A well researched and more detailed treatment on what children are capable of, how we as a society went mad, and how they need to learn independently is in the book "Free Range Kids". My wife and I read this with for ourselves and our two kids and are beginning to try to counter the pervasive paranoia one friend at a time.
4 years ago I was in your shoes, wanting to take better pictures (of my kids primarily). I received a Nikon D40 as a gift, and have gone on from there to using all manner of cameras
There are lots and lots of tradeoffs to consider, unfortunately. Generally speaking the SLRs will set up, focus, and click much much faster than anything point and shoot. Larger sensors perform better, especially in Low light. See this
You don't need the latest generation of DSLR to get started, and I don't really recommend that you start with a lot of features. There are a lot of things to learn if you get into it. I know you want to keep it simple, and every _photographer_ (as opposed to gearhead) wants their stuff to get out of the way so they can take pictures. Unfortunately there are a lot of decisions to be made, gear and otherwise with each click and making better decisions with more capable gear means better pictures. Pro pictures look pro for a reason.
Having enough gear to make those decisions is important, but learning what they are is more important. Things like composition and lighting, and how to bounce-flash when you can get away with it.
You can always buy gear on CL and sell it the same way when you have exhausted its limits. You can more or less try gear out "for free" with a deposit that way. Especially if you stick with "popular" (hence semi-liquid) brands/items.
With all that said, buy either a used D40 or D3100 off of Craigslist with a kit lens (or the canon equivalent), or get an Olympus E-P3, E-PL3, E-P1 or Panasonic GF3 (with kit lens). The new m43 bodies set up and shoot much much faster than previous "small" cameras and the m43 sensor is big enough to be "good". And they are a heck of a lot less bulky than the SLRs.
0.17 Music Union 0.80 Manufacturing 0.82 Pub Royalties 0.90 Distribution 1.60 Artist Royalties
Your cost = $4.29
Sell us the discs for 8 (or less). We'll charge 9.72. The rest is your problem. Deal with it. We don't care how much you currently spend on payola^H^H^H^H^H promotion. We don't care how much you spend on acts that don't sell. We don't care how much rent you pay for your offices or what you pay your staff or what your profit is. You get 50% margins and if you can't make a business out of that, tough.
This enlarges the customer base
on
Blu-ray BD+ Cracked
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
As was posted earlier to/. regarding gaming, the studios et. al. should really focus on _customers_, not pirates because, duh, customers buy things. Some customers demand fair use rights by hook or crook (for example those that want for various reasons to have a lone htpc+speakers+monitor be your entire HT), and now that slysoft has provided for a fee, the _customer_ base for Fox. et. al. just expanded. The pirate base is probably unchanged by this, so really the studios should be celebrating, and the people that should really be cackeling incessantly are the ones that get the mandatory fee paid for providing the snake oil that is the useless AACS and BD+ "protections".
From the slysoft AnyDVD HD forum:
Xtrap1979
I can now make a collective order of all the Fox titles
http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=14787&page=3
I think the philosophers have addressed the basis for this "struggle" in a way that neither Davies nor Overbye take into consideration.
To the point, when asking questions about why there are nifty and tremendously useful & predictive ways of talking about the empirical world it is not useful think about discovering laws that are out there. Because of that it's not useful to ask what created those laws.
Rather, those laws are expressions of the way our minds work. We mentally organize the world around us in wondrous and interrelated (and intersubjective but that's a longer story) ways and give meaning to those concepts. We didn't "find" the laws, we made them by observing the empirical world and talking about it to each other.
Kant gave us this insight in the Critique of Pure reason when he usefully told us that there are a-priori categories... ways of thinking, hard wiring in our consciousness that make us.
That does raise the question of why do we think the way we do, what are these categories and could they be different, which is a little bit the same in the sense that we are given something and wonder about the mechanism for it but very different in another... the question shifts from something "out there which is for unknown reasons" to an examination of our own consciousness, "why do we organize the empirical world in this particular way". This does not, of course address the question of why anything at all, including our consciousness.
From my point of view this is the truly awe-inspiring knee weakening thing. That we are and we have the gift of consciousness to celebrate, and can be grateful for it.
