I felt like this movie had a lot to do with parenting too. The most poignant moments in the film were Sulley's "parenting dilemmas": when boo was frightened of him for the first time, when he had to leave her for her own good, when he had to sacrifice his friendships and his career for her... these were key parts of the film.
I suppose the moral question here is "am I really going to sacrifice ____ for my child?"
Well, look at AOL Instant Messenger. A great little app, that stores some useful stuff on AOL's server for you--namely your buddy list. Wherever you go, if you have your username and your password and an internet connection, you have your buddy list.
Microsoft wants this to happen more and more. You can get your email (hotmail) from anywhere, you can use Word on your buddy's computer who hasn't bought it, you can access your documents from anywhere, your photos, etc... All the good data is stored on the server, all that hangs around locally is the generic program data and a nice big cache.
So if everything you do needs to grab stuff off the server, do you really want to authenticate everything? Type one user/pwd into winamp, one into AIM, one into Outlook, another for slashdot? No, passport allows you to log in once, and forget about it.
Yeah, when you buy a couple of things online now, it's not hard to type in a couple of passwords, and have to enter your personal information every now and then, but damn! It gets more and more annoying every day. And when *everything* you do on the computer wants to be authenticated (not a bad idea) it's going to be unbearable.
I just hope sun or whoever goes ahead and provides a nice open alternative to passport, because it's not a bad idea.
It'd be one thing if this was for a PowerPC machine... MacOS X's PDF-based display system could actually make use of this resolution.
But at over 200dpi, the file menu in Win2k is going to be less than a tenth of an inch tall!
So you set your display settings to "really really big fonts and a big theme" but that won't really solve the problem, as a huge portion of the interface (web pages) are still designed for a raster-based scale and will either a) look like crap, or b) have parts of the interface be too tiny to hit with the mouse.
Even so, I hope this causes folks to start realizing that screen scale and resolution need to be independant. The "just squint your eyes, you wuss!" attitude to separating the two doesn't really work with this new tech.
"Vibrating Sandbox" doesn't want its music distributed on *ster, then that's their problem.
Why doesn't some small band sue the RIAA for shutting down their major distribution channel? Isn't it anti-competetive for a monopoly like the RIAA to shut down my (as a small-time artist's) only way to get my music out there: p2p filesharing?
gave way, causing the 6 million lb. floor to fall and begin the domino effect
Out of curiosity, Would it be possible that we could safeguard (to a certain extent) against this by designing each floor to withstand the force of the floors above falling 15ft? So Floor 56 could withstand the weight of floors 56-110 falling from the height of the 57th floor.
The bottom floors would have to be ridiculously sturdy... is it way more than would be feasable?
Don't think that Eazel accomplished nothing. For one thing, they brought usability issues much closer to the forefront of the minds of the GNOME organization.
Also bear in mind that file managers like nautilus to an even greater extent the Windows XP version of Windows Explorer are becoming more and more like a document-centric operating environment in and of themselves (as opposed to the application-centric OS as a whole).
As it stands today, you can start Windows XP, maximize Windows Explorer, hide the taskbar, and still have a very functional OS. You can download pictures from a digital camera, edit them to a limited degree, burn CDs, browse the web, and do email all from within the file browser.
So don't discount the importance of a "half assed file manager". OS's are too set in stone to change the face of computing. Applications like the web browser (and now the file manager) grow from small incidental applications into robust environments that can change the way we use computers.
-Erik
Re:Training and Planning are the keys.
on
KDE 2.2.1 Up
·
· Score: 1
Linux is soooo ready for the desktop.
Don't get me wrong... Linux is great, and I'm very excited about it's future on the desktop, but I just installed Windows XP over my Win2k partition last night, and it's quite clear that Linux has a good distance further to go.
Managing digital photos and other files for instance is a dream on XP. You can sort photos by date taken and the thumbnail engine is blazingly fast. Burning files to a CD or ordering prints online is one click away. In the control panel, the most common tasks are brought to the forefront, and many moderately advanced tasks can be done by newbies.
Linux, on the other hand, can be very difficult to configure. Even simple changes in managing user profiles, networking, managing hardware and software are often impossible for a non-hacker user to figure out without taking an afternoon to learn about the back end. Most configuration options are available only thought the command line.
