AFAIK, dark is the active state of the (sub)pixels, so a black screen would actually draw more power than a white one, not to mention that the filtering occurring on dark pixels means the panel heats up and breaks earlier.
The crackpot idea would indeed work if we were all using plasma screens which really draw a lot of power for lit areas.
Take e.g. Impress. Not so impressive, is it? It is exactly the same crap as Powerpoint. Animations are limited and have the same apparent bugs, like in PP, mathematical text is an ugly hack, editing drawings is a ROYAL pain, including tables is far less than intuitive or user-friendly, it still doesn't support any half-way sane vector image format, and what it renders in presentation view is pure garbage.
It's similar with the word processing and the spreadsheet components, which both appear to precisely identify and emulate the mistakes MS made. The only argument for actually using OOo is that it runs on otehr operating systems than just Windows. Hell, even LaTeX with LyX is far better and far more user-friendly than anything OOo has to offer for what my colleagues and I need to do.
The whole rumble "debate" is so funny. Just about every mobile phone can rumble, my dishwasher can rumble, the washing machine is just far out, and Lord, does my car ever rumble on a bad road.
It's old news. And it's also useless. I want real force feedback that's actually telling me something about the environment, like proper racing wheels of the ancient MS Sidewinder sticks have; not some generic on/off crap, but something with actual direction to it.
Also, PS3 owners should be glad that there are new controllers coming, the original ones suck and feel like a 5 cent (Canadian) molding job from a run-by-night sweatshop in rural China.
You will die of heart disease, lung cancer from (passive) smoking, intestinal cancer from bad eating, prostate cancer from pretty much anything (only a concern for about 50% of the population/95% of slashdot readers), a car/plane/boat accident or some other freak thing looooong before mobile phones or WLAN get you. Hell, it's more likely that you choke on your goddamn mobile, using it while driving.
Thus, I invite you to tag this story with the really undervalued "dumbestfuckingidea" tag.
Really, if you need something to further your agenda, FUCKING BUILD IT! Don't ask a rather large community to change their ways radically to a medium that is one giant security vulnerability.
Well, IR and UV may not really be problems. The only thing that's keeping you from using you camera for IR or UV photography is the high-pass filter that covers most cameras' sensors. There are plenty of little HOWTOs how to remove those and even shops that will replace them by non-filtering elements. Fuji's S3 Pro UVIR has this "built-in".
I do however doubt that "white" sensors would do much good. They would provide very little information not already included in the RGB channels. One of the good points of RAW processing is that you can simulate a lot of film and filter characteristics, which would not be possible with information from white sensors.
But you probably still won't be able to import pictures from your new Nijitson S-D900D with the HyperCMOS-sensor, because it uses an octagonal color pattern with an IR channel in the gaps. The issue here is that the program needs to understand the physical characteristics of the sensor, and EXIF data only tells you a part of the story.
[Do] Apple and Adobe have some kind of contract with the camera manufacturers, so that ist's sure that Aperture and Lightroom will support the next-gen, encrypted and proprietary RAW-format? othewrwise the software could be rendered useless when buying a new cam...
You're new to the wacky RAW world, aren't you? RAW formats are pretty much always closed. The SDKs come with NDAs the size of Roseanne.
Of course, companies like Adobe or Apple have some kind of leverage and the resources (==legal teams) to get at that stuff, so chances are that you won't be left hanging quite as much as with niche products like RawShooter (bought by Adobe to implement some of its goodies in a worse form in Lightroom, but hell... That means I get Lightroom for under 60 EUR...). Every vendor is also peddling its own converter/processing package, so there's some kind of conflict as well. The "native" packages are likely to have some neat features using undisclosed parts of the nonstandard raw format.
Writing to my BIOS.... now thats a different matter and one I would take exception to.
Writing there should be considered a fundamental flaw of the operating system. If the OS manages to boot, there is no need at all to change any values in the configuration. If the OS doesn't manage to boot, there is no way at all to change any values in the configuration. QED;-)
Granted, with the floppy drive being on the way out, I can see kind of a problem for BIOS updates.
A 4MHz Z80 will still barely work up a sweat as part of say, a logging weather station.
