Great point, and this is actually one of the draws for the hi-def formats for me. Absolutely every film released in either format has been in the original aspect ratio, including a number of films (some of Kubrick's in particular) that haven't been available that way since they were in theatres. It's very depressing to see half the new release DVDs at Blockbuster in "Full Screen". I think they should place a (skippable) clip explaining the difference into all new DVD releases along with the trailers (maybe using that famous Ben Hur chariot race footage) to educate the masses as to what they're missing with pan'n'scan.
There are even more potentially interesting groups of downloaders. I, for one, downloaded the album for free for the time being, but intend on purchasing a physical copy when it's released on CD in January.
All the standard says is that a DX 10.1 card has to support 4xAA in hardware; that doesn't mean you have to turn it on in a game. It's similar to how DX 9 cards have to support one of the pixel shader models (2.0 I think). It doesn't mean you have no control over the effects when you're playing, it just means a card that complies with that version of the standard is capable of supporting all the features.
Sounds like a decent book, but....
on
OpenGL SuperBible
·
· Score: 1
Is there a comparable equivalent for DirectX? I've been looking for an up-to-date one (Direct3D 9 and 10, all the shader models, etc) to add to my library to learn more about graphics programming, shaders, and the fixed-function pipeline.
Just to chime in with some more evidence to support you on this... in my job search for a full-time developer position after graduation, I interviewed with about a dozen companies and sent my resume off to at least thirty. Google was the only one that required that I send them a copy of my academic transcripts as well.
I thought I'd share my experiences interviewing with Google as well, since they're somewhat similar to yours. I had sent them my resume twice previously in hopes of getting a summer internship, no response. I ran into an acquaintance at a career fair, a fellow Cal grad, who gave me a referral to get me an interview for a full-time job.
They also asked me to bring in a code sample for a problem they sent me about a week before the interview was scheduled. I was to write a program that takes a directory path, and returns the names of any files whose contents are identical (even if the filenames are not) in that directory and its sub-directories. Ostensibly, this is useful if you have a huge media collection where you might want to remove a bunch of copies of large files for disk space. The trick, since this is Google, is to do this efficiently. I wrote a DFS that hashed the file paths into a table by their length, since getting the length is a cheap operation most operating systems support. Then I did a slow O(N^2) comparison of all files in the same-length bucket, using two methods. First, I randomly selected some sections of each file and compared them byte-by-byte. This could be tailored to work well with how much RAM your machine has / how your disk reads work. Since the algorithm was supposed to be deterministic, if the files passed the random selection, then I did a very slow byte-by-byte compare, to ensure they were identical. I think the random selection could also be done using some sort of checksum, which might be marginally faster. When I handed the interviewer the print-out, he glanced over it in 5 minutes or so, and asked me how I might have to change the algorithm if the files were instead on a server on a local network, instead of on the machines hard disk.
It was an on-campus interview, but they asked me the same three questions as they asked you. Apparently they share a list of them among the recruiters. The marble one I struggled with by trying to start out with calculating probabilities, but I got the right algorithm and narrowed the floor interval down to between 12 and 15 in my head, good enough. The second question was simple for me (just break the file up, use an in-place sort and then merge the runs of smaller files). The third question I was lost on, mostly because I was tired by that point, and annoyed that the interviewer didn't seem to be listening to me at all. Overall, I thought the interview went alright, but they contacted me about two weeks later to say that they had too many applicants and too few positions.
I was simulataneously contacted by a different HR person at Google, who was interviewing me for a Web Application developer position (the other interview was for a generic Software Developer position). I had basically no web development on my resume, so I'm not sure why I was picked up, but I said I was interested. They sent me a 10 page worksheet to complete for them in a week, including a Python question (I didn't know Python at the time), some user interface questions, a lot of questions about my prior work experience, some basic math problems (algebra, estimation, simple probability), and a bunch of MySQL questions I had no idea how to answer since I had no useful prior experience with databases. After turning in the worksheet, they left me hanging for about two months before I got another e-mail saying they weren't interested.
