Silk is an awesome material; it requires almost zero post processing,ng or chemical. Leather, on the other hand, requires a pretty nasty chemical process. Check out the movie "perfume " for an interesting view of this nasty process during the mideival era.
I think they're trying to engage the male population here - AFAIK, PETA membership is skewed towards women. Since the last fur fashion for men were Davey Crocket "coon hats" in the 1950's, men aren't acutely aware of fur as a fashion device unless PETA parades a model half/completely naked in front of them, or makes a video game for them to play.
To take the "any publicity is good publicity" argument in a different direction, I think PETA might be doing more to help the fur fashion industry than to hurt it. If it weren't for PETA, I would have assumed that fur fashions died out in the 1920s. Maybe they're more popular in colder climates? I've seen perhaps five people wear furs here in Dallas and I spent my college years working in a Godiva chocolate shop, parked outside of a Neiman Marcus (think Saks 5th Avenue or Barney's New York) which is one of the few places you can buy furs in this part of the world.
Sandboxing is fun, but games generally have rules and objectives. Until recently there was a very limited tech tree (now recently improved enchantments and that ender pearl receptacle thing), but nothing too crazy. Generally when describing gameplay to someone else, you should be able to describe the starting circumstances, one or two high points, and the end result. Sim City is a sandbox game with good gameplay; the player has to start a town, grow it, respond to natural disasters and define it as a major megalopolis with a population of X before the year 2050. Minecraft... you build tools, mine minerals, build better tools to mine minerals, and build things. I guess you could say that building a mega-project is "beating the game" but that's a very broad definition.
Minecraft has been a very fun sandbox for a long time, but it's lacked any sort of direction or gameplay focus or even narrative or backstory. Finally we have an "alien" language and some spells, but in terms of gameplay it's very minor.
It's possible (currently) that you could share an ID number with a friend who actually owns an iPhone. I'm sure the next patch (either client or server) will only allow one IP address a day access to the siri service. If your buddy doesn't use his siri service, you might be able to permanently use it.
I think Minecraft had netted ~$15 million in October 2010, which means they made ~$30+ million in 2011. Prior to May 2010 the game was definitely Alpha, and by July or August 2010 it was what I would call "beta" and actually playable. By January-March 2011 it was in a state most companies would release as gold master. Multiplayer was essentially finished, and players could access the "nether" world without crashing it too badly. What we're getting here in November is sort of "major patch #2" you might see 6-8 months after release from a large studio.
All numbers and dates are approximate. I'll let the real minecraft fans correct me with actual dates and numbers.
My computer spent about 10 minutes auto installing and rebooting yesterday, does that count? If we all used and judged an os purely by the software that came preinstalled, the world would be in pretty sorry shape.
How is Win7 easier to use than XP? - for starters, it supports more than 4GB of ram. Currently running 12GB, with 6.7GB used. I've never had issues with wifi on my Win7 systems (except one card that had only unsigned 64-bit drivers, requiring a special boot sequence to use).
I think the only time I've spent configuring Win7 was trying to figure out where they'd moved the desktop wallpaper selection menu to. It used to be accessible from the desktop screen resolution context menu, but it's buried deep elsewhere now.
I've probably installed 10 different versions of Ubuntu over the past 6 years, played around with obscure distros like Deli Linux and even got Linux working on a 68K mac (harder than it sounds, macs won't boot off of non-apple branded hard drives without special tweaks). I remember goofing around with DSL linux in college and using those buisness card sized CD-Rs. I'm very aware that there's a flavor of linux for every user... but Win7 is "good enough", and I've yet to find a reason to switch. When the time comes to upgrade again, I'll definiely consider linux and take a hard look at it, but there will need to be a good reason to switch yet again.
It's not a religious war, it's a matter of convenience, and apathy towards digging around in the console for a device that's little more than an appliance to me these days. Linux and OSX are both excellent OSes, but on the desktop, Win7 is just the better option for me at this point and time.
