Is it just me or are video games way ahead of other apps on user interface? These days most people can pick up a game and given the general type (fps, driving, rts, rpg) have a pretty damn good guess at the interface. It's not that the game authors have agreed on a standard interface for each genre, it's that they've figured out the things that frustrate new gamers the least so they enjoy the game more with less manual reading. When was the last time you had to read a game's manual to actually jump in and play it? I mean just the basic playing around, not the detailed stuff.
Why haven't desktops and apps incorporated advances from here? Let's take an old RTS, say Command and Conquer. The designers figured out how to make a USEABLE virual desktop that DOESN'T SUCK! You can navigate around this huge screenspace and the radar keeps track of where you are. Also, how do they handle things similar to launching apps? Well there's a sidebar full of big easy to distinguish one click icons, and a set of tabs at the top that switches what set of icons is displayed by type (units, buildings, etc). Seems pretty easy to figure out to me. Want to quickly get back to the thing you were last working on? You can designate hotkeys with ctrl+number an then pressing the number jumps back to it. Some RTS's have seperate select and change focus but all seem to use a similar hotkey system.
One of the things that keeps me happier with windows than linux is the at least moderate effort at standardized interfaces. Most apps of simlar types have similar interfaces and I don't have to relearn all the terms that someone decided to use THEIR names for. Every time I see a custom media player or something with this horrible neo-future interface on windows I cringe, because it's such a bad idea. I don't want to spend time relearning how to use a media player just so it can look cool, I want to watch media with it. On linux it seems every app suffers from this "I want to look unique" urge, or a complete lack of asthetic design whatsoever. So your choices are pretty and confusing or ugly and confusing.
The longer mission means they can accomplish everything they'd hoped to, not just everything they needed to. This means there's less of a case for "We need to send another rover to do more of this" in the future, so either another mission may not be needed or a future mission will not need to waste resources (especially weight, in space exploration mass is money) duplicating the instrumentation and capabilities of these rovers.
Also, since we know the rover design appears robust and successful, it could potentially be reused for another mission without designing a new rover. Let's send one to somewhere like Europa. That'd probably require a larger solar panel or some other power source but the rest of the design could be kept the same, saving the R&D budget.
If we're actually going to do a manned mission to mars, it's also a good idea to test our electronics and mechanical engineering for the environment BEFORE the people get there and depend on it to breathe, so better we learn how to build reliably for mars now.
I'm just wondering if this laptop is used in a portable, carry around with me manner, or if it's one of those laptops that says plugged into AC 99% of the time doing word processing.
If it's the latter, do you have a network and at least one other machine? If so, how about a TFTP and network boot? I'm not sure if you have a boot rom in your laptop but it's possible or maybe you could find a cheap network card for it with one. Once the laptop's booted up it should be fine as long as it stays attatched to whatever network FS it needs to read files off of.
I assume your bios does not allow boot from usb, so that's kinda out... Again, if it's a "static" laptop, one option might be a 44->40 pin IDE adapter, run the wire out of the case, and hook it to a standard 3.5" HD and use an old AT powersupply to keep it spinning. I'm just trying to think up ways to fix this thing with the typical "junk" around the average geek's house. I know there's usually half a ton of old cables, drives, cpus, cards etc in mine. If you're working on the premise that $130 is too much to spend I'd suspect that digging for junk or getting it from a friend may be an option in your case.
With this approach the problem will never be solved or even reduced. Even if I only educate one person that this is a load of bull, that's one less person forwarding this crap around to everyone they know.
I usually tell whoever forwarded this to me (as it's usually someone who knows me) that if they keep doing it I'll be forced to block all mail from them. Then they get pissed off. It's like hello, you're being rude! Have some freaking manners already. If people want to forward this stuff to idiots, then fine, but I find it insulting when people who know me think I'd either fall for this lame crap, or actually WANT any of it.
