Maybe this research in MagLev tech, military as it is, can somehow benefit the MagLev train development in the U. S. Wouldn't it be nice to travel between LA and NY on a train that "floats" at 500 km/hr, as demonstrated in this video (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=292640039 6387878713) shot by some guy who rode on a Japanese MagLev.
"Most people think of blogs as being primarily political or tech-focused. To most people, the important things they want to learn about have to do with people they know. So I think personal blogs are really the future, and with that comes a challenge for blogs to be more friendly and welcoming."
Blogs have always been primarily a personal tool. The avalanche of blogs, ironically, even out the playing field. The so-called "famous bloggers" may have their clicks, but for the millions of faceless bloggers (like me
), blogging is a source of entertainment, nothing solemn about it at all.
Here is the famous photo from Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 showing a young man standing in front of a column of Chinese tanks sent to quash the students who demonstrated for democracy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_mass acre.
Today we don't know the fate of that brave young man, but we can safely assume that there is more steel in that young man's spine than any of the leaders in Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Cicso who would choose to clear the way for the Chinese tanks if they were given the choice.
Glad to hear that Industrial Light and Magic, a movie special effects company founded by George Lucas, is one of the recipients of this award. Obviously this piece of news was drowned out by the sound of one certain shotgun blast in Texas.
A trivia about ILM -- John Lasseter (director of Toy Story) worked for ILM in the early 1980s as a computer animator. The computer graphics department, now known as Pixar, was eventually sold to Steve Jobs, which went on to create the first CG animated feature with Toy Story. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Light_and_ Magic)
Maybe Internet radio stations should openly tell people that streaming music can be legitimately recorded for personal use. Audacity (an open-source free sound editor), for instance, can record streamed music; in fact, it teaches you how to do it: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq?s=recordi ng&i=streaming.
Radio music is about "surprises" -- it plays new music you wouldn't have the chance to hear about otherwise. Like the old cassette days when you simply pushed the record button and recorded a whole bunch of songs and later edited out the ones you don't like, you can do the same with streamed music from Internet radio stations.
From Wikipedia: "String theory is a model of fundamental physics whose building blocks are one-dimensional extended objects (strings) rather than the zero-dimensional points (particles) that are the basis of the Standard Model of particle physics..."
During the period of Apartheid in South Africa, American companies that did business with the white-minority government used similar rationale to justify their investments in South Africa. Their basic argument was that if they did not go into South Africa, poor black South Africans would suffer. Most people did not buy their argument then, and those few who did were in the camp of "look, business is business, there's nothing wrong in trying to make a buck". The only saving grace for Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergy Brin, et al, is that people do have short memories.
Ebert is simply being territorial. Blame him for being a film enthusiast -- it's like hearing an energetic sushi chef tell us that Japanese food is better than French cuisine.
One common point between viewing movies and playing video games is the "pleasure of encountering surprises". When we watch a movie, we may guess that A, B, C might happen, but in fact, X, Y, Z occur, and if the director is smart, we may feel gratified by the unpredictable twists, which is a sensation similar to, during a video gameplay, when we are suddenly attacked by a "surprise monster" which we engage with pleasure (or pain), but in the end are happy about the virtual engagement.
What is different is this: when watching a movie, we prefer to be "outwitted" by the filmmaker, whereas in video gameplaying, we prefer to overcome the artificial intelligence thrown at us, meaning, the pleasure of video gameplaying is in the notion (perhaps erroneous) that we have "beaten" the game designer -- and there lies the art of video game design, as we, the players, are "fooled" into believing that we have the authorial control.
GIIMP-related books can be found at: http://www.gimp.org/books/. Better yet, go to its online tutorials at: http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/, and just print them out on sheets of 3-hole punched paper and bind them into a book, and then download a copy of GIMP (from http://www.gimp.org/), burn it into a CD, and gift-wrap all the items and present the package as a Christmas gift for her.
Without using any dead-tree books, I taught myself how to use GIMP and other free graphic software like Pixia and ArtRage by consulting their "Help" sections and online tutorials. Here are some examples of what I, someone who has no formal computer graphics training, can do: http://sunandfun.blogspot.com/2005/10/new-looks-at -old-movie-classics.html
I just came back from a trip to my local Wal-Mart where I watched, for the first time, some guy play the new Xbox 360 on a demo machine. Despite the fact that (oddly enough) there was no one else but me and the player to admire this machine, I was totally impressed by the vivid graphics of the "Call of Duty" demo I saw, and can therefore conclude that it is possible for video game design to reach the level of "art".