I'm sorry if I misinterpreted your comment, that's just the way it read to me, and given the typical bias seen in comments around here I think it's a forgiveable interpretation. I agree that the first reaction for many people is that $2 a TV show is too expensive. But, for many other people, it isn't. Perhaps they watched an episode and want to download it to re-watch, to show their friends. It's convenient to turn the Xbox or iTunes on and do that practically instantly. Perhaps you only watch the show when there are guests on that you like. Perhaps it's the only show you watch. A few of my friends download The Office every week because they don't want to wait for the DVD to come out. They like having it in their collection, and there is not a big difference in price between the downloads and the discs. My cable bill is almost $70 a month. There are definitely situations where this can be cheaper.
I worked on the iTunes music store last summer, and the TV shows are a very big success. All I was saying with my comment is that $2 a show, even if you think it's expensive, is the established price for a TV show download. Microsoft isn't pulling it out of their ass. I personally think that other things Microsoft is selling on Xbox Live are far too expensive, like the $6.00 Guitar Hero packs of 3 songs. However, a look at the leaderboards shows that plenty of people don't feel the same way. You and I may not be buying, but thousands of people are.
They're the same price as on the iTunes store. I'm not sure if these shows are filmed in HD or if they'll offer HD version, but from what I've seen, they look better on my HDTV than tv shows do streamed over an AppleTV. So, superior product at the same price point as a competitor. Can't miss a chance to jab at Microsoft?
I've been tempted to upgrade, but the competition between the two formats is what has been holding me back. It's a catch-22; many, like myself, won't purchase a player until there's a clear winner in the format war, but there won't be a clear winner until people start buying the players and the movies. In the media companies' eyes, I'm probably in their target demographic. I watch tons of movies. I've had an HDTV for over a year now, because I needed a new TV and I wanted something future-proof. I have an Xbox 360, so for $200 I could buy an HD-DVD player. I've seen some demonstrations and the picture quality is significantly better. But, I've seen the Betamax and Laserdisc collections accumulating dust in neighbors' houses. I don't want to be stuck with that investment and a meager half a dozen movies when, perhaps in a year's time, the announcement is made the no more HD-DVDs will be produced and that Blu-Ray has won. I don't want to take the chance that the special HD editions of some old favorites are released for the other format. I wonder how many of those 30 million HDTV owners are in a similar situation, just biding their time.
In today's Penny Arcade, Tycho shared some similar thoughts about the game being a venue for new talent. http://www.penny-arcade.com/
I don't think it's very likely that Rock Band will include tools of a high enough quality to create serious music, especially since its a console game. Allowing people to upload their own songs requires tons of regulation (for obscenity, copyright infringement). It seems far too early to tout this game as the Next Big Thing for music. It'll be like Guitar Hero, with more instruments.
Personally, I think the new MTV already exists in MySpace (and to a lesser extent YouTube). There have already been numerous artists whose popularity on these sites has landed them record deals. Its a better breeding ground for new bands: there is much more infrastructure for rated and discovering related talent to what you like, especially when you factor in that all the legitimate rock stars have MySpace pages for their bands. New music videos are premiered there. Concerts are announced "secretly" for MySpace fans, with tickets only purchasable via the site. And since MTV (and now MTV2) almost never show music videos any more, this is where people go to see them.
The article says that people who claim to remember seeing it live didn't actually see it live, because most networks just showed a tape replay after cutting away. So technically it's not live, but still, most of these people saw the events just after they happened. It also says that the shuttle didn't explode, but then describes what happened as a huge fireball. I can see how people might describe it as an explosion. So the crew may not have died instantly, but they were probably unconscious until the cabin fell back to the Earth, so it doesn't make too much of a difference to them or to anyone. I gave up reading at this point, but there don't seem to be any major revelations. It was a tragedy, and the important lessons learned from the loss of lives are what I hope live on.
Just a note on the Berkeley classes, Berkeley uses a different numbering scheme from most other universities. Instead of xx, 1xx, 2xx, 3xx being first through fourth year level, xx classes are lower division (freshman and sophomore), 1xx classes are upper division (juniors and seniors), and 2xx classes are graduate level. If you look at the webcast site, less than half are intro classes, most are upper division or graduate level.
Plus I've been told that our upper div classes cover higher-level content than a number of other schools' graduate programs, but that could be the school spirit talking.
(Go Bears)
Berkeley is a public school: no affirmative action. It's also huge and not too difficult to get into compared to the smaller private schools (Stanford, MIT, Ivies), though the engineering department is a slightly different story. However, it is almost as pricy as any of those schools for non-residents of California.
