I have rolled through more stop signs than most. I passed my time with moral relativism, until work sent me to Europe for a couple weeks with a rental car (circa 1998).
During those two weeks, I never rolled through a stop sign -- because where it made sense, they put up Yield signs. Where it made sense, there are Stop signs. I rolled through the Yields, I stopped at the Stops.
It made so much sense while I was there. And back in the USA, it still frustrates me that we love our Stop signs, and can't trust our population with Yield signs.
Last time I tried Foxit -- it would not let you select text and copy it, so the text can be copied into another app. Copying text was a premium feature (cue the advertising for the $$ upgrade). Foxit is smaller and faster. I loved Foxit up to that point, but absent that feature I went right back to Adobe Acrobat.
So that's profitable, as in they bring in more revenue than expenses.
But is it a reasonable profit for a company worth $2.9B?
Re:Another software service with no way to make $$
on
Skype Kills Extras Program
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Unfortunately for eBay, they originally bought them for quite a bit more.
EBay bought Skype in 2005 for $2.6B.
EBay sold 65% of Skype in 2009 for $1.9B (so the new value is $1.9B/.65 = $2.9B).
So - no, not "quite a bit more".
From the historical-perspective dept.
I keep track of CPU and graphics card prices from pricewatch.com, for no-good-reason.
slashdot does not like my long lists (too few characters per line) so here are the abbreviated lists which keep the most expensive options.
Here are my scrapes from ~6 years ago:
Sep 16, 2003 List of Graphics Cards
$384 - Fire GL Z1 128mb
$696 - Fire GL X1 256mb
$529 - Fire GL X1 128mb
$469 RADEON 9800 Pro Ultimate
$373 - RADEON 9800 Pro Ultimate 128
$417 - RADEON 9800 Pro 256MB
$294 - RADEON 9800 Pro 128MB
$368 - RADEON 9800 All-In-Wonder Pro
$192 - RADEON 9800 128MB
$299 - RADEON 9700 Pro Ultimate
$266 - RADEON 9700 Pro
$389 - GeForce FX 5900 256MB
$235 - GeForce FX 5900 128MB
$251 - GeForce FX 5800 128MB
imagemagick can also compare two images, and tell you how different they are.
That is -- quantify the differences by returning a floating point number or two (PSNR, RMSE) in a way that a more-compressed JPEG image will return a correspondingly different floating point value.
I know the question concerns two JPEG-compressed images, but if you do have an original image -- and you want to test which is closest to the original, ImageMagick can do that. Use the ImageMagick compare function.
See http://www.imagemagick.org/script/compare.php
Also, [[www.gimp.org]] is able to look at an image and approximate what JPEG compression quality setting was used, and use that same quality setting to save an output JPEG copy of the image. So -- they have some algorithm inside of their application which takes an image and returns (a good guess of) the corresponding jpeg quality value.
Of course, this does not help you if the image was saved with a lousy JPEG quality value, like 10/100, and later saved at a much higher value, like 98/100. Since the algorithm only sees the last image, it would tell you the quality value is 98/100, even though the contents of the image would indicate the results of 10/100 compression, because of multi-generational lossy compression.
Well that's because there wasn't anything, strictly speaking, illegal done.
Nothing illegal done? Let's start with the dishonest loan brokers. Those brokers had people come in with a $40,000/yr salary, but put on the application that the salary was $160,0000/yr. Of course, these were no-doc loans, so no documentation was required. There was a lot of of fraud going on. Let's send a few thousand loan brokers to jail. Anyone with me?
> I want, need, have needed for years an electric car. I want 100 Klicks per charge. It only has to do maybe 100 Kph max. OK, so I need to re-buy the batteries every five years or so. I do not want a car that goes 0 to 110 Mph in 3 seconds. That is just stupid. It should cost around 15 grand. Where is that car?
Let's look at some real-world examples -- the Prius can go about 7 miles on battery-only power at 35mph max. Replacement batteries are about $8k. They start at $23k.
