As far as I can tell on my Win8 computer (and this is backed up by the Engadget article) there is no Metro calculator. When I open the start screen and start typing "calculator" it brings up the old Win7 calculator. How did you get a full-screen Metro one?
I love Win8's Start screen. I took 5 minutes to organize it and get rid of the stupid Metro apps I don't use. I have a column of work-related things, a column of fun things, and a bunch of stuff I use occasionally. To open a program I press the Windows key, then mouse over a tiny amount to what I want. Way faster workflow than I ever had before. When I try to use my kids' Win7 machine, I now find the Start menu painful.
I don't really have anything new to add to the conversation, but I want to say thanks.
I discovered Slashdot while I was in college, about 10 years ago. I used it to get current events to talk about in my computers and ethics class. Since then, I've checked it nearly daily. I've spent many a happy lunch hour hanging around this site. There are other sites for news and discussion, but I've always come back to/.
Thanks again, Rob. I hope your next project, whatever it may be, is as successful, or at least fun, as this has been.
If I recall correctly, when King and company made Kingdom Hospital a few years ago, the same guy directed all 11 episodes (13 TV-hours). It's a TON of work for one guy to do, but if Ron Howard thinks he can get it right, I say go for it.
That's almost too bad. Syzygy is such a cool word. (And I almost got a chance to play it in Scrabble once. I had all the right letters, but my uncle decided to use the S on the board for something else.)
Absolutely. I remember a physics test that was open book and open notes. I had only missed a couple of days of class and a couple of homework assignments and I ended up with a around a 54% on the test. Quite possibly the hardest test I took through my entire time in college.
I might be wrong (someone official, please correct me if I am) but it does look like some of the shows that used to be entirely free will now be behind the Hulu Plus paywall. For example, Miami Vice currently has 4 seasons available. That's on the list of shows that will be available in Hulu Plus. Does this mean that it will no longer be available for free? Or will they be changing it (like they did with Buffy and Arrested Development) so that only one season at a time is available?
Honestly, I rarely watch the older shows, and I'm ok with Hulu keeping the latest 5 or so episodes of the shows I watch. It looks like very little will actually change for me, either.
Maybe the Guggenheim has changed in the last 15 years, but the last time I was there nearly every piece of "art" that I saw was some pointless sculpture. For example, one sculpture was just barbed wire wrapped around a tree trunk. This is art? I only remember one piece that I liked in the entire museum (a painting of a lobster and a cat done by Picasso, I think). This is the perfect place to show off awful, pointless videos. They'll fit right in.
Re:Babylon 5 / Firefly / Star Blazers
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
Thank you. If not for your name, I'd have sworn I wrote your post. At the end of Lost we knew nothing more than the characters themselves did (except Hurley, but he probably has a few hundred years more experience than the rest). That's how it had always been through the show. I enjoyed the ending. Bad guys got what they deserved, good guys got what they deserved. And everything I wanted answered was given at least a vague explanation somewhere in season 6.
I will be so very, very glad when I never have to see a Flash ridden site again.
Out of curiosity, what does HTML5 have in it that will prevent web developers from making sites that are just as annoying as Flash-based ones? I'm purely an applications developer, not a web developer, but it seems to me that you can stick a whole bunch of video tags on a page and you'll have a site that looks suspiciously like most of the web does now. At least right now I can use FlashBlock in Firefox to keep the useless Flash stuff hidden.
There is a difference between art and entertainment, in that there is art that simply isn't entertaining. This applies to sculpture, paintings, movies and even video games. Movies are an art form. And I've seen some that were simply no good. This doesn't mean they weren't art. They were simply bad art. I've seen sculptures that were the same. Someone thought that a piece of barbed wire wrapped around a tree trunk deserved a place in the Guggenheim museum. They must have thought it was art. I thought it was something that should have been thrown away.
I'm not saying that GTA IV is good art. I've never played it. But I do think that any game that makes you feel some real emotion or makes you think is artistic at some level. It's not the Mona Lisa, but it's something.
