That's why I never go outside. And when I stay inside, I insist on strobe lighting.
Funny - the 3D outside never gives me headaches. Probably because its not continually forcing my eyeballs to converge and focus on something that my stereoscopic sense says is just in front of me but is actually 60' away on a screen. That and I only have to wear sunglasses if its actually sunny...
Nor does the 50Hz (60Hz for our US viewers) strobing of the indoor lighting worry me much, and when I were a lad, monitors were all 50Hz and we was grateful.
(From G.P.) ... if anything, this will result in a film that looks unnaturally smooth to a movie going audience... essentially adding a distraction for the 2D viewers while not fixing anything for 3D viewers...
Is that what made my new LCD/LED TV make everything feel like it was shot on video in a studio until I got used to it? That freaked me out, because part of me thought the picture was really, really good, while another part told me that all my DVDs had morphed into cheap daytime soaps.
If they are engineering or comp-sci professors? Okay, I can see your end.
Yup, because nobody outside engineering and comp sci needs anything other than Office... Education departments never develop - or even review/evaluate teaching applets, Social Science departments don't do research into "the effectiveness of social networking for X". Geography departments never find themselves with a need for specialist mapping software. The Arts departments never need some specialist software for scriptwriting, music scoring or 3D imaging software (and, if they do, they can get the geeks in the IT department to evaluate the alternatives for them) and the math department never does anything that the renaissance men in the IT department can't second guess... and nobody, but nobody doing research ever wants to use a specialist statistics test not covered by SPSS - or, for that matter, ever find a new avenue for research.
If you work for IT in a bank, or car sales firm, or sprocket flange manufacturer then maybe you can reasonably assume that a sub-assistant-sales manager needs Email, WP and sub-assistant-sales-manager-level access to the intranet (I say "maybe" because I've never been a sub-assistant sales manager so I'd want to talk to a few before making that definite). If you try to apply that sort of model to a moderate sized university, it won't work. A University IT service needs to think more like a (good) internet service provider.
DIsclaimer: most IT support people I've had the pleasure of dealing with have been responsive, constructive, knowledgable and helpful (provided you can wade through the system to get to them and their hands aren't tied).
Doesn't matter. IT gets reprimanded or fired if they find out the student has access and don't report it, whether the professor "trusts the grad student not to do anything wrong" or not.
Grad students traditionally act as assistants to professors - I take it your security model takes this into account and provides a safe, yet workable mechanism for making sure they can do this without also letting them into the student records? And if your management doesn't support you in disputes with the awkward squad then you're complaining about the wrong people.
OK, I'm off to explain to IT why I need access to Minecraft for serious research purposes:-)
Now add in that you might be working in an EDUCATION environment - where every tenured faculty member is also a brain-dead PHB.
...and who maybe, just maybe, knows more than you do about what their job involves and what software/hardware they need to do it properly. Try working on a sequence of externally funded research projects sometime, and see if you can predict what software/hardware you'll need in 6 months time (and even if you can, you can't SCHEDULE it because the funders are still crossing the 'i's and dotting the 't's on the contract and you won't actually be able to authorize any spending against the project until a week before the first report is due...)
Of course, you could try implementing this system.
Yes, I've worked on the other side of the fence and spent my time on the helldesk. Yes, clueless PHB users happen. So does useless IT support with one-size-fits-nobody policies and no concept of providing a service. If you don't generalize, then neither will I.
Plus, YMMV, but in many educational institutions "tenure" is now a long-lost memory.
One basic method used by almost all animals with stereoscopic vision is to look at the scene using two eyes and use the difference to perceive depth
...but if you try to fake this with stereoscopic images (e.g. never-to-be-sufficiently-damned 3D movies*) you set up conflicts between the stereoscopic sense and all the other methods (e.g. focal distance, head motion) and give people headaches. Plus you have to wear glasses.
From what I've seen of the similar accelerometer technique used in the Labyrinth app, this technique might be a bit easier on the eye...
Funny, though, those 'open' Macs only appeared after Jobs was gone!
ISTR the pattern in the Scully years was pretty much the same as today - minimal internal expansion and screwed-tight cases for the low/middle-range desktop models c.f. clip-open access for the top-of-the-range (often tower) models with NuBus.
The Centris and early PowerMacs were not remarkably easy to get into, and the only expansion was an optional Ethernet card.
Also, remember that, to balance the lack of internal expansion, Apple have been pretty pro-active in pushing external expansion - first SCSI, then FireWire, then popularizing USB, now ThunderBolt...
Other good reasons for closing the box...
on
Remembering the Apple I
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I have an affinity for things I can tweak but I have to admit this represents a minority opinion and that sealed boxes make sense for typical users (cost reductions, simplified supply chain, etc).
Of course there are other good reasons for "closing the box"... The original Mac, the first iMac and several models in between had built-in CRTs and the associated high-voltage circuitry, so you really, really didn't want users poking their fingers inside.
