By exclusively adopting NVIDIA hardware for their worldwide studios, EA is escalating the creative palette of its 3D artists and programmers
I thought a palette was a piece of wood or something that had a range of colors, so how can a creative palette be obtained from using only one gfx card?
Maybe they meant 'pallet', the 3'x3' forklift-ready cargo platform. Kinda reminds me of the cubicles into which many 3d artists and programmers are crammed at these "layoff-before-christmas" game shops.
Or maybe they meant 'palate', referring to the walls of the mouth. It's also used to refer to some aspects of the overall taste of a beverage, or a person's skills in tasting. This whole PR campaign leaves a funny taste in my mouth, maybe that's the connection.
In the extra materials on the Minority Report disc, there was a mention that Mel Gibson was involved in an aborted attempt to develop a new Fahrenheit 451 treatment. Too bad. I'd like to see more positive-subversive movies in the mainstream theaters.
> flip the switch
Which switch do you mean? The red switch, the green switch, or the aluminum knife switch attached to the scary-looking fusion apparatus?
> the aluminum switch
All of the electricity on campus goes out.
It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I can't believe there aren't a ton of replies making references to the Great Underground Empire. Bah, the kids these days. They gotta have all the glitzy mind-rotting graphics in their games. Hmph.
Help distribute the load.. go buy a box.
While it's installing, flip through the nice printed materials, apply decals to your car, or call up the technical support folks just to say thanks.
Here are a few I've pondered lately... and per your writeup, I'm not asking if these are legal, but whether these are morally justifiable.
Is it moral for a government to confine a human being (citizen or not) without charging them for any committed crime? Is it moral to confine someone without telling them a definite fixed criteria for their release? Is it moral to confine a non-criminal and disallow any contact with family, representation, or Congress? Contrast with current "material witness" statutes.
Is it moral for the reading records of civilians to be collected by the government? Is it moral for a government to disallow librarians from discussing whether surveillance has been underway? Is it moral for a government to disenfranchise librarians from their First Amendment guaranteed right to go to Congress for redress? Contrast with USA PATRIOT (v1.0).
Is it moral for the government to strip a person of their birthrighted citizenship, to reclassify the person as a non-citizen so as to prosecute under different criteria for detention and punishment? Contrast with the proposed USA PATRIOT (v2.0).
You missed the point. He typed out an "email" correspondance that never occurred. He made up the thread. He forged the "evidence" of permission. He printed it out.
Printouts are not evidentiary in nature; there's no forensic integrity.
Voting Records of Reps
on
NARA Goes Online
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Maybe this exists somewhere I've not found. I'd like to see a nice searchable voting record for Representatives, which is indexed against Presidential Vetos and Supreme Court rulings. If a bill was originally drafted by a non-legislator, I'd like to see that, too. Then on top of that, summarize certain interesting tallies.
Rep. Harry Careless (X-SS) has sponsored 2 and voted in favor of 18 bills, subsequently Vetoed or Struck.
Some people are just nearly incapable of doing something they don't feel they've done before. Unfamiliar tasks are daunting. A button they've never touched before is foreboding. They feel they need someone else to walk them through it many times before that task or feature becomes a part of their competent repertoire.
This is hard for developers to grok. This incapacity or unwillingness to extrapolate from one skill they've mastered to another seemingly similar concept. The compartmentalization which is the opposite of generalization. The lack of pattern-awareness. However, it's a real fact of life: some people, even smart people, have mental barriers against the unknown. They would RATHER break the device than use that knob that nobody's trained them how and when and why they should turn.
Isn't that conclusion the opposite of CmdrTaco's use of compression to weed out "lame" postings? More noise is apparently more valuable discussion, while less noise is somehow considered likely spam? How many good postings have you seen with a line "this has been added to get past the lameness filter"?
