I was not too pleased with Qt on Windows. The gui seemed very slugish.
I have not noticed anything like that. I thought the advantage of Opera was that it was supposed to be lightning fast, faster than IE. Also, QT's platform consistency is great.
About reuse, well, TrollTech already spent time doing QT's widgets, so you might as well use them.
To appeal to a wider audience lets start having the option of having circular, triangular, morphing windows.
How on earth did this get modded insightful? Why would you want triangular windows? What possible benefit would that give you? It wouldn't even look cooler, it would just be different (and harder to manage). Also note that arbitrarily-shaped windows are already available for applications that can use them such as Noatun or other themeable media players. For every other application with a sane interface, triangular windows are about the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
And it has the IMO great advantage over Qt in that it uses native widgets where possible. Qt draws its own widgets afaik.
And this is such a great advantage why? QT's themes mean that you can make it look exactly like anything. You can make QT look (and feel) like it's using native widgets, in which case it doesn't matter one tiny bit who is actually doing the drawing. Plus you automatically get themeability if you want it.
OK, a description of the demo. It starts off with Quake III. It is a video of the screen with a hand wearing the glove at the bottom of the frame, next to the gun. To shoot, the guy moves his thumb. To move around, he sort of waves his hand, and the screen magically moves. Or something. I couldn't tell exactly how the movements of his hand were supposed to be translated into movement. The video moves on to Half-Life, then MechWarrior. Then it switches to 3D Studio. Apparently you can control the mouse cursor with it too. Then it showed a 3D hand in the window that mirrored the actions of the guy's hand in the glove (or maybe the other way around). The 3D hand moves around and pulls stuff around and makes a little mouse-thingy out of a few primitives. To me it looked like the real hand was mimicing the on-screen movements and not the other way around. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was a "dramatization."
That demo looks totally fake. It looks like they recorded a video of someone playing Quake, Half-Life, and modeling in 3DS Max with a mouse, then superimposed that picture of someone acting out the movements. I would be very surprised if those on-screen movements were actually made with the glove in real-time. Besides, with no tactile feedback, I imagine it would be pretty hard to "grasp" objects.
Hm. I guess this does work now. I could have sworn it didn't, maybe it was fixed. Oh well. Still, top-level comments shouldn't have "Parent" links, that's just confusing.
How about making the "Parent" link actually work? That's one of my pet peeves with Slashdot: If you click "Parent" it is usually because the parent is below your threshold and you want to read it. Does the "Parent" link acually lower your threshold so you can read the comment? No. Does it even display the parent comment if it is below your threshold? No. It dumps you at the top of the comment page with no explanation and the same threshold you had before.
What a horrible ending! CRC is the big winner here. By threataning to bring a lawsuit they probably wouldn't win they have won all sorts of money and rights to the intellectual "property" contained in MathWorld. This case shows as plain as any I have ever seen the problems with our legal system.
This demonstration version will let you use all of the CrossOver functionality, except that from time to time, you will be given a reminder to purchase our product.
So basically, this will be like Winzip: everyone uses it, nobody pays for it. I wonder how long until the crack comes out...
Cells were "designed" by evolution to grow and reproduce. A species of cell that reproduced over the whole world and survived under any conditions would have been amazingly successful by the standards of evolution. It would have ruined the Earth in the process, but there's nothing preventing that. Simply because no cells ever evolved that could accomplish this feat is proof enough to me that it can't be done.
Exactly. "Nanotechnology" in the traditional sense won't work. The real advances in this field will be advances in biology (which can be seen as a kind of nanotechnology, but its not what this article is about - this article is about the Star Trek crap kind).
2.2.19 is no number to end a kernel series with. It's so ugly and odd. Doesn't 2.2.20 seem like such a better number? It's even and it's got alliteration. Thank goodness for this bug, or we would have never had a proper end to the 2.2.X series.
Yes. Yours is a much more realistic concern, and it quite frankly scares me. Wiping out the human race through genetically engineering super-virii/bacteria, working from existing ones, is much easier than designing a synthetic nanomachine to turn the world into gray goo. I still don't think you could turn the world into gray goo but you could totally destroy the environment without going nearly that far.