I was playing an old "Battlefield 1942" game only yesterday on my laptop, and to see the dramatic changes in the graphical details, the lighting, the virtual human movements, the AI, etc., in Xbox 360 is a mesmerising experience. As the saying goes in the movie industry that "great special effects do not necessarily make good movies, great stories do," the same is perhaps true in PC/Video gaming. When playing games or watching movies, people want to be surprised, pleasantly, by dramatic twists and turns, and be immersed in the story, and in the case of video gaming, the advancement in technology does help, because as the CPU power increases and memory chips are cheaper to manufacture, the games will become more life-like, and it definitely requires artistic temperament to code and render the facial expressions and body movements of those virtual players that are the gamers' alter egos.
Buying books by the pages and chapters is not a new idea. I
actually wrote about it way back in 2003. Random House, the
mega publisher, is obviously giving its approval to Amazon's proposal
by coming out with its own idea of micro-payment model -- charging 5
cents a page, with 4 of that going to the authors and the publishers,
as reported here.<br><br>
These days, Johny and Susie Happy-Clickers gladly "click to
purchase" 99-cents songs, so it seems like a natural progression to
click to buy a page here, a chapter there.
This reminds me of Woody Allen's 1973 movie "Sleeper", in which he plays a character who wakes up from a deep cryonics sleep and finds himself in a futuristic society in which "everything that used to be considered bad for health, such as smoking and eating red meat, is now considered good for you."
I'm sure the author of "Everything Bad Is Good for You" is serious, but I think the correct way to approach this book is with a sense of humor. Before video games, people played chess for brain exercise; before TV, there was a thing called "reading books"; before Internet, one went to a place called "library".
The "increasing IQ" claim is suspicious -- Einstein never played "Doom", never watched "Sopranos", never surfed online, but we can all agree that 50 years after his death we have yet to find anyone smarter.
Lucas, as the creator of "Star Wars", is allowed to do whatever his little billionaire heart desires, as far as "Star Wars" and his other films, including "THX 1138" and "American Graffiti", are concerned.
If he chose to show, in a future episode (or a new TV series), that Han Solo and Princess Leia did "have a thing" and produce a child, who grows up to become another Jedi master, he could.
The creator of original fictional characters has the license to do whatever he darn well pleases.
True that. I gave him the wrong title. But he's the Speaker of the House, so he's third in the line of presidential succession, after the Vice President, so he's pretty high up there.
Right off the bat, this Republican Senator did something his Repblican colleagues probably won't like -- he criticized oil companies. From his blog:
"Today, energy companies started reporting their 3rd quarter earnings, and while Americans paying were record prices at the pump, energy companies were making record profits.
This is America. And Republicans don't believe in punishing success. But what are these oil companies doing to bring down the cost of oil and natural gas?"
"Herbert Mitgang, a former New York Times editorial writer and the author of numerous fiction and nonfiction books, including "The Fiery Trial: A Life of Lincoln," published by Viking Press; Betty Miles, the award-winning author of many works for children and young adults, and the co-author of "Just Think," published by Alfred A. Knopf; and Daniel Hoffman, the author and editor of many volumes of poetry, translation, and literary criticism, including "Barbarous Knowledge: Myth in the Poetry of Yeats, Graves and Muir" and "Striking the Stones," both published by Oxford University Press. Mr. Hoffman was the 1973-74 Poet Laureate of the United States."
As accomplished as those three authors are, they are nowhere near being household names, and one can only speculate two possible reasons why they're opposed to Google's effort: 1) they think people will stop buying their books once the books are turned into digital form and made available in the wild cyber frontier; 2) or just the opposite -- they think their books are so precious that they don't want people to find out about them on the Internet. This paranoia about new technology by some authors (here I emphasize "some", because many writers, including this one, do not mind having their books scanned by Google Print program) is really puzzling.
The commercial reality is this: Google can stop this scanning program right now, and it will continue to make money, and lots of money, in other areas. I believe Google's sincerity when it says it does this to help a student in Bangladesh to locate a hard-to-find book. Clearly, some writers, including the three mentioned above, do not think it's important for their books to be discovered by a diligent student in Bangladesh.
"Price" element -- You can buy the cheapest iPod for $99 with 512MB storage, but the $99 model PDA (Palm Z22) holds only 32MB data and can barely do anything.
