> Too bad the only thing going for Google maps is that it is pretty (antialiased graphics, map can be as large as you want) and lets you pan. That's really the ONLY thing that is innovative about it- not even the "use google maps for displaying stuff from your site" is innovative; Yahoo and Mapquest have been doing this for years.
Unless you consider the innovation which sprung up around it - adding nearly all of those features through client side javascripts (usally through browser extensions like greasemonkey) or other websites with modified versions of the Google javascript. Yahoo and Mapquest may have let you display stuff from your site, but all I've ever seen is the standard maps they already provided. Not all of the improvements and new data sources people added to Google Maps. I think the easy hackability is really what made Google Maps as popular as it is, as much as the simple easy-to-use interface.
Feature #2 is the only one I haven't seen added. MapQuest _used_ to have this feature, but got rid of it quite some time ago. I think it was at the same time they got rid of the "big map" feature (which still wasn't as big Google maps can be, but made the forms based interface not quite as annoying.) Ah, how I used to love MapQuest, before they castrated their site...
BTW, Google just added a limited version of your first feature a week or so ago - you can now set your "Home location".
> It'd be like taking a low res digital camera of an object, then taking a high resolution image. There is an obvious difference in quality, and with processing, the extra pixels can be "guessed" based on the source image. **Note that I am NOT saying the quality will be the same as the high res image!!**
If that _really_ works, who needs HDTV? You can just upsample your SDTV video to 1080i. Sure, it wouldn't be as good as real HDTV, but it'd be better than SDTV.
While we're at it, let's upsample our CDs from 16-bit to 32-bit. With appropriate processing, they will be "higher quality" than the original CDs!
You seem to be missing the parent poster's point. You can't create new data that wasn't in the original data stream. Yes, you can increase the resolution and process it to make up for the loss of sharpness from that, but you can't really make it "better" than the original source.
I suspect your original reasoning is more of the reason you see an improvement than upscaling: The higher end projectors have better components.
> If they pull out of the iTunes Music Store, people will still be gobbling up iPods, and they'll just be filling them with pirated music instead. Jobs knows this, and so do the labels...they're just making a public fuss after realizing they're losing decades of control they once had over music distribution, all because they waited and waited and waited, and so Apple just strolled along and legitimized it without them.
Right. And it will never happen, unless all of the record companies get together and pull out together, because just one of them won't pull out of iTMS. If they do, they'd be losing a big chunk of sales which the other record companies that didn't pull out would not be losing. That'd look awfully bad for profits...who wants to give up part of the market to their competitors?
I doubt that any CMS author would design this feature to download the files that are actually in use on your webserver. They would most likely turn your web server into a cacheing proxy for the main distribution web site.
The point of the clause is to ensure that your modifications are available. I imagine most web software with this feature just links to a tarball that lives somewhere inside it's directory, rather than create an archive on the fly. So if you use software like this, you will probably just have to provide a modified distribution-ready tarball that is available for download off of your site.
After watching several complete anime series and many movies subtitled, I find I don't even notice I am reading them anymore. Now I have the problem that I am watching something and I will look away, to the computer screen or something else, and after hearing a couple seconds of speaking in a langauge I can't understand, I'm like "wait, I can't understand what they are saying. Oh yeah, gotta read the subtitles...":)
> Give me $20B, and I'll plan and build a giant Hot Wheels launch track -- complete with pointless loop in the middle -- and we'll fling cars into orbit all day long!
Unfortunately this is a charitable organization. In other words, money is unfortunately a factor. Looking for the best protection for the buck. Right now a RAID is looking like the best way to go, as there is a bit too much data to cost-effectively back up.
--
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Wow, so the Department of Redundancy Department can't even affford decent redundancy?
Exactly. We already have a much better controller for that. It's called a steering wheel. For instance, this model that hooks up via USB to your Playstation 2 or PC (this is just the first hit for it on google):
You get meeting notices with any email client, as they are standard mail messages. Evolution and Outlook (possibly others) just know how to read the times from them and insert them into your local calendar.
> However, I'm not saying Apple is supporting "open source" software. I'd say that they're using FOSS smartly for now, but I don't see them in the OSS camp.
Apple has released several of their own projects as OSS. What are the requirements to be "in the OSS camp", 100% open source software?
Red Hat is about as in the OSS camp as you can get, and they still ship some proprietary software in their commercial distributions (real, flash, acrobat, etc).
> The comment that my Mac game-developing friends kept making was that co-op multitasking was better for holding the processor's attention for gameplay.
