This fails the bribbery-prevention test. The #1 reason why they have those secret booths where you make your decisions. Until mind-reading technology is developed, home voting WILL NOT HAPPEN.
That train already left the station long ago. Absentee ballots are extremely common in the United States.
More importantly we have dozens of candidates and offices on every ballot, from President down to Municipal Assistant Judge's Assistant Assistant.
We should stop doing that. No other advanced democracy does it, there's no evidence it leads to better outcomes, and it complicates the electoral process unnecessarily. How many people can actually cast an informed vote for, say, Insurance Commissioner?
and no matter how the TSA likes to get piled on here, their scanners do emit a small amount of radiation in the scheme of things
They are supposed to emit only a small amount of radiation. Do we have hard evidence of this from anyone who doesn't have a conflict of interest (e.g. not the TSA or a manufacturer)? Remember the Therac-25 incident. I don't trust the average programmer to write firmware that will work 100% of the time in a life-or-death situation without very careful outside auditing.
But does iPad have support for multi-process usage methods?
Chatting and browsing at the same time next to each other?
Better yet, has anyone put Linux on an iPad yet with full support for general PC work?
Re-read the original article. He's looking for a touchscreen device to use in the kitchen that can do basic web surfing and TV streaming. He isn't looking for a general-purpose PC, which he presumably already has as his main workstation.
Yes, the false ~1.3 GB figure was displaying when "Show preview" was checked. (When it's unchecked, it won't attempt to estimate the file size, which is expected behavior.)
"Free" tuition isn't much of a bargain for someone who is intellectually or temperamentally unsuited to college – neither for the "student-athlete" himself, nor for the real students who are burdened with his presence.
It's always boggled my mind how the relatively modest and restrained use of anabolic steroids and/or HGH by some baseball players was considered a huge scandal in the sports world, yet much larger doses of steroids that turn football players into 350+ pound freaks are completely ignored. Greater player mass translates into greater collision force - it's basic physics and there is no way around it. Football players didn't weigh nearly as much 30 years ago. While a crackdown on juicing in football wouldn't fix the problem, it could at least ameliorate it to some degree. Steroids are far more dangerous in a full-contact sport like football than they are in baseball.
I would just like to find an alternative to Photoshop that has the capacity of working with CMYK. Evidently, all open source alternatives fail to deliver in this regard, as if CMYK harbors some sort of plague or it's something way out of their league.
Krita supports CMYK. Unfortunately, there is no stable version for Windows.
I would just like to find an alternative to Photoshop that has the capacity of working with CMYK. Evidently, all open source alternatives fail to deliver in this regard, as if CMYK harbors some sort of plague or it's something way out of their league.
Krita supports CMYK. Unfortunately, there is no stable version for Windows.
Every time there is anything posted about GIMP the entire comments consist of nothing but people complaining that it is not photoshop. What does it contribute to the discussion?
What it contributes is that we wish the GIMP coders would stop trying to be "creative," and instead just work on an open-source clone of the best-in-class proprietary software. Their attempts at creativity and innovation frankly all suck.
I have tried that release candidate, and while it works (mostly), it has some serious problems:
It can't properly estimate the size of JPEG files before saving. Instead, it shows an absurd number (1.3 GB, I think) for any JPEG preview on save, no matter what the actual size is.
It doesn't save the dock positions in single window mode. for example, if I expand the right dock and contract the left dock, they return to their default sizes every time I close the program and open it again.
It won't remember it was in full-screen mode. It always opens in windowed mode, no matter what.
There is no option to close the left or right dock entirely in single-window mode. You can minimize it all the way by dragging to the edge, but that's not the same thing.
ClearType-like rendering for Linux exists: it's called Infinality patchset for FreeType. Screenshot (be sure to view at 100% zoom, and pay attention to small letters, that are usually botched pretty badly on vanilla FT).
That's supposed to be better? It looks absolutely terrible (and yes, I did view it at 100% zoom). Look at the 10pt Times New Roman on this screenshot – it's so blurry it is practically unreadable. This is really the best Linux has to offer? Again, the only open-source package I've seen that even comes close to acceptable font rendering is Anti-Grain Geometry, and it isn't currently part of Linux or any other larger project.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is that font rendering on Linux is utterly horrible.
