The Mona Lisa is art. It has a very high value tied to it, but the artist never saw any of htat value. He created it because of his love of the creation of it, not because he was going to make big money for it.
He certainly was paid big money for it. Da Vinci worked on commission, and for specific people most of his life, including the Pope, the Duke Of Milan and others.
So their choice is to sell my information behind my back (but legally, since it's in the contract) and increase profits, or not make a profit and keep my information secure. I would prefer a company *not* have that kind of power over me.
Which part of "Opt In" don't you understand?
You have more to worry about if you own a credit card. Much much more.
We know that Valve must be in the wrong here. After all, Vivendi has a long history of keeping the developer's/creative's best interests in mind. Anyone remember Vivendi's excellent (and forward-thinking) handling of mp3.com? (VU sold the domain, but not the music itself, to CNet, presumably for One Hundred Billion Dollars, as well as some sexual favors and two FREE Igia nail clippers.)
That's a completely different part of the company to Sierra. Just in case you were wondering.
Not that Sierra really exists in any way other than brand name as of this past month, but anyway...
Valve: We're going to eventually cut you guys outta the picture and begin distributing the game via the internet and our own in-house publishing solution instead of signing our games away to you forever.
Sierra: Oh no you don't...
I hope valve wins, it'd be nice to see these large game publishers dissapear.
You missed the part where Valve signed a large contract with Sierra, and have been paid millions since 1999 to develop Half Life 2 for Siera... and are now trying to breach that contract.
No, those corps tried to use EXISTING LAWS against Microsoft, while you may not agree with those laws they didn't ask for new ones. Microsoft, OTOH, is trying to have new laws passed to help them.
No, Microsoft's not. In this case, they're trying to prevent more legislation (pro-Open Source as it may be) from being passed.
That's right... of course a lot of use Geeks are also at fault since a good number of us have told friends, families, even clients that "no, you can't get a virus from a picture".
That was somewhat shortsighted, wasn't it?
Anything involving compression is susceptible to exploits. We knew this back in the 80s with BBS file-bombs - specially crafted files which expanded to near infinite size when unzipped, taking up the entire hard-drive of the unwitting victim.
Just wait until the postscript and PDF viruses hit. (The perfect Unix vector would appear to be postscript or PDF). Or font viruses. You'll be very unhappy.
The only difference is size and placement. That's not innovation; if it was, I could sell IE with a green icon instead of blue and call it "innovative new technology."
Please yourself.
The info-bar approach is much easier to use, and gives more more readily available feedback than the "icon in the statusbar" approach.
Given that this is the case, they obviously did something better in their different design.
If that doesn't count as innovation, your bar is set too high. Not everything is a revolutionary change. And Firefox still copied it from IE - because it was a good innovation.
I was playing with 1.0PR last night and found the firebird developers have already mimicked IE. The "info bar" which displays when something is blocked is blatantly "stolen" from IE.
The very first version of AdBlock had a notification for when a pop-up was blocked (an unobtrusive exclamation mark in the bottom-right corner or the screen).
Who's "blatantly stealing" from whom?
Just a hint here, Skippy, but you might want to compare and contrast the picture of the info-bar to a "small unobtrusive exclamation mark in the bottom-right corner of the screen". Those two concepts? Not very similar at all, I'm afraid. One's a bar at the top of the screen which gives you pretty detailed but brief information as to what has been blocked and allows you to fix it, and you see, the other is a small unobtrusive exclamation mark in the bottom-right corner which doesn't actually tell you what or why something has been blocked. And looks completely different, it being a small exclamation mark and not a bar.
Just stop being so snipey. The IE team came up with something innovative for once - get over it.
Interestingly enough, we never "ignored" standards. We spent a huge amount of time understanding and evaluating the existing standards. SVG and CSS both were passed on because they weren't adaquate to meet our needs. WinFX is a platform for the next decade or longer - we can't start with a base that doesn't meet our needs.
What a load of shit. That mentality is where the "embrace and extend" came from. It might not meet Microsoft's needs, but CSS and SVG are the bloody standards that people are using! What do they know about the coming decade that we don't?
Would you care to explain to the crowd what you think CSS and SVG are "standards" for?
From what I've seen, they're standards used on web pages.
