Maybe, but I still think this comment, at least, bears very troll-like hallmarks. Not the least of which is the near orthogonally stereotypical posture of the comment. Phrases that are obviously intended to spike the trolled into flame wars, like "Thank God I come from somewhere where they value the diff.." give it away.
Frauduleant chargebacks are a major problem
on
A Matter Of Trust?
·
· Score: 1
Having run a medium size e-commerce hardware wholesaler for some time a while back, I can tell you that at least for international orders, chargebacks are a major issue. Twice our company was burned when foreign "entities" (can't really call them companies in these cases) basically ordered a bunch of hardware from us, on Visa or JCB, and then upon receiving the shipment immediately charged back the order to their card company, claiming they never received the order.
Yes, this is fraud, and yes the credit card companies claimed to be "looking into the matter." As did the shipping companies. But these groups have little vested interest in resolving the problem since they already got their money back from us. We were left holding the bag.
Needless to say, subsequently we either never bothered with international orders from companies we didn't already recognize, or else we made them send a bank draft, or verify their shipping sizteen ways to sunday before dealing with them. Sorry, but here again was a case of the irresponsibility of the few infringing upon the freedom of the many.
The Deepvideo monitor's resolution is 800x600x2, measured in pixels. The "2" doesn't refer to color depth, as your post seems to imply. And anyway, 2 bitplanes of color depth would yield 4 colors, not monochrome. It's 2 *panels* deep, each panel handling, presumably, 24 bits color space. Thus the "3d" effect. Why this is cool is beyond me, seems like its just doing in hardware (layering) what can easily be accomplished in software, or at mixdown just prior to AD converter level on the video interface.
The barn door example you give reminds me of something from Marvin Gardner on supertasks. It is interseting since while an instantaneously closing barn door is not a practical concept, an instantaneous switch (quantum well) is. So:
Suppose you have a light which state is determined by a switch that takes zero time to turn on or off, timed in a halving geometric progression. Thus, the lamp turns on for one second, then off for the next 1/2 second, then on for the next 1/4 second, then off for the next 1/8th and so on. At the end of two seconds, is the lamp on or off?
It doesnt say so in the article, but that miata kit looks to be impersonating a "Dino" Ferrari, front engined, V6 car built from... Late 60's into early 70's. They were not too popular, but the kit does - remotely - resemble that particular model.
Now it's been a while since I've worked in this field directly, but one point that stands out by its not beind addressed is the issue of exposure latitude for digital CCDs vs. chemical film emulsion.
Yeah, resolution is important. That's an incremental technical issue. And quality lenses can be attached to the better digital cameras now. But exposure latitude (the ratio of complete black to complete white, you might say the "luminosity bandwidth") is what really "tells" your eyes if you are seeing a natural film photo or a digital capture.
In my eyes' experience (certain brands of) film excel at granting wide exposure latitude across the entire color spectrum, whereas CCDs are more cramped.
was a game called "Tunnel Runner" for the Atart 2600. Yes, the Atari 2600.
It featured a 3D maze you walked (or ran) through in first person perspective, a secondary automapping screen, and large, multiple monsters with differing attributes (slight differences mind you) that even made different levels of sound depending on their distance from the player.
It featured key-and-lock puzzles, location warp portals, and more. It was really well ahead of its time and pushed that system to its limits. You didnt fight the monsters though, yuo simply had to avoid being chased down dead ends by them.
Copyright was something like 1981 IIRC.
And, my spider sense tells me there was something similar for the old Vectrex machine that went back even earlier.
Well, I always knew I was preparing myself for some important post in life.
QK104: Quake Linguistics. Topics will include study and morphology of native Quake player dialects, including such colloquialisms as "BFG, Owned, Frag" and others. Prerequisites: Q103, "Bindings" and Q102, "The Zen of 1337"
It's too bad that the noisiest members of the Amiga community also tend to be those least in touch with market realities. Someone (Dave Haynie, I think) observed that choosing your favorite computer/OS falls somewhere between choosing a sports team to back and choosing a religion (or political party). All have their zealots. I'm suprised, though, that your opinions of what is essentially a specification set are mostly colored by fanatics. I was just asking if you saw design similarities to other systems by the same designer(s). A commentary on the communities surrounding them seems out of place.
