Most (all?) CS curricula will have a linear algebra course, add to that a graphics course where you learn why graphics is mainly linear algebra and you have the math pretty well covered.
That said, I think physics might become much more important as games increasingly have realistic physical simulations, instead of the silly simple dynamics (or even static models, e.g. indestructible buildings and terrain) of the past.
Yes this is right. If you find your chosen organizational/management structure requires IT projects of this size, and using custom components, you have the wrong organization/management structure. Think again, find a way to make it smaller and more decentralized.
Says who? These programs are awfully expensive, but it's still entirely possible that they'll create huge savings over the long run. The UK program is particularly expensive, but also ambitious - a complete, unified, nationwide patient records system. If it succeeds, it would greatly increase the flexibility of where and when people can be treated. Given that health care averages thousands of dollars per person per year, the savings could be enormous. Medical mistreatment errors could also be greatly reduced, especially in emergency situations.
That's not how all medical insurance is designed to work. There are expensive plans with low copays, and cheaper plans with higher copays. (And the guy did mention only a small amount is deducted from his pay). So which is better? Naively you might think catastrophic insurance is more efficient from a market standpoint because people are incentivized to avoid unnecessary health care for small problems. Problem is, many health care problems are progressive. If you avoid treating small problems now, you get to treat big problems later, which is much more expensive.
You'll never see a truly free market for health care because the idea is absurd. What, if one incompetent unlicensed doctor kills me, I should vote with my walette and see a different one from now on?
No, I don't think it will slow the adoption of Vista. The only question is whether people will use these new secured media pipelines Vista provides, or keep doing more or less what they're doing now. I'm sure you'll still be able to play good old mp3's one way or another. I don't think adoption of secure media is inevitable, just as Microsoft failed to kill off AOL with MSN dial-up service, even though they put MSN icons on the Windows 95 desktop.
Well, I diagree. I think Sony has flopped in the digital music market for about 15 years now because again and again they keep releasing restricted devices and formats that just don't do what you would expect, starting with DAT, on through Mini Disc, ATRAC, and continuing to this day. Again and again they try, again and again the market takes a whiff and heads for the door in droves.
I think maybe he was assuming that Linux and other OSS would provide an unrestricted way to access DRM material. It's not impossible, CSS was finally cracked after several annoying years of being unable to play DVDs on Linux. Some people think all partial-access cryptography is doomed. Personally, I'm not so sure. I think one of these times they'll get it right and we'll be locked out for good. The cable industry seems to have a pretty good handle on it.
The reason why.doc compatibility sucks has nothing to do with "the State".
Without "the State," we would hardly need compatibility because we could copy Word to each other freely, without paying Microsoft. And for that reason there would be no profit and therefore no Microsoft or Word in the first place. But if there were, there would be nothing to stop a disgruntled Microsoft employee from emailing the Word source code to a million of his closest friends for them to copy and paste into OpenOffice. Except there would be no Internet and hence no email. Anyways you get my point; your view is exceedingly narrow.
"Truly free market," what does that mean? With total freedom there would be no Microsoft, because as soon as they released a product everybody would copy it to each other, without paying Microsoft. More generally it's impossible for me to imagine a market without laws to institute ownership of property, to enforce contracts, etc. It is law which restricts freedom and thereby creates markets. (And please don't assume I think that's bad). Markets are not creations of nature.
So many decry this type of thing as paranoid and conspiracy, but the fact of the matter is people with power and control will do anything they can to remain in power and control.
For that matter the same thing could happen without any foresight (aka conspiracy). Even if they have no current plans to round people up, who's to say unfolding events might not motivate them to do so in the future? I think this is why the NRA opposes gun registration in the US. I also think about this when I post to Usenet. Never know when I might want to run for office:)
I think you have a point, but I also don't think the situation is quite that simple. First, they have a "national spine" to integrate everything, so at least at some level there are standard interfaces and a single infrastructure. Apparently there is some duplication, but it's not as you imply that they are indepently implementing 5 different stovepipes from top to bottom. Second, the system's biggest woes seem to be in 1) transferring existing patient records from myriads of different systems into the new national system, and 2) input from and training for individual doctors and nurses, and hence user acceptance. These are labor-intensive tasks that aren't solved simply by writing a computer program and giving everybody a copy.
