Re:Sheezus, enough with the conceit already...
on
Going To Boot Camp
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· Score: 1
The 1980s comment about BIOS was a bit snarky, but the "plague" is perfectly appropriate. Windows IS plagued by attacks from worms and viruses and other problems. There is probably no better word for it from a marketing standpoint, and it is common language (e.g. something is plagued with problems).
So how, exactly, is email or even the web (especially with the newer Javascript+DHTML ads) conceptually different? Spam and phishing schemes on email (wasn't there some report saying spam makes up over half of all internet traffic?); poorly designed or IE-only webpages, pages with embedded MIDI or mp3 files; etc.
Which is not to say I give Flash a free pass--there is undoubtedly crappy Flash out there. But like any technology, including the Slashdot-friendly iPod, and P2P apps, it has its good and bad uses.
(No, I'm not a Flash developer, nor do I personally know any who are)
If you look at history, the melting and freezing of icecaps varys throughout history. The specs are skewed for everything.
I agree the melting and re-freezing of ice caps are cyclical, and that stats always skewed, but you do realize that coastal communities are a lot less mobile than they were the last time the icecaps melted significantly? (And yes, I know that only the melting of one of the icecaps, the Antarctic, can actually affect sea levels). You can't easily abandon all the infrastructure in say New York and rebuild on higher ground, like a small tribe living in simple huts or cabins could.
Just because events are historically cyclical, doesn't mean we're better able to weather them.
He never said he was doing an illustration. For the record the lack of a oval/rectangle paint tool is *the* biggest pet peeve of mine in GIMP.
I use Windows at work. I only do occasional graphics work so I don't have PhotoShop. At the same time, I often need a tool that's more advanced than what Paint or even Paint.NET provide, so GIMP fits the bill nicely. Usually.
Then, here I am trying to add just a small touch-up to a screenshot to be used on a web page, say a red anti-aliased oval around something I want to highlight. Surely this qualifies as MANIPULATING an IMAGE. Why on earth *shouldn't* there be a simple shape tool for this? This kind of paint tool has been around since the original Mac's MacPaint in 1984, so it isn't rocket science!
Suggesting that I open up Inkscape for this is asinine. The source image is NOT an illustration or vector-based graphic. Why not use Paint or Paint.net for something so simple? I would, if they preserved translucency settings of PNGs. Bottom line, I've not heard a good defence for a lack of oval/rectangle shape tools, and suggestions to use another program (or even the multiple steps to do it in GIMP) are merely non-intuitive workarounds for a problem that shouldn't exist.
Oh, my other pet peeve with GIMP? Toolbars that can't float atop the main image window(s), and this isn't fixed with GIMPshop, which just slaps an MDI paradigm onto it. But that may be more of a GTK limitation.
Played in on a PS2 over the weekend, with two others in a turn-based Crash level. Despite being the exact same map, with the same car, for over half an hour (we really sucked at first), it still took over 15 seconds to reset the level for the next player's attempt.
Bar none, it was the solitary (but big) complaint in an othewise awesome game.
I'm *so* glad I RTFA for this one, else I'd have missed this gem: Celestia, "a real-time, 3-D space simulation".
Think Google Earth, but for the solar system/galaxy/universe. I just spent a hour playing with this, checking out the plug-ins for real and fictional spacecraft.
as far as what's going to be working 10 years from now it's rather hard to say. It's all being made by the lowest bidder chinese factory anyway
I'd put my bet on a cheap analog camera with manual lens cover and no zoom lens.
During a 6-day trip through the Australian outback a couple years ago the cameras for several people on my tour jammed in some way. The fine sand got into the mechanisms for the zoom lenses, and more than one fancy automatic lens cover got stuck in a half-open position regardless of whether the lens was in or out.
Meanwhile my $40 Canon Owl, zoomless camera with manually-switched lens cover kept on clicking.
(Despite all this though, if I could do the trip over I'd have brought a digital camera...)
We have two phones at the apartment that come with AC adapters, and both work fine as phones without being hooked into the outlet. We'd just not get the fancy LCD display or volume control.
Beyond that, I don't know where you're shopping, but there are tons of corded phones being sold in retail stores that don't need AC, and they're cheap too.
