Re:journalists
on
Meet Joe Blog
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You're totally unqualified to assess a profession in which you have zero experience.
As long as we're making general statements here, I'd say that his experience as a subject of journalism counts for more than yours does as a reporter.
What he said is absolutely true in my experience. Whenever I've been personally involved with the subject of a news or magazine story -- whether it's an event, a person of note, or a technical topic reported in the lay press -- the "facts" as related by the journalist rarely bear a resemblance to my own experience. (Well, OK, the Antlers American captioned one of my science-fair award photos correctly back in the eighth grade, but that's about it.)
The truth is that reality is boring most of the time, and boring doesn't sell soap. (The other, complementary side of that particular truth is that most journalists don't want to be Edward R. Murrow when they grow up... they want to be Tom Clancy.)
I am a journalist, and there IS no story if the facts are wrong. Anyone who publishes a story they know to be false or even have doubts about is behaving unethically and this sort of practice is not the rule but the exception in the industry.
Sorry, but my experience as both a consumer of, and participant in, journalism is completely contrary to that.
Perhaps you haven't been around long enough to make that call on behalf of your entire industry. I'm afraid that I have been.
Ironic you should pick pro cyclists as an example though, the +$7000 titanium/carbon/kevlar creations they ride (and inspire) are as likely to be ridiculed by the general riding public as a 300B SET amp is by MP3 aficionados.
It's not really the same thing.
Nobody laughs at the guy on the $7000 bike when he crosses the finish line first. But if you want to convince me that your tennis-ball triode does a better job at music reproduction than a couple of 99-cent MOSFETs from my parts drawer.... well, let's just say you've got a lot more to prove than Lance does.
Ok, but then why should you be allowed to put license restrictions on that tax-funded code?
I never said I should be allowed to do that. Using the code is not the same as restricting the code.
As long as I can't take the code away from you, you shouldn't care what I do with it. If I want to fork it into a private closed-source project, and lose the benefits of further public development, then that's my mistake to make, right?
I don't get to put "license restrictions" on the taxes I pay, so the government should not be allowed to put license restrictions on code it develops with those taxes.
The GPL is fine for private authors to adopt if that's what they prefer, but it should have no place in the public sector. As another poster points out, it unfairly favors some users over others.
In general, people who listen to their equipment prefer LPs. People who listen to the music are happier with CDs.
That, in a nutshell, is the reason behind the audiophile community's preference for LPs. Those people think of music the same way Lance Armstrong thinks of chain lubricant.
Oh, give me a break. It was an accident, for crying out loud.
I don't think anyone seriously buys that.
(That puritanism, BTW, is why HBO is eating their lunch.)
Which, again, is exactly as it should be. HBO is a cable channel that is available only to viewers who explicitly request it. HBO viewers have a reasonable expectation of boobage. ABC viewers do not.
Janet and Justin are the ones who took that choice away from everybody, not the FCC.
Many people, especially Americans, are offended by nudity, for whatever reason, and choose to pass on that sensibility to their children. (I don't personally find that worldview very healthy or sensible, but nobody asked me.) The FCC manages the open airwaves and their content on behalf of all Americans, and since a broadcast like this one appears on network TV across the entire country, it is expected to meet the "community standards" of the entire population represented by the FCC.
Otherwise -- if the public's sensibilities are being offended -- the FCC isn't doing its job as the custodian of a shared public resource. The American audience watching the Super Bowl that day had a reasonable expectation that they were going to see a normal football game and halftime show, but they got something entirely different, and the more prudish of them are justifiably up in arms about it. Their point is the same as yours: the TV audience that day was denied its right to choose what it wanted to watch.
There are numerous entertainment venues in which nudity and sexual themes are legal and accepted, even in the most puritanical corners of the USA. But all of these venues have one thing in common: if you want to see that stuff, you have to go looking for it. Very few people, from preachers to porn purveyors, think it's a good idea to shove unsolicited content of this nature in Joe Six-Pack and Jane Boxwine's faces when it's not requested or expected.
