Haven't seen the others yet, but World of Goo at least is not only in my local games shops, but in my local supermarket where they only stock the massively popular things (Sims, WoW, $football_game_of_the_week, etc)
I tried the previous version via mythbuntu, and found it so inconsistent and ugly (all those screenshots are from a single theme) that I even filed a bug report about it, but it was marked wontfix on the basis that a new version with new theme would be here in 6 months -- looking at the screenshots on the website I don't see much sign of improvement, can anyone who's used it comment?
Speaking as an acedemic prima donna, a word in my defence: I would love to work in a team with clue, but 90% of compsci students really, really suck. The last group I was forced to work with were two other compsci students who were in their third year of learning java and didn't know the difference between a class and an object, and someone doing the module as an extra from their management course who flat out refused to do any of the programming or documentation (and his management style to say "I don't know what to do, you're a programmer, work it out", then leave the country).
As a result, the only experience I have from working in a good team is open source projects, which are a somewhat different model:(
The good news is that it is an opt-in service and free so you don't have to make Google your energy-monitor if you dont't want to do so.
Since when is this news at all? To say that it is would mean that it's different to normal, which implies that google regularly install monitoring hardware into people's homes as an opt-out service...
Generally I use the foreground select tool* to select the smallest area to cover the object, then grow selection by a few pixels so that none of the object's edges are poking out and confusing it, then filters - map - resynthesize (ie, use the plugin rather than the script), and have the "tilable" options disabled since they tend to grab samples from the opposite edge of the image (if I want a tilable image, I'll use the tiling filter separately...)
Probably the biggest factor for simple success is to have the object you want to remove be on its own (surrounded on all sides by similar textures) -- if it isn't, then you need to do things the long way -- eg, if you want to remove the leftmost wheelchair from this image, and you want it to be replaced by grass when three of its borders are touching non-grass, then you'll find that it ends up somewhat messy since it attempts to merge four different edge textures. In this case you'll need to copy a section of your desired fill texture (ie, a rectangle of pure grass) into a separate image (specifically, a single layer image with no transparency); then on the original image select the object to remove, open resynthesizer, and select the "fill texture" image as the texture source; this way the generated texture will both match the surroundings of the original as much as possible, while being filled with the "surroundings" that you've specifically chosen. Having taken a sample of "pure grass" and a sample of "pure stone", then removing the top and bottom halves of the wheelchair with each respectively, the results are nicer. (with the exception that the first two images were produced with a mouse and twenty minutes of careful selecting, and the final one was 5 minutes work with a laptop nipple, so there are still some bits of wheelchair poking out of the sides...)
Incidentally, does photoshop have SIOX yet? Having the features "vaguely scribble in the general area of an object to have the object selected precisely" and "automatically and realistically remove a selection" could potentially combine to form "one-click realistic object removal" \o/
Just tried expanding a panorama as in the demo too, and resynthesizer does that pretty well too (please ignore the fact that the source material is REALLY shittily exposed, it was shot on a mobile phone with no manual exposure mode:( ):
The demo seems to have been done under pretty much ideal conditions -- when I've been working with similarly suitable source material, I've had similarly awesome results from resynthesizer.
Some examples of things I've resynthesized in the last 10 minutes for the sake of demonstration, mixed in with some "missing object" quiz questions I made for an anime society a couple of months ago, again done with the resynthesizer: http://shishnet.org/ufufuf/mo/
Everything in that video, I have done with resynthesizer in the last couple of weeks, and have been doing with resynthesizer for the last few years -- the only interesting thing about this is that there is the option to do it all in a single step (fill brush) where the gimp makes you select then fill as two separate steps.
I've been using the resynthesizer for a while, and found that it can do exactly what's in the demo -- but not much more. It *really* depends on your choice of source image, and the people doing the demo just happen to have chosen images which work perfectly (by resynthesizer standards). If they can get good looking results with source images that the resynthesizer chokes on, *then* I'll be impressed.
Do note that the script-fu wrapper works better for larger images, which this isn't
Also, the example from the video, done with gimp instead, the results are pretty similar (IMO, better, but I'm pretty sure that the "improvements" are just luck): http://shishnet.org/ufufuf/panorama-synth.png
Having been using the resynthesizer for years, I've developed a knack for which source images will work well and which won't, and the thing that struck me about that video was that the source images are pretty much ideal conditions -- I'll be impressed when they can get good results on the images that aren't so clean:-)
Are there any laptops out there with two hard drive slots, so that I could have the system data and random files on SSD, and videos / VM images / other huge data on the platters?
