But, for example, we've chosen to use it (Ogg Vorbis) as the audio format in Magicosm. We have to encode and decode files, and ogg is a free, well-tested way to do that. I suspect a lot of other content producers have made the same choice.
If one program uses profiling information to run faster than another, it runs faster nonetheless. I agree with other posters that this is comparing compilation & runtime environments rather than languages, but when I care about how fast a program runs I care about how fast it runs, not how fast it would run in some hypothetical nonexistent environment. C++ would probably be faster if it had some kind of JIT environment to run in, but it doesn't, and as a developer trying to write fast software, that's what I care about.
That said, I doubt the performance differences are enough to affect my decision about what language to use, unless I am writing some application that does enough computation that a person has to wait on the program, rather than the other way 'round.
Magicosm is a 3D real time persistent online world. It's not released yet, but we have about a dozen beta testers. If we were funded, we would be way done by now; working on things only in your spare time is a bitch;-)
We use Xith3D (primary written by our main client developer), a Java3D workalike. Xith3D was spun off in response to Sun's news that Java3D would no longer be supported. Sun's decision may have been reversed; I'm not entirely sure.
Anyway, we have slick looking 3D that performs just fine; comparably to other engines. It's on top of an API (Xith3D/Java3D) that sits on top of opengl.
There have been several good 3D java games displayed at the GDCs, stuff from FullSail and GetAmped.
By the way, the project is currently going through a lull as I work on another side project (an online yard sale) and the primary client developer has had to leave the team to spend more time with his family. Send us a note at jobs@magicosm.net if you want to help out as a developer, 3D artist, system administrator, or (especially) investor!
I felt the urge to respond the same way based on the way the post was written, but he *is* unique, just like everyone else. I don't mean that to be trite - everyone is truly unique.
You absolutely don't have to take the subjugated workaholic path, regardless of what some sour assholes may tell you. You can choose to worry less about having lots of disposable stuff and the latest style, and instead do the things you love that may pay less.
That said, if your attitude is "if I like it, I'll work hard and learn it well, and if I don't, I'll fail it and that's just me being myself", then I wouldn't even bother starting college with the intent of getting a degree. That won't cut it. You can find groups of people interested in the subjects you'll need in college and have engaging conversations with them, and learn the subjects well - but you have to take the initiative.
That's not to say you shouldn't go to college. But if you are proud of being non-traditional and OK with not doing well in traditional things, you will simply fail when you try to get recognized for doing traditional things.
That turned out more rambling than I intended. My point is, if you want a degree, change your attitude. If you're cool with yourself and just want to carve a life that you enjoy, set aside any materialistic hang ups you may have and live the life you choose.
And just like everyone else, you're convinced that you're in the upper 5% of people who only need to worry about other people screwing up, not when you screw up.
Regarding other people dying - right, and as you point out, others feel the same way. This is why it makes sense for everyone to agree not to do these things. There are all kinds of things that we can do that will improve our lives (and screw up others') if only we do them, but not if others do. Those same things fuck up everyone's life if we all do them. That's when it makes sense culturally or legislatively to make those things not happen. Hence my strong disdain for and my encouragment of disdain of others for counterproductive selfishness.
I do think we have a chronic cowardice problem in the US. We are so afraid of death and pain that we shut down the major thrust of the space program over seven deaths, we accept countless limitations to our freedoms over an additional 0.00001 chance of death per year (3k people dying out of 300m, and that's assuming every year would be like the worst year ever), etc. Life doesn't last forever and it's far better to die at 40 having lived a meaningful life than die at 80 having spent your life worthless.
People's safety concerns for SUVs are not jealousy issues in which we are worried that SUV drivers are safer than us. In fact, SUVs are safer in collisions with other vehicles - but they cause more additional deaths in the other vehicles than the lives they save of SUV occupants. BUT, in terms of fatalities of occupants per mile driven, they are WORSE. Weighty, top-heavy, relatively narrow SUVs are more prone to go out of control on wet roads and especially likely to flip if the steering wheel is turned too quickly or if they hit a guardrail.
