We have a similar program in Cincinnati, Ohio called Streetvibes People buy the magazines for 30 cents and sell them for 1 dollar. The articles themselves are also all written by volunteers, mostly the same people that sell them.
There was a guy I met once who had literally a 5 minute skit worked out to try to convince people to give him money. He would be standing in a parking lot pretending to be talking on a pay phone to his mother about how his nearby car had run out of gas. As someone walked by, he would loudly tell his "mom" to hold on a second and approach the person walking by, placing special emphasis on the word "mom" to be sure that other people could hear it.
I didn't give him any money, but I've wondered a lot about the guy since. He could have just been a run of the mill con artist I suppose, since I don't remember his clothes really indicating that he was definitely homeless. The thing that keeps bugging me about him, is that I'm positive they aren't enough people in the area he was doing this for him to make more than $5 an hour. His skit, while obviously fake, was really presented with a lot of energy and effort. If he was willing to put as much effort into flipping burgers as he did into this skit he would make substantially more money. So I keep wondering if there is something psychological about him that makes him think he is coming out more ahead by cheating people out of their money than by making it at a job.
I could be completely off base about him, and it could be that he makes more money doing that than I think. However, I worry that giving to someone not providing a service might in some people reinforce the mentality that you are earning more money if someone just gives it to you, even though in aggregate you are earning less than minimum wage. That's why I love buying papers from streetvibes sellers. I know I'm only reinforcing positive behavior.
I find bundling software to be acceptible on one condition. The default state for the check box should be off so that I don't accidentally install it.
Believe it or not, not everyone knows all of the software available to them at any given time. As such, advertising like this (which is essentially what bundling software is, advertising for the bundled program) does have a useful purpose. If someone offers me a program, I like the look of it and I install it and enjoy it, then I am thankful for whoever offered it to me. It's only onerous when they use people's natural inattention to force it on them.
Opera is now more standards compliant than Firefox. If you care about web standards, you should use the browser that supports them most fully. I love firefox, but I recognize that the existence of web standards is ultimately what allows firefox or any other non microsoft browser to exist. Until Firefox catches up, I'm going to use Opera.
I don't know to what extent this is possible in the current Chinese economy, but normally self-motivated people with degrees can create opportunity for themselves by starting new companies. Educating more people can only raise the wealth of a nation because educated people can be more productive, regardless of what the current economy has ready for them when they first graduate.
I recently graduated, and many of my professors said they were generally impressed with the quality of information on wikipedia. Furthermore, while mathworld et al. often have the information, they all recommended wikipedia as being by far the most accessible.
Shape from shading works only on a very narrow set of objects. If you are trying to recover the shape of a marble statue, use shape from shading. If your object has color forget about it.
What you are saying amounts to "People have done research into computer vision in the past, therfore any new research into computer vision is soooo not new."
This is only for outdoor scenes and only extracts planar information. It isn't designed for objects at all. It provides general geometric context, ie this area is ground, this area is a left facing wall, etc. That's not to say that a similar technique couldn't be used for identifying round objects, but that isn't what this is for.
The complexity of the models that the program is able to extract is similar to what you would see in a game like doom. All "floors" are perfectly horizontal, all "walls" are perfectly vertical, and most objects (people, trees, cars) become small vertical walls. This doesn't attempt to capture surface geometry at all; it approximates things with large planes. What they are saying is that most things you see in pictures are very well approximated by these simple primitives, such that when they create a scene using them it provides convincing parallax as you move around it. It's a really neat effect.
Half the time, I think people feel that science is out of their reach because the articles they read about it don't give them enough information to even start learning about it. When science is presented like this it gets reduced to blurbs with the logical content of zen koans. "sound from no sound" "noise from silence" A little more and I've got a haiku. I appreciate the need for simple summaries, but comeon, at least link to the meat of it.
I believe it's everyone in the company from the CEO on down, but I'm not positive on that.
