Bloody hell, do people actually READ the post before commenting? First someone posted a $150 item when he CLEARLY asked for sub $50 ones, and now this! A suggestion for a laser pointer where he said "For example, a small laser pointer keychain I bought him a couple of years ago still provides tons of entertainment. "
This should be the topmost comment for all of the 'Stop taking away MY FREEDOM' type people.
Just wonderfully stated and spot on. The selfishness and narrow mindedness of people continues to amaze and infuriate me. I'm indeed glad to read great comments like yours to even out somewhat the arguments.
And of course, yours is a lot more insightful and better thought out than 'This here country was dangit founded on 'Freedom' and taxes ain't free... so I want me some more money'.
Bingo... Much of this is true here in Australia too, which is kinda my point.
All this 'Socialism' is a bad word stuff at the moment is scary. You want a country where everyone has a chance at a good life, and those that have made it good don't have the mindset that all the unwashed rabble "should bugger off because they are obviously lazy and don't work hard enough."
If you spend that bit of money on making sure everyone gets a chance you get really huge returns by having a much better educated, more healthy and happier populous... but hey, these sorts of people just want to have their money and sneer at everyone else.
Seriously, this insanely stupid "It's against our freedoms to be taxed" idea is insane.
You live in a country that has a government that provides services. Roads, schools, hospitals etc. etc.
These things need to be funded. The people who benefit from said things should fund them with some of their earnings because they are able to earn the money in the first place due to the services provided by said country.
And don't start that 'Well I don't use X or Y services, so why should I have to pay for it?' bullshit. If only the people who used X service paid for it when they used it, well... how the hell would social security work? You can't well pay for that when you need it, because you don't have the money in the first place.
People like you, and Joe the Plumber are either seriously selfish and don't see the common good in everyone being helped in a prosperous nation, or seriously dense in that you just don't get how it's fair, and instead just see the simpleton's equation of: I earn money, it's mine, not yours.
Or both.
Seriously, grow up, stop saying anything you don't like is 'Infringing on your freedoms', because it's not, you're just being selfish.
All for computer education in schools (of course, I make my living programming)... BUT.
A laptop per child? For what really? It's just not needed. Have excellent rooms of computers where the kids can do work etc. in a supervised environment in and out of classes (heck, have one room that has no scheduled classes in it, just for kids to do extra curricular stuff).
But give all kids a laptop? A real waste I think, a real waste.
I'm not sure why in your steps you have 'Download full CCC installer'... why not just download the display driver only? They always give the option. The full CCC doesn't even give temp readings from the card, so I'm keen to give Tray Tools a go, being a media pc in my entertainment unit, I like to keep things quiet, but in doing so you sometimes have to keep an eye on temps.
I have an older 9550 ATI in one box and my more powerful machine has an 8800 nVidia in it.
As far as large, clunky drivers go, ATI is king of the hill... their setup that requires.Net to install, the bloated and resource hungry Catalyst Control Center... it's ugly.
nVidia on the otherhand seems to be far more lightweight and fits in better with Windows.
But performance wise I haven't really had anything to complain about though, and I can't think of instances of actually cursing the drivers for not working...
I've never been loyal to either really, when it comes time to do an upgrade I research on the web what card people are saying gives best bang for buck in my pricerange, I don't give a hoot who makes it.
So, they tried this crap as a trial run in Australia, telling everyone it was going to become the policy... except, well, enough people saw it for what it was, which is purely trying to make even more money... and got the ACCC (Australian Competition & Consumer Commission) to rule it not allowed.
Huzzah for Australia, but man... eBay can't be going too well if they're going to keep trying this crap.
They're going to discover people aren't quite as loyal as they may have thought.
We love it ourselves, and am finally close to launching our large web application that has its client completely encoded in it.
It's being really actively developed (ie. Now you have Flash OR DHTML as a runtime for the same chunk of code... which is pretty cool), there is quite a large group of people using it (the forums are very active). The company that leads the development, Laszlo Systems, is doing well for themselves with a variety of spin of services and the like (we are in direct contact with them).