Fast forward two years: the Chevy Volt can go 40 miles on battery power. Replacement batteries: ???, but most be more than $8k. They will start (I'm guessing) $40k.
Rewind 12 years: GM's EV-1 was produced for: well, they spent about $1.5B for 1500 cars - that's around $1M each. Higher production numbers: let's guess $100k. Batteries (replaced every 3 years or so - guessing again): $50k. Not close to $15k. GM bet big that they would find a significant battery break-through (the breakthrough that has been "just 5 years away" for the past 25 years). What do you do with 1500 cars that will require a $50k replacement battery pack? Recall them, and shred them.
Toyota's Rav4 EV is a contender. Though battery packs for that vehicle are $26k (so says Wikipedia). I've seen used ones on ebay in reasonable shape for $60k. Except for cost -- this one is a winner for you.
The Aptera has 3 wheels so it can be classified a motorcycle, and not meet all the safety requirements and testing that cars need. (neighborhood cars - max speed of 25mph and another way to avoid being tested as a "real" car - are not included here) It's much lighter and easier to get speed and distance out of the batteries (plus batteries are better today).
Assuredly -- if someone could build a viable EV for $15k, they would, and they would make a killing. Your $15k goal is too low for today's battery technology.
while this is useful admirable-- if I had millions, I would consider setting up a program to pay a limited number of folks $100 for installing Linux on a desktop machine used 8+ hours a week and using it for a few months. A weekly (at least) intelligent posting to the forums would be required. You would have to apply for the program - show some of your writing on the internet (slashdot posts) as someone who really exists and can actually communicate.
Meanwhile, paid staff would facilitate a way to solve problems (watching forums, suggesting fixes, adding to a wiki) -- perhaps the organization could also offer bounties for FOSS developers to improve certain areas which are most annoying.
This guy is way ahead of me, I'm still waiting for the millions.
Which raises the question, "Why will a school district need to customize its physics textbook?"
I can think of many reasons. Perhaps you want to simplify the high school physics book into one suitable for a gifted 4th grader. Perhaps a certain area of Virginia has a nuclear power plant nearby and you want to reference that plant for nearby students. Or a local person had some influence in the development of certain theories -- that could be localized to a certain area. Maybe a certain teacher has a PhD in quantum mechanics (uh - yeah, and is teaching high school physics - bear with me here), and wants to add a chapter to bring the concepts to her students.
So -- *need* to edit? Probably not. Might be useful? Could be.
The NBC (USA) broadcast talked about the cinematic show, but this part (the helicopter following the firework footsteps) really were cinema. Looked computer generated to me too.
This paper and many other interesting papers are being presented at Siggraph 2008 (a Computer Graphics conference) in August.
Here is one list of Siggraph 2008 papers: http://kesen.huang.googlepages.com/sig2008.html
There is no copy protection scheme that has not been utterly broken.
What about the Nintendo Gamecube? It has funny-sized (smaller than CDs) discs, they spin backwards from CDs and DVDs. Hard to read apart from a Gamecube, hard to write. I can't think of a second example copy protection scheme that has been so successful, but I thought the Gamecube was fairly immune to "backup" copies.
I think GM made the right decision to stop the EV1. Let's think about this - GM spent about $1.5B to build 1500 cars. That's $1M/car. This is back in the 90's, when a million dollars was a lot of money. They leased them for 2 years at ~$700/mo. That's a loss leader. They were banking on a leap in battery technology which never happened.
And no - nickel metal hydride batteries would not last the life of the car. Typically, NiMH have (best case) 1000 recharge cycles before they are pretty useless. I wouldn't want to depend on them to get me home the last few hundred cycles. The Prius' battery pack costs about $8k to replace. That's after 11 years of improvements in battery technology, and that battery will only move the car a few miles - much smaller battery capacity than the EV1. Also, the Prius only uses about 5 or 10% of the range of the battery (it is not fully charged or discharged in normal driving) to maximize battery life.
