So, a friend who will remain unnamed, and works for an unnamed contractor called me one day a few months ago and asked me to scope out a ( unnamed ) Navy website. He said he saw something suspicious -- looking like a subtle defacement by a 3rd party. So, I went there and took a look and yes, in fact, there was a *tiny* javascript insertion in the page calling a javascript file from some random IP. I tracked it down -- several indirections later -- to a chinese website which was causing the insertion of an active x control. It was all very obfuscated and suspicious.
So, my friend contacts the webmaster of the navy site and explains what he saw, how it was tracked down ( he left my name out -- thank god -- since my name is very islamic and happens to be shared with an at-large eastern european islamic terrorist. Bad enough that it's a disaster whenever I *try* to fly. Thanks, dad. ) and what did my friend get in return? Thanks? A "We'll look into that, good job, citizen". No, he was accused of hacking the site, and they informed the secret service of him and his "actions".
Fortunately, the SS ( lol ) realized he'd done the right thing and was innocent.
Also, they say the endpoint ( way past geosync ) would be a good launching point for spacecraft. You'd pretty much just "drop" the ship...
That said, these space elevator stories give me the tinglies like visiting the Air and Space museum did when I was a kid. I *believed* when I was a kid that space was mankind's future. I still do, but between Challenger, the ISS boondoggle, etc, etc the gusto is gone. Space elevators, I think, are the logical next step for a true, permanent -- democratic -- future in space. I say democratic because once one's up, making dozens or hundreds more may very well be relatively cheap.
Time will tell. When these finally happen, I'll probably be too old to go up, but maybe my children, or grandchildren will.
As far as I'm concerned, the *world* is filthy, and millions of years of evolution have allowed us to live healthily ( mostly ) in it. It's part of being alive. And the more we're exposed, the stronger we are for it.
I'm not surprised that keyboards are filthy, but frankly, when I was a kid wandering around in creeks hunting crawfish, climbing trees, etc etc I never got sick, and I (almost) never get sick as an adult.
We *need* this exposure. I'm worried for children growing up in sterilized environments today.
Read the comments before you make a post like this. The majority of the comments have fallen into two categories:
1) It's spyware, but not malware. 2) Apple's a company, looking to make money, and targetted advertising is a good way to do it.
I didn't see any mindless maclot apologies above, just surprisingly reasonable commentary and a few funny jokes. And, I'd like to point out, this site isn't nearly as anti-MS as you claim. Look at any recent article about windows flaws and you'll see a lot of +5 comments about how it's MS's responsibility to test their patches thoroughly before distributing them. Since there are SO MANY machines running windows, their responsibility to do it correctly is very high.
I was raised a pretty secular muslim -- not fundamentalist or anything, just a normal muslim, and I'm an atheist now -- and my father and mother both wanted me to read these books. It never bothered them that they had christian undertones; they just liked that the books were well written, exciting, and had good morals. Of course, I was pretty dense about christianity as a child, and I didn't pick up on that aspect at all. I haven't read the books since I was 7 or 8, and I'm 28 now, so all I recall is how the one kid betrayed his friends for the turkish candy.
Anyway, just sayin. I bet lots of non-christians read the books and didn't end up fundies or flat-earthers or anything else byzantine and stupid.
Do they expect me to *pay* for the luxury of wearing -- on my face no less -- something that looks like a Geigeresque metal-sheened plastic turd? I would be ashamed to leave the house wearing one of these. I might as well have a sign on my chest that says "Too much money, and no standards"
And, to anybody who says these are for cyclists and such. Well. I'm a cyclist, I ride 50+ miles on weekends on a road bike, and I bike to work daily in downtown washington dc in rush-hour traffic. My iPod works *just* fine, and as a bonus, I still get to wear my real glasses, so I can see the taxis that want to annihilate me.
Those may very well be excellent machines -- good build quality, good components, good performance. I don't doubt that. In fact, their dead-pixel policy and QC in general is something the whole industry should respect.
I'm not saying iBooks or Powerbooks are the be all of design, but I'll tell you one thing: They are designed to look adult, and respectable. I can open my powerbook in a meeting with important people -- in a recent situation, bigwigs of the russian oil industry -- and feel like they will still respect me. As agraphic designer that's important.
First off, I should say I'm one of the lucky people who can ride his bike to work. I live across the river from DC and work in DC, so my commute is only a few miles.
