It really should be obvious - but most of us are so used to Google by now that we might be too comfy.
Google has an enormous information gathering capability. Seen those Goooooooogle ADS everywhere? While it may not be spy-WARE per say... it certainly feeds you a cookie. Noticed how MANY of these Goooooogle ADS sites there are? Theyre just popping up everywhere arent they?! Yes they are - and you dont even give it a second thought while you throw yourself into the Google anti-spyware projects. Google dont want competitors. A Spyware program is a competitor of Google as it gathers information about the users surfing habits just like Google does - but in a much more intrusive way (well...at least if feels that way).
With a pricetag of 3000-4000 dollars on the aibo robotic dog
this would be a too expensive toy for the most of us (me to... I could only dream of purchasing a toy like that) so it should come as no surprise that they cut of this part of their company.
I do robotics now and then myself (more like Tilden) simple transistor based Beam robots with my wast amounts of ebay-surplus transistors;) but it aint Aibo I can tell ya:)
Does this mean that the world is not ready for robotic toys like the Aibo? No - I dont think so. I am old enough to remember Hero-1 - a robotic kit from the 80s that could do quite a lot of stuff when built, cost far less than Aibo as well - but not nearly as dexterious and flexible as Aibo.
Toys do sell well, thats why they produce them, but you cant produce toys that "look-ma---I am moving"... you need to bring something more useful to the world to make it accept it and fork out the hard earned dough.
I miss the days when Philips made the EE2000 series electronic engineer kits where you could build stuff from scratch and re-use the components over again to build something else...well..I actually dont miss it..since i have millions of transistors and capacitors (again..thank you Ebay!) But you get the point. People need to have something to challenge their minds and it should not cost an arm and a leg.
Very interesting read!
"It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for "basic skills" practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I've just taught you."
I believe that particular notion myself. Ive tried to teach classes by that principle, not math, not english - but animation & 3d. I found that if you teach these students abilities to teach themselves they become stronger and will adapt to their own skill level without being "dumbed down" to the average level of the whole class. No one feels particularily stupid either as they all have different skills as well.
Re:A lesson that changes your entire life
on
How to Do What You Love
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· Score: 4, Interesting
It's not too late. Back in the 8-bit days, computers sucked at math even more than you did. If you think carefully about what you were doing back then, most of your programming time was focused on avoiding math, not doing it.
I beg to differ with you there. You kind of contradict yourself when you say that I focused on avoiding it rather than doing it because of the...as you say... sucky math of the 8 bit processor, and here is why:
On the contrary, because of its primitive math, lacking multiplication, division and 16 bit size...not to mention the lack of floating point numbers I had to code these functions so they where translated from real-world math to 8 bit 6502 math.
But I didnt see it that way at the time - I just wanted to code games and demos. You may not know who I am and it will remain unimportant for this discussion - but me and my neightbours where belived to have started the C64 and Amiga demo-scene culture. I started out as primitive programs we wrote to each other for fun and threw it into each others (real world mailboxes). Now for a kid - that was a lot of fun, but belive it or not - there is a lot of advanced math in making sine scrollers, 3d scrollers etc. with an 1 mhz 8 bit computer;)
As a kid I was taught that I had to learn Math. An no one explained to me WHY I had to learn math.
To me it was more fun to play with my Commodore 64 and the Philips EE2003- electronics kits.
I was very curious as a kid, and every time I asked those who tried to teach me math what X and Y meant they never
explained it to me but just told me to concentrate on the math formula itself and just solve it the way it has been told and
explained. They told me I did not need to know what X and Y stands for. This is just ONE event of my childhood and why
the fun of math became a chore to me instead of the fun it really could be.
Back then, teachers where not advanced enough with computers to know that the stuff I coded in assembly actually where
pretty advanced math. And since I was only 11 years old I had no clue it was advanced, to me it was just pure fun and I could
not get enough of it. Too much later in life I discovered the connection between the school math and the computer programming
that occupied my childhood.
I think teachers should be more creative in showing kids how they could use the things they learn in real life. Because of
these experiences in my childhood - I got very bad math grades and did terribly in school. Later in life - I got a job as a service
technican, but still I had many holes and lack of real knowledge on how things worked because of my lack of schooling.
Much later in life I rediscovered math and how fun it could be - because it rewared my personal projects with results that
I really needed, that made math a lot of fun. Now I just really wish I knew the connection as a kid, maybe I was not smart enough
to see the connection - but its kind of funny that I actually performed very advanced math formulas and calculations in an even
more difficult environment... 8-bit assembly back then. Food for thoughts.
Re:Disney died when they fired Roy
on
Disney Buys Pixar
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· Score: 1
True! I stand corrected.
But in my opinion its the same as getting fired when the whole management is going exactly against you and everything you do. Kind of like fighting fire with fire. Whats a man to do?
Disney died when they fired Roy
on
Disney Buys Pixar
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· Score: 2, Interesting
My gripe with the Disney company is that the current management promised that they would invest more in motion pictures than animation.
Roy Disney where one of the last in the Disney family that was still in the studio and he wanted to push animation forward. He was also the first one to oppose the management suggestions to drop Pixar and let them "off" to sail their own sea. Big mistake, Roy knew it - and due to the management maximum age policy got laid off. Another big mistake.
Not more than a year later - the Disney 2D department where subject to severe reduction and closedowns, 80 percent of the animation staff where dismissed due to the decline in success for 2D-animated feature films, strange - when you think of that they just dismissed Pixar back then.