John, you mentioned the Lynx as an example of a well designed platform for game programming. RJ Mical and Dave Needle were both engineers (principle, I think) on the Lynx design. They also did a lot of the design on the original Amiga. Now, this depends on your knowledge of Amiga hardware and OS design, but I was wondering if you noticed any consistencies in the way the Lynx and Amiga are laid out (HW or OS)? For that matter, do you see the signature of their (Mical, Needle) designs in the 3DO specification?
> I mean, after all, think about it: isn't it a little *too* coincidental that species generate evolutionary *beneficient* mutations, most of the time?
I'll just answer this with the following quote:
"...Thus a real scientist like Professor J.B.S. Haldane is at pains to point out that popular ideas of Evolution lay a wholly unjustified emphasis on those changes that have rendered creatured (by human standards) 'better' or more interesting. He adds: 'We are therefore inclined progress as the rule in evolution. Actually it is the exception. And for every case of it there are ten of degenration.'"
C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections, The Funeral of a Great Myth p.85
my (rather anecdotal) notes: JBS Haldane, along with two others, is considered one of the fathers of neo-darwinism. His major theoretical work was outlined in his book, "Causes of Evolution."
C.S. Lewis wrote a heck of a lot more than just the Narnia books (with which, among other fantasy writings, he had a hearty rivalry with his good friend and fellow Christian J.R.R. Tolkein). Christian Reflections, a compilation of short essays on various topics, is one of the best.
with their Flame of the Week contest. This is certainly a stunt designed to belittle their critics, and only the flames that are the most imbecilic and easiest to shoot down will ever be featured. Instead, take some time to write a polite note to any given analyst or editor of a financial magazine. Those are the people who will properly discredit LinuxOne and nullify their existence.
I wonder, Amber, what do the Taiwan papers say about this? I imagine the People's Daily (mainland paper) has *their* spin, do you read Taiwan's news at all? What are their thoughts?
Well, maybe not chump change. But the fact is, years ago, when I heard about these mega-spots for the suprebowl and their associated price tags, 7 figures were simply inconceivable amount of money to spen on anything, let alone a TV ad.. $1 million bucks (back then) for a commercial? Huh?
But today, with.com companies taking in venture funding in the range of $50 to $100 million a round, and having all of $2 million worth of real work to do, this kind of pricing must seem like a drop in the bucket. Especially when you consider how superbowl ads accomplish the dual tasks of getting them noticed, and also making internet use a more mainstream acceptable activity.
On a different note, My vote for the most useless ad goes to Netpliance, where in the beginning of the ad they talk about how you shouldn't need a computer to send e-mail, etc.. and end the ad with a picture of their "innovation" that makes this possible, which is, um... a computer. Albeit a weak, stripped down one.
It's not out for Linux (alas, nor will it likely ever be) but the game that I would vote for "Best Atmosphere" would be Thief: The Dark Project, from Looking Glass (dist. Eidos).
It's an FSP that is squarely un-FSP-like, in that the object is not to just run around and frag everything that twitches. It's a game that, if you let it, will give you the same feeling you get when you leave a really good movie - like you've been "somewhere else" for the last two (or eight or 12) hours. By "let it" I mean that you shouldn't rely on saving every 5 minutes, or immeidately look up the walkthroughs, or turn up the gamma to see better (it relies heavily on both shadows and sound as plot and gameplay devices) Play it in a dark room, alone.
I highly recommend it to any serious gamer, now all we need is Eidos to take Linux seriously...
Say, where do you get a copy of those guidelines? I'm curious to see what the FedGov thinks about usability in a scenario where you have basically all levels of intelligence/language ability/handicaps etc. to deal with.
They are the electronic ink guys, i.e. "paper" that can display like a screen based on using electrically sensitive chemicals as "ink." Similar concept to an LCD screen, except you can do it on paper.
This would simply be the most perfect strategic partner for him, especially as they are already in contact withthe kinds of money that would be interested in his project.
Looking at the list of the 27 root certifications in IE 5, i see that 21 of them are either held by Thawte or Verisign. Now, I've been a Verisign customer for a long time, and I like the fact that I can count on their root certificate being in 99% of browsers out there, but there was always a peace of mind that came with knowing I had Thawte to go to if i was ever dissatisfied. Well, no more.
