Nonsense. Microsoft bought 3DV in 2008, who had demonstrated the ZCam at CES that year. The ZCam is indeed true IR-based TOF 3D, as demonstrated in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hDKaMvAFzA and many other videos. The Kinect is the direct descendant of the ZCam.
Look at the iFixit teardown. The Kinect has an IR projector, a TOF 3D camera and a color webcam.
I don't have a Kinect yet and haven't seen any in-depth examination by a researcher. But normally these things work not by projecting a pattern, but rather infrared light with a large-wavelength modulation. Then each pixel detects the phase offset of the incoming light.
I don't see any innovation here. Kinect and iPad are both just evolutionary steps. None of the concepts of these devices are in any form new.
What?
I won't dwell on the iPad, that's not the point here. But where in the world have you been able to buy a 3D camera with skeletal pose estimation that works reliably enough to play video games with it, let alone for this price? The Kinect doesn't have new technology... for cutting-edge researchers working in motion capturing, robotics and the automotive industry. For the mass market, its technology is entirely new and absolutely revolutionary.
Heck, just the TOF infrared camera in that resolution alone is something that would have cost you a sweet 10,000$ before Monday this week.
What's the point of using simulated robots in a simulated environment? What's the point of having thousands of DOF to "play with"? Currently, most robots are not application platforms but toys. This is one of the very few robots that can actually help in developing working, robust autonomous robotic applications, and they're giving it away for free. That's not to be knocked.
That's what you get when you invade countries at will. We could need a "world police" at times, and this may be such a time. But, to stick with the metaphor, who will put their trust in a police force that will beat up random people in the street, just because they look like they're carrying a gun?
Jonathan What are some of the other game genres you enjoy and the games in them? Jeff [...]The Lucas Arts and the Sierra Online stuff; that's probably where I really fell in love with the adventure games. [...]I'm crossing my fingers that the new Salmon Max is gonna be good.
Myself, I found Salmon Max vastly inferior to Polish Quest, Funky Island or Day of the Testicle. Seriously, can somebody shoot the guy who transcribed this?
You have quite obviously no idea what developer kits cost anywhere else in the industry. Even in software: Visual Studio.NET alone costs more than $999.
Except for the "lickability" of the widgets, Dashboard is a quite different animal. It's like a second desktop that can be populated with widget-like productivity tools and faded in/out on keypress.
That sounds very appealing to me since the productivity stuff never gets in the way or wastes screen real estate when you don't need it, the way the Konfabulator widgets do.
So even if Konfabulator had been the first to use widgets (which it wasn't), Dashboard would still not be a rip-off but a good idea done right.
That's an interesting point of view. It's also a very short-sighted one for the large time scale of the implications you make. After all, you're talking about the rise and fall of nations and economy systems here.
I don't even agree with you on the semantics of "left" and "right". For me "left" means "progressive" and "right" means "conservative". You decide which one of these adjectives is more descriptive of the Soviet Union in its late state. But even using your semantics, it is only about 200 years since the United States were considered "left" (meaning, at the time, "democratic" and "anti-monarchist") of just about anybody else in the world. And man, did they rise.
So statistics indeed do not show any correlation at all between political stance and a country's success, and it's dangerous to hypothesize any such correlation.
About him claiming to speak for the rest of the world: I think it's fair to assume that if you held a vote in Europe about who should be president of the US, the odds would be about 80% against George W. Bush. If you held that same vote in the Middle East, it is even fairer to assume the outcome would be even worse. I've heard similar comments from friends (of all political stances) from South America. (I know nobody in Asia.) In the absence of a world-wide ballot, I think this gives enough ground to assume that the "rest of the world" is pretty much united against the current US regime.
NeXTStep integrated cross-compilers and stored cross-compiled executables as separate files in the same application bundle. So the effect was the same: Compile on one platform, distribute code that will run on all platforms running NeXTStep.
Only the way the effect was achieved was much cleaner than the messy VM stuff you need with Java.
First of all, what keeps you from combining object orientation and messages? An event is a message that gets placed in a queue and taken out sometime later and delivered. Objects register for the events they want to receive. Perfectly threadable, perfectly object-oriented and moreover perfectly obvious to understand.
Second, if your students over-design, maybe you're doing something wrong as a teacher? I'm a research fellow at a German university and teach students myself. It's true, it takes a while for them to "grok" OO. But once they do, it's the most obvious and simple concept there is.