Now the management realize they have made a BIG boo-boo and desperately hook into Pixar again.
See why I worry? With management like that - and as an Animator myself - I do worry!
A half an inch thick E-ink based gadget? What are they thinking? The whole point with the E-ink is that it can be on a flexible super thin piece of plastic. All Sony is doing...is making an inferior PDA like gadget with a worse screen, sure - it will save batteries... but then again - so will an black and grey Palm-pilot without backlight too. Pointless stuff.
You are bound to get upsides and downsides to everything new. While it might not be 3-4 times the performance per say, it is certainly faster and not much pricier than the predecessors...I would say thats a good thing (damn, I sound like Martha Stewart here).
We cant complain really, now we get even better compatibility in and with our hardware. Remember all the time Mac users have wanted windows compatibility for certain software solutions because of their work? Now Mac lovers can enjoy future compatibility with ease.
Cant blame us geeks for being a little biased on our geekhood now can you?;)
Personally I go the road of "speed and stability" is king. I am definitely guilty of being a fanboy sometimes especially when I get caught up in good results that I can actually use in real life situations.
Most of the times I optimize my systems because of desperation, lack of money if you will - so whats a guy to do? Use the knowledge that I have of course...and if I dont... I learn it. Belive me - I would not be much of an AMD fan if I discovered that in "my case"...renderpower...Intel chips would help me speed up my rendering times tremendously - heck...Id change and ditch my AMD in a hoot. Ive got a power-pc based machine too, curiously that one is only 1.3 ghz and renders like a speed-daemon with another render engine called Yafray... but is slow like an geriatric on turtlewax when it comes to Blenders internal rendering engine. On the Intel box...its exactly the opposite, and again..very curiously yafray is still fast under Linux, but not as fast as the powerpc processor. So again - for me...speed is king. You know - I have to sit here and twiddle my thumbs while rendering so the faster I can get the job done - the more work I get done, so I really cant afford being a fanboy:)
Quote "Performance-wise, our Intel 660 series chips (about $340) perform almost TWICE as well as the Opteron 250's (~$442, prices from pricewatch). The intel code optimized with Intel's compiler, the AMD code optimized with Portland Group. We've tried every optimization we can think of (we even wrote out own compiler). The AMD chips just cannot keep up with Intel for OUR application.
It amazes me that every time an INTEL/AMD story comes up, or a MAC/WIN/LINUX story comes up for that matter, everyone flies to the keyboard to rant about how great their choice is without any consideration for the niche that they're in.
For gaming there is no comparison, the AMD chip wins hands down (though Intel's dothan/yonah architecture is changing that, and let's see an Athlon64 produce only 26 watts of heat disspation). AMD's smaller cache size pays a penalty though when dealing with large data arrays where 3.6 GHz and a 2MB cache smoke AMD."
Interesting stuff.
Taking into account that you guys wrote your own compiler for the task (which is something I can only admire) Im somewhat puzzled with your conclusion since you mention gaming in comparison as well.
Its not entirely impossible that the Blender code is way different from the code that you guys have (most likely) so it could somewhat use the features of the AMD chip more.
In all fairness - I would like to point out that the comparison I did was to "standard-windows" machines versus my own blend of natively compiled Linux & software (Blender 3D) so from what youre telling me I should experience even better optimizations on an Intel platform? Its of course worth a shot. But the fact remains the same no matter what story comes up to dismiss this and that, the scenes I make actually renders faster on the AMD machines, now - as I said before - this COULD be due to the fact that its different code than yours. Anyhow, Im not a coder - but Im a bit fuzzy on the whole Gaming versus Floating point issue... I seriously thought games these days where CPU/fpu intensive. I know that a lot of the realtime graphics can be done with the graphic cards own "gpu", but still...calculations remains the same.
Quote : "what's gonna happen to me anyways? Why should I care? Why should I clean my cache or even care about my privacy? Can you or anyone else out there who seems to be concerned by this type of stuff explain me why I should care about the government knowing the kind of shit they can know about me on internet?"
This probably wont be an issue for most people. But in the event that you should seek employment with the government, a position with NSA, FBI or CIA, or a huge corporate that pays 10.000-50.000 dollars just to find the right person for an important position - chances are they WILL go trough fire and water to get EVERYTHING about you, every little dustparticle, you shat in a corner somewhere - they want to know about it, your problems with authorities...they want to read what opinions you have...will you become a future issue for them or against them?
Take me as an example... I question Google and its ethics... now lets say I want to get hired by Google...and they find out that Ive put them in some bad light by questioning their ethics...what do you think theyll say? "Thank you for applying with us - we regret to say that currently we have no openings that fit your profile - do try again another time.". Yeah right - fat chance, they would not touch me with an iron-glove if that was the case. Same with any other company, you may not think of anything right now - but you can bet management is thinking of you.
And youre right - they couldnt care less about you - right now....but when you
do apply for that job...any info on YOU might be worth the companys future.
You know what guys? I used to be an Intel fan. I worked at a PC-store assembling and servicing customers computers for years. We dealt in both AMD, Cyrix and Intel at the time. At that time Amd was often prone to overheating and crashes while the Intel processors where very stable and easy to install.
All that changed...