Everyone at ford must first work in the factory.
on
Ballmer Beaten by Spyware
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I had a friend who was considering taking an offer from Ford as a mechanical engineer. Apparantly they require everyone they hire to spend a month working on the assembly lines so that no matter where they end up in the company they will have a sense of how things really get done on the ground.
If you haven't checked out his stuff yet you owe it to yourself. Professional quality with a sense of immediacy and humor not found often in other games. Hella fun too.
I played through Episode 1. It took me longer than most I think. I got around 7 hours of gameplay out of it. Y'know what? That 7 hours was some of the best gameplay I've ever had. I never play through single player games more than once, and I've been going back and replaying chapters of this.
What you are arguing is the fallacy of the slippery slope. You are arguing that because this appears to be less content for more money that in the future we will see even less content for more money. Similarly, a stock I own went down last week. Therefore clearly I should sell it now and nip this downward trend in the bud. . .
There are advantages to the episodic model on both sides. Personally, as a young professional, I'm getting to a point in my life where I spend less time gaming and prefer to buy games in smaller chunks. 5-15 hours of gameplay feels right to me.
Furthermore, there are advantages to the developers beyond just the more regular revenue. The commentary in episode 1 talks a lot about this. With episodic content you can incorporate improvements in graphics hardware technology at the time scales that they become available rather than guessing about stuff that's 3 years away when you start development and hoping you guess right. Taking the gameplay in smaller chunks also seems to improve the product in other ways. With a shorter time span its easier to tailor the technology specifically to the gameplay you are creating because there is less of it to target. In episode 1 for instance, they dramatically improved the ways in which NPCs can interact programatically with their environment in order to make Alyx a more engaging companion, because having her as a companion was decided to be an essential part of the gameplay for this episode. The developers also get feedback faster. They know if they are going in the right direction after 8 months of investment rather than 3 years.
All in all, I think its a great change. It fits the aging demographic of gamers better, it fits download distribution better, and it makes games manageable investments for game companies again.
People have been bemoaning the lack of innovation in games, and much of that is because of the huge investments that full retail games require. I'm willing to bet that if episodes become the norm, we'll be seeing a lot more interesting games because publishers will know that if it doesn't work out they can can the project after the first one is released.
Use hydrocarbons as your fuel source. This is environmentally little different from using a standard internal combustion engine.
I disagree. When the fossil fuels are being used at a centralized location it can be economical to use huge scrubbers on the stacks and reduce emissions far below what is possible on each and every car.
In everything you've described, what motivation does the "recipient" have to reencrypt it? At every step you are counting on the software of the person recieving the file to say, "Yep, I'll do something my user doesn't want." How long do you expect that to last? All of the functionality you describe would be easy indeed to put in any player, but it would also be easy to put in decryptMyMusic.exe . At the very least you would need some kind of system to authenticate the recieving piece of software as one that the content holder recognizes as compliant, but we've seen how well that works with game copy protection.
The moment google starts leveraging their monopoly on operating systems to promote their other products, everyone should feel free to get on their case.
Windows doesn't come with a photo organizer. Picassa is a great one. Makes sense to me.
You are probably familiar with the earlier versions of Google Desktop which, aside from the search, were basically a fancy distraction, but the features that I have on mine right now enhance my productivity: nice to-do list, scratch pad, google calendar, weather. None of these things are present or nearly as convenient in Windows. The search is also fantastic, and completely obsoletes the default Windows search.
You left out Google Talk. I think including a chat program that uses an open standard, with no ads and a nice interface is a good addition.
I haven't tried to use Google Earth for more than the pretty factor, but I bet someone who has can tell me what they do with it.
Slashdot Mirror
We have a similar program in Cincinnati, Ohio called Streetvibes People buy the magazines for 30 cents and sell them for 1 dollar. The articles themselves are also all written by volunteers, mostly the same people that sell them.
