To be honest I thought they would push the book more, spell my name correctly, etc (they called me Tom Denis for the longest while). If I knew a year ago what I knew now I would have just fired them off to Lulu.com and been done with.
The first book wasn't written to sell really, it was public domain for the longest time. My "2nd" book was actually my 1st contract with a publisher. They decided they wanted to also publish the first book I wrote [years previous] to go along with the other one I was writing for them. I figured it couldn't hurt [surprise!].
Anyways, you don't write tech books and sell them through the likes of O'Reily, Syngress, etc, if you want to make a lot of money as an author. You usually only see 8% royalties, and they cut into it for "return protection." The millionaires you see on Oprah's book list are probably making closer to 20-30% royalties [if not more] and have publishers that spell their authors name correctly.
C'est la vie, mais ce n'est pas tout mauvais. On the plus side I'm now a "published author." w00t! All the groupies are overwhelming at times hehehehehehe
I would hazard to say you look closely at your own government.
As a Canadian, I'm ashamed how we treat our armed forces. Not because I think we should spend billions on cruise missles to go "liberate" people but that we can both use our "peace keeping" history as a talking point, while sending solidiers out with 35 year old gear and a pat on the back. Or how we bow to the UN, follow their lead and then supply them with people to witness the horrors that they're powerless to stop. (Rwanda anyone?)
I'm fully aware there are Americans who are xenophobic pricks who think their shit don't stink and that their way of life is the best. But despite the image people may have that's not all Americans. It's hardly even a non-trivial percentage.
People vote demo/repo because they're confused, they think the media is all their is and the country was meant to be bipartisan (hint: it's not). They're not bad people, they're just intellectually lazy, and frankly so are many people from countries all over the world. Canada in particular is no fucking better.
Fair use means you can include non-substantial portions of a copyrighted work for the purposes of education or parody. Google is archiving random portions of copyrighted text for the purposes of making sales. That isn't fair use.
You may argue that's not harmful to the rights owners, but that's not the point. They're not exercising fair use when they take snippets out of my book, and then link to amazon to say "you can buy it here." As odd as that sounds...
While there are cultural differences between cannucks and yanks, most cannucks hate the yank POLITICIANS not the people. There are asshole civilians on both sides of the fence. I've been face to face with drunk assholes in Toronto, Ottawa, and in places like San Diego and Seattle [etc.]
And yes, most born in Canada cannucks will say "sorry" even if they're the ones getting bumped into. It's just a polite way of saying "sorry we had this mixup." We're not stupid or something, just polite. Except when behind the wheel of a car, or in any sort of queue, or in public. But other than that... just fine:-)
Depends on the book. Most comp.sci books are just fine on the screen (e.g. PDF) as opposed to in your hands in print. Sure it's nice to have a printed copy but it's not always better. I was hoping to have my first book be picked up by some crypto oriented comp.sci group. As far as I know that hasn't happened. Oh well, i'm just happy that some people have read it and that the related OSS projects are being found useful.
The thing that drives legit audio downloads is the quality control. For less than a buck you can have your 4 mins of blissful pop music [or whatever] at a technological quality level that is ideal [or should be] as compared to the random download from P2P services which offer random qualities.
To put it differently, suppose bandwidth wasn't a problem and people traded FLAC's. There would be a lot less drive for legit downloads, as aside from having a higher moral standing the process is inherently no better. And we know that most people, capable of getting away with a seemingly guilt-free crime will try so.
I never said what Google was doing was *right*, I said it probably doesn't hurt sales. Just like me picking your lock and sitting in your house doesn't "hurt" you but it isn't right. If anything, sales are hurt by over zealous publishers who push content the wrong way, especially such as in ebook form at the same time.
I'm positive that, at least in my case, my sales suck due to me being a first time author, relatively unknown outside my circle, and not advertising the books. However, on the very same day my book was in stores on sale, you could torrent it from a dozen websites around the world. That certainly can't be helping sales. If they held off on ebook sales for at least a year or two, I'd probably have a few hundred more sales to my name. Which in the grand scheme of things isn't a lot, but multiply it by the hundreds of small time authors out there and it adds up.
And unlike audio, you don't suffer compression artifacts. At least in the audio/video biz, people will pay for quality [medium wise not content]. So while there is a lot of media piracy, there is way more sales because people are tired of getting 56kbps rips of avril lavigne hits from kazaa or whatever.
With a book, the pirates trade in PDF formats, which are lossless. So there is very little inherit gain in buying a legit copy other than "feeling good." which sadly is not enough for most anyone to actually cough up the dough.
