That's really all that matters. It doesn't take any money and hardly any skill to make a nice animation of an airplane with folding wings, but to actually build one and fly it, that's entirely different.
I'm looking forward to the performance of the flying prototype. I wish them good luck on making it and flying it to Oshkosh this year. If they make it to Oshkosh even without meeting all of their planned specs I expect them to make money for years since this really does fit a niche that no other vehicle does. While they'll have plenty of revenue, hopefully they'll be profitable too.
I've been using Blender for a while and I think 3DS Max has one of the worst interfaces I've ever seen. Honestly, what the hell IS that? I'd love to challenge a Blender expert on doing some animations vs. doing it with 3D Studio Max (in a timed race and also the quality of the output). I don't know why so many people have a hard time with 3D Studio Max. I love the way you build materials with it, how you can edit motion parameter curves, the ease of its scripting language, etc. Even programming C++ plugins for it isn't too difficult IMO. Unfortunately 3DS Max is expensive! I haven't used it in quite a while because I can't afford $3500 for a hobby program and don't want to use an illegal version of it.
I've used all sorts of applications on many platforms but have never encountered one where I couldn't hardly do jack without looking in tutorials until I ran into Blender (well, and vi of course). Even in 3D Studio Max I was able to do very nifty materials and mappings before I looked in the help section. I couldn't do hardly anything at all in Blender though and still can't believe people call that program's interface 'intuitive'. Even old versions of the Gimp have a better interface than that.
The only program I've ever used that could give Blender a run for its money for an interface that simply cannot be used on your first exposure to the program is old versions of Pro/E (a sophisticated and horribly expensive CAD program originally written for UNIX).
I was a kid watching that game on TV. I remember seeing things begin to shake, then the signal was lost, then it came back for a bit and then I think there was a minute or more of no signal (just a screen saying they were having technical problems). And then they canceled the game so I was bummed out.
Then the next day I found out how bad the earthquake had been and was sorry for the people living there and the victims but also glad I lived in an area that experienced no earthquakes.
I recently went to Japan and experienced a couple of small earthquakes at night. I slept through the first one but the second one felt like somebody was trying to wake me by shaking me. I literally said out loud "I'm up already" before I realized nobody was shaking me and it was just an earthquake. It was so small that it didn't scare me though, although it was a bit unnerving (it was the first earthquake I ever experienced).
Thanks for the info. We're still using CVS here (much to my annoyance) but are planning to switch to something new soon. I'll give Git a try.
Note to mods: I don't think the sibling post by gbjbaanb was a troll. A disagreement does not a troll make. His post was on-topic and not insulting so I really can't see why somebody would mod it as 'troll'.
Now, I sort of look down on Guitar Hero, but I'm a live and let live kind of guy. That's OK, I kinda look down on GTA IV, but I'm also a live and let live guy. As a musician, I can tell you that it takes an enormous amount of time and hard work to master most instruments (some exceptions: cow bell, kazoo, gong). If you are just starting out on an instrument it really isn't fun for most people because you can't play anything you'd want to play and have to do very simple songs and exercises first for hours on end. If it's a woodwind then you'll sound horrible too and make your mouth and/or lips sore or for a guitar your fingers will get sore. The piano is nice at first since you can get nice notes right away, but the difficulty increases to the point that many drop out after a while whereas with easier instruments people drop out due to either the boredom of the songs or the lack of will to master phrasing and technique to be able to play the songs you want.
It seems like the guitar is a good instrument for most people because it has some of the advantages of the piano of not needing a year or two of training to get a nice note out while also not being too complicated since you can (usually) only play one note or chord at a time.
I guess my point is that instruments aren't for most people so it's nice to have something that's a compromise so you learn some simple technique and can play with your friends but it sounds like you have years of training and can play like a pro. Even for musicians it's nice because nobody has the time to learn every instrument so it's nice to be able to play something you have no training for. Like for me, I know how to play piano and the sax but now have the chance to play the fake guitar and drums (with the drums close enough to actually help learn how to play the real thing).
