There was also not enough correlation to math, because the problem sets were so basic. I think a lot of kids could be more interested in math through good CS education, where CS gives a good practical application for math. Generally, there's not enough crossover of this kind going on, and neither in Germany nor in the US where I live now, do they take enough advantage in one class of what's being taught in another. It's almost like each of the subjects is in its own vacuum, which gives students very little opportunity to practically use what they're being taught. Practical use is the most important thing in retention, not to mention seeing the sense in learning a specific thing - how often have you heard 'I don't need to learn this, I'll never use it anyway' from a student?
I'd think that that's something that would be paid more attention to. CS and math are a good example of this, and one where using the knowledge taught across classes would be relatively easy to do, too.
about 24 years ago, our (elective) CS class covered the basics in terms of hardware, and then went straight into programming (BASIC). Starting on IBMs, later moving to Commodore 128s. It did a pretty good job at challenging kids and getting them interested in what can be done with a computer when you know how to program it, although the exercises themselves were a bit mundane and boring if I recall correctly. This started in 7th grade, going all the way through 10th. The progression wasn't quick enough for me - there wasn't enough increase in the complexity and scope of the challenges and exercises in the later grades.
Think about it. 10-20 hours of gameplay content, a few square miles' worth of environmental models and effects, dozens of characters and animations, matching voiceover and audio content, and the engine, AI and gameplay code to drive it all. Add to that between 20 minutes and an hour's worth of CG movies.
Now consider that we're doing this with teams 1/5th the size of what they are for 2-hour movies, at 1/8th of the budget in half the time (exceptions notwithstanding).
$50M for the most expensive games doesn't sound too bad compared to $500 for the most expensive movies...
Seconded. I've got a 25 mile commute as well, on 101 in the bay area (on my '93 ZX-6 E1, ~50 mpg). My only problems with this drive would be solved if people would just do what is common sense: look where you want to go, and let others know (use your turn signal) before you start going there.
Being so lazy that you won't even turn your head or move your finger two inches to avoid potentially killing someone (motorcyclist or the mothers, fathers and children in another car) is unacceptable and inexcusable, no matter who or what you think you are. Driving that way won't buy you anything, especially not once you've caused one of those horrible wrecks that you're rubbernecking at once a week.
As ridiculous (yet fun) as the movie Shoot 'em up was, there's something profoundly right about what Clive Owen's character said some 20 minutes in. So many people in big, fat, expensive cars drive this way because they had to be callous assholes to get to the point where they could buy that sort of car in the first place. So they continue that trend and become callous asshole drivers, too.
I suggest everybody start riding motorcycles. For one, it would improve their gas mileage tremendously, and secondly, I wouldn't have to worry anymore about morons in their SUVs changing lanes without so much as looking or setting their turn signal, and almost running over me when I'm on mine.
Hey, just an idea. And Darwin will take care of the idiots, something that SUVs are currently preventing.
An experienced engineer that would be able do serious work on a port of a AAA title to a different OS wouldn't take a job at Bioware for $50k;) I'm an engineer in the industry, and I know I wouldn't. Aside from that, you'll have to add insurance and other costs that employers pay beyond salary... and then there probably wouldn't just a single engineer working on porting the entire game. Three months? I'm doubtful of that as well. I'd set aside six months for a port to a different OS, including halfways fruitful alpha and beta phases.
5000 units at $50 each would make $250k in revenue - that's not much, and, all inclusive, about what I'd estimate in costs for a finished, quality port.
The question is now, how many units could you sell of a commercial linux port of, say, NWN2, setting at $50 a piece. Is 5000 an outworldly number? No... but if sales just creep around that number somewhere, the developer and publisher are likely to think twice about doing a port again, and tie up people that could be used elsewhere to greater efficiency, for a product that yields a marginal profit at best.
In other words, for developers and publishers to take notice and say 'yeah, let's do that again next time', my guess would be that they'd have to sell upwards of 10k units of the port.
That's just my $0.02 (and of course I have no idea of what's going through the heads of the people at Bioware, so I may be completely off), but it's a halfways educated guess;)
Most publishers won't even start looking at a game project unless they project sales upward of 100k units. Being a port makes things easier, but doesn't pave the way entirely.
