I have no interest in watching online sports of any kind, but there is a sport I'd like to watch an organized competitive version of.
Paintball.
Most sports are combat/war derivative anyway, so now that we have a very direct squad analog, it could be a spectator sport.
Imagine watching trained squads from the armed services go up against some corporate or region sponsored teams. I'd watch that. Nike vs. Army in the Krylon Bowl.
For 2D hand-drawn, true, the budget is often much lower, with less in-between frames actually drawn (lower effective framerate).
In this case there is a sort of animator hierarchy, with lead animator doing every N frames, with sketchy lines. Then a lower tier of animator fill in frames, and in some cases there is yet another tier below that. Labor intensive. halve the framerate, halve the largest labor cost.
For CGI, this is not quite the same. The render farm is doing that last tier. Skipping frames just saves render time (and finaling, which is labor intensive). For CGI, the main cost reduction mechanism is offshoring all of the animation itself and dropping the marketing and distribution budget. Alot of CGI cost is relatively independent of framecount. CGI needs the mostly frame independent rigging (virtual puppetmakers), surfacing, lighting (minute/shot dependent, framerate independent) as well as the frame dependent finaling and rendering.
A CGI direct to DVD movie, based on a preceeding theatrical release movie, is less likely than 2D to have visible compromises in the content itself.
Note that Toy Story 2 was direct to video until very late in production.
Futurama is a hybrid. Where and how direct to DVD cost-cutting will have an effect is unclear. Also note that direct-to-DVD during production does not mean it will not be upgraded to theatrical release later, as happened to Toy Story 2.
There is this small gap between a program and a product that Open Source software seems to be unable to bridge, this final, annoying, painful step of really _finishing_ it so that it _could_ be sold.
That small gap is the last 10%. But that 10% is the infamous part of the 90/10 rule.
Say MS via some clever legal or technical tweaking puts linux/Mono on uncertain ground, at least from your PHB's point of view. Say you are also tasked with some short deadline project, for which your now current skillset would make.NET by far the quickest platform to develop on.
For many people the need for a PC at all could dissolve if google were to package up their thin client as a PS3, revolution, or xbox2 disk/media.
Apple could do the same with iTunes. etc. etc.
I think the obsolescence of consumer PCs will be driven from teens upwards. Outside of the professional workplace (where desktops and laptops will not obsolesce) teens are the heaviest computer and internet users. They are also the most cash constrained. The clincher is that this is not really a thin-client 60s mainframe style solution. It is for personal data, but not for all applications. Heavy client applications like traditional games are still supported.
Do you also choose neither to believe nor disbelieve in invisible pink elephants? There's no evidence for them either...
Actually, there is no such thing as invisible pink elephants by definition, unless of course the elephant is standing in front of a pink background and your invisible elephant is invisible by virtue of some chameleon-like ability.
Come on, this is just a loose fictional story. No
need to do forensic analysis on the details.
10,000 years ago I can see guys like you stomping away from the campfire when the oral tradition of that night contradicts last year's story. Of course that means you'd be the guys missing out on procreational activities later that night.
Yet somehow those genes keep recurring. Odd that is.
They won't do it themselves though. A MS distro
approach would help alleviate the monopolistic
results of things like including anti-spyware.
The fundamental problem is that a useful desktop OS install needs a kernel, utilities, email client, browser, desktop, anti-spyware (if the kernel is windows), etc. If MS provides all of this stuff by default, they tend to get a monopoly...intended or not.
However, if they were forced to vend pieces, from which OEMs or whoever could assemble distros, the anti-spyware companies, browser companies, etc would not automaticly be near death as soon as MS included what they really need to include to have their own viable distro.
This is what the justice department should have driven towards. Splitting off the Office side would not have accomplished this.
All the time that is spent playing politics could be spent improving software and fighting FUD with the truth
Nope. Lots of posts are saying this, but this is not true. Talking heads will talk. Developers will develop. The F/OSS community has plenty of both. I certainly do not want the F/OSS 'politicians' who have little development skill diving into code. The politicians who do have dev skill may dive at will though.
Any person with half a brain knows that Microsoft, Sun, insert any corporation, will lie (or stretch the truth) in order to make their stuff look better than their competitors.
Wrong again. Most people, and plenty with over half a brain, do not know this (I take 'half a brain' to mean an average intellegence person). That is why advertising actually works and why corporations pay so much for it.
The g-force is not necessary for a realistic racing game. I race in a real-world series where we pull almost 3gs with certain tires on certain tracks.
