Putting on my old school broadcast engineering hat for a second. There are a lot of differences between CRTs and LCD displays, and in terms of nostalgia and authenticity towards 'the way it was' yes there will be something lost. For starters, CRT tubes were driven with an interlaced signal - the gun would scan top to bottom every other pixel row in 1/60th of a second, then scan the rows between those bottom to top in the next 1/60th of a second. Each set of half resolution rows is called a field. NTSC television ran at 60 fields per second, which gave the motion equivalent of 60 frames per second. A lot of these video games ran using only one field, for a vertical resolution of about 240 lines, at 30 fields per second. In between those lines were black lines, which gave the games a unique look. Rather than doubling each line, which makes the graphics look blocky, the black lines tricked the eyes into making it look like it was a higher resolution than it actually was, it gave a pleasing look. On some emulators such as MAME, there is an option to add the black lines in, which approximates the look. for the games that ran the full 60 fields, it also had a unique look as you could make out interlace flickering. Another artifact is the slight glow / spillover from each pixel, and the rather large visible discreet R, G and B dots that make up each pixel area, which also had some black between them. Add to that the curvature of the glass, and the frequent misalignment of the RGB pattern giving a chromatic abberation towards the edges of the signal. (when the R, G and B lines diverge) plus the softness of the analog signal overall, and you have a pretty unique look. In truth, emulators display games far crisper than they ever looked to us. This tends to over-emphasizes the simplicity of the graphics in a negative fashion. It's very possible to get close to the CRT look, but it will never be quite the same. I think that increased computing power will allow for the emulation of all of the artifacts listed above in realtime, it's just a matter of someone understanding them enough to emulate them. you could even dictate a level of screen burn for the attract screens, which most games tended to develop after a number of years cycling endlessly.
In the mean time, get thee to an arcade expo such as California Extreme to experience it 'as it was'.
I think they need to clarify immediately what they mean by that, whether it's art that users have explicitly open sourced for stock use (a common thing there, artists allowing other artists to use their work as input material for photomanipulations) or if they are insinuating that everything is up for grabs, which would be a violation of everyone's copyright. I suspect it is the former, but they need to clarify to avoid a panic among the DA userbase.
The stuff I have on there is copyrighted and specifically not allowed for stock use without permission. Allowing Wix users to use the work on their own sites does not seem to be a valid extension of the permission given to DA to use the artwork on its own pages and promotions.
You're talking about two entirely different things. One is a dedicated music service where users listen to music exclusively for hours on end. Another is a video service where people might occasionally go listen to a song, amongst the other videos they might watch that do not contain third party copyrighted music content. So comparing the amount per user is a bit like apples and oranges.
This should be straightforward...number of views on licensed content times amount per view, maybe on a sliding scale or something if that's how it was negotiated. Adjustment for percentage of the song they listened to or was used in the video, if desired.
Currently it is incredibly energy intensive to separate hydrogen from oxygen. What power plant is powering the separator? If it's anything but nuclear, hydro, solar or wind, then it's powered by whatever fossil fuel is doing the separation, and at a much lower efficiency than simply putting diesel fuel into a diesel-electric or directly powering an electric train by overhead catenary. In the end you're just centralizing the pollution.
If the separator is run by a non-fossil fuel source, then more power to them.
if it is directed only at street level storefront space on University Ave (downtown) and surrounding areas, that's fine. If including the office space around downtown - that's dumb.
Palo Alto has done many dumber things, such as declaring itself a "Nuclear Free Zone". No nucleii allowed!
The zero growth advocacy and climate is similar to Santa Cruz. Their housing crisis is their own creation. The classic hippies vs. techies war.
People who have lived in Palo Alto for a very long time are understandably pissed that it isn't the town they moved into 40 years ago. I remember it before the first tech boom. University Avenue was mainly a place for Stanford Students to unwind at the local restaurants and sushi joints. Some nice independent bookstores and the Varsity Theater. It was a cleaned up but not super busy downtown.
