Several have already mentioned TeX and LaTeX, and have given valuable details about them. This is a "me too" post. I was first exposed to LaTeX in my senior year of college, while in an AI class. I was severely impressed.
I had been a hard-core, old-school HTML person for years, and I was very happy to find a language that was to printed text as HTML was to hypertext, but better. I don't use it hardly at all now that I'm in a corporate, Word-or-Notes-are-what-you-are-to-use environment, but if I had to generate print-perfect material again, in the form of PostScript or PDFs, I would use LaTeX, no doubt.
Human interaction is based on a balance of aggression and submission. A person with zero aggression goes no where in life, and is a complete mess. I'm not talking about people who don't engage in fisticuffs, I'm talking about mindset. As mammalian omnivores, we have a natural bit of aggressive tendency built into our brains. It's natural!
What do all omnivorous and carnivorous mammals do as young? They play-fight. Puppies chew on each other. Lion cubs pounce at each other. Humans play tag, wrestle, play football, and now video games.
There is a reason for this! Fight-play helps excercise those tendencies, as well as release built-up urges. It also teaches consequences! When wrestling, kids get hurt... they realize if they push too hard, or get hit too hard, it is unpleasant. When playing a deathmatch, you die. And you die again. And those around you die. And it's bloody. It may not hurt, but the use of simulated weapons in these games yields simulated death. I'd worry a lot more about kiddie FPS games that don't have death resulting from the use of guns, but rather bloodless crap... what does a kid learn from it?
Raise your Waterboys and Watergirls. When your kids blow up and realize they can't handle their anger and instincts, it's going to be a lot more dangerous than a little desensitization.
I think you're trying to make it too simple... yes, most people on the net are consuming information, rather than creating information. However, they are now consuming information from far many more sources:
the long-standing magazine who's always been an authority on a topic now is on-line
the brand-new, independant webzine that popped up a year or two ago, and is now known as a new authority on the topic
the ignorant kid who posts in a discussion or newsgroup
the fifteen, more informed people who reply to the kid with links to additional information
the hobbiest who put together a site just to share his or her knowledge and experience with the topic
the well designed database / forum which democratically elevates the best information to the top (reviews, prices, search engines, slashcode)
I won't use myself as an argument, because I'm an exception, a nerd, but, people like my mother or siblings had to be very interested in a topic before going to the library to begin the slow, methodical practice of obtaining information through a few, outdated sources that had passed political, grammatic and stylistic approval.
Now, anything they want to know about, clickety click and they have their info, published 5 years ago, published today, asking questions to information authors and getting replies instantly, getting information on obscure topics previously nowhere to be found from someone who has NO command over English, but has the needed information.
The Internet IS already making an impact, and IS already changing this for many, many people... and even if the ratio of people who contribute to those who lurk is low, it's a hell of a lot higher than it ever was with TV, radio, newspapers, books, magazines, or stone carvings....Well, maybe not stone carvings...
</rant>
Just think... most consumers used to have to wait for the appropriate issue of consumer reports and hope it covered the right product... now they can obtain literally hundreds of opinions regarding the same product before they buy it, finding out about known flaws, limitations, benefits, and prices in advance! I've already listened to car dealerships bitch about this new development.:-D
I saw this at Thinkgeek. It is a Linux-running 10 Gig HD with USBs, Ethernet, PCMCIA, etc... I don't think it records, but it sounds really cool anyway. Here's the manufacturer's link.
Anything automated does indeed require some human intervention / maintainance, but can generally work out without nearly as much human-labor as what gets used here on earth. The reason we don't have a lot more automation is that people on this rock need jobs, and the wetware is cheaper than the hardware here. In space / on the moon, keeping up wetware will probably be a higher cost than keeping up advanced hardware, so automation is more likely there than here.
$1500 for a basic unit, and then you need to buy all the extra crap for wireless networking so it can read you your e-mail and wander your home under your control from a PC, but if you want an expensive toy, this one is feature rich
If I actually did go out and build my own laptop, do you think there would be enough general interest to get a community together? Maybe even start a little company to sell pc104 compatible laptop shells and the various adapters, trackpads, keyboards and other doodads that people would need?
Hell Yes! Look at the market for home-brew PCs. My guess is that most people in that market are like me and would love to be able to build a laptop with the features important to us, at a more reasonable price than a new laptop. I've been daydreaming about being able to buy the parts and roll my own laptop for at least a decade.
