There was a case where someone had the bright idea of dumping tires over a huge area of open sea, to offer marine habitat. Years and years later, the barnacles and coral organisms haven't adopted this habitat, because the tide keeps pushing the tires around, unlike heavier debris. It's an eco-disaster, worse than nothing, essentially.
They're finally getting around to hauling them up, but volunteer effort can only go after a few tires at a time, with tens of thousands or millions of tires to go. Maybe if there was a clear use for all the tires, they could get some funds to lift the old "reef" up and use it for a different, and this time beneficial, marine-related purpose.
I was developing another product back in 2001, and we evaluated the Unreal kit back then. As a part of our evaluation, we were shown an ISS model which had been developed with NASA cooperation for some projects they were pursuing back then. Since that time, geeks like Shuttleworth and Ansari have been to the real ISS, and soon Simonyi too. The world of software has changed in radical ways in a very few years.
Ars Technica had an article today highlighting what's known about this case, and what Ars themselves were doing during the "Open Ultima Online" days, providing a reproduction experience like the reverse-engineered official service.
What's the actual evidence that closed Lineage II code was stole^Winfringed, versus clean-room reproduced? What's the actual evidence that the knock-off groups were offering unlicensed copies of Lineage II clients? And like the RIAA-$$$$-per-song arguments, what's the actual lost revenue on official clients sold, if someone doesn't actually intend to connect to your official revenue-producing server?
Whatever happened to Punicode (Unicode in a special dns-characters-only encoding format)? There was some hoopla about the scheme, which would require browsers to show punicode-encoded URLs in the appropriate characters on the screen, but some naysayers said that it was a phisher's dream since many glyphs throughout Unicode looked alike. I figure this issue has nothing to do with Unicode per se, but with phishing vs certified sites in general, but I haven't heard a peep from the Punicode camp for over a year.
How can you have a George Lucas movie that doesn't heavily feature a clan of excitable little people? Maybe American Graffiti, but I think that was just due to a misunderstanding about how long it had been since that Opie Taylor kid had actually appeared on film.
Maybe it's just some sort of RMS Reality Distortion Zone fumes I'm breathing here, but exactly HOW is a license that limits a party's legal options on collaboration of ANY form supposed to be a win for "freedom" and "openness"?
When reading this blurb about using system condition to drive a "melody" of diagnostic signals, the first thing that came to my mind was a certain automatic doorway on the Heart of Gold. It was positively humming with joy when it was able to open and close for the people wandering through, thanks to an implementation of Genuine People Personalities(tm) software. From the TV series, the robotic sing-song line, "Glad to be of seeer-vice!" just floated through my mind.
Kinda weird how you first seemed almost humanist, what with your suggestion to communicate and use common sense in social situations. Then you turn a quick 180 and suggest artificial class barriers to society like "with children" vs "you." Sure, some kids are annoying because they don't understand why their ears are hurting. Some people in seat 13B are annoying because they like watching the climax of "Airport 1977" on a bigscreen laptop and can't understand why it might be a bit anxiety-inducing for their neighbors. If you can live with one but not the other, what does that say about you?
Clearly all that NPfIT needs to increase political buy-in and remain on schedule and under budget is a catchier name for the act. A good catchy feel-good name can bury a lot of dead bodies. Take USAPATRIOT for example. When in the private sector, adding punctuation or coining a new non-cultural word has its benefits too. Consider Cue:Cat: and Flooz.
Clearly the second phase is buying press and spin through under-the-table payments to various industry blowhards. The only way that an underpowered, poorly architected, creatively weak and boring toy like SL could get anywhere near so much press is when accompanied by greasy cash. There is positively nothing "grassroots" about the rise of SL as a "popular" or "powerful" service at all. It's got all the worst attributes of a 1996 IRC server, a 1996 webpage, and and a 1996 three-dee console game, drawn by people born in 1996, all over 1996 dial-up.
The parent was a reference to the "Tycho Magnetic Anomaly 1," the discovery of the second Monolith in the novel and movie, "2001: A Space Odyssey."
The first monolith was temporarily positioned near the early homo erectus tribes, giving them a sort of gift of wonder and exploration, which immediately translated to tool usage and subsequent dominance over their competing tribes for resources.
The second monolith was a simple beacon to indicate when mankind was ready to travel away from its home planet. It was buried under the crust of the moon, and the ONLY indication it gave to humanity was that it disturbed the natural magnetic flux of an inert rocky ball. Tycho itself may have even been shaped to help lead mankind to it. Once exposed to the vacuum of space, it sent a loud radio signal that would be heard by the likely discoverers as well as lead them to the next monolith breadcrumb.
