One approach is to add the concept of "experts." Citizendium (mentioned in the article blurb) has this concept, but I believe it could be much more powerful. The real question is how to choose who these experts are. It is unreasonable to think that the site administrators themselves can serve as (or even hire) experts to cover every possible subject.
So, what I would propose is this: - Anyone can create or edit any article. - Anyone can rate any edit that is made to an article. - Articles and edits with the highest ratings are displayed. - Users acquire "expertise" in their field according to how their articles and/or edits are rated. - Gaining expertise provides two benefits: a) Articles and edits in the area of expertise start with an initially higher rating, and b) Votes on articles and edits in the area of expertise carry more weight.
What you would have is a community where experts are chosen from the community, by the community. However, everyone is still able to contribute.
Consider this example. Stephen Hawking writes an article on black holes. Stephen's expertise rating in astrophysics would be huge, because presumably he would have already written dozens of articles, and people would presumably give his articles good ratings. Now, you, Joe Schmoe, are reading the article, and you find a spelling error. Your expertise rating in astrophysics is tiny compared to Hawking's. You're still allowed to make edits to the article, but you do so knowing that you are the "underdog." You fix the spelling and submit your change. The change doesn't take effect, but the page does make a note that someone has suggested an edit (maybe a good way to show this is to change the text color for the section where the edit has been suggested). So anyone reading the article sees that there's an edit hiding there, and can click to see what it is. And if you are correct about the spelling error, people will "vote up" your correction until eventually it will rate highly enough to be displayed. And in fact, this might happen rather quickly because Stephen himself probably looks over his own articles from time to time, and might help you (and himself) by giving your edit a good rating.
The net result is that Stephen's article gets a little better, and you improve your astrophysics expertise rating a little. And you deserve it, even though you only made a spelling correction. You won't gain a huge amount of expertise, because once your correction becomes visible, people just won't care about it any more, so you'll stop receiving votes. But the article as a whole will continue to be read and appreciated by people interested in astrophysics, so Stephen will continue to receive expertise points.
Some additional things to consider... - Edits with a rating below a certain threshold should just be removed completely to allow pornography, spam, trolls, ignorance, and misinformation to simply disappear without ever even being visible. - It is important to restrict expertise to certain areas of study. In other words, Stephen Hawking's astrophysics articles don't earn him preferential treatment when writing about baking.
A nice thing about this approach is that the current Wikipedia content could be used as a starting point. Everything would just go in as a new, unrated article and would be voted up or down over time, and the good stuff would rise to the top, while the crap would just fall off the radar.
We had X-Prize for getting into space. Can we not get C-Prize started to find a cure for cancer?
Maybe, but "C-Prize" is already taken by the artificial intelligence guys. I think the problem with a contest like that is that curing cancer isn't really something that can be done by the average Joe, barring some amazing accidental discovery like Penicillin. Granted, launching a scpacecraft to win the X-Prize isn't something most people can do in their back yard, but at least it's something tangible. You can write up a plan and work out the math and say, "Yes, we can do this, but it's going to cost X to get it done." You could invest that same X in cancer research and you're probably going to come up empty handed.
But realistically, if someone does manage to cure cancer, I think they'll be rewarded. I don't think an official prize needs to be established. In fact, one of the things holding back cancer research is that everyone is already too focused on the money. Every potential treatment gets tangled up in patent issues.
Yeah, good point... He just has his setup arranged so that all of his inputs go into the de-interlacer, whether they're 1080p or not. It just makes things easier, so he never has to deal with switching inputs on the TV. But you'd think that 1080p-input to 1080p-output would be just a passthrough.
A good friend was just telling me a story about DRM that I found kind of funny. He's loaded, and loves electronics. Who doesn't?
This is a list of stuff that he's bought over the last year or so. - A really nice "Brillian" HDTV ($10000) - A PS3 ($600) - A really high-end Sony digital camcorder that records 1080p ($2500?) - A really, REALLY high-end Sony laptop that can burn Blu-ray movies ($5000) - A de-interlacer ($3000)
Ok, so he has all this stuff, and he's excited to start recording 1080p content with his camcorder and burning it to Blu-ray disks, and then watching it on his top-of-the-line entertainment system. Every piece of his setup is among the best you can get, and it all supports 1080p. So he records some stuff, finds burns it to disk, and can't get it to play. I talked to him about his setup several times over the course of a couple of weeks... There were so many roadblocks that he ran into, and every single one was because of DRM. It was comical.
