Probably holding the camera with the other hand. After buying all that laser hardware, I don't think they had much of a budget left for an actual crew.:)
It's nonsense typing anyway. You can plainly see them hitting the 'T' and 'Y' keys simultaneously.
Love the shot of the two geeks in front of the Tempest display, pointing at the screen as if we would have missed it otherwise.
Before posting links to small-time web sites, Slashdot themselves could download a full "mirror" of said site before posting, and include a link to that before the actual site link (or at the top of the article), since their own servers can obviously handle the load. After a week or so, however long it takes for interest to settle down, the mirror could be removed and the original link restored.
Pity about the rather expensive controller card and additional bits of hardware this requires (and that they seem to be hoarding the source at the moment).
Somewhere down along my "hacks to do" list was to try doing something like this on the cheap. Rather than the laser projector, an oscilloscope would provide the vector image. An ordinary sound card would be used to provide the D/A functionality (using the left and right audio channels to drive the X and Y position of the beam), and perhaps a cheap circuit on a bidirectional parallel port to provide beam blanking or brightness (or an additional analogue channel from a second audio card).
Of course there are problems with accuracy and repeatability when using a sound card for specific D/A conversion, but the initial bit of poking around I did (canned "audio" loops corresponding to image test patterns) suggested that games would at least be recognizable.
> Sounds nice, but what if, after creating the
> file, I don't want to open it up with whatever
> application created it to start with?
Same way the Mac does it: rather than double-click, either drag-and-drop or explicitly open the file in the new application.
I've always felt that file extensions were a contrivance, and the Registry concept only made this even more brain-damaged. I must admit, amidst all the other sloth that is MacOS, the type/creator scheme is among the system's human-centric gems.
Once again...another Slashdot article that lets the acronyms/buzzwords fly without once giving a definition or synopsis.
Authors could take a lesson from the previous article, "P2P Developers Stand Up To Intel," which defines its acronym in the first sentence. It's not that difficult, people.
First he recommends an OS/hardware split for X86 users: Win95/98 for older sytems, NT/Win2K for new systems. Then he bitches at Apple for doing precisely the same thing, with OSX not running on older hardware.
Mocks Apple for finally offering proper multitasking/memory protection in OSX...then in the very next sentence bitches how easy it is to lock up a MacOS9 system. Well DUH!
Bitches at the delays, recalls, and limited availability of 1GHz processors. Hello? Since when was the hardware industry obligated to perform to your every whim? This is bleeding-edge stuff...have you considered the simple possibility that it's just not ready for prime time yet? No...he wants it NOW, and has to throw a tantrum when they can't deliver.
I could go on, but it's just inane and tiring. Maybe this guy can program with the best, but he can't put up a coherent argument about anything. Sounds like he just woke up in a bad mood one day and decided to rant at the whole world.
Many of the Mac's original "killer apps" (Photoshop, etc.) resulted from the simple fact that suitable Windows API's simply weren't there yet. Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, for instance, didn't make their way to the PC until Windows 3.1. Think way back...at the time, Windows just couldn't cut it. Similarly with the version of Illustrator which ran on NextStep...with Display PostScript at the OS level, this version of the app was years ahead of the Mac/Win versions. Today, these apps run virtually identically regardless of platform, and that killer app advantage just isn't there.
I'm hopeful that with OSX API's such as Quartz (system-level PDF support, plus some cool compositing), that perhaps we'll see a new breed of apps that, as with Adobe's killer offerings nearly a decade ago, simply aren't worth the bother to try to reproduce on less capable operating systems. Or with Apache at the back end tightly knit with a good UI, apps, and development tools at the front end, this could be poised to be THE web development platform of choice. Author and serve on a single system.
I'm optimistic, at least with regard to their traditional publishing markets. Let's see what happens.
