One of the problems with the current techniques is that programmers have to write shaders and artists have to make normal maps, high and low poly versions of models, and so on. It may be that raytracing reduces some of the need to do this work, and thus making games cheaper and faster to create.
I always wonder why these sort of discussions leave out public libraries. Our local library has an amazing DVD selection (much of it purchased from a failed video store). Sure, the new stuff is often hard to get (Hot Fuzz had 66 holds on it, last I checked), but there's tons of classics, Anime, and other things I missed in the theater.
It's become a weekly tradition for me to head out to the library after Saturday breakfast and return with my booty of media. Like Santa, I open my sack and hand out books and movies to my kids and occasionally my wife (depending on whether or not she's on the naughty list).
My kids love hearing tales of horrible injuries for some reason. I started to rattle off the bike and car accidents that hit our family over the years. In one, my dad had part of his scalp peeled back (no helmet) when hit by a car on his bike. In another, my 3 year-old sister was in the back seat without a seat belt during a car accident. Then there was the time I was hit by a motorcycle while on my bike - neither one was wearing a helmet and the motorcycle rider got some serious hospital bills.
I think there's some risks, such as abduction, which are completely overblown. My wife was admitting she sometimes worries about it last night. I told her she should worry about heart disease instead. I tell my kids they shouldn't worry about monsters, they should worry about dogs off their leashes or walking in the street.
Personally I'm quite happy with the level of parenting I give my kids, which includes managing their screen time and amount of exercise. Plus they're not doing the crazy things I used to do, like ride the bus downtown at age five or climb cliffs in the rain without ropes when I was twelve. Insanity . . .
We've started to use Microsoft's SharePoint product, which is not particularly user-friendly. In one case, a coworker was getting JavaScript errors whenever she tried to edit a web part. I switched over to Firefox to try and debug and it turns out it worked perfectly without any errors.
Sadly we have a lot of web-based vendor products that don't work with Firefox, but I love breaking it out for these sorts of things. It's also great for validating Internet pages, making sure they'll work with other standards-based browsers.
Every time I visit Microsoft now, I get an annoying popup telling me how great Silverlight is. It's horribly annoying, and doesn't exactly enhance my feeling about them as a company. If a product doesn't stand on its merit, telling me repeatedly how great it is simply turns me off. Personally I wish they'd be patient and use existing client standards. Making up new standards to suit your business model is frustrating as a developer.
Bottlenose dolphins never truly sleep, at least not like humans. Half their brains shut down, while the other side keeps a watchful eye for predators. A couple hours later, the other half does the same trick.
It's likely that sleep is essential, but there are various tricks to minimize it if evolution demands.
They could also use the same sugar-based markers that sperm uses. This makes the cell universally ignored by the immune system. Of course, certain cancers use the same trick, so I'm not sure you want to put a bunch of them in your body.
Personally I think I'd rather have my own personal cell line which matches my immune system exactly. The latest cloning news of adult cells shows it's quite likely in my lifetime.
Years ago, before I had my second kid, I created a Fossil computer that was Victorian themed in brass, wood, and had an old fish fossil mounted where the tag went. It took a huge amount of time, but was one of those great father-son bonding experiences (he has a full machine shop, so he did most of the work). I loved the look and still feel I should turn it into a Media PC and stick it in our living room.
It seems a little sad that it's now my daughter's computer, sitting on the floor. The most excitement it gets these days is to play online Barbie or NickJr games.
I have a lot of applications that are elegant enough. It may not have perfect validation for every field and not all the GUI bells and whistles, but it does what it's supposed to. I know my share of developers that spend a ton of time making their code elegant and beautiful. In one case, the developer spent so much time making their N-tier application with huge numbers of tables that were normalized to the bajillionth degree that they were finally let go. The goal is to meet the need, not to fulfill some inner desire to create art with lines of code.