Most people who would pirate my books are college bound students getting into cryptography (and mathematics). They're the people the books are aimed at since they're not very advanced texts (more pratical than theoretical).
I don't know if people who torrented the books later bought copies. For me, I wasn't really that motivated by getting rich (or making more than a couple grand). I was more into getting the ideas out there. The first book, is actually available [legally] for free from the LibTomMath archive. Though the copy there is older than the printed copy. That being said, it would be validating that if all the people who read my books actually bought a copy I could then measure and say "cool, people read my book." Not that I expected to make a lot of sales. To be honest I thought both books would sell ~3K a piece then die out. As it stands right now I'm nowhere near that mark and it's been nearly a year for my first book and one quarter for the second.
I think a combination of piracy and first time unknown authorism have contributed to the shitastic sales (more the latter than the former).
To bring this back on point though, I don't think "leaking" a passage here or there would have a measurable impact on sales [see this for an idea]. I probably did lose a few hundred sales to torrents though, keeping in mind I only sold 46 math texts last quarter...
Anyways, parting words, write to be read, not to make sales. You'll be more satisfied in the end.
of two books that have sold upwards of 2000 copies (yipee I suck!) I have to say, STFU Microsoft. The day my books came out they were on the torrent websites (thanks to my publisher releasing the book in ebook format the same day). Google archiving the book would have ZERO effect on my sales (which are low because nobody knows who I am, and I suck at teh English) and in effect may actually help them if key passages are searchable.
If publishers want to stop piracy of texts, STOP RELEASING EBOOKS THE SAME DAY FOR CRYING OUT LOUD.
Sorry, i don't buy into the "graphics make the game" bit. The goal is to have fun, not be pixel accurate like RL or something.
Immersion comes from plot, gameplay, and objectives [among other things]. If the plot is linear, it's hard to get wrapped up in deciding what to do in the game. If the gameplay sucks, it's just frustrating and gathers dust. And if the objectives are near impossible (re: prince of persia) the game loses interest when you hit an impass for the 39th time.
Sure the graphics have to make sense, be clear, etc. But you pass a point where more polygons and more texture data don't really make the game any clearer. Remember that people were playing things like Stunts and Testdrive 3 with their glorious flatshade polygons long before graphics became half-way realistic.
I dunno, having played both the 360 and the Wii, I'd say I'd rather have the Wii any day and twice on Sunday. The 360 is just an overgrown xbox. Same games, just shinier. Comparing them on the same scale is just really nonsensical.
Perhaps the Wii is less fun by yourself, but from my experience (and from the fact I'm a fat bastard) I'd rather dance around playing Smooth Moves or Wii Sports Bowling/Tennis (my favs) then sitting down with a controller playing an FPS. Wii kinda does need multiple peeps around to keep things interesting. More reason to invite the friends over.
As for the FPS being "realistic," let me explain realism to you. You get shot, you go down go boom. None of this "get a medkit, heal thyself" and carry on bullshit. That's realism. People want FANTASY, but they just want it to look real, not be realistic. And yeah, I know some FPSes are like that [CS for one] but most aren't.
Ok, now that I got that out of my system... Most reviewers (not just for video games) don't really take the job serious. This is why you have sites comparing which CPU will get you that extra one FPS, instead of which one will get you decent FPS without consuming hordes of power or blowing your budget. It's why year after year the same tired first person shooters get 9/10 SUPER FUN WOW! etc.
I just tried the Wii last weekend, and all I can say is every other console sucks by comparison. The Wii is just so god damn fun to play, especially with 4-5 other peeps. Compare that to the stagnate "sit on your ass" consoles of the past... Putting Wii games on the same scale as 360 games is just lame. I'd much rather play Wii Sports [for example] then "Ghost Recon: Make Things Go Boom 2037 II Gold silver platnium edition." If review sites could put those consoles on the same scale, I don't think there is a point reading what they have to write, because they're liars.
I think the easiest way to avoid getting burned is to just rent the damn game first. Spend $5 to try it out, if you hate it, all you lost is $5. But at least you're supporting your local economy.
I didn't say it would be snow (as in electrical noise).
But think about it, if you are say 0.5 frames out of sync with the display, then only half of the display will actually have "live" content. The result (especially with movement) will look very distorted. So even with modern displays, you need to sync to vsync and draw only during vblank (or draw during the frame but use frame switching).
