Not sure what this is implying, but it seems to be a surprisingly common misconception that MacOSX has vector based artwork. Not so. GNOME can do, and I think KDE3.1 can as well, via SVG. MacOS icons though are just bitmaps in a variety of sizes, with some scaling/blending algorithms applied.
Actually, Apple had built support for QuickTime vector graphics even in Mac OS 9. I guess it depends on whether you consider QuickTime an integral part of the Mac OS.
Otherwise, though, you're wrong that Mac OS X doesn't support vector graphics. It does, as part of the Quartz graphics subsystem.
Re:Freecell Solitaire...
on
Awari Solved
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· Score: 3, Funny
I'm up to game 4386. ~2 years so far. I'm hoping to break 5000 by the end of the year.
Let me guess... you currently answer phones for a living?:-)
Yeah, and don'tcha get the joke? Electronic Arts... EA... oh the IRONY! THE IRONY!!
All kidding aside, hey whaddaya know -- I posted the parent at +1 bonus, and it's since been modded down one with no explanation. I guess CmdrTaco et al really do get hot and bothered about that DMCA stuff.
The 3D Studio people hardly invented this type of technique. We've been cracking^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hseeing various forms of this type of copy protection at least as far back as the Apple ][ days.
Electronic Arts, for example, used to write the floppy discs for their games with "bad sectors" that would cause read errors. It was possible to copy the entire disc except for the bad sector. With the appropriate nybble copier, you might have even been able to extract the data from the bad sector and write it, byte for byte, to the copy. Ah! But the trick was that the game looked for the bad sector. If reading that sector didn't return the right kind of error from the OS internals, the program would fail to load. There was no way to reproduce the same bad sector with any kind of copy program.
Of course (and as you mention re: the 3DS dongle), the trick wasn't to reproduce the protection, but to remove the code the checked for it. And how hard was that? In the case of Bard's Tale II, it meant modifying three bytes.
Three bytes.
P.S. If I said "NOP NOP NOP," some of you will know what I mean -- but then I'd probably be violating the DMCA.;-)
As somebody who types documents for a living, I wholeheartedly understand everybody's complaints about Microsoft Word for Windows. It sucks ass.
However (and I've seen no one mention this so far), when I leave my office, I get to go home to a Macintosh. There, I use Microsoft Word for Mac -- and I have to tell you guys, it's 5x better than Word for Windows. Inexplicable, perhaps, but it's true.
No annoying drag-to-select bug. I have more options than "select everything from here to the end of the document."
By default, both the Thesaurus and the Dictionary are included in the right-click contextual menu (yes, I use a mouse with more than one button)
The Dictionary includes not just spelling suggestions, but *definitions* as well
The Mac keyboard's Option key makes it a cinch to enter special characters and punctuation, without remembering multi-digit codes
...and these are just a few of the many little odds and ends that Microsoft's Mac team were somehow able to fix, but the Windows team seemingly can't. How many versions of Word for Windows did it take for them to copy the Mac's "one window per document" format? And even installation on the Mac is a cinch... just drag the MS Office folder to your hard drive, and double-click on the Word application.
I'm not saying this is a perfect product, mind you... but it's far less annoying than the Windows equivalent.
Oh, and if Word for Mac is 5x better than Word for Windows, then Microsoft Entourage for Mac is 10x better than Outlook!
I bought my first Red Hat Box Set Linux in 1997 -- not because they had some kind of gun to my head, but because I felt bad for taking something good for free without supporting it.
Is it just me or is this a stupid idea? Almost no one who rides the subway is actively looking out the windows at the subway walls... It's not like TV where there's something interesting to watch and then a commerical pop up. There's nothing interesting on the subway walls so who's going to be looking there?
Dummy... the idea is that, after all this publicity, people will be looking out the subway window to see the animated ads!
Here in San Francisco, the Loews Cinemas Metreon theater complex regularly screens first-run films on their IMAX screen, if the demand is there. I've seen "Apocalypse Now Redux" in the IMAX theater, as well as "Minority Report," and maybe some others. I think the first film they did this with was "The Matrix."
As far as I'm concerned, the movies look just fine as it is. I'm betting that one of the criteria is that the theater have a 70mm print available, but otherwise it's great. The picture stretches to both edges of the screen (though not the full height). So long as it's not an old, battered print, the image looks fine. Sound is great.
I think what IMAX is offering here is to take a film and blow it up to full IMAX specs. As far as I can tell, all this means is that IMAX will be able to capitalize on what's already common practice -- IMAX theaters screening non-IMAX movies on the big screen.
So let's see. Average cost of a 120 minute film on a regular screen at the Metreon? $9.50. Average cost of a 20 minute IMAX movie at the Metreon? $9.50. Average cost of a full-length IMAX format film, then, would be... what? $58? No thanks.
