Firstly, can I just say that stating that "the shift isn't as major as Intel's move from NetBurst to Core 2" is like... er... comparing a decent incremental car improvement with swapping a bicylce for a car. Or something. I'm not saying Core2Duo isn't great tech, but look; Netburst was shit. Everyone knows it. They flogged that horse for far too long, so comparing on the grounds of the proportional improvement is not a useful comment. It's like when the thick kid in school got the "most improved" award, and everyone sat there and went "Well yeah, but what was his alternative?".
As for the quad-core thing, it's the same story all over again. Intel rush out a solder-together-two-chips job to beat the competition to market, and then the actual innovators come out with something coherent that works more efficiently etc.
I'm not saying the AMD will necessarily be better. What I'm saying is I don't care who gets to market 2 months earlier. I want the better chip, and I can live with the mystery for a few weeks.
Although, frankly, I can barely afford to eat having just built a decent Core2Duo rig, so I won't be investing either way just yet...
It'd be nice if enough people were still reading this story to mod you Insightful/Informative, Chris. My bad for not looking further into what the "product" actually is (ie not just a box but a service too). Sadly you're right about education-IT being a no-win for FOSSers and the like - people like what is a) familiar, b) well-supported and, usually, c) recommended by a consultant Advisor paid by the Local Education Authority. You've got b, a comes with time, but the people you really need to convince are those in c, or some very forward-thinking, technologically-minded Headteachers.
Believe it or not I think this is pitched about the right price for most secondary schools - if you can convince them that they'll be able to do something novel and useful with it, they'll find the money (best to showcase it March-thru-May, when budget-frenzy happens). If you can get interest from the "dynamic" trouble-shooter Headteachers brought into problem schools where they have shit-loads of funding just to keep the kids interested and in-school then (provided it's any good!) you'll get press in the Times Education Supplement (TES) and you're made.
You say "video fingerprinting", I say "evil bit". </troll> Anyway, I the article suggests Google don't know the trouble they're getting into. Well, seems they did okay with Google Video. I haven't seen them screw it up yet...
Every machine on our network (thousands) is XP Pro SP1. The technician (who was frankly a lot more knowledgeable than the 2nd-line helpdesk) explained to me once why they couldn't/wouldn't switch to SP2, and it was a technical reason unrelated to cost. Damned if I can remember what it was though.
Anyone have an idea why this might be the case, or is our IT dept doing more arse-talking than usual?
Anyway, I just can't wait to find out how badly this is going to fuck our network. Everything else does...
PIAB has been available for about two years, priced at $2,000.
I would have hoped the price would have come down somewhat in that time. Oh well.
I love the idea of making podcasting a simple task like this and, working in the Education arm of local govt, I can see how appealing this will be - the opportunities for seconeary schools, especially, to do interesting things with this gadget are endless. However, I really feel for schools when it seems anything with "education" in its profile gets another zero added on the end. Sad, but true.
Still, I like the "plug/unplug" functionality. That's something that can really help with technophobic teachers, thank god.
You should definitely take a look at the talk Will Wright gave at the GDC - while it's probable that it hadn't all been tied together by that point, he played the game for you there & then, with the occasional gaff & things not going according to plan. With the sheer level of user customisation and content creation, there's no way it could be pre-rendered or scripted. That's actually what his talk was about (apart from being a showcase) - the importance of user-created content and flexibility, of deriving behaviour from design at a core, algorithmic level - which is what made the game so incredibly exciting and impressive to watch.
As for boredom, Spore is about as replayable as any game is possible to be. It has several phases that each map to games that are "fun" on different levels. It has the pac-man stage (very much like fl0w) for plain fun, it has a micro-management SimCity-like building stage, a very civ-like conquest stage - and at all points you can push your character/civilisation towards an aggressive/defensive/reproductive/whatever style, which changes how the game works for you.
Too easy/hard? The game adapts to your ability by actually bringing in user-created creatures etc from the interweb that it thinks will match your ability but challenge you enough to evolve effectively. That was a core idea of the game.
