But, given the fact that we all NEED a Social Security card to WORK, a Drivers Licence to DRIVE, a ID to buy Cigerettes and Beer, why not have ONE ID?
I read your rant, but you are wrong. A single national ID will automatically tie together all the various personal databases. No, not by magically moving all the data to the same location, but by creating a unique persistent ID which relates disparate data to the same person.
In the current system, with separate IDs for every agency, there is no way for a cop who looks at your driver's license to also check out your employment history, credit rating, drug prescriptions, criminal records, religious affiliation, or anything else not associated with your driving records. The cop could not call up the AMA and find your drug prescriptions because there is no unique, persistent relationship between your driver's license and medical record. No, I hate to break it to you, but your name, birthdate, address, and phone number are not unique, persistent identifiers.
If there were a single national ID for every person, someone looking at your driver's licence could call your doctor and find out your medical history through this ID that you, and you alone, have which he now has access to. So could a bouncer that checked your age. With a national ID, everyone will be able to find out everything about everyone else.
It gets worse. What if someone steals your national ID? Now they have access to everything about you; they can withdraw all your money, take your drug prescriptions, sell your house, get your passport, enroll you in political parties or movements, take over your life.
To escape this you would have to get a new national ID. Consider the amount of grief you go through to cancel your credit cards. Now imagine you have to the the same thing for every form of personal identification you ever used in your entire life. It would be a nightmare, but that's only the start. The new ID would be that of a completely new person, there would be no way to revoke all the times you had used the ID in the past. The person who stole your card would become you, and you would be a different person.
A universal national ID would be a privacy and civil liberties disaster; the people opposing it are not idiots. I agree it's a nuisance to have separate driver's licences, blue cross, library cards, employee ID, and so on, but someone who would give up liberty for convenience deservers neither.
Do you know how obscenely expensive hand animation is compared to acting?
Yup. Most shockwave animation is done for nothing, though a few cost up to a few hundred bucks.
Full animated features can be made for as little as $5 million, and the total cost less than $50 million. Disney's huge, bloated, animated blockbusters cost about $150 million total, but only a fraction of that is the actual cost of the animation. Compare that to the $20 million salary of a single "A" list actor alone, and the production costs of a typical live-action blockbuster of over $200 million.
with motion capture, one actor can play a dozen parts
One actor can play a dozen parts even without motion capture. Using the same actor for all the motion capture makes all the characters look the same and is no cheaper or faster. You still need to do 12 motion captures.
do you really think they're going to pay Tom Hanks $32 million when they can pay some actor $5000 to do the motion capture sequences?
No, I think they're going to pay Tom Hanks $5 million instead of some actor $5000 because Hanks contributes more than $5 million to the movie.
The thing I want to see that has already been invented is cars running on water.
This scam has been around since the 1930s and has reappeared whenever a new generation of rubes arise. It's the same scheme as the "300 mpg carburetor".
Drain your gas tank, fuel line, and carburetor. Fill the carb or valve with acetone (a volatile, water-soluble chemical used in making plastics and explosives). The explosive vapors given off when it's dissolved will run the engine for a few blocks. Of course, after that the engine is a total write-off, but you don't let the mark drive it that long.
The genius of the plan is that it really does run on water! You can let the mark examine the engine, fuel, even try it out on their own vehicle. You have to be fast though, to get out of town with their money before they check out what's left of their engine after the demonstration.
The old "the oil companies are trying to shut me down" is the most common excuse used for why the mark hasn't heard of it before, and why you have to conduct the deal quickly, in secret. Though I did hear of it being used in the 1940s where it was supposed to be a government secret to prevent the Nazis, who had limited petroleum reserves, from getting hold of it.
It hasn't been used much since the advent of modern engines; though there must be some way of doctoring a fuel injector.
... I wouldn't be surprised if one day this same sort of mix up... will create a real problem or crisis.
It's happened many, many times.
My favorite example is when the British tabloid "News of the World" published the names and addresses of convicted pedophiles. Some Brits went amok, trying to burn down a house a pedophile once rented (and the innocent family then living there), and running a pediatrician (which they apparently thought was the same thing as a pedophile) out of town.