Most subsequent consumer Macs have been "small form factor" (and usually much smaller form-factor than competing SFF computers). If you make something as tiny as the Mac Mini or a slim as a modern iMac, you're gonna end up with "no user servicable parts inside". The advantage for Apple is that ultra-slim systems can sell for a premium *useful if you're trying to develop your own platform), rather than trying to compete in the low-margin mini-tower and boxy laptop market.
As you point out, Apple tower systems are still clip-open (swapping drives or adding memory to a Mac Pro is a breeze).
The other thing is, the motive and opportunity for tinkering has reduced. In the 80s any self-respecting geek would have lost the lid of their computer and have all manner of internal expansion - even on systems that didn't support it there would be boards piggybacked on chips and flying wires soldered to pins on the motherboard. Not so easy on a modern multi-layer motherboard with surface-mount components. I haven't felt the need to go near a computer with a soldering iron in years... There's also less need - the main reason I ever went delving in a Mac (apart from memory and HD upgrades) was to fit ethernet cards - these days, you'll find at least one ethernet port (probably plus WiFi) built in to any half-decent board, and anything else can be fitted via USB. The only PC with an internal add-on card I have now is my MythTV box - and I'm planning to replace that with a smaller box + USB tuner (having found that there are few linux-supported PCIe tuners and that the most suitable dual tuner PCI card is actually a USB tuner stuck on a card with a PCI-USB bridge...)
Apple have also pushed external expansion - first SCSI, then Firewire, then the iMac pulled USB out of the doldrums, now they're pushing ThunderBolt...
but saying it has poor graphics is like saying your novel doesn't have enough pictures
Spot on.
More to the point, I don't think it would work with better graphics - the whole point of the game is that the entire world is made of 1m3 blocks, and you can move any of them. Maybe the blocks could have hi-res textures when seen close up - but I suspect that would be incongruous. The 1980s computer game feel works for me (and things like square clouds, sun and moon match the completely whacky physics).
Its about time we had another game that makes good use of vast, stylized, pseudo-random worlds rather than human-designed maps with only wallpaper in the distance. I think the last one was Elite...
But when you have no clue about what software development is, then how on earth would you be able to judge trials about it fairly?
That is the problem with IP laws on technology: there are very, very few people with the combination of legal knowledge and technical knowledge needed to enforce them sensibly (and, in the case of patents, a lack of Renaissance Men with the required level of omniscience to make the hair-thin but crucial judgements about obviousness etc.*). Solution: don't pass laws that are impossible to enforce fairly (don't hold your breath).
(Does anybody know if Einstein was any good as a patent officer? "Sorry sir, what was that about claim 137b? I was daydreaming about riding on a beam of light...")
The result is applications that are often less responsive than their primitive predecessors which were written in hand-coded assembly language.
True in part, but not entirely down to the pointy-haired bosses. Modern applications are doing vastly more than their primitive predecessors, if only in terms of user interface. A Z80 would take ages just to refresh a modern screen from a pre-rendered bitmap - hell, a Z80 couldn't directly address enough memory to hold a modern screen image. Also, old-school wordprocessors like WordStar are only the "primitive ancestors" of basic text editors: all modern wordprocessors are effectively fully-fledged "desktop publishers" with full typographic control, graphics etc. plus complex wrinkles such as change tracking.
Also, a lot of the capacity of the modern computer is going into "hardware abstraction" - CP/M only gave a very, very thin layer of hardware abstraction for basic file access and text I/O, anything else had to talk directly to the hardware or the BIOS (or BDOS or whatever it was called under CP/M). Remember patching Wordstar to send the right escape codes for your terminal and printer? Modern software rarely needs to do that, since the OS does so much more, (which is why modern software, from OpenOffice to Apache, can support such a diverse range of hardware - its also why we can have multi-tasking) but the cost is a lot of "bureaucracy".
Ditto standards for data exchange and communication - nice to have, complicated to support. 80s software authors could just do their own thing and not worry about supporting features they weren't interested in .
You might want to compare early 80s computer software with contemporary UNIX applications in terms of complexity - I'm guessing EMACS was already somewhat larger than WordStar when the Osbourne came out:-) That was when "Eight Megabytes and Continually Swapping" was a criticism.
and the Open Source folks were bent on imitating the very corporations they despised.
...do you really think OpenOffice would have been as successful as it was if it didn't offer similar features to MS Office and (in particular) load its files?
Ergo, you can have Microsoft Office hog your resources or have OpenOffice.org hog your resources or you can use emacs or vim to write your documents in LaTeX.
Yes - user-friendliness is free software's Achilies heel. Making things user-friendly takes time and money.
Trouble is, many programmers would rather write in vim and LaTeX than use a WYSIWYG wordprocessor and, quite frankly, they have a point, especially when it comes to technical/academic writing with TOCs, indices and citations. If a programmer is giving away their work, why the fsck should they work on something they'd rather not use? Alternatively, if they do care about providing what end-users want, the message from end-users is likely to be "please give us something that works just like MS Word" - because that is what they are familiar with.
