"If you can get it to fly, it means you have got into a nice relaxed state," he explained. The game takes place in a virtual 3D world set aboard a starship in space. The environment is designed to immerse the player, drawing more of their attention and making the feedback more effective.
Why does this remind me of a certain Star Trek: TNG episode I've seen?
I use Mozilla to disable auto-popups, and I love it. But it occurs to me that if/when IE integrates this feature, it won't be long before it's worked around.
The problem is that many pages create JavaScript popups when you click on a link, and for this reason Mozilla allows you to enable or disable this separately. There are many reasons you would want to enable click-triggered popups, so most folks will want/need to leave this on.
Well, I've written a couple of sites where a user clicks on a link, and JS triggers a popup as well as opening up the desired page. This is done intentionally and for functional reasons; but it's only a matter of time before someone at Geocities or Angelfire figures out how to rewrite a user's page so that every single link triggers a popup in addition to opening the desired hyperlink.
It would only take a few lines of server-side scripting; a Perl regexp could do it in a second. And then we'll all have to contend with unwanted popups again, opening on the second page of a site instead of the first; only this time we'll have to disable the good popups as well as the bad ones.
Towards that end, I dearly hope that MS never, ever decides to add pop-up blocking to their browser. As long as they have over 50% usage 'net-wide and lack this feature, no one will see the need to do any of the above. See, unjust monopolies can be a Good Thing....
The reviewer can't be bothered to capitalize any of his proper nouns or use correct punctuation half the time; I'd say misplaced hyphens are the least of his problems.
(Yeah, I'm a grammatical elitist. Deal with it. IMO if someone can't be bothered to learn how to write correctly, they honestly shouldn't be writing.)
Yes, but I meant the server-scripts that capture the requests to that email address and send them to SpamCop auto-magically. 'Twould be nice to automate that all over the WWW.
You should publish this little trick as a script tool for Apache or other web servers, or encourage SpamCop to make it available for them -- it may not last, surely the popular SpamBots will figure a way around it eventually -- but it's clever and clearly effective.
Scooby Doo didn't "begin" the Transformers resurgence. Transformers never actually died out -- Hasbro's been keeping the brand active ever since the mid-80's, in one form or another.
What's new here is the activity with the "Generation One" line of toys, from the mid- to late-eighties before "Generation Two" and, eventually, "Beast Wars". And the reason is simple: all the fans who've been actively demanding DVD releases of "Transformers: The Movie" for years and snatching up mint-in-box versions of every TF toy that's come out since 1990 are now in their mid- to late-twenties, with oodles of disposable income. It's now economically feasible for a company to release the entire first season of TF cartoons on DVD, or for a fairly small company to license a new comic book based on the original toys, because the fans now have money and even the people who haven't thought about TF since the movie was released have enough money to start reliving their childhoods.
If Hasbro decides to re-release the original G1 toys the way Takara is in Japan, rest assured there will be a sizable audience of buyers. Meanwhile, the new "Armada" toys, comics and cartoons coming out are being targetted towards children, not collectors (despite reusing many G1 names and faces) -- because, hey, they're still toys, right?
There's just something about these toys that people love, and never forgot about. You ask me, it's the attention to detail -- all of the G1 vehicles were modelled on real cars, trucks and planes, and even the Dinobots and Insecticons were identical enough to their organic counterparts to impress. The robots were a bit chunky (okay, a lot chunky in most cases), but still beautiful in their own way.
These are exactly the reasons I love the "Robots in Disguise" toys, incidentally -- authenticity and elegance, with the added bonus of much, much more posability for the robots. "Armada" may take the posability tack, but the vehicles aren't "real" anymore and the robots are far less elegant. I may buy them, but probably not. G1 is where it's at for me.
According to sites that monitor this sort of thing, demand has already oustripped the first run. So if you're late in coming, you'll have to wait for a second run of DVDs.
They did not have to do this, but they were cool enough to do it anyway.
Actually, I'm pretty sure they did have to -- when they allowed their work to be published in Asimov or the other magazines, they also allowed those magazines to publish their work online.