There was a guy I met once who had literally a 5 minute skit worked out to try to convince people to give him money. He would be standing in a parking lot pretending to be talking on a pay phone to his mother about how his nearby car had run out of gas. As someone walked by, he would loudly tell his "mom" to hold on a second and approach the person walking by, placing special emphasis on the word "mom" to be sure that other people could hear it.
I didn't give him any money, but I've wondered a lot about the guy since. He could have just been a run of the mill con artist I suppose, since I don't remember his clothes really indicating that he was definitely homeless. The thing that keeps bugging me about him, is that I'm positive they aren't enough people in the area he was doing this for him to make more than $5 an hour. His skit, while obviously fake, was really presented with a lot of energy and effort. If he was willing to put as much effort into flipping burgers as he did into this skit he would make substantially more money. So I keep wondering if there is something psychological about him that makes him think he is coming out more ahead by cheating people out of their money than by making it at a job.
I could be completely off base about him, and it could be that he makes more money doing that than I think. However, I worry that giving to someone not providing a service might in some people reinforce the mentality that you are earning more money if someone just gives it to you, even though in aggregate you are earning less than minimum wage. That's why I love buying papers from streetvibes sellers. I know I'm only reinforcing positive behavior.
I find bundling software to be acceptible on one condition. The default state for the check box should be off so that I don't accidentally install it.
Believe it or not, not everyone knows all of the software available to them at any given time. As such, advertising like this (which is essentially what bundling software is, advertising for the bundled program) does have a useful purpose. If someone offers me a program, I like the look of it and I install it and enjoy it, then I am thankful for whoever offered it to me. It's only onerous when they use people's natural inattention to force it on them.
100,000 dollars would certainly be nice, but I think the potential loss of my immortal soul is the dealbreaker for me.
Opera is now more standards compliant than Firefox. If you care about web standards, you should use the browser that supports them most fully. I love firefox, but I recognize that the existence of web standards is ultimately what allows firefox or any other non microsoft browser to exist. Until Firefox catches up, I'm going to use Opera.
I don't know to what extent this is possible in the current Chinese economy, but normally self-motivated people with degrees can create opportunity for themselves by starting new companies. Educating more people can only raise the wealth of a nation because educated people can be more productive, regardless of what the current economy has ready for them when they first graduate.
I recently graduated, and many of my professors said they were generally impressed with the quality of information on wikipedia. Furthermore, while mathworld et al. often have the information, they all recommended wikipedia as being by far the most accessible.
Shape from shading works only on a very narrow set of objects. If you are trying to recover the shape of a marble statue, use shape from shading. If your object has color forget about it.
What you are saying amounts to "People have done research into computer vision in the past, therfore any new research into computer vision is soooo not new."
This is only for outdoor scenes and only extracts planar information. It isn't designed for objects at all. It provides general geometric context, ie this area is ground, this area is a left facing wall, etc. That's not to say that a similar technique couldn't be used for identifying round objects, but that isn't what this is for.
Well to the extent that Linsey Lohans boobies can be modelled by large flat planes you are right. :)
Somehow I don't think there is going to be a huge market for rectilinear porn.
My mind practically self destructs when looking at that.
Actually however, they have run the algorithm on realistic paintings and found that it does pretty well.
The complexity of the models that the program is able to extract is similar to what you would see in a game like doom. All "floors" are perfectly horizontal, all "walls" are perfectly vertical, and most objects (people, trees, cars) become small vertical walls. This doesn't attempt to capture surface geometry at all; it approximates things with large planes. What they are saying is that most things you see in pictures are very well approximated by these simple primitives, such that when they create a scene using them it provides convincing parallax as you move around it. It's a really neat effect.
Half the time, I think people feel that science is out of their reach because the articles they read about it don't give them enough information to even start learning about it. When science is presented like this it gets reduced to blurbs with the logical content of zen koans. "sound from no sound" "noise from silence" A little more and I've got a haiku. I appreciate the need for simple summaries, but comeon, at least link to the meat of it.