So you're left with a car with a very expensive battery pack (let's guess north of $20k) which needs to be replaced every 3-5 years. You paid a million dollars per car. Economies of scale can build the car for less. But that doesn't solve the battery problem. The breakthrough that GM was counting on in battery technology failed to materialize. The requirement of selling a percentage of zero-emission-vehicles in California began to show signs of weakness. What do you do - ask lessees to pay the true cost of >$20k for a new battery when they are needed in a few years? Do you continue to subsidize the car by selling batteries for less than you pay for them -- and figure out a way to stop people from buying the batteries and selling them for a profit? Where was the future in this car? There was no way for GM to even break even on it.
I agree that GM should have continued working on their EV line - maybe building a dozen prototypes a year, lending vehicles to magazine editors and car shows, but the battery issue was the killer.
This is similar to the
Elumens Vision Station from years ago, only the vision station has a front-projection projector with a fish-eye lens. They also claim a 180 degree FOV.
Isn't this code still running?
And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morningâ"the first day.
My gaming daughter started really gaming when she was 4. We played Super Mario 64 on the Nintendo 64 (a great early kids system because those carts are so sturdy). At first she just liked moving him in circles and making him jump. Soon she was understanding the layout of a 3D world, learning problem-solving skills (and not just the skill of asking Daddy to get by this part), recognizing opportunities for danger and reward. Oh, and the very exciting - new area! New skill (when Mario could start jumping into cannons and being blasted into the air, that was too cool).
Since then, she has played other N64 games including Zelda (not very deep into that game yet), Sonic on the Dreamcast, Wii Sports, Mario Party and her current favorite: Super Mario Galaxy. She also plays on her Leapster and on the computer -- huh, that's a lot of games. It was amazing to see how quickly her skills improved. We play together - it's fun and entertaining. It builds her confidence, lets her explore and just play with another toy. If she plays too much, she throws a fit, refuses to listen -- but we limit her game time. It's a healthy part of play time during her day.
Anyway - I'd say about 4 is a good age. Watch them, set reasonable limits, play with them, let them win most of the time. Leave lots of time for other active play (tonight the favorite toy was a new top).
I own a standard-def Pioneer DVR-640H-S 160GB DVR, which can write normal video DVDs. It has various (6?) bit-rates of 4GB/hour, 2GB/hr, 1GB/hr, 500MB/hr, down to something pretty darn crappy which I've never used (maybe 0.125GB/hr). We can put 9 55min episodes of Sesame Street on a single-layer DVD-R at the 0.5GB/hr rate. (Sorry, Sesame Street is not a popular Slashdot example) It's kinda blocky but quite watchable. Typical shows us adults watch at the 2GB/hr rate.
So, this DVR is talking about their very worst bit-rate for video. 18 hours on a dual-layer DVD: 9000MB/18hours = 500MB/hour; 500MB/3600sec = a final video rate of 139KB/sec - a little less than an audio CD. Much less than a typical commercial quality DVD (about 1MB/sec).
But, this is the same rate as the Sesame Street example - which must be fairly blocky and the results would not stand up favorably next to other HD example video.
What would be interesting is a more typical bit-rate HD stream. Say, squeezing two hours of video onto a single-layer DVD - how would that video quality compare to a commercially available BlueRay disc?
Arctic Thunder (xbox) - Great anytime, lots of secrets to find and ways to make yourself better. At the same time -- you hold down the gas and do nothing else, you're still only a few seconds back from the leader. (so even when you're bad, you don't look that bad) Mr. Do (mame) - old school addiction from my youth Online Euchre - Old school addiction from college Rise of Nations - build up an army and crush the computer (in easy mode, of course, to make sure I win) Star Wars Battlefront - quick fun in the Star Wars universe, also easy to win in easy mode
SGI had a ray tracing demo at Siggraph 2002. On the show floor, a 128-processor SGI box ran demos at around 20hz at about 512x512 pixels. http://www.sci.utah.edu/stories/2002/sum_star-ray. html
They make some good points about geometric complexity increasing much faster than displayed pixels, so there are fewer graphics primitives per pixel, so scan-line-based algorithms will make less sense.
