aerogel costs about $1 per cc in 1 litre quantities. Since 6 cubic inches is 98.322384 cc, $160 seems a little over priced.
So you're paying about $1.60/cc to buy it in units of one-tenth of a liter. The $1.00 price was for units of a liter. Doesn't sound so bad to me, it's about on par with the price-per-soda difference between an individual soda and a twelve pack.
But what they failed to notice is that Freecraft was using that word pattern, established through the marketing dollars of Blizzard, in the promotion of its own product which was a direct competitor to Blizzard's products.
The parent post is right, the spirit of trademark law is to prevent piggybacking on established product names by competitors. "Freecraft" was against that spirit. So is hijacking "Playboy" and "Playmate" to benefit Playboy's competitors. Whether these things are against the letter of the law is up to the courts to decide, but we shouldn't hide unethical behavior behind the letter of the law when we lambast Microsoft, RIAA, etc for doing the same thing.
You're still right, but I'd like to clarify something... Ep 1 had a budget of $115,000,000. Ep 2 had a budget of $120,000,000. Not exactly chump change. They were both extremely profitable, but you should factor the cost of making movies of this magnitude.
Still, the fact that they were that profitable despite the fact that I and everyone I know thinks that they're an affront to the quality of the original trilogy tells me something important (though hardly a new idea): fans of the original trilogy are no longer the target audience of the Star Wars franchise.
Lucas isn't pleasing us these days because he's not trying to please us. And at those numbers, I can hardly blame him. Empire Strikes Back, my personal favorite, had grossed $290,158,751 as of May '97 (source). If Episode 2 grosses more in one year than Episode 5 grossed in seventeen, the old formula is a hard sell.
What would be interesting is a genetically mutated mussel for ships which a) roams around sealing cracks, and b) kills all other non super-mussel mussels from the hull.
Oh, great. Some ship with one of these on it sinks, and suddenly the tectonic plate boundaries are sealed. Then what're we gonna do, huh?
Hmmm, on second thought, no more earthquakes or volcanos or tidal waves doesn't seem like such a bad thing...
Time to get to work... (Score:3, Funny)
by DaZedAdAm (131819) on Friday January 09, @03:02PM (#7931712) 1. Make RIAA jacket and take street vendors' products.
2. ?
3. Profit!!!
At this point, I just don't know whether there are still people who find that tired joke funny, or whether you're getting the "funny" moderations by people who laugh at the meta-joke. Or both.
Well it's somewhat undemocratic - even if there is a vast majority of voters voting against the guy you like to vote for in one poll - I feel this shouldn't prevent you from voting for him again.
I don't think it's undemocratic; By voting "none of the above", more people said that they (actively) did not want Candidate X, than said that they did. To allow that candidate to run in a revote would be against the expressed wishes of all of those people. It would also open the opportunity for the parties to just decide to blow more money on the same candidate in the hopes that the "none of the above" voters will be suggestible and buy into the marketing.
I see your point though, and I recognize that an absolute restriction would be somewhat stifling towards the most-important-by-far form of free speech, the vote. So I would probably be willing to compromise that the rejected candidates could still win via write-in votes, but they are ineligible for listing on the ballot.
That would also still solve the problem with the party spending; no party would risk spending tons more money if the candidate they supported couldn't even be listed on the bill.
trying to find problems where none exist. Let's see what happens if a "none of the above" button is added to the UI before we go crying about the inequities of touch screen voting.
For that matter, let's just add a "none of the above" option to elections anyways. I'm not talking about "no vote placed in favor of any candidate"... I'm talking about an active rejection of all listed candidates. Then, if the "none of the above" options gets more votes than any candidate, the election must be rerun with none of the original choices on the bill.
Other than the logistical stuff of keeping someone in office past term while the repeat election process is taking place, can someone tell me why this has never been implemented?
Photoshop and its imitators have shown that a true MDI workspace is ideal for image editing"
That's closed mindness at it's finest.
No, because while that is what I believe, I do not presume to impose my preferences on others. I merely ask for my opinions to be considered as well.
