There is a person in our town who actually is a sort of tech-hick. He claims to be a computer recycling service and gets paid to take old computers from schools and businesses. The hardware is then stuffed into his garage or tossed on to piles in his yard. My guess is that the city isn't aware of how toxic some of that stuff is, otherwise they would have sent in the hazardous material cleanup crew by now.
ProFont is a good coding font, but unfortunately it is no longer useful in OS X. The new version of Monaco has a slash through the zero, proper Ls and Is, and has better kerning and readability than ProFont, IMHO.
A good substitute for the simulated scroll wheel feature is to hold the Command key and then drag with the mouse/trackpad. In some applications this will allow the cursor to "grab" the page to scroll both vertically and horizontally. I use it quite a bit in IE and the Finder (under OS 9, haven't tried it with OS X). Unfortunately, many applications don't work like this.
Do you generally buy a system blind and then throw a RIP on it? Every RIP I've ever bought came as a package deal you ran the OS / hardware bundle the RIP came with.
I'm talking about client machines, not the RIPs themselves. We've found that not all software generates output that works properly with our RIPs. If it turns out that OS X's printing services in combination with some other application don't work as well as it did in OS 9, it will make things very difficult for us when it comes time to add new workstations.
I work at a newspaper where all of the layout and printing is done from systems running OS 9. It's not because we don't want to run OS X, but because a lot of our software just isn't available for it. If we buy a new system without OS 9 support we'll suddenly lose the ability to natively run QuarkXPress with its numerous 3rd-party XTensions, all of our custom Associated Press applications break, we can no longer connect to our all-important Tandem server (not to mention the Exchange system too), and there's no telling what havoc will be wrought upon our OPI, RIPs, and imagesetters with the new OS X printing services...those things aren't exactly free to replace!
I seem to remember that MPEG-2 support was originally announced for QuickTime 5 too... it was also "quietly dropped" in the release. I'm guessing Apple is still having a really tough time getting a proper license for it.
According to the article, this isn't laser-powered flight... it's just a a laser-powered launch. The aluminium "paper" plane glided downward after being launched.
This is like saying that an arm-launched paper plane will someday navigate a volcano, powered only by passengers who will tear off fragments of the wing to control it's direction.
This AC is right; the Animation codec (one of the oldest codecs in the QuickTime package) uses compression. It's not even very fast compression - I've found that standard motion JPEG is faster. If they really wanted a fair comparison they should have used uncompressed video or possibly just standard DV spacial compression. Accessing uncompressed video isn't very taxing on the CPU (because it's not compressed), but it is very disk intensive because the files tend to be *huge*.
Java support in OS X is quite good. I used it to write projects for an object-oriented design class that I took last year. There are some differences from the Win32 implementationn the CS lab had that took me by suprise (such as anti-aliasing enabled by default, and OS-provided double buffering). Apple's java-dev mailing list turned out to be a valuable resource, as did some of the other information on their developer site.
The problem is that the defendants chose which four games were viewed:
The only video games given to the Court were those presented by defendants, and the Court simply did not find the "extensive plot and character development" referred to by the plaintiffs in the games it viewed. For all of these reasons, the Court finds that plaintiffs failed to meet their burden of showing that video games are a protected form of speech under the First Amendment.
Either the plaintiffs were totally incompetent and deserved to be pushed around like that, or there is something seriously wrong here.
According to the paper, this judgement was based on an earlier finding:
"In the early 1980s, courts began facing the issue of whether video games were forms of expression entitled to First Amendment protection. Courts almost unanimously held that video games lacked the expressive element necessary to trigger the First Amendment."
Ok, so what games were common in the early 80's? Pac Man? Asteroids? I can see how this decision came about with that kind of content. Probably the only expressive games around were MUDs, but text-based games hardly satisfy the "video" requirement. This was just a technological limitation at the time.
"The court went on to hold that the plaintiff had succeeded in establishing only that video games are more technologically advanced games than pinball or chess, and that technological advancement alone does not impart First Amendment status to what is an otherwise unprotected game."
This is clearly flawed. If movies and books are protected, why not games that are based on them? How about movies/novels that are based on games? The only thing really different about games is that they are interactive. But wait...would a magazine or a dictionary be considered a game? Reading an index and flipping through pages is quite interactive. Even a T.V. becomes a video game when one uses the "controller" to surf through commercials in order to find the best shows.
It looks like UT will be adding some kind of flag-tag variant; possibly reminiscent of Marathon's "Kill The Man With The Ball" scenario... This looks a bit different though since the wording makes it sound like you actually have to deliver the ball somewhere instead of just being timed on how long you can keep it.
While nostalgia for old classic computer games might be cool in sort of a "I remember when..." way, PLAY THEM. Go to the Underdogs site and download them and play them. You will soon see that despite rosy-colored memories of how much fun you had playing Empire or Sword of Aragon, suddenly it's apparent that, while great games for their time, our expectations are tremendously higher.
