Question is though - why does it say that? I've never heard TV referred to as the "boob tube" before? "The Tube" sure. I thought the "boob tube" was a peice of awful looking clothing from the eighties.
Well - either you're a FPS talent waiting to be discovered, or you're playing & watching the wrong type of FPS.
There has been a trend in recent years for FPS games to level the playing field a bit: they tend to be slower, more complicated and the strategies are more obvious, as the game leads you by the nose. Counterstrike, for exmaple is so slow I thought my avatar's shoe laces were tied tigether the first time I played - but that's the nature of the game. The relatively slow speed of play coupled with the easy to understand objectives are what gives it mass appeal. You don't need to be some sort of uber talent to have a meaningful game. Things like SW Battlefront, the whole gamut of fortress mods and those "realistic" or "historical" FPS games usually from WWII are much the same.
Take a look at someone like Thresh or Fatality (sorry I'm not about to look up how he writes it but suffice to say it has 1's in it:P) playing Quake2 or even the slightly slower Quake3. If you can do that - then I suggest you enter some tournaments!
I suspect not though - these older games are deceptively simple: the tactics are not defined by the game.
I think Fratz understood that - what he/she is saying that they will *still* spend the entire lecture taking notes, only now they will do it on paper - which may mean even less time spent listening and more time writing as it takes longer.
Back in the dim and distant past when I was at Uni, I remember a first year lecture where the girl next to me copied absolutley everything down, including a slide the guy put up that had a labelled picture of a PC, monitor and keyboard. "A bit late" I thought to be wondering how to indentify those pesky computer things when you're on an IT degree course. Anyway, later on in the lecture - and I kid you not - she wrote "he coughs".
I realised quite quickly, that for me at least, notes were fairly useless. I rarely read them again - as there were books in the university library with better explanations, that weren't in my scrawly handwriting.
Even Today - I never take notes in meetings. This always freaks the note takers out - after all: how you can be doing anything if you're not furiously scribbling? Meetings are to come to an agreement. If you want to exchange information, email it. I consider it rude if people come to meet with me and spend the entire time writing.
So - whilst I think this lecturer is right - I don't think this will make any difference - they'll still copy everything down like a hall full of writing monks, some of them in that strange square shaped not-quite-joined-up handrwriting. Some of them will colour in the margins. Still, I guess 40 ballpoints make less noise than 40 clattering laptop keyboards.
I can only hope that this apparent reaction is the usual nutters with their own agenda, using this as a vehicle to make their "point", or to win some bizarre bet.
Otherwise we have a sequence of events thus:-
Cartoonists depict Mohammed with a huge ACME style bomb Protesters turn up demanding death of cartoonists.
So what was the protesters' point exactly? That they *aren't* bloodthirsty lunatics, and the cartoon was unfair? Didn't they just justify the cartoon as completely accurate?
Political cartoons such as this have been published for a very long time, lampooning just about very group or individual you can think of. Geez - remember Spitting Image? No group left un-insulted there - but I never once saw them all forming an orderly queue outside Central Telly on Broad Street demanding the "head of light entertainment".
Grow up you guys - the rest of the world is getting tired of your tantrums.
I agree. If a physically stronger person sets out to humiliate another becasue they lack physical strength or dexterity, we recognise that as bad. It goes on all the time for sure, but that doesn't make it right. I feel the same is true of other human attributes. If you're a physically large guy with muscles the size of Kong's, don't pick on the weedy guy. If you're mentally well endowed, don't pick on the hard of thinking - try and help them understand a bit more instead.
Trouble is though, these people aren't just uneducated or dim-witted: it takes a very large ego to fall for this sort of stuff - have you *seen* the set? I mean these guys may not know anything about basic physics, but even so, don't they watch reality TV shows enough to recognise one when they see it? TV shows like this have been done before in the UK - notably "BrassEye" - a fake current affairs TV show. Some very otherwise astute, and often well known people were duped into the most incredibly obvious fake-ups. It seems to me that this works using the subjects own arrogance. I mean for this current crop to actually believe some organisation would be willing to invest billions to put their unworthy arses in orbit??? The fact that the set looks like it was made on Blue Peter, and they're not allowed in the "cockpit" ?
