I'm not saying URL shorteners aren't useful. I'm saying that in most cases there's a better, existing solution that's less prone to linkrot and actually lets me see where I'm going.
Hyperlinks aren't supported on Twitter, so the choice argument doesn't seem relevant here. (Also, it's other people's use of URL shorteners that affects me, but I can accept being outvoted.) If you want more choice, you should be arguing for hyperlinks, not defending URL shorteners.
The solution to this problem is hyperlinks. Hyperlinks were also the solution to this problem a decade ago. On a computer, text doesn't have to be plain.
Never understood why Twitter didn't allow those. (Or why it's 140 characters instead of 160, for that matter.)
Which is a shame, because poor visualization takes up even more time. A lot of it is just basic stuff like labeling your data and thinking about what you're doing. Get that wrong and you have a dozen people in a meeting trying to guess at what a graph is telling them. That adds up pretty quick -- 12 people * 5 minutes = 1 man-hour. Tufte has a one-day training class, and the books themselves are pretty short (and mostly pictures). There are lots of web sites, too. Communications skills are a career booster, and interesting stuff besides. This is well worth even a week of your personal time.
Really, though, I think this is something that belongs in schools. We spend 12+ years learning how to read and write and studying examples of verbal communication, but visual communication, which is almost equally important in today's world, gets... nothing. Maybe a few Powerpoint projects that teach all the wrong lessons, or some halfhearted formatting guidelines for lab reports.
Yeah, my experience in the corporate world has been that almost nobody knows anything about data visualization. It's a rare person who even goes beyond the default Excel graphs. Most people don't read books, either, so getting them to read something called "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is a non-starter.
The GE guy seems like an artist who thinks graphics have to be exciting instead of informative. The BP guy doesn't seem dishonest at all -- he gives a rough daily average right on his graph. Whether you use cumulative collection or daily collection, one graph isn't going to tell the whole story. The graphics here aren't great, but in these cases I'd care more about whether the data supports the overall message.
Some researchers did a survey to find out what elements people like and dislike in music. They then combined them to produce the most wanted and most unwanted songs.
For the first few months, yeah. But what about after that? Books can teach you agriculture, construction, medicine, basic chemistry and manufacturing, military tactics, and lots of other practical things. Without TV or radio, people will want stories to read. Children still have to be educated. The people who last are going to be the ones who band together to create a civilization, not the ones hoarding ammo and canned goods.
At the risk of proving your point, adaptively tweaking software (or hardware) operations based on measured performance is a common engineering technique and is not normally considered an empirical science in itself. That being said, if you want to argue for some edge cases, I'm not going to stand in your way. That's not what the OP was talking about, though.
Computer science involves taking those observations about natural phenomena (electrons, etc...) and doing innovative things with them.
What you're talking about is engineering. CS is a science in name only, being made up of computational theory (a field of mathematics) and software engineering (its application). Computer engineering is the application of electromagnetism and solid-state physics. Nobel physics prizes have been awarded for work on transistors, semiconductors, CCDs, etc.
Then again, the Nobel foundation was set up by Alfred Nobel long before anyone thought of such a thing.
I'm sure Nobel was familiar with applied science, given that his claim to fame was the invention and marketing of dynamite. The industrial revolution had been going on for quite a while, too.
In practice, most users find that width is more important than height.
Wish I knew who these "most users" are. Almost every document type I work with needs height more than width. Word processing and web pages do -- wide columns are horrible for reading. Spreadsheets are a toss-up. PowerPoint slides are closer to square (and so are most projectors, still). When I'm coding, I want to see more lines of code. Even image editing doesn't necessarily involve wide images.
Rotating a widescreen monitor gives a super-narrow, super-tall screen, which is often just as annoying. Especially if you're on a low-end TN screen that only shows colors right if you're viewing from straight ahead.
