I agree with others who say that OCD asset management of literally everything (inventories etc) is overkill, but there are still a lot of important things that end up lost if you don't have a way of not only storing them, but also accessing them when/where you need them. While it's easy to discount the author's overwhelmed status, it's important to keep context that we're living in an age that's overcrowded by information like never before. Learning what's not important is the beginning but sadly, people seem to continue to expect of us we're somehow still tracking with most of it.
My wife and I have struggled with keeping our family organized and while this was primarily an issue with keeping track of things, we've found the Cloud to save us on most (but not all) levels. The fact that we're also Apple users I'm sure causes our approach to not necessarily be right for all of you
For names & dates (things I am worst at remembering), we use Addressbook and iCal along with our iPhones to synch with our MobileMe account. I'm sure there's nerdier/cheaper alternatives but it works for us to keep a common addressbook and calendar that can be updated from anywhere via phone or from desktop/laptops at work & home.
For notes & tasks (something Apple seems to largely ignore), I've dabbled with the GTD app Things, but that falls apart in a multi-user situation. Instead, we've turned to a free 1-project account with Basecamp (37signals.com) and created a project called "Life". We then use the slick ruby-on-rails web interface along with the iPhone app Headquarters to manage & schedule our tasks for each other. We even use it to manage our grocery list by posting a task for that and adding comments as things come to mind.
For other random web links, photos, etc, we post stuff to Facebook when we want it to be public. Facebook blows as an archiving tool (and as a private place) though, so it's definitely wise to have a desktop-based photo manager that lets you organize things and back them up (we use iPhoto but Picasa seems good as well).
Nifty tip for organizing yourself financially: Mint.com has a great secure finance aggregator to give you a central dashboard for all your various loans/accounts/investments/budgets.
Obviously solar panels feed it to maintain energy stores; however since it must store this energy in a battery of some sort, is it required that the batteries be empty when launched? If not, what's to stop someone with a major pile of pre-charged solar-rechargeable batteries from tacking one solar panel on top & calling it a solar vehicle even if it could never fully charge those during use? Not accusing these folks of doing that but just curious about how they classify solar vehicles...
I thought it would have looked a lot more like the animation in Osmosis Jones. Still, with the mentioned possibillities of better displaying cervical cells, I'm sure this will lead to some geeky new trends in pr0n.
I'm not aware of any closed-captioning option within the native FLV video format (which most of these web video warehouses use) - I think they'd have to re-render everything with cue-points & custom code the functionality into their flash player. Supposedly Flash CS3 makes it easier to CC now but it will ultimately be up to the content providers to make it available on a clip-by-clip basis.
i don't have cable. And if i only watched one show a month, this $10/mo may make sense. Once you want to watch more than one show? well cable is obviously way more bang for yer buck, and comes with 4x the resolution.
i'd hate paying per GB overage as much as the next guy who uses his bandwidth as much as he can. That said, it's still the only truly fair way to assign costs to the parties responsible for using the resources. I think the fairest model is one which sets a prepaid amount of data bandwidth which, when exceeded costs the party accordingly.
That said, the ISP's would be liable to provide some pretty accurate monitoring tools imho since most people have no clue how much data hits their system when they check emails with attachments and/or visit websites. BT junkies generally see exactly what they're getting before they start the transfer, but on a website with video streams and other such convolutions, it's pretty hard.
Cell phones don't provide such things (other than calling in to check usage) but it's a much simpler thing to watch a clock while you're talking than it is to know exactly how many words were spoken.
The only reason I paid over $3K for a dual G5 with 23" flat panel (aside from the fact that I got a 15% discount from my Apple employee friend) is that it ran OSX. It's slower than many cheaper PCs yet the OS keeps me more productive and with almost no learning curve.
Had I not been sick of spending more time *fixing* my windows install on the previous dual Athlon system than I did actually using it to be productive, I would probably never have switched.
Without OSX I will never buy another apple computer, case closed.
I can't remember - didn't MacDraw support SVG?;) It was definitely vector at any rate..../me tries installing MacDraw for MacOS 7.1 on his dual G5 to no avail...
without games it will probably do little better than the Nuon-enhanced DVD players did./me fondles the total of 5 games he found for his Samsung Nuon-enhanced DVD player.
seriously, though, open source gaming can never touch the hotbed of market share that Sony has forged with ridiculous numbers of titles.
The biggest change need I can imagine is a larger screen. I would love to be able to watch media on the bus every morning/evening (that's a good hr/day of media I'm missing video on:).
