When I was a lad (50's/60's) we had a toy where you'd melt some metal (lead? or something with a low melting point anyway) in a little crucible over a burner and pour the result into a mold. It would cool and form a little metal soldier figure, whereupon you'd take the two sides of the mold apart and out it would fall.
The cast metal hobby ("tin soldiers") is still very much alive.
The difference is that - like many thiings - it has become an adult hobby. The molds will set you back about $20 each for a 54mm WWII soldier. These are substantial high-quality miniatures meant for hand painting.
"Model Metal" about 300 F. "Tin" 485 F.
I'd rather not lived in the kind of dumbed down idiot-proof world that comes from trying to save people from themselves. That's a surefire way to breed more idiots.
Do they start with Australia and Brazil because they do not care about the users there?
Looking at Statcounter, I noticed two things about Australia and Brazil:
IE 8 is the dominant browser in both countries (30% each) and IE 6 doesn't even make the top 12 in either country. The last of the hold-outs running IE 6 should not be a problem.
I'll get him to relay messages to me and I'll post them anonymously to a blog.
A word of advice:
Don't step into someone else's shit until you know how deep it is.
Conspiracy to violate a court order is not going to end well for you or for some nutcase revenge blogger ---- and maybe a stalker ---- who now has a new target in his sights.
... they'll adopt WebOS, stick it on top of Meego, include the Qt stuff to keep existing, highly productive Maemo developers on board and have themselves a cheap, vastly superior alternative to Android & iOS.
That no one uses because apps are being written for the platforms with significant market share and a commercially viable app store.
OpenOffice is, by and large, more than sufficient for most users.
The original goal for OpenOffice was to become a competitive alternative to MS Office, not Microsoft Works.
That means whether there are 15 or 1500 clerical workers on the payroll, all the features have to be there that will be needed by your full and part time staff, temps and senior volunteers.
Adding one image at the begining telling "FedFlix brings you !", and one at the end with "Thank you for watching" and maybe a small watermark would be enough and trivial to automate.
Don't try this at home, kids. Call your lawyer first.
"It's a Wonderful Life" is a horrible movie.
The only reason it's remembered is because it fell into the public domain.
It is a James Capra film starring Jimmy Stewart, Lionel Barrymore and a young Donna Reed. The release of so sentimental a fantasy in the immeadiate postwar years may have doomed to it to failure at the box office.
But you could say with just as much truth that 1939 was not the right year for "The Wizard of Oz," which found its television audience in the mid-fifties.
Despite the lapsed copyright, television stations that aired it still were required to pay royalties. Although the film's images had entered the public domain, the film's story was still protected by virtue of it being a derivative work of the published story "The Greatest Gift", whose copyright was properly renewed by Philip Van Doren Stern in 1971. The film became a perennial holiday favorite in the 1980s, possibly due to its repeated showings each holiday season on hundreds of local television stations.
but for me an office suite is good for writing letters, resumes and occasionally technical manuals. These latter require sections, tables, an index and... that's usually about it. I often wonder what the other 10 million settings and options in office suites are for, and if anyone uses them. What do people do with a word processing program that requires scripts FFS?
MS Office is successful because it scales well to an enterprise of any size.
If you have a desk available you can set someone down and put them to work on pretty much anything that can be done "in house."
With traffic moving freely from one app to another.
In office products...performance/productivity isn't really very important. It's much more important to be "friendly," whatever "friendly" means to the people making buying decisions (often the ones running the help desk.)
When performance is important, you get a different picture.
The office manager is expected to get work out the door on time --- no matter how many of his staff are temps, part-timers, senior or student volunteers.
There are days when he will be caught desperately short-handed, shuffling people about trying to fill all those empty chairs.
That is why he keeps things simple, stupid.
For instance, how many FPS games have a ribbon-type interface for weapon selection? FPS is probably the single most performance-emphasizing part of general computing
The user's "performance" in a FPS is almost entirely illusion.
