I had the same experience with glasses, and with my optometrist. Thankfully, my parents forced me to do eye exercises when I was young (7-13) and I'm now only somewhat myopic (-3.75 in each eye) instead of nearly legally blind (my father is nearly -10).
This idea has been floated around for a while, and is expected to have big benefits for certain groups of drivers. The two biggest beneficiaries are likely to be 1) students and 2) the poor.
There is (unsurprisingly) a high correlation between total miles driven and number of accidents. Right now, your insurance premiums don't account for this at all. The BBC article focuses on the GPS effects of pay-as-you-drive (PAYD), such as charging for types of motorway, time of day, etc., but the really big deal is just knowing the total number of miles driven.
So how does this help students, or the poor? Well, those two groups typically meet two criteria: high risk, and low financial resources. For these people, there are real benefits to being able to reduce their premiums which they can do by reducing the miles they drive. Right now, if you're a high risk driver, you're SOL - you pay the high premiums and suck it up. With PAYD, you can at least drive less, and still gain the benefits of having a car without breaking the bank.
(As a side effect, PAYD could help to encourage more sustainable modes of transportation, by making transit/walking/etc. more attractive relative to driving.)
One interesting note from the article: the reason poor drivers pay more as "higher risk" drivers is geographic. Insurance companies rank poorer neighbourhoods as "high risk", but not because poor drivers are more risky in their behaviour. No, it's because rich neighbourhoods tend to have more underused (second or third) cars, which are very low risk, lowering the risk of the entire neighbourhood.
And I do agree with the many posts here complaining about the ripoff world of automobile insurance... it's insane how expensive it is, and how cruel those companies are!
Waterloo's bookstore is definitely the best system I've seen. It's a student-managed business (owned by the federation of students), and it sells books on consignment - you put it in the store and decide the price, they take 10-15% of the sale. It's a fantastic system - I only got stuck with two unsold textbooks in my undergraduate degree, both old editions that weren't very sellable. I recently came to UBC for my M.Sc. and was kind of shocked to learn that most schools don't have a comparable system!
The author mentions large-format cameras. Here is a link to a lowcost large-format camera project, built by cannibalizing a 1200dpi scanner to make a 122 megapixel camera.
It's called infill, and needs new urban planning
on
Creating Car Free Cities
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Most of the problems with car-centric cities lie in urban planning. Single-use zoning leads to separate residential, commerical and industrial districts. Wide lots limit the uses for the land - i.e., only single family homes, and not higher density housing like duplexes, row houses, or three-story apartment blocks. Suburban sidewalk free zones discourage pedestrians, and winding streets make public transit ineffective.
You can fix it all by changing the urban planning strategy. I live in Vancouver, and you can see the success of our program. The region is bounded by an Agricultural Land Reserve, and can't grow outwards - so it can only grow by increasing density. This is achieved by "infill" - taking existing low-density lots, and filling in the gaps to increase density. The first target is the surface parking lot, followed by empty malls, brownfield industrial sites, and even upping zoning densities when lots are redeveloped.
Small steps count. Since amalgamating into a larger megacity, Toronto has forced the suburbs to build sidewalks and bikelanes, and is slowly improving the livability of the outlying regions. Vancouver's downtown is a model of urban high-density redevelopment, as the abandoned portlands and waterfront industrial sites were rebuilt into highly livable condominium towers.
So don't give up hope - lobby your municipality for better urban planning, and push out the highway engineers!
Let's stop for a minute and discuss the scientific review process. Slashdot has just done what so many traditional media outlets do when reporting scientific issues: presented a minority opinion as fact.
Science advances slowly through peer-reviewed journals. Major scientific papers are reviewed by leaders in the field, and eventually accepted into the top line journals if the research is of sufficiently high quality. If a paper is rejected from a top journal, it is usually submitted to a lesser journal, and so on until it is eventually accepted.
Science and Nature are among the most prestigious journals for general science publications (but rarely computer science), and any major breakthrough in climate research would likely be published there. This Energy and the Environment journal is one I've never heard of (but I'm not a climate researcher), and doesn't seem to be a commonly cited source. I'd put very little stock in the claims made in the paper, since it hasn't been accepted by the scientific community.
Print media (like this daily telegraph article) do this sort of thing all the time - claiming that an article in some obscure journal reflects the current state of science, rather than one group's opinion. In Canada, the National Post often presents global warming as a "contentious issue" in the scientific community, treating the handful of dissenting scientists as equal to the majority who believe global warming is occurring. Read between the lines, people.
