We are just medium through which ideas express themselves.
And those ideas are mine! I'll sue you all, honest! Mwuhahahahaha!!!
Ahem.
I always reckoned the real innovation of Apple's Dashboard was the inverse-F11-Exposé-style manner of appearance. No messing around shuffling a tiny window to somewhere legible next to your application window, instead press a button, FVOM! widgets are there, press button again, FWOOSH! widgets are gone.
Probably done before, somewhere, but I still reckon it's a nice idea...
Konfabulator takes a Dual G5/2.0 with 1.5G of RAM and makes it run like an Apple IIc.
When there was the Dashboard brouhaha a while back over ideas being 'stolen' from Konfabulator, I got linked to an interesting comparison between the two. It's quite illuminating reading, and should explain some of the performance, um, issues of Konfabulator:
Konfabulator is not a lightweight or small-footprint environment -- every Konfabulator widget runs as a separate process, with its own runtime environment in memory. Most Konfabulator widgets use more memory than typical full-blown Mac OS X applications. Not just Konfabulator as a whole -- but each widget. Install it, fire up Process Viewer, and see for yourself.
I really got the impression that one reason Apple passed over it for incorporation into MacOS X Tiger was because of the low-level architecture not being up to scratch. Instead of using the same, single instance of Safari's rendering and Javascript for all widgets, booting up some monolithic monstrosity for each sounds just... Horrid...
Is Thunderbird 0.9 the one that comes up from under the swimming pool?
Kind of. 0.9's the one which comes up from under the swimming pool while the swimming pool is still in the way. It should be fixed for Thunderbird 1.0, after they've knocked the (literal) dents out...
(Engage topic realignment!)
Um... The only major thing I can think of as missing from Thunderbird when I last installed it was some sort of mbox importer. It's easy enough to copy the files in to Thunderbird's Special Folder, after you've figured out where that is (in Windows at least, it's not particularly obvious), but making it part of the email import wizard would be brilliant. Like it is in Apple's Mail.app.:-)
Actually, I think the article might be right - the total mass carried to Mars won't be the same as what enters the Martian atmosphere, thanks to there being various support equipment attached to the orbiter. Dodgy mass-to-weight calculations were probably never involved.:-)
The original Beagle 2 apparently had a mass of 65kg, probably including support equipment, so the new Beagle is over twice as massive.
It seems they really got the science instrumentation right for the old lander, so let's hope they get everything else working too. Instruments do have a tendency to fly on missions they weren't originally intended for - the camera on Mars Express, the High Resolution Stereo Camera (a mere 20.4kg) was originally designed for the ill-fated Russian Mars 96 probe, for example.
With a bit of luck, Beagle 2's successor will safely reach the surface of Mars in 2009, so the important work can start...
The BBC has a pretty cool Flash election map - presumably it'll get updated with results as they come in, but for a European like me there's lots of historical information too.
Want to find out how states voted in the past? Or read potted summaries of previous candidates and so on? I've learned quite a lot already.:-)
Since we use a small fraction of our brain (the amount various depending on what source you ask, some say less than 10 some say less than 30, I say less than 10 is less than 30 but 10 is probably only counting conscious usage, 30 is probably counting all brain activity), it may only cause you to use some of it that isn't normally used at all, while the rest of us go without.
Huge urban myth - humans use all of their brains, and if they didn't, natural selection would have disposed of us pretty quickly.
Brain tissue is incredibly expensive from an energy point of view, and it's only because we make very good use of it* that it gave us such an evolutionary advantage. It is highly adaptable, though, and in certain cases it's possible to make a partial recovery from severe brain injury, effectively through reassigning some of it to a new task.
Google found me an interesting article with figures and stuff, if anyone wants to read it.:-)
Which is why the smarter ones amongst us mapped it (and numerous others) to 0.0.0.0 instead. I've yet to find a single IP stack where that isn't the network equivalent of/dev/null.
