I had an idea that next year, on New Year's Day, we could turn our hackerspace into a public domain printing press for all the new freed works. We might even be able to do it on New Year's Eve, as we're well-situated in a downtown location that might have some slightly tipsy foot traffic after midnight.
of course, we'll need to plan ahead. Will it be important to get them from a clean source, or will pirated works magically become legal? If not, do we just refresh the Gutenberg Project website until it all shows up? Will we be able to print and bind books cheaply enough to give them away? Are our printers fast enough to print on demand, or should we print a few copies of the most important works in advance? And of course we'll have to secure volunteers and fix up donated printers.
Making TVs smarter has other drawbacks, that won't be alleviated by simply unplugging from the network.
For one, when you turn them on, they have to "boot up", and this takes longer than whatever warm-up period is required. And once they've started, they're in a multitasking OS, so they have better things to do than respond immediately to your remote control presses. This is especially frustrating when you switch inputs; you can't just tap "input" three times. You have to tap "input", and wait for the box to move before pressing "input" again. If it takes too long to move, you might try pressing "input" an extra time, but this time it gets buffered and you end up going too far.
Unfortunately, I expect smart TVs are here to stay, because the presence of those "Netflix" and "Amazon Prime" buttons on your remote are subsidizing the low cost of the TV. And there aren't enough of us nerds that would pay more for a TV that does less.
I've been noticing since the election how odd it is that whenever I meet a Trump supporter, or a Hillary hater, If I bring up Russia, their nationalistic sense of American sovereignty will completely evaporate. To a person, they deflect concern about Russian hacking or Putin's oligarchy with such skill as if they've attended an 8-week media training course. They'll claim the Russians did us a favor by exposing Democratic corruption, and even shed a tear for the plight of the Russian people suffering under Obama's sanctions.
When I meet someone who says they "don't support Trump" but somehow only attacks liberals, I can just imagine the Facebook group that got their hooks in them. I keep seeing groups for political causes that used to have their own identities, but now only post pro-Trump or anti-liberal messages. "Being Libertarian" had a perfect example – libertarianism is diametrically opposed from authoritarianism, and yet it showed up in my feed because a friend of mine clicked "Like" on a picture of a parody of that one poem. It said "They came for the socialists, and I said nothing. Then everything was better and they stopped coming for people." Thousands of likes, each one from someone who labels themselves "libertarian" but totally signed off on the rounding-up of their political enemies, and declared their trust that strongman authority only takes away rights temporarily.
And that's what is worrying, because even if Trump gets impeached, the national psyche is already gravely wounded, and the Kremlin has a fresh truckload of salt for us every day to stop it from healing.
When this topic comes up in person, it turns into the Four Yorkshiremen sketch, as we all take turns one-upping each other about the lowest-spec computer we had to use. I had an Atari 400 in 1983, and my friend's first computer was a Vic-20 in 1990, and then some old-timer who cobbled together some kit machine in the 1970s would chime in... and some older guy had it tough, he had to go to the university to buy computer time.
Ever notice how people who attack CNN for how they treated Bernie, somehow never mention Fox News' 20 years of consistent and deliberate lying, nor to both networks' bounty of free airtime to the Trump campaign?
Yes, CNN was "declared fake news". Directly by the President, who has declared uncooperative journalists his enemy.
So, Fox's 20-year war against facts has finally succeeded, and Trump's war on journalism itself has only started. The weakening of the American spirit will continue, until the one-party system is cemented into place.
I can see why you're defending the propagandists from France's efforts to fight them. It would work so much better for the Kremlin, if only Western Europe would also destroy itself in this way, wouldn't it? But of course, we're not supposed to believe in that, either. It's not politically correct?
Your criticism might sound more sincere if there were any chance at all that Trump would tolerate this kind of criticism at President. He would not hesitate to crush any media outlet that so much as commented on the size of his hands.