But they pride themselves on their free-wheeling tolerance for criticism, so they tend to not censor *anything*. It makes the board nearly useless for its intended purpose of reading the kudos and flames about a product.
I wonder then, how about a system where editors can flag the spam and other junk posts as "filter out". These posts would then only appear on a separate page ("Filtered posts" or some such), linked to from the main review. This eliminates outright censorship, since the original spam/junk posts are still accessible (and if you suspect they're removing all the negative reviews you can check), and keeps the relevant content on top.
First off, anyone using the user agent for ANYTHING is stupid
Not true; I use it on my personal website to display a "public service announcement" urging the user to switch to the far more secure Firefox if it detects that they're using IE of any flavour.;-)
(The message is hidden by default if they're using anything else)
Besides, You're getting Dr. Who right now (among others). Who knows if it will ever be ported across the pond to the US.
It's already been "ported across the pond". Both ponds, in fact: Dr Who airs on both Canadian and Australian television, and none of that 3-months-later bullshit either. At least in Canada, it's a mere two weeks behind.
Enterprise had so much potential, but they made one tiny screw-up, they got ride of all the science that star trek fans love.
There was the odd ref to some exotic particle or space-time distortion but appart from that it was kept too basic. The net result a series with too much science/not enough action and nudity for TV Joe public and too little science for the average trek-fan.
Are you kidding? I liked the "technobabble" in TNG because it was (usually) kept to a sane level, but they took so many liberties with techno dialogue in Voyager that I became sick of the prepostrous-ness of it. Enterprise was lacking in technobabble sure, but introduced the even worse concept of a temporal cold war, delivered in its entirety with a straight face (for me, Dr. Who gets away with it--barely--because it's camp, and perhaps more importantly knows it's camp).
I'm a Trek nut who grew up on TNG (give me a 5-10 word describing some key events in an episode, and I can give you the title and season almost instantly) and appreciates DS9 and TOS, but Voyager and especially the first seasons of Enterprise made me despise "postmodern" Trek and its producers with a vengeance.
In the Peter David novel "Imzadi II", Riker is half-expecting Picard to say to him exactly this, but that Picard was too mindful of the seriousness of the situation to do so.
A couple friends recently got engaged, and they had an artisan who specialized in jewelry design and make her engagement ring.
Of all the exotic materials they can make rings out of, one thing she would not do was make rings out of titanium. The reason? In case of certain medical emergencies (snagged in a machine, or crashed car, or whatever), they'd need to cut the ring off to free the finger (and ultimately the entire person). But no paramedic or even hospital ward is routinely equipped with tools to cut through titanium. If they encountered a titanium ring in a time-critical emergency, they could well be forced to cut the finger off instead.
Canada's telecom regulator not only ruled over a month and a half ago that "real" 911 service must be made available by VoIP providers servicing Canada, they also only gave them 90 days from the date of the ruling (April 4), not 120:
It didn't help that patches to IE could take down the entire system, thanks to their brilliant idea to tightly integrate the browser to the core system.
If you live close enough to a large Canadian city across the border, you might be able to pick up the local CBC TV broadcast (i.e. antenna reception). It airs Tuesdays at 8.
That said, the situation royally sucks, no question.
I've known for awhile that there's some trickery involved, but after experiencing it firsthand I can live with it. The point is I can actually start using XP as soon as the desktop appears, even if other processes are still loading in the background. Under W2K, it takes at least twice as long before the desktop appears, meaning I can't do jack squat on it while I'm waiting for it to boot up (normally following a system lock-up, of course). And W2K *still* needs to load up additional stuff after the desktop appears.
I'm not a Windows apologist--I can't wait to get home to my Mac after wrangling with the Windows PCs at work--but these were my direct observations.
Never mind hotels and cruise ships, almost all the residential apartments we've been looking at the last few weeks jump from 12 to 14 on the elevator panels.
And for a new apartment complex where a relative now lives, when they were still building (i.e. before bricks and such were placed over the frame) it the construction guys had spray-painted the floor numbers on the concrete exterior so they knew which floor their outdoor lift was at. 13 had actually been painted on initially, but then "crossed off" and 14 substituted. Each floor above it had to be similarly "corrected".
This is in Ottawa, Canada too--hardly a bastion of God-fearing religious types.
I doubt it was as simple as "substitute the descent engine for the CSM main engine and change the signs"...