The report is interesting, but I saw no evidence Dr. Karageorghis used double blind or control subjects in the experiments to avoid Adaptive Thinking. That is, "The Zone" may be nothing more than an artifact of the way he conducted his experiments.
The simplest example of adaptive thinking is to flip a coin a large number of times and look for long runs of heads (or tails). You are sure to get them, but this is an inevitable result of a large number of independent trials, and not evidence of coin flips influencing each other or a "Heads Zone" where you are in an "optimal psychological experience" for flipping a coin heads-up.
He claims that "people performing at the peak of their abilities can experience an increased level of alpha brainwave activity." Well, even supposing they do, what about people performing at less than their peak? Or people performing poorly, or sleeping or eating breakfast? Can they also experience an increased level? I don't know, and the article never asks the question.
Can people perform at the peak of their abilities without an increased level of alpha brainwave activity? Do the two have anything to do with each other at all? I don't know, and you'll never find out by reading this article.
He looked for "flow state" in winners and found them, but what if he found it in losers as well? Or what if he found it in the winners while they weren't winning? Does this "flow state" have anything to do with winning, or is it about as relevant as the number of heads in a row you can flip on a coin?
The existence of faster-than-light travel has no material effect on the colonization of the galaxy.
The galaxy is over 14 billion years old and only 100000 light years across. That means light could have crossed it over 100000 times so far. Even if a civilization could only manage 1% the speed of light, there is enough time for a spaceship from every star in the galaxy to have crossed the galaxy 1000 times.
One hint for clueless moderators who gave this comment a "+2: Interesting"; the poster is making a joke about The Sims computer game. "Sim-puter" = "computer for the simulated people called 'Sims' in the game".
A few posters, and Scientific American itself, are skeptical of these claims. This is reasonable, because they are so dramatic.
If Dr. Chiao is worried about his reputation, or getting published, or arguing with critics, I have some free advice:
discover first, publicise second.
The article claims "By the time the theory is vetted, though, Chiao will probably have conducted his experiment and settled the question." Wonderful! Wait a few months to actually do the experiment, then publicise it. His reputation will be safe, everyone will want to publish it, and critics can try the experiment themselves. He will probably be able to complete it faster because he won't have all these clueless reporters asking him questions.
"Now this is cool"!? How on Earth is this "News for Nerds" or "Stuff that Matters"?
Is VA so hard up it's resorting to advertorializing for totally worthless junk?
Oh, and if you think the rich actually buy crap like this, do yourself a favor and read The Millionaire Next Door. Most millionaires would never say something like this is "cool".
Unfortunately, the margin was too small to contain the proof.
Re:How to work efficiently with MacOS X?
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KDE Ported to Mac OS X
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I am an experienced Unix system administrator, but... feel completely lost trying to work with MacOS X.
This doesn't surprise me. I have been supporting Mac users in education for a few years now, and can tell you that not only are most existing Mac users not experienced Unix system administrators, but that they would feel completely lost trying to work with most *nix desktop managers.
I care for a functional environment... where you can separate your desktops for different tasks. In my case, I usually have my first virtual desktop for an xterm and e-mail, my second for browsing the web and my third and fourth for other tasks various tasks.
This notion is completely foreign to most Mac users, who think of a "task" as something they, not the computer, does. A task would be editing a movie, sending a friend some music, or writing a message. They might use 3 or 4 different sets of overlapping applications to do each of these tasks, but to them, using iMovie to import some video, PEAK to add audio, and QuickTime Pro to encode it is one "task", regardless of the fact the menu bar changes 3 times while they do it.
The notion of having a separate "desktop" for each stage of a single task would be as absurd to them as someone telling you to use different window managers depending on whether you want to type vowels, consonants, or digits on the keyboard.
I usually reserve the first desktop for some command line hacking..., the second virtual desktop for Emacs and the third for...
