I have a pair of e-dimensional 3d glasses (yes, they DO work if you have the right set-up and some patience*), and can say after showing them to a few people, several issues will keep 3d from mainstream:
I've tried shutter glasses for games in the past and it wasn't a great experience. I think you really need to use a proper HMD with built-in screens. Although the field of view of HMDs is still far too pathetic to convince you that you are in a 3D game world, the FOV of some of them is perfect for watching movies. The Indicube portable movie player is coming out soon and it has glasses that are equivalent to a 17 inch desk monitor. It's not geared up for 3D but once that sort of thing becomes widespread, 3D is sure to follow.
Speaking of the obvious thought of porn, I'm surprised magazines haven't tried using stereoscopic pictures. This is a really easy 3d trick anyone can do- simply take two pictures...
This is an old but effective trick. They even used to make cameras geared up for it. Harold LLoyd took lots of 3D pictures of Marilyn Monroe and other celebrities. You can even buy a book of his work. A lot of people have trouble viewing the pictures unaided though. You can get little plastic viewers to help, but they restrict the size of the pictures you can see. If TV goggles become widespread, maybe 3D photography will get a boost too.
At the company I used to work for there were about 5 developers and we used Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, which didn't actually seem to be that safe. The main nightmare was when we needed to have several versions on the go, e.g. one release version that was just for bug fixes etc and another version that was for development. It was annoying because bug fixes in the release version had to be copied over to the development version (and sometimes vice versa). There are obviously better ways to do things and we were quite conscious that this kind of source code management was our dumbest area.
One day we were at a conference with our competitors and we were sure they were smarter and more professional than us, so after a few drinks we started talking about the nightmare of managing source code. I said "How do you deal with managing the code and versioning etc, do you use sourcesafe or something better". To which he responded "Oh, I just keep my source code on my machine and he keeps his on his laptop." These were the two directors of the company, and obviously the developers as well!
The embargo has been condemned by the UN General Assembly for the last 15 years or so. It's not just the US conducting the embargo though. The US government has bullied international companies and banks to join in. Recently banks in the UK have told customers they will have to stop trading with Cuba or find another bank.
The embargo has nothing to do with Cuba not being a democracy of course. Even if Cuba was a democracy, it would no doubt be the "wrong" kind of democracy and would be subject to a US-backed coup as was the case in Venezuela in 2002 (although it failed). It's not just a case of economic embargoes either. The US waged a campaign of terror against Cuba known as Operation Mongoose. At one point a Cuban airliner was blown up, and it is believed to have been carried out by a CIA agent called Luis Posada Carriles. The US has been harbouring this man for some time and refuses to extradite him to Venezuela in case he is tortured (or at least that is the excuse). They must fear something worse than waterboarding since that apparently is ok now.
The people liked us shortly after the revolution and blue jeans and MTV could have really made for a good relationship
Well liking US culture is very different from liking the US government. This is why anti-American is such a stupid and propagandistic word. People who complain about US government actions are often called anti-American, which conjures up the notion that they hate US culture and American citizens in general. The US government wrecked the democracy the Iranians had in 1953, installed a dictator, then trained a brutal secret police called the SAVAK to keep him in power. The CIA-trained SAVAK tortured and murdered thousands.
I've used Second Life several times over the years and every time I look, it's like being transported back into 1998. Perhaps some of the dire graphics can be blamed on user generated content, but even the areas created by Linden Labs look terrible. There are plenty of good game engines about and I am sure they could be adapted.
Then there is the issue of the build tools. So much of the Second Life experience is supposed to be about building things, so why are the build tools so awful? Why after all these years is there still no ability to just upload a simple.obj file which is pretty much a standard in the 3D Graphics community?
The Second Life client is also a complete memory monster. On a 2 Gig system it will happily chew up over 600 megs, and completely unnecessarily since minimizing the app seems to kick in some garbage collection which slashes memory usage dramatically. The memory usage then rapidly starts to build up again.
Second Life also has some serious DRM issues. It seems to be quite common for creators of content to make their goods non-Transferable. So if you ever want to leave Second Life, you will have to just kiss goodbye to much of the money you have spent, because you won't be able to resell many of your purchases.
Before too long, some people who actually know what they are doing are going to come along and blow Second Life (and it's 1998 graphics) right out of the water. It will hopefully have a client that has simple off-line build tools which behave just like other 3D apps but also support import of standard formats such as.obj. The build tools should help you build things, not hinder you like the tools (and 10 meter object Restrictions) in Second Life.
