If you are considering any type of projection system, you need to think about how dark the room can be made, and how much disruption you are prepared to put up with to darken the room. If you don't have blackout curtains, then you need to think about factoring in the cost of installing them. This may also be the case for LCD/Plasma solutions if you have a room with floor to ceiling windows where the sun hits the wall you want the screen to be on.
Another potential option is to use something like a 42" display at one end of the room and a pair of slaved 'repeater' 32"s at the sides of the rooms nearer the back. This can work out a lot cheaper than a single 65", solves the problem of a round boardroom table pointing people the wrong way and has the benefit of a bit of redundancy for the day something breaks.
Lastly, don't rule out renting a plasma screen for a few months, then swapping it. Prices of big displays are always going down, and quality is always going up, so this might prove very cost-effective as well as countering the plasma's possible burn in problems.
If you don't want to read the article to find the link from there to the blog to see the video look here it's in Japanese, but you get the gist of how it works well enough.
Is it sexist that the don't make a pink version, or is that homophobic today?
Would it be more or less racist to deny the brown woman her right to choose to be paid to appear in the ad?
Should I be boycotting both versions of the PSP, because I'm a nudist and I fnd the clothing in the ads offensive?...Or is all this a big fuss over nothing, and a lot of free advertising for Sony?
It's done that way for several reasons, including:
It guarantees a certain share value (if all the shares are sold). Rightly or wrongly, lots of investors prefer a guarantee to an auction-dependant price.
It attracts people who invest in IPOs (because they usually go up) but are not interested investing in the particular market sector long term. These people smooth over the problem that while the company might be worth x per share, there isn't necessarily (x times the number of shares for sale) spare cash floating around on day 1 to buy the shares.
This isn't going to piss off investors or potential shareholders, it's good for them.
What's better for investors, Vonage sitting on unsold shares with a paper value of $12.02 each or Vonage having $17 cash in the bank?
The more shares Vonage sells for $17, the more money it makes, and the more valuable it is as company, which should mean the shares go up. Good for investors, good for potential shareholders.
The only people this is bad for are the gamblers who agreed to pay $17 for something that turned out to be worth $12.02.
If you don't want to see Flash, don't have it installed. The use of validators *should* help ensure that pages degrade nicely for you, my problem is that the W3C one doesn't.
While I don't know your taste in fonts, I do know that I (like every other graphic designer) am paid to have a better taste in them than you.
Do you find prerendered text in.gif and.jpg files "offensive" and "dumb"? If not, why not?
1) The Object element simply doesn't work in many browsers. Macromedia recommend it should used in parallell with the Embed tag, which does not validate. Essentially the W3C cannonised MS's method of embedding and banned Netscape's. If W3C had simply allowed but depreciated the Embed tag, I'd happily be validating everything!
2) You might be on 3Mb/s DSL, but that site isn't, try it on a day when it's not linked to from Slashdot!
3) Degredation for screenreaders... this was thoroughly fixed after version 3 of Flash. Nowadays properly written Flash is arguably better for the partially sighted than HTML, as it supports 'audio descriptions of multimedia content', which is required to meet some accessibility standards.
I'm not writing off validation because I don't understand its purpose, I'm writing it off because it denies me one of the tools of my trade.
Flash should always be optional, so users still get to see content in a less pretty format if they don't have Flash installed. Validating to the W3C standards precludes this.
I'm seeing a lot of knee-jerk anti-flash prejudice in your comment. With the Dreamengine site I linked above, the maximum "wait for a bunch of animations and loading screens" is 24/25ths of a second, unless you choose a picture or video clip, in which case you wait exactly as long to load as you would if the site was coded in HTML.
Are you saying that nearly every professionally designed paper document in the western world looks unprofessional because they too use non-default fonts and sizes?
As a graphic designer with nearly 20 years experience, I find it rather insulting that you think I can't be trusted to use fonts other than those chosen for their low licencing costs by Microsoft.
I wouldn't normally use Flash for a whole site (although Joshua Davis often does with gorgeous results) and I tried it myself once.
I find Flash is most useful for headlines (it's the only way to render arbitrary text in an arbitrary size on the user's machine in a specific font they don't have, which, as a graphic desinger, I want to do a LOT of the time), and general 'niceness' features such as pictures that change after 30 seconds, or fade in when they have loaded, or that reshape to make best use of whatever ratio the user has their window size, or are chosen randomly from a pool, or any combination of the above. For example the scrolling eye-candy I used here, which I think strikes the right balance between irritation and prettiness.