...but the price is not. They have no serious competitors as far as I can tell, the market is screaming for competition. If you need to build a network-accessible database driven application that runs in a browser, it's really, really slick.
I was involved with a project to build a type of customer database using QuckBase - it would track and follow a customer's project all the way to completion, and multiple people with different roles could interact with it in various ways. Imagine Filemaker Pro or MS Access on steroids and network enabled.
To earn our business, QBase reps basically built the bones of the program in realtime as we chatted on the phone and watched via webex, for free and gave us a month to play with it at no cost. After that it was around $300 per month, so out of range of individuals but fine for businesses that can justify it with revenue.
I think there is a huge future for this market that's waiting to be tapped further. Right now it's a bit of a monopoly.
"Dr." Nick Begich attend the open house, and for someone to be rolling video on him. He is singularly responsible for the conspiracy theories via his book "Real Angels Don't Play This HAARP".
Not that, as most people here say, it would change any minds. They merely move the goal posts or say that everything really worthwhile has been hidden from view during the open house, or misrepresented. Conspiracy theorists don't want to learn, they just want to be right.
I also stopped after the first few Win 7 service packs - everything's running great. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. They got all the major stuff ironed out early. I have not had a crash or a problem in many years.
This is fine for a home user who runs with noscript and adblock plus and is very careful in general with security. I wouldn't try to force that paradigm on my family or anyone not a serious computer enthusiast, however.
I played with and also searched for various titles. Mostly it is endless demo scene disks, demo versions of games and many of them don't work properly. The ones that do load play sound erratically, the emulator timing ramps up and down like a record with variable speed playback.
There were some really amazing games on the Amiga, and you're not going to get the sense of what it was like here. No Psygnosis games, and I couldn't get even the Turrican Demo to work properly. Plus no options that I can see for scanline emulation, the line doubling looks pretty bad and doesn't present what it actually looked like on a CRT monitor.
The fascinating thing which is hard to realize now is that when games like "Shadow of the Beast" came out in 1986, the PC / DOS crowd was still largely on 16 color CGA with no sound beyond beeps and clicks unless you bought an expensive add on sound card like a Turtle beach. The Macintosh was just discovering color. We were enjoying arcade quality graphics and sound as far back as the Amiga 1,000 thanks to a set of discreet graphics and sound chips. (Paula, Agnes, Denise etc.) It was heady times and a great time to be an Amiga user, from the mid-80s till the early 90s.
A good ad-blocker should let the page think it is being rendered exactly as requested, but actually removing the display of the ads to the user.
What manner of Javascript trickery or feedback loops do large site owners use to try to get around that?
It seems like the paradigm needs to be a sort of sandbox for the page and its anti-adblocker scripting, and then the page is delivered to the user sans ads completely unknowingly to the page.
I guess the one thing Facebook could do to make it very hard to remove the ads is to make them look exactly like a user post. you would need a sort of fingerprinting as another poster mentioned to get around it.
Aahh. and look how fast that page loads, devoid of all the needless crap we pile on now.
I don't have a grey beard (it wasn't THAT long ago and I was young) but I do remember downloading the entire IMDB as a file and parsing it with a reader. They would post periodic updates.
I was also the designer of the original set of icon buttons for web version of IMDB, which were made on my Amiga. Good times.
What good does extra speed do when there are very low data caps, at least here in the US?
Right now the typical account gievs you 1 - 3 GB per month. Pretty easy to burn though in no time watching a few videos.
Their new account tier 'adjustments' announced a few days ago change nothing.
If higher speeds are to be useful, and mobile streaming is to be useful, they need to do away with the data caps again. Right now we're starting to see a very non-neutrality focusd solution where certain companies streaming services are exempt from the data count. This is a problem when the little indie streaming station I want to listen to is not included. Listener supported indie radio outlets like somaFM.com and Radio Paradise are left out in the cold, shutting out diversity. I can't listen to them in my car, only at home.