That said, I *do* own a car, a small 2 door focus stick-shift which gets great mileage. My vow, when I bought the car, was to own it long enough that my *next* car would be an alternate fuel vehicle. Be it hydrogen, electric, whatever. I intend to stand by that, even if I have to keep my focus on the road for ten more years ( it's almost 5 years old ).
The issue here is that I live in an apartment. I LOVE apartment life, I don't intend to own a house, ever, unless it's in ( or very near ) a city, as I love city life. As such, the promise of charging an electric from my garage is kind of a deal breaker, since I don't have a garage, and I don't intend to run a power cable from my apartment window to the street.
For alternate fuel vehicles to succeed we need a way to charge or refuel them that doesn't require people to have garages!
I suppose you've never done any sort of complicated 3d or other sorts of geometry programming?
Frankly, having point/matrix/quaternion/plane/etc classes with reasonably chosen operator overloading allows me to condense a LOT of code into quite little, with as far as I can tell a general *increase* in legibility.
When I started doing 3d programming, for robotics simulation, I used a typedef'd float[4] for vertices, and float[16] for matrices. I had C functions for adding, dot products, cross products, matrix multiplication, etc. It worked. But the code was LONG and verbose. Temporaries were scattered all over the place, and in general, the code wasn't self documenting, so I had to not just explain the algorithm, but why the code I wrote performed said algorithm.
Eventually I decided to rewrite all my core maths as proper C++ classes with reasonably chosen operator overloads. On average, heavy code that did a lot of geometric math was reduced in line-count by 50 to 75%. Plus, the code actually read like the human-readable algorithmic description. Best of all, since the code became easier to read, I caught a few minor bugs.
Sure, I'm not saying operator overloading is right when you'r talking about, say, adding a button to a window. But it has its uses. Consider, the whole world is not necessarily just writing database apps. There's a lot of different stuff out there, and limiting programmer's choices is erring on the side of caution a little too far.
P.S. In your quoted code sample, you *clearly* don't understand what the original author was trying to perform.
I tried reasoning with the IT people
on
Too Many Passwords
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I made the argument, some time ago, that instead of forcing us to make new passwords every 45 days ( which is basically a solid way to guarantee weak, easily dictionary-attacked passwords stuck on the monitor ) they should allow us to keep our passwords longer the more complicated they are.
Say, I choose an easily dictionary attacked password with just 5 lowercase letters. Whammo -- I'm told I can use that password for 3 days. So I make a 20 character, non-dictionary password with a mix of letters, numbers, random symbols, etc and I'm told I can keep it for a year.
Seems to me that's a reasonable approach: reward people for better passwords.
Suffice to say, I was told: "No way, we like it as it is"
My father became nearly crippled because a cocky young doctor refused to listen to the advice and experience of an older doctor ( who knew exactly what work my father needed: specifically, fusing vertebrae due to a collapsed disc ), and instead did it "his own way". It took a subsequent operation by the experienced doctor to undo the damage.
Discounting the old and experienced simply because you think youth is always right shows you to be a) a youth, perhaps a teenager, or b) an ass. Take your pick.
Both the young and old have a lot to learn from one another. In the case of medicine, if either refuses, I say fire him. There's no room for ego when patients' lives are on the line.
And regarding modern "IT", well, consider that your average IT guy 20 or 30 years ago could actually, you know, write code and build mechanisms to solve problems. Today you've got people with MCSEs who wouldn't know a shell script or a compiler if it bit them on their asses. People who, when they sit at a linux or Mac machine say "Where's the start menu". Criminy.
Let me know when I can reliably use the keyboard shortcuts my hands have memorized over the last ~15 years. As in, command-shift-s to save as a new file. If I do that in a web app, what happens? Well, perhaps my browser tries to save the html file I'm viewing, not save the file I'm remotely editing. Or command-f -- what happens? Oh, the browser looks for matching text in the page, not the app.
And I know that you can make custom command shortcuts that the *app* not the browser responds to. But that's retarded. I have to now think of my shortcuts like nested namespaces? Is this the mnemonic for the hosted app or the host? No way.
ZUL is the best bet here, I and I applaud that effort. But traditional HTML web apps simply don't cut the mustard. They aren't applications, in my mind, if they don't behave the way applications have behaved for 20 years. And frankly, it's not like I need to just get with the program and accept the new. The new sucks, it isn't as good as what we've got today. I refuse to adapt to an inferior process.
