While I find the prefix inconvenient in everyday usage, the techie in me is glad that there exists unambiguous terms that I may optionally use. If I were working on some large software project where size mattered (Say, at NASA), I'm sure I would mandate the clear distinction between the two, by using the binary prefixes. Sorry for ruining your language. And 'poetic ambiguity' my arse. "Oh mine harddrive, how thou teaseth me. Verily, thou sayeth one thing and meaneth quite another." That kind of thing fits into engineering about as well as imperial units.
So I'm wondering here, if I never watched doctor Who and wanted to check it out, where should I begin? I'm normally very adamant at starting at the very beginning, but I read something about episodes from the first seasons being lost? I'd want to start somewhere introductionary, do they do that at the start of every season, or every doctor or whatever? If I wanted a litmus test, which one would be the doctor Whoiest?
Wow, a picture of a finger pointing at a screen! What an amazing demonstration of the concept! There's even a text blurb saying it is revolutionary! Are there perhaps any videos of this actually in action that you could link to instead?
You know, I'd almost pay the price they're asking for a chance to play DEFCON on this... Then again, I'm hoping I'll get to make such a screen during the next few years, so maybe I'll get it.
From what I know of FTIR screens (I think that's what they're using), the outer layer is probably a back projection screen, with something like acrylic glass under it. There's no active tech in the screen itself, just the projector, the camera and the IR LEDs, so the screen should tolerate whatever doesn't damage the projection screen. I think they can make those out of plastics, which should be pretty washable unless you by solvent mean Acetone and the likes.
The demos on their website wasn't half bad, especially for Microsoft. And they didn't even try to sabotage Opera users, if only because the website was pure flash (and not Silverlight, thank god.) It kind of annoyed me the way they make silent implications that they invented all this stuff (simply by not giving any outside credit, even the 'history' page is all wishy washy and Microsofty), especially seeing how at least half of the demos is the same stuff we've been seeing from everyone else, like the photo app, maps, etc. I guess that's to be expected from any large evil organization, though. No props given in the business world. I have mixed feelings about stuff like laying cameras on the board and having the pictures show up. It seems like a very intuitive, and at the same time horribly inefficient way to organize photos. They show people freely sharing music and pictures via the Zune though? PIRATZ!!1
The overall impression I get is that someone forgot to lock the cage that is Microsoft Research. I'm sure they will correct this oversight with exuberant use of DRM, poor quality control, disregard for standards, frivolous patents and anything else it takes. They have withstood excellent, polished and/or innovative ideas before, and they will do so again, dammit!
The most relevant movie here is of course Minority Report, which is noteworthy for having put some research into their futuristic tech to have realistic interface. And because this can't be linked to often enough from this story: check out Jeff Han's progress with this at http://youtube.com/watch?v=ysEVYwa-vHM Note especially the on-screen keyboard he at one point gets up. I saw this at another video too, which demonstrated a pretty cool gesture for text entry; you placed all your fingers on the screen in a typing position, and the keyboard popped up, correctly sized to your hands. It would be a pain for prolonged text entry, but it could be plenty for annoting pictures and maps, socializing, etc.
One grand is a bit on the low side. You need a projector and a camera at the very least. Not sure how smart it is to link there from slashdot, but check out http://www.multitouch.nl/ which blogs a student project where they create one of these screens. FTIR screens are actually relatively simple to make, they even have a HOWTO document, and I've seen several similar ventures around the net. I'm actually interested in this field, and wanted to do look into making one of these at my uni, but now I'm sure everyone will look at it and go "ZOMG, a Microsoft screen!" Thank you so much, Microsoft.
I'll agree it had the general form of an advertisement, but if you look at the actual text it would be one of unprecedented candidness and modesty. Then again, looking at the comments Torque is getting, I suppose it would have reason to be.
Well, if you're having a real medical problem that the doctors won't believe exists, you have to convince someone. Having a doctor's attest that says something like "as far as I can tell, this person is sensitive to radiation from wireless equipment" wouldn't prove much anything, but it would lend credibility to your claim, both for employers and for contacting any further specialists. I can't claim any knowledge of the specific process, but only express my perhaps overly optimistic belief that if people who really do reliably show these symptoms make themselves known, then this information will bubble up to the relevant people, new studies will be made, medical conditions will be acknowledged, medical science will advance, and there will be much rejoycing.
