The Great Library in Alexandria was a wonder of the ancient world until it got burned down as part of a domestic dispute between Mark Antony and Cleopatra.
Uh... what? For centuries people have blamed the burning of Alexandria's Great Library on the Romans, the Christians, or the Muslims, depending on which ones they disliked. But Mark Antony? Cleopatra? That's a new one. Maybe you're thinking of Julius Caesar, who gets the blame according to this fellow (a self-proclaimed Christian apologist).
Yes, and the browsers in mobile computers. And the browsers that blind people use.
There are Flash players for various models of cellphones and PDAs already, and more in the works. And Flash MX supports what Macromedia calls "assistive technologies functionality." It complies with government standards for.gov Web site accessibility by the blind and disabled.
SVG can have XHTML or GIF alternate code embedded.
Seems to me a Web page designer who can embed alternate XHTML code would find it trivial to implement a Javascript or other server-side check for the presence of the Flash client, then "degrade" to static pages as needed. Even if SVG becomes a widespread standard, I could imagine a lot of pages checking for Flash first, then "degrading" to SVG -- because Flash files are compressed binaries, far smaller than the equivalent SVG.
Re:For idiots like me -
on
SVG On the Rise
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Every time Flash comes up in a Slashdot thread, there's always some poster who hasn't heard of Flash MX saying "It doesn't support search engines, Unicode, accessibility, or the back button." The MX version has been out about a year now -- isn't it time to update your talking points?
"It doesn't degrade if you browser isn't able to support it." And that browser would be -- what, Lynx? Which also lacks SVG support, and always will.
As for "the majority of the Web browsing public," that's a very mild way of saying that the Flash plug-in is (according to Macromedia) the most pervasive software in the world, with over half a billion users. Given that Flash MX has strong XML support, and that it's now targeting "rich Internet applications" instead of ordinary vector animation, SVG has a long uphill battle ahead.
Re:For idiots like me -
on
SVG On the Rise
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Other posts in this thread have listed some disadvantages of SVG, but omitted that a browser plug-in fully implementing the spec weighs in at several megs. This is in contrast to the Flash player, which is still under 500K in the latest version. Not an issue for broadband users, but they are still a minority in the Web world.
Flash is anywhere *near* J2EE? Last I looked, Flash is entirely orthogonol to J2EE. It is just a media/presentation layer. That's like saying HTML or SMIL just took a step closer to J2EE. Nonsense.
Sounds like you haven't looked at Flash MX. Lots of data-handling, XML support, and talking to application layers. It works transparently with ColdFusion MX as backend through the Flash Remoting technology. There are Rich Text Editors, calendar plug-ins, FTP clients, etc. for Flash MX. Macromedia calls the new Flash stuff "rich Internet applications."
The Two Towers Visual Companion, a movie tie-in, features a nice four-page foldout illustrating the battle's progress. (N.B. The book's foreword, by Viggo Mortensen (who played Aragorn), is worth a read. Maybe I'm a bigot, but I hadn't expected an actor's commentary to be so perceptive and nuanced.)
Some of [the writer's] fringe beliefs will turn out to be true. The writer will seem prophetic. It's of little significance.
One of the most famous examples of this was Gulliver's Travels, wherein Jonathan Swift successfully guessed not only that Mars has two moons, but that they're extremely small and fast-moving. This was a remarkable non-intuitive guess, but it was just a guess. In his annotated version of Gulliver, Isaac Asimov suggested that Swift might have guessed two moons by imagining a supposed numeric progression from Earth (one Moon) to Mars (X moons) to Jupiter (thought from Galileo's time to have four moons). 1, 2, 4... Swift's idea was clever, and by coincidence he got it right. Shrug.
Uh-huh. And yet -- funny -- the Western European and Scandinavian countries that practice these press freedoms you resent don't seem unpleasant places to live. I mean, people's lives and careers don't seem to get destroyed there any more often than in the US. Their press covers a much wider spectrum of debate than ours. And if you think the US press doesn't frequently label people guilty by inference...
As for "putting forth our own political agendas and parad[ing] our biases as Journalism," have you watched Fox News lately?
There used to be a proud tradition of advocacy journalism in the US. That's what got us most of our labor and sanitation laws, after all.
