I'll third it. I play Lego Star Wars with my 8yo son. It's cute and fun for both of us. And it feels so good to whack Jar-Jar with a light sabre...
Some of the older FPSs have good co-op modes. Heretic is one of my favorites; I worked through that a couple times with my son. The Doomsday engine breathes new life into a lot of those old games by updating the graphics, sound, and control schemes.
I can definitely vouch for TortoiseSVN's usefulness - I have used it on some of my own projects, and it's really easy enough for anyone. A great example of a well executed piece of software.
I agree that SVN, especially the Tortoise front-end, is really easy to work with. One caveat if you're working with binary files and have multiple developers: Make sure you have a recent server which supports file locking! SVN didn't originally support this; text files were merged together at commit time. You can't merge binaries. Our EEs found the lack of locks to be a major drawback a few releases ago when they were trying to work on schematics. They opted to stick with PVCS rather than work out some kludgy out-of-band method (ie., patch pumpkin) to prevent simultaneous edits to one file. Once file locks were supported they were happy again.
Of course, if you're working with people not used to version control, there's the little issue of training them to actually remember to lock the files before they start working on them...
I also like the 3-pane layout. I don't understand the animosity towards it. Now mind you, for my home account I use Pine. It has features I need which I haven't seen in any other mailer. But in general I prefer the 3-pane layout.
(What features do I need from Pine? I have it configured to store all its settings and address book on my IMAP server. So I can run a local client on my home PC, my work PC, and my laptop and have access to everything. Plus, if I'm using someone else's machine (or my Palm pilot) I can SSH in to my server and run the command-line client. And I even have a Java-based SSH client accessible from my web server, so I don't even have to rely on someone else having an SSH client installed!)
This is a bad trend. All of the software (with the possible exception of Norton AV, which I've never used) runs just fine on Win2k. Why the XP restriction? This is twice in one week I've run up against an arbitrary won't-install-on-2000 roadblock. (The first was trying to install Age of Empires III, which actually runs just fine on 2000 if you can manage to trick the installer.) It looks like the days of Win2k are numbered, not because it can't run the software but simply because the software refuses to install. I really hate artificial limitations.
The problem isn't the HTML per se, it's the half-assed implementation in most mail readers. Rich text in general is a good thing. HTML is a reasonable choice for rich-text. Ther are just two rules for securing HTML mail: Do not display anything not included in the message. Embedded images are okay, but don't fetch <img> links. And donot, under any circumstances, run any scripts of any sort. That's it. Pay attention to those two rules and you get HTML mail that's exactly as secure as plain-text mail.
For the love of God, why? Why would anyone pay real money for a thumbnail-sized ad on some random, content-free page? I see a couple 100x100 pixel ads there. $10,000? Just to be part of the freak show? Does anyone really expect to make that back in revenue?
sigh I guess that's why he has a million dollars and I don't. I don't understand why anyone would pay five bucks for a ring-tone, either, yet they do...
Now it's having to endure visual clutter like the station ID logo, and these rediculous sliders that zip in and out at the bottom of the screen just after we've already been subject to four or more commercials.
I predict that within the next year we'll see stations running a constant advertising crawler. They'l probably shrink the size of the actual content area and fill the margins with advertising, much like CNN does with its stock ticker, weather, etc. Ha! Try to skip that! I further predict that within another year this practice will be commonplace and used on the majority of channels.
In fact, this may drive wide-screen format for shooting new shows. The shows will be shot in 16:9 and broadcast full-screen, with the ads taking up the remaining space. And no, those of you with wide-format TVs won't be able to just crop out the ads. Some shows will be broadcast with the content at the top of the screen and ads at the bottom. Some will have the content at the bottom and ads at the top. Some will have content in the middle and ads both top and bottom. And some will even flip the ad and content panes mid-show. If you want to see the shows ad-free you'll have to buy the DVDs. (Or, of course, download pirated copies that have already been cropped.)
I thought the product placement in Minority Report was extremely well done. It was kind of in-your-face, but it needed to be. It actually advanced the plot. I think avoiding product placement and using obviously fake brands would have detracted from the movie. "John Anderton, you look like you could use a Duff Lite!" doesn't have the same feel to it.
You couldn't get away with this in many movies, but once in a while it works.
Why didn't I read/. in 1979? I lost two tooth caps that way!
I knocked the braces off my front teeth more than once, myself...
The brick separator is really good, though. My Mindstorms kit has one, and it does a great job of getting two stuck flat pieces apart. Better than my teeth, and better than the screwdriver that I eventually just tossed into my Lego bin.