If there are any voting machines running on PCs, it is essential that they disconnect public-facing USB ports from the motherboard. Because if your goal is to shut down or slow down a polling place, then you don't need a sophisticated hacking device, just a power spike that disables one of your machines.
If we had time, we could design a USB port with an alarm in it so that we could catch tamperers in the act.
The opening doors at railroad crossings is the real low-hanging fruit. And it takes more than half a second, because the bus has to come to a complete stop. This keeps the bus from ever reaching a good speed on that block, costs a lot of fuel, and slows down traffic behind the bus. It lets more hot air into the bus in summer, and more cold air into the bus in winter. And all the railroad tracks in my town have bells and barriers, so the exercise is totally pointless.
But, it's a Federal law, so good luck changing it.
I just tried the game, and if this had been finished and released in 1985, it would have competed well with Elite on the C64.
It plays very much like the first Star Raiders game, but the joystick moves the crosshairs as well as the ship. Objects in space are rendered in what looks like full 3D line art, rather than simple sprites. And you can fly into planets' atmospheres to do strafing runs of enemy bases. I was awestruck when I saw the spherical planet come into view; it looked like something just a little beyond what I expected an Atari game to do in the 1980s. You're not used to seeing big ol' globes on an Atari 8-bit. You're used to seeing big flat raster sunsets, or if you're lucky, some clever animation like Rescue on Fractalus used. The plantery terrain wasn't quite as realistic as Fractalus, but was still very good, and very arcade-like.
The part that really shows the game's ambition is the galactic map. The game starts with "galactic history", a cutscene for lack of a better word, which simulates the progress of the Zylon fleet up to the point of the player joining the fight. The map is no longer arranged in a simple grid like the original cartridge. It contains not only enemy squadrons and starbases, but star systems with orbiting planets. It is an extension of the thing that Star Raiders always had that Elite didn't: while you were in your sector, time was still passing in other sectors. Even in the original Star Raiders, enemy squadrons would move to different sectors, surrounding starbases, and eventually destroying them if the player didn't intervene. In this sequel, new squadrons could also be launched from occupied planets. I haven't played the advanced levels yet, but I imagine the player has to choose carefully between defending starbases and raiding shipyards.
I've found no game-ruining bugs, but I am not sure whether the flight and combat system has been completely worked out, or whether I'm just not good at the game yet. If this had been leaked on a BBS, it would have been received so much better than the ones that were, well, actually leaked.
It looks like the age where you can use SMS instead of apps is coming to a close.
Five years ago, most of what I did with a smartphone was possible with SMS. I could call a cab, order a pizza, look up arrival times at a bus stop, tweet, and check in on Foursquare.
It's not that nobody would watch people code for four days. It's that nobody would watch manufactured reality show drama troweled over hour-long chunks of dramatically-edited footage of people coding.
Well, people would, but at that level of edited reality, it becomes irrelevant what the contestants are actually doing. They could be sorting tiny screws or building Lego sculptures of breakfast foods and the show would be the same.
I attended a panel of veteran video game programmers from the Phoenix area a few years ago. They asserted that the PCjr had a greater role in the video game crash of 1984 than people realize. Many software companies bought into IBM's hype that the PCjr would dominate the market, and put a lot of resources into PCjr development, and ended up going bankrupt when the PCjr failed.
I've looked at the top threads here and I've noticed that most people blame the noise floor rising as WiFi devices become more capable, and a few people talking about how to configure the routers or flash the firmware to get into less-occupied frequencies. A few people have described how 5 GHz spectrum is more vacant, but doesn't travel as far, how there are only three channels that don't overlap in the US, and how traffic slows down when new routers have to step down to old protocols.
I don't hear much about the gains that can be made by freeing up one's dependence on WiFi within the home. If your computer is next to the router, running an Ethernet cable to it is a no-brainer, and certainly too obvious for this thread. But video streaming gets more common every year, so maybe these homes have reached the point where it's worthwhile to run Ethernet to the room with the TV in it. And I'm sure there are kids out there who think nothing of running BitTorrent on a WiFi device. Is it worthwhile to move devices to Ethernet, or is that just a lay assumption? Or maybe also too obvious for this thread?
