*Innovation is a good thing, but a tried and tested formula that still works fantasticly is just as good* Well, yeah, when I go for a Pokemon game, I mostly want the same old thing...
But, you know, it wouldn't have been too much to ask for them to, say, animate the characters, just a little. I'm sick of all the Pokemon just being two sprites (front and back) and a few generically-applied effects...
The days of $12,000 80 MB hard drives and portable accoustic-coupler terminals are before my time - but not so far that the concepts seem completely alien. Accoustic couplers don't surprise me - I wanted one as a kid, but wound up getting a regular wired modem. I remember the time before internet e-mail was something I regularly used - when e-mail was something I could get only on BBSes, and therefore rather limited - so the idea of a time completely before e-mail doesn't surprise me either. And I remember when a 200 MB hard drive was a major investment - for me anyway - and before that when smaller hard drives than that were a big deal on a home computer.
Likewise the notion of a laptop computer with the power of a PC XT, or any kind of big, heavy "portable" computer - my dad had a Commodore SX 64 when I was a kid, and I used to dream of having a real C-64 laptop.
So probably this article has a much more potent effect on the kids who had internet e-mail when they were ten years old or younger, don't remember operating systems prior to Windows 95, never saw an Apple IIe or IIc... It's interesting stuff but it's not "hilarious"...
That's funny, but just stupid. The PS3 is and always has been worth well more than its price in the store for a lot of reasons that nobody should have to justify anymore. That's ridiculous. Value is subjective. Sure, the PS3 is a fine machine, but to say that it's worth the price - that's something people have to decide for themselves. You could put $3000 worth of computer hardware into a little black box that does nothing but play MP3s - it doesn't matter that it cost you $3000 in hardware, though, because the thing is still worth no more to me than what an iPod costs.
If Sony's doing well at selling the PS3 at its current price point - then fine, good for them. For me, it's too damn expensive. There are much better ways I could spend $600, you know?
I actually liked Elephant's Dream... but it was a bit high brow. A few car crashes/pirate ships would have broadened the appeal of the movie and gained a wider audience, which is the point of a tech demo, no? It wasn't just a tech demo - part of the idea, as I understand it, was to use the project as a shake-down for Blender. People don't do major projects with programs like Blender every day, so there's not the kind of in-depth feedback on advanced topics that there should be. By applying Blender to such a task in Orange Project, they were able to see for themselves what went well and what didn't. As a result they identified some things to improve and (more importantly) how to improve them in order to make character animation better.
I had heard they were considering some kind of game project in order to give the Blender game engine a similar overhaul - I don't know if that's still the plan (since they're now using a different engine, I guess?) but I think the basic idea is still the same: a shakedown to help them improve the code.
As for the subject matter - you have to consider the time and energy it takes to make a film like that. Let's say you were going to make a short film, right? Only it takes so much time or effort or money or whatever that you don't know when, or even if, you'll be able to make another one. Do you make what you think people want to see, or do you make what you want to make? Which you choose is a matter of personal taste, of course - but if I weren't in it for the money I'd choose the latter, no question.
That is not water, it's yellow! Wow... I knew the Church of All Worlds had changed a few of the established traditions over the years but I didn't know that was what they considered "water sharing"...
Drinking Martian water is not something to be done without careful consideration... Martians place a very high value on the sharing of water. If you're going to do it, you mustn't do it without understanding the full implications of doing so - the cultural significance and the implicit promises that accompany water ritual.
Is it just me or does emacs go completely against the grains of *nix philosophy? i.e. simple, modular, parsimony, etc. The emacs base distribution is 126 megabytes, larger then the FreeBSD operating system... How did emacs get to be like this? (Huh? The binaries on gnu.org are around 36MiB... If you still think of that as large, then fine - but it's a long way from 126 MiB....)
I have a general idea of why this may be the case. The straightforward answer, of course, is feature bloat, right? Everybody wanted something else added to the editor, lots of that stuff got integrated into the core release, etc. But why did everything have to get integrated in the first place, if the Unix philosophy is that the system should be host to a large number of cooperating, simple, largely single-use tools that could be easily connected together?