See http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/nhtsa/announce/press/pres sdisplay.cfm?year=2003&filename=pr32-03.html and http://www.suv.gs/suv-rollover/suv-rollover-fatali ty-risk-suv-controversy.html and http://www.smartmotorist.com/suv/suv.htm or just google for "SUVs accident statistics rollovers" for yourself.
So, it sounds to me like a selfishness and cowardice issue on the part of the SUV driver - I would rather two other people die in a car to car collision than I die. And then of course you factor in the foolishness issue - in fact, my chances as an SUV driver of dying on the road are higher. It's only my chances of dying in a collision with another car that are lower.
I personally firmly believe SUVs have their place. If you have three kids and a frequent need to haul things, by all means drive an SUV. If you have rough dirt roads or offroading, again - go for it. However, I have serious issues with dealing with the externalized costs of higher pollution, higher risk of accident and higher risk of fatalities from accidents of people who use their giant SUV as a commuting vehicle in congested city driving.
Yeah, sorry, I should have been more specific: some meaning that would make it appropriate for Bender's room # that I should be aware of:) I figured "beginning of line" could also be called home.
in the details, although perhaps not in the final answer. I would be very surprised if the actual input data is anywhere near that huge - do you think someone (or some group of people) actually did enough work to generate that many bits (and that's not counting the order of magnitude greater work done on things that got thrown away)?
What is much more likely is that the grass, skin, hair, etc. is described by some relatively simple input parameters from which millions of polygons are generated. The "rendering" process almost certainly includes generating the polygons from raw input data and seeded random number generators through perlin noise distribution routines through fractal instantiation through spline generation through polys to a rendered frame as the final product.
However, much of that work would only have to be done once, then shots taken from different angles on the resulting textured polygon structure, whereas on a distributed architecture any info that isn't sent to your machine would have to be regenerated for your machine. Not to mention that memory requirements are likely to be pretty darn high.
When you cut down a 100 year old tree and replace it with two saplings, that is a net negative change. It is much fewer than 1 in 2 saplings that grow to 100 years old.
It's possible I'm badly mistaken, but I don't believe paper companies are harvesting much from fields they planted 5 years ago or less. For one thing, two five year old trees can't provide much pulp.
It is in fact a business like any other business, run by average to slightly above average people. They have been making tons of money and have lots of power based on the way things have been. They don't want things to change - there might be something unforseen that upsets their apple cart.
From a purely selfish point of view, when what you've been doing has put you in a powerful place and kept you there, it's perfectly sensible. It's not some conspiracy to keep things from getting better. It's fear of the unknown in play to keep things from getting worse (from their POV).
It's selfish and wrong, but in an ordinary human sort of way. You can see examples of this (why don't paper companies all convert over to bamboo or other quick-growing renewable plants? It's not because there's something wrong with the idea. It's because changing might rearrange the power structure. They already know all the right people and right things to do to be very good at making paper from wood. Someone else might know the right people to take over if they start demonstrating it's profitable to make it from something else.)
Young companies have to try new things - they can't succeed if they don't figure out a better way to do it than everyone else.
Have people just grown to stupid to recognize jumping the shark? IMO any time you have Jason vs. Freddy, hypersonic albino rasta spirits with guns, surfing on lava, or Vinn Diesel, you have an obvious disaster. All fluff & special effects, no story. (It's possible I'm mistaken on the Vinn Diesel bit, but the commercials make me sick so I've never watched on of the movies:)
WTF are these guys thinking? Of course, I personally thought that Legolas surfing the elephant trunk was cheesy. I absolutely loved LOTR in general, but a couple of scenes went beyond the bounds of good taste IMO.
Work on your statistics, guy. By those numbers everyone on earth could have an account, and none of them would be over 1MB.
Of course, nit-picks aside, I agree with your point. The reason they can offer so much storage is that virtually on one will use it. Note the 10MB limit per email.
In the US, you have every right to get together with friends and make tape copies or digital copies of music on digital audio recording equipment.
