Wow. Thanks to Fark.com, I've gone from 15 page views (mostly mine) to almost 5,000 in about 24 hours. Very nice to have so many compliments - it'll be the first and last fan mail I ever get, probably.:) Check for some additional notes and answers at the bottom of the page.
He has no idea what a slashdotting is, apparently.
Forgot to mention... they're only conidering magazine content for now. The other properties are not up for consideration at this time. CNN is a question, though... does cnn.com qualify as a publication?
Time People Life Fortune SI A ton of other magazines Warner brothers (WB network and WB movie studios. This includes All THings Looney Tunes, as well.) CNN TW Music Time Warner cable HBO
The list goes on and on. So if TW goes all out, you will be unable to access all of that content without paying a fee.
Oh, I don't have kids. I just can't stand the little bastards in all of the movies that I _DO_ go see. The 8 year old punk rapping along with Eminem at the end of 8 mile was just a little emore than I could stand.
My previous comment was more of a sympathy thing on behalf of all of the people I know that _DO_ have kids that dragged them along.
It's that simple. Even if MS produced some kind of patch that was stored on the local X-Box hard drive, the vast majority of users would still be unable to play halo online because they wouldn't be able to meet the bandwidth requirements. Each player generates something like 100K/s of traffic keeping track of all manner of detail. Even with the gateway that was developed outside of MS, gameplay is terrible.
So with three or more players in a single game of halo, most cable modems or DSL lines would choke and die.
The "Impatient Parents" edition would be nice. I was dragged off to see "this is the film that never ends, it just goes on and on my friends," last night, and I'm still recovering from the boredom. Two hours and forty one minutes? PLUS 20 minutes of previes and commercials at the theater? How can a parent with young children POSSIBLY expect their kids to sit still during this? The film moved along at a SNAIL'S pace, with at least half of the scenes being irrelevant to the central plotline. I understand tha there was a lot of detail that will lead up to future films, but THREE HOURS? One can't even NAP during this movie because of the screaming children in the theater, the screaming children on the screen, or the screaming voice in the back of one's head telling you to run screaming to pretect your sanity.
I've done it... I've sold my soul to the Beast and picked up an x-box live kit. I felt bad enough supporting MS, but when I had to give them a CREDIT CARD NUMBER, I knew I was screwed. But like all those that have sold their souls before me for riches, wealth, power, etc... I'm having one hell of a time. Mmmm... mech assault.
I'll probably be able to pick my soul back up on e-bay soon anyway, but eh.
Re:The Before and after shots look backwards
on
Font HOWTO For Linux
·
· Score: 2
It's probably you. By default, MSIE will scale large images down to fit on screen, thus royally screwing up the images. Turn this feature off to see the proper screenshots.
It seems to me that the long term goal of replacing outdated infrastructure and ancient business models may be reached sooner by this "fail fast" proposal, but the chaos produced would be devastating to customers. Service outages, price fluctuations, and provider changes could cripple customers large and small. The industry that might come out of such a proposal may be worse off for the experience.
I'm surprised this took so long, now that I think about it some. The illusion of depth on a flat surface can be achieved by forcing each eye to receive a different image, effectively tricking the eye into believing that what it's seeing has depth.
Try looking very closely at an LCD monitor some time, like within 4 inches. Due to the narrow viewing angle present on LCDs, each eye will see a different view of the same pixels. If you angle your head just right, you can perceive something resembling depth, though without any real control. I wouldn't think it would be that difficult to engineer a panel to make use of this effect.
Then again, my eyes are pretty jacked up, what with me having severe macular degeneration and some pretty crappy color vision. The experiment may also work a little better if you drink a bottle of 'tussin right before viewing.
The name David Brin pops up on/. every few weeks, and I feel obligated to flame him every time. Now he's commenting on AoTC? Pot, meet kettle... kettle, this is pot. David Brin, like George Lucas in the newest crop of films, starts with a great idea, rolls along, tells a good story, then takes a big fat dump all over what he's written so far. Want a neat story about gravity lasers and artificial black holes? "Screw that," he saya 300 pages in, "I want exploding meat puppets and space aliens. And if that's not enough, how about an earth spirit?" And Kiln people? Don't get me started.