Basically, I contend, it's the same reason why Ruby, Perl, and Python all have their own implementations of various common libraries, redundant as they are - while the Unix philosophy is built up around ideas of data interchange, the system doesn't really do much to facilitate a high degree of interoperation. With no common assumptions of how interprocess data is formatted, software can't readily be written to take advantage of shell-level facilities on the system - and shell-level facilities can't be readily written in a way that software designed to work with shell-level concepts will readily be able to usefully interact with them. So, basically, for a package like Emacs to accumulate features, it must implement that functionality entirely within itself. Each of these mega-packages then becomes like its own little sovereign nation, and exchanges between the mighty applications are done with care. In effect, we ourselves (the programmers, that is) are moving away from the "Unix Philosophy" just because it seems the most straightforward way to get things done.
As an example, think about what would be required for a shell program to implement something rougly equivalent to regular expressions - let's say, a simple parser generator language, compact enough to be convenient for search/replace - in a way that Emacs could use this facility as readily as it can use its internal searches. There would have to be an elisp component to handle the Emacs-side interaction, of course - define the command name and keyboard shortcut, maybe even to perform the search as the user types it and update the Emacs display accordingly - then this would have to interface with the shell-level program that provides the functionality - providing the search as defined by the user, and streaming the whole text of the Emacs buffer being searched until the process signalled that it had found a match. Certainly feasible - the problem is the difficulty involved in binding this little program to enough "environments" to make it really useful to more than just Emacs. Every one becomes its own little chore - some wrapper code is required to make the functionality visible, make it work in the local language environment, deal with the peculiarities of that particular module, and so on. Not all of that can be truly automated away, but I believe a lot of it can. Hence, my belief that while the Unix method is sound, it requires a more modern infrastructure to really work.
Of course, there's an alternate perspective, too - Emacs was one of the early examples of an application built around a scripting engine. Nowadays that kind of thing is fairly common - you've got Python embedded in Blender, for instance - this effectively gives the application access to all the modules written for that one scripting language - and in some cases may also give the scripting language (outside of the application) access to the application's functionality - you could think of "everything Python" or "everything Perl" as its own little Unix-style ecosystem, of interoperating mini-tools. Emacs, being such an old example of this, carries more history, more cruft - it may be that other scripting applications will fare similarly, ten or fifteen years down the line...
I suppose a "materialize a 5'4 asian Girl Friend" command would be useful too. I think we should push for that in the next revision.
Once that's implemented, the whole vi vs. Emacs thing is over.
Hot asian girlfriend FTW! Wait a minute, the specs didn't call for her to be hot... It just said 5'4" and Asian...
So we could be talking about a chunky girl with mosquito bites, and a mouth full of crooked teeth, a strict no-sex-before-marriage policy, and a really foul attitude... Like the kind that would be all screaming at you in Cantonese every night, unless you cater to her every whim, as uttered in broken, thickly-accented English - and then if you give her the boot she sneaks back into your place and steals or destroys all your stuff...
See? SEE? Now do you understand why it's important to clearly and thoroughly define the requirements of your software before coding begins?
Dude - you need to learn to relax. You need to get over your compulsive need to dump on Emacs any time it's mentioned. You don't like it - that's fine. Nobody said you had to.
I guess I'll just have to quit watching baseball games. Oh wait I find the sport boring and asinine and don't watch it anyways. Baseball is something to experience in person, or not at all. Being out at the park on a fine day is good times. If the sport itself is slow at times, that's mitigated by the fact that you're there enjoying nice weather and the company of friends, plus the social activity of cheering for your team.
'Course, I'd love to add "good food and drink" to the list, but frankly the stuff they serve at the park is overpriced garbage - "sex in a canoe"-type beer and dried-up cold sausage - and under the pretense of security they prevent people from bringing in any outside food that would compete with what they sell. Can't win 'em all, I guess.
You know, when it comes to fighting aliens with a guitar, Master Chief's got nothing on Colonel Bluegrass. Any chance of a Silverhawks game for the 360?
Unless you use an iPod, this appears to be a real weak point in the Linux desktop.
iRiver doesn't work very well on a Macintosh either, so I bet you consider it a weak point in the Macintosh desktop as well.
How about this: if iRiver doesn't work in Linux, complain to iRiver. The difference is that none of these manufacturers of music players are seeking to support Linux as they do other OSes - we as a community have taken on that yoke ourselves for now - and so, as a result, if a particular player doesn't play well with Linux, it is a failure of those who have been trying to improve support for the players on Linux. It's fine to say that companies should provide Linux support for their hardware - but generally that just doesn't happen. If you want to use Linux you need to accept that and deal with it.
