The landing target on Titan borders a bright-dark region thought to be an oil-rich shoreline.
What's even less reported is that this is actually recon for a pre-emptive invasion by the United States (and Poland), in the event this turns out to be true.
If your house gets uncomfortably cold in 8 hours with only a UK winter going on outside, it has serious heat-retention problems. You need (better?) insulation.
Winter before last, a nasty ice storm took down countless power lines across the state of Michigan. I was in a similar situation as the original poster: nat.-gas-powered hot-water furnace but with an electric pump. Temperatures were in the teens Fahrenheit (say, -10C) but for the first day or so, all I needed to keep comfy in my house was to add a sweater. (By the end of the third day, when my power finally came back on, I was wearing a couple t-shirts, a couple shirts, the sweater, a coat, sweatpants under my jeans, and a wooly hat.)
Afterward, I did invest in a 1000W inverter-type petrol-powered generator. Between ice, wind, lightning, the occasional suicidal squirrel, and general flakiness of the local grid, I lose electricity for a few hours at least once a year, and I make some of my living from being on the internet, so it was worth it. It provides just enough juice to keep my mail/web server online, and to power a lamp, radio, or laptop, as needed. It puts out a pretty smooth current (I run it through the UPS anyway) and with the power-throttling enabled (so it slows down to produce only as much power as you're drawing) it'll run for several hours on a single tank of petrol. It's makes a bit of noise, but not really bad, especially it being outside and with the door closed.
Minix is a "predecessor" to Linux only chronologically, not in terms of derivation, as you seem to be implying.
This certification is about operation, not source code or derivation. They're not saying "This is based on an old Unix," they're saying "This works like a current UNIX® is supposed to."
Heck, if Microsoft could get Windows to do everything the OpenGroup's spec called for, and ponied up the cash, they could start calling it "Microsoft Windows UNIX®". And it would be true. Likewise, if that street bootlegger's bags operated according to Louis Vuitton's specs (same appearance, same durability), and he paid a licensing fee to Louis Vuitton, he could call them "authentic" and it would be true. That is, in fact, how lots of brand-name goods are distributed around the world: the brand owner licences local manufacturers to make them to the owner's specs.
Yes, I do live in the city. But if I had too much acreage to mow with a reel, and I wasn't trying to run a golf course or community football field, I'd try letting something other than simulated astroturf grow on it (e.g. trees, bushes, native plants, a garden).
No mention anywhere in the branded products register of any Linux/BSD distribution, or Mac OS X. Are any companies still developing software to this certification, or requiring it?
I thought it was always strictly a UNIX® thang that was never important to the noncommercial BSDs, Linux, or OS X. That doesn't mean it isn't important to the markets that still rely on it for interoperability.
I'm still trying to figure out how combustion engines or electric motors help grass cutters do their job better, let alone propulsion mechanisms to compensate for the weight of the motors... which require even more power to compensate for their own weight, and nuisance safety mechanisms which have to stop the engine if you loosen your grip on the controls... in a viscious cycle that deploys so bloody much energy at trimming such little blades of grass. Personally, I get pretty good results - and a nice, trivial amount of peaceful exercise - from an inexpensive, quiet, low-tech reel mower.
That and a large chunk of the people out there don't game, or just simply don't care about FPS and so forth. They just want something that is solid, works, quiet, and not space heater.
Amen. I'm a card-carrying tech geek (enough to know two distinct but on-topic expansions for "FPS"), but the way to put me to sleep fastest is to start talking about how uber-sweet your graphics card is for playing such-and-such shooter. Heck, I swapped video cards in one of my machines a couple weeks ago... to put in something more cool (not more kewl).
There were only 2 things that students really learned in Art School:
1. How to dress like an artist.
2. How to act like an artist.
Then I must not have learned anything, because I still dress the same as I did before art school (mostly the very same articles of clothing), and I don't think I act any differently. I'll have to go ask for my money back. {smile}
The main thing I did learn (which I suspect the folks with narrow black ties, hornrim glasses, and pocket protectors at International Business Machines didn't know how to quantify) was how to think like an artist. That was far more important than the techniques I also learned.