There arealternatives in free/open source/proprietary universes: LyX, Google Docs, AbiWord, Apple Pages, Koffice, Scrivener, and various deliberately minimalist offerings "that let you concentrate on writing" who's names currently escape me. But, guess what, the ones that make it big are the all-singing, all-dancing jack-of-all-trades ones that don't give MS Office users culture shock and which stand a better-than-even chance of opening that.docx file that someone sent you.
Yes, there is a problem here - MS Office "peaked" at around version 5.1 (for Mac) and has been pointless bloat ever since. Open/Libre/Neo Office's advantages over word are (a) Its free, (b) its not much worse than Word and (c) er, hang on, it will come to me...
If I have a device running honeycomb and request the source, don't google have to release it to me immediately? Not 1 year from now or when they decide it's ok?
Only the parts which are covered by the GPL - such as the Linux kernel.
Most of Android is covered by the Apache license which doesn't oblige you to provide source to users.
Plus, Google can do what the hell it likes with their own code, provided its not a derivative work of other people's GPL code. (see any GPL FAQ for the rules)
What if holding public office were regarded in the same way that most people seem to view jury duty?
With or without US-style "jury selection"?
I don't think you can get away from the fact that "leadership ability" and a certain amount of charisma are essential for the top level of government - part of their job is to "sell" the decisions once they have been made - but having some/all of parliament "conscripted" at random - rather than filled with party members obliged to follow the whip - has always seemed like an interesting idea to me. I'm sure, however, that the unanticipated consequences would be legion...
In the words of the immortal Douglas Adams: "Nobody capable of getting themselves elected as President should on any account be allowed to do the job. To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem."
The only place this is likely to lead is the specific advert in question (and maybe others like it) will get a subtle re-wording and a suitably legalistic footnote added in 7 point type. People will continue ripping their CDs to their iPods, and the industry will continue to ignore it unless someone rubs their noses in it.
The government was already promising a re-write of the copyright laws and making some hopeful noises about strengthening "fair use", but don't hold your breath.
As I said, this isn't a court trying to enforce a previously ignored aspect of the law - this is the advertising watchdog being backed into a corner because an advertiser broke the unwritten rules by explicitly suggesting that users could "copy all your CDs to disk" and "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells" just had to complain.
The one to watch is the Amazon "cloud" music service and whatever Apple are cooking up in that respect, which can't launch in the UK until the law changes.
The UK doesn't have the US's fair use rules, so technically ripping your CDs is illegal, although its never enforced (at least not against individuals) .
Record shops were always happy to sell blank cassettes, CD-Rs and MiniDiscs - you just don't shatter the illusion that an awful lot of customers are amateur musicians taping their own work by going up to the assistant and saying "Dear assistant, can you recommend a blank CD onto which I can copy this here album which I am about to purchase?"
Basically, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell".
In this case, some public-spirited person has submitted a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority about this particular ad, so there's not much the ASA can do but say, yeah, the ad incites copyright violation.
Note that its the specific ad that's been banned - not the product. The ASA is an independent industry regulator, not a court of law - nobody has been prosecuted. The manufacturer will just have to stick in some small print.
The best April fools jokes I've seen so far today are the Canterbury Distribution and the ThinkGeek "Apple Store" Playmobil set, and the ThinkGeek "Lightsaber Popsicle"
Just close enough to reality to catch you unawares.
Actually, xkcd's effort this year is (a) fun and (b) is a cool hack. Not so much a "gotcha" though since (like last year) they've actually been and gone and done it (Don't just look at the latest cartoon).
Sorry, Slashdot pranksters, to rain on your parade, but you needed to add tweaks to every single article to compete...
Sorry, I just re-read the post and decided that the way I "snipped" the Amazon quote (unintentionally) put a bit of a slant on it. The full quote is
5.2 Our Right to Access Your Files. You give us the right to access, retain, use and disclose your account information and Your Files: to provide you with technical support and address technical issues; to investigate compliance with the terms of this Agreement, enforce the terms of this Agreement and protect the Service and its users from fraud or security threats; or as we determine is necessary to provide the Service or comply with applicable law.
I don't think that alters my point that they are asking you to grant them rights to IP that you don't own, but Amazon clearly aren't proposing to party down to "your" music!
Do I need a license to stream MP3s from system RAM to the MP3 player?
Outside the US, that depends on your country's provisions for fair use (one area in which the US seems relatively enlightened). In the UK, if you ripped a CD then you've infringed even before you get round to streaming (although that's never enforced - but if you bring a third party into the process, who knows?)
However, the question is, if you let Amazon stream your files, is it still personal use (bear in mind, Amazon are not ar charity, so they'll have a cunning plan to make some money out of it somehow)? For instance, this snippit from the Amazon Cloud T&C recently turned up on Groklaw:
5.2 Our Right to Access Your Files. You give us the right to access, retain, use and disclose your account information and Your Files...
Do you think you have the right to sub-license your Lady Gaga collection to Amazon?
Disclaimer - I'm not saying that it should be stopped. Who knows, maybe Amazon will force copyright laws to be updated to sensibly cover technologies invented since the player piano?
use 3D to add depth perception and a realistic sense of scale.
