This is probably not the revolution right here, but it could be the sign that the wave is cresting and ready to break. One day all flat screen HD tvs will have an rj45 jack (or maybe builtin wireless) they'll connect to the central servers and peer-to-peer share every tv show and film you could possibly want to watch, whenever you want to watch it. no more messing with recordable media to time shift the broadcasters dictated overlapping randomised scheduling, especially considering the buy-once-download-again-any-time model:-)
Though i'm a little dubious about any chain letter i'm glad this advice is in there, if you are given the ability to use a long password then IMO song lyrics are easy to remember but hard to guess. especially that one eternally chisseled into your brain from the record your grandma used to play when you were 6
Half Life and Quake 3 lacked Coop play and killed it. I'd never played deathmatch until i tried HL's "Multiplayer" mode and up until then me and my 3 brothers had between us conquered Doom,Doom II,Duke Nukem 3D,Quake,Quake 2 and made a start on Unreal (not Tournement, the actual game). Coop IMO is something sorely missing from the shooters of today, (at least Halo and Halo2 gave it a bit of a go and me and a mate made it through both together). In coop you get to team up, ram tanks at each other, "accidentally" set of a BFG in a room where your buddies are, climb on things as well as blast the living sh*t out of every bad guy you find. You have to learn not to hoarde health, armor and ammo and delegate who needs it most, generally i think the experience is a much greater one than promoting primal competition: racing for a rocket launcher time and time and time again only to frag or be fragged. dont get me wrong i loved HL's DMC (quake DM) Mod and really got into the teamplay of TFC clan matches and i'm always up for a bout of destruction in Halo's deathmatch but these should complement a coop mode.
i think when it comes down to it deathmatch is like drinking lager on a night out in a club: you drink a lot, fast and get stupidly drunk. coop is more like a civilised few pints of real cask ale around an open fire in a warm pub, sure you still get a bit silly and have a joke but you end the night with warm toes - which is important. where was my point again?
Start->Programs->MS Visual Studio (or DevCpp, or Visual-MinGW, but preferably all three) File->Load Project/Workspace->[project file] Build double click resulting exe
for an example of how NOT to achieve this see FireFox
Seriously, looks and smells just like a smallish digital reciever (as used in the UK at least) but instead of sucking TV through the aerial it'd just have an RJ45 jack at the back. All that's left to the user is to plug that into their modem/router/etc. This box would then operate like the Venice Project's GUI probably but the killer would the taking out of the loop the PC. I have no desire to run cables around my house so i can play movies and tv shows on my PC upstairs and shuffle them over to my TV and i dont think the Wife will be too savvy at finding, downloading and codec-hunting just to get the darned things to play. i want the box to do the lot, even allow you to pick 8 shows to "buffer" overnight to be viewed tomorrow instantly as well as stream what you want to watch now. And being networked up it too could act as a P2P client for the rest of the network. All seamless and only requiring me to plug in three cables: power, network, SCART.
Tivo and Sky+ are great steps towards this but they still rely on someone else's decision on how to use the available bandwidth (i.e. linear tv scheduling)
This leads me nicely into my question: A 1080p HD movie won't fit onto a DVD in H.264 without an unreasonably low data rate but how large would it be if you picked an ideal compromise between quality and rate? Then compare that to the sizes of Blu-Ray vs HDDVD... AFAIK a lot of the argument over which format is best is in terms of the two-layer capacity, but if the aforementioned H.264 movie fits onto both with plenty room to spare wouldnt it make the argument moot?*
*at least for movies, i suspect the Special Features will still come on another disc and wont be full max hardcore HD anyway. Also TV series will still probably be spread across as many discs as possible in an attempt by the studios to convince you it's worth forking over an arm,a leg and your wife for the complete X-files.
You touched upon an important point there too, Joe Public usually doesnt think in terms of Windows vs OSX vs GNU/Linux vs AmigaOS4... They buy a "computer". That computer will most likely come in the form of a Dell a HP or a Mac and may well be from PC World with a free digital camera, oh and have Intel Inside too, because that's what the TV adverts tell them is good.
