Also, in a corporate setting, if you make a call to a buddy in your building, chances are the data will be routed on your own private routers and never even hit the ISP. I'd say that was a big plus for P2P.
Not sure why you are getting up-votes for this. It isn't adding anything to the conversation other than obvious Microsoft bashing.
The Pixel Sense technology is obviously quite new, so I'm not sure how they were supposed to put it in anything eons ago.
As far as Microsoft not shipping... Well they ship more stuff than a lot of people. True that their tablet and phone offerings are not as good as the competition (yet), but that isn't through not shipping, it's through creating products that was out of touch with consumer expectations.
In the phone world, over the lifetime of the window Mobile, they've probably been quite successful. In tablets, less so, but still they have shipped numerous times over the past decade.
Here's my first shot at a theory of how Pixel Sense might work
There is an IR LED backlight as well as the regular white backlight. They have an additional per-pixel LCD shutter that blocks IR. The display repeatedly displays sweeping horizontal and vertical patterns on the IR blocking shutters. At the edges of the display there are a series of IR light detectors. When an object is placed on the display, some IR light will bounce off the object and be internally reflected in the plane of the panel glass. The light is received by the detectors.
Yes you are right, the instruction timings were very exact as far as I remember. The only cases where there was an option was in the case of a branch taken or not.
Heh, yeah I still remember 6502 opcodes... 4C xx xx is jmp absolute, 20 xx xx is jsr (jump subroutine) absolute, A9 xx xx is load accumulator absolute, 8D store accumulator, 60 is rts... I could go on.
Typing shit in to the hex monitor for a few years will do that :)
I loved the 6502. Around that era I programmed the SC/MP, Z80, the 8080 and the 6800. Although the Z80 was more powerful, the 6502 holds a special place in my heart as it was the first CPU I worked with and I loved the simplicity of the instruction set.
My crowning achievement was a multi-threaded kernel for a CNC punch. Since the stack was at a fixed memory address and there was no PUSHA, I had to change threads (in response to an IRQ) by sequentially pushing the registers on to the stack and then swapping the stack with a block copy. It worked! Crazy :/
I loved reading this article - thanks for posting. Awesome stuff! Makes me want to code my own circuit emulator :)
How about if Adobe helped make the decision in the first place? Let's say, Adobe realized Flash is on its last legs, that Apple hate them and their engineering staff have much greater alignment with Microsoft than any other platform. Now let's say the call up Microsoft and say, hey, how about you buy us and put our engineers to work building kick ass H5 dev tools.
At the same time, Microsoft realized that like Flash, Silverlight will never achieve universal penetration, hence why developers are reluctant to use it on the web. Microsoft, seeing Adobe having similar issues and spats with Apple think, hey, what if we bought Adobe and put all the Flash engineers on H5.
I used to be highly addicted to cell phones in the '90's.
In 2005 I spent a year working overseas. When I got back I just never got around to buying a new phone. I have to say, it has been extremely liberating.
So much so that we went one further - we don't answer our land-line either unless it's someone we know and we don't check voice mail.
I also don't wear a watch and go to sleep/get up whenever my body tells me to rather than stick to a strict schedule.
You can reach me via email, MSN, GoogleTalk, Skype or hey, knock on my door and say hello!
Net neutrality is a concept founded upon a fantasy.
The idea that we should all get the same priority on the Internet is ridiculous. It has always been the case (and always will be the case), that the more money you have, the better services you can acquire.
From the guy running a gaming server, through the hacker building a highly scalable network using Linode, CNN using Akamai for streaming media and Google building hundreds of data centers; we're all willing to pay for bandwidth or reduce latency.
I'm not against the idea of network neutrality, quite the contrary; however, the gap between the aspiration and what goes on in practice is already too great. We're all players and it can never be unwound.
Maybe being able to buy virtual swag might be a better way to go for Reddit, in a similar fashion to Dungeons & Dragons Online.
Tiny [icons] of narwhal tusks, lolcats or rashers of bacon that could appear next to your name could prove quite popular with the community. Similarly, being able to not only upvote, downvote, but also put a 'hex' on a comment I could see as being an amusing pastime. Not to mention, they already have the beginnings of an achievement system in place with the awards panel. I could see them greatly expanding that with quest style achievements; "posted 5 links", say, to earn /reddit/credits.
I'm not sure how it would affect the community, but the revenue possibilities are endless.
Not far at all! It's great to see someone else here on HN who is in a small Belgian town.
There doesn't seem to be a lot going on here technically outside of Brussels. But I'm certainly wrong... I'm not native and find it really hard to know what's happening :(
I try to follow a simple rule.. Leave the code in a better state than I found it.
Every time I submit a revision I try to include a change which improves an area of the code outside of my main focus.
By doing this I am constantly improving and re-learning parts of the codebase that otherwise become moldy.
So, A typical checking might be something like...
Add ability for animation tracks to play in reverse.
Add missing null reference check to CalculateWorldTransform
Improve per of serializer by 10% (avoid string parse for main line case)
BUGFIX #1087: Keyboard input delayed by one frame
Basically, I try to make refactoring/improvements an ongoing part of development rather than a chore.
Luckily my wife and I are both developers. We've always worked together from corporations to a number of startups that we were involved in.
I can't begin to imagine what it must be like for a spouse who has to put up with a significant other working in a startup... Crazy hours, the highs, the lows, lack of sleep, bad moods, wondering where cash is going to come from.
On the other hand, doing startups together has been an immensely rewarding experience. Through our shared experiences we've become closer than I could possibly have imagined. So, for us, it has all been worth it - at least emotionally.
I really feel for people who aren't able to spend enough time together, or are finding empathy for a partner hard to muster. I can hardly begin to imagine how bad it must have been for the poor EA wives - awful.
Thanks a lot for pointing this out, I've wanted this ability for years. My last company decided to change names and it caused me endless headaches migrating mail accounts.