People aren't going to jump on either the HD-DVD or Blue-ray wagon for at least a year or so. The first buyers will be the geeks and peeps with enough money. On top of that, most consumers don't have plasma displays or projectors (although a growing number do have HD-TVs and they're a common item at Wal-Mart. In a few years they'll probably phase out regular TVs just like 900Mhz phones phased out older cordless models).
The quality of existing DVDs is quite amazing and I think most people will be happy with it for a while. The question comes with compatibility. Consumers want to only have to buy one version of something. Will the HD-DVD/Blue-ray they purchase work at their friend's house?
Personally I like the Blue-ray standard. It's a massive amount of data crammed onto a single disc. It's interesting that the article states that "...said the HD DVD format would make it easier for consumers to copy high-definition movies to computer hard drives...". So will HD-DVD have a less restrictive DRM than Blue-ray or are we talking about media size again?
I doubt both standards will stick around like DVD-R/DVD+R, because as I said earlier, people only want one universal format for content they purchase. One will be here five years from now and another, like laser discs, will end up at your local used book store in huge bins selling for $5 a pop.
You know, I am annoyed by the onslaught of Google articles on here, but maybe there are so many articles because they are great innovators. Google doesn't necessarally makes new software, but take an old idea and make it much better, or work in a different way that may or may not be more efficient.
People complain about Google possibly turning into another Microsoft, but I say that may not be a bad thing. Two giants with totally different ideas about engineering, research and design are now trying to grab a hold onto the same markets. There are similarities too; both companies to a lot of live testing with their consumers.
My revenue on google Adwords hasn't been all that great, so at least now if I desired, I could try a different option from a major provider. I like this and I'd hope to see more healthy competition between Google and Microsoft.
Every one in a while I still get those e-mails about the goverment trying to tax e-mail. Anyone in the networking community knows this is logistically impossible due to the nature of the SMTP protocol, the Internet, etc. In the same way many believe it is also difficult if not impossible, for the government to truly censor the Internet.
Here comes China. China is only one of many countries that filters Internet and media content. It's no where near as extreme say North Korea, which doesn't allow ANYTHING in. China has an economy that's integrated into the world economy and therefore needs the Internet available to the public in order for commerce. There are always ways around such filtering, back to the nature of the Internet, however it comes at a steep price if you get caught.
Free speech is valuable and is feared by governments who want to keep control. In many westernized countries, we take it for granted.
I made the mistake of wanting to get real world experience before I went back and get my masters. I really hate the real world. Don't get me wrong, I've gotten tons of good experience and my job really isn't too bad.
Even before I started working there I was all ready enrolled in graduate school. I really want to teach. I enjoy computer science. I realize teaching is a lot more work, but I think it's easier to deal with burnout in an academic environment.
There is always an end in sight. You know there is a break between spring and summer classes and that there is time to recoup for the next semester. During my undergraduate degree, I really enjoyed the lab work and the research I was given a stipend to do.
40 hours a week sitting down at a box and then getting to spend your breaks outside with all the smokers with nothing but buildings and urban sprawl around you. I'd much rather be on a campus where I could take my breaks by walking through the park on campus.
To quote one of my favorite movies: "...Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about about mission statements..." (Office Space)
Right now I'm really burnt out at work. With my 5 personal days a year, I all ready had to use two on a wedding and another as a sick day. I have two more days off between now and next summer.
I like the line from the movie Office Space about how man was not meant to
General Questions about Adventure Games
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Ask Sid Meier
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· Score: 4, Interesting
This is just a general game design question. Have any of you worked on Adventure games (Kings Quest, Full Throttle, Star Trek: Judgment Rights, etc). Adventure games were my favorite genre and were part of the reason I started down a path that led to my computer science degree. Now days, it seems like that genre is dead with many games of that era that were scheduled for sequels in eternal limbo (the Tex Murphy series and Gabrial Knight are examples).
My question is, what do you think led to the move away from this genre? Comsumer demand? Replay value? Do you see a return to the old inventory/pont-n-click/story driven games eventually in the future?
Looking at the prices, I took the plunge into getting a projector. My apartment has a decently sized living room. At first I bought a DLP project, but my hearing is still really good and that high pitch sound (I assume it is from the color wheel) hurts my ears. I returned the InFocus X2 (didn't realize there was a 10% restocking fee..$80..watch out for those) and invested in a ViewSonic 1024x768. I liked the fact that the InFocus had DVI, however the ViewSonic only has VGA and Component (Question: Is the input from Component equal in quality to that of DVI input?)