The Great Wardrobe Malfunction was essentially an act of civil disobedience, and that implies a willingness to pay the price to get your message across. In this case, the price is a neo-Puritan backlash that's caused a lot of collateral damage to people like Howard Stern who were known for pushing the community-standards envelope. Your quarrel is with Janet, Justin, and their unwilling audience... not the regulatory agency that is chartered to represent that audience.
Other than the nature of power to consolidate itself...which is a function of being human...which means it may never go away... what is your issue with the priests and the philosophers taking on the custodianship of things for a while? Seriously...?
I guess my answer would be that those guys had their respective shots, and they pretty much blew it.
The priests gave us two thousand years of darkness (no, the Dark Ages aren't over yet, as far as I can see), punctuated by assorted crusades and other forms of physical and intellectual enslavement.
And the philosophers.... well, there's the whole Kant->Hegel->Marx lineage of lameness that ultimately necessitated building all those bombs in the first place, but it's not really fair to blame the philosophers for the sins of their followers.:-)
I believe that if, like Joy, you want contemplation to replace invention and action, you'll have to rewire the whole human species to make it happen. Failing that, science has given us DDT and hydrogen bombs and a lot of other stuff that ruffles everyone's feathers, but no other endeavor has given us a useful model of objective reality. Religion and philosophy tell us about ourselves, but they don't allow us to look past the limits of the visible world, regardless of the promises they make to the contrary. No amount of thinking will bring the stars into focus, and no amount of prayer will take us to them.
Besides... have you ever met a widely-respected scientist who didn't have the wit of a wizened philosopher and the wisdom of a veteran priest?
Agreed 100%, really. The main point of Joy's that does justify concern is the growing power of individual actors to commit acts of disproportionate destruction. The helplessness that many people felt (and still feel) after 9/11 is likely to become a very familiar feeling over the next century or two. After the Towers fell, one pundit said, "We are all Israelis now." Without taking a political side in the whole Israeli/Arab thing, I tend to agree.
That vulnerability is a natural consequence of an increasingly technological society, because, after all, the whole point of "technology" is leverage. Technology cannot benefit the individual without empowering the individual, for good or for ill.
Joy's suggestion that we return to a medieval guild system to limit the spread of hazardous technological ideas is as wacky as anything in the Unabomber Manifesto. He seems to be forgetting the basic fact that the guild system didn't last, thanks to (guess what?) the spread of technological know-how, driven by the individual political empowerment that accompanied the printing press. Any solution that relies on keeping secrets is just prima facie naive, and if Joy keeps making proposals along those lines, he's going to find it increasingly difficult to avoid that label.
Somehow, I don't think liability insurance is an adequate answer, either. Who's going to underwrite the risk that we'll turn our solar system into a black hole the next time we fire up the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider? Are we going to be in good hands with Allstate then?
We don't even know what the right questions are, much less the answers. Stopping the progress of science and civilization for an extended navel-gazing session doesn't sound very interesting, though. It would shift the custodianship of scientific power away from the scientists and towards the politicians, the philosophers, or, heaven forbid, the priests. Bad move for civilization, IMHO.
After all, it may be that self-destruction is not only our destiny as human beings, but our purpose.
All facetiousness aside, his mention of Bertrand Russell's opposition to nuclear weapons raises a good point. Sure, we risked barbecuing ourselves during the Cold War. But, arguably, the same weapons also prevented World War III, and are continuing to do so. You could say that we traded an unimaginable amount of economic power -- strategic nuclear-weapons programs are, after all, the most expensive investment the human race has ever made -- for the very security that Joy says we're recklessly neglecting.
At the end of the day, he'll just have to finish his manifesto and submit it for review by civilization at large. Even Ted Kaczynski managed to get that far.
This reminded me how much I miss the old DOS programmer's text editor BRIEF. Ctrl-l to begin selecting lines and Ctrl-m to begin selecting a block and a simple tap of - or + on the numeric keypad cut or pasted.
Wish all modern IDE's allowed BRIEF emulation. Everything was seemed so intuitive when I first started using it.
Have you tried CRiSP? It's the only editor that actually nails BRIEF emulation almost perfectly. (Chances are, you would not be able to tell the difference.)
CRiSP runs on just about every platform there is, and the author does a good job maintaining it, for the most part. (Although the Win32 version's usage of the clipboard is somewhat inconsistent from version to version, you can't really complain about it in a BRIEF-emulation context.)