Okay, so KDE on a Gamecube is pretty useless, but it does show that the cross-compiler is working on complex software (even if it is just for a PowerPC), and that pretty resource-intensive software will work on the machine. Plus, I bet the people doing it have learned a lot in porting this stuff to work on an unfamiliar, undocumented hardware platform.
Now, port Linux to run on any generic Postscript printer!:-)
An interesting comparison between Halo and Marathon that I really wish would be discussed is that a lot of the 'hidden depth' found in Marathon's plot could be attributed to how the plot was told(which was via text 'computer terminals').
The recent Doom 3 had text (also video and voice) PDAs lying around with additional material driving the plot. You can play it as a dumb shooter, or read everything for a bit more background on the events in the game - although I've played the Doom 3 demo and the writing didn't seem all that impressive, especially when compared with the Bungie intrigue of yesteryear.
I imagine it's definitely possible to do another Marathon while not seeming too out-of-place in today's market. I just suppose you have to make sure the game's still playable and the plot still entertaining to people who don't want to read all the terminals, and (much more importantly) you have to make sure the background plot is well written.:-)
In this Washington Post Writeup", they clearly refer to the "island rule: animals smaller than rabbits get larger; animals larger than rabbits get smaller."
For anyone not familiar with Charlie Brooker's brand of comedy, he's the creator of the (sadly resting) TV Go Home, author of numerous close-to-the-bone satirical articles in British computer gaming magazines, and is now working on various other projects. His Screen Burn column in the Guardian's Guide supplement is frequently hilarious, and he's suggested far, far worse things in it than the mere assassination of a president. I'm often amazed they can print it - this censored article was pretty tame by comparison....
Oh, and he's an utter geek too. He's allied with NTK, and I seem to recall reading something in the Guide by him extolling the virtues of downloading television programmes by Bittorrent. Yup.
Um...this is a POLITICAL CAMPAIGN SITE. The people not voting next week should have NO IMPACT here. The official policies of the United States, whoever is in office, are not disseminated by political campaign sites, but by myriad other means.
Perhaps it could have been treated as some sort of demonstration of democracy to internet-using citizens of the new Iraq and Afghanistan, an indication of the Right Manner of Doing Things?
Instead, there's just an error message with no explanation. Even a polite error message would have been an improvement...
For some reason, I'm reminded of the platform-independent device drivers and boot code written in Forth in Open Firmware.
I don't know how useful a processor architecture-independent version of this would be (the compiler itself is pre-compiled for a specific processor, presumably!) but it does seem a rather cool hack. Maybe an ultra-inclusive version of Gentoo?
I got an iBook earlier this year, and while it's definitely a great machine and I really like MacOS X overall, I do miss a lot of KDE's stuff.
For instance, the Finder seems quite polished from the outside, but its innards basically stink. It's often crashed on me on imported Samba shares, and it broke horribly when I tried copying just a few thousand JPEGs* in a folder which Konqueror coped fine with, even loading all the thumbnails for the images in a nice, fast and tidy manner.
Talking of thumbnails, the Finder doesn't appear to have any thumbnail caching. When I look at my exported home directory on my elderly Linux server, I hear its hard disk churning as the iBook copies all the pictures over the network for the millionth time. It leaves enough.DS_Store droppings on there already, so why not save the thumbnails too?
Oh, and files go missing. I can save something on to the desktop from Safari, click on the 'Attach' button in Mail.app to bring up the file selector, go to the desktop folder only to find the file I just saved isn't there. Randomly clicking on stuff often makes the file magically reappear. I've never seen behaviour like this with software on Linux...
I do like OS X, and to me the above flaws are just annoyances, but I really don't think it's some pinnacle of software engineering that KDE and the like can never reach. It's good, yes, but I'm still interested in running Linux on this machine as well.:-)
I would definitely pay that kind of money for community-created mods if I knew it had gone through some kind of BioWare QA process. Sifting through thousands (?) of mods on fan sites just isn't worth the time.
Blame the fan sites, then. I've never played Neverwinter Nights, and haven't a clue about its modding community, but over in the land of Half-Life there are well-respected sites like Ten Four reviewing single-player releases.
