Some time back I was looking for the source of a catch-phrase I occasionally use: "A man with a sharp wit. Someone ought to take it away from him before he cuts himself." (or some variation on this phrase). So, what do I do? I google it... and find that as far as the Internet is concerned, I'm the author. There's plenty of references to this, probably more than enough to pass casual inspection by Wikipedians, with my name attached. I've found it in lists of "quotes by famous people", where I'm apparently a peer of people like Ghandi and Orwell.
And yet I'm still convinced I was quoting something I read when I first used it, maybe twenty or thirty years ago. OK, it's possible I'm mistaken, it's possible "I said it first", but I don't think so... but how could I prove it? Someone thought it was funny, put it in their Usenet sigfile, it got added to a collection of "fortune cookie" quotes, and now people all over the Internet are using each other as references.
I'm sure that a good many "famous quotes" that have been authoritatively attributed, because they've been found in independent sources, are similarly erroneous. Sure, it can happen faster on the Internet, but the social factors are the same whether the medium is digital or analog, Usenet or Newspaper, phosphor or ink. Some number of these, like Willie Sutton's "That's where the money is", have been disclaimed by the alleged author (kind of like what I'm doing now), but how many haven't... because the person involved was dead, didn't see them, or just thought they were good enough to keep?
Who knows, Maurice Jarre might have even approved of this one.
When Zork and Rogue came out and people started calling computer combat games "role playing games" the real role players who knew there was more to role playing than dungeon crawls were mortified.
So, what, now you're complaining that Warcrack isn't a real role playing game because it's not immersive, or something?
Nitpick back. I'm so tired of people who either (a) don't understand what the revolution in computing that UNIX introduced was and what it meant, or (b) have skin in the game and want to queer the pitch for everyone else by playing games.
NeXTstep was UNIX. FreeBSD is UNIX. Linux is UNIX, and was UNIX even before they got certification. OS X is UNIX. UNIX is as UNIX does.
UNIX is and has been for over a quarter of a century - since the first independent implementations like Idris and Regulus, a FAMILY of operating systems, with a huge variety of underlying implementations, that share a common core API based around the revolutionary simplifications in API design that were developed at Bell Labs in the early '70s. They didn't just make a "simple Multics", they went far beyond that. There's been nothing like it since, and we're long overdue for another revolution of that level.
The biggest jump in improvement of the Apple platform was when Apple quit trying to write their own operating system and switched to UNIX. That was long after they stopped allowing clones to run that piece of crap Mac OS.
Yes, I've been to college, for real, dude. And not just for the coed babes and frat parties.
Yes, there's way more information off the web than on it, my point was about the quality of the search tools. I'm totally in agreement about the ephemeral nature of the net. We need an "interweb of congress" with the fundage to archive everything and the will not to remove anything, or we're going to end up in the future of Stross's "Glasshouse" where there's virtually nothing known from the '90s to the 2100s because it all got lost...
How many times have you had to re-word your search phrase, try several search results, and use ctrl-f to actually select the usefull information from all the extra crap.
Yes, that's way more trouble than driving down to a university library and spending the afternoon grovelling through microfiche to get a comparable amount of information.
The thing that pisses me off most about people who mindlessly follow Hungarian notation, even more than the ones who use hungarian notation in typeless languages, and that's the ones who don't realize that "sz" means "zero-terminated string" and tag all their strings in languages where the string is a first class opaque data type with "sz".
Apple dropped autoplay last century, even for CDs. There's theoretically a scheme for autoplay for Linux... but nobody sane implements it. Autoplay is one of those things that can not, even in theory, be implemented safely... because what it does is automatically grant full local user execution privileges to any random media you stick in your computer. Once you do that, you're penetrated... and you know what they say about that: "Security is like sex, once you're penetrated you're ****ed".
So I dearly hope you ARE the only one who thinks that it's even potentially a good idea to implement "autoplay" for executable content.
"Roight, this here's a law professor who's made a career of making stupid lawyers look like fools. If I screw up here my careers gonna bleed out all over the ground. So what I'm gonna do, what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna prod him in the arse with a stick. Let's see what happens!"
A spouse is not automatically authorized to see your medical records [...]
Since she was right there, and I was doing it so she could see the images of the broken ankle that was keeping her from walking over to the monitor, I'm not sure what your point is.
Having worked with neuroimaging software before, very few of them offer to save to a "normal" graphics format
I already had a copy of OsiriX, which is a better DICOM viewer than the hospital was using.
Many researchers will anyhow because that's ridiculous.
Which is probably why the hospital software was designed so that the doctor couldn't give the patient a copy of their own medical records even if they wanted to.
I would think that a lossy compression like JPEG might not be the best option for pictures that you are trying to find hairline fractures in.
(a) it wasn't a hairline fracture. Alas. (b) my wife's the patient, not a technician, she just wanted to see what it looked like. I was able to zoom in and get a nice snap of exactly what she wanted. (c) sheesh.
The issue with putting images on a flash stick has more to do with security, as it is against most Hospital IT policy to use them at all, much less have people who are not employees use them.