If you don't care who you "blame" - if you only care about the practical results you can achieve, then this situation is not necessarily a failure of any particular set of developers (since we're not laying blame) but nevertheless, the set of software that makes up the "Linux Desktop" can't do what you want, so it has failed.
With Windows, you don't have those options... How so?
I mean, you just recalibrate the main deflector to emit inverse polarized tachyon pulses at the resonant frequencies of known weapons - the resonating tachyon pulses will show up on the main sensor grid, so you tie that data into the transporter system, and transport the terrorists into the brig. There will, of course, be a.001 second delay between the termination of the transporter beam and the activation of the brig's force field, but it's really unlikely that anyone could escape in that short a time.
You crave small, you don't want pain, and yet you ask for the most bloated editor in the realm. Sounds a little left of centre, n'est ce pas? I don't care what you think of Emacs, OK? I use it and I like it - and I don't need to propagate some assertion that other editors are worse just to feel secure about that. It's not perfect but it does a good job at doing what I want.
The fact is, a low-end machine of today provides everything you need to run Emacs. My frikkin' phone could run Emacs quite happily, if it had a suitable OS on it. Your standards for defining excessive bloat are about ten years out of date.
If it does decent powerpoint, or reasonable alternative, they would go like hotcakes. That's one reason why I'm interested in a device like this. Not necessarily the Foleo, mind you - but some kind of subnotebook machine. From time to time I travel and give presentations, and on these trips I'd like to have: - presentation software with VGA-out (Particularly, I want kpresenter. Openoffice causes me pain.) - certain capacity for gaming, video playback to keep myself entertained (I suspect this thing will have enough horsepower for MPEG4 - at least the less-demanding files. My Treo can do that much...) - The usual hacker toys - like ssh, emacs, python, a command shell, and so on...
And specifically, in such a machine, I don't want a lot of weight or bulk (I currently have a 12" powerbook - it's a fine machine but I don't like lugging it around for a whole weekend)
I've looked at various ways of getting that functionality - ultra-mobiles and tablets are especially interesting possibilities, to me - this thing may also be a possibility, though for what I'm interested in it seems a bit on the large side.
I love the idea of running all my favorite desktop software on a mobile computer - things like Blender or GIMP, for instance - I can do that on my laptop already but the experience isn't great - I feel like to make that work you need one of the big, heavy laptops, so I'd rather give up on that instead of getting such a beast.
do you suffer from where you think you know and own all the music you will ever want to listen to in your life That's rich. So I'm going to find some exciting new artist I've never heard of before... on the local radio station? It's not impossible but it seems really unlikely and a big waste of time. I listen to enough FM to know that...
I find new music by talking to my friends or by going to shows. Usually the stuff that interests me doesn't even get played on the damn radio. (Oh, if you listen long enough they might play Regina Spektor, for instance, but not the old stuff, just the singles from the current album. Most artists, if they get airplay at all, it's usually just a very small number of their songs getting played over and over...) I'm not saying FM has no value - but if you feel like there's some kind of universal outcry for AM/FM to be built-in to iPods, you might need to rethink that.
For a more straightforward answer to your basic question - there's no point in adding a feature that most people have no interest in. It effectively adds no value to the product, but it increases manufacturing costs - so one way or another it reduces profit. (Either by raising the retail price, and thus impacting sales, or else decreasing profit margins without yielding a worthwhile boost in sales...)
I can't tell you that an FM receiver isn't a feature you need - because apparently it's something you really want to have. For that reason I also won't presume to say that the iPod is a product you need to own. You telling me that an FM receiver is something I do need is equally ridiculous.
(You young whippersnappers these days - you don't realize what a cool concept "the year 2000" was, before it happened. For years it'd been seen as the border between the boring old 20th century and a fantastic new future-world with flying cars and robot servants - tacking "2000" onto anything was like a blessing from the Pope. Now, of course, we know that 2000 was, in fact, a lot like 1999...)
Very nice. The question, though, is was WWII "looming" or "started". If it was only looming for America then it was only looming for Ireland and, in fact, by that basis WWII never started if you are in Ireland since they never bothered to fight.
