It sounds to me like this little gadget is the modern implementation of a narrowband television. There are still guys who dink around with this stuff (indeed, I've started to assemble the parts for one myself), for fun you could try the Narrow Band Television Association website.
That being said, it seems like the format can't possibly be that difficult to determine. If the authors posted.wav files of some of the audio tracks, I suspect that an afternoon's worth of work by someone familiar with NBTV would crack the modulation wide open. After all, the box itself is obviously very cheap, it probably has very little CPU power, it can't be that
complicated.
It's a pity they don't use the normal mini-CDs, if they did I might buy one just for the novelty of being able to make my own CDs. I think they missed a bit of a hacker market by deliberately disabling this possibility.
I'm always faintly amused when an "expert" takes the time out his/her busy schedule to tell us something so obvious and/or useless.
In the practical matters, video games are already on a par with television and Hollywood. Major game releases can expect to have revenues which approach those of major feature films. In their target demographic (teenage and older males) they are already occupying a greater portion of their conciousness than other media.
To argue that they aren't going to be as popular as films is pointless: they already are.
But what really seems silly to me is the following quote:
She told her audience that games had the potential to change people's lives, offering them the chance to experience a wide range of emotions in a safe environment.
To this I would merely counter with a question: "What movie have you seen recently that changed your life?" C'mon, let's get real. Even if movies do have that power, most of them fall way short of that standard, and yet they remain popular and engaging. Frankly, I don't need movies to tell me how to feel, or to teach me about myself: I have a real life with real family and real experiences to teach me that.
But what I do not have is the ability to pilot a light-speed fighter against impossible odds!
It's not exactly earth-shattering to claim that games should be better. They should be. It doesn't take an expert to observe that video gaming still remains a male-dominated activity. But the simple fact is that video games and movies have made a pretty good living out of catering to
their audience, and it seems strange to argue that some revolution needs to occur before it will really take off.
It just goes to show you that you can prove anything with statistics. Let's spin this another
way. STS-107 was the 113th shuttle mission. For
the sake of argument, let's assume each mission
had 7 people aboard, and that they were all
distinct individuals. 14 have died because of
the Challenger and Columbia disasters. This places your odds of returning from a shuttle mission at about 1.7%. If we take the number
of astronauts as 600, we get 2.3%.
The number presented for fatalities due to automobile seem absurd. 110 fatalities per million passenger miles means that there is one
fatality every 9090 miles per passenger. Whatever
the number 110 is supposed to represent, it isn't
fatalities per million passenger miles.
The usual rate quoted for automobiles is 0.75 fatalities per 100 million passenger miles.
I'm new to the world of programming, and, having had luck with the Dummies series before, thought this the best place to start off.
and continues...
I've read countless books and online tutorials on QBASIC, C++, PHP, and other various languages.
These two statements aren't precisely contradictory, but they do seem to be statements that imply opposite ends of the knowledge spectrum.
Ultimately the review has little to say other than as a book for dummies, they seemed to have overestimated the skills and knowledge of at least one dummy. How useful this is as a review is questionable.
I'll leave off the obvious joke about the missing Is in the title.
I'm now firmly in the trenches of middle age, and so have begun to succumb to that tendancy that we all get as we grow older to gaze back upon my life and to tell the kids of today how great they have it now. This usually begins with the phrase Back when I was a kid...
Back when I was a kid, microcomputers were just beginning to be something that my super rich friends could get. Computers like an Apple II, which I had no chance of affording.
Then the Atari came out. Not only was it cheaper, but it had really kick/ass graphics like Star Raiders. So I worked for nearly a year, earned $400 and bought my first computer. I had already learned BASIC on other machines, so I saved a bit longer and got a BASIC cartridge. A few months more, and I had a cassette deck to store my programs on.
About that time I started to learn about how the graphics architecture of the machine worked. I bought a copy of De Re Atari. I got their assembler/editor cartridge and started to write some programs of my own. I read the ROM listings. I remember writing my first truly useful program: a program for copying copy protected cassette tapes so I could backup my copy of Jawbreaker.
I goofed around with that silly computer for years. By the time I was finished, there was really very little about the system that I did not understand. And that's probably the last computer that I truly did understand.
It's simply not possible to understand all the inner workings of a computer like that any more. Or, maybe it is possible, but it simply isn't worth your time. You (or your kid) probably have other things to do with computers, like make web pages, edit photos, or make videos. Computers have become a doorway to doing other things, and
like most doorways, people don't give them much
thought anymore. I sometimes find that a bit
sad, but then I think of all the cool things kids
can do. My nineteen year old swears that he didn't want to learn to program, but he has a webpage with all sorts of javascript madness on it. He's made videos. He's photoshopped photos of his friends. In short, he's doing what he likes to do: taking the computer for what it is, and using it to do what he wants. I can't say that I see much wrong with that.