In need of something to play? Click on the reviews index, sort by rating, then look through the well-written reviews to see if there's anything that sounds interesting. (Disclaimer - one of my maps has a 'gold' rating!)
I suppose this has some advantages over a more community-driven approach (like the NWVault thing mentioned above), in that the real crap simply doesn't get reviewed, or gets clearly marked as such, and the poor taste of the general public doesn't rate pointless siege maps beyond the real works of art (oh, I sound so pretentious!).
If there isn't such a site for NWN, then why not create one? Write some quick reviews of mods you liked, add some statistics (how many players, difficulty etc.), upload them somewhere, then see what happens. Oh, and tell the mod authors. When you're doing something as work-intensive as creating a mod for free, positive feedback is incredibly rewarding.:-)
But the XServers come at 2.0GHz, with the desktop powermacs at 2.5GHz. Is this a mistake?
From the article:
Apple said last week that the 2.3GHz machines were a one-off deal for Virginia Tech and not something the company plans to announce for broader consumption anytime soon.
What I really want to know is what they do with the old machines. The articles speaks of the cluster being 'upgraded' - are the older G5s replaced, or do they just become part of the new cluster?
Still, I suppose there's one or two unwanted G5s - anyone want to send me a couple?:-)
Your target audience for this comment are people who are interested in favorite mathematical equations, yet you feel the necessity to point out the definition of "exponentiation"?....
Given that my post spawned a discussion about typing rude words into calculators, I think the definition may have been a good idea after all...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
We are just medium through which ideas express themselves.
And those ideas are mine! I'll sue you all, honest! Mwuhahahahaha!!!
Ahem.
I always reckoned the real innovation of Apple's Dashboard was the inverse-F11-Exposé-style manner of appearance. No messing around shuffling a tiny window to somewhere legible next to your application window, instead press a button, FVOM! widgets are there, press button again, FWOOSH! widgets are gone.
Probably done before, somewhere, but I still reckon it's a nice idea...
When there was the Dashboard brouhaha a while back over ideas being 'stolen' from Konfabulator, I got linked to an interesting comparison between the two. It's quite illuminating reading, and should explain some of the performance, um, issues of Konfabulator:I really got the impression that one reason Apple passed over it for incorporation into MacOS X Tiger was because of the low-level architecture not being up to scratch. Instead of using the same, single instance of Safari's rendering and Javascript for all widgets, booting up some monolithic monstrosity for each sounds just... Horrid...
Oh, and the Windows port was apparently announced in December last year.
Is Thunderbird 0.9 the one that comes up from under the swimming pool?
:-)
Kind of. 0.9's the one which comes up from under the swimming pool while the swimming pool is still in the way. It should be fixed for Thunderbird 1.0, after they've knocked the (literal) dents out...
(Engage topic realignment!)
Um... The only major thing I can think of as missing from Thunderbird when I last installed it was some sort of mbox importer. It's easy enough to copy the files in to Thunderbird's Special Folder, after you've figured out where that is (in Windows at least, it's not particularly obvious), but making it part of the email import wizard would be brilliant. Like it is in Apple's Mail.app.
BAD science reporter! BAD! no treat for you.
:-)
Actually, I think the article might be right - the total mass carried to Mars won't be the same as what enters the Martian atmosphere, thanks to there being various support equipment attached to the orbiter. Dodgy mass-to-weight calculations were probably never involved.
The original Beagle 2 apparently had a mass of 65kg, probably including support equipment, so the new Beagle is over twice as massive.
It seems they really got the science instrumentation right for the old lander, so let's hope they get everything else working too. Instruments do have a tendency to fly on missions they weren't originally intended for - the camera on Mars Express, the High Resolution Stereo Camera (a mere 20.4kg) was originally designed for the ill-fated Russian Mars 96 probe, for example.
With a bit of luck, Beagle 2's successor will safely reach the surface of Mars in 2009, so the important work can start...
No, no, no, no. Get out and vote EVEN IF YOU CAN'T.
