I've had RAM which could pass all day long on a so-called memory tester, put it into a PC and the thing couldn't even finish POST.
Doesn't sound like the memory module per se was faulty, but like it didn't work okay in combination with your particular (type of) mainboard. Good shops will allow you to swap the module for a different one with similar specs, even to bring in your computer to try out different modules until you find one that works. Sure that's a very annoying problem and it should never happen, but it explains why the memory tester couldn't find any problem with your stick.
Seriously, I would love a code-writting competition with simular rules, provide that the program has to work at its intended function, even if it has lots of bugs.
Either it works as specified, or it has bugs -- the two are mutually exclusive.
Newton was a great physicist, but he was definitely inferior to
Leibniz both as a mathematician and as a philosopher. And Newton was
a rotten human being---so much so that Djerassi and Pinner call
their recent book Newton's Darkness.
Leibniz invented the calculus, published it, wrote letter after
letter to continental mathematicians to explain it to them,
initially received all the credit for this from his contemporaries,
and then was astonished to learn that Newton, who had never
published a word on the subject, claimed that Leibniz had stolen it
all from him. Leibniz could hardly take Newton seriously!
But it was Newton who won, not Leibniz.
Newton bragged that he had destroyed Leibniz and rejoiced in
Leibniz's death after Leibniz was abandoned by his royal patron,
whom Leibniz had helped to become the king of England. It's
extremely ironic that Newton's incomprehensible Principia---written
in the style of Euclid's Elements---was only appreciated by
continental mathematicians after they succeeded in translating it
into that effective tool, the infinitesimal calculus that Leibniz
had taught them!
Morally, what a contrast! Leibniz was such an elevated soul that he
found good in all philosophies: Catholic, Protestant, Cabala,
medieval scholastics, the ancients, the Chinese... It pains me to
say that Newton enjoyed witnessing the executions of counterfeiters
he pursued as Master of the Mint.
[The science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson has recently published
the first volume, Quicksilver, of a trilogy about Newton versus
Leibniz, and comes out strongly on Leibniz's side. See also Isabelle
Stengers, La Guerre des sciences aura-t-elle lieu?, a play about
Newton vs. Leibniz, and the above mentioned book, consisting of two
plays and a long essay, called Newton's Darkness.]
So you don't even own a digital camera. Imagine you need one for a day and borrow one from a friend. It happens to be a Nikon. Not that there's anything wrong with that, Nikon make excellent cameras. You take some pictures and want to put them onto your computer and touch them up with the GIMP. Only you don't have the right tool to do so, and you need the pictures now. The Nikon web site tells you you can download the tools, but you need to log in with the account tied to that specific camera. You call your friend, but she doesn't remember her account data and it would take her ages to dig out her user name and get a new password. This is a pain in the ass. (Happened to me.) And now you think, what if there was a gratis tool that converts my images into a compatible format, and the download is just a click away?
I'm sorry about being a jerk and whining about my comment being down-rated, but as there already are a couple of comments here that explain why it is utterly impossible to use PNG as it is as a 'raw' format, could anyone please tell me what is so wrong about pointing out a couple of vital features that PNG misses? What is it that I failed to realise? Am I supposed to hate Adobe for putting out their press release in Acrobat 6 format, or for not making their tool completely free (open source)? Or is it that (because I didn't know that for sure 10 minutes ago) I didn't state that as you can add data in any not-yet-specified format to a PNG file, you could essentially embed a DNG into a PNG (just like you can in fact out a PNG inside a DNG)?
What about using the new version of JPEG, for 'digital negatives'?
I also wonder why new cameras don't support JPEG 2000 by now. Maybe it involves too (CPU) expensive processing? But anyway, JPEG 2000 is pretty much as close to a raw format as BMP.
Does this format offer anything that couldn't be done with PNG?
Well, I would hope so, because otherwise it would be incredibly retarded. As the article says, "Raw photo files contain all the original information captured by a digital camera sensor before any in-camera processing occurs [...]" Many cameras have sensors with not just sensors for red, green, and blue, but also a fourth colour. PNG can possibly contain a fourth colour channel, but can it also save meta-information about that channel, which colour it represents? Surely not in any standardised, widely compatible way. In the future, there could be CCDs that don't have square pixels, but hex ones, like an insect's eye. And then there already are cameras with a laser sensor that adds depth information to every pixel. A truly universal file format would have to handle this. Adobe's current version probably doesn't support that kind of funky stuff, but they could include it in a future version and make it backwards compatible. I'm not sure if PNG can even save basic information that's vital for a photographer, like aperture or exposure time.