Hey, wait a minute... I _LIKED_ keaton as batman! The first (OK, not first, but you know what I mean) movie was by far the best of the lot. Of course, that could be attributed to Nicholson...
On the other hand, what business does he have writing a review of a product he's never used? Not unly is that unduly harsh, it's unfair. That's like reviewing a movie based on the trailers.
I'm personally amused by those who are so deeply entrenched in their religions (I hesitate to call them zealots, but let's call a spade a garden tool, here,) that they can bring themselves to a near boil over books like American Gods and Harry Potter. Try explaining Wicca, Satanism, or hell JUDAISM to these people some time... it's hilarious. They're so entrenched in their religious dogma that they refuse to even HEAR the other side.
It's like trying to convince a hard SF fan to read Harry Potter... or a Linux user to load MS Windows. Hmmm... maybe zealot is perfect.
One interesting side effect of these definitions... what happens to Sci Fi if the science is disproven at a later date? Is "The Time Machine" still science fiction? What about much of Clark and Asimov's work that has been disproven by later scientific developments? Hell, what about 90% of what David "I don't know how to end a book" Brin writes?
"1. Science fiction stories are those in which some aspect of future science or technology is so integral to the stroy that, if you take away the science or technology, the story collapses... 2. Science fiction writers are free to extrapolate from today's knowledge and to invent anything they can imagine -- so long as no one can prove that what they have 'invented' is wrong."
Isaac Asimov: "In my view, the best science fiction, the only valid science fiction and the science fiction I try to write depends on legitimate science rationally extrapolated. If something is wrong, distored and illogical, it cannot be categorized as science fiction, any more than noise can be called music or a used paint rag a painting."
So by these definitions, Harry Potter ain't SF. Then again, neither is American Gods.
Exactly three days. The novelty lasts exactly three days. Fortunately, that's short enough that we don't need any survivor's groups and supoprt sponsors.
True, but you wouldn't need to know the location of every node on the network... only those nodes involved in reaching the next fixed node, which could be placed every few (10? 20?) miles. A map of nodes geographically close is all that's necessary. You run into problems when you get into high traffic areas, so a system of choosing routes based on a minimum distance could be used.
Interesting idea, though wouldn't the equipment to measure this be substantially more expensive than a GPS, or even a simple electronic compass?
GPS data would also allow for constructing the network based on position as well as direction, allowing each node to locate the best choice for the next hop.
I found myself considering a similar possibility while on a long car trip the other day. If EVERY CAR were fitted with a GPS and wireless repeater, it would be possible to build a wireless mesh that could cover the highways of most major cities. Put a land based, hard wired internet connected WAP every few miles, and you've got broadband wireless on the road! Why GPS? Two cars headed in opposite directions at 100+ KPH would not want to act as repeaters for each other, as the would only be within range of each other for a very short time. The GPS could determine which cars were best suited for the current direction fo travel, and detect when a car was leaving the "mesh" by watching for exiting on an offramp. The GPS could also be used to determine an optimal path for data to travel, so as not to hop to every single car before reaching a land-based connection, which would be expensive time-wise.
This probably wouldn't work very well in rural areas or at night when few cars are on the road, but could likely be effective near large cities. And of course, the idea could be expanded to individuals walking, ala Neil Stephenson's "Snow Crash" network.
Of course, the font sizes are manageable in some locations. But this isn't the only component necessary for assisting people with low vision. Inversion of the image is also often important, and this rarely works with Gnome/KDE. (It doesn't always work with windows, either, but it works far more often than on any of the major X-based WMs.) There's also the matter of component scaling. Under windows and MacOS, changing the font size will also almost always proportionally scale windows, icons, dialog boxes, etc. Unfortunately, one of the areas in which this will NOT work is games. The scaling doesn't apply to most (all?) directX functions.
As for windows... you can change the system wide font-scaling in the display->settings->advanced->general panel. This will affect just about every font system wide.
