... before the pick-pocket crowd notice these shills... With their neverending supply of cameras provided by the company... Being paid to hand them over to other people they don't know... cameras that are new and thus expensive and in high demand...
There is a difference between following OS guidelines, and imitating another application. OS guidelines set standards for how all applications work, how menus work, what standard keystrokes do what, what happens if you right click or drag. Mozilla is nice, but in many fundamental ways it breaks these guidelines, thus making it harder for average non technical users to use.
That is not inefficiency, that's just plain common sense.
You end with the note that "the moz interface is easily and infinitely malleable. This is a program where people could test out hundreds new ideas on interface design". Great, then it's a nice testbed for ideas... but it's still a mediocre browser.
A previous article (months or years ago) said that it worked by setting up interference patterns in the ultrasonic beam. Just like interference patterns in normal sound can let you make subsonic noises, interference patterns in the ultrasonic beam can create audible sound.
Exactly how they do it? I dunno. I'm not even sure they have released their method to the public yet.
Re:uhh, TLC had this a *looong* time ago
on
Voices in Your Head
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· Score: 2
Yo didn't read the article, did you? This does not LISTEN to people, it does the reverse... it sends a directed 'beam' of sound, that cannot be heard anywhere except inside the beam itself. True, private sound that can be directed just like a beam of light. Read the article, then post.
Re:Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy
on
Spy Fly
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· Score: 2
I loved that series. Some of them, including that one, were quite insightful. Compared to the drivel made by most childrens authors, the Danny Dunn books were far more interesting science fiction, with enough fiction to allow the plot, and enough science to make it believable.
Actually, perhaps this explains the weird offtopic replies ALICE often gives... perhaps ALICE is an accurate model of HIS intelligence. That would explain why he thinks people have little-to-no ego/id/conciousness, and why he thinks ALICE is a good model for human AI.:-)
... it is some modified excerpts from his Thesis or something. In fact, rarely does he even come close to answering the question asked! This 'interview' would have made more sense if you had cut out all the questions, and simply run all his answers together.
Perhaps it was not stated clearly enough in the dialogs to enable it, but cleartype is ONLY FOR FLAT PANELS. It does nothing for CRT monitors, it improves the look of type on laptops and flat-panel displays only.
I have used NetBSD on servers, and was highly impressed with the ease of installing via their source based distro tree (pkgsrc). No comments I have seen have discussed it or compared it to the Linux solutions. Could someone contrast and compare, for my edification at least?
Well, he is currently selling at a rate of about 100 per month... 400 around movies. I averaged that out to 150 per month over the last year, and that's nearly half a million gross. That's respectable, even after you take out parts and labor.
The ability to tell it something, voiced, and have it remind me about it later. I want to be able to add timer/alarm based voice recordings. It does not need to parse the entire language... just certain key words.
Remind me to walk the dog every day at 6pm.
REMIND ME TO (intro keyword, start listening) "walk the dog" recorded verbatim, played back when the timer goes off. EVERY DAY AT 6PM (parsed into an alarm)
It should be able to handle many kinds of timers and alarms:
Remind me to go home you workaholic every weekday at 6pm. Remind me to check for a new mozilla version next Tuesday. Remind me to buy mom a birthday card on September 1st. Remind me to call my brother every Easter. Remind me to check the pizza in 10 minutes. Remind me to check my heart rate every 5 minutes for one hour.
That's all I want. I could care less about every other feature on a stupid PDA... I do not use them. All I need is someting to remind me of things, quickly and easily. A small LCD screen to review reminders, or possibly an IR port (or bluetooth) instead and some PC software.
It would not need to parse quickly... it could take up to a minute to process the speech. It could confirm that it has successfully added by beeping or vibrating for a second... confused parsing or incorrect parsing would cause it to beep or vibrate several times to get your attention.
Power needs would be quite low... the thing could probably go weeks or months on a single charge. I have a Casio Voice-Recording watch that I have not had to change batteries for yet, and it's over a year and a half old. Only parsing a new recording would tax its batteries.
That is my killer feature. When something can do that for me, I will be on it in a hot second. And if someone patents it and sits on it, I'm gonna be suing for prior art, the b**ches.:P
I'm sorry, I am being picky, but this comment is highly inaccurate (though amusing in a satirical fashion). This comment is +1 Funny, not +1 Insightful.
More accurate, though less 'Insightful', would be to say that watching content in any fashion other than the way they dictate is becoming illegal. If you want their content (paid for or not) they demand you watch it their way, and no other. They are not making content illegal, they are making Fair Use and its logical relatives (like Common Sense) illegal.
I believe the big media corps are desperate to hold on to the unnaturally big chunk of power they currently have in the US. I believe they will fail, but go down kicking, screaming, and lobbying.
