This is one of many reasons why I would love WIFI and auto-blogging software to become integrated into digital cameras. In this way, we achieve the security of a "video camera everywhere" effect, but the feed is openly available to everybody.
I'm using a version of IE with pop up blocking and tabbed browsing. It's from XP Service Pack 2. Microsoft did not STOP development on IE. The world at large was saying 'we don't like having updates pushed at us every week' so they slowed it down.
Wow. Pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing? State of the art, for 1999. What about inline searches, mousegestures, style sheet switching, or even a built-in search bar? Does it even display PNG's properly yet?
By reducing the number of updates you're supposed to instead release the same amount of stuff, just in larger updates. I.E. is so pathetically far behind the browser development curve that it is only now catching up to where it's competitors were when it was last updated about four years ago. It's indefensible that a software company that still has roughly 100% profit margins would allow a key component of it's architecture to fall so badly behind. The only thing they have added since the days of actual competition is CSS, and that they had to be dragged into kicking and screaming.
You'll excuse me if I sound a little jaded, but many of their "ton of new features" are things that should easily have been there years ago, if they had bothered to care.
My old Macintosh moniter is so small I have to save the files, then enlarge them in a text editor. But it can be difficult to mouse over and hold down the mouse button for several seconds to get to the "save link as" menu.
It makes me so frustrated that I want to force a hard shutdown by holding the power button down for three seconds.
But while playback may be legal, not all playback tools are. DeCss and, sadly, any program based off of it, is illegal in the US. It is a foolish distinction setup by people trying to separate us from our money, but it is a legal one. This distro would give a business that relies upon DVD playback, such as an authoring studio, a screening lab, or somesuch, an option that would stand up to a BSB investigation. Plus they can stream windows media, which another section of thier business may rely upon and which would be far more difficult to do legally than simple DVD playback.
I agree that it is scary. I don't think that our society has lost perspective, so much as gained a perspective pushed by large financial interests. But if you are an insufficiently large business, you must play by the rules.
You should see the equipment to get into a locked house sometime. My personal favorite is a shockwave gun that knocks the pins up and into place. There is also the freezy-heaty gun that freezes the pins in an upward position, then heats the lower pins until they fall into position. Neither of these will allow anyone to know they have been hacked. Then there are traditional lock picking techniques, which take longer. In a pinch, you can always just pound down the door with a piece of concrete, or break a window.
They don't want a copy of your house key because they don't need your house key to get in your house. That data is not secure. Even picks for those nice, safe-looking round locks can be had for about 400 dollars. But what they can't do is break strong encryption. If you put a good system on your computer with a well-chosen key, and make sure there isn't a keylogger installed on your keyboard, or a trojan, or a camera pointed at your fingers... Well, OK, there are ways around it. But after they catch you the only way to open that data is in your head. This violates their whole "hit it with something large until it opens" strategy, so they need that key from you.
That's why they're going for your encryption keys, but not your house keys. It's not because encryption keys aren't sacred, but because your house protection is trivial.
CD Rom drives. Sound Cards. VGA cards (like DOS was using it). Color Monitors. Joystick ports.
All of the above upgrades were essentially driven by gaming. What use was a sound card before Roberta Williams started supporting them in King's Quest? What did a CD Rom drive do before Myst? Sure, windows would eventually come to rely upon 2D graphics processing, much like the plan is to integrate 3D processing into Longhorn, but the cart in this case did not lead the horse. All of these were driven by gaming, with the operating system and applications expanding to take advantage of these new additions.
If anything, this upgrade generation is the first in the past few years that has been driven by gaming because people started jumping on the Internet and buying machines. People had a more compelling reason to upgrade for a while: I.E. was a dog, and you need really fast hardware to run it satisfactorily. Now, I won't say how Firefox or Opera might fit into this equation more cheaply, but this did mean that people were upgrading their hardware and it had little to do with gaming. We are, of course, back on the gaming upgrade cycle.
It's not a new phenomenon, it just took the back burner for a little while.