When you're considering commercial engines, that probably means you aren't planning to release the game as open source, which would make a GPL engine kind of unsuitable, no?
You serious? Now I'm as liable to NIH as the next guy, but if you want to actually be productive, use a pre-existing engine. A decent 3d-engine is a non-trivial thing to make, and if he's dissatisfied with the features of the current open source offerings, I'll bet he'd be in for many months work on the engine before he had something usable. It's completely redundant effort, and you don't want to waste all that time when you just want to make a game.
Then have the doctor do blind tests? They're all pretty eager to discover some new complex or syndrome, you know. I wouldn't be surprised if there have been rewards offered for demonstrating real electrosensitivity, either. So if you aren't bullshitting us (and I think you are, does it show?), then find her a doctor who is willing to run blind tests on her. The reason it's not being taken seriously is that, to the best of my knowledge, they haven't been able to prove any such effects in controlled tests, and if people are having demonstratable symptoms, then they need to come forward and demonstrate them. If they do, they'll get the recognition they need.
Is the training very specific to Red Hat systems, or would you use it even if the final systems they'd be working on were, say, Debian, or Slackware? When I (some time ago, now) moved from Red Hat to Slackware at home, a lot of the basic commands I had learned for things like network setup turned out to be Red Hat specific tools. How does LPI fare in that regard?
Monotone is my current favourite also, but it's pretty different from the CVS/SVN style of work, and not nearly as widespread, which makes it harder to use in a team project. Git borrows a lot from it and gets exposure from being used for Linux kernel VC.
There are still some reasons for choosing SVN over monotone though, the major one for me is partial checkout, which you learn to appreciate once you've been stuck behind dialup or on a cell phone. (On the other hand, SVN doesn't do complete checkouts.)
People tread carefully when dealing with their version control. I think both Sourceforge and Gnome only relatively recently went from CVS to SVN. If you're still using CVS for current projects (or God forbid, Visual SourceSafe), it may make sense to get them switched over to SVN, and use monotone for small sandbox projects until you can make a good case for using it in a new, bigger project (especially one where you anticipate a lot of branched work, maybe with parallelly mantained branches). It seems simpler to develop and integrate tools with monotone than with CVS, and there's development going on for things like trac support, so I have high hopes for the eventual availability of a large number of tools for working with monotone.
For extra value we should also ask Theo de Raadt for a comment. And it would make a good House episode. "So what you're saying, Mr. NVIDIA, is that you got that driver bug from a public toilet seat?"
Honestly, if you think Subversion is the wave of the future, you haven't been paying much attention. It fixes some fundamental flaws in CVS, which is nice, but elsewhere there's exciting stuff like Monotone, darcs and many others. It seems people aren't looking hard enough for source control options, when they'll go wild over things like SVN, or more recently GIT.
I suppose one has to be conservative with deployment of this stuff, you don't want to have code locked away in unmantained software, or erased by immaturity bugs, but it's still an interesting field.
Maybe 1. Impress your investors. 2. It looks cutting edge and professional. would make for a better market at the current price, though I'm sure some high-paid techies will find your posted reasons sufficient.
If I wanted the kind of dynamic graphical shortcuts that this keyboard offer, I'd just as soon keep it separate from text entry, and mount a small touch screen beside the keyboard.
Actually, it kind of comments on the inefficiency of the mouse as an input device that it is so much faster to use a physical button compared to an onscreen one. The mouse is mainly useful as a FPS game controller, and needs to step down from the UI throne. I'm looking forward to when this hits mainstream, though I won't hold my breath. I saw a pretty impressive demonstration of a interactive whiteboard a while ago, though I know it's old news to people that are keeping up with this thing. Isn't touch technology getting cheap enough to reach the main desktop market soon?
I meant, as opposed to free will. Meaning, religion have some people arguing free will versus fate, while some ateistists argue about free will versus determinism. I did not say the concept of fate was ingrained in all religions, nor that all non-religious people believed in determinism, but that both views had supporters in both groups. That's why I said they were orthogonal.
Slashdot Mirror
You get the original free code from the same place that they got it.
While I find the prefix inconvenient in everyday usage, the techie in me is glad that there exists unambiguous terms that I may optionally use. If I were working on some large software project where size mattered (Say, at NASA), I'm sure I would mandate the clear distinction between the two, by using the binary prefixes. Sorry for ruining your language.