I'm not denying that it may eventually (in the far, far, far, far future) be possible to build machines on the complexity scale of living cells. What I am denying is the absurd premise that we will somehow be able to create unstoppable self-replicating machines to turn the world into gray goo. Cells aren't even close to being able to do that. We aren't even close to being able to make cells.
It's easy to demonstrate that it's possible and to put an upper bound on the complexity of a replicater by looking for existing examples. Bacteria are self-replicating machines capable of synthesizing a wide variety of things, and while they're quite complex, understanding them is far from being an insurmountable challenge. Ditto understanding enough to design our own similar machines from scratch.
I have a lot of faith in the abilities of science, but it's going to be a very long time before we can design machines as complex and elegant as bacteria. You're right about the upper bound on complexity, bacteria aren't capable of turning the world into gray goo and I don't think nanomachines ever will be either.
Nanotech weapons? This is the kind of thing where you get visions of little machines, building each other over and over, replicating until they turn the whole world into gray goo, right?
I can't think of anything more rediculous. First of all, how are you going to build a self-replicating machine? The obstacles are so large as to be practically insurmountable. Consider that we've never even come close to building a machine that can make duplicates of itself in the macro-sized world, even using pre-machined parts, and then think how complex it would be to make a microscopic machine that could replicate. First of all, data storage would be a problem. The machine would have to have incredibly advanced molecular-level storage technology, and incredibly advanced tiny molecular storage reading technology to read the information. Then it would have to have a computer to process this information, and very sophisticated sensors to tell where it was, and some sort of locomotion device that worked in three dimensions somehow, and some sort of advanced grabbing arm to move stuff with. Just the grabbing arm itself would be an achievement. How do you expect this machine to grab atoms? With other atoms? It would be a clumsy arm that was built with the things it was supposed to move! Plus, the arm would have to build itself as part of the replicating process, so it couldn't include any components that would be too small for it to build itself.
And the final requirement: Power. Where is this machine going to be powered from? It's going to have to have a lot of power in order to grab atoms, since it will have to break atomic bonds to move the atoms around. It must be a steady, reliable source of power, one that is available everywhere in the world if it is going to turn the whole world into gray goo. Sunlight you say? What is going to collect the sunlight? Solar panels? These solar panels would need to be made of certain atoms which wouldn't be available everywhere. How would the machines replicate if they couldn't find the correct elements to build their solar panels? Remember that these are tiny machines that can only roam tiny distances, they can't go out searching for the elements they need.
One must only look at nature to see what can be accomplished in terms of molecular-sized self-replicating machines. Cells are masterpieces of design, with ingenious mechanisms that are still out of our realm of understanding in some cases, and certainly way out of our ability to design and create on our own. And yet algae is in no danger of turning the whole world into "green goo." It only survives under certain conditions. I don't think man will be able to out-design nature for the forseeable future.
OK. Windows XP has a command line, it is in the start menu. It is much better than the old one, it comes with tab completion (enabled by default, even). However, it is not DOS. DOS is dead. Gone. There still seems to be some sort of emulation there because I can run some old DOS games reasonably well, but it is just emulation.
In supporting 480p, the Gamecube offers a true 60 fps, as the entire screen updates every frame. With a standard television, running at 480i, you will really only effectively get 30fps, as it takes 2 frames to draw a full image.
This isn't entirely true. The GameCube always renders 60 FPS no matter what its hooked up to. If you're using a HDTV you get the full picture. If you're using a regular TV, you still get something that's better than 30 FPS. Regular TVs display an interlaced signal which means that it shows all the odd lines of the picture first, then the even lines afterward. It traces across the screen at 60 Hz but you need two traces to get a full picture. What the GameCube does is send all the odd lines from one frame to the TV, and then it sends all the even lines from the next frame. So it is sort of like 60 FPS even though the TV is only displaying 30 full frames per second. This results in some interesting still-frames, but in motion it looks good.
KDE-Look is a great site! It's got all sorts of great stuff, more than kde.themes.org ever had, and better too. The site has more features, a better interface, and it is updated more often than kde.themes.org, and it is here right now.