The distinction between "individual computer" and "wireless router" could get a little blurry, considering any computer with a wireless card could potentially rebroadcast access to other machines. So do we ban wireless cards from campus? But it's integrated in laptops and coming to standard motherboards soon.
If you're running a secure wireless network where you need a passkey to access it, how is the college going to know you're linked to their primary network unless they either obtain or crack your key and see where data winds up routing through? You could say your wireless network isn't connected to the campus network, how do they prove otherwise?
I'll see your 80lb CRT and raise you my 92lb 24" widescreen trinitron running 1920x1280 @100hz. I could go for 2304x1440 but why bother when HDTV fits so nice at the 1920 res? =)
I just wish I coulda grabbed the second one that was for sale so I'd have dualhead.
Or at least they did when I worked there. I could see 100/hour being an issue for mail lists, but usually 500/day is reasonable and I think that's the only filter they have. One it detects higher than that it blocks port 25. It stays blocked until the user calls in to complain, at which time they get interrogated about mailing lists, viruses, etc. Usually it doesn't get unblocked until they demonstrate that they've gotten updated antivirus etc.
There was that one guy with the legitimate 3000 user mailing list though, he was really annoyed that we weren't going to let him run that.
Is it enough to fix your life? Buy a house for you and your SO and a family? Maybe enough to relocate to be with an SO somewhere far away? Enough to put your kids through college? Enough to support your parents as they get older?
It's not the money so much as what you can get with it. You're risking your life. People risk theirs every day by just crossing the street to work, the only difference here is the magnitude of the risk and payoff. As to whether the payoff is worth the risk, that really depends its size and your needs. People on here are going to scream no amount of money is enough but sometimes it is, if it ensures the things you really need in your life. But that's something unique to each person.
If it's really good pay I might be interested in going myself. I failed out of college, and I want a second chance. I love someone who's all but homeless in a 3rd world country. My car keeps falling apart and I'm too broke to fix it. I'm sick of living at home. I could find a good use for alot of money and my IT skills are pretty good. Anyone know where you inquire about this kinda thing?
It's important as Proof It Can Be Done. Even though this vehicle has no clear path to an orbital version, it'll be much easier for any proposal for a bigger, more powerful, more practical vehicle to get sponsorship or funding from commercial interests. Before X-prize ships started doing test flights, most companies would think you'd be crazy offering them service to space for payloads, but I bet a successful 100km flight will change alot of minds and open them to the possibility.
Well that seems to let it run from the download manager, but then I still have to open the download manager after choosing to save the file. Why can't I just open the file directly from the link so it doesn't waste any disk space other than temp storage which is automaticly freed later?
shouldn't they just browse sites and not let you download files? That's what FTP's for isn't it?
I'd really prefer being able to control what I can and can't do with software on my computer rather than being kept "safe for your own good". It's basicly a form of DRM. You're saying I can't execute this file because you assume I'm an idiot and would either unknowingly run malicious code without adequate antivirus protection or that I'm too stupid to find a way to circumvent it, which I'm not. It's just constantly inconvenient and irritating.
You can find an example of some of my in-progress code here.
Of course this is after thinking about the design for awhile. Rarely have I just gone and said "Ok I'm going to code this function now." without thinking "Ok what will this break? What will I want to add in the future and will it mean redoing this a different way?" I spend alot more time thinking about how to get the best flexibility out of a design than actually coding. I tend to think up the data structures first, by figuring out what data I need and what I'm going to do with it. Once I have that, I construct objects around the structures and figure out what methods I need to manipulate them. Everything revolves around the data, not the process. I try to keep the objects segregated on a "need to know" basis so that it's easier to swap out one implementation for another later. I don't want to be sitting forever rewriting the entire project because I've found that quicksort sucks for this data and I'm better off with a heap than a linked list.
