Your having a 'right to internet access' does not mean another party has a duty to give that access to you. If it did, then nobody would pay for internet access.. just demand that party X hook you up; after all, it's 'a right'.
Not that I agree with cutting off (limiting bandwidth would be a much better option)- but if your connection at home is cut off, that doesn't mean you can't still go to an internet café, a library, etc. for internet access.
I can type faster on T9 than I can type on my iPhone.
Same here - and my old phone had a slide-out keyboard, a virtual keyboard *and* a 'PhonePad' keyboard (essentially the old ABC, DEF, etc. + T9 + numeric, easily switched); I can definitely type faster on the T9 'phonepad' virtual keyboard than I can even with the slide-out keyboard. Perhaps because I can easily hold the phone with one hand while tapping with the other (instead of needing both hands to type on the slide-out keyboard).. but I rather think that T9 is actually pretty efficient. Add a reasonably-decent grammar check and things like 'on' vs 'no' and 'good' vs 'home' are no longer an issue either.
I've tried a bunch of other input methods back then (windows mobile phone - there's easily a dozen almost completely different on-screen input methods), and other than Dasher ( http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/djw30/dasher/ - stand-alone app ) for special case use (e.g. users with limited dexterity), I couldn't find any that were as easy to work with as the ABC/T9/numeric phone pad. ( Quikwriting, by Ken Perlin - yes, of the procedural noise fame, was okay-ish to work with, but ultimately a lot of the tap-and-slide methods were too strenuous )
A full size keyboard resting on a desk simply doesn't translate so well to tiny little slide-out keyboards and even tinier on-screen keyboards, it seems; at least for me.
The point is that it wasn't just the SSID that was stored - the datablocks of the fragments were stored as well.. that means any data that was sent over the wireless was captured - both encrypted and unencrypted.
At which point it doesn't matter whether you, yourself, are on Facebook - as long as that 'friend' puts your name in an entry, you could be flagged in such an internet query. I.e. if you're laying face-down in vomit with a half-empty bottle of Absolut in your hands, it doesn't really matter whether that somebody 'tags' that photo with the 'friend' account 'dcm' or simply jots down 'lol dcm after a FUN night out!'
Reminds me of ThunderBird bug #92165 - Cannot rename a local folder to its current name with different case
Although the apparent action required there is that... laymen, who merely encounter the bug, find it odd, and go through the trouble of creating a mozilla bugzilla account to post on the topic.. are told by the people who understand the bug and know exactly how to fix it, to create a patch themselves if they find it so important.
If that is the general response people who are enthusiastic about open source projects (given that there's plenty of other free-as-in-beer mail apps) are greeted with, I can see why a newbie programmer would raise an eyebrow and think to themselves that submitting a patch is likely going to be greeted with "if people want this fixed, they can take your patch and re-build thunderbird themselves".
What exactly is the informative or educational value of malware toolsets?
To scriptkiddies they're a source of lulz - just as would be the malicious use of pubic lice.
To security researchers, they're a source of information, on how to recognize them, how to stop a malware infestation, how to stop the malware from spreading, and how to clean an infestation already present. To pharmaceutical researchers and others, live pubic lice serve much the same purpose - recognition, infestation prevention, spread prevention, and cleaning are all fundamental pieces of knowledge for those dealing with lice of any kind.
Just as with malware the argument is that not just top security researchers and those with true malicious intent should have access to the malware toolsets, why should only top pharmaceutical researchers have access to live lice?
So while I may be modded Troll instead of seeing replies with convincing arguments as to how the two cases simply cannot be compared at all, my take on it stands.
If instead the difference is only irrational - one being computers which we all know and just point and laugh and say the user should have used Linux and they wouldn't have had a malware infestation, and the other being little bugs that we only hear about within the context of social pariahs as that's how society likes treating them - that's fine, too.
In the mean time.. getting rid of lice is a matter of a topical cream, cleanliness (bedsheets, etc.), and a solid schedule. Getting rid of a full-on malware infestation by one of the malware toolkits, if no image backup is available - and most people don't - is something best left to salvaging what data one can, and then formatting the entire drive using a boot CD/DVD, then re-installing everything, re-setting all program preferences, etc. I can't imagine which one is easier to perform by the layman.
