Seems doubtful. It's a router, not a server. It gets the content from the network, like from your video server on your LAN. Compare to how the AirPort Express works, streaming music through itself. The iTV looks like it has a fancier version of Front Row, which does the remote polling of content. Kind of like how iTunes and iPhoto now work with shared libraries.
I want to know if the component out is YPbPr or RGB. I'm hoping it's not RGB, but the picture of the ports shows them colored that way. Blah.
Actually, it is needed. The entire Florida deal showed that (as has all the frauds that have been committed over the eons i.e. Chicago). We do need to make voting more fraud-proof and easier. Votes do count.
No, we don't need electronic voting. At best we need better ballot-making machines.
Florida showed us we need to generate paper ballots better, which is what voting technology has been all about until electronic voting came along. Punch ballots are ancient technology, one of the first machine-readable forms of balloting. It's an outdated method that has been eclipsed by machine-readable marked ballots such as optical scanning. Even with that, the failures in Florida came primarily from not maintaining the machines properly such as dull punches and catch basins full of chads making it harder to punch through.
If we want to use touch screens for a more user-friendly voting experience, fine. Design a better user input system and then have it print out a ballot that is scanned separately and can be hand-checked on recounts. Receipts are a meaningless placebo for voodoo tabulation by the Master Control Program which then announces the winner of an election and this is not verifiable or trustworthy voting. I don't need to see it fail to have no faith in it, just as I don't need to see an electrical fire started by exposed wires to know it's a possibility.
As for voter fraud, I challenge anyone to cite concrete examples of problems. There has been and is election fraud, where those in power rig the results. That's what happened in Chicago in the 1960s and Ohio in 2004 and Mexico this year. Voter fraud is the straw man being used to institute election fraud.
These should be quite doable. The NXT brain has nice full-featured Bluetooth. I have no problem connecting via Bluetooth on my PowerBook (no Bluetooth with Intel Macs until the universal binary is released). I was amazed that it paired with my Samsung T509 with absolutely no effort. Now I just need some software on my phone to control the robot. Or collect data.
The flexibility and robustness of the Bluetooth communications seems present, it's just a matter of writing software to send data through the mesh. I'm not sure if the default programming tool has the flexibility (yet) for this kind of logic, but the control of the sensors and motors is very detailed.
Unlike the original Mindstorms being dominated by bricks and plates, Mindstorms NXT is really a Technics set with all kinds of liftarms, axles and connectors. It's much more like building robots than putting bricks together. See this photo of what's in the box, and this Flickr set (not mine).
I was thinking of the install footprint, not the runtime. I guess I'm showing my (java) age. A huge barrier to adopting Java software in the client world is getting Java on the client. Really, Windows it the biggest pain in the ass because it doesn't come with Java. I don't care how big Java is on Mac OS X because it's just there. I guess follow-up comments lead me to realize that splitting up the libraries is pretty pointless in this broadband (tubes? dump trucks?) age.
So I'll stand by my call to actually remove deprecated methods. Otherwise, what's the point in deprecation? Five years should be more than enough time to stop using something. But thinking about it, there are some serious bugs that could stand fixing, particularly in the big, complex parts like Swing. Or how about revisiting existing code and optimizing the performance? Some of Java's code is gnarly. Open source eyeballs could really tackle those without burdening Sun developers, who are busy pushing out the next unnecessary release for the sake of marketing...
It's definitely the class libraries that make Java "java". The language is straightforward and there are decent JVM workalikes, but developers write their code around the class libraries. The problem I've always found with Java is the bloat of the class libraries, so I'd like to see open source distributions make lean and mean Java variants.
A perfect Java distro would maybe drop all the deprecated methods (will Sun ever do that? Java 1.6 is a good opportunity...) and unbundle some of the least-used stuff like the CORBA and RMI stuff. Heck, even Swing and AWT should be optional packages. Why couldn't Java be structured sort of like a Java Web Start install, pulling in libraries only if needed. Almost everything is connected to the internet these days and good caching of libraries from trusted sources would be a decent way to get full functionality with a smaller initial footprint.
I also got this printer when the toner went out on my ancient LaserJet 4. The HL-5170DN was cheaper than a new toner drum for the lj4, and it's higher resolution and faster. Because of the separate toner from the drum it'll be cheaper to operate, and it draws less power I'm sure. It also has Bonjour/Zeroconf, which makes using it with a Mac a snap.
