but it is interesting that this report hits the streets the same day that Enterprise debuts.
No, what's interesting is that there's MORE IMPORTANT THINGS going on in the world at the moment. Or has all this geek-wanking blinded everyone to the fact that the potential for a catastrophic biological terrorist attack in major Western cities has increased a thousand-fold over the past fortnight?
How is Quantum Entanglement going to save us when the factories can't keep up with the demand for gas masks and NBC protection suits? Didn't we learn ANYTHING from Aum and the Sarin attack on the Tokyo subway?
What geek sites need to be focusing on now are PRACTICAL uses of technology to help restore some piece of mind to the population. All the intelligence in the world can't outsmart a single determined zealot with a vial of Anthrax.
Complain. Loudly. Make it heard that you don't want to receive inferior merchandise. The more returns that the record companies receive, the less they'll be tempted to rip the consumer off this way again.
I always thought Einstürzende Neubauten were a forward thinking progressive band anyway, and wouldn't want to be associated with this kind of nonsense.
Let's just hope they get treated like fingerprints or DNA - you don't go in the database unless you're a threat to your fellow citizens.
You mean like all the DNA samples most people around this country have been 'donating' at their local blood banks? Hell, if we're going to go for all-out conspiracy theories and start accusing those in power, then there's a good place to start. The people in power are HUMAN too, remember, and they're just as frightened as we are.
Of course, this really should be a time for everyone in our fair nation to band together and show our strength in unity. But already, we're getting the usual naysayers claiming that it's all some evil sinister plot to advance the Military-Industrial Complex (or was that LAST decade's boogieman?) and bring about a totalitarian government the likes of which has never been seen since Stalin's era.
It's amazing how quickly the chattering classes are willing to make excuses, the further away from the epicentre they live.
Geez, do Intel have sadists working in their ergonomics lab or something. That big loop thing on the controllers seems take up EXACTLY the same space that gamer's wrists would normally go.
"It is MS-HTML. You must have an MS-HTML-capable browser to see it. Apparently NS 6 is not MS-HTML-capable"
Deliberately locking off browsers is wrong, no matter WHO made them. An IE user facing one of these anti-MS sites isn't going to think "I'll change my browser to a more politically correct version". They're gonna think "This guy who runs this site is an asshole."
Nintendo's bait and switch.
on
The New Zelda
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
OK, I won't post the link to the old Zelda pics for fear of being redundant, but it's clear that there's already been a lot of development on a realistic, lifelike version of a Zelda game. And now here comes this jolly happy cartoon Zelda game. Somehow, the plot seems to have been lost along the way...
But why shouldn't there be BOTH in the same game? It's clear that the last few Zelda games have all dealt with an alternative world somehow, be it the Lightworld / Darkworld in Link To The Past, or the Young Link / Old Link worlds in Ocarina Of Time.
Given this pattern, perhaps we might see a Realistic / Cartoon world changeover in this next game. Remember that the actual plot of this game hasn't been published yet. So for the moment, anything goes!
Some browsers (opera), recognizing the fact that crashes do happen, are now saving the window/url chain state so they can resume more or less where they left off. Mozilla isn't doing this, and should. Besides taking the sting out of crashes, it lets you shut down without worrying about losing all your windows. This is a big deal, for a small amount of programming effort.
Well, Alphanumerica (creators of the Aphrodite skin) were working on a package called 'Total Recall', which promised just that. It's now been subverted to a generic browser plug-in called Recall, available at http://recall.mosdev.org. Worth checking out!
There's a lot of cool projects being worked on at Mozdev. XUL is starting to look like a viable platform, now the spec's more or less cast in stone!
and is a standard from the W3C (or will be soon:-).
And therein lies the problem. Flash is here NOW! And it's what people are using. Where are the fancy point-and-drool SVG creation tools?
Whenever people think of 'fancy animations' in websites, they think of Flash. It's got the marketshare, and the plugin comes pre-installed on most of the major browsers.
I agree that SVG is going to be A. Good. Thing., but it's already fighting an uphill battle! The integration of Flash with XML means that we can create dynamic data-driven sites now, without waiting for the SVG standard to be ratified.
Current copyright laws are, in my opinion, going to put the 20th century's greatest artistic outpourings into a legally mandated black hole. Most artists and authors have an expectation that their work will immortalize them. Otherwise we wouldn't have such things as the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame (as biased and political an organization as it is) or the Grammys, or the Oscars, or any other prizes and awards for great contributions to the field.
