little irony: originally the shuttle was supposed to be launched horizontally from piggyback position on what would be similar to a 747. The risks were lower, and the shuttle would be far more capable than the current system using a giant tower of cryo-o2 and 2 giant solid-boosters strapped on. This hybrid space-plane design was scrapped near the end for essentially design conflicts, the army wanted something it could use for different purposes without needing the piggyback launch facility, and considered using a hybrid launch vehicle too technologically backwards, also, the design costs were lower though the per-launch costs were much higher, and eventually they decided that they could make it fly again by just strapping a whole lot of rockets to it and lighting the fuse.
Both of the shuttle losses were caused by failures in the launch system and not the orbiter itself, but that's to be expected when you strap rockets that big to something that was never designed to be launched that way. Sad too, launch stresses were much lighter in the original design, and the entire design was reusable.
yes... well 2 shuttles with crew have died so far. I mean a: yes going into outer space is risky, but 2: if they are going to go we should stop forcing them to use the technology that really isn't fit for the task. The shuttle system is a reagan remnant, like star wars and the stealth bomber and a lot of other things that were designed PURELY to scare the russians with our way overengineered tech. seriously, that was their job, they were made with the design principal "oh and put a bunch of sharp black pointy things on the front to scare the shit out of anyone who sees it" (note the soviet's tried to come up with a copy, they never really could get it to work, and it cost so freaking much they stopped trying, and they are arguably better at space than we are). The SR-71 was made in a similar vein with the only difference being it actually worked, check out combat ready ratings on B-1's sometime.
I think we should let NASA make their own call, but we aren't, we're forcing them to play gay govt accounting games so the investment in the current shuttle program, and all its maintainance look good, and costs us over $1B a flight. Commercial sat launches go for under $50 most of the time, and are much more flexible regarding orbits. Create a new heavy-lifter, or even bring back the Saturn V, because even at $1B a shot, and counting all the cash we put in for upgrades and maint it's still way way way down the line in terms of launch vehicle capabilities. A Soyuz system is actually safer for docking with the ISS, and half the other things you need to do in space.
The shuttle was well designed in the beginning, but all the modifications to baselines due to budget pork, politcal conprimises, and simple age have made it unfit for it's duties. You wouldn't ask jet pilots to patrol the skies in p-51 mustangs because we already had some, and north american aviation was an important constituent of the chair of the commitee for armed services, why are we sending our astronauts up in vehicles that are unable to perform their real requirements, and are also designed for size and looks over safety and functionality? Also, would you rather have 1 big ship that can be launched twice every year or 10 small ships that can be launched monthly with the same overall benefit?
i posted something similar further down, the fish and oil thing is a very nice touch though.
"Give me 2 ships full of Iron and I'll give you an Ice Age" -- some scientist guy i forgot.
Iron is the primary bottleneck to ocean life, there isn't enough to keep the chloroplast going in algae and other stuff. Magnesium also, but that is more readily recycled, iron tends to go to the bottom, hence those pages in our elementary school books about mining the bottom of the ocean for metal.
This is what happens when those fired nasa exec's try to come up with ideas to get work again... Thank god Reagan isn't pres.
$100 million, 2-5 large ocean-barges full of fine iron-filings, scattered across the equatorial oceans slowly over the course of a year, welcome to the ice-age.
sea life is mostly bottlenecked by iron and a few other mineral concentrations, this iron would allow enough protozoa to form and capture carbon from the atmosphere, producing o2 before they slowly fell to the bottom of the ocean, taking the carbon with them. This is an understood mechanism, and it's simple, the only problem is how much iron is enough to stop global-warming/greenhousing, but not enough to start a long ice-age.
There are variations on this theme which are more efficient, but also more risky, KISS.
yeah, let's build a halo, cause like we don't have a working oxy generator on the iss, and the station barely works even when that's ok, so a Large Space Structure is really the answer...
This is news? I've been doing this for months with asterisk, bluetooth, and broadvoice sip. $50 a month for Tmobile 2 line service and you end up with unlimited nationwide and some of europe (wife is swedish).
Is handy for when she's at school, but who wants to call that much from a cell? Especially considering quality, it's not really worth it for most people who don't run around that much, and tmobile's reception is spotty. Will be a lot better when companies start setting things like this up so cell's become roaming pbx extensions, they'll actually use the minutes.
