Why did Xerox just put it all away though and let others develop it.
It was like the Vikings went to America and did nothing with the knowledge and it had to wait until Columbus went back to America (having read the Viking accounts) and then told everyone about it.
Full kudos to Xerox for ingenuity but not much else.
Back in 1993/4 I installed Redhat on my 386sx. I tried SUSE first but if wouldn't install at all. I had tried OS/2 first of all but it wouldn't recognise my Lexmark printer. Redhat worked fine, ran the printer under some simulation mode but there was almost no software for Linux back then. Win 3.0 came out, I saw CorelDraw 2.0 and I leaped onto the Windows wagon.
That version of Redhat was the last version of Linux that ever worked properly for me.
Everytime I upgrade my computer now I use my old computer to try out various Linux distros, generally Redhat because of that initial success although Redhat is one that fails more spectacularly than most nowadays. I take a clean system with older hardware and single install Linux (several dual boot installs that gutted the partition tables convinced me of the error of that path). I then play around trying to get a clean working install of any version of Linux that I can lay my hands on, Turbolinux, Debian, Suse, Redhat, Mandrake.
I have never succeeded yet. Mostly I get video problems and never now boot directly into GUI mode. I feel more at home with a CLI anyway (I know, I'm showing my age). I never had a proper modem lying aroung to play with so I never tried to use a modem with Linux.
Many of my problems were video related. The install would often recognise the video card (generally Matrox - I know, but 2D is more important to me than games and Matrox does 2D better than anyone) and fall down on the monitor (either Sony, NEC or an ancient 20" Apple - actually a Sony 20sf I think).
Other funny problems include printing PS code to a non PS printer (the only time I got a printer to work in any form with Linux). Also installing Linux without telling me what my password was because it had chosen one for me (really! this happened to me at least six times because I kept at it until I worked out that it wasn't my fault). I'd start an install, step through the initial stages and then going away to cook dinner for my wife and then when I returned to find it had installed but with who knows what password? Being unable to access anything at all is a bad start to a new OS's useful life.
Another consistent problem was being unable to make any kind of boot disk because I don't use FDDs, I use ls-120 drives which are quite useable within Linux generally except for those wretched manual mounts and unmounts which plague FDDs and CDs as well. That sends me spare! That a pentium II doesn't have the spare cycles necessary to mean that I don't have to tell it that I have removed a floppy or a CD? Puhleeze!
On the rare occasions that I have had a GUI working the fonts have been universally inferior (ie: less attractive and less readable) to those that MS Windows provides although the XP fonts don't do it for me any more than the Mac fonts do (my wife uses Mac - don't hold it against me).
I had the "no cursor" problem too a couple of times. That is frustrating, so close but totally out of reach.
I missed testing the newer Linux distros very extensively on my last upgrade because I upgraded specifically to play NWN and a six hour session of NWN blew up my Athlon in a plume of foul smelling smoke taking out the ATI video card as well.
What little testing I did do told me that the Celeron 533 and ABIT mobo that I am currently writing on because I returned to the old hardware will not install any version of Linux nor Win XP because everytime the hard drives are accessed after the install is done then the whole OS dies (I checked the logs and it happens within very tight parameters but not quite at exactly the same point). It is now running Win 2000 so who knows?
There are several Linux programs that I want to run, specifically those with produce Java bytecode from languages other than Java and I am looking at Cygwin at the moment but haven't actually done anything yet.
Anyway, I had a good laugh at the article because it reflects my own experience very closely. I never had anything on the line when I pl
He is a back to the 50's "all the way with LBJ (whoever he/she/it is)".
Don't mistake me. He is as quick as a snake on a hot plate and has less scruples. He just doesn't get modern media (look at Australian media laws...). He does get the current situation however and he wants cheap petrol to keep the people happy, which will be 100% effective if he can manage it.
Thank you for a very interesting post. I never thought of Tolkein as Arthurian before but he clearly uses the style. It wasn't a lack of understanding of women but a lack of use for them.
I have always thought that Pearl and Orfeo were original works of Tolkein's and was quite disappointed with them. It is quite strange to discover twenty years later that they were 'just' translations.
In my opinion Farmer Giles Of Ham is Tolkein's best work and Leaf By Niggle his most subtle. But of course Tolkein was a scholar before he was an author. Rather iconoclastic, but still a scholar first and foremost. I can't wait to read his translation of Beowulf because no-one else's has ever got me to read more than two or three pages.
I rather liked Matamata when I last visited in 1999. I got some yamyams that my mother cooked for dinner later that day and the people in the pub were all in a group and singing songs. We were strangers but they sure that that we joined the group and had a good time.