I'd love to have a Piano Hero where you could hook up a normal, MIDI digital piano or keyboard up to the system and sightread. It would need to be normally scored music on treble and base clef though, otherwise I don't think I'd want to play it. Imagine trying to play on a full 88-key keyboard where all you see is Guitar Hero-style notes dropping from the sky in 88 columns. Umm, no thanks.
Unfortunately, this would only target aspiring (or actual) musicians so wouldn't sell nearly as well as other games.
Well, some newspaper companies are still able to make plenty of money both in print and online. There was an article recently about The New York Times writes their html and css code by hand which, honestly, is probably the best way for them to make the best possible website. They've also had an online presence longer than even amazon.com so I really don't see why you would trust amazon more than NY Times just because amazon has only an online presence whereas NY Times prints papers in addition to having a nice website.
For the record, the only word I'm aware of as being spoken 'correctly' in American English rather than British English is aluminum. I'm not aware of any words that are spelled correctly in one dialect over the other since one set of spelling rules does not have priority over the other.
Most Americans are very ignorant of British spelling rules since usually our only exposure is classic English works that are mainly read in higher-level English classes in school. Heck, if you go to an American website with more average demographics than here at slashdot (say rockymountainnews.com for example), many can't even apply American spelling rules correctly.
Who said anything about 1000 different sites? In the US, the newspapers with the most significant web presence are The New York Times, LA Times and Washington Post. There's many local newspapers but I don't think any of the others have as much national appeal.
They do, you know, already accept credit card numbers for newspaper subscriptions. This would just force everyone to give their credit card number in order to comment on articles.
Honestly, I'm all for that. I'm sick and tired of the countless trolls on so many unmoderated (or essentially unmoderated) newspaper forums.
It's good to be worried about identity theft, but trusting one of the nation's major newspapers with your credit card number isn't asking a lot, unless you consider buying anything online from anyone (including amazon) as too risky.
Do you have a source for that? I'd like to read it.
I once knew a spammer (by family, not by choice) and he would always claim it was protected speech under the 1st amendment despite my protests to the contrary.
From your posts I doubt that you can be convinced. For what it's worth though, the people that can afford Hummers can afford the fuel to run them. We live in a society with very different demographics. There's people at the top that want private business jets so much that there's a huge backlog on them (you have to get in line to buy one).
Then you have people that have minimal skills and live off of minimum wage. They can't afford a fuel-efficient car so are stuck with whatever used piece of junk they can get. If fuel goes up in price they have no choice but to drive less or make cuts elsewhere.
It's really people between the two that may make different decisions based on fuel prices when buying cars. And considering the enormous wait time in most (all?) states to buy Prius cars I think the effect of gas prices has been pretty obvious.
if people WANTED underpowered crackerboxes they would buy them and Detroit/Tokyo/etc will be happy to make em in whatever qualtity moves off the lots Actually, Japan would be happy to make them, not Detroit. I distinctly recall an interview on NPR where a Ford or GMC executive was interviewed 2 summers ago about why they weren't preparing to make more fuel-efficient cars and the reply was, "Well, people want big cars so we're making big cars." Of course, this ignored the fact that it takes years for them to retool should demand change (which it did the following year mainly due to high gas prices that was 100% foreseeable). So they then had a couple of the worst years they ever had and Japanese car companies made money hand-over-fist while Detroit car manufacturers ended up with a bunch of enormous cars they couldn't sell (at least, not until they discounted the price to the point where they were losing money on each car moved off the lot).
I think people should desire the best, most qualified person for government positions possible (even if this person is smarter than yourself), not a bunch of yes-men and ideologues that don't have a clue or any qualifications for their position (such as Michael Brown--FEMA guy that was clueless, and the other turkeys they sent over to Iraq to run a country when most had no foreign policy or government administration experience).