So in 2002 it took 128 processors to run at 20Hz at 512x512 pixels. And now we think quad-cores will be enough to render today's complex environments? That math doesn't add up to me. I think scan-line algorithms are the mainstream answer for a long time coming...
This week's editorial from gamesindustry.biz:
If respectable business news service Bloomberg is to be believed, J Allard has been locked in a room somewhere in Redmond for the last year or so working away on Microsoft's fashionably late entry to the iPod party - and we'll be seeing the fruits of his labours at the end of this year. Actually, you don't just have to believe Bloomberg on this; the idea that Allard is working on a handheld media device, if true, is the industry's worst kept secret, as anyone who has read Dean Takahashi's excellent recent book on the Xbox 360 project, The Xbox 360 Uncloaked, can tell you.
Conventional wisdom says that Allard most recently worked as the public face of the videogames division at Microsoft - a role for which he got an extreme corporate makeover and a much-vaunted passion for extreme sports and skateboarding in the corridors at work, which we'd call a mid-life crisis in full effect if we didn't think that shooting fish in barrels makes for poor sport - so therefore, it stands to reason that this device will have gaming functions. Conventional wisdom may well be right; after all, Microsoft's Live Anywhere model, which the firm revealed at E3, would expand very nicely indeed to fit a connected handheld console into the family.
However, Bloomberg - and much of the rest of the world - is far more interested in the idea of Microsoft's system as an iPod killer than it is in the idea of a PSP killer, not least because the much-vaunted giant-slaying capabilities of the PSP have so far left Nintendo and Apple without so much as a scratch to show for the battle.
In this instance, you can see why Microsoft might want to join the fray. Apple's dominance of the portable music market isn't doing its rival's health much good, after all; even though the majority of iPods are plugged into Windows machines, those machines are running iTunes, Apple's own music player, they are buying music from the iTunes Music Store, and they've even got the audacity to be storing music in the AAC format which, in its encrypted form, doesn't play nicely with Microsoft's own Windows Media family of software.
This breaks the Microsoft model. It means you can't stream music off a Windows Media Centre PC, because it's not stored in Windows Media Player. It means your music is inaccessible to your Xbox 360 (okay, admittedly, that's not insurmountable - if you use a Mac, you can find a fantastic third party application called Connect360 which shares your iTunes library of music with your Xbox 360, but then again, Microsoft would probably prefer if you didn't use a Mac either), to your UMPC tablet device, and so on. Worse again, Apple is making a huge head-start on doing exactly the same thing with video content - arguably the entire raison d'etre of the Windows Media push.
So the firm's new projects storm trooper J Allard is dispatched to create a device that will rival the iPod, and give buyers an alternative this Christmas. He may well succeed; Microsoft has learned many lessons about hardware design since the obnoxious shape and size of the original Xbox amused the industry so much nearly six years ago, after all, and it's easy to believe that the firm could produce a sleek, pocket-sized, attractive music and movie player, perhaps even one that plays a decent game of Geometry Wars.
However, that's not good enough. What Microsoft needs is not just a sleek player and a good marketing campaign; if defeating the iPod was that simple, companies like Sony would have done it by now. Apple's advantage in the media device market isn't just sleek design and good marketing - it's all about the software. The iPod is stunningly easy to use, even for a rank amateur in the technology field, and that isn't just in terms of the interface on the device. Plug it into a PC or Mac, and iTunes integrates seamlessly with the player; go to the iTunes Music Store, or rip a CD, and the experience is equally smooth and simple. People buy iPods because they like the design and the
Slashdot Mirror
This business plan is clearly based on following directions from a GPS.
The first thing a GPS says:
Acquiring satellites...
For the record -- right now US dollars are worth more than Canadian. 1.00 USD = 1.01230 CAD
News for nerds. Resumes that matter.
I have rolled through more stop signs than most. I passed my time with moral relativism, until work sent me to Europe for a couple weeks with a rental car (circa 1998). During those two weeks, I never rolled through a stop sign -- because where it made sense, they put up Yield signs. Where it made sense, there are Stop signs. I rolled through the Yields, I stopped at the Stops. It made so much sense while I was there. And back in the USA, it still frustrates me that we love our Stop signs, and can't trust our population with Yield signs.