It's certainly true that electricity doesn't get from the generating plant to one's outlets with perfect efficiency (I've heard figures anywhere from 85 to 95 percent efficiency)...but what's frequently overlooked is that refined gasoline doesn't just magically spring from gasoline pumps either. Fossil fuels suffer their own "line loss," having to be dredged up halfway around the world, transported by ship, refined, and transported locally by truck before reaching the consumer It would be interesting to hear what the corresponding transit efficiency is, in terms of burning fossil fuels to deliver fossil fuels. I have a suspicion, due to the number of mechanical processes involved, that the 'loss' for fossil fuels would be at least twice as high as for electrical transmission...though if you have the actual numbers to show otherwise, please do set me straight.
Pardon my lack of enthusiasm, but...while I find these sorts of competitions fascinating when MIT or CalTech engineering students pit their problem-solving skills head-to-head using limited and identical resources, this "BattleBots" thing just strikes me as a glorified tractor pull for washed-up defense contractor employees who can't get laid and need an outlet for their aggression.
Other competitions such as Sunrayce or the IHPVA events emphasize problem-solving through engineering finesse rather than brute force. What's more, these contests work to address pressing real-world issues. I see these testosterone-dripping remote-controlled chainsaws fighting for no good or purpose and can't help but think about the people in this country living in cardboard boxes. What are the Battle Bot builders hoping to prove? What are they doing that has lasting value in this world?
It's low-brow entertainment under the guise of science. Pro wrestling with a metallic sheen. I would expect so much better from anybody with the brains to build one of these things.
People keep calling this "a 3D interface," which isn't quite correct. Only 2D affine transformations are demonstrated...this provides a skewed, pseudo-3D effect, but ultimately it's just a kludge. True 3D requires a projective transformation. Dig up [Heckbert89] for canonical examples with code.
If we extrapolate from past experiences, it's quite obvious...
All six episodes will be released on DVD about three seconds before the first HD-DVD discs and players start appearing on store shelves.
Rabid fans will rush out and buy the DVD versions (to add to their collection of nine million VHS varieties) when Lucas then announces that HD-DVD versions won't be released for several years...not until he completes Episodes 7-9, insisting that he "never said" there would only be six films in the series.
I know I'll burn in hell for dissing the Almighty Sony...but I'd rather eat a dog turd than buy another one of their monitors. They seem to be specially designed to die precisely 30 seconds after the warranty has expired (as with three of the four Sony's I've owned...and I've heard of similar experiences from others).
Maybe the Glasstron is different. Maybe it works reliably for years. Watch me not care, not want to find out. Been burned by them too many times. I'd just as soon buy junk from Goldstar.
...for correct use of the term "bated breath." If I had a nickel for every time I've seen somebody improperly use "baited" there, I'd be richer than Bill Gates.
I can understand the V5's need for an external supply since the bus alone can't provide that much power. But...why an external brick? Why not an ordinary drive-style power connector internally that can tap the system's existing power supply?
Both Sony and Apple, perhaps others, have LCD monitors that perform interpolation in hardware to provide non-integral resolutions. Not cheesy pixel-doubling, but actual convolution. Great for games, DVD, etc...but it's mostly just irritating for any "serious" use.
Egad...this has got to be a troll, right? When is the last time anybody gave 1/10th of one crap about floppies? Okay, I'll admit...I do still use them very occasionally...for booting old '486 machines.
I'm no Apple worshipper...and I think the iBook looks like a toilet seat...but I do try to be objective in evaluating the substantive capabilities of a system...and I for one applaud Apple's recent efforts to trim legacy interfaces that aren't so much "features" anymore as they are "nuisances," with most everything now covered by much simpler USB, Ethernet and/or FireWire. Yes, I do have quite an investment in SCSI, parallel and serial peripherals...but I will be GLAD when it comes time to replace them and not have to deal with all that black magic anymore.
Floppies were neat at one time. Critical, even. But they've long since passed to the "nuisance" stage. Not even good for sneakernet anymore. I'll be glad to see them dead and buried too. Only problem, unlike the other legacy crap, is that there's no definitive established standard to take their place. Zip? CD-RW? Something else? This remains to be seen.
Re:Can you give me what is cheaper and outperforms
on
iBook boots Linux
·
· Score: 1
Tons and tons and tons of 'x86 hardware comes to mind to me.
"Tons and tons and tons," and yet you can't cite a single example?
