It is one of the pilar of modern French state: governement, schools are all 'religion-free', religious activities are considered are purely private issue.
On the other hand, neutrality with respect to religion and respect for the personal beliefs of people is not a part of the culture as the recent ban on religiously-mandated clothing shows. As an American, I find the slight to the Muslim, Jewish, and Sikh communities to be highly offensive and oppressive. In France, apparently relgious freedom means suppression of individual religious expression. This is a similar difference between the American protection of hate speech and the European ban of it while both claim to protect Free Speech.
It is very strange for French people to see the US president using the bible during his nomination, or witness swearing on the bible during a trial.
It is one of those odd traditions that continue to this day that are non-neutral. It's also unlikely to ever stop being the default due to the fact that it would be an unpopular move and the fact that witnesses can refuse to use a Bible and substitute another tome or nothing at all. Jews swear on the Talmud, Muslims on the Koran, etc. It is an odd continued joining between church and state, but it's not surprising if you consider that the tradition came from a time when the big worry about religious oppression was from one sect of Christianity dominating another sect of Christianity.
Your argument -- almost word for word -- was probably used over a two decades ago when RMS started the GNU project to build a Free UNIX. The exact same reasons why the GNU project was started apply to why the ReactOS project should exist.
Today we have Linux. Who knows what we'll have ten years from now if ReactOS can keep up the good work?
Re:Manufacturing tolerances for full 1080i support
on
CableCARDs and HDTV
·
· Score: 1
So you aren't talking about the JVC DLA-SX21U, because that LCoS unit offers a native 4x3 resolution of 1400x1050; just shy of 1080 lines. Looked like a nice unit, but waaaay out of my price range. And it doesn't meet the OPer's definition of meeting "real" 1920x1080 resolution either.
Actually, I was talking about the Toshiba 57HLX82, a 3-chip LCoS RPTV.
BTW, thanks for the interresting reply.
No prob. I'm one of those people obsessed with a burn-in-free 1080 set to use as a oversized computer monitor. If the 57HLX82 wasn't still out of my price range, I'd be getting one of those today. I'm hoping that the single-chip 1080 DLP solutions will be a little less expensive when they come out, but I'm not holding my breath.
Re:Manufacturing tolerances for full 1080i support
on
CableCARDs and HDTV
·
· Score: 1
n fact, there are no DLP chips out there that do more than 1280x720, and the high end of LCD Front/Rear projection is still 1366x768 (Sony HS-20). Only a CRT offers full 1440x1080i resolution, because CRTs are inherently analog technology from the electron beam out to phosphor.
Actually, TI already has begun manufacture of a 1080 DLP chip. The xHD3 chip was demoed at a trade show back in February in a Samsung RPTV prototype and should be out in the market by the end of the year.
Oh, and there's been a 1080p LCoS set out for about a year now. Unfortunately, Toshiba is discontinuing it because its LCoS chip provider couldn't keep up with the demand.
Aw, man. I'm crying from the strain of not busting out laughing in my cubicle. I'm going to have to post this and then get away quickly before I fail to keep my slacking quiet.
Until Safari allows me to allow or deny cookies from individual servers like the Mozilla family can, it will never satisfy my inner Cookie Nazi. I'll stick with Firefox until then (despite its many flaws).
So before you start a narcissistic rant about how blogs are mostly narcissistic rantings, remember that this useless forum discussion takes place on a blog. That's right, slashdot is a blog.
Since "blog" is short for "web log," what exactly does Slashdot log?
The difference between news sites with discussion and blogs is one of the personal nature of the content published. Slashdot isn't a log of anyone's life, and it's far more discussion-oriened than the usual expositionist diaries that characterize blogging. It has little in common with the blogs that came after it other than the fact that it has articles and discussion.
Which is why I said that it might be too much work.
Sorry. I thought that was sarcasm. My bad.
I'm just a curmudgeon about Apple. I can't really think of a UI change made since Mac OS X debuted that didn't increase inconsistency, and it constantly miffs me to hear people sing praise of how much better it is. I just triggered on something innocuous.
You do know that having to continuously mouse-over windows is very inefficient compared to knowing ahead of time which window to click, right? Having to hunt for which window you want is a productivity waster and adds to frustration in using the system.
People today just honestly don't appreciate good, unobtrusive user-interface design anymore.