I was one of loki's beta testers and didn't play much after Loki folded. Along came NWN and I tried it out and liked it. I played the OC and really enjoyed it. Along the way I noticed one of the best guides written was by silverforce about the cleric, and he mentioned exaria
http://www.exaria.net
I have not played anything else since. It is an excellent PW with very good desingers that keep things balanced and tough through L20. You'll know fear when you first see a crag crusader;) The players are mature and many game styles are well supported.
Aside from exaria, grom the looks of things there are persistent worlds for every style of play: PvP, RP, Hack n Slash and so on. If you have the time, I'd definietly reccomend checking it out.
Shameless but accurate linux plug: From what I've been able to gather the Linux client is superior to the windows one with the exception that it's more difficult to install/patch. Primary reason: out of the box linux will give you better network performance and is not subject to bandwidth stealing windows update / ms office indexing jobs/ various bandwith stealing viri and so forth. The client itself is very stalbe (the violence setting may need to be turned down as some splats are known to induce crashes, and this applies to all clients, YMMV)
Since stocks (should overall) tend to grow in a compound fashion, I (and other tech chart readers) find the log scale (which "linearizes" compounding) best.
I _really_ favor candlesticks as do many others familar with techincal analysis.
Of course, it's more dramatic to see the drop on a linear scale....
SCOX = tanking
due in no large part to the assesement (as reported in Cnet etc.) of how _expensive_ it's going to be for them to defend themselves against big blue's patent claims. If they don't succeed in that, then they will have about 0 in revenue.
Eric S. Raymond (http://www.tuxedo.org), the guy the media was getting quotes from back in the hype days has been telling a well developed version of this for some time. For example, he presented it at a talk to the MITRE Corperation in Feb of 1999. It can also be found in his writings:
I wrote those covered calls a bit too early. Serves my lack of faith right:)
As a beta tester, I can say that it is a great gam
on
Kohan for Linux
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Sam L. et. all have gotten the Linux implementation tight as .
The gameplay and economic model ARE different from your standard total annihilation / warcraft/starcraft fare. (Well, those were the last time I touched a game under win32).
The economic model focuses on balancing lots of different resourcecs which can be generated by towns themselves. Takes a bit of getting used to, but it is much more interesting than "energy/metal" all harvested from "mines".
The unit play and tactics are also very interesting - morale, formation, terrain bonuses, flanking. Military historians should love this.
Oh, and they fixed that damnable "rush" tactic.
As of now, I don't miss bilzzard at all (well, that's a lie. I still kinda wanted to try DiabloII in my copius spare time).
And it has additional cool Loki - type features such as the "middle mouse map drag/scroll" that Win32 folks don't.
Check it out!
I loved diablo I, even with rampant cheeting.
Today, I only have windows in VMware, and then, only for Office.
I guarantee I'll buy a copy of diablo / starcraft etc. if blizzard would let loki port it.
Take a look at what your processing will be doing.
It it is mostly integer, nothing out there will beat the hot x86 chips (P III/IV, Athlon) this side of a supercomptuer. If your doing lots of FP intesive stuff, _and_ you don't have space for twice as many x86 boxes, the alpha is the chip of choice. The Suns have excellent reliablilty and bandwith (nice for ISPs), but suck for price/performance. SGI MIPS hardware is very specialized.
I'd go for the VA linux boxes.
SMP PIII
And btw -- running RH 7 happily on a production system.
Actually, the SGI 1600SW (and Radius Artica) do not use DVI, they use Open LDI as their native digital input -- and this is where the story starts.
The SGI Multilink Adapter (MLA) has a single DVI input that supports either DVI-I (analog) or DVI-D (digital) and comes with the necessary cables to
hook up to either 15-pin analog, DFP or DVI-D video outputs, doing whatever conversion, and thus driving the 1600SW that way.
At one point in time, SGI shipped the 1600SW with a Number Nine Revolution IV video card, that both XFree86 3.3.6 and the 4.0.2 release candidates
support very nicely - you can even do multi-head setups with AGP and PCI versions of the card in the same system. Alas, S3 bought #9 awhile back,
closed them down, and now these cards are rather hard to find.