Would you prefer a different target? A military target? Then name the system!
Closest thing I could turn up for an actual supported, brand-name system would be last year's Sony VAIO 505's and IBM's low-end i-series Thinkpads...both being blown out now for nearly the same price as the iBook. Both are great basic systems for the money (and look better than the iBook, IMHO)...but neither quite meets the "cheaper" or "outperform" criteria specified.
I often experience the same thing...only tolerating instrumental music when deep into coding or involved in certain types of art or writing.
I suspect this stems from the notion of "split-brain psychology," a model of the human mind which has distinct hemispheres processing different types of thought: the left brain primarily handling logical and verbal skills, the right brain handling conceptual (non-verbal) and creative skills. The theory is descibed quite well in Betty Edwards' book, "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain," a very good read even for non-artists. She suggests that the average person's difficulty in drawing is the result of being stuck in a left-brain-dominant mode, trying to process a conceptual task with the verbal part of the brain.
Coding, I believe, is a conceptual task like drawing, not a verbal one, despite being built up of little words like "while" and "if." When in Deep Hack Mode, one considers "while" as a programmatic concept, not a word, and the movements necessary to convey that concept (typing) are performed out of rote rather than requiring verbal concentration. A skilled musician may experience the same thing...the names and durations of the individual notes are no longer something to be concentrated on while playing...the body is "tuned" to carry them out and string them together as an act of continuous non-verbal expression.
Even playing in the background and/or long since familiar from repeated listening, words keep the verbal left-brain mildly active to a point where it may still trip up our ability to work toward a purely conceptual and basically artistic goal.
It's interesting, looking at the other posts, to see not only a tendency toward instrumental music, but often very specific types or instances...Philip Glass, Jarre, Ravel's "Bolero," etc. Often very rhythmic, repetitive or sort of fractal, in a way. "Minimalism," I believe is the classification. Perhaps the aural perception of these rhythms sets up a sort of "carrier wave" throughout the brain, an atmosphere conducive to performing similarly structured tasks like programming...that not only are the same neurons involved to avoid conflict, as Chad suggests, but perhaps the music can actually kick-start and/or naturally amplify the process, a sort of constructive interference. Funny...sometimes I can only stomach such music when I'm deeply involved in programming...other times it may just be grating.
Allow me to add Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians" and anything by Penguin Cafe Orchestra to that list.
Slashdot Mirror
It's nonsense typing anyway. You can plainly see them hitting the 'T' and 'Y' keys simultaneously.
Love the shot of the two geeks in front of the Tempest display, pointing at the screen as if we would have missed it otherwise.
How about this:
Before posting links to small-time web sites, Slashdot themselves could download a full "mirror" of said site before posting, and include a link to that before the actual site link (or at the top of the article), since their own servers can obviously handle the load. After a week or so, however long it takes for interest to settle down, the mirror could be removed and the original link restored.
Pity about the rather expensive controller card and additional bits of hardware this requires (and that they seem to be hoarding the source at the moment).
Somewhere down along my "hacks to do" list was to try doing something like this on the cheap. Rather than the laser projector, an oscilloscope would provide the vector image. An ordinary sound card would be used to provide the D/A functionality (using the left and right audio channels to drive the X and Y position of the beam), and perhaps a cheap circuit on a bidirectional parallel port to provide beam blanking or brightness (or an additional analogue channel from a second audio card).
Of course there are problems with accuracy and repeatability when using a sound card for specific D/A conversion, but the initial bit of poking around I did (canned "audio" loops corresponding to image test patterns) suggested that games would at least be recognizable.
It's the year 2000, and people STILL can't get this right?
> Sounds nice, but what if, after creating the
> file, I don't want to open it up with whatever
> application created it to start with?
Same way the Mac does it: rather than double-click, either drag-and-drop or explicitly open the file in the new application.
I've always felt that file extensions were a contrivance, and the Registry concept only made this even more brain-damaged. I must admit, amidst all the other sloth that is MacOS, the type/creator scheme is among the system's human-centric gems.
Once again...another Slashdot article that lets the acronyms/buzzwords fly without once giving a definition or synopsis.