I can tell you from long, painful experience, this will never work for most Mac users. For them, if they can't see it on the screen it doesn't exist. I've had to explain (over and over...) to users that windows behind other windows aren't really gone, the data is still there, it's just hidden by a more frontmost window. Understanding the dock is a conceptual leap, trying to explain the concept of multiple desktops is practically impossible; to most Mac users the desktop is the one fundamental bedrock of their computer.
IMHO, even if you did explain it, most Mac users wouldn't like it. I'm sending my son this web page; here's the web page window and here's the email window. They're both sitting right there on the screen, why on Earth would you want to go through all that rigamarole to hide the windows you're working on? Or to hide the entire *desktop*, yet? Why try to hide what you're working on? That makes no sense.
I feel that this separation of tasks keeps me organized... since I can quickly move between different aspects of my work, but how can I keep everything organized with MacOS X with just one desktop and with applications with more than one window (say, Appleworks)?
Mac users would ask the same thing about *nix window managers. Since each document is a task, how can you keep it organized when it keeps opening in different windows that look completely different, or even in a different "desktop" where you can't even see it, for God's sake.
Users don't think applications have more than one window; my printout, my email, my expense form, and my customer list are all applications, right? And they're each one window. Oh sure, the menu bar reads "AppleWorks" when I'm working on my expense form and customer list, and "Entourage" when I'm working on my email, but that's one of those weird computer eccentricities. You're saying I can only look at my expense form and customer list together at one time? That as soon as I open one the other also opens automatically? That makes no sense, they have nothing to do with each other. What if I wanted to email my expense form. I have to use two different windows? Two different *desktops*, where I can't even see what I'm working on? You're nuts!
So, this is an honest question: how are you guys productive with MacOS X? Is there any way to keep various applications organized?
They are organized. Forget about "applications", think about the job you're trying to do. If you're a manufacturer do you have a special workshop just for scewdrivers, another one for chisels, and third for drills, and so on, so every time you build something you have to carry all your work from one workshop to another? On the Mac, you have a document for each thing you're working on, and you open it with whatever tool you want. All the tools and all the documents are right there on the screen, it doesn't hide anything on you. If it did, Mac users would go nuts; there are a lot of long-time Mac users who hate OS X because of this.
So, when people say that MacOS X's user interface is so good, I can only think that they work in a different fashion than I do or that they are exploring features that I don't know about.
From the very first Mac from 1984, the OS has tried to be document-centric. The original PICT document format could be opened in graphics, database, and word-processing applications. Apple spent enormous effort to create a document-only API called OpenDoc a while ago. Now I admit they don't always succeed, and OpenDoc was a failure, but this has been the guiding principle behind the Mac from day 1.
Think visual documents; anything you can see is a document you can work on. If you can't see it on the screen it doesn't exist, or at least you don't have to worry about it. Forget about "files" and "programs" and you'll get into the mindset of Mac users.
At the risk of being modded "-1, Pedantic", please be aware that the word "LEGO" (all uppercase) is a trademark for LEGO Group A/S, and is a proper name. It is not an all-purpose noun and verb like "Smurf" and should be used as an adjective.
You can say "LEGO Mindstorms", "LEGO bricks", or "LEGO Technic", but "I built some lego with legos" is as jarring as "I built some linux with linuxs".
... the first century only had 99 years. Simple enough, no?
No.
The first century, like the second, and all the others up to the 20th, had 100 years; that's what "century" means.
The first century lasted from the years 1AD to 101AD. See? 100 years. The second century was from 101 to 201AD, and so on from 1901 to 2001. Twenty centuries. Get it?
I think the Open Source analogy of the article title is particularly apt.
One of the claims of Open Source development is that, with many developers being able to examine the source, bugs will be found quickly.
One problem with this idea is demonstrated by the nature of the "errors" submitted by viewers of the Spider-Man movie. Most are not technical errors, but disagreements like "I don't like the way that looked" or "if I was doing that I'd...". Obviously the director did like the way it looked, and the movie character did it differently.
The problem, of course, is that making a movie, playing the part of a fictional character, and such is hard work, but complaining about what you don't like is easy. This doesn't bug me too much about movies, but it does bug me about Open Source development.