Third, you base your statement that "compilers are not good at OO" on current C++ compilers. Well, (although this is a Qt thread) C++ is not the only object-oriented language around, and I agree it's certainly one of the hardest to learn. For a programming course that's about concepts (such as "usable interfaces"), you probably don't want problems with the language get in the way of the students. After a student has the concepts down pat, it's easy to write them in a different language, even an unwieldy monster such as C++.
For alternatives, check out Objective-C or Smalltallk (maybe even Java) sometime. They're both excellent languages for learning object-oriented programming, and the language doesn't get in your way (maybe Smalltalk even less than ObjC). Once the students have understood what OO and good GUI programming is all about, they can always learn C++ if they feel the need. It's only a language. But be warned, they'll probably balk at C++ once they've seen how nice a language can be.
Fourth, C++ compilers (especially gcc) have improved a lot during the last couple years.
The Logitech trackballs used to have this too; you just pressed a button and the trackball became a 2D scroll ball. I always thought this was extremely nifty.
I've played this thing last February at the Hannover industry fair. I'm by no means a tournament-level player, but I'm not crap either, so I think I can judge this thing's playing power. It's not very good at planning shots (in fact, it's crap at that;-)), but it's amazingly fast. Better reactions than I have ever seen in a human. And keep in mind, this was a year ago. They use motion prediction to increase the frame rate, so that isn't the limit.
I do think that they can make a tournament-level player out of this thing. Which isn't the motivation, of course, but give them two or three years.
OK. I've been thinking about buying a PS2 for a while. I'm really fed up with graphics and sound incompatibilities, the fact that game installations seem to grow in size much faster than hard drives do, etc. However, these are the kinds of games I like:
Adventures, such as Monkey Island or Runaway. This is my main focus.
Hide-and-seek strategy, such as Desperados, Robin Hood, Commandos.
Civilization-building strategy, such as Age of Empires, Anno 1503.
RPGs, such as the Baldur's Gate series.
I don't care much for sports or racing. I also really like good graphics, and 3D simply is not up to par on that.
From what I've seen so far, none of these kinds of games seem to exist on any console; partly because the TV resolution is really limited. So does that mean that I'm stuck with the PC forever? Or are there any games that fit this profile on any of the major consoles?
I'd really like to switch. But right now, it looks like I can't.
this is a really honest question. Why would anyone want a GNU/Darwin system? OS X is a Unix (arguably the one that is the nicest to use), and the few of tools it lacks can be gotten with Fink. And if you really really don't want anything non-free, get FreeBSD. Where is the need for any effort on Darwin? I'd really like to know.
And please don't tell me "it's so Apple can port Aqua to x86". You can't honestly believe that's going to happen.
Re:Who Actually USES These Patterns?
on
Design Patterns
·
· Score: 1
You're missing the point. First, merely using C++ or Java does not mean you're writing object-oriented code. You can have objects all over the place and your code is still not object-oriented.
Second, I personally know lots of programmers who get by (and certainly don't need any Dummies' Guides). Pitiably few of these (three, actually) grok OOP. This is just personal experience and not in any way statistically relevant, but from the sorry state of available software, I'm led to believe that not just the programmers I know could use a hit from the clue bong. If your employees are much better than that, good for you.
Third, this is not a Dummies Guide to Software Design. This has been groundbreaking work when it was first published, and still is today.
Fourth, you obviously haven't read it. You may want to give it a try.
Re:Who Actually USES These Patterns?
on
Design Patterns
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Banking and Scientific Computing are hardly leading innovators when it comes to software design (COBOL, anyone? FORTRAN, anyone?) But apart from that, it is my firm belief that any programmer worth her/his wages uses patterns. They may not be the actual patterns portrayed in the Gamma book, but they're patterns nonetheless.
The main good thing about this book is not that it lists a lot of patterns, but rather that it teaches you what a pattern is. This is truly a mind-altering experience. Once you grok the concept, you see patterns pop up all over your own code! Then you can extract and refine their specialties, encapsulate them and re-use them again and again.
This, besides saving you a shitload of future work, teaches you entirely new ways of thinking about object-oriented programming. I've talked to a lot of people who found that reading this book is truly a mind-blowing experience in that respect. Certainly changed my coding.
And the specific patterns in the book are kind of cool, too.
Well, there's a BSD [1] under the hood. Just about anything from the *BSD archives should compile cleanly, and much does. Seeing as most software that you refer to is standard Unix server stuff, yes, almost all of it should run.
