The Science Of Discworld
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Thief of Time
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· Score: 3
For those Discworld fans who're also nerds (am I seriously even having to add that on/. ?) but never quite got around to finishing A Brief History Of Time, there's the somewhat less well known The Science Of Discworld.
Chapters alternate: One chapter has Rincewind and the other wizards tinkering with an experiment gone wrong that's turned in to an explorable solar system, the next has a real world science explanation of the concepts. There's just something about mixing in Discworld ridiculousness that makes the science more memorable.
The beloved Hex also turns up (Obligatory/. comment: Gee, imagine if I had a Hex cluster!), with it gaining insights in to the future. As a result it starts getting messages along the lines of "Make money fast!" "Send $1 to each of these five people and you'll make $millions" etc. I guess some things never change then.
Title: The Science Of Discworld.
Authors: Terry Pratchett, Lian Stewart & Jack Cohen
ISBN: 0 09 187477 7
Publisher: EBURY PRESS
Pages: 368
There has been a BT internet payphone installed at Chancelry Lane tube station (right beside WorldCom's office, ironically enough) for quite a while now. Curiously, it won't accept money and is marked for emergency use only. Quite what emergencies require net us never seemed to be made clear.
On the fun geek side, they seem to crash regularly and you get to watch the OS (looked like a linux variation) boot up along with the processor and memory info.
Leno owns the first "production" example-serial number 002-of this unique species. The long, slab-sided machine is the handiwork of Louisiana entrepreneur Ted McIntyre. In simple terms, McIntyre slots an ex-Bell Jet Ranger helicopter Allison Rolls Royce gas turbine into a home-built aluminum chassis, adds controls and a seat pad, then sends you on your way. Price? $150,000.
My favourite line has to be: Another drawback (besides the noise) is the enormous heat that billows from the outward-facing slash-cut pipes. "I was sitting at a traffic light," Leno says in slightly hushed tones. "I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw this Infinity car bumper kind of fold in on itself. I thought, 'Oh jeez, let's just pull away from here..."'
Re:Broadcast TV generally isn't worth it anyways
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Digital TV Approaches
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· Score: 3
I moved out to the US in December from England. Before I moved I made my US wife promise that I could have 'five hundred channels' - it seemed to be the American dream and if I was moving 7,000 miles for her, I was going to have it.
I watched a couple of hours worth at her parents and completely gave up on the idea as it's so commercial ridden as to be unwatchable [from the point of view of an English person who's used to three three-minute commercial breaks an hour]. All of a sudden it seemed less appealing.
So, we ended up without cable. Our TV's hooked up to the VCR, though not to the aerial or any other signal. I spend about the cost of cable access on video and DVD rentals which means I get a couple of movies of my choice, with no commercials, pretty much every day (with BB's reward card, I'm unlucky if I pay for half of what I rent). All in all it seems like a pretty good deal cost/content wise.
The real rewards have been the unexpected ones. And no I'm not going to do the usual quality time I now get to spend with my favourite rubber ducky taking long baths. I'm pretty much stress free. The reality is that most highschool students aren't shooting each other, most mexicans aren't going to rob me the moment they see me, no one's been murdered, no one's been raped, the world's actually a pretty nice place. News shows need to sensationalise what's happening to keep people interested. Once you get away from the over excited reporting you realise that they present a totally skewed and totally depressing view of the world. I now read slashdot for geek news, the bbc news site for news from back home and generally get told by friends if there's anything I really should know about. As a result I get to hear about what I'm interested in without having a load of sensational crimes distorted to the point where the world seems too evil to live in (except for the MPAA *grin* slashdot sees to that).
As for music, I'm now buying way more than ever before because I'm listening to the radio instead and hearing way more that I ever heard on MTV.
So, for me, the quality of life improvement isn't the extra time, it's that I get a way less depressing view of the world and can actually target what I want, not what some executive at Fox decides I want.
As has been said before, the viewer enters in to a trade with the TV company. Every time they up the number of commercials, they make it harder to copy content, they up the costs, degrade the service, they push the customer one step closer to considering the options and, more and more, once people have considered the options they're saying "Thanks but no thanks."