The Athlon came along and my personal "intel-fanboyism" was over. I saw that you could get the same performance for 3 times less money if you did your homework and got it right with the bios settings - the reason I mention Bios settings is...youd be amazed if you knew how many people in this world that cant get it right. Even applying artic-silver (the cooler paste between the cooler and the cpu head) is an artform not to be taken lightly.
Price...
...doesnt matter nearly as much today as performance. And the AMD processors surely can perform. Let me give you a real-life example. Im an animator by trade and as you probably can guess...I need RENDERPOWER...uhmmm..that sweet sweet
taste of renderpower and custom optimization. Today I use Linux because Ive
compiled the whole kernel and modules for Amd athlon_xp and Ive compiled my
favourite opensource 3D program Blender with the same optimizations. Belive it or
not - I got over 30 percent better rendertime overall, in some cases even 70
percent! Now thats power that you can feel and taste. Intel didnt even come close.
Another real life example. Im in a community house that houses 40 computers or so
mostly Intel computers. I tried my "old" Amd Xp 2500+ up against an Intel 3.2 ghz
cpu. (yes..thats a 3.2 ghz cpu versus an 1.8 ghz Amd!) Guess who won? No... this
is not a joke... the AMD won by ca. 5 percent. but keep in mind...this was an
1.8 GHZ computer versus an 3.2 ghz. What gives? Ive also tried several other
Intel computers with various bus-speeds, ram-size etc. No deal - AMD wins hands
down each time.
Now... Im no coder anymore (Used to be way back in Amiga/C64 days) so I dont
know squat really, but it amazes me to see this working with 3d all the time
that AMD wins the battle again and again.
Maybe theres better code for the processor? Maybe its my Linux optimizations
that does the trick? I really dont know - but I am impressed.
Wake up people. While I am all for Google and Share the knowledge with everyone policy - I am less for the privacy issue that arises here. You all know it - Gooooooogle ADS are everywhere and you have a couple of cookies that identify you. Probably not the Slashdotters as we regularly clean our cache, but people with less knowledge will eventually suffer privacy issues.
As far as I am concerned - Google is the smartest internet move in the world. CIA, FBI and NSA loves this stuff. Why do you think the "military" abandoned the internet to the public? Imagine if you create a system that everyone uses...and Imagine you have full access to it...given all of that...you dont really need that much imagination to imagine how bad this COULD be. You can monitor just about anyone and everyone - find out their habits, what do they like? Are Johnny-Pedo
watching the "family-album" on a Gooooooogle ADS partner online-photo-album today? If so...is he also logging onto his GMAIL today? Maybe Alichk-WoludbeTerrorist is visiting the do-it-yourself-bombmaker site a bit too frequently and of course using his nice free big juicy google mailbox?
While thats kind of obvious to most of us...there is something FAR more sinister at hand...something you might need to be a bit of a paranoid person to think of (like me!)
Imagine that youre a worried "family dad" and want to educate yourself, finding out what "bad stuff" there is out there and what your family could be subjected to, or just curious in general. Imagine that you are subscribing to the same Goooooogle ADS partner sites and you are a man of your habits...you read certain news in online newspapers with great interest, you also give up what you prefer to eat, what people you hang with, which chat groups you visit, what products you prefer etc. All this can and WILL create a profile of you which Google easily can use for 2 things. 1) Direct their marketing at you with almost lethal accuracy and 2) Sell your information to the highest bidder...wether this is the government that make a "sweet trade-deal" with them...or the sinister business corporate that want to make sure that they only get "pure and clean" employees that fit the "corporate profile". This kind of information is worth more than Gold these days.
All that I am saying guys...is...Honestly, if you didnt see
this coming then youre simply to plain naive.
Remember - Knowledge is YOUR power too.
I have to admit it - I absolutely love the mythbusters show.
Its a show allright - but wouldnt you rather prefer as how like this (being the geek you are) rather than those endless idiot-shows like wheel-of-fortune, jeopardy, tv-poker etc.?
Sure, Jamie and Adam gets it wrong sometimes, but it inspires
normal people to get an interest in science because theyre "naturally" funny and they like what they do, whats wrong with that?
You want to see bad stuff on Discovery? Watch Brainiac - probably the "WORST" science-wannabee show ever.
Being the "geek" I am, electronics all over my house theres
nothing nicer than to come home from work to a little "tech"
show about "normal people" dealing with things related to
science they may or may not know about - and getting it out
into the open. Its fun, makes tv background-noise worthy;)
Youre saying Im an full-time alcoholic?
Shit - my new year resolution was to give up alcohol
and now they tell me that Im drunk every day just by
waking up, greeeeeat!...better get sign up for one of those AA meetings.
Maybe its better now...who knows? Dont use windows anymore, but I certainly remember all the frequent updates and they where WAY more than monthly. But if its better now - good for them. I wont see windows anymore anyway.
Ive noticed that the time I spend learning about my Linux system is far less than the time I wasted when I was using Windows. On windows I got my "near-daily" "windowsupdater-needs-to-restart-computer" that annoyed me beyond belief because it was usually very unconvinient. And sometimes these updates would completely screw up my installations or drivers.
When I switched to Linux for a year ago...permanently, I had a lot of troubles too - mostly learning how to do stuff differently from windows and entirely new ways of thinking, that was hard and sometimes very annoying too.
But Ive come to notice something that I take for granted with Linux... Theres no more worms...viruses...silly attacks from script-kiddies. Wonderful! My computer has finally been left alone from all of those daily plagues. I dreadfully remember at work when all the computers went down due to some kind of sober virus and how worried everyone where about losing their work. And not to mention the hassle of waiting until the network administrator finished the servicing because of these incidents.