Probably the most frustrating thing with Ubuntu (and linux in general) was that damned Broadcom wifi driver problem. Granted, they've "fixed" it since then, but I've had few rage inducing moments more frustrating than getting the broadcom driver wrapper to work. Nowadays some of the bigger problems are restore from sleep, and enabling those dual-mode laptop graphics cards. Another time it was Ubuntu muting my sound when I put my laptop to sleep, forcing me to manually reinitialize my sound card if I wanted audio through my speakers instead of my headphone jack. Most recently my problems have been that the laptop won't reconnect to the same wifi access point after being put to sleep unless you power down the wifi first, otherwise you have to reboot. This is using the legendary WRT54G which works flawlessly with everything else. On my laptop, you can blacken the screen with the brightness set to low, but you have to wait for power management to actually turn off the backlight - the user can't turn it off using keyboard commands. Those are the most common problems I've tried fixing recently, I'm sure I'll think of more. With my windows systems/android phones, I power them on and they just work.
I received just enough inheritance money when I graduated high school to buy me a fancy laptop (Powerbook G4 Ti) for college in 2001. It started falling apart in 2006 and I purchased a new computer in 2008, but couldn't afford Windows at the time so I installed linux. I got a new job in 2010 and upgraded most of my hardware along with my OS. A medium/high end gaming system cost about 60% of what a low end mac laptop cost, and I had already purchased a netbook for travel computing needs (still running Ubuntu 9.10, has been to two continents and 11 countries since then).
Maybe if Apple had a gaming desktop that cost less than $1500 I would consider them, but the price difference between a PC and an Apple gaming system is the down payment on a used BMW.
Yeah but when you google "problem XYZ ubuntu" the solutions are almost always going to be Unity, not Gnome2/3/KDE. Gnome3 losing official support from Ubuntu was the kiss of death for me.
If I have to spend more than 30 seconds googling for a solution (hell, I shouldn't have to google for solutions at all) I don't want to deal with it, and it's probably going to be an ugly hack until it's resolved 6-12 months down the road. Getting support for problems on Ubuntu using KDE is about as fast as resolving Swahili localization problems - good fucking luck. If you have to make excuses for how to fix a glaring oversight, there's something fundementally wrong with your viewpoint. I'm too old to be fiddling with crap like that these days, sorry.
Has anyone else noticed that the recently many of the dissenting opinions tend to be anonymous cowards? It seems to be a significant uptick lately.
I was on Mac (2001-2008, then Linux (2008-2010), but then my linux buddy switched back to Windows 7. I was skeptical at first, but his glowing reviews that "everything just worked on the desktop - graphics card, drivers, audio, sleep/restore, etc every time. No more configuring random crap to try and get it to work until a real patch was released. He and I still deploy Linux for work servers, but on day to day desktop, I've seen the light, and it's Windows 7. I installed Win7 in ~Sept 2010 and haven't had any configuration problems since then. It's super speedy and all my games work with it.
Coding is a bit of an issue on Windows, but Python, Ruby and Java are easy enough to develop on the Windows platform these days. Between CoreFTP, WinSCP, Putty and the other various tools, Windows is extremely functional for day to day power users. Linux had started getting an edge over XP, but Win7 is just so easy to use, it's really difficult to switch back to tinkering with things 2-3 times a week with Linux. OEM copies of Win7 are often $100 on NewEgg - when I think about it, $100 is well worth me not spending 10-20 hours a year configuring and tweaking my OS to keep it running in top shape.
I dearly want to love Ubuntu on the desktop, but after 9.10 they switched to Unity and it makes me sick to my stomach to use that crap interface. Gnome 2 was rock solid and a very functional interface. I might look at Ubuntu again once they solve all the problems with Unity, or Gnome3 is fully usable. Wine is top notch these days and handles 95% of my windows needs.... but for $100, Windows7 is just less of a hassle to deal with right now.
So where does this leave Netflix, the only company willing to take dirty bribe money to require silverlight for use with their service? Even Hulu doesn't use silverlight.
What about the Olympics? They require(d) silverlight to view any footage, live or recorded.
It does help organize things a bit. http://www.coolwebpages.co.uk/ you know immediately is english language, but also strictly British..gov,.edu and.mil are generally safer than a.ru site to visit, and you know that you're going to have an epileptic seizure if you try reading the flashing text on a.jp site. You can figure out someone's nationality from their accent in speech, but a nationalized or regional top level domains are the only identifier about the location or level of trust you have before you click on a link.