Nobody in Radiology had any concerns about me plugging the flash stick into the computer. The problem is that the PC was running a dedicated app that locked out the shell and refused to let the person at the desk save the image to a file, burn a CD, or even print it. I was happy to pay for it or provide a blank CD... which I have done in the past on a number of occasions to get digital imagery from technicians.
Time for Philip Slusallek to dust of the RPU from 2005. If he was able to build a 60 FPS raytrace accelerator using about the same gate count and clock as a Rage II, then a state of the art accelerator for OpenRT and one killer game using hardware raytracing and nobody will remember the $99 Radeon.
When my wife was in the hospital with a broken ankle I tried to get a copy of the X-ray, because it was on a big monitor out of view of the patient. The user interface of the DICOM viewer did not provide a way to print or save the image... presumably to protect patient confidentiality.
The next day I went in to the hospital to pick up the "films" for her doctor, and they gave me a copy of the same files on a CD, completely uncontrolled, and I used OsiriX to convert them from DICOM to JPEG so my wife could see them.
Having the files in digital format is great, but let's have some appropriate level of controls. If the patient wants the images on a flash stick, it's THEIR records, let them have it!
It certainly is possible that NeWS would have beaten out X11 if it had been open source from the beginning. But that wasn't your argument.
I'm talking about when they decided to try and fight a rear-guard action with XNews, they should have open-sourced NeWS as well. There was no X11/DPS, no LBX, I don't even think XShape was universally available.
It was definitely not to late to save it then, or even later. Display Postscript was actually on the upswing, and since then there's been at least two major non-X11 window systems using OpenGL, Berlin and Quartz, and if either of them had used NeWS as the transport it would have been a whole different story. ESPECIALLY when Apple was looking for a replacement for Display Postscript in OpenStep/Rhapsody because Adobe was fighting a delaying action against Yellow Box... one they didn't give up on until Apple killed 64 bit Carbon... what, last year?
One would hope that if the Open Source projects like Project Looking Glass, are worthwhile... they will be picked up by people who are using them. If they can open-source others rather than just killing them at least some can stay alive without showing up on the bottom line.
Slashdot Mirror
As Oscar Wilde once said:
"Whoever uses Wikipedia as a source without checking the references, might as well trust the Irish"
"A man with a sharp wit. Someone better take it away before he cuts himself." -- Peter da Silva
All the world's got 32-bit twos-complement integers aligned on a 4-byte boundary, right?
That's exactly the kind of person I want supporting a portable runtime library. Not.
Some time back I was looking for the source of a catch-phrase I occasionally use: "A man with a sharp wit. Someone ought to take it away from him before he cuts himself." (or some variation on this phrase). So, what do I do? I google it... and find that as far as the Internet is concerned, I'm the author. There's plenty of references to this, probably more than enough to pass casual inspection by Wikipedians, with my name attached. I've found it in lists of "quotes by famous people", where I'm apparently a peer of people like Ghandi and Orwell.
And yet I'm still convinced I was quoting something I read when I first used it, maybe twenty or thirty years ago. OK, it's possible I'm mistaken, it's possible "I said it first", but I don't think so... but how could I prove it? Someone thought it was funny, put it in their Usenet sigfile, it got added to a collection of "fortune cookie" quotes, and now people all over the Internet are using each other as references.
I'm sure that a good many "famous quotes" that have been authoritatively attributed, because they've been found in independent sources, are similarly erroneous. Sure, it can happen faster on the Internet, but the social factors are the same whether the medium is digital or analog, Usenet or Newspaper, phosphor or ink. Some number of these, like Willie Sutton's "That's where the money is", have been disclaimed by the alleged author (kind of like what I'm doing now), but how many haven't... because the person involved was dead, didn't see them, or just thought they were good enough to keep?
Who knows, Maurice Jarre might have even approved of this one.
Singstar isn't a *game*, sheesh.
Your music could get integrated into the game environment.
It would totally rock to play games incorporating music by my favorite artists like Yasunori Mitsuda, Koji Kondo, and Nobuo Uematsu!
When Zork and Rogue came out and people started calling computer combat games "role playing games" the real role players who knew there was more to role playing than dungeon crawls were mortified.
So, what, now you're complaining that Warcrack isn't a real role playing game because it's not immersive, or something?
I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning.
Nitpick back. I'm so tired of people who either (a) don't understand what the revolution in computing that UNIX introduced was and what it meant, or (b) have skin in the game and want to queer the pitch for everyone else by playing games.
NeXTstep was UNIX.
FreeBSD is UNIX.
Linux is UNIX, and was UNIX even before they got certification.
OS X is UNIX.
UNIX is as UNIX does.
UNIX is and has been for over a quarter of a century - since the first independent implementations like Idris and Regulus, a FAMILY of operating systems, with a huge variety of underlying implementations, that share a common core API based around the revolutionary simplifications in API design that were developed at Bell Labs in the early '70s. They didn't just make a "simple Multics", they went far beyond that. There's been nothing like it since, and we're long overdue for another revolution of that level.
Is this for running badly-behaved games or something?
