Good point, but you ignore the importance of timing here. If protected mode stuff running on Windows would have been done half a year later, Microsoft may already have made a decision to go with OS/2 - and enhanced Windows would have just been another nice demo.
That would seem to include a baby wailing to me:-P
That's actually the example somebody used to define art in a talk I saw once. He defined an artist as somebody who wants to change the world, and has the means to do so. So that's what the baby does: to get fed (change the world), it screams (use his/her means of communication). So the baby's an artist - why not?
As my "brother post" points out, intention is very important here. Otherwise you would of course be right, that almost anything (including a pretty piece of rock) would be art.
Also, a depiction (like your example of the flower) has meaning almost by definition, because it shows something to the viewer. The artist picked out a particular scene, and rendered it in a way that he/she thought would convey his impressions (or express his feelings or whatever, depending, again, on his/her intention).
Art is about expression. Just because you can hold a pencil or a brush doesn't make you an artist. Any monkey can do that...
But if you can create something that has meaning - even if that meaning is not immediately obvious) -, or that grabs the audience's attention (and you intended doing that), you create art.
Now this is not necessarily the only definition of art, but I believe it is the most useful one. But by this definition, art can only be produced by a human (or a very advanced AI, one that we consider equal to a human).
Not sure I agree. It took Linux a long time to be recognized as a viable alternative to other Unices. I don't think this can be easily done again. And I doubt that Hurd would have any noticeable advantages over Linux. It's also free, it runs the same software (99.9% or so...), and it's a Unix (or, well, Not Unix).
So why not have the people working on Hurd work on something new instead, or work on improving Linux? Competition can also hurt, by splitting up the resources into many small parts...
Try wxWindows. The documentation is great, and it works very well on top of GTK (and Windows native).
Re:wxWindows (slightly OT)
on
GTK-- vs. QT
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· Score: 1
wxWindows is really great. Not only does it contain a lot of useful stuff (and far beyond just UI things, also threads, sockets, etc), but they also have very good documentation. When I looked at GTK--, the documentation was totally unusable. There were lots of classes without a single word of documentation.
You know, reading the article really helps... it says "4 to 20 minutes", which is quite impressive. Amazing stuff, next thing you know they will be shooting down starting ICBMs with lasers...;-)
Good point;-) But what I meant was this: With some of the pro instant films, you get a print AND a useable negative. The negative is quite good (compared to the 600 positives). But the Polaroid instant slide film is CRAP, so all you get is a CRAPPY SLIDE, and nothing else. And that is a lot worse than Kodachrome, where you get a DECENT SLIDE.
Not quite. Polaroid has a lock on ANY "instant" or self-developing film.
That can't be true! Fuji does make instant films and cameras (there is nothing about them on their US web site, so maybe Polaroid's patents are only valid in the US).
Their 35mm instant film sucks. It just doesn't have enough exposure range (shadows are just pitch black without any color or structure) and it's too expensive. AND you don't even get a usable negative, just a crappy slide. And especially with 35mm, you can't just take two or three pictures, take them out and develop them, but you have to shoot a whole film (12 or 36 pictures). So it's really useless.
Regarding their patent people keep talking about: Why don't they sue Fuji? They're making instant films (and also cameras) now. And - to me - it seems that Fuji is much more responsible for Polaroid's problems than digital cameras are.
Forget about Polaroid CAMERAS. They're consumer products, and crappy ones, too. But you can use Pola-Backs with almost any medium or large format camera (and there are even adaptors for 35mm cameras).
So you set everything up (including your Hasselblad or whatever camera you use), and put on the Pola-Back and take a test-shot. Now you can check the lighting, light-temperature (within certain limits), composition, etc. That is much easier than while looking through the viewfinder, and you're less likely to miss something. You can also put shots from several different setups side by side and compare them. And the photographer can retain a crude idea of the image if he gives the negatives or slides away.
But there are also Polaroid black/white films where you get a negative in addition to the positive (the print). You can use that to make an enlargement - I have already seen a very expensive, very well done calendar done entirely using Polaroid films.
So there are a lot of things you can do with Polaroids (much more than just what I mentioned here) - just forget about cheap plastic cameras and i-Zone crap!
And that is the market where digital cameras are no real competition. Yes, there are digital backs etc. But there are things you just can't do with digital cameras. And with the speed of current scan-backs, I wouldn't be surprised if photographers still used a Polaroid before making that final scan (a scan-back scans the are where the image is normally projected onto the film).
I agree with you about the consumer stuff, but Polaroid plays a much bigger role with professional photographers. They need Polas to check the lighting, composition, etc for pictures, and they can do a lot of fancy stuff with Polaroid material (like dye-transfers, etc.). But in that market, Fuji seems to have taken over quite a big share, so they are losing on two fronts. Digital and Polaroid aren't really competitors in the pro market, but Fuji and Polaroid are...
