Okay, so it's rocket powered, so what? ?Rockets are not the best type of engines for atmospheric flight. Consider the Rocket pack's 30 seconds of flight time vs. the jet pack's half hour. Here's the relevant sound bite:
"The planes carry enough fuel for a total of two minutes of thrust. So, once real racing begins, the winning pilot will likely be the one who most effectively manages the plane's energy under such constraints".
Oh, how exhilarating!
And don't forget they don't actually race each other - that would be too unsafe. Each racer has its own virtual track. Forget about Nascar-style collisions!
I like space technology and airplanes, but this is just pathetic.
Google's post states that the target of most of the hacking they intercepted are chinese dissidents and human rights activist. Corporate espionage is bad, yes, my heart goes to all those executives whose companies will lose $$$s, but there are more important issues at stake, the lives and freedoms of people who want to be free.
DRM is a copy-protection scheme, which is only natural when you are attempting to sell anything that can be easily duplicated. But DRM is a technology designed to enforce a legal concept. Currently, it is used to enforce the idea of "license to read". But it doesn't have to! DRM can be used even when the rights state that the digital copy is owned by the reader. If there is some legal problem with this, the law can be changed. But it has nothing to do with DRM itself.
I believe DRM should allow one to transfer their digital copy (of anything), free of charge, to other people, for a limited period of time (loaning) or indefinitely (selling or giving away). DRM should also be compatible across all vendors and the DRM scheme should be taken out of vendors and into the hands of an independent body of some sort. Once such a scheme is in place, I will happily buy DRM'd books.
I'm with the people who don't think DRM is necessarily evil.
Remember: Lulu is a *print-on-demand* outfit. You want a non-DRM'd version of a book? buy the print version and do whatever you want with it. I don't see why we should force writers to give their work in a format that can be duplicated too easily. If you write technical manuals, software guides, that sort of thing... you're in a market where piracy is very, very strong, to the point you may never make any money on your book, while it may be pirated by thousands or tens of thousands of users. Just look a the book section on Pirate Bay.
Yes, I would have preferred if there was some global DRM scheme which was vendor-agnostic and internationally maintained by some non-affiliated organization, so we'd have some assurances our DRM'd media isn't going to just go away one day. But all the arguments I hear against DRM are about the specific implementation, not the idea in general. The idea is... well... necessary if you want people to bother writing professionally.
I'm confused, first you talk about getting to orbit, then you mention a height of 62.5 miles, which implies you are talking about a suborbital flight with a ballistic trajectory. So which is it?
Since when's Microsoft using red-orange-yellow? Never mind their photoshopping black people into white, now they're totally stealing Ubuntu's color scheme!
What NASA needs to concentrate on is making ground to orbit cheaper, then move on tonovative space drives such as VASIMR. Find a way to loft cargo to orbit without paying through the nose for each kilogram, and everything else becomes much easier. No point in going anywhere if it requires bazillions of dollars in disposable hardware.
Well, the article says the games have been RE-ported. Which makes sense: I tried playing the first one - or a demo - on my Ubuntu machine about six months ago, and it was the most unstable piece of software I've ever seen, and crashed so frequently I gave up on playing it pretty quickly.
Just the opposite. etherlad is pointing out that automatically believing something Hawking says, just because "he's a famous scientist", is a logical fallacy in itself. Hawking is not a biologist and therefore is unlikely to have made any actual research, theoretical work or experiment regarding evolution or memes. Therefore, what he said was probably just opinion. No better than anyone else's.
And, as other people said, it's not even a new idea, and certainly it isn't HIS idea. So why is it even news? I don't know.
If you work with 3DS max, they "update" their file format so it's not backward compatible *every frickin' version*! and they release a version every year! Tey do it for no reason at all other than to force you to keep up with others - the actual difference between versions is usually minor. Their business practices make Microsoft look like the Mother Teresa of software development.
People, go check iWork.com. This is not Google docs by Apple. This is a fully fledged offline office suite, and judging by the tutorial they have there it's pretty sweet. They seem to be marketing it for personal use, not office work, for some reason, so it may lack features MS Office has. I don't know.
Obvious downside is it's currently only for Macs. But check the pricing: single license is $79, family pack (install on 5 computers) is $99, So it's cheaper than MS office (if you don't take into account the $$$ you paid for your mac in the first place). There's also a related online service but that's just a bonus. And they're promising full compatibility with Office docs.
Shutter glasses indeed give whatever is displayed inside the monitor a 3D effect; unfortunately instead of looking like a window to 3d world, it looks like a puppet show inside the monitor: the distance cues these glasses send to your brain just make everything look small. In a sense it's even worse than 2D. Anything that doesn't take up most or all of your field of vision won't do. But perhaps with today's large screens...
