The way I was taught (although a lot of the students, me included, knew a lot of it) was the tools and the theory at the same time, using the tools to learn the theory one could say. Telling the students to model a certain way so that it will be possible to animate it later (and explain why). The first lectures I went to on the first 3D course I took were mostly on the "here's a cube, these are vertex points..." level.
Not really, it was pretty neat for something you could get for free but compared to Maya, 3D Studio MAX and the other "giants" it wasn't even on the map..
And to get back on topic, if you spend a semester or two working with Maya you will be forced to pick up a lot of the basic concepts of 3D Modelling, UV-mapping, texturing and animation, with some programs you might be able to get around some things but generally you have to understand what you are doing to get anything done.
My first computer, a Spectravideo SVI-328, had 80kB of RAM, my next computer had 4MB, the one after that 8MB, then upgraded to 12MB, then 20MB, next computer had 128MB, upgraded to 256, and my current machines have 768MB (stationary) and 512MB (laptop).
That's 9830.4 and 6553.6 times the memory my first computer had. Also, my first computer had a 3.6MHz Z80 that I thought was fast compared to the 0.9xx MHz CPUs in my friends' C=64s.. Now I have 2.53GHz and wouldn't mind it being faster, times sure do change..
This sounds like a horrible idea as it would mean that you could no longer use your cell phone while on the bus/train or in the subway, although I suppose it might work in the US where most people see public transport as "communism" anyway..;)
Strange indeed, seeing as MSN is probably the least popular messenger between AIM/Yahoo/MSN..
In the US perhaps.. In europe ICQ was pretty much "The" IM until Microsoft's bundling of MSN Messenger attracted the dimwitted hordes of teenagers, at this point anyone wanting to contact any of these people would use MSN Messenger (since before this point not a lot of people were using IM software) and this in turn led to a situation where only "nerds" were using ICQ and most of them ended up getting an MSN account just to be able to keep in touch with their friends..
Now if only Microsoft could get offline messages for MSN Messenger I wouldn't mind this situation but it seems they think "E-mail = offline message"..
Most people are using something like 'AccessDiver'. Many sites now set firewall rules against IP's using those tools, start showing them a bogus valid login page, or any of a number of tricks to mess with them. I know some of the 'hackers' were using multiple proxies after a while, but really, when you have to do tens of thousands of attempts to even think you're getting one password, how many proxies could you possibly have at your disposal.
Oh, it's pretty easy (although time-consuming) to harvest proxy lists from the web , exclude those on your blacklist (government IPs and whatnot) and then test which ones are working..;)
Except for cases of "hey look, I'm running my old harddrive without the lid on!" sort of things the first time I saw a guide to doing this was around '00-'01 on a website dedicated to the Abit BP6 Dual celeron motherboards, it was a lot more impressive five years ago, now it's really just old news..
Well, probably because someone decided that there isn't a market for them. Also, why sell a cheaper "better" product that's slightly larger than your expensive smaller model? You'd just lose sales of the smaller model..
Children, this is why you shouldn't let people who only care about money and greed run the world..:P
I'll probably get flogged for saying this, but for front-end apps that might need to be developed quickly I'd recommend Delphi. I used to look at Delphi as the bastard child of Pascal, but after taking a uni software development course where they stated on the first day that we'd be using Delphi I got hooked.. It can actually be very useful for when you know what you want since there's not a lot of "unnecessary" code just to get things up and running.
...that stuff gets stored in your body, comes back at random times in your life years later (usually during times of stress, when you least need it)
No it doesn't get stored in your body, that's a myth right up there with "LSD contains rat poison" and "LSD will make you think you can fly".
So-called flashback are AFAIK related to post-traumatic stress and have nothing to do with any drugs being stored in your body.
...alters your brain's fundamental chemistry, has the ability to severly fuck your brain up if you OD and you're saying it's long term effects on the *majority* of users isn't that bad??
Lots of things alter your brain's chemistry, news at 11..
Overdosing LSD is quite hard, taking a dose that is beyond what you can handle mentally isn't, which is why it'd be good if you could get LSD where the amount of LSD per dose was known and factual information instead of "LSD destroys your chromosomes! (just like Milk!)"
I know that pro-pot propaganda talks of the success of the legalisation experiments in Holland and Alaska, but they don't tell you about the problems that they caused, e.g. more crime, more hard drug users.
Actually from the statistics I've seen de-criminalization of cannabis in the Netherlands combined with their other fairly permissive policies on drugs seem to be doing a much better job at reducing the number of hard drug abusers and deaths among them than Sweden's hard-line "Hashish is the most dangerous drug!", "One puff and you're sitting on 'plattan' with a needle in your arm!", etc..-policy has done (highest number of dead hard drug addicts in the EU (per capita) IIRC).
...and before that drug dealers all the way back to the days of the opium trade.
