You guys are making this too complicated. NASA's site says: "Located 10 billion miles away, but with a diameter that is a little more than half the width of the United States, Xena is only 1.5 picture elements across in Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys' view."
Think projection in a 3D game. A pixel represents, at a projected distance of 10 billion miles, a width x. Xena is 1.5x.
The final image (as you all have pointed out) would require a minimum of two pixels of information to accurately reproduce the projected image from a distance of 10 billion miles. The second pixel would not have the intensity of the first. But from the image on the site, it looks like a lot more than two pixels of information were recorded; I don't see how they could magnify two pixels and get that.
[rant] It's truly amazing that we can see things so far away with our little technology; but ultimately, humans have made it so far as the moon... with respect to our sandbox in the universe, that's not very far. Jupiter and Mars are completely different things - they probably were created via entirely different processes. Mars is a dusty rock that gets hot & cold a lot. Jupiter is a massive ball of gas that has thunderstorms with its moons; I read somewhere that one of Jupiter's moons has a tidal terrain. Could you imagine the crust of the Earth rising and falling some-odd hundred meters as the moon went by? One (many?) of Jupiters' moons has this property.
We need a name for balls of mass (whether a few km in diameter or an astronomical unit, e.g. 93 million miles, in diameter) that orbit stars for a living. If that's a planet, fine. Sounds like comets, Pluto, Xena, and everything else that orbits a star is a planet. Otherwise, a "planet" is a name for the eight terrestrial entities that astronomers have known about for centuries... and we still need a name/class system for things that orbit parent stars. Many (most?) argue that comets and the like are not planets because they came to be and exist in a different way than our traditional "planets"... but our own (8 or 9) planets are so very different to begin with, that if you think about it long enough, they're all too radically different to be in the same class. We may like to think we know how Jupiter and Mars and Earth and the Moon were created; that crap happened so long ago, it's safe to say that humans have no way of knowing - none of us were there.
I like the second article, which suggests we demote Pluto and Xena (and similar objects) to "dwarf" planets.
We're only human! For a long time we thought matter and energy were two different things; now, the fact that matter is considered "solid" is coming into question. It goes to show how little we really know to begin with, and arguing the definition of a "planet" is as useful to our curiosities as arguing the difference between a rabbit turd and a cow pie. [/rant]
So as not to only rant, I thought I would try to be informative as well.:)
If anyone would like to see Xena, here's a page with a decent shot. The actual NASA feature about the recent picture is here.
Yeah, they are destroying America by allowing the poorer people in society to buy more goods to improve their lifestyle. How dare they! So what if a family can save $2500+ dollars a year shopping at wal-mart! cheaper groceries is just a horrible thing!
The inherent reply here is that a lot of families are poor because Wal-Mart came to town and drove their family-owned business to shambles... I don't know how accurate that is, but that's the impression most Wal-Mart boycotters would like us to believe.
I'm sorry, but this article is at least making a bigger deal out of this than it really is. Wal-Mart seems to admit plenty of blood and guts given that they sell Doom 3, San Andreas, Far Cry, etc. So that leaves some extraneous sex scenes and tits. Who cares? I've never once bought a game "simply because" it had some boobs in it. I've never played a game with boobs in it where the boobs made the difference between a fun game or a crappy game. There were a lot of "underground" NES cartridges that featured sexual themes in all of a handful of colors; and guess why Nintendo wouldn't license them? But I never saw anybody complaining that Nintendo was dictating modern game design, even in the late 80s or early 90s. I believe 3D Realms took it to mainstream with Duke3d; I still didn't buy Duke3d for the really lame 2-frame animated breast flashing. I actually thought it was done in poor taste; you could tell they didn't want to push it.
I never knew about the hidden sex in GTA:SA until it surfaced in the media; I still thought it was one of the coolest (and raciest!) games I have ever played.
Wal-Mart, if anything, has minimal standards for games; I see a lot of games with epic cut scenes all over the box and no real screenshots... the game play ends up being mediocre. The CEOs seem to work these half-assed game formulas more than Wal-Mart does; if a game is actually fun and creative, it's more power to the developer. That certainly wouldn't discount it from being sold at Wal-Mart... I doubt Wal-Mart tells them to "leave the fun and creativity out of it; just have some sparkly water and some glitzy looking cut scenes mmkay?" or "we need another boring RTS with some 3D stuff and maybe some terrorists, if you don't mind".
Anyone play C&C/Generals? Did you really think it was clever that the resource-snatching unit is also the transport unit? Or did anyone take that as a clear indicator that the game was rushed, and no wonder it's not as cool as Red Alert or Total Annihilation? Games today answer to money with or without Wal-Mart. If your game doesn't ship before Christmas, your profits get cut to like a third; some really great and heavily anticipated games like Gran Turismo 4 still succeed after missing a Christmas deadline, but ultimately, most get scrapped if they can't be finished in time. Even Quake 2 was criticized for being "rushed" in time for the holidays, way back when. It still succeeded wildly.
Here's some guidelines:
If your game has a lot to market, and doesn't have nudity, and is possibly fun to play, it probably has some leverage with Wal-Mart's executives.