LCDs are not instantaneous either. Try filming an LCD without the correct shutter. You'll see the same annoying bar floating down the screen as you do with a CRT (albeit usually slower depending on refresh rate I guess). So it isn't as if BOOM the frame appears 100% all at once.
NO WAI! I needed the inventor of the intertubes to tell me that...
No offense, and I'm glad he has his opinions and all, but who gives a shit? Really? I mean 2600 [and the like] have been touting the virtures of the hacker culture for over 20 years now (before there was an internet in public usage really).
Oh I get it, famous dude + say something obvious == news.
How do you install Word? Open it? Save documents? Search? Replace? etc... see I can ask stupid questions too.
First off, why are you install LaTeX tools on random platforms? If you had people writing TeX documents you'd just get them a Linux distro workstation, save on the license fees for Windows and use a common set of tools. But anyone stupid enough, or incapable of being train on the use of a text editor, probably shouldn't be a technical writer/editor. I'm sorry, but the job has requirements and responsibilities and thinking for your god damn self is one of them.
Your middle paragraph sounds like you are authoring a website not a printed document. Maybe you should re-think your goals in life first? If your plan is to embed videos (wtf?), vector graphics, and whatever other multi-media, you are not producing something meant for TeX. If you are writing a journal, book, paper, thesis, article, or slides, sheet music, etc., then TeX is for you.
How is it better tham FrameMaker or Indesign? Well first, tetex is free. It's fairly universal (unix, bsd, linux, windows, mac OSX), standard, and not proprietary. Can Indesign open Framemaker native files (e.g. without losing data in the conversion)?
At anyrate, if I were to run a publishing house, I'd want employees who can learn on their own, not throw a hissy fit when things don't go their way (re: have to learn something) and know when to use what tools. LaTeX is not the be-all of publishing, I never said it was. But it certainly runs circles around Word and oowriter in terms of look/layout, style and portability. If my employees couldn't teach themselves to use tools of the trade, they don't deserve a salary and should work in another field.
What training do you need to use a text editor like textpad, gedit, kate, or nedit? As for the compiling stage you could use a make script or a simple batch file (named make.bat), etc.
Once you set someone up with a shell LaTeX document it's pretty easy to show them how to compile/preview the document. Learning the macros comes as needed, e.g. how do I make bold? oh \textbf{} gotcha, etc...
My problem is that this "oh it takes effort" issue being a problem. YES, it takes effort to learn LaTeX, but you'd learn it because it serves a purpose. And we're talking about LaTeX not TeX so it's not like they have to manually format everything or write their own macros to make pre-styled documents.
I don't see what "do 1/3 on windows, 1/3 on..." matters. LaTeX doesn't change because you're running a different OS. In fact, that's the point of LaTeX to begin with. if anything, mimicing the style is hard, independent of what platform you're on (though if I used LaTeX more often I'd argue it's doable within a day).
The trick you're missing, is once you figure out your layout style, you do things as macros. E.g., for my math book I re-wrote \section{} to be \mysection{} so I could put the name of the section on every right hand page (iirc). I only had to write the macro once, now I can use it for all future books I write, if I were so inclined I could even create my own style package. Which is what you would do for a magazine or serial publication anyways.
I think the problem with you is you don't really understand what TeX is about, nor how it is meant to be used. You think that metafont or the grammar changes with platform, which isn't true. you think that macros are not user creatable, they are, etc.
If used correctly, once setup, the majority of your time is spent on the content and not the look. For my math book, I know from experience that I spent the vast majority of the time (say high 80 percent) worrying about content and grammar. I did spend a non-trivial amount of time on the layout, but that was mostly near the end (two weeks before print) and saw the creation of some handy re-useable macros. If anything, I underused the macro capabilities of LaTeX (esp. around pseudo-code figures), but that hindsight comes from experience I guess.
Point is, yes, LaTeX is harder than point-click Word. But it also is portable and properly sets the document.
That works with both tetex [unix/linux/bsd] and Cygwin's tetex as well as the windows port miktex [iirc name...]. xdvik is common to both unix/windows. As for editors, any unix compatible text editor will work. Finally the metafonts and other styles are not only standard, but they're freely distributable. A document you pdftex in Linux should look exactly the same as one you did in Windows or BSD or a UNIX box for that matter. That's the whole point of TeX to start with.
Saying that "LaTeX fails because it lacks common tools" is very naive and ignorant.
For the record, in my project group, the leader used cygwin, I used Linux, and the group members used MikTeX. We used the book style class for our manuals and for the most part things [at least as far as the software was concerned] went smooth.