I probably should have qualified my statement with an "IMO", but in either case I have made it clear that I welcome constructive suggestions from others, even if (gasp!) it means that I don't have an indestructably perfect understanding of EVERYONE'S needs.
Or do you (deep down) just tolerate the imposition that is PhotoShop's MDI because you're so used to it?
I'll be honest, even if I were using GIMP in X11, and I had a viewport separated for specifically that purpose, I think I'd still prefer MDI. Part of that is that I'm used to it, but the value of my familiarity is that by this point, I've wrapped my head around the desktop-within-a-desktop metaphor, and I no longer have any troubles with it.
When I look at GIMP, I see multiple windows. For reference, my conception of a "window" is an independent process. So what I see is a process that seems to have no function except to provide little toolbar buttons. Independently, I see a process that has no function other than to list layers in some image. I see a process apparently devoted to displaying an image, and modifying it with the mouse (but within the scope of that process, there's no way to change what function the mouse performs).
In short, there's nothing subconsciously telling me that the Gimp windows are all connected; that the things I do in one will affect the state of another. Obviously I know it consciously (if from nothing else than the window icons), but it's not a fundamental realization... I always have to think about it.
Contrast Photoshop. I have a big window, with clearly defined boundaries (even if those boundaries are the maximized size of the screen). This window gets a little neuron in my head saying "here is photoshop... it's all in here". Within that window, I get image windows, which look like normal Windows XP windows. That's okay, I can tell by the fact that they're images that they're within the scope of Photoshop; and the each-window-is-a-separate-conceptual-process metaphor holds; from my perspective as the user, each image is a separate process. I don't interdependently work on two images at the same time. Then, also within the main Photoshop window, I have toolbar windows. These are not separate processes, because I'm not "processing" them. Instead, I conceive of them as subsidiary functions to Photoshop. So that little neuron telling me "Here is Photoshop" wants me to look for things that clearly "belong" to that window. So, Human-Computer Interaction experts aside, the different window decorations for the tool windows actually help me structure my workspace in my head.
Furthermore, some of the debate in that bug report had to do with the proper location and context of the menus. When I'm using a graphics editor, and I want to blur an image, what I'm really saying is "I want the program I'm using to blur the image". In Photoshop's context, the menu item for doing that "belongs" to the big Photoshop window, so my conception is accurate. In GIMP, the metaphor seems to be saying "I want this image to blur itself." Since I see Photoshop (or the GIMP) as a program, and the image as a static document, I can see the former performing an action on something else, but the latter cannot take action.
So that's my justification of MDI. It correctly extends the metaphors I have in my head to the behavior of the program. The (valid) question you should ask is, would those metaphors have developed naturally, or did my extensive use of Photoshop force me to adopt them in order to trace an outline of logic around my behaviors. I'm honestly not sure. But the metaphors don't seem illogical. They don't seem like they're really inconsistent with the actual roles of files and programs that have been established in other systems (examples: in a preferences dialog, the settings don't "change" themselves, they are changed by the program. In a word processing document, the document does not check its own spelling, the word processor checks it). So I think it's entirely possible that MDI is just a natural adaptation to the real role structures that we had conceived for our applications.
I promise that I was not intending to be a troll. I chose that particular comment of Sven's because it was an example of his defense to an idea he disagrees with: insulting the idea and dismissing it without recognizing it as a valid opinion to someone else.
As I have said in another comment, I do not think that Sven is wrong. It is his opinion, and it is shared by many. His architectural concerns are also valid, applications should not be window managers as a general rule. But in the absence of functionality viewed as necessary (or at least useful) by some users, some part of the architecture should take responsibility for providing it. But the more important, overreaching concern is that his dismissal of the idea does not encourage cooperative communication about the needs of the product.
There's NO REASON to restrict the movements of a window to a parent window. None. My specialty in school (I have a BS in Computer Science) was Human-Computer Interaction -- I know these things.
