But the prospect of GM pets has outraged pet dealers
Please go look at a Chihuahua and an Irish Wolfhound, and tell me again about genetic manipulation. And creating new breeds named Peekapoo and Labradoodle is as much an abomination as Mephisto's five-assed monkey.
Then, take a look at the problems rampant in the pet population:
Deafness prevalent in Dalmatians
Congenital skin conditions in numerous cat and dog breeds
Hip displasia in a many of the larger breeds of dogs
Cardiomyopathy in Great Danes
Who wouldn't want the genes fixed?
What about the remote users?
on
150 Mbit/s DSL.
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm currently about 5KM or so from my CO. No ADSL available, only Comcast cable modem with their usual bandwidth throttling.
SBC did offer to sell me SDSL: twice the price of their standard ADSL ($80/mo) at 128K (bleah).
How about some devices to make it easy to relay the DSL signals to the edges of the CO's area? If a chip can give you those great speeds at 4KM, can we at least get reasonable service beyond that?
My kids basically learned to program through games: 1) Flow-like programs such as "The Incredible Toon Machine" let them understand logic and blow things up
2) Starcraft and Warcraft III have scripted triggers and a programming environment for creating bizarre games based on the existing engine. I've seen "Mastermind" programmed in Starcraft, and any of the "Mania" modules created have so little resemblance to Starcraft that they're unique games in their own right
3) Someone else mentioned Inform, and that's a good start too, although there are no graphics.
But I have to object to the "No programming language on PCs" statement. Every copy of Windows XP has VBScript and JScript/JavaScript/ECMAScript which will run from the command line or a clicked icon. An IDE is lacking, but the functionality certainly isn't.
Although I'm not a Windows chauvinist, I don't advocate making the kids slug through Linux just to start programming -- it's too much of a chore to tear them away from their everyday games, AIM, etc. to reboot into Linux (yeah yeah, GAIM, yeah yeah some games available in Linux, but not many).
All the GNU tools will run on Windows, and there are some IDEs so you can avoid using CYGWIN.
Python, as mentioned elsewhere, is a nice interactive environment to help get things started -- much friendlier than the write-and-try languages such as Perl, VBScript, etc.
And don't forget Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) -- if you've got MS Word or Excel, you've got a full-fledged version of Visual Basic that can do everything but create stand-alone executables, and a reasonable IDE to work in.
There's little chance of life "as we know it" existing post-supernova, but if these science writers read much science fiction, they'd have the chance of thinking that other kinds of life could be there.
I strongly disagree. Apple's reigning in of the clones nearly killed them (although it was at least as much IBM reneging on their open platform).
Consolidating tiny Handspring is a drop in the bucket, and as some other poster said, more of a handout to the ex-Palm execs. With Sony and several other PalmOS licensees going strong, taking Handspring out of the mix will have little impact.
What does Palm get? Some existing licensing into the wireless phone companies. Most of the other Handspring innovations, such as a card slot, are default features these days.
I'm still waiting for my perfect convergence device: 2.5+Megapixel camera, 3G phone with a decent virtual machine (JVM, CLR, whatever), GPS, GB+ storage, MP3 playback, all of it no bigger than my Palm 500-series, and with battery life that'll work all weekend.
Just have a 'bot watch for the red light on the TiVo, and the TV being on. If nobody's watching, and nothing's being recorded, change the channel every ten minutes to something random. Hit instant replay a buncha times.
Race ya' to sourceforge to create the TiVoMonkey project.
99% of the messages I receive that have automated messages from Exim servers are carriers of the Goldfish family of malware.
I just assumed that Exim was a bogus server name made up by the malware writer.
Another fatality from software/hardware interface
on
When Bad Software Can Kill
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I would love to find some attribution to this, I believe I remember reading it in Computerworld in the mid-'80s:
A manufacturer of particle accelerators for treating cancers had a unit, that due to a software bug, would occasionally blow a fuse. It wasn't considered important enough to track down, since you could just reset the machine, and it'd be fine.
