I occasionally find myself wondering that. I think its biggest problem is that everyone thinks it's now "failed" and therefore not worth looking at.
It'd be nice to have a concise, text-based format for "describing" a 3-D scene, if only to play with.
Last time I read a coherent discussion of "what's wrong with VRML", there really seemed to be two real complaints that I remember:
While the text of a "scene" wasn't necessarily too large, TEXTURES for all the objects take/took an eternity to load up. (Still and issue, but less of one as broadband gets more popular).
What the heck do you really use it for? Interactive 3D has limited REAL usefulness on the web. For performance reasons, games tend to do better with the 3D (code and data) handled entirely "client-side" rather than read from a server.
Other than the occasional "virtual chat room" (and annoying advertisements, and "cartoons" - which Flash seems to cover nicely for most people already) there I'm guessing there's just not as much demand for 3D in this particular "niche" - which is unfortunate, since as I mentioned, I think it'd be fun to play with...
Where should someone with quick learning skills but no cooking background start?
I'd say pick a type of food you really like and learn to make it. Heck, the whole reason I know how to cook now is that many, many years ago, I had a conversation with my mother that went something like "Mom, will you make some cookies?" "No, I'm busy." "Well....can I?"....
My greatest recipie irritant is I am _not_ cooking for a small army. Generally how does one scale down a recipie[...]
Simple, don't use recipes:-). Most of the time, I just think in terms of proportion and flavor, and work it from there. It takes just a little practice, but you soon get a "feel" for how much food will result from THIS much raw material, and what it will taste like (and, by extension, what to do to it if you want it to taste differently in the end).
Either that, or get a bunch of Tupperware(tm) or whatever and resign yourself to eating the leftovers for lunch the next day...
Okay, I'm obviously NOT Alton Brown, but I am an opinionated person who cooks for fun (and am told I'm quite good at it...)
What can be done about the dumbing down of american cuisine?
Cook GOOD food and share it. Experiment and share the results. Invite people over and show them how much fun (and how easy) cooking is. If you don't want them standing around the kitchen watching, they can sit in the Living Room watching episodes of "Good Eats" (the only drawback to this is the danger of having people watching say "Wow that sounds GOOD! When will you make some of THAT?" and making more 'work' for you. I was "forced" to make French Onion Soup this weekend after someone saw the "Onion" episode....not that I'm complaining. P.S. Verjuice instead of Cognac. Yum. On the other hand, they may get impatient and decide to make whatever it is themselves, which, of course, is the ultimate goal anyway. Showing the two Chocolate-related episodes usually sparks some interest...)
The contrast between Real Food (both well-made "ordinary" food and the varieties of "exotic" food) and "McGrub(tm)" will sink in eventually, and as people start rediscovering that cooking is fun and a lot easier than they think, we'll start seeing higher expectation and better food everywhere...
I have always been a big fan of using recipes as guidelines for cooking and winging the rest[...]
What I generally do when I'm trying to cook something unlike anything I've cooked before is, quite literally, do a google search for the name of the food and "browse" through a few recipes that happen to be online until I get a feel for proportions and technique. Then I just go for it. Noodles, for example, came down to "An egg to about a cup (or in my case, about a double-handful) of semolina flour, with optionally a little water and/or oil to get the right texture. Mix. Roll. Cut. Boil. Eat."
You've written a book (which I now own a copy of, naturally). Shirley Corriher's written a book (which I also own a copy of).
Will Deb Duchon, Nutritional Anthropologist, also be writing a book, and if so, when will it come out (and if not, who do we mope at to encourage her?)
I've recently re-discovered how much fun cooking is, along with the advantage that not only is the food generally better that way, I get the additional advantage of being able to experiment with food styles that you just can't generally get in restaurants or out of a grocery store. My current "experimental theme" is Medieval European food (which I like because of it's unique flavor set and "free-form" cooking style [at least, compared to modern "books of recipes".])
I've noticed in a couple of your fine shows that you've repeated the silly fallacy that the style of food uses spices so often because "the meat was all rotten and they were trying to disguise the taste."