I guess I should give some recommendations for those people whose kids really think they do want to learn how to program. They could do a lot worse than to use Python. It's a
fairly reasonable language that is interactive and enables you to do fun stuff nearly immediately. If the kid is interested in making games, they can use Pygame, which I've found to be very pleasant to play with, and is available on many platforms. Download some example games, and then help them figure out how
they work. Change some of the graphics to use
graphics of their own. Encourage them to share their work with others, perhaps using the web.
Answer questions. Be enthused. Help get a club or group started at their school. Be a parent.:-)
Just to put some perspective on my background, I've taken calligraphy courses, both for Roman alphabets and for Chinese. I admire beautiful, clear handwriting as much as next person, and I believe that writing letters "the old fashioned" way has something to be said for it in terms of "romance".
But we don't send kids to school to teach them to write because of the "romance" of hand lettering. We teach them it because it is a valuable communication skill.
First of all, let's examine the legibility of cursive writing. I'm sure we have all got a relative whose writing is absolutely illegible, and odds are they were writing cursive. Cursive is simply harder to read. That should be evident by its near total absence from any kind of print media. If cursive writing were easier to read, you can bet that all the paperback books that you
see would be typeset with cursive fonts. You don't see that, and the reason is obvious: you'd take a dull spoon to your eyes and gouge them out after only a few pages.
So if it's hard to read, then why bother learning to write that way? Well, the justification is usually that it is faster. The reality is that most people can only write cursive letters about 10% faster than they can print them. I know that I can print very nearly as fast as I can write cursive, and more importantly, you can decipher my printing, even when I am in a hurry, even when you have to read pages of it.
You want to do kids a favor? Get them typing. They will have neater work with less effort and fatigue. They'll produce work faster. They'll have more time to concentrate on what they write rather than how they write.
Firstly, I'm an irregularly active cacher (78 finds or so
at last count). I find the hobby to be a lot of fun, and good exercise. It gets me motivated to go to parks I might overlook and to hike deeper into them than I normally would. I've also attended numerous local caching events, and met a lot of nice people.
In all the 78 caches that I've found, I've never seen any sign that the placement of this cache was even visible, much less causing any damage to the surrounding environment with a single exception. I once found the contents of a cache scattered all over the side of a hill. Why? Because somebody had not read the rules, and had left cookies in the cache. Oh well. What did I do? I carefully gathered every scrap of stuff and repackaged it all. Problem solved.
Caching is an environmentally friendly activity. It gets people out to parks they normally wouldn't, and gets them to pick up trash in those
parks. Just one motivated individual can clean up
a lot of trash, and caching puts hundreds or thousands of them out every weekend.
I do understand the motivation in trying to limit damage to sensitive areas, say, where endangered
birds or plants can be found, but cachers are more
than willing to try to adopt these reasonable restrictions. There is currently a ban on geocaching in national parks. Guess what? You won't find any caches in national parks. I hope that state parks do not follow suit in making a general ban, but instead work with geocachers to
try to establish reasonable guidelines for the
placement of caches. The idea of moving caches
at least once every 12 months to prevent trail
formation is a sane and reasonable solution, and
I doubt that any cacher would have any issues
with that.
The effects are pretty cool. Great fight sequences. Lots of action. Yes, more of the classic Matrix effect, but done more aggressively and with good impact.
The general storyline is heading in what I view as a fairly interesting (but ultimately predictable) direction. The theme is worthy of real science fiction.
Now, on to the not so good stuff.
At two different points in the film, the story is advanced by two individuals explaining what is going on with a long monologue. These monologues break the action and create unnecessary pauses. I think they represent poor screenplay, because if the movie were really done well, you wouldn't need to stop the action and explain what is going on.
There is a very clumsy set of editting near the end of the film where three teams go off in different directions. The action is very muddled on screen.
At least one major event occurs off screen, and we only hear about it second hand.
There is one long techno dance sequence that makes me think I'm watching a Zima commercial.
Overall, I give the film a B. It delivered what I went to see. The irritations are nowhere near as bad as watching the love scenes in Episode II.
Can it really be possible that science education standards have fallen this low?
Let's begin slowly:
Phones generate noise by vibrating. This vibration moves air back and forth and generates sound waves.
If you harnessed the energy from these vibrations, the phone wouldn't make any noise. The energy that would have gone to creating acoustic energy is no diverted to restoring the batteries charge.
Of course, there are losses in any system, so the energy rechannelled back to recharging the battery is some fraction of the energy output. Since that charge originally came from the battery, this means that the battery loses charge just the same, even while it is not providing the audio cue that sort of makes the whole thing worthwhile.