The PS3 refused to even play the disks because they appeared to be pirated. This has come up quite a bit in various Blu-ray forums. So he found a workaround for this, but it sucks because you have to use this "special" format that doesn't allow your movies to have menus. Ok, so he burns another disk with the crappy no-menu format, and the PS3 still refuses to play it. Turns out the PS3 can't "authenticate" the TV over HDMI, so it won't output anything in 1080p. So he has to deal with Brillian on the phone to get a firmware update. He finally gets that, and tries again. Still won't play. Now, the PS3 says it can't authenticate the de-interlacer box. So, he still hasn't found a fix for that, but he can finally watch his movies as long as he plugs the PS3 directly into the TV, AND, burns his movies in the special format with no menus.
The net result is that his movies can't have menus, his $3000 de-interlacer is collecting dust, but after two weeks of debugging and tech support calls and firmware upgrades, his $20000 worth of equipment will actually allow him to record and watch movies. Makes you think back to the good old days, when you recorded something onto a VHS tape and stuck it in the VCR.
So contrary to what you may think, if online gambling were legal in the US it would be absolutely dominated by the large corporations that run the casinos in Vegas. These casinos would JUMP at the chance to be involved in online gambling if they could (as 10 years ago they tried quite extensively to lobby congress to allow it)
I don't think that's "contrary" at all to what most people think. I think it's obvious that the major casinos salivate at the idea of running online gambling sites. Why wouldn't they? Party Poker was taking in millions of dollars per day. You bet your ass the big casinos want in on that.
Furthermore (I've said this many times before), I believe that the 2006 law was completely driven by the Vegas casinos. Making online gambling illegal does several great things for their cause: 1) It stops or greatly slows the unbelievable flood of cash leaving the US and going into the pockets of Party Poker, etc. 2) It forces the US lawmakers to decide whether or not poker is a form of gambling, and thus, illegal. That's the biggie. As part of the 2006 law, a committee was established to determine the answer to that exact question. And I'll bet you that the same dirty Vegas (read Mob) money that got that law passed in the first place is also going to ensure that the committee's decision is that poker is a "game of skill" and is therefore exempt from all this hooplah over online gambling. And presto, the Vegas bigwigs have an open door to legal online poker, which is by far the most lucrative form of online gambling.
From my experience, the vast majority of programmers learn how to actually program at work. Myself, for example... In school I learned to program in Ada and Fortran, which are both fairly useless in the industry unless you're doing some extremely specific things. Then I had an internship in the real world where I learned C and C++, which I use every day. But the real value in your CS education is learning general programming concepts like what a "heap" and a "stack" and a "linked list" and all those other abstract data structures are, as well as the difference between "object oriented" and "procedural" and "functional" programming paradigms, etc... None of it is extremely complicated, but I promise you, you'll be ahead of the game if you can see things from that level, as opposed to getting pigeon-holed into only knowing one specific thing, like writing HTML and Javascript. Yes, those specific things are useful, but if that's all you know, you'll find yourself very limited.
Another thing to keep in mind is that there are two worlds of programming -- 1) Your work, and 2) your hobbies. If you're really, really, really lucky, then those two things will become the same thing. I've finally reached that point, and I can tell you, it's pure joy. I worked at various places in Silicon Valley for a few years, doing everything from writing BIOS code (assembly), to graphics driver code (C++), to designing web pages (perl and HTML). But all along, I put time and effort into my hobby programming, which is 3D game programming, and now that's what I do for a living. I work for myself and a good friend, and my work day consists of sitting in front of my PC in my underwear, firing up 3D Studio and creating some sort of monster character, or maybe a new weapon, then writing the code to make that model work in the 3D engine. What more could you want from a job?:)
And it's not as difficult as you might think to get to that point. Do your time out there in the computer industry. Learn as much as you can learn. Make as many talented and bright friends as you can, but don't be that guy who drives everyone crazy by constantly trying to ride their coattails. Pursue your own programming hobbies with passion. If emulators are your thing, dive in. There are plenty of resources out there that will keep you busy.
Re:Even in China they can't get cheap lasers?
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Blu-ray Laser Gadget
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· Score: 2, Insightful
why don't they... leave the marketing BS to Sony?
Well, probably because if they said "The cost of a blue diode from the factory down the street combined with international shipping, and import taxes raises the cost of obtaining a 405nm diode in China to approximately $8," then they would have a hard time selling them for $2000.
... that make me understand why Slashdot continues to lose market share to Digg. Yeah, Digg has horribly inaccurate stories, too, but at least there they are quickly lost to the void because no one "diggs" them. Here, they go straight to the front page. And there's no way to moderate the story as flamebait+troll+ignorant, except for tags, which are meaningless. Would it be so hard to let users moderate stories?
It's funny that these articles always need to justify the cause... They say things like "fish filter toxins from the water" and "we won't have any seafood to eat!" It's like they're letting us know that killing all the life in the world's oceans would actually be a bad thing. Oh, now I get it! I had always just assumed that all life on Earth was mainly just for decoration and for me to put in my mouth, until this article clued me in.