Broadcasters have two options going digital: Higher quality, same channel bandwidth. Or current quality, something like 1/4 channel bandwidth.
Yeah, only that "current quality" in the digital format looks like something I scraped off the bottom of my shoe... blocky, full of MPEG artifacts... way lower quality than a clean analog broadcast.
(What's more, am I the only one who's noticed that a good analog broadcast signal looks better than most people's analog cable these days? I don't use cable myself, but a lot of the cable hookups I've seen give pictures that are full of ghosts, poor color, etc... )
Apple SHOULD be looking to G4/5 alternatives, particulary 64 bit options if they want to maintain any customers in the movie industry. The sparc wouldn't be a poor choice, since it seems like its roadmap goes farther than the vanilla powerpc chips.
The rumors I've heard lately say that the Apple branded hardware they'll call the "G5" isn't going to use the chips that are currently marketed as PowerPC G5 chips, but rather IBM's POWER line. This would put them on the same manufacturing page as IBM's POWER-based workstations etc., which would probably be a smart move for the road ahead, unlike the idea of switching to yet another processor architecture.
And since the laws don't allow dual citizenship past the age of 18, getting a US citizenship means losing your native citizenship.
You must be talking about Japanese law. I'm a dual citizen of the United States and Canada. The US has reformed its stance toward dual citizenship considerably in recent years. As it stands now, if you're a citizen of a first-world country (like you mention), they pretty much don't care whether you keep that citizenship when you're naturalized in the US.
Whoever said that .ORG was noncommercial?
on
Control of the .ORG TLD
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· Score: 3, Insightful
"Dot-org is important now because it the one space on the Internet that... has been devoted to noncommercial speech," said Barry Steinhardt, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Technology and Liberty Program. "If it were to be turned into just another dot-com, that would be a blow to speech."
A blow to speech? A little exaggerated, don't you think, considering as how most of the registrars advise you to register all three --.com,.net, and.org -- whenever you register a domain? That's been common practice since way back.
What is it, exactly, that makes this guy think.org has some lockout on commercial entities? If anything, the tendency for nonprofits to gravitate there seems like a popular custom more than a rule.
I own two.org domains. I don't have any plans to make any money off them... but why shouldn't I?
The correct way to handle H1B visas is to make them into real greencards and eliminate them as sojourner visas. Hey, I don't want my cousin-in-law to be forced to go back to Thailand when her H1B visa ends.
And then, as a naturalized U.S. citizen myself, I would argue that the thing to do with green cards is to eliminate them completely, along with the second-class citizenship they represent. Why should a skilled worker from another country come to this one to build software, pay taxes on that income, and then be denied the right to vote on how those taxes are spent -- a right that any U.S.-born yokel on unemployment is given at age 18?
If anything, US engineers having to "fight" for jobs is a "good thing". If US citizens get competition, they are going to feel obligated to raise their skills in order to get an IT job. As a software user, this finally translates into better products.
This is the easy argument to make, but I doubt it's true. Programming tools, APIs, SDKs, and frameworks are evolving and "upgrading" almost as fast as desktop applications software. A programmer who knows Pascal like the back of his hand today isn't likely to be half as marketable as a kid out of college with a CS degree and a reasonable understanding of Java.
More likely, US workers are going to have to broaden their skills to include ones other than coding. There is more to being a programmer than just the coding, you know.
Genes are complex organic molecules,
and when you isolate and purify them from the chromosomes where they reside, they are eligible to be patented as chemical compounds. And that is the extent of the patent protection that is given. We're not giving patents on whole chromosomes, and we certainly don't give patents on anything as it exists in nature.
Isn't that basically what I said? That the fact that you've chemically isolated a gene is what makes it patentable?
The original suite(sp?) was because Apple was terrified that FlashMX producers would use it it to make video using the Sorenson spark codec. The fear is justified because just about everybody has the Flash plug-in and far fewer have the QuickTime plug-In.
Not really. The way Macromedia people have described it to me, the Spark codec really works best for things like talking heads, webcams and the like. Nobody expects anyone to use Flash to stream first-run feature films. Another big benefit of the Spark codec for Macromedia is that it's TINY... something like 100K. Keeping the size of the Flash plug-in small is one of their top priorities.
My opinion is that Apple is sometimes just plain dumb. If they had just bothered to include the Spark codec in the QuickTime6 engine then everything would have been fine: Video makers and web developers will not go to the extra lengths of having to embed the video in a Flash movie (Time is money!)
Again, not quite accurate. Flash has much greater market penetration than QuickTime. And it's not as easy to build applications for streaming video with QuickTime as with Flash...
So, yeah, you can patent math, just like you can now patent genes that occur naturally.
