Typing and typesetting are different things. I believe you should type two spaces into source material to avoid throwing away valuable information. Your formatting software should adjust the amount of space depending on your reading preference.
Perhaps it depends on the theatre. I saw Avatar in 3D in a traditional IMAX theatre (not IMAX digital), and they were definitely using linear polarization--the glasses were compatible with my own linearly-polarized 3D glasses. I have seen other 3D movies in that same IMAX theatre that used LCD shutter glasses, so it wouldn't surprise me if they also show some 3D movies using circular polarization.
All of the 3D movies I've seen in commercial theatres with digital projection have used circular polarization.
I'm pretty sure that "recording device" is not the same thing as "timeshifter". A timeshifter allows you to view a stream of data at a point in time other than what it is also simultaneously chronicling.
It's true that what a DVR does is different than what you could do with a VCR, but what you can do with a VCR is properly called time shifting. In fact, that term became popular during the Betamax case. It was determined that "time shifting" was a legal use of VCRs, and since VCRs had legal uses, they couldn't be banned as copyright infringement devices.
NPR has a phthalates story today. It explains how certain phthalates were banned from children's products based on scientific evidence that they were dangerous, but other phthalates were banned just this year for political reasons despite scientific evidence that they were safe.
The request was for drafts and proposals for treaties. This doesn't keep any existing treaty, law, or regulation secret.
Interestingly, the letter references Executive order 12958, which Clinton issued to loosen up documents under the FOIA. Bush issued EO 13292, which made it easier to classify documents (and gave the VP more power to do so). Since the denial references the older Clinton order, I assume that means Obama has rolled back the standards to the Clinton-era.
I'm surprise Amazon wasn't sued because the original Kindle lacked text-to-speech. Isn't it just an accessibility feature added for people with disabilities? Aren't such things virtually required under the Americans with Disability Acts?
here in CA, only talking on the phone is illegal. Texting is perfectly ok
Only until next month when enforcement of the no-texting law kicks in.
Actually, hands-free or not, most cell phones are illegal in the front seat of the car anyway, as they have video screens. A couple years ago, California outlawed video screens placed anywhere in front of the back of the driver's seat, unless the screen is part of a system that's 100% dedicated to navigation and vehicle status--which technically means even some GPS systems are illegal if they can also play games, control the radio, etc.
Here in California, we pay much more for electricity than the national average. Your first kWh are about $0.12, but it's a progressive scale. My incremental kWh is almost $0.32.
So using your example of saving 1.25 kWh per day works out to almost $12 a month for me, or about $140 a year. Still not oodles of money, but enough to motivate me to factor energy efficiency into the equation when I replace something. Blown out incandescent? Replace it with a CFL. Wine cooler keeps breaking down (when it's not running the compressor 24/7)? Replace it with a more reliable model that's also more energy efficient.
It's also enough incentive to make a few spontaneous changes, like replacing the power strip in my wife's office with a $30 one that cuts off all the peripherals when her computer is shut down. I've also aggressively re-programmed the thermostat as our schedules have shifted.
With a hard cap, I'm going to have even less compunction about running an ad blocker to filter out megabytes and megabytes of graphics, animated GIFs, and Flash that just distract from the content I'm after.
I wonder if this is what Pete Shirley went to NVIDIA to do.
The article and some of the comments here have oft-repeated myths about ray tracing. For example, ray tracing algorithms are generally simpler than rasterization algorithms, not more complex--though they do require more processing power.
One commenter said this demo was limited to 3 rays per pixel. That may not be true. The article said each ray was limited to 3 bounces. That doesn't preclude firing multiple primary rays per pixel for antialiasing. From the images, though, it doesn't look like there's much antialiasing.
I'm also disappointed to read that it's still done with bajillions of polygons. One potential advantage of ray tracing is rendering smooth, curved surfaces. Few of the real-timers seem to attempt this though. Too bad, the savings in memory for the model could improve the transform and rendering times.