Being able to compress knowledge well is believed to be related to acting intelligently.
There's actually a little more to it than that. The creators of the Hutter prize believe that intelligence is the ability to compress knowledge. That's why they're offering this prize -- to solve the artificial intelligence problem. I'm not saying I buy into it, but that's their claim. That's why they call it "The most crucial technology prize of all."Here is the page describing the origin of the prize.
Well, the thing about a high-end CPU is that it's something like 80% custom logic, where a GPU is much more "standard cell" design. So the fact that NVIDIA is good at GPUs with lots of transistors doesn't mean that it will be easy for them to build a CPU. It will be very difficult to build something competitive with Intel and AMD. But if anyone out there right now has a shot at it, it's NVIDIA. Licensing of the x86 architecture is going to be a sticky issue.
Something that's interesting about this, if true, is that Intel might be the one playing catch-up. AMD will have ATI graphics, NVIDIA will have NVIDIA graphics, and Intel will have Intel graphics, which have always been pretty horrible.
Ok, the tag system isn't working... Every story on the front page is tagged as "yes, no, maybe, fud, notfud." How is that supposed to be useful? And more importantly, how was the tag system ever intended to be useful in the first place? There's no way to browse stories with a particular tag (is there?)... Isn't that how tags generally work? People tag a story as "science" and then some time later, I can look for all stories with the "science" tag and read about science. Either that functionality isn't here, or it's really hard to find. But either way, the tags aren't being used well anyway, so it wouldn't matter. Searching for stories tagged as "yes" isn't going to be very productive...
Actually, it's a "negative sum" game. The house takes its cut of every hand. So you have to be good enough to win more than the house take, on average. And that amount varies widely, depending on the stakes of the table. For example, at a $1 table, the maximum rake is probably $1 or $2 from each pot. But at a $50 table, the rake is still probably only $2 or $3, max.
As for the fad fading, it isn't likely. Poker is basically just the new version of the lottery, and the lottery certainly hasn't faded. The only difference is, people don't realize poker is a lottery, so it's even more addictive. They see some guy win $12 million on ESPN and think, "Hey, I know how to play poker! I can do that!" But it really is just drawing names out of a hat. Skill only takes you so far in poker -- in fact (although you'll be hard pressed to find many poker players who will admit this), random chance is by far the largest factor in poker, especially in large tournaments. Practically every pro poker player has been overheard calling the World Series "the lottery." That's not to say you can't make money in the long run as a poker player, but you just have to be willing to grind it out.
Please mod parent as ignorant. Poker is not a game played against the house. A good poker player will make money, a bad poker player will lose money (in the long run). Casino games like blackjack are, of course, designed to take your money by favoring the house. Poker, on the other hand, is played against other flash and blood players and the house just takes a small percent from each pot. That's one of the reasons why online poker has exploded and surpassed all the other online gambling. Party Poker makes FOUR MILLION DOLLARS PER DAY. It's ridiculous.
Holy crap! That 6502 assembler is awesome. One of my hobbies is writing C64 games... You probably already know this, but there are actually C compilers out there for the 6502 -- that's what I've been using for game coding. But, wow, really nice job on the 6502 assembler web page. Hours and hours of nostalgic entertainment.:)
Here comes my standard AMD+Dell troll, which has held true for years. But that never prevents it from being moderated as troll.
Dell will never ship an AMD CPU (in a PC). I had to add the parenthetical part recently because someone pointed out that Dell does sell individual AMD CPUs. Intel and Dell are the same company. Intel makes the chips, Dell makes the plastic boxes that hold them. Move along.
I haven't had cause to write something in C++ since the 1900s. I wouldn't be surprised if VS2005 is ass for the needs of C++ development. If someone took a survey of what people are using VS for, I'm guessing C++ would be less than 10%.
Not a chance. C++ is still the language used to get things done. I'm a game developer, and games are pretty much 100% developed in C++. Well, unless you count Flash and Java type stuff on the web, but that's all still very young technology. I've seen "Runescape," which is actually a decent 3D RPG, and I believe it's all done in Java. It runs entirely in a web browser. But in order to make that feasible, the 3D graphics have to be scaled down to a bare minimum. There's just too much overhead using an interpreted language to do serious work.
The game industry is still what drives the entire computer industry, and C and C++ are still the only languages that are useable for developing (real) games. Things like.NET and Java are great for things where performance isn't really an issue, like web-based business and e-commerce and all that. But no one runs out and buys a $700 video card and a 4 GHz CPU so that Internet Explorer runs faster. Games are where the money is -- the game industry is now bigger than the movie industry -- and they're all done in C++. And a big portion of everything else continues to be written in C++, like the web servers that serve up those Java applets and.NET crap, the browsers that display them, and the operating systems that run them.