Of course, Dave Bowman found the third monolith despite the psychotic interference of a computer with competing secret directives.
Microsoft's continued existance has ALWAYS depended on cash cow products such as MS-DOS, Word, Excel and Windows. The only way that a product goes from concept to cash cow is through multiple releases which are sold to end users, offering the vital feedback to improve the product and market preparation to need the product. The only way a cash cow does not turn into a dead cow is through multiple releases which are sold to end users, offering newer features for devotees and fixing some of the most egregious integration problems for enterprises. Without new versions, people grow out of a product. Users adopt a new methodology entirely, or adopt a new product from someone else.
An update treadmill necessarily requires that the updates keep coming. Users cannot adopt a new update unless it is nearly seamless to synchronize and integrate with the other treadmills they are running.
today's maps will be historical
on
Google Earth In 4D
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I was thinking the other day about this. As new photos become available on Google Earth, the old ones will be removed... or pushed back in time, just like a CVS repository. A hundred years from now, you'd be able to walk the repository backwards and watch the suburbs shrink, the global waters recede, the forests regrow and the ice shelves stitch themselves together. (No guarantees expressed or implied.) Of course, Google would be one of those stodgy old companies that you wonder why they didn't implode in the nanostock scandals of 2065, but I digress.
I just want to make sure I'm on the same page as everyone else.
I thought Foley already left town? And to be fair, I think Bill was on an intern, not a page. I expect you can choose whatever young idealistic assistant you want.
This debate, traditionally painted textures versus mathematically derived textures, reminds me of the feeling I got when I would use any one of the (in)famous Kai's Power Tool suite.
These tools were image processing tools with (to be polite) quirky user interface concepts. The output was always interesting, but never what you really planned. Throughout the literature and documentation, there were sprinkled sentences straight from my Jr. High School art teacher, about "happy accidents" and "explore" and "try a few different things to see what's exciting." The interfaces didn't explain themselves, you had to fiddle with them, and in the process of fiddling, you might get some image output that was astounding, exciting, bizarre, cool, inspiring. The creators of KPT saw that as a good thing.
However, there's a big difference between opportunistic art and production art. The opportunist is the lady on the edge of town who boldly wields an acetyline torch and welds together scraps of iron to sell as mobiles or unique garden fairies or whatever happens to come up. The production artist is told to make a Chanel No 5 ad, which entails a certain palette, a certain wispy but crisp attention to lighting, an interplay of gravity and weightlessness, and above all, black garments on gaunt 30-something models. Things are constrained very tightly for the production artist, and they let that constraint drive their creativity.
KPT is great for opportunity artists, but not for production artists. Write down a concept on a Post-It, and just *try* to achieve that concept with their tools. You can't figure out what the third blobdot widget from the left is doing, so you try to get it to where it is somewhat close. Then you hope the fourth blobdot widget from the left doesn't fuck up any progress you've made when you touch it. You may find a thousand really cool accidents on the way, but you will never really achieve that concept you wrote down on the note paper beforehand.
This comes back to procedural textures.
You can tweak and tune and adjust for hours, just trying for the perfect simulacrum of a chunk of oak woodgrain, trying to achieve the ultimate blend of four levels of grain periodicity through natural variations in density, allowing for convolutions that resemble knots and sawblade artifacts, all within a neat 16 parameters.
Or you can snap a photograph of the boardroom table, use some morphing and blending tricks to make it tile if necessary, and be done.
Which approach do you think will still be in use when they make Final Fantasy XXXIV?
The number 2^24 is of interest to digital computer artists, as that is the number of unique colors combined in the commonly implemented "True Color" RGB8 space. That color space is looking pretty limiting in some respects, but that is truly a lot of unique colors when you think about it. A 16 megapixel image does not need to repeat any color used.
If all slashdot posts from the history of Slashdot were sorted into color bins,
every post including the -2 trolls would get their own unique color,
all the colors which are predominantly blue would be claimed as "first posts,"
all the colors which are predominantly green would be unfunny memes like "hot grits,"
all the colors which are predominantly red would be complaints about editing or journalism,
the pure cyan, magenta, yellow shades are moderated as insightful or interesting,
the 256 posts corresponding to completely neutral gray shades are actually insightful or interesting
Once that were done, people could simply post their replies as a reference to existing posts. "Hey, #938D3A to you, buddy!" "Know what I think of that? #F2C2A9!"
Just feed this new system a few reruns of Japanese television game shows. After that, we will be safe from automated snooping for at least another decade. As a plus, all artificial intelligence projects at the DARPA will be set back by another decade as well.
