Again, I'll agree with you that the series of tubes metaphor is pretty good, but the big truck metaphor is pretty good too if it is taken in the sense of a highway system. If, on the other hand, he actually meant the internet is a single large truck on the road, then it makes no sense at all, so let's assume it's the highway idea. I think he is referring to a single large truck, and I think it kinda works, here's why: He's trying to explain that the data travels sequentially, one (packet?) after the other. A tube is a good example for this, since if you put something (a packet) in a tube, you need to put another one in after it to push it along. You keep pushing more and more, one at a time, and eventually they start spilling out at the end.
I interpret the truck to be representing something unlike a tube, in which you can just dump a whole heap of stuff, and it all arrives at the same time when it gets to its destination. This is different to a tube, in which you have to wait for other things come out first before you can get yours, and which can get congested. The inside of a truck doesn't really get congested, and you can just take out whichever packet you want, without worrying about the others.
"Now Apple is borrowing good features from Solaris as well as FreeBSD. And the Xray GUI for DTrace looks pretty cool; I've been wondering why nobody has written such a GUI before."
It's a rare occasion that you find an open source application designed for users that has a GUI as nice as Xray seems. Good luck finding one for developers.
I also wonder if any usability studies were done with these entries. I don't really care (it's only Slashdot), but I'm curious.
I think if Slashdot were interested in that kind of professionalism they would have actually hired a designer/company and had a proper dialogue with them instead of running a shallow contest.
Urm, the gradients and rounded corners are on the top header bar, and also those of each story. There's also funky javascript sliding menus with the disclosure triangles on the left panels. And, I love it! It looks and feels really nice.
It uses MP42, which is an MPEG4 codec, compatible with MSMPEG4, encoded with ffmpeg. It's basically what was around and possible at the time, when the DVDs were hurriedly being put together.
We tried our best to make a Theora/Voribs file for the release, but weren't able to. I (a Mac user) spent the best part of a week attempting different things to encode versions from 1024 down, analogous to the H.264 ones. I even installed Linux on an old PC in the hope that it would make things easier, but it didn't. Our audio guy was in contact with Ogg Vorbis developers and produced what may be the first 5.1 surround Vorbis file in existence. Currently, after a lot of trial and error, I'm left with an Ogg Theora video file, and a stereo Ogg Vorbis Audio file. They seem both fine on their own, but when I tried to merge them with oggzmerge, the two are out of sync. Along with the encoding of the other files, the release of our new website, our promise to release the videos, and thousands of screaming fans, I didn't have time to keep trying so we released as is.
Hopefully when the release fuss dies down I'll blog about it and try and get some help. In any case, those who condemn others for not using open formats should actually try and use them themselves. I'm sure Theora would get used a lot more if it were easy, or even at least possible for content producers (i.e. artists, not developers) to actually use. My experience hasn't shown that to be the case so far.
That's ridiculous. As a professional photoshop user I'd be far more interested in nifty things like the simple masking that would help clearing up the general clunkiness of working with GIMP day-to-day, compared to some flashy whiz-bang feature that probably only works halfway and is more practical to do it manually yourself. Oh, and Photoshop has had the 'Extract' tool or years now, which seems to do the same, so I doubt that's going to make thousands of Photoshop users magically switch.
Modelling and texturing? Sure. Especially for sub-d character modelling, Blender's toolset is extremely capable. The LSCM UV unwrapping is arguably better than in many of the big 'high end' apps - some people have been bringing it into their pipeline for that feature alone.
Character animation? Technically yes, but can be very difficult and inflexible, so practically, probably not. A big rewrite of Blender's animation tools is planned for an upcoming version, after which, the answer will a lot closer to yes, but that remains to be seen. Having said that, it held up fine for the previs animation on Spiderman 2.
Rendering? No. Blender's renderer is fantastic and very fast for video work, but doesn't have nearly the same sort of flexibility and robustness as you'd get with something like PRMan or Mental Ray, that these guys doing Star Wars would be using. On the other hand, there are a few Blender -> Renderman exporters in various states of completion, and if you had the resources, it shouldn't be difficult develop these further or write your own.
