Probably because (just guessing here), they have different library version requirements from the core Ubuntu distro; some libraries needing to be newer, and some libraries needing to be older.
LinuxMCE tries to do what you suggest, except instead of being a video editor distro, it's a video player distro containing MythTV and the like. I gave it a shot, and it had to change so many things (including completely replacing my customized/etc/apt/sources.list file) that I ended up reinstalling Ubuntu to get it back to the way I liked it (I just wanted to peek at it to see what it was like, I wasn't really ready to commit my desktop to it full time). By the way, stuff like this is why you want/home on a different partition =) It makes it easy to wipe and reinstall without ever jeopardizing anything important.
Well I don't know what Duke's hardware is, and I don't know what the iPhone is doing to bring it down, but I can imagine circumstances where the network going down under excessive load does not represent a fault in the network in any sense other than perhaps capacity planning. If all iPhones perform certain operations at specific times based on the phone's clock (which they will all be synchronized due to being based on the time advertised by the cell network), a network planned for X number of normal devices can suddenly become very very overwhelmed if those devices all simultaneously reauthenticate.
In such a circumstance, the "fault" in the network is failure to anticipate the unusual nature of a specific device which did not exist at the time the network was planned. Suddenly a network capable of supporting X thousand standard wireless devices can only support X/5 thousand iPhones. Calling this a fault in the network is like calling lack of CSS support in HTML 1.0 a fault. It's just not what it was designed for.
I'm not saying that is what is necessarily going on here, but it's at least plausible. Where the "fault" lies is an exercise for the reader, but I'd certainly be inclined to look toward the device which behaves differently from all other devices in the same class, whether or not it manages to break specification.
Perhaps they have been trying to resolve it with this guy out of court for a while now. Believe it or not, some people have a moral opposition to lawsuits as any but a last resort.
Perhaps it doesn't matter why they waited, if the guy stole the code from them.
Yes, I'm using NFS. I can't imagine it would be different for a samba mounted filesystem (rather than a smb:// URL) but I haven't tried.
I don't know what it's like to convert to MySQL if you want to preserve your statistics, or if there's even a built in way to do it. I started mine on MySQL from the start. If you don't mind losing your statistics, you can probably just change the engine and it should rescan your collection. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a plugin for exporting and importing Amarok library data. Even if not, it has a pretty rich DCOP interface which should make it relatively easy to do this on your own. Just type dcop amarok to see what it can do. Scripting this to export then later import it should be easy.
I would strongly recommend with a collection that size that you convert to MySQL backend. I run that way at home because like you I have a collection which I listen to from a number of devices, and I wanted it to keep all my statistics synchronized. Plus I was already running MySQL for other purposes so there wasn't much overhead to doing this.
FWIW, the memory footprint I mentioned earlier was on the version I have at work which uses the SQLite backend.
Really? I have 4,244 files consuming 41 gig of space and I find it to be neither slow nor memory intensive. Right now for me (and it's been running and constantly playing a few days now) it's using 41.8mb total (which includes the shared memory with KDE libraries so its actual footprint is smaller, though I can't tell you exactly how much smaller). It launches in about 2 seconds and all of its features respond instantly.
Compare that with iTunes on the same hardware (I have identical machines side-by-side one running Windows, and the other Ubuntu Feisty, using Synergy to control them). This takes around 10 seconds to launch and with exactly zero songs in its library consumes 38.6 meg.
So in comparing like for like, my 4,000+ song 41gig Amarok is faster with a similar memory footprint to the substantially less featureful iTunes with an empty library.
So I'm not really sure what your basis for comparison is. Maybe you're running AmaroK under Gnome and noticing startup sluggishness due to the KDE libraries needing to be initialized? (which you don't experience if you run AmaroK under KDE since these are initialized when you log in, and also the reported memory stays the same, but actual memory footprint is much lower since in that desktop so many of the libraries which count against AmaroK's reported memory are also shared with a variety of other apps)
The only thing I can think is that perhaps you're comparing it to XMMS or Winamp 3.x series (each eating under 10 meg of RAM and starting virtually instantly). Certainly if you want a music player that does nothing but play music you won't be satisfied with the performance loss to music juke boxes like AmaroK and iTunes. But in that case, may I suggest mpg123 as your primary music player since this will be even smaller and faster yet!
Non-photographic child pornography is a different matter and certainly one I feel less strongly about. I think the reasoning for this is that it is thought it would whet appetites if legal which would otherwise remain dormant. I don't know if I agree with that reasoning or not, but I can say that I think there's a reasonable chance it is true. I'm not a (psycholog|psychiatri)st so I am certainly not qualified to say one way or the other. However I think the chances are good enough, and that access to child pornography (real or not) is sufficiently unnecessary that I think it's a good idea to limit it also in case it is true.