;-)
I agree with the sentiment about everyone voting, but I'm finding rather difficult to vote for the US presidency this side of the Atlantic.
Anyone got any recommendations as to how I can do so?
The BBC has a pretty cool Flash election map - presumably it'll get updated with results as they come in, but for a European like me there's lots of historical information too.
:-)
Want to find out how states voted in the past? Or read potted summaries of previous candidates and so on? I've learned quite a lot already.
Brain tissue is incredibly expensive from an energy point of view, and it's only because we make very good use of it* that it gave us such an evolutionary advantage. It is highly adaptable, though, and in certain cases it's possible to make a partial recovery from severe brain injury, effectively through reassigning some of it to a new task.
Google found me an interesting article with figures and stuff, if anyone wants to read it.
(* Some politicians excepted, of course!)
Which is why the smarter ones amongst us mapped it (and numerous others) to 0.0.0.0 instead. I've yet to find a single IP stack where that isn't the network equivalent of /dev/null.
:-)
No, that's my IP address, you insensitive clod!
Ahem.
Just open it as a 'raw' image file, 640x480x16bpp. You say you'll have to write a program specifically for this? Sounds like you are a true /. geek! :-)
:-)
Oh crap. I win the 'Geek' prize, then.
I wrote a really poor PHP program to do it - and ended up with a fairly uninteresting screenshot.
Okay, so KDE on a Gamecube is pretty useless, but it does show that the cross-compiler is working on complex software (even if it is just for a PowerPC), and that pretty resource-intensive software will work on the machine. Plus, I bet the people doing it have learned a lot in porting this stuff to work on an unfamiliar, undocumented hardware platform.
Now, port Linux to run on any generic Postscript printer!
This chap is signing from the mountaintops.
Like this?
An interesting comparison between Halo and Marathon that I really wish would be discussed is that a lot of the 'hidden depth' found in Marathon's plot could be attributed to how the plot was told(which was via text 'computer terminals').
:-)
The recent Doom 3 had text (also video and voice) PDAs lying around with additional material driving the plot. You can play it as a dumb shooter, or read everything for a bit more background on the events in the game - although I've played the Doom 3 demo and the writing didn't seem all that impressive, especially when compared with the Bungie intrigue of yesteryear.
I imagine it's definitely possible to do another Marathon while not seeming too out-of-place in today's market. I just suppose you have to make sure the game's still playable and the plot still entertaining to people who don't want to read all the terminals, and (much more importantly) you have to make sure the background plot is well written.
2600 is such a beautiful number... Balmer could have made a more direct point with just 42 tho.
;-)
Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers?
Something along those lines, anyhow.
In this Washington Post Writeup", they clearly refer to the "island rule: animals smaller than rabbits get larger; animals larger than rabbits get smaller."
What about rabbits? What size do they become?
That would be Charlie Brooker, comedian, right? You're aware of the concept of humour, right? OK, this isn't very funny, but it is clearly a joke.
I've managed to find a full copy of the column online - in China, home of free speech, amusingly enough.
For anyone not familiar with Charlie Brooker's brand of comedy, he's the creator of the (sadly resting) TV Go Home, author of numerous close-to-the-bone satirical articles in British computer gaming magazines, and is now working on various other projects. His Screen Burn column in the Guardian's Guide supplement is frequently hilarious, and he's suggested far, far worse things in it than the mere assassination of a president. I'm often amazed they can print it - this censored article was pretty tame by comparison....
Oh, and he's an utter geek too. He's allied with NTK, and I seem to recall reading something in the Guide by him extolling the virtues of downloading television programmes by Bittorrent. Yup.
Um...this is a POLITICAL CAMPAIGN SITE. The people not voting next week should have NO IMPACT here. The official policies of the United States, whoever is in office, are not disseminated by political campaign sites, but by myriad other means.
Perhaps it could have been treated as some sort of demonstration of democracy to internet-using citizens of the new Iraq and Afghanistan, an indication of the Right Manner of Doing Things?