But the technology *has* to be mostly separate from the plot....In Sci-Fi, the fiction has to come before the science
Yes. The problem that ST:TNG (and probably the others; I kinda quite watching Star Trek after that ended) ran into was when episode plots were resolved with bad, techy science. When a Star Trek writer could write the climax of an episode as "[tech] the [tech]. Geordi does the [tech] and saves the day" that's a BAD episode. Episodes that were about people and their interactions ("there are FOUR lights!") could be (and sometimes were) really good episodes.
I'm a huge WoT fan, started reading them right before the 6th book came out. And I've noticed something really weird. I agree with most of the negative things people say about it. The books are too long. There's too much description of scenery (although even Tolkien seemed to think that everyone wants to know what kind of trees were in every forest in Middle Earth). Lots of the characters (women, in particular) are kind of 1-dimensional. All true. But here's the thing: to me, anyway, the story is just so freaking cool that all the negative stuff no longer matters. After reading a page/scene/book/etc I don't think about the writing. I remember what happened. There's most of a very long, very cool movie in my head. And I am thrilled to have Sanderson giving me the ending that Jordan intending to that movie.
Anyone that's a fan of fantasy books at all should read Mistborn (and Sanderson's other books). It's not quite like any other fantasy I've ever read. There's a good amount of action. A good amount of character development. Some people are there for the action, some are there for the motivations. Sanderson is amazingly good at writing both. I gave a copy of the series to my dad who read them and then told me: "The last 10 pages make the whole series worth reading." Man, those books were fun.
There's one thing about Star Wars that has bothered me since I was about 8. If C3-PO is supposed to be fluent in 6 million forms of communication, why is sign language not one of them? I assume there are deaf people in the Star Wars universe. I would assume that they have created their own sign language of some sort. Maybe 3PO can understand them, but he can't talk back to them. Seems like a pretty big flaw in a protocol droid that is supposed to be able to work as a translator.
Thank you! I always appreciate it when someone can appropriately quote Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett (or, in your case, both).
Where are my mod points when I need them?
Nethack's description of their achievements (actually called "conduct") is what makes them worthwhile. From the Nethack Guidebook: "certain players seek to challenge themselves by imposing restrictions on the way they play the game". When I play games that have achievements, I typically play pretty much all the way through once, the way the game is designed to be played. Then I go back (replay value? in a modern game? unheard of!) and start playing for achievements that seem like they could be fun. To use a slightly older game for example: Portal takes almost no time to beat. And in the process you get 3 out of about 20 achievements. So trying to get the others gave me something to do in a game that I had already "completed". That was fun and made it more worth the money I paid for it.
There are a lot of things in recent games that I don't like (unlockables, downloadable content, and pay-to-play come quickly to mind) but achievements are actually pretty cool.
Abso-freaking-lutely. ABC's client drives me completely insane. For whatever reason it just doesn't work well on my laptop. Maybe it's my wireless network. Maybe it's the time of day that I'm trying to watch their shows. I don't know. All I know is that HULU gives me no trouble at all and ABC only occasionally works. Please, Disney/ABC, move your shows (at least "Lost", "Life on Mars" and "Private Practice") over to HULU. Or at least get something that works as well. (But moving to a proven, reliable system is better than starting from scratch or using a less-capable alternative.)
I had the same problem with GIMP at first. Then I realized that by using the "Paint along Path" or "Stroke Selection" options you can draw your ellipse (or rectangle or whatever) with _any_ of the available painting tools and brushes. You're not limited to just a simple colored shape, like you are if you use something like MS Paint. In typical GIMP fashion, it's a couple of non-intuitive steps that give you a great amount of flexibility.
One day?!?!?! Holy crap. That one took me nearly 4 months! But reading it that fast had to be fun. It's got a really good, tight plot with details that were easy to miss or forget when it took me so long to read it.