Lego's quality may be their downfall, though. I still have my old bin of Lego bricks. Now my kids play with those same pieces. There's no real reason for me to buy the basic bricks for them, 'cause they have a huge supply already. They do love the Bionicles, though. And it turns out, you can use the specialty Bionicle parts to make original creations. My kids have created some pretty interesting-looking monsters from those sets.
Gyricon is also shipping an electronic paper product, in the form of signage. (Full disclosure: I'm one of the firmware guys at Gyricon.) We have a 15"x17" segmented display and a 7"x5.5" 100dpi all-points-addressable display. And you can buy them right now.
Unfortunately the technology isn't quite there yet to produce the re-writable newspaper that everyone thinks of when you say "electronic paper". The biggest problem is getting a flexible backplane. You need a flexible TFT or something like it. We have the flexible re-writable media; we just need something flexible to put it on. I imagine you'll see flexible LCD displays before you see flexible e-paper displays, just because the backplane technology is similar but LCDs are in much higher production.
Thickness is another issue. Every form of e-paper I know of is mechanical in nature. You have to move colored particles from the back of the display to the front of the display and vice-versa. The particles in front need to be opaque enough to hide the particles at the back. Gyricon's displays use beads that are half-black and half-white. The beads rotate one way or the other. E-Ink uses individual black and white particles in capsules of clear liquid. SiPix uses a single-color particle in an opaque fluid. By the time you get the particles, the fluid, and something in which to contain it all (say, sandwiched between sheets of plastic) you have a relatively thick package.
The big differentiator between today's electronic paper and other display technologies is that e-paper is bistable. Once you write the image you can remove power and the image stays put. This makes it good for very low-power applications where the display isn't constantly changing. If you want video you probably don't want electronic paper.
I'm not trying to be an apologist, just explaining the current state of the technology. Yes, we all know that everyone wants "electronic paper" that acts like real paper. And yes, we want it too! We're working on it. These are the first baby steps in that direction. Right now electronic paper is at the point where it can mimic real paper's ability to maintain an image without power, and that image can be viewed in ambient light. We need to continue to refine that and to start branching out into other aspects of real paper: Flexible, cuttable, thin. We're working on it.
As usual, all the standard disclaimers apply. I speak for myself, not my company, yada, yada, yada...
They could have made it a bit more obvious. I missed it the first couple times, too. They should have given the torrent a section like each country has.
Of course, I'm getting a whopping 0 kB/s download rate using the torrent, so I'm not sure what good it's going to do...
While it's a somewhat ugly text-based, flat-file format, it does permit organization of information in ways that will be useful to genealogists and researchers.
Even better, pretty much any genealogy software can read and write GEDCOM files. Think of GEDCOM as the CSV of the genealogy world. It even has rudimentary facilities for storing multimedia files in an encoding similar to Base64. I don't know if the various software packages commonly support it, though. (My wife's the family genealogist. I just occasionally do data conversion for her.)
By having a well publicised street date, they create a false scarcity and a sort of frenzy in the consumers (not the readers -- the consumers, the people with the money).
Amen. I know a woman who used to own a small specialty bookstore. She always said that publishers sell "white bricks". They don't particularly care what's contained within those bricks, so long as people are buying them.
It's about ICANN getting to sell the same domains again with different TLDs for the same prices.
Amen, brother! As long as.com exists at all, people will equate it with "that Intarweb thang". (I've had corporate "Internet Experts" tell me that my email address was invalid, because it doesn't end in ".com".) No matter what new domains they create, most businesses will still want to have "foobar.com" alongside any categorized TLD like ".xxx". You'll note there hasn't exactly been a stampede towards ".biz".
This is a revenue-generating move, nothing more. It won't give more than a superficial aid to filters, nor will it alleviate crowding of the ".com" namespace. It might help people specifically looking for porn sites, but it's not like "filthycumsluts.com" would ever be mistaken for anything else. I hardly think "filthycumsluts.xxx" is any more descriptive.
Okay, color me clueless on this one. What's the big deal about podcasting? As far as I can tell, it's just making audio files available via an RSS feed. Is that really so life-changing? Couldn't this have been done years ago without the RSS, just by listing the files as links on a web page or even by dropping them in an ftp directory somewhere? Heck, I even remember a little something put out back before the turn of the millenium, definitely predating the iPod and almost predating RSS. There's nothing new here, except the name and the tangential link to Apple via the iPod. So really, what's all the fuss about?
Illinois also has a use tax. One of my cow-orkers did get nailed by it. He went to Hong Kong and bought some cheap camcorders. He declared them on his customs form coming back home. Sure enough, Illinois checked the customs records and sent him a bill...
This kind of thing is not new. As the article and another poster pointed out already, it's being aided by a law that's been on the books for over fifty years.