Authors could take a lesson from the previous article, "P2P Developers Stand Up To Intel," which defines its acronym in the first sentence. It's not that difficult, people.
Mocks Apple for finally offering proper multitasking/memory protection in OSX...then in the very next sentence bitches how easy it is to lock up a MacOS9 system. Well DUH!
Bitches at the delays, recalls, and limited availability of 1GHz processors. Hello? Since when was the hardware industry obligated to perform to your every whim? This is bleeding-edge stuff...have you considered the simple possibility that it's just not ready for prime time yet? No...he wants it NOW, and has to throw a tantrum when they can't deliver.
I could go on, but it's just inane and tiring. Maybe this guy can program with the best, but he can't put up a coherent argument about anything. Sounds like he just woke up in a bad mood one day and decided to rant at the whole world.
Many of the Mac's original "killer apps" (Photoshop, etc.) resulted from the simple fact that suitable Windows API's simply weren't there yet. Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, for instance, didn't make their way to the PC until Windows 3.1. Think way back...at the time, Windows just couldn't cut it. Similarly with the version of Illustrator which ran on NextStep...with Display PostScript at the OS level, this version of the app was years ahead of the Mac/Win versions. Today, these apps run virtually identically regardless of platform, and that killer app advantage just isn't there.
I'm hopeful that with OSX API's such as Quartz (system-level PDF support, plus some cool compositing), that perhaps we'll see a new breed of apps that, as with Adobe's killer offerings nearly a decade ago, simply aren't worth the bother to try to reproduce on less capable operating systems. Or with Apache at the back end tightly knit with a good UI, apps, and development tools at the front end, this could be poised to be THE web development platform of choice. Author and serve on a single system.
I'm optimistic, at least with regard to their traditional publishing markets. Let's see what happens.
It's certainly true that electricity doesn't get from the generating plant to one's outlets with perfect efficiency (I've heard figures anywhere from 85 to 95 percent efficiency)...but what's frequently overlooked is that refined gasoline doesn't just magically spring from gasoline pumps either. Fossil fuels suffer their own "line loss," having to be dredged up halfway around the world, transported by ship, refined, and transported locally by truck before reaching the consumer It would be interesting to hear what the corresponding transit efficiency is, in terms of burning fossil fuels to deliver fossil fuels. I have a suspicion, due to the number of mechanical processes involved, that the 'loss' for fossil fuels would be at least twice as high as for electrical transmission...though if you have the actual numbers to show otherwise, please do set me straight.
Pardon my lack of enthusiasm, but...while I find these sorts of competitions fascinating when MIT or CalTech engineering students pit their problem-solving skills head-to-head using limited and identical resources, this "BattleBots" thing just strikes me as a glorified tractor pull for washed-up defense contractor employees who can't get laid and need an outlet for their aggression.
Other competitions such as Sunrayce or the IHPVA events emphasize problem-solving through engineering finesse rather than brute force. What's more, these contests work to address pressing real-world issues. I see these testosterone-dripping remote-controlled chainsaws fighting for no good or purpose and can't help but think about the people in this country living in cardboard boxes. What are the Battle Bot builders hoping to prove? What are they doing that has lasting value in this world?
It's low-brow entertainment under the guise of science. Pro wrestling with a metallic sheen. I would expect so much better from anybody with the brains to build one of these things.
People keep calling this "a 3D interface," which isn't quite correct. Only 2D affine transformations are demonstrated...this provides a skewed, pseudo-3D effect, but ultimately it's just a kludge. True 3D requires a projective transformation. Dig up [Heckbert89] for canonical examples with code.
All six episodes will be released on DVD about three seconds before the first HD-DVD discs and players start appearing on store shelves.
Rabid fans will rush out and buy the DVD versions (to add to their collection of nine million VHS varieties) when Lucas then announces that HD-DVD versions won't be released for several years...not until he completes Episodes 7-9, insisting that he "never said" there would only be six films in the series.
More bloat, more bugs, and completely incompatible behavior across even minor revisions. Then they'll be a true replacement for Motif.