And if you have some money to spare and some experience, you could get some sensor nodes, lik e.g. Crossbow's MicaZ series with some data acquisition boards and solder away. That gives you electronics to play with and programming fun.
For a site like slashdot, the solution would be to serve all comments in a big <div rel="nsfw">. That way, content that has been controlled by an editor gets through, but the uncontrolled content is blocked. Finer-grained controls would just extend the link tags by that attribute.
Like I said the hardware requirements are higher, but one can have about 64 simultaneous users on about $500 worth of hardware at todays prices and much less than a thousand a year in hosting.
That may hold for non-persistent games like FPS or tactics titles that have a ridiculously small world and just scrap pretty much all state after a short time. A good-sized MMOG needs to keep track of a persistent world, a lot of players, their belongings, their stats, their relationships (long-term like guilds, short-term like (battle)groups), missions, NPCs and enemies. Add some consistency checks to prevent cheating and have proper line of sight for good measure, and don't forget about mob-"AI" (granted, there's not much in that regard in today's games). That stuff usually scales quadratically or worse with the number of objects, so it is quite some difference between a 64 player BF2 match and a lazy 2000 player day on a WoW server. If a lot of players have the stupid idea of gathering in a small area, things really get fun. Doing this requires some real hardware. Luckily, bandwidth seems to have become quite cheap, or you would pay quite a bit for that too. Streaming data adds up, and you also need to add patches into the mix.
A lot of the so called computer science considerations go away once you start with previously developed software.
Heh:-)
Only if the PDS doesn't use strange specialised workarounds that break once you do something that the original developer didn't plan for, and there's a big number of those. Most computer science considerations tend not to go away, and if they do, then not in a good way.
Why so? Seems the biggest inherent difference is simply processing power needed on the server and client sides and bandwidth... but those are things that are getting cheaper every year.
Most websites offer their users rather disjoint snapshots of a current state. A game needs to push a common state with some realtime requirements to all clients in a certain environment. This gets into some problems of computer science that aren't usually encountered by your common blog or webshop. As an operator, you'll also want to guarantee some quality of service to your customers (and the internet so can't really do that), so you have to get into some peering contracts, and generally start looking more like an ISP than a developer.
It just means that small companies could spring up using free software to power their pay for MMOs, but that they could charge some monthly fee.
Such a company would enter an extremely hostile and satiated marketplace. The only point I could see there would be a niche product that aims at some small demographic, and it's at least questionable how well that would go.
I can imagine a really good Open/Free game (Volition did release the source for Freespace some years back), but for an MMO, I don't see a chance.
The same could have been said about websites 10 years ago, but that didn't stop tens of thousands of people from giving it a try. And... some succeeded.
It is infinitely easier to create and run a website than to run an MMO. Just have a look at the number of successful "open" MMOs. I know of only one that got to the point of having a few dozen players and was actually halfway self-sustaining, in contrast to the numerous amateurs that try to start one and then just have to give up because they lack the skill or the resources.
And to the "OS" reply: Linus got extremely "lucky" (I don't know if he would call it that) and has proven a skill in managing his beast, e.g. in preventing forks, that isn't common among developers. BSD had quite a commercial kickstart. The other OS-OSs aren't all that big and often to fail, more often than not because they're lacking community support, and for that aspect I'd like to point at my original post.
Contrary to popular belief, an MMOG requires a lot of logistics, financial backing and personnel to be run. It also requires a lot of users to be fun (which requires a lot of hype and a wisely-chosen release to get started). Neither of those points could really be met in an OSS project. OK, there may even be three or four people having enough time and motivation to try and understand the system, and they might even get it to run on a small scalle, supporting a few hundred players.
A lot of people without the necessary skills will start forks, which in this case is very damaging. If you have, say, fifty slight variations of the same thing (all with programmer art, or at least with the same assets and rules), neither fork is likely to ever attract the necessary manpower and player base to reach a critical mass and stay alive.