As for editing LaTeX documents, they're basically plaintext with macros here and there, e.g We \textit{all} went to the park today. Which would read as "We all went to the park today." when rendered. Unless you're doing a lot of embedded equations, the majority of the characters in a.tex file will be for the grammar of the language (e.g. English). By percentage very little is for the markup.
And yes, while it takes a bit to learn the tools, I think it's worth it given what they enable you to do. just because something requires effort, doesn't mean it's bad. things like oowriter and Word are shite for producing well typeset documents. There is no way around that fact. You end up having to use expensive tools like Quark to do the layout, and from what I've seen, it's not perfect either.
LaTeX is free, not super hard to learn 95% of it in a few months, and lets you produce professionally set documents. And for the occasional "how do I do this" layout question, it's usually answered somewhere on the net.
Um, you'll see noise on any array display if you write to the memory while it is drawing. It may not always show up as noise, it could show up as unsynced portions of the display (re: looking sucktastic).
So we should call ahead, wait 15, 20, 30, ??? minutes, then drive [likely] to the store, pick it up, and drive back. As opposed to downloading it at home, watching and saving the trip to the store, which for most folk is what they're trying to avoid in the first place.
Also, consider the distribution of bandwidth. Assuming we're fetching say 5GB [average] movies. To download the movie in 15 mins you'd need to sustain a rate of 5.68MiB/sec which is fairly high for consumer net connections. Now suppose you are in a city of 50,000 and will likely have to serve, say 50 customers at any given time during peak hours. That's 284.4MiB/sec sustained.
I don't know about you, but I don't know which non-peering service can even get close to that. And even if you did have a 2.3Gigabit/sec connection to the Net, the host (e.g. movie place) would have at least the same, but in reality a lot more (think about it, multiple stores hitting the same site). More realistically, the download will take 3 or so days. In the same time, you could just order the damn movie from Amazon, have it sent to your house, have watched it already and moved on with your life.
Where this makes sense IS the home, where you can say start a download on Monday, and have a movie for Friday night or whatever.
5 days a week, times 47 [or so] weeks of work == 235 days. That gives them just under 3 (2.83) days to read the patent, understand it, look for prior art, and then say "yay/nay."
That's not actually a lot if you think about it. Sure some patents are probably trivially rejectable, but many probably require some deciphering before you get to the "omg that's obvious" stage.
Like this 7 page patent (yes, I'm picking on them) for table based multiplication. Not only is it an obvious idea, that even the average 10 year old could figure out, but it's already been used by many hardware manufacturers (ARM used it for the ARM7 multiplier for instance). From the first few claims the "invention" doesn't really seem invalid until you put it together, and realize that it's the mechanical equivalent of long hand multiplication.
While you or I would easily spot that patent and say "no shit," a patent examiner must be able to defend their decision, so they must actually cite prior art (or make a convincing argument the idea was obvious). That also takes time.
Why not just require more concise, less ambiguous language in the patents?
Oh, and penalties for things that are obviously non-patentable like this table base multiplier. But the penalty shouldn't be money, though the fees should be forfeited. It should be in time. As in each obvious, or invalid patent sends your company to the bottom of the patent pile for 12 months.
The # of patents doesn't match the # of true innovations. So the true solution to the problem, and not the stopgap band-aid solution, is to reduce the # of junk patents. Since companies can't be trusted [sadly] to use self-control we'll have to, as a society, impose penalties and restrictions.
Maybe if companies knew they could lose patents for legit ideas by filing bogus applications they'd think twice before sending in the application?
Should do what I did when I hit the two semester "project" class in my college program. Convert my group to LaTeX. Once I showed the group leader that he could spend time editing the document and not wrestling with enumerations, layout, table of contents, etc, he jump on board. That there were TeX tools for both Linux and Windows made things very simple.
Why people write technical documents in anything else is really beyond me. With a proper macro package you can make LaTeX very simple to use, even with fancy letterheads and the like.
Slashdot Mirror
Hindsight, it's 20/20. :-)
To be honest I thought they would push the book more, spell my name correctly, etc (they called me Tom Denis for the longest while). If I knew a year ago what I knew now I would have just fired them off to Lulu.com and been done with.
The first book wasn't written to sell really, it was public domain for the longest time. My "2nd" book was actually my 1st contract with a publisher. They decided they wanted to also publish the first book I wrote [years previous] to go along with the other one I was writing for them. I figured it couldn't hurt [surprise!].
