not developed far enough mentally to be truly capable of abstract thought Since when is the ability to think abstractly is a prerequisite for having sex? With all my respect, my mom is not truly capable of abstract thought. Do you think all adults can understand long-term consequences of sex? Let me tell you what, I couldn't fully do it when I was 21. Do you think I was fully prepared to deal with the emotional dimension? Don't get me started on that.
It's all a bunch of crap, you are just trying to force your vision of childhood innocence on kids, pretending that adults are somehow all-knowing and all-powerful. This is simply nonsense and age discrimination. Many children are as capable of making informed decision as adults and many adults are just as uncapable of it as 3-month infants.
Of course, it's legal. Some people don't realise the world != the US. Laws are different in different countries. In the US you have a legal right to record a cover version of a song for a fixed fee. In Russia you have a legal right to get a cheap license from the Russian "RIAA" for Internet distribution.
Allofmp3 and the hordes of its clones are perfectly legal. All have excellent selection, all have cheap music, all have English versions of their sites, all support MP3 format (many support OGG, FLAC and uncompressed CDs). Some charge per song, some charge per Mb. And all of them place the customer first.
Check out this fascinating thread. Many eMule users "care" about what files they share and so support the "push" market model by determining the supply. You won't find many people who would proudly say "I shared "Spiderman 2" so that it spread better", but many would enjoy sharing rare, old and niche files. Because of this the eDonkey network is a much better library, but a worse content releasing system.
It's the flash crowd effect that was described in The Register's review covered on Slashdot earlier. The feature means that each file is shared as if it was the most important thing in the world.:) And, of course, only the select few can publish.torrents and files die relatively soon (between weeks and months).
eDonkey2000, on the other hand, is tuned for long-term sharing. People are not "encouraged" by the application to stop sharing (implying they start sharing new files), so in addition to people downloading the latest blockbusters you have people downloading 3-year and 30-year old films (or music, books, etc.). There is no "focusing", that's why it is slow. Instead of BitTorrent's "share more of this file with other people in the swarm, get more of it very soon" you have queue-based downloading and credit system that were designed to encourage long-term sharing and downloading of rare files.
It should be possible to modify the ed2k protocol/clients for better release distribution, adding some sort of swarming, but it doesn't seem to currently be a priority.
There are hi-tech solutions as well, that might be preferable to geeks.:) For example, voice recognition can easily replace keyboard for most of the navigational tasks (scrolling, etc.) and some of the typing. One can also use a tablet with handwriting recognition instead of typing. A wearable pointing device can replace the mouse. Less typing and clicking, less reasons to get carpal tunnel syndrome.
May be we can even go as far as saying that spellcheck is only good enough to compensate for typing errors.:) You would never write "never" as "nveer" when writing it.
You're right, I was too harsh. But while what you are saying is indeed a clear advantage of BT, it's very different from what the GP was saying. BT has the flash crowd effect, where smart uploading allows much faster distribution of new files - "oversaturating" the network with the file. eDonkey (and eMule) are less effective at this. But it should be noted that 200-600 Mb files are still released on eDonkey quite well. But to say that it wasn't possible to release a file on other networks is simply not true. If a file is popular, it spreads anywhere, be it BitTorrent or KaZaA.
The ability to create your own 'torrents' was present in pretty fucking much every P2P application. BitTorrent was the only example of retarded programming by that idiot Cohen, which doesn't have this ability.
To release a file in KaZaA, eDonkey, DC, WinMX, SoulSeek, even original Napster, you just include the folder in the list of shared folders. Most applications offer to search your disk and automatically share media files.
This ability will no more set this service apart than the ability to maximize and minimize the application window. Next level of P2P my ass! What a moron.
I don't know. My sister plays Sims 2 quite a lot (and used to play Sims with various expansions) and she also regularly watches some crappy (aren't they all?) Russian reality show. If she lived in the US she would probably be the target audience.