Clearly, whether an individual country fought in it or not, WWII did actually happen and likewise whether an individual country had joined in or not WWII had started, and it started in 1939.
TWW
"In July 1941 with World War II looming..."
Tell me where in that bit of sentence it says World War II hadn't started by 1941. Note that something can start and still be "looming". Let's say Germany invades Poland, right? Only you're not in Poland, you're somewhere else. Now, you know a bit about what's been happening in Germany and it seems like this might not be the end of it, but rather the beginning. How far is it gonna go? Will people in France be affected? Will people in Britain be affected? Is Hitler gonna expand the war or is there going to be some measure of success in containing the conflict? You really don't know at that point. For you, only the threat is real. The war has, in fact, started, but to you it's "looming" - its effect and outcome are undetermined. Maybe you even hold out hope that it won't affect you at all, but it's not certain.
The truth of that statement depends on its point of view - that of the US military in mid-1941. At that point it was becoming clear that, one way or another, the US would become directly involved in the war. The war was a reality, but its direct effect on the US was still unrealized - the dangers were recognized but the impact not yet felt. Hence, the war, already in progress, was looming.
Not that Tron was CG. No, it wasn't CG. A lot of it was live-action, filmed on physical sets, with rotoscoping techniques for the "glow" on characters and objects.
But it featured CG... The entire lightcycle sequence, for instance - well, not counting shots of the characters or the interiors of the vehicles...
Slashdot Mirror
*goes to check if Ben Heckendorn has built one yet* With the C-64 DTV available these days I'm sure somebody has built one. It's just too easy.
*Innovation is a good thing, but a tried and tested formula that still works fantasticly is just as good* Well, yeah, when I go for a Pokemon game, I mostly want the same old thing...
But, you know, it wouldn't have been too much to ask for them to, say, animate the characters, just a little. I'm sick of all the Pokemon just being two sprites (front and back) and a few generically-applied effects...
The days of $12,000 80 MB hard drives and portable accoustic-coupler terminals are before my time - but not so far that the concepts seem completely alien. Accoustic couplers don't surprise me - I wanted one as a kid, but wound up getting a regular wired modem. I remember the time before internet e-mail was something I regularly used - when e-mail was something I could get only on BBSes, and therefore rather limited - so the idea of a time completely before e-mail doesn't surprise me either. And I remember when a 200 MB hard drive was a major investment - for me anyway - and before that when smaller hard drives than that were a big deal on a home computer.
Likewise the notion of a laptop computer with the power of a PC XT, or any kind of big, heavy "portable" computer - my dad had a Commodore SX 64 when I was a kid, and I used to dream of having a real C-64 laptop.
So probably this article has a much more potent effect on the kids who had internet e-mail when they were ten years old or younger, don't remember operating systems prior to Windows 95, never saw an Apple IIe or IIc... It's interesting stuff but it's not "hilarious"...
If Sony's doing well at selling the PS3 at its current price point - then fine, good for them. For me, it's too damn expensive. There are much better ways I could spend $600, you know?
I had heard they were considering some kind of game project in order to give the Blender game engine a similar overhaul - I don't know if that's still the plan (since they're now using a different engine, I guess?) but I think the basic idea is still the same: a shakedown to help them improve the code.
As for the subject matter - you have to consider the time and energy it takes to make a film like that. Let's say you were going to make a short film, right? Only it takes so much time or effort or money or whatever that you don't know when, or even if, you'll be able to make another one. Do you make what you think people want to see, or do you make what you want to make? Which you choose is a matter of personal taste, of course - but if I weren't in it for the money I'd choose the latter, no question.
Drinking Martian water is not something to be done without careful consideration... Martians place a very high value on the sharing of water. If you're going to do it, you mustn't do it without understanding the full implications of doing so - the cultural significance and the implicit promises that accompany water ritual.
May you never thirst...
See, it's comments like these that show the kind of ignorance there is out there of the real effects of this kind of radiation.
The most common effects of radioactive contamination are three-eyed fish: though radioactive spiders are also a common concern.
I have a general idea of why this may be the case. The straightforward answer, of course, is feature bloat, right? Everybody wanted something else added to the editor, lots of that stuff got integrated into the core release, etc. But why did everything have to get integrated in the first place, if the Unix philosophy is that the system should be host to a large number of cooperating, simple, largely single-use tools that could be easily connected together?