Try using Expose when you have multiple text files open at once -- say about 10 or so. Now, try to predict which window will equal which file so that you don't have to spend time hunting around to see which (now indecipherable scribbles on white) window you want. Expose (just like the Dock) is only really good to use if windows are somehow easy to idenfity at a glance from a "zoomed-out" state. I basically have to use a pager-like setup and a little memory to quickly access different documents since Mac OS X provides no real way of organizing documents in an easily remember state (like alphabetical order as opposed to most recent access).
(If BBEdit or some other Mac editor supported a single-window, multiple-document mode to allow for quick switching between multiple files, I wouldn't even have noticed this problem.)
Read two games: Sorceror (and all 3 of its small, excellent supplements) and Nobilis. Both games have small, excellent systems and pack your brain full of grand ideas.
Join the RPG.net forums and lurk for a long time. Find out what kind of gamer you are and what class of game you'd enjoy playing. (From the suggested games above, I'm obviously a huge narrativist.)
In my opinion, a good game doesn't NEED balance to be interesting. Good players won't run roughshod over each other if their characters aren't balanced. If this is a problem, find new players.
Who Will Be Eaten First?
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 1
Ya know, I've always preferred "Who Will Be Eaten First?" (It's a shame that the author got a nastygram from Jack Chick's lawyers, and you can't find it on his site.)
FYI: Tekumel
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Guardians of Order is releasing a new edition of "Empire of the Petal Throne" in July with the full support of Barker, the game's creator. With Tekumel, Amber, and Nobilis under their belt, GoO is becoming a clearinghouse for underappreciated and brilliant games.
If ethanol were threatening to the oil companies pockets, they'd not be helping research it, but instead shutting up the researchers.
I've got two questions for you.
If gasoline were completely replaced by ethanol, what companies would be positioned best in the market to distribute it, deliver it, and sell it? What companies would own a massive fleet of tanker trucks, miles and miles of pipelines, storage tanks and distribution centers, and hundreds of thousands of facilities with underground storage tanks and pumping devices for delivering ethanol to a consumer's vehicle?
(I'll give you a hint -- both questions have the same answer.)
Both Pac-man and Rogue came out in 1980. Nethack is a "Rogue-like" game that came out in 1987 (as a fork of Hack, I believe). By this time, the world had already grown to know Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Baby Pac-Man, Pac-Man Plus, Super Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man, Pac & Pal, Professor Pac-man, and Pac-Land. Pac-mania is Nethack's contemporary in age.
The surviving mouse was named Kaguya after that girl in the Japanese legend of a bamboo-cutter who finds a baby in a bamboo sheaf. He raises her (with gold he find in more bamboo sheafs later) to be a woman whose wit and beauty attract suitors from all over. She has no desire to marry and gives them all impossible tasks to earn her hand to get rid of them and catches all the frauds. In the end, she tearfully confesses to her father that she comes from the moon and allowed herself to be born on Earth to experience life here but must go back to her people.
We all know the type. Slick management type, wearing neatly pressed suits. Reads the type of trade publications that feature head shots of middle and upper managements atop articles full of jargon, but devoid of content. Power lunches. Golf trips. Owns a Lexus. Won't give a lowly programmer type the time of day.
Actually, if you read the article, BayStar's #1 complaint with SCO is the fact that they're paying their executives too much, blowing too much money on travel, and making too many publicity stunts instead of quietly focusing on the bottom line.
In other words, BayStar is criticizing SCO for acting like the stereotype you put forth.
I'm sure you realize in retrospect that the "executive vice president at Carstar, the largest auto-body repair franchise in the United States" didn't say this with the implication that it was a good thing, right?
The entire point of his trademark antagonism is to generate publicity through lawsuits. At this point, though, I'm not entirely sure that torquing off industry giants isn't the entire motivation of having created the company thanks to this sort of thing.
Tell you what -- if I had that much money to blow, I might be tempted to troll at the corporate level as well.
In addition to new dial-up users as the AC mentioned, you also failed to account for a large chunk of "last mile" customers who can't switch away from dial-up no matter how desperately they may want to, like my parents were for at least 3 years.
The funny thing is, the way the picture is displayed seems to hypnotize people. Scientific studies have shown that, within about 10 seconds of watching TV, the brain slips out of alpha waves and into beta waves (like you're sleeping).
You've got that backwards. TV engages alpha and theta wave patterns. Reading a book engages beta waves. Alpha waves tend to indicate dreaming and sleep. Theta waves tend to indicate strong emotional and intuitive responses. Together they do contribute to intelligence and creativity, but when the left brain is disengaged, they basically equal a passive, trance state. Beta waves are indicative of concentration and activity. Excessive theta and minimized beta is common in sufferers of ADHD when they're being distracted.