Wasted in what sense? The notion that it could be done for $12BN in the first place was, after all, speculation (a.k.a. "a plan".) After reading the article, it does sound like they've had some success and nationally automated some systems. Apparently they even built a new national fiber network (which sounds odd, but had they done otherwise I can already hear the cries of "you're sending imporant medical information on the same wires as porno spam!?")
The amount of money spent is rather shocking, however the potential payoff is also huge. So far it appears they've spent $480 for every patient to be served by the system, which is a lot of money. But to put that in perspective, the US averages $5,700 per patent, per year, and the UK averages $2,428 (cite). So recouping the investment is not that hard to imagine. (And by the way big bureaucracy is clearly kicking the crap out of the invisible hand when it comes to efficiently delivering medical care).
It's awfully easy to mourn all the money spent and see it as waste. What's much harder is to see the vast sums wasted every year in the form of systematic inefficiency, one paper form or redundant Windows license at a time.
I wish the huge projects could turn out better, but it's too bad people don't see them for what they are: ambitious and groundbreaking. I don't see that many people decrying the $16BN 'wasted' on NASA last year alone. And why? Because people realize it is exploratory, and the payoff is long-term. I am sick of the US sitting on our butts watching healthcare costs spiral out of control year after year and doing NOTHING to increase efficiency. We have the most wasteful system in the world, but since the excess is hidden away in private coffers instead of disclosed to the public, nobody cares.
It shows just how different the idea of the "telephone" is from a decade ago.
Email (which is what "texting" really is) hasn't changed too much though. I figure it's just a quirk of history that we think of cellphones as a phone with a pda, camera, and email. Had the Treo been #1, maybe we'd think of them as PDAs with voice capability. Not that the devices would have ended up any different anyways, it's just interesting how the particular evolutionary path can change how we think of something even if all the legacy of that path were to disappear.
Plus, we're talking about thumb boards here anyways. There's no reason to think that whatever effect QWERTY layout has on 10 finger typing would carry over to thumbs-only typing.
What, 25 years of backwards compatibility only counts as cool if it's on accident? I agree a lot of credit goes to Microsoft, but also to the engineers at Intel and AMD for keeping the zombie that is x86 on its feet all those years - and outperforming everything else to boot. Legacy is a heavy burden to carry; they say Longhorn almost crushed Microsoft. But that also means that the very few companies with enough grunt to pull it off have a big competitive advantage. 25 years of Microsoft and Intel, I don't know whether to admire or resent it.
I only wish good ideas and good engineering had more to do with making a fortune than they do. Don't get me wrong, it does happen, and perhaps more in the US than anywhere else. But still, most of the money normally goes to whoever already has enough money to advance the innovator a paycheck so they can develop the idea. (Of course engineering wage slavery still beats pushing a plow 9 times out of 10!)
Slashdot Mirror
That said, I think physics might become much more important as games increasingly have realistic physical simulations, instead of the silly simple dynamics (or even static models, e.g. indestructible buildings and terrain) of the past.
Capturing 2 soldiers does not constitute an invasion.
Which side are you talking about? There was only one invading army in the recent Lebanese war.
I wonder what percent have VCRs?
That's not how all medical insurance is designed to work. There are expensive plans with low copays, and cheaper plans with higher copays. (And the guy did mention only a small amount is deducted from his pay). So which is better? Naively you might think catastrophic insurance is more efficient from a market standpoint because people are incentivized to avoid unnecessary health care for small problems. Problem is, many health care problems are progressive. If you avoid treating small problems now, you get to treat big problems later, which is much more expensive.
You'll never see a truly free market for health care because the idea is absurd. What, if one incompetent unlicensed doctor kills me, I should vote with my walette and see a different one from now on?