Yes along with ridiculous artificial restrictions aimed at boosting sales of vista. I was stung with this when I purchased Crysis. Physics in multiplayer is only available in Vista and they claimed this was something to do with DirectX10 (only available on Vista). Also I wish they would stop using proprietary DirectX crap and stick to OpenGL which is an open standard.
Now if there is sufficient desire by the people of Iran (or any country) for democratic freedom, then they will fight for it.
They had a democracy prior to the US-backed coup in 1953 which installed the brutal Shah. The people eventually fought back against the Shah and his murderous CIA-trained SAVAK secret police. Unfortunately they didn't end up with a democracy, but they certainly don't want another Shah either. If there hadn't been a coup in 1953, Iran might still be a democracy now. As for a Iran being oppressive though, Saudi Arabia is worse.
But for our intervention, where would Iran be today?
Probably still a democracy of sorts. Some of the most bloody US meddling has been in South America though. The US criticises Castro (and he is a dictator albeit pretty benign as they go) yet he is Mother Teresa compared to the dictators the US supported in the region.
As for Iran being oppressive, Saudi Arabia is worse, yet is a close US ally. I used to work for an Iranian who fled the regime there and even they said they would rather live in Iran that Saudi Arabia.
I can't imagine how scared must be the old timers of 20, 30, or more years.
I'm more excited than scared. It's going to completely change things. Obviously debugging is going to be tricky though. Code that runs perfectly one time can fail the next time due to the OS juggling the threads about and exposing some problem. In fact you might have to run it a hundred times before the problem shows up. I think it's going to make development fundamentally harder and a more difficult mental task. I think this is a good thing, since perhaps programmers who can do it will be given more respect at work instead of being treated like they are flipping burgers.
Well I should think that a lot of programs will benefit from calling prebuilt components that themselves make use of parallelism. So for example, if you write a graphics program like the GIMP, many of the routines you call, like Gaussian Blur, will themselves be exploiting all the cores even if you don't explicitly do that yourself.
It only takes one student on a course to collect all the books together and make a CD. It will then get copied around pretty quickly. I spent an absolute fortune on books when I was at Uni in the mid 90s. Every term I had to transport over a hundredweight of books home (so I could keep reading/working), and then back again for the next term. There's no way I would go through all that aggravation and expense now. Either they would have to sell me an electronic copy for a lot less, or I would grab a copy of the inevitable CD full of all the required books that would be circulating among the students.
Of course, perpetual access to the internet may mean that books are not quite as critical as they once were. I used to try to get every book I could, because if one book explained a particular topic badly (e.g. Fractional Quantum Hall Effect), another might excel on that topic. These days I could just search for that topic on the internet and get dozens of different explanations.
As technology improves, the ability of governments to spy on and control their populations similarly improves. Reading everyone's mail once wasn't practice, but as soon as it was practice (when email came along) they quickly moved in that direction.
This trend poses an extreme long term danger for democracy and it's made all the more extreme due to its slow creeping nature. The governments of today that are authorising mass surveillance etc., are laying the foundations for future tyranny.
The company I used to work for was hit badly by Microsoft dumping VB (VB.NET is not VB, and don't mention the upgrade wizard) and I'm sure it's only one of many. We were hoping for an improved version of VB6 but Microsoft decided to wreck the huge investment we had made in VB code. We had spent years and lots of money writing VB code for our apps because it was easy and convenient with lots of business components available which were simple to plug in. The company just didn't have the resources to rewrite everything in another language and it was a pretty big disaster really. I just couldn't believe that with so many millions of lines of code and so much investment in VB6 from industry that Microsoft would just dump it, but I was wrong.
The bosses asked me my opinion on what we should do next. We didn't really have a solution to the enormous cost of rewriting everything, but we needed to decide on a new language to adopt. After being so horribly stung by Microsoft on VB I suggested that Java would be a safer direction to go in. C# and.NET were nice of course, but after Microsoft dumping VB6 I was quite worried they would pull some similar devastating stunt in the future. Unfortunately my advice fell on deaf ears and the gravitational pull of Microsoft products was just too great. It's a shame because a lot of the customers are now moving over to Linux, Java and various Open Source technologies as a matter of company policy.
After the VB saga, I am very dubious of using any language which is controlled by a company (particularly when it's Microsoft). Clearly Sun still has a lot of control, but now with Java being Open source, it won't matter so much if Sun dumps Java. We'll have the code after all.