The assertion that alpha/theta wave activity increases is based on research done by Dr. Thomas Mullholland back in the 70s. He expected to see an oscillation between alpha and beta wave activity as kids watched their favorite shows but found no beta waves at all. Kids stayed spaced out through an entire show. Their minds resembled that of someone in a hypnotic trance.
One last thought. Advertisers have been aware of this for years and are even now funding more research into neurosciences for the purpose of "building strong brand loyalty" -- in other words, brainwashing.
You know, before there was P2P, I used to frequently say that I downloaded something "off FTP," "off IRC," or even "off the Web" without implying that all FTP/IRC/Web sites were somehow part of a vast shadowy pirate conspiracy. (Okay, well, IRC aside...)
Typically, the kinds of cookies that spyware programs identify are cookies used by advertising companies that have multiple sites as customers and which are used to track you as a unique user from site to site, building an demographic profile. There have been efforts before to weld information from your logins at these sites to your browsing habits for a more personal marketing profile.
I've never, for example, seen Ad-Aware tag a Slashdot cookie as a privacy risk, but I have seen it tag Doubleclick and other crap from when I have to use Explorer (which I use for really uncompromising, cookie-laden sites).
Yes, you can read newspapers to get by, but having moving pictures in your home is one of the greatest inventions of all time. Why would you want to abstain from it for some enlightend purpose?
I will leave you with a quote from Howard Beale, an overstressed news anchor turned mad street prophet, from the movie "Network":
You people and sixty-two million other Americans are listening to me right now. Because less than three percent of you people read books. Because less than fifteen percent of you read newspapers. Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube. Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn't come out of this tube. This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break Presidents, Popes, Prime Ministers. This tube is the most awesome, god-damned force in the whole godless world. And woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people [...movie plot stuff snipped...] And when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome, god-damned propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what s--t will be peddled for truth on this network.
So, you listen to me! Listen to me! Television is not the truth. Television is a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, story tellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business. So if you want the truth, go to your God, go to your gurus, go to yourselves because that's the only place you're ever gonna find any real truth. But man, you're never gonna get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell! We'll tell you that Kojack always gets the killer, and nobody ever gets cancer in Archie Bunker's house. And no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don't worry. Just look at your watch - at the end of the hour, he's gonna win. We'll tell you any s--t you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds - we're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube.
This is mass madness. You maniacs. In God's name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion. So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I am speaking to you now. Turn them off!
Network is simply one of the best movies ever made about TV and the News. I highly recommend it. Despite 70s dress and equipment, it manages not to be dated. All the issues it deals with are still relevant, from how sensationalism taints objectivity and values to how quickly idealists can sell-out when given the opportunity.
So USB 2.0 got isochronous transfers? Cool. Do the bulk transfers follow the scheme I mentioned, or is there intelligent division of the bus between... say... a DVD burner and a keyboard instead of a 50-50 timeslice split?
Slashdot Mirror
It is one of the pilar of modern French state: governement, schools are all 'religion-free', religious activities are considered are purely private issue.
On the other hand, neutrality with respect to religion and respect for the personal beliefs of people is not a part of the culture as the recent ban on religiously-mandated clothing shows. As an American, I find the slight to the Muslim, Jewish, and Sikh communities to be highly offensive and oppressive. In France, apparently relgious freedom means suppression of individual religious expression. This is a similar difference between the American protection of hate speech and the European ban of it while both claim to protect Free Speech.
It is very strange for French people to see the US president using the bible during his nomination, or witness swearing on the bible during a trial.
It is one of those odd traditions that continue to this day that are non-neutral. It's also unlikely to ever stop being the default due to the fact that it would be an unpopular move and the fact that witnesses can refuse to use a Bible and substitute another tome or nothing at all. Jews swear on the Talmud, Muslims on the Koran, etc. It is an odd continued joining between church and state, but it's not surprising if you consider that the tradition came from a time when the big worry about religious oppression was from one sect of Christianity dominating another sect of Christianity.
Your argument -- almost word for word -- was probably used over a two decades ago when RMS started the GNU project to build a Free UNIX. The exact same reasons why the GNU project was started apply to why the ReactOS project should exist.
Today we have Linux. Who knows what we'll have ten years from now if ReactOS can keep up the good work?
So you aren't talking about the JVC DLA-SX21U, because that LCoS unit offers a native 4x3 resolution of 1400x1050; just shy of 1080 lines. Looked like a nice unit, but waaaay out of my price range. And it doesn't meet the OPer's definition of meeting "real" 1920x1080 resolution either.