Like the game of golf,* most of the difficulties are purely artificial. Presented as challenges to the player and scalable to his ability. The environments, advesaries, weaponry and tactics do not have to be realistic.
_____
* When the time-and-motion man Frederick Winslow Taylor discovered golf he couldn't stop thinking of ways to remove its difficulties. The perfect green. The perfect ball. The perfect club...
Please be sure to read up on the concept of jury nullification before you go. You have more power in the jury box than any other individual in the justice system.
Oregon --- for example --- no longer requires a unaminous verdict even in the most horrendous of murder cases.
You want to play the lone hold-out?
Get yourself a job in dinner theater.
The system is weighted against jury nullification because nullification freed the Klansman and hanged the black man.
It always favors the home town boy against the outsider.
The oddball, the dork, the nerd and the geek get it in the neck. Every time.
Or you can just tell the MPEG-LA group to screw themselves and use VP8.
There are about thirty H.264 licensors --- most of them global giants in manufacturing like Mitshubishi.
These are the companies that dominate every link in the hardware chain from the studo camera to your tv set. Your Internet enabled HDTV doesn't need a browser, it only needs the client app.
Open the Metro UI in Windows 8 and the H.264 or HEVC Netflix app will be there. "Web Standards" no longer matter when you can distribute higher quality or more secure video outside the web.
There are close on to 1100 H,264 licensees.
That is for all practical purposes a global Fortune 1000 in content production and video distribution. Inclusive of commercial, industrial, medical, and military applications.
While the defendant is definitely a scumbag, I can't agree with the "standards" for being called a journalist outlined. Why do I need to go to school to be a journalist? Why do I need to toe the line to be hired by a news organization to be a journalist?.....
Shield laws are construed narrowly.
Through most of our history the reporter had no special protection against a libel suit. He had to produce his anonymous sources or make his case by other means.
They have a script. Their decision to avoid CGI *and green screens* is pretty radical, considering that their script is interstellar space opera.
I don't see a script.
What I see is a fund-raising trailer consisting mostly of stock footage and Tron lit interior shots that keep the cardboard sets deliberately out of focus.
Let me know when the Humble Bundles come to the PS3.
But Indie games like Machinarium are available for the PS3. Most Indie games have had a good run around the track on other platforms before they become part of the Humble Bundle.
Which is why almost no one is willing to contribute more than $5 for the lot.
And precisely how does that explain FreeBSD, Haiku OS or any number of other OSes that are tiny in terms of the desktop market, yet still attract enough following to be viable?
A lot of [projects are] driven because a few developers dislike the status quo or for whom the status quo doesn't work. Firefox is probably the best example of that.
The geek can still build an OS that will have some visibility in niche markets. Whether it will run on readily available commodity hardware is another question.
But Firefox and Mozilla live and die by the add click ---- adoption in the mass consumer market
They have no other significant sources of funding.
Stealing is the act of taking someone else's property with the intention of permanently depriving them of that property. This is not stealing in any way. There is no intention to permanently deprive anyone of anything.
The property rights in question are the copyright holder's exclusive right to control distribution --- and the right to profit from his work if he chooses.
You know you haven't paid for your copy.
You know you haven't paid for the right to redistrbute his work through the P2P nets.
You lnow you can't undo what you have done after the file has been uploaded to the P2P nets.
You know that if the feds do come down on you, you will cop a plea rather than risk a trial by jury. You know you are not Jamie Thomas and you are not going to be next year's poster boy for the EFF.
Not only will downloading for personal use stay completely legal, but the copyright holders won't suffer because of it, since people eventually spend the money saved on entertainment products."
What sort of entertainment products?
Entertainment products produced by who and where?
When your backers commit a substantial amount of money to a production, they expect to see a direct and measurable return --- or they take their busines elsewhere.
Homes with three or more TV sets will climb a notch to 56 percent.