It's been about eight months now since NGE was pushed live, and SWG is a shadow of its former self. Worse yet, they haven't delivered on any of the NGE promises (such as full collision detection) or restored the galactic civil war, but instead are trying to add WoW-style content (Battle of Restuss). It's all so forced and incomplete.
Sure, some people like aspects of the new combat. But melee was ruined. Then they put in a fix for melee, and it screwed up other things. But the real destruction of SWG by NGE is the end of the player community. The NGE changes have eliminated any need to interact with people: no more wounds or fatigue that need healing by doctors or in cantinas, switching to a loot-drop economy and screwing over crafters. Want to find the most powerful weapons or best armor? It doesn't really matter anymore, it's all based on your combat level and not the gear itself.
There are still many NGE-introduced bugs, eight months later. SWG always has had a reputation for bugs and being unfinished, but prior to NGE there was always a sense that new stuff was being added. NGE bugs are all because of resetting things, so stuff that used to work doesn't. It's like re-introducing problems that used to be gone. Very frustrating for players.
The attempts to turn SWG into a persistent KOTOR or a WoW work-alike they've ruined the game. If you like fighting for an hour or so every night maybe SWG is worthwhile. Or you can just play an FPS that doesn't have a monthly subscription. The stats on mmogchart.com don't show an increase in subscribers, that's for sure.
It is the software running on the host machine which does not validate the data coming from the tag that has major issues.
Absolutely. This is just like the Windows JPEG "virus" that was due to buggy JPEG parsing. Describing RFIDs as an attack vector is appropriate, but inert data can not be a virus. You typically don't execute images or identification information. Perhaps there needs to be some catchy name for this type of attack, but really it's just a new example of the common overflow bug.
I also don't understand why people can't realize that "net neutrality" means preserving the existing internet. It's all about equality of packets. Everything else on the subject is FUD. Light the dark fiber or charge a proper fee base on bytes-per-second (megabytes per month doesn't control tube-clogging, it's more like a truck model). We're really supposed to believe Google doesn't pay for all the video they're transmitting? Hah.
(By the way, OSWeekly could unclog the tubes with a better web design. One sentence per page to maximize ad loads is ridiculous and I sure stopped reading by the third page.)
I've got Parallels running WinXP just fine on my Mac mini, and it's pretty nice. I'm forced to run certain things (robot programming) under Windows. Now that I have a good environment to play with I can play with linux distros and find better robot tools.
I didn't even know about the virtualization problem, I just got the warning from Parallels but it ran fine. Now I have to look into some fixes and speed that sucker up. Or maybe I can upgrade to a Core 2 Duo.
These drones will be used to monitor the streets of Los Angeles to gather track citizens and citizen activities at the expense of intruding on people's privacy (not legally defined privacy, but real-life privacy).
Exactly right, this is what the movie Blue Thunder was all about. Except instead of stealth helicopters we're now seeing unmanned drones deployed over population centers. How long until these drones become more "useful" by being armed with crowd-control features such as gas or even lethal force?
Dammit, I got punk'd. But still, the real picture isn't much different from a violence standpoint. I was trying to avoid giving the game any links, but if anyone wants to see official screenshots and a trailer the url is http://www.leftbehindgames.com/pages/the_games.htm
I wonder whether or not the Christian fundamentalist unbeliever-killing Left Behind: Eternal Forces game is "appropriate" violence. Does this look any better than GTA? At least Doom and Quake are about fighting demons and mutants. This "convert or kill" game is a far cry from Veggie Tales, and very telling of the state of some religions in the US that churches refuse to denounce it.
The Olympics are for physical athletes, not people with unusually high twitch-response ability.
Some of the Olympic sports that run counter to this comment are:
Archery Shooting Table Tennis Curling
They rely more on twitch response (except curling) than actual physical capabilities. I'd also include fencing as a twitch response sport, but it does require a fair amount of athleticism.
Video gaming would seem possible, being enjoyed around the world. But the fate of chess and other comments that have pointed out the need for "sameness" would make it seem highly unlikely. I Guess gamers will have to go for the professional circuit in South Korea and elsewhere.