I believe it's everyone in the company from the CEO on down, but I'm not positive on that.
I had a friend who was considering taking an offer from Ford as a mechanical engineer. Apparantly they require everyone they hire to spend a month working on the assembly lines so that no matter where they end up in the company they will have a sense of how things really get done on the ground.
If you haven't checked out his stuff yet you owe it to yourself. Professional quality with a sense of immediacy and humor not found often in other games. Hella fun too.
I played through Episode 1. It took me longer than most I think. I got around 7 hours of gameplay out of it. Y'know what? That 7 hours was some of the best gameplay I've ever had. I never play through single player games more than once, and I've been going back and replaying chapters of this.
What you are arguing is the fallacy of the slippery slope. You are arguing that because this appears to be less content for more money that in the future we will see even less content for more money. Similarly, a stock I own went down last week. Therefore clearly I should sell it now and nip this downward trend in the bud. . .
There are advantages to the episodic model on both sides. Personally, as a young professional, I'm getting to a point in my life where I spend less time gaming and prefer to buy games in smaller chunks. 5-15 hours of gameplay feels right to me.
Furthermore, there are advantages to the developers beyond just the more regular revenue. The commentary in episode 1 talks a lot about this. With episodic content you can incorporate improvements in graphics hardware technology at the time scales that they become available rather than guessing about stuff that's 3 years away when you start development and hoping you guess right. Taking the gameplay in smaller chunks also seems to improve the product in other ways. With a shorter time span its easier to tailor the technology specifically to the gameplay you are creating because there is less of it to target. In episode 1 for instance, they dramatically improved the ways in which NPCs can interact programatically with their environment in order to make Alyx a more engaging companion, because having her as a companion was decided to be an essential part of the gameplay for this episode. The developers also get feedback faster. They know if they are going in the right direction after 8 months of investment rather than 3 years.
All in all, I think its a great change. It fits the aging demographic of gamers better, it fits download distribution better, and it makes games manageable investments for game companies again.
People have been bemoaning the lack of innovation in games, and much of that is because of the huge investments that full retail games require. I'm willing to bet that if episodes become the norm, we'll be seeing a lot more interesting games because publishers will know that if it doesn't work out they can can the project after the first one is released.
Anyone making $120k/year can afford some of the nicer houses in any midwestern city.
Use hydrocarbons as your fuel source. This is environmentally little different from using a standard internal combustion engine.
I disagree. When the fossil fuels are being used at a centralized location it can be economical to use huge scrubbers on the stacks and reduce emissions far below what is possible on each and every car.
nt
The most egregious stoners I met in high school often turned out to be bi-polar.
In everything you've described, what motivation does the "recipient" have to reencrypt it? At every step you are counting on the software of the person recieving the file to say, "Yep, I'll do something my user doesn't want." How long do you expect that to last? All of the functionality you describe would be easy indeed to put in any player, but it would also be easy to put in decryptMyMusic.exe . At the very least you would need some kind of system to authenticate the recieving piece of software as one that the content holder recognizes as compliant, but we've seen how well that works with game copy protection.
The moment google starts leveraging their monopoly on operating systems to promote their other products, everyone should feel free to get on their case.
Windows doesn't come with a photo organizer. Picassa is a great one. Makes sense to me.
You are probably familiar with the earlier versions of Google Desktop which, aside from the search, were basically a fancy distraction, but the features that I have on mine right now enhance my productivity: nice to-do list, scratch pad, google calendar, weather. None of these things are present or nearly as convenient in Windows. The search is also fantastic, and completely obsoletes the default Windows search.
You left out Google Talk. I think including a chat program that uses an open standard, with no ads and a nice interface is a good addition.
I haven't tried to use Google Earth for more than the pretty factor, but I bet someone who has can tell me what they do with it.
nt