The problem with this expectation is that in order for your work to be immortalized, it has to survive beyond the first generation of its fans. Just because the Baby Boomers put down in their book that Bob Dylan was somebody fuckin' great, doesn't mean that I will. And it is my generation that will be responsible for ensuring the longevity of art created by my parents' generation. In order for a work to survive past a generation, copies have to be made. Lots of them. Vinyl albums are incredibly fragile, and are easily scratched by careless children, and left on radiators or in attics and warp. CD's get dropped behind the sofa. Cassette tapes are left on the dashboard and melt. Boo.
Since copying all of these media is now illegal, I won't be making any copies of them. The only entity authorised to copy the media is the record company. They only make copies when they think they'll get a sale. Now, as the generation who popularized the work starts dropping off, sales of the work drop off as well. Fewer copies are made. But the copyright term still stands. Before the copyright expires, virtually every "consumer" of his work will have expired as well. Their collections will be sold at estate sales, thrown in the trash, or left in the attic to decay.
Finally, the copyright expires and people are now free to distribute their own copies of the work. But who cares anymore? The first generation that will be legally able to make free and clear copies of Bob Dylan's work, as I understand it, will be my own grandchildren, who will not be born for another twenty years.
The possibility exists that there will be few private copies after 75 years. The company that owns them may clear them out to make more room in their vault.
Put that in the wayforward machine and imagine any type of bleak orwellian culture you like. The results are in the long-term detrimental to that which most artists crave: their continued adulation by a rapt audience. It is the cheer of the crowd that keeps them going. Knowing that the cheer goes on after their funeral has to be a significant part of what they expect as their legacy. Over-restrictive copyright laws will cut that legacy short, and their life's work will be merely "product," to be disposed of immediately upon consumption.
That's one thing that the RSS 1.0 fascists won't ever tell you. RSS 1.0 is NOT compatible with RSS 0.92. It's a totally different syntax.
Of course, they'll whinge and moan and say "upgrade to our new fancy spec" that only about eight geeks in the world can comprehend. When the truth is that 0.91 was a standard that EVERYONE could understand, including Frontpage-using HTML novices - EXACTLY the kind of people that the uber-geek elite want to stamp out of existence.
Sorry, geeks, it's a big wide web out there, and everyone's invited. Stop trying to bury web standards under layers of incomprehensibility.
In the meantime, as Alien54 suggests, RSS 0.91 providers can switch their Doctype to 0.92. The DTD's on Userland, which at least is run by someone with a clue.
Then everything should start working smoothly again, without having to learn an entirely new specification.
Actually, it could be the best way to decide the whole Bush/Gore thing once and for all. Give the Presidency to the first one who chooses to have his schlong cut off!
Hell, if anything else it'll prevent another Zippergate!
I notice one of the fake email addresses they have in the sample output is one @yahoo.com. Surely, this isn't really a _fake_ email address, as it's pointing to a valid mailserver? (Thus causing yahoo.com to be clogged up when the next round of spam discharge is fired.)
Damn, and I was just about to go to that article to cut and paste all the (5, Insightful) comments and post them under my name... You've blown my scam!
1. Never send the files as raw Jpegs. (PNGs / GIFs / whatever) All it takes is one overzealous network adminstrator to take a peek at the images going through their server, and it's boot up the arse time.
2. If this software works (which I severely doubt!), all you'll have to do is apply a 'negative' filter to the image, achievable in most basic art packages and/or the ppm tools. This will remove all the flesh tones, which is what these things normally check for.
At least it's not one of those 'Undeletable' icons that Microsoft likes putting on the desktop.
Hmm. THAT'S a good reason for not opening up the Windows APIs - Not letting AOL take over your entire OS just because you've installed Winamp or something.
One good thing about the Netscape 6 install is that the bloody AIM crap is optional, and it DOESN'T try to register itself as the default viewer for every filetype imaginable, whether you want it to or not.
The nightly builds from mozilla.org are already leaps and bounds ahead of the buggy product that Netscape is pushing onto the world. (2 frozen screens and reboots in the first 10 minutes of using 6.0, everything fine on the Nov 12th Nightly.)
Oh yeah, and a free clue to the Netscape rebadgers: I'm already online, so WHY THE F**K WOULD I WANT AN AOL ICON ON MY DESKTOP?
Slashdot Mirror
but it is interesting that this report hits the streets the same day that Enterprise debuts.
No, what's interesting is that there's MORE IMPORTANT THINGS going on in the world at the moment. Or has all this geek-wanking blinded everyone to the fact that the potential for a catastrophic biological terrorist attack in major Western cities has increased a thousand-fold over the past fortnight?
How is Quantum Entanglement going to save us when the factories can't keep up with the demand for gas masks and NBC protection suits? Didn't we learn ANYTHING from Aum and the Sarin attack on the Tokyo subway?
