When I read about the towel interface I got really excited. I hope this means I'll be able to put the towel over my head and play the old Infocom game Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Because you never want to go anywhere without a towel. Douglas Adams was ahead of his time.
It froze on the loading of game 4 for me. Sucked up 100% of the CPU and wouldn't respond. Seemed slow before that point too. Might be an OK puzzle game but only if they get it working.
LOTRO has also learned from the bad experiences seen in other games, he said.
For instance, LOTRO rewards the repetitive actions often required in online games. In return for slaughtering large numbers of one type of creature players will become more powerful or gain a fancy title to demonstrates their prowess.
In this way, he said, LOTRO hopes to avoid the "grind" that afflicts the middle ranks of those adventuring in WoW.
How is that avoiding the grind? I may be mistaken, but repetitively killing the same things over and over again to advance sounds suspiciously like grinding to me. If they had an entertaining system that avoided grinding to advance, then the article might have been worth reading.
There were some good points made in the responses, but they still missed a lot of the 'how to really do it".
Everyone talks about benchmarking or comparing themselves to others. The first step in this scenario is being able to communicate what your organization does, then how well it does it. If you can't do that... forget benchmarking, and forget being able to validate your' IT organization's value.
It is most important to first look at the work being done. Even if your processes/activities aren't formalized, every organization has elements of problem management, change management, monitoring, inventory management. However, it is critical to recognize that many organizations think of the work very differently. Do you do release management? If so, are you in development or operations? Because release management may mean packaging a newly developed application for release into the environment (development views it this way), or it may mean performing all the functions necessary (e.g., reviewing support capabilities, evaluating risk, performing load balancing) to actually drop the new application into the environment (operations views it this way). Does your organization think of asset management in conjunction with the configuration of the environment and IT finances or does it simply view asset management as inventory management?
Once you identify the work, start to look who are responsible for those functions and what tools they are using. That will tell you how the work is being performed. Are there too many work overlaps? Are work hand-offs not covered? Do we have too many tools performing similar functions, or are we missing some automation opportunities? This information can be easily captured at the task level, as long as you provide those in your organization with a high-level example of each of the work areas.
Now that you have the work being performed identified and the mix of people and automation necessary to make it function, you are ready to consistently capture the performance necessary for benchmarking. It is true, there are no two 'identical' companies and even within similar industries, organizations are quite different. As such, apples-to-apples comparisons are rare. However, many valuable comparisons can be made. A number of the previous posts made some good suggestions regarding performance measures and not creating SLAs unless they are necessary and unless you can validate the numbers promised. You don't need a lot of metrics. In fact, the metrics you capture will change as your organization matures. Start measuring the things you are capable of measuring. As you mature you will grow into identifying those measures that are relevant to the processes, the business, and your regulatory requirements.
Once you are capable of capturing and communicating what you do and how well you do it, then you are ready to compare against others that can do the same. The company we used for IT process benchmarking did it this way and it worked well for us.
I would assume that it's similar to casting in that the orientation matters. If the handle is attached to the mug, you should be able to orient the model you are creating such that the handle is on top (the mug is created on it's side). That way you never start making a handle that isn't attached to the mug at that stage. It would require the user to orient the computer model so that orphins were never created as the piece is built up.
"When the sled had been accelerated to its top speed of 10 kilometres per second, laser and pyrotechnic devices would be used to separate the cone from the sled. Then, the cone would skid into a side tunnel, losing some speed due to friction with the tunnel's walls. The tunnel would direct the cone to a ramp angled at 30 to the horizon, where the cone would launch towards space at about 8 kilometres per second, or more than 23 times the speed of sound.... Anything launched in this way would have to be able to survive enormous accelerations - more than 2000 times the acceleration due to gravity (2000g)."
They claim that the payload would be accelerated slowly around the ring. The huge acceleration occurs when the payload's trajectory is changed to angle it up 30 degrees towards the sky. Why wouldn't they angle the ring itself at 30 degrees, releasing the payload at the point where the tangent points up at 30 degrees? They wouldn't need a ramp at all, just a piece that moves out of the way before the payload swings around the loop again.