When I actually get around to coding, my first concern is clarity. If I can't read my code, I'm going to be screwed when I have to debug it tomorrow, and totally lost when I need to add a feature or rework something next month. I tend to name my variables and functions for what they are, sometimes with fairly long names. Sure it's a pain in the ass to type cosine_offset and I can typo it alot, but it's a hell of alot easier than figuring out that w stands for cosine offset a month from now. Compilers catch name typos, they won't tell you what the hell you were thinking when you wrote the code. I find the stupid "hungarian warts" where you get names like pfstrqlrdwFOO are absolutely worthless. The only prefixer I use is p, for pointer, because pointer screwups are bad and it's possible to forget something is a pointer and requires different operands. I can usually figure out if something's an int or float or string pretty easy by following the names and what functions it comes from/goes to. GetInputString(myinput) makes it pretty obvious what myinput is, I don't need pcstrz in front of it.
Having other people able to read your code is a huge bonus. Readability = less time debugging = more time to improve or optimize later. I don't know ASM, but if my code is readable by someone who does, it's alot easier to get them to help me if they don't have to spend a week going "WTF is this variable for? What is the point of this function?"
Another thing I do that was taught to me by a very realisticly-oriented CS professor is go for low linecount. Outside of clarity, linecount is king. Why? Because fewer lines are easier to comprehend, tend to have fewer bugs, can be easier to optimize (into ASM for example). Functions over 50 lines are rare for me. My functions do exactly one thing that they're named for, I don't group an entire 9 step procedure into a single long function. If I have to do that then it'll be a function calling a bunch of other functions in order. That way when I have a bottleneck, I can just rewrite 25 lines of code instead of poring over 250 looking for where the slow code is and misunderstanding parts of it.
Granted I'm not the best programmer. I'm probably not even an average programmer around here given my lack of experience. I had a basic course in ASM at college that mostly covered MIPS, and an EE course that covered up through basic CPUs and registers. I know some of the concepts but have never written in ASM. Maybe when I finish the main parts of my current project I'll learn x86 ASM so I can optimize it.
I tried finding a way to profile my code recently. I found AMD's profiler was totally incomprehensible. So I tried to download Intel's, even though I'm using an AMD CPU. Well it was so hard to figure out how to use that the trial expired before I ever got to use it once, and they want some hideous amount of money for a version that doesn't expire.
Seriously, is this stuff really coming from websites? I mean, way back in the old days of like 1996 you could find websites with (non-legal) mp3s on them for downloading, and we see how well crack down on that has eliminated the problem of music piracy, right? I'm sure the people distributing and collecting this kind of material have long since realized the world of peer to peer apps and that shutting down websites will be no real deterrent to them.
This is a useless effort that sets a dangerous precident. It does nothing to help the children who are victimized this, because it's already been done. If you want to stop this, you need to find the people who take the original pictures, otherwise you're just covering eyes and pretending the problem goes away without actually solving it. There's also the question of who's standards do you apply? The age of consent isn't uniform, it's not even uniform state to state in the US let alone in every country in the world. Then there's various laws about specific acts etc. It's quite easy to bring in censorship at a low level for the least popular elements and then start creeping up the ladder. Ok child pornography is illegal. Next beastiality is also illegal. Next watersports/scat are illegal. Next BDSM is illegal. Next homosexuality is illegal. Next anal sex is illegal. Next penetration and oral sex are illegal. Next any nudity is illegal. If you think this kind of progression can't happen, think again. And once it works in the porn area it's not as hard a jump to start censoring something else and when people protest say "Well we censor for porn because it's bad, and everyone agreed on that right?" People still freak out in the US over a pair of fully mature breasts being shown in an act unrelated to sex at all, it's not hard to drum up support to start censoring things and the amount of support you need decreases with the amount of censorship successfully in place.