The proper use of this idea would be to use the normal motion (such as bouncing around in your purse or bouncing around the front seat of your car) to recharge the battery.
SGI laughed at the unassuming threat of the video chipsets, thinking that they would never be as fast as brute force. Even Pixar thought the same [siliconinvestor.com]. Boy, were they wrong though. You can set up a cheap-ass render farm for about $250k, taking up minimal space that can do the same job as a SGI render farm that costs a cool $2 million (Shuttle SFF PC w/ 3 gig CPU + ATI 9700). Of course, there's still the software side.
Characterizing SGI as 'brute force' is unfair: many of the engineers responsible for development of SGI's graphics hardware can now be gainfully employed at places like ATI and nVidia. They weren't all "holding back" in the years that they worked at SGI: they were held back by the business model that SGI promoted and which drove their product development. Companies like 3dfx, ATI and nVidia are driven by a different business model, and since it involved delivering powerful graphics chips to the masses driven by the demonstrated desire for more realistic gaming experiences, they've literally cleaned SGIs clock. Similarly, the speed of Intel and AMD cpus have been advanced by participation in the highly competitive commercial market. It doesn't take a huge prophet
to judge the outcome of this arms race: I did so nearly a decade ago.
The quoted comments by Tom Duff are properly described as Tom Duff's, not Pixar's as a whole, but many of the comments he makes are correct: the amount of effort that are spent per pixel is many thousands of times higher than the amount of effort that can be harnessed with even the most advanced boards by nVidia. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that the presence of advanced computer graphics hardware with programmable shading is a terrific development for the film industry, and every studio and software development group is trying to discover new ways to use such hardware to reduce their development time and costs.
How is limiting the number of sales outlets for your product supposed to improve your profitability? How is making the purchase of your products more difficult an improvement for the consumer?
It seems rather obvious to me that if their retail stores are being undercut by Internet sales, the obvious thing is to jettison the unprofitable stores and sell directly to consumers through the
Internet.
Contributions to BSD don't really help us as much because they can just be forked off into proprietary OS'es like Microsoft - which they will promptly use to put the reams to us with custom extensions. It would be much nicer if they went all GPL and nothing else.
This is just the wooly-headed mindless nonsense that seems so prevalent amongst the stylish Slashdot crowd. Perhaps you could explain BSD licensed software is less useful than GPL'ed software. If you don't like using BSD licensed software, don't. If you don't want to use BSD-derived software with lots of custom extensions, don't. But it's hard to imagine how
software with fewer restrictions on its use and distribution could somehow be less useful than software with morerestrictions.
Scanned documents might be fine for readers, but what if you're looking for "oh, you know, that one line in the book, where the dude was talking about melons."
It might help to actually understand what you are talking about before you are so quick to dismiss it. DJVU does support searchable text, which can be inserted automatically via OCR. The advantage of this is that the OCR need not be 100% accurate to still be useful (vastly more useful and accurate than the indices in most books, for instance).
They obviously publish articles written by people with their head up their asses.
Honestly, just what is Mr. J. Bradford DeLong thinking? To characterize Project Gutenberg as a failure is just imbecilic. From PG's own pages,
203 ebooks were released in October 2002. 1975 new books in 2002 (1240 in 2001). It's a lot of work to produce even one book, and PG is churning them out at a pretty good clip for an entirely volunteer effort.
Even as it is, I've found PG to be pretty damned
useful. It's kind of nice to be able to grep
the collected works of Shakespeare. Or Darwin. Or Conan Doyle. Or H. G. Wells. Or Jules Verne.
Or Charles Dickens. Or Frank. L. Baum.
Despite advances in technology, scanning, OCRing and proofreading books remains a very labor intensive process, and it is a boring, often thankless process as well. The Million Book project wants to take a somewhat different approach to providing digital books: they actually scan the books and store them in DJVU format (a very nice format similar to PDF). They can do OCR on it to provide searchable text, but such text doesn't have to be 100% accurate to be effective. Most of the time you print and read the original scans. After all, some publisher
went to the trouble of carefully typesetting the
book and proofreading it once, why bother to do
it all again?
I first became aware of this project and technology when I met Brewster Kahle as he drove the Internet Bookmobile around the U.S., going to libraries and schools trying to drum up interest in Eldred vs. Ashcroft. A compressed version of
Alice in Wonderland in DJVU format is about 5 megabytes (the same as a single MP3) including the illustrations and fancy typesetting. He could print and bind a copy of it for about $2 in materials, on demand using an HP laser printer out of the back of the mobile. The binding isn't amazing, but consider the possibility of having literally any book in any small town library in any place in the world. It's an
exciting idea, and one that technology is only making easier and cheaper. You can get a decent scanner for $100 (even one small enough to hook to a laptop and take to a library). You can scan a book in an evening. And after you do, the file can be converted to a simple, easy to use format that everyone can use. Forever. One evening. One person. One book.