UPDATE A Nielsen rep, after seeing media stories reacting to their report and chart, emailed to clarify that TV ownership has actually declined once before: In 1992, "after Nielsen adjusted for the 1990 Census, and subsequently underwent a period of significant growth."
or the articles it links to:
So, my story (below) about six-month-old Nielsen data has so far been picked up by the New York Post and Pat's Papers.
TV technologies on their way up include DVRs, which Nielsen estimates will be in 41 percent of homes in 2012, digital cable (51 percent) and HDTV (67 percent).
Also upticking: houses with three or more TV sets (56 percent) and time the average household spends in front of the tube or flat screen: a record 59 hours 28 minutes of TV watching per week.
Despite earlier reports that suggested people were unplugging, cable and satellite TV use has remained rock-steady in homes with TV (90 percent versus 10 percent of homes using rabbit ears).
These blog posts are a few paragraphs long and don't link to the Nielson report itself.
I would have liked to have had a look at regional and ethnic distribution --- our local cable service has gone multiingual and multicultural in a very big way.
There are a lot of ways to feed media to that big screen HDTV --- if you can afford (and have access to) digital cable, broadband Internet service, the video game console, the Roku set top box, and so on.
I haven't seen a shortage of programs worth watching. The problem is finding a program that everyone in the family wants to watch together.
Slashdot Mirror
When Microsoft swallows its pride and ports it (or puts XP support into IE10), that will be cause for dancing in the streets.
IE 10 builds on changes in the OS that began with Vista and Win 7. This has been rehashed endlessly on Sladhdot --- and there is no turning back.
When I was a lad (50's/60's) we had a toy where you'd melt some metal (lead? or something with a low melting point anyway) in a little crucible over a burner and pour the result into a mold. It would cool and form a little metal soldier figure, whereupon you'd take the two sides of the mold apart and out it would fall.
The cast metal hobby ("tin soldiers") is still very much alive.
The starter kit will cost about $25-$50. The Dunken Company
The difference is that - like many thiings - it has become an adult hobby. The molds will set you back about $20 each for a 54mm WWII soldier. These are substantial high-quality miniatures meant for hand painting.
"Model Metal" about 300 F. "Tin" 485 F.
I'd rather not lived in the kind of dumbed down idiot-proof world that comes from trying to save people from themselves. That's a surefire way to breed more idiots.
Lamarckism, I see, is alive and well in the geek.
Do they start with Australia and Brazil because they do not care about the users there?
Looking at Statcounter, I noticed two things about Australia and Brazil:
IE 8 is the dominant browser in both countries (30% each) and IE 6 doesn't even make the top 12 in either country. The last of the hold-outs running IE 6 should not be a problem.
I'll get him to relay messages to me and I'll post them anonymously to a blog.
A word of advice:
Don't step into someone else's shit until you know how deep it is.
Conspiracy to violate a court order is not going to end well for you or for some nutcase revenge blogger ---- and maybe a stalker ---- who now has a new target in his sights.
... they'll adopt WebOS, stick it on top of Meego, include the Qt stuff to keep existing, highly productive Maemo developers on board and have themselves a cheap, vastly superior alternative to Android & iOS.
That no one uses because apps are being written for the platforms with significant market share and a commercially viable app store.
OpenOffice is, by and large, more than sufficient for most users.
The original goal for OpenOffice was to become a competitive alternative to MS Office, not Microsoft Works.
That means whether there are 15 or 1500 clerical workers on the payroll, all the features have to be there that will be needed by your full and part time staff, temps and senior volunteers.
Adding one image at the begining telling "FedFlix brings you !", and one at the end with "Thank you for watching" and maybe a small watermark would be enough and trivial to automate.
Don't try this at home, kids. Call your lawyer first.
"It's a Wonderful Life" is a horrible movie.
The only reason it's remembered is because it fell into the public domain.
It is a James Capra film starring Jimmy Stewart, Lionel Barrymore and a young Donna Reed. The release of so sentimental a fantasy in the immeadiate postwar years may have doomed to it to failure at the box office.
But you could say with just as much truth that 1939 was not the right year for "The Wizard of Oz," which found its television audience in the mid-fifties.