But still - certianly in the UK, we will laugh and joke with these guys when they emerge - and then pay them large sums of cash to appear on those shows that have people who are famous for being on those shows, er.. on them. And good luck to em - thats what I say. Jade Goody is still making good money out of it even now.
Loved the Uranus mantra. "We are begging to come in".
Cheers, Scoot.
Oh - and those other shows like XXX Idol, X Factor, Fame Academy? All hoaxes. Every one. It was all staged to dupe 3 celebs into thinking they were judging a talent contest. Honest. They were really on the moon being experimented on by a race of creatures from somewhere near Betelgeuse 5, who all look remarkably like Jeremy Paxman. Yeeesss.
I bought 2 of the original SliMP3 players 3 years ago, and have since added a Squeezebox2. I also run the Java software client "SoftSqueeze" on my PVR box, with keys bound to my Hauppauge remote, and on my workstation.
I can sync all of these up together, and even sync the controls so raising the volume does it on all the clients, hardware or software.
The hardware clients are as thin as they can get really - the remote codes are not interpretted by the client: they are sent to the server, which acts upon it and sends back the text to display on the client. Because of this server-centric design, you can get the server to do anything you like in response to a remote code.
This open architecture has produced armfuls of wonderful plugins, from RSS readers, weather, to plugins that will display a biog of the artist currently playing. For me though, the killer plugin is AlienBBC. I can browse through the entire "listen again" archive by station, show or day and choose anything. The day this happens for TV as well, will be joyous indeed. As the BBC listen again archive is (for reasons presumably known to the BBC, but not adequately explained to me) streamed in the adfest protocol that is the so-called "Real" media, AlienBBC uses mplayer to transcode the streams on the fly to something a little more friendly. You can chose from good old mp3 to lossless formats like FLAC.
My setup runs quite happily on a mixed mode 802.b/g network. I always buy the wired players, so I can upgrade the net later without throwing them away. Plus, where you want the player, isn't always a good place for the antenna - so my advice is keep em separate.
The high geek factor of the software may put some people off, but you can just use it out of the box (although you'll have to rip your CD's with something else - I use cdparanoia and lame, fronted by Grip) There are also some nicely packaged Slimserver music server devices now too - check out this one from Multitask:-
A lot of websites seem to make the same mistake. However, Bletchley Park's own website agrees with you, and I guess we can take that is a fairly authoritative source:-
A lot of the work done at Bletchley was also about deciphering the messages quicker - as the information had a very limited life span. All code brealing is framed by a time constraint. You could beak any encryption given enough time, so yes - they could crack enigma early on, but it often took too long, until Max Newman, a talented mathematician, who had already built a working but very unreliable mechanical device for speeding up the code breaking (called "Robinson" after Heath Robinson), got together with Tommy Flowers, a Post Office (telephone) engineer who was largely responsible, with Newman for designing and building Colossus, the electronic code breaking computer. About 10 of these were built, and decoded thousands of messages throughout the war.
Yes - that takes care of the actual technical issue. These guys are trying to avoid costly and time consuming certification that must be done on *new* controller chips. If they can successfully blag the powers that be that it's an existing one, then no certification required.
This is an unfortunate side effect of "too many procedures, too many monkeys, not enough reasonable thinkers" that plagues most modern corporates. Eventually, for most upper-middle management and below, the object becomes one of manipulating the policy to make the numbers they are judged by, better, rather than achieving any real world goal. So - (waves hand) "it's a tried and trusted chip guv'nor. Honest. You don't need to see his design schematics. In fact, these aren't even the chips you're looking for. Move along." will save them a whole bundle of cash; they won't have to wait for the chips to pass the tests, the 'plane will be built on time, and the faceless project manager/bean counter who didn't ever really understand the technical issue anyway get's his appraisal score up and a bigger bonus.