I took a few courses that focused on HCI at my school too, and while it had valuable theories about the subject, it is unquestionably a young science. Comparatively, in the "hard" sciences like Physics and Chemistry, most people shy away from statements like "I know these things". Even in systems with such strict rules, there's just too much possibility that there has been a fundamental misperception. When you translate that uncertainty into a young science, with few discrete quantitative metrics, and a person with only a bachelor-level degree specializing in it, it actually becomes quite arrogant to make such a lofty claim.
Even if you were right, and that the only advantage MDI has is that people have learned to use it, it is nevertheless an influencing variable. So-called "better" interfaces for things like the filesystem or keyboard layout have failed because people are already used to the interfaces made popular by Apple and Microsoft and QWERTY. More specifically, because people have a developed skill in the "inferior" interface, it is actually a better interface.
Gimp people are not complaining that Gimp "customers" want stupid things, they complain that Photoshop customers want stupid things.
If the goal is to increase GIMP market share, then Photoshop customers are GIMP customers. People who do graphic design for a living may have brand loyalty to Photoshop, but only because it's been so consistently powerful and usable for their purposes. If GIMP were truly "better", there would be a changing of the guard.
Window in window is really a horrible user interface, either you maximize the main window, and lose the whole point in multitasking and having a window system, or you resize it, making the space left for the inner windows so small, that they are useless.
When I write a word document, I keep Word maximized. When I browse the web, I keep Mozilla maximized. When I need to do both, I keep them both maximized and switch windows. The times when I actually need visual attention to more than one program, however, I'll unmaximize and do split screen. But discounting programs like taskbar icons and IM, that is a rare occasion indeed.
On the other hand, it's quite frequent, when using the GIMP, for me to inadvertently click on a program in the background, and have to manually re-raise each GIMP window. Additionally, the unnecessary window decorations (full titlebar, outline, etc) waste a great deal of screen real estate when applied to several windows of the same program.
Your opinion is your own, and valid to you. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying that open-mindedness to the preferences of others will win many more converts than proselytizing.
so that everything is restricted to one of my monitors
Well, that's kind of the beauty of open source. I'm not disagreeing with Sven's opinion, just his closed-mindedness to other opinions. I'm all in favor of leaving MDI as a selectable option, like it is in NetBeans IDE, for instance. There will always be people in both camps, so neither one would really die out once they were both adopted.
The problem with gimp...is its User interface...
What happened to the MDI model.
Someone responded saying the problem has been partially solved in later versions of gimp, with "docking" ability. But I think Photoshop and its imitators have shown that a true MDI workspace is ideal for image editing.
Putting my own personal bias into it, attitudes like Sven's (for example, an exerpt from a message on 2002-12-10 08:31: "WiW is evil! Why do you want to put a large window
all over your screen that hides everything but your application?
Because your desktop sucks? Then get a better one.") are what I see as the big imediment towards adoption of open source. If someone in a commercial project vocally complained that the customers of that project wanted dumb things and that their environments were inferior, he or she would be fired.
I understand that these people have given freely of their time to improve GIMP, but they also claim to want widespread adoption of it; something that won't happen if they establish a mental wall between their personal agendas and the desires of other users.
Prepare for Microsoft to retaliate by inserting Clippy into MS Paint...
"I see you're trying to defraud the federal government - would you like some help with that?"
Considering how widespread their products are in the government, Microsoft might actually be a valuable reference for that particular kind of "assistance".
In the spirit of operating system universe metaphors:
In the beginning, God created the universe, and saw that it was good. And God created Man, and Man developed Windows 3.1. Angered, God sent a UDP packet flood filled with His wrath to destroy the sins of man.
Time went on, and once again mankind became wicked and corrupt. Arrogantly, a tower was built of such size and breadth that it was said that it would reach the Gates of heaven, and it was named the tower of Win32. God punished the wickedness of man by releasing a plague of worms o'er the land, and caused the tribes of men to be unable to interoperate. The tribe of Noob called their language Me98. The tribe of Sadmin called their language Entie2000, or Ekspee in certain regions.
And time went on in that manner for some time. But yet again, mankind became frought with sin, and God sent a savior, whom he named Linus. But the descendents of the tribe of Redmond had Linus berated under the rule of Pontius PHB.