Creators and authors get to choose copyright protection OR technological protection measures, but not both. DRM is incompatible with copyright law. I'm happy to let you have both, IF your DRM scheme manages to respect Fair Use and expiration of copyright and doesn't invent any restrictions that aren't part of the copyright protections (e.g., geographic restrictions). Of course, that's impossible.
Any work whose primary distribution is encumbered with DRM must place an unencumbered copy in escrow with the Library of Congress before any commercial distribution, along with a maintenance fee to off set the Library's expense.
No copyright registration is required UNTIL commercial distribution of a work.
Copyright expiration is dramatically shortened. Lifetime of author, 25 years from creation for a corporation, or 14 years from first commercial distribution. Protection may be renewed for a modest fee every 14 years, indefinitely. Disney can keep Steamboat Willie as long as they value it, but we get all the orphaned and abandoned works in the public domain.
False use of DMCA take downs and lawsuits alleging infringement may be penalized by placed the work(s) in question into the public domain.
In that case, Californians tempted to Google and drive can breathe a big sigh of relief: The new laws don't proscribe use of computers or the Web, except for drivers under 18 years old. There is a different law on the books preventing the use of television screens or video screens farther forward than the rear of the front seats, but it's unclear whether that measure applies to computers browsing the Internet.
I've read that law, and it didn't seem unclear to me. Video screens that aren't completely dedicated to vehicle status and/or navigation aren't allowed forward of the back or the front seat. Seems to me it applies to laptops, PDAs, and most cell phones.
A person may not drive a motor vehicle if a... video screen... displaying a... video signal that produces entertainment or business applications, is operating and is located in the motor vehicle at any point forward of the back of the driver's seat, or is operating and visible to the driver while driving the motor vehicle.
There are specific exemptions for GPS and other nav systems, as well as police car terminals, etc.
All true. But, of course, Pixar has converted RenderMan to a full ray tracer because it's now feasible and because they wanted that extra bit of realism that ray tracing elegantly delivers (see Cars and Ratatouille).
Depending on design decisions, ray tracers can represent complex scenes with far less memory than most rasterizers. Rasterizers generally rely on increasing numbers of triangles (or perhaps other polygons) for complexity. Ray tracers can use all sorts of parametric surfaces that require much less storage. And vast amounts of memory are more affordable, so the size of the geometry is becoming less of an issue.
Besides, when games based on rasterizers try to emulate features that ray tracer gives natively (reflections, shadows, global illumination, etc.), they generally require random access to the model similar that required by ray tracers.
Actually Pixar has switched to Ray Tracing. Cars was ray traced [PDF]. Skimming through the whitepapers on the Pixar site, it's clear ray tracing was also used extensively in Ratatouille.
Even so, what Pixar is doing in feature films isn't particularly relevant to real-time ray tracing on mobile devices.
The MSFT/INTU deal was not blocked by regulators. The regulators said they would have to investigate. Microsoft said they didn't want to deal with the delay of an investigation and the risk that it might be blocked, so they paid to terminate the deal.
In the mean time, they had learned a lot about how Intuit's products worked and how Intuit set up their development processes. They (re?)launched MS Money shortly thereafter.
While it did throw things off course for Intuit for a while, it also helped them indirectly. Intuit had been trying to meet with financial institutions to jump-start online banking, but the big banks had never heard of Intuit or cared to talk to them. After the exposure Microsoft brought, the banks started begging to work with Intuit.
Effectively, I'm losing coverage. The article says Verizon has been warning customers, but this is the first I've heard of this. Sure, my phone does digital, but never from home. Only the analog network reaches me here. And I don't live in a rural area. I'm in the hills just east of San Francisco Bay. Coverage here sucks.
I've worked at a load of places where there's insufficient resources to do things that customers actually want, but an endless program to refactor away the ugliness of code.
If the design is clear and appropriate, it takes much less time to implement what the customers need and want. Refactoring is about getting a design back on track so you can deliver more in less time. You should have a motivation for each refactoring step besides making the code prettier. You should undertake refactoring that makes what you're trying to do easier.
