Reading the article, it appears as though they can present completely independent images to each eye. The depth of the physical device doesn't matter at all if you can do that. They should be able to get every bit as much depth as a pair of goggles, just not the peripheral vision. The other drawback is that you have to keep your head fairly still, moving out of the correct viewing position will ruin the 3D effect.
As a programmer of CTP, I would like to thank you for revealing to me this previously unknown use of my program. It is always wonderful to hear how people find new and cool uses for the things you create. I am going to call my former coworkers from the marketing department at Activision (I'm not there any more, they still are) and tell them to start pursuing cross-licensing deals with crib manufacturers, Gerber's, etc. There's nothing that'll get 'em into a bigger frenzy than a brand new demographic. And what could be more natural than a new parent-world domination link? Not much, I think. Thanks again!
I don't think this is actually feasible. Gracenote's database as a whole isn't available - you are just able to send them a query describing a CD (a chunk of "random" bytes) and get back the song titles and other info. In order to find the missing data, you'd have to keep sending queries for all possible sequences, and there are far, far too many for that for any reasonably sized identifying chunk.
So, nice thought, but not possible in practice unless you can hack into Gracenote somehow and copy their whole DB.
Disclaimer: I've never looked at how CDDB works, I'm just making logical guesses, but I think I'm right, and that's all that matters for slashdot.
The show was slated to be a mid-season replacement, but was then bumped to next fall. There is still no assurance from Fox that it will be in the Fall line-up, either... so you might not actually get to see it until January of next year.
Actually, if you'd read the article, you would have seen that The Tick will be on on Thursday following The Family Guy. It isn't a fan-boy article, it's from a Fox press release. The reason it was bumped to next Fall instead of already being on is due to the writers and actors strike. They didn't want to show what they had and then be unable to produce for for an indefinite amount of time.
I actually saw the entire pilot in an early form late last year. It was missing most sound effects, no music, a few other rough edges, but it was one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time. I am really looking forward to that show. The version I saw had no laugh track - I am really hoping it's going to stay that way, adding stupid canned laughter would just kill it. Luckily I think Fox actually understands that some of the time (Simpsons, Malcom in the Middle, all their other animated shows - none of them have laugh tracks).
Jimmy wasn't in the pilot at all. Based on that, I think maybe the network made Carter add him ("Put someone who isn't a geek on the show or you don't get to make it"). But I agree with the sentiment either way, the show didn't need Yves or Jimmy at all, and Yves actually hurt it by never letting the Gunmen get themselves out of their own predicaments. Why even bother calling the shoe "The Lone Gunmen" when Yves is the only one who ever knows what's going on? She would've been alright in an occasional part, but every week is way too much.
If the/. title here is true, then what I learned from the Sims is awfully depressing: Life is intensely interesting for about 3 days, and then you never want to see it again.
I think in/.'s case, the common carrier defense will never work, because there's no way for a user to remove an article. If you post something copyrighted, the only way the owner of that work can get it removed is to ask the editors, you yourself have no way to do it. Therefore,/. has put itself in the position of having to police its forums.
It's good that it hasn't been an issue until now, but I don't think many would argue that allowing any and all coyrighted materials be posted is a good thing. Scientology aside, you wouldn't want people posting say, scanned novels, or uuencoded warez, or anything else of the sort. Yet some moron probably will, and then the editors will have to remove it since the moron can't.
If slashdot were able to defend any posting of copyrighted material using the common carrier defense, then pretty soon slashdot would become the next napster, because hey, there's nothing anyone can do about it. Someone has to be responsible.
Or else copyright law has to change at a very basic level, but that's another argument entirely.
There's at least one legitimate reason to have reprogrammable mac addresses. At the last place I lived, I had a cable modem that was set to work only when connected to a card with a specific mac address. Any other mac address and it wouldn't work at all. I could call the cable company to change it (and when I moved, it appeared they were working on letting you do it via a web page), but having a programmable card would have been less annoying. Yes, it was braindead, but what are you going to do when your other choices are pricey, slow DSL or a plain old modem? That's right, deal with it.
I now have a little SMC router that will let me reprogram its Mac address, it would've been good at that place, but I don't need that feature any more, thankfully.
How many shows do you think are on the big networks? If you define big as CBS, NBC, ABC, and FOX, and say there are an average of 5 programs on each every night (3 hours split between sitcoms and hour-long dramas), that's 20 shows every night, 140 shows per week. Everything in the top 20 is on one of those networks. so #20 out of 140 is pretty good.
