A median of $50,000 would indicate that at most 50% are below that line.
A mean of $50,000 has no such indication without additional figures, and considering the almost hyperbolic distribution of incomes, much more than 50% of the population could be below the mean income value.
I can attest to this. When I wake up, my judgment is severely impaired, to the point that I'll hit my snooze alarm for 2 hours and end up late for work, while not really getting much more sleep. Even after I do wake up, it takes a long time before I'm really capable of doing much. It seems that even our supercomputer brains need time to spin up before we're ready for action.
Facade is actually a constant dialogue that can be interrupted and steered by participating in it via typing comments. It has an aspect of randomness, so it's not just a fixed cutscene that will play out the same way every time if you don't do something.
The AI is driven by a collection of modules mostly written in custom languages. One is used to describe the natural language processor, another is used to control the agents, another does the 3D rendering. Michael Mateas, who is one of the guys behind this project, is a big proponent of "little languages", although I wouldn't really call ABL little since it describes a superset of java.
I actually worked on the agent behavior language for a research project in university, under the professor responsible for constructing this game. ABL (A Behavior Language) is a bit of a departure from procedural and OO paradigms, introducing a form of concurrency into the language itself that allows many behaviors to be active or latent simultaneously. It's a bit of a pain to write, but after having dealt with it for a while, I do get the impression that it can help make more expressive and interactive agents that exhibit emergent behavior.
My father is actually right-handed but started using the mouse in his left hand some years ago because he was starting to feel the effects of RSI in his right hand, which he uses for writing, typing, etc. He uses a regular old wheelmouse without any lopsided bulges, and I haven't heard him complain of wrist pain since the switch.
I did plenty of research into MP3 players over the summer, and arrived at a purchase of an iRiver H120 (previously IHP-120) instead of the equivalent iPod or Karma units. It has a 20GB hard drive, inline remote with full functionality, microphone for recording, fm radio reception, supports MP3 and OGG, long battery life (16 hours or so), works as a mass storage device (no iTunes or other custom software to upload music, can be used easily as a file transfer unit), and pretty decent firmware. Essentially, it's the best hardware on the market, although I'm not sure if they're being sold anymore - iRiver seems to be pimping the H300 series now instead. Comparatively, the iPod has a severe lack of functionality, and the Karma was getting a terrible reputation for hard drive failures, so my choice was pretty clear.
The firmware has a few deficiencies, like a lack of gapless playback and a true random shuffle, and the iRiver firmware developers seem to have other priorities. Rockbox has chosen the H100 series as its next toy, since the Archos boxes are no longer available, so hopefully we'll have some nice open-source firmware to play with soon enough. Rockbox has refused to touch the Rio and iPod because of the built-in DRM chips that have no published specs.
I run a website with a membership paradigm, where the members have access to the source code, but only select developers can commit changes. We recently switched from CVS to Subversion, and I must say that the process was rather painful. People told me that svn supported various things, and convinced me to make the upgrade; they were largely incorrect, and this "CVS replacement" doesn't really deserve to be at 1.0, let alone 1.1.
You can download a pre-compiled binary, but it was several builds behind and missing some vital features when we made the switch, and so we had to compile from source. There are numerous dependencies that are all in unstable status, we had to upgrade and recompile half the server platform just to get svn built.
CVS allowed per-user authentication, such that I could set up some users to be authenticated as read/write and others as read-only, for the cases when a non-committer needed an update of the code immediately without us having to go off and build a tarball and have them download it. Subversion does not support this, instead allowing "anonymous" and "authenticated" access levels - you're either logged in or not, and get read/write permission accordingly, with no ability to configure permissions on a per-user basis.
CVS allows you to use a standard htpasswd file for storing hashed passwords along with user names. Subversion requires the passwords to be in plain text mode, so I had to ask all my developers to generate random passwords so that I wouldn't be accidentally exposed to passwords they use for other things.
