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> All CBS has to do to make money off this is have advertising in a corner of the screen

Right on. thenewsroom is one of those content distribution sites, and the beauty of it is that you can do things like create a custom feed of Coast Guard videos and you'll get the latest content both from CBS and from other content providers. The videos are of pretty high quality and the ads aren't too long. Ditto for text content, too, except it's a static ad and thus doesn't take up any time.

Disclaimer: I'm working on the Rails app that's powering thenewsroom.

> All CBS has to do to make money off this is have advertising in a corner of the screen

Right on. thenewsroom is one of those content distribution sites, and the beauty of it is that you can do things like create a custom feed of Coast Guard videos and you'll get the latest content both from CBS and from other content providers. The videos are of pretty high quality and the ads aren't too long. Ditto for text content, too, except it's a static ad and thus doesn't take up any time.

Disclaimer: I'm working on the Rails app that's powering thenewsroom.

Looks like IBM is getting some money from Amazon (via thenewsroom) to settle some patent disputes, maybe they can hang on to a few of those employees after all....

I don't know, looks like it's getting used in the 2008 Olympics (via thenewsroom).

> I don't see this as being any different from WebStart,
> which everyone loves to hate because it is so clunky.

JWS is pretty sweet for internal apps, though. I wrote a Swing client for a J2EE app for an internal group and folks were quite happy with the easy updates. They'd suggest a change and half an hour later I'd come buy their office, ask them to restart the app, and the new version would get downloaded and Bob's your uncle. Pretty sweet.

The JavaFX code looks pretty nice, and here's the original press release (got it from thenewsroom).

...having just missed their first quarter profit numbers. But their revenue is still fine, 10B a quarter...

Here's one that has voted today for Sarkozy. And he gives some good reasons why.

It's not only about Sarkozy, it's about Segolene. Why is she playing cheap cards like raped policewoman when they're talking about economic growth? In fact, I think was the best to show whom to vote for. Sarkozy had been asking her for about 5 minutes to tell us how she would return 2,5% economic growth to the country. As far as I remembered, except for "je le pourrais", she didn't say anything meaningful. Segolene has dreams but she has no idea of how to achieve them. That's why I put a reference to G.W.Bush (OK, I admit, it was unthoughtful) in my previous post: they both (would) do stupid things without listening to others.

You can get those with SUSE now; not sure what the 2K version gets you, but seems like a reasonable price for a starter workstation...

Batteries or no, Microsoft is doing just fine with Vista.

Bought by Yahoo, and now further by Microsoft... break out the new business cards....

I'm amazed at the comments I read so far. Come people, it's time to wake up.

Every month or so we hear a "breakthrough" in hiv research that leads to nothing. The reason that is is because HIV IS NOT THE CAUSE OF AIDS. This was a mistake made the US government in 1984 (that's right) that is too late to correct.

Just do the research and look at the statistics. HIV simply cannot explain what we call AIDS.

I tested positive, even though I never shared needles (or IV drugs), never had a transfusion, and never had unprotected sex. Didn't get it from my mom either.

AIDS is a toxic and malnutrition syndrome.

There are thousands of reason to use a condom. But to avoid AIDS is not one of them.

http://reviewingaids.org/awiki/index.php/Main_Page (good place to start)
http://aliveandwell.org/ (tons of info. All referenced)
http://barnesworld.blogs.com/barnes_world/ (nice intelligent blog)

A good video to start with is "The Other Side of AIDS". Available at: http://www.theothersideofaids.com/

Don't believe the hype. It's not a conspiracy theory, just the fact.

<object CLASSID="clsid:xxxxxxxx-yyyy-zzzz-aaaa-bbbbbbbbbbb b"
CODEBASE="http://www.sourceforge.net/opensourc ecodec/windowsbinaries/
install.cab#version=a,b,c ,ddd"
width="640" height="480">
<param name="Src" value="filename.ext">
</object>

...as we can see scientifically from this image. Besides, chimpanzees have never invented any weapons that can wipe out their entire species. But then again, that may be an argument of wisdom versus intelligence. ;-)

"you do know that 79% of the tax burden is carried by the top 20% of income earners, right?"

You mean those folks that hold the vast majority of the assets? Sure just cherry pick a single statistic from a single source and proclaim 'look what I know, you dip shits didn't know this did you, huh, huh?'. Look the issue here is just how out of balance things can get EITHER way before it breaks the system. The balance right now grossly favors those at the top of the economic food chain. If it continues to the point of breakdown just what do you think the fate of the top x% will be? In the end it is in everyones interest to not break the frickin system.