Until they upgraded the equipment for a higher power unit, with the same software. The radiation dose killed a patient.
This came up originally under the subject of software malpractice.
Effective copy protection -- and frankly, theirs was pretty darn effective, compared to most -- at this point has to be intrusive to actually work.
The only way around it would be to patch the code to prevent the lookup, and that's more work than your average person is willing to do.
Theirs certainly was intrusive. Aside from the possible damage to my machine from questionable tactics such as boot-sector munging, their policy of requiring only a single PC being able to use the software is the biggest real objection.
I have multiple PC's at home. I do most of my work in the living room, but it would be nice to be able to alternately work on my taxes from the upstairs office. No can do, without a second license. At least Micro$oft's Activation method lets you have two copies in most cases.
If they really want effective copy protection, the product should come with a USB dongle. That's still annoying, because it may cause you to go out and get a hub and still use your other USB devices at the same time, but I'd live with that.
Would it be fair to then hand my USB dongle to my buddy so he can do his taxes? I'd say yes -- because I would not be able to use it while he has it. Intuit would probably say no. On the other hand, my buddy would probably be more likely to go out and get his own copy for next year.
Ooh! And give a discount to those who have last years' key!
That contrasts with their current policy of offering early versions to registered users, and a price usually $20 higher than BestBuy will have just after XMas.
What I'd use with Radio TiVo for
on
TiVo For Radio?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Side note -- just looked, and RadiVo already is trademarked and has a website -- but no product. Eh. Slashdot 'em anyway.
I rarely listen to radio at home anymore -- my home theater system gets crappy reception. It's primarily my car. So I'd love for it to start recording a half-hour (or hour) before I get in the car:
1) Let me hear the weather and traffic that's inevitably broadcast just before I start driving 2) Scroll through the music, and skip over the commercials (until I catch up *snif*) 3) Hit a button to spool the current song off to the SD/memstik in [your favorite encoding here] for portable players.
At FM radio quality, I can't imagine anyone is overly concerned about piracy. In an ideal world, it would carry ID tags so I know what the artist and album are -- perhaps build me a shopping list while it's at it, or carry an iTunes URL so I can buy the full-strength version when I get home.
This shouldn't even be too hard to do: I think there's at least one Sony Clio model that has an FM receiver -- can you get at the streams? Hmm.. PalmOS doesn't multitask well, that might not be good enuf.
As the article says, it only changes enforcement of the laws on the books, and maybe broadens existing rules just a bit: service and other facilities within the state now count as brick & mortar to cause you to be responsible for in-state sales tax.
Amazon already keeps its distribution facilities in Oregon and Nevada for just this reason. They might get caught if they have a supply/delivery depot set up for same-day delivery in LA.
This is mainly to put some muscle into collecting from folks like Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble and Borders, who claimed to have separate businesses running their internet. The new law states that the same 'brand name' is a trigger for tax collection.
The two goals, which in my mind are separate directions, are speed and independence from wires.
If I can 'print' an e-book, I don't care about refresh rate. But is a 300-page e-paperback cheaper than buying, say 50 paperbacks? 20 paperbacks? Or is it silly to even think of having 300 pages of this stuff, and I'd just 'leaf' through pages like I do on my PDA currently? Maybe I'm old, but I still like the page-flipping aspect of books, especially if I want to flip back to find when a character that just stepped out of the wings first showed up.
If this stuff is as durable, and as cheap, power-friendly and fast as LCDs, I'd be happy to drop a fair chunk of my PDA's weight. Cell-phone screens sound like another perfect application.
Now for the more far-out stuff: How about rewritable MTG cards? Medical 'patches' that tell you when they need replacing, or can monitor glucose or other body functions. Devices when you need to measure bend
Sounds reasonable
on
TiVo Basic
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
If I didn't already have my lifetime subscription -- and frankly, I'm watching too much TV with my existing 30-hour series 1 box -- I'd probably be happy with the 3-day limits.