Moreover, I've never heard anyone talk about consumer-friendly methods to block WiFi signals from outside the home. Whenever I ask my network engineer friends about this, they act like I'd have to build a Faraday cage around my entire network with specialized copper mesh. No, I'd just like to do my level best to discourage signals from passing through my exterior walls, so that my traffic doesn't have to compete with weak packets from across the street. My router is close to the north wall, so is there something small I can hang behind the router to attenuate any of the signal through that wall? What about replacing my chain link fence with concrete?
I look at it more in terms of maturity, where the technology proves itself through subtlety rather than through going over the top. Less is more.
And my moment of CGI maturity was in the movie Amélie. I didn't realize how often the director used it until I watched it with director's commentary. They used CGI for really the most frivolous things, although it was the frivolous things that made the movie awesome.
The article touched on how CGI gets cheaper and accessible to small filmmakers, but I think the real beauty of CGI happens when it allows people to get something they wouldn't ordinarily be able to get without studio backing or lots of union workers. Virtual sets and virtual actors have already been done, but they're still time-intensive and space-intensive, even if the hardware is getting cheaper. I want to do a shot-for-shot remake of Citizen Kane with my iPod Nano's camcorder, and I want to play all the parts.
I've been seeing a lot of posts saying "[Name] likes [platitude] on." from people who would probably never post [platitude]. Things like "Clarence likes “I don't have a temper problem, everyone else needs to stop pissing me off” on." I'm afraid to click either the platitude or the heart, but I can't really find any evidence about what the hell is going on.
Perhaps I bought CFL's too long ago and they last too long.
The switching mechanism on my Clapper has always worked, but when the switch is in the "off" position, the light flashes on dimly every few seconds. Not good for the bedroom, and probably not good for the life of the bulb.
This same "bug" prevented my father from pulling a prank on my mom's friend who was staying in from out of town. He was going to hook up a timer to a strobe light so that it would go off in her room at midnight. But it would flash once every few minutes.
I have a Clapper that I've been unable to use with CFL bulbs. I'd like to know whether these new LED lights work with the Clapper and other remote-switching appliances.
I was watching French in Action a few years ago, and thought that this might be a good way to introduce an alien species to humanity and a particular culture. It's a foreign language telecourse that's produced entirely in the target language of French, so in order to be effective, it needs to demonstrate the usage of the language, as well as every concept a human being needs to talk about. The only problem is that this approach would inevitably focus on one culture, no matter which language you choose.
I do agree that it's completely pointless to send out a single one-time message. It seriously needs to repeat many times, for a long time. Who would pay for that?
I remember seeing this many years ago, as a proposed modeler for the educational programming tool Alice. A later version called SmoothTeddy adds the ability to paint your object after you model it. The demonstration video for the original Teddy was perhaps the best ground-up demonstration of the technology, and has cute Japanese kids drawing things with a touch screen.
As others have posted, this is a rather old program and a lot has changed since then. Even Alice has gone through a few iterations. But I don't think enough people know about it yet, so I hope it gains some wider usage now.
I attended a Classic Gaming Expo recently, and heard an Activision employee talk about what he says to people asking for advice about how to get into the industry. He says, "don't." In his day, a single programmer could creata a game that sells millions. Today, a game that sells millions also costs millions, and that means lots of anonymous cogs and testers working slave hours.
It's never been like those commercials that run on G4, with those two guys in recliners looking at a big screen TV. "Which way do you think this guy should move?" "THIS way!"
I saw this a few days before slashdotting. So I have to ask: which episode did they get that first shot of Kirk looking super-smug? He had to have been in the middle of a sentence or something.
"I'm sorry, I can't hear you over how awesome I am."
Also, someone just told me there's more than one page, and now I'll never know what's on them. damn tubes.
