Actually, he was probably shown with "MISSING IMAGE" covering his entire body. I guess, in SL, even the CEO needs to rebake his avatar textures once in awhile...
A PowerPoint-style screen isn't too hard to do. You would upload your slides as textures and display them on a "screen" object (a flat rectangular prim) with a script to allow the presenter to advance to the next slide by clicking on the screen. The "screen" object would contain the control script, the slides, and possibly a notecard containing the names of the slides in order. I've done something very similar to this as a photo display tool, and a friend of mine took my script and modified it for just this use.
Oh, you could make it fancier if you wanted, with a dialog box control to allow the presenter to go forwards or back, or possibly use a chat-based control system. It would cost you L$10 per slide you wanted to upload, but that's not a huge expense, and, if anything, it's an incentive to keep the presentation short.:-)
Excellent! I'll make sure and check those out...I'm particularly interested in the "retro" suits, as I am one of the owners of a new club (The Gin Rummy) that's designed to resemble a speakeasy of the 1920's, and I could do with more period-correct outfits for use while working there.
"Wearing well" probably means something akin to "no weird graphical/color glitches, and that it works well with your own shape. (some items don't work very well depending on shape)
Precisely. The nubuck shoes come with "shoe fit" inserts that ensure a good fit, and you don't have to set your foot size to 0 to make them look right, unlike other shoes I've seen (and own). They also have customizable sole and lace colors, and built-in "walk" animations which are useful if you don't already have a good animation overrider.
I've done my share of lamenting the state of masculine fashion in SL. Most of the clothes out there are for women, and most of the stuff that is available for men, I wouldn't be caught dead in.
Still, there are decent clothes to be found. The best suits in SL (complete with flexiprim ties!) come from Blaze, and they also sell good casual menswear. I found more decent menswear at Swell Second Life, including khaki pants and a polo shirt. Blaze is also good for formal wear, and Simone sells a high-class tux that is top-notch. SIMWEAR Menswear is a good location for relatively inexpensive stuff, including suits and tuxes, and also has a good line of shoes, hats, and accessories. Another good shoe retailer is D2TK, where I've bought a couple pairs of brown nubuck leather shoes that look good and wear well. And I have a couple of outfits from Vitamin Ci that also look nice, as well as a pair of Victorian suits from Silver Rose Designs in Caledon that are quite well done. As for hair, I've found decent men's hair designs at both Pazazz and GuRL 6.
Suffice it to say, there are options for the male avatar out there, if you know where to look. "'Cos every girl crazy 'bout a sharp-dressed man..."
Indeed. Information I've seen about the server hardware SL relies on says that each "sim" (256x256m area) is backed by a single CPU core, so a single server with twin dual-core processors could support 4 sims, the size of an island like Caledon. As far as I can tell, a 1U server with those processors will run about $3000, and that doesn't include hosting costs, so $5000 would be about right for a "private island" of that size.
I've just started in on SL myself, and I can tell you that economic issues are currently a hot topic of discussion there.
Statistics are showing that Linden Labs is dumping way more money into the economy than is getting taken out; as a result, the L$ is now trading at 340/US$ and going down from there. The primary way money gets poured in is through stipends; LL is trying to cut off the spigot by eliminating the weekly stipend on free accounts, and there are those that would like to see them eliminated for "premium" (paid) accounts as well. They're also phasing out "dwell" (bonus money paid out to landowners based on how many visitors they get and how long they stay). Whether this will halt the decline in the value of the L$, no one can say; on the other hand, it'll cause a certain amount of pain for the holders of free accounts. Some will upgrade to premium, but some will quit SL altogether.
(Some people question the value of a premium account, because, with the premium stipend at L$250/week, you could get more money just buying L$ on the open market with that US$10/month. The premium accounts also get the privilege of owning land, but there are ways for basic accounts to own or rent property, too.)
LL has encouraged content vendors to raise their prices, but many of them are refusing to do so because they don't want to screw their customers, or precipitate an inflationary spiral, or both. And the contract of LL's "economist on staff" has just expired; no word on a possible replacement yet.