While us geeks are sitting around slashdot arguing about Vista's lateness, OSX's niceness and Linux's empire toppling innocence PC World, HP, Dell and Apple are raking in the big bucks and conditioning the public's opinions on what constitutes the latest greatest in computing via advertising.
The simple fact is that until PC World adertises their latest Red Hat or Suse bundle during the Superbowl GNU/Linux will not be joe-public's-desktop-ready no matter what we collectively shout about it here.
Obviously, i sincerely hope to be eventually proven wrong, but i suspect my karma's about to plummet rollercoaster style, in which case: Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
The mistake probably wasnt the suffix itself but the assumption that the country was the lowest common denominator between organisations. This is why we have microsoft.com and microsoft.co.uk instead of us.microsoft and uk.microsoft . Many companies do rearrange their websites to use this subdomaining system (as probably does MS) and it makes more sense in that respect.
We've also had this discussion before about.tel because it seems obvious that telephony should either use an email-like syntax but with a different identifyer: technical.support#uk.microsoft or at least use a "standard" suffix like www/ftp: tel.technical-support.uk.microsoft
however this doesnt solve the problem about what the root domains should be?.earth.sol may seem like a good idea so we can have microsoft.earth.sol and asteroidminingco.sol but still retain cyclomedia.co.uk(.earth.sol) seperate from cyclomedia.nl(.earth.sol), but cyclomedia.net is just a mirror of the latter and so could be considered naughty.
in any case the big co's are always going to buy up all the permutations they can, and that makes ICANN lot's of cash.
i've used a 100 sided dice in the past, it was about 2 inches in diameter and made up of hexagons/pentagons, you had to roll it on a perfectly flat surface to figure out what you'd rolled, mind.
i love the idea of doing it in a FOSS fashion and can easily envision a MOD scene evolving around the game as it is extensible. In favour of that is also my lack of spare time what with being a full time worker and parent. Against that idea is that i DO have kids to feed and would like to indulge in at least a little capitalism:-)
Perhaps there is a middle way, maybe i can just copyright the fundamental concept and then license sets, mods and expansions for sale - but allow plenty of fair use to create your own sets. That would still need to be some proof of consumer-demand to get people to want to license. On the other hand, setting up a web site with the rules and how to make your own sets, along with an AJAX powered version to play online would be great, but i wouldnt want to get into an argument about licensing terms because i changed a neuance of a rule at a user's suggestion and they then want a cut. (though saying that, being a software beta tester doesn't grant you a share of the software co's profits, so there is a precedent i suppose)
Anyway, i'm not being pretentious about any plans for global domination and the comparison to chess and go was just in terms of the rules. Also i'm fully aware that not having a tested prototype doesnt help my situation but i'm not planning on pitching it to $BigGameCo tomorrow. Hence me asking for advice about which path to follow, before i step out the door.
If movies were £2 a Disc and not £20 a disc then they'd suddenly find themselves selling a bucket load more. We're witnessing a slooooow move towards this: Batman begins came out simultaneously in 2 disc (toys!) and 1 disc (just the movie) editions.
It's unlikely to happen any time soon though because the exec's attitude at MAFIAA affiliates just isn't there yet. Hence the annual iTunes arguments about price, they currently want the ability to charge extra for premium tracks... "premium" meaning "the new britney spears track" where they expect a bunch of consumers to want to pay more for it to get it ASAP than wait a month or two to get it at the usual $.99. By advertising these as "exclusive" and "VIP" they want to create a bizzarro false market where the only difference in the content is when exactly you get it... i.e. milking the happy consumers who want to be "cool" because they have the latest VIP exclusive britney release on their iPod and can brag to their clique who are obviously cheap because they dont want to fork over the cash.