But what the networks actually care about is that they have the #1 show in any given time slot, that's what advertisers actually pay for. You might have the #10 show on television, but if you're running it against Survivor and that game show with Regis, you're probably not making any money off of it.
Slightly more on-topic, I've watched CSI once, and never watched Survivor. I have Tivo. I had no idea they were in proximity to each other. What shows are on before or after each other has no relevance at all to what I watch, I don't even know when things are on any more.
No, he is American. I couldn't find anything stating JM Straczynski's place of birth in a quick search, but you can easily find audio interviews in which he has a clearly American accent. (His name is obviously not British either, not that that means anything)
Even if he was British, I would tend to think the important thing in determining what country a television show is from is the country for which it was produced. Babylon 5 was produced for American television, and that makes it an American series, regardless of who wrote it. If the BBC hired an American producer to make a series, I'd still call it a British show. But it doesn't matter, as JMS is an American anyway.
But boy oh boy, I tivo'ed a few episodes from that BBC Cable channel we've got now, and man does it stink up the joint. It was incredibly painful, enough that I had to vow never to watch it again, for fear of completely ruining fond childhood memories. Frankly, watching Battlestar Galactica reruns, bad as it was, is much less distressing.
Like several other people have pointed out, I'm fairly certain Space: 1999 was an American series. And it stunk too.
There are really only two series that were ever truly good Science Fiction, both American, and neither mentioned in your rant: Babylon 5 and The Twilight Zone. These are timeless classics that I will never be embarrassed to watch again. TZ is sort of a special case having no regular cast or plot, putting B5 in a class by itself. It is truly unique in all of television's history. It has what you seem to think British Sci-Fi offers: a focus on stories, dialog, and character development. The flashy special effects are just a bonus, the meat of this show was the stories that took FOUR YEARS to develop (the fifth season being really separate from the rest). No one else has done that to the extent B5 did. Maybe someday someone will, but I don't see anything on the horizon. Just more Star Trek and syndicated junk. (Some of which I'll watch and enjoy anyway, but for entirely different reasons.)
Of course, even rogue-like games have become real-time. Now there's Mangband - multiplayer real-time angband. It's not very popular (in that I never saw more than a handful of people playing when I looked), but kind of neat anyway.
That's the actual derivation of the word, you know. From m-w.com:
Etymology: Middle English lunatik, from Old French or Late Latin; Old French lunatique, from Late Latin lunaticus, from Latin luna; from the belief that lunacy fluctuated with the phases of the moon
I just got one a few days ago. It's working fine as a router for my cable modem, but the wireless card I bought for my laptop came with drivers that windows won't even recognize as valid drivers. I had to return it, and Fry's didn't have any other choices for PC cards. So I don't know how well the wireless works yet.
The progress made by BearShare and others is commendable, but it's all incremental. Nothing that's actually up and running today implements any long-term scalability solutions, and as far as I can see, nothing that attempts to connect to existing gnutella clients ever will. There were a number of good proposals for new protocols from the (apprently dead) next generation group, but none of them have yet amounted to anything. (As of a few weeks ago at least, I have not checked today.)
As a Gnutella developer of sorts, I'd love to see an alternative emerge and add support for it. Of course, I'm not actually taking that initiative myself, so I can't point the finger at anyone here. But if I have some time to spare when and if someone does something truly new, I'll do what I can to add support to Gumshoe. In the meantime, I'm doing what I can to catch up with the improvements made by others.
I think you're confusing the fulfillment derived from overcoming a set of challenges with the
fulfillment derived from knowing that you created something that saves lives or improves the
standard of living in some way. Obviously, computer games don't save lives (if anyone cares to
disagree with me on that one, I'd love to hear your argument),
One counter argument to the notion that violent games like Quake cause violence is that such games actually give an outlet to violent tendencies, preventing them from manifesting themselves in everyday life. If you believe that argument, you could extend it to believe that games have prevented some people from becoming serial killers, thus saving lives.
I doubt many people who write games believe either side of that. I know I don't. But it's what you asked for, an argument that games save lives.
Re:Bombs might be more likely, but not nuclear war
on
'Thirteen Days'
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· Score: 2
I also haven't studied it, but I would have to disagree. If you limited your statement to any use of long range nuclear missiles then maybe - a nuclear missile, at this point, is something only a nation can develop and launch (I hope!), while I believe a stand-alone bomb is something that could be built by a terrorist group and smuggled to the point of detonation. I think it's likely that will happen someday. In the case of such a bomb, I don't believe there would be any form of nuclear retaliation, it would be an isolated incident, and the offenders would be tracked and punished via the usual channels for terrorists (with a great deal of urgency, no doubt, but nevertheless, you can't nuke a terrorist group to get back at them! Even if you know exactly where they are, nuking millions of people to get back at a handful of wrongdoers is just not going to happen.)