Slashdot Mirror
Forgot to mention... they're only conidering magazine content for now. The other properties are not up for consideration at this time. CNN is a question, though... does cnn.com qualify as a publication?
Keep in mind that TW owns a LOT of properties.
Time
People
Life
Fortune
SI
A ton of other magazines
Warner brothers (WB network and WB movie studios. This includes All THings Looney Tunes, as well.)
CNN
TW Music
Time Warner cable
HBO
The list goes on and on. So if TW goes all out, you will be unable to access all of that content without paying a fee.
So yeah, that sucks.
Oh, I don't have kids. I just can't stand the little bastards in all of the movies that I _DO_ go see. The 8 year old punk rapping along with Eminem at the end of 8 mile was just a little emore than I could stand.
My previous comment was more of a sympathy thing on behalf of all of the people I know that _DO_ have kids that dragged them along.
It's that simple. Even if MS produced some kind of patch that was stored on the local X-Box hard drive, the vast majority of users would still be unable to play halo online because they wouldn't be able to meet the bandwidth requirements. Each player generates something like 100K/s of traffic keeping track of all manner of detail. Even with the gateway that was developed outside of MS, gameplay is terrible.
So with three or more players in a single game of halo, most cable modems or DSL lines would choke and die.
The "Impatient Parents" edition would be nice. I was dragged off to see "this is the film that never ends, it just goes on and on my friends," last night, and I'm still recovering from the boredom. Two hours and forty one minutes? PLUS 20 minutes of previes and commercials at the theater? How can a parent with young children POSSIBLY expect their kids to sit still during this? The film moved along at a SNAIL'S pace, with at least half of the scenes being irrelevant to the central plotline. I understand tha there was a lot of detail that will lead up to future films, but THREE HOURS? One can't even NAP during this movie because of the screaming children in the theater, the screaming children on the screen, or the screaming voice in the back of one's head telling you to run screaming to pretect your sanity.
Trim off an hour next time, guys.
I've done it... I've sold my soul to the Beast and picked up an x-box live kit. I felt bad enough supporting MS, but when I had to give them a CREDIT CARD NUMBER, I knew I was screwed. But like all those that have sold their souls before me for riches, wealth, power, etc... I'm having one hell of a time. Mmmm... mech assault.
I'll probably be able to pick my soul back up on e-bay soon anyway, but eh.
It's probably you. By default, MSIE will scale large images down to fit on screen, thus royally screwing up the images. Turn this feature off to see the proper screenshots.
It seems to me that the long term goal of replacing outdated infrastructure and ancient business models may be reached sooner by this "fail fast" proposal, but the chaos produced would be devastating to customers. Service outages, price fluctuations, and provider changes could cripple customers large and small. The industry that might come out of such a proposal may be worse off for the experience.
Oh well, I've been trying to get a distributed kernel compilation system working using Platform's LSF. Guess I can throw that project away. ;)
Two words : CAD/CAE
I'm surprised this took so long, now that I think about it some. The illusion of depth on a flat surface can be achieved by forcing each eye to receive a different image, effectively tricking the eye into believing that what it's seeing has depth.
Try looking very closely at an LCD monitor some time, like within 4 inches. Due to the narrow viewing angle present on LCDs, each eye will see a different view of the same pixels. If you angle your head just right, you can perceive something resembling depth, though without any real control. I wouldn't think it would be that difficult to engineer a panel to make use of this effect.
Then again, my eyes are pretty jacked up, what with me having severe macular degeneration and some pretty crappy color vision. The experiment may also work a little better if you drink a bottle of 'tussin right before viewing.
The name David Brin pops up on /. every few weeks, and I feel obligated to flame him every time. Now he's commenting on AoTC? Pot, meet kettle... kettle, this is pot. David Brin, like George Lucas in the newest crop of films, starts with a great idea, rolls along, tells a good story, then takes a big fat dump all over what he's written so far. Want a neat story about gravity lasers and artificial black holes? "Screw that," he saya 300 pages in, "I want exploding meat puppets and space aliens. And if that's not enough, how about an earth spirit?" And Kiln people? Don't get me started.
