Just tried MSN with an OEM IE 5.5, and when I click on "Get Map" nothing happens. Get "error on page" in the status bar. Guess their attempt to screen out other browsers by using arcane HTML has bit them in the ass as well...
If you are looking for something inexpensive, try www.hash.com. I have used AnimationMaster for years and you will find it an awesome package that is only behind Maya and 3DSMax in name.
I bought a copy of Hash based on a computer show demo, and liked the interface and features until I really tried to get down to business and import some triangle models created algorithmically with other software-- and found that despite it claims to be compatible with triangle formats such as DXF, it really can't import them, as it goes off and crunches on it so long that you won't want to wait for it to finish-- I ran a simple model and after 8 hours it still hadn't finished the import. I've yet to see the results of an import, as it takes so darn long it quickly gets to the point that it doesn't matter how it looks because the time it takes is nuts. Hash is a great program as long as you don't want to import any modelling from anywhere else, but that doesn't work for me. I might use Hash to generate models, then I'd export them to a triangle format that I can use in some other renderer with models generated elsewhere. Hash's unusual model format is powerful within itself but appears to be a dead end when the rendering is strictly dependent on it. The rest of the world is not going to make itself compatible with Hash, and given Hash's apparent inability to usefully import sources from outside, it is an isolated island and will apparently remain so.
So what am I using now? OpenGL and a C compiler. I'd probably be using POVRay except I've been spoiled by the real-time performance of OpenGL.
AESTHETICS of STYLE? Try CORRUPTION of GREED
on
The Substance of Style
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You're looking at the downside of the "invisible hand" here, methinks.
Take anything by the Sharper Image for example. Their corporate motto is apparently "Style over Substance", though they are only one of the most blatant. A specifically good example would be their "Ionic Breeze." Selling points? Quieter than HEPA filters (that's because HEPA filters actually DO something). Empty BOXES are quiet too, and pollute your air less. Standardized tests show the Ionic Breeze's ability to remove airborne particles to be almost negligible. Tests also show it doesn't trap the particles it does catch very well such that they can be re-introduced to the environment. It produces levels of the oxidant gas ozone that accumulate over time, reportedly less than 0.05 ppm after 24 hours, but what after 48? The EPA's safe limit is 0.08, are you sure your ventilation is sufficient to keep it below that level if you have it on all the time? Do you trust the EPA's limit as being actually safe? (they dropped it to 0.08 from 0.12 in 1997 as apparently, 0.12 wasn't good enough). And what does it matter if the darn thing doesn't even remove dust and germs out of your environment worth a darn, because most dust and germs are not airborne?Oh, but it LOOKS SO SEXY.
There are countless products that people buy not because they are tuned into the brilliant aesthetics, but because the intimidation value of the brilliant marketing campaigns that convince them that if they don't have the product, they're deprived. That they need it to shallowly show off they have good taste when they really have no taste at all except that which was sold to them.
Here's what I want-- a 976 number that by default charges the caller $1 a minute or something, where I can opt to override the amount with a *{something} when the call comes in if it's someone I actually know.
Then the telemarketers can call me all they want...
Get a clue, there are easy adapters available to run the iPod thru your cassette deck (or thru the radio).
Yeah, but the iPod costs twice as much as this thing, doesn't take up extra space and cabling in my car, and (despite what some idiot said about 1/2 hour) can store some 6 hours worth of music as Mp3 files, which is enough to keep in my car at a time.
It works, eh? Well, the iPod does not meet my definition of "portability." So just what do I have to do to play it on a device like this or this? They allows me to play umpteen hours of digital audio in my existing auto cassette player, which is pretty much the only place I have much opportunity to listen to music. iPod indeed.
But "real design" doesn't work, at least, not very well.
It works as long as you don't have morons for designers. Software design is an expertise, and as such includes benefits of experience. Lacking the expertise and experience (or the budget for it), some will instead attach to a dogmatism, a "one true way" which is always correct in lieu of any expertise or lack thereof.
What many XP-ers don't realize, is that many of us have lived through previous incarnations of "one true way" software development dogmas and have come to recognize the signs.