Basically dumb-assed consumers hold plenty of the blame because they think that buying a pair of trousers for £200 is somehow better than getting a pair for £20 (or in my case: £2 from a charity shop, thank you very much) because having some other guy's name tattooed across your butt is so much cooler than saving cash and basically having warm legs.
oops, i ranted, i did have a point somewhere back there
Slightly off topic but something i've been wandering about, if you're time-shifting your generated electricity by only a few hours - using solar at night is a good example - are there better or just more interesting ways to store the *energy* than good old lead-acid and the like?
One idea i had was to spin up a largish gyroscope, (though you might need to give it a kick start...attach a bicycle!) whilst "charging" then change a gearbox to drive an alternator when "discharging". The efficiency of this could probably be quite good over a few hours, provided you keep it's bearings well greased.
Another was clockwork: wind a spring when charging and again, run the power through a gearbox to an alternator when discharging, you could even use a clutch to directly wind the spring via wind or water power (though i suspect the former wouldnt have the torque) that way you wouldnt lose energy converting it to/from electricity in the first instance. AFAIK though it's hard to regulate clockwork to provide a continuous reliable RPM, which is why clocks tick instead of running smoothly.
Or good old gravity power: Charge by pumping water uphill, Discharge by releasing it downhill, this probably wouldnt be that great on a less than reservior scale, you'd have to reinforce your attic and make it into a huge tank, and do the same for the basement. on the other hand the same water might be able to be used as a heat store/heat sink for temperature regulation.
Havent researched any of this but i suspect that using huge tanks of hazadours chemicals to electolytically store electricity isnt exactly environmentally sound when you think about production and disposal.
is an open source cross platform community driven recreation of AmigaOS and all it's wonders that even modern OS's STILL just don't mangage 20+ years on such as
1. Logical Volume Assignment : Assign "Webs" to your web site dir and point your web server at the Drive called Webs, not a hard path attatched to a hardware controlled drive letter. oh and if you want to move your website or switch to a backup just reassign Webs to point to the new location, only the underlying OS will know that you've moved it. Also works for removable media, ram drives, network mappings. Beautiful and not tied to a mysterious legacy drive structure peppered with acronyms like unix/linux wither
2. ability to control window z-index. The window you are currently using isnt forced to be on top, again this may sound odd at first but imagine you are copy-pasting text line-by-line from one window to another, in windows you'd have to resize and move them around so you could always see both whichever was in focus just so you didn't give yourself an epliectic fit by switching back and forth constantly. in Amiga OS even a maximised app can stay underneath other apps when you are using it. this is by far the feature i'd still most like to see in windows, you can however configure KDE to do this, fortunatley (i usually assign bring-to-front to a double click on the title bar, simple, would someone PLEASE write some kind of service to allow me to do this in Windows!?)
3. multiple screens, different software can open a new screen in a different resolution with different color depth. yeah you can kind of do this in windows when booting up a game but we all know it's actually re-setting the resolution of the system as a whole, illustrated by the fact that when a game bombs your desktop is f**ked. You can have as many as a like, so you can be tight with your desktop's video ram and run it in 256 colors if you wish, but imagine at the same time being able to host a HD movie on another screen, pause it, and switch back to the desktop instantly without waiting for the OS to have a fit first.
4. actually well implimented multitasking, like being able to zip up a bunch of folders on your hard drive AND format a floppy ready to put them on at the same time. without a) a major slowdown or b) the whole system crashing and burning. and what's with windows totally stopping dead when you stick anything in an optical drive, does Vista still do that?
i use windows professionally day in day out, and have done for about a decade, but i still get frustrated by what i see as it's bizzare failure to impliment even the simplist, sensiblest features i started off using when i first ever set foot in a multitasking OS
not to mention these are probably just email accounts and document shares on desktop PCs i doubt very much there's a shortcut on Tony Blair's laptop to a nuclear missile launch VB app.
does anyone else here think it seems a bit odd to print a number with 16 decimal places then stick an E+08 at the end, why not just an 8 digit number with 8 decimal places?
i do actually know the TECHNICAL answer: one digit, followed by a bunch of decimal places followed by an exponent is standard scientific notation. Still looks bizzarro to me though
which leads to another interesting thought: If cold war II got phyisical - but only in LEO so we mostly all survived - then what if all the resulting orbitting debris became so vast in reach, velocity and resulting deadliness that the human race became effectively trapped on earth?...