I have anecdotal evidence that indicate the opposite is true but I don't claim my anecdotes are indicative of the whole of the human race (or the coder subset of it)
Sorry, but I think you're being close-minded. If we take operating system for example, ther's one big glaringly obvious idea that has been much talked about but never fully implemented system-wide - the idea of a virtual file system that would replace the file/folder metaphor with something resembling the filing system of email clients, with virtual folders, tags, etc. Object in a computer - single emails, files, whatever - should act the same. Why can't I file my pictures of cousin Larry along with my emails from and to cousin Larry in the same place? The entire desktop metaphor should also be ditched in favor of something else and serious improvements are required in the area of error recovery - for example, why won't the OS auto-save each document I'm working on every 1-5 minutes so I can recover from mistakenly overwriting a file or saving it when I intended to discard changes? Why can't they put an undo button on the desktop and file manager?
Microsoft tried to do some of it with WinFS and failed. OSX now has "time machine" to recover files but they could go further. There's this innovative Linux-based project, Symphony OS, but it suffers from lack of volunteers. Anyway the OS has a lot of places where it could improve and I bet other apps could too.
This is what I've been waiting for. I almost considered buying Sony's Ebook reader a while ago, but, to tell the truth, I hate Sony. The Kindle sounds like something I'd really like to have. It's not cheap but once it's in my hands, I have the entire Project Gutenberg to go through.
That's all well and good but the fact is, you never entirely "master" a 3D application. There's just too much stuff to learn, and if you work in an environment where you use other apps as well, there are so many things you need to remember it's impossible. A good UI should be self-explanatory enough so you can find things quickly even if you don't remember *exactly* where everything is. And blender has one big fault here, which is that because of the way its interface panels are limited by size, it has to cram too much information into not enough space. So you get in each panel a hodgepodge of barely-sorted buttons which are labeled with concatenations and meaningless invented terms like "spin dup" and "innervert" and "shadbuf" because there isn't enough space to write the real term. The tool tips are a quick fix, but are not a good solution.
Also, the interface is supposedly customized for speed and so is very different in basic operation (context menus, mouse selection and such) from most applications. But if you use it in conjunction with other applications - for example, when you use GIMP and Blender to texture a model - the mental gear shifting is so jarring you just get slowed down by the completely different interaction paradigm. And you almost always use more than one application in any normal professional workflow.
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That's only relevant in short stories. Novels are different and are always more complex.
Okay, so it's rocket powered, so what? ?Rockets are not the best type of engines for atmospheric flight. Consider the Rocket pack's 30 seconds of flight time vs. the jet pack's half hour. Here's the relevant sound bite: "The planes carry enough fuel for a total of two minutes of thrust. So, once real racing begins, the winning pilot will likely be the one who most effectively manages the plane's energy under such constraints". Oh, how exhilarating! And don't forget they don't actually race each other - that would be too unsafe. Each racer has its own virtual track. Forget about Nascar-style collisions! I like space technology and airplanes, but this is just pathetic.
And the Blue Windshield of Death will actually cause your death.
There are no aliens in "Foundation". None at all. Just humans. Emerich got a case of the me-too's, that's all.
What FOSS tools should I use for this?
Google's post states that the target of most of the hacking they intercepted are chinese dissidents and human rights activist. Corporate espionage is bad, yes, my heart goes to all those executives whose companies will lose $$$s, but there are more important issues at stake, the lives and freedoms of people who want to be free.
DRM is a copy-protection scheme, which is only natural when you are attempting to sell anything that can be easily duplicated. But DRM is a technology designed to enforce a legal concept. Currently, it is used to enforce the idea of "license to read". But it doesn't have to! DRM can be used even when the rights state that the digital copy is owned by the reader. If there is some legal problem with this, the law can be changed. But it has nothing to do with DRM itself. I believe DRM should allow one to transfer their digital copy (of anything), free of charge, to other people, for a limited period of time (loaning) or indefinitely (selling or giving away). DRM should also be compatible across all vendors and the DRM scheme should be taken out of vendors and into the hands of an independent body of some sort. Once such a scheme is in place, I will happily buy DRM'd books.
I'm with the people who don't think DRM is necessarily evil. Remember: Lulu is a *print-on-demand* outfit. You want a non-DRM'd version of a book? buy the print version and do whatever you want with it. I don't see why we should force writers to give their work in a format that can be duplicated too easily. If you write technical manuals, software guides, that sort of thing... you're in a market where piracy is very, very strong, to the point you may never make any money on your book, while it may be pirated by thousands or tens of thousands of users. Just look a the book section on Pirate Bay. Yes, I would have preferred if there was some global DRM scheme which was vendor-agnostic and internationally maintained by some non-affiliated organization, so we'd have some assurances our DRM'd media isn't going to just go away one day. But all the arguments I hear against DRM are about the specific implementation, not the idea in general. The idea is... well... necessary if you want people to bother writing professionally.
They will have to get back, won't they? 39 days one way, 39 days the other way, ~10 days on Mars.
I'm confused, first you talk about getting to orbit, then you mention a height of 62.5 miles, which implies you are talking about a suborbital flight with a ballistic trajectory. So which is it?