Take a look a the Bugzilla database sometime. Some bugs are things like crashing or standard noncompliance, but an awful lot are "I don't like the way that looked". I remember a bunch about whether mouse-overs should activate text fields, or what the PgDn should do.
Now, in most cases, the developers are following platform conventions or trying to keep the interface consistent. Unfortunately, like the Spider-Man viewer who hated the logo used in one scene, some Mozilla users simply don't like the decision, no matter the reason.
I agree that, to a certain extent, one has to accept "that's the way it happened in the movie". I hope that the people critiquing computer programs will accept that sometimes "that's the way the program does it".
You have something screwed up;.png files look fine on my OS X machines.
Do other image types appear? If so, open your IE Preferences, click on the "File Helpers" item, scroll down to the image/png data type, double-click it, select "View with browser" for handling, then "OK".
Okay, I'll bite, but how do you end up with "dripping" panes in very old windows?
I have actually seen such panes in Italy, and can tell you the "dripping" is an artifact of the way the glass is made. The "drips" are distributed all over the entire pane, and the top of the pane is just as thick as the bottom. Horizontal and curved pieces of the same glass also have this "dripped" surface.
If you mean clear glass thicker at the bottom than the top, sometimes found in old English buildings, the Glass Flow page page at the Urban Legends page someone posted earlier says this is also an artifact of the way early clear glass panes were made. The slabs are uneven, and the builders install them with the thickest portion at the bottom to avoid unbalancing the panes.
If you still think glass is a liquid, tell me why Cartaginian glass, made thousands of years ago, are not puddles, and why obsidian shards milions of years old still have sharp edges.
I'm sure many will disagree, but I don't mind when movie directors change small things about a character like Spiderman if it adds to the story
I'm one of those people who disagree. Not because they're changing the comic book, but because it totally changes the character.
Spider-man was written during the 60s; when teenagers interested in technology were even greater social outcasts than they are now; technology was associated with the Vietnam war, ROTC, and the military-industrial complex. The "cool kids" were all dropping acid and communing with nature.
Peter Parker was the first anti-establishment teenage super hero. Superman and the Fantastic Four were as straight as could be. Batman was an adult vigilante. But Spider-man was a groovy nerd; many early issues had him inventing chemical and electronic gadgets to solve crimes.
The movie spider-man is none of these; he's now a teenage heartthrob. Since all his powers are biological, he doesn't need to have any technical knowledge at all. Just get into one-ness with your inner spider, and Nature will rescue you. See, the 60s acid-heads were right all along! That is why I hate the biolgical web-shooters.
As for all the posters who will say "but how can a teenager invent what 3M can't"; because he's a technical genius, that's why! This is one of the most important themes from the comic book; that intelligence can be used to make things that help humanity instead of things like napalm.
It looks like the Green Goblin still has his hoverjet and gas bombs, gee I wonder why 3M isn't trying to get its hands on those. Let me guess why... because only villians use technology now.
Sorry to burst you bubble, but Office for Mac is not written specifically for the Mac. I don't know about the entire suite, but I am certain that Excel is written as platform idependent code.
This it totally, perniciously, wrong. If Mac Office is "based off the same code as the Windows version", where's Entourage for Windows? Why do the Mac Office applications have Mac-only resource forks with Mac-only data structures instead of MFC or rez files? Why is MacRoman the default text encoding, QuickTime the default media type, PICT the default clipboard type?
It is platform-independent so far as it will compile for Mac OS 9 and X, but it is not ported from Windows, it does not use MSC, it is not based on Windows code.
Free advice for fringe physicists
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Time Travel
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· Score: 1
If you know how to invent a time machine, cold fusion reactor, faster-than-light drive, or anything else where you are worried people will think you are a nut, I have a few words of advice:
First invent, then publicise.
This guy says he will have a demonstration possible "in a few months". Great! Spend a few months, do the demonstration, then publicise. The university, Nobel Prize committee, and the rest of the world can wait while you finish your invention.