I used to like SmartMedia. Until I folded one in a backpack accidentally. It's too thin. The SD chits are almost too small for convenient use. There's a useful size for media, and not everyone can deal with fragile postage-stamp parts that need to get handled occasionally.
I like CompactFlash. It's virtually indestructable, big enough to see on a messy desk, small enough to fit in a PDA nicely, and just the right form-factor for carrying a few with me on a digicam expedition. Replacing a flash card with a hard drive in the same form factor and bus connection, now that's cool. There are multiple vendors, each trying to push the boundaries of access speed and capacity. I know the addressing space is nearing a limit.
And principally, it's not peppered with pounds of private proprietary protected patented perversions.
On the first month of home sales, Red Hat should offer fresh boxed copies of Linux (yes, with the usual support) to each new resident. Just drop off the promotional crate with the sales agent; it's just like some laundry detergent, barbecue briquette or furniture coupons that other subdivisions offer their new home-owning residents.
I also grabbed a Zaurus 5500 from the HSN special. Guess those paid-u-tainment slash-vertisements work.
First thing I did was to look for the terminal package. One version came on the CDs, so I installed that.
Second thing I did was to find the OpenZaurus installer (now 3.1-rc3.1), but after finding with several problematic.ipk's from the Zaurus Software Index, I went back to the stock Sharp ROM image. Can you imagine holding the C and D chicklet keys on one side, and poking a recessed reset button on the other? All with the DC power plug attached? I had to do this operation a few times in my experiments, and I can safely say they chose a combination quite apt at avoiding the accidental re-flash.
I still haven't gotten the USB networking worked out. It apparently needs the usbdnet module, which is not in the Red Hat stock kernels (latest errata nor the last beta). I prefer to stick to my distro's official kernels, rather than rebuilding a kernel just so I can ssh to a pda. Maybe eventually.
I noticed that if I install a new ipk file, it restarts Qtopia, which loses the icons for any other already-running tasks. (ps aux) still shows the tasks, they just have no gui anymore.
I noticed that if I click an app button to switch away from the terminal, some key cruft like ~3 or ~4 appears in the terminal. Also, if the unit gets suspended (low power, power off button, etc.), then whatever console app was running gets sent to the background and I have to (fg 1) when I return. This screws up some console programs which don't have a convenient "redraw all" key for when you return. (Example app: frotz.)
I noticed that the text editor opens to what looks like an empty note which is ready for typing, but no, it's in a no-document state and you must tap for a "New" text document before starting.
I figured out how to retrain the handwriting, but not sure how often I'll use it. The real keyboard, virtual keyboard and pickboard are quite enough for text entry, thanks. Weird that you can tap the Fn key prefix then tap the desired key for a function, but you have to HOLD a shift key while tapping a letter. Supporting tap-shift-tap-letter would probably been nicer given the form factor.
I would never have purchased this kind of device anywhere near its original price-- it's a toy to me, not a tool. But it's worth the money I put into it.
Microsoft has used the term "gold" since before they were burning CD masters. Windows 3.1 and almost all products before that were mastered on floppies. Some reference materials were available on CD-ROM, but not many, until Windows 3.0 MPC and Windows 3.1 made CD-ROM an obvious and ubiquitous replacement.
The top tier authoritative master, regardless of media type, is "gold," and the direct copies from that master are "silvers." It's the silvers that are taken to the various departments to sign off, and silvers that are taken to the production facility. The gold goes in the vault.
EverQuest and its brethren have railed against the virtual marketplace, usually because it creates support issues ("he robbed me, the check bounced, give me my character back!"). It also creates major gameplay imbalances, some complain; however, the whole idea of an ever-expanding micro-economy has major inflation issues, so get over it.
I've always assumed the better model would be for EverQuest to design in an escrow facility. Mark your account (or property) as escrowed, and the game system will lock access to the property until both parties are satisfied with the escrow. It's what, another bit flag per tradable object? And since there's money changing hands, the game hosts can (1) shave some profit for their escrow service, (2) limit trades to game economy or service economy or legal tender, as desired, (3) flag traded characters so the players recognize "under new playership" situations, as desired, and (4) rid themselves of the bulk of the problem in policing swindles.