I could go on, but my point is this: here we have a lead developer who actually understands the concerns you've raised, and has proved time & again that he can overcome them. He's really put a hell of a lot of thought & creativity into this. It takes a lot to get me excited usually, especially about civilisation games (I'm an FPSer by habit), but this is an exception.
I may be wrong on all accounts, and I'd recommend anyone read the reviews about anything before they buy. All I'm saying is I have very high expectations of this game. Seriously, watch the vid.
What amazes me about Spore (quite apart from it looking like a FANTASTIC game) is that it seems to have developed so rapidly, to be able to demonstrate such deep quality so soon, to have such enthusiastic support from all corners. There are many games that have managed one or two of the above, but how many manage all three?
I'm pretty sure this will be out next year, and will be one of those games that forevermore gets mentioned in the biannual "best games in history" articles that somehow get posted. And I'll probably agree.
I'm more of a user than a professional, and it still galls me what the IT support guys have to put up with (and what we have to put up with from them, but that's a different issue). The policy on passwords is clear: we're told how and why to keep our passwords secure and difficult to guess, and it's pretty much common sense anyway. It's easy to bleat that "fools will be fools", but that doesn't mean they don't deserve berating for their own stupidity. They're the first to moo when things go south, and they won't entertain the thought that it might be their own fault.
It's not a car manufacturer's responsibility to ensure that drivers obey basic safety rules on the road. They can put in airbags, ABS, intelligent wipers, whatever they want to make the user safer - but if a user drives into a tree, they drive into a tree. Metaphorically. So it is with account safety. The rules are there, everyone knows them, but when people get complacent there's nothing you can do.
*pant pant*
Well... it is an interesting concept, and I like how they've made it work. Thing is, the problem is never the system, but the people using it. Shoulder-surfing shoudl be nigh-on impossible when the user touch-types at anything approaching a decent speed - it's the two-finger-jabbers who make it easy. The passwords themselves are only easy to guess because people are total gimps.
Cool though this tech is, there is nothing so clever that fools can't render it worthless.
The gaming community is a continuum of players who play for different things, for different reasons, at different times. To suggest that there is a binary "hardcore/casual" divide is only a generalisation, sure, but it's also an unhelpful one. It is a divisive concept that only serves to hinder effective debate and understanding.
Clearly a better measure of how "hardcore" a gamer is - at least from an objective pov, to which most gamers do not subscribe - is how much of their free time they spend gaming. Telly addicts tend to watch TV during most of their spare time, which would suggest they're "hardcore". If they have the opportunity to do anything of an evening, they'll watch TV. Then you get those who enjoy spending time watching telly, but find that they don't enjoy doing it all the time. Then there are those who just keep an eye out for or hear about the odd thing that they'd really like to see, so they just watch it then, or similarly those who occasionally flick it on for half an hour and then go "meh", and switch it off. Finally there are those who never watch it or don't own a telly, and don't see what the fuss is about. Interestingly, the most addicted are those who get into soaps and drama series with an ongoing plot/plots, who would feel that they were really missing out if they missed an episode - a clever hook employed frequently.
And so with gamers. There are some who don't own a computer/console, or who have one but use it for only the most utilitarean of functions. There are those who enjoy the occasional bout on a comfort-game or something new that they're interested in. There are those who really enjoy gaming when they do it, but have other things they'd rather do sometimes. At the far end of the spectrum are those who either order pizza every night or die of exhaustion & starvation in internet cafes. An interesting hook for such addicts is the MMORPG, where there is a continuous development of the experience (plot) and you don't want to get left behind. Spotting the parallels?
Most importantly, none of these are "categories" of viewers or gamers. They are just distinct points along a continuous line of users. People tend to categorise TV viewers according to how much they watch, what sort of things they watch or what interests them - whichever categorisation is most appropriate at the time. One day gamers will be categorised in a similar fashion, and only at that point will these articles and blogs make any sense outside of anecdotal observation. They certainly won't be reliable studies until then.