Historically and especially when related to sexuality, we know that male appetites tend to increase rather than to decrease when tantalized; this is why many serial rapists slowly ramp up over time until they get reckless and get caught. I think that certainly at least some if not most men who had access to artificial kiddy porn (and also find it especially arousing, something which does not click in my brain so I have a hard time understanding it) would seek the real thing and some of those (who would not otherwise have) will seek to fulfill the fantasy.
We're not imprisoning people because they possess evidence of a crime, we are imprisoning them because they are a consumer of the fruits of that crime, something which can only come *from* a crime. This is the same exact reason that snuff films are illegal.
Or are you trying to say that it's an evolutionary imperative that males molest children, because if that's the case, then apparently I'm evolutionally devolved as this does not appeal to me in the slightest.
And more effective yet is to pursue both the suppliers and the consumers. Maybe the consumers have information which can lead you to find the suppliers. Also, maybe the suppliers are in a country where it's not illegal or whose police force is insufficient to spare the resources for this.
If there isn't demand, then there isn't supply. Meaning if noone seeks child porn then no child porn will be made. We can extend this to say that if we can reduce the demand for child porn, we can reduce the number of children abused to create it.
Also, that bomb I made is only a bunch of protons and electrons. A very specific configuration of them, but if society makes owning protons and electrons a crime, this is very scary stuff.
You don't evaluate things as their most basic parts, you evaluate them at high functional parts.
And actually it's not really a big number at all, it's a whole bunch of small numbers, and it's not even that, it's a whole bunch of magnetic charges or perhaps little holes burned in a media substrate. What it's made of doesn't matter, something that can only reasonably be arrived at by abusing and permanently emotionally damaging children.
Comic sales, I've heard, have been steadily declining for years.
To take a tip from our RIAA overlords, we can assume that this is in some way related to file sharing and peer to peer in general.
It's time we start selling comic books with a biometric lock which can only be read by one person, up to a maximum of 4 different fingers. The only explanation for these declining sales is clearly no fault of the industry.
Having been formerly a maintainer for an open source project (see my sig), I can say that we at least (being even a small project) got way more submissions per week than we could possibly have integrated even if all we did full time was integrate them. Of course we didn't just accept simple patches, we reviewed every line of code and evaluated it for cleanliness, security, performance, and (since this is a game) game balance.
In addition to this, the truth is that at least 9 in 10 submissions which we did evaluate were rejected for various reasons, not the least of which were that many of the implementations were horribly ugly even when they did manage to pass all the other criteria. The people whose submissions got looked at most seriously were those who contributed regularly. My eventual development partner hounded me literally for months before I took him seriously (he was a pretty abrasive guy on the surface, with a lot of criticism for my work, and this turned me off to him at first).
The fact is that there's no way most OSS developers have the time to look at the submission of every Tom, Dick, and Harry. The way to get noticed is to provide features which are innovative, well coded, make sense (so many of our submissions were simply bad ideas), and to persevere. We want partners, not dump and run developers.
I believe people *are* genuinely excited by it. But I also believe that part of it is marketing hype engine.
I do get excited by things, and I do talk about them in advance. However there's talking, and then there's beating the horse.
I think there's plenty of areas where the iPhone can yet fail. If the interface is not as easy to use as might be expected. If (as I strongly suspect) it turns out that it *is* hard to both hit buttons on purpose on a completely smooth and static surface, as well as avoid hitting them by accident (I recall how easy it was to accidentally cause my 3rd gen iPod to skip tracks when I only intended to pick it up; very annoying on the long audiobooks I typically used it for since that model wouldn't remember your place in the book if you skipped off of it). Will battery life be as good as advertised? Will the UI be as responsive as advertised? Is it feasible to browse web pages with a touch screen on a small surface without a stylus (I don't like browsing web pages on a small touch screen *with* a stylus)? Will it be easy to build decent apps for it? Will those apps drain a lot of battery life?
There's just so many questions, and so very many ways which the iPhone can fail. Many Apple products take two or three versions before they're really refined enough to not be more annoying than they are innovative. For example there were flaws with the first 3 generations of iPods each of which were annoying enough to cause me to sell it and upgrade to the next generation which fixed the previous generation's problems (though from a sales perspective maybe this is a *good* thing). Safari for Windows may be fast, but the UI is hard to read (how small and fuzzy can they *make* the menus anyway?); maybe that's a low blow since they consider it beta, but at least they could have released it either capable of authenticating against a Microsoft proxy and against NTLM authenticated sites, or else disabled this feature entirely; whenever I try the browser crashes.
