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Um, no it doesn't... Do you not have automatic updates on or something?

I started reading Snow Crash two days ago.There is a car called the "Deliverator" in Death Rally. Awesome! (game shot)

That's the stupidest argument I've ever heard. The core problem with it is that it relies on the assumption that an OS and it's respective applications will break horribly at anything other than 96 DPI. While this is true on Windows (and indeed would make running Windows on a 200 DPI screen a prescription for eye strain), it is a Windows-only problem.

Sort of. Windows can lie about DPI and scale everything up, so that interface layouts don't break like they used to in the past. Se7en improved it by a lot, but it's still not good enough and requires a ton of work from application developers.

You can end up with this:

http://www.istartedsomething.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/120.png

The start menu looks fine, because Seven comes with 128x128 icons for everything, if I'm not mistaken. However, take a close look at Wordpad - the toolbar icons and the zoom on the bottom.

It gets much worse for legacy apps. For example, this:

DPI virtualization: http://a.imagehost.org/0342/SS-2010-05-15_01_14_47.png
XP-mode scaling: http://h.imagehost.org/0718/SS-2010-05-15_01_18_02.png

The first one looks like blurry shit (as I've said before), and the second one breaks the layout.

Font scaling and image scaling are solved problems, get with the times.

As you can see above, it's *not* a solved problem.

That's the stupidest argument I've ever heard. The core problem with it is that it relies on the assumption that an OS and it's respective applications will break horribly at anything other than 96 DPI. While this is true on Windows (and indeed would make running Windows on a 200 DPI screen a prescription for eye strain), it is a Windows-only problem.

Sort of. Windows can lie about DPI and scale everything up, so that interface layouts don't break like they used to in the past. Se7en improved it by a lot, but it's still not good enough and requires a ton of work from application developers.

You can end up with this:

http://www.istartedsomething.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/120.png

The start menu looks fine, because Seven comes with 128x128 icons for everything, if I'm not mistaken. However, take a close look at Wordpad - the toolbar icons and the zoom on the bottom.

It gets much worse for legacy apps. For example, this:

DPI virtualization: http://a.imagehost.org/0342/SS-2010-05-15_01_14_47.png
XP-mode scaling: http://h.imagehost.org/0718/SS-2010-05-15_01_18_02.png

The first one looks like blurry shit (as I've said before), and the second one breaks the layout.

Font scaling and image scaling are solved problems, get with the times.

As you can see above, it's *not* a solved problem.

As I don't live in NYC, I just checked out their website for the first site. The "about us" section describes how they make $13 billion revenue.. And still, the site I'm presented with looks like this: http://j.imagehost.org/view/0334/Untitled_8 in my browser. Checking out the sources it seems this masterpiece is coded in classic ASP.

Now don't get me wrong, but why does a company with such a high profile present the world such a peace of misery? I mean, this is one of the most important interfaces they have to the world, and it's garbage. Should I assume that all their services have this quality, especially those which I don't directly see? Just asking..

Like this tune?

Yup. I tried that too. The result can be observed here: http://j.imagehost.org/view/0164/resynth

Note: I'm as far away from being a graphics crack as the next guy, but at least a basic understanding of your tools is useful. I created this image quick and dirty with the GIMP resyth. And I certainly can draw ugly pictures in CS5 to prove that GIMP is superior. Such comparisons are completely meaningless though.

So it appears!

Luckily I took a screenshot of the post before I refreshed the page, though, because even if it was deleted it was certainly true!

http://j.imagehost.org/0004/untitled_4.png

I’d like to see the screenshot of the PM that you claim Mr. Cunningham sent you... oh wait, he didn’t.

Have you played the game in question? The upper-left square, and all neighbouring squares of the same colour as it, can be changed to any colour by clicking one of the tiles from the colour palette. You can’t click the colour it already is (nothing will happen), so there are really 5 possible moves at any given point. The contiguous region of the same colour as the upper-left square will change colours, merging into squares neighbouring it of the colour that you are changing to, creating a larger region of contiguous colour.

So, for a board with c colours, on any given move you can choose any of the colours except the colour of the upper-left square, so the total search space, assuming a 25-move play, is (c - 1)^25.

(For c = 6, that equals 298,023,223,876,953,150 possibilities.)

For instance, this board. For the 15th move, you could choose any colour except pink, leaving 5 possible moves (purple, blue, green, yellow, or orange).

One obvious optimization is that of these 5, choosing orange makes no sense because no adjacent squares are orange. So, you should eliminate that entire branch where the next move is orange. My solver tries only the colours that are actually adjacent to the same-colour region.