And God spake, "fsck this", and made Linux the True System of the Universe. And he didst pipe all sinners into/dev/null, and he didst give those of kind spirit very high "nice" priorities.
We must look to the day when all zombie processes will rise from their slumber, and the monitors will go black, and the high-bandwidth pipes will run red as blood, and all directories in/home will be judged as fit, or...
Gah! I see this comment right after I burn my last mod point in that caffeine-diabetes article.
This was so insightful, I snorted my coffee, so I can pretty much guarantee that my sinuses are not going to be diabetic at any point in the near future.
Slashdot Mirror
Worse... they both ended up with the same password: "big_govt".
So you're paying about $1.60/cc to buy it in units of one-tenth of a liter. The $1.00 price was for units of a liter. Doesn't sound so bad to me, it's about on par with the price-per-soda difference between an individual soda and a twelve pack.
But what they failed to notice is that Freecraft was using that word pattern, established through the marketing dollars of Blizzard, in the promotion of its own product which was a direct competitor to Blizzard's products.
The parent post is right, the spirit of trademark law is to prevent piggybacking on established product names by competitors. "Freecraft" was against that spirit. So is hijacking "Playboy" and "Playmate" to benefit Playboy's competitors. Whether these things are against the letter of the law is up to the courts to decide, but we shouldn't hide unethical behavior behind the letter of the law when we lambast Microsoft, RIAA, etc for doing the same thing.
You're still right, but I'd like to clarify something... Ep 1 had a budget of $115,000,000. Ep 2 had a budget of $120,000,000. Not exactly chump change. They were both extremely profitable, but you should factor the cost of making movies of this magnitude.
Still, the fact that they were that profitable despite the fact that I and everyone I know thinks that they're an affront to the quality of the original trilogy tells me something important (though hardly a new idea): fans of the original trilogy are no longer the target audience of the Star Wars franchise.
Lucas isn't pleasing us these days because he's not trying to please us. And at those numbers, I can hardly blame him. Empire Strikes Back, my personal favorite, had grossed $290,158,751 as of May '97 (source). If Episode 2 grosses more in one year than Episode 5 grossed in seventeen, the old formula is a hard sell.
Things You Should Never Do, Part I
This oughtta be good. (puts on asbestos-lined pants)
Weird, I thought that was the subtitle to "Bring It On Again"...
[the sound of imdb vicariously crashing as people try to figure out who Carmine Caridi is...]
Oh, great. Some ship with one of these on it sinks, and suddenly the tectonic plate boundaries are sealed. Then what're we gonna do, huh?
Hmmm, on second thought, no more earthquakes or volcanos or tidal waves doesn't seem like such a bad thing...
At this point, I just don't know whether there are still people who find that tired joke funny, or whether you're getting the "funny" moderations by people who laugh at the meta-joke. Or both.
I don't think it's undemocratic; By voting "none of the above", more people said that they (actively) did not want Candidate X, than said that they did. To allow that candidate to run in a revote would be against the expressed wishes of all of those people. It would also open the opportunity for the parties to just decide to blow more money on the same candidate in the hopes that the "none of the above" voters will be suggestible and buy into the marketing.
I see your point though, and I recognize that an absolute restriction would be somewhat stifling towards the most-important-by-far form of free speech, the vote. So I would probably be willing to compromise that the rejected candidates could still win via write-in votes, but they are ineligible for listing on the ballot.
That would also still solve the problem with the party spending; no party would risk spending tons more money if the candidate they supported couldn't even be listed on the bill.
What do you think of that idea?
For that matter, let's just add a "none of the above" option to elections anyways. I'm not talking about "no vote placed in favor of any candidate"... I'm talking about an active rejection of all listed candidates. Then, if the "none of the above" options gets more votes than any candidate, the election must be rerun with none of the original choices on the bill.
Other than the logistical stuff of keeping someone in office past term while the repeat election process is taking place, can someone tell me why this has never been implemented?
No, because while that is what I believe, I do not presume to impose my preferences on others. I merely ask for my opinions to be considered as well.