Actually, I've never met a drug dealer who did anything like that, I've only heard it referenced in "Think of teh CHILDRUN!!!111"-speeches and government pamphlets about the horrors of smoking pot even once (it leads, without exceptions, to heroin addiction and then death... Did I mention I live in Sweden?).
I was considering buying a Nintendo Revolution, and this whole thing has just made me decide to not under any circumstances buy a Playstation 3 (or a PSP).
The problem is, of course, that they'll still charge you what you'd pay online plus another 30% (at least, I've seen some crazy markups), especially in stores run by some guy who started the store straight out of high school in nineteeneightywhatever and who thinks that The Intarweb is just a fad...
Oh, I forgot, at times I actually like listening to music while reading a book. You know, to block out the crying baby a few seats away, the noises the bus is making and the idiot who won't stop talking on his cellphone..
Whats wrong with reading a book ? No battery issues, and you might actually learn something, or heaven forbid talk to a fellow passenger !
Ooh, did I say battery ? One must assume that you will not be using the player while you're actually away, just on the bus, coz you would need the charger otherwise. Do you have a phone ?, does that need a charger ?
I read books all the time, it's just that sometimes I'd prefer to listen to music. As for talking to other passengers, I've done that a couple of times but you have to be lucky enough to find someone who doesn't just want to zone out and listen to music the whole trip. I normally don't use the player while I'm actually away, normally I just connect it to a computer at a friend's or my gf's place to charge it, besides, the battery time is close to 20 hours with those small in-ear headphones. I've had a cellphone since I was 13, my dad is a bit of an early adopter and gave me one as well (aah NMT, sound quality is horrible but it worked everywhere).
How much shit are you carrying around just to listen to music you probably already listened to a zillion times.
I'm not carrying the phone with me to listen to music, it's for communication. And the reason I have a hard drive based mp3 player is so that I won't be stuck listening to the same damn music over and over again...
I drove across the states, 3 times in 2 months, then flew to New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Japan, then drove most of the major routes in australia, before flying back to the states and then on to the uk, all within 9 months, and I never once listened to music while I travelled. What could you possibly like so much that you take it with you wherever you go.
So you don't like music, guess you don't see why an mp3 player might be nice to have then..
As for not having to remember that you forgot to put an album on the player, how would more space help then ? If you don't remember, then its too late - if you forgot, ditto. BTW, I thought work was a place you went to, err, work.
My point was that with less storage I couldn't just put lots of different stuff on it, I'd have to ration out the space on it and would probably end up forgetting to put stuff on it (I used to do this when burning mix CD's and making mixtapes).
Why do you need a tiny monitor on your mp3 player ? Whats wrong with the abum and track title ?
I was talking about the iPod shuffle "fanboys" who in IRL have given me lots of grief about how useless it is to be able to quickly find a specific song or album on the hard drive of my mp3 player.
sounds like you're trying to justify having an expensive toy to yourself.
I don't really feel like I have to justify owning an mp3 player that does what I want an mp3 player to do, but the iPod shuffle minimalists are constantly asking me to do just that..
Personally I'd like to see an MMORPG where real-life skills could be applied to the game, cut down on the funky stats and let the player figure out on his own how to get past that locked door... So in say, a futuristic cyberpunk environment, a player might not have a computer skill but would rather have to rely on his/her own understanding of computers to use a computer in the game, to understand a note written in a foreign language you'd have to find someone else to translate it for you instead of just buffing up your "translate foreign language" skill. I might actually play such a game for more than a few days..
My opinion exactly, unfortunately the train takes just as long (since they shut down the direct train line, you have to travel out to the coast and change trains) and costs four times as much...
Have you ever been on a seven hour bus ride? And then had to travel back again a few days later? That's 14 hours, and your taste in music might change depending on your mood so it's always nice to at least have three times (Travel Time)/(Average Song Length) songs with you. It's also quite nice not having remember that you forgot to put that good album on your mp3 player before you left for work..
Of course, another pet peeve of mine is people who go "Why would anyone need a tiny monitor for their mp3 player?" because they only have 512/256/128/whatever MB of storage on their mp3 player and everyone else must use their mp3 players in the same way.. but that's a different discussion.
Heck, didn't I just hear that FRANCE, long considered a smoker's paradise, is thinking of instituting public smoking bans?
Of course, the french seem to consider bans on smoking to be ridiculus and I've been in many a french building where smoking was banned that had lots of cigarette butts in the lying around, not to mention sometimes even ashtrays... So they might ban it but that doesn't mean people will care.
/Mikael
Re:Some shows/films don't stand i18n
on
Homer Becomes Omar
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· Score: 3, Informative
It's reasonably funny in many western countries, because the american culture is kind of universal, and even when it's dubbed, it's not too hard to understand half of the jokes (many very US-centric jokes are lost in France, Sweden or Spain though, particularly those involving famous personalities known only to the US public).