If TV companies want to continue, they need to realise they need to make the customer feel they're getting what they want. Traditionally that's been with more captivating shows (Weakest Link may be drivel but it's addictive drivel) but they seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel on that at the moment. Soon, if they wish to survive, they'll have to address other means and that may actually be to backtrack and offer better terms.
I've been digging through my collection of old games that run unplayably on anything over 33mhz recently and came across Magic Carpet from Bullfrog. Granted it used sterograms (cross your eyes and lie to your friends that you can see a ship) but they were successfully producing 3D, without goggles or even a monitor upgrade, in a commercial game, ten years ago. It kind of makes you wonder what they could do with a modern PC and a little help from NVidia if they re-explored the concepts.
One theory is that you sleep in cycles. Usually they're around three or four hours. Getting a complete number of cycles refreshes you, getting an incomplete number leaves you tired.
Hence, if you need three hour cycles, 3,6,9 or 12 hours will leave you refreshed but 8 won't - hence the curious effect of 3 hours seeming better than 8.
In the same way, if you need four hour cycles, 4, 8 or 12 hours works but say six or ten turn out to be next to useless.
As I said, it's just a theory but it does explain why differing lengths of sleep work differently.
The problem with trying to assess efectiveness for users is the old problem that everyone works in different ways - often capable of great idiocy.
I was involved in the Y2K cover for MCI WorldCom's web services. We had constant calls from scared silly customers who'd seen that support for their area was down around 50-60% and were worried they'd lose service.
The reality of what happened was we were using ultraseek, they'd type in a term like ATM, then get the search results page. Next to each search was an accuracy score - it just doesn't say it's an accuracy score and they all interpreted it as a service level score, hence the panic.
So, in conclusion, any metrics you impose are going to end up being subjective and making assumptions of a basic level of intelligence that you just can't assume.
I ran all of the posts through a plagiarism check and found most of them can be failed for copying, "as a former [degree] [student/major]".
As Eric wrote in his post, from a different perspective, anything we get from a computer we tend to treat as absolute fact. It is all to easy to find some connection that implies plagiarism.
There's a great statistic on birthdays. How many people do you think you'd need to have in a room before the odds were in favour of two of them having the same birthday? About 365/2=182? Actually about 30.
In a new year's science lecture on the BBC, a lecturer asked the left half of a room of 1024(ish) people to think heads, the other half tails. He flipped a coin and discounted the half that got it wrong. He carried on subdividing until he got to one who got it right ten times.
The problem is that most people don't realise how common some probabilities really are. In the first group of 30 (about a class size), "two of them clearly copied each other's birthdays!" In the second group, "no one can guess a coin correctly ten times in a row, he clearly went forward in time and copied what the coin was going to do - or the coin was rigged and he was told the answers!"
These are amusing, semi-trivial examples but they demonstrate the point that putting all of your convictions behind apparently conclusive numbers is flawed. Six word sequences can only be an indicator of cheating, not conclusive proof. All a six word phrase may really be showing you is that two students come from the same area and share the same turns of speach or that they were both equally influenced by something that was presented in a lecture.
I don't mean to maintain that statistical analysis is impossible, simply that it is all too easy to put too much weight behind it. Add that to the very valid point that in two identical papers, you may only have one cheat and one victim, expelling based on the system seems very flawed.
The kicker in your question is that lasts a copule of hours.
PCs are built safe in the knowledge that they're connected to a constant supply of power and it doesn't really matter how much they use. It's not even the PC itself so much as that big glowing box on your desk as opposed to that little, dull, low-power draining one that folds out of your laptop.
Take a look at the domestic UPSs that are available. You'll notice that they're rated in time they last for a given power load. Unplug the monitor from the equation and they'll last dramatically longer. Now look at the size of them and their relatively short lifetimes. For a PC, I'd be suprised if anyone could make a battery that'd power them and a monitor for any length of time that'd actually be small enough to fit in the case.
Remove the monitor from the equation, replacing it with a low drain equivalent (which is where a chunk of the laptop cost comes in) and assuming you can provide that for about normal desktop costs, whack on any domestic UPS and you've got your solution for the sort of money you're talking about.
Unfortunately, there's not a low drain monitor option for about the same cost/quality as a CRT.
