I'm not sure about telemann, because their servers have been soundly/.ed so I haven't seen their product, but hauppage hasn't been hit too hard yet, so I've checked it out.
The Hauppage solution downsizes any signal it gets to 480i before displaying it. If the telemann solution will display, for example, 720p at native resolutions, it'll kick the hauppage card's ass.
I personally think 720p is the superior format over what was listed as the 'highest': 1050i. Sure, the resolution is slightly less, but 720 pixels ought to be big enough for pretty much anyone (at least, on a TV or monitor), and the progressive scanning eliminates messiness with pausing, motion jagginess (every other line being one frame out of sync becomes very noticeable when high-contrast objects are moving at high speed, but is visible whenever objects are in motion), and conversion to the progressive-scanning that CRTs use. In short, the image is slightly smaller, but higher-quality.
*grin* That's because they don't spend enough time playing Shadowrun. Any good SR gamer can tell you that it's a +1(S) weapon with a +2 reach, and kicks even more ass if it's dikoted. And they ought to be able to spell it (or at least know that it's in the middle of the table on the left-hand page of the cannon companion in the melee weapons section, even if they don't know the exact pagenumber so they can look it up).
Those who haven't read 'em would be surprised at the biology and chemistry you learn reading the sourcebooks...
actavista? Aliavista? autavista? antavista? Take a look at a keyboard, folks. The C and L are on opposite sides of the keyboard. So are the I and T, though they're closer. L and U are on the same hand, but aren't next to each other (even on diagonals). Same with L and N. Not every letter-substitution deserves to be called a 'typo' in my book.
Are there really people out there who type this badly? I can see the argument for names with characters right next to each other. I can see it for missing characters (alavista, for example) because some people have crappy keyboards that click sometimes when a key isn't pressed. I can see it for swapped letters (atlavista), and for added letters (altravista) next to ones you really are supposed to type, but a bunch of people at WIPO have a really negative opinion of the typing prowess of the average net user if they think enough people are legitimately mistyping a C (in qwerty, the middle finger of the left hand) when they mean to type an L (the ring finger of the right hand) that it's worth their time to arbitrate the dispute.
If someone's typing ability is really that bad, wouldn't they at least be in the habbit of checking what they've typed before hitting enter, given the number of times they must screw things up typing?
I'm not saying that typo squatting is fine (though in most cases I'd say it is), but can't we at least pick plausable cases to argue about?
*grin* My vidcard's got 32mb. My first computer was a 386 (yeah, I'm a young'un), with the HD factory-upgraded from 20mb to 40. And the card cost less than the drive upgrade. Maybe in 10 more years, I'll have that much memory on a scsi controller (having a hard time justifying getting one at all right now, much less a really cool one with a big cache).
What people seem to be forgetting (or perhaps you didn't even read the article?) is the way the image is created. There's a screen rotating at 600RPM about a vertical axis, and the projector sticks an image on it every 1/20 second. You can't step inside it or reach inside with VR gloves to move stuff. In short, it's a 3D image, *NOT* a hologram.
There are some drawbacks to the design. First, at a certain size, the air resistance at the outer edges of the whirling screen will necessitate stronger materials, larger motors, etc. and it will very quickly become a big, noisy beast. Secondly, unless there's some very careful tinkering with the projection equipment, the voxels at the center are updated as often as the ones on the outside, resulting in squished (about the axis) voxels at the center and elongated ones along the outside. To make each voxel the same size, the refresh rate has to be proportional to the distance from the central axis.
I'm not saying it's not excellent tech, but it will be expensive to make it stable, properly proportioned, and quiet.
VMware under win2k doesn't run X (3.3.6), at least without using the X-server they provide, which won't necessarily work very well when I actually boot to linux. It does boot to the text login just fine, and works excellently there, however.
VMware under linux (RH7, pretty stock config) doesn't run win2k (it complains that it doesn't support certain power management features, and therefore can't boot...?!?). If you've already got the stability of linux, why would you want to run anything *other* than win2k when you need a bit of evil?
I'm not sure where you're looking, but it seems to me the Sun Blade 1000 has a 438 in int and a 427 in fp. The P3 does well in integer (the same 438) but gets its ass kicked in fp performance (327). I wouldn't call a 23.5% difference in speed being 'just a hair off'
Tee hee. That was clever. You only need one CD for RH7 too. Just because it comes with a bunch of apps doesn't make it a bloated OS. On that stupid windows CD, you only get the OS. The RH CD comes with the OS and hundreds of apps.
I don't know if that was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, but it came off as being stupid...
Nope. If 'those clever hackers' figured out HOW the barcode is encoded, and did it themselves, that would be reverse-engineering. Nothing (IMHO) was reverse-engineered. The hardware takes input (the barcode) and creates output (the base-64 stuff XORed with 63, etc...). Nobody cares how that was done. Nobody cares how their software turns that into something useful. All that was done was to interpret the output, using no knowledge of either the hardware, firmware, software, or other -ware belonging to DC.
So, a link to DeCSS is illegal, eh? And so is a link to a link to a link to... DeCSS. How about a link to a page offering cryptographic analysis of CSS encryption, with the understanding that certain 'examples' will be provided? The link in fact DOES point to a page containing a cryptographic analysis of said encryption, and provides some (innocuous / faulty / whatever) examples, but refreshes in 3 seconds, taking the user to a page with DeCSS.zip Obviously, the owner of such a page would get a letter because the MPAA doesn't care whether they have the legal right to bully others around, but would such a letter carry legal weight?
Another scenario:
What if a page of mine were to be attacked by some script kiddie who happened to post DeCSS there? If the MPAA couldn't prove I was aware of the content, am I still responsable?
