It was a hardware device that allowed you to do realtime video editing. I'm not sure of all the features, but our system allowed you to do realtime fades between two video streams. The software integrated well with Lightwave 3D, so you could also insert 3D objects and animations into a video stream on the fly.
At the time, an Amiga was the only way to go due to some hardware issue. I think it was that there was some sort of issue with the clocking of a TV signal that was much more difficult to solve on PCs and Macs than it was on Amigas.
Anyway, Amigas did the job so well that the Preview channel supposedly ran on nothing but aging Amiga 2000s with Toaster cards up until when they were bought out by TV Guide.
How often do you hear someone of one party praise someone of another party? Not often.
John McCain. Most everyone I know loves John McCain, even the staunch Democrats (like myself).
Still, I have to agree that the current political climate makes it damn hard for a politican to get away with sticking with his convictions and speaking his mind rather than rolling over and doing what is demanded by party and fashion. (McCain is another great example of this.)
. The Senate was not meant to be a House of Lords - it was created in order to give small states an equal standing with larger states, while at the same time allowing larger states to have more representation in the House.
Having an appointed Senate would have no effect on this. The argument over whether or not the US Senate should be appointed by state legislature or appointed by popular vote is really more about whether you lean more towards a pure democracy or a more republican system of government.
Which then boils down to whether you prefer to call it 'popular vote' or 'mob rule.'
DNA by itself does not a creature make. You still have to have a cell to put that DNA in, and that cell has to be able to repsond properly to the protiens that that are transcribed from that DNA, and also be able to produce the proper chemical signals to cause the correct parts of that DNA to be transcribed at the right time.
Until bringing back the Dodo and the Passenger Pigeon becomes feasible, I fail to see how sending DNA from every animal to the moon is any better a way to spend research money than sending a box full of the covers to every O'Reilly book ever publshed tot he moon.
Ah, Video Toaster. That was a fun toy back in the day.
Used to work with it on an old Amiga 2000 that would build up enough static electricity in the keyboard to make a loud snap and make your hand go numb when you first touched it.
I'm tired of everyone assuming that the only people who could possibly consider supporting Nader would vote Democrat were Nader not around.
In 2000, exit polls showed his consituency being a little over one quarter people who would have voted for Gore, a little under one quarter people who would have voted for Bush, and half people who wouldn't have voted.
Fudge the numbers to account for the fudge factor all you want, that still doesn't show Nader's constituency as being nothing but leftists and Democrats. But then again, "every fifteenth vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" just doesn't have the same bite.
And then you throw in the electoral college. A lot of people (myself included) lived in partisan states and voted for Nader with complete confidence in the knowledge that our lack of a vote for {insert name of other canditate we would (or would not) have voted for's name here} wasn't going to change who got the votes from our state.
Of course, "Every fifteenth vote for Nader is a vote for Bush, but only if you come from one of 10 states. Otherwise, it's really not such a big deal." really doesn't have the same bite.
It's true, Perot probably did swing the 1992 election. But as close as the 2000 election was, it's still a lot harder to say that about Nader.
On the other hand, getting rid of the electoral college would be a hit to the third party camp, because right now the bread and butter of third parties seems to be people who live in strongly partisan states who know their vote isn't going to come close to mattering on the Big Vote, and so choose to use it to help a third party get recognition.
I hear liberitarians' fortunes are among the oldest and largest in the country, too.
Maybe when I, too, can cast my ballot while dining on caviar and fine wine from within my ivory tower, far from the plebian masses and the need to care about them.
But, like most Americans, I live close to the social safety net. Close enough to be glad it's there. Especially with the economy in the shakes it's been in.
I think I'll 'waste my vote' on a party that agrees that I shouldn't have to live in a cardboard box.
It's fascist to make arguments that deny people the right to vote. And I do think it's horrible to keep felons from voting. It's an amazingly crafty way to give legislators a little power to politically marginalize groups by tweaking the classifications of various crimes a bit. (cue classic story about tweaking the "intent to sell" mass for one drug in one direction and another drug in another direction)
But arguing that someone shouldn't vote (as in they should not of their own accord, not that they should not be allowed to) isn't fascist. I'll defend the right of a racist organization to stand on street corners handing out pamphlets, but I also think they're a bunch of worthless fuckwads and wouldn't really be saddened if they got knocked off that street corner in a freak bus accident. There is no conflict there - free speech is all about being adult enough to accept the idea that people aren't always going to say things that you like.