I mean, if genius is innate, should we not have like 10 Da Vincis just due to probability and the increase in population?
We probably have hundreds of Da Vinci's, struggling along in fields nobody has heard of with genius ideas that nobody understands. The mathematician Physicists working with 22 dimentional string theory are probably Da Vinci level of genius, but unlike Da Vinci they are utterly incomprehensible and make things irrelevant to most people's lives. The computer engineer who invented Hash tables might have a Da Vinci level of intelligence, but good luck explaining what Hash tables are to an overstimulated population. What about genetic researchers who combine intuition with intelligence to stimulate cells in the human body whose physiology we still don't fully understand to make it do things it has never done before? I can't even pretend to know what they're doing behind closed doors, let alone shout "genius" from the corners of the streets, like Da Vinci's followers.
In short, we've gotten far too advanced for any real stroke of genius to make any comprehensible sense to the layman. We truly are at the point of magic, which people accept and move on. But genius cannot be declared if nobody can understand what they are saying, intelligent as it may be.
Tomb Raider wasn't that bad of a game to base a movie off of, being essentially based off of Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones character. Instead of a globetrotting American professor you have a globetrotting British society woman, but the settings and potential plots are not significantly different. Certainly Lara Croft's mysteriously backstory could have led to a gripping script, and her John Woo action stylings could have let to a much grittier and more intense movie than Spielberg's fist fights ever could.
What sets the two apart is that Jones was written, directed, and acted by people at the top of their field. Harrison Ford injected character into Indiana Jones in a way that Jolie is still trying to come to grips with, and Spielberg ensured that there were plenty of "moments" in the movie where the audience would really feel for the characters.
The amount of skill required to pull off a great movie, like a great game, is tremendous. While these movies are handled by second-string directors they will continue to be terrible. There is nothing inherently wrong in basing a movie off of a game, any more than basing it off of a book or a song, but it will always take a skilled cast and crew to make a movie good no matter what it is based off of.
Hardware support. There was another thread recently that mentioned the good, but not excellent hardware support under Linux. It's always getting better, but it's still not perfect.
Even if it is good, how will the game support hardware released after the game goes gold? Better let the OS support that.
...Just answered my own question. Combining A+ Web Screensaver (nonfree) with a random web page URL (www.uroulette.com/visit.php) gets a random web page display on idle. Yay! Now I'll never know if I'm going to a polynesian community church or a poorly written Raiders fansite.
Now if there were only a way to open said site and continue reading in non-screensaver mode...
The closest thing to what you're talking about is Grub, which is run by Looksmart as a dead-link checker and also feeds to WiseNut. While it doesn't allow you to crawl sites that you don't have control over, it does allow you to crawl your own site.
Personally, I've wanted a Google toolbar that indexes the sites that you surf, and adds additional positive weight to the sites that you linger on. It may not know what you liked there, but it knows that you liked it.
Completely offtopic, but does anyone know of a screensaver on Windows that displays random (or spidered) web pages? I've been looking for an equivalent to the XWindows version for years.
Seriously, finding the right combination of string, loop tightness, gumming agents, and time will teach you a lot about what your yo-yo is actually doing. I used to create yoyo strings from kite string for the other kids in the neighborhood. I started with a traditional yoyo weight cotton fiber kite string, would soak it in water for several minutes, and then would twist it to a 4 foot length (slightly longer than usual). Then I would dry it slightly, coat it in honey, and leave it outside overnight. In the morning, a quick spray of hairspray would add even more to the tackyness, and the string would be ready to go. Metal cores would chew through the string like knives through butter, but maple axles would have significantly improved spin times. You would have to wind it a little more tightly than normal to wake it up at all, but improved sleep times were far more valuable than a somewhat groggy wake. Besides, if you caught it in free-flight it woke up without problem.
