Something about that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Goodness knows how he feels today!
I've got a copy of the ESA Bulletin journal from either January or February 1985 which was given to me years ago by a friend of the family - and one of the main articles is about the Huygens probe, in a form very similar to the final version launched in 1997. I think I ought to scan the article and post it online, just to give people an indication of how thoroughly planned these projects are. Unfortunately it's at home, and I'm in Brussels.
I was five years old when they had a detailed design for this probe. Now that's scary.:-)
(Oh, and captain, we get signal! Now just waiting for main screen turn on...;-) )
Or are their safeguards in place for this kind of attack?
Yup - each 'GUID' for a Bittorrent block is an SHA1 cryptographic hash. If you find a way of generating collisions for those, many computer scientists and mathematicians would love to know.;-)
BitTorrent does cryptographic hashing (SHA1) of all data. When you see "Download succeeded!" you can be sure that BitTorrent has already verified the integrity of the data. The integrity and authenticity of a BitTorrent download is as good as the original request to the tracker. Checking the MD5/CRC32/other hash of a file downloaded via BitTorrent is redundant.
I gather that if a client was pumping out corrupt blocks, or if they were corrupted at some point during transmission, they'd simply get dropped and re-requested. No idea if there's anything to permanently ignore a client that's pumping out nothing but junk, though - but on a busy tracker, it would get drowned out by all the others. Anyone know?
Incidentally, is anyone else worried by the way the article concentrated on the distribution of television shows, almost to the exclusion of everything else? I've used Bittorrent quite a bit, but only ever for completely legal purposes - plus, I've always thought of it being a rubbish way of distributing dubious stuff, what with IP addresses of everyone downloading available straight from the tracker to whoever might be investigating...
Doesn't Apple recognize, that sites like Think Secret actually help Apple? Just think about how many stories there are on the web about rumours that immanate from these kind of sides and how much exposure these stories give to Apple.
Yes, but if the rumours are wrong, they can damage how any real products might be perceived.
Okay, I'll invent the next iPod rumour - it's going to have full video capability, an 18 hour battery life and the top model will have a 220GB hard disk. You can connect up a digital camcorder to its Firewire port, or a camera to its USB port, and use it to store all your photos and video, for syncing into the next-generation iLife suite.
If someone picks up on that rumour, and if it gains legitimacy, people may be disappointed by the next real iPod.
I've got an iBook, and while it's a great machine I still look on with bemusement at some of the more fanatical followers of Apple. As, I imagine, do some of the levels of Apple management - why, when Fred Smith worked at Dell, he didn't have www.DellSecrets.web posting distorted rumours about the latest products...;-)
The rumours were even the subject of the non-computing Pass Notes column in yesterday's Guardian. I'm definitely interested in whatever it is Apple are going to announce, but there is always the possibility that it's, say, a $600 Mac, or just a new word processor.
The rumours might be accurate in part, but perhaps terribly inaccurate in other ways - and could significantly undermine the true products if they're seen as inferior to the imaginary ones. If that's the case, I can see why people at Apple would be upset...
Probably already posted, but there's NeoOffice/J, which does a much better job of integrating into Mac OS X. Ignore the Windows-style widgets in the user interface - properly important things like styled copy-and-paste, printing, system fonts and so on work brilliantly, unlike with the X11-based port.
Also, it's very much in active development, and keeps on improving. They've been working on the low-level stuff first, getting that to work nicely, and they're now starting on making it much more Mac-like. Aqua menus are just one recent addition...:-)
Graphics engines don't really need to become any better than the UT2 / Doom 3 / Crytek/HL2 ones. With those powerful engines and top-quality artists, you can display pretty much whatever you want.
From a graphics point of view, the Half-Life 2 engine is actually fairly basic beyond its (admittedly pretty) shaders. It doesn't appear able to do volume-specific fog (as could Quake 3), there's no LOD on non-model geometry, and lighting for model geometry itself is derived from a single point, whatever the size of the model.
But the second part of your equation is the most important aspect - it's the glorious artwork that makes Half-Life 2 look so lovely (to me, anyhow). The engine is 'good enough', and should allow Valve (and modders) to concentrate more on the gameplay and design aspects...
I use Wikipedia only for casual information. I would never cite it.
You shouldn't cite any encyclopaedia in your own work - use them as a jumping board towards new lines of research.