The man with the 7-figure pockets could get sexe.xxx and sexo.xxx, but not sex.xxx? After the battle over sex.com, I'm curious who was awarded that domain.
How did you manage to go through the entire post - commentary included - and not mention it's direct competitor? We discuss apple vs microsoft on a daily basis, but when it comes to games, we won't compare them to their peers? Despite being released 2 weeks apart?
Uh, don't get me wrong here, it takes a lot of fuel and energy to get something to Mars.... and then back again. But the lunar moon lander returned with ~300 pounds of material. It seems that after all of the engineering, R&D money and development, it would only be an additional 1% to the project cost to bring back 10 pounds of the stuff. 7 oz is going to be hugely helpful to science, but most of the trip is spent coasting to and from it's destination - there isn't that much additional fuel involved in bumping the payload up from a single serving soda to a family size 12 pack, is there?
At this point I don't really see the version of numbering it anymore. It's a stable product (...line) that isn't going to be replaced by a better, newer technology in the next few years. I hate to make a car analogy but you might as well call it firefox 11. as in, the 2011 model of firefox. just keep releasing small updates throughout the year and when you're ready to introduce some major plugin breaking features, then go ahead and announce firefox 12. I'm a windows user and can't be arsed to figure out what version I have. I only know what chrome version (13.x) i'm using because I was trying to bug test a plugin with a friend last week. web browsers are no longer version numbers, they're "out of date" and "updated".
You wouldn't need an aimable laser, you could just use a DLP projector. The main problem I can see with the system is that you would have a tremendous amount of input lag for the bottom half of the display until you could write an algorithm to predict where you can place water droplets early so they wouldn't obstruct view, but would probably be used/lit towards the bottom of the screen. You'd probably just need an engine that could keep track of a 100x100 grid and which items on the grid you could light up without lighting up other points on other grids. You'd probably have quite a few flickering voxels, depending on the number of DLP projectors.
You're the only person to say "you're wrong" and sign your name to it. Yes, they have occurred before. Occasionally there are earthquakes in the Ozark Mountains far to the east, but as a resident of the region, I think can safely say that if you ask anyone in Texas if we have earthquakes here, short of a seismologist (or slashdot reader with too much time on his hands;) ), nobody would answer "yes". There is a difference between a 100% seismically dead, and "we have a 4.0 earthquake every 10 years". Few people can feel a 4.0, especially in this part of the world. They're exceedingly rare. They are once in a generation, once in a lifetime events here. I stand by my use of "ever".
Because we don't get earthquakes in this part of the world. Ever. There was an earthquake just SE of San Antonio, Texas - the second ever recorded, and about 5 miles from an active fracking operation. Fracking is a really screwy operation that a lot of countries have banned because it causes a lot of problems and earthquakes.
Last time I was in a brick and mortar electronics store (to buy my Nexus S) in February, all the models were 5" and 7". Has the market changed that much in 9 months?
Seriously, in developing countries, BRIC countries in particular like Brazil, Russia, India, China - even Mexico on to our South - you can buy a motorcycle, which uses global commodities like steel and rubber, for $1200 delivered. It gets 80-100mpg and will do 60mph, can be repaired anywhere, by nearly anyone.
Don't get me wrong, electric technology is amazing, but when it comes to scooter/motorcycle technology, it's very difficult to make the argument for a $7000 scooter. 150cc motorcycle technology is about 100 years old and quite safe, simple, and for the most part -- green. Motorcycle engines are modular and easily repairable. I am repeating myself, but $7000 is approaching the price of a tiny sedan here in the states. Sure, there will be future versions that cost less, but perhaps we should be approaching electric passenger and commercial vehicles, not trying to reinvent the (two) wheel(ed vehicle).
to take big gambles by locking up supplies of parts for years
I've heard that the reason you see so few 9.5" "ipad size" tablet displays is that Apple bought up the entire stock. This is also why the iPad 2 had the same resolution as the ipad 1, and why the Android tablets are mostly stuck at 7". Can anyone confirm/deny this? Or explain that better. My knowledge of LCD manufacturing plants and capability is minimal, to say the least.