At what level of removal from the actual DeCSS code does one become an innocent again? Unless I misread something (possible, since I wasn't looking for it), it's not illegal to have a copy of DeCSS, just to provide it to others. If I talk to a friend of mine about the case, making reference to a printed copy I happen to own, and then leave the room, leaving it on a table, am I guilty of 'trafficking, etc.' in DeCSS if my friend snags it? What about a floppy?
If willingly providing the code is illegal, how about theft of the code?
If Microsoft can claim that publicly-available documents are intellectual property and can control access to them accordingly, can I post DeCSS somewhere under password protection (password = 'password' or 'DeCSS' or other easily-guessable string) for 'my own personal use'? A password is about as worthwhile protection scheme as CSS, so it's covered by the DMCA, right? So I can claim I am effectively controlling access, right? And since I'm the only one who knows the password (anyone who so much as guesses is doing so illegally, trying to circumvent the intellectual property control scheme, right?), I'm not providing it to the public, right? And if I told a friend about it, and s/he posted on a page that going to my page and using the password 'DeCSS' could get a copy, that's not my problem, right?
The MPAA has made rediculously wide-ranging claims as to their intellectual property rights, some of which have been upheld, but can they really expect to be able to stop every possible distribution mechanism without to resort to something so all-encompassing that not even the most dim-witted (or technologically illiterate, to be fair) judge wouldn't dream of passing it? Does that greedy, holier-than-thou organization really expect to outwit, intimidate, bully, and/or legally force over 5 billion people to cower before their demands?!? Yikes! Why do such people always end up in positions of power?
I'm not in high school anymore (graduated this spring), but second semester Senior year I took an introductory programming course at the university here in Madison (WI, that is--CS302, if you're interested).
If college freshmen can understand it in a semester, HS students can get it in a year, esp. if they're taking an AP CS class anyway. Check out the TA's wepbage (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~davin/), which used to have the list of class projects, but still has useful information, including sample exams. As the fall semester progresses, he'll be posting information for his own class that you can take a look at for ideas.
Alternately, LOGO is a good language to learn. Before I get yelled at here, it's not practical to use but it's an excellent language to learn because of the way it's structured. It's simple, easy to debug, and will run on just about anything. There are versions that will run on an old Apple ][, a 386, or whatever. My personal favorite is MSWLogo (http://www.softronix.com/logo.html), by George Mills of UC-Berkeley, using the UCBLogo core developed by Brian Harvey. Yes, it's a windows program, but it's excellently done, and incredibly full-featured, and has only crashed on me about 3 times in as many years. It's got a primitive (now--it's under constant development by George Mills' graduate students and was just updated in the last version, 2 weeks ago) GUI toolkit, 3D support (check out the demos!), sound, commands to control serial and parallel ports, open files, read from the game port, etc. The language is interpreted (though compilers exist if you really want one--this defeats the purpose though), but within the constraints of an arbitrarily-sized 'page', your students can do literally anything they want.
I agree with other posters who have said that you should have your students work on their own design documents before they begin coding--this is incredibly helpful, esp. on large projects, or those they'll only be working on in class.
First off I would like to say... has anyone noticed that, well, the mouse ONLY fits right-handed people? The renditions, I mean, look at them, the hand that fits the mouse is only the right hand. And so the 10% of the population gets ripped off, for the mouse doesnt fit them! You're right, but you're missing a bigger point. With a mouse (and, with that damn puck), your handsize is irrelavent. My hands are in the top 5% as regards size, and my palm covers an entire mouse. I don't use the palm--only the fingers. With this device, it looks as if a palmrest is integrated, meaning I'll be resting my palm on the groove in the back, while my thumb will miss the contact on the side, since it's anchored at the base of an 8" long hand (wrist to fingers, roughly, straight fingers). People with small hands will likely be in less trouble, but anyone who's even a bit large will start having problems, I think.
Second off, the Puck. Many people have complained about the puck, and I frankly don't see why. The puck is designed for use in a certain position, where your palm does _not_ rest on the mouse, merely the fingers. As I said, I do this naturally. Regardless, I can grab a mouse (in this case, a default gateway MSmouse on my mom's computer) and know how it's aligned, and align it correctly. With a puck, I grab it and it just might be twisted 30 degrees or so so my fingers don't bump into the cord on the back. So, when I move right, the mouse moves up at a 30 degree angle. That is my complaint with the mouse--it requires extra steps to use: I have to visually determine its orientation, and then move it awkwardly into the correct position, rather than feeling the angle of the top corner of the mouse and knowing how to turn it without moving my eyes to the mouse (.5sec minimum), looking (another.5sec minimum), moving back to the screen and locating what I was doing (1 sec?). That's a wasted 2 seconds every time I stop using the keyboard to use the mouse.
The only fault I see is that there is only one button, but then again, the Mac OS only needs one. Third, about the squeezing part... I really don't think it will be a pain to squeeze or push what appears to be five?! "pressure spots"? and a pseudo scroll wheel... But I thought you just said it only needs 1. So how come Apple suddenly thinks it needs 5 and a wheel?!?
It is cool that Apple is innovating... cordless mouse with an optical sensor, and the most shocking part, _no_ buttons, all *standard* with their new macs (hopefully). Perhaps I'm being foolish here, but if you push it and it reacts, it's a button. Unless the sensitivity is important (different actions for different whacks), it's a button.
As regards another poster's comment about contextual menus and such: I think we can all agree that just about all UIs currently suck (at least in some significant way or another). That being said, the ability to do lots of stuff is never bad. That I can do tons of things with two buttons and a wheel (which, at least on the MS mice, is a button too), says alot. I can't scroll a window in netscape on a mac without the keyboard or without hitting tiny scroll arrows or the bar. I can't sit back, pull out some mouse cord, cradle the damn thing upside down because it's more comfortable, and scroll while I read. Why is having this feature a drawback? Note: I'm not saying windows doesn't suck. I'm not saying lots of stuff couldn't be better, including the wheel. I'm just saying that in many cases (particularly mine, since I've got the most experience being me), it's better.
