GrassTutorial
This small Tutorial will show the methods I use to create grass, everything was created using Adobe® Photoshop 5.5 and a mouse. Below are some step by step images showing the various stages and a brief description outlining the easy methods used to create them.
http://slayeroffice.com/code/imageCrossFade/xfade2.html
This is a rewrite of a very old experiment. This rewrite uses unobtrusive DOM scripting and semantic markup to achieve its goals, and is somewhat less abusive of the CPU in Firefox. It also works in Safari - the original version was written prior to Safari supporting the CSS3 “opacity” property. Opera doesn’t support opacity, so the images will just flip in that browser.
Following the unobtrusive philosophy, the document is completely usable when javascript isn’t available. This is accomplished by overwriting the style sheet with one designed for the application in the so_init() method. If javascript isn’t available, the user gets an arms length list of photos.
For Nintendo, The Glory Is In the Game - washingtonpost.com
It’s almost a radical thought in the video game industry these days: What if a new game console were actually just about the games — and not about having a zillion other multimedia features?
That’s the question posed by Nintendo’s new console, scheduled for debut later this year. The Wii — pronounced “we” — does not feature scorchingly advanced technology, compared with its rivals, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s upcoming PlayStation 3. And, unlike the competition, the device does not push a DVD replacement technology or strive to be the living room’s all-purpose media center.
Microsoft delivers a Wallop
In the beginning, there was HTML, and everyone (including Dennis Leary) rushed forward to put up cat pictures on the web. Then came dynamic pages, and they brought forth discussion boards, and blogs, and LiveJournals. These days, as The Daily Show’s Dmitri Martin showed, it’s all about “social networking,” the idea that you can obtain and manage a group of contacts over the Internet. As Martin said: “It’s easy! Last week I helped eight friends move… to my top eight list.”
Well, Microsoft Research has also been working on social networking. The division, which includes 700 people in five separate labs in Redmond, Silicon Valley, Bangalore, Beijing, and Cambridge, is staffed by many brilliant people but rarely gets much press coverage. Much of their work is highly abstract and mathematical, and that doesn’t make for good soundbites. The few times they have merited a major PR announcement, the results have been somewhat disappointing.
zegenie Studios Linux Distribution Chooser
This wizard is created to help you decide which Linux distribution to choose. Before we start out, please answer the questions below.
Moneydick » A Scientific Approach to Myspace’s Failure
Using the power of Google searches, I hope to prove why Myspace.com is a failure of humanity. I’m not debating whether Myspace offers a good system or service, I’m only lamenting the place it has become thanks to its user base. There are good and bad uses for social networking websites. Most are useless and waste more time without contributing to the social good. Myspace is the worst. Before TV, people thought it would be an incredible tool for education and it would be used for benevolent purposes. It turned out that what people wanted to watch was crap, so the people who made TV made crap. This is what’s happening to MySpace. It’s a great tool at first glance, but the desire to produce crap by those in control of the content (the users) overwhelms the networking aspect almost 5 to 1. A few things to note before we begin….
Committing MySpacecide
Briefly, on November 13th, 2005, I was a friend of Tom. I’m talking, of course, about Tom Anderson — male, 30-years old, based in Santa Monica, California, and founder of MySpace. The man with $580 million and nearly 50 million “friends.”
The iMomus MySpace page was online for just 48 minutes. Barely long enough to tell the world my relationship status, sexual orientation, body type, ethnicity, religion, zodiac sign, smoking and drinking habits, income and company affiliations. To receive a message telling me to “read the FAQ and give Tom a break.” To upload the most flattering photo I could find. To notice that Tom had been added automatically as my first friend, and that Tom’s favorite music included Billy Joel, Oasis, Guns & Roses and Whitney Houston (”particularly The Bodyguard soundtrack”).
I don’t know what made me delete it. It just looked ugly: the page layout, the blue writing. I felt like a sheep, letting social pressures, memes and fads herd me around. I wondered why I needed yet another social networking website to check: After all, I was already on Friendster and Japanese network Mixi, not to mention LiveJournal, a network organized around daily content rather than mere profiles and links. Mostly, I just wondered why I needed to affirm tenuous affiliation with a new set of ghosts.