After a year of fiddling with Python, I find I quite like it for some things, and it's not the right fit for other things. That's fine, there's no reason to be rabid pro- or rabid con- about any language.
I happen to use Linux, OSX and Windows, and the number one annoyance for me is a lack of clear "native-looking" GUI or OpenGL toolkit offering that is reachable by scripting languages like Perl and Python.
I'd like to see PyGame in a MacPort. The Images module was pretty easy to build but it should be in MacPorts too. I don't want to rely on X11 when on a Mac, but to use X11 when on Linux, which seems to be like bringing antimatter and matter together in the same universe. A GladeXML-like module that relies only on Aqua would be great.
Similarly on Windows, you're relegated to some fugly Tk choice if you want portable GUI. I can't think of a toolkit that looks less native than Tk, unless you count the early Java Swing "Metal" theme.
The fact that OSX still isn't standardized on python2.4 makes it hard to support python-rich applications like Blender, and we still run into problems where a 2.3 parser can't let scripts use 2.4 features (even smart scripts that try:except: to fall back gracefully). I think Leopard will be python2.4 but don't recall seeing official confirmation on that.
I'm sure I've misstated something technically-- I don't have my notes from home to double-check a few things from my last gui toolkit search a couple weeks ago.
My one major wish for this election is for the mainstream press to give some breakdown numbers that show precinct-by-precinct-by-ballot-type totals. Does Diebold seem as party-neutral as other electronic tally machines? Do paper-trailed machines disagree strongly with pull-lever machine totals? Does optical scan seem to lean to the Preservatives? Does punchcard seem to go to the Libertines?
Even if everything looks mostly kosher with regards to the final vote totals, it would plant the seed that shows that it's not just what you vote, it's who counts your vote.
This has been discussed many times with the folk-science of elders in colder climates around the world for centuries. If the landscape wasn't violent as well as cold, people up North just seem to live longer.
Before I poo-poo the idea, let me say I like the idea of OSS implementations of anything the government does: they pay for this implementation in my dollars, so I might as well get a chance to see how it works. But this does not make the system more secure.
Even with OSS, you're relying on an assurance by some clerk at the polling station that the code you've audited at home is the code that drives your voting choice from fingertip to election commission. You can't SEE software, and as this crowd knows, rootkits can virtualize the whole machine to appear to run one thing while really doing something else.
The only way for an individual to audit their vote is to see their vote on a tangible artifact, be it marks on paper, holes in paper, colored beads or whatever works in your village. It's already bad enough that you can't follow that vote artifact out of the voting booth into the counting center, and watch it every step of the way, but with many eyes from all vested parties along the path, you can have a small sense of security in this process.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a case where someone had the bright idea of dumping tires over a huge area of open sea, to offer marine habitat. Years and years later, the barnacles and coral organisms haven't adopted this habitat, because the tide keeps pushing the tires around, unlike heavier debris. It's an eco-disaster, worse than nothing, essentially.
They're finally getting around to hauling them up, but volunteer effort can only go after a few tires at a time, with tens of thousands or millions of tires to go. Maybe if there was a clear use for all the tires, they could get some funds to lift the old "reef" up and use it for a different, and this time beneficial, marine-related purpose.
This is ancient news, really.
I was developing another product back in 2001, and we evaluated the Unreal kit back then. As a part of our evaluation, we were shown an ISS model which had been developed with NASA cooperation for some projects they were pursuing back then. Since that time, geeks like Shuttleworth and Ansari have been to the real ISS, and soon Simonyi too. The world of software has changed in radical ways in a very few years.
What's the actual evidence that closed Lineage II code was stole^Winfringed, versus clean-room reproduced? What's the actual evidence that the knock-off groups were offering unlicensed copies of Lineage II clients? And like the RIAA-$$$$-per-song arguments, what's the actual lost revenue on official clients sold, if someone doesn't actually intend to connect to your official revenue-producing server?
Whatever happened to Punicode (Unicode in a special dns-characters-only encoding format)? There was some hoopla about the scheme, which would require browsers to show punicode-encoded URLs in the appropriate characters on the screen, but some naysayers said that it was a phisher's dream since many glyphs throughout Unicode looked alike. I figure this issue has nothing to do with Unicode per se, but with phishing vs certified sites in general, but I haven't heard a peep from the Punicode camp for over a year.
How can you have a George Lucas movie that doesn't heavily feature a clan of excitable little people? Maybe American Graffiti, but I think that was just due to a misunderstanding about how long it had been since that Opie Taylor kid had actually appeared on film.