Considering the Mac's popularity as a gaming platform, they must be right!;)
It makes sense in theory, but games seem to work fine on Linux, Windows, and other multitasking systems.
> Apple is not that spectacular in terms of choosing chips for performance, from their past history. M68k: good chip, but it was suffering from old age when they moved to PowerPC.
Funny that you mention the M68k, since it was ahead of x86 in performance when Apple chose it. Incidentally, it was also WAY ahead when IBM chose the 8086 over it for cost reasons.
> Movie studios wonder why movie revenue is down...Many people have large TVs with decent audio. Why pay 50 bucks to see that when you can see it in your own home - without people talking over the movie?
I'm not sure that's the case. I have a pretty decent home theater setup with a projector, surround sound, etc. I still go to the movies when I see something that looks like it will be good. Yet, the number of mainstream movies I have seen this year has been pretty low, because not much actually looked very good. I have actually been to the "local" indie theater (http://musicboxtheatre.com/ ) that is 40 minutes away more than I have been to the AMC that's only 5 minutes away. I'll admit I have watched many more movies at home than I have seen at the theater, but they are mostly movies more than a couple of years old, that would not be in theaters anyway.
> Art is a commodity item - this is why people pay large sums of money to have 'the only one'. See 'Picasso'. You ask 'when did people stop viewing movies as a luxury item'? Do you *live* in North America? Movies are consumables.
You could go as far as to say that mainstream movies and music are not really even art. Their primary purpose is to make the companies that produce them money. When Terminator 4 recycles the plot of the first one yet again, but with new actors, is it really art? Or is it movie studio X trying to turn a bigger profit?
You are probably screwed. There is an open source VP3 codec, but I think the higher versions are all closed source. The DLL's can be used with mplayer on x86, but that won't work for you on PPC.
Cylinder shutdown was poorly done in the day of carbeurators and purely mechanical control systems.
It's done much better in the days of computer controlled electronic ignition and fuel control. Cadillac has been doing it since the early 90's in their Northstar engine's "limp-home" mode. Honda has been doing it for a few years with their Japanese market Inspire (US Accord) to boost highway mpg, cruising on 3 cylinders instead of 6. The new V6 Hybrid Accord uses this method as well.
> "built light" is a piece of FUD that was touted at the chevy dealers in order to deter people from buying the GEO line that was on the same lot.
> My daily commute on 696 in Detroit every day proves that these lightly built cars with only 55hp can certianly work well in highway traffic.
So, are they are "built light" or not?;)
To a sports car guy, "built light" sounds like an advantage, not a disadvantage.:) The Geo Metro/Suzuki Swift only weighs about 2000 lbs, about the same as an Insight. Weight is the enemy of handling (as well as acceleration, braking, and fuel economy), so for an econobox, they are going to handle pretty well. Putting low rolling resistance tires is going to decrease handling a bit, while increasing mileage. Unfortunately, modern cars have grown heavier due to increased requirements for safety (ABS, airbags, etc) and convenience features (try to find a new car without power windows...). This is why the Insight is smaller and less practical, yet is no lighter than your 10+ year old car. Also, the Insight's mileage is not much better because it uses a 3cyl engine like your car, and hybrid power is really only good for improving acceleration, not highway driving.
> I guess nowadays with most autos being at least 4 speed and with computer engine controls, they have already caught up (except Subarus, not sure why?).
The manuals probably have shorter gearing, so the engine turns at higher speeds at the same road speed...resulting in better performance, but worse fuel economy. Makes sense, since performance enthusiasts are likely to buy the manual version.
I am right handed, but due to limited space when I built my first dedicated gaming box, I had to use my left hand to have enough mouse room for gaming. Now I always game with my left hand, even though I usually use my rigth for mousing around other apps. I have no problem switching back and forth for normal use, but for gaming, I completely suck with my right hand. I suppose if I practiced enough, I could switch, but then I'd have to switch my keyboard layout as well.
Re:Whatever happened to single-stage-to-orbit?
on
NASA's Shuttle Plans
·
· Score: 1
According to this new plan, the new "shuttle" design should allow them to put up over 100 tons into orbit.
Now, I don't know how useful this is, exactly.
One of the articles implied sending up longer range craft for moon/mars type missions using the larger rocket, and sending up a crew in the smaller rocket. Maybe that is the reason for the greatly increased capacity.