It's certainly a lot less data. The only real loss is the ability to look ahead two weeks to see what episodes are running and picking up specific ones. I'd assume that all the subscriptions still work.
Vacation time could be a pain, because I wouldn't be able to prioritize over the full time I'm gone.
The primary things I use the two-week lookahead are for things such as 24, Monk and Dead Zone that run new(ish) eps on multiple networks: I don't subscribe 24 on both Fox and FX, so if I miss an ep on Fox, I scan for it on FX.
Hopefully, this will bring in more sales for TiVo.
> Hey, there are many more good hosts which offer hosting for price far lesser (sic) than that.
Bandwidth gets to be a mofo. The cheaper hosts will eat your profits quickly if you use past their set bandwidth caps. And with customers demanding Amazon-scale pictures of everything, and 10,000 spiders sucking your servers dry every day, that bandwidth goes away fast before your first customer shows up.
My wife's webstore (home grown, and I'm not crass enough to plug it with a link here) has about 70,000 items, the catalog takes up about 150MB, and it eats about 12GB in transfer a month. When it exceeds 15, our host wants $5/GB! One month (I think due to their accounting error) it went to 30GB, so the extra 15*5 is more than 3X our $20/month hosting cost. They say I need a different plan -- but they don't offer one with significantly more bandwidth.
Google -- where else would you go to look for free porn, or just about anything
Showtime (cable network) page for Penn & Teller's Bullshit, where they debunk commercial claims, occult, superbabies, bottled water, greenpeace, etc. Quite entertaining.
The spammers will claim they all fit in the personal communications requested by the recipient, and are not required to fill in all that rigamarole.
And you're right back where you started from.
No, the solution is to inform people that a) Your body parts aren't going to get bigger (bellies excluded) b) You really don't want to trust your finances -- even credit bailouts -- to people who'd SPAM you c) There are no dignitaries in Nigeria that have millions of dollars they need to launder into the US, and if they did, you'd be arrested d) There's no need to pay for porn. Go out into the big blue room and you could find someone real. Besides, there's enough free internet porn, just look.
You get SPAM because it works. People buy this crap. If they didn't, the spammers would stop.
Here's the real challenge: a 120-minute movie has about a 120-page shooting script. This is wide-spaced, large-margin dialog and some scene directions.
The flowery descriptive language is gone (production design is done elsewhere), but you've pared a 400-page novel to the bone to get this to work. Look at Stephen King's filmography. Some of the best adaptations were novellas (and not horror either, but that's not the point): Stand By Me (The Body) and Shawshank Redemption.
If you have a 400-page novel, get a 400-minute mini-series (9 hours on commercial TV).
So today's 10-pound novels are not great fodder for films. And publishers have little interest in novella-length, except as kids' books (Coraline by Neil Gaiman is being made by the director of Nightmare Before Christmas).
Pre-1980 novels might be better sources, as you had some really short stuff out there: Heinlein, Zelazny and others were known for 95-page novels in really cheap paperback form.
I was just looking into motherboards this afternoon, and most of the newest P4 motherboards only support 4 gig -- and the older ones only support 3 or 2 gig.
So maybe the chip does support 64GB (I don't have a link for that)... the limit could be the chipset, the motherboard makers, or perhaps its just the max size of RAM available?
... and I don't mean the colors on cheap newsprint either.
Aside from the Sturgeon's Law factor (95% of everything is crap), one of the main reasons why I don't buy many new indy comix is because anything I'm likely to enjoy has a high probability of just plain disappearing:
companies fold (big examples include Fireman, Comico, even First!, Pacific, Eclipse if you're old enough)
artists can't be kept to schedules when they're doing it themselves (THB anyone?)
or they get "hot" and snatched up by the majors (example: Kelly Jones' early work on Chrome -- I want to know where that story was going)
Trade papers are the evidence of success: if it's good enough to get 4-8 issues collected, grab it!
Prime examples: "Bronze Age" by Eric Shanower, and "Girl Genius" by the manic Phil and Kaja Foglio
I haven't looked at the XML generated by saving 'normal' docs to XML, but I'm rather impressed by Word's ability to edit XML.