Maybe it's just some sort of RMS Reality Distortion Zone fumes I'm breathing here, but exactly HOW is a license that limits a party's legal options on collaboration of ANY form supposed to be a win for "freedom" and "openness"?
http://www.google.com/search?q=define:+macaca
http://news.google.com/news?q=macaca
When reading this blurb about using system condition to drive a "melody" of diagnostic signals, the first thing that came to my mind was a certain automatic doorway on the Heart of Gold. It was positively humming with joy when it was able to open and close for the people wandering through, thanks to an implementation of Genuine People Personalities(tm) software. From the TV series, the robotic sing-song line, "Glad to be of seeer-vice!" just floated through my mind.
Kinda weird how you first seemed almost humanist, what with your suggestion to communicate and use common sense in social situations. Then you turn a quick 180 and suggest artificial class barriers to society like "with children" vs "you." Sure, some kids are annoying because they don't understand why their ears are hurting. Some people in seat 13B are annoying because they like watching the climax of "Airport 1977" on a bigscreen laptop and can't understand why it might be a bit anxiety-inducing for their neighbors. If you can live with one but not the other, what does that say about you?
NPfIT
Clearly all that NPfIT needs to increase political buy-in and remain on schedule and under budget is a catchier name for the act. A good catchy feel-good name can bury a lot of dead bodies. Take USAPATRIOT for example. When in the private sector, adding punctuation or coining a new non-cultural word has its benefits too. Consider Cue:Cat: and Flooz.
Clearly the second phase is buying press and spin through under-the-table payments to various industry blowhards. The only way that an underpowered, poorly architected, creatively weak and boring toy like SL could get anywhere near so much press is when accompanied by greasy cash. There is positively nothing "grassroots" about the rise of SL as a "popular" or "powerful" service at all. It's got all the worst attributes of a 1996 IRC server, a 1996 webpage, and and a 1996 three-dee console game, drawn by people born in 1996, all over 1996 dial-up.
The parent was a reference to the "Tycho Magnetic Anomaly 1," the discovery of the second Monolith in the novel and movie, "2001: A Space Odyssey."
The first monolith was temporarily positioned near the early homo erectus tribes, giving them a sort of gift of wonder and exploration, which immediately translated to tool usage and subsequent dominance over their competing tribes for resources.
The second monolith was a simple beacon to indicate when mankind was ready to travel away from its home planet. It was buried under the crust of the moon, and the ONLY indication it gave to humanity was that it disturbed the natural magnetic flux of an inert rocky ball. Tycho itself may have even been shaped to help lead mankind to it. Once exposed to the vacuum of space, it sent a loud radio signal that would be heard by the likely discoverers as well as lead them to the next monolith breadcrumb.
Of course, Dave Bowman found the third monolith despite the psychotic interference of a computer with competing secret directives.
(Also from an ancient Microsoft experience.)
Microsoft's continued existance has ALWAYS depended on cash cow products such as MS-DOS, Word, Excel and Windows. The only way that a product goes from concept to cash cow is through multiple releases which are sold to end users, offering the vital feedback to improve the product and market preparation to need the product. The only way a cash cow does not turn into a dead cow is through multiple releases which are sold to end users, offering newer features for devotees and fixing some of the most egregious integration problems for enterprises. Without new versions, people grow out of a product. Users adopt a new methodology entirely, or adopt a new product from someone else.
An update treadmill necessarily requires that the updates keep coming. Users cannot adopt a new update unless it is nearly seamless to synchronize and integrate with the other treadmills they are running.
I was thinking the other day about this. As new photos become available on Google Earth, the old ones will be removed... or pushed back in time, just like a CVS repository. A hundred years from now, you'd be able to walk the repository backwards and watch the suburbs shrink, the global waters recede, the forests regrow and the ice shelves stitch themselves together. (No guarantees expressed or implied.) Of course, Google would be one of those stodgy old companies that you wonder why they didn't implode in the nanostock scandals of 2065, but I digress.
Cute joke, I guess, but...
You say you're Ford Prefect, but I think you wioll haven be Dr. Dan Streetmentioner.
I thought Foley already left town? And to be fair, I think Bill was on an intern, not a page. I expect you can choose whatever young idealistic assistant you want.
Er, step out into the hallway or the kitchenette or, maybe call me crazy, but use the conference room?
This debate, traditionally painted textures versus mathematically derived textures, reminds me of the feeling I got when I would use any one of the (in)famous Kai's Power Tool suite.