True, but you just can't escape the fact that the act of shooting the dinosaur is going to affect causality. You're going to knock it an inch or two out of balance, causing a ripple in the tar, and there goes that blade of grass.
Bradbury is a god of SF and all that, and the Butterfly Effect is a really interesting and influential concept... but IMHO it's coming to the screen too late to pass the "yeah, but" test. There are a lot of people giving Bradbury a free pass who would take the Wachowskis all the way to the Supreme Court if they could.
Quick summary: Story takes place in 2055 where time travel is possible and occurs on a daily, regulated basis. Time Safari Inc. offers hunting safaris to any point in the past. You pick an animal, they give you big guns, send you back in time and you shoot your animal dead. Hunters are kept on anti-gravity paths in order to prevent them from changing history through the so-called butterfly effect (stomping on a blade of grass may wipe out Texas in the future, etc.)
Um, so what would be the difference between a hunter who steps on a blade of grass, and a dinosaur not stepping on a blade of grass because it was capped by some asshat with an elephant gun? Both events would logically have the same potential to skew the future, if not more so in the latter case!
This plot sounds about as well-thought-out as most Hollywood opuses these days. Like another poster suggested, I'm not sure the distinction between Renny Harlin and Peter Hyams is what's going to make the difference here, somehow.
DjVu has an open-source implementation [sf.net] and well-documented specs.
Peachy. So did that really cool Hangman game I wrote in 9th-grade computer class. But that doesn't mean I could put my hands on it now.
Believe me, 20 years from now, you are not going to appreciate saving a measly gigabyte or two by using DjVu instead of.PDF. Your daughter's nose ring will have more mass storage than that. You may, however, be willing to sell your soul to Bill Gates's kids for a DjVu reader that works on Windows 2020 Maxi-DRM Edition.
DjVu is probably the best format for the poster's needs.
You could very well be right; I'm not saying it's a bad format, or that it won't do the job. DjVu is certainly a lot nicer to browse onscreen than.PDF. The obsolescence issue may not be a concern for the original poster, given that the course notes will probably be obsolete a couple of semesters from now.
It all comes down to picking the right tool for the job. Still, I felt it was appropriate to offer a counterpoint to all the DjVu cheerleading that's going on. The same debate has come up on the Tek and Agilent mailing lists before, and for those applications, it should be.PDF or nothing, because people will need to support that equipment for (human) generations to come.
I've run into a similar problem, and have no good solutions in the general case. I'm on a mailing list for users and collectors of Tektronix test equipment (oscilloscopes, logic and spectrum analyzers, and so forth). Last year, Tektronix's legal department issued a copyright release that permits the reproduction and distribution of documentation for test equipment that they (Tek) no longer support. This was of great interest to the people on the TekScopes list, because it gave a green light to scanning and trading/selling copies of manuals. I've scanned in a few manuals for some equipment I own, and it's a huge pain in the butt any way you look at it.
Electronic test-equipment manuals are pretty much worst-case candidates for scanning. In Tek's case, the schematic volumes often consist of hundreds of double-sided, nonstandard-sized foldout sheets (11x23" for example) with lots of fine detail that must be reproduced clearly. You can either scan the pages in segments and leave it to the reader to reassemble them, or you can take the manuals to Kinko's and have the foldout pages shrunk to 11x17" or 8.5x11" for scanning. Either way, it's a real hassle, and highlights a clear need for a "prosumer" duplex sheet-feed scanner solution.
A few years ago you could buy scanners like this one that could handle arbitrary sheet sizes, but I haven't seen them in stores lately. These may be easier to use than flatbed scanners, assuming the precision they offer is sufficient for your application. I don't know how well they'd work on densely-printed schematics.
Other than bitching about the state of the scanner marketplace, I don't have much to suggest. There are a few hints that will improve the quality and usability of your final document:
There are other formats, like DjVu, that have certain advantages over.PDF, but think carefully before using them. Will you be able to read your files 10, 20 years from now? In.PDF's case, the answer is an unequivocal 'yes' because of widespread government, military, and commercial standardization around it. I hate to see people spend hours scanning manuals in DjVu or another nonstandard format, because I'm 95% sure I won't be able to read them years down the road on a completely different platform.