An existing example is the Palm market... there are many small companies that specialize in selling hacker hardware to replace Palm cases, buttons, and also sell new screens, memory chips, etc... I could definitely see it being viable for X86 portable gear too.
I know this is off-topic, but the mention of barebones CNN reminded me: Did anyone else think it was great to see CNN in barebones mode a couple months ago? The tragedy was horrible, of course, but when I saw CNN looking like the web did 5+ years ago, I got a sort of nostalgic feeling, accompanied with a sense of "this is the right way to do it."
I've read several mentions of CDs and CD-Rs becoming obsolete, and thus unreadable in the years to come. So what!? The world of computers is a connected world these days... The LAN has made the media issue irrellevant!
Example:
I used to buy video games on 5.25" disks and on 3.5" disks. My last working 5.25" disk drive crapped out years ago. I still have several of those games, because I transferred the data to the hard drive... as I got new machines, and new hard drives, the archival information moved from one machine to the other, over my LAN, to whichever drive I designated as the place to put my old data. All of my old data from 3 different, long dead machines occupies a very small percentage of my current 40GB media / backup drive.
As the 'net gets faster, and online backup space becomes more reasonable, guess where some of my backup media is going? Five years ago, when digital cameras were babies, they sucked, and personal data retention sucked. It still does for non-networked people, but this part of the world is continuing to get better every day. By the time analog film is dropped completely for digital, there will only be benefits, not losses!
I remember this exact concept, but it was applied to microdisplays rather than macrodisplays: Head-mounted displays for wearable computers. You basically described the exact workings of several of the products that the 'borgs at MIT used.
... and did it rather poorly. I own three of the old Cyrix 6x86 chips... one called a P120+ that's really 100MHz, a P150+ that's really 120MHz, and a P200+ that's actually 150MHz. These ran fine, but arguments were made both ways as to whether or not the "P" rating worked out to be equivalent to an Intel chip of that number of MHz.
In the end, it came down to the simple fact that people got annoyed when they realized the speed rating of the chip was pretending to be MHz, but was higher than the actual MHz... especially after purchase. (I knew ahead of time, and read lotsa reviews, but that's not universal behavior).
If they put some marketing money behind a new initiative like this, I think the CPI idea would be much more successful. This wannabe MHz crap has been tried, and when was the last time anyone bought a Cyrix chip for his or her home hot-rod.
I first went beyond BBSs to the Internet around the time Doom came out, because I found out about a Star Wars Total Conversion. By the time I tracked down the right message boards, etc... I had found that the original group of developers had given up because LucasArts had sent them cease and desist letters. However, LucasArts at the time was developing a Doom-ish Star Wars game, "Dark Forces," so they had a little more interest than Funimation.
For a while, I picked up where the original Star Wars conversion people left off, made a website and everything, and made lotsa progress, but never once received a negative communication from anyone with a commercial interest.
After a crappy Dragonball Z game comes out with proper licensing, I have a feeling no one will care if better or different stuff is released later.:-)
Yahoo, Inc. closed its doors today as it has failed to meet the new government requirements that search engines block illegal material.
"We didn't want to drag things out, settling with every possible interested party because we provided a central link to content that someone else didn't like... Napster made that mistake two years ago and now we have the IP laws you see today." said former Yahoo spokeswoman...
...Internet use in the U.S. has decreased 83% with the last few major search engines ceasing to exist. Illegal "BBS"s" (Bulletin Board Systems) are sprouting up across the country, sparking furious comment from IP conservatives.
"BBSs used to be legal, but so did automatic weapons. These things are just as dangerous as long as they exist in the hands of common people. Like automatic weapons, we're only safe when BBSs are gone from the streets and only held by the government!" said U.S. Senator(N) Lars Ulrich....
Even when we do hit the size / resolution limit detectable by the human eye (or sound range dectable by the ear, etc...), sometimes twice or more of the resources used to display that information can be used to acheive special effects! 3D is the best example:
positional audio technology: if you include more information about the audio, it takes more space and processing (simple stereo vs. stereo plus fade doubles the info)
shutter glasses: you have two images being displayed instead of one to get a single stereo image.
antialiasing: not specifically 3D, but you double the resolution of what you're seeing and work on that
As we get more and cooler output peripherals, the processing and storage requirements will increase, even beyond what it takes to simply store what we can "see." If we ever get some nifty neural interfaces going, the quality of information delivered will have another opportunity to increase. We will never run out of a need for higher capacity!