There's more... centralized, stardardized help, universal anti-aliasing, task-based interaction, and a very solid, robust feeling interface all make Windows a better experience (not to proliferate MS's lame slogan) a nicer one.
Of course, we have Ximian Setup Tools, Pango, Nautilus and dozens of other projects that are addressing these issues right now, so I'm nothing but optimistic that Linux will be a desktop contender some day.
Yes, but gossip and cruelty are not exactly the most complicated issues there are. Most reasonably self-aware people stop being bullies by their mid twenties (I hope?) and well, some people never get over gossip. But Harry Potter looks like The Little Engine That Could compared to Ender's Game.
I didn't mean to imply that literature for adults couldn't be written about children, just that in this case (Harry Potter) the issues in question are most relevant to a child's life, as are the plots and the attitudes.
Ender's game, on the other hand asks some very big, very adult questions about things like responsibility and childhood. Yes, childhood is an adult issue. To children there is no childhood, it's just "life". It's not until you become an adult that whether you were allowed to live a childhood matters. I don't remember much of EG, but freedom, genocide, and morality were big, adult issues.
They are children's books because the language is accessible to children, the issues in question are typically those important to children, and the main characters are what, 14 in this fourth book?
The fact is the books are written from a child's perspective, not an adult's. They don't seem to me a particularly poignant commentary on my life today. They are wonderful, fantastic stories that remind me of childhood in plot, attitude, and morality. (ah... my wizarding days)
The 3Dwm project does not aim to create the "be-all-end-all" 3D user interface. There is little sense in arbitrarily choosing from a number of Most people have a hard enough time keeping a 2D desktop organised that they'd hardly want things at arbitrary 3D angles!! Wouldn't a far better way to go be
Perhaps you're referring to the 3Dwm project? Of course, what you're talking about above has little relevance if that is the case. From the 3Dwm introduction: "The 3Dwm project does not aim to create the 'be-all-end-all' 3D user interface... To the contrary, the mission is to build a solid research platform with the necessary primitives to support just about any kind of user interface."
The fine folks working on 3dwm are not claiming to have some great desktop. They are simply making the tools that will allow ambitious developers to write 3D interfaces. Not to mention the fact that they are squarely against the oddly angled 2D windows you are complaining about. Running current apps in a 3D environment is just a migration nicety. Apps that take full advantage of living in a 3D environment should (hopefully) provide read gains over 2D interfaces. Think Borders Books vs. one very very very long bookshelf.
In my experience downloading... erm, "independant" films through gnutella, I've found that a 500mb DIVX file is simply not going to be very good quality. And I'm not talking about amazing sharpness or biting sounds. At 500mb, there are often annoying intruding audio artifacts. The video is a tenth of the resolution of DVD and it looks like a JPEG on the highest compression setting.
The gap between 500 and 800mb really seems to make all the difference in the world. At 800mb, the quality is just good enough that you can forget about the artifacts and get into the movie.
-Erik
P.S. I know the length of the movie changes the file size. I'm generalizing here.
"Gender" in this context is a wholly American politically-correct corruption of the language
So American isn't sexually repressed? Wouldn't a language grow to mirror the mindset of the people who speak it? On what planet is a language controlled by something other than how people use it?
remember this is the entry level - the top end starts at $7699 less monitor (but with the apple superdrive DVD burner) and a monitor starts at $1399
I guess you missed the price cuts in the last couple of months. A 867MHz PowerPC G4 with the superdrive DVD burneris $2,499.00 and the 17" flat panel screen is $999.
Granted you can get a more powerful PC for $3,498, but not with a DVD burner and a screen like that.
So Mr. Gates doesn't like these structural remedies? Perhaps he'd prefer a Mitnick-style behavioral remedy.
Gates and his descendant Mr. Ballamer are never again to run a technology company in any way, shape, or form. No CEO, no "head technologist", no shareholder, no V.P., no nothing. They've demonstrated that at the helm of a technology company they have no restraint. They will break the law every time.
Mitnick can't use a computer, they can't run a business. Fair is fair.