Hey, wait a minute... I _LIKED_ keaton as batman! The first (OK, not first, but you know what I mean) movie was by far the best of the lot. Of course, that could be attributed to Nicholson...
On the other hand, what business does he have writing a review of a product he's never used? Not unly is that unduly harsh, it's unfair. That's like reviewing a movie based on the trailers.
I'm personally amused by those who are so deeply entrenched in their religions (I hesitate to call them zealots, but let's call a spade a garden tool, here,) that they can bring themselves to a near boil over books like American Gods and Harry Potter. Try explaining Wicca, Satanism, or hell JUDAISM to these people some time... it's hilarious. They're so entrenched in their religious dogma that they refuse to even HEAR the other side.
It's like trying to convince a hard SF fan to read Harry Potter... or a Linux user to load MS Windows. Hmmm... maybe zealot is perfect.
One interesting side effect of these definitions... what happens to Sci Fi if the science is disproven at a later date? Is "The Time Machine" still science fiction? What about much of Clark and Asimov's work that has been disproven by later scientific developments? Hell, what about 90% of what David "I don't know how to end a book" Brin writes?
Some definitions by the masters
:
:
Ben Bova
"1. Science fiction stories are those in which some aspect of future science or technology is so integral to the stroy that, if you take away the science or technology, the story collapses...
2. Science fiction writers are free to extrapolate from today's knowledge and to invent anything they can imagine -- so long as no one can prove that what they have 'invented' is wrong."
Isaac Asimov
"In my view, the best science fiction, the only valid science fiction and the science fiction I try to write depends on legitimate science rationally extrapolated. If something is wrong, distored and illogical, it cannot be categorized as science fiction, any more than noise can be called music or a used paint rag a painting."
So by these definitions, Harry Potter ain't SF. Then again, neither is American Gods.
Exactly three days. The novelty lasts exactly three days. Fortunately, that's short enough that we don't need any survivor's groups and supoprt sponsors.
That's daytime population. At night, the population drops below four million.
True, but you wouldn't need to know the location of every node on the network... only those nodes involved in reaching the next fixed node, which could be placed every few (10? 20?) miles. A map of nodes geographically close is all that's necessary. You run into problems when you get into high traffic areas, so a system of choosing routes based on a minimum distance could be used.
Interesting idea, though wouldn't the equipment to measure this be substantially more expensive than a GPS, or even a simple electronic compass?
GPS data would also allow for constructing the network based on position as well as direction, allowing each node to locate the best choice for the next hop.
I found myself considering a similar possibility while on a long car trip the other day. If EVERY CAR were fitted with a GPS and wireless repeater, it would be possible to build a wireless mesh that could cover the highways of most major cities. Put a land based, hard wired internet connected WAP every few miles, and you've got broadband wireless on the road! Why GPS? Two cars headed in opposite directions at 100+ KPH would not want to act as repeaters for each other, as the would only be within range of each other for a very short time. The GPS could determine which cars were best suited for the current direction fo travel, and detect when a car was leaving the "mesh" by watching for exiting on an offramp. The GPS could also be used to determine an optimal path for data to travel, so as not to hop to every single car before reaching a land-based connection, which would be expensive time-wise.
This probably wouldn't work very well in rural areas or at night when few cars are on the road, but could likely be effective near large cities. And of course, the idea could be expanded to individuals walking, ala Neil Stephenson's "Snow Crash" network.
Assuming constant acceleration, that'd be almost 3 Gs for sixty seconds. Fairly uncomfortable for the average joe.
Of course, the font sizes are manageable in some locations. But this isn't the only component necessary for assisting people with low vision. Inversion of the image is also often important, and this rarely works with Gnome/KDE. (It doesn't always work with windows, either, but it works far more often than on any of the major X-based WMs.) There's also the matter of component scaling. Under windows and MacOS, changing the font size will also almost always proportionally scale windows, icons, dialog boxes, etc. Unfortunately, one of the areas in which this will NOT work is games. The scaling doesn't apply to most (all?) directX functions.
As for windows... you can change the system wide font-scaling in the display->settings->advanced->general panel. This will affect just about every font system wide.