Interesting? Perhaps. But in this demo, we've gone from limited 2D to limited 3D. You're still stuck in this godforsaken sphere, which is even more of a prison, in a way. Because you can see beyond it but can't escape the coordinate of 0,0,0 -- from what I can tell, anyway. You can zoom in and out, but you can't ever "go over there".
Seems like this could put you in the sphere of your computer but allow you to leave it and go swimming around the network. You can see that guy's computer over there (only the stuff he lets you see, of course) and head over there and look at one of his files. Or drag it back over to your neck of the woods. You could also look at your ports visually if you choose, seeing packets coming in and going out.
Even within your own computer, seems like you could leave 0,0,0 and spin around and look at your windows from behind. Yeah, I know... harder than it looks. The Sun demo had something like that, though. But what they were missing was the sphere thing.
This is an interesting interface but since you've made it more of an endless world, the users's new-found confinements will have to be addressed.
I'm not sure I want to end up like this guy, in a badly-lit office, in complete silence, except for the insane breathing and the sound of the annoying mouse wheel and some strange periodic noise. Then there's the mad spinning around the user interface, randomly clicking applications, zooming them, and dragging them around. Pure insanity. No thanks.
Hey dude, if you're not going to narrarate this -- you should, by the way -- turn the sound OFF. It will make your file sizes smaller and it won't sound so insane.
There are two McDonald's jokes attached to this story, and both of them are highly moderated. They also both say sort of the same thing, that a picture of a McDonald's will overtask the server?
I"m sorry, I know this is incredibly naive of me. Go ahead and mod me down, I know I deserve it. I have some karma to spare. I'm sure I'm just ignorant of what this really is and what makes it so cool. But you ran 100 machines for a MONTH and you got THAT?!?! It just had to be said. Seems like you could have rendered Manhattan or something in the same amount of time.
Again, pure ignorant drivel here. I just couldn't pass it up.
As a parent and a software developer, I can say that many, many, MANY children's games absolutely suck. I'm in favor of full disclosure on the labels. I propose a "suck factor" or something. A big sticker on the front. "Suck Factor: 7"... on a scale of 1 to 10, with a suck factor of 0 being the best.
RP
By the way, FTLOG means "For the Love of God"... trying to start a new acronym here:)
This happened to me with a double live album I wanted to buy. I checked the price on iTunes and checked the price on Amazon and they were the same. Of course, I would have had to pay shipping from Amazon. I saw that their price was just barely below retail and I decided then that I would buy it at an actual STORE, believe it or not. I hardly ever buy CDs at stores anymore, and I've bought 1.5 GB of music from iTunes.
For this one album, I decided it would be worth the inconvenience and very small additional cost to walk out with the CDs that I could then rip into whatever format I choose, with liner notes and the whole nine yards.
But this was because the online version was just a tad cheaper than the store-bought version. I'll tell you right now. If you make them more expensive, or even the same price, as the CD version, you will absolutely NOT sell albums to me. Maybe individual songs (for not much more than 99 cents, by the way), but definitely not albums. $9.99 is a very good price. Keep it there for a few years and see what happens or you'll die an ugly death.
There are many people in the world who would call $18,000 a year -- as you say -- "a shitload of money". Laborers and starving people all over the world who see the incredible wealth all over this country. Then there are all the other countries of the world that pay a MUCH larger tax percentage than most Americans do. Tell them that 20% is too much to pay.
Prosperity is relative, of course. I used to think of "the rich" in a different way than I do now, because I make more money today than I ever thought I would (and I was making more a few years ago). Of course I'm not "rich", which is kind of a silly word. But there are millions of people in this country who believe that I deserve to pay a higher percentage of my income than they do because I don't need mine as much. That's just not true.
We all work hard for what we have -- some harder than others, admittedly -- and out standard of living goes up as our income goes up. Most of us spend about 30% of our income on shelter, about 12% on food, and about 5% on clothing. If you make more money, you can spend more on your shelter, food and clothing. And you can also pay more taxes, but the PERCENTAGE should be the same.
The argument was presented that a guy who makes $16,000 a year shouldn't have to pay $3600 in taxes. Comparing it to 4 months rent was an emotional argument, and I could make the same argument but take it a step further. My total tax for 2003 is roughly equal to 7.5 months of my mortgage payments. How is that fair to me? There are people who honestly think that I have piles of cash sitting around my living room, I guess. Believe me, I don't. I have financial struggles too.
And the guy who makes a million dollars a year? He probably has a $15,000 mortgage payment. You could confront him with that and shame him for living in an expensive house, but you, too, would probably want to live in an expensive house if your hard work made you wealthy (insert here the tired argument about how none of the rich have ever worked hard for anything).