Despite the setback of Eldred v. Ashcroft, more and more books are going to be made available by the true philanthropists of the world: the volunteers who give something of their own time
to make the world a better place. I wonder what
Mr. DeLong has done to make the world a better place...
The problem with this kind of compromise is that it isn't a compromise at all: it simply hands the recording industry additional copyrights without giving consumers anything, even with laws already on the books. Why? Because of the DMCA of course.
Under the DMCA it is a crime to circumvent the copy protection schemes of a digitally protected work. It doesn't matter if the original material is in the public domain. You cannot exercise your unregulated uses of a public domain work that is (for instance) distributed in the form of a DVD encrypted with CSS without breaking a law that can send your butt to jail.
This effectively extends copyrights forever, as there is never any way for you to excercise your rights over works that have entered the public domain. They simply have to continue to release works in digital form.
Any sort of compromise on this front should be viewed carefully and with great scepticism. You can't expect the music, film and publishing industries to act in the best interests of society at large: that's why we have government.
Oh god, did I really just say that? We really are doomed.:-)
PNG has been accepted as far as browser support, but is relatively (in comparison to JPG and GIF) unused. Unless this image format has vastly improved abilities over the conventional method, this is a non-starter.
Don't hold back, tell us what you really think.
This might come as a shock to some, but the entire world isn't the same as you. They have different needs and different desires. In this case, ILM has a need for an image format which allows for high dynamic range and lossy compression. PNG doesn't supply that. TIFF doesn't supply that. JPG doesn't supply that. So they invented their own, and released it for all to use.
They really don't care very much about whether your browser supports it (although a nice plugin
would be a cool idea, and golly, it is possible
because they were kind enough to release the source). They are busy making movies. If you aren't making movies or interested in high dynamic range photography, you probably don't care. But then, they never said you had to care, did they?
Re:good example of advantage of extended copyright
on
Beyond Eldred v. Ashcroft
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The LA Times gives a good example of an advantage of extending film copyright. The grand-daughter of Harold Lloyd is spending a lot of money restoring and digitizing Harold Lloyd films. Without copyright protection, there's no way this could have been done since the guarantee of a return on the investment goes to zero if people can simply share the restored files over the internet.
This is not a good reason for extending copyrights, and it betrays the fact that our dialogue on copyrights is entirely reversed from where it should be.
It is first of all an incredibly tenuous assertion that nobody would go to the trouble of restoring these films without the ability to make a buck from them. For instance, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has recently begun to work on preservation of our film heritage as part of their educational and cultural activities. Many films could be saved from decay by educational institutions.
Second of all, even if it were true that nobody would restore such films without a monetary incentive, there is no reason to believe that the author and/or his heirs should be the only ones to benefit. I think it is pretty safe to say that the market for Harold Lloyd's films would be large, and if they had reverted into the public domain, some publisher could step in and make a fairly good chunk of change off the restoration and pressing of DVDs. If his films reverted to the public domain, the market would take over and inexpensive versions of Lloyd's films would be widely available for the public to enjoy.
The situation now is the same as if all the films had been lost in a fire: everyone is deprived of a significant contributor to early film. You can hardly blame his heirs for trying to make a buck, but arguing that it is the best of all possible outcomes seems horrendously naive.
This sort of subject has been around for years, and gets rediscovered every so often, by a "new" generation of hackers. (Look, for instance, at the big deal made about Duff's Device [tuxedo.org] when C came along.) The problem is, that implementations of these ideas are often non-portable. (To other architectures, languages, or even the next version of the compiler.)
I'm not sure why you mentioned Duff's device. Duff's device is portable. If I had an
ANSI C spec in front of me, I could quote you chapter and verse that explicitly allows it.
I think it is a damn spiffy idiom. It is relatively obvious what it means (at least after you've seen it once) and why you would use it. Yes, modern C compilers may do loop unrolling, so it is probably not something that is worth expending a lot of time on. As Tom Duff told me:
I did it once. I haven't done it since. I don't recommend you do it.
I too believe that code can be too clever, but increasingly I see code written with very little
regard to either space or time behavior. Gratuitously inefficient code should not be tolerated, and understanding idioms like Duff's device puts one in a mindset of where such inefficiences are revealed more often.
The basic problem with this view is its starry eyed idealism.
The ISS isn't our stepping stone to the stars, or if it is, it is like saying your front porch is your portal to the rest of the world. Stepping out on your front porch isn't a significant help to getting half way around the globe, and the ISS isn't anywhere close to getting us to the stars.