My question, then, is in two parts:
Where is a Nutritional Anthropologist to correct fallacies like this when you need one?
Have you/would you consider doing a "Medieval European Food"-themed show? Your show is probably one of the only ones around adventurous enough to take on such an unusual theme...
Hopefully, they'll include some technical information about the gadgetry and animatronics they used. I, for one, am eager to find out what they used to build the robots that played Obi-wan, Anakin, Padme, and the rest...:-)
The only way he can prevent the DVD from being pirated to death is if it includes tons and tons and tons of stuff on it.
And/Or charge a reasonable price for it. I'm thinking some of the DVD distributors are starting to clue into this - I've been seeing a few (obviously less famous [They put "Caveman" out on DVD????]) DVD's showingup for $7.99-$9.99 at the local superhypermegamart. That's NEW, not "previously viewed". Heck, that price range seemed just fine for "previously viewed" VHS's a few years ago...
When the price of a typical DVD (new) has dropped down to ~$10 or so (currently seems to be $15-20US for most of them right now) the only people who'll be left pirating will be unemployed small children abusing their parents' broadband connection.
Combined with your point, I'd say that what little real "piracy" there is of DVD's right now (far less than the MPAA claims, I suspect) will dwindle to near nothing in the next couple of years.
Unless, of course, cheap set-top "DivX;)" (or Ogg-Theora?) boxes with TV-out start showing up on the market...and maybe even then.
On the subject of spam and legalities, I've lately gotten a couple of those "blackmail" spams, you know the ones politely worded "we request your permission to contact you" in the subject, but with instructions that essentially boil down to "If you don't want us and our affiliates to spam you senseless, reply to us so we can confirm your email address and sell it to another spammer".
Is this even legal? Basically, they are asserting that if I don't actively decline their "offer", (and open myself up to be spammed by anyone they sell my "confirmed" address to), they claim I am "consenting" to be spammed by them and all of their affiliates.....
If I refuse to contact them and they spam me anyway, will that constitute harassment of some sort?
Ironically, BOTH of the last two spamming companies (both of them seem to be set up specifically to spam on behalf of others) that have done this claim on their websites that they only use "triple opt-in" addresses, which is obviously a falsehood considering they wouldn't be contacting me at all if they weren't harvesting my email address from some other not-opted-into spam list or a website or something...and only the twisted mind of a spammer thinks "refusing contact" is the same as "Oh, please, spam me!"...
You know, MOST of the biotech/corporation-bashing that goes on here is of the knee-jerk variety and irritates me greatly, but I actually agree with this one....
Personally, i think the doctrine of "first sale" ought to apply to "patented" organisms just as it does (or at least, is SUPPOSED TO) to other things encumbered by the "intellectual property" label.
Hmmmm....though would that mean that the farmer's sale of the seeds is a "public performance"?......
(Side question - how much longer before the first of the GM plants' patents expire? Can't be long now, can it?....)
[...]the guy is a republican from texas, and frankly, I think he's a little too beholden to big business, and media in particular.[...]
Here we go again...I really wish people would quit pretending that only "Those Evil Republicans(tm)" are owned and operated by Big Business. I especially don't "get" the notion that MEDIA controls the republicans, especially with Hollings' and Biden's legislative behavior lately (and, e.g. Feinstein's vocal and passionate support for Big Media in California...)
Face it - BOTH of the "two parties" that the press ever mentions in any important way are wholly owned subsidiaries of major donors. The alleged "left" seems to be owned mostly by lawyers and media companies, while the "right" seems to be owned by "old-school" industries like manufacturing, oil, and power. Don't trust EITHER of them...
(Most of the "Big Media" companies DO give me the impresssion of having a "leaning" towards the Democratic Party [NOT a "liberal" or "leftist" slant - if that were true, we'd be seeing a lot more favorable stories about, e.g., Ralph Nader and the "Peace and Freedom" party and the "personal freedom" aspects of libertarianism and so on], with the exception of Rupert Murdoch's "FOX" channel. "The Two Parties", then, aren't really "Democrat" and "Republican", they are "Disney" and "Rupert".....)