Actually, the pieces do still fit together rather nicely.
OK this will be a little long, but I'm gonna spell out a little history for ya if you aren't already familiar with it.
Amiga Inc., prior to Jim Collas' (CEO) departure, was making all kinds of noise about the AmigaObjects modular layer or whatever. It was supposed to be a highly flexible and scalable distribution of Linux. Ultimately it was revealed by Gateway that their plans for Amiga had little to do with a desktop machine (to the ire of many an old Amigaphile) and a lot to do with so-called pervasive computing. "Amiga" was going to be a kind of brand name for the general software technology tying together a whole host of upcoming PDA's, wristwatch computers, car computers, set-top computers, game consoles, etc. Kind of like Bluetooth but in a more abstract and comprehensive OS sense rather than just a wireless protocol.
All the while there was this Transmeta / Amiga co-operation rumor, culminating with the Transmeta logo being featured at some big (heh) Amiga show in London. Naturally, the chiphead community (and especially the Amigans within it) being as optimistic as they are, the Transmeta chip was suspected to be a kind of smart FPGA or something, which was able to emulate the microcode of other CPU's in real time. This may still be true, but back then it seemed a little tenuous at best that a company as cutting edge as Transmeta, who could probably have their pick of partners, would choose a faded, orphaned, and probably cursed platform/brand as it's conveyance into the marketplace. When Amiga, Inc. clammed up, ejected or lost half of the celebrities in management, and summarily round-filed the Amiga desktop machine project, it looked like the naysayers were right: the rumored partnership was just that - a wishful rumor.
Fast forward to today. Turn out Transmeta has in fact been making a microprocessor (duh) and - what's this? - it's going to power portable computing devices. Hmmm... And a revolution in portable (or "ubiquitous/pervasive") computing is also exactly what Gateway had in mind for Amiga. It seems, in fact, that the two companies' business plans had been on a parallel course since the beginning.
Now Amiga *is* still in business, still has engineers, etc. on payroll, and is still planning on doing something , they are just a lot quieter about it now. Could it be that the rumors were too close to being true that they had to do something drastic (like get rid of - or make life difficult for - the too-friendly management staff)so as not to blow the cover (and likely get sued by) for partner Transmeta (and any other partners)?
Slashdot Mirror
I have now added The Guy I Almost Was to my bookmarks. Memetic replication successful.
ACKK! there I go again..
Maybe, but I still think this comment, at least, bears very troll-like hallmarks. Not the least of which is the near orthogonally stereotypical posture of the comment. Phrases that are obviously intended to spike the trolled into flame wars, like "Thank God I come from somewhere where they value the diff.." give it away.
And a well done one at that.
AMIGA
A Marketing Image Gone Awry
Yes, this is fraud, and yes the credit card companies claimed to be "looking into the matter." As did the shipping companies. But these groups have little vested interest in resolving the problem since they already got their money back from us. We were left holding the bag.
Needless to say, subsequently we either never bothered with international orders from companies we didn't already recognize, or else we made them send a bank draft, or verify their shipping sizteen ways to sunday before dealing with them. Sorry, but here again was a case of the irresponsibility of the few infringing upon the freedom of the many.
The Deepvideo monitor's resolution is 800x600x2, measured in pixels. The "2" doesn't refer to color depth, as your post seems to imply. And anyway, 2 bitplanes of color depth would yield 4 colors, not monochrome. It's 2 *panels* deep, each panel handling, presumably, 24 bits color space. Thus the "3d" effect. Why this is cool is beyond me, seems like its just doing in hardware (layering) what can easily be accomplished in software, or at mixdown just prior to AD converter level on the video interface.
It is interseting since while an instantaneously closing barn door is not a practical concept, an instantaneous switch (quantum well) is. So:
Suppose you have a light which state is determined by a switch that takes zero time to turn on or off, timed in a halving geometric progression. Thus, the lamp turns on for one second, then off for the next 1/2 second, then on for the next 1/4 second, then off for the next 1/8th and so on. At the end of two seconds, is the lamp on or off?
Napster has neatly proved that when information becomes free, information becomes worthless.
It doesnt say so in the article, but that miata kit looks to be impersonating a "Dino" Ferrari, front engined, V6 car built from... Late 60's into early 70's. They were not too popular, but the kit does - remotely - resemble that particular model.
