coming up with a captivating universe, especially for video game adaptations, is no easy task.
I think the screenwriting experience is vastly underappreciated. While it's rough, perhaps, to think about what an alien world would be like, and then try to imagine some fictional situation, a much easier route is to just write about what you know, and then, embellish! Every day you go through events that you later tell others about, because they're inherently interesting stories... they're real world situations that people can relate to. These are perfect as inspiration for a movie plot.
For instance, perhaps I would talk about my first botany experiment. I grew a few plants in my apartment, and while I'm at first entranced at how things spring to life.. how my sunflowers, for instance, reach for the ceiling in weeks, I soon learned that if you overwater them, you fall prey to fruit flies that plant their eggs in your watery soil and soon multiply and become a problem.
So, let's embellish! Replace fruit flies with aliens. Archaeologists have been researching the reproduction of extinct animals using ancient DNA a la Jurassic Park, right? Don't worry about repeating prior art.. it's impossible to avoid, and if you tell your own story, it'll have a fresh perspective that will be appreciated on its own. But we want this to be an invasion with spaceships, right? So let's have them make this discovery in a Martian colony, and they decide to interbreed them with llamas. Surprise, this DNA was from an egg sent off by evil aliens from Alpha Centauri, that happen to reproduce fast like fruit flies, or maybe Zerglings. The Earth loses touch with its remote sister world, and soon send out a rescue spaceship to investigate. You see flashing across the 200 inch wide screen display on the bridge or whatever a face of a creature that looks like a cross between an insect and a llama. It hisses a warning to the ship's captain, along with the rest of the human race, that the human colony has been eradicated, they have regained contact with their mother race at Alpha Centauri, and soon, the entire race will be either enslaved, or destroyed. Their choice.
I'd watch that! The real challenge with filmmaking is NOT coming up with a good story. The challenge is coming up with reliable, knowledgeable people and locations, and the funds for the equipment/props you need. Money solves all of that. Making a well-funded movie is a complex task, but it sure as hell is a lot easier than if you have a low budget and volunteer/low-paid crewmen/actors. For the many well-funded movies that turn out to be crap, in my opinion, they have no excuse.
Reality check here... what he did was really cool. Did you guys see the video? : http://vimeo.com/25958231.. as a filmmaker, I find it's a huge pain for people to express themselves without worrying about where they can film, if there's someone's logo on something, if everyone in the film has given their permission, etc. Either you have the enormous cash required for production insurance, renting locations, securing official permission from every company with a visible product, funds to pay police for securing exclusive use of city property, payment for extras to populate your scene rather than just filming bystanders... or... you have to do something illegal and be subjected to some risk. I can see if there's a place/product/person displayed unfairly (libel), and if so, sure, take whoever to court and prove your damages, but you should not need permission to film/photograph whatever, wherever, and whoever otherwise.
As long as rotaries are well marked, sign-wise, they're relatively safe. Just like most city-driving, collisions are at much lower speeds than on straightaways/highways. But if it's a large rotary, it needs a clear sign stating that it's a one-way circle. Otherwise, it's quite possible late at night with low traffic, someone will make the wrong turn, and a head-to-head collision can be quite dangerous. This comes from personal experience in one of the thousands of smaller towns that rely on traffic court for revenue.
Just a note.. I figured out launching apps from the omnibox, one of Chrome 12's new features, only means an app installed via the chrome app store. You can't just type "cmd.exe" or "Command Prompt" and expect it to launch. But if you install the Angry Birds app via the Chrome Web Store, you can type "Angry Birds" and your game will load.
It happens often enough.. A company offers groupons then goes out of business. Customers complain to groupon and get refunds, no questions asked. I think everyone, including Groupon, is really fine with it and no one ends up going to court or doing slave labor.
"Before the Internet, there was a collection of nets, like Compuserve, Minitel, MSN, and AOL. Then the 'Inter' prefix was added by linking these nets altogether, and everyone was given the freedom to request information from any computer out there."
The Internet predates CompuServe, AOL, etc., and wasn't created by linking those walled-garden services together.
It's mostly correct if you think of the internet in terms of its userbase.
In this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_root_wolpe_it_s_time_to_question_bio_engineering.html... the speaker details an experiment where they had a robotic arm respond to the brain signals a monkey has when it moves one of its arms. The monkey realized intuitively how it's controlled and eventually was able to move the arm without moving its real arm, effectively giving the monkey three working arms. Might've been an ape -- I forget.
The obvious question, "How long has it been since it landed?" wasn't answered by TFA. It originally landed January 4, 2004 and has been doing research for nearly 7 and a quarter years.
I don't think you know the gravity of what you've done. You've just popped the cherries of millions of the 98% of long-time/. readers who have never once RTFA. Now that they've had a taste, could it be a dawn of a new era?