A few quick references on the subject (I'm not endorsing anything else on this site, I just found this while searching for "peer review" with Google.
I'm a grad student in computer graphics, touching on computer vision as well.
I also find Matlab invaluable for prototyping. For matrix operations, it's quite quick and well assembled, and not even much of a "black box", since Matlab/C source for most routines is available. For image processing - well, it's okay, but I can definitely write faster code myself. I often prototype in Matlab, and then translate to C++ for a final, fast edition.
For computer graphics, Matlab is awkward. When you need complicated data structures for 3D objects (like a winged-edge mesh), Matlab just gets painful.
In C++, I've tried a few matrix libraries. The Matrix Template Library (MTL) was okay but ugly and not very well maintained. I've heard good things about Blitz, but it wasn't quite right for my problems. Lately, I've preferred Boost's uBLAS library for a clean, STL-style templated C++ matrix library. In the end, your choice of library will depend heavily on your application.
Actually, Pi does have a decent representation of the life of some programmers. Sure, the computer was ridiculous and over the top - it was mostly there for atmosphere and visual effect.
But some of the psychology was right. I liked the scenes where he left the office and walked in crowds, and everywhere he looked, equations popped into his head; he couldn't stop thinking about his work. For me, that's what happens for 30 mins after finishing work - still contemplating the problem, still "in the zone", with ideas about the day's work coalescing in my head as I bike home. I often can't even hold a normal conversation for the next half hour.
Where are you getting this from? The EU stated that DSD (owner of the green dot program) has too large an advantage due to its large market share - a monopoly type problem, not "abusive" or "wasteful". Sure, the link says that the practice is overly bureaucratic, but that's not the same as wasteful - in fact, it's reducing solid waste.
And your comment about the "old world" is the wrongheaded. If anything, the USA represents the "old world" way of doing things. The EU is years ahead of North America in terms of environmental programs. (I say this as a Canadian, just as guilty as any American - I'm not trying to start a nationality flamewar here.) The idea that all things European are "old world" is just inflammatory.
> What would be good would be binary compatibilty between XMMS and Winamp plugins. Having not looked at Winamp plugin development, I don't know how hard that would be; anyone know how compatible they are/could be?
*cough*. The Winamp (1.x/2.x) plugin API is absolutely terrible. Let me give you an example. If you want to retrieve the title of the track, what do you do? Well, you get the window handle for Winamp by calling a few Win32 API functions with "WINAMP.EXE" as the argument. Then, you call the Win32 GetWindowTitle function, then you take the resulting string and strip off the "Winamp - " from the front. No, there's no nice exported "GetSongTitle()" function.
It gets worse. What do you have to do to get id3 information from the playing mp3 file? Well, you get the HWND again using the old approach. Then you send a WM_USER message to get back the index into the playlist of the file being played. Then you send another WM_USER message to get the filename of the playlist. Then you ask Windows politely for Winamp's full path, and use that to build a full path to the playlist. Then you read the playlist file in, and find the ith entry. Then you use id3lib to retrieve the id3 info, after patching id3lib since Winamp generates non-conforming id3 tags.
Please, do not bring this Frankenstein to Linux. Won't someone think about the children?
Moreover, is this a precedent slashdot wants to set? That anyone with a secrecy "issue" can post info on slashdot and then let Andover fight a legal battle over it? Yes, your hearts are in the right place guys, but let's be realistic - the battle we want to fight is "slashdot's not responsible for our users" not "kerberos sucks". So let's see... if I uuencode a metallica mp3 and post it on slashdot...
If you want a man with *ideas*, Greg Egan has 'em in spades... I still can't get over the wild uses he comes up for computers, nanotech, all manner of cool tech... plus he's got a CS degree. What more could you want? Try "Axiomatic" for a taste, then maybe "Diaspora". Mind you, I don't know what the ESA could take away from this...
No kidding... what utter and total crap. I'm sorry, but anyone who falls for this is in serious need of critical thinking skills. And I quote:
Analysis of government-sponsored space projects shows that no more than 10% of the money, usually even less, is actually spent on developing and operating the spacecraft.... While some of these extra costs can be trimmed, most of the overhead is the inevitable nature of government programs.
While this logic may appeal to joe-blow government-sucks-free-enterprise-forever, I'd like to see some evidence to back this up. Every aspect of this site seems dedicated to wishful thinking, from adopting aerospace standards to expecting SuperBowl-level funding for this pie-in-the-sky. Utter nonsense... I can't believe that so few see through it.