Believe me, I'm no C/C++ zealot... There are tons of things I don't like about it. If something better came along, I would jump on it. But there just isn't any other choice for developing processing-intensive or graphics-intensive applications.
At this point, I'd be ready for just about anything that let me get away from Visual Studio. I've used it since it was 16-bit, and I've even tolerated all the weird interface changes they've made to the IDE over the years. Through version 7.0, it was pretty much just a matter of re-learning where the things I needed were, which sucks, but whatever. It wasn't a big enough productivity sink to justify switching to something else. But with version 8.0 (a.k.a. Visual Studio 2005), Microsoft has officially lost their minds. They're so determined to push ".NET" and "managed" code down our throats that they've ruined what used to be a really solid development environment. Going into the details of why it sucks so bad would be too far off-topic, and lots of other web pages have already summed it up nicely. But sweet Jeebus, does it ever suck.
So bring on the Borland Turbo C++... There's never been a better timing opportunity.
Well, everyone has their own doom and gloom projections. I used to think that the crash was coming sometime around 2009 or 2010, based solely on my observations of the ridiculous home sales. In 2005, we went to look at what we thought were some new apartments being built near us. It was a four-storey building with a pretty modest exterior. It looked like it would be something affordable, which is why we were interested. So we went into what we thought was the apartment leasing office... Wrong! It was the sales office, and these were being sold as "homes." So we decided to take a tour. The one we looked at was about 1000 square feet, two bedrooms, and below-average quality of construction. The floors were some kind of fake wood (not even as nice as Pergo) that creaked just about everywhere you walked. The "balcony" (ha ha) was about 5' by 5', just large enough for one person to stand there, and it overlooked a supermarket parking lot. And keep in mind that this unit was the model! No yard, no garage, one underground parking space...
Anyway, we looked at this place, thinking how weird it would be to buy a "home" and have neighbors above, below, left, right, and across the hall. But we figured it would probably be cheap. Wrong again. They wanted $700K for those units. And here's the real kicker -- all but like two units (out of maybe 300) were sold!! That was when we realized that all remnants of reality were completely gone. So it might seem on the surface like a really good sign, when tiny, crappy places are selling for ridiculous prices like that.
Well, here's the problem: When you drive by that place (it's just off Montague Expressway in San Jose), you can see in a lot of the windows. Maybe like one unit in ten actually has furniture in it. The rest are sold, but empty. And several of them have a sign hanging off the balcony with the name, phone number, and picture of a realtor. So obviously, what's happening is that these real estate speculators are buying these places and just assuming that the price will go up over the next three years or so. Well, what if it doesn't? What happens to all those empty places? Even if, as you said, the market just "levels off," those people are screwed. They now have this place that they can't sell, because there's too much competition. And they still owe 100% of the principal, because they've been paying an interest-only loan.
That article from the NYT that I cited in my original post has the cold, hard numbers to back this up. In 2006, about $400M worth of these crazy adjustable-rate mortgages will readjust. In 2007, that number triples to over ONE TRILLION DOLLARS. In any market you can imagine, tripling the number of people trying to sell something is definitely going to drive prices down. It's not going to level off, it's going down. And that wouldn't be so terrible, but the problem is that everyone has gambled so heavily on prices continuing to go up. What the hell do you do when your mortgage is about to readjust, you owe $700K, and no one is willing to pay more than $500K? You go bankrupt and the bank forecloses on the home. When bankruptcy and foreclosures start happening on a wide scale, look out.
And never mind all the other potential catalysts... What if interest rates go up? What if the government's disaterous foreign policy over the last few years starts to really hurt the dollar, or even the stock market? Personally, I'm predicting far worse than a "bubble burst" for the Bay Area. The really unfortunate part is that it will probably have a much wider impact than just the Bay Area.
That's a really good idea... If I had the money, I'd just buy the foreclosed homes and then re-sell them. But I don't, so instead, I'm playing the real-estate futures market. Yeah, pretty risky, I know. But it's the most direct way to speculate on the future of the real estate market.
There's no way Silicon Valley could compete in a survey like this, when the median home price there is now $770,000 (Santa Clara County). I just moved out of Santa Clara County for just this reason. I was making a fantastic salary, but to be honest, it was probably only 20% more, at most, than I would make anywhere else. And when home prices are 300% more than anywhere else, it just doesn't make sense.
I'm betting (literally) that the housing market out there is headed for a major crash.
I witnessed the madness out there first hand. I shopped around for houses and found that there's just not much available below half a million dollars. I asked the real estate people how people can afford anything, and they told me "Most people take an adjustable, interest-only loan." All that means is that they're gambling that the price of their home will go up and then they can sell it before their mortgage readjusts to some horrendous amount.