SGI is currently shipping one bundle of the 1600SW with the 3DLabs Oxygen VX1-1600SW PCI card which can drive the 1600SW directly (it is actually a PC
version of the Formac Proformance 3 with Permedia 3 chip). Alas, I have not been able to figure out the proper XF86Config file settings to make the
1600SW and this video card work natively together under the XFree86 4.0.2 release candidates. The same mode lines, and some variations that I've tried from a working #9 I128 driver XF86Config, do not function with this combination - and I have not yet received an answer on the XFree86 Xpert
list on this topic.
The other option is to use the SGI MLA with a DVI-out video card: Matrox G400 with DVI module, ATI Rage Fury Pro DVI, ATI Raedon All-In-Wonder, or some variation of an nVidia GeForce2-based card with DVI out. I've read that there is a limitation in the Matrox closed source HAL module for XFree86 that prevents you from running the second head, which is where the Matrox DVI module is driven from, at the required 1600x1024 resolution, so, for now, you can't use the SGI MLA with a Matrox card - someone please correct
me if I am wrong. I haven't read anything yet about driving the SGI MLA from the ATI Rage Fury Pro DVI, ATI Raedon All-In-Wonder, or an nVidia
GeForce2-based card at 1600x1024. I just got an SGI MLA myself the other day and I do have an ATI Rage Fury Pro DVI card that I will be trying out
sometime this week in this particular combination.
Bottom line, IMHO, the best thing to do (most flexible combination) is to get the SGI 1600SW with the SGI MLA. This will let you work at any
resolution *now* on any machine and platform, and when things get ironed out with driving DVI outputs at 1600x1024, you will enjoy the benefits then.
BTW, IMNSHO [:-)] , the SGI 1600SW is the best flat panel out there bar none. The 22" Apple Cinema display is too grainy (same resolution, larger display, larger pixels, twice as much) and all of the other flat panels just don't have the same quality, nor the ability to turn the 'pixels' on and off fast enough - they ghost like mad when moving windows around or playing videos.
I don't even look at these anymore. Well, I would if someone wrote a program that started actually solving these problems. That would be truly excellent.
The reason I don't look at them is, as explained by my advisor, is they are an incredible time suck. Since this is a holy grail, lots of reasonably talented people give it a spin. And it never pans out. And it takes a huge ammount of time to figure out what the subtle error in their logic/proof is.
Put another way, I know lots of people that will happily take a $10 -> $1k bet that your discovery won't be blessed by a tier 1 journal in 5 years time or less. I'm one of them.
Part of the reason for the extreme skepticism is that thousands of brilliant people have tried to come up with a solution to this problem. This is because all NP problems are polynomially transformable to each other, and there are lots of very useful real world problems that are NP. Ergo, some (or all) of the best practicing algorithmers have tried and failed to get an efficient exact algorithm for this problem in their own very well understood (to them) subdomain.
Not holding my breath (but I'd love to eat crow on this, as would every other OR practitioner).
See Gary & Jhonson for all the gory details.
Have you joined the EFF
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 5
I graduated, got a job, and joined the EFF.
Follow the articles advice and join up. Every $10, $25, $50 or $500 helps. Let's/. the EFF membership!
If you have secrets, there is no good alternative to destroying the media. Disks are cheap; presumably your secrets are worth more. -- Stolen from Applied Cryptography
Why am I seeing "?" when I should see "'", and on on/. no less? I may give up my quest to fight the "?" little cyber kid-leashing, and while you?re making s http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/
Openmap is probably what you are looking for
on
GIS Web Mapping?
·
· Score: 1
Check out the opensource java gis mapper: http://openmap.bbn.com
The article is exactly right; it's legal for sun to do what they did, and it is helpful to both java and linux. HOWEVER.... some snaps to Blackdown in the press release would have been very appropriate. From sun's point of view, other's contributions to Java are small compatred to the $ and effort the've put in to something that costs them money at an accelerating rate. BTW -- I'm using the blackdown JDK becase I want native threads on my SMP box...
Slashdot Mirror
with SCIENCE.
You ignorant fool, go away before I drop science on you a second time!