To make the document searchable, use an OCR package like FineReader if possible... but expect to spend even more time babysitting the process.
Experiment with your scanner resolution settings to minimize the resulting.PDF file size. There's a big difference in size between 200 dpi and 300 dpi, and between a B&W and color scan.
For some mysterious, forehead-slapping reason, flatbed scanners often use glossy-white backing material in the lid. This encourages bleedthrough of text on the reverse side of double-sided material, making your scanned documents look sloppy and compress poorly. Placing a sheet of black paper, plastic, or cardboard material between your document and the scanner lid will make a big difference.
As far as the reviewer's desire for a searchable online reference goes, you can't beat Google, as usual. Just look up the function name in question, and it'll bring up the same information that the $60 dead-tree reference book would have given you.
Re:Takes me back a bit
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Not so much, surprisingly enough.
Demons and devils are mentioned in your typical Christian church a lot more than they're mentioned in the Bible.
You're missing the point. All projects created with Aurora are interacive fiction by definition.
Well, that depends on who's doing the defining, I'd say. But I'm not unsympathetic to your point of view.
There's no significant difference between
There is a box here. > open the box You don't have a key.
and just clicking on a box in Neverwinter.
Correct... because neither example represents IF writing of any quality. The important thing isn't how you open the box (clicking on it versus typing 'open the box'), but in how real the box appears to the user.
Textual description, unlike textual input, is not something I consider optional in a genuine IF game (despite what I wrote in the Montfort review about how we shouldn't be so quick to leave games like Deus Ex or Half-Life out of the IF canon.) When I walk into the room and see your box for the first time, a true IF engine should do more than just tell me about the presence of the box. It should show me what I've found, in a way that graphics alone can't (easily) accomplish:
On the table rests a small wooden box, carved of oak and stained with red wine or something darker. Fine scratches in the veneer lend the box a patina of antiquity, and a closer look reveals a spidery line of symbols carved into its lid.
"The runes of Woznir," muses Anrael. "I've seen their power before, under very unhappy circumstances. If you intend to open that foul repository, I'll wait for you in the next room... or perhaps the next life."
No, generally, user type-in is not a mode of interation the Aurora toolkit supports, but that isn't necessary for interactive fiction.
Agreed (personally).
(snip) But that isn't the point. A game created with Aurora is just as much Interactive Fiction (and, at least potentiall, just as rich and deep interactive fiction) as games created with the classic text adventture toolkits.
Do you have any links to IF projects created with Aurora? I don't see how you can use that engine to carry on significant text-based interaction with the player. I'd be very interested in being proven wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
You're totally unqualified to assess a profession in which you have zero experience.
As long as we're making general statements here, I'd say that his experience as a subject of journalism counts for more than yours does as a reporter.
What he said is absolutely true in my experience. Whenever I've been personally involved with the subject of a news or magazine story -- whether it's an event, a person of note, or a technical topic reported in the lay press -- the "facts" as related by the journalist rarely bear a resemblance to my own experience. (Well, OK, the Antlers American captioned one of my science-fair award photos correctly back in the eighth grade, but that's about it.)
The truth is that reality is boring most of the time, and boring doesn't sell soap. (The other, complementary side of that particular truth is that most journalists don't want to be Edward R. Murrow when they grow up... they want to be Tom Clancy.)
I am a journalist, and there IS no story if the facts are wrong. Anyone who publishes a story they know to be false or even have doubts about is behaving unethically and this sort of practice is not the rule but the exception in the industry.
Sorry, but my experience as both a consumer of, and participant in, journalism is completely contrary to that.
Perhaps you haven't been around long enough to make that call on behalf of your entire industry. I'm afraid that I have been.
Ironic you should pick pro cyclists as an example though, the +$7000 titanium/carbon/kevlar creations they ride (and inspire) are as likely to be ridiculed by the general riding public as a 300B SET amp is by MP3 aficionados.
It's not really the same thing.
Nobody laughs at the guy on the $7000 bike when he crosses the finish line first. But if you want to convince me that your tennis-ball triode does a better job at music reproduction than a couple of 99-cent MOSFETs from my parts drawer.... well, let's just say you've got a lot more to prove than Lance does.