Getting my logic book to respond to your argument...
Yes, but I'm not arguing about MSR:MS as BELL:AT&T, I'm just upset the comparision is being made in the first place.
While one could make the analogy Hitler:Germany::Ghandi:India, it's still not a very good comparision to set up.
Call it less of a "Invalid analogy argument", and more of a "Yes but yo' momma is so fat..." argument.
Also, while I agree there are great people working at MSR, and great things may one day spring forth, I still cannot agree that it is, or even will ever be on par with "Oh so the universe was created in a big bang and here's the proof", kinda stuff.
Wow, this is a group of words that i never expected to see together:
MSR is to Microsoft what Bell Labs was to AT&T, PARC was to Xerox and TJ Watson Research Center is to IBM.
I'm not trying to flame, but do you have any fucking clue what parc (mac/windows gui&mice+more), Bell Labs(Big bang research, phones, unix, so much more), ibm research (hard drives, memory, halography, ad nauseum) do?
Oh and lets look at MSR:... uhh, they uhh, they made this cool calender with address book i saw on cnet once in 2000, i don't think it's been released. oh and something with making phones work with computers. also they told us once that computers are badly organized and they had a better way to make everything work.
hmmm.
no seriously, MSR is less than a fucking joke, and tend to stay away from any research that could actually make any kind of difference in the world. The closest i've seen is some papers showing how new algorithms would make searching or file storage better with nothing to actually back it up. You don't do real research when you have a monopoly, innovation undermines your monopoly because it causes change, which is always perceived to be bad for you.
Oh yeah, most of those companies gave their work away to the community as part of their research program. MSR gives their shit to billg to stick in his super-digital house and show off how cool it is to reporters, but never let it into the real world, kinda like the ark in Raiders.
If you have are an admin, or your company uses linux or anything please donate. So much of the cross-architecture, and device driver support for the BSD's and linux comes from NetBSD you'd be surprised. I gave 50 just cause I remember back in the day when they were the only group to support my old SGI Indigo2, and they still lead in most wierd architecture support.
If you have a wierd or rare architecture they probably support it, or have something that can be hacked to work, and that kind of resourcefulness is why we aren't all running windows 3.3, TPM Borg edition.
Re:Machima, Game Conversions - just awesome
on
Total Conversion HL2 Mod
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· Score: 2, Interesting
yeah uh hi, it also means the craptacular game houses that basically do the same thing but do a worse job have to compete with people who are probably a lot better, and can tweak the game as it goes on, and sell it for free... so look for this to not happen for any game where the designer gets most of their money from engine licensing fees.
Jesus let this $1B a launch albatross sleep in the deepest oceans. We spend more maintaining and compensating for its way overbuilt and ancient design than we do on the missions it's sent on. That and it's starting to get the smell of the old carnival ride "death trap", which no matter how many times you hose out, still smells funny.
Please, let this abomination of attempted Reaganomics and the Cold War die and stop sucking away our already pathetic space budget. The space shuttle has been the biggest obstacle to our conquest of space for the last 25 years, and that's just sad.
p.s. what moron designs the next generation space vehicle that is so advanced it cannot go to the moon or basically do much of anything besides flop around in orbit for a few days? Do we also design submarines that can't go into the ocean?
sorta ot, but somebody mentioned "nucular" powa. why don't they make nuclear plants underground? can increase efficiency because waste heat can be recylced, would vastly limit contamination risks, all you need for inputs and outputs are a uranium elevator (one for ppl too) and cables for power, and if anything goes wrong just slam a 50 ton lead slab over the intakes and outputs, problem solves itself.
thinking some of the more stable coal or ore mines could be used for this, but it beats the HELL out of putting it it new jersey (im guessing when they designed 3-mile island they figured nobody'd notice).
oh, also of all the reactor plants, nuclear plants can be the smallest, i mean christ they have rather strong reactors on submarines with long duty cycles, just pull a few on the decomm'd LA and BF SSN and SSBN's and you could power a small city for cheap, those things are relatively low-maintanance, tho they do have integrated cores which means after the first overhaul you'd have to replace them (which you do for some plant reactors anyway).