Basically whatever excitement I had about the iPhone is passed and I think it was time a while ago to just let it wait until release to see how good it is or isn't.
If you take a few moments, you'll observe two things. Allow me to quote myself:
Actually officially (and maybe easier to conceptualize) "A not B" is a short hand of "A and not B," where not is an operator that applies only to B and inverts it.
Now allow me to quote the Wikipedia article:
INPUT A 0 0 1 1 B 0 1 0 1... NOT B 1 0 1 0... NOT A 1 1 0 0
So you'll see how I already qualified that there is no official two-input NOT operator, it's actually a one-input operator commonly coupled with the two-input AND operator since at least in my experience this is one of the most common uses of NOT. As way of supporting that, A and not B turns off whatever bits in A are turned on in B, so when for example you have a constant USER_PERMISSION_SOMETHING which is a bit mask, and you want to turn this permission off on the permissions field for some user, only if they have it, and also preserve other permission bits, you'll execute $user->privileges = $user->priveleges & ~USER_PERMISSION_SOMETHING. You'll also notice that I described that it's common (I don't have a citation on this, but at least among me, my coworkers, and my professor of logic in college this is the case) to use a short-hand reference as if there were a two-input operator which actually performs AND NOT.
The difference between NOT and XOR is in the false-true comparison. Actually officially (and maybe easier to conceptualize) "A not B" is a short hand of "A and not B," where not is an operator that applies only to B and inverts it. There is more info at the Wikipedia article on logic gates.
Apple is spending all this money paying for the constant hype stories and is turning the iPhone into the most hated product ever before it is even released.
Aah, if only I still had those mod points I just used up this morning. I thought it looked like an interesting device. Nothing ground breaking, but perhaps some cool innovations (which will probably be locked away from the rest of the world with patents). But now I am just sick of hearing about it. Every tech news site is just buzzing about it like crazy. It merited the attention it was getting a month ago. In a few days when it is actually out it may merit some more attention. But until it's out and in people's hands, it merits everyone just being quiet and waiting till it arrives.
The bad news for Apple is that I sincerely doubt it'll be able to live up to the hype. Even if it's a decent device; even if it's best of its class, it can't live up to the absurd hype, and no matter how good it actually is, it'll be a disappointment.
If it does by some miracle live up to the hype, that hype would be all the more potent if it came after the device came out and people just couldn't stop talking about them at that time. As it is, there won't be that much new about it to talk about, and it'll lose some of its buzzworthiness to people already being sick of hearing about it.
Honestly I'm personally not too concerned about a niche market that the iPhone will be. However I am very concerned over usability and accessibility. Depending on hover-style events is not typically very high on usability and almost always not accessible (meaning section 508 compliance - users who use things like screen readers because they are sight-impaired).
Forget the iPhone, if your interface is Section 508 compliant, then it should be fine in devices which essentially offer higher functionality than screen readers.
Personally, my stuff works in links and lynx, complete with access keys (I was going to post the links output but the lameness filter told me it was too much whitespace). It's not that hard, you just have to focus on creating a usable application and not get hung up on crazy pretty stuff.
I think that if there is such a catastrophic and sudden failure of government that the moneyorder became valueless between when you bought it and when you were able to hand it in an hour later, 1) the loss of $100 would be the least of your concerns, and 2) your cash isn't much good any more either.
Although I guess if a person doesn't trust banks then why entrust your money to the government or quasi-government agencies.
You don't have to trust them, only the recipient of the money order does. As long as they accept that form of payment, it has just as much purchasing power to you as the cash did.
I agree with the frustration over not having cash accepted as a form of payment, but I think the other posters here are right, probably the reason they don't accept cash is for liability reasons; cash disappears too easily and is equally valuable if it is intercepted, while checks, credit cards, and money orders have little or no value to any interceptors.
My guess is they have RA's and the like accepting the payments (untrusted agents) so it's not you they're concerned with, it's the recipients of the money.
Check with your bursar's office, where I went to school they offered money orders for something like $0.50, and also issued certificates of deposit which could be used to cover atypical school expenses (such as fees associated with a school trip which were payable to the professor running the trip). Finally for all official and typical school functions, they enabled parents to put a certain amount of money against the student's photo ID, and this photo ID could be used at things like the dining hall (if you were not on a meal plan), on-campus convenience stores, the school store (including school supplies, and books and other merchandise), and also for those sorts of unusual fees (we also had to pay a deposit if we were expecting to room there the following semester, and they accepted student ID's for this purpose).
Basically they wanted to give parents a way to grant their child access to money, without that child being able to use it for non-school-related activities, but students could use the same system as quasi cash.