Maybe the Glasstron is different. Maybe it works reliably for years. Watch me not care, not want to find out. Been burned by them too many times. I'd just as soon buy junk from Goldstar.
The spelling. "Bated" vs. "baited."
...for correct use of the term "bated breath." If I had a nickel for every time I've seen somebody improperly use "baited" there, I'd be richer than Bill Gates.
Okay...dumb question...
I can understand the V5's need for an external supply since the bus alone can't provide that much power. But...why an external brick? Why not an ordinary drive-style power connector internally that can tap the system's existing power supply?
Gay! Totally gay! Liberace gay!
Both Sony and Apple, perhaps others, have LCD monitors that perform interpolation in hardware to provide non-integral resolutions. Not cheesy pixel-doubling, but actual convolution. Great for games, DVD, etc...but it's mostly just irritating for any "serious" use.
Star Trek is beyond tired...it's a fat old horse with four broken legs. They should shoot it and put it out of our misery.
I'm no Apple worshipper...and I think the iBook looks like a toilet seat...but I do try to be objective in evaluating the substantive capabilities of a system...and I for one applaud Apple's recent efforts to trim legacy interfaces that aren't so much "features" anymore as they are "nuisances," with most everything now covered by much simpler USB, Ethernet and/or FireWire. Yes, I do have quite an investment in SCSI, parallel and serial peripherals...but I will be GLAD when it comes time to replace them and not have to deal with all that black magic anymore.
Floppies were neat at one time. Critical, even. But they've long since passed to the "nuisance" stage. Not even good for sneakernet anymore. I'll be glad to see them dead and buried too. Only problem, unlike the other legacy crap, is that there's no definitive established standard to take their place. Zip? CD-RW? Something else? This remains to be seen.
"Tons and tons and tons," and yet you can't cite a single example?
Would you prefer a different target? A military target? Then name the system!
Closest thing I could turn up for an actual supported, brand-name system would be last year's Sony VAIO 505's and IBM's low-end i-series Thinkpads...both being blown out now for nearly the same price as the iBook. Both are great basic systems for the money (and look better than the iBook, IMHO)...but neither quite meets the "cheaper" or "outperform" criteria specified.
I suspect this stems from the notion of "split-brain psychology," a model of the human mind which has distinct hemispheres processing different types of thought: the left brain primarily handling logical and verbal skills, the right brain handling conceptual (non-verbal) and creative skills. The theory is descibed quite well in Betty Edwards' book, "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain," a very good read even for non-artists. She suggests that the average person's difficulty in drawing is the result of being stuck in a left-brain-dominant mode, trying to process a conceptual task with the verbal part of the brain.
Coding, I believe, is a conceptual task like drawing, not a verbal one, despite being built up of little words like "while" and "if." When in Deep Hack Mode, one considers "while" as a programmatic concept, not a word, and the movements necessary to convey that concept (typing) are performed out of rote rather than requiring verbal concentration. A skilled musician may experience the same thing...the names and durations of the individual notes are no longer something to be concentrated on while playing...the body is "tuned" to carry them out and string them together as an act of continuous non-verbal expression.
Even playing in the background and/or long since familiar from repeated listening, words keep the verbal left-brain mildly active to a point where it may still trip up our ability to work toward a purely conceptual and basically artistic goal.
It's interesting, looking at the other posts, to see not only a tendency toward instrumental music, but often very specific types or instances...Philip Glass, Jarre, Ravel's "Bolero," etc. Often very rhythmic, repetitive or sort of fractal, in a way. "Minimalism," I believe is the classification. Perhaps the aural perception of these rhythms sets up a sort of "carrier wave" throughout the brain, an atmosphere conducive to performing similarly structured tasks like programming...that not only are the same neurons involved to avoid conflict, as Chad suggests, but perhaps the music can actually kick-start and/or naturally amplify the process, a sort of constructive interference. Funny...sometimes I can only stomach such music when I'm deeply involved in programming...other times it may just be grating.
Allow me to add Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians" and anything by Penguin Cafe Orchestra to that list.
You have absolutely no taste. I'm glad I don't know you.