Slashdot Mirror
Silk is an awesome material; it requires almost zero post processing,ng or chemical. Leather, on the other hand, requires a pretty nasty chemical process. Check out the movie "perfume " for an interesting view of this nasty process during the mideival era.
I think they're trying to engage the male population here - AFAIK, PETA membership is skewed towards women. Since the last fur fashion for men were Davey Crocket "coon hats" in the 1950's, men aren't acutely aware of fur as a fashion device unless PETA parades a model half/completely naked in front of them, or makes a video game for them to play.
To take the "any publicity is good publicity" argument in a different direction, I think PETA might be doing more to help the fur fashion industry than to hurt it. If it weren't for PETA, I would have assumed that fur fashions died out in the 1920s. Maybe they're more popular in colder climates? I've seen perhaps five people wear furs here in Dallas and I spent my college years working in a Godiva chocolate shop, parked outside of a Neiman Marcus (think Saks 5th Avenue or Barney's New York) which is one of the few places you can buy furs in this part of the world.
Sandboxing is fun, but games generally have rules and objectives. Until recently there was a very limited tech tree (now recently improved enchantments and that ender pearl receptacle thing), but nothing too crazy. Generally when describing gameplay to someone else, you should be able to describe the starting circumstances, one or two high points, and the end result. Sim City is a sandbox game with good gameplay; the player has to start a town, grow it, respond to natural disasters and define it as a major megalopolis with a population of X before the year 2050. Minecraft... you build tools, mine minerals, build better tools to mine minerals, and build things. I guess you could say that building a mega-project is "beating the game" but that's a very broad definition.
Minecraft has been a very fun sandbox for a long time, but it's lacked any sort of direction or gameplay focus or even narrative or backstory. Finally we have an "alien" language and some spells, but in terms of gameplay it's very minor.
It's possible (currently) that you could share an ID number with a friend who actually owns an iPhone. I'm sure the next patch (either client or server) will only allow one IP address a day access to the siri service. If your buddy doesn't use his siri service, you might be able to permanently use it.
I think Minecraft had netted ~$15 million in October 2010, which means they made ~$30+ million in 2011. Prior to May 2010 the game was definitely Alpha, and by July or August 2010 it was what I would call "beta" and actually playable. By January-March 2011 it was in a state most companies would release as gold master. Multiplayer was essentially finished, and players could access the "nether" world without crashing it too badly. What we're getting here in November is sort of "major patch #2" you might see 6-8 months after release from a large studio.
All numbers and dates are approximate. I'll let the real minecraft fans correct me with actual dates and numbers.
My computer spent about 10 minutes auto installing and rebooting yesterday, does that count? If we all used and judged an os purely by the software that came preinstalled, the world would be in pretty sorry shape.
How is Win7 easier to use than XP? - for starters, it supports more than 4GB of ram. Currently running 12GB, with 6.7GB used. I've never had issues with wifi on my Win7 systems (except one card that had only unsigned 64-bit drivers, requiring a special boot sequence to use).
I think the only time I've spent configuring Win7 was trying to figure out where they'd moved the desktop wallpaper selection menu to. It used to be accessible from the desktop screen resolution context menu, but it's buried deep elsewhere now.
I've probably installed 10 different versions of Ubuntu over the past 6 years, played around with obscure distros like Deli Linux and even got Linux working on a 68K mac (harder than it sounds, macs won't boot off of non-apple branded hard drives without special tweaks). I remember goofing around with DSL linux in college and using those buisness card sized CD-Rs. I'm very aware that there's a flavor of linux for every user... but Win7 is "good enough", and I've yet to find a reason to switch. When the time comes to upgrade again, I'll definiely consider linux and take a hard look at it, but there will need to be a good reason to switch yet again.
It's not a religious war, it's a matter of convenience, and apathy towards digging around in the console for a device that's little more than an appliance to me these days. Linux and OSX are both excellent OSes, but on the desktop, Win7 is just the better option for me at this point and time.