These tools were image processing tools with (to be polite) quirky user interface concepts. The output was always interesting, but never what you really planned. Throughout the literature and documentation, there were sprinkled sentences straight from my Jr. High School art teacher, about "happy accidents" and "explore" and "try a few different things to see what's exciting." The interfaces didn't explain themselves, you had to fiddle with them, and in the process of fiddling, you might get some image output that was astounding, exciting, bizarre, cool, inspiring. The creators of KPT saw that as a good thing.
However, there's a big difference between opportunistic art and production art. The opportunist is the lady on the edge of town who boldly wields an acetyline torch and welds together scraps of iron to sell as mobiles or unique garden fairies or whatever happens to come up. The production artist is told to make a Chanel No 5 ad, which entails a certain palette, a certain wispy but crisp attention to lighting, an interplay of gravity and weightlessness, and above all, black garments on gaunt 30-something models. Things are constrained very tightly for the production artist, and they let that constraint drive their creativity.
KPT is great for opportunity artists, but not for production artists. Write down a concept on a Post-It, and just *try* to achieve that concept with their tools. You can't figure out what the third blobdot widget from the left is doing, so you try to get it to where it is somewhat close. Then you hope the fourth blobdot widget from the left doesn't fuck up any progress you've made when you touch it. You may find a thousand really cool accidents on the way, but you will never really achieve that concept you wrote down on the note paper beforehand.
This comes back to procedural textures.
Which approach do you think will still be in use when they make Final Fantasy XXXIV?
The number 2^24 is of interest to digital computer artists, as that is the number of unique colors combined in the commonly implemented "True Color" RGB8 space. That color space is looking pretty limiting in some respects, but that is truly a lot of unique colors when you think about it. A 16 megapixel image does not need to repeat any color used.
If all slashdot posts from the history of Slashdot were sorted into color bins,Once that were done, people could simply post their replies as a reference to existing posts. "Hey, #938D3A to you, buddy!" "Know what I think of that? #F2C2A9!"
Just feed this new system a few reruns of Japanese television game shows. After that, we will be safe from automated snooping for at least another decade. As a plus, all artificial intelligence projects at the DARPA will be set back by another decade as well.
After a year of fiddling with Python, I find I quite like it for some things, and it's not the right fit for other things. That's fine, there's no reason to be rabid pro- or rabid con- about any language.
I happen to use Linux, OSX and Windows, and the number one annoyance for me is a lack of clear "native-looking" GUI or OpenGL toolkit offering that is reachable by scripting languages like Perl and Python.
I'd like to see PyGame in a MacPort. The Images module was pretty easy to build but it should be in MacPorts too. I don't want to rely on X11 when on a Mac, but to use X11 when on Linux, which seems to be like bringing antimatter and matter together in the same universe. A GladeXML-like module that relies only on Aqua would be great.
Similarly on Windows, you're relegated to some fugly Tk choice if you want portable GUI. I can't think of a toolkit that looks less native than Tk, unless you count the early Java Swing "Metal" theme.
The fact that OSX still isn't standardized on python2.4 makes it hard to support python-rich applications like Blender, and we still run into problems where a 2.3 parser can't let scripts use 2.4 features (even smart scripts that try:except: to fall back gracefully). I think Leopard will be python2.4 but don't recall seeing official confirmation on that.
I'm sure I've misstated something technically-- I don't have my notes from home to double-check a few things from my last gui toolkit search a couple weeks ago.
My one major wish for this election is for the mainstream press to give some breakdown numbers that show precinct-by-precinct-by-ballot-type totals. Does Diebold seem as party-neutral as other electronic tally machines? Do paper-trailed machines disagree strongly with pull-lever machine totals? Does optical scan seem to lean to the Preservatives? Does punchcard seem to go to the Libertines?
Even if everything looks mostly kosher with regards to the final vote totals, it would plant the seed that shows that it's not just what you vote, it's who counts your vote.
This has been discussed many times with the folk-science of elders in colder climates around the world for centuries. If the landscape wasn't violent as well as cold, people up North just seem to live longer.
Before I poo-poo the idea, let me say I like the idea of OSS implementations of anything the government does: they pay for this implementation in my dollars, so I might as well get a chance to see how it works. But this does not make the system more secure.
Even with OSS, you're relying on an assurance by some clerk at the polling station that the code you've audited at home is the code that drives your voting choice from fingertip to election commission. You can't SEE software, and as this crowd knows, rootkits can virtualize the whole machine to appear to run one thing while really doing something else.
The only way for an individual to audit their vote is to see their vote on a tangible artifact, be it marks on paper, holes in paper, colored beads or whatever works in your village. It's already bad enough that you can't follow that vote artifact out of the voting booth into the counting center, and watch it every step of the way, but with many eyes from all vested parties along the path, you can have a small sense of security in this process.