As a Seattle resident I've found the OneBusAway app extremely useful, it's never been off by more than a couple minutes. Getting widespread realtime transit info into a mainstream app like gmaps could be a complete game-changer for public transit.
I've had one for a few months now and it's been excellent, good keyboard, great Linux support and really good battery life (with the 9-cell battery I can get 8hrs+). It's nice and compact, and pretty darn light, if a little on the thick side.
With 8gb of RAM, 128gb SSD, and a midrange Core i5 it runs about $1200-1300, but you could probably buy the RAM/SSD separately and save a fair amount.
The one weak point is the screen resolution (1366x768), but the screen is IPS and very good quality otherwise.
It is actually exactly stereo, except one of the cameras is replaced with an IR projector; you basically do the standard stereo math as though the projector is a camera 'seeing' the image that is being projected.
This is an awesome program. I did it last year, and having it on my otherwise empty resume really helped in the internship hunt this year (I don't know if they used my GSoC evaluations or anything during the process, but I ended up landing a Google internship!).
It looks like you're just rendering plain cubes, I'd be curious to see how much performance could be had by doing things the same as Minecraft (batching only the visible surfaces into larger 'chunk' meshes). I've been interested in WebGL for a while, and it'd be interesting to see how practical Javascript is for a fairly CPU-intensive game like Minecraft.
I've always thought Minecraft was an interesting programming challenge (I made a little clone of my own a while back (with portals, for whatever reason): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk_KjtbHUIs).
On modern graphics hardware, backface culling is done by the hardware itself. It would help if this demo were anywhere close to the limits of the hardware, which it isn't.
Instead, it's likely to be limited by the JavaScript code that runs it. Backface culling wouldn't help here.
riyela is probably referring to the way Minecraft itself draws the world. If you have a solid block floating in free space, Minecraft draws all six faces of that block. However, if you have two solid blocks touching, Minecraft doesn't bother drawing the faces between them. It only draws the faces that are exposed to air (and are, therefore, visible), so it doesn't need to draw nearly as many faces.
Very true. As a current CS student, I couldn't agree more.
From what I've seen thus far, most school assignments are pretty easy to stumble through without really understanding what you're doing. As much useful stuff as I've learned in class, it's been personal projects that have really solidified things and taught me the most valuable lessons.
Cool, I got 39th. Ludum Dare is always a blast, I encourage anyone with even the slightest interest in game dev to give it a go sometime. It's an awesome excuse to write some really ugly code and not feel guilty about it.
It's great to see LD growing so fast, my first one (#16) had ~120 entries, this time there were almost 600.
The whole "I've been programming since X" attitude is BS and does nothing but continue stereotypes, I suspect stuff like this is a big part of why there's such a lack of diversity in CS.
As someone who "started programming at 14" and a current CS undergrad, I know enough to know that I know next to nothing. I know plenty of people who'd never programmed before college who are way better at it than me.
That said, I would really love to see programming taught early on, since I'm sure a lot of people who'd really love it get put off by this sort of attitude and just never get exposed to CS (every chance I get, I point people towards my school's excellent intro classes).
