Some flavors of Engineering are licensed, many are not. The computer side of ECE (Electrical and Computer Engineering) doesn't have any license required at all, at least in the US. You don't even need a degree, although most have one. Programming is even more of a free-for-all.
The EM drive MIGHT be a reactionless drive which is NOT a warp drive at all, but would be rather useful. In Star Trek terms this would be the impulse drive they use to scoot around whenever the warp drive is off.
In real world terms it could be useful for long range space travel as it frees you from devoting most of your weight budget to reaction mass.
I have a pebble as well. It has it's limitations but it have a few nice functions that make it worthwhile.
1. See who is calling without taking out your phone, button press will tell your phone you've decided not to answer the call to it stops ringing.
2. See the text of new messages from SMS/email/twitter and likely any other source you care to see. You can scroll up and down to read them.
3. 5-7 days between charges. Some apps or faces will shorten this by a LOT. 99% of the time I use the two functions above, on a 4 day trip out of town now, didn't even bother to bring the charging cable.
4. See how many voicemails, texts, email you have waiting.
5. Control Tasker (Android only) which brings up a bunch of simple things you can do.
6. Current weather
I wouldn't want to try to enter text on it, only has 4 buttons, but if you want to see if it's worth leaving the clean room it's great. You could likely set up a couple stock messages and send them if you really wanted to, not sure if there is an app or if you'd have to get Tasker to do it.
You can already print your postage at home, on any printer. So, they're adding an expensive but fancy way to print and some kind of nebulous destination locating service. Oh, and an App. I forgot, everything is brand new it you tie it to a smartphone app.
I'd be amazed if Carmack's employment agreement (likely reworked when they bought id) was broad enough to encompass work he did on other projects. At least some of the code base he used for the OR was from his Armadillo Aerospace side project, I'm betting he made sure they didn't have any rights to his space project IP at the very least. I hope Greedymax gets slapped down hard enough they have to pay the legal fees for FB to discourage this kind of crap.
The Occulus team has been shooting for close to, or below, the $300 dev kit price for a long time. They realize that cost will be a big factor in the adoption rate and they need to sell a ton for the first commercial release to get and keep the software developers making VR content.
Except that a neutron hit throws off a bunch of alpha particles which do the actual bit flips. Think hand grenade not bullet. So if you have physically adjacent bits in the same ECC word there is a good chance you will have a multi-bit error. Usually they do try to spread the bits out within the DRAM for any one word but sometimes they fail to do this. There are some ECC codes that are able to tolerate adjacent double (or even more) bit failures so if you're willing to pay the price for the more complex algorithm and have large ECC words then you can tolerate multi-bit errors from a single device as well.
The current Rift is a lot better than 100ms, but yes, there is room for improvement. I've been able to use mine for over an hour and only had issues when HL2 hits me with a load screen or otherwise turns off the head tracking for a bit. I'm wondering if some people have checked their frame rates and tried turning down some settings to make sure they are running at 60FPS. I had disorientation nausea for the first week but then it has mostly gone away and only persists for a few minutes after using it. I also didn't try long sessions until after the driver update that had the calibration tool with it, so that might have helped. I'm also immune to motion sickness in cars/planes/boats/roller coasters IRL so far (never been out in REALLY heavy seas) so I probably have an easier time than most with VR motion effects.
I think they have been making good progress at improving the experience. One big one will be when they get the full positional tracking into the next version of the kit. Right now it only does orientation tracking and some inferred positional tracking. A couple demos use a Razer Hyrda to hack this in a bit and I found it helps the disorientation a LOT. If you follow some of the blogs of people working on it there is still a lot of work to be done in the prediction algorithms which will improve the effective latency as well, which again, should improve the disorientation people feel.
The Rift already has development support from the Crytech, Source, Unity and Unreal engines, and Carmack had already announced the next iDTech would support it as well. So nothing new there.