Mind you, having seen a bit of telly recently about the A380, I reckon that things got other "issues". I still can't beleive they designed the main undercarriage in a way that it relies on the wheels to push certain parts of the cover out of the way when it deploys! The test crew had come round to sign for the aircraft for it's first test flight a week later and the wheels kept getting stuck on this bit of cover. They "fixed" it with some silicone spray! Why on earth they couldn't design a mechanism that opened fully before the wheels deployed is beyond me. But then I'm not an undercarraige designer...
You know, I'm not sure I want to travel on anything designed and built in this day and age of mindless "by the numbers, one size fits all" policy and procedure. I see stuff built in this way by disparate vendors and in-house shops from around the globe that, when cobbled all together, sort of works but has a lot of inadequately explained failures. I can get frustrated with those, and maybe sometimes even laugh at them. But then, we don't make aeroplanes...
I agree - I had used Gallery 1.3.x for years and it was "OK", but was a pain to permission up, and stored all the images below the doc-root, so it was trivial to bypass the security anyway.
All of this has now been fixed, with a robust user/group model with a permission "tree" ("view all sizes" implies "view full size" and "view thumbnail" for example), and the images stored in a dedicated data directory outside of the web server doc-root. They've also fixed that annoying "feature" of 1.x.x where it would output image URLs with the explicit host name used during the install. This meant for my old gallery, that all the image URLs were prefixed with my internal host name for the server, so you got no images when browsing it from outside (unless you had a real non-proxied connection to the Intarweb and could edit the local hosts file:P ) It no longer gets it's knickers in a twist and corrupts it's own config file either (although I suspect this only happened on certain combinations of PHP and Apache)
Gallery 2 demonstrates the ease of use of a mature project. Upgrading within 1.x.x release used to be a bit of a chore, but after unpacking Gallery 2 to a new virtual server, a couple of MySQL commands to create and permissiona new database, all I had to do was browse to the new server, and tell it where the data was for the old gallery and it just got on with it. Detected all the image tools and preserved all the comments and metadata.
The "help n fill" on the local server paths is a bit spooky, but handy. The upload options are comprehensive, even supporting Xo's "publish to Internet" function, although I can't really reccomend that - it's very slow. The best option is to use Gallery Remote - a swing app that lets you just drag images, or folders or zip files of images onto it to upload to your gallery.
It even acts as a shop, letting your customers select images to buy from smaller versions and then making them a handy zip archive for checkout time.
Now I don't have to bother emailing pictures to family and friends - I just made them a user id each, created some groups, permissioned up the albums (and it supports inheritence too for permissions) and mailed people the link:)
"It's only a model..." "What's yer favourite colour?" "it's only a flesh wound!" "Where? Behind the rabbit?" "...and they had to eat Robin's troubadours.." "4 shalt thou not count"
"The Polish explorer Krystof Wielicki dropped his digital camera when climbing the Himalayas on his latest expedition, smashing it to smithereens and damaging the memory card in the process"
So... man drops camera and breaks it. Excuse me while I laugh at the stupidity, the cruel irony and....
Anyway. A friend worked at a company that sold accounts systems to small businesses many years ago, back in the age of the 5.25" diskette. Reception was operated by dear old Pat, a somewhat confused woman in her mid 60's. Reception didn't have a lot of receiving to do and so one quiet day, she was assigned the task of installing Sage something or other on a PC. The software shipped on half a dozen 5.25" disks.
"It's easy, says the techy - just follow the prompts on screen to the letter and you can't go wrong".
So, in goes the first disk, and after a while, the screen says "Insert disk 2 and press Enter".
Yes folks, you got it - at no time did the install script say "Take out disk 1". It was a struggle, but Pat managed to get disk 2 in the drive and shut the door again.
LOL Treeshock - I always wonder for a second whether you're serious. Then I read your sig:D
Isotope Feng Shui - could catch on among the hard of thinking. I'm always amazed at what people will believe in, and then I'm disgusted with myself for not selling it to them in a shiny packet for large sums of money:P
"I'm afraid so sir, the energy levels in the isotopes in your case material are out of alignment, but you're in luck! Not only is Jupiter in ascendance with your power supply, but we have a special on CPU/chassis chi alignment this week!"
