I'm often staggered by how smart some people are in occupations I wouldn't expect at first thought, like plumbers, cleaners, farmers, clerics (not the D&D sort!), etc etc. And from my anecdotal evidence it seems the smarter people in these jobs do very well, so you're not "wasting yourself" on a lowly job.
But are you happy? Does you partner (if you want one) an an equal, honest, loving basis based on trust and openness? Are you proud of who you are and what you do? Do you really know that your answers to these questions is right? Personally I know I don't have the answers, but I do know that moving forwards will always be part of the answers, as well as daring to challenge my own narrow thinking and that I've willing adopted from the world.
Back in the early 90s my band recorded 3 albums, all self funded and it took about $2k each time. But we were amateurs and got equipment for free and used friends instead of prefessionals wherever possible.
Today it's very different. I have a friend who does his own CDs. He writes it all and has his own prologic setup and does all his own music and sounds excellent.
Now try recording a band who doesn't know anything about production. Invariably there's a sound engineer and producer - total cost is 100-200$ per hr but could be a lot more. Studio hire (and extra equipment hire if necessary) is anywhere from $0 to $X000 a day, but lets say its $500 a day. Now how long will this sucker take? Record it in a week and it'll sound like it. Let's say a month which still isn't generous. Then you're all working 12-20hrs a day. That's $2.5k a day, $75k a month. Then all the things we missed like up front money for the band to live off, legal fees, CD cover design, marketing and so much more.
Yes, you can record a CD for $2k. But you can also validly spend $500k too (especially once marketing kicks in). Then there's all the times money is spent on all the above and the album bombs and makes hardly a cent (it happens more often than an album doing well).
You want to do it all at home on your PC and do your own cover art etc etc. Great! More power to you, yep you certainly can. Doesn't Moby record all his stuff at home in his NY apartment? You can too! Now what's the chance you'll sell millions of copies (even if you're really good)?????
Having been an IT Manager in a big corp and also worked at SGI where 21" monitors are par for the course, and in military app development, I can think of many reasons to favour LCD screens: (not in any particular order)
- less desktop space - lighter (you'd be surprised the number of insurance claims for back problems come from lifting monitors, they get moved from deskto desk or returned for repairs) - don't go fuzzy over time - look more high tech - less fire risk - less electric shock risk - less radiation risk - no alignment problems - less heat generated - lower magnetic interference of nearby equipment - able to withstand wider temp and pressure fluctuations - less storage space for stock
This is offset by the dowsides ppl have mentioned like:
- limited viewing angle - gamma/colour problems in cheaper LCDs - fixed resolution - images can look "harsh" - cost
I'm sure Sony did their marketing homework before announcing this. Personally I love my 21" Trinitron...
8087 stack underflow error, TV programmer bug etc
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Pet Bugs?
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I recall using an 8086 with the (drumm roll) 8087 floating point accelerator chip (for those too young to remember, that was a separate chip you had the option to buy in early PCs if you wanted to do fast maths calulation. The Microsoft compiler of the time (v3or 4) had a bug that under some condition cause an underflow in the 8087 internal register stack on the 8th call (I think the internal hw stack had 8 entries). It took a real long time to find that, many weeks, I rang Microsoft and they said "Thanks!" and I never heard from them or got a work around. Some things never change...
I was helping a friend program their TV and found an error in the sequence of assigning frequencies to station numbers, it caused garbage to show where the nice green channel number was meant to be.
I remember writing a maze program on my trusty HP11C back in about '81 and I gave it to a friend. The bug cause the maze to be reflected on the x and y axes. I was trying out the program and got this creepy feeling as I wandered around the maze 4 times bigger than what the calculator had memory to handle. It was so weird. I took hours wandering around and eventually drew it out before seeing the pattern. Serendipity strikes:-)
I wont mention the military system I worked on where the laser it fired (don't ask) would switch direction 180 degrees every time it crossed the Tropic of Capricorn (latitude 45 deg south). Or the bug in the artificial life breeding prgram that caused all offspring to remove their brains (controling code) when they were old enough to reproduce. Or the AI system that caused the 2D life to be attracted to a light but when the light was too close they spun in circles until they died - so weird to watch on the screen, very funny at the time.