[1] Yes, yes. It's Mach with a BSD personality and a couple of twists. But for the apps in question, that's really nitpicking.
Slashdot Mirror
Was that a question.
I have to correct myself.
This video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7nRKU0nFxA shows it uses pattern-based triangulation. No time-of-flight involved.
You're right, it uses pattern-based triangulation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7nRKU0nFxA
Nonsense. Microsoft bought 3DV in 2008, who had demonstrated the ZCam at CES that year. The ZCam is indeed true IR-based TOF 3D, as demonstrated in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hDKaMvAFzA and many other videos. The Kinect is the direct descendant of the ZCam.
Look at the iFixit teardown. The Kinect has an IR projector, a TOF 3D camera and a color webcam.
I don't have a Kinect yet and haven't seen any in-depth examination by a researcher. But normally these things work not by projecting a pattern, but rather infrared light with a large-wavelength modulation. Then each pixel detects the phase offset of the incoming light.
I don't see any innovation here. Kinect and iPad are both just evolutionary steps. None of the concepts of these devices are in any form new.
What?
I won't dwell on the iPad, that's not the point here. But where in the world have you been able to buy a 3D camera with skeletal pose estimation that works reliably enough to play video games with it, let alone for this price? The Kinect doesn't have new technology... for cutting-edge researchers working in motion capturing, robotics and the automotive industry. For the mass market, its technology is entirely new and absolutely revolutionary.
Heck, just the TOF infrared camera in that resolution alone is something that would have cost you a sweet 10,000$ before Monday this week.
What's the point of using simulated robots in a simulated environment? What's the point of having thousands of DOF to "play with"? Currently, most robots are not application platforms but toys. This is one of the very few robots that can actually help in developing working, robust autonomous robotic applications, and they're giving it away for free. That's not to be knocked.
Well, you *could* use my LGControl:
http://giesler.biz/bjoern/en/sw_lgcontrol.html
Then you just need a serial cable...
That's what you get when you invade countries at will. We could need a "world police" at times, and this may be such a time. But, to stick with the metaphor, who will put their trust in a police force that will beat up random people in the street, just because they look like they're carrying a gun?
Jonathan What are some of the other game genres you enjoy and the games in them?
Jeff [...]The Lucas Arts and the Sierra Online stuff; that's probably where I really fell in love with the adventure games. [...]I'm crossing my fingers that the new Salmon Max is gonna be good.
Myself, I found Salmon Max vastly inferior to Polish Quest, Funky Island or Day of the Testicle. Seriously, can somebody shoot the guy who transcribed this?
How does he sleep at night?
He has a machine that simulates the sound of the ocean.
You have quite obviously no idea what developer kits cost anywhere else in the industry. Even in software: Visual Studio .NET alone costs more than $999.
Except for the "lickability" of the widgets, Dashboard is a quite different animal. It's like a second desktop that can be populated with widget-like productivity tools and faded in/out on keypress.
That sounds very appealing to me since the productivity stuff never gets in the way or wastes screen real estate when you don't need it, the way the Konfabulator widgets do.
So even if Konfabulator had been the first to use widgets (which it wasn't), Dashboard would still not be a rip-off but a good idea done right.
That's an interesting point of view. It's also a very short-sighted one for the large time scale of the implications you make. After all, you're talking about the rise and fall of nations and economy systems here.
I don't even agree with you on the semantics of "left" and "right". For me "left" means "progressive" and "right" means "conservative". You decide which one of these adjectives is more descriptive of the Soviet Union in its late state. But even using your semantics, it is only about 200 years since the United States were considered "left" (meaning, at the time, "democratic" and "anti-monarchist") of just about anybody else in the world. And man, did they rise.
So statistics indeed do not show any correlation at all between political stance and a country's success, and it's dangerous to hypothesize any such correlation.
About him claiming to speak for the rest of the world: I think it's fair to assume that if you held a vote in Europe about who should be president of the US, the odds would be about 80% against George W. Bush. If you held that same vote in the Middle East, it is even fairer to assume the outcome would be even worse. I've heard similar comments from friends (of all political stances) from South America. (I know nobody in Asia.) In the absence of a world-wide ballot, I think this gives enough ground to assume that the "rest of the world" is pretty much united against the current US regime.
NeXTStep integrated cross-compilers and stored cross-compiled executables as separate files in the same application bundle. So the effect was the same: Compile on one platform, distribute code that will run on all platforms running NeXTStep.
Only the way the effect was achieved was much cleaner than the messy VM stuff you need with Java.
