I dont think anybody seems to have a great problem with the technology - ie bytcode and VM's - although it seems rather premature to be thinking of applying it to GNOME at the moment. Get some medium sized apps running under Mono first before crippling GNOME with something that isn't ready.
The real problem is Microsoft. It might be a cool technology, but Microsoft wont think twice before taking their ball and going home with it.
Mark my words: If it happens, it'll all end in tears.
Could work out well for the KDE guys though;-)
Re:Perception of Scott vs. Amundsen in Norway
on
The Coldest March
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Perhaps there is an elusive undertone in what is meant when (often British) people refer to Scott as a hero. In fact, having just bothered to check a definition, I'm not too sure if it's very elusive at all, it's just the meaning:
1. In mythology and legend, a man, often of divine ancestry, who is endowed with great courage and strength, celebrated for his bold exploits, and favored by the gods.
2. A person noted for feats of courage or nobility of purpose, especially one who has risked or sacrificed his or her life
It's nothing to do with being well prepared and doing stuff "right". It's all to do with how you react when things go pearshaped. This is why IMHO Shackleton is more of a hero than Amundsen.
It is true there is nothing especially glorious in getting yourself killed, but there can be something glorious in the way you go about it. When Oates, who presumably was in no doubt about the seriousness of his condition, walked outside to die, he didn't go to a glorious death in the freezing cold, but he did do something heroic. Something perhaps more heroic than good planning.
From the BBC:
Bond's producers unsuccessfully contested the title of Myers's last movie, The Spy Who Shagged Me - a spoof on 007 movie The Spy Who Loved Me.
I'd love to switch our users here If you read the article you'd know that they didn't switch any users: they started new users on Linux instead of on Windows.
Find me a story where a company that has a $100M invested into their custom accounting/billing solution has decided to throw it out and spend another $100M to rewrite the software for Linux. In the same way that you wouldnt necessarily retrain users who are already doing their job perfectly well, why would you rewrite something already working? What's more akin to the article is "would a company investing $100M into a custom accounting/billing solution now consider doing it with Linux?"
Surely the 'legal weight' will be determined by the courts: It's only a matter of time before somebody signs something (or appears to), and then denies any involvment. Excuses (true or not) of "My card was stolen", "They made me tell them the key", "I don't know what you're talking about" will presumably be uttered (in german). Cryptogram has covered the problem that "the key isnt the person" in the past.
If the first 10 cases all end up with courts deicing that there isn't enough evidence that the person did actually "sign" the document, there surely won't be much legal weight? A paper signature means little if there is sufficient doubt about it's authenticity, I dont see how that's going to change here.
As an aside, I like the last line of the CNN piece:
Bitkom called instead for a "citizens' card," with chip and electronic signature, for all Germans.
Yeah Baby! I can't see anything bad happening down that road!
The fact that this is +4 insightful is probably the straw that broke the camels back for me and/.
These people are supposedly fleeing for their lives from places like *Turkey* (UK travel agents sell package cruise holidays to Turkey for f***'s sake )
Is there any logic here? UK Travel agents will ship you anywhere for cash. China! Random african countries! Russia! Israel! You think none of these places abuse human rights enough for anyone to be fleeing their life? Please. As for turkey read this
Just ask any UK citizen which system they think is better, Australia's or their own.
The UK's. And I'm not the only one, even if we are a minority.
Its claimed that the structure weighs less then the air it contains though I do find this hard to believe.
The architect of the millenium dome told me the same thing about the millenium dome, so I don't see why it couldn't be true. Plus, all the air in the biodomes is warm, so weighs less than "normal" air too.
Perhaps they have in the back of their minds the fact that at the moment the waste is being stored all over the country in various temporary containment facilities.
I don't know for a fact, but perhaps even with the known problems for the new site, they still think it's better than the current situation.