One of the biggest draws of the game was the series of mods I expected to come out in the years following, but I haven't heard of any must-play mods yet. Certainly nothing has happened like with the first Halflife, where we had CounterStrike, Opposing Force, Day of Defeat, The Specialist, etc. I suppose it could just be an issue with how much more complex the Source engine is. It simply takes much more manpower and skill to create mods for this generation game, compared to the last. Does anyone know of any great Halflife 2 mods out there? Is this Minerva one worth a play through?
But what happens if you can't reach the remote control for the remote control? Wouldn't you then need a remote control for the remote control for the remote control? And if you couldn't reach the remote control for the remote control for the remote control? Wouldn't you then need a remote control for the remote control for the remote control for the remote control? And if you couldn't reach the remote control for the remote control for the remote control for the remote control?...
STACK OVERFLOW
I was an intern at Lockheed last summer. I got a quick unclassified tour of the THAAD facility, it was very cool stuff. This story made me laugh a little bit though, since I asked them if it was a good idea to run Windows, like they were on the mock-up consoles they showed me. Guess they changed their minds:)
Bayesian inference is typically used when you have a guess about a certain distribution, in this case a player's skill, and you can take observations that give you some information about the true distribution to get a fairly good approximation that converges to the real distribution as the number of samples increases. There are a couple of problems with the framework here. First, it says that it takes 50-100 games to converge to the real value. This becomes problematic when you factor in the fact that each player's skill is changing fairly constantly, probably at a rate faster than the convergence factor, and moreover the entire skill of all the player's on the network probably increases over time fairly steadily too. I don't know how to work the math out, but it seems like this may not be accurate for the given application. They would be better off with some sort of temporal model, but these tend to be much more complicated.
Take this with a grain of salt though, I'm just an undergrad and may be reading it completely wrong.
What can you do with Xbox Live Silver? Download more content?
I don't really understand what the incentive is for companies to release free downloadable content. I mean, they've already got your money. Seems like the smart thing to do would be to save any new content you create and release an updated or director's cut version later, or adopt the EA model and if the game is successful, just start releasing it every year with very small changes.
Paid downloadable content makes sense, at least, but I don't see how big a part of the 360 strategy that is. The important number for Microsoft should be how many more people can they get to pay for Xbox Gold, especially if the price is going up compared to current Xbox Live rates.
Slashdot Mirror
Great point, and this is actually one of the draws for the hi-def formats for me. Absolutely every film released in either format has been in the original aspect ratio, including a number of films (some of Kubrick's in particular) that haven't been available that way since they were in theatres. It's very depressing to see half the new release DVDs at Blockbuster in "Full Screen". I think they should place a (skippable) clip explaining the difference into all new DVD releases along with the trailers (maybe using that famous Ben Hur chariot race footage) to educate the masses as to what they're missing with pan'n'scan.
There are even more potentially interesting groups of downloaders. I, for one, downloaded the album for free for the time being, but intend on purchasing a physical copy when it's released on CD in January.
All the standard says is that a DX 10.1 card has to support 4xAA in hardware; that doesn't mean you have to turn it on in a game. It's similar to how DX 9 cards have to support one of the pixel shader models (2.0 I think). It doesn't mean you have no control over the effects when you're playing, it just means a card that complies with that version of the standard is capable of supporting all the features.
Is there a comparable equivalent for DirectX? I've been looking for an up-to-date one (Direct3D 9 and 10, all the shader models, etc) to add to my library to learn more about graphics programming, shaders, and the fixed-function pipeline.
Just to chime in with some more evidence to support you on this... in my job search for a full-time developer position after graduation, I interviewed with about a dozen companies and sent my resume off to at least thirty. Google was the only one that required that I send them a copy of my academic transcripts as well.
I thought I'd share my experiences interviewing with Google as well, since they're somewhat similar to yours. I had sent them my resume twice previously in hopes of getting a summer internship, no response. I ran into an acquaintance at a career fair, a fellow Cal grad, who gave me a referral to get me an interview for a full-time job.