Early publicity will kill your project; you will have to defend your idea from skeptics and cranks, waste time in interviews and business negotiations, and will give competitors information.
Simply invent your invention first. Then the invention can defend and publicise itself, you can hire a lawyer to negotiate, and you can patent the device to block competition.
Weak AI says that it's impossible to ever create a computer program that really thinks and feels and loves and hates like a human. The best we can hope for is to simulate these thoughts to create a close approximation.
Obviously Weak AI is true, because I am the only "really" intelligent being in the universe. Only I "really" think and feel and love and hate. Everyone else, including you, are only a "close approximation".
I know, you believe you actually think and feel but trust me, you are only simulating it. You can't tell, because your feelings are only simulations, but I can tell they are only "close approximatiions".
Personally, I think the single person responsible for killing Be was Steve Jobs. If Apple had bought Be, instead of his pet project NeXT...
How could Steve Jobs possibly have killed Be? Gil Amelio was CEO of Apple when it bought NexT; Steve was not even an employee.
I'm sure Steve was flogging NeXT to Gil, but J. L. Gasse was pimping for Be even more; he was giving interviews to Apple magazines. I remember reading somewhere Gasse was asking for an outrageous amount of money for Be, so Amelio went with NeXT.
If you're going to blame one person for the demise of Be, blame Gasse.
... and its near total absence of traditional TV fare like sex
I was about to go into a long rant about why C.S.I. is about as scientifically accurate as McGyver, but the statement above made me realize Katz has no clue what he's talking about.
Every episode of C.S.I. I have seen is just as titillating as any other American TV program. In one episode, prostitutes are killing clients by poisoning their nipples, which is shown over and over in SI swimsuit-style soft core. The hero can't just tell the cops this; no, he has to "investigate" this personally and in "private". Another episode has the hot chick investigating a semen stain and having to find a "matching sample"....
For that matter, why does everyone on this program, even the skid row prostitutes, look like a fashion model?
Since the original article is about cross-platform development, and the Native Mac OS X API is written in Objective C, is there a cross-platform Objective C API?
The other XP APIs people posted, Crystal Space and SDL, are written in C++. Now I have nothing against C++, but if Apple wants native OS X games it would be very useful to have a native, cross-platform, game API.
I have heard of Apple's Game Sprockets project, but AFAIK this is a proprietary Mac API.
Anyone have a suggestion for an XP Objective C game API?
Slashdot Mirror
In the current system, with separate IDs for every agency, there is no way for a cop who looks at your driver's license to also check out your employment history, credit rating, drug prescriptions, criminal records, religious affiliation, or anything else not associated with your driving records. The cop could not call up the AMA and find your drug prescriptions because there is no unique, persistent relationship between your driver's license and medical record. No, I hate to break it to you, but your name, birthdate, address, and phone number are not unique, persistent identifiers.
If there were a single national ID for every person, someone looking at your driver's licence could call your doctor and find out your medical history through this ID that you, and you alone, have which he now has access to. So could a bouncer that checked your age. With a national ID, everyone will be able to find out everything about everyone else.
It gets worse. What if someone steals your national ID? Now they have access to everything about you; they can withdraw all your money, take your drug prescriptions, sell your house, get your passport, enroll you in political parties or movements, take over your life.
To escape this you would have to get a new national ID. Consider the amount of grief you go through to cancel your credit cards. Now imagine you have to the the same thing for every form of personal identification you ever used in your entire life. It would be a nightmare, but that's only the start. The new ID would be that of a completely new person, there would be no way to revoke all the times you had used the ID in the past. The person who stole your card would become you, and you would be a different person.
A universal national ID would be a privacy and civil liberties disaster; the people opposing it are not idiots. I agree it's a nuisance to have separate driver's licences, blue cross, library cards, employee ID, and so on, but someone who would give up liberty for convenience deservers neither.
Full animated features can be made for as little as $5 million, and the total cost less than $50 million. Disney's huge, bloated, animated blockbusters cost about $150 million total, but only a fraction of that is the actual cost of the animation. Compare that to the $20 million salary of a single "A" list actor alone, and the production costs of a typical live-action blockbuster of over $200 million.