Why would Apple want the vast bulk of their customer base cured?
(I jest, big Apple fan here.)
While there's plenty you can fairly point out wrong with Apple, there's nothing wrong with being gay. I know it was in good humor, and you might very well have gay friends, but comments like this propagate prejudice. The Slashdot community's certainly got its problems, but we're better than this.
I really do find the notion of "app tabs" to be very useful. It's a small tab designed for frequently accessed pages such as your webmail (or slash dot), just showing the icon instead of the web page title. My only hope is that they provide some persistence for these tabs. I'd love if the first firefox window I opened contained my saved app tabs.
I was wondering why they mention "normal light". It's not at all a measure of comparison between this new microscope and its predecessors. I figure it's an artifact of something mentioned by the interviewed scientists. The subject of observation can react to abnormal light levels, and may even die, so they cannot just up the light level.
I watched this TED talk here: "http://www.ted.com/talks/sheila_patek_clocks_the_fastest_animals.html" which details a scientist's struggles to see a tiny organism (a mantis shrimp) at high speeds, and she stressed "low light" was important, because too much light would kill it. While in the film business, more light equals better video, the same cannot be applied to biology.
The "20 feet of steel per second" number is similar to Slashdots car analogies - a way to make an otherwise difficult to understand number more human friendly. It's probably just the time it took to burn though, say, 1/4" of steel scaled up how much it could cut through in a second, if they could operate it continuously (which presumably they can't).
The goal of this thing certainly isn't cutting though many feet of steel - it's for shooting down missiles.
With 20 ft per second I can maybe agree (that translates to a quarter an inch of steel per millisecond on a stationary target), but when they hit 2000, it's quacking like the duck that it is.
Who needs to burn through 20 feet of steel? Or even 2 feet of steel?
What's even more crazy is that their ultimate goal is to reach a megawatt of power and burn through *2000* feet of steel per second. I'd imagine seeing a phalanx of tanks, and with one 3 second FWOOOONG! from the laser, our military crosscuts through them all in one sweep. Here's the Wired article I'm referring to:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/02/unexpectedly-navys-superlaser-blasts-away-a-record
Silkworms are looking more promising than goats because they have the body parts to actually spin the silk. With goats, the silk gets filtered from the milk (which hopefully is disposed of) and then has to be spun via some post-processing technology. The best this has resulted in are threads that are around an order of magnitude thicker than spiders can manage, according to the highly-esteemed Wikipedia.
If you clicked on the "A" after it's fully rendered, you see some of the timing issues with the tests that may have passed. For this version of Chrome, all I saw was:
"Test 69 passed, but took 7 attempts (less than perfect)."
From a Slashdotter's perspective, I'm happy to get even one attempt at THAT test!
You hit the nail on the head with that one. I, too, find myself using queries containing "site:msdn.microsoft.com (rest of search)" (for say Windows API information) or using "-" in the searches to suppress certain results. Like you say, otherwise you get basically "a bunch of crap" - mainly from people who have no idea what they are doing. Just today I had a problem with elbyvcdshell.dll (from Slysoft's Virtual Clone Drive) causing Windows Explorer to hang for 5 minutes each time I renamed a folder. I tried searching that on Google - hell half of the hits were stupid posts of every file on a system at malware check sites, or bleepingcomputer.com, or other "is this malware" posts. Did I say half? Shoot - I just checked again and I think I meant 85%. The results for most tech searches are indeed useless unless you already know what site you want and include that information in your search. The internet is just filled with crap sites that make it into the indexes and get high relevance.
I think Google seems pretty good with providing discussions of particular error messages. Just copy and paste it into the search field and you'll see a few hits on threads where the problem is at least explained and maybe resolved too. Invaluable for any programmer/sys admin who deals regularly with new technologies.
I had no real impetus to relearn a lot of my forgotten math from engineering until recently. I've been helping my gf get through a Calculus I class.. she approaches me when she really gets stuck, and I usually end up finding a similar problem on the internet.. Yahoo Answers in particular... and then between that and the resources she's provided, I have confidence in my ability to do all of it. Not sure if this is applicable in your situation, but it worked for me.
There is actually a website available here that monitors the situation and gives real-time updates on the status of the LHC.
What's amusing is if you view the page source of that link. There's even a nifty comment there: "if the lhc actually destroys the earth & this page isn't yet updated
please email mike@frantic.org to receive a full refund" Going to email Mikey and ask for a refund. Maybe he won't check.
Slashdot Mirror
coming up with a captivating universe, especially for video game adaptations, is no easy task.
I think the screenwriting experience is vastly underappreciated. While it's rough, perhaps, to think about what an alien world would be like, and then try to imagine some fictional situation, a much easier route is to just write about what you know, and then, embellish! Every day you go through events that you later tell others about, because they're inherently interesting stories... they're real world situations that people can relate to. These are perfect as inspiration for a movie plot.