The point of using an existing brand, of course, is to slightly reduce the risk. It is believed that a show based on existing IP has more chances to succeed than a totally new idea. But most of the IP doesn't really lend itself to a reality show. There aren't many popular books that can be turned into a reality show, there aren't many movies, and I guess it's just as bad with music. Sims 2 just happens to be a reality show itself. It seems absolutely logical to EA executives that you can probably exploit this by making a "real" reality-show. It isn't necessarily about art of videogames, about exploring the possibilities, it's about using a household name to promote another entertainment product. Happens all the time. We must be grateful to EA, though, that they are willing to experiment a bit and suggest innovative ideas for interactive entertainment (even though one may abhor their ideas). Innovation is good.
Thanks for the link. If I decide to switch to Macs for my desktop needs, those would be nice. But as long as I am sticking with the PC I'd rather not have anything other than 4:3, as I suspect most games would not appreciate 1680x1050 resolution all that much.
And of course, it would feel a bit like downgrading switching from 2048x1536 on a CRT to something with 1.7 times less pixels and 3 times the price.
And, of course, this doesn't answer the question of why among ~100 different models of sub-$1000 LCD displays at least 95 would be 1280x1024 ones. Suddenly a large chunk of displays have a new aspect ration and there seems to be no explanation at all. It really looks like a revolution has happened, but noone bothered to tell me about it.:)
I have two questions that I couldn't find answers for, despite intensive googling.
1) Why larger (17"-19") LCDs always have 5:4 aspect ratio, as opposed to more conventional 4:3 that most CRT and most 15" LCD displays have? What is the reason - is it easier to produce, is there particular demand for more squarish displays, do they look better on a desk?
2) Why the highest resolution you can realistically get is 1280x1024 or 1024x768 (uless you pay $5000+)? Why are there almost no displays with 1600x1200 or 1440x1050 resolution, while such resolution is commonplace on laptops. Is there no demand for higher res desktop LCD displays? Did someone decided that people don't need that resolution? Is the demand for hi-res LCD panels from notebook manufacturers so high that there are no panels left for stand-alone displays?
Ember has some nice ideas and an a few interesting approaches to the interface, but it's not in a usable state right now. There are some completely unacceptable things in a viewer, such as
sound effects that you can't turn off
a toolbar in the fullscreen mode that you can't turn off
no image scrolling in fullscreen mode
no keyboard shortcut for up level in the browser
it's fucking slow
almost no extra options in the free version
no downloadable demo of the full version
It's not even a contender for a title of good image viewer.
Good points. I'd add that a rocket is a rocket (looks like a rocket) because it's the most functional form for using propulsion. Since you need a lot of propellant/fuel to launch into orbit, you need to store it somewhere. And since that propellant/fuel is usually much heavier/larger than the payload, the form of the vehicle is determined by the need to store the fuel. And what better way to do it than with a huge cylinder? Add a cylindrical (since it's going to fly through air for some time) capsule for the payload and you have a traditionally looking rocket. Adding wings, while sexing up the craft, doesn't really help something which flights straight up through the air and after that basically flies in vacuum.
You'll have to settle for free as in "stolen TV set".:) There are no great viewers, but there are some decent ones.
First, there is very little innovation. Most free viewers are extremely simple (folder tree, filelist/thumbnails and the image) and so are useless to anyone with more than a few directories of pictures. I remember when I had a 286 I only had a few tens of GIF photos that I got through floppynet and which were mainly intended to showcase the brilliant quality of the EGA display.:) For those times a simple viewer such as PV or QPV were ok.
But if you have a lot of images, which includes personal photos (different categories, such as your own ones which you need organised, those of your relatives that you don't care about, random photos, such as 50 images of something/someone that were taken simply because with a digital camera you can, etc.), porn, funny pics, useful pics, images for your software, websites, etc., then you can't really settle with a useless simple viewer.
There are some decent ones, but each has its problems. I like CompuPic, because it has good smooth scaling when resizing images both up and down (even the latest ACDSee apparently uses nearest neighbour or similar for upscaling, which is ridiculous). ACDSee 7 has some nice features, but is very bloated and sometimes (but not always) excruciatingly slow. Then there is ACDSee 3, which you can still probably find at oldversion.com, which is great and very fast, but lacks too many features to compete with modern viewers. Still, it's the default viewer for me.
There are some other monstrosities, such as ThumbsPlus, but most big viewers have poorly designed interfaces, many kinks that they haven't yet worked out, less than stellar performance and sometimes bad stability (ThumbsPlus crashes a lot).