I'm not sure what this means about copying a CD someone else bought to a tape, but copying a CD for a friend using digital audio equipment and audio cds is perfectly legal, and copying an audio tape to another audio tape is also legal. We pay a "tax" to the RIAA on every piece of digital audio equipment, audio CD, and audio tape to allow this per The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992.
Also, craigslist doesn't let me order by distance. By far the biggest omission is the number of steps it takes to post and the support for only a few areas, though.
A lot of people use floating divs to divide visual page space up where we used to use tables as a hack to do so. So when you wanted a page with a blurb of text that spans the top, and below it three columns of text that fill the rest of the page, the solution used to be either one table with a span or one table nested in another. Now the solution is four divs with the right flow set up.
I agree with the grandparent, though. It doesn't always work very easily when you have e.g. several rows of data that you want columnated. I don't know of any way to make a grid of data with multiple rows & multiple columns using div & css.
Craigslist looks nice, but offhand it looks too unfocused, too difficult to list an item (I got 4 or 5 clicks into it before I stopped), only appears to support a few specific very coarse-grained areas.
Thanks for pointing it out, though. I looked around the web for similar sites and didn't find them. Craigslist is the closest so far, but I still personally think they're a little off the mark.
Hmm, I don't see how that could be. My Java just requires that you have an @ and a . in your email address. I have tested it with addys with all combinations of having/lack of . and @.
Could you send your email address (or one formatted like it) to bobbymartin@hotmail.com so I can test?
Buy from your neighbors - it's cheaper, there's no shipping, quicker service, and a lot less hassle.
We're building a website to help you connect with your neighbors and buy their stuff. It's basically a yard sale that is always going on. Our goal is to let you sign up and have stuff for sale in less than 5 minutes, without asking for intrusive personal information. You can also just browse around to see what your neighbors are giving away for free and/or selling.
Slashdot Mirror
can the top post be redundant, that's what I want to know.
But, for example, we've chosen to use it (Ogg Vorbis) as the audio format in Magicosm. We have to encode and decode files, and ogg is a free, well-tested way to do that. I suspect a lot of other content producers have made the same choice.
I care about how fast it runs the hundredth time and onward with "representative" data, whatever that means ;-)
If one program uses profiling information to run faster than another, it runs faster nonetheless. I agree with other posters that this is comparing compilation & runtime environments rather than languages, but when I care about how fast a program runs I care about how fast it runs, not how fast it would run in some hypothetical nonexistent environment. C++ would probably be faster if it had some kind of JIT environment to run in, but it doesn't, and as a developer trying to write fast software, that's what I care about.
That said, I doubt the performance differences are enough to affect my decision about what language to use, unless I am writing some application that does enough computation that a person has to wait on the program, rather than the other way 'round.
We use Xith3D (primary written by our main client developer), a Java3D workalike. Xith3D was spun off in response to Sun's news that Java3D would no longer be supported. Sun's decision may have been reversed; I'm not entirely sure.
Anyway, we have slick looking 3D that performs just fine; comparably to other engines. It's on top of an API (Xith3D/Java3D) that sits on top of opengl.
There have been several good 3D java games displayed at the GDCs, stuff from FullSail and GetAmped.
By the way, the project is currently going through a lull as I work on another side project (an online yard sale) and the primary client developer has had to leave the team to spend more time with his family. Send us a note at jobs@magicosm.net if you want to help out as a developer, 3D artist, system administrator, or (especially) investor!
I felt the urge to respond the same way based on the way the post was written, but he *is* unique, just like everyone else. I don't mean that to be trite - everyone is truly unique.
You absolutely don't have to take the subjugated workaholic path, regardless of what some sour assholes may tell you. You can choose to worry less about having lots of disposable stuff and the latest style, and instead do the things you love that may pay less.
That said, if your attitude is "if I like it, I'll work hard and learn it well, and if I don't, I'll fail it and that's just me being myself", then I wouldn't even bother starting college with the intent of getting a degree. That won't cut it. You can find groups of people interested in the subjects you'll need in college and have engaging conversations with them, and learn the subjects well - but you have to take the initiative.