Actually, i hearby declare first dibs on putting this concept to work in scifi literature, copyright me, two-thousand and now.
yeah AFAIK it's easier for a PAL TV to support NTSC than the other way around. The picture usually looks stretched due to the difference in the analogue signal timing but if you have a TV that has a 16:9 letterbox mode you can use that to squash the picture back down to something a bit more palettable, though probably not 4:3 either.
Works for me playing import games on my PS1 too and i doubt that does any conversion, so i suspect that the DVD players i've used this way simply output a 50Hz (PAL at 2x25) or 60Hz (NTSC @ (5*24)/2) signal depending on the mode, indeed the good ole Amiga could be easily switched betwix t' modes wi' nary a trouble
it's not like it's hard, in the UK at least we have a big black number on a white background inside a big red circle. If you want to drive outlandishly fast take your car to a racetrack, most have open days where you can thrash it at your peril.
Though i expect a person like you would be banned from these too for ignoring the guys waving the yellow flags near an incident because YOU decided that it was safe to speed on by.
Same principle applies to the rules of the road: Don't like the rules? Either lobby to change them OR BUILD YOUR OWN ROADS.
the fundamental principle of the given A,B,C example is based upon newton's laws, for helicopter gunships firing missiles the principle this: the velocity of the launched missile is added to the velocity of the helicopter (air resistance, opposing force of launched rocket and momentum asided, let's keep it simple!) to get the "final" velocity of a rocket. i.e. if you've got a launcher that launches projectiles at 10m/s and you are travelling at 100m/s fire it forward and the projectile goes 110m/s.
the problem i have is when this is applied to light, which is massless and intangible. The example assumes that a laser fired from the front of a space freighter (travelling at velocity V) would - according to newton - have a resulting velocity of c + v. relativaty tries to bend time itself so that c = c+v can be true without v==0 being true. However, light isnt actually launched - it's emitted, maybe, just maybe, because it has no mass too it is not effected by the velocity of the space freighter, maybe it just goes along on it's merry way at c regardless. The people on the space freighter might start to see some wierd-assed things as their speed approaches c and they start to catch up with their own emmitted light (and relativity expects this: it yeilds a blue shift forward and a red shift aft). But frankly i find the idea that because light is travelling at a fixed speed and everything looks a bit wierd you make a giant leap to frames of reference and warping spacetime bizzarre.
Naturally of course relativity is real and observable, but it could be that Einy stumbled across it by accident whilst trying to bend his mind around an entirely different - and non existent - problem.
Alternatively, i just might not *get* it, i do have a physics degree, but my final grade wasn't exactly up there (i spent far too much time in the computer lab playing with the new interweb thingy).
5 years? That's fast for MS, in 1985ish the Amiga was born, who's filesystem allowed logical volume names to be attatched to every device and then be intrinsically addressed by that name by the OS or any application, regardless if it was a Hard Disk, Floppy, CD, Ramdisk or a folder in a subdirectory somewhere that you wanted to promote to volume status by running a command called "Assign"... absobloodyutely astonishingly simple. imagine being able to switch to a backup website by just changing the logical volume "Webs" to point to a different location... And MS is *still* stuck on Drive letters and absolute paths, the best we can hope for is to mount a network drive on letter W and point that back to the location on the same computer.