Many people feel that data caps are strictly a business decision, and not a technical issue. Which means that there is not enough competition in the cellular wireless sphere. The barrier to entry in this market is very high so it's not surprising.
This is an interesting issue because it's become so complex. To browse privately and still allow a website to function has become a difficult prospect.
You want each website to work, but you don't want any cookies or other data from one site to be able to be read by another. So individually sandboxed pages and cookies are the idea. Even if you block third party tracking cookies, other sites might be looking for cookies set by other discreet sites, not just cookies from tracking firms. The problem is so many sites use third party services for photo and sometimes entire article syndication that it's very difficult to tear everything apart. It's almost a case by case basis.
The worst offenders are news sites. Browsing with noscript, the list of third party URLs sometimes scrolls off the page. It can be difficult to pick through the content and find the correct one to enable an embedded video to play, for example.
For now I browse with noscript and adblock plus and occasionally private windows, but noscript is not an option for anything but serious enthusiasts who are willing to pick through all the trash to get what they want.
Browsing without an ad blocker and noscript on most sites is like sex without protection. You might be looking on that one day when a mainstream ad network has become infected with malware, and oops, you're fucked! I'm not against advertising but how you can trust any of it when so many ad networks have been compromised in the past, repeatedly?
I second Homeseer as the local server of choice that will work with a variety of PLC (power line carrier devices) such as Insteon products (more modern X-10 equivalent) and security systems, thermostats. etc.
It's extremely powerful as you can do pretty much anything with the scripting language, or just stay within the confines of the UI and make some very flexible ladder logic and timed events.
To access the system remotely, open a port on your firewall for it and use a dynamic DNS service to make sure you have consistent access to it. That's all.
I ran a Homeseer setup with Insteon light switches and outlets about 10 years ago and even then it was pretty neat. Haven't gotten back into it lately, just hasn't been a priority for me.
Also it looks like Insteon themselves have started to make UI control for mobile devices, don't know if it talks to a central server but I imagine it does because aunt prudence isn't gonna know anything about port forwarding.
Winamp supports playlists that are separate from the files themselves. You can drag songs into a playlist and save that playlist as a.M3U text-based file, which is a widely recognized format.
In any case you know where all your data is and it's not wrapped up in a bloated, proprietary interface.
It's easy to edit a playlist to remove songs you're bored with, rearrange it, save multiple versions. It does not allow for behavior such as "play me all the music I haven't heard in a while" but I tend to know my collection well enough that I know what I want to hear. For those of us who grew up with album based music we already have it organized in our heads that way. I realize that this is now old school, but it's what's comfortable for me. I am guessing that this method of organizing music will die out with my generation.
In the garage I use a 15 year old throwaway laptop just to play music, and it works very well running Winamp's very light footprint.
I continue to use Winamp to this day. I like organizing my music files directly as files and folders. I never understood the attraction of a piece of software that slurped in all your music haphazardly and piled it all together trying to rely on ID3 information to sort it out. Easy enough to create playlists in Winamp via drag and drop.
In my car I use a thumbdrive organized by folders, navigated with the car's entertainment unit. Fortunately most manufacturers are still supporting this method.
Yes these are plugins for popular photo editors such as Photoshop, Lightroom and Aperture. The plugins were originally targeted at the professional photographer market. Pretty much all of us use at least one of those applications.
Most photo editing these days is done in nondestructive RAW mode in Aperture or Lightroom, and photoshop is now only touched when more precise editing tools are needed to fix a localized problem or paint out a telephone line (for non-editorial images.) So it's nice to have the plugins available directly in LR or Aperture.
GIMP still has some serious shortcomings when applied to a professional workflow, so it was never really on the radar for this market, and why plugins like this do not typically support GIMP.
There's nothing more annoying than speaking trite phrases to a machine as if it were a human. Especially if you're an introvert. You just want to type it or a push a button.