Dagnabbit, I've somehow managed to develop a completely irrational impatience to see an "official" implementation, or at LEAST an official spec, for a reasonably free-as-in-speech video-in-ogg format, and now that Ogg/Vorbis 1.0 is out, I was hoping they'd get a chance to get at least a creaky alpha version of the VP3 code and ogg mux'er out Real Soon Now...but instead [from the press release]:
the Xiph.org Foundation will begin immediate work on the Ogg Vorbis plug-ins.
Another distraction....
Hopefully, the potential for Theora to be used in RealPlayer/Server will spur some development on it soon, too. People are starting to get impatient, and unnofficial video-in-ogg is already appearing which may or may not be "compatible" with the official one, if it ever comes out....
If I read the bugtraq announcement correctly, on IA32 (including, I assume, my K6-2 Linux Box hosting the webserver) is "safe" from remote code execution (but the server can still be crashed by the exploit). Did I read that right?...
I'm one of those obsessed nerds that keeps a local copy of CVS for projects that I am interested in (just to use, typically, not as a developer), and updates them from time to time just to see what's changing (and whether or not I want to recompile to see it).
In the last couple of days, a bunch of spec documents have been added to CVS for vorbis and ogg...
Hopefully now they'll get going on the Ogg Theora project. I wonder, though - how much of it will appear in the VP32 module and how much in the Ogg module? I imagine they were putting off dealing with "video in Ogg" until the 1.0 release...
I was baking in 5th grade, geeking on a VIC20 by the 9th[...]
Hmmmm. Did Vic-20's have some sort of subliminal cooking message? Perhaps "cooking is fun" was appearing every 1/30th of a second where the "Press Play on Tape" message was and we never noticed....
As a recreational improvisational cook, I agree completely. Anyone who finds this hard to believe may want to check out a book called "Bake it like a Man" .
This was the first place I saw reference to using a blowtorch in the kitchen (creme brulee', of course.)
Think about it, cooking involves hacking things up with knives, pounding things, playing with fire and complex power tools...all KINDS of "Manly" things....I find it amazing that male chauvinists even let their wives into the kitchen let alone have them do all of the cooking....(Fortunately, my wife is ALSO a talented cook, so we just switch off from time to time...)
I really hope he isn't suggesting that you staple shut a paper bag and put it in the microwave.
Actually, if I remember correctly, not only DOES he, but he EXPLAINS WHY AND HOW HE/YOU CAN (i.e. he doesn't do it out of ignorance of what happens when you put a bunch of metal in the Microwave) without making your microwave explode and/or belch smoke.
...as if having thousands of dollars of computer equipment somehow is a reflection of their cooking skills...
ESPECIALLY after seeing him make a cold-smoker out of some yard-sale refuse and a cardboard box (instead of buying some fancy expensive commercial thing - He's like the "Anti-Martha-Stewart" [My wife an I refer to her show as "Martha's Gadget Shop" since it seemed like she was selling some overpriced special device for everything she does...]), and recommend buying a lot of your cooking supplies at a hardware store. ($25 spice grinder for nutmeg? Or $2 wood rasp?....). This is NOT an "expensive technological gizmo" snob by any stretch of the imagination...
I am living proof that you are incorrect about this one...I've been computer nerding (~20 years now - I started with a Vic-20 ["Why, sonny, when I was YOUR age...."]) almost as long as I've been cooking (an additional 3-4 years, casually).
Cooking is FUN, if it's done improvisationally. It is, as the reviewer implies, a lot like coding in its philosophy. At least, the way *I* code. ("Hmmm. I want to grab THIS off the net and do THAT to it. [Grab keyboard. Hackhackhackhackhack. Test. Run. Enjoy.]" "Hmmm. I'm hungry, I want something with beef. [Grab knife. Hackhackhackhackhack. Cook. Spice. Enjoy.])
However, while I've not yet personally read it, "The Joy of Cooking" is, indeed, one of the classics and almost certainly worth looking over (we've got it in the house here...somewhere...)