So, yeah, if you're after a language that gives you an Object Orientated way of programming web clients that can render in either Flash or DHTML, and does so with no cost (not for the coding environment or server licensing fees), then I highly recommend it.
Of course... I would say that as I'm pretty bloody proficient in it now and want to be a valued resource when it takes over the world:)
My language of use for the past 3 years, OpenLaszlo has brilliant doco right there on the site. With a reference guide that lists all the objects, methods and events with live, editable examples for many.
And then if the documentation doesn't cover what you want, there's the great forums which have helped me out of plenty of sticky coding situations.
The doco was what drew us to OpenLaszlo in the first place. Well, that and the fact it's open source helped a lot!
I just don't get how they can be saying this at all.
Ok... so from the article we have:
Take a 1999 interview with Gamespy, for instance, in which he lays out the future timeline for the development of 3D game rendering that has turned out to be remarkably prescient in hindsight:
2006-7: CPU's become so fast and powerful that 3D hardware will be only marginally beneficial for rendering, relative to the limits of the human visual system, therefore 3D chips will likely be deemed a waste of silicon (and more expensive bus plumbing), so the world will transition back to software-driven rendering. And, at this point, there will be a new renaissance in non-traditional architectures such as voxel rendering and REYES-style microfacets, enabled by the generality of CPU's driving the rendering process. If this is a case, then the 3D hardware revolution sparked by 3dfx in 1997 will prove to only be a 10-year hiatus from the natural evolution of CPU-driven rendering.
Which they say is remarkably true.
HUH?
So, all these new GPUs really don't speed up your machine? So I can take my nvidia 8800 OUT of my box, leave it to an onboard graphics chipset and I'll be getting the same performance will I?
Yeah.
Right.
I don't see AT ALL how they're getting this right?
Please someone enlighten me, as I'm not seeing it from where I'm sitting.
Except that they are even older and even further down their phasing out path, so the chances of there being a magnetic tape reader in 25 years is even more slim than a CD, DVD or USB drive reader.
But again, why just store it on one format? Storage media is cheap as chips, so rather than taking a punt on which one will still be readable, throw it on all possible formats.
Although your point about graphic format is a good one. Yeah, again, pick a bunch of different formats and you should hit gold with at least one of them being still readable in 25 years.
With the prevalence of jpegs around today, and being used for storage pretty much everywhere I'd wager there'd be something that can read them in 25 years.
But yes, don't put all your eggs in one basket in media or image format.
Why not store the data on a: * DVD * Pile of CDs * USB drive * SD card * xD card * Hard drive
And a choice few in hard copy.
Seriously... with the price of these things, and the timeframe, surely you can afford to store it on all of these things and put them all in? Plus it'll be fascinating in 25 years time to see how many are still readable... all? None? Some?
I currently do it one day a week, and work better for it, the change of pace, the ability to not have to travel for the one day all works really well. I have some of my best coding days when I work from home.
BUT
You really do need that real facetime with people, and the office environment with your colleagues to keep it all working.
I would say you need AT LEAST 2 days a week in office to make it work.
Unless what you're doing is a real 'package' of work that is self contained and can be done without any real collaboration until you've finished it.
Exactly... For the year 2000 we held a street party, which obviously involves lots of alcohol, and involved fireworks etc. My family held it, and we paid for the public liability insurance, and it was only a couple of hundred dollars for an event like that, so one would guess a Lan party might be even cheaper.
The multiple channel thing isn't their fault actually, it's a restriction enforced by the government, they're not allowed to multicast SD channels until... erm... next year or something. It was something to do with the Foxtel deal I think.
But yeah, I long for the day when whoever is showing the olympics gives us multiple channels to pick what we want to watch.
Because our esteemed broadcaster, Channel 7, decided that it wouldn't stream anything of note at all online live.... at all.
Rather than, oh, I don't know, streaming what was being shown on tv onto the web (with ads and all, hence just the damn same revenue possibility, only with more viewers), they decided to occasionally stream some match that no-one was actually interested in at all, while they showed the 'good stuff' on tv. Which sucked, because in Australia most of the good stuff is happening while we're at work.