There is also IrfanView, which is reportedly rather powerful and is freeware, but it has extremely bad interface with separate windows used and this really gets annoying, especially when you need to start up the viewer often.
These were general purpose viewers - programs designed in the 1990s that were simply intended to view graphics files.
Today you may need more features, particularly when managing photo albums. The problem is, though, that Picasa is probably the best product, but it still sucks. I just uninstalled Picasa 2, because I couldn't stand the crappy changes to the satisfactory design of Picasa 1 (and most problems of Picasa 1 not being addressed at all).
There are some decent offerings from Ulead and Adobe - they have wide product lines, including software with overlapping capabilities - image viewing, creating slideshows, adjusting images, editing them, etc. Still, I can't say I was satisfied with the viewing and managing parts of their offerings.
BTW, one simple program that I have no complaints about is the innovative PicaView (there are similar ones today), which displays a thumbnail in the context menu for graphics files in explorer and can display the full size image. But it can only perform this one function, even though it does it well.
As for OSS, the last time I checked there wasn't anything worth speaking about on Windows (and on Linux too). Haven't personally tried the iPhotos, but I don't expect it to be perfect either. Better then Picasa and ACDSee - may be, but not as good a program as I would like to have.
While your are reading the article on open source biotech, read another article in Wired: The Cuban Biotech Revolution. A reported Castro's quote: "What's all this about patents? You're sounding crazy! We don't like patents, remember?"
Just another gentle reminder that Open Source is indeed communist at its heart and that the principles of open scientific research, libre software and communism are generally the same.
Another quote:
"It's like Castro said: They don't really like patents. They like medicine. Cuba's drug pipeline is most interesting for what it lacks: grand-slam moneymakers, cures for baldness or impotence or wrinkles. It's all cancer therapies, AIDS medications, and vaccines against tropical diseases."
It's about helping the people, not about raising venture capital or making it big on NASDAQ.
I just hate it when programs do things on their own. Especially when I tell them not to do it.
On install Picasa 2 asked whether I want to keep old database from Picasa or index my disk and find all pics. I chose the first option, but still found out later that Picasa 2 added My Documents folder (which I absolutely abhore and don't use for anything, so it only contains things like NFS2 save files and other crap that various retarded programs put there) and two partitions J: and K: that it has absolutely no business indexing. Surprisingly, the rest of the disks were left as they were (i.e. only some folders on F: were added).
Also, for some unknown reason they removed thumbnails from Picasa albums, which is stupid.
TBH, other programs had categories. ACDSee had (and has) categories, so that you can easily see all images that are located in C:\Oops and subfolders, D:\Lalala and subfolders, E:\New\More\Extra and subfolders, were made in 2003 and belong to categories A, B and F. Of course, ACDSee is a resource hog, slow as hell (with constant multi-second delays on routine operations such as selecting a photo) and has an unfriendly interface. There is only one feature there that I miss in other viewers - thumbnails on folders.
Still, Picasa (even Picasa 1) is great. As for the state of the art, for the last 20 years there was no compelling need for powerful data organising software, because there was little data on most consumer machines. Digital cameras became popular only a couple years ago.
I am not saying education is necessarily biased, but it would be natural if it was. Modern education developed through survival of most successful models, not by careful planning and consideration*. And for a very long time to be successful it needed to be effective at teaching boys. It wouldn't be surprising if some of the methods adopted would not be very effective with girls. Again, I am not a specialist in the pedagogy (though I used to teach a bit and did it quite well), so I can't say whether there actually are such methods in reality.
* - you need not look farther than at the evolution vs. creationism, at phonics vs. whole language and at sport spendings to realise that to be successful education doesn't need to be effective.
Well, there can be no proof without research and research in this field is verbotten.:) But it wouldn't surprise me if it was so. Our university education today is quite similar to how it was a century ago, when almost no women studied in universities. It would be natural that the education process was designed for men then. And when women finally got the right to attend the same schools, I bet nobody thought much about adapting the process to better suit unique needs of female students. Of course, a lot of changes happened gradually, but some basic principles still may give boys an advantage.
That, my friend, is the force of Stupidity. You see, while people of different races may posess different amounts of intelligence, stamina and buoyancy, they all posess equal amounts of stupidity. Which is, of course, infinite.