Come on. This is just a reaction to the changing view on the Blair Witch Project. Thesis: yes the movie is good, but no the studio hype vis-a-vis "internet phenom" is bad.
To be honest, despite being a Katzenbasher Kid myself on occasion, I kind of liked this article - a lot of hype blurbs I hadn't heard, a little insight. Doublespeak it's not. (Even if somewhat self-contradictory...)
And yes, I liked the movie - a clever investigation of the word fear, neat camerawork, good premise. I don't watch horror, so I wasn't disappointed by the shocks/lack of shocks.
3D modeler + animation + dynamics + renderer package, integrated slickly and with loads o' plugins. High-end - i.e. makes 3DSMax look toylike - *nice* graph-based architecture (more than just a DAG), real UI, snappy and *big*. I'm tempted to reply to the earlier troll about "open sourcing it", but won't. And yes, I used to work for A|W, so I'm biased. I wish I had the hardware (and money) to have my own copy of Maya... sigh. Writing plugins for Maya is kind of dreamy.
So I see "Rasterman goes to VA" in the top headline. Simultaneously, the advertisement above it goes through a VA spiel: listing various coders' names, including Mandrake - and Rasterman. "What do they have in common? They all work VA Linux". Rob! You got scooped by your own advertiser!
My peeve on this account: "the will of the force". Before now, the force has been just a power to tap in to, an impersonal feature of the universe like, say, physics. Now it has a "will", implying little things in cells that form some sentient being. Blah.
This is perhaps one of the most frightening features of the Slashdot comments: probably 60% of the writers haven't read the article. Maybe the new system will help.
Wood's article is intelligent; his criticism of Slashdot and Katz are entirely valid. I was in the "Katz has nothing to say, but he's innocent enough" camp before this article, but I will filter Katz out from now on. (Well... maybe he'll have a response. That could be amusing.) I have nothing against Katz personally, but I don't like the content of his articles and I think he's a poor advocate for the open source movement. See Wood's article.
Wood's arguments are solid. I haven't seen Raymond in public, so I can't comment on Wood's analysis of Raymond, but his take on RMS was bang on. While I was turned off by the you-haven't-read-Foucault-yet! attitude, it's entirely valid - philosophizing without knowing philosophy is so much line noise. And dammit, everyone *should* read Foucault. Even if I haven't...
But would Wood write for Slashdot? Doesn't seem likely. After flaming the site so eloquently, why would he write for it? Besides, if he researches his topics, he couldn't put out anything like Katz's volume, making the counterpoint weak.
After reading Wood's post, I'm tempted to wait and revise my comments, to think everything through perfectly. But that's not the nature of a discussion board; if every comment were a researched essay it'd be sparse discussion. Sigh. Descending to cliches, I'll just add my two cents to the pot and step out of the fray.
This brings me back to my original point - commenting without knowledge. It is a discussion board, and anyone can put their opinion out there, even though everyone has varying levels of knowledge of a given topic. But for god's sake, please read the article before posting. At least we'll have a common starting point.
Okay - so who wants to do the Mac port? I'm sure that it can't be hard, just reverse the endian here and there and voila! Free Mac software. Linux port will be even easier, since the byte order is the same on any PC platform. What are you waiting for? Jump on board. Contribute to the "source tree", now that it's "Open Source".
From Gossi-the-aptly-named-dog's home page:
The asm() instructions show that the U64 cpu "emulation" seems to have translated fairly well, and so I'm wondering if we fixed the broken bits and tacked it onto a new GUI if we'd have a working emulator. Again, this is just theory. In practice?
...it won't work. Maybe the biggest problem with UltraHLE isn't the GUI? Things like Win-only, GLIDE-only, imperfect emulation, no "flat polys only" mode, etc.? Not so easy to change these from the disassembly... This is such a joke.
