Slashdot Mirror

Thanks to relentless innovation from Redmond, the choice is clear. A team working in Visual Basic will clearly triumph.

Art At Home

ok, so this thread will now shoot further off topic. Since you're a mac tech, what do you think the chances are of my 8600/250 lasting another 4-5 years?
Art At Home

Check out Synphony for dot Matrix Printers by The User. It's really quite good, plus it comes on one of those cool little 3-inch CDs.
Art At Home

"The PSA would have a wireless network connection to the computers of the shuttle or space station, enabling it to access information about hardware, inventory, crew schedules, or science experiments -- then relay that information to crew members as needed."

...simply by logging into Hotmail.

Art At Home

So I bolited, skipped illegally across the hallways of the megaplex to write a weekly wrap-up instead.
"Bolted" is spelled wrong. "Illegally" is misplaced. There should probably be an "and" after the comma.

What can you say about a week in which the most entertaining movie was Legally Blonde? Hang on for Planet of the Apes next Friday.
Well, you seemed to say quite a bit. If you were serious the article would have ended there. What can you say about a review that confirms its futility in the first paragraph?

We are deep into the summer doldrums, and to what is shaping up as a sub-par movie summer.
This sentence doesn't read well. Say it out loud. The phrase "sub-par movie summer" should not be used by a professional writer.

Score (Robert DeNiro, Edward Norton, Marlon Brando) is a stylish, genial, high-end crime saga, one of those old-style movies in which the good guys are classy, harm no one, have high ethical standards, and have the neatest tools in the world. The movie is a bit flat and predictable.
One sentence, three lists, eight commas. Following that ornate creation, we have the choppiest sentence in the article. Interesting juxtaposition.

The movie is worth seeing, if only to see these good actors, atmospheric scenes of Montreal, and an aging Brando do one or two neat scenes that suggest the great actor still has it.
"Seeing" or "see", one of them has to go. Professional writers generally don't use the adjective "neat", unless they mean "tidy."

Witherspoon plays a seemingly brainless but good-hearted Malibu-Barbie type who applies to Harvard Law School to pursue her snotty boyfriend (who dumps her once he's admitted because he needs someone more serious) and who, in the name of diversity, gets admitted.
Whoa.

But still, this is the most enjoyable movie I saw all week, which says something.
But we know not what.

The truth is, when push comes to shove, any film is often simply about the writing, something that did in Final Fantasy, and the writing in this one is just terrible.
Again, whoa. On of the first two prepositional phrases has to go. The rest of the sentence is terrible and should be srapped. Bad use of pronouns, undescriptive adjectives, and questionable sentence structure.

I hope I wasn't too hard on you. Your sentence structure would improve a great deal if you chose more appropriate adjectives.

Art At Home

" ...please tell me why the human race is doomed to become extinct due to global warming? If we're affraid for the very existence of our race over adversely affecting the climate, then we need to be equally, if not more, concerned about the natural changes to our climate. "

well, that's kind of subjective, since the vast majority of people who live and work in Kuwait aren't citizens.

Art At Home

Imagine if some other nation decided that Washington was a separate country, and the Gates family was royalty.
Art At Home

I don't see where you're getting this information on my personal life and attitude. I'm not a paranoid conspiracy freak. If you got that impression from visiting my page, you missed the joke. My favorite humor has to do with black helicopters and UFOs.

I don't believe the media is a tool of evil, but I don't harbor the illusion that the NY Times, Reuters, or CNN are any different from MSNBC. The value system they reflect is inseparable from their ownership. There's a great article over on plastic about the Stalin-esque propaganda vocabulary that our government uses today, on the right and left. Terms like "pro-life", "faith-based", "affirmative action", etc. Terms that the mainstream media repeat like parrots. And what's with the 'elitism' thing? So it's OK to question the media, but voicing your opinion when you disagree isn't? Does pointing out their glaring conflicts of interest imply that I have some sort of 'inside-track'?