Disclaimer: I use Linux and play games on Linux, and wish big titles were not so few and far between.
Sorry, but the $50k in revenue you'd make from those 1000 copies don't even pay for the salary of the people porting the game.
That being said, I'd think there's more than 1000 copies in it for any game company releasing a good AAA title for Linux, and that it might be worth it, if ports are something your company is willing to do. For it to be profitable, I'd say 5000 to 10000 units sell through would have to be the minimum - of course you've got to consider the value of the PR as well, considering that games for Linux is a market just at its beginning...
... and during the last 5 months, than at other times, because many companies are still ramping up for their next-gen teams. That doesn't necessarily mean, however, that it's easier for candidates with little experience and qualification. Long term, it pays for a company to be picky about who they hire; That means, that finding people with the right qualifications for a job opening is difficult from the hiring company's side as well. I can't even begin to tell how difficult it is to find a truly qualified engineering candidate. Needle in a hay stack kind of, sort of, describes the feeling.
More antibiotics is what is getting us into this mess in the first place. Seriously, people get a simple cold and run to their doctor to get a prescription; Mothers run around their house disinfecting everything with wipes and sprays. Parents medicate their children every chance they get. How long until our immune systems aren't worth sh*t anymore because we never get exposed to the little bugs in the first place until it's too late, and how long until we have a pandemic of a human-transmittable infection that has grown immune to all known antibiotics because everybody is pumped full of them all the time?
Seeing how console devkits are traditionally priced in the low to medium five-figure amounts, I don't think an affordable PS3 devkit is anything I'd hold my breath for.
There seem to be two torrents currently online:
http://66.90.75.92/suprnova//torrents/2658/worldwi nd.torrent
http://www.planettrevor.net/worldwind-1_2.zip.torr ent
I have a 110lb Rottweiler/Sheperd Mix. My brother has two 190lb English Mastiffs. To say it in his words, anyone who can hop over the fence, get in the house, pack up stuff, and make it out alive, deserves everything they got.
OpenAL for one is something few people seem to know about. I've developed sound systems using both DirectSound/DirectMusic directly as well as OpenAL - and there are worlds of difference between MS's obfuscated crAPI and OpenAL - It's actually a pleasure to write a capable 3D sound system on top of OpenAL.
We have the open standards. What I think we really need is more information for developers starting Linux development. More tutorials, more books, and more publically available (read: web) articles on how to get certain things to work under Linux, to make it easier for software engineers to make the transition and/or port of their software to Linux.
Finding good, clear sources of information on how to get certain things done is what I've found to be the biggest hurdle to start developing software for Linux. Maybe I just didn't know where and how to look, but I imagine I'm not the only one involved in programming, who has had that problem.
I think this kind of research could prove valuable not just for the better planning of successful titles, as the article stated. Maybe this kind of research can also finally show that playing Doom/CS/UT/[Insert favorite FPS here] does not simply turn you into a shotgun-swinging psycho who runs around blowing people's heads off for fun. Maybe this can help put an end to using video games as a scapegoat for the results of a lack of parenting and tutoring.
They say this is proof for language shaping thought, but couldn't it be just as well proof for thought shaping language?
If they don't have the need to perform tasks involving quantities more than two accurately, they would have never had the need to develop the necessary language to express quantities more than two accurately.
The one time I thought I'd try it and installed Grokster, I ended up with a total of about 15 different spy- and adware programs and, according to my virus scanner, three different trojan horse downloaders. I sure as hell ain't ever touching that one again.
More 3D displays already available
on
3D Monitor
·
· Score: 1
There's a list at
stereo3d.com. Now all we need is decent resolution and a decent price tag;)
But the problem there is that Chicago and many other urban cities don't get nearly enough sunlight to make a panel farm efficient
Dallas, Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Phoenix, Miami, Orlando, Oklahoma City, Santa Fe, New Orleans, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Denver, Nashville... not all big cities are in the north;)
Just for the hell of it, let's assume that we could panel the sides of a moderate size building, say, an area of 150*50*50 ft with that. Ideally, two sides of the building would be receiving sunlight, so 150*50*2 = 15,000 ft2.
At 3.8W/ft2 that would be 57kW. If we assume that we get this kind of yield on average over a 4-hour period every day, that's 228 kWh per day.