Mr. Kevern is offering prizes to all dealerships to hand over the names and addresses of all Microsoft employees buying 'clean' cars (ones without payment protection plays).
While Mr. Kervern does not believe all Microsoft employees intend to default on their repayments, he feels he has a right to be ready just in case.
The first submit crashed before it returned the confirmation page so I hit submit again, only to find out the first had gone through before it crashed.
There seem to be three basic approaches to creating a 3D walkthrough.
Create a huge series of linked images.
Create a 360 degree panorama and use a plug in that allows you to pan around it/interact with it.
Build a 3D model and display it via some other means such as a plug in or separate viewer.
I've used all three methods to varying degrees of success. I'll explain what the strengths and weaknesses of each one are:
Swapping in and out a large number of images involves sending a large number of images. Every time you want a slight update you end up having to send a new image over the web which brings lag, download times and everything else in to play. You will also only ever be able to view it from wherever the designer set viewpoints. The positive side is it's compatable with pretty much every browser out there if you can write good HTML (use a script to generate each individual page out of a database/data file with all the details in).
Products such as QuickTime VR allow you to stitch panoramas together, add hotspots and so on. As with the first solution, they are a predefined set of images so you can only view from the points that were originally considered.
You also have a fun time trying to create a good panorama image. Taking a lot of pictures and stitching them together brings out issues with the lens and you get distortions which you can only really minimise by taking a lot of pictures at small angle intervals and only using the center slivers - which creates a lot of work. There are 360 degree cameras out there but they're probably a lot more expensive than you're looking to use.
Building a 3D model allows users to move around freely. If they want to look at the back of your wardrobe while standing on the back of your couch, that's up to them. With most systems you get to add a degree of interactivity as well so you can simulate lights being turned on and off, drawers opening, etc.
If you have access to decent modelling packages where you can do something with the data they generate, there are more and more packages available that will take two or more photos and determine 3D data, even texturing the meshes for you, which will take a lot of the hassle out of the modelling if you're not in to that. They're not perfectly accurate but they can produce very good results.
The big downside of a 3D model is it requires some means to view it. VRML and superscape are two of the most common browser plug in options but browser plug ins tend to be designed for genericity, are slow, hard to navigate in and generally look pretty bad. The other alternative is to create a file that has to be opened outside of the browser in something that's capable of displaying high quality images. Creating a Quake 3 model of your house may sound like a gamers passtime but it's been used by everyone from them through to architects since Doom editors became common.
The final downside of this approach is that you are building a virtual model. Even with photomapped textures (which VRML handles horribly) it will always be a model not a genuine photo that people instill as much belief as they do in a photo.
In conclusion, there's not really a good solution to all of the issues.
If you want true platform independence take 1.
If you want reasonable platform independance, good quality but limited views and would rather get your hands dirty with image manipulation than 3D modelling, choose 2.
If you want to give the user complete freedom to explore though they'll possibly attribute less belief to what they see, are prepared to spend the time modelling in 3D and don't mind that only those people with the right renderer will gain access, choose 3.
Once you've made that decision then you get to choose which of the competing packages for that option you wish to use.
"Craig Mundie, a senior vice president at Microsoft and one of its software strategists, will argue that the company already follows the best attributes of the open-source model by sharing the original programmer's instructions, or source code, more widely than is generally realized."
<sacrcasm>
Think about it. All that crap on the BSOD has to come from somewhere - namely programmer's instructions. Use the simple equation:
RegularityOfBSOD*NumberOfWinUsers
And you'll soon realise more people spend more time looking at Microsoft programmer's instructions than ever look at Linux's.
</sarcasm>
Most of the post throught the thread talk about all of the ways in - and there are a lot of different ones from coding your own demos and shareware releases to mods to 3D showreels to QA.
What they tend not to be focusing on is that part of it is blatant self advertising:
The creator of the Worms series of games walked up to Team 17 at a trade fair, loaded up his admitedly amateurish but original effort on one of their Amigas and said "This is what I can do.