It's the magazines that we have to thank for making these stories freely available, then -- not the authors, although they certainly knew it would follow publication.
...that in light of the current climate for authors, musicians, etc. trying to protect their copyrights online to unnecessary extremes, it's very nice to see that two of the five Nebula winners (Novella, "The Ultimate Earth", and Short Story, "The Cure for Everything") are freely available online, along with many of the non-winning nominees as well.
It's nice to know that professional literature can still be free, even if professional music often can't.
Macs have always been expecially popular in the education market, and Apple has always been targetting it. (Why do you think they picked the name "Apple"?)
Examples: special pricing has always been available for Apple products to schools and students; I'm willing to bet they even pioneered it. Not too long ago they announced Apple Remote Desktop software, and the first paragraph on that page talks about the advantages it offers to a lab/classroom environment. Old articles I'm finding through Google say that, at least recently, Apple's share in the education market is anywhere from 20 to 35 percent, versus 5 to 10 percent in the consumer market.
Partly this is because Apple wants to "convert" people early to their OS, but there's a more straightforward reason: Macs really are easier to use, individually or in groups, right out of the box. And elementary and high-school teachers have better things to do than try to keep up on the software and security issues surrounding computer labs. They just want them to work, and Apple helps them.
Maybe they just wanted to make the things harder for kids to steal. Student (and non-student) theft of lab computers has always been a big problem; making this one weigh 50 lbs. and giving it nice round edges is a small way to impact the problem, but I'm sure it helps.
Something like: "Their software deletes our spyware automatically without our permission. Therefore, we have the right to delete their software automatically without their permission."
The flaw, of course, is that Ad-Aware doesn't delete their product automatically -- it gets the user's permission to delete it first, unless that user explicitly changes Ad-Aware's settings to do auto-deletions. Whereas deleting Ad-Aware automatically without confimation or giving the user the choice not to is unethical, even if you do put it at the bottom of your EULA.
I don't imagine these two tiny companies could afford a lawsuit (in what country?) over the matter, but I find it hard to see a fair judge deciding against Ad-Aware on this matter.
If the media didn't hype the virus issue to people who normally wouldn't know any different, then the problem would probably have been much much greater.
Think of Y2K: a big deal, yes, and plenty of people were saying right up through January 1999 that something had to be done, and soon, because thousands if not millions of computers and software programs were affected. Eventually, they all got on it. The problem was licked, and virtually no major Y2K issues were still existing by the time the date actually arrived.
Sure, some people overreacted by building underground computer-free bunkers and stocking up on gasoline and bottled water -- but then, there are always people who overreact. Y2K probably wouldn't have caused the end of the world, but it would have been a pretty big nuisance if the media didn't get the word out so that normal people knew to upgrade their products and pressure companies to produce the upgrades for them.
You can't over-hype virus issues. You can lie and say a problem exists that doesn't, but you can't stop stressing that antivirus software and common sense when opening attachments and securing connections is important. There's always someone new to the computing world, or someone who introduces a new attack strategy, which necessitates restating all the rules.
Bottom line: everybody with a computer needs some sort of antivirus protection, even if it's just common sense. Everybody with an Windows PC on the Internet ought to have antivirus software as well, and keep it up-to-date, just because that OS is so susceptible to new attacks.
I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too?'
That would be an accurate comparison if people were copying music and then selling them for profit, rather than giving them away for free.
She should have replied: "Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and show it to all their friends as an example of what they think is good writing?" To which I'd reply: Hell, yes. Anything that gets more people to read my columns, articles or books is a good thing for me as an author.
It catches car thieves, but only car thieves. This is one of the few uses of technology that has zero probability of catching "the wrong guy".
I'm now waiting for the first action movie out of Hollywood that features a tough, no-nails cop breaking into an available car to chase an escaping murder suspect, only to be stopped in traffic two minutes later by a different part of the department.
What, that people like to make as much money as possible? That they want to reinterpret or alter the laws to do it? Or that consumers are so hung up on mass-market entertainment that this is even an issue?
Skeptics, *yawn*
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
one of the strongest influences on the authors, a young [...] astronomer who they acknowledge in their preface 'changed many of our views about planets and habitable zones', has a hidden, Earth-is-unique agenda motivated by strong 'intelligent design' religious views.