And good programmers can deal with ugly code.
Yup. And better programmers find and/or build tools to make ugly code more tractable. The best programmers keep the code from becoming ugly in the first place. Even if you're totally comfortable dealing with a rat's nest, it's nice to have the flexibility to delegate some tasks to other developers who may not cope with the mess as well.
Will your rewritten 'pretty' version duplicate all features that the ugly version has?
Rewriting is not refactoring. Refactoring is applying well-defined transforms to improve the design without changing the functionality (and checking to ensure that it indeed does not change the functionality). If you're "pretty" version doesn't duplicate the features, you're not refactoring correctly.
Do you even understand which ones are features and which ones are bugs? If so, why do you want to refactor it? And if not, how can you expect to get it right first time and not provoke howls of protest from the people that use it.
By using test scripts that know the correct behavior and checking my work. If you don't have test scripts and the current version "defines" correct behavior, then you have to build test scripts that will thoroughly exercise the code and check for differing results.
And if anyone whines about how old code needs to be rewritten, point them at [Joel Spolsky's famous article against rewriting old code].
Joel makes good points. You don't want to throw away what you've invested in the code. But code does rot as changes are made and as bugs are half-fixed because the design doesn't allow for a correct fix. True refactoring lets you shed the handicaps of clumsy design without throwing away the knowledge and experience of existing code. As I read it, Joel wasn't ranting against refactoring, he was ranting against throwing code away and starting from scratch.
Try refactoring the 'ugliness' out of an embedded system and see how long your employer still has customers, and how long you still have a job.
Done. I've worked on code embedded in medical devices. Since the FDA people read your source code and must understand it, you better make sure the design is clear and correct. (Hint, they're not the best programmers.) Oh yeah, the design better be right or people die, too.
I've also worked on firmware for a disk drive. I inherited a mess that could not function correctly because the design was so wrong. I spent six months fixing bugs (without trying to rewrite or refactor the code) until the company shut down the division and laid everyone off.
I can't find a shred of evidence anywhere stating that the 911 system today will intentionally route calls differently based upon if they were placed via a landline or a mobile phone.
In California, 911 from a cellular phone is routed to a central dispatch center run by the California Highway Patrol. 911 from a landline typically goes to a traditional 911 dispatch center run by a local law enforcement agency.
Our crime prevention coordinator for our Neighborhood Watch confirmed this and suggested programming the local police department's emergency number into our cell phones.
Actually going from 11.8% from 8.8% is only a 3% increase, not 34%.
No, it's a 3 percentage point increase, but that's still an increase of 34%. Suppose the sample size was 1000 developers, then change was from 88 developers to 118. That's a 34% increase.
Slashdot Mirror
This debate has raged for a while.
Typing and typesetting are different things. I believe you should type two spaces into source material to avoid throwing away valuable information. Your formatting software should adjust the amount of space depending on your reading preference.
Perhaps it depends on the theatre. I saw Avatar in 3D in a traditional IMAX theatre (not IMAX digital), and they were definitely using linear polarization--the glasses were compatible with my own linearly-polarized 3D glasses. I have seen other 3D movies in that same IMAX theatre that used LCD shutter glasses, so it wouldn't surprise me if they also show some 3D movies using circular polarization.
All of the 3D movies I've seen in commercial theatres with digital projection have used circular polarization.
And that link was the follow-up article. Matt Pietrek's first column on this topic was in MSJ in 1996.
It's true that what a DVR does is different than what you could do with a VCR, but what you can do with a VCR is properly called time shifting. In fact, that term became popular during the Betamax case. It was determined that "time shifting" was a legal use of VCRs, and since VCRs had legal uses, they couldn't be banned as copyright infringement devices.
Of course it's the store that's shady. What's insightful about that? Neither the summary nor the article put the blame on Microsoft.