Same for voting. I believe that every adult should have the right to vote, including groups like felons and the developmentally disabled. I also believe that there are some people who vote in a manner that is making a travesty of democracy, and would be much happier if these people a) shaped up or b) stopped voting. It angers me that people will vote for the most popular candidate just because he's the most popular candidate, or that people will just pick random names in local races where they don't even know who the candidates are. Hell, even people who vote based on what CNN, Fox, NPR (yes, NPR), et al have to say about the candidate piss me off - they're doing the electoral equivalent of trial by combat. I hold these opinions beause I strongly believe in the basic precepts upon which the idea of liberal government (Meaning democracies and republics, not donkeys running congress.) is founded, and it upsets me to see people simultaneously take their vote for granted and make a mockery of it in one careless act.
But for all that, I don't think that anyone should be denied their vote. Denying a vote is a far greater affront to democracy than squandering one. And it pisses me off more than squandering votes.
So yeah, all I'm saying is there are a lot of nuances. You gotta watch out for the nuances. The word 'fascist' has been diluted enough as it is.
I'm not sure if you can really get a good idea of how self-maintaining Wikipedia is from this experiment. It seems to me that Wikipedia is mostly used by geeks, so the five entries he edited aren't ones that I would think would be read as often, as, say, an article on two's compliment numbers. Who's to say that some of these pages were even viewed by more than one or two people in the time he allowed for them to be fixed?
With that in mind, I'd rather seen an experiment that tries to determine how many times a page is viewed before it gets altered. I bet if one of the edits he had made were to introduce some sort of error into the database normalization page's explanation of third normal form, it would be a lot more likely to be noticed within two days.
Stil, shame on anyone who takes any encyclopedia or other reference book as unquestionable authority. Any collection of information that dense is going to be full of errors like made-up words and the like.
If you went with the first answer rather than giving respondents two chances, I'd say you would have had a lot more that answered, "I dunno, what's a browser", and another 30% that answered, "Windows."
I'll grant you, anything more than the basic "dump files into a CD" type of burning is not nearly so intuitive. (And not anywhere in the documentation, because Apple's help files are just so *good*), but there is an article on how to do it at MacDevCenter
I think what you meant to say is that MS is known for making an interface that's almost usable to the masses.
I agree that Windows is more usable than Linux, but next-to-worst can still be pretty bad. And Windows is Bad. And there are several better examples out there. There are even a few Good examples out there.
Assuming the goal is to be good (or even mediocre) and not bad, trying to copy Windows (here I'm talking about how it acts, not how it looks.) is totally the wrong way to go about it.
Seriously. Apple is the only company that even comes close to getting drag and drop right. This tends to cause a problem with Windows users I've trained because they are used to having to have a specialized app or process for doing everything, so they do things like assume they need to go buy Roxio Toast because they don't have any CD burning software. It never occurs to them to try just dragging some files into the CD. A key idea in working with MacOS, especially the Finder, is that they try hard to maintain the illusion that something's representation in the GUI is in fact the thing itself. Hence, you add files to a CD by adding those files to the CD.
Need to e-mail someone's address book info to a co-worker, but you don't have your mail app open? Try dragging that person's name from your address book to the Mail app icon in the dock. Kinda cool how it automagically opens mail and starts a blank e-mail with a vcard containing the contact's info already in there as an attatchment. If your coworker has a Mac, he/she can just drag that attatchment's icon straight from Mail to the Address Book - no need to save it first. Similarly, you can IM an image you see on the Web to a friend by just dragging that image from your web browser to iChat.
Granted, a lot of this Drag and Drop coolness has become a bit bastardized on OS X, but it's still mostly there and I'd say it's the single largest difference between Windows and OS X.
(That one button mouse thing is mostly a cosmetic issue; you can buy a two (or 3) button mouse, and if you're on a laptop and don't have a mouse plugged in it's just as easly to hold down the Splat key and click to get your right clicks. Still, I agree that if they're going to do things like offering X11 bundled with the OS they should get a clue and at least make an option to get your laptop with 3 buttons underneath the touchpad.)
