What if you're going the speed limit (40mph) and just before you enter the intersection the light turns yellow?
Yeah, but how long is this intersection if you still get photographed at it when the light has turned red?
Given speed: 40mph = 58.666666etc. feet per second or 17.8816 meter per second Given yellow light duration (from the artile): "the yellow light should be 4.5 seconds. Mogil said he tested it 15 times with an average of only 3.8 seconds." 3.8s * 58.666666 feet/second ~= 223 feet. or 3.8s * 17.8816 meter per second = 68 meter.
That's one heck of an intersection; especially given that the cameras tend to take the photo of the area just after the stop line.. and not clear on the other side of the intersection.
( This doesn't in any way detract from the fact that these yellow lights are too short - or the notion that the munis/states are using them to rake in money. )
It would be impossible to stop
Not sure about every single state/whatever law - but typically it should be something along the lines of "stop if you can stop safely". Hint: the middle of the intersection is not a safe place to stop. So yes, please do keep driving.
and if you slammed on your breaks the guy behind you would probably run right into you.
Because the guy behind you was paying attention to neither the light -nor- the distance between his vehicle and yours. Doesn't make your situation any more fortunate if you do get rear-ended, but let's not blame short yellows for others' craptacular driving attitude.
Let's face it.. the vast majority of these cases are going to be from people who see the yellow, could stop perfectly fine, but -assume- that it is the proper time of 4.5s and say to themselves "hah! I can still make that!" and then *click* they get caught.
( Again - not that these tickets shouldn't be thrown out if the yellow was indeed too short; but I don't think that even 3s would give drivers a valid excuse under normal circumstances. Now if the intersection is blocked.. or you were getting out of the way of an ambulance.. or there was this murderous semi truck driver after you and you wanted to avoid being careened into.. that's a different story. )
If that article was intended to show that Wikileaks is "providing incorrect/incomplete/biased information", then that article failed on numerous accounts. I won't list them here - it looks like the people commenting on that article (although going off the deep end in another way) have already taken that bother. I highly doubt that was its intent anyway as it goes more into the general topic of what you see in a video and what the actual circumstances were. It still fails even at that, but it's not really directed at Wikileaks.
alright... rephrase.. there are articles on Microsoft.com that point out that when you are building your installer, the default (with the latest set of Visual * products) will download prerequisites over the internet, and that this could possibly maybe not likely but hey here you go... cause the installation to fail.
If you try to install the program on a computer that doesn't have Internet access, the installation could fail. To prevent this, you can package prerequisites such as the.NET Framework redistributable files along with the program.
Subtle - but there it is. Now guess what.. unless you -do- expect every single one of your clients to have an internet connection even though you're selling a boxed product (so you have no real reason to believe that they do)... *plonk*...the installer just sits there and does nothing. It gets better when you don't build in a method for your installer to include the prerequisites from a drive so that - if the user managed to get the prerequisites from an alternate location to their machine - the installer will still just sit there and do nothing for it insists that it must get the prerequisites off the internet. One can always choose to not care and tell people to get internet, I suppose.
You also have an option of statically linking with ATL (and MFC, and CRT).
Which flies in the face of one of the things that this guy wants to address.. everybody including the libs.. and that does include statically linking. Worse yet - if Microsoft patches something, your app will need an update and that update would need to be sent to your clients in order to fix things.
My intent is to completely do away with the practice of everybody shipping every damn shared library.
If you only succeed in getting windows folks to learn this lesson you should be made a saint.
The major problem with this is that, as mentioned, Windows doesn't have a package manager, and Microsoft keeps telling developers that they cannot expect a user to have internet connectivity.
So when you compiled your application with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 with the ATL update installed - which means every user of your software will have to have the Visual C++ 2008 SP1 ATL runtime redistributable package installed as well, you're left with scant few options.
The most reasonable of which are: A. If you're distributing something boxed, to include the redistributable package on the media (CD/DVD/USB stick/whatever).
B. If you're distributing something via downloads: B.a. Include it because - again - you're not supposed to assume the user will have connectivity. B.b. Don't include it, but detect whether the user has it installed and has internet access, and then offer to download it and install it (silently or otherwise).
Of course for option B.b., Microsoft further seems to suggest that you do not link to -their- download pages (after all, the URLs could change, etc.) but instead host the binaries yourself.