Slashdot Mirror
I had an idea that next year, on New Year's Day, we could turn our hackerspace into a public domain printing press for all the new freed works. We might even be able to do it on New Year's Eve, as we're well-situated in a downtown location that might have some slightly tipsy foot traffic after midnight.
of course, we'll need to plan ahead. Will it be important to get them from a clean source, or will pirated works magically become legal? If not, do we just refresh the Gutenberg Project website until it all shows up? Will we be able to print and bind books cheaply enough to give them away? Are our printers fast enough to print on demand, or should we print a few copies of the most important works in advance? And of course we'll have to secure volunteers and fix up donated printers.
Making TVs smarter has other drawbacks, that won't be alleviated by simply unplugging from the network.
For one, when you turn them on, they have to "boot up", and this takes longer than whatever warm-up period is required. And once they've started, they're in a multitasking OS, so they have better things to do than respond immediately to your remote control presses. This is especially frustrating when you switch inputs; you can't just tap "input" three times. You have to tap "input", and wait for the box to move before pressing "input" again. If it takes too long to move, you might try pressing "input" an extra time, but this time it gets buffered and you end up going too far.
Unfortunately, I expect smart TVs are here to stay, because the presence of those "Netflix" and "Amazon Prime" buttons on your remote are subsidizing the low cost of the TV. And there aren't enough of us nerds that would pay more for a TV that does less.
I've been noticing since the election how odd it is that whenever I meet a Trump supporter, or a Hillary hater, If I bring up Russia, their nationalistic sense of American sovereignty will completely evaporate. To a person, they deflect concern about Russian hacking or Putin's oligarchy with such skill as if they've attended an 8-week media training course. They'll claim the Russians did us a favor by exposing Democratic corruption, and even shed a tear for the plight of the Russian people suffering under Obama's sanctions.
When I meet someone who says they "don't support Trump" but somehow only attacks liberals, I can just imagine the Facebook group that got their hooks in them. I keep seeing groups for political causes that used to have their own identities, but now only post pro-Trump or anti-liberal messages. "Being Libertarian" had a perfect example – libertarianism is diametrically opposed from authoritarianism, and yet it showed up in my feed because a friend of mine clicked "Like" on a picture of a parody of that one poem. It said "They came for the socialists, and I said nothing. Then everything was better and they stopped coming for people." Thousands of likes, each one from someone who labels themselves "libertarian" but totally signed off on the rounding-up of their political enemies, and declared their trust that strongman authority only takes away rights temporarily.
And that's what is worrying, because even if Trump gets impeached, the national psyche is already gravely wounded, and the Kremlin has a fresh truckload of salt for us every day to stop it from healing.
When this topic comes up in person, it turns into the Four Yorkshiremen sketch, as we all take turns one-upping each other about the lowest-spec computer we had to use. I had an Atari 400 in 1983, and my friend's first computer was a Vic-20 in 1990, and then some old-timer who cobbled together some kit machine in the 1970s would chime in... and some older guy had it tough, he had to go to the university to buy computer time.
Ever notice how people who attack CNN for how they treated Bernie, somehow never mention Fox News' 20 years of consistent and deliberate lying, nor to both networks' bounty of free airtime to the Trump campaign?
Yes, CNN was "declared fake news". Directly by the President, who has declared uncooperative journalists his enemy.
So, Fox's 20-year war against facts has finally succeeded, and Trump's war on journalism itself has only started. The weakening of the American spirit will continue, until the one-party system is cemented into place.
I can see why you're defending the propagandists from France's efforts to fight them. It would work so much better for the Kremlin, if only Western Europe would also destroy itself in this way, wouldn't it? But of course, we're not supposed to believe in that, either. It's not politically correct?
Your criticism might sound more sincere if there were any chance at all that Trump would tolerate this kind of criticism at President. He would not hesitate to crush any media outlet that so much as commented on the size of his hands.
If there are any voting machines running on PCs, it is essential that they disconnect public-facing USB ports from the motherboard. Because if your goal is to shut down or slow down a polling place, then you don't need a sophisticated hacking device, just a power spike that disables one of your machines.