Now, the first big wave of the mortgage boom is cresting as more than $400 billion worth of adjustable-rate mortgages, or about 5 percent of all outstanding mortgage debt, will readjust this year for the first time, according to Loan Performance, a research firm. Next year, another $1 trillion in loans will readjust.
In other words, the number of people whose mortgages will readjust will roughly triple in 2007, resulting in over a trillion dollars in mortgages that people are desperate to get out of. I don't see how home prices can continue to go up when suddenly everyone needs to sell their homes (that they never had any intention of paying for in the first place) all at the same time. And when home prices do stop going up, now all those people (who haven't paid one cent towards the principal) are faced with selling their homes for less than they paid. Bad times. Oh well... Maybe I'll be able to buy a foreclosed home at a more reasonable price.
So has the day finally arrived where I can run my AC off of all that heat outdoors?
Ok... I'll be the first to admit I wasn't paying close attention when this was discussed in my college physics class, but something having to do with the laws of thermodynamics feels wrong here.:)
Well, what I've read/heard is that the primary limitation to building a true, x86 based system-on-chip isn't the area, it's the I/O. There would just be too many pins to put everything (CPU, GPU, Memory controller, Southbridge, SIO) all on the same chip. So it's not a question of just replacing a couple of CPUs on the die with other chips. But anything's possible, I suppose.
Well, yes, to some extent. What he's saying is that we should just accept the creation of the universe as the work of God, just like we should accept that the Bible is the word of God, without question, literally. Studying the creation of the universe is somewhat like studying the mortality of Jesus (was he married, etc...), which is also a big no-no in many fundamentalists' opinions.
Disclaimer - I'm with you... I personally don't believe that God would have given us brains capable of studying and reasoning and science if he had wanted us to just blindly accept everything in a single book as all we ever needed to know. The search for truth is the search for truth, regardless of whether you're searching in the Bible or in subatomic particle physics.
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So, what I would propose is this:
- Anyone can create or edit any article.
- Anyone can rate any edit that is made to an article.
- Articles and edits with the highest ratings are displayed.
- Users acquire "expertise" in their field according to how their articles and/or edits are rated.
- Gaining expertise provides two benefits: a) Articles and edits in the area of expertise start with an initially higher rating, and b) Votes on articles and edits in the area of expertise carry more weight.
What you would have is a community where experts are chosen from the community, by the community. However, everyone is still able to contribute.
Consider this example. Stephen Hawking writes an article on black holes. Stephen's expertise rating in astrophysics would be huge, because presumably he would have already written dozens of articles, and people would presumably give his articles good ratings. Now, you, Joe Schmoe, are reading the article, and you find a spelling error. Your expertise rating in astrophysics is tiny compared to Hawking's. You're still allowed to make edits to the article, but you do so knowing that you are the "underdog." You fix the spelling and submit your change. The change doesn't take effect, but the page does make a note that someone has suggested an edit (maybe a good way to show this is to change the text color for the section where the edit has been suggested). So anyone reading the article sees that there's an edit hiding there, and can click to see what it is. And if you are correct about the spelling error, people will "vote up" your correction until eventually it will rate highly enough to be displayed. And in fact, this might happen rather quickly because Stephen himself probably looks over his own articles from time to time, and might help you (and himself) by giving your edit a good rating.
The net result is that Stephen's article gets a little better, and you improve your astrophysics expertise rating a little. And you deserve it, even though you only made a spelling correction. You won't gain a huge amount of expertise, because once your correction becomes visible, people just won't care about it any more, so you'll stop receiving votes. But the article as a whole will continue to be read and appreciated by people interested in astrophysics, so Stephen will continue to receive expertise points.
Some additional things to consider...
- Edits with a rating below a certain threshold should just be removed completely to allow pornography, spam, trolls, ignorance, and misinformation to simply disappear without ever even being visible.
- It is important to restrict expertise to certain areas of study. In other words, Stephen Hawking's astrophysics articles don't earn him preferential treatment when writing about baking.
A nice thing about this approach is that the current Wikipedia content could be used as a starting point. Everything would just go in as a new, unrated article and would be voted up or down over time, and the good stuff would rise to the top, while the crap would just fall off the radar.
But realistically, if someone does manage to cure cancer, I think they'll be rewarded. I don't think an official prize needs to be established. In fact, one of the things holding back cancer research is that everyone is already too focused on the money. Every potential treatment gets tangled up in patent issues.
Yeah, good point... He just has his setup arranged so that all of his inputs go into the de-interlacer, whether they're 1080p or not. It just makes things easier, so he never has to deal with switching inputs on the TV. But you'd think that 1080p-input to 1080p-output would be just a passthrough.
A good friend was just telling me a story about DRM that I found kind of funny. He's loaded, and loves electronics. Who doesn't?
This is a list of stuff that he's bought over the last year or so.