Let the average office computer draw 400W, that means that an office building (assuming the above, completely out-of-thin-air parameters) could run 140 computers for 4 hours, or 70 computers for 8 hours a day off of only the solar panels.
Now, if we assume, say, 20c per kWh for big-city electricity, a company could save over $15,000 a year. In other words, if these panels would last an average of 5 years, the price including installation would have to be lower than $5 per square foot, for a business to consider replacing old-fashioned electricity with the new solar panels. And yes, I know that's a more than rough approximation;)
A long time back I was trying to upgrade something in my Atari 260ST. I don't remember exactly if it was the operating system ROM or memory - there weren't any fancy DIMMs or stuff like that back then, expanding memory consisted of backpack soldering more memory chips on top of the old ones.
Anyway, I did, and when I turned the computer on, there was nothing. No booting. No image on the screen. I looked over the board to find out what was wrong, when I heard a noticeable crackle from one of the chips I had added. I could watch a thin crack appear slowly along the plastic housing. Then suddenly, a small smoke cloud that looked exactly like a miniature version of a nuclear explosion appeared with an audible 'poof' sound.
I hadn't paid as much attention as I should have, and soldered that one chip in facing the wrong way, turned by 180 degrees.
This kind of thing has become a serious problem. And no, up-to-date antivirus software and Windows' builtin firewall are not the answer.
The problem with this one is that, by the time client's antivirus software is up to date for the latest viruses, worms, and exploits, the damage is already done. I have had Windows boxes on which the antiviruses were updated twice daily - just to find that by the time I had received the update, the malicious software had already been on the machine. God knows for how long.
On a Windows box at home, despite antivirus software, Windows' builtin firewall and a 3rd party firewall software, I once counted 12 (!) different infections within less than 24 hours.
Interestingly enough, it's gotten much better for me at home since I've been running my Windows box through a Linux gateway. Still, stuff slips through, but it's on the order of one a week or so. This has taught me one lesson:
If you have to run Windows on a machine connected to the net, for your own sake and the sake of others you're prone to infect, run a reliable hardware router with a reliable firewall, or take an old computer and run a linux gateway/router. You wouldn't believe how much trouble you'll spare yourself.
...that so often, there are natural phenomena, for which good explanation exists (say, the wave-like properties of photons, which cause one photon to interfer with itself). And then, someone has to come along and say something along the lines of 'but, it's much more likely that it's because of parallel universes' or 'but i'm sure it's evil spirits from the other side' or 'and this proves that extraterrestrials exist and actually have taken over the bodies of our politicians'.
What is a petabit-meter? How is it a significant measure of transmission speed?
I'd think a petabit-meter is the transfer of one petabit of data over a distance of 1m. That's significant, because transfer takes longer (and is less reliable) over a greater distance. Think switching times, packet routing and other latencies, and of course the short time the signal needs to travel halfway around the globe.
In other words, transferring 1 pb over 1 meter in one second is considered the same 'achievement' as 0.5 pb over 2m in one second (0.5 pb * 2m = 1pbm/s).
However, I think this form of measurement is not entirely correct for short distance, because where you might see a noticeable difference in transfer rates between transferring data over half a mile (e.g. from your ISP to you) and transferring it halfway around the globe, you won't notice much of a difference caused by above mentioned latencies between 1m and 2m distances.
What I mean to say is, I don't think that the latencies that are meant to be taken into account by using bm/s actually scale linearly (signal travel time does, but not the other factors) - it's more likely that they only matter at large distances (or when comparing transfer speeds at large differences in distance).
Where 1 pb transferred over 6000 miles in one second might be the same 'achievement' as 2pb transferred over 3000 miles in one second, that doesn't hold true for short distances. 1pb over 1m in one second seems to be a higher transfer rate to me than 0.5pb over 2m in one second.
a) Because UDP isn't reliable. In other words, if you'd send byte by byte via UDP, there's no guarantee that they arrive in the same order, or arrive at all. You'd need to make it reliable by implementing your own layer on top of it.
