While I understand what you're implying about the older games not winning on technical excellence, I have a few slight reservations on the comment.
The amount of work that the designers of 80's coin ops were able to get out of such limited systems was and still is amazing. We're talking back when the 64 in C64 stood for 64 K. In the days of feature creep and bloatware, this is something we should keep in mind.
The oft cited gameplay of the old games was often mindless and repetitive. However, is was incredibly addictive. Kinda like hitting the 'Reload' button when visiting/. =)
Fair enough. My bad for going on the/. blurb, which just begins with the ambiguous A Yale computer scientist. Given the # of people here who do recognize him, perhaps that should have been mentioned in the write up. I didn't recognize him however. I was just presenting my opinions on the article that I read.
That being said, my opinion of the article hasn't changed much. It still feels like an essay in a English Lit 391: Cyperpunk than any real roadmap for the future.
Hmmm. The author makes some interesting predictions for the future usages of computers, but not really interesting to anyone who has read a smattering of the Holy Trinity of Cyperpunk.
POersonally, about halfway through, and witnessing about the 20th noun with the word 'cyber' prefixed to it, the paper became more interested and self-involved with the words it was creating ("Cybersphere", etc) and finding metaphors for the situations.
Like a Bruckheimer movie, I started to be able to pick the plot points and figure what coined term was going to appear next ("Cyberbody?" Cyberbody: Check.)
So while he does raise some interesting points, is it all that new, or is it merely someone wanting to bullshit their profs by writing a paper that appears "deep" and "Visionary"?
Moreover, is it someone like our esteemed Mr Katz who wishes to help shape the lexicon for the new age because they realzie they lack the ability to actually work with the technology itself.
You know, if they really wanted to raise public awareness, they'd put mini-cams and mikes everywhere, and broadcast the damn thing nightly.
I mean, just think:
An hostile environment which can weed out the morons (none of this pansy "Tropical Resort" crap)
A bunch of scientists in a closed space. If they're anything like the scientists, grad students, or OSS programmers I know, the political infighting will be better than any soap opera
Tons of nifty new tech gadgets from Nasa (or assorted VC start-ups, paying to be showcased)
And the looming spectre of the US Military in the background. (ya gotta have a bad guy)
To hell with Survivor or Big Brother, I wanna see this.
Are you kidding me? Stampede in this town is a hoot. Especially if you're working in the tech or oil industry downtown, as it pretty much amounts to an extra 10-day vacation in July. Basically, it's an extended pub-crawl, and there aren't too many other places that offer that with a scenic mountain view and city-wide cable-modem coverage (for $40CDN a month, which is what, $5 US?)
Were you playing the same CivII as the rest of us?
Civ2 had the game rules in delimited text, and the graphics were also easily substituted. I remember the ton of various Civ2 mods that existed prior to the release of Fantastic Worlds, and FW itself was just a mod pack and a GUI editor.
Why do I need to change the source if I can change the.ini files anyways? The game could be expanded and updated, allowing new art and endless replayability. (not that Civ didn't have that in the first place)
Not bad, but essentially saying the same thing as the tweak3d article. Some of the other, non-holographic versions of storage sund like they may actually see the light of day first.
The move in the industry is (or soon will be, with any luck), towards DVD cases. You know, the tall ones with enough room for a brochure about the flick. Considering the amount of "info" that comes in most boxes these days, there is no real loss with going this route.
Sid Meier's Antietam! already shipped like this, and I beleive more are on the way. I hope so. They stack up much better in a bookshelf, and allow me to keep the original packaging, which is a nice touch.
I don't see what being a Gimp fan has anything aty all to do with Corel Draw.
One's a Vector-based drawing tool, the other is an Image editor. They are meant to do entirely different things. (Or the same thing in entirely different ways. Potato - Po-tah-to, I guess)
Linux has been missing a decent vector-based tool, and this port has been anticipated. Isn't this like comparing C&C and Quake?
They were testing for OpenGL performance. They used Quake. Shouldn't this level the playing field as much as possible?
BTW, I understand your point, that there is a bias in every test. But if you use the test of choice and for your particular area, and win, then is this not proof enough?
Oh, I see. A *mini* satellite. For a moment there I thought that someone was proposing sending up nanobots into orbit, which would eventually sow the seeds of our own destruction.
Well, it looks like you guys have crushed their poor little server. Nasty, nasty Slashdotters! It does have one of the cuter "can not connect" errors I've seen though.
On topic though, I think this is sweet. It definetly will make it worth the wait. I do find it interesting that the cards that they are using for this demo are also the ones that are most accessible to the Open-Source community in general: 3dFX and Matrox.
These are the vendors that have gone the furthest in allowing access to their products, and this has allowed a company with a limited budget to show what some of those cards are really capable in. Good for Be. Good for 3dFX and Matrox. Good for the consumers. Win-win-win.
Black & White will be one of the first titles to come directly to BeOS too. I'm damn sure gonna get the Be version now.