I'm no friend of massive Lexus SUV's, I assure you, but people should have a choice. We live in a capitalist system, whether you like it or not, and there is a market for large SUV-type cars ...I don't feel 'enslaved' by corporations. I dont feel that Nike is my master. I have a brain. If i like a nike product, and its the right price, i'll buy it.

I think you're equating consumer choice with freedom. People want SUVs and the companies are building them, but that doesn't mean that the consumers are running the show. You're not allowed to sell anything you want in America, and there's nothing inherently anti-capitalist about adding to that list. Maybe anti-libertarian, but that's different. The right wing in America has created a false dichotomy between near total laissez-faire economics and socialism, which is ridiculous. Even Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations) advocated fairly extensive market regulation.

It's not that I feel enslaved, people do have to work somewhere, right? Corporations have the same rights as individuals under US law, which is OK. But when it comes to responsibility, they revert to amorphous entities with no one responsible. You can't send a corporation to jail, or do anything remotely near to it. I think (some) people feel that the legal system is an ineffective way to deal with Corporate America. That won't change until they're made more accountable. When I wrote "wake the fuck up", I should have followed it with "this is not a level playing field."

Art At Home

Also, the status quo is not a without a value system. Is it wrong to propose a different one? The current value system in America has very little to do with what it's architects envisioned. Especially with regard to the economy. Even Adam Smith advocated market supervision by the government.

Art At Home

Wow. That's shockingly ignorant. We use our military power to hold down gas prices. It's basically a divide and conquer thing. We keep the middle east fucked up because we want it that way.
Art At Home

yeah, if it'll fucking squash me like a bug.
Art At Home

2. There is a demand for Excursions and demand drives the market.

3. Consumers have the right to buy what they want.

Why is it legal to make them? Your concept of your rights and freedoms fails to take into account the right of others to a clean environment. This is indeed the United States, and all of your rights are balanced with the rights of others, unless of course you happen to be a large corporation. You could take a broader view of safety, like the safety of other drivers. Would you want to die because an Excursion is the only thing that their sedentary, obese family will fit in?

Art At Home

I'm from Oregon, too by the way. I feel your pain about bicycle protests and tree-ins. I had to move to NYC to get away from that crap. But this doesn't change what I said about corporate responsibility. Typically this issue is countered with the "red-tape" boogy man. To question the way our media presents issues to us is not elitism. Try reading a foreign paper about US issues in parallel with a local one. Ra Ra America!

Answer me this. Why is it OK for Ford to make Excursions?

Art At Home

So there's a difference between vigilante justice and corporate decisions? Wake the fuck up. Our country has a system in place that gives corporations all the rights of individuals but not all the responsibilities. What would happen to you if you built 100 engines that spewed the equibvalent of 100 Ford Excursions? Nothing nice. But we reward Ford for it.

Personally, I would never kill anyone unless I had to. But torching an SUV dealership does far less damage than SUV's themselves cause.

Carnivore are in operation on the Internet, you just moved way up on a couple of watch lists.

...start with yourself & ride your bike to work a couple times a week.. Take the train or bus once in a while.

Yeah, be a good little worker bee. Otherwise Uncle Sam will have to give you a spanking.
Art At Home

It does stand for Digital Versatile Disc.
Art At Home

His capsule is a cement mixer. I'm with Taco. I'm waiting until I can use my miles to upgrade to a first class cement mixer.

Art At Home

1.) They make great web browsers. Sure, they've got privacy issues and they're closed, but they work pretty damn well. I type this from IE5 mac, which is a pleasure to use. Making web pages look as good as MS Word documents gives consumers confidence.

2.) They run Hotmail. Everybody's used this at least once. It's a great example of data accessibility. Another great examlpe is Corbis.

Another factor here is connectivity. There's much better and faster Net access now than there used to be. People couldn't see the benefit of NCs when all they had was 10base-T at work and modem everywhere else. At that time, NCs offered little benefit over carrying a floppy over to your co-worker's desk. With the spread of broadband, 802.11b, and faster ethernet, NCs are a much more practical idea.