Scale relative to what? The scale of a movie screen is continually changing, and cinematographers continually play with depth of field and focal length effects. To shoot non-disorienting 3D cinematographers would have to continually think about where, plausibly, the viewer could be standing, and match the focal length of their eyeballs.
Meanwhile, there are all sorts of other, less problematic, visual cues that give a sense of scale - parallax motion, camera motion, depth of field, lighting, distance haze plus plain old biological intelligence courtesy of everybody having the most awesome image processing device in the world sitting between their ears. Your brain is perfectly capable of extracting depth and scale cues from a 2D image.
Nope, the problem with 3D is that stereoscopy is only one source of "depth perception" and the stereo information on anaglyph movies often ends up contradicting the others. Maybe, just maybe, cinematographers will learn a new language for using 3D effectively (just as they had to when cameras became sufficiently portable to move around and take on location, so you could do more than just point a fixed camera at a stage play).
Unlike sound and color (and some people might even argue against color) 3D is trying to replace something who's absence isn't really missed. If they did stuck to depth (i.e. treat the movie screen as a window, and don't break the glass) then it might be easier on the eye, but last time I went to a 3D movie I only noticed the 3D effect when they pulled an eye-popper and had something floating (against all logic) over the head of the bald guy in row 5.
Google mail - email comes in all the time, and you want to check and reply to it from anywhere. Heck, even if you don't like Google Mail IMAP isn't a million miles away from "cloud computing" and that's been useful for years.
Google docs - useful for sharing documents, collaborative writing, or other documents you update frequently for multiple devices, and far, far simpler than having to "merge" conflicting versions of documents.
DropBox - ditto (and a good way round the lousy document syncing on iDevices).
Calendar/contacts - again ditto: these are continually changing, you may want to share them with others or update them on the move (and the only way to get calendar/contact info on an Android device).
Music - WTF? First - you're not allowed to share it with others. Second - even if you are inclined to buying music on the move the actual files don't change and you can always re-download them on your main computer. Third, most people's music library will fit on a single micro-SD card and most of those files will never change - you'll just add to them. Fourth, people don't just play music on their smartphones - they play them on their car radio, their clock radio, their TV/DVD/BR player, their MP3-enabled HiFi, the cheap'n'cheerful MP3 "dispensible" player they bought for the beach etc. etc.
...and workplaces will so block this service at the firewall.
If there's one thing that is falling-of-a-log easy its keeping static, compact (by today's storage sizes) music files synced over multiple devices.
Streaming makes sense with services like Spotify which give you access to a vast music library (and I believe the Spotify player will also index and play your locally stored music, so you can use a single interface).
Plus, I'm sure this will be illegal in the UK (probably one reason why its currently blocked) - where its still technically illegal to rip your own CDs or otherwise format-shift. That's never enforced for personal use, but uploading those files to a third party seems like sticking your neck out. What if a hacker gets into Amazon and copies "your" files? Will Amazon indemnify users against any consequential infringement (flap, oink)? Even if they did, will that count for anything in countries where you already infringed by giving the material to Amazon?
So on the one hand it's efficient, on the other it seems prone to trampling its citizens.
Whereas, in the US, the government outsources the tyranny to the private sector: The Invisible Hand holds the citizens down while Mammon gives them a good kicking.
Meanwhile, here in good old England we get to enjoy the best of both worlds: the humanitarianism, public spirit and and social justice of Capitalism combined with the efficiency and personal freedoms of Socialism.
Where do all these electric cars get their power from? It's okay to pollute wherever the power plants are built, just as long as it's not in the city limits, eh?
Yeah, if you are worried about CO2 and global warming electric cars only make sense if you (a) live in a country with tonnes (sorry, joules) of hydro or geothermal power pr (b) go nuclear.
OTOH, there are other arguments for not burning stuff and making lots of noise at ground level in high population density areas.
The idea that people could go into a bank and get loans with no proof that they could ever pay it back is absolutely absurd.
...but that problem isn't caused by credit per se. Back in the day, a bank would do its best to check that borrowers could afford to pay back the loan with interest because that was where their profit was coming from. The problem is that debt has now been turned into a tradeable commodity, so as soon as the mark has signed a loan agreement the lender can effectively sell the debt on for an instant profit, everybody gets commissions and drinks all round - no more pesky waiting for years as the interest trickles in... Of course, then you're not getting long-term interest trickling in so you need to start actively looking for new vict^H^H^H^H borrowers in places you might not have looked before...
Slashdot Mirror
That's why I never go outside. And when I stay inside, I insist on strobe lighting.
Funny - the 3D outside never gives me headaches. Probably because its not continually forcing my eyeballs to converge and focus on something that my stereoscopic sense says is just in front of me but is actually 60' away on a screen. That and I only have to wear sunglasses if its actually sunny...
Nor does the 50Hz (60Hz for our US viewers) strobing of the indoor lighting worry me much, and when I were a lad, monitors were all 50Hz and we was grateful.