Slashdot Mirror
not developed far enough mentally to be truly capable of abstract thought
Since when is the ability to think abstractly is a prerequisite for having sex? With all my respect, my mom is not truly capable of abstract thought. Do you think all adults can understand long-term consequences of sex? Let me tell you what, I couldn't fully do it when I was 21. Do you think I was fully prepared to deal with the emotional dimension? Don't get me started on that.
It's all a bunch of crap, you are just trying to force your vision of childhood innocence on kids, pretending that adults are somehow all-knowing and all-powerful. This is simply nonsense and age discrimination. Many children are as capable of making informed decision as adults and many adults are just as uncapable of it as 3-month infants.
Of course, it's legal. Some people don't realise the world != the US. Laws are different in different countries. In the US you have a legal right to record a cover version of a song for a fixed fee. In Russia you have a legal right to get a cheap license from the Russian "RIAA" for Internet distribution.
Allofmp3 and the hordes of its clones are perfectly legal. All have excellent selection, all have cheap music, all have English versions of their sites, all support MP3 format (many support OGG, FLAC and uncompressed CDs). Some charge per song, some charge per Mb. And all of them place the customer first.
Check out this fascinating thread. Many eMule users "care" about what files they share and so support the "push" market model by determining the supply. You won't find many people who would proudly say "I shared "Spiderman 2" so that it spread better", but many would enjoy sharing rare, old and niche files. Because of this the eDonkey network is a much better library, but a worse content releasing system.
It's the flash crowd effect that was described in The Register's review covered on Slashdot earlier. The feature means that each file is shared as if it was the most important thing in the world. :) And, of course, only the select few can publish .torrents and files die relatively soon (between weeks and months).
eDonkey2000, on the other hand, is tuned for long-term sharing. People are not "encouraged" by the application to stop sharing (implying they start sharing new files), so in addition to people downloading the latest blockbusters you have people downloading 3-year and 30-year old films (or music, books, etc.). There is no "focusing", that's why it is slow. Instead of BitTorrent's "share more of this file with other people in the swarm, get more of it very soon" you have queue-based downloading and credit system that were designed to encourage long-term sharing and downloading of rare files.
It should be possible to modify the ed2k protocol/clients for better release distribution, adding some sort of swarming, but it doesn't seem to currently be a priority.
Nope. In fact it is well-known that nVidia has a huge department optimising its drivers for current games.
There are hi-tech solutions as well, that might be preferable to geeks. :) For example, voice recognition can easily replace keyboard for most of the navigational tasks (scrolling, etc.) and some of the typing. One can also use a tablet with handwriting recognition instead of typing. A wearable pointing device can replace the mouse. Less typing and clicking, less reasons to get carpal tunnel syndrome.
May be we can even go as far as saying that spellcheck is only good enough to compensate for typing errors. :) You would never write "never" as "nveer" when writing it.
You're right, I was too harsh. But while what you are saying is indeed a clear advantage of BT, it's very different from what the GP was saying. BT has the flash crowd effect, where smart uploading allows much faster distribution of new files - "oversaturating" the network with the file. eDonkey (and eMule) are less effective at this. But it should be noted that 200-600 Mb files are still released on eDonkey quite well. But to say that it wasn't possible to release a file on other networks is simply not true. If a file is popular, it spreads anywhere, be it BitTorrent or KaZaA.
The ability to create your own 'torrents' was present in pretty fucking much every P2P application. BitTorrent was the only example of retarded programming by that idiot Cohen, which doesn't have this ability.
To release a file in KaZaA, eDonkey, DC, WinMX, SoulSeek, even original Napster, you just include the folder in the list of shared folders. Most applications offer to search your disk and automatically share media files.
This ability will no more set this service apart than the ability to maximize and minimize the application window. Next level of P2P my ass! What a moron.
Unles you are illitearte, msot misspellings dont make sense, thats' why their usually catched by spell checkers quiet well.
P.S. As you can see, there are exceptions to that, but it's not on the scale your joke implied.
They all have physical 5:4 aspect ratio. Like this one. So their pixels are square.
I don't know. My sister plays Sims 2 quite a lot (and used to play Sims with various expansions) and she also regularly watches some crappy (aren't they all?) Russian reality show. If she lived in the US she would probably be the target audience.