M$ is also launching services, rather than trying sell you what appears to be a shitty computer. I think this is pretty key. The problem with previous NC initiatives is that they were hardware based. A guiding principle of NC thought should be that "hardware matters little". So why in the world would Sun be interested?

Art At Home

HAVE A NICE DAY!

Art At Home

Whoa. What are you talking about? There's nothing to prevent M$ or the like from writing competing software... but why should there be? The kerberos example is extending specs, quite a different matter. The GPL merely prevents competitors/others from breaking your code without disclosing how they did it, unless they wnat to keep it to themselves.

Art At Home

What if you're selling software? The GPL prevents other companies from using the old "embrace and extend" trick.

More generally, by allowing others to incorporate your work into closed source products, you make market conditions more difficult in the exact area of your experrtise. However, your competitors aren't competing really, they're parasites.

Art At Home

Opera has plenty of problems. My favorite is the inability of Opera5/Windows to reset the SRC attribute of an iframe. I know of certain sites that make Opera 5 users refresh everything instead. that sucks.

Art At Home

Well, a lot of these plugins require communicating with the browser (which is in another process), for things like POST operations. If they had that functionality built-in, then /. would be complaining about the download time to get the plugin.

Art At Home

True, but once you release code under the GPL you can't change the license. Sure you can release later versions under a different license, but the code released under the GPL remains so.

I really want to understand how the GPL is better than other Open Source licences. I understand why some people consider Open Source licences superior to commercial licences (I release software under both types of licences depending on business objectives). This is about understanding why people get so hot and bothered about the GPL. It's not that the GPL is superior on some objective basis, it's a license that reflects a particular set of values, like being able to extend or modify software, without the fear of it being taken over by an entity leveraging its position in other areas. Other Open Source licenses allow companies to "embrace and extend". For some developers that's not an issue, for some it is.

Art At Home

The GPL is a choice. Some developers choose closed source. Some choose public domain. Some choose the BSD licence.

The GPL ensures that no one has more (or less) control over the code than the author. You might prefer a different license, and you're free to use it on your code. If you have problems with the GPL, just don't use GPL programs. Write some new ones yourself.

Art At Home

The "serverness" of the machine should probably be determined by the hardware, like RAID arrays and such.

Art At Home

I like those CD "transports" that are supposed to be all stable. Those have got to be the dumbest things. Why not use a fast CD-ROM drive and buffer?
Art At Home

The broader the subject matter, the less compelling the appeal to a broader base of people. The narrower the subject matter, the stronger the potential appeal to a smaller base of people. They are failing because they thought if they focused on broad subjects...

What is the Plastic.com POV? There isn't one, really. It isn't created BY a certain specialized community FOR a specialized community. It is a created by a conglomerate of differently-minded interests, lacking in a coherent POV, and it feels like it.

I think another demographic issue that's at work here is bandwidth. I bet Slashdot's readership is much more likely than Plastic's to have high-bandwidth access. Any site works better when users have fat pipes. So maybe Slashdot is the only site that's really thriving, but with the current bandwidth situation, it may be the one of the only ones that could.

Art At Home

What's wrong with re-selling GPL software? At least there are few businesses out there making money this way.

Art At Home

We've seen this before at NBCi with their QuickClick thing. Here's an article from MSNBC (!) about why such things are evil.

Art At Home

It's not difficult to process color film, but it's very unhealthy. Take it to the lab and pay $3. Have you ever seen the stuff that photographers die from? Scary.

Art At Home

You've never heard of testing? What if you wrote an app that worked in OS X, but you wanted to make it more portable? After you tried it on some other *BSD, YellowDog or some other PPC Linux would be the next step. Needless to say, it would also help with identifying the nature of whatever bugs might be encountered.

Art At Home

Linux, from everything I've heard and seen, runs quite well on older hardware- yet there's no mention of said hardware on the YDL page. Anywhere. MKLinux is ass (from a Mac user's perspective), LinuxPPC took a huge shit when I tried to drop it on my 8500, and the Debian installer is going nowhere unless you already know how to partition and format a disk from the command line, 'cuz from firsthand experience, there is NO help for the damned formatting utility.

