NYCL, thanks for the clarification on #1. I was fairly sure of myself for criminal cases (though IANAL), but didn't feel as confident with my assertion for civil law.
There is a moral obligation (and a legal one in criminal cases) that ALL evidence that could exculpate the accused party MUST be shared with the defense. Two different defendants have two different cases going on with two different defense teams. (In the RIAA's case, that's 20,000 defendants.) The defense team may not be aware of new developments in other cases, but the one common party to all these cases does know, and should be communicating this appropriately. It's called ethics.
My favored culprit for drastic friction reduction during faulting is lubricating Silica Gel; finely crushed quartz in the active fault zone reacts with water forming fluidic silica gel. And I have it on good authority that it's best to spray highways with huge vats of chicken fat and banana peels just before rush hour...
Yes, somewhat. MFC 1.0 was caught in the middle historically, because the C++ compiler was not going to support templates (and thus collections had to be type-rigid). I think it was right for the compiler group to refuse to support the unratified template syntax, one of the few "don't invent" decisions I can credit Microsoft for making. You have to remember, this was when the most common C++ compiler was cfront, the C++-to-C preprocessor, and the most popular C++ library was Rogue Wave, so the MSFT C++ compiler was making the new (immature) language available to a lot of people. In the end, it made collection classes a bit easier to understand but tougher to use. ATL was a move away from MFC compatibility and "wrap Win32 API as thinly as possible" but it was okay.
It's not about the oft-slagged interface, it's about actual capability falling behind the curve.
It's going to be a common rant in this thread, I am sure, but the fact is, GIMP is falling behind because it has not yet mainstreamed any support for "deep color." It is stuck in an 8-bits-per-channel world, which is fine for many forms of web graphics and proofing, but has some serious limitations in advanced photography. Many photographers are getting quite interested in HDR, RAW, and ICC. What few plugins exist for these in the GIMP world are incomplete and only allow you to import their results back into the limits of an 8-bits-per-channel world.
The original 1991 team that developed the Microsoft Foundation Classes 1.0 (to go with the first Microsoft C++ compiler, and even before the first C++ Visual Studio) was planning to go completely "closed source." It makes sense from a library point of view to close access to the implementation, and only offer the interfaces in header files. However, I was one of the folks on that team that felt that since this was the first "thin" wrapper on the C Win32 API, it was more important to show just how thin that wrapper was, and to offer visibility into the MFC implementation. It wasn't "open source" but it was "source provided as documentation." You could still build MFC on Borland's Win32-ready compiler, in fact. Since I myself was fairly experienced with Win32 but not with C++ (as was the target market), I felt this was a reasonable compromise.
Before you throw eggs at me, let me point out that I then left that group before they invented CDocument and all the ugly MFC hell that has become associated with bloat. Before CDocument, it was essentially a reasonable alternative to STL with some HWND wrappers. Afterwards, the command-routing and OLE-managing framework turned almost any MFC app into a real rats' nest of unmaintainable spaghetti. I still wrote apps in MFC, but I have less and less stomach for it, in the rare instances I must develop Win32 at all.
If I recall, Germany has (or used to have) specific rules about the depiction of blood. You can release a game which kills thousands without remorse, but you can't release a game that has one guy who loses a finger in a bloody mess.
I had heard rumors that there were some arcade games which had a "blood" switch for this reason, as well as general public appetites. I haven't seen any concrete examples of this, though.
My current working theory is that there is a simple reason, a reason of omission.
Either they plan a new real iNewton in the future with total OSX-oid support, and don't want to undercut that thunder, or they plan a de facto newton-like level of customization on the iPhone/iPod Touch line of products, but are not yet ready to deal with the developer support.
I would have thought that adding metal would make the signal worse. If anything, it's the opposite. I moved from a 12-year old apartment building with steel central vents, and a glass-and-steel desk, to a 120-year old house with wood floors, slat-and-lath walls, and a mostly wood desk. If anything, the old place must have been *absorbing* signal.
I recently moved, and found some troubling differences in Bluetooth performance. At the old place, my bluetooth keyboard and mouse worked quite solidly: smooth responsive mouse motion and I could type full speed without problems. The range was quite good with no deterioration at 5ft. At the new place, the mouse often jitters or sloshes as I move it, and if I type quickly, once in a while it will receive the keystrokes in a different order. (At first I felt it was just an occasional transpose mistake on my part, but every once in a while, a whole word will be received *mostly* backwards.) There's a noticeable improvement/degradation effect if I simply move a Coke can around on my desk, even if I keep the mouse within about 2ft of the Mac. The mouse is so bad I switched to an older radio-based wireless mouse instead.