I dont even see this stuff on Linux.
So for all its worth, all the hassle learning and maintaining Linux - its actually a better world (at least for now).
No wonder Microsoft is worried - imagine if the truth leaks out and people find out on their own?;) Im a happy camper.
Past and gone are the wonderful days of personal computers
when computers where indeed personal.
Im one of the "oldschool" geeks that grew up with an Atari 2600 and wrote my first assembly code games on a Commodore 64 way back then when an electronics kit where all the buzz and computers where something that banks used.
I was a part of a local computer club in Stavanger in Norway where we met once a week to bring our beloved computers together and exchange code and just marvel at the "cool" computers we had. You could see a range of Commodore 64, Vic 20, Spectrum, ZX-81,BBC and many more there. It was passionate fun - and basically every day of our lives revolved around our home computers.
Not too sure where all that went - but I had an "idea" about
LUGs being somewhat the same as "back then"...unfortunately
it seems like that no longer holds true (at least not to me). Im a Long time Linux user myself - using Slackware (an derivative self-compiled version of it that is).
But Ive tried several times to get in touch with such groups, I now Live in Denmark in an small town called Odense. I tried to meet with the local LUGs over here and most of them where elitist-snobs to say the very least. It consist of mostly System-administrators and incarnate Linux professionals that seems to be very good friends - but shun any outsiders. If you dont know your way around Bash - then youre frozen outside and no one would even dare to talk to you. Funnily enough - theyre not the only example...other LUGs Ive tried to get in contact with - are less than willing to help and waste most of the time by measuring you up-and-down on who you are and what on "earth" makes you "think" that youd even fit in.
Oh-boy - times have sure changed. Maybe its just me that is getting to be an old geezer and stuck in the past, either that
or it actually could be why theyre getting "less important"...at least to the "commoners" like me.
Then youll be happy to know that - not only do we have full
undo functionality , but theres even an UNDO-HISTORY function with a menu to go (Alt + U) so you can go anywhere in the history and redo from wherever you wish...heck...you can even browse through the various changes you made and go forward again if you still change your mind:)
Blender even has different undos for different systems.
Example: Global Undo and Local Undo - Meaning if you change stuff in you scene...you can just do the normal Ctrl + Z to undo there...or if you where editing your mesh you can undo/redo stuff with U in meshedit mode (Tab).
Blenders all about safety and workflow these days, if all above wasnt enough security for you - you can adjust your preferences to save "xxx-number-of-versions-back". Theres even a separate "Reopen last" and "Recover last session" system
so if you for some reason stopped in the middle of it all..can continue your work where you left it - or select the last file you worked on. Hows that for total paranoia?:)
Want more? I could go on an on...but Ill leave that to you.
So amazing that its hard to realize its free.
on
Blender 2.40 Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
I have been using Blender since version 1.8. And I realize
that a lot find the user-interface hard to use when you are a beginner.
The truth is however - even if it is harder to grasp as a beginner, most 3d applications are hard to learn - in fact...all 3D is hard to learn when youre new to 3d in general.
Blender isnt that hard compared to 3dstudio Max or Maya because of its better and more efficient workflow. I have bought 3dstudio max (a license) for over 4 years - but switched to Blender because I found that the modeling workflow was faster and more efficient. You can export/import.3ds if you want to - and now with the new Collada protocol you can import/export even more information so virtually nothing gets lost in the pipeline - of course, theres still some improvements to be made here. But hey - thats what the community is all about - you want it? Participate - and Well come up with something great for us all to use - together!
The main advantage That I think Blender has - in comparison to eg. 3Dstudio max is that once you get started it all becomes easier...while in 3dstudio max...you get a lot of "boxes and cylinders" to draw-off straight away...without learning anything at all...so yeah...3dstudio max is more "pleasing-straight-away". Maya is more professional and can handle bigger more complex jobs but is harder to work on smaller projects. Blender is sort of the "middle way"... I am not saying that Blender is better or worse than 3Dstudio max or Maya...but they all have their advantages - and you will all definetively do yourselves a HUGE FAVOR trying this application. Its a killer app!
It has - fluids (a really good one), Softbody, Some of the best
rigging tools around and support that simply cant be beat. What do I mean by that? I mean - when I used 3dstudio max...I was an unsignificant "flea"... and when I complained about bugs in the software...It was always "my-fault" or "Windows fault"...but never Discreets fault.. And months later when the bugs finally got acknowledged and fixed - I had to purchase 1000 dollars in upgrades just to fix the bugs.
When I switched to Blender and had problems - guess what? 2 days after "mentioning" possible bugs - they got fixed. And it kept going that way. Blender rarely chrashes and its a dream to work with the passionate developers.
Re:How about information about your car's health?
on
VW Goes USB
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· Score: 1
Thanks, I'm not always aware of the international Terms being from another country and all;).
But seriously...that's only half the story... Imagine if it could report on the state of the brakes (time to replace...etc?) and much more, it would really contribute to safety.
Unfortunately there are quite a lot of drivers who either forget or ignore to change their oil (and much more) - these are not only a danger to themselves but also to others. I dont think they do this on purpose as most people are decent enough... it's just various things in our lives that makes us "forget" the stuff that seem less interesting or less important at the moment, that might be much more important than the average joe is avare of.