Wake me up when they can make an app as rich as Flash MX, or Photoshop, or XCode run in a browser.
Quantifying intelligence is a fool's errand, at best. And over time, by god. Every generation believes the young folk are lazy idiots, and that civilization's going down the tubes.
And then you read example essay material from students today in universities and you think, "holy shit, they're right, these people are dumber than a sack of hammers".
But as far as I'm concerned, the *sum* is much higher today than ever before. More people are literate than ever before, more people have some basic math skills than ever before. More people get some basic schooling ( even if they don't want it, or use it ) than ever before.
Perhaps in the old days ( up until a couple centuries ago ) you might have had a situation where 95% of the population were illiterate in every way. No reading, no math, no geography. No knowledge except how to do their respective jobs. And the remaining 5% might have been, by our standards of thoroughness, quite well educated, with serious teachings in history, language, rhetoric, natural philosphy, etc.
Today education is better distributed, even if it means that we have some fairly dumb people coming out of our universities. The fact is, more people are getting an education, or at least the *means* for an education. If they should fail at it, it's their own damn fault, not society.
And the smart people today, by god, they're astonishing. Just pick up any book on some specialized field, say, physics, literature, GPU shader programming, biology, whatever. The work these people do blows my mind.
As far as I'm concerned, it's all A-O-K. At least the responsibility for success (or failure) lies progressively in our own hands. I'd say that's a step in the right direction.
Re:Microsoft continues the tradition...
on
Office 12 Exposed
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't know where you hang out, but here as well as on almost all OS X forums, there's NO END AT ALL to people whinging about OS X's interface inconsistency.
This is NOT an example of everything-MS-does-is-bad-but-if-Apple-does-it-it' s-OK. Apple does it and people bitch. MS does it and people bitch. Hell, it happens on linux too, and people bitch about it there, too. So stop pretending MS is the only one being bitched at about it. It happens everywhere, and people get pissed about it everywhere.
The linked article gives very little information. So, while I'm super stoked by this ( it's a really, really important development ) my questions are:
1) How do they get the hydrogen back out? Do they crush the pellets ( destroying them ), do they heat them, etc.
2) Are the pellets re-usable? Or do you have to get new ones? And if they *aren't* re-usable, can the carrier material be re-cycled into new pellets?
My concerns would be that if the material isn't re-usable/re-cyclable we'd end up with vast landfills full of crushed or otherwise useless carrier material, in which case this is hardly a boon.
On the other hand, if it's recyclable, I can see the oil companies being very happy with this, since you could go to a hydrogen station and dump your used pellets and "refill" with a dump of charged pellets. The station would send the used pellets to a recharging or recycling facility. I say "oil companies" because they've already got quite an infrastucture, and would probably be willing to make the investment into such facilities, since it would maintain their quasi-monopoly on automotive energy distribution.
Still, the appeal of safe hydrogen storage is great.
To answer your actual question, you *do* need a relatively modern API reference, if you're studying from the 1.1 spec ( I learned off the 1.2 spec ). But the thing is, OpenGL is very well backwards compatible, so code written for the first edition will work fine on a modern OpenGL 2 driver.
Still, but it: It's a good book. I went from *zero* opengl experience to My mediocre game in 1.5 years, with a robotics simulator in the interim.
I don't know about you, but when I'm studying a complicated topic, be it programming or something in the real world, I prefer to have a real book to read, which I can hilight, post-it-note and carry into the toilet with me for deep thinking time.
Also, I'm not a cheap bastard. The book's good, so I paid for it.
No, but crap like King of Queens and American Idol look essentially the same between the two.
Explain to me how higher resolution crap is significantly better than low resolution crap... I'm curious.
The stuff I do want to see is mostly on VHS and DVD, and from what I've seen, it won't look significantly better on a new TV. E.g., it looks better, but not 1000 dollars better.
Depends on the theater. Personally, I like going to the theater, it's only a 15 minute walk or bike ride ( I live in DC, relatively close to a number of good theaters ) and it's a wonderful way to spend the evening with my girlfriend. We can go out beforehand or afterwards to get food, walk around, so on and so forth. The potomac waterfront in georgetown can be quite beautiful, too.
Sure, the theater's only a small part of the experience, but it's a hell of an improvement over sitting my my apartment -- particularly since I've got a 20 year old zenith and don't intend to "upgrade" to a 3000 dollar flatscreen.