Evangelion is good but it can be slow at times. For a livlier story that is just as wide ranging try out the first few episodes of Bugglegum Crisis. The characters are perhaps less troubled, but the animation is much more captivating. There's about 20 episodes is all I think.
MMORPGs are substantially different to MUDS and MOOS. I played a lot of MUDS and stuff in the late 80s and developed my own MMORPG back in 1990+ (Cyberterm - go look it up) and whilst the gameplay is similar the implementation is vastly different. I believe the largest MUD I played in had about 180 simultaneous users (Qwest) but currently MMORPG designs are pushing 10k users per server. This isn't just a matter of scale. The whole way things are done has to be changed.
Also, as far as gameplay goes, MMORPGs (current) are still dragging their feet compared to MUDs and pencil and paper AD&D because they are way too static and inflexible. That's why the system I developed has dynamic content generation (even way back in the early 90s). I always believed it was the GMs job to define the rules of the universe (laws of nature etc)and the player can do whatever they want within that. So if they want to wander 50 miles east and dig a hole in the ground and build a castle they can. Or if they want to establish a bakery they can.
It's been a long road to now, but after 4 rewrites the system will be going alpha sometime late this year. We intent to allow users to develop their own content and program their own monsters, character etc based on a currency of CPU cycles, online time etc. Levelling is passe (like in my AD&D pencil and paper game I have a char who's been level 2 for over 20 yrs but he has great fun!!). The important thing is for players to have fun. We're examining concepts like object histories (this is the knife that killed Thera the seer in 486AF and was originally given to Thorin the Black in 482AF - if you have the spells to divine this!). We are also thinking of having very comprehensive "entry tests" for alpha testers to allow like minded players to the developers and our vision. Ultimately we'd prefer 10000 mature players than 100k levellers. Research has shown players are willing to pay more ($US25-50/m or more) for a high quality experience, which will also hopefully thin out the ranks. We've just finished a complete client and server rewrite but it's a slow road (yes, it's a hobby!)
I was offered a job by one of the "big" unix computer systems companies in Silicon Valley. Their intellectual property clause was a horrible blanket statment. I refused to sign it as I was working on some stuff of my own as a hobby. They said "We didn't think you'd sign but be thought we'd it on you anyway"!!! I got a lawyer to rewrite their paragraph (it came out to 10 pages long) and the company lawyers took 2 months to ok it but it the end they realised it was all above board.
So they were happy with that. But a few months later when I was approach by a national TV network to do an interview about my software I checked with my boss about it and word came down the line that if I said anything I'd get fired [shrug] Can't win them all but I guess that was reasonable as my software competed with a product my employer was working on internally (which was one main reason they employed me in the first place, because of my specialist knowledge).
A few years back when I visited HITL at UNi of Washington (where most of the Micorvision research was done) I got to use one of these things an of all the HMDs I've used (and I've used a lot, from $200 cheapies to $60k milspec jobs) this is by far the best. The thing I liked the most is that the image is so sharp and focused - way better than my vision even with my glasses on. And the nifty thing is that it's in focus even with my glasses off, whilst the rest of the room is a blur. Maybe this needs a few more years (the one I used was full colour) but this is definitely the way things will be.
The evidence on the pattern of trees that collapsed at Tunguska and those that didn't suggest a small comet (ie snowball) coming in at about 40deg. Computer simulations of this exactly match the pattern of trees, which is a pretty unusual pattern. No need for conspiracy therories when a little science fits the data better.
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These clauses don't hold water here in Australia.
Every company I've worked for had me sign something similar and I had a lawyer friend who specialised in IT intellectual property who confirmed such clauses are not binding in Australia. It's basically designed to scare people.
I did know a guy who jumped ship from a company to work for the opposition and was told they would take him to court as he'd signed the agreement when he started working for the initial company to say he wouldn't work in the same field for two years. He told his old boss to f&#k off and he never heard from them.