- A really nice "Brillian" HDTV ($10000)
- A PS3 ($600)
- A really high-end Sony digital camcorder that records 1080p ($2500?)
- A really, REALLY high-end Sony laptop that can burn Blu-ray movies ($5000)
- A de-interlacer ($3000)
Ok, so he has all this stuff, and he's excited to start recording 1080p content with his camcorder and burning it to Blu-ray disks, and then watching it on his top-of-the-line entertainment system. Every piece of his setup is among the best you can get, and it all supports 1080p. So he records some stuff, finds burns it to disk, and can't get it to play. I talked to him about his setup several times over the course of a couple of weeks... There were so many roadblocks that he ran into, and every single one was because of DRM. It was comical.
The PS3 refused to even play the disks because they appeared to be pirated. This has come up quite a bit in various Blu-ray forums. So he found a workaround for this, but it sucks because you have to use this "special" format that doesn't allow your movies to have menus. Ok, so he burns another disk with the crappy no-menu format, and the PS3 still refuses to play it. Turns out the PS3 can't "authenticate" the TV over HDMI, so it won't output anything in 1080p. So he has to deal with Brillian on the phone to get a firmware update. He finally gets that, and tries again. Still won't play. Now, the PS3 says it can't authenticate the de-interlacer box. So, he still hasn't found a fix for that, but he can finally watch his movies as long as he plugs the PS3 directly into the TV, AND, burns his movies in the special format with no menus.
The net result is that his movies can't have menus, his $3000 de-interlacer is collecting dust, but after two weeks of debugging and tech support calls and firmware upgrades, his $20000 worth of equipment will actually allow him to record and watch movies. Makes you think back to the good old days, when you recorded something onto a VHS tape and stuck it in the VCR.
Furthermore (I've said this many times before), I believe that the 2006 law was completely driven by the Vegas casinos. Making online gambling illegal does several great things for their cause: 1) It stops or greatly slows the unbelievable flood of cash leaving the US and going into the pockets of Party Poker, etc. 2) It forces the US lawmakers to decide whether or not poker is a form of gambling, and thus, illegal. That's the biggie. As part of the 2006 law, a committee was established to determine the answer to that exact question. And I'll bet you that the same dirty Vegas (read Mob) money that got that law passed in the first place is also going to ensure that the committee's decision is that poker is a "game of skill" and is therefore exempt from all this hooplah over online gambling. And presto, the Vegas bigwigs have an open door to legal online poker, which is by far the most lucrative form of online gambling.
From my experience, the vast majority of programmers learn how to actually program at work. Myself, for example... In school I learned to program in Ada and Fortran, which are both fairly useless in the industry unless you're doing some extremely specific things. Then I had an internship in the real world where I learned C and C++, which I use every day. But the real value in your CS education is learning general programming concepts like what a "heap" and a "stack" and a "linked list" and all those other abstract data structures are, as well as the difference between "object oriented" and "procedural" and "functional" programming paradigms, etc... None of it is extremely complicated, but I promise you, you'll be ahead of the game if you can see things from that level, as opposed to getting pigeon-holed into only knowing one specific thing, like writing HTML and Javascript. Yes, those specific things are useful, but if that's all you know, you'll find yourself very limited.
:)
Another thing to keep in mind is that there are two worlds of programming -- 1) Your work, and 2) your hobbies. If you're really, really, really lucky, then those two things will become the same thing. I've finally reached that point, and I can tell you, it's pure joy. I worked at various places in Silicon Valley for a few years, doing everything from writing BIOS code (assembly), to graphics driver code (C++), to designing web pages (perl and HTML). But all along, I put time and effort into my hobby programming, which is 3D game programming, and now that's what I do for a living. I work for myself and a good friend, and my work day consists of sitting in front of my PC in my underwear, firing up 3D Studio and creating some sort of monster character, or maybe a new weapon, then writing the code to make that model work in the 3D engine. What more could you want from a job?
And it's not as difficult as you might think to get to that point. Do your time out there in the computer industry. Learn as much as you can learn. Make as many talented and bright friends as you can, but don't be that guy who drives everyone crazy by constantly trying to ride their coattails. Pursue your own programming hobbies with passion. If emulators are your thing, dive in. There are plenty of resources out there that will keep you busy.
... that make me understand why Slashdot continues to lose market share to Digg. Yeah, Digg has horribly inaccurate stories, too, but at least there they are quickly lost to the void because no one "diggs" them. Here, they go straight to the front page. And there's no way to moderate the story as flamebait+troll+ignorant, except for tags, which are meaningless. Would it be so hard to let users moderate stories?