Not necessarily true. Only a couple of years years ago I stumbled across The Quest For Glory VGA remake on an abandonware site. I had only been playing newer games like Unreal and Half-Life, but I dropped those and bought the whole QFG collection from Sierra for $20. QFG2 was an awesome game and the best of the lot, IMO. Last year I found another gem: Escape from Monkey Island. That game totally blew me away and I'm still working my way through the series. The Curse of Monkey Island has been the best so far. There are still some more modern adventure (Myst III) and RPGs (Escape Velocity Nova) that I play, but nothing compares to those old, yet "new-to-me", titles.
I remember seeing slow-motion video footage of one of the Orion prototypes. It was scaled down and used conventional explosives instead of real nukes. It was conical in shape and dropped timed charges that would detonate in succession to propel the craft. The accelerations were extremely violent and the engineers had to design a sophisticated shock-absorbing mechanism to keep the craft from being crushed.
I think one problem with the idea was that a full-sized ship would require thousands of standalone fission bombs. It doesn't take much imagination to view this as an orbiting dispenser of nuclear death.
I'm sure if we claim to "discover" life on, say, Mars then someone will invariably find proof that the Vikings and Chinese had already done this. They even wouldn't have had to sail there...an asteroid containg evidence of life as part of an ancient artifact would be probably enough.
Gasoline isn't going to cause an explosion generally - there isn't enough oxygen nearby for a whole tank to burn at once. If the fuel tank leaks, it leaks. No big deal unless it starts to burn but you'll still have time to step back.
A punctured high-pressure air tank will either leak harmlessly or (if crushed) will *FREAKING* *EXPLODE*.
I'm not sure I'd be very confortable driving in a car alongside tanks of high-pressure air. Enough to travel 200 miles? That's a lot of energy that could potentially be released in an accident. What sort of safety measures are in place to save a driver from a broken tank?
On the bright side, I'm sure that for bystanders it would make a very loud and impressive-looking explosion!
Apple's standard configs ship with ATA/66 controllers. This is enough to get the fastest sustained transfer rate of any IDE drive on the market. The only real advantage ATA 133 has over 66 and 100 is that it can accomodate drives larger than 130GB. Last I checked, there are hardly any drives available of that size. The Maxtor 160 is probably the most popular, but the slow 5200RPM speed makes it almost worthless. If you really must have a 133 controller, just buy one - they're pretty much free these days anyway.
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There is a person in our town who actually is a sort of tech-hick. He claims to be a computer recycling service and gets paid to take old computers from schools and businesses. The hardware is then stuffed into his garage or tossed on to piles in his yard. My guess is that the city isn't aware of how toxic some of that stuff is, otherwise they would have sent in the hazardous material cleanup crew by now.
ProFont is a good coding font, but unfortunately it is no longer useful in OS X. The new version of Monaco has a slash through the zero, proper Ls and Is, and has better kerning and readability than ProFont, IMHO.
A good substitute for the simulated scroll wheel feature is to hold the Command key and then drag with the mouse/trackpad. In some applications this will allow the cursor to "grab" the page to scroll both vertically and horizontally. I use it quite a bit in IE and the Finder (under OS 9, haven't tried it with OS X). Unfortunately, many applications don't work like this.
Do you generally buy a system blind and then throw a RIP on it? Every RIP I've ever bought came as a package deal you ran the OS / hardware bundle the RIP came with.
I'm talking about client machines, not the RIPs themselves. We've found that not all software generates output that works properly with our RIPs. If it turns out that OS X's printing services in combination with some other application don't work as well as it did in OS 9, it will make things very difficult for us when it comes time to add new workstations.
I work at a newspaper where all of the layout and printing is done from systems running OS 9. It's not because we don't want to run OS X, but because a lot of our software just isn't available for it. If we buy a new system without OS 9 support we'll suddenly lose the ability to natively run QuarkXPress with its numerous 3rd-party XTensions, all of our custom Associated Press applications break, we can no longer connect to our all-important Tandem server (not to mention the Exchange system too), and there's no telling what havoc will be wrought upon our OPI, RIPs, and imagesetters with the new OS X printing services...those things aren't exactly free to replace!
I seem to remember that MPEG-2 support was originally announced for QuickTime 5 too... it was also "quietly dropped" in the release. I'm guessing Apple is still having a really tough time getting a proper license for it.
...because Mr. T kicked his a$$ the last time he complained about their products.
According to the article, this isn't laser-powered flight... it's just a a laser-powered launch. The aluminium "paper" plane glided downward after being launched.
This is like saying that an arm-launched paper plane will someday navigate a volcano, powered only by passengers who will tear off fragments of the wing to control it's direction.
Is it just me, or does "The Wrong Way" to draw a dogcow look an awful lot like Bill Atkinson?
Our world will implode! Implode, I say!!
Quite possible. I think we should begin using improved safety mechanisms on our telescopes to prevent this from happening.
it features a song from the previous The Matrix soundtrack
I don't remember any singing in the last matrix movie... This doesn't mean they are turning the next one into some kind of musical, does it?
Probably not... but they could very well explain the mystery of spontaneous human explosion.
This AC is right; the Animation codec (one of the oldest codecs in the QuickTime package) uses compression. It's not even very fast compression - I've found that standard motion JPEG is faster. If they really wanted a fair comparison they should have used uncompressed video or possibly just standard DV spacial compression. Accessing uncompressed video isn't very taxing on the CPU (because it's not compressed), but it is very disk intensive because the files tend to be *huge*.