Likewise a friend who was leaving a trech company I was at was asked to sign a "termination of employment contract" (though he quit, wasn't fired) and he told them where to go and there never was any fuss made.
These were not hugely senior people though. I imagine if you were a senior technologist in a company that depended largely on it's IP then the departed company might make more effort to pursue. I know this happened when a bunch of guys left SGI to form the company that did the Playstation One chipset (which possibly used SGI know how, it was remoured legal proceedings against this company - Magic Carpet? - scared Sony faway from using them for the PS2), and also when many people left SGI to go to nVidia (an even more direct threat to SGI business.
The truth is your average programmer or whatever leaving a large company isn't likely to be a commercial threat/competition butkey/senior techs going to set up a competitor is a problem. People are constantly moving between Sun, HP, IBM, SGI etc and generally it's seen as good that they have "experience of the opposition" and know their hardware. I know people that have worked for 30+ yrs moving back and forth. Look at all the senior management types who jump between similar companies. It's the real IP tech heads at the top who you don't see moving.
This isn't about clusters vs single memory architectures. The main issue as mentioned elsewhere in comments is that the market for high end computing is being partly filled by cheap clusters so *US* manufacturers are not focusing on those kinds of systems as it's less commercially viable.
Non-US copanies like NEC are still focusing on and winning the non-cluster high end market race. Notice how the US govt was so protectionistic a few years back (97 I think) when NEC won a major contract over a US supplier (SGI) because the NEC was cheaper. The US govt overturned the sale saying NEC unfairly discounted.
Well in this battle the US companies are slipping behind so now the US govt is injecting funds to help prop up these less competitive US companies. I'm sure this money will be spent on purchasing "classified" systems that non-US manufacturers wont be allowed to compete for "security reasons".
At the end of the day it's just another form of protectionism.
rifle bullet breaks the sound barrier - one reason it is loud (the other being expansion of gases in the barrel) - hence silencers only really work on subsonic bullets. Artillery from ships is loud when fired for two reasons as well, expansion of propellant gas and the sonic boom. I'm fairly sure a sonic boom is the same volume if the projectile breaks the sound barrier a bit or by a lot. So overal rail guns are much quieter. My experience of building one in the shed at home when I was younger still proved them to be v v loud, but that was partly because of the target hitting the metal wall of the shed!:-)
Which is different again to a Doctor of Science (DSc) which is earnt by compiling 30 or so more papers that you have written for prestigious peer reviewed journals and showing the common thread and how you have made a significant contribution to science. It's a small thesis consisting mostly of reprints and some glue text. They're not really common (eg at the local university with some 800 academic staff about 20 have DSCs). My dad got his a while ago saying it was because they get to wear a funny floppy black felt hat and an orange, yellow and black robe that looks kinda freaky.
Did a bit of scrounging on the net and it looks like you're right. I find reference at http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/system/ to X10r4 whilst the oldest system I recall was X11r4 which I downloaded over a 2400 baud modem (it took 5 days!) to build for a military project I was working on at the time. Back then Sun had just come out with workstations with X11 or SunView(?) (I think it was) as the GUI.
Whilst Apple did a good job with the Lisa then Mac it wasn't until the Amiga with windows structure very similar to X11 (or identical much of the time, if you look at the code) that things really took off for X.
Good UI for programming started when I saw Compass Pascal under CP/M in 1982 and used it for several projects controlling laboratory equipment (on an AppleII with an 8080 card). Compass (a German comany I think) was bought out by an unknown (at the time) US company called Borland and re-released as pretty much the identical product call Turbo Pascal and suddenly it was easier for every man and his dog to code - largely because edit/debugging/run was so much faster. It was text based but very well done.
Back to the X name though - I'd love someone from the original project to give some insight into the origin of the name. Clearly the story I read 15+ years ago was incorrect.
X11 was X11 right from the start as far as I remember. The 11 stands for one megapixel (as in a display 1000x1000) and one MIP (million instructions per second). At the time X11 was conceived this theoretical platform spec was thought to be about 5-10 in the future (ie mid 1980s) but actually such a machine was available in only 2 yrs.