So what? Science is science, and all that anyone is doing in this subject is educated guesswork. If an author or influence had a 'hidden, Earth-is-random agenda motivated by strong atheistic and humanist views,' would that make his science automatically invalid as well?
Just because someone's science is motivated by pre-existing beliefs doesn't automatically make his science bad. This is just prejudice, end of discussion.
I'd be very interested in statistics on usage, downloads, burn rate, etc. This is going to be a fun one to track.
Search Forsmash mouthinArtist Names [Search] No matches found....
Search FormadonnainArtist Names [Search] No matches found....
(Maybe if I search for "All Star" or "Lucky Star" individually....)
Search ForstarinSong Titles [Search] 25 Results from: Atari Teenage Riot, James Taylor Quartet, Double Vision, Patric Catani...
Clearly the major record labels are giving Soundbuzz.com nowhere near their entire collections of music. At this price, I'm reasonably certain they never will. Nothing to see here, folks.
They could go for volume, but I'd rather pay 5 cents a track. And the option to "return" them if it's not what I want.
As if three or four songs by a given artist wouldn't tell you whether or not to keep downloading them. You'd demand the right to return an item that cost you $0.05 to purchase in the first place? What are you going to do, download their entire library and send back everything you don't like?
Being a beginning Flash developer myself, I can attest that it's probably next to impossible to produce a full-bore "budget" tool to create Flash files.
This isn't HTML we're talking about here. Flash files use coordinated timelines, compressed files, and loads of user interaction to do what it does, and it's not cheap. You can't just open the source code and peek inside. It's probably going to be some time before any open source project can produce the complexity Macromedia's put into six versions of their product.
As others have pointed out, though, you don't really need to use Flash. 99% of the time it's just that: flash, pretty animations which are implemented badly by non-professionals in order to make their site look cooler than it needs to. Most people honestly just want the information. You should consider this.
However, if you're persistently determined to use Flash, then I'd recommend buying a used copy of an Flash 4 on eBay or somewhere. It's certain to be better than any of the open source products currently available.
IE for Mac and IE for Windows don't begin to have identical feature sets, even where HTML tags and CSS support are concerned. The same actually goes for MS Office on the Mac, which also doesn't use the same names as Office for Windows.
The reason for this is because Microsoft's Mac products are produced by an entirely different division of the company, which focuses on Mac-specific interfaces and features as well as maximum compatibility with Windows-made files. It's also partly because most of the whiz-bang features for IE-Win (and Office-Win) are specific to the Windows OS, nearly impossible to reproduce on the Mac even if Mac users wanted them. Microsoft's Mac and Windows products may have the same name, but invariably that's where the similarity ends.
Mozilla and Netscape Navigator have used a common code base for all platforms, so identical version numbers were meaningful there. Microsoft does not. Comparing IE-Mac and IE-Win by version numbers is an exercise in futility.
And as an unrelated aside: is IE6 for Windows really all that different from IE5? I sure don't see any major differences in my day-to-day browsing.
But with identity theft becoming a more popular form of fraud, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), more attention is being paid to chat rooms that serve as flea markets for hackers.
This is the real thrust of the article, although it's brevity and excessive misuse of the word "hacker" makes it easy to miss. The article isn't slamming IRC as an evil haven of credit card thieves, it's pointing out that there's an entire chunk of the Internet called IRC that most people aren't aware of, and that it's possible, if not likely, that your credit cards and other personal information are being bought and sold on it right now.
When did our system get so unusable. When did it become "Acceptable" to pull this kind of shit ? I expect revolution at some point. I claim that our current system of laws is so complicated that it is not possible to spend even a single second of your life without breaking some law at some level of government.
There's no "system" even discussed here. There's no "laws" being mentioned or even demanded by the Author's Guild to prevent Amazon.com from doing what they do. There's just a guild of writers who argues (incorrectly, IMO) that Amazon's approach hurts writers and publishers and therefore should be protested by linking to other online booksellers.