I'm sorry. I respect Panix's comments, I agree with the principles he puts forward, but ultimately I think that this viewpoint is every bit as naïve as his opponents. Emulation has never been about elegance, about sharing. The very roots of the scene lie in warez and demo land; you can't get a ROM or demo to test an emulator without venturing into that territory. Emulator authors do write for the sake of technical beauty, but - like OSS - there's also a large element of prestige. These days, prestige is associated more with usefulness, i.e. the ability to run real games. And so, it is ultimately tied to the ability to get real ROMs. That doesn't mean that the scene can't change. I would like to see a return to the likes of Yoshi, who released large amounts of SNES docs to the community, making new emulators easier and allowing new coders access to the scene. I think that the emu scene still has a lot to learn from the OSS community: if masterworks like NESticle were open source, we might see development on those last few bugs and unimplemented modes, making a perfect emu. (Then again, we might just get another MindRape scenario...) To UltraHLE authors - thanks for keeping the scene alive, if only briefly. To warez kiddies - clue in or screw off! Put up some ROM sites of your own, and *don't* bug the emu authors! Without them, your ROMs are worthless. ROMs are necessary to make the scene worthwhile, since your average N64 owner doesn't have the ROM ripping hardware. It's unfortunate; my idealistic streak would like to keep emus entirely legal. Ah well. As long as there are good boxes to emulate and techie nuts to write the emus, the scene will survive.
Slashdot Mirror
I had the same experience with glasses, and with my optometrist. Thankfully, my parents forced me to do eye exercises when I was young (7-13) and I'm now only somewhat myopic (-3.75 in each eye) instead of nearly legally blind (my father is nearly -10).
There is (unsurprisingly) a high correlation between total miles driven and number of accidents. Right now, your insurance premiums don't account for this at all. The BBC article focuses on the GPS effects of pay-as-you-drive (PAYD), such as charging for types of motorway, time of day, etc., but the really big deal is just knowing the total number of miles driven.
So how does this help students, or the poor? Well, those two groups typically meet two criteria: high risk, and low financial resources. For these people, there are real benefits to being able to reduce their premiums which they can do by reducing the miles they drive. Right now, if you're a high risk driver, you're SOL - you pay the high premiums and suck it up. With PAYD, you can at least drive less, and still gain the benefits of having a car without breaking the bank.
(As a side effect, PAYD could help to encourage more sustainable modes of transportation, by making transit/walking/etc. more attractive relative to driving.)
If you're interested in these issues, check out this article: Pay-as-you-drive pricing for insurance affordability by Todd Litman.
One interesting note from the article: the reason poor drivers pay more as "higher risk" drivers is geographic. Insurance companies rank poorer neighbourhoods as "high risk", but not because poor drivers are more risky in their behaviour. No, it's because rich neighbourhoods tend to have more underused (second or third) cars, which are very low risk, lowering the risk of the entire neighbourhood.
And I do agree with the many posts here complaining about the ripoff world of automobile insurance... it's insane how expensive it is, and how cruel those companies are!
Waterloo's bookstore is definitely the best system I've seen. It's a student-managed business (owned by the federation of students), and it sells books on consignment - you put it in the store and decide the price, they take 10-15% of the sale. It's a fantastic system - I only got stuck with two unsold textbooks in my undergraduate degree, both old editions that weren't very sellable. I recently came to UBC for my M.Sc. and was kind of shocked to learn that most schools don't have a comparable system!
The author mentions large-format cameras. Here is a link to a lowcost large-format camera project, built by cannibalizing a 1200dpi scanner to make a 122 megapixel camera.
You can fix it all by changing the urban planning strategy. I live in Vancouver, and you can see the success of our program. The region is bounded by an Agricultural Land Reserve, and can't grow outwards - so it can only grow by increasing density. This is achieved by "infill" - taking existing low-density lots, and filling in the gaps to increase density. The first target is the surface parking lot, followed by empty malls, brownfield industrial sites, and even upping zoning densities when lots are redeveloped.
Small steps count. Since amalgamating into a larger megacity, Toronto has forced the suburbs to build sidewalks and bikelanes, and is slowly improving the livability of the outlying regions. Vancouver's downtown is a model of urban high-density redevelopment, as the abandoned portlands and waterfront industrial sites were rebuilt into highly livable condominium towers.
So don't give up hope - lobby your municipality for better urban planning, and push out the highway engineers!
- David
Science advances slowly through peer-reviewed journals. Major scientific papers are reviewed by leaders in the field, and eventually accepted into the top line journals if the research is of sufficiently high quality. If a paper is rejected from a top journal, it is usually submitted to a lesser journal, and so on until it is eventually accepted.
Science and Nature are among the most prestigious journals for general science publications (but rarely computer science), and any major breakthrough in climate research would likely be published there. This Energy and the Environment journal is one I've never heard of (but I'm not a climate researcher), and doesn't seem to be a commonly cited source. I'd put very little stock in the claims made in the paper, since it hasn't been accepted by the scientific community.