The Archos video players and PSP's already exist, why is it such a big deal that Apple will finally think about following suit? It makes sense, given that Quicktime has been one of the oldest enduring cornerstones to their infiltration of computing on all platforms.
It also makes sense, given that videos can play in iTunes now.
A much bigger advance would be if Apple could figure out how to make Xvid video with MP3 audio play back natively in Quicktime without all the 3rd party dickery that's currently required. Until then I'm looking at having to transcode on hulluva lot of media to H264 (or whatever they use).
Do you usually get a lot of people and plot in the first paragraph?
I wonder if his handheld will need to re-name itself several times due to the existence of other similiarly named. progress.
"I flipped the cover off the Firefox handheld and studied...." -from The Escapist - 3rd edition
Re:Cyberspace?
on
The Escapist
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Tron?:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk has plenty of other authors (most of which I've never read, since I'm pretty limited to gibson & stephenson myself for that genre).
Apparently computers are not a prerequisite so much as technology. In that case the Phillip K Dick I've read would fit (though it borders on regular Sci Fi). His work is stupendous in its abilities to create magnificent twists of philosophical (and not just technological) profundity.
The author(s) of that Wikipedia entry don't seem to require dystopia as a theme in cyberpunk; however can anyone think of any examples which aren't dark in their portrayal of technology's impact on the future?
As much as I prefer working in digital media vs. traditional media it still seems ironic to me that despite thousands of years of painting technology, someone is still trying (and failing) to top a brush developed over 2000 years ago.
I have continually hoped that digital media manages to give the tools required to begin a new digital renaissance of art which manages to shake art to its core the way that 3D perspective did back in the 15th-18th centuries; unfortunately I know enough about art to know that artistic skill is more important than fancy-pants tools any day.
Still, the techniques possible with tools like 3D modeling/texturing/rendering and Corel Painter should open the door to some major mold-breaking. Artists even 20 years ago had no way of painting on a scanned or 3d rendered photograph, then (while paint was still wet?!) drawing on that with dry charcoals & swirling the whole thing together with water-simulations. The number of artistic permutations are now nearly endless.
don't forget ProCreate - the company that briefly held the Painter reins for version 6. I think the idea of having a rabbit mascot and a drip of paint for a company called Procreate was genius.
From what I remember (having used Painter since ~'97) Fractal Design Painter was v1-3 MetaCreations Painter 4 Corel Painter 5 ProCreate Painter 6 Corel Painter 7-present.
There's a big difference between the brushes Photoshop includes and natural media. You're right that a Wacom tablet is a must for anyone looking to do digital painting (think the difference in tablet pressure vs mouse click as comparable to difference between 24-bit image and 1-bit black/white image).
As for the "Sumi-e" filter - it's just a filter, no comparison for seeing ink come out of your brush and interact with the paper and existing areas of wetness.
As has been pointed out, Corel Painter is a much more flexible & accurate way to simulate natural media. Photoshop is great if you're an airbrush artist, but their brushes always strike me as being too "digital" and don't actually seem to mix/smear/react the way real media do IRL.
the fact that this RSS feed was the first thing I read after finishing watching Vanilla Sky for the first time (about 5 min ago) seems a freaky coincidence. No, I'm not making this up.
"You know, life is full of surprises. But the greatest surprise of all is that this doesn't have to end.... ever...... Take the example of Benny the Dog... Benny's a dog who was frozen for 3 months... and thawed out to live a normal life." -Raymond Tooley, Vanilla Sky
Had the post here mentioned a dog in 3 months of cryogenic stasis (and named Benny?), I think I may have run screaming from the building (assuming I'm not in some sort of Lucid post-death dream).
Well they wouldn't have to use so much flash if browsers would universally just start supporting the blink tag again...;) At least we can see that it's not returned by 2056
God is it ever funny to see geeks fume about the existence of animation on the internet. If it's not static 9pt courier, it's wasting our time! blah blah blah.
too true. Hemp's powers are mighty in nearly every industry. I still am baffled at how it remains illegal. For those who are not aware, smoking Hemp does nothing. It's Marijuana (a related plant) which has the THC.
I think we may as well continue our idiocy & outlaw cotton.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with others who say that OCD asset management of literally everything (inventories etc) is overkill, but there are still a lot of important things that end up lost if you don't have a way of not only storing them, but also accessing them when/where you need them. While it's easy to discount the author's overwhelmed status, it's important to keep context that we're living in an age that's overcrowded by information like never before. Learning what's not important is the beginning but sadly, people seem to continue to expect of us we're somehow still tracking with most of it.