Most of the time I'm looking at one document at once (e.g. recreational web browsing), or actually want to see as much of one document as possible, or just don't mind flipping back and forth. Tiling windows is a pain, and I hardly ever see anyone do it. Most people I see who need to look at two documents at once get two monitors. The other answer I get is "just don't maximize the window!", but since I don't have IM and other widgets cluttering up my screen, the extra space goes unused. A 22" monitor becomes a 14" monitor.
I don't begrudge anyone their widescreen, I'm just bothered that I don't have a choice.
The SoC on this board has an internal ADC along with timers, PWM, and GPIOs. Not sure what you mean about latencies and jitter. Shouldn't a 32-bit CPU handle code and data accesses better than an 8-bit CPU? I'm not really a CPU architecture guy, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
According to the datasheets, this STM ARM chip at 3.3V consumes a bit over half the power of the ATMega328 from an Arduino Uno running at 5V despite the former's CPU/memory advantage. Dynamic power is proportional to the square of supply voltage, so a 3.3V chip is going to have a big advantage over a 5V chip, all else being equal. A low-voltage chip is also easier to run off of a solar panel or small battery. If you want to go below nominal, the STM has an even bigger advantage at 2.0V. There are Arduinos that run at low voltages, but they have to run at lower frequencies. An AVR still wins for many needs, but not all.
ARMs come in all sizes. On Slashdot you usually hear about them as a netbook CPU, but there are plenty of low-end chips available too. This board is designed for higher performance, but it's not excessive. If you can get more flash and RAM for roughly the same price and power consumption, why not take it?
I don't use Arduinos so I can't speak for the overall system design, but I don't see any reason why you can't use an ARM SoC as the core of a hobbyist platform. It might not always be the best choice, but it does seem like a valid choice.
Well, it is the same architecture (ARMv7) -- just a Cortex-M3 instead of a Cortex-A8. It's not quite an iPhone, but 72MHz and 128kB of flash is nothing to sneeze at for small embedded projects.
The killer is both devices are current mode devices, which means they'll almost certainly never be power-competitive with voltage mode devices.
Are there any voltage mode devices anymore? Flash and DRAM are current mode, and my understanding is that even SRAM uses current mode sensing. I don't work in the FRAM group (I'm a flash guy), but TI's FRAM MCUs are supposed to be super low-power.
CMOS processes always have to be modified to support nonvolatile memory. Not sure what extra steps memristors would need but I doubt it would involve throwing out all existing equipment -- more like adding one or two things.
Has it actually been confirmed (by Visa, Mastercard, or Sony) that credit card numbers were stolen? Not just anecdotes -- we'd expect a few of the millions of PSN customers to be victims of ID theft anyway.
The Rockstar guy doesn't say it's new, he just says that this is what they're trying to do. IndustryGamers layers a bunch of superlatives on top, then the summary adds some more. Bad article.
I'm glad that more studios are listening to Valve, though. I was starting to think that cutscene-heavy, gameplay-light was the mandatory style of this generation.
I think two simple things would go a long way towards recapturing the magic that Square game used to have:
1. More interactivity 2. A fucking editor
Actually, that would help other games too (I'm looking at you, Metal Gear Solid). The fan favorites all have these attributes -- there is no more of the game than there needs to be, and the player is actually allowed to play it. Up through FF7 Square did both of these well. Things like stopping a speeding train or doing exercises to keep warm in a blizzard required the player to push buttons in sequence. Cut scenes were only used for huge vistas or key events, which made them more exciting. Dialogue was short and (mostly) meaningful. Things got slowly worse after that, culminating in FF12, which had almost no world interaction (it's an MMO engine) and was so padded with side-quests that the main plot lost all urgency. I haven't played FF13, but I hear it's even worse.
If Square can make the jump back to good game design, I think there's hope for Final Fantasy. It's not like Metal Gear or Star Wars where the director's vision is inherently a bad game.