Anyways, you don't write tech books and sell them through the likes of O'Reily, Syngress, etc, if you want to make a lot of money as an author. You usually only see 8% royalties, and they cut into it for "return protection." The millionaires you see on Oprah's book list are probably making closer to 20-30% royalties [if not more] and have publishers that spell their authors name correctly.
C'est la vie, mais ce n'est pas tout mauvais. On the plus side I'm now a "published author." w00t! All the groupies are overwhelming at times hehehehehehe
I would hazard to say you look closely at your own government.
As a Canadian, I'm ashamed how we treat our armed forces. Not because I think we should spend billions on cruise missles to go "liberate" people but that we can both use our "peace keeping" history as a talking point, while sending solidiers out with 35 year old gear and a pat on the back. Or how we bow to the UN, follow their lead and then supply them with people to witness the horrors that they're powerless to stop. (Rwanda anyone?)
I'm fully aware there are Americans who are xenophobic pricks who think their shit don't stink and that their way of life is the best. But despite the image people may have that's not all Americans. It's hardly even a non-trivial percentage.
People vote demo/repo because they're confused, they think the media is all their is and the country was meant to be bipartisan (hint: it's not). They're not bad people, they're just intellectually lazy, and frankly so are many people from countries all over the world. Canada in particular is no fucking better.
Tom
Fair use means you can include non-substantial portions of a copyrighted work for the purposes of education or parody. Google is archiving random portions of copyrighted text for the purposes of making sales. That isn't fair use.
You may argue that's not harmful to the rights owners, but that's not the point. They're not exercising fair use when they take snippets out of my book, and then link to amazon to say "you can buy it here." As odd as that sounds...
Tom
While there are cultural differences between cannucks and yanks, most cannucks hate the yank POLITICIANS not the people. There are asshole civilians on both sides of the fence. I've been face to face with drunk assholes in Toronto, Ottawa, and in places like San Diego and Seattle [etc.]
... just fine :-)
And yes, most born in Canada cannucks will say "sorry" even if they're the ones getting bumped into. It's just a polite way of saying "sorry we had this mixup." We're not stupid or something, just polite. Except when behind the wheel of a car, or in any sort of queue, or in public. But other than that
Tom
Depends on the book. Most comp.sci books are just fine on the screen (e.g. PDF) as opposed to in your hands in print. Sure it's nice to have a printed copy but it's not always better. I was hoping to have my first book be picked up by some crypto oriented comp.sci group. As far as I know that hasn't happened. Oh well, i'm just happy that some people have read it and that the related OSS projects are being found useful.
The thing that drives legit audio downloads is the quality control. For less than a buck you can have your 4 mins of blissful pop music [or whatever] at a technological quality level that is ideal [or should be] as compared to the random download from P2P services which offer random qualities.
To put it differently, suppose bandwidth wasn't a problem and people traded FLAC's. There would be a lot less drive for legit downloads, as aside from having a higher moral standing the process is inherently no better. And we know that most people, capable of getting away with a seemingly guilt-free crime will try so.
I SAW YOU JAYWALKER!!!
hehehe
Tom
I never said what Google was doing was *right*, I said it probably doesn't hurt sales. Just like me picking your lock and sitting in your house doesn't "hurt" you but it isn't right. If anything, sales are hurt by over zealous publishers who push content the wrong way, especially such as in ebook form at the same time.
I'm positive that, at least in my case, my sales suck due to me being a first time author, relatively unknown outside my circle, and not advertising the books. However, on the very same day my book was in stores on sale, you could torrent it from a dozen websites around the world. That certainly can't be helping sales. If they held off on ebook sales for at least a year or two, I'd probably have a few hundred more sales to my name. Which in the grand scheme of things isn't a lot, but multiply it by the hundreds of small time authors out there and it adds up.
And unlike audio, you don't suffer compression artifacts. At least in the audio/video biz, people will pay for quality [medium wise not content]. So while there is a lot of media piracy, there is way more sales because people are tired of getting 56kbps rips of avril lavigne hits from kazaa or whatever.
With a book, the pirates trade in PDF formats, which are lossless. So there is very little inherit gain in buying a legit copy other than "feeling good." which sadly is not enough for most anyone to actually cough up the dough.
Tom
Most people who would pirate my books are college bound students getting into cryptography (and mathematics). They're the people the books are aimed at since they're not very advanced texts (more pratical than theoretical).