It worked out really well. After a while I bought a mount (don't buy the Universal mounts from eBay. They suck ass. I got mine working eventually, but it took a lot of work!)
I don't have a screen. The image measures 7 1/2 feet wide by..something I can't remember. The quality is spetecular. I was watching Akira last night and was amazed by all the detail. I felt like I was in a theater. My wall is white with bumps however sitting about 5 or 6 feet away on my couch, I really don't notice it. If it bothers you, hanging an ironed white bedsheet works really well. I disagree with the previous post because you really don't need to spend that much money of an expensive screen.
That combined with a 600 Watt Onkyo reciever and a Linux box with an SBLive (digital out) and Gentoo Linux makes up my entertainment system. I have a TV tuner I should probably hook up at some point to get broadcast, but most of the stuff I watch I download (Cable Internet, but not TV) or buy on DVD.
The projectors do require a lot more maintance than a regular TV. You gotta get a small vacume to clean out the filter every 100 hours and you have to change out the blub every once in a while which can cost up to $400!
Still, I am very happy with my investment. Overall I spent under $2000 (not including the Computer which was an old one I had) and have a pimptastic theater system to which my friends love to invite themselves over to every weekend:)
One thing that is true from the earlier post, light will drench the image. I got some thick black curtains, but even then I'll usually watch movies with a lot of dark scenes in the evening cause they show up better.
Overall, I'd take my projector setup to a plasma screen any day.
I download most of my stuff using bitorrent these days and haven't touched Gnutella in a long time, although Limewire was my favorite client for Linux. A few months back I would use it from time to time to grab a song I heard on the radio. I just remember it being filled with lots of endless loops, blank files and songs with random glitches placed it and distributed by publisher groups.
There is so much music out there in single serving format (I still think they should have $1 CD downloads..Britney Spears..yea her CDs would be worth about a dollar). Although the DRM stuff is annoying, at least it shows that the music industry is trying to adapt to what consumers really want.
Gnutella protocols are really goind the way of the casual user who used their machine to browse the internet, use e-mail, download porn and play video games. They're more than happy to pay 99 cents (or however much it's gone up to now) to download DRMed music.
The true people who copy tons of illegal software and copyrighted music will move on to Bittorrent or continuing using usenet and irc fservs. They'll be the next target for the RIAA of course, but stuff keeps moving fast enough that nerds, audiophiles and the such will be a few steps ahead of them.
I live in Chattanooga, a decent sized city in Tennessee, but no where near the size of Nashville or even Knoxville. I tried to find a job in Atlanta, mainly because I like large cities and I like mass transit.
Don't get me wrong, I love driving and own a 5spd and do most of my own car work, but sometimes it would be nice to be able to get drunk at a bar, stumble onto a train and get off only a block or two from your apartment.
Atlanta has a rail and subway system, Marta, but it doesn't really blanket the city all that well. I have a friend who lives down there and it's a 20 minute drive to work, even in the thick traffic, and 45 minute train ride with two transfers.
I really wish the rail era in this country didn't die the way it did. It would have been nice during the Interstate construction , if they had placed two high speed rail tracks in the median. I realize the Interstates were designed to move troops and also be used as a stage to land airplanes, but I think both could have still been accomplished with an integrated rail system.
I like the way Chicago's rail system is setup. Their rails run in the medians in the Interstate and they even have train stations in the medians with pedestrian bridges above them connecting them to the streets.
A good mass transit system (keyword good; well designed) with a fair ticket price or monthly passes is a really great way to help reduce pollution, unclog traffic ways and it lets you read a book or play with your laptop on the way to work. The trouble is we're a country conditioned to use cars and we like control, so many people will continue to drive those gas hogging SUVs with just themselves and five empty seats on the 20min drive to work every morning.
Well there is aspell/pspell (which replaced the older ispell) which is the standard library most Linux apps link into, but you're right. There is no system wide spell check like Mac OSX has. I also like the OSX system wide speech synth you can use with almost any application. My old roommate used it to read off Something Awful pages while we ate dinner. He really hated Safari (and Konquror for that matter) and wished the option existed in Firefox as well.
I think the most useful feature of the google toolbar is the spell check. Many places, such as slashdot, don't have spell check and some places, such as Livejournal, have spell check but it really sucks.
I realize now that there are probably many other firefox extentions out there with spell check, but the first one I came across and used was in the google toolbar.