P.S. Trying to upgrade component by component using interop was hell and not really a viable option.
Except that its not the individual soldiers role to question that objective.
If a soldier believes their orders to be illegal, then they should not obey them. Far more suffering in this world has been caused by soldiers obeying orders than by disobeying ones they felt were wrong or illegal.
The Nuremberg trials stated that a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, which differs from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows. In the case of Iraq, what that means is that although the US and allies did not directly kill over a million Iraqis (Lancet and ORB surveys), the mere act of waging the war encompasses all the chaos and carnage that follows.
I would have to agree with that sentiment. They want geniuses for burger-flipping salaries which is pretty outrageous. There are of course companies that don't even think you need smart people in the first place and actually hire people who should be burger flipping. I find that equally annoying.
They got almost no mention in the news. A brief page 13 story that there had been small protests against the war in Chicago and other cities. Nary a mention on the evening news (local or national).
It's not protests themselves that governments are scared of, it's the news coverage of those protests. The reason is that only a tiny fraction of the people ever go on protests, whereas a much larger fraction watch the news and will get the protesters message. Normally governments can rely on the mainstream media to ignore protesters or demonize them, but they still make efforts to shut them out of the media.
In the UK the government has effectively banned mass protests outside Parliament. They were spooked by the large anti-war protests and the news coverage they received. Protests outside Parliament are very newsworthy, but protests in some random street or field are not. Similarly in the US the concept of "Free Speech" zones was created to keep protesters away from the eyes of the media.
A while back in the UK, the Police burst into the house of "suspected terrorists" and shot one of them (he survived). It turned out they were not terrorists at all and the police claimed the shooting was an accident. However, to reduce sympathy for the men, the police claimed they had found child porn on their computers. Later the child porn charges were quietly dropped.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a pair of e-dimensional 3d glasses (yes, they DO work if you have the right set-up and some patience*), and can say after showing them to a few people, several issues will keep 3d from mainstream:
I've tried shutter glasses for games in the past and it wasn't a great experience. I think you really need to use a proper HMD with built-in screens. Although the field of view of HMDs is still far too pathetic to convince you that you are in a 3D game world, the FOV of some of them is perfect for watching movies. The Indicube portable movie player is coming out soon and it has glasses that are equivalent to a 17 inch desk monitor. It's not geared up for 3D but once that sort of thing becomes widespread, 3D is sure to follow.
Speaking of the obvious thought of porn, I'm surprised magazines haven't tried using stereoscopic pictures. This is a really easy 3d trick anyone can do- simply take two pictures...
This is an old but effective trick. They even used to make cameras geared up for it. Harold LLoyd took lots of 3D pictures of Marilyn Monroe and other celebrities. You can even buy a book of his work. A lot of people have trouble viewing the pictures unaided though. You can get little plastic viewers to help, but they restrict the size of the pictures you can see. If TV goggles become widespread, maybe 3D photography will get a boost too.
So you are going to control your mouse pointer all day by keeping your arm in the air with your finger touching your screen? I think not.
At the company I used to work for there were about 5 developers and we used Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, which didn't actually seem to be that safe. The main nightmare was when we needed to have several versions on the go, e.g. one release version that was just for bug fixes etc and another version that was for development. It was annoying because bug fixes in the release version had to be copied over to the development version (and sometimes vice versa). There are obviously better ways to do things and we were quite conscious that this kind of source code management was our dumbest area.
One day we were at a conference with our competitors and we were sure they were smarter and more professional than us, so after a few drinks we started talking about the nightmare of managing source code. I said "How do you deal with managing the code and versioning etc, do you use sourcesafe or something better". To which he responded "Oh, I just keep my source code on my machine and he keeps his on his laptop." These were the two directors of the company, and obviously the developers as well!
But I agree - The embargo is idiotic.
The embargo has been condemned by the UN General Assembly for the last 15 years or so. It's not just the US conducting the embargo though. The US government has bullied international companies and banks to join in. Recently banks in the UK have told customers they will have to stop trading with Cuba or find another bank.
