Well I don`t know too much about the wiimote internals but I have just spent an hour or two playing Tomb Raider on the Wii and I can tell you that the game can still track where the wiimote is when it is pointed off screen.
If you point the wiimote off screen, a little arrow appears on the edge of the indicating where the wiimote went. This little arrow happily moves around the edges of the screen as you wave the wiimote around off screen.
The game certainly seems to have an idea where the wiimote is when not pointing at it.
The principle that downloading unauthorised work is morally wrong is probably correct. Personally I dont do it for that very reason.
However, to expect hardware or software manufacturers or, indeed, any external carrier of your product to be morally obliged to help you protect your product is not in any way a principle you could be proud of.
If companies wish to protect their product from being "stolen" they need to do it themselves before it leaves their "factories". Most companies apply for patents and also put locks on the doors of their premises. Copyright is the equivalent of patents for the music industry and in my view, each and every person who downloads a song without authorisation should be liable for the cost of producing that copy or even the loss of the sale of said copy i.e practically, but not quite, nothing.
In order to protect themselves in these difficult times, the morally correct way for the record companies to do it would be to produce an extremely well encrypted media containing the songs and also to produce the players on which to play them.
Of course nobody would buy these. The record companies are, therefore, actually complaining about the very thing that makes them work at all.
In case anyone can feel the panic setting in while thoughts of closed source qt libraries swirl around their heads it may be as well to remind people that Troll Tech and KDE have this all worked out nicely already.
The KDE Foundation takes the code if qt is ever released closed. Not sure if it covers a buy out situation but I'm pretty sure it does.
Scary argument that because it presumably would work the other way around i.e. a photographer could be sued for selling a picture of a sculpture and by extention a wedding photographer could get sued for taking a picture of the happy couple in front of a building. Any photograph sold with anything designed by man in the background could be subject to a law suit.
It may just be me but every project that has been attacked by a team of UI experts seems to become totally illogical, almost unuseable and utterly joyless shortly afterwards.
Indeed, they do look better, slightly unreal at times but overall better. However, I can not help remembering every time I upgraded my car and was amazed at the quality of the sound system in it. It sounded fantastic compared to what I had before. After a week or to it sounded pretty much just as as dull and uninteresting.
The same seems true of DVDs now. Do you put a DVD in a go "Wow! what great quality compared to that crappy VHS stuff I used to watch?" I think these things look or sound great compared to what you had before but in themselves add very little to the overall enjoyment.
As I said before the big reason to swap your VHS library for DVD was convenience and not image quality. That does not apply to the new formats so the only reason most people will change is if they have no choice. However, it is entirely possible that both the new formats fail miserably.
I find it hard to believe there is much of a market for either of these formats and at best, widespread adoption will be very slow. I am convinced that DVD's became popular because you could skip over the trailers to exactly the bits you wanted, they were thinner than VHS tapes and they didn't need rewinding. I don't think it had much to do with visual quality.
While there are people who will want to get that extra resolution (which, once you get used to it, looks like everything else ever did) there is little to convince the majority that they need a new format.
I have recently purchased a mac mini and a macbook pro. There is something great about both these machine and I enjoyed using them for a short while. The silence of the mac mini and the elegance of the macbook pro make them a joy to use. However, after a while I realised what a heap of crap OS X is. At least there are some unixy things about it which helped me considerably when the macbook pro could not connect to my network but the GUI is full of really dumb deign decisions and the supplied software is awful when compared to the Linux equivalent.
Now, I dont use the mac mini any more though my girlfriend likes it. My macbook pro now starts vmware fusion at boot with a nice slackware virtual machine. It is so nice to drop iTunes and use Amarok instead (particularly now I have it talking to an airport express) and digiKam is so much better than that stoopid iPhoto it is hard to believe.
Using vmware fusion is a nice solution on the macbook pro as there is plenty of hardware to keep it zipping along nicely (now I have installed a 7200rpm disk at least) and a quick CTRL->RIGHT gets you back to OS X so you still have access to the weird bits of hardware, can sync the ipod and run Windows/Mac OS only stuff too.
Great hardware but completely over hyped and utterly crappy software.
I have to agree with you on this one. The texting on the iphone is by far the best of any phone i have used. It is also the only phone i have owned that i felt happy about writing emails on.
I live in Norway and use an unlocked US iphone on a local provider No problems with reception here.
Pisses me off that the thing is so tied in with all the apple crap though.
Not really accurate this. RAW isn't actually a format at all and shouldn't really be capitalised. The term "raw" only refers to unmanipulated data.
By the way, all digital cameras shoot "RAW", it's just that many immediately convert these data to a format that you can actually see, e.g jpeg.
On the other hand, I agree with your point here. I see no problem with a new and improved image format except that Microsoft has a dubious history of making it extremely annoying for everyone to be able to read their standards.
What is wrong here is using blackmail to force people to give up their intellectual property.
The employees had worked, trained and otherwise educated themselves in order to obtain a skill. Presumably the employer wanted to buy these skills and so employed them.