The phrasing does sound a lot like Shatner, who would be great at reading the finalists for these at a contest. I bet there are lots of Star Trek poems possible. It also sounds a little bit like Adam West from Batman.
IPBN - Indigenous Peoples Biodiversity Network in Cusco, Peru
SEARICE - South East Asia Regional Inititiaves in Community Empowerment Philippines
ETC Group - Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration in Ottawa
Is that the best this organization is bringing? Why is this even news? Can anyone create a catchy name for an award, put it on a web page, and this then becomes real news? For crying out loud, those fakers even spelled "Initiatives" wrong. Not that my own spelling is great, but am I the only one that see how fake this is?
"Emulating the CPU isn't really a difficult task. They have three 3GHz cores, so emulating one 733MHz chip is pretty easy."
The article goes on to say that it's the proprietary routines in the GPU that will cause the problem, since those are found in the nvidia graphics chips. What I found interesting was Microsoft's own need for emulation, re-writing proprietary graphics routines much the same way that wine or other emulators need to in order to do their jobs. It makes me wonder if Microsoft will wind up on the other side of the gooey emulation stick.
MUDs have a few advantages over MMORPGs. The biggest in my mind is that they require more imagination than MMORPGs because they are text based. This also allows for the developers to say things like "12,000 ice skating elephants with hockey stick glide onto the ice, snatching helpless contestants from the Zarbania Curling Olympics." Try showing that graphically. The text based nature of MUDs brings the player's imagination into play far more than the graphical MMORPG interface. The verbal descriptions are not only more descriptive, they are also far easier to modify. You want rhinos instead of elephants? Easy, just change that word.
You actually get to roleplay your character, which is an important part of the experience. Instead of killing X number of rats so you can gain points to kill bigger things, or mining gold so you spend more billable hours on the game, the range of options and quests is much broader.
Certainly the ability of the players to customize their environment is also much higher, as well as being easier to accomplish. Adding flair and pizzazz to a player can be as easy as modifying a text string.
What I really liked about the article was its use of an existing technology in a novel way. I never would have thought to use a Bayesian filter to look at tables of chess moves in order to develop a program to play the game. I also thought that demonstrating the use of pipes to move data from out of one program into another was interesting. Some people complained about the length of the article, but I can't see how the authors could due justice to the work they had done in a couple of paragraphs.
It made me wonder what other applications there might be for these kinds of filters, which I assume is what the authors intended.
I thought he made some excellent points. You do need great people working on your team, a product that people want, and to spend as little money as possible. What I had an issue with was his cutoff age of 38.
Who knows more good people? Someone who has had more time to meet them and see what they're like in the long haul and hard times.
Who knows what's bad in the market? People who have had to deal with the products and use then. People who have used something for 1 month know how to dumb it down for the new folks, but long term users understand all of the tasks that really need to get done using the product. They also understand the market dynamics and product pricing better.
Who knows how to handle money? If you had to give your money to someone to hold for you, would you pick the 23 year old or the 40+ year old? Like he said in the article, "If you try something that blows up and leaves you broke at 26, big deal." You know that the 40+ year old is trying harder and has more money management experience.
In addition to the large shield shown in the image, I would think that the dust particles would have some small amount of centripetal force acting on them, pulling them to the outside of the mirror.
These mirrors work by spinning a pan of mercury. The force on the fluid is a function of its distance from the spin axis. The shape formed is a parabola, which is just what you would want for a telescope (collimated ray bundles formed into a point). If you put annular shield say 5 inches from the edge, then the edge of the mirror where the dust collects would be covered and wouldn't affect the image quality so much. There might also be some type of surface duster under that edge that could be used every now and then to lift off the particles. The ripples would die out after a while and you could go back to the astronomy.