don't know why i felt the need to rant about that, it's been a stick up my ass for over a decade now
Slashdot Mirror
This is probably not the revolution right here, but it could be the sign that the wave is cresting and ready to break. One day all flat screen HD tvs will have an rj45 jack (or maybe builtin wireless) they'll connect to the central servers and peer-to-peer share every tv show and film you could possibly want to watch, whenever you want to watch it. no more messing with recordable media to time shift the broadcasters dictated overlapping randomised scheduling, especially considering the buy-once-download-again-any-time model :-)
Though i'm a little dubious about any chain letter i'm glad this advice is in there, if you are given the ability to use a long password then IMO song lyrics are easy to remember but hard to guess. especially that one eternally chisseled into your brain from the record your grandma used to play when you were 6
Half Life and Quake 3 lacked Coop play and killed it. I'd never played deathmatch until i tried HL's "Multiplayer" mode and up until then me and my 3 brothers had between us conquered Doom,Doom II,Duke Nukem 3D,Quake,Quake 2 and made a start on Unreal (not Tournement, the actual game). Coop IMO is something sorely missing from the shooters of today, (at least Halo and Halo2 gave it a bit of a go and me and a mate made it through both together). In coop you get to team up, ram tanks at each other, "accidentally" set of a BFG in a room where your buddies are, climb on things as well as blast the living sh*t out of every bad guy you find. You have to learn not to hoarde health, armor and ammo and delegate who needs it most, generally i think the experience is a much greater one than promoting primal competition: racing for a rocket launcher time and time and time again only to frag or be fragged. dont get me wrong i loved HL's DMC (quake DM) Mod and really got into the teamplay of TFC clan matches and i'm always up for a bout of destruction in Halo's deathmatch but these should complement a coop mode.
i think when it comes down to it deathmatch is like drinking lager on a night out in a club: you drink a lot, fast and get stupidly drunk. coop is more like a civilised few pints of real cask ale around an open fire in a warm pub, sure you still get a bit silly and have a joke but you end the night with warm toes - which is important. where was my point again?
Start->Programs->MS Visual Studio (or DevCpp, or Visual-MinGW, but preferably all three)
File->Load Project/Workspace->[project file]
Build
double click resulting exe
for an example of how NOT to achieve this see FireFox
Seriously, looks and smells just like a smallish digital reciever (as used in the UK at least) but instead of sucking TV through the aerial it'd just have an RJ45 jack at the back. All that's left to the user is to plug that into their modem/router/etc. This box would then operate like the Venice Project's GUI probably but the killer would the taking out of the loop the PC. I have no desire to run cables around my house so i can play movies and tv shows on my PC upstairs and shuffle them over to my TV and i dont think the Wife will be too savvy at finding, downloading and codec-hunting just to get the darned things to play. i want the box to do the lot, even allow you to pick 8 shows to "buffer" overnight to be viewed tomorrow instantly as well as stream what you want to watch now. And being networked up it too could act as a P2P client for the rest of the network. All seamless and only requiring me to plug in three cables: power, network, SCART.
Tivo and Sky+ are great steps towards this but they still rely on someone else's decision on how to use the available bandwidth (i.e. linear tv scheduling)
This leads me nicely into my question: A 1080p HD movie won't fit onto a DVD in H.264 without an unreasonably low data rate but how large would it be if you picked an ideal compromise between quality and rate? Then compare that to the sizes of Blu-Ray vs HDDVD ... AFAIK a lot of the argument over which format is best is in terms of the two-layer capacity, but if the aforementioned H.264 movie fits onto both with plenty room to spare wouldnt it make the argument moot?*
*at least for movies, i suspect the Special Features will still come on another disc and wont be full max hardcore HD anyway. Also TV series will still probably be spread across as many discs as possible in an attempt by the studios to convince you it's worth forking over an arm,a leg and your wife for the complete X-files.
You touched upon an important point there too, Joe Public usually doesnt think in terms of Windows vs OSX vs GNU/Linux vs AmigaOS4 ... They buy a "computer". That computer will most likely come in the form of a Dell a HP or a Mac and may well be from PC World with a free digital camera, oh and have Intel Inside too, because that's what the TV adverts tell them is good.
While us geeks are sitting around slashdot arguing about Vista's lateness, OSX's niceness and Linux's empire toppling innocence PC World, HP, Dell and Apple are raking in the big bucks and conditioning the public's opinions on what constitutes the latest greatest in computing via advertising.