It just takes somebody with a CD player that has SP/DIF output, and a soundcard with digital input. No hax0ring required, it's dead simple. And I guess a LOT of people will download that file once it's available - just BECAUSE it is from a copy-protected CD.
So they say the street noise would make the noise of the generators less of a problem. But they also want to build these into apartment buildings - where during the night at least, people will want things to be quiet. Do they turn them off in the night?
I am also wondering about the output of these things. Since they can't be turned to face the wind, I guess you can only use them where you have a more or less steady wind in one main direction. I am not sure this is really useful in many places. And then, you need a lot of free space around such a building, otherwise you won't get a lot of wind into the propellers in the first place. So I'm not really sure if this is such a hot idea.
You can copy parts of the image to a texture (glCopyTexImage/glCopyTexSubImage), which is very fast, and then map the texture to a billboard (which is fast, too). And you can use more than one texture, of course.
This is a bullshit proof. First, you define your number not to contain any 8s, and then you say "see, it doesn't contain any 8s!". But that doesn't tell us anything about wether or not there is a string of 5,646,498,765 8s in pi or any other irrational number in decimal.
The formula sums up the expression in the square brackets multiplied with 1/16^k - so that means (if I am not completely mistaken) that that expression gives you the k-th *hex* digit of pi. You just have to use the right number system to make the problem easy;-) (not very useful if you want decimal digits, though)
He didn't "move it to the web", but simply found the place it had come from in the first place. If you take a quick look at the top few lines of the article, you will see that it is written by people from the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC - compare that to "www.ips-dc.org"... notice something?
Re:Gods you fiends! Here's your changelog...
on
XFree 4.1.0 Out
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· Score: 1
Riiiiight... and so the new features are?
It's not very useful to just list the bugfixes of the last three days, when nobody knows what new features there are in 4.1.0. Okay, so there were over 600 bugfixes, which probably makes it worthwile to upgrade. But apart from that?
Isn't there anybody here who has a bit more insight into XFree who knows what stuff is to expect? Antialiased fonts maybe? Other stuff?
I think Matrox will have to delay their new chip... after reading this article, the developers laughed so hard they needed a month to recover...
Can you imagine working on stuff that is described in the parent of this post, and then reading that article? Man, that would crack me up...
I don't think there is a big difference in how much you eat wether you ride your bike to work or not. The bike isn't the ultimate solution to all transport problems, but for short-distance travel like in most cities or in suburbs, it's great.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point, but you ignore the importance of timing here. If protected mode stuff running on Windows would have been done half a year later, Microsoft may already have made a decision to go with OS/2 - and enhanced Windows would have just been another nice demo.
That's actually the example somebody used to define art in a talk I saw once. He defined an artist as somebody who wants to change the world, and has the means to do so. So that's what the baby does: to get fed (change the world), it screams (use his/her means of communication). So the baby's an artist - why not?
As my "brother post" points out, intention is very important here. Otherwise you would of course be right, that almost anything (including a pretty piece of rock) would be art.
Also, a depiction (like your example of the flower) has meaning almost by definition, because it shows something to the viewer. The artist picked out a particular scene, and rendered it in a way that he/she thought would convey his impressions (or express his feelings or whatever, depending, again, on his/her intention).
Art is about expression. Just because you can hold a pencil or a brush doesn't make you an artist. Any monkey can do that ...
But if you can create something that has meaning - even if that meaning is not immediately obvious) -, or that grabs the audience's attention (and you intended doing that), you create art.
Now this is not necessarily the only definition of art, but I believe it is the most useful one. But by this definition, art can only be produced by a human (or a very advanced AI, one that we consider equal to a human).
Not sure I agree. It took Linux a long time to be recognized as a viable alternative to other Unices. I don't think this can be easily done again. And I doubt that Hurd would have any noticeable advantages over Linux. It's also free, it runs the same software (99.9% or so ...), and it's a Unix (or, well, Not Unix).
...
So why not have the people working on Hurd work on something new instead, or work on improving Linux? Competition can also hurt, by splitting up the resources into many small parts
Try wxWindows. The documentation is great, and it works very well on top of GTK (and Windows native).
wxWindows is really great. Not only does it contain a lot of useful stuff (and far beyond just UI things, also threads, sockets, etc), but they also have very good documentation. When I looked at GTK--, the documentation was totally unusable. There were lots of classes without a single word of documentation.
You know, reading the article really helps ... it says "4 to 20 minutes", which is quite impressive. Amazing stuff, next thing you know they will be shooting down starting ICBMs with lasers ... ;-)
Could somebody mod this up, please? I think the idea is great!
Good point ;-) But what I meant was this: With some of the pro instant films, you get a print AND a useable negative. The negative is quite good (compared to the 600 positives). But the Polaroid instant slide film is CRAP, so all you get is a CRAPPY SLIDE, and nothing else. And that is a lot worse than Kodachrome, where you get a DECENT SLIDE.