When Hannibal asks when we might play "a game that looks like FF," Troy Brooks, the Production Systems Supervisor says he "can't even imagine."
Well, if it took 934,162 processor-days to render the final movie, thats...
22419888 hours or...
11209944 times real-time (assuming a 2hr movie)
Assuming computing power doubles every 18 months, computers will be 16777216 times faster in 36 years (24 18 month periods = 2^24 times faster)
So, a single workstation will be able to render the whole movie in real-time in the year 2037 (at 66% capacity!) Use the remaining third of the processor for game logic and A.I., and you have a game that looks like FFTSW.
Imagine software following actors around through their career, watching their movies and public appearances and learning their style and their history and developing a database to draw on to simulate them.
The actor hits their third blockbuster at 28 and the computer says "I think I can take it from here."
many cel animators concentrate on the movement and articulation of the bodies, rather than detail of surfaces
This is why I like Pixar... they grok this. While they do invest heavily in rendering technology and tools development, there is a lot of pure animation talent at Pixar.
It's projects like Apache (and Tomcat, etc.) that are examples of what we need to be doing
What about CS undegrads like myself who think Java and C# type languages are nicer to code in than C++? And people who want strong IDE's because they speed along the coding/debugging process? Yet we also appreciate the value of OSS.
It's projects like this that will make linux a more appealing platform for us to develop on. Maybe Ximian is copying Windows. But I'm sure there are lots of Windows developers who've tried linux and said to themselves, "I'd love to do more with linux, but general system maintenance for the desktop is a pain, there's no solid groupware, no decent IDEs, and no one is trying to compete with Microsoft's new technologies."
Well guess what? Ximian is actually trying to solve these issues to attract developers from the often-more-appealing Windows development platform.
Slashdot Mirror
I felt like this movie had a lot to do with parenting too. The most poignant moments in the film were Sulley's "parenting dilemmas": when boo was frightened of him for the first time, when he had to leave her for her own good, when he had to sacrifice his friendships and his career for her... these were key parts of the film.
I suppose the moral question here is "am I really going to sacrifice ____ for my child?"
-Erik
Hmm... if the drive is silent, how do you tell if the machine crashed or is just busy thinking?
-Erik
Before I reinstalled, XP gave me a BSOD every time I tried to shut down.
-Erik
Well, look at AOL Instant Messenger. A great little app, that stores some useful stuff on AOL's server for you--namely your buddy list. Wherever you go, if you have your username and your password and an internet connection, you have your buddy list.
Microsoft wants this to happen more and more. You can get your email (hotmail) from anywhere, you can use Word on your buddy's computer who hasn't bought it, you can access your documents from anywhere, your photos, etc... All the good data is stored on the server, all that hangs around locally is the generic program data and a nice big cache.
So if everything you do needs to grab stuff off the server, do you really want to authenticate everything? Type one user/pwd into winamp, one into AIM, one into Outlook, another for slashdot? No, passport allows you to log in once, and forget about it.
Yeah, when you buy a couple of things online now, it's not hard to type in a couple of passwords, and have to enter your personal information every now and then, but damn! It gets more and more annoying every day. And when *everything* you do on the computer wants to be authenticated (not a bad idea) it's going to be unbearable.
I just hope sun or whoever goes ahead and provides a nice open alternative to passport, because it's not a bad idea.
-Erik
Ah, sarcasm. Thanks, man... that was the first out loud laugh I've had on slashdot in a long time.
-Erik
It'd be one thing if this was for a PowerPC machine... MacOS X's PDF-based display system could actually make use of this resolution.
But at over 200dpi, the file menu in Win2k is going to be less than a tenth of an inch tall!
So you set your display settings to "really really big fonts and a big theme" but that won't really solve the problem, as a huge portion of the interface (web pages) are still designed for a raster-based scale and will either a) look like crap, or b) have parts of the interface be too tiny to hit with the mouse.
Even so, I hope this causes folks to start realizing that screen scale and resolution need to be independant. The "just squint your eyes, you wuss!" attitude to separating the two doesn't really work with this new tech.
-Erik
"Vibrating Sandbox" doesn't want its music distributed on *ster, then that's their problem.