This is why it's so important for encyclopaedia (and Wikipedia) articles to give references. Treat them as brief introductions and overviews of particular areas, and then do your own reading and work from the references. An encyclopaedia should never be the primary source of a particular piece of information.
Wikipedia leans more towards the 'interesting general knowledge' use for me as well, and while I'd probably not use it for anything particularly serious, I do trust its content a bit more than that from some random web page turned up by Google. Still, remember the old adage - never believe anything you read on the Intarweb.;-)
Why can't someone port the Direct3D API to Linux? This would save a lot of hassle of porting the games to OpenGL.
Well, with Cedega (formerly WineX), they basically have...
Still, with porting to OpenGL, you get the benefit of not having to use a runtime Direct3D-to-OpenGL translator (which is essentially what Wine/WineX/Cedega uses), and you're also a step closer to the OpenGL-only Mac.
There was more open game structure in a single level of FarCry, particularly that big island level, than all of HL2.
I played the demo of Far Cry a while ago (I'll get round to buying the full game once I've upgraded my PC), and while much of the game did feel pretty derivative, the multiple-paths thing was very impressive.
Hopefully it'll be the kick-start to other games adopting something similar - Far Cry came out too recently to really affect the developers of the latest batch of big-title FPS games, but with a bit of luck it'll act as a catalyst for future development.:-)
Personally, I really liked the ending - in keeping with the ultra-subtle, sparse storytelling, it has an ending which leaves almost everything to the imagination. The beginnings of a massive explosion, suggesting that you've succeeded in destroying the main Combine citadel, and some deliberately provocative words from the G-man, all wrapped up with a demonstration of how he can mess with the flow of time, pretty much confirming the 'stasis' Gordon must have been in between HL1 and HL2...
I can see why some people hate it, and the manner in which the overall story was told, but try playing the game again. You'll notice a hell of a lot more, and notice some - ambiguities - in what some of the characters say, particularly Dr Mossman. A lot of her apparent 'betrayal' is down to an incorrect assumption by Alyx. Judith's actions are in fact entirely justifiable, but she's the one being maniuplated, in this case by Breen...
What I've been saying to people who dislike the Half-Life 2 ending - please think of a better one. I don't think I can.;-)
Wasn't HL1 based on the Q2 engine? Or am I just pulling that out of my ass because I haven't have caffiene yet.
The Half-Life 1 engine is a massively hacked-about version of the original Quake's engine - it's lacking some important features from Quake 2 like areaportals, surface properties and so on. Things like coloured lighting, skyboxes etc. got put into Half-Life by Valve, hence there are some odd differences...
Plus, if you want the Quake 1 deathmatch in a updated form, have a go with Valve's 'Deathmatch Classic', which my Steam installation describes as follows: "Valve's tribute to the work of id software, DMC invites players to grab their rocket launchers and put their reflexes to the test in a collection of futuristic settings."
It's got remakes of classic Quake deathmatch maps - I've no idea if it's in any way an 'authorised' thing, but I never heard of complaints from id about it...:-)
... Fifty-foot-high robot controlled by flowers, you say?
Sounds almost like something a certain Bob the Angry Flower would be behind. And if he's behind it, it'll definitely try to enslave humanity. Until he gets bored, of course...
Hmmm... I really didn't know Mos Def... In this version, maybe Ford Prefect doesn't sound like he's from Guildford...
Well, it turns out I'm not from Guildford after all...
As for skin colour, I checked with your Earthly equivalent of the Guide (instead of, say, looking in a mirror) and I found a photo of a black Ford Prefect. Got a problem with that, monkey-man?;-)
The great green Arkelseizure was the creature who's nose the universe was sneezed out of. It is worshipped by the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI, which lives in fear of the time of the coming of the great white hankerchief.
Do realise that you're getting this information from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - reality isn't noted for being terribly accurate with respect to the Guide's contents. For all we know, reality might have got it wrong again...
Actually, it's rather cold. Assuming that a SI unit pedant would use Kelvin...
Yeah, but the real SI unit pedants know that temperatures in kelvin (note the lower-case 'k') aren't given in degrees.;-)
Re:Mac Version dissected
on
GIMP 2.2 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It's not up to 2.2 yet, but Gimp.app manages to integrate into MacOS X in a surprisingly elegant manner. It's got a dock icon, which I drag photos from iPhoto on to; it can take screenshots with Grab.app; it can read images from the Mac clipboard. It comes as a single program package (Gimp.app, imaginatively) which you just drag-and-drop into your Applications folder, like any other decent Mac program.