There's plenty of food in the world. The issue is one of distribution, not lack of ability to grow it. Typically hunger and poverty go hand in hand with war and social inequalities. If you look at the Global Hunger Map (requires Google Earth), you'll see hunger is worst in the Middle East, central Africa, and parts of India. Sending rice or laptops to those places will help little until they can establish safety and equality.
Let me be the first to object to using tidal energy as a "renewable" resource. Don't people know that it will cause the moon to fly away from the Earth at ever increasing speeds? It's not like the energy is free, you know. Call me a lunatic if you'd like, but I refuse to destroy our moon just to let people run their massive new television sets.
Society #3 has done a good job locking up the lunatics as well as policing the borders to make sure "insane" societies don't attack. Because weapons of mass destruction are difficult to get, the few insane individuals who aren't treated or locked up can do little damage. Rates of death from violent means far below that of natural causes, such as cancer, accidents, and heart disease. This allows the society to out compete the neighboring violet countries, due to extended lifespans, greater time for education, and the rule of law allowing for peaceful dispute mediation.
Looking around, it seems that more and more countries are moving in this direction. I haven't known anyone who died from violent assault, but I've known lots of people who have died of cancer. I know no one who regularly carries a weapon around. The unfortunate part is that this type of society seems to go a bit counter to human nature. Fortunately people are pretty flexible and continue to evolve at a surprisingly fast rate.
Sure, having innate gifts helps, but it doesn't do any good if you don't show up and get things done. That's why doing homework is part of my kids' nightly routine. It's also why being borderline obsessive/compulsive tends to get you ahead academically and in many work environments. Of course, it means tearing my kids away from their current project for dinner time is occasionally an epic battle. I tell my son that our ability to intensely focus on things is our family's superpower, and should be used for good and not evil.
The other thing I've seen research on is that praising kids in general ways such as "you're smart" isn't very helpful. Being specific with your praise, such as "you've got a good memory and learn spelling words well" is more effectively motivating.
I remember playing Grand Theft Auto pretty seriously for a few days. As I drove around, I had this urge to drive over curbs and look for places to do cool jumps. Fortunately I'm not mentally deficient, so I have this other part of my brain that advised me it wasn't such a keen idea.
Every experience has an effect, but it's not always to emulate what you see. Have you seen two girls, one cup?
They really seem to be pushing 3D interfaces in the article. While that's neat and all, I suspect there's a reason not every book is a pop-up book. Flat, 2D representations of data are typically the most efficient for our brain and eyeballs. For entertainment and representing 3D data, it can make sense. I just don't plan on coding in 3D any time soon.
Of course, the "IT guy" probably doesn't have any recourse if management decides to obtain unlicensed software while employed. Personally I think it's fairly idiotic for businesses to not be completely above-board when it comes to software licensing.
The gray goo event already happened, though they got the color wrong. It was actually green, and involved self-replicating nanobots using sunlight to make the atmosphere toxic and kill off most life on the planet.
Some of you might have heard of this Oxygen Catastrophe. Sad times for our planet, indeed.
This essay is probably my favorite I've seen on the subject.
I'd couple any dietary changes with regular exercise, especially cardiovascular.
My rule of thumb is that if I model my diet and exercise to humans living a thousand years ago, I'll reap the benefits of millions of years of evolution. If I eat weird stuff and sit around all day, I'll have to wait for a few hundred generations of humans to adapt before my distant offspring can benefit.
That's what I was shooting for, though admittedly it's challenging trying to find accurate values. There's individual universities doing cancer research without funding from the NCI, drug companies doing their own research, and so on. What I was shooting for was a single government agency that represented research at a national level.
I completely agree that our country spends a lot of money treating cancer. Mostly that's because so many people get it. Our neighbor just had surgery, radiation therapy, and is currently on her second round of chemotherapy. As a treatment, it basically kills her, just slightly less quickly than the cancer itself. It's also very expensive, with lots of office visits, surgical procedures, and lab tests.
