"Things like the crossover plugin alleviate the pain of much of these problems, of course. Alternatively your vendor could take the time to write a bridge for ActiveX controls."
We tried that, didn't work initially. If we find some more time we'll investigate it further.
"If that's not enough for you, then maybe you should find something to do that doesn't involve computers, as you're clearly not ready to accept the realities of them. "
The reality is that MS is going to own everything. No, I don't want to accept that. I conceed that having IE be the dominating browser out there is better for the end users. Consider the price we pay for it though. Personally, I like having choice.
I switched to Opera because a.) it has some really nifty and useful features, b.) it's far easier on my memory resources. I guess I should just stick with MS though, that way I can buy a brand new computer every 1.5 years just so I can do the same stuff I've alwasy been doing. Why not? I have money to burn on porn surfing.
"Microsoft is the company that supported both plug-in interfaces for a long time, but Netscape only ever supported their own parochial nickle-and-dime plug-in interface, which totally sucks. Get your facts right. "
First off, I think you present good thoughts, although you did aim them as an attack towards me, hence the 'get the facts right' comment.
Tell you what though, I'll present you a 'mudslinging-free' response. First, though, I never ever ever said that the NSP interface was superior in any way. The benefit to it that I give any care to is that it works with nearly every browser out there. If it's clunky, fine. I never made a case that it wasn't. Because of that, nearly everything you said in your post had nothing to do with what I said. The reason I posted Opera's comments on the matter was that it strengthened my case that not everybody wants to go ActiveX just because MS says so. Their comment about security got my attention. I didn't think I needed to elaborate on it because I thought it was pretty obvious why ActiveX is a security problem, but I guess I need to explain it.
Any app that supports ActiveX can call any ActiveX control. When we had an ActiveX control, emails in Outlook, for example, could call the control and activate it. Pretty snazzy, eh? Well that exact same feature that I just described means that e-mail can be a launching mechanism for ActiveX controls. Uh-oh, can you say vulnerability? All somebody has to do is create an ActiveX control that has a backdoor in it. And then, to activate that back door, they have so many ways of doing it it's not even funny. They could send an email to trigger the backdoor, they could create a webpage with specific HTML to do it, and so on. Before you tell me this isn't possible, consider that the reason MS is hit so hard by virsues is because it has too many features that are easy to exploit. All it takes is a creative mind and time to do it. Is it as easy with NSP? I'm no developer, but your case that NSP doesn't have a whole lot of features lends itself to the idea that no, it's not as easy.
You are correct that I didn't post my quote very well. I apologize for that. I have a bad habit of posting before reading. You want a link? Fine, here it is:
Pardon me for not doing that right away, thought I'd save you all the trouble by copy/pasting it. Notice it's on Opera's site.
As a plug-in developer (I'm not personally one, but my company used to be...) I don't care who implemented things better. It's a matter of supporting our userbase. Gee whiz, it certainly would have been grand of Netscape to support ActiveX. They didn't. And when we started, it was 50/50 Netscape and IE. In other words, we had to make the choice to support one or the other. We didn't have the resources to do both an ActiveX control and a Netscape Style Plugin. We *tried* but it was very difficult to maintain consistency across them both. It turned into an engineering-moneypit. We needed two different engineers to keep both plugins going. With the NSP interface, we were able to keep it to one. Could better management have eased that problem? Oh yeah, I don't doubt that. Remember, though, that this is a small company and we had to do with what we had.
There are support problems with that as well. It takes a lot of HTML code just to throw up an ActiveX control in a web page, embedding an object is far more simplified. Technical support was a problem, particularly when some people didn't realize they had to play with their security settings from time to time to get it working.
For my company in particular, the Netscape Style Interface was *our* best choice. Keep in mind, this was a company of like 15 people. Also keep in mind that the interface is a WC3 standard. This means that future browsers down the road, in theory, should be supported. I was able to get our plug-in to work in Opera. We certainly didn't want to close any doors. When you're a big company, you can make choices like that and call it 'policy.' When you're a 15 person company, you want to do absolutely 0 to piss anybody off. If you've never worked in a company that small, don't tell me I'm wrong.
So yeah, IE supported them both, and yeah Netscape flubbed the implementation of it. So what? If MS was so in the right to drop NSP support, how come they did it just before releasing IE6? How come the only real update to IE 5.5 SP 2 was to take away NSP support?
Why didn't MS just say "This is an old standard. We're dropping it in the next release of IE in a few months, please be prepared."? This is the part that offends me the most! If MS had done that, I wouldn't be whinging now. This thread would not exist.