Ok, but then why should you be allowed to put license restrictions on that tax-funded code?
I never said I should be allowed to do that. Using the code is not the same as restricting the code.
As long as I can't take the code away from you, you shouldn't care what I do with it. If I want to fork it into a private closed-source project, and lose the benefits of further public development, then that's my mistake to make, right?
I don't get to put "license restrictions" on the taxes I pay, so the government should not be allowed to put license restrictions on code it develops with those taxes.
The GPL is fine for private authors to adopt if that's what they prefer, but it should have no place in the public sector. As another poster points out, it unfairly favors some users over others.
In general, people who listen to their equipment prefer LPs. People who listen to the music are happier with CDs.
That, in a nutshell, is the reason behind the audiophile community's preference for LPs. Those people think of music the same way Lance Armstrong thinks of chain lubricant.
The FCC is a reflection of people like you who claim a right to be not offended.
Mostly right, except for the "like you" part.
Oh, give me a break. It was an accident, for crying out loud.
I don't think anyone seriously buys that.
(That puritanism, BTW, is why HBO is eating their lunch.)
Which, again, is exactly as it should be. HBO is a cable channel that is available only to viewers who explicitly request it. HBO viewers have a reasonable expectation of boobage. ABC viewers do not.
If you don't like it, don't watch it.
Janet and Justin are the ones who took that choice away from everybody, not the FCC.
Many people, especially Americans, are offended by nudity, for whatever reason, and choose to pass on that sensibility to their children. (I don't personally find that worldview very healthy or sensible, but nobody asked me.) The FCC manages the open airwaves and their content on behalf of all Americans, and since a broadcast like this one appears on network TV across the entire country, it is expected to meet the "community standards" of the entire population represented by the FCC.
Otherwise -- if the public's sensibilities are being offended -- the FCC isn't doing its job as the custodian of a shared public resource. The American audience watching the Super Bowl that day had a reasonable expectation that they were going to see a normal football game and halftime show, but they got something entirely different, and the more prudish of them are justifiably up in arms about it. Their point is the same as yours: the TV audience that day was denied its right to choose what it wanted to watch.
There are numerous entertainment venues in which nudity and sexual themes are legal and accepted, even in the most puritanical corners of the USA. But all of these venues have one thing in common: if you want to see that stuff, you have to go looking for it. Very few people, from preachers to porn purveyors, think it's a good idea to shove unsolicited content of this nature in Joe Six-Pack and Jane Boxwine's faces when it's not requested or expected.
The Great Wardrobe Malfunction was essentially an act of civil disobedience, and that implies a willingness to pay the price to get your message across. In this case, the price is a neo-Puritan backlash that's caused a lot of collateral damage to people like Howard Stern who were known for pushing the community-standards envelope. Your quarrel is with Janet, Justin, and their unwilling audience... not the regulatory agency that is chartered to represent that audience.
Other than the nature of power to consolidate itself...which is a function of being human...which means it may never go away ... what is your issue with the priests and the philosophers taking on the custodianship of things for a while? Seriously...?
:-)
I guess my answer would be that those guys had their respective shots, and they pretty much blew it.
The priests gave us two thousand years of darkness (no, the Dark Ages aren't over yet, as far as I can see), punctuated by assorted crusades and other forms of physical and intellectual enslavement.
And the philosophers.... well, there's the whole Kant->Hegel->Marx lineage of lameness that ultimately necessitated building all those bombs in the first place, but it's not really fair to blame the philosophers for the sins of their followers.
I believe that if, like Joy, you want contemplation to replace invention and action, you'll have to rewire the whole human species to make it happen. Failing that, science has given us DDT and hydrogen bombs and a lot of other stuff that ruffles everyone's feathers, but no other endeavor has given us a useful model of objective reality. Religion and philosophy tell us about ourselves, but they don't allow us to look past the limits of the visible world, regardless of the promises they make to the contrary. No amount of thinking will bring the stars into focus, and no amount of prayer will take us to them.
Besides... have you ever met a widely-respected scientist who didn't have the wit of a wizened philosopher and the wisdom of a veteran priest?