Not to mention, we're (probably) not talking a simple "scroll down a bunch of pages and replace appropriate variables." While I'm pretty sure they weren't forced to use punch cards to program the simulation, we're still talking about mid-to-late 60's technology here, even if it was state-of-the-art for its time.
Slashdot Mirror
The 1980s comment about BIOS was a bit snarky, but the "plague" is perfectly appropriate. Windows IS plagued by attacks from worms and viruses and other problems. There is probably no better word for it from a marketing standpoint, and it is common language (e.g. something is plagued with problems).
Tell that to all the nutjobs who think the moon landings were fake.
Unless they included "what operating system are you running" as a question, the metrics are slightly skewed.
Mac and Linux users obviously should still have a hardware firewall, but anti-virus and anti-malware scanners? Don't need them (yet, anyway).
So how, exactly, is email or even the web (especially with the newer Javascript+DHTML ads) conceptually different? Spam and phishing schemes on email (wasn't there some report saying spam makes up over half of all internet traffic?); poorly designed or IE-only webpages, pages with embedded MIDI or mp3 files; etc.
Which is not to say I give Flash a free pass--there is undoubtedly crappy Flash out there. But like any technology, including the Slashdot-friendly iPod, and P2P apps, it has its good and bad uses.
(No, I'm not a Flash developer, nor do I personally know any who are)
I agree the melting and re-freezing of ice caps are cyclical, and that stats always skewed, but you do realize that coastal communities are a lot less mobile than they were the last time the icecaps melted significantly? (And yes, I know that only the melting of one of the icecaps, the Antarctic, can actually affect sea levels). You can't easily abandon all the infrastructure in say New York and rebuild on higher ground, like a small tribe living in simple huts or cabins could.
Just because events are historically cyclical, doesn't mean we're better able to weather them.
He never said he was doing an illustration. For the record the lack of a oval/rectangle paint tool is *the* biggest pet peeve of mine in GIMP.
I use Windows at work. I only do occasional graphics work so I don't have PhotoShop. At the same time, I often need a tool that's more advanced than what Paint or even Paint.NET provide, so GIMP fits the bill nicely. Usually.
Then, here I am trying to add just a small touch-up to a screenshot to be used on a web page, say a red anti-aliased oval around something I want to highlight. Surely this qualifies as MANIPULATING an IMAGE. Why on earth *shouldn't* there be a simple shape tool for this? This kind of paint tool has been around since the original Mac's MacPaint in 1984, so it isn't rocket science!
Suggesting that I open up Inkscape for this is asinine. The source image is NOT an illustration or vector-based graphic. Why not use Paint or Paint.net for something so simple? I would, if they preserved translucency settings of PNGs. Bottom line, I've not heard a good defence for a lack of oval/rectangle shape tools, and suggestions to use another program (or even the multiple steps to do it in GIMP) are merely non-intuitive workarounds for a problem that shouldn't exist.
Oh, my other pet peeve with GIMP? Toolbars that can't float atop the main image window(s), and this isn't fixed with GIMPshop, which just slaps an MDI paradigm onto it. But that may be more of a GTK limitation.
Played in on a PS2 over the weekend, with two others in a turn-based Crash level. Despite being the exact same map, with the same car, for over half an hour (we really sucked at first), it still took over 15 seconds to reset the level for the next player's attempt.
Bar none, it was the solitary (but big) complaint in an othewise awesome game.
Think Google Earth, but for the solar system/galaxy/universe. I just spent a hour playing with this, checking out the plug-ins for real and fictional spacecraft.
I'd put my bet on a cheap analog camera with manual lens cover and no zoom lens.
During a 6-day trip through the Australian outback a couple years ago the cameras for several people on my tour jammed in some way. The fine sand got into the mechanisms for the zoom lenses, and more than one fancy automatic lens cover got stuck in a half-open position regardless of whether the lens was in or out.
Meanwhile my $40 Canon Owl, zoomless camera with manually-switched lens cover kept on clicking.
(Despite all this though, if I could do the trip over I'd have brought a digital camera...)
We have two phones at the apartment that come with AC adapters, and both work fine as phones without being hooked into the outlet. We'd just not get the fancy LCD display or volume control.
Beyond that, I don't know where you're shopping, but there are tons of corded phones being sold in retail stores that don't need AC, and they're cheap too.