I practice with F1 99-02 (an EA sim) and GPL (Grand Prix Legends, a 1998 Papyrus sim). The car control, thought process, and concentration are all very similar to the real thing.
'hopelessly unrealistic' for 1st person vehicular games is not true.
> Why can't we just have an open, honest election?
Because most people don't think. They react. They react more to dramatic negativity. Campaigns that win do what works. It is Darwinian that way. The problem is not so much the system as it is the voters themselves.
That is also why in the big picture candidates are getting closer and closer to each other. They are finding the least negative spinnable (appropriately called 'politically correct') positions on most issues.
People won't think until food starts coming off the table. By then we'll have collapsed beyond repair.
I am holding off on buying a Mac because of games.
I use my computer (currently Pentium M/debian) for development (mainly C++ and lua), surfing, writing, image management (digital pictures), watching DVDs on trips, and games (on winXP dual boot). So it is a general purpose computer that I share with my wife.
I would like 64 bit next (for my code), so pragmatically I am looking at Mac and Opteron. My wife wants easy-to-use-learn-and-manage and prefers OsX over XP, gnome, KDE, fvwm2, etc (to her the 'OS' is the desktop/WM).
I still want games, but I do NOT need latest and fastest premium priced HW. It is about gameplay, but there is not gameplay without game. Mac doesn't have the games. Linux doesnt either, but it can share HW (dual boot) with XP, which does have the games.
So the right choice for us now is x86. It would not be if Mac had the games.
If you do not like your job your attitude will affect others around you whose motivation may be to enjoy their job.
It IS valid to consider source motivation in hiring.
If all there was to life was being a productivity unit to serve a money engine then sure, your logic holds. But it isn't. And "how" you are productive does have impact on other peoples quality of life.
Personally, I think the selfish goal of life is to maximize the integral of enjoyment over one's lifetime. The unselfish goal would be to maximize the integral of society's enjoyment. Since when has the golden rule been replaced with "Treat others however necessary to be productive for the corporation"
However, the realist in me says that once Firefox really takes off, we can look forward to people finding security exploits in it too.
Firefox alone is not the solution. It is part of the solution. So is Konqueror. Diversity of implementations of acceptable standards is the solution. Many browsers with one standard to rule them all. So even IE could be part of the solution if it followed acceptable standards.
Because of the automobile addiction
on
Palmtop Nirvana?
·
· Score: 1
Subnotebooks vs. notebook
In the US, the typical usage model does not usually include habitual 'lap' or 'palm' usage. Typical means the average joe in the average white collar job. Typical does not include field work.
We drive everywhere, so there is per-capita not much usage in transit. Not even as passengers in cars (HOV in LA is only 2 and it is still usually moving well).
Air travel has a little table, so a fuller notebook is fine.
At home, at work, at starbucks, usage is on a table or desk, often plugged in to AC.
So the truth is, w/o much bus or train usage, the subnotebook tradeoff is hard to justify over a full notebook. By tradeoff I mean price and space (screen and KB). 1900x1200 in 15" is actually useful for real work, but 1024x768 in 12" is marginal.
Now solid-state vs. rotating disks is a more compelling tradeoff I'd like to see get affordable.
Most people would prefer nearer to the 'top' of the 'heap' than not. If there is only one 'top' of one 'heap' than only a small percentage of the population can be happy (I'll defer an exact definition of happy).
In other words, everyone wants to feel special.
Fortunately, in real life there are multiple 'tops' (fastest 100m runner, richest person, sexiest babe) and multiple 'heaps' (local, regional, or global; money or power [although correlated]; skinny or curvy).
This allows for much more special feelingness to be attained in the population. Virtual worlds add more tops and heaps, but they also add more chances. In real life we carry consequences of all previous choices and actions forward, and often route into a condition of reducing flexibility. In the virtual, one can 'reset' as often as one likes (bound by real world restrictions since the real world must host the necessary real bodies and equipment).
One nice feature of the virtual worlds is that they could eventually draw population away from competition in the real world, making the satisfaction of us real world participants higher.
if gpl_invalid():
if fallback_to_default_Copyright:
scoHasViolatedIBMCopyright = True
else # fallforward_to_public_domain (cannot unring bell of extra rights)
scoHasViolated = False else:
scoHasViolatedGPL = True
Slashdot Mirror
I have no interest in watching online sports of any kind, but there is a sport I'd like to watch an organized competitive version of.
Paintball.
Most sports are combat/war derivative anyway, so now that we have a very direct squad analog, it could be a spectator sport.