Agreed 100%, really. The main point of Joy's that does justify concern is the growing power of individual actors to commit acts of disproportionate destruction. The helplessness that many people felt (and still feel) after 9/11 is likely to become a very familiar feeling over the next century or two. After the Towers fell, one pundit said, "We are all Israelis now." Without taking a political side in the whole Israeli/Arab thing, I tend to agree.
That vulnerability is a natural consequence of an increasingly technological society, because, after all, the whole point of "technology" is leverage. Technology cannot benefit the individual without empowering the individual, for good or for ill.
Joy's suggestion that we return to a medieval guild system to limit the spread of hazardous technological ideas is as wacky as anything in the Unabomber Manifesto. He seems to be forgetting the basic fact that the guild system didn't last, thanks to (guess what?) the spread of technological know-how, driven by the individual political empowerment that accompanied the printing press. Any solution that relies on keeping secrets is just prima facie naive, and if Joy keeps making proposals along those lines, he's going to find it increasingly difficult to avoid that label.
Somehow, I don't think liability insurance is an adequate answer, either. Who's going to underwrite the risk that we'll turn our solar system into a black hole the next time we fire up the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider? Are we going to be in good hands with Allstate then?
We don't even know what the right questions are, much less the answers. Stopping the progress of science and civilization for an extended navel-gazing session doesn't sound very interesting, though. It would shift the custodianship of scientific power away from the scientists and towards the politicians, the philosophers, or, heaven forbid, the priests. Bad move for civilization, IMHO.
After all, it may be that self-destruction is not only our destiny as human beings, but our purpose.
All facetiousness aside, his mention of Bertrand Russell's opposition to nuclear weapons raises a good point. Sure, we risked barbecuing ourselves during the Cold War. But, arguably, the same weapons also prevented World War III, and are continuing to do so. You could say that we traded an unimaginable amount of economic power -- strategic nuclear-weapons programs are, after all, the most expensive investment the human race has ever made -- for the very security that Joy says we're recklessly neglecting.
At the end of the day, he'll just have to finish his manifesto and submit it for review by civilization at large. Even Ted Kaczynski managed to get that far.
This reminded me how much I miss the old DOS programmer's text editor BRIEF. Ctrl-l to begin selecting lines and Ctrl-m to begin selecting a block and a simple tap of - or + on the numeric keypad cut or pasted.
Wish all modern IDE's allowed BRIEF emulation. Everything was seemed so intuitive when I first started using it.
Have you tried CRiSP? It's the only editor that actually nails BRIEF emulation almost perfectly. (Chances are, you would not be able to tell the difference.)
CRiSP runs on just about every platform there is, and the author does a good job maintaining it, for the most part. (Although the Win32 version's usage of the clipboard is somewhat inconsistent from version to version, you can't really complain about it in a BRIEF-emulation context.)
And at the end of your lifetime, you will still own nothing.
Which is not necessarily a deal-breaker, seeing as how I'll be dead and all.
I've been told that the LJIII has rubber parts in the sheet feed mechanism. They eventually get hard and slippery, and won't feed any more.
Correct, but $10 and five minutes later, you're good for another 200,000 pages.
True, but you just can't escape the fact that the act of shooting the dinosaur is going to affect causality. You're going to knock it an inch or two out of balance, causing a ripple in the tar, and there goes that blade of grass.
Bradbury is a god of SF and all that, and the Butterfly Effect is a really interesting and influential concept... but IMHO it's coming to the screen too late to pass the "yeah, but" test. There are a lot of people giving Bradbury a free pass who would take the Wachowskis all the way to the Supreme Court if they could.
Quick summary: Story takes place in 2055 where time travel is possible and occurs on a daily, regulated basis. Time Safari Inc. offers hunting safaris to any point in the past. You pick an animal, they give you big guns, send you back in time and you shoot your animal dead. Hunters are kept on anti-gravity paths in order to prevent them from changing history through the so-called butterfly effect (stomping on a blade of grass may wipe out Texas in the future, etc.)
Um, so what would be the difference between a hunter who steps on a blade of grass, and a dinosaur not stepping on a blade of grass because it was capped by some asshat with an elephant gun? Both events would logically have the same potential to skew the future, if not more so in the latter case!