Not to mention that coding a game for the heck of it doesn't offer the same rewards that working on a utility does. If I build a web browser, my knowledge of the internal workings of the software doesn't hurt my ability to use and enjoy the software. On a (large) game, though, I already know the solutions to all the puzzles, and the path through the game, and everything. It's the mother of all spoilers. This removes one of the fundamental things that open source depends on - that folks will stick with a project for a long time because they benefit directly from the success of that project. This incentive can even work for small to medium-sized puzzle or strategy games with a random element, like Tetris, because there are no spoilers, anyway. But big commercial games involve lots of puzzles and surprises, lots and lots of playtesting for balance, and a lot of input from level designers, artists, etc.
The latter group is composed of people who are computer savvy, but not necessarily hackers. These people are already in short supply in the open source community (documentation, anyone?). As for the programmers, the spoiler factor plus the amount of time you spend refining combines to make it really hard for them to keep their interest up enough to stick it out for the long haul.
After all, a quick peek through Freshmeat suggests the problem isn't the number of ambitious game projects that get started, it's the number of ambitious game projects that are completed.
If we can get our hands on enough documents from a given culture it gets easier to figure these things out. If I recall right, we know that the Golden Age Greeks didn't really believe any of their mythology, even if they did believe in their gods, which is what you'd expect from such a scientifically-minded culture. Sort of like how most modern-day Christians don't really think that Hell is a physical place in the way it is described in the Bible and would be pretty skeptical if the evening news were to claim that a man was enervated by a haircut.
Given that the ancient Engyptions of that time period believed that they needed to have all the crap they were buried with in the afterlife, and that mantaining the sanctity of the tomb was necessary for them to be able to exist in the next life, I'd say that, assuming that they actually believed the above, an ancient Egyptian king's interest in millenia of fame would stop short of anything that would ruin his afterlife.
Seriously. My big fear is, how sturdy is that stand? I raise this fear because at work every single one of our Apple flat panel displays is now held up by velcroing the feet to the desk and leaning the monitor against something - the stands all snapped off.
Slashdot Mirror
Because Infinium believes unwaveringly in naive consumers. They've based an entire business model on their existence.
That pixel! I want to look at THAT PIXEL!
It was a hardware device that allowed you to do realtime video editing. I'm not sure of all the features, but our system allowed you to do realtime fades between two video streams. The software integrated well with Lightwave 3D, so you could also insert 3D objects and animations into a video stream on the fly.
At the time, an Amiga was the only way to go due to some hardware issue. I think it was that there was some sort of issue with the clocking of a TV signal that was much more difficult to solve on PCs and Macs than it was on Amigas.
Anyway, Amigas did the job so well that the Preview channel supposedly ran on nothing but aging Amiga 2000s with Toaster cards up until when they were bought out by TV Guide.
How often do you hear someone of one party praise someone of another party? Not often.
John McCain. Most everyone I know loves John McCain, even the staunch Democrats (like myself).
Still, I have to agree that the current political climate makes it damn hard for a politican to get away with sticking with his convictions and speaking his mind rather than rolling over and doing what is demanded by party and fashion. (McCain is another great example of this.)
. The Senate was not meant to be a House of Lords - it was created in order to give small states an equal standing with larger states, while at the same time allowing larger states to have more representation in the House.
Having an appointed Senate would have no effect on this. The argument over whether or not the US Senate should be appointed by state legislature or appointed by popular vote is really more about whether you lean more towards a pure democracy or a more republican system of government.
Which then boils down to whether you prefer to call it 'popular vote' or 'mob rule.'
DNA by itself does not a creature make. You still have to have a cell to put that DNA in, and that cell has to be able to repsond properly to the protiens that that are transcribed from that DNA, and also be able to produce the proper chemical signals to cause the correct parts of that DNA to be transcribed at the right time.
Until bringing back the Dodo and the Passenger Pigeon becomes feasible, I fail to see how sending DNA from every animal to the moon is any better a way to spend research money than sending a box full of the covers to every O'Reilly book ever publshed tot he moon.
Ah, Video Toaster. That was a fun toy back in the day.
Used to work with it on an old Amiga 2000 that would build up enough static electricity in the keyboard to make a loud snap and make your hand go numb when you first touched it.
I'm tired of everyone assuming that the only people who could possibly consider supporting Nader would vote Democrat were Nader not around.
In 2000, exit polls showed his consituency being a little over one quarter people who would have voted for Gore, a little under one quarter people who would have voted for Bush, and half people who wouldn't have voted.
Fudge the numbers to account for the fudge factor all you want, that still doesn't show Nader's constituency as being nothing but leftists and Democrats. But then again, "every fifteenth vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" just doesn't have the same bite.