You need a schema, which is a bit of a pain, but it's at least as friendly as most of the XML editors out there. Plus you can embed all the 'normal' Word formatting content where any CDATA would go.
I'd like to see a better UI for entering attributes rather than having to right-click the tag -- there's this handy-dandy task pane on the right, why not default to attribute entry there?
The live validation is pretty good, the pick-and-choose entities is just fine. The best part, is that the XML is accessible from VBA,.Net, and anything else that can talk COM/OLE.
I'm starting to look into their "SmartDocs" SDK, where you can have behaviors appear in that task pane (probably can do the attribute editing there), based on the XML tags. It's an extension of their SmartTag interface, and not the most straightforward interface I've ever seen, because the tag is just a parameter to a generic call, but I think I can make it work.
I'm less impressed with their XML form editor Infowhatever -- it appears to be limited to usability with certain kinds of schemas (and never DTDs, it seems), more database-like, less document-like. If its forms could be embedded ito Word, it would be even nicer.
FYI, the DTD I'm working with is the International Council of Harmonization's Electronic Common Technical Document, which is not a document, but the table of contents for submissions of data to the Food and Drug Administration and regulatory agencies worldwide (Ok, only Europe and Japan, with Canada and Australia and others riding the coattails).
Ok, when I posted the same info from a Yahoo article several days ago, this was rejected, but now it's news?
I even mentioned the fact that all it's asking for is legit reply addresses and obeying remove requests (of course if the reply address is bogus, you can't ask to be removed, and the attorneys general have a harder time suing anyway...).
Can anyone explain what makes this reference by Timmy to a CNN story migut be more respected than mine to the Yahoo story?
Whoops. Sloppy of me. I was looking at them from the top down in the packaging, and there's a large visible divot on each of the tanks below the turret, and I mistakenly identified that as the IR transmitter. It's smaller, and indeed on the turret.
The turret only moves about 30-40 degrees to the right and left. But since you can back up easily, you can still fire in the opposite direction.
Slashdot Mirror
Kevin Mitchell's , one of the first GIF-manipulating products for Mac, is still available as shareware.
He's still dedicated Mac only, so he could use your support.
Please go look at a Chihuahua and an Irish Wolfhound, and tell me again about genetic manipulation. And creating new breeds named Peekapoo and Labradoodle is as much an abomination as Mephisto's five-assed monkey.
Then, take a look at the problems rampant in the pet population:
Who wouldn't want the genes fixed?
I'm currently about 5KM or so from my CO. No ADSL available, only Comcast cable modem with their usual bandwidth throttling.
SBC did offer to sell me SDSL: twice the price of their standard ADSL ($80/mo) at 128K (bleah).
How about some devices to make it easy to relay the DSL signals to the edges of the CO's area?
If a chip can give you those great speeds at 4KM, can we at least get reasonable service beyond that?
My kids basically learned to program through games:
1) Flow-like programs such as "The Incredible Toon Machine" let them understand logic and blow things up
2) Starcraft and Warcraft III have scripted triggers and a programming environment for creating bizarre games based on the existing engine. I've seen "Mastermind" programmed in Starcraft, and any of the "Mania" modules created have so little resemblance to Starcraft that they're unique games in their own right
3) Someone else mentioned Inform, and that's a good start too, although there are no graphics.
But I have to object to the "No programming language on PCs" statement. Every copy of Windows XP has VBScript and JScript/JavaScript/ECMAScript which will run from the command line or a clicked icon. An IDE is lacking, but the functionality certainly isn't.
Although I'm not a Windows chauvinist, I don't advocate making the kids slug through Linux just to start programming -- it's too much of a chore to tear them away from their everyday games, AIM, etc. to reboot into Linux (yeah yeah, GAIM, yeah yeah some games available in Linux, but not many).
All the GNU tools will run on Windows, and there are some IDEs so you can avoid using CYGWIN.