My only real complaint about it is the default theme - I've replaced it on my iBook with one called Milk 2.0 which manages to look a lot cleaner and smarter than the standard.
There's this general opinion that The GIMP is somehow utterly impossible to use, but I really do disagree. I taught myself to use it very quickly some years ago, merely by sitting down and playing around with it. Compared with something like vi or Blender, it's absolutely brilliant - while it's a bit quirky in places, it's generally very consistent in how it does things, and menu entries are logically named and placed. There aren't multiple modes for the program to operate in (beyond indexed, greyscale and full-colour), and with a comprehensive help system, tooltips and so on with no hidden basic functionality, it's more akin to pico than vi...;-)
I started off using The GIMP because it was all that I could afford. I continue using it (towards my paid work as well as hobbies such as photography and computer game design) because while I could probably afford Photoshop these days, it doesn't really offer me anything useful in addition to what I already have for free.
If you want to use The GIMP, try it with an open mind. Don't expect Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or whatever, it's its own program in its own right, with its own advantages and disadvantages. Do appreciate that it's a cross-platform thing with its home on X11 and UNIX - the Windows and Mac ports are very close in user interface to the original, for ease of maintenance and porting. And above all, have fun.:-)
The Epson printer mentioned (r800?) has IIRC 8 cartridges - I saw them for £7 which i didn't think was too bad. Mind you i don't do a lot of high colour print outs.
If you're thinking about doing a lot of printing, look into getting a continuous ink system. I don't have one (neither am I associated with the above company!), but I do print a fair number of my photos for people and it's something I'm really starting to think about.
As for the colour fading issue with different inks - I've been running my Epson Stylus Photo 1290 on proper Epson ink since I got it, and the photos I printed a while ago look absolutely identical to new copies I print. My father's got one in a frame and it's been up on a wall in a bright room for over a year, but no change...
If you just want your holiday snaps printing, then taking the memory card to the local supermarket or photo outlet can be fine - but as the article says, you do get a lot more control if you print them yourself. I got some printed at Jessops (free gift thing), and while the detail was great, the colours were... Brown. I get much better results from my own printer, even if it is a tad expensive to run.
Oh, and biggest tip possible - get a guillotine. Cropping printouts with a scalpel or scissors is asking for trouble. I make birthday and Christmas cards myself, people really appreciate it but the truth is I can never remember to buy cards.;-)
I think it's great that monolithic, cross-platform applications like Firefox and OpenOffice.org remain cross-platform, integrating as necessary with the underlying operating system.
Unfortunately, something like KDE is in a way part of that operating system itself - while porting, say, the rendering engine of Konqueror to Windows and giving it a Windows front-end could be useful, a full-scale port of Konqueror with all the KDE support libraries underneath would frequently involve reinventing and replacing wheels already present in Windows.
Things like file selectors, the print subsystem, network abstraction and so on - while incredibly useful features for KDE to provide to its applications, they're generally available in different forms on other non-UNIX operating systems (and MacOS X). It makes more sense to integrate with the platform's existing facilities, giving the users a more consistent interface, rather than present them with a whole new interface for certain tasks.
It's great that many Open Source applications are cross-platform, but the best cross-platform things are those which are carefully tailored to each system...:-/
Interestingly enough, Bungie's master server and client model is the same model humans use for perceiving the world. For example, right now, Milton Flapdoodle in New Jersey is responsible for perceiving the world, authorizing adjustments to humanity's world view, and beaming the changes to each of us telepathically.
Something tells me that you're perceiving the world in an ever so slightly different manner to the rest of us...;-)
Re:OT: Question for Slashdotters
on
Lego Logic Gates
·
· Score: 1
Maplin Electronics is getting to be a bit of a joke these days. Four or five years ago I'd have agreed with you, but the range of components they have is dropping year on year to be replaced by standard consumer electronics.
Admittedly I haven't bought components from Maplin for years - Tandy would have been another suggestion, but I was recently surprised to learn that they'd disappeared from the UK ages ago.
I usually get my stuff from a titchy little electronics shop in Derby called R.F. Potts. They don't appear to have any kind of internet presence (beyond random posts in tech mailing lists from people saying how great it is) - but it's exactly the sort of place you'd go to if you needed a sync-on-green graphics card, stepper motor, obscure rechargeable battery or giant obsolete monitor. As a result, my knowledge of other electronics suppliers is a bit lacking, and I always think other stores should have assistants who clamber up ladders and rummage through wooden drawers to find that precise shape of transistor heatsink you were looking for...