A couple years back I tried several Linux distributions. Looking at the browser window hurt my eyes – horribly blurry and aliased compared to the ClearType rendering in Windows. I downloaded and installed the MS corefonts and it didn't help. I even tried recompiling TrueType to support RGB subpixel rendering (which is not included by default!) and it still looked terrible compared to Windows. There doesn't seem to be any way to get TrueType to do RGB subpixel smoothing and yet for hinting to respect pixel boundaries the way that ClearType does. Instead it's all a blurry mess. Anti-Grain Geometry has some very promising open-source experimentation on font rendering, but sadly, so far it doesn't seem to be put into production in Linux or anything else.
In the 16-bit era, it cost 50k-300k to make a game. This article lists $17m-$20m to produce a game. And we know certain games like Max Payne 3 and GTAIV cost north of $100m.
And yet the average quality of games in the 16-bit era was far higher than it is now. Maybe designers should go back to making games that way, with sprites instead of 3D models, and two-dimensional parallax-scrolled levels. Back then they actually had to think about what they were doing, not just throw in some graphical glitz.
Only Nintendo and (occasionally) Square/Enix have used 3D effectively. For most other vendors, 3D was a step back in quality and playability.
The linked article misidentifies the problem. If you look at the greatest games of all time (e.g. Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker, Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger) they often use the "cliches" mentioned in the article. That is because these cliches are a necessary part of a well-designed game, especially if it is an action adventure or a JRPG.
The problem is a monoculture of game genres. Just as hip-hop has pretty much taken over music to the exclusion of everything else, so have two specific game genres (FPS and MMORPG) basically colonized the entire PC/console gaming industry. These were never very good genres to begin with, and they're totally overdone and worn-out now. I, personally, will not play any game that has a first-person perspective because I simply can't feel comfortable or get used to it. Good 3D games need to have a third-person camera angle.
I don't think there was a video game crash in the mid-1980s. There was a console crash, which is not the same thing. What happened is that for a couple years, after the Atari VCS wore out its welcome and before the NES arrived, the Commodore 64 was the "game console" of choice. People thought the industry had fundamentally changed because the C-64 was also a home computer, but it really hadn't. When the NES supplanted the C-64 as the home gaming device of choice, things went back to normal.
Haven't we learned anything from Battlestar Galactica? You don't network everything. You keep things separate.
Or, if you snerk at that example, haven't we learned anything from Unix/Linux where each piece does it's thing, and ONLY it's thing?
So your two examples are a sci-fi TV show, and an OS that works well on servers but is an absolute failure on the desktop because its "do one thing well" mentality creates fragmentation and doesn't fit the needs or expectations of average users.
Soon Linux will be, depending on context, "that operating system that can't play videos on the web and doesn't support standards", or "that operating system where everyone infringes patents, so it would be crazy to use it in a business".
Both of these scenarios can be avoided by using the hardware H.264 decoding capabilities built into nearly every PC video output device made in the past 5 years. (Intel's pre-Cedar Trail Atom is about the only exception I can think of.) As long as the driver support is present (which, granted, may be a big if on Linux) then the software can simply pass the raw H.264 bitstream to the video driver, and the driver will handle the decoding. The license fees were already paid by the hardware manufacturer in this case, so there's no need to shell out any additional money.
I don't know where people get off thinking they can spend 5% of their income on food when throughout history it required practically 100% of their labor.
This is because agricultural productivity was so much lower in the past. It's not that food is artificially cheap today – it's that food is much cheaper and easier to produce now due to advances in technology. Mechanization, chemical research (fertilizers) and more recently biotechnology have all dramatically increased how much food you can get out of an acre of land, and decreased how much labor you need to put in to get it. Just 100 years ago, farmers were about 31% of the workforce in the United States. Nearly one of three Americans was a farmer. Today it's one-tenth that and yet we are producing far more food than ever before.
Slashdot Mirror
This fails the bribbery-prevention test. The #1 reason why they have those secret booths where you make your decisions. Until mind-reading technology is developed, home voting WILL NOT HAPPEN.