I've suggested before that the slash code could easily take the URLs in a submission and look back through previous submissions and posted stories. It could mark the submission as "possibly a repeat" when it's entered in the queue, so the editor has a clue at first glance.
In fact, when multiple submissions refer to the same link, the queue routines could even find the "best" submission or the "earliest" submission and give those preferential weighting. You could define "best" as having more links, more text, text below the fold, or other metrics. Heck, if editors cared, then slashcode could search for some simple grammar blunders and reduce the weighting appropriately.
Automated metrics and quality-checking flags are just a part of the solution-- a set of standards used by the editors (like, oh, reading it) would still be necessary.
In fact, half of the techs in my office use linux, and the other half use Opera on Win2K... but everyone identifies themselves as IE, just to get around stupid browser sniffers.
Sounds like it's time to make the spoofing relative to the site or the page. Broadcast a reliable presence indicator for Linux for as many sites as possible, but if a site is known to be broken, then spoof. In fact, if your browser followed up every spoof with a second invisible request with a browser named "Linux browser using Microsoft tag because your site is broken!", it might inform the site operators. Hey, I could dream, right?
Ask Slashdot: house thingy
From the where-you-hang-your-@ dept.
Homeowner writes, "I've got this house. No focused ideas, no single burning question on my mind, just a little rambling conversation-starting fluff. Well... what do you think about it? Talk amongst yourselves."
Congressional Representatives only get "clued up" when they're interacting with people from a diverse background. If all they hear all day are businessfolk crying about stolen profits, that's what they will understand. They don't call up other people to ask what the real story is, they take what's brought to them.
If they hear from an opposing viewpoint, they can then decide what will earn more votes: campaign money or campaign promises. At the end of the day, there are more consumers^Wconstituents than there are corporations.
Great, now I can run all those classic ASCII games on my television set. It'll be even better than when I connected a VIC-20 to an old 1950s Philco television.
A lot of people had been hoping to see a backporting and/or merge between these two versions. This sounds like the architecture's going to be mainly irreparable.
Some people would really like to see deep color channels and stronger tools for doing compositing work on movie frames.
The more that digital cameras offer 12bpc RAW mode, the more the OSS world is lacking until GIMP can handle them well. Color corrections can and should be done with more bits, to avoid losing fine color integrity.
Diamond Age, and the Queen of the Ants
on
Swarm Intelligence
·
· Score: 1
There were many examples of swarm intelligence in the book, Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson. Since it's been several months since I've picked it up, pardon any inconsistencies.
The "toner wars" were about the release of billions of self-powered nanobots, and the breath-choking dust composed of useless black nanojunk that remained when all those nanoscopic power cells gave out.
Physical security systems were made up of larger microbots that could cooperate to generate an ad-hoc physical barrier to human-scale intruders.
Today's TCP and tomorrow's untrackable but reliable data transactions were explained as a mesh of dumb routers that continued to attempt knowledgeless hand-offs to other routers.
The Drummers were a sex-driven subculture who regularly and ritually exchange body fluids in the primal way, and thus exchange viral portions of larger computations to complete a batch process. One character discovers that mass computing facility and uses it to "crack" and backtrack such an encrypted routeless transaction.
But about ants... the protagonist little girl's AI-driven "book" develops a fable character to illustrate the concept of swarm intelligence to the girl. I liked how the Queen of the Ants explained that ants have two numbers: some and none. Some is anything above around a million, and anything less than that is functionally equivalent to none.
Slashdot Mirror
By exclusively adopting NVIDIA hardware for their worldwide studios, EA is escalating the creative palette of its 3D artists and programmers
I thought a palette was a piece of wood or something that had a range of colors, so how can a creative palette be obtained from using only one gfx card?