I wish I could be more impressed by that.. but I'm not. It's already trivial to... 1. take a video source 2. split up into images 3. from those images, sort by quality (least blur to most blur) 4. map them onto the panoramic plane (thanks to it being video, you can use motion vectors to help this process, but it's not really needed.. existing algorithms will chew through them easily enough) 5. remove those images that are superfluous (i.e. not needed for covering the entire canvas) 6. blend (using al algorithm a la smartblend to try to keep the number of decapitated people down)
The article notes that the panorama of one of the microsoft buildings is 'crisp'.. well sure, when scaled down a good fraction of the original video's size in terms of coverage. Now if they combined multiple frames for a superresolution image (similar to how astronomers might image stack a bunch of blurry shots and out comes a high-resolution detailed image) and thus panorama, that'd be more fun.
Let's say you watch 2 shows per night, which is not unreasonable.
Well I guess if you're a TV junkie, it isn't, no.. but that's not contingent upon the argument you're trying to make, so moving on...
That's $4 a day, or $80 a month
So it's two shows that are on -every- weekday, right? So in the that simple case, that's 20 episodes for $40. $2/episode, as mentioned. Heroes, season 4 DVD (not even HD Blu-Ray, which I would imagine the downloads would be equivalent to..).. 18 episodes / $53.99 (amazon.com pre-order). Or just about $3/episode. The blu-ray version? $4/episode ($79.99). Seems to me you're off a good bit cheaper with the downloaded version.
Just because it adds up to a good bit of money doesn't make it expensive.. it's you who wants to see two shows in such quick succession (usually it's 1 episode per week or per 2 weeks, no? doesn't that spread the cost and all that? just saying...)
Now if you're arguing "I pay $30/month for cable and can watch all the shows I want".. hey, go for it.. those broadcasters paid big lump sumps of money for it, funded by advertisers, etc. So record those, or duplicate their model of acquiring media.. good luck with that, though.. recording would be easier.
But what -would- be a fair price model, to you, then?
sorry - I didn't mean to come across as ignoring the point he was making.. in fact, I agree with the point... there's always going to be people, and I dare say it would be the vast majority, who will download for free simply because they can. Others will even make it a point to download because they can (out of some misguided statement, or because they think it's cooler, or whatever). Pricing things down to $0.01/movie won't even help there.
Heck, one of my other comments points out as much:)
However... there's also a group of people who -are- willing to pay, like myself.. and if the only reason those people -can't- pay is because of some artificial completely bullcrap barriers.. well, some of them are going to just break through that barrier.. myself, in some instances, included.
Just because the industry believes - rightly so - in the former, doesn't mean they can't also address the latter; but as it appears now, they're doing everything to just lump everybody into two extreme groups.. those who will abide by their rules no matter what the rules, and those who will break their rules no matter what their rules.
This is geographically right next to where I live.. save for the north sea.
But I can't buy it.
We're sorry. We could not process your order because of geographical restrictions on the product which you were attempting to purchase. Please refer to the terms of use for this product to determine the geographical restrictions. We apologize for the inconvenience.
There's no Dutch Amazon, so that's out. The Dutch 7digital doesn't have it (fwiw, neither does the American Amazon). Granted - I haven't checked iTunes yet.. too bad I have to go through a specific piece of software to even find out.
But clearly it's not as simple as "music. You can even download, legally, for a small price, DRM free MP3s from iTunes, Amazon", as that only applies to those items actually for sale.
It -is- that simple with illegal downloads, on the other hand. No geographic restrictions, no having to set up any account, nothing.
I purchase my music, movies, etc wherever I can or typically just do without. But every once in a while, if a company decides to be boneheaded to the core, I have no qualms with downloading (heck, downloading (music/movies) is legal in NL anyway, so I shouldn't have any qualms regardless).
that - and let me say that $2/episode is nowhere near expensive (a beer at a bar is easily $2 and all you get from it is the need to take a piss).. not sure what GP would pay for a 3.5 minute song, if anything - and...