Then think of the amount of energy resources that could be saved if everybody did this. I must number in the billions of barrels of oil. Maybe Homeland Security should be in on it.:)
Actually I think that's under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Plenty. Course the Ministry of Love (MS) will have APM 2006 with screens that can't be disabled and watch you at all times to ensure your participating properly in full compliance with the law and the principles of EngSoc (DRM/TPM), so that should make everything much easier and idealogically pure, thankfully.:)
hes got a point man, i've been waiting forever for someone to put out a new nfs for windows client, the unix acl model is a lot more flexible from my pov than the windows model, and unless youre streaming a big file over an FD eth switch the performance is god-awful.
had a 3650 for a few years, and while it is a mediocre phone, it seems great at everything else.
used to have an ipaq set up for autoconnect to tmobile gprs, so i could check email or whatever anywhere without having to dig out the phone. worked great as a failsafe web connection too. fired up isync the other day and it works perfectly, so it may be old but it keeps surprising me.
one thing, it has a really stupid dial pad, so you might want to try the 3660 or so, but s60 phones seem pretty solid from my pov.
ok, yes fine, i meant the old windows api..net will change everything, all pointers will be safe, all buffers checked, lennon will be resurrected by jesus for another beatles tour with the j-man as drummer...
i agree.net is a better platform, but it is not yet windows, and a lot of programming for windows, esp i/o and multimedia work still means dealing with 9 kinds of api per task.
and, how many windows programs need to be updated due to a new version of windows, new service pack incompatibility, security, ad nauseum.
my point is, there was no consistency, and since.net has been around for all of 2 years and is not quite the primary api (and not api stable with 1.1, not fully supported for all the subsystems, or OS platform versions, i'd just like to say, maybe you can say.net = windows api next year.
so far my experience with canon gear has only been positive. firstly, they released linux and osx drivers for an old inkjet i had, along with most of their current line, and a good number of their scanners. second, their cameras are amazing, and use normal sd and cf cards instead of the MS and XD that are becoming infuriatingly ubiquitous. Also, their printer lines tend to standardize on the same types of ink, with better quality than the hp's and terrible machines epson is putting out nowadays (my r300 photo printer ran low on lt yellow ink, so it won't print black and white and keeps nagging me in windows to order more ink).
i suspect this is just canon usa marketing dicks playing bs politics for their own sake. so far theyve given out a lot better specs for most of their printers than most companies, and few printer mfg's will even bother to put out cups drivers for their lines.
not releasing their RAW format seems amazingly petty, but sounds exactly like all those fat, middle-aged sales execs who thought it wasn't worth it developing open-sourced linux drivers, cause they could get more commision charging each customer for the drivers themselves. we released them anyway, but a lot of those types make VP and do stupid shit like this to try to throw their cock around.
err, ok, but is that a "yeah it works great", or a "whatever, it's works, and i hate dancing paperclips and magically disappearing menus"? But i see what you mean.
Just FYI, there are 8 different api's for handling a length prefixed string in windows, each defined separately with WHOLLY different semantics and parameters for performing the same tasks. Ironically while they are not interchangable, each of them has a different, subsection of text-proccessing or storage-management none of the others has, and a completely separate method of conversion to a LPSTR (std string pointer). I have talked to dozens of people about this, and most people who've done work in windows have seen this, Nobody has the slightest fucking clue why they are there or what they have to do with each other. It's like seeing a glowing pink elephant on I-95 every day while going to work, but everyone just drives around it, pretending it doesn't exist.
Got a mac SE in 89 at the age of 11, gave it up in 94 for a pc, just for the game and tinker-factor.
I am one of the biggest closet mac lovers in the world. Till my mini this year i hadn't touched one in a decade, and now im happy.
Smalltalk, Obj-C, HONEST TO GOD FUCKING DESIGN!
Windows programming is a combination between brute force and kludged hack, with just almost no technique or architectural finesse. Get it done, and hope it works. When is the last time you saw a windows app that people used for 5 years without an update and said "yeah it works great". It's like disposable software, not disposable like a funcam, disposable like an adult diaper, you just can't put up with the same one for more than a day.
Linux. Love the theory, but 500 people each with their own pita view of how an OS should work... sucks. Love everything that goes on below the gui, and it makes a great server, though they redefine library hell.
OSX. This is what happens to software when people keep consistent design principles. Compatibility is secondary to consistency, and programming doesn't mean learning a new way to malloc memory for EVERY G-D interface you try to use. It's like all those MIT guys I knew made an os with all their theory, and kept with it, even when the marketing pricks masturbated on them with their quick-to-copy new features and API's, that were so badly designed that 5 months later they became "legacy" (do not fuck with me on this, look through the windows com+ and ATL specs, or anything involving OLE), and had absolutely nothing in common with any other api in the system.