What could be safer than disposing of unwanted bodies in the Nevada desert? Stick them in an enormous nuclear silo with 77 000 tons of stuff that'll kill you if you get near it!;-)
'We look forward to a long and mutually successful relationship between our companies through this new license for intellectual property and current and advanced music recognition services.' End of quote.
Is this a new slashdot editing style we have to look forward to?
I was speaking to my friend the other day. He said start of quote "Hello" end of quote, so I said start of quote "Hello" end of quote back. He said start of quote "I just saw James, and he said start of quote "Hello" end of quote to you" end of quote
Perhaps the/. style is only going to have end-of-quotes, so I'm going completely overboard using start-of-quotes too. I guess when you look at it that way, only having duplicate end-of-quotes is a 50% improvment over the alternative
I wonder if "intimidatingly smart" is doublespeak for something else. I meet really really smart people a lot, and don't feel intimidated (I'm not so smart, so maybe I'm just oblivious;-)
OTOH, I've met a fare share of moderately intelligent assholes who have a chip on their shoulder about how smart they are.
Well thats an entirely different point. If you're asking "Why do they bother putting a TV-out there at all?", the answer is simply because the increased cost of the product is low compared to the increased functionality of not making people have a second board for no other reason than to output onto a TV.
Same reason we no longer have to have both a 2D and a 3D graphics card any longer.
I am fighting and losing a battle with my "last word" neurons:-)
As you can see, it's doable. "CAVE on the cheap" is clearly doable: it's already been done with the NAVE, and the "Wedge".
Really, it doesn't have to take up *that* much space. The article mentioned a 6 sided CAVE. It's the floor/ceiling setup that require the extra vertical space. If you dont have them, of course you need less space.
Noting that this is clustering software for a *CAVE*.
1. You can't use "standard or flat monitors" in any form of "downsized setting", because unless you are 6 inches high, it's not going to be immersive. You can't stand in the cubic space formed by the faces of 6 monitors, flat or not, unless you are a person of very very small stature. Even if you can find a 6" high person to get in this contraption, they'll probably get fried by all the EM radition & heat after a few minutes, so you'll need a supply of these people...
2. Bringing up kernel.org looks like blatent karma-whoring - it's completely irrelevant. The problems you missed, and which I pointed out to you in my first post are the physical problems - you have to build an immersive space environment - a physical one - out of wood. You can't email an 12 foot high wooden structure around on the internet you know!
3. (You need a big room for this) "Unless you downsize it". Oh sure, if you can also "downsize" your users. You have to build something that you can get inside of. There's a limit to downsizing - at the limit is your body!
If you're only going to use a powerwall or something it's a different kettle of fish, and you can just hook up WireGL or something of that nature with what I expect will be a lot less effort.
So as I attempted to point out (and obviously failed) in my first post - there are real physical engineering problems that make the construction of your own CAVE environment much much harder than downloading some code and playing with the configuration files.
You could - it just wouldn't be very immersive. With a 3D environment in a CAVE you dont just stand in the centre, you actually walk around a bit. If a virtual object is in the way, you might lean around it, or crouch down to look under it, just like in real life.
This means that the views have to be created based upon where your head is - which is why at least one person will have a head tracker, if you dont have this, it doesn't feel immersive, it just looks plain wrong.
Of course, you could keep your head in the centre, and not move it but it kind of ruins the point. Also keep in mind that I am taking 3D stereo display for granted here, but it's not so easy with real cameras, especially if you want 360 degree recording.
Often people stick video images onto 2D objects (like the front of a virtual TV) within the 3D environment. That's pretty cool:-)
That seems like pretty doable by any geeks with enough boxes.
#include "Wry smile.h"
6 linux boxes and the clustering software is only half of the problem. The harder half is 6 or 12 videoprojectors (or more!), the mirrors and the (back) projection surfaces for the CAVE. Add in the tracking hardware (cost and complexity (ie EM interference)), and you have a lot more work to do.