You're right. And it's a bummer too because I'd use PNG all over the place if the alpha channel was supported correctly. I also wish that IE would run some sort of bi-linear filtering on resized images so that I could take advantage of it's percentage based image sizing tags, while maintaining image quality.
"I don't give a flip if it's a plugin, activex, or a fucking fred flintstone bird inside a camera...if I can still access the SAME content, and it still renders correctly, and perhaps renders more reliably and quickly, well, let them do what they will. "
You'll give a flip when you decide to switch to a new browser (or a new OS that doesn't have IE on it) and half the internet doesn't work for you.
I can't believe people are actually responding with "It's okay that the internet only works with IE!", did I wander off of Slashdot and not realize it?
"What a narrowminded and stupid thing to say. You will never update a browser that removes standard features? So in otherwords, you want your browser (/OS/all other programs etc) to be a collection of legacy junk which can never be changed for fear of alienating you?"
Um, no. I don't want to upgrade to a browser by a company who wants to bend standards in their favor, leaving other browsers unable to cope. The advantage to Netscape Style Plug-ins over ActiveX controls is that they play in other browsers like Netscape (DUH!) and Opera. This isn't a case of an old standard no longer being followed, it's a case of MS changing the de-facto standard so that IE remains dominant. So no, I'm not willing to change browser/OS/etc over this.
Now that IE doesn't support non-standard controls, this means that anybody who makes an IE plug-in is stuck making an ActiveX interface.
My favorite browser is Opera. It doesn't support ActiveX. According to their site, it won't support ActiveX. Here's a quote:
"Opera does not support ActiveX, nor does it support VBScript. There are three reasons for this:
Opera Software AS is committed to supporting open Internet standards, recommended by the W3C, something neither ActiveX nor VBScript, being license issued Microsoft technologies, are.
The second reason is much more simple: There's just not enough market demand for these technologies to warrant the cost of implementing them.
In addition, some reports raise the question of how secure ActiveX is. It has been claimed that ActiveX has serious problems with security, and some even say that the problem is an almost complete lack of security. The same concerns have been raised about VBScript."
So besides making me stick with an insecure plug-in interface, what other reason is there for me to go to IE6 or newer?
"Changes sometimes need to happen, and given that by the time the change to 6.0 happened there was no plugin that I ever ran into that didn't have an ActiveX version, there's no reason for your ranting. "
Changes? Sure! But to disable a widely used technology? Uh uh. Sorry. I'm not rolling over and taking that. True narrowmindedness would be if I were to say "Okay Microsoft, thank you for making the choice for me. You know more than I do!"
As for not being able to get an ActiveX version of a plug-in, I can give you an example: The company I work for. (Who shall remain nameless.)
IE 6's betas supported our plug-in just fine. And then, once it was released, I had customers telling me it no longer worked. Somewhere between beta 2 and release they removed support for it. Did they tell us (a registerred MS Developer...)? No. They just did it. Their knowledge base called the removal of Netscape Style Plugins 'a security feature."
Interesting, I guess not being able to run as much stuff means less chance of security breach. Whatever. Maybe if MS had said "In 6 months when IE 6 is released, it won't support NSP's" Id have little room to gripe. But MS just did it. So my company (a startup company I might add) is forced to write an ActiveX control. We looked into it, and its not as easy as it may seem. For one thing, our product has a lot of web-based features that would all need to be rigourously tested. Since browser functionality is not our core focus right now, we don't have the engineering time to spend on it. Do our customers understand that? Only after I explain our priorities to them.
The worst part is that IE doesn't give any clue as to what is wrong. The behaviour of running a NSP on IE is the same as not having a plugin installed at all! What a wonderful way to prevent MS from getting customer service complaints!
In any case, thanks for calling me narrow-minded even though it's pretty obvious I know more about this topic than you do.
Getting back to the original topic, I hope the JPEG2000 group releases a Netscape Style Plugin so I can use it with Opera. I am geninuinely concerned that what they'll do is release an ActiveX version because IE is the dominant browser, and that's it. If they do that, they'll be further supporting MS's dominance. Unfortunately, I can see JPEG2000 causing that if the images are really as compressed as they say.
JPEG2000 Plugin for IE? More like an ActiveX control for IE. IE6 no longer supports Netscape Style Plug-ins. I'll never forgive MS for that.
It's for that reason I won't go past IE 5.01. I refuse to update to a browser that removes standard features. The sad thing is, I may not be able to enjoy JPEG 2000 because of that.
