Seriously, this is a major point. I had my first job out of college two years ago... I was payed $45k with a promise of $10k more if stuck around for 6 months, and then I would get bumped up to $65k after one year. Well 9 months past, I didn't get the raise, and I hated the boring, tedious, simple job. I quit. Guess what, a year later, I am making only $50k but I am 100% self employed, don't have a single boss, and absolutely enjoy what I do (mostly writing code for audio applications and smoking weed and playing video games). Screw those idiots... I was working hard, getting payed squat, and I hated every second of it. Granted, I probably didn't contribute much in the first 4 months of my tenure in the position, what with being completely new to the office environment, but it didn't mean I couldn't still do a lot better for a job. If they wanted to keep me in that role, they would have started me at $65k or higher, and then maybe I would have thought it was worth while to jump through all their hoops. But I didn't... Maybe it's because I'm young, or maybe it's because I am extremely ambitious and know what I can accomplish. I don't need to wait for them to hand me responsibility, I can go take it on for myself. Having fun at work makes a big difference in my quality of life! If you can't provide the fun, you better compensate for that with a higher salary, otherwise I could give a rats ass about your shitty little company. And btw, my business is doing just fine...
Why do you have to go and ruin some perfectly reasonable points with totally incorrect, misinformed statements? Most people can't run Crysis. Duh. The number of people who own graphics cards with 256 mb of memory is quite low relative to the total population who own a PC/Mac... You know what "majority" means, right? Unless you're on AMD, you are going to need a pretty fast processor to meet the minimum specs. My Girlfriend's brand new intel core duo laptop is not up to par... she runs vista so her dual 2 ghz processor is.2 ghz short of the requirements. Also, your assertion that the graphics are the only notable thing in the game is pretty far off... the physics in Crysis _are_ very impressive. very few games allow the level of atomization found in Crysis, and so far, it does it better than anything else I've played (havent played call of duty 4 yet...). Having said that, it's impressive that Crysis scales as well as it does. With the level of physical interaction possible in the game, it's surprising that a typical gaming PC from a couple years ago will usually be able to play it, provided that it has an adequate graphics card.
I couldn't agree with you more. If anything, open sourcing your software and making it available for peer review may lead to fixes for many of these so-called vulnerabilities. Most of Java is now available under some sort of "open" license... are business abandoning Java because of this? "Oh no, people can go through all the libraries and find new vulnerabilities that we didn't know about before, and then turn them against us!"... Give me a break. Most likely, McAfee has violated the GPL, making them "vulnerable" to real damage... from lawsuits.
This is a crap argument. Your drug dealer may be out of town or out of drugs or recently arrested, but the homeless guy who lives in the park is almost always ready to buy beer... Sorry Charlie, it was never hard to get beer. Want some pot? Well you better know somebody, and contrary to common belief, most 13 year olds don't know dozens of drug dealers. And you want cocaine? Well then it's much harder, but it wouldn't be if anybody who needed 5 bucks could go into a 7-11 and resell it to some high schoolers.
I worked with an artist who was experimenting with these speakers... Your description is right on target. The primary "awe" factor is really just that the sound is quite localized, so you only hear it if you're directly in front of it, or near it's reflection off a similar material. However, it's very quiet and extremely tinny... Ultimately, we concluded that for something like $2000 dollars a piece, we could do much better with conventional speakers and a bit of ingenuity. It has a lot of promise for things like advertising, but it's a long way from being ready for prime time. BTW, these speakers were covered in the New York Times Magazine about 4 years ago... No huge explosion in their popularity, and at the time it was promised that every McDonald's would soon have them in the drive through...
Whatever; it's idiotic to think that garbage collection means no memory leaks. GC cleans up the program when it ends, and objects get deleted if there are no outstanding references to them.
In this case, there were outstanding references to the objects.
I can't believe that there is even a widespread difference of opinion on an issue like this...
One is a tactile physical object, and the other is a simulation of the aforementioned object... One is easily reachable through touch alone, the other requires sight and may actually be unreachable if it's not prominently displayed in the interface.
Uh, it still has virtual buttons... I see where he's coming from in terms of aesthetics, but i think it often makes the interfaces worse. For example, I am constantly annoyed by my inability to change the volume of a song while I'm in the menu of my ipod. We still want the extra features, even minus the buttons, so the items tend to get incorporated into the GUI. Not sure that's so great, but I suppose it takes the pressure off the industrial designers.