Probably the most frustrating thing with Ubuntu (and linux in general) was that damned Broadcom wifi driver problem. Granted, they've "fixed" it since then, but I've had few rage inducing moments more frustrating than getting the broadcom driver wrapper to work. Nowadays some of the bigger problems are restore from sleep, and enabling those dual-mode laptop graphics cards. Another time it was Ubuntu muting my sound when I put my laptop to sleep, forcing me to manually reinitialize my sound card if I wanted audio through my speakers instead of my headphone jack. Most recently my problems have been that the laptop won't reconnect to the same wifi access point after being put to sleep unless you power down the wifi first, otherwise you have to reboot. This is using the legendary WRT54G which works flawlessly with everything else. On my laptop, you can blacken the screen with the brightness set to low, but you have to wait for power management to actually turn off the backlight - the user can't turn it off using keyboard commands. Those are the most common problems I've tried fixing recently, I'm sure I'll think of more. With my windows systems/android phones, I power them on and they just work.
I received just enough inheritance money when I graduated high school to buy me a fancy laptop (Powerbook G4 Ti) for college in 2001. It started falling apart in 2006 and I purchased a new computer in 2008, but couldn't afford Windows at the time so I installed linux. I got a new job in 2010 and upgraded most of my hardware along with my OS. A medium/high end gaming system cost about 60% of what a low end mac laptop cost, and I had already purchased a netbook for travel computing needs (still running Ubuntu 9.10, has been to two continents and 11 countries since then).
Maybe if Apple had a gaming desktop that cost less than $1500 I would consider them, but the price difference between a PC and an Apple gaming system is the down payment on a used BMW.
Yeah but when you google "problem XYZ ubuntu" the solutions are almost always going to be Unity, not Gnome2/3/KDE. Gnome3 losing official support from Ubuntu was the kiss of death for me.
If I have to spend more than 30 seconds googling for a solution (hell, I shouldn't have to google for solutions at all) I don't want to deal with it, and it's probably going to be an ugly hack until it's resolved 6-12 months down the road. Getting support for problems on Ubuntu using KDE is about as fast as resolving Swahili localization problems - good fucking luck. If you have to make excuses for how to fix a glaring oversight, there's something fundementally wrong with your viewpoint. I'm too old to be fiddling with crap like that these days, sorry.
Has anyone else noticed that the recently many of the dissenting opinions tend to be anonymous cowards? It seems to be a significant uptick lately.
I was on Mac (2001-2008, then Linux (2008-2010), but then my linux buddy switched back to Windows 7. I was skeptical at first, but his glowing reviews that "everything just worked on the desktop - graphics card, drivers, audio, sleep/restore, etc every time. No more configuring random crap to try and get it to work until a real patch was released. He and I still deploy Linux for work servers, but on day to day desktop, I've seen the light, and it's Windows 7. I installed Win7 in ~Sept 2010 and haven't had any configuration problems since then. It's super speedy and all my games work with it.
Coding is a bit of an issue on Windows, but Python, Ruby and Java are easy enough to develop on the Windows platform these days. Between CoreFTP, WinSCP, Putty and the other various tools, Windows is extremely functional for day to day power users. Linux had started getting an edge over XP, but Win7 is just so easy to use, it's really difficult to switch back to tinkering with things 2-3 times a week with Linux. OEM copies of Win7 are often $100 on NewEgg - when I think about it, $100 is well worth me not spending 10-20 hours a year configuring and tweaking my OS to keep it running in top shape.
I dearly want to love Ubuntu on the desktop, but after 9.10 they switched to Unity and it makes me sick to my stomach to use that crap interface. Gnome 2 was rock solid and a very functional interface. I might look at Ubuntu again once they solve all the problems with Unity, or Gnome3 is fully usable. Wine is top notch these days and handles 95% of my windows needs.... but for $100, Windows7 is just less of a hassle to deal with right now.
So where does this leave Netflix, the only company willing to take dirty bribe money to require silverlight for use with their service? Even Hulu doesn't use silverlight.
What about the Olympics? They require(d) silverlight to view any footage, live or recorded.
It does help organize things a bit. http://www.coolwebpages.co.uk/ you know immediately is english language, but also strictly British. .gov, .edu and .mil are generally safer than a .ru site to visit, and you know that you're going to have an epileptic seizure if you try reading the flashing text on a .jp site. You can figure out someone's nationality from their accent in speech, but a nationalized or regional top level domains are the only identifier about the location or level of trust you have before you click on a link.