Except, well, channel seven's coverage has been ABYSMAL.
They: * Spend half their time showing recaps and highlights of stuff that's already happened instead of showing things that are ACTUALLY ON RIGHT NOW * Spend a sizeable chunk of their time broadcasting Australian Rules Football matches instead of the Olympics! For god sakes! I'm sure the footy fans can live without a bloody live football match during the Olympics... show the games when the Olympics are not happening RIGHT NOW! * Spend a huge amount of time advertising all the shows we don't want to watch on their channel that will be on after the olympics, including one horrendously insulting one where they show some Olympic gold moment, then a bit from one of their shows, then an olympic moment, then one of their shows, all the while with soaring music and a voice over being overly earnest. Trying to suggest that they are reaching for gold, and doing their personal best and trying to compare themselves to Olympic athelets when showing Australia's next Top Model is, frankly disgusting. * Then when they do show anything live, they seem to like showing heats and almost entire matches of deciding games of hockey or the like rather than showing finals of things that are happening RIGHT NOW.
Urgh, the coverage of the games in Australia this year has been downright pathetic, and I hope Channel 7 gets a downturn rather than an upturn in their ratings to punish them for treating them with the utter contempt they have.
All I was saying was that the Microsoft tech, which got the small billing, looked to be the more interesting and useful now compared to the other tech which got prime billing.
You know, because Microsoft is 'evil', so doesn't get attention, but a University is wholly 'good' so gets top billing.
And also, you're telling me there aren't a heap of research time spent on ways of doing things that are overly complex and impractical just because the researchers want to do so, when there is, in fact, a far simpler approach?
Yes, some of those ridiculous ways of doing things are done for the learnings involved, but that doesn't mean we all have to ooh and ahh over them while they're in their research mode.
I don't think anyone looked at a gigantic radio back in the day and said 'Man, that's useless, that lets me listen to stuff from thin air'. They didn't say that because that was all there was.
I can look at something like this and feel that it's slightly less useful because it's prime two applications are 'better res and exposure' which are indeed already available using a better camera, and 'removing unwanted things from the video'... which is something I quite detest in the world of digital photography and the like today (let's not show the world as it is, warts and all, let's scrub it until it's the sterile version we hoped it would be). And while it has applications in film making, well, they wouldn't be using the consumer cameras this is all aimed at.
Just chill out, I don't fail to see the smarts in this, don't go ape over anyone who doesn't like a bit of tech you do.
And don't think that the views of anyone on Slashdot represent the 'norm' at all.
If they did, we'd all be using command line only interfaces on linux with no driver support for anything and having to code anything we wanted in a new software product ourselves, because, well, if we want it, 'why don't you fix it yourself then?'
Really, the ability for their software to 'unwrap' a 3D object and allow you to fiddle with it as you wish is very cool.
And not limited to a 'static' scene.
And, really, if you're going to go to the effort of videoing a scene, then photographing the scene, then passing the video and the photos through their software. All to get better exposure and resolution.
Um.
Wouldn't it be a far better cost/effort equation to just buy a better HD camera in the damn first place?
He's not charging anything, this is a guy with an old turntable, a Dell, the software that came with his SoundBlaster and a copy of MultiMediaJukebox to convert to MP3 and Roxio to burn to DVD.
It's just a guy working with what he has, and I seriously doubt he has the room or the time to create 4 different formats for every one of the 4000 tracks he has.
I was actually pretty shocked to learn that the footstep part wasn't known to be CG. I figured it had been a video presentation that led into those real fireworks seen from inside the stadium. Other Olympics have had a marrying of video segments leading into real things in stadium and I assumed it was another one of those. I just didn't know it was believed to be real until I saw these articles popping up.
I mean, really, they were poorly mapped onto the vision (they moved around a bit in respect to the moving camera motion), they didn't have a 'real' look, they looked too 'smooth', and I figured it was just a given there was no way to marry the flight path and fireworks that well reliably.