Last time I tried Foxit -- it would not let you select text and copy it, so the text can be copied into another app. Copying text was a premium feature (cue the advertising for the $$ upgrade). Foxit is smaller and faster. I loved Foxit up to that point, but absent that feature I went right back to Adobe Acrobat.
Skype is profitable, according to eBay.
So that's profitable, as in they bring in more revenue than expenses.
But is it a reasonable profit for a company worth $2.9B?
EBay bought Skype in 2005 for $2.6B.
EBay sold 65% of Skype in 2009 for $1.9B (so the new value is $1.9B/.65 = $2.9B).
So - no, not "quite a bit more".
From the historical-perspective dept.
I keep track of CPU and graphics card prices from pricewatch.com, for no-good-reason.
slashdot does not like my long lists (too few characters per line) so here are the abbreviated lists which keep the most expensive options.
Here are my scrapes from ~6 years ago:
Sep 16, 2003 List of Graphics Cards
$384 - Fire GL Z1 128mb
$696 - Fire GL X1 256mb
$529 - Fire GL X1 128mb
$469 RADEON 9800 Pro Ultimate
$373 - RADEON 9800 Pro Ultimate 128
$417 - RADEON 9800 Pro 256MB
$294 - RADEON 9800 Pro 128MB
$368 - RADEON 9800 All-In-Wonder Pro
$192 - RADEON 9800 128MB
$299 - RADEON 9700 Pro Ultimate
$266 - RADEON 9700 Pro
$389 - GeForce FX 5900 256MB
$235 - GeForce FX 5900 128MB
$251 - GeForce FX 5800 128MB
6/16/2003 List of CPUs:
$467 - Xeon 2.8GHz 533FSB
$315 - Xeon 2.66GHz 533FSB
$235 - Xeon 2.4GHz 533FSB
$236 - Xeon 2.0GHz 533FSB
$839 - Opteron 244
$708 - Opteron 242
$280 - Opteron 240
$451 - Athlon XP 3200
$440 - Athlon XP 3200 400
$249 - Athlon XP 3000
$294 - Athlon XP 3000 400
$282 - Athlon MP 2800
$205 - Athlon MP 2600
$158 - Athlon MP 2400
$127 - Athlon MP 2200
$199 - Athlon MP 2100
$122 - Athlon MP 2000
$147 - Athlon MP 1900
$149 - Athlon MP 1800
$115 - Athlon MP 1600
$108 - Athlon MP 1500
imagemagick can also compare two images, and tell you how different they are. That is -- quantify the differences by returning a floating point number or two (PSNR, RMSE) in a way that a more-compressed JPEG image will return a correspondingly different floating point value. I know the question concerns two JPEG-compressed images, but if you do have an original image -- and you want to test which is closest to the original, ImageMagick can do that. Use the ImageMagick compare function.
See http://www.imagemagick.org/script/compare.php
Also, [[www.gimp.org]] is able to look at an image and approximate what JPEG compression quality setting was used, and use that same quality setting to save an output JPEG copy of the image. So -- they have some algorithm inside of their application which takes an image and returns (a good guess of) the corresponding jpeg quality value.
Of course, this does not help you if the image was saved with a lousy JPEG quality value, like 10/100, and later saved at a much higher value, like 98/100. Since the algorithm only sees the last image, it would tell you the quality value is 98/100, even though the contents of the image would indicate the results of 10/100 compression, because of multi-generational lossy compression.
Well that's because there wasn't anything, strictly speaking, illegal done.
Nothing illegal done? Let's start with the dishonest loan brokers. Those brokers had people come in with a $40,000/yr salary, but put on the application that the salary was $160,0000/yr. Of course, these were no-doc loans, so no documentation was required. There was a lot of of fraud going on. Let's send a few thousand loan brokers to jail. Anyone with me?