Re: ZDNet article: can someone explain "In a way, the entire mouse will act as a button: Pushing down on it rocks the top of the mouse, causing a click."? The top panel of the mouse in hinged? Why? What's wrong with a button? Why does it have to kick up some other part of the mouse when you click? I must be missing something here. Also, as regards the inference of possible side-rocking action, this had better not be true. When you rock a mouse to the side, it moves. Try it. Really. It does. Now pretend that somewhere in that rocking motion, a click occurs, except that your cursor is moving when you click. This is a no. I will lose all faith in Apple as a company that can design mice if they do this. And if my reading on the rocking sentence is correct, they're going to lose major points there too. Anyone got firmer info?
Now, since it's 4 in the morning, I'm going to be unconscious for some time.
Purely in theory, the insurance company cannot hike your rates for unsubstantiated stuff they find on a website. Purely in theory, I don't care what's posted--it's not necessarily true, and any thinking person wouldn't believe it anyway.
Practically, I'd be royally pissed. Credit cards can be cancelled. Other stuff isn't quite so nice to have hanging around, even if you can deny it.
On a more widespread basis though, this might actually be a good thing. Suppose someone were to find somewhere the credit card numbers of all the members of the US House of Representatives and Congress? When they cancel 'em, repeat the post. Ditto for credit, purchases made, etc. In short, suppose someone pissed someone off, not you or I, but someone with real power.
At this point, everyone's going to sue, and HavenCo will have problems (legal or not--strictly speaking, CA courts don't have jurisdiction over DeCSS hosted in other states/countries, yet people keep getting cease and desist orders / lawsuits / etc.). This, I think, would be a poor response. If Havenco gets bankrupted with legal bills (worst case scenario, right?), then someone will step in and take their place. Sealand will likely be shot as a principality (since HavenCo can't be touched without that, right?), but there will always be information-friendly countries around, or those who don't care to enforce 'bad' legislation, for whatever reason.
Ideally, what will happen is that when the legal mud settles back to the ground, HavenCo will still exist, still be raking in the money (huzzah!), and those hundreds of angry powerful people will have to fix their problems in other ways. Since we dealt with the worst cases in the previous scenario, let's go with best cases here. I can see lots of privacy legislation being passed very quickly if a significant portion of the government's powerful people have a lot to gain by it. I'm not talking about 'you can't collect info' laws here: the kind of legislation I'm talking about is something that will touch the core of the issue: that people can get at your sensitive personal information. Hopefully, some fundamental laws: laws mandating good encryption of things like credit reports, financial transactions, medical histories, etc. By good encryption, I mean something like PGP with a long (2K+) key, that would get tougher and tougher as time progresses. There would have to be required authentication of whoever gets this information, as well, since it's not useful to have it encrypted to protect theft if I can easily con a bank teller, for example, into thinking I'm someone I'm not and getting their info.
Hopefully, the first scenario will quickly illustrate that attempting to control information that has become public is futile. For proof of this, just take a look at DeCSS. If the MPAA never talked about it, only those people who need it would have it, and it'd quickly become a lovely piece of software, but few would care, nobody would use it to pirate (duh--better methods exist), and everyone would be happy, except the lawyers. Now, it's splattered across the world, and nobody has a chance in hell of getting it back--so much for damage control. The only other way of keeping private information private is by keeping it private--don't let it get loose in the first place. To do this will require lots of money, lots of smart people, and lots of political muscle, which is why it will only happen if someone in power gets burned by the poor security infrastructure of this (and every other) country.
Wouldn't it be nice if HavenCo did let people post credit card numbers and such? As long as they're not mine, I don't care. We need some way to prod the people in control into action, and this sort of thing ought to do it.
It is widely known that the ATA/66 standard is a theoretical improvement over ATA/33, but presents few real-world benefits. I read somewhere (Thought it was storagereview, but I can't find the article on their site now) that it's surprisingly well-implemented. I can't even remember the drive being tested, but I remember seeing the graphs of performance, which varied from 50+MB/s on the outside to ~35 on the inside of the drive. Crap! Can't find it. Anyway, it was a considerable improvement.
I still think SCSI is superior though. Even UW2 v. ATA/100. UW2 has a max. transfer rate of 80MB/s, while ATA/100 has a max. transfer of (surprise, surprise) 100MB/s. Regardless, UW2 SCSI supports 7 devices per interrupt, whereas IDE supports only 2. For systems with several drives, this is a considerable improvement, and definately worth the extra few hundred dollars for the controller and for each HD. Further, while IDE devices are seeking, the channel cannot be used. So, if a CD is seeking (85-110ms), the other device on its channel cannot be used. In contrast, while SCSI devices are seeking, the SCSI bus can be used for other things. When multiple SCSI drives are on the same chain, data can be requested from one, and while it is searching, more data can be requested from the other, reducing total latency.
NOTE: I can't use the strike tag here, so stuff in square brackets was struck out by Microsoft:
"Technical Information" means all information regarding the identification and means of using APIs and Communications Interfaces that competent software developers require to make their products running on any computer interoperate [effectively] with Microsoft Platform Software running on a Personal Computer. [Technical information includes but is not limited to reference implementations, communications protocols, file formats, data formats, syntaxes and grammers, data structure definitions and layouts, error codes, memory allocation and deallocation conventions, threading and synchronization conventions, functional specifications and descriptions, algorithms for data translation or reformatting (including compression/decompression algorithms and encryption/decryption algorithms), registry settings, and field contents.]
I guess Microsoft didn't think they could avoid interoperating, they left it in. They just change the wording so they don't have to effectively interoperate. So: they tell people that word files end in.doc so that a linux filemanager can recognize them and add the appropriate icon. Aha! Interoperability! And if they make available a windows bitmap of an icon that can be used (subject to the appropriate licensing terms, of course)...that's just plain generous!