We can't use the web-svn server because it needs to run through Apache 2.0 and we're running 1.3 still, without the option to upgrade because of some other plugins that haven't been ported.
The server is a royal pain to set up, the cvs2svn script is ok but not stellar, the "subversion book" is useless as a setup guide but might be useful as a reference to the experienced SVN user, and the lack of web-svn is pretty poor too. TortoiseSVN is also still under heavy development, and has some annoying version-change conflicts.
On the bright side, the single-commit operations are considerably slicker.
Overall, I'm not very impressed with Subversion, and will probably still keep updated my CVS repository in parallel until SVN gets its act in order. I'll take a look and see if 1.1 fixes any of my complaints.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. It's a file format aimed at intermediate resources in the content development pipeline. You make your level in 3dsmax or maya or wings3d or whatever, export it to MyLevel.COLLADA, then use a bunch of processing tools on that, and eventually compile it into a binary format that you can ship on a CD and load very quickly at runtime; the game itself never sees the intermediate file format. The inline tools will include: lightmap generation (including fancy new kinds of lightmaps like precomputed radiance transfer), normal-map generation, mesh simplification, BSP compilation, auto-portalization, flow field calculation, AI waypoint placement, and the list goes on as people dream up new things to play with. Along the content pipeline, these tools suck in the file, inject their particular contribution, and spit the modified file back out.
You can't do much (aka any) of that in file formats such as.3DS, and the more "flexible" formats such as MS's.X and Softimage's.XSI (essentially the same thing) have crappy predefined templates that all the known exporters conform to. Creating a custom, extensible file format specifically for holding tons of intermediate assets is pretty much a requisite unless you plan to write a 3dsmax plugin for each task. Having a custom, extensible file format that all the known content-creation tools conform to means you can use pretty much anything to make your game content without worrying about data being lost in the conversion process - everything is retained.
At least, that's what my intermediate file format does. This "collada" one might just be a new.3DS replacement.
Slashdot Mirror
A median of $50,000 would indicate that at most 50% are below that line.
A mean of $50,000 has no such indication without additional figures, and considering the almost hyperbolic distribution of incomes, much more than 50% of the population could be below the mean income value.
I can attest to this. When I wake up, my judgment is severely impaired, to the point that I'll hit my snooze alarm for 2 hours and end up late for work, while not really getting much more sleep. Even after I do wake up, it takes a long time before I'm really capable of doing much. It seems that even our supercomputer brains need time to spin up before we're ready for action.
Facade is actually a constant dialogue that can be interrupted and steered by participating in it via typing comments. It has an aspect of randomness, so it's not just a fixed cutscene that will play out the same way every time if you don't do something.
The AI is driven by a collection of modules mostly written in custom languages. One is used to describe the natural language processor, another is used to control the agents, another does the 3D rendering. Michael Mateas, who is one of the guys behind this project, is a big proponent of "little languages", although I wouldn't really call ABL little since it describes a superset of java.
I actually worked on the agent behavior language for a research project in university, under the professor responsible for constructing this game. ABL (A Behavior Language) is a bit of a departure from procedural and OO paradigms, introducing a form of concurrency into the language itself that allows many behaviors to be active or latent simultaneously. It's a bit of a pain to write, but after having dealt with it for a while, I do get the impression that it can help make more expressive and interactive agents that exhibit emergent behavior.
My father is actually right-handed but started using the mouse in his left hand some years ago because he was starting to feel the effects of RSI in his right hand, which he uses for writing, typing, etc. He uses a regular old wheelmouse without any lopsided bulges, and I haven't heard him complain of wrist pain since the switch.
That story on technewsworld is very similar indeed to the story on technewsworld.