Even the general concept that looking at something, no matter how horrific an act it depicts, is a crime, is ludicrous. You might as well arrest everyone who's seen the Iraqi prisoner abuse photos or the beheading video because they're obviously going to become violent murderers and abusers right? The argument that anyone who consumes a specific type of information is therefor a specific type of person is flawed, there will always be accidental cases on both the user side and server side. There's also the issue that exposure does not equal thoughts, and thoughts do not equal action, and thoughts are unknowable. We can only punish for actions. Trying to regulate thoughts by regulating exposure (and believe me that's what it is, put a tinfoil hat on me if you want) is wrong.
Targeting the consumers is not solving the problem, because you can't know the consumers' intentions and it does not solve the problem of the crime being comitted to begin with. You must find the producers of this content who commit the actual crime on the actual child and deal with them. Only then will you have justice and protection of children. Censorship is just another wrong added to the problem, and believe me it will not make a right.
So how do you turn off resize in javascript? I can't seem to find anything for it after combing through the options. Ditto for allowing exes to open, there's no option for it that I can see. Any hints?
Yeah except when you go to mail.com to check your mail and not only does it pop up to a new tab that suddenly becomes on top, it RESIZES YOUR BROWSER. I hate that! It happened again today too.
Oh and firefox still won't let me open an.exe, which keeps making me want to go back to IE. I can't stand the hipocracy of "Oh it's open source you have total control etc" but you can't choose to run a file you know is safe on your own damn machine.
I think they got the size wrong.
on
OQO Examined
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I dunno, 4.9x3.4x0.9" seems just a little too big to fit in my pocket if you ask me. So it's too big for pockets but too small for a real keyboard or anything.
If you're going into the $1500 price class, you'll need to take on things like Acer's c110 10.4" tablet PC. It's in the same priceclass, has equal or better specs (what's the battery life on the OQO anyway?), and is still smaller than an 8.5x11 sheet of paper and around an inch thick. I'm betting the pen support is better and the ULV centrino will really give the transmeta chip in the OQO a run for the money. Plus I'm betting the RAM and HD are more expandable.
There just doesn't seem to be a realistic compromise between size and function right now, and one of the main reasons why is we're still too keyboard-centric with interfaces. It's just really hard to do even a modest text document on anything the size of a PDA or this thing. Voice recognition keeps being touted as the holy grail and end of all these problems but where is it? I remember VR demos from the 486 days, you can't tell me a 200-400mhz PDA can't manage that much horsepower.
What I'd really like to see is disjointed systems. With bluetooth finally hitting mainstream I want to see a PDA that can autodetect when I've got some portable storage device or HD based mp3 player in my backpack and mount the volume automaticly. If they had that, you wouldn't need much more space on the PDA than just the OS, everything else you could keep on multipurpose portable drives.
...is that it's really hard to get the "instant gratification" factor.
Back when computing and video games were moving some characters around, it was fairly easy to take a couple months of work learing BASIC and make something reasonably amusing. From there you could kinda grasp how "professional" projects/games were the same thing only bigger.
These days, it's like spend a year learning C++ and you can umm... display text in a console that nobody even learns the interface for anymore.
Java and some other languages have the graphical type widgets but those are mostly too advanced to use out of the box for most people.
The problem is it's hard to find a language where you can have a reasonable graphical app up and running with only a couple days or weeks worth of learning time. If it takes too long, people give up because they can't see the bridge from where they are now to where they want to be.
What about Flash? I don't have any direct experience with it but I've seen interesting things done with it, it can be used for both business (website/forms/etc) or play (games/animations/etc) and seems like it can't be THAT hard to get going or there wouldn't be such a proliferation of it on sites like newgrounds. I mean sure you're not going to write a database or word processor or nuclear simlulation in it, but it could be a good starting point to keep interest for more serious things later.
You could rob all the great houses blind while the guards watched, you could kill entire towns, you could reach the rank of guild master in any of several guilds. But nothing changed. No one reacted diferently to you regardless of what you did (unless you where wanted for murder or something, then you had to pay a small fine. And keep in mind that you realy could kill entire towns without getting a price put on your head). One would hope that in the future there will be Morrowind like games with real interaction rather then scripted events.