The 'Players Options' were a giant Kludge, and the knew it. That's why the new optional class guides are much better... everything in them is actually OPTIONAL, and is not much better or worse than the normal abilities. Nor does using those rules break the normal rules.
There are a few minor unbalancing things in the optional rules... I recall one of the added exotic weapons in Swords and Fist was abnormally more powerful than any of the core exotic weapons. However, as a DM you can balance that by allowing them to buy the fancy exotic weapon... just never make a magical sword from one. Eventually they will become powerful enough to craft their own magical sword out of one, but by then the extra damage it does will be negligable compared to their character power.
In short (too late!) yes, Player Options in 2nd edition sucked. They do not in 3rd edition.
Think of the Terrorist Uses!
on
DRM Helmet
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· Score: 5, Funny
With a device like this, if ubiquitous enough, malicious individuals could cause massive harm! Imagine projecting a ripped off copy of Episode 3 onto a plane runway... or taping playboy centerfolds next to stop signs and traffic lights. The carnage! The humanity!
I found the Sarlacc pit scene to be a more believable scene than most of EP2. The lighting is dramatic and real, particularly on the inside shots. The scene was set well, and the action roamed around the set... and in the end, it blew up good.:-)
I'm a little sad to see that era pass. I'm not sure that it should.
is this one: OMB is also asked to consider if it would be more efficient to buy code for office productivity products (and release into the public domain), rather than spend billions to lease software.
It would be fascinating to see what would happen if the USG pumped 100 million into the open source driver and gui industry per year. Good, stable device drivers (for newer hardware) and a solid, easy to use GUI are part of what is lacking in the freenix arena, partly because these projects are not as sexy as some more visible projects.
Freenix GUIs suffer from 'featuritis', where features are implimented while usability suffers. And the driver issue just suffers from lack of incentive by the hardware manufacturers.
What do you think would happen if the Government started pouring money into freenix efforts?
Re:TECHNO is not the same as electronica.
on
lowercase music
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· Score: 2
The fact that you've "been into the whole techno" thing demonstrates the usual laypersons' ineptitude in describing electronica.
Someone can be 'into' a type of music, yet still label it incorrectly, because they are not into the 'scene' surrounding the music. For example, I could care less whether Smashing Pumpkins are Rock, Alternative, or Pop of some various sort... if I said 'Starting with Smashing Pumpkins, I've been into this Rock thing for a while' a lot of purists would leap down my gullet because I get the f***ing label wrong.
Don't be so tightassed. Techno is what made 'Electronica' popular, before Techno it was fringe. Now a lot of people refer to all Electronica by referring to the first sub-genre that boomed. So what. A person does not have to read magazines, websites, and cd liners obsessively to like a genre of music. Telling someone 'they are not a real fan because they get a term wrong' is stupid, IMO.
I admit that your other assertion, that AotC had better action overall, is true. But I disagree with this:
Did anybody really find the "Green Goblin" to be a good bad guy
I loved the Green Goblin. The action scenes were ok, but the real icing was the scenes where he talks to himself... the concept of a completely schizophrenic evil guy was pulled off quite nicely.
They weight their marketing data based on account usage. Unused accounts are unimportant and ignored. Only used accounts are weighted into their marketing information.
Who cares if the picture is washed out? Heck, even if you only get one color out of it (say, the person has blue wallpaper, so only blue reflects well) you will STILL be able to see most of the screen. Anyone who has had broken a pin or two on their monitor can still USE their computer, though it is ugly.
Environmental conditions will add noise to the screen, but noise will not prevent it from working. I believe this system would work rather well even under less optimal conditions.
The worst problem? Flourescant lighting. It flickers 60 times a second, which will add significant noise to the image, made worse if the user is using a refresh rate that is not 60Hz.
But wallpaper? Lighting? That simply makes the signal weaker in one or more colors. It does not make it less accurate, just screws up the color balance. And for this application, color balance really does not matter much.
He was doing satire. That's where you take a salient point about a person or thing and make fun of it.
A 'salient point' about VB is the ads and promotional material that describe how easy it is to create an application using drag and drop. A 'salient point' about C# is that it only compiles to.NET, which Microsoft advertises heavily with web services.
A one liner joke should not be criticised for not covering the whole issue.
Too bad Unreal started great, and ended lame. They put a lot of attention into the first few levels, polishing them to a shiny finish... and leaving many of the later levels to rust, flaking large patches of orange-brown sameness.
For a game that was more consistently good from beginning to end, I'd have to point to Half Life. Other games have equaled it in part, but I have yet to see another game that was as CONSISTENT as Half Life in delivering new, exciting, and interesting levels and challenges from beginning to end instead of petering out and becoming repetetive halfway through.