"Play" element -- Nobody associates PDA with "play", while iPod is all about having fun.
Happy 15th birthday, IMDb! I write about movies on my blog (http://sunandfun.blogspot.com/), and IMDb is THE place the go for trivia. The site is a trivia galore. Where else can you find out that Peter Sellers was supposed to play four roles in "Dr. Strangelove", including Major Kong, which was eventually played by Slim Pickens? And in "2001: the Space Odyssey", by incrementing IBM you get HAL, for HAL-9000 the badass computer, although Arthur C. Clarke, the co-screenwriter, claims HAL stands for Heuristic ALgorithmic Computer.
Oh, yeah, geek but not meek! Congrats to the guys and gals who work for IMDb.com.
Gmail is another AJAX application, and it has immense possibilities. I wrote this comment using Gmail, checked my spelling with its spellchecker, saved it in Draft, and it is stored on Google's server, which is safer than my own hard drive.
Web-based applications are here to stay, and if they are from reputable companies like Google and Yahoo, you know your files stored on their servers will remain there for a long time, if not forever.
Or "OpenOffice vs. MS Office", or "Firefox vs. IE". Be fair. Open some minds. I don't know about others, but OSS is a big part of what I do -- I use Firefox 90% of the time and IE 10% of the time; I got OpenOffice in my hard drive but rarely use it (in this case, MS Word/Works wins); I use GIMP 100% of the time (exhibit: my blog at http://sunandfun.blogspot.com/), because the price of Photoshop ($600) scares me away.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe this research in MagLev tech, military as it is, can somehow benefit the MagLev train development in the U. S. Wouldn't it be nice to travel between LA and NY on a train that "floats" at 500 km/hr, as demonstrated in this video (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=292640039 6387878713) shot by some guy who rode on a Japanese MagLev.
"Most people think of blogs as being primarily political or tech-focused. To most people, the important things they want to learn about have to do with people they know. So I think personal blogs are really the future, and with that comes a challenge for blogs to be more friendly and welcoming."
Blogs have always been primarily a personal tool. The avalanche of blogs, ironically, even out the playing field. The so-called "famous bloggers" may have their clicks, but for the millions of faceless bloggers (like me ), blogging is a source of entertainment, nothing solemn about it at all.
Here is the famous photo from Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 showing a young man standing in front of a column of Chinese tanks sent to quash the students who demonstrated for democracy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_mass acre.
Today we don't know the fate of that brave young man, but we can safely assume that there is more steel in that young man's spine than any of the leaders in Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Cicso who would choose to clear the way for the Chinese tanks if they were given the choice.
Glad to hear that Industrial Light and Magic, a movie special effects company founded by George Lucas, is one of the recipients of this award. Obviously this piece of news was drowned out by the sound of one certain shotgun blast in Texas.
_ Magic)
A trivia about ILM -- John Lasseter (director of Toy Story) worked for ILM in the early 1980s as a computer animator. The computer graphics department, now known as Pixar, was eventually sold to Steve Jobs, which went on to create the first CG animated feature with Toy Story. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Light_and
Maybe Internet radio stations should openly tell people that streaming music can be legitimately recorded for personal use. Audacity (an open-source free sound editor), for instance, can record streamed music; in fact, it teaches you how to do it: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq?s=recordi ng&i=streaming.
Radio music is about "surprises" -- it plays new music you wouldn't have the chance to hear about otherwise. Like the old cassette days when you simply pushed the record button and recorded a whole bunch of songs and later edited out the ones you don't like, you can do the same with streamed music from Internet radio stations.
From Wikipedia: "String theory is a model of fundamental physics whose building blocks are one-dimensional extended objects (strings) rather than the zero-dimensional points (particles) that are the basis of the Standard Model of particle physics..."
y
Here is the article:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theor
Smile, you're on Slashdot: http://icoc.freehomepage.com/contact.html
According to Wikipedia, there are 63 million card-carrying Communist Party members in China (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_C hina), out of the entire population of 1.3 billion. In other words, less than 5% of the population are lording over the other 95% in a country that the Constitution stipulates that only one party, namely Chinese Communist Party, can govern the nation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_pa rties_in_China).
During the period of Apartheid in South Africa, American companies that did business with the white-minority government used similar rationale to justify their investments in South Africa. Their basic argument was that if they did not go into South Africa, poor black South Africans would suffer. Most people did not buy their argument then, and those few who did were in the camp of "look, business is business, there's nothing wrong in trying to make a buck". The only saving grace for Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergy Brin, et al, is that people do have short memories.