Slashdot Mirror
Bloody hell, do people actually READ the post before commenting? First someone posted a $150 item when he CLEARLY asked for sub $50 ones, and now this! A suggestion for a laser pointer where he said "For example, a small laser pointer keychain I bought him a couple of years ago still provides tons of entertainment. "
*sigh*
Well, I think everything you just said demonstrates a fine, selfish, dickish attitude towards other people.
Bravo.
Big friggen YES to your comment.
This should be the topmost comment for all of the 'Stop taking away MY FREEDOM' type people.
Just wonderfully stated and spot on. The selfishness and narrow mindedness of people continues to amaze and infuriate me. I'm indeed glad to read great comments like yours to even out somewhat the arguments.
And of course, yours is a lot more insightful and better thought out than 'This here country was dangit founded on 'Freedom' and taxes ain't free... so I want me some more money'.
Bravo sir.
Bingo... Much of this is true here in Australia too, which is kinda my point.
All this 'Socialism' is a bad word stuff at the moment is scary. You want a country where everyone has a chance at a good life, and those that have made it good don't have the mindset that all the unwashed rabble "should bugger off because they are obviously lazy and don't work hard enough."
If you spend that bit of money on making sure everyone gets a chance you get really huge returns by having a much better educated, more healthy and happier populous... but hey, these sorts of people just want to have their money and sneer at everyone else.
Seriously, this insanely stupid "It's against our freedoms to be taxed" idea is insane.
You live in a country that has a government that provides services. Roads, schools, hospitals etc. etc.
These things need to be funded. The people who benefit from said things should fund them with some of their earnings because they are able to earn the money in the first place due to the services provided by said country.
And don't start that 'Well I don't use X or Y services, so why should I have to pay for it?' bullshit. If only the people who used X service paid for it when they used it, well... how the hell would social security work? You can't well pay for that when you need it, because you don't have the money in the first place.
People like you, and Joe the Plumber are either seriously selfish and don't see the common good in everyone being helped in a prosperous nation, or seriously dense in that you just don't get how it's fair, and instead just see the simpleton's equation of: I earn money, it's mine, not yours.
Or both.
Seriously, grow up, stop saying anything you don't like is 'Infringing on your freedoms', because it's not, you're just being selfish.
All for computer education in schools (of course, I make my living programming)... BUT.
A laptop per child? For what really? It's just not needed. Have excellent rooms of computers where the kids can do work etc. in a supervised environment in and out of classes (heck, have one room that has no scheduled classes in it, just for kids to do extra curricular stuff).
But give all kids a laptop? A real waste I think, a real waste.
I'm going to give ATI Tray Tools a whirl.
I'm not sure why in your steps you have 'Download full CCC installer'... why not just download the display driver only? They always give the option. The full CCC doesn't even give temp readings from the card, so I'm keen to give Tray Tools a go, being a media pc in my entertainment unit, I like to keep things quiet, but in doing so you sometimes have to keep an eye on temps.
I have an older 9550 ATI in one box and my more powerful machine has an 8800 nVidia in it.
As far as large, clunky drivers go, ATI is king of the hill... their setup that requires .Net to install, the bloated and resource hungry Catalyst Control Center... it's ugly.
nVidia on the otherhand seems to be far more lightweight and fits in better with Windows.
But performance wise I haven't really had anything to complain about though, and I can't think of instances of actually cursing the drivers for not working...
I've never been loyal to either really, when it comes time to do an upgrade I research on the web what card people are saying gives best bang for buck in my pricerange, I don't give a hoot who makes it.
So, they tried this crap as a trial run in Australia, telling everyone it was going to become the policy... except, well, enough people saw it for what it was, which is purely trying to make even more money... and got the ACCC (Australian Competition & Consumer Commission) to rule it not allowed.
Huzzah for Australia, but man... eBay can't be going too well if they're going to keep trying this crap.
They're going to discover people aren't quite as loyal as they may have thought.
We love it ourselves, and am finally close to launching our large web application that has its client completely encoded in it.