The only reason, thus, that Windows developers tend to include or download shared libraries at runtime, is simply because there -isn't- a package manager for Windows.
Will the underlying mechanisms only be available to Windows Installer-based delivery systems, and not to alternative installation systems such as InnoSetup, NSIS, and the remainder of the usual suspects?
How much did they pay with the shuttle, per astonaut?
About $75 Million ($450 Million per launch)i>Q. How much does it cost to launch a Space Shuttle? A. The average cost to launch a Space Shuttle is about $450 million per mission
That's not the answer to the question, then.
If it costs $450M/launch, and you presume it has a crew of 6 (some had 5, some had 7), and you suggest it costs $75/astronaut... then sending up an empty shuttle would cost $0, naught, nil, nothing, be free, etc.?
So.. who wants to give the original question another stab?
Your chem (or physics, depends a little) class never dealt with the island of stability when discussing the periodic table?
I think it's one of the first things we were taught here - although I do admit it was in the very first year and it was never touched upon again (simply because we wouldn't be likely to ever have to deal with it, and knowing the hypothesis was good enough).
They can use corporate money to pay for advertisements advancing their agenda. They can not give corporate money directly to a political campaign.
And the subtle distinction is?
Joe gives Marc $10,000 and Marc makes advertisement X for $10,000 Joe goes to Marc, asks what advertisement Marc wants, Marc says 'advertisement X', Joe spends his $10,000 and make advertisement X
Maybe they're limited in what -else- they can do with that money - as opposed to giving it to the campaign and then having that campaign group use it to buy many gallons of beer - but for the most basic of campaigning methods, i.e. advertising, the distinction seems far too subtle to even be noteworthy.
the guy who finally gave the robots.txt convention a legal status quo
Good lord, I hope not. There's two sides to that coin.. if you're going to give legal clout to "it wasn't listed in robots.txt therefore it's legal to index it" you give the same legal clout to the notion "it was listed in robots.txt, so your crawler which disregards it is in violation of legal statutes". Next they would suggest that the pages behind the little "Terms of use" links hidden away somewhere should get legal clout as well.
robots.txt is entirely voluntary. A crawler -may- follow it, it -may- also completely disregard it. If a website owner doesn't want a crawler to see something, actively block it. If they come to the realization that some crawlers don't readily identify themselves (e.g. through the user-agent string), or there's a new crawler in town every month and they don't want to keep adding their identification, then maybe they're just going to have to put the data they don't want to share with the world behind a login.
Ditto terms of use. No - I do -not- have to agree to their 'terms of use' as described in some page in order to be allowed to visit their site. I request its content, they give it to me, end of story. Don't like it? Again - put it behind a login, or block me.
One of the few rights they have are copyrights.. in which case, yes, Facebook -should- be eyeing Google or Archive.org and similar service that do in fact redistribute their content. That doesn't stop anyone from being fully allowed to aggregate data that happens to be presented within a copyrighted document, though (not sure which case applies in the U.S., Feist v Rural? ianal and all that)
I can see many uses for this - but then, I've got AutoIt for the sorts of things I'm thinking of already.
I think the article title and summary are completely bunk, though. They're not making the software any more -open- than it was before; If you have a button that writes "Hello World" to a file, then you can replace that button with a contrast-rich enlarged version with excellent text-to-speech functionality, or make it a bouncing spinny glowing orb like something out of Kai Krause's mind... but pressing it is still going to write "Hello Word" to a file. It doesn't make it actually do anything differently from before.
It's fun that they can detect UI elements out of a bitmap, but there's so many non-standard UI elements in play that this is going to fail horribly on a lot of UIs. Maybe that means we should stop using custom UI elements, but sometimes those custom UI elements simply are more appropriate than the widgets that come with the OS/widget provider.
PC games are supposed to run on both NVIDIA graphics and ATI graphics.
I highlighted the problem area.
Let's ignore the other vendors for a moment (Intel, Matrox, etc.) and concentrate just on one of them.. let's say ATI.