In England, they'd have no problem as long as they were a midgets, singing or not. With all of the Dr.Who/Willy Wanka movie things going on in England. See this article in scifi storm: http://scifistorm.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/13/2251 213
Well, yes and no. If a tennis ball were perfectly elastic, it would loose no energy and would bounce to the same height each time. It's frequency would be constant. Because it loses energy on each bounce, it bounces to a lower height each time, so it has less distance to fall, so the frequency goes up.
The magnets do the same, but the have the additional non-linearity in the force which adds even more to the frequency shift. I mentioned the "tennis ball" like loss when I was talking about the heat loss.
This is blowing my mind. You would think it should be a constant frequency with decay, like the classical pendulum. The difference between the classical pendulum and this case is that for a pendulum, the force is constant; with the magnet, the force is inversely proportional to the distance between the magnets. As the energy in the velocity (E=1/2mv^2) is converted to heat, the magnets have a lower velocity so they travel a shorter distance away from the other magnet. The closer the magnets are, the greater the force, again reducing the period between "clacks". The frequency increases because the magnets have a non constant in the force between them (the force increases as the reciprocal of the square of the distance).
Very true. That's why I like DSL linux which fits onto a 50 Meg credit card CD. Because it's banging against it's limit (which they won't change, that's the point of it), they only put the really good and important stuff in.
I thought her arguments were very valid. How could they change so much in a set of books that are so short? It's not like adapting Lord of the Rings, were the whole thing won't fit.
It's sad that color still plays such an enormous role in what sells on TV. I guess the sci-fi channel felt that they would get more advertising dollars without all of the red and brown cast members.
I'm really sorry to see the screen savers go away. I wasn't a fan of the original, but I enjoyed the Alex/Kevin/Sarah/Yoshi days. They presented a wide variety of topics in an entertaining way, and I haven't missed a show in over a month. They were able to inform the public about things like Firefox, Linux, an war driving that most mainstream people wouldn't be exposed to. It may not have had the eye candy of Morgan Webb or Tina Wood, but it had a soul.
I hope they don't create yet another Tommy Tallarico show (not that's he's bad, he's just on way to much). They must have looked at their ratings and said "hey, shows with sexy women really draw in viewers. Screw variety, put on X-Play 24-7"
I wish them the best of luck, the ones who got let go, and the ones who didn't but aren't long for the TV world. I hope they are able to start up something web based and independent for themselves. I know I'll watch it if they do.
It looked fishy to me too. People want to see something and they turn all of there filters off. "It must be true, I read it on SlashDot, I even saw pictures and everything." Then they go on parroting back what this guys article said. Believe when your playing it (and I'm apologizing).
I mean, people would sing my praises for months if I wrote that I had ported the Halo to the NES and showed a few flashy screens I made and a toaster next to an old NES with some wires.
You can't believe everything you see on TV or read on SlashDot. Given that, maybe I should would on that Halo port...
It sounds like a ploy to keep students from going into other fields. How else can the keep up the rolls in the computer science department? "No no no, outsourcing won't take the jobs away, here, pay for this course and we'll show you."
If you were really trying for the Oz crowd (scarecrows and ruby slippers not shankings and rapes), the Harry Potter machine might be a more profitable choice. Lots of possibilities, and a very large and loyal fan base.
And if they did want the other Oz, they could always hang out in the Azkaban section of the game.
It made me think of Mr. Freeze from the old Batman TV show. Didn't he have a German accent?
I guess he really is a villain if he's freezing Linux on us. At least the penguin will be OK.
Slashdot Mirror
When I read about the towel interface I got really excited. I hope this means I'll be able to put the towel over my head and play the old Infocom game Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Because you never want to go anywhere without a towel. Douglas Adams was ahead of his time.
It froze on the loading of game 4 for me. Sucked up 100% of the CPU and wouldn't respond. Seemed slow before that point too. Might be an OK puzzle game but only if they get it working.