"Maybe for once we should stop being partisan"

Yea, thats rich, considering the drivel to from the "conservative" party I have listened with great restraint, and admittedly often with amusement, for most my life. Can you make a clear argument just using common sense instead of falling back on a single cherry picked statistic form BillO's list of "facts" to throw at a liberal---remember you have to use this word in with a dirty slur pretext or voice. Don't take this to mean I am a just another sheep in the Democratic flock, which in contrast to the Republican flock, is actually more like a herd of cats anyway. I will say I like many others are sick of the "good cop - bad cop" routine the two parties have used so successfully for so many years. So exactly whose drivel is it you like best? Oh thats right you like to quote the "fiducially conservative ones", hehehe, yea.

Wabi-Sabi
Matthew

read...

http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2 007/20070206/default.htm

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/f5e905ce-69d8-11db-952e-00 00779e2340.html

http://neweconomist.blogs.com/new_economist/povert y_and_inequality/index.html

http://www.chicagofed.org/economic_research_and_da ta/wp_abstract.cfm?pubsID=732

http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2003/03may/may03 interviewswolff.html

http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?st ory_id=7055911

http://ideas.repec.org/a/ecj/econjl/v112y2002i478p c68-c73.htm

http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2004/0704tilly .html

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18995

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB11418244330 8492484.html

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/71954e1a-ad43-11da-9643-00 00779e2340,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http% 3A%2F%2Fnews.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F71954e1a-ad43-11da -9643-0000779e2340.html&_i_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fne weconomist.blogs.com%2Fnew_economist%2Fpoverty_and _inequality%2Findex.html

http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/

I will also ask for an appropriation of an extra $100 million to launch an intensive campaign to find a cure for cancer, and I will ask later for whatever additional funds can effectively be used. The time has come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward conquering this dread disease. Let us make a total national commitment to achieve this goal. America has long been the wealthiest nation in the world. Now it is time we became the healthiest nation in the world.--President Richard M. Nixon in his 1971 State of the Union address.

Colt took existing designs and improved them.

McCormick appears to have been beaten to it by the Romans.

Singer. Nope (ignoring minor inventions).

Whitney. OK, but considering that Europe was inventing nitroglycerine and the computer at this time, yet another mechanical agricultural device is hardly revolutionary.

John Fitch stole his idea from English and French inventors.

Oliver Evans invented yet another 'tool driven with steam'. Very much in the current mould of 'Something that exists, only on a computer' kind of "invention" that goes on today.

Edwin Drake. Poland had a well and refinery 4 years earlier.

And lets not forget the stealing of:

• The rocket (german)
• Supersonic flight (british)
• lighbulb (swann)
• pretty much everything else except the internet.

But dont worry. The Romans were much the same. Everything was stolen from the Greeks, Carthage or someone else.

Switching latency: it's much slower to mash the keyboard to switch desktops than to move one's eye.

Old board-trained draftsmen have always known this. Most of the frustration I found with moving to CAD was with not being able to see the "full picture" at a glance and having to scroll and zoom around to interpret drawing details.

Here's a blog (not mine) that is extremely helpful on how to do clean and nice presentations...

Pity Gates and Ballmer didn't go on those courses. The slides I've seen behind them at recent presentations have been some of the most awful in living memory. Take a look at the slides on this page for some examples of what I'm talking about.
I guess the bosses get an exemption. Pity.

Presentation Zen. Definitely read their contrast of presentations given by Gates and Jobs. On a personal note, I can proudly say I have never given a presentation with bullet points. I tried hard to give up that crutch and the result has always been commendation afterwards. My audiences have described my presentations as fluid, participatory, and engaging. Avoiding bullet points at least proves you know your material. Also remember that your presentation is there to enhance what you have to say, and not the other way around.

From TFA:

iTunes Store does not offer DRM-free music despite the fact that many artists have requested it

iTunes does carry indie music, so Apple does have lots of people they can negotiate with without the major labels getting in the way. For instance, all of CDBaby's catalog is available on iTunes. [1] [2]

> I'm also disappointed that yet another MMOG-focused magazine, Massive, will be ceasing publication as well.
Why do you only hear about useful things when they go out of business.