> I want, need, have needed for years an electric car. I want 100 Klicks per charge. It only has to do maybe 100 Kph max. OK, so I need to re-buy the batteries every five years or so. I do not want a car that goes 0 to 110 Mph in 3 seconds. That is just stupid. It should cost around 15 grand. Where is that car?
Let's look at some real-world examples -- the Prius can go about 7 miles on battery-only power at 35mph max. Replacement batteries are about $8k. They start at $23k.
Fast forward two years: the Chevy Volt can go 40 miles on battery power. Replacement batteries: ???, but most be more than $8k. They will start (I'm guessing) $40k.
Rewind 12 years: GM's EV-1 was produced for: well, they spent about $1.5B for 1500 cars - that's around $1M each. Higher production numbers: let's guess $100k. Batteries (replaced every 3 years or so - guessing again): $50k. Not close to $15k. GM bet big that they would find a significant battery break-through (the breakthrough that has been "just 5 years away" for the past 25 years). What do you do with 1500 cars that will require a $50k replacement battery pack? Recall them, and shred them.
Toyota's Rav4 EV is a contender. Though battery packs for that vehicle are $26k (so says Wikipedia). I've seen used ones on ebay in reasonable shape for $60k. Except for cost -- this one is a winner for you.
The Aptera has 3 wheels so it can be classified a motorcycle, and not meet all the safety requirements and testing that cars need. (neighborhood cars - max speed of 25mph and another way to avoid being tested as a "real" car - are not included here) It's much lighter and easier to get speed and distance out of the batteries (plus batteries are better today).
Assuredly -- if someone could build a viable EV for $15k, they would, and they would make a killing. Your $15k goal is too low for today's battery technology.
while this is useful admirable-- if I had millions, I would consider setting up a program to pay a limited number of folks $100 for installing Linux on a desktop machine used 8+ hours a week and using it for a few months. A weekly (at least) intelligent posting to the forums would be required. You would have to apply for the program - show some of your writing on the internet (slashdot posts) as someone who really exists and can actually communicate.
Meanwhile, paid staff would facilitate a way to solve problems (watching forums, suggesting fixes, adding to a wiki) -- perhaps the organization could also offer bounties for FOSS developers to improve certain areas which are most annoying.
This guy is way ahead of me, I'm still waiting for the millions.
Which raises the question, "Why will a school district need to customize its physics textbook?"
I can think of many reasons. Perhaps you want to simplify the high school physics book into one suitable for a gifted 4th grader. Perhaps a certain area of Virginia has a nuclear power plant nearby and you want to reference that plant for nearby students. Or a local person had some influence in the development of certain theories -- that could be localized to a certain area. Maybe a certain teacher has a PhD in quantum mechanics (uh - yeah, and is teaching high school physics - bear with me here), and wants to add a chapter to bring the concepts to her students.
So -- *need* to edit? Probably not. Might be useful? Could be.
The NBC (USA) broadcast talked about the cinematic show, but this part (the helicopter following the firework footsteps) really were cinema. Looked computer generated to me too.
This paper and many other interesting papers are being presented at Siggraph 2008 (a Computer Graphics conference) in August.
Here is one list of Siggraph 2008 papers: http://kesen.huang.googlepages.com/sig2008.html
There is no copy protection scheme that has not been utterly broken.
What about the Nintendo Gamecube? It has funny-sized (smaller than CDs) discs, they spin backwards from CDs and DVDs. Hard to read apart from a Gamecube, hard to write. I can't think of a second example copy protection scheme that has been so successful, but I thought the Gamecube was fairly immune to "backup" copies.
I think GM made the right decision to stop the EV1. Let's think about this - GM spent about $1.5B to build 1500 cars. That's $1M/car. This is back in the 90's, when a million dollars was a lot of money. They leased them for 2 years at ~$700/mo. That's a loss leader. They were banking on a leap in battery technology which never happened.