Hopefully Opera will, however...
Re:It's obvious where this is going.
on
JPEG2000 Coming Soon
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· Score: 5, Informative
"If we aren't all using PNG right now, there's no way we're gonna be using jp2 "
You're talking about the difference between 300k and 20k. The reason that.PNG wasn't adopted in the internet world is that it didn't compress enough. Also, it's alpha channel was never really utilized. There are those in the 3D-Art world that think.PNG is a god-send, however.
JPEG2000 has a few things going for it:
- Familiar Name - Familiar Standard - Smaller filesizes - Likely to be better supported by IE and other browsers
Re:Umm particles from the future?
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 2
"Why has no-one pointed this out?"
Because it's wrong?
The containment field containing the distorted space would be moving right along with the Earth and the sun and yadda yadda. Since the lasers are taking the particle with it, it's fairly safe to assume that the 2nd particle would appear in roughly the same place, maybe with a different spin.
That's the part I'm not sure about. I'm concerned with if they'll show up in the same place.
As for what you said, I had that question about Back to the Future. Why didn't the Delorean appear somewhere in space?
I have a couple of ideas about this:
1.) The 'time circuits' took the Earth's rotation and movement etc into account. He was a smart enough guy, he could do it.
2.) There is one shot in BttF where the Delorean appears to explode and then implode again. I think this was supposed to be some sort of portal opening up. In which case, I imagine a tunnel connecting the portal in the future to the portal in the past. If so, then maybe the point of going 88 miles an hour was so that the time machine could breach the portal and make it to the other end of it. If that's the case, then I could also imagine this tunnel being sort of an energy vacuum, which would explain the car freezing as it re-entered normal space.
If the portals/tunnel theory works, then the two portals would have relative positions on Earth, therefore the Delorean would appear to be in the same spot.
Analog time machines suck. HG Wells showed us that. I mean look at it, you just sit down and play with a few levers. The Delorean time machine though... digital, and it could fly!
"Seriously, why in the hell would you want this? "
Rail building materials: $4,000
Roses to sooth diplomatic relations with your wife: $100
Being the coolest dad on your block: Priceless
How does one measure usefulness?
on
GameBoy Web Server
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I skimmed some of the posts on this topic and was a little disheartened by some people's reactions to the usefulness of this hack. Let's put a couple of things into perspective:
1.) It's not a product
2.) It looks as though he just wanted to do it for shits and giggles, not seriously trying to solve any probelms other than 'it can be done.'
A lot of things we take for granted today were based on ideas that people questioned the usefulness of. Did anybody think Pong was useful? "Why would I pay $119 for a game that I could play on a pingpong table?"
Consider that usefulness depends on the individual too. You yourself may not care about running a websever on a GBA, but soembody might find an interesting use for it. If I were setting up a brand new network somewhere, I could see the potential of firing up a GBA, getting it on the network, and seeing if I could connect to it. It could be a troubleshooting device, maybe. (Although if it's connected to a Linux machine, that idea seems a little absurd. But if they made the GBA independent of it...)
What of somebody took the code from this project and made the GBA into a VNC client? I think there are sysadmins out there who would find that rather useful. Seeing as how GBA's are $70 nowadays, that could turn into an interesting product. There are some of us out there that would think it was totally cool that I could buy a GBA and get reimbursed from my company with it, heh.
Come to think of it... if the XBOX were a little more open, it could turn into one hell of a sysadmin tool....
There's rumors to the effect that Nintendo may drop the price of the GameCube. If that happens, then it's likely Sony and possibly Microsoft will have to follow suit.
The time frame I heard was E3'ish, but please consider that it is a non-substantiated rumor.
Some dipshit moderator went around and modded some of my posts down as a Troll. I have evidence of this, if you are interested. Check out this screen grab:
http://www.nanogator.com/slashdot.jpg
The last 5 posts are of a moderator that went through and just modded me down. If you look at the times, you can see that all 5 moderation points happened within a few minutes, vs. every other moderation I've had rarely happens within a half hour of each other.
If you are a moderator reading this post now, please, before you mod me as off-topic, understand that I'm trying to re-claim the visibilty of the parent post. Since it has a score of -1 now, it will slip through most people's filters. I just don't feel that my post deserved to be modded down, specifically considering the point I was making.
If you need to mod this down as off-topic, I understand. But could you please look at the parent post and consider moderating it too? Thank you.
