"Once again, we see so-called 'environmentalism' exposed as a mere tool for class warfare. That ends our lesson for today. "
Sounds good to me.
I have NOTHING what so ever against taking the middle class and rich and beating the living sh*t out of them followed by summarily executions.
Have to just kill them outright and efficiently though. It would be a little bit hypocritical to go on about efficiency and then waste all of that energy slowly torturing the bastards. (however enjoyable delivering said tortures may be.;) )
Oh, and it is the fact that those tree 'farms' are going to be CUT DOWN for a PROFIT that I object too.
If they just used, and I repeat, JUST USED tree farms then I would have no problem with them.
But it is making those tree farms and pointing at them and saying "oh hey look here we are being good to the environment!" and then going about and chopping down beautiful forest land while your looking at their "Great environmental accomplishments."
I actually run Windows 2000 with most of its defaults (I have full path view on of course, and all files are 'unhidden'. )
It is easy to read the text on, everything is of the right size, and by golly, it is PLEASING to look at. It is not some phenomenal work of art, but damnit, if I turn on my computer to go to a word processing program to type up some document (star office, damned if I will use word, I refuse to use word, I have used EDIT in the past rather then use word, I used word to spellcheck that time, but I didn't type in it.:) ) damned if I want to have to wait for textures and alpha blended shadow effects to be loaded.
I just want my f*cking word processing application to start up.
Quite frankly everything else is fluff.
Since I am known to typically have 20+ windows open at once, I would have to have tons of ram and/or one kick ass hard drive cache in order to keep too many 'fluffy' effects going at once. I like to have things running smoothly and efficiently.
Curvy windows and alpha blended, well heck, alpha blended just about ANYTHING, do not help me approach the Smooth and Efficient way of computing.
Irony: The MAX people brag about being able to drag playing videos around with them showing. Only some MINOR slow downs and such occur. . . .
Windows has been able to do that for YEARS now. Win2k since 1999, never bothered paying any attention to it on win98 (may be able to do it, beats me, the rest of the Win98 pretty much sucks though, heh.)
Transparent windows? Yah, win2k has that. Performance killer on some video cards though (depends). Should really turn ActiveX desktop off for that, things tend to slow down a bit if you have/TOO/ many videos playing on top of each other, heh.
::evil grin::
Hell could even get a setup going where I had MULTIPLE video windows flying around on my Windows desktop. Why the hell not?
Sure none but the first one is going to be video accelerated, but hell, I have this 950mhz (1ghz, depending on time of year and ambient temperatures.:) ) CPU for something after all.
Did I mention that those are multiple video windows dragging around across multiple monitors? Sweet.
OSX is HIGHLY overrated. Windows 2000 has been able to do 99.99% of the stuff that OSX can do, but, oh yah, Win2K is not slowed down to a crawl doing it.
(WTF? OSX has issues RESIZING WINDOWS damnit, how the HELL did they manage to screw that up? I can do opaque window resizing in real time with NO slow downs, hell I can do SEMI-TRANSPARENT WINDOW RESIZING OF PLAYING VIDEO IN REAL TIME with no slow downs! Yeesh. And all of this on a $500 PC. . . ..)
I think that we all need to recalibrate ourselves here.
It is Microsoft's awful marketing, licencing, and overall business methods, ethics, and such, that we are against.
We have to stop artificialy saying how much their interface sucks.
People, Win2k has one of the MOST STREAMLINED and EFFICENT interfaces that you will find.
I have found/one/ rough corner on this thing so far. I would like to be able to drag a file's icon into an "open from" dialog box and have that files path automaticaly pasted into the "open from" dialog box.:)
"The 2nd paper and the people that signed it proved that deforestation was not a problem and that their research showed that our planet's tree population was far greater than it was in the 1920's and increasing rapidly."
Heh, increasing rapidly. . . . .
Dude
You DO realize that there is a SIGNIFICANT different between a SAPLING and a 100 YEAR OLD tree right?
No, seriously. I mean like 50-200ft or so of difference.
The worlds forests are NOT increasing.
Well unless you could forest farms, which are harvested regularly and hardly get to the size of REAL trees.
The forest is shrinking each year. How do I know?
Simple;
gotta drive further along the road to get to the darn'ed thing.
and don't tell me about no world view. World view my ass, no trees in MY area means that _I_ can't breath. And quite frankly I don't GIVE A FUCK about some corporate 'sponsered' (read: EPA made them do it and/or they are making a profit out of it in the long run) program to replant trees.
My lungs, my breath, so stop chopping down all those fr*cking trees.
This e-mail address here was not up on any site for years (well, before it was @Home.com, but still,) and I got a grand total of, err, 3 spam messages over the course of 3 or 4 years.
I put it up just here on/. and it took me two weeks to get anything.
During those first two weeks it was not even obscusicated at all. In fact since selecting to use/.'s automatic obscurification(?) routine the amount of spam I am receiving has INCREASED, leading me to believe that some of the trolls likely keep up with the latest methods and likely go about and purposely harvest the e-mail address's from people who use the obscusification option on/.
Err, spellcheck just choked on my message, and google cannot even figure out some of those mystery words. Screw it, good luck reading the above.:)
Sorry, my bad, EUV is being used for the NEXT generation of chips.
It does come directory from US government Star Wars research though.
The Star Wars program concentrated on spending a lot of money on getting lasers that did had as little dispersion as possible after going through the atmosphere.