I never use voice anything, and I have it on my phone and in my car. I tried the car thing the first few days I had it and it felt so stupid talking to the thing and it was so slow I wanted to punch it.
The worst is voice based tree menus on corporate voice jail systems. Please let me punch numbers.
That's a common argument used against ANY human activity by zero growth advocates and radical environmentalists. Just pick an activity and make something up. (lets not have backup cameras because it will allow the elderly and disabled to drive more, which will lead to a tiny amount of increased pollution, nevermind the lives it saves)
By using that argument you are demeaning all of the people that the post admits would benefit the most, such as the elderly, disabled, the most vulnerable of our population.
The idea of arguing against something because it is easier to use therefore more people will use it is mind boggling. The vast majority of road pollution today comes from semi trucks. Modern cars are incredibly clean and efficient compared to their counterparts 30 and 40 years ago. By comparison they emit almost no pollution at all. You're debating over a small percentage of a small percentage that's not even worth worrying about on any scale. Also, having automated car services will lead to less cars on the road overall.
After my previous post I went and talked to my teacher wife directly about this. She said at the age level that she teaches (first and second grade) it would be a really bad idea. They are just then learning their directions and compass directions and changing the perspective would make it very confusing.
Also, she pointed out that some, but not all of the lessons use compass directions, North South East and West. Switching East and West on them when they are just learning about them is not an age-appropriate thing to do, their brains are not ready for that yet. You and I get that concept easily but at that age it's not there yet. She did say that the code.org programs are an excellent and applied way for kids to learn compass directions.
The interesting thing however is that if you DID want to teach it, the tools are there. One of the first things that they learn to do is to define the function of the direction buttons in the GUI when making interactive games. You could wire them in reverse. But there's no way that she would be doing that with her grade level.
This is a concept that should be saved for and given as a lesson for the older kids using the more advanced classes that are programming directly in javascript.
I'd like to hear from more actual teachers who are actually using code.org with their kids.
Some have mentioned the idea of "stage" left and right. Coming from a theater and television background I can relate to this, but it is unnecessary in this application.
My wife just got her entire school to do the hour of code. She teaches a 1st and 2nd grade combo class. Adding the difficulty of character-centric directions from the get-go would make it more difficult for some first and second graders to do this, that is a concept that can come later. A few of her students breezed through the entire first lesson set, most can just grasp all the concepts, and some need a little more help but always succeed. (they work in teams, trading off keyboard/mouse time, and that works best for kids of their age.) and it teaches an amazing wealth of concepts even without having to deal with third party perspective direction.
It would be a good concept to switch it up on a much later lesson and specifically talk about the difference between screen direction and character perspective direction. They did not 'get it wrong' for the basic lessons in any way shape or form.
This is much ado about nothing. The hour of code and code.org offerings are amazing as they are. They are giving kids a big boost in fundamental concepts they would not normally learn or at least in an applied manner until much later. It makes learning fun. Unlike most technology oriented education programs, this one actually is useful and works. When first and second graders go home and explain to their parents what an algorithm is and how they use one that's a pretty awesome thing.
I am a photographer, and I have no problem sharing this:
If you want to get around the image obfuscation used by most photo sharing sites and more and more news sites, open up firefox, and go to view -> page style -> no style. That usually gives you the actual image displayed somewhere in the resulting page. No plugins needed.