They also asked me to bring in a code sample for a problem they sent me about a week before the interview was scheduled. I was to write a program that takes a directory path, and returns the names of any files whose contents are identical (even if the filenames are not) in that directory and its sub-directories. Ostensibly, this is useful if you have a huge media collection where you might want to remove a bunch of copies of large files for disk space. The trick, since this is Google, is to do this efficiently. I wrote a DFS that hashed the file paths into a table by their length, since getting the length is a cheap operation most operating systems support. Then I did a slow O(N^2) comparison of all files in the same-length bucket, using two methods. First, I randomly selected some sections of each file and compared them byte-by-byte. This could be tailored to work well with how much RAM your machine has / how your disk reads work. Since the algorithm was supposed to be deterministic, if the files passed the random selection, then I did a very slow byte-by-byte compare, to ensure they were identical. I think the random selection could also be done using some sort of checksum, which might be marginally faster. When I handed the interviewer the print-out, he glanced over it in 5 minutes or so, and asked me how I might have to change the algorithm if the files were instead on a server on a local network, instead of on the machines hard disk.
It was an on-campus interview, but they asked me the same three questions as they asked you. Apparently they share a list of them among the recruiters. The marble one I struggled with by trying to start out with calculating probabilities, but I got the right algorithm and narrowed the floor interval down to between 12 and 15 in my head, good enough. The second question was simple for me (just break the file up, use an in-place sort and then merge the runs of smaller files). The third question I was lost on, mostly because I was tired by that point, and annoyed that the interviewer didn't seem to be listening to me at all. Overall, I thought the interview went alright, but they contacted me about two weeks later to say that they had too many applicants and too few positions.
I was simulataneously contacted by a different HR person at Google, who was interviewing me for a Web Application developer position (the other interview was for a generic Software Developer position). I had basically no web development on my resume, so I'm not sure why I was picked up, but I said I was interested. They sent me a 10 page worksheet to complete for them in a week, including a Python question (I didn't know Python at the time), some user interface questions, a lot of questions about my prior work experience, some basic math problems (algebra, estimation, simple probability), and a bunch of MySQL questions I had no idea how to answer since I had no useful prior experience with databases. After turning in the worksheet, they left me hanging for about two months before I got another e-mail saying they weren't interested.
I worked on the iTunes music store last summer, and the TV shows are a very big success. All I was saying with my comment is that $2 a show, even if you think it's expensive, is the established price for a TV show download. Microsoft isn't pulling it out of their ass. I personally think that other things Microsoft is selling on Xbox Live are far too expensive, like the $6.00 Guitar Hero packs of 3 songs. However, a look at the leaderboards shows that plenty of people don't feel the same way. You and I may not be buying, but thousands of people are.
They're the same price as on the iTunes store. I'm not sure if these shows are filmed in HD or if they'll offer HD version, but from what I've seen, they look better on my HDTV than tv shows do streamed over an AppleTV. So, superior product at the same price point as a competitor. Can't miss a chance to jab at Microsoft?
The obvious motivation to me is that you can play with friends who may not have, or may only have, 360s.
I've been tempted to upgrade, but the competition between the two formats is what has been holding me back. It's a catch-22; many, like myself, won't purchase a player until there's a clear winner in the format war, but there won't be a clear winner until people start buying the players and the movies. In the media companies' eyes, I'm probably in their target demographic. I watch tons of movies. I've had an HDTV for over a year now, because I needed a new TV and I wanted something future-proof. I have an Xbox 360, so for $200 I could buy an HD-DVD player. I've seen some demonstrations and the picture quality is significantly better. But, I've seen the Betamax and Laserdisc collections accumulating dust in neighbors' houses. I don't want to be stuck with that investment and a meager half a dozen movies when, perhaps in a year's time, the announcement is made the no more HD-DVDs will be produced and that Blu-Ray has won. I don't want to take the chance that the special HD editions of some old favorites are released for the other format. I wonder how many of those 30 million HDTV owners are in a similar situation, just biding their time.
In today's Penny Arcade, Tycho shared some similar thoughts about the game being a venue for new talent. http://www.penny-arcade.com/
I don't think it's very likely that Rock Band will include tools of a high enough quality to create serious music, especially since its a console game. Allowing people to upload their own songs requires tons of regulation (for obscenity, copyright infringement). It seems far too early to tout this game as the Next Big Thing for music. It'll be like Guitar Hero, with more instruments.