A well researched and more detailed treatment on what children are capable of, how we as a society went mad, and how they need to learn independently is in the book "Free Range Kids". My wife and I read this with for ourselves and our two kids and are beginning to try to counter the pervasive paranoia one friend at a time.
http://www.amazon.com/Free-Range-Raise-Self-Reliant-Children-Without/dp/0470574755/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1340643190&sr=8-1&keywords=Free+Range+Kids
4 years ago I was in your shoes, wanting to take better pictures (of my kids primarily). I received a Nikon D40 as a gift, and have gone on from there to using all manner of cameras
There are lots and lots of tradeoffs to consider, unfortunately. Generally speaking the SLRs will set up, focus, and click much much faster than anything point and shoot. Larger sensors perform better, especially in Low light. See this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_sensor_format
You don't need the latest generation of DSLR to get started, and I don't really recommend that you start with a lot of features. There are a lot of things to learn if you get into it. I know you want to keep it simple, and every _photographer_ (as opposed to gearhead) wants their stuff to get out of the way so they can take pictures. Unfortunately there are a lot of decisions to be made, gear and otherwise with each click and making better decisions with more capable gear means better pictures. Pro pictures look pro for a reason.
Having enough gear to make those decisions is important, but learning what they are is more important. Things like composition and lighting, and how to bounce-flash when you can get away with it.
You can always buy gear on CL and sell it the same way when you have exhausted its limits. You can more or less try gear out "for free" with a deposit that way. Especially if you stick with "popular" (hence semi-liquid) brands/items.
With all that said, buy either a used D40 or D3100 off of Craigslist with a kit lens (or the canon equivalent), or get an Olympus E-P3, E-PL3, E-P1 or Panasonic GF3 (with kit lens). The new m43 bodies set up and shoot much much faster than previous "small" cameras and the m43 sensor is big enough to be "good". And they are a heck of a lot less bulky than the SLRs.
Fantastic deals on those today
http://www.43rumors.com/black-friday-brings-superdeals-on-e-pl3-e-p3-e-5-and-gf3/
I'll bet the computations could have been finished a lot faster (development time excluded ;) on a PS3 http://cag.csail.mit.edu/ps3/
Walmart means something like this:
0.17 Music Union
0.80 Manufacturing
0.82 Pub Royalties
0.90 Distribution
1.60 Artist Royalties
Your cost = $4.29
Sell us the discs for 8 (or less). We'll charge 9.72. The rest is your problem. Deal with it. We don't care how much you currently spend on payola^H^H^H^H^H promotion. We don't care how much you spend on acts that don't sell. We don't care how much rent you pay for your offices or what you pay your staff or what your profit is. You get 50% margins and if you can't make a business out of that, tough.
As was posted earlier to /. regarding gaming, the studios et. al. should really focus on _customers_, not pirates because, duh, customers buy things. Some customers demand fair use rights by hook or crook (for example those that want for various reasons to have a lone htpc+speakers+monitor be your entire HT), and now that slysoft has provided for a fee, the _customer_ base for Fox. et. al. just expanded. The pirate base is probably unchanged by this, so really the studios should be celebrating, and the people that should really be cackeling incessantly are the ones that get the mandatory fee paid for providing the snake oil that is the useless AACS and BD+ "protections".
From the slysoft AnyDVD HD forum:
Xtrap1979
I can now make a collective order of all the Fox titles
http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?t=14787&page=3
I think the philosophers have addressed the basis for this "struggle" in a way that neither Davies nor Overbye take into consideration.
... ways of thinking, hard wiring in our consciousness that make us.
... the question shifts from something "out there which is for unknown reasons" to an examination of our own consciousness, "why do we organize the empirical world in this particular way". This does not, of course address the question of why anything at all, including our consciousness.
To the point, when asking questions about why there are nifty and tremendously useful & predictive ways of talking about the empirical world it is not useful think about discovering laws that are out there. Because of that it's not useful to ask what created those laws.
Rather, those laws are expressions of the way our minds work. We mentally organize the world around us in wondrous and interrelated (and intersubjective but that's a longer story) ways and give meaning to those concepts. We didn't "find" the laws, we made them by observing the empirical world and talking about it to each other.
Kant gave us this insight in the Critique of Pure reason when he usefully told us that there are a-priori categories
That does raise the question of why do we think the way we do, what are these categories and could they be different, which is a little bit the same in the sense that we are given something and wonder about the mechanism for it but very different in another
From my point of view this is the truly awe-inspiring knee weakening thing. That we are and we have the gift of consciousness to celebrate, and can be grateful for it.