If you want to make a boring game that even looks boring, Wal-Mart (and myself for that matter) probably won't buy it.
If you're looking for a game with nudity, go to a porn shop or something; Wal-Mart (nor mass America, nor hardcore gamers, nor me, etc.) are probably going to buy it.
And therefore, if you want to make a game with nudity as a central theme AND want the success of a game like GTA or Doom 3, dream on, Wal-Mart or not.
Incidentally, if Wal-Mart controls anything (along with Best Buy and Circuit City) it's probably music, since those three brands are responsible for something like 90% of CD retail sales. I don't even like Wal-Mart, mainly because of their historical mistreatment of their staff and their ability to wipe out a town full of hard working, family owned businesses with one store.
and if we do find SUV's on Venus, we'll know that any future NASA Venusian rovers will need to carry good auto insurance, and gas prices will probably be amazingly high...
I agree with you. My FX board is a Boss GT6, which is certainly better than the Digitech "thing" I was using before... although it doesn't have the solid state circuitry of Boss' stomp boxes, the quality is truly superb compared to a stomp box run through a practice amp. If I were actually playing in a band, I would shell out for a nice amp.
IMO, with the GT6 run stereo/digitally through a decent PC sound system (nice stereo or surround amp/speakers w/ a decent SoundBlaster Live, or better, card), you get the best sound for the money, assuming you already had the nice stereo and the PC. Like you said though, if you can actually afford two high quality tube amps, the sound is exquisite. I take back what I said about it sounding better than any amp I've ever heard; it would be more accurate to say it sounds better *for the money*.:) A nice Fender Twin Reverb or something in a sound stage with nice acoustics is pretty hard to beat, but far too noisy (and expensive!) for what I do. By contrast, most practice amps (even nice Marshall non-tube gig amps) hamper my FX board IMO; you're limited to the range and dynamics of the amp, particluarly at non-ear-blasting volume.
This is the wrong format to use for teaching basic level content like this. As others have pointed out, it's really easy basic stuff... one of the high-level (5) screens is like "Which of the following gives heat and light to the Earth?" Options: Moon, Sun, or Neptune. Fourth graders?! That's 9 and 10 year olds.
Teaching this stuff isn't that difficult without using a website anyway. My elementary education was sufficient that by sixth grade I was very interested in astronomy, and was able to use the Internet to satisfy my curiosities; there were already flyby pictures of Io (Saturn moon) and from Venera 13 (Soviet Venus Lander), IIRC, on JPL's website in 1994 or 95. I didn't have Internet access in elementary school (and neither did my school), but I do vividly recall some astronomy projects I did in 2nd or 3rd grade; it went a lot deeper than "the sun gives off heat and light to the Earth, but Neptune and the Moon do not".
If NASA wants to get involved in education, they should actually get involved with schools. Think how other effective government sponsored education campaigns for reading & whatnot have worked. Think about how companies like TI, Yamaha, or Apple have gotten involved with math, music & computers. And they manage to make money in schools! Could NASA not benefit from some other funding besides taxpayer dollars? Especially since there's already other taxpayer dollars delegated to education...
Either way, a cheesy flash site with multiple-choice edutrivia is pretty worthless. Saving for telemetry engineers or something would have been a more worthwhile way to spend the money.
Sound editing: Started w/ CoolEdit Pro, moved to SonicFoundry SoundForge, now I use Audacity/Win32.
MIDI/composing: Cakewalk! It came w/ my sound card.
Track editing: SonicFoundry Acid.
For Linux:
Sound editing: Audacity!
MIDI/composing: Rosegarden
Track editing: (haven't tried/looked into it)
[sort of offtopic]
If you play the electric guitar, you should try to find a recording of Paganini's 5th Caprice. It's kind of an etude for violin; I used Audacity to slow it down (it's all 16th notes at upwards of 200bpm or more) and figure it out on guitar. Jason Becker has a great 1987 video out there of himself playing it when he was about 17. After two years, I'm still not even at two thirds of the original speed (little more than half maybe), but I haven't found anything more fun to play if you like fast guitar solos (and just play for kicks). I've been playing electric guitar for about 11 years now, and this is far and beyond the most challenging piece ever.
Incidentally, using Audacity (or similar) to slow down your favorite guitar solo and then using Cakewalk (or Rosegarden) to tab it out is a great way to learn how to play it. Especially since almost 100% of the tabs I see on the Internet are wrong (true for everything, not just the 5th Caprice). Not to brag or anything, but this is also how I learned the Comfortably Numb solo, Hotel California solo, Stairway to Heaven solo, Hendrix/Little Wing (whole song), Paradise City solo, Top Gun Anthem solo, and a bunch of others (this is not bragging because I never thought I was good enough to learn any of these, especially after looking at tabs on the web:-) again, I just play to listen to myself play)
On (another) side note - if you are in the market for a guitar effects board, I reccomend getting one with a digital output. If you have a SoundBlaster with a LiveDrive (a front panel that gives you more audio connectors such as optical in, RCA in, headphones w/ volume and 1/4 din connector, etc.) or a similar card with S/PDIF input you can hook it right up, and everything after the effects board stays digital. This gives you stereo choruses, reverbs, amp/cabinet models, phases, etc. w/out having to buy two guitar amps (again if you just play for fun). I actually don't own a guitar amp anymore; I just have a halfway decent used stereo on both my front and rear PC channels, and it sounds better than any amp I've ever heard (but will NOT match the volume of a drumset, and is not suitable for jamming w/ others or live stuff - once again, I just play for me)
[/sort of offtopic]
Using software and this hardware setup, I have made my practices at least 100% more effective, and at least 1000% more fun. I highly reccomend it over keeping the two in seperate worlds.