X11 is a great example of designing for a theortical platform in the future so you're not tied to hardware constraints which results in sw with good longevity as it is to some extent, future proof (hence X11 last 20yrs beyond it's original design). Games designers have to do this all the time - MS Windows didn't do this in the past hence had to be rewritten from the ground up several times while X11 is (design wise) largely unchanged. MS Windows advantage is better performance generally (because it's is designed each time with the hardware more in mind) but much shorter life between rewrites.
This has also been a drawback of X11 requiring to take advantage of hw technology especially in the last 5-8 years - starting with SGIs GLX extensions and many more since then - some done nicely and some not.
when I read the part in the contract I was to sign about "anything you develop is ours" I told my prospective boss (at the multi billion dollar Silicon Valley computer vendor) that I thought it was unreasonable as they knew I was working on a hobby that was in conflict with the vendor (one reason they wanted to hire me, because of my knowledge). They said it was fine to come up with my own words (which I got a lawyer friend to do - converted two sentences into 11 pages to clarify that in my own time what I develop is mine). It took 3 months for the employers lawyers to ok it (it was a low priority for them) but I got the job and the company lawyers asked if they could use the new statement for future contracts. Sure they might have told me to piss off but they didn't.
What about the trucks of soldiers escorting the tanker? Maybe 10 soldiers and their vehicles and the maintenance costs (where spares parts have to be flown in from the US) and the truck was flown in from the US and the mechanics to fix the truck were flown in from the US. Then there's the fuel cost for the escorting trucks and the food costs for the soldiers and their training costs and their uniform and weapons costs (all done over several years in the US and shipped to Iraq). How much do you think it costs to train 10 soldiers? Then all they do is drive next to a tanker - but they still had to be trained anyway just-in-case. This all adds up to a lot! There's the cost of the logistics guys planning the operation, the cooks, the tents/accomodation etc etc. The list just goes on and on. I read somewhere the cost to the US to get a trained soldier kitted up an on the ground in Iraq is over $US1m. So once they're there it'd be nice if the fuel some of them protect can do twice as much work!
Back in the 80's Dr Morton Shatzman (a London psychologist/doctor) did a series of articles in New Scientist on this. In the first he talked about it then posed a number of puzzles and asked readers to sleep on it and if they solved them then to write in. Subsequent articles docuemnted the responses.
I recall three of the problems.
The first asked how do you make four equilateral triangles with 6 matches. Someone had a dream where they walked past a weatherboard building and ran their hand down it and all the wood fell off the side into a pile that made a triangular pyramid (the answer).
The second was a rather gruesome sentence of about ten words - I only recall the word "slaughter". You were meant to solve this (though no problem was stated). Someone reported a dream where she had the sentence on a piece of paper and knocked on a door and gave the paper to the man who answered. He read the sentence then laughed so hard his head fell off (literally). The next morning the woman couln't work out what this meant until many hours later when she realised if you took the first letter of every word in the sentence it made a humorous pun. (an example of our unconscious having trouble communicating with our conscious minds and only able to do so through metaphores)
The third was "What fraction between 0.5 and 1.0, when inverted is still between 0.5 and 1.0 This had me stumped (as all the others did). I went to bed and dreamt of two people having sex (typical teenage dream!) Then the next day I was baffled as to if that had anything to do with the problem then realised the people in the dream were 69ing and the answer came to me immediately: 6/9! Write it on a price of paper and turn it upside down ("inverted") and it's still 6/9. I wrote in and this was indeed the correct answer.
Interesting stuff.
I've been out of the scene for a little (didn't get to E3 last year) but I remember the Microsoft guys telling me the year before that the Xbox user DirectX 8.0 and if you code specifically for the nVidia card in the Xbox you get about a 2x increase in performance. These days the Xbox graphics is barely on par with current new PCs so there will need to be hand tailoring of the graphics pipe for the dual floating point units on the Xbox nVidia chip. You can get code speedups knowing exactly what the graphics card is. They could port DoomIII quickly I'm sure - but I suspect id and Micosoft would like the code optimised for the Xbox to make it look as good as possible. This may take 3-6 months I'd guess. It wouldn't look good if D3 is released and the Xbox version runs half the speed of the latest PCs!! It might end up running 80% of the speed even with customisation though and that's as good as it gets. id may have to reduce their geometry to fewer polygons and smaller textures to speed things up - that can take a lot of tweaking too.