Don't get me wrong - it excellent that it's feasable for a department to install their own fully immersive VE without an Onyx and a team of engineers, but you'll still need a team of grad students, builders and time.
Also dont forget that you need a *big* room for one of these too - say you have 2m high surfaces, you basically need 6-8m of vertical space once you include the space for the projectors and mirrors for the top/bottom 'walls'
I'm all for the sentiment behind "The vague space of the hard disk should not exist for you.", but that's just a bad badbad idea until computers are rock solid. No I don't mean Windows 2000 solid, or even debian Potato solid, I mean solid like my old 286 machine that hasn't had a software update for eons.
At the moment my other half knows what a floppy disk is (it looks like a floppy disk, and you can put files on it). She knows that the "hard disk" is a "big floppy disk inside the computer", and that she should copy from the later to the former whenever she needs to keep a safe copy. This is a good thing, because she knows where her stuff is, and so do I (as sys admin). As soon as you start blurring the lines, it makes it harder for people to control their own files.
I think it's right to be pushing the state of the art in the interface. However, I have this conservative feeling that the current status quo matches well to the actual reality of buggy software and hw/sw failures. Once we cross over into "you dont need to know that" space, we better be sure that we actually don't need to know it, otherwise we'll be SOL.
Slashdot Mirror
I dont think anybody seems to have a great problem with the technology - ie bytcode and VM's - although it seems rather premature to be thinking of applying it to GNOME at the moment. Get some medium sized apps running under Mono first before crippling GNOME with something that isn't ready.
;-)
The real problem is Microsoft. It might be a cool technology, but Microsoft wont think twice before taking their ball and going home with it.
Mark my words: If it happens, it'll all end in tears.
Could work out well for the KDE guys though
Perhaps there is an elusive undertone in what is meant when (often British) people refer to Scott as a hero. In fact, having just bothered to check a definition, I'm not too sure if it's very elusive at all, it's just the meaning:
1. In mythology and legend, a man, often of divine ancestry, who is endowed with great courage and strength, celebrated for his bold exploits, and favored by the gods.
2. A person noted for feats of courage or nobility of purpose, especially one who has risked or sacrificed his or her life
It's nothing to do with being well prepared and doing stuff "right". It's all to do with how you react when things go pearshaped. This is why IMHO Shackleton is more of a hero than Amundsen.
It is true there is nothing especially glorious in getting yourself killed, but there can be something glorious in the way you go about it. When Oates, who presumably was in no doubt about the seriousness of his condition, walked outside to die, he didn't go to a glorious death in the freezing cold, but he did do something heroic. Something perhaps more heroic than good planning.
0.02 etc
From the BBC:
Bond's producers unsuccessfully contested the title of Myers's last movie, The Spy Who Shagged Me - a spoof on 007 movie The Spy Who Loved Me.
I'd love to switch our users here
If you read the article you'd know that they didn't switch any users: they started new users on Linux instead of on Windows.
Find me a story where a company that has a $100M invested into their custom accounting/billing solution has decided to throw it out and spend another $100M to rewrite the software for Linux.
In the same way that you wouldnt necessarily retrain users who are already doing their job perfectly well, why would you rewrite something already working? What's more akin to the article is "would a company investing $100M into a custom accounting/billing solution now consider doing it with Linux?"
That seems far more likely.
Surely the 'legal weight' will be determined by the courts: It's only a matter of time before somebody signs something (or appears to), and then denies any involvment. Excuses (true or not) of "My card was stolen", "They made me tell them the key", "I don't know what you're talking about" will presumably be uttered (in german). Cryptogram has covered the problem that "the key isnt the person" in the past.
If the first 10 cases all end up with courts deicing that there isn't enough evidence that the person did actually "sign" the document, there surely won't be much legal weight? A paper signature means little if there is sufficient doubt about it's authenticity, I dont see how that's going to change here.
As an aside, I like the last line of the CNN piece:
Bitkom called instead for a "citizens' card," with chip and electronic signature, for all Germans.