Yeah, I really really liked Oblivion until I crossed certain thresholds and all the challenge was suddenly removed from the game.
It should not be possible to get 100% chameleon no matter how hard you try, or else at least give higher level monsters a Perceive: -X% Chameleon style attribute (letting them see through Chameleon to a certain percent). Heck, your own detect life spells see through all levels of chameleon and invisibility, and this is available at level one!!
Better than this though would be the effects being multiplicative. Such that two 50% chameleon items would give you 75% chameleon (50% from the first one, then the 2nd one is merely 50% of the remaining non-chameleon value).
I played a stealth class; of course I gravitated to chameleon effects which aided my stealth. It wasn't long before I managed 100% chameleon, and this was just boring. You could get up in a monster's face and slap it around, and it might dart around looking for you, but it would never see you. Likewise, getting the skeleton key removed all the interest and challenge from lock picking. Sure you can play the mini game, but since there is no detriment to failure there's also no point. Just click Auto Attempt repeatedly until it opens.
Int from potion effects should not affect the outcome of other potions, to avoid the int stacking bug, or at the least you should be capped at how much int a potion can give you to avoid you getting absurd int levels off a potion. You only need to do this once and make sure to keep a quantity of your uber int pots available, and drink one to make more whenever you are running low.
Feh. Such a great game which punished you by trivializing the content if you tried too hard. I can't enjoy a game where I purposely avoid beneficial paths in order to avoid their benefits which make the game tedious. I want a game that challenges me to the end.
But personally I don't want all that much on my phone. It needs an address book, it needs to be able to make calls...the ability to surf the web looks nifty, but not all that essential..
Then respectfully, you are not the target audience for the iPhone, and I hear many outcries and lamentations from those who are or would like to be that it won't be extensible.
Those who want a phone to just be a phone probably already have a phone they are happy with and won't be giving them money regardless of whether or not it has a SDK. Those who want a phone to do everything are typically willing to pay for this, and if they don't believe it will be everything it could and should be, they won't, particularly when there are other devices available which are. (did I make sense?)
The bigger cause for worry is when someone's music is compromised through no substantial fault of their own (their laptop / ipod is stolen, malware, insecure password on a campus computer network, etc), and that person is suddenly answering the knocking fist of black-suited feds at 4am.
Maybe that sounds exaggerated but I experienced a similar encounter when I was in college because the IP address which was assigned to me was used to attempt a hack against LLNL systems. Fortunately for me I could prove that I was not on campus the weekend when this occurred, and the investigation showed that switch logs for the event traced the physical port being used as a publicly accessible port in a computer lab.
Part of the lack of triviality is the difficulty in debugging. In sequential programming, the program's operations happen in the same order every time. In parallel programming they might happen in a certain order 99% of the time, and in a different order 1% of the time.
At least with the procedural and OO languages that we primarily use today, it can be very nearly impossible for even the most veteran of programmers to correctly identify all of the potential race conditions which can happen.
Unless you are using a functional language, you simply aren't going to be able to avoid race conditions. I don't have much experience in this venue other than with XSLT. Functional languages are by nature inherently parallelizable without additional developer considerations.
Interestingly most of what is considered parallel programming today is actually a whole lot of serial functions operating in parallel. It's this mix of systems which leads to the race conditions which are in my book why "parallel" programming isn't more main-stream.
Are they really all that caricatured? Do you really believe they are less human than the Oblivion character?
Definitely. They look more like high quality dolls than like real people especially in stills (though they move very naturally).
I think that the whole reason the valley exists is because you instinctively identify that *something* is wrong, only you can't put your finger on it. If you can put your finger on it, it's not uncanny, it's just unreal. I think this is the whole reason you're attracted to Shrek and not to Oblivion.
That seems like an artificial line. Remember, this is a curve.
The reason the valley exists is because you get too close to real, but not close enough to be believable. You're so close that you stop being forgiving of features which are not right; your evolutionary history has taught you to instinctively be repulsed by things which you detect are not right. We are not repulsed by the appearance of animals because they are not close enough to human to have their differences trigger this response. Likewise we are not repulsed by good CGI which still falls short of the valley because it purposely falls to the left of the valley (which I think Shrek does and probably on purpose by making their characters slightly cartoonish). It's for this reason that I think anything which doesn't require careful examination to distinguish from photographic necessarily sets it to the left (of course the more careful the necessary examination, the farther right it is).
Oblivion can't do the really high quality intricate effects such as slight skin translucency, pores on your nose, realistically moving hair, and these are for technical reasons having to do with Oblivion being rendered in real time while Shrek was rendered substantially slower than real time. It's specifically because these things are missing which cause it to fall into the valley. It'll probably take a lot more computing power before computers can render the right side of the valley in real time. Though the screenshot you provided doesn't really do it justice, whoever that was needed to use the top texture quality to be representative =).