I purchased Painkiller for cheap after ZeroPunctuation's review of it - it was in a 'Universe' edition that came with an extension pack and Painkiller Overdose. I loved Painkiller - I couldn't tell you a thing about Painkiller Overdose. The reason for this is that although the main Painkiller game will happily run on the machine, Painkiller Overdose will not - complaining that I need at least a DirectX 9.0c capable card. The DVD box happily claims DirectX 8.1 as minimal requirement, and 'DirectX 9 (Geforce FX 5700 or better)' as recommended. Yet it refuses. But let's say this wasn't a notebook and I could choose to purchase a new graphics card. Obviously -now- I would just pick up the latest and I'd probably be set. But back at the time of release.. if I were eying ATi cards, then what good is 'Geforce FX 5700' going to do me? And if I had relied on just the 'DirectX 9' bit, and got one, but then found out I needed 9.0c, I'd still be stuck.
And that's just the graphics card;)
Of course with consoles you have multiple choices - but I think you know what he meant. Otherwise I could claim that 'a PC' could just as well mean one that is running Apple's OS X or Linux.. how are -those- going to run 'PC Games' if they really mean 'Windows Games'? At least with a given console - say the PS3 - you've got exactly one target. Sure there's been several editions, now a slimline model, etc. But afaik, any game coded for the first PS3 (homebrew 'OtherOS' stuff aside) will still happily run on the latest PS3, and a game coded for the latest PS3 will happily run on the first edition.
I very much enjoy gaming on a (Windows) PC - but I can certainly see why developers and publishers would rather target consoles based on the above alone.
The story title seems to cast a rather broad net with its "`Supertaskers` Can Safely Use Mobile Phones While Driving"... there's a huge difference between...
involved having a hands-free mobile phone conversation
...and...
The Transportation Department on Wednesday proposed a ban on text messaging at the wheel
One just requires you to listen and yap - still not as good paying attention to your driving 100%, but people listen to (talk) radio and whatnot and sing along with songs or carry on conversations with others in the car (yes, they can help pay attention to the road), etc.
The other typically requires you to actually look away from the road and to a little screen/keyboard so you know what you're typing. Even if you've become highly proficient at texting using e.g. T9 on a standard phone pad (much easier than a full keyboard in this case) and don't have to look, you've still got one hand focused on a particular task not related to driving for an extended amount of time.
So even these 'supertaskers' aside, the study conclusion referred to doesn't seem to say anything about things like texting or checking your facebook or playing games and all those other things one can use a mobile phone for these days; just hands-free conversation.
The 2nd comment I saw in here was from some guy suggesting that using a condom and not sleeping with 'just anyone' was living a dull life. They got +4 Insightful (at the time of this writing). I'm not sure what to make of that.
Is it truly the case that in the U.S. (presumption based on the current time) condoms and/or not having sex with 'just anyone' is so disregarded as to deriding it being hailed with a "hear, hear!" ?
I didn't think that potentially getting - or spreading - an STD was something that should be hailed as a virtue.. nevermind the basic statement suggesting that in order to 'live a little', the aforementioned is a totally acceptable risk.
Of course prevention can be taken to an extreme as well - but to see the basic suggestion of using a condom and/or not sleeping around with random-persons-A-through-Z so belittled as it is, I'm going to have to say it's rather obvious why the vast majority of STDs aren't on a decline; and in fact on the rise. No wonder every time I'm staying in the U.S. and flick a hotel TV on I'm met with there-is-no-cure-for-herpes ads in practically every commercial break - it must be a booming business.
Just to add to parent - think also distribution rights.
They get $nnK or more from a broadcaster in order to broadcast a given production to a given audience.
They do not get that $nnK from .
Similarly.. just because, say, FOX broadcasted a production and paid for it, doesn't mean that TNT, NBC, ABC, etc. can then broadcast it for $0 based on the argument that people could have watched it for free on FOX before -anyway-.
That said, there's also a big distinction between the parent's post and this... his is about downloaders, this is essentially about uploaders. It's the uploaders that they should chase, not the downloaders. In the case of bittorrent it tends to be that downloaders are automatically uploaders as well. Lo and behold, the actual case linked to (the PDF) states this as what the rub seems to be:
The Plaintiff is informed and believes that each Defendant, without the permission or consent of the Plaintiff, has used, and continues to use, an online media distribution system to distribute to the public, including by making available for distribution to others, the Copyrighted Motion Picture.
I'm not sure how they would go after -downloaders- anyway; they would have to either offer the data themselves, or supervise a third party that does so. If they themselves are essentially distributing it, or a third party is doing so for them, then clearly it's not an unlawful distribution - so anybody who downloads it should be in the clear regardless of any downloading laws. ( IANAL, so maybe the above common sense goes out the window in the courts )
Probably trying to play on some popular fears or something with that 'Sharia Law' thing.