(From G.P.)
... if anything, this will result in a film that looks unnaturally smooth to a movie going audience... essentially adding a distraction for the 2D viewers while not fixing anything for 3D viewers...
Is that what made my new LCD/LED TV make everything feel like it was shot on video in a studio until I got used to it? That freaked me out, because part of me thought the picture was really, really good, while another part told me that all my DVDs had morphed into cheap daytime soaps.
If they are engineering or comp-sci professors? Okay, I can see your end.
Yup, because nobody outside engineering and comp sci needs anything other than Office... Education departments never develop - or even review/evaluate teaching applets, Social Science departments don't do research into "the effectiveness of social networking for X". Geography departments never find themselves with a need for specialist mapping software. The Arts departments never need some specialist software for scriptwriting, music scoring or 3D imaging software (and, if they do, they can get the geeks in the IT department to evaluate the alternatives for them) and the math department never does anything that the renaissance men in the IT department can't second guess... and nobody, but nobody doing research ever wants to use a specialist statistics test not covered by SPSS - or, for that matter, ever find a new avenue for research.
If you work for IT in a bank, or car sales firm, or sprocket flange manufacturer then maybe you can reasonably assume that a sub-assistant-sales manager needs Email, WP and sub-assistant-sales-manager-level access to the intranet (I say "maybe" because I've never been a sub-assistant sales manager so I'd want to talk to a few before making that definite). If you try to apply that sort of model to a moderate sized university, it won't work. A University IT service needs to think more like a (good) internet service provider.
DIsclaimer: most IT support people I've had the pleasure of dealing with have been responsive, constructive, knowledgable and helpful (provided you can wade through the system to get to them and their hands aren't tied).
Doesn't matter. IT gets reprimanded or fired if they find out the student has access and don't report it, whether the professor "trusts the grad student not to do anything wrong" or not.
Grad students traditionally act as assistants to professors - I take it your security model takes this into account and provides a safe, yet workable mechanism for making sure they can do this without also letting them into the student records? And if your management doesn't support you in disputes with the awkward squad then you're complaining about the wrong people.
OK, I'm off to explain to IT why I need access to Minecraft for serious research purposes :-)
Now add in that you might be working in an EDUCATION environment - where every tenured faculty member is also a brain-dead PHB.
...and who maybe, just maybe, knows more than you do about what their job involves and what software/hardware they need to do it properly. Try working on a sequence of externally funded research projects sometime, and see if you can predict what software/hardware you'll need in 6 months time (and even if you can, you can't SCHEDULE it because the funders are still crossing the 'i's and dotting the 't's on the contract and you won't actually be able to authorize any spending against the project until a week before the first report is due...)
Of course, you could try implementing this system.
Yes, I've worked on the other side of the fence and spent my time on the helldesk. Yes, clueless PHB users happen. So does useless IT support with one-size-fits-nobody policies and no concept of providing a service. If you don't generalize, then neither will I.
Plus, YMMV, but in many educational institutions "tenure" is now a long-lost memory.
One basic method used by almost all animals with stereoscopic vision is to look at the scene using two eyes and use the difference to perceive depth
...but if you try to fake this with stereoscopic images (e.g. never-to-be-sufficiently-damned 3D movies*) you set up conflicts between the stereoscopic sense and all the other methods (e.g. focal distance, head motion) and give people headaches. Plus you have to wear glasses.
From what I've seen of the similar accelerometer technique used in the Labyrinth app, this technique might be a bit easier on the eye...
Funny, though, those 'open' Macs only appeared after Jobs was gone!
ISTR the pattern in the Scully years was pretty much the same as today - minimal internal expansion and screwed-tight cases for the low/middle-range desktop models c.f. clip-open access for the top-of-the-range (often tower) models with NuBus.
The Centris and early PowerMacs were not remarkably easy to get into, and the only expansion was an optional Ethernet card.
Also, remember that, to balance the lack of internal expansion, Apple have been pretty pro-active in pushing external expansion - first SCSI, then FireWire, then popularizing USB, now ThunderBolt...
I have an affinity for things I can tweak but I have to admit this represents a minority opinion and that sealed boxes make sense for typical users (cost reductions, simplified supply chain, etc).
Of course there are other good reasons for "closing the box"... The original Mac, the first iMac and several models in between had built-in CRTs and the associated high-voltage circuitry, so you really, really didn't want users poking their fingers inside.
Most subsequent consumer Macs have been "small form factor" (and usually much smaller form-factor than competing SFF computers). If you make something as tiny as the Mac Mini or a slim as a modern iMac, you're gonna end up with "no user servicable parts inside". The advantage for Apple is that ultra-slim systems can sell for a premium *useful if you're trying to develop your own platform), rather than trying to compete in the low-margin mini-tower and boxy laptop market.
As you point out, Apple tower systems are still clip-open (swapping drives or adding memory to a Mac Pro is a breeze).
