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Comment Campus funding (Score 1) 244

by Earyauteur (#35336444) Attached to: Is Attending a CS Conference Worth the Time?
While it is difficult for faculty at many institutions to find funding to attend conferences, it is possible that funding possibilities exist for students at your institution. Be sure to exhaust all university travel grants before you spend any of your own money. If there isn't an official program, ask your department for funding directly.

Comment Why not experiment with algorithmic art? (Score 1) 131

by Earyauteur (#34133448) Attached to: Doing Digital Art When You Can't Use Your Hand?
It might be an interesting time to explore algorithmic art. There are many authoring environments such as Processing which have a rich array of methods to create using algorithmic techniques. Your friend could perhaps learn a chording keyboard with the other hand, or simply use a QWERTY keyboard one handed to work in such an authoring environment.

Comment But with Disappointing Authoring Software? (Score 4, Interesting) 513

by Earyauteur (#28949295) Attached to: Goodbye Apple, Hello Music Production On Ubuntu

Kim mentions the use of free audio production software, such as Audacity, as substitutes for commercial offerings. While an Audacity user is more than welcome to dive into the code base and make needed improvements, not every user has the time and/or ability to do such. In my estimation, neither Audacity 1.3.7 nor Audacity 1.2.6 are stable enough to be considered "professional-quality" software. I am not trying to insult the developers and their abilities -- they have a complex project on their hands. But Audacity's graphical interface has serious and repeatable bugs; Audacity's sound export facilities reliably adds spurious noise to sound. I admire Kim's decision to use Ubuntu as an audio workstation, but I don't think Kim has been forthcoming about sacrifices in software quality that a user must make to do so. Kim can easily translate most audio programming done in Max/MSP (the commercial environment he has worked with extensively) to the public domain environment "pd" -- but as an experienced user of both systems there are more functionality loses than gains moving from the commercial Max/MSP/Jitter environment to pd (Pure Data).

If the cost of an Apple system and the higher cost of outfitting it with professional quality audio production and performance software are bankrupting a musician, then I can see the logic of using an Ubuntu system at this time. Otherwise, I still believe the adage "you get what you pay for" applies. However, I believe with effort from open source audio developers an Ubuntu audio workstation with both cost and quality advantages is more than possible. The bugs I am seeing in Audacity today remind me of the bugs I saw in the comparable commercial application "Peak" ten years ago.

Comment Re:I'd go iPhone: (Score 1) 344

by Earyauteur (#25507427) Attached to: Which Phone To Develop For?

You're practically self-parodying here...

You can target the iPod touch as well as the iPhone, and can develop on the iPod touch as well as the iPhone ($220 development platforms with no per-month cost).

Excluding, of course, the per-month AT&T contract.

Ummm, there isn't a contract for the iPod touch. You can pay $220 for the iPod touch and develop for the iPhone without any monthly contract as long as your application doesn't require carrier networking. One of two iPhones that I develop for is a 1st gen without a sim and without a contract. They sometimes can be picked up cheaply used at this point. It needs to be jailbroken, but Apple still lets me develop on it.

And apple takes only a 30% cut of revenue, in exchange for a nice distribution mechanism.

"Only" 30%? And they can pull the plug on your app any time they want.

All you've managed to do so far is to show that it could work, not why it's better than anything else.

And Apple has pulled how many plugs now out of close to ten thousand? I can count them on my hands. More than 5 less than 10. Of those pulled only 2 of them could be proudly shown to the developer's mother. And several of the pulled apps could be created in less than 1 hour of work.

The iPhone is a fantastic platform for networking development. It has several excellent network APIs available at its disposal. I went with BSD for my networking code -- byzantine but solid and extraordinarily well-documented. Windows Mobile as an alternative? I would not even ping .NET let alone touch it with a ten foot pole. I really don't think it is as appropriate a networking framework for the poster's application.

Sure Android is a good platform for network development too... but if you want to sell your work, have a more elegant, easier to code user interface environment, and hundreds of really fun apps to play with, I would go with the iPhone.

BTW, There is nothing more galvanizing for an iPhone developer than getting paid -- first checks (yes plural from several regions of our planet) came in today. =)
Biotech

Training Bacteria To Deliver Drugs? 29

Posted by timothy from the please-don't-teach-them-to-fetch-the-paper dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "While it may seem unlikely that single-celled organisms could be trained to salivate like Pavlov's dog at the sound of a bell, researchers say that bacteria can 'learn' to associate one stimulus with another by employing molecular circuits. This raises the possibility that bioengineers could teach bacteria to act as sentinels for the human body, ready to spot and respond to signs of danger. As with Pavlov's dog, the bacteria in the model learn to build stronger associations between the two stimuli the more they occur together. Now called Hebbian learning, it's often expressed as a situation in which 'neurons that fire together wire together.'" (More below.)
Classic Games (Games)

16th World Computer Chess Championship In Progress 183

Posted by timothy from the all-the-hipsters-are-there dept.
vmartell writes "The 16th World Computer Chess Championship is now in progress in Beijing, as part of the Computer Games Championship. Currently in the lead are Rybka 3.0, recognized as the world's strongest chess engine and Hiarcs, another commercial engine. Another curiosity is a Java ME based engine running on a Nokia phone, which is currently being trounced by the other engines. A very interesting sideline: before the computer tournament, a Women's Grandmaster played two games against Rybka. The result? Rybka won both games!"
The Almighty Buck