One way of accomplishing this that was worked on was by starting out with small highly concentrated laser beams.
Quite a few years later, research falls apart, but all of that research done is still there. Thanks government money, we end up with a new class of highly accrete lasers.
If there is ONE thing that Science has proven time and time again it is that if you DO throw enough money at a problem that eventually SOMETHING -USEFUL- will come out of it.
It may not be anything as to what you are working for (alchemists stone or some such) but there will -ALWAYS- be positive benefits to getting a bunch of Smart People(TM) into a room together and giving them almost unlimited funding and resources.
"Government funding of science, while helps, is not a sure fire way to get a technology off the ground, as we can see by Fusion and space based laser weapons. "
Government research into space based laser weapons paved the way for modern discoveries highly accrete lasers which are currently being used for all sorts of nifty short range stuff.
You know those Gigahert+ CPUs that are being thrown around for less then $100 nowa'days?
QDR is coming out soon, (though they are calling it something else as I recall, no idea why, QDR is such a nice logical name, even the laymen can understand it) and it (seems to be?) but a mere advance of DDR technology.
Not to mention how far up Nvidia has managed to scale DDR RAM. Heh. I would like to see RAMBUS get that.:) (it never would, latency is too high, part of the base rambus technology)
RAMBUS would settle down good in a video toaster type of applicance, but that is about it. Video editing seems to be one of its few strong suits.
Besides, I would like to see a Motherboard that is halfway cheap and can support 3-4GigaBytes of RAMBUS RAM.:)
The first patch for those VBscript security bugs in outlook? The one that Microsoft Promised(TM) solved the issue? Only to turn out to be a situational only patch that JUST took care of that one particular virus? And that another virus came out shortly after that exploited the SAME DAMN BUG?
(only to have another patch come out for the next bug which took care of that bug for all of about a tenth of a second until the NEXT virus took hold? Oh well at least the last virus for outlook actualy made somebody CLICK on something before it ran!)
The image also appears to be verticaly interlaced, thus ensuring that RLE or even the more advanced compression used in GIF files is rendered almost compleatly useless.
(or it might just be my cruddy screen that makes it look interlaced. ^_^ )
Oooh oooh, can I PLEEEEEAAASSSEEEE jump in here with a microsoft bash? I mean this is/so/ easy! ^_^
(seriously, check TheRegister archives for plenty of "oops it was patched, patch is easily bypassed" type of security warnings for Microsoft.)
In all fairness though, I do see a lot of release notes across all genres of software that read "patch 1.23b, fixed problem in patch 1.23 designed to fix problem introduced by patch 1.22"
"Other than soundcards, there is a standardized system in Unix to handle input and graphical output. It's called X. X also has incredible extendibility built into it - the most common API people use right now was intended to be a reference implementation. Right now, the RENDER extension is bringing nice 2D effects in."
X is complicated. Hell we all know X is complicated. What is needed is a BeOS like system, or whatever else you may choose.
X is nice, but, uh, isn't it time for Y? Or Z? Or something? I mean standards have to be updated sooner or latter. There is a reason why nobody is using B any more, it was supplanted (rather quickly:) ) by C. Of course C is far superior to B, which had many shortcomings, while X is a good system the fact is that it can indeed be improved.
Ah, what the computing world REALLY needs though is some sort of cross platform driver set though.:( Give each device a 512K, 1024K, or 2048K ROM chip (Flashable or not, whatever) that can store a base driver that all platforms can then interpret.
Of course getting ANYBODY to agree to this would be a MAJOR pain.
Microsoft benefits from devices only working on their platform, and a good part of the rest of the computer community is highly unwilling to subscribe to any standard that The Beast Of Redmond also agrees to.
But still, it would make like SO much simplier, and FINALLY allow for TRUE plug and play. (drivers? What drivers? Your video card, sound card, modem, NIC, etc, would all work once plugged in with no fuss what so ever.)
The way such a driver system would most likely work is that it would provide an abstraction layer for the drivers to work on (thus allowing for the platform independency)and then interpret (yes I used a bad bad word.:) ) those drivesr for that platform. The drivers would only have to be interpreted the first time the device was plugged in (and you mine as well spend some time doing it, heh) and then they would Just Work Damnit.
(basically I am saying write drivers in Java, C#, whatever. ^_^ Not likely Java, can Java even DO things like that??? I mean one device all platform type of a thing, heh. Obviously a custom language would need to be developed, since compatibility would come first.)
Now each platform would THEN be dependent upon providing the driver interface panel and such.
The driver would say
"Give them a Gamma Adjustment option with Settings Such And Such, This and That, and So on And So On." and the individual OS, err, GUI, would be responsible for providing the controls.
Hell even a text based console interface would work, it would just pop up a message saying "heya, buddy, edit this text file here, when your done run this script file and your setting will be loaded".
The idea would be that I could plug in ANY device to ANY computer and have it work, just so long as the connectors matched up.:)
No more printer issues, no more scanner issues, no more d*mn friggin driver CDs (heh).
Anyways, just an idea, it would be hard to implement and performance would likely take a significant drop (serious limits would be put on hardware based optimizations, since even just putting in flags saying that such and such section of the code is for the Windows plateform and what not would in itself start to cause driver developers to once again start writing for that one platform. . ..), but darnit the pay off would ROCK.
