Changes are needed... but not in the kernel
on
Fresh Air For Windows?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Seems odd for such a non-technical article to latch onto a term like "micro-kernel" like it was all hot and new. OS X is built on a BSD which has it's roots in 60's and 70's OS design, just like the VMS roots of WinNT.
OS X didn't change the world by bringing some great new underlying architecture to the table. In fact, their kernel and filesystem are arguably getting long in the tooth. The value that OS X brought to the table was the fantastic Carbon and Cocoa development platforms. And they have continued to execute and iterate on these platforms, providing the "Core" series of APIs (CoreGraphics, CoreAnimation, CoreAudio, etc.) to make certain HW services more accessible.
There's very little cool stuff to be gained in the windows world by developing a new kernel from scratch. A quantum leap to something like Singularity would not solve MS's problem. The problem is the platform. What's really dead and bloated is the Win32 subsystem. The kernel doesn't need major tweaking. In fact, the NT kernel was designed from the beginning such that it could easily run the old busted Win32 subsystem alongside a new subsystem without needing to resort to expensive virtualization.
Unfortunately, the way Microsoft is built today it have a fatal organizational flaw that prevents creating the next great Windows platform. The platform/dev tools team and the OS team are in completely different business groups within the company. The platform team develops the wonderful.NET platform for small/medium applications and server apps while the OS team keeps crudging along with Win32. Managed languages have their place, but they have yet to gain traction for any top shelf large-scale windows client application vendors (Office, Adobe, etc.) Major client application development still relies on unmanaged APIs, and IMHO the Windows unmanaged APIs are arguably the worst (viable) development platform available today.
What Windows needs is a new subsystem/development platform to break with Win32, providing simplified, extensible *unmanaged* application development, with modern easy-to-use abstractions for hardware services such as graphics, data, audio and networking (which would probably look not entirely unlike an unmanaged counterpart to WPF/WCF/WinFS).
Was Nigeria using signed ints to indicate an applicant's financial status? I could see Bill's balance causing an overflow and appearing in the negatives leading to misinterpretation...
Most citizens of Africa and indeed, any "developing" country, have very difficult times obtaining US visas. The presumption of US visa officers is that you are an intending immigrant unless you show otherwise, ie, guilty unless proven innocent. Even if one provides paperwork like financial statements, etc, they are often thought to be forged, even if not. It all boils down to a quick interview of a couple of minutes at most where the officer has to review all documents and make a snap decision.
I guess Nigeria just wanted to give the US a taste of its own medicine.
Japan was basically levelled in the Second World War, and thus enjoyed the benefits of rebuilding infrastructure following logical planning for the future from the ground up, unlike the US/EU that are saddled with centuries-old cities. It's much easier to lay fiber if you've already got the conduits, etc. for it.
This is disturbing for cross-platform devs.
on
Intel Purchases Havok
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· Score: 4, Interesting
All game consoles of the current generation use non-Intel chips. Amongst games devs, Havok are reowned for their quality technical support, and the work they put into tweaking their physics engine for all the platforms, Intel PCs, AMD, and PPC consoles.
What's to say Havok won't "focus" their optimization efforts in the future on Intel exclusively?
This is sort of like what Sony did with SN systems (a very good maker of third-party dev tools for consoles) and then dropping all support for non-Sony platforms.
Most, if not all of my employers have had policies forbidding the autoforward of corporate email to external accounts, for the obvious confidentiality/security reasons.
The site paints this to be a cool hack that MS never intended, but really, Microsoft may have always intended for this to happen officially in the future. They already officially support Xbox 360 controller use on Windows, for instance and have released drivers. This is the logical next step.
Really, it's part of their strategy to converge the 360 and Windows gaming worlds together... witness the recent reorganization into a single games division, for instance.
I'm intrigued reading this article. At, Nintendo, our r & D are working also working on something simliar to this. taking the integration of physical activity with video games to a whole new level... we're researching motion tracking in 3-D using purely computer vision techniques, and using no sensors worn on the body, like traditional mocap techniques require.
One difference is that we track the motion in 3-D space, using spatial extraction coupled with a stochastic Kalman-filter technique, rather than doing silloutte matching like these Taiwan guys are doing.