Actually, I was talking about the Toshiba 57HLX82, a 3-chip LCoS RPTV.
BTW, thanks for the interresting reply.
No prob. I'm one of those people obsessed with a burn-in-free 1080 set to use as a oversized computer monitor. If the 57HLX82 wasn't still out of my price range, I'd be getting one of those today. I'm hoping that the single-chip 1080 DLP solutions will be a little less expensive when they come out, but I'm not holding my breath.
n fact, there are no DLP chips out there that do more than 1280x720, and the high end of LCD Front/Rear projection is still 1366x768 (Sony HS-20). Only a CRT offers full 1440x1080i resolution, because CRTs are inherently analog technology from the electron beam out to phosphor.
Actually, TI already has begun manufacture of a 1080 DLP chip. The xHD3 chip was demoed at a trade show back in February in a Samsung RPTV prototype and should be out in the market by the end of the year.
Oh, and there's been a 1080p LCoS set out for about a year now. Unfortunately, Toshiba is discontinuing it because its LCoS chip provider couldn't keep up with the demand.
Aw, man. I'm crying from the strain of not busting out laughing in my cubicle.
I'm going to have to post this and then get away quickly before I fail to keep my slacking quiet.
Until Safari allows me to allow or deny cookies from individual servers like the Mozilla family can, it will never satisfy my inner Cookie Nazi. I'll stick with Firefox until then (despite its many flaws).
So before you start a narcissistic rant about how blogs are mostly narcissistic rantings, remember that this useless forum discussion takes place on a blog. That's right, slashdot is a blog.
Since "blog" is short for "web log," what exactly does Slashdot log?
The difference between news sites with discussion and blogs is one of the personal nature of the content published. Slashdot isn't a log of anyone's life, and it's far more discussion-oriened than the usual expositionist diaries that characterize blogging. It has little in common with the blogs that came after it other than the fact that it has articles and discussion.
Which is why I said that it might be too much work.
Sorry. I thought that was sarcasm. My bad.
I'm just a curmudgeon about Apple. I can't really think of a UI change made since Mac OS X debuted that didn't increase inconsistency, and it constantly miffs me to hear people sing praise of how much better it is. I just triggered on something innocuous.
You do know that having to continuously mouse-over windows is very inefficient compared to knowing ahead of time which window to click, right? Having to hunt for which window you want is a productivity waster and adds to frustration in using the system.
People today just honestly don't appreciate good, unobtrusive user-interface design anymore.
Try using Expose when you have multiple text files open at once -- say about 10 or so. Now, try to predict which window will equal which file so that you don't have to spend time hunting around to see which (now indecipherable scribbles on white) window you want. Expose (just like the Dock) is only really good to use if windows are somehow easy to idenfity at a glance from a "zoomed-out" state. I basically have to use a pager-like setup and a little memory to quickly access different documents since Mac OS X provides no real way of organizing documents in an easily remember state (like alphabetical order as opposed to most recent access).
(If BBEdit or some other Mac editor supported a single-window, multiple-document mode to allow for quick switching between multiple files, I wouldn't even have noticed this problem.)
Read two games: Sorceror (and all 3 of its small, excellent supplements) and Nobilis. Both games have small, excellent systems and pack your brain full of grand ideas.
Join the RPG.net forums and lurk for a long time. Find out what kind of gamer you are and what class of game you'd enjoy playing. (From the suggested games above, I'm obviously a huge narrativist.)
In my opinion, a good game doesn't NEED balance to be interesting. Good players won't run roughshod over each other if their characters aren't balanced. If this is a problem, find new players.
Ya know, I've always preferred "Who Will Be Eaten First?"
(It's a shame that the author got a nastygram from Jack Chick's lawyers, and you can't find it on his site.)
Guardians of Order is releasing a new edition of "Empire of the Petal Throne" in July with the full support of Barker, the game's creator. With Tekumel, Amber, and Nobilis under their belt, GoO is becoming a clearinghouse for underappreciated and brilliant games.
If ethanol were threatening to the oil companies pockets, they'd not be helping research it, but instead shutting up the researchers.
I've got two questions for you.
If gasoline were completely replaced by ethanol, what companies would be positioned best in the market to distribute it, deliver it, and sell it? What companies would own a massive fleet of tanker trucks, miles and miles of pipelines, storage tanks and distribution centers, and hundreds of thousands of facilities with underground storage tanks and pumping devices for delivering ethanol to a consumer's vehicle?
(I'll give you a hint -- both questions have the same answer.)
FYI, Pac-man is older than Nethack.