Slashdot Mirror
It really should be obvious - but most of us are so used to Google by now that we might be too comfy.
Google has an enormous information gathering capability. Seen those Goooooooogle ADS everywhere? While it may not be spy-WARE per say... it certainly feeds you a cookie. Noticed how MANY of these Goooooogle ADS sites there are? Theyre just popping up everywhere arent they?! Yes they are - and you dont even give it a second thought while you throw yourself into the Google anti-spyware projects. Google dont want competitors. A Spyware program is a competitor of Google as it gathers information about the users surfing habits just like Google does - but in a much more intrusive way (well...at least if feels that way).
Are we getting the picture yet?
With a pricetag of 3000-4000 dollars on the aibo robotic dog this would be a too expensive toy for the most of us (me to... I could only dream of purchasing a toy like that) so it should come as no surprise that they cut of this part of their company.
;) but it aint Aibo I can tell ya :)
... you need to bring something more useful to the world to make it accept it and fork out the hard earned dough.
I do robotics now and then myself (more like Tilden) simple transistor based Beam robots with my wast amounts of ebay-surplus transistors
Does this mean that the world is not ready for robotic toys like the Aibo? No - I dont think so. I am old enough to remember Hero-1 - a robotic kit from the 80s that could do quite a lot of stuff when built, cost far less than Aibo as well - but not nearly as dexterious and flexible as Aibo.
Toys do sell well, thats why they produce them, but you cant produce toys that "look-ma---I am moving"
I miss the days when Philips made the EE2000 series electronic engineer kits where you could build stuff from scratch and re-use the components over again to build something else...well..I actually dont miss it..since i have millions of transistors and capacitors (again..thank you Ebay!) But you get the point. People need to have something to challenge their minds and it should not cost an arm and a leg.
Ah, there you go - now I feel safe again.
I guess there is a reason my 38L fishtank is filled with guppies only.
...it could be one of those that swims up your organic tube and when snug as a bug.... POOF! Blows up and stays in there.
(/me watches as half the slashdotters in here crosses legs)
Very interesting read! "It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for "basic skills" practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I've just taught you."
I believe that particular notion myself. Ive tried to teach classes by that principle, not math, not english - but animation & 3d. I found that if you teach these students abilities to teach themselves they become stronger and will adapt to their own skill level without being "dumbed down" to the average level of the whole class. No one feels particularily stupid either as they all have different skills as well.
It's not too late. Back in the 8-bit days, computers sucked at math even more than you did. If you think carefully about what you were doing back then, most of your programming time was focused on avoiding math, not doing it.
...as you say... sucky math of the 8 bit processor, and here is why:
;)
I beg to differ with you there. You kind of contradict yourself when you say that I focused on avoiding it rather than doing it because of the
On the contrary, because of its primitive math, lacking multiplication, division and 16 bit size...not to mention the lack of floating point numbers I had to code these functions so they where translated from real-world math to 8 bit 6502 math. But I didnt see it that way at the time - I just wanted to code games and demos. You may not know who I am and it will remain unimportant for this discussion - but me and my neightbours where belived to have started the C64 and Amiga demo-scene culture. I started out as primitive programs we wrote to each other for fun and threw it into each others (real world mailboxes). Now for a kid - that was a lot of fun, but belive it or not - there is a lot of advanced math in making sine scrollers, 3d scrollers etc. with an 1 mhz 8 bit computer
As a kid I was taught that I had to learn Math. An no one explained to me WHY I had to learn math. To me it was more fun to play with my Commodore 64 and the Philips EE2003- electronics kits. I was very curious as a kid, and every time I asked those who tried to teach me math what X and Y meant they never explained it to me but just told me to concentrate on the math formula itself and just solve it the way it has been told and explained. They told me I did not need to know what X and Y stands for. This is just ONE event of my childhood and why the fun of math became a chore to me instead of the fun it really could be.
... 8-bit assembly back then. Food for thoughts.
Back then, teachers where not advanced enough with computers to know that the stuff I coded in assembly actually where pretty advanced math. And since I was only 11 years old I had no clue it was advanced, to me it was just pure fun and I could not get enough of it. Too much later in life I discovered the connection between the school math and the computer programming that occupied my childhood.
I think teachers should be more creative in showing kids how they could use the things they learn in real life. Because of these experiences in my childhood - I got very bad math grades and did terribly in school. Later in life - I got a job as a service technican, but still I had many holes and lack of real knowledge on how things worked because of my lack of schooling.
Much later in life I rediscovered math and how fun it could be - because it rewared my personal projects with results that I really needed, that made math a lot of fun. Now I just really wish I knew the connection as a kid, maybe I was not smart enough to see the connection - but its kind of funny that I actually performed very advanced math formulas and calculations in an even more difficult environment
True! I stand corrected.
But in my opinion its the same as getting fired when the whole management is going exactly against you and everything you do. Kind of like fighting fire with fire. Whats a man to do?
My gripe with the Disney company is that the current management promised that they would invest more in motion pictures than animation.
Roy Disney where one of the last in the Disney family that was still in the studio and he wanted to push animation forward. He was also the first one to oppose the management suggestions to drop Pixar and let them "off" to sail their own sea. Big mistake, Roy knew it - and due to the management maximum age policy got laid off. Another big mistake.
Not more than a year later - the Disney 2D department where subject to severe reduction and closedowns, 80 percent of the animation staff where dismissed due to the decline in success for 2D-animated feature films, strange - when you think of that they just dismissed Pixar back then.