Also, there are some really good theaters out there. In arlington ( admittedly, I have to drive to this one ) there's a theater call the "Cinema and Drafthouse" where -- and this rules -- you pay very little to get in, you can drink, eat and smoke all you want, and there's no commericials. The atmosphere is great ( and if you don't smoke, that's fine, the front is all no smoking and the ventilation's good ). The price is dirt cheap because they show movies about 6 months late, and only the *good* ones.
Basically, as far as I can tell, if you don't like what the theaters are providing, try to find a better theater. As far as I can tell, all reaonsably sized american cities & quasi-urban areas have *some* sort of indy theater, or at the very least, something better than just a theater in a strip-mall in suburbia. Maybe you'll have to drive farther, but the whole experience can be better.
let me put it this way. I saw _The Island_ with a friend in Georgetown's big-corporate-multiplex. The movie sucked. But then we walked across the street to a really nice bar and had a wonderful time discussing it, eating bar fries and drinking. That made up for it wonderfully, and in all I had a great time. It's hard to do that when your theater's just a plug in the middle of nowhere.
That said, summer movies do suck, and sometimes I'd rather just stay home and watch Logan's Run again.
I wish more people felt this way. What's the damn rush, anyhow? ( Yes, yes, I know there are many situations where a rush is important, and that's fine. )
Personally, I'd like to take a zeppelin to somewhere far away, like australia ( I'm in DC ). It'd be a two week trip each way, probably. I'd relax, and see the country, and ocean. My god, would it be beautiful.
Everybody's in too much of a damn hurry. I commute by bike, or on foot ( an hour walk, about ), and people are always shocked that I'm willing to take the time. I tell them it's good for the mind, for the soul. They shake their heads in disbelief.
Slashdot Mirror
So, a friend who will remain unnamed, and works for an unnamed contractor called me one day a few months ago and asked me to scope out a ( unnamed ) Navy website. He said he saw something suspicious -- looking like a subtle defacement by a 3rd party. So, I went there and took a look and yes, in fact, there was a *tiny* javascript insertion in the page calling a javascript file from some random IP. I tracked it down -- several indirections later -- to a chinese website which was causing the insertion of an active x control. It was all very obfuscated and suspicious.
So, my friend contacts the webmaster of the navy site and explains what he saw, how it was tracked down ( he left my name out -- thank god -- since my name is very islamic and happens to be shared with an at-large eastern european islamic terrorist. Bad enough that it's a disaster whenever I *try* to fly. Thanks, dad. ) and what did my friend get in return? Thanks? A "We'll look into that, good job, citizen". No, he was accused of hacking the site, and they informed the secret service of him and his "actions".
Fortunately, the SS ( lol ) realized he'd done the right thing and was innocent.
But, seriously folks, how fucked up is this?
My god, it looks like Microsoft Word.
Also, they say the endpoint ( way past geosync ) would be a good launching point for spacecraft. You'd pretty much just "drop" the ship...
That said, these space elevator stories give me the tinglies like visiting the Air and Space museum did when I was a kid. I *believed* when I was a kid that space was mankind's future. I still do, but between Challenger, the ISS boondoggle, etc, etc the gusto is gone. Space elevators, I think, are the logical next step for a true, permanent -- democratic -- future in space. I say democratic because once one's up, making dozens or hundreds more may very well be relatively cheap.
Time will tell. When these finally happen, I'll probably be too old to go up, but maybe my children, or grandchildren will.
As far as I'm concerned, the *world* is filthy, and millions of years of evolution have allowed us to live healthily ( mostly ) in it. It's part of being alive. And the more we're exposed, the stronger we are for it.
I'm not surprised that keyboards are filthy, but frankly, when I was a kid wandering around in creeks hunting crawfish, climbing trees, etc etc I never got sick, and I (almost) never get sick as an adult.
We *need* this exposure. I'm worried for children growing up in sterilized environments today.
It's the sticker in the packaging that you see when you open it up: "Please don't steal music". Who'd have thought people would pay attention?
Read the comments before you make a post like this. The majority of the comments have fallen into two categories:
1) It's spyware, but not malware.
2) Apple's a company, looking to make money, and targetted advertising is a good way to do it.
I didn't see any mindless maclot apologies above, just surprisingly reasonable commentary and a few funny jokes. And, I'd like to point out, this site isn't nearly as anti-MS as you claim. Look at any recent article about windows flaws and you'll see a lot of +5 comments about how it's MS's responsibility to test their patches thoroughly before distributing them. Since there are SO MANY machines running windows, their responsibility to do it correctly is very high.