If you read the Lionhead website, the guys who are the makers of Black and White, they talk quite a bit about how their team members got noticed. One of their coders entered a game design competition when he was a kid that Peter Molyneaux was judging with the prize being to work at Bulfrog. He was too young to enter but just wanted to meet Peter. As a result Peter followed his progression through university and when the time was right offered him a job. I believe their web designer was a QA tester who knew a little HTML and volunteered.
Even in the movie industry, there was a thread months back about two kids who sent in their 3D showreel to Lucas Arts and ended up doing albeit minor roles on Episode 1.
The moral of this post is - there are a huge number of opportunities but most people who take them don't do anything to distinguish themselves. If you're doing QA, use it as a chance to volunteer to help on other projects. If it's a mod, design one perfect level rather than 30 good but not unique attempts. If it's a demo, find out where the heads of the companies you're interested in will be and find a way to show it to them. You need to be something more than one of the many hopefuls.
Finally, a common cry from most of the 3D people who see a constant stream of showreels. "Don't send an animation of a spaceship - we've seen it all before. Show realistic moving light through a window or great character animation. Focus on one thing you can do brilliantly as most projects have a lot of specialists not one person filling every role. Most important, don't send in a group project - how are we supposed to know what you did and what's other people's work?"
is it also copyright infringement to display a list of numbers to press and save that will "sound just like" a popular song?
See yesterday's thread about OLGA (On Line Guitar Archive). The Harry Fox Agency is going after amateur guitarists who create their own similar [but not even identical] versions of song tabs for the guitar. If they are a target, there's no reason to believe button 'tabs' for mobile phone tones wouldn't be either.
There's a simple one word reply that really needs to be given to all the claims of technophobia on this one. Considering the harm this [one word] has already done with gene patents, is it such a bad thing we hold back until the laws manage to catch up with the technology?
The UK has the Data Protection act (1988) modified by various junk Europe has dumped on top of it. One of the fun bits there is that it's illegal for any European to give their personal details to any system based in a country without adequate data protection legislation (which Europe decrees includes the USA).
Back when I worked for [multinational telco] they had all sorts of problems trying to make up ways to get round the legality of the London employees simply having their phone numbers stored on the US phone directory.
Does that mean Microsoft can stop annoying Europeans too? With luck they can close themselves out of every market soon.
crazy to think about the fact that just one year ago we were breaking the 1GHz barrier and now we're almost up to 2GHz.
Yeah, it's just crazy to think that it's almost like every year to eighteen months processor power doubles. Someone should theorise a rule about it or something!
It sadly appears that US highschools have reached the point where they're run by cowards who'll take the easiest way out to avoid bad publicity/a lawsuit over something as complex as targeting bullying.
Perhaps what is needed is for more parents such as Sean's to stand up against such cowardice and give them the very thing they are so afraid of (lawsuits). While it does not move the balance towards what's right and away from fear, it at least pushes them to be fearful of not doing what's right.
Sean's father says he can not afford a lawyer. In the post I'm replying to, several free or lowcost options are explored. I don't know if anyone's organising a fund or not (and sorry, I know far too little about such things to offer) but if Sean's father [or someone organising a fund] wishes to contact me, I for one will pledge a couple of hundred dollars towards legal costs.
It may not be much but it doesn't take that large a percentage of/. readers doing the same to make an example out of the school involved and hopefully give other highschools reason to think before siding with the bullies in the future.
Television is paid for by commercials. Your $50 a month only goes a tiny part of the way towards the total cost, the rest is made up through advertisers trying to sell you something or the programmes sucking money from you (i.e. Millionaire's phone scheme).
As you take away the ability for advertisers to make money under the current model the equilibrium has to shift: Advertisers find the system unprofitable so they stop advertising, TV stations then find programming unprofitable to they either shift to cheaper programming (assumed to mean lower quality) or ways to make the advertising more effective (product placements in shows, "this show is brought to you by...", more and more frequent, unscheduled, harder to predict and avoid, advertising).
We've already seen the effect of this as people have got better at channel surfing. US TV is now a random mess of commercials and program glued together with dozen-product-long "brought to you by" lists.
Yeah, TiVo's the latest great trick to avoid commercials, just like the remote before it, basic channel surfing before that and getting up for a few minutes before that. For a brief while it will allow those with the units to get a more commercial free viewing experience at the expense of those without the units. Then in a couple of years the advertisers will change to a medium that beats TiVo (product placement etc) and the 'next' unit will come out (no doubt an image manipulator from NVidia) that will blank those placements, and in turn that will go.