Avalon is not a HTML-based UI. You don't write web pages for the UI for Longhorn. So which bit of CSS and SVG do you think would be sufficient without modification to be used for generic client-side API use?
HTML, by the way, was never meant to have an IMG tag. By your logic, it still wouldn't have one today. Similarly, we'd only ever use 7-bit ASCII and not Unicode.
Ahh.... so something you don't agree with or can't see equates to rampant speculation reguardless of the foundation. Your POV does not make my post speculation.
No, but the fact that yet again you refused to provide any kind of examples does.
You seem to be very confused. XBOX is basically a GeForce3 system with some extra vertex processors, yes it supports D3D but your assumptions about APIs are wrong. NVIDIA actually extended D3D on the XBOX with a few OpenGL like features that don't even exist today on Windows versions of D3D. So rather than D3D giving hardware the advantage it holds developers back, in a situation where hardware developers are free to extend (as they can with OpenGL) they do and bring innovative hardware features to developers early. In the unique case of the XBOX NVIDIA actually threw in a few extra functions they'd always wanted to expose on Windows D3D but couldn't because D3D didn't let them. With the shackles off on XBOX they did
Which OpenGL-like features are those that you're claiming they added? I've seen plenty of not-normally-in-Direct3D functions in the XBOX development libraries, but none of them look even remotely like OpenGL.
When was the last time OpenGL allowed you to insert rendering fencepost callbacks in the render queue?
Answer: it doesn't.
Perhaps you could provide more details instead of rampant speculation.
Except it is relevant because Reiser4 has metadata built-in. WinFS is supposed to be built on top of NTFS but its (NTFS+WinFS) purpose is similar to that of Reiser4.
NTFS has always had metadata built in. That's not what WinFS provides.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've never had a Linux system become completely unable to boot because of a bad video driver.
Apparently you've never run it on a system which has the mobile S3Virge chipset. It'll completely hardlock the system every time - even when probing for the device using YaST.
I couldn't give a flying fuck how safe YOU feel driving that speed. It's the poor schmuck you run into I worry about.
Kid runs out into road. Splat.
Damn stupid kid shouldn't have been playing on the freeway. The freeway is NOT for pedestrians.
Now me personally, no problem with speeding. I do, however, have huge problems with cyclists who pretend to be vehicles until they hit a stop light, and then get up on the sidewalk and blow through the crosswalk at full speed.
Not only is that illegal (bikes are vehicles according to the law), but if I'm turning right, I'm looking for a pedestrian-speed object to abort my turn. I'm not going to keep looking right long enough to see a cyclist going at 20mph through the crosswalk without looking.
Diffusely focusing it, as suggested by the original poster, however, does affect its coherence. Unless you're claiming that diffusing a light source has no effect on its coherence, which is an argument I'd love to see you back up.
In fact, they almost certainly focus the light, to make sure that they only get a strong signal back from where they expect the surface to be. So even if you held the mouse up right to your eye, your retina is far enough away that the laser would be unlikely to cause damage (aside from the fact that they use an IR laser, so most of the light wouldn't get absorbed by your retina anyway).
Highly unlikely as that completely removes the possibility of using interference on the surface being lit as a way of determining how the mouse is being moved - which is the feature which would allow it to be used on any surface.
Also, the original poster was right about the damage from lasers. The reason they're dangerous is that when the light is collimated, the intensity doesn't drop off with distance the way it does with ordinary light. If a laser beam were to get into your eye, it wouldn't matter how wide your pupils were since the beam is narrowly confined to begin with. It also wouldn't matter whether your eye tried to focus on it or not, since a ray passing through a lens still comes out as a ray.
That's completely incorrect. Even lasers have a coherence length, so their intensity does drop off over time - and it will anyway, even if just by scattering and absorption.
And, again, the reason it's a problem is because parallel light gets focused to a spot on your retina. If you look around the web, you'll see that the spot it gets focused to is on the order of the size of a blood cell. All of the energy of the beam gets focused into that area because it is a parallel beam - and your pupil opens wider in response to it automatically.
As for LEDs being coherent... that's great and everything, but nearly every ultrabright LED in consumer electronics is covered by a glass lens which spreads and diffuses the light making it incoherent.