If we had time, we could design a USB port with an alarm in it so that we could catch tamperers in the act.
The opening doors at railroad crossings is the real low-hanging fruit. And it takes more than half a second, because the bus has to come to a complete stop. This keeps the bus from ever reaching a good speed on that block, costs a lot of fuel, and slows down traffic behind the bus. It lets more hot air into the bus in summer, and more cold air into the bus in winter. And all the railroad tracks in my town have bells and barriers, so the exercise is totally pointless.
But, it's a Federal law, so good luck changing it.
I just tried the game, and if this had been finished and released in 1985, it would have competed well with Elite on the C64.
It plays very much like the first Star Raiders game, but the joystick moves the crosshairs as well as the ship. Objects in space are rendered in what looks like full 3D line art, rather than simple sprites. And you can fly into planets' atmospheres to do strafing runs of enemy bases. I was awestruck when I saw the spherical planet come into view; it looked like something just a little beyond what I expected an Atari game to do in the 1980s. You're not used to seeing big ol' globes on an Atari 8-bit. You're used to seeing big flat raster sunsets, or if you're lucky, some clever animation like Rescue on Fractalus used. The plantery terrain wasn't quite as realistic as Fractalus, but was still very good, and very arcade-like.
The part that really shows the game's ambition is the galactic map. The game starts with "galactic history", a cutscene for lack of a better word, which simulates the progress of the Zylon fleet up to the point of the player joining the fight. The map is no longer arranged in a simple grid like the original cartridge. It contains not only enemy squadrons and starbases, but star systems with orbiting planets. It is an extension of the thing that Star Raiders always had that Elite didn't: while you were in your sector, time was still passing in other sectors. Even in the original Star Raiders, enemy squadrons would move to different sectors, surrounding starbases, and eventually destroying them if the player didn't intervene. In this sequel, new squadrons could also be launched from occupied planets. I haven't played the advanced levels yet, but I imagine the player has to choose carefully between defending starbases and raiding shipyards.
I've found no game-ruining bugs, but I am not sure whether the flight and combat system has been completely worked out, or whether I'm just not good at the game yet. If this had been leaked on a BBS, it would have been received so much better than the ones that were, well, actually leaked.
It looks like the age where you can use SMS instead of apps is coming to a close.
Five years ago, most of what I did with a smartphone was possible with SMS. I could call a cab, order a pizza, look up arrival times at a bus stop, tweet, and check in on Foursquare.
It's not that nobody would watch people code for four days. It's that nobody would watch manufactured reality show drama troweled over hour-long chunks of dramatically-edited footage of people coding.
Well, people would, but at that level of edited reality, it becomes irrelevant what the contestants are actually doing. They could be sorting tiny screws or building Lego sculptures of breakfast foods and the show would be the same.
I attended a panel of veteran video game programmers from the Phoenix area a few years ago. They asserted that the PCjr had a greater role in the video game crash of 1984 than people realize. Many software companies bought into IBM's hype that the PCjr would dominate the market, and put a lot of resources into PCjr development, and ended up going bankrupt when the PCjr failed.
I've looked at the top threads here and I've noticed that most people blame the noise floor rising as WiFi devices become more capable, and a few people talking about how to configure the routers or flash the firmware to get into less-occupied frequencies. A few people have described how 5 GHz spectrum is more vacant, but doesn't travel as far, how there are only three channels that don't overlap in the US, and how traffic slows down when new routers have to step down to old protocols.
I don't hear much about the gains that can be made by freeing up one's dependence on WiFi within the home. If your computer is next to the router, running an Ethernet cable to it is a no-brainer, and certainly too obvious for this thread. But video streaming gets more common every year, so maybe these homes have reached the point where it's worthwhile to run Ethernet to the room with the TV in it. And I'm sure there are kids out there who think nothing of running BitTorrent on a WiFi device. Is it worthwhile to move devices to Ethernet, or is that just a lay assumption? Or maybe also too obvious for this thread?