Similarly, our Apple rep (showing off the insides of the new G5 iMac) explained that if you put a bigger hard drive in it, Apple simply won't cover the hard drive, and if the hard drive catches fire and melts the rest of the system they won't cover the damage. But the rest of your hardware is still under warranty.
So major hacking of MacOS is an alternative to replacing it with Linux. Fair enough. But that doesn't mean that nobody will prefer the replacement to the hacking.
Oh, please! It's hardly "major hacking". Installing KDE on top of the X11 that comes with OS X is no more difficult (probably less) than installing KDE, X11, and Linux on the same Mac.
If you prefer Linux over Darwin (which is what we're really talking about at this point) that's a perfectly reasonable preference. (I'm planning to use Yellow Dog Linux on some old Apple hardware I want to use as a firewall, simply because I know how to do it with Linux and I'd have to start at square one figuring out how to do it with a BSD system.) Trying to support that choice by complaining about the OS X UI which is rather easily replaceable is not.
Computers are not displacing traditional media in art.
I'm not trying to argue that digital media is "just as good as" or a one-for-one replacement for every other media. Oil painting and charcoal drawing aren't going to vanish from the earth any time soon, and are still unique artistic media. But in certain segments of the professional world, digital tools most definitely are displacing traditional media, as surely as word processors have displaced most typewriters, photography has displaced most newspaper illustration, and drum machines have displaced more than a few skin-pounders:
The entire process of coloring and lettering comics is now done digitally, and publishers are experimenting with using digital processing of penciled art to eliminate the pen-and-ink (or brush-and-ink) stage as well. Some artists are using 3d modeling software to do their backgrounds, and some are even doing fully-digitally-rendered art. Or they're doing all their drawing on tablets, such that they may never touch pencil and paper.
I know several professional freelance illustrators (magazines, brochures, etc) who do all of their work digitally.
Architectural "artist's renderings" (especially in the latter stages of development) are done with modeling programs instead of pens and pencils. Likewise with industrial product and furniture designs, interiors, etc.
Photography is increasingly becoming digital photography, with the chemical and optical darkroom techniques being replaced by digital processing.
Graphic designers used to hand-letter or hand-transfer type in roughs and mock-ups; now they're using outline fonts on computers. (I found a whole box of old Letraset materials in storage at the college where I work, and I can assure you that none of our current students are being taught how to use that stuff.) And when was the last time you saw an ad rough done up in pastels?
The Metals & Jewelry department were I work has a device that takes digital 3D models and "prints" them in a resin of some kind as a physical object which can them be used for casting, instead of sculpting the originals by hand in some other material.
The entire animation industry has been turned upside down by digital media. The tools of Toy Story and Shrek (and even mixed media like Beauty and the Beast) have definitely displaced to a substantial degree the tools of Snow White and Looney Tunes.
In short, I can walk the halls of my college and find students in nearly every department being taught the use of digital tools and processes to do things that once would have been done using some other "traditional" craft. Some of the things they're doing have no antecedent, so they're not "displacing" anything, but a lot of the digital work being done is simply the 21st-century way of doing something that used to be done with pencils or paint or plaster.
"When you mix blue and yellow paint, or put a blue glass in front of a yellow glass, you get green."
Mixing pigments works more like componentwise multiplication. In this case you get black. Now try multiplying cyan (which many non-technical people call a shade of "blue") with yellow, and you'll get green.
Speaking as someone who has actually done this, I can tell you that when I mix blue paint - even a warm, definitely-not-cyan blue like ultramarine - with cadmium yellow, I get a shade of green. A fairly dull one and a fairly dark one, but still green. If I want black, I mix that ultramarine with an equal quantity of burnt siena (a dull warm orange)... the result is deep, dark, and neutral. But you are sort of right: mixing a cool blue like cyan with yellow will get me a brighter green.
You're making the mistake of trying to apply the CMYK color scheme (which works fine with transparent inks and dyes) to the pigments in paint, and it simply doesn't work. Paints use a third system of primaries and secondaries, in which the mixing complement of yellow is violet (not blue), the complement of cyan is scarlet (halfway between red and orange) instead of true red, and the complement of magenta is a warm, yellowish green. It's similar to CMYK, but not identical. So what you learned in first grade is still technically correct: in the RYB system, blue + yellow => green.