First of all, in Sweden The Simpsons is not dubbed, it's subtitled like just about every other foreign (non-swedish, it's sad that I feel the need to add this) show.
Also, while there probably are a few US-centric jokes that most viewers don't get you'd probably be surprised at how many of these "famous personalities known only to the US public" are actually if not famous in Sweden then at least well-known enough that quite a lot of the viewers get the jokes. Hell, there are enough people in Sweden who know enough about bad US movies and tv shows from the 80's to make Family guy popular... So once again, you'd be surprised at just how much we know of american culture.
It's not "offline messages" if you're still connected, "offline messages" means (like with ICQ in the late 90's) that others can send messages to you when you're not even connected and the server will deliver deliver them the next time you connect.
As for "Appear offline", it makes you appear offline for everyone, with ICQ you can/could use the "invisible" mode to appear offline to some people and online to others (no, this is not like blocking them, that's another feature, this means just what I wrote, that you appear to be offline to those on the offline list and online to those on your "people who don't annoy the crap out of you while you're trying to work" list).
Not the server - background email checking continues when you close the mail client window on a Mac.
It seems just about every fairly recent piece of software released for Windows does this as well, leaving an "agent" running in the background.. quite annoying actually... I don't need my video player, soundcard driver or any other similar app to continue running after I specifically told it to shut down.
It's a very good idea - an open window has nothing to do with a program actually being running. It takes a bit of getting used to if you're coming from Windoze, but imagine that the close button is just sending the app to the systray - which is not an unheard of Windoze behavior.
And of course something that is also becoming more common with windows is an "agent" running without being visible, only appearing now and again to annoy you with various alerts about more expensive version of them being available.
That said, I can see why you'd want your mail app to keep running in the background, but for most apps this kind of behaviour is totally unwarranted and just drains resources (it's not uncommon for these little "agents" to each consume 2-5MB of RAM, not a lot if you've only got one or two running, but when you've got Maya and Photoshop running at the same time you don't want to waste 50MB of your precious RAM on little helper apps that do nothing (did I mention I also turn off the "automatic/realtime/whatever scanning" in anti-virus software because it seems to be completely random and really messes with performance?)).
Slashdot Mirror
/Mikael
And to get back on topic, if you spend a semester or two working with Maya you will be forced to pick up a lot of the basic concepts of 3D Modelling, UV-mapping, texturing and animation, with some programs you might be able to get around some things but generally you have to understand what you are doing to get anything done.
/Mikael
That's 9830.4 and 6553.6 times the memory my first computer had. Also, my first computer had a 3.6MHz Z80 that I thought was fast compared to the 0.9xx MHz CPUs in my friends' C=64s.. Now I have 2.53GHz and wouldn't mind it being faster, times sure do change..
/Mikael
/Mikael
In the US perhaps.. In europe ICQ was pretty much "The" IM until Microsoft's bundling of MSN Messenger attracted the dimwitted hordes of teenagers, at this point anyone wanting to contact any of these people would use MSN Messenger (since before this point not a lot of people were using IM software) and this in turn led to a situation where only "nerds" were using ICQ and most of them ended up getting an MSN account just to be able to keep in touch with their friends..
Now if only Microsoft could get offline messages for MSN Messenger I wouldn't mind this situation but it seems they think "E-mail = offline message"..
/Mikael
Oh, it's pretty easy (although time-consuming) to harvest proxy lists from the web , exclude those on your blacklist (government IPs and whatnot) and then test which ones are working.. ;)
/Mikael
/Mikael
Children, this is why you shouldn't let people who only care about money and greed run the world.. :P
/Mikael
/Mikael
So you're saying that the "church" of Scientology isn't a cult?
No it doesn't get stored in your body, that's a myth right up there with "LSD contains rat poison" and "LSD will make you think you can fly".
So-called flashback are AFAIK related to post-traumatic stress and have nothing to do with any drugs being stored in your body.
Lots of things alter your brain's chemistry, news at 11..
Overdosing LSD is quite hard, taking a dose that is beyond what you can handle mentally isn't, which is why it'd be good if you could get LSD where the amount of LSD per dose was known and factual information instead of "LSD destroys your chromosomes! (just like Milk!)"
/Mikael
Actually from the statistics I've seen de-criminalization of cannabis in the Netherlands combined with their other fairly permissive policies on drugs seem to be doing a much better job at reducing the number of hard drug abusers and deaths among them than Sweden's hard-line "Hashish is the most dangerous drug!", "One puff and you're sitting on 'plattan' with a needle in your arm!", etc..-policy has done (highest number of dead hard drug addicts in the EU (per capita) IIRC).