First of all, what keeps you from combining object orientation and messages? An event is a message that gets placed in a queue and taken out sometime later and delivered. Objects register for the events they want to receive. Perfectly threadable, perfectly object-oriented and moreover perfectly obvious to understand.
Second, if your students over-design, maybe you're doing something wrong as a teacher? I'm a research fellow at a German university and teach students myself. It's true, it takes a while for them to "grok" OO. But once they do, it's the most obvious and simple concept there is.
Third, you base your statement that "compilers are not good at OO" on current C++ compilers. Well, (although this is a Qt thread) C++ is not the only object-oriented language around, and I agree it's certainly one of the hardest to learn. For a programming course that's about concepts (such as "usable interfaces"), you probably don't want problems with the language get in the way of the students. After a student has the concepts down pat, it's easy to write them in a different language, even an unwieldy monster such as C++.
For alternatives, check out Objective-C or Smalltallk (maybe even Java) sometime. They're both excellent languages for learning object-oriented programming, and the language doesn't get in your way (maybe Smalltalk even less than ObjC). Once the students have understood what OO and good GUI programming is all about, they can always learn C++ if they feel the need. It's only a language. But be warned, they'll probably balk at C++ once they've seen how nice a language can be.
Fourth, C++ compilers (especially gcc) have improved a lot during the last couple years.
The Logitech trackballs used to have this too; you just pressed a button and the trackball became a 2D scroll ball. I always thought this was extremely nifty.
I've played this thing last February at the Hannover industry fair. I'm by no means a tournament-level player, but I'm not crap either, so I think I can judge this thing's playing power. It's not very good at planning shots (in fact, it's crap at that ;-)), but it's amazingly fast. Better reactions than I have ever seen in a human. And keep in mind, this was a year ago. They use motion prediction to increase the frame rate, so that isn't the limit.
I do think that they can make a tournament-level player out of this thing. Which isn't the motivation, of course, but give them two or three years.
You're reading stuff (vaguely) about ASSAULT RIFLES, and you're worried about the BIKINI?
I won't begin to tell you how sick I find this.
Sheesh. Americans.
I don't care much for sports or racing. I also really like good graphics, and 3D simply is not up to par on that.
From what I've seen so far, none of these kinds of games seem to exist on any console; partly because the TV resolution is really limited. So does that mean that I'm stuck with the PC forever? Or are there any games that fit this profile on any of the major consoles?
I'd really like to switch. But right now, it looks like I can't.
Hi,
this is a really honest question. Why would anyone want a GNU/Darwin system? OS X is a Unix (arguably the one that is the nicest to use), and the few of tools it lacks can be gotten with Fink. And if you really really don't want anything non-free, get FreeBSD. Where is the need for any effort on Darwin? I'd really like to know.
And please don't tell me "it's so Apple can port Aqua to x86". You can't honestly believe that's going to happen.
You're missing the point. First, merely using C++ or Java does not mean you're writing object-oriented code. You can have objects all over the place and your code is still not object-oriented.
Second, I personally know lots of programmers who get by (and certainly don't need any Dummies' Guides). Pitiably few of these (three, actually) grok OOP. This is just personal experience and not in any way statistically relevant, but from the sorry state of available software, I'm led to believe that not just the programmers I know could use a hit from the clue bong. If your employees are much better than that, good for you.
Third, this is not a Dummies Guide to Software Design. This has been groundbreaking work when it was first published, and still is today.
Fourth, you obviously haven't read it. You may want to give it a try.
The main good thing about this book is not that it lists a lot of patterns, but rather that it teaches you what a pattern is. This is truly a mind-altering experience. Once you grok the concept, you see patterns pop up all over your own code! Then you can extract and refine their specialties, encapsulate them and re-use them again and again.
This, besides saving you a shitload of future work, teaches you entirely new ways of thinking about object-oriented programming. I've talked to a lot of people who found that reading this book is truly a mind-blowing experience in that respect. Certainly changed my coding.
And the specific patterns in the book are kind of cool, too.
Well, there's a BSD [1] under the hood. Just about anything from the *BSD archives should compile cleanly, and much does. Seeing as most software that you refer to is standard Unix server stuff, yes, almost all of it should run.
[1] Yes, yes. It's Mach with a BSD personality and a couple of twists. But for the apps in question, that's really nitpicking.
Try getting it in another European country. It's just 2200 instead of 2550 in the Netherlands, for example. A new keyboard is cheap.