We'd rather not say more at this point, but suffice to say, we've got some interesting preliminary prototypes of this technology, such as Swing Swing Revolution, like DDR, except you have to do swing moves, not merely hit the arrows with your feet, and Kung Fu Master, a remake of the venerable NES game, where you guessed it, need to do real punching and kicking.
We look forward to commercializing this and making Nintendo the first and foremost choice of overweight geeks everywhere!
Most of Europe and China, if you try to access Google Video, you are told it's not available in your country yet. Why they have this restriction by unilaterally banning ALL videos from users of said countries is beyond me.
Is it legal (due to censorship policies)? Than why do the other sites not have this?
This is a major detractor of Google Video's usability in my opinion.
This has been available for several years now in Japan and other non-US markets. The reason why Toyota didn't release this tech in the US was fear of liability lawsuits in the US' sue-happy culture if something went wrong. Have they changed their stance on this?
I work in the R&D division of a major Japanese video game corporation. Some members of my research group have been working with major Japanese automakers (whose identity I am not at liberty to discuss at the moment) to apply concepts learned in video game design to driving cars. Instead of a cumbersome set of multiple controls, we are experimenting with a single two-axis controller, one axis controlling acceleration and braking in the up-down direction, and the other controlling steering in the left-right direction. Gear shifting is mapped to the start and select buttons. We're experimenting with a number of control devices, from the Power Glove to GameCube controllers as input effectors.
We believe that this research will lead to much more drivable and intuitively controllable autos, especially for a generation of drivers raised on video games, and will cause fewer accidents on the road, due to the intuitive nature of the control mechanisms and the ingrained neurological psycho-response actuations which have developed from extensive game playing. It will further open up driving to those who may not have all limbs working, but as long as one has thumb control, driving will be accessible to all. I look forward to seeing this coming revolution on the commericial market.
I work in the R&D division of a major Japanese video game corporation. Some members of my research group have been working with major Japanese automakers (whose identity I am not at liberty to discuss at the moment) to apply concepts learned in video game design to driving cars. Instead of a cumbersome set of multiple controls, we are experimenting with a single two-axis controller, one axis controlling acceleration and braking in the up-down direction, and the other controlling steering in the left-right direction. Gear shifting is mapped to the start and select buttons. We're experimenting with a number of control devices, from the Power Glove to GameCube controllers as input effectors.
We believe that this research will lead to much more drivable and intuitively controllable autos, especially for a generation of drivers raised on video games, and will cause fewer accidents on the road, due to the intuitive nature of the control mechanisms and the ingrained neurological psycho-response actuations which have developed from extensive game playing. It will further open up driving to those who may not have all limbs working, but as long as one has thumb control, driving will be accessible to all. I look forward to seeing this coming revolution on the commericial market.
At my last job at SEGA, my lab was in charge of coming up with many different and pioneering ideas for new ways to play video games, many of which, for one reason or another, never made it to market.
One of those was HOLO-GENESIS. It was a 3-D laser holographic projection device for the MegaDrive/geneis. It could have displayed 3-D rendered images, in full-color, in real-time, using a system of 3 red/green/blue lasers, and a finely-meshed micro-faceted surface which gave a pseudo 3-D effect based on carefully utilized light diffraction effects, a la printed holograms.
It was slated to come out in mid-1995, but at the time, we couldn't get a acceptable frame rate (3-D graphics accelerator hardware was still very primitive and expensive, the province of SGI workstations and arcade machines), so we decided to not commercialize it at the time.
In any case, I must say, this is a very interesting announcement, and I must congratulate IBM for further and seemingly admirable work on bringing such technology to the market. Hopefully they can continue to lower the price point and make it adopted wider.
Ever notice how nowadays, almost all major movies are simultaneously released worldwide -- or at the most, within a few days?
Before Internet piracy took off, movies would be delayed for months before overseas release.
And I would guess that broadband ISPs, hard drive makers, CD/DVD media or burner manufacturers, PC makers in general have also benefitted enormously over the past few years due to illicit copying, These technologies -- all with legitimate non-piracy applications -- are now inexpensive ubiquitous. Had it not been for piracy, I'd submit it wouldn't be the case today.
I'm not claiming it's justifiable morally, but it's not all 100% evil.
For schools, from a maintanance and TCO point of view, game consoles often prove to be financially more viable as a technology platform than PCs or Macs, very recently studies have shown, especially with the capabilities of the next generation.