This employer seems to be suggesting that they have the right to force their employees to just hand those skills over to some else.
I have no problem with them being told to transfer knowledge gained about the employers own systems but forcing skilled workers to "train" the offshore staff in say, unix administration, seems utterly reprehensible to me.
I think it comes from all those little models that attempt to show how the theory of gravity being bent space works. The general idea is to have a large sheet of some stretched rubber material suspended off the ground and then put some heavy ball on it. The resulting deformity looks like a funnel.
Photos fade and negatives need to be carefully looked after to survive. Your digital data is simple to keep foreever.
Your photo is not the disk you store it on. Keep copies of your photo on different mediums, copy it to new technologies as they arise and your image will be available as far into the future as you care to continue doing that.
No "shooting delays" on DSLR's any more. The only shooting delays are with film these days. Things like changing film when you come to the end of a roll (you can go hundreds and even thousands of shots with a DSLR before swapping a memory card).
We don't even have to mention the problems involved with changing ISO on a film camera.
You obviously haven't tried even one of the newer entry level DSLR's. They are instant on. You can turn the camera on and take a shot with it at the same time.
"Sure it's better. Much better. The ligth-sensor in the camera can only tell how much ligth is being *reflected* by the object, the *real* question is how much ligth is *falling* on the object."
I've never really understood this argument though am willing to believe there it's just me. Given that the camera records light reflecting off the subject, isn't that what you should be measuring?
"Automatic ligth-meters all fail in that they underexpose a pure white surface and overexpose anything that *should* be mostly black."
This isn't a failure! Light meters do the sensible thing i.e tell you what the exposure should be to get the thing you are metering in the middle of your dynamic range. As long as you know that, you adjust your exposure to suit the final result you want. It's much more flexible than something like Nikon's matrix metering which probably will expose everything, even snow, correctly from the start but you can't really know what it's doing and adjust for the effect you want.
Depends on your pixel size really. Nikon seem to believe that their top quality zooms, like the 17-35, 28-70 or the 70-200VR will give up on an APS sensor at around 12 mega pixels which, surprisingly, is what their flagship D2X has.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I don`t know too much about the wiimote internals but I have just spent an hour or two playing Tomb Raider on the Wii and I can tell you that the game can still track where the wiimote is when it is pointed off screen.
If you point the wiimote off screen, a little arrow appears on the edge of the indicating where the wiimote went. This little arrow happily moves around the edges of the screen as you wave the wiimote around off screen.
The game certainly seems to have an idea where the wiimote is when not pointing at it.
The principle that downloading unauthorised work is morally wrong is probably correct. Personally I dont do it for that very reason.
However, to expect hardware or software manufacturers or, indeed, any external carrier of your product to be morally obliged to help you protect your product is not in any way a principle you could be proud of.
If companies wish to protect their product from being "stolen" they need to do it themselves before it leaves their "factories". Most companies apply for patents and also put locks on the doors of their premises. Copyright is the equivalent of patents for the music industry and in my view, each and every person who downloads a song without authorisation should be liable for the cost of producing that copy or even the loss of the sale of said copy i.e practically, but not quite, nothing.
In order to protect themselves in these difficult times, the morally correct way for the record companies to do it would be to produce an extremely well encrypted media containing the songs and also to produce the players on which to play them.
Of course nobody would buy these. The record companies are, therefore, actually complaining about the very thing that makes them work at all.
Why would he be looking for ducks?
In case anyone can feel the panic setting in while thoughts of closed source qt libraries swirl around their heads it may be as well to remind people that Troll Tech and KDE have this all worked out nicely already.
The KDE Foundation takes the code if qt is ever released closed. Not sure if it covers a buy out situation but I'm pretty sure it does.
Scary argument that because it presumably would work the other way around i.e. a photographer could be sued for selling a picture of a sculpture and by extention a wedding photographer could get sued for taking a picture of the happy couple in front of a building. Any photograph sold with anything designed by man in the background could be subject to a law suit.
It may just be me but every project that has been attacked by a team of UI experts seems to become totally illogical, almost unuseable and utterly joyless shortly afterwards.
Indeed, they do look better, slightly unreal at times but overall better. However, I can not help remembering every time I upgraded my car and was amazed at the quality of the sound system in it. It sounded fantastic compared to what I had before. After a week or to it sounded pretty much just as as dull and uninteresting.
The same seems true of DVDs now. Do you put a DVD in a go "Wow! what great quality compared to that crappy VHS stuff I used to watch?" I think these things look or sound great compared to what you had before but in themselves add very little to the overall enjoyment.
As I said before the big reason to swap your VHS library for DVD was convenience and not image quality. That does not apply to the new formats so the only reason most people will change is if they have no choice. However, it is entirely possible that both the new formats fail miserably.
I'm with you.
I find it hard to believe there is much of a market for either of these formats and at best, widespread adoption will be very slow. I am convinced that DVD's became popular because you could skip over the trailers to exactly the bits you wanted, they were thinner than VHS tapes and they didn't need rewinding. I don't think it had much to do with visual quality.