All of those use the driver from Oculus which is what I will assume Carmack will be key in improving, along with the firmware running on the Rift. His experience with Armadillo will be directly applicable (and already has it seems) to aspects of real time head tracking that have a big impact on VR. I'm guessing the time to get the software in a more polished state just got shorter with him joining the team and it wouldn't surprise me to see a few new algorithms that noone else though of either.
The whole POINT is to let in talented people who are more attractive than a college grad. Having such a pool of people _inside the US_ is a huge competitive advantage over countries with strict immigration. What in the world keeps American engineering salaries so high if not available talent pool?
If you want them in the talent pool here, give them a green card, not a temporary visa, or at least a temporary visa with a clear path it citizenship. Say, after the first year or two it converts to a green card instead of just getting an extension. Also, if they are more attractive than a college grad, why are they only getting about the same pay as a college grad?
The whole point of the H1-B program is that it's supposed to be hard to find technical expertise that the companies can't find here AT ALL. So, we should be talking experienced people with a proven expertise in a technical field that should be earning well above entry level wages, NOT fresh college grads who by and large are not experts in anything. The reality is they're using it to hire engineers at reduced salaries to control costs and eventually exporting the whole job with them when they go back home in many cases. Kill H1-B, give out more green cards so they and the jobs stay here.
This is power storage, not generation. Think of it as a big underground air tank. You pump air in to store power (when your wind farm is making more than you need), release it though some turbines when you need power later.
I fail to see how he confuses a single player game with an MMO. WTF. His eventual goal may have been an MMO but THIS GAME was a single player action CRPG.
You fail to realize the time scale at which the anti-trust people operate on. This investigation is aimed at the time when AMD had the x86-64 (Opteron and Athlon) and Intel had the P4 and Pentium M. The AMD chips were destroying Intel in price/performance/power on desktops and small servers while Intel had the mobile market in a similar lock. What Intel is accused of doing to keep people Intel exclusive customers is discount the P4 chips to near the cost of producing them if they stayed Intel only and threaten to withhold allocations and raise the price of Pentium M chips of they left. I'm sure there were several other variants of this depending on how many other Intel products the company was dependent on for their business. Supply can be an even more powerful tool than price, especially when there is high demand for a product. Intel could essentially determine market share for Pentium M laptops, which were more profitable than ANY desktop, at that time.
Currently Intel is ahead because they dumped the P4 architecture and made a decent desktop/server processor again. They shouldn't be dinged for grabbing market share back now that they have a great product again. The issue was when they DIDN'T have a good product in the desktop/server market they used their 800-lbs gorilla status to keep market share unfairly and hurt AMD by this.
As a former board designer I can tell you someone with a 2 year degree will not be getting hired on as a board designer fresh out of school by all but a very few places. Frankly they are not going to have the combination of skills needed. Add in some good industry experience and some personal initiative and they might have a shot. A good board designer will need to know logic design, low level programming (assembly and/or C probably), tranmission line and power analysis skills. I really don't see packing all that in to a two year program, especially not with time to build up a firm math and physics base. We did hire layout people with two year degrees that simply routed the traces on the board but that is mainly a CAD tool job, not engineering.
I find the claim of descrimination based on a few grammar/spelling mistakes a bit far fetched. Anyone who has played these games, or chatted on-line or read/. knows a lot of native english speakers can barely spell and the rules of grammar are right out. Insisting on someone having at least basic language skills is more likely and should be expected on the ENGLIGH servers since there are Chinese ones too.
You might like it. No details on the changes for 4e yet but for 3e:
1. You will need a to have enough strength to handle the emcumberence of plate to make it worth it. The guy in chain or lighter will be able to outrun the guy in plate if they have the same base speed. You also get vision and skill penalties if you wear the full helm with just eye slits.
2. Axes have higher damage than swords, staves have a better parry and flails are hard to defend against. Swords are a good general weapon but some of the others can be better for some combat styles.
If you go with the DirecTivo units you get NO loss at all since stores the incoming digital signal to the HD directly. You get about 1 hour/GB and it is as good as it is coming off the sat.
HP sold a 128 way SPP-2000 back in '97 or that was a single image NUMA based system. We could go higher than that but nobody was able to afford a system larger than that. It also only ran SPP-UX (from Convex), not HP-UX so the market was kind of specialized.