50% more than online? Hmm I remember a time when that was true, but the Dixons group (Dixons, Currys, PC World et al) seem to have woken up to this and set their prices very carefully now. The Canon 350D kit (with 18-55mm lens thrown in) is £649 in Dixons. 7Day (Online camera retailer) have the same kit for £599. By the time you add the delivery charge for the online shop you're probably only looking at £30 difference. I wouldn't be bothered by that (and I won't have to worry about when it's going to turn up).
With more obscure stuff, such as graphics cards, I do find that Dixons are just way off. It's not so much that they are overpriced - more that the stuff on offer is so old it's starting to smell. They can get away with this with componentry like video cards as a certian portion of the customer base will lack the knowledge to recognise a GForce 4 as old. With the so called "consumer goods" like cameras, and expecially the fully auto pocket sized ones, they must price the itmes in line with their commonly held "worth". Well known items almost take on a commodity-like value like gold or pork bellies: consumers know their worth down to the last pound or dollar.
As for buying from a general electronics store versus a "Camera shop", I look at it like this:-
You're in the shop what, 20 minutes? Then you own and use the item for a few years say. Who cares what the guy in the shop knows or doesn't know? Find out what you need, *before* you go anywhere near a shop. Then buy it for the cheapest price you can get - whilst keeping in mind that it's easier to take it back to a shop with a physical high street presence. How much this is worth to you is a personal thing - I tend to be prepared to spend an extra 10% before the part of my brain that handles the budget says "er thats a lot more dude". You don't need a shop to get advice on what to buy these days.
Finally, another thought drifted into my head: digital cameras, especially SLRs where you are just buying the camera - no lens,: why would we think staff in a traditional camera shop would be better placed to advise on that anyway? It's a chunk of pure electronics, so maybe I'd be better off in an computer shop. Not so the lens of course. In fact with tongue a bit further in cheek - why would I want to buy a chunk of USB connected elctronics from a camera manufacturer? When did say... Nikon get cleverer than say.. Sony at designing and making this stuff? It'd be like Daewoo (makers of ships, ship yards, kettles etc) suddenly deciding they know how to make cars! Oh.. er hang on.. Those Fujifilm adverts really do bemuse me: who are they trying to kid claiming that SD cards are "digital film" and that their SD cards will somehow record the image better ?
Meanwhile, back at the topic:p and whilst I have no particular love of shops like Dixons and do agree with you to a large extent, there are occasionally knowledgable staff in these shops. They are usually the younger and geekier looking lads with strange hairdos. Always seek out this guy if you do need to ask a question - as even if they don't know they'd rather find out than admit it. The technical bits are not their forte though I must admit. I remember asking to see the back of a DVD player once in Dixons. Total confusion. I mean why are they on the shelf facing forwards? I know it will have a slot for a DVD and a power switch - the buying decision is made over what sockets it has - not what buttons are on the front (that you never ever use unless you lost the remote).
I would mind though - if Dixons up and died: Apart from the odd thing I do buy becasue I want it now, where else would I go to look at the stuff I then buy from ebuyer?
That's a very good point. You would need to take the disks out of the RS6000 (what were those back then?) and connect them to a system that you could boot one of these tools. dban, for example, supports x86 and Mac PPC. The beta version is ported to Sparc and RiSC (it's a Busybox/Linux based tool).
Slashdot Mirror
Question is though - why does it say that? I've never heard TV referred to as the "boob tube" before? "The Tube" sure. I thought the "boob tube" was a peice of awful looking clothing from the eighties.
Well - either you're a FPS talent waiting to be discovered, or you're playing & watching the wrong type of FPS.
:P) playing Quake2 or even the slightly slower Quake3. If you can do that - then I suggest you enter some tournaments!
There has been a trend in recent years for FPS games to level the playing field a bit: they tend to be slower, more complicated and the strategies are more obvious, as the game leads you by the nose. Counterstrike, for exmaple is so slow I thought my avatar's shoe laces were tied tigether the first time I played - but that's the nature of the game. The relatively slow speed of play coupled with the easy to understand objectives are what gives it mass appeal. You don't need to be some sort of uber talent to have a meaningful game. Things like SW Battlefront, the whole gamut of fortress mods and those "realistic" or "historical" FPS games usually from WWII are much the same.