The point of using an existing brand, of course, is to slightly reduce the risk. It is believed that a show based on existing IP has more chances to succeed than a totally new idea. But most of the IP doesn't really lend itself to a reality show. There aren't many popular books that can be turned into a reality show, there aren't many movies, and I guess it's just as bad with music. Sims 2 just happens to be a reality show itself. It seems absolutely logical to EA executives that you can probably exploit this by making a "real" reality-show. It isn't necessarily about art of videogames, about exploring the possibilities, it's about using a household name to promote another entertainment product. Happens all the time. We must be grateful to EA, though, that they are willing to experiment a bit and suggest innovative ideas for interactive entertainment (even though one may abhor their ideas). Innovation is good.
Thanks for the link. If I decide to switch to Macs for my desktop needs, those would be nice. But as long as I am sticking with the PC I'd rather not have anything other than 4:3, as I suspect most games would not appreciate 1680x1050 resolution all that much.
:)
And of course, it would feel a bit like downgrading switching from 2048x1536 on a CRT to something with 1.7 times less pixels and 3 times the price.
And, of course, this doesn't answer the question of why among ~100 different models of sub-$1000 LCD displays at least 95 would be 1280x1024 ones. Suddenly a large chunk of displays have a new aspect ration and there seems to be no explanation at all. It really looks like a revolution has happened, but noone bothered to tell me about it.
I have two questions that I couldn't find answers for, despite intensive googling.
1) Why larger (17"-19") LCDs always have 5:4 aspect ratio, as opposed to more conventional 4:3 that most CRT and most 15" LCD displays have? What is the reason - is it easier to produce, is there particular demand for more squarish displays, do they look better on a desk?
2) Why the highest resolution you can realistically get is 1280x1024 or 1024x768 (uless you pay $5000+)? Why are there almost no displays with 1600x1200 or 1440x1050 resolution, while such resolution is commonplace on laptops. Is there no demand for higher res desktop LCD displays? Did someone decided that people don't need that resolution? Is the demand for hi-res LCD panels from notebook manufacturers so high that there are no panels left for stand-alone displays?
- sound effects that you can't turn off
- a toolbar in the fullscreen mode that you can't turn off
- no image scrolling in fullscreen mode
- no keyboard shortcut for up level in the browser
- it's fucking slow
- almost no extra options in the free version
- no downloadable demo of the full version
It's not even a contender for a title of good image viewer.Good points. I'd add that a rocket is a rocket (looks like a rocket) because it's the most functional form for using propulsion. Since you need a lot of propellant/fuel to launch into orbit, you need to store it somewhere. And since that propellant/fuel is usually much heavier/larger than the payload, the form of the vehicle is determined by the need to store the fuel. And what better way to do it than with a huge cylinder? Add a cylindrical (since it's going to fly through air for some time) capsule for the payload and you have a traditionally looking rocket. Adding wings, while sexing up the craft, doesn't really help something which flights straight up through the air and after that basically flies in vacuum.
You'll have to settle for free as in "stolen TV set". :) There are no great viewers, but there are some decent ones.
:) For those times a simple viewer such as PV or QPV were ok.
First, there is very little innovation. Most free viewers are extremely simple (folder tree, filelist/thumbnails and the image) and so are useless to anyone with more than a few directories of pictures. I remember when I had a 286 I only had a few tens of GIF photos that I got through floppynet and which were mainly intended to showcase the brilliant quality of the EGA display.
But if you have a lot of images, which includes personal photos (different categories, such as your own ones which you need organised, those of your relatives that you don't care about, random photos, such as 50 images of something/someone that were taken simply because with a digital camera you can, etc.), porn, funny pics, useful pics, images for your software, websites, etc., then you can't really settle with a useless simple viewer.
There are some decent ones, but each has its problems. I like CompuPic, because it has good smooth scaling when resizing images both up and down (even the latest ACDSee apparently uses nearest neighbour or similar for upscaling, which is ridiculous). ACDSee 7 has some nice features, but is very bloated and sometimes (but not always) excruciatingly slow. Then there is ACDSee 3, which you can still probably find at oldversion.com, which is great and very fast, but lacks too many features to compete with modern viewers. Still, it's the default viewer for me.