There are similar problems in other professions-- Teacher for one example. Rather than trust a teacher's own education and experience, it has become the fashion to instead impose some dogma which, as usual is designed to take all the mediocre-to-poor performers and at least have them channelled into all doing the same thing. Frankly, I'd prefer to see teachers as professionals who bring something besides warm bodies-jammed-into-one-size-fits-all-methodologies to their profession. I think professional associations and credentialing for teachers like doctors and lawyers have would do far more to improve the quality of education, but it wouldn't be particularly cheap. In my book though, you may just be getting what you're paying for...
XP, like those dogmas before it, is designed to take a group of young, aspiring and inepensive programmers who don't know any better, have a huge amount of enthusiasm but the attention span of a flea, and give them focus in order to exert some common direction and control over their productivity. The XP methodology is a specifically defined and fixed target and not itself an example of it's own design methodologies.
The whole reason I changed to Google from whatever I was using before (probably AltaVista) was NOT their ad-minimalist approach (though that is appreciated) but was the fact that if you enter a series of terms that results in no hits, you'd get a NO HITS message, not the hits for the next closest subset of terms. Fortunately, it currently still works that way-- try "candle truck speaker bracelet" (without the quotes) and you'll get the "no matches" result you (presumably) SHOULD get. Also I've noted that many other engines have since followed suit (though interestingly, AltaVista finds some 8000 hits on this and most of the top ones appear to have all four terms from word randomization pages), perhaps because they realize the importance of the feature. If Google does a VeriSign and starts giving you goofball hits rather than no hits, I'm jumping ship...
At the risk of making you look bad, for phrase searches you have to put the phrase in quotes.
Phrases are one thing, but try searching for something like "-no." Can't do it without getting thousands of occurrances of the word "no."
Doesn't matter if you quote it-- Google edits out symbols it appears, and there are some things pretty damn hard to find because of it...
Read the last paragraph of the ICANN advisory-- was this VeriSign's actual intent? Or did they really think that their wildcarding trick is a good idea?
Seems like everyone is vying for a share of the Linux user's wallet. If SCO doesn't get it with it's licensing fee, then HP'll get it by providing a protected version if you'll pay THEM what amounts to a license fee (in buying their hardware).
Nice to see so many hungry for a piece of the Linux market I suppose, but the very fact that a user is using Linux may just be a sign that he's rather tight with his money...
You got that right. I first started out using Yahoo for search. Then they started vectoring matches through intermediate category pages which kept me in Yahoo for a page or two more-- so they could throw more ads at me, apparently. I no longer trust them and won't go back.
Then I moved to altavista, and later tried iwon, but gave up on that due to the slow accumulation of more and more popups that foiled the popup killer I was using at the time. By that time, Google was out, and had one important characteristic that NO OTHER search engine at the time had-- and I'm not talking about the less-is-more interface which is a plus, but the important characteristic was that if you type in a common keyword, and also type in a gibberish word, it came up with NO MATCHES while all other engines of the time would show you whatever subset it could find of keywords if it couldn't match all the keywords. Note that yahoo and altavista NOW act like google in this regard, but they DIDN'T at that time. If there's NO MATCHES, it damn well better come up with a NO MATCHES page and not throw some crap at me that someone thinks I might be interested in. And, it better not be more than one click after the search is entered to get to any of the first pages indexed sites-- none of these "intermediary" pages that are designed just to keep me on the search site as long as possible.
So I no longer trust Yahoo, AltaVista or Iwon, and I have a long memory. I haven't used any MS searches just because I don't trust MS in general. Prohibiting Google's indexing of MS sites would be doing me a favor, as I wouldn't ever have to encounter any of their crap in searches-- a feature, not a bug.
The only way MS has a snowball's chance to get any of my search time is to provide some capability that is so far advanced from what Google has as to make it worth while. And we all know Microsoft historically has been quite pathetic in the groundbreaking arena-- the "innovation" they like to tout at every possible occasion always turns out to be something that has been stolen or bought from someone else in every case that I have seen so far.
Problem is, at least in the case of SCO and probably in the case of many other code comparisons, it'll match on code that was commonly duplicated from open source or various sorts of PD or free sources. Consequently, the degree of similarity between the two trees will not be an indication of the extent of any copyright infringement.
Circumvent copy protection-- refuse to buy media that use it.