I'm guessing from other cases mentioned on the web that Bluetooth gets stuck trying to resend packets if there's interference killing some packets. I imagine this sort of jitter and resend loop can be a big problem if it happens in a sleep mode.
I know they're proud to have shot 999 frames with that camera, and they're not trying to match Apple advertising standards, but can they maybe... I dunno... work at getting a slightly better photo?
A vanishingly small number of situations require a specific material object to cross the globe in a couple hours. The Internet relieves any information hauling needs, and the rise of manufacturing and general ubiquity of export goods has meant that there's probably an identical copy of that object that can be had more locally. So most remaining situations would be fully burdened (not amortized like all 2,000 packages in a neighborhood UPS truck). Now it takes a LOT of energy to get even the smallest object into orbit,...
Is there a listing of each ID that is affected? Or do we have to trust eBay to send out the usual 1-year-of-credit-watch "protection" to each affected party?
Overtime is one of those things both the company and the employee has to consider when taking a job and the salary is based around those terms.
I agree that if you are offered a salary, then that's it. The job is estimated at a standard work week, you work until the job is done, and you can only expect a certain constant paycheck in return. If you have to work longer hours, suck it up, that's part of being a professional.
I also think that if the staff are hired as "contractors" for per-hour fees that are above the usual salary pay ladder, then that per-hour fee can't go into the stratosphere if the contractor works more than the standard work week. It's just a sign of a bad contract if the contractor can double-charge at whim.
What I don't agree with is the way companies will hire long-term "contract labor" for an hourly rate that matches the ambient salary (with fewer guarantees of job security or benefits), and then avoid the time-and-a-half/double-time structure for overtime pay. If the company wants me to work more than the healthy forty hours a week, rather than hire yet another IT staffer, then there should be something in it for me, and a disincentive for the company. If they really have that much extra work to do, I'd rather have them hire some help to assist me.
The purpose of the system was to get a large number of people in many field locations "used to" the physical size and to practice procedures related to large expensive equipment, long before the actual equipment was delivered. The alternative was to build a lot of expensive physical mockups. The drawing capability was added to help sketch-author some of the training materials, because some training scenarios are only discovered while doing the procedures physically.
The people developing the procedures should be able to offer their expert advice into the training materials, even if they're not familiar with CAD. This is directly analogous to motion capture used in acting: actors shouldn't have to know how to smooth out the spline-interpolation of a hierarchically-deformable mesh, in order to add a pirouette to an animation.
I'm not sure why this is considered new. It's just the same biofeedback we saw in the 70s, with new glitz spat upon it. I can imagine the Nintendo DS version now: Wario Yawned, with fifty microgames to test how fast you can get your zen on.
About 18 months ago, I implemented a similar mechanism in Python, using the "WorldViz" toolkit, to prototype an engineering training concept where I work. Too bad the project didn't get more funding, it was a blast.
While wearing goggles and data gloves, the user could use various hand gestures to perform different actions. You could point at virtual items, then "levitate" them to new positions. Or you could use a two-finger pointing gesture to "paint" lines in mid-air. Your other hand became a palette, and tapping the palette let you change colors. These drawings were to be saved back into a CAD format.
I also saw a group of artists made a similar system about the same time, whereby they moved a tracking wand through space to "draw" a piece of furniture. The drawing was downloaded into a 3D stereolith program, and a plastic prototype of the furniture was created. Very organic, very cool ideas.
If Ford sells me an "experience" like a Mustang, and I decide to rip out the Ford stock stereo or take off the Ford street tires and replace it with an aftermarket stereo or racing whitewalls, that's my decision, not Ford's. And court precedent bears this out. Apple wants to explain that this is somehow different, but it's not. I'm the customer. I decide what "experience" to have with the product, after they've sold me the goods.
I'm not arguing their ability to put junk I don't want in there. I'm arguing that unless there's nefarious anti-consumer contracts with carriers, they have no right to "fix my experience" away from the configuration I choose. A patch to re-lock SIMs to a sole vendor is explicitly against the legal and moral arguments that define SIM transferrability. And if they do have those contracts, like Ford with Firestone or Ford with Panasonic, I say this is unconscionable and such contracts should be made void.
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Gotta catch 'em all!
NYCL, thanks for the clarification on #1. I was fairly sure of myself for criminal cases (though IANAL), but didn't feel as confident with my assertion for civil law.