Geez, where have you been. There's no money in honesty like that! How are all the marketing creeps supposed to feed their kids?
Really, this is kind of like the next level of spyware. Instead of watching your cyber-life on the Internet, they watch your real life, in the real world. Soon enough, these people will have lawyer'ized this crap into your cell phone, your iPod, your PDA, your notebook, your car, your place of business, your kids, and everything else you pack up and carry around with you, without your ever knowing it.
Someday we'll all be speaking that double-speak language from 1984, and that innocent looking picture of George W. Bush hanging on your wall will start watching you. You'll be sitting there, getting ready to scream at the whitehouse press secretary on CSPAN when they'll break your door down, mug you, and force you to watch endless commercials for prescription impotence medicine, get-rich-quick real estate schemes, and Vonage until you've spent every last penny you have on crap you'll never use.
heinousjay: I like your attitude. An unreasonable sense of entitlement is a wonderful trait to have.
Hmm, you misunderstood me I guess? The card doesn't work because of their drivers. Under Windows, I mean. I can either have a functioning TV tuner, or up-to-date 3D functionality; not both, because their latest drivers (last year and a half) break the TV functionality.
It would be nice if they acknowledge that people want to use the All-In-Wonder cards under Linux; but I understand, most manufacturers historically hate Linux. In all fairness, they have released somewhat flakey closed-source Linux 3D drivers. But you'd think in three years, they'd be willing to give some specs on the TV tuner to some OSS developers. And they have... ONE GUY on the gatos project, who had to sign an NDA.
So, between having miserable Windows drivers and an apathetic atitude towards Linux users, I'm not going to buy ATI products anymore. Am I not entitled to feel this way? How about, it's my money, I'm entitled to have any atitude I want with it.
Referring to yourself as heinous. Is that a trait? 'Cause that's a wonderful trait to have!
The headline indeed says that AT&T is "forwarding" their traffic to the NSA.
If the NSA and AT&T are in it together, there's absolutely nothing to stop the NSA from putting their own hardware on AT&T's premises to do some initial scanning and filtering, and then sends anything interesting to the NSA. I highly doubt that there's some ginormous 500 terrabit WAN in place to facilitate forwarding all of AT&T's traffic to the NSA. Who pays for something like that and keeps it a secret? A few dozen servers that passively analyze stuff on AT&T's premises would cost next to nothing compared with having some super wide optical WAN. To that end, the article writer probably wasn't entirely accurate in saying that they're "forwarding all".
ATI put a lot of work into development for the XBox 360
And THAT would explain why ATI is so damn inconsiderate with Linux users (i.e. it's been what, three years since I bought my AIW Radeon 9800? And gatos is just now starting to get some things into the mainstream as far as TV tuning support). I didn't know that ATI made the graphics hardware in the 360; I'm sure I should have, but I have no interest in the expensive-as-hell 360.:)
EVEN ON WINDOWS, the latest ATI drivers (for the last year or so) for my AIW TV tuner BARELY work (i.e. if I shut down every single thing I have running in the background and coax the crap out of it, it's barely watchable). Even though the stock drivers that came with it worked fine three years ago. And I would use the stock drivers, except the 3D end is simply out of date. Even their modern 3D drivers aren't as polished as they could be (like why do I need the.NET framework to tune my graphics card again?)
I always bought ATI stuff because I thought their visual quality was a little better than nVidia, and still do. But I probably won't buy anymore ATI stuff because they've been SO inconsiderate of the Linux crowd, and can't even get their Win32 drivers right. I realize it might not be so profitable for them, but they still could have done some things to move the opensource front along a little bit...
These "entities" that get busted are only fined some arbitrary number, and since they rake in a lot more from their profitable spamming business, then there's no incentive to stop. Right? Why don't they do an investigation and find out how much profit was earned from their spamming ventures, and make that their fine? Better yet, they could just find out how much assets they have, and take all. Wouldn't that stop it?
They could make it completely illegal with penalties up to and including taking every last penny you have. So what? Won't they just move out of the country and/or use clever Internet spoofing to hide themselves? Of course it's hard to get people to send you money when they don't know where/who you are... but just because I own some real estate company, and just because 10 million spams went out yesterday advertising that company's product, doesn't mean that I was the one that sent the spam. Without officially knowing the source, as long as I can keep hiding that, I'm in the clear. If they just shutdown the company that the spam advertised, it would become a great way to get your competition shut down!