Maybe they meant 'pallet', the 3'x3' forklift-ready cargo platform. Kinda reminds me of the cubicles into which many 3d artists and programmers are crammed at these "layoff-before-christmas" game shops.
Or maybe they meant 'palate', referring to the walls of the mouth. It's also used to refer to some aspects of the overall taste of a beverage, or a person's skills in tasting. This whole PR campaign leaves a funny taste in my mouth, maybe that's the connection.
EXPLORER has performed an illegal operation in KERNELAMD64 at 01543267BA98CDEF.
EXPLORER will now terminate.
Hello, Microsoft? Is this an error address, or an activation code?
In the extra materials on the Minority Report disc, there was a mention that Mel Gibson was involved in an aborted attempt to develop a new Fahrenheit 451 treatment. Too bad. I'd like to see more positive-subversive movies in the mainstream theaters.
> flip the switch
Which switch do you mean? The red switch, the green switch, or the aluminum knife switch attached to the scary-looking fusion apparatus?
> the aluminum switch
All of the electricity on campus goes out.
It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I can't believe there aren't a ton of replies making references to the Great Underground Empire. Bah, the kids these days. They gotta have all the glitzy mind-rotting graphics in their games. Hmph.
Help distribute the load.. go buy a box.
While it's installing, flip through the nice printed materials, apply decals to your car, or call up the technical support folks just to say thanks.
How about "what does the copyright bargain really mean, if authors use technology to grant or deny access in perpetuity?"
Here are a few I've pondered lately... and per your writeup, I'm not asking if these are legal, but whether these are morally justifiable.
Is it moral for a government to confine a human being (citizen or not) without charging them for any committed crime? Is it moral to confine someone without telling them a definite fixed criteria for their release? Is it moral to confine a non-criminal and disallow any contact with family, representation, or Congress? Contrast with current "material witness" statutes.
Is it moral for the reading records of civilians to be collected by the government? Is it moral for a government to disallow librarians from discussing whether surveillance has been underway? Is it moral for a government to disenfranchise librarians from their First Amendment guaranteed right to go to Congress for redress? Contrast with USA PATRIOT (v1.0).
Is it moral for the government to strip a person of their birthrighted citizenship, to reclassify the person as a non-citizen so as to prosecute under different criteria for detention and punishment? Contrast with the proposed USA PATRIOT (v2.0).
You missed the point. He typed out an "email" correspondance that never occurred. He made up the thread. He forged the "evidence" of permission. He printed it out.
Printouts are not evidentiary in nature; there's no forensic integrity.
Maybe this exists somewhere I've not found. I'd like to see a nice searchable voting record for Representatives, which is indexed against Presidential Vetos and Supreme Court rulings. If a bill was originally drafted by a non-legislator, I'd like to see that, too. Then on top of that, summarize certain interesting tallies.
Rep. Harry Careless (X-SS) has sponsored 2 and voted in favor of 18 bills, subsequently Vetoed or Struck.
Some people are just nearly incapable of doing something they don't feel they've done before. Unfamiliar tasks are daunting. A button they've never touched before is foreboding. They feel they need someone else to walk them through it many times before that task or feature becomes a part of their competent repertoire.
This is hard for developers to grok. This incapacity or unwillingness to extrapolate from one skill they've mastered to another seemingly similar concept. The compartmentalization which is the opposite of generalization. The lack of pattern-awareness. However, it's a real fact of life: some people, even smart people, have mental barriers against the unknown. They would RATHER break the device than use that knob that nobody's trained them how and when and why they should turn.
I kinda like The Matrix Lower Upper Decomposition, and the electro-political thriller Gaussian Elimination.
Isn't that conclusion the opposite of CmdrTaco's use of compression to weed out "lame" postings? More noise is apparently more valuable discussion, while less noise is somehow considered likely spam? How many good postings have you seen with a line "this has been added to get past the lameness filter"?