One actor can play a dozen parts even without motion capture. Using the same actor for all the motion capture makes all the characters look the same and is no cheaper or faster. You still need to do 12 motion captures. No, I think they're going to pay Tom Hanks $5 million instead of some actor $5000 because Hanks contributes more than $5 million to the movie. Truer words were never spoken.Drain your gas tank, fuel line, and carburetor. Fill the carb or valve with acetone (a volatile, water-soluble chemical used in making plastics and explosives). The explosive vapors given off when it's dissolved will run the engine for a few blocks. Of course, after that the engine is a total write-off, but you don't let the mark drive it that long.
The genius of the plan is that it really does run on water! You can let the mark examine the engine, fuel, even try it out on their own vehicle. You have to be fast though, to get out of town with their money before they check out what's left of their engine after the demonstration.
The old "the oil companies are trying to shut me down" is the most common excuse used for why the mark hasn't heard of it before, and why you have to conduct the deal quickly, in secret. Though I did hear of it being used in the 1940s where it was supposed to be a government secret to prevent the Nazis, who had limited petroleum reserves, from getting hold of it.
It hasn't been used much since the advent of modern engines; though there must be some way of doctoring a fuel injector.
My favorite example is when the British tabloid "News of the World" published the names and addresses of convicted pedophiles. Some Brits went amok, trying to burn down a house a pedophile once rented (and the innocent family then living there), and running a pediatrician (which they apparently thought was the same thing as a pedophile) out of town.
Check out one BBC news article.
The report is interesting, but I saw no evidence Dr. Karageorghis used double blind or control subjects in the experiments to avoid Adaptive Thinking. That is, "The Zone" may be nothing more than an artifact of the way he conducted his experiments.
The simplest example of adaptive thinking is to flip a coin a large number of times and look for long runs of heads (or tails). You are sure to get them, but this is an inevitable result of a large number of independent trials, and not evidence of coin flips influencing each other or a "Heads Zone" where you are in an "optimal psychological experience" for flipping a coin heads-up.
He claims that "people performing at the peak of their abilities can experience an increased level of alpha brainwave activity." Well, even supposing they do, what about people performing at less than their peak? Or people performing poorly, or sleeping or eating breakfast? Can they also experience an increased level? I don't know, and the article never asks the question.
Can people perform at the peak of their abilities without an increased level of alpha brainwave activity? Do the two have anything to do with each other at all? I don't know, and you'll never find out by reading this article.
He looked for "flow state" in winners and found them, but what if he found it in losers as well? Or what if he found it in the winners while they weren't winning? Does this "flow state" have anything to do with winning, or is it about as relevant as the number of heads in a row you can flip on a coin?
The galaxy is over 14 billion years old and only 100000 light years across. That means light could have crossed it over 100000 times so far. Even if a civilization could only manage 1% the speed of light, there is enough time for a spaceship from every star in the galaxy to have crossed the galaxy 1000 times.
One hint for clueless moderators who gave this comment a "+2: Interesting"; the poster is making a joke about The Sims computer game. "Sim-puter" = "computer for the simulated people called 'Sims' in the game".
+2: Interesting (shakes head sadly).
you can download it from Late Night Software.
O'Reilly Net had a tutorial on scripting applications with JavaScript.
If Dr. Chiao is worried about his reputation, or getting published, or arguing with critics, I have some free advice: discover first, publicise second.
The article claims "By the time the theory is vetted, though, Chiao will probably have conducted his experiment and settled the question." Wonderful! Wait a few months to actually do the experiment, then publicise it. His reputation will be safe, everyone will want to publish it, and critics can try the experiment themselves. He will probably be able to complete it faster because he won't have all these clueless reporters asking him questions.
But you have to discover it first.
Is VA so hard up it's resorting to advertorializing for totally worthless junk?
Oh, and if you think the rich actually buy crap like this, do yourself a favor and read The Millionaire Next Door. Most millionaires would never say something like this is "cool".