South Korea's Free Computer Game Business Model Hits the US 159

Posted by Soulskill from the nickel-and-dime dept.
Anti-Globalism writes with this excerpt from AFP via Yahoo! News: "Seoul-based 'free-to-play' computer game titan Nexon on Wednesday blasted into the US videogame arena with a 'Combat Arms' online first-person shooter title that makes its cash from optional 'micro-transactions' by players. The game makes its money from players that buy animated helmets, outfits, emblems or other virtual items to customize in-game characters. To keep the battlefield even, players earn experience or advanced weaponry by skill so people essentially can't pay for power. ... Startups and established game makers including Japanese goliath Sony are venturing into the free computer game market, according to DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole. 'It looks like it could be very big,' Cole told AFP. 'It's one of the things everybody seems to be looking at. The challenge is it is a very new model and it remains to be seen whether customers used to a free model will be tight when it comes to actually spending money on it.'"
Government

Can Static Electricity Generate Votes? 377

Posted by timothy from the dc-elections-crack-me-up-and-barry-too dept.
artgeeq writes "A recent local election in Washington, DC resulted in 1500 extra votes for a candidate. The board of elections is now claiming that static electricity caused the malfunction. Is this even remotely possible? If so, couldn't an election be invalidated pretty easily?"
Upgrades

Cell Chip Coming To the PC Via a PCI Express Card 164

Posted by timothy from the buy-one-for-every-prisoner dept.
arcticstoat writes with an excerpt from Custom PC: "After developing a brand new CPU architecture from the ground-up, you'd expect that Toshiba, Sony and IBM would have more uses for the Cell architecture than the PlayStation 3, and Toshiba has been quick to make use of the architecture's HD video transcoding abilities in its new Qosimo laptops. However, Leadtek is now taking Toshiba's efforts a step further by putting the chip onto a PCI-E card for desktop PCs. The WinFast PxVC1100 is based on Toshiba's SpursEngine SE1000 processor, which is a cut-down version of the Cell chip. The SpursEngine chip features four SPEs (synergistic processing elements) based on 128-bit RISC cores, along with H.264 and MPEG-2 codecs, but it doesn't contain its own CPU as the chip in the PS3 does. The chip is capable of encoding and decoding H.264, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video streams in hardware."
Games

Server Structure in EVE Online 141

Posted by Soulskill from the more-the-merrier dept.
Massively takes an interesting look at the server model used by EVE Online. It's unusual for a MMOG because it doesn't divide the player load among different servers or "shards." Instead, the same cluster handles the entire EVE universe and all 300,000 subscribers (total; record concurrent load is around 40,000). The EVE Dev Blog recently announced some upgrades to keep things running smoothly and allow for battles involving over 1,000 ships. They call the technology StacklessIO.
Space

No Space Porn (For Now) 260

Posted by timothy from the perpetual-virgin-galactic dept.
With the entry to sub-orbital flight, and even orbital flight, becoming ever so slightly easier, the obvious thought of space porn kicks in. Who wouldn't want to see two or more people going at it like rabbits in a weightless environment (or at least trying to go at it like rabbits in a weightless environment)? Sadly, Virgin Galactic has turned down a $1 million offer to do just that. The offer was made by an unidentified party who was willing to put the money up front to do a space porn movie. Considering that a flight aboard VG costs $200,000 for a two-hour flight, $1 million doesn't seem too bad. Though how much you could actually do and perform in two hours is debatable. And what if one or more of the actors gets sick?
Wii

Nintendo's Wii Storage Solution — SD Cards 79

Posted by Soulskill from the 2gb-ought-to-be-enough-for-anybody dept.
Lucas123 writes "After gamers complained for the better part of a year, Nintendo finally came out with a solution to the Wii's lack of storage capacity — a 2GB SD card from which users can execute games, adding to the console's measly 512MB of onboard storage. The card is expected out in the Spring. With the ability to download, the card should allow users to store up to 60 games." This news came out of the same press conference that announced the Nintendo DSi we discussed earlier today. They made a number of other announcements as well, including Gamecube remakes for the Wii, updated to make use of the Wiimote, Club Nintendo coming to North America this year, and the Wii Speak Channel, an online voice chat utility.
Transportation

Plug-in Hybrids May Not Go Mainstream, Toyota Says 519

Posted by timothy from the charge-up-before-wyoming dept.
mattnyc99 writes "Honda's challenger to the Prius — the Insight hybrid that we discussed so lividly a month ago — got its official unveiling today at the Paris auto show, with insiders confirming it would be cheaper than the world's most popular 'green' car while still hitting the same fuel-efficiency range. But the hybrid-electric showdown comes in the midst of a sudden rethink by Toyota about plug-in hybrids. Apparently all the recent hype — over the production version of the Chevy Volt, plus Chrysler's new electric trio and even the cool new Pininfarina EV also unveiled today — has execs from the world's number one automaker, and alt-fuel experts, questioning how many people will really buy electric cars, whether people will really charge them at night to keep the grid clear, whether batteries will make them too expensive and more. "

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