Unpublished APIs? What unpublished APIs? We don't officially use those anymore. You don't need them to interoperate. Ignore the fact that everyone uses them because that's what they were written for.
Now that you can read Word files (remember: they end in.doc), you want to write files a windows box can read? Save them as text-only. More interoperability. Look how well Microsoft shares toys in the sandbox!
Yech! Look at their revisions sometime. The stuff they took out, added, and re-worded is just sick. They claim the government's definitions of just about everything are too broad, so they narrow them, making them apply to just about nothing.
And just look at the big section of nixed stuff at the bottom. Despite complaining throughout the document of imprecisely defined terms, Microsoft objects to the precise definition of this term, and wants to scratch it all out. This is almost starting to sound familiar familiar familiar familiar...
"Anonymity, on the other hand, means being able to get away with stealing, or hacking, or disseminating illegal material on the Internet - and presuming the right that nobody should know who you are. There is no such right. This is nothing more than the digital equivalent of putting on a ski mask when you rob a bank."
Actually, you put a ski mask on BEFORE you rob the bank. Putting that ski mask on is legal. Walking into a bank with it on is probably legal (though perhaps not). Robbing them is illegal. Similarly, on the net, being anonymous is legal. Browsing someone's auction site while anonymous is legal.
Separating anonymity and privacy is naive. While it would be nice not to have to be anonymous to ensure privacy, history (and Realnetworks, among others) has shown us that the corporations we patronize do not respect our rights, so we must ensure our privacy the only way we can. The only way to ensure law-abiding citizens' privacy is to ensure their anonymity, and that of the criminals. This principle also exists in the physical world. Our legal system is based on the idea that it is better to let 100 criminals go free than to falsely imprision even 1 person wrongly.
Yep. This is the only time I've gotten this much bandwidth over HTTP on this modem. It's a 56k, but still...9.4k over the course of a 200k slashdot page? Excellent! 'cept for the fact that the page was 200k, but I guess that's fair, since it's a bunch of comments.
Re:Google's syntax is really nasty
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Yes, replying to one's own post is tacky. So what?
Anyway, I can only get it down to about 150 bytes. If I could post it to google instead of their opener, I could lose the "http://www.google.com" and just leave "/search", so that'd be 21 fewer bytes...
Re:"You'd make a great Lara Croft"
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Or perhaps she's just rather well-endowed. After all, there're quite a few million people in Britain, and it's conceivable that one of them happens to be good looking, have large breasts (yes, those are separate items), and be willing to be Lara Croft, though perhaps I'm just being wilfully naive. She is 16, after all...for another 2 months.
*grin* Dual C366, both OC'd to 550, 256mb ram...I like being able to run lots and lots of things simultaneously at really high resolutions without taking a performance hit. Oh yes, and a 19" monitor. (I'd've gotten a 21 incher, but I prefer a high-quality 19" than a mediocre 21")
Re:Google's syntax is really nasty
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Just stick the whole damn thing in quotes. They don't (that I can find) have a good explanation of how it all works, like Altavista does, but they consistently return much better results, which makes it more than worthwhile, unless I have a very specific boolean search to do, in which case it's Altavista all the way.
I've got an entry for the 5k html contest, BTW. I downloaded the google page, saved it to the HD, and pared it down to the bare essentials. No graphics, one line, consisting of the entry box and the two buttons. It's under 300 bytes, and is completely correct HTML. I could probably strip another 100 off it if I got rid of HTML, BODY, and the javascript to auto-focus the search box (though that's damn convenient). In fact, getting rid of one of the search buttons and other paring, I'll bet I could get it down to less than 100 bytes.
Well, this post sure wandered, didn't it. Anyway, ignore this part and keep the useful suggestion about using quotes. And bug Google about documenting how their parser works, and we might get some good documentation.
Finally! Someone's talking sense. Magic is where it's at, folks. So, head off to your local gaming store, pick up a copy of Shadowrun 3rd ed. and start working on that armor spell (target number 6, drain +2(m)) so the people who head off to their local gaming store and pick up a copy of quake to learn how to load, aim, and fire automatic weapons can't hurt you. Cripes. If you get really good at it, the bullet will bounce back and they'll end up killing themselves.
Damn! Now, if only I could figure out how to go from 'walk over the weapon and press control when things wander into the yellow crosshairs' to 'find, purchase, load, aim (without yellow crosshairs, mind), and fire' the damn thing, I'll be set to go.
Race ya! I've never touched a firearm in my life, but I'll bet after an hour of quake I can figure it out, right?
Presume the same increase for 1999, giving 9 million * 6 = 54 million DVDs. What does a DVD cost these days? $20? A bit more? Figure printing, packaging, and media costs, and profit's probably $20 or less. So, 54 million DVDs * $20 each is roughly $1.1 billion.
Someone is seriously screwed up in the head if they expect anyone to believe that even though blank DVDs cost more than pre-recorded ones, somebody (a whole industry of somebodies, from the looks of it) has managed to turn a profit selling over twice as many DVDs as the entire motion picture industry, even with the help of country codes and other monopolistic advantages?
I would certainly like to see the chain of reasoning that supports the MPAA's claim, especially starting from the same figures I've got. Further, even if this were true, the MPAA has the gall to say that this piracy is due to DeCSS, and that everyone who apparently bought two pirated DVDs would have been willing to pay full price, so the MPAA in fact lost a sale, which also is a false assumption.
Frankly, I'd be surprised if they lost a tenth of what they claim, in all the years since DVDs have been for sale.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure about telemann, because their servers have been soundly /.ed so I haven't seen their product, but hauppage hasn't been hit too hard yet, so I've checked it out.