Slashdot Mirror
February 14, 2002 - The day that CmdrTaco's life changed forever: https://slashdot.org/story/02/...
I agree with pretty much every word you said. I wish I had some mod points to mod this comment up.
As far as I can tell on my Win8 computer (and this is backed up by the Engadget article) there is no Metro calculator. When I open the start screen and start typing "calculator" it brings up the old Win7 calculator. How did you get a full-screen Metro one?
I love Win8's Start screen. I took 5 minutes to organize it and get rid of the stupid Metro apps I don't use. I have a column of work-related things, a column of fun things, and a bunch of stuff I use occasionally. To open a program I press the Windows key, then mouse over a tiny amount to what I want. Way faster workflow than I ever had before. When I try to use my kids' Win7 machine, I now find the Start menu painful.
I don't really have anything new to add to the conversation, but I want to say thanks.
I discovered Slashdot while I was in college, about 10 years ago. I used it to get current events to talk about in my computers and ethics class. Since then, I've checked it nearly daily. I've spent many a happy lunch hour hanging around this site. There are other sites for news and discussion, but I've always come back to /.
Thanks again, Rob. I hope your next project, whatever it may be, is as successful, or at least fun, as this has been.
Sorry. 13 episodes, 15 hours.
If I recall correctly, when King and company made Kingdom Hospital a few years ago, the same guy directed all 11 episodes (13 TV-hours). It's a TON of work for one guy to do, but if Ron Howard thinks he can get it right, I say go for it.
That's almost too bad. Syzygy is such a cool word. (And I almost got a chance to play it in Scrabble once. I had all the right letters, but my uncle decided to use the S on the board for something else.)
Absolutely. I remember a physics test that was open book and open notes. I had only missed a couple of days of class and a couple of homework assignments and I ended up with a around a 54% on the test. Quite possibly the hardest test I took through my entire time in college.
Meanwhile, what's appearing on Randy's screen is (mostly) incorrect information. A very cool plot device in a very cool book.
Honestly, I rarely watch the older shows, and I'm ok with Hulu keeping the latest 5 or so episodes of the shows I watch. It looks like very little will actually change for me, either.
Maybe the Guggenheim has changed in the last 15 years, but the last time I was there nearly every piece of "art" that I saw was some pointless sculpture. For example, one sculpture was just barbed wire wrapped around a tree trunk. This is art? I only remember one piece that I liked in the entire museum (a painting of a lobster and a cat done by Picasso, I think). This is the perfect place to show off awful, pointless videos. They'll fit right in.
Thank you. If not for your name, I'd have sworn I wrote your post. At the end of Lost we knew nothing more than the characters themselves did (except Hurley, but he probably has a few hundred years more experience than the rest). That's how it had always been through the show. I enjoyed the ending. Bad guys got what they deserved, good guys got what they deserved. And everything I wanted answered was given at least a vague explanation somewhere in season 6.
I will be so very, very glad when I never have to see a Flash ridden site again.
Out of curiosity, what does HTML5 have in it that will prevent web developers from making sites that are just as annoying as Flash-based ones? I'm purely an applications developer, not a web developer, but it seems to me that you can stick a whole bunch of video tags on a page and you'll have a site that looks suspiciously like most of the web does now. At least right now I can use FlashBlock in Firefox to keep the useless Flash stuff hidden.
There is a difference between art and entertainment, in that there is art that simply isn't entertaining. This applies to sculpture, paintings, movies and even video games. Movies are an art form. And I've seen some that were simply no good. This doesn't mean they weren't art. They were simply bad art. I've seen sculptures that were the same. Someone thought that a piece of barbed wire wrapped around a tree trunk deserved a place in the Guggenheim museum. They must have thought it was art. I thought it was something that should have been thrown away. I'm not saying that GTA IV is good art. I've never played it. But I do think that any game that makes you feel some real emotion or makes you think is artistic at some level. It's not the Mona Lisa, but it's something.