Take a look at someone like Thresh or Fatality (sorry I'm not about to look up how he writes it but suffice to say it has 1's in it
I suspect not though - these older games are deceptively simple: the tactics are not defined by the game.
"What makes a TeraByte?"
:P
I dunno - tormenting it with a pointy stick?
Uh.. is that my coat?
I think Fratz understood that - what he/she is saying that they will *still* spend the entire lecture taking notes, only now they will do it on paper - which may mean even less time spent listening and more time writing as it takes longer.
Back in the dim and distant past when I was at Uni, I remember a first year lecture where the girl next to me copied absolutley everything down, including a slide the guy put up that had a labelled picture of a PC, monitor and keyboard. "A bit late" I thought to be wondering how to indentify those pesky computer things when you're on an IT degree course. Anyway, later on in the lecture - and I kid you not - she wrote "he coughs".
I realised quite quickly, that for me at least, notes were fairly useless. I rarely read them again - as there were books in the university library with better explanations, that weren't in my scrawly handwriting.
Even Today - I never take notes in meetings. This always freaks the note takers out - after all: how you can be doing anything if you're not furiously scribbling? Meetings are to come to an agreement. If you want to exchange information, email it. I consider it rude if people come to meet with me and spend the entire time writing.
So - whilst I think this lecturer is right - I don't think this will make any difference - they'll still copy everything down like a hall full of writing monks, some of them in that strange square shaped not-quite-joined-up handrwriting. Some of them will colour in the margins. Still, I guess 40 ballpoints make less noise than 40 clattering laptop keyboards.
I can only hope that this apparent reaction is the usual nutters with their own agenda, using this as a vehicle to make their "point", or to win some bizarre bet.
Otherwise we have a sequence of events thus:-
Cartoonists depict Mohammed with a huge ACME style bomb
Protesters turn up demanding death of cartoonists.
So what was the protesters' point exactly? That they *aren't* bloodthirsty lunatics, and the cartoon was unfair? Didn't they just justify the cartoon as completely accurate?
Political cartoons such as this have been published for a very long time, lampooning just about very group or individual you can think of. Geez - remember Spitting Image? No group left un-insulted there - but I never once saw them all forming an orderly queue outside Central Telly on Broad Street demanding the "head of light entertainment".
Grow up you guys - the rest of the world is getting tired of your tantrums.
If it's been done it isn't really impossible is it?
I agree. If a physically stronger person sets out to humiliate another becasue they lack physical strength or dexterity, we recognise that as bad. It goes on all the time for sure, but that doesn't make it right. I feel the same is true of other human attributes. If you're a physically large guy with muscles the size of Kong's, don't pick on the weedy guy. If you're mentally well endowed, don't pick on the hard of thinking - try and help them understand a bit more instead.
Trouble is though, these people aren't just uneducated or dim-witted: it takes a very large ego to fall for this sort of stuff - have you *seen* the set? I mean these guys may not know anything about basic physics, but even so, don't they watch reality TV shows enough to recognise one when they see it? TV shows like this have been done before in the UK - notably "BrassEye" - a fake current affairs TV show. Some very otherwise astute, and often well known people were duped into the most incredibly obvious fake-ups. It seems to me that this works using the subjects own arrogance. I mean for this current crop to actually believe some organisation would be willing to invest billions to put their unworthy arses in orbit??? The fact that the set looks like it was made on Blue Peter, and they're not allowed in the "cockpit" ?
But still - certianly in the UK, we will laugh and joke with these guys when they emerge - and then pay them large sums of cash to appear on those shows that have people who are famous for being on those shows, er.. on them. And good luck to em - thats what I say. Jade Goody is still making good money out of it even now.
Loved the Uranus mantra. "We are begging to come in".
Cheers,
Scoot.
Oh - and those other shows like XXX Idol, X Factor, Fame Academy? All hoaxes. Every one. It was all staged to dupe 3 celebs into thinking they were judging a talent contest. Honest. They were really on the moon being experimented on by a race of creatures from somewhere near Betelgeuse 5, who all look remarkably like Jeremy Paxman. Yeeesss.