That's what I was getting at in my original post. Some people seem to have missed the point. An all out global nuclear war is certainly still a possibility, but for several decades, LOTS of people thought it was a near certainty. These days, I don't think many people believe it will ever happen.
What people believe has little to do with what will actually happen, of course, but perhaps it has some bearing on reality.
Of COURSE a nuclear detonation is a terrible thing. Duh! But the human race will survive it.
Bombs might be more likely, but not nuclear war
on
'Thirteen Days'
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· Score: 2
I would agree that it's almost certain that sooner or later terrorist groups are going to set off a few nuclear devices here and there. But what we used to be worried about was thousands of missiles being launched from the US and the USSR: A nuclear holocaust. A few scattered incidents won't even come close to that horror. Yes, it's possible millions might die. But I don't think many people are worried about *everyone* dying, as they used to be.
I've got Memorex discs that are gold on top and bright blue on the recording surface. Haven't had any problems with 'em. The CD-RWs are generic CompUSA crap, and they're also fine.
Kozmo's a weird one. It seems like they're doomed, but here in L.A. there's a company called PDQuick.com, formerly Pink Dot, who have been in essentially the same business, just taking phone orders, for the last 12 years. They don't do "everything", like Kozmo's trying to, just groceries and sandwiches and stuff. They are, as far as I know, a successful, profitable, company, and the only change they've made recently other than their name is to implement internet ordering. If it weren't for PDQuick, I would have no hope at all for Kozmo. On the other hand, it's possible PDQuick is still thriving mainly on the catalog->phone system, I don't really know. I find internet ordering much more convenient, but maybe there's still not a big enough user base to support your business on internet orders alone.
I see some people saying many DVD drives don't play CD-R's, but for what it's worth, I have what Windows identifies as a "Toshiba DVD-ROM SD-M1202" that not only reads CD-R, but even CD-RW with no trouble. I got it dirt cheap a year and a half ago, before I had a CD burner at all. I wasn't expecting CD-RW to work, that was a nice surprise, but I would have been disappointed if CD-R hadn't.
I think that's about right, in a galactic sense. Is this message anything more than posting a "Hey, lookit us! We's smart!" to all the advanced races out there? It's just like those first posters trying to get attention. Just like them, I say. We as a race will say any stupid thing in order to get attention.
Do you really think any race capable of receiving this doesn't already know what a prime number is? They'll just moderate us to -1, and if we're lucky someone will tell us, "Duh! Go away you damn trolls, we know that already."
Slashdot Mirror
Reading the article, it appears as though they can present completely independent images to each eye. The depth of the physical device doesn't matter at all if you can do that. They should be able to get every bit as much depth as a pair of goggles, just not the peripheral vision. The other drawback is that you have to keep your head fairly still, moving out of the correct viewing position will ruin the 3D effect.
As a programmer of CTP, I would like to thank you for revealing to me this previously unknown use of my program. It is always wonderful to hear how people find new and cool uses for the things you create. I am going to call my former coworkers from the marketing department at Activision (I'm not there any more, they still are) and tell them to start pursuing cross-licensing deals with crib manufacturers, Gerber's, etc. There's nothing that'll get 'em into a bigger frenzy than a brand new demographic. And what could be more natural than a new parent-world domination link? Not much, I think. Thanks again!
;-)
Joe
P.S.
I don't think this is actually feasible. Gracenote's database as a whole isn't available - you are just able to send them a query describing a CD (a chunk of "random" bytes) and get back the song titles and other info. In order to find the missing data, you'd have to keep sending queries for all possible sequences, and there are far, far too many for that for any reasonably sized identifying chunk.
So, nice thought, but not possible in practice unless you can hack into Gracenote somehow and copy their whole DB.
Disclaimer: I've never looked at how CDDB works, I'm just making logical guesses, but I think I'm right, and that's all that matters for slashdot.
Actually, if you'd read the article, you would have seen that The Tick will be on on Thursday following The Family Guy. It isn't a fan-boy article, it's from a Fox press release. The reason it was bumped to next Fall instead of already being on is due to the writers and actors strike. They didn't want to show what they had and then be unable to produce for for an indefinite amount of time.
