I did want to read Starship troopers, just to see where (if) the movie screwed things up. I'm glad to hear TCWWTW was a bomb, but I am not happy to hear why. That's rather sad to hear. I'll have to pick up something earlier.
Is this a benchmark proposal or an episode synopsis for Babylon 5? If it's the former, good luck getting it accepted, if it's the latter, it needs to work on the episode order.
Re:I don't think this is a film about scientology.
on
Battlefield Earth
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· Score: 2
>>I found the books quite funny, and IMHO "Mission Earth" is funny as hell and really worth reading! You confess that you have never read more than 10 pages of the books or anything Ron Hubbard, then how can you criticise the books?<<
I have gotten as far as 3/4 through Heinlein's "the cat who walks through walls" and dropped it. I have not to this day picked up another of his books. The same goes for Dean Koontz's "Dragon's Tears".. It sucked, and it tainted my view of the authors.
First impressions matter, and this fellow got a first impression of Hubbard. Personally, I find it funny that he won his bet to start a believable religion. THAT makes him a good writer.
Not to mention if you keep up the war on drugs, you have all those permanent DEA agents getting paid, there is a need for a Drug "czar" and so on. It is quite ironic that the chief of DEA is known as a Czar. It rather accentuates the bureaucracy, don't you think? King of drug agents, such a worthy title. I agree with Jessie Ventura, the way to stop the war on drugs is to get addicts un-hooked. Legalise everything, regulate it, tax it. Revenue for enforcement, no fear of prosecution for users, and help for hardcore users. Of course, you can get just as hooked on Methadone than you can on Morphi(ne |um).
>>NVIDIA's cards - They've been making quite a stir with reports of fast, quality drivers that aren't open source. When they arrive, I'll be doing my best to compare their performance with all the other cards available<<
So, apparently they didn't review this because the drivers still aren't ready. I guess it's a good thing I don't expect any sort of performance out of my tnt card.
It seems that security is generally the opposite of usability. Sad really, when the most secure computers are behind a damned door, and you can't hit them from your desk outside the media centre. One of your sibling posts was more correct. The situation I refer to would me more akin to A0.
A1 likely involves a secure processing facility, a optical network diverter, and no doubt some heavy-duty Electromagnetic Airlock trapping. It most likely involves a entry-way lined with 2 lead doors and a right angle somewhere. Tempest hardening is illegal though. I suppose the A1 is for military computers only.
I work for a software company in a Pittsburgh sattelite office, and I can say for the most part I have had no real problems with ethics or corporate responsibility. We take pride in our products and stand behind them 100%. When there is a problem with our EDI solutions such as a failure, be certain we will be on top of it. Our call response time is very short, with some 100 people effectively assisting over 6000 medical practices. When we make mistakes, we admit them and move on honestly instead of attempting a coverup. The employees are well treated, have a relaxed dress code and very good stock compensation/profit sharing plans. There is plenty of incentive to work in areas outside of your norms, and people often pick up side-projects as an internal hobby. It is, so far the best 3 years of my career. I have learned much during this time that my education could never afford me.
>> Not having to route standby power is useful, but not essential. <<
It is funny that you should say this. The entire computer industry is based in the concept of "useful, but not essential." Soundcards, 3d graphics and 13 gig hdds sure are useful, sometimes not, and most times overkill for people who only touch a computer for internet access.
Oh, and I meant to say nano, but being not awake can naught but harm my thinking skills.
Besides, if the difference in access from 70ns to 10ns is noticable in hefty applications such as photoshop, a 10ms to 0ms jump would be just as noticable.
I'd say dismissing this as a laptop thing is a bit out of bounds. The ability to suspend your system without power is good for desktops as well. It would be nice since board manufactures don't have to route standby power, decreasing complexity.
Also, any milliseconds not spent refreshing power is a millisecond using data. Consider what this would do for realtime access.