I bought 2 of the original SliMP3 players 3 years ago, and have since added a Squeezebox2. I also run the Java software client "SoftSqueeze" on my PVR box, with keys bound to my Hauppauge remote, and on my workstation.
u ct_info.php?products_id=394&osCsid=d36fe1b16b40778 a4c40769dfec64b65
I can sync all of these up together, and even sync the controls so raising the volume does it on all the clients, hardware or software.
The hardware clients are as thin as they can get really - the remote codes are not interpretted by the client: they are sent to the server, which acts upon it and sends back the text to display on the client. Because of this server-centric design, you can get the server to do anything you like in response to a remote code.
This open architecture has produced armfuls of wonderful plugins, from RSS readers, weather, to plugins that will display a biog of the artist currently playing. For me though, the killer plugin is AlienBBC. I can browse through the entire "listen again" archive by station, show or day and choose anything. The day this happens for TV as well, will be joyous indeed. As the BBC listen again archive is (for reasons presumably known to the BBC, but not adequately explained to me) streamed in the adfest protocol that is the so-called "Real" media, AlienBBC uses mplayer to transcode the streams on the fly to something a little more friendly. You can chose from good old mp3 to lossless formats like FLAC.
My setup runs quite happily on a mixed mode 802.b/g network. I always buy the wired players, so I can upgrade the net later without throwing them away. Plus, where you want the player, isn't always a good place for the antenna - so my advice is keep em separate.
The high geek factor of the software may put some people off, but you can just use it out of the box (although you'll have to rip your CD's with something else - I use cdparanoia and lame, fronted by Grip) There are also some nicely packaged Slimserver music server devices now too - check out this one from Multitask:-
http://www.multitask-computing.co.uk/catalog/prod
A lot of websites seem to make the same mistake. However, Bletchley Park's own website agrees with you, and I guess we can take that is a fairly authoritative source:-
:P
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/
Good point on the "Robinsons" too, although they do seem to refer to it as just "Robinson" more often than not.
That'll teach me just to read a couple of sources
Cheers,
Scoot.
Newman's early machine was just called "Robinson". And both it and the Colussus machines *were* used to crack Enigma ciphers.:-
i gma13.htm
http://www.iwm.org.uk/upload/package/10/enigma/en
A lot of the work done at Bletchley was also about deciphering the messages quicker - as the information had a very limited life span. All code brealing is framed by a time constraint. You could beak any encryption given enough time, so yes - they could crack enigma early on, but it often took too long, until Max Newman, a talented mathematician, who had already built a working but very unreliable mechanical device for speeding up the code breaking (called "Robinson" after Heath Robinson), got together with Tommy Flowers, a Post Office (telephone) engineer who was largely responsible, with Newman for designing and building Colossus, the electronic code breaking computer. About 10 of these were built, and decoded thousands of messages throughout the war.
"...OpenGL titles such as DOOM 3, Quake 4,..."
Quake4's installer told me it *required* directx 9c. How does one make it go with OpenGL instead?
Well that's a relief !
Yes - that takes care of the actual technical issue. These guys are trying to avoid costly and time consuming certification that must be done on *new* controller chips. If they can successfully blag the powers that be that it's an existing one, then no certification required.
This is an unfortunate side effect of "too many procedures, too many monkeys, not enough reasonable thinkers" that plagues most modern corporates. Eventually, for most upper-middle management and below, the object becomes one of manipulating the policy to make the numbers they are judged by, better, rather than achieving any real world goal. So - (waves hand) "it's a tried and trusted chip guv'nor. Honest. You don't need to see his design schematics. In fact, these aren't even the chips you're looking for. Move along." will save them a whole bundle of cash; they won't have to wait for the chips to pass the tests, the 'plane will be built on time, and the faceless project manager/bean counter who didn't ever really understand the technical issue anyway get's his appraisal score up and a bigger bonus.