This is also why I think it probably substantially depends on how much you instinctively value various characteristics. I still firmly believe Shrek is left of the valley in some areas, and right of the valley in others (which is probably why you and I can't agree on where Shrek falls overall). The Final Fantasy movie was to the right of the curve in almost every way I think, though their skin did look slightly plastic, it really wasn't much different from people wearing too much well-applied makeup (such as the prosthetics in modern sci-fi and fantasy movies). I'd bet you disagree since you seem to value tone more than I do and shape less than I do =)
I'd be interested to see how a Peter Jackson (LoTR quality) CGI human would look. Gollum was very believable, though of course by his nature was not incredibly human like, and anyway any uncanny effect would only add to that character. He was at least photo-realistic, so he probably would fall inside the valley or to the right for any other Gollumoids (not being one myself it's impossible to say for sure).
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Probably because (just guessing here), they have different library version requirements from the core Ubuntu distro; some libraries needing to be newer, and some libraries needing to be older.
/etc/apt/sources.list file) that I ended up reinstalling Ubuntu to get it back to the way I liked it (I just wanted to peek at it to see what it was like, I wasn't really ready to commit my desktop to it full time). By the way, stuff like this is why you want /home on a different partition =) It makes it easy to wipe and reinstall without ever jeopardizing anything important.
LinuxMCE tries to do what you suggest, except instead of being a video editor distro, it's a video player distro containing MythTV and the like. I gave it a shot, and it had to change so many things (including completely replacing my customized
Well I don't know what Duke's hardware is, and I don't know what the iPhone is doing to bring it down, but I can imagine circumstances where the network going down under excessive load does not represent a fault in the network in any sense other than perhaps capacity planning. If all iPhones perform certain operations at specific times based on the phone's clock (which they will all be synchronized due to being based on the time advertised by the cell network), a network planned for X number of normal devices can suddenly become very very overwhelmed if those devices all simultaneously reauthenticate.
In such a circumstance, the "fault" in the network is failure to anticipate the unusual nature of a specific device which did not exist at the time the network was planned. Suddenly a network capable of supporting X thousand standard wireless devices can only support X/5 thousand iPhones. Calling this a fault in the network is like calling lack of CSS support in HTML 1.0 a fault. It's just not what it was designed for.
I'm not saying that is what is necessarily going on here, but it's at least plausible. Where the "fault" lies is an exercise for the reader, but I'd certainly be inclined to look toward the device which behaves differently from all other devices in the same class, whether or not it manages to break specification.
Perhaps they have been trying to resolve it with this guy out of court for a while now. Believe it or not, some people have a moral opposition to lawsuits as any but a last resort.
Perhaps it doesn't matter why they waited, if the guy stole the code from them.
Yes, I'm using NFS. I can't imagine it would be different for a samba mounted filesystem (rather than a smb:// URL) but I haven't tried.
I don't know what it's like to convert to MySQL if you want to preserve your statistics, or if there's even a built in way to do it. I started mine on MySQL from the start. If you don't mind losing your statistics, you can probably just change the engine and it should rescan your collection. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a plugin for exporting and importing Amarok library data. Even if not, it has a pretty rich DCOP interface which should make it relatively easy to do this on your own. Just type dcop amarok to see what it can do. Scripting this to export then later import it should be easy.
I would strongly recommend with a collection that size that you convert to MySQL backend. I run that way at home because like you I have a collection which I listen to from a number of devices, and I wanted it to keep all my statistics synchronized. Plus I was already running MySQL for other purposes so there wasn't much overhead to doing this.
FWIW, the memory footprint I mentioned earlier was on the version I have at work which uses the SQLite backend.
Just started it again.
38,432k memory used.
iTunes version 7.2.0.34. After clicking the About dialog to get the exact version, memory jumped to 39,508k. Database is still empty.
Really? I have 4,244 files consuming 41 gig of space and I find it to be neither slow nor memory intensive. Right now for me (and it's been running and constantly playing a few days now) it's using 41.8mb total (which includes the shared memory with KDE libraries so its actual footprint is smaller, though I can't tell you exactly how much smaller). It launches in about 2 seconds and all of its features respond instantly.
Compare that with iTunes on the same hardware (I have identical machines side-by-side one running Windows, and the other Ubuntu Feisty, using Synergy to control them). This takes around 10 seconds to launch and with exactly zero songs in its library consumes 38.6 meg.