Just cracked open XCode, and for the first time in years I'm looking forward to coding again. Everything is intuitive, 1 theory of operation to rule them all.
Maybe it's an american thing, but why the hell do people buy from companies with such a horrible history of design? Jesus, the only time Ford had a semi-reliable engine was when it was designed so simply that every 10k miles you could rebuild half the engine yourself and get it working well again that way, consumer-products shouldn't be brute forced.
Seriously, I've been a windows, then linux junkie for the last decade, but can any of you tell me there is any consistent design going on anywhere in there? Till dec 2003 you had to hardcode all the driver init hooks into the linux kernel with ifdefs, explain to me how that makes any sense. Well, another decade from now maybe Mach 1.0 will be out and another ridiculously long software milestone will have been reached.
also, make sure you have a good vga cable. at higher rez and doubly so with lcd's, the vga signal is sensitive to noise and any number of problems, and ghosting is almost always a problem in the signal quality reaching the lcd (or maybe a cheap adc in the panel).
had terrible results once with a no-name cable, and a kvm made my panel almost unreadable, the video card matters too, but most have decent dacs this day and age. set 60hz refresh too, 75 doesn't help with panels.
Re:Another perspective on Vanguard: Saga of Heroes
on
The MMOGs of Tomorrow
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· Score: 1
honestly, is getting to L60 in WoW anything more than proof you have too much time?
getting 50+ in eq (pre-pop) meant you either a) knew what you were doing, or b) had a good paypal account, and you could tell the difference by sight.
it was nice when the people that had the best gear deserved it, and you needed skills and brains instead of just time.
All my old eq friends are on wow right now, but i just think they don't get it. eq was hard, but unless you weren't skilled enough for your level you rarely got beaten down severely.
actually eq went downhill when the melees restarted as casters and started whining that everything was too hard. the skilled casters started leaving around then, with the flood of bots and twinks, and the game just went to hell.
Slashdot Mirror
little irony: originally the shuttle was supposed to be launched horizontally from piggyback position on what would be similar to a 747. The risks were lower, and the shuttle would be far more capable than the current system using a giant tower of cryo-o2 and 2 giant solid-boosters strapped on. This hybrid space-plane design was scrapped near the end for essentially design conflicts, the army wanted something it could use for different purposes without needing the piggyback launch facility, and considered using a hybrid launch vehicle too technologically backwards, also, the design costs were lower though the per-launch costs were much higher, and eventually they decided that they could make it fly again by just strapping a whole lot of rockets to it and lighting the fuse.
Both of the shuttle losses were caused by failures in the launch system and not the orbiter itself, but that's to be expected when you strap rockets that big to something that was never designed to be launched that way. Sad too, launch stresses were much lighter in the original design, and the entire design was reusable.
http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v1ch1.htm
yes... well 2 shuttles with crew have died so far. I mean a: yes going into outer space is risky, but 2: if they are going to go we should stop forcing them to use the technology that really isn't fit for the task. The shuttle system is a reagan remnant, like star wars and the stealth bomber and a lot of other things that were designed PURELY to scare the russians with our way overengineered tech. seriously, that was their job, they were made with the design principal "oh and put a bunch of sharp black pointy things on the front to scare the shit out of anyone who sees it" (note the soviet's tried to come up with a copy, they never really could get it to work, and it cost so freaking much they stopped trying, and they are arguably better at space than we are). The SR-71 was made in a similar vein with the only difference being it actually worked, check out combat ready ratings on B-1's sometime.
I think we should let NASA make their own call, but we aren't, we're forcing them to play gay govt accounting games so the investment in the current shuttle program, and all its maintainance look good, and costs us over $1B a flight. Commercial sat launches go for under $50 most of the time, and are much more flexible regarding orbits. Create a new heavy-lifter, or even bring back the Saturn V, because even at $1B a shot, and counting all the cash we put in for upgrades and maint it's still way way way down the line in terms of launch vehicle capabilities. A Soyuz system is actually safer for docking with the ISS, and half the other things you need to do in space.
