Yes, of course I realize that. That's why I said "from what I did see", instead of trying to claim it as truth. I may well be totally wrong. Am I?
Yes. B5's first series was relatively episodic, but even then there are references which are still pertinent much later on. I think the fact that it started off episodic and gradually moved to a more continuity based format is because it was released in the early 90's, and people weren't really used to the new format, and so had to be gradually eased in. Also, the episodic nature helps to draw people in during the first series. The new BSG had an established audience since it was being hyped up, had a killer pilot movie, a lot of history and because there's not a huge amount of competition.
AFAIK, all tablet pens have a button on the side to right-click. Certainly the pen that came with my TC1000 does. As for XP not going far enough in terms of a pen-based interface, that was a deliberate choice by the MS Tablet PC team, who felt that people would be scared off by the changes.
You know what's great? Little mini-games you can play while the main game is loading. Too long have we been fobbed off with high-res ingame shots or unused coverart! Give us scrolling text that adds to the story, or a mini-game to occupy us - because sitting still for more than 30 seconds is *hard*.
Crazy Browser is free, and it's interface is almost a direct copy of NetCaptor but is no longer being actively developed.
MyIE2 has a stupid name but is free and being actively developed. It also has tons of features including skinning, a plugin architecture and mouse gestures. Watch the spyware during installation though.
As an aside, how do I change the keys for moving through tabs in Mozilla? They are truely awful - the three browsers above use F2 and F3 and Opera uses 1 and 2 (and is easily customisable) which are much, much better. --jobby
Speaking as someone unschooled in the respective anarchist, socialist, libertarian, communist dogmas, I found all of the political stuff in the other three Macleod books a painful muddle to get through.
I'm in total agreement with you here - although there were some lovely hard sci-fi concepts and ideas, all the political stuff completely ruined it for me. I don't think anyone has mentioned Alastair Reynolds yet. He's a stunning space opera writer, although I think that's a little restrictive. Start with Revelation Space: fantastic characters, inventive technologies and the end is completely mind-blowing. It just gets better with the sequel, Redemption Ark and with the final part of the trilogy, Absolution Gap, out in October what better time to start reading?
Unlike the Imax DMR releases last year of "Apollo 13" and "Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones," "The Matrix" films won't have to be shortened, as Imax reel units can now support film lengths of 150 minutes.
You're gonna get an interesting response, cos I'm still pretty drunk. Get this - some people don't use computers for data entry! For web-surfing and scrawling a quick reply to an email, the pen interface is near-perfect. There's almost zero learning curve for users too, since using a pen is second nature to pretty much everyone. Sure, I'll admit that currently it's faster for people (me included) to input say a pages' worth of text with a keyboard. But what about a computer system trained to recognise a writer's shorthand? I'd bet that that would be equal to or faster than the average computer user. Still, only time will tell...
> A pen is not the easiest interface to a computer.
What the heck do you think the whole point of the tablet computer revolution is? Take a look around you next time you go to work/lecture/whatever. What's that freaky interface everybody is using? That's right, A FREAKING PEN. Dolt.
Hi, Slashdot? You know shoes, those things people have been putting on their feet for thousands of years? THEY HAVE LIGHTS NOW! POST TO THE FRONT PAGE! THE GEEKS HAVE A RIGHT TO KNOW!
This article is moronic. It's completely unjustified since the focus of the technology (the shiny little camera) has been out for coming up to THREE YEARS. So it has a DVD/CD/RW drive? Every piece of technology better than a wristwatch has those now.
Or maybe it's that TRANSFORMER CROOSO processor, huh? Doesn't your criminal ringleader LINEOX TORVALDEZ work for them? Explains a lot.
Seriously, don't post any more gadget reviews unless it does something totally amazing. Something like unleashing rapid ninja death on a person of your choosing, or getting a female human to walk within ten feet of a/. reader.
I saw this in a physics lesson quite recently. It's not bad since they leave in a lot of the explanation bits (like the Babel fish) in the form of badly-animated scene with a sarcastic narrator. The actors weren't brilliant though, and made the dialogue forced. One scene that was infinitely more powerful was at the pub, when Ford orders six pints of bitter, hands over a five pound note and says "Keep the change."
Am I some sort of recidivist, counter-revolutionary x86 using pervert?