No, I don't think it will slow the adoption of Vista. The only question is whether people will use these new secured media pipelines Vista provides, or keep doing more or less what they're doing now. I'm sure you'll still be able to play good old mp3's one way or another. I don't think adoption of secure media is inevitable, just as Microsoft failed to kill off AOL with MSN dial-up service, even though they put MSN icons on the Windows 95 desktop.
Well, I diagree. I think Sony has flopped in the digital music market for about 15 years now because again and again they keep releasing restricted devices and formats that just don't do what you would expect, starting with DAT, on through Mini Disc, ATRAC, and continuing to this day. Again and again they try, again and again the market takes a whiff and heads for the door in droves.
I think maybe he was assuming that Linux and other OSS would provide an unrestricted way to access DRM material. It's not impossible, CSS was finally cracked after several annoying years of being unable to play DVDs on Linux. Some people think all partial-access cryptography is doomed. Personally, I'm not so sure. I think one of these times they'll get it right and we'll be locked out for good. The cable industry seems to have a pretty good handle on it.
Wouldn't the perception of scarcity just make the oil producers' resources all the more valuable?
"Truly free market," what does that mean? With total freedom there would be no Microsoft, because as soon as they released a product everybody would copy it to each other, without paying Microsoft. More generally it's impossible for me to imagine a market without laws to institute ownership of property, to enforce contracts, etc. It is law which restricts freedom and thereby creates markets. (And please don't assume I think that's bad). Markets are not creations of nature.
I think you have a point, but I also don't think the situation is quite that simple. First, they have a "national spine" to integrate everything, so at least at some level there are standard interfaces and a single infrastructure. Apparently there is some duplication, but it's not as you imply that they are indepently implementing 5 different stovepipes from top to bottom. Second, the system's biggest woes seem to be in 1) transferring existing patient records from myriads of different systems into the new national system, and 2) input from and training for individual doctors and nurses, and hence user acceptance. These are labor-intensive tasks that aren't solved simply by writing a computer program and giving everybody a copy.
The amount of money spent is rather shocking, however the potential payoff is also huge. So far it appears they've spent $480 for every patient to be served by the system, which is a lot of money. But to put that in perspective, the US averages $5,700 per patent, per year, and the UK averages $2,428 (cite). So recouping the investment is not that hard to imagine. (And by the way big bureaucracy is clearly kicking the crap out of the invisible hand when it comes to efficiently delivering medical care).
It's awfully easy to mourn all the money spent and see it as waste. What's much harder is to see the vast sums wasted every year in the form of systematic inefficiency, one paper form or redundant Windows license at a time.
I wish the huge projects could turn out better, but it's too bad people don't see them for what they are: ambitious and groundbreaking. I don't see that many people decrying the $16BN 'wasted' on NASA last year alone. And why? Because people realize it is exploratory, and the payoff is long-term. I am sick of the US sitting on our butts watching healthcare costs spiral out of control year after year and doing NOTHING to increase efficiency. We have the most wasteful system in the world, but since the excess is hidden away in private coffers instead of disclosed to the public, nobody cares.
Plus, we're talking about thumb boards here anyways. There's no reason to think that whatever effect QWERTY layout has on 10 finger typing would carry over to thumbs-only typing.
What, 25 years of backwards compatibility only counts as cool if it's on accident? I agree a lot of credit goes to Microsoft, but also to the engineers at Intel and AMD for keeping the zombie that is x86 on its feet all those years - and outperforming everything else to boot. Legacy is a heavy burden to carry; they say Longhorn almost crushed Microsoft. But that also means that the very few companies with enough grunt to pull it off have a big competitive advantage. 25 years of Microsoft and Intel, I don't know whether to admire or resent it.
I only wish good ideas and good engineering had more to do with making a fortune than they do. Don't get me wrong, it does happen, and perhaps more in the US than anywhere else. But still, most of the money normally goes to whoever already has enough money to advance the innovator a paycheck so they can develop the idea. (Of course engineering wage slavery still beats pushing a plow 9 times out of 10!)
I'm gonna put blue lenses on mini mag-lites and make out like a bandit.
Ah, but LLNL != LANL.
Do iPods still have to be sent off to replace the battery or not? How about the Zune?