Okay, RS has more stuff, but it's nowhere near as much fun.:-)
I still reckon the best game networking in the world is that in Quake and its successors, such as Half-Life and its sequel. Unlike Halo and Halo 2, where co-operative play online was apparently an insurmountable technical challenge, in Quake-based stuff even single-player games are inherently client-server anyway.
From the article, it sounds like Halo 2 multiplayer has moved in that direction away from the all-clients-equal approach of Marathon and Doom, with a single server accepting or denying player-damaging events. Although each client apparently still has a full version of the game world at hand, unlike Quake-style games where a client is only sent relevant stuff - might this allow for some audacious, map-spanning ultra-vision hacks and so on?
Still, that's how they do the recovery thing if the server gets unexpectedly removed from play...
Re:OT: Question for Slashdotters
on
Lego Logic Gates
·
· Score: 0
*But* physical stuff is a pain; has anyone put together a program that allows me to simulate basic electronic gates, and "build" these things. It would help me understand a lot better how computers' internal logic work.
The 'real thing' is actually surprisingly easy - with a power supply, a breadboard, logic chips and some LEDs, you can build your own flip-flops, counters and suchlike.
I did a short course in digital microelectronics at university, and it was great fun. I was busy building my own, non-course-required, multi-digit adder when I ran out of components, and had to get back to the actual course material. If you've got any knowledge of programming and Boolean logic, the basics are pretty easy - I found it far easier than the course on analogue stuff involving impedance, resistance and whatever, i.e. lots of complex numbers. I've forgotten most of that already.:-)
You can probably get pre-organised logic kits from Maplin (UK) or Radio Shack (US) - failing that, I'm sure other Slashdotters will know where.
There may be no obvious immediate use for mechanical analogs of digital circuits, when digital circuits are orders of maginitude faster than mechanical circuits
If you scale things down a bit, mechanical 'circuits' can become a lot faster - and combined with the electrical properties of the components there might be an interesting hybrid some point in the future.
Still, using Lego is just a little insane, and there is the minor problem of a '1' or a '0' slowly degrading into '0.5's further along the Lego logic chain...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Something about that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Goodness knows how he feels today!
:-)
;-) )
I've got a copy of the ESA Bulletin journal from either January or February 1985 which was given to me years ago by a friend of the family - and one of the main articles is about the Huygens probe, in a form very similar to the final version launched in 1997. I think I ought to scan the article and post it online, just to give people an indication of how thoroughly planned these projects are. Unfortunately it's at home, and I'm in Brussels.
I was five years old when they had a detailed design for this probe. Now that's scary.
(Oh, and captain, we get signal! Now just waiting for main screen turn on...
Yup - each 'GUID' for a Bittorrent block is an SHA1 cryptographic hash. If you find a way of generating collisions for those, many computer scientists and mathematicians would love to know.
From the FAQ:
I gather that if a client was pumping out corrupt blocks, or if they were corrupted at some point during transmission, they'd simply get dropped and re-requested. No idea if there's anything to permanently ignore a client that's pumping out nothing but junk, though - but on a busy tracker, it would get drowned out by all the others. Anyone know?
Incidentally, is anyone else worried by the way the article concentrated on the distribution of television shows, almost to the exclusion of everything else? I've used Bittorrent quite a bit, but only ever for completely legal purposes - plus, I've always thought of it being a rubbish way of distributing dubious stuff, what with IP addresses of everyone downloading available straight from the tracker to whoever might be investigating...
In Soviet, erm...
;-)
I'm sure there's a joke here somewhere, but I can't for the life of me remember what it is.
Alternatively, he could just burn his purchased tracks to a CD, for playing in any common or garden portable CD player.
If there's anything to complain about with the iTunes Music Store in the UK, it's the pricing - it's still £0.79 (US$1.48) a track over here...
Doesn't Apple recognize, that sites like Think Secret actually help Apple? Just think about how many stories there are on the web about rumours that immanate from these kind of sides and how much exposure these stories give to Apple.
;-)
Yes, but if the rumours are wrong, they can damage how any real products might be perceived.
Okay, I'll invent the next iPod rumour - it's going to have full video capability, an 18 hour battery life and the top model will have a 220GB hard disk. You can connect up a digital camcorder to its Firewire port, or a camera to its USB port, and use it to store all your photos and video, for syncing into the next-generation iLife suite.