My wife and I have struggled with keeping our family organized and while this was primarily an issue with keeping track of things, we've found the Cloud to save us on most (but not all) levels. The fact that we're also Apple users I'm sure causes our approach to not necessarily be right for all of you
For names & dates (things I am worst at remembering), we use Addressbook and iCal along with our iPhones to synch with our MobileMe account. I'm sure there's nerdier/cheaper alternatives but it works for us to keep a common addressbook and calendar that can be updated from anywhere via phone or from desktop/laptops at work & home.
For notes & tasks (something Apple seems to largely ignore), I've dabbled with the GTD app Things, but that falls apart in a multi-user situation. Instead, we've turned to a free 1-project account with Basecamp (37signals.com) and created a project called "Life". We then use the slick ruby-on-rails web interface along with the iPhone app Headquarters to manage & schedule our tasks for each other. We even use it to manage our grocery list by posting a task for that and adding comments as things come to mind.
For other random web links, photos, etc, we post stuff to Facebook when we want it to be public. Facebook blows as an archiving tool (and as a private place) though, so it's definitely wise to have a desktop-based photo manager that lets you organize things and back them up (we use iPhoto but Picasa seems good as well).
Nifty tip for organizing yourself financially: Mint.com has a great secure finance aggregator to give you a central dashboard for all your various loans/accounts/investments/budgets.
Obviously solar panels feed it to maintain energy stores; however since it must store this energy in a battery of some sort, is it required that the batteries be empty when launched? If not, what's to stop someone with a major pile of pre-charged solar-rechargeable batteries from tacking one solar panel on top & calling it a solar vehicle even if it could never fully charge those during use? Not accusing these folks of doing that but just curious about how they classify solar vehicles...
I thought it would have looked a lot more like the animation in Osmosis Jones. Still, with the mentioned possibillities of better displaying cervical cells, I'm sure this will lead to some geeky new trends in pr0n.
I'm not aware of any closed-captioning option within the native FLV video format (which most of these web video warehouses use) - I think they'd have to re-render everything with cue-points & custom code the functionality into their flash player. Supposedly Flash CS3 makes it easier to CC now but it will ultimately be up to the content providers to make it available on a clip-by-clip basis.
i don't have cable. And if i only watched one show a month, this $10/mo may make sense. Once you want to watch more than one show? well cable is obviously way more bang for yer buck, and comes with 4x the resolution.
i'd hate paying per GB overage as much as the next guy who uses his bandwidth as much as he can. That said, it's still the only truly fair way to assign costs to the parties responsible for using the resources. I think the fairest model is one which sets a prepaid amount of data bandwidth which, when exceeded costs the party accordingly.
That said, the ISP's would be liable to provide some pretty accurate monitoring tools imho since most people have no clue how much data hits their system when they check emails with attachments and/or visit websites. BT junkies generally see exactly what they're getting before they start the transfer, but on a website with video streams and other such convolutions, it's pretty hard.
Cell phones don't provide such things (other than calling in to check usage) but it's a much simpler thing to watch a clock while you're talking than it is to know exactly how many words were spoken.
clearly nothing is that simple. Otherwise the Xbox would be utterly dominating the game console market.
The only reason I paid over $3K for a dual G5 with 23" flat panel (aside from the fact that I got a 15% discount from my Apple employee friend) is that it ran OSX. It's slower than many cheaper PCs yet the OS keeps me more productive and with almost no learning curve.
Had I not been sick of spending more time *fixing* my windows install on the previous dual Athlon system than I did actually using it to be productive, I would probably never have switched.
Without OSX I will never buy another apple computer, case closed.
I can't remember - didn't MacDraw support SVG? ;) It was definitely vector at any rate.... /me tries installing MacDraw for MacOS 7.1 on his dual G5 to no avail...
without games it will probably do little better than the Nuon-enhanced DVD players did. /me fondles the total of 5 games he found for his Samsung Nuon-enhanced DVD player.
seriously, though, open source gaming can never touch the hotbed of market share that Sony has forged with ridiculous numbers of titles.
The biggest change need I can imagine is a larger screen. I would love to be able to watch media on the bus every morning/evening (that's a good hr/day of media I'm missing video on :).
The Archos video players and PSP's already exist, why is it such a big deal that Apple will finally think about following suit? It makes sense, given that Quicktime has been one of the oldest enduring cornerstones to their infiltration of computing on all platforms.