(Disclaimer - this is NOT to say that I don't also eat my share of Pesto-sauce pizza or Jack-in-the-Box from time to time...)
Slashdot Mirror
If he's into multimedia and codecs and such. I'd love to see usable code come out of the Ogg/Theora project soon - especially an encoder...
He's obviously got talent and experience with related coding from BladeENC, and Theora has a similar goal ("free" multimedia for wide use)...
Not that I'm anxious to see Theora take off or anything :-)
I occasionally find myself wondering that. I think its biggest problem is that everyone thinks it's now "failed" and therefore not worth looking at.
It'd be nice to have a concise, text-based format for "describing" a 3-D scene, if only to play with.
Last time I read a coherent discussion of "what's wrong with VRML", there really seemed to be two real complaints that I remember:
Other than the occasional "virtual chat room" (and annoying advertisements, and "cartoons" - which Flash seems to cover nicely for most people already) there I'm guessing there's just not as much demand for 3D in this particular "niche" - which is unfortunate, since as I mentioned, I think it'd be fun to play with...
I'd say pick a type of food you really like and learn to make it. Heck, the whole reason I know how to cook now is that many, many years ago, I had a conversation with my mother that went something like "Mom, will you make some cookies?" "No, I'm busy." "Well....can I?"....
Not even Famine? :-)
Simple, don't use recipes :-). Most of the time, I just think in terms of proportion and flavor, and work it from there. It takes just a little practice, but you soon get a "feel" for how much food will result from THIS much raw material, and what it will taste like (and, by extension, what to do to it if you want it to taste differently in the end).
Either that, or get a bunch of Tupperware(tm) or whatever and resign yourself to eating the leftovers for lunch the next day...
Okay, I'm obviously NOT Alton Brown, but I am an opinionated person who cooks for fun (and am told I'm quite good at it...)
What can be done about the dumbing down of american cuisine?Cook GOOD food and share it. Experiment and share the results. Invite people over and show them how much fun (and how easy) cooking is. If you don't want them standing around the kitchen watching, they can sit in the Living Room watching episodes of "Good Eats" (the only drawback to this is the danger of having people watching say "Wow that sounds GOOD! When will you make some of THAT?" and making more 'work' for you. I was "forced" to make French Onion Soup this weekend after someone saw the "Onion" episode....not that I'm complaining. P.S. Verjuice instead of Cognac. Yum. On the other hand, they may get impatient and decide to make whatever it is themselves, which, of course, is the ultimate goal anyway. Showing the two Chocolate-related episodes usually sparks some interest...)
The contrast between Real Food (both well-made "ordinary" food and the varieties of "exotic" food) and "McGrub(tm)" will sink in eventually, and as people start rediscovering that cooking is fun and a lot easier than they think, we'll start seeing higher expectation and better food everywhere...
What I generally do when I'm trying to cook something unlike anything I've cooked before is, quite literally, do a google search for the name of the food and "browse" through a few recipes that happen to be online until I get a feel for proportions and technique. Then I just go for it. Noodles, for example, came down to "An egg to about a cup (or in my case, about a double-handful) of semolina flour, with optionally a little water and/or oil to get the right texture. Mix. Roll. Cut. Boil. Eat."
You've written a book (which I now own a copy of, naturally). Shirley Corriher's written a book (which I also own a copy of).
Will Deb Duchon, Nutritional Anthropologist, also be writing a book, and if so, when will it come out (and if not, who do we mope at to encourage her?)
I've recently re-discovered how much fun cooking is, along with the advantage that not only is the food generally better that way, I get the additional advantage of being able to experiment with food styles that you just can't generally get in restaurants or out of a grocery store. My current "experimental theme" is Medieval European food (which I like because of it's unique flavor set and "free-form" cooking style [at least, compared to modern "books of recipes".])
I've noticed in a couple of your fine shows that you've repeated the silly fallacy that the style of food uses spices so often because "the meat was all rotten and they were trying to disguise the taste."