Was it "The Subliminal Man?"
http://www.searchlores.org/opr0207B.htm
Everyone talks about benchmarking or comparing themselves to others. The first step in this scenario is being able to communicate what your organization does, then how well it does it. If you can't do that... forget benchmarking, and forget being able to validate your' IT organization's value.
It is most important to first look at the work being done. Even if your processes/activities aren't formalized, every organization has elements of problem management, change management, monitoring, inventory management. However, it is critical to recognize that many organizations think of the work very differently. Do you do release management? If so, are you in development or operations? Because release management may mean packaging a newly developed application for release into the environment (development views it this way), or it may mean performing all the functions necessary (e.g., reviewing support capabilities, evaluating risk, performing load balancing) to actually drop the new application into the environment (operations views it this way). Does your organization think of asset management in conjunction with the configuration of the environment and IT finances or does it simply view asset management as inventory management?
Once you identify the work, start to look who are responsible for those functions and what tools they are using. That will tell you how the work is being performed. Are there too many work overlaps? Are work hand-offs not covered? Do we have too many tools performing similar functions, or are we missing some automation opportunities? This information can be easily captured at the task level, as long as you provide those in your organization with a high-level example of each of the work areas.
Now that you have the work being performed identified and the mix of people and automation necessary to make it function, you are ready to consistently capture the performance necessary for benchmarking. It is true, there are no two 'identical' companies and even within similar industries, organizations are quite different. As such, apples-to-apples comparisons are rare. However, many valuable comparisons can be made. A number of the previous posts made some good suggestions regarding performance measures and not creating SLAs unless they are necessary and unless you can validate the numbers promised. You don't need a lot of metrics. In fact, the metrics you capture will change as your organization matures. Start measuring the things you are capable of measuring. As you mature you will grow into identifying those measures that are relevant to the processes, the business, and your regulatory requirements.
Once you are capable of capturing and communicating what you do and how well you do it, then you are ready to compare against others that can do the same. The company we used for IT process benchmarking did it this way and it worked well for us.
I would assume that it's similar to casting in that the orientation matters. If the handle is attached to the mug, you should be able to orient the model you are creating such that the handle is on top (the mug is created on it's side). That way you never start making a handle that isn't attached to the mug at that stage. It would require the user to orient the computer model so that orphins were never created as the piece is built up.
"When the sled had been accelerated to its top speed of 10 kilometres per second, laser and pyrotechnic devices would be used to separate the cone from the sled. Then, the cone would skid into a side tunnel, losing some speed due to friction with the tunnel's walls. The tunnel would direct the cone to a ramp angled at 30 to the horizon, where the cone would launch towards space at about 8 kilometres per second, or more than 23 times the speed of sound. ... Anything launched in this way would have to be able to survive enormous accelerations - more than 2000 times the acceleration due to gravity (2000g)."
They claim that the payload would be accelerated slowly around the ring. The huge acceleration occurs when the payload's trajectory is changed to angle it up 30 degrees towards the sky. Why wouldn't they angle the ring itself at 30 degrees, releasing the payload at the point where the tangent points up at 30 degrees? They wouldn't need a ramp at all, just a piece that moves out of the way before the payload swings around the loop again.
The phrasing does sound a lot like Shatner, who would be great at reading the finalists for these at a contest. I bet there are lots of Star Trek poems possible. It also sounds a little bit like Adam West from Batman.
Groups involved with the coalition include:
IPBN - Indigenous Peoples Biodiversity Network in Cusco, Peru
SEARICE - South East Asia Regional Inititiaves in Community Empowerment Philippines
ETC Group - Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration in Ottawa
Is that the best this organization is bringing? Why is this even news? Can anyone create a catchy name for an award, put it on a web page, and this then becomes real news? For crying out loud, those fakers even spelled "Initiatives" wrong. Not that my own spelling is great, but am I the only one that see how fake this is?