Mind you, having seen a bit of telly recently about the A380, I reckon that things got other "issues". I still can't beleive they designed the main undercarriage in a way that it relies on the wheels to push certain parts of the cover out of the way when it deploys! The test crew had come round to sign for the aircraft for it's first test flight a week later and the wheels kept getting stuck on this bit of cover. They "fixed" it with some silicone spray! Why on earth they couldn't design a mechanism that opened fully before the wheels deployed is beyond me. But then I'm not an undercarraige designer...
You know, I'm not sure I want to travel on anything designed and built in this day and age of mindless "by the numbers, one size fits all" policy and procedure. I see stuff built in this way by disparate vendors and in-house shops from around the globe that, when cobbled all together, sort of works but has a lot of inadequately explained failures. I can get frustrated with those, and maybe sometimes even laugh at them. But then, we don't make aeroplanes...
Indeed - and (quoth the fireman from TFA): "...measured a current of 40,000 volts".
Firefighter Barton - do *not*, I repeat do *not* ever attempt to do any wiring in your house - get professional help.
..and it doesn't modify your old Gallery install/data, so you have nothing to lose. It did mine without a hitch!
I agree - I had used Gallery 1.3.x for years and it was "OK", but was a pain to permission up, and stored all the images below the doc-root, so it was trivial to bypass the security anyway.
:P ) It no longer gets it's knickers in a twist and corrupts it's own config file either (although I suspect this only happened on certain combinations of PHP and Apache)
:)
All of this has now been fixed, with a robust user/group model with a permission "tree" ("view all sizes" implies "view full size" and "view thumbnail" for example), and the images stored in a dedicated data directory outside of the web server doc-root. They've also fixed that annoying "feature" of 1.x.x where it would output image URLs with the explicit host name used during the install. This meant for my old gallery, that all the image URLs were prefixed with my internal host name for the server, so you got no images when browsing it from outside (unless you had a real non-proxied connection to the Intarweb and could edit the local hosts file
Gallery 2 demonstrates the ease of use of a mature project. Upgrading within 1.x.x release used to be a bit of a chore, but after unpacking Gallery 2 to a new virtual server, a couple of MySQL commands to create and permissiona new database, all I had to do was browse to the new server, and tell it where the data was for the old gallery and it just got on with it. Detected all the image tools and preserved all the comments and metadata.
The "help n fill" on the local server paths is a bit spooky, but handy. The upload options are comprehensive, even supporting Xo's "publish to Internet" function, although I can't really reccomend that - it's very slow. The best option is to use Gallery Remote - a swing app that lets you just drag images, or folders or zip files of images onto it to upload to your gallery.
It even acts as a shop, letting your customers select images to buy from smaller versions and then making them a handy zip archive for checkout time.
Now I don't have to bother emailing pictures to family and friends - I just made them a user id each, created some groups, permissioned up the albums (and it supports inheritence too for permissions) and mailed people the link
Fantastic job guys.
....another explanation is that you just can't see it BECAUSE IT'S VERY DARK. :P
Indeed - opens the way for hacking of a very different kind :P
It doesn't even have to be the first line.....
"It's only a model..."
"What's yer favourite colour?"
"it's only a flesh wound!"
"Where? Behind the rabbit?"
"...and they had to eat Robin's troubadours.."
"4 shalt thou not count"
btw - wasn't it "...I'm being oppressed!"??
That article is well, crap. I mean come on:-
"The Polish explorer Krystof Wielicki dropped his digital camera when climbing the Himalayas on his latest expedition, smashing it to smithereens and damaging the memory card in the process"
So... man drops camera and breaks it. Excuse me while I laugh at the stupidity, the cruel irony and....
Anyway. A friend worked at a company that sold accounts systems to small businesses many years ago, back in the age of the 5.25" diskette. Reception was operated by dear old Pat, a somewhat confused woman in her mid 60's. Reception didn't have a lot of receiving to do and so one quiet day, she was assigned the task of installing Sage something or other on a PC. The software shipped on half a dozen 5.25" disks.
"It's easy, says the techy - just follow the prompts on screen to the letter and you can't go wrong".
So, in goes the first disk, and after a while, the screen says "Insert disk 2 and press Enter".