My question, then, is in two parts:
That wouldn't do me much good when they take my name off of THEIR list then sell it to some other spammer with a different IP address...
I think public beatings may be the only potentially effective deterrent to spammers sometimes...
Hopefully, they'll include some technical information about the gadgetry and animatronics they used. I, for one, am eager to find out what they used to build the robots that played Obi-wan, Anakin, Padme, and the rest... :-)
And/Or charge a reasonable price for it. I'm thinking some of the DVD distributors are starting to clue into this - I've been seeing a few (obviously less famous [They put "Caveman" out on DVD????]) DVD's showingup for $7.99-$9.99 at the local superhypermegamart. That's NEW, not "previously viewed". Heck, that price range seemed just fine for "previously viewed" VHS's a few years ago...
When the price of a typical DVD (new) has dropped down to ~$10 or so (currently seems to be $15-20US for most of them right now) the only people who'll be left pirating will be unemployed small children abusing their parents' broadband connection.
Combined with your point, I'd say that what little real "piracy" there is of DVD's right now (far less than the MPAA claims, I suspect) will dwindle to near nothing in the next couple of years.
Unless, of course, cheap set-top "DivX;)" (or Ogg-Theora?) boxes with TV-out start showing up on the market...and maybe even then.
On the subject of spam and legalities, I've lately gotten a couple of those "blackmail" spams, you know the ones politely worded "we request your permission to contact you" in the subject, but with instructions that essentially boil down to "If you don't want us and our affiliates to spam you senseless, reply to us so we can confirm your email address and sell it to another spammer".
Is this even legal? Basically, they are asserting that if I don't actively decline their "offer", (and open myself up to be spammed by anyone they sell my "confirmed" address to), they claim I am "consenting" to be spammed by them and all of their affiliates.....
If I refuse to contact them and they spam me anyway, will that constitute harassment of some sort?
Ironically, BOTH of the last two spamming companies (both of them seem to be set up specifically to spam on behalf of others) that have done this claim on their websites that they only use "triple opt-in" addresses, which is obviously a falsehood considering they wouldn't be contacting me at all if they weren't harvesting my email address from some other not-opted-into spam list or a website or something...and only the twisted mind of a spammer thinks "refusing contact" is the same as "Oh, please, spam me!"...
You know, MOST of the biotech/corporation-bashing that goes on here is of the knee-jerk variety and irritates me greatly, but I actually agree with this one....
Personally, i think the doctrine of "first sale" ought to apply to "patented" organisms just as it does (or at least, is SUPPOSED TO) to other things encumbered by the "intellectual property" label.
Hmmmm....though would that mean that the farmer's sale of the seeds is a "public performance"?......
(Side question - how much longer before the first of the GM plants' patents expire? Can't be long now, can it?....)
Here we go again...I really wish people would quit pretending that only "Those Evil Republicans(tm)" are owned and operated by Big Business. I especially don't "get" the notion that MEDIA controls the republicans, especially with Hollings' and Biden's legislative behavior lately (and, e.g. Feinstein's vocal and passionate support for Big Media in California...)
Face it - BOTH of the "two parties" that the press ever mentions in any important way are wholly owned subsidiaries of major donors. The alleged "left" seems to be owned mostly by lawyers and media companies, while the "right" seems to be owned by "old-school" industries like manufacturing, oil, and power. Don't trust EITHER of them...
(Most of the "Big Media" companies DO give me the impresssion of having a "leaning" towards the Democratic Party [NOT a "liberal" or "leftist" slant - if that were true, we'd be seeing a lot more favorable stories about, e.g., Ralph Nader and the "Peace and Freedom" party and the "personal freedom" aspects of libertarianism and so on], with the exception of Rupert Murdoch's "FOX" channel. "The Two Parties", then, aren't really "Democrat" and "Republican", they are "Disney" and "Rupert".....)