BeOS will never die as long as people like you and me keep it close to our hearts...*sniffle*...oh, I promised myself I wouldn't cry! I need some time alone *sob*
I think Enterprise is fantastic for all the reasons most of you people hate it for. Because Star Trek has, after ten movies and twenty-four seasons, discovered a sense of humour. Seriously, the theme tune is hilarious and I laugh out loud every single time I hear it. The 'sex scene' was brilliantly done, especially with the geek-boy fantasy of rubbing a voluptuous Vulcan's pointy ears. In one of the episodes the away team is going through a deserted town, and a freaking tumbleweed blows past them. And let's not forget the guest spot with Al from Quantum Leap. I mean, who's cracked a real smile at most of the recent Treks? Hmm? Neelix, funny? Data? Anybody? I suppose you could make a possible exception for Quark, but even that's pushing it.
Compare this with Babylon 5 (all hail JMS), which can be darkly emotional and amusingly flippant with ease. For instance, when the first officer says to the captain "Good luck Captain, I think you're about to go where every man has gone before." just before he gets laid. Sci-fi should take itself less seriously once in a while. TOS had it just right - making you think while still being entertaining.
By the way, why isn't there a Captain Debate? I'll start you off: Kirk's the best because he's not afraid to use force and he gets laid nearly every single episode. Also, he could beat any other captain in single combat with ease. And blatantly William Shatner could out-sing them too.
He's dead, Jim. You grab his wallet, I'll take his tricorder.
Behind them there'd be a dartboard with Linus Torvalds' face on the wall and several disemboweled penguins hanging down the ceiling above.
You got it ass-backwards; we have Tux's face on the dartboard and a disemboweled Linus Torvalds hanging from the ceiling. You were right about the miniskirted waitresses though - who said Bill Gates doesn't have taste?
Neutron is a 9 KB app that does a quick synchronise. It doesn't stay in the background gobbling resources, and can be set up to synchronise and close on startup. Oh, and it works under 2K:)
NetCaptor has had tab support since around 1999. It is currently at version 7.0 and was great to use...until I tried Opera. NetCaptor's two main flaws are:
It costs $29.95
It is based on the IE engine, and gets horribly slow and munches RAM like the Cookie Monster.
Although Mozilla support for NetCaptor has been talked about, nothing concrete has appeared.
The reason for this date should be obvious to many a Stephenson fan - he's probably working on the ending. Sure he's an excellent author and his books represent some of the best cyberpunk out there, but the man couldn't finish a book to save his life.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, of course I realize that. That's why I said "from what I did see", instead of trying to claim it as truth. I may well be totally wrong. Am I?
Yes. B5's first series was relatively episodic, but even then there are references which are still pertinent much later on. I think the fact that it started off episodic and gradually moved to a more continuity based format is because it was released in the early 90's, and people weren't really used to the new format, and so had to be gradually eased in. Also, the episodic nature helps to draw people in during the first series. The new BSG had an established audience since it was being hyped up, had a killer pilot movie, a lot of history and because there's not a huge amount of competition.
To be fair, Sony treats Europe like ass too. Our release date for MGS3 is 'Q1 2005', and I don't think Katamari Damacy has a release date at all.
AFAIK, all tablet pens have a button on the side to right-click. Certainly the pen that came with my TC1000 does. As for XP not going far enough in terms of a pen-based interface, that was a deliberate choice by the MS Tablet PC team, who felt that people would be scared off by the changes.
You know what's great? Little mini-games you can play while the main game is loading. Too long have we been fobbed off with high-res ingame shots or unused coverart! Give us scrolling text that adds to the story, or a mini-game to occupy us - because sitting still for more than 30 seconds is *hard*.
As long as they remember to beef up security around it.
Go to meter at 3am (no sunlight...power down)
Here's hoping these people haven't heard of batteries.
That's let them eat static. Idiot.
[hmm: make a harddrive system where you only carry the platters around and the motor/controller stay in the computer? Damn patent that idea!].
Check out the iDVR consortium...
>> The machine's UMD media can hold up to two hours' of DVD-quality video or four hours 'standard' quality,
>And that is oh-so-important on a 4.5" screen...
It's got Dolby 7.1 too - oh-so-important with headphones. More than likely they will include a TV-Out.
Anyone know which UK cinemas this is going to be showing at (if any) ?
As an aside, how do I change the keys for moving through tabs in Mozilla? They are truely awful - the three browsers above use F2 and F3 and Opera uses 1 and 2 (and is easily customisable) which are much, much better.
--jobby
I'm in total agreement with you here - although there were some lovely hard sci-fi concepts and ideas, all the political stuff completely ruined it for me. I don't think anyone has mentioned Alastair Reynolds yet. He's a stunning space opera writer, although I think that's a little restrictive. Start with Revelation Space: fantastic characters, inventive technologies and the end is completely mind-blowing. It just gets better with the sequel, Redemption Ark and with the final part of the trilogy, Absolution Gap, out in October what better time to start reading?