And then you throw in the electoral college. A lot of people (myself included) lived in partisan states and voted for Nader with complete confidence in the knowledge that our lack of a vote for {insert name of other canditate we would (or would not) have voted for's name here} wasn't going to change who got the votes from our state.
Of course, "Every fifteenth vote for Nader is a vote for Bush, but only if you come from one of 10 states. Otherwise, it's really not such a big deal." really doesn't have the same bite.
It's true, Perot probably did swing the 1992 election. But as close as the 2000 election was, it's still a lot harder to say that about Nader.
On the other hand, getting rid of the electoral college would be a hit to the third party camp, because right now the bread and butter of third parties seems to be people who live in strongly partisan states who know their vote isn't going to come close to mattering on the Big Vote, and so choose to use it to help a third party get recognition.
Yeah, and people who think a dictatorial police state can possibly be communists are dorks, too. Whatever. Sob sob.
A lot of political words had one definition xxx decades ago, and a different one now. Fascist is one of those words.
I hear liberitarians' fortunes are among the oldest and largest in the country, too.
Maybe when I, too, can cast my ballot while dining on caviar and fine wine from within my ivory tower, far from the plebian masses and the need to care about them.
But, like most Americans, I live close to the social safety net. Close enough to be glad it's there. Especially with the economy in the shakes it's been in.
I think I'll 'waste my vote' on a party that agrees that I shouldn't have to live in a cardboard box.
Nader is running independent. The Green Party wouldn't support him this year.
So even if he does get 5% of the vote, that isn't going to do anything for anybody, unless that somebody is Ralph Nader's ego.
So yeah, find someone else to vote for if you're interested in a third party.
It's fascist to make arguments that deny people the right to vote. And I do think it's horrible to keep felons from voting. It's an amazingly crafty way to give legislators a little power to politically marginalize groups by tweaking the classifications of various crimes a bit. (cue classic story about tweaking the "intent to sell" mass for one drug in one direction and another drug in another direction)
But arguing that someone shouldn't vote (as in they should not of their own accord, not that they should not be allowed to) isn't fascist. I'll defend the right of a racist organization to stand on street corners handing out pamphlets, but I also think they're a bunch of worthless fuckwads and wouldn't really be saddened if they got knocked off that street corner in a freak bus accident. There is no conflict there - free speech is all about being adult enough to accept the idea that people aren't always going to say things that you like.
Same for voting. I believe that every adult should have the right to vote, including groups like felons and the developmentally disabled. I also believe that there are some people who vote in a manner that is making a travesty of democracy, and would be much happier if these people a) shaped up or b) stopped voting. It angers me that people will vote for the most popular candidate just because he's the most popular candidate, or that people will just pick random names in local races where they don't even know who the candidates are. Hell, even people who vote based on what CNN, Fox, NPR (yes, NPR), et al have to say about the candidate piss me off - they're doing the electoral equivalent of trial by combat. I hold these opinions beause I strongly believe in the basic precepts upon which the idea of liberal government (Meaning democracies and republics, not donkeys running congress.) is founded, and it upsets me to see people simultaneously take their vote for granted and make a mockery of it in one careless act.
But for all that, I don't think that anyone should be denied their vote. Denying a vote is a far greater affront to democracy than squandering one. And it pisses me off more than squandering votes.
So yeah, all I'm saying is there are a lot of nuances. You gotta watch out for the nuances. The word 'fascist' has been diluted enough as it is.
I'm not sure if you can really get a good idea of how self-maintaining Wikipedia is from this experiment. It seems to me that Wikipedia is mostly used by geeks, so the five entries he edited aren't ones that I would think would be read as often, as, say, an article on two's compliment numbers. Who's to say that some of these pages were even viewed by more than one or two people in the time he allowed for them to be fixed?
With that in mind, I'd rather seen an experiment that tries to determine how many times a page is viewed before it gets altered. I bet if one of the edits he had made were to introduce some sort of error into the database normalization page's explanation of third normal form, it would be a lot more likely to be noticed within two days.
Stil, shame on anyone who takes any encyclopedia or other reference book as unquestionable authority. Any collection of information that dense is going to be full of errors like made-up words and the like.
I used to use StarOffice as one of my web browsers.