Even using older game consoles such as N64 and even SNES/SFC enables schools, particularly in rural areas, to immediately gain the benefits of technology without the cost and maintainence expense associated with traditional PC platforms.
Nintendo have done a lot of research into uses of Nintendo consoles other than gaming, such as using it as a inexpensive terminal for Internet access, or more compellingly, education, and we have done preliminary work with various Chinese governmental bodies and NGOs to make games such as Super Marx Brothers and The Legend of Deng Xiaoping to teach Chinese youth in new and engaging dynamic ways.
We look forward to seeing the results of this experiment in China, and will likely expand to other developing countries if it goes well.
Before Google and Yahoo, there was Microsoft Research or maybe PARC, DEC, SGI as the "hot place" to work in industry for Ph.Ds who didn't want to go into academia. Before THAT there was Bellcore, IBM Research, etc getting all the brains and publishing all the papers.
Empires rise and fall... I don't see anything usual about the hiring practices of Google or Yahoo snatching up the best talent.
Ever wonder what happened to all those mainframe or COBOL folks? Knowing about E-commerce, Unix, Windows, Java, XML, or whatever the technology or trend du jour is might be impressive now, but in a few years, come the next thing, where will you be then? These things change at the blink of an eye.
On the other hand, algorithms, computability theory, formal languages, predicate logic, etc. don't.
A solid foundation of the theory will enable you to understand and learn whatever specific language or technology you need for the job, and allow you to be nimble enough to quickly pick up and go with the latest trends as the market changes.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems odd for such a non-technical article to latch onto a term like "micro-kernel" like it was all hot and new. OS X is built on a BSD which has it's roots in 60's and 70's OS design, just like the VMS roots of WinNT.
OS X didn't change the world by bringing some great new underlying architecture to the table. In fact, their kernel and filesystem are arguably getting long in the tooth. The value that OS X brought to the table was the fantastic Carbon and Cocoa development platforms. And they have continued to execute and iterate on these platforms, providing the "Core" series of APIs (CoreGraphics, CoreAnimation, CoreAudio, etc.) to make certain HW services more accessible.
There's very little cool stuff to be gained in the windows world by developing a new kernel from scratch. A quantum leap to something like Singularity would not solve MS's problem. The problem is the platform. What's really dead and bloated is the Win32 subsystem. The kernel doesn't need major tweaking. In fact, the NT kernel was designed from the beginning such that it could easily run the old busted Win32 subsystem alongside a new subsystem without needing to resort to expensive virtualization.
Unfortunately, the way Microsoft is built today it have a fatal organizational flaw that prevents creating the next great Windows platform. The platform/dev tools team and the OS team are in completely different business groups within the company. The platform team develops the wonderful .NET platform for small/medium applications and server apps while the OS team keeps crudging along with Win32. Managed languages have their place, but they have yet to gain traction for any top shelf large-scale windows client application vendors (Office, Adobe, etc.) Major client application development still relies on unmanaged APIs, and IMHO the Windows unmanaged APIs are arguably the worst (viable) development platform available today.
What Windows needs is a new subsystem/development platform to break with Win32, providing simplified, extensible *unmanaged* application development, with modern easy-to-use abstractions for hardware services such as graphics, data, audio and networking (which would probably look not entirely unlike an unmanaged counterpart to WPF/WCF/WinFS).
The article doesn't say anything about how they found out about this espionage. Anyone have more info on this?
Was Nigeria using signed ints to indicate an applicant's financial status? I could see Bill's balance causing an overflow and appearing in the negatives leading to misinterpretation...
Most citizens of Africa and indeed, any "developing" country, have very difficult times obtaining US visas. The presumption of US visa officers is that you are an intending immigrant unless you show otherwise, ie, guilty unless proven innocent. Even if one provides paperwork like financial statements, etc, they are often thought to be forged, even if not. It all boils down to a quick interview of a couple of minutes at most where the officer has to review all documents and make a snap decision.
I guess Nigeria just wanted to give the US a taste of its own medicine.
Japan was basically levelled in the Second World War, and thus enjoyed the benefits of rebuilding infrastructure following logical planning for the future from the ground up, unlike the US/EU that are saddled with centuries-old cities. It's much easier to lay fiber if you've already got the conduits, etc. for it.