Fortunately, we have a universal law that makes everything fair. It's called math... more specifically, percentages. If everybody pays the same percentage, instant fairness. This won't happen, though, because the majority of Americans don't want to take the subtantial majority of the tax burden away from the "evil rich". It sure it weird for me to suddenly be among them and feel the hate spewing in my general direction. I'm really, honestly, not rich. I'm just trying to keep things rolling the way they are for me, and maybe a little better, just like everybody else.
For once something is happening on Linux just in the nick of time. WordPerfect is just starting to make its mark out there on the street. It should be in a position to give Microsoft a run for its money.
It also looks like Back to the Future Part II will be a big smash this weekend and OS/2 should revolutionize desktop computing.
Looks like the 90s are going to be almost as exciting as the 80s have been.
And Pluto was discovered by Percival Lowell, thus the "PL" symbol for the planet Pluto.
No, it wasn't. Percival Lowell died in 1916, but he had started the search for "Planet X" before he died (and back when X was simply a variable instead of a marketing word directed at young people). Astronomers of the time knew that there was something affecting the orbits of Neptune and Uranus.
Lowell founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ, and that was where Tombaugh discovered Pluto, when he was a 24-year-old research assistant.
It appears that the symbol of PL was chosen as an homage to Lowell.
MS offcials say that a malisious hacker, is destroying websites around the world, by making them compatible with other web browsers.
Actually neither of them are really needed, but the first one hits the reader like a brick in the head. Don't get me wrong, it's not so much about you. I've seen this kind of extreme comma usage a lot, and I've never understood it. Can somebody provide some insight about this? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this comma is absolutely correctly placed. I'd be thrilled to see the rule that calls for this comma if somebody has it handy.
You also misspelled malicious, but hey, mispellings happen. I don't care. I'm more concerned about the potential rule misunderstanding with the comma, that's all.
Oh, and don't get me started on overzealous usage of "whom":)
Like that's any more dangerous than an adrenaline-filled division of 18-year-old armored vehicle drivers coming at you.
Disclaimer: I am a veteran and a supporter of all who serve or have served in our armed forces. But it's a simple truth that the training for the judgement calls that the military has to make at a moment's notice (and cops also) is just as tricky a thing as the technology required to identify obstacles or to determine the difference between friends, foes and noncombatants.
I just voted about an hour ago, and I was surprised at a couple of things:
That we have electronic voting this soon
That the app sucks as bad as it does. You can't tell me they didn't have a decent budget for that thing. They could have made it a LOT less amateur looking.
Sorry to be a part of the problem in this case instead of a part of the solution, but I just wanted to express my surprise and disappointment.
That's a great analogy, but to make it just a bit more accurate, it would be like NASDAQ making that default trade be a purchase of NASDAQ stock. "Oh, this guy doesn't know WHAT he wants to buy. We'll help him buy a share of OUR stock."
What do you think the K stands for in UK? "States"? There are freedoms similar to those of the United States all over the world, but that similarity doesn't mean squat without a constitution that expressly grants us rights that most of the rest of the world do not have.
The European Convention on Human Rights of 1950 extended free expression to the citizenry of the signing countries, but there are many limitations to that "free" expression:
"The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or the rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary." (bold added by RP)
It brings up some interesting privacy issues, because according to the article 'The last time you bought a six-pack of Bud Light at the Piggly Wiggly, Anheuser servers most likely recorded what you paid, when that beer was brewed, whether you purchased it warm or chilled, and whether you could have gotten a better deal down the street.'
It does NOT bring up any privacy issues, interesting or not. It's marketing data and there's no personal connection to the consumer whatsoever. Budweiser has a business obligation to determine where and how their product is selling.
Just because they say "you" in the text doesn't mean that "you" are part of the data collected. They're just using a purchase that sounds familiar to "you" to give "you" a frame of reference.
I'm surprised none of the privacy nuts have muttered the words "Ashcroft" or "Bush" in this thread yet, for no good reason, as is usually the case.
Surely the Linux vendors are getting pretty pissed off at SCO's FUD when they say things like, "These customers unknowingly received illegal copies of SCO property and many are running critical business applications on Linux." They used the word "allegations" in the previous sentence, but it would be very easy (yes, I know this is the whole idea) to scare people into buying a "just-in-case" license. Depending, of course, on the cost, which I didn't see, because their store site is down).