Settle down. There's no call for a revolution here.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you can get it to fly, it means you have got into a nice relaxed state," he explained. The game takes place in a virtual 3D world set aboard a starship in space. The environment is designed to immerse the player, drawing more of their attention and making the feedback more effective.
Why does this remind me of a certain Star Trek: TNG episode I've seen?
I use Mozilla to disable auto-popups, and I love it. But it occurs to me that if/when IE integrates this feature, it won't be long before it's worked around.
The problem is that many pages create JavaScript popups when you click on a link, and for this reason Mozilla allows you to enable or disable this separately. There are many reasons you would want to enable click-triggered popups, so most folks will want/need to leave this on.
Well, I've written a couple of sites where a user clicks on a link, and JS triggers a popup as well as opening up the desired page. This is done intentionally and for functional reasons; but it's only a matter of time before someone at Geocities or Angelfire figures out how to rewrite a user's page so that every single link triggers a popup in addition to opening the desired hyperlink.
It would only take a few lines of server-side scripting; a Perl regexp could do it in a second. And then we'll all have to contend with unwanted popups again, opening on the second page of a site instead of the first; only this time we'll have to disable the good popups as well as the bad ones.
Towards that end, I dearly hope that MS never, ever decides to add pop-up blocking to their browser. As long as they have over 50% usage 'net-wide and lack this feature, no one will see the need to do any of the above. See, unjust monopolies can be a Good Thing....
The reviewer can't be bothered to capitalize any of his proper nouns or use correct punctuation half the time; I'd say misplaced hyphens are the least of his problems.
(Yeah, I'm a grammatical elitist. Deal with it. IMO if someone can't be bothered to learn how to write correctly, they honestly shouldn't be writing.)
Yes, but I meant the server-scripts that capture the requests to that email address and send them to SpamCop auto-magically. 'Twould be nice to automate that all over the WWW.
You should publish this little trick as a script tool for Apache or other web servers, or encourage SpamCop to make it available for them -- it may not last, surely the popular SpamBots will figure a way around it eventually -- but it's clever and clearly effective.
Scooby Doo didn't "begin" the Transformers resurgence. Transformers never actually died out -- Hasbro's been keeping the brand active ever since the mid-80's, in one form or another.
What's new here is the activity with the "Generation One" line of toys, from the mid- to late-eighties before "Generation Two" and, eventually, "Beast Wars". And the reason is simple: all the fans who've been actively demanding DVD releases of "Transformers: The Movie" for years and snatching up mint-in-box versions of every TF toy that's come out since 1990 are now in their mid- to late-twenties, with oodles of disposable income. It's now economically feasible for a company to release the entire first season of TF cartoons on DVD, or for a fairly small company to license a new comic book based on the original toys, because the fans now have money and even the people who haven't thought about TF since the movie was released have enough money to start reliving their childhoods.
If Hasbro decides to re-release the original G1 toys the way Takara is in Japan, rest assured there will be a sizable audience of buyers. Meanwhile, the new "Armada" toys, comics and cartoons coming out are being targetted towards children, not collectors (despite reusing many G1 names and faces) -- because, hey, they're still toys, right?
There's just something about these toys that people love, and never forgot about. You ask me, it's the attention to detail -- all of the G1 vehicles were modelled on real cars, trucks and planes, and even the Dinobots and Insecticons were identical enough to their organic counterparts to impress. The robots were a bit chunky (okay, a lot chunky in most cases), but still beautiful in their own way.
These are exactly the reasons I love the "Robots in Disguise" toys, incidentally -- authenticity and elegance, with the added bonus of much, much more posability for the robots. "Armada" may take the posability tack, but the vehicles aren't "real" anymore and the robots are far less elegant. I may buy them, but probably not. G1 is where it's at for me.
According to sites that monitor this sort of thing, demand has already oustripped the first run. So if you're late in coming, you'll have to wait for a second run of DVDs.
Transformers are back and as popular as ever, along with G.I. Joe and a new, improved line of Masters of the Universe figures. Ahh, my childhood is "cool" once again.
They did not have to do this, but they were cool enough to do it anyway.