Also, realise that I used the word "release" above. This is not something OSS people are generally very good at. Unless development is strictly centralised, there will be a never ending slew of broken and incompatible client- and server versions which no user can even hope to understand. Current commercial MMOGs are extremely stable. Sure, they make changes to core rules now and then, add new assets and do other kinds of maintenance, but large-scale overhauls are rare. If such a thing happens, there usually are enough resources to update a good part of the userbase within a few days, which involves moving massive amounts of data, which, again, is not something the run-off-the-mill OSS project would be able to cope with. Generally speaking: "Massive Multiplayer Online" and "Release Early, Release Often" are pretty much mutually exclusive. So, any such project would have to be strictly regulated and changes would take very long to go live.
IMO, the FSF is just wasting a lot of money for something that can't end well.
You are exactly the kind of person that no one would miss were you to stop using Linux.
And you are the kind of person that makes me want to do so, namely a stupid elitist asshole. I really tried to help with the little time I had. I was trying to help people on debian-user, I hacked a little something now and then, and tried to be polite.
Sometimes, you want to get a little something back. Just about every question I ever asked either wasn't answered at all (and joined the tons of questions that make sense but weren't answered, or the comments about serious bugs that were never fixed) or got some inane reply that could have come from an IRC bot, except that most bots are better spoken.
During my last year at university, I did some driver hacking. During that time, none of my questions were answered. No-one was helpful. A colleague of mine now continues the project and has since found a few really damn stupid and dangerous bugs (think DoS, buffer overrun with kernel privileges and disclosure), which the core developers weren't really eager to fix.
All this doesn't really make me want to "give back to the community". I'll just keep on leeching, which is what everyone else is doing, only that most don't admit it.
It's just a shame that all this is basically the result of a really fucked up kernel design.
The kernel right now is one big monolithic, undocumented blob of ever changing ugly interfaces that requires breaking the license if you want to add a closed source driver. There is no clear interface for any third-party work that doesn't involve the inclusion of core kernel code into closed-source modules. This design of course clashes with the reality of needing closed-source drivers for some tasks. Face it: nvidia, ATI and others are not going to open their driver sources just because a minority OS doesn't want to play with them anymore. It's really a miracle that they still are making drivers, because core interfaces are changing weekly, so instead of being little bitching whiners, be thankful for that gesture of goodwill.
What Linux IMO really needs is a stable, well-designed external interface for such drivers. I don't know how possible it would be to create something like that, but systems like QNX suggest that it actually works. But I guess that having such an interface and actual *gasp* documentation for it would be too much to ask, especially from people who apparently don't know about the terrific capability of C to include comments in the code. It does work for other things than just the license! So far, I've only been working with three or four little interfaces in the kernel, and and each one of those required at least a week of code exploration before I could even only get to a trial-and-error phase, just because to the fact that (1) there is no or just outdated documentation in the kernel package itself, (2) the code isn't commented, and (3) all tutorials on the web are aimed at kernel version 2.2.0.
Yes, I'm quite disgusted with OSS in general and especially Linux, but it's still less expensive than the other crap./p
New Orleans was caused by a hurricane. This is a risk you take when you build a city on land that is under sea level. Even if the city was just above sea level, it would have been devastated.
Granted, the city is in a damn stupid location (and still, people are returning in huge numbers), but still: for some reason that we might not be all innocent of, the number of major storms, and thus the chance of that and other cities drowning, is increasing.
People lived in Africa with those ice deposits melted in the past.
Near rivers, in (then) humid areas, or in damn small numbers. Apart from the cultures who had the good fortune to live near major rivers, you don't hear of too many highly advanced civilizations from there. Also, the deserts are rapidly growing, destroying ever more land marginally able to support more that a small family per a few square miles.
There didn't used to be much ice at the north pole, and we all were doing just fine.
Yeah, all 5 million of us, huddled together in the subtropics, except for some freak people who could swim in Helium 2 and not care, who were basically eating fish, drowning their sorrow in mead and then invaded the next bees place. (The melting ice isn't the direct problem there, the problem is the Gulf stream dying because the "sink" at the pole gets clogged with sweetwater.)
It will not get better in the future. We are by far not advanced enough to get through a "spontaneous" climate change on the scale of a few decades without a major loss of lifes.