I was one of loki's beta testers and didn't play much after Loki folded. Along came NWN and I tried it out and liked it. I played the OC and really enjoyed it. Along the way I noticed one of the best guides written was by silverforce about the cleric, and he mentioned exaria
;) The players are mature and many game styles are well supported.
http://www.exaria.net
I have not played anything else since. It is an excellent PW with very good desingers that keep things balanced and tough through L20. You'll know fear when you first see a crag crusader
Aside from exaria, grom the looks of things there are persistent worlds for every style of play: PvP, RP, Hack n Slash and so on. If you have the time, I'd definietly reccomend checking it out.
Shameless but accurate linux plug: From what I've been able to gather the Linux client is superior to the windows one with the exception that it's more difficult to install/patch. Primary reason: out of the box linux will give you better network performance and is not subject to bandwidth stealing windows update / ms office indexing jobs/ various bandwith stealing viri and so forth. The client itself is very stalbe (the violence setting may need to be turned down as some splats are known to induce crashes, and this applies to all clients, YMMV)
Since stocks (should overall) tend to grow in a compound fashion, I (and other tech chart readers) find the log scale (which "linearizes" compounding) best.
....
I _really_ favor candlesticks as do many others familar with techincal analysis.
Of course, it's more dramatic to see the drop on a linear scale
SCOX = tanking
due in no large part to the assesement (as reported in Cnet etc.) of how _expensive_ it's going to be for them to defend themselves against big blue's patent claims. If they don't succeed in that, then they will have about 0 in revenue.
I had an order to short sell 200 shares of it at 14.70. The broker didn't have any. I'm going to be out almost $3k on that. Sigh.
Eric S. Raymond (http://www.tuxedo.org), the guy the media was getting quotes from back in the hype days has been telling a well developed version of this for some time. For example, he presented it at a talk to the MITRE Corperation in Feb of 1999. It can also be found in his writings:
g /h omesteading/
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/homesteadin
I wrote those covered calls a bit too early. Serves my lack of faith right :)
Sam L. et. all have gotten the Linux implementation tight as . The gameplay and economic model ARE different from your standard total annihilation / warcraft /starcraft fare. (Well, those were the last time I touched a game under win32).
The economic model focuses on balancing lots of different resourcecs which can be generated by towns themselves. Takes a bit of getting used to, but it is much more interesting than "energy/metal" all harvested from "mines".
The unit play and tactics are also very interesting - morale, formation, terrain bonuses, flanking. Military historians should love this.
Oh, and they fixed that damnable "rush" tactic.
As of now, I don't miss bilzzard at all (well, that's a lie. I still kinda wanted to try DiabloII in my copius spare time).
And it has additional cool Loki - type features such as the "middle mouse map drag/scroll" that Win32 folks don't.
Check it out!
I loved diablo I, even with rampant cheeting. Today, I only have windows in VMware, and then, only for Office. I guarantee I'll buy a copy of diablo / starcraft etc. if blizzard would let loki port it.
Take a look at what your processing will be doing. It it is mostly integer, nothing out there will beat the hot x86 chips (P III/IV, Athlon) this side of a supercomptuer. If your doing lots of FP intesive stuff, _and_ you don't have space for twice as many x86 boxes, the alpha is the chip of choice. The Suns have excellent reliablilty and bandwith (nice for ISPs), but suck for price/performance. SGI MIPS hardware is very specialized. I'd go for the VA linux boxes. SMP PIII And btw -- running RH 7 happily on a production system.
Actually, the SGI 1600SW (and Radius Artica) do not use DVI, they use Open LDI as their native digital input -- and this is where the story starts.
The SGI Multilink Adapter (MLA) has a single DVI input that supports either DVI-I (analog) or DVI-D (digital) and comes with the necessary cables to hook up to either 15-pin analog, DFP or DVI-D video outputs, doing whatever conversion, and thus driving the 1600SW that way.
At one point in time, SGI shipped the 1600SW with a Number Nine Revolution IV video card, that both XFree86 3.3.6 and the 4.0.2 release candidates support very nicely - you can even do multi-head setups with AGP and PCI versions of the card in the same system. Alas, S3 bought #9 awhile back, closed them down, and now these cards are rather hard to find.