Yes folks, you got it - at no time did the install script say "Take out disk 1". It was a struggle, but Pat managed to get disk 2 in the drive and shut the door again.
LOL Treeshock - I always wonder for a second whether you're serious. Then I read your sig :D
:P
Isotope Feng Shui - could catch on among the hard of thinking. I'm always amazed at what people will believe in, and then I'm disgusted with myself for not selling it to them in a shiny packet for large sums of money
"I'm afraid so sir, the energy levels in the isotopes in your case material are out of alignment, but you're in luck! Not only is Jupiter in ascendance with your power supply, but we have a special on CPU/chassis chi alignment this week!"
Hmmm...
50% more than online? Hmm I remember a time when that was true, but the Dixons group (Dixons, Currys, PC World et al) seem to have woken up to this and set their prices very carefully now. The Canon 350D kit (with 18-55mm lens thrown in) is £649 in Dixons. 7Day (Online camera retailer) have the same kit for £599. By the time you add the delivery charge for the online shop you're probably only looking at £30 difference. I wouldn't be bothered by that (and I won't have to worry about when it's going to turn up).
:p and whilst I have no particular love of shops like Dixons and do agree with you to a large extent, there are occasionally knowledgable staff in these shops. They are usually the younger and geekier looking lads with strange hairdos. Always seek out this guy if you do need to ask a question - as even if they don't know they'd rather find out than admit it. The technical bits are not their forte though I must admit. I remember asking to see the back of a DVD player once in Dixons. Total confusion. I mean why are they on the shelf facing forwards? I know it will have a slot for a DVD and a power switch - the buying decision is made over what sockets it has - not what buttons are on the front (that you never ever use unless you lost the remote).
With more obscure stuff, such as graphics cards, I do find that Dixons are just way off. It's not so much that they are overpriced - more that the stuff on offer is so old it's starting to smell. They can get away with this with componentry like video cards as a certian portion of the customer base will lack the knowledge to recognise a GForce 4 as old. With the so called "consumer goods" like cameras, and expecially the fully auto pocket sized ones, they must price the itmes in line with their commonly held "worth". Well known items almost take on a commodity-like value like gold or pork bellies: consumers know their worth down to the last pound or dollar.
As for buying from a general electronics store versus a "Camera shop", I look at it like this:-
You're in the shop what, 20 minutes? Then you own and use the item for a few years say. Who cares what the guy in the shop knows or doesn't know? Find out what you need, *before* you go anywhere near a shop. Then buy it for the cheapest price you can get - whilst keeping in mind that it's easier to take it back to a shop with a physical high street presence. How much this is worth to you is a personal thing - I tend to be prepared to spend an extra 10% before the part of my brain that handles the budget says "er thats a lot more dude". You don't need a shop to get advice on what to buy these days.
Finally, another thought drifted into my head: digital cameras, especially SLRs where you are just buying the camera - no lens,: why would we think staff in a traditional camera shop would be better placed to advise on that anyway? It's a chunk of pure electronics, so maybe I'd be better off in an computer shop. Not so the lens of course. In fact with tongue a bit further in cheek - why would I want to buy a chunk of USB connected elctronics from a camera manufacturer? When did say... Nikon get cleverer than say.. Sony at designing and making this stuff? It'd be like Daewoo (makers of ships, ship yards, kettles etc) suddenly deciding they know how to make cars! Oh.. er hang on.. Those Fujifilm adverts really do bemuse me: who are they trying to kid claiming that SD cards are "digital film" and that their SD cards will somehow record the image better ?
Meanwhile, back at the topic
I would mind though - if Dixons up and died: Apart from the odd thing I do buy becasue I want it now, where else would I go to look at the stuff I then buy from ebuyer?
Cheers,
Scoot.
That's a very good point. You would need to take the disks out of the RS6000 (what were those back then?) and connect them to a system that you could boot one of these tools. dban, for example, supports x86 and Mac PPC. The beta version is ported to Sparc and RiSC (it's a Busybox/Linux based tool).
We brits hit Mars a few months back already!
:P
You remember - it was called "Deep doodoo" or something.