While I enjoyed the voiceover version of Blade Runner, when I finally saw the director's cut I was blown away. The movie works on a whole different level without the voiceover. The voiceover pulls you out of the picture, making you feel like an outside observer. But the way the movie was filmed, being immersed in the visuals and the moods makes for a much more engrossing experience.
The biggest problem with learning how to use computers I've seen from neophytes is the fear of trying stuff. Everything I know about computers comes from wanting to find out how stuff works. I tinker and mess around and do stupid things and eventually figure out what things are and how they work.
Too many people are afraid they'll break the computer and resort to memorizing what they are shown. Since they only do the one thing they are trained to they are unable to grasp the underlying components and what it all means.
To be literate you have to tinker. Try stuff. Break things, get someone to fix them. Then try some different stuff.
I've never been a big fan of energy drinks, but I've recently switched to Tab Energy (warning, annoying flash) for half my caffeine intake. It's not a cola, but it's got good carbonation and a refreshing taste. It uses sucralose for the sweetener, and only has five calories per can. It's the best low-calorie soda-type beverage I've found.
One of the advantages/curses of the Mach microkernel that Mac OS X uses is the abstraction between the hardware drivers and the "kernel" that does stuff like manage IPC and disk activity etc., etc. The advantage is the isolation of hardware, the disadvantage is performance. While slower than a monolithic kernel, Mach can be a lot more stable. And with computing power at the level it's at these days I'm not sure how noticeable the difference is for everyday desktop use.
Cringley's idea would make a heck of a lot of sense in this kind of environment, because you'd just instantiate a Windows "kernel" (server in Mach parlance) that provides the runtime profile. This gives you a heck of a robust virtualization implementation, with the Windows and Mac OS X kernels running as peers with equal yet controlled access to the hardware. When us Mac users were running MkLinux it was not unheard of to run a development version of the linux kernel as a Mach server alongside the current linux kernel.
I've always felt Apple's Boot Camp was merely a reason for them to provide the driver glue needed for Windows, and that dual-booting most certainly is not Apple's final goal.
The tone of this post is misleading, making it sound like bloggers (online sites, actually) get special privilege. Nothing is farther from the truth. The FEC decision is that the internet community is to be held to the same standards as traditional media. This is a great thing, I just hope it holds. The FEC commissioners now get that the internet is just another media outlet, like print or television. In fact it is more egalitarian; the corporate owners of Gawker Media (for example) can't dictate the political bent of internet content the way News Corp. (FOX) or GE (NBC) can with their large-scale dominance of the limited bandwidth of television. There are hundreds of thousands of web servers on the internet, but only a few hundred broadcasters on both over-the-air and cable television.
In the last couple of days there was some extensive feedback from SOE developers (which is amazing in and of itself), nicely summarized in this forum post.
Some of the highlights:
Moving from crafting-based economy to loot-drop economy
No longer interested in "sandbox" play, switching to quest content
If you don't fight, you don't belong in the game
This is, for all intents and purposes, SWG becoming a sci-fi analog to WoW. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but it's not the game a lot of the players signed up for. If SOE pulls it off they may get a sizable player base, although I wouldn't pretend they'll match WoW's size.
The developer Helios has really upset the players with his pronouncement that SWG no longer strives to be a world simulator. One of the selling points of the original SWG was the open world where players would find their own things to do instead of being on treadmills. Sure, SWG failed in large ways because of experience grinding and lack of working, interesting content. But the play area was flexible enough and the way things worked pre-NGE managed to keep a lot of people interested.
Another developer, ChrisCao, comes across as an ass. He managed to insult just about everyone with what he said, being particularly dismissive of entertainers. His contention is that entertainers don't belong in the Star Wars universe because the only one in the movie got eaten. Not only is this wrong (cantina in Mos Eisley, partying ewoks, Jabba's personal entertainers), but by his logic they should eliminate bounty hunters because Greedo and both Jengo and Boba Fett were killed.
There was also a developer comment made (I think by ChrisCao) that droid engineers didn't exist in Star Wars, which is also ridiculous. Annakin was a droid engineer who built C-3PO. Luke, too, was a budding droid engineer. It was his tinkering with R2-D2 that unlocked Princess Leia's message. The jawas, as scavengers, also served as droid engineers. Gotta whip them into shape to sell them.