Tom Kuhn deserves more credit
on
Extreme Yo-Yoing
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The article credits Tom Kuhn with the Silver Bullet 2, the first production yo-yo with a ball-bearing axle, but they don't truly give the man his due credit. He is also the creator of the world's largest functional yoyo, and the first yoyo you can disassemble. The article mentions that gap width is now adjustable, but doesn't mention that Tom Kuhn was the first person to do that (in the aformentioned SB2, nonetheless). His Silver Bullet 1 was the first yo-yo weighted out the outside, and the first manufactured from aircraft aluminum. Basically, he defined state-of-the-art for yo-yos up until the mid 90's, when his business started having problems (his San Fransisco shop closed down, sadly).
If you are doing an article on bringing the YoYo from the 1950's fad to the mid 90's high-performance device, Tom deserves a lot of credit. He doesn't have the revolutionary influence that he once did, but that's like saying Chuck Barry doesn't have the influence that he once did. Both defined where we are today, and their industries would be tremendously different without them.
I've worked with game programmers with varying degrees of experience, and I must say the more experience the far fewer bugs come down the line. A fresh-faced programmer just learning the system might take 3 or 4 tries to get bug-free code into our hands, while a 6 year veteran will know the exact problem the moment they see the stack, and will be able to fix it quickly. The 12 year veteran will implement a new chunk of code and have a very good chance that it will be bug-free.
Though it's also harder to sucker some with experience into working 60+ hour weeks. Younger programmers don't know better.
Generally I find the programmer with experience gets his work done without the 60+ hour weeks. You save a lot of time if the first thing a programmer tries, works.
I've always thought that percentages were too detailed to be useful. Is a 76% better than a 74%? Not necessarily, but the classification that it falls into the seventies does give information for a basis of comparison.
Perhaps games should be put into one of four categories: junk, OK, good, and great. MGS would fall into the great category, as would Prince of Persia and Halo. AoM Titans and Empires: DMW would fall into good. Moo3 would be categorized "OK", and Big Motha Truckers would be junk. That way, you can discriminate between those games that should achieve legendary status, those games that are fun to play, those games that might be fun to play but probably not, and those games that don't deserve the CD they were printed on.
That way, players can make up their own minds based upon the review and gameplay whether or not they would enjoy the experience, without giving too much rein to the biases of the reviewer. But those without the patience could easily know what is quality worth giving a look, and what should be avoided.
"Hey Ben, I need that little thingie. You know, the one with the two parts and the stuff around it?"
I don't think you need to go so far as editing to find a good use for this.
Software is void, revoked and terminated.
on
VIA Pulls PadLockSL
·
· Score: 1
Can one really "revoke" a gpl computer license? If someone from Nullsoft posted the software to the website, they are acting as Nullsoft, even if they do so amidst objections of their co-workers. Can Nullsoft, or anyone else for that matter, suddenly turn around and say "Sorry, ours. You can't use it anymore. We changed our minds."
Do copyright abilities trump contract law when companies get buyer's remorse?
Hello Mr. Clueless-modded-insightful. What is listed as a requirement for Quake 3? That's right, Open GL. UT2004 doesn't explicitly require DirectX9.0b if you're willing to run in software emulation mode, but don't kid yourself and try it without. And since when does a static linking to DirectX9 take 5 CD's?
Games take a lot of space because they are full of detailed 3d animated models, extra-large textures, and lots of sound and music. None of that comes from DirectX. These guys have managed to use some cool tricks to create detailed models and images on par with a lot of what is released today and do so in under 100k. That's pretty darned impressive.
If your "Hello World" is dynamically linked to a C++ library, and mine procedurally generates a novel titled "Hello World" of comparable quality to a Tom Clancy book, my "Hello World" is just cooler.
Of course, mr. Repugnant_Shit, you are a troll. But someone modded you up for reasons unknown, and as such a little explanation was in order.
Slashdot Mirror
This is one of many reasons why I would love WIFI and auto-blogging software to become integrated into digital cameras. In this way, we achieve the security of a "video camera everywhere" effect, but the feed is openly available to everybody.
How about a web interface to the GUI wrapper?