In 1998 my wife visited the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, specifically to look at the Voynich Manuscript. She only got to see it for 20 minutes or so (the library was about to close), and needless to say she didn't crack the mystery. She did observe that some of the letters look like Arabic, and some of the plant illustrations reminded her of medieval herbals (books about herbs). She speculates that the author intended it as a spellbook to summon female spirits. It was a highly intriguing, frustrating, and very cool experience.
The nascent art of machinima, which involves using 3D game engines to make desktop movies, could benefit from a practical way to record game output faster. (It would also be nice to export directly to.AVI format for editing in Premiere or Avid, but that's another wishlist.)
Just before our wedding, I was looking at wedding rings with my fiancee. The jeweler had a new line of titanium rings with an inlaid band of rose gold. I thought these were the coolest possible choice: symbolically durable, practically lightweight, fashionably high-tech. And I, at least, thought them pretty.
She shot down that idea like a wounded bustard. Still calls me weird for even considering it.
I'm giving her my mom's old engagement ring. Has a diamond (sigh).
The raid on Steve Jackson Games was for the GURPS Cyberpunk supplement, written by Lloyd Blankenship
GURPS Cyberpunk wasn't a reason, it was an excuse. The Secret Service and the Chicago Computer Crime Bureau raided SJG as part of the "Operation Sunfire" raid on the hacker group the Legion of Doom. Blankenship (aka Mentor) was a former member of the Legion at that time. They raided his home and his place of work, SJG. When it became clear to the feds that they'd found nothing in the SJG raid, they offered as a face-saving pretext the preposterous idea that GURPS Cyberpunk was "a manual for computer crime."
I second the recommendation of the fine Bruce Sterling book THE HACKER CRACKDOWN, linked in another post on this thread.
Show of hands: How many Slashdotters remember seeing that first Pong game? I would have guessed it closer to 1975, but such is my fading memory. I read that Nolan Bushnell installed the first quarter-operated Pong machine in a Bay Area pizza restaurant, and the next day the owners called to complain that it was broken. He went to check it, and found that the reason it wouldn't work was that the coin box was absolutely stuffed full.
You young sprats today can't appreciate what a weird feeling it was to twist a knob and see, up on the black-and-white TV screen, something responding to the motion. It was one of those "everything has changed" moments.
Andrei Tarkovsky's Russian adaptation of Solaris (1972) was the first, of course, and is widely regarded as a sci-fi classic.
...by those who haven't seen it. Most desperately, petrifyingly boring film I've ever seen. The movie spends ten or fifteen minutes just showing a guy driving home. Just driving. You think I'm exaggerating.
This being a Russian film, everybody's character arc takes them from depressed to depressed, visiting many states of depression in between. On a spaceship that somehow manages to look like a spare bedroom, the artificial gravity gets temporarily turned off, and we see a depressed couple floating mournfully in mid-air, while seated in chairs.
They should support GreyHawk. It is the Most detailed campaign setting they (TSR) ever had.
No, the Forgotten Realms is the most detailed TSR world by quite a long shot. When Ed Greenwood sold TSR the rights, he shipped them 60 large boxes of his campaign notes going back ten years or more. That was apparently under half of his total amount.
Greyhawk was detailed as worlds go, but Gary Gygax couldn't match Greenwood's output -- if nothing else, because Gygax had a gaming company to run!
Not many published worlds match the Forgotten Realms for depth and volume of creativity by a single designer: M. A. R. Barker's Tekumel (seen in Empire of the Petal Throne, Swords and Glory, and elsewhere), Greg Stafford's Glorantha (the original setting for RuneQuest), N. Robin Crossby's Harn, possibly Skyrealms of Jorune (but that had two creators), Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia (a pre-gaming forerunner), and someplace by a guy named Tolkien, I know I've seen it somewhere....
It's a rare and very interesting psychological syndrome: the tendency to obsessively create an imaginary world, not out of psychosis but as an aesthetic compulsion. "The Jet-Propelled Couch," an interesting account of a less balanced version of the syndrome, where the creator broke with reality and came to believe his invented world was real, appears in Dr. Robert Lindner's 1955 study The Fifty-Minute Hour.
Forgotten Realms which, if I recall correctly, Ed Greenwood still owns the rights to
Untrue. Ed Greenwood sold all rights to the Forgotten Realms to TSR circa 1986-7 for $100. I have this information from Greenwood himself and from one of the TSR marketing execs involved in the purchase.