It's being really actively developed (ie. Now you have Flash OR DHTML as a runtime for the same chunk of code... which is pretty cool), there is quite a large group of people using it (the forums are very active). The company that leads the development, Laszlo Systems, is doing well for themselves with a variety of spin of services and the like (we are in direct contact with them).
So, yeah, if you're after a language that gives you an Object Orientated way of programming web clients that can render in either Flash or DHTML, and does so with no cost (not for the coding environment or server licensing fees), then I highly recommend it.
Of course... I would say that as I'm pretty bloody proficient in it now and want to be a valued resource when it takes over the world :)
The end is not justified by the means
I think you mean 'the means are not justified by the end'.
As the means are the thing that needs justifying here, not the end result.
My language of use for the past 3 years, OpenLaszlo has brilliant doco right there on the site. With a reference guide that lists all the objects, methods and events with live, editable examples for many.
And then if the documentation doesn't cover what you want, there's the great forums which have helped me out of plenty of sticky coding situations.
The doco was what drew us to OpenLaszlo in the first place. Well, that and the fact it's open source helped a lot!
I just don't get how they can be saying this at all.
Ok... so from the article we have:
Which they say is remarkably true.
HUH?
So, all these new GPUs really don't speed up your machine? So I can take my nvidia 8800 OUT of my box, leave it to an onboard graphics chipset and I'll be getting the same performance will I?
Yeah.
Right.
I don't see AT ALL how they're getting this right?
Please someone enlighten me, as I'm not seeing it from where I'm sitting.
Except that they are even older and even further down their phasing out path, so the chances of there being a magnetic tape reader in 25 years is even more slim than a CD, DVD or USB drive reader.
But again, why just store it on one format? Storage media is cheap as chips, so rather than taking a punt on which one will still be readable, throw it on all possible formats.
Although your point about graphic format is a good one. Yeah, again, pick a bunch of different formats and you should hit gold with at least one of them being still readable in 25 years.
With the prevalence of jpegs around today, and being used for storage pretty much everywhere I'd wager there'd be something that can read them in 25 years.
But yes, don't put all your eggs in one basket in media or image format.
Why is everyone suggest A format?
Why not store the data on a:
* DVD
* Pile of CDs
* USB drive
* SD card
* xD card
* Hard drive
And a choice few in hard copy.
Seriously... with the price of these things, and the timeframe, surely you can afford to store it on all of these things and put them all in? Plus it'll be fascinating in 25 years time to see how many are still readable... all? None? Some?
I currently do it one day a week, and work better for it, the change of pace, the ability to not have to travel for the one day all works really well. I have some of my best coding days when I work from home.
BUT
You really do need that real facetime with people, and the office environment with your colleagues to keep it all working.
I would say you need AT LEAST 2 days a week in office to make it work.
Unless what you're doing is a real 'package' of work that is self contained and can be done without any real collaboration until you've finished it.
Exactly... For the year 2000 we held a street party, which obviously involves lots of alcohol, and involved fireworks etc. My family held it, and we paid for the public liability insurance, and it was only a couple of hundred dollars for an event like that, so one would guess a Lan party might be even cheaper.
The multiple channel thing isn't their fault actually, it's a restriction enforced by the government, they're not allowed to multicast SD channels until... erm... next year or something. It was something to do with the Foxtel deal I think.
But yeah, I long for the day when whoever is showing the olympics gives us multiple channels to pick what we want to watch.
*sigh*
Because our esteemed broadcaster, Channel 7, decided that it wouldn't stream anything of note at all online live.... at all.
Rather than, oh, I don't know, streaming what was being shown on tv onto the web (with ads and all, hence just the damn same revenue possibility, only with more viewers), they decided to occasionally stream some match that no-one was actually interested in at all, while they showed the 'good stuff' on tv. Which sucked, because in Australia most of the good stuff is happening while we're at work.
Except, well, channel seven's coverage has been ABYSMAL.