I think 'elite' is much too often used as a substitution for 'smart'. If someone talks with intelligence they are often branded 'elite' even if they are stating perfectly reasoned positions. I wonder if you would brand someone like Rei (slashdot user) who seems to be one of the most knowledgeable and intelligent people posting here in regards to politics as 'elite'.
You never know. One of the most popular, brightest students at my high school (graduating a couple of years before me) shot himself during his second year of college. The only thing that happened ahead of his suicide that anyone was aware of was that he went to his parents the day he shot himself and acted rather upset about not being able to live up to expectations (which was odd because he always excelled at everything).
That was it. If it hadn't been for that one outburst no-one would have had a clue as to why he killed himself. It was really tragic too because he was a really nice, talented guy with tons of potential.
I suppose it's good for some people. A very good friend of mine who graduated with a chemical engineering degree told me that many of his classmates went back to college to get a masters degree in a different field after a year or two of work in the petroleum industry (which hires more chemical engineers than any other industry, at least at the time he graduated).
You should try doing GUI programming with C++ using Qt. It's a piece of cake (but not free for commercial development unless your code is open source).
PHP has come a long ways in terms of security and good practices thanks to the Zend framework. You should check them out. I use Perl and PHP all the time, but haven't used mod_perl in years. I use PHP for all dynamic pages and Perl for tasks I run from the shell.
It really comes down to different tools for different jobs. Having a vast number of tools at your disposal for free is not a bad thing, just get a cursory knowledge of each tool and what it's good for so that when your next project comes up you can make an informed decision on which one(s) to use.
Also, you make it seem like only knowing the C/C++ languages is sufficient to accomplish anything. That's really not true--at a minimum you need to know the STL for C++ related stuff, some GUI library for doing graphics, an XML library for doing XML manipulation, a database library for interacting with the database of your choice, a cross-platform library to write portable code, etc. Even if you're using something that does all of that (such as Qt) you still need to learn about XML, XMLSchema and DTD if you are using those technologies (just as you would for web programming).
Good point. It also doesn't address the ongoing problem of releasing CO2 into the atmosphere at a rate that can't be reabsorbed naturally (so the concentration of CO2 keeps increasing without limit). As others point out it also exacerbates the world food problem.
While I'd love to see cheap gas, if we need to make a major infrastructure investment then it should be with the mindset that it is truly sustainable and won't ruin the environment for future generations and starve poorer countries.
I'm not saying ethanol won't be the fuel of the future, but if it is then there should be plans on how to address these major issues (perhaps by growing ethanol fuels in locations that currently aren't growing anything--such as within buildings as they do in Japan for some crops--and creating some sort of device to extract CO2 from the atmosphere in large quantities efficiently).
You know that's much more the old Russian style, not the US style. We were never so gung-ho that we would find a 50% survival rate acceptable. The US was very meticulous and careful during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. The only fatalities that resulted from the program were the Apollo 1 astronauts. After that, there was a huge delay as they did a thorough investigation into the cause of the accident and made many changes to make it safer (not using pure oxygen in the capsule, better wiring, made it easier to open capsule door, etc.). If another accident had occurred soon after it was quite possible that the entire Apollo program would have been canceled.
The Russian program, in contrast, had many accidents and were willing to launch men on a mission to the moon with almost no hope of them returning. They never got that far though (thank God) since we took the wind out of their sails by getting there first--not to mention their continuing difficulties of keeping their rocket from malfunctioning.
I've been in saunas heated to over 100 degrees celsius lots of times and I'm still alive.
But could you live at that temperature for an extended period of time? I grew up in Texas where it often gets above 100 degrees F in summer and lived to tell the tale. I don't think I would have survived if it got up to 100 degrees Celsius every day for a month (with lows in the 90s).