So here's an idea... why don't we start educating the public about how to recognize spam and NOT TO BUY WHAT THEY'RE SELLING!!!! The day this stops is the day it becomes not profitable. Ultimately, it's Joe Dufus in Bumsville, USA who actually says "Wow, my penis must be really small and/or impotent. I guess my wife got me on some pfvizagra mailing list... I better buy some from this company to make her happy!" or, "Wow, I can get a $300k loan at a flat rate of 5%!! I don't know what that means, but it sounds like a hell of a deal! I better call them..."
The people who keep spam alive are the people who buy into it. That should be the target of our anti-spam efforts; trying to stop people from sending spam is like trying to stop the Internet altogether (since that's about what it would take, if you're fighting it from that end). We've got to get people to quit buying this shit!
Well in all fairness, I do stuff that most people would consider wasting time... like playing Paganini's 5th Caprice over, and over, and over again on the guitar. I don't consider it wasting time just like you don't consider your poetry (which I like btw, as well as your blog) wasting time.
But... why is Slashdot posting an article about someone's fibonacci poetry blog entry? IMHO, that's a pretty lame/. story - why does the middle-of-the-night crowd get all the lame stuff? Last night, it was a footlocker on wheels roaming Antarctica. I'm sorry, I'm sure it's very important research and all, but most people couldn't care less! Maybe they have a giant shortage of article submissions? (right)
All in all, I decided to write a fib poem about/.ers having better things to comment on.:) Ultimately,/. is one big community waste of time, depending on how you look at it or who you ask...
I bet that guy is real freakin' proud of himself, too! I wonder if he gets up in the morning and considers himself to be a good person... I mean to be a lawyer is one thing - to be a patent lawyer is another thing - but to be an all-out dickhole to all of society... geez!
The main area that patents should be allowed is in truly revolutionary technology, not evolutionary.
Exactly!
Even in this case, the poor inventor will have very hard time to defend itself against a company that can afford a whole lawyer company during 100 years.
This is true. But, people like to think of the lone inventor who's spent his entire life, yada yada yada.
not every 'little invention' is a 'revolutionary invention'...like something that improve lawnmowner blade durability by 5%
I agree with you. In that case, if ten lawnmower companies all hire ten alloy chemists to improve the durability of their blades, then it's just ten people doing their jobs. Neither the chemists nor their employers should have any patents on anything - they took an existing invention (the power lawnmower) and improved it (slightly).
Neither MS nor Lucent invented MPEG, and neither of them invented microchips. MPEG and microchips are both patent-deserving revolutionary inventions; but putting a software algorithm into a chip is basic stuff. If MS used Lucent's exact specification for doing so, perhaps there's a copyright infringement somewhere... that's about it.
The more I think about it, the more I think we should do away with patent law altogether, or mainly apply it to credit's sake i.e. if I come up with a new kind of telephone, I would have to give credit to A.G. Bell for his invention; not pay him a bunch of royalties. He didn't build my phone, he built his own and has every right to market and sell his phone. He also has every right to claim that he's the inventor. But I built my phone, and thus should be making the money for it, while stating something like "Based on technology from Alexander Bell, etc."
There's six billion people on the planet. Two of them are likely to have the same idea; it's absolutely not fair that one of them gets all the money just because he made it to the patent office first, or that he thought of it first, or whatever. People work for money. If I think up a brilliant idea and patent it, I did a little work... but all of the other people who perfect my idea, produce it, market it, support it, etc. are the real workers, and should be compensated as such. Essentially, the lone inventor is at fault for trying to do everything himself and not trying to work with all of the other talented people in an organization that could really make his idea work for society in a beneficial way. It's a radical idea I suppose, but very applicable to software. After all, we as programmers are constantly taught not to reinvent the wheel, when in fact patent law forces us to.
Am I in another universe here, or does that seem reasonable?
Actually, that's not entirely accurate... I really don't like Tool much at all, but one thing I found unique about them was that a lot of their songs don't use the traditional 4/4 (drumBASSdrumBASSdrumBASS) type rhythm. Don't they have some tunes in 9/8?
Considering just about every rock song that comes out anymore sounds exactly like every other, a break from the 4/4 rock beat is noteworthy. Of course, all of my exposure to Tool at all comes from years ago...
Was MS the inventor of double-clicking? They have the patent on it, IIRC... Do pre-Windows versions of MacOS (or Xerox's GUI, or whatever) feature double-clicking? Something tells me MS didn't invent the idea. But theoretically, every GUI company everywhere today has infringed on such a brilliant...ahem... "invention".
(It's news for nerds, in'nit? Or is it news at all?)
When I took CSI-1050 at school (computer science 1), our prof had us write a fibonacci sequence writer in his little pretend assembly language. I knew from there on out, every reference I ever saw to Fibonacci would have to do with accomplishing nothing.
Here, on Slashdot, just now, I confirmed that prophecy. Hehehe.
And really, if you're going to post flamebait anyway, why not let it be on a story about fibonacci poetry?
To
me,
stories
about things
like fibonacci
poetry are just like flamebait.