Some dipshit moderator went around and modded some of my posts down as a Troll. I have evidence of this, if you are interested. Check out this screen grab:
http://www.nanogator.com/slashdot.jpg
The last 5 posts are of a moderator that went through and just modded me down. If you look at the times, you can see that all 5 moderation points happened within a few minutes, vs. every other moderation I've had rarely happens within a half hour of each other.
If you are a moderator reading this post now, please, before you mod me as off-topic, understand that I'm trying to re-claim the visibilty of the parent post. Since it has a score of -1 now, it will slip through most people's filters. I just don't feel that my post deserved to be modded down, specifically considering the point I was making.
If you need to mod this down as off-topic, I understand. But could you please look at the parent post and consider moderating it too?
"Download a demo of Race Fever." is that Pocket PC or Palm? I have a PocketPC but no longer have a Palm.
You bring up an interesting point that Psuedo 3D is nice. I really like Mario Kart for the GBA, for example. It's when everything is 3D w/o Anti-Aliasing or bi-linear filtering that it becomes a real mess.
Thanks! I'm glad you saw my post before it was modded down as a troll.
Some of you might find it interesting that 5 of my most recent posts were all marked as being a Troll, including this one.
All of the mod-downs I got were right in front of each other, as if somebody went down the list of my recent posts and modded me down. If you look at the context of the post above, and the following links, I think you'd agree that I wasn't even trying to be a troll.
I was rather disappointed when I saw the screenshots of '3D Demos'. Nobody is going to want to play Mario 64 for very long on one of these devices.
I played a port of Quake on an iPaq once. It was kind of cute, but it didn't take too long for the gimmick to wear off. What was once 3D, while I was excited about it, turned into a puddle of pixels. For a screen that small, they really need some sort of filtering (bi-linear?) to make effective use of the screen realestate. Otherwise, it's just awful.
I am surprised at Sega for going down that road. One only needs to look at the strengths of these systems to realize the true gaming potential of them:
- Stylus Interface - Ability to easily turn on and off without resetting the game - The demographics of who owns these devices - The IR Port - Clarity of text on the screen
If I were a game company looking to make a game for a Palm Pilot, and considering these observations I made about the system, then my first choice for a game to develop would be a turn-based strategy game. Think about it, you could have a really long term game going (like MONTHS) and play it anywhere. You could play it for 20 minutes in your bed before going to sleep. You could play it in the can (during work hours!). You could play it while waiting for your bus. I hated CivII on my PC because it took so damn long, but I think I'd love a port of this game on my PocketPC because the system really lends itself to it.
As long as the game isn't terribly reflex based, this would be a perfect fit for this system and it's audience. Puzzle games are also quite perfect for this system as well. I've spent many hours playing reversi.
3D doesn't fit this system at all. I suppose if anybody could make it work, it'd be Sega. Boy would I be surprised, though.
Believe it or not, I don't think games on PDAs would actually compete with the GBA. The reason is that these games are likely an attempt to get more people to buy the PDA's themselves.
I'm willing to bet that most people made their choice to buy a PC over a MAC (like 10 years ago...) because the PC had a ton more games. This may sound silly to a non-game-player, but consider walking into CompUSA, finding that PC has shelf after shelf after shelf of software, and then going into the corner where the Mac stuff is. Even if you don't play games, the psychology of this may come into play.
The GBA will always be a better game machine than any PDA. It's dedicated to games and it shows. However, the PDA gaming market would likely do just fine for those of us who have one but aren't sure what to do with it besides keep phone #'s.
In other words, the two markets likely touching borders.
"There were "garage bands" and amature film makers 20 years ago."
The internet is the next big distribution medium. It's already happening today. I could go to my complex with a video camera, shoot a cheap movie, edit it on my pc, and put the streaming version up on my website.
This wasn't available 20 years ago. If enough people make use of the internet for this reason, then the RIAA will certainly have a lot to fear when the internet becomes the first place people look for music and what they get isn't made by the RIAA at all.
Slashdot Mirror
"Things like the crossover plugin alleviate the pain of much of these problems, of course. Alternatively your vendor could take the time to write a bridge for ActiveX controls."
We tried that, didn't work initially. If we find some more time we'll investigate it further.
"If that's not enough for you, then maybe you should find something to do that doesn't involve computers, as you're clearly not ready to accept the realities of them. "
The reality is that MS is going to own everything. No, I don't want to accept that. I conceed that having IE be the dominating browser out there is better for the end users. Consider the price we pay for it though. Personally, I like having choice.