For instance, perhaps I would talk about my first botany experiment. I grew a few plants in my apartment, and while I'm at first entranced at how things spring to life.. how my sunflowers, for instance, reach for the ceiling in weeks, I soon learned that if you overwater them, you fall prey to fruit flies that plant their eggs in your watery soil and soon multiply and become a problem.
So, let's embellish! Replace fruit flies with aliens. Archaeologists have been researching the reproduction of extinct animals using ancient DNA a la Jurassic Park, right? Don't worry about repeating prior art.. it's impossible to avoid, and if you tell your own story, it'll have a fresh perspective that will be appreciated on its own. But we want this to be an invasion with spaceships, right? So let's have them make this discovery in a Martian colony, and they decide to interbreed them with llamas. Surprise, this DNA was from an egg sent off by evil aliens from Alpha Centauri, that happen to reproduce fast like fruit flies, or maybe Zerglings. The Earth loses touch with its remote sister world, and soon send out a rescue spaceship to investigate. You see flashing across the 200 inch wide screen display on the bridge or whatever a face of a creature that looks like a cross between an insect and a llama. It hisses a warning to the ship's captain, along with the rest of the human race, that the human colony has been eradicated, they have regained contact with their mother race at Alpha Centauri, and soon, the entire race will be either enslaved, or destroyed. Their choice.
I'd watch that! The real challenge with filmmaking is NOT coming up with a good story. The challenge is coming up with reliable, knowledgeable people and locations, and the funds for the equipment/props you need. Money solves all of that. Making a well-funded movie is a complex task, but it sure as hell is a lot easier than if you have a low budget and volunteer/low-paid crewmen/actors. For the many well-funded movies that turn out to be crap, in my opinion, they have no excuse.
Dark Kidney Films
Reality check here... what he did was really cool. Did you guys see the video? : http://vimeo.com/25958231 .. as a filmmaker, I find it's a huge pain for people to express themselves without worrying about where they can film, if there's someone's logo on something, if everyone in the film has given their permission, etc. Either you have the enormous cash required for production insurance, renting locations, securing official permission from every company with a visible product, funds to pay police for securing exclusive use of city property, payment for extras to populate your scene rather than just filming bystanders... or... you have to do something illegal and be subjected to some risk. I can see if there's a place/product/person displayed unfairly (libel), and if so, sure, take whoever to court and prove your damages, but you should not need permission to film/photograph whatever, wherever, and whoever otherwise.
As long as rotaries are well marked, sign-wise, they're relatively safe. Just like most city-driving, collisions are at much lower speeds than on straightaways/highways. But if it's a large rotary, it needs a clear sign stating that it's a one-way circle. Otherwise, it's quite possible late at night with low traffic, someone will make the wrong turn, and a head-to-head collision can be quite dangerous. This comes from personal experience in one of the thousands of smaller towns that rely on traffic court for revenue.
Just a note.. I figured out launching apps from the omnibox, one of Chrome 12's new features, only means an app installed via the chrome app store. You can't just type "cmd.exe" or "Command Prompt" and expect it to launch. But if you install the Angry Birds app via the Chrome Web Store, you can type "Angry Birds" and your game will load.
It happens often enough.. A company offers groupons then goes out of business. Customers complain to groupon and get refunds, no questions asked. I think everyone, including Groupon, is really fine with it and no one ends up going to court or doing slave labor.
"Before the Internet, there was a collection of nets, like Compuserve, Minitel, MSN, and AOL. Then the 'Inter' prefix was added by linking these nets altogether, and everyone was given the freedom to request information from any computer out there."
The Internet predates CompuServe, AOL, etc., and wasn't created by linking those walled-garden services together.
It's mostly correct if you think of the internet in terms of its userbase.
In this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_root_wolpe_it_s_time_to_question_bio_engineering.html ... the speaker details an experiment where they had a robotic arm respond to the brain signals a monkey has when it moves one of its arms. The monkey realized intuitively how it's controlled and eventually was able to move the arm without moving its real arm, effectively giving the monkey three working arms. Might've been an ape -- I forget.
The obvious question, "How long has it been since it landed?" wasn't answered by TFA. It originally landed January 4, 2004 and has been doing research for nearly 7 and a quarter years.
There, now you've read the entire article.
I don't think you know the gravity of what you've done. You've just popped the cherries of millions of the 98% of long-time /. readers who have never once RTFA. Now that they've had a taste, could it be a dawn of a new era?
Why would Apple want the vast bulk of their customer base cured? (I jest, big Apple fan here.)
While there's plenty you can fairly point out wrong with Apple, there's nothing wrong with being gay. I know it was in good humor, and you might very well have gay friends, but comments like this propagate prejudice. The Slashdot community's certainly got its problems, but we're better than this.