Which is the most popular doesn't matter so much -- IE *not* being the most popular (or at least, being less popular) is important. When IE had pretty much all the market, the options were "spend 5 minutes coding to standards, have it work fine in most browsers but break for the 95% of people who use IE" or "spend 5 hours working around IE bugs; if making it work in IE breaks other browsers, don't bother trying to fix it in case IE breaks again". Now that it's less popular, coding for standards is becoming a plausible option, and the IE team either need to fix their bugs or get left out.
People download more than the first debian ISO? I don't even do that; just grab the netinst, boot, and hit "enter" to select the defaults for a couple of minutes; total process about 30 minutes including download time...
you must have overlooked his closing statement regarding 'if the backup generator failed to kick in'.
If the backup generator fails, then you want 2 hours, not 20 minutes, so that you can have a third set of generators and specialist engineers flown in to install them; if the outage looks long-term, get a tanker truck running between the building and the fuel depot, etc.
"20 minutes to shut down gracefully" might be better than "nothing", but it's certainly not great
Besides, I'm unsure why you'd ever need more than that 22min since that is plenty of time for our on site staff to gracefully power down any of our major servers if the backup generator failed to kick in.
You consider powering down major servers to be a good option? Smells like an opinion from microsoft land (where "planned downtime" counts as "uptime", and an "uptime" of 95% is "acceptable"...)
GNU/Linux is the platform that suits me better than any of the competition. How on earth is that possible if I'm not concerned about software freedom?
"Because the software is of higher quality" is the only reason that I and many others need, why should I care about freedom in the creation process if the end result is worse?
If everyone followed that logic, we would never have had tabbed browsing.
If everyone had decent window managers, we would never have needed tabbed browsing
(I've been having tabbed browsing with fluxbox since before browsers had tabs; I also have tabbed terminals even though xterm has no tabs; I have tabbed image editing when the gimp has no tabs... long story short, making the window manager do window management has turned out better than expecting every application to add its own work-around)
Slashdot Mirror
Haven't seen the others yet, but World of Goo at least is not only in my local games shops, but in my local supermarket where they only stock the massively popular things (Sims, WoW, $football_game_of_the_week, etc)
I tried the previous version via mythbuntu, and found it so inconsistent and ugly (all those screenshots are from a single theme) that I even filed a bug report about it, but it was marked wontfix on the basis that a new version with new theme would be here in 6 months -- looking at the screenshots on the website I don't see much sign of improvement, can anyone who's used it comment?
Speaking as an acedemic prima donna, a word in my defence: I would love to work in a team with clue, but 90% of compsci students really, really suck. The last group I was forced to work with were two other compsci students who were in their third year of learning java and didn't know the difference between a class and an object, and someone doing the module as an extra from their management course who flat out refused to do any of the programming or documentation (and his management style to say "I don't know what to do, you're a programmer, work it out", then leave the country).
As a result, the only experience I have from working in a good team is open source projects, which are a somewhat different model :(
The good news is that it is an opt-in service and free so you don't have to make Google your energy-monitor if you dont't want to do so.
Since when is this news at all? To say that it is would mean that it's different to normal, which implies that google regularly install monitoring hardware into people's homes as an opt-out service...
obvious question: workflow / parameters?
Generally I use the foreground select tool* to select the smallest area to cover the object, then grow selection by a few pixels so that none of the object's edges are poking out and confusing it, then filters - map - resynthesize (ie, use the plugin rather than the script), and have the "tilable" options disabled since they tend to grab samples from the opposite edge of the image (if I want a tilable image, I'll use the tiling filter separately...)
Probably the biggest factor for simple success is to have the object you want to remove be on its own (surrounded on all sides by similar textures) -- if it isn't, then you need to do things the long way -- eg, if you want to remove the leftmost wheelchair from this image, and you want it to be replaced by grass when three of its borders are touching non-grass, then you'll find that it ends up somewhat messy since it attempts to merge four different edge textures. In this case you'll need to copy a section of your desired fill texture (ie, a rectangle of pure grass) into a separate image (specifically, a single layer image with no transparency); then on the original image select the object to remove, open resynthesizer, and select the "fill texture" image as the texture source; this way the generated texture will both match the surroundings of the original as much as possible, while being filled with the "surroundings" that you've specifically chosen. Having taken a sample of "pure grass" and a sample of "pure stone", then removing the top and bottom halves of the wheelchair with each respectively, the results are nicer. (with the exception that the first two images were produced with a mouse and twenty minutes of careful selecting, and the final one was 5 minutes work with a laptop nipple, so there are still some bits of wheelchair poking out of the sides...)