I think they're talking about the signal processing most LCDs do to reduce ghosting. Usually it involves looking at least one frame ahead plus some extra processing time, which gives 20+ms latency. Some monitors are really bad and get >50ms latency. This is very noticeable. In theory, a higher refresh rate would let you get more frames for processing in less time. I'm not sure if it's really equivalent, though -- it depends on whether looking 8ms (1/120sec) ahead is just as good as looking 16ms (1/60sec) ahead.
I think he's talking about the image processing. LCD controllers need to see multiple frames in advance so they can set the control signals right to minimize ghosting. This "response time" is a marketing number, so they try to make it as small as possible. Unfortunately, that means delaying one or more input frames plus some extra processing time. At 60Hz, one frame is 16ms, which is a large unit for input lag purposes. Changing to 120Hz means the next frame comes faster, which in theory means less lag.
I'm not sure whether that actually works, though -- it depends on whether looking 8ms ahead is just as good as looking 16ms ahead.
Very little. Reductions in cost have mostly come from advances in process technology (aka Moore's Law) and high-volume production. A state of the art logic-only device is probably 45nm right now (32nm if you're Intel). OpenCores would probably be targeting 130nm or higher if they released today, which is three generations behind. That's a large difference in circuit density (>10x? the process naming isn't directly based on MOSFET size) and also a large difference in wafer size.
Note also that an off-the-shelf SoC is probably going to have nonvolatile memory. The OpenCores device needs off-chip memory. Adding NVM is extremely difficult and expensive (I know because that's my day job), so there's little chance of an open hardware version. That means OpenCores isn't feature-competitive with microcontrollers. Probably they're only planning to be a PC on a chip, especially given their stated goal of running Linux. That gives it even less market appeal, and thus even less volume pricing.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying URL shorteners aren't useful. I'm saying that in most cases there's a better, existing solution that's less prone to linkrot and actually lets me see where I'm going.
Hyperlinks aren't supported on Twitter, so the choice argument doesn't seem relevant here. (Also, it's other people's use of URL shorteners that affects me, but I can accept being outvoted.) If you want more choice, you should be arguing for hyperlinks, not defending URL shorteners.
The solution to this problem is hyperlinks. Hyperlinks were also the solution to this problem a decade ago. On a computer, text doesn't have to be plain.
Never understood why Twitter didn't allow those. (Or why it's 140 characters instead of 160, for that matter.)
Thanks, I appreciate the hard work. My blood pressure is a lot lower now as a result of your comment.
Which is a shame, because poor visualization takes up even more time. A lot of it is just basic stuff like labeling your data and thinking about what you're doing. Get that wrong and you have a dozen people in a meeting trying to guess at what a graph is telling them. That adds up pretty quick -- 12 people * 5 minutes = 1 man-hour. Tufte has a one-day training class, and the books themselves are pretty short (and mostly pictures). There are lots of web sites, too. Communications skills are a career booster, and interesting stuff besides. This is well worth even a week of your personal time.
Really, though, I think this is something that belongs in schools. We spend 12+ years learning how to read and write and studying examples of verbal communication, but visual communication, which is almost equally important in today's world, gets... nothing. Maybe a few Powerpoint projects that teach all the wrong lessons, or some halfhearted formatting guidelines for lab reports.
Yeah, my experience in the corporate world has been that almost nobody knows anything about data visualization. It's a rare person who even goes beyond the default Excel graphs. Most people don't read books, either, so getting them to read something called "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is a non-starter.
The GE guy seems like an artist who thinks graphics have to be exciting instead of informative. The BP guy doesn't seem dishonest at all -- he gives a rough daily average right on his graph. Whether you use cumulative collection or daily collection, one graph isn't going to tell the whole story. The graphics here aren't great, but in these cases I'd care more about whether the data supports the overall message.
Hold down the right mouse button in an empty space, move it over the link, then release. That got me a context menu.
Some researchers did a survey to find out what elements people like and dislike in music. They then combined them to produce the most wanted and most unwanted songs.
http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/05/survey-produced/
http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/04/a-scientific-at/
The most wanted song is bland and annoying. The most unwanted song is *hilarious*.