Dagnabbit, I've somehow managed to develop a completely irrational impatience to see an "official" implementation, or at LEAST an official spec, for a reasonably free-as-in-speech video-in-ogg format, and now that Ogg/Vorbis 1.0 is out, I was hoping they'd get a chance to get at least a creaky alpha version of the VP3 code and ogg mux'er out Real Soon Now...but instead [from the press release]:
the Xiph.org Foundation will begin immediate work on the Ogg Vorbis plug-ins.Another distraction....
Hopefully, the potential for Theora to be used in RealPlayer/Server will spur some development on it soon, too. People are starting to get impatient, and unnofficial video-in-ogg is already appearing which may or may not be "compatible" with the official one, if it ever comes out....
If I read the bugtraq announcement correctly, on IA32 (including, I assume, my K6-2 Linux Box hosting the webserver) is "safe" from remote code execution (but the server can still be crashed by the exploit). Did I read that right?...
Slashdoter[sic]
Hey! We prefer "Differently Rational", thank you very much, you oppressive tool of The Man(tm)!
I'm one of those obsessed nerds that keeps a local copy of CVS for projects that I am interested in (just to use, typically, not as a developer), and updates them from time to time just to see what's changing (and whether or not I want to recompile to see it).
In the last couple of days, a bunch of spec documents have been added to CVS for vorbis and ogg...
Hopefully now they'll get going on the Ogg Theora project. I wonder, though - how much of it will appear in the VP32 module and how much in the Ogg module? I imagine they were putting off dealing with "video in Ogg" until the 1.0 release...
Hmmmm. Did Vic-20's have some sort of subliminal cooking message? Perhaps "cooking is fun" was appearing every 1/30th of a second where the "Press Play on Tape" message was and we never noticed....
I've been hoping to find something like this (that I could get to work) for some time now, to, e.g., make VCD's out of FLASH cartoons...
I did run into what appeared to be an abandoned project ("xvidcap", I think?) but I couldn't get it to compile...
As a recreational improvisational cook, I agree completely. Anyone who finds this hard to believe may want to check out a book called "Bake it like a Man" .
This was the first place I saw reference to using a blowtorch in the kitchen (creme brulee', of course.)
Think about it, cooking involves hacking things up with knives, pounding things, playing with fire and complex power tools...all KINDS of "Manly" things....I find it amazing that male chauvinists even let their wives into the kitchen let alone have them do all of the cooking....(Fortunately, my wife is ALSO a talented cook, so we just switch off from time to time...)
Actually, if I remember correctly, not only DOES he, but he EXPLAINS WHY AND HOW HE/YOU CAN (i.e. he doesn't do it out of ignorance of what happens when you put a bunch of metal in the Microwave) without making your microwave explode and/or belch smoke.
ESPECIALLY after seeing him make a cold-smoker out of some yard-sale refuse and a cardboard box (instead of buying some fancy expensive commercial thing - He's like the "Anti-Martha-Stewart" [My wife an I refer to her show as "Martha's Gadget Shop" since it seemed like she was selling some overpriced special device for everything she does...]), and recommend buying a lot of your cooking supplies at a hardware store. ($25 spice grinder for nutmeg? Or $2 wood rasp?....). This is NOT an "expensive technological gizmo" snob by any stretch of the imagination...
I am living proof that you are incorrect about this one...I've been computer nerding (~20 years now - I started with a Vic-20 ["Why, sonny, when I was YOUR age...."]) almost as long as I've been cooking (an additional 3-4 years, casually).
Cooking is FUN, if it's done improvisationally. It is, as the reviewer implies, a lot like coding in its philosophy. At least, the way *I* code. ("Hmmm. I want to grab THIS off the net and do THAT to it. [Grab keyboard. Hackhackhackhackhack. Test. Run. Enjoy.]" "Hmmm. I'm hungry, I want something with beef. [Grab knife. Hackhackhackhackhack. Cook. Spice. Enjoy.])
However, while I've not yet personally read it, "The Joy of Cooking" is, indeed, one of the classics and almost certainly worth looking over (we've got it in the house here...somewhere...)
(Disclaimer - this is NOT to say that I don't also eat my share of Pesto-sauce pizza or Jack-in-the-Box from time to time...)