If someone picks up on that rumour, and if it gains legitimacy, people may be disappointed by the next real iPod.
I've got an iBook, and while it's a great machine I still look on with bemusement at some of the more fanatical followers of Apple. As, I imagine, do some of the levels of Apple management - why, when Fred Smith worked at Dell, he didn't have www.DellSecrets.web posting distorted rumours about the latest products...
The rumours were even the subject of the non-computing Pass Notes column in yesterday's Guardian. I'm definitely interested in whatever it is Apple are going to announce, but there is always the possibility that it's, say, a $600 Mac, or just a new word processor.
The rumours might be accurate in part, but perhaps terribly inaccurate in other ways - and could significantly undermine the true products if they're seen as inferior to the imaginary ones. If that's the case, I can see why people at Apple would be upset...
Probably already posted, but there's NeoOffice/J, which does a much better job of integrating into Mac OS X. Ignore the Windows-style widgets in the user interface - properly important things like styled copy-and-paste, printing, system fonts and so on work brilliantly, unlike with the X11-based port.
:-)
Also, it's very much in active development, and keeps on improving. They've been working on the low-level stuff first, getting that to work nicely, and they're now starting on making it much more Mac-like. Aqua menus are just one recent addition...
Graphics engines don't really need to become any better than the UT2 / Doom 3 / Crytek /HL2 ones. With those powerful engines and top-quality artists, you can display pretty much whatever you want.
From a graphics point of view, the Half-Life 2 engine is actually fairly basic beyond its (admittedly pretty) shaders. It doesn't appear able to do volume-specific fog (as could Quake 3), there's no LOD on non-model geometry, and lighting for model geometry itself is derived from a single point, whatever the size of the model.
But the second part of your equation is the most important aspect - it's the glorious artwork that makes Half-Life 2 look so lovely (to me, anyhow). The engine is 'good enough', and should allow Valve (and modders) to concentrate more on the gameplay and design aspects...
I use Wikipedia only for casual information. I would never cite it.
;-)
You shouldn't cite any encyclopaedia in your own work - use them as a jumping board towards new lines of research.
This is why it's so important for encyclopaedia (and Wikipedia) articles to give references. Treat them as brief introductions and overviews of particular areas, and then do your own reading and work from the references. An encyclopaedia should never be the primary source of a particular piece of information.
Wikipedia leans more towards the 'interesting general knowledge' use for me as well, and while I'd probably not use it for anything particularly serious, I do trust its content a bit more than that from some random web page turned up by Google. Still, remember the old adage - never believe anything you read on the Intarweb.
Why can't someone port the Direct3D API to Linux? This would save a lot of hassle of porting the games to OpenGL.
Well, with Cedega (formerly WineX), they basically have...
Still, with porting to OpenGL, you get the benefit of not having to use a runtime Direct3D-to-OpenGL translator (which is essentially what Wine/WineX/Cedega uses), and you're also a step closer to the OpenGL-only Mac.
There was more open game structure in a single level of FarCry, particularly that big island level, than all of HL2.
:-)
I played the demo of Far Cry a while ago (I'll get round to buying the full game once I've upgraded my PC), and while much of the game did feel pretty derivative, the multiple-paths thing was very impressive.
Hopefully it'll be the kick-start to other games adopting something similar - Far Cry came out too recently to really affect the developers of the latest batch of big-title FPS games, but with a bit of luck it'll act as a catalyst for future development.
Personally, I really liked the ending - in keeping with the ultra-subtle, sparse storytelling, it has an ending which leaves almost everything to the imagination. The beginnings of a massive explosion, suggesting that you've succeeded in destroying the main Combine citadel, and some deliberately provocative words from the G-man, all wrapped up with a demonstration of how he can mess with the flow of time, pretty much confirming the 'stasis' Gordon must have been in between HL1 and HL2...
;-)
I can see why some people hate it, and the manner in which the overall story was told, but try playing the game again. You'll notice a hell of a lot more, and notice some - ambiguities - in what some of the characters say, particularly Dr Mossman. A lot of her apparent 'betrayal' is down to an incorrect assumption by Alyx. Judith's actions are in fact entirely justifiable, but she's the one being maniuplated, in this case by Breen...
What I've been saying to people who dislike the Half-Life 2 ending - please think of a better one. I don't think I can.