Somehow I'm a bit suspicious of a huge bid by an account that has feedback of 0 though it has been around for a year. I suppose it could be an EFF lawyer who can write it off....? Or would there be a legal problem with that potentially being a shill? I wonder what will happen if the winner turns out to be a deadbeat? Perhaps he should have done this with a Buy-It-Now price of $10 or something just to get it over with before someone has the chance to mess it up.
Wouldn't be surprised if this makes it to TV news....
I create a document in Office 2003 and Microsoft owns the digital rights to it? Not bloody likely. Is circumventing an anti-copying mechanism that is keeping me from getting to my own IP a violation of the DMCA? If so, not for long.
Problem is, there are conflicting interests here. If a user is interested in networked workstations running shared, client server and/or non-realtime apps, he should choose one interface, and if he wants near-realtime games, video or graphics programs that require huge CPU computation sitting on top of a frame buffer, he should choose another interface. An X based interface is not a very good tool for video editing or interactive OpenGL apps, and a Microsoft Windows like frame-buffer GUI isn't going to work very good over a network.
And frankly, I've yet to need networked graphics, as I kinda see it as an oxymoron-- for me graphics have always meant some kind of bitmapping which really sucks over a TCP/IP connection. I use MS Windows as my primary GUI with Linux servers, and won't move to Linux on the desktop until they come up with a high-performance framebuffer oriented GUI. Fresco/GGI seems to be the closest thing to it so far, and it has quite a ways to go before it can perform anything like my current MS desktop can. At this point, I'd say standardization is the least of the problems, taking a back-seat to performance.
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Trust me, computers for kids (Apple eMac) NEED one button mice standard.
Oh yeah, great. Let's all just optimize the world for 6-year-olds. It's exactly this sort of thing that's wrong with the U.S. education system.
Just tried MSN with an OEM IE 5.5, and when I click on "Get Map" nothing happens. Get "error on page" in the status bar. Guess their attempt to screen out other browsers by using arcane HTML has bit them in the ass as well...
If you are looking for something inexpensive, try www.hash.com. I have used AnimationMaster for years and you will find it an awesome package that is only behind Maya and 3DSMax in name.
I bought a copy of Hash based on a computer show demo, and liked the interface and features until I really tried to get down to business and import some triangle models created algorithmically with other software-- and found that despite it claims to be compatible with triangle formats such as DXF, it really can't import them, as it goes off and crunches on it so long that you won't want to wait for it to finish-- I ran a simple model and after 8 hours it still hadn't finished the import. I've yet to see the results of an import, as it takes so darn long it quickly gets to the point that it doesn't matter how it looks because the time it takes is nuts. Hash is a great program as long as you don't want to import any modelling from anywhere else, but that doesn't work for me. I might use Hash to generate models, then I'd export them to a triangle format that I can use in some other renderer with models generated elsewhere. Hash's unusual model format is powerful within itself but appears to be a dead end when the rendering is strictly dependent on it. The rest of the world is not going to make itself compatible with Hash, and given Hash's apparent inability to usefully import sources from outside, it is an isolated island and will apparently remain so.
So what am I using now? OpenGL and a C compiler. I'd probably be using POVRay except I've been spoiled by the real-time performance of OpenGL.
You're looking at the downside of the "invisible hand" here, methinks.
Take anything by the Sharper Image for example. Their corporate motto is apparently "Style over Substance", though they are only one of the most blatant. A specifically good example would be their "Ionic Breeze." Selling points? Quieter than HEPA filters (that's because HEPA filters actually DO something). Empty BOXES are quiet too, and pollute your air less. Standardized tests show the Ionic Breeze's ability to remove airborne particles to be almost negligible. Tests also show it doesn't trap the particles it does catch very well such that they can be re-introduced to the environment. It produces levels of the oxidant gas ozone that accumulate over time, reportedly less than 0.05 ppm after 24 hours, but what after 48? The EPA's safe limit is 0.08, are you sure your ventilation is sufficient to keep it below that level if you have it on all the time? Do you trust the EPA's limit as being actually safe? (they dropped it to 0.08 from 0.12 in 1997 as apparently, 0.12 wasn't good enough). And what does it matter if the darn thing doesn't even remove dust and germs out of your environment worth a darn, because most dust and germs are not airborne? Oh, but it LOOKS SO SEXY.