So it does matter, because if the article is true, then global warming is nothing scary, but there is a massive conspiracy to propagate lies in order to seize power.
Yeah, New Orleans going down was indeed damn funny (I did laugh, did you?), and the melting ice caps in Africa potentially leaving millions with severely reduced water supplies may be a good thing afterall. Oh, and the danger of the melting polar ice caps causing the oceanic heat transport to stop is also just a minor problem.
I'm sorry to say it, but everyone trying to ignore that by saying that it's all natural severely needs to be hit in the face. By a bus.
Slashdot Mirror
AFAIK, dark is the active state of the (sub)pixels, so a black screen would actually draw more power than a white one, not to mention that the filtering occurring on dark pixels means the panel heats up and breaks earlier.
The crackpot idea would indeed work if we were all using plasma screens which really draw a lot of power for lit areas.
Take e.g. Impress. Not so impressive, is it? It is exactly the same crap as Powerpoint. Animations are limited and have the same apparent bugs, like in PP, mathematical text is an ugly hack, editing drawings is a ROYAL pain, including tables is far less than intuitive or user-friendly, it still doesn't support any half-way sane vector image format, and what it renders in presentation view is pure garbage.
It's similar with the word processing and the spreadsheet components, which both appear to precisely identify and emulate the mistakes MS made. The only argument for actually using OOo is that it runs on otehr operating systems than just Windows. Hell, even LaTeX with LyX is far better and far more user-friendly than anything OOo has to offer for what my colleagues and I need to do.
The whole rumble "debate" is so funny. Just about every mobile phone can rumble, my dishwasher can rumble, the washing machine is just far out, and Lord, does my car ever rumble on a bad road.
It's old news. And it's also useless. I want real force feedback that's actually telling me something about the environment, like proper racing wheels of the ancient MS Sidewinder sticks have; not some generic on/off crap, but something with actual direction to it.
Also, PS3 owners should be glad that there are new controllers coming, the original ones suck and feel like a 5 cent (Canadian) molding job from a run-by-night sweatshop in rural China.
You will die of heart disease, lung cancer from (passive) smoking, intestinal cancer from bad eating, prostate cancer from pretty much anything (only a concern for about 50% of the population/95% of slashdot readers), a car/plane/boat accident or some other freak thing looooong before mobile phones or WLAN get you. Hell, it's more likely that you choke on your goddamn mobile, using it while driving.
Now that would make for one badass Mario!
Thus, I invite you to tag this story with the really undervalued "dumbestfuckingidea" tag.
Really, if you need something to further your agenda, FUCKING BUILD IT! Don't ask a rather large community to change their ways radically to a medium that is one giant security vulnerability.
All there, old man... Origin had that long before Blizzard even started to read documentation for networking.
And their review of the same pairing.
Well, IR and UV may not really be problems. The only thing that's keeping you from using you camera for IR or UV photography is the high-pass filter that covers most cameras' sensors. There are plenty of little HOWTOs how to remove those and even shops that will replace them by non-filtering elements. Fuji's S3 Pro UVIR has this "built-in".
I do however doubt that "white" sensors would do much good. They would provide very little information not already included in the RGB channels. One of the good points of RAW processing is that you can simulate a lot of film and filter characteristics, which would not be possible with information from white sensors.
But you probably still won't be able to import pictures from your new Nijitson S-D900D with the HyperCMOS-sensor, because it uses an octagonal color pattern with an IR channel in the gaps. The issue here is that the program needs to understand the physical characteristics of the sensor, and EXIF data only tells you a part of the story.
You're new to the wacky RAW world, aren't you? RAW formats are pretty much always closed. The SDKs come with NDAs the size of Roseanne.
Of course, companies like Adobe or Apple have some kind of leverage and the resources (==legal teams) to get at that stuff, so chances are that you won't be left hanging quite as much as with niche products like RawShooter (bought by Adobe to implement some of its goodies in a worse form in Lightroom, but hell... That means I get Lightroom for under 60 EUR...). Every vendor is also peddling its own converter/processing package, so there's some kind of conflict as well. The "native" packages are likely to have some neat features using undisclosed parts of the nonstandard raw format.