Again, IANAL, but I don't think that's possible. The corporation has liability, but the shareholders have limited liability in a Ltd or PLC. The CEOs, board of directors or whoever are only criminally liable if they can be shown to have acted illegally or in a manner that shows they knowingly or negligently threatened people's data-security, finances etc without informing their customers of the risk or, in any case, threatened them against UK law. In that event it is the crown that prosecutes, and you can bring suit against the company, but not against the individual - that is the company's prerogative.
Anyone experts out there, please step in. I think the above is generally correct, bu I'm out of my depth here.
IANAL, but I would assume that the company is liable, not the individual. The likelihood is that the company will take action against the outsourced-service-provider. If they then choose to take action against the individual, that's their prerogative.
That's not much of an "assurance" of prosecuting the individual, sure, but in terms of civil action you will be more likely to win compensation from a company than an individual so you're on a winner there. If it's not about the money but the principle, well, life's a bitch.
God, this is the most interesting and intelligent discussion I've ever seen on Slashdot! More articles by researchers please, Editors!
The change in cross-section hadn't occurred to me - which just goes to show how long it's been since I did Civil Engineering! Biologically speaking I suspect the shape of whiskers is a combination of the fact that they're specially adapted hairs, and the importance of keeping whiskers light and flexible. My structural mechanics is rusty, but I think a rigid, fixed-cross-sectional whisker would experience a significant stress due to internal bending moment along its length that increases by square along its length (from the free end), while the gradient of a graph mapping length against stress in a conical whisker decreases - partly due to the end being lighter, and partly due to the base cross-section increasing with length. If I had to design a free-ended beam, I'd make it taper. This also means that it can be made of a flexible material instead of maintaining rigidity along its length, which is of obvious benefit in the real world.
Also, growing a thick fixed-section hair from scratch would, I imagine, be as irritating as all hell
(if my girlfriend's whining about shaving is anything to go by).
Anyway, I have to go and teach my gran to suck eggs, so I'll stop here. I shall definitely be keeping an eye out for that Nature publication...
...like my missus. She's actually not that good at maths, but she understands how people think and learn about maths pretty well, as will any good maths teacher. There are hundreds of books on the subject, so find a Maths PGCE/Teaching course syllabus and look for the Recommended Reading section - that should give you some good grounding.
The important thing to understand about maths is that it isn't an intrinsic ability - our brains are not designed to deal with even counting, and certainly not with abstract mathematical concepts. We adapt various neural modules such as language, spatial perception etc by constantly using them in unique ways to consider mathematical concepts.
As an example, the notion of a "number-line" as something on which all natural numbers have a place is introduced at an early stage in teaching. This is later developed to deal with non-integers, and then extended backwards to develop an understanding of negative numbers (and how they're not "different" numbers, but a continuation of the line). Then at a higher level this is further developed to include imaginary numbers as a perpendicular axis to real numbers, and the notion of complex numbers is introduced. Through all of this, it is the spatial-perception module that is being used and thus adapted to deal with abstract space and its relationship to number.
One of the most important mathematical concepts to develop (though few high-school children do) is to stop thinking of numbers as abstract things in themselves, and see them more as names of matched sets of objects - four elephants can be "matched" to four marmosets on a one-to-one basis (unlikely and unproductive though that might be), so those menageries are in the set of all things that can be matched in this way, but they cannot be matched to any abstract "thing" called Four. Four is just the name of the set. This is a simple way of approaching the basis of Set Theory, which is irrelevant at high-school but vital at Uni. Admittedly, it might not be so useful for EE, but IANAEE.
One of the key areas you will need to master for EE, I suspect, is algebra. This is closely linked to the language centre of the brain, so you will find it easier to learn if you consider it as a language. Start with simple expressions and learn how to translate them either way, gain a familiarity with the most basic ones so they become second nature, and progressively move on by expanding your vocabulary and the complexity of expressions. When you face a challenge, slow down, break it down and try to translate it. Eventually you will become fluent and - more importantly - it will be like a second language in which you can converse without difficulty or any real conscious thought.