I currently use it with Gentoo and on some firefox releases I had some trouble with the toolbar crashing/hanging as well as the spell check correction box appearing half way down the page. I am anxious to try out this new release and see if a lot of these issue have been solved.
My friend Nick just bought an iPod. He went ahead and got the mini instead of the nano and I'm glad he did after reading this article. I really like the iPod interface, and if it played oggs I'd probably have one myself.
I think what makes this design flaw so bad is that it really should have been picked up during the testing phase. If you get a group of test subjects to use it for a month, how could they not get feedback when the screens start to scratch and break.
It's a nice case, transparent and looked like a good solution, however its something that should have come with the unit itself.
I have a feeling this device was rushed into the market on its coolness factor and not enough time was spent testing and developing it for real world use. It reminds me of those Apple cubes that came out years ago with a touch sensetitive power button that had the tendency to turn of if you waved something warm across them.
I love Apples. I wish I could affoard an iBook, however they do seem to place a lot in style and looks over actual preformance and cost in many cases, which I think has been one of the short falls of many of their designs.
I like the concept of doing more on the client side, making web applications actually feel like applications instead of static pages that have to refresh everytime you change a combo box.
However, from the comments I've read, AJAX seems like a bad solution. First off, I HATE XML. It's overly verbose and wastes tons of bandwidth. People say its human readable, but have you ever tried to open an abiword document in a text editor? Human readable?
You know what's human readable? LDIF. It's the stanrd format for importing and exporting information from an X.500 directory (LDAP, Novel Directory, etc). It's human readable, the dn gives you a location where the information fits into the tree and it eats up a lot less space than XML (although there is a lot of repeated data and wasted space still)
XML does have advantages over properity text and binary protocols in being standaridzed with DTDs/schema, however it still feels like bloat. You ever look at a raw SOAP request? It's not pretty. It's actually quite distrubting.
Still, overcomming the logistic of javascript implementations on multiple browsers is quit a task and there are many engines and concepts, AJAX being only one of them, that seem to do a good job of takling the issue. As far as XML based protocols, I try to avoid them at all cost.
I don't understand why the parent has been moderated as a troll. Over half of my collection is in OGGs. It is a good and solid format and there are cheap decoder chips out there. It's not unreasonable that if a player supports MP3, WMV and ACC, then why not OGG?
Well to be fair, the last article talked about why LSB is awful and shouldn't be implemented. This article mentions the other side of it. You're right it's not exactly a dupe, but then again, there's nothing really new here.
Microsoft has always embrased open standards. They "embrace and extend." They have DHCP servers...sure some old versions of Windows don't obtain DHCP leases correctly, but they've been patches and fixes here and there and everything seems to work.
ActiveDirectry is a standard X.500 protocol...with a couple of interesting extras which the Samba team is still trying to work with.
SOAP, well to be honest I never liked SOAP...or XML, but Microsoft uses it and it sorta works with other SOAP implementations...sorta. (I tried using a.NET client to communicate with nuSOAP for PHP about a year ago...worked fine unless you wanted to send an array).
The fact is with any open standard, you're gonna have problems with getting the implementations correct between ever device, OS and embedded that implements it. But back to the point, I RTFA and, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like they're just supporting another open standard like they've done so many times before. How is their support of MPI different than how they support SOAP via the.NET Framework?
I tend to use public sites that don't keep track of ratios of individuals--honor system an all that--and I still always try to keep at least a 1.0 on all torrents, many of them usually end up at 2.0 ~ 3.0 just because ratios build up very quickly on popular torrens overnight on broadband connections.
It seems like from the posts the BT community has known about this for a while and it really doesn't seem to matter too much. Most downloaders who have at least a basic understanding of how torrents work will keep those downloads going caust it's just a nice thing to do.
We really have a huge lack of evidence about global warming. The earth is warming yes, but are we causing it? The eart has gone to drastic changes over the course of several million years. Within the past 10,000 years, glaicers have formed and receeded in northern Europe and North America. Not too long ago, Chicago was covered in ice. It's why there is so much good farm land up near Indiana.
The fact is that humans, even with all our pollution, can't put a dent in our planets ecosystem compared to the power of one rhylothetic (sp?) volcanic eruption.
On top of this, many geologists believe that we are currently in an Ice Age and we're on the cooling side of it!
You know I've never owned a console. My parents never bought me a Nintendo, Sega Genesis, etc. I had a 286 computer, and several years later I got a 486 with a 2x CD-rom drive!