Slashdot Mirror
... before the pick-pocket crowd notice these shills... With their neverending supply of cameras provided by the company... Being paid to hand them over to other people they don't know... cameras that are new and thus expensive and in high demand...
This should be amusing.
There is a difference between following OS guidelines, and imitating another application. OS guidelines set standards for how all applications work, how menus work, what standard keystrokes do what, what happens if you right click or drag. Mozilla is nice, but in many fundamental ways it breaks these guidelines, thus making it harder for average non technical users to use.
That is not inefficiency, that's just plain common sense.
You end with the note that "the moz interface is easily and infinitely malleable. This is a program where people could test out hundreds new ideas on interface design". Great, then it's a nice testbed for ideas... but it's still a mediocre browser.
A previous article (months or years ago) said that it worked by setting up interference patterns in the ultrasonic beam. Just like interference patterns in normal sound can let you make subsonic noises, interference patterns in the ultrasonic beam can create audible sound.
Exactly how they do it? I dunno. I'm not even sure they have released their method to the public yet.
Yo didn't read the article, did you? This does not LISTEN to people, it does the reverse... it sends a directed 'beam' of sound, that cannot be heard anywhere except inside the beam itself. True, private sound that can be directed just like a beam of light. Read the article, then post.
I loved that series. Some of them, including that one, were quite insightful. Compared to the drivel made by most childrens authors, the Danny Dunn books were far more interesting science fiction, with enough fiction to allow the plot, and enough science to make it believable.
Nice to see I'm not alone.
Actually, perhaps this explains the weird offtopic replies ALICE often gives... perhaps ALICE is an accurate model of HIS intelligence. That would explain why he thinks people have little-to-no ego/id/conciousness, and why he thinks ALICE is a good model for human AI. :-)
... it is some modified excerpts from his Thesis or something. In fact, rarely does he even come close to answering the question asked! This 'interview' would have made more sense if you had cut out all the questions, and simply run all his answers together.
Perhaps it was not stated clearly enough in the dialogs to enable it, but cleartype is ONLY FOR FLAT PANELS. It does nothing for CRT monitors, it improves the look of type on laptops and flat-panel displays only.
I have used NetBSD on servers, and was highly impressed with the ease of installing via their source based distro tree (pkgsrc). No comments I have seen have discussed it or compared it to the Linux solutions. Could someone contrast and compare, for my edification at least?
Well, he is currently selling at a rate of about 100 per month... 400 around movies. I averaged that out to 150 per month over the last year, and that's nearly half a million gross. That's respectable, even after you take out parts and labor.
The ability to tell it something, voiced, and have it remind me about it later. I want to be able to add timer/alarm based voice recordings. It does not need to parse the entire language... just certain key words.
:P
Remind me to walk the dog every day at 6pm.
REMIND ME TO (intro keyword, start listening)
"walk the dog" recorded verbatim, played back when the timer goes off.
EVERY DAY AT 6PM (parsed into an alarm)
It should be able to handle many kinds of timers and alarms:
Remind me to go home you workaholic every weekday at 6pm.
Remind me to check for a new mozilla version next Tuesday.
Remind me to buy mom a birthday card on September 1st.
Remind me to call my brother every Easter.
Remind me to check the pizza in 10 minutes.
Remind me to check my heart rate every 5 minutes for one hour.
That's all I want. I could care less about every other feature on a stupid PDA... I do not use them. All I need is someting to remind me of things, quickly and easily. A small LCD screen to review reminders, or possibly an IR port (or bluetooth) instead and some PC software.
It would not need to parse quickly... it could take up to a minute to process the speech. It could confirm that it has successfully added by beeping or vibrating for a second... confused parsing or incorrect parsing would cause it to beep or vibrate several times to get your attention.
Power needs would be quite low... the thing could probably go weeks or months on a single charge. I have a Casio Voice-Recording watch that I have not had to change batteries for yet, and it's over a year and a half old. Only parsing a new recording would tax its batteries.
That is my killer feature. When something can do that for me, I will be on it in a hot second. And if someone patents it and sits on it, I'm gonna be suing for prior art, the b**ches.
They digitally add many of those spots, they can digitally change them as well. A bit W00t! out to blue screen technology!
I'm sorry, I am being picky, but this comment is highly inaccurate (though amusing in a satirical fashion). This comment is +1 Funny, not +1 Insightful.
More accurate, though less 'Insightful', would be to say that watching content in any fashion other than the way they dictate is becoming illegal. If you want their content (paid for or not) they demand you watch it their way, and no other. They are not making content illegal, they are making Fair Use and its logical relatives (like Common Sense) illegal.
I believe the big media corps are desperate to hold on to the unnaturally big chunk of power they currently have in the US. I believe they will fail, but go down kicking, screaming, and lobbying.