So, in short, I politely suggest you STFU.
Then, with each subsequent return, the customer earns more downloadable data, eventually getting an entire movie or game."
That's it. Civilization is over. We had a nice run.
"secular heeb"
I was raised a pretty secular muslim -- not fundamentalist or anything, just a normal muslim, and I'm an atheist now -- and my father and mother both wanted me to read these books. It never bothered them that they had christian undertones; they just liked that the books were well written, exciting, and had good morals. Of course, I was pretty dense about christianity as a child, and I didn't pick up on that aspect at all. I haven't read the books since I was 7 or 8, and I'm 28 now, so all I recall is how the one kid betrayed his friends for the turkish candy.
Anyway, just sayin. I bet lots of non-christians read the books and didn't end up fundies or flat-earthers or anything else byzantine and stupid.
Do they expect me to *pay* for the luxury of wearing -- on my face no less -- something that looks like a Geigeresque metal-sheened plastic turd? I would be ashamed to leave the house wearing one of these. I might as well have a sign on my chest that says "Too much money, and no standards" And, to anybody who says these are for cyclists and such. Well. I'm a cyclist, I ride 50+ miles on weekends on a road bike, and I bike to work daily in downtown washington dc in rush-hour traffic. My iPod works *just* fine, and as a bonus, I still get to wear my real glasses, so I can see the taxis that want to annihilate me.
Those may very well be excellent machines -- good build quality, good components, good performance. I don't doubt that. In fact, their dead-pixel policy and QC in general is something the whole industry should respect.
3 00x225.jpg ) for, at the very least, the irony. For god's sake, why do people think that shiny electric blue, or green or red, ( http://www.hypersonic-pc.com/_inventoryImages/imag es/color_choice_m2/piercing.jpg ) and a huge ugly logo is a good thing?
But I'd be downright embarassed to be seen with something that looked like that. I'd rather be seen with a barbie laptop ( http://www.cnet.com.au/i/r/2004/PC/barbie_laptop_
I'm not saying iBooks or Powerbooks are the be all of design, but I'll tell you one thing: They are designed to look adult, and respectable. I can open my powerbook in a meeting with important people -- in a recent situation, bigwigs of the russian oil industry -- and feel like they will still respect me. As agraphic designer that's important.
First off, I should say I'm one of the lucky people who can ride his bike to work. I live across the river from DC and work in DC, so my commute is only a few miles.
That said, I *do* own a car, a small 2 door focus stick-shift which gets great mileage. My vow, when I bought the car, was to own it long enough that my *next* car would be an alternate fuel vehicle. Be it hydrogen, electric, whatever. I intend to stand by that, even if I have to keep my focus on the road for ten more years ( it's almost 5 years old ).
The issue here is that I live in an apartment. I LOVE apartment life, I don't intend to own a house, ever, unless it's in ( or very near ) a city, as I love city life. As such, the promise of charging an electric from my garage is kind of a deal breaker, since I don't have a garage, and I don't intend to run a power cable from my apartment window to the street.
For alternate fuel vehicles to succeed we need a way to charge or refuel them that doesn't require people to have garages!
Just sayin'
I suppose you've never done any sort of complicated 3d or other sorts of geometry programming?
Frankly, having point/matrix/quaternion/plane/etc classes with reasonably chosen operator overloading allows me to condense a LOT of code into quite little, with as far as I can tell a general *increase* in legibility.
When I started doing 3d programming, for robotics simulation, I used a typedef'd float[4] for vertices, and float[16] for matrices. I had C functions for adding, dot products, cross products, matrix multiplication, etc. It worked. But the code was LONG and verbose. Temporaries were scattered all over the place, and in general, the code wasn't self documenting, so I had to not just explain the algorithm, but why the code I wrote performed said algorithm.
Eventually I decided to rewrite all my core maths as proper C++ classes with reasonably chosen operator overloads. On average, heavy code that did a lot of geometric math was reduced in line-count by 50 to 75%. Plus, the code actually read like the human-readable algorithmic description. Best of all, since the code became easier to read, I caught a few minor bugs.
Sure, I'm not saying operator overloading is right when you'r talking about, say, adding a button to a window. But it has its uses. Consider, the whole world is not necessarily just writing database apps. There's a lot of different stuff out there, and limiting programmer's choices is erring on the side of caution a little too far.