(and the desire to keep the additional cost of the ROM chips down would also hopefully encourage companies to stop writing TWENTY FRIGGIN MEGABYTE driver files! What the HELL is up with that????? SHIT. That sucks. A lot. Nobody should not have to wait an hour to download drivers. . . ever. . . . Grrr.::starts swearing in Creative's general direction:: )
Somebody above said it is digital, hmm, may be.::checks site:: Yup, it is!
Ok, listen up, I don't like microsoft having a monopoly any more then the next antiMShavingAmonopoly slashdot'er, but damnit, the Cinerama is ONE damn good benefit of it.
If you have not seen Lord Of The Rings, Starwars Episode 1, Gladiator, and Harry Potter on this screen, then your life SUCKS. Period. It does.
Yes folks, even Star Wars Episode 1 was good on this screen, and with the sound system in it you could hear EACH AND EVERY ARROW flying by in the opening scene of Gladiator.
Made folks damn near want to duck and hide for cover.
The theater is that good. The seats are nice (though they bend back a bit too much, and some people find them too high up off the ground, their legs end up going numb or at least getting bit into by the chairs edge. ^_^ ), the sound system will have your bones shaking (the THX intros alone are well worth it, there are THX approved theaters and then there are theaters that THX movies are MADE for. ) and even the shittiest movie is well worth seeing here.
Bill Gates can rot in hell, but there is a special place in Heaven for people like Paul Allen who bring this much joy to Geeks.:)
Thanks for the compliments.:) Normaly I get flamed to hell for saying "such stupid things."
::sigh::
Sad times when advocating honest gets a person flamed at.:(
With WindowsXP being what Microsoft seems to be forcing OEMs to install on all new computers now days, software companies might want to seriously consider switching over compleatly to MSI now. Though as I recall it requires an update to the system on many Windows9x machines.
One of my optic nerves never fully developed (the other one mostly developed, close enough.:) ).
I have already stated else where in other/. discussions as to how this can find some cool uses (blink your eyes, have a map of the area around you appear, great for those long road trips and such.:) Catch your bearings while stopping at a restroom. ), but all in all
I WANT SOME NEW OPTIC NERVES DAMNIT.
Or optic nerve regrowth. Or what ever works. Seriously, I just want some damn depth perception!:)
MSI installers beat the royal crude outa Wise now days.:)
Wise installers shove everything under ALL users (uh, BAD) and if any one user tries to remove it from their start menu, it is removed from everybodies start menu. . . .
DirectX is more then just a 3d standard now. Heck games on windows that use OpenGL for the graphics still often times (the majority of them) use DirectX for EVERYTHING else.
In the interview it was said that hopefully somebody will port over other stuff besides Direct3d. I certainly hope so. DirectX makes everything so nice and seamless for the end user.:) (for one, joystick button 1 is joystick button 1 across all applications, heh. And joystick button 9 is joystick button 9, and so forth. Sound is also nice and nifty, it just/works/ damnit. To whatever level your sound card supports it works.)
Sorry man, I hate to admit it (and trust me, I REALLY hate to admit it) but DirectX _HAS_ become a worthwhile standard.
It just. . . . rocks.
For the end user at least.
It is uber-sweet to have everything working together.
The ZSNES team went over to DirectX just because it made so much of their life easier. The controllers for starters. . . .
A game that does a -good- job implementing DirectX control does not care how many buttons your joystick has, or how many joysticks you are using at once to control things.
I have seen games where I can switch over dynamically from one controller to another with no problems. Sheeps is nice in this regard.
But that is not what DirectX is all about.
It is about having a -standardized- set of APIs that people can latch on to.
Linux currently has the problem that there are a gazzilion different ways to access damn nearly everything. Sound cards, monitors, and so forth. Sure on the system level they (tend) to have the same way of doing things, but the game programmers cannot just say "heya, latch on to monitor 1 if that is all that is available, but if the person has two monitors latch on to monitor one for the primary view and pop up a dialog box asking the player if they want to have monitor two used for their rearview mirror."
Nor is there just -one- way for a game to ask
"Heya, I notice you have two separate sound cards installed, which one would you like to use for playing this game?"
Of course there ARE game programing APIs to be had, and in fact there are plenty of them.
Which makes it an absolute bitch for game developers to make requests for new features.
Nvidia and ATI were recently able to strong arm Microsoft into including each companies choosen features into DirectX8. (ah, there are also now four pixel shaders versions, ugh. ATI's 1.4 card came out before Nvidia's faster 1.3 card,::groans:: )
still though, all in all having one central target to direct feature requests to is nice. This means that over time ALL of the necessary features will hopefully be added.
But if you have multitudes of API standards, you can either get one that just fits you right with no extra baggage (yah for you) or more likely you will find that some of them have some of the features that you want but none of them have all of the features that you want. (yes sure you can add those features on, open source and all, but shit, then your company is learning a new API, adding to that API, and programming a game for that API, ouch.)
DirectX streamlines stuff. Or at least the complaint and request part of 'stuff'.
It may not be profound, and hell it may be full of bugs (heh, Nvidia cards have had some rather. . . odd. . . issues with DirectX from time to time.:) ) and misusing it may be far to easy for the game developers to do (THANKFULLY/most/ of them have learned that disabling alt-tab will just piss off most of your customers, and that it is also a big Plus is a person can alt-tab in and out of the application/game. I said most of them. . . . few damn stragglers left, grrr.)
Quite frankly if they just asked me I would be more then willing to SUBMIT this information TO them.
Why?