That's not to say you shouldn't go to college. But if you are proud of being non-traditional and OK with not doing well in traditional things, you will simply fail when you try to get recognized for doing traditional things.
That turned out more rambling than I intended. My point is, if you want a degree, change your attitude. If you're cool with yourself and just want to carve a life that you enjoy, set aside any materialistic hang ups you may have and live the life you choose.
And just like everyone else, you're convinced that you're in the upper 5% of people who only need to worry about other people screwing up, not when you screw up.
Regarding other people dying - right, and as you point out, others feel the same way. This is why it makes sense for everyone to agree not to do these things. There are all kinds of things that we can do that will improve our lives (and screw up others') if only we do them, but not if others do. Those same things fuck up everyone's life if we all do them. That's when it makes sense culturally or legislatively to make those things not happen. Hence my strong disdain for and my encouragment of disdain of others for counterproductive selfishness.
I do think we have a chronic cowardice problem in the US. We are so afraid of death and pain that we shut down the major thrust of the space program over seven deaths, we accept countless limitations to our freedoms over an additional 0.00001 chance of death per year (3k people dying out of 300m, and that's assuming every year would be like the worst year ever), etc. Life doesn't last forever and it's far better to die at 40 having lived a meaningful life than die at 80 having spent your life worthless.
People's safety concerns for SUVs are not jealousy issues in which we are worried that SUV drivers are safer than us. In fact, SUVs are safer in collisions with other vehicles - but they cause more additional deaths in the other vehicles than the lives they save of SUV occupants. BUT, in terms of fatalities of occupants per mile driven, they are WORSE. Weighty, top-heavy, relatively narrow SUVs are more prone to go out of control on wet roads and especially likely to flip if the steering wheel is turned too quickly or if they hit a guardrail.
s sdisplay.cfm?year=2003&filename=pr32-03.html and http://www.suv.gs/suv-rollover/suv-rollover-fatali ty-risk-suv-controversy.html and http://www.smartmotorist.com/suv/suv.htm or just google for "SUVs accident statistics rollovers" for yourself.
See http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/nhtsa/announce/press/pre
So, it sounds to me like a selfishness and cowardice issue on the part of the SUV driver - I would rather two other people die in a car to car collision than I die. And then of course you factor in the foolishness issue - in fact, my chances as an SUV driver of dying on the road are higher. It's only my chances of dying in a collision with another car that are lower.
I personally firmly believe SUVs have their place. If you have three kids and a frequent need to haul things, by all means drive an SUV. If you have rough dirt roads or offroading, again - go for it. However, I have serious issues with dealing with the externalized costs of higher pollution, higher risk of accident and higher risk of fatalities from accidents of people who use their giant SUV as a commuting vehicle in congested city driving.
Where do you live? I saw the last pic with the palm trees and became unbearably homesick for somewhere I've never been :)
Great Venus pics too, thanks!
Yeah, sorry, I should have been more specific: some meaning that would make it appropriate for Bender's room # that I should be aware of :) I figured "beginning of line" could also be called home.
Ah, not bad.
;-)
Not good, but also not bad
Hmm... ~ is the standard symbol for "home" in *nix. ^ is the regex for beginning of line... is there some other use for ^ of which I'm unaware?
01111110 woulda been a far better #, IMO.
in the details, although perhaps not in the final answer. I would be very surprised if the actual input data is anywhere near that huge - do you think someone (or some group of people) actually did enough work to generate that many bits (and that's not counting the order of magnitude greater work done on things that got thrown away)?
What is much more likely is that the grass, skin, hair, etc. is described by some relatively simple input parameters from which millions of polygons are generated. The "rendering" process almost certainly includes generating the polygons from raw input data and seeded random number generators through perlin noise distribution routines through fractal instantiation through spline generation through polys to a rendered frame as the final product.
However, much of that work would only have to be done once, then shots taken from different angles on the resulting textured polygon structure, whereas on a distributed architecture any info that isn't sent to your machine would have to be regenerated for your machine. Not to mention that memory requirements are likely to be pretty darn high.