'Most people who illegally download movies, music and TV shows would pay for them if there was a cheap and legal service as convenient as file-sharing tools like BitTorrent.'
...that's an unrealistic demand right there; It will never be as convenient, given that you will have to register, set up payment options, etc... not to mention that having a large selection can also be seen as convenience.. it's 'inconvenient' that the legal U.S. online movie download sites do not have the crappy Iron Man 2 cam edition shot in a European theater.
And then there's people like one of the posters below who would gladly pay a subscription fee for unlimited access. Sure, who wouldn't. 2 months subscription at some measly $30/month + downloading 24/7 = set for years. New releases? Well just 'pirate' those, as $30 for 1, maybe 2 movies per month is far too expensive, of course.
See.. I don't doubt that there's people who would pay 'if'. It's just that the 'ifs' proposed are completely out of touch with reality. If only the two sides could reach a compromise.. but neither side appears to be willing to let go of any of their demands.
( Just recently a dutch online film store started offering their films in DiVX format. Hurray - right? No.. you can only play it back on DiVX-certified machines which have to be 'registered' with the store as being authorized to play back the film. Nope - not interested in a scheme that would make my films null and void if the device were to die. )
Stupid question that pivots around every Flash-hating entity's mouth wrapped firmly around Steve Jobs'... marketing skills.
What's not to like, then? Well, the user experience, which in my experience is fourth-rate for anything but games
Ding! Ding! Ding!
Show me an even remotely decent HTML5-based game on par with a remotely decent Flash-based game. Oh snap - you can't.. because HTML5 doesn't specify anything with regard to styles or interactivity. So let's allow jscript, CSS and SVG, too. See if you can get the same performance as Flash. Ready. Set. Go.
No "Back" button, feaugh.
That's a problem caused by the author, not Flash itself. Perhaps Flash makes it all too easy to break this standard usability model - probably so. Then again, it takes but a few seconds to find solutions: http://www.google.com/search?q=flash+back+button
But even if this is a major stumbling click, where's the hate for all the *box (lightbox, thickbox, etc.) photo viewers, then? I have yet to see even -one- that adjusts the address bar so that I can link to a specific photo. If I'm lucky, I can still right-click the thing to get the image's direct location and point people there. If I'm unlucky, it's "Okay, so go to http://somegallery/, click next page 3 times, then the 2nd row, 3rd image from the left". Mmmm. If the author did their job well, there'll be a link on the image or somewhere within the frame that I can use. But if Flash isn't excused, why is *box?
Hey, as far as VIDEO goes, absolutely.. ditch it.. bring on the HTML5 video tag. ( preferably without any "only h.264" limitations, especially if the host OS is perfectly capable of playing back pretty much every video format under the moon. Let the market decide - and if the market decides that Indeo5 within an AVI container happens to be a much better for a given video than either of h.264 OR Theora, then why restrict that from being played back? )
But until something actually better than Flash comes along for -everything else- (except for ads) that Flash does, Flash isn't about to go away - it will merely be reduced to the market it had -before- video sites boomed.
Actually, I wouldn't say it's not 'commonly discussed'.. given that it's in the planning. It just tends to be drowned out by the noise about the separate windows vs a single window approach:)
Well okay, I can more-or-less see why MSFT wouldn't be interested.. licensed tech, non-open, non-standard (could have become defacto, of course).. and for their foundry 'partners'.. no use limitations.
Still.. surprising to see it took this long to come up with an alternative, then.
No matter if the author had written an installer for Windows or not, you'd still have to go out on the internet and find it.
Sure
With Linux, you just click on your Add/Remove programs in your menu, put resynth into the search box and click the install button for whatever comes up
So... instead of searching the internet, you search a pre-defined list of 'approved' programs available in the repository of choice (if given the choice). Then instead of downloading and executing, you click an install button which downloads and executes it for you. Presuming, of course, it's available from that repository.. otherwise you're back to the same steps as Windows users: search the internet.