I used to like SmartMedia. Until I folded one in a backpack accidentally. It's too thin. The SD chits are almost too small for convenient use. There's a useful size for media, and not everyone can deal with fragile postage-stamp parts that need to get handled occasionally.
I like CompactFlash. It's virtually indestructable, big enough to see on a messy desk, small enough to fit in a PDA nicely, and just the right form-factor for carrying a few with me on a digicam expedition. Replacing a flash card with a hard drive in the same form factor and bus connection, now that's cool. There are multiple vendors, each trying to push the boundaries of access speed and capacity. I know the addressing space is nearing a limit.
And principally, it's not peppered with pounds of private proprietary protected patented perversions.
On the first month of home sales, Red Hat should offer fresh boxed copies of Linux (yes, with the usual support) to each new resident. Just drop off the promotional crate with the sales agent; it's just like some laundry detergent, barbecue briquette or furniture coupons that other subdivisions offer their new home-owning residents.
I also grabbed a Zaurus 5500 from the HSN special. Guess those paid-u-tainment slash-vertisements work.
First thing I did was to look for the terminal package. One version came on the CDs, so I installed that.
Second thing I did was to find the OpenZaurus installer (now 3.1-rc3.1), but after finding with several problematic .ipk's from the Zaurus Software Index, I went back to the stock Sharp ROM image. Can you imagine holding the C and D chicklet keys on one side, and poking a recessed reset button on the other? All with the DC power plug attached? I had to do this operation a few times in my experiments, and I can safely say they chose a combination quite apt at avoiding the accidental re-flash.
I still haven't gotten the USB networking worked out. It apparently needs the usbdnet module, which is not in the Red Hat stock kernels (latest errata nor the last beta). I prefer to stick to my distro's official kernels, rather than rebuilding a kernel just so I can ssh to a pda. Maybe eventually.
I noticed that if I install a new ipk file, it restarts Qtopia, which loses the icons for any other already-running tasks. (ps aux) still shows the tasks, they just have no gui anymore.
I noticed that if I click an app button to switch away from the terminal, some key cruft like ~3 or ~4 appears in the terminal. Also, if the unit gets suspended (low power, power off button, etc.), then whatever console app was running gets sent to the background and I have to (fg 1) when I return. This screws up some console programs which don't have a convenient "redraw all" key for when you return. (Example app: frotz.)
I noticed that the text editor opens to what looks like an empty note which is ready for typing, but no, it's in a no-document state and you must tap for a "New" text document before starting.
I figured out how to retrain the handwriting, but not sure how often I'll use it. The real keyboard, virtual keyboard and pickboard are quite enough for text entry, thanks. Weird that you can tap the Fn key prefix then tap the desired key for a function, but you have to HOLD a shift key while tapping a letter. Supporting tap-shift-tap-letter would probably been nicer given the form factor.
I would never have purchased this kind of device anywhere near its original price-- it's a toy to me, not a tool. But it's worth the money I put into it.
Microsoft has used the term "gold" since before they were burning CD masters. Windows 3.1 and almost all products before that were mastered on floppies. Some reference materials were available on CD-ROM, but not many, until Windows 3.0 MPC and Windows 3.1 made CD-ROM an obvious and ubiquitous replacement.
The top tier authoritative master, regardless of media type, is "gold," and the direct copies from that master are "silvers." It's the silvers that are taken to the various departments to sign off, and silvers that are taken to the production facility. The gold goes in the vault.
EverQuest and its brethren have railed against the virtual marketplace, usually because it creates support issues ("he robbed me, the check bounced, give me my character back!"). It also creates major gameplay imbalances, some complain; however, the whole idea of an ever-expanding micro-economy has major inflation issues, so get over it.