Print media (like this daily telegraph article) do this sort of thing all the time - claiming that an article in some obscure journal reflects the current state of science, rather than one group's opinion. In Canada, the National Post often presents global warming as a "contentious issue" in the scientific community, treating the handful of dissenting scientists as equal to the majority who believe global warming is occurring. Read between the lines, people.
A few quick references on the subject (I'm not endorsing anything else on this site, I just found this while searching for "peer review" with Google.
I also find Matlab invaluable for prototyping. For matrix operations, it's quite quick and well assembled, and not even much of a "black box", since Matlab/C source for most routines is available. For image processing - well, it's okay, but I can definitely write faster code myself. I often prototype in Matlab, and then translate to C++ for a final, fast edition.
For computer graphics, Matlab is awkward. When you need complicated data structures for 3D objects (like a winged-edge mesh), Matlab just gets painful.
In C++, I've tried a few matrix libraries. The Matrix Template Library (MTL) was okay but ugly and not very well maintained. I've heard good things about Blitz, but it wasn't quite right for my problems. Lately, I've preferred Boost's uBLAS library for a clean, STL-style templated C++ matrix library. In the end, your choice of library will depend heavily on your application.
- David
But some of the psychology was right. I liked the scenes where he left the office and walked in crowds, and everywhere he looked, equations popped into his head; he couldn't stop thinking about his work. For me, that's what happens for 30 mins after finishing work - still contemplating the problem, still "in the zone", with ideas about the day's work coalescing in my head as I bike home. I often can't even hold a normal conversation for the next half hour.
Can I get paid for that time? Please?
- David
Where are you getting this from? The EU stated that DSD (owner of the green dot program) has too large an advantage due to its large market share - a monopoly type problem, not "abusive" or "wasteful". Sure, the link says that the practice is overly bureaucratic, but that's not the same as wasteful - in fact, it's reducing solid waste.
And your comment about the "old world" is the wrongheaded. If anything, the USA represents the "old world" way of doing things. The EU is years ahead of North America in terms of environmental programs. (I say this as a Canadian, just as guilty as any American - I'm not trying to start a nationality flamewar here.) The idea that all things European are "old world" is just inflammatory.
- David
Let's call a troll a troll.
"Playing on your emotions rather than hard, scientific data", eh? Sounds vaguely familiar, for some reason.
- David
> What would be good would be binary compatibilty between XMMS and Winamp plugins. Having not looked at Winamp plugin development, I don't know how hard that would be; anyone know how compatible they are/could be?
*cough*. The Winamp (1.x/2.x) plugin API is absolutely terrible. Let me give you an example. If you want to retrieve the title of the track, what do you do? Well, you get the window handle for Winamp by calling a few Win32 API functions with "WINAMP.EXE" as the argument. Then, you call the Win32 GetWindowTitle function, then you take the resulting string and strip off the "Winamp - " from the front. No, there's no nice exported "GetSongTitle()" function.
It gets worse. What do you have to do to get id3 information from the playing mp3 file? Well, you get the HWND again using the old approach. Then you send a WM_USER message to get back the index into the playlist of the file being played. Then you send another WM_USER message to get the filename of the playlist. Then you ask Windows politely for Winamp's full path, and use that to build a full path to the playlist. Then you read the playlist file in, and find the ith entry. Then you use id3lib to retrieve the id3 info, after patching id3lib since Winamp generates non-conforming id3 tags.
Please, do not bring this Frankenstein to Linux. Won't someone think about the children?
- David
Moreover, is this a precedent slashdot wants to set? That anyone with a secrecy "issue" can post info on slashdot and then let Andover fight a legal battle over it? Yes, your hearts are in the right place guys, but let's be realistic - the battle we want to fight is "slashdot's not responsible for our users" not "kerberos sucks". So let's see... if I uuencode a metallica mp3 and post it on slashdot...
Wow, I'm glad to see someone working on increasing the connectivity of the web. That industrial cement floors link was so valuable.
If you want a man with *ideas*, Greg Egan has 'em in spades... I still can't get over the wild uses he comes up for computers, nanotech, all manner of cool tech... plus he's got a CS degree. What more could you want? Try "Axiomatic" for a taste, then maybe "Diaspora". Mind you, I don't know what the ESA could take away from this...
To be honest, despite being a Katzenbasher Kid myself on occasion, I kind of liked this article - a lot of hype blurbs I hadn't heard, a little insight. Doublespeak it's not. (Even if somewhat self-contradictory...)
And yes, I liked the movie - a clever investigation of the word fear, neat camerawork, good premise. I don't watch horror, so I wasn't disappointed by the shocks/lack of shocks.