On the other hand... if he's thinking of that "somebody who steals has their hand chopped off"... well, I'll bed filesharing would go down dramatically if that -were- the punishment;)
A friend of mine needed to download some files from my server and no matter what route we tried (https, http, ftp), he just couldn't get to the files without some manner of corruption of the files. So eventually I pointed to my free Dropbox Account so he could download from there. These were two files of 122.4MB and 137.3MB. He e-mailed a while later that he couldn't download the 30MB file; I already got the reason why in an e-mail from dropbox a bit earlier:
This email is an automated notification from Dropbox that your Public links have been temporarily suspended on account of generating excessive traffic. Your Dropbox will continue to function completely normally with the exception of Public links.
Oh, yes.. Dropbox is a -great- way to share files publicly. Uh-huh. At least until you hit some virtual limit and then they just shut the access down.
Not that I would suggest using either Dropbox or Google Docs or etc. for distributing items for which you have no license to do so in the first place - but just as a general method of sharing files, it's not all that. (Or at least wasn't late January)
Now I have to draft a letter to our research department telling them to stay the hell away from Ubuntu because their data will potentially be wrong (unless they take pains to remember the kilo=/=kibi switch).
If your research department... 1. Doesn't work in bytes 2. Doesn't know how to tell the difference between kB/MB/GB/TB and KiB/MiB/GiB/TiB...then maybe you (or rather the person in charge) need to educate your research department on these matters, rather than compiling a list every month of operating systems and products to avoid/pay special attention to, which is only bound to grow longer.
I went to an EE prep school and had to tell one of my classmates - after he asked me if a stripe on a resistor was orange or red - that if he had difficulty discerning the two colors, he should check with the school council on this matter. They did indeed offer a variety of different courses to him simply because - by law - he would not be allowed to work with a large variety of systems based on e.g. old color coding of wiring (red and green for live and neutral) in houses.
He *could* still pursue the course he was taking, but they did warn him that in either direction (installation tech - not just the 220V AC systems but also the very common 24V and 12V DC systems used in control panels - or electronics), he would face many issues ranging from inconveniences to basically a note on his certification that would preclude him from working on various electrical systems.
On an up note - he went into mechanical engineering instead and last I bumped into him he was designing parts for water turbines/scoops that raise water from a lower water level to a higher water level without harming - and in some ways in fact helping - fish migrations.
However, he still decided to give up his first passion. Maybe he would have gone on to do great things in that field just as well.. so if his colorblindness could have been 'cured' in the term mentioned in the story summary (20 weeks), then he could have simply applied for a hiatus on medical grounds and return the next year (or try and fast-track from the next semester) without re-enrollment procedures/etc.
I can't find a site that actually details how it works, etc. It's certainly entirely possible for a charger that is already active (power is flowing through it) to shut itself off, mechanically (a relais will do) once current draw drops below a particular level - this would make it shut itself off when the device is fully powered as well (presuming it's not using the charging power source as its main power supply while connected).
The problem is - once it -is- shut off, you can't just connect a device again and have it magically start back up *unless* that device itself provides the power to the charger to initiate this logic. I can't think of device that does this on purpose.. some leak current might be expected, I suppose, but that should be -very- low. So I would think that there's still a switch on the charger itself to turn it on.
Regardless, it looks like it has a nice shiny blue LED going on when it is on, which may very well be more of a vampire draw than a well-designed charger that's not 'smart'.
Cool - that does look a lot better; still not as good as the fellow-commenter's quick clone brush (rubber stamp yadda) effort which I think would be a more natural path for a texture synthesis plugin to take, but a lot better than what I kept getting.
So - obvious question: workflow / parameters? Obviously I missed something (I did play with the parameters, the sky was pretty much stuck in there). Just wanting to see if I missed something (non-)obvious that might make Resynthesizer work on more images I've had trouble with in the past.
I'd still imagine Adobe's new toy would work better (it has its own flaws - which the presenter is quick to scroll out of view), but I'll gladly stand corrected on Resynthesizer's typical results.