It also makes sense, given that videos can play in iTunes now.
A much bigger advance would be if Apple could figure out how to make Xvid video with MP3 audio play back natively in Quicktime without all the 3rd party dickery that's currently required. Until then I'm looking at having to transcode on hulluva lot of media to H264 (or whatever they use).
1.) depends on whether I'm on hold & how good their hold music is.
2.) Most of the freebie phones can't really honestly say they're able to do much more than send/receive calls & text messages.
Do you usually get a lot of people and plot in the first paragraph?
I wonder if his handheld will need to re-name itself several times due to the existence of other similiarly named. progress.
"I flipped the cover off the Firefox handheld and studied...."
-from The Escapist - 3rd edition
Tron? :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk has plenty of other authors (most of which I've never read, since I'm pretty limited to gibson & stephenson myself for that genre).
Apparently computers are not a prerequisite so much as technology. In that case the Phillip K Dick I've read would fit (though it borders on regular Sci Fi). His work is stupendous in its abilities to create magnificent twists of philosophical (and not just technological) profundity.
The author(s) of that Wikipedia entry don't seem to require dystopia as a theme in cyberpunk; however can anyone think of any examples which aren't dark in their portrayal of technology's impact on the future?
As much as I prefer working in digital media vs. traditional media it still seems ironic to me that despite thousands of years of painting technology, someone is still trying (and failing) to top a brush developed over 2000 years ago.
I have continually hoped that digital media manages to give the tools required to begin a new digital renaissance of art which manages to shake art to its core the way that 3D perspective did back in the 15th-18th centuries; unfortunately I know enough about art to know that artistic skill is more important than fancy-pants tools any day.
Still, the techniques possible with tools like 3D modeling/texturing/rendering and Corel Painter should open the door to some major mold-breaking. Artists even 20 years ago had no way of painting on a scanned or 3d rendered photograph, then (while paint was still wet?!) drawing on that with dry charcoals & swirling the whole thing together with water-simulations. The number of artistic permutations are now nearly endless.
don't forget ProCreate - the company that briefly held the Painter reins for version 6. I think the idea of having a rabbit mascot and a drip of paint for a company called Procreate was genius.
From what I remember (having used Painter since ~'97)
Fractal Design Painter was v1-3
MetaCreations Painter 4
Corel Painter 5
ProCreate Painter 6
Corel Painter 7-present.
There's a big difference between the brushes Photoshop includes and natural media. You're right that a Wacom tablet is a must for anyone looking to do digital painting (think the difference in tablet pressure vs mouse click as comparable to difference between 24-bit image and 1-bit black/white image).
As for the "Sumi-e" filter - it's just a filter, no comparison for seeing ink come out of your brush and interact with the paper and existing areas of wetness.
As has been pointed out, Corel Painter is a much more flexible & accurate way to simulate natural media. Photoshop is great if you're an airbrush artist, but their brushes always strike me as being too "digital" and don't actually seem to mix/smear/react the way real media do IRL.
10 print "goto rules"
20 goto 10
Sounds a lot like the film Waking Life.
the fact that this RSS feed was the first thing I read after finishing watching Vanilla Sky for the first time (about 5 min ago) seems a freaky coincidence. No, I'm not making this up.
... Take the example of Benny the Dog... Benny's a dog who was frozen for 3 months... and thawed out to live a normal life."
"You know, life is full of surprises. But the greatest surprise of all is that this doesn't have to end.... ever...
-Raymond Tooley, Vanilla Sky
Had the post here mentioned a dog in 3 months of cryogenic stasis (and named Benny?), I think I may have run screaming from the building (assuming I'm not in some sort of Lucid post-death dream).
at least I don't have to rummage the site looking for one more title to push it into free Super Saver shipping status...
anyone looking to buy this should probably sign up for the A9.com dealio so they can save 1.57% (aka $125). This drops the price to a mere $7864
Well they wouldn't have to use so much flash if browsers would universally just start supporting the blink tag again... ;) At least we can see that it's not returned by 2056
God is it ever funny to see geeks fume about the existence of animation on the internet. If it's not static 9pt courier, it's wasting our time! blah blah blah.
probably all the flash that your machine is choking on. I saw no activeX errors on MacOSX ;) Tons of stuff slow to load due to /.'d
too true. Hemp's powers are mighty in nearly every industry. I still am baffled at how it remains illegal. For those who are not aware, smoking Hemp does nothing. It's Marijuana (a related plant) which has the THC.
I think we may as well continue our idiocy & outlaw cotton.