I still get all the video games jokes in Simpsons and Family Guy because I did play Blaster Master, Contra, Sonic, etc, just not in my own house and I've actually never beaten a single Mario game. I also played around with a lot of emulators. Remember the days of iNes? When Nesticle and Genecyst came out, those were the shit. People take them for granted these days.
I play Dance Dance Revolution a lot, however I use Step Mania for Linux, avoiding the need of a console. A good PSX/USB connector and some dance pads are all you need, plus a torrent of all the DDR mixes in Step Mania format.
I think if I do buy a console, it will be the PS3 when it comes out. I really never liked the X-box, and not just because I hate Microsoft. I've always hated the feel of the controller, even the newer ones. They're as big as the entire damn Dreamcast system...and I really wish Sega didn't drop the Dreamcast line.
Maybe if I click on enough ads I'll get a "Free XBox 360" as well as a "Free iPod" (which still wouldn't play my oggs!) however I think I'll just hold out for my first console to be a PS3.
You guys look at the system requirements for this? They recommend dual Opterons.
You know, being a lowly Computer Science major struggling to get through graduate school, I've often had dreams about making a small independent film. I've also had more realistic dreams of owning an Athlon64 system. Maybe the two dreams aren't too far off.
One day I hope to have a masters and begin teaching, and in the mean time I'll simply write my master screen play. With high quality digital video equipment getting cheaper, one day all I'll need is a decent camera, boom mike, power Linux box and some college drama students who will work for less than minimum wage.
Ah hell, who am I kidding. I'm way too lazy for all that.
Damn. I like the part of the site that says "Gmail is under heavey development" yet it hasn't had a release since '99.
It's interesting to not that if you look up Gentoo, you'll also find a file manager called Gentoo (on top of the Linux distribution). And the really funny thing is that if you use gentoo, the gentoo file manager is actually in the package tree!
Man, I'd so lose an iPod Nano. They're so tiny. I have a hard enough time not losing my cell phone and it's not tiny.
Having a little postage stamp photo album, it's no so useless as the article makes it out to be. You have wallet sized photos right? Just think of it has a smaller digital wallet. You could use it for "Hey guess what this is" type games, you know where you take photo of something really close up.
Oh and scratches...you know I had a problem with my Dell laptop (runs Gentoo:-) and my roommate had a problem with his iBook where the keyboard would actually leave little indents in the screen. My roommate used the piece of foam that came with his laptop to prevent it, until he lost the piece of foam.
I don't know if the iPod screen is the same way, but that is annoying. I'd hate to have keys up aganist my iPod and then see a key impression in the screen.
I remember one think I learned from my 500 level network security class was something very basic, don't let users execute unapproved binaries.
Even in Windows as far back as NT you could use the NTConfig.pol to create a list of approved binaries that the user could execute. In more modern XP/2003 system, you can use Group Policies, but the principal is the same.
Sure word.exe could get replaced by a malicious program, but the only way for that to happen is for the user to have rights to replace word.exe and that shouldn't happen with the proper domain setup and systems that are kept up to date with patches.
Home systems are harder. It would be nice if we could adopt the same model. At home I use nothing by Linux systems and use a regular user account daily, only going to root when I need to. On corporate systems you can also take the extra step to limit the regular users abilities to compile and execute their own binaries.
With XP Home edition, we see the complete suspension of NTFS permissions as well as a host of other things that would save a lot of users a lot of trouble. If people used XP Pro as a regular user and only ran programs as administrator when necessary (and that involves the discretion of not installing tons of free programs that come loaded with spyware), we'd have a lot less security problems on home system.
Windows Vista is supposed to add in a lot of stuff that defaults to this functionality which should help, however what's really needed is more education for home users, in simply straightforward means, to help prevent a lot of these problems.
I mean don't get me wrong, it looks cool and everything and is fairly priced aganist the other iPods, but I have a tendency to loose things. I'm surprised I've even hung onto my cell phone this long. If I had a music player as small as a bussiness card, I'd loose it eventually...and then I'd cry.
I think its cool that we are all ready at the point where we can crash probes into comets and examine them. I wonder how long it will be until we can actually pull a comet into earth orbit and mine it for resources.
Slashdot Mirror
People aren't going to jump on either the HD-DVD or Blue-ray wagon for at least a year or so. The first buyers will be the geeks and peeps with enough money. On top of that, most consumers don't have plasma displays or projectors (although a growing number do have HD-TVs and they're a common item at Wal-Mart. In a few years they'll probably phase out regular TVs just like 900Mhz phones phased out older cordless models).