I've always assumed the better model would be for EverQuest to design in an escrow facility. Mark your account (or property) as escrowed, and the game system will lock access to the property until both parties are satisfied with the escrow. It's what, another bit flag per tradable object? And since there's money changing hands, the game hosts can (1) shave some profit for their escrow service, (2) limit trades to game economy or service economy or legal tender, as desired, (3) flag traded characters so the players recognize "under new playership" situations, as desired, and (4) rid themselves of the bulk of the problem in policing swindles.
I've suggested before that the slash code could easily take the URLs in a submission and look back through previous submissions and posted stories. It could mark the submission as "possibly a repeat" when it's entered in the queue, so the editor has a clue at first glance.
In fact, when multiple submissions refer to the same link, the queue routines could even find the "best" submission or the "earliest" submission and give those preferential weighting. You could define "best" as having more links, more text, text below the fold, or other metrics. Heck, if editors cared, then slashcode could search for some simple grammar blunders and reduce the weighting appropriately.
Automated metrics and quality-checking flags are just a part of the solution-- a set of standards used by the editors (like, oh, reading it) would still be necessary.
When the apple is ripe, it will fall. --Irish proverb
In fact, half of the techs in my office use linux, and the other half use Opera on Win2K... but everyone identifies themselves as IE, just to get around stupid browser sniffers.
Sounds like it's time to make the spoofing relative to the site or the page. Broadcast a reliable presence indicator for Linux for as many sites as possible, but if a site is known to be broken, then spoof. In fact, if your browser followed up every spoof with a second invisible request with a browser named "Linux browser using Microsoft tag because your site is broken!", it might inform the site operators. Hey, I could dream, right?
Ask Slashdot: house thingy
From the where-you-hang-your-@ dept.
Homeowner writes, "I've got this house. No focused ideas, no single burning question on my mind, just a little rambling conversation-starting fluff. Well... what do you think about it? Talk amongst yourselves."
clearly a clued up congressional representative
Congressional Representatives only get "clued up" when they're interacting with people from a diverse background. If all they hear all day are businessfolk crying about stolen profits, that's what they will understand. They don't call up other people to ask what the real story is, they take what's brought to them.
If they hear from an opposing viewpoint, they can then decide what will earn more votes: campaign money or campaign promises. At the end of the day, there are more consumers^Wconstituents than there are corporations.
Great, now I can run all those classic ASCII games on my television set. It'll be even better than when I connected a VIC-20 to an old 1950s Philco television.
Be careful, it's a new moon tonight.
Too bad for the GIMP.
A lot of people had been hoping to see a backporting and/or merge between these two versions. This sounds like the architecture's going to be mainly irreparable.
Some people would really like to see deep color channels and stronger tools for doing compositing work on movie frames.
The more that digital cameras offer 12bpc RAW mode, the more the OSS world is lacking until GIMP can handle them well. Color corrections can and should be done with more bits, to avoid losing fine color integrity.
There were many examples of swarm intelligence in the book, Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson. Since it's been several months since I've picked it up, pardon any inconsistencies.
The "toner wars" were about the release of billions of self-powered nanobots, and the breath-choking dust composed of useless black nanojunk that remained when all those nanoscopic power cells gave out.
Physical security systems were made up of larger microbots that could cooperate to generate an ad-hoc physical barrier to human-scale intruders.
Today's TCP and tomorrow's untrackable but reliable data transactions were explained as a mesh of dumb routers that continued to attempt knowledgeless hand-offs to other routers.
The Drummers were a sex-driven subculture who regularly and ritually exchange body fluids in the primal way, and thus exchange viral portions of larger computations to complete a batch process. One character discovers that mass computing facility and uses it to "crack" and backtrack such an encrypted routeless transaction.
But about ants... the protagonist little girl's AI-driven "book" develops a fable character to illustrate the concept of swarm intelligence to the girl. I liked how the Queen of the Ants explained that ants have two numbers: some and none. Some is anything above around a million, and anything less than that is functionally equivalent to none.