Cool - thanks for pointing that one out as well, I'll have to give it a run and see what it (and that TechTracker thing) come up with on the other machine. I know all the software I use regularly on it is up-to-date, but it's seen so many crap installs that it'll be fun to see what they find:)
Select the top-left dark thing, run the Resynthesizer script-fu - voila... dark thing removed, and sky filled in pretty well.
The problem is that this is entirely hit-or-miss.. and it's far more often miss than hit.. and then -when- it is a miss, it's a spectacular miss (as in that person-in-field image).
Slashdot Mirror
gimp hood?
Yeah, but how long is this intersection if you still get photographed at it when the light has turned red?
Given speed: 40mph = 58.666666etc. feet per second or 17.8816 meter per second
Given yellow light duration (from the artile): "the yellow light should be 4.5 seconds. Mogil said he tested it 15 times with an average of only 3.8 seconds."
3.8s * 58.666666 feet/second ~= 223 feet.
or
3.8s * 17.8816 meter per second = 68 meter.
That's one heck of an intersection; especially given that the cameras tend to take the photo of the area just after the stop line.. and not clear on the other side of the intersection.
( This doesn't in any way detract from the fact that these yellow lights are too short - or the notion that the munis/states are using them to rake in money. )
Not sure about every single state/whatever law - but typically it should be something along the lines of "stop if you can stop safely". Hint: the middle of the intersection is not a safe place to stop. So yes, please do keep driving.
Because the guy behind you was paying attention to neither the light -nor- the distance between his vehicle and yours. Doesn't make your situation any more fortunate if you do get rear-ended, but let's not blame short yellows for others' craptacular driving attitude.
Let's face it.. the vast majority of these cases are going to be from people who see the yellow, could stop perfectly fine, but -assume- that it is the proper time of 4.5s and say to themselves "hah! I can still make that!" and then *click* they get caught.
( Again - not that these tickets shouldn't be thrown out if the yellow was indeed too short; but I don't think that even 3s would give drivers a valid excuse under normal circumstances. Now if the intersection is blocked.. or you were getting out of the way of an ambulance.. or there was this murderous semi truck driver after you and you wanted to avoid being careened into.. that's a different story. )
If that article was intended to show that Wikileaks is "providing incorrect/incomplete/biased information", then that article failed on numerous accounts. I won't list them here - it looks like the people commenting on that article (although going off the deep end in another way) have already taken that bother. I highly doubt that was its intent anyway as it goes more into the general topic of what you see in a video and what the actual circumstances were. It still fails even at that, but it's not really directed at Wikileaks.
alright... rephrase.. there are articles on Microsoft.com that point out that when you are building your installer, the default (with the latest set of Visual * products) will download prerequisites over the internet, and that this could possibly maybe not likely but hey here you go... cause the installation to fail.
Subtle - but there it is. Now guess what.. unless you -do- expect every single one of your clients to have an internet connection even though you're selling a boxed product (so you have no real reason to believe that they do)... *plonk* ...the installer just sits there and does nothing.
It gets better when you don't build in a method for your installer to include the prerequisites from a drive so that - if the user managed to get the prerequisites from an alternate location to their machine - the installer will still just sit there and do nothing for it insists that it must get the prerequisites off the internet.
One can always choose to not care and tell people to get internet, I suppose.
Which flies in the face of one of the things that this guy wants to address.. everybody including the libs.. and that does include statically linking. Worse yet - if Microsoft patches something, your app will need an update and that update would need to be sent to your clients in order to fix things.
It's an option - just not a very good one.
The major problem with this is that, as mentioned, Windows doesn't have a package manager, and Microsoft keeps telling developers that they cannot expect a user to have internet connectivity.
So when you compiled your application with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 with the ATL update installed - which means every user of your software will have to have the Visual C++ 2008 SP1 ATL runtime redistributable package installed as well, you're left with scant few options.
The most reasonable of which are:
A. If you're distributing something boxed, to include the redistributable package on the media (CD/DVD/USB stick/whatever).
B. If you're distributing something via downloads:
B.a. Include it because - again - you're not supposed to assume the user will have connectivity.
B.b. Don't include it, but detect whether the user has it installed and has internet access, and then offer to download it and install it (silently or otherwise).
Of course for option B.b., Microsoft further seems to suggest that you do not link to -their- download pages (after all, the URLs could change, etc.) but instead host the binaries yourself.
The only reason, thus, that Windows developers tend to include or download shared libraries at runtime, is simply because there -isn't- a package manager for Windows.
