Its not really a "hybrid" the same way that Toyota's vehicles are hybrid. The current hybrids have the following (I am over-simplifying this) algorithm: - If at slow speed: use battery - If at high speed or high acceleration, use gas - If at medium speed with little or no acceleration, then use a little bit of both
However, the Volt uses the following algorithm: - Use as much battery until almost dead - If battery is just about dead, use gas
For short distances, it can give almost infinite MPG (which is why there has to be a special way to rate the MPG for this kind of vehicle). Toyota and Honda are going to use this second algorithm (called "EV Mode") in their new cars soon.
Anyway, Apple was one of the companies that first came up with the OpenCL standard. Apple worked with Khronos to make it a full standard. AMD is one of the first to publicly release a full implementation of OpenCL which is why this is big news.
I haven't read too much of OpenCL (just a few whitepapers and tutorials) but does anybody know if you can use both the GPU and CPU at the same time for the same kind of task. For example, in a single "kernel", I want it done 100 times, I can send 4 to the quad-core CPU and the rest to the GPU? If so, this would be a big win for AMD.
As a 25 year old, I was taught good handwriting and cursive when I was in grade school. However, after elementary, I found it pointless to write in cursive anymore. As a matter of fact, in my generation, most people's cursive is worse than their "regular" handwriting. To complicate matters, when we see a cursive "n", we often misread it as "m". Other things I noticed about our generation is that we have a harder time seeing hyphenated words (as they often appear in newspapers, but almost never on a computer) and we tend like our san-serif fonts more than the regular serif font.
Sorry for being off-topic, but what do you guys think is the best keyboard out there? I recently got a Model M keyboard (from Unicomp) and I can't say its worth the price. Also, I feel like the newer the keyboard is, the harder it is to program in (due to location of the arrows and/or the buttons gives little tactile feedback). Anybody else feel the same way?
Its not a good idea to compare watching commercials on TV vs. Hulu. One major difference that should be taken into consideration is the fact that there is only one commercial between segments of shows on Hulu; while on TV there are multiple. Its easier to "remember" the commercials after only seeing one rather than multiple but at the same time the overall revenue that the episode gets per viewer would probably be much less.
Reasons why cell phone companies hate tethering: 1. Youtube. When AT&T did calculations for the iPhone, they initially didn't take youtube into account and once it was available to iPhone customers, their 3 year bandwidth projection was hit in just 3 weeks (I'll look up the citation later, but you'll have to take my word on it). Now that youtube is available to many mobile devices, I would assume that they are worried that other apps (like WoW, Skype, BitTorrent) could suck up a lot of bandwidth 2. Tethering your computer to your phone means that your cellphone could potentially be part of a botnet from your pwned windows computer. 3. If they can legally charge you for it, why not? Many businesses are willing to pay the fee as a "cost of doing business".
Half the reason why Apple made their stores was to encourage people to test drive a Mac right there. They placed most of the stores in malls so people who had other shopping to do can just hop in and try this "Mac" thing out. On top of that, they are able to repair your computer (or at least send it out for repair) right there without giving you the trouble of shipping it yourself. The apple store is half the reason why I ended up with a Mac.
Most people are familiar with Windows so a "test drive" will not do much good. And the people who use Windows tend to be the people that end up using whatever OS is installed in their computer anyway. Microsoft is not really in the PC selling business so they can't help you with your laptop when there is a hardware problem. The only product I think the store will really push is mobile devices since they seem to think thats where a lot of money is (or at least they are scared that Linux or iPhone will grab too much of the market). They can be a "Windows Mobile Phone" store that sells phones that use WindowsCE. I can't think of anything else that would differentiate them from a "Best Buy" or "Frys".
There is one course that I took that made us write down not only our answers in the test, but also our certainty for our answer. The scoring was a logarithmic scale such that if you say you are 100% sure of an answer but get it wrong, you get Negative Infinity for that question and you end up failing the class. Oddly enough, this course was in CMU at Pittsburgh.