Now, this is not to paint a picture of gloom and doom. SL is still going strong, and, with the 1.10 client release, it's never looked better. The introduction of more dynamic lighting effects and flexible primitives open up new possibilities for content creators, and a new capability for making HTTP requests from scripts offers some interesting possibilities for interaction between the SL world and the RL Internet. (As a software guy, I'm interested in the content-creation and scripting aspects, but I'm also interested in the virtual-community aspects of the world, too.) Money's one aspect of the whole environment, but it's certainly not all of it. It's still worth your time to check it out, if you haven't.
Well, Lord knows Bush has done plenty to piss me off, but I welcomed the announcement of a return to the Moon. I'm the kind of person that gets misty at the final line of the movie Apollo 13: "I look up at the Moon, and I wonder: When will we be going back? And who will that be?" For the first time in a long while, I felt, there was a possibility that the answers to those questions would no longer be null.
It's useful, though, to keep another line from Apollo 13 in mind: "From now on, we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. But it wasn't a miracle. We just decided to go." That says a lot about how we made it happen the first time...and how we will make it happen again, if we do. We, as a society, are going to have to "decide to go." That decision's going to be a lot harder to make this time around, though.
Certainly, if this effort does fail, given the timeline involved, it will likely be long after Bush has stepped down before the fact of its failure is realized, so you're kind of right there. But I hope that, somehow or another, you're proven wrong...
(Now if only there were a way to develop an "open-source space program." Could a band of international volunteers succeed where major governments have failed? Even I think it's unlikely...but it would make a hell of a story if they could.)
They were. However, the guy that actually wrote the script wasn't that comfortable in the genre, and he was trying to save money for MGM.
Ironically, William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson (the original authors of the book) had already written a screenplay, but MGM didn't use it. A reviewer from Cinefantastique who read both screenplays thought the Nolan/Johnson screenplay would have made a better movie.
Despite this, Logan's Run was the SF movie when it came out, and enjoyed that title until the following year...when a little flick you may have heard of, by a fellow named Lucas, came along and upset everyone's applecart.
(If you can, get your hands on the omnibus volume Logan: A Trilogy. It contains all three--yes, three--Logan novels, as well as Nolan's story of how the concept developed from the first novel through the movie to the abysmal TV show.)
Yeah. The fact that only the first page of the article was mirrored means I didn't get to see their notes on Myrinet or InfiniBand...which are the high-speed interconnects that the company I work for, Aspen Systems, generally use when building clusters. (This is in addition to a standard GigE network used as the "control" network, freeing up the high-speed network for application data. The part I'm responsible for, the management software, uses the control network exclusively.) I'm interested to see what they say about them.
No kidding. I literally just mentioned to my wife that I remember being thrilled to pieces over getting a 1.2 Gb hard drive (which replaced a 540 Mb drive), and that these new Seagate drives make that old one look "like tablets of baked clay."
I used to keep track of how cheap hard disks were getting in terms of megabytes per dollar. Well, we've long since hit and blown through the gigabyte-per-dollar mark; for my next upgrade, I'm considering 250 Gb SATA drives, which are already up at close to 3 Gb/dollar (and, if another commenter has the right of it, may well blast through that mark by the time I have the money to buy them).
Obviously, at this point, it's inevitable that we will see a 1 Tb drive in 2007 if not earlier; that prediction is like predicting an egg will break when you see it fall off the counter and head for the floor. I just wonder what the upper limit is. Will we crack the terabyte-per-dollar mark? Within ten years? Five? And what will that involve, nanoscale-density recording? Gonna be interesting to find out.
You forgot one possibility: individual users and developers. This might give Microsoft some victories they could crow about in the press (against people without the resources to fight them), and might satisfy their shareholders, but would cause them to sink to RIAA levels of unpopularity with pretty much everybody else.