Actually, I'm pretty sure they did have to -- when they allowed their work to be published in Asimov or the other magazines, they also allowed those magazines to publish their work online.
It's the magazines that we have to thank for making these stories freely available, then -- not the authors, although they certainly knew it would follow publication.
...that in light of the current climate for authors, musicians, etc. trying to protect their copyrights online to unnecessary extremes, it's very nice to see that two of the five Nebula winners (Novella, "The Ultimate Earth", and Short Story, "The Cure for Everything") are freely available online, along with many of the non-winning nominees as well.
It's nice to know that professional literature can still be free, even if professional music often can't.
Macs have always been expecially popular in the education market, and Apple has always been targetting it. (Why do you think they picked the name "Apple"?)
Examples: special pricing has always been available for Apple products to schools and students; I'm willing to bet they even pioneered it. Not too long ago they announced Apple Remote Desktop software, and the first paragraph on that page talks about the advantages it offers to a lab/classroom environment. Old articles I'm finding through Google say that, at least recently, Apple's share in the education market is anywhere from 20 to 35 percent, versus 5 to 10 percent in the consumer market.
Partly this is because Apple wants to "convert" people early to their OS, but there's a more straightforward reason: Macs really are easier to use, individually or in groups, right out of the box. And elementary and high-school teachers have better things to do than try to keep up on the software and security issues surrounding computer labs. They just want them to work, and Apple helps them.
Maybe they just wanted to make the things harder for kids to steal. Student (and non-student) theft of lab computers has always been a big problem; making this one weigh 50 lbs. and giving it nice round edges is a small way to impact the problem, but I'm sure it helps.
Yet Microsoft's cash seems to be just sitting there. Why would Microsoft, the ultimate growth company, allow so much money to pile up?
I knew MS reminded me of the dragon Smaug for a good reason....
Something like: "Their software deletes our spyware automatically without our permission. Therefore, we have the right to delete their software automatically without their permission."
The flaw, of course, is that Ad-Aware doesn't delete their product automatically -- it gets the user's permission to delete it first, unless that user explicitly changes Ad-Aware's settings to do auto-deletions. Whereas deleting Ad-Aware automatically without confimation or giving the user the choice not to is unethical, even if you do put it at the bottom of your EULA.
I don't imagine these two tiny companies could afford a lawsuit (in what country?) over the matter, but I find it hard to see a fair judge deciding against Ad-Aware on this matter.
If the media didn't hype the virus issue to people who normally wouldn't know any different, then the problem would probably have been much much greater.
Think of Y2K: a big deal, yes, and plenty of people were saying right up through January 1999 that something had to be done, and soon, because thousands if not millions of computers and software programs were affected. Eventually, they all got on it. The problem was licked, and virtually no major Y2K issues were still existing by the time the date actually arrived.
Sure, some people overreacted by building underground computer-free bunkers and stocking up on gasoline and bottled water -- but then, there are always people who overreact. Y2K probably wouldn't have caused the end of the world, but it would have been a pretty big nuisance if the media didn't get the word out so that normal people knew to upgrade their products and pressure companies to produce the upgrades for them.
You can't over-hype virus issues. You can lie and say a problem exists that doesn't, but you can't stop stressing that antivirus software and common sense when opening attachments and securing connections is important. There's always someone new to the computing world, or someone who introduces a new attack strategy, which necessitates restating all the rules.
Bottom line: everybody with a computer needs some sort of antivirus protection, even if it's just common sense. Everybody with an Windows PC on the Internet ought to have antivirus software as well, and keep it up-to-date, just because that OS is so susceptible to new attacks.
I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too?'
That would be an accurate comparison if people were copying music and then selling them for profit, rather than giving them away for free.
She should have replied: "Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and show it to all their friends as an example of what they think is good writing?" To which I'd reply: Hell, yes. Anything that gets more people to read my columns, articles or books is a good thing for me as an author.
It catches car thieves, but only car thieves. This is one of the few uses of technology that has zero probability of catching "the wrong guy".
I'm now waiting for the first action movie out of Hollywood that features a tough, no-nails cop breaking into an available car to chase an escaping murder suspect, only to be stopped in traffic two minutes later by a different part of the department.