All game consoles of the current generation use non-Intel chips. Amongst games devs, Havok are reowned for their quality technical support, and the work they put into tweaking their physics engine for all the platforms, Intel PCs, AMD, and PPC consoles.
What's to say Havok won't "focus" their optimization efforts in the future on Intel exclusively?
This is sort of like what Sony did with SN systems (a very good maker of third-party dev tools for consoles) and then dropping all support for non-Sony platforms.
Most, if not all of my employers have had policies forbidding the autoforward of corporate email to external accounts, for the obvious confidentiality/security reasons.
There's no oil on the moon as far as I know...
The site paints this to be a cool hack that MS never intended, but really, Microsoft may have always intended for this to happen officially in the future. They already officially support Xbox 360 controller use on Windows, for instance and have released drivers. This is the logical next step.
Really, it's part of their strategy to converge the 360 and Windows gaming worlds together... witness the recent reorganization into a single games division, for instance.
I'm intrigued reading this article. At, Nintendo, our r & D are working also working on something simliar to this. taking the integration of physical activity with video games to a whole new level... we're researching motion tracking in 3-D using purely computer vision techniques, and using no sensors worn on the body, like traditional mocap techniques require.
One difference is that we track the motion in 3-D space, using spatial extraction coupled with a stochastic Kalman-filter technique, rather than doing silloutte matching like these Taiwan guys are doing.
We'd rather not say more at this point, but suffice to say, we've got some interesting preliminary prototypes of this technology, such as Swing Swing Revolution, like DDR, except you have to do swing moves, not merely hit the arrows with your feet, and Kung Fu Master, a remake of the venerable NES game, where you guessed it, need to do real punching and kicking.
We look forward to commercializing this and making Nintendo the first and foremost choice of overweight geeks everywhere!
Did the Department of Redundancy Department make up that name?
The USA did it to China indeed.
Most of Europe and China, if you try to access Google Video, you are told it's not available in your country yet. Why they have this restriction by unilaterally banning ALL videos from users of said countries is beyond me.
Is it legal (due to censorship policies)? Than why do the other sites not have this?
This is a major detractor of Google Video's usability in my opinion.
Step 1: DVI (Analogue or Digital)->HD-SDI - XDVI-20s
1 5.html
http://www.doremilabs.com/products/XDVI-20.htm
http://www.onevideo.co.uk/xdvi20s-p-359.html
(In the UK £2,687.23 inc VAT)
Step 2: HD-SDI capture board - Blackmagic decklink HD pro 4:4:4
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/hd/
http://www.onevideo.co.uk/decklink-hd-pro-444-p-1
(In the UK £959.98 inc VAT)
There are many other alternatives to this. This is just one suggestion that I have tested to work.
For my capture PC:
Opteron 254 (2.8ghz)
Tyan Thunder K8WE
Adaptec PCI-X Ultra 320 SCSI Raid controller (39320 series)
4 x 300GB 10,000rpm Seagate SCSI disks running as raid0 (6-8 would be best)
New Nvidia graphics card
2GB ECC RAM
This has been available for several years now in Japan and other non-US markets. The reason why Toyota didn't release this tech in the US was fear of liability lawsuits in the US' sue-happy culture if something went wrong. Have they changed their stance on this?
I work in the R&D division of a major Japanese video game corporation. Some members of my research group have been working with major Japanese automakers (whose identity I am not at liberty to discuss at the moment) to apply concepts learned in video game design to driving cars. Instead of a cumbersome set of multiple controls, we are experimenting with a single two-axis controller, one axis controlling acceleration and braking in the up-down direction, and the other controlling steering in the left-right direction. Gear shifting is mapped to the start and select buttons. We're experimenting with a number of control devices, from the Power Glove to GameCube controllers as input effectors.
We believe that this research will lead to much more drivable and intuitively controllable autos, especially for a generation of drivers raised on video games, and will cause fewer accidents on the road, due to the intuitive nature of the control mechanisms and the ingrained neurological psycho-response actuations which have developed from extensive game playing. It will further open up driving to those who may not have all limbs working, but as long as one has thumb control, driving will be accessible to all. I look forward to seeing this coming revolution on the commericial market.