Effects such as particles, dynamics, etc? No. Blender's particles are rather limited and don't provide enough programmable control for the hard-core cases. Blender has no dynamics system yet, though the next release will include soft body dynamics. Since it's in development, it remains to be seen how robust it will be, the tests so far have been promising for everyday work, but still probably won't compete with a fully specialised system with teams of TDs tweaking it. I don't think it's targeting that audience anyway - more of an artist's tool.
Do you know what "form over function" means? It means they when it came to "making it sound good" or "making it good looking", they chose good looking.
Erm, what? So the fact that they're white precludes them from sounding good? You making a pretty wild assumption that Apple could either have white earplugs or good sounding earplugs, and had to choose one or the other, at equal cost.
I would presume the situation would be more like the earplugs were going to be white anyway, and to keep the overall costs down, they chose to use a pretty average set that probably aren't the best quality. Most people that care about sound would use their own anyway, and besides, when you buy an iPod at the online Apple store, as an optional extra, you can buy some other inner-ear earplugs that probably sound better, and are *gasp* white, too.
I'd be surprised if it didn't. Apple seems to pay a lot of attention to typography - ligatures are a standard feature in the Mac OS X 10.3+ text editing control. You can even use them in the simple ol' TextEdit.
For a Mac soulseek client, check out 'Solarseek'. It doesn't have all the very latest features of the PC version like the recommendations, but it works very well. I was in a similar situation to you, but now my PC gets turned on less and less:)
The biggest benefit I see for this is that by opening their portfolio, the innovations they spearheaded are built upon by an army of thousands.
That's an interesting point. Consider this as a future model:
1. IBM does research, comes up with innovations, gets patents awarded 2. IBM gives OSS coders access to said patents and promotes them as interesting things to work on 3. OSS coders develop an application based on the patent 4. IBM (eventually) gets a working, tested, implementation of their original idea, all for free, which they promptly ship out, adding value to their services/solutions. The OSS community gets the same, which they can use freely.
It's a very interesting concept, almost like an economy between IBM and OSS developers, trading ideas and intellectual property for work and practicality. But the clever thing is, both IBM and the OSS community reap the benefits in the end.
Read the recent Stallman interview, he clarified this. In fact, every time he has to explain that he means free and in libre. The problem is the ambiguity in the english language, where free can mean both gratis and libre.
I'd say the problem is that Stallman stupidly chose to use the term "free", knowing just how ambiguous it was. He could have just as easily called it "liberated software" or "unrestricted software" or whatever synonym he could think up and alleviated all of the confusion and pedantry.
This is why I think FOSS is the way of the future.
Well, that's if your future only includes enormous companies the size of IBM selling support services to customers for $90k a month. That business model doesn't leave nearly as much room for a small or even mid sized operations.
Yes, I do. It would be hypocritical for me to agree that Microsoft are abusing their operating system monopoly, if I didn't think that Apple are abusing their music download monopoly.
Except to do this, you have to prove that Apple have a music download monopoly, which I'd like to see you try and do. Remember how long it took just to get a judgement that Microsoft had a monopoly (before any remedies were even discussed)? It's not a simple matter. As far as I'm concerned, Apple by no means have a music download monopoly - there are plenty of other services around doing fine. Don't confuse 'most popular' with monopoly.
Exercise because it feels good, because you enjoy martial arts or something, or because you want to attract women. Don't exercise because your diet requires you to. Or exercise because it's necessary if you want to be healthy. Losing weight is more of a side effect of this, rather than an end in itself. Like it or not, even though in the last 100-200 years or so our lifestyle has significantly changed from the hunter-gatherers of the past, our bodies evolved that way, and it's going to take a long time for them to evolve to something that doesn't need the same amount of exercise to stay healthy.