Basically, I contend, it's the same reason why Ruby, Perl, and Python all have their own implementations of various common libraries, redundant as they are - while the Unix philosophy is built up around ideas of data interchange, the system doesn't really do much to facilitate a high degree of interoperation. With no common assumptions of how interprocess data is formatted, software can't readily be written to take advantage of shell-level facilities on the system - and shell-level facilities can't be readily written in a way that software designed to work with shell-level concepts will readily be able to usefully interact with them. So, basically, for a package like Emacs to accumulate features, it must implement that functionality entirely within itself. Each of these mega-packages then becomes like its own little sovereign nation, and exchanges between the mighty applications are done with care. In effect, we ourselves (the programmers, that is) are moving away from the "Unix Philosophy" just because it seems the most straightforward way to get things done.
As an example, think about what would be required for a shell program to implement something rougly equivalent to regular expressions - let's say, a simple parser generator language, compact enough to be convenient for search/replace - in a way that Emacs could use this facility as readily as it can use its internal searches. There would have to be an elisp component to handle the Emacs-side interaction, of course - define the command name and keyboard shortcut, maybe even to perform the search as the user types it and update the Emacs display accordingly - then this would have to interface with the shell-level program that provides the functionality - providing the search as defined by the user, and streaming the whole text of the Emacs buffer being searched until the process signalled that it had found a match. Certainly feasible - the problem is the difficulty involved in binding this little program to enough "environments" to make it really useful to more than just Emacs. Every one becomes its own little chore - some wrapper code is required to make the functionality visible, make it work in the local language environment, deal with the peculiarities of that particular module, and so on. Not all of that can be truly automated away, but I believe a lot of it can. Hence, my belief that while the Unix method is sound, it requires a more modern infrastructure to really work.
Of course, there's an alternate perspective, too - Emacs was one of the early examples of an application built around a scripting engine. Nowadays that kind of thing is fairly common - you've got Python embedded in Blender, for instance - this effectively gives the application access to all the modules written for that one scripting language - and in some cases may also give the scripting language (outside of the application) access to the application's functionality - you could think of "everything Python" or "everything Perl" as its own little Unix-style ecosystem, of interoperating mini-tools. Emacs, being such an old example of this, carries more history, more cruft - it may be that other scripting applications will fare similarly, ten or fifteen years down the line...
Or is it just now Eight Hundred Megs And Constantly Swapping?
Once that's implemented, the whole vi vs. Emacs thing is over.
Hot asian girlfriend FTW! Wait a minute, the specs didn't call for her to be hot... It just said 5'4" and Asian...
So we could be talking about a chunky girl with mosquito bites, and a mouth full of crooked teeth, a strict no-sex-before-marriage policy, and a really foul attitude... Like the kind that would be all screaming at you in Cantonese every night, unless you cater to her every whim, as uttered in broken, thickly-accented English - and then if you give her the boot she sneaks back into your place and steals or destroys all your stuff...
See? SEE? Now do you understand why it's important to clearly and thoroughly define the requirements of your software before coding begins?
Deeeeep huuurrting... DEEEEEP HUUURRRTING!!!
(lameness filter, go and fucking lick me.)
'Course, I'd love to add "good food and drink" to the list, but frankly the stuff they serve at the park is overpriced garbage - "sex in a canoe"-type beer and dried-up cold sausage - and under the pretense of security they prevent people from bringing in any outside food that would compete with what they sell. Can't win 'em all, I guess.
You know, when it comes to fighting aliens with a guitar, Master Chief's got nothing on Colonel Bluegrass. Any chance of a Silverhawks game for the 360?
Oh, P'shaw. Ore no uta wo kike!How about this: if iRiver doesn't work in Linux, complain to iRiver. The difference is that none of these manufacturers of music players are seeking to support Linux as they do other OSes - we as a community have taken on that yoke ourselves for now - and so, as a result, if a particular player doesn't play well with Linux, it is a failure of those who have been trying to improve support for the players on Linux. It's fine to say that companies should provide Linux support for their hardware - but generally that just doesn't happen. If you want to use Linux you need to accept that and deal with it.
If you don't care who you "blame" - if you only care about the practical results you can achieve, then this situation is not necessarily a failure of any particular set of developers (since we're not laying blame) but nevertheless, the set of software that makes up the "Linux Desktop" can't do what you want, so it has failed. With Windows, you don't have those options... How so?