Slashdot Mirror
> Too bad the only thing going for Google maps is that it is pretty (antialiased graphics, map can be as large as you want) and lets you pan. That's really the ONLY thing that is innovative about it- not even the "use google maps for displaying stuff from your site" is innovative; Yahoo and Mapquest have been doing this for years.
Unless you consider the innovation which sprung up around it - adding nearly all of those features through client side javascripts (usally through browser extensions like greasemonkey) or other websites with modified versions of the Google javascript. Yahoo and Mapquest may have let you display stuff from your site, but all I've ever seen is the standard maps they already provided. Not all of the improvements and new data sources people added to Google Maps. I think the easy hackability is really what made Google Maps as popular as it is, as much as the simple easy-to-use interface.
Feature #2 is the only one I haven't seen added. MapQuest _used_ to have this feature, but got rid of it quite some time ago. I think it was at the same time they got rid of the "big map" feature (which still wasn't as big Google maps can be, but made the forms based interface not quite as annoying.) Ah, how I used to love MapQuest, before they castrated their site...
BTW, Google just added a limited version of your first feature a week or so ago - you can now set your "Home location".
> Netscape had the exact same idea a decade ago (sans trendy development tools of course).
Yeah, but back then, we always disabled JavaScript on our browser because it made it more likely to crash...
> It'd be like taking a low res digital camera of an object, then taking a high resolution image. There is an obvious difference in quality, and with processing, the extra pixels can be "guessed" based on the source image. **Note that I am NOT saying the quality will be the same as the high res image!!**
If that _really_ works, who needs HDTV? You can just upsample your SDTV video to 1080i. Sure, it wouldn't be as good as real HDTV, but it'd be better than SDTV.
While we're at it, let's upsample our CDs from 16-bit to 32-bit. With appropriate processing, they will be "higher quality" than the original CDs!
You seem to be missing the parent poster's point. You can't create new data that wasn't in the original data stream. Yes, you can increase the resolution and process it to make up for the loss of sharpness from that, but you can't really make it "better" than the original source.
I suspect your original reasoning is more of the reason you see an improvement than upscaling: The higher end projectors have better components.
On a self destructing DVD, of course!
> If they pull out of the iTunes Music Store, people will still be gobbling up iPods, and they'll just be filling them with pirated music instead. Jobs knows this, and so do the labels...they're just making a public fuss after realizing they're losing decades of control they once had over music distribution, all because they waited and waited and waited, and so Apple just strolled along and legitimized it without them.
Right. And it will never happen, unless all of the record companies get together and pull out together, because just one of them won't pull out of iTMS. If they do, they'd be losing a big chunk of sales which the other record companies that didn't pull out would not be losing. That'd look awfully bad for profits...who wants to give up part of the market to their competitors?
The point of the clause is to ensure that your modifications are available. I imagine most web software with this feature just links to a tarball that lives somewhere inside it's directory, rather than create an archive on the fly. So if you use software like this, you will probably just have to provide a modified distribution-ready tarball that is available for download off of your site.
> Sunbird and Thunderbird coming together? Did somebody run a red light?
At least Firebird wasn't involved...
After watching several complete anime series and many movies subtitled, I find I don't even notice I am reading them anymore. Now I have the problem that I am watching something and I will look away, to the computer screen or something else, and after hearing a couple seconds of speaking in a langauge I can't understand, I'm like "wait, I can't understand what they are saying. Oh yeah, gotta read the subtitles..." :)
512K is obviously not enough. But 640K should be enough for everyone.
> Give me $20B, and I'll plan and build a giant Hot Wheels launch track -- complete with pointless loop in the middle -- and we'll fling cars into orbit all day long!
Sweet. Now, who's going to chrome the moon?
Wow, so the Department of Redundancy Department can't even affford decent redundancy?
Exactly. We already have a much better controller for that. It's called a steering wheel. For instance, this model that hooks up via USB to your Playstation 2 or PC (this is just the first hit for it on google):
s px?id=A44823&src=FG
http://www.techonweb.com/products/productdetail.a
You get meeting notices with any email client, as they are standard mail messages. Evolution and Outlook (possibly others) just know how to read the times from them and insert them into your local calendar.
> However, I'm not saying Apple is supporting "open source" software. I'd say that they're using FOSS smartly for now, but I don't see them in the OSS camp.
Apple has released several of their own projects as OSS. What are the requirements to be "in the OSS camp", 100% open source software?
Red Hat is about as in the OSS camp as you can get, and they still ship some proprietary software in their commercial distributions (real, flash, acrobat, etc).
> You would have to compile your simple program twice, once on Windows and once on Linux to create two binaries.