TiVo's a great victory for those who have it for now. Give it time and that $400 unit will need to be replaced by the next one and the next one and the next one as advertisers get smarter. The only winners will be the makers of the next great thing and those that give up watching altogether.
Even if the client massively changed the system, you should have still been capable of porting whatever data clients had willingly given to the new system. Yeah, it would have been a hell of a lot of work and yes, it may have invalidated your new schemas, but that's not the point. A hell of a lot of work, maybe but it could be done. (Export out to XML from whatever system you're in (writing an export tool if you really must), import in to the new system - and XML's just one of the alternatives)
If a someone has submitted their data to you with the express indication that they do not want to be contacted, ever, by any means, then they have the right to expect you to honour that. Just because it is a lot of hard work does not give you the right to go against what is essentially the contract they entered in to with you. Sure, they may miss out on new features, lose their registration or any one of a number of problems but that is their choice when they chose not to have you contact them via email. Even if it is a security risk to them - all you can do is publicise it by whatever means you have legally available to you.
As for your client massively changing the system - perhaps this case will give developers a good reason to give to clients as to why they should think before making such sweeping changes. You now have four options: Leave the system the same, change it and do a hell of a lot of work to port the data, change it and lose all of the users who requested not to be contacted or breach the 'contract' you entered in to with them and risk getting sued.
I completely agree with you, it's a nightmare when you need to totally replace the database but just because it's a nightmare it doesn't give you the right to go against the wishes of those who've asked you never to email them.
"now if only we could eliminate all-Flash sites as well."
A device that changes an array of pins based on what array of black and white is underneath it? The first rapidly animated flash site that goes over is going to end up shredding the user's fingers. With the impending lawsuits, I can see it really being the end of all-Flash sites.
Slashdot Mirror
Chapters alternate: One chapter has Rincewind and the other wizards tinkering with an experiment gone wrong that's turned in to an explorable solar system, the next has a real world science explanation of the concepts. There's just something about mixing in Discworld ridiculousness that makes the science more memorable.
The beloved Hex also turns up (Obligatory /. comment: Gee, imagine if I had a Hex cluster!), with it gaining insights in to the future. As a result it starts getting messages along the lines of "Make money fast!" "Send $1 to each of these five people and you'll make $millions" etc. I guess some things never change then.
Title: The Science Of Discworld.
Authors: Terry Pratchett, Lian Stewart & Jack Cohen
ISBN: 0 09 187477 7
Publisher: EBURY PRESS Pages: 368
On the fun geek side, they seem to crash regularly and you get to watch the OS (looked like a linux variation) boot up along with the processor and memory info.
Leno owns the first "production" example-serial number 002-of this unique species. The long, slab-sided machine is the handiwork of Louisiana entrepreneur Ted McIntyre. In simple terms, McIntyre slots an ex-Bell Jet Ranger helicopter Allison Rolls Royce gas turbine into a home-built aluminum chassis, adds controls and a seat pad, then sends you on your way. Price? $150,000.
My favourite line has to be:
Another drawback (besides the noise) is the enormous heat that billows from the outward-facing slash-cut pipes. "I was sitting at a traffic light," Leno says in slightly hushed tones. "I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw this Infinity car bumper kind of fold in on itself. I thought, 'Oh jeez, let's just pull away from here..."'
I watched a couple of hours worth at her parents and completely gave up on the idea as it's so commercial ridden as to be unwatchable [from the point of view of an English person who's used to three three-minute commercial breaks an hour]. All of a sudden it seemed less appealing.
So, we ended up without cable. Our TV's hooked up to the VCR, though not to the aerial or any other signal. I spend about the cost of cable access on video and DVD rentals which means I get a couple of movies of my choice, with no commercials, pretty much every day (with BB's reward card, I'm unlucky if I pay for half of what I rent). All in all it seems like a pretty good deal cost/content wise.