The embargo has nothing to do with Cuba not being a democracy of course. Even if Cuba was a democracy, it would no doubt be the "wrong" kind of democracy and would be subject to a US-backed coup as was the case in Venezuela in 2002 (although it failed). It's not just a case of economic embargoes either. The US waged a campaign of terror against Cuba known as Operation Mongoose. At one point a Cuban airliner was blown up, and it is believed to have been carried out by a CIA agent called Luis Posada Carriles. The US has been harbouring this man for some time and refuses to extradite him to Venezuela in case he is tortured (or at least that is the excuse). They must fear something worse than waterboarding since that apparently is ok now.
The people liked us shortly after the revolution and blue jeans and MTV could have really made for a good relationship
Well liking US culture is very different from liking the US government. This is why anti-American is such a stupid and propagandistic word. People who complain about US government actions are often called anti-American, which conjures up the notion that they hate US culture and American citizens in general. The US government wrecked the democracy the Iranians had in 1953, installed a dictator, then trained a brutal secret police called the SAVAK to keep him in power. The CIA-trained SAVAK tortured and murdered thousands.
I've used Second Life several times over the years and every time I look, it's like being transported back into 1998. Perhaps some of the dire graphics can be blamed on user generated content, but even the areas created by Linden Labs look terrible. There are plenty of good game engines about and I am sure they could be adapted.
.obj file which is pretty much a standard in the 3D Graphics community?
.obj. The build tools should help you build things, not hinder you like the tools (and 10 meter object Restrictions) in Second Life.
Then there is the issue of the build tools. So much of the Second Life experience is supposed to be about building things, so why are the build tools so awful? Why after all these years is there still no ability to just upload a simple
The Second Life client is also a complete memory monster. On a 2 Gig system it will happily chew up over 600 megs, and completely unnecessarily since minimizing the app seems to kick in some garbage collection which slashes memory usage dramatically. The memory usage then rapidly starts to build up again.
Second Life also has some serious DRM issues. It seems to be quite common for creators of content to make their goods non-Transferable. So if you ever want to leave Second Life, you will have to just kiss goodbye to much of the money you have spent, because you won't be able to resell many of your purchases.
Before too long, some people who actually know what they are doing are going to come along and blow Second Life (and it's 1998 graphics) right out of the water. It will hopefully have a client that has simple off-line build tools which behave just like other 3D apps but also support import of standard formats such as
Yes along with ridiculous artificial restrictions aimed at boosting sales of vista. I was stung with this when I purchased Crysis. Physics in multiplayer is only available in Vista and they claimed this was something to do with DirectX10 (only available on Vista). Also I wish they would stop using proprietary DirectX crap and stick to OpenGL which is an open standard.
Now if there is sufficient desire by the people of Iran (or any country) for democratic freedom, then they will fight for it.
They had a democracy prior to the US-backed coup in 1953 which installed the brutal Shah. The people eventually fought back against the Shah and his murderous CIA-trained SAVAK secret police. Unfortunately they didn't end up with a democracy, but they certainly don't want another Shah either. If there hadn't been a coup in 1953, Iran might still be a democracy now. As for a Iran being oppressive though, Saudi Arabia is worse.
But for our intervention, where would Iran be today?
Probably still a democracy of sorts. Some of the most bloody US meddling has been in South America though. The US criticises Castro (and he is a dictator albeit pretty benign as they go) yet he is Mother Teresa compared to the dictators the US supported in the region.
As for Iran being oppressive, Saudi Arabia is worse, yet is a close US ally. I used to work for an Iranian who fled the regime there and even they said they would rather live in Iran that Saudi Arabia.
I can't imagine how scared must be the old timers of 20, 30, or more years.
I'm more excited than scared. It's going to completely change things. Obviously debugging is going to be tricky though. Code that runs perfectly one time can fail the next time due to the OS juggling the threads about and exposing some problem. In fact you might have to run it a hundred times before the problem shows up. I think it's going to make development fundamentally harder and a more difficult mental task. I think this is a good thing, since perhaps programmers who can do it will be given more respect at work instead of being treated like they are flipping burgers.
Well I should think that a lot of programs will benefit from calling prebuilt components that themselves make use of parallelism. So for example, if you write a graphics program like the GIMP, many of the routines you call, like Gaussian Blur, will themselves be exploiting all the cores even if you don't explicitly do that yourself.
Three things have killed TV.
1. The internet came along with it's wide variety of diversions.
2. TV companies decided to have hundreds of channels of crap, rather than a few good ones.
3. People are watching TV programs online now.
It only takes one student on a course to collect all the books together and make a CD. It will then get copied around pretty quickly. I spent an absolute fortune on books when I was at Uni in the mid 90s. Every term I had to transport over a hundredweight of books home (so I could keep reading/working), and then back again for the next term. There's no way I would go through all that aggravation and expense now. Either they would have to sell me an electronic copy for a lot less, or I would grab a copy of the inevitable CD full of all the required books that would be circulating among the students.