b) because TCP is what the majority of traffic on the net is, and using it for a benchmark is more realistic
Slashdot Mirror
There was also not enough correlation to math, because the problem sets were so basic. I think a lot of kids could be more interested in math through good CS education, where CS gives a good practical application for math. Generally, there's not enough crossover of this kind going on, and neither in Germany nor in the US where I live now, do they take enough advantage in one class of what's being taught in another. It's almost like each of the subjects is in its own vacuum, which gives students very little opportunity to practically use what they're being taught. Practical use is the most important thing in retention, not to mention seeing the sense in learning a specific thing - how often have you heard 'I don't need to learn this, I'll never use it anyway' from a student? I'd think that that's something that would be paid more attention to. CS and math are a good example of this, and one where using the knowledge taught across classes would be relatively easy to do, too.
about 24 years ago, our (elective) CS class covered the basics in terms of hardware, and then went straight into programming (BASIC). Starting on IBMs, later moving to Commodore 128s. It did a pretty good job at challenging kids and getting them interested in what can be done with a computer when you know how to program it, although the exercises themselves were a bit mundane and boring if I recall correctly. This started in 7th grade, going all the way through 10th. The progression wasn't quick enough for me - there wasn't enough increase in the complexity and scope of the challenges and exercises in the later grades.
Eh... nothing I haven't heard at a Chemical Brothers concert.
Think about it. 10-20 hours of gameplay content, a few square miles' worth of environmental models and effects, dozens of characters and animations, matching voiceover and audio content, and the engine, AI and gameplay code to drive it all. Add to that between 20 minutes and an hour's worth of CG movies. Now consider that we're doing this with teams 1/5th the size of what they are for 2-hour movies, at 1/8th of the budget in half the time (exceptions notwithstanding). $50M for the most expensive games doesn't sound too bad compared to $500 for the most expensive movies...
Seconded. I've got a 25 mile commute as well, on 101 in the bay area (on my '93 ZX-6 E1, ~50 mpg). My only problems with this drive would be solved if people would just do what is common sense: look where you want to go, and let others know (use your turn signal) before you start going there.
Being so lazy that you won't even turn your head or move your finger two inches to avoid potentially killing someone (motorcyclist or the mothers, fathers and children in another car) is unacceptable and inexcusable, no matter who or what you think you are. Driving that way won't buy you anything, especially not once you've caused one of those horrible wrecks that you're rubbernecking at once a week.
As ridiculous (yet fun) as the movie Shoot 'em up was, there's something profoundly right about what Clive Owen's character said some 20 minutes in. So many people in big, fat, expensive cars drive this way because they had to be callous assholes to get to the point where they could buy that sort of car in the first place. So they continue that trend and become callous asshole drivers, too.
I suggest everybody start riding motorcycles. For one, it would improve their gas mileage tremendously, and secondly, I wouldn't have to worry anymore about morons in their SUVs changing lanes without so much as looking or setting their turn signal, and almost running over me when I'm on mine.
Hey, just an idea. And Darwin will take care of the idiots, something that SUVs are currently preventing.
An experienced engineer that would be able do serious work on a port of a AAA title to a different OS wouldn't take a job at Bioware for $50k ;) I'm an engineer in the industry, and I know I wouldn't. Aside from that, you'll have to add insurance and other costs that employers pay beyond salary... and then there probably wouldn't just a single engineer working on porting the entire game. Three months? I'm doubtful of that as well. I'd set aside six months for a port to a different OS, including halfways fruitful alpha and beta phases.
;)
5000 units at $50 each would make $250k in revenue - that's not much, and, all inclusive, about what I'd estimate in costs for a finished, quality port.
The question is now, how many units could you sell of a commercial linux port of, say, NWN2, setting at $50 a piece. Is 5000 an outworldly number? No... but if sales just creep around that number somewhere, the developer and publisher are likely to think twice about doing a port again, and tie up people that could be used elsewhere to greater efficiency, for a product that yields a marginal profit at best.
In other words, for developers and publishers to take notice and say 'yeah, let's do that again next time', my guess would be that they'd have to sell upwards of 10k units of the port.
That's just my $0.02 (and of course I have no idea of what's going through the heads of the people at Bioware, so I may be completely off), but it's a halfways educated guess
Most publishers won't even start looking at a game project unless they project sales upward of 100k units. Being a port makes things easier, but doesn't pave the way entirely.
Disclaimer: I use Linux and play games on Linux, and wish big titles were not so few and far between.