So don't blame the developers - blame the lack of a package manager. Which I fully welcomed the last time a topic hinting at a package manager popped up on /.
Unfortunately it seems like they would be two rather separate projects?
http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/03/24/189248/Microsoft-To-Distribute-Third-Party-Patches
Will the underlying mechanisms only be available to Windows Installer-based delivery systems, and not to alternative installation systems such as InnoSetup, NSIS, and the remainder of the usual suspects?
That's not the answer to the question, then.
If it costs $450M/launch, and you presume it has a crew of 6 (some had 5, some had 7), and you suggest it costs $75/astronaut... then sending up an empty shuttle would cost $0, naught, nil, nothing, be free, etc.?
So.. who wants to give the original question another stab?
Your chem (or physics, depends a little) class never dealt with the island of stability when discussing the periodic table?
I think it's one of the first things we were taught here - although I do admit it was in the very first year and it was never touched upon again (simply because we wouldn't be likely to ever have to deal with it, and knowing the hypothesis was good enough).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability
And the subtle distinction is?
Joe gives Marc $10,000 and Marc makes advertisement X for $10,000
Joe goes to Marc, asks what advertisement Marc wants, Marc says 'advertisement X', Joe spends his $10,000 and make advertisement X
Maybe they're limited in what -else- they can do with that money - as opposed to giving it to the campaign and then having that campaign group use it to buy many gallons of beer - but for the most basic of campaigning methods, i.e. advertising, the distinction seems far too subtle to even be noteworthy.
So what did I miss?
Good lord, I hope not. There's two sides to that coin.. if you're going to give legal clout to "it wasn't listed in robots.txt therefore it's legal to index it" you give the same legal clout to the notion "it was listed in robots.txt, so your crawler which disregards it is in violation of legal statutes". Next they would suggest that the pages behind the little "Terms of use" links hidden away somewhere should get legal clout as well.
robots.txt is entirely voluntary. A crawler -may- follow it, it -may- also completely disregard it. If a website owner doesn't want a crawler to see something, actively block it. If they come to the realization that some crawlers don't readily identify themselves (e.g. through the user-agent string), or there's a new crawler in town every month and they don't want to keep adding their identification, then maybe they're just going to have to put the data they don't want to share with the world behind a login.
Ditto terms of use. No - I do -not- have to agree to their 'terms of use' as described in some page in order to be allowed to visit their site. I request its content, they give it to me, end of story. Don't like it? Again - put it behind a login, or block me.
One of the few rights they have are copyrights.. in which case, yes, Facebook -should- be eyeing Google or Archive.org and similar service that do in fact redistribute their content. That doesn't stop anyone from being fully allowed to aggregate data that happens to be presented within a copyrighted document, though (not sure which case applies in the U.S., Feist v Rural? ianal and all that)
I can see many uses for this - but then, I've got AutoIt for the sorts of things I'm thinking of already.
I think the article title and summary are completely bunk, though. They're not making the software any more -open- than it was before; If you have a button that writes "Hello World" to a file, then you can replace that button with a contrast-rich enlarged version with excellent text-to-speech functionality, or make it a bouncing spinny glowing orb like something out of Kai Krause's mind... but pressing it is still going to write "Hello Word" to a file. It doesn't make it actually do anything differently from before.
It's fun that they can detect UI elements out of a bitmap, but there's so many non-standard UI elements in play that this is going to fail horribly on a lot of UIs. Maybe that means we should stop using custom UI elements, but sometimes those custom UI elements simply are more appropriate than the widgets that come with the OS/widget provider.
I highlighted the problem area.
Let's ignore the other vendors for a moment (Intel, Matrox, etc.) and concentrate just on one of them.. let's say ATI.
I purchased Painkiller for cheap after ZeroPunctuation's review of it - it was in a 'Universe' edition that came with an extension pack and Painkiller Overdose. I loved Painkiller - I couldn't tell you a thing about Painkiller Overdose. The reason for this is that although the main Painkiller game will happily run on the machine, Painkiller Overdose will not - complaining that I need at least a DirectX 9.0c capable card. The DVD box happily claims DirectX 8.1 as minimal requirement, and 'DirectX 9 (Geforce FX 5700 or better)' as recommended. Yet it refuses.