Why doesn't some small band sue the RIAA for shutting down their major distribution channel? Isn't it anti-competetive for a monopoly like the RIAA to shut down my (as a small-time artist's) only way to get my music out there: p2p filesharing?
-Erik
gave way, causing the 6 million lb. floor to fall and begin the domino effect
Out of curiosity, Would it be possible that we could safeguard (to a certain extent) against this by designing each floor to withstand the force of the floors above falling 15ft? So Floor 56 could withstand the weight of floors 56-110 falling from the height of the 57th floor.
The bottom floors would have to be ridiculously sturdy... is it way more than would be feasable?
-Erik
Don't think that Eazel accomplished nothing. For one thing, they brought usability issues much closer to the forefront of the minds of the GNOME organization.
Also bear in mind that file managers like nautilus to an even greater extent the Windows XP version of Windows Explorer are becoming more and more like a document-centric operating environment in and of themselves (as opposed to the application-centric OS as a whole).
As it stands today, you can start Windows XP, maximize Windows Explorer, hide the taskbar, and still have a very functional OS. You can download pictures from a digital camera, edit them to a limited degree, burn CDs, browse the web, and do email all from within the file browser.
So don't discount the importance of a "half assed file manager". OS's are too set in stone to change the face of computing. Applications like the web browser (and now the file manager) grow from small incidental applications into robust environments that can change the way we use computers.
-Erik
Linux is soooo ready for the desktop.
Don't get me wrong... Linux is great, and I'm very excited about it's future on the desktop, but I just installed Windows XP over my Win2k partition last night, and it's quite clear that Linux has a good distance further to go.
Managing digital photos and other files for instance is a dream on XP. You can sort photos by date taken and the thumbnail engine is blazingly fast. Burning files to a CD or ordering prints online is one click away. In the control panel, the most common tasks are brought to the forefront, and many moderately advanced tasks can be done by newbies.
Linux, on the other hand, can be very difficult to configure. Even simple changes in managing user profiles, networking, managing hardware and software are often impossible for a non-hacker user to figure out without taking an afternoon to learn about the back end. Most configuration options are available only thought the command line.
There's more... centralized, stardardized help, universal anti-aliasing, task-based interaction, and a very solid, robust feeling interface all make Windows a better experience (not to proliferate MS's lame slogan) a nicer one.
Of course, we have Ximian Setup Tools, Pango, Nautilus and dozens of other projects that are addressing these issues right now, so I'm nothing but optimistic that Linux will be a desktop contender some day.
-Erik
Most families are average.
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
-Erik
Sucks to be you. :)
-Erik
Yes, but gossip and cruelty are not exactly the most complicated issues there are. Most reasonably self-aware people stop being bullies by their mid twenties (I hope?) and well, some people never get over gossip. But Harry Potter looks like The Little Engine That Could compared to Ender's Game.
-Erik
I didn't mean to imply that literature for adults couldn't be written about children, just that in this case (Harry Potter) the issues in question are most relevant to a child's life, as are the plots and the attitudes.
Ender's game, on the other hand asks some very big, very adult questions about things like responsibility and childhood. Yes, childhood is an adult issue. To children there is no childhood, it's just "life". It's not until you become an adult that whether you were allowed to live a childhood matters. I don't remember much of EG, but freedom, genocide, and morality were big, adult issues.
-Erik
They are children's books because the language is accessible to children, the issues in question are typically those important to children, and the main characters are what, 14 in this fourth book?
The fact is the books are written from a child's perspective, not an adult's. They don't seem to me a particularly poignant commentary on my life today. They are wonderful, fantastic stories that remind me of childhood in plot, attitude, and morality. (ah... my wizarding days)
-Erik
The 3Dwm project does not aim to create the "be-all-end-all" 3D user interface. There is little sense in arbitrarily choosing from a number of Most people have a hard enough time keeping a 2D desktop organised that they'd hardly want things at arbitrary 3D angles!! Wouldn't a far better way to go be
... To the contrary, the mission is to build a solid research platform with the necessary primitives to support just about any kind of user interface."