And 'poetic ambiguity' my arse. "Oh mine harddrive, how thou teaseth me. Verily, thou sayeth one thing and meaneth quite another." That kind of thing fits into engineering about as well as imperial units.
So I'm wondering here, if I never watched doctor Who and wanted to check it out, where should I begin? I'm normally very adamant at starting at the very beginning, but I read something about episodes from the first seasons being lost? I'd want to start somewhere introductionary, do they do that at the start of every season, or every doctor or whatever? If I wanted a litmus test, which one would be the doctor Whoiest?
You... Wash it? I realize the concept may be foreign to you, but it involves soap and water. I'm sure you can look it up on Wikipedia.
There's several projects documented where people have hacked their own screens. Check out http://www.whitenoiseaudio.com/touchlib/ and http://www.multitouch.nl/
Wow, a picture of a finger pointing at a screen! What an amazing demonstration of the concept! There's even a text blurb saying it is revolutionary!
Are there perhaps any videos of this actually in action that you could link to instead?
Much of the effort so far has been academic and open source. Check out Touchlib to get started.
You know, I'd almost pay the price they're asking for a chance to play DEFCON on this... Then again, I'm hoping I'll get to make such a screen during the next few years, so maybe I'll get it.
From what I know of FTIR screens (I think that's what they're using), the outer layer is probably a back projection screen, with something like acrylic glass under it.
There's no active tech in the screen itself, just the projector, the camera and the IR LEDs, so the screen should tolerate whatever doesn't damage the projection screen. I think they can make those out of plastics, which should be pretty washable unless you by solvent mean Acetone and the likes.
You mean Jeff Han? I'm pretty sure they're both using FTIR (Frustrated total internal reflection) screens.
The demos on their website wasn't half bad, especially for Microsoft. And they didn't even try to sabotage Opera users, if only because the website was pure flash (and not Silverlight, thank god.)
It kind of annoyed me the way they make silent implications that they invented all this stuff (simply by not giving any outside credit, even the 'history' page is all wishy washy and Microsofty), especially seeing how at least half of the demos is the same stuff we've been seeing from everyone else, like the photo app, maps, etc. I guess that's to be expected from any large evil organization, though. No props given in the business world.
I have mixed feelings about stuff like laying cameras on the board and having the pictures show up. It seems like a very intuitive, and at the same time horribly inefficient way to organize photos.
They show people freely sharing music and pictures via the Zune though? PIRATZ!!1
The overall impression I get is that someone forgot to lock the cage that is Microsoft Research. I'm sure they will correct this oversight with exuberant use of DRM, poor quality control, disregard for standards, frivolous patents and anything else it takes.
They have withstood excellent, polished and/or innovative ideas before, and they will do so again, dammit!
Multitouch pong game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRNO4dlf_MY
The most relevant movie here is of course Minority Report, which is noteworthy for having put some research into their futuristic tech to have realistic interface.
And because this can't be linked to often enough from this story: check out Jeff Han's progress with this at http://youtube.com/watch?v=ysEVYwa-vHM
Note especially the on-screen keyboard he at one point gets up. I saw this at another video too, which demonstrated a pretty cool gesture for text entry; you placed all your fingers on the screen in a typing position, and the keyboard popped up, correctly sized to your hands. It would be a pain for prolonged text entry, but it could be plenty for annoting pictures and maps, socializing, etc.
One grand is a bit on the low side. You need a projector and a camera at the very least. Not sure how smart it is to link there from slashdot, but check out http://www.multitouch.nl/ which blogs a student project where they create one of these screens. FTIR screens are actually relatively simple to make, they even have a HOWTO document, and I've seen several similar ventures around the net.
I'm actually interested in this field, and wanted to do look into making one of these at my uni, but now I'm sure everyone will look at it and go "ZOMG, a Microsoft screen!" Thank you so much, Microsoft.
I'll agree it had the general form of an advertisement, but if you look at the actual text it would be one of unprecedented candidness and modesty. Then again, looking at the comments Torque is getting, I suppose it would have reason to be.
Well, if you're having a real medical problem that the doctors won't believe exists, you have to convince someone. Having a doctor's attest that says something like "as far as I can tell, this person is sensitive to radiation from wireless equipment" wouldn't prove much anything, but it would lend credibility to your claim, both for employers and for contacting any further specialists.