I have a PS3 and have been getting a bunch of Blu-ray movies via Netflix. The PS3 is connected to a 5.1 surround system and a hi-def projector that projects on to a 100" screen (so I can see every pixel;) ). Here are some of my observations: - Older movies, like "The Usual Suspects", don't look that much better in Blu-ray than on upscaled DVD. I thought I was watching the DVD version of until after I hit the eject button and realized that Netflix gave me the blu-ray version. Oddly enough, some low-budget movies like Juno looked better than big-budget film like Batman Begins. Most of the older movies are really not worth seeing again in Blu-ray. - Most Blu-ray movies do not take advantage of the extra interactive features that it can offer. No biggie since I never use them anyway. - Sound is not that much better. Even with a 5.1 system, its hard to tell the difference between 5.1 from a DVD vs. 5.1 or 7.1 from a blu-ray. Sure, some audiophile could probably tell the difference, but I am in the higher end of the spectrum of people and I really couldn't tell the difference.
I was on the same boat not that long ago; here are a few ideas:
1. Wiki documentation to non-wiki documentation ratio. Compare how much documentation there is between the wiki itself vs. other project documentation like your word documents and pdfs (assuming they are not just copy/paste stuff from the wiki). A simple word count as measure will probably please your PHBs. 2. Assuming that this is a programming project that you are in, you can also compare the % growth of the wiki vs. the % growth of the codebase. It somewhat implies how much people are contributing to the wiki vs. doing the actual project. 3. Assuming that people properly tag pages; you can try to see the average time it takes for a tagged article to become untagged. I don't know exactly how to do that in mediawiki but I am sure you can write a complicated SQL script in order to get such information (assuming you have direct access to the database). 4. Other people mentioned activity as a good measure. I would also include average number of edits per page (people are actually reading and editing pages instead of dumping things in) and also average time between edits (people are constantly updating pages).
It is a real shame that Game DRM hasn't gotten the same bad publicity and force for change movement against it that music has.
The reason why DRM for computer games have not been been getting the same amount of bad publicity is because the entire computer industry has really bad DRM. The DRM problems that you go through is nothing compared to other software out there (like anything from Telelogic) and this is nothing new. The music industry got a lot of flack mostly because they only recently imposed the DRM schemes and nobody would have expected a music CD to install a rootkit.
I overall agree that Apple needs competition but a few points:
1. There is a open source version of Cocoa called GNUStep. It doesn't have every feature that Cocoa has like Core Image, but as more people move to enterprise Macs, I imagine more people will help the project out. There are ways to combine C++ and Objective C but it requires a person who actually knows that they are doing. 2. The dock can be hidden and shown only when the mouse is over it. If you really hate the reflection on the dock, you can always put the dock to the left or right side which would make it non-reflective. Apple in general has responded well to UI problems that people have complained about. The Stacks' icon fiasco is another example. 3. The Apple sys-admins I have talked to didn't have too much trouble customizing apple software packages. I don't know exactly how they did it. However, they seem to complain more about how "Apple screwed up their filesystem" more than anything else.
I think that even if they were told a year or 2 in advance about this decision, Adobe still would not have been able to make the port to Cocoa in time. I suspect a lot of their code is in C++. Carbon is also C++ which makes it easy to integrate while Cocoa is Objective-C. There is a way to combine C and C++ code, but if the wrong person does it, it can lead to a big mess. Even open source projects like OpenSceneGraph (OSG) and Qt are having trouble making a Mac 64-bit since its so hard to combine the Objective-C and their C++ together (but it can be done). So its easy to blame Apple for their "last minute" change, but for a large codebase like Photoshop, it wouldn't have made much of a difference.
For those of us who don't know what the Sony-Betamax decision was, can someone please explain? What are the implications of this? Thanks!