Both Pac-man and Rogue came out in 1980. Nethack is a "Rogue-like" game that came out in 1987 (as a fork of Hack, I believe). By this time, the world had already grown to know Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Baby Pac-Man, Pac-Man Plus, Super Pac-Man, Jr. Pac-Man, Pac & Pal, Professor Pac-man, and Pac-Land. Pac-mania is Nethack's contemporary in age.
The surviving mouse was named Kaguya after that girl in the Japanese legend of a bamboo-cutter who finds a baby in a bamboo sheaf. He raises her (with gold he find in more bamboo sheafs later) to be a woman whose wit and beauty attract suitors from all over. She has no desire to marry and gives them all impossible tasks to earn her hand to get rid of them and catches all the frauds. In the end, she tearfully confesses to her father that she comes from the moon and allowed herself to be born on Earth to experience life here but must go back to her people.
It's a bizarre little legend.
We all know the type. Slick management type, wearing neatly pressed suits. Reads the type of trade publications that feature head shots of middle and upper managements atop articles full of jargon, but devoid of content. Power lunches. Golf trips. Owns a Lexus. Won't give a lowly programmer type the time of day.
Actually, if you read the article, BayStar's #1 complaint with SCO is the fact that they're paying their executives too much, blowing too much money on travel, and making too many publicity stunts instead of quietly focusing on the bottom line.
In other words, BayStar is criticizing SCO for acting like the stereotype you put forth.
I'm sure you realize in retrospect that the "executive vice president at Carstar, the largest auto-body repair franchise in the United States" didn't say this with the implication that it was a good thing, right?
The entire point of his trademark antagonism is to generate publicity through lawsuits. At this point, though, I'm not entirely sure that torquing off industry giants isn't the entire motivation of having created the company thanks to this sort of thing.
Tell you what -- if I had that much money to blow, I might be tempted to troll at the corporate level as well.
In addition to new dial-up users as the AC mentioned, you also failed to account for a large chunk of "last mile" customers who can't switch away from dial-up no matter how desperately they may want to, like my parents were for at least 3 years.
Many people HATE dial-up but have no alternative.
The funny thing is, the way the picture is displayed seems to hypnotize people. Scientific studies have shown that, within about 10 seconds of watching TV, the brain slips out of alpha waves and into beta waves (like you're sleeping).
You've got that backwards. TV engages alpha and theta wave patterns. Reading a book engages beta waves. Alpha waves tend to indicate dreaming and sleep. Theta waves tend to indicate strong emotional and intuitive responses. Together they do contribute to intelligence and creativity, but when the left brain is disengaged, they basically equal a passive, trance state. Beta waves are indicative of concentration and activity. Excessive theta and minimized beta is common in sufferers of ADHD when they're being distracted.
The assertion that alpha/theta wave activity increases is based on research done by Dr. Thomas Mullholland back in the 70s. He expected to see an oscillation between alpha and beta wave activity as kids watched their favorite shows but found no beta waves at all. Kids stayed spaced out through an entire show. Their minds resembled that of someone in a hypnotic trance.
One last thought. Advertisers have been aware of this for years and are even now funding more research into neurosciences for the purpose of "building strong brand loyalty" -- in other words, brainwashing.
TV is sleep teaching.
You know, before there was P2P, I used to frequently say that I downloaded something "off FTP," "off IRC," or even "off the Web" without implying that all FTP/IRC/Web sites were somehow part of a vast shadowy pirate conspiracy. (Okay, well, IRC aside...)
Typically, the kinds of cookies that spyware programs identify are cookies used by advertising companies that have multiple sites as customers and which are used to track you as a unique user from site to site, building an demographic profile. There have been efforts before to weld information from your logins at these sites to your browsing habits for a more personal marketing profile.
I've never, for example, seen Ad-Aware tag a Slashdot cookie as a privacy risk, but I have seen it tag Doubleclick and other crap from when I have to use Explorer (which I use for really uncompromising, cookie-laden sites).
I will leave you with a quote from Howard Beale, an overstressed news anchor turned mad street prophet, from the movie "Network":
Network is simply one of the best movies ever made about TV and the News. I highly recommend it. Despite 70s dress and equipment, it manages not to be dated. All the issues it deals with are still relevant, from how sensationalism taints objectivity and values to how quickly idealists can sell-out when given the opportunity.
So USB 2.0 got isochronous transfers? Cool.
Do the bulk transfers follow the scheme I mentioned, or is there intelligent division of the bus between... say... a DVD burner and a keyboard instead of a 50-50 timeslice split?