I think Seymour also said that "a supercomputer is one that costs more than a million dollars"
Slashdot Mirror
Some flavors of Engineering are licensed, many are not. The computer side of ECE (Electrical and Computer Engineering) doesn't have any license required at all, at least in the US. You don't even need a degree, although most have one. Programming is even more of a free-for-all.
The EM drive MIGHT be a reactionless drive which is NOT a warp drive at all, but would be rather useful. In Star Trek terms this would be the impulse drive they use to scoot around whenever the warp drive is off. In real world terms it could be useful for long range space travel as it frees you from devoting most of your weight budget to reaction mass.
I have a pebble as well. It has it's limitations but it have a few nice functions that make it worthwhile.
1. See who is calling without taking out your phone, button press will tell your phone you've decided not to answer the call to it stops ringing.
2. See the text of new messages from SMS/email/twitter and likely any other source you care to see. You can scroll up and down to read them.
3. 5-7 days between charges. Some apps or faces will shorten this by a LOT. 99% of the time I use the two functions above, on a 4 day trip out of town now, didn't even bother to bring the charging cable.
4. See how many voicemails, texts, email you have waiting.
5. Control Tasker (Android only) which brings up a bunch of simple things you can do.
6. Current weather
I wouldn't want to try to enter text on it, only has 4 buttons, but if you want to see if it's worth leaving the clean room it's great. You could likely set up a couple stock messages and send them if you really wanted to, not sure if there is an app or if you'd have to get Tasker to do it.
You can already print your postage at home, on any printer. So, they're adding an expensive but fancy way to print and some kind of nebulous destination locating service. Oh, and an App. I forgot, everything is brand new it you tie it to a smartphone app.
I'd be amazed if Carmack's employment agreement (likely reworked when they bought id) was broad enough to encompass work he did on other projects. At least some of the code base he used for the OR was from his Armadillo Aerospace side project, I'm betting he made sure they didn't have any rights to his space project IP at the very least. I hope Greedymax gets slapped down hard enough they have to pay the legal fees for FB to discourage this kind of crap.
Guessing the EU universal charging standard helped push this along. The symmetric plug is a nice bonus.
The Occulus team has been shooting for close to, or below, the $300 dev kit price for a long time. They realize that cost will be a big factor in the adoption rate and they need to sell a ton for the first commercial release to get and keep the software developers making VR content.
Except that a neutron hit throws off a bunch of alpha particles which do the actual bit flips. Think hand grenade not bullet. So if you have physically adjacent bits in the same ECC word there is a good chance you will have a multi-bit error. Usually they do try to spread the bits out within the DRAM for any one word but sometimes they fail to do this. There are some ECC codes that are able to tolerate adjacent double (or even more) bit failures so if you're willing to pay the price for the more complex algorithm and have large ECC words then you can tolerate multi-bit errors from a single device as well.
Looks like you REALLY don't want to be on the roads in the United Arab Emirates, 310 vs. the USA 8.5 in the deaths per 1B km driven.
The current Rift is a lot better than 100ms, but yes, there is room for improvement. I've been able to use mine for over an hour and only had issues when HL2 hits me with a load screen or otherwise turns off the head tracking for a bit. I'm wondering if some people have checked their frame rates and tried turning down some settings to make sure they are running at 60FPS. I had disorientation nausea for the first week but then it has mostly gone away and only persists for a few minutes after using it. I also didn't try long sessions until after the driver update that had the calibration tool with it, so that might have helped. I'm also immune to motion sickness in cars/planes/boats/roller coasters IRL so far (never been out in REALLY heavy seas) so I probably have an easier time than most with VR motion effects.
I think they have been making good progress at improving the experience. One big one will be when they get the full positional tracking into the next version of the kit. Right now it only does orientation tracking and some inferred positional tracking. A couple demos use a Razer Hyrda to hack this in a bit and I found it helps the disorientation a LOT. If you follow some of the blogs of people working on it there is still a lot of work to be done in the prediction algorithms which will improve the effective latency as well, which again, should improve the disorientation people feel.