There is a moral obligation (and a legal one in criminal cases) that ALL evidence that could exculpate the accused party MUST be shared with the defense. Two different defendants have two different cases going on with two different defense teams. (In the RIAA's case, that's 20,000 defendants.) The defense team may not be aware of new developments in other cases, but the one common party to all these cases does know, and should be communicating this appropriately. It's called ethics.
Yes, somewhat. MFC 1.0 was caught in the middle historically, because the C++ compiler was not going to support templates (and thus collections had to be type-rigid). I think it was right for the compiler group to refuse to support the unratified template syntax, one of the few "don't invent" decisions I can credit Microsoft for making. You have to remember, this was when the most common C++ compiler was cfront, the C++-to-C preprocessor, and the most popular C++ library was Rogue Wave, so the MSFT C++ compiler was making the new (immature) language available to a lot of people. In the end, it made collection classes a bit easier to understand but tougher to use. ATL was a move away from MFC compatibility and "wrap Win32 API as thinly as possible" but it was okay.
It's not about the oft-slagged interface, it's about actual capability falling behind the curve.
It's going to be a common rant in this thread, I am sure, but the fact is, GIMP is falling behind because it has not yet mainstreamed any support for "deep color." It is stuck in an 8-bits-per-channel world, which is fine for many forms of web graphics and proofing, but has some serious limitations in advanced photography. Many photographers are getting quite interested in HDR, RAW, and ICC. What few plugins exist for these in the GIMP world are incomplete and only allow you to import their results back into the limits of an 8-bits-per-channel world.
The original 1991 team that developed the Microsoft Foundation Classes 1.0 (to go with the first Microsoft C++ compiler, and even before the first C++ Visual Studio) was planning to go completely "closed source." It makes sense from a library point of view to close access to the implementation, and only offer the interfaces in header files. However, I was one of the folks on that team that felt that since this was the first "thin" wrapper on the C Win32 API, it was more important to show just how thin that wrapper was, and to offer visibility into the MFC implementation. It wasn't "open source" but it was "source provided as documentation." You could still build MFC on Borland's Win32-ready compiler, in fact. Since I myself was fairly experienced with Win32 but not with C++ (as was the target market), I felt this was a reasonable compromise.
Before you throw eggs at me, let me point out that I then left that group before they invented CDocument and all the ugly MFC hell that has become associated with bloat. Before CDocument, it was essentially a reasonable alternative to STL with some HWND wrappers. Afterwards, the command-routing and OLE-managing framework turned almost any MFC app into a real rats' nest of unmaintainable spaghetti. I still wrote apps in MFC, but I have less and less stomach for it, in the rare instances I must develop Win32 at all.
Let me say this bluntly: nothing that Adobe does is compelling to me as a developer, except to reiterate my outrage that corporations openly assume and exercise the power to suppress legal speech about legal activities.
If I recall, Germany has (or used to have) specific rules about the depiction of blood. You can release a game which kills thousands without remorse, but you can't release a game that has one guy who loses a finger in a bloody mess.
I had heard rumors that there were some arcade games which had a "blood" switch for this reason, as well as general public appetites. I haven't seen any concrete examples of this, though.
My current working theory is that there is a simple reason, a reason of omission.
Either they plan a new real iNewton in the future with total OSX-oid support, and don't want to undercut that thunder, or they plan a de facto newton-like level of customization on the iPhone/iPod Touch line of products, but are not yet ready to deal with the developer support.
I would have thought that adding metal would make the signal worse. If anything, it's the opposite. I moved from a 12-year old apartment building with steel central vents, and a glass-and-steel desk, to a 120-year old house with wood floors, slat-and-lath walls, and a mostly wood desk. If anything, the old place must have been *absorbing* signal.
I recently moved, and found some troubling differences in Bluetooth performance. At the old place, my bluetooth keyboard and mouse worked quite solidly: smooth responsive mouse motion and I could type full speed without problems. The range was quite good with no deterioration at 5ft. At the new place, the mouse often jitters or sloshes as I move it, and if I type quickly, once in a while it will receive the keystrokes in a different order. (At first I felt it was just an occasional transpose mistake on my part, but every once in a while, a whole word will be received *mostly* backwards.) There's a noticeable improvement/degradation effect if I simply move a Coke can around on my desk, even if I keep the mouse within about 2ft of the Mac. The mouse is so bad I switched to an older radio-based wireless mouse instead.
