If they're building panels for monitors, and they only produce them in 16x9, then my money is looking for a competitor that produces 16x10, or even 4x3 or 3x2 panels.
My money, my decision.
If my money remains unspent, so be it - I'll stick with what I already have, until it finally stops working.
> First, there is no reason to believe that we can built robots that can reproduce themselves.
What? This is exactly the technology humans are trying to reach! We're already a significant way down this path!!
> Second, there is no evidence that we or anyone else can build intelligent machines, as the original story seems to presuppose.
Nature did it. We can do it.
> Third, biological organisms are so many orders of magnitude more efficient and flexible than machines that it barely makes sense to put them into the same qualitative category "form of life".
This whole conversation is about extrapolating on the cosmic scale. If you look at the path robotics has taken in the last century it does, as pointed out, actually support the premise of this article.
> Hint: A human consumes only about 2.9 kilowatt hours per day, the equivalent of 1-2 light bulbs
Not relevant. Once machines are replicating and repairing themselves they'll do exactly what we do and find other sources of energy.
Frankly I agree with you that it's hard to picture Transformers inhabiting the universe, but OP did make a really good point that extrapolation isn't even in the ballpark of refuting this clown. Honestly I'm shocked he didn't come back with that XKCD cartoon.
Just wanted to thank you for the links. I was especially pleased to find that Python is supported!
Thank you! You've given me reason to sit up and pay attention when 3 rolls around, I appreciate that.
I would recommend against showing the more diehard Photoshop fans that link, though. It won't get you anywhere because what it really needs to be is a list like this:
- GIMP has a plugin/feature for automatically generating normal maps from elevation data.
- GIMP has a perspective correction feature that is superior to Photoshops in that it...
- GIMP's 'save all layers' button saves all of the layers in your file into seperate files.
5 is horribly overrated. Lots of artists can script, but few (if any) can make actual plugins or modify the source code. (Even if they do dig in to the code how do they maintain those features when a new version of GIMP comes along?) I do want to mention, though, that there's another reply to my original post that seems to have covered the scripting point. I haven't checked it out yet but given that scripting is something I do, I'm certainly interested in trying that out.
6 needs an extra line, something like: "its better than Photoshop's Batch feature because...."
10... actually this is a really good one. In fact, just before this thread started, I went and found the portable version and downloaded in. Why? Welp, if the scripting that Culture20 posted a link to turns out to be worthwhile for me, coupling that with a portable version of GIMP is *awesome*. What that means is I will be able to automate certain tasks AND keep a fresh install on my DropBox account so I can even use it off-site. This is 1 out of 9.5 (I gave partial credit to the source-code bit) and, as you can already see from other replies you've gotten, most are refutable.
I'm a little worried you might read my post and think that I'm trying to perpetuate the GIMP vs. Photoshop debate. I'm not, instead I'm trying to explain what needs to happen explanation-wise to get more Photoshop people to try GIMP out. I think there's this mentality that people should switch to GIMP and that's simply not true. If you got the professional Photoshop users to start using GIMP for certain tasks, you may find that some studios may find it worth their time to invest some development time into improving it. Given how Adobe has been dicking around with the licensing, this would be a good time to get that ball rolling. Start touting the unique features it has that shave man-hours off a project. If those features don't exist, then the team needs to start talking to people like me and finding out what else they need.
Care to run off a list of ways that "GIMP doesn't come close"? If it's really so bad, it shouldn't be that difficult to name at least a dozen or so... In actuality, I expect that enumerating the shortcomings of GIMP will not be in quantity, but in terms of a relatively small number of particularly desirable features that many may perceive as critically important in such software.
Hi, professional artist here. Your latter point, at least from my perspective, is correct. I know Photoshop really well, but since I make my living doing this work I am not biased in a way that'd prevent me from using a free tool. Let me be extra clear: It would hurt me to be fanboyishly loyal to be any particular app. I do pick up and mess with GIMP from time to time, but it has two critical omissions from Photoshop that make it unusable in my field. First, it lacks adjustment layers. Second, it lacks Smart Objects.