In a nutshell: Sony was pissed off that people were using their VCRs to record or possibly pirate video media. Sony wanted to make sure that Betamax didn't have the "record" function in their products to prevent piracy. In the end, the judge ruled that its ok to have a "record" function since it is not always used for piracy.
I orignally wanted to do Computer Science since I wanted to make computer games. However, after taking a bunch of high level CS courses, I learned tha CS is not just programming. There is a ton of crazy math crap that I have to learn. Before college, I would have never imagined that mathmatical induction would play a vital role in computer science. All I really wanted to do in CS was just to make computer games and the more higher level courses I took, the detached the work was from game programming. I know a real programmer should know the complicated math behind it, but CS no longer appealed to me the same way it used to so I switched majors to Human-Computer Interaction since it was much closer to what I wanted than CS (now I am just minoring in CS).
If there is no paper trails and nobody (expect for the company that made the program) knows really what the program does, how do you know its going to be a fair election? I might be wrong saying the program is closed source but if it is, who can verify the fact that the program does what it is supposed to do on election day. It kinda reminds me of shareware programs that work perfectly until a certain date, then it goes bonkers.
I have been using Flash for years and never knew anything about SVG. Because this article told me so many things about it, I am going to try it out. Thanks Macromedia.
Its funny, I thought Doom III would be released in either 2001 or at the very latest, 2002. I never expected it be released this late. I guess its time for another computer if I want to play Doom III with all the goodies.
Back in 2001, when the first preview of Doom III got out, I decided to buy a new computer just for Doom III. It is a 1.2 MHz Pentium 4, 256MB of RAM and has a GeForce 3 (since that was the video card that Doom III was initally demoed in). Now I have to buy another freaken computer to play the real Doom 3!
Slashdot Mirror
Then I guess this gallery should be useful for a lot of people.
Its not really a "hybrid" the same way that Toyota's vehicles are hybrid. The current hybrids have the following (I am over-simplifying this) algorithm:
- If at slow speed: use battery
- If at high speed or high acceleration, use gas
- If at medium speed with little or no acceleration, then use a little bit of both
However, the Volt uses the following algorithm:
- Use as much battery until almost dead
- If battery is just about dead, use gas
For short distances, it can give almost infinite MPG (which is why there has to be a special way to rate the MPG for this kind of vehicle). Toyota and Honda are going to use this second algorithm (called "EV Mode") in their new cars soon.
Ok, I'll feed the troll (this time)
Anyway, Apple was one of the companies that first came up with the OpenCL standard. Apple worked with Khronos to make it a full standard. AMD is one of the first to publicly release a full implementation of OpenCL which is why this is big news.
I haven't read too much of OpenCL (just a few whitepapers and tutorials) but does anybody know if you can use both the GPU and CPU at the same time for the same kind of task. For example, in a single "kernel", I want it done 100 times, I can send 4 to the quad-core CPU and the rest to the GPU? If so, this would be a big win for AMD.
As a 25 year old, I was taught good handwriting and cursive when I was in grade school. However, after elementary, I found it pointless to write in cursive anymore. As a matter of fact, in my generation, most people's cursive is worse than their "regular" handwriting. To complicate matters, when we see a cursive "n", we often misread it as "m".
Other things I noticed about our generation is that we have a harder time seeing hyphenated words (as they often appear in newspapers, but almost never on a computer) and we tend like our san-serif fonts more than the regular serif font.
What does OpenGL shaders have to do with archiving data?
Sorry for being off-topic, but what do you guys think is the best keyboard out there? I recently got a Model M keyboard (from Unicomp) and I can't say its worth the price. Also, I feel like the newer the keyboard is, the harder it is to program in (due to location of the arrows and/or the buttons gives little tactile feedback). Anybody else feel the same way?
Its not a good idea to compare watching commercials on TV vs. Hulu. One major difference that should be taken into consideration is the fact that there is only one commercial between segments of shows on Hulu; while on TV there are multiple. Its easier to "remember" the commercials after only seeing one rather than multiple but at the same time the overall revenue that the episode gets per viewer would probably be much less.