Interestingly, a lot of our perceptions and methods of thinking about mathematical issues are conceptually conflicting, and that is a barrier that is difficult to overcome. As an early example, moving from algebra to graphs to vectors & matrices is a serious stumbling block for many children - they can handle any concept individually and with practice they can translate one to the other, but until the mental connections are made they will find it difficult and obscure. Once those connections are made it is a rapid revelation, and they find their understanding and enjoyment of both topics is enhanced (as you might have guessed, this is precisely what my missus seeks as a reward for her hard work).
I mentioned algebra as a key player in EE. There are obviously other areas you will need to grapple with - trigonometry and graphs being obvious ones - and they will require different approaches, but if you find you have trouble with any of them then I strongly recommend you call in the professionals. Uni-level course books and materials tend to present the facts and concepts in a very clear way, but they do not tend to be very forgiving or understanding of those who have difficulties - if you don't get a concept, you will fall down later when you need to build upon it. The best thing you can do is enrol o
How is this different from when you keep nodding your head and waking up when you're very, very tired but doing something critical/dangerous? Hasn't everyone, to their horror, experienced this when driving? Or when you're in a lecture, your head drops, and you jerk awake with an embarrassing snorting noise?
I wouldn't consider this to be an impressive evolved behaviour, so much as just what happens when a bird in flight is pushing itself to its limits of endurance. There just aren't many animals other than humans and avians that ever find themselves having to maintain such prolonged alertness to survive, so this is seen as a phenomenon. Try keeping squirrels on a wire over a pit of spikes or something, and you'll probably observe the same behaviour.
Slashdot Mirror
As for the quad-core thing, it's the same story all over again. Intel rush out a solder-together-two-chips job to beat the competition to market, and then the actual innovators come out with something coherent that works more efficiently etc.
I'm not saying the AMD will necessarily be better. What I'm saying is I don't care who gets to market 2 months earlier. I want the better chip, and I can live with the mystery for a few weeks.
Although, frankly, I can barely afford to eat having just built a decent Core2Duo rig, so I won't be investing either way just yet...
They already announced that they were dropping SP1...
Believe it or not I think this is pitched about the right price for most secondary schools - if you can convince them that they'll be able to do something novel and useful with it, they'll find the money (best to showcase it March-thru-May, when budget-frenzy happens). If you can get interest from the "dynamic" trouble-shooter Headteachers brought into problem schools where they have shit-loads of funding just to keep the kids interested and in-school then (provided it's any good!) you'll get press in the Times Education Supplement (TES) and you're made.
Sorry. Train-of-thought stuff there. Now, suck eggs, gran.
You need to apply a tourniquet to your heart.
Then these web-vendors must be stopped - FOR GREAT JUSTICE!!!
You say "video fingerprinting", I say "evil bit".
</troll>
Anyway, I the article suggests Google don't know the trouble they're getting into. Well, seems they did okay with Google Video. I haven't seen them screw it up yet...
Yeah, but you had IDKFA on through the rest of the game, so you deserve what you get.
Anyone have an idea why this might be the case, or is our IT dept doing more arse-talking than usual?
Anyway, I just can't wait to find out how badly this is going to fuck our network. Everything else does...
I love the idea of making podcasting a simple task like this and, working in the Education arm of local govt, I can see how appealing this will be - the opportunities for seconeary schools, especially, to do interesting things with this gadget are endless. However, I really feel for schools when it seems anything with "education" in its profile gets another zero added on the end. Sad, but true.
Still, I like the "plug/unplug" functionality. That's something that can really help with technophobic teachers, thank god.
As for boredom, Spore is about as replayable as any game is possible to be. It has several phases that each map to games that are "fun" on different levels. It has the pac-man stage (very much like fl0w) for plain fun, it has a micro-management SimCity-like building stage, a very civ-like conquest stage - and at all points you can push your character/civilisation towards an aggressive/defensive/reproductive/whatever style, which changes how the game works for you.
Too easy/hard? The game adapts to your ability by actually bringing in user-created creatures etc from the interweb that it thinks will match your ability but challenge you enough to evolve effectively. That was a core idea of the game.