This is what is wrong with the US today.
What, that people like to make as much money as possible? That they want to reinterpret or alter the laws to do it? Or that consumers are so hung up on mass-market entertainment that this is even an issue?
one of the strongest influences on the authors, a young [...] astronomer who they acknowledge in their preface 'changed many of our views about planets and habitable zones', has a hidden, Earth-is-unique agenda motivated by strong 'intelligent design' religious views.
So what? Science is science, and all that anyone is doing in this subject is educated guesswork. If an author or influence had a 'hidden, Earth-is-random agenda motivated by strong atheistic and humanist views,' would that make his science automatically invalid as well?
Just because someone's science is motivated by pre-existing beliefs doesn't automatically make his science bad. This is just prejudice, end of discussion.
(Maybe if I search for "All Star" or "Lucky Star" individually....)
Clearly the major record labels are giving Soundbuzz.com nowhere near their entire collections of music. At this price, I'm reasonably certain they never will. Nothing to see here, folks.
They could go for volume, but I'd rather pay 5 cents a track. And the option to "return" them if it's not what I want.
As if three or four songs by a given artist wouldn't tell you whether or not to keep downloading them. You'd demand the right to return an item that cost you $0.05 to purchase in the first place? What are you going to do, download their entire library and send back everything you don't like?
Being a beginning Flash developer myself, I can attest that it's probably next to impossible to produce a full-bore "budget" tool to create Flash files.
This isn't HTML we're talking about here. Flash files use coordinated timelines, compressed files, and loads of user interaction to do what it does, and it's not cheap. You can't just open the source code and peek inside. It's probably going to be some time before any open source project can produce the complexity Macromedia's put into six versions of their product.
As others have pointed out, though, you don't really need to use Flash. 99% of the time it's just that: flash, pretty animations which are implemented badly by non-professionals in order to make their site look cooler than it needs to. Most people honestly just want the information. You should consider this.
However, if you're persistently determined to use Flash, then I'd recommend buying a used copy of an Flash 4 on eBay or somewhere. It's certain to be better than any of the open source products currently available.
IE for Mac and IE for Windows don't begin to have identical feature sets, even where HTML tags and CSS support are concerned. The same actually goes for MS Office on the Mac, which also doesn't use the same names as Office for Windows.
The reason for this is because Microsoft's Mac products are produced by an entirely different division of the company, which focuses on Mac-specific interfaces and features as well as maximum compatibility with Windows-made files. It's also partly because most of the whiz-bang features for IE-Win (and Office-Win) are specific to the Windows OS, nearly impossible to reproduce on the Mac even if Mac users wanted them. Microsoft's Mac and Windows products may have the same name, but invariably that's where the similarity ends.
Mozilla and Netscape Navigator have used a common code base for all platforms, so identical version numbers were meaningful there. Microsoft does not. Comparing IE-Mac and IE-Win by version numbers is an exercise in futility.
And as an unrelated aside: is IE6 for Windows really all that different from IE5? I sure don't see any major differences in my day-to-day browsing.
But with identity theft becoming a more popular form of fraud, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), more attention is being paid to chat rooms that serve as flea markets for hackers.
This is the real thrust of the article, although it's brevity and excessive misuse of the word "hacker" makes it easy to miss. The article isn't slamming IRC as an evil haven of credit card thieves, it's pointing out that there's an entire chunk of the Internet called IRC that most people aren't aware of, and that it's possible, if not likely, that your credit cards and other personal information are being bought and sold on it right now.
*sigh*
When did our system get so unusable. When did it become "Acceptable" to pull this kind of shit ? I expect revolution at some point. I claim that our current system of laws is so complicated that it is not possible to spend even a single second of your life without breaking some law at some level of government.
There's no "system" even discussed here. There's no "laws" being mentioned or even demanded by the Author's Guild to prevent Amazon.com from doing what they do. There's just a guild of writers who argues (incorrectly, IMO) that Amazon's approach hurts writers and publishers and therefore should be protested by linking to other online booksellers.
Settle down. There's no call for a revolution here.