I don't know what kind of Star Wars fans the developers are, but it seems the ones making the decisions only understand the superficial aspects of the story arc. Some of us like playing someone like Oola or Watto or Uncle Owen. Give me an arid planet and some second-hand, rusted moisture extractors and I'll keep myself entertained for as long as there's a market for water.
SWG is turning into a radically different game. That's fine, if that's the business decision that needs to be made. I'm not sure they'll be able to make all of their changes in a short enough time to save the game, but that's just one player's opinion. And thank you, SOE, for finally being forthcoming in your intent so we can make informed decisions about playing. I started playing SWG because it was sci-fi and it had one of the most elaborate crafting systems of any MMOG on the market. Now that crafters are going to shift to glorified loot pimpers maybe I'll look elsewhere. Seed looks intriguing and is scheduled to launch in about a month. A zero-combat MMORPG may be just the antidote to what SWG wants to become.
Example, my workplace Exchange web interface- Safari misses parts of the page, FireFox renders it fine. ACID test or no, I like the one that works in all situations.
There are a lot of crappy pages out there. If a page doesn't make it through the HTML validator why should anyone expect a browser to render it? Are your pages at work valid? What's the point of standards-compliant rendering engines if they all allow exceptions to the standard to be rendered?
A lot of times Safari won't render big chunks of web pages because of malformed markup. Dave Hyatt (rightly, I believe) doesn't want to spend lots of coding effort dealing with error recovery when parsing sloppy web pages. Browsers like MSIE and Netscape (pre-Mozilla) are too permissive and have allowed people to get away with downright bad HTML.
That said, the Safari Compatibility Hit List was recently created, to either fix Safari compatibility problems or to encourage sites to fix their markup.
Swing is a bloated nightmare of an API, way overly complex for what it tries to do. It gives you great flexibility, but things that should be simple—like setting a fixed width (of the right width) for a JTree—are actually difficult programming tasks. Heck, everything is time-consuming. If you work long enough on your GUI, Swing does give you the power to do a lot. But it isn't trivial to use, unlike AWT.
When Swing was introduced as an add-on package (for Java 1.1) the size/memory was a big deal, but Swing solved a lot of GuI performance problems that plagued AWT. Nowadays Swing is an integral part of Java and comes "for free", and the memory issues don't mean as much when you're using computers with gigabytes of RAM. Meanwhile the performance issues of AWT have been largely solved by improvements to the JVM. As for SWT, it seems to me like an extra class library to have to load and run, with native bindings. Kind of the worst of Swing and AWT combined, although many people like using it.
I am a bit biased towards Swing, doing everything on Mac OS X. Apple has implemented class library caching and sharing, and they've hardware-accelerated a bunch of the Swing drawing. I recently ran some of my Java stuff on an Intel-based iMac Duo and things ran lightning fast; seemed almost faster than Carbon stuff. Almost.
Am I now going to have to start assuming that any decent OSS/FS project will eventually sell out?
Maybe this is just the way of business, who knows. People do want to make money, even from their labors of love. But the question I pose is simple: can't the "sell-out" software simply fork at the point of the acquisition? It's not like you can put open source software back in the can. All you can do is restrict it going forward.
Let's take JBoss as an example. What's to prevent JBoss developers (or anyone) from coming out with "JHoncho" based on the pre-Oracle version of JBoss and fork from that point? Oracle ends up buying the JBoss name and not much more, unless the developers want to work for them.
I understand all the concepts of user controlled economies, desire to play but not fight, etc. BUT I still don't know what any of this has to do with STAR WARS. If someone wants to roleplay being a farmer or an "image consultant" why not seek out a more appropriate venue.
I speak as an SWG player who has easily spent 90% of my time as a crafter and merchant. There isn't "a more appropriate venue", mostly. SWG has (had) one of the most extensive crafting systems of any MMOG. When the NGE came along I looked at what options I had for a new MMOG with the same depth of player crafting, since the NGE really has ruined the non-combat professions. I have yet to find a decent alternative to SWG. Some of us really have no interest in swords and sorcery type MMOGs and prefer more of a sci-fi universe.
So far the most promising alternatives for a non-combat experience don't quite exist yet, like Dark and Light (swords and sorcery, I know) or Pirates of the Burning Sea. As for the Star Wars universe, it's not the ideal sci-fi setting but it is rich and has depth. I'd much prefer a good cyberpunk or steampunk MMOG, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, will it have DVR capability?