Didn't Jobs and Woz get started in this business by hacking the phone system in the first place? I seem to recall something about blue boxes. :-)
You could speculate that the XBox numbers don't overcome the PS3 numbers, or you could RTFA and find out the actual results of the survey.
Assuming that there's negligible overlap:
Blu-ray (7%) + PS3 (9%) = 16%
HD-DVD (11%) + XBox 360 (13%) = 24%
So, according to the referenced survey, HD-DVD has more U.S. household penetration than Blu-ray whether you count the game consoles or not.
NPR has a phthalates story today. It explains how certain phthalates were banned from children's products based on scientific evidence that they were dangerous, but other phthalates were banned just this year for political reasons despite scientific evidence that they were safe.
The request was for drafts and proposals for treaties. This doesn't keep any existing treaty, law, or regulation secret.
Interestingly, the letter references Executive order 12958, which Clinton issued to loosen up documents under the FOIA. Bush issued EO 13292, which made it easier to classify documents (and gave the VP more power to do so). Since the denial references the older Clinton order, I assume that means Obama has rolled back the standards to the Clinton-era.
I'm surprise Amazon wasn't sued because the original Kindle lacked text-to-speech. Isn't it just an accessibility feature added for people with disabilities? Aren't such things virtually required under the Americans with Disability Acts?
Only until next month when enforcement of the no-texting law kicks in.
Actually, hands-free or not, most cell phones are illegal in the front seat of the car anyway, as they have video screens. A couple years ago, California outlawed video screens placed anywhere in front of the back of the driver's seat, unless the screen is part of a system that's 100% dedicated to navigation and vehicle status--which technically means even some GPS systems are illegal if they can also play games, control the radio, etc.
Here in California, we pay much more for electricity than the national average. Your first kWh are about $0.12, but it's a progressive scale. My incremental kWh is almost $0.32.
So using your example of saving 1.25 kWh per day works out to almost $12 a month for me, or about $140 a year. Still not oodles of money, but enough to motivate me to factor energy efficiency into the equation when I replace something. Blown out incandescent? Replace it with a CFL. Wine cooler keeps breaking down (when it's not running the compressor 24/7)? Replace it with a more reliable model that's also more energy efficient.
It's also enough incentive to make a few spontaneous changes, like replacing the power strip in my wife's office with a $30 one that cuts off all the peripherals when her computer is shut down. I've also aggressively re-programmed the thermostat as our schedules have shifted.
With a hard cap, I'm going to have even less compunction about running an ad blocker to filter out megabytes and megabytes of graphics, animated GIFs, and Flash that just distract from the content I'm after.
I wonder if this is what Pete Shirley went to NVIDIA to do.
The article and some of the comments here have oft-repeated myths about ray tracing. For example, ray tracing algorithms are generally simpler than rasterization algorithms, not more complex--though they do require more processing power.
One commenter said this demo was limited to 3 rays per pixel. That may not be true. The article said each ray was limited to 3 bounces. That doesn't preclude firing multiple primary rays per pixel for antialiasing. From the images, though, it doesn't look like there's much antialiasing.
I'm also disappointed to read that it's still done with bajillions of polygons. One potential advantage of ray tracing is rendering smooth, curved surfaces. Few of the real-timers seem to attempt this though. Too bad, the savings in memory for the model could improve the transform and rendering times.
I've read that law, and it didn't seem unclear to me. Video screens that aren't completely dedicated to vehicle status and/or navigation aren't allowed forward of the back or the front seat. Seems to me it applies to laptops, PDAs, and most cell phones.
There are specific exemptions for GPS and other nav systems, as well as police car terminals, etc.
All true. But, of course, Pixar has converted RenderMan to a full ray tracer because it's now feasible and because they wanted that extra bit of realism that ray tracing elegantly delivers (see Cars and Ratatouille).