It's easy to shudder and say, "What a maroon!" But Greenwood says he knew exactly what he was doing, is happy with the decision, and would do it again. By selling the Forgotten Realms, he bought himself an entire career writing novels and modules for TSR/Wizards, has travelled the world as a guest at gaming conventions, and has made countless friends. No, the Realms hasn't made him rich, but he feels himself rich in other, more important ways.
Google does in fact now index Flash sites. Do a search that includes "Flash."
Flash MX supports accessibility by screen readers, with integrated support for Microsoft Active Accessibility and US government accessibility standards.
No one should argue that Flash is suitable for every possible Web function, but it has been improving. If everyone had to design every page so that it works in (say) Lynx, the Web would be a more widely accessible but less interesting place.
Bunches of cellphone game makers have gone under (e.g., Unplugged Games, www.ungames.com), and the rest have been treading water by selling their backend technology. Telecom companies are understandably risk-averse right now (something about laying off a quarter or more of your staff will do that), and they haven't wanted to hear about games.
One company still hanging in there, waiting for the drought to end, is PureVis. They do a completely visual programming environment that was originally intended for easy production of online games. They started out as GameWorld.com; the name change is a sign of the times.
I wanted to use Opera on my new(ish) Linux box, but it sometimes rendered just the headers of a page (such as Slashdot) and then stopped. Sometimes the failed pages were ASP, but I know it would be a reaaally cold day somewhere before Slashdot uses ASP. Anyway, I never figured out what I needed to set to make Opera load the whole page. Help for a newbie?
Slashdot Mirror
The Great Library in Alexandria was a wonder of the ancient world until it got burned down as part of a domestic dispute between Mark Antony and Cleopatra.
Uh... what? For centuries people have blamed the burning of Alexandria's Great Library on the Romans, the Christians, or the Muslims, depending on which ones they disliked. But Mark Antony? Cleopatra? That's a new one. Maybe you're thinking of Julius Caesar, who gets the blame according to this fellow (a self-proclaimed Christian apologist).
Yes, and the browsers in mobile computers. And the browsers that blind people use.
There are Flash players for various models of cellphones and PDAs already, and more in the works. And Flash MX supports what Macromedia calls "assistive technologies functionality." It complies with government standards for .gov Web site accessibility by the blind and disabled.
SVG can have XHTML or GIF alternate code embedded.
Seems to me a Web page designer who can embed alternate XHTML code would find it trivial to implement a Javascript or other server-side check for the presence of the Flash client, then "degrade" to static pages as needed. Even if SVG becomes a widespread standard, I could imagine a lot of pages checking for Flash first, then "degrading" to SVG -- because Flash files are compressed binaries, far smaller than the equivalent SVG.
Every time Flash comes up in a Slashdot thread, there's always some poster who hasn't heard of Flash MX saying "It doesn't support search engines, Unicode, accessibility, or the back button." The MX version has been out about a year now -- isn't it time to update your talking points?
"It doesn't degrade if you browser isn't able to support it." And that browser would be -- what, Lynx? Which also lacks SVG support, and always will.
As for "the majority of the Web browsing public," that's a very mild way of saying that the Flash plug-in is (according to Macromedia) the most pervasive software in the world, with over half a billion users. Given that Flash MX has strong XML support, and that it's now targeting "rich Internet applications" instead of ordinary vector animation, SVG has a long uphill battle ahead.
Other posts in this thread have listed some disadvantages of SVG, but omitted that a browser plug-in fully implementing the spec weighs in at several megs. This is in contrast to the Flash player, which is still under 500K in the latest version. Not an issue for broadband users, but they are still a minority in the Web world.
Flash is anywhere *near* J2EE? Last I looked, Flash is entirely orthogonol to J2EE. It is just a media/presentation layer. That's like saying HTML or SMIL just took a step closer to J2EE. Nonsense.
Sounds like you haven't looked at Flash MX. Lots of data-handling, XML support, and talking to application layers. It works transparently with ColdFusion MX as backend through the Flash Remoting technology. There are Rich Text Editors, calendar plug-ins, FTP clients, etc. for Flash MX. Macromedia calls the new Flash stuff "rich Internet applications."