There are countless products that people buy not because they are tuned into the brilliant aesthetics, but because the intimidation value of the brilliant marketing campaigns that convince them that if they don't have the product, they're deprived. That they need it to shallowly show off they have good taste when they really have no taste at all except that which was sold to them.
Here's what I want-- a 976 number that by default charges the caller $1 a minute or something, where I can opt to override the amount with a *{something} when the call comes in if it's someone I actually know.
Then the telemarketers can call me all they want...
The only way you'd get 6 hours out of 64M is to compress the Hell out of it. Maybe down to 32 kbps.
The 64M is on a memory card which you can upgrade to 512M, and since 6 hours is 360 minutes, at 1M/minute that should fit nicely...
That's pretty cool. Too bad it only holds 1/2 hour of music. Otherwise, the concept is nice.
Check it out again-- 64M of mp3 files is something like 6 hours, not 1/2 hour...
Get a clue, there are easy adapters available to run the iPod thru your cassette deck (or thru the radio).
Yeah, but the iPod costs twice as much as this thing, doesn't take up extra space and cabling in my car, and (despite what some idiot said about 1/2 hour) can store some 6 hours worth of music as Mp3 files, which is enough to keep in my car at a time.
It works, eh? Well, the iPod does not meet my definition of "portability." So just what do I have to do to play it on a device like this or this? They allows me to play umpteen hours of digital audio in my existing auto cassette player, which is pretty much the only place I have much opportunity to listen to music. iPod indeed.
But "real design" doesn't work, at least, not very well.
It works as long as you don't have morons for designers. Software design is an expertise, and as such includes benefits of experience. Lacking the expertise and experience (or the budget for it), some will instead attach to a dogmatism, a "one true way" which is always correct in lieu of any expertise or lack thereof.
What many XP-ers don't realize, is that many of us have lived through previous incarnations of "one true way" software development dogmas and have come to recognize the signs.
There are similar problems in other professions-- Teacher for one example. Rather than trust a teacher's own education and experience, it has become the fashion to instead impose some dogma which, as usual is designed to take all the mediocre-to-poor performers and at least have them channelled into all doing the same thing. Frankly, I'd prefer to see teachers as professionals who bring something besides warm bodies-jammed-into-one-size-fits-all-methodologies to their profession. I think professional associations and credentialing for teachers like doctors and lawyers have would do far more to improve the quality of education, but it wouldn't be particularly cheap. In my book though, you may just be getting what you're paying for...
XP, like those dogmas before it, is designed to take a group of young, aspiring and inepensive programmers who don't know any better, have a huge amount of enthusiasm but the attention span of a flea, and give them focus in order to exert some common direction and control over their productivity. The XP methodology is a specifically defined and fixed target and not itself an example of it's own design methodologies.
The whole reason I changed to Google from whatever I was using before (probably AltaVista) was NOT their ad-minimalist approach (though that is appreciated) but was the fact that if you enter a series of terms that results in no hits, you'd get a NO HITS message, not the hits for the next closest subset of terms. Fortunately, it currently still works that way-- try "candle truck speaker bracelet" (without the quotes) and you'll get the "no matches" result you (presumably) SHOULD get. Also I've noted that many other engines have since followed suit (though interestingly, AltaVista finds some 8000 hits on this and most of the top ones appear to have all four terms from word randomization pages), perhaps because they realize the importance of the feature. If Google does a VeriSign and starts giving you goofball hits rather than no hits, I'm jumping ship...
At the risk of making you look bad, for phrase searches you have to put the phrase in quotes.
Phrases are one thing, but try searching for something like "-no." Can't do it without getting thousands of occurrances of the word "no." Doesn't matter if you quote it-- Google edits out symbols it appears, and there are some things pretty damn hard to find because of it...
Problem is, the only thing ICANN can do about it besides sue is pull the tld out of the root-- then they might as well look for new jobs...
Ooops-- I mean act *fast*...
Act fact though, bet they won't last long...
Read the last paragraph of the ICANN advisory-- was this VeriSign's actual intent? Or did they really think that their wildcarding trick is a good idea?