Don't get me wrong - I see how this is easier, as does Microsoft which are planning / not planning / planning / etc. similar functionality for Windows.. but I thought we were talking about installing the software, and not about acquiring it in the first place.
For the record, there are no serious UI issues beyond it being unfamiliar, there is a ton of minor ones, but to see them you actually have to spend some time with the program, so unsurprisingly they are not the target of much criticism.
If 'some time' is more than 10 minutes.. sure.
I use The GIMP. A lot. Almost exclusively, in fact. My secondary editor? Picture Publisher 5.0a from 1995. It's 16bit. No, that's not the color bitdepth - that's the "Was made for Windows 3.x" bit. Only reason is because it still does some things better/faster. (Tertiary is a toss-up between several.. actually, if IrfanView would count as an 'editor', it'd be 3rd).
I'm familiar with its interface, I'm familiar with how it differs from Photoshop, I simply moved the floating dialogs around on the screen with a big central window to get a more familiar feel.. no problem.
But it still only took me 10 minutes to realize there's a -huge- UI-related workflow issue with The Gimp... No. Unified. Transform tool.
In The Gimp, you may: A. Scale B. Rotate C. Shear D. Distort (called the Perspective tool, but as each corner point is independent, I'm not too sure about that term).
Pick any one - but only one. No, you can not scale down -and- rotate*. You can scale down - and then you can rotate. Two operations - twice the filtering. In fact, you'd probably want to rotate first, and -then- scale, just so the rotation operation has more data to work on for a higher quality result. ( * unless you want to get crackin' with a calculator and determine the new corner pixels and use the Distort (perspective) transform. )
Apparently it's on the list for 2.8 - so here's hoping. ( I'd point to the gui.gimp.org topic on the unified transform tool, but that site is - once again - blank. )
Ideally it would never actually put anything into pixels until you requested it to be (so that a layer scaled down to 10% and then back up by 1000% would simply yield the original image give-or-take some float precision errors), but that's much further away and not really UI/workflow related.
I must have completely missed it, but... what exactly would "Mozilla's font files" entail? Google is mostly returning the WOFF bits and pieces now, so I'm not entirely sure what to search for, there.
Yeah, it is that 'hard' - as the author didn't bother to write an installer. If nobody bothered to write a package around the thing for the usual linux suspects, you'd be in much the same boat on those.
If anyone has managed to install this plugin under Windows
resynthesizer.exe - c:\Program Files\GIMP-2.0\lib\gimp\2.0\plug-ins\ ( path may differ based on exact GIMP install location )
It should then be available under Filters > Map > Resynthesize...
There's also shortcuts available from Script-Fu > Enhance > Smart enlarge... / Smart remove selection... / Smart sharpen... But the results out of those can be a bit iffy (output in general can be a bit iffy, but I do prefer the manual control).
I understand what you're saying - but in that case the solution would be to offer a separate course where attendance indeed -doesn't- matter but your participation also doesn't count toward the student count. Then somebody who does need the attendance for themselves can still get in.
Sure there'll always be people who attend and don't learn.. that's where the intake committee didn't do their homework.
With many students being denied entry into a particular college/university/etc. because they are at their supposed maximum capacity.. I, for one, would think it entirely that college/university's business to say "If you're not going to attend, gtfo - we'd rather have somebody who does." as a deterrent to future students who plan on low/no attendance.
The only real solution is going to be to find a way to divert
I'm absolutely not a deep sea aquatic etc. engineer, but what exactly is the problem with the diverting?
i.e. my house has gutters and pipes to lead the water that naturally flows down along paths and through those pipes to a destination I want it to - the sewage system below.
So why doesn't the reverse work?
i.e. create a (flexible) tube - probably out of segments, that can be installed one segment at a time by divers or robots, with the first one placed around the well source. It would take a fair bit of materials but with each segment the potential dispersion area gets smaller as you get closer to the surface.. and eventually, it seems to me, you reach the actual surface and you can pipe it away from there to floating storage containers that can then be hauled off to have the crude pumped over to ships/whatever and be of some use.