Since when's Microsoft using red-orange-yellow? Never mind their photoshopping black people into white, now they're totally stealing Ubuntu's color scheme!
What NASA needs to concentrate on is making ground to orbit cheaper, then move on tonovative space drives such as VASIMR. Find a way to loft cargo to orbit without paying through the nose for each kilogram, and everything else becomes much easier. No point in going anywhere if it requires bazillions of dollars in disposable hardware.
Well, the article says the games have been RE-ported. Which makes sense: I tried playing the first one - or a demo - on my Ubuntu machine about six months ago, and it was the most unstable piece of software I've ever seen, and crashed so frequently I gave up on playing it pretty quickly.
Just the opposite. etherlad is pointing out that automatically believing something Hawking says, just because "he's a famous scientist", is a logical fallacy in itself. Hawking is not a biologist and therefore is unlikely to have made any actual research, theoretical work or experiment regarding evolution or memes. Therefore, what he said was probably just opinion. No better than anyone else's. And, as other people said, it's not even a new idea, and certainly it isn't HIS idea. So why is it even news? I don't know.
If you work with 3DS max, they "update" their file format so it's not backward compatible *every frickin' version*! and they release a version every year! Tey do it for no reason at all other than to force you to keep up with others - the actual difference between versions is usually minor. Their business practices make Microsoft look like the Mother Teresa of software development.
People, go check iWork.com. This is not Google docs by Apple. This is a fully fledged offline office suite, and judging by the tutorial they have there it's pretty sweet. They seem to be marketing it for personal use, not office work, for some reason, so it may lack features MS Office has. I don't know. Obvious downside is it's currently only for Macs. But check the pricing: single license is $79, family pack (install on 5 computers) is $99, So it's cheaper than MS office (if you don't take into account the $$$ you paid for your mac in the first place). There's also a related online service but that's just a bonus. And they're promising full compatibility with Office docs.
Now that is a surprise. That always struck me as funny, the way they just beamed at some wound and it closed.
Shutter glasses indeed give whatever is displayed inside the monitor a 3D effect; unfortunately instead of looking like a window to 3d world, it looks like a puppet show inside the monitor: the distance cues these glasses send to your brain just make everything look small. In a sense it's even worse than 2D. Anything that doesn't take up most or all of your field of vision won't do. But perhaps with today's large screens...
Err... Duke Nukem Forever *IS* a ten year old game, albeit an unpublished one. Duke Nukem 3D is 12 years old.
I have anecdotal evidence that indicate the opposite is true but I don't claim my anecdotes are indicative of the whole of the human race (or the coder subset of it)
Sorry, but I think you're being close-minded. If we take operating system for example, ther's one big glaringly obvious idea that has been much talked about but never fully implemented system-wide - the idea of a virtual file system that would replace the file/folder metaphor with something resembling the filing system of email clients, with virtual folders, tags, etc. Object in a computer - single emails, files, whatever - should act the same. Why can't I file my pictures of cousin Larry along with my emails from and to cousin Larry in the same place? The entire desktop metaphor should also be ditched in favor of something else and serious improvements are required in the area of error recovery - for example, why won't the OS auto-save each document I'm working on every 1-5 minutes so I can recover from mistakenly overwriting a file or saving it when I intended to discard changes? Why can't they put an undo button on the desktop and file manager? Microsoft tried to do some of it with WinFS and failed. OSX now has "time machine" to recover files but they could go further. There's this innovative Linux-based project, Symphony OS, but it suffers from lack of volunteers. Anyway the OS has a lot of places where it could improve and I bet other apps could too.
This is what I've been waiting for. I almost considered buying Sony's Ebook reader a while ago, but, to tell the truth, I hate Sony. The Kindle sounds like something I'd really like to have. It's not cheap but once it's in my hands, I have the entire Project Gutenberg to go through.
Quick, somebody send Cillian Murphy and Michelle Yeoh to restart it.
...Or that America is a continent.
That's all well and good but the fact is, you never entirely "master" a 3D application. There's just too much stuff to learn, and if you work in an environment where you use other apps as well, there are so many things you need to remember it's impossible. A good UI should be self-explanatory enough so you can find things quickly even if you don't remember *exactly* where everything is. And blender has one big fault here, which is that because of the way its interface panels are limited by size, it has to cram too much information into not enough space. So you get in each panel a hodgepodge of barely-sorted buttons which are labeled with concatenations and meaningless invented terms like "spin dup" and "innervert" and "shadbuf" because there isn't enough space to write the real term. The tool tips are a quick fix, but are not a good solution. Also, the interface is supposedly customized for speed and so is very different in basic operation (context menus, mouse selection and such) from most applications. But if you use it in conjunction with other applications - for example, when you use GIMP and Blender to texture a model - the mental gear shifting is so jarring you just get slowed down by the completely different interaction paradigm. And you almost always use more than one application in any normal professional workflow.