The significance of this is not the size, price or color/mono. Its HOW it is done. This particular one shoots the image straight to the retina, versus hanging an LCD in front of the eye, which seems to be how microoptical is doing it (their website seemed a touch sparse on technical info). I believe microvision does sell the lcd style display at a much cheaper price, in color and to very high resolutions (800x600?).
All this is more or less from memory, so I could be wrong!
The problem is, I doubt the ps2 linux kit will work well for game development at all. I imagine that all the specialized processors will be nearly useless to joe programmer. It won't be easy to access all of them. And to really make the ps2 fly, you have to.
The other problem, which most people don't realize when they want to program consoles, is how limited these things are. The ps2 has 32 megs of ram. Now that may sound like a fair amount, but remember.. theres no swap memory. On a PC you can get by with 64 because of swap. But on the ps2, you have to not only fit into 32 megs (which isn't much once you get some art!), you have to repeatedly fit, meaning you can't fragment your memory. This is just one of the *minor* problems.
PS2 programming is considered some of the hardest console programming there is. Not sure I would recommend it to anyone. Plus you'd have to pay sony licensing fees to do it legally (I think). I would recommend just writing games on the PC. Its a lot easier. =)
Actually, I bet many have (outside of the usual Redhat/Cygnus/etc group). See by USING (not selling), they save money, which in economic terms, is pretty much the same as making money (since it reduces costs, the net income is greater). If company A switches to all GPL open source software, while still developing their own code in a proprietary manner, they can save bundles of cash, which means they net more.
I see the necessity for this, but at the same time, the most positive contributers will end up payong the most. This seems counter productive. Why not do something like reward positive moderation. So, for example, at the end of the month, add up all the moderation points on my comments. If I have a positive balance, credit me with banner-less page views. You'd have to figure out a good "pricing" system, but I think this would be beneficial in (at least) two ways:
1. Positive contributers get rewarded. 2. Everyday users may work towards more positive contribution for reward, resulting in even better content!
The problem with at least some of these, is that these universities have so many because they were some of the institutions which started it all. Its tough to take something away from someone when they played a large part in its creation.
The only problem I have here is "the bacteria and vegetation are the same, all coming from the bacteria and vegetation on pangaea." Just take a look at North america for an example of why this isn't necessarily valid. We have dramatically different climates all over North America. If it were to break up, the local climate would push for whatever is best best suited for the area. Before you may have had some immigration and other outside forces, but now, with the contitent segmented, this wouldn't happen as much.
So each subcontinent of Pangaea wouldn't be "the same." The different climates would already have created some differentiation.
Actually, even at that amount, you'd be tough pressed to make money. Isn't it like $10000/lb to get stuff to orbit? You'd need to do that once for earth, and then once for mars. Plus it would be more expensive since you have to carry fuel to get to and from Mars, etc, etc..
I don't know much about Australian geography, but the US is also plagued by terrain problems. The high (14000ft) mountains throught a good portion of the US means it is tough to have signals which cover a large range, since the various mountains cast "shadows." I know this is a problem near my home in CA, where we sit in a small valley, surrounded by 2000ft mountains and rolling hills. Yes, they have put transmitters on the tops of the moutains, but there are still lots of dead zones.
I would have to disagree pretty strongly with using STL. As a programmer of game consoles (read TIGHT memory constraints and tough shipping restrictions), we found that STL's internal memory management to be a real horror. STL can allocate and deallocate more or less whenever it wants. We were fighting to have no memory fragmentation (which we have now), but with STL, this becomes EXTREMELY hard. STL actually increased memory problems. Finally we put in our own memory manager, and found all those stl classes and cleaned 'em out.
Now if only *printf wouldn't use the internal memory routines (they can allocate on their own too, but we can override those memory allocation routines!)
If you do implement printing quotas, it would be nice to also provide options like printing 4 pages on one sheet, and maybe double sided printing. This doesn't reduce toner costs (the more expensive part, I would presume), but it does reduce paper use, which is always a nice plus. I used to do this when I needed to print out tons of pages of class notes at the end of the semester.
$8.75 is completely accurate. Pretty sad wage if you ask me. People work at the media lab because it tends to have a more flexible schedule, and provides opportunities for masters work later.
Not true. The pro forma profits were $35 million (from about the middle of the article). A quote:
Excluding those expenses, the e-tailer's pro forma profits topped estimates handily, reaching $35 million, or 9 cents a share. According to First Call, Amazon was expected to lose 7 cents a share, excluding goodwill, on sales of $1.01 billion.