I don't know about mice, but I can easily picture my cats learning to do that. Scary, psychotic animals...
But the technology *has* to be mostly separate from the plot. ...In Sci-Fi, the fiction has to come before the science
Yes. The problem that ST:TNG (and probably the others; I kinda quite watching Star Trek after that ended) ran into was when episode plots were resolved with bad, techy science. When a Star Trek writer could write the climax of an episode as "[tech] the [tech]. Geordi does the [tech] and saves the day" that's a BAD episode. Episodes that were about people and their interactions ("there are FOUR lights!") could be (and sometimes were) really good episodes.
I'm a huge WoT fan, started reading them right before the 6th book came out. And I've noticed something really weird. I agree with most of the negative things people say about it. The books are too long. There's too much description of scenery (although even Tolkien seemed to think that everyone wants to know what kind of trees were in every forest in Middle Earth). Lots of the characters (women, in particular) are kind of 1-dimensional. All true. But here's the thing: to me, anyway, the story is just so freaking cool that all the negative stuff no longer matters. After reading a page/scene/book/etc I don't think about the writing. I remember what happened. There's most of a very long, very cool movie in my head. And I am thrilled to have Sanderson giving me the ending that Jordan intending to that movie.
Anyone that's a fan of fantasy books at all should read Mistborn (and Sanderson's other books). It's not quite like any other fantasy I've ever read. There's a good amount of action. A good amount of character development. Some people are there for the action, some are there for the motivations. Sanderson is amazingly good at writing both. I gave a copy of the series to my dad who read them and then told me: "The last 10 pages make the whole series worth reading." Man, those books were fun.
There's one thing about Star Wars that has bothered me since I was about 8. If C3-PO is supposed to be fluent in 6 million forms of communication, why is sign language not one of them? I assume there are deaf people in the Star Wars universe. I would assume that they have created their own sign language of some sort. Maybe 3PO can understand them, but he can't talk back to them. Seems like a pretty big flaw in a protocol droid that is supposed to be able to work as a translator.
Thank you! I always appreciate it when someone can appropriately quote Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett (or, in your case, both).
Where are my mod points when I need them?
Nethack's description of their achievements (actually called "conduct") is what makes them worthwhile. From the Nethack Guidebook: "certain players seek to challenge themselves by imposing restrictions on the way they play the game". When I play games that have achievements, I typically play pretty much all the way through once, the way the game is designed to be played. Then I go back (replay value? in a modern game? unheard of!) and start playing for achievements that seem like they could be fun. To use a slightly older game for example: Portal takes almost no time to beat. And in the process you get 3 out of about 20 achievements. So trying to get the others gave me something to do in a game that I had already "completed". That was fun and made it more worth the money I paid for it.
There are a lot of things in recent games that I don't like (unlockables, downloadable content, and pay-to-play come quickly to mind) but achievements are actually pretty cool.
Abso-freaking-lutely. ABC's client drives me completely insane. For whatever reason it just doesn't work well on my laptop. Maybe it's my wireless network. Maybe it's the time of day that I'm trying to watch their shows. I don't know. All I know is that HULU gives me no trouble at all and ABC only occasionally works. Please, Disney/ABC, move your shows (at least "Lost", "Life on Mars" and "Private Practice") over to HULU. Or at least get something that works as well. (But moving to a proven, reliable system is better than starting from scratch or using a less-capable alternative.)
I had the same problem with GIMP at first. Then I realized that by using the "Paint along Path" or "Stroke Selection" options you can draw your ellipse (or rectangle or whatever) with _any_ of the available painting tools and brushes. You're not limited to just a simple colored shape, like you are if you use something like MS Paint. In typical GIMP fashion, it's a couple of non-intuitive steps that give you a great amount of flexibility.
One day?!?!?! Holy crap. That one took me nearly 4 months! But reading it that fast had to be fun. It's got a really good, tight plot with details that were easy to miss or forget when it took me so long to read it.