Depending on design decisions, ray tracers can represent complex scenes with far less memory than most rasterizers. Rasterizers generally rely on increasing numbers of triangles (or perhaps other polygons) for complexity. Ray tracers can use all sorts of parametric surfaces that require much less storage. And vast amounts of memory are more affordable, so the size of the geometry is becoming less of an issue.
Besides, when games based on rasterizers try to emulate features that ray tracer gives natively (reflections, shadows, global illumination, etc.), they generally require random access to the model similar that required by ray tracers.
Actually Pixar has switched to Ray Tracing. Cars was ray traced [PDF]. Skimming through the whitepapers on the Pixar site, it's clear ray tracing was also used extensively in Ratatouille.
Even so, what Pixar is doing in feature films isn't particularly relevant to real-time ray tracing on mobile devices.
The MSFT/INTU deal was not blocked by regulators. The regulators said they would have to investigate. Microsoft said they didn't want to deal with the delay of an investigation and the risk that it might be blocked, so they paid to terminate the deal.
In the mean time, they had learned a lot about how Intuit's products worked and how Intuit set up their development processes. They (re?)launched MS Money shortly thereafter.
While it did throw things off course for Intuit for a while, it also helped them indirectly. Intuit had been trying to meet with financial institutions to jump-start online banking, but the big banks had never heard of Intuit or cared to talk to them. After the exposure Microsoft brought, the banks started begging to work with Intuit.
Effectively, I'm losing coverage. The article says Verizon has been warning customers, but this is the first I've heard of this. Sure, my phone does digital, but never from home. Only the analog network reaches me here. And I don't live in a rural area. I'm in the hills just east of San Francisco Bay. Coverage here sucks.
If the design is clear and appropriate, it takes much less time to implement what the customers need and want. Refactoring is about getting a design back on track so you can deliver more in less time. You should have a motivation for each refactoring step besides making the code prettier. You should undertake refactoring that makes what you're trying to do easier.
Yup. And better programmers find and/or build tools to make ugly code more tractable. The best programmers keep the code from becoming ugly in the first place. Even if you're totally comfortable dealing with a rat's nest, it's nice to have the flexibility to delegate some tasks to other developers who may not cope with the mess as well.
Rewriting is not refactoring. Refactoring is applying well-defined transforms to improve the design without changing the functionality (and checking to ensure that it indeed does not change the functionality). If you're "pretty" version doesn't duplicate the features, you're not refactoring correctly.
By using test scripts that know the correct behavior and checking my work. If you don't have test scripts and the current version "defines" correct behavior, then you have to build test scripts that will thoroughly exercise the code and check for differing results.
Joel makes good points. You don't want to throw away what you've invested in the code. But code does rot as changes are made and as bugs are half-fixed because the design doesn't allow for a correct fix. True refactoring lets you shed the handicaps of clumsy design without throwing away the knowledge and experience of existing code. As I read it, Joel wasn't ranting against refactoring, he was ranting against throwing code away and starting from scratch.
Done. I've worked on code embedded in medical devices. Since the FDA people read your source code and must understand it, you better make sure the design is clear and correct. (Hint, they're not the best programmers.) Oh yeah, the design better be right or people die, too.
I've also worked on firmware for a disk drive. I inherited a mess that could not function correctly because the design was so wrong. I spent six months fixing bugs (without trying to rewrite or refactor the code) until the company shut down the division and laid everyone off.
You'd think that—with all the tables in that HTML—they might have actually been able to align the domain names with the friggin' dates!
In California, 911 from a cellular phone is routed to a central dispatch center run by the California Highway Patrol. 911 from a landline typically goes to a traditional 911 dispatch center run by a local law enforcement agency.
Cellular 911
Our crime prevention coordinator for our Neighborhood Watch confirmed this and suggested programming the local police department's emergency number into our cell phones.
No, it's a 3 percentage point increase, but that's still an increase of 34%. Suppose the sample size was 1000 developers, then change was from 88 developers to 118. That's a 34% increase.
Does this mean employees will no longer be able to watch Semel's Academy Award screeners in the cafeteria?