BECAUSE I AM SICK AND TIRED OF UNTARGETED ADVERTISING.
I would be MORE then pleased if I got to see some GOOD ads for products that I actualy WANTED.
Being male, that series of pop up ads for breast enlargement that was going around on the net awhile ago was insanly stupid. (besides, those ads have what, a 50% market penetration at MAX? Bleh, stupid.)
"They are "free" here too, unless you have "message rate" service. It's a real low monthly fee, but you pay something like 20 cents for every call you make. Do you have something similar in Canada? "
Dude where the heck do you live?
I thought that everywhere in the United States it was just a flat rate for all local service.
In my city it is $15 a month (recently went up to $20 or so I believe) per each number after the first. The first number and base services cost you something like $25 a month or such.
Unlimited everything, and the lines around here are pretty clear (46.6k, though I use a cable modem. Not to mention that my computer room has so much EMF interferance that the line noise is audiable all the time even on my wirebound phone. Damn f*cking fluorescents. . . . and monitors, plural. And scanner, printer, full tower case, 2 HDs, DVD-ROM drive, CD-Burner, wireless keyboard and mouse, 4.1 speaker setup currently with 3.1 speakers, and so forth. Hehe. I am SOOO going to get cancer. )
Mabye the lawyers in this case are ACTUALY on OUR side and they just filed this thing in such a stupid fashion as to ensure that a legal precident gets set in favor of PVR devices.
God I sure hope so. Either that or the Gene Pool is even worse off then I thought!
Thousands upon thousands of childern in this nation alone need to be adopted. A struggling foster care program begs for honest good people to help kids before it is too late,
please people, DO NOT have any more f*cking kids.
If you feel that a little microscopic grouping of molecules makes all that much difference as to whether or not you can love a child, then please, do not have any childern. You are too short sighted.
But if you are of the reasonable and decent type, then for crying out loud, ADOPT. Do _NOT_ have any more childern, do NOT fill up this world any more then it needs to be.
If you spend hunderds of thousands of dollars (or even just tens of thousands) going to extremes to have your 'own' child, then you are not only keeping an innocent baby from having a home but you have just spent more $$$ in a nice way that shows exactly how egotistical and self-fucking-centered we of western civilization are.
Bah, no wonder the world thinks we (mostly us in the USA, but you Europeans are not getting off of this one either) are a bunch of self centered fuckwits.
(and if you already have adopted, may whatever Diety, Dieties, or scientific conjucture(s) you believe in, bless you.)
Now then, on the other hand this presents a WONDERFUL opportunity for birthing almost extinct animals.
w00t. Hey, we have any more Dodo bird genes left lying around?
hey that would even be popular, think of all the The World's Funniest Animal Home Videos episodes you could make off of just Dodo birds.:)
Nah man, that just gives you minimal depth perspective, the data format is still 2d.
It is the difference between having a 3d object and taking a front on picture of it and importing that picture into Adobe Illustrator (or Kilistrator, take your pick, now Kdraw or KVector isn't it? ) and using a "convert to paths" tool, which will get you a very nice 3d -looking- image but it will only store two dimensions for you, VS taking multiple shots of that object and importing them into an Application that calculated the 3d space of that object.
Of course the advantage of what THIS camera does is that you get some 3d information without having to do a lot of REALLY nasty interpolation between multiple images. Granted modern techniques to do such have gotten better, but artificialy creating 3D data from 2D pictures of 3D objects, well. . . . heh. Even worse if those objects are "4D" (aka moving).
This new camera seems to deal with moving objects just fine. Yah.
The MAIN thing that I am thinking of this of is that you could possably translate objects around in your 3D space that was created by this camera.
Your point of view would remain fixed and none of the objects could rotate (more on this latter) but you could still do some REALLY nice stuff in regards to Object Based Encoding.
In fact the integration of 3D data into Object Based Video Encoding technologies could work to create for some VERY nice bit rates, or at least the removal of gobs of artifacts.
Imagine if the Video Encoding KNEW that such and such person was going BEHIND that plant.
Now of course one other use for this is that if you combined it with the pre-existing methods of using multiple cameras to capture a 3d space. With this method you could, mabye even after just creating an object outline in one viewpoint, (I will have to think over this particular facet of this new technology more in order to prove or disprove that idea) to rotate all the seperate OBJECTS within the scene, and not just move your view around the scene. (This is of course excluding any partialy obscured objects, which would likely have some strange things happen to them.:) )
Because you have each objects X, Y, and Z coordinates, and your camera could have almost complete X, Y, and Z plane movements (remember, interpolated between multiple sources and your image quality when zooming in would be dependent upon your original image capture quality) you have yourself what is basicaly a fully workable 3d workspace.
Imagine importing your video some day not into Adobe Premiere but rather into Maya or 3D Studio Max.
Slashdot Mirror
"Once again, we see so-called 'environmentalism' exposed as a mere tool for class warfare. That ends our lesson for today. "
;) )
Sounds good to me.
I have NOTHING what so ever against taking the middle class and rich and beating the living sh*t out of them followed by summarily executions.
Have to just kill them outright and efficiently though. It would be a little bit hypocritical to go on about efficiency and then waste all of that energy slowly torturing the bastards. (however enjoyable delivering said tortures may be.
Oh, and it is the fact that those tree 'farms' are going to be CUT DOWN for a PROFIT that I object too.
If they just used, and I repeat, JUST USED tree farms then I would have no problem with them.