This wouldn't be all that bad, except that our ISS stepping stone is a very expensive stepping stone. It costs real money to maintain, money that could be available for other projects, projects that would more reasonably allow us to fufill our goal of reaching out to the stars. The luxury of storing soft squishy humans in orbit is just that: a luxury. In these tough economic times, it makes sense to reconsider spending on luxury items.
I'm just about as gung-ho on space exploration as they get, but I'd like to see more bang for the buck from our science projects.
Significant quantities of caffeinated cola beverages were used to enable the delivery of effects on Star Trek: Nemesis.
Lead technical director I. M. Tyred was quoted as saying:
If it weren't for Coke, Jolt and No-Doze, there is no way we could have finished this stuff on time.
We also credit various snack cakes, particularly those made by Hostess, except for those Pink Snowballs, they suck.
Industry insiders claim that improvements in snack cake and cola technology will soon make the delivery of films with entirely synthetic cast members possible in the next decade, eliminating the need for traditional actors entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
'We haven't talked to a single user who has said they're using [open source] because it's better.'
Perhaps the folks at Microsoft should get out more.
It sounds to me like this little gadget is the modern implementation of a narrowband television. There are still guys who dink around with this stuff (indeed, I've started to assemble the parts for one myself), for fun you could try the Narrow Band Television Association website.
That being said, it seems like the format can't possibly be that difficult to determine. If the authors posted .wav files of some of the audio tracks, I suspect that an afternoon's worth of work by someone familiar with NBTV would crack the modulation wide open. After all, the box itself is obviously very cheap, it probably has very little CPU power, it can't be that
complicated.
It's a pity they don't use the normal mini-CDs, if they did I might buy one just for the novelty of being able to make my own CDs. I think they missed a bit of a hacker market by deliberately disabling this possibility.
I'm always faintly amused when an "expert" takes the time out his/her busy schedule to tell us something so obvious and/or useless.
In the practical matters, video games are already on a par with television and Hollywood. Major game releases can expect to have revenues which approach those of major feature films. In their target demographic (teenage and older males) they are already occupying a greater portion of their conciousness than other media. To argue that they aren't going to be as popular as films is pointless: they already are.
But what really seems silly to me is the following quote:
To this I would merely counter with a question: "What movie have you seen recently that changed your life?" C'mon, let's get real. Even if movies do have that power, most of them fall way short of that standard, and yet they remain popular and engaging. Frankly, I don't need movies to tell me how to feel, or to teach me about myself: I have a real life with real family and real experiences to teach me that.But what I do not have is the ability to pilot a light-speed fighter against impossible odds!
It's not exactly earth-shattering to claim that games should be better. They should be. It doesn't take an expert to observe that video gaming still remains a male-dominated activity. But the simple fact is that video games and movies have made a pretty good living out of catering to their audience, and it seems strange to argue that some revolution needs to occur before it will really take off.
It just goes to show you that you can prove anything with statistics. Let's spin this another way. STS-107 was the 113th shuttle mission. For the sake of argument, let's assume each mission had 7 people aboard, and that they were all distinct individuals. 14 have died because of the Challenger and Columbia disasters. This places your odds of returning from a shuttle mission at about 1.7%. If we take the number of astronauts as 600, we get 2.3%.
The number presented for fatalities due to automobile seem absurd. 110 fatalities per million passenger miles means that there is one fatality every 9090 miles per passenger. Whatever the number 110 is supposed to represent, it isn't fatalities per million passenger miles.
The usual rate quoted for automobiles is 0.75 fatalities per 100 million passenger miles.
Oh, great I always wanted a ringtone THAT I CAN'T FREAKIN' HEAR!!!!
It's really great the the MOSQUITOS can hear 'em!
Bzzzzzt! [ Swats at mosquito ] Bzzzzzt! [ Swats again ] BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT! [ Answers Cell Phone ]"Oh, it's for you..."
It begins..
and continues...These two statements aren't precisely contradictory, but they do seem to be statements that imply opposite ends of the knowledge spectrum.
Ultimately the review has little to say other than as a book for dummies, they seemed to have overestimated the skills and knowledge of at least one dummy. How useful this is as a review is questionable.
I'll leave off the obvious joke about the missing Is in the title.
I'm now firmly in the trenches of middle age, and so have begun to succumb to that tendancy that we all get as we grow older to gaze back upon my life and to tell the kids of today how great they have it now. This usually begins with the phrase Back when I was a kid...
Back when I was a kid, microcomputers were just beginning to be something that my super rich friends could get. Computers like an Apple II, which I had no chance of affording.
Then the Atari came out. Not only was it cheaper, but it had really kick/ass graphics like Star Raiders. So I worked for nearly a year, earned $400 and bought my first computer. I had already learned BASIC on other machines, so I saved a bit longer and got a BASIC cartridge. A few months more, and I had a cassette deck to store my programs on.