I didn’t know at that point that just four months earlier, on July 19th, MySpace had been bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News International. That’s where Tom’s $580 million came from. I think if I’d known that, the MySpace iMomus page wouldn’t even have lasted 48 minutes. Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, isn’t my favorite guy.
Coming soon: Cars that get 100 miles per gallon | CNET News.com
A few small companies will start to offer services and products for converting hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius that currently get around 50 miles per gallon into plug-in hybrids that rely more heavily on electrical power and can get about 100 miles per gallon.
Intel Duo Core clocked at 3.4Ghz beats P4 overclock to 7.2Ghz! :: Hack In The Box :: Keeping Knowledge Free
Local forum member Gamer casually posted his first overclocking results with an Intel Duo Core T2600 clocked default at 2.16Ghz. Using a modified subzero cooling he was able to push the CPU to 3.4Ghz and run a CPU intensive SuperPi 1Mb calculation in 17.75 seconds; which is slightly faster than the current world record hold by Tom Holck with a P4 670 at 7.2Ghz! With less than halve the CPU cycles the new Duo Core proves to be quite the performer!
Brilliant anti-piracy strategy: lower prices
Warner Bros. is in the midst of trying something “new” in the war against piracy: pricing their products a little lower. Warner’s Chinese arm of its home video business is now pricing select titles at US$1.50 (RMB¥12), while offering fewer features and cardboard packaging. The test is simple: will people buy it?
There’s reason to suspect that they will. The normal price for new, legitimate DVDs ranges from $2.75-$4.40 for new releases, and you can see the difference: the new pricing experiment puts discs at 55 to 66 percent the cost of normal releases. While this may appear to be a pittance of difference for many consumers in the West, in China it is no small matter. In 2005, urban Chinese incomes averaged about $1,000/year, while rural incomes were close to $300/year. When your nation’s daily wage ranges (on average) from $2.75 to $1/day, price cuts like this can be substantial.
A step in the right direction
For piracy to thrive, at least three things are needed: “pirates” (aka, bootleggers, counterfeiters, etc.), a method or medium of exchange (the Internet, the local “black market,” etc.) and people to avail themselves of pirated services and products. In the United States, the anti-piracy movement has become a PR war that focuses primarily on the last of these three requirements, with plenty of lawsuits to make the show the spectacle that it is designed to be. It turns out that this isn’t necessarily a bad move from a profit standpoint, either (at least in the short turn).
However, where the long arm of the law fails, there’s problems. The majority of the world’s piracy is not constituted by teenagers downloading the latest hit single. Rather, organized piracy is where the real threat is at, and in countries abroad, American (and other) products are being pirated for both fun and profit. What’s an industry to do? Lowering prices has longed seemed to be the smart idea, especially in countries where watching Leonardo DiCaprio play Howard Hughes could cost you an entire day’s labor.
We have long argued at Ars that organized piracy is best thought of as a market phenomenon as opposed to an issue of morality. China is a perfect example. Here two things conspire to create a thriving black market: extremely overpriced products from the West, and extremely tight governmental controls in China. Warner is trying to do something about the former, and it’s a smart and intelligent move. That didn’t stop the Financial Times from portraying this as “a move likely to anger consumers in developed markets such as Europe and the US.” Are they right? If heaps of lawsuits and pro-industry lobbying haven’t soured the average consumer, it’s hard to see how this move will. On the other hand, it’s a great excuse for keeping prices high, and it’s been used to that effect both in the entertainment and software industries.
I’m reminded of an old aphorism. “What does all of this have to do with the price of DVDs in China?”
For consumers in the West, next to nothing.
Explosive Decompression and Vacuum Exposure
A frequently asked question is: how realistic is the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where astronaut Bowman makes a space-walk without a helmet? How long could a human survive if exposed to vacuum? Would you explode? Would you survive? How long would you remain conscious?
The quick answers to these questions are: Clarke got it about right in 2001. You would survive about a ninety seconds, you wouldn’t explode, you would remain conscious for about ten seconds.
What does it mean to “rip” a file from a CD? Will you lose it off the original CD if you do that? - Yahoo! Answers
What does it mean to “rip” a file from a CD? Will you lose it off the original CD if you do that?
I have a recording on a cd that I want to save to my computer and then email it to friends but I can’t figure out how. There is no “save” option on my windows player but I see something that says “Rip files from CD”. Can someone help 
Thank you!!