SGI is currently shipping one bundle of the 1600SW with the 3DLabs Oxygen VX1-1600SW PCI card which can drive the 1600SW directly (it is actually a PC version of the Formac Proformance 3 with Permedia 3 chip). Alas, I have not been able to figure out the proper XF86Config file settings to make the 1600SW and this video card work natively together under the XFree86 4.0.2 release candidates. The same mode lines, and some variations that I've tried from a working #9 I128 driver XF86Config, do not function with this combination - and I have not yet received an answer on the XFree86 Xpert list on this topic.
The other option is to use the SGI MLA with a DVI-out video card: Matrox G400 with DVI module, ATI Rage Fury Pro DVI, ATI Raedon All-In-Wonder, or some variation of an nVidia GeForce2-based card with DVI out. I've read that there is a limitation in the Matrox closed source HAL module for XFree86 that prevents you from running the second head, which is where the Matrox DVI module is driven from, at the required 1600x1024 resolution, so, for now, you can't use the SGI MLA with a Matrox card - someone please correct me if I am wrong. I haven't read anything yet about driving the SGI MLA from the ATI Rage Fury Pro DVI, ATI Raedon All-In-Wonder, or an nVidia GeForce2-based card at 1600x1024. I just got an SGI MLA myself the other day and I do have an ATI Rage Fury Pro DVI card that I will be trying out sometime this week in this particular combination.
Bottom line, IMHO, the best thing to do (most flexible combination) is to get the SGI 1600SW with the SGI MLA. This will let you work at any resolution *now* on any machine and platform, and when things get ironed out with driving DVI outputs at 1600x1024, you will enjoy the benefits then.
BTW, IMNSHO [:-)] , the SGI 1600SW is the best flat panel out there bar none. The 22" Apple Cinema display is too grainy (same resolution, larger display, larger pixels, twice as much) and all of the other flat panels just don't have the same quality, nor the ability to turn the 'pixels' on and off fast enough - they ghost like mad when moving windows around or playing videos.
I don't even look at these anymore. Well, I would if someone wrote a program that started actually solving these problems. That would be truly excellent. The reason I don't look at them is, as explained by my advisor, is they are an incredible time suck. Since this is a holy grail, lots of reasonably talented people give it a spin. And it never pans out. And it takes a huge ammount of time to figure out what the subtle error in their logic/proof is. Put another way, I know lots of people that will happily take a $10 -> $1k bet that your discovery won't be blessed by a tier 1 journal in 5 years time or less. I'm one of them. Part of the reason for the extreme skepticism is that thousands of brilliant people have tried to come up with a solution to this problem. This is because all NP problems are polynomially transformable to each other, and there are lots of very useful real world problems that are NP. Ergo, some (or all) of the best practicing algorithmers have tried and failed to get an efficient exact algorithm for this problem in their own very well understood (to them) subdomain. Not holding my breath (but I'd love to eat crow on this, as would every other OR practitioner). See Gary & Jhonson for all the gory details.
I graduated, got a job, and joined the EFF. Follow the articles advice and join up. Every $10, $25, $50 or $500 helps. Let's /. the EFF membership!
If you have secrets, there is no good alternative to destroying the media. Disks are cheap; presumably your secrets are worth more. -- Stolen from Applied Cryptography
Why am I seeing "?" when I should see "'", and on on /. no less? I may give up my quest to fight the "?" little cyber kid-leashing, and while you?re making s http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/
Check out the opensource java gis mapper: http://openmap.bbn.com
The article is exactly right; it's legal for sun to do what they did, and it is helpful to both java and linux. HOWEVER .... some snaps to Blackdown in the press release would have been very appropriate. From sun's point of view, other's contributions to Java are small compatred to the $ and effort the've put in to something that costs them money at an accelerating rate. BTW -- I'm using the blackdown JDK becase I want native threads on my SMP box ...
I'm using 1.2.5-1
M9 works ok, but with M10 I'm getting
/usr/lib/libgdk_imlib.so.1: undefined symbol: gdk_display
Gtk-WARNING **:
I'm going to try to recompile from source;
as the Imlib I have (1.9.5) is the latest version.
I love it. I can't think of a better way for MS
to give linux credibility.