About that time I started to learn about how the graphics architecture of the machine worked. I bought a copy of De Re Atari. I got their assembler/editor cartridge and started to write some programs of my own. I read the ROM listings. I remember writing my first truly useful program: a program for copying copy protected cassette tapes so I could backup my copy of Jawbreaker.
I goofed around with that silly computer for years. By the time I was finished, there was really very little about the system that I did not understand. And that's probably the last computer that I truly did understand.
It's simply not possible to understand all the inner workings of a computer like that any more. Or, maybe it is possible, but it simply isn't worth your time. You (or your kid) probably have other things to do with computers, like make web pages, edit photos, or make videos. Computers have become a doorway to doing other things, and like most doorways, people don't give them much thought anymore. I sometimes find that a bit sad, but then I think of all the cool things kids can do. My nineteen year old swears that he didn't want to learn to program, but he has a webpage with all sorts of javascript madness on it. He's made videos. He's photoshopped photos of his friends. In short, he's doing what he likes to do: taking the computer for what it is, and using it to do what he wants. I can't say that I see much wrong with that.
I guess I should give some recommendations for those people whose kids really think they do want to learn how to program. They could do a lot worse than to use Python. It's a fairly reasonable language that is interactive and enables you to do fun stuff nearly immediately. If the kid is interested in making games, they can use Pygame, which I've found to be very pleasant to play with, and is available on many platforms. Download some example games, and then help them figure out how they work. Change some of the graphics to use graphics of their own. Encourage them to share their work with others, perhaps using the web. Answer questions. Be enthused. Help get a club or group started at their school. Be a parent. :-)
Just to put some perspective on my background, I've taken calligraphy courses, both for Roman alphabets and for Chinese. I admire beautiful, clear handwriting as much as next person, and I believe that writing letters "the old fashioned" way has something to be said for it in terms of "romance".
But we don't send kids to school to teach them to write because of the "romance" of hand lettering. We teach them it because it is a valuable communication skill.
First of all, let's examine the legibility of cursive writing. I'm sure we have all got a relative whose writing is absolutely illegible, and odds are they were writing cursive. Cursive is simply harder to read. That should be evident by its near total absence from any kind of print media. If cursive writing were easier to read, you can bet that all the paperback books that you see would be typeset with cursive fonts. You don't see that, and the reason is obvious: you'd take a dull spoon to your eyes and gouge them out after only a few pages.
So if it's hard to read, then why bother learning to write that way? Well, the justification is usually that it is faster. The reality is that most people can only write cursive letters about 10% faster than they can print them. I know that I can print very nearly as fast as I can write cursive, and more importantly, you can decipher my printing, even when I am in a hurry, even when you have to read pages of it.
If we really were interested in teaching children to write fast, we'd have them learning any of a number of shorthand systems.
You want to do kids a favor? Get them typing. They will have neater work with less effort and fatigue. They'll produce work faster. They'll have more time to concentrate on what they write rather than how they write.
Firstly, I'm an irregularly active cacher (78 finds or so at last count). I find the hobby to be a lot of fun, and good exercise. It gets me motivated to go to parks I might overlook and to hike deeper into them than I normally would. I've also attended numerous local caching events, and met a lot of nice people.
In all the 78 caches that I've found, I've never seen any sign that the placement of this cache was even visible, much less causing any damage to the surrounding environment with a single exception. I once found the contents of a cache scattered all over the side of a hill. Why? Because somebody had not read the rules, and had left cookies in the cache. Oh well. What did I do? I carefully gathered every scrap of stuff and repackaged it all. Problem solved.
Caching is an environmentally friendly activity. It gets people out to parks they normally wouldn't, and gets them to pick up trash in those parks. Just one motivated individual can clean up a lot of trash, and caching puts hundreds or thousands of them out every weekend.
I do understand the motivation in trying to limit damage to sensitive areas, say, where endangered birds or plants can be found, but cachers are more than willing to try to adopt these reasonable restrictions. There is currently a ban on geocaching in national parks. Guess what? You won't find any caches in national parks. I hope that state parks do not follow suit in making a general ban, but instead work with geocachers to try to establish reasonable guidelines for the placement of caches. The idea of moving caches at least once every 12 months to prevent trail formation is a sane and reasonable solution, and I doubt that any cacher would have any issues with that.
Give it a try. It's a lot of fun.
My guess it that this is intentional -- you get to do those parts yourself in the game.
It's absurd to center part of the movie experience around a video game. For my $8.50, I expect to see the whole story, not just part of it.
First of all, the good stuff:
The effects are pretty cool. Great fight sequences. Lots of action. Yes, more of the classic Matrix effect, but done more aggressively and with good impact.
The general storyline is heading in what I view as a fairly interesting (but ultimately predictable) direction. The theme is worthy of real science fiction.