Imagine watching trained squads from the armed services go up against some corporate or region sponsored teams. I'd watch that. Nike vs. Army in the Krylon Bowl.
For 2D hand-drawn, true, the budget is often much lower, with less in-between frames actually drawn (lower effective framerate).
In this case there is a sort of animator hierarchy, with lead animator doing every N frames, with sketchy lines. Then a lower tier of animator fill in frames, and in some cases there is yet another tier below that. Labor intensive. halve the framerate, halve the largest labor cost.
For CGI, this is not quite the same. The render farm is doing that last tier. Skipping frames just saves render time (and finaling, which is labor intensive). For CGI, the main cost reduction mechanism is offshoring all of the animation itself and dropping the marketing and distribution budget. Alot of CGI cost is relatively independent of framecount. CGI needs the mostly frame independent rigging (virtual puppetmakers), surfacing, lighting (minute/shot dependent, framerate independent) as well as the frame dependent finaling and rendering.
A CGI direct to DVD movie, based on a preceeding theatrical release movie, is less likely than 2D to have visible compromises in the content itself. Note that Toy Story 2 was direct to video until very late in production.
Futurama is a hybrid. Where and how direct to DVD cost-cutting will have an effect is unclear. Also note that direct-to-DVD during production does not mean it will not be upgraded to theatrical release later, as happened to Toy Story 2.
Half Life 2, World of Warcraft, San Andreas, Silent Hill 4, Resident Evil 4, Halo 2, Doom III, Metroid Prime 2, Paper Mario
2, 'world of', GTA yet again, 4, 4, 2, III, 2, 'paper'
They are all sequels. They are all "same old song and dance".
Duke Nukem Forever In racing, DNF means "did not finish".
There is this small gap between a program and a product that Open Source software seems to be unable to bridge, this final, annoying, painful step of really _finishing_ it so that it _could_ be sold. That small gap is the last 10%. But that 10% is the infamous part of the 90/10 rule.
OK I've go on too long, but MONO is GREAT!!!
.NET by far the quickest platform to develop on.
Say MS via some clever legal or technical tweaking puts linux/Mono on uncertain ground, at least from your PHB's point of view. Say you are also tasked with some short deadline project, for which your now current skillset would make
Who won then, windows or linux?
For many people the need for a PC at all could dissolve if google were to package up their thin client as a PS3, revolution, or xbox2 disk/media.
Apple could do the same with iTunes. etc. etc.
I think the obsolescence of consumer PCs will be driven from teens upwards. Outside of the professional workplace (where desktops and laptops will not obsolesce) teens are the heaviest computer and internet users. They are also the most cash constrained. The clincher is that this is not really a thin-client 60s mainframe style solution. It is for personal data, but not for all applications. Heavy client applications like traditional games are still supported.
Do you also choose neither to believe nor disbelieve in invisible pink elephants? There's no evidence for them either...
Actually, there is no such thing as invisible pink elephants by definition, unless of course the elephant is standing in front of a pink background and your invisible elephant is invisible by virtue of some chameleon-like ability.
Mare Nostrum (in print) has a three player mod (Triumvirate) available from boardgamegeek.com that is similar to Republic of Rome.
mammals from the Precambrian period
Now there's a contradiction in story.
Come on, this is just a loose fictional story. No need to do forensic analysis on the details.
10,000 years ago I can see guys like you stomping away from the campfire when the oral tradition of that night contradicts last year's story. Of course that means you'd be the guys missing out on procreational activities later that night.
Yet somehow those genes keep recurring. Odd that is.
They won't do it themselves though. A MS distro approach would help alleviate the monopolistic results of things like including anti-spyware.
The fundamental problem is that a useful desktop OS install needs a kernel, utilities, email client, browser, desktop, anti-spyware (if the kernel is windows), etc. If MS provides all of this stuff by default, they tend to get a monopoly...intended or not.
However, if they were forced to vend pieces, from which OEMs or whoever could assemble distros, the anti-spyware companies, browser companies, etc would not automaticly be near death as soon as MS included what they really need to include to have their own viable distro.
This is what the justice department should have driven towards. Splitting off the Office side would not have accomplished this.
All the time that is spent playing politics could be spent improving software and fighting FUD with the truth
Nope. Lots of posts are saying this, but this is not true. Talking heads will talk. Developers will develop. The F/OSS community has plenty of both. I certainly do not want the F/OSS 'politicians' who have little development skill diving into code. The politicians who do have dev skill may dive at will though.
Any person with half a brain knows that Microsoft, Sun, insert any corporation, will lie (or stretch the truth) in order to make their stuff look better than their competitors.