This is nuts-- it's obviously a complete free-for-all WRT making bogus claims to inflate your stock.
Wake me up in the year 3000 when it finally gets around to optimizing for realtime interactive 3D.
Seems like everyone is vying for a share of the Linux user's wallet. If SCO doesn't get it with it's licensing fee, then HP'll get it by providing a protected version if you'll pay THEM what amounts to a license fee (in buying their hardware).
Nice to see so many hungry for a piece of the Linux market I suppose, but the very fact that a user is using Linux may just be a sign that he's rather tight with his money...
You got that right. I first started out using Yahoo for search. Then they started vectoring matches through intermediate category pages which kept me in Yahoo for a page or two more-- so they could throw more ads at me, apparently. I no longer trust them and won't go back.
Then I moved to altavista, and later tried iwon, but gave up on that due to the slow accumulation of more and more popups that foiled the popup killer I was using at the time. By that time, Google was out, and had one important characteristic that NO OTHER search engine at the time had-- and I'm not talking about the less-is-more interface which is a plus, but the important characteristic was that if you type in a common keyword, and also type in a gibberish word, it came up with NO MATCHES while all other engines of the time would show you whatever subset it could find of keywords if it couldn't match all the keywords. Note that yahoo and altavista NOW act like google in this regard, but they DIDN'T at that time. If there's NO MATCHES, it damn well better come up with a NO MATCHES page and not throw some crap at me that someone thinks I might be interested in. And, it better not be more than one click after the search is entered to get to any of the first pages indexed sites-- none of these "intermediary" pages that are designed just to keep me on the search site as long as possible.
So I no longer trust Yahoo, AltaVista or Iwon, and I have a long memory. I haven't used any MS searches just because I don't trust MS in general. Prohibiting Google's indexing of MS sites would be doing me a favor, as I wouldn't ever have to encounter any of their crap in searches-- a feature, not a bug.
The only way MS has a snowball's chance to get any of my search time is to provide some capability that is so far advanced from what Google has as to make it worth while. And we all know Microsoft historically has been quite pathetic in the groundbreaking arena-- the "innovation" they like to tout at every possible occasion always turns out to be something that has been stolen or bought from someone else in every case that I have seen so far.
Problem is, at least in the case of SCO and probably in the case of many other code comparisons, it'll match on code that was commonly duplicated from open source or various sorts of PD or free sources. Consequently, the degree of similarity between the two trees will not be an indication of the extent of any copyright infringement.
Circumvent copy protection-- refuse to buy media that use it.
Somehow I'm a bit suspicious of a huge bid by an account that has feedback of 0 though it has been around for a year. I suppose it could be an EFF lawyer who can write it off....? Or would there be a legal problem with that potentially being a shill? I wonder what will happen if the winner turns out to be a deadbeat? Perhaps he should have done this with a Buy-It-Now price of $10 or something just to get it over with before someone has the chance to mess it up.
Wouldn't be surprised if this makes it to TV news....
Why don't we each buy one song on iTunes, and then trade them to each other endlessly using P2P?
I create a document in Office 2003 and Microsoft owns the digital rights to it? Not bloody likely. Is circumventing an anti-copying mechanism that is keeping me from getting to my own IP a violation of the DMCA? If so, not for long.
Problem is, there are conflicting interests here. If a user is interested in networked workstations running shared, client server and/or non-realtime apps, he should choose one interface, and if he wants near-realtime games, video or graphics programs that require huge CPU computation sitting on top of a frame buffer, he should choose another interface. An X based interface is not a very good tool for video editing or interactive OpenGL apps, and a Microsoft Windows like frame-buffer GUI isn't going to work very good over a network.
And frankly, I've yet to need networked graphics, as I kinda see it as an oxymoron-- for me graphics have always meant some kind of bitmapping which really sucks over a TCP/IP connection. I use MS Windows as my primary GUI with Linux servers, and won't move to Linux on the desktop until they come up with a high-performance framebuffer oriented GUI. Fresco/GGI seems to be the closest thing to it so far, and it has quite a ways to go before it can perform anything like my current MS desktop can. At this point, I'd say standardization is the least of the problems, taking a back-seat to performance.