Perhaps you're referring to the 3Dwm project? Of course, what you're talking about above has little relevance if that is the case. From the 3Dwm introduction: "The 3Dwm project does not aim to create the 'be-all-end-all' 3D user interface
The fine folks working on 3dwm are not claiming to have some great desktop. They are simply making the tools that will allow ambitious developers to write 3D interfaces. Not to mention the fact that they are squarely against the oddly angled 2D windows you are complaining about. Running current apps in a 3D environment is just a migration nicety. Apps that take full advantage of living in a 3D environment should (hopefully) provide read gains over 2D interfaces. Think Borders Books vs. one very very very long bookshelf.
-Erik
Does this mean the author of Tree.h commited a crime when his component object was used in the decryption software?
Only if Tree.h is "primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection."
Which it's not.
-Erik
In my experience downloading... erm, "independant" films through gnutella, I've found that a 500mb DIVX file is simply not going to be very good quality. And I'm not talking about amazing sharpness or biting sounds. At 500mb, there are often annoying intruding audio artifacts. The video is a tenth of the resolution of DVD and it looks like a JPEG on the highest compression setting.
The gap between 500 and 800mb really seems to make all the difference in the world. At 800mb, the quality is just good enough that you can forget about the artifacts and get into the movie.
-Erik
P.S. I know the length of the movie changes the file size. I'm generalizing here.
"Gender" in this context is a wholly American politically-correct corruption of the language
So American isn't sexually repressed? Wouldn't a language grow to mirror the mindset of the people who speak it? On what planet is a language controlled by something other than how people use it?
Oh yeah... France.
-Erik
remember this is the entry level - the top end starts at $7699 less monitor (but with the apple superdrive DVD burner) and a monitor starts at $1399
I guess you missed the price cuts in the last couple of months. A 867MHz PowerPC G4 with the superdrive DVD burneris $2,499.00 and the 17" flat panel screen is $999.
Granted you can get a more powerful PC for $3,498, but not with a DVD burner and a screen like that.
-Erik
So Mr. Gates doesn't like these structural remedies? Perhaps he'd prefer a Mitnick-style behavioral remedy.
Gates and his descendant Mr. Ballamer are never again to run a technology company in any way, shape, or form. No CEO, no "head technologist", no shareholder, no V.P., no nothing. They've demonstrated that at the helm of a technology company they have no restraint. They will break the law every time.
Mitnick can't use a computer, they can't run a business. Fair is fair.
-Erik
When Hannibal asks when we might play "a game that looks like FF," Troy Brooks, the Production Systems Supervisor says he "can't even imagine."
Well, if it took 934,162 processor-days to render the final movie, thats...
22419888 hours or...
11209944 times real-time (assuming a 2hr movie)
Assuming computing power doubles every 18 months, computers will be 16777216 times faster in 36 years (24 18 month periods = 2^24 times faster)
So, a single workstation will be able to render the whole movie in real-time in the year 2037 (at 66% capacity!) Use the remaining third of the processor for game logic and A.I., and you have a game that looks like FFTSW.
Can't wait.
-Erik
Imagine software following actors around through their career, watching their movies and public appearances and learning their style and their history and developing a database to draw on to simulate them.
The actor hits their third blockbuster at 28 and the computer says "I think I can take it from here."
-Erik
many cel animators concentrate on the movement and articulation of the bodies, rather than detail of surfaces
This is why I like Pixar... they grok this. While they do invest heavily in rendering technology and tools development, there is a lot of pure animation talent at Pixar.
-Erik
It's projects like Apache (and Tomcat, etc.) that are examples of what we need to be doing
What about CS undegrads like myself who think Java and C# type languages are nicer to code in than C++? And people who want strong IDE's because they speed along the coding/debugging process? Yet we also appreciate the value of OSS.
It's projects like this that will make linux a more appealing platform for us to develop on. Maybe Ximian is copying Windows. But I'm sure there are lots of Windows developers who've tried linux and said to themselves, "I'd love to do more with linux, but general system maintenance for the desktop is a pain, there's no solid groupware, no decent IDEs, and no one is trying to compete with Microsoft's new technologies."
Well guess what? Ximian is actually trying to solve these issues to attract developers from the often-more-appealing Windows development platform.
-Erik