The Hauppage solution downsizes any signal it gets to 480i before displaying it. If the telemann solution will display, for example, 720p at native resolutions, it'll kick the hauppage card's ass.
I personally think 720p is the superior format over what was listed as the 'highest': 1050i. Sure, the resolution is slightly less, but 720 pixels ought to be big enough for pretty much anyone (at least, on a TV or monitor), and the progressive scanning eliminates messiness with pausing, motion jagginess (every other line being one frame out of sync becomes very noticeable when high-contrast objects are moving at high speed, but is visible whenever objects are in motion), and conversion to the progressive-scanning that CRTs use. In short, the image is slightly smaller, but higher-quality.
*grin* That's because they don't spend enough time playing Shadowrun. Any good SR gamer can tell you that it's a +1(S) weapon with a +2 reach, and kicks even more ass if it's dikoted. And they ought to be able to spell it (or at least know that it's in the middle of the table on the left-hand page of the cannon companion in the melee weapons section, even if they don't know the exact pagenumber so they can look it up).
Those who haven't read 'em would be surprised at the biology and chemistry you learn reading the sourcebooks...
actavista? Aliavista? autavista? antavista? Take a look at a keyboard, folks. The C and L are on opposite sides of the keyboard. So are the I and T, though they're closer. L and U are on the same hand, but aren't next to each other (even on diagonals). Same with L and N. Not every letter-substitution deserves to be called a 'typo' in my book.
Are there really people out there who type this badly? I can see the argument for names with characters right next to each other. I can see it for missing characters (alavista, for example) because some people have crappy keyboards that click sometimes when a key isn't pressed. I can see it for swapped letters (atlavista), and for added letters (altravista) next to ones you really are supposed to type, but a bunch of people at WIPO have a really negative opinion of the typing prowess of the average net user if they think enough people are legitimately mistyping a C (in qwerty, the middle finger of the left hand) when they mean to type an L (the ring finger of the right hand) that it's worth their time to arbitrate the dispute.
If someone's typing ability is really that bad, wouldn't they at least be in the habbit of checking what they've typed before hitting enter, given the number of times they must screw things up typing?
I'm not saying that typo squatting is fine (though in most cases I'd say it is), but can't we at least pick plausable cases to argue about?
This is mentioned every time a NYT article comes up, but there *IS* a no-registration-required site. Instead of www.nytimes... use partners.nytimes...
HERE'S THE ARTICLE without registration crap.
*grin* My vidcard's got 32mb. My first computer was a 386 (yeah, I'm a young'un), with the HD factory-upgraded from 20mb to 40. And the card cost less than the drive upgrade. Maybe in 10 more years, I'll have that much memory on a scsi controller (having a hard time justifying getting one at all right now, much less a really cool one with a big cache).
What people seem to be forgetting (or perhaps you didn't even read the article?) is the way the image is created. There's a screen rotating at 600RPM about a vertical axis, and the projector sticks an image on it every 1/20 second. You can't step inside it or reach inside with VR gloves to move stuff. In short, it's a 3D image, *NOT* a hologram.
There are some drawbacks to the design. First, at a certain size, the air resistance at the outer edges of the whirling screen will necessitate stronger materials, larger motors, etc. and it will very quickly become a big, noisy beast. Secondly, unless there's some very careful tinkering with the projection equipment, the voxels at the center are updated as often as the ones on the outside, resulting in squished (about the axis) voxels at the center and elongated ones along the outside. To make each voxel the same size, the refresh rate has to be proportional to the distance from the central axis.
I'm not saying it's not excellent tech, but it will be expensive to make it stable, properly proportioned, and quiet.
VMware under win2k doesn't run X (3.3.6), at least without using the X-server they provide, which won't necessarily work very well when I actually boot to linux. It does boot to the text login just fine, and works excellently there, however.
VMware under linux (RH7, pretty stock config) doesn't run win2k (it complains that it doesn't support certain power management features, and therefore can't boot...?!?). If you've already got the stability of linux, why would you want to run anything *other* than win2k when you need a bit of evil?
I'm not sure where you're looking, but it seems to me the Sun Blade 1000 has a 438 in int and a 427 in fp. The P3 does well in integer (the same 438) but gets its ass kicked in fp performance (327). I wouldn't call a 23.5% difference in speed being 'just a hair off'
Tee hee. That was clever. You only need one CD for RH7 too. Just because it comes with a bunch of apps doesn't make it a bloated OS. On that stupid windows CD, you only get the OS. The RH CD comes with the OS and hundreds of apps.
I don't know if that was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, but it came off as being stupid...
Nope. If 'those clever hackers' figured out HOW the barcode is encoded, and did it themselves, that would be reverse-engineering. Nothing (IMHO) was reverse-engineered. The hardware takes input (the barcode) and creates output (the base-64 stuff XORed with 63, etc...). Nobody cares how that was done. Nobody cares how their software turns that into something useful. All that was done was to interpret the output, using no knowledge of either the hardware, firmware, software, or other -ware belonging to DC.
So, a link to DeCSS is illegal, eh? And so is a link to a link to a link to ... DeCSS. How about a link to a page offering cryptographic analysis of CSS encryption, with the understanding that certain 'examples' will be provided? The link in fact DOES point to a page containing a cryptographic analysis of said encryption, and provides some (innocuous / faulty / whatever) examples, but refreshes in 3 seconds, taking the user to a page with DeCSS.zip Obviously, the owner of such a page would get a letter because the MPAA doesn't care whether they have the legal right to bully others around, but would such a letter carry legal weight?
Another scenario:
What if a page of mine were to be attacked by some script kiddie who happened to post DeCSS there? If the MPAA couldn't prove I was aware of the content, am I still responsable?