As an interesting comparison, deaths due to heart disease have been improving. I know a couple people who would have died ten or twenty years ago from heart disease, but the treatments are really good now. My guess is that the nature of heart disease is mostly mechanical (e.g. tubes and a pump) while cancer is a problem of molecular biology. Unfortunately we just don't understand the latter well enough yet.
Basically everyone I've known who has died, has died of cancer. It drives me crazy that we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars to avenge the deaths of 3,000 people, while under four billion is spent on fighting cancer, which kills half a million people each year. It reminds me again how terrible people are at estimating risk.
These days, I often find myself watching or helping my kids play and less time playing myself.
Last night I had both kids playing Garry's Mod (a HL2 mod) against each other. Emma, who's four and a half, was having a great time spawning in odd things and making rebel companions. I did have to step in and mediate Emma wailed "Sam's murdering my buddies." Ah, parenting.
They also both spent a lot of time playing the experimental game Darwin Hill. Emma requested it, "The one where there's the bugs and you get to squish them!".
I work for a large healthcare organization and typically have very fast turn-around times (bugs often get squished within an hour). For clinical applications and other core applications, though, we're much more methodical and careful.
I often explain to the user that I can push changes out immediately, but it introduces certain risks. I then detail the risks they may face, and that if they say to go ahead anyway, at least they'll be aware of what might happen.
The catch is that in order to take advantage of the new language features, developers will potentially have to do twice as much work. Already JavaScript's event model varies between browsers. In my ideal world there'd be a single language and all modern browsers would support it fully.
After yesterday's CmdrTaco interview, it sounds like he's locked in a constant struggle with the marketing department. Perhaps this was a battle lost? Or maybe their evil mind-control rays are finally starting to work?
I imagine some parents would be thrilled about installing something like this in the car of their teenagers. "Come back by 10 pm or I'll shut off the car."
On a more serious note, not all tracking systems are inherently bad. There's an interesting story about a teenager whose parents installed a GPS tracking system into his car. Now he's going to court as the GPS record shows he wasn't speeding, unlike the police officer who wrote him a ticket.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the problems with the current techniques is that programmers have to write shaders and artists have to make normal maps, high and low poly versions of models, and so on. It may be that raytracing reduces some of the need to do this work, and thus making games cheaper and faster to create.
I always wonder why these sort of discussions leave out public libraries. Our local library has an amazing DVD selection (much of it purchased from a failed video store). Sure, the new stuff is often hard to get (Hot Fuzz had 66 holds on it, last I checked), but there's tons of classics, Anime, and other things I missed in the theater.
It's become a weekly tradition for me to head out to the library after Saturday breakfast and return with my booty of media. Like Santa, I open my sack and hand out books and movies to my kids and occasionally my wife (depending on whether or not she's on the naughty list).
My kids love hearing tales of horrible injuries for some reason. I started to rattle off the bike and car accidents that hit our family over the years. In one, my dad had part of his scalp peeled back (no helmet) when hit by a car on his bike. In another, my 3 year-old sister was in the back seat without a seat belt during a car accident. Then there was the time I was hit by a motorcycle while on my bike - neither one was wearing a helmet and the motorcycle rider got some serious hospital bills.
I think there's some risks, such as abduction, which are completely overblown. My wife was admitting she sometimes worries about it last night. I told her she should worry about heart disease instead. I tell my kids they shouldn't worry about monsters, they should worry about dogs off their leashes or walking in the street.
Personally I'm quite happy with the level of parenting I give my kids, which includes managing their screen time and amount of exercise. Plus they're not doing the crazy things I used to do, like ride the bus downtown at age five or climb cliffs in the rain without ropes when I was twelve. Insanity . . .
We've started to use Microsoft's SharePoint product, which is not particularly user-friendly. In one case, a coworker was getting JavaScript errors whenever she tried to edit a web part. I switched over to Firefox to try and debug and it turns out it worked perfectly without any errors.
Sadly we have a lot of web-based vendor products that don't work with Firefox, but I love breaking it out for these sorts of things. It's also great for validating Internet pages, making sure they'll work with other standards-based browsers.