The simple fact is that until PC World adertises their latest Red Hat or Suse bundle during the Superbowl GNU/Linux will not be joe-public's-desktop-ready no matter what we collectively shout about it here.
Obviously, i sincerely hope to be eventually proven wrong, but i suspect my karma's about to plummet rollercoaster style, in which case: Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
1. story about compiling an app using punch cards
... that dad told me
2.
hands up all those slashdotters who suddenly felt very old
The mistake probably wasnt the suffix itself but the assumption that the country was the lowest common denominator between organisations. This is why we have microsoft.com and microsoft.co.uk instead of us.microsoft and uk.microsoft . Many companies do rearrange their websites to use this subdomaining system (as probably does MS) and it makes more sense in that respect.
.tel because it seems obvious that telephony should either use an email-like syntax but with a different identifyer: technical.support#uk.microsoft or at least use a "standard" suffix like www/ftp: tel.technical-support.uk.microsoft
.earth.sol may seem like a good idea so we can have microsoft.earth.sol and asteroidminingco.sol but still retain cyclomedia.co.uk(.earth.sol) seperate from cyclomedia.nl(.earth.sol), but cyclomedia.net is just a mirror of the latter and so could be considered naughty.
We've also had this discussion before about
however this doesnt solve the problem about what the root domains should be?
in any case the big co's are always going to buy up all the permutations they can, and that makes ICANN lot's of cash.
i've used a 100 sided dice in the past, it was about 2 inches in diameter and made up of hexagons/pentagons, you had to roll it on a perfectly flat surface to figure out what you'd rolled, mind.
oh wait, quick hunt around the net: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zocchihedron
obviously 80 was a number i pulled out of my ass, sorry about that
i love the idea of doing it in a FOSS fashion and can easily envision a MOD scene evolving around the game as it is extensible. In favour of that is also my lack of spare time what with being a full time worker and parent. Against that idea is that i DO have kids to feed and would like to indulge in at least a little capitalism :-)
Perhaps there is a middle way, maybe i can just copyright the fundamental concept and then license sets, mods and expansions for sale - but allow plenty of fair use to create your own sets. That would still need to be some proof of consumer-demand to get people to want to license. On the other hand, setting up a web site with the rules and how to make your own sets, along with an AJAX powered version to play online would be great, but i wouldnt want to get into an argument about licensing terms because i changed a neuance of a rule at a user's suggestion and they then want a cut. (though saying that, being a software beta tester doesn't grant you a share of the software co's profits, so there is a precedent i suppose)
Anyway, i'm not being pretentious about any plans for global domination and the comparison to chess and go was just in terms of the rules. Also i'm fully aware that not having a tested prototype doesnt help my situation but i'm not planning on pitching it to $BigGameCo tomorrow. Hence me asking for advice about which path to follow, before i step out the door.
If movies were £2 a Disc and not £20 a disc then they'd suddenly find themselves selling a bucket load more. We're witnessing a slooooow move towards this: Batman begins came out simultaneously in 2 disc (toys!) and 1 disc (just the movie) editions.
... "premium" meaning "the new britney spears track" where they expect a bunch of consumers to want to pay more for it to get it ASAP than wait a month or two to get it at the usual $.99. By advertising these as "exclusive" and "VIP" they want to create a bizzarro false market where the only difference in the content is when exactly you get it... i.e. milking the happy consumers who want to be "cool" because they have the latest VIP exclusive britney release on their iPod and can brag to their clique who are obviously cheap because they dont want to fork over the cash.
It's unlikely to happen any time soon though because the exec's attitude at MAFIAA affiliates just isn't there yet. Hence the annual iTunes arguments about price, they currently want the ability to charge extra for premium tracks
Basically dumb-assed consumers hold plenty of the blame because they think that buying a pair of trousers for £200 is somehow better than getting a pair for £20 (or in my case: £2 from a charity shop, thank you very much) because having some other guy's name tattooed across your butt is so much cooler than saving cash and basically having warm legs.
oops, i ranted, i did have a point somewhere back there
try http://www.aros.org/ :-)
Slightly off topic but something i've been wandering about, if you're time-shifting your generated electricity by only a few hours - using solar at night is a good example - are there better or just more interesting ways to store the *energy* than good old lead-acid and the like?