At what level of removal from the actual DeCSS code does one become an innocent again? Unless I misread something (possible, since I wasn't looking for it), it's not illegal to have a copy of DeCSS, just to provide it to others. If I talk to a friend of mine about the case, making reference to a printed copy I happen to own, and then leave the room, leaving it on a table, am I guilty of 'trafficking, etc.' in DeCSS if my friend snags it? What about a floppy?
If willingly providing the code is illegal, how about theft of the code?
If Microsoft can claim that publicly-available documents are intellectual property and can control access to them accordingly, can I post DeCSS somewhere under password protection (password = 'password' or 'DeCSS' or other easily-guessable string) for 'my own personal use'? A password is about as worthwhile protection scheme as CSS, so it's covered by the DMCA, right? So I can claim I am effectively controlling access, right? And since I'm the only one who knows the password (anyone who so much as guesses is doing so illegally, trying to circumvent the intellectual property control scheme, right?), I'm not providing it to the public, right? And if I told a friend about it, and s/he posted on a page that going to my page and using the password 'DeCSS' could get a copy, that's not my problem, right?
The MPAA has made rediculously wide-ranging claims as to their intellectual property rights, some of which have been upheld, but can they really expect to be able to stop every possible distribution mechanism without to resort to something so all-encompassing that not even the most dim-witted (or technologically illiterate, to be fair) judge wouldn't dream of passing it? Does that greedy, holier-than-thou organization really expect to outwit, intimidate, bully, and/or legally force over 5 billion people to cower before their demands?!? Yikes! Why do such people always end up in positions of power?
I think we can all agree that constitutes a link. But how about ?
I'm not in high school anymore (graduated this spring), but second semester Senior year I took an introductory programming course at the university here in Madison (WI, that is--CS302, if you're interested).
If college freshmen can understand it in a semester, HS students can get it in a year, esp. if they're taking an AP CS class anyway. Check out the TA's wepbage (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~davin/), which used to have the list of class projects, but still has useful information, including sample exams. As the fall semester progresses, he'll be posting information for his own class that you can take a look at for ideas.
Alternately, LOGO is a good language to learn. Before I get yelled at here, it's not practical to use but it's an excellent language to learn because of the way it's structured. It's simple, easy to debug, and will run on just about anything. There are versions that will run on an old Apple ][, a 386, or whatever. My personal favorite is MSWLogo (http://www.softronix.com/logo.html), by George Mills of UC-Berkeley, using the UCBLogo core developed by Brian Harvey. Yes, it's a windows program, but it's excellently done, and incredibly full-featured, and has only crashed on me about 3 times in as many years. It's got a primitive (now--it's under constant development by George Mills' graduate students and was just updated in the last version, 2 weeks ago) GUI toolkit, 3D support (check out the demos!), sound, commands to control serial and parallel ports, open files, read from the game port, etc. The language is interpreted (though compilers exist if you really want one--this defeats the purpose though), but within the constraints of an arbitrarily-sized 'page', your students can do literally anything they want.
I agree with other posters who have said that you should have your students work on their own design documents before they begin coding--this is incredibly helpful, esp. on large projects, or those they'll only be working on in class.
First off I would like to say... has anyone noticed that, well, the mouse ONLY fits right-handed people? The renditions, I mean, look at them, the hand that fits the mouse is only the right hand. And so the 10% of the population gets ripped off, for the mouse doesnt fit them!
.5sec minimum), moving back to the screen and locating what I was doing (1 sec?). That's a wasted 2 seconds every time I stop using the keyboard to use the mouse.
You're right, but you're missing a bigger point. With a mouse (and, with that damn puck), your handsize is irrelavent. My hands are in the top 5% as regards size, and my palm covers an entire mouse. I don't use the palm--only the fingers. With this device, it looks as if a palmrest is integrated, meaning I'll be resting my palm on the groove in the back, while my thumb will miss the contact on the side, since it's anchored at the base of an 8" long hand (wrist to fingers, roughly, straight fingers). People with small hands will likely be in less trouble, but anyone who's even a bit large will start having problems, I think.
Second off, the Puck. Many people have complained about the puck, and I frankly don't see why. The puck is designed for use in a certain position, where your palm does _not_ rest on the mouse, merely the fingers.
As I said, I do this naturally. Regardless, I can grab a mouse (in this case, a default gateway MSmouse on my mom's computer) and know how it's aligned, and align it correctly. With a puck, I grab it and it just might be twisted 30 degrees or so so my fingers don't bump into the cord on the back. So, when I move right, the mouse moves up at a 30 degree angle. That is my complaint with the mouse--it requires extra steps to use: I have to visually determine its orientation, and then move it awkwardly into the correct position, rather than feeling the angle of the top corner of the mouse and knowing how to turn it without moving my eyes to the mouse (.5sec minimum), looking (another
The only fault I see is that there is only one button, but then again, the Mac OS only needs one.
Third, about the squeezing part... I really don't think it will be a pain to squeeze or push what appears to be five?! "pressure spots"? and a pseudo scroll wheel...
But I thought you just said it only needs 1. So how come Apple suddenly thinks it needs 5 and a wheel?!?
It is cool that Apple is innovating... cordless mouse with an optical sensor, and the most shocking part, _no_ buttons, all *standard* with their new macs (hopefully).
Perhaps I'm being foolish here, but if you push it and it reacts, it's a button. Unless the sensitivity is important (different actions for different whacks), it's a button.
As regards another poster's comment about contextual menus and such: I think we can all agree that just about all UIs currently suck (at least in some significant way or another). That being said, the ability to do lots of stuff is never bad. That I can do tons of things with two buttons and a wheel (which, at least on the MS mice, is a button too), says alot. I can't scroll a window in netscape on a mac without the keyboard or without hitting tiny scroll arrows or the bar. I can't sit back, pull out some mouse cord, cradle the damn thing upside down because it's more comfortable, and scroll while I read. Why is having this feature a drawback? Note: I'm not saying windows doesn't suck. I'm not saying lots of stuff couldn't be better, including the wheel. I'm just saying that in many cases (particularly mine, since I've got the most experience being me), it's better.