Re:All good and well but we need an excellent brow
on
GNOME 2.0 Desktop Alpha
·
· Score: 3, Offtopic
Have you tried opera? No, its not open source, and the free version is ad ware, but I personally love their interface (pop up windows can't get out of control!) and the gestures are great! Small things, like the ability to turn off popup windows directly from the menu, are nice! Its really coming along!
Just because this book tells you how to program more realistic models, does NOT mean they have to be realistic. For example, you can set gravity to 9.8m/s^2, or hell set it to 4.9m/s^2 and have it be the moon. Or if you JUST want higher jumps, increase the force you apply when jumping.
The important thing this book (I assume) lets you do is generate better MODELS. These models can be parameterized on all sorts of things. The outcome doesn't have to be more realistic, but the interactions will be more consistent and reliable. In this way, the interactions of the forces (even if gravity is half or what it is normally) can still be realistic.
Wow.. thats completely false. When you exercise for an hour, you can burn on the order or 600-700 Calories (yes, with a capital C, and yes, there is a difference). Given the average person burns about 2500 a day, this is in fact very significant. Plus, exercising raises your metabolism for nearly an hour afterwards, so you continues to burn calories. Please do a little research. Of course exercise won't cure over eating - if you eat those extra 600 Calories, you're not going to lose weight. I speak from MUCH experience as a lightweight athelete (no, not a starving wrestler), who had to monitor his weight carefully.
Actually, most of the problems of math and science could not be solved by a math coprocessor in a brain. It doesn't take that much time to move the problem from your head to a computer. The problem is not so much solving the problem as it is formulating it correctly. Like so many things, the correct representation of a problem often makes the solution trivial. So many things (like strong AI, for example, or the mind), just don't have good strong representations to work with.
Of course they could go through those possible representations and rule out the bad ones more quickly. =)
I'm just parrotting what it says in another later comment, but a few problems w/ balloons:
1. Getting the gas (presumeably h2). Either build a support infrastructure there to generate it, with is tough and expensive, or carry it, which is not easy either.
2. A balloon can only lift as much as the difference in weight between the weight of the gas in the balloon and the weighty of an equivalent volume of the atmosphere. Since the atmosphere is already pretty thin, you'd need pretty large balloons. Plus the extreme temp changes (as mentioned in the article) change things constantly, so you have to ensure that all your materials can stretch as the gas inside expands, or they have to be full only at the hottest temperatures, and thus be relatively empty later, or carry a tank to transfer gas in and out.. but that adds a lot of weight.
Its old, so you probably can't buy it new, but the RIO 500 rocks. It uses SmartMedia, has no copy protection, and came with 64MB built in. The smartmedia cards are now pretty cheap, so its not too bad to buy lots of these tiny cards. It has pretty good battery life (a little less than 10 hours if you are actively - triggering the backlite - using it). It runs on a single AA, is rugged, and light. It has nice sound quality (the earphones that come with it suck though). I recommend one if you can find it.
By jacking up sales, you actually make it cheaper for them to make them, so eventually they make money on the XBox - economies of scale. Its expensive at the start, but in the end they make money, even off the box, once they get production ramped up and going hard. So you are really just helping them along to making money on it.
The half life is relatively short. I think its on the order of a month. I know it decays to a different radioactive isotope within 10days, which then decays to a stable form fairly quickly.
I had a problem with this. Call UPS. I called at 5pm one day, after the 3rd "failed" attempt. My roommate was home for ALL 3 "attempts." After bitching for a while, they got the person to turn the truck around from across town (LA) and come back.
Interesting. I went to MIT, and, as far as I understand, they had almost the polar opposite of this policy. All work done by undergrads (with relation to classwork, anyway - I never did graduate work) is the sole property of the student. This meant that all rights to projects, homework, essentially everything, were retained by the student. And given the nature of a lot of the projects and classes, this was important. Many students have made a lot of money off their undergrad work.
Speaking as a starting game developer, I can already see some problems:
Conflict of interest, NDA's, IP issues abound. It would be tough for any game developer to really have a significant impact on a truly OSS library. The minute it became large, his or her employer would want to make it proprietary, and probably could do to the all the legal stuff. What motivation does any company have to share its code freely? Why give competition help? Now, former game developers or independant game developers might be able to do this, but its tough for industry developers. Of course, this is just my guess.