This plot sounds about as well-thought-out as most Hollywood opuses these days. Like another poster suggested, I'm not sure the distinction between Renny Harlin and Peter Hyams is what's going to make the difference here, somehow.
DjVu has an open-source implementation [sf.net] and well-documented specs.
.PDF. Your daughter's nose ring will have more mass storage than that. You may, however, be willing to sell your soul to Bill Gates's kids for a DjVu reader that works on Windows 2020 Maxi-DRM Edition.
.PDF. The obsolescence issue may not be a concern for the original poster, given that the course notes will probably be obsolete a couple of semesters from now.
.PDF or nothing, because people will need to support that equipment for (human) generations to come.
Peachy. So did that really cool Hangman game I wrote in 9th-grade computer class. But that doesn't mean I could put my hands on it now.
Believe me, 20 years from now, you are not going to appreciate saving a measly gigabyte or two by using DjVu instead of
DjVu is probably the best format for the poster's needs.
You could very well be right; I'm not saying it's a bad format, or that it won't do the job. DjVu is certainly a lot nicer to browse onscreen than
It all comes down to picking the right tool for the job. Still, I felt it was appropriate to offer a counterpoint to all the DjVu cheerleading that's going on. The same debate has come up on the Tek and Agilent mailing lists before, and for those applications, it should be
Electronic test-equipment manuals are pretty much worst-case candidates for scanning. In Tek's case, the schematic volumes often consist of hundreds of double-sided, nonstandard-sized foldout sheets (11x23" for example) with lots of fine detail that must be reproduced clearly. You can either scan the pages in segments and leave it to the reader to reassemble them, or you can take the manuals to Kinko's and have the foldout pages shrunk to 11x17" or 8.5x11" for scanning. Either way, it's a real hassle, and highlights a clear need for a "prosumer" duplex sheet-feed scanner solution.
A few years ago you could buy scanners like this one that could handle arbitrary sheet sizes, but I haven't seen them in stores lately. These may be easier to use than flatbed scanners, assuming the precision they offer is sufficient for your application. I don't know how well they'd work on densely-printed schematics.
Other than bitching about the state of the scanner marketplace, I don't have much to suggest. There are a few hints that will improve the quality and usability of your final document:
The STK-500 from DigiKey is a good way to go.
The best introductory guide is the companion volume to the one being reviewed.
As far as the reviewer's desire for a searchable online reference goes, you can't beat Google, as usual. Just look up the function name in question, and it'll bring up the same information that the $60 dead-tree reference book would have given you.
Not so much, surprisingly enough.
Demons and devils are mentioned in your typical Christian church a lot more than they're mentioned in the Bible.
Bass in the studio is made at the same time as the high end. Your speakers can't do the same.
Sounds like it's time to add some elementary signal-processing theory to high-school physics curriculums.
Well, that depends on who's doing the defining, I'd say. But I'm not unsympathetic to your point of view.
There's no significant difference betweenand just clicking on a box in Neverwinter.
Correct... because neither example represents IF writing of any quality. The important thing isn't how you open the box (clicking on it versus typing 'open the box'), but in how real the box appears to the user.
Textual description, unlike textual input, is not something I consider optional in a genuine IF game (despite what I wrote in the Montfort review about how we shouldn't be so quick to leave games like Deus Ex or Half-Life out of the IF canon.) When I walk into the room and see your box for the first time, a true IF engine should do more than just tell me about the presence of the box. It should show me what I've found, in a way that graphics alone can't (easily) accomplish:
No, generally, user type-in is not a mode of interation the Aurora toolkit supports, but that isn't necessary for interactive fiction.
Agreed (personally).
(snip) But that isn't the point. A game created with Aurora is just as much Interactive Fiction (and, at least potentiall, just as rich and deep interactive fiction) as games created with the classic text adventture toolkits.
To that, I'd have to say "show me the money."
Do you have any links to IF projects created with Aurora? I don't see how you can use that engine to carry on significant text-based interaction with the player. I'd be very interested in being proven wrong.
Graham Chapman sold Cleese the parrot in the first place. Nowadays, I understand he's a reseller for SCO.