The other thing is, the motive and opportunity for tinkering has reduced. In the 80s any self-respecting geek would have lost the lid of their computer and have all manner of internal expansion - even on systems that didn't support it there would be boards piggybacked on chips and flying wires soldered to pins on the motherboard. Not so easy on a modern multi-layer motherboard with surface-mount components. I haven't felt the need to go near a computer with a soldering iron in years... There's also less need - the main reason I ever went delving in a Mac (apart from memory and HD upgrades) was to fit ethernet cards - these days, you'll find at least one ethernet port (probably plus WiFi) built in to any half-decent board, and anything else can be fitted via USB. The only PC with an internal add-on card I have now is my MythTV box - and I'm planning to replace that with a smaller box + USB tuner (having found that there are few linux-supported PCIe tuners and that the most suitable dual tuner PCI card is actually a USB tuner stuck on a card with a PCI-USB bridge...)
Apple have also pushed external expansion - first SCSI, then Firewire, then the iMac pulled USB out of the doldrums, now they're pushing ThunderBolt...
but saying it has poor graphics is like saying your novel doesn't have enough pictures
Spot on.
More to the point, I don't think it would work with better graphics - the whole point of the game is that the entire world is made of 1m3 blocks, and you can move any of them. Maybe the blocks could have hi-res textures when seen close up - but I suspect that would be incongruous. The 1980s computer game feel works for me (and things like square clouds, sun and moon match the completely whacky physics).
Its about time we had another game that makes good use of vast, stylized, pseudo-random worlds rather than human-designed maps with only wallpaper in the distance. I think the last one was Elite...
It's complete crap. It's not fun. It doesn't even look good.
I'd post a witty reply to this blatant trolling, but I'm trying to build a glass tower underwater so I'm too busy collecting sand...
Thank you for letting me know that I'm not having fun, though.
But when you have no clue about what software development is, then how on earth would you be able to judge trials about it fairly?
That is the problem with IP laws on technology: there are very, very few people with the combination of legal knowledge and technical knowledge needed to enforce them sensibly (and, in the case of patents, a lack of Renaissance Men with the required level of omniscience to make the hair-thin but crucial judgements about obviousness etc.*). Solution: don't pass laws that are impossible to enforce fairly (don't hold your breath).
(Does anybody know if Einstein was any good as a patent officer? "Sorry sir, what was that about claim 137b? I was daydreaming about riding on a beam of light...")
I wonder if in 30 years we'll be looking back at the iPad 2 and wondering how we managed to do anything with something so slow, restricted and clunky.
Or we could be looking back at the iPad2 and thinking "Ye gods, wasn't computing so much more fun back then..."
Come on, with the likes of the Osbourne, Sinclair ZX81, BBC Micro all turning 30 this year, who here is over 40 and not thinking the same thing now...
The result is applications that are often less responsive than their primitive predecessors which were written in hand-coded assembly language.
True in part, but not entirely down to the pointy-haired bosses. Modern applications are doing vastly more than their primitive predecessors, if only in terms of user interface. A Z80 would take ages just to refresh a modern screen from a pre-rendered bitmap - hell, a Z80 couldn't directly address enough memory to hold a modern screen image. Also, old-school wordprocessors like WordStar are only the "primitive ancestors" of basic text editors: all modern wordprocessors are effectively fully-fledged "desktop publishers" with full typographic control, graphics etc. plus complex wrinkles such as change tracking.
Also, a lot of the capacity of the modern computer is going into "hardware abstraction" - CP/M only gave a very, very thin layer of hardware abstraction for basic file access and text I/O, anything else had to talk directly to the hardware or the BIOS (or BDOS or whatever it was called under CP/M). Remember patching Wordstar to send the right escape codes for your terminal and printer? Modern software rarely needs to do that, since the OS does so much more, (which is why modern software, from OpenOffice to Apache, can support such a diverse range of hardware - its also why we can have multi-tasking) but the cost is a lot of "bureaucracy".
Ditto standards for data exchange and communication - nice to have, complicated to support. 80s software authors could just do their own thing and not worry about supporting features they weren't interested in .
You might want to compare early 80s computer software with contemporary UNIX applications in terms of complexity - I'm guessing EMACS was already somewhat larger than WordStar when the Osbourne came out :-) That was when "Eight Megabytes and Continually Swapping" was a criticism.
and the Open Source folks were bent on imitating the very corporations they despised.
...do you really think OpenOffice would have been as successful as it was if it didn't offer similar features to MS Office and (in particular) load its files?
Ergo, you can have Microsoft Office hog your resources or have OpenOffice.org hog your resources or you can use emacs or vim to write your documents in LaTeX.
Yes - user-friendliness is free software's Achilies heel. Making things user-friendly takes time and money.
Trouble is, many programmers would rather write in vim and LaTeX than use a WYSIWYG wordprocessor and, quite frankly, they have a point, especially when it comes to technical/academic writing with TOCs, indices and citations. If a programmer is giving away their work, why the fsck should they work on something they'd rather not use? Alternatively, if they do care about providing what end-users want, the message from end-users is likely to be "please give us something that works just like MS Word" - because that is what they are familiar with.