Do you still have to micromanage your sim's bathroom habits?
You didn't have to in Sims 1. When I play Sims, I play the first part exclusively, without any extentions and without any additional objects imported. It does get boring quickly that way, but that is good, I don't want to become addicted and waste lots of time playing it. And once in a while it's still fun, I set goals like trying to fit a house worth 100,000 credits in as few tiles as possible. So, I've got the most primitive version of the game, and when they have to go, they just go. They also shower and take a bath when appropriate. (Not necessarily at the optimal time, but the intervals are quite OK). If yours don't, maybe the layout of your houses isn't good or they have rather weird personalities.
i've seen the string "Go/Baduk/WeiQi" several times already on slashdot. apparently some people write it like this way because they want to be impartial and they think these are the japanese, korean and chinese names respectively. however, this is not the case. 'Baduk' is a correct romanisation, and 'WeiQi', while not totally perfect for a linguistic nitpicker (or nitpicking linguist), is also an OK and acceptable romanisation. however, the japanese are left out completely. 'Go' is the name of the game in english and probably several other languages (it is in german, just pronounced very slightly differently).
the japanese name of the game is 'Igo'. so i'd say you should just use 'go' or 'igo' or 'Igo' or whatever you like, but if you want to be comprehensive (for whichever weird reasons), maybe write "Go/Igo/Wei-ch'i/Baduk".
[...]
they would have found some time to give her some [hair] "down there". Or am I the only one seeing "virtual camel toe"?
There is a dark line in the crotch that makes it look like a camel toe, but this would be caused by too tight a panty; no normal amount of pubic hair would counteract this. But don't wore Joe, one day you too will get to check out the anatomy of a vulva. Just follow these simple rules: Be nice and respectful, shower and brush your teeth, and bring cash; that slot is not for credit cards.
This Wonderful Life is a very impressive animated short
No, it isn't. It was schown at the Ars Electronica Festival, along with other animations nominated for the Prix Ars Electronica, and totally paled in comparison. Some of the shorts were full of artistic originality, showing off ideas and techniques most hadn't seen before, some were very funny, some were decent executions of some 'high concept', some were ambitious student films showing a fair share of talent; this one was just annoying. So they made two models (a woman and a baby) and scripted a couple of facial expressions for them. Decent craftsmanship, but standard 3DS Max fare, nothing you wouldn't also see in a high-budget Hollywood production with CGI actors.
What made this annoying was the way they showed off their achivement (two models with facial expressions): They artificially constructed a 'storyline' in which the woman got to show as many emotions as possible, and due to the lack of a talented writer they ended up with nonsense and kitsch galore. The animation process doesn't use motion capturing or a physics engine or anything else that would further realism; it's old-school keyframe animation, which looks (in scenes like the one in which she jumps from one stone in the water to another) artificial and very out of place with these partly near-photorealistic images (she looks like a marionette draged along on wires). They're stuck deep in the uncanny valley (if you haven't heard that term before, google it;/. has also reported on this); most characters in Finding Nemo looked more human than this woman.
This short looks like one painfully long commercial for the product they made; it's just a demo of the 3D models, and not a very impressive one. Also shown were the very humorous New Balls Please and the hilarious Pfffirate, which made the giggling audience gasp for air, but This Wonderful Life definitely got the most laughs -- they just weren't intended.
But don't take my word for it; if you want to see a recent animated short that's very impressive, check out the documentary Ryan: "The audience hears the voices of real people who accompanied Ryan as he made his way through life. In the world of computer-animated film, these people speak through strange, distorted, broken, disembodied beings, humans whose exterior appearance comes across as bizarre, humorous or irritating." The author calls this style psycholrealism.
It is true that we have to pay the Televison Licence every year and it's about £110-£120 (I have not checked). But look at all we get!
In Austria, we get the best of both worlds. If you own just one device that can show/play the state-owned TV/radio stations -- even if you only use it to watch German and French stations over satellite -- you have to pay for a license, but all of the channels also air commercials. Not as many as the private stations, and they're in between programmes, not interrupting them, but still annoying considering we also pay for it.
No, it really isn't. You just think it is because you've never tried.