But let's say this wasn't a notebook and I could choose to purchase a new graphics card. Obviously -now- I would just pick up the latest and I'd probably be set. But back at the time of release.. if I were eying ATi cards, then what good is 'Geforce FX 5700' going to do me? And if I had relied on just the 'DirectX 9' bit, and got one, but then found out I needed 9.0c, I'd still be stuck.
And that's just the graphics card ;)
Of course with consoles you have multiple choices - but I think you know what he meant. Otherwise I could claim that 'a PC' could just as well mean one that is running Apple's OS X or Linux.. how are -those- going to run 'PC Games' if they really mean 'Windows Games'?
At least with a given console - say the PS3 - you've got exactly one target. Sure there's been several editions, now a slimline model, etc. But afaik, any game coded for the first PS3 (homebrew 'OtherOS' stuff aside) will still happily run on the latest PS3, and a game coded for the latest PS3 will happily run on the first edition.
I very much enjoy gaming on a (Windows) PC - but I can certainly see why developers and publishers would rather target consoles based on the above alone.
The story title seems to cast a rather broad net with its "`Supertaskers` Can Safely Use Mobile Phones While Driving"... there's a huge difference between...
One just requires you to listen and yap - still not as good paying attention to your driving 100%, but people listen to (talk) radio and whatnot and sing along with songs or carry on conversations with others in the car (yes, they can help pay attention to the road), etc.
The other typically requires you to actually look away from the road and to a little screen/keyboard so you know what you're typing. Even if you've become highly proficient at texting using e.g. T9 on a standard phone pad (much easier than a full keyboard in this case) and don't have to look, you've still got one hand focused on a particular task not related to driving for an extended amount of time.
So even these 'supertaskers' aside, the study conclusion referred to doesn't seem to say anything about things like texting or checking your facebook or playing games and all those other things one can use a mobile phone for these days; just hands-free conversation.
Live a little! Spread herpes! ... wait, what?
The 2nd comment I saw in here was from some guy suggesting that using a condom and not sleeping with 'just anyone' was living a dull life. They got +4 Insightful (at the time of this writing). I'm not sure what to make of that.
Is it truly the case that in the U.S. (presumption based on the current time) condoms and/or not having sex with 'just anyone' is so disregarded as to deriding it being hailed with a "hear, hear!" ?
I didn't think that potentially getting - or spreading - an STD was something that should be hailed as a virtue.. nevermind the basic statement suggesting that in order to 'live a little', the aforementioned is a totally acceptable risk.
Of course prevention can be taken to an extreme as well - but to see the basic suggestion of using a condom and/or not sleeping around with random-persons-A-through-Z so belittled as it is, I'm going to have to say it's rather obvious why the vast majority of STDs aren't on a decline; and in fact on the rise. No wonder every time I'm staying in the U.S. and flick a hotel TV on I'm met with there-is-no-cure-for-herpes ads in practically every commercial break - it must be a booming business.
Just to add to parent - think also distribution rights.
They get $nnK or more from a broadcaster in order to broadcast a given production to a given audience.
They do not get that $nnK from .
Similarly.. just because, say, FOX broadcasted a production and paid for it, doesn't mean that TNT, NBC, ABC, etc. can then broadcast it for $0 based on the argument that people could have watched it for free on FOX before -anyway-.
That said, there's also a big distinction between the parent's post and this... his is about downloaders, this is essentially about uploaders.
It's the uploaders that they should chase, not the downloaders. In the case of bittorrent it tends to be that downloaders are automatically uploaders as well. Lo and behold, the actual case linked to (the PDF) states this as what the rub seems to be:
I'm not sure how they would go after -downloaders- anyway; they would have to either offer the data themselves, or supervise a third party that does so. If they themselves are essentially distributing it, or a third party is doing so for them, then clearly it's not an unlawful distribution - so anybody who downloads it should be in the clear regardless of any downloading laws.
( IANAL, so maybe the above common sense goes out the window in the courts )
wow.. bed. beT.
I blame 4am. bet sounds good right about now.
Probably trying to play on some popular fears or something with that 'Sharia Law' thing.
On the other hand... if he's thinking of that "somebody who steals has their hand chopped off"... well, I'll bed filesharing would go down dramatically if that -were- the punishment ;)
why even bother with those... just point people to http://www.browserchoice.eu/ (and tell them to ignore the IE one, I suppose)
Really?