It's very simple: A book obviously shouldn't be rendered obsolete, and neither should software. If Microsoft is going to adopt new standards, every effort should be made to keep them compatible with previous applications, because they are a valuable part of our history. Sometimes people make a good app, and then go on to do something else with their lives. MS controls the standard, MS should make the standard flexible. BTW, I write software apps that run on top of video drivers. I am terrified of what I will find when I am finally forced to make the jump.
I'm sorry, but Blizzard having had to reboot the servers for 2 whole years now was very bad coding on Blizzard's part. Imagine if you had to reboot the servers at your job everyday? I doubt they would be around long. How do you know? Sounds like they didn't have a true high-availability architecture and now they have enough redundancy in their production environment that they can make changes to application instances (i.e. modifications and improvements to the game) without the user experience getting altered. Basically, they spent money on more servers...
Hi. A friend and I have been writing some computer vision software for precisely this scenario. We intend to market it to consumers like you for a low cost (> $200) but it's not available yet. That said, a couple of things come to mind: First of all, the library of choice for all things computer vision is Intel's OpenCV library. They have a linux version. I know nothing about the linux library, but the windows version only supports a few webcams. The cheapest and best for the money is the usb 2.0 Logitech quickcam pro, which runs extremely well thanks to intel's performance primitives and windows' direct show. I doubt that you will have much trouble tracking at 24.0 fps which should be fine for you (I mean don't kid yourself, it's not like the results of your blobs analysis is going to be 100% consistent from frame to frame anyway). Programming a robust/complete motion capture solution could take months, if it works at all (assuming you have never done anything computer vision related). Outsourcing might be a better solution.
I too say "fuck the papers". The editorial tenancies of most major American papers are so poor that people would probably be better off getting no news than laboring under the incorrect assumption that they are "well informed". Nowadays, we must turn to international papers in order to understand America's role in the world. Google News is a nearly perfect tool for this purpose. Stories that matter to the world as a whole get major coverage there, whereas they are typically shunned by American papers in favor of 'human interest' garbage or whatever else. The NYT is no exception here. People who wanted to stay up on world affairs have always turned to small journals for the real facts, where stories are researched in depth and typically well reported. Those journals aren't going away anytime soon. They don't have to worry about staying in the mainstream, and so they don't have to worry about having non-subscribers as part of their web based readership.
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Seriously, this is a major point. I had my first job out of college two years ago... I was payed $45k with a promise of $10k more if stuck around for 6 months, and then I would get bumped up to $65k after one year. Well 9 months past, I didn't get the raise, and I hated the boring, tedious, simple job. I quit. Guess what, a year later, I am making only $50k but I am 100% self employed, don't have a single boss, and absolutely enjoy what I do (mostly writing code for audio applications and smoking weed and playing video games). Screw those idiots... I was working hard, getting payed squat, and I hated every second of it. Granted, I probably didn't contribute much in the first 4 months of my tenure in the position, what with being completely new to the office environment, but it didn't mean I couldn't still do a lot better for a job. If they wanted to keep me in that role, they would have started me at $65k or higher, and then maybe I would have thought it was worth while to jump through all their hoops. But I didn't... Maybe it's because I'm young, or maybe it's because I am extremely ambitious and know what I can accomplish. I don't need to wait for them to hand me responsibility, I can go take it on for myself. Having fun at work makes a big difference in my quality of life! If you can't provide the fun, you better compensate for that with a higher salary, otherwise I could give a rats ass about your shitty little company. And btw, my business is doing just fine...
Why do you have to go and ruin some perfectly reasonable points with totally incorrect, misinformed statements? Most people can't run Crysis. Duh. The number of people who own graphics cards with 256 mb of memory is quite low relative to the total population who own a PC/Mac... You know what "majority" means, right? .2 ghz short of the requirements.
Unless you're on AMD, you are going to need a pretty fast processor to meet the minimum specs. My Girlfriend's brand new intel core duo laptop is not up to par... she runs vista so her dual 2 ghz processor is
Also, your assertion that the graphics are the only notable thing in the game is pretty far off... the physics in Crysis _are_ very impressive. very few games allow the level of atomization found in Crysis, and so far, it does it better than anything else I've played (havent played call of duty 4 yet...).