I switched to Opera because a.) it has some really nifty and useful features, b.) it's far easier on my memory resources. I guess I should just stick with MS though, that way I can buy a brand new computer every 1.5 years just so I can do the same stuff I've alwasy been doing. Why not? I have money to burn on porn surfing.
"Microsoft is the company that supported both plug-in interfaces for a long time, but Netscape only ever supported their own parochial nickle-and-dime plug-in interface, which totally sucks. Get your facts right. "
h .c gi?options=index&name=150
First off, I think you present good thoughts, although you did aim them as an attack towards me, hence the 'get the facts right' comment.
Tell you what though, I'll present you a 'mudslinging-free' response. First, though, I never ever ever said that the NSP interface was superior in any way. The benefit to it that I give any care to is that it works with nearly every browser out there. If it's clunky, fine. I never made a case that it wasn't. Because of that, nearly everything you said in your post had nothing to do with what I said. The reason I posted Opera's comments on the matter was that it strengthened my case that not everybody wants to go ActiveX just because MS says so. Their comment about security got my attention. I didn't think I needed to elaborate on it because I thought it was pretty obvious why ActiveX is a security problem, but I guess I need to explain it.
Any app that supports ActiveX can call any ActiveX control. When we had an ActiveX control, emails in Outlook, for example, could call the control and activate it. Pretty snazzy, eh? Well that exact same feature that I just described means that e-mail can be a launching mechanism for ActiveX controls. Uh-oh, can you say vulnerability? All somebody has to do is create an ActiveX control that has a backdoor in it. And then, to activate that back door, they have so many ways of doing it it's not even funny. They could send an email to trigger the backdoor, they could create a webpage with specific HTML to do it, and so on. Before you tell me this isn't possible, consider that the reason MS is hit so hard by virsues is because it has too many features that are easy to exploit. All it takes is a creative mind and time to do it. Is it as easy with NSP? I'm no developer, but your case that NSP doesn't have a whole lot of features lends itself to the idea that no, it's not as easy.
You are correct that I didn't post my quote very well. I apologize for that. I have a bad habit of posting before reading. You want a link? Fine, here it is:
http://www.opera.com/support/supsearch/supsearc
Pardon me for not doing that right away, thought I'd save you all the trouble by copy/pasting it. Notice it's on Opera's site.
As a plug-in developer (I'm not personally one, but my company used to be...) I don't care who implemented things better. It's a matter of supporting our userbase. Gee whiz, it certainly would have been grand of Netscape to support ActiveX. They didn't. And when we started, it was 50/50 Netscape and IE. In other words, we had to make the choice to support one or the other. We didn't have the resources to do both an ActiveX control and a Netscape Style Plugin. We *tried* but it was very difficult to maintain consistency across them both. It turned into an engineering-moneypit. We needed two different engineers to keep both plugins going. With the NSP interface, we were able to keep it to one. Could better management have eased that problem? Oh yeah, I don't doubt that. Remember, though, that this is a small company and we had to do with what we had.
There are support problems with that as well. It takes a lot of HTML code just to throw up an ActiveX control in a web page, embedding an object is far more simplified. Technical support was a problem, particularly when some people didn't realize they had to play with their security settings from time to time to get it working.
For my company in particular, the Netscape Style Interface was *our* best choice. Keep in mind, this was a company of like 15 people. Also keep in mind that the interface is a WC3 standard. This means that future browsers down the road, in theory, should be supported. I was able to get our plug-in to work in Opera. We certainly didn't want to close any doors. When you're a big company, you can make choices like that and call it 'policy.' When you're a 15 person company, you want to do absolutely 0 to piss anybody off. If you've never worked in a company that small, don't tell me I'm wrong.
So yeah, IE supported them both, and yeah Netscape flubbed the implementation of it. So what? If MS was so in the right to drop NSP support, how come they did it just before releasing IE6? How come the only real update to IE 5.5 SP 2 was to take away NSP support?
Why didn't MS just say "This is an old standard. We're dropping it in the next release of IE in a few months, please be prepared."? This is the part that offends me the most! If MS had done that, I wouldn't be whinging now. This thread would not exist.
Tell that to all the Mac, Linux, and Opera users out there.
You're right. And it's a bummer too because I'd use PNG all over the place if the alpha channel was supported correctly. I also wish that IE would run some sort of bi-linear filtering on resized images so that I could take advantage of it's percentage based image sizing tags, while maintaining image quality.
That's one of the reasons I like Flash.