The idea is too simple to not have been considered by other laymen before, but googling around gives so many generic articles right now that I can't find the obvious reason as to why this is not an option. So your (and others') thoughts are appreciated.
Slashdot Mirror
Your having a 'right to internet access' does not mean another party has a duty to give that access to you. If it did, then nobody would pay for internet access.. just demand that party X hook you up; after all, it's 'a right'.
Not that I agree with cutting off (limiting bandwidth would be a much better option)- but if your connection at home is cut off, that doesn't mean you can't still go to an internet café, a library, etc. for internet access.
Same here - and my old phone had a slide-out keyboard, a virtual keyboard *and* a 'PhonePad' keyboard (essentially the old ABC, DEF, etc. + T9 + numeric, easily switched); I can definitely type faster on the T9 'phonepad' virtual keyboard than I can even with the slide-out keyboard. Perhaps because I can easily hold the phone with one hand while tapping with the other (instead of needing both hands to type on the slide-out keyboard).. but I rather think that T9 is actually pretty efficient. Add a reasonably-decent grammar check and things like 'on' vs 'no' and 'good' vs 'home' are no longer an issue either.
I've tried a bunch of other input methods back then (windows mobile phone - there's easily a dozen almost completely different on-screen input methods), and other than Dasher ( http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/djw30/dasher/ - stand-alone app ) for special case use (e.g. users with limited dexterity), I couldn't find any that were as easy to work with as the ABC/T9/numeric phone pad.
( Quikwriting, by Ken Perlin - yes, of the procedural noise fame, was okay-ish to work with, but ultimately a lot of the tap-and-slide methods were too strenuous )
A full size keyboard resting on a desk simply doesn't translate so well to tiny little slide-out keyboards and even tinier on-screen keyboards, it seems; at least for me.
The point is that it wasn't just the SSID that was stored - the datablocks of the fragments were stored as well.. that means any data that was sent over the wireless was captured - both encrypted and unencrypted.
At which point it doesn't matter whether you, yourself, are on Facebook - as long as that 'friend' puts your name in an entry, you could be flagged in such an internet query. I.e. if you're laying face-down in vomit with a half-empty bottle of Absolut in your hands, it doesn't really matter whether that somebody 'tags' that photo with the 'friend' account 'dcm' or simply jots down 'lol dcm after a FUN night out!'
Reminds me of ThunderBird bug #92165 - Cannot rename a local folder to its current name with different case
Although the apparent action required there is that...
laymen, who merely encounter the bug, find it odd, and go through the trouble of creating a mozilla bugzilla account to post on the topic.. are told by the people who understand the bug and know exactly how to fix it, to create a patch themselves if they find it so important.
If that is the general response people who are enthusiastic about open source projects (given that there's plenty of other free-as-in-beer mail apps) are greeted with, I can see why a newbie programmer would raise an eyebrow and think to themselves that submitting a patch is likely going to be greeted with "if people want this fixed, they can take your patch and re-build thunderbird themselves".
What exactly is the informative or educational value of malware toolsets?
To scriptkiddies they're a source of lulz - just as would be the malicious use of pubic lice.
To security researchers, they're a source of information, on how to recognize them, how to stop a malware infestation, how to stop the malware from spreading, and how to clean an infestation already present. To pharmaceutical researchers and others, live pubic lice serve much the same purpose - recognition, infestation prevention, spread prevention, and cleaning are all fundamental pieces of knowledge for those dealing with lice of any kind.
Just as with malware the argument is that not just top security researchers and those with true malicious intent should have access to the malware toolsets, why should only top pharmaceutical researchers have access to live lice?
So while I may be modded Troll instead of seeing replies with convincing arguments as to how the two cases simply cannot be compared at all, my take on it stands.
If instead the difference is only irrational - one being computers which we all know and just point and laugh and say the user should have used Linux and they wouldn't have had a malware infestation, and the other being little bugs that we only hear about within the context of social pariahs as that's how society likes treating them - that's fine, too.