The real rewards have been the unexpected ones. And no I'm not going to do the usual quality time I now get to spend with my favourite rubber ducky taking long baths. I'm pretty much stress free. The reality is that most highschool students aren't shooting each other, most mexicans aren't going to rob me the moment they see me, no one's been murdered, no one's been raped, the world's actually a pretty nice place. News shows need to sensationalise what's happening to keep people interested. Once you get away from the over excited reporting you realise that they present a totally skewed and totally depressing view of the world. I now read slashdot for geek news, the bbc news site for news from back home and generally get told by friends if there's anything I really should know about. As a result I get to hear about what I'm interested in without having a load of sensational crimes distorted to the point where the world seems too evil to live in (except for the MPAA *grin* slashdot sees to that).
As for music, I'm now buying way more than ever before because I'm listening to the radio instead and hearing way more that I ever heard on MTV.
So, for me, the quality of life improvement isn't the extra time, it's that I get a way less depressing view of the world and can actually target what I want, not what some executive at Fox decides I want.
As has been said before, the viewer enters in to a trade with the TV company. Every time they up the number of commercials, they make it harder to copy content, they up the costs, degrade the service, they push the customer one step closer to considering the options and, more and more, once people have considered the options they're saying "Thanks but no thanks."
If TV companies want to continue, they need to realise they need to make the customer feel they're getting what they want. Traditionally that's been with more captivating shows (Weakest Link may be drivel but it's addictive drivel) but they seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel on that at the moment. Soon, if they wish to survive, they'll have to address other means and that may actually be to backtrack and offer better terms.
I've been digging through my collection of old games that run unplayably on anything over 33mhz recently and came across Magic Carpet from Bullfrog. Granted it used sterograms (cross your eyes and lie to your friends that you can see a ship) but they were successfully producing 3D, without goggles or even a monitor upgrade, in a commercial game, ten years ago. It kind of makes you wonder what they could do with a modern PC and a little help from NVidia if they re-explored the concepts.
Hence, if you need three hour cycles, 3,6,9 or 12 hours will leave you refreshed but 8 won't - hence the curious effect of 3 hours seeming better than 8.
In the same way, if you need four hour cycles, 4, 8 or 12 hours works but say six or ten turn out to be next to useless.
As I said, it's just a theory but it does explain why differing lengths of sleep work differently.
I was involved in the Y2K cover for MCI WorldCom's web services. We had constant calls from scared silly customers who'd seen that support for their area was down around 50-60% and were worried they'd lose service.
The reality of what happened was we were using ultraseek, they'd type in a term like ATM, then get the search results page. Next to each search was an accuracy score - it just doesn't say it's an accuracy score and they all interpreted it as a service level score, hence the panic.
So, in conclusion, any metrics you impose are going to end up being subjective and making assumptions of a basic level of intelligence that you just can't assume.
As Eric wrote in his post, from a different perspective, anything we get from a computer we tend to treat as absolute fact. It is all to easy to find some connection that implies plagiarism.
There's a great statistic on birthdays. How many people do you think you'd need to have in a room before the odds were in favour of two of them having the same birthday? About 365/2=182? Actually about 30.
In a new year's science lecture on the BBC, a lecturer asked the left half of a room of 1024(ish) people to think heads, the other half tails. He flipped a coin and discounted the half that got it wrong. He carried on subdividing until he got to one who got it right ten times.
The problem is that most people don't realise how common some probabilities really are. In the first group of 30 (about a class size), "two of them clearly copied each other's birthdays!" In the second group, "no one can guess a coin correctly ten times in a row, he clearly went forward in time and copied what the coin was going to do - or the coin was rigged and he was told the answers!"
These are amusing, semi-trivial examples but they demonstrate the point that putting all of your convictions behind apparently conclusive numbers is flawed. Six word sequences can only be an indicator of cheating, not conclusive proof. All a six word phrase may really be showing you is that two students come from the same area and share the same turns of speach or that they were both equally influenced by something that was presented in a lecture.
I don't mean to maintain that statistical analysis is impossible, simply that it is all too easy to put too much weight behind it. Add that to the very valid point that in two identical papers, you may only have one cheat and one victim, expelling based on the system seems very flawed.
PCs are built safe in the knowledge that they're connected to a constant supply of power and it doesn't really matter how much they use. It's not even the PC itself so much as that big glowing box on your desk as opposed to that little, dull, low-power draining one that folds out of your laptop.