That way you could setup a Kiosk in every Dominoes...
http://memoware.com/
Tons of excellent free e-books, and quite a few bad ones too.
I'm using a version of IE with pop up blocking and tabbed browsing. It's from XP Service Pack 2. Microsoft did not STOP development on IE. The world at large was saying 'we don't like having updates pushed at us every week' so they slowed it down.
Wow. Pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing? State of the art, for 1999. What about inline searches, mousegestures, style sheet switching, or even a built-in search bar? Does it even display PNG's properly yet?
By reducing the number of updates you're supposed to instead release the same amount of stuff, just in larger updates. I.E. is so pathetically far behind the browser development curve that it is only now catching up to where it's competitors were when it was last updated about four years ago. It's indefensible that a software company that still has roughly 100% profit margins would allow a key component of it's architecture to fall so badly behind. The only thing they have added since the days of actual competition is CSS, and that they had to be dragged into kicking and screaming.
You'll excuse me if I sound a little jaded, but many of their "ton of new features" are things that should easily have been there years ago, if they had bothered to care.
My old Macintosh moniter is so small I have to save the files, then enlarge them in a text editor. But it can be difficult to mouse over and hold down the mouse button for several seconds to get to the "save link as" menu.
It makes me so frustrated that I want to force a hard shutdown by holding the power button down for three seconds.
He's from the USA, where if you are opposing the RIAA, and are guilty, you're likely to lose.
What he doesn't say, is that if you are opposing the RIAA, and are innocent, you're still likely to lose.
But while playback may be legal, not all playback tools are. DeCss and, sadly, any program based off of it, is illegal in the US. It is a foolish distinction setup by people trying to separate us from our money, but it is a legal one. This distro would give a business that relies upon DVD playback, such as an authoring studio, a screening lab, or somesuch, an option that would stand up to a BSB investigation. Plus they can stream windows media, which another section of thier business may rely upon and which would be far more difficult to do legally than simple DVD playback.
I agree that it is scary. I don't think that our society has lost perspective, so much as gained a perspective pushed by large financial interests. But if you are an insufficiently large business, you must play by the rules.
Lots of appologies, then. The Critic was an excellent show that died far before it's time. I guess I got my "UN Episodes" confused.
You should see the equipment to get into a locked house sometime. My personal favorite is a shockwave gun that knocks the pins up and into place. There is also the freezy-heaty gun that freezes the pins in an upward position, then heats the lower pins until they fall into position. Neither of these will allow anyone to know they have been hacked. Then there are traditional lock picking techniques, which take longer. In a pinch, you can always just pound down the door with a piece of concrete, or break a window.
They don't want a copy of your house key because they don't need your house key to get in your house. That data is not secure. Even picks for those nice, safe-looking round locks can be had for about 400 dollars. But what they can't do is break strong encryption. If you put a good system on your computer with a well-chosen key, and make sure there isn't a keylogger installed on your keyboard, or a trojan, or a camera pointed at your fingers... Well, OK, there are ways around it. But after they catch you the only way to open that data is in your head. This violates their whole "hit it with something large until it opens" strategy, so they need that key from you.
That's why they're going for your encryption keys, but not your house keys. It's not because encryption keys aren't sacred, but because your house protection is trivial.
Maybe he's hiding from those ruffians who
wish to manhandle his dickie. They've already kicked his ascot.
(appologies to Groening)
CD Rom drives.
Sound Cards.
VGA cards (like DOS was using it).
Color Monitors.
Joystick ports.
All of the above upgrades were essentially driven by gaming. What use was a sound card before Roberta Williams started supporting them in King's Quest? What did a CD Rom drive do before Myst? Sure, windows would eventually come to rely upon 2D graphics processing, much like the plan is to integrate 3D processing into Longhorn, but the cart in this case did not lead the horse. All of these were driven by gaming, with the operating system and applications expanding to take advantage of these new additions.