Re:Don't forget the TRON soundtrack!
on
The Story of Tron
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· Score: 3, Informative
I have a couple of her other albums, which are also good. One is Switched-On Bach 2000, in which she revisited the material she covered in the original Switched-On Bach album, with modern synthesizer gear and period-correct Bach tunings. She added one "bonus track" as well, a rendition of the famous Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor--perfect for Halloween music. The second is her collaboration with "Weird Al" Yankovic on a rendition of Prokofiev's Peter And The Wolf, as well as a new piece, Carnival of the Animals, Part Two (parody of Camille Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals). She proved she could be as much of a parody artist as Al, throwing a bunch of references to other pieces into her compositions to counterpoint Al's bizarre sense of humor.
Bear in mind that, if you're a developer, you can get the WristPDA SDK from Fossil's Web site, and use it in conjunction with the standard Palm SDK to adapt an application for use on the watch, including the use of special fonts, the button presses, etc.
Then, too, the "rocker switch" on the side of the watch is encoded in the same fashion as the "jog dial" on the Sony Clie Palms, so many applications may support it already.
I don't think so anymore; I did see them in a store when they first came out (for about $125), but that was some years ago. I got mine via ShopAtHomeTV.com, and I at least had a chance to see the watch on TV before I bought it. (My wife was watching, and she pointed it out to me, and I needed a new watch, so...)
If they're anywhere, they'll most likely be at a Fossil retail store; in your area, there's stores at Universal CityWalk, South Coast Plaza, The Oaks in Thousand Oaks, on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, and outlet stores in Camarillo and at Ontario Mills. (Reference)
As others have mentioned, you sometimes find them on Amazon. eBay also has some listed.
I do have a couple of photos of mine, though, including one of it on my wrist.
The little mini-stylus snaps right into the buckle of the watchband; it requires a little tug to get it out. I'm not worried about losing it...but they did ship a spare with the watch just in case.
However, I wouldn't use that teeny little thing in anything but an emergency. Instead, I bought a Belkin Quadra pen/stylus, which also has a built-in LED flashlight and laser pointer. With the stylus tip extended, it works just fine for scrawling on the watch face.
I have rather large wrists, so the Abacus looks just fine on me...it looks a lot classier than my old Casio Databank, being of nice solid stainless steel construction. It syncs up well with jpilot under Linux (tip: use the Handspring Visor USB driver in the kernel). And, as for price, it cost me only $50. Can't beat that. (I used to carry a Palm VII around, but the Abacus more than replaces it.)
Maybe so. But...do you want to be the test case? Didn't think so.
That's why it's important to kill this bill before someone has to go to court and spend megabuck$ on lawyers to defend themselves against such a poorly-written piece of crap.
Re:Alan Shepard won the first hole
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Golf in Space
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· Score: 1
Ah, I dunno...that first shot of Al's looked like a slice.
Looks like Yahoo! is headed down the path to dhimmitude. And I think their reasons for doing it come down, in the end, to fear.
This is similar to why American newspapers won't publish the Danish Jyllands-Posten "Mohammed" cartoons, and why American TV networks won't show them. To that end, here's some insightful commentary by DailyPundit commenter "Jack" on this issue (as quoted in this thread):
There is a thing about the reason that the Muhammed cartoons not being published that seems to have been left unsaid.
An important thing.
Newspapers and Television news shows are not showing the cartoons out of fear of what that might cause. Terror at what might happen to them, their homes, their lives.
Terror, as in 'Terrorism'.
The West's shining fundamental tenet, the First Amendment, has been attacked by Islam, terrorized.
And it fell faster than the World Trade Center.
No planes were needed, no bombs. No innocent victims needed to have their heads sawn off.
They used our foolish nature, our tolerance, our multiculturalism, our determination to believe the best about people and fashioned it into a spear--and rammed it into our heart.
They didn't merely destroy buildings this time. They took aim--and hit, our very souls.
I would say rise up. I would say, arm yourself, fight for your country.
But it's too late. Our government, our press--our allies are already accepting the scimitar at their necks. They're already sold us all down the river--just to buy a few more moments to allow themselves to milk the status quo.
And Yahoo! appears to be falling over themselves to do likewise.
Just remember the famous quote from Strictly Ballroom, Yahoo!: "A life lived in fear is a life half-lived."