Sorry, but to say themes are for "hackers" and tweakers is somewhat arrogant. To say the average person has no interest contradicts the popularity of the "skinz" scene. The average people download winamp skins to make them look like "Akira" or are probably neither hackers nor tweakers. They don't do these things for hack value. They do it for a personal sense of aesthetics, or some other drive such as boredom. Changing window managers wildly I would agree is done for hack value, but skins are not really much of a hack. Zul files recreate the entire browsing experience, can create programs inside of a Navigator/Mozilla window, and have the capability to make life a living hell for someone trying to implement them. If you load the classic navigator interface, you can get back some of that, but the users have no choice when they use the largely (so far) undocumented chrome protocol. But the point suck is trying to make is mozilla's and QT's interfaces are crap by default. They are already "tweaked" the wrong way.
BTW, my favourite Mozilla theme so far is the Sullivan theme from alphanumerica. It is simple and functional and aesthetic, the way things should have been.
Re:Crystal Space, compare and contrast.
on
Jet3d Game Engine
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· Score: 1
In fact Jet3d and genesis3d appear to be identical down to the features list. Is this a new name for the same engine?
Re:Crystal Space, compare and contrast.
on
Jet3d Game Engine
·
· Score: 1
This is odd. Some of the Genesis 3d engine screenshots are on the Jet3d website. This is noted in the glowing particle sphere that is also on the genesis engine's webpage.
I realised that after I posted. To bring it up in a half dozen or so posts as so many have is pedantry at best. The actual cost is $526.80 if you want to get really anal about it.
Or to put it another way, they make about $328 off of you all costs considered. The equipment probably costs them $130, and the ISP on average $70 out of the $520 to support. If I dial into my current ISP instead, I pay $504 with or without a Dreamcast anyways. I don't see the benifit of online gaming. Ultima online was the last one I've played, and Asheron and EverQuest didn't seem to learn from origin's mistakes.
(( Colour choice: go for contrast any time. I prefer dark backgrounds with light text, too, and find (for example) standard M$loth-produced black-on-bright-white painful to think about. ))
Yes, black on white is painful, but it is better than the blue on black I see all too often. The amount of pages with crazy backgrounds I see never fails to amaze. Another tip for those people: teal text on a gray background with a dark image is fine until the image disappears or fails to load. Then I kiss the illegible page goodbye. personally, the user has the power to change the colour to what he/she wants in options. But, at your suggestion, I changed my page (by swapping 2 things in one.css file) and everything is different. I expect everbody to access my pages with either a gui browser or with lynx. either way, it's white on black.
I open new windows when a user clicks on an outside link. But only one. I use the Target property to open to "_", which replaces content in that one window instead of one each.
I'm not a big fan of multiple images, as I prefer to do things with type. Sometimes I wished you could build all your "fancier" (layers and the like) text within the css borders, never to render in plaintext (or to render differently).
1) no font tags. It slows download times, bloats filesize, and holds no weight for the colourblind. If you want to make colour or font size changes, be uniform -- use css to make certain pages are readable with/without your changes. My page is an example of css not going overboard.
2) no frames, unless you handle them right! Set targets! If someone hits back, It better not take them to the top of your site!
3) Indent paragraphs the way they should be -- with a <P>! Use a "text-indent: 20px" to get the appropriate result. Non css (that is, 2.0 and lower) browsers won't recognize this, but the result is not important at that level. It will still have a clear break. I have personally converted a <br> Text to a <p>text <</p> pair and saved 10 k off of a 55k document! Each tag went from 25 bytes to 7!
4) Break up tables. Nothing is worse than going to a page like stileproject and waiting for a half hour for it to load. break things down as much as possible. Not everybody is on the campus net, or on dsl.
5) keep all pages, unless they are about graphics or media, under 25k. most of my pages weigh a measly 2.6k. That is because I don't use images. I designed a portal template that takes at most 4k. Adding stuff later won't be much a burden on the webserver or the user that way.
6) finally, use xhtml where available. This way, you have validated code, and little handheld web devices can grab your data in the future.
It is interesting you should mention scientists hating science, but using it as a tool to find truth. I really hate most forms of computers. The break randomly, have horrible interfaces (Qwerty, mice, etc.) and are non-intuitive. I like them because I use them in my job (getting me money in the process) and I can look up information, most likely through OpenDirectory , simply because humans do it better.