A company that revenues a quarter as much as Microsoft isn't really "the little guy", since we're talking on the order of tens of billions of dollars. MS does $35 - $40 billion a year in gross revenue; Lucent does slightly less than $10 billion a year.
Plus, you have to consider MS in pragmatic terms; they're not being sued over Windows (the heart of their organization), they're being sued over an auxilary market that they've gotten themselves into. Their investors who count on Windows profitability aren't going to be happy if they're losing money because of their "video game" ventures.
Ultimately, if MS truly did infringe a patent of Lucent's, this is going to be a pretty good fight; certainly not comparable to a David vs. Goliath type battle.
Slashdot Mirror
You guys are making this too complicated. NASA's site says: "Located 10 billion miles away, but with a diameter that is a little more than half the width of the United States, Xena is only 1.5 picture elements across in Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys' view."
Think projection in a 3D game. A pixel represents, at a projected distance of 10 billion miles, a width x. Xena is 1.5x.
The final image (as you all have pointed out) would require a minimum of two pixels of information to accurately reproduce the projected image from a distance of 10 billion miles. The second pixel would not have the intensity of the first. But from the image on the site, it looks like a lot more than two pixels of information were recorded; I don't see how they could magnify two pixels and get that.
First of all, IANAA (an astronomer).
:)
[rant]
It's truly amazing that we can see things so far away with our little technology; but ultimately, humans have made it so far as the moon... with respect to our sandbox in the universe, that's not very far. Jupiter and Mars are completely different things - they probably were created via entirely different processes. Mars is a dusty rock that gets hot & cold a lot. Jupiter is a massive ball of gas that has thunderstorms with its moons; I read somewhere that one of Jupiter's moons has a tidal terrain. Could you imagine the crust of the Earth rising and falling some-odd hundred meters as the moon went by? One (many?) of Jupiters' moons has this property.
We need a name for balls of mass (whether a few km in diameter or an astronomical unit, e.g. 93 million miles, in diameter) that orbit stars for a living. If that's a planet, fine. Sounds like comets, Pluto, Xena, and everything else that orbits a star is a planet. Otherwise, a "planet" is a name for the eight terrestrial entities that astronomers have known about for centuries... and we still need a name/class system for things that orbit parent stars. Many (most?) argue that comets and the like are not planets because they came to be and exist in a different way than our traditional "planets"... but our own (8 or 9) planets are so very different to begin with, that if you think about it long enough, they're all too radically different to be in the same class. We may like to think we know how Jupiter and Mars and Earth and the Moon were created; that crap happened so long ago, it's safe to say that humans have no way of knowing - none of us were there.
I like the second article, which suggests we demote Pluto and Xena (and similar objects) to "dwarf" planets.
We're only human! For a long time we thought matter and energy were two different things; now, the fact that matter is considered "solid" is coming into question. It goes to show how little we really know to begin with, and arguing the definition of a "planet" is as useful to our curiosities as arguing the difference between a rabbit turd and a cow pie.
[/rant]
So as not to only rant, I thought I would try to be informative as well.
If anyone would like to see Xena, here's a page with a decent shot. The actual NASA feature about the recent picture is here.
I'm sorry, but this article is at least making a bigger deal out of this than it really is. Wal-Mart seems to admit plenty of blood and guts given that they sell Doom 3, San Andreas, Far Cry, etc. So that leaves some extraneous sex scenes and tits. Who cares? I've never once bought a game "simply because" it had some boobs in it. I've never played a game with boobs in it where the boobs made the difference between a fun game or a crappy game. There were a lot of "underground" NES cartridges that featured sexual themes in all of a handful of colors; and guess why Nintendo wouldn't license them? But I never saw anybody complaining that Nintendo was dictating modern game design, even in the late 80s or early 90s. I believe 3D Realms took it to mainstream with Duke3d; I still didn't buy Duke3d for the really lame 2-frame animated breast flashing. I actually thought it was done in poor taste; you could tell they didn't want to push it.
I never knew about the hidden sex in GTA:SA until it surfaced in the media; I still thought it was one of the coolest (and raciest!) games I have ever played.
Wal-Mart, if anything, has minimal standards for games; I see a lot of games with epic cut scenes all over the box and no real screenshots... the game play ends up being mediocre. The CEOs seem to work these half-assed game formulas more than Wal-Mart does; if a game is actually fun and creative, it's more power to the developer. That certainly wouldn't discount it from being sold at Wal-Mart... I doubt Wal-Mart tells them to "leave the fun and creativity out of it; just have some sparkly water and some glitzy looking cut scenes mmkay?" or "we need another boring RTS with some 3D stuff and maybe some terrorists, if you don't mind".
Anyone play C&C/Generals? Did you really think it was clever that the resource-snatching unit is also the transport unit? Or did anyone take that as a clear indicator that the game was rushed, and no wonder it's not as cool as Red Alert or Total Annihilation? Games today answer to money with or without Wal-Mart. If your game doesn't ship before Christmas, your profits get cut to like a third; some really great and heavily anticipated games like Gran Turismo 4 still succeed after missing a Christmas deadline, but ultimately, most get scrapped if they can't be finished in time. Even Quake 2 was criticized for being "rushed" in time for the holidays, way back when. It still succeeded wildly.