"[T]eaching using computers in the area of art" sounds like this is intended to be an art class. Why not just hand out some pads and pencils? What do you need the computers for?
(What do you need pads and pencils for? Let them scratch stuff in the dirt.)
He didn't say it was just "an art class"; he said it was a class on how to use a particular tool (computers) for art. Kind of like you can teach a class on using oil paint for art, using charcoal pencils for art, or using pieces of wood for art. By high school most kids with any kind of competent art program in their school system have at least experimented a little with traditional media. And digital media are important to add to the list, especially since they are displacing traditional media in so many areas.
How do you know whether you are a geek or a "true artist"? You seem to imply that you are a "true artist" more than a geek because you make more money being a "true artist" than being a geek.
I consider myself a "true geek" more than a "true artist". It's just a bit of self-assessment; the fact that I make more money doing geekstuff than artstuff just reflects where my strengths lie, and which skills get the most development.
I wouldn't hold out much hope of finding a curriculum based around Libre software, because what's out there generally isn't very suitable for learning digital art. The GIMP is the granddaddy in this segment, and only just reached the point (with 2.0) where I'd even show it to a creative professional, out of embarassment. GIMP 1.x was practically a poster child for poorly designed, counter-intuitive interfaces. 2.0 is probably OK for newbies to digital painting to explore with, but if you build a good intro class around it, you'll probably be the first.
I do tech support for an art school, and I also picked up a BFA there, so I have a pretty good sense of the kinds of tools needed to teach digital media effectively. I promote the use of Libre software here as much as anywhere else I've worked, but I have to admit that there's little use for it in the classrooms (except for mainstream officeware like OOo and Firefox). Macromedia's apps and Photoshop Elements aren't Gratis or Libre, but they're fairly inexpensive for schools, and meet the rest of your requirements (e.g. cross platform, curricula) pretty well.
I'm setting up one of my old Macs for sale to a student, and in trying to "add value" with some free apps they'd actually have use for, the best I could come up with was GIMP (which I'm sure they'll delete and replace with a cracked or educational-licence copy of Photoshop) and WordPress for blogging.
Libre stuff might be OK if you're just trying to help high school students get their feet wet, but if you're trying to prepare people to do this stuff as professionals, you need to teach them the software the industry uses. Employers don't want someone with digital-paint-program vector-drawing-program experience; they want someone with Photoshop and Illustrator/Freehand experience. (They'll usually settle for Windows users, but they'd rather have someone who knows his way around OS X.) And freelancers are going to want to be proficient in the best tools they can afford, and that's also going to be commercial software.
I think what you're doing is a great idea, and I don't want to discourage it, but it's definitely going to be an uphill battle. Best of luck, and if you pull it off... please share what you learn from it!
Windowpane
Windowpane C9H12 gets its name from its resemblance to a set of windows, [it forms a 2x2 grid, reminiscent of a certain OS logo] but unfortunately it has never been synthesised. But the version with a corner carbon missing C8H12 has been made, and goes by the name 'broken windowpane', or more accurately fenestrane.... or more popularly, Microsoft Windowpane.
Re:When did mediocrity become something to shoot f
on
Kamikaze Novel Writing
·
· Score: 1
This happened around the same time that the expression "winning isn't everything" came along.
I imagine that people participate in this for the same reasons that other people run marathons despite the impossibility of them placing well... mostly for the experience of doing it. And maybe they'll learn something from the process and perhaps next time they'll do better.
Also, if you're familiar at all with the writing process, you may have heard of something known as the "first draft". A stunt like this seems like a good way of generating one of those.
Whatever happened to "if you're not going to do it right don't do it at all"?
Hopefully it's in the rubbish bin with all the other excuses for giving up before you start.