Of course it is not necessary but it is interesting. I remember the glory days and I have no problem with having a look at what is left of when we left footprints on other worlds.
Having lost two relatives to golden staph in the last twelve months, both of whom went into hospital with terminal conditions and both of whom died of staph instead. This particular Geek chooses to die with his pocket protectors on.
I am in Australia but we are talking about the American Government here dealing on your behalf.
On a persoanl level (and I work for the military so I know about security), what are you afraid of? My wife is Moslem so no doubt we have been checked ten times over or more. Shouldn't you be clamouring over your ten rights of citizenship (I just cannot remember the proper name). You should stop defending how and start defending why.
You watch the Superbowl, you watch Wimbledon.
on
G4: The Pong Channel?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Did you ever watch your children play football.
It is all the same unless you are on the field and your body is on the line.
You said "Time is an observational reference, not a measured dimension. We don't move forward in time, we experience infinitely small discrete moments, which do not necessarily sync with someone else's experienced moments."
Can you extrapolate on that a little. I am seriously interested.
" I promised that I would tell you how to visualise a four dimensional object.
Imagine a picture in a book that shows a scene viewed through an arch. The picture is two dimensional (2D) but it creates the illusion of what the scene would look like viewed in 3D. If we want to find what is around the corner then we need a different picture viewed from a different angle. If we have enough pictures then we can create a movie of what it would look like to walk past the arch and view the scene as we walked (or flew because they are pictures we are not limited by such mundane things as gravity).
We can use a similar technique to visualise a 4D object. By the way, dimensions come in different sorts. Our three spatial dimensions are bidirectional but time is monodirectional and we can only travel through time in one direction. Those tiny rolled up dimensions that are produced by string theory are just little pockets that could make a grain of salt vanish from existence (as we knew it, it would still exist where we had no way of seeing or measuring it) . My fourth dimension is quite clearly a bidrectional spatial dimension.
Imagine a cube on a pedestal. The cube is perfect and all one colour and is four dimensional. Start with the 3D cube and imagine if it went back the same distance as the length of its sides and the other cubes stretched out behind it like cream on milk. You have just seen the image through the arch. Move around a little and the cubes stretch behind the one on the pedestal no matter which angle you view it from, even from directly above or below.
In reality the 'other' cubes would be directly behind the 3D cube and so invisible but I was only after a way to visualise or perhaps conceptualise the fourth dimension. When I consider objects that are different colours and shapes along their oopth (I have invented this word, length, width, depth and now we have oopth). When objects change through their oopth then they become much more interesting and much harder to visualise. Once you can do it then the relationship of time to space is immediate and necessary. A suitable object to conceptualise is a person changing from a baby to a child to an adult to a public servant.
This is all rather hard and you can forget it if you like but it will change your view of everything if you can master it. "
A computer is just a tool. When used for graphics it can produce any kind of art that you choose. You can produce graphic art (as my wife does), or you can produce fine art.
The people who you asked were artists unfamiliar with the capabilities of computers. Listen to their advice when they know what they are talking about. Nod and say nothing when they don't. You have a chance to pioneer the acceptance of computers as a valid fine art tool if you choose. Personally I'd just paint with the computer and they'll work it out one day.
A brush doesn't make an artist. A canvas doesn't make it fine art. Being done on a computer doesn't mean that it is not fine art. Nor that it is. Art has many forms but should never be confused with the tools and media used to make it.
I'm Australian and I own a commercial website that uses a.com instead of a.com.au because the.com.au was too hard to get
Robert Elz is well known here and I think that he is just great. Keeping.com.au credible is very important in Australia. The US has nothing similar.
Here in Australia the government is made up of technophobes and economic rationalists. The Prime Minister would sell his wife to Armenia for landfill if he could get a good price.
Robert Elz is our last bulwark against Senator Alston and his kind. If Mr Elz ever gives in (or is broken) then the.com.au will become worthless.
We have seen bizarre and unenforceable internet laws introduced left and right over here. Mr Elz is the only person left with both profile and credibility.
The situation looks strange from overseas but here it is very important.
After the cotton gin, electricity and the combustion engine there isn't so much. Babbage's work came to nothing. I think that they should concentrate on this century.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm an old fart and I like it.
All of those people complaining will become acclimatised soon enough.
I say keep the purple at least in the short term.
When the spirit moves, you just got to get up and move the body to the spirit moving.
Some people get respect from their friends by being sent to prison or running the risk of it.
Crackers fall into that category.
Has this array identified San Francisco as a potentially habitable host?
If it has then we are in trouble.
Bugger I can't. Multi-user is an MS feature and not an MS bug.