The quality of existing DVDs is quite amazing and I think most people will be happy with it for a while. The question comes with compatibility. Consumers want to only have to buy one version of something. Will the HD-DVD/Blue-ray they purchase work at their friend's house?
Personally I like the Blue-ray standard. It's a massive amount of data crammed onto a single disc. It's interesting that the article states that "...said the HD DVD format would make it easier for consumers to copy high-definition movies to computer hard drives...". So will HD-DVD have a less restrictive DRM than Blue-ray or are we talking about media size again?
I doubt both standards will stick around like DVD-R/DVD+R, because as I said earlier, people only want one universal format for content they purchase. One will be here five years from now and another, like laser discs, will end up at your local used book store in huge bins selling for $5 a pop.
You know, I am annoyed by the onslaught of Google articles on here, but maybe there are so many articles because they are great innovators. Google doesn't necessarally makes new software, but take an old idea and make it much better, or work in a different way that may or may not be more efficient.
People complain about Google possibly turning into another Microsoft, but I say that may not be a bad thing. Two giants with totally different ideas about engineering, research and design are now trying to grab a hold onto the same markets. There are similarities too; both companies to a lot of live testing with their consumers.
My revenue on google Adwords hasn't been all that great, so at least now if I desired, I could try a different option from a major provider. I like this and I'd hope to see more healthy competition between Google and Microsoft.
Every one in a while I still get those e-mails about the goverment trying to tax e-mail. Anyone in the networking community knows this is logistically impossible due to the nature of the SMTP protocol, the Internet, etc. In the same way many believe it is also difficult if not impossible, for the government to truly censor the Internet.
Here comes China. China is only one of many countries that filters Internet and media content. It's no where near as extreme say North Korea, which doesn't allow ANYTHING in. China has an economy that's integrated into the world economy and therefore needs the Internet available to the public in order for commerce. There are always ways around such filtering, back to the nature of the Internet, however it comes at a steep price if you get caught.
Free speech is valuable and is feared by governments who want to keep control. In many westernized countries, we take it for granted.
I made the mistake of wanting to get real world experience before I went back and get my masters. I really hate the real world. Don't get me wrong, I've gotten tons of good experience and my job really isn't too bad.
Even before I started working there I was all ready enrolled in graduate school. I really want to teach. I enjoy computer science. I realize teaching is a lot more work, but I think it's easier to deal with burnout in an academic environment.
There is always an end in sight. You know there is a break between spring and summer classes and that there is time to recoup for the next semester. During my undergraduate degree, I really enjoyed the lab work and the research I was given a stipend to do.
40 hours a week sitting down at a box and then getting to spend your breaks outside with all the smokers with nothing but buildings and urban sprawl around you. I'd much rather be on a campus where I could take my breaks by walking through the park on campus.
To quote one of my favorite movies: "...Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about about mission statements..." (Office Space)
Right now I'm really burnt out at work. With my 5 personal days a year, I all ready had to use two on a wedding and another as a sick day. I have two more days off between now and next summer.
I like the line from the movie Office Space about how man was not meant to
This is just a general game design question. Have any of you worked on Adventure games (Kings Quest, Full Throttle, Star Trek: Judgment Rights, etc). Adventure games were my favorite genre and were part of the reason I started down a path that led to my computer science degree. Now days, it seems like that genre is dead with many games of that era that were scheduled for sequels in eternal limbo (the Tex Murphy series and Gabrial Knight are examples).
My question is, what do you think led to the move away from this genre? Comsumer demand? Replay value? Do you see a return to the old inventory/pont-n-click/story driven games eventually in the future?
Looking at the prices, I took the plunge into getting a projector. My apartment has a decently sized living room. At first I bought a DLP project, but my hearing is still really good and that high pitch sound (I assume it is from the color wheel) hurts my ears. I returned the InFocus X2 (didn't realize there was a 10% restocking fee..$80..watch out for those) and invested in a ViewSonic 1024x768. I liked the fact that the InFocus had DVI, however the ViewSonic only has VGA and Component (Question: Is the input from Component equal in quality to that of DVI input?)
:)
It worked out really well. After a while I bought a mount (don't buy the Universal mounts from eBay. They suck ass. I got mine working eventually, but it took a lot of work!)