One idea i had was to spin up a largish gyroscope, (though you might need to give it a kick start...attach a bicycle!) whilst "charging" then change a gearbox to drive an alternator when "discharging". The efficiency of this could probably be quite good over a few hours, provided you keep it's bearings well greased.
Another was clockwork: wind a spring when charging and again, run the power through a gearbox to an alternator when discharging, you could even use a clutch to directly wind the spring via wind or water power (though i suspect the former wouldnt have the torque) that way you wouldnt lose energy converting it to/from electricity in the first instance. AFAIK though it's hard to regulate clockwork to provide a continuous reliable RPM, which is why clocks tick instead of running smoothly.
Or good old gravity power: Charge by pumping water uphill, Discharge by releasing it downhill, this probably wouldnt be that great on a less than reservior scale, you'd have to reinforce your attic and make it into a huge tank, and do the same for the basement. on the other hand the same water might be able to be used as a heat store/heat sink for temperature regulation.
Havent researched any of this but i suspect that using huge tanks of hazadours chemicals to electolytically store electricity isnt exactly environmentally sound when you think about production and disposal.
www.aros.org
is an open source cross platform community driven recreation of AmigaOS and all it's wonders that even modern OS's STILL just don't mangage 20+ years on such as
1. Logical Volume Assignment : Assign "Webs" to your web site dir and point your web server at the Drive called Webs, not a hard path attatched to a hardware controlled drive letter. oh and if you want to move your website or switch to a backup just reassign Webs to point to the new location, only the underlying OS will know that you've moved it. Also works for removable media, ram drives, network mappings. Beautiful and not tied to a mysterious legacy drive structure peppered with acronyms like unix/linux wither
2. ability to control window z-index. The window you are currently using isnt forced to be on top, again this may sound odd at first but imagine you are copy-pasting text line-by-line from one window to another, in windows you'd have to resize and move them around so you could always see both whichever was in focus just so you didn't give yourself an epliectic fit by switching back and forth constantly. in Amiga OS even a maximised app can stay underneath other apps when you are using it. this is by far the feature i'd still most like to see in windows, you can however configure KDE to do this, fortunatley (i usually assign bring-to-front to a double click on the title bar, simple, would someone PLEASE write some kind of service to allow me to do this in Windows!?)
3. multiple screens, different software can open a new screen in a different resolution with different color depth. yeah you can kind of do this in windows when booting up a game but we all know it's actually re-setting the resolution of the system as a whole, illustrated by the fact that when a game bombs your desktop is f**ked. You can have as many as a like, so you can be tight with your desktop's video ram and run it in 256 colors if you wish, but imagine at the same time being able to host a HD movie on another screen, pause it, and switch back to the desktop instantly without waiting for the OS to have a fit first.
4. actually well implimented multitasking, like being able to zip up a bunch of folders on your hard drive AND format a floppy ready to put them on at the same time. without a) a major slowdown or b) the whole system crashing and burning. and what's with windows totally stopping dead when you stick anything in an optical drive, does Vista still do that?
i use windows professionally day in day out, and have done for about a decade, but i still get frustrated by what i see as it's bizzare failure to impliment even the simplist, sensiblest features i started off using when i first ever set foot in a multitasking OS
you need a hardware interface to manage the funky access speed switching: google catweasle
not to mention these are probably just email accounts and document shares on desktop PCs i doubt very much there's a shortcut on Tony Blair's laptop to a nuclear missile launch VB app.
does anyone else here think it seems a bit odd to print a number with 16 decimal places then stick an E+08 at the end, why not just an 8 digit number with 8 decimal places?
i do actually know the TECHNICAL answer: one digit, followed by a bunch of decimal places followed by an exponent is standard scientific notation. Still looks bizzarro to me though
which leads to another interesting thought: If cold war II got phyisical - but only in LEO so we mostly all survived - then what if all the resulting orbitting debris became so vast in reach, velocity and resulting deadliness that the human race became effectively trapped on earth? ...