I did plenty of research into MP3 players over the summer, and arrived at a purchase of an iRiver H120 (previously IHP-120) instead of the equivalent iPod or Karma units. It has a 20GB hard drive, inline remote with full functionality, microphone for recording, fm radio reception, supports MP3 and OGG, long battery life (16 hours or so), works as a mass storage device (no iTunes or other custom software to upload music, can be used easily as a file transfer unit), and pretty decent firmware. Essentially, it's the best hardware on the market, although I'm not sure if they're being sold anymore - iRiver seems to be pimping the H300 series now instead. Comparatively, the iPod has a severe lack of functionality, and the Karma was getting a terrible reputation for hard drive failures, so my choice was pretty clear.
The firmware has a few deficiencies, like a lack of gapless playback and a true random shuffle, and the iRiver firmware developers seem to have other priorities. Rockbox has chosen the H100 series as its next toy, since the Archos boxes are no longer available, so hopefully we'll have some nice open-source firmware to play with soon enough. Rockbox has refused to touch the Rio and iPod because of the built-in DRM chips that have no published specs.
I run a website with a membership paradigm, where the members have access to the source code, but only select developers can commit changes. We recently switched from CVS to Subversion, and I must say that the process was rather painful. People told me that svn supported various things, and convinced me to make the upgrade; they were largely incorrect, and this "CVS replacement" doesn't really deserve to be at 1.0, let alone 1.1.
You can download a pre-compiled binary, but it was several builds behind and missing some vital features when we made the switch, and so we had to compile from source. There are numerous dependencies that are all in unstable status, we had to upgrade and recompile half the server platform just to get svn built.
CVS allowed per-user authentication, such that I could set up some users to be authenticated as read/write and others as read-only, for the cases when a non-committer needed an update of the code immediately without us having to go off and build a tarball and have them download it. Subversion does not support this, instead allowing "anonymous" and "authenticated" access levels - you're either logged in or not, and get read/write permission accordingly, with no ability to configure permissions on a per-user basis.
CVS allows you to use a standard htpasswd file for storing hashed passwords along with user names. Subversion requires the passwords to be in plain text mode, so I had to ask all my developers to generate random passwords so that I wouldn't be accidentally exposed to passwords they use for other things.
We can't use the web-svn server because it needs to run through Apache 2.0 and we're running 1.3 still, without the option to upgrade because of some other plugins that haven't been ported.
The server is a royal pain to set up, the cvs2svn script is ok but not stellar, the "subversion book" is useless as a setup guide but might be useful as a reference to the experienced SVN user, and the lack of web-svn is pretty poor too. TortoiseSVN is also still under heavy development, and has some annoying version-change conflicts.
On the bright side, the single-commit operations are considerably slicker.
Overall, I'm not very impressed with Subversion, and will probably still keep updated my CVS repository in parallel until SVN gets its act in order. I'll take a look and see if 1.1 fixes any of my complaints.
Here's another CNN story with a few more pictures of the capsule after being recovered and brought back to a hangar.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. It's a file format aimed at intermediate resources in the content development pipeline. You make your level in 3dsmax or maya or wings3d or whatever, export it to MyLevel.COLLADA, then use a bunch of processing tools on that, and eventually compile it into a binary format that you can ship on a CD and load very quickly at runtime; the game itself never sees the intermediate file format. The inline tools will include: lightmap generation (including fancy new kinds of lightmaps like precomputed radiance transfer), normal-map generation, mesh simplification, BSP compilation, auto-portalization, flow field calculation, AI waypoint placement, and the list goes on as people dream up new things to play with. Along the content pipeline, these tools suck in the file, inject their particular contribution, and spit the modified file back out.
.3DS, and the more "flexible" formats such as MS's .X and Softimage's .XSI (essentially the same thing) have crappy predefined templates that all the known exporters conform to. Creating a custom, extensible file format specifically for holding tons of intermediate assets is pretty much a requisite unless you plan to write a 3dsmax plugin for each task. Having a custom, extensible file format that all the known content-creation tools conform to means you can use pretty much anything to make your game content without worrying about data being lost in the conversion process - everything is retained.
.3DS replacement.
You can't do much (aka any) of that in file formats such as
At least, that's what my intermediate file format does. This "collada" one might just be a new