But it is making those tree farms and pointing at them and saying "oh hey look here we are being good to the environment!" and then going about and chopping down beautiful forest land while your looking at their "Great environmental accomplishments."
I actually run Windows 2000 with most of its defaults (I have full path view on of course, and all files are 'unhidden'. )
:) ) damned if I want to have to wait for textures and alpha blended shadow effects to be loaded.
/TOO/ many videos playing on top of each other, heh.
:) ) CPU for something after all.
.)
/one/ rough corner on this thing so far. I would like to be able to drag a file's icon into an "open from" dialog box and have that files path automaticaly pasted into the "open from" dialog box. :)
It is easy to read the text on, everything is of the right size, and by golly, it is PLEASING to look at. It is not some phenomenal work of art, but damnit, if I turn on my computer to go to a word processing program to type up some document (star office, damned if I will use word, I refuse to use word, I have used EDIT in the past rather then use word, I used word to spellcheck that time, but I didn't type in it.
I just want my f*cking word processing application to start up.
Quite frankly everything else is fluff.
Since I am known to typically have 20+ windows open at once, I would have to have tons of ram and/or one kick ass hard drive cache in order to keep too many 'fluffy' effects going at once. I like to have things running smoothly and efficiently.
Curvy windows and alpha blended, well heck, alpha blended just about ANYTHING, do not help me approach the Smooth and Efficient way of computing.
Irony: The MAX people brag about being able to drag playing videos around with them showing. Only some MINOR slow downs and such occur. . . .
Windows has been able to do that for YEARS now. Win2k since 1999, never bothered paying any attention to it on win98 (may be able to do it, beats me, the rest of the Win98 pretty much sucks though, heh.)
Transparent windows? Yah, win2k has that. Performance killer on some video cards though (depends). Should really turn ActiveX desktop off for that, things tend to slow down a bit if you have
::evil grin::
Hell could even get a setup going where I had MULTIPLE video windows flying around on my Windows desktop. Why the hell not?
Sure none but the first one is going to be video accelerated, but hell, I have this 950mhz (1ghz, depending on time of year and ambient temperatures.
Did I mention that those are multiple video windows dragging around across multiple monitors? Sweet.
OSX is HIGHLY overrated. Windows 2000 has been able to do 99.99% of the stuff that OSX can do, but, oh yah, Win2K is not slowed down to a crawl doing it.
(WTF? OSX has issues RESIZING WINDOWS damnit, how the HELL did they manage to screw that up? I can do opaque window resizing in real time with NO slow downs, hell I can do SEMI-TRANSPARENT WINDOW RESIZING OF PLAYING VIDEO IN REAL TIME with no slow downs! Yeesh. And all of this on a $500 PC. . . .
I think that we all need to recalibrate ourselves here.
It is Microsoft's awful marketing, licencing, and overall business methods, ethics, and such, that we are against.
We have to stop artificialy saying how much their interface sucks.
People, Win2k has one of the MOST STREAMLINED and EFFICENT interfaces that you will find.
I have found
"The 2nd paper and the people that signed it proved that deforestation was not a problem and that their research showed that our planet's tree population was far greater than it was in the 1920's and increasing rapidly."
Heh, increasing rapidly. . . . .
Dude
You DO realize that there is a SIGNIFICANT different between a SAPLING and a 100 YEAR OLD tree right?
No, seriously. I mean like 50-200ft or so of difference.
The worlds forests are NOT increasing.
Well unless you could forest farms, which are harvested regularly and hardly get to the size of REAL trees.
The forest is shrinking each year. How do I know?
Simple;
gotta drive further along the road to get to the darn'ed thing.
and don't tell me about no world view. World view my ass, no trees in MY area means that _I_ can't breath. And quite frankly I don't GIVE A FUCK about some corporate 'sponsered' (read: EPA made them do it and/or they are making a profit out of it in the long run) program to replant trees.
My lungs, my breath, so stop chopping down all those fr*cking trees.
KTHXBYEANDFUCKOFF
How many years in a row does it have to be 'odd' for?
It used to be perfectly natural for my area to get a little something called SNOW now and then.
The last 5 years have gotten snow that almost immediately melted from the ground (within a day) and even then the snow fall was pitiful.
10 years ago we would get a regular snowfall of some sort.
20 years ago a regular snowfall of some decency.
50 years ago you actually had to own a pair of snow boots to wear more then once a year.
Now days the 1 day of snow we get is so thin that you can walk in it with sneakers.
This e-mail address here was not up on any site for years (well, before it was @Home.com, but still,) and I got a grand total of, err, 3 spam messages over the course of 3 or 4 years.
/. and it took me two weeks to get anything.
/.'s automatic obscurification(?) routine the amount of spam I am receiving has INCREASED, leading me to believe that some of the trolls likely keep up with the latest methods and likely go about and purposely harvest the e-mail address's from people who use the obscusification option on /.
:)
I put it up just here on
During those first two weeks it was not even obscusicated at all. In fact since selecting to use
Err, spellcheck just choked on my message, and google cannot even figure out some of those mystery words. Screw it, good luck reading the above.
I would not buy OSX on the x86 for the same reason that I refuse to buy WindowsXP.
****IT IS FUCKING UGLY AS HELL***.
Thank you.
(blue + curves == UGLY AS DAMNED HELL DAMNIT FUCKING SHIT MAN.)
---- self subscribed Beige + 90 degree corner lover.
Sorry, my bad, EUV is being used for the NEXT generation of chips.