Here's some guidelines:
- If your game has a lot to market, and doesn't have nudity, and is possibly fun to play, it probably has some leverage with Wal-Mart's executives.
- If you want to make a boring game that even looks boring, Wal-Mart (and myself for that matter) probably won't buy it.
- If you're looking for a game with nudity, go to a porn shop or something; Wal-Mart (nor mass America, nor hardcore gamers, nor me, etc.) are probably going to buy it.
- And therefore, if you want to make a game with nudity as a central theme AND want the success of a game like GTA or Doom 3, dream on, Wal-Mart or not.
Incidentally, if Wal-Mart controls anything (along with Best Buy and Circuit City) it's probably music, since those three brands are responsible for something like 90% of CD retail sales. I don't even like Wal-Mart, mainly because of their historical mistreatment of their staff and their ability to wipe out a town full of hard working, family owned businesses with one store.and if we do find SUV's on Venus, we'll know that any future NASA Venusian rovers will need to carry good auto insurance, and gas prices will probably be amazingly high...
i.e., I don't think he's spinning in his grave; he's not dead.
I agree with you. My FX board is a Boss GT6, which is certainly better than the Digitech "thing" I was using before... although it doesn't have the solid state circuitry of Boss' stomp boxes, the quality is truly superb compared to a stomp box run through a practice amp. If I were actually playing in a band, I would shell out for a nice amp.
:) A nice Fender Twin Reverb or something in a sound stage with nice acoustics is pretty hard to beat, but far too noisy (and expensive!) for what I do. By contrast, most practice amps (even nice Marshall non-tube gig amps) hamper my FX board IMO; you're limited to the range and dynamics of the amp, particluarly at non-ear-blasting volume.
IMO, with the GT6 run stereo/digitally through a decent PC sound system (nice stereo or surround amp/speakers w/ a decent SoundBlaster Live, or better, card), you get the best sound for the money, assuming you already had the nice stereo and the PC. Like you said though, if you can actually afford two high quality tube amps, the sound is exquisite. I take back what I said about it sounding better than any amp I've ever heard; it would be more accurate to say it sounds better *for the money*.
This is the wrong format to use for teaching basic level content like this. As others have pointed out, it's really easy basic stuff... one of the high-level (5) screens is like "Which of the following gives heat and light to the Earth?" Options: Moon, Sun, or Neptune. Fourth graders?! That's 9 and 10 year olds.
Teaching this stuff isn't that difficult without using a website anyway. My elementary education was sufficient that by sixth grade I was very interested in astronomy, and was able to use the Internet to satisfy my curiosities; there were already flyby pictures of Io (Saturn moon) and from Venera 13 (Soviet Venus Lander), IIRC, on JPL's website in 1994 or 95. I didn't have Internet access in elementary school (and neither did my school), but I do vividly recall some astronomy projects I did in 2nd or 3rd grade; it went a lot deeper than "the sun gives off heat and light to the Earth, but Neptune and the Moon do not".
If NASA wants to get involved in education, they should actually get involved with schools. Think how other effective government sponsored education campaigns for reading & whatnot have worked. Think about how companies like TI, Yamaha, or Apple have gotten involved with math, music & computers. And they manage to make money in schools! Could NASA not benefit from some other funding besides taxpayer dollars? Especially since there's already other taxpayer dollars delegated to education...
Either way, a cheesy flash site with multiple-choice edutrivia is pretty worthless. Saving for telemetry engineers or something would have been a more worthwhile way to spend the money.
- Sound editing: Started w/ CoolEdit Pro, moved to SonicFoundry SoundForge, now I use Audacity/Win32.
- MIDI/composing: Cakewalk! It came w/ my sound card.
- Track editing: SonicFoundry Acid.
For Linux:- Sound editing: Audacity!
- MIDI/composing: Rosegarden
- Track editing: (haven't tried/looked into it)
[sort of offtopic]If you play the electric guitar, you should try to find a recording of Paganini's 5th Caprice. It's kind of an etude for violin; I used Audacity to slow it down (it's all 16th notes at upwards of 200bpm or more) and figure it out on guitar. Jason Becker has a great 1987 video out there of himself playing it when he was about 17. After two years, I'm still not even at two thirds of the original speed (little more than half maybe), but I haven't found anything more fun to play if you like fast guitar solos (and just play for kicks). I've been playing electric guitar for about 11 years now, and this is far and beyond the most challenging piece ever.