Lasers are absolutely not inherently more dangerous than any other form of light. The danger comes from the amplitude of light that enters your eye, which is a function of the power of the source, the distance, and the focusing. So assuming they focus the laser as diffusely as they focus the red light from current optical mice, it's no more dangerous.
1. In that case, why use a laser at all? Why not use an ultrabright red LED? To have any benefit in using a laser at all, they must be making use of interference effects, which means they need a coherent light source. Which meas that no, they won't diffusely focus the light at all.
2. The danger comes from the fact that laser light is planar, and because of this not only will your eye will attempt to focus it, and will open the pupil wider in response to it at the same time, for maximum retinal damage.
According to modern definitions, the unqualified word "mass" refers to invariant mass (which for massive particles is called "rest mass", although that term makes no sense for photons which can never be at rest). Thus, photons are referred to as massless particles.
The kind of mass you're talking about is nowadays referred to variously as "mass-energy", "effective mass", "relativistic mass", or just "energy" when people feel like slurring the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
The Mona Lisa is art. It has a very high value tied to it, but the artist never saw any of htat value. He created it because of his love of the creation of it, not because he was going to make big money for it.
He certainly was paid big money for it. Da Vinci worked on commission, and for specific people most of his life, including the Pope, the Duke Of Milan and others.
Learn some history.
And, no, I don't download from their music store. I use it to sample music before pirating it
Ah, so you're not just paranoid. You're thieving scum as well. Ok.
Which part of "don't want to be dealing with someone who doesn't have my best interests at heart" don't *you* understand?
Yet you promote Apple. Who don't have your best interests at heart.
Who do you deal with?
So their choice is to sell my information behind my back (but legally, since it's in the contract) and increase profits, or not make a profit and keep my information secure. I would prefer a company *not* have that kind of power over me.
Which part of "Opt In" don't you understand?
You have more to worry about if you own a credit card. Much much more.
BUt is my name attached to that?
No, and it never has been.
I don't want that, and I can't trust TiVo *not* to sell my name.
I'm surprised by that - especially because, IIRC, TiVo is opt-in.
Why don't you trust them? What reason have they given you not to trust them?
We know that Valve must be in the wrong here. After all, Vivendi has a long history of keeping the developer's/creative's best interests in mind. Anyone remember Vivendi's excellent (and forward-thinking) handling of mp3.com? (VU sold the domain, but not the music itself, to CNet, presumably for One Hundred Billion Dollars, as well as some sexual favors and two FREE Igia nail clippers.)
That's a completely different part of the company to Sierra. Just in case you were wondering.
Not that Sierra really exists in any way other than brand name as of this past month, but anyway...
From what I've gathered, there were minimal (zero?) VU/Sierra development funds involved. It was all fronted by Valve.
That was for HalfLife if you read the story. Sierra have been funding Valve with several million $'s per year since 1999.
(It's amazing what you hear smoking on the loading bay at Sierra's HQ).
Valve: We're going to eventually cut you guys outta the picture and begin distributing the game via the internet and our own in-house publishing solution instead of signing our games away to you forever.
Sierra: Oh no you don't...
I hope valve wins, it'd be nice to see these large game publishers dissapear.
You missed the part where Valve signed a large contract with Sierra, and have been paid millions since 1999 to develop Half Life 2 for Siera... and are now trying to breach that contract.
But hey, stick it to the man, right?
No, those corps tried to use EXISTING LAWS against Microsoft, while you may not agree with those laws they didn't ask for new ones. Microsoft, OTOH, is trying to have new laws passed to help them.
No, Microsoft's not. In this case, they're trying to prevent more legislation (pro-Open Source as it may be) from being passed.
Way to misinterpret the situation.
Pure Capitalism doesn't involve the goverment to the level that Microsoft has.
Sun Microsystems, Netscape, Real Networks, AOL, Oracle, Caldera and Novell can be blamed for that.
They tried to use the Government against Microsoft. Until that point, Microsoft didn't use lobbyists. They didn't believe in them.
Well, now they know differently.
But hey, you were cheering during the antitrust trial, right? Well, look what you created.
That's right... of course a lot of use Geeks are also at fault since a good number of us have told friends, families, even clients that "no, you can't get a virus from a picture".