And no - nickel metal hydride batteries would not last the life of the car. Typically, NiMH have (best case) 1000 recharge cycles before they are pretty useless. I wouldn't want to depend on them to get me home the last few hundred cycles. The Prius' battery pack costs about $8k to replace. That's after 11 years of improvements in battery technology, and that battery will only move the car a few miles - much smaller battery capacity than the EV1. Also, the Prius only uses about 5 or 10% of the range of the battery (it is not fully charged or discharged in normal driving) to maximize battery life.
So you're left with a car with a very expensive battery pack (let's guess north of $20k) which needs to be replaced every 3-5 years. You paid a million dollars per car. Economies of scale can build the car for less. But that doesn't solve the battery problem. The breakthrough that GM was counting on in battery technology failed to materialize. The requirement of selling a percentage of zero-emission-vehicles in California began to show signs of weakness. What do you do - ask lessees to pay the true cost of >$20k for a new battery when they are needed in a few years? Do you continue to subsidize the car by selling batteries for less than you pay for them -- and figure out a way to stop people from buying the batteries and selling them for a profit? Where was the future in this car? There was no way for GM to even break even on it.
I agree that GM should have continued working on their EV line - maybe building a dozen prototypes a year, lending vehicles to magazine editors and car shows, but the battery issue was the killer.
This is similar to the Elumens Vision Station from years ago, only the vision station has a front-projection projector with a fish-eye lens. They also claim a 180 degree FOV.
Isn't this code still running?
And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morningâ"the first day.
My gaming daughter started really gaming when she was 4. We played Super Mario 64 on the Nintendo 64 (a great early kids system because those carts are so sturdy). At first she just liked moving him in circles and making him jump. Soon she was understanding the layout of a 3D world, learning problem-solving skills (and not just the skill of asking Daddy to get by this part), recognizing opportunities for danger and reward. Oh, and the very exciting - new area! New skill (when Mario could start jumping into cannons and being blasted into the air, that was too cool).
Since then, she has played other N64 games including Zelda (not very deep into that game yet), Sonic on the Dreamcast, Wii Sports, Mario Party and her current favorite: Super Mario Galaxy. She also plays on her Leapster and on the computer -- huh, that's a lot of games. It was amazing to see how quickly her skills improved. We play together - it's fun and entertaining. It builds her confidence, lets her explore and just play with another toy. If she plays too much, she throws a fit, refuses to listen -- but we limit her game time. It's a healthy part of play time during her day.
Anyway - I'd say about 4 is a good age. Watch them, set reasonable limits, play with them, let them win most of the time. Leave lots of time for other active play (tonight the favorite toy was a new top).
I own a standard-def Pioneer DVR-640H-S 160GB DVR, which can write normal video DVDs. It has various (6?) bit-rates of 4GB/hour, 2GB/hr, 1GB/hr, 500MB/hr, down to something pretty darn crappy which I've never used (maybe 0.125GB/hr). We can put 9 55min episodes of Sesame Street on a single-layer DVD-R at the 0.5GB/hr rate. (Sorry, Sesame Street is not a popular Slashdot example) It's kinda blocky but quite watchable. Typical shows us adults watch at the 2GB/hr rate.
So, this DVR is talking about their very worst bit-rate for video. 18 hours on a dual-layer DVD: 9000MB/18hours = 500MB/hour; 500MB/3600sec = a final video rate of 139KB/sec - a little less than an audio CD. Much less than a typical commercial quality DVD (about 1MB/sec).
But, this is the same rate as the Sesame Street example - which must be fairly blocky and the results would not stand up favorably next to other HD example video.
What would be interesting is a more typical bit-rate HD stream. Say, squeezing two hours of video onto a single-layer DVD - how would that video quality compare to a commercially available BlueRay disc?
This excellent website http://trowley.org/sig2007.html has a host of links to almost all of the papers presented at SIGGRAPH 2007.