Instead, there's just an error message with no explanation. Even a polite error message would have been an improvement...
... though it's a little off-message.
.co.uk site: http://www.georgewbush.co.uk/
:-)
So's the
Seems that Dubya's put on a bit of weight, too.
Comparing it to Perl is a bit unfair considering we don't exactly have a full fledged Unix like kernel written in Perl to boot...
;-)
How about using it to bootstrap Emacs? That's virtually an operating system already...
For some reason, I'm reminded of the platform-independent device drivers and boot code written in Forth in Open Firmware.
I don't know how useful a processor architecture-independent version of this would be (the compiler itself is pre-compiled for a specific processor, presumably!) but it does seem a rather cool hack. Maybe an ultra-inclusive version of Gentoo?
I got an iBook earlier this year, and while it's definitely a great machine and I really like MacOS X overall, I do miss a lot of KDE's stuff.
.DS_Store droppings on there already, so why not save the thumbnails too?
:-)
For instance, the Finder seems quite polished from the outside, but its innards basically stink. It's often crashed on me on imported Samba shares, and it broke horribly when I tried copying just a few thousand JPEGs* in a folder which Konqueror coped fine with, even loading all the thumbnails for the images in a nice, fast and tidy manner.
Talking of thumbnails, the Finder doesn't appear to have any thumbnail caching. When I look at my exported home directory on my elderly Linux server, I hear its hard disk churning as the iBook copies all the pictures over the network for the millionth time. It leaves enough
Oh, and files go missing. I can save something on to the desktop from Safari, click on the 'Attach' button in Mail.app to bring up the file selector, go to the desktop folder only to find the file I just saved isn't there. Randomly clicking on stuff often makes the file magically reappear. I've never seen behaviour like this with software on Linux...
I do like OS X, and to me the above flaws are just annoyances, but I really don't think it's some pinnacle of software engineering that KDE and the like can never reach. It's good, yes, but I'm still interested in running Linux on this machine as well.
(* See signature!)
I would definitely pay that kind of money for community-created mods if I knew it had gone through some kind of BioWare QA process. Sifting through thousands (?) of mods on fan sites just isn't worth the time.
:-)
Blame the fan sites, then. I've never played Neverwinter Nights, and haven't a clue about its modding community, but over in the land of Half-Life there are well-respected sites like Ten Four reviewing single-player releases.
In need of something to play? Click on the reviews index, sort by rating, then look through the well-written reviews to see if there's anything that sounds interesting. (Disclaimer - one of my maps has a 'gold' rating!)
I suppose this has some advantages over a more community-driven approach (like the NWVault thing mentioned above), in that the real crap simply doesn't get reviewed, or gets clearly marked as such, and the poor taste of the general public doesn't rate pointless siege maps beyond the real works of art (oh, I sound so pretentious!).
If there isn't such a site for NWN, then why not create one? Write some quick reviews of mods you liked, add some statistics (how many players, difficulty etc.), upload them somewhere, then see what happens. Oh, and tell the mod authors. When you're doing something as work-intensive as creating a mod for free, positive feedback is incredibly rewarding.
What's wrong with Project Orion? ;-)
I mean, if we're going to go to Mars, we might as well do it properly - even if it does end up filling the atmosphere with radioactive fallout...
From the article:What I really want to know is what they do with the old machines. The articles speaks of the cluster being 'upgraded' - are the older G5s replaced, or do they just become part of the new cluster?
Still, I suppose there's one or two unwanted G5s - anyone want to send me a couple?
Your target audience for this comment are people who are interested in favorite mathematical equations, yet you feel the necessity to point out the definition of "exponentiation"?....
;-)
Given that my post spawned a discussion about typing rude words into calculators, I think the definition may have been a good idea after all...
this is the perfect reason to get a graphing calculator, most of which allow you to enter real text ;), think of the dirty word possibilities.
Graphics calculator, remember. Think of the dirty pictures!
Take a look at the username, and take a guess at mine :o)
/\ 1 = 1 ?
But shurely 1