I'm guessing from other cases mentioned on the web that Bluetooth gets stuck trying to resend packets if there's interference killing some packets. I imagine this sort of jitter and resend loop can be a big problem if it happens in a sleep mode.
Is this the Japanese numbering of Final Fantasy II, or the USA releases?
I know they're proud to have shot 999 frames with that camera, and they're not trying to match Apple advertising standards, but can they maybe... I dunno... work at getting a slightly better photo?
I just heard that the new names range from Confusium to Confusium Core 2 Gold Pro Deluxe 1800 Gamma.
Seriously, though, when has Intel ever simplified the brands to make things easier?
Why is that? Is the video game format unsuitable for insight and their authors uninspired? I think not.
A vanishingly small number of situations require a specific material object to cross the globe in a couple hours. The Internet relieves any information hauling needs, and the rise of manufacturing and general ubiquity of export goods has meant that there's probably an identical copy of that object that can be had more locally. So most remaining situations would be fully burdened (not amortized like all 2,000 packages in a neighborhood UPS truck). Now it takes a LOT of energy to get even the smallest object into orbit, ...
Is there a listing of each ID that is affected? Or do we have to trust eBay to send out the usual 1-year-of-credit-watch "protection" to each affected party?
That was probably a typo, but it's spelled "litmus test."
I agree that if you are offered a salary, then that's it. The job is estimated at a standard work week, you work until the job is done, and you can only expect a certain constant paycheck in return. If you have to work longer hours, suck it up, that's part of being a professional.
I also think that if the staff are hired as "contractors" for per-hour fees that are above the usual salary pay ladder, then that per-hour fee can't go into the stratosphere if the contractor works more than the standard work week. It's just a sign of a bad contract if the contractor can double-charge at whim.
What I don't agree with is the way companies will hire long-term "contract labor" for an hourly rate that matches the ambient salary (with fewer guarantees of job security or benefits), and then avoid the time-and-a-half /double-time structure for overtime pay. If the company wants me to work more than the healthy forty hours a week, rather than hire yet another IT staffer, then there should be something in it for me, and a disincentive for the company. If they really have that much extra work to do, I'd rather have them hire some help to assist me.
The purpose of the system was to get a large number of people in many field locations "used to" the physical size and to practice procedures related to large expensive equipment, long before the actual equipment was delivered. The alternative was to build a lot of expensive physical mockups. The drawing capability was added to help sketch-author some of the training materials, because some training scenarios are only discovered while doing the procedures physically.
The people developing the procedures should be able to offer their expert advice into the training materials, even if they're not familiar with CAD. This is directly analogous to motion capture used in acting: actors shouldn't have to know how to smooth out the spline-interpolation of a hierarchically-deformable mesh, in order to add a pirouette to an animation.
The secret is: "There is no dragon."
I'm not sure why this is considered new. It's just the same biofeedback we saw in the 70s, with new glitz spat upon it. I can imagine the Nintendo DS version now: Wario Yawned, with fifty microgames to test how fast you can get your zen on.
About 18 months ago, I implemented a similar mechanism in Python, using the "WorldViz" toolkit, to prototype an engineering training concept where I work. Too bad the project didn't get more funding, it was a blast.
While wearing goggles and data gloves, the user could use various hand gestures to perform different actions. You could point at virtual items, then "levitate" them to new positions. Or you could use a two-finger pointing gesture to "paint" lines in mid-air. Your other hand became a palette, and tapping the palette let you change colors. These drawings were to be saved back into a CAD format.
I also saw a group of artists made a similar system about the same time, whereby they moved a tracking wand through space to "draw" a piece of furniture. The drawing was downloaded into a 3D stereolith program, and a plastic prototype of the furniture was created. Very organic, very cool ideas.
If Ford sells me an "experience" like a Mustang, and I decide to rip out the Ford stock stereo or take off the Ford street tires and replace it with an aftermarket stereo or racing whitewalls, that's my decision, not Ford's. And court precedent bears this out. Apple wants to explain that this is somehow different, but it's not. I'm the customer. I decide what "experience" to have with the product, after they've sold me the goods.
I'm not arguing their ability to put junk I don't want in there. I'm arguing that unless there's nefarious anti-consumer contracts with carriers, they have no right to "fix my experience" away from the configuration I choose. A patch to re-lock SIMs to a sole vendor is explicitly against the legal and moral arguments that define SIM transferrability. And if they do have those contracts, like Ford with Firestone or Ford with Panasonic, I say this is unconscionable and such contracts should be made void.