Python, as mentioned elsewhere, is a nice interactive environment to help get things started -- much friendlier than the write-and-try languages such as Perl, VBScript, etc.
And don't forget Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) -- if you've got MS Word or Excel, you've got a full-fledged version of Visual Basic that can do everything but create stand-alone executables, and a reasonable IDE to work in.
There's little chance of life "as we know it" existing post-supernova, but if these science writers read much science fiction, they'd have the chance of thinking that other kinds of life could be there.
Examples:
I strongly disagree. Apple's reigning in of the clones nearly killed them (although it was at least as much IBM reneging on their open platform).
Consolidating tiny Handspring is a drop in the bucket, and as some other poster said, more of a handout to the ex-Palm execs. With Sony and several other PalmOS licensees going strong, taking Handspring out of the mix will have little impact.
What does Palm get? Some existing licensing into the wireless phone companies. Most of the other Handspring innovations, such as a card slot, are default features these days.
I'm still waiting for my perfect convergence device: 2.5+Megapixel camera, 3G phone with a decent virtual machine (JVM, CLR, whatever), GPS, GB+ storage, MP3 playback, all of it no bigger than my Palm 500-series, and with battery life that'll work all weekend.
Just have a 'bot watch for the red light on the TiVo, and the TV being on. If nobody's watching, and nothing's being recorded, change the channel every ten minutes to something random. Hit instant replay a buncha times.
Race ya' to sourceforge to create the TiVoMonkey project.
99% of the messages I receive that have automated messages from Exim servers are carriers of the Goldfish family of malware.
I just assumed that Exim was a bogus server name made up by the malware writer.
I would love to find some attribution to this, I believe I remember reading it in Computerworld in the mid-'80s:
A manufacturer of particle accelerators for treating cancers had a unit, that due to a software bug, would occasionally blow a fuse. It wasn't considered important enough to track down, since you could just reset the machine, and it'd be fine.
Until they upgraded the equipment for a higher power unit, with the same software. The radiation dose killed a patient.
This came up originally under the subject of software malpractice.
Effective copy protection -- and frankly, theirs was pretty darn effective, compared to most -- at this point has to be intrusive to actually work.
The only way around it would be to patch the code to prevent the lookup, and that's more work than your average person is willing to do.
Theirs certainly was intrusive. Aside from the possible damage to my machine from questionable tactics such as boot-sector munging, their policy of requiring only a single PC being able to use the software is the biggest real objection.
I have multiple PC's at home. I do most of my work in the living room, but it would be nice to be able to alternately work on my taxes from the upstairs office. No can do, without a second license. At least Micro$oft's Activation method lets you have two copies in most cases.
If they really want effective copy protection, the product should come with a USB dongle. That's still annoying, because it may cause you to go out and get a hub and still use your other USB devices at the same time, but I'd live with that.
Would it be fair to then hand my USB dongle to my buddy so he can do his taxes? I'd say yes -- because I would not be able to use it while he has it. Intuit would probably say no. On the other hand, my buddy would probably be more likely to go out and get his own copy for next year.
Ooh! And give a discount to those who have last years' key!
That contrasts with their current policy of offering early versions to registered users, and a price usually $20 higher than BestBuy will have just after XMas.
Side note -- just looked, and RadiVo already is trademarked and has a website -- but no product. Eh. Slashdot 'em anyway.
I rarely listen to radio at home anymore -- my home theater system gets crappy reception. It's primarily my car. So I'd love for it to start recording a half-hour (or hour) before I get in the car:
1) Let me hear the weather and traffic that's inevitably broadcast just before I start driving
2) Scroll through the music, and skip over the commercials (until I catch up *snif*)
3) Hit a button to spool the current song off to the SD/memstik in [your favorite encoding here] for portable players.
At FM radio quality, I can't imagine anyone is overly concerned about piracy. In an ideal world, it would carry ID tags so I know what the artist and album are -- perhaps build me a shopping list while it's at it, or carry an iTunes URL so I can buy the full-strength version when I get home.