Actually I used the word "partner" as she is not my wife (ie we're not married) but we've been living together for some years with kids from my marriage and her's. I'm a little too old to have a "girlfriend"! I just used a term that everyone here understands. If I'd referred to her as my "mate" then out here that means it's a male friend! If it makes you feel more comfortable, think about her as my wife :-)
I had to drag and con my 4 kids into seeing this film. They'd never heard of it, or seen ads or anything and they really did not want to go, nor did my partner. In the end we went (I used a pointed stick :-) and they all absolutely loved it and went and told all their friends by which time they movie was pulled from all local cinemas. My daughter (10) especially loved the movie, as did my partner. Wonderful stuff!
Just discussing this at work yesterday and we all agreed the stunning realism of Feathers McGraw just as he walked into the house for the first time and looked at Grommit was a pivotal moment. How they make a lump of plasticine (clay) act so lifelike is a true art. There's a lot to do with the timing, camera angle, script, etc etc that's missing from things like FF (movie, cutscenes etc).
I've worked on many projects in the last 20years, some went very badly, some really well, some big military projects some small for commercial industry, some hobby, some finance some realtime etc etc.
I think at this point I can safely say I see people who thinks they're software developers and those who *know* they're software developers. I've worked with both types. I'd say the "real" ones are those who've worked on a largish project (say a few man years) at least once from initial specification to design to coding to testing to deployment to maintenance/support - and done this all successfully. I'm staggered at the number of people who somehow think that if they coded someone else's design then they too can design code, or who wrote function specs who then think they can design code, or who can write wonderful design docs but can't code. Some people bullshit very well to cover their asses and get high pay and more senior positions, but the real software developers see through the crap. If you're in doubt look at something they did themselves from the ground up, look at how it works and look at the code. I don't care if it was written on weekends or took 2 weeks to do what should take 2 days (or visa versa). The truth is in the src code *and* the final running software (because I've seen programs that run that are a nightmare under the hood).
And then some (many?) people think they're good and they're not. What can I say? That's the way in all industries. I was lucky enough to have my first programming job at a company called Software Craftsmen Pty Ltd back in the early 80s and they lived by the craftsmen ethic. In my general experience maybe one in 10 software developers is a craftsman and maybe 6 or 7 out of 10 think they are. The coders in a project with the courage perceive the truth and know who does the real work and who's opinion is worth seeking can still do good work themselves, but chances are they'll be in the same job and company in 5 years whereas the real developers would have moved on or up.
my 2 cents
I read recently tha there will be more people in China earning above the average US wage in 5 years and this point will be reached in India in 3 years. Give these countries 10-15 years and the US will be the "has been" that the UK is already becoming. I'm sure historians will see the current US recession as a turning point towards this end.
I have several friends with polyphonic ring tone phone and they're really cheesy. Much better is Samsung phones (and a few others) that allow you to record *any* audio and use it as your ring tone. This way you can have proper music or sound effects as your ring tone. The first I saw this feature was about 18 months ago here in Australia so surely it's available elsewhere.
I can realte to this stuff. I've been in the IT field for nearly 20 years and it's all starting to look very much the same these days.
Last year I decided to go back to uni and study counselling (psychotherapy) and you know what? I love it! Not only that but I find I'm very good at it. So in another year I'll start working on te side of my day job (a software development manager at world's #2 defense company) then go full time. On average maybe I'll earn half the wage (and no, I don't have much cash or a house paid off or anything like that as I got separated a few years back and lost it all mostly). If I do well maybe eventually I'll earn what I do now (in 5-10 years time).
The thing for me (and I stress, as others here have, that this is for me) the money isn't the goal. In fact I've gone from being a big time planner and strategist for my life to realising that happiness isn't a goal I'm trying to reach, but something I do on the way. Now I am sooo much happier than I was 5 years ago, only then I didn't think I was unhappy!!