So in comparing like for like, my 4,000+ song 41gig Amarok is faster with a similar memory footprint to the substantially less featureful iTunes with an empty library.
So I'm not really sure what your basis for comparison is. Maybe you're running AmaroK under Gnome and noticing startup sluggishness due to the KDE libraries needing to be initialized? (which you don't experience if you run AmaroK under KDE since these are initialized when you log in, and also the reported memory stays the same, but actual memory footprint is much lower since in that desktop so many of the libraries which count against AmaroK's reported memory are also shared with a variety of other apps)
The only thing I can think is that perhaps you're comparing it to XMMS or Winamp 3.x series (each eating under 10 meg of RAM and starting virtually instantly). Certainly if you want a music player that does nothing but play music you won't be satisfied with the performance loss to music juke boxes like AmaroK and iTunes. But in that case, may I suggest mpg123 as your primary music player since this will be even smaller and faster yet!
Non-photographic child pornography is a different matter and certainly one I feel less strongly about. I think the reasoning for this is that it is thought it would whet appetites if legal which would otherwise remain dormant. I don't know if I agree with that reasoning or not, but I can say that I think there's a reasonable chance it is true. I'm not a (psycholog|psychiatri)st so I am certainly not qualified to say one way or the other. However I think the chances are good enough, and that access to child pornography (real or not) is sufficiently unnecessary that I think it's a good idea to limit it also in case it is true.
Historically and especially when related to sexuality, we know that male appetites tend to increase rather than to decrease when tantalized; this is why many serial rapists slowly ramp up over time until they get reckless and get caught. I think that certainly at least some if not most men who had access to artificial kiddy porn (and also find it especially arousing, something which does not click in my brain so I have a hard time understanding it) would seek the real thing and some of those (who would not otherwise have) will seek to fulfill the fantasy.
We're not imprisoning people because they possess evidence of a crime, we are imprisoning them because they are a consumer of the fruits of that crime, something which can only come *from* a crime. This is the same exact reason that snuff films are illegal.
Or are you trying to say that it's an evolutionary imperative that males molest children, because if that's the case, then apparently I'm evolutionally devolved as this does not appeal to me in the slightest.
And more effective yet is to pursue both the suppliers and the consumers. Maybe the consumers have information which can lead you to find the suppliers. Also, maybe the suppliers are in a country where it's not illegal or whose police force is insufficient to spare the resources for this.
If there isn't demand, then there isn't supply. Meaning if noone seeks child porn then no child porn will be made. We can extend this to say that if we can reduce the demand for child porn, we can reduce the number of children abused to create it.
Also, that bomb I made is only a bunch of protons and electrons. A very specific configuration of them, but if society makes owning protons and electrons a crime, this is very scary stuff.
You don't evaluate things as their most basic parts, you evaluate them at high functional parts.
And actually it's not really a big number at all, it's a whole bunch of small numbers, and it's not even that, it's a whole bunch of magnetic charges or perhaps little holes burned in a media substrate. What it's made of doesn't matter, something that can only reasonably be arrived at by abusing and permanently emotionally damaging children.
It's time we start selling comic books with a biometric lock which can only be read by one person, up to a maximum of 4 different fingers. The only explanation for these declining sales is clearly no fault of the industry.
Having been formerly a maintainer for an open source project (see my sig), I can say that we at least (being even a small project) got way more submissions per week than we could possibly have integrated even if all we did full time was integrate them. Of course we didn't just accept simple patches, we reviewed every line of code and evaluated it for cleanliness, security, performance, and (since this is a game) game balance.
In addition to this, the truth is that at least 9 in 10 submissions which we did evaluate were rejected for various reasons, not the least of which were that many of the implementations were horribly ugly even when they did manage to pass all the other criteria. The people whose submissions got looked at most seriously were those who contributed regularly. My eventual development partner hounded me literally for months before I took him seriously (he was a pretty abrasive guy on the surface, with a lot of criticism for my work, and this turned me off to him at first).
The fact is that there's no way most OSS developers have the time to look at the submission of every Tom, Dick, and Harry. The way to get noticed is to provide features which are innovative, well coded, make sense (so many of our submissions were simply bad ideas), and to persevere. We want partners, not dump and run developers.
I believe people *are* genuinely excited by it. But I also believe that part of it is marketing hype engine.
I do get excited by things, and I do talk about them in advance. However there's talking, and then there's beating the horse.