The shuttle was well designed in the beginning, but all the modifications to baselines due to budget pork, politcal conprimises, and simple age have made it unfit for it's duties. You wouldn't ask jet pilots to patrol the skies in p-51 mustangs because we already had some, and north american aviation was an important constituent of the chair of the commitee for armed services, why are we sending our astronauts up in vehicles that are unable to perform their real requirements, and are also designed for size and looks over safety and functionality? Also, would you rather have 1 big ship that can be launched twice every year or 10 small ships that can be launched monthly with the same overall benefit?
i posted something similar further down, the fish and oil thing is a very nice touch though.
"Give me 2 ships full of Iron and I'll give you an Ice Age" -- some scientist guy i forgot.
Iron is the primary bottleneck to ocean life, there isn't enough to keep the chloroplast going in algae and other stuff. Magnesium also, but that is more readily recycled, iron tends to go to the bottom, hence those pages in our elementary school books about mining the bottom of the ocean for metal.
This is what happens when those fired nasa exec's try to come up with ideas to get work again... Thank god Reagan isn't pres.
$100 million, 2-5 large ocean-barges full of fine iron-filings, scattered across the equatorial oceans slowly over the course of a year, welcome to the ice-age.
sea life is mostly bottlenecked by iron and a few other mineral concentrations, this iron would allow enough protozoa to form and capture carbon from the atmosphere, producing o2 before they slowly fell to the bottom of the ocean, taking the carbon with them. This is an understood mechanism, and it's simple, the only problem is how much iron is enough to stop global-warming/greenhousing, but not enough to start a long ice-age.
There are variations on this theme which are more efficient, but also more risky, KISS.
yeah, let's build a halo, cause like we don't have a working oxy generator on the iss, and the station barely works even when that's ok, so a Large Space Structure is really the answer...
This is news? I've been doing this for months with asterisk, bluetooth, and broadvoice sip. $50 a month for Tmobile 2 line service and you end up with unlimited nationwide and some of europe (wife is swedish).
Is handy for when she's at school, but who wants to call that much from a cell? Especially considering quality, it's not really worth it for most people who don't run around that much, and tmobile's reception is spotty. Will be a lot better when companies start setting things like this up so cell's become roaming pbx extensions, they'll actually use the minutes.
never expected to use this reply on /.
thank you, i agree.
Getting my logic book to respond to your argument...
Yes, but I'm not arguing about MSR:MS as BELL:AT&T, I'm just upset the comparision is being made in the first place.
While one could make the analogy Hitler:Germany::Ghandi:India, it's still not a very good comparision to set up.
Call it less of a "Invalid analogy argument", and more of a "Yes but yo' momma is so fat..." argument.
Also, while I agree there are great people working at MSR, and great things may one day spring forth, I still cannot agree that it is, or even will ever be on par with "Oh so the universe was created in a big bang and here's the proof", kinda stuff.
I'm not trying to flame, but do you have any fucking clue what parc (mac/windows gui&mice+more), Bell Labs(Big bang research, phones, unix, so much more), ibm research (hard drives, memory, halography, ad nauseum) do?
Oh and lets look at MSR:
uhh, they uhh, they made this cool calender with address book i saw on cnet once in 2000, i don't think it's been released. oh and something with making phones work with computers. also they told us once that computers are badly organized and they had a better way to make everything work.
hmmm.
no seriously, MSR is less than a fucking joke, and tend to stay away from any research that could actually make any kind of difference in the world. The closest i've seen is some papers showing how new algorithms would make searching or file storage better with nothing to actually back it up. You don't do real research when you have a monopoly, innovation undermines your monopoly because it causes change, which is always perceived to be bad for you.
Oh yeah, most of those companies gave their work away to the community as part of their research program. MSR gives their shit to billg to stick in his super-digital house and show off how cool it is to reporters, but never let it into the real world, kinda like the ark in Raiders.
MS Research, talk about a contradiction in terms.
"Stop that ship! Blast them!"
If you have are an admin, or your company uses linux or anything please donate. So much of the cross-architecture, and device driver support for the BSD's and linux comes from NetBSD you'd be surprised. I gave 50 just cause I remember back in the day when they were the only group to support my old SGI Indigo2, and they still lead in most wierd architecture support.