Slashdot Mirror
The significance of this is not the size, price or color/mono. Its HOW it is done. This particular one shoots the image straight to the retina, versus hanging an LCD in front of the eye, which seems to be how microoptical is doing it (their website seemed a touch sparse on technical info). I believe microvision does sell the lcd style display at a much cheaper price, in color and to very high resolutions (800x600?).
All this is more or less from memory, so I could be wrong!
The problem is, I doubt the ps2 linux kit will work well for game development at all. I imagine that all the specialized processors will be nearly useless to joe programmer. It won't be easy to access all of them. And to really make the ps2 fly, you have to.
The other problem, which most people don't realize when they want to program consoles, is how limited these things are. The ps2 has 32 megs of ram. Now that may sound like a fair amount, but remember.. theres no swap memory. On a PC you can get by with 64 because of swap. But on the ps2, you have to not only fit into 32 megs (which isn't much once you get some art!), you have to repeatedly fit, meaning you can't fragment your memory. This is just one of the *minor* problems.
PS2 programming is considered some of the hardest console programming there is. Not sure I would recommend it to anyone. Plus you'd have to pay sony licensing fees to do it legally (I think). I would recommend just writing games on the PC. Its a lot easier. =)
Actually, I bet many have (outside of the usual Redhat/Cygnus/etc group). See by USING (not selling), they save money, which in economic terms, is pretty much the same as making money (since it reduces costs, the net income is greater). If company A switches to all GPL open source software, while still developing their own code in a proprietary manner, they can save bundles of cash, which means they net more.
This would be inaddition to the current subscription system. It would be so that positive contributers get a break. It would not be a replacement.
I see the necessity for this, but at the same time, the most positive contributers will end up payong the most. This seems counter productive. Why not do something like reward positive moderation. So, for example, at the end of the month, add up all the moderation points on my comments. If I have a positive balance, credit me with banner-less page views. You'd have to figure out a good "pricing" system, but I think this would be beneficial in (at least) two ways:
1. Positive contributers get rewarded.
2. Everyday users may work towards more positive contribution for reward, resulting in even better content!
Seems like there is no reason not to try this!
The problem with at least some of these, is that these universities have so many because they were some of the institutions which started it all. Its tough to take something away from someone when they played a large part in its creation.
The only problem I have here is "the bacteria and vegetation are the same, all coming from the bacteria and vegetation on pangaea." Just take a look at North america for an example of why this isn't necessarily valid. We have dramatically different climates all over North America. If it were to break up, the local climate would push for whatever is best best suited for the area. Before you may have had some immigration and other outside forces, but now, with the contitent segmented, this wouldn't happen as much.
So each subcontinent of Pangaea wouldn't be "the same." The different climates would already have created some differentiation.
Actually, even at that amount, you'd be tough pressed to make money. Isn't it like $10000/lb to get stuff to orbit? You'd need to do that once for earth, and then once for mars. Plus it would be more expensive since you have to carry fuel to get to and from Mars, etc, etc..
I don't know much about Australian geography, but the US is also plagued by terrain problems. The high (14000ft) mountains throught a good portion of the US means it is tough to have signals which cover a large range, since the various mountains cast "shadows." I know this is a problem near my home in CA, where we sit in a small valley, surrounded by 2000ft mountains and rolling hills. Yes, they have put transmitters on the tops of the moutains, but there are still lots of dead zones.
I would have to disagree pretty strongly with using STL. As a programmer of game consoles (read TIGHT memory constraints and tough shipping restrictions), we found that STL's internal memory management to be a real horror. STL can allocate and deallocate more or less whenever it wants. We were fighting to have no memory fragmentation (which we have now), but with STL, this becomes EXTREMELY hard. STL actually increased memory problems. Finally we put in our own memory manager, and found all those stl classes and cleaned 'em out.
Now if only *printf wouldn't use the internal memory routines (they can allocate on their own too, but we can override those memory allocation routines!)
If you do implement printing quotas, it would be nice to also provide options like printing 4 pages on one sheet, and maybe double sided printing. This doesn't reduce toner costs (the more expensive part, I would presume), but it does reduce paper use, which is always a nice plus. I used to do this when I needed to print out tons of pages of class notes at the end of the semester.
$8.75 is completely accurate. Pretty sad wage if you ask me. People work at the media lab because it tends to have a more flexible schedule, and provides opportunities for masters work later.
Not true. The pro forma profits were $35 million (from about the middle of the article). A quote:
Excluding those expenses, the e-tailer's pro forma profits topped estimates handily, reaching $35 million, or 9 cents a share. According to First Call, Amazon was expected to lose 7 cents a share, excluding goodwill, on sales of $1.01 billion.