I don't know if people who torrented the books later bought copies. For me, I wasn't really that motivated by getting rich (or making more than a couple grand). I was more into getting the ideas out there. The first book, is actually available [legally] for free from the LibTomMath archive. Though the copy there is older than the printed copy. That being said, it would be validating that if all the people who read my books actually bought a copy I could then measure and say "cool, people read my book." Not that I expected to make a lot of sales. To be honest I thought both books would sell ~3K a piece then die out. As it stands right now I'm nowhere near that mark and it's been nearly a year for my first book and one quarter for the second.
I think a combination of piracy and first time unknown authorism have contributed to the shitastic sales (more the latter than the former).
To bring this back on point though, I don't think "leaking" a passage here or there would have a measurable impact on sales [see this for an idea]. I probably did lose a few hundred sales to torrents though, keeping in mind I only sold 46 math texts last quarter...
Anyways, parting words, write to be read, not to make sales. You'll be more satisfied in the end.
Tom
of two books that have sold upwards of 2000 copies (yipee I suck!) I have to say, STFU Microsoft. The day my books came out they were on the torrent websites (thanks to my publisher releasing the book in ebook format the same day). Google archiving the book would have ZERO effect on my sales (which are low because nobody knows who I am, and I suck at teh English) and in effect may actually help them if key passages are searchable.
If publishers want to stop piracy of texts, STOP RELEASING EBOOKS THE SAME DAY FOR CRYING OUT LOUD.
Tom
Sorry, i don't buy into the "graphics make the game" bit. The goal is to have fun, not be pixel accurate like RL or something.
Immersion comes from plot, gameplay, and objectives [among other things]. If the plot is linear, it's hard to get wrapped up in deciding what to do in the game. If the gameplay sucks, it's just frustrating and gathers dust. And if the objectives are near impossible (re: prince of persia) the game loses interest when you hit an impass for the 39th time.
Sure the graphics have to make sense, be clear, etc. But you pass a point where more polygons and more texture data don't really make the game any clearer. Remember that people were playing things like Stunts and Testdrive 3 with their glorious flatshade polygons long before graphics became half-way realistic.
I dunno, having played both the 360 and the Wii, I'd say I'd rather have the Wii any day and twice on Sunday. The 360 is just an overgrown xbox. Same games, just shinier. Comparing them on the same scale is just really nonsensical.
Tom
Perhaps the Wii is less fun by yourself, but from my experience (and from the fact I'm a fat bastard) I'd rather dance around playing Smooth Moves or Wii Sports Bowling/Tennis (my favs) then sitting down with a controller playing an FPS. Wii kinda does need multiple peeps around to keep things interesting. More reason to invite the friends over.
As for the FPS being "realistic," let me explain realism to you. You get shot, you go down go boom. None of this "get a medkit, heal thyself" and carry on bullshit. That's realism. People want FANTASY, but they just want it to look real, not be realistic. And yeah, I know some FPSes are like that [CS for one] but most aren't.
Tom
I'm going to say something obvious first.
... Putting Wii games on the same scale as 360 games is just lame. I'd much rather play Wii Sports [for example] then "Ghost Recon: Make Things Go Boom 2037 II Gold silver platnium edition." If review sites could put those consoles on the same scale, I don't think there is a point reading what they have to write, because they're liars.
Reviews are written to make money.
Ok, now that I got that out of my system... Most reviewers (not just for video games) don't really take the job serious. This is why you have sites comparing which CPU will get you that extra one FPS, instead of which one will get you decent FPS without consuming hordes of power or blowing your budget. It's why year after year the same tired first person shooters get 9/10 SUPER FUN WOW! etc.
I just tried the Wii last weekend, and all I can say is every other console sucks by comparison. The Wii is just so god damn fun to play, especially with 4-5 other peeps. Compare that to the stagnate "sit on your ass" consoles of the past
I think the easiest way to avoid getting burned is to just rent the damn game first. Spend $5 to try it out, if you hate it, all you lost is $5. But at least you're supporting your local economy.
Tom
I didn't say it would be snow (as in electrical noise).
But think about it, if you are say 0.5 frames out of sync with the display, then only half of the display will actually have "live" content. The result (especially with movement) will look very distorted. So even with modern displays, you need to sync to vsync and draw only during vblank (or draw during the frame but use frame switching).
LCDs are not instantaneous either. Try filming an LCD without the correct shutter. You'll see the same annoying bar floating down the screen as you do with a CRT (albeit usually slower depending on refresh rate I guess). So it isn't as if BOOM the frame appears 100% all at once.