In the mean time.. getting rid of lice is a matter of a topical cream, cleanliness (bedsheets, etc.), and a solid schedule. Getting rid of a full-on malware infestation by one of the malware toolkits, if no image backup is available - and most people don't - is something best left to salvaging what data one can, and then formatting the entire drive using a boot CD/DVD, then re-installing everything, re-setting all program preferences, etc. I can't imagine which one is easier to perform by the layman.
so what you're saying is... malware samples should not be made publicly available because scriptkiddies might run with it?
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1639434&cid=32078300
Whether or not the answer is any good is another matter entirely - I wouldn't know.
I wish I could be more impressed by that.. but I'm not. It's already trivial to...
1. take a video source
2. split up into images
3. from those images, sort by quality (least blur to most blur)
4. map them onto the panoramic plane (thanks to it being video, you can use motion vectors to help this process, but it's not really needed.. existing algorithms will chew through them easily enough)
5. remove those images that are superfluous (i.e. not needed for covering the entire canvas)
6. blend (using al algorithm a la smartblend to try to keep the number of decapitated people down)
You can have fun with some movies that way...
Terminator 4: http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/1629/moviepanosterminator4.jpg
The Mist (may be considered a spoiler, for those who haven't seen it yet): http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/3221/moviepanosthemist.jpg
The article notes that the panorama of one of the microsoft buildings is 'crisp'.. well sure, when scaled down a good fraction of the original video's size in terms of coverage. Now if they combined multiple frames for a superresolution image (similar to how astronomers might image stack a bunch of blurry shots and out comes a high-resolution detailed image) and thus panorama, that'd be more fun.
Well I guess if you're a TV junkie, it isn't, no.. but that's not contingent upon the argument you're trying to make, so moving on...
So it's two shows that are on -every- weekday, right? So in the that simple case, that's 20 episodes for $40. $2/episode, as mentioned.
Heroes, season 4 DVD (not even HD Blu-Ray, which I would imagine the downloads would be equivalent to..).. 18 episodes / $53.99 (amazon.com pre-order). Or just about $3/episode. The blu-ray version? $4/episode ($79.99).
Seems to me you're off a good bit cheaper with the downloaded version.
Just because it adds up to a good bit of money doesn't make it expensive.. it's you who wants to see two shows in such quick succession (usually it's 1 episode per week or per 2 weeks, no? doesn't that spread the cost and all that? just saying...)
Now if you're arguing "I pay $30/month for cable and can watch all the shows I want".. hey, go for it.. those broadcasters paid big lump sumps of money for it, funded by advertisers, etc. So record those, or duplicate their model of acquiring media.. good luck with that, though.. recording would be easier.
But what -would- be a fair price model, to you, then?
sorry - I didn't mean to come across as ignoring the point he was making.. in fact, I agree with the point... there's always going to be people, and I dare say it would be the vast majority, who will download for free simply because they can. Others will even make it a point to download because they can (out of some misguided statement, or because they think it's cooler, or whatever). Pricing things down to $0.01/movie won't even help there.
Heck, one of my other comments points out as much :)
However... there's also a group of people who -are- willing to pay, like myself.. and if the only reason those people -can't- pay is because of some artificial completely bullcrap barriers.. well, some of them are going to just break through that barrier.. myself, in some instances, included.
Just because the industry believes - rightly so - in the former, doesn't mean they can't also address the latter; but as it appears now, they're doing everything to just lump everybody into two extreme groups.. those who will abide by their rules no matter what the rules, and those who will break their rules no matter what their rules.
So let's go with a counter-example from recent experience...
"Only You" (re-recorded version) by The Flying Pickets, at Amazon UK:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Only-You-Re-recorded-Version/dp/B001LBT6S4/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1273254270&sr=1-2
This is geographically right next to where I live.. save for the north sea.
But I can't buy it.
There's no Dutch Amazon, so that's out.
The Dutch 7digital doesn't have it (fwiw, neither does the American Amazon).
Granted - I haven't checked iTunes yet.. too bad I have to go through a specific piece of software to even find out.