It's funny that these articles always need to justify the cause... They say things like "fish filter toxins from the water" and "we won't have any seafood to eat!" It's like they're letting us know that killing all the life in the world's oceans would actually be a bad thing. Oh, now I get it! I had always just assumed that all life on Earth was mainly just for decoration and for me to put in my mouth, until this article clued me in.
Well, the thing about a high-end CPU is that it's something like 80% custom logic, where a GPU is much more "standard cell" design. So the fact that NVIDIA is good at GPUs with lots of transistors doesn't mean that it will be easy for them to build a CPU. It will be very difficult to build something competitive with Intel and AMD. But if anyone out there right now has a shot at it, it's NVIDIA. Licensing of the x86 architecture is going to be a sticky issue.
Something that's interesting about this, if true, is that Intel might be the one playing catch-up. AMD will have ATI graphics, NVIDIA will have NVIDIA graphics, and Intel will have Intel graphics, which have always been pretty horrible.
Ok, the tag system isn't working... Every story on the front page is tagged as "yes, no, maybe, fud, notfud." How is that supposed to be useful? And more importantly, how was the tag system ever intended to be useful in the first place? There's no way to browse stories with a particular tag (is there?)... Isn't that how tags generally work? People tag a story as "science" and then some time later, I can look for all stories with the "science" tag and read about science. Either that functionality isn't here, or it's really hard to find. But either way, the tags aren't being used well anyway, so it wouldn't matter. Searching for stories tagged as "yes" isn't going to be very productive...
Actually, it's a "negative sum" game. The house takes its cut of every hand. So you have to be good enough to win more than the house take, on average. And that amount varies widely, depending on the stakes of the table. For example, at a $1 table, the maximum rake is probably $1 or $2 from each pot. But at a $50 table, the rake is still probably only $2 or $3, max.
As for the fad fading, it isn't likely. Poker is basically just the new version of the lottery, and the lottery certainly hasn't faded. The only difference is, people don't realize poker is a lottery, so it's even more addictive. They see some guy win $12 million on ESPN and think, "Hey, I know how to play poker! I can do that!" But it really is just drawing names out of a hat. Skill only takes you so far in poker -- in fact (although you'll be hard pressed to find many poker players who will admit this), random chance is by far the largest factor in poker, especially in large tournaments. Practically every pro poker player has been overheard calling the World Series "the lottery." That's not to say you can't make money in the long run as a poker player, but you just have to be willing to grind it out.
Please mod parent as ignorant. Poker is not a game played against the house. A good poker player will make money, a bad poker player will lose money (in the long run). Casino games like blackjack are, of course, designed to take your money by favoring the house. Poker, on the other hand, is played against other flash and blood players and the house just takes a small percent from each pot. That's one of the reasons why online poker has exploded and surpassed all the other online gambling. Party Poker makes FOUR MILLION DOLLARS PER DAY. It's ridiculous.
Holy crap! That 6502 assembler is awesome. One of my hobbies is writing C64 games... You probably already know this, but there are actually C compilers out there for the 6502 -- that's what I've been using for game coding. But, wow, really nice job on the 6502 assembler web page. Hours and hours of nostalgic entertainment. :)
Yep, you're right. This is the one. All the others have just been hype, but this one is real. My bad. I'm wrong this time, for sure. Apologies.
Yeah right.
Here comes my standard AMD+Dell troll, which has held true for years. But that never prevents it from being moderated as troll.
Dell will never ship an AMD CPU (in a PC). I had to add the parenthetical part recently because someone pointed out that Dell does sell individual AMD CPUs. Intel and Dell are the same company. Intel makes the chips, Dell makes the plastic boxes that hold them. Move along.
The game industry is still what drives the entire computer industry, and C and C++ are still the only languages that are useable for developing (real) games. Things like
Believe me, I'm no C/C++ zealot... There are tons of things I don't like about it. If something better came along, I would jump on it. But there just isn't any other choice for developing processing-intensive or graphics-intensive applications.
At this point, I'd be ready for just about anything that let me get away from Visual Studio. I've used it since it was 16-bit, and I've even tolerated all the weird interface changes they've made to the IDE over the years. Through version 7.0, it was pretty much just a matter of re-learning where the things I needed were, which sucks, but whatever. It wasn't a big enough productivity sink to justify switching to something else. But with version 8.0 (a.k.a. Visual Studio 2005), Microsoft has officially lost their minds. They're so determined to push ".NET" and "managed" code down our throats that they've ruined what used to be a really solid development environment. Going into the details of why it sucks so bad would be too far off-topic, and lots of other web pages have already summed it up nicely. But sweet Jeebus, does it ever suck.
So bring on the Borland Turbo C++... There's never been a better timing opportunity.