The biggest jump in improvement of the Apple platform was when Apple quit trying to write their own operating system and switched to UNIX. That was long after they stopped allowing clones to run that piece of crap Mac OS.
Yes, I've been to college, for real, dude. And not just for the coed babes and frat parties.
Yes, there's way more information off the web than on it, my point was about the quality of the search tools. I'm totally in agreement about the ephemeral nature of the net. We need an "interweb of congress" with the fundage to archive everything and the will not to remove anything, or we're going to end up in the future of Stross's "Glasshouse" where there's virtually nothing known from the '90s to the 2100s because it all got lost...
How many times have you had to re-word your search phrase, try several search results, and use ctrl-f to actually select the usefull information from all the extra crap.
Yes, that's way more trouble than driving down to a university library and spending the afternoon grovelling through microfiche to get a comparable amount of information.
The thing that pisses me off most about people who mindlessly follow Hungarian notation, even more than the ones who use hungarian notation in typeless languages, and that's the ones who don't realize that "sz" means "zero-terminated string" and tag all their strings in languages where the string is a first class opaque data type with "sz".
Apple dropped autoplay last century, even for CDs. There's theoretically a scheme for autoplay for Linux... but nobody sane implements it. Autoplay is one of those things that can not, even in theory, be implemented safely... because what it does is automatically grant full local user execution privileges to any random media you stick in your computer. Once you do that, you're penetrated... and you know what they say about that: "Security is like sex, once you're penetrated you're ****ed".
So I dearly hope you ARE the only one who thinks that it's even potentially a good idea to implement "autoplay" for executable content.
Damn, this reminds me of poor old Stingray Steve.
"Roight, this here's a law professor who's made a career of making stupid lawyers look like fools. If I screw up here my careers gonna bleed out all over the ground. So what I'm gonna do, what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna prod him in the arse with a stick. Let's see what happens!"
Mel Kaye was a real person, and here's his signature to prove it.
What's next, Microsoft dropping ActiveX?
A spouse is not automatically authorized to see your medical records [...]
Since she was right there, and I was doing it so she could see the images of the broken ankle that was keeping her from walking over to the monitor, I'm not sure what your point is.
Having worked with neuroimaging software before, very few of them offer to save to a "normal" graphics format
I already had a copy of OsiriX, which is a better DICOM viewer than the hospital was using.
Many researchers will anyhow because that's ridiculous.
Which is probably why the hospital software was designed so that the doctor couldn't give the patient a copy of their own medical records even if they wanted to.
I would think that a lossy compression like JPEG might not be the best option for pictures that you are trying to find hairline fractures in.
(a) it wasn't a hairline fracture. Alas.
(b) my wife's the patient, not a technician, she just wanted to see what it looked like. I was able to zoom in and get a nice snap of exactly what she wanted.
(c) sheesh.
The issue with putting images on a flash stick has more to do with security, as it is against most Hospital IT policy to use them at all, much less have people who are not employees use them.
Nobody in Radiology had any concerns about me plugging the flash stick into the computer. The problem is that the PC was running a dedicated app that locked out the shell and refused to let the person at the desk save the image to a file, burn a CD, or even print it. I was happy to pay for it or provide a blank CD... which I have done in the past on a number of occasions to get digital imagery from technicians.
Time for Philip Slusallek to dust of the RPU from 2005. If he was able to build a 60 FPS raytrace accelerator using about the same gate count and clock as a Rage II, then a state of the art accelerator for OpenRT and one killer game using hardware raytracing and nobody will remember the $99 Radeon.
When my wife was in the hospital with a broken ankle I tried to get a copy of the X-ray, because it was on a big monitor out of view of the patient. The user interface of the DICOM viewer did not provide a way to print or save the image... presumably to protect patient confidentiality.
The next day I went in to the hospital to pick up the "films" for her doctor, and they gave me a copy of the same files on a CD, completely uncontrolled, and I used OsiriX to convert them from DICOM to JPEG so my wife could see them.
Having the files in digital format is great, but let's have some appropriate level of controls. If the patient wants the images on a flash stick, it's THEIR records, let them have it!
It certainly is possible that NeWS would have beaten out X11 if it had been open source from the beginning. But that wasn't your argument.
I'm talking about when they decided to try and fight a rear-guard action with XNews, they should have open-sourced NeWS as well. There was no X11/DPS, no LBX, I don't even think XShape was universally available.
It was definitely not to late to save it then, or even later. Display Postscript was actually on the upswing, and since then there's been at least two major non-X11 window systems using OpenGL, Berlin and Quartz, and if either of them had used NeWS as the transport it would have been a whole different story. ESPECIALLY when Apple was looking for a replacement for Display Postscript in OpenStep/Rhapsody because Adobe was fighting a delaying action against Yellow Box... one they didn't give up on until Apple killed 64 bit Carbon ... what, last year?
Put the money into JParrot.
I'm sure there's a great Monty JPython joke in there, somewhere.
One would hope that if the Open Source projects like Project Looking Glass, are worthwhile... they will be picked up by people who are using them. If they can open-source others rather than just killing them at least some can stay alive without showing up on the bottom line.