The man with the 7-figure pockets could get sexe.xxx and sexo.xxx, but not sex.xxx? After the battle over sex.com, I'm curious who was awarded that domain.
How did you manage to go through the entire post - commentary included - and not mention it's direct competitor? We discuss apple vs microsoft on a daily basis, but when it comes to games, we won't compare them to their peers? Despite being released 2 weeks apart?
Uh, don't get me wrong here, it takes a lot of fuel and energy to get something to Mars.... and then back again. But the lunar moon lander returned with ~300 pounds of material. It seems that after all of the engineering, R&D money and development, it would only be an additional 1% to the project cost to bring back 10 pounds of the stuff. 7 oz is going to be hugely helpful to science, but most of the trip is spent coasting to and from it's destination - there isn't that much additional fuel involved in bumping the payload up from a single serving soda to a family size 12 pack, is there?
At this point I don't really see the version of numbering it anymore. It's a stable product (...line) that isn't going to be replaced by a better, newer technology in the next few years. I hate to make a car analogy but you might as well call it firefox 11. as in, the 2011 model of firefox. just keep releasing small updates throughout the year and when you're ready to introduce some major plugin breaking features, then go ahead and announce firefox 12. I'm a windows user and can't be arsed to figure out what version I have. I only know what chrome version (13.x) i'm using because I was trying to bug test a plugin with a friend last week. web browsers are no longer version numbers, they're "out of date" and "updated".
You wouldn't need an aimable laser, you could just use a DLP projector. The main problem I can see with the system is that you would have a tremendous amount of input lag for the bottom half of the display until you could write an algorithm to predict where you can place water droplets early so they wouldn't obstruct view, but would probably be used/lit towards the bottom of the screen. You'd probably just need an engine that could keep track of a 100x100 grid and which items on the grid you could light up without lighting up other points on other grids. You'd probably have quite a few flickering voxels, depending on the number of DLP projectors.
You're the only person to say "you're wrong" and sign your name to it. Yes, they have occurred before. Occasionally there are earthquakes in the Ozark Mountains far to the east, but as a resident of the region, I think can safely say that if you ask anyone in Texas if we have earthquakes here, short of a seismologist (or slashdot reader with too much time on his hands ;) ), nobody would answer "yes". There is a difference between a 100% seismically dead, and "we have a 4.0 earthquake every 10 years". Few people can feel a 4.0, especially in this part of the world. They're exceedingly rare. They are once in a generation, once in a lifetime events here. I stand by my use of "ever".
Because we don't get earthquakes in this part of the world. Ever. There was an earthquake just SE of San Antonio, Texas - the second ever recorded, and about 5 miles from an active fracking operation. Fracking is a really screwy operation that a lot of countries have banned because it causes a lot of problems and earthquakes.
Last time I was in a brick and mortar store, 3.x hadn't been released outside of that one motorola tablet.
Out of curiosity, what aspect ratios are US Letter, US Legal, and A4?
Last time I was in a brick and mortar electronics store (to buy my Nexus S) in February, all the models were 5" and 7". Has the market changed that much in 9 months?
Seriously, in developing countries, BRIC countries in particular like Brazil, Russia, India, China - even Mexico on to our South - you can buy a motorcycle, which uses global commodities like steel and rubber, for $1200 delivered. It gets 80-100mpg and will do 60mph, can be repaired anywhere, by nearly anyone.
Don't get me wrong, electric technology is amazing, but when it comes to scooter/motorcycle technology, it's very difficult to make the argument for a $7000 scooter. 150cc motorcycle technology is about 100 years old and quite safe, simple, and for the most part -- green. Motorcycle engines are modular and easily repairable. I am repeating myself, but $7000 is approaching the price of a tiny sedan here in the states. Sure, there will be future versions that cost less, but perhaps we should be approaching electric passenger and commercial vehicles, not trying to reinvent the (two) wheel(ed vehicle).
I've heard that the reason you see so few 9.5" "ipad size" tablet displays is that Apple bought up the entire stock. This is also why the iPad 2 had the same resolution as the ipad 1, and why the Android tablets are mostly stuck at 7". Can anyone confirm/deny this? Or explain that better. My knowledge of LCD manufacturing plants and capability is minimal, to say the least.