The Two Towers Visual Companion, a movie tie-in, features a nice four-page foldout illustrating the battle's progress. (N.B. The book's foreword, by Viggo Mortensen (who played Aragorn), is worth a read. Maybe I'm a bigot, but I hadn't expected an actor's commentary to be so perceptive and nuanced.)
[TROLL]
Vote a Republican administration into power, and the next thing you know, the magnetic field is gone.
[/TROLL]
Some of [the writer's] fringe beliefs will turn out to be true. The writer will seem prophetic. It's of little significance.
One of the most famous examples of this was Gulliver's Travels, wherein Jonathan Swift successfully guessed not only that Mars has two moons, but that they're extremely small and fast-moving. This was a remarkable non-intuitive guess, but it was just a guess. In his annotated version of Gulliver, Isaac Asimov suggested that Swift might have guessed two moons by imagining a supposed numeric progression from Earth (one Moon) to Mars (X moons) to Jupiter (thought from Galileo's time to have four moons). 1, 2, 4... Swift's idea was clever, and by coincidence he got it right. Shrug.
They tell that same joke in Wales and Scotland (scroll down each page until you see it).
Uh-huh. And yet -- funny -- the Western European and Scandinavian countries that practice these press freedoms you resent don't seem unpleasant places to live. I mean, people's lives and careers don't seem to get destroyed there any more often than in the US. Their press covers a much wider spectrum of debate than ours. And if you think the US press doesn't frequently label people guilty by inference...
As for "putting forth our own political agendas and parad[ing] our biases as Journalism," have you watched Fox News lately?
There used to be a proud tradition of advocacy journalism in the US. That's what got us most of our labor and sanitation laws, after all.
In 1998 my wife visited the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, specifically to look at the Voynich Manuscript. She only got to see it for 20 minutes or so (the library was about to close), and needless to say she didn't crack the mystery. She did observe that some of the letters look like Arabic, and some of the plant illustrations reminded her of medieval herbals (books about herbs). She speculates that the author intended it as a spellbook to summon female spirits. It was a highly intriguing, frustrating, and very cool experience.
Coming soon, Microsoft Pong XP! With incredible 3D ray-traced graphics rendered in real time with anti-aliasing!
It wasn't Microsoft, it was Hasbro, early 2000. The original Pong game, remixed with 3D accelerated graphics. Debuted to a resounding thud.
Think I'm joking? Check out the Gold Guide list of reviews.
The nascent art of machinima, which involves using 3D game engines to make desktop movies, could benefit from a practical way to record game output faster. (It would also be nice to export directly to .AVI format for editing in Premiere or Avid, but that's another wishlist.)
Just before our wedding, I was looking at wedding rings with my fiancee. The jeweler had a new line of titanium rings with an inlaid band of rose gold. I thought these were the coolest possible choice: symbolically durable, practically lightweight, fashionably high-tech. And I, at least, thought them pretty.
She shot down that idea like a wounded bustard. Still calls me weird for even considering it.
I'm giving her my mom's old engagement ring. Has a diamond (sigh).
The raid on Steve Jackson Games was for the GURPS Cyberpunk supplement, written by Lloyd Blankenship
GURPS Cyberpunk wasn't a reason, it was an excuse. The Secret Service and the Chicago Computer Crime Bureau raided SJG as part of the "Operation Sunfire" raid on the hacker group the Legion of Doom. Blankenship (aka Mentor) was a former member of the Legion at that time. They raided his home and his place of work, SJG. When it became clear to the feds that they'd found nothing in the SJG raid, they offered as a face-saving pretext the preposterous idea that GURPS Cyberpunk was "a manual for computer crime."
I second the recommendation of the fine Bruce Sterling book THE HACKER CRACKDOWN, linked in another post on this thread.
Show of hands: How many Slashdotters remember seeing that first Pong game? I would have guessed it closer to 1975, but such is my fading memory. I read that Nolan Bushnell installed the first quarter-operated Pong machine in a Bay Area pizza restaurant, and the next day the owners called to complain that it was broken. He went to check it, and found that the reason it wouldn't work was that the coin box was absolutely stuffed full.
You young sprats today can't appreciate what a weird feeling it was to twist a knob and see, up on the black-and-white TV screen, something responding to the motion. It was one of those "everything has changed" moments.