Now, on to the not so good stuff.
At two different points in the film, the story is advanced by two individuals explaining what is going on with a long monologue. These monologues break the action and create unnecessary pauses. I think they represent poor screenplay, because if the movie were really done well, you wouldn't need to stop the action and explain what is going on.
There is a very clumsy set of editting near the end of the film where three teams go off in different directions. The action is very muddled on screen.
At least one major event occurs off screen, and we only hear about it second hand.
There is one long techno dance sequence that makes me think I'm watching a Zima commercial.
Overall, I give the film a B. It delivered what I went to see. The irritations are nowhere near as bad as watching the love scenes in Episode II.
Go, geek out, enjoy.
This linkdeals with Apple rather than Linux, but seems topical nonetheless.
If you want games, buy a machine that has games.
Can it really be possible that science education standards have fallen this low?
Let's begin slowly:
The proper use of this idea would be to use the normal motion (such as bouncing around in your purse or bouncing around the front seat of your car) to recharge the battery.
Characterizing SGI as 'brute force' is unfair: many of the engineers responsible for development of SGI's graphics hardware can now be gainfully employed at places like ATI and nVidia. They weren't all "holding back" in the years that they worked at SGI: they were held back by the business model that SGI promoted and which drove their product development. Companies like 3dfx, ATI and nVidia are driven by a different business model, and since it involved delivering powerful graphics chips to the masses driven by the demonstrated desire for more realistic gaming experiences, they've literally cleaned SGIs clock. Similarly, the speed of Intel and AMD cpus have been advanced by participation in the highly competitive commercial market. It doesn't take a huge prophet to judge the outcome of this arms race: I did so nearly a decade ago.
The quoted comments by Tom Duff are properly described as Tom Duff's, not Pixar's as a whole, but many of the comments he makes are correct: the amount of effort that are spent per pixel is many thousands of times higher than the amount of effort that can be harnessed with even the most advanced boards by nVidia. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that the presence of advanced computer graphics hardware with programmable shading is a terrific development for the film industry, and every studio and software development group is trying to discover new ways to use such hardware to reduce their development time and costs.
How is limiting the number of sales outlets for your product supposed to improve your profitability? How is making the purchase of your products more difficult an improvement for the consumer?
It seems rather obvious to me that if their retail stores are being undercut by Internet sales, the obvious thing is to jettison the unprofitable stores and sell directly to consumers through the Internet.
But what do I know?
This is just the wooly-headed mindless nonsense that seems so prevalent amongst the stylish Slashdot crowd. Perhaps you could explain BSD licensed software is less useful than GPL'ed software. If you don't like using BSD licensed software, don't. If you don't want to use BSD-derived software with lots of custom extensions, don't. But it's hard to imagine how software with fewer restrictions on its use and distribution could somehow be less useful than software with morerestrictions.
Next you'll be saying that people will just donate their work to, oh, I dunno, say create an entire operating system from scratch.
We all know that that will never work.
It might help to actually understand what you are talking about before you are so quick to dismiss it. DJVU does support searchable text, which can be inserted automatically via OCR. The advantage of this is that the OCR need not be 100% accurate to still be useful (vastly more useful and accurate than the indices in most books, for instance).
They obviously publish articles written by people with their head up their asses.
Honestly, just what is Mr. J. Bradford DeLong thinking? To characterize Project Gutenberg as a failure is just imbecilic. From PG's own pages, 203 ebooks were released in October 2002. 1975 new books in 2002 (1240 in 2001). It's a lot of work to produce even one book, and PG is churning them out at a pretty good clip for an entirely volunteer effort.
Even as it is, I've found PG to be pretty damned useful. It's kind of nice to be able to grep the collected works of Shakespeare. Or Darwin. Or Conan Doyle. Or H. G. Wells. Or Jules Verne. Or Charles Dickens. Or Frank. L. Baum.
Despite advances in technology, scanning, OCRing and proofreading books remains a very labor intensive process, and it is a boring, often thankless process as well. The Million Book project wants to take a somewhat different approach to providing digital books: they actually scan the books and store them in DJVU format (a very nice format similar to PDF). They can do OCR on it to provide searchable text, but such text doesn't have to be 100% accurate to be effective. Most of the time you print and read the original scans. After all, some publisher went to the trouble of carefully typesetting the book and proofreading it once, why bother to do it all again?
I first became aware of this project and technology when I met Brewster Kahle as he drove the Internet Bookmobile around the U.S., going to libraries and schools trying to drum up interest in Eldred vs. Ashcroft. A compressed version of Alice in Wonderland in DJVU format is about 5 megabytes (the same as a single MP3) including the illustrations and fancy typesetting. He could print and bind a copy of it for about $2 in materials, on demand using an HP laser printer out of the back of the mobile. The binding isn't amazing, but consider the possibility of having literally any book in any small town library in any place in the world. It's an exciting idea, and one that technology is only making easier and cheaper. You can get a decent scanner for $100 (even one small enough to hook to a laptop and take to a library). You can scan a book in an evening. And after you do, the file can be converted to a simple, easy to use format that everyone can use. Forever. One evening. One person. One book.