Wrong again. Most people, and plenty with over half a brain, do not know this (I take 'half a brain' to mean an average intellegence person). That is why advertising actually works and why corporations pay so much for it.
The g-force is not necessary for a realistic racing game. I race in a real-world series where we pull almost 3gs with certain tires on certain tracks. I practice with F1 99-02 (an EA sim) and GPL (Grand Prix Legends, a 1998 Papyrus sim). The car control, thought process, and concentration are all very similar to the real thing. 'hopelessly unrealistic' for 1st person vehicular games is not true.
> Why can't we just have an open, honest election?
Because most people don't think. They react. They react more to dramatic negativity. Campaigns that win do what works. It is Darwinian that way. The problem is not so much the system as it is the voters themselves.
That is also why in the big picture candidates are getting closer and closer to each other. They are finding the least negative spinnable (appropriately called 'politically correct') positions on most issues.
People won't think until food starts coming off the table. By then we'll have collapsed beyond repair.
I am holding off on buying a Mac because of games. I use my computer (currently Pentium M/debian) for development (mainly C++ and lua), surfing, writing, image management (digital pictures), watching DVDs on trips, and games (on winXP dual boot). So it is a general purpose computer that I share with my wife. I would like 64 bit next (for my code), so pragmatically I am looking at Mac and Opteron. My wife wants easy-to-use-learn-and-manage and prefers OsX over XP, gnome, KDE, fvwm2, etc (to her the 'OS' is the desktop/WM). I still want games, but I do NOT need latest and fastest premium priced HW. It is about gameplay, but there is not gameplay without game. Mac doesn't have the games. Linux doesnt either, but it can share HW (dual boot) with XP, which does have the games. So the right choice for us now is x86. It would not be if Mac had the games.
If you do not like your job your attitude will affect others around you whose motivation may be to enjoy their job.
It IS valid to consider source motivation in hiring.
If all there was to life was being a productivity unit to serve a money engine then sure, your logic holds. But it isn't. And "how" you are productive does have impact on other peoples quality of life.
Personally, I think the selfish goal of life is to maximize the integral of enjoyment over one's lifetime. The unselfish goal would be to maximize the integral of society's enjoyment. Since when has the golden rule been replaced with "Treat others however necessary to be productive for the corporation"
However, the realist in me says that once Firefox really takes off, we can look forward to people finding security exploits in it too.
Firefox alone is not the solution. It is part of the solution. So is Konqueror. Diversity of implementations of acceptable standards is the solution. Many browsers with one standard to rule them all. So even IE could be part of the solution if it followed acceptable standards.
Subnotebooks vs. notebook
In the US, the typical usage model does not usually include habitual 'lap' or 'palm' usage. Typical means the average joe in the average white collar job. Typical does not include field work.
We drive everywhere, so there is per-capita not much usage in transit. Not even as passengers in cars (HOV in LA is only 2 and it is still usually moving well).
Air travel has a little table, so a fuller notebook is fine.
At home, at work, at starbucks, usage is on a table or desk, often plugged in to AC.
So the truth is, w/o much bus or train usage, the subnotebook tradeoff is hard to justify over a full notebook. By tradeoff I mean price and space (screen and KB). 1900x1200 in 15" is actually useful for real work, but 1024x768 in 12" is marginal.
Now solid-state vs. rotating disks is a more compelling tradeoff I'd like to see get affordable.
Most people would prefer nearer to the 'top' of the 'heap' than not. If there is only one 'top' of one 'heap' than only a small percentage of the population can be happy (I'll defer an exact definition of happy).
In other words, everyone wants to feel special.
Fortunately, in real life there are multiple 'tops' (fastest 100m runner, richest person, sexiest babe) and multiple 'heaps' (local, regional, or global; money or power [although correlated]; skinny or curvy).
This allows for much more special feelingness to be attained in the population. Virtual worlds add more tops and heaps, but they also add more chances. In real life we carry consequences of all previous choices and actions forward, and often route into a condition of reducing flexibility. In the virtual, one can 'reset' as often as one likes (bound by real world restrictions since the real world must host the necessary real bodies and equipment).
One nice feature of the virtual worlds is that they could eventually draw population away from competition in the real world, making the satisfaction of us real world participants higher.
Actually, it is more like:
if gpl_invalid():
if fallback_to_default_Copyright:
scoHasViolatedIBMCopyright = True
else # fallforward_to_public_domain (cannot unring bell of extra rights)
scoHasViolated = False
else:
scoHasViolatedGPL = True