Yeah, resolution is important. That's an incremental technical issue. And quality lenses can be attached to the better digital cameras now. But exposure latitude (the ratio of complete black to complete white, you might say the "luminosity bandwidth") is what really "tells" your eyes if you are seeing a natural film photo or a digital capture.
In my eyes' experience (certain brands of) film excel at granting wide exposure latitude across the entire color spectrum, whereas CCDs are more cramped.
It featured a 3D maze you walked (or ran) through in first person perspective, a secondary automapping screen, and large, multiple monsters with differing attributes (slight differences mind you) that even made different levels of sound depending on their distance from the player.
It featured key-and-lock puzzles, location warp portals, and more. It was really well ahead of its time and pushed that system to its limits. You didnt fight the monsters though, yuo simply had to avoid being chased down dead ends by them.
Copyright was something like 1981 IIRC.
And, my spider sense tells me there was something similar for the old Vectrex machine that went back even earlier.
for that department...
Well, I always knew I was preparing myself for some important post in life.
QK104: Quake Linguistics. Topics will include study and morphology of native Quake player dialects, including such colloquialisms as "BFG, Owned, Frag" and others. Prerequisites: Q103, "Bindings" and Q102, "The Zen of 1337"
for answering my actual question.
It's too bad that the noisiest members of the Amiga community also tend to be those least in touch with market realities. Someone (Dave Haynie, I think) observed that choosing your favorite computer/OS falls somewhere between choosing a sports team to back and choosing a religion (or political party). All have their zealots. I'm suprised, though, that your opinions of what is essentially a specification set are mostly colored by fanatics. I was just asking if you saw design similarities to other systems by the same designer(s). A commentary on the communities surrounding them seems out of place.
John, you mentioned the Lynx as an example of a well designed platform for game programming. RJ Mical and Dave Needle were both engineers (principle, I think) on the Lynx design. They also did a lot of the design on the original Amiga. Now, this depends on your knowledge of Amiga hardware and OS design, but I was wondering if you noticed any consistencies in the way the Lynx and Amiga are laid out (HW or OS)? For that matter, do you see the signature of their (Mical, Needle) designs in the 3DO specification?
> I mean, after all, think about it: isn't it a little *too* coincidental that species generate evolutionary *beneficient* mutations, most of the time?
I'll just answer this with the following quote:
"...Thus a real scientist like Professor J.B.S. Haldane is at pains to point out that popular ideas of Evolution lay a wholly unjustified emphasis on those changes that have rendered creatured (by human standards) 'better' or more interesting. He adds: 'We are therefore inclined progress as the rule in evolution. Actually it is the exception. And for every case of it there are ten of degenration.'"
C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections, The Funeral of a Great Myth p.85
my (rather anecdotal) notes: JBS Haldane, along with two others, is considered one of the fathers of neo-darwinism. His major theoretical work was outlined in his book, "Causes of Evolution."
C.S. Lewis wrote a heck of a lot more than just the Narnia books (with which, among other fantasy writings, he had a hearty rivalry with his good friend and fellow Christian J.R.R. Tolkein). Christian Reflections, a compilation of short essays on various topics, is one of the best.
with their Flame of the Week contest. This is certainly a stunt designed to belittle their critics, and only the flames that are the most imbecilic and easiest to shoot down will ever be featured.
Instead, take some time to write a polite note to any given analyst or editor of a financial magazine. Those are the people who will properly discredit LinuxOne and nullify their existence.
I wonder, Amber, what do the Taiwan papers say about this? I imagine the People's Daily (mainland paper) has *their* spin, do you read Taiwan's news at all? What are their thoughts?
Well, maybe not chump change. But the fact is, years ago, when I heard about these mega-spots for the suprebowl and their associated price tags, 7 figures were simply inconceivable amount of money to spen on anything, let alone a TV ad.. $1 million bucks (back then) for a commercial? Huh?
.com companies taking in venture funding in the range of $50 to $100 million a round, and having all of $2 million worth of real work to do, this kind of pricing must seem like a drop in the bucket. Especially when you consider how superbowl ads accomplish the dual tasks of getting them noticed, and also making internet use a more mainstream acceptable activity.
