Made me raise eyebrows too. When did the whole "to hell with XP, I'll stick to Win2k" thing vanished ? Remember ? XP has nasty anti-piracy features that can lock your PC, mandatory upgrades that you can not refuse and the license gives MS the right to erase any file on your disk. It also says you must send a kidney of your firstborn to Mr. B. G. Redmond, Seattle.
While I am not sure that realtime raytracing will really be the next big thing, I think there are unintended consequences you overwatched.
Today, most CG effects must be hard coded, using tricks, shaders, complex modeling techniques, multiple passes, etc...
In the raytracing world, as you are aware, the engine is easier to use, and I would also say, easier to code. It is also very easy to parallelize (so a specialized card could bring HUGE performance gains) and require few modeling tweaking compared to the current T&L world. In a raytracer, shadows (including self-projecting), reflections, refractions, bump mapping, displacement mapping, etc... are an integral part of the renderer, they are not a lot of different modules stacked on top of each other. Bringing down the complexity of the rendering engine hopefully frees more resources to work on other parts of the game.
I really don't see the IT field as more discriminatory than others. Seeing how well women are welcomed in this field I really see it as a field for equal opportunity. All the feedbacks I had from female coworkers, friends, or school mates were all positive, they enjoyed the IT world and felt very welcomed in it.
I have yet to see someone who thinks that his virility is expressed in BogoMips or in coding skills (yeah, I know some claim that the bandwidth is a function of the penis size, but this is some sort of cult, they are not, like, orthodox ITers).
I do have, however, to point a bias that exists among women against IT. I will accept a fellow female engineer with no problem, but any "regular" girl sees IT as some sort of a district of Hell. Speak of stupid gender-specific prejudice, nerds have underwent quite a few. It is a lot more socially safer to assume at first, when speaking to an unknown woman, that she knows nothing about computers, even if it is rude for the 1% of them who actually have some technical knowledge (1% isn't exaggerated).
I don't think that the low number of women in IT professions are due to stupid geek jokes (ever heard of dirty jokes from the sales department ? So gross it's boring ) but more because of a wrong idea among "female student culture" about the IT field.
So stop saying this is a machist field, this is only making the prejudice more important.
Well, I suspect this from the pictures : given the disposition of LEDs (like a stick figure) and the drawing on the shirt (a running stylized burning character) that the board was actually beneath the shirt. That would look a lot more like art in my eye.
Isn't it the role of a good artist to explore the boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not about our society ?
I think she made her point. This form of art is prohibited in airports, fine. Now everyone will judge if this is acceptable or not. It would have been more interesting if it looked more like art, like with only the leds visible through the sweater. To get arrested just for carrying blinking leds, now that would have been interesting. In fact I suspect this was the case when I see the disposition of leds and the drawing on the sweater beneath the board.
Man, I long for the days when men were men, women were women, and any serious space exploration project had his own 8,000,000 tons spaceship powered by 1000 bombs of 3 tons !
Apple was thinking along these lines when they proposed firewire. I am not a Mac expert, but from what I have seen so far, firewire can be used for networking (does it use ethernet, I am not sure) video transfer, peripherals connection, external drive connections. From the start it was fast enough and designed for all these applications while we still struggle to get USB working everywhere at full speed...
Quite the opposite. Intel's going to work on making it scale well across multiple CPU cores so that gamers will want to buy quad core CPUs. And preferably in a way that makes it incompatible with AMD chips. Better yet : compatible but 10x slower.
I am amazed at how technophobic people enjoy electronic voting without seeing the problems of it.
Hell, I am ready to get my brain wired to a computer through surgery but when discussing of the e-voting problems with people I am being told that I must not be afraid of progress...
Yeah, it may be funny, but the very fact that this event occurred gives him media coverage. Probably unintended side effect, but well deserved! I, for one, had never heard of the Killacycle. This is seriously cool stuff !
I don't disagree that the city is being a bit obstinate, but I can see why they wouldn't want to change streetfronts on Apple's request. If they do it for them, they'll have to do it for every other downtown storefront. Plus, couldn't this be considered as corruption or lobbying ? After all, they are giving money for a public organization to make them make their wishes...