Reasons why cell phone companies hate tethering:
1. Youtube. When AT&T did calculations for the iPhone, they initially didn't take youtube into account and once it was available to iPhone customers, their 3 year bandwidth projection was hit in just 3 weeks (I'll look up the citation later, but you'll have to take my word on it). Now that youtube is available to many mobile devices, I would assume that they are worried that other apps (like WoW, Skype, BitTorrent) could suck up a lot of bandwidth
2. Tethering your computer to your phone means that your cellphone could potentially be part of a botnet from your pwned windows computer.
3. If they can legally charge you for it, why not? Many businesses are willing to pay the fee as a "cost of doing business".
Not that I don't believe this guy, but can we have some screen shots and some evidence before we scream and yell to the rest of the world?
If indeed Windows 7 does this, I know a lot of people that will get a "rude awakening" from DRM and they will not stand for it.
Half the reason why Apple made their stores was to encourage people to test drive a Mac right there. They placed most of the stores in malls so people who had other shopping to do can just hop in and try this "Mac" thing out. On top of that, they are able to repair your computer (or at least send it out for repair) right there without giving you the trouble of shipping it yourself. The apple store is half the reason why I ended up with a Mac.
Most people are familiar with Windows so a "test drive" will not do much good. And the people who use Windows tend to be the people that end up using whatever OS is installed in their computer anyway. Microsoft is not really in the PC selling business so they can't help you with your laptop when there is a hardware problem. The only product I think the store will really push is mobile devices since they seem to think thats where a lot of money is (or at least they are scared that Linux or iPhone will grab too much of the market). They can be a "Windows Mobile Phone" store that sells phones that use WindowsCE. I can't think of anything else that would differentiate them from a "Best Buy" or "Frys".
IIRC, doesn't the Berne Convention say that all creative works have copyright even if you don't register it?
There is one course that I took that made us write down not only our answers in the test, but also our certainty for our answer. The scoring was a logarithmic scale such that if you say you are 100% sure of an answer but get it wrong, you get Negative Infinity for that question and you end up failing the class. Oddly enough, this course was in CMU at Pittsburgh.
I have a PS3 and have been getting a bunch of Blu-ray movies via Netflix. The PS3 is connected to a 5.1 surround system and a hi-def projector that projects on to a 100" screen (so I can see every pixel ;) ). Here are some of my observations:
- Older movies, like "The Usual Suspects", don't look that much better in Blu-ray than on upscaled DVD. I thought I was watching the DVD version of until after I hit the eject button and realized that Netflix gave me the blu-ray version. Oddly enough, some low-budget movies like Juno looked better than big-budget film like Batman Begins. Most of the older movies are really not worth seeing again in Blu-ray.
- Most Blu-ray movies do not take advantage of the extra interactive features that it can offer. No biggie since I never use them anyway.
- Sound is not that much better. Even with a 5.1 system, its hard to tell the difference between 5.1 from a DVD vs. 5.1 or 7.1 from a blu-ray. Sure, some audiophile could probably tell the difference, but I am in the higher end of the spectrum of people and I really couldn't tell the difference.
I was on the same boat not that long ago; here are a few ideas:
1. Wiki documentation to non-wiki documentation ratio. Compare how much documentation there is between the wiki itself vs. other project documentation like your word documents and pdfs (assuming they are not just copy/paste stuff from the wiki). A simple word count as measure will probably please your PHBs.
2. Assuming that this is a programming project that you are in, you can also compare the % growth of the wiki vs. the % growth of the codebase. It somewhat implies how much people are contributing to the wiki vs. doing the actual project.
3. Assuming that people properly tag pages; you can try to see the average time it takes for a tagged article to become untagged. I don't know exactly how to do that in mediawiki but I am sure you can write a complicated SQL script in order to get such information (assuming you have direct access to the database).