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Is it just me or are video games way ahead of other apps on user interface? These days most people can pick up a game and given the general type (fps, driving, rts, rpg) have a pretty damn good guess at the interface. It's not that the game authors have agreed on a standard interface for each genre, it's that they've figured out the things that frustrate new gamers the least so they enjoy the game more with less manual reading. When was the last time you had to read a game's manual to actually jump in and play it? I mean just the basic playing around, not the detailed stuff.
Why haven't desktops and apps incorporated advances from here? Let's take an old RTS, say Command and Conquer. The designers figured out how to make a USEABLE virual desktop that DOESN'T SUCK! You can navigate around this huge screenspace and the radar keeps track of where you are. Also, how do they handle things similar to launching apps? Well there's a sidebar full of big easy to distinguish one click icons, and a set of tabs at the top that switches what set of icons is displayed by type (units, buildings, etc). Seems pretty easy to figure out to me. Want to quickly get back to the thing you were last working on? You can designate hotkeys with ctrl+number an then pressing the number jumps back to it. Some RTS's have seperate select and change focus but all seem to use a similar hotkey system.
One of the things that keeps me happier with windows than linux is the at least moderate effort at standardized interfaces. Most apps of simlar types have similar interfaces and I don't have to relearn all the terms that someone decided to use THEIR names for. Every time I see a custom media player or something with this horrible neo-future interface on windows I cringe, because it's such a bad idea. I don't want to spend time relearning how to use a media player just so it can look cool, I want to watch media with it. On linux it seems every app suffers from this "I want to look unique" urge, or a complete lack of asthetic design whatsoever. So your choices are pretty and confusing or ugly and confusing.
Well, while the first 32bit arcade games weren't around until 1990 or so, I believe your 16bit console had been around for 5 years or so already.
The longer mission means they can accomplish everything they'd hoped to, not just everything they needed to. This means there's less of a case for "We need to send another rover to do more of this" in the future, so either another mission may not be needed or a future mission will not need to waste resources (especially weight, in space exploration mass is money) duplicating the instrumentation and capabilities of these rovers.
Also, since we know the rover design appears robust and successful, it could potentially be reused for another mission without designing a new rover. Let's send one to somewhere like Europa. That'd probably require a larger solar panel or some other power source but the rest of the design could be kept the same, saving the R&D budget.
If we're actually going to do a manned mission to mars, it's also a good idea to test our electronics and mechanical engineering for the environment BEFORE the people get there and depend on it to breathe, so better we learn how to build reliably for mars now.
I'm just wondering if this laptop is used in a portable, carry around with me manner, or if it's one of those laptops that says plugged into AC 99% of the time doing word processing.
If it's the latter, do you have a network and at least one other machine? If so, how about a TFTP and network boot? I'm not sure if you have a boot rom in your laptop but it's possible or maybe you could find a cheap network card for it with one. Once the laptop's booted up it should be fine as long as it stays attatched to whatever network FS it needs to read files off of.
I assume your bios does not allow boot from usb, so that's kinda out... Again, if it's a "static" laptop, one option might be a 44->40 pin IDE adapter, run the wire out of the case, and hook it to a standard 3.5" HD and use an old AT powersupply to keep it spinning. I'm just trying to think up ways to fix this thing with the typical "junk" around the average geek's house. I know there's usually half a ton of old cables, drives, cpus, cards etc in mine. If you're working on the premise that $130 is too much to spend I'd suspect that digging for junk or getting it from a friend may be an option in your case.
With this approach the problem will never be solved or even reduced. Even if I only educate one person that this is a load of bull, that's one less person forwarding this crap around to everyone they know.
I usually tell whoever forwarded this to me (as it's usually someone who knows me) that if they keep doing it I'll be forced to block all mail from them. Then they get pissed off. It's like hello, you're being rude! Have some freaking manners already. If people want to forward this stuff to idiots, then fine, but I find it insulting when people who know me think I'd either fall for this lame crap, or actually WANT any of it.