Human or Computer? Take This Test
As chief scientist of the Internet portal Yahoo, Dr. Udi Manber had a profound problem: how to differentiate human intelligence from that of a machine.
His concern was more than academic. Rogue computer programs masquerading as teenagers were infiltrating Yahoo chat rooms, collecting personal information or posting links to Web sites promoting company products. Spam companies were creating havoc by writing programs that swiftly registered for hundreds of free Yahoo e-mail accounts then used them for bulk mailings.
“What we needed,” said Dr. Manber, “was a simple way of telling a human user from a computer program.”
So, in a September 2000 conference call, Dr. Manber discussed the problem with a group of computer science researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. The result was a long-term project that is just now beginning to bear fruit.
Beginners Guides: Most Common Ways to Kill a PC - PCSTATS.com
Computers should be essentially immortal right? They are just a collection of circuits and signals, and as long as power flows to them, they should continue to operate; there’s nothing to break down, nothing to age… uh-huh. Anyone who’s ever owned a computer knows that this is not quite true.
Computers and their component parts do have a finite life span, and just like us, they have a list of afflictions that are most likely to claim their digital existences. Also just like us, most of these problems stem from careless handling, neglect, unhealthy environments and old age. Toss careless manufacturing into the mix, and you can see why the average computer system rarely survives more than ten years without some sort of catastrophic failure.
Ordinarily, this brief lifespan would not be of concern, since the average useful life of a computer system, the time in which it is still relevant and capable of running the software of the day, is far shorter, five years tops. The thing is though, careless handling can cut your computer down while it is still in its prime. I know this is true, I worked in a computer store. Chances are anyone who has ever owned more than one computer has experienced some sort of unexpected computing catastrophe from a system that still had years of useful life left to it.
Bush: government research developed iPod - Engadget
Apple has long boasted of its culture of innovation, and how this led to such products as the original Mac and the iPod. However, it turns out that, at least in the case of the iPod, Apple had a hidden ally: the US government. During a speech at Tuskegee University, President (and iPod user) George W. Bush told his audience, “the government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod.” While we have to gratefully acknowledge the efforts of government agencies such as DARPA in some of the fields mentioned by the President, we also feel obligated to point out the accomplishments of private companies in the US and abroad, including IBM, Hitachi and Toshiba — not to mention the Fraunhofer Institute, which developed the original MP3 codec, and codeveloped (with Sony, AT&T and others) the AAC format used by Apple in the iPod. Still, we have to bow down before his Steveness; we knew he was well-connected, but until now we had no idea of his level of influence in the area of government research. Hey, Steve, while you’re at it, why not get the government to resolve the display problems plaguing the next-gen video iPod? We’re sure they’ll get their best minds on it and fix it in no time.
Typo Confounds Kryptos Sleuths
For more than a decade, amateur and professional cryptographers have been trying to decipher an encrypted sculpture that sits on the grounds of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Three-fourths of the sculpture has already been solved.
But now Jim Sanborn, the artist who created the Kryptos sculpture, says he made a mistake. A previously solved part of the puzzle that sleuths assumed was correct for years isn’t. The new information, including what the mistaken text really says, is creating a buzz among enthusiasts who’ve been obsessed over the sculpture for years.
It all comes down to a letter that Sanborn left out of the sculpture. He only recently realized the omission was leading sleuths down a misguided path. His followers, however, aren’t feeling any grief about the misdirection.
$87,000,000,000.00
On September 7th, 2003, President Bush announced on national television that he was going to ask the Congress to grant him an additional $87 billion dollars for the fiscal year, beginning October 1, 2004, to continue the fight on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since before then, to the end of September, 2007, the United States has dedicated approximately $315 billion dollars to the cause.
But these amounts of money are an impossible for anyone to visualize. Let’s have a look….
Soda Machine Hack | Skatter Tech
Most modern soda machines have little computers in them. The tiny RED LCD usually displays the data. The computer can be controlled by using certain buttons on the soda machine in different combinations. This can be used to check the temperature, see the amount of money (load and dump), and dump certain sodas. Will usually only work on newer machines that look like the one on the right. They need to have an LCD and also need to have some type of message on it “ICE COLD SODAS� This tells you it is running something.