Did anyone else notice how truly horrible the backgrounds were on the outdoor sets!? My girlfriend and I were almost nauseated by them. The Wizard of Oz had more convincing outdoor backdrops than the Dune series. I hope they do better next time. (that aside, I did enjoy seeing a true-to-the-book movie of Dune and would like to see more...)
... as long as the villans don't end every sentence with a rhyme!!
Believe it or not, when you run only one application on Windows, and you've fine-tuned the system for that purpose, it doesn't crash at all!! If / when I add GPS, or other functions, I'm sure I'd have problems staying on Windows.:-)
Look around for Book PCs! I bought one at a computer show for $150, and it is a great system for a car player.
I'm using WinMe of all the horrible things, just because it was quick and simple (anyone can build a player like mine). I use WinAMP with a Joystick plugin and the resumer plugin, and a removable hard-drive bay with an old 6GB drive. The only things I needed to buy were:
$150 BookPC (had most stuff on board)
$60 Celeron processor
$20 2 Removable Hard-Drive Bays
$30 Power Inverter
$10 tape adapter
I already had a spare 1GB hardrive for the OS, a spare 6GB for the songs, and a couple of 32MB DIMMS lying around.
A device like the iPAQ player is nice, but for $1000, I could totally Mack-out my Winblowz standard machine, which fits under the seat in my Corolla. And, it doesn't require you to look at it! I just alphabetically sort my playlists, and use the joystick to traverse tracks 1 or 10 at a time; a lot safer while driving! If I ever want a display, I can add any RCA video-input screen later, and it'll just be for convenience, not required.
Reasons to keep increasing framerate/resolution
on
GeForce3 and Linux
·
· Score: 1
There is a growing population of people who express the opinion that after a certain point, increased resolutions and framerates are useless. I beg to differ! Immersion increases with these factors, but not by these factors alone. If you've ever tried FSAA and/or 3D shutter glasses, you'll have seen a remarkably more immersive environment than you've ever seen before. Both technologies, however, require double processing, either resolution or framerate. As framerates and resolutions continue to increase, we'll see more of this cool shiznit, and, as someone who's used both on a GeForce2, I can tell you, we need more speed, and always will. Good gameplay is in the hands of the software developers; immersion is enabled by the hardware people. Keep it up!
Slashdot Mirror
So harvesting one of these feti is not like killing a baby, it's like killing a baby Jesus!!!
Trust me, they'll whine about it.
Since Excite (the portal, Excite.com) got bought, their Technology news has had a very similar phenomenon occurring, without the word "Advertisement."
Several have already mentioned TeX and LaTeX, and have given valuable details about them. This is a "me too" post. I was first exposed to LaTeX in my senior year of college, while in an AI class. I was severely impressed.
I had been a hard-core, old-school HTML person for years, and I was very happy to find a language that was to printed text as HTML was to hypertext, but better. I don't use it hardly at all now that I'm in a corporate, Word-or-Notes-are-what-you-are-to-use environment, but if I had to generate print-perfect material again, in the form of PostScript or PDFs, I would use LaTeX, no doubt.
...Because rape and murder don't hurt big corporations' bottom lines.
I'm just thankful this is a transition phase before the next revolution...
Let's look at it from another perspective:
Human interaction is based on a balance of aggression and submission. A person with zero aggression goes no where in life, and is a complete mess. I'm not talking about people who don't engage in fisticuffs, I'm talking about mindset. As mammalian omnivores, we have a natural bit of aggressive tendency built into our brains. It's natural!
What do all omnivorous and carnivorous mammals do as young? They play-fight. Puppies chew on each other. Lion cubs pounce at each other. Humans play tag, wrestle, play football, and now video games.
There is a reason for this! Fight-play helps excercise those tendencies, as well as release built-up urges. It also teaches consequences! When wrestling, kids get hurt... they realize if they push too hard, or get hit too hard, it is unpleasant. When playing a deathmatch, you die. And you die again. And those around you die. And it's bloody. It may not hurt, but the use of simulated weapons in these games yields simulated death. I'd worry a lot more about kiddie FPS games that don't have death resulting from the use of guns, but rather bloodless crap... what does a kid learn from it?
Raise your Waterboys and Watergirls. When your kids blow up and realize they can't handle their anger and instincts, it's going to be a lot more dangerous than a little desensitization.
I won't use myself as an argument, because I'm an exception, a nerd, but, people like my mother or siblings had to be very interested in a topic before going to the library to begin the slow, methodical practice of obtaining information through a few, outdated sources that had passed political, grammatic and stylistic approval.