You would have to compile your program twice, but technically you could do both builds on either system, as GCC can be set up to cross-compile.
Not to mention "If Linux patented Linux that would certainly happen."
Quick, someone check the kernel changelogs to see if someone checked in any self-patenting code!
> The comment that my Mac game-developing friends kept making was that co-op multitasking was better for holding the processor's attention for gameplay.
;)
Considering the Mac's popularity as a gaming platform, they must be right!
It makes sense in theory, but games seem to work fine on Linux, Windows, and other multitasking systems.
> Apple is not that spectacular in terms of choosing chips for performance, from their past history. M68k: good chip, but it was suffering from old age when they moved to PowerPC.
Funny that you mention the M68k, since it was ahead of x86 in performance when Apple chose it. Incidentally, it was also WAY ahead when IBM chose the 8086 over it for cost reasons.
> Movie studios wonder why movie revenue is down...Many people have large TVs with decent audio. Why pay 50 bucks to see that when you can see it in your own home - without people talking over the movie?
I'm not sure that's the case. I have a pretty decent home theater setup with a projector, surround sound, etc. I still go to the movies when I see something that looks like it will be good. Yet, the number of mainstream movies I have seen this year has been pretty low, because not much actually looked very good. I have actually been to the "local" indie theater (http://musicboxtheatre.com/ ) that is 40 minutes away more than I have been to the AMC that's only 5 minutes away. I'll admit I have watched many more movies at home than I have seen at the theater, but they are mostly movies more than a couple of years old, that would not be in theaters anyway.
> Art is a commodity item - this is why people pay large sums of money to have 'the only one'. See 'Picasso'. You ask 'when did people stop viewing movies as a luxury item'? Do you *live* in North America? Movies are consumables.
You could go as far as to say that mainstream movies and music are not really even art. Their primary purpose is to make the companies that produce them money. When Terminator 4 recycles the plot of the first one yet again, but with new actors, is it really art? Or is it movie studio X trying to turn a bigger profit?
You are probably screwed. There is an open source VP3 codec, but I think the higher versions are all closed source. The DLL's can be used with mplayer on x86, but that won't work for you on PPC.
Cylinder shutdown was poorly done in the day of carbeurators and purely mechanical control systems.
It's done much better in the days of computer controlled electronic ignition and fuel control. Cadillac has been doing it since the early 90's in their Northstar engine's "limp-home" mode. Honda has been doing it for a few years with their Japanese market Inspire (US Accord) to boost highway mpg, cruising on 3 cylinders instead of 6. The new V6 Hybrid Accord uses this method as well.
> "built light" is a piece of FUD that was touted at the chevy dealers in order to deter people from buying the GEO line that was on the same lot.
;)
:) The Geo Metro/Suzuki Swift only weighs about 2000 lbs, about the same as an Insight. Weight is the enemy of handling (as well as acceleration, braking, and fuel economy), so for an econobox, they are going to handle pretty well. Putting low rolling resistance tires is going to decrease handling a bit, while increasing mileage. Unfortunately, modern cars have grown heavier due to increased requirements for safety (ABS, airbags, etc) and convenience features (try to find a new car without power windows...). This is why the Insight is smaller and less practical, yet is no lighter than your 10+ year old car. Also, the Insight's mileage is not much better because it uses a 3cyl engine like your car, and hybrid power is really only good for improving acceleration, not highway driving.
> My daily commute on 696 in Detroit every day proves that these lightly built cars with only 55hp can certianly work well in highway traffic.
So, are they are "built light" or not?
To a sports car guy, "built light" sounds like an advantage, not a disadvantage.
> I guess nowadays with most autos being at least 4 speed and with computer engine controls, they have already caught up (except Subarus, not sure why?).
The manuals probably have shorter gearing, so the engine turns at higher speeds at the same road speed...resulting in better performance, but worse fuel economy. Makes sense, since performance enthusiasts are likely to buy the manual version.
I am right handed, but due to limited space when I built my first dedicated gaming box, I had to use my left hand to have enough mouse room for gaming. Now I always game with my left hand, even though I usually use my rigth for mousing around other apps. I have no problem switching back and forth for normal use, but for gaming, I completely suck with my right hand. I suppose if I practiced enough, I could switch, but then I'd have to switch my keyboard layout as well.
One of the articles implied sending up longer range craft for moon/mars type missions using the larger rocket, and sending up a crew in the smaller rocket. Maybe that is the reason for the greatly increased capacity.