Well, everyone has their own doom and gloom projections. I used to think that the crash was coming sometime around 2009 or 2010, based solely on my observations of the ridiculous home sales. In 2005, we went to look at what we thought were some new apartments being built near us. It was a four-storey building with a pretty modest exterior. It looked like it would be something affordable, which is why we were interested. So we went into what we thought was the apartment leasing office... Wrong! It was the sales office, and these were being sold as "homes." So we decided to take a tour. The one we looked at was about 1000 square feet, two bedrooms, and below-average quality of construction. The floors were some kind of fake wood (not even as nice as Pergo) that creaked just about everywhere you walked. The "balcony" (ha ha) was about 5' by 5', just large enough for one person to stand there, and it overlooked a supermarket parking lot. And keep in mind that this unit was the model! No yard, no garage, one underground parking space...
Anyway, we looked at this place, thinking how weird it would be to buy a "home" and have neighbors above, below, left, right, and across the hall. But we figured it would probably be cheap. Wrong again. They wanted $700K for those units. And here's the real kicker -- all but like two units (out of maybe 300) were sold!! That was when we realized that all remnants of reality were completely gone. So it might seem on the surface like a really good sign, when tiny, crappy places are selling for ridiculous prices like that.
Well, here's the problem: When you drive by that place (it's just off Montague Expressway in San Jose), you can see in a lot of the windows. Maybe like one unit in ten actually has furniture in it. The rest are sold, but empty. And several of them have a sign hanging off the balcony with the name, phone number, and picture of a realtor. So obviously, what's happening is that these real estate speculators are buying these places and just assuming that the price will go up over the next three years or so. Well, what if it doesn't? What happens to all those empty places? Even if, as you said, the market just "levels off," those people are screwed. They now have this place that they can't sell, because there's too much competition. And they still owe 100% of the principal, because they've been paying an interest-only loan.
That article from the NYT that I cited in my original post has the cold, hard numbers to back this up. In 2006, about $400M worth of these crazy adjustable-rate mortgages will readjust. In 2007, that number triples to over ONE TRILLION DOLLARS. In any market you can imagine, tripling the number of people trying to sell something is definitely going to drive prices down. It's not going to level off, it's going down. And that wouldn't be so terrible, but the problem is that everyone has gambled so heavily on prices continuing to go up. What the hell do you do when your mortgage is about to readjust, you owe $700K, and no one is willing to pay more than $500K? You go bankrupt and the bank forecloses on the home. When bankruptcy and foreclosures start happening on a wide scale, look out.
And never mind all the other potential catalysts... What if interest rates go up? What if the government's disaterous foreign policy over the last few years starts to really hurt the dollar, or even the stock market? Personally, I'm predicting far worse than a "bubble burst" for the Bay Area. The really unfortunate part is that it will probably have a much wider impact than just the Bay Area.
That's a really good idea... If I had the money, I'd just buy the foreclosed homes and then re-sell them. But I don't, so instead, I'm playing the real-estate futures market. Yeah, pretty risky, I know. But it's the most direct way to speculate on the future of the real estate market.
I'm betting (literally) that the housing market out there is headed for a major crash.
I witnessed the madness out there first hand. I shopped around for houses and found that there's just not much available below half a million dollars. I asked the real estate people how people can afford anything, and they told me "Most people take an adjustable, interest-only loan." All that means is that they're gambling that the price of their home will go up and then they can sell it before their mortgage readjusts to some horrendous amount.
And to get an idea of just how bad the situation is, there's this (from the NYT): http://www.dailynews.com/portlet/article/html/fra
In other words, the number of people whose mortgages will readjust will roughly triple in 2007, resulting in over a trillion dollars in mortgages that people are desperate to get out of. I don't see how home prices can continue to go up when suddenly everyone needs to sell their homes (that they never had any intention of paying for in the first place) all at the same time. And when home prices do stop going up, now all those people (who haven't paid one cent towards the principal) are faced with selling their homes for less than they paid. Bad times. Oh well... Maybe I'll be able to buy a foreclosed home at a more reasonable price.
Well, what I've read/heard is that the primary limitation to building a true, x86 based system-on-chip isn't the area, it's the I/O. There would just be too many pins to put everything (CPU, GPU, Memory controller, Southbridge, SIO) all on the same chip. So it's not a question of just replacing a couple of CPUs on the die with other chips. But anything's possible, I suppose.
Well, yes, to some extent. What he's saying is that we should just accept the creation of the universe as the work of God, just like we should accept that the Bible is the word of God, without question, literally. Studying the creation of the universe is somewhat like studying the mortality of Jesus (was he married, etc...), which is also a big no-no in many fundamentalists' opinions.
Disclaimer - I'm with you... I personally don't believe that God would have given us brains capable of studying and reasoning and science if he had wanted us to just blindly accept everything in a single book as all we ever needed to know. The search for truth is the search for truth, regardless of whether you're searching in the Bible or in subatomic particle physics.