Every time I visit Microsoft now, I get an annoying popup telling me how great Silverlight is. It's horribly annoying, and doesn't exactly enhance my feeling about them as a company. If a product doesn't stand on its merit, telling me repeatedly how great it is simply turns me off. Personally I wish they'd be patient and use existing client standards. Making up new standards to suit your business model is frustrating as a developer.
Bottlenose dolphins never truly sleep, at least not like humans. Half their brains shut down, while the other side keeps a watchful eye for predators. A couple hours later, the other half does the same trick.
It's likely that sleep is essential, but there are various tricks to minimize it if evolution demands.
They could also use the same sugar-based markers that sperm uses. This makes the cell universally ignored by the immune system. Of course, certain cancers use the same trick, so I'm not sure you want to put a bunch of them in your body.
Personally I think I'd rather have my own personal cell line which matches my immune system exactly. The latest cloning news of adult cells shows it's quite likely in my lifetime.
Years ago, before I had my second kid, I created a Fossil computer that was Victorian themed in brass, wood, and had an old fish fossil mounted where the tag went. It took a huge amount of time, but was one of those great father-son bonding experiences (he has a full machine shop, so he did most of the work). I loved the look and still feel I should turn it into a Media PC and stick it in our living room.
It seems a little sad that it's now my daughter's computer, sitting on the floor. The most excitement it gets these days is to play online Barbie or NickJr games.
I have a lot of applications that are elegant enough. It may not have perfect validation for every field and not all the GUI bells and whistles, but it does what it's supposed to. I know my share of developers that spend a ton of time making their code elegant and beautiful. In one case, the developer spent so much time making their N-tier application with huge numbers of tables that were normalized to the bajillionth degree that they were finally let go. The goal is to meet the need, not to fulfill some inner desire to create art with lines of code.
There's plenty of food in the world. The issue is one of distribution, not lack of ability to grow it. Typically hunger and poverty go hand in hand with war and social inequalities. If you look at the Global Hunger Map (requires Google Earth), you'll see hunger is worst in the Middle East, central Africa, and parts of India. Sending rice or laptops to those places will help little until they can establish safety and equality.
Let me be the first to object to using tidal energy as a "renewable" resource. Don't people know that it will cause the moon to fly away from the Earth at ever increasing speeds? It's not like the energy is free, you know. Call me a lunatic if you'd like, but I refuse to destroy our moon just to let people run their massive new television sets.
Society #3 has done a good job locking up the lunatics as well as policing the borders to make sure "insane" societies don't attack. Because weapons of mass destruction are difficult to get, the few insane individuals who aren't treated or locked up can do little damage. Rates of death from violent means far below that of natural causes, such as cancer, accidents, and heart disease. This allows the society to out compete the neighboring violet countries, due to extended lifespans, greater time for education, and the rule of law allowing for peaceful dispute mediation.
Looking around, it seems that more and more countries are moving in this direction. I haven't known anyone who died from violent assault, but I've known lots of people who have died of cancer. I know no one who regularly carries a weapon around. The unfortunate part is that this type of society seems to go a bit counter to human nature. Fortunately people are pretty flexible and continue to evolve at a surprisingly fast rate.
Sure, having innate gifts helps, but it doesn't do any good if you don't show up and get things done. That's why doing homework is part of my kids' nightly routine. It's also why being borderline obsessive/compulsive tends to get you ahead academically and in many work environments. Of course, it means tearing my kids away from their current project for dinner time is occasionally an epic battle. I tell my son that our ability to intensely focus on things is our family's superpower, and should be used for good and not evil.
The other thing I've seen research on is that praising kids in general ways such as "you're smart" isn't very helpful. Being specific with your praise, such as "you've got a good memory and learn spelling words well" is more effectively motivating.
I remember playing Grand Theft Auto pretty seriously for a few days. As I drove around, I had this urge to drive over curbs and look for places to do cool jumps. Fortunately I'm not mentally deficient, so I have this other part of my brain that advised me it wasn't such a keen idea.