As a substitute, check out Terra Nova: http://terranova.blogs.com/

It's fairly academic, but good for a no-nonsense read on what's up with MMOGs. Koster, other MMOG bigwigs and academics post there.

JK On the run has a video of it in action. apart from his very amateurish video work, you get a pretty good appreciation of the device.

in summary... powerful but chunky!

Check out Fred's blog post where he's trying to find MySQL people.

Aways funny to see these removed-from-the-trenches guys who think the solution to making their startup spaghetti code perform is to bring in a database guy/gal. We all know how this goes... the startup's founders/coders stonewall the database pro because they don't want anyone to see how shitty their code is.

So yeah, it's a joke to think that someone's going to come in and make everything go faster now, but hey, good chance to grab some of that VC money before it goes away.

The thing that people forget is that HL2's art direction was amazing. I can't think of another title in recent memory that had a higher level of visual cohesiveness on a reasonable polybudget. For example, darkness consistently equals safety throughout the game, whereas any point you're exposed to sunlight is a location shrouded in danger. This is consistent both internally and externally. No-one, to my knowledge, has followed this color styling, yet it is an effective technique at making the player feel like an unwelcome outcast.

You can see how minimalist this tree really is. They only gave it just enough branches to cover the illusion, but not so many that it holds up to actual inspection. Another shot of said tree, from a more common angle. By not wasting any polys, they really can afford to put more on-screen. Heck, look at leaves. Artificially close, they are a big smear. But from the distance you normally see them, they can stick thousands of these things on screen, and they look beautiful.

Love the look of brick? Notice how in this shot they've burned the bump maps and damage maps and everything into the same texture? The increases the repetition in texture, but if you vary your geometry sufficiently the player will never notice. All they'll notice is a lot more is going on on-screen than they're used to. This technique looks terrible for big-open walls, but Half Life studiosly avoids big open walls within proximity of the player.

They even used a distinct pallete of blacks, muted browns, and light blues. This was far before anyone else was using anything but super-saturated primary colors.

Ignoring any technical accomplishments, this is an achievement of strong visual composition and consistent, solid art direction.

A comment posted to that blog addresses that:

Yes - it must take foreshortening into account. Briefly what it does is calibrate the camera's parameters (field-of-view for one) from the reference DigiTarget image which has known dimensions, and generates a perspective transformation from that. This should be a simple exercise in computer vision. Notice how it only measures horizontal and vertical lengths. This is because these have particularly special invariance properties under a perspective transformation. This leads me to deduce that the DigiTarget must always be shot head-on for this thing to work at all.

That Polar Bear in the snowstorm is gigantic!

That link doesn't work (at least, not for me). I think it looks at the referer and won't let you deeplink to the image. You have to go through the blog to see it:
http://jkontherun.blogs.com/jkontherun/2007/02/how _to_measure_.html

Looking at that photo, I'm not buying that it can measure all those distances from a single photo. I think there is some advertising hyperbole going on here. I get that you could measure all those distances and dimensions, using multiple photos -- one each of every flat surface, moving the target each time so it's the same distance from the camera as the surface being measured -- but I don't think it would work from a single photo.

The only way you could measure everything from a single photo like that, would be if the camera was stereoscopic, or had some other form of depth perception. Otherwise, as you noticed, there's no way for it to know that the window that's closer to the camera is not really bigger than the garage door that's further away.

See: http://blogs.msdn.com/michael_howard/archive/2004/ 10/15/242966.aspx
See: http://rmh.blogs.com/weblog/2005/05/is_microsoft_i i.html

Those posts are somewhat old, but the trend apparently continues if you go check Secunia, or your favorite vulnerability lists.

Daniel Radcliffe acting in Equus. Saucy photo included.

Who'da thunk it? Harry Potter has a treasure trail.

> Look, most of us want a database system we can use for our
> own limited but still important purposes. We don't need a
> lot of enterprise-level crud bogging us down.

So true. I'm running a small database (only 20 million records), and PostgreSQL is more than sufficient. We use it in production, too, and it's quite solid.

Maybe someday when we get up to 100 TB or so we'll think about something else, but by then PostgreSQL will probably be capable of handling that load as well...

It's getting installed at a furious rate... we're doing around a gem a second now.

....including "Operating Systems and Systems Programming" and "Machine Structures" are here. Hopefully these are a good listen.

I've also gotten through most of the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs lectures and although there's a lot of chalk-on-blackboard noises that you're not able to see, you can still pick up quite a bit of good info.