Re: ZDNet article: can someone explain "In a way, the entire mouse will act as a button: Pushing down on it rocks the top of the mouse, causing a click."? The top panel of the mouse in hinged? Why? What's wrong with a button? Why does it have to kick up some other part of the mouse when you click? I must be missing something here. Also, as regards the inference of possible side-rocking action, this had better not be true. When you rock a mouse to the side, it moves. Try it. Really. It does. Now pretend that somewhere in that rocking motion, a click occurs, except that your cursor is moving when you click. This is a no. I will lose all faith in Apple as a company that can design mice if they do this. And if my reading on the rocking sentence is correct, they're going to lose major points there too. Anyone got firmer info?
Now, since it's 4 in the morning, I'm going to be unconscious for some time.
Purely in theory, the insurance company cannot hike your rates for unsubstantiated stuff they find on a website. Purely in theory, I don't care what's posted--it's not necessarily true, and any thinking person wouldn't believe it anyway.
Practically, I'd be royally pissed. Credit cards can be cancelled. Other stuff isn't quite so nice to have hanging around, even if you can deny it.
On a more widespread basis though, this might actually be a good thing. Suppose someone were to find somewhere the credit card numbers of all the members of the US House of Representatives and Congress? When they cancel 'em, repeat the post. Ditto for credit, purchases made, etc. In short, suppose someone pissed someone off, not you or I, but someone with real power.
At this point, everyone's going to sue, and HavenCo will have problems (legal or not--strictly speaking, CA courts don't have jurisdiction over DeCSS hosted in other states/countries, yet people keep getting cease and desist orders / lawsuits / etc.). This, I think, would be a poor response. If Havenco gets bankrupted with legal bills (worst case scenario, right?), then someone will step in and take their place. Sealand will likely be shot as a principality (since HavenCo can't be touched without that, right?), but there will always be information-friendly countries around, or those who don't care to enforce 'bad' legislation, for whatever reason.
Ideally, what will happen is that when the legal mud settles back to the ground, HavenCo will still exist, still be raking in the money (huzzah!), and those hundreds of angry powerful people will have to fix their problems in other ways. Since we dealt with the worst cases in the previous scenario, let's go with best cases here. I can see lots of privacy legislation being passed very quickly if a significant portion of the government's powerful people have a lot to gain by it. I'm not talking about 'you can't collect info' laws here: the kind of legislation I'm talking about is something that will touch the core of the issue: that people can get at your sensitive personal information. Hopefully, some fundamental laws: laws mandating good encryption of things like credit reports, financial transactions, medical histories, etc. By good encryption, I mean something like PGP with a long (2K+) key, that would get tougher and tougher as time progresses. There would have to be required authentication of whoever gets this information, as well, since it's not useful to have it encrypted to protect theft if I can easily con a bank teller, for example, into thinking I'm someone I'm not and getting their info.
Hopefully, the first scenario will quickly illustrate that attempting to control information that has become public is futile. For proof of this, just take a look at DeCSS. If the MPAA never talked about it, only those people who need it would have it, and it'd quickly become a lovely piece of software, but few would care, nobody would use it to pirate (duh--better methods exist), and everyone would be happy, except the lawyers. Now, it's splattered across the world, and nobody has a chance in hell of getting it back--so much for damage control. The only other way of keeping private information private is by keeping it private--don't let it get loose in the first place. To do this will require lots of money, lots of smart people, and lots of political muscle, which is why it will only happen if someone in power gets burned by the poor security infrastructure of this (and every other) country.
Wouldn't it be nice if HavenCo did let people post credit card numbers and such? As long as they're not mine, I don't care. We need some way to prod the people in control into action, and this sort of thing ought to do it.
It is widely known that the ATA/66 standard is a theoretical improvement over ATA/33, but presents few real-world benefits. I read somewhere (Thought it was storagereview, but I can't find the article on their site now) that it's surprisingly well-implemented. I can't even remember the drive being tested, but I remember seeing the graphs of performance, which varied from 50+MB/s on the outside to ~35 on the inside of the drive. Crap! Can't find it. Anyway, it was a considerable improvement.
I still think SCSI is superior though. Even UW2 v. ATA/100. UW2 has a max. transfer rate of 80MB/s, while ATA/100 has a max. transfer of (surprise, surprise) 100MB/s. Regardless, UW2 SCSI supports 7 devices per interrupt, whereas IDE supports only 2. For systems with several drives, this is a considerable improvement, and definately worth the extra few hundred dollars for the controller and for each HD. Further, while IDE devices are seeking, the channel cannot be used. So, if a CD is seeking (85-110ms), the other device on its channel cannot be used. In contrast, while SCSI devices are seeking, the SCSI bus can be used for other things. When multiple SCSI drives are on the same chain, data can be requested from one, and while it is searching, more data can be requested from the other, reducing total latency.
NOTE: I can't use the strike tag here, so stuff in square brackets was struck out by Microsoft:
.doc so that a linux filemanager can recognize them and add the appropriate icon. Aha! Interoperability! And if they make available a windows bitmap of an icon that can be used (subject to the appropriate licensing terms, of course)...that's just plain generous!
.doc), you want to write files a windows box can read? Save them as text-only. More interoperability. Look how well Microsoft shares toys in the sandbox!
"Technical Information" means all information regarding the identification and means of using APIs and Communications Interfaces that competent software developers require to make their products running on any computer interoperate [effectively] with Microsoft Platform Software running on a Personal Computer. [Technical information includes but is not limited to reference implementations, communications protocols, file formats, data formats, syntaxes and grammers, data structure definitions and layouts, error codes, memory allocation and deallocation conventions, threading and synchronization conventions, functional specifications and descriptions, algorithms for data translation or reformatting (including compression/decompression algorithms and encryption/decryption algorithms), registry settings, and field contents.]