Yes, they do sync under Linux. I use my Fossil Abacus (an AU5005 model I picked up from ShopAtHomeTV.com for $50) with JPilot under Debian. You also need the pilot-link package and the kernel USB driver for Handspring Visor.
If you download the WristPDA SDK, you can even compile apps for it under Linux. (You'll also need the m68k development tools, PilRC, and the PalmOS SDK from PalmSource.)
What is interesting however, is that telgraphs were able to send information long distances over wires... sort of reminds me of, um, the internet.
That's a better analogy than you might think...there's some good history of telegraphy in a book called The Victorian Internet, which I was inspired to dig out last night after reading about this story over on JWZ's blog. The parallels in the history of the telegraph network and the Internet are striking...they had many similar uses, including news delivery and commercial transactions; telegraph operators commonly used the wires for "chat" and even "online gaming" (playing chess); people devised, and broke, codes and ciphers for telegraph traffic; there were even some "telegraph romances." And, in its day, the telegraph network was referred to by some as "the highway of thought." (Compare with the overhyped phrase "the information superhighway.")
Exactly! The key portion of Joel's article is this:
Now, the reason the music recording industry wants different prices has nothing to do with making a premium on the best songs. What they really want is a system they can manipulate to send signals about what songs are worth, and thus what songs you should buy. [...]
Here's the dream world for the EMI Group, Sony/BMG, etc.: there are two prices for songs on iTunes, say, $2.49 and $0.99. All the new releases come out at $2.49. Some classic rock (Sweet Home Alabama) is at $2.49. Unwanted, old, crap, like, say, Brandy (You're A Fine Girl) -- the crap we only know because it was pushed on us in the 70s by paid-off disk jockeys -- would be deliberately priced at $0.99 to send a clear message that $0.99 = crap.
And now when a musician gets uppity, all the recording industry has to do is threaten to release their next single straight into the $0.99 category, which will kill it dead no matter how good it is. And suddenly the music industry has a lot more leverage over their artists in negotiations: the kind of leverage they are used to having. Their favorite kind of leverage. The "we won't promote your music if you don't let us put rootkits on your CDs" kind of leverage.
In other words: both the customers and the artists get screwed over again, and the fat-cat record company executives laugh all the way to the bank. Because, otherwise, the executives might have to give up their six-martini lunches, their limos and Learjets full of stacked blonde bimbos, and all the cocaine they stuff up their noses...and we can't have that, now can we?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, he was probably shown with "MISSING IMAGE" covering his entire body. I guess, in SL, even the CEO needs to rebake his avatar textures once in awhile...
Oh, you could make it fancier if you wanted, with a dialog box control to allow the presenter to go forwards or back, or possibly use a chat-based control system. It would cost you L$10 per slide you wanted to upload, but that's not a huge expense, and, if anything, it's an incentive to keep the presentation short. :-)
Well, I should bloody well hope so!
(Though I haven't really hacked on the code for awhile, my Venice is still powering Electric Minds to this day...)
Excellent! I'll make sure and check those out...I'm particularly interested in the "retro" suits, as I am one of the owners of a new club (The Gin Rummy) that's designed to resemble a speakeasy of the 1920's, and I could do with more period-correct outfits for use while working there.
Precisely. The nubuck shoes come with "shoe fit" inserts that ensure a good fit, and you don't have to set your foot size to 0 to make them look right, unlike other shoes I've seen (and own). They also have customizable sole and lace colors, and built-in "walk" animations which are useful if you don't already have a good animation overrider.
Still, there are decent clothes to be found. The best suits in SL (complete with flexiprim ties!) come from Blaze, and they also sell good casual menswear. I found more decent menswear at Swell Second Life, including khaki pants and a polo shirt. Blaze is also good for formal wear, and Simone sells a high-class tux that is top-notch. SIMWEAR Menswear is a good location for relatively inexpensive stuff, including suits and tuxes, and also has a good line of shoes, hats, and accessories. Another good shoe retailer is D2TK, where I've bought a couple pairs of brown nubuck leather shoes that look good and wear well. And I have a couple of outfits from Vitamin Ci that also look nice, as well as a pair of Victorian suits from Silver Rose Designs in Caledon that are quite well done. As for hair, I've found decent men's hair designs at both Pazazz and GuRL 6.