IANAScientist, but I don't believe you can actually patent a gene. What you patent is the chemical method for isolating or reproducing the gene. This isn't a lot better -- better would be patenting a specific application of the function of the gene -- but you don't patent the naturally occurring material itself.
Another thing that has been lost is that computers no longer boot into BASIC...ok, stop laughing, I'm a little bit serious here. Home computers booting into BASIC, plus hobbyist magazines (some oriented at kids) I think were a great boon to budding programmers/designers in the early 1980s.
I'm following you... BASIC definitely changed my life. One of my favorite games on the Apple ][, in fact, was a public domain package called Eamon. It let you create Dungeons & Dragons style text adventure games complete with character development, and you could make any mods tot he gaming engine you wanted using BASIC.
On the other hand, I suspect I'd be able to get a lot further these days using Perl than I could have back then using BASIC. Perl has:
Copious free documentation
Plenty of tutorials available online
Libraries available to take care of all the weird little things you might want to do -- no need to invent things if you don't want to
A superior programming environment -- just being able to use a windowing text editor to write my code instead of typing it into the BASIC shell was a revelation to me when I got into C
Good structured programming if you want it, an intro to object oriented programming if you want it -- tools that will let you transition more smoothly into more powerful languages when you're ready
And of course, you could insert Python or PHP or Ruby in here instead of Perl... Perl is just the one I learned first and felt most comfortable with.
Maybe the most significant thing about BASIC vs. using a scripting language today is that most young people will have grown up on a GUI and won't be particularly interested in the kind of text-only programs we used to bash out in BASIC, even though it would probably be much easier to create more powerful ones today.
Is LEGO ("please refer to our products as LEGO toys or bricks, not 'Legos'...") really still alive and well? Back when I used to extort hundreds of dollars out of my parents to buy new LEGO sets, the name of the game was building things. You want a knight on horseback? OK, we'll give you the knight, but you have to build the horse. You want a spaceship? OK, that's going to take about an hour.
These days it seems like LEGO has become little more than a lame re-working of Playmobil, with barely a nod given to the idea that these things are meant to be built, not just looked at. They seem to be more interested in competing with action figures and other more "mainstream" toys than in making products like the LEGO I used to know -- Mindstorms being perhaps the only exception. I'm the first to admit that if I had Star Wars LEGO when I was a kid, I never would have left the house. These days, though, I just see more corporate branding tie-ins from a company that markets products to kids. This doesn't seem like the LEGO I grew up with.
The 51" projector doesn't give you any more resolution, though. The pop-ups will still have to take up a certain amount of screen real estate to be legible. I guess we'll just have to wait for HDTV before this can really be viable.
Or, you can be like me. I refuse to order cable in my apartment. I get all my TV via rabbit ears. If it isn't viewable, I don't watch.
Fortunately, among the channels I do get are three PBS stations -- KQED out of San Francisco, KTEH in San Jose, and KCSM from Santa Clara. And, yes; I do support them with my pledge dollars.
I'm currently taking a book editing class at a local university, and one of my instructors told me that, more and more since September 11, few publishers of any kind will accept unsolicited paper manuscripts. Some of them won't even accept solicited ones anymore.
According to my instructor, they don't want the brown paper packages sent in the mail.
As an editor myself, however, one problem I've had with accepting electronic manuscripts is that the writers, for some reason, seem to want to go apeshit with the style menu... italics, bold, large font for subheads, headers and footers, footnotes at the bottom of each page... all of these things make it very difficult to get at the actual text of the article. Some people even want to submit manuscripts as HTML (a nightmare).
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Otherwise, though, you're wrong that Mac OS X doesn't support vector graphics. It does, as part of the Quartz graphics subsystem.
Let me guess... you currently answer phones for a living?
>EA EA EA
... EA ... oh the IRONY! THE IRONY!!
Yeah, and don'tcha get the joke? Electronic Arts
All kidding aside, hey whaddaya know -- I posted the parent at +1 bonus, and it's since been modded down one with no explanation. I guess CmdrTaco et al really do get hot and bothered about that DMCA stuff.
The 3D Studio people hardly invented this type of technique. We've been cracking^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hseeing various forms of this type of copy protection at least as far back as the Apple ][ days.
;-)
Electronic Arts, for example, used to write the floppy discs for their games with "bad sectors" that would cause read errors. It was possible to copy the entire disc except for the bad sector. With the appropriate nybble copier, you might have even been able to extract the data from the bad sector and write it, byte for byte, to the copy. Ah! But the trick was that the game looked for the bad sector. If reading that sector didn't return the right kind of error from the OS internals, the program would fail to load. There was no way to reproduce the same bad sector with any kind of copy program.
Of course (and as you mention re: the 3DS dongle), the trick wasn't to reproduce the protection, but to remove the code the checked for it. And how hard was that? In the case of Bard's Tale II, it meant modifying three bytes.