Ebert is simply being territorial. Blame him for being a film enthusiast -- it's like hearing an energetic sushi chef tell us that Japanese food is better than French cuisine.
One common point between viewing movies and playing video games is the "pleasure of encountering surprises". When we watch a movie, we may guess that A, B, C might happen, but in fact, X, Y, Z occur, and if the director is smart, we may feel gratified by the unpredictable twists, which is a sensation similar to, during a video gameplay, when we are suddenly attacked by a "surprise monster" which we engage with pleasure (or pain), but in the end are happy about the virtual engagement.
What is different is this: when watching a movie, we prefer to be "outwitted" by the filmmaker, whereas in video gameplaying, we prefer to overcome the artificial intelligence thrown at us, meaning, the pleasure of video gameplaying is in the notion (perhaps erroneous) that we have "beaten" the game designer -- and there lies the art of video game design, as we, the players, are "fooled" into believing that we have the authorial control.
GIIMP-related books can be found at: http://www.gimp.org/books/. Better yet, go to its online tutorials at: http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/, and just print them out on sheets of 3-hole punched paper and bind them into a book, and then download a copy of GIMP (from http://www.gimp.org/), burn it into a CD, and gift-wrap all the items and present the package as a Christmas gift for her.
t -old-movie-classics.html
Without using any dead-tree books, I taught myself how to use GIMP and other free graphic software like Pixia and ArtRage by consulting their "Help" sections and online tutorials. Here are some examples of what I, someone who has no formal computer graphics training, can do: http://sunandfun.blogspot.com/2005/10/new-looks-a
Happy birthday to GIMP, the "King Pimp" of graphics software. Without this powerful, free, open-source image editor, I couldn't have created the graphics for my blog: http://sunandfun.blogspot.com/2005/04/in-praise-of -gimp.html
partly to offer some kind of counter offense against Microsoft's Xbox 360 blitz, partly to rehabilitate itself from the DRM rootkit mess.
I just came back from a trip to my local Wal-Mart where I watched, for the first time, some guy play the new Xbox 360 on a demo machine. Despite the fact that (oddly enough) there was no one else but me and the player to admire this machine, I was totally impressed by the vivid graphics of the "Call of Duty" demo I saw, and can therefore conclude that it is possible for video game design to reach the level of "art".
I was playing an old "Battlefield 1942" game only yesterday on my laptop, and to see the dramatic changes in the graphical details, the lighting, the virtual human movements, the AI, etc., in Xbox 360 is a mesmerising experience. As the saying goes in the movie industry that "great special effects do not necessarily make good movies, great stories do," the same is perhaps true in PC/Video gaming. When playing games or watching movies, people want to be surprised, pleasantly, by dramatic twists and turns, and be immersed in the story, and in the case of video gaming, the advancement in technology does help, because as the CPU power increases and memory chips are cheaper to manufacture, the games will become more life-like, and it definitely requires artistic temperament to code and render the facial expressions and body movements of those virtual players that are the gamers' alter egos.
Here is a fairly long list of websites that use AJAX -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_usin g_Ajax
Buying books by the pages and chapters is not a new idea. I actually wrote about it way back in 2003. Random House, the mega publisher, is obviously giving its approval to Amazon's proposal by coming out with its own idea of micro-payment model -- charging 5 cents a page, with 4 of that going to the authors and the publishers, as reported here.<br><br>
These days, Johny and Susie Happy-Clickers gladly "click to purchase" 99-cents songs, so it seems like a natural progression to click to buy a page here, a chapter there.
Red Herring magazine is reporting that Google Wallet, the so-called "PayPal killer", may debut before Christmas. The article (http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=14233&he d=Google+Wallet+May+Debut+Soon§or=Industries&s ubsector=Communications) says Google Wallet might make it possible for anyone to click on a Google ad and make a purchase without leaving the site.
Google Ads, Google Wallet, Google Bank, Google Credit Card. It's all very natural.
This reminds me of Woody Allen's 1973 movie "Sleeper", in which he plays a character who wakes up from a deep cryonics sleep and finds himself in a futuristic society in which "everything that used to be considered bad for health, such as smoking and eating red meat, is now considered good for you."
I'm sure the author of "Everything Bad Is Good for You" is serious, but I think the correct way to approach this book is with a sense of humor. Before video games, people played chess for brain exercise; before TV, there was a thing called "reading books"; before Internet, one went to a place called "library".