If you have a wierd or rare architecture they probably support it, or have something that can be hacked to work, and that kind of resourcefulness is why we aren't all running windows 3.3, TPM Borg edition.
yeah uh hi, it also means the craptacular game houses that basically do the same thing but do a worse job have to compete with people who are probably a lot better, and can tweak the game as it goes on, and sell it for free... so look for this to not happen for any game where the designer gets most of their money from engine licensing fees.
i hate being this cynical, please kill me thx!
Jesus let this $1B a launch albatross sleep in the deepest oceans. We spend more maintaining and compensating for its way overbuilt and ancient design than we do on the missions it's sent on. That and it's starting to get the smell of the old carnival ride "death trap", which no matter how many times you hose out, still smells funny.
Please, let this abomination of attempted Reaganomics and the Cold War die and stop sucking away our already pathetic space budget. The space shuttle has been the biggest obstacle to our conquest of space for the last 25 years, and that's just sad.
p.s. what moron designs the next generation space vehicle that is so advanced it cannot go to the moon or basically do much of anything besides flop around in orbit for a few days? Do we also design submarines that can't go into the ocean?
sorta ot, but somebody mentioned "nucular" powa. why don't they make nuclear plants underground? can increase efficiency because waste heat can be recylced, would vastly limit contamination risks, all you need for inputs and outputs are a uranium elevator (one for ppl too) and cables for power, and if anything goes wrong just slam a 50 ton lead slab over the intakes and outputs, problem solves itself.
thinking some of the more stable coal or ore mines could be used for this, but it beats the HELL out of putting it it new jersey (im guessing when they designed 3-mile island they figured nobody'd notice).
oh, also of all the reactor plants, nuclear plants can be the smallest, i mean christ they have rather strong reactors on submarines with long duty cycles, just pull a few on the decomm'd LA and BF SSN and SSBN's and you could power a small city for cheap, those things are relatively low-maintanance, tho they do have integrated cores which means after the first overhaul you'd have to replace them (which you do for some plant reactors anyway).
anyone else want to add to this?
Jesus, completely forgot MS took "democracy" and other words out of the chinese internet, ala newspeak 1.0!
Sarcasm should not be allowed to be this realistic, please tell them all to cut it out.
Actually I think that's under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Plenty. Course the Ministry of Love (MS) will have APM 2006 with screens that can't be disabled and watch you at all times to ensure your participating properly in full compliance with the law and the principles of EngSoc (DRM/TPM), so that should make everything much easier and idealogically pure, thankfully.
I guess that makes Jobs Goldstein. (Grr)
I'm in a orwellian mood today...
hes got a point man, i've been waiting forever for someone to put out a new nfs for windows client, the unix acl model is a lot more flexible from my pov than the windows model, and unless youre streaming a big file over an FD eth switch the performance is god-awful.
had a 3650 for a few years, and while it is a mediocre phone, it seems great at everything else.
used to have an ipaq set up for autoconnect to tmobile gprs, so i could check email or whatever anywhere without having to dig out the phone. worked great as a failsafe web connection too. fired up isync the other day and it works perfectly, so it may be old but it keeps surprising me.
one thing, it has a really stupid dial pad, so you might want to try the 3660 or so, but s60 phones seem pretty solid from my pov.
love the bt on it.
ok, yes fine, i meant the old windows api. .net will change everything, all pointers will be safe, all buffers checked, lennon will be resurrected by jesus for another beatles tour with the j-man as drummer...
.net is a better platform, but it is not yet windows, and a lot of programming for windows, esp i/o and multimedia work still means dealing with 9 kinds of api per task.
.net has been around for all of 2 years and is not quite the primary api (and not api stable with 1.1, not fully supported for all the subsystems, or OS platform versions, i'd just like to say, maybe you can say .net = windows api next year.
i agree
and, how many windows programs need to be updated due to a new version of windows, new service pack incompatibility, security, ad nauseum.
my point is, there was no consistency, and since
yes, and i'm sure the gimp-print people must be swearing up and down about canon's reluctance as they work hard to crank out epson and hp profiles.
so far my experience with canon gear has only been positive. firstly, they released linux and osx drivers for an old inkjet i had, along with most of their current line, and a good number of their scanners. second, their cameras are amazing, and use normal sd and cf cards instead of the MS and XD that are becoming infuriatingly ubiquitous. Also, their printer lines tend to standardize on the same types of ink, with better quality than the hp's and terrible machines epson is putting out nowadays (my r300 photo printer ran low on lt yellow ink, so it won't print black and white and keeps nagging me in windows to order more ink).