The distinction between "individual computer" and "wireless router" could get a little blurry, considering any computer with a wireless card could potentially rebroadcast access to other machines. So do we ban wireless cards from campus? But it's integrated in laptops and coming to standard motherboards soon.
If you're running a secure wireless network where you need a passkey to access it, how is the college going to know you're linked to their primary network unless they either obtain or crack your key and see where data winds up routing through? You could say your wireless network isn't connected to the campus network, how do they prove otherwise?
I'll see your 80lb CRT and raise you my 92lb 24" widescreen trinitron running 1920x1280 @100hz. I could go for 2304x1440 but why bother when HDTV fits so nice at the 1920 res? =)
I just wish I coulda grabbed the second one that was for sale so I'd have dualhead.
Or at least they did when I worked there. I could see 100/hour being an issue for mail lists, but usually 500/day is reasonable and I think that's the only filter they have. One it detects higher than that it blocks port 25. It stays blocked until the user calls in to complain, at which time they get interrogated about mailing lists, viruses, etc. Usually it doesn't get unblocked until they demonstrate that they've gotten updated antivirus etc.
There was that one guy with the legitimate 3000 user mailing list though, he was really annoyed that we weren't going to let him run that.
Is it enough to fix your life? Buy a house for you and your SO and a family? Maybe enough to relocate to be with an SO somewhere far away? Enough to put your kids through college? Enough to support your parents as they get older?
It's not the money so much as what you can get with it. You're risking your life. People risk theirs every day by just crossing the street to work, the only difference here is the magnitude of the risk and payoff. As to whether the payoff is worth the risk, that really depends its size and your needs. People on here are going to scream no amount of money is enough but sometimes it is, if it ensures the things you really need in your life. But that's something unique to each person.
If it's really good pay I might be interested in going myself. I failed out of college, and I want a second chance. I love someone who's all but homeless in a 3rd world country. My car keeps falling apart and I'm too broke to fix it. I'm sick of living at home. I could find a good use for alot of money and my IT skills are pretty good. Anyone know where you inquire about this kinda thing?
It's important as Proof It Can Be Done. Even though this vehicle has no clear path to an orbital version, it'll be much easier for any proposal for a bigger, more powerful, more practical vehicle to get sponsorship or funding from commercial interests. Before X-prize ships started doing test flights, most companies would think you'd be crazy offering them service to space for payloads, but I bet a successful 100km flight will change alot of minds and open them to the possibility.
Astronaut icecream!
Well that seems to let it run from the download manager, but then I still have to open the download manager after choosing to save the file. Why can't I just open the file directly from the link so it doesn't waste any disk space other than temp storage which is automaticly freed later?
shouldn't they just browse sites and not let you download files? That's what FTP's for isn't it?
I'd really prefer being able to control what I can and can't do with software on my computer rather than being kept "safe for your own good". It's basicly a form of DRM. You're saying I can't execute this file because you assume I'm an idiot and would either unknowingly run malicious code without adequate antivirus protection or that I'm too stupid to find a way to circumvent it, which I'm not. It's just constantly inconvenient and irritating.
I'm tired of having to copy links to new drivers or utilities and paste them to IE to open them.
Of course this is after thinking about the design for awhile. Rarely have I just gone and said "Ok I'm going to code this function now." without thinking "Ok what will this break? What will I want to add in the future and will it mean redoing this a different way?" I spend alot more time thinking about how to get the best flexibility out of a design than actually coding. I tend to think up the data structures first, by figuring out what data I need and what I'm going to do with it. Once I have that, I construct objects around the structures and figure out what methods I need to manipulate them. Everything revolves around the data, not the process. I try to keep the objects segregated on a "need to know" basis so that it's easier to swap out one implementation for another later. I don't want to be sitting forever rewriting the entire project because I've found that quicksort sucks for this data and I'm better off with a heap than a linked list.