I actually saw the entire pilot in an early form late last year. It was missing most sound effects, no music, a few other rough edges, but it was one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time. I am really looking forward to that show. The version I saw had no laugh track - I am really hoping it's going to stay that way, adding stupid canned laughter would just kill it. Luckily I think Fox actually understands that some of the time (Simpsons, Malcom in the Middle, all their other animated shows - none of them have laugh tracks).
Jimmy wasn't in the pilot at all. Based on that, I think maybe the network made Carter add him ("Put someone who isn't a geek on the show or you don't get to make it"). But I agree with the sentiment either way, the show didn't need Yves or Jimmy at all, and Yves actually hurt it by never letting the Gunmen get themselves out of their own predicaments. Why even bother calling the shoe "The Lone Gunmen" when Yves is the only one who ever knows what's going on? She would've been alright in an occasional part, but every week is way too much.
If the /. title here is true, then what I learned from the Sims is awfully depressing: Life is intensely interesting for about 3 days, and then you never want to see it again.
I think in /.'s case, the common carrier defense will never work, because there's no way for a user to remove an article. If you post something copyrighted, the only way the owner of that work can get it removed is to ask the editors, you yourself have no way to do it. Therefore, /. has put itself in the position of having to police its forums.
It's good that it hasn't been an issue until now, but I don't think many would argue that allowing any and all coyrighted materials be posted is a good thing. Scientology aside, you wouldn't want people posting say, scanned novels, or uuencoded warez, or anything else of the sort. Yet some moron probably will, and then the editors will have to remove it since the moron can't.
If slashdot were able to defend any posting of copyrighted material using the common carrier defense, then pretty soon slashdot would become the next napster, because hey, there's nothing anyone can do about it. Someone has to be responsible.
Or else copyright law has to change at a very basic level, but that's another argument entirely.
There's at least one legitimate reason to have reprogrammable mac addresses. At the last place I lived, I had a cable modem that was set to work only when connected to a card with a specific mac address. Any other mac address and it wouldn't work at all. I could call the cable company to change it (and when I moved, it appeared they were working on letting you do it via a web page), but having a programmable card would have been less annoying. Yes, it was braindead, but what are you going to do when your other choices are pricey, slow DSL or a plain old modem? That's right, deal with it.
I now have a little SMC router that will let me reprogram its Mac address, it would've been good at that place, but I don't need that feature any more, thankfully.
How many shows do you think are on the big networks? If you define big as CBS, NBC, ABC, and FOX, and say there are an average of 5 programs on each every night (3 hours split between sitcoms and hour-long dramas), that's 20 shows every night, 140 shows per week. Everything in the top 20 is on one of those networks. so #20 out of 140 is pretty good. But what the networks actually care about is that they have the #1 show in any given time slot, that's what advertisers actually pay for. You might have the #10 show on television, but if you're running it against Survivor and that game show with Regis, you're probably not making any money off of it. Slightly more on-topic, I've watched CSI once, and never watched Survivor. I have Tivo. I had no idea they were in proximity to each other. What shows are on before or after each other has no relevance at all to what I watch, I don't even know when things are on any more.
No, he is American. I couldn't find anything stating JM Straczynski's place of birth in a quick search, but you can easily find audio interviews in which he has a clearly American accent. (His name is obviously not British either, not that that means anything)
Even if he was British, I would tend to think the important thing in determining what country a television show is from is the country for which it was produced. Babylon 5 was produced for American television, and that makes it an American series, regardless of who wrote it. If the BBC hired an American producer to make a series, I'd still call it a British show. But it doesn't matter, as JMS is an American anyway.
But boy oh boy, I tivo'ed a few episodes from that BBC Cable channel we've got now, and man does it stink up the joint. It was incredibly painful, enough that I had to vow never to watch it again, for fear of completely ruining fond childhood memories. Frankly, watching Battlestar Galactica reruns, bad as it was, is much less distressing.
Like several other people have pointed out, I'm fairly certain Space: 1999 was an American series. And it stunk too.
There are really only two series that were ever truly good Science Fiction, both American, and neither mentioned in your rant: Babylon 5 and The Twilight Zone. These are timeless classics that I will never be embarrassed to watch again. TZ is sort of a special case having no regular cast or plot, putting B5 in a class by itself. It is truly unique in all of television's history. It has what you seem to think British Sci-Fi offers: a focus on stories, dialog, and character development. The flashy special effects are just a bonus, the meat of this show was the stories that took FOUR YEARS to develop (the fifth season being really separate from the rest). No one else has done that to the extent B5 did. Maybe someday someone will, but I don't see anything on the horizon. Just more Star Trek and syndicated junk. (Some of which I'll watch and enjoy anyway, but for entirely different reasons.)