1) Accessing the Menu: Press the buttons [4][2][3][1] one after another. It will be left to right in some machines and up and down in some so try both methods. Once you press these keys you will be in the “debug menu.� It should display ERROR or something similar.
2) Once you are in, button [1] becomes the back/exit type of command. Button [2] becomes scroll up. Button [3] becomes scroll down. And Button [4] becomes select/enter. You can now scroll through the features.
3) As you scroll through the menus you will see items such as SALE, CASH, VER, ERROR, and RTN.
4) What each item means: Cash- displays the amount of money in the machine. You will also be able to find more info on what was purchased how much for each item and are arranged by slot #s. SALE- shows how many drinks have been sold and how many from each slot. (slots are in same order as buttons so if button 1 is coke then slot 1 is coke as well.) VER- the machine firmware version. (pointless) ERROR- COLJ (Column Jam), VEnd (Vend Mechanism), Door (Door Switch), Sels (Selection Switch), CHAR (Changer Errors), Acce (Acceptor Errors), Sts (Space 2 Sales), and bVal (Vill Validators). (can’t do anything w/ this either, except clear the errors!) RTN- Returns back to normal menus, you can also do this by pressing on the coin return button or the back button. Also by holding a coin at the tip of the coin slot it will display the current temperature of the inside of the soda machine.
5) There above are the options that are usually enabled, but most other options are usually disabled if the owner (or maintenance dude) is smart. But if they happen to be enabled here they are: CPO- Coin payment mode, which will dump coins out of the machine. You will be able to specify the type (dime, nickel, ect.) and the amount. tvFL- tube fill mode, which lets you fill the machine w/ coins. (retarded huh) PASS- allows you to change the default password from 4231 to something else. PrlC- change the price of a drink! (1 cent!) StOS change what each button links to (so if some1 presses coke you can make it go 2 sprite.) COn- are machine configuration settings too much to tell just experiment. TIME- Set TIME. LANG- change language.
Cramer’s Rule
Given a system of linear equations, Cramer’s Rule is a handy way to solve for just one of the variables without having to solve the whole system of equations. They don’t usually teach Cramer’s Rule this way, but this is supposed to be the point of the Rule. Instead of solving the whole system, you can use Cramer’s to solve for just one variable.
Look at the following system of equations:
2x y z = 3
x – y – z = 0
x 2y z = 0
Looking at the system, you have the left-hand side with the variables and the right-hand side with the answer values. Let D be the determinant of the coefficient matrix of the above system, and let Dx be the determinant formed by replacing the x-column values with the answer-column values.
Homosexuals show colours at White House Easter events
Washington - Same-sex families flocked to the White House on Monday for the traditional Easter egg roll and to show that they, too, are a part of US society.
Dozens of homosexual families literally showed their colours by wearing rainbow-coloured garlands at the event, which allows thousands of children onto the White House grounds for Easter fun.
Many of the 16,000 tickets were distributed on a first-come, first-served basis and some people stood in line through the night to get in.
Gay parents said their participation was meant not as a protest, but to show that they are part of American life.
‘It is a wonderful and important display of the reality of gay and lesbian American families,’ said Cathy Renna, a lesbian parent from New York, while waiting to enter the White House grounds.
President George W. Bush, who has expressed support for a US constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman, kicked off an event that this year had a decidedly political flavour.
Despite Bush’s position, the White House made clear that all families were welcome at the traditional egg roll. First held in 1878, the event includes children using spoons to roll eggs on the lawn in a race.
Though same-sex families have fewer rights than traditional families, the egg roll shows they have ‘a lot more in common with other families’ than people realize, Renna said.
Homosexual parents insisted that marriage is about love, not sexual orientation, and they proudly pointed to their children happily mingling with others.
First Lady Laura Bush called the event the ‘happiest of traditions at the White House’ and urged everyone to have ‘a great time.’
‘I want to thank all of the children here today, who brought their parents with them,’ she said in her opening remarks.
Kyle Turner, who participated with his partner and their daughter Emma, said he was happy because the event was so ‘normal.’
The visibility of the homosexual families, some of which had travelled thousands of miles to participate, did not bother other guests.
‘Kids are kids,’ said Steve Shur, who attended the event with his wife and children. ‘They don’t know the difference.’