I don't have a screen. The image measures 7 1/2 feet wide by..something I can't remember. The quality is spetecular. I was watching Akira last night and was amazed by all the detail. I felt like I was in a theater. My wall is white with bumps however sitting about 5 or 6 feet away on my couch, I really don't notice it. If it bothers you, hanging an ironed white bedsheet works really well. I disagree with the previous post because you really don't need to spend that much money of an expensive screen.
That combined with a 600 Watt Onkyo reciever and a Linux box with an SBLive (digital out) and Gentoo Linux makes up my entertainment system. I have a TV tuner I should probably hook up at some point to get broadcast, but most of the stuff I watch I download (Cable Internet, but not TV) or buy on DVD.
The projectors do require a lot more maintance than a regular TV. You gotta get a small vacume to clean out the filter every 100 hours and you have to change out the blub every once in a while which can cost up to $400!
Still, I am very happy with my investment. Overall I spent under $2000 (not including the Computer which was an old one I had) and have a pimptastic theater system to which my friends love to invite themselves over to every weekend
One thing that is true from the earlier post, light will drench the image. I got some thick black curtains, but even then I'll usually watch movies with a lot of dark scenes in the evening cause they show up better.
Overall, I'd take my projector setup to a plasma screen any day.
SumDog
I download most of my stuff using bitorrent these days and haven't touched Gnutella in a long time, although Limewire was my favorite client for Linux. A few months back I would use it from time to time to grab a song I heard on the radio. I just remember it being filled with lots of endless loops, blank files and songs with random glitches placed it and distributed by publisher groups.
There is so much music out there in single serving format (I still think they should have $1 CD downloads..Britney Spears..yea her CDs would be worth about a dollar). Although the DRM stuff is annoying, at least it shows that the music industry is trying to adapt to what consumers really want.
Gnutella protocols are really goind the way of the casual user who used their machine to browse the internet, use e-mail, download porn and play video games. They're more than happy to pay 99 cents (or however much it's gone up to now) to download DRMed music.
The true people who copy tons of illegal software and copyrighted music will move on to Bittorrent or continuing using usenet and irc fservs. They'll be the next target for the RIAA of course, but stuff keeps moving fast enough that nerds, audiophiles and the such will be a few steps ahead of them.
On to other ramblings...
I live in Chattanooga, a decent sized city in Tennessee, but no where near the size of Nashville or even Knoxville. I tried to find a job in Atlanta, mainly because I like large cities and I like mass transit.
Don't get me wrong, I love driving and own a 5spd and do most of my own car work, but sometimes it would be nice to be able to get drunk at a bar, stumble onto a train and get off only a block or two from your apartment.
Atlanta has a rail and subway system, Marta, but it doesn't really blanket the city all that well. I have a friend who lives down there and it's a 20 minute drive to work, even in the thick traffic, and 45 minute train ride with two transfers.
I really wish the rail era in this country didn't die the way it did. It would have been nice during the Interstate construction , if they had placed two high speed rail tracks in the median. I realize the Interstates were designed to move troops and also be used as a stage to land airplanes, but I think both could have still been accomplished with an integrated rail system.
I like the way Chicago's rail system is setup. Their rails run in the medians in the Interstate and they even have train stations in the medians with pedestrian bridges above them connecting them to the streets.
A good mass transit system (keyword good; well designed) with a fair ticket price or monthly passes is a really great way to help reduce pollution, unclog traffic ways and it lets you read a book or play with your laptop on the way to work. The trouble is we're a country conditioned to use cars and we like control, so many people will continue to drive those gas hogging SUVs with just themselves and five empty seats on the 20min drive to work every morning.
Sumit
Well there is aspell/pspell (which replaced the older ispell) which is the standard library most Linux apps link into, but you're right. There is no system wide spell check like Mac OSX has. I also like the OSX system wide speech synth you can use with almost any application. My old roommate used it to read off Something Awful pages while we ate dinner. He really hated Safari (and Konquror for that matter) and wished the option existed in Firefox as well.
I think the most useful feature of the google toolbar is the spell check. Many places, such as slashdot, don't have spell check and some places, such as Livejournal, have spell check but it really sucks.
I realize now that there are probably many other firefox extentions out there with spell check, but the first one I came across and used was in the google toolbar.
I currently use it with Gentoo and on some firefox releases I had some trouble with the toolbar crashing/hanging as well as the spell check correction box appearing half way down the page. I am anxious to try out this new release and see if a lot of these issue have been solved.
