Before you get angry, I suggest you go read the page what we prove and what we assume. The researchers are not claiming the kernel is bug-free. They are saying that certain parts of the kernel are free from certain classes of errors so long as the rest of the system (the C compiler, the linker, the hardware, the boot code, assembly code related to direct hardware access, etc..) is working as designed.
As someone who has been doing Linux kernel programming for about 8 years, I enthusiastically support efforts to make a more robust operating system. Just being able to say "this chunk of C code doesn't have any null pointer dereferences" is a significant achievement (and incidentally, it's one of the reasons why I do all my "for fun" programming in Haskell and not in C; life is too short to spend tracking down type errors that would never have gotten past a decent compiler).
7500 lines of code is actually quite a lot. Mainstream OSes like Linux have much bigger code bases, but that's because they need to support as many hardware devices as possible, dozens of filesystems, many cpu architectures, work equally well on embedded devices and many-cpu NUMA machines, and support any feature anyone happens to want. If you just want a system that can run particular applications on a particular hardware platform, a significant amount of functionality can fit in 7500 lines of code.
I doubt he can be profitable on just 200 registered players.
That's 200 players per server. My understanding is that he plans to run more than one server. I also hope he is successful; the video game industry needs more high-risk, low budget success stories.
My advice for learning fpga programming is the same for learning a regular programming language: it's a lot easier to stay motivated if you're not just learning for learning's sake, but have some particular project in mind. This is where I got stuck; I read a big thick book on verilog and got myself a development board and all the software set up, and I figured out how to make the LEDs blink faster or slower, but then I got distracted and never actually went on to do anything more complicated.
Caps don't generate revenue, except perhaps in fines. It's really just a way of giving current polluters a free pass to continue polluting at slightly less than current levels. The rules as to who gets carbon credits will undoubtedly be arbitrary, and subject to modification depending on future lobbying efforts.
I prefer a plain carbon tax on all fossil fuels (offset by a cut in income tax), and "cap and trade" is perhaps better than doing nothing at all, but it's really a very transparent attempt by congress to ensure a steady flow of revenue into the re-election funds of its members in exchange for carbon credits.
The arduino is a wonderful microcontroller for this sort of thing. It's cheap, it's available in small form factors, and it has pwm outputs that can be used to control servos.
I've also heard that some people have had success interfacing a wii controller with the arduino. If it's not to heavy, that might serve as a good, inexpensive accelerometer.
Same here, I didn't know he wrote science fiction. I've only read Empire of the Sun, which is well worth reading, and I liked the movie too ("There are Frigidaires falling from the sky, it's kingdom come!").
I think one of the problems with high school science is that it's mostly about learning facts that other scientists have learned. I'm not saying that having a good foundation isn't important, but it doesn't teach students much about the actual process of science, or how to evaluate the claims made in a particular paper - in the realm where new science is being created, you can't always just look up the right answer in the textbook.
Unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot of opportunity for a high-schooler to make a major discovery and get a paper accepted into a journal. However, I can think of two ways to introduce them to peer review system that many real scientists interact with.
1) Have them do the sort of non-glamorous science that everyone wants done but no one has the time to do, such as evaluating products. For instance, verifying that the nutrition information on a food label matches up with the contents, or testing wireless routers to see which one uses the least electricity. They could then post their results on the school district's website, and/or peer-review each other's findings.
2) Obtain a handful of research papers, some of which have been accepted by a major journal or conference, and some of which have been rejected. See if the students can figure out which ones were accepted and which ones were rejected and why.
I only mentioned it for the sake of completeness. I've never tried implementing it myself for my own projects, and don't plan to. However, I understand that it converges faster than photon mapping for some scenes lit by light sources that are mostly occluded, like light from underneath the crack of a door. In the photon mapping scenario, few of the photons would contribute to the final image.
Movie studios and the like may not care about this, as they can just manually position their lights so this isn't an issue. If MLT isn't used much in industry, though, that may be in large part because, unlike photon mapping, MLT is patented.
Not surprisingly, that text from the article is actually copied and pasted straight from Caustic's web site. Granted, the text appears in the article in the context of a quote, but the way it is presented makes it sound like they actually spoke with a representative of the company.
Gitit is a wiki that uses a git repository as a backend and exports to LaTeX. I haven't used it myself, and I expect you'll have to do a bit of hand-editing of the generated LaTeX to match whatever template you're using, but it might be worth looking into.