Have you tried opera? No, its not open source, and the free version is ad ware, but I personally love their interface (pop up windows can't get out of control!) and the gestures are great! Small things, like the ability to turn off popup windows directly from the menu, are nice! Its really coming along!
Just because this book tells you how to program more realistic models, does NOT mean they have to be realistic. For example, you can set gravity to 9.8m/s^2, or hell set it to 4.9m/s^2 and have it be the moon. Or if you JUST want higher jumps, increase the force you apply when jumping.
The important thing this book (I assume) lets you do is generate better MODELS. These models can be parameterized on all sorts of things. The outcome doesn't have to be more realistic, but the interactions will be more consistent and reliable. In this way, the interactions of the forces (even if gravity is half or what it is normally) can still be realistic.
Wow.. thats completely false. When you exercise for an hour, you can burn on the order or 600-700 Calories (yes, with a capital C, and yes, there is a difference). Given the average person burns about 2500 a day, this is in fact very significant. Plus, exercising raises your metabolism for nearly an hour afterwards, so you continues to burn calories. Please do a little research. Of course exercise won't cure over eating - if you eat those extra 600 Calories, you're not going to lose weight. I speak from MUCH experience as a lightweight athelete (no, not a starving wrestler), who had to monitor his weight carefully.
Actually, most of the problems of math and science could not be solved by a math coprocessor in a brain. It doesn't take that much time to move the problem from your head to a computer. The problem is not so much solving the problem as it is formulating it correctly. Like so many things, the correct representation of a problem often makes the solution trivial. So many things (like strong AI, for example, or the mind), just don't have good strong representations to work with.
Of course they could go through those possible representations and rule out the bad ones more quickly. =)
I'm just parrotting what it says in another later comment, but a few problems w/ balloons:
1. Getting the gas (presumeably h2). Either build a support infrastructure there to generate it, with is tough and expensive, or carry it, which is not easy either.
2. A balloon can only lift as much as the difference in weight between the weight of the gas in the balloon and the weighty of an equivalent volume of the atmosphere. Since the atmosphere is already pretty thin, you'd need pretty large balloons. Plus the extreme temp changes (as mentioned in the article) change things constantly, so you have to ensure that all your materials can stretch as the gas inside expands, or they have to be full only at the hottest temperatures, and thus be relatively empty later, or carry a tank to transfer gas in and out.. but that adds a lot of weight.
Its old, so you probably can't buy it new, but the RIO 500 rocks. It uses SmartMedia, has no copy protection, and came with 64MB built in. The smartmedia cards are now pretty cheap, so its not too bad to buy lots of these tiny cards. It has pretty good battery life (a little less than 10 hours if you are actively - triggering the backlite - using it). It runs on a single AA, is rugged, and light. It has nice sound quality (the earphones that come with it suck though). I recommend one if you can find it.
By jacking up sales, you actually make it cheaper for them to make them, so eventually they make money on the XBox - economies of scale. Its expensive at the start, but in the end they make money, even off the box, once they get production ramped up and going hard. So you are really just helping them along to making money on it.
The half life is relatively short. I think its on the order of a month. I know it decays to a different radioactive isotope within 10days, which then decays to a stable form fairly quickly.
I had a problem with this. Call UPS. I called at 5pm one day, after the 3rd "failed" attempt. My roommate was home for ALL 3 "attempts." After bitching for a while, they got the person to turn the truck around from across town (LA) and come back.
... or did anyone else read the headline as "Surf the net on a digital computer"? I wasn't all that impressed at first. :-P
Interesting. I went to MIT, and, as far as I understand, they had almost the polar opposite of this policy. All work done by undergrads (with relation to classwork, anyway - I never did graduate work) is the sole property of the student. This meant that all rights to projects, homework, essentially everything, were retained by the student. And given the nature of a lot of the projects and classes, this was important. Many students have made a lot of money off their undergrad work.
Speaking as a starting game developer, I can already see some problems:
Conflict of interest, NDA's, IP issues abound. It would be tough for any game developer to really have a significant impact on a truly OSS library. The minute it became large, his or her employer would want to make it proprietary, and probably could do to the all the legal stuff. What motivation does any company have to share its code freely? Why give competition help? Now, former game developers or independant game developers might be able to do this, but its tough for industry developers. Of course, this is just my guess.
Kevin