If you want to better ensure your name stays with an image, watermark it, and add meta-data. Depending on how annoying the watermark is, someone could take the time to paint it out, and meta data is trivial to strip. As the saying goes, if you can see it, you can take it. If you're that worried about it, don't show it to anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Putting on my old school broadcast engineering hat for a second. There are a lot of differences between CRTs and LCD displays, and in terms of nostalgia and authenticity towards 'the way it was' yes there will be something lost. For starters, CRT tubes were driven with an interlaced signal - the gun would scan top to bottom every other pixel row in 1/60th of a second, then scan the rows between those bottom to top in the next 1/60th of a second. Each set of half resolution rows is called a field. NTSC television ran at 60 fields per second, which gave the motion equivalent of 60 frames per second. A lot of these video games ran using only one field, for a vertical resolution of about 240 lines, at 30 fields per second. In between those lines were black lines, which gave the games a unique look. Rather than doubling each line, which makes the graphics look blocky, the black lines tricked the eyes into making it look like it was a higher resolution than it actually was, it gave a pleasing look. On some emulators such as MAME, there is an option to add the black lines in, which approximates the look. for the games that ran the full 60 fields, it also had a unique look as you could make out interlace flickering. Another artifact is the slight glow / spillover from each pixel, and the rather large visible discreet R, G and B dots that make up each pixel area, which also had some black between them. Add to that the curvature of the glass, and the frequent misalignment of the RGB pattern giving a chromatic abberation towards the edges of the signal. (when the R, G and B lines diverge) plus the softness of the analog signal overall, and you have a pretty unique look. In truth, emulators display games far crisper than they ever looked to us. This tends to over-emphasizes the simplicity of the graphics in a negative fashion. It's very possible to get close to the CRT look, but it will never be quite the same. I think that increased computing power will allow for the emulation of all of the artifacts listed above in realtime, it's just a matter of someone understanding them enough to emulate them. you could even dictate a level of screen burn for the attract screens, which most games tended to develop after a number of years cycling endlessly.
In the mean time, get thee to an arcade expo such as California Extreme to experience it 'as it was'.
I think they need to clarify immediately what they mean by that, whether it's art that users have explicitly open sourced for stock use (a common thing there, artists allowing other artists to use their work as input material for photomanipulations) or if they are insinuating that everything is up for grabs, which would be a violation of everyone's copyright. I suspect it is the former, but they need to clarify to avoid a panic among the DA userbase.
The stuff I have on there is copyrighted and specifically not allowed for stock use without permission. Allowing Wix users to use the work on their own sites does not seem to be a valid extension of the permission given to DA to use the artwork on its own pages and promotions.
You're talking about two entirely different things. One is a dedicated music service where users listen to music exclusively for hours on end. Another is a video service where people might occasionally go listen to a song, amongst the other videos they might watch that do not contain third party copyrighted music content. So comparing the amount per user is a bit like apples and oranges.
This should be straightforward...number of views on licensed content times amount per view, maybe on a sliding scale or something if that's how it was negotiated. Adjustment for percentage of the song they listened to or was used in the video, if desired.
Currently it is incredibly energy intensive to separate hydrogen from oxygen. What power plant is powering the separator? If it's anything but nuclear, hydro, solar or wind, then it's powered by whatever fossil fuel is doing the separation, and at a much lower efficiency than simply putting diesel fuel into a diesel-electric or directly powering an electric train by overhead catenary. In the end you're just centralizing the pollution.
If the separator is run by a non-fossil fuel source, then more power to them.
"SF tech culture is focused on solving one problem: What is my mother no longer doing for me?"
Not much world changing going on in that paradigm.
Big companies do put lots of money at trying to change the world (usually in a way that also benefits them) but rarely succeed.
if it is directed only at street level storefront space on University Ave (downtown) and surrounding areas, that's fine. If including the office space around downtown - that's dumb.
Palo Alto has done many dumber things, such as declaring itself a "Nuclear Free Zone". No nucleii allowed!
The zero growth advocacy and climate is similar to Santa Cruz. Their housing crisis is their own creation. The classic hippies vs. techies war.
People who have lived in Palo Alto for a very long time are understandably pissed that it isn't the town they moved into 40 years ago. I remember it before the first tech boom. University Avenue was mainly a place for Stanford Students to unwind at the local restaurants and sushi joints. Some nice independent bookstores and the Varsity Theater. It was a cleaned up but not super busy downtown.