Maybe types are wonderful. I first thought they were inconvenient, since you have to pattern match against them any time you want to extract the value, but then I realized that that was something I ought to be doing anyways, and the advantages of never accidentally dereferencing a null pointer vastly outweigh a little extra typing. And then, more recently, I figured out how to use the maybe monad to string together a bunch of things that might fail without having to manually pattern match every time.
Make magazine had an article a few issues back about how to install solar panels on your house and do it according to code. It looked like a complicated process.
You might want to look at this Google tech talk, as well.
I had thought about mentioning FF7, but I glossed over it in the interests of brevity, and because I haven't ever actual played it, but rather watched someone else play. (You can spot a great game when people sit and watch other people play and aren't bored.)
Your other examples are all games I haven't played (save megaman), so it may be that I just haven't been playing the right games.
You happen to have picked two of my favorite anime (I don't have an opinion on Ghost in the Shell, it's been too long since I saw it, and I'm thinking I probably watched it as a mediocre dub), so I have reason to suspect the games you suggest may appeal to me.
It's interesting that the opposite argument was expressed in a separate reply: that books can be written by one person in a short length of time, whereas games require a large team (and a lot of money up front).
Maybe you're right about the stability of technology; it's hard to spend a long time working on a game because then it will be "obsolete" before it goes on sale. That may be part of the difference between anime and games; the technology of the former does not change as fast.
I have not played The Longest Journey. Thanks for the recommendation.
If a game developer wants games to be taken seriously, he (or she) ought to start making games that can be taken seriously. I can't think of any game on par with The Lord of the Rings, or Les Miserables, or Till We Have Faces, or (to use more modern examples) Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, or Hyperion, or any of dozens of great books I've read.
Sidenote: more prominent boobs on the box aren't going to earn the gaming industry any more respect. They may increase sales, but the same can be said of romance novels, and they're not widely regarded as great literature either. Sometimes, to gain respect you have to give up a few sales.
I realize that games aren't books, and we should have different expectations, but the best games still seem to be about on par with mediocre books in terms of character development, emotional impact, and philosophical content.
I think games ought to take some inspiration from the anime industry; there's a whole lot of bad anime, but there is also some great anime, and I think part of the reason why is that the people in charge are willing to take risks and explore complex issues, and they trust their viewers to "get it". (This can result in bad anime as often as good anime, but the industry on the whole seems to encourage risk-taking, whereas the game industry does not.)
I don't play a lot of games, so it may be that I'm just not aware of the rare gems out there. Riven is the best example I can think of off the top of my head as a game that made me think deeper thoughts (and I don't mean the puzzles). Some of the Zeldas have been pretty good overall (though all of them are rather silly at times, and perhaps a little too predictable). I have heard good things about Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, though I haven't actually played either.
If anyone has any great suggestions for what they think is the video-game equivalent of, say, Pachabell's canon, or Michaelangelo's David, or the Notre Dame cathedral, or the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, please enlighten me with your suggestions.
That is very true. In other respects, I'm not much of a fan of Microsoft, but they do support a lot of basic research. The same is true of IBM and Intel.
Thanks for the info, that is the real story that was completely missed by the article. The main benefits of atom are obscured when attached to a lot of power-hungry peripherals.
That's true. It's already the case in some well-written ray tracers that the memory bus is the bottleneck, not the floating point math. There are some interesting tricks to get the most out of that limited bandwidth. With packet tracing, for instance, you trace a bundle of rays (often 4 or 16) at the same time, so you don't have to access the same geometry over and over again, once for each ray.
Movie studios usually go with rasterization rather than ray-tracing because ray-tracers access scene memory in an unpredictable way, and so ray-tracing is excruciatingly slow if you can't fit the entire scene into the memory of one of the machines that's rendering it. Rasterizers can split the scene up, render the pieces separately, and combine the results in a single image.
For games, which typically run on a single machine, this is a non-issue.
I am still waiting for a game/demo that actually is build from the ground up with ray tracing in mind and by that I mean one that actually looks good,
Have you tried Outbound? You can find it here. While it's probably not destined to be a huge hit, it looks nice and runs at a playable framerate on a reasonably fast computer. (If you don't want to try to "beat" the game, there's an option buried in one of the configuration files to disable physics and just fly around and admire the scenery.)