If anything, this upgrade generation is the first in the past few years that has been driven by gaming because people started jumping on the Internet and buying machines. People had a more compelling reason to upgrade for a while: I.E. was a dog, and you need really fast hardware to run it satisfactorily. Now, I won't say how Firefox or Opera might fit into this equation more cheaply, but this did mean that people were upgrading their hardware and it had little to do with gaming. We are, of course, back on the gaming upgrade cycle.
It's not a new phenomenon, it just took the back burner for a little while.
I mean, if genius is innate, should we not have like 10 Da Vincis just due to probability and the increase in population?
We probably have hundreds of Da Vinci's, struggling along in fields nobody has heard of with genius ideas that nobody understands. The mathematician Physicists working with 22 dimentional string theory are probably Da Vinci level of genius, but unlike Da Vinci they are utterly incomprehensible and make things irrelevant to most people's lives. The computer engineer who invented Hash tables might have a Da Vinci level of intelligence, but good luck explaining what Hash tables are to an overstimulated population. What about genetic researchers who combine intuition with intelligence to stimulate cells in the human body whose physiology we still don't fully understand to make it do things it has never done before? I can't even pretend to know what they're doing behind closed doors, let alone shout "genius" from the corners of the streets, like Da Vinci's followers.
In short, we've gotten far too advanced for any real stroke of genius to make any comprehensible sense to the layman. We truly are at the point of magic, which people accept and move on. But genius cannot be declared if nobody can understand what they are saying, intelligent as it may be.
Tomb Raider wasn't that bad of a game to base a movie off of, being essentially based off of Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones character. Instead of a globetrotting American professor you have a globetrotting British society woman, but the settings and potential plots are not significantly different. Certainly Lara Croft's mysteriously backstory could have led to a gripping script, and her John Woo action stylings could have let to a much grittier and more intense movie than Spielberg's fist fights ever could.
What sets the two apart is that Jones was written, directed, and acted by people at the top of their field. Harrison Ford injected character into Indiana Jones in a way that Jolie is still trying to come to grips with, and Spielberg ensured that there were plenty of "moments" in the movie where the audience would really feel for the characters.
The amount of skill required to pull off a great movie, like a great game, is tremendous. While these movies are handled by second-string directors they will continue to be terrible. There is nothing inherently wrong in basing a movie off of a game, any more than basing it off of a book or a song, but it will always take a skilled cast and crew to make a movie good no matter what it is based off of.
Hardware support. There was another thread recently that mentioned the good, but not excellent hardware support under Linux. It's always getting better, but it's still not perfect.
Even if it is good, how will the game support hardware released after the game goes gold? Better let the OS support that.
...Just answered my own question. Combining A+ Web Screensaver (nonfree) with a random web page URL (www.uroulette.com/visit.php) gets a random web page display on idle. Yay! Now I'll never know if I'm going to a polynesian community church or a poorly written Raiders fansite.
Now if there were only a way to open said site and continue reading in non-screensaver mode...
The closest thing to what you're talking about is Grub, which is run by Looksmart as a dead-link checker and also feeds to WiseNut. While it doesn't allow you to crawl sites that you don't have control over, it does allow you to crawl your own site.
Personally, I've wanted a Google toolbar that indexes the sites that you surf, and adds additional positive weight to the sites that you linger on. It may not know what you liked there, but it knows that you liked it.
Completely offtopic, but does anyone know of a screensaver on Windows that displays random (or spidered) web pages? I've been looking for an equivalent to the XWindows version for years.
Seriously, finding the right combination of string, loop tightness, gumming agents, and time will teach you a lot about what your yo-yo is actually doing. I used to create yoyo strings from kite string for the other kids in the neighborhood. I started with a traditional yoyo weight cotton fiber kite string, would soak it in water for several minutes, and then would twist it to a 4 foot length (slightly longer than usual). Then I would dry it slightly, coat it in honey, and leave it outside overnight. In the morning, a quick spray of hairspray would add even more to the tackyness, and the string would be ready to go. Metal cores would chew through the string like knives through butter, but maple axles would have significantly improved spin times. You would have to wind it a little more tightly than normal to wake it up at all, but improved sleep times were far more valuable than a somewhat groggy wake. Besides, if you caught it in free-flight it woke up without problem.