...but the price is not. They have no serious competitors as far as I can tell, the market is screaming for competition. If you need to build a network-accessible database driven application that runs in a browser, it's really, really slick.
I was involved with a project to build a type of customer database using QuckBase - it would track and follow a customer's project all the way to completion, and multiple people with different roles could interact with it in various ways. Imagine Filemaker Pro or MS Access on steroids and network enabled.
To earn our business, QBase reps basically built the bones of the program in realtime as we chatted on the phone and watched via webex, for free and gave us a month to play with it at no cost. After that it was around $300 per month, so out of range of individuals but fine for businesses that can justify it with revenue.
I think there is a huge future for this market that's waiting to be tapped further. Right now it's a bit of a monopoly.
"Dr." Nick Begich attend the open house, and for someone to be rolling video on him. He is singularly responsible for the conspiracy theories via his book "Real Angels Don't Play This HAARP".
Not that, as most people here say, it would change any minds. They merely move the goal posts or say that everything really worthwhile has been hidden from view during the open house, or misrepresented. Conspiracy theorists don't want to learn, they just want to be right.
I also stopped after the first few Win 7 service packs - everything's running great. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. They got all the major stuff ironed out early. I have not had a crash or a problem in many years.
This is fine for a home user who runs with noscript and adblock plus and is very careful in general with security. I wouldn't try to force that paradigm on my family or anyone not a serious computer enthusiast, however.
I played with and also searched for various titles. Mostly it is endless demo scene disks, demo versions of games and many of them don't work properly. The ones that do load play sound erratically, the emulator timing ramps up and down like a record with variable speed playback.
There were some really amazing games on the Amiga, and you're not going to get the sense of what it was like here. No Psygnosis games, and I couldn't get even the Turrican Demo to work properly. Plus no options that I can see for scanline emulation, the line doubling looks pretty bad and doesn't present what it actually looked like on a CRT monitor.
The fascinating thing which is hard to realize now is that when games like "Shadow of the Beast" came out in 1986, the PC / DOS crowd was still largely on 16 color CGA with no sound beyond beeps and clicks unless you bought an expensive add on sound card like a Turtle beach. The Macintosh was just discovering color. We were enjoying arcade quality graphics and sound as far back as the Amiga 1,000 thanks to a set of discreet graphics and sound chips. (Paula, Agnes, Denise etc.) It was heady times and a great time to be an Amiga user, from the mid-80s till the early 90s.
A good ad-blocker should let the page think it is being rendered exactly as requested, but actually removing the display of the ads to the user.
What manner of Javascript trickery or feedback loops do large site owners use to try to get around that?
It seems like the paradigm needs to be a sort of sandbox for the page and its anti-adblocker scripting, and then the page is delivered to the user sans ads completely unknowingly to the page.
I guess the one thing Facebook could do to make it very hard to remove the ads is to make them look exactly like a user post. you would need a sort of fingerprinting as another poster mentioned to get around it.
Aahh. and look how fast that page loads, devoid of all the needless crap we pile on now.
I don't have a grey beard (it wasn't THAT long ago and I was young) but I do remember downloading the entire IMDB as a file and parsing it with a reader. They would post periodic updates.
I was also the designer of the original set of icon buttons for web version of IMDB, which were made on my Amiga. Good times.
-Mike
...just wait until geofencing is applied to self driving cars, and for political reasons. "I'm sorry dave, I can't take you to the protest zone..."
What good does extra speed do when there are very low data caps, at least here in the US?
Right now the typical account gievs you 1 - 3 GB per month. Pretty easy to burn though in no time watching a few videos.
Their new account tier 'adjustments' announced a few days ago change nothing.
If higher speeds are to be useful, and mobile streaming is to be useful, they need to do away with the data caps again. Right now we're starting to see a very non-neutrality focusd solution where certain companies streaming services are exempt from the data count. This is a problem when the little indie streaming station I want to listen to is not included. Listener supported indie radio outlets like somaFM.com and Radio Paradise are left out in the cold, shutting out diversity. I can't listen to them in my car, only at home.