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I'll third it. I play Lego Star Wars with my 8yo son. It's cute and fun for both of us. And it feels so good to whack Jar-Jar with a light sabre...
Some of the older FPSs have good co-op modes. Heretic is one of my favorites; I worked through that a couple times with my son. The Doomsday engine breathes new life into a lot of those old games by updating the graphics, sound, and control schemes.
I agree that SVN, especially the Tortoise front-end, is really easy to work with. One caveat if you're working with binary files and have multiple developers: Make sure you have a recent server which supports file locking! SVN didn't originally support this; text files were merged together at commit time. You can't merge binaries. Our EEs found the lack of locks to be a major drawback a few releases ago when they were trying to work on schematics. They opted to stick with PVCS rather than work out some kludgy out-of-band method (ie., patch pumpkin) to prevent simultaneous edits to one file. Once file locks were supported they were happy again.
Of course, if you're working with people not used to version control, there's the little issue of training them to actually remember to lock the files before they start working on them...
Or, that's how you know a game is bad -- When cracking the copy protection is more fun than actually playing the game!
Don't forget, you can always relive the glory.
Groovy.
Or use WSH + PerlScript. Although it does have the drawback of requiring ActivePerl to be installed on the target machine.
Or NETCommOCX. It works quite well from within HTA scripts.
Hopefully it'll turn out better than the rather lackluster Star Trek: New Worlds RTS did.
Now, if they decide to make it space-based and use something like the Homeworld engine, they might actually have something!
I also like the 3-pane layout. I don't understand the animosity towards it. Now mind you, for my home account I use Pine. It has features I need which I haven't seen in any other mailer. But in general I prefer the 3-pane layout.
(What features do I need from Pine? I have it configured to store all its settings and address book on my IMAP server. So I can run a local client on my home PC, my work PC, and my laptop and have access to everything. Plus, if I'm using someone else's machine (or my Palm pilot) I can SSH in to my server and run the command-line client. And I even have a Java-based SSH client accessible from my web server, so I don't even have to rely on someone else having an SSH client installed!)
This is a bad trend. All of the software (with the possible exception of Norton AV, which I've never used) runs just fine on Win2k. Why the XP restriction? This is twice in one week I've run up against an arbitrary won't-install-on-2000 roadblock. (The first was trying to install Age of Empires III, which actually runs just fine on 2000 if you can manage to trick the installer.) It looks like the days of Win2k are numbered, not because it can't run the software but simply because the software refuses to install. I really hate artificial limitations.
The problem isn't the HTML per se, it's the half-assed implementation in most mail readers. Rich text in general is a good thing. HTML is a reasonable choice for rich-text. Ther are just two rules for securing HTML mail: Do not display anything not included in the message. Embedded images are okay, but don't fetch <img> links. And donot, under any circumstances, run any scripts of any sort. That's it. Pay attention to those two rules and you get HTML mail that's exactly as secure as plain-text mail.
For the love of God, why? Why would anyone pay real money for a thumbnail-sized ad on some random, content-free page? I see a couple 100x100 pixel ads there. $10,000? Just to be part of the freak show? Does anyone really expect to make that back in revenue?
sigh I guess that's why he has a million dollars and I don't. I don't understand why anyone would pay five bucks for a ring-tone, either, yet they do...
I predict that within the next year we'll see stations running a constant advertising crawler. They'l probably shrink the size of the actual content area and fill the margins with advertising, much like CNN does with its stock ticker, weather, etc. Ha! Try to skip that! I further predict that within another year this practice will be commonplace and used on the majority of channels.
In fact, this may drive wide-screen format for shooting new shows. The shows will be shot in 16:9 and broadcast full-screen, with the ads taking up the remaining space. And no, those of you with wide-format TVs won't be able to just crop out the ads. Some shows will be broadcast with the content at the top of the screen and ads at the bottom. Some will have the content at the bottom and ads at the top. Some will have content in the middle and ads both top and bottom. And some will even flip the ad and content panes mid-show. If you want to see the shows ad-free you'll have to buy the DVDs. (Or, of course, download pirated copies that have already been cropped.)
I thought the product placement in Minority Report was extremely well done. It was kind of in-your-face, but it needed to be. It actually advanced the plot. I think avoiding product placement and using obviously fake brands would have detracted from the movie. "John Anderton, you look like you could use a Duff Lite!" doesn't have the same feel to it.
You couldn't get away with this in many movies, but once in a while it works.
I knocked the braces off my front teeth more than once, myself...
The brick separator is really good, though. My Mindstorms kit has one, and it does a great job of getting two stuck flat pieces apart. Better than my teeth, and better than the screwdriver that I eventually just tossed into my Lego bin.