Do I truly hate computers? Not completely, but for devices that are supposed to be so organised, they sure are bundles of discord. The internet runs on standards, yet there is no standard for submitting websites. There is no standard for dropping stale links out of search engines or combing for 404s. This is the part of computers I hate. But at least they get the job done.
I have to register a hearty amen to the conflict of interest thing. Also, there seems to be a large number of patents out there that are slight variations of the same concept. The situation is out of hand and that is why I think advocates are pushing hard in the past year for reform. Too bad it has come to this.
check out my patent rant for a little more of what I wrote on this subject. It sorta runs with the same concepts you and I both mentioned above. The amazon patent covers something you do at wallmart. You scan your card (login + cookie) and the scan a product (the "one click" part) and give it to you (shipping). The one clicking part is merely a seperation of steps, and the "innovation" is merely in the perception of the process. Same system, slightly different interface.
as to the matter of not knowing if someone is pulling a patent on something, check that something out. It's usually marked "patent pending". Whether this is REQUIRED I do not know.
(((I thinkt is importnat..but how would competitors prove this prior art and disprove the validity of patents? )))
The would prove prior art as they would in any dispute afore. Usually you can take a design document down to a lawyer/notary and get it stamped as an official copy. Or you can send sealed certified mail contaning the information, as it becomes postmarked and logged. Those are just the ones I've heard of. The best idea is to apply for patents on your best, original ideas before anyone else.
I think that many ideas are the consolidation of external influences. The ones that can put two and two together and sell or patent that idea deserve the spoils of said idea. One problem: some meta-ideas aren't -- that is, some ideas (like 1-click selling) are somewhat of a duh concept. Still, the system protects them (for ever-increasing amounts of time) and they make money. If a patent is too common, it holds no water as a money making device. Lots of patents, I'm certain, were taken out on the "little obvious things" in life. But that is where prior art comes in. It is up to the competitors to prove this prior art and disprove the patent's validity.
And here I thought the burlap on the dashboards all the rage in Charlotte a few years back was tacky. I've seen neon door bumpers on a neon a few years ago. what the point was, I don't know. It's like the pimp across the street from a friend of mine who over-pimped a 92-ish Pontiac Grand-AM. A note: blue, yellow, and grey only works when applied properly, like on csx trains.
That barely edges out Seagate's 73.2 drive. the seagate spins to 10,000 rpm, 3000 more leet than the IBM. Oh, the Seagates are SCSI 160 drives as well. Gee this is a fun project...
try partyworks for some wire outright, or cool neon for some neat designs using same. coolwireusa has 'smore. coolwireusa has the biggest line out of these. coolneon has diy info. Funny thing is that I just looked this up for a project today... random tip: altoids crushed in coke or pepsi... mmmm.
Slashdot Mirror
I did want to read Starship troopers, just to see where (if) the movie screwed things up. I'm glad to hear TCWWTW was a bomb, but I am not happy to hear why. That's rather sad to hear. I'll have to pick up something earlier.
Is this a benchmark proposal or an episode synopsis for Babylon 5? If it's the former, good luck getting it accepted, if it's the latter, it needs to work on the episode order.
>>I found the books quite funny, and IMHO "Mission Earth" is funny as hell and really worth reading! You confess that you have never read more than 10 pages of the books or anything Ron Hubbard, then how can you criticise the books?<<
I have gotten as far as 3/4 through Heinlein's "the cat who walks through walls" and dropped it. I have not to this day picked up another of his books. The same goes for Dean Koontz's "Dragon's Tears" .. It sucked, and it tainted my view of the authors.
First impressions matter, and this fellow got a first impression of Hubbard. Personally, I find it funny that he won his bet to start a believable religion. THAT makes him a good writer.
Not to mention if you keep up the war on drugs, you have all those permanent DEA agents getting paid, there is a need for a Drug "czar" and so on. It is quite ironic that the chief of DEA is known as a Czar. It rather accentuates the bureaucracy, don't you think? King of drug agents, such a worthy title. I agree with Jessie Ventura, the way to stop the war on drugs is to get addicts un-hooked. Legalise everything, regulate it, tax it. Revenue for enforcement, no fear of prosecution for users, and help for hardcore users. Of course, you can get just as hooked on Methadone than you can on Morphi(ne |um).