Suffice it to say, there are options for the male avatar out there, if you know where to look. "'Cos every girl crazy 'bout a sharp-dressed man..."
Indeed. Information I've seen about the server hardware SL relies on says that each "sim" (256x256m area) is backed by a single CPU core, so a single server with twin dual-core processors could support 4 sims, the size of an island like Caledon. As far as I can tell, a 1U server with those processors will run about $3000, and that doesn't include hosting costs, so $5000 would be about right for a "private island" of that size.
Statistics are showing that Linden Labs is dumping way more money into the economy than is getting taken out; as a result, the L$ is now trading at 340/US$ and going down from there. The primary way money gets poured in is through stipends; LL is trying to cut off the spigot by eliminating the weekly stipend on free accounts, and there are those that would like to see them eliminated for "premium" (paid) accounts as well. They're also phasing out "dwell" (bonus money paid out to landowners based on how many visitors they get and how long they stay). Whether this will halt the decline in the value of the L$, no one can say; on the other hand, it'll cause a certain amount of pain for the holders of free accounts. Some will upgrade to premium, but some will quit SL altogether.
(Some people question the value of a premium account, because, with the premium stipend at L$250/week, you could get more money just buying L$ on the open market with that US$10/month. The premium accounts also get the privilege of owning land, but there are ways for basic accounts to own or rent property, too.)
LL has encouraged content vendors to raise their prices, but many of them are refusing to do so because they don't want to screw their customers, or precipitate an inflationary spiral, or both. And the contract of LL's "economist on staff" has just expired; no word on a possible replacement yet.
Now, this is not to paint a picture of gloom and doom. SL is still going strong, and, with the 1.10 client release, it's never looked better. The introduction of more dynamic lighting effects and flexible primitives open up new possibilities for content creators, and a new capability for making HTTP requests from scripts offers some interesting possibilities for interaction between the SL world and the RL Internet. (As a software guy, I'm interested in the content-creation and scripting aspects, but I'm also interested in the virtual-community aspects of the world, too.) Money's one aspect of the whole environment, but it's certainly not all of it. It's still worth your time to check it out, if you haven't.
Let's just say that it's this sort of news that makes me try to push the popularity of the article tag "hollywoodisoutofideas"...
It's useful, though, to keep another line from Apollo 13 in mind: "From now on, we live in a world where man has walked on the Moon. But it wasn't a miracle. We just decided to go." That says a lot about how we made it happen the first time...and how we will make it happen again, if we do. We, as a society, are going to have to "decide to go." That decision's going to be a lot harder to make this time around, though.
Certainly, if this effort does fail, given the timeline involved, it will likely be long after Bush has stepped down before the fact of its failure is realized, so you're kind of right there. But I hope that, somehow or another, you're proven wrong...
(Now if only there were a way to develop an "open-source space program." Could a band of international volunteers succeed where major governments have failed? Even I think it's unlikely...but it would make a hell of a story if they could.)
Ironically, William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson (the original authors of the book) had already written a screenplay, but MGM didn't use it. A reviewer from Cinefantastique who read both screenplays thought the Nolan/Johnson screenplay would have made a better movie.
Despite this, Logan's Run was the SF movie when it came out, and enjoyed that title until the following year...when a little flick you may have heard of, by a fellow named Lucas, came along and upset everyone's applecart.
(If you can, get your hands on the omnibus volume Logan: A Trilogy. It contains all three--yes, three--Logan novels, as well as Nolan's story of how the concept developed from the first novel through the movie to the abysmal TV show.)
Yeah. The fact that only the first page of the article was mirrored means I didn't get to see their notes on Myrinet or InfiniBand...which are the high-speed interconnects that the company I work for, Aspen Systems, generally use when building clusters. (This is in addition to a standard GigE network used as the "control" network, freeing up the high-speed network for application data. The part I'm responsible for, the management software, uses the control network exclusively.) I'm interested to see what they say about them.