The article credits Tom Kuhn with the Silver Bullet 2, the first production yo-yo with a ball-bearing axle, but they don't truly give the man his due credit. He is also the creator of the world's largest functional yoyo, and the first yoyo you can disassemble. The article mentions that gap width is now adjustable, but doesn't mention that Tom Kuhn was the first person to do that (in the aformentioned SB2, nonetheless). His Silver Bullet 1 was the first yo-yo weighted out the outside, and the first manufactured from aircraft aluminum. Basically, he defined state-of-the-art for yo-yos up until the mid 90's, when his business started having problems (his San Fransisco shop closed down, sadly).
If you are doing an article on bringing the YoYo from the 1950's fad to the mid 90's high-performance device, Tom deserves a lot of credit. He doesn't have the revolutionary influence that he once did, but that's like saying Chuck Barry doesn't have the influence that he once did. Both defined where we are today, and their industries would be tremendously different without them.
I've worked with game programmers with varying degrees of experience, and I must say the more experience the far fewer bugs come down the line. A fresh-faced programmer just learning the system might take 3 or 4 tries to get bug-free code into our hands, while a 6 year veteran will know the exact problem the moment they see the stack, and will be able to fix it quickly. The 12 year veteran will implement a new chunk of code and have a very good chance that it will be bug-free.
Though it's also harder to sucker some with experience into working 60+ hour weeks. Younger programmers don't know better.
Generally I find the programmer with experience gets his work done without the 60+ hour weeks. You save a lot of time if the first thing a programmer tries, works.
I've always thought that percentages were too detailed to be useful. Is a 76% better than a 74%? Not necessarily, but the classification that it falls into the seventies does give information for a basis of comparison.
Perhaps games should be put into one of four categories: junk, OK, good, and great. MGS would fall into the great category, as would Prince of Persia and Halo. AoM Titans and Empires: DMW would fall into good. Moo3 would be categorized "OK", and Big Motha Truckers would be junk. That way, you can discriminate between those games that should achieve legendary status, those games that are fun to play, those games that might be fun to play but probably not, and those games that don't deserve the CD they were printed on.
That way, players can make up their own minds based upon the review and gameplay whether or not they would enjoy the experience, without giving too much rein to the biases of the reviewer. But those without the patience could easily know what is quality worth giving a look, and what should be avoided.
Co#ld you give m* so%e tips on to d# that? I'm **&*& some pro8lems with m^ pitc#...
"Hey Ben, I need that little thingie. You know, the one with the two parts and the stuff around it?"
I don't think you need to go so far as editing to find a good use for this.
Can one really "revoke" a gpl computer license? If someone from Nullsoft posted the software to the website, they are acting as Nullsoft, even if they do so amidst objections of their co-workers. Can Nullsoft, or anyone else for that matter, suddenly turn around and say "Sorry, ours. You can't use it anymore. We changed our minds."
Do copyright abilities trump contract law when companies get buyer's remorse?
like a *real* engine such as Quake 3 or UT2004
Hello Mr. Clueless-modded-insightful. What is listed as a requirement for Quake 3? That's right, Open GL. UT2004 doesn't explicitly require DirectX9.0b if you're willing to run in software emulation mode, but don't kid yourself and try it without. And since when does a static linking to DirectX9 take 5 CD's?
Games take a lot of space because they are full of detailed 3d animated models, extra-large textures, and lots of sound and music. None of that comes from DirectX. These guys have managed to use some cool tricks to create detailed models and images on par with a lot of what is released today and do so in under 100k. That's pretty darned impressive.
If your "Hello World" is dynamically linked to a C++ library, and mine procedurally generates a novel titled "Hello World" of comparable quality to a Tom Clancy book, my "Hello World" is just cooler.
Of course, mr. Repugnant_Shit, you are a troll. But someone modded you up for reasons unknown, and as such a little explanation was in order.