"I don't give a flip if it's a plugin, activex, or a fucking fred flintstone bird inside a camera...if I can still access the SAME content, and it still renders correctly, and perhaps renders more reliably and quickly, well, let them do what they will. "
You'll give a flip when you decide to switch to a new browser (or a new OS that doesn't have IE on it) and half the internet doesn't work for you.
I can't believe people are actually responding with "It's okay that the internet only works with IE!", did I wander off of Slashdot and not realize it?
"What a narrowminded and stupid thing to say. You will never update a browser that removes standard features? So in otherwords, you want your browser (/OS/all other programs etc) to be a collection of legacy junk which can never be changed for fear of alienating you?"
Um, no. I don't want to upgrade to a browser by a company who wants to bend standards in their favor, leaving other browsers unable to cope. The advantage to Netscape Style Plug-ins over ActiveX controls is that they play in other browsers like Netscape (DUH!) and Opera. This isn't a case of an old standard no longer being followed, it's a case of MS changing the de-facto standard so that IE remains dominant. So no, I'm not willing to change browser/OS/etc over this.
Now that IE doesn't support non-standard controls, this means that anybody who makes an IE plug-in is stuck making an ActiveX interface.
My favorite browser is Opera. It doesn't support ActiveX. According to their site, it won't support ActiveX. Here's a quote:
"Opera does not support ActiveX, nor does it support VBScript. There are three reasons for this:
Opera Software AS is committed to supporting open Internet standards, recommended by the W3C, something neither ActiveX nor VBScript, being license issued Microsoft technologies, are.
The second reason is much more simple: There's just not enough market demand for these technologies to warrant the cost of implementing them.
In addition, some reports raise the question of how secure ActiveX is. It has been claimed that ActiveX has serious problems with security, and some even say that the problem is an almost complete lack of security. The same concerns have been raised about VBScript."
So besides making me stick with an insecure plug-in interface, what other reason is there for me to go to IE6 or newer?
"Changes sometimes need to happen, and given that by the time the change to 6.0 happened there was no plugin that I ever ran into that didn't have an ActiveX version, there's no reason for your ranting. "
Changes? Sure! But to disable a widely used technology? Uh uh. Sorry. I'm not rolling over and taking that. True narrowmindedness would be if I were to say "Okay Microsoft, thank you for making the choice for me. You know more than I do!"
As for not being able to get an ActiveX version of a plug-in, I can give you an example: The company I work for. (Who shall remain nameless.)
IE 6's betas supported our plug-in just fine. And then, once it was released, I had customers telling me it no longer worked. Somewhere between beta 2 and release they removed support for it. Did they tell us (a registerred MS Developer...)? No. They just did it. Their knowledge base called the removal of Netscape Style Plugins 'a security feature."
Interesting, I guess not being able to run as much stuff means less chance of security breach. Whatever. Maybe if MS had said "In 6 months when IE 6 is released, it won't support NSP's" Id have little room to gripe. But MS just did it. So my company (a startup company I might add) is forced to write an ActiveX control. We looked into it, and its not as easy as it may seem. For one thing, our product has a lot of web-based features that would all need to be rigourously tested. Since browser functionality is not our core focus right now, we don't have the engineering time to spend on it. Do our customers understand that? Only after I explain our priorities to them.
The worst part is that IE doesn't give any clue as to what is wrong. The behaviour of running a NSP on IE is the same as not having a plugin installed at all! What a wonderful way to prevent MS from getting customer service complaints!
In any case, thanks for calling me narrow-minded even though it's pretty obvious I know more about this topic than you do.
Getting back to the original topic, I hope the JPEG2000 group releases a Netscape Style Plugin so I can use it with Opera. I am geninuinely concerned that what they'll do is release an ActiveX version because IE is the dominant browser, and that's it. If they do that, they'll be further supporting MS's dominance. Unfortunately, I can see JPEG2000 causing that if the images are really as compressed as they say.
JPEG2000 Plugin for IE? More like an ActiveX control for IE. IE6 no longer supports Netscape Style Plug-ins. I'll never forgive MS for that.
It's for that reason I won't go past IE 5.01. I refuse to update to a browser that removes standard features. The sad thing is, I may not be able to enjoy JPEG 2000 because of that.
Hopefully Opera will, however...
"If we aren't all using PNG right now, there's no way we're gonna be using jp2 "
.PNG wasn't adopted in the internet world is that it didn't compress enough. Also, it's alpha channel was never really utilized. There are those in the 3D-Art world that think .PNG is a god-send, however.