Slashdot Mirror
Before you get angry, I suggest you go read the page what we prove and what we assume. The researchers are not claiming the kernel is bug-free. They are saying that certain parts of the kernel are free from certain classes of errors so long as the rest of the system (the C compiler, the linker, the hardware, the boot code, assembly code related to direct hardware access, etc..) is working as designed.
As someone who has been doing Linux kernel programming for about 8 years, I enthusiastically support efforts to make a more robust operating system. Just being able to say "this chunk of C code doesn't have any null pointer dereferences" is a significant achievement (and incidentally, it's one of the reasons why I do all my "for fun" programming in Haskell and not in C; life is too short to spend tracking down type errors that would never have gotten past a decent compiler).
7500 lines of code is actually quite a lot. Mainstream OSes like Linux have much bigger code bases, but that's because they need to support as many hardware devices as possible, dozens of filesystems, many cpu architectures, work equally well on embedded devices and many-cpu NUMA machines, and support any feature anyone happens to want. If you just want a system that can run particular applications on a particular hardware platform, a significant amount of functionality can fit in 7500 lines of code.
That's 200 players per server. My understanding is that he plans to run more than one server. I also hope he is successful; the video game industry needs more high-risk, low budget success stories.
My advice for learning fpga programming is the same for learning a regular programming language: it's a lot easier to stay motivated if you're not just learning for learning's sake, but have some particular project in mind. This is where I got stuck; I read a big thick book on verilog and got myself a development board and all the software set up, and I figured out how to make the LEDs blink faster or slower, but then I got distracted and never actually went on to do anything more complicated.
Caps don't generate revenue, except perhaps in fines. It's really just a way of giving current polluters a free pass to continue polluting at slightly less than current levels. The rules as to who gets carbon credits will undoubtedly be arbitrary, and subject to modification depending on future lobbying efforts.
I prefer a plain carbon tax on all fossil fuels (offset by a cut in income tax), and "cap and trade" is perhaps better than doing nothing at all, but it's really a very transparent attempt by congress to ensure a steady flow of revenue into the re-election funds of its members in exchange for carbon credits.
The arduino is a wonderful microcontroller for this sort of thing. It's cheap, it's available in small form factors, and it has pwm outputs that can be used to control servos.
I've also heard that some people have had success interfacing a wii controller with the arduino. If it's not to heavy, that might serve as a good, inexpensive accelerometer.
Same here, I didn't know he wrote science fiction. I've only read Empire of the Sun, which is well worth reading, and I liked the movie too ("There are Frigidaires falling from the sky, it's kingdom come!").
I think one of the problems with high school science is that it's mostly about learning facts that other scientists have learned. I'm not saying that having a good foundation isn't important, but it doesn't teach students much about the actual process of science, or how to evaluate the claims made in a particular paper - in the realm where new science is being created, you can't always just look up the right answer in the textbook.
Unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot of opportunity for a high-schooler to make a major discovery and get a paper accepted into a journal. However, I can think of two ways to introduce them to peer review system that many real scientists interact with.
1) Have them do the sort of non-glamorous science that everyone wants done but no one has the time to do, such as evaluating products. For instance, verifying that the nutrition information on a food label matches up with the contents, or testing wireless routers to see which one uses the least electricity. They could then post their results on the school district's website, and/or peer-review each other's findings.
2) Obtain a handful of research papers, some of which have been accepted by a major journal or conference, and some of which have been rejected. See if the students can figure out which ones were accepted and which ones were rejected and why.
I thought that it was, but I can't find find any reference to back that up, so maybe you're right.
I only mentioned it for the sake of completeness. I've never tried implementing it myself for my own projects, and don't plan to. However, I understand that it converges faster than photon mapping for some scenes lit by light sources that are mostly occluded, like light from underneath the crack of a door. In the photon mapping scenario, few of the photons would contribute to the final image.
Movie studios and the like may not care about this, as they can just manually position their lights so this isn't an issue. If MLT isn't used much in industry, though, that may be in large part because, unlike photon mapping, MLT is patented.
Not surprisingly, that text from the article is actually copied and pasted straight from Caustic's web site. Granted, the text appears in the article in the context of a quote, but the way it is presented makes it sound like they actually spoke with a representative of the company.
I shall remain skeptical until more information is forthcoming.
Main site
Demo site
Gitit is a wiki that uses a git repository as a backend and exports to LaTeX. I haven't used it myself, and I expect you'll have to do a bit of hand-editing of the generated LaTeX to match whatever template you're using, but it might be worth looking into.