It follows the GPL to the letter. Go to www.fsf.org and read up a little. The GPL never requires anything to be free (as in beer). It only requires that they include the source to GPL programs with their distributions.

I know there is no requirement that they actually make an .iso for you, but don't they have to at least make the source available?

The source is available, from the sites of the included programs. The reason you pay them money is that they put everything together correctly.

Art At Home

What I find particularly interesting about this whole deal is how their distributed network setup has worked against them. Reading the wording of that email closely, you notice that you are being asked to change your password because you MAY have used the system that was compromised. They don't actually know.

Misunderstanding alert...
What I meant was that the Flash client can communicate with server middleware without reloading, making things like stock tickers possible. If you wanted, you could use Ruby to communicate with Flash. I don't much about Ruby, but it seems suitable. Most people use Perl, Java Servlets, PHP, Cold Fusion, or ASP. The actual communication with the client is fairly simple, so I think the decision is mostly based on what you're already using for everything else. As far as language paradigms go, ActionScript isn't new, it's pretty much identical to ECMAScript (Javascript).

I can't even tell what physics has to do with all this...

It was just a reference to what web design sites call "flash experiments", where actionscript is used to create motion effects like bouncing balls, explosions, pseudo-3d space, etc. A lot of actionscript sites and books focus on this type of stuff, which isn't very experimental if you've ever programmed in any other graphics environment.

As for OOP discussions in the book (the only on-topic part of your post, the rest was just bad advocacy) I thought the reviewer made the point that the book was rare in that it /did/ talk about OO metaphors in the language. I can't really tell what the model is though, does it use interface inheritance?

ActionScript obviously isn't suitable for everything, which is when you pass the task back to the server middleware. However, this has to be balanced with bandwidth considerations. It may be more convenient to manipulate the given data on the server, but is it worth the overhead of passing the data back and forth? What I would like to see in a Flash book are case studies of data driven Flash apps. Flash can be pretty cool for data visualization over the web. Another good thing Flash does is what-you-see-is-not-what-you-print, allowing your data to presented in both a screen- and print-appropriate manner. I'd like to see some (Flash specific) strategies of splitting business logic between the client and server.

Art At Home

In fact, I'll just rebut your response to the second criticism of flash. You miss the point that those areas where Flash might possibly be stealing ground from Java are exactly in those areas where Java has been found to be inappropriate. Cute animations and framing techniques add zero value to the content of a site. Content is presumably what brings the eyeballs there in the first place.

I agree that Flash does lack here, and the problem is that people are writing their own interfaces. Macromedia has already included prebuilt pull-down menus and checkboxes that behave specific to platform. Hopefully they'll bundle a whole toolkit next time.

Art At Home

Unfortunately, Flash books rarely discuss such things. Most of them are devoted to making UI thingys or physics algorithms. Worst case, you've got UI thingys and physics together (navigate my website with a parametric EQ!).

Flash does have some great effects, my favorite is that it gets new types of people programming. It's too bad that /. readers will keep their no doubt keep their blinders on. On Slashdot, there seems to be three main gripes about Flash:

1.)Flash websites are badly designed.
It's true, Flash sites are often badly designed. The thing is, they're often trying to accomplish fairly complex goals. A DHTML site trying the same type of thing is bound to be at least as bad, if not worse.

2.)Flash is unnecessary.
For you, maybe. Don't forget that Flash is taking over a lot of territory from Java applets rather than HTML. Which would you rather have?

3.)Flash is not Free
The authoring tool is not free in any sense, but the players are, and the file format is open. People are doing some really cool things with SWFs on the server side, like JGenerator or Flash2XML. While I agree it's unlikely that the authoring tool will ever be open source, there may one day be a linux version, since there will certainly be a MacOS X version. Anyway, I'm not convinced that Open Source could create products that compete with Adobe or Macromedia. It's possible, but it hasn't happened yet (I like the GIMP too, but it's no PhotoShop), especially when it comes to publishing.

Art At Home

A lot of video editors don't watch much full motion video on the monitor screen. They just use it for pallettes, timelines, and 320x240 edit windows. Then they watch their work on an external NTSC monitor.