Despite the setback of Eldred v. Ashcroft, more and more books are going to be made available by the true philanthropists of the world: the volunteers who give something of their own time to make the world a better place. I wonder what Mr. DeLong has done to make the world a better place...
The problem with this kind of compromise is that it isn't a compromise at all: it simply hands the recording industry additional copyrights without giving consumers anything, even with laws already on the books. Why? Because of the DMCA of course.
Under the DMCA it is a crime to circumvent the copy protection schemes of a digitally protected work. It doesn't matter if the original material is in the public domain. You cannot exercise your unregulated uses of a public domain work that is (for instance) distributed in the form of a DVD encrypted with CSS without breaking a law that can send your butt to jail.
This effectively extends copyrights forever, as there is never any way for you to excercise your rights over works that have entered the public domain. They simply have to continue to release works in digital form.
Any sort of compromise on this front should be viewed carefully and with great scepticism. You can't expect the music, film and publishing industries to act in the best interests of society at large: that's why we have government.
Oh god, did I really just say that? We really are doomed. :-)
Don't hold back, tell us what you really think.
This might come as a shock to some, but the entire world isn't the same as you. They have different needs and different desires. In this case, ILM has a need for an image format which allows for high dynamic range and lossy compression. PNG doesn't supply that. TIFF doesn't supply that. JPG doesn't supply that. So they invented their own, and released it for all to use.
They really don't care very much about whether your browser supports it (although a nice plugin would be a cool idea, and golly, it is possible because they were kind enough to release the source). They are busy making movies. If you aren't making movies or interested in high dynamic range photography, you probably don't care. But then, they never said you had to care, did they?
This is not a good reason for extending copyrights, and it betrays the fact that our dialogue on copyrights is entirely reversed from where it should be.
It is first of all an incredibly tenuous assertion that nobody would go to the trouble of restoring these films without the ability to make a buck from them. For instance, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has recently begun to work on preservation of our film heritage as part of their educational and cultural activities.
Many films could be saved from decay by educational institutions.
Second of all, even if it were true that nobody would restore such films without a monetary incentive, there is no reason to believe that
the author and/or his heirs should be the only
ones to benefit. I think it is pretty safe
to say that the market for Harold Lloyd's films
would be large, and if they had reverted into the
public domain, some publisher could step in and
make a fairly good chunk of change off the restoration and pressing of DVDs. If his films
reverted to the public domain, the market would
take over and inexpensive versions of Lloyd's films would be widely available for the public to
enjoy.
The situation now is the same as if all the
films had been lost in a fire: everyone is deprived of a significant contributor to early
film. You can hardly blame his heirs for trying
to make a buck, but arguing that it is the best
of all possible outcomes seems horrendously naive.
This sort of subject has been around for years, and gets rediscovered every so often, by a "new" generation of hackers. (Look, for instance, at the big deal made about Duff's Device [tuxedo.org] when C came along.) The problem is, that implementations of these ideas are often non-portable. (To other architectures, languages, or even the next version of the compiler.)
I'm not sure why you mentioned Duff's device. Duff's device is portable. If I had an ANSI C spec in front of me, I could quote you chapter and verse that explicitly allows it.
I think it is a damn spiffy idiom. It is relatively obvious what it means (at least after you've seen it once) and why you would use it. Yes, modern C compilers may do loop unrolling, so it is probably not something that is worth expending a lot of time on. As Tom Duff told me:
I too believe that code can be too clever, but increasingly I see code written with very little regard to either space or time behavior. Gratuitously inefficient code should not be tolerated, and understanding idioms like Duff's device puts one in a mindset of where such inefficiences are revealed more often.
The basic problem with this view is its starry eyed idealism.
The ISS isn't our stepping stone to the stars, or if it is, it is like saying your front porch is your portal to the rest of the world. Stepping out on your front porch isn't a significant help to getting half way around the globe, and the ISS isn't anywhere close to getting us to the stars.
This wouldn't be all that bad, except that our ISS stepping stone is a very expensive stepping stone. It costs real money to maintain, money that could be available for other projects, projects that would more reasonably allow us to fufill our goal of reaching out to the stars. The luxury of storing soft squishy humans in orbit is just that: a luxury. In these tough economic times, it makes sense to reconsider spending on luxury items.
I'm just about as gung-ho on space exploration as they get, but I'd like to see more bang for the buck from our science projects.