Maybe types are wonderful. I first thought they were inconvenient, since you have to pattern match against them any time you want to extract the value, but then I realized that that was something I ought to be doing anyways, and the advantages of never accidentally dereferencing a null pointer vastly outweigh a little extra typing. And then, more recently, I figured out how to use the maybe monad to string together a bunch of things that might fail without having to manually pattern match every time.
Make magazine had an article a few issues back about how to install solar panels on your house and do it according to code. It looked like a complicated process.
You might want to look at this Google tech talk, as well.
For the benefit of the curious reader, here's some more information on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that you (and the summary) mention.
Thanks, I guess it's getting to be about time to convey myself to the nearest purveyor of used video games.
I had thought about mentioning FF7, but I glossed over it in the interests of brevity, and because I haven't ever actual played it, but rather watched someone else play. (You can spot a great game when people sit and watch other people play and aren't bored.)
Your other examples are all games I haven't played (save megaman), so it may be that I just haven't been playing the right games.
You happen to have picked two of my favorite anime (I don't have an opinion on Ghost in the Shell, it's been too long since I saw it, and I'm thinking I probably watched it as a mediocre dub), so I have reason to suspect the games you suggest may appeal to me.
It's interesting that the opposite argument was expressed in a separate reply: that books can be written by one person in a short length of time, whereas games require a large team (and a lot of money up front).
Maybe you're right about the stability of technology; it's hard to spend a long time working on a game because then it will be "obsolete" before it goes on sale. That may be part of the difference between anime and games; the technology of the former does not change as fast.
I have not played The Longest Journey. Thanks for the recommendation.
I had indeed forgotten about interactive fiction.
If a game developer wants games to be taken seriously, he (or she) ought to start making games that can be taken seriously. I can't think of any game on par with The Lord of the Rings, or Les Miserables, or Till We Have Faces, or (to use more modern examples) Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, or Hyperion, or any of dozens of great books I've read.
Sidenote: more prominent boobs on the box aren't going to earn the gaming industry any more respect. They may increase sales, but the same can be said of romance novels, and they're not widely regarded as great literature either. Sometimes, to gain respect you have to give up a few sales.
I realize that games aren't books, and we should have different expectations, but the best games still seem to be about on par with mediocre books in terms of character development, emotional impact, and philosophical content.
I think games ought to take some inspiration from the anime industry; there's a whole lot of bad anime, but there is also some great anime, and I think part of the reason why is that the people in charge are willing to take risks and explore complex issues, and they trust their viewers to "get it". (This can result in bad anime as often as good anime, but the industry on the whole seems to encourage risk-taking, whereas the game industry does not.)
I don't play a lot of games, so it may be that I'm just not aware of the rare gems out there. Riven is the best example I can think of off the top of my head as a game that made me think deeper thoughts (and I don't mean the puzzles). Some of the Zeldas have been pretty good overall (though all of them are rather silly at times, and perhaps a little too predictable). I have heard good things about Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, though I haven't actually played either.
If anyone has any great suggestions for what they think is the video-game equivalent of, say, Pachabell's canon, or Michaelangelo's David, or the Notre Dame cathedral, or the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, please enlighten me with your suggestions.
That is very true. In other respects, I'm not much of a fan of Microsoft, but they do support a lot of basic research. The same is true of IBM and Intel.
Thanks for the info, that is the real story that was completely missed by the article. The main benefits of atom are obscured when attached to a lot of power-hungry peripherals.
That's true. It's already the case in some well-written ray tracers that the memory bus is the bottleneck, not the floating point math. There are some interesting tricks to get the most out of that limited bandwidth. With packet tracing, for instance, you trace a bundle of rays (often 4 or 16) at the same time, so you don't have to access the same geometry over and over again, once for each ray.
Movie studios usually go with rasterization rather than ray-tracing because ray-tracers access scene memory in an unpredictable way, and so ray-tracing is excruciatingly slow if you can't fit the entire scene into the memory of one of the machines that's rendering it. Rasterizers can split the scene up, render the pieces separately, and combine the results in a single image.
For games, which typically run on a single machine, this is a non-issue.
Have you tried Outbound? You can find it here. While it's probably not destined to be a huge hit, it looks nice and runs at a playable framerate on a reasonably fast computer. (If you don't want to try to "beat" the game, there's an option buried in one of the configuration files to disable physics and just fly around and admire the scenery.)