A friend of mine needed to download some files from my server and no matter what route we tried (https, http, ftp), he just couldn't get to the files without some manner of corruption of the files. So eventually I pointed to my free Dropbox Account so he could download from there. These were two files of 122.4MB and 137.3MB. He e-mailed a while later that he couldn't download the 30MB file; I already got the reason why in an e-mail from dropbox a bit earlier:
Oh, yes.. Dropbox is a -great- way to share files publicly. Uh-huh. At least until you hit some virtual limit and then they just shut the access down.
Not that I would suggest using either Dropbox or Google Docs or etc. for distributing items for which you have no license to do so in the first place - but just as a general method of sharing files, it's not all that. (Or at least wasn't late January)
If your research department... ...then maybe you (or rather the person in charge) need to educate your research department on these matters, rather than compiling a list every month of operating systems and products to avoid/pay special attention to, which is only bound to grow longer.
1. Doesn't work in bytes
2. Doesn't know how to tell the difference between kB/MB/GB/TB and KiB/MiB/GiB/TiB
I went to an EE prep school and had to tell one of my classmates - after he asked me if a stripe on a resistor was orange or red - that if he had difficulty discerning the two colors, he should check with the school council on this matter. They did indeed offer a variety of different courses to him simply because - by law - he would not be allowed to work with a large variety of systems based on e.g. old color coding of wiring (red and green for live and neutral) in houses.
He *could* still pursue the course he was taking, but they did warn him that in either direction (installation tech - not just the 220V AC systems but also the very common 24V and 12V DC systems used in control panels - or electronics), he would face many issues ranging from inconveniences to basically a note on his certification that would preclude him from working on various electrical systems.
On an up note - he went into mechanical engineering instead and last I bumped into him he was designing parts for water turbines/scoops that raise water from a lower water level to a higher water level without harming - and in some ways in fact helping - fish migrations.
However, he still decided to give up his first passion. Maybe he would have gone on to do great things in that field just as well.. so if his colorblindness could have been 'cured' in the term mentioned in the story summary (20 weeks), then he could have simply applied for a hiatus on medical grounds and return the next year (or try and fast-track from the next semester) without re-enrollment procedures/etc.
I can't find a site that actually details how it works, etc. It's certainly entirely possible for a charger that is already active (power is flowing through it) to shut itself off, mechanically (a relais will do) once current draw drops below a particular level - this would make it shut itself off when the device is fully powered as well (presuming it's not using the charging power source as its main power supply while connected).
The problem is - once it -is- shut off, you can't just connect a device again and have it magically start back up *unless* that device itself provides the power to the charger to initiate this logic. I can't think of device that does this on purpose.. some leak current might be expected, I suppose, but that should be -very- low.
So I would think that there's still a switch on the charger itself to turn it on.
Regardless, it looks like it has a nice shiny blue LED going on when it is on, which may very well be more of a vampire draw than a well-designed charger that's not 'smart'.
Cool - that does look a lot better; still not as good as the fellow-commenter's quick clone brush (rubber stamp yadda) effort which I think would be a more natural path for a texture synthesis plugin to take, but a lot better than what I kept getting.
So - obvious question: workflow / parameters? Obviously I missed something (I did play with the parameters, the sky was pretty much stuck in there). Just wanting to see if I missed something (non-)obvious that might make Resynthesizer work on more images I've had trouble with in the past.
I'd still imagine Adobe's new toy would work better (it has its own flaws - which the presenter is quick to scroll out of view), but I'll gladly stand corrected on Resynthesizer's typical results.
Cool - thanks for pointing that one out as well, I'll have to give it a run and see what it (and that TechTracker thing) come up with on the other machine. I know all the software I use regularly on it is up-to-date, but it's seen so many crap installs that it'll be fun to see what they find :)
darn blockquote fail :)
I know I picked it out - what about it?
I didn't pick it out to specifically make Resynthesizer fail - it's image #2 on images.google.com for 'person in field' (sans quotes).
For an example that does work with Resynthesizer, try:
http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/01/0f/33/e2/so-cool.jpg
Select the top-left dark thing, run the Resynthesizer script-fu - voila... dark thing removed, and sky filled in pretty well.
The problem is that this is entirely hit-or-miss.. and it's far more often miss than hit.. and then -when- it is a miss, it's a spectacular miss (as in that person-in-field image).