What geek sites need to be focusing on now are PRACTICAL uses of technology to help restore some piece of mind to the population. All the intelligence in the world can't outsmart a single determined zealot with a vial of Anthrax.
Complain. Loudly. Make it heard that you don't want to receive inferior merchandise. The more returns that the record companies receive, the less they'll be tempted to rip the consumer off this way again.
I always thought Einstürzende Neubauten were a forward thinking progressive band anyway, and wouldn't want to be associated with this kind of nonsense.
If a small Meteor is a Meteroid, does that mean that Hemos' new addition is a Hemmoroid?
who wants to write a program that may never be used?
Quite a few people, apparently!
Let's just hope they get treated like fingerprints or DNA - you don't go in the database unless you're a threat to your fellow citizens.
You mean like all the DNA samples most people around this country have been 'donating' at their local blood banks? Hell, if we're going to go for all-out conspiracy theories and start accusing those in power, then there's a good place to start. The people in power are HUMAN too, remember, and they're just as frightened as we are.
Of course, this really should be a time for everyone in our fair nation to band together and show our strength in unity. But already, we're getting the usual naysayers claiming that it's all some evil sinister plot to advance the Military-Industrial Complex (or was that LAST decade's boogieman?) and bring about a totalitarian government the likes of which has never been seen since Stalin's era.
It's amazing how quickly the chattering classes are willing to make excuses, the further away from the epicentre they live.
Geez, do Intel have sadists working in their ergonomics lab or something. That big loop thing on the controllers seems take up EXACTLY the same space that gamer's wrists would normally go.
That can't be good for RSI.
And not ONE mention of "Biker Mice from Mars". For shame!
No one said you have to use an Adobe product to view the output of one.
Try telling that to Dmitry Sklyarov.
"It is MS-HTML. You must have an MS-HTML-capable browser to see it. Apparently NS 6 is not MS-HTML-capable"
Deliberately locking off browsers is wrong, no matter WHO made them. An IE user facing one of these anti-MS sites isn't going to think "I'll change my browser to a more politically correct version". They're gonna think "This guy who runs this site is an asshole."
OK, I won't post the link to the old Zelda pics for fear of being redundant, but it's clear that there's already been a lot of development on a realistic, lifelike version of a Zelda game. And now here comes this jolly happy cartoon Zelda game. Somehow, the plot seems to have been lost along the way...
But why shouldn't there be BOTH in the same game? It's clear that the last few Zelda games have all dealt with an alternative world somehow, be it the Lightworld / Darkworld in Link To The Past, or the Young Link / Old Link worlds in Ocarina Of Time.
Given this pattern, perhaps we might see a Realistic / Cartoon world changeover in this next game. Remember that the actual plot of this game hasn't been published yet. So for the moment, anything goes!
Some browsers (opera), recognizing the fact that crashes do happen, are now saving the window/url chain state so they can resume more or less where they left off. Mozilla isn't doing this, and should. Besides taking the sting out of crashes, it lets you shut down without worrying about losing all your windows. This is a big deal, for a small amount of programming effort.
Well, Alphanumerica (creators of the Aphrodite skin) were working on a package called 'Total Recall', which promised just that. It's now been subverted to a generic browser plug-in called Recall, available at http://recall.mosdev.org. Worth checking out!
There's a lot of cool projects being worked on at Mozdev. XUL is starting to look like a viable platform, now the spec's more or less cast in stone!
and is a standard from the W3C (or will be soon :-).
And therein lies the problem. Flash is here NOW! And it's what people are using. Where are the fancy point-and-drool SVG creation tools?
Whenever people think of 'fancy animations' in websites, they think of Flash. It's got the marketshare, and the plugin comes pre-installed on most of the major browsers.
I agree that SVG is going to be A. Good. Thing., but it's already fighting an uphill battle! The integration of Flash with XML means that we can create dynamic data-driven sites now, without waiting for the SVG standard to be ratified.
Current copyright laws are, in my opinion, going to put the 20th century's greatest artistic outpourings into a legally mandated black hole. Most artists and authors have an expectation that their work will immortalize them. Otherwise we wouldn't have such things as the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame (as biased and political an organization as it is) or the Grammys, or the Oscars, or any other prizes and awards for great contributions to the field.
The problem with this expectation is that in order for your work to be immortalized, it has to survive beyond the first generation of its fans. Just because the Baby Boomers put down in their book that Bob Dylan was somebody fuckin' great, doesn't mean that I will. And it is my generation that will be responsible for ensuring the longevity of art created by my parents' generation. In order for a work to survive past a generation, copies have to be made. Lots of them. Vinyl albums are incredibly fragile, and are easily scratched by careless children, and left on radiators or in attics and warp. CD's get dropped behind the sofa. Cassette tapes are left on the dashboard and melt. Boo.