Now, anything they want to know about, clickety click and they have their info, published 5 years ago, published today, asking questions to information authors and getting replies instantly, getting information on obscure topics previously nowhere to be found from someone who has NO command over English, but has the needed information.
The Internet IS already making an impact, and IS already changing this for many, many people... and even if the ratio of people who contribute to those who lurk is low, it's a hell of a lot higher than it ever was with TV, radio, newspapers, books, magazines, or stone carvings.
</rant>
Just think... most consumers used to have to wait for the appropriate issue of consumer reports and hope it covered the right product... now they can obtain literally hundreds of opinions regarding the same product before they buy it, finding out about known flaws, limitations, benefits, and prices in advance! I've already listened to car dealerships bitch about this new development.
May be a little off topic..., but is this going to have any impact on getting Sorenson into other containers?
Has anyone out there seen an existing way to get Sorenson outside of Quicktime?
I'd like to mod that right up to the RIAA's eyeballs.
I saw this at Thinkgeek. It is a Linux-running 10 Gig HD with USBs, Ethernet, PCMCIA, etc... I don't think it records, but it sounds really cool anyway. Here's the manufacturer's link.
Anything automated does indeed require some human intervention / maintainance, but can generally work out without nearly as much human-labor as what gets used here on earth. The reason we don't have a lot more automation is that people on this rock need jobs, and the wetware is cheaper than the hardware here. In space / on the moon, keeping up wetware will probably be a higher cost than keeping up advanced hardware, so automation is more likely there than here.
The latest AIBO is directly aimed at nerds. It no longer looks like a dog, but more like an evil little droid.
$1500 for a basic unit, and then you need to buy all the extra crap for wireless networking so it can read you your e-mail and wander your home under your control from a PC, but if you want an expensive toy, this one is feature rich
If I actually did go out and build my own laptop, do you think there would be enough general interest to get a community together? Maybe even start a little company to sell pc104 compatible laptop shells and the various adapters, trackpads, keyboards and other doodads that people would need?
Hell Yes! Look at the market for home-brew PCs. My guess is that most people in that market are like me and would love to be able to build a laptop with the features important to us, at a more reasonable price than a new laptop. I've been daydreaming about being able to buy the parts and roll my own laptop for at least a decade.
An existing example is the Palm market... there are many small companies that specialize in selling hacker hardware to replace Palm cases, buttons, and also sell new screens, memory chips, etc... I could definitely see it being viable for X86 portable gear too.
I know this is off-topic, but the mention of barebones CNN reminded me: Did anyone else think it was great to see CNN in barebones mode a couple months ago? The tragedy was horrible, of course, but when I saw CNN looking like the web did 5+ years ago, I got a sort of nostalgic feeling, accompanied with a sense of "this is the right way to do it."
Anyone else feel that way?
What does Voice Mail have to do with Linux??!!
I've read several mentions of CDs and CD-Rs becoming obsolete, and thus unreadable in the years to come. So what!? The world of computers is a connected world these days... The LAN has made the media issue irrellevant!
Example:
I used to buy video games on 5.25" disks and on 3.5" disks. My last working 5.25" disk drive crapped out years ago. I still have several of those games, because I transferred the data to the hard drive... as I got new machines, and new hard drives, the archival information moved from one machine to the other, over my LAN, to whichever drive I designated as the place to put my old data. All of my old data from 3 different, long dead machines occupies a very small percentage of my current 40GB media / backup drive.
As the 'net gets faster, and online backup space becomes more reasonable, guess where some of my backup media is going? Five years ago, when digital cameras were babies, they sucked, and personal data retention sucked. It still does for non-networked people, but this part of the world is continuing to get better every day. By the time analog film is dropped completely for digital, there will only be benefits, not losses!
I remember this exact concept, but it was applied to microdisplays rather than macrodisplays: Head-mounted displays for wearable computers. You basically described the exact workings of several of the products that the 'borgs at MIT used.
This tends to work nicely:
Telespammer: Hello, this is blah blah blah... and we'd like to sell you some crap...
Me: Ah... soooo... what are you wearing? (in Butt-Head making a pass at a woman voice)
It's useful no matter what gender the conversants are too!
... and did it rather poorly. I own three of the old Cyrix 6x86 chips... one called a P120+ that's really 100MHz, a P150+ that's really 120MHz, and a P200+ that's actually 150MHz. These ran fine, but arguments were made both ways as to whether or not the "P" rating worked out to be equivalent to an Intel chip of that number of MHz.