3D modeler + animation + dynamics + renderer package, integrated slickly and with loads o' plugins. High-end - i.e. makes 3DSMax look toylike - *nice* graph-based architecture (more than just a DAG), real UI, snappy and *big*. I'm tempted to reply to the earlier troll about "open sourcing it", but won't. And yes, I used to work for A|W, so I'm biased. I wish I had the hardware (and money) to have my own copy of Maya... sigh. Writing plugins for Maya is kind of dreamy.
So I see "Rasterman goes to VA" in the top headline. Simultaneously, the advertisement above it goes through a VA spiel: listing various coders' names, including Mandrake - and Rasterman. "What do they have in common? They all work VA Linux". Rob! You got scooped by your own advertiser!
My peeve on this account: "the will of the force". Before now, the force has been just a power to tap in to, an impersonal feature of the universe like, say, physics. Now it has a "will", implying little things in cells that form some sentient being. Blah.
On another note, Jar-jar must die.
This is perhaps one of the most frightening features of the Slashdot comments: probably 60% of the writers haven't read the article. Maybe the new system will help.
Wood's article is intelligent; his criticism of Slashdot and Katz are entirely valid. I was in the "Katz has nothing to say, but he's innocent enough" camp before this article, but I will filter Katz out from now on. (Well... maybe he'll have a response. That could be amusing.) I have nothing against Katz personally, but I don't like the content of his articles and I think he's a poor advocate for the open source movement. See Wood's article.
Wood's arguments are solid. I haven't seen Raymond in public, so I can't comment on Wood's analysis of Raymond, but his take on RMS was bang on. While I was turned off by the you-haven't-read-Foucault-yet! attitude, it's entirely valid - philosophizing without knowing philosophy is so much line noise. And dammit, everyone *should* read Foucault. Even if I haven't...
But would Wood write for Slashdot? Doesn't seem likely. After flaming the site so eloquently, why would he write for it? Besides, if he researches his topics, he couldn't put out anything like Katz's volume, making the counterpoint weak.
After reading Wood's post, I'm tempted to wait and revise my comments, to think everything through perfectly. But that's not the nature of a discussion board; if every comment were a researched essay it'd be sparse discussion. Sigh. Descending to cliches, I'll just add my two cents to the pot and step out of the fray.
This brings me back to my original point - commenting without knowledge. It is a discussion board, and anyone can put their opinion out there, even though everyone has varying levels of knowledge of a given topic. But for god's sake, please read the article before posting. At least we'll have a common starting point.
Okay - so who wants to do the Mac port? I'm sure that it can't be hard, just reverse the endian here and there and voila! Free Mac software. Linux port will be even easier, since the byte order is the same on any PC platform. What are you waiting for? Jump on board. Contribute to the "source tree", now that it's "Open Source".
From Gossi-the-aptly-named-dog's home page:
...it won't work. Maybe the biggest problem with UltraHLE isn't the GUI? Things like Win-only, GLIDE-only, imperfect emulation, no "flat polys only" mode, etc.? Not so easy to change these from the disassembly... This is such a joke.
I'm sorry. I respect Panix's comments, I agree with the principles he puts forward, but ultimately I think that this viewpoint is every bit as naïve as his opponents. Emulation has never been about elegance, about sharing. The very roots of the scene lie in warez and demo land; you can't get a ROM or demo to test an emulator without venturing into that territory. Emulator authors do write for the sake of technical beauty, but - like OSS - there's also a large element of prestige. These days, prestige is associated more with usefulness, i.e. the ability to run real games. And so, it is ultimately tied to the ability to get real ROMs. That doesn't mean that the scene can't change. I would like to see a return to the likes of Yoshi, who released large amounts of SNES docs to the community, making new emulators easier and allowing new coders access to the scene. I think that the emu scene still has a lot to learn from the OSS community: if masterworks like NESticle were open source, we might see development on those last few bugs and unimplemented modes, making a perfect emu. (Then again, we might just get another MindRape scenario...) To UltraHLE authors - thanks for keeping the scene alive, if only briefly. To warez kiddies - clue in or screw off! Put up some ROM sites of your own, and *don't* bug the emu authors! Without them, your ROMs are worthless. ROMs are necessary to make the scene worthwhile, since your average N64 owner doesn't have the ROM ripping hardware. It's unfortunate; my idealistic streak would like to keep emus entirely legal. Ah well. As long as there are good boxes to emulate and techie nuts to write the emus, the scene will survive.