How about Linux? Can I get One-user on Linux then? I can't? Multiuser is still a feature and not a bug?
Bugger.
Why did Xerox just put it all away though and let others develop it.
It was like the Vikings went to America and did nothing with the knowledge and it had to wait until Columbus went back to America (having read the Viking accounts) and then told everyone about it.
Full kudos to Xerox for ingenuity but not much else.
Back in 1993/4 I installed Redhat on my 386sx. I tried SUSE first but if wouldn't install at all. I had tried OS/2 first of all but it wouldn't recognise my Lexmark printer. Redhat worked fine, ran the printer under some simulation mode but there was almost no software for Linux back then. Win 3.0 came out, I saw CorelDraw 2.0 and I leaped onto the Windows wagon.
That version of Redhat was the last version of Linux that ever worked properly for me.
Everytime I upgrade my computer now I use my old computer to try out various Linux distros, generally Redhat because of that initial success although Redhat is one that fails more spectacularly than most nowadays.
I take a clean system with older hardware and single install Linux (several dual boot installs that gutted the partition tables convinced me of the error of that path). I then play around trying to get a clean working install of any version of Linux that I can lay my hands on, Turbolinux, Debian, Suse, Redhat, Mandrake.
I have never succeeded yet. Mostly I get video problems and never now boot directly into GUI mode. I feel more at home with a CLI anyway (I know, I'm showing my age). I never had a proper modem lying aroung to play with so I never tried to use a modem with Linux.
Many of my problems were video related. The install would often recognise the video card (generally Matrox - I know, but 2D is more important to me than games and Matrox does 2D better than anyone) and fall down on the monitor (either Sony, NEC or an ancient 20" Apple - actually a Sony 20sf I think).
Other funny problems include printing PS code to a non PS printer (the only time I got a printer to work in any form with Linux). Also installing Linux without telling me what my password was because it had chosen one for me (really! this happened to me at least six times because I kept at it until I worked out that it wasn't my fault). I'd start an install, step through the initial stages and then going away to cook dinner for my wife and then when I returned to find it had installed but with who knows what password? Being unable to access anything at all is a bad start to a new OS's useful life.
Another consistent problem was being unable to make any kind of boot disk because I don't use FDDs, I use ls-120 drives which are quite useable within Linux generally except for those wretched manual mounts and unmounts which plague FDDs and CDs as well. That sends me spare! That a pentium II doesn't have the spare cycles necessary to mean that I don't have to tell it that I have removed a floppy or a CD? Puhleeze!
On the rare occasions that I have had a GUI working the fonts have been universally inferior (ie: less attractive and less readable) to those that MS Windows provides although the XP fonts don't do it for me any more than the Mac fonts do (my wife uses Mac - don't hold it against me).
I had the "no cursor" problem too a couple of times. That is frustrating, so close but totally out of reach.
I missed testing the newer Linux distros very extensively on my last upgrade because I upgraded specifically to play NWN and a six hour session of NWN blew up my Athlon in a plume of foul smelling smoke taking out the ATI video card as well.
What little testing I did do told me that the Celeron 533 and ABIT mobo that I am currently writing on because I returned to the old hardware will not install any version of Linux nor Win XP because everytime the hard drives are accessed after the install is done then the whole OS dies (I checked the logs and it happens within very tight parameters but not quite at exactly the same point). It is now running Win 2000 so who knows?
There are several Linux programs that I want to run, specifically those with produce Java bytecode from languages other than Java and I am looking at Cygwin at the moment but haven't actually done anything yet.
Anyway, I had a good laugh at the article because it reflects my own experience very closely. I never had anything on the line when I pl
He is a back to the 50's "all the way with LBJ (whoever he/she/it is)".
Don't mistake me. He is as quick as a snake on a hot plate and has less scruples. He just doesn't get modern media (look at Australian media laws...). He does get the current situation however and he wants cheap petrol to keep the people happy, which will be 100% effective if he can manage it.
Thank you for a very interesting post. I never thought of Tolkein as Arthurian before but he clearly uses the style. It wasn't a lack of understanding of women but a lack of use for them.
I have always thought that Pearl and Orfeo were original works of Tolkein's and was quite disappointed with them. It is quite strange to discover twenty years later that they were 'just' translations.
In my opinion Farmer Giles Of Ham is Tolkein's best work and Leaf By Niggle his most subtle. But of course Tolkein was a scholar before he was an author. Rather iconoclastic, but still a scholar first and foremost. I can't wait to read his translation of Beowulf because no-one else's has ever got me to read more than two or three pages.
I rather liked Matamata when I last visited in 1999. I got some yamyams that my mother cooked for dinner later that day and the people in the pub were all in a group and singing songs. We were strangers but they sure that that we joined the group and had a good time.