As for zero F not being cold, many, many people would beg to differ. You're from Finland for crying out loud! Try asking an Aussie sometime if he thinks -18 C is cold. Another one on this thread said 0 C was cold. If there's wind you will DIE at this temperature in a short amount of time without sufficient clothing. I think that should constitute as 'being cold'. If you do exercise, you'll stay warm but your throat will get sore after about 10-20 minutes of vigorous exercise. It's great for alpine skiing though. Or do you define 'being cold' as 'Well, if you step outside in your underwear you'll have hypothermia in about 2 minutes. I guess that's a bit cold.'
Obviously I meant for an extended period of time. I can live at 100 degrees F--not pleasant, but I grew up in Texas with limited to no A/C and managed somehow. You can't stay at 100 degrees C for very long at all before you would die from heatstroke. You can live in a total vacuum for a short while too if you want.
The value of Fahrenheit is that it has greater precision than Celsius (when just reporting the integer part of course). The other is that it is a bit easier for people to relate to: 0 degrees is cold!, 100 degrees is hot! Whereas in Celsius 0 degrees is somewhat cold and 100 degrees, well you're way past dead at that point.
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That's really all that matters. It doesn't take any money and hardly any skill to make a nice animation of an airplane with folding wings, but to actually build one and fly it, that's entirely different.
I'm looking forward to the performance of the flying prototype. I wish them good luck on making it and flying it to Oshkosh this year. If they make it to Oshkosh even without meeting all of their planned specs I expect them to make money for years since this really does fit a niche that no other vehicle does. While they'll have plenty of revenue, hopefully they'll be profitable too.
I've used all sorts of applications on many platforms but have never encountered one where I couldn't hardly do jack without looking in tutorials until I ran into Blender (well, and vi of course). Even in 3D Studio Max I was able to do very nifty materials and mappings before I looked in the help section. I couldn't do hardly anything at all in Blender though and still can't believe people call that program's interface 'intuitive'. Even old versions of the Gimp have a better interface than that.
The only program I've ever used that could give Blender a run for its money for an interface that simply cannot be used on your first exposure to the program is old versions of Pro/E (a sophisticated and horribly expensive CAD program originally written for UNIX).
I was a kid watching that game on TV. I remember seeing things begin to shake, then the signal was lost, then it came back for a bit and then I think there was a minute or more of no signal (just a screen saying they were having technical problems). And then they canceled the game so I was bummed out.
Then the next day I found out how bad the earthquake had been and was sorry for the people living there and the victims but also glad I lived in an area that experienced no earthquakes.
I recently went to Japan and experienced a couple of small earthquakes at night. I slept through the first one but the second one felt like somebody was trying to wake me by shaking me. I literally said out loud "I'm up already" before I realized nobody was shaking me and it was just an earthquake. It was so small that it didn't scare me though, although it was a bit unnerving (it was the first earthquake I ever experienced).
Thanks for the info. We're still using CVS here (much to my annoyance) but are planning to switch to something new soon. I'll give Git a try.
Note to mods: I don't think the sibling post by gbjbaanb was a troll. A disagreement does not a troll make. His post was on-topic and not insulting so I really can't see why somebody would mod it as 'troll'.
Thanks, I hadn't thought of that. So which DVCS would you recommend?
It seems like the guitar is a good instrument for most people because it has some of the advantages of the piano of not needing a year or two of training to get a nice note out while also not being too complicated since you can (usually) only play one note or chord at a time.
I guess my point is that instruments aren't for most people so it's nice to have something that's a compromise so you learn some simple technique and can play with your friends but it sounds like you have years of training and can play like a pro. Even for musicians it's nice because nobody has the time to learn every instrument so it's nice to be able to play something you have no training for. Like for me, I know how to play piano and the sax but now have the chance to play the fake guitar and drums (with the drums close enough to actually help learn how to play the real thing).