I probably should have qualified my statement with an "IMO", but in either case I have made it clear that I welcome constructive suggestions from others, even if (gasp!) it means that I don't have an indestructably perfect understanding of EVERYONE'S needs.
I'll be honest, even if I were using GIMP in X11, and I had a viewport separated for specifically that purpose, I think I'd still prefer MDI. Part of that is that I'm used to it, but the value of my familiarity is that by this point, I've wrapped my head around the desktop-within-a-desktop metaphor, and I no longer have any troubles with it.
When I look at GIMP, I see multiple windows. For reference, my conception of a "window" is an independent process. So what I see is a process that seems to have no function except to provide little toolbar buttons. Independently, I see a process that has no function other than to list layers in some image. I see a process apparently devoted to displaying an image, and modifying it with the mouse (but within the scope of that process, there's no way to change what function the mouse performs).
In short, there's nothing subconsciously telling me that the Gimp windows are all connected; that the things I do in one will affect the state of another. Obviously I know it consciously (if from nothing else than the window icons), but it's not a fundamental realization... I always have to think about it.
Contrast Photoshop. I have a big window, with clearly defined boundaries (even if those boundaries are the maximized size of the screen). This window gets a little neuron in my head saying "here is photoshop... it's all in here". Within that window, I get image windows, which look like normal Windows XP windows. That's okay, I can tell by the fact that they're images that they're within the scope of Photoshop; and the each-window-is-a-separate-conceptual-process metaphor holds; from my perspective as the user, each image is a separate process. I don't interdependently work on two images at the same time. Then, also within the main Photoshop window, I have toolbar windows. These are not separate processes, because I'm not "processing" them. Instead, I conceive of them as subsidiary functions to Photoshop. So that little neuron telling me "Here is Photoshop" wants me to look for things that clearly "belong" to that window. So, Human-Computer Interaction experts aside, the different window decorations for the tool windows actually help me structure my workspace in my head.
Furthermore, some of the debate in that bug report had to do with the proper location and context of the menus. When I'm using a graphics editor, and I want to blur an image, what I'm really saying is "I want the program I'm using to blur the image". In Photoshop's context, the menu item for doing that "belongs" to the big Photoshop window, so my conception is accurate. In GIMP, the metaphor seems to be saying "I want this image to blur itself." Since I see Photoshop (or the GIMP) as a program, and the image as a static document, I can see the former performing an action on something else, but the latter cannot take action.
So that's my justification of MDI. It correctly extends the metaphors I have in my head to the behavior of the program. The (valid) question you should ask is, would those metaphors have developed naturally, or did my extensive use of Photoshop force me to adopt them in order to trace an outline of logic around my behaviors. I'm honestly not sure. But the metaphors don't seem illogical. They don't seem like they're really inconsistent with the actual roles of files and programs that have been established in other systems (examples: in a preferences dialog, the settings don't "change" themselves, they are changed by the program. In a word processing document, the document does not check its own spelling, the word processor checks it). So I think it's entirely possible that MDI is just a natural adaptation to the real role structures that we had conceived for our applications.
As I have said in another comment, I do not think that Sven is wrong. It is his opinion, and it is shared by many. His architectural concerns are also valid, applications should not be window managers as a general rule. But in the absence of functionality viewed as necessary (or at least useful) by some users, some part of the architecture should take responsibility for providing it. But the more important, overreaching concern is that his dismissal of the idea does not encourage cooperative communication about the needs of the product.
I took a few courses that focused on HCI at my school too, and while it had valuable theories about the subject, it is unquestionably a young science. Comparatively, in the "hard" sciences like Physics and Chemistry, most people shy away from statements like "I know these things". Even in systems with such strict rules, there's just too much possibility that there has been a fundamental misperception. When you translate that uncertainty into a young science, with few discrete quantitative metrics, and a person with only a bachelor-level degree specializing in it, it actually becomes quite arrogant to make such a lofty claim.