Many people feel that data caps are strictly a business decision, and not a technical issue. Which means that there is not enough competition in the cellular wireless sphere. The barrier to entry in this market is very high so it's not surprising.
This is an interesting issue because it's become so complex. To browse privately and still allow a website to function has become a difficult prospect.
You want each website to work, but you don't want any cookies or other data from one site to be able to be read by another. So individually sandboxed pages and cookies are the idea. Even if you block third party tracking cookies, other sites might be looking for cookies set by other discreet sites, not just cookies from tracking firms. The problem is so many sites use third party services for photo and sometimes entire article syndication that it's very difficult to tear everything apart. It's almost a case by case basis.
The worst offenders are news sites. Browsing with noscript, the list of third party URLs sometimes scrolls off the page. It can be difficult to pick through the content and find the correct one to enable an embedded video to play, for example.
For now I browse with noscript and adblock plus and occasionally private windows, but noscript is not an option for anything but serious enthusiasts who are willing to pick through all the trash to get what they want.
Browsing without an ad blocker and noscript on most sites is like sex without protection. You might be looking on that one day when a mainstream ad network has become infected with malware, and oops, you're fucked! I'm not against advertising but how you can trust any of it when so many ad networks have been compromised in the past, repeatedly?
I second Homeseer as the local server of choice that will work with a variety of PLC (power line carrier devices) such as Insteon products (more modern X-10 equivalent) and security systems, thermostats. etc.
It's extremely powerful as you can do pretty much anything with the scripting language, or just stay within the confines of the UI and make some very flexible ladder logic and timed events.
To access the system remotely, open a port on your firewall for it and use a dynamic DNS service to make sure you have consistent access to it. That's all.
I ran a Homeseer setup with Insteon light switches and outlets about 10 years ago and even then it was pretty neat. Haven't gotten back into it lately, just hasn't been a priority for me.
Also it looks like Insteon themselves have started to make UI control for mobile devices, don't know if it talks to a central server but I imagine it does because aunt prudence isn't gonna know anything about port forwarding.
Winamp supports playlists that are separate from the files themselves. You can drag songs into a playlist and save that playlist as a .M3U text-based file, which is a widely recognized format.
In any case you know where all your data is and it's not wrapped up in a bloated, proprietary interface.
It's easy to edit a playlist to remove songs you're bored with, rearrange it, save multiple versions. It does not allow for behavior such as "play me all the music I haven't heard in a while" but I tend to know my collection well enough that I know what I want to hear. For those of us who grew up with album based music we already have it organized in our heads that way. I realize that this is now old school, but it's what's comfortable for me. I am guessing that this method of organizing music will die out with my generation.
In the garage I use a 15 year old throwaway laptop just to play music, and it works very well running Winamp's very light footprint.
I continue to use Winamp to this day. I like organizing my music files directly as files and folders. I never understood the attraction of a piece of software that slurped in all your music haphazardly and piled it all together trying to rely on ID3 information to sort it out. Easy enough to create playlists in Winamp via drag and drop.
In my car I use a thumbdrive organized by folders, navigated with the car's entertainment unit. Fortunately most manufacturers are still supporting this method.
Yes these are plugins for popular photo editors such as Photoshop, Lightroom and Aperture. The plugins were originally targeted at the professional photographer market. Pretty much all of us use at least one of those applications.
Most photo editing these days is done in nondestructive RAW mode in Aperture or Lightroom, and photoshop is now only touched when more precise editing tools are needed to fix a localized problem or paint out a telephone line (for non-editorial images.) So it's nice to have the plugins available directly in LR or Aperture.
GIMP still has some serious shortcomings when applied to a professional workflow, so it was never really on the radar for this market, and why plugins like this do not typically support GIMP.