I'd love to have a Piano Hero where you could hook up a normal, MIDI digital piano or keyboard up to the system and sightread. It would need to be normally scored music on treble and base clef though, otherwise I don't think I'd want to play it. Imagine trying to play on a full 88-key keyboard where all you see is Guitar Hero-style notes dropping from the sky in 88 columns. Umm, no thanks.
Unfortunately, this would only target aspiring (or actual) musicians so wouldn't sell nearly as well as other games.
Well, some newspaper companies are still able to make plenty of money both in print and online. There was an article recently about The New York Times writes their html and css code by hand which, honestly, is probably the best way for them to make the best possible website. They've also had an online presence longer than even amazon.com so I really don't see why you would trust amazon more than NY Times just because amazon has only an online presence whereas NY Times prints papers in addition to having a nice website.
For the record, the only word I'm aware of as being spoken 'correctly' in American English rather than British English is aluminum. I'm not aware of any words that are spelled correctly in one dialect over the other since one set of spelling rules does not have priority over the other.
Most Americans are very ignorant of British spelling rules since usually our only exposure is classic English works that are mainly read in higher-level English classes in school. Heck, if you go to an American website with more average demographics than here at slashdot (say rockymountainnews.com for example), many can't even apply American spelling rules correctly.
Who said anything about 1000 different sites? In the US, the newspapers with the most significant web presence are The New York Times, LA Times and Washington Post. There's many local newspapers but I don't think any of the others have as much national appeal.
They do, you know, already accept credit card numbers for newspaper subscriptions. This would just force everyone to give their credit card number in order to comment on articles.
Honestly, I'm all for that. I'm sick and tired of the countless trolls on so many unmoderated (or essentially unmoderated) newspaper forums.
It's good to be worried about identity theft, but trusting one of the nation's major newspapers with your credit card number isn't asking a lot, unless you consider buying anything online from anyone (including amazon) as too risky.
Do you have a source for that? I'd like to read it.
I once knew a spammer (by family, not by choice) and he would always claim it was protected speech under the 1st amendment despite my protests to the contrary.
From your posts I doubt that you can be convinced. For what it's worth though, the people that can afford Hummers can afford the fuel to run them. We live in a society with very different demographics. There's people at the top that want private business jets so much that there's a huge backlog on them (you have to get in line to buy one).
Then you have people that have minimal skills and live off of minimum wage. They can't afford a fuel-efficient car so are stuck with whatever used piece of junk they can get. If fuel goes up in price they have no choice but to drive less or make cuts elsewhere.
It's really people between the two that may make different decisions based on fuel prices when buying cars. And considering the enormous wait time in most (all?) states to buy Prius cars I think the effect of gas prices has been pretty obvious.
I think people should desire the best, most qualified person for government positions possible (even if this person is smarter than yourself), not a bunch of yes-men and ideologues that don't have a clue or any qualifications for their position (such as Michael Brown--FEMA guy that was clueless, and the other turkeys they sent over to Iraq to run a country when most had no foreign policy or government administration experience).
I think 'elite' is much too often used as a substitution for 'smart'. If someone talks with intelligence they are often branded 'elite' even if they are stating perfectly reasoned positions. I wonder if you would brand someone like Rei (slashdot user) who seems to be one of the most knowledgeable and intelligent people posting here in regards to politics as 'elite'.
You never know. One of the most popular, brightest students at my high school (graduating a couple of years before me) shot himself during his second year of college. The only thing that happened ahead of his suicide that anyone was aware of was that he went to his parents the day he shot himself and acted rather upset about not being able to live up to expectations (which was odd because he always excelled at everything).
That was it. If it hadn't been for that one outburst no-one would have had a clue as to why he killed himself. It was really tragic too because he was a really nice, talented guy with tons of potential.
I suppose it's good for some people. A very good friend of mine who graduated with a chemical engineering degree told me that many of his classmates went back to college to get a masters degree in a different field after a year or two of work in the petroleum industry (which hires more chemical engineers than any other industry, at least at the time he graduated).