Now the management realize they have made a BIG boo-boo and desperately hook into Pixar again.
See why I worry? With management like that - and as an Animator myself - I do worry!
A half an inch thick E-ink based gadget? What are they thinking? The whole point with the E-ink is that it can be on a flexible super thin piece of plastic. All Sony is doing...is making an inferior PDA like gadget with a worse screen, sure - it will save batteries... but then again - so will an black and grey Palm-pilot without backlight too. Pointless stuff.
You are bound to get upsides and downsides to everything new. While it might not be 3-4 times the performance per say, it is certainly faster and not much pricier than the predecessors...I would say thats a good thing (damn, I sound like Martha Stewart here).
We cant complain really, now we get even better compatibility in and with our hardware. Remember all the time Mac users have wanted windows compatibility for certain software solutions because of their work? Now Mac lovers can enjoy future compatibility with ease.
Cant blame us geeks for being a little biased on our geekhood now can you? ;)
...and if I dont... I learn it. Belive me - I would not be much of an AMD fan if I discovered that in "my case" ...renderpower...Intel chips would help me speed up my rendering times tremendously - heck...Id change and ditch my AMD in a hoot. Ive got a power-pc based machine too, curiously that one is only 1.3 ghz and renders like a speed-daemon with another render engine called Yafray... but is slow like an geriatric on turtlewax when it comes to Blenders internal rendering engine. On the Intel box ...its exactly the opposite, and again..very curiously yafray is still fast under Linux, but not as fast as the powerpc processor. So again - for me...speed is king. You know - I have to sit here and twiddle my thumbs while rendering so the faster I can get the job done - the more work I get done, so I really cant afford being a fanboy :)
Personally I go the road of "speed and stability" is king. I am definitely guilty of being a fanboy sometimes especially when I get caught up in good results that I can actually use in real life situations.
Most of the times I optimize my systems because of desperation, lack of money if you will - so whats a guy to do? Use the knowledge that I have of course
Quote "Performance-wise, our Intel 660 series chips (about $340) perform almost TWICE as well as the Opteron 250's (~$442, prices from pricewatch). The intel code optimized with Intel's compiler, the AMD code optimized with Portland Group. We've tried every optimization we can think of (we even wrote out own compiler). The AMD chips just cannot keep up with Intel for OUR application.
It amazes me that every time an INTEL/AMD story comes up, or a MAC/WIN/LINUX story comes up for that matter, everyone flies to the keyboard to rant about how great their choice is without any consideration for the niche that they're in.
For gaming there is no comparison, the AMD chip wins hands down (though Intel's dothan/yonah architecture is changing that, and let's see an Athlon64 produce only 26 watts of heat disspation). AMD's smaller cache size pays a penalty though when dealing with large data arrays where 3.6 GHz and a 2MB cache smoke AMD."
Interesting stuff.
Taking into account that you guys wrote your own compiler for the task (which is something I can only admire) Im somewhat puzzled with your conclusion since you mention gaming in comparison as well.
Its not entirely impossible that the Blender code is way different from the code that you guys have (most likely) so it could somewhat use the features of the AMD chip more.
In all fairness - I would like to point out that the comparison I did was to "standard-windows" machines versus my own blend of natively compiled Linux & software (Blender 3D) so from what youre telling me I should experience even better optimizations on an Intel platform? Its of course worth a shot. But the fact remains the same no matter what story comes up to dismiss this and that, the scenes I make actually renders faster on the AMD machines, now - as I said before - this COULD be due to the fact that its different code than yours. Anyhow, Im not a coder - but Im a bit fuzzy on the whole Gaming versus Floating point issue... I seriously thought games these days where CPU/fpu intensive. I know that a lot of the realtime graphics can be done with the graphic cards own "gpu", but still...calculations remains the same.
Quote : "what's gonna happen to me anyways? Why should I care? Why should I clean my cache or even care about my privacy? Can you or anyone else out there who seems to be concerned by this type of stuff explain me why I should care about the government knowing the kind of shit they can know about me on internet?"
... now lets say I want to get hired by Google...and they find out that Ive put them in some bad light by questioning their ethics...what do you think theyll say? "Thank you for applying with us - we regret to say that currently we have no openings that fit your profile - do try again another time.". Yeah right - fat chance, they would not touch me with an iron-glove if that was the case. Same with any other company, you may not think of anything right now - but you can bet management is thinking of you.
This probably wont be an issue for most people. But in the event that you should seek employment with the government, a position with NSA, FBI or CIA, or a huge corporate that pays 10.000-50.000 dollars just to find the right person for an important position - chances are they WILL go trough fire and water to get EVERYTHING about you, every little dustparticle, you shat in a corner somewhere - they want to know about it, your problems with authorities...they want to read what opinions you have...will you become a future issue for them or against them? Take me as an example... I question Google and its ethics
And youre right - they couldnt care less about you - right now....but when you do apply for that job...any info on YOU might be worth the companys future.
You know what guys? I used to be an Intel fan. I worked at a PC-store assembling and servicing customers computers for years. We dealt in both AMD, Cyrix and Intel at the time. At that time Amd was often prone to overheating and crashes while the Intel processors where very stable and easy to install.