It does come directory from US government Star Wars research though.
The Star Wars program concentrated on spending a lot of money on getting lasers that did had as little dispersion as possible after going through the atmosphere.
One way of accomplishing this that was worked on was by starting out with small highly concentrated laser beams.
Quite a few years later, research falls apart, but all of that research done is still there. Thanks government money, we end up with a new class of highly accrete lasers.
If there is ONE thing that Science has proven time and time again it is that if you DO throw enough money at a problem that eventually SOMETHING -USEFUL- will come out of it.
It may not be anything as to what you are working for (alchemists stone or some such) but there will -ALWAYS- be positive benefits to getting a bunch of Smart People(TM) into a room together and giving them almost unlimited funding and resources.
"Government funding of science, while helps, is not a sure fire way to get a technology off the ground, as we can see by Fusion and space based laser weapons. "
:)
Government research into space based laser weapons paved the way for modern discoveries highly accrete lasers which are currently being used for all sorts of nifty short range stuff.
You know those Gigahert+ CPUs that are being thrown around for less then $100 nowa'days?
Thank you government laser weapon research.
QDR is coming out soon, (though they are calling it something else as I recall, no idea why, QDR is such a nice logical name, even the laymen can understand it) and it (seems to be?) but a mere advance of DDR technology.
:) (it never would, latency is too high, part of the base rambus technology)
:)
Not to mention how far up Nvidia has managed to scale DDR RAM. Heh. I would like to see RAMBUS get that.
RAMBUS would settle down good in a video toaster type of applicance, but that is about it. Video editing seems to be one of its few strong suits.
Besides, I would like to see a Motherboard that is halfway cheap and can support 3-4GigaBytes of RAMBUS RAM.
Ok smart ass.
The first patch for those VBscript security bugs in outlook? The one that Microsoft Promised(TM) solved the issue? Only to turn out to be a situational only patch that JUST took care of that one particular virus? And that another virus came out shortly after that exploited the SAME DAMN BUG?
(only to have another patch come out for the next bug which took care of that bug for all of about a tenth of a second until the NEXT virus took hold? Oh well at least the last virus for outlook actualy made somebody CLICK on something before it ran!)
The image also appears to be verticaly interlaced, thus ensuring that RLE or even the more advanced compression used in GIF files is rendered almost compleatly useless.
(or it might just be my cruddy screen that makes it look interlaced. ^_^ )
Oooh oooh, can I PLEEEEEAAASSSEEEE jump in here with a microsoft bash? I mean this is /so/ easy! ^_^
(seriously, check TheRegister archives for plenty of "oops it was patched, patch is easily bypassed" type of security warnings for Microsoft.)
In all fairness though, I do see a lot of release notes across all genres of software that read "patch 1.23b, fixed problem in patch 1.23 designed to fix problem introduced by patch 1.22"
"Other than soundcards, there is a standardized system in Unix to handle input and graphical output. It's called X. X also has incredible extendibility built into it - the most common API people use right now was intended to be a reference implementation. Right now, the RENDER extension is bringing nice 2D effects in."
:) ) by C. Of course C is far superior to B, which had many shortcomings, while X is a good system the fact is that it can indeed be improved.
:( Give each device a 512K, 1024K, or 2048K ROM chip (Flashable or not, whatever) that can store a base driver that all platforms can then interpret.
:) ) those drivesr for that platform. The drivers would only have to be interpreted the first time the device was plugged in (and you mine as well spend some time doing it, heh) and then they would Just Work Damnit.
:)
.), but darnit the pay off would ROCK.
::starts swearing in Creative's general direction:: )
X is complicated. Hell we all know X is complicated. What is needed is a BeOS like system, or whatever else you may choose.
X is nice, but, uh, isn't it time for Y? Or Z? Or something? I mean standards have to be updated sooner or latter. There is a reason why nobody is using B any more, it was supplanted (rather quickly
Ah, what the computing world REALLY needs though is some sort of cross platform driver set though.
Of course getting ANYBODY to agree to this would be a MAJOR pain.
Microsoft benefits from devices only working on their platform, and a good part of the rest of the computer community is highly unwilling to subscribe to any standard that The Beast Of Redmond also agrees to.
But still, it would make like SO much simplier, and FINALLY allow for TRUE plug and play. (drivers? What drivers? Your video card, sound card, modem, NIC, etc, would all work once plugged in with no fuss what so ever.)
The way such a driver system would most likely work is that it would provide an abstraction layer for the drivers to work on (thus allowing for the platform independency)and then interpret (yes I used a bad bad word.
(basically I am saying write drivers in Java, C#, whatever. ^_^ Not likely Java, can Java even DO things like that??? I mean one device all platform type of a thing, heh. Obviously a custom language would need to be developed, since compatibility would come first.)
Now each platform would THEN be dependent upon providing the driver interface panel and such.
The driver would say
"Give them a Gamma Adjustment option with Settings Such And Such, This and That, and So on And So On." and the individual OS, err, GUI, would be responsible for providing the controls.
Hell even a text based console interface would work, it would just pop up a message saying "heya, buddy, edit this text file here, when your done run this script file and your setting will be loaded".
The idea would be that I could plug in ANY device to ANY computer and have it work, just so long as the connectors matched up.
No more printer issues, no more scanner issues, no more d*mn friggin driver CDs (heh).