This shouldn't even be too hard to do: I think there's at least one Sony Clio model that has an FM receiver -- can you get at the streams? Hmm.. PalmOS doesn't multitask well, that might not be good enuf.
As the article says, it only changes enforcement of the laws on the books, and maybe broadens existing rules just a bit: service and other facilities within the state now count as brick & mortar to cause you to be responsible for in-state sales tax.
Amazon already keeps its distribution facilities in Oregon and Nevada for just this reason. They might get caught if they have a supply/delivery depot set up for same-day delivery in LA.
This is mainly to put some muscle into collecting from folks like Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble and Borders, who claimed to have separate businesses running their internet. The new law states that the same 'brand name' is a trigger for tax collection.
The two goals, which in my mind are separate directions, are speed and independence from wires.
If I can 'print' an e-book, I don't care about refresh rate. But is a 300-page e-paperback cheaper than buying, say 50 paperbacks? 20 paperbacks? Or is it silly to even think of having 300 pages of this stuff, and I'd just 'leaf' through pages like I do on my PDA currently? Maybe I'm old, but I still like the page-flipping aspect of books, especially if I want to flip back to find when a character that just stepped out of the wings first showed up.
If this stuff is as durable, and as cheap, power-friendly and fast as LCDs, I'd be happy to drop a fair chunk of my PDA's weight. Cell-phone screens sound like another perfect application.
Now for the more far-out stuff:
How about rewritable MTG cards?
Medical 'patches' that tell you when they need replacing, or can monitor glucose or other body functions.
Devices when you need to measure bend
If I didn't already have my lifetime subscription -- and frankly, I'm watching too much TV with my existing 30-hour series 1 box -- I'd probably be happy with the 3-day limits.
It's certainly a lot less data. The only real loss is the ability to look ahead two weeks to see what episodes are running and picking up specific ones. I'd assume that all the subscriptions still work.
Vacation time could be a pain, because I wouldn't be able to prioritize over the full time I'm gone.
The primary things I use the two-week lookahead are for things such as 24, Monk and Dead Zone that run new(ish) eps on multiple networks: I don't subscribe 24 on both Fox and FX, so if I miss an ep on Fox, I scan for it on FX.
Hopefully, this will bring in more sales for TiVo.
> Hey, there are many more good hosts which offer hosting for price far lesser (sic) than that.
Bandwidth gets to be a mofo. The cheaper hosts will eat your profits quickly if you use past their set bandwidth caps. And with customers demanding Amazon-scale pictures of everything, and 10,000 spiders sucking your servers dry every day, that bandwidth goes away fast before your first customer shows up.
My wife's webstore (home grown, and I'm not crass enough to plug it with a link here) has about 70,000 items, the catalog takes up about 150MB, and it eats about 12GB in transfer a month. When it exceeds 15, our host wants $5/GB! One month (I think due to their accounting error) it went to 30GB, so the extra 15*5 is more than 3X our $20/month hosting cost. They say I need a different plan -- but they don't offer one with significantly more bandwidth.
The two links were:
Google -- where else would you go to look for free porn, or just about anything
Showtime (cable network) page for Penn & Teller's Bullshit, where they debunk commercial claims, occult, superbabies, bottled water, greenpeace, etc. Quite entertaining.
Y'know, the one that seems to go on forever with the big hot light that moves from east to west?... ...Outside!
The spammers will claim they all fit in the personal communications requested by the recipient, and are not required to fill in all that rigamarole.
And you're right back where you started from.
No, the solution is to inform people that
a) Your body parts aren't going to get bigger (bellies excluded)
b) You really don't want to trust your finances -- even credit bailouts -- to people who'd SPAM you
c) There are no dignitaries in Nigeria that have millions of dollars they need to launder into the US, and if they did, you'd be arrested
d) There's no need to pay for porn. Go out into the big blue room and you could find someone real. Besides, there's enough free internet porn, just look.