>>NVIDIA's cards - They've been making quite a stir with reports of fast, quality drivers that aren't open source. When they arrive, I'll be doing my best to compare their performance with all the other cards available<<
So, apparently they didn't review this because the drivers still aren't ready. I guess it's a good thing I don't expect any sort of performance out of my tnt card.
A1 likely involves a secure processing facility, a optical network diverter, and no doubt some heavy-duty Electromagnetic Airlock trapping. It most likely involves a entry-way lined with 2 lead doors and a right angle somewhere. Tempest hardening is illegal though. I suppose the A1 is for military computers only.
To me it's how steak is done.
I work for a software company in a Pittsburgh sattelite office, and I can say for the most part I have had no real problems with ethics or corporate responsibility. We take pride in our products and stand behind them 100%. When there is a problem with our EDI solutions such as a failure, be certain we will be on top of it. Our call response time is very short, with some 100 people effectively assisting over 6000 medical practices. When we make mistakes, we admit them and move on honestly instead of attempting a coverup. The employees are well treated, have a relaxed dress code and very good stock compensation/profit sharing plans. There is plenty of incentive to work in areas outside of your norms, and people often pick up side-projects as an internal hobby. It is, so far the best 3 years of my career. I have learned much during this time that my education could never afford me.
A1: a unplugged computer, locked in Fort Knox. Even Windows can achieve that.
>> Not having to route standby power is useful, but not essential. <<
It is funny that you should say this. The entire computer industry is based in the concept of "useful, but not essential." Soundcards, 3d graphics and 13 gig hdds sure are useful, sometimes not, and most times overkill for people who only touch a computer for internet access.
Oh, and I meant to say nano, but being not awake can naught but harm my thinking skills.
Besides, if the difference in access from 70ns to 10ns is noticable in hefty applications such as photoshop, a 10ms to 0ms jump would be just as noticable.
I'd say dismissing this as a laptop thing is a bit out of bounds. The ability to suspend your system without power is good for desktops as well. It would be nice since board manufactures don't have to route standby power, decreasing complexity.
Also, any milliseconds not spent refreshing power is a millisecond using data. Consider what this would do for realtime access.
Sorry, but to say themes are for "hackers" and tweakers is somewhat arrogant. To say the average person has no interest contradicts the popularity of the "skinz" scene. The average people download winamp skins to make them look like "Akira" or are probably neither hackers nor tweakers. They don't do these things for hack value. They do it for a personal sense of aesthetics, or some other drive such as boredom. Changing window managers wildly I would agree is done for hack value, but skins are not really much of a hack. Zul files recreate the entire browsing experience, can create programs inside of a Navigator/Mozilla window, and have the capability to make life a living hell for someone trying to implement them. If you load the classic navigator interface, you can get back some of that, but the users have no choice when they use the largely (so far) undocumented chrome protocol. But the point suck is trying to make is mozilla's and QT's interfaces are crap by default. They are already "tweaked" the wrong way.
BTW, my favourite Mozilla theme so far is the Sullivan theme from alphanumerica. It is simple and functional and aesthetic, the way things should have been.
In fact Jet3d and genesis3d appear to be identical down to the features list. Is this a new name for the same engine?
This is odd. Some of the Genesis 3d engine screenshots are on the Jet3d website. This is noted in the glowing particle sphere that is also on the genesis engine's webpage.
I realised that after I posted. To bring it up in a half dozen or so posts as so many have is pedantry at best. The actual cost is $526.80 if you want to get really anal about it.
Or to put it another way, they make about $328 off of you all costs considered. The equipment probably costs them $130, and the ISP on average $70 out of the $520 to support. If I dial into my current ISP instead, I pay $504 with or without a Dreamcast anyways. I don't see the benifit of online gaming. Ultima online was the last one I've played, and Asheron and EverQuest didn't seem to learn from origin's mistakes.