Of course it is not necessary but it is interesting. I remember the glory days and I have no problem with having a look at what is left of when we left footprints on other worlds.
I wanted to be the next doctor. Everyone else has their turn.
Having lost two relatives to golden staph in the last twelve months, both of whom went into hospital with terminal conditions and both of whom died of staph instead. This particular Geek chooses to die with his pocket protectors on.
It looks like poor OCR without a human checking the result. 'M' to 'V' is quite typical in my rather limited experience.
Yup. That says it all.
That is what security services are for.
The correct translation is (LOL)
I am only cleaning the place so why was my wallet stolen?
Better to think
Cuiusvis hominis est errore: nullius nisi insipientis in errore perserverare.
I am in Australia but we are talking about the American Government here dealing on your behalf.
On a persoanl level (and I work for the military so I know about security), what are you afraid of? My wife is Moslem so no doubt we have been checked ten times over or more. Shouldn't you be clamouring over your ten rights of citizenship (I just cannot remember the proper name). You should stop defending how and start defending why.
Did you ever watch your children play football.
It is all the same unless you are on the field and your body is on the line.
Pong is fine by me.
You said
"Time is an observational reference, not a measured dimension. We don't move forward in time, we experience infinitely small discrete moments, which do not necessarily sync with someone else's experienced moments."
Can you extrapolate on that a little. I am seriously interested.
This is a straight paste from an old email.
"
I promised that I would tell you how to visualise a four dimensional object.
Imagine a picture in a book that shows a scene viewed through an arch. The picture is two dimensional (2D) but it creates the illusion of what the scene would look like viewed in 3D. If we want to find what is around the corner then we need a different picture viewed from a different angle. If we have enough pictures then we can create a movie of what it would look like to walk past the arch and view the scene as we walked (or flew because they are pictures we are not limited by such mundane things as gravity).
We can use a similar technique to visualise a 4D object. By the way, dimensions come in different sorts. Our three spatial dimensions are bidirectional but time is monodirectional and we can only travel through time in one direction. Those tiny rolled up dimensions that are produced by string theory are just little pockets that could make a grain of salt vanish from existence (as we knew it, it would still exist where we had no way of seeing or measuring it) . My fourth dimension is quite clearly a bidrectional spatial dimension.
Imagine a cube on a pedestal. The cube is perfect and all one colour and is four dimensional. Start with the 3D cube and imagine if it went back the same distance as the length of its sides and the other cubes stretched out behind it like cream on milk. You have just seen the image through the arch. Move around a little and the cubes stretch behind the one on the pedestal no matter which angle you view it from, even from directly above or below.
In reality the 'other' cubes would be directly behind the 3D cube and so invisible but I was only after a way to visualise or perhaps conceptualise the fourth dimension. When I consider objects that are different colours and shapes along their oopth (I have invented this word, length, width, depth and now we have oopth). When objects change through their oopth then they become much more interesting and much harder to visualise. Once you can do it then the relationship of time to space is immediate and necessary. A suitable object to conceptualise is a person changing from a baby to a child to an adult to a public servant.
This is all rather hard and you can forget it if you like but it will change your view of everything if you can master it.
"
A computer is just a tool. When used for graphics it can produce any kind of art that you choose. You can produce graphic art (as my wife does), or you can produce fine art.
The people who you asked were artists unfamiliar with the capabilities of computers. Listen to their advice when they know what they are talking about. Nod and say nothing when they don't. You have a chance to pioneer the acceptance of computers as a valid fine art tool if you choose. Personally I'd just paint with the computer and they'll work it out one day.
A brush doesn't make an artist. A canvas doesn't make it fine art. Being done on a computer doesn't mean that it is not fine art. Nor that it is. Art has many forms but should never be confused with the tools and media used to make it.
The military use .gov.au
I'm Australian and I own a commercial website that uses a .com instead of a .com.au because the .com.au was too hard to get .com.au credible is very important in Australia. The US has nothing similar. .com.au will become worthless.
Robert Elz is well known here and I think that he is just great. Keeping
Here in Australia the government is made up of technophobes and economic rationalists. The Prime Minister would sell his wife to Armenia for landfill if he could get a good price.
Robert Elz is our last bulwark against Senator Alston and his kind. If Mr Elz ever gives in (or is broken) then the
We have seen bizarre and unenforceable internet laws introduced left and right over here. Mr Elz is the only person left with both profile and credibility.
The situation looks strange from overseas but here it is very important.
After the cotton gin, electricity and the combustion engine there isn't so much. Babbage's work came to nothing. I think that they should concentrate on this century.