Like I said, I know that's the whole point of what they're doing (part of the whole point, anyway), but they shouldn't be allowed to do that as long as the illegality of Linux hasn't been established. Seems like RedHat and the rest would have a pretty good case against SCO for damaging the reputation of their products.
Still, he added, it would be tough for VeriSign to win the public relations war because its opponents are highly regarded technologists.
Come again? Since when are "highly regarded technologists" given a second thought by the average user? Their thinking is...
"Let's see... www dot... oh, I hate these computers... where's the g? hootmaail.como... there! Wait, that's not my mail. This is... uh... oh yeah, silly me. I spelled it wrong. Yes, that's the one I want... I'll that... wait... online dry cleaning... I need THAT."
And that is the END of the thought process. They don't think about whether or not it's a helpful service unless a surveyor puts a gun to their head and makes them commit one way or the other. They certainly don't think about asking the "highly regarded technologists".
Remember how we got used to strange an obviously-new product and company names because of the domain name craze? Yeah, it was kind of stupid, but it seems to me it was a little less stupid than Mozilla projects having to change their name all the time. Firebird? Come on. Why not just come up with something very obscure that we're pretty doggone sure is not in use.
Like Netscape. Oh wait, that wasn't fair (get it? "not in use"). Ahem... But you know what I mean. "Mozilla" itself is a good example. At the time Netscape came up with that word, they had no doubt whatsoever that it wasn't being used by anybody, because they created the word themselves.
One could argue that it's harder to get "mindshare" (sorry for the flashback to 1999) with a very obscure name, but it seems to me that it's better to have to go through that process once than take the time to explain why your whole project had to change it's name, and never mind all the code references to the old name. I still have quite a few Chimera references left over on my disk that Camino uses.
I think Mozilla should release they project-naming software as a separate open source project. We could perhaps eliminate some of the more obvious bugs that way.... like the one that always picks a name that is probably taken by something else the first time around, the the other bug that changes most new projects' names before they have a chance to really get adopted.
...if our space program hadn't become stagnant over the last 35 years to the point that we need to hang onto relics like this to remember our mighty past.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting? Perhaps. But in this demo, we've gone from limited 2D to limited 3D. You're still stuck in this godforsaken sphere, which is even more of a prison, in a way. Because you can see beyond it but can't escape the coordinate of 0,0,0 -- from what I can tell, anyway. You can zoom in and out, but you can't ever "go over there".
Seems like this could put you in the sphere of your computer but allow you to leave it and go swimming around the network. You can see that guy's computer over there (only the stuff he lets you see, of course) and head over there and look at one of his files. Or drag it back over to your neck of the woods. You could also look at your ports visually if you choose, seeing packets coming in and going out.
Even within your own computer, seems like you could leave 0,0,0 and spin around and look at your windows from behind. Yeah, I know... harder than it looks. The Sun demo had something like that, though. But what they were missing was the sphere thing.
This is an interesting interface but since you've made it more of an endless world, the users's new-found confinements will have to be addressed.
RP
I'm not sure I want to end up like this guy, in a badly-lit office, in complete silence, except for the insane breathing and the sound of the annoying mouse wheel and some strange periodic noise. Then there's the mad spinning around the user interface, randomly clicking applications, zooming them, and dragging them around. Pure insanity. No thanks.
Hey dude, if you're not going to narrarate this -- you should, by the way -- turn the sound OFF. It will make your file sizes smaller and it won't sound so insane.
RP
There are two McDonald's jokes attached to this story, and both of them are highly moderated. They also both say sort of the same thing, that a picture of a McDonald's will overtask the server?
I give up. I don't get it. Please explain.
Thanks,
RP
Couldn't resist. I apologize. I am fully prepared to be moderated into submission.
RP
I"m sorry, I know this is incredibly naive of me. Go ahead and mod me down, I know I deserve it. I have some karma to spare. I'm sure I'm just ignorant of what this really is and what makes it so cool. But you ran 100 machines for a MONTH and you got THAT?!?! It just had to be said. Seems like you could have rendered Manhattan or something in the same amount of time.
Again, pure ignorant drivel here. I just couldn't pass it up.
RP
As a parent and a software developer, I can say that many, many, MANY children's games absolutely suck. I'm in favor of full disclosure on the labels. I propose a "suck factor" or something. A big sticker on the front. "Suck Factor: 7"... on a scale of 1 to 10, with a suck factor of 0 being the best.
:)
RP
By the way, FTLOG means "For the Love of God"... trying to start a new acronym here
This happened to me with a double live album I wanted to buy. I checked the price on iTunes and checked the price on Amazon and they were the same. Of course, I would have had to pay shipping from Amazon. I saw that their price was just barely below retail and I decided then that I would buy it at an actual STORE, believe it or not. I hardly ever buy CDs at stores anymore, and I've bought 1.5 GB of music from iTunes.