I have worked on user interfaces and still do; in fact it's part of my course of studies. We see frustrating mistakes and flaws in user interfaces all the time. Many computer programs, even ones that are used by millions of people and were developed with huge amounts of money, have aspects that seem counter-intuitive to most users. Pretty much every web site's design is far from optimal. This wouldn't be the case if UI design was always very easy.
Microsoft later put the words "Click Here" on the taskbar with an arrow pointing to the Start button.
This hint appeared when a user had just rebooted or logged in, but did not click the start button right away. As soon as s-/he did, it vanished again. This is not correcting a broken start button, but adding a new feature targeted at n00bs. Using "Click Here" as a hint is very different from using it as a button's label.
Any of those make more sense than "Start".
100% wrong. They needed to make a design choice that was to stay around for many years. "Click Me" or "Open Here" would have been, and still be, ridiculed much more than "Start", and not just by MSFT opponents. "Menu" isn't very inventive, as you could label any menu "Menu". It isn't completely braindead, but I doubt it would improve on usanility compared to "Start". As the start menu contains, among other things, links to documents, which are neither "Actions", nor "Tasks", these labels would be simply wrong.
I don't want to play the MSFT apologist at all, in fact if I got to design a desktop interface, I'd do it very differently. I just want to point out that UI design can be very difficult, as it involves figuring out what's going on in the minds of complete strangers. Even though you don't like the word 'Start' and think that for you your suggestions make more sense, they really don't.
If anyone should apologize, it is the person that decided on "Start" for the button label.
Originally the button just showed the Windows flag, so it basically the choice of a label was the same as in Gnome and KDE today. However, the average Windows user didn't figure out that this logo isn't just there for decorative purposes, but you actually have to click it in order to accomplish just about anything. So someone had to come up with a short piece of text that clues newbies in, and it worked rather well (in usability tests). 'Start' may not be optimal, but has anyone thought of something better? (Not that is matters anymore.)
Dogs are the best. They know when some one is there, even outside the property.
Cats are even better at this. They don't just know if someone is there, they also know who it is, even if the person is still half a mile away. Just from the faint sound of footsteps or a car engine. Cats really know these things... they just fucking don't care a bit.
Because [t]his one isn't an exclusive gated community.
Well, it is exclusively for US citizens and Canadians. In contrast to Orkut, where everyone can join. Yes, you have to get an invitation, but this was mainly to stir interest and at the same time not let hundreds of thousands of people overrun the site at the same time. It is very easy to get invited, as every user can invite arbitrarily many other people. This is very different from GMail, where every user can invite only one other user.
Would any fellow hackers be interested in building a neighbour-finder that works worldwide, and with GPS precision instead of ZIP-code precision? (User's wouldn't need a GPS receiver, they'd just estimate their position with a map or something and the system would put these values, along with the street address, in a knowledge base, and learn and correct itself as it gets more data samples. Others couldn't query your address or your position, just how close they are to you, up to a precision that _you_ define.) Maybe as a P2P-system, maybe based on top of Jabber? You know, just ike Trepia, but with the big difference that it would work?
Incidentally, I hadn't realized how confusing the two button paradigm was until I got a mac and tried to learn Blender. Blender is a mess of multiple mouse clicks, metas, rolls, etc.
In other words, you never ever found having two mouse buttons confusing, except when you used a program with one of the worst, least newbie-friendly, in short: confusing user interfaces ever.
Ctrl-Click is generally used to pull down context menus a-la Windows, and this is the default functionality of the second mouse button.
So for those who do want to use the right mouse button, they can have it emulate ctrl-click. This is in no way better than having ctrl-click emulate the right mouse button for users who don't want to use it. It is a good idea to encourage designers to use modified clicks sparingly, but it doesn't make a difference if the modification is done by using an altenate button or a meta key on the keyboard. Users who can only operate pointing devices with a single 'button' usually can't use a standard keyboard at all.
they're little more than calculators with a cash drawer attached, but in a bigger store that has five or six of them, those calculators alone suck a kilowatt all day long. do these system specs have any other purpose than justifying IBM's price?
Slashdot Mirror
UnapprovedThought:
Either way, you can wave goodbye to your money.