While the 'state of the art' may well have moved on, most of the linked methods look pretty familiar. I've done a lot of tests with similar methods, but only for a site where part of the spec was 'no javascript' (necessary to meet the highest British accessibility rating avaialble at the time, which we were shooting for), and you had to be fairly flexible with your definition of 'most browsers' to use these hacks. Specifically, all versions of IE for Mac only worked if you sacrificed all versions of Safari, and vice-versa, while Netscape 4.7 for Mac didn't just degrade to the text/static alternative, it crashed entirely.
Last time I looked, there was no way of embedding Flash in a page that validates and actually works in most browsers. Therefore, I gave up on validation.
(oh and just because lots of sites and ads do annoying things with Flash, please don't assume that I do... like any tool it can be used or misused.)
When they are grooming their prey, they will be safe in the knowledge that nobody from the general public or library staff will walks past and see what's on the kid's screen. Way to go, legislators!
Unfortunately I can't tell how much earlier, but it was probably bimonthly or quarterly, issue 19 being dated "Spring/Winter 1982". It might not count as a computer games magazine, as it was subscription only, but the VCS did have a Basic cartridge (of sorts) so I'd argue it's a games computer.
If they forked Firefox and labeled it IE7 (or 8), who would they be dependent on? Their only obligation would be to release the source, which wouldn't hurt them as they give the software away for free anyway.
Sadly I threw out my QCR-Z when data projectors took over from 35mm slides, since the maintenance costs were higher than the profits. It required.tiff or postscript files as input, not a video stream, so it's not really relevant. The other poster is right about air-tightness, we used to seal ours up to prevent dust getting in, but that wasn't a standard feature.
My suggestion would be to speak to the programmers and get them to add a debug mode that captures the screen to disk after every refresh, it seems silly to go to all this trouble to capture images to a computer when they are already on a computer!
That was possibly the least informed comment I've ever read on Slashdot.
You can obtain good quality capture by pointing a HDTV camera at a computer screen in the same way that you can produce the next harry potter book with ink, paper, a knife and a large supply of potatos.
ILM used slow-scanning film recorders (like the Agfa QCR-Z that I used to make 35mmm slides from powerpoint with) which have resolutions of up to 32,000 lines and take up to 16 minutes to expose a single frame. While these machines do techincally point a camera at a screen, the camera is a fixed-focus 35mm head,the screen is closer to an oscilloscope than a monitor and it builds up colour through 3 passes with R,G,B filters, and the wole unit is airtight, blacked out inside, and highly susceptible to vibration.
From a business point of view, upgrades are a really bad thing. You have to pay again for something already bought, and you have to retrain. The only time my company has ever bought an Office upgrade has been when people send us documents we can't read in the old version.
I believe Office (and windows XP for that matter) is in as 'finished' a state as it needs to be, there isn't anything major missing... or if there is its not anything most businesses would find a cost-effective buy.
In the real world, upgrades are driven by Microsoft EOL-ing the previous version, not by desire for new features, which is why Open Office won't benefit.
Trademarks for dictionary words are granted where the field of usage is new. This is why Microsoft have windows as a trademark - they have a trademark for the (reasonably new at the time) use of windows as a computer software porduct. Selling bits of glass for houses as "windows" does not infringe this trademark, because it's a different field. If you launch a product in a completely different field (potato chips for example), you too could call it Windows, and get a trademark for it too.
Sony games chief Ken Kutaragi said they were still finalising agreements on disc copy protection technology...
The news was announced at a hastily convened news conference, after reports of a delay appeared in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Japan's main financial daily newspaper...
The reports had triggered a 1.8% drop in Sony's shares to 5,470 yen ($46.56; £26.67) on the Tokyo market...
November [b]release in Japan, the US and Europe simultaneously[/b]...
"We are absolutely delighted that we will be able to bring PS3 to gamers in Europe and Australia before Christmas," said David Reeves, head of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.
Sony have known for a long time that the Xbox 360 would be first to market. Rather than watch their potential customers make a huge investment in a competing system they are obviously going to do whatever it takes to make buyers wait for the PS3, which means constantly dangling the carrot of a possible huge announcement in the near future infront of the gaming public... which is exactly what they are doing. Hardly 'brilliant' or 'insane', their strategy strikes me more as 'bleeding obvious'.
British Rail's legendarily lazy staff do still exist, and they are the reason that no matter who owns the various parts of the system, our British train service will always be laughably bad.
The notoriously socialist 'strike-at-the-drop-of a-hat' RMT rail union are the cause of British train service's problems, it's hardly fair to blame recent centre or right wing governments for the actions of an organisation that thinks promotions should be given to whoever has worked in a job the longest!
Slashdot Mirror
If you are considering any type of projection system, you need to think about how dark the room can be made, and how much disruption you are prepared to put up with to darken the room. If you don't have blackout curtains, then you need to think about factoring in the cost of installing them. This may also be the case for LCD/Plasma solutions if you have a room with floor to ceiling windows where the sun hits the wall you want the screen to be on.