Dennis Forbes on Pragmatic Software Development - Interesting Facts About Domain Names
You’ve thought up a brilliant idea for a new Web 2.0, AJAX-enabled web app, or you’re about to release a thus-far-unnamed killer software app. Now you just need to find the perfect domain name for it to live at (and, in true new-economy fashion, you’ll base your corporate name upon whatever available domain name you find… PILLAGEANDPLUNDR Corporation).
You pull up GoDaddy and start punching in clever names, along with their many variations, only to find that they’re all seemingly taken.
“This can’t be!” you cry. “Has every possibility already been registered?”
Given that there are approximately 50 million .COM domains registered, it is indeed true that the low-hanging fruit domain names are overwhelming taken, and your chances of lucking upon an unnoticed available three-letter acronym (TLA) are close to zero, and your only recourse would be to haggle with domain speculators.
The following is a copy of my parent’s cell phone bill for the previous month. They asked that I shop around and sign up for my own phone plan soon because it is getting a little too costly for them to support my phone on their plan. I felt like I’d just take a gander at hour much of a burden on their bill I really was, just so that I’d know how much trouble I was causing them. So in comparison to everyone else on the share-plan, here is how I stack up.
And yes, that total is $377.85 for one month.
Sex On Menu At Hooters? - April 14, 2006
APRIL 13–We’ve carefully read the Hooters employee handbook and it does not address what a manager is supposed to do when a corporate trainer tells waitresses they could earn extra money by sexually servicing customers. In a federal lawsuit, Jarman Gray, a former assistant manager of an Alabama Hooters, charges that he was fired last year after complaining about comments made to employees by a female “visiting training manager.” In his April 7 U.S. District Court complaint, a copy of which you’ll find below, the 31-year-old Gray claims that a trainer named Cat told waitresses that they were “the ones with the pussys and you are in control because of that.” Then she reportedly added, “If you need the extra money, go ahead and suck a dick or fuck a customer if the money is right.” Gray contends that offended waitresses approached him and “asked if he could resolve this problem and correct Cat’s offensive behavior.” But after he called the Hooters corporate office to complain about the trainer’s remarks, Gray said he was canned by the owner of the Auburn franchise where he worked. Gray, who is suing for sexual harassment and retaliation, charges that franchisee Darrell Spikes told him, “I’m top dog, you don’t call corporate. You no longer have a job here.” Gray, who worked at Hooters for about nine months, filed his complaint days after receiving a “right to sue” letter from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In mid-2005, Gray filed a complaint with the EEOC alleging that he had been terminated “in retaliation for reporting sexual harassment in the workplace.”
EFF reports on the DMCA’s unintended consequences
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released version 4 of their “Unintended Consequences” document, which details problematic side effects arising out of the oft-maligned Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Much of the criticism is targeted specifically at section 1201 of the act, which is targeted at circumvention of copyright protection systems.
This seemingly innocuous provision was originally meant to provide a safeguard for copyright holders against those who would engage in piracy, but it has been wielded—and sometimes more importantly, threatened to be wielded—against a wide range of legitimate activity as well. It is important to note that section 1201 does not merely restrict those who actually engage in piracy, but also those whose actions or creations could be used to do so.
The report is mostly a summary of things that have happened over the last seven years, and as such, contains little new information. Nevertheless, it’s worth a read, if only because many of the issues surrounding the DMCA have been collected in one place. In a few of my favorites, you can follow the thread that began with a single incident, which I’m calling the Curious Case of Dmitry Sklyarov.
Sklyarov is a programmer from Russia who came to the US to speak at the DEFCON conference in 2001. He was arrested and jailed for a few weeks, then forced to remain in the States for 5 months pending the investigation of charges brought against him by Adobe. His “crime?” Contributing to the design of software published by his employer, ElcomSoft, which allowed for the conversion of files from e-Book format to PDF format. Since e-Books contain digital rights management and PDF files do not, it was supposed by Adobe that someone might take advantage of the ElcomSoft application to distribute pirated copies of e-Books.
Although charges were eventually dropped against Sklyarov and Elcomsoft, the butterfly effect continued apace: Niels Ferguson, a Dutch security systems analyst, uncovered a serious security flaw in an Intel video encryption system, then refused to publish his findings due to concerns that his travels to the US could result in an arrest similar to Sklyarov’s. Several other security and forensics experts followed suit, removing their own software and articles from web sites, citing a fear of retaliation under the DMCA.
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