While there are people who will want to get that extra resolution (which, once you get used to it, looks like everything else ever did) there is little to convince the majority that they need a new format.
I am with you that.
I have recently purchased a mac mini and a macbook pro. There is something great about both these machine and I enjoyed using them for a short while. The silence of the mac mini and the elegance of the macbook pro make them a joy to use. However, after a while I realised what a heap of crap OS X is. At least there are some unixy things about it which helped me considerably when the macbook pro could not connect to my network but the GUI is full of really dumb deign decisions and the supplied software is awful when compared to the Linux equivalent.
Now, I dont use the mac mini any more though my girlfriend likes it. My macbook pro now starts vmware fusion at boot with a nice slackware virtual machine. It is so nice to drop iTunes and use Amarok instead (particularly now I have it talking to an airport express) and digiKam is so much better than that stoopid iPhoto it is hard to believe.
Using vmware fusion is a nice solution on the macbook pro as there is plenty of hardware to keep it zipping along nicely (now I have installed a 7200rpm disk at least) and a quick CTRL->RIGHT gets you back to OS X so you still have access to the weird bits of hardware, can sync the ipod and run Windows/Mac OS only stuff too.
Great hardware but completely over hyped and utterly crappy software.
I have to agree with you on this one. The texting on the iphone is by far the best of any phone i have used. It is also the only phone i have owned that i felt happy about writing emails on.
I live in Norway and use an unlocked US iphone on a local provider No problems with reception here.
Pisses me off that the thing is so tied in with all the apple crap though.
We know!
Well over a thousand I should think.
I still miss that guy with the Nathalie Portman obsession. Can't remember his name but it began with an "o". I think he got banned eventually.
I was reading the site for ages before I registered but I guess I should be pleased with my nice round number.
Not really accurate this. RAW isn't actually a format at all and shouldn't really be capitalised. The term "raw" only refers to unmanipulated data.
By the way, all digital cameras shoot "RAW", it's just that many immediately convert these data to a format that you can actually see, e.g jpeg.
On the other hand, I agree with your point here. I see no problem with a new and improved image format except that Microsoft has a dubious history of making it extremely annoying for everyone to be able to read their standards.
What is wrong here is using blackmail to force people to give up their intellectual property.
The employees had worked, trained and otherwise educated themselves in order to obtain a skill. Presumably the employer wanted to buy these skills and so employed them.
This employer seems to be suggesting that they have the right to force their employees to just hand those skills over to some else.
I have no problem with them being told to transfer knowledge gained about the employers own systems but forcing skilled workers to "train" the offshore staff in say, unix administration, seems utterly reprehensible to me.
Unlikely considering he sold the data to the buyer.
Don't you think your argument only applies to the Christian God?
Actually, I think what's clever about the GPL is that distributing the software automatically binds you too it.
Or, in other words, if you re-distribute GPL'd software, you are breaking copyright law if you haven't agreed to the GPL.
Not sure if it works but it sure is a clever license.
I think it comes from all those little models that attempt to show how the theory of gravity being bent space works. The general idea is to have a large sheet of some stretched rubber material suspended off the ground and then put some heavy ball on it. The resulting deformity looks like a funnel.
Photos fade and negatives need to be carefully looked after to survive. Your digital data is simple to keep foreever.
Your photo is not the disk you store it on. Keep copies of your photo on different mediums, copy it to new technologies as they arise and your image will be available as far into the future as you care to continue doing that.
No "shooting delays" on DSLR's any more. The only shooting delays are with film these days. Things like changing film when you come to the end of a roll (you can go hundreds and even thousands of shots with a DSLR before swapping a memory card).
We don't even have to mention the problems involved with changing ISO on a film camera.
You obviously haven't tried even one of the newer entry level DSLR's. They are instant on. You can turn the camera on and take a shot with it at the same time.
"Sure it's better. Much better. The ligth-sensor in the camera can only tell how much ligth is being *reflected* by the object, the *real* question is how much ligth is *falling* on the object."
I've never really understood this argument though am willing to believe there it's just me. Given that the camera records light reflecting off the subject, isn't that what you should be measuring?
"Automatic ligth-meters all fail in that they underexpose a pure white surface and overexpose anything that *should* be mostly black."
This isn't a failure! Light meters do the sensible thing i.e tell you what the exposure should be to get the thing you are metering in the middle of your dynamic range. As long as you know that, you adjust your exposure to suit the final result you want. It's much more flexible than something like Nikon's matrix metering which probably will expose everything, even snow, correctly from the start but you can't really know what it's doing and adjust for the effect you want.
Regards
Depends on your pixel size really. Nikon seem to believe that their top quality zooms, like the 17-35, 28-70 or the 70-200VR will give up on an APS sensor at around 12 mega pixels which, surprisingly, is what their flagship D2X has.
Regardless, if you want the absolute best resolution you can get, forget film of any type and use a digital scanning back such as this