There's a similar exercise for writers with a more visually artistic bent: 24-Hour Comics. There are a few rules, but the gist of it is that one creator produces a complete 24-page comicbook in 24 consecutive hours. That includes coming up with the idea, writing the story, laying it out, finishing the art, and lettering it. You can do one any day you like, but 23 April 2005 is going to be the next "official" 24 Hour Comics Day in which probably hundreds of cartoonists around the world will each attempt it over the same weekend. The first organised event was this past April, and I plan to participate next year.
They would be "Lucas' movies" if he had never released them.
But they won't be "our movies" until... well, a long long time from now. But if the original spirit of copyright law were still in effect, they'd be "our movies" fairly soon.
and TV was still in black and white, and stereophonic recordings hadn't been invented yet, movies had just recently become "talkies", and there was no FM radio. Those of us who were alive at the time and think we remember differently are simply mistaken.
"Which is fine, except I'm making the movies, so I should have it my way."
So it is about the art.
The whole point of being an artist/creator is to shape something the way you want it to be made. If that's "ego", it's simply the sort of ego that leads one to create stuff in the first place.
Whether other people also like it, or whether it's commercially successful is entirely separate questions.
Slashdot Mirror
What's even less reported is that this is actually recon for a pre-emptive invasion by the United States (and Poland), in the event this turns out to be true.
At least that's what they seem to be teaching in U.S. schools.
It's not my house, so neither I nor my landlord is keen on me making modifications to its utility hookups.
"They aren't that much more expensive" is still "more expensive" and I had to overextend my finances for a while just to buy what I did.
I can take this little puppy anywhere, which makes it more versatile and a little easier to justify.
One really shouldn't submit one's one bandwidth-limited site to /. before making arrangements for lots more bandwidth.
Winter before last, a nasty ice storm took down countless power lines across the state of Michigan. I was in a similar situation as the original poster: nat.-gas-powered hot-water furnace but with an electric pump. Temperatures were in the teens Fahrenheit (say, -10C) but for the first day or so, all I needed to keep comfy in my house was to add a sweater. (By the end of the third day, when my power finally came back on, I was wearing a couple t-shirts, a couple shirts, the sweater, a coat, sweatpants under my jeans, and a wooly hat.)
Afterward, I did invest in a 1000W inverter-type petrol-powered generator. Between ice, wind, lightning, the occasional suicidal squirrel, and general flakiness of the local grid, I lose electricity for a few hours at least once a year, and I make some of my living from being on the internet, so it was worth it. It provides just enough juice to keep my mail/web server online, and to power a lamp, radio, or laptop, as needed. It puts out a pretty smooth current (I run it through the UPS anyway) and with the power-throttling enabled (so it slows down to produce only as much power as you're drawing) it'll run for several hours on a single tank of petrol. It's makes a bit of noise, but not really bad, especially it being outside and with the door closed.
Yes, I do live in the city. But if I had too much acreage to mow with a reel, and I wasn't trying to run a golf course or community football field, I'd try letting something other than simulated astroturf grow on it (e.g. trees, bushes, native plants, a garden).
I thought it was always strictly a UNIX® thang that was never important to the noncommercial BSDs, Linux, or OS X. That doesn't mean it isn't important to the markets that still rely on it for interoperability.
I'm still trying to figure out how combustion engines or electric motors help grass cutters do their job better, let alone propulsion mechanisms to compensate for the weight of the motors... which require even more power to compensate for their own weight, and nuisance safety mechanisms which have to stop the engine if you loosen your grip on the controls... in a viscious cycle that deploys so bloody much energy at trimming such little blades of grass. Personally, I get pretty good results - and a nice, trivial amount of peaceful exercise - from an inexpensive, quiet, low-tech reel mower.
Amen. I'm a card-carrying tech geek (enough to know two distinct but on-topic expansions for "FPS"), but the way to put me to sleep fastest is to start talking about how uber-sweet your graphics card is for playing such-and-such shooter. Heck, I swapped video cards in one of my machines a couple weeks ago... to put in something more cool (not more kewl).
1. How to dress like an artist.
2. How to act like an artist.
Then I must not have learned anything, because I still dress the same as I did before art school (mostly the very same articles of clothing), and I don't think I act any differently. I'll have to go ask for my money back. {smile}
The main thing I did learn (which I suspect the folks with narrow black ties, hornrim glasses, and pocket protectors at International Business Machines didn't know how to quantify) was how to think like an artist. That was far more important than the techniques I also learned.