My posting speed exceeded my reading speed - very bad mojo. You've given me things to investigate; thanks!
When you cut down a 100 year old tree and replace it with two saplings, that is a net negative change. It is much fewer than 1 in 2 saplings that grow to 100 years old.
It's possible I'm badly mistaken, but I don't believe paper companies are harvesting much from fields they planted 5 years ago or less. For one thing, two five year old trees can't provide much pulp.
It is in fact a business like any other business, run by average to slightly above average people. They have been making tons of money and have lots of power based on the way things have been. They don't want things to change - there might be something unforseen that upsets their apple cart.
From a purely selfish point of view, when what you've been doing has put you in a powerful place and kept you there, it's perfectly sensible. It's not some conspiracy to keep things from getting better. It's fear of the unknown in play to keep things from getting worse (from their POV).
It's selfish and wrong, but in an ordinary human sort of way. You can see examples of this (why don't paper companies all convert over to bamboo or other quick-growing renewable plants? It's not because there's something wrong with the idea. It's because changing might rearrange the power structure. They already know all the right people and right things to do to be very good at making paper from wood. Someone else might know the right people to take over if they start demonstrating it's profitable to make it from something else.)
Young companies have to try new things - they can't succeed if they don't figure out a better way to do it than everyone else.
Have people just grown to stupid to recognize jumping the shark? IMO any time you have Jason vs. Freddy, hypersonic albino rasta spirits with guns, surfing on lava, or Vinn Diesel, you have an obvious disaster. All fluff & special effects, no story. (It's possible I'm mistaken on the Vinn Diesel bit, but the commercials make me sick so I've never watched on of the movies :)
WTF are these guys thinking? Of course, I personally thought that Legolas surfing the elephant trunk was cheesy. I absolutely loved LOTR in general, but a couple of scenes went beyond the bounds of good taste IMO.
Work on your statistics, guy. By those numbers everyone on earth could have an account, and none of them would be over 1MB.
Of course, nit-picks aside, I agree with your point. The reason they can offer so much storage is that virtually on one will use it. Note the 10MB limit per email.
I'm not sure what this means about copying a CD someone else bought to a tape, but copying a CD for a friend using digital audio equipment and audio cds is perfectly legal, and copying an audio tape to another audio tape is also legal. We pay a "tax" to the RIAA on every piece of digital audio equipment, audio CD, and audio tape to allow this per The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992.
See my other post.
Also, craigslist doesn't let me order by distance. By far the biggest omission is the number of steps it takes to post and the support for only a few areas, though.
A lot of people use floating divs to divide visual page space up where we used to use tables as a hack to do so. So when you wanted a page with a blurb of text that spans the top, and below it three columns of text that fill the rest of the page, the solution used to be either one table with a span or one table nested in another. Now the solution is four divs with the right flow set up.
I agree with the grandparent, though. It doesn't always work very easily when you have e.g. several rows of data that you want columnated. I don't know of any way to make a grid of data with multiple rows & multiple columns using div & css.
Craigslist looks nice, but offhand it looks too unfocused, too difficult to list an item (I got 4 or 5 clicks into it before I stopped), only appears to support a few specific very coarse-grained areas.
Thanks for pointing it out, though. I looked around the web for similar sites and didn't find them. Craigslist is the closest so far, but I still personally think they're a little off the mark.
Hmm, I don't see how that could be. My Java just requires that you have an @ and a . in your email address. I have tested it with addys with all combinations of having/lack of . and @.
Could you send your email address (or one formatted like it) to bobbymartin@hotmail.com so I can test?
Thanks
Buy from your neighbors - it's cheaper, there's no shipping, quicker service, and a lot less hassle.
We're building a website to help you connect with your neighbors and buy their stuff. It's basically a yard sale that is always going on. Our goal is to let you sign up and have stuff for sale in less than 5 minutes, without asking for intrusive personal information. You can also just browse around to see what your neighbors are giving away for free and/or selling.
Check us out at http://www.frimp.net