My top 5:
Arctic Thunder (xbox) - Great anytime, lots of secrets to find and ways to make yourself better. At the same time -- you hold down the gas and do nothing else, you're still only a few seconds back from the leader. (so even when you're bad, you don't look that bad)
Mr. Do (mame) - old school addiction from my youth
Online Euchre - Old school addiction from college
Rise of Nations - build up an army and crush the computer (in easy mode, of course, to make sure I win)
Star Wars Battlefront - quick fun in the Star Wars universe, also easy to win in easy mode
SGI had a ray tracing demo at Siggraph 2002. On the show floor, a 128-processor SGI box ran demos at around 20hz at about 512x512 pixels.. html
http://www.sci.utah.edu/stories/2002/sum_star-ray
They make some good points about geometric complexity increasing much faster than displayed pixels, so there are fewer graphics primitives per pixel, so scan-line-based algorithms will make less sense.
So in 2002 it took 128 processors to run at 20Hz at 512x512 pixels. And now we think quad-cores will be enough to render today's complex environments? That math doesn't add up to me. I think scan-line algorithms are the mainstream answer for a long time coming...
This week's editorial from gamesindustry.biz:
If respectable business news service Bloomberg is to be believed, J Allard has been locked in a room somewhere in Redmond for the last year or so working away on Microsoft's fashionably late entry to the iPod party - and we'll be seeing the fruits of his labours at the end of this year. Actually, you don't just have to believe Bloomberg on this; the idea that Allard is working on a handheld media device, if true, is the industry's worst kept secret, as anyone who has read Dean Takahashi's excellent recent book on the Xbox 360 project, The Xbox 360 Uncloaked, can tell you.
Conventional wisdom says that Allard most recently worked as the public face of the videogames division at Microsoft - a role for which he got an extreme corporate makeover and a much-vaunted passion for extreme sports and skateboarding in the corridors at work, which we'd call a mid-life crisis in full effect if we didn't think that shooting fish in barrels makes for poor sport - so therefore, it stands to reason that this device will have gaming functions. Conventional wisdom may well be right; after all, Microsoft's Live Anywhere model, which the firm revealed at E3, would expand very nicely indeed to fit a connected handheld console into the family.
However, Bloomberg - and much of the rest of the world - is far more interested in the idea of Microsoft's system as an iPod killer than it is in the idea of a PSP killer, not least because the much-vaunted giant-slaying capabilities of the PSP have so far left Nintendo and Apple without so much as a scratch to show for the battle.
In this instance, you can see why Microsoft might want to join the fray. Apple's dominance of the portable music market isn't doing its rival's health much good, after all; even though the majority of iPods are plugged into Windows machines, those machines are running iTunes, Apple's own music player, they are buying music from the iTunes Music Store, and they've even got the audacity to be storing music in the AAC format which, in its encrypted form, doesn't play nicely with Microsoft's own Windows Media family of software.
This breaks the Microsoft model. It means you can't stream music off a Windows Media Centre PC, because it's not stored in Windows Media Player. It means your music is inaccessible to your Xbox 360 (okay, admittedly, that's not insurmountable - if you use a Mac, you can find a fantastic third party application called Connect360 which shares your iTunes library of music with your Xbox 360, but then again, Microsoft would probably prefer if you didn't use a Mac either), to your UMPC tablet device, and so on. Worse again, Apple is making a huge head-start on doing exactly the same thing with video content - arguably the entire raison d'etre of the Windows Media push.
So the firm's new projects storm trooper J Allard is dispatched to create a device that will rival the iPod, and give buyers an alternative this Christmas. He may well succeed; Microsoft has learned many lessons about hardware design since the obnoxious shape and size of the original Xbox amused the industry so much nearly six years ago, after all, and it's easy to believe that the firm could produce a sleek, pocket-sized, attractive music and movie player, perhaps even one that plays a decent game of Geometry Wars.
However, that's not good enough. What Microsoft needs is not just a sleek player and a good marketing campaign; if defeating the iPod was that simple, companies like Sony would have done it by now. Apple's advantage in the media device market isn't just sleek design and good marketing - it's all about the software. The iPod is stunningly easy to use, even for a rank amateur in the technology field, and that isn't just in terms of the interface on the device. Plug it into a PC or Mac, and iTunes integrates seamlessly with the player; go to the iTunes Music Store, or rip a CD, and the experience is equally smooth and simple. People buy iPods because they like the design and the