(( Colour choice: go for contrast any time. I prefer dark backgrounds with light text, too, and find (for example) standard M$loth-produced black-on-bright-white painful to think about. ))
Yes, black on white is painful, but it is better than the blue on black I see all too often. The amount of pages with crazy backgrounds I see never fails to amaze. Another tip for those people: teal text on a gray background with a dark image is fine until the image disappears or fails to load. Then I kiss the illegible page goodbye. personally, the user has the power to change the colour to what he/she wants in options. But, at your suggestion, I changed my page (by swapping 2 things in one .css file) and everything is different. I expect everbody to access my pages with either a gui browser or with lynx. either way, it's white on black.
I open new windows when a user clicks on an outside link. But only one. I use the Target property to open to "_", which replaces content in that one window instead of one each.
I'm not a big fan of multiple images, as I prefer to do things with type. Sometimes I wished you could build all your "fancier" (layers and the like) text within the css borders, never to render in plaintext (or to render differently).
1) no font tags. It slows download times, bloats filesize, and holds no weight for the colourblind. If you want to make colour or font size changes, be uniform -- use css to make certain pages are readable with/without your changes. My page is an example of css not going overboard.
2) no frames, unless you handle them right! Set targets! If someone hits back, It better not take them to the top of your site!
3) Indent paragraphs the way they should be -- with a <P>! Use a "text-indent: 20px" to get the appropriate result. Non css (that is, 2.0 and lower) browsers won't recognize this, but the result is not important at that level. It will still have a clear break. I have personally converted a <br> Text to a <p>text <</p> pair and saved 10 k off of a 55k document! Each tag went from 25 bytes to 7!
4) Break up tables. Nothing is worse than going to a page like stileproject and waiting for a half hour for it to load. break things down as much as possible. Not everybody is on the campus net, or on dsl.
5) keep all pages, unless they are about graphics or media, under 25k. most of my pages weigh a measly 2.6k. That is because I don't use images. I designed a portal template that takes at most 4k. Adding stuff later won't be much a burden on the webserver or the user that way.
6) finally, use xhtml where available. This way, you have validated code, and little handheld web devices can grab your data in the future.
Do I truly hate computers? Not completely, but for devices that are supposed to be so organised, they sure are bundles of discord. The internet runs on standards, yet there is no standard for submitting websites. There is no standard for dropping stale links out of search engines or combing for 404s. This is the part of computers I hate. But at least they get the job done.
I have to register a hearty amen to the conflict of interest thing. Also, there seems to be a large number of patents out there that are slight variations of the same concept. The situation is out of hand and that is why I think advocates are pushing hard in the past year for reform. Too bad it has come to this.
as to the matter of not knowing if someone is pulling a patent on something, check that something out. It's usually marked "patent pending". Whether this is REQUIRED I do not know.
The would prove prior art as they would in any dispute afore. Usually you can take a design document down to a lawyer/notary and get it stamped as an official copy. Or you can send sealed certified mail contaning the information, as it becomes postmarked and logged. Those are just the ones I've heard of. The best idea is to apply for patents on your best, original ideas before anyone else.
I think that many ideas are the consolidation of external influences. The ones that can put two and two together and sell or patent that idea deserve the spoils of said idea. One problem: some meta-ideas aren't -- that is, some ideas (like 1-click selling) are somewhat of a duh concept. Still, the system protects them (for ever-increasing amounts of time) and they make money. If a patent is too common, it holds no water as a money making device. Lots of patents, I'm certain, were taken out on the "little obvious things" in life. But that is where prior art comes in. It is up to the competitors to prove this prior art and disprove the patent's validity.
And here I thought the burlap on the dashboards all the rage in Charlotte a few years back was tacky. I've seen neon door bumpers on a neon a few years ago. what the point was, I don't know. It's like the pimp across the street from a friend of mine who over-pimped a 92-ish Pontiac Grand-AM. A note: blue, yellow, and grey only works when applied properly, like on csx trains.
That barely edges out Seagate's 73.2 drive. the seagate spins to 10,000 rpm, 3000 more leet than the IBM. Oh, the Seagates are SCSI 160 drives as well. Gee this is a fun project...
try partyworks for some wire outright, or cool neon for some neat designs using same. coolwireusa has 'smore. coolwireusa has the biggest line out of these. coolneon has diy info. Funny thing is that I just looked this up for a project today...
random tip: altoids crushed in coke or pepsi... mmmm.