Unfortunately, the margin was too small to contain the proof.
The notion of having a separate "desktop" for each stage of a single task would be as absurd to them as someone telling you to use different window managers depending on whether you want to type vowels, consonants, or digits on the keyboard.
I can tell you from long, painful experience, this will never work for most Mac users. For them, if they can't see it on the screen it doesn't exist. I've had to explain (over and overIMHO, even if you did explain it, most Mac users wouldn't like it. I'm sending my son this web page; here's the web page window and here's the email window. They're both sitting right there on the screen, why on Earth would you want to go through all that rigamarole to hide the windows you're working on? Or to hide the entire *desktop*, yet? Why try to hide what you're working on? That makes no sense.
Mac users would ask the same thing about *nix window managers. Since each document is a task, how can you keep it organized when it keeps opening in different windows that look completely different, or even in a different "desktop" where you can't even see it, for God's sake.Users don't think applications have more than one window; my printout, my email, my expense form, and my customer list are all applications, right? And they're each one window. Oh sure, the menu bar reads "AppleWorks" when I'm working on my expense form and customer list, and "Entourage" when I'm working on my email, but that's one of those weird computer eccentricities. You're saying I can only look at my expense form and customer list together at one time? That as soon as I open one the other also opens automatically? That makes no sense, they have nothing to do with each other. What if I wanted to email my expense form. I have to use two different windows? Two different *desktops*, where I can't even see what I'm working on? You're nuts!
They are organized. Forget about "applications", think about the job you're trying to do. If you're a manufacturer do you have a special workshop just for scewdrivers, another one for chisels, and third for drills, and so on, so every time you build something you have to carry all your work from one workshop to another? On the Mac, you have a document for each thing you're working on, and you open it with whatever tool you want. All the tools and all the documents are right there on the screen, it doesn't hide anything on you. If it did, Mac users would go nuts; there are a lot of long-time Mac users who hate OS X because of this. From the very first Mac from 1984, the OS has tried to be document-centric. The original PICT document format could be opened in graphics, database, and word-processing applications. Apple spent enormous effort to create a document-only API called OpenDoc a while ago. Now I admit they don't always succeed, and OpenDoc was a failure, but this has been the guiding principle behind the Mac from day 1.Think visual documents; anything you can see is a document you can work on. If you can't see it on the screen it doesn't exist, or at least you don't have to worry about it. Forget about "files" and "programs" and you'll get into the mindset of Mac users.
At the risk of being modded "-1, Pedantic", please be aware that the word "LEGO" (all uppercase) is a trademark for LEGO Group A/S, and is a proper name. It is not an all-purpose noun and verb like "Smurf" and should be used as an adjective.
You can say "LEGO Mindstorms", "LEGO bricks", or "LEGO Technic", but "I built some lego with legos" is as jarring as "I built some linux with linuxs".
The first century, like the second, and all the others up to the 20th, had 100 years; that's what "century" means.
The first century lasted from the years 1AD to 101AD. See? 100 years. The second century was from 101 to 201AD, and so on from 1901 to 2001. Twenty centuries. Get it?
I think the Open Source analogy of the article title is particularly apt.
...". Obviously the director did like the way it looked, and the movie character did it differently.
One of the claims of Open Source development is that, with many developers being able to examine the source, bugs will be found quickly.
One problem with this idea is demonstrated by the nature of the "errors" submitted by viewers of the Spider-Man movie. Most are not technical errors, but disagreements like "I don't like the way that looked" or "if I was doing that I'd
The problem, of course, is that making a movie, playing the part of a fictional character, and such is hard work, but complaining about what you don't like is easy. This doesn't bug me too much about movies, but it does bug me about Open Source development.
Take a look a the Bugzilla database sometime. Some bugs are things like crashing or standard noncompliance, but an awful lot are "I don't like the way that looked". I remember a bunch about whether mouse-overs should activate text fields, or what the PgDn should do.
Now, in most cases, the developers are following platform conventions or trying to keep the interface consistent. Unfortunately, like the Spider-Man viewer who hated the logo used in one scene, some Mozilla users simply don't like the decision, no matter the reason.