Since copying all of these media is now illegal, I won't be making any copies of them. The only entity authorised to copy the media is the record company. They only make copies when they think they'll get a sale. Now, as the generation who popularized the work starts dropping off, sales of the work drop off as well. Fewer copies are made. But the copyright term still stands. Before the copyright expires, virtually every "consumer" of his work will have expired as well. Their collections will be sold at estate sales, thrown in the trash, or left in the attic to decay.
Finally, the copyright expires and people are now free to distribute their own copies of the work. But who cares anymore? The first generation that will be legally able to make free and clear copies of Bob Dylan's work, as I understand it, will be my own grandchildren, who will not be born for another twenty years.
The possibility exists that there will be few private copies after 75 years. The company that owns them may clear them out to make more room in their vault.
Put that in the wayforward machine and imagine any type of bleak orwellian culture you like. The results are in the long-term detrimental to that which most artists crave: their continued adulation by a rapt audience. It is the cheer of the crowd that keeps them going. Knowing that the cheer goes on after their funeral has to be a significant part of what they expect as their legacy. Over-restrictive copyright laws will cut that legacy short, and their life's work will be merely "product," to be disposed of immediately upon consumption.
That's one thing that the RSS 1.0 fascists won't ever tell you. RSS 1.0 is NOT compatible with RSS 0.92. It's a totally different syntax.
Of course, they'll whinge and moan and say "upgrade to our new fancy spec" that only about eight geeks in the world can comprehend. When the truth is that 0.91 was a standard that EVERYONE could understand, including Frontpage-using HTML novices - EXACTLY the kind of people that the uber-geek elite want to stamp out of existence.
Sorry, geeks, it's a big wide web out there, and everyone's invited. Stop trying to bury web standards under layers of incomprehensibility.
In the meantime, as Alien54 suggests, RSS 0.91 providers can switch their Doctype to 0.92. The DTD's on Userland, which at least is run by someone with a clue.
Then everything should start working smoothly again, without having to learn an entirely new specification.
People have died for puns like that!
Actually, it could be the best way to decide the whole Bush/Gore thing once and for all. Give the Presidency to the first one who chooses to have his schlong cut off!
Hell, if anything else it'll prevent another Zippergate!
For now they can keep BOTH hands on the keyboard!
I notice one of the fake email addresses they have in the sample output is one @yahoo.com. Surely, this isn't really a _fake_ email address, as it's pointing to a valid mailserver? (Thus causing yahoo.com to be clogged up when the next round of spam discharge is fired.)
And you've got to feel sorry for sweetp@dash.com!
Sometimes you whore the Karma, sometimes the Karma's whored from you. All part of the natural balance of the universe.
Hell, if I hadn't already posted, I'd moderate you up out of principle. As well as the "Jingle Bells" song and the "torso plate" story.
Damn, why is all the best stuff relegated to '-1'?
Wouldn't a "Psalm Pilot" be easier to carry?
Yup! We've seen This Article before! Yesterday, in fact.
Unfortunately, I can't meta-whore by ripping off all the Score: 5 posts from the old article because ONLY TWO FUCKERS POSTED TO IT!
Damn, and I was just about to go to that article to cut and paste all the (5, Insightful) comments and post them under my name... You've blown my scam!
1. Never send the files as raw Jpegs. (PNGs / GIFs / whatever) All it takes is one overzealous network adminstrator to take a peek at the images going through their server, and it's boot up the arse time.
2. If this software works (which I severely doubt!), all you'll have to do is apply a 'negative' filter to the image, achievable in most basic art packages and/or the ppm tools. This will remove all the flesh tones, which is what these things normally check for.
3. Add cryptography to taste.
4. Get out more, your palms are growing hairy.
At least it's not one of those 'Undeletable' icons that Microsoft likes putting on the desktop.
Hmm. THAT'S a good reason for not opening up the Windows APIs - Not letting AOL take over your entire OS just because you've installed Winamp or something.
One good thing about the Netscape 6 install is that the bloody AIM crap is optional, and it DOESN'T try to register itself as the default viewer for every filetype imaginable, whether you want it to or not.
The nightly builds from mozilla.org are already leaps and bounds ahead of the buggy product that Netscape is pushing onto the world. (2 frozen screens and reboots in the first 10 minutes of using 6.0, everything fine on the Nov 12th Nightly.)
Oh yeah, and a free clue to the Netscape rebadgers: I'm already online, so WHY THE F**K WOULD I WANT AN AOL ICON ON MY DESKTOP?
Try to imagine playing Track and Field (or any other Joystick Waggler) with this. You'll look like you're having a fit!