I could go on, but my point is this: here we have a lead developer who actually understands the concerns you've raised, and has proved time & again that he can overcome them. He's really put a hell of a lot of thought & creativity into this. It takes a lot to get me excited usually, especially about civilisation games (I'm an FPSer by habit), but this is an exception.
I may be wrong on all accounts, and I'd recommend anyone read the reviews about anything before they buy. All I'm saying is I have very high expectations of this game. Seriously, watch the vid.
What amazes me about Spore (quite apart from it looking like a FANTASTIC game) is that it seems to have developed so rapidly, to be able to demonstrate such deep quality so soon, to have such enthusiastic support from all corners. There are many games that have managed one or two of the above, but how many manage all three?
I'm pretty sure this will be out next year, and will be one of those games that forevermore gets mentioned in the biannual "best games in history" articles that somehow get posted. And I'll probably agree.
It's not a car manufacturer's responsibility to ensure that drivers obey basic safety rules on the road. They can put in airbags, ABS, intelligent wipers, whatever they want to make the user safer - but if a user drives into a tree, they drive into a tree. Metaphorically. So it is with account safety. The rules are there, everyone knows them, but when people get complacent there's nothing you can do. *pant pant*
Are you suggesting that most /.ers don't also spend time hanging out at in other technical fora? That's crazy talk.
Cool though this tech is, there is nothing so clever that fools can't render it worthless.
The gaming community is a continuum of players who play for different things, for different reasons, at different times. To suggest that there is a binary "hardcore/casual" divide is only a generalisation, sure, but it's also an unhelpful one. It is a divisive concept that only serves to hinder effective debate and understanding.
Clearly a better measure of how "hardcore" a gamer is - at least from an objective pov, to which most gamers do not subscribe - is how much of their free time they spend gaming. Telly addicts tend to watch TV during most of their spare time, which would suggest they're "hardcore". If they have the opportunity to do anything of an evening, they'll watch TV. Then you get those who enjoy spending time watching telly, but find that they don't enjoy doing it all the time. Then there are those who just keep an eye out for or hear about the odd thing that they'd really like to see, so they just watch it then, or similarly those who occasionally flick it on for half an hour and then go "meh", and switch it off. Finally there are those who never watch it or don't own a telly, and don't see what the fuss is about. Interestingly, the most addicted are those who get into soaps and drama series with an ongoing plot/plots, who would feel that they were really missing out if they missed an episode - a clever hook employed frequently.
And so with gamers. There are some who don't own a computer/console, or who have one but use it for only the most utilitarean of functions. There are those who enjoy the occasional bout on a comfort-game or something new that they're interested in. There are those who really enjoy gaming when they do it, but have other things they'd rather do sometimes. At the far end of the spectrum are those who either order pizza every night or die of exhaustion & starvation in internet cafes. An interesting hook for such addicts is the MMORPG, where there is a continuous development of the experience (plot) and you don't want to get left behind. Spotting the parallels?
Most importantly, none of these are "categories" of viewers or gamers. They are just distinct points along a continuous line of users. People tend to categorise TV viewers according to how much they watch, what sort of things they watch or what interests them - whichever categorisation is most appropriate at the time. One day gamers will be categorised in a similar fashion, and only at that point will these articles and blogs make any sense outside of anecdotal observation. They certainly won't be reliable studies until then.
Anyone experts out there, please step in. I think the above is generally correct, bu I'm out of my depth here.
That's not much of an "assurance" of prosecuting the individual, sure, but in terms of civil action you will be more likely to win compensation from a company than an individual so you're on a winner there. If it's not about the money but the principle, well, life's a bitch.