You mentioned OCR software, but didn't go much further with it. Wouldn't this be the solution you need?
Scan to OCR to PS to PDF
there are apprarently a couple tools to do this for you. check out a brief list here
Seeing as you've looked into Adobe Capture, windows may be an option. If so, then the other question would be whether you've looked into Textbridge? This looks like it would do exactly what you're asking. No muss, little fuss.
The big backlash about the Orion project wasn't so much about the radiative effects of nukes, or what it may due to the crew, but rather the environmental cost if something fscked up during launch, or just in getting the nuclear material in orbit in the first place.
Ties into the same reasons that all those "get rid of nuclear waste by rocketing the crap into the sun" plans go nowhere as well.
I guess that's the question. Would this tech make it easy to get large amounts of materials up the gravity well to build larger orbital facilities and spacecraft, or will things use be restricted to launching from orbit?
Basically, is having a plasma rocket inherently more dangerous to be launching through the atmoshpere than the normal chemical rockets currenntly employed?
Lastly, I guess is the bit about "large magnets that are super-conductive in space temeperatures" imply that these rockets may not be able to leave orbit in order to keep the engine functional (or have massive amounts of cooling available to take over for atmoshperic descent).
Battlefield Earth does have redeeming qualities. However, it is only by plumbing through the depths of its wretchedness that those admiral qualities can truly be appreciated. The quality is best paraphrased by those ancient words of wisdom: "If evil did not exist, how would we know what good is?"
And thus does Battlefield Earth prove it's merit. It sets the bar quite high for any of those who may attempt to surpass it in the future. B.E. also wiill amke it diffcult for any wretched movie to be made solely based on the interests ofa a top name star, thus saving future moviegoers for quite some time to come. It can be argued that only for the involvement of Travolta did this movie see the light of day. If he nad not agreed to it, it quite likely may never have left the studio vaults, much like the infamous Marvel "Fantastic Four" movie, but unfortunately unlike so many shallow comedies based on 2-minute SNL sketches.
So Battlefield Earth has contributed much. Someone has to be the one try, to strive, and then to let the rest of humanity "don't go there". In this, Battlefield Earth succeeds to degrees where few others have gone before.
The headline seems to be misleading, taking the stance that no MS in the office includes removing Windows. Most of the quotes seemed to focus on just being able to exist without MS-Office (presumably to cut down on security hazards or vicoious upgrade cycles). NO big surprise, really.
There are windows-based non-MS solutions. Howabout Lotus for crissakes? We're stuck with Windows on the desktop at work, but we use a Notes - Smartsuite solution for work, and we seem able to get by just fine. No e-mail viruses, no major compatibility problems. No need for MS Office. The only concession is the (free) MS Word viewer that I keep for those occasional documents that don't come through. That, or a polite phone-call to the document creator to send in RTF or something if there is a problem.
No MS-Office, and work seems to get done just fine. It's important to remeber that Windows != MS-Office, and that there are other solutions out there. Also !(MS-Office) <> Linux. Think outside the box, kids.
Slashdot Mirror
The amount of work that the designers of 80's coin ops were able to get out of such limited systems was and still is amazing. We're talking back when the 64 in C64 stood for 64 K. In the days of feature creep and bloatware, this is something we should keep in mind.
The oft cited gameplay of the old games was often mindless and repetitive. However, is was incredibly addictive. Kinda like hitting the 'Reload' button when visiting /. =)
I was thinking along the lines of authors Gibson, Sterling, and Stephenson, rather than any set of books.
That being said, my opinion of the article hasn't changed much. It still feels like an essay in a English Lit 391: Cyperpunk than any real roadmap for the future.
POersonally, about halfway through, and witnessing about the 20th noun with the word 'cyber' prefixed to it, the paper became more interested and self-involved with the words it was creating ("Cybersphere", etc) and finding metaphors for the situations.
Like a Bruckheimer movie, I started to be able to pick the plot points and figure what coined term was going to appear next ("Cyberbody?" Cyberbody: Check.)
So while he does raise some interesting points, is it all that new, or is it merely someone wanting to bullshit their profs by writing a paper that appears "deep" and "Visionary"?
Moreover, is it someone like our esteemed Mr Katz who wishes to help shape the lexicon for the new age because they realzie they lack the ability to actually work with the technology itself.
Just some 1st impressions...
Watched Demolition Man lately, have we?
I mean, just think:
An hostile environment which can weed out the morons (none of this pansy "Tropical Resort" crap)
A bunch of scientists in a closed space. If they're anything like the scientists, grad students, or OSS programmers I know, the political infighting will be better than any soap opera
Tons of nifty new tech gadgets from Nasa (or assorted VC start-ups, paying to be showcased)
And the looming spectre of the US Military in the background. (ya gotta have a bad guy)
To hell with Survivor or Big Brother, I wanna see this.