You're talking about the difference between 300k and 20k. The reason that
JPEG2000 has a few things going for it:
- Familiar Name
- Familiar Standard
- Smaller filesizes
- Likely to be better supported by IE and other browsers
"Why has no-one pointed this out?"
Because it's wrong?
The containment field containing the distorted space would be moving right along with the Earth and the sun and yadda yadda. Since the lasers are taking the particle with it, it's fairly safe to assume that the 2nd particle would appear in roughly the same place, maybe with a different spin.
That's the part I'm not sure about. I'm concerned with if they'll show up in the same place.
As for what you said, I had that question about Back to the Future. Why didn't the Delorean appear somewhere in space?
I have a couple of ideas about this:
1.) The 'time circuits' took the Earth's rotation and movement etc into account. He was a smart enough guy, he could do it.
2.) There is one shot in BttF where the Delorean appears to explode and then implode again. I think this was supposed to be some sort of portal opening up. In which case, I imagine a tunnel connecting the portal in the future to the portal in the past. If so, then maybe the point of going 88 miles an hour was so that the time machine could breach the portal and make it to the other end of it. If that's the case, then I could also imagine this tunnel being sort of an energy vacuum, which would explain the car freezing as it re-entered normal space.
If the portals/tunnel theory works, then the two portals would have relative positions on Earth, therefore the Delorean would appear to be in the same spot.
It'd be seperate software. :P
I never said anything about 'out of the box'. Heh.
"The second particle would be the first one visiting itself from the future."
I see two problems with this:
1.) What would keep the particle appearing in the future from appearing in the same spot? Seems like they'd try to occupy the same space..
2.) how will they know it's the same particle? Guage it's spin maybe?
Im concerned that the experiment could produce positive results, but not positively. Kind of like that fusion bubbles thing not too long ago.
Here's a question though: Is it possible this could be a new way to harness energy? Imagine reclaiming energy from the past...
Analog time machines suck. HG Wells showed us that. I mean look at it, you just sit down and play with a few levers. The Delorean time machine though... digital, and it could fly!
Because I wouldn't have to set the damn thing up?
Hey, check it out! It's their next door neighbor Wilson!:
http://www.monorails.org/webpix%202/nmt10.JPG
"Seriously, why in the hell would you want this? "
Rail building materials: $4,000
Roses to sooth diplomatic relations with your wife: $100
Being the coolest dad on your block: Priceless
I skimmed some of the posts on this topic and was a little disheartened by some people's reactions to the usefulness of this hack. Let's put a couple of things into perspective:
1.) It's not a product
2.) It looks as though he just wanted to do it for shits and giggles, not seriously trying to solve any probelms other than 'it can be done.'
A lot of things we take for granted today were based on ideas that people questioned the usefulness of. Did anybody think Pong was useful? "Why would I pay $119 for a game that I could play on a pingpong table?"
Consider that usefulness depends on the individual too. You yourself may not care about running a websever on a GBA, but soembody might find an interesting use for it. If I were setting up a brand new network somewhere, I could see the potential of firing up a GBA, getting it on the network, and seeing if I could connect to it. It could be a troubleshooting device, maybe. (Although if it's connected to a Linux machine, that idea seems a little absurd. But if they made the GBA independent of it...)
What of somebody took the code from this project and made the GBA into a VNC client? I think there are sysadmins out there who would find that rather useful. Seeing as how GBA's are $70 nowadays, that could turn into an interesting product. There are some of us out there that would think it was totally cool that I could buy a GBA and get reimbursed from my company with it, heh.
Come to think of it... if the XBOX were a little more open, it could turn into one hell of a sysadmin tool....
There's rumors to the effect that Nintendo may drop the price of the GameCube. If that happens, then it's likely Sony and possibly Microsoft will have to follow suit.
The time frame I heard was E3'ish, but please consider that it is a non-substantiated rumor.
Could you at least come out and tell me what your problem is? If you've got a problem out with it.
Some dipshit moderator went around and modded some of my posts down as a Troll. I have evidence of this, if you are interested. Check out this screen grab:
http://www.nanogator.com/slashdot.jpg
The last 5 posts are of a moderator that went through and just modded me down. If you look at the times, you can see that all 5 moderation points happened within a few minutes, vs. every other moderation I've had rarely happens within a half hour of each other.
If you are a moderator reading this post now, please, before you mod me as off-topic, understand that I'm trying to re-claim the visibilty of the parent post. Since it has a score of -1 now, it will slip through most people's filters. I just don't feel that my post deserved to be modded down, specifically considering the point I was making.