P.S. In your quoted code sample, you *clearly* don't understand what the original author was trying to perform.
I made the argument, some time ago, that instead of forcing us to make new passwords every 45 days ( which is basically a solid way to guarantee weak, easily dictionary-attacked passwords stuck on the monitor ) they should allow us to keep our passwords longer the more complicated they are.
Say, I choose an easily dictionary attacked password with just 5 lowercase letters. Whammo -- I'm told I can use that password for 3 days. So I make a 20 character, non-dictionary password with a mix of letters, numbers, random symbols, etc and I'm told I can keep it for a year.
Seems to me that's a reasonable approach: reward people for better passwords.
Suffice to say, I was told: "No way, we like it as it is"
My father became nearly crippled because a cocky young doctor refused to listen to the advice and experience of an older doctor ( who knew exactly what work my father needed: specifically, fusing vertebrae due to a collapsed disc ), and instead did it "his own way". It took a subsequent operation by the experienced doctor to undo the damage.
Discounting the old and experienced simply because you think youth is always right shows you to be a) a youth, perhaps a teenager, or b) an ass. Take your pick.
Both the young and old have a lot to learn from one another. In the case of medicine, if either refuses, I say fire him. There's no room for ego when patients' lives are on the line.
And regarding modern "IT", well, consider that your average IT guy 20 or 30 years ago could actually, you know, write code and build mechanisms to solve problems. Today you've got people with MCSEs who wouldn't know a shell script or a compiler if it bit them on their asses. People who, when they sit at a linux or Mac machine say "Where's the start menu". Criminy.
Let me know when I can reliably use the keyboard shortcuts my hands have memorized over the last ~15 years. As in, command-shift-s to save as a new file. If I do that in a web app, what happens? Well, perhaps my browser tries to save the html file I'm viewing, not save the file I'm remotely editing. Or command-f -- what happens? Oh, the browser looks for matching text in the page, not the app.
And I know that you can make custom command shortcuts that the *app* not the browser responds to. But that's retarded. I have to now think of my shortcuts like nested namespaces? Is this the mnemonic for the hosted app or the host? No way.
ZUL is the best bet here, I and I applaud that effort. But traditional HTML web apps simply don't cut the mustard. They aren't applications, in my mind, if they don't behave the way applications have behaved for 20 years. And frankly, it's not like I need to just get with the program and accept the new. The new sucks, it isn't as good as what we've got today. I refuse to adapt to an inferior process.
Wake me up when they can make an app as rich as Flash MX, or Photoshop, or XCode run in a browser.
Quantifying intelligence is a fool's errand, at best. And over time, by god. Every generation believes the young folk are lazy idiots, and that civilization's going down the tubes.
And then you read example essay material from students today in universities and you think, "holy shit, they're right, these people are dumber than a sack of hammers".
But as far as I'm concerned, the *sum* is much higher today than ever before. More people are literate than ever before, more people have some basic math skills than ever before. More people get some basic schooling ( even if they don't want it, or use it ) than ever before.
Perhaps in the old days ( up until a couple centuries ago ) you might have had a situation where 95% of the population were illiterate in every way. No reading, no math, no geography. No knowledge except how to do their respective jobs. And the remaining 5% might have been, by our standards of thoroughness, quite well educated, with serious teachings in history, language, rhetoric, natural philosphy, etc.
Today education is better distributed, even if it means that we have some fairly dumb people coming out of our universities. The fact is, more people are getting an education, or at least the *means* for an education. If they should fail at it, it's their own damn fault, not society.
And the smart people today, by god, they're astonishing. Just pick up any book on some specialized field, say, physics, literature, GPU shader programming, biology, whatever. The work these people do blows my mind.
As far as I'm concerned, it's all A-O-K. At least the responsibility for success (or failure) lies progressively in our own hands. I'd say that's a step in the right direction.
I don't know where you hang out, but here as well as on almost all OS X forums, there's NO END AT ALL to people whinging about OS X's interface inconsistency.
' s-OK. Apple does it and people bitch. MS does it and people bitch. Hell, it happens on linux too, and people bitch about it there, too. So stop pretending MS is the only one being bitched at about it. It happens everywhere, and people get pissed about it everywhere.