Are you kidding me? Stampede in this town is a hoot. Especially if you're working in the tech or oil industry downtown, as it pretty much amounts to an extra 10-day vacation in July. Basically, it's an extended pub-crawl, and there aren't too many other places that offer that with a scenic mountain view and city-wide cable-modem coverage (for $40CDN a month, which is what, $5 US?)
But on the plus side, Norrath could be quite quiet over the weekend, with blow-out sales to follow during the Sunday markets. Mmmm. Quiet...
Civ2 had the game rules in delimited text, and the graphics were also easily substituted. I remember the ton of various Civ2 mods that existed prior to the release of Fantastic Worlds, and FW itself was just a mod pack and a GUI editor.
Why do I need to change the source if I can change the .ini files anyways? The game could be expanded and updated, allowing new art and endless replayability. (not that Civ didn't have that in the first place)
What, you mean you forgot about "Homeboys in Outer Space" on UPN from a couple years ago? For shame.
(Not that I'm choked about them canceling "Nowhere Man" to bring on this classic, mind you. Nope, not me.)
Seriously though I see to recall an article back in the old, dead tree edition. Er, just a sec
...Man, I wish all the magazines had archives as complete as the old Byte ones. Anyhoo, they have a couple links about holographic storage there too:
1996 and 1998
Not bad, but essentially saying the same thing as the tweak3d article. Some of the other, non-holographic versions of storage sund like they may actually see the light of day first.
I mean, we all know it ain't for geeks until there's an O'Reilly book, right?
Sid Meier's Antietam! already shipped like this, and I beleive more are on the way. I hope so. They stack up much better in a bookshelf, and allow me to keep the original packaging, which is a nice touch.
One's a Vector-based drawing tool, the other is an Image editor. They are meant to do entirely different things. (Or the same thing in entirely different ways. Potato - Po-tah-to, I guess)
Linux has been missing a decent vector-based tool, and this port has been anticipated. Isn't this like comparing C&C and Quake?
They were testing for OpenGL performance. They used Quake. Shouldn't this level the playing field as much as possible?
BTW, I understand your point, that there is a bias in every test. But if you use the test of choice and for your particular area, and win, then is this not proof enough?
Don't scare me like that, /.
On topic though, I think this is sweet. It definetly will make it worth the wait. I do find it interesting that the cards that they are using for this demo are also the ones that are most accessible to the Open-Source community in general: 3dFX and Matrox.
These are the vendors that have gone the furthest in allowing access to their products, and this has allowed a company with a limited budget to show what some of those cards are really capable in. Good for Be. Good for 3dFX and Matrox. Good for the consumers. Win-win-win.
Black & White will be one of the first titles to come directly to BeOS too. I'm damn sure gonna get the Be version now.
Scan to OCR to PS to PDF
there are apprarently a couple tools to do this for you. check out a brief list here
Seeing as you've looked into Adobe Capture, windows may be an option. If so, then the other question would be whether you've looked into Textbridge? This looks like it would do exactly what you're asking. No muss, little fuss.
Ties into the same reasons that all those "get rid of nuclear waste by rocketing the crap into the sun" plans go nowhere as well.
Basically, is having a plasma rocket inherently more dangerous to be launching through the atmoshpere than the normal chemical rockets currenntly employed?
Lastly, I guess is the bit about "large magnets that are super-conductive in space temeperatures" imply that these rockets may not be able to leave orbit in order to keep the engine functional (or have massive amounts of cooling available to take over for atmoshperic descent).
Oh yeah, the direct link is here.
And thus does Battlefield Earth prove it's merit. It sets the bar quite high for any of those who may attempt to surpass it in the future. B.E. also wiill amke it diffcult for any wretched movie to be made solely based on the interests ofa a top name star, thus saving future moviegoers for quite some time to come. It can be argued that only for the involvement of Travolta did this movie see the light of day. If he nad not agreed to it, it quite likely may never have left the studio vaults, much like the infamous Marvel "Fantastic Four" movie, but unfortunately unlike so many shallow comedies based on 2-minute SNL sketches.
So Battlefield Earth has contributed much. Someone has to be the one try, to strive, and then to let the rest of humanity "don't go there". In this, Battlefield Earth succeeds to degrees where few others have gone before.
Process halts
As does the summer
Soon comes snow
The headline seems to be misleading, taking the stance that no MS in the office includes removing Windows. Most of the quotes seemed to focus on just being able to exist without MS-Office (presumably to cut down on security hazards or vicoious upgrade cycles). NO big surprise, really.
There are windows-based non-MS solutions. Howabout Lotus for crissakes? We're stuck with Windows on the desktop at work, but we use a Notes - Smartsuite solution for work, and we seem able to get by just fine. No e-mail viruses, no major compatibility problems. No need for MS Office. The only concession is the (free) MS Word viewer that I keep for those occasional documents that don't come through. That, or a polite phone-call to the document creator to send in RTF or something if there is a problem.
No MS-Office, and work seems to get done just fine. It's important to remeber that Windows != MS-Office, and that there are other solutions out there. Also !(MS-Office) <> Linux. Think outside the box, kids.