If you need to mod this down as off-topic, I understand. But could you please look at the parent post and consider moderating it too? Thank you.
Some dipshit moderator went around and modded some of my posts down as a Troll. I have evidence of this, if you are interested. Check out this screen grab:
http://www.nanogator.com/slashdot.jpg
The last 5 posts are of a moderator that went through and just modded me down. If you look at the times, you can see that all 5 moderation points happened within a few minutes, vs. every other moderation I've had rarely happens within a half hour of each other.
If you are a moderator reading this post now, please, before you mod me as off-topic, understand that I'm trying to re-claim the visibilty of the parent post. Since it has a score of -1 now, it will slip through most people's filters. I just don't feel that my post deserved to be modded down, specifically considering the point I was making.
If you need to mod this down as off-topic, I understand. But could you please look at the parent post and consider moderating it too?
"Download a demo of Race Fever." is that Pocket PC or Palm? I have a PocketPC but no longer have a Palm.
You bring up an interesting point that Psuedo 3D is nice. I really like Mario Kart for the GBA, for example. It's when everything is 3D w/o Anti-Aliasing or bi-linear filtering that it becomes a real mess.
Thanks! I'm glad you saw my post before it was modded down as a troll.
Some of you might find it interesting that 5 of my most recent posts were all marked as being a Troll, including this one.
2 91 705
2 91 359
h ol d=1&commentsort=0&tid=126&mode=thread&cid=3288445
2 88 409
All of the mod-downs I got were right in front of each other, as if somebody went down the list of my recent posts and modded me down. If you look at the context of the post above, and the following links, I think you'd agree that I wasn't even trying to be a troll.
Here's a link to each one:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=30613&cid=3
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=30575&cid=3
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=30580&thres
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=30580&cid=3
(The fifth is is the parent post to this response.)
Would you call me paranoid for saying that somebody was out to 'teach me a lesson'? Heh. If so, what'd I do wrong?
I was rather disappointed when I saw the screenshots of '3D Demos'. Nobody is going to want to play Mario 64 for very long on one of these devices.
I played a port of Quake on an iPaq once. It was kind of cute, but it didn't take too long for the gimmick to wear off. What was once 3D, while I was excited about it, turned into a puddle of pixels. For a screen that small, they really need some sort of filtering (bi-linear?) to make effective use of the screen realestate. Otherwise, it's just awful.
I am surprised at Sega for going down that road. One only needs to look at the strengths of these systems to realize the true gaming potential of them:
- Stylus Interface
- Ability to easily turn on and off without resetting the game
- The demographics of who owns these devices
- The IR Port
- Clarity of text on the screen
If I were a game company looking to make a game for a Palm Pilot, and considering these observations I made about the system, then my first choice for a game to develop would be a turn-based strategy game. Think about it, you could have a really long term game going (like MONTHS) and play it anywhere. You could play it for 20 minutes in your bed before going to sleep. You could play it in the can (during work hours!). You could play it while waiting for your bus. I hated CivII on my PC because it took so damn long, but I think I'd love a port of this game on my PocketPC because the system really lends itself to it.
As long as the game isn't terribly reflex based, this would be a perfect fit for this system and it's audience. Puzzle games are also quite perfect for this system as well. I've spent many hours playing reversi.
3D doesn't fit this system at all. I suppose if anybody could make it work, it'd be Sega. Boy would I be surprised, though.
Believe it or not, I don't think games on PDAs would actually compete with the GBA. The reason is that these games are likely an attempt to get more people to buy the PDA's themselves.
I'm willing to bet that most people made their choice to buy a PC over a MAC (like 10 years ago...) because the PC had a ton more games. This may sound silly to a non-game-player, but consider walking into CompUSA, finding that PC has shelf after shelf after shelf of software, and then going into the corner where the Mac stuff is. Even if you don't play games, the psychology of this may come into play.
The GBA will always be a better game machine than any PDA. It's dedicated to games and it shows. However, the PDA gaming market would likely do just fine for those of us who have one but aren't sure what to do with it besides keep phone #'s.
In other words, the two markets likely touching borders.
"There were "garage bands" and amature film makers 20 years ago."
The internet is the next big distribution medium. It's already happening today. I could go to my complex with a video camera, shoot a cheap movie, edit it on my pc, and put the streaming version up on my website.
This wasn't available 20 years ago. If enough people make use of the internet for this reason, then the RIAA will certainly have a lot to fear when the internet becomes the first place people look for music and what they get isn't made by the RIAA at all.