Even if you were right, and that the only advantage MDI has is that people have learned to use it, it is nevertheless an influencing variable. So-called "better" interfaces for things like the filesystem or keyboard layout have failed because people are already used to the interfaces made popular by Apple and Microsoft and QWERTY. More specifically, because people have a developed skill in the "inferior" interface, it is actually a better interface.
If the goal is to increase GIMP market share, then Photoshop customers are GIMP customers. People who do graphic design for a living may have brand loyalty to Photoshop, but only because it's been so consistently powerful and usable for their purposes. If GIMP were truly "better", there would be a changing of the guard.
When I write a word document, I keep Word maximized. When I browse the web, I keep Mozilla maximized. When I need to do both, I keep them both maximized and switch windows. The times when I actually need visual attention to more than one program, however, I'll unmaximize and do split screen. But discounting programs like taskbar icons and IM, that is a rare occasion indeed.
On the other hand, it's quite frequent, when using the GIMP, for me to inadvertently click on a program in the background, and have to manually re-raise each GIMP window. Additionally, the unnecessary window decorations (full titlebar, outline, etc) waste a great deal of screen real estate when applied to several windows of the same program.
Your opinion is your own, and valid to you. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying that open-mindedness to the preferences of others will win many more converts than proselytizing.
Well, that's kind of the beauty of open source. I'm not disagreeing with Sven's opinion, just his closed-mindedness to other opinions. I'm all in favor of leaving MDI as a selectable option, like it is in NetBeans IDE, for instance. There will always be people in both camps, so neither one would really die out once they were both adopted.
Someone responded saying the problem has been partially solved in later versions of gimp, with "docking" ability. But I think Photoshop and its imitators have shown that a true MDI workspace is ideal for image editing.
For the story of why MDI wasn't adopted earlier, read the following:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7379
Putting my own personal bias into it, attitudes like Sven's (for example, an exerpt from a message on 2002-12-10 08:31: "WiW is evil! Why do you want to put a large window all over your screen that hides everything but your application? Because your desktop sucks? Then get a better one.") are what I see as the big imediment towards adoption of open source. If someone in a commercial project vocally complained that the customers of that project wanted dumb things and that their environments were inferior, he or she would be fired.
I understand that these people have given freely of their time to improve GIMP, but they also claim to want widespread adoption of it; something that won't happen if they establish a mental wall between their personal agendas and the desires of other users.
Considering how widespread their products are in the government, Microsoft might actually be a valuable reference for that particular kind of "assistance".
More like: build your own with money!
I'm not good at guessing games... is it you?
In the beginning, God created the universe, and saw that it was good. And God created Man, and Man developed Windows 3.1. Angered, God sent a UDP packet flood filled with His wrath to destroy the sins of man.
Time went on, and once again mankind became wicked and corrupt. Arrogantly, a tower was built of such size and breadth that it was said that it would reach the Gates of heaven, and it was named the tower of Win32. God punished the wickedness of man by releasing a plague of worms o'er the land, and caused the tribes of men to be unable to interoperate. The tribe of Noob called their language Me98. The tribe of Sadmin called their language Entie2000, or Ekspee in certain regions.
And time went on in that manner for some time. But yet again, mankind became frought with sin, and God sent a savior, whom he named Linus. But the descendents of the tribe of Redmond had Linus berated under the rule of Pontius PHB.
And God spake, "fsck this", and made Linux the True System of the Universe. And he didst pipe all sinners into /dev/null, and he didst give those of kind spirit very high "nice" priorities.
We must look to the day when all zombie processes will rise from their slumber, and the monitors will go black, and the high-bandwidth pipes will run red as blood, and all directories in /home will be judged as fit, or...
DELETED!
4 gigabytes, announced today. NASA could've spent $50 extra and gotten the 15 gigabyte one, but budget cuts et cetera et cetera. You know how it goes.
Besides, this lander is about half the size of the 15 gig model, and weighs less, which is great for that heavy martian gravity.
Oh, mars has less gravity? Oops.
This was so insightful, I snorted my coffee, so I can pretty much guarantee that my sinuses are not going to be diabetic at any point in the near future.