...doesnt matter nearly as much today as performance. And the AMD processors surely can perform. Let me give you a real-life example. Im an animator by trade and as you probably can guess...I need RENDERPOWER...uhmmm..that sweet sweet
taste of renderpower and custom optimization. Today I use Linux because Ive
compiled the whole kernel and modules for Amd athlon_xp and Ive compiled my
favourite opensource 3D program Blender with the same optimizations. Belive it or
not - I got over 30 percent better rendertime overall, in some cases even 70
percent! Now thats power that you can feel and taste. Intel didnt even come close.
All that changed...
The Athlon came along and my personal "intel-fanboyism" was over. I saw that you could get the same performance for 3 times less money if you did your homework and got it right with the bios settings - the reason I mention Bios settings is...youd be amazed if you knew how many people in this world that cant get it right. Even applying artic-silver (the cooler paste between the cooler and the cpu head) is an artform not to be taken lightly.
Price...
Another real life example. Im in a community house that houses 40 computers or so mostly Intel computers. I tried my "old" Amd Xp 2500+ up against an Intel 3.2 ghz cpu. (yes..thats a 3.2 ghz cpu versus an 1.8 ghz Amd!) Guess who won? No... this is not a joke... the AMD won by ca. 5 percent. but keep in mind...this was an 1.8 GHZ computer versus an 3.2 ghz. What gives? Ive also tried several other Intel computers with various bus-speeds, ram-size etc. No deal - AMD wins hands down each time.
Now... Im no coder anymore (Used to be way back in Amiga/C64 days) so I dont know squat really, but it amazes me to see this working with 3d all the time that AMD wins the battle again and again.
Maybe theres better code for the processor? Maybe its my Linux optimizations that does the trick? I really dont know - but I am impressed.
As if they didnt already?
Wake up people. While I am all for Google and Share the knowledge with everyone policy - I am less for the privacy issue that arises here. You all know it - Gooooooogle ADS are everywhere and you have a couple of cookies that identify you. Probably not the Slashdotters as we regularly clean our cache, but people with less knowledge will eventually suffer privacy issues.
As far as I am concerned - Google is the smartest internet move in the world. CIA, FBI and NSA loves this stuff. Why do you think the "military" abandoned the internet to the public? Imagine if you create a system that everyone uses...and Imagine you have full access to it...given all of that...you dont really need that much imagination to imagine how bad this COULD be. You can monitor just about anyone and everyone - find out their habits, what do they like? Are Johnny-Pedo watching the "family-album" on a Gooooooogle ADS partner online-photo-album today? If so...is he also logging onto his GMAIL today? Maybe Alichk-WoludbeTerrorist is visiting the do-it-yourself-bombmaker site a bit too frequently and of course using his nice free big juicy google mailbox?
While thats kind of obvious to most of us...there is something FAR more sinister at hand...something you might need to be a bit of a paranoid person to think of (like me!)
Imagine that youre a worried "family dad" and want to educate yourself, finding out what "bad stuff" there is out there and what your family could be subjected to, or just curious in general. Imagine that you are subscribing to the same Goooooogle ADS partner sites and you are a man of your habits...you read certain news in online newspapers with great interest, you also give up what you prefer to eat, what people you hang with, which chat groups you visit, what products you prefer etc. All this can and WILL create a profile of you which Google easily can use for 2 things. 1) Direct their marketing at you with almost lethal accuracy and 2) Sell your information to the highest bidder...wether this is the government that make a "sweet trade-deal" with them...or the sinister business corporate that want to make sure that they only get "pure and clean" employees that fit the "corporate profile". This kind of information is worth more than Gold these days.
All that I am saying guys...is...Honestly, if you didnt see this coming then youre simply to plain naive. Remember - Knowledge is YOUR power too.
I have to admit it - I absolutely love the mythbusters show. Its a show allright - but wouldnt you rather prefer as how like this (being the geek you are) rather than those endless idiot-shows like wheel-of-fortune, jeopardy, tv-poker etc.?
;)
Sure, Jamie and Adam gets it wrong sometimes, but it inspires normal people to get an interest in science because theyre "naturally" funny and they like what they do, whats wrong with that?
You want to see bad stuff on Discovery? Watch Brainiac - probably the "WORST" science-wannabee show ever.
Being the "geek" I am, electronics all over my house theres nothing nicer than to come home from work to a little "tech" show about "normal people" dealing with things related to science they may or may not know about - and getting it out into the open. Its fun, makes tv background-noise worthy
Youre saying Im an full-time alcoholic? Shit - my new year resolution was to give up alcohol and now they tell me that Im drunk every day just by waking up, greeeeeat! ...better get sign up for one of those AA meetings.
Maybe its better now...who knows? Dont use windows anymore, but I certainly remember all the frequent updates and they where WAY more than monthly. But if its better now - good for them. I wont see windows anymore anyway.
You know what?
;) Im a happy camper.
Ive noticed that the time I spend learning about my Linux system is far less than the time I wasted when I was using Windows. On windows I got my "near-daily" "windowsupdater-needs-to-restart-computer" that annoyed me beyond belief because it was usually very unconvinient. And sometimes these updates would completely screw up my installations or drivers.
When I switched to Linux for a year ago...permanently, I had a lot of troubles too - mostly learning how to do stuff differently from windows and entirely new ways of thinking, that was hard and sometimes very annoying too.
But Ive come to notice something that I take for granted with Linux... Theres no more worms...viruses...silly attacks from script-kiddies. Wonderful! My computer has finally been left alone from all of those daily plagues. I dreadfully remember at work when all the computers went down due to some kind of sober virus and how worried everyone where about losing their work. And not to mention the hassle of waiting until the network administrator finished the servicing because of these incidents.