But clearly it's not as simple as "music. You can even download, legally, for a small price, DRM free MP3s from iTunes, Amazon", as that only applies to those items actually for sale.
It -is- that simple with illegal downloads, on the other hand. No geographic restrictions, no having to set up any account, nothing.
I purchase my music, movies, etc wherever I can or typically just do without. But every once in a while, if a company decides to be boneheaded to the core, I have no qualms with downloading (heck, downloading (music/movies) is legal in NL anyway, so I shouldn't have any qualms regardless).
that - and let me say that $2/episode is nowhere near expensive (a beer at a bar is easily $2 and all you get from it is the need to take a piss).. not sure what GP would pay for a 3.5 minute song, if anything - and...
And then there's people like one of the posters below who would gladly pay a subscription fee for unlimited access. Sure, who wouldn't. 2 months subscription at some measly $30/month + downloading 24/7 = set for years. New releases? Well just 'pirate' those, as $30 for 1, maybe 2 movies per month is far too expensive, of course.
See.. I don't doubt that there's people who would pay 'if'. It's just that the 'ifs' proposed are completely out of touch with reality. If only the two sides could reach a compromise.. but neither side appears to be willing to let go of any of their demands.
( Just recently a dutch online film store started offering their films in DiVX format. Hurray - right? No.. you can only play it back on DiVX-certified machines which have to be 'registered' with the store as being authorized to play back the film. Nope - not interested in a scheme that would make my films null and void if the device were to die. )
Stupid question that pivots around every Flash-hating entity's mouth wrapped firmly around Steve Jobs' ... marketing skills.
Ding! Ding! Ding!
Show me an even remotely decent HTML5-based game on par with a remotely decent Flash-based game. Oh snap - you can't.. because HTML5 doesn't specify anything with regard to styles or interactivity. So let's allow jscript, CSS and SVG, too. See if you can get the same performance as Flash. Ready. Set. Go.
That's a problem caused by the author, not Flash itself. Perhaps Flash makes it all too easy to break this standard usability model - probably so. Then again, it takes but a few seconds to find solutions: http://www.google.com/search?q=flash+back+button
But even if this is a major stumbling click, where's the hate for all the *box (lightbox, thickbox, etc.) photo viewers, then? I have yet to see even -one- that adjusts the address bar so that I can link to a specific photo. If I'm lucky, I can still right-click the thing to get the image's direct location and point people there. If I'm unlucky, it's "Okay, so go to http://somegallery/, click next page 3 times, then the 2nd row, 3rd image from the left". Mmmm. If the author did their job well, there'll be a link on the image or somewhere within the frame that I can use. But if Flash isn't excused, why is *box?
Hey, as far as VIDEO goes, absolutely.. ditch it.. bring on the HTML5 video tag.
( preferably without any "only h.264" limitations, especially if the host OS is perfectly capable of playing back pretty much every video format under the moon. Let the market decide - and if the market decides that Indeo5 within an AVI container happens to be a much better for a given video than either of h.264 OR Theora, then why restrict that from being played back? )
But until something actually better than Flash comes along for -everything else- (except for ads) that Flash does, Flash isn't about to go away - it will merely be reduced to the market it had -before- video sites boomed.
Yes.
Actually, I wouldn't say it's not 'commonly discussed'.. given that it's in the planning. It just tends to be drowned out by the noise about the separate windows vs a single window approach :)
aha... thanks for the info :)
Well okay, I can more-or-less see why MSFT wouldn't be interested.. licensed tech, non-open, non-standard (could have become defacto, of course).. and for their foundry 'partners'.. no use limitations.
Still.. surprising to see it took this long to come up with an alternative, then.
Sure
So... instead of searching the internet, you search a pre-defined list of 'approved' programs available in the repository of choice (if given the choice). Then instead of downloading and executing, you click an install button which downloads and executes it for you. Presuming, of course, it's available from that repository.. otherwise you're back to the same steps as Windows users: search the internet.
Don't get me wrong - I see how this is easier, as does Microsoft which are planning / not planning / planning / etc. similar functionality for Windows.. but I thought we were talking about installing the software, and not about acquiring it in the first place.