Despite the lapsed copyright, television stations that aired it still were required to pay royalties. Although the film's images had entered the public domain, the film's story was still protected by virtue of it being a derivative work of the published story "The Greatest Gift", whose copyright was properly renewed by Philip Van Doren Stern in 1971. The film became a perennial holiday favorite in the 1980s, possibly due to its repeated showings each holiday season on hundreds of local television stations.
It's a Wonderful Life
95% Fresh --- Critics ---- 94% Audience
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
A designer may indeed be condescending when giving that message if she doesn't really know enough about the targeted user.
The key words here are "targeted user."
For an office suite, that will be the 9 to 5 clerical worker, the office temp, and the senior volunteer.
They are the ones who will be doing the heavy lifting.
Well, if they were doing 'serious work', they would be using TeX, not MS-Word, right?
For pre-press work, maybe.
For the countless hours of routine clerical work that keeps your business afloat, maybe not.
but for me an office suite is good for writing letters, resumes and occasionally technical manuals. These latter require sections, tables, an index and... that's usually about it.
I often wonder what the other 10 million settings and options in office suites are for, and if anyone uses them. What do people do with a word processing program that requires scripts FFS?
MS Office is successful because it scales well to an enterprise of any size.
If you have a desk available you can set someone down and put them to work on pretty much anything that can be done "in house."
With traffic moving freely from one app to another.
In office products...performance/productivity isn't really very important. It's much more important to be "friendly," whatever "friendly" means to the people making buying decisions (often the ones running the help desk.)
When performance is important, you get a different picture.
The office manager is expected to get work out the door on time --- no matter how many of his staff are temps, part-timers, senior or student volunteers.
There are days when he will be caught desperately short-handed, shuffling people about trying to fill all those empty chairs.
That is why he keeps things simple, stupid.
For instance, how many FPS games have a ribbon-type interface for weapon selection? FPS is probably the single most performance-emphasizing part of general computing
The user's "performance" in a FPS is almost entirely illusion.
Like the game of golf,* most of the difficulties are purely artificial. Presented as challenges to the player and scalable to his ability. The environments, advesaries, weaponry and tactics do not have to be realistic.
_____
* When the time-and-motion man Frederick Winslow Taylor discovered golf he couldn't stop thinking of ways to remove its difficulties. The perfect green. The perfect ball. The perfect club...
Please be sure to read up on the concept of jury nullification before you go. You have more power in the jury box than any other individual in the justice system.
Oregon --- for example --- no longer requires a unaminous verdict even in the most horrendous of murder cases.
You want to play the lone hold-out?
Get yourself a job in dinner theater.
The system is weighted against jury nullification because nullification freed the Klansman and hanged the black man.
It always favors the home town boy against the outsider.
The oddball, the dork, the nerd and the geek get it in the neck. Every time.
Or you can just tell the MPEG-LA group to screw themselves and use VP8.
There are about thirty H.264 licensors --- most of them global giants in manufacturing like Mitshubishi.
These are the companies that dominate every link in the hardware chain from the studo camera to your tv set. Your Internet enabled HDTV doesn't need a browser, it only needs the client app.
Open the Metro UI in Windows 8 and the H.264 or HEVC Netflix app will be there. "Web Standards" no longer matter when you can distribute higher quality or more secure video outside the web.
There are close on to 1100 H,264 licensees.
That is for all practical purposes a global Fortune 1000 in content production and video distribution. Inclusive of commercial, industrial, medical, and military applications.
The web is ony one small slice of a very big pie.
While the defendant is definitely a scumbag, I can't agree with the "standards" for being called a journalist outlined. Why do I need to go to school to be a journalist? Why do I need to toe the line to be hired by a news organization to be a journalist?.....
Shield laws are construed narrowly.
Through most of our history the reporter had no special protection against a libel suit. He had to produce his anonymous sources or make his case by other means.
It kept him honest.
That rules out most professional journalists.
Does it?