Wasn't HL1 based on the Q2 engine? Or am I just pulling that out of my ass because I haven't have caffiene yet.
:-)
The Half-Life 1 engine is a massively hacked-about version of the original Quake's engine - it's lacking some important features from Quake 2 like areaportals, surface properties and so on. Things like coloured lighting, skyboxes etc. got put into Half-Life by Valve, hence there are some odd differences...
Plus, if you want the Quake 1 deathmatch in a updated form, have a go with Valve's 'Deathmatch Classic', which my Steam installation describes as follows: "Valve's tribute to the work of id software, DMC invites players to grab their rocket launchers and put their reflexes to the test in a collection of futuristic settings."
It's got remakes of classic Quake deathmatch maps - I've no idea if it's in any way an 'authorised' thing, but I never heard of complaints from id about it...
... Fifty-foot-high robot controlled by flowers, you say?
Sounds almost like something a certain Bob the Angry Flower would be behind. And if he's behind it, it'll definitely try to enslave humanity. Until he gets bored, of course...
Hooray!
Hmmm... I really didn't know Mos Def... In this version, maybe Ford Prefect doesn't sound like he's from Guildford...
;-)
Well, it turns out I'm not from Guildford after all...
As for skin colour, I checked with your Earthly equivalent of the Guide (instead of, say, looking in a mirror) and I found a photo of a black Ford Prefect. Got a problem with that, monkey-man?
The great green Arkelseizure was the creature who's nose the universe was sneezed out of. It is worshipped by the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI, which lives in fear of the time of the coming of the great white hankerchief.
:-)
Do realise that you're getting this information from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - reality isn't noted for being terribly accurate with respect to the Guide's contents. For all we know, reality might have got it wrong again...
I should know, after all. I'm a researcher.
Actually, it's rather cold. Assuming that a SI unit pedant would use Kelvin...
;-)
Yeah, but the real SI unit pedants know that temperatures in kelvin (note the lower-case 'k') aren't given in degrees.
It's not up to 2.2 yet, but Gimp.app manages to integrate into MacOS X in a surprisingly elegant manner. It's got a dock icon, which I drag photos from iPhoto on to; it can take screenshots with Grab.app; it can read images from the Mac clipboard. It comes as a single program package (Gimp.app, imaginatively) which you just drag-and-drop into your Applications folder, like any other decent Mac program.
;-)
:-)
My only real complaint about it is the default theme - I've replaced it on my iBook with one called Milk 2.0 which manages to look a lot cleaner and smarter than the standard.
There's this general opinion that The GIMP is somehow utterly impossible to use, but I really do disagree. I taught myself to use it very quickly some years ago, merely by sitting down and playing around with it. Compared with something like vi or Blender, it's absolutely brilliant - while it's a bit quirky in places, it's generally very consistent in how it does things, and menu entries are logically named and placed. There aren't multiple modes for the program to operate in (beyond indexed, greyscale and full-colour), and with a comprehensive help system, tooltips and so on with no hidden basic functionality, it's more akin to pico than vi...
I started off using The GIMP because it was all that I could afford. I continue using it (towards my paid work as well as hobbies such as photography and computer game design) because while I could probably afford Photoshop these days, it doesn't really offer me anything useful in addition to what I already have for free.
If you want to use The GIMP, try it with an open mind. Don't expect Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or whatever, it's its own program in its own right, with its own advantages and disadvantages. Do appreciate that it's a cross-platform thing with its home on X11 and UNIX - the Windows and Mac ports are very close in user interface to the original, for ease of maintenance and porting. And above all, have fun.
The Epson printer mentioned (r800?) has IIRC 8 cartridges - I saw them for £7 which i didn't think was too bad. Mind you i don't do a lot of high colour print outs.
;-)
If you're thinking about doing a lot of printing, look into getting a continuous ink system. I don't have one (neither am I associated with the above company!), but I do print a fair number of my photos for people and it's something I'm really starting to think about.
As for the colour fading issue with different inks - I've been running my Epson Stylus Photo 1290 on proper Epson ink since I got it, and the photos I printed a while ago look absolutely identical to new copies I print. My father's got one in a frame and it's been up on a wall in a bright room for over a year, but no change...
If you just want your holiday snaps printing, then taking the memory card to the local supermarket or photo outlet can be fine - but as the article says, you do get a lot more control if you print them yourself. I got some printed at Jessops (free gift thing), and while the detail was great, the colours were... Brown. I get much better results from my own printer, even if it is a tad expensive to run.