But today, with
On a different note, My vote for the most useless ad goes to Netpliance, where in the beginning of the ad they talk about how you shouldn't need a computer to send e-mail, etc.. and end the ad with a picture of their "innovation" that makes this possible, which is, um... a computer. Albeit a weak, stripped down one.
It's not out for Linux (alas, nor will it likely ever be) but the game that I would vote for "Best Atmosphere" would be Thief: The Dark Project, from Looking Glass (dist. Eidos).
It's an FSP that is squarely un-FSP-like, in that the object is not to just run around and frag everything that twitches. It's a game that, if you let it, will give you the same feeling you get when you leave a really good movie - like you've been "somewhere else" for the last two (or eight or 12) hours. By "let it" I mean that you shouldn't rely on saving every 5 minutes, or immeidately look up the walkthroughs, or turn up the gamma to see better (it relies heavily on both shadows and sound as plot and gameplay devices) Play it in a dark room, alone.
I highly recommend it to any serious gamer, now all we need is Eidos to take Linux seriously...
the one and only time this will ever be a *good* post..
Happy New Year All!
Say, where do you get a copy of those guidelines? I'm curious to see what the FedGov thinks about usability in a scenario where you have basically all levels of intelligence/language ability/handicaps etc. to deal with.
Here http://www.eink.com
They are the electronic ink guys, i.e. "paper" that can display like a screen based on using electrically sensitive chemicals as "ink." Similar concept to an LCD screen, except you can do it on paper.
This would simply be the most perfect strategic partner for him, especially as they are already in contact withthe kinds of money that would be interested in his project.
- The Count
Looking at the list of the 27 root certifications in IE 5, i see that 21 of them are either held by Thawte or Verisign. Now, I've been a Verisign customer for a long time, and I like the fact that I can count on their root certificate being in 99% of browsers out there, but there was always a peace of mind that came with knowing I had Thawte to go to if i was ever dissatisfied. Well, no more.
Yikes.
... doesn't seem so odd.
Actually, the pieces do still fit together rather nicely.
OK this will be a little long, but I'm gonna spell out a little history for ya if you aren't already familiar with it.
Amiga Inc., prior to Jim Collas' (CEO) departure, was making all kinds of noise about the AmigaObjects modular layer or whatever. It was supposed to be a highly flexible and scalable distribution of Linux. Ultimately it was revealed by Gateway that their plans for Amiga had little to do with a desktop machine (to the ire of many an old Amigaphile) and a lot to do with so-called pervasive computing. "Amiga" was going to be a kind of brand name for the general software technology tying together a whole host of upcoming PDA's, wristwatch computers, car computers, set-top computers, game consoles, etc. Kind of like Bluetooth but in a more abstract and comprehensive OS sense rather than just a wireless protocol.
All the while there was this Transmeta / Amiga co-operation rumor, culminating with the Transmeta logo being featured at some big (heh) Amiga show in London. Naturally, the chiphead community (and especially the Amigans within it) being as optimistic as they are, the Transmeta chip was suspected to be a kind of smart FPGA or something, which was able to emulate the microcode of other CPU's in real time. This may still be true, but back then it seemed a little tenuous at best that a company as cutting edge as Transmeta, who could probably have their pick of partners, would choose a faded, orphaned, and probably cursed platform/brand as it's conveyance into the marketplace. When Amiga, Inc. clammed up, ejected or lost half of the celebrities in management, and summarily round-filed the Amiga desktop machine project, it looked like the naysayers were right: the rumored partnership was just that - a wishful rumor.
Fast forward to today. Turn out Transmeta has in fact been making a microprocessor (duh) and - what's this? - it's going to power portable computing devices. Hmmm... And a revolution in portable (or "ubiquitous/pervasive") computing is also exactly what Gateway had in mind for Amiga.
It seems, in fact, that the two companies' business plans had been on a parallel course since the beginning.
Now Amiga *is* still in business, still has engineers, etc. on payroll, and is still planning on doing something , they are just a lot quieter about it now. Could it be that the rumors were too close to being true that they had to do something drastic (like get rid of - or make life difficult for - the too-friendly management staff)so as not to blow the cover (and likely get sued by) for partner Transmeta (and any other partners)?
Whadda *you* think?
- The Count