Lego's quality may be their downfall, though. I still have my old bin of Lego bricks. Now my kids play with those same pieces. There's no real reason for me to buy the basic bricks for them, 'cause they have a huge supply already. They do love the Bionicles, though. And it turns out, you can use the specialty Bionicle parts to make original creations. My kids have created some pretty interesting-looking monsters from those sets.
Gyricon is also shipping an electronic paper product, in the form of signage. (Full disclosure: I'm one of the firmware guys at Gyricon.) We have a 15"x17" segmented display and a 7"x5.5" 100dpi all-points-addressable display. And you can buy them right now.
Unfortunately the technology isn't quite there yet to produce the re-writable newspaper that everyone thinks of when you say "electronic paper". The biggest problem is getting a flexible backplane. You need a flexible TFT or something like it. We have the flexible re-writable media; we just need something flexible to put it on. I imagine you'll see flexible LCD displays before you see flexible e-paper displays, just because the backplane technology is similar but LCDs are in much higher production.
Thickness is another issue. Every form of e-paper I know of is mechanical in nature. You have to move colored particles from the back of the display to the front of the display and vice-versa. The particles in front need to be opaque enough to hide the particles at the back. Gyricon's displays use beads that are half-black and half-white. The beads rotate one way or the other. E-Ink uses individual black and white particles in capsules of clear liquid. SiPix uses a single-color particle in an opaque fluid. By the time you get the particles, the fluid, and something in which to contain it all (say, sandwiched between sheets of plastic) you have a relatively thick package.
The big differentiator between today's electronic paper and other display technologies is that e-paper is bistable. Once you write the image you can remove power and the image stays put. This makes it good for very low-power applications where the display isn't constantly changing. If you want video you probably don't want electronic paper.
I'm not trying to be an apologist, just explaining the current state of the technology. Yes, we all know that everyone wants "electronic paper" that acts like real paper. And yes, we want it too! We're working on it. These are the first baby steps in that direction. Right now electronic paper is at the point where it can mimic real paper's ability to maintain an image without power, and that image can be viewed in ambient light. We need to continue to refine that and to start branching out into other aspects of real paper: Flexible, cuttable, thin. We're working on it.
As usual, all the standard disclaimers apply. I speak for myself, not my company, yada, yada, yada...
It's all been downhill ever since Galaxian, which was just a clone of Space Invaders with glitzier graphics.
They could have made it a bit more obvious. I missed it the first couple times, too. They should have given the torrent a section like each country has.
Of course, I'm getting a whopping 0 kB/s download rate using the torrent, so I'm not sure what good it's going to do...
Even better, pretty much any genealogy software can read and write GEDCOM files. Think of GEDCOM as the CSV of the genealogy world. It even has rudimentary facilities for storing multimedia files in an encoding similar to Base64. I don't know if the various software packages commonly support it, though. (My wife's the family genealogist. I just occasionally do data conversion for her.)
Amen. I know a woman who used to own a small specialty bookstore. She always said that publishers sell "white bricks". They don't particularly care what's contained within those bricks, so long as people are buying them.
Amen, brother! As long as .com exists at all, people will equate it with "that Intarweb thang". (I've had corporate "Internet Experts" tell me that my email address was invalid, because it doesn't end in ".com".) No matter what new domains they create, most businesses will still want to have "foobar.com" alongside any categorized TLD like ".xxx". You'll note there hasn't exactly been a stampede towards ".biz".
This is a revenue-generating move, nothing more. It won't give more than a superficial aid to filters, nor will it alleviate crowding of the ".com" namespace. It might help people specifically looking for porn sites, but it's not like "filthycumsluts.com" would ever be mistaken for anything else. I hardly think "filthycumsluts.xxx" is any more descriptive.
Maybe for the same reason that OpenOffice can't even render HTML properly?
Okay, color me clueless on this one. What's the big deal about podcasting? As far as I can tell, it's just making audio files available via an RSS feed. Is that really so life-changing? Couldn't this have been done years ago without the RSS, just by listing the files as links on a web page or even by dropping them in an ftp directory somewhere? Heck, I even remember a little something put out back before the turn of the millenium, definitely predating the iPod and almost predating RSS. There's nothing new here, except the name and the tangential link to Apple via the iPod. So really, what's all the fuss about?
"My hovercraft is full of eels."
Illinois also has a use tax. One of my cow-orkers did get nailed by it. He went to Hong Kong and bought some cheap camcorders. He declared them on his customs form coming back home. Sure enough, Illinois checked the customs records and sent him a bill...
This kind of thing is not new. As the article and another poster pointed out already, it's being aided by a law that's been on the books for over fifty years.