I think there's plenty of areas where the iPhone can yet fail. If the interface is not as easy to use as might be expected. If (as I strongly suspect) it turns out that it *is* hard to both hit buttons on purpose on a completely smooth and static surface, as well as avoid hitting them by accident (I recall how easy it was to accidentally cause my 3rd gen iPod to skip tracks when I only intended to pick it up; very annoying on the long audiobooks I typically used it for since that model wouldn't remember your place in the book if you skipped off of it). Will battery life be as good as advertised? Will the UI be as responsive as advertised? Is it feasible to browse web pages with a touch screen on a small surface without a stylus (I don't like browsing web pages on a small touch screen *with* a stylus)? Will it be easy to build decent apps for it? Will those apps drain a lot of battery life?
There's just so many questions, and so very many ways which the iPhone can fail. Many Apple products take two or three versions before they're really refined enough to not be more annoying than they are innovative. For example there were flaws with the first 3 generations of iPods each of which were annoying enough to cause me to sell it and upgrade to the next generation which fixed the previous generation's problems (though from a sales perspective maybe this is a *good* thing). Safari for Windows may be fast, but the UI is hard to read (how small and fuzzy can they *make* the menus anyway?); maybe that's a low blow since they consider it beta, but at least they could have released it either capable of authenticating against a Microsoft proxy and against NTLM authenticated sites, or else disabled this feature entirely; whenever I try the browser crashes.
Basically whatever excitement I had about the iPhone is passed and I think it was time a while ago to just let it wait until release to see how good it is or isn't.
NOT is only true if A is true and B is false. A not B.
true NOT true = false
true NOT false = true
false NOT true = false
false NOT false = false
XOR is true when A and B are different.
true XOR true = false
true XOR false = true
false XOR true = true
false XOR false = false
The difference between NOT and XOR is in the false-true comparison. Actually officially (and maybe easier to conceptualize) "A not B" is a short hand of "A and not B," where not is an operator that applies only to B and inverts it. There is more info at the Wikipedia article on logic gates.
The bad news for Apple is that I sincerely doubt it'll be able to live up to the hype. Even if it's a decent device; even if it's best of its class, it can't live up to the absurd hype, and no matter how good it actually is, it'll be a disappointment.
If it does by some miracle live up to the hype, that hype would be all the more potent if it came after the device came out and people just couldn't stop talking about them at that time. As it is, there won't be that much new about it to talk about, and it'll lose some of its buzzworthiness to people already being sick of hearing about it.
Honestly I'm personally not too concerned about a niche market that the iPhone will be. However I am very concerned over usability and accessibility. Depending on hover-style events is not typically very high on usability and almost always not accessible (meaning section 508 compliance - users who use things like screen readers because they are sight-impaired).
Forget the iPhone, if your interface is Section 508 compliant, then it should be fine in devices which essentially offer higher functionality than screen readers.
Personally, my stuff works in links and lynx, complete with access keys (I was going to post the links output but the lameness filter told me it was too much whitespace). It's not that hard, you just have to focus on creating a usable application and not get hung up on crazy pretty stuff.
I think that if there is such a catastrophic and sudden failure of government that the moneyorder became valueless between when you bought it and when you were able to hand it in an hour later, 1) the loss of $100 would be the least of your concerns, and 2) your cash isn't much good any more either.
I agree with the frustration over not having cash accepted as a form of payment, but I think the other posters here are right, probably the reason they don't accept cash is for liability reasons; cash disappears too easily and is equally valuable if it is intercepted, while checks, credit cards, and money orders have little or no value to any interceptors.
My guess is they have RA's and the like accepting the payments (untrusted agents) so it's not you they're concerned with, it's the recipients of the money.
Check with your bursar's office, where I went to school they offered money orders for something like $0.50, and also issued certificates of deposit which could be used to cover atypical school expenses (such as fees associated with a school trip which were payable to the professor running the trip). Finally for all official and typical school functions, they enabled parents to put a certain amount of money against the student's photo ID, and this photo ID could be used at things like the dining hall (if you were not on a meal plan), on-campus convenience stores, the school store (including school supplies, and books and other merchandise), and also for those sorts of unusual fees (we also had to pay a deposit if we were expecting to room there the following semester, and they accepted student ID's for this purpose).
Basically they wanted to give parents a way to grant their child access to money, without that child being able to use it for non-school-related activities, but students could use the same system as quasi cash.
Yeah, I really really liked Oblivion until I crossed certain thresholds and all the challenge was suddenly removed from the game.
It should not be possible to get 100% chameleon no matter how hard you try, or else at least give higher level monsters a Perceive: -X% Chameleon style attribute (letting them see through Chameleon to a certain percent). Heck, your own detect life spells see through all levels of chameleon and invisibility, and this is available at level one!!
Better than this though would be the effects being multiplicative. Such that two 50% chameleon items would give you 75% chameleon (50% from the first one, then the 2nd one is merely 50% of the remaining non-chameleon value).