That can't be true! Fuji does make instant films and cameras (there is nothing about them on their US web site, so maybe Polaroid's patents are only valid in the US).
Their 35mm instant film sucks. It just doesn't have enough exposure range (shadows are just pitch black without any color or structure) and it's too expensive. AND you don't even get a usable negative, just a crappy slide. And especially with 35mm, you can't just take two or three pictures, take them out and develop them, but you have to shoot a whole film (12 or 36 pictures). So it's really useless.
Regarding their patent people keep talking about: Why don't they sue Fuji? They're making instant films (and also cameras) now. And - to me - it seems that Fuji is much more responsible for Polaroid's problems than digital cameras are.
Forget about Polaroid CAMERAS. They're consumer products, and crappy ones, too. But you can use Pola-Backs with almost any medium or large format camera (and there are even adaptors for 35mm cameras).
So you set everything up (including your Hasselblad or whatever camera you use), and put on the Pola-Back and take a test-shot. Now you can check the lighting, light-temperature (within certain limits), composition, etc. That is much easier than while looking through the viewfinder, and you're less likely to miss something. You can also put shots from several different setups side by side and compare them. And the photographer can retain a crude idea of the image if he gives the negatives or slides away.
But there are also Polaroid black/white films where you get a negative in addition to the positive (the print). You can use that to make an enlargement - I have already seen a very expensive, very well done calendar done entirely using Polaroid films.
So there are a lot of things you can do with Polaroids (much more than just what I mentioned here) - just forget about cheap plastic cameras and i-Zone crap!
And that is the market where digital cameras are no real competition. Yes, there are digital backs etc. But there are things you just can't do with digital cameras. And with the speed of current scan-backs, I wouldn't be surprised if photographers still used a Polaroid before making that final scan (a scan-back scans the are where the image is normally projected onto the film).
I agree with you about the consumer stuff, but Polaroid plays a much bigger role with professional photographers. They need Polas to check the lighting, composition, etc for pictures, and they can do a lot of fancy stuff with Polaroid material (like dye-transfers, etc.). But in that market, Fuji seems to have taken over quite a big share, so they are losing on two fronts. Digital and Polaroid aren't really competitors in the pro market, but Fuji and Polaroid are ...
It just takes somebody with a CD player that has SP/DIF output, and a soundcard with digital input. No hax0ring required, it's dead simple. And I guess a LOT of people will download that file once it's available - just BECAUSE it is from a copy-protected CD.
It's called Falcon's Eye NetHack - and it looks pretty cool. Thanks for making me look for it ;-)
So they say the street noise would make the noise of the generators less of a problem. But they also want to build these into apartment buildings - where during the night at least, people will want things to be quiet. Do they turn them off in the night?
I am also wondering about the output of these things. Since they can't be turned to face the wind, I guess you can only use them where you have a more or less steady wind in one main direction. I am not sure this is really useful in many places. And then, you need a lot of free space around such a building, otherwise you won't get a lot of wind into the propellers in the first place. So I'm not really sure if this is such a hot idea.
You can copy parts of the image to a texture (glCopyTexImage/glCopyTexSubImage), which is very fast, and then map the texture to a billboard (which is fast, too). And you can use more than one texture, of course.
This is a bullshit proof. First, you define your number not to contain any 8s, and then you say "see, it doesn't contain any 8s!". But that doesn't tell us anything about wether or not there is a string of 5,646,498,765 8s in pi or any other irrational number in decimal.
The formula sums up the expression in the square brackets multiplied with 1/16^k - so that means (if I am not completely mistaken) that that expression gives you the k-th *hex* digit of pi. You just have to use the right number system to make the problem easy ;-) (not very useful if you want decimal digits, though)
Exactly. For a discussion of this point, see my Thoughts on AI (yes, this is a blatant plug).
He didn't "move it to the web", but simply found the place it had come from in the first place. If you take a quick look at the top few lines of the article, you will see that it is written by people from the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC - compare that to "www.ips-dc.org" ... notice something?
Riiiiight ... and so the new features are?
It's not very useful to just list the bugfixes of the last three days, when nobody knows what new features there are in 4.1.0. Okay, so there were over 600 bugfixes, which probably makes it worthwile to upgrade. But apart from that?
Isn't there anybody here who has a bit more insight into XFree who knows what stuff is to expect? Antialiased fonts maybe? Other stuff?
If it's so secure, then why is it called OpenBSD?
;-)
SCNR
I think Matrox will have to delay their new chip ... after reading this article, the developers laughed so hard they needed a month to recover ...
...
Can you imagine working on stuff that is described in the parent of this post, and then reading that article? Man, that would crack me up
I don't think there is a big difference in how much you eat wether you ride your bike to work or not. The bike isn't the ultimate solution to all transport problems, but for short-distance travel like in most cities or in suburbs, it's great.