They:
* Spend half their time showing recaps and highlights of stuff that's already happened instead of showing things that are ACTUALLY ON RIGHT NOW
* Spend a sizeable chunk of their time broadcasting Australian Rules Football matches instead of the Olympics! For god sakes! I'm sure the footy fans can live without a bloody live football match during the Olympics... show the games when the Olympics are not happening RIGHT NOW!
* Spend a huge amount of time advertising all the shows we don't want to watch on their channel that will be on after the olympics, including one horrendously insulting one where they show some Olympic gold moment, then a bit from one of their shows, then an olympic moment, then one of their shows, all the while with soaring music and a voice over being overly earnest. Trying to suggest that they are reaching for gold, and doing their personal best and trying to compare themselves to Olympic athelets when showing Australia's next Top Model is, frankly disgusting.
* Then when they do show anything live, they seem to like showing heats and almost entire matches of deciding games of hockey or the like rather than showing finals of things that are happening RIGHT NOW.
Urgh, the coverage of the games in Australia this year has been downright pathetic, and I hope Channel 7 gets a downturn rather than an upturn in their ratings to punish them for treating them with the utter contempt they have.
Um... geeze... a little impassioned perhaps?
All I was saying was that the Microsoft tech, which got the small billing, looked to be the more interesting and useful now compared to the other tech which got prime billing.
You know, because Microsoft is 'evil', so doesn't get attention, but a University is wholly 'good' so gets top billing.
And also, you're telling me there aren't a heap of research time spent on ways of doing things that are overly complex and impractical just because the researchers want to do so, when there is, in fact, a far simpler approach?
Yes, some of those ridiculous ways of doing things are done for the learnings involved, but that doesn't mean we all have to ooh and ahh over them while they're in their research mode.
I don't think anyone looked at a gigantic radio back in the day and said 'Man, that's useless, that lets me listen to stuff from thin air'. They didn't say that because that was all there was.
I can look at something like this and feel that it's slightly less useful because it's prime two applications are 'better res and exposure' which are indeed already available using a better camera, and 'removing unwanted things from the video'... which is something I quite detest in the world of digital photography and the like today (let's not show the world as it is, warts and all, let's scrub it until it's the sterile version we hoped it would be). And while it has applications in film making, well, they wouldn't be using the consumer cameras this is all aimed at.
Just chill out, I don't fail to see the smarts in this, don't go ape over anyone who doesn't like a bit of tech you do.
And don't think that the views of anyone on Slashdot represent the 'norm' at all.
If they did, we'd all be using command line only interfaces on linux with no driver support for anything and having to code anything we wanted in a new software product ourselves, because, well, if we want it, 'why don't you fix it yourself then?'
Really, the ability for their software to 'unwrap' a 3D object and allow you to fiddle with it as you wish is very cool.
And not limited to a 'static' scene.
And, really, if you're going to go to the effort of videoing a scene, then photographing the scene, then passing the video and the photos through their software. All to get better exposure and resolution.
Um.
Wouldn't it be a far better cost/effort equation to just buy a better HD camera in the damn first place?
He's not charging anything, this is a guy with an old turntable, a Dell, the software that came with his SoundBlaster and a copy of MultiMediaJukebox to convert to MP3 and Roxio to burn to DVD.
It's just a guy working with what he has, and I seriously doubt he has the room or the time to create 4 different formats for every one of the 4000 tracks he has.
And the inability to play them on 99% of personal music or other players for that matter.
Jesus, people can be ridiculously over the top in their support of 'open' formats.
You don't have to pay anything for listening to the MP3s, he doesn't have to pay anything for making them.
They are playable on the widest number of players possible, stop whinging.
I was actually pretty shocked to learn that the footstep part wasn't known to be CG. I figured it had been a video presentation that led into those real fireworks seen from inside the stadium. Other Olympics have had a marrying of video segments leading into real things in stadium and I assumed it was another one of those. I just didn't know it was believed to be real until I saw these articles popping up.
I mean, really, they were poorly mapped onto the vision (they moved around a bit in respect to the moving camera motion), they didn't have a 'real' look, they looked too 'smooth', and I figured it was just a given there was no way to marry the flight path and fireworks that well reliably.
But there you go... people will believe anything.