You should try doing GUI programming with C++ using Qt. It's a piece of cake (but not free for commercial development unless your code is open source).
PHP has come a long ways in terms of security and good practices thanks to the Zend framework. You should check them out. I use Perl and PHP all the time, but haven't used mod_perl in years. I use PHP for all dynamic pages and Perl for tasks I run from the shell.
It really comes down to different tools for different jobs. Having a vast number of tools at your disposal for free is not a bad thing, just get a cursory knowledge of each tool and what it's good for so that when your next project comes up you can make an informed decision on which one(s) to use.
Also, you make it seem like only knowing the C/C++ languages is sufficient to accomplish anything. That's really not true--at a minimum you need to know the STL for C++ related stuff, some GUI library for doing graphics, an XML library for doing XML manipulation, a database library for interacting with the database of your choice, a cross-platform library to write portable code, etc. Even if you're using something that does all of that (such as Qt) you still need to learn about XML, XMLSchema and DTD if you are using those technologies (just as you would for web programming).
Good point. It also doesn't address the ongoing problem of releasing CO2 into the atmosphere at a rate that can't be reabsorbed naturally (so the concentration of CO2 keeps increasing without limit). As others point out it also exacerbates the world food problem.
While I'd love to see cheap gas, if we need to make a major infrastructure investment then it should be with the mindset that it is truly sustainable and won't ruin the environment for future generations and starve poorer countries.
I'm not saying ethanol won't be the fuel of the future, but if it is then there should be plans on how to address these major issues (perhaps by growing ethanol fuels in locations that currently aren't growing anything--such as within buildings as they do in Japan for some crops--and creating some sort of device to extract CO2 from the atmosphere in large quantities efficiently).
You know that's much more the old Russian style, not the US style. We were never so gung-ho that we would find a 50% survival rate acceptable. The US was very meticulous and careful during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. The only fatalities that resulted from the program were the Apollo 1 astronauts. After that, there was a huge delay as they did a thorough investigation into the cause of the accident and made many changes to make it safer (not using pure oxygen in the capsule, better wiring, made it easier to open capsule door, etc.). If another accident had occurred soon after it was quite possible that the entire Apollo program would have been canceled.
The Russian program, in contrast, had many accidents and were willing to launch men on a mission to the moon with almost no hope of them returning. They never got that far though (thank God) since we took the wind out of their sails by getting there first--not to mention their continuing difficulties of keeping their rocket from malfunctioning.
But could you live at that temperature for an extended period of time? I grew up in Texas where it often gets above 100 degrees F in summer and lived to tell the tale. I don't think I would have survived if it got up to 100 degrees Celsius every day for a month (with lows in the 90s).
As for zero F not being cold, many, many people would beg to differ. You're from Finland for crying out loud! Try asking an Aussie sometime if he thinks -18 C is cold. Another one on this thread said 0 C was cold. If there's wind you will DIE at this temperature in a short amount of time without sufficient clothing. I think that should constitute as 'being cold'. If you do exercise, you'll stay warm but your throat will get sore after about 10-20 minutes of vigorous exercise. It's great for alpine skiing though. Or do you define 'being cold' as 'Well, if you step outside in your underwear you'll have hypothermia in about 2 minutes. I guess that's a bit cold.'
Obviously I meant for an extended period of time. I can live at 100 degrees F--not pleasant, but I grew up in Texas with limited to no A/C and managed somehow. You can't stay at 100 degrees C for very long at all before you would die from heatstroke. You can live in a total vacuum for a short while too if you want.
The value of Fahrenheit is that it has greater precision than Celsius (when just reporting the integer part of course). The other is that it is a bit easier for people to relate to: 0 degrees is cold!, 100 degrees is hot! Whereas in Celsius 0 degrees is somewhat cold and 100 degrees, well you're way past dead at that point.
Not only that, but it's a hell of a lot more expensive to install than just adding a wind turbine.