I used to keep track of how cheap hard disks were getting in terms of megabytes per dollar. Well, we've long since hit and blown through the gigabyte-per-dollar mark; for my next upgrade, I'm considering 250 Gb SATA drives, which are already up at close to 3 Gb/dollar (and, if another commenter has the right of it, may well blast through that mark by the time I have the money to buy them).
Obviously, at this point, it's inevitable that we will see a 1 Tb drive in 2007 if not earlier; that prediction is like predicting an egg will break when you see it fall off the counter and head for the floor. I just wonder what the upper limit is. Will we crack the terabyte-per-dollar mark? Within ten years? Five? And what will that involve, nanoscale-density recording? Gonna be interesting to find out.
You forgot one possibility: individual users and developers. This might give Microsoft some victories they could crow about in the press (against people without the resources to fight them), and might satisfy their shareholders, but would cause them to sink to RIAA levels of unpopularity with pretty much everybody else.
I have a couple of her other albums, which are also good. One is Switched-On Bach 2000, in which she revisited the material she covered in the original Switched-On Bach album, with modern synthesizer gear and period-correct Bach tunings. She added one "bonus track" as well, a rendition of the famous Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor--perfect for Halloween music. The second is her collaboration with "Weird Al" Yankovic on a rendition of Prokofiev's Peter And The Wolf, as well as a new piece, Carnival of the Animals, Part Two (parody of Camille Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals). She proved she could be as much of a parody artist as Al, throwing a bunch of references to other pieces into her compositions to counterpoint Al's bizarre sense of humor.
Well, I was going to put that as, "Remember, boys and girls, you can't say SCAMP without SCAM," but your way works too.
Then, too, the "rocker switch" on the side of the watch is encoded in the same fashion as the "jog dial" on the Sony Clie Palms, so many applications may support it already.
If they're anywhere, they'll most likely be at a Fossil retail store; in your area, there's stores at Universal CityWalk, South Coast Plaza, The Oaks in Thousand Oaks, on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, and outlet stores in Camarillo and at Ontario Mills. (Reference)
As others have mentioned, you sometimes find them on Amazon. eBay also has some listed.
I do have a couple of photos of mine, though, including one of it on my wrist.
However, I wouldn't use that teeny little thing in anything but an emergency. Instead, I bought a Belkin Quadra pen/stylus, which also has a built-in LED flashlight and laser pointer. With the stylus tip extended, it works just fine for scrawling on the watch face.
I have rather large wrists, so the Abacus looks just fine on me...it looks a lot classier than my old Casio Databank, being of nice solid stainless steel construction. It syncs up well with jpilot under Linux (tip: use the Handspring Visor USB driver in the kernel). And, as for price, it cost me only $50. Can't beat that. (I used to carry a Palm VII around, but the Abacus more than replaces it.)
That's why it's important to kill this bill before someone has to go to court and spend megabuck$ on lawyers to defend themselves against such a poorly-written piece of crap.
Ah, I dunno...that first shot of Al's looked like a slice.
This is similar to why American newspapers won't publish the Danish Jyllands-Posten "Mohammed" cartoons, and why American TV networks won't show them. To that end, here's some insightful commentary by DailyPundit commenter "Jack" on this issue (as quoted in this thread):
And Yahoo! appears to be falling over themselves to do likewise.Just remember the famous quote from Strictly Ballroom, Yahoo!: "A life lived in fear is a life half-lived."
If you download the WristPDA SDK, you can even compile apps for it under Linux. (You'll also need the m68k development tools, PilRC, and the PalmOS SDK from PalmSource.)
That's a better analogy than you might think...there's some good history of telegraphy in a book called The Victorian Internet , which I was inspired to dig out last night after reading about this story over on JWZ's blog. The parallels in the history of the telegraph network and the Internet are striking...they had many similar uses, including news delivery and commercial transactions; telegraph operators commonly used the wires for "chat" and even "online gaming" (playing chess); people devised, and broke, codes and ciphers for telegraph traffic; there were even some "telegraph romances." And, in its day, the telegraph network was referred to by some as "the highway of thought." (Compare with the overhyped phrase "the information superhighway.")