I agree that, to a certain extent, one has to accept "that's the way it happened in the movie". I hope that the people critiquing computer programs will accept that sometimes "that's the way the program does it".
You have something screwed up; .png files look fine on my OS X machines.
Do other image types appear? If so, open your IE Preferences, click on the "File Helpers" item, scroll down to the image/png data type, double-click it, select "View with browser" for handling, then "OK".
If you mean clear glass thicker at the bottom than the top, sometimes found in old English buildings, the Glass Flow page page at the Urban Legends page someone posted earlier says this is also an artifact of the way early clear glass panes were made. The slabs are uneven, and the builders install them with the thickest portion at the bottom to avoid unbalancing the panes.
If you still think glass is a liquid, tell me why Cartaginian glass, made thousands of years ago, are not puddles, and why obsidian shards milions of years old still have sharp edges.
Spider-man was written during the 60s; when teenagers interested in technology were even greater social outcasts than they are now; technology was associated with the Vietnam war, ROTC, and the military-industrial complex. The "cool kids" were all dropping acid and communing with nature.
Peter Parker was the first anti-establishment teenage super hero. Superman and the Fantastic Four were as straight as could be. Batman was an adult vigilante. But Spider-man was a groovy nerd; many early issues had him inventing chemical and electronic gadgets to solve crimes.
The movie spider-man is none of these; he's now a teenage heartthrob. Since all his powers are biological, he doesn't need to have any technical knowledge at all. Just get into one-ness with your inner spider, and Nature will rescue you. See, the 60s acid-heads were right all along! That is why I hate the biolgical web-shooters.
As for all the posters who will say "but how can a teenager invent what 3M can't"; because he's a technical genius, that's why! This is one of the most important themes from the comic book; that intelligence can be used to make things that help humanity instead of things like napalm.
It looks like the Green Goblin still has his hoverjet and gas bombs, gee I wonder why 3M isn't trying to get its hands on those. Let me guess why... because only villians use technology now.
MS Office for Mac are native Mac OS applications written specifically for the Mac. Microsoft says so, Apple says so.
It is platform-independent so far as it will compile for Mac OS 9 and X, but it is not ported from Windows, it does not use MSC, it is not based on Windows code.
First invent, then publicise.
This guy says he will have a demonstration possible "in a few months". Great! Spend a few months, do the demonstration, then publicise. The university, Nobel Prize committee, and the rest of the world can wait while you finish your invention.
Early publicity will kill your project; you will have to defend your idea from skeptics and cranks, waste time in interviews and business negotiations, and will give competitors information.
Simply invent your invention first. Then the invention can defend and publicise itself, you can hire a lawyer to negotiate, and you can patent the device to block competition.
But you need to actually invent it first.
I know, you believe you actually think and feel but trust me, you are only simulating it. You can't tell, because your feelings are only simulations, but I can tell they are only "close approximatiions".
I'm sure Steve was flogging NeXT to Gil, but J. L. Gasse was pimping for Be even more; he was giving interviews to Apple magazines. I remember reading somewhere Gasse was asking for an outrageous amount of money for Be, so Amelio went with NeXT.
If you're going to blame one person for the demise of Be, blame Gasse.
Every episode of C.S.I. I have seen is just as titillating as any other American TV program. In one episode, prostitutes are killing clients by poisoning their nipples, which is shown over and over in SI swimsuit-style soft core. The hero can't just tell the cops this; no, he has to "investigate" this personally and in "private". Another episode has the hot chick investigating a semen stain and having to find a "matching sample"....
For that matter, why does everyone on this program, even the skid row prostitutes, look like a fashion model?
The other XP APIs people posted, Crystal Space and SDL, are written in C++. Now I have nothing against C++, but if Apple wants native OS X games it would be very useful to have a native, cross-platform, game API.
I have heard of Apple's Game Sprockets project, but AFAIK this is a proprietary Mac API.
Anyone have a suggestion for an XP Objective C game API?