Another potential option is to use something like a 42" display at one end of the room and a pair of slaved 'repeater' 32"s at the sides of the rooms nearer the back. This can work out a lot cheaper than a single 65", solves the problem of a round boardroom table pointing people the wrong way and has the benefit of a bit of redundancy for the day something breaks.
Lastly, don't rule out renting a plasma screen for a few months, then swapping it. Prices of big displays are always going down, and quality is always going up, so this might prove very cost-effective as well as countering the plasma's possible burn in problems.
If you don't want to read the article to find the link from there to the blog to see the video look here it's in Japanese, but you get the gist of how it works well enough.
Is it sexist that the don't make a pink version, or is that homophobic today?
...Or is all this a big fuss over nothing, and a lot of free advertising for Sony?
Would it be more or less racist to deny the brown woman her right to choose to be paid to appear in the ad?
Should I be boycotting both versions of the PSP, because I'm a nudist and I fnd the clothing in the ads offensive?
Well they can always sue Microsoft for monopoly abuse... everyone else is!
Adding
http://video.google.com/sv*
to my addblock filter kills the logos, but does anyone have a rule that kills the text and box too?
It's done that way for several reasons, including:
It guarantees a certain share value (if all the shares are sold). Rightly or wrongly, lots of investors prefer a guarantee to an auction-dependant price.
It attracts people who invest in IPOs (because they usually go up) but are not interested investing in the particular market sector long term. These people smooth over the problem that while the company might be worth x per share, there isn't necessarily (x times the number of shares for sale) spare cash floating around on day 1 to buy the shares.
This isn't going to piss off investors or potential shareholders, it's good for them.
What's better for investors, Vonage sitting on unsold shares with a paper value of $12.02 each or Vonage having $17 cash in the bank?
The more shares Vonage sells for $17, the more money it makes, and the more valuable it is as company, which should mean the shares go up. Good for investors, good for potential shareholders.
The only people this is bad for are the gamblers who agreed to pay $17 for something that turned out to be worth $12.02.
If you don't want to see Flash, don't have it installed. The use of validators *should* help ensure that pages degrade nicely for you, my problem is that the W3C one doesn't.
.gif and .jpg files "offensive" and "dumb"? If not, why not?
While I don't know your taste in fonts, I do know that I (like every other graphic designer) am paid to have a better taste in them than you.
Do you find prerendered text in
Tackling each point in turn...
1) The Object element simply doesn't work in many browsers. Macromedia recommend it should used in parallell with the Embed tag, which does not validate. Essentially the W3C cannonised MS's method of embedding and banned Netscape's. If W3C had simply allowed but depreciated the Embed tag, I'd happily be validating everything!
2) You might be on 3Mb/s DSL, but that site isn't, try it on a day when it's not linked to from Slashdot!
3) Degredation for screenreaders... this was thoroughly fixed after version 3 of Flash. Nowadays properly written Flash is arguably better for the partially sighted than HTML, as it supports 'audio descriptions of multimedia content', which is required to meet some accessibility standards.
I'm not writing off validation because I don't understand its purpose, I'm writing it off because it denies me one of the tools of my trade.
Flash should always be optional, so users still get to see content in a less pretty format if they don't have Flash installed. Validating to the W3C standards precludes this.
I'm seeing a lot of knee-jerk anti-flash prejudice in your comment. With the Dreamengine site I linked above, the maximum "wait for a bunch of animations and loading screens" is 24/25ths of a second, unless you choose a picture or video clip, in which case you wait exactly as long to load as you would if the site was coded in HTML.
Are you saying that nearly every professionally designed paper document in the western world looks unprofessional because they too use non-default fonts and sizes?
As a graphic designer with nearly 20 years experience, I find it rather insulting that you think I can't be trusted to use fonts other than those chosen for their low licencing costs by Microsoft.
I wouldn't normally use Flash for a whole site (although Joshua Davis often does with gorgeous results) and I tried it myself once.
I find Flash is most useful for headlines (it's the only way to render arbitrary text in an arbitrary size on the user's machine in a specific font they don't have, which, as a graphic desinger, I want to do a LOT of the time), and general 'niceness' features such as pictures that change after 30 seconds, or fade in when they have loaded, or that reshape to make best use of whatever ratio the user has their window size, or are chosen randomly from a pool, or any combination of the above. For example the scrolling eye-candy I used here, which I think strikes the right balance between irritation and prettiness.