There are some other monstrosities, such as ThumbsPlus, but most big viewers have poorly designed interfaces, many kinks that they haven't yet worked out, less than stellar performance and sometimes bad stability (ThumbsPlus crashes a lot).
There is also IrfanView, which is reportedly rather powerful and is freeware, but it has extremely bad interface with separate windows used and this really gets annoying, especially when you need to start up the viewer often.
These were general purpose viewers - programs designed in the 1990s that were simply intended to view graphics files.
Today you may need more features, particularly when managing photo albums. The problem is, though, that Picasa is probably the best product, but it still sucks. I just uninstalled Picasa 2, because I couldn't stand the crappy changes to the satisfactory design of Picasa 1 (and most problems of Picasa 1 not being addressed at all).
There are some decent offerings from Ulead and Adobe - they have wide product lines, including software with overlapping capabilities - image viewing, creating slideshows, adjusting images, editing them, etc. Still, I can't say I was satisfied with the viewing and managing parts of their offerings.
BTW, one simple program that I have no complaints about is the innovative PicaView (there are similar ones today), which displays a thumbnail in the context menu for graphics files in explorer and can display the full size image. But it can only perform this one function, even though it does it well.
As for OSS, the last time I checked there wasn't anything worth speaking about on Windows (and on Linux too). Haven't personally tried the iPhotos, but I don't expect it to be perfect either. Better then Picasa and ACDSee - may be, but not as good a program as I would like to have.
Just another gentle reminder that Open Source is indeed communist at its heart and that the principles of open scientific research, libre software and communism are generally the same.
Another quote:
It's about helping the people, not about raising venture capital or making it big on NASDAQ.
I just hate it when programs do things on their own. Especially when I tell them not to do it.
On install Picasa 2 asked whether I want to keep old database from Picasa or index my disk and find all pics. I chose the first option, but still found out later that Picasa 2 added My Documents folder (which I absolutely abhore and don't use for anything, so it only contains things like NFS2 save files and other crap that various retarded programs put there) and two partitions J: and K: that it has absolutely no business indexing. Surprisingly, the rest of the disks were left as they were (i.e. only some folders on F: were added).
Also, for some unknown reason they removed thumbnails from Picasa albums, which is stupid.
TBH, other programs had categories. ACDSee had (and has) categories, so that you can easily see all images that are located in C:\Oops and subfolders, D:\Lalala and subfolders, E:\New\More\Extra and subfolders, were made in 2003 and belong to categories A, B and F. Of course, ACDSee is a resource hog, slow as hell (with constant multi-second delays on routine operations such as selecting a photo) and has an unfriendly interface. There is only one feature there that I miss in other viewers - thumbnails on folders.
Still, Picasa (even Picasa 1) is great. As for the state of the art, for the last 20 years there was no compelling need for powerful data organising software, because there was little data on most consumer machines. Digital cameras became popular only a couple years ago.
I am not saying education is necessarily biased, but it would be natural if it was. Modern education developed through survival of most successful models, not by careful planning and consideration*. And for a very long time to be successful it needed to be effective at teaching boys. It wouldn't be surprising if some of the methods adopted would not be very effective with girls. Again, I am not a specialist in the pedagogy (though I used to teach a bit and did it quite well), so I can't say whether there actually are such methods in reality.
* - you need not look farther than at the evolution vs. creationism, at phonics vs. whole language and at sport spendings to realise that to be successful education doesn't need to be effective.
Well, there can be no proof without research and research in this field is verbotten. :) But it wouldn't surprise me if it was so. Our university education today is quite similar to how it was a century ago, when almost no women studied in universities. It would be natural that the education process was designed for men then. And when women finally got the right to attend the same schools, I bet nobody thought much about adapting the process to better suit unique needs of female students. Of course, a lot of changes happened gradually, but some basic principles still may give boys an advantage.
Why everyone is so negative? Personally I think these are rather nice photos.
But I don't think a prototype Mac would be in a room used for relaxed publicity photos.
That, my friend, is the force of Stupidity. You see, while people of different races may posess different amounts of intelligence, stamina and buoyancy, they all posess equal amounts of stupidity. Which is, of course, infinite.