When I actually get around to coding, my first concern is clarity. If I can't read my code, I'm going to be screwed when I have to debug it tomorrow, and totally lost when I need to add a feature or rework something next month. I tend to name my variables and functions for what they are, sometimes with fairly long names. Sure it's a pain in the ass to type cosine_offset and I can typo it alot, but it's a hell of alot easier than figuring out that w stands for cosine offset a month from now. Compilers catch name typos, they won't tell you what the hell you were thinking when you wrote the code. I find the stupid "hungarian warts" where you get names like pfstrqlrdwFOO are absolutely worthless. The only prefixer I use is p, for pointer, because pointer screwups are bad and it's possible to forget something is a pointer and requires different operands. I can usually figure out if something's an int or float or string pretty easy by following the names and what functions it comes from/goes to. GetInputString(myinput) makes it pretty obvious what myinput is, I don't need pcstrz in front of it.
Having other people able to read your code is a huge bonus. Readability = less time debugging = more time to improve or optimize later. I don't know ASM, but if my code is readable by someone who does, it's alot easier to get them to help me if they don't have to spend a week going "WTF is this variable for? What is the point of this function?"
Another thing I do that was taught to me by a very realisticly-oriented CS professor is go for low linecount. Outside of clarity, linecount is king. Why? Because fewer lines are easier to comprehend, tend to have fewer bugs, can be easier to optimize (into ASM for example). Functions over 50 lines are rare for me. My functions do exactly one thing that they're named for, I don't group an entire 9 step procedure into a single long function. If I have to do that then it'll be a function calling a bunch of other functions in order. That way when I have a bottleneck, I can just rewrite 25 lines of code instead of poring over 250 looking for where the slow code is and misunderstanding parts of it.
Granted I'm not the best programmer. I'm probably not even an average programmer around here given my lack of experience. I had a basic course in ASM at college that mostly covered MIPS, and an EE course that covered up through basic CPUs and registers. I know some of the concepts but have never written in ASM. Maybe when I finish the main parts of my current project I'll learn x86 ASM so I can optimize it.
I tried finding a way to profile my code recently. I found AMD's profiler was totally incomprehensible. So I tried to download Intel's, even though I'm using an AMD CPU. Well it was so hard to figure out how to use that the trial expired before I ever got to use it once, and they want some hideous amount of money for a version that doesn't expire.
Seriously, is this stuff really coming from websites? I mean, way back in the old days of like 1996 you could find websites with (non-legal) mp3s on them for downloading, and we see how well crack down on that has eliminated the problem of music piracy, right? I'm sure the people distributing and collecting this kind of material have long since realized the world of peer to peer apps and that shutting down websites will be no real deterrent to them.
This is a useless effort that sets a dangerous precident. It does nothing to help the children who are victimized this, because it's already been done. If you want to stop this, you need to find the people who take the original pictures, otherwise you're just covering eyes and pretending the problem goes away without actually solving it. There's also the question of who's standards do you apply? The age of consent isn't uniform, it's not even uniform state to state in the US let alone in every country in the world. Then there's various laws about specific acts etc. It's quite easy to bring in censorship at a low level for the least popular elements and then start creeping up the ladder. Ok child pornography is illegal. Next beastiality is also illegal. Next watersports/scat are illegal. Next BDSM is illegal. Next homosexuality is illegal. Next anal sex is illegal. Next penetration and oral sex are illegal. Next any nudity is illegal. If you think this kind of progression can't happen, think again. And once it works in the porn area it's not as hard a jump to start censoring something else and when people protest say "Well we censor for porn because it's bad, and everyone agreed on that right?" People still freak out in the US over a pair of fully mature breasts being shown in an act unrelated to sex at all, it's not hard to drum up support to start censoring things and the amount of support you need decreases with the amount of censorship successfully in place.