RTFA:
Unlike the Imax DMR releases last year of "Apollo 13" and "Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones," "The Matrix" films won't have to be shortened, as Imax reel units can now support film lengths of 150 minutes.
See? Magic.
You're gonna get an interesting response, cos I'm still pretty drunk. Get this - some people don't use computers for data entry! For web-surfing and scrawling a quick reply to an email, the pen interface is near-perfect. There's almost zero learning curve for users too, since using a pen is second nature to pretty much everyone. Sure, I'll admit that currently it's faster for people (me included) to input say a pages' worth of text with a keyboard. But what about a computer system trained to recognise a writer's shorthand? I'd bet that that would be equal to or faster than the average computer user. Still, only time will tell...
> A pen is not the easiest interface to a computer.
What the heck do you think the whole point of the tablet computer revolution is? Take a look around you next time you go to work/lecture/whatever. What's that freaky interface everybody is using? That's right, A FREAKING PEN. Dolt.
Hi, Slashdot? You know shoes, those things people have been putting on their
feet for thousands of years? THEY HAVE LIGHTS NOW! POST TO THE FRONT PAGE!
THE GEEKS HAVE A RIGHT TO KNOW!
This article is moronic. It's completely unjustified since the focus of the
technology (the shiny little camera) has been out for coming up to THREE YEARS.
So it has a DVD/CD/RW drive? Every piece of technology better than a wristwatch
has those now.
Or maybe it's that TRANSFORMER CROOSO processor, huh? Doesn't your criminal
ringleader LINEOX TORVALDEZ work for them? Explains a lot.
Seriously, don't post any more gadget reviews unless it does something /. reader.
--jobbytotally amazing. Something like unleashing rapid ninja death on a person of your
choosing, or getting a female human to walk within ten feet of a
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
Violence is the last refuge of pretty much everyone.
Therefore, pretty much everyone is incompetent. Sounds about right to me...
I saw this in a physics lesson quite recently. It's not bad since they leave in a lot of the explanation bits (like the Babel fish) in the form of badly-animated scene with a sarcastic narrator. The actors weren't brilliant though, and made the dialogue forced. One scene that was infinitely more powerful was at the pub, when Ford orders six pints of bitter, hands over a five pound note and says "Keep the change."
BeOS will never die as long as people like you and me keep it close to our hearts...*sniffle*...oh, I promised myself I wouldn't cry! I need some time alone *sob*
I think Enterprise is fantastic for all the reasons most of you people hate it for. Because Star Trek has, after ten movies and twenty-four seasons, discovered a sense of humour. Seriously, the theme tune is hilarious and I laugh out loud every single time I hear it. The 'sex scene' was brilliantly done, especially with the geek-boy fantasy of rubbing a voluptuous Vulcan's pointy ears. In one of the episodes the away team is going through a deserted town, and a freaking tumbleweed blows past them. And let's not forget the guest spot with Al from Quantum Leap. I mean, who's cracked a real smile at most of the recent Treks? Hmm? Neelix, funny? Data? Anybody? I suppose you could make a possible exception for Quark, but even that's pushing it.
Compare this with Babylon 5 (all hail JMS), which can be darkly emotional and amusingly flippant with ease. For instance, when the first officer says to the captain "Good luck Captain, I think you're about to go where every man has gone before." just before he gets laid. Sci-fi should take itself less seriously once in a while. TOS had it just right - making you think while still being entertaining.
By the way, why isn't there a Captain Debate? I'll start you off: Kirk's the best because he's not afraid to use force and he gets laid nearly every single episode. Also, he could beat any other captain in single combat with ease. And blatantly William Shatner could out-sing them too.
He's dead, Jim. You grab his wallet, I'll take his tricorder.
Like a fly's eye...would a grid of small, cheap camera's be better than a single very high resolution one?
You got it ass-backwards; we have Tux's face on the dartboard and a disemboweled Linus Torvalds hanging from the ceiling. You were right about the miniskirted waitresses though - who said Bill Gates doesn't have taste?
Neutron is a 9 KB app that does a quick synchronise. It doesn't stay in the background gobbling resources, and can be set up to synchronise and close on startup. Oh, and it works under 2K :)
Although Mozilla support for NetCaptor has been talked about, nothing concrete has appeared.
The reason for this date should be obvious to many a Stephenson fan - he's probably working on the ending. Sure he's an excellent author and his books represent some of the best cyberpunk out there, but the man couldn't finish a book to save his life.
--jobby