I really do find the notion of "app tabs" to be very useful. It's a small tab designed for frequently accessed pages such as your webmail (or slash dot), just showing the icon instead of the web page title. My only hope is that they provide some persistence for these tabs. I'd love if the first firefox window I opened contained my saved app tabs.
I was wondering why they mention "normal light". It's not at all a measure of comparison between this new microscope and its predecessors. I figure it's an artifact of something mentioned by the interviewed scientists. The subject of observation can react to abnormal light levels, and may even die, so they cannot just up the light level.
I watched this TED talk here: "http://www.ted.com/talks/sheila_patek_clocks_the_fastest_animals.html" which details a scientist's struggles to see a tiny organism (a mantis shrimp) at high speeds, and she stressed "low light" was important, because too much light would kill it. While in the film business, more light equals better video, the same cannot be applied to biology.
The "20 feet of steel per second" number is similar to Slashdots car analogies - a way to make an otherwise difficult to understand number more human friendly. It's probably just the time it took to burn though, say, 1/4" of steel scaled up how much it could cut through in a second, if they could operate it continuously (which presumably they can't).
The goal of this thing certainly isn't cutting though many feet of steel - it's for shooting down missiles.
With 20 ft per second I can maybe agree (that translates to a quarter an inch of steel per millisecond on a stationary target), but when they hit 2000, it's quacking like the duck that it is.
Who needs to burn through 20 feet of steel? Or even 2 feet of steel?
What's even more crazy is that their ultimate goal is to reach a megawatt of power and burn through *2000* feet of steel per second. I'd imagine seeing a phalanx of tanks, and with one 3 second FWOOOONG! from the laser, our military crosscuts through them all in one sweep. Here's the Wired article I'm referring to: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/02/unexpectedly-navys-superlaser-blasts-away-a-record
It's 20%, not 10%.
Silkworms are looking more promising than goats because they have the body parts to actually spin the silk. With goats, the silk gets filtered from the milk (which hopefully is disposed of) and then has to be spun via some post-processing technology. The best this has resulted in are threads that are around an order of magnitude thicker than spiders can manage, according to the highly-esteemed Wikipedia.
(they also have some of their own reporters)
Doesn't this mean that without newspapers, there is an AP?
Iron is supposedly a scam according to some web sites: http://chromium.hybridsource.org/the-iron-scam
If you clicked on the "A" after it's fully rendered, you see some of the timing issues with the tests that may have passed. For this version of Chrome, all I saw was: "Test 69 passed, but took 7 attempts (less than perfect)." From a Slashdotter's perspective, I'm happy to get even one attempt at THAT test!
You hit the nail on the head with that one. I, too, find myself using queries containing "site:msdn.microsoft.com (rest of search)" (for say Windows API information) or using "-" in the searches to suppress certain results. Like you say, otherwise you get basically "a bunch of crap" - mainly from people who have no idea what they are doing. Just today I had a problem with elbyvcdshell.dll (from Slysoft's Virtual Clone Drive) causing Windows Explorer to hang for 5 minutes each time I renamed a folder. I tried searching that on Google - hell half of the hits were stupid posts of every file on a system at malware check sites, or bleepingcomputer.com, or other "is this malware" posts. Did I say half? Shoot - I just checked again and I think I meant 85%. The results for most tech searches are indeed useless unless you already know what site you want and include that information in your search. The internet is just filled with crap sites that make it into the indexes and get high relevance.
I think Google seems pretty good with providing discussions of particular error messages. Just copy and paste it into the search field and you'll see a few hits on threads where the problem is at least explained and maybe resolved too. Invaluable for any programmer/sys admin who deals regularly with new technologies.
I had no real impetus to relearn a lot of my forgotten math from engineering until recently. I've been helping my gf get through a Calculus I class.. she approaches me when she really gets stuck, and I usually end up finding a similar problem on the internet.. Yahoo Answers in particular... and then between that and the resources she's provided, I have confidence in my ability to do all of it. Not sure if this is applicable in your situation, but it worked for me.
System for automatically generating queries http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&RefSrch=yes&Query=PN%2F6778979
Method and apparatus for the integration of information and knowledge http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&RefSrch=yes&Query=PN%2F6778979
You posted the same URL twice.
You can block ads in Chrome with tools such as Privoxy at http://www.privoxy.org/ Works fine for me.
You'd think for whoever owns the Terminator franchise, business would be a-boomin' on Judgement Day, when Skynet clicks to order.
There is actually a website available here that monitors the situation and gives real-time updates on the status of the LHC.
What's amusing is if you view the page source of that link. There's even a nifty comment there: "if the lhc actually destroys the earth & this page isn't yet updated please email mike@frantic.org to receive a full refund" Going to email Mikey and ask for a refund. Maybe he won't check.