Furthermore, note that in this example game, the board will be fundamentally identical after the plays blue, yellow or the plays yellow, blue (note that it should read step 16 at that point), so only one of those branches need be played out.

Have you played the game in question? The upper-left square, and all neighbouring squares of the same colour as it, can be changed to any colour by clicking one of the tiles from the colour palette. You can’t click the colour it already is (nothing will happen), so there are really 5 possible moves at any given point. The contiguous region of the same colour as the upper-left square will change colours, merging into squares neighbouring it of the colour that you are changing to, creating a larger region of contiguous colour.

So, for a board with c colours, on any given move you can choose any of the colours except the colour of the upper-left square, so the total search space, assuming a 25-move play, is (c - 1)^25.

(For c = 6, that equals 298,023,223,876,953,150 possibilities.)

For instance, this board. For the 15th move, you could choose any colour except pink, leaving 5 possible moves (purple, blue, green, yellow, or orange).

One obvious optimization is that of these 5, choosing orange makes no sense because no adjacent squares are orange. So, you should eliminate that entire branch where the next move is orange. My solver tries only the colours that are actually adjacent to the same-colour region.

Furthermore, note that in this example game, the board will be fundamentally identical after the plays blue, yellow or the plays yellow, blue (note that it should read step 16 at that point), so only one of those branches need be played out.

Considering that the regular image clone tool did that in one click (well, not counting tracing a selection and setting the clone source), I don’t think it’s a very good test image.

(I used GIMP, not PS, if it makes a difference.)

I found a higher-resolution (cropped) copy of the panorama used in the video:

http://www.scottkelby.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/7_deathvalley.jpg

(According to the description here, photomerge, dodge, burn, and sponge were used, but basically only the colours have been changed.)

Composite I made of image from YouTube video + image from the blog: here

Wakka Wakka Wakka

http://d.imagehost.org/0731/lg_logo_is_pac-man_jpg-550x0.jpg

(warning, you cannot unsee it)

Wait, an incredible obscure image macro is now actually relevant? Crass humour is prescient!

The NRA called. They say you're not allowed to be a pro-gun fanatic unless you actually know something about guns.

Politicians want to ban them because they look intimidating next to, say, a standard bolt-action Ruger 30.06.

No, they want to ban them because they can easily be retrofitted to full auto. Hard to do with a bolt-action rifle.

This whole business of people regurgitating bullshit they heard on talk radio is really out of hand. It was bad enough when people just used bad logic to support their prejudices. Now they're just reciting factoids that don't stand up under even momentary scrutiny.

But maybe that's a good thing. Now that attack politics has gone totally brain dead, people will realize how pointless it is, and we'll go back to having actual arguments.

Turning off new mail notification is buried deep inside Outlook 2003's options. I made a cheat sheet for those who are interested: How_to_turn_off_outlook_notification.png

new government mascot

Boat Moves Without an Engine Or Sails

the vikings fixed this problem long ago.

They sure did.

i noticed as the sneaky bastards managed to deliver the email past gmail's spam filter straight into my inbox :(

heres the email
http://b.imagehost.org/0997/Image3.jpg

Congres rambles on the 700 billion thing, Banks are crashing in Europe, Bosenova on /. , now this.

Here's a kitten

just in case they remove this folder (and any evidence)

heres a listing of files
http://www.mediadefender.com/marketing/HBO_Watcher.avi
http://www.mediadefender.com/marketing/HumanWeapon_Karate_SneakPeak.mov
http://www.mediadefender.com/marketing/JAY-Z_LIMEWIRE.wmv
http://www.mediadefender.com/marketing/Kanye_West-Graduation-Stronger.zip
http://www.mediadefender.com/marketing/MP3_Music_Sponsorship_Presentation.ppt
http://www.mediadefender.com/marketing/MediaDefenderP2PDemo.exe
http://www.mediadefender.com/marketing/MediaDefender_one-sheet.pdf
http://www.mediadefender.com/marketing/MediaDefender_presentation-8_15_07.ppt
http://www.mediadefender.com/marketing/Sample_p2p_MarketingReport.ppt
http://www.mediadefender.com/marketing/Sprint%20-%20Parking%20-%20H264.mov
http://www.mediadefender.com/marketing/Timbaland-The_Way_I_Are.zip
http://www.mediadefender.com/marketing/jayz_coca_cola.wmv
http://www.mediadefender.com/marketing/lebron_yall.wmv
http://www.mediadefender.com/marketing/sampleReport.ppt

heres a screenshot of the folder
http://b.imagehost.org/0325/Image2.jpg

and here is a mirror of the folder contents
http://ifile.it/_rcytws3/mediadefender