For this one album, I decided it would be worth the inconvenience and very small additional cost to walk out with the CDs that I could then rip into whatever format I choose, with liner notes and the whole nine yards.
But this was because the online version was just a tad cheaper than the store-bought version. I'll tell you right now. If you make them more expensive, or even the same price, as the CD version, you will absolutely NOT sell albums to me. Maybe individual songs (for not much more than 99 cents, by the way), but definitely not albums. $9.99 is a very good price. Keep it there for a few years and see what happens or you'll die an ugly death.
RP
There are many people in the world who would call $18,000 a year -- as you say -- "a shitload of money". Laborers and starving people all over the world who see the incredible wealth all over this country. Then there are all the other countries of the world that pay a MUCH larger tax percentage than most Americans do. Tell them that 20% is too much to pay.
Prosperity is relative, of course. I used to think of "the rich" in a different way than I do now, because I make more money today than I ever thought I would (and I was making more a few years ago). Of course I'm not "rich", which is kind of a silly word. But there are millions of people in this country who believe that I deserve to pay a higher percentage of my income than they do because I don't need mine as much. That's just not true.
We all work hard for what we have -- some harder than others, admittedly -- and out standard of living goes up as our income goes up. Most of us spend about 30% of our income on shelter, about 12% on food, and about 5% on clothing. If you make more money, you can spend more on your shelter, food and clothing. And you can also pay more taxes, but the PERCENTAGE should be the same.
The argument was presented that a guy who makes $16,000 a year shouldn't have to pay $3600 in taxes. Comparing it to 4 months rent was an emotional argument, and I could make the same argument but take it a step further. My total tax for 2003 is roughly equal to 7.5 months of my mortgage payments. How is that fair to me? There are people who honestly think that I have piles of cash sitting around my living room, I guess. Believe me, I don't. I have financial struggles too.
And the guy who makes a million dollars a year? He probably has a $15,000 mortgage payment. You could confront him with that and shame him for living in an expensive house, but you, too, would probably want to live in an expensive house if your hard work made you wealthy (insert here the tired argument about how none of the rich have ever worked hard for anything).
Fortunately, we have a universal law that makes everything fair. It's called math... more specifically, percentages. If everybody pays the same percentage, instant fairness. This won't happen, though, because the majority of Americans don't want to take the subtantial majority of the tax burden away from the "evil rich". It sure it weird for me to suddenly be among them and feel the hate spewing in my general direction. I'm really, honestly, not rich. I'm just trying to keep things rolling the way they are for me, and maybe a little better, just like everybody else.
RP
This was posted 5 years ago. It has a birthday every year, folks :)
RP
Wow, this is from 2000.
For once something is happening on Linux just in the nick of time. WordPerfect is just starting to make its mark out there on the street. It should be in a position to give Microsoft a run for its money.
It also looks like Back to the Future Part II will be a big smash this weekend and OS/2 should revolutionize desktop computing.
Looks like the 90s are going to be almost as exciting as the 80s have been.
RP
And Pluto was discovered by Percival Lowell, thus the "PL" symbol for the planet Pluto.
No, it wasn't. Percival Lowell died in 1916, but he had started the search for "Planet X" before he died (and back when X was simply a variable instead of a marketing word directed at young people). Astronomers of the time knew that there was something affecting the orbits of Neptune and Uranus.
Lowell founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ, and that was where Tombaugh discovered Pluto, when he was a 24-year-old research assistant.
It appears that the symbol of PL was chosen as an homage to Lowell.
RP
MS offcials say that a malisious hacker, is destroying websites around the world, by making them compatible with other web browsers.
:)
Actually neither of them are really needed, but the first one hits the reader like a brick in the head. Don't get me wrong, it's not so much about you. I've seen this kind of extreme comma usage a lot, and I've never understood it. Can somebody provide some insight about this? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this comma is absolutely correctly placed. I'd be thrilled to see the rule that calls for this comma if somebody has it handy.
You also misspelled malicious, but hey, mispellings happen. I don't care. I'm more concerned about the potential rule misunderstanding with the comma, that's all.
Oh, and don't get me started on overzealous usage of "whom"
Thanks,
John
Like that's any more dangerous than an adrenaline-filled division of 18-year-old armored vehicle drivers coming at you.