That train already left the station long ago. Absentee ballots are extremely common in the United States.
I think you may want a technocracy. I'm not sure that there are any countries currently employing that form of government at the moment however...
China and Singapore probably come closest.
More importantly we have dozens of candidates and offices on every ballot, from President down to Municipal Assistant Judge's Assistant Assistant.
We should stop doing that. No other advanced democracy does it, there's no evidence it leads to better outcomes, and it complicates the electoral process unnecessarily. How many people can actually cast an informed vote for, say, Insurance Commissioner?
How did you manage to type up and post this comment within 1 minute of the time the original article was posted?
and no matter how the TSA likes to get piled on here, their scanners do emit a small amount of radiation in the scheme of things
They are supposed to emit only a small amount of radiation. Do we have hard evidence of this from anyone who doesn't have a conflict of interest (e.g. not the TSA or a manufacturer)? Remember the Therac-25 incident. I don't trust the average programmer to write firmware that will work 100% of the time in a life-or-death situation without very careful outside auditing.
But does iPad have support for multi-process usage methods? Chatting and browsing at the same time next to each other? Better yet, has anyone put Linux on an iPad yet with full support for general PC work?
Re-read the original article. He's looking for a touchscreen device to use in the kitchen that can do basic web surfing and TV streaming. He isn't looking for a general-purpose PC, which he presumably already has as his main workstation.
Yes, the false ~1.3 GB figure was displaying when "Show preview" was checked. (When it's unchecked, it won't attempt to estimate the file size, which is expected behavior.)
"Free" tuition isn't much of a bargain for someone who is intellectually or temperamentally unsuited to college – neither for the "student-athlete" himself, nor for the real students who are burdened with his presence.
It's always boggled my mind how the relatively modest and restrained use of anabolic steroids and/or HGH by some baseball players was considered a huge scandal in the sports world, yet much larger doses of steroids that turn football players into 350+ pound freaks are completely ignored. Greater player mass translates into greater collision force - it's basic physics and there is no way around it. Football players didn't weigh nearly as much 30 years ago. While a crackdown on juicing in football wouldn't fix the problem, it could at least ameliorate it to some degree. Steroids are far more dangerous in a full-contact sport like football than they are in baseball.
When your job is to play a full-contact sport, injuries happen. That's why they get multi-million dollar contracts
College football players don't get paid, even though the schools make millions of dollars on their labor.
I would just like to find an alternative to Photoshop that has the capacity of working with CMYK. Evidently, all open source alternatives fail to deliver in this regard, as if CMYK harbors some sort of plague or it's something way out of their league.
Krita supports CMYK. Unfortunately, there is no stable version for Windows.
I would just like to find an alternative to Photoshop that has the capacity of working with CMYK. Evidently, all open source alternatives fail to deliver in this regard, as if CMYK harbors some sort of plague or it's something way out of their league.
Krita supports CMYK. Unfortunately, there is no stable version for Windows.
Every time there is anything posted about GIMP the entire comments consist of nothing but people complaining that it is not photoshop. What does it contribute to the discussion?
What it contributes is that we wish the GIMP coders would stop trying to be "creative," and instead just work on an open-source clone of the best-in-class proprietary software. Their attempts at creativity and innovation frankly all suck.
Um, Commodore BASIC *was* MS Basic. Why would they need to prove it "in court" when Commodore bought and paid for the license from MS?
ClearType-like rendering for Linux exists: it's called Infinality patchset for FreeType. Screenshot (be sure to view at 100% zoom, and pay attention to small letters, that are usually botched pretty badly on vanilla FT).
That's supposed to be better? It looks absolutely terrible (and yes, I did view it at 100% zoom). Look at the 10pt Times New Roman on this screenshot – it's so blurry it is practically unreadable. This is really the best Linux has to offer? Again, the only open-source package I've seen that even comes close to acceptable font rendering is Anti-Grain Geometry, and it isn't currently part of Linux or any other larger project.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is that font rendering on Linux is utterly horrible.