My friend Nick just bought an iPod. He went ahead and got the mini instead of the nano and I'm glad he did after reading this article. I really like the iPod interface, and if it played oggs I'd probably have one myself.
t ectors.html
I think what makes this design flaw so bad is that it really should have been picked up during the testing phase. If you get a group of test subjects to use it for a month, how could they not get feedback when the screens start to scratch and break.
I've read some post talking about nice cases you can get for your iPod such as this one:
http://www.theinvisibleshield.com/ipod_screen_pro
It's a nice case, transparent and looked like a good solution, however its something that should have come with the unit itself.
I have a feeling this device was rushed into the market on its coolness factor and not enough time was spent testing and developing it for real world use. It reminds me of those Apple cubes that came out years ago with a touch sensetitive power button that had the tendency to turn of if you waved something warm across them.
I love Apples. I wish I could affoard an iBook, however they do seem to place a lot in style and looks over actual preformance and cost in many cases, which I think has been one of the short falls of many of their designs.
Sumdog
I like the concept of doing more on the client side, making web applications actually feel like applications instead of static pages that have to refresh everytime you change a combo box.
However, from the comments I've read, AJAX seems like a bad solution. First off, I HATE XML. It's overly verbose and wastes tons of bandwidth. People say its human readable, but have you ever tried to open an abiword document in a text editor? Human readable?
You know what's human readable? LDIF. It's the stanrd format for importing and exporting information from an X.500 directory (LDAP, Novel Directory, etc). It's human readable, the dn gives you a location where the information fits into the tree and it eats up a lot less space than XML (although there is a lot of repeated data and wasted space still)
XML does have advantages over properity text and binary protocols in being standaridzed with DTDs/schema, however it still feels like bloat. You ever look at a raw SOAP request? It's not pretty. It's actually quite distrubting.
Still, overcomming the logistic of javascript implementations on multiple browsers is quit a task and there are many engines and concepts, AJAX being only one of them, that seem to do a good job of takling the issue. As far as XML based protocols, I try to avoid them at all cost.
Sumdog
Actually, you can now validate. There are still around 11 errors when I checked, but they unblocked the validator!
Even without w3, you can still valdiate using Firefox using
http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/
I don't understand why the parent has been moderated as a troll. Over half of my collection is in OGGs. It is a good and solid format and there are cheap decoder chips out there. It's not unreasonable that if a player supports MP3, WMV and ACC, then why not OGG?
Well to be fair, the last article talked about why LSB is awful and shouldn't be implemented. This article mentions the other side of it. You're right it's not exactly a dupe, but then again, there's nothing really new here.
Microsoft has always embrased open standards. They "embrace and extend." They have DHCP servers...sure some old versions of Windows don't obtain DHCP leases correctly, but they've been patches and fixes here and there and everything seems to work.
.NET client to communicate with nuSOAP for PHP about a year ago...worked fine unless you wanted to send an array).
.NET Framework?
ActiveDirectry is a standard X.500 protocol...with a couple of interesting extras which the Samba team is still trying to work with.
SOAP, well to be honest I never liked SOAP...or XML, but Microsoft uses it and it sorta works with other SOAP implementations...sorta. (I tried using a
The fact is with any open standard, you're gonna have problems with getting the implementations correct between ever device, OS and embedded that implements it. But back to the point, I RTFA and, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like they're just supporting another open standard like they've done so many times before. How is their support of MPI different than how they support SOAP via the
SumDog
I tend to use public sites that don't keep track of ratios of individuals--honor system an all that--and I still always try to keep at least a 1.0 on all torrents, many of them usually end up at 2.0 ~ 3.0 just because ratios build up very quickly on popular torrens overnight on broadband connections.
It seems like from the posts the BT community has known about this for a while and it really doesn't seem to matter too much. Most downloaders who have at least a basic understanding of how torrents work will keep those downloads going caust it's just a nice thing to do.
We really have a huge lack of evidence about global warming. The earth is warming yes, but are we causing it? The eart has gone to drastic changes over the course of several million years. Within the past 10,000 years, glaicers have formed and receeded in northern Europe and North America. Not too long ago, Chicago was covered in ice. It's why there is so much good farm land up near Indiana.
The fact is that humans, even with all our pollution, can't put a dent in our planets ecosystem compared to the power of one rhylothetic (sp?) volcanic eruption.
On top of this, many geologists believe that we are currently in an Ice Age and we're on the cooling side of it!