I work in the R&D division of a major Japanese video game corporation. Some members of my research group have been working with major Japanese automakers (whose identity I am not at liberty to discuss at the moment) to apply concepts learned in video game design to driving cars. Instead of a cumbersome set of multiple controls, we are experimenting with a single two-axis controller, one axis controlling acceleration and braking in the up-down direction, and the other controlling steering in the left-right direction. Gear shifting is mapped to the start and select buttons. We're experimenting with a number of control devices, from the Power Glove to GameCube controllers as input effectors.
We believe that this research will lead to much more drivable and intuitively controllable autos, especially for a generation of drivers raised on video games, and will cause fewer accidents on the road, due to the intuitive nature of the control mechanisms and the ingrained neurological psycho-response actuations which have developed from extensive game playing. It will further open up driving to those who may not have all limbs working, but as long as one has thumb control, driving will be accessible to all. I look forward to seeing this coming revolution on the commericial market.
... for Slashdot stories!
or Pig Latin, etc... when will they learn?
At my last job at SEGA, my lab was in charge of coming up with many different and pioneering ideas for new ways to play video games, many of which, for one reason or another, never made it to market.
One of those was HOLO-GENESIS. It was a 3-D laser holographic projection device for the MegaDrive/geneis. It could have displayed 3-D rendered images, in full-color, in real-time, using a system of 3 red/green/blue lasers, and a finely-meshed micro-faceted surface which gave a pseudo 3-D effect based on carefully utilized light diffraction effects, a la printed holograms.
It was slated to come out in mid-1995, but at the time, we couldn't get a acceptable frame rate (3-D graphics accelerator hardware was still very primitive and expensive, the province of SGI workstations and arcade machines), so we decided to not commercialize it at the time.
In any case, I must say, this is a very interesting announcement, and I must congratulate IBM for further and seemingly admirable work on bringing such technology to the market. Hopefully they can continue to lower the price point and make it adopted wider.
Ever notice how nowadays, almost all major movies are simultaneously released worldwide -- or at the most, within a few days?
/DVD media or burner manufacturers, PC makers in general have also benefitted enormously over the past few years due to illicit copying, These technologies -- all with legitimate non-piracy applications -- are now inexpensive ubiquitous. Had it not been for piracy, I'd submit it wouldn't be the case today.
Before Internet piracy took off, movies would be delayed for months before overseas release.
And I would guess that broadband ISPs, hard drive makers, CD
I'm not claiming it's justifiable morally, but it's not all 100% evil.
For schools, from a maintanance and TCO point of view, game consoles often prove to be financially more viable as a technology platform than PCs or Macs, very recently studies have shown, especially with the capabilities of the next generation.
Even using older game consoles such as N64 and even SNES/SFC enables schools, particularly in rural areas, to immediately gain the benefits of technology without the cost and maintainence expense associated with traditional PC platforms.
Nintendo have done a lot of research into uses of Nintendo consoles other than gaming, such as using it as a inexpensive terminal for Internet access, or more compellingly, education, and we have done preliminary work with various Chinese governmental bodies and NGOs to make games such as Super Marx Brothers and The Legend of Deng Xiaoping to teach Chinese youth in new and engaging dynamic ways.
We look forward to seeing the results of this experiment in China, and will likely expand to other developing countries if it goes well.
How much was the voltage? Would the power be more than 1.21 Gigawatts?
Was it part of a modified DeLorean travelling at 88 mph?
Before Google and Yahoo, there was Microsoft Research or maybe PARC, DEC, SGI as the "hot place" to work in industry for Ph.Ds who didn't want to go into academia. Before THAT there was Bellcore, IBM Research, etc getting all the brains and publishing all the papers.
Empires rise and fall... I don't see anything usual about the hiring practices of Google or Yahoo snatching up the best talent.
Another player will come along in due time...
Should I study Data Warehousing or E-Commerce?
You should be studying Computer Science...
Ever wonder what happened to all those mainframe or COBOL folks? Knowing about E-commerce, Unix, Windows, Java, XML, or whatever the technology or trend du jour is might be impressive now, but in a few years, come the next thing, where will you be then? These things change at the blink of an eye.
On the other hand, algorithms, computability theory, formal languages, predicate logic, etc. don't.
A solid foundation of the theory will enable you to understand and learn whatever specific language or technology you need for the job, and allow you to be nimble enough to quickly pick up and go with the latest trends as the market changes.