I wonder then, how about a system where editors can flag the spam and other junk posts as "filter out". These posts would then only appear on a separate page ("Filtered posts" or some such), linked to from the main review. This eliminates outright censorship, since the original spam/junk posts are still accessible (and if you suspect they're removing all the negative reviews you can check), and keeps the relevant content on top.
Not true; I use it on my personal website to display a "public service announcement" urging the user to switch to the far more secure Firefox if it detects that they're using IE of any flavour. ;-)
(The message is hidden by default if they're using anything else)
That does it! We need to start a PAP smear campaign!
It's already been "ported across the pond". Both ponds, in fact: Dr Who airs on both Canadian and Australian television, and none of that 3-months-later bullshit either. At least in Canada, it's a mere two weeks behind.
There was the odd ref to some exotic particle or space-time distortion but appart from that it was kept too basic. The net result a series with too much science/not enough action and nudity for TV Joe public and too little science for the average trek-fan.
Are you kidding? I liked the "technobabble" in TNG because it was (usually) kept to a sane level, but they took so many liberties with techno dialogue in Voyager that I became sick of the prepostrous-ness of it. Enterprise was lacking in technobabble sure, but introduced the even worse concept of a temporal cold war, delivered in its entirety with a straight face (for me, Dr. Who gets away with it--barely--because it's camp, and perhaps more importantly knows it's camp).
I'm a Trek nut who grew up on TNG (give me a 5-10 word describing some key events in an episode, and I can give you the title and season almost instantly) and appreciates DS9 and TOS, but Voyager and especially the first seasons of Enterprise made me despise "postmodern" Trek and its producers with a vengeance.
In the Peter David novel "Imzadi II", Riker is half-expecting Picard to say to him exactly this, but that Picard was too mindful of the seriousness of the situation to do so.
A couple friends recently got engaged, and they had an artisan who specialized in jewelry design and make her engagement ring.
Of all the exotic materials they can make rings out of, one thing she would not do was make rings out of titanium. The reason? In case of certain medical emergencies (snagged in a machine, or crashed car, or whatever), they'd need to cut the ring off to free the finger (and ultimately the entire person). But no paramedic or even hospital ward is routinely equipped with tools to cut through titanium. If they encountered a titanium ring in a time-critical emergency, they could well be forced to cut the finger off instead.
That's par for the course for Jedi though--just re-watch ESB when Luke jumps out of the carbonite pit.
CRTC Decision on 9-1-1 Emergency Services for VoIP Service Providers
It didn't help that patches to IE could take down the entire system, thanks to their brilliant idea to tightly integrate the browser to the core system.
That's news to me; we didn't get "1984", but we did have a close second with "Brave New World"...
If you live close enough to a large Canadian city across the border, you might be able to pick up the local CBC TV broadcast (i.e. antenna reception). It airs Tuesdays at 8.
That said, the situation royally sucks, no question.
I've known for awhile that there's some trickery involved, but after experiencing it firsthand I can live with it. The point is I can actually start using XP as soon as the desktop appears, even if other processes are still loading in the background. Under W2K, it takes at least twice as long before the desktop appears, meaning I can't do jack squat on it while I'm waiting for it to boot up (normally following a system lock-up, of course). And W2K *still* needs to load up additional stuff after the desktop appears.
I'm not a Windows apologist--I can't wait to get home to my Mac after wrangling with the Windows PCs at work--but these were my direct observations.
Never mind hotels and cruise ships, almost all the residential apartments we've been looking at the last few weeks jump from 12 to 14 on the elevator panels.
And for a new apartment complex where a relative now lives, when they were still building (i.e. before bricks and such were placed over the frame) it the construction guys had spray-painted the floor numbers on the concrete exterior so they knew which floor their outdoor lift was at. 13 had actually been painted on initially, but then "crossed off" and 14 substituted. Each floor above it had to be similarly "corrected".
This is in Ottawa, Canada too--hardly a bastion of God-fearing religious types.
Not to mention, we're (probably) not talking a simple "scroll down a bunch of pages and replace appropriate variables." While I'm pretty sure they weren't forced to use punch cards to program the simulation, we're still talking about mid-to-late 60's technology here, even if it was state-of-the-art for its time.