Yeah Baby! I can't see anything bad happening down that road!
The fact that this is +4 insightful is probably the straw that broke the camels back for me and /.
These people are supposedly fleeing for their lives from places like *Turkey* (UK travel agents sell package cruise holidays to Turkey for f***'s sake )
Is there any logic here? UK Travel agents will ship you anywhere for cash. China! Random african countries! Russia! Israel! You think none of these places abuse human rights enough for anyone to be fleeing their life? Please. As for turkey read this
Just ask any UK citizen which system they think is better, Australia's or their own.
The UK's. And I'm not the only one, even if we are a minority.
Its claimed that the structure weighs less then the air it contains though I do find this hard to believe.
The architect of the millenium dome told me the same thing about the millenium dome, so I don't see why it couldn't be true. Plus, all the air in the biodomes is warm, so weighs less than "normal" air too.
but for the most part they let the plants speak for themselves
;-)
Man! That's something I have see, as long as they're not the type of plants from Tarzan that say
"yummmmmmm... yuuuuuuuummmm.... man fleshhhh.....", and then drag you off into the bushes to the sound of slurping and screaming.
Do they have tenticles? Do you have to go around with guards wielding flamesthrowers and herbicide grenades?
Sounds COOL!
lagom = moderate is about as accurate as saying that Free Software = Open Source
ie, not very accurate at all. There is no simple translation, why do people think there should be?
Oops yeah, I multiplied by 9/5 instead of 5/9. TFI friday!
Perhaps they have in the back of their minds the fact that at the moment the waste is being stored all over the country in various temporary containment facilities.
I don't know for a fact, but perhaps even with the known problems for the new site, they still think it's better than the current situation.
0.02
Imagine what sort of a hideout that would be, for, say, an international terrorist or two ...
;-)
Quite a hot one according to the article - it's 400 degrees F (~750 celsius)
Actually, maybe that's what you meant, it'd be like a 5 minute preparation for where they're going to end up for the rest of eternity
What could be safer than disposing of unwanted bodies in the Nevada desert? Stick them in an enormous nuclear silo with 77 000 tons of stuff that'll kill you if you get near it! ;-)
'We look forward to a long and mutually successful relationship between our companies through this new license for intellectual property and current and advanced music recognition services.' End of quote.
/. style is only going to have end-of-quotes, so I'm going completely overboard using start-of-quotes too. I guess when you look at it that way, only having duplicate end-of-quotes is a 50% improvment over the alternative
Is this a new slashdot editing style we have to look forward to?
I was speaking to my friend the other day. He said start of quote "Hello" end of quote, so I said start of quote "Hello" end of quote back. He said start of quote "I just saw James, and he said start of quote "Hello" end of quote to you" end of quote
Perhaps the
God help us! (End of Comment)
The motto of a new generation (of /. editors)
;-)
I wonder if "intimidatingly smart" is doublespeak for something else. I meet really really smart people a lot, and don't feel intimidated (I'm not so smart, so maybe I'm just oblivious ;-)
OTOH, I've met a fare share of moderately intelligent assholes who have a chip on their shoulder about how smart they are.
0.02
what I was asking is, why do people want a TV-out on a high-end video card?
;-)
You might be asking, but you're obviously not listening
For those cards, a TV out is almost useless.
That's clearly false.
0.02
Well thats an entirely different point. If you're asking "Why do they bother putting a TV-out there at all?", the answer is simply because the increased cost of the product is low compared to the increased functionality of not making people have a second board for no other reason than to output onto a TV.
Same reason we no longer have to have both a 2D and a 3D graphics card any longer.
Sometimes I need 1920x1200 resolution on the desktop, but othertimes I just want to display video on the TV.
I am fighting and losing a battle with my "last word" neurons :-)
As you can see, it's doable.
"CAVE on the cheap" is clearly doable: it's already been done with the NAVE, and the "Wedge".