In the end, it came down to the simple fact that people got annoyed when they realized the speed rating of the chip was pretending to be MHz, but was higher than the actual MHz... especially after purchase. (I knew ahead of time, and read lotsa reviews, but that's not universal behavior).
If they put some marketing money behind a new initiative like this, I think the CPI idea would be much more successful. This wannabe MHz crap has been tried, and when was the last time anyone bought a Cyrix chip for his or her home hot-rod.
I first went beyond BBSs to the Internet around the time Doom came out, because I found out about a Star Wars Total Conversion. By the time I tracked down the right message boards, etc... I had found that the original group of developers had given up because LucasArts had sent them cease and desist letters. However, LucasArts at the time was developing a Doom-ish Star Wars game, "Dark Forces," so they had a little more interest than Funimation.
:-)
For a while, I picked up where the original Star Wars conversion people left off, made a website and everything, and made lotsa progress, but never once received a negative communication from anyone with a commercial interest.
After a crappy Dragonball Z game comes out with proper licensing, I have a feeling no one will care if better or different stuff is released later.
Yahoo, Inc. closed its doors today as it has failed to meet the new government requirements that search engines block illegal material.
...Internet use in the U.S. has decreased 83% with the last few major search engines ceasing to exist. Illegal "BBS"s" (Bulletin Board Systems) are sprouting up across the country, sparking furious comment from IP conservatives.
...
"We didn't want to drag things out, settling with every possible interested party because we provided a central link to content that someone else didn't like... Napster made that mistake two years ago and now we have the IP laws you see today." said former Yahoo spokeswoman...
"BBSs used to be legal, but so did automatic weapons. These things are just as dangerous as long as they exist in the hands of common people. Like automatic weapons, we're only safe when BBSs are gone from the streets and only held by the government!" said U.S. Senator(N) Lars Ulrich.
3D is the best example:
- positional audio technology: if you include more information about the audio, it takes more space and processing (simple stereo vs. stereo plus fade doubles the info)
- shutter glasses: you have two images being displayed instead of one to get a single stereo image.
- antialiasing: not specifically 3D, but you double the resolution of what you're seeing and work on that
As we get more and cooler output peripherals, the processing and storage requirements will increase, even beyond what it takes to simply store what we can "see." If we ever get some nifty neural interfaces going, the quality of information delivered will have another opportunity to increase. We will never run out of a need for higher capacity!Did anyone else notice how truly horrible the backgrounds were on the outdoor sets!? My girlfriend and I were almost nauseated by them. The Wizard of Oz had more convincing outdoor backdrops than the Dune series. I hope they do better next time. (that aside, I did enjoy seeing a true-to-the-book movie of Dune and would like to see more...)
... as long as the villans don't end every sentence with a rhyme!!
Believe it or not, when you run only one application on Windows, and you've fine-tuned the system for that purpose, it doesn't crash at all!! If / when I add GPS, or other functions, I'm sure I'd have problems staying on Windows. :-)
I'm using WinMe of all the horrible things, just because it was quick and simple (anyone can build a player like mine). I use WinAMP with a Joystick plugin and the resumer plugin, and a removable hard-drive bay with an old 6GB drive. The only things I needed to buy were:
- $150 BookPC (had most stuff on board)
- $60 Celeron processor
- $20 2 Removable Hard-Drive Bays
- $30 Power Inverter
- $10 tape adapter
I already had a spare 1GB hardrive for the OS, a spare 6GB for the songs, and a couple of 32MB DIMMS lying around.A device like the iPAQ player is nice, but for $1000, I could totally Mack-out my Winblowz standard machine, which fits under the seat in my Corolla. And, it doesn't require you to look at it! I just alphabetically sort my playlists, and use the joystick to traverse tracks 1 or 10 at a time; a lot safer while driving! If I ever want a display, I can add any RCA video-input screen later, and it'll just be for convenience, not required.
There is a growing population of people who express the opinion that after a certain point, increased resolutions and framerates are useless. I beg to differ! Immersion increases with these factors, but not by these factors alone. If you've ever tried FSAA and/or 3D shutter glasses, you'll have seen a remarkably more immersive environment than you've ever seen before. Both technologies, however, require double processing, either resolution or framerate. As framerates and resolutions continue to increase, we'll see more of this cool shiznit, and, as someone who's used both on a GeForce2, I can tell you, we need more speed, and always will. Good gameplay is in the hands of the software developers; immersion is enabled by the hardware people. Keep it up!