Seems doubtful. It's a router, not a server. It gets the content from the network, like from your video server on your LAN. Compare to how the AirPort Express works, streaming music through itself. The iTV looks like it has a fancier version of Front Row, which does the remote polling of content. Kind of like how iTunes and iPhoto now work with shared libraries.
I want to know if the component out is YPbPr or RGB. I'm hoping it's not RGB, but the picture of the ports shows them colored that way. Blah.
Actually, it is needed. The entire Florida deal showed that (as has all the frauds that have been committed over the eons i.e. Chicago). We do need to make voting more fraud-proof and easier. Votes do count.
No, we don't need electronic voting. At best we need better ballot-making machines.
Florida showed us we need to generate paper ballots better, which is what voting technology has been all about until electronic voting came along. Punch ballots are ancient technology, one of the first machine-readable forms of balloting. It's an outdated method that has been eclipsed by machine-readable marked ballots such as optical scanning. Even with that, the failures in Florida came primarily from not maintaining the machines properly such as dull punches and catch basins full of chads making it harder to punch through.
If we want to use touch screens for a more user-friendly voting experience, fine. Design a better user input system and then have it print out a ballot that is scanned separately and can be hand-checked on recounts. Receipts are a meaningless placebo for voodoo tabulation by the Master Control Program which then announces the winner of an election and this is not verifiable or trustworthy voting. I don't need to see it fail to have no faith in it, just as I don't need to see an electrical fire started by exposed wires to know it's a possibility.
As for voter fraud, I challenge anyone to cite concrete examples of problems. There has been and is election fraud, where those in power rig the results. That's what happened in Chicago in the 1960s and Ohio in 2004 and Mexico this year. Voter fraud is the straw man being used to institute election fraud.
These should be quite doable. The NXT brain has nice full-featured Bluetooth. I have no problem connecting via Bluetooth on my PowerBook (no Bluetooth with Intel Macs until the universal binary is released). I was amazed that it paired with my Samsung T509 with absolutely no effort. Now I just need some software on my phone to control the robot. Or collect data.
The flexibility and robustness of the Bluetooth communications seems present, it's just a matter of writing software to send data through the mesh. I'm not sure if the default programming tool has the flexibility (yet) for this kind of logic, but the control of the sensors and motors is very detailed.
Unlike the original Mindstorms being dominated by bricks and plates, Mindstorms NXT is really a Technics set with all kinds of liftarms, axles and connectors. It's much more like building robots than putting bricks together. See this photo of what's in the box, and this Flickr set (not mine).
I was thinking of the install footprint, not the runtime. I guess I'm showing my (java) age. A huge barrier to adopting Java software in the client world is getting Java on the client. Really, Windows it the biggest pain in the ass because it doesn't come with Java. I don't care how big Java is on Mac OS X because it's just there. I guess follow-up comments lead me to realize that splitting up the libraries is pretty pointless in this broadband (tubes? dump trucks?) age.
So I'll stand by my call to actually remove deprecated methods. Otherwise, what's the point in deprecation? Five years should be more than enough time to stop using something. But thinking about it, there are some serious bugs that could stand fixing, particularly in the big, complex parts like Swing. Or how about revisiting existing code and optimizing the performance? Some of Java's code is gnarly. Open source eyeballs could really tackle those without burdening Sun developers, who are busy pushing out the next unnecessary release for the sake of marketing...
It's definitely the class libraries that make Java "java". The language is straightforward and there are decent JVM workalikes, but developers write their code around the class libraries. The problem I've always found with Java is the bloat of the class libraries, so I'd like to see open source distributions make lean and mean Java variants.
A perfect Java distro would maybe drop all the deprecated methods (will Sun ever do that? Java 1.6 is a good opportunity...) and unbundle some of the least-used stuff like the CORBA and RMI stuff. Heck, even Swing and AWT should be optional packages. Why couldn't Java be structured sort of like a Java Web Start install, pulling in libraries only if needed. Almost everything is connected to the internet these days and good caching of libraries from trusted sources would be a decent way to get full functionality with a smaller initial footprint.