There's nothing more annoying than speaking trite phrases to a machine as if it were a human. Especially if you're an introvert. You just want to type it or a push a button.
I never use voice anything, and I have it on my phone and in my car. I tried the car thing the first few days I had it and it felt so stupid talking to the thing and it was so slow I wanted to punch it.
The worst is voice based tree menus on corporate voice jail systems. Please let me punch numbers.
That's a common argument used against ANY human activity by zero growth advocates and radical environmentalists. Just pick an activity and make something up. (lets not have backup cameras because it will allow the elderly and disabled to drive more, which will lead to a tiny amount of increased pollution, nevermind the lives it saves)
By using that argument you are demeaning all of the people that the post admits would benefit the most, such as the elderly, disabled, the most vulnerable of our population.
The idea of arguing against something because it is easier to use therefore more people will use it is mind boggling. The vast majority of road pollution today comes from semi trucks. Modern cars are incredibly clean and efficient compared to their counterparts 30 and 40 years ago. By comparison they emit almost no pollution at all. You're debating over a small percentage of a small percentage that's not even worth worrying about on any scale. Also, having automated car services will lead to less cars on the road overall.
After my previous post I went and talked to my teacher wife directly about this. She said at the age level that she teaches (first and second grade) it would be a really bad idea. They are just then learning their directions and compass directions and changing the perspective would make it very confusing.
Also, she pointed out that some, but not all of the lessons use compass directions, North South East and West. Switching East and West on them when they are just learning about them is not an age-appropriate thing to do, their brains are not ready for that yet. You and I get that concept easily but at that age it's not there yet. She did say that the code.org programs are an excellent and applied way for kids to learn compass directions.
The interesting thing however is that if you DID want to teach it, the tools are there. One of the first things that they learn to do is to define the function of the direction buttons in the GUI when making interactive games. You could wire them in reverse. But there's no way that she would be doing that with her grade level.
This is a concept that should be saved for and given as a lesson for the older kids using the more advanced classes that are programming directly in javascript.
I'd like to hear from more actual teachers who are actually using code.org with their kids.
Some have mentioned the idea of "stage" left and right. Coming from a theater and television background I can relate to this, but it is unnecessary in this application.
My wife just got her entire school to do the hour of code. She teaches a 1st and 2nd grade combo class. Adding the difficulty of character-centric directions from the get-go would make it more difficult for some first and second graders to do this, that is a concept that can come later. A few of her students breezed through the entire first lesson set, most can just grasp all the concepts, and some need a little more help but always succeed. (they work in teams, trading off keyboard/mouse time, and that works best for kids of their age.) and it teaches an amazing wealth of concepts even without having to deal with third party perspective direction.
It would be a good concept to switch it up on a much later lesson and specifically talk about the difference between screen direction and character perspective direction. They did not 'get it wrong' for the basic lessons in any way shape or form.
This is much ado about nothing. The hour of code and code.org offerings are amazing as they are. They are giving kids a big boost in fundamental concepts they would not normally learn or at least in an applied manner until much later. It makes learning fun. Unlike most technology oriented education programs, this one actually is useful and works. When first and second graders go home and explain to their parents what an algorithm is and how they use one that's a pretty awesome thing.
I am a photographer, and I have no problem sharing this:
If you want to get around the image obfuscation used by most photo sharing sites and more and more news sites, open up firefox, and go to view -> page style -> no style. That usually gives you the actual image displayed somewhere in the resulting page. No plugins needed.
If you want to better ensure your name stays with an image, watermark it, and add meta-data. Depending on how annoying the watermark is, someone could take the time to paint it out, and meta data is trivial to strip. As the saying goes, if you can see it, you can take it. If you're that worried about it, don't show it to anyone.
Another question. Does anyone know if the TPP eliminates the chicken tax for participating countries?
I did not find any mention of it in the US Motor Vehicle Trade document that is part of the TPP documents.