When low-power microcomputers hit the masses, the advances that had happened in software in the minicomputer / mainframe world couldn't follow along. So in the first instance you had computers that could only barely run BASIC programs and where you were programming in assembly close to the bare metal if you really wanted to do much more advanced things with the machine.
Now, the kids growing up on these computers in the 70s and 80s (I'm an 80s kid myself) had no idea about things like GUIs or the latest in virtualization technology on minicomputers or all the many problems that had been solved in big-mainframe world but were yet to hit consumer devices. One factor is that consumer hardware of the time wouldn't have run the software efficiently anyway; another one is that there was no Internet where you could just Google anything and find out.
So many of us then grew up in this era and became software engineers that would go on to write operating systems and software of the 90s and beyond. We'd never seen or heard of, for example, Lisp Machines or what they could do. Which is I think why you end up with this weird generational gap, almost like a chasm of knowledge born in the 80s and 90s.
Whenever I watch an Alan Kay video I'm blown away by how much was possible 'back then'. My mental map of technological progress starts with 8-bit micros in the 1980s, which we all thought were 'cutting edge technology' except that they weren't, in the broadest scheme of things. It's this amazement that I think leads to the feeling of a 'Golden Lost Age'.
Remember when Windows 95 touted preemptive multitasking as a groundbreaking new feature? Or when DMA for hard disks was a 'new' thing? (except that the Mother Of All Demos basically showed the concept, from what I vaguely remember from watching it many years back).
We see the same cycle in mobile computing - phones were once close-to-the-metal devices; now they're running full mutli-tasking basically desktop-class operating systems. The difference these days is that we have the Internet and we have the lessons of history actually available to us.
See here for a start -- this post is extremely enlightening on the situation:
http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-o...
Basically now the Rift is considered a proper HMD as a category of its' own and not a bastardized monitor. There is no more extended mode. Everything compiled with Oculus SDK 0.6.0.0 and above now works in Direct Mode only. The latency is noticeably better. With the latest AMD/Nvidia drivers, you just plug the headset in and there's no monitor-type configuration at all.
Note this is with Windows 10; I don't have first-hand experience with 8.1 but think it'd be much the same. It really is that much better.
Also, if you haven't checked out the latest VR Desktop (http://www.vrdesktop.net), you need to do this too. In addition to giving you a giant screen to see your desktop on, you can now play full-screen games in it, watch YouTube 360 videos properly in it and watch 3D movies encoded in side-by-side or top/bottom encoding. It's really really awesome :)
As for 3D stereoscopy in movies; that's an inherently limited format (it's limited because of the fixed viewer viewpoint and the edges of the screen). 3D stereo and VR are not comparable by any means. About the only thing that they have in common is that you use two eyes to view them. Here though, the VR cinema adds an advantage - 3D stereoscopic content can be shown perfectly without any cross-talk between images, which helps with the integrity of the effect. Note effect. IMHO 3D on a fixed movie screen is strictly a special effect. When used in such a way, it's great. When overused or used improperly, it sucks.
TL;DR: '3D movies' and VR shouldn't be uttered in the same sentence.
As an aside, I really wish Google and Oculus could get together and work out how to allow Cardboard apps to take advantage of the extra hardware from the Gear VR if it's available. Using a Gear VR and then trying Cardboard shows how woefully inadequate Cardboard is; but there are some cool Cardboard apps that I'd really love to be able to try with the much much better tracking of my Gear VR.
Non-techy people routinely consume digital content on YouTube or on their Facebook feeds. Most new 'smart' TVs stream YouTube at least as a minimum.
Which part is difficult? Are you talking more about the tech from the content distributor's side (as opposed to the consumer)?
As an individual contributor I can't imagine giving up my day-to-day coding for a management position. Management responsibilities, sure. I'd wager that most software developers who are given enough autonomy are doing a lot of micro-project management anyway.
Giving up on researching new technology and playing around with stuff? Not a chance.
The one I can understand - companies being compelled to share with the government. However is this act also giving these companies to share with each other?
I had a read of the article that was linked to from that Quora answer and I still couldn't glean 'evil' from that -- potential to become evil, yes; actively intending to do evil, not so much.
I was also a huge Smule fan and would recommend their apps to people looking for interesting music making tools. Not anymore. Will be doing quite the opposite actually.