Incidentally, using Audacity (or similar) to slow down your favorite guitar solo and then using Cakewalk (or Rosegarden) to tab it out is a great way to learn how to play it. Especially since almost 100% of the tabs I see on the Internet are wrong (true for everything, not just the 5th Caprice). Not to brag or anything, but this is also how I learned the Comfortably Numb solo, Hotel California solo, Stairway to Heaven solo, Hendrix/Little Wing (whole song), Paradise City solo, Top Gun Anthem solo, and a bunch of others (this is not bragging because I never thought I was good enough to learn any of these, especially after looking at tabs on the web
On (another) side note - if you are in the market for a guitar effects board, I reccomend getting one with a digital output. If you have a SoundBlaster with a LiveDrive (a front panel that gives you more audio connectors such as optical in, RCA in, headphones w/ volume and 1/4 din connector, etc.) or a similar card with S/PDIF input you can hook it right up, and everything after the effects board stays digital. This gives you stereo choruses, reverbs, amp/cabinet models, phases, etc. w/out having to buy two guitar amps (again if you just play for fun). I actually don't own a guitar amp anymore; I just have a halfway decent used stereo on both my front and rear PC channels, and it sounds better than any amp I've ever heard (but will NOT match the volume of a drumset, and is not suitable for jamming w/ others or live stuff - once again, I just play for me)
[/sort of offtopic]
Using software and this hardware setup, I have made my practices at least 100% more effective, and at least 1000% more fun. I highly reccomend it over keeping the two in seperate worlds.
Geez, where have you been. There's no money in honesty like that! How are all the marketing creeps supposed to feed their kids?
Really, this is kind of like the next level of spyware. Instead of watching your cyber-life on the Internet, they watch your real life, in the real world. Soon enough, these people will have lawyer'ized this crap into your cell phone, your iPod, your PDA, your notebook, your car, your place of business, your kids, and everything else you pack up and carry around with you, without your ever knowing it.
Someday we'll all be speaking that double-speak language from 1984, and that innocent looking picture of George W. Bush hanging on your wall will start watching you. You'll be sitting there, getting ready to scream at the whitehouse press secretary on CSPAN when they'll break your door down, mug you, and force you to watch endless commercials for prescription impotence medicine, get-rich-quick real estate schemes, and Vonage until you've spent every last penny you have on crap you'll never use.
I'm moving to Jarvis Island!!
Hrmm... methinks I should have read that one a little closer. :) Good for him.
It would be nice if they acknowledge that people want to use the All-In-Wonder cards under Linux; but I understand, most manufacturers historically hate Linux. In all fairness, they have released somewhat flakey closed-source Linux 3D drivers. But you'd think in three years, they'd be willing to give some specs on the TV tuner to some OSS developers. And they have... ONE GUY on the gatos project, who had to sign an NDA.
So, between having miserable Windows drivers and an apathetic atitude towards Linux users, I'm not going to buy ATI products anymore. Am I not entitled to feel this way? How about, it's my money, I'm entitled to have any atitude I want with it.
Referring to yourself as heinous. Is that a trait? 'Cause that's a wonderful trait to have!
The headline indeed says that AT&T is "forwarding" their traffic to the NSA.
:)
If the NSA and AT&T are in it together, there's absolutely nothing to stop the NSA from putting their own hardware on AT&T's premises to do some initial scanning and filtering, and then sends anything interesting to the NSA. I highly doubt that there's some ginormous 500 terrabit WAN in place to facilitate forwarding all of AT&T's traffic to the NSA. Who pays for something like that and keeps it a secret? A few dozen servers that passively analyze stuff on AT&T's premises would cost next to nothing compared with having some super wide optical WAN. To that end, the article writer probably wasn't entirely accurate in saying that they're "forwarding all".
uh, right?
EVEN ON WINDOWS, the latest ATI drivers (for the last year or so) for my AIW TV tuner BARELY work (i.e. if I shut down every single thing I have running in the background and coax the crap out of it, it's barely watchable). Even though the stock drivers that came with it worked fine three years ago. And I would use the stock drivers, except the 3D end is simply out of date. Even their modern 3D drivers aren't as polished as they could be (like why do I need the
I always bought ATI stuff because I thought their visual quality was a little better than nVidia, and still do. But I probably won't buy anymore ATI stuff because they've been SO inconsiderate of the Linux crowd, and can't even get their Win32 drivers right. I realize it might not be so profitable for them, but they still could have done some things to move the opensource front along a little bit...
These "entities" that get busted are only fined some arbitrary number, and since they rake in a lot more from their profitable spamming business, then there's no incentive to stop. Right? Why don't they do an investigation and find out how much profit was earned from their spamming ventures, and make that their fine? Better yet, they could just find out how much assets they have, and take all. Wouldn't that stop it?
They could make it completely illegal with penalties up to and including taking every last penny you have. So what? Won't they just move out of the country and/or use clever Internet spoofing to hide themselves? Of course it's hard to get people to send you money when they don't know where/who you are... but just because I own some real estate company, and just because 10 million spams went out yesterday advertising that company's product, doesn't mean that I was the one that sent the spam. Without officially knowing the source, as long as I can keep hiding that, I'm in the clear. If they just shutdown the company that the spam advertised, it would become a great way to get your competition shut down!
So here's an idea... why don't we start educating the public about how to recognize spam and NOT TO BUY WHAT THEY'RE SELLING!!!! The day this stops is the day it becomes not profitable. Ultimately, it's Joe Dufus in Bumsville, USA who actually says "Wow, my penis must be really small and/or impotent. I guess my wife got me on some pfvizagra mailing list... I better buy some from this company to make her happy!" or, "Wow, I can get a $300k loan at a flat rate of 5%!! I don't know what that means, but it sounds like a hell of a deal! I better call them..."