If you went with the first answer rather than giving respondents two chances, I'd say you would have had a lot more that answered, "I dunno, what's a browser", and another 30% that answered, "Windows."
. . .as this new trend I've seen of people driving and text messaging at the same time.
I'll grant you, anything more than the basic "dump files into a CD" type of burning is not nearly so intuitive. (And not anywhere in the documentation, because Apple's help files are just so *good*), but there is an article on how to do it at MacDevCenter
m acosxhints.html
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/06/03/
I think what you meant to say is that MS is known for making an interface that's almost usable to the masses.
I agree that Windows is more usable than Linux, but next-to-worst can still be pretty bad. And Windows is Bad. And there are several better examples out there. There are even a few Good examples out there.
Assuming the goal is to be good (or even mediocre) and not bad, trying to copy Windows (here I'm talking about how it acts, not how it looks.) is totally the wrong way to go about it.
Seriously. Apple is the only company that even comes close to getting drag and drop right. This tends to cause a problem with Windows users I've trained because they are used to having to have a specialized app or process for doing everything, so they do things like assume they need to go buy Roxio Toast because they don't have any CD burning software. It never occurs to them to try just dragging some files into the CD. A key idea in working with MacOS, especially the Finder, is that they try hard to maintain the illusion that something's representation in the GUI is in fact the thing itself. Hence, you add files to a CD by adding those files to the CD.
Need to e-mail someone's address book info to a co-worker, but you don't have your mail app open? Try dragging that person's name from your address book to the Mail app icon in the dock. Kinda cool how it automagically opens mail and starts a blank e-mail with a vcard containing the contact's info already in there as an attatchment. If your coworker has a Mac, he/she can just drag that attatchment's icon straight from Mail to the Address Book - no need to save it first. Similarly, you can IM an image you see on the Web to a friend by just dragging that image from your web browser to iChat.
Granted, a lot of this Drag and Drop coolness has become a bit bastardized on OS X, but it's still mostly there and I'd say it's the single largest difference between Windows and OS X.
(That one button mouse thing is mostly a cosmetic issue; you can buy a two (or 3) button mouse, and if you're on a laptop and don't have a mouse plugged in it's just as easly to hold down the Splat key and click to get your right clicks. Still, I agree that if they're going to do things like offering X11 bundled with the OS they should get a clue and at least make an option to get your laptop with 3 buttons underneath the touchpad.)
Not to mention that coding a game for the heck of it doesn't offer the same rewards that working on a utility does. If I build a web browser, my knowledge of the internal workings of the software doesn't hurt my ability to use and enjoy the software.
On a (large) game, though, I already know the solutions to all the puzzles, and the path through the game, and everything. It's the mother of all spoilers. This removes one of the fundamental things that open source depends on - that folks will stick with a project for a long time because they benefit directly from the success of that project.
This incentive can even work for small to medium-sized puzzle or strategy games with a random element, like Tetris, because there are no spoilers, anyway. But big commercial games involve lots of puzzles and surprises, lots and lots of playtesting for balance, and a lot of input from level designers, artists, etc.
The latter group is composed of people who are computer savvy, but not necessarily hackers. These people are already in short supply in the open source community (documentation, anyone?). As for the programmers, the spoiler factor plus the amount of time you spend refining combines to make it really hard for them to keep their interest up enough to stick it out for the long haul.
After all, a quick peek through Freshmeat suggests the problem isn't the number of ambitious game projects that get started, it's the number of ambitious game projects that are completed.
If we can get our hands on enough documents from a given culture it gets easier to figure these things out. If I recall right, we know that the Golden Age Greeks didn't really believe any of their mythology, even if they did believe in their gods, which is what you'd expect from such a scientifically-minded culture. Sort of like how most modern-day Christians don't really think that Hell is a physical place in the way it is described in the Bible and would be pretty skeptical if the evening news were to claim that a man was enervated by a haircut.
Given that the ancient Engyptions of that time period believed that they needed to have all the crap they were buried with in the afterlife, and that mantaining the sanctity of the tomb was necessary for them to be able to exist in the next life, I'd say that, assuming that they actually believed the above, an ancient Egyptian king's interest in millenia of fame would stop short of anything that would ruin his afterlife.
Seriously. My big fear is, how sturdy is that stand? I raise this fear because at work every single one of our Apple flat panel displays is now held up by velcroing the feet to the desk and leaning the monitor against something - the stands all snapped off.
Cheaper. More effective.