Every experience has an effect, but it's not always to emulate what you see. Have you seen two girls, one cup?
They really seem to be pushing 3D interfaces in the article. While that's neat and all, I suspect there's a reason not every book is a pop-up book. Flat, 2D representations of data are typically the most efficient for our brain and eyeballs. For entertainment and representing 3D data, it can make sense. I just don't plan on coding in 3D any time soon.
Of course, the "IT guy" probably doesn't have any recourse if management decides to obtain unlicensed software while employed. Personally I think it's fairly idiotic for businesses to not be completely above-board when it comes to software licensing.
The gray goo event already happened, though they got the color wrong. It was actually green, and involved self-replicating nanobots using sunlight to make the atmosphere toxic and kill off most life on the planet.
Some of you might have heard of this Oxygen Catastrophe. Sad times for our planet, indeed.
This essay is probably my favorite I've seen on the subject.
I'd couple any dietary changes with regular exercise, especially cardiovascular.
My rule of thumb is that if I model my diet and exercise to humans living a thousand years ago, I'll reap the benefits of millions of years of evolution. If I eat weird stuff and sit around all day, I'll have to wait for a few hundred generations of humans to adapt before my distant offspring can benefit.
That's what I was shooting for, though admittedly it's challenging trying to find accurate values. There's individual universities doing cancer research without funding from the NCI, drug companies doing their own research, and so on. What I was shooting for was a single government agency that represented research at a national level.
I completely agree that our country spends a lot of money treating cancer. Mostly that's because so many people get it. Our neighbor just had surgery, radiation therapy, and is currently on her second round of chemotherapy. As a treatment, it basically kills her, just slightly less quickly than the cancer itself. It's also very expensive, with lots of office visits, surgical procedures, and lab tests.
As an interesting comparison, deaths due to heart disease have been improving. I know a couple people who would have died ten or twenty years ago from heart disease, but the treatments are really good now. My guess is that the nature of heart disease is mostly mechanical (e.g. tubes and a pump) while cancer is a problem of molecular biology. Unfortunately we just don't understand the latter well enough yet.
Basically everyone I've known who has died, has died of cancer. It drives me crazy that we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars to avenge the deaths of 3,000 people, while under four billion is spent on fighting cancer, which kills half a million people each year. It reminds me again how terrible people are at estimating risk.
References:
NCI budget
Cost of Iraq war
cancer deaths
These days, I often find myself watching or helping my kids play and less time playing myself.
Last night I had both kids playing Garry's Mod (a HL2 mod) against each other. Emma, who's four and a half, was having a great time spawning in odd things and making rebel companions. I did have to step in and mediate Emma wailed "Sam's murdering my buddies." Ah, parenting.
They also both spent a lot of time playing the experimental game Darwin Hill. Emma requested it, "The one where there's the bugs and you get to squish them!".
I work for a large healthcare organization and typically have very fast turn-around times (bugs often get squished within an hour). For clinical applications and other core applications, though, we're much more methodical and careful.
I often explain to the user that I can push changes out immediately, but it introduces certain risks. I then detail the risks they may face, and that if they say to go ahead anyway, at least they'll be aware of what might happen.
The catch is that in order to take advantage of the new language features, developers will potentially have to do twice as much work. Already JavaScript's event model varies between browsers. In my ideal world there'd be a single language and all modern browsers would support it fully.
After yesterday's CmdrTaco interview, it sounds like he's locked in a constant struggle with the marketing department. Perhaps this was a battle lost? Or maybe their evil mind-control rays are finally starting to work?
I imagine some parents would be thrilled about installing something like this in the car of their teenagers. "Come back by 10 pm or I'll shut off the car."
On a more serious note, not all tracking systems are inherently bad. There's an interesting story about a teenager whose parents installed a GPS tracking system into his car. Now he's going to court as the GPS record shows he wasn't speeding, unlike the police officer who wrote him a ticket.