Take a look at the domestic UPSs that are available. You'll notice that they're rated in time they last for a given power load. Unplug the monitor from the equation and they'll last dramatically longer. Now look at the size of them and their relatively short lifetimes. For a PC, I'd be suprised if anyone could make a battery that'd power them and a monitor for any length of time that'd actually be small enough to fit in the case.
Remove the monitor from the equation, replacing it with a low drain equivalent (which is where a chunk of the laptop cost comes in) and assuming you can provide that for about normal desktop costs, whack on any domestic UPS and you've got your solution for the sort of money you're talking about.
Unfortunately, there's not a low drain monitor option for about the same cost/quality as a CRT.
If you don't get the reference, click here.
Mr. Kevern is offering prizes to all dealerships to hand over the names and addresses of all Microsoft employees buying 'clean' cars (ones without payment protection plays).
While Mr. Kervern does not believe all Microsoft employees intend to default on their repayments, he feels he has a right to be ready just in case.
The first submit crashed before it returned the confirmation page so I hit submit again, only to find out the first had gone through before it crashed.
- Create a huge series of linked images.
- Create a 360 degree panorama and use a plug in that allows you to pan around it/interact with it.
- Build a 3D model and display it via some other means such as a plug in or separate viewer.
I've used all three methods to varying degrees of success. I'll explain what the strengths and weaknesses of each one are:You also have a fun time trying to create a good panorama image. Taking a lot of pictures and stitching them together brings out issues with the lens and you get distortions which you can only really minimise by taking a lot of pictures at small angle intervals and only using the center slivers - which creates a lot of work. There are 360 degree cameras out there but they're probably a lot more expensive than you're looking to use.
If you have access to decent modelling packages where you can do something with the data they generate, there are more and more packages available that will take two or more photos and determine 3D data, even texturing the meshes for you, which will take a lot of the hassle out of the modelling if you're not in to that. They're not perfectly accurate but they can produce very good results.
The big downside of a 3D model is it requires some means to view it. VRML and superscape are two of the most common browser plug in options but browser plug ins tend to be designed for genericity, are slow, hard to navigate in and generally look pretty bad. The other alternative is to create a file that has to be opened outside of the browser in something that's capable of displaying high quality images. Creating a Quake 3 model of your house may sound like a gamers passtime but it's been used by everyone from them through to architects since Doom editors became common.
The final downside of this approach is that you are building a virtual model. Even with photomapped textures (which VRML handles horribly) it will always be a model not a genuine photo that people instill as much belief as they do in a photo.
In conclusion, there's not really a good solution to all of the issues.
Once you've made that decision then you get to choose which of the competing packages for that option you wish to use.
<sacrcasm>
And you'll soon realise more people spend more time looking at Microsoft programmer's instructions than ever look at Linux's.Think about it. All that crap on the BSOD has to come from somewhere - namely programmer's instructions. Use the simple equation:
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What they tend not to be focusing on is that part of it is blatant self advertising:
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The creator of the Worms series of games walked up to Team 17 at a trade fair, loaded up his admitedly amateurish but original effort on one of their Amigas and said "This is what I can do.
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If you read the Lionhead website, the guys who are the makers of Black and White, they talk quite a bit about how their team members got noticed. One of their coders entered a game design competition when he was a kid that Peter Molyneaux was judging with the prize being to work at Bulfrog. He was too young to enter but just wanted to meet Peter. As a result Peter followed his progression through university and when the time was right offered him a job. I believe their web designer was a QA tester who knew a little HTML and volunteered.
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Even in the movie industry, there was a thread months back about two kids who sent in their 3D showreel to Lucas Arts and ended up doing albeit minor roles on Episode 1.
The moral of this post is - there are a huge number of opportunities but most people who take them don't do anything to distinguish themselves. If you're doing QA, use it as a chance to volunteer to help on other projects. If it's a mod, design one perfect level rather than 30 good but not unique attempts. If it's a demo, find out where the heads of the companies you're interested in will be and find a way to show it to them. You need to be something more than one of the many hopefuls.Finally, a common cry from most of the 3D people who see a constant stream of showreels. "Don't send an animation of a spaceship - we've seen it all before. Show realistic moving light through a window or great character animation. Focus on one thing you can do brilliantly as most projects have a lot of specialists not one person filling every role. Most important, don't send in a group project - how are we supposed to know what you did and what's other people's work?"