Sorry, but the $50k in revenue you'd make from those 1000 copies don't even pay for the salary of the people porting the game. That being said, I'd think there's more than 1000 copies in it for any game company releasing a good AAA title for Linux, and that it might be worth it, if ports are something your company is willing to do. For it to be profitable, I'd say 5000 to 10000 units sell through would have to be the minimum - of course you've got to consider the value of the PR as well, considering that games for Linux is a market just at its beginning...
... and during the last 5 months, than at other times, because many companies are still ramping up for their next-gen teams. That doesn't necessarily mean, however, that it's easier for candidates with little experience and qualification. Long term, it pays for a company to be picky about who they hire; That means, that finding people with the right qualifications for a job opening is difficult from the hiring company's side as well. I can't even begin to tell how difficult it is to find a truly qualified engineering candidate. Needle in a hay stack kind of, sort of, describes the feeling.
More antibiotics is what is getting us into this mess in the first place. Seriously, people get a simple cold and run to their doctor to get a prescription; Mothers run around their house disinfecting everything with wipes and sprays. Parents medicate their children every chance they get. How long until our immune systems aren't worth sh*t anymore because we never get exposed to the little bugs in the first place until it's too late, and how long until we have a pandemic of a human-transmittable infection that has grown immune to all known antibiotics because everybody is pumped full of them all the time?
Seeing how console devkits are traditionally priced in the low to medium five-figure amounts, I don't think an affordable PS3 devkit is anything I'd hold my breath for.
There seem to be two torrents currently online: http://66.90.75.92/suprnova//torrents/2658/worldwi nd.torrent
http://www.planettrevor.net/worldwind-1_2.zip.torr ent
I have a 110lb Rottweiler/Sheperd Mix. My brother has two 190lb English Mastiffs. To say it in his words, anyone who can hop over the fence, get in the house, pack up stuff, and make it out alive, deserves everything they got.
How about
OpenGL,
SDL and OpenAL?
OpenAL for one is something few people seem to know about. I've developed sound systems using both DirectSound/DirectMusic directly as well as OpenAL - and there are worlds of difference between MS's obfuscated crAPI and OpenAL - It's actually a pleasure to write a capable 3D sound system on top of OpenAL.
We have the open standards. What I think we really need is more information for developers starting Linux development. More tutorials, more books, and more publically available (read: web) articles on how to get certain things to work under Linux, to make it easier for software engineers to make the transition and/or port of their software to Linux.
Finding good, clear sources of information on how to get certain things done is what I've found to be the biggest hurdle to start developing software for Linux. Maybe I just didn't know where and how to look, but I imagine I'm not the only one involved in programming, who has had that problem.
I think this kind of research could prove valuable not just for the better planning of successful titles, as the article stated. Maybe this kind of research can also finally show that playing Doom/CS/UT/[Insert favorite FPS here] does not simply turn you into a shotgun-swinging psycho who runs around blowing people's heads off for fun. Maybe this can help put an end to using video games as a scapegoat for the results of a lack of parenting and tutoring.
They say this is proof for language shaping thought, but couldn't it be just as well proof for thought shaping language?
If they don't have the need to perform tasks involving quantities more than two accurately, they would have never had the need to develop the necessary language to express quantities more than two accurately.
The one time I thought I'd try it and installed Grokster, I ended up with a total of about 15 different spy- and adware programs and, according to my virus scanner, three different trojan horse downloaders. I sure as hell ain't ever touching that one again.
There's a list at stereo3d.com. Now all we need is decent resolution and a decent price tag ;)
But the problem there is that Chicago and many other urban cities don't get nearly enough sunlight to make a panel farm efficient
;)
;)
Dallas, Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Phoenix, Miami, Orlando, Oklahoma City, Santa Fe, New Orleans, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Denver, Nashville... not all big cities are in the north
Just for the hell of it, let's assume that we could panel the sides of a moderate size building, say, an area of 150*50*50 ft with that. Ideally, two sides of the building would be receiving sunlight, so 150*50*2 = 15,000 ft2.
At 3.8W/ft2 that would be 57kW. If we assume that we get this kind of yield on average over a 4-hour period every day, that's 228 kWh per day.