Three bytes.
P.S. If I said "NOP NOP NOP," some of you will know what I mean -- but then I'd probably be violating the DMCA.
However (and I've seen no one mention this so far), when I leave my office, I get to go home to a Macintosh. There, I use Microsoft Word for Mac -- and I have to tell you guys, it's 5x better than Word for Windows. Inexplicable, perhaps, but it's true.
I'm not saying this is a perfect product, mind you ... but it's far less annoying than the Windows equivalent.
Oh, and if Word for Mac is 5x better than Word for Windows, then Microsoft Entourage for Mac is 10x better than Outlook!
I bought my first Red Hat Box Set Linux in 1997 -- not because they had some kind of gun to my head, but because I felt bad for taking something good for free without supporting it.
...does Tim O'Reilly ever change that beige shirt?
Here in San Francisco, the Loews Cinemas Metreon theater complex regularly screens first-run films on their IMAX screen, if the demand is there. I've seen "Apocalypse Now Redux" in the IMAX theater, as well as "Minority Report," and maybe some others. I think the first film they did this with was "The Matrix."
... what? $58? No thanks.
As far as I'm concerned, the movies look just fine as it is. I'm betting that one of the criteria is that the theater have a 70mm print available, but otherwise it's great. The picture stretches to both edges of the screen (though not the full height). So long as it's not an old, battered print, the image looks fine. Sound is great.
I think what IMAX is offering here is to take a film and blow it up to full IMAX specs. As far as I can tell, all this means is that IMAX will be able to capitalize on what's already common practice -- IMAX theaters screening non-IMAX movies on the big screen.
So let's see. Average cost of a 120 minute film on a regular screen at the Metreon? $9.50. Average cost of a 20 minute IMAX movie at the Metreon? $9.50. Average cost of a full-length IMAX format film, then, would be
(What's more, am I the only one who's noticed that a good analog broadcast signal looks better than most people's analog cable these days? I don't use cable myself, but a lot of the cable hookups I've seen give pictures that are full of ghosts, poor color, etc... )
What is it, exactly, that makes this guy think .org has some lockout on commercial entities? If anything, the tendency for nonprofits to gravitate there seems like a popular custom more than a rule.
I own two .org domains. I don't have any plans to make any money off them ... but why shouldn't I?
More likely, US workers are going to have to broaden their skills to include ones other than coding. There is more to being a programmer than just the coding, you know.
On the other hand, I suspect I'd be able to get a lot further these days using Perl than I could have back then using BASIC. Perl has:
- Copious free documentation
- Plenty of tutorials available online
- Libraries available to take care of all the weird little things you might want to do -- no need to invent things if you don't want to
- A superior programming environment -- just being able to use a windowing text editor to write my code instead of typing it into the BASIC shell was a revelation to me when I got into C
- Good structured programming if you want it, an intro to object oriented programming if you want it -- tools that will let you transition more smoothly into more powerful languages when you're ready
And of course, you could insert Python or PHP or Ruby in here instead of Perl... Perl is just the one I learned first and felt most comfortable with.Maybe the most significant thing about BASIC vs. using a scripting language today is that most young people will have grown up on a GUI and won't be particularly interested in the kind of text-only programs we used to bash out in BASIC, even though it would probably be much easier to create more powerful ones today.
These days it seems like LEGO has become little more than a lame re-working of Playmobil, with barely a nod given to the idea that these things are meant to be built, not just looked at. They seem to be more interested in competing with action figures and other more "mainstream" toys than in making products like the LEGO I used to know -- Mindstorms being perhaps the only exception. I'm the first to admit that if I had Star Wars LEGO when I was a kid, I never would have left the house. These days, though, I just see more corporate branding tie-ins from a company that markets products to kids. This doesn't seem like the LEGO I grew up with.
Or, you can be like me. I refuse to order cable in my apartment. I get all my TV via rabbit ears. If it isn't viewable, I don't watch.
Fortunately, among the channels I do get are three PBS stations -- KQED out of San Francisco, KTEH in San Jose, and KCSM from Santa Clara. And, yes; I do support them with my pledge dollars.
I'm currently taking a book editing class at a local university, and one of my instructors told me that, more and more since September 11, few publishers of any kind will accept unsolicited paper manuscripts. Some of them won't even accept solicited ones anymore.
... italics, bold, large font for subheads, headers and footers, footnotes at the bottom of each page ... all of these things make it very difficult to get at the actual text of the article. Some people even want to submit manuscripts as HTML (a nightmare).
According to my instructor, they don't want the brown paper packages sent in the mail.
As an editor myself, however, one problem I've had with accepting electronic manuscripts is that the writers, for some reason, seem to want to go apeshit with the style menu
Admittedly it's not as nice as that Sony product you linked to, but Keyspan does make this...