I guess Microsoft didn't think they could avoid interoperating, they left it in. They just change the wording so they don't have to effectively interoperate. So: they tell people that word files end in
Unpublished APIs? What unpublished APIs? We don't officially use those anymore. You don't need them to interoperate. Ignore the fact that everyone uses them because that's what they were written for.
Now that you can read Word files (remember: they end in
Yech! Look at their revisions sometime. The stuff they took out, added, and re-worded is just sick. They claim the government's definitions of just about everything are too broad, so they narrow them, making them apply to just about nothing.
And just look at the big section of nixed stuff at the bottom. Despite complaining throughout the document of imprecisely defined terms, Microsoft objects to the precise definition of this term, and wants to scratch it all out. This is almost starting to sound familiar familiar familiar familiar...
"Anonymity, on the other hand, means being able to get away with stealing, or hacking, or disseminating illegal material on the Internet - and presuming the right that nobody should know who you are. There is no such right. This is nothing more than the digital equivalent of putting on a ski mask when you rob a bank."
Actually, you put a ski mask on BEFORE you rob the bank. Putting that ski mask on is legal. Walking into a bank with it on is probably legal (though perhaps not). Robbing them is illegal. Similarly, on the net, being anonymous is legal. Browsing someone's auction site while anonymous is legal.
Separating anonymity and privacy is naive. While it would be nice not to have to be anonymous to ensure privacy, history (and Realnetworks, among others) has shown us that the corporations we patronize do not respect our rights, so we must ensure our privacy the only way we can. The only way to ensure law-abiding citizens' privacy is to ensure their anonymity, and that of the criminals. This principle also exists in the physical world. Our legal system is based on the idea that it is better to let 100 criminals go free than to falsely imprision even 1 person wrongly.
Yep. This is the only time I've gotten this much bandwidth over HTTP on this modem. It's a 56k, but still...9.4k over the course of a 200k slashdot page? Excellent! 'cept for the fact that the page was 200k, but I guess that's fair, since it's a bunch of comments.
Yes, replying to one's own post is tacky. So what?
Anyway, I can only get it down to about 150 bytes. If I could post it to google instead of their opener, I could lose the "http://www.google.com" and just leave "/search", so that'd be 21 fewer bytes...
Or perhaps she's just rather well-endowed. After all, there're quite a few million people in Britain, and it's conceivable that one of them happens to be good looking, have large breasts (yes, those are separate items), and be willing to be Lara Croft, though perhaps I'm just being wilfully naive. She is 16, after all...for another 2 months.
*grin* Dual C366, both OC'd to 550, 256mb ram...I like being able to run lots and lots of things simultaneously at really high resolutions without taking a performance hit. Oh yes, and a 19" monitor. (I'd've gotten a 21 incher, but I prefer a high-quality 19" than a mediocre 21")
Just stick the whole damn thing in quotes. They don't (that I can find) have a good explanation of how it all works, like Altavista does, but they consistently return much better results, which makes it more than worthwhile, unless I have a very specific boolean search to do, in which case it's Altavista all the way.
I've got an entry for the 5k html contest, BTW. I downloaded the google page, saved it to the HD, and pared it down to the bare essentials. No graphics, one line, consisting of the entry box and the two buttons. It's under 300 bytes, and is completely correct HTML. I could probably strip another 100 off it if I got rid of HTML, BODY, and the javascript to auto-focus the search box (though that's damn convenient). In fact, getting rid of one of the search buttons and other paring, I'll bet I could get it down to less than 100 bytes.
Well, this post sure wandered, didn't it. Anyway, ignore this part and keep the useful suggestion about using quotes. And bug Google about documenting how their parser works, and we might get some good documentation.
Finally! Someone's talking sense. Magic is where it's at, folks. So, head off to your local gaming store, pick up a copy of Shadowrun 3rd ed. and start working on that armor spell (target number 6, drain +2(m)) so the people who head off to their local gaming store and pick up a copy of quake to learn how to load, aim, and fire automatic weapons can't hurt you. Cripes. If you get really good at it, the bullet will bounce back and they'll end up killing themselves.
Damn! Now, if only I could figure out how to go from 'walk over the weapon and press control when things wander into the yellow crosshairs' to 'find, purchase, load, aim (without yellow crosshairs, mind), and fire' the damn thing, I'll be set to go.
Race ya! I've never touched a firearm in my life, but I'll bet after an hour of quake I can figure it out, right?
According to http://www.techweb.com/wire/stor y/TWB19990112S0011, just over 9 million DVDs were sold in '98, an increase of 600% over the year before.
Presume the same increase for 1999, giving 9 million * 6 = 54 million DVDs. What does a DVD cost these days? $20? A bit more? Figure printing, packaging, and media costs, and profit's probably $20 or less. So, 54 million DVDs * $20 each is roughly $1.1 billion.
Someone is seriously screwed up in the head if they expect anyone to believe that even though blank DVDs cost more than pre-recorded ones, somebody (a whole industry of somebodies, from the looks of it) has managed to turn a profit selling over twice as many DVDs as the entire motion picture industry, even with the help of country codes and other monopolistic advantages?
I would certainly like to see the chain of reasoning that supports the MPAA's claim, especially starting from the same figures I've got. Further, even if this were true, the MPAA has the gall to say that this piracy is due to DeCSS, and that everyone who apparently bought two pirated DVDs would have been willing to pay full price, so the MPAA in fact lost a sale, which also is a false assumption.
Frankly, I'd be surprised if they lost a tenth of what they claim, in all the years since DVDs have been for sale.