4. Other people mentioned activity as a good measure. I would also include average number of edits per page (people are actually reading and editing pages instead of dumping things in) and also average time between edits (people are constantly updating pages).
It is a real shame that Game DRM hasn't gotten the same bad publicity and force for change movement against it that music has.
The reason why DRM for computer games have not been been getting the same amount of bad publicity is because the entire computer industry has really bad DRM. The DRM problems that you go through is nothing compared to other software out there (like anything from Telelogic) and this is nothing new.
The music industry got a lot of flack mostly because they only recently imposed the DRM schemes and nobody would have expected a music CD to install a rootkit.
I overall agree that Apple needs competition but a few points:
1. There is a open source version of Cocoa called GNUStep. It doesn't have every feature that Cocoa has like Core Image, but as more people move to enterprise Macs, I imagine more people will help the project out. There are ways to combine C++ and Objective C but it requires a person who actually knows that they are doing.
2. The dock can be hidden and shown only when the mouse is over it. If you really hate the reflection on the dock, you can always put the dock to the left or right side which would make it non-reflective. Apple in general has responded well to UI problems that people have complained about. The Stacks' icon fiasco is another example.
3. The Apple sys-admins I have talked to didn't have too much trouble customizing apple software packages. I don't know exactly how they did it. However, they seem to complain more about how "Apple screwed up their filesystem" more than anything else.
I think that even if they were told a year or 2 in advance about this decision, Adobe still would not have been able to make the port to Cocoa in time. I suspect a lot of their code is in C++. Carbon is also C++ which makes it easy to integrate while Cocoa is Objective-C. There is a way to combine C and C++ code, but if the wrong person does it, it can lead to a big mess. Even open source projects like OpenSceneGraph (OSG) and Qt are having trouble making a Mac 64-bit since its so hard to combine the Objective-C and their C++ together (but it can be done). So its easy to blame Apple for their "last minute" change, but for a large codebase like Photoshop, it wouldn't have made much of a difference.
Sorry, that is what my dad said; last time I ask him for info...
For those of us who don't know what the Sony-Betamax decision was, can someone please explain? What are the implications of this? Thanks!
In a nutshell: Sony was pissed off that people were using their VCRs to record or possibly pirate video media. Sony wanted to make sure that Betamax didn't have the "record" function in their products to prevent piracy. In the end, the judge ruled that its ok to have a "record" function since it is not always used for piracy.
I orignally wanted to do Computer Science since I wanted to make computer games. However, after taking a bunch of high level CS courses, I learned tha CS is not just programming. There is a ton of crazy math crap that I have to learn. Before college, I would have never imagined that mathmatical induction would play a vital role in computer science. All I really wanted to do in CS was just to make computer games and the more higher level courses I took, the detached the work was from game programming. I know a real programmer should know the complicated math behind it, but CS no longer appealed to me the same way it used to so I switched majors to Human-Computer Interaction since it was much closer to what I wanted than CS (now I am just minoring in CS).
If there is no paper trails and nobody (expect for the company that made the program) knows really what the program does, how do you know its going to be a fair election? I might be wrong saying the program is closed source but if it is, who can verify the fact that the program does what it is supposed to do on election day. It kinda reminds me of shareware programs that work perfectly until a certain date, then it goes bonkers.
I have been using Flash for years and never knew anything about SVG. Because this article told me so many things about it, I am going to try it out. Thanks Macromedia.
Its funny, I thought Doom III would be released in either 2001 or at the very latest, 2002. I never expected it be released this late. I guess its time for another computer if I want to play Doom III with all the goodies.
Back in 2001, when the first preview of Doom III got out, I decided to buy a new computer just for Doom III. It is a 1.2 MHz Pentium 4, 256MB of RAM and has a GeForce 3 (since that was the video card that Doom III was initally demoed in). Now I have to buy another freaken computer to play the real Doom 3!