Slashdot Mirror
I interpret the truck to be representing something unlike a tube, in which you can just dump a whole heap of stuff, and it all arrives at the same time when it gets to its destination. This is different to a tube, in which you have to wait for other things come out first before you can get yours, and which can get congested. The inside of a truck doesn't really get congested, and you can just take out whichever packet you want, without worrying about the others.
"Now Apple is borrowing good features from Solaris as well as FreeBSD. And the Xray GUI for DTrace looks pretty cool; I've been wondering why nobody has written such a GUI before."
It's a rare occasion that you find an open source application designed for users that has a GUI as nice as Xray seems. Good luck finding one for developers.
I think if Slashdot were interested in that kind of professionalism they would have actually hired a designer/company and had a proper dialogue with them instead of running a shallow contest.
Urm, the gradients and rounded corners are on the top header bar, and also those of each story. There's also funky javascript sliding menus with the disclosure triangles on the left panels. And, I love it! It looks and feels really nice.
It uses MP42, which is an MPEG4 codec, compatible with MSMPEG4, encoded with ffmpeg. It's basically what was around and possible at the time, when the DVDs were hurriedly being put together.
We tried our best to make a Theora/Voribs file for the release, but weren't able to. I (a Mac user) spent the best part of a week attempting different things to encode versions from 1024 down, analogous to the H.264 ones. I even installed Linux on an old PC in the hope that it would make things easier, but it didn't. Our audio guy was in contact with Ogg Vorbis developers and produced what may be the first 5.1 surround Vorbis file in existence. Currently, after a lot of trial and error, I'm left with an Ogg Theora video file, and a stereo Ogg Vorbis Audio file. They seem both fine on their own, but when I tried to merge them with oggzmerge, the two are out of sync. Along with the encoding of the other files, the release of our new website, our promise to release the videos, and thousands of screaming fans, I didn't have time to keep trying so we released as is.
Hopefully when the release fuss dies down I'll blog about it and try and get some help. In any case, those who condemn others for not using open formats should actually try and use them themselves. I'm sure Theora would get used a lot more if it were easy, or even at least possible for content producers (i.e. artists, not developers) to actually use. My experience hasn't shown that to be the case so far.
Cheers
Matt
Yeah, how dare he report about what is actually happening so people can make up their own minds, rather than repeating groupthink propaganda.
Special effects professionals? You mean wire-removal/clean-up/roto monkeys right? I've never heard of anyone using Cinepaint for 'special effects'.
That's ridiculous. As a professional photoshop user I'd be far more interested in nifty things like the simple masking that would help clearing up the general clunkiness of working with GIMP day-to-day, compared to some flashy whiz-bang feature that probably only works halfway and is more practical to do it manually yourself. Oh, and Photoshop has had the 'Extract' tool or years now, which seems to do the same, so I doubt that's going to make thousands of Photoshop users magically switch.
I'd say this is a far better example of good design being put to use for the good of society:
A School of Visual Arts Grad Remakes the Pill Bottle
Capable of what, exactly?
Modelling and texturing? Sure. Especially for sub-d character modelling, Blender's toolset is extremely capable. The LSCM UV unwrapping is arguably better than in many of the big 'high end' apps - some people have been bringing it into their pipeline for that feature alone.
Character animation? Technically yes, but can be very difficult and inflexible, so practically, probably not. A big rewrite of Blender's animation tools is planned for an upcoming version, after which, the answer will a lot closer to yes, but that remains to be seen. Having said that, it held up fine for the previs animation on Spiderman 2.
Rendering? No. Blender's renderer is fantastic and very fast for video work, but doesn't have nearly the same sort of flexibility and robustness as you'd get with something like PRMan or Mental Ray, that these guys doing Star Wars would be using. On the other hand, there are a few Blender -> Renderman exporters in various states of completion, and if you had the resources, it shouldn't be difficult develop these further or write your own.
Effects such as particles, dynamics, etc? No. Blender's particles are rather limited and don't provide enough programmable control for the hard-core cases. Blender has no dynamics system yet, though the next release will include soft body dynamics. Since it's in development, it remains to be seen how robust it will be, the tests so far have been promising for everyday work, but still probably won't compete with a fully specialised system with teams of TDs tweaking it. I don't think it's targeting that audience anyway - more of an artist's tool.