It seems to me a lot of people get into computers because they're really smart, it's interesting (to many people) and you can (although perhaps, less importantly at first) make good money. The downfall I see with the people I work with is that relating to a computer all day is not good experience for relating to people. It doesn't mean geeks don't have skills at relating, just that they don't practice it as much as in many other professions.
There are many other jobs (not in the hard sciences) that need smart people. I'm often staggered by how smart some people are in occupations I wouldn't expect at first thought, like plumbers, cleaners, farmers, clerics (not the D&D sort!), etc etc. And from my anecdotal evidence it seems the smarter people in these jobs do very well, so you're not "wasting yourself" on a lowly job.
But are you happy? Does you partner (if you want one) an an equal, honest, loving basis based on trust and openness? Are you proud of who you are and what you do? Do you really know that your answers to these questions is right? Personally I know I don't have the answers, but I do know that moving forwards will always be part of the answers, as well as daring to challenge my own narrow thinking and that I've willing adopted from the world.
my two cents
Back in the early 90s my band recorded 3 albums, all self funded and it took about $2k each time. But we were amateurs and got equipment for free and used friends instead of prefessionals wherever possible.
Today it's very different. I have a friend who does his own CDs. He writes it all and has his own prologic setup and does all his own music and sounds excellent.
Now try recording a band who doesn't know anything about production. Invariably there's a sound engineer and producer - total cost is 100-200$ per hr but could be a lot more. Studio hire (and extra equipment hire if necessary) is anywhere from $0 to $X000 a day, but lets say its $500 a day. Now how long will this sucker take? Record it in a week and it'll sound like it. Let's say a month which still isn't generous. Then you're all working 12-20hrs a day. That's $2.5k a day, $75k a month. Then all the things we missed like up front money for the band to live off, legal fees, CD cover design, marketing and so much more.
Yes, you can record a CD for $2k. But you can also validly spend $500k too (especially once marketing kicks in). Then there's all the times money is spent on all the above and the album bombs and makes hardly a cent (it happens more often than an album doing well).
You want to do it all at home on your PC and do your own cover art etc etc. Great! More power to you, yep you certainly can. Doesn't Moby record all his stuff at home in his NY apartment? You can too! Now what's the chance you'll sell millions of copies (even if you're really good)?????
Having been an IT Manager in a big corp and also worked at SGI where 21" monitors are par for the course, and in military app development, I can think of many reasons to favour LCD screens:
(not in any particular order)
- less desktop space
- lighter (you'd be surprised the number of insurance claims for back problems come from lifting monitors, they get moved from deskto desk or returned for repairs)
- don't go fuzzy over time
- look more high tech
- less fire risk
- less electric shock risk
- less radiation risk
- no alignment problems
- less heat generated
- lower magnetic interference of nearby equipment
- able to withstand wider temp and pressure fluctuations
- less storage space for stock
This is offset by the dowsides ppl have mentioned like:
- limited viewing angle
- gamma/colour problems in cheaper LCDs
- fixed resolution
- images can look "harsh"
- cost
I'm sure Sony did their marketing homework before announcing this. Personally I love my 21" Trinitron...
I recall using an 8086 with the (drumm roll) 8087 floating point accelerator chip (for those too young to remember, that was a separate chip you had the option to buy in early PCs if you wanted to do fast maths calulation. The Microsoft compiler of the time (v3or 4) had a bug that under some condition cause an underflow in the 8087 internal register stack on the 8th call (I think the internal hw stack had 8 entries). It took a real long time to find that, many weeks, I rang Microsoft and they said "Thanks!" and I never heard from them or got a work around. Some things never change...
:-)
I was helping a friend program their TV and found an error in the sequence of assigning frequencies to station numbers, it caused garbage to show where the nice green channel number was meant to be.