I also got this printer when the toner went out on my ancient LaserJet 4. The HL-5170DN was cheaper than a new toner drum for the lj4, and it's higher resolution and faster. Because of the separate toner from the drum it'll be cheaper to operate, and it draws less power I'm sure. It also has Bonjour/Zeroconf, which makes using it with a Mac a snap.
It's been about eight months now since NGE was pushed live, and SWG is a shadow of its former self. Worse yet, they haven't delivered on any of the NGE promises (such as full collision detection) or restored the galactic civil war, but instead are trying to add WoW-style content (Battle of Restuss). It's all so forced and incomplete.
Sure, some people like aspects of the new combat. But melee was ruined. Then they put in a fix for melee, and it screwed up other things. But the real destruction of SWG by NGE is the end of the player community. The NGE changes have eliminated any need to interact with people: no more wounds or fatigue that need healing by doctors or in cantinas, switching to a loot-drop economy and screwing over crafters. Want to find the most powerful weapons or best armor? It doesn't really matter anymore, it's all based on your combat level and not the gear itself.
There are still many NGE-introduced bugs, eight months later. SWG always has had a reputation for bugs and being unfinished, but prior to NGE there was always a sense that new stuff was being added. NGE bugs are all because of resetting things, so stuff that used to work doesn't. It's like re-introducing problems that used to be gone. Very frustrating for players.
The attempts to turn SWG into a persistent KOTOR or a WoW work-alike they've ruined the game. If you like fighting for an hour or so every night maybe SWG is worthwhile. Or you can just play an FPS that doesn't have a monthly subscription. The stats on mmogchart.com don't show an increase in subscribers, that's for sure.
It is the software running on the host machine which does not validate the data coming from the tag that has major issues.
Absolutely. This is just like the Windows JPEG "virus" that was due to buggy JPEG parsing. Describing RFIDs as an attack vector is appropriate, but inert data can not be a virus. You typically don't execute images or identification information. Perhaps there needs to be some catchy name for this type of attack, but really it's just a new example of the common overflow bug.
I also don't understand why people can't realize that "net neutrality" means preserving the existing internet. It's all about equality of packets. Everything else on the subject is FUD. Light the dark fiber or charge a proper fee base on bytes-per-second (megabytes per month doesn't control tube-clogging, it's more like a truck model). We're really supposed to believe Google doesn't pay for all the video they're transmitting? Hah.
(By the way, OSWeekly could unclog the tubes with a better web design. One sentence per page to maximize ad loads is ridiculous and I sure stopped reading by the third page.)
I've got Parallels running WinXP just fine on my Mac mini, and it's pretty nice. I'm forced to run certain things (robot programming) under Windows. Now that I have a good environment to play with I can play with linux distros and find better robot tools.
I didn't even know about the virtualization problem, I just got the warning from Parallels but it ran fine. Now I have to look into some fixes and speed that sucker up. Or maybe I can upgrade to a Core 2 Duo.
These drones will be used to monitor the streets of Los Angeles to gather track citizens and citizen activities at the expense of intruding on people's privacy (not legally defined privacy, but real-life privacy).
Exactly right, this is what the movie Blue Thunder was all about. Except instead of stealth helicopters we're now seeing unmanned drones deployed over population centers. How long until these drones become more "useful" by being armed with crowd-control features such as gas or even lethal force?
Dammit, I got punk'd. But still, the real picture isn't much different from a violence standpoint. I was trying to avoid giving the game any links, but if anyone wants to see official screenshots and a trailer the url is http://www.leftbehindgames.com/pages/the_games.htm
I wonder whether or not the Christian fundamentalist unbeliever-killing Left Behind: Eternal Forces game is "appropriate" violence. Does this look any better than GTA? At least Doom and Quake are about fighting demons and mutants. This "convert or kill" game is a far cry from Veggie Tales, and very telling of the state of some religions in the US that churches refuse to denounce it.
The Olympics are for physical athletes, not people with unusually high twitch-response ability.
Some of the Olympic sports that run counter to this comment are:
Archery
Shooting
Table Tennis
Curling
They rely more on twitch response (except curling) than actual physical capabilities. I'd also include fencing as a twitch response sport, but it does require a fair amount of athleticism.
Video gaming would seem possible, being enjoyed around the world. But the fate of chess and other comments that have pointed out the need for "sameness" would make it seem highly unlikely. I Guess gamers will have to go for the professional circuit in South Korea and elsewhere.