I dont even see this stuff on Linux.
So for all its worth, all the hassle learning and maintaining Linux - its actually a better world (at least for now).
No wonder Microsoft is worried - imagine if the truth leaks out and people find out on their own?
Youre right. I stand corrected - at least you guessed the punch line I screwed up ;)
Now ...back to the bottles and season festivites.
Past and gone are the wonderful days of personal computers when computers where indeed personal.
...other LUGs Ive tried to get in contact with - are less than willing to help and waste most of the time by measuring you up-and-down on who you are and what on "earth" makes you "think" that youd even fit in.
Im one of the "oldschool" geeks that grew up with an Atari 2600 and wrote my first assembly code games on a Commodore 64 way back then when an electronics kit where all the buzz and computers where something that banks used.
I was a part of a local computer club in Stavanger in Norway where we met once a week to bring our beloved computers together and exchange code and just marvel at the "cool" computers we had. You could see a range of Commodore 64, Vic 20, Spectrum, ZX-81,BBC and many more there. It was passionate fun - and basically every day of our lives revolved around our home computers.
Not too sure where all that went - but I had an "idea" about LUGs being somewhat the same as "back then"...unfortunately it seems like that no longer holds true (at least not to me). Im a Long time Linux user myself - using Slackware (an derivative self-compiled version of it that is).
But Ive tried several times to get in touch with such groups, I now Live in Denmark in an small town called Odense. I tried to meet with the local LUGs over here and most of them where elitist-snobs to say the very least. It consist of mostly System-administrators and incarnate Linux professionals that seems to be very good friends - but shun any outsiders. If you dont know your way around Bash - then youre frozen outside and no one would even dare to talk to you. Funnily enough - theyre not the only example
Oh-boy - times have sure changed. Maybe its just me that is getting to be an old geezer and stuck in the past, either that or it actually could be why theyre getting "less important"...at least to the "commoners" like me.
Just my 5.14" cents.
Then youll be happy to know that - not only do we have full undo functionality , but theres even an UNDO-HISTORY function with a menu to go (Alt + U) so you can go anywhere in the history and redo from wherever you wish...heck...you can even browse through the various changes you made and go forward again if you still change your mind :)
:)
Blender even has different undos for different systems. Example: Global Undo and Local Undo - Meaning if you change stuff in you scene...you can just do the normal Ctrl + Z to undo there...or if you where editing your mesh you can undo/redo stuff with U in meshedit mode (Tab).
Blenders all about safety and workflow these days, if all above wasnt enough security for you - you can adjust your preferences to save "xxx-number-of-versions-back". Theres even a separate "Reopen last" and "Recover last session" system so if you for some reason stopped in the middle of it all..can continue your work where you left it - or select the last file you worked on. Hows that for total paranoia?
Want more? I could go on an on...but Ill leave that to you.
I have been using Blender since version 1.8. And I realize that a lot find the user-interface hard to use when you are a beginner.
...all 3D is hard to learn when youre new to 3d in general.
.3ds if you want to - and now with the new Collada protocol you can import/export even more information so virtually nothing gets lost in the pipeline - of course, theres still some improvements to be made here. But hey - thats what the community is all about - you want it? Participate - and Well come up with something great for us all to use - together!
...while in 3dstudio max...you get a lot of "boxes and cylinders" to draw-off straight away ...without learning anything at all...so yeah...3dstudio max is more "pleasing-straight-away". Maya is more professional and can handle bigger more complex jobs but is harder to work on smaller projects. Blender is sort of the "middle way"... I am not saying that Blender is better or worse than 3Dstudio max or Maya...but they all have their advantages - and you will all definetively do yourselves a HUGE FAVOR trying this application. Its a killer app!
The truth is however - even if it is harder to grasp as a beginner, most 3d applications are hard to learn - in fact
Blender isnt that hard compared to 3dstudio Max or Maya because of its better and more efficient workflow. I have bought 3dstudio max (a license) for over 4 years - but switched to Blender because I found that the modeling workflow was faster and more efficient. You can export/import
The main advantage That I think Blender has - in comparison to eg. 3Dstudio max is that once you get started it all becomes easier
It has - fluids (a really good one), Softbody, Some of the best rigging tools around and support that simply cant be beat. What do I mean by that? I mean - when I used 3dstudio max...I was an unsignificant "flea"... and when I complained about bugs in the software...It was always "my-fault" or "Windows fault"...but never Discreets fault.. And months later when the bugs finally got acknowledged and fixed - I had to purchase 1000 dollars in upgrades just to fix the bugs.
When I switched to Blender and had problems - guess what? 2 days after "mentioning" possible bugs - they got fixed. And it kept going that way. Blender rarely chrashes and its a dream to work with the passionate developers.
Thanks, I'm not always aware of the international Terms being from another country and all ;).
But seriously...that's only half the story... Imagine if it could report on the state of the brakes (time to replace...etc?) and much more, it would really contribute to safety.
Unfortunately there are quite a lot of drivers who either forget or ignore to change their oil (and much more) - these are not only a danger to themselves but also to others. I dont think they do this on purpose as most people are decent enough... it's just various things in our lives that makes us "forget" the stuff that seem less interesting or less important at the moment, that might be much more important than the average joe is avare of.