Really, it doesn't have to take up *that* much space.
The article mentioned a 6 sided CAVE. It's the floor/ceiling setup that require the extra vertical space. If you dont have them, of course you need less space.
0.02
Noting that this is clustering software for a *CAVE*.
1. You can't use "standard or flat monitors" in any form of "downsized setting", because unless you are 6 inches high, it's not going to be immersive. You can't stand in the cubic space formed by the faces of 6 monitors, flat or not, unless you are a person of very very small stature. Even if you can find a 6" high person to get in this contraption, they'll probably get fried by all the EM radition & heat after a few minutes, so you'll need a supply of these people...
2. Bringing up kernel.org looks like blatent karma-whoring - it's completely irrelevant. The problems you missed, and which I pointed out to you in my first post are the physical problems - you have to build an immersive space environment - a physical one - out of wood. You can't email an 12 foot high wooden structure around on the internet you know!
3. (You need a big room for this) "Unless you downsize it". Oh sure, if you can also "downsize" your users. You have to build something that you can get inside of. There's a limit to downsizing - at the limit is your body!
If you're only going to use a powerwall or something it's a different kettle of fish, and you can just hook up WireGL or something of that nature with what I expect will be a lot less effort.
So as I attempted to point out (and obviously failed) in my first post - there are real physical engineering problems that make the construction of your own CAVE environment much much harder than downloading some code and playing with the configuration files.
0.02
a whole slew of Microsoft Outlook features - something necessary in the enterprise
Can somebody tell me what these features are, compared to what you'd get with sendmail/qmail / some-random-pop/imap-client ?
You could - it just wouldn't be very immersive. With a 3D environment in a CAVE you dont just stand in the centre, you actually walk around a bit. If a virtual object is in the way, you might lean around it, or crouch down to look under it, just like in real life.
:-)
This means that the views have to be created based upon where your head is - which is why at least one person will have a head tracker, if you dont have this, it doesn't feel immersive, it just looks plain wrong.
Of course, you could keep your head in the centre, and not move it but it kind of ruins the point. Also keep in mind that I am taking 3D stereo display for granted here, but it's not so easy with real cameras, especially if you want 360 degree recording.
Often people stick video images onto 2D objects (like the front of a virtual TV) within the 3D environment. That's pretty cool
0.02
That seems like pretty doable by any geeks with enough boxes.
#include "Wry smile.h"
6 linux boxes and the clustering software is only half of the problem. The harder half is 6 or 12 videoprojectors (or more!), the mirrors and the (back) projection surfaces for the CAVE. Add in the tracking hardware (cost and complexity (ie EM interference)), and you have a lot more work to do.
Don't get me wrong - it excellent that it's feasable for a department to install their own fully immersive VE without an Onyx and a team of engineers, but you'll still need a team of grad students, builders and time.
Also dont forget that you need a *big* room for one of these too - say you have 2m high surfaces, you basically need 6-8m of vertical space once you include the space for the projectors and mirrors for the top/bottom 'walls'
I'm all for the sentiment behind "The vague space of the hard disk should not exist for you.", but that's just a bad bad bad idea until computers are rock solid. No I don't mean Windows 2000 solid, or even debian Potato solid, I mean solid like my old 286 machine that hasn't had a software update for eons.
At the moment my other half knows what a floppy disk is (it looks like a floppy disk, and you can put files on it). She knows that the "hard disk" is a "big floppy disk inside the computer", and that she should copy from the later to the former whenever she needs to keep a safe copy. This is a good thing, because she knows where her stuff is, and so do I (as sys admin). As soon as you start blurring the lines, it makes it harder for people to control their own files.
I think it's right to be pushing the state of the art in the interface. However, I have this conservative feeling that the current status quo matches well to the actual reality of buggy software and hw/sw failures. Once we cross over into "you dont need to know that" space, we better be sure that we actually don't need to know it, otherwise we'll be SOL.