Of course, even rogue-like games have become real-time. Now there's Mangband - multiplayer real-time angband. It's not very popular (in that I never saw more than a handful of people playing when I looked), but kind of neat anyway.
I just got one a few days ago. It's working fine as a router for my cable modem, but the wireless card I bought for my laptop came with drivers that windows won't even recognize as valid drivers. I had to return it, and Fry's didn't have any other choices for PC cards. So I don't know how well the wireless works yet.
As a Gnutella developer of sorts, I'd love to see an alternative emerge and add support for it. Of course, I'm not actually taking that initiative myself, so I can't point the finger at anyone here. But if I have some time to spare when and if someone does something truly new, I'll do what I can to add support to Gumshoe. In the meantime, I'm doing what I can to catch up with the improvements made by others.
One counter argument to the notion that violent games like Quake cause violence is that such games actually give an outlet to violent tendencies, preventing them from manifesting themselves in everyday life. If you believe that argument, you could extend it to believe that games have prevented some people from becoming serial killers, thus saving lives.
I doubt many people who write games believe either side of that. I know I don't. But it's what you asked for, an argument that games save lives.
I also haven't studied it, but I would have to disagree. If you limited your statement to any use of long range nuclear missiles then maybe - a nuclear missile, at this point, is something only a nation can develop and launch (I hope!), while I believe a stand-alone bomb is something that could be built by a terrorist group and smuggled to the point of detonation. I think it's likely that will happen someday. In the case of such a bomb, I don't believe there would be any form of nuclear retaliation, it would be an isolated incident, and the offenders would be tracked and punished via the usual channels for terrorists (with a great deal of urgency, no doubt, but nevertheless, you can't nuke a terrorist group to get back at them! Even if you know exactly where they are, nuking millions of people to get back at a handful of wrongdoers is just not going to happen.) That's what I was getting at in my original post. Some people seem to have missed the point. An all out global nuclear war is certainly still a possibility, but for several decades, LOTS of people thought it was a near certainty. These days, I don't think many people believe it will ever happen. What people believe has little to do with what will actually happen, of course, but perhaps it has some bearing on reality. Of COURSE a nuclear detonation is a terrible thing. Duh! But the human race will survive it.
I would agree that it's almost certain that sooner or later terrorist groups are going to set off a few nuclear devices here and there. But what we used to be worried about was thousands of missiles being launched from the US and the USSR: A nuclear holocaust. A few scattered incidents won't even come close to that horror. Yes, it's possible millions might die. But I don't think many people are worried about *everyone* dying, as they used to be.
That's my take anyway. Someone want to scare me?
I've got Memorex discs that are gold on top and bright blue on the recording surface. Haven't had any problems with 'em. The CD-RWs are generic CompUSA crap, and they're also fine.
I know it's hard to read every link posted to slashdot's front page, but it would be nice to think someone was trying.
Kozmo's a weird one. It seems like they're doomed, but here in L.A. there's a company called PDQuick.com, formerly Pink Dot, who have been in essentially the same business, just taking phone orders, for the last 12 years. They don't do "everything", like Kozmo's trying to, just groceries and sandwiches and stuff. They are, as far as I know, a successful, profitable, company, and the only change they've made recently other than their name is to implement internet ordering. If it weren't for PDQuick, I would have no hope at all for Kozmo. On the other hand, it's possible PDQuick is still thriving mainly on the catalog->phone system, I don't really know. I find internet ordering much more convenient, but maybe there's still not a big enough user base to support your business on internet orders alone.
Oops.
I see some people saying many DVD drives don't play CD-R's, but for what it's worth, I have what Windows identifies as a "Toshiba DVD-ROM SD-M1202" that not only reads CD-R, but even CD-RW with no trouble. I got it dirt cheap a year and a half ago, before I had a CD burner at all. I wasn't expecting CD-RW to work, that was a nice surprise, but I would have been disappointed if CD-R hadn't.
I knew I should have put a smiley on it for the humor impaired. Sheesh.
Do you really think any race capable of receiving this doesn't already know what a prime number is? They'll just moderate us to -1, and if we're lucky someone will tell us, "Duh! Go away you damn trolls, we know that already."