Maybe the Tor team should stop saying in their explanation pages that they use encryption. They should do like every company, use a near-English word, "Anonimyzation technology" maybe...
And a little warning in bold letters "Careful ! Tor provides you with anonymity, not secret of the transmission. You should still use encryption to protect your sensitive transfers."
I must add that my tinfoil little guy (which sits next to the angel little guy and the demon little guy) says that I should not assume that because my phone says so it is not spying on me. After all, what do I know about these closed-designed beasts ? How can I know that some government man-in-black didn't put some backdoor into the firmware to listen to me and my conversations even when I am not making a call ? I would surely put these things in if I were in the intelligence services of a police state that produced a lot of hardware going into phones.
Someone told me that Russian businessmen remove their cellphones batteries before having a serious business conversation. In these countries they remember (and in some cases, still witness) what a government would do to spy on people.
In other words, this study was flawed in the first place. Our eyes don't look at individual letters, they look at groups at a time. I learned this in high school.... There are quite a lot of layers between the eyes and the upper levels of consciousness. This study is interested in very low level layers : eye movements. The fact that eyes scans one letter at a time or two letters simultaneously does not make assumption about how words are treated in the next layer.
Asimov's New Guide to Science ISBN, 0140172130.
My sister bought it when she began to have an interest in science and I was amazed by Asimov's skill to tell the history of scientific discoveries like a thrilling tale. This is however a big book (800+ pages), I would recommend to choose some chapters or some extracts and to study them.
What's/where's the threshold between a blob of carbon+goo, and me? Or at least, are there any theories? Or is all of this stuff discussed only in the philosphical realm? Consciousness doesn't seem to be a magical property of a carbon blob but simply the ability for something to treat concept including its own self.
There are thousands of theories and definitions for life or consciousness. Some argue that a mug with "I AM A MUG" written on it is self-conscious, some say that the ego is just an elaborate illusion, some say the brain uses some spooky quantum stuff.
I, for one, believe that we are living the beginning of a new Scientific Revolution. Most people see the brain as a magic black box that is too mysterious to be understood by science. This mentality will have to change : the brain, the parts of it that manage the ego, the motivational drive, the rational self are unfolding their secrets and the consciousness is not a monolithic block of soul anymore.
I believe that these discovery will not make the definition for consciousness clearer but that it will show how this concept is vague and bears no real signification.
Slashdot Mirror
Made me raise eyebrows too. When did the whole "to hell with XP, I'll stick to Win2k" thing vanished ? Remember ? XP has nasty anti-piracy features that can lock your PC, mandatory upgrades that you can not refuse and the license gives MS the right to erase any file on your disk. It also says you must send a kidney of your firstborn to Mr. B. G. Redmond, Seattle.
While I am not sure that realtime raytracing will really be the next big thing, I think there are unintended consequences you overwatched.
Today, most CG effects must be hard coded, using tricks, shaders, complex modeling techniques, multiple passes, etc... In the raytracing world, as you are aware, the engine is easier to use, and I would also say, easier to code. It is also very easy to parallelize (so a specialized card could bring HUGE performance gains) and require few modeling tweaking compared to the current T&L world. In a raytracer, shadows (including self-projecting), reflections, refractions, bump mapping, displacement mapping, etc... are an integral part of the renderer, they are not a lot of different modules stacked on top of each other. Bringing down the complexity of the rendering engine hopefully frees more resources to work on other parts of the game.
I really don't see the IT field as more discriminatory than others. Seeing how well women are welcomed in this field I really see it as a field for equal opportunity. All the feedbacks I had from female coworkers, friends, or school mates were all positive, they enjoyed the IT world and felt very welcomed in it.
I have yet to see someone who thinks that his virility is expressed in BogoMips or in coding skills (yeah, I know some claim that the bandwidth is a function of the penis size, but this is some sort of cult, they are not, like, orthodox ITers).
I do have, however, to point a bias that exists among women against IT. I will accept a fellow female engineer with no problem, but any "regular" girl sees IT as some sort of a district of Hell. Speak of stupid gender-specific prejudice, nerds have underwent quite a few. It is a lot more socially safer to assume at first, when speaking to an unknown woman, that she knows nothing about computers, even if it is rude for the 1% of them who actually have some technical knowledge (1% isn't exaggerated).