That was somewhat shortsighted, wasn't it?
Anything involving compression is susceptible to exploits. We knew this back in the 80s with BBS file-bombs - specially crafted files which expanded to near infinite size when unzipped, taking up the entire hard-drive of the unwitting victim.
Just wait until the postscript and PDF viruses hit. (The perfect Unix vector would appear to be postscript or PDF). Or font viruses. You'll be very unhappy.
The only difference is size and placement. That's not innovation; if it was, I could sell IE with a green icon instead of blue and call it "innovative new technology."
Please yourself.
The info-bar approach is much easier to use, and gives more more readily available feedback than the "icon in the statusbar" approach.
Given that this is the case, they obviously did something better in their different design.
If that doesn't count as innovation, your bar is set too high. Not everything is a revolutionary change. And Firefox still copied it from IE - because it was a good innovation.
The very first version of AdBlock had a notification for when a pop-up was blocked (an unobtrusive exclamation mark in the bottom-right corner or the screen).
Who's "blatantly stealing" from whom?
Just a hint here, Skippy, but you might want to compare and contrast the picture of the info-bar to a "small unobtrusive exclamation mark in the bottom-right corner of the screen". Those two concepts? Not very similar at all, I'm afraid. One's a bar at the top of the screen which gives you pretty detailed but brief information as to what has been blocked and allows you to fix it, and you see, the other is a small unobtrusive exclamation mark in the bottom-right corner which doesn't actually tell you what or why something has been blocked. And looks completely different, it being a small exclamation mark and not a bar.
Just stop being so snipey. The IE team came up with something innovative for once - get over it.
Then you're be wrong. Both Inkscape and Sodipodi are tools along the lines of CorelDraw, and guess what, they use SVG as their format!
And they use GTK+ as their toolset. SVG as it stands is NOT a good way to go for UI design + development.
Interestingly enough, we never "ignored" standards. We spent a huge amount of time understanding and evaluating the existing standards. SVG and CSS both were passed on because they weren't adaquate to meet our needs. WinFX is a platform for the next decade or longer - we can't start with a base that doesn't meet our needs.
What a load of shit. That mentality is where the "embrace and extend" came from. It might not meet Microsoft's needs, but CSS and SVG are the bloody standards that people are using! What do they know about the coming decade that we don't?
Would you care to explain to the crowd what you think CSS and SVG are "standards" for?
From what I've seen, they're standards used on web pages.
Avalon is not a HTML-based UI. You don't write web pages for the UI for Longhorn. So which bit of CSS and SVG do you think would be sufficient without modification to be used for generic client-side API use?
HTML, by the way, was never meant to have an IMG tag. By your logic, it still wouldn't have one today. Similarly, we'd only ever use 7-bit ASCII and not Unicode.
Ahh.... so something you don't agree with or can't see equates to rampant speculation reguardless of the foundation. Your POV does not make my post speculation.
No, but the fact that yet again you refused to provide any kind of examples does.
As the phrase goes, put up or shut up.
You seem to be very confused. XBOX is basically a GeForce3 system with some extra vertex processors, yes it supports D3D but your assumptions about APIs are wrong. NVIDIA actually extended D3D on the XBOX with a few OpenGL like features that don't even exist today on Windows versions of D3D. So rather than D3D giving hardware the advantage it holds developers back, in a situation where hardware developers are free to extend (as they can with OpenGL) they do and bring innovative hardware features to developers early. In the unique case of the XBOX NVIDIA actually threw in a few extra functions they'd always wanted to expose on Windows D3D but couldn't because D3D didn't let them. With the shackles off on XBOX they did
Which OpenGL-like features are those that you're claiming they added? I've seen plenty of not-normally-in-Direct3D functions in the XBOX development libraries, but none of them look even remotely like OpenGL.
When was the last time OpenGL allowed you to insert rendering fencepost callbacks in the render queue?
Answer: it doesn't.
Perhaps you could provide more details instead of rampant speculation.
Except it is relevant because Reiser4 has metadata built-in. WinFS is supposed to be built on top of NTFS but its (NTFS+WinFS) purpose is similar to that of Reiser4.
NTFS has always had metadata built in. That's not what WinFS provides.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've never had a Linux system become completely unable to boot because of a bad video driver.