I mean, you just recalibrate the main deflector to emit inverse polarized tachyon pulses at the resonant frequencies of known weapons - the resonating tachyon pulses will show up on the main sensor grid, so you tie that data into the transporter system, and transport the terrorists into the brig. There will, of course, be a .001 second delay between the termination of the transporter beam and the activation of the brig's force field, but it's really unlikely that anyone could escape in that short a time.
The fact is, a low-end machine of today provides everything you need to run Emacs. My frikkin' phone could run Emacs quite happily, if it had a suitable OS on it. Your standards for defining excessive bloat are about ten years out of date.
- presentation software with VGA-out (Particularly, I want kpresenter. Openoffice causes me pain.)
- certain capacity for gaming, video playback to keep myself entertained (I suspect this thing will have enough horsepower for MPEG4 - at least the less-demanding files. My Treo can do that much...)
- The usual hacker toys - like ssh, emacs, python, a command shell, and so on...
And specifically, in such a machine, I don't want a lot of weight or bulk (I currently have a 12" powerbook - it's a fine machine but I don't like lugging it around for a whole weekend)
I've looked at various ways of getting that functionality - ultra-mobiles and tablets are especially interesting possibilities, to me - this thing may also be a possibility, though for what I'm interested in it seems a bit on the large side.
I love the idea of running all my favorite desktop software on a mobile computer - things like Blender or GIMP, for instance - I can do that on my laptop already but the experience isn't great - I feel like to make that work you need one of the big, heavy laptops, so I'd rather give up on that instead of getting such a beast.
I find new music by talking to my friends or by going to shows. Usually the stuff that interests me doesn't even get played on the damn radio. (Oh, if you listen long enough they might play Regina Spektor, for instance, but not the old stuff, just the singles from the current album. Most artists, if they get airplay at all, it's usually just a very small number of their songs getting played over and over...) I'm not saying FM has no value - but if you feel like there's some kind of universal outcry for AM/FM to be built-in to iPods, you might need to rethink that.
For a more straightforward answer to your basic question - there's no point in adding a feature that most people have no interest in. It effectively adds no value to the product, but it increases manufacturing costs - so one way or another it reduces profit. (Either by raising the retail price, and thus impacting sales, or else decreasing profit margins without yielding a worthwhile boost in sales...)
I can't tell you that an FM receiver isn't a feature you need - because apparently it's something you really want to have. For that reason I also won't presume to say that the iPod is a product you need to own. You telling me that an FM receiver is something I do need is equally ridiculous.
Gigabeat 2000 would have been cooler...
(You young whippersnappers these days - you don't realize what a cool concept "the year 2000" was, before it happened. For years it'd been seen as the border between the boring old 20th century and a fantastic new future-world with flying cars and robot servants - tacking "2000" onto anything was like a blessing from the Pope. Now, of course, we know that 2000 was, in fact, a lot like 1999...)
Clearly, whether an individual country fought in it or not, WWII did actually happen and likewise whether an individual country had joined in or not WWII had started, and it started in 1939.
TWW
"In July 1941 with World War II looming..."Tell me where in that bit of sentence it says World War II hadn't started by 1941. Note that something can start and still be "looming". Let's say Germany invades Poland, right? Only you're not in Poland, you're somewhere else. Now, you know a bit about what's been happening in Germany and it seems like this might not be the end of it, but rather the beginning. How far is it gonna go? Will people in France be affected? Will people in Britain be affected? Is Hitler gonna expand the war or is there going to be some measure of success in containing the conflict? You really don't know at that point. For you, only the threat is real. The war has, in fact, started, but to you it's "looming" - its effect and outcome are undetermined. Maybe you even hold out hope that it won't affect you at all, but it's not certain.
The truth of that statement depends on its point of view - that of the US military in mid-1941. At that point it was becoming clear that, one way or another, the US would become directly involved in the war. The war was a reality, but its direct effect on the US was still unrealized - the dangers were recognized but the impact not yet felt. Hence, the war, already in progress, was looming.
But it featured CG... The entire lightcycle sequence, for instance - well, not counting shots of the characters or the interiors of the vehicles...
He also didn't say that he and his (former?) fiance wound up married to each other...