Let the average office computer draw 400W, that means that an office building (assuming the above, completely out-of-thin-air parameters) could run 140 computers for 4 hours, or 70 computers for 8 hours a day off of only the solar panels.
Now, if we assume, say, 20c per kWh for big-city electricity, a company could save over $15,000 a year. In other words, if these panels would last an average of 5 years, the price including installation would have to be lower than $5 per square foot, for a business to consider replacing old-fashioned electricity with the new solar panels. And yes, I know that's a more than rough approximation
The poster of this article may have wanted to do a little more research.
J2ME is the Java 2 Micro Edition, not Media edition. Jeez.
A long time back I was trying to upgrade something in my Atari 260ST. I don't remember exactly if it was the operating system ROM or memory - there weren't any fancy DIMMs or stuff like that back then, expanding memory consisted of backpack soldering more memory chips on top of the old ones.
Anyway, I did, and when I turned the computer on, there was nothing. No booting. No image on the screen. I looked over the board to find out what was wrong, when I heard a noticeable crackle from one of the chips I had added. I could watch a thin crack appear slowly along the plastic housing. Then suddenly, a small smoke cloud that looked exactly like a miniature version of a nuclear explosion appeared with an audible 'poof' sound.
I hadn't paid as much attention as I should have, and soldered that one chip in facing the wrong way, turned by 180 degrees.
This kind of thing has become a serious problem. And no, up-to-date antivirus software and Windows' builtin firewall are not the answer.
The problem with this one is that, by the time client's antivirus software is up to date for the latest viruses, worms, and exploits, the damage is already done. I have had Windows boxes on which the antiviruses were updated twice daily - just to find that by the time I had received the update, the malicious software had already been on the machine. God knows for how long.
On a Windows box at home, despite antivirus software, Windows' builtin firewall and a 3rd party firewall software, I once counted 12 (!) different infections within less than 24 hours.
Interestingly enough, it's gotten much better for me at home since I've been running my Windows box through a Linux gateway. Still, stuff slips through, but it's on the order of one a week or so. This has taught me one lesson:
If you have to run Windows on a machine connected to the net, for your own sake and the sake of others you're prone to infect, run a reliable hardware router with a reliable firewall, or take an old computer and run a linux gateway/router. You wouldn't believe how much trouble you'll spare yourself.
...that so often, there are natural phenomena, for which good explanation exists (say, the wave-like properties of photons, which cause one photon to interfer with itself). And then, someone has to come along and say something along the lines of 'but, it's much more likely that it's because of parallel universes' or 'but i'm sure it's evil spirits from the other side' or 'and this proves that extraterrestrials exist and actually have taken over the bodies of our politicians'.
What is a petabit-meter? How is it a significant measure of transmission speed?
I'd think a petabit-meter is the transfer of one petabit of data over a distance of 1m. That's significant, because transfer takes longer (and is less reliable) over a greater distance. Think switching times, packet routing and other latencies, and of course the short time the signal needs to travel halfway around the globe.
In other words, transferring 1 pb over 1 meter in one second is considered the same 'achievement' as 0.5 pb over 2m in one second (0.5 pb * 2m = 1pbm/s).
However, I think this form of measurement is not entirely correct for short distance, because where you might see a noticeable difference in transfer rates between transferring data over half a mile (e.g. from your ISP to you) and transferring it halfway around the globe, you won't notice much of a difference caused by above mentioned latencies between 1m and 2m distances.
What I mean to say is, I don't think that the latencies that are meant to be taken into account by using bm/s actually scale linearly (signal travel time does, but not the other factors) - it's more likely that they only matter at large distances (or when comparing transfer speeds at large differences in distance).
Where 1 pb transferred over 6000 miles in one second might be the same 'achievement' as 2pb transferred over 3000 miles in one second, that doesn't hold true for short distances. 1pb over 1m in one second seems to be a higher transfer rate to me than 0.5pb over 2m in one second.
IANANE (I Am Not A Networking Expert)
a) Because UDP isn't reliable. In other words, if you'd send byte by byte via UDP, there's no guarantee that they arrive in the same order, or arrive at all. You'd need to make it reliable by implementing your own layer on top of it. b) because TCP is what the majority of traffic on the net is, and using it for a benchmark is more realistic