The change in cross-section hadn't occurred to me - which just goes to show how long it's been since I did Civil Engineering! Biologically speaking I suspect the shape of whiskers is a combination of the fact that they're specially adapted hairs, and the importance of keeping whiskers light and flexible. My structural mechanics is rusty, but I think a rigid, fixed-cross-sectional whisker would experience a significant stress due to internal bending moment along its length that increases by square along its length (from the free end), while the gradient of a graph mapping length against stress in a conical whisker decreases - partly due to the end being lighter, and partly due to the base cross-section increasing with length. If I had to design a free-ended beam, I'd make it taper. This also means that it can be made of a flexible material instead of maintaining rigidity along its length, which is of obvious benefit in the real world.
Also, growing a thick fixed-section hair from scratch would, I imagine, be as irritating as all hell (if my girlfriend's whining about shaving is anything to go by).
Anyway, I have to go and teach my gran to suck eggs, so I'll stop here. I shall definitely be keeping an eye out for that Nature publication...
No, it's divisible by three-and-a-bit.
I gather they're introducing Crabs in the new Sims2 expansion pack: Nasty Rash
Alba? I thought Sony's budget brand was Aiwa...
Don't be stupid. Alligators can't balance on a wire.
The important thing to understand about maths is that it isn't an intrinsic ability - our brains are not designed to deal with even counting, and certainly not with abstract mathematical concepts. We adapt various neural modules such as language, spatial perception etc by constantly using them in unique ways to consider mathematical concepts.
As an example, the notion of a "number-line" as something on which all natural numbers have a place is introduced at an early stage in teaching. This is later developed to deal with non-integers, and then extended backwards to develop an understanding of negative numbers (and how they're not "different" numbers, but a continuation of the line). Then at a higher level this is further developed to include imaginary numbers as a perpendicular axis to real numbers, and the notion of complex numbers is introduced. Through all of this, it is the spatial-perception module that is being used and thus adapted to deal with abstract space and its relationship to number.
One of the most important mathematical concepts to develop (though few high-school children do) is to stop thinking of numbers as abstract things in themselves, and see them more as names of matched sets of objects - four elephants can be "matched" to four marmosets on a one-to-one basis (unlikely and unproductive though that might be), so those menageries are in the set of all things that can be matched in this way, but they cannot be matched to any abstract "thing" called Four. Four is just the name of the set. This is a simple way of approaching the basis of Set Theory, which is irrelevant at high-school but vital at Uni. Admittedly, it might not be so useful for EE, but IANAEE.
One of the key areas you will need to master for EE, I suspect, is algebra. This is closely linked to the language centre of the brain, so you will find it easier to learn if you consider it as a language. Start with simple expressions and learn how to translate them either way, gain a familiarity with the most basic ones so they become second nature, and progressively move on by expanding your vocabulary and the complexity of expressions. When you face a challenge, slow down, break it down and try to translate it. Eventually you will become fluent and - more importantly - it will be like a second language in which you can converse without difficulty or any real conscious thought.
Interestingly, a lot of our perceptions and methods of thinking about mathematical issues are conceptually conflicting, and that is a barrier that is difficult to overcome. As an early example, moving from algebra to graphs to vectors & matrices is a serious stumbling block for many children - they can handle any concept individually and with practice they can translate one to the other, but until the mental connections are made they will find it difficult and obscure. Once those connections are made it is a rapid revelation, and they find their understanding and enjoyment of both topics is enhanced (as you might have guessed, this is precisely what my missus seeks as a reward for her hard work).
I mentioned algebra as a key player in EE. There are obviously other areas you will need to grapple with - trigonometry and graphs being obvious ones - and they will require different approaches, but if you find you have trouble with any of them then I strongly recommend you call in the professionals. Uni-level course books and materials tend to present the facts and concepts in a very clear way, but they do not tend to be very forgiving or understanding of those who have difficulties - if you don't get a concept, you will fall down later when you need to build upon it. The best thing you can do is enrol o
I wouldn't consider this to be an impressive evolved behaviour, so much as just what happens when a bird in flight is pushing itself to its limits of endurance. There just aren't many animals other than humans and avians that ever find themselves having to maintain such prolonged alertness to survive, so this is seen as a phenomenon. Try keeping squirrels on a wire over a pit of spikes or something, and you'll probably observe the same behaviour.