Or are you just gaming Slashdot for an instant mod-up to +5, Insightful?
They have a script. Their decision to avoid CGI *and green screens* is pretty radical, considering that their script is interstellar space opera.
I don't see a script.
What I see is a fund-raising trailer consisting mostly of stock footage and Tron lit interior shots that keep the cardboard sets deliberately out of focus.
Let me know when the Humble Bundles come to the PS3.
But Indie games like Machinarium are available for the PS3. Most Indie games have had a good run around the track on other platforms before they become part of the Humble Bundle.
Which is why almost no one is willing to contribute more than $5 for the lot.
Honestly this is getting kind of ridiculous, though. Doesn't the US government have more pressing issues on its hands right now?
This is the same question the cop is asked by every white collar criminal he collars.
No matter how small the crime or how big.
And precisely how does that explain FreeBSD, Haiku OS or any number of other OSes that are tiny in terms of the desktop market, yet still attract enough following to be viable?
A lot of [projects are] driven because a few developers dislike the status quo or for whom the status quo doesn't work. Firefox is probably the best example of that.
The geek can still build an OS that will have some visibility in niche markets. Whether it will run on readily available commodity hardware is another question.
But Firefox and Mozilla live and die by the add click ---- adoption in the mass consumer market
They have no other significant sources of funding.
Stealing is the act of taking someone else's property with the intention of permanently depriving them of that property. This is not stealing in any way. There is no intention to permanently deprive anyone of anything.
The property rights in question are the copyright holder's exclusive right to control distribution --- and the right to profit from his work if he chooses.
You know you haven't paid for your copy.
You know you haven't paid for the right to redistrbute his work through the P2P nets.
You lnow you can't undo what you have done after the file has been uploaded to the P2P nets.
You know that if the feds do come down on you, you will cop a plea rather than risk a trial by jury. You know you are not Jamie Thomas and you are not going to be next year's poster boy for the EFF.
Not only will downloading for personal use stay completely legal, but the copyright holders won't suffer because of it, since people eventually spend the money saved on entertainment products."
What sort of entertainment products?
Entertainment products produced by who and where?
When your backers commit a substantial amount of money to a production, they expect to see a direct and measurable return --- or they take their busines elsewhere.
Despite what you might think, I'm pretty sure Mozilla is interested in more than just sticking it to MS.
The add click keeps Moz alive.
It has no other significant source of funding.
Ok I get it if this is really your thing one would know about this months in advance but thanks for the ultra short notice.
You might have Slashdot's snail-on-a-salt-lick editors to thank for that.
Meanwhile the rich get richer:
Homes with three or more TV sets will climb a notch to 56 percent.
UPDATE A Nielsen rep, after seeing media stories reacting to their report and chart, emailed to clarify that TV ownership has actually declined once before: In 1992, "after Nielsen adjusted for the 1990 Census, and subsequently underwent a period of significant growth."
or the articles it links to:
So, my story (below) about six-month-old Nielsen data has so far been picked up by the New York Post and Pat's Papers.
TV technologies on their way up include DVRs, which Nielsen estimates will be in 41 percent of homes in 2012, digital cable (51 percent) and HDTV (67 percent).
Also upticking: houses with three or more TV sets (56 percent) and time the average household spends in front of the tube or flat screen: a record 59 hours 28 minutes of TV watching per week.
Despite earlier reports that suggested people were unplugging, cable and satellite TV use has remained rock-steady in homes with TV (90 percent versus 10 percent of homes using rabbit ears).
For first time in history, TV ownership declines
These blog posts are a few paragraphs long and don't link to the Nielson report itself.
I would have liked to have had a look at regional and ethnic distribution --- our local cable service has gone multiingual and multicultural in a very big way.
There are a lot of ways to feed media to that big screen HDTV --- if you can afford (and have access to) digital cable, broadband Internet service, the video game console, the Roku set top box, and so on.
I haven't seen a shortage of programs worth watching. The problem is finding a program that everyone in the family wants to watch together.