I don't think that the low number of women in IT professions are due to stupid geek jokes (ever heard of dirty jokes from the sales department ? So gross it's boring ) but more because of a wrong idea among "female student culture" about the IT field.
So stop saying this is a machist field, this is only making the prejudice more important.
Well, I suspect this from the pictures : given the disposition of LEDs (like a stick figure) and the drawing on the shirt (a running stylized burning character) that the board was actually beneath the shirt. That would look a lot more like art in my eye.
Isn't it the role of a good artist to explore the boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not about our society ?
I think she made her point. This form of art is prohibited in airports, fine. Now everyone will judge if this is acceptable or not. It would have been more interesting if it looked more like art, like with only the leds visible through the sweater. To get arrested just for carrying blinking leds, now that would have been interesting. In fact I suspect this was the case when I see the disposition of leds and the drawing on the sweater beneath the board.
Man, I long for the days when men were men, women were women, and any serious space exploration project had his own 8,000,000 tons spaceship powered by 1000 bombs of 3 tons !
Go for the Super Orion !
Apple was thinking along these lines when they proposed firewire. I am not a Mac expert, but from what I have seen so far, firewire can be used for networking (does it use ethernet, I am not sure) video transfer, peripherals connection, external drive connections. From the start it was fast enough and designed for all these applications while we still struggle to get USB working everywhere at full speed...
Or our votes....
Isn't it why you make donations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation ?
Sorry, by "old fashioned way" I was thinking about manual counting, transparent boxes and human readable ballots inside opaque envelopes.
I am amazed at how technophobic people enjoy electronic voting without seeing the problems of it.
Hell, I am ready to get my brain wired to a computer through surgery but when discussing of the e-voting problems with people I am being told that I must not be afraid of progress...
Yep, that sounds good.
However, I still wonder what advantage this brings over the old fashioned way...
Yeah, it may be funny, but the very fact that this event occurred gives him media coverage. Probably unintended side effect, but well deserved! I, for one, had never heard of the Killacycle. This is seriously cool stuff !
Maybe the Tor team should stop saying in their explanation pages that they use encryption. They should do like every company, use a near-English word, "Anonimyzation technology" maybe...
And a little warning in bold letters "Careful ! Tor provides you with anonymity, not secret of the transmission. You should still use encryption to protect your sensitive transfers."
The Seti@Home project. Registered in the Guiness Book of Records as the largest computation ever made.
Brilliant !
It can't be 120F in North Pole, it is outside US. If something it would be 49C.
I must add that my tinfoil little guy (which sits next to the angel little guy and the demon little guy) says that I should not assume that because my phone says so it is not spying on me. After all, what do I know about these closed-designed beasts ? How can I know that some government man-in-black didn't put some backdoor into the firmware to listen to me and my conversations even when I am not making a call ? I would surely put these things in if I were in the intelligence services of a police state that produced a lot of hardware going into phones.
Someone told me that Russian businessmen remove their cellphones batteries before having a serious business conversation. In these countries they remember (and in some cases, still witness) what a government would do to spy on people.
Asimov's New Guide to Science ISBN, 0140172130.
My sister bought it when she began to have an interest in science and I was amazed by Asimov's skill to tell the history of scientific discoveries like a thrilling tale. This is however a big book (800+ pages), I would recommend to choose some chapters or some extracts and to study them.
There are thousands of theories and definitions for life or consciousness. Some argue that a mug with "I AM A MUG" written on it is self-conscious, some say that the ego is just an elaborate illusion, some say the brain uses some spooky quantum stuff.
I, for one, believe that we are living the beginning of a new Scientific Revolution. Most people see the brain as a magic black box that is too mysterious to be understood by science. This mentality will have to change : the brain, the parts of it that manage the ego, the motivational drive, the rational self are unfolding their secrets and the consciousness is not a monolithic block of soul anymore.
I believe that these discovery will not make the definition for consciousness clearer but that it will show how this concept is vague and bears no real signification.
An old invention, probably soon to be rediscovered, can make a ship consume 0 MPG.
Seriously, a diesel-fueled catamaran ? why would it be more efficient than a single-hull vessel ?
Let me introduce the new G.I. J.O.E. character : "Le légionnaire Jean"