IIRC, they also did the same thing with visual art using survey data from different countries.
Er... rage is a legitimate verb.
I heard something like that, only it was that meat doesn't cause tooth decay the way carbohydrates do.
For the first few months, yeah. But what about after that? Books can teach you agriculture, construction, medicine, basic chemistry and manufacturing, military tactics, and lots of other practical things. Without TV or radio, people will want stories to read. Children still have to be educated. The people who last are going to be the ones who band together to create a civilization, not the ones hoarding ammo and canned goods.
At the risk of proving your point, adaptively tweaking software (or hardware) operations based on measured performance is a common engineering technique and is not normally considered an empirical science in itself. That being said, if you want to argue for some edge cases, I'm not going to stand in your way. That's not what the OP was talking about, though.
Computer science involves taking those observations about natural phenomena (electrons, etc...) and doing innovative things with them.
What you're talking about is engineering. CS is a science in name only, being made up of computational theory (a field of mathematics) and software engineering (its application). Computer engineering is the application of electromagnetism and solid-state physics. Nobel physics prizes have been awarded for work on transistors, semiconductors, CCDs, etc.
Then again, the Nobel foundation was set up by Alfred Nobel long before anyone thought of such a thing.
I'm sure Nobel was familiar with applied science, given that his claim to fame was the invention and marketing of dynamite. The industrial revolution had been going on for quite a while, too.
In practice, most users find that width is more important than height.
Wish I knew who these "most users" are. Almost every document type I work with needs height more than width. Word processing and web pages do -- wide columns are horrible for reading. Spreadsheets are a toss-up. PowerPoint slides are closer to square (and so are most projectors, still). When I'm coding, I want to see more lines of code. Even image editing doesn't necessarily involve wide images.
Rotating a widescreen monitor gives a super-narrow, super-tall screen, which is often just as annoying. Especially if you're on a low-end TN screen that only shows colors right if you're viewing from straight ahead.
Most of the time I'm looking at one document at once (e.g. recreational web browsing), or actually want to see as much of one document as possible, or just don't mind flipping back and forth. Tiling windows is a pain, and I hardly ever see anyone do it. Most people I see who need to look at two documents at once get two monitors. The other answer I get is "just don't maximize the window!", but since I don't have IM and other widgets cluttering up my screen, the extra space goes unused. A 22" monitor becomes a 14" monitor.
I don't begrudge anyone their widescreen, I'm just bothered that I don't have a choice.
Hackers: 6, Sony customers: 0
Let's not lose sight of who's actually being hurt here.
The SoC on this board has an internal ADC along with timers, PWM, and GPIOs. Not sure what you mean about latencies and jitter. Shouldn't a 32-bit CPU handle code and data accesses better than an 8-bit CPU? I'm not really a CPU architecture guy, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
According to the datasheets, this STM ARM chip at 3.3V consumes a bit over half the power of the ATMega328 from an Arduino Uno running at 5V despite the former's CPU/memory advantage. Dynamic power is proportional to the square of supply voltage, so a 3.3V chip is going to have a big advantage over a 5V chip, all else being equal. A low-voltage chip is also easier to run off of a solar panel or small battery. If you want to go below nominal, the STM has an even bigger advantage at 2.0V. There are Arduinos that run at low voltages, but they have to run at lower frequencies. An AVR still wins for many needs, but not all.
ARMs come in all sizes. On Slashdot you usually hear about them as a netbook CPU, but there are plenty of low-end chips available too. This board is designed for higher performance, but it's not excessive. If you can get more flash and RAM for roughly the same price and power consumption, why not take it?
I don't use Arduinos so I can't speak for the overall system design, but I don't see any reason why you can't use an ARM SoC as the core of a hobbyist platform. It might not always be the best choice, but it does seem like a valid choice.
Well, it is the same architecture (ARMv7) -- just a Cortex-M3 instead of a Cortex-A8. It's not quite an iPhone, but 72MHz and 128kB of flash is nothing to sneeze at for small embedded projects.