I remember writing a maze program on my trusty HP11C back in about '81 and I gave it to a friend. The bug cause the maze to be reflected on the x and y axes. I was trying out the program and got this creepy feeling as I wandered around the maze 4 times bigger than what the calculator had memory to handle. It was so weird. I took hours wandering around and eventually drew it out before seeing the pattern. Serendipity strikes
I wont mention the military system I worked on where the laser it fired (don't ask) would switch direction 180 degrees every time it crossed the Tropic of Capricorn (latitude 45 deg south). Or the bug in the artificial life breeding prgram that caused all offspring to remove their brains (controling code) when they were old enough to reproduce. Or the AI system that caused the 2D life to be attracted to a light but when the light was too close they spun in circles until they died - so weird to watch on the screen, very funny at the time.
Evangelion is good but it can be slow at times. For a livlier story that is just as wide ranging try out the first few episodes of Bugglegum Crisis. The characters are perhaps less troubled, but the animation is much more captivating. There's about 20 episodes is all I think.
my two cents worth
MMORPGs are substantially different to MUDS and MOOS. I played a lot of MUDS and stuff in the late 80s and developed my own MMORPG back in 1990+ (Cyberterm - go look it up) and whilst the gameplay is similar the implementation is vastly different. I believe the largest MUD I played in had about 180 simultaneous users (Qwest) but currently MMORPG designs are pushing 10k users per server. This isn't just a matter of scale. The whole way things are done has to be changed.
Also, as far as gameplay goes, MMORPGs (current) are still dragging their feet compared to MUDs and pencil and paper AD&D because they are way too static and inflexible. That's why the system I developed has dynamic content generation (even way back in the early 90s). I always believed it was the GMs job to define the rules of the universe (laws of nature etc)and the player can do whatever they want within that. So if they want to wander 50 miles east and dig a hole in the ground and build a castle they can. Or if they want to establish a bakery they can.
It's been a long road to now, but after 4 rewrites the system will be going alpha sometime late this year. We intent to allow users to develop their own content and program their own monsters, character etc based on a currency of CPU cycles, online time etc. Levelling is passe (like in my AD&D pencil and paper game I have a char who's been level 2 for over 20 yrs but he has great fun!!). The important thing is for players to have fun. We're examining concepts like object histories (this is the knife that killed Thera the seer in 486AF and was originally given to Thorin the Black in 482AF - if you have the spells to divine this!). We are also thinking of having very comprehensive "entry tests" for alpha testers to allow like minded players to the developers and our vision. Ultimately we'd prefer 10000 mature players than 100k levellers. Research has shown players are willing to pay more ($US25-50/m or more) for a high quality experience, which will also hopefully thin out the ranks. We've just finished a complete client and server rewrite but it's a slow road (yes, it's a hobby!)
I was offered a job by one of the "big" unix computer systems companies in Silicon Valley. Their intellectual property clause was a horrible blanket statment. I refused to sign it as I was working on some stuff of my own as a hobby. They said "We didn't think you'd sign but be thought we'd it on you anyway"!!! I got a lawyer to rewrite their paragraph (it came out to 10 pages long) and the company lawyers took 2 months to ok it but it the end they realised it was all above board.
So they were happy with that. But a few months later when I was approach by a national TV network to do an interview about my software I checked with my boss about it and word came down the line that if I said anything I'd get fired [shrug] Can't win them all but I guess that was reasonable as my software competed with a product my employer was working on internally (which was one main reason they employed me in the first place, because of my specialist knowledge).
Live and learn.
A few years back when I visited HITL at UNi of Washington (where most of the Micorvision research was done) I got to use one of these things an of all the HMDs I've used (and I've used a lot, from $200 cheapies to $60k milspec jobs) this is by far the best. The thing I liked the most is that the image is so sharp and focused - way better than my vision even with my glasses on. And the nifty thing is that it's in focus even with my glasses off, whilst the rest of the room is a blur. Maybe this needs a few more years (the one I used was full colour) but this is definitely the way things will be.
The evidence on the pattern of trees that collapsed at Tunguska and those that didn't suggest a small comet (ie snowball) coming in at about 40deg. Computer simulations of this exactly match the pattern of trees, which is a pretty unusual pattern. No need for conspiracy therories when a little science fits the data better.