While I enjoyed the voiceover version of Blade Runner, when I finally saw the director's cut I was blown away. The movie works on a whole different level without the voiceover. The voiceover pulls you out of the picture, making you feel like an outside observer. But the way the movie was filmed, being immersed in the visuals and the moods makes for a much more engrossing experience.
The biggest problem with learning how to use computers I've seen from neophytes is the fear of trying stuff. Everything I know about computers comes from wanting to find out how stuff works. I tinker and mess around and do stupid things and eventually figure out what things are and how they work.
Too many people are afraid they'll break the computer and resort to memorizing what they are shown. Since they only do the one thing they are trained to they are unable to grasp the underlying components and what it all means.
To be literate you have to tinker. Try stuff. Break things, get someone to fix them. Then try some different stuff.
I've never been a big fan of energy drinks, but I've recently switched to Tab Energy (warning, annoying flash) for half my caffeine intake. It's not a cola, but it's got good carbonation and a refreshing taste. It uses sucralose for the sweetener, and only has five calories per can. It's the best low-calorie soda-type beverage I've found.
One of the advantages/curses of the Mach microkernel that Mac OS X uses is the abstraction between the hardware drivers and the "kernel" that does stuff like manage IPC and disk activity etc., etc. The advantage is the isolation of hardware, the disadvantage is performance. While slower than a monolithic kernel, Mach can be a lot more stable. And with computing power at the level it's at these days I'm not sure how noticeable the difference is for everyday desktop use.
Cringley's idea would make a heck of a lot of sense in this kind of environment, because you'd just instantiate a Windows "kernel" (server in Mach parlance) that provides the runtime profile. This gives you a heck of a robust virtualization implementation, with the Windows and Mac OS X kernels running as peers with equal yet controlled access to the hardware. When us Mac users were running MkLinux it was not unheard of to run a development version of the linux kernel as a Mach server alongside the current linux kernel.
I've always felt Apple's Boot Camp was merely a reason for them to provide the driver glue needed for Windows, and that dual-booting most certainly is not Apple's final goal.
The tone of this post is misleading, making it sound like bloggers (online sites, actually) get special privilege. Nothing is farther from the truth. The FEC decision is that the internet community is to be held to the same standards as traditional media. This is a great thing, I just hope it holds. The FEC commissioners now get that the internet is just another media outlet, like print or television. In fact it is more egalitarian; the corporate owners of Gawker Media (for example) can't dictate the political bent of internet content the way News Corp. (FOX) or GE (NBC) can with their large-scale dominance of the limited bandwidth of television. There are hundreds of thousands of web servers on the internet, but only a few hundred broadcasters on both over-the-air and cable television.
Some of the highlights:
This is, for all intents and purposes, SWG becoming a sci-fi analog to WoW. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but it's not the game a lot of the players signed up for. If SOE pulls it off they may get a sizable player base, although I wouldn't pretend they'll match WoW's size.
The developer Helios has really upset the players with his pronouncement that SWG no longer strives to be a world simulator. One of the selling points of the original SWG was the open world where players would find their own things to do instead of being on treadmills. Sure, SWG failed in large ways because of experience grinding and lack of working, interesting content. But the play area was flexible enough and the way things worked pre-NGE managed to keep a lot of people interested.
Another developer, ChrisCao, comes across as an ass. He managed to insult just about everyone with what he said, being particularly dismissive of entertainers. His contention is that entertainers don't belong in the Star Wars universe because the only one in the movie got eaten. Not only is this wrong (cantina in Mos Eisley, partying ewoks, Jabba's personal entertainers), but by his logic they should eliminate bounty hunters because Greedo and both Jengo and Boba Fett were killed.
There was also a developer comment made (I think by ChrisCao) that droid engineers didn't exist in Star Wars, which is also ridiculous. Annakin was a droid engineer who built C-3PO. Luke, too, was a budding droid engineer. It was his tinkering with R2-D2 that unlocked Princess Leia's message. The jawas, as scavengers, also served as droid engineers. Gotta whip them into shape to sell them.