I especially like the Noatun skin section, I had no idea that there were such cool skins out there that Noatun could use. Now if only Noatun would stop skipping and get more playlist features, it would be better than XMMS.
Oh, and for a cool wallpaper no matter what desktop you are using, try this artful take on a crash:-)
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I have not noticed anything like that. I thought the advantage of Opera was that it was supposed to be lightning fast, faster than IE. Also, QT's platform consistency is great.
About reuse, well, TrollTech already spent time doing QT's widgets, so you might as well use them.
How on earth did this get modded insightful? Why would you want triangular windows? What possible benefit would that give you? It wouldn't even look cooler, it would just be different (and harder to manage). Also note that arbitrarily-shaped windows are already available for applications that can use them such as Noatun or other themeable media players. For every other application with a sane interface, triangular windows are about the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
Uh... what? You can code faster, with fewer errors, and get more done! I don't think the benefits decrease at all.
And this is such a great advantage why? QT's themes mean that you can make it look exactly like anything. You can make QT look (and feel) like it's using native widgets, in which case it doesn't matter one tiny bit who is actually doing the drawing. Plus you automatically get themeability if you want it.
OK, a description of the demo. It starts off with Quake III. It is a video of the screen with a hand wearing the glove at the bottom of the frame, next to the gun. To shoot, the guy moves his thumb. To move around, he sort of waves his hand, and the screen magically moves. Or something. I couldn't tell exactly how the movements of his hand were supposed to be translated into movement. The video moves on to Half-Life, then MechWarrior. Then it switches to 3D Studio. Apparently you can control the mouse cursor with it too. Then it showed a 3D hand in the window that mirrored the actions of the guy's hand in the glove (or maybe the other way around). The 3D hand moves around and pulls stuff around and makes a little mouse-thingy out of a few primitives. To me it looked like the real hand was mimicing the on-screen movements and not the other way around. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was a "dramatization."
That demo looks totally fake. It looks like they recorded a video of someone playing Quake, Half-Life, and modeling in 3DS Max with a mouse, then superimposed that picture of someone acting out the movements. I would be very surprised if those on-screen movements were actually made with the glove in real-time. Besides, with no tactile feedback, I imagine it would be pretty hard to "grasp" objects.
Routing.
Hm. I guess this does work now. I could have sworn it didn't, maybe it was fixed. Oh well. Still, top-level comments shouldn't have "Parent" links, that's just confusing.
How about making the "Parent" link actually work? That's one of my pet peeves with Slashdot: If you click "Parent" it is usually because the parent is below your threshold and you want to read it. Does the "Parent" link acually lower your threshold so you can read the comment? No. Does it even display the parent comment if it is below your threshold? No. It dumps you at the top of the comment page with no explanation and the same threshold you had before.
What? KDE has PRINT to PDF, so any KDE program that can print can also produce PDFs. It doesn't require a license from Adobe, and its really cool.
What a horrible ending! CRC is the big winner here. By threataning to bring a lawsuit they probably wouldn't win they have won all sorts of money and rights to the intellectual "property" contained in MathWorld. This case shows as plain as any I have ever seen the problems with our legal system.
And yet, it bows under the mighty weight of the Slashdot Effect. Good going guys, now it's back down again.
So basically, this will be like Winzip: everyone uses it, nobody pays for it. I wonder how long until the crack comes out...
RPN is alive and well. There is a *great* program out there that slaps a RPN interface onto a TI-89. The page for it is slashdotted right now along with the rest of calc.org, but you can see the google cache here. When you are using this program it feels like the TI-89 was designed for RPN.
Cells were "designed" by evolution to grow and reproduce. A species of cell that reproduced over the whole world and survived under any conditions would have been amazingly successful by the standards of evolution. It would have ruined the Earth in the process, but there's nothing preventing that. Simply because no cells ever evolved that could accomplish this feat is proof enough to me that it can't be done.
Exactly. "Nanotechnology" in the traditional sense won't work. The real advances in this field will be advances in biology (which can be seen as a kind of nanotechnology, but its not what this article is about - this article is about the Star Trek crap kind).