I'm sorry about being a jerk and whining about my comment being down-rated, but as there already are a couple of comments here that explain why it is utterly impossible to use PNG as it is as a 'raw' format, could anyone please tell me what is so wrong about pointing out a couple of vital features that PNG misses? What is it that I failed to realise? Am I supposed to hate Adobe for putting out their press release in Acrobat 6 format, or for not making their tool completely free (open source)? Or is it that (because I didn't know that for sure 10 minutes ago) I didn't state that as you can add data in any not-yet-specified format to a PNG file, you could essentially embed a DNG into a PNG (just like you can in fact out a PNG inside a DNG)?
i've seen the string "Go/Baduk/WeiQi" several times already on slashdot. apparently some people write it like this way because they want to be impartial and they think these are the japanese, korean and chinese names respectively. however, this is not the case. 'Baduk' is a correct romanisation, and 'WeiQi', while not totally perfect for a linguistic nitpicker (or nitpicking linguist), is also an OK and acceptable romanisation. however, the japanese are left out completely. 'Go' is the name of the game in english and probably several other languages (it is in german, just pronounced very slightly differently).
the japanese name of the game is 'Igo'. so i'd say you should just use 'go' or 'igo' or 'Igo' or whatever you like, but if you want to be comprehensive (for whichever weird reasons), maybe write "Go/Igo/Wei-ch'i/Baduk".
What made this annoying was the way they showed off their achivement (two models with facial expressions): They artificially constructed a 'storyline' in which the woman got to show as many emotions as possible, and due to the lack of a talented writer they ended up with nonsense and kitsch galore. The animation process doesn't use motion capturing or a physics engine or anything else that would further realism; it's old-school keyframe animation, which looks (in scenes like the one in which she jumps from one stone in the water to another) artificial and very out of place with these partly near-photorealistic images (she looks like a marionette draged along on wires). They're stuck deep in the uncanny valley (if you haven't heard that term before, google it;
This short looks like one painfully long commercial for the product they made; it's just a demo of the 3D models, and not a very impressive one. Also shown were the very humorous New Balls Please and the hilarious Pfffirate, which made the giggling audience gasp for air, but This Wonderful Life definitely got the most laughs -- they just weren't intended.
But don't take my word for it; if you want to see a recent animated short that's very impressive, check out the documentary Ryan: "The audience hears the voices of real people who accompanied Ryan as he made his way through life. In the world of computer-animated film, these people speak through strange, distorted, broken, disembodied beings, humans whose exterior appearance comes across as bizarre, humorous or irritating." The author calls this style psycholrealism.
This hint appeared when a user had just rebooted or logged in, but did not click the start button right away. As soon as s-/he did, it vanished again. This is not correcting a broken start button, but adding a new feature targeted at n00bs. Using "Click Here" as a hint is very different from using it as a button's label.
Click Me. Menu. Actions. Tasks. Open Here.
Any of those make more sense than "Start". 100% wrong. They needed to make a design choice that was to stay around for many years. "Click Me" or "Open Here" would have been, and still be, ridiculed much more than "Start", and not just by MSFT opponents. "Menu" isn't very inventive, as you could label any menu "Menu". It isn't completely braindead, but I doubt it would improve on usanility compared to "Start". As the start menu contains, among other things, links to documents, which are neither "Actions", nor "Tasks", these labels would be simply wrong.
I don't want to play the MSFT apologist at all, in fact if I got to design a desktop interface, I'd do it very differently. I just want to point out that UI design can be very difficult, as it involves figuring out what's going on in the minds of complete strangers. Even though you don't like the word 'Start' and think that for you your suggestions make more sense, they really don't.
thanks a lot for that info! i didn't know about this, as i'm not a GMail user myself. have you got a spare invitation? :-)
Because [t]his one isn't an exclusive gated community.
Well, it is exclusively for US citizens and Canadians. In contrast to Orkut, where everyone can join. Yes, you have to get an invitation, but this was mainly to stir interest and at the same time not let hundreds of thousands of people overrun the site at the same time. It is very easy to get invited, as every user can invite arbitrarily many other people. This is very different from GMail, where every user can invite only one other user.
Would any fellow hackers be interested in building a neighbour-finder that works worldwide, and with GPS precision instead of ZIP-code precision? (User's wouldn't need a GPS receiver, they'd just estimate their position with a map or something and the system would put these values, along with the street address, in a knowledge base, and learn and correct itself as it gets more data samples. Others couldn't query your address or your position, just how close they are to you, up to a precision that _you_ define.) Maybe as a P2P-system, maybe based on top of Jabber? You know, just ike Trepia, but with the big difference that it would work?
they're little more than calculators with a cash drawer attached, but in a bigger store that has five or six of them, those calculators alone suck a kilowatt all day long. do these system specs have any other purpose than justifying IBM's price?