/Mikael
Actually, I've never met a drug dealer who did anything like that, I've only heard it referenced in "Think of teh CHILDRUN!!!111"-speeches and government pamphlets about the horrors of smoking pot even once (it leads, without exceptions, to heroin addiction and then death... Did I mention I live in Sweden?).
/Mikael
/Mikael
/Mikael
I read books all the time, it's just that sometimes I'd prefer to listen to music. As for talking to other passengers, I've done that a couple of times but you have to be lucky enough to find someone who doesn't just want to zone out and listen to music the whole trip. I normally don't use the player while I'm actually away, normally I just connect it to a computer at a friend's or my gf's place to charge it, besides, the battery time is close to 20 hours with those small in-ear headphones. I've had a cellphone since I was 13, my dad is a bit of an early adopter and gave me one as well (aah NMT, sound quality is horrible but it worked everywhere).
How much shit are you carrying around just to listen to music you probably already listened to a zillion times.
I'm not carrying the phone with me to listen to music, it's for communication. And the reason I have a hard drive based mp3 player is so that I won't be stuck listening to the same damn music over and over again...
I drove across the states, 3 times in 2 months, then flew to New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Japan, then drove most of the major routes in australia, before flying back to the states and then on to the uk, all within 9 months, and I never once listened to music while I travelled. What could you possibly like so much that you take it with you wherever you go.
So you don't like music, guess you don't see why an mp3 player might be nice to have then..
As for not having to remember that you forgot to put an album on the player, how would more space help then ? If you don't remember, then its too late - if you forgot, ditto. BTW, I thought work was a place you went to, err, work.
My point was that with less storage I couldn't just put lots of different stuff on it, I'd have to ration out the space on it and would probably end up forgetting to put stuff on it (I used to do this when burning mix CD's and making mixtapes).
Why do you need a tiny monitor on your mp3 player ? Whats wrong with the abum and track title ?
I was talking about the iPod shuffle "fanboys" who in IRL have given me lots of grief about how useless it is to be able to quickly find a specific song or album on the hard drive of my mp3 player.
sounds like you're trying to justify having an expensive toy to yourself.
I don't really feel like I have to justify owning an mp3 player that does what I want an mp3 player to do, but the iPod shuffle minimalists are constantly asking me to do just that..
/Mikael
/Mikael
/Mikael
Of course, another pet peeve of mine is people who go "Why would anyone need a tiny monitor for their mp3 player?" because they only have 512/256/128/whatever MB of storage on their mp3 player and everyone else must use their mp3 players in the same way.. but that's a different discussion.
/Mikael
Use of the slippery slope can be valid or fallacious.
In this case I think it's all too likely that it's valid. After all, "they" have a history of doing things like this..
/Mikael
Of course, the french seem to consider bans on smoking to be ridiculus and I've been in many a french building where smoking was banned that had lots of cigarette butts in the lying around, not to mention sometimes even ashtrays... So they might ban it but that doesn't mean people will care.
/Mikael
First of all, in Sweden The Simpsons is not dubbed, it's subtitled like just about every other foreign (non-swedish, it's sad that I feel the need to add this) show.
Also, while there probably are a few US-centric jokes that most viewers don't get you'd probably be surprised at how many of these "famous personalities known only to the US public" are actually if not famous in Sweden then at least well-known enough that quite a lot of the viewers get the jokes. Hell, there are enough people in Sweden who know enough about bad US movies and tv shows from the 80's to make Family guy popular... So once again, you'd be surprised at just how much we know of american culture.
/Mikael
As for "Appear offline", it makes you appear offline for everyone, with ICQ you can/could use the "invisible" mode to appear offline to some people and online to others (no, this is not like blocking them, that's another feature, this means just what I wrote, that you appear to be offline to those on the offline list and online to those on your "people who don't annoy the crap out of you while you're trying to work" list).
/Mikael
It seems just about every fairly recent piece of software released for Windows does this as well, leaving an "agent" running in the background.. quite annoying actually... I don't need my video player, soundcard driver or any other similar app to continue running after I specifically told it to shut down.
It's a very good idea - an open window has nothing to do with a program actually being running. It takes a bit of getting used to if you're coming from Windoze, but imagine that the close button is just sending the app to the systray - which is not an unheard of Windoze behavior.
And of course something that is also becoming more common with windows is an "agent" running without being visible, only appearing now and again to annoy you with various alerts about more expensive version of them being available.
That said, I can see why you'd want your mail app to keep running in the background, but for most apps this kind of behaviour is totally unwarranted and just drains resources (it's not uncommon for these little "agents" to each consume 2-5MB of RAM, not a lot if you've only got one or two running, but when you've got Maya and Photoshop running at the same time you don't want to waste 50MB of your precious RAM on little helper apps that do nothing (did I mention I also turn off the "automatic/realtime/whatever scanning" in anti-virus software because it seems to be completely random and really messes with performance?)).