Having said that, it's impressive that Crysis scales as well as it does. With the level of physical interaction possible in the game, it's surprising that a typical gaming PC from a couple years ago will usually be able to play it, provided that it has an adequate graphics card.
I couldn't agree with you more. If anything, open sourcing your software and making it available for peer review may lead to fixes for many of these so-called vulnerabilities. Most of Java is now available under some sort of "open" license... are business abandoning Java because of this? "Oh no, people can go through all the libraries and find new vulnerabilities that we didn't know about before, and then turn them against us!"... Give me a break.
Most likely, McAfee has violated the GPL, making them "vulnerable" to real damage... from lawsuits.
This is a crap argument. Your drug dealer may be out of town or out of drugs or recently arrested, but the homeless guy who lives in the park is almost always ready to buy beer... Sorry Charlie, it was never hard to get beer. Want some pot? Well you better know somebody, and contrary to common belief, most 13 year olds don't know dozens of drug dealers. And you want cocaine? Well then it's much harder, but it wouldn't be if anybody who needed 5 bucks could go into a 7-11 and resell it to some high schoolers.
I worked with an artist who was experimenting with these speakers... Your description is right on target. The primary "awe" factor is really just that the sound is quite localized, so you only hear it if you're directly in front of it, or near it's reflection off a similar material. However, it's very quiet and extremely tinny... Ultimately, we concluded that for something like $2000 dollars a piece, we could do much better with conventional speakers and a bit of ingenuity. It has a lot of promise for things like advertising, but it's a long way from being ready for prime time.
BTW, these speakers were covered in the New York Times Magazine about 4 years ago... No huge explosion in their popularity, and at the time it was promised that every McDonald's would soon have them in the drive through...
Whatever; it's idiotic to think that garbage collection means no memory leaks. GC cleans up the program when it ends, and objects get deleted if there are no outstanding references to them. In this case, there were outstanding references to the objects. I can't believe that there is even a widespread difference of opinion on an issue like this...
One is a tactile physical object, and the other is a simulation of the aforementioned object... One is easily reachable through touch alone, the other requires sight and may actually be unreachable if it's not prominently displayed in the interface.
Uh, it still has virtual buttons...
I see where he's coming from in terms of aesthetics, but i think it often makes the interfaces worse. For example, I am constantly annoyed by my inability to change the volume of a song while I'm in the menu of my ipod. We still want the extra features, even minus the buttons, so the items tend to get incorporated into the GUI. Not sure that's so great, but I suppose it takes the pressure off the industrial designers.
It's very simple: A book obviously shouldn't be rendered obsolete, and neither should software. If Microsoft is going to adopt new standards, every effort should be made to keep them compatible with previous applications, because they are a valuable part of our history.
Sometimes people make a good app, and then go on to do something else with their lives. MS controls the standard, MS should make the standard flexible.
BTW, I write software apps that run on top of video drivers. I am terrified of what I will find when I am finally forced to make the jump.
Hi. A friend and I have been writing some computer vision software for precisely this scenario. We intend to market it to consumers like you for a low cost (> $200) but it's not available yet. That said, a couple of things come to mind:
First of all, the library of choice for all things computer vision is Intel's OpenCV library. They have a linux version. I know nothing about the linux library, but the windows version only supports a few webcams. The cheapest and best for the money is the usb 2.0 Logitech quickcam pro, which runs extremely well thanks to intel's performance primitives and windows' direct show. I doubt that you will have much trouble tracking at 24.0 fps which should be fine for you (I mean don't kid yourself, it's not like the results of your blobs analysis is going to be 100% consistent from frame to frame anyway). Programming a robust/complete motion capture solution could take months, if it works at all (assuming you have never done anything computer vision related). Outsourcing might be a better solution.
I too say "fuck the papers". The editorial tenancies of most major American papers are so poor that people would probably be better off getting no news than laboring under the incorrect assumption that they are "well informed". Nowadays, we must turn to international papers in order to understand America's role in the world. Google News is a nearly perfect tool for this purpose. Stories that matter to the world as a whole get major coverage there, whereas they are typically shunned by American papers in favor of 'human interest' garbage or whatever else. The NYT is no exception here. People who wanted to stay up on world affairs have always turned to small journals for the real facts, where stories are researched in depth and typically well reported. Those journals aren't going away anytime soon. They don't have to worry about staying in the mainstream, and so they don't have to worry about having non-subscribers as part of their web based readership.