Writing there should be considered a fundamental flaw of the operating system. If the OS manages to boot, there is no need at all to change any values in the configuration. If the OS doesn't manage to boot, there is no way at all to change any values in the configuration. QED ;-)
Granted, with the floppy drive being on the way out, I can see kind of a problem for BIOS updates.
... but I haven't quit yet because the alternatives still suck more.
And it's amazing how childish aggressive even the tags are.
And if you have some money to spare and some experience, you could get some sensor nodes, lik e.g. Crossbow's MicaZ series with some data acquisition boards and solder away. That gives you electronics to play with and programming fun.
For a site like slashdot, the solution would be to serve all comments in a big <div rel="nsfw">. That way, content that has been controlled by an editor gets through, but the uncontrolled content is blocked. Finer-grained controls would just extend the link tags by that attribute.
That may hold for non-persistent games like FPS or tactics titles that have a ridiculously small world and just scrap pretty much all state after a short time. A good-sized MMOG needs to keep track of a persistent world, a lot of players, their belongings, their stats, their relationships (long-term like guilds, short-term like (battle)groups), missions, NPCs and enemies. Add some consistency checks to prevent cheating and have proper line of sight for good measure, and don't forget about mob-"AI" (granted, there's not much in that regard in today's games). That stuff usually scales quadratically or worse with the number of objects, so it is quite some difference between a 64 player BF2 match and a lazy 2000 player day on a WoW server. If a lot of players have the stupid idea of gathering in a small area, things really get fun. Doing this requires some real hardware. Luckily, bandwidth seems to have become quite cheap, or you would pay quite a bit for that too. Streaming data adds up, and you also need to add patches into the mix.
Heh :-)
Only if the PDS doesn't use strange specialised workarounds that break once you do something that the original developer didn't plan for, and there's a big number of those. Most computer science considerations tend not to go away, and if they do, then not in a good way.
Most websites offer their users rather disjoint snapshots of a current state. A game needs to push a common state with some realtime requirements to all clients in a certain environment. This gets into some problems of computer science that aren't usually encountered by your common blog or webshop. As an operator, you'll also want to guarantee some quality of service to your customers (and the internet so can't really do that), so you have to get into some peering contracts, and generally start looking more like an ISP than a developer.
Such a company would enter an extremely hostile and satiated marketplace. The only point I could see there would be a niche product that aims at some small demographic, and it's at least questionable how well that would go.
I can imagine a really good Open/Free game (Volition did release the source for Freespace some years back), but for an MMO, I don't see a chance.
It is infinitely easier to create and run a website than to run an MMO. Just have a look at the number of successful "open" MMOs. I know of only one that got to the point of having a few dozen players and was actually halfway self-sustaining, in contrast to the numerous amateurs that try to start one and then just have to give up because they lack the skill or the resources.
And to the "OS" reply: Linus got extremely "lucky" (I don't know if he would call it that) and has proven a skill in managing his beast, e.g. in preventing forks, that isn't common among developers. BSD had quite a commercial kickstart. The other OS-OSs aren't all that big and often to fail, more often than not because they're lacking community support, and for that aspect I'd like to point at my original post.
Contrary to popular belief, an MMOG requires a lot of logistics, financial backing and personnel to be run. It also requires a lot of users to be fun (which requires a lot of hype and a wisely-chosen release to get started). Neither of those points could really be met in an OSS project. OK, there may even be three or four people having enough time and motivation to try and understand the system, and they might even get it to run on a small scalle, supporting a few hundred players.
A lot of people without the necessary skills will start forks, which in this case is very damaging. If you have, say, fifty slight variations of the same thing (all with programmer art, or at least with the same assets and rules), neither fork is likely to ever attract the necessary manpower and player base to reach a critical mass and stay alive.
Also, realise that I used the word "release" above. This is not something OSS people are generally very good at. Unless development is strictly centralised, there will be a never ending slew of broken and incompatible client- and server versions which no user can even hope to understand. Current commercial MMOGs are extremely stable. Sure, they make changes to core rules now and then, add new assets and do other kinds of maintenance, but large-scale overhauls are rare. If such a thing happens, there usually are enough resources to update a good part of the userbase within a few days, which involves moving massive amounts of data, which, again, is not something the run-off-the-mill OSS project would be able to cope with. Generally speaking: "Massive Multiplayer Online" and "Release Early, Release Often" are pretty much mutually exclusive. So, any such project would have to be strictly regulated and changes would take very long to go live.