Disclaimer: I am a veteran and a supporter of all who serve or have served in our armed forces. But it's a simple truth that the training for the judgement calls that the military has to make at a moment's notice (and cops also) is just as tricky a thing as the technology required to identify obstacles or to determine the difference between friends, foes and noncombatants.
RP
- That we have electronic voting this soon
- That the app sucks as bad as it does. You can't tell me they didn't have a decent budget for that thing. They could have made it a LOT less amateur looking.
Sorry to be a part of the problem in this case instead of a part of the solution, but I just wanted to express my surprise and disappointment.RP
That's a great analogy, but to make it just a bit more accurate, it would be like NASDAQ making that default trade be a purchase of NASDAQ stock. "Oh, this guy doesn't know WHAT he wants to buy. We'll help him buy a share of OUR stock."
RP
Yeah, but in this case Linus' comment about SCO applies to Verisign as well: "They're smoking crack."
What happened to freedom of expression online?
What do you think the K stands for in UK? "States"? There are freedoms similar to those of the United States all over the world, but that similarity doesn't mean squat without a constitution that expressly grants us rights that most of the rest of the world do not have.
The European Convention on Human Rights of 1950 extended free expression to the citizenry of the signing countries, but there are many limitations to that "free" expression:
"The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or the rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary." (bold added by RP)
Thanks, but I prefer the US Constitution.
RP
This privacy stuff is getting out of hand...
It brings up some interesting privacy issues, because according to the article 'The last time you bought a six-pack of Bud Light at the Piggly Wiggly, Anheuser servers most likely recorded what you paid, when that beer was brewed, whether you purchased it warm or chilled, and whether you could have gotten a better deal down the street.'
It does NOT bring up any privacy issues, interesting or not. It's marketing data and there's no personal connection to the consumer whatsoever. Budweiser has a business obligation to determine where and how their product is selling.
Just because they say "you" in the text doesn't mean that "you" are part of the data collected. They're just using a purchase that sounds familiar to "you" to give "you" a frame of reference.
I'm surprised none of the privacy nuts have muttered the words "Ashcroft" or "Bush" in this thread yet, for no good reason, as is usually the case.
RP
Surely the Linux vendors are getting pretty pissed off at SCO's FUD when they say things like, "These customers unknowingly received illegal copies of SCO property and many are running critical business applications on Linux." They used the word "allegations" in the previous sentence, but it would be very easy (yes, I know this is the whole idea) to scare people into buying a "just-in-case" license. Depending, of course, on the cost, which I didn't see, because their store site is down).
Like I said, I know that's the whole point of what they're doing (part of the whole point, anyway), but they shouldn't be allowed to do that as long as the illegality of Linux hasn't been established. Seems like RedHat and the rest would have a pretty good case against SCO for damaging the reputation of their products.
RP
they could never have a more stupid name.
Still, he added, it would be tough for VeriSign to win the public relations war because its opponents are highly regarded technologists.
Come again? Since when are "highly regarded technologists" given a second thought by the average user? Their thinking is...
"Let's see... www dot... oh, I hate these computers... where's the g? hootmaail.como... there! Wait, that's not my mail. This is... uh... oh yeah, silly me. I spelled it wrong. Yes, that's the one I want... I'll that... wait... online dry cleaning... I need THAT."
And that is the END of the thought process. They don't think about whether or not it's a helpful service unless a surveyor puts a gun to their head and makes them commit one way or the other. They certainly don't think about asking the "highly regarded technologists".
Remember how we got used to strange an obviously-new product and company names because of the domain name craze? Yeah, it was kind of stupid, but it seems to me it was a little less stupid than Mozilla projects having to change their name all the time. Firebird? Come on. Why not just come up with something very obscure that we're pretty doggone sure is not in use.
Like Netscape. Oh wait, that wasn't fair (get it? "not in use"). Ahem... But you know what I mean. "Mozilla" itself is a good example. At the time Netscape came up with that word, they had no doubt whatsoever that it wasn't being used by anybody, because they created the word themselves.
One could argue that it's harder to get "mindshare" (sorry for the flashback to 1999) with a very obscure name, but it seems to me that it's better to have to go through that process once than take the time to explain why your whole project had to change it's name, and never mind all the code references to the old name. I still have quite a few Chimera references left over on my disk that Camino uses.
RP
I think Mozilla should release they project-naming software as a separate open source project. We could perhaps eliminate some of the more obvious bugs that way.... like the one that always picks a name that is probably taken by something else the first time around, the the other bug that changes most new projects' names before they have a chance to really get adopted.
RP
...if our space program hadn't become stagnant over the last 35 years to the point that we need to hang onto relics like this to remember our mighty past.
RP