Java support in OS X is quite good. I used it to write projects for an object-oriented design class that I took last year. There are some differences from the Win32 implementationn the CS lab had that took me by suprise (such as anti-aliasing enabled by default, and OS-provided double buffering). Apple's java-dev mailing list turned out to be a valuable resource, as did some of the other information on their developer site.
You mean you didn't try to sell her an extended mousepad upgrade for $200?
The problem is that the defendants chose which four games were viewed:
The only video games given to the Court were those presented by defendants, and the Court simply did not find the "extensive plot and character development" referred to by the plaintiffs in the games it viewed. For all of these reasons, the Court finds that plaintiffs failed to meet their burden of showing that video games are a protected form of speech under the First Amendment.
Either the plaintiffs were totally incompetent and deserved to be pushed around like that, or there is something seriously wrong here.
According to the paper, this judgement was based on an earlier finding:
"In the early 1980s, courts began facing the issue of whether video games were forms of expression entitled to First Amendment protection. Courts almost unanimously held that video games lacked the expressive element necessary to trigger the First Amendment."
Ok, so what games were common in the early 80's? Pac Man? Asteroids? I can see how this decision came about with that kind of content. Probably the only expressive games around were MUDs, but text-based games hardly satisfy the "video" requirement. This was just a technological limitation at the time.
"The court went on to hold that the plaintiff had succeeded in establishing only that video games are
more technologically advanced games than pinball or chess, and that technological advancement alone does not impart First Amendment status to what is an otherwise unprotected game."
This is clearly flawed. If movies and books are protected, why not games that are based on them? How about movies/novels that are based on games? The only thing really different about games is that they are interactive. But wait...would a magazine or a dictionary be considered a game? Reading an index and flipping through pages is quite interactive. Even a T.V. becomes a video game when one uses the "controller" to surf through commercials in order to find the best shows.
It looks like UT will be adding some kind of flag-tag variant; possibly reminiscent of Marathon's "Kill The Man With The Ball" scenario... This looks a bit different though since the wording makes it sound like you actually have to deliver the ball somewhere instead of just being timed on how long you can keep it.
No Automated Querying: You may not send automated queries of any sort to Google's system without express permission in advance from Google.
Great...there goes my plans to use Google's database as training data for the neural network in my trolling AI.
While nostalgia for old classic computer games might be cool in sort of a "I remember when..." way, PLAY THEM. Go to the Underdogs site and download them and play them. You will soon see that despite rosy-colored memories of how much fun you had playing Empire or Sword of Aragon, suddenly it's apparent that, while great games for their time, our expectations are tremendously higher.
Not necessarily true. Only a couple of years years ago I stumbled across The Quest For Glory VGA remake on an abandonware site. I had only been playing newer games like Unreal and Half-Life, but I dropped those and bought the whole QFG collection from Sierra for $20. QFG2 was an awesome game and the best of the lot, IMO. Last year I found another gem: Escape from Monkey Island. That game totally blew me away and I'm still working my way through the series. The Curse of Monkey Island has been the best so far. There are still some more modern adventure (Myst III) and RPGs (Escape Velocity Nova) that I play, but nothing compares to those old, yet "new-to-me", titles.
I remember seeing slow-motion video footage of one of the Orion prototypes. It was scaled down and used conventional explosives instead of real nukes. It was conical in shape and dropped timed charges that would detonate in succession to propel the craft. The accelerations were extremely violent and the engineers had to design a sophisticated shock-absorbing mechanism to keep the craft from being crushed.
I think one problem with the idea was that a full-sized ship would require thousands of standalone fission bombs. It doesn't take much imagination to view this as an orbiting dispenser of nuclear death.
I'm sure if we claim to "discover" life on, say, Mars then someone will invariably find proof that the Vikings and Chinese had already done this. They even wouldn't have had to sail there...an asteroid containg evidence of life as part of an ancient artifact would be probably enough.
Gasoline isn't going to cause an explosion generally - there isn't enough oxygen nearby for a whole tank to burn at once. If the fuel tank leaks, it leaks. No big deal unless it starts to burn but you'll still have time to step back.
A punctured high-pressure air tank will either leak harmlessly or (if crushed) will *FREAKING* *EXPLODE*.
I'm not sure I'd be very confortable driving in a car alongside tanks of high-pressure air. Enough to travel 200 miles? That's a lot of energy that could potentially be released in an accident. What sort of safety measures are in place to save a driver from a broken tank?
On the bright side, I'm sure that for bystanders it would make a very loud and impressive-looking explosion!
Apple's standard configs ship with ATA/66 controllers. This is enough to get the fastest sustained transfer rate of any IDE drive on the market. The only real advantage ATA 133 has over 66 and 100 is that it can accomodate drives larger than 130GB. Last I checked, there are hardly any drives available of that size. The Maxtor 160 is probably the most popular, but the slow 5200RPM speed makes it almost worthless. If you really must have a 133 controller, just buy one - they're pretty much free these days anyway.