If 'some time' is more than 10 minutes.. sure.
I use The GIMP. A lot. Almost exclusively, in fact. My secondary editor? Picture Publisher 5.0a from 1995. It's 16bit. No, that's not the color bitdepth - that's the "Was made for Windows 3.x" bit. Only reason is because it still does some things better/faster. (Tertiary is a toss-up between several.. actually, if IrfanView would count as an 'editor', it'd be 3rd).
I'm familiar with its interface, I'm familiar with how it differs from Photoshop, I simply moved the floating dialogs around on the screen with a big central window to get a more familiar feel.. no problem.
But it still only took me 10 minutes to realize there's a -huge- UI-related workflow issue with The Gimp...
No. Unified. Transform tool.
In The Gimp, you may:
A. Scale
B. Rotate
C. Shear
D. Distort (called the Perspective tool, but as each corner point is independent, I'm not too sure about that term).
Pick any one - but only one.
No, you can not scale down -and- rotate*. You can scale down - and then you can rotate. Two operations - twice the filtering. In fact, you'd probably want to rotate first, and -then- scale, just so the rotation operation has more data to work on for a higher quality result.
( * unless you want to get crackin' with a calculator and determine the new corner pixels and use the Distort (perspective) transform. )
Apparently it's on the list for 2.8 - so here's hoping.
( I'd point to the gui.gimp.org topic on the unified transform tool, but that site is - once again - blank. )
Ideally it would never actually put anything into pixels until you requested it to be (so that a layer scaled down to 10% and then back up by 1000% would simply yield the original image give-or-take some float precision errors), but that's much further away and not really UI/workflow related.
I must have completely missed it, but... what exactly would "Mozilla's font files" entail?
Google is mostly returning the WOFF bits and pieces now, so I'm not entirely sure what to search for, there.
I know you're a troll.. so just for the record:
Yeah, it is that 'hard' - as the author didn't bother to write an installer. If nobody bothered to write a package around the thing for the usual linux suspects, you'd be in much the same boat on those.
This isn't an operating system issue.
resynthesizer.exe - c:\Program Files\GIMP-2.0\lib\gimp\2.0\plug-ins\
( path may differ based on exact GIMP install location )
It should then be available under Filters > Map > Resynthesize...
There's also shortcuts available from Script-Fu > Enhance > Smart enlarge... / Smart remove selection... / Smart sharpen...
But the results out of those can be a bit iffy (output in general can be a bit iffy, but I do prefer the manual control).
I understand what you're saying - but in that case the solution would be to offer a separate course where attendance indeed -doesn't- matter but your participation also doesn't count toward the student count. Then somebody who does need the attendance for themselves can still get in.
Sure there'll always be people who attend and don't learn.. that's where the intake committee didn't do their homework.
In the off chance that you're running on Windows;
http://mion.faireal.net/BES/
( ugly UI, does the job )
With many students being denied entry into a particular college/university/etc. because they are at their supposed maximum capacity.. I, for one, would think it entirely that college/university's business to say "If you're not going to attend, gtfo - we'd rather have somebody who does." as a deterrent to future students who plan on low/no attendance.
I'm absolutely not a deep sea aquatic etc. engineer, but what exactly is the problem with the diverting?
i.e. my house has gutters and pipes to lead the water that naturally flows down along paths and through those pipes to a destination I want it to - the sewage system below.
So why doesn't the reverse work?
i.e. create a (flexible) tube - probably out of segments, that can be installed one segment at a time by divers or robots, with the first one placed around the well source. It would take a fair bit of materials but with each segment the potential dispersion area gets smaller as you get closer to the surface.. and eventually, it seems to me, you reach the actual surface and you can pipe it away from there to floating storage containers that can then be hauled off to have the crude pumped over to ships/whatever and be of some use.
The idea is too simple to not have been considered by other laymen before, but googling around gives so many generic articles right now that I can't find the obvious reason as to why this is not an option. So your (and others') thoughts are appreciated.