Anyways, just an idea, it would be hard to implement and performance would likely take a significant drop (serious limits would be put on hardware based optimizations, since even just putting in flags saying that such and such section of the code is for the Windows plateform and what not would in itself start to cause driver developers to once again start writing for that one platform. . .
(and the desire to keep the additional cost of the ROM chips down would also hopefully encourage companies to stop writing TWENTY FRIGGIN MEGABYTE driver files! What the HELL is up with that????? SHIT. That sucks. A lot. Nobody should not have to wait an hour to download drivers. . . ever. . . . Grrr.
Somebody above said it is digital, hmm, may be. ::checks site:: Yup, it is!
:)
Ok, listen up, I don't like microsoft having a monopoly any more then the next antiMShavingAmonopoly slashdot'er, but damnit, the Cinerama is ONE damn good benefit of it.
If you have not seen Lord Of The Rings, Starwars Episode 1, Gladiator, and Harry Potter on this screen, then your life SUCKS. Period. It does.
Yes folks, even Star Wars Episode 1 was good on this screen, and with the sound system in it you could hear EACH AND EVERY ARROW flying by in the opening scene of Gladiator.
Made folks damn near want to duck and hide for cover.
The theater is that good. The seats are nice (though they bend back a bit too much, and some people find them too high up off the ground, their legs end up going numb or at least getting bit into by the chairs edge. ^_^ ), the sound system will have your bones shaking (the THX intros alone are well worth it, there are THX approved theaters and then there are theaters that THX movies are MADE for. ) and even the shittiest movie is well worth seeing here.
Bill Gates can rot in hell, but there is a special place in Heaven for people like Paul Allen who bring this much joy to Geeks.
Thanks for the compliments. :) Normaly I get flamed to hell for saying "such stupid things."
:(
:(
::sigh::
Sad times when advocating honest gets a person flamed at.
With WindowsXP being what Microsoft seems to be forcing OEMs to install on all new computers now days, software companies might want to seriously consider switching over compleatly to MSI now. Though as I recall it requires an update to the system on many Windows9x machines.
doh, gotta go, no time to spellcheck.
Why a cuecat? Microvision plans to soon offer a wireless barcode scanner
:) Chop off the tail, add an RF transmitter and. . . .:)
On the other hand, this very well might be were all of those 'destoryed' cuecats are going too.
One of my optic nerves never fully developed (the other one mostly developed, close enough. :) ).
/. discussions as to how this can find some cool uses (blink your eyes, have a map of the area around you appear, great for those long road trips and such. :) Catch your bearings while stopping at a restroom. ), but all in all
:)
I have already stated else where in other
I WANT SOME NEW OPTIC NERVES DAMNIT.
Or optic nerve regrowth. Or what ever works. Seriously, I just want some damn depth perception!
MSI installers beat the royal crude outa Wise now days. :)
Wise installers shove everything under ALL users (uh, BAD) and if any one user tries to remove it from their start menu, it is removed from everybodies start menu. . . .
Suffice to say, leads to clutter.
DirectX is more then just a 3d standard now. Heck games on windows that use OpenGL for the graphics still often times (the majority of them) use DirectX for EVERYTHING else.
:) (for one, joystick button 1 is joystick button 1 across all applications, heh. And joystick button 9 is joystick button 9, and so forth. Sound is also nice and nifty, it just /works/ damnit. To whatever level your sound card supports it works.)
In the interview it was said that hopefully somebody will port over other stuff besides Direct3d. I certainly hope so. DirectX makes everything so nice and seamless for the end user.
Sorry man, I hate to admit it (and trust me, I REALLY hate to admit it) but DirectX _HAS_ become a worthwhile standard.
::groans:: )
:) ) and misusing it may be far to easy for the game developers to do (THANKFULLY /most/ of them have learned that disabling alt-tab will just piss off most of your customers, and that it is also a big Plus is a person can alt-tab in and out of the application/game. I said most of them. . . . few damn stragglers left, grrr.)
It just. . . . rocks.
For the end user at least.
It is uber-sweet to have everything working together.
The ZSNES team went over to DirectX just because it made so much of their life easier. The controllers for starters. . . .
A game that does a -good- job implementing DirectX control does not care how many buttons your joystick has, or how many joysticks you are using at once to control things.
I have seen games where I can switch over dynamically from one controller to another with no problems. Sheeps is nice in this regard.
But that is not what DirectX is all about.
It is about having a -standardized- set of APIs that people can latch on to.
Linux currently has the problem that there are a gazzilion different ways to access damn nearly everything. Sound cards, monitors, and so forth. Sure on the system level they (tend) to have the same way of doing things, but the game programmers cannot just say "heya, latch on to monitor 1 if that is all that is available, but if the person has two monitors latch on to monitor one for the primary view and pop up a dialog box asking the player if they want to have monitor two used for their rearview mirror."
Nor is there just -one- way for a game to ask
"Heya, I notice you have two separate sound cards installed, which one would you like to use for playing this game?"
Of course there ARE game programing APIs to be had, and in fact there are plenty of them.
Which makes it an absolute bitch for game developers to make requests for new features.
Nvidia and ATI were recently able to strong arm Microsoft into including each companies choosen features into DirectX8. (ah, there are also now four pixel shaders versions, ugh. ATI's 1.4 card came out before Nvidia's faster 1.3 card,
still though, all in all having one central target to direct feature requests to is nice. This means that over time ALL of the necessary features will hopefully be added.