IMO, the FSF is just wasting a lot of money for something that can't end well.
Subject says it all.
And you are the kind of person that makes me want to do so, namely a stupid elitist asshole. I really tried to help with the little time I had. I was trying to help people on debian-user, I hacked a little something now and then, and tried to be polite.
Sometimes, you want to get a little something back. Just about every question I ever asked either wasn't answered at all (and joined the tons of questions that make sense but weren't answered, or the comments about serious bugs that were never fixed) or got some inane reply that could have come from an IRC bot, except that most bots are better spoken.
During my last year at university, I did some driver hacking. During that time, none of my questions were answered. No-one was helpful. A colleague of mine now continues the project and has since found a few really damn stupid and dangerous bugs (think DoS, buffer overrun with kernel privileges and disclosure), which the core developers weren't really eager to fix.
All this doesn't really make me want to "give back to the community". I'll just keep on leeching, which is what everyone else is doing, only that most don't admit it.
It's just a shame that all this is basically the result of a really fucked up kernel design.
The kernel right now is one big monolithic, undocumented blob of ever changing ugly interfaces that requires breaking the license if you want to add a closed source driver. There is no clear interface for any third-party work that doesn't involve the inclusion of core kernel code into closed-source modules. This design of course clashes with the reality of needing closed-source drivers for some tasks. Face it: nvidia, ATI and others are not going to open their driver sources just because a minority OS doesn't want to play with them anymore. It's really a miracle that they still are making drivers, because core interfaces are changing weekly, so instead of being little bitching whiners, be thankful for that gesture of goodwill.
What Linux IMO really needs is a stable, well-designed external interface for such drivers. I don't know how possible it would be to create something like that, but systems like QNX suggest that it actually works. But I guess that having such an interface and actual *gasp* documentation for it would be too much to ask, especially from people who apparently don't know about the terrific capability of C to include comments in the code. It does work for other things than just the license! So far, I've only been working with three or four little interfaces in the kernel, and and each one of those required at least a week of code exploration before I could even only get to a trial-and-error phase, just because to the fact that (1) there is no or just outdated documentation in the kernel package itself, (2) the code isn't commented, and (3) all tutorials on the web are aimed at kernel version 2.2.0.
Yes, I'm quite disgusted with OSS in general and especially Linux, but it's still less expensive than the other crap./p
Just make sure you get proper receipt for that 20p artefact, and don't get caught trying to get a tax refund for you Trifecta addiction.
Granted, the city is in a damn stupid location (and still, people are returning in huge numbers), but still: for some reason that we might not be all innocent of, the number of major storms, and thus the chance of that and other cities drowning, is increasing.
Near rivers, in (then) humid areas, or in damn small numbers. Apart from the cultures who had the good fortune to live near major rivers, you don't hear of too many highly advanced civilizations from there. Also, the deserts are rapidly growing, destroying ever more land marginally able to support more that a small family per a few square miles.
Yeah, all 5 million of us, huddled together in the subtropics, except for some freak people who could swim in Helium 2 and not care, who were basically eating fish, drowning their sorrow in mead and then invaded the next bees place. (The melting ice isn't the direct problem there, the problem is the Gulf stream dying because the "sink" at the pole gets clogged with sweetwater.)
It will not get better in the future. We are by far not advanced enough to get through a "spontaneous" climate change on the scale of a few decades without a major loss of lifes.
Yeah, New Orleans going down was indeed damn funny (I did laugh, did you?), and the melting ice caps in Africa potentially leaving millions with severely reduced water supplies may be a good thing afterall. Oh, and the danger of the melting polar ice caps causing the oceanic heat transport to stop is also just a minor problem.
I'm sorry to say it, but everyone trying to ignore that by saying that it's all natural severely needs to be hit in the face. By a bus.