Of course, perpetual access to the internet may mean that books are not quite as critical as they once were. I used to try to get every book I could, because if one book explained a particular topic badly (e.g. Fractional Quantum Hall Effect), another might excel on that topic. These days I could just search for that topic on the internet and get dozens of different explanations.
As technology improves, the ability of governments to spy on and control their populations similarly improves. Reading everyone's mail once wasn't practice, but as soon as it was practice (when email came along) they quickly moved in that direction. This trend poses an extreme long term danger for democracy and it's made all the more extreme due to its slow creeping nature. The governments of today that are authorising mass surveillance etc., are laying the foundations for future tyranny.
I didn't even realise there were adds on Slashdot. I had to disable Ablock to look.
The company I used to work for was hit badly by Microsoft dumping VB (VB.NET is not VB, and don't mention the upgrade wizard) and I'm sure it's only one of many. We were hoping for an improved version of VB6 but Microsoft decided to wreck the huge investment we had made in VB code. We had spent years and lots of money writing VB code for our apps because it was easy and convenient with lots of business components available which were simple to plug in. The company just didn't have the resources to rewrite everything in another language and it was a pretty big disaster really. I just couldn't believe that with so many millions of lines of code and so much investment in VB6 from industry that Microsoft would just dump it, but I was wrong.
.NET were nice of course, but after Microsoft dumping VB6 I was quite worried they would pull some similar devastating stunt in the future. Unfortunately my advice fell on deaf ears and the gravitational pull of Microsoft products was just too great. It's a shame because a lot of the customers are now moving over to Linux, Java and various Open Source technologies as a matter of company policy.
The bosses asked me my opinion on what we should do next. We didn't really have a solution to the enormous cost of rewriting everything, but we needed to decide on a new language to adopt. After being so horribly stung by Microsoft on VB I suggested that Java would be a safer direction to go in. C# and
After the VB saga, I am very dubious of using any language which is controlled by a company (particularly when it's Microsoft). Clearly Sun still has a lot of control, but now with Java being Open source, it won't matter so much if Sun dumps Java. We'll have the code after all.
P.S. Trying to upgrade component by component using interop was hell and not really a viable option.
I suppose the claws could cut any intruder up pretty bad, but are they practical?
If a soldier believes their orders to be illegal, then they should not obey them. Far more suffering in this world has been caused by soldiers obeying orders than by disobeying ones they felt were wrong or illegal.
The Nuremberg trials stated that a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, which differs from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows. In the case of Iraq, what that means is that although the US and allies did not directly kill over a million Iraqis (Lancet and ORB surveys), the mere act of waging the war encompasses all the chaos and carnage that follows.
Absolutely. It was the internet that really put a computer in ever home. Before interest in the Internet took of, few people actually had PCs.
I would have to agree with that sentiment. They want geniuses for burger-flipping salaries which is pretty outrageous. There are of course companies that don't even think you need smart people in the first place and actually hire people who should be burger flipping. I find that equally annoying.
It's not protests themselves that governments are scared of, it's the news coverage of those protests. The reason is that only a tiny fraction of the people ever go on protests, whereas a much larger fraction watch the news and will get the protesters message. Normally governments can rely on the mainstream media to ignore protesters or demonize them, but they still make efforts to shut them out of the media.
In the UK the government has effectively banned mass protests outside Parliament. They were spooked by the large anti-war protests and the news coverage they received. Protests outside Parliament are very newsworthy, but protests in some random street or field are not. Similarly in the US the concept of "Free Speech" zones was created to keep protesters away from the eyes of the media.
A while back in the UK, the Police burst into the house of "suspected terrorists" and shot one of them (he survived). It turned out they were not terrorists at all and the police claimed the shooting was an accident. However, to reduce sympathy for the men, the police claimed they had found child porn on their computers. Later the child porn charges were quietly dropped.
Hmm. Some moderator seems to have clicked on Troll rather than funny. Nevermind.
Which country is this? :)
Due to their support for various Fascist groups (including the Nazis) prior to World War 2, the paper became known as the Daily Heil.
No jokes about Captain Picard saying "Come!". Okay? :)