You get SPAM because it works. People buy this crap. If they didn't, the spammers would stop.
Here's the real challenge: a 120-minute movie has about a 120-page shooting script. This is wide-spaced, large-margin dialog and some scene directions.
The flowery descriptive language is gone (production design is done elsewhere), but you've pared a 400-page novel to the bone to get this to work. Look at Stephen King's filmography. Some of the best adaptations were novellas (and not horror either, but that's not the point): Stand By Me (The Body) and Shawshank Redemption.
If you have a 400-page novel, get a 400-minute mini-series (9 hours on commercial TV).
So today's 10-pound novels are not great fodder for films. And publishers have little interest in novella-length, except as kids' books (Coraline by Neil Gaiman is being made by the director of Nightmare Before Christmas).
Pre-1980 novels might be better sources, as you had some really short stuff out there: Heinlein, Zelazny and others were known for 95-page novels in really cheap paperback form.
I was just looking into motherboards this afternoon, and most of the newest P4 motherboards only support 4 gig -- and the older ones only support 3 or 2 gig.
Go check out Tom's Hardware if you don't believe me.
So maybe the chip does support 64GB (I don't have a link for that)... the limit could be the chipset, the motherboard makers, or perhaps its just the max size of RAM available?
... and I don't mean the colors on cheap newsprint either.
Aside from the Sturgeon's Law factor (95% of everything is crap), one of the main reasons why I don't buy many new indy comix is because anything I'm likely to enjoy has a high probability of just plain disappearing:
Trade papers are the evidence of success: if it's good enough to get 4-8 issues collected, grab it!
Prime examples: "Bronze Age" by Eric Shanower, and "Girl Genius" by the manic Phil and Kaja Foglio
It's more than just constructing walking robots... it's a laugh and a half, at how ridiculous some of these moving animations are.
But it shows the beauty of math within nature, reduced down to a handful of lines and tension points.
Check out Sodaplay
I haven't looked at the XML generated by saving 'normal' docs to XML, but I'm rather impressed by Word's ability to edit XML.
.Net, and anything else that can talk COM/OLE.
You need a schema, which is a bit of a pain, but it's at least as friendly as most of the XML editors out there. Plus you can embed all the 'normal' Word formatting content where any CDATA would go.
I'd like to see a better UI for entering attributes rather than having to right-click the tag -- there's this handy-dandy task pane on the right, why not default to attribute entry there?
The live validation is pretty good, the pick-and-choose entities is just fine. The best part, is that the XML is accessible from VBA,
I'm starting to look into their "SmartDocs" SDK, where you can have behaviors appear in that task pane (probably can do the attribute editing there), based on the XML tags. It's an extension of their SmartTag interface, and not the most straightforward interface I've ever seen, because the tag is just a parameter to a generic call, but I think I can make it work.
I'm less impressed with their XML form editor Infowhatever -- it appears to be limited to usability with certain kinds of schemas (and never DTDs, it seems), more database-like, less document-like. If its forms could be embedded ito Word, it would be even nicer.
FYI, the DTD I'm working with is the International Council of Harmonization's Electronic Common Technical Document, which is not a document, but the table of contents for submissions of data to the Food and Drug Administration and regulatory agencies worldwide (Ok, only Europe and Japan, with Canada and Australia and others riding the coattails).
Ok, when I posted the same info from a Yahoo article several days ago, this was rejected, but now it's news?
I even mentioned the fact that all it's asking for is legit reply addresses and obeying remove requests (of course if the reply address is bogus, you can't ask to be removed, and the attorneys general have a harder time suing anyway...).
Can anyone explain what makes this reference by Timmy to a CNN story migut be more respected than mine to the Yahoo story?
Whoops. Sloppy of me. I was looking at them from the top down in the packaging, and there's a large visible divot on each of the tanks below the turret, and I mistakenly identified that as the IR transmitter. It's smaller, and indeed on the turret.
The turret only moves about 30-40 degrees to the right and left. But since you can back up easily, you can still fire in the opposite direction.