Actually, i hearby declare first dibs on putting this concept to work in scifi literature, copyright me, two-thousand and now.
yeah AFAIK it's easier for a PAL TV to support NTSC than the other way around. The picture usually looks stretched due to the difference in the analogue signal timing but if you have a TV that has a 16:9 letterbox mode you can use that to squash the picture back down to something a bit more palettable, though probably not 4:3 either.
Works for me playing import games on my PS1 too and i doubt that does any conversion, so i suspect that the DVD players i've used this way simply output a 50Hz (PAL at 2x25) or 60Hz (NTSC @ (5*24)/2) signal depending on the mode, indeed the good ole Amiga could be easily switched betwix t' modes wi' nary a trouble
actually, the other translation was more correct, i was just having an uncontrolled yorkshireman moment, it happens
it's not like it's hard, in the UK at least we have a big black number on a white background inside a big red circle. If you want to drive outlandishly fast take your car to a racetrack, most have open days where you can thrash it at your peril.
Though i expect a person like you would be banned from these too for ignoring the guys waving the yellow flags near an incident because YOU decided that it was safe to speed on by.
Same principle applies to the rules of the road: Don't like the rules? Either lobby to change them OR BUILD YOUR OWN ROADS.
Because THAT worked wonders for release timing, content control and market restrictions, didn't it.*
*Though having a decent TV that can handle PAL and NTSC helps, in the UK they're 6 bob a throw i can tell ye!
the fundamental principle of the given A,B,C example is based upon newton's laws, for helicopter gunships firing missiles the principle this: the velocity of the launched missile is added to the velocity of the helicopter (air resistance, opposing force of launched rocket and momentum asided, let's keep it simple!) to get the "final" velocity of a rocket. i.e. if you've got a launcher that launches projectiles at 10m/s and you are travelling at 100m/s fire it forward and the projectile goes 110m/s.
the problem i have is when this is applied to light, which is massless and intangible. The example assumes that a laser fired from the front of a space freighter (travelling at velocity V) would - according to newton - have a resulting velocity of c + v. relativaty tries to bend time itself so that c = c+v can be true without v==0 being true. However, light isnt actually launched - it's emitted, maybe, just maybe, because it has no mass too it is not effected by the velocity of the space freighter, maybe it just goes along on it's merry way at c regardless. The people on the space freighter might start to see some wierd-assed things as their speed approaches c and they start to catch up with their own emmitted light (and relativity expects this: it yeilds a blue shift forward and a red shift aft). But frankly i find the idea that because light is travelling at a fixed speed and everything looks a bit wierd you make a giant leap to frames of reference and warping spacetime bizzarre.
Naturally of course relativity is real and observable, but it could be that Einy stumbled across it by accident whilst trying to bend his mind around an entirely different - and non existent - problem.
Alternatively, i just might not *get* it, i do have a physics degree, but my final grade wasn't exactly up there (i spent far too much time in the computer lab playing with the new interweb thingy).
5 years? That's fast for MS, in 1985ish the Amiga was born, who's filesystem allowed logical volume names to be attatched to every device and then be intrinsically addressed by that name by the OS or any application, regardless if it was a Hard Disk, Floppy, CD, Ramdisk or a folder in a subdirectory somewhere that you wanted to promote to volume status by running a command called "Assign" ... absobloodyutely astonishingly simple. imagine being able to switch to a backup website by just changing the logical volume "Webs" to point to a different location... And MS is *still* stuck on Drive letters and absolute paths, the best we can hope for is to mount a network drive on letter W and point that back to the location on the same computer.
don't know why i felt the need to rant about that, it's been a stick up my ass for over a decade now