Art At Home

Most graphics professionals never bought Apple monitors anyway. My guess is that Apple did some market research, unlike the majority of Slashdot posters.

Art At Home

I can't believe all the whining about "but I'm a graphic artist and LCD doesn't give reliable colors!" Well, DUHHH, you don't have to be a mind numbed robot and only buy monitors from the same company that made your computer! And if you only use Pantone colors, it doesn't really matter how accurate the monitor is; you should be picking colors out of your swatch book.

Graphic artist types should get a nice Sony/Mitsu/NEC type thing, set their inkjet to SWOP, and calibrate that way. You'll never get too far off. For vector stuff, you proof it and tweak the color list, which should take very little time. In Photoshop, save the fiddling for the end, while you're proofing. Adjust as much as you can via histograms and such, rather than what you see.

I think Apple's strategy is pretty sound, especially considering their plans to open up retail stores:

They've eliminated CRTs from their supply chain, saving a ton of space and shipping costs. They've simplified the purchasing process, at least in their stores. There's a simple ratio of size to price. Only the Cube and the tower use these. You know those cube owners want LCDs, and tower people who would want a third party monitor probably aren't their target market. CRTs are great for color, but not for geometry. CRTs break easy, they're heavy, and it's hard to fit a boxed CRT of decent size in a car. Apple wants people to drive to the store, pick out their computer, and put in the back seat next the kid and the dog. Maybe most /. readers have noticed, but buying a computer can be a very unfriendly experience for our Slashdottirs (women). It's a lot like buying a car, only you have to deal with pimply faced CompUSA teens (who I'm sure are perfectly nice) instead of car salesmen. Ever notice how many Saturn drivers are women? Apple is trying to make buying a computer more like the GAP. I'm not trying to say women are unsophisticated buyers, I just think the current retail experience is one that's geared towards males.

Additional screenshots at LucasArts.

Art At Home

my point was merely that mean time between failure is meaningless in both hardware and software.
Art At Home

It'll definitely break, you can't know when or how until it happens.

Art At Home

Software, of the other hand, is a digital entity, so its function doesn't change with time. If it was broken on the 10,000th time around, it was broken all along. Whether anyone noticed it was broken is completely another issue.

On a somewhat related note, GEB is indeed Gödel, Escher, Bach.
Check it: HTML Character Entities

Art At Home

Art At Home

DisGracenote?
Art At Home

It's obvious that we need a way to describe the output. XML is the answer.
If you use the hair tag inside the kitsch tag, then the program goes to get hair renderings from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Let's not forget the all-important self-referential (a slfref) tag. Or the critical distance tag (a refref), which is different from the META tag. ArtML allows the artist to transmit his intent as well as the formal aspects of his art (which are contained in separate stylesheets).

In the future, all artist's intent will be searchable on the net. For instance, a search using the sheep,anatomy,warhol, and plastic tags could turn up Damian Hirst. Thanks to Boolean logic and the descriptive tags of XML, we'll be able to find art that appeals to us while avoiding art that does not. This will also allow programs such as Aaron to understand context and create new art. Will this make Aaron a follower? No, Aaron will have some success in predicting new trends and styles by using a similar algorithm to PubGene.

Context problem solved. You could even subscribe to a selection of artist programs through .NET.

Art At Home

...If Sony and Phillips don't make it, the 2nd tier players will fill up the space.

I don't see how the MPAA or RIAA can use software tactis in their industries when it is so easy to "just press play" to use their wares.

The nice thing about that corporate structure is that license agreements are not needed. They can build compliance right into the hardware. They already sell DVDs with version encoding. Make no mistake, it costs a lot of money to deliver the production value that consumers expect these days, and mega media conglomerates are one of the only ways to deliver it. What you'll likely see is a situation where you can play by their rules or spend your time sifting through piles of "independent" crap. And no harping on about DV equipment and computers getting cheaper. The most expensive part of delivering production value is people. Talented media producers and techs are expensive.

Art At Home