Never owned a Console
You know I've never owned a console. My parents never bought me a Nintendo, Sega Genesis, etc. I had a 286 computer, and several years later I got a 486 with a 2x CD-rom drive!
I still get all the video games jokes in Simpsons and Family Guy because I did play Blaster Master, Contra, Sonic, etc, just not in my own house and I've actually never beaten a single Mario game. I also played around with a lot of emulators. Remember the days of iNes? When Nesticle and Genecyst came out, those were the shit. People take them for granted these days.
I play Dance Dance Revolution a lot, however I use Step Mania for Linux, avoiding the need of a console. A good PSX/USB connector and some dance pads are all you need, plus a torrent of all the DDR mixes in Step Mania format.
I think if I do buy a console, it will be the PS3 when it comes out. I really never liked the X-box, and not just because I hate Microsoft. I've always hated the feel of the controller, even the newer ones. They're as big as the entire damn Dreamcast system...and I really wish Sega didn't drop the Dreamcast line.
Maybe if I click on enough ads I'll get a "Free XBox 360" as well as a "Free iPod" (which still wouldn't play my oggs!) however I think I'll just hold out for my first console to be a PS3.
You guys look at the system requirements for this? They recommend dual Opterons.
You know, being a lowly Computer Science major struggling to get through graduate school, I've often had dreams about making a small independent film. I've also had more realistic dreams of owning an Athlon64 system. Maybe the two dreams aren't too far off.
One day I hope to have a masters and begin teaching, and in the mean time I'll simply write my master screen play. With high quality digital video equipment getting cheaper, one day all I'll need is a decent camera, boom mike, power Linux box and some college drama students who will work for less than minimum wage.
Ah hell, who am I kidding. I'm way too lazy for all that.
Damn. I like the part of the site that says "Gmail is under heavey development" yet it hasn't had a release since '99.
It's interesting to not that if you look up Gentoo, you'll also find a file manager called Gentoo (on top of the Linux distribution). And the really funny thing is that if you use gentoo, the gentoo file manager is actually in the package tree!
Man, I'd so lose an iPod Nano. They're so tiny. I have a hard enough time not losing my cell phone and it's not tiny.
:-) and my roommate had a problem with his iBook where the keyboard would actually leave little indents in the screen. My roommate used the piece of foam that came with his laptop to prevent it, until he lost the piece of foam.
Having a little postage stamp photo album, it's no so useless as the article makes it out to be. You have wallet sized photos right? Just think of it has a smaller digital wallet. You could use it for "Hey guess what this is" type games, you know where you take photo of something really close up.
Oh and scratches...you know I had a problem with my Dell laptop (runs Gentoo
I don't know if the iPod screen is the same way, but that is annoying. I'd hate to have keys up aganist my iPod and then see a key impression in the screen.
I like the 2nd argument, "Enumerating Badness"
I remember one think I learned from my 500 level network security class was something very basic, don't let users execute unapproved binaries.
Even in Windows as far back as NT you could use the NTConfig.pol to create a list of approved binaries that the user could execute. In more modern XP/2003 system, you can use Group Policies, but the principal is the same.
Sure word.exe could get replaced by a malicious program, but the only way for that to happen is for the user to have rights to replace word.exe and that shouldn't happen with the proper domain setup and systems that are kept up to date with patches.
Home systems are harder. It would be nice if we could adopt the same model. At home I use nothing by Linux systems and use a regular user account daily, only going to root when I need to. On corporate systems you can also take the extra step to limit the regular users abilities to compile and execute their own binaries.
With XP Home edition, we see the complete suspension of NTFS permissions as well as a host of other things that would save a lot of users a lot of trouble. If people used XP Pro as a regular user and only ran programs as administrator when necessary (and that involves the discretion of not installing tons of free programs that come loaded with spyware), we'd have a lot less security problems on home system.
Windows Vista is supposed to add in a lot of stuff that defaults to this functionality which should help, however what's really needed is more education for home users, in simply straightforward means, to help prevent a lot of these problems.
I mean don't get me wrong, it looks cool and everything and is fairly priced aganist the other iPods, but I have a tendency to loose things. I'm surprised I've even hung onto my cell phone this long. If I had a music player as small as a bussiness card, I'd loose it eventually...and then I'd cry.
I think its cool that we are all ready at the point where we can crash probes into comets and examine them. I wonder how long it will be until we can actually pull a comet into earth orbit and mine it for resources.