I have a long master passphrase - too long to type on a touchscreen keyboard in any convenient amount of time and where there's a non-trivial risk that somebody peering over my shoulder (think - using it on the bus) could spy it. So in that case I resort to using the fingerprint-unlock feature (which I assume is the security equivalent of 'save master passphrase' or at least token).
I am aware that this might open me up to other attacks - an adversary dusting my fingerprints off my tablet, etc. Curious though as to whether this is an attack vector for the same or a similar type of process to what the authors are describing (haven't read their blog post, just the Black Hat description).
Also awareness of things like tools that analyze or try and provoke race conditions, etc.
Our future software engineers need to have security as a fundamental concern to software engineering and not as something that's an 'add-on'.
Yet on the other hand, it seems like we very easily gravitate towards isolation. The gravitation towards on-demand media and 'looking at the screen' has to be appealing, more appealing en-masse than socializing, otherwise why would we collectively gravitate towards it as a large group?
I think what I'm saying is that I think people gravitating towards TV and solitary activities is the symptom, not the cause. The real question is - what's making people more anxious about being social? Is this really a rise in social anxiety, causing a rise in people being isolated?
Why would they do this?!?!
I thought it was obvious that children need sleep in order to learn and grow.
Secondly even if I put on a tinfoil hat I can't see even a financial incentive for getting rid of naps. That's down time that kindergarten teachers get to relax in the relative quiet and organize things.
So what possible rationale is there for getting rid of nap time?
I'm actually looking at one of the Hue Tap switches now; they're a battery-less switch (kinetic power) with three buttons (I think) that you can customize. So I can, for example, put one in my bedroom and have a button on it that turns all the lights off in the house for when I'm about to go to sleep, etc. No need to run cables through walls and have switches where you want.
I've been out of the PC building game for a few years and coming back into it to build my latest rig, oh boy....What the hell is going on with product segmentation? It seems like there's a confusing mass of very subtle differences between motherboards and processors that's only spelled out in fine print. Slots that only work in certain configurations if you don't have too many drives or an M.2...
I have an FPGA dev board and have wanted to do something like this; start with VGA generation and work my way up to sprites.
I've been looking for something that gives a modern, live-coding-ish experience similar to how you used to program in BASIC on the Commodore 64. No clutter, a fullscreen immediate editor/REPL in one window, nice big text, etc.
The closest I've found to what I'm after (until now that is) is (fluxus) (http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/). Would really really love to hear of any others.
Keyboard.... how quaint! :)
It's also the frustrating potential that the product will be 98% awesome but with niggling problems that don't seem to get fixed as it's abandoned quickly; ie- my recent Ask HN submission about Android TV.
When I was a kid, I can remember people getting excited about the Olympics. People would sit glued to their TV screens, it would be a big deal.
Now it just seems meh, like people have more pressing things to worry about. The story seems the same for every country that hosts it:
- Yay we got the Olympics!
- <insert controversy here>
- Oh no! They most certainly AREN'T going to be ready for the Olympics!
- <insert controversy here>
- <insert sudden turnaround here>
- These Olympics were a fantastic success!
- <insert years of debt here>
It's a shame too. Maybe having them in one place would take away a lot of the distraction.
The Nexus Player is 99% perfect as a TV box, but it makes no sense the things it misses; like YouTube subscribing. Why would Google cut such a feature from their app?
I have none of the network issues that others complain about and I'm not interested in pulling my phone out of my pocket, unlocking it then waiting for an app to load just so I can Chromecast something to the TV.
I think Google made a big mistake making the app selection so curated. Well it probably would be okay, if they were actually going to curate it on a regular basis and present now content.
To anyone in the know, is Android TV a dead platform? It certainly seems that way.From stock apps that haven't been updated in forever (you _still_ cannot subscribe to channels from the YouTube app, for example) to the fact that the featured games and apps haven't really changed in months, what's the landscape looking like?Is it a platform worth writing apps for?
It doesn't help the perception that there are a lot of companies out there that seem to be using Kickstarter as a service for basically taking pre-orders though. Often I've thought "Why the heck is that big company with lots of money doing a Kickstarter? Isn't Kickstarter for people that wouldn't have the money to fund the project at all?".
A whole other debate, I know.
I'd also add:
Will this kind of gene therapy allow protection or regeneration of the optic nerve?