Raven
The 'Players Options' were a giant Kludge, and the knew it. That's why the new optional class guides are much better... everything in them is actually OPTIONAL, and is not much better or worse than the normal abilities. Nor does using those rules break the normal rules.
There are a few minor unbalancing things in the optional rules... I recall one of the added exotic weapons in Swords and Fist was abnormally more powerful than any of the core exotic weapons. However, as a DM you can balance that by allowing them to buy the fancy exotic weapon... just never make a magical sword from one. Eventually they will become powerful enough to craft their own magical sword out of one, but by then the extra damage it does will be negligable compared to their character power.
In short (too late!) yes, Player Options in 2nd edition sucked. They do not in 3rd edition.
With a device like this, if ubiquitous enough, malicious individuals could cause massive harm! Imagine projecting a ripped off copy of Episode 3 onto a plane runway... or taping playboy centerfolds next to stop signs and traffic lights. The carnage! The humanity!
I found the Sarlacc pit scene to be a more believable scene than most of EP2. The lighting is dramatic and real, particularly on the inside shots. The scene was set well, and the action roamed around the set... and in the end, it blew up good. :-)
I'm a little sad to see that era pass. I'm not sure that it should.
That's a neat sig. Simultaneously amusing, self serving, and sneaky. I like.
is this one: OMB is also asked to consider if it would be more efficient to buy code for office productivity products (and release into the public domain), rather than spend billions to lease software.
It would be fascinating to see what would happen if the USG pumped 100 million into the open source driver and gui industry per year. Good, stable device drivers (for newer hardware) and a solid, easy to use GUI are part of what is lacking in the freenix arena, partly because these projects are not as sexy as some more visible projects.
Freenix GUIs suffer from 'featuritis', where features are implimented while usability suffers. And the driver issue just suffers from lack of incentive by the hardware manufacturers.
What do you think would happen if the Government started pouring money into freenix efforts?
The fact that you've "been into the whole techno" thing demonstrates the usual laypersons' ineptitude in describing electronica.
Someone can be 'into' a type of music, yet still label it incorrectly, because they are not into the 'scene' surrounding the music. For example, I could care less whether Smashing Pumpkins are Rock, Alternative, or Pop of some various sort... if I said 'Starting with Smashing Pumpkins, I've been into this Rock thing for a while' a lot of purists would leap down my gullet because I get the f***ing label wrong.
Don't be so tightassed. Techno is what made 'Electronica' popular, before Techno it was fringe. Now a lot of people refer to all Electronica by referring to the first sub-genre that boomed. So what. A person does not have to read magazines, websites, and cd liners obsessively to like a genre of music. Telling someone 'they are not a real fan because they get a term wrong' is stupid, IMO.
Raven
I admit that your other assertion, that AotC had better action overall, is true. But I disagree with this:
Did anybody really find the "Green Goblin" to be a good bad guy
I loved the Green Goblin. The action scenes were ok, but the real icing was the scenes where he talks to himself... the concept of a completely schizophrenic evil guy was pulled off quite nicely.
The Raven
They weight their marketing data based on account usage. Unused accounts are unimportant and ignored. Only used accounts are weighted into their marketing information.
Who cares if the picture is washed out? Heck, even if you only get one color out of it (say, the person has blue wallpaper, so only blue reflects well) you will STILL be able to see most of the screen. Anyone who has had broken a pin or two on their monitor can still USE their computer, though it is ugly.
Environmental conditions will add noise to the screen, but noise will not prevent it from working. I believe this system would work rather well even under less optimal conditions.
The worst problem? Flourescant lighting. It flickers 60 times a second, which will add significant noise to the image, made worse if the user is using a refresh rate that is not 60Hz.
But wallpaper? Lighting? That simply makes the signal weaker in one or more colors. It does not make it less accurate, just screws up the color balance. And for this application, color balance really does not matter much.
He was doing satire. That's where you take a salient point about a person or thing and make fun of it.
.NET, which Microsoft advertises heavily with web services.
A 'salient point' about VB is the ads and promotional material that describe how easy it is to create an application using drag and drop. A 'salient point' about C# is that it only compiles to
A one liner joke should not be criticised for not covering the whole issue.
I prefer ZDoom for Windows as well. I never liked JDoom. Dunno why, just never blew my whistle.
Too bad Unreal started great, and ended lame. They put a lot of attention into the first few levels, polishing them to a shiny finish... and leaving many of the later levels to rust, flaking large patches of orange-brown sameness.
For a game that was more consistently good from beginning to end, I'd have to point to Half Life. Other games have equaled it in part, but I have yet to see another game that was as CONSISTENT as Half Life in delivering new, exciting, and interesting levels and challenges from beginning to end instead of petering out and becoming repetetive halfway through.