I played a stealth class; of course I gravitated to chameleon effects which aided my stealth. It wasn't long before I managed 100% chameleon, and this was just boring. You could get up in a monster's face and slap it around, and it might dart around looking for you, but it would never see you. Likewise, getting the skeleton key removed all the interest and challenge from lock picking. Sure you can play the mini game, but since there is no detriment to failure there's also no point. Just click Auto Attempt repeatedly until it opens.
Int from potion effects should not affect the outcome of other potions, to avoid the int stacking bug, or at the least you should be capped at how much int a potion can give you to avoid you getting absurd int levels off a potion. You only need to do this once and make sure to keep a quantity of your uber int pots available, and drink one to make more whenever you are running low.
Feh. Such a great game which punished you by trivializing the content if you tried too hard. I can't enjoy a game where I purposely avoid beneficial paths in order to avoid their benefits which make the game tedious. I want a game that challenges me to the end.
Those who want a phone to just be a phone probably already have a phone they are happy with and won't be giving them money regardless of whether or not it has a SDK. Those who want a phone to do everything are typically willing to pay for this, and if they don't believe it will be everything it could and should be, they won't, particularly when there are other devices available which are. (did I make sense?)
The bigger cause for worry is when someone's music is compromised through no substantial fault of their own (their laptop / ipod is stolen, malware, insecure password on a campus computer network, etc), and that person is suddenly answering the knocking fist of black-suited feds at 4am.
Maybe that sounds exaggerated but I experienced a similar encounter when I was in college because the IP address which was assigned to me was used to attempt a hack against LLNL systems. Fortunately for me I could prove that I was not on campus the weekend when this occurred, and the investigation showed that switch logs for the event traced the physical port being used as a publicly accessible port in a computer lab.
Part of the lack of triviality is the difficulty in debugging. In sequential programming, the program's operations happen in the same order every time. In parallel programming they might happen in a certain order 99% of the time, and in a different order 1% of the time.
At least with the procedural and OO languages that we primarily use today, it can be very nearly impossible for even the most veteran of programmers to correctly identify all of the potential race conditions which can happen.
Unless you are using a functional language, you simply aren't going to be able to avoid race conditions. I don't have much experience in this venue other than with XSLT. Functional languages are by nature inherently parallelizable without additional developer considerations.
Interestingly most of what is considered parallel programming today is actually a whole lot of serial functions operating in parallel. It's this mix of systems which leads to the race conditions which are in my book why "parallel" programming isn't more main-stream.
I think that the whole reason the valley exists is because you instinctively identify that *something* is wrong, only you can't put your finger on it. If you can put your finger on it, it's not uncanny, it's just unreal. I think this is the whole reason you're attracted to Shrek and not to Oblivion. The reason the valley exists is because you get too close to real, but not close enough to be believable. You're so close that you stop being forgiving of features which are not right; your evolutionary history has taught you to instinctively be repulsed by things which you detect are not right. We are not repulsed by the appearance of animals because they are not close enough to human to have their differences trigger this response. Likewise we are not repulsed by good CGI which still falls short of the valley because it purposely falls to the left of the valley (which I think Shrek does and probably on purpose by making their characters slightly cartoonish). It's for this reason that I think anything which doesn't require careful examination to distinguish from photographic necessarily sets it to the left (of course the more careful the necessary examination, the farther right it is).
Oblivion can't do the really high quality intricate effects such as slight skin translucency, pores on your nose, realistically moving hair, and these are for technical reasons having to do with Oblivion being rendered in real time while Shrek was rendered substantially slower than real time. It's specifically because these things are missing which cause it to fall into the valley. It'll probably take a lot more computing power before computers can render the right side of the valley in real time. Though the screenshot you provided doesn't really do it justice, whoever that was needed to use the top texture quality to be representative =).
This is also why I think it probably substantially depends on how much you instinctively value various characteristics. I still firmly believe Shrek is left of the valley in some areas, and right of the valley in others (which is probably why you and I can't agree on where Shrek falls overall). The Final Fantasy movie was to the right of the curve in almost every way I think, though their skin did look slightly plastic, it really wasn't much different from people wearing too much well-applied makeup (such as the prosthetics in modern sci-fi and fantasy movies). I'd bet you disagree since you seem to value tone more than I do and shape less than I do =)
I'd be interested to see how a Peter Jackson (LoTR quality) CGI human would look. Gollum was very believable, though of course by his nature was not incredibly human like, and anyway any uncanny effect would only add to that character. He was at least photo-realistic, so he probably would fall inside the valley or to the right for any other Gollumoids (not being one myself it's impossible to say for sure).
BTW, I'm enjoying the discussion =)