Tom
NO WAI! I needed the inventor of the intertubes to tell me that...
No offense, and I'm glad he has his opinions and all, but who gives a shit? Really? I mean 2600 [and the like] have been touting the virtures of the hacker culture for over 20 years now (before there was an internet in public usage really).
Oh I get it, famous dude + say something obvious == news.
Is Anna still dead?
it would be bad if their other overtly secure products (*cough* whitelabel ATMs *cough*) were found to be just as riddle with insecurities...
DIE DIEBOLD DIE
You had me at "what if I want my sheet music to include sample audio."
You're clearly trolling. Bravo. You've obviously never actually used TeX, and there is no point to continue this discussion.
How do you install Word? Open it? Save documents? Search? Replace? etc... see I can ask stupid questions too.
First off, why are you install LaTeX tools on random platforms? If you had people writing TeX documents you'd just get them a Linux distro workstation, save on the license fees for Windows and use a common set of tools. But anyone stupid enough, or incapable of being train on the use of a text editor, probably shouldn't be a technical writer/editor. I'm sorry, but the job has requirements and responsibilities and thinking for your god damn self is one of them.
Your middle paragraph sounds like you are authoring a website not a printed document. Maybe you should re-think your goals in life first? If your plan is to embed videos (wtf?), vector graphics, and whatever other multi-media, you are not producing something meant for TeX. If you are writing a journal, book, paper, thesis, article, or slides, sheet music, etc., then TeX is for you.
How is it better tham FrameMaker or Indesign? Well first, tetex is free. It's fairly universal (unix, bsd, linux, windows, mac OSX), standard, and not proprietary. Can Indesign open Framemaker native files (e.g. without losing data in the conversion)?
At anyrate, if I were to run a publishing house, I'd want employees who can learn on their own, not throw a hissy fit when things don't go their way (re: have to learn something) and know when to use what tools. LaTeX is not the be-all of publishing, I never said it was. But it certainly runs circles around Word and oowriter in terms of look/layout, style and portability. If my employees couldn't teach themselves to use tools of the trade, they don't deserve a salary and should work in another field.
Tom
What training do you need to use a text editor like textpad, gedit, kate, or nedit? As for the compiling stage you could use a make script or a simple batch file (named make.bat), etc.
..." matters. LaTeX doesn't change because you're running a different OS. In fact, that's the point of LaTeX to begin with. if anything, mimicing the style is hard, independent of what platform you're on (though if I used LaTeX more often I'd argue it's doable within a day).
Once you set someone up with a shell LaTeX document it's pretty easy to show them how to compile/preview the document. Learning the macros comes as needed, e.g. how do I make bold? oh \textbf{} gotcha, etc...
My problem is that this "oh it takes effort" issue being a problem. YES, it takes effort to learn LaTeX, but you'd learn it because it serves a purpose. And we're talking about LaTeX not TeX so it's not like they have to manually format everything or write their own macros to make pre-styled documents.
I don't see what "do 1/3 on windows, 1/3 on
The trick you're missing, is once you figure out your layout style, you do things as macros. E.g., for my math book I re-wrote \section{} to be \mysection{} so I could put the name of the section on every right hand page (iirc). I only had to write the macro once, now I can use it for all future books I write, if I were so inclined I could even create my own style package. Which is what you would do for a magazine or serial publication anyways.
I think the problem with you is you don't really understand what TeX is about, nor how it is meant to be used. You think that metafont or the grammar changes with platform, which isn't true. you think that macros are not user creatable, they are, etc.
If used correctly, once setup, the majority of your time is spent on the content and not the look. For my math book, I know from experience that I spent the vast majority of the time (say high 80 percent) worrying about content and grammar. I did spend a non-trivial amount of time on the layout, but that was mostly near the end (two weeks before print) and saw the creation of some handy re-useable macros. If anything, I underused the macro capabilities of LaTeX (esp. around pseudo-code figures), but that hindsight comes from experience I guess.
Point is, yes, LaTeX is harder than point-click Word. But it also is portable and properly sets the document.
Tom
say what?
.tex file will be for the grammar of the language (e.g. English). By percentage very little is for the markup.
"latex myproject.tex"
That works with both tetex [unix/linux/bsd] and Cygwin's tetex as well as the windows port miktex [iirc name...]. xdvik is common to both unix/windows. As for editors, any unix compatible text editor will work. Finally the metafonts and other styles are not only standard, but they're freely distributable. A document you pdftex in Linux should look exactly the same as one you did in Windows or BSD or a UNIX box for that matter. That's the whole point of TeX to start with.