Apparently you've never run it on a system which has the mobile S3Virge chipset. It'll completely hardlock the system every time - even when probing for the device using YaST.
I couldn't give a flying fuck how safe YOU feel driving that speed. It's the poor schmuck you run into I worry about.
Kid runs out into road. Splat.
Damn stupid kid shouldn't have been playing on the freeway. The freeway is NOT for pedestrians.
Now me personally, no problem with speeding. I do, however, have huge problems with cyclists who pretend to be vehicles until they hit a stop light, and then get up on the sidewalk and blow through the crosswalk at full speed.
Not only is that illegal (bikes are vehicles according to the law), but if I'm turning right, I'm looking for a pedestrian-speed object to abort my turn. I'm not going to keep looking right long enough to see a cyclist going at 20mph through the crosswalk without looking.
See http://www.intl-light.com/handbook/ch04.html - look at the top of the page.
Holography doesn't involve diffusing the laser light. I was talking specifically about diffusion - as mentioned by the original poster.
Focusing laser light doesn't affect its coherence
Diffusely focusing it, as suggested by the original poster, however, does affect its coherence. Unless you're claiming that diffusing a light source has no effect on its coherence, which is an argument I'd love to see you back up.
In fact, they almost certainly focus the light, to make sure that they only get a strong signal back from where they expect the surface to be. So even if you held the mouse up right to your eye, your retina is far enough away that the laser would be unlikely to cause damage (aside from the fact that they use an IR laser, so most of the light wouldn't get absorbed by your retina anyway).
Highly unlikely as that completely removes the possibility of using interference on the surface being lit as a way of determining how the mouse is being moved - which is the feature which would allow it to be used on any surface.
Also, the original poster was right about the damage from lasers. The reason they're dangerous is that when the light is collimated, the intensity doesn't drop off with distance the way it does with ordinary light. If a laser beam were to get into your eye, it wouldn't matter how wide your pupils were since the beam is narrowly confined to begin with. It also wouldn't matter whether your eye tried to focus on it or not, since a ray passing through a lens still comes out as a ray.
That's completely incorrect. Even lasers have a coherence length, so their intensity does drop off over time - and it will anyway, even if just by scattering and absorption.
And, again, the reason it's a problem is because parallel light gets focused to a spot on your retina. If you look around the web, you'll see that the spot it gets focused to is on the order of the size of a blood cell. All of the energy of the beam gets focused into that area because it is a parallel beam - and your pupil opens wider in response to it automatically.
As for LEDs being coherent... that's great and everything, but nearly every ultrabright LED in consumer electronics is covered by a glass lens which spreads and diffuses the light making it incoherent.
Lasers are absolutely not inherently more dangerous than any other form of light. The danger comes from the amplitude of light that enters your eye, which is a function of the power of the source, the distance, and the focusing. So assuming they focus the laser as diffusely as they focus the red light from current optical mice, it's no more dangerous.
1. In that case, why use a laser at all? Why not use an ultrabright red LED? To have any benefit in using a laser at all, they must be making use of interference effects, which means they need a coherent light source. Which meas that no, they won't diffusely focus the light at all.
2. The danger comes from the fact that laser light is planar, and because of this not only will your eye will attempt to focus it, and will open the pupil wider in response to it at the same time, for maximum retinal damage.
M$FT pays a dividend of 0.29%. For the biggest corporation in the country to pay such a low amount is stock fraud.
Microsoft isn't the biggest corporation in the country. It's not even close. You're thinking of Walmart.
According to modern definitions, the unqualified word "mass" refers to invariant mass (which for massive particles is called "rest mass", although that term makes no sense for photons which can never be at rest). Thus, photons are referred to as massless particles.
The kind of mass you're talking about is nowadays referred to variously as "mass-energy", "effective mass", "relativistic mass", or just "energy" when people feel like slurring the difference.
Really? Where did you study?
UMIST cosmology course
Google search on term "rest mass" at UMIST, in the UK
Similar google search on Stanford in the US
You can run the same search on Berkeley, Princeton... you name it. You'll get very very similar results.
So either no-one's using the modern definitions, or you're talking about a very specific subfield where they've defined their own terminology.