I can't claim any knowledge of the specific process, but only express my perhaps overly optimistic belief that if people who really do reliably show these symptoms make themselves known, then this information will bubble up to the relevant people, new studies will be made, medical conditions will be acknowledged, medical science will advance, and there will be much rejoycing.
When you're considering commercial engines, that probably means you aren't planning to release the game as open source, which would make a GPL engine kind of unsuitable, no?
You serious? Now I'm as liable to NIH as the next guy, but if you want to actually be productive, use a pre-existing engine. A decent 3d-engine is a non-trivial thing to make, and if he's dissatisfied with the features of the current open source offerings, I'll bet he'd be in for many months work on the engine before he had something usable. It's completely redundant effort, and you don't want to waste all that time when you just want to make a game.
Then have the doctor do blind tests? They're all pretty eager to discover some new complex or syndrome, you know. I wouldn't be surprised if there have been rewards offered for demonstrating real electrosensitivity, either.
So if you aren't bullshitting us (and I think you are, does it show?), then find her a doctor who is willing to run blind tests on her. The reason it's not being taken seriously is that, to the best of my knowledge, they haven't been able to prove any such effects in controlled tests, and if people are having demonstratable symptoms, then they need to come forward and demonstrate them. If they do, they'll get the recognition they need.
Is the training very specific to Red Hat systems, or would you use it even if the final systems they'd be working on were, say, Debian, or Slackware?
When I (some time ago, now) moved from Red Hat to Slackware at home, a lot of the basic commands I had learned for things like network setup turned out to be Red Hat specific tools. How does LPI fare in that regard?
Monotone is my current favourite also, but it's pretty different from the CVS/SVN style of work, and not nearly as widespread, which makes it harder to use in a team project. Git borrows a lot from it and gets exposure from being used for Linux kernel VC.
There are still some reasons for choosing SVN over monotone though, the major one for me is partial checkout, which you learn to appreciate once you've been stuck behind dialup or on a cell phone. (On the other hand, SVN doesn't do complete checkouts.)
People tread carefully when dealing with their version control. I think both Sourceforge and Gnome only relatively recently went from CVS to SVN. If you're still using CVS for current projects (or God forbid, Visual SourceSafe), it may make sense to get them switched over to SVN, and use monotone for small sandbox projects until you can make a good case for using it in a new, bigger project (especially one where you anticipate a lot of branched work, maybe with parallelly mantained branches).
It seems simpler to develop and integrate tools with monotone than with CVS, and there's development going on for things like trac support, so I have high hopes for the eventual availability of a large number of tools for working with monotone.
For extra value we should also ask Theo de Raadt for a comment. And it would make a good House episode. "So what you're saying, Mr. NVIDIA, is that you got that driver bug from a public toilet seat?"
Honestly, if you think Subversion is the wave of the future, you haven't been paying much attention. It fixes some fundamental flaws in CVS, which is nice, but elsewhere there's exciting stuff like Monotone, darcs and many others. It seems people aren't looking hard enough for source control options, when they'll go wild over things like SVN, or more recently GIT.
I suppose one has to be conservative with deployment of this stuff, you don't want to have code locked away in unmantained software, or erased by immaturity bugs, but it's still an interesting field.
Maybe
1. Impress your investors.
2. It looks cutting edge and professional.
would make for a better market at the current price, though I'm sure some high-paid techies will find your posted reasons sufficient.
If I wanted the kind of dynamic graphical shortcuts that this keyboard offer, I'd just as soon keep it separate from text entry, and mount a small touch screen beside the keyboard.
Actually, it kind of comments on the inefficiency of the mouse as an input device that it is so much faster to use a physical button compared to an onscreen one. The mouse is mainly useful as a FPS game controller, and needs to step down from the UI throne. I'm looking forward to when this hits mainstream, though I won't hold my breath. I saw a pretty impressive demonstration of a interactive whiteboard a while ago, though I know it's old news to people that are keeping up with this thing. Isn't touch technology getting cheap enough to reach the main desktop market soon?
I meant, as opposed to free will. Meaning, religion have some people arguing free will versus fate, while some ateistists argue about free will versus determinism. I did not say the concept of fate was ingrained in all religions, nor that all non-religious people believed in determinism, but that both views had supporters in both groups. That's why I said they were orthogonal.