There are alternatives in free/open source/proprietary universes: LyX, Google Docs, AbiWord, Apple Pages, Koffice, Scrivener, and various deliberately minimalist offerings "that let you concentrate on writing" who's names currently escape me. But, guess what, the ones that make it big are the all-singing, all-dancing jack-of-all-trades ones that don't give MS Office users culture shock and which stand a better-than-even chance of opening that .docx file that someone sent you.
Yes, there is a problem here - MS Office "peaked" at around version 5.1 (for Mac) and has been pointless bloat ever since. Open/Libre/Neo Office's advantages over word are (a) Its free, (b) its not much worse than Word and (c) er, hang on, it will come to me...
If I have a device running honeycomb and request the source, don't google have to release it to me immediately? Not 1 year from now or when they decide it's ok?
Only the parts which are covered by the GPL - such as the Linux kernel.
Most of Android is covered by the Apache license which doesn't oblige you to provide source to users.
Plus, Google can do what the hell it likes with their own code, provided its not a derivative work of other people's GPL code. (see any GPL FAQ for the rules)
I for one used them to record programs and data using the CUTS format. Don't blame me!
That's what C15s and C10s were for...
What if holding public office were regarded in the same way that most people seem to view jury duty?
With or without US-style "jury selection"?
I don't think you can get away from the fact that "leadership ability" and a certain amount of charisma are essential for the top level of government - part of their job is to "sell" the decisions once they have been made - but having some/all of parliament "conscripted" at random - rather than filled with party members obliged to follow the whip - has always seemed like an interesting idea to me. I'm sure, however, that the unanticipated consequences would be legion...
In the words of the immortal Douglas Adams: "Nobody capable of getting themselves elected as President should on any account be allowed to do the job. To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem."
I'd be curious to see where this leads,
The only place this is likely to lead is the specific advert in question (and maybe others like it) will get a subtle re-wording and a suitably legalistic footnote added in 7 point type. People will continue ripping their CDs to their iPods, and the industry will continue to ignore it unless someone rubs their noses in it.
The government was already promising a re-write of the copyright laws and making some hopeful noises about strengthening "fair use", but don't hold your breath.
As I said, this isn't a court trying to enforce a previously ignored aspect of the law - this is the advertising watchdog being backed into a corner because an advertiser broke the unwritten rules by explicitly suggesting that users could "copy all your CDs to disk" and "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells" just had to complain.
The one to watch is the Amazon "cloud" music service and whatever Apple are cooking up in that respect, which can't launch in the UK until the law changes.
The UK doesn't have the US's fair use rules, so technically ripping your CDs is illegal, although its never enforced (at least not against individuals) .
Record shops were always happy to sell blank cassettes, CD-Rs and MiniDiscs - you just don't shatter the illusion that an awful lot of customers are amateur musicians taping their own work by going up to the assistant and saying "Dear assistant, can you recommend a blank CD onto which I can copy this here album which I am about to purchase?"
Basically, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell".
In this case, some public-spirited person has submitted a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority about this particular ad, so there's not much the ASA can do but say, yeah, the ad incites copyright violation.
Note that its the specific ad that's been banned - not the product. The ASA is an independent industry regulator, not a court of law - nobody has been prosecuted. The manufacturer will just have to stick in some small print.
The tweaks should have let me choose:
..As [open-minded] as Debian, [technologically simple] as Gentoo, [stable] as Ubuntu etc...
The best April fools jokes I've seen so far today are the Canterbury Distribution and the ThinkGeek "Apple Store" Playmobil set, and the ThinkGeek "Lightsaber Popsicle"
Just close enough to reality to catch you unawares.
Actually, xkcd's effort this year is (a) fun and (b) is a cool hack. Not so much a "gotcha" though since (like last year) they've actually been and gone and done it (Don't just look at the latest cartoon).
Sorry, Slashdot pranksters, to rain on your parade, but you needed to add tweaks to every single article to compete...
Sorry, I just re-read the post and decided that the way I "snipped" the Amazon quote (unintentionally) put a bit of a slant on it. The full quote is
5.2 Our Right to Access Your Files. You give us the right to access, retain, use and disclose your account information and Your Files: to provide you with technical support and address technical issues; to investigate compliance with the terms of this Agreement, enforce the terms of this Agreement and protect the Service and its users from fraud or security threats; or as we determine is necessary to provide the Service or comply with applicable law.
I don't think that alters my point that they are asking you to grant them rights to IP that you don't own, but Amazon clearly aren't proposing to party down to "your" music!
Do I need a license to stream MP3s from system RAM to the MP3 player?
Outside the US, that depends on your country's provisions for fair use (one area in which the US seems relatively enlightened). In the UK, if you ripped a CD then you've infringed even before you get round to streaming (although that's never enforced - but if you bring a third party into the process, who knows?)