2.2.19 is no number to end a kernel series with. It's so ugly and odd. Doesn't 2.2.20 seem like such a better number? It's even and it's got alliteration. Thank goodness for this bug, or we would have never had a proper end to the 2.2.X series.
Yes. Yours is a much more realistic concern, and it quite frankly scares me. Wiping out the human race through genetically engineering super-virii/bacteria, working from existing ones, is much easier than designing a synthetic nanomachine to turn the world into gray goo. I still don't think you could turn the world into gray goo but you could totally destroy the environment without going nearly that far.
I'm not denying that it may eventually (in the far, far, far, far future) be possible to build machines on the complexity scale of living cells. What I am denying is the absurd premise that we will somehow be able to create unstoppable self-replicating machines to turn the world into gray goo. Cells aren't even close to being able to do that. We aren't even close to being able to make cells.
I have a lot of faith in the abilities of science, but it's going to be a very long time before we can design machines as complex and elegant as bacteria. You're right about the upper bound on complexity, bacteria aren't capable of turning the world into gray goo and I don't think nanomachines ever will be either.
That's what I think. A long time before.
I can't think of anything more rediculous. First of all, how are you going to build a self-replicating machine? The obstacles are so large as to be practically insurmountable. Consider that we've never even come close to building a machine that can make duplicates of itself in the macro-sized world, even using pre-machined parts, and then think how complex it would be to make a microscopic machine that could replicate. First of all, data storage would be a problem. The machine would have to have incredibly advanced molecular-level storage technology, and incredibly advanced tiny molecular storage reading technology to read the information. Then it would have to have a computer to process this information, and very sophisticated sensors to tell where it was, and some sort of locomotion device that worked in three dimensions somehow, and some sort of advanced grabbing arm to move stuff with. Just the grabbing arm itself would be an achievement. How do you expect this machine to grab atoms? With other atoms? It would be a clumsy arm that was built with the things it was supposed to move! Plus, the arm would have to build itself as part of the replicating process, so it couldn't include any components that would be too small for it to build itself.
And the final requirement: Power. Where is this machine going to be powered from? It's going to have to have a lot of power in order to grab atoms, since it will have to break atomic bonds to move the atoms around. It must be a steady, reliable source of power, one that is available everywhere in the world if it is going to turn the whole world into gray goo. Sunlight you say? What is going to collect the sunlight? Solar panels? These solar panels would need to be made of certain atoms which wouldn't be available everywhere. How would the machines replicate if they couldn't find the correct elements to build their solar panels? Remember that these are tiny machines that can only roam tiny distances, they can't go out searching for the elements they need.
One must only look at nature to see what can be accomplished in terms of molecular-sized self-replicating machines. Cells are masterpieces of design, with ingenious mechanisms that are still out of our realm of understanding in some cases, and certainly way out of our ability to design and create on our own. And yet algae is in no danger of turning the whole world into "green goo." It only survives under certain conditions. I don't think man will be able to out-design nature for the forseeable future.
OK. Windows XP has a command line, it is in the start menu. It is much better than the old one, it comes with tab completion (enabled by default, even). However, it is not DOS. DOS is dead. Gone. There still seems to be some sort of emulation there because I can run some old DOS games reasonably well, but it is just emulation.
This isn't entirely true. The GameCube always renders 60 FPS no matter what its hooked up to. If you're using a HDTV you get the full picture. If you're using a regular TV, you still get something that's better than 30 FPS. Regular TVs display an interlaced signal which means that it shows all the odd lines of the picture first, then the even lines afterward. It traces across the screen at 60 Hz but you need two traces to get a full picture. What the GameCube does is send all the odd lines from one frame to the TV, and then it sends all the even lines from the next frame. So it is sort of like 60 FPS even though the TV is only displaying 30 full frames per second. This results in some interesting still-frames, but in motion it looks good.
I especially like the Noatun skin section, I had no idea that there were such cool skins out there that Noatun could use. Now if only Noatun would stop skipping and get more playlist features, it would be better than XMMS.
Oh, and for a cool wallpaper no matter what desktop you are using, try this artful take on a crash :-)