The killer is both devices are current mode devices, which means they'll almost certainly never be power-competitive with voltage mode devices.
Are there any voltage mode devices anymore? Flash and DRAM are current mode, and my understanding is that even SRAM uses current mode sensing. I don't work in the FRAM group (I'm a flash guy), but TI's FRAM MCUs are supposed to be super low-power.
CMOS processes always have to be modified to support nonvolatile memory. Not sure what extra steps memristors would need but I doubt it would involve throwing out all existing equipment -- more like adding one or two things.
Has it actually been confirmed (by Visa, Mastercard, or Sony) that credit card numbers were stolen? Not just anecdotes -- we'd expect a few of the millions of PSN customers to be victims of ID theft anyway.
The Rockstar guy doesn't say it's new, he just says that this is what they're trying to do. IndustryGamers layers a bunch of superlatives on top, then the summary adds some more. Bad article.
I'm glad that more studios are listening to Valve, though. I was starting to think that cutscene-heavy, gameplay-light was the mandatory style of this generation.
I think two simple things would go a long way towards recapturing the magic that Square game used to have:
1. More interactivity
2. A fucking editor
Actually, that would help other games too (I'm looking at you, Metal Gear Solid). The fan favorites all have these attributes -- there is no more of the game than there needs to be, and the player is actually allowed to play it. Up through FF7 Square did both of these well. Things like stopping a speeding train or doing exercises to keep warm in a blizzard required the player to push buttons in sequence. Cut scenes were only used for huge vistas or key events, which made them more exciting. Dialogue was short and (mostly) meaningful. Things got slowly worse after that, culminating in FF12, which had almost no world interaction (it's an MMO engine) and was so padded with side-quests that the main plot lost all urgency. I haven't played FF13, but I hear it's even worse.
If Square can make the jump back to good game design, I think there's hope for Final Fantasy. It's not like Metal Gear or Star Wars where the director's vision is inherently a bad game.
I'm sure you didn't mean it quite this way, but a 60% improvement in the amount of work done per clock cycle is some pretty impressive engineering...
It's not uncommon. Other benchmarking sites do it too.
I think they're talking about the signal processing most LCDs do to reduce ghosting. Usually it involves looking at least one frame ahead plus some extra processing time, which gives 20+ms latency. Some monitors are really bad and get >50ms latency. This is very noticeable. In theory, a higher refresh rate would let you get more frames for processing in less time. I'm not sure if it's really equivalent, though -- it depends on whether looking 8ms (1/120sec) ahead is just as good as looking 16ms (1/60sec) ahead.
I think he's talking about the image processing. LCD controllers need to see multiple frames in advance so they can set the control signals right to minimize ghosting. This "response time" is a marketing number, so they try to make it as small as possible. Unfortunately, that means delaying one or more input frames plus some extra processing time. At 60Hz, one frame is 16ms, which is a large unit for input lag purposes. Changing to 120Hz means the next frame comes faster, which in theory means less lag.
I'm not sure whether that actually works, though -- it depends on whether looking 8ms ahead is just as good as looking 16ms ahead.
Very little. Reductions in cost have mostly come from advances in process technology (aka Moore's Law) and high-volume production. A state of the art logic-only device is probably 45nm right now (32nm if you're Intel). OpenCores would probably be targeting 130nm or higher if they released today, which is three generations behind. That's a large difference in circuit density (>10x? the process naming isn't directly based on MOSFET size) and also a large difference in wafer size.
Note also that an off-the-shelf SoC is probably going to have nonvolatile memory. The OpenCores device needs off-chip memory. Adding NVM is extremely difficult and expensive (I know because that's my day job), so there's little chance of an open hardware version. That means OpenCores isn't feature-competitive with microcontrollers. Probably they're only planning to be a PC on a chip, especially given their stated goal of running Linux. That gives it even less market appeal, and thus even less volume pricing.