These are both features intended to do non-destructive editing of imagery. Let's say you have a tree with green leaves. You can create a Hue/Saturation 'adjustment layer' that will turn all the green pixels beneath it blue. If you put a picture of a different tree below that layer, its leaves would turn blue, too. If you took that tree and made it a 'smart object', you'd effectively be snapshotting that image and every operation you do causes it to regenerate itself. In other words, if you shrank a Smart Object down, then scaled it back up again, you'd get all its original detail back.
If you're creating imagery it doesn't take long for these two features to change your workflow in such a way that you gain a HUGE time savings. In fact I have created several templates to speed up the generation of images I do that I just plain cannot do in GIMP. Realistically speaking that is enough man-hours lost that I'd actually make a greater profit paying for Photoshop than I would saving the cost of the license in favor of GIMP.
With that said, I'd be *very* happy if you told me that version 3 would add these features. I'd also be very happy if somebody could tell me what GIMP does that Photoshop doesn't. It's free. if it shaves man-hours off my work, then load me up with the tips. I ain't gonna switch, but I ain't above using both.
When I went to uni, more years ago than I care to remember, I would return home from time to time at the weekend, and go out with the lads on a Saturday night. As it was a rural area, we'd drive to the nearest big town, visit a pub and then go on clubbing.
We'd usually visit the same pub, but every few months the pub we went to would change.
Why?
We didn't go to the pub with the best beer, the best music, the best seats. No, we just went to the "place where everyone else went". From time to time, everyone in town would get bored with one place and move on somewhere else which then became the new "place where everyone went". That made it (for us, at that time) the place with the best atmosphere.
What Dice needs to realise is that all that Slashdot is is one of the "places where everyone goes" for computer / techie discussion (OK, so it's not the only one, but you get my drift). This site has no value, other than being the "place where everyone goes".
It won't be at all difficult for someone to set up Dashslot, or Slushdirt or whatever, with the same formula as traditional Slashdot, and once word gets around that new site will be the "place where everyone goes" instead of here. Slashdot will become the new Kuro5hin, a steep and tragic decline from former glories.
And that new site might even have decent editing and Unicode support.
Check out the this article and search for the section on Geoffrey Prime and read what he got up to.
And remember his "data collection" was done on pieces of card, and was before the days that most adults/parents carry mobile tracking devices around with them so their locations could be known at most times.
No one is being killed by the 5v on the USB bus. The problem is the counterfeit chargers are often poorly designed and can fail in a way that shorts the USB cable to the AC power.
There was an excellent teardown & analysis of a cheap charger last year that pointed out serious safety issues.
Recently they added the ability to also buy the audiobook version and the app *syncs your place* so you can switch between the two formats. That's a pretty amazing idea.
But the app doesn't help the author. He said he had a Nook. Thanks to the recent firmware update people with a Nook Color or Nook HD can get then app, but if you have the eInk based "normal" Nook, you're just out of luck.
As DRM goes, Amazon has done an excellent job of reducing annoyance. They don't try that "you can only read this book on 2 devices, ever." stuff that we've seen elsewhere. But I get the feeling the only reason Amazon's DRM is so unobtrusive is they were so overwhelmingly powerful they could force publishers into a relatively consumer friendly system. We're lucky Amazon cares more about selling books than trying to wring money out of Kindle hardware sales, or the DRM would have been a lot worse.
The video says that the wind is manually entered by the operator. I find it odd that it shows the temperature and barometric pressure. Is that really useful information when you're lining up a shot?
After watching their little YouTube clip, I wonder how useful this is. Placing the aiming dot seems really similar to aiming in the first place, I guess the only difference is you don't have to compensate for gravity/etc. I found it conspicuous that they didn't show their simulated target moving in the video. Can this only help with a stationary target? It seems like it would screw up your aiming if half the time you had to do it manually (compensating for everything) and half the time the system handled it.
I'm very surprised someone from AMD would say this, given that they used to produce the AMD29000, which used to be rather popular in some niche areas. This used register windows, with 192 registers in total. Nice chip, back in the day.
The Wikipedia article also says that parts of the 29050 design were used as the basis for the K5 x86-compatible chips.
I'm not surprised. It can be bad enough when they actually know what they're doing, if they have no clue it can be terrible.
There is an amazing story on Reddit (in 23 short parts!) of an IT manager from hell destroying a workplace. It's frustrating just to read.
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. -- George Orwell