i suspect this is just canon usa marketing dicks playing bs politics for their own sake. so far theyve given out a lot better specs for most of their printers than most companies, and few printer mfg's will even bother to put out cups drivers for their lines.
not releasing their RAW format seems amazingly petty, but sounds exactly like all those fat, middle-aged sales execs who thought it wasn't worth it developing open-sourced linux drivers, cause they could get more commision charging each customer for the drivers themselves. we released them anyway, but a lot of those types make VP and do stupid shit like this to try to throw their cock around.
err, ok, but is that a "yeah it works great", or a "whatever, it's works, and i hate dancing paperclips and magically disappearing menus"? But i see what you mean.
Just FYI, there are 8 different api's for handling a length prefixed string in windows, each defined separately with WHOLLY different semantics and parameters for performing the same tasks. Ironically while they are not interchangable, each of them has a different, subsection of text-proccessing or storage-management none of the others has, and a completely separate method of conversion to a LPSTR (std string pointer). I have talked to dozens of people about this, and most people who've done work in windows have seen this, Nobody has the slightest fucking clue why they are there or what they have to do with each other. It's like seeing a glowing pink elephant on I-95 every day while going to work, but everyone just drives around it, pretending it doesn't exist.
Got a mac SE in 89 at the age of 11, gave it up in 94 for a pc, just for the game and tinker-factor.
I am one of the biggest closet mac lovers in the world. Till my mini this year i hadn't touched one in a decade, and now im happy.
Smalltalk, Obj-C, HONEST TO GOD FUCKING DESIGN!
Windows programming is a combination between brute force and kludged hack, with just almost no technique or architectural finesse. Get it done, and hope it works. When is the last time you saw a windows app that people used for 5 years without an update and said "yeah it works great". It's like disposable software, not disposable like a funcam, disposable like an adult diaper, you just can't put up with the same one for more than a day.
Linux. Love the theory, but 500 people each with their own pita view of how an OS should work... sucks. Love everything that goes on below the gui, and it makes a great server, though they redefine library hell.
OSX. This is what happens to software when people keep consistent design principles. Compatibility is secondary to consistency, and programming doesn't mean learning a new way to malloc memory for EVERY G-D interface you try to use. It's like all those MIT guys I knew made an os with all their theory, and kept with it, even when the marketing pricks masturbated on them with their quick-to-copy new features and API's, that were so badly designed that 5 months later they became "legacy" (do not fuck with me on this, look through the windows com+ and ATL specs, or anything involving OLE), and had absolutely nothing in common with any other api in the system.
Just cracked open XCode, and for the first time in years I'm looking forward to coding again. Everything is intuitive, 1 theory of operation to rule them all.
Maybe it's an american thing, but why the hell do people buy from companies with such a horrible history of design? Jesus, the only time Ford had a semi-reliable engine was when it was designed so simply that every 10k miles you could rebuild half the engine yourself and get it working well again that way, consumer-products shouldn't be brute forced.
Seriously, I've been a windows, then linux junkie for the last decade, but can any of you tell me there is any consistent design going on anywhere in there? Till dec 2003 you had to hardcode all the driver init hooks into the linux kernel with ifdefs, explain to me how that makes any sense. Well, another decade from now maybe Mach 1.0 will be out and another ridiculously long software milestone will have been reached.
also, make sure you have a good vga cable. at higher rez and doubly so with lcd's, the vga signal is sensitive to noise and any number of problems, and ghosting is almost always a problem in the signal quality reaching the lcd (or maybe a cheap adc in the panel).
had terrible results once with a no-name cable, and a kvm made my panel almost unreadable, the video card matters too, but most have decent dacs this day and age. set 60hz refresh too, 75 doesn't help with panels.
honestly, is getting to L60 in WoW anything more than proof you have too much time?
getting 50+ in eq (pre-pop) meant you either a) knew what you were doing, or b) had a good paypal account, and you could tell the difference by sight.
it was nice when the people that had the best gear deserved it, and you needed skills and brains instead of just time.
All my old eq friends are on wow right now, but i just think they don't get it. eq was hard, but unless you weren't skilled enough for your level you rarely got beaten down severely.
actually eq went downhill when the melees restarted as casters and started whining that everything was too hard. the skilled casters started leaving around then, with the flood of bots and twinks, and the game just went to hell.