So is that a Samsung Anycall in your pocket, or are you just really happy to see me?
Similarly, our Apple rep (showing off the insides of the new G5 iMac) explained that if you put a bigger hard drive in it, Apple simply won't cover the hard drive, and if the hard drive catches fire and melts the rest of the system they won't cover the damage. But the rest of your hardware is still under warranty.
So major hacking of MacOS is an alternative to replacing it with Linux. Fair enough. But that doesn't mean that nobody will prefer the replacement to the hacking.
Oh, please! It's hardly "major hacking". Installing KDE on top of the X11 that comes with OS X is no more difficult (probably less) than installing KDE, X11, and Linux on the same Mac.
If you prefer Linux over Darwin (which is what we're really talking about at this point) that's a perfectly reasonable preference. (I'm planning to use Yellow Dog Linux on some old Apple hardware I want to use as a firewall, simply because I know how to do it with Linux and I'd have to start at square one figuring out how to do it with a BSD system.) Trying to support that choice by complaining about the OS X UI which is rather easily replaceable is not.
I'm not trying to argue that digital media is "just as good as" or a one-for-one replacement for every other media. Oil painting and charcoal drawing aren't going to vanish from the earth any time soon, and are still unique artistic media. But in certain segments of the professional world, digital tools most definitely are displacing traditional media, as surely as word processors have displaced most typewriters, photography has displaced most newspaper illustration, and drum machines have displaced more than a few skin-pounders:
The entire process of coloring and lettering comics is now done digitally, and publishers are experimenting with using digital processing of penciled art to eliminate the pen-and-ink (or brush-and-ink) stage as well. Some artists are using 3d modeling software to do their backgrounds, and some are even doing fully-digitally-rendered art. Or they're doing all their drawing on tablets, such that they may never touch pencil and paper.
I know several professional freelance illustrators (magazines, brochures, etc) who do all of their work digitally.
Architectural "artist's renderings" (especially in the latter stages of development) are done with modeling programs instead of pens and pencils. Likewise with industrial product and furniture designs, interiors, etc.
Photography is increasingly becoming digital photography, with the chemical and optical darkroom techniques being replaced by digital processing.
Graphic designers used to hand-letter or hand-transfer type in roughs and mock-ups; now they're using outline fonts on computers. (I found a whole box of old Letraset materials in storage at the college where I work, and I can assure you that none of our current students are being taught how to use that stuff.) And when was the last time you saw an ad rough done up in pastels?
The Metals & Jewelry department were I work has a device that takes digital 3D models and "prints" them in a resin of some kind as a physical object which can them be used for casting, instead of sculpting the originals by hand in some other material.
The entire animation industry has been turned upside down by digital media. The tools of Toy Story and Shrek (and even mixed media like Beauty and the Beast) have definitely displaced to a substantial degree the tools of Snow White and Looney Tunes.
In short, I can walk the halls of my college and find students in nearly every department being taught the use of digital tools and processes to do things that once would have been done using some other "traditional" craft. Some of the things they're doing have no antecedent, so they're not "displacing" anything, but a lot of the digital work being done is simply the 21st-century way of doing something that used to be done with pencils or paint or plaster.
Mixing pigments works more like componentwise multiplication. In this case you get black. Now try multiplying cyan (which many non-technical people call a shade of "blue") with yellow, and you'll get green.
Speaking as someone who has actually done this, I can tell you that when I mix blue paint - even a warm, definitely-not-cyan blue like ultramarine - with cadmium yellow, I get a shade of green. A fairly dull one and a fairly dark one, but still green. If I want black, I mix that ultramarine with an equal quantity of burnt siena (a dull warm orange)... the result is deep, dark, and neutral. But you are sort of right: mixing a cool blue like cyan with yellow will get me a brighter green.