This is NOT an example of everything-MS-does-is-bad-but-if-Apple-does-it-it
The linked article gives very little information. So, while I'm super stoked by this ( it's a really, really important development ) my questions are:
1) How do they get the hydrogen back out? Do they crush the pellets ( destroying them ), do they heat them, etc.
2) Are the pellets re-usable? Or do you have to get new ones? And if they *aren't* re-usable, can the carrier material be re-cycled into new pellets?
My concerns would be that if the material isn't re-usable/re-cyclable we'd end up with vast landfills full of crushed or otherwise useless carrier material, in which case this is hardly a boon.
On the other hand, if it's recyclable, I can see the oil companies being very happy with this, since you could go to a hydrogen station and dump your used pellets and "refill" with a dump of charged pellets. The station would send the used pellets to a recharging or recycling facility. I say "oil companies" because they've already got quite an infrastucture, and would probably be willing to make the investment into such facilities, since it would maintain their quasi-monopoly on automotive energy distribution.
Still, the appeal of safe hydrogen storage is great.
Sorry about the rant.
To answer your actual question, you *do* need a relatively modern API reference, if you're studying from the 1.1 spec ( I learned off the 1.2 spec ). But the thing is, OpenGL is very well backwards compatible, so code written for the first edition will work fine on a modern OpenGL 2 driver.
Still, but it: It's a good book. I went from *zero* opengl experience to My mediocre game in 1.5 years, with a robotics simulator in the interim.
I don't know about you, but when I'm studying a complicated topic, be it programming or something in the real world, I prefer to have a real book to read, which I can hilight, post-it-note and carry into the toilet with me for deep thinking time.
Also, I'm not a cheap bastard. The book's good, so I paid for it.
No, but crap like King of Queens and American Idol look essentially the same between the two.
Explain to me how higher resolution crap is significantly better than low resolution crap... I'm curious.
The stuff I do want to see is mostly on VHS and DVD, and from what I've seen, it won't look significantly better on a new TV. E.g., it looks better, but not 1000 dollars better.
From a mechanical standpoint, yes, it would be an improved machine. But it'd show the same shit that my zenith shows, albeit more flatly.
Depends on the theater. Personally, I like going to the theater, it's only a 15 minute walk or bike ride ( I live in DC, relatively close to a number of good theaters ) and it's a wonderful way to spend the evening with my girlfriend. We can go out beforehand or afterwards to get food, walk around, so on and so forth. The potomac waterfront in georgetown can be quite beautiful, too.
Sure, the theater's only a small part of the experience, but it's a hell of an improvement over sitting my my apartment -- particularly since I've got a 20 year old zenith and don't intend to "upgrade" to a 3000 dollar flatscreen.
Also, there are some really good theaters out there. In arlington ( admittedly, I have to drive to this one ) there's a theater call the "Cinema and Drafthouse" where -- and this rules -- you pay very little to get in, you can drink, eat and smoke all you want, and there's no commericials. The atmosphere is great ( and if you don't smoke, that's fine, the front is all no smoking and the ventilation's good ). The price is dirt cheap because they show movies about 6 months late, and only the *good* ones.
Basically, as far as I can tell, if you don't like what the theaters are providing, try to find a better theater. As far as I can tell, all reaonsably sized american cities & quasi-urban areas have *some* sort of indy theater, or at the very least, something better than just a theater in a strip-mall in suburbia. Maybe you'll have to drive farther, but the whole experience can be better.
let me put it this way. I saw _The Island_ with a friend in Georgetown's big-corporate-multiplex. The movie sucked. But then we walked across the street to a really nice bar and had a wonderful time discussing it, eating bar fries and drinking. That made up for it wonderfully, and in all I had a great time. It's hard to do that when your theater's just a plug in the middle of nowhere.
That said, summer movies do suck, and sometimes I'd rather just stay home and watch Logan's Run again.
I wish more people felt this way. What's the damn rush, anyhow? ( Yes, yes, I know there are many situations where a rush is important, and that's fine. )
Personally, I'd like to take a zeppelin to somewhere far away, like australia ( I'm in DC ). It'd be a two week trip each way, probably. I'd relax, and see the country, and ocean. My god, would it be beautiful.
Everybody's in too much of a damn hurry. I commute by bike, or on foot ( an hour walk, about ), and people are always shocked that I'm willing to take the time. I tell them it's good for the mind, for the soul. They shake their heads in disbelief.
Bummer. Then, what this *really* is, is is a crappy, transparent monitor.