Even the general concept that looking at something, no matter how horrific an act it depicts, is a crime, is ludicrous. You might as well arrest everyone who's seen the Iraqi prisoner abuse photos or the beheading video because they're obviously going to become violent murderers and abusers right? The argument that anyone who consumes a specific type of information is therefor a specific type of person is flawed, there will always be accidental cases on both the user side and server side. There's also the issue that exposure does not equal thoughts, and thoughts do not equal action, and thoughts are unknowable. We can only punish for actions. Trying to regulate thoughts by regulating exposure (and believe me that's what it is, put a tinfoil hat on me if you want) is wrong.
Targeting the consumers is not solving the problem, because you can't know the consumers' intentions and it does not solve the problem of the crime being comitted to begin with. You must find the producers of this content who commit the actual crime on the actual child and deal with them. Only then will you have justice and protection of children. Censorship is just another wrong added to the problem, and believe me it will not make a right.
So how do you turn off resize in javascript? I can't seem to find anything for it after combing through the options. Ditto for allowing exes to open, there's no option for it that I can see. Any hints?
Yeah except when you go to mail.com to check your mail and not only does it pop up to a new tab that suddenly becomes on top, it RESIZES YOUR BROWSER. I hate that! It happened again today too.
.exe, which keeps making me want to go back to IE. I can't stand the hipocracy of "Oh it's open source you have total control etc" but you can't choose to run a file you know is safe on your own damn machine.
Oh and firefox still won't let me open an
If you're going into the $1500 price class, you'll need to take on things like Acer's c110 10.4" tablet PC. It's in the same priceclass, has equal or better specs (what's the battery life on the OQO anyway?), and is still smaller than an 8.5x11 sheet of paper and around an inch thick. I'm betting the pen support is better and the ULV centrino will really give the transmeta chip in the OQO a run for the money. Plus I'm betting the RAM and HD are more expandable.
There just doesn't seem to be a realistic compromise between size and function right now, and one of the main reasons why is we're still too keyboard-centric with interfaces. It's just really hard to do even a modest text document on anything the size of a PDA or this thing. Voice recognition keeps being touted as the holy grail and end of all these problems but where is it? I remember VR demos from the 486 days, you can't tell me a 200-400mhz PDA can't manage that much horsepower.
What I'd really like to see is disjointed systems. With bluetooth finally hitting mainstream I want to see a PDA that can autodetect when I've got some portable storage device or HD based mp3 player in my backpack and mount the volume automaticly. If they had that, you wouldn't need much more space on the PDA than just the OS, everything else you could keep on multipurpose portable drives.
Sorry, couldn't resist the gratuitous movie quote reference, the names are too similar. :P
...is that it's really hard to get the "instant gratification" factor.
Back when computing and video games were moving some characters around, it was fairly easy to take a couple months of work learing BASIC and make something reasonably amusing. From there you could kinda grasp how "professional" projects/games were the same thing only bigger.
These days, it's like spend a year learning C++ and you can umm... display text in a console that nobody even learns the interface for anymore.
Java and some other languages have the graphical type widgets but those are mostly too advanced to use out of the box for most people.
The problem is it's hard to find a language where you can have a reasonable graphical app up and running with only a couple days or weeks worth of learning time. If it takes too long, people give up because they can't see the bridge from where they are now to where they want to be.
What about Flash? I don't have any direct experience with it but I've seen interesting things done with it, it can be used for both business (website/forms/etc) or play (games/animations/etc) and seems like it can't be THAT hard to get going or there wouldn't be such a proliferation of it on sites like newgrounds. I mean sure you're not going to write a database or word processor or nuclear simlulation in it, but it could be a good starting point to keep interest for more serious things later.
...is that blockbuster movies will be "intelligent" computer-generated renderings of professional gamers's playthroughs of the latest games? =)
Can it really be worse than some of the halfassed scripts coming out now?
I hear someone is working on this problem.