The article goes on to say that it's the proprietary routines in the GPU that will cause the problem, since those are found in the nvidia graphics chips. What I found interesting was Microsoft's own need for emulation, re-writing proprietary graphics routines much the same way that wine or other emulators need to in order to do their jobs. It makes me wonder if Microsoft will wind up on the other side of the gooey emulation stick.
You actually get to roleplay your character, which is an important part of the experience. Instead of killing X number of rats so you can gain points to kill bigger things, or mining gold so you spend more billable hours on the game, the range of options and quests is much broader.
Certainly the ability of the players to customize their environment is also much higher, as well as being easier to accomplish. Adding flair and pizzazz to a player can be as easy as modifying a text string.
It made me wonder what other applications there might be for these kinds of filters, which I assume is what the authors intended.
Who knows more good people? Someone who has had more time to meet them and see what they're like in the long haul and hard times.
Who knows what's bad in the market? People who have had to deal with the products and use then. People who have used something for 1 month know how to dumb it down for the new folks, but long term users understand all of the tasks that really need to get done using the product. They also understand the market dynamics and product pricing better.
Who knows how to handle money? If you had to give your money to someone to hold for you, would you pick the 23 year old or the 40+ year old? Like he said in the article, "If you try something that blows up and leaves you broke at 26, big deal." You know that the 40+ year old is trying harder and has more money management experience.
These mirrors work by spinning a pan of mercury. The force on the fluid is a function of its distance from the spin axis. The shape formed is a parabola, which is just what you would want for a telescope (collimated ray bundles formed into a point). If you put annular shield say 5 inches from the edge, then the edge of the mirror where the dust collects would be covered and wouldn't affect the image quality so much. There might also be some type of surface duster under that edge that could be used every now and then to lift off the particles. The ripples would die out after a while and you could go back to the astronomy.
Hey, some of my best friends are midgets!
The magnets do the same, but the have the additional non-linearity in the force which adds even more to the frequency shift. I mentioned the "tennis ball" like loss when I was talking about the heat loss.
This is blowing my mind. You would think it should be a constant frequency with decay, like the classical pendulum. The difference between the classical pendulum and this case is that for a pendulum, the force is constant; with the magnet, the force is inversely proportional to the distance between the magnets. As the energy in the velocity (E=1/2mv^2) is converted to heat, the magnets have a lower velocity so they travel a shorter distance away from the other magnet. The closer the magnets are, the greater the force, again reducing the period between "clacks". The frequency increases because the magnets have a non constant in the force between them (the force increases as the reciprocal of the square of the distance).
Very true. That's why I like DSL linux which fits onto a 50 Meg credit card CD. Because it's banging against it's limit (which they won't change, that's the point of it), they only put the really good and important stuff in.
It's sad that color still plays such an enormous role in what sells on TV. I guess the sci-fi channel felt that they would get more advertising dollars without all of the red and brown cast members.
I hope they don't create yet another Tommy Tallarico show (not that's he's bad, he's just on way to much). They must have looked at their ratings and said "hey, shows with sexy women really draw in viewers. Screw variety, put on X-Play 24-7"
I wish them the best of luck, the ones who got let go, and the ones who didn't but aren't long for the TV world. I hope they are able to start up something web based and independent for themselves. I know I'll watch it if they do.
I mean, people would sing my praises for months if I wrote that I had ported the Halo to the NES and showed a few flashy screens I made and a toaster next to an old NES with some wires.
You can't believe everything you see on TV or read on SlashDot. Given that, maybe I should would on that Halo port...
It sounds like a ploy to keep students from going into other fields. How else can the keep up the rolls in the computer science department? "No no no, outsourcing won't take the jobs away, here, pay for this course and we'll show you."
And if they did want the other Oz, they could always hang out in the Azkaban section of the game.
How can expect that poor old man to save Enterprise when he couldn't even float Iron Chef USA? "Today's theme ingredient is... TIME TRAVEL"
It made me think of Mr. Freeze from the old Batman TV show. Didn't he have a German accent? I guess he really is a villain if he's freezing Linux on us. At least the penguin will be OK.