A couple years back I tried several Linux distributions. Looking at the browser window hurt my eyes – horribly blurry and aliased compared to the ClearType rendering in Windows. I downloaded and installed the MS corefonts and it didn't help. I even tried recompiling TrueType to support RGB subpixel rendering (which is not included by default!) and it still looked terrible compared to Windows. There doesn't seem to be any way to get TrueType to do RGB subpixel smoothing and yet for hinting to respect pixel boundaries the way that ClearType does. Instead it's all a blurry mess. Anti-Grain Geometry has some very promising open-source experimentation on font rendering, but sadly, so far it doesn't seem to be put into production in Linux or anything else.
Charge candidate A X dollars for a spot, but charge candidate B 3X for a spot
This is already prohibited by the FCC. All candidates must be charged the same amount.
In the 16-bit era, it cost 50k-300k to make a game. This article lists $17m-$20m to produce a game. And we know certain games like Max Payne 3 and GTAIV cost north of $100m.
And yet the average quality of games in the 16-bit era was far higher than it is now. Maybe designers should go back to making games that way, with sprites instead of 3D models, and two-dimensional parallax-scrolled levels. Back then they actually had to think about what they were doing, not just throw in some graphical glitz.
Only Nintendo and (occasionally) Square/Enix have used 3D effectively. For most other vendors, 3D was a step back in quality and playability.
The linked article misidentifies the problem. If you look at the greatest games of all time (e.g. Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker, Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger) they often use the "cliches" mentioned in the article. That is because these cliches are a necessary part of a well-designed game, especially if it is an action adventure or a JRPG.
The problem is a monoculture of game genres. Just as hip-hop has pretty much taken over music to the exclusion of everything else, so have two specific game genres (FPS and MMORPG) basically colonized the entire PC/console gaming industry. These were never very good genres to begin with, and they're totally overdone and worn-out now. I, personally, will not play any game that has a first-person perspective because I simply can't feel comfortable or get used to it. Good 3D games need to have a third-person camera angle.
I don't think there was a video game crash in the mid-1980s. There was a console crash, which is not the same thing. What happened is that for a couple years, after the Atari VCS wore out its welcome and before the NES arrived, the Commodore 64 was the "game console" of choice. People thought the industry had fundamentally changed because the C-64 was also a home computer, but it really hadn't. When the NES supplanted the C-64 as the home gaming device of choice, things went back to normal.
Haven't we learned anything from Battlestar Galactica? You don't network everything. You keep things separate. Or, if you snerk at that example, haven't we learned anything from Unix/Linux where each piece does it's thing, and ONLY it's thing?
So your two examples are a sci-fi TV show, and an OS that works well on servers but is an absolute failure on the desktop because its "do one thing well" mentality creates fragmentation and doesn't fit the needs or expectations of average users.
Soon Linux will be, depending on context, "that operating system that can't play videos on the web and doesn't support standards", or "that operating system where everyone infringes patents, so it would be crazy to use it in a business".
Both of these scenarios can be avoided by using the hardware H.264 decoding capabilities built into nearly every PC video output device made in the past 5 years. (Intel's pre-Cedar Trail Atom is about the only exception I can think of.) As long as the driver support is present (which, granted, may be a big if on Linux) then the software can simply pass the raw H.264 bitstream to the video driver, and the driver will handle the decoding. The license fees were already paid by the hardware manufacturer in this case, so there's no need to shell out any additional money.
further sources of leaks are now being hunted down by a crack team headed by an 82-year old Opus Dei cardinal.
Opus Dei? If they catch the whistleblowers, will they be strangled to death by albino monks?
I don't know where people get off thinking they can spend 5% of their income on food when throughout history it required practically 100% of their labor.
This is because agricultural productivity was so much lower in the past. It's not that food is artificially cheap today – it's that food is much cheaper and easier to produce now due to advances in technology. Mechanization, chemical research (fertilizers) and more recently biotechnology have all dramatically increased how much food you can get out of an acre of land, and decreased how much labor you need to put in to get it. Just 100 years ago, farmers were about 31% of the workforce in the United States. Nearly one of three Americans was a farmer. Today it's one-tenth that and yet we are producing far more food than ever before.