Incidentally, does photoshop have SIOX yet? Having the features "vaguely scribble in the general area of an object to have the object selected precisely" and "automatically and realistically remove a selection" could potentially combine to form "one-click realistic object removal" \o/
Just tried expanding a panorama as in the demo too, and resynthesizer does that pretty well too (please ignore the fact that the source material is REALLY shittily exposed, it was shot on a mobile phone with no manual exposure mode :( ):
original
expanded
The demo seems to have been done under pretty much ideal conditions -- when I've been working with similarly suitable source material, I've had similarly awesome results from resynthesizer.
Some examples of things I've resynthesized in the last 10 minutes for the sake of demonstration, mixed in with some "missing object" quiz questions I made for an anime society a couple of months ago, again done with the resynthesizer: http://shishnet.org/ufufuf/mo/
Everything in that video, I have done with resynthesizer in the last couple of weeks, and have been doing with resynthesizer for the last few years -- the only interesting thing about this is that there is the option to do it all in a single step (fill brush) where the gimp makes you select then fill as two separate steps.
I've been using the resynthesizer for a while, and found that it can do exactly what's in the demo -- but not much more. It *really* depends on your choice of source image, and the people doing the demo just happen to have chosen images which work perfectly (by resynthesizer standards). If they can get good looking results with source images that the resynthesizer chokes on, *then* I'll be impressed.
This is what I get using the plugin on its own: http://shishnet.org/ufufuf/resynth2.jpg
Do note that the script-fu wrapper works better for larger images, which this isn't
Also, the example from the video, done with gimp instead, the results are pretty similar (IMO, better, but I'm pretty sure that the "improvements" are just luck): http://shishnet.org/ufufuf/panorama-synth.png
Having been using the resynthesizer for years, I've developed a knack for which source images will work well and which won't, and the thing that struck me about that video was that the source images are pretty much ideal conditions -- I'll be impressed when they can get good results on the images that aren't so clean :-)
Are there any laptops out there with two hard drive slots, so that I could have the system data and random files on SSD, and videos / VM images / other huge data on the platters?
If 10am is the new 9am then 1am is the new midnight. Give them some time to adapt and they'll still be late for school
Only if the sun is a teenager, and also taking part in this scheme of getting up an hour later
Which is the most popular doesn't matter so much -- IE *not* being the most popular (or at least, being less popular) is important. When IE had pretty much all the market, the options were "spend 5 minutes coding to standards, have it work fine in most browsers but break for the 95% of people who use IE" or "spend 5 hours working around IE bugs; if making it work in IE breaks other browsers, don't bother trying to fix it in case IE breaks again". Now that it's less popular, coding for standards is becoming a plausible option, and the IE team either need to fix their bugs or get left out.
or for linux, kismet
These problems will all be fixed over the next couple of years
I admit complete ignorance in this area, so please educate me if this sounds stupid -- but surely writing a DNS server can't be that hard?
People download more than the first debian ISO? I don't even do that; just grab the netinst, boot, and hit "enter" to select the defaults for a couple of minutes; total process about 30 minutes including download time...
you must have overlooked his closing statement regarding 'if the backup generator failed to kick in'.
If the backup generator fails, then you want 2 hours, not 20 minutes, so that you can have a third set of generators and specialist engineers flown in to install them; if the outage looks long-term, get a tanker truck running between the building and the fuel depot, etc.
"20 minutes to shut down gracefully" might be better than "nothing", but it's certainly not great
Besides, I'm unsure why you'd ever need more than that 22min since that is plenty of time for our on site staff to gracefully power down any of our major servers if the backup generator failed to kick in.
You consider powering down major servers to be a good option? Smells like an opinion from microsoft land (where "planned downtime" counts as "uptime", and an "uptime" of 95% is "acceptable"...)
GNU/Linux is the platform that suits me better than any of the competition. How on earth is that possible if I'm not concerned about software freedom?
"Because the software is of higher quality" is the only reason that I and many others need, why should I care about freedom in the creation process if the end result is worse?
So, basically, a nobody commented.
This is Anonymous -- if they weren't a nobody, then their opinion would be invalid. As it is, they are the most appropriate person to ask.
I just signed in via bitlbee with no problem, so either they've removed this feature or it only applies to specific people
If everyone followed that logic, we would never have had tabbed browsing.
If everyone had decent window managers, we would never have needed tabbed browsing
(I've been having tabbed browsing with fluxbox since before browsers had tabs; I also have tabbed terminals even though xterm has no tabs; I have tabbed image editing when the gimp has no tabs... long story short, making the window manager do window management has turned out better than expecting every application to add its own work-around)
95% is intentionally bad, the other 5% is just shit
Mozilla CAN'T support h264
Why CAN'T they hook into the OS's native codec libraries?
Customers want high quality computers, Apple sells high quality computers; where does corporate culture come into this equation?