The people who keep spam alive are the people who buy into it. That should be the target of our anti-spam efforts; trying to stop people from sending spam is like trying to stop the Internet altogether (since that's about what it would take, if you're fighting it from that end). We've got to get people to quit buying this shit!
Well in all fairness, I do stuff that most people would consider wasting time... like playing Paganini's 5th Caprice over, and over, and over again on the guitar. I don't consider it wasting time just like you don't consider your poetry (which I like btw, as well as your blog) wasting time.
/. story - why does the middle-of-the-night crowd get all the lame stuff? Last night, it was a footlocker on wheels roaming Antarctica. I'm sorry, I'm sure it's very important research and all, but most people couldn't care less! Maybe they have a giant shortage of article submissions? (right)
/.ers having better things to comment on. :) Ultimately, /. is one big community waste of time, depending on how you look at it or who you ask...
But... why is Slashdot posting an article about someone's fibonacci poetry blog entry? IMHO, that's a pretty lame
All in all, I decided to write a fib poem about
cheers!
*rolls eyes*
I bet that guy is real freakin' proud of himself, too! I wonder if he gets up in the morning and considers himself to be a good person... I mean to be a lawyer is one thing - to be a patent lawyer is another thing - but to be an all-out dickhole to all of society... geez!
Neither MS nor Lucent invented MPEG, and neither of them invented microchips. MPEG and microchips are both patent-deserving revolutionary inventions; but putting a software algorithm into a chip is basic stuff. If MS used Lucent's exact specification for doing so, perhaps there's a copyright infringement somewhere... that's about it.
The more I think about it, the more I think we should do away with patent law altogether, or mainly apply it to credit's sake i.e. if I come up with a new kind of telephone, I would have to give credit to A.G. Bell for his invention; not pay him a bunch of royalties. He didn't build my phone, he built his own and has every right to market and sell his phone. He also has every right to claim that he's the inventor. But I built my phone, and thus should be making the money for it, while stating something like "Based on technology from Alexander Bell, etc."
There's six billion people on the planet. Two of them are likely to have the same idea; it's absolutely not fair that one of them gets all the money just because he made it to the patent office first, or that he thought of it first, or whatever. People work for money. If I think up a brilliant idea and patent it, I did a little work... but all of the other people who perfect my idea, produce it, market it, support it, etc. are the real workers, and should be compensated as such. Essentially, the lone inventor is at fault for trying to do everything himself and not trying to work with all of the other talented people in an organization that could really make his idea work for society in a beneficial way. It's a radical idea I suppose, but very applicable to software. After all, we as programmers are constantly taught not to reinvent the wheel, when in fact patent law forces us to.
Am I in another universe here, or does that seem reasonable?
Tool's music sticks to rock rhythms
Actually, that's not entirely accurate... I really don't like Tool much at all, but one thing I found unique about them was that a lot of their songs don't use the traditional 4/4 (drumBASSdrumBASSdrumBASS) type rhythm. Don't they have some tunes in 9/8?
Considering just about every rock song that comes out anymore sounds exactly like every other, a break from the 4/4 rock beat is noteworthy. Of course, all of my exposure to Tool at all comes from years ago...
Was MS the inventor of double-clicking? They have the patent on it, IIRC... Do pre-Windows versions of MacOS (or Xerox's GUI, or whatever) feature double-clicking? Something tells me MS didn't invent the idea. But theoretically, every GUI company everywhere today has infringed on such a brilliant ...ahem... "invention".
LOL
(It's news for nerds, in'nit? Or is it news at all?)
When I took CSI-1050 at school (computer science 1), our prof had us write a fibonacci sequence writer in his little pretend assembly language. I knew from there on out, every reference I ever saw to Fibonacci would have to do with accomplishing nothing.
Here, on Slashdot, just now, I confirmed that prophecy. Hehehe.
And really, if you're going to post flamebait anyway, why not let it be on a story about fibonacci poetry?
To
me,
stories
about things
like fibonacci
poetry are just like flamebait.
"Poem" is definitely two syllables.
(lets try that again, w/out HTML formatting hehe)
I
thought
Slashdot
Readers had
More important things
To write about; but I was wrong.
I thought Slashdot Readers had More important things To write about; but I was wrong.
A company that revenues a quarter as much as Microsoft isn't really "the little guy", since we're talking on the order of tens of billions of dollars. MS does $35 - $40 billion a year in gross revenue; Lucent does slightly less than $10 billion a year.
Plus, you have to consider MS in pragmatic terms; they're not being sued over Windows (the heart of their organization), they're being sued over an auxilary market that they've gotten themselves into. Their investors who count on Windows profitability aren't going to be happy if they're losing money because of their "video game" ventures.
Ultimately, if MS truly did infringe a patent of Lucent's, this is going to be a pretty good fight; certainly not comparable to a David vs. Goliath type battle.
DOH! (uh, Homer, right?)
:-)
Never was good with names...