Check out Colloquy. It rules.
Do you know what "form over function" means? It means they when it came to "making it sound good" or "making it good looking", they chose good looking.
Erm, what? So the fact that they're white precludes them from sounding good? You making a pretty wild assumption that Apple could either have white earplugs or good sounding earplugs, and had to choose one or the other, at equal cost.
I would presume the situation would be more like the earplugs were going to be white anyway, and to keep the overall costs down, they chose to use a pretty average set that probably aren't the best quality. Most people that care about sound would use their own anyway, and besides, when you buy an iPod at the online Apple store, as an optional extra, you can buy some other inner-ear earplugs that probably sound better, and are *gasp* white, too.
I'd be surprised if it didn't. Apple seems to pay a lot of attention to typography - ligatures are a standard feature in the Mac OS X 10.3+ text editing control. You can even use them in the simple ol' TextEdit.
For a Mac soulseek client, check out 'Solarseek'. It doesn't have all the very latest features of the PC version like the recommendations, but it works very well. I was in a similar situation to you, but now my PC gets turned on less and less :)
The biggest benefit I see for this is that by opening their portfolio, the innovations they spearheaded are built upon by an army of thousands.
That's an interesting point. Consider this as a future model:
1. IBM does research, comes up with innovations, gets patents awarded
2. IBM gives OSS coders access to said patents and promotes them as interesting things to work on
3. OSS coders develop an application based on the patent
4. IBM (eventually) gets a working, tested, implementation of their original idea, all for free, which they promptly ship out, adding value to their services/solutions. The OSS community gets the same, which they can use freely.
It's a very interesting concept, almost like an economy between IBM and OSS developers, trading ideas and intellectual property for work and practicality. But the clever thing is, both IBM and the OSS community reap the benefits in the end.
Read the recent Stallman interview, he clarified this. In fact, every time he has to explain that he means free and in libre. The problem is the ambiguity in the english language, where free can mean both gratis and libre.
I'd say the problem is that Stallman stupidly chose to use the term "free", knowing just how ambiguous it was. He could have just as easily called it "liberated software" or "unrestricted software" or whatever synonym he could think up and alleviated all of the confusion and pedantry.
This is why I think FOSS is the way of the future.
Well, that's if your future only includes enormous companies the size of IBM selling support services to customers for $90k a month. That business model doesn't leave nearly as much room for a small or even mid sized operations.
Yes, I do. It would be hypocritical for me to agree that Microsoft are abusing their operating system monopoly, if I didn't think that Apple are abusing their music download monopoly.
Except to do this, you have to prove that Apple have a music download monopoly, which I'd like to see you try and do. Remember how long it took just to get a judgement that Microsoft had a monopoly (before any remedies were even discussed)? It's not a simple matter. As far as I'm concerned, Apple by no means have a music download monopoly - there are plenty of other services around doing fine. Don't confuse 'most popular' with monopoly.
They are also a major sponsor of the Blender Foundation, IIRC providing rack space and bandwidth. Go XS4ALL!
Exercise because it feels good, because you enjoy martial arts or something, or because you want to attract women. Don't exercise because your diet requires you to.
Or exercise because it's necessary if you want to be healthy. Losing weight is more of a side effect of this, rather than an end in itself. Like it or not, even though in the last 100-200 years or so our lifestyle has significantly changed from the hunter-gatherers of the past, our bodies evolved that way, and it's going to take a long time for them to evolve to something that doesn't need the same amount of exercise to stay healthy.
Hey, if CNN can do it, surely Fox can too?
Imagine an arena like a boxing ring, with the tracking pattern on the floor. You could have life-size VR beat-em-up video games!
The solution to the pollution and energy problems is to reduce the population. Pure and simple
Or (shock, horror) reduce the population's energy consumption.
Dear god, that had me in stitches. Thanks for brightening up an otherwise dreary evening :)