Moreover, I've never heard anyone talk about consumer-friendly methods to block WiFi signals from outside the home. Whenever I ask my network engineer friends about this, they act like I'd have to build a Faraday cage around my entire network with specialized copper mesh. No, I'd just like to do my level best to discourage signals from passing through my exterior walls, so that my traffic doesn't have to compete with weak packets from across the street. My router is close to the north wall, so is there something small I can hang behind the router to attenuate any of the signal through that wall? What about replacing my chain link fence with concrete?
I look at it more in terms of maturity, where the technology proves itself through subtlety rather than through going over the top. Less is more.
And my moment of CGI maturity was in the movie Amélie. I didn't realize how often the director used it until I watched it with director's commentary. They used CGI for really the most frivolous things, although it was the frivolous things that made the movie awesome.
The article touched on how CGI gets cheaper and accessible to small filmmakers, but I think the real beauty of CGI happens when it allows people to get something they wouldn't ordinarily be able to get without studio backing or lots of union workers. Virtual sets and virtual actors have already been done, but they're still time-intensive and space-intensive, even if the hardware is getting cheaper. I want to do a shot-for-shot remake of Citizen Kane with my iPod Nano's camcorder, and I want to play all the parts.
I've been seeing a lot of posts saying "[Name] likes [platitude] on ." from people who would probably never post [platitude]. Things like "Clarence likes “I don't have a temper problem, everyone else needs to stop pissing me off” on ." I'm afraid to click either the platitude or the heart, but I can't really find any evidence about what the hell is going on.
Perhaps I bought CFL's too long ago and they last too long.
The switching mechanism on my Clapper has always worked, but when the switch is in the "off" position, the light flashes on dimly every few seconds. Not good for the bedroom, and probably not good for the life of the bulb.
This same "bug" prevented my father from pulling a prank on my mom's friend who was staying in from out of town. He was going to hook up a timer to a strobe light so that it would go off in her room at midnight. But it would flash once every few minutes.
I have a Clapper that I've been unable to use with CFL bulbs. I'd like to know whether these new LED lights work with the Clapper and other remote-switching appliances.
I was watching French in Action a few years ago, and thought that this might be a good way to introduce an alien species to humanity and a particular culture. It's a foreign language telecourse that's produced entirely in the target language of French, so in order to be effective, it needs to demonstrate the usage of the language, as well as every concept a human being needs to talk about. The only problem is that this approach would inevitably focus on one culture, no matter which language you choose.
I do agree that it's completely pointless to send out a single one-time message. It seriously needs to repeat many times, for a long time. Who would pay for that?
As others have posted, this is a rather old program and a lot has changed since then. Even Alice has gone through a few iterations. But I don't think enough people know about it yet, so I hope it gains some wider usage now.
Could an overzealous district attorney use this to persecute, for example, streakers and those who hire prostitutes?
I attended a Classic Gaming Expo recently, and heard an Activision employee talk about what he says to people asking for advice about how to get into the industry. He says, "don't." In his day, a single programmer could creata a game that sells millions. Today, a game that sells millions also costs millions, and that means lots of anonymous cogs and testers working slave hours.
It's never been like those commercials that run on G4, with those two guys in recliners looking at a big screen TV. "Which way do you think this guy should move?" "THIS way!"
I saw this a few days before slashdotting. So I have to ask: which episode did they get that first shot of Kirk looking super-smug? He had to have been in the middle of a sentence or something.
"I'm sorry, I can't hear you over how awesome I am."
Also, someone just told me there's more than one page, and now I'll never know what's on them. damn tubes.
So it's like Alton Brown's "I'm Just Here for the Data"?
I'm a DeVry graduate, who took four semesters of COBOL in the mid-90's. And it seems you're asking the wrong question.
The better course of action is to transfer your credits to a university that has more women attending.
Why didn't they try to convert a GOOD movie?
This almost suggests that Sony doesn't own the rights to any good movies.
I'm liking Sony less and less.