However, the question is, if you let Amazon stream your files, is it still personal use (bear in mind, Amazon are not ar charity, so they'll have a cunning plan to make some money out of it somehow)? For instance, this snippit from the Amazon Cloud T&C recently turned up on Groklaw:
5.2 Our Right to Access Your Files. You give us the right to access, retain, use and disclose your account information and Your Files...
Do you think you have the right to sub-license your Lady Gaga collection to Amazon?
Disclaimer - I'm not saying that it should be stopped. Who knows, maybe Amazon will force copyright laws to be updated to sensibly cover technologies invented since the player piano?
use 3D to add depth perception and a realistic sense of scale.
Scale relative to what? The scale of a movie screen is continually changing, and cinematographers continually play with depth of field and focal length effects. To shoot non-disorienting 3D cinematographers would have to continually think about where, plausibly, the viewer could be standing, and match the focal length of their eyeballs.
Meanwhile, there are all sorts of other, less problematic, visual cues that give a sense of scale - parallax motion, camera motion, depth of field, lighting, distance haze plus plain old biological intelligence courtesy of everybody having the most awesome image processing device in the world sitting between their ears. Your brain is perfectly capable of extracting depth and scale cues from a 2D image.
Nope, the problem with 3D is that stereoscopy is only one source of "depth perception" and the stereo information on anaglyph movies often ends up contradicting the others. Maybe, just maybe, cinematographers will learn a new language for using 3D effectively (just as they had to when cameras became sufficiently portable to move around and take on location, so you could do more than just point a fixed camera at a stage play).
Unlike sound and color (and some people might even argue against color) 3D is trying to replace something who's absence isn't really missed. If they did stuck to depth (i.e. treat the movie screen as a window, and don't break the glass) then it might be easier on the eye, but last time I went to a 3D movie I only noticed the 3D effect when they pulled an eye-popper and had something floating (against all logic) over the head of the bald guy in row 5.
A lot of the cloud, I can see the point of...
Google mail - email comes in all the time, and you want to check and reply to it from anywhere. Heck, even if you don't like Google Mail IMAP isn't a million miles away from "cloud computing" and that's been useful for years.
Google docs - useful for sharing documents, collaborative writing, or other documents you update frequently for multiple devices, and far, far simpler than having to "merge" conflicting versions of documents.
DropBox - ditto (and a good way round the lousy document syncing on iDevices).
Calendar/contacts - again ditto: these are continually changing, you may want to share them with others or update them on the move (and the only way to get calendar/contact info on an Android device).
Music - WTF? First - you're not allowed to share it with others. Second - even if you are inclined to buying music on the move the actual files don't change and you can always re-download them on your main computer. Third, most people's music library will fit on a single micro-SD card and most of those files will never change - you'll just add to them. Fourth, people don't just play music on their smartphones - they play them on their car radio, their clock radio, their TV/DVD/BR player, their MP3-enabled HiFi, the cheap'n'cheerful MP3 "dispensible" player they bought for the beach etc. etc.
...and workplaces will so block this service at the firewall.
If there's one thing that is falling-of-a-log easy its keeping static, compact (by today's storage sizes) music files synced over multiple devices.
Streaming makes sense with services like Spotify which give you access to a vast music library (and I believe the Spotify player will also index and play your locally stored music, so you can use a single interface).
Plus, I'm sure this will be illegal in the UK (probably one reason why its currently blocked) - where its still technically illegal to rip your own CDs or otherwise format-shift. That's never enforced for personal use, but uploading those files to a third party seems like sticking your neck out. What if a hacker gets into Amazon and copies "your" files? Will Amazon indemnify users against any consequential infringement (flap, oink)? Even if they did, will that count for anything in countries where you already infringed by giving the material to Amazon?
So on the one hand it's efficient, on the other it seems prone to trampling its citizens.
Whereas, in the US, the government outsources the tyranny to the private sector: The Invisible Hand holds the citizens down while Mammon gives them a good kicking.
Meanwhile, here in good old England we get to enjoy the best of both worlds: the humanitarianism, public spirit and and social justice of Capitalism combined with the efficiency and personal freedoms of Socialism.
Sorry - its one of those days.
Where do all these electric cars get their power from? It's okay to pollute wherever the power plants are built, just as long as it's not in the city limits, eh?
Yeah, if you are worried about CO2 and global warming electric cars only make sense if you (a) live in a country with tonnes (sorry, joules) of hydro or geothermal power pr (b) go nuclear.
OTOH, there are other arguments for not burning stuff and making lots of noise at ground level in high population density areas.
The idea that people could go into a bank and get loans with no proof that they could ever pay it back is absolutely absurd.
...but that problem isn't caused by credit per se. Back in the day, a bank would do its best to check that borrowers could afford to pay back the loan with interest because that was where their profit was coming from. The problem is that debt has now been turned into a tradeable commodity, so as soon as the mark has signed a loan agreement the lender can effectively sell the debt on for an instant profit, everybody gets commissions and drinks all round - no more pesky waiting for years as the interest trickles in... Of course, then you're not getting long-term interest trickling in so you need to start actively looking for new vict^H^H^H^H borrowers in places you might not have looked before...