Personally, I think the new MTV already exists in MySpace (and to a lesser extent YouTube). There have already been numerous artists whose popularity on these sites has landed them record deals. Its a better breeding ground for new bands: there is much more infrastructure for rated and discovering related talent to what you like, especially when you factor in that all the legitimate rock stars have MySpace pages for their bands. New music videos are premiered there. Concerts are announced "secretly" for MySpace fans, with tickets only purchasable via the site. And since MTV (and now MTV2) almost never show music videos any more, this is where people go to see them.
The article says that people who claim to remember seeing it live didn't actually see it live, because most networks just showed a tape replay after cutting away. So technically it's not live, but still, most of these people saw the events just after they happened. It also says that the shuttle didn't explode, but then describes what happened as a huge fireball. I can see how people might describe it as an explosion. So the crew may not have died instantly, but they were probably unconscious until the cabin fell back to the Earth, so it doesn't make too much of a difference to them or to anyone. I gave up reading at this point, but there don't seem to be any major revelations. It was a tragedy, and the important lessons learned from the loss of lives are what I hope live on.
Just a note on the Berkeley classes, Berkeley uses a different numbering scheme from most other universities. Instead of xx, 1xx, 2xx, 3xx being first through fourth year level, xx classes are lower division (freshman and sophomore), 1xx classes are upper division (juniors and seniors), and 2xx classes are graduate level. If you look at the webcast site, less than half are intro classes, most are upper division or graduate level. Plus I've been told that our upper div classes cover higher-level content than a number of other schools' graduate programs, but that could be the school spirit talking. (Go Bears)
Berkeley is a public school: no affirmative action. It's also huge and not too difficult to get into compared to the smaller private schools (Stanford, MIT, Ivies), though the engineering department is a slightly different story. However, it is almost as pricy as any of those schools for non-residents of California.
One of the biggest draws of the game was the series of mods I expected to come out in the years following, but I haven't heard of any must-play mods yet. Certainly nothing has happened like with the first Halflife, where we had CounterStrike, Opposing Force, Day of Defeat, The Specialist, etc. I suppose it could just be an issue with how much more complex the Source engine is. It simply takes much more manpower and skill to create mods for this generation game, compared to the last. Does anyone know of any great Halflife 2 mods out there? Is this Minerva one worth a play through?
I was never the first to post an article anyway.
But what happens if you can't reach the remote control for the remote control? Wouldn't you then need a remote control for the remote control for the remote control? And if you couldn't reach the remote control for the remote control for the remote control? Wouldn't you then need a remote control for the remote control for the remote control for the remote control? And if you couldn't reach the remote control for the remote control for the remote control for the remote control? ...
STACK OVERFLOW
I was an intern at Lockheed last summer. I got a quick unclassified tour of the THAAD facility, it was very cool stuff. This story made me laugh a little bit though, since I asked them if it was a good idea to run Windows, like they were on the mock-up consoles they showed me. Guess they changed their minds :)
Bayesian inference is typically used when you have a guess about a certain distribution, in this case a player's skill, and you can take observations that give you some information about the true distribution to get a fairly good approximation that converges to the real distribution as the number of samples increases. There are a couple of problems with the framework here. First, it says that it takes 50-100 games to converge to the real value. This becomes problematic when you factor in the fact that each player's skill is changing fairly constantly, probably at a rate faster than the convergence factor, and moreover the entire skill of all the player's on the network probably increases over time fairly steadily too. I don't know how to work the math out, but it seems like this may not be accurate for the given application. They would be better off with some sort of temporal model, but these tend to be much more complicated. Take this with a grain of salt though, I'm just an undergrad and may be reading it completely wrong.
Yes, certainly there will never be anything new created from this point forward.
Anyone else scared to click that link?
Can we mod the story off-topic?
Socket puppet? *zap*
What can you do with Xbox Live Silver? Download more content? I don't really understand what the incentive is for companies to release free downloadable content. I mean, they've already got your money. Seems like the smart thing to do would be to save any new content you create and release an updated or director's cut version later, or adopt the EA model and if the game is successful, just start releasing it every year with very small changes. Paid downloadable content makes sense, at least, but I don't see how big a part of the 360 strategy that is. The important number for Microsoft should be how many more people can they get to pay for Xbox Gold, especially if the price is going up compared to current Xbox Live rates.