See yesterday's thread about OLGA (On Line Guitar Archive). The Harry Fox Agency is going after amateur guitarists who create their own similar [but not even identical] versions of song tabs for the guitar. If they are a target, there's no reason to believe button 'tabs' for mobile phone tones wouldn't be either.
Anyway, that one word: Monsanto
Back when I worked for [multinational telco] they had all sorts of problems trying to make up ways to get round the legality of the London employees simply having their phone numbers stored on the US phone directory.
Does that mean Microsoft can stop annoying Europeans too? With luck they can close themselves out of every market soon.
"Now Jim, we'll be stopping them mid frag for a few moments while we show our viewers a flash animation of new Jolt flavoured Lucky Charms"
"Whatever you do, don't change urls!"
Yeah, it's just crazy to think that it's almost like every year to eighteen months processor power doubles. Someone should theorise a rule about it or something!
Samo suits woz ere.
Perhaps what is needed is for more parents such as Sean's to stand up against such cowardice and give them the very thing they are so afraid of (lawsuits). While it does not move the balance towards what's right and away from fear, it at least pushes them to be fearful of not doing what's right.
Sean's father says he can not afford a lawyer. In the post I'm replying to, several free or lowcost options are explored. I don't know if anyone's organising a fund or not (and sorry, I know far too little about such things to offer) but if Sean's father [or someone organising a fund] wishes to contact me, I for one will pledge a couple of hundred dollars towards legal costs. It may not be much but it doesn't take that large a percentage of /. readers doing the same to make an example out of the school involved and hopefully give other highschools reason to think before siding with the bullies in the future.
I can be reached via nick_davison@hotmail.com
As you take away the ability for advertisers to make money under the current model the equilibrium has to shift: Advertisers find the system unprofitable so they stop advertising, TV stations then find programming unprofitable to they either shift to cheaper programming (assumed to mean lower quality) or ways to make the advertising more effective (product placements in shows, "this show is brought to you by...", more and more frequent, unscheduled, harder to predict and avoid, advertising).
We've already seen the effect of this as people have got better at channel surfing. US TV is now a random mess of commercials and program glued together with dozen-product-long "brought to you by" lists.
Yeah, TiVo's the latest great trick to avoid commercials, just like the remote before it, basic channel surfing before that and getting up for a few minutes before that. For a brief while it will allow those with the units to get a more commercial free viewing experience at the expense of those without the units. Then in a couple of years the advertisers will change to a medium that beats TiVo (product placement etc) and the 'next' unit will come out (no doubt an image manipulator from NVidia) that will blank those placements, and in turn that will go.
TiVo's a great victory for those who have it for now. Give it time and that $400 unit will need to be replaced by the next one and the next one and the next one as advertisers get smarter. The only winners will be the makers of the next great thing and those that give up watching altogether.
If a someone has submitted their data to you with the express indication that they do not want to be contacted, ever, by any means, then they have the right to expect you to honour that. Just because it is a lot of hard work does not give you the right to go against what is essentially the contract they entered in to with you. Sure, they may miss out on new features, lose their registration or any one of a number of problems but that is their choice when they chose not to have you contact them via email. Even if it is a security risk to them - all you can do is publicise it by whatever means you have legally available to you.
As for your client massively changing the system - perhaps this case will give developers a good reason to give to clients as to why they should think before making such sweeping changes. You now have four options: Leave the system the same, change it and do a hell of a lot of work to port the data, change it and lose all of the users who requested not to be contacted or breach the 'contract' you entered in to with them and risk getting sued.
I completely agree with you, it's a nightmare when you need to totally replace the database but just because it's a nightmare it doesn't give you the right to go against the wishes of those who've asked you never to email them.
A device that changes an array of pins based on what array of black and white is underneath it? The first rapidly animated flash site that goes over is going to end up shredding the user's fingers. With the impending lawsuits, I can see it really being the end of all-Flash sites.