The "increasing IQ" claim is suspicious -- Einstein never played "Doom", never watched "Sopranos", never surfed online, but we can all agree that 50 years after his death we have yet to find anyone smarter.
Lucas, as the creator of "Star Wars", is allowed to do whatever his little billionaire heart desires, as far as "Star Wars" and his other films, including "THX 1138" and "American Graffiti", are concerned.
If he chose to show, in a future episode (or a new TV series), that Han Solo and Princess Leia did "have a thing" and produce a child, who grows up to become another Jedi master, he could.
The creator of original fictional characters has the license to do whatever he darn well pleases.
True that. I gave him the wrong title. But he's the Speaker of the House, so he's third in the line of presidential succession, after the Vice President, so he's pretty high up there.
Right off the bat, this Republican Senator did something his Repblican colleagues probably won't like -- he criticized oil companies. From his blog:
"Today, energy companies started reporting their 3rd quarter earnings, and while Americans paying were record prices at the pump, energy companies were making record profits. This is America. And Republicans don't believe in punishing success. But what are these oil companies doing to bring down the cost of oil and natural gas?"
Welcome to blogosphere, Senator.
The first lawsuit filed against Google's plan to scan books is by The Authors Guild and three authors who are described by their press release (http://www.authorsguild.org/news/sues_google_citi ng.htm) as follows:
"Herbert Mitgang, a former New York Times editorial writer and the author of numerous fiction and nonfiction books, including "The Fiery Trial: A Life of Lincoln," published by Viking Press; Betty Miles, the award-winning author of many works for children and young adults, and the co-author of "Just Think," published by Alfred A. Knopf; and Daniel Hoffman, the author and editor of many volumes of poetry, translation, and literary criticism, including "Barbarous Knowledge: Myth in the Poetry of Yeats, Graves and Muir" and "Striking the Stones," both published by Oxford University Press. Mr. Hoffman was the 1973-74 Poet Laureate of the United States."
As accomplished as those three authors are, they are nowhere near being household names, and one can only speculate two possible reasons why they're opposed to Google's effort: 1) they think people will stop buying their books once the books are turned into digital form and made available in the wild cyber frontier; 2) or just the opposite -- they think their books are so precious that they don't want people to find out about them on the Internet. This paranoia about new technology by some authors (here I emphasize "some", because many writers, including this one, do not mind having their books scanned by Google Print program) is really puzzling.
The commercial reality is this: Google can stop this scanning program right now, and it will continue to make money, and lots of money, in other areas. I believe Google's sincerity when it says it does this to help a student in Bangladesh to locate a hard-to-find book. Clearly, some writers, including the three mentioned above, do not think it's important for their books to be discovered by a diligent student in Bangladesh.
"Price" element -- You can buy the cheapest iPod for $99 with 512MB storage, but the $99 model PDA (Palm Z22) holds only 32MB data and can barely do anything.
"Play" element -- Nobody associates PDA with "play", while iPod is all about having fun.
Happy 15th birthday, IMDb! I write about movies on my blog (http://sunandfun.blogspot.com/), and IMDb is THE place the go for trivia. The site is a trivia galore. Where else can you find out that Peter Sellers was supposed to play four roles in "Dr. Strangelove", including Major Kong, which was eventually played by Slim Pickens? And in "2001: the Space Odyssey", by incrementing IBM you get HAL, for HAL-9000 the badass computer, although Arthur C. Clarke, the co-screenwriter, claims HAL stands for Heuristic ALgorithmic Computer.
Oh, yeah, geek but not meek! Congrats to the guys and gals who work for IMDb.com.
Gmail is another AJAX application, and it has immense possibilities. I wrote this comment using Gmail, checked my spelling with its spellchecker, saved it in Draft, and it is stored on Google's server, which is safer than my own hard drive.
Web-based applications are here to stay, and if they are from reputable companies like Google and Yahoo, you know your files stored on their servers will remain there for a long time, if not forever.
Or "OpenOffice vs. MS Office", or "Firefox vs. IE". Be fair. Open some minds. I don't know about others, but OSS is a big part of what I do -- I use Firefox 90% of the time and IE 10% of the time; I got OpenOffice in my hard drive but rarely use it (in this case, MS Word/Works wins); I use GIMP 100% of the time (exhibit: my blog at http://sunandfun.blogspot.com/), because the price of Photoshop ($600) scares me away.