Oh, and biggest tip possible - get a guillotine. Cropping printouts with a scalpel or scissors is asking for trouble. I make birthday and Christmas cards myself, people really appreciate it but the truth is I can never remember to buy cards.
I think it's great that monolithic, cross-platform applications like Firefox and OpenOffice.org remain cross-platform, integrating as necessary with the underlying operating system.
:-/
Unfortunately, something like KDE is in a way part of that operating system itself - while porting, say, the rendering engine of Konqueror to Windows and giving it a Windows front-end could be useful, a full-scale port of Konqueror with all the KDE support libraries underneath would frequently involve reinventing and replacing wheels already present in Windows.
Things like file selectors, the print subsystem, network abstraction and so on - while incredibly useful features for KDE to provide to its applications, they're generally available in different forms on other non-UNIX operating systems (and MacOS X). It makes more sense to integrate with the platform's existing facilities, giving the users a more consistent interface, rather than present them with a whole new interface for certain tasks.
It's great that many Open Source applications are cross-platform, but the best cross-platform things are those which are carefully tailored to each system...
Interestingly enough, Bungie's master server and client model is the same model humans use for perceiving the world. For example, right now, Milton Flapdoodle in New Jersey is responsible for perceiving the world, authorizing adjustments to humanity's world view, and beaming the changes to each of us telepathically.
;-)
Something tells me that you're perceiving the world in an ever so slightly different manner to the rest of us...
Maplin Electronics is getting to be a bit of a joke these days. Four or five years ago I'd have agreed with you, but the range of components they have is dropping year on year to be replaced by standard consumer electronics.
:-)
Admittedly I haven't bought components from Maplin for years - Tandy would have been another suggestion, but I was recently surprised to learn that they'd disappeared from the UK ages ago.
I usually get my stuff from a titchy little electronics shop in Derby called R.F. Potts. They don't appear to have any kind of internet presence (beyond random posts in tech mailing lists from people saying how great it is) - but it's exactly the sort of place you'd go to if you needed a sync-on-green graphics card, stepper motor, obscure rechargeable battery or giant obsolete monitor. As a result, my knowledge of other electronics suppliers is a bit lacking, and I always think other stores should have assistants who clamber up ladders and rummage through wooden drawers to find that precise shape of transistor heatsink you were looking for...
Okay, RS has more stuff, but it's nowhere near as much fun.
... Here ;-)
I still reckon the best game networking in the world is that in Quake and its successors, such as Half-Life and its sequel. Unlike Halo and Halo 2, where co-operative play online was apparently an insurmountable technical challenge, in Quake-based stuff even single-player games are inherently client-server anyway.
From the article, it sounds like Halo 2 multiplayer has moved in that direction away from the all-clients-equal approach of Marathon and Doom, with a single server accepting or denying player-damaging events. Although each client apparently still has a full version of the game world at hand, unlike Quake-style games where a client is only sent relevant stuff - might this allow for some audacious, map-spanning ultra-vision hacks and so on?
Still, that's how they do the recovery thing if the server gets unexpectedly removed from play...
*But* physical stuff is a pain; has anyone put together a program that allows me to simulate basic electronic gates, and "build" these things. It would help me understand a lot better how computers' internal logic work.
:-)
The 'real thing' is actually surprisingly easy - with a power supply, a breadboard, logic chips and some LEDs, you can build your own flip-flops, counters and suchlike.
I did a short course in digital microelectronics at university, and it was great fun. I was busy building my own, non-course-required, multi-digit adder when I ran out of components, and had to get back to the actual course material. If you've got any knowledge of programming and Boolean logic, the basics are pretty easy - I found it far easier than the course on analogue stuff involving impedance, resistance and whatever, i.e. lots of complex numbers. I've forgotten most of that already.
You can probably get pre-organised logic kits from Maplin (UK) or Radio Shack (US) - failing that, I'm sure other Slashdotters will know where.
There may be no obvious immediate use for mechanical analogs of digital circuits, when digital circuits are orders of maginitude faster than mechanical circuits
:-)
If you scale things down a bit, mechanical 'circuits' can become a lot faster - and combined with the electrical properties of the components there might be an interesting hybrid some point in the future.
Still, using Lego is just a little insane, and there is the minor problem of a '1' or a '0' slowly degrading into '0.5's further along the Lego logic chain...