But if you have multitudes of API standards, you can either get one that just fits you right with no extra baggage (yah for you) or more likely you will find that some of them have some of the features that you want but none of them have all of the features that you want. (yes sure you can add those features on, open source and all, but shit, then your company is learning a new API, adding to that API, and programming a game for that API, ouch.)
DirectX streamlines stuff. Or at least the complaint and request part of 'stuff'.
It may not be profound, and hell it may be full of bugs (heh, Nvidia cards have had some rather. . . odd. . . issues with DirectX from time to time.
The information is ALREADY useless.
Quite frankly if they just asked me I would be more then willing to SUBMIT this information TO them.
Why?
BECAUSE I AM SICK AND TIRED OF UNTARGETED ADVERTISING.
I would be MORE then pleased if I got to see some GOOD ads for products that I actualy WANTED.
Being male, that series of pop up ads for breast enlargement that was going around on the net awhile ago was insanly stupid. (besides, those ads have what, a 50% market penetration at MAX? Bleh, stupid.)
"They are "free" here too, unless you have "message rate" service. It's a real low monthly fee, but you pay something like 20 cents for every call you make. Do you have something similar in Canada? "
Dude where the heck do you live?
I thought that everywhere in the United States it was just a flat rate for all local service.
In my city it is $15 a month (recently went up to $20 or so I believe) per each number after the first. The first number and base services cost you something like $25 a month or such.
Unlimited everything, and the lines around here are pretty clear (46.6k, though I use a cable modem. Not to mention that my computer room has so much EMF interferance that the line noise is audiable all the time even on my wirebound phone. Damn f*cking fluorescents. . . . and monitors, plural. And scanner, printer, full tower case, 2 HDs, DVD-ROM drive, CD-Burner, wireless keyboard and mouse, 4.1 speaker setup currently with 3.1 speakers, and so forth. Hehe. I am SOOO going to get cancer. )
Mabye the lawyers in this case are ACTUALY on OUR side and they just filed this thing in such a stupid fashion as to ensure that a legal precident gets set in favor of PVR devices.
God I sure hope so. Either that or the Gene Pool is even worse off then I thought!
Thousands upon thousands of childern in this nation alone need to be adopted. A struggling foster care program begs for honest good people to help kids before it is too late,
:)
please people, DO NOT have any more f*cking kids.
If you feel that a little microscopic grouping of molecules makes all that much difference as to whether or not you can love a child, then please, do not have any childern. You are too short sighted.
But if you are of the reasonable and decent type, then for crying out loud, ADOPT. Do _NOT_ have any more childern, do NOT fill up this world any more then it needs to be.
If you spend hunderds of thousands of dollars (or even just tens of thousands) going to extremes to have your 'own' child, then you are not only keeping an innocent baby from having a home but you have just spent more $$$ in a nice way that shows exactly how egotistical and self-fucking-centered we of western civilization are.
Bah, no wonder the world thinks we (mostly us in the USA, but you Europeans are not getting off of this one either) are a bunch of self centered fuckwits.
(and if you already have adopted, may whatever Diety, Dieties, or scientific conjucture(s) you believe in, bless you.)
Now then, on the other hand this presents a WONDERFUL opportunity for birthing almost extinct animals.
w00t. Hey, we have any more Dodo bird genes left lying around?
hey that would even be popular, think of all the The World's Funniest Animal Home Videos episodes you could make off of just Dodo birds.
Nah man, that just gives you minimal depth perspective, the data format is still 2d.
:) )
It is the difference between having a 3d object and taking a front on picture of it and importing that picture into Adobe Illustrator (or Kilistrator, take your pick, now Kdraw or KVector isn't it? ) and using a "convert to paths" tool, which will get you a very nice 3d -looking- image but it will only store two dimensions for you, VS taking multiple shots of that object and importing them into an Application that calculated the 3d space of that object.
Of course the advantage of what THIS camera does is that you get some 3d information without having to do a lot of REALLY nasty interpolation between multiple images. Granted modern techniques to do such have gotten better, but artificialy creating 3D data from 2D pictures of 3D objects, well. . . . heh. Even worse if those objects are "4D" (aka moving).
This new camera seems to deal with moving objects just fine. Yah.
The MAIN thing that I am thinking of this of is that you could possably translate objects around in your 3D space that was created by this camera.
Your point of view would remain fixed and none of the objects could rotate (more on this latter) but you could still do some REALLY nice stuff in regards to Object Based Encoding.
In fact the integration of 3D data into Object Based Video Encoding technologies could work to create for some VERY nice bit rates, or at least the removal of gobs of artifacts.
Imagine if the Video Encoding KNEW that such and such person was going BEHIND that plant.
Now of course one other use for this is that if you combined it with the pre-existing methods of using multiple cameras to capture a 3d space. With this method you could, mabye even after just creating an object outline in one viewpoint, (I will have to think over this particular facet of this new technology more in order to prove or disprove that idea) to rotate all the seperate OBJECTS within the scene, and not just move your view around the scene. (This is of course excluding any partialy obscured objects, which would likely have some strange things happen to them.
Because you have each objects X, Y, and Z coordinates, and your camera could have almost complete X, Y, and Z plane movements (remember, interpolated between multiple sources and your image quality when zooming in would be dependent upon your original image capture quality) you have yourself what is basicaly a fully workable 3d workspace.
Imagine importing your video some day not into Adobe Premiere but rather into Maya or 3D Studio Max.
Kick Ass.