You're making the mistake of trying to apply the CMYK color scheme (which works fine with transparent inks and dyes) to the pigments in paint, and it simply doesn't work. Paints use a third system of primaries and secondaries, in which the mixing complement of yellow is violet (not blue), the complement of cyan is scarlet (halfway between red and orange) instead of true red, and the complement of magenta is a warm, yellowish green. It's similar to CMYK, but not identical. So what you learned in first grade is still technically correct: in the RYB system, blue + yellow => green.
(What do you need pads and pencils for? Let them scratch stuff in the dirt.)
He didn't say it was just "an art class"; he said it was a class on how to use a particular tool (computers) for art. Kind of like you can teach a class on using oil paint for art, using charcoal pencils for art, or using pieces of wood for art. By high school most kids with any kind of competent art program in their school system have at least experimented a little with traditional media. And digital media are important to add to the list, especially since they are displacing traditional media in so many areas.
I consider myself a "true geek" more than a "true artist". It's just a bit of self-assessment; the fact that I make more money doing geekstuff than artstuff just reflects where my strengths lie, and which skills get the most development.
I do tech support for an art school, and I also picked up a BFA there, so I have a pretty good sense of the kinds of tools needed to teach digital media effectively. I promote the use of Libre software here as much as anywhere else I've worked, but I have to admit that there's little use for it in the classrooms (except for mainstream officeware like OOo and Firefox). Macromedia's apps and Photoshop Elements aren't Gratis or Libre, but they're fairly inexpensive for schools, and meet the rest of your requirements (e.g. cross platform, curricula) pretty well.
I'm setting up one of my old Macs for sale to a student, and in trying to "add value" with some free apps they'd actually have use for, the best I could come up with was GIMP (which I'm sure they'll delete and replace with a cracked or educational-licence copy of Photoshop) and WordPress for blogging.
Libre stuff might be OK if you're just trying to help high school students get their feet wet, but if you're trying to prepare people to do this stuff as professionals, you need to teach them the software the industry uses. Employers don't want someone with digital-paint-program vector-drawing-program experience; they want someone with Photoshop and Illustrator/Freehand experience. (They'll usually settle for Windows users, but they'd rather have someone who knows his way around OS X.) And freelancers are going to want to be proficient in the best tools they can afford, and that's also going to be commercial software.
I think what you're doing is a great idea, and I don't want to discourage it, but it's definitely going to be an uphill battle. Best of luck, and if you pull it off... please share what you learn from it!
Windowpane
Windowpane C9H12 gets its name from its resemblance to a set of windows, [it forms a 2x2 grid, reminiscent of a certain OS logo] but unfortunately it has never been synthesised. But the version with a corner carbon missing C8H12 has been made, and goes by the name 'broken windowpane', or more accurately fenestrane.... or more popularly, Microsoft Windowpane.
I imagine that people participate in this for the same reasons that other people run marathons despite the impossibility of them placing well... mostly for the experience of doing it. And maybe they'll learn something from the process and perhaps next time they'll do better.
Also, if you're familiar at all with the writing process, you may have heard of something known as the "first draft". A stunt like this seems like a good way of generating one of those.
Whatever happened to "if you're not going to do it right don't do it at all"?
Hopefully it's in the rubbish bin with all the other excuses for giving up before you start.
There's a similar exercise for writers with a more visually artistic bent: 24-Hour Comics. There are a few rules, but the gist of it is that one creator produces a complete 24-page comicbook in 24 consecutive hours. That includes coming up with the idea, writing the story, laying it out, finishing the art, and lettering it. You can do one any day you like, but 23 April 2005 is going to be the next "official" 24 Hour Comics Day in which probably hundreds of cartoonists around the world will each attempt it over the same weekend. The first organised event was this past April, and I plan to participate next year.
But they won't be "our movies" until... well, a long long time from now. But if the original spirit of copyright law were still in effect, they'd be "our movies" fairly soon.
and TV was still in black and white, and stereophonic recordings hadn't been invented yet, movies had just recently become "talkies", and there was no FM radio. Those of us who were alive at the time and think we remember differently are simply mistaken.
So it is about the art.
The whole point of being an artist/creator is to shape something the way you want it to be made. If that's "ego", it's simply the sort of ego that leads one to create stuff in the first place.
Whether other people also like it, or whether it's commercially successful is entirely separate questions.