Saying that "LaTeX fails because it lacks common tools" is very naive and ignorant.
For the record, in my project group, the leader used cygwin, I used Linux, and the group members used MikTeX. We used the book style class for our manuals and for the most part things [at least as far as the software was concerned] went smooth.
As for editing LaTeX documents, they're basically plaintext with macros here and there, e.g We \textit{all} went to the park today. Which would read as "We all went to the park today." when rendered. Unless you're doing a lot of embedded equations, the majority of the characters in a
And yes, while it takes a bit to learn the tools, I think it's worth it given what they enable you to do. just because something requires effort, doesn't mean it's bad. things like oowriter and Word are shite for producing well typeset documents. There is no way around that fact. You end up having to use expensive tools like Quark to do the layout, and from what I've seen, it's not perfect either.
LaTeX is free, not super hard to learn 95% of it in a few months, and lets you produce professionally set documents. And for the occasional "how do I do this" layout question, it's usually answered somewhere on the net.
Tom
Um, you'll see noise on any array display if you write to the memory while it is drawing. It may not always show up as noise, it could show up as unsynced portions of the display (re: looking sucktastic).
Tom
You can't discriminate based on their income.
However, I don't see where filing patents is a right. If a company abuses it, they should have their patent abilities suspended.
Tom
So we should call ahead, wait 15, 20, 30, ??? minutes, then drive [likely] to the store, pick it up, and drive back. As opposed to downloading it at home, watching and saving the trip to the store, which for most folk is what they're trying to avoid in the first place.
Also, consider the distribution of bandwidth. Assuming we're fetching say 5GB [average] movies. To download the movie in 15 mins you'd need to sustain a rate of 5.68MiB/sec which is fairly high for consumer net connections. Now suppose you are in a city of 50,000 and will likely have to serve, say 50 customers at any given time during peak hours. That's 284.4MiB/sec sustained.
I don't know about you, but I don't know which non-peering service can even get close to that. And even if you did have a 2.3Gigabit/sec connection to the Net, the host (e.g. movie place) would have at least the same, but in reality a lot more (think about it, multiple stores hitting the same site). More realistically, the download will take 3 or so days. In the same time, you could just order the damn movie from Amazon, have it sent to your house, have watched it already and moved on with your life.
Where this makes sense IS the home, where you can say start a download on Monday, and have a movie for Friday night or whatever.
Tom
5 days a week, times 47 [or so] weeks of work == 235 days. That gives them just under 3 (2.83) days to read the patent, understand it, look for prior art, and then say "yay/nay."
That's not actually a lot if you think about it. Sure some patents are probably trivially rejectable, but many probably require some deciphering before you get to the "omg that's obvious" stage.
Like this 7 page patent (yes, I'm picking on them) for table based multiplication. Not only is it an obvious idea, that even the average 10 year old could figure out, but it's already been used by many hardware manufacturers (ARM used it for the ARM7 multiplier for instance). From the first few claims the "invention" doesn't really seem invalid until you put it together, and realize that it's the mechanical equivalent of long hand multiplication.
While you or I would easily spot that patent and say "no shit," a patent examiner must be able to defend their decision, so they must actually cite prior art (or make a convincing argument the idea was obvious). That also takes time.
Tom
Why not just require more concise, less ambiguous language in the patents?
Oh, and penalties for things that are obviously non-patentable like this table base multiplier. But the penalty shouldn't be money, though the fees should be forfeited. It should be in time. As in each obvious, or invalid patent sends your company to the bottom of the patent pile for 12 months.
The # of patents doesn't match the # of true innovations. So the true solution to the problem, and not the stopgap band-aid solution, is to reduce the # of junk patents. Since companies can't be trusted [sadly] to use self-control we'll have to, as a society, impose penalties and restrictions.
Maybe if companies knew they could lose patents for legit ideas by filing bogus applications they'd think twice before sending in the application?
Tom
Should do what I did when I hit the two semester "project" class in my college program. Convert my group to LaTeX. Once I showed the group leader that he could spend time editing the document and not wrestling with enumerations, layout, table of contents, etc, he jump on board. That there were TeX tools for both Linux and Windows made things very simple.
Why people write technical documents in anything else is really beyond me. With a proper macro package you can make LaTeX very simple to use, even with fancy letterheads and the like.
Tom
There is apparently a large gap between reality and media execs. Nothing really new here.
Tom