While the 'state of the art' may well have moved on, most of the linked methods look pretty familiar. I've done a lot of tests with similar methods, but only for a site where part of the spec was 'no javascript' (necessary to meet the highest British accessibility rating avaialble at the time, which we were shooting for), and you had to be fairly flexible with your definition of 'most browsers' to use these hacks. Specifically, all versions of IE for Mac only worked if you sacrificed all versions of Safari, and vice-versa, while Netscape 4.7 for Mac didn't just degrade to the text/static alternative, it crashed entirely.
Last time I looked, there was no way of embedding Flash in a page that validates and actually works in most browsers. Therefore, I gave up on validation.
(oh and just because lots of sites and ads do annoying things with Flash, please don't assume that I do... like any tool it can be used or misused.)
When they are grooming their prey, they will be safe in the knowledge that nobody from the general public or library staff will walks past and see what's on the kid's screen. Way to go, legislators!
Unfortunately I can't tell how much earlier, but it was probably bimonthly or quarterly, issue 19 being dated "Spring/Winter 1982". It might not count as a computer games magazine, as it was subscription only, but the VCS did have a Basic cartridge (of sorts) so I'd argue it's a games computer.
Some scans here. This publication has special memories for me because I was in it
If they forked Firefox and labeled it IE7 (or 8), who would they be dependent on? Their only obligation would be to release the source, which wouldn't hurt them as they give the software away for free anyway.
Sadly I threw out my QCR-Z when data projectors took over from 35mm slides, since the maintenance costs were higher than the profits. It required .tiff or postscript files as input, not a video stream, so it's not really relevant. The other poster is right about air-tightness, we used to seal ours up to prevent dust getting in, but that wasn't a standard feature.
My suggestion would be to speak to the programmers and get them to add a debug mode that captures the screen to disk after every refresh, it seems silly to go to all this trouble to capture images to a computer when they are already on a computer!
That was possibly the least informed comment I've ever read on Slashdot.
You can obtain good quality capture by pointing a HDTV camera at a computer screen in the same way that you can produce the next harry potter book with ink, paper, a knife and a large supply of potatos.
ILM used slow-scanning film recorders (like the Agfa QCR-Z that I used to make 35mmm slides from powerpoint with) which have resolutions of up to 32,000 lines and take up to 16 minutes to expose a single frame. While these machines do techincally point a camera at a screen, the camera is a fixed-focus 35mm head,the screen is closer to an oscilloscope than a monitor and it builds up colour through 3 passes with R,G,B filters, and the wole unit is airtight, blacked out inside, and highly susceptible to vibration.
So much for "Photos and a video clip included.", the article has no links!
From a business point of view, upgrades are a really bad thing. You have to pay again for something already bought, and you have to retrain. The only time my company has ever bought an Office upgrade has been when people send us documents we can't read in the old version.
I believe Office (and windows XP for that matter) is in as 'finished' a state as it needs to be, there isn't anything major missing... or if there is its not anything most businesses would find a cost-effective buy.
In the real world, upgrades are driven by Microsoft EOL-ing the previous version, not by desire for new features, which is why Open Office won't benefit.
Trademarks for dictionary words are granted where the field of usage is new. This is why Microsoft have windows as a trademark - they have a trademark for the (reasonably new at the time) use of windows as a computer software porduct. Selling bits of glass for houses as "windows" does not infringe this trademark, because it's a different field. If you launch a product in a completely different field (potato chips for example), you too could call it Windows, and get a trademark for it too.
From http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4807858.stm
Key points:
Sony games chief Ken Kutaragi said they were still finalising agreements on disc copy protection technology...
The news was announced at a hastily convened news conference, after reports of a delay appeared in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Japan's main financial daily newspaper...
The reports had triggered a 1.8% drop in Sony's shares to 5,470 yen ($46.56; £26.67) on the Tokyo market...
November [b]release in Japan, the US and Europe simultaneously[/b]...
"We are absolutely delighted that we will be able to bring PS3 to gamers in Europe and Australia before Christmas," said David Reeves, head of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.
Sony have known for a long time that the Xbox 360 would be first to market. Rather than watch their potential customers make a huge investment in a competing system they are obviously going to do whatever it takes to make buyers wait for the PS3, which means constantly dangling the carrot of a possible huge announcement in the near future infront of the gaming public... which is exactly what they are doing. Hardly 'brilliant' or 'insane', their strategy strikes me more as 'bleeding obvious'.
British Rail's legendarily lazy staff do still exist, and they are the reason that no matter who owns the various parts of the system, our British train service will always be laughably bad.
The notoriously socialist 'strike-at-the-drop-of a-hat' RMT rail union are the cause of British train service's problems, it's hardly fair to blame recent centre or right wing governments for the actions of an organisation that thinks promotions should be given to whoever has worked in a job the longest!