All of those use the driver from Oculus which is what I will assume Carmack will be key in improving, along with the firmware running on the Rift. His experience with Armadillo will be directly applicable (and already has it seems) to aspects of real time head tracking that have a big impact on VR. I'm guessing the time to get the software in a more polished state just got shorter with him joining the team and it wouldn't surprise me to see a few new algorithms that noone else though of either.
You might want to check out some of the newer 240Hz LCDs and/or ones with lightboost.
The whole POINT is to let in talented people who are more attractive than a college grad. Having such a pool of people _inside the US_ is a huge competitive advantage over countries with strict immigration. What in the world keeps American engineering salaries so high if not available talent pool?
If you want them in the talent pool here, give them a green card, not a temporary visa, or at least a temporary visa with a clear path it citizenship. Say, after the first year or two it converts to a green card instead of just getting an extension. Also, if they are more attractive than a college grad, why are they only getting about the same pay as a college grad?
The whole point of the H1-B program is that it's supposed to be hard to find technical expertise that the companies can't find here AT ALL. So, we should be talking experienced people with a proven expertise in a technical field that should be earning well above entry level wages, NOT fresh college grads who by and large are not experts in anything. The reality is they're using it to hire engineers at reduced salaries to control costs and eventually exporting the whole job with them when they go back home in many cases. Kill H1-B, give out more green cards so they and the jobs stay here.
Full time or contract? What are the posted requirements? How much do they pay? Might be the boom hasn't hit Texas yet I guess.
This is power storage, not generation. Think of it as a big underground air tank. You pump air in to store power (when your wind farm is making more than you need), release it though some turbines when you need power later.
I fail to see how he confuses a single player game with an MMO. WTF. His eventual goal may have been an MMO but THIS GAME was a single player action CRPG.
I'll bet they run iTunes on their server and stream it. You will want to keep your music on the 50GB of network storage anyhow.
Currently Intel is ahead because they dumped the P4 architecture and made a decent desktop/server processor again. They shouldn't be dinged for grabbing market share back now that they have a great product again. The issue was when they DIDN'T have a good product in the desktop/server market they used their 800-lbs gorilla status to keep market share unfairly and hurt AMD by this.
As a former board designer I can tell you someone with a 2 year degree will not be getting hired on as a board designer fresh out of school by all but a very few places. Frankly they are not going to have the combination of skills needed. Add in some good industry experience and some personal initiative and they might have a shot. A good board designer will need to know logic design, low level programming (assembly and/or C probably), tranmission line and power analysis skills. I really don't see packing all that in to a two year program, especially not with time to build up a firm math and physics base. We did hire layout people with two year degrees that simply routed the traces on the board but that is mainly a CAD tool job, not engineering.
I find the claim of descrimination based on a few grammar/spelling mistakes a bit far fetched. Anyone who has played these games, or chatted on-line or read /. knows a lot of native english speakers can barely spell and the rules of grammar are right out. Insisting on someone having at least basic language skills is more likely and should be expected on the ENGLIGH servers since there are Chinese ones too.
You might like it. No details on the changes for 4e yet but for 3e:
1. You will need a to have enough strength to handle the emcumberence of plate to make it worth it. The guy in chain or lighter will be able to outrun the guy in plate if they have the same base speed. You also get vision and skill penalties if you wear the full helm with just eye slits.
2. Axes have higher damage than swords, staves have a better parry and flails are hard to defend against. Swords are a good general weapon but some of the others can be better for some combat styles.
If you go with the DirecTivo units you get NO loss at all since stores the incoming digital signal to the HD directly. You get about 1 hour/GB and it is as good as it is coming off the sat.
HP sold a 128 way SPP-2000 back in '97 or that was a single image NUMA based system. We could go higher than that but nobody was able to afford a system larger than that. It also only ran SPP-UX (from Convex), not HP-UX so the market was kind of specialized. I think Seymour also said that "a supercomputer is one that costs more than a million dollars"