I don't know what kind of Star Wars fans the developers are, but it seems the ones making the decisions only understand the superficial aspects of the story arc. Some of us like playing someone like Oola or Watto or Uncle Owen. Give me an arid planet and some second-hand, rusted moisture extractors and I'll keep myself entertained for as long as there's a market for water.
SWG is turning into a radically different game. That's fine, if that's the business decision that needs to be made. I'm not sure they'll be able to make all of their changes in a short enough time to save the game, but that's just one player's opinion. And thank you, SOE, for finally being forthcoming in your intent so we can make informed decisions about playing. I started playing SWG because it was sci-fi and it had one of the most elaborate crafting systems of any MMOG on the market. Now that crafters are going to shift to glorified loot pimpers maybe I'll look elsewhere. Seed looks intriguing and is scheduled to launch in about a month. A zero-combat MMORPG may be just the antidote to what SWG wants to become.
Example, my workplace Exchange web interface- Safari misses parts of the page, FireFox renders it fine. ACID test or no, I like the one that works in all situations.
There are a lot of crappy pages out there. If a page doesn't make it through the HTML validator why should anyone expect a browser to render it? Are your pages at work valid? What's the point of standards-compliant rendering engines if they all allow exceptions to the standard to be rendered?
A lot of times Safari won't render big chunks of web pages because of malformed markup. Dave Hyatt (rightly, I believe) doesn't want to spend lots of coding effort dealing with error recovery when parsing sloppy web pages. Browsers like MSIE and Netscape (pre-Mozilla) are too permissive and have allowed people to get away with downright bad HTML.
That said, the Safari Compatibility Hit List was recently created, to either fix Safari compatibility problems or to encourage sites to fix their markup.
Swing is a bloated nightmare of an API, way overly complex for what it tries to do. It gives you great flexibility, but things that should be simple—like setting a fixed width (of the right width) for a JTree—are actually difficult programming tasks. Heck, everything is time-consuming. If you work long enough on your GUI, Swing does give you the power to do a lot. But it isn't trivial to use, unlike AWT.
When Swing was introduced as an add-on package (for Java 1.1) the size/memory was a big deal, but Swing solved a lot of GuI performance problems that plagued AWT. Nowadays Swing is an integral part of Java and comes "for free", and the memory issues don't mean as much when you're using computers with gigabytes of RAM. Meanwhile the performance issues of AWT have been largely solved by improvements to the JVM. As for SWT, it seems to me like an extra class library to have to load and run, with native bindings. Kind of the worst of Swing and AWT combined, although many people like using it.
I am a bit biased towards Swing, doing everything on Mac OS X. Apple has implemented class library caching and sharing, and they've hardware-accelerated a bunch of the Swing drawing. I recently ran some of my Java stuff on an Intel-based iMac Duo and things ran lightning fast; seemed almost faster than Carbon stuff. Almost.
Am I now going to have to start assuming that any decent OSS/FS project will eventually sell out?
Maybe this is just the way of business, who knows. People do want to make money, even from their labors of love. But the question I pose is simple: can't the "sell-out" software simply fork at the point of the acquisition? It's not like you can put open source software back in the can. All you can do is restrict it going forward.
Let's take JBoss as an example. What's to prevent JBoss developers (or anyone) from coming out with "JHoncho" based on the pre-Oracle version of JBoss and fork from that point? Oracle ends up buying the JBoss name and not much more, unless the developers want to work for them.
I understand all the concepts of user controlled economies, desire to play but not fight, etc. BUT I still don't know what any of this has to do with STAR WARS. If someone wants to roleplay being a farmer or an "image consultant" why not seek out a more appropriate venue.
I speak as an SWG player who has easily spent 90% of my time as a crafter and merchant. There isn't "a more appropriate venue", mostly. SWG has (had) one of the most extensive crafting systems of any MMOG. When the NGE came along I looked at what options I had for a new MMOG with the same depth of player crafting, since the NGE really has ruined the non-combat professions. I have yet to find a decent alternative to SWG. Some of us really have no interest in swords and sorcery type MMOGs and prefer more of a sci-fi universe.
So far the most promising alternatives for a non-combat experience don't quite exist yet, like Dark and Light (swords and sorcery, I know) or Pirates of the Burning Sea. As for the Star Wars universe, it's not the ideal sci-fi setting but it is rich and has depth. I'd much prefer a good cyberpunk or steampunk MMOG, though.