Oh well. Time to order some Geritol.
Obviously, opt-out should be the default, otherwise an undue burden of opting-out on tens of thousands of databases would be placed on the individual.
I think you mean "opt-IN should be the default." (AOL mode on) Me too! (AOL mode off)
Andrei Tarkovsky's Russian adaptation of Solaris (1972) was the first, of course, and is widely regarded as a sci-fi classic.
...by those who haven't seen it. Most desperately, petrifyingly boring film I've ever seen. The movie spends ten or fifteen minutes just showing a guy driving home. Just driving. You think I'm exaggerating.
This being a Russian film, everybody's character arc takes them from depressed to depressed, visiting many states of depression in between. On a spaceship that somehow manages to look like a spare bedroom, the artificial gravity gets temporarily turned off, and we see a depressed couple floating mournfully in mid-air, while seated in chairs.
Four hours of my life I'll never get back.
it doesn't matter how much you have, you'll always be wanting a little more.
Actually, the Buddha pointed that out about 2,500 years ago.
They should support GreyHawk. It is the Most detailed campaign setting they (TSR) ever had.
No, the Forgotten Realms is the most detailed TSR world by quite a long shot. When Ed Greenwood sold TSR the rights, he shipped them 60 large boxes of his campaign notes going back ten years or more. That was apparently under half of his total amount.
Greyhawk was detailed as worlds go, but Gary Gygax couldn't match Greenwood's output -- if nothing else, because Gygax had a gaming company to run!
Not many published worlds match the Forgotten Realms for depth and volume of creativity by a single designer: M. A. R. Barker's Tekumel (seen in Empire of the Petal Throne, Swords and Glory, and elsewhere), Greg Stafford's Glorantha (the original setting for RuneQuest), N. Robin Crossby's Harn, possibly Skyrealms of Jorune (but that had two creators), Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia (a pre-gaming forerunner), and someplace by a guy named Tolkien, I know I've seen it somewhere....
It's a rare and very interesting psychological syndrome: the tendency to obsessively create an imaginary world, not out of psychosis but as an aesthetic compulsion. "The Jet-Propelled Couch," an interesting account of a less balanced version of the syndrome, where the creator broke with reality and came to believe his invented world was real, appears in Dr. Robert Lindner's 1955 study The Fifty-Minute Hour.
Forgotten Realms which, if I recall correctly, Ed Greenwood still owns the rights to
Untrue. Ed Greenwood sold all rights to the Forgotten Realms to TSR circa 1986-7 for $100. I have this information from Greenwood himself and from one of the TSR marketing execs involved in the purchase.
It's easy to shudder and say, "What a maroon!" But Greenwood says he knew exactly what he was doing, is happy with the decision, and would do it again. By selling the Forgotten Realms, he bought himself an entire career writing novels and modules for TSR/Wizards, has travelled the world as a guest at gaming conventions, and has made countless friends. No, the Realms hasn't made him rich, but he feels himself rich in other, more important ways.
Google does in fact now index Flash sites. Do a search that includes "Flash."
Flash MX supports accessibility by screen readers, with integrated support for Microsoft Active Accessibility and US government accessibility standards.
No one should argue that Flash is suitable for every possible Web function, but it has been improving. If everyone had to design every page so that it works in (say) Lynx, the Web would be a more widely accessible but less interesting place.
Bunches of cellphone game makers have gone under (e.g., Unplugged Games, www.ungames.com), and the rest have been treading water by selling their backend technology. Telecom companies are understandably risk-averse right now (something about laying off a quarter or more of your staff will do that), and they haven't wanted to hear about games.
One company still hanging in there, waiting for the drought to end, is PureVis. They do a completely visual programming environment that was originally intended for easy production of online games. They started out as GameWorld.com; the name change is a sign of the times.
I wanted to use Opera on my new(ish) Linux box, but it sometimes rendered just the headers of a page (such as Slashdot) and then stopped. Sometimes the failed pages were ASP, but I know it would be a reaaally cold day somewhere before Slashdot uses ASP. Anyway, I never figured out what I needed to set to make Opera load the whole page. Help for a newbie?
Seems like the Flamebait choice should be split into "Stupid Flamebait (-1)" and "Really Good Flamebait (+1)."