The blurb on parallel constructs is well said. This has been said on Slashdot before, but with more and more computers getting multicore CPUs, it behooves us to figure out ways to get apps to use multiple threads of execution.

We can do this by multithreading in a single process, which the latest release of PMD does. This is kind of complicated, although using a good concurrency library certainly helps. Or we can separate concerns, like moving the user interface into a separate process like we do with indi. Either way, no sense in leaving CPU power on the table...

> It would be nice if there was a nice open source COBOL IDE

A starting point might be this JavaCC grammar for COBOL.

> For a company of our size, they package this as a VMWare image.

FWIW, there are also GForge VMWare appliances out there. I can see how it'd make a normal installation easier to troubleshoot, too, if you had a VMWare installation for comparison.

And of course, it's awesome that they both run on PostgreSQL, great stuff!

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

It's the domino theory of island obliteration! As environmentalists always warned, once Lohachara falls, that's it for Egypt.

The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

Got that right, Geoffrey. I can't remember Lohachara ever disappearing previously.

Until now the Carteret Islands off Papua New Guinea were expected to be the first populated ones to disappear, in about eight years' time, but Lohachara has beaten them to the dubious distinction.

By quite a margin, as it happens. Lean doesn't say so, but Lohachara apparently vanished two decades ago. So much for Lean's scoop; the event took place back when Lean had hair, and several years before he emerged from a coma. Some locals aren't buying that global warming line, by the way:

Atanu Raha, director of Sundarban Biosphere Reserve, said the islands were getting eroded by oceanic currents, not by rising sea levels.

"Erosion and accretion are natural phenomena. Across the world islands submerge and new ones emerge. This is natural," Raha said.

Not according to Lean, who evidently believes all weather change is due to Meddling Humans. And that's all change, whether towards cold or heat. In 2004, Lean reported that "Britain is likely to be plunged into an ice age within our lifetime by global warming". Two years later, he asked: "So where has all the snow gone?" There's no pleasing Geoffrey.

UPDATE. This nonsense was republished in the NZ Herald.

UPDATE II. Lean has previously been convicted of sins of omission and other crimes against journalism.

UPDATE III. Jackalope Pursuivant: "I've seen worse cases of journalistic malpractice, but not much worse."

You don't want to think about a new pair of sneakers or getting a sandwich.

I don't want to think about buying sneakers or eating a sandwich, no matter what I'm doing. People don't watch TV because they're hungry or they want to go shopping (exception might be the Super Bowl ads and the Home Shopping channel). They don't drive their cars to look at billboards (unless there's something news worth about one). And they don't go to the cinema to sit through 20 mins of ads (though, I love seeing the pre-views). Yet, advertisements are there (often times undesirably so, just ask any European who watches a TV show in the U.S. how annoying ads are).

You bought the game to play it, not to solicit advertising for upgrades to your lifestyle.

I paid for cable to watch TV, not watch ads. I paid my $10 for a movie ticket to see a film, not watch ads. I pay my taxes and toll fees to drive on good roads, not watch ads. Yet, they're there. Why? Because there's an audience. Part of what I got from this article was that advertisers realize that ads are not effective in some (if not most) games, not just that gamers didn't want ads. Ads will become common in games soon, in one way or another. WoW is already doing marketing tie-ins for some time, through their website with Nvida and other companies. They're running Coka-Cola TV ads and cross-promotion in Asia.

A lot of this 'games in Ads' is just FUD. You're not going to see Pepsi billboard in your Lord of the Rings game, and your not have to eat a Domino's pizza to regain your life points in Half-Life 2. (though, companies have made their own video games, and continue to do so, look at Burger Kings mascots games)

What you will see are Nike ads in NBA 2k8, or maybe some kind of half-time "Ford Motor Company Quarterback Challenge" mini game in the next Madden. Whats FUD is to not realize that game developers are still the ones who are making games and not marketing people. If a company is going to pay to put an ad in a game, first, the marketing department is going to make sure there is a good potential ROI for spending that money on an ad. Second, the game developer is going to make sure that promotion will and can be fit into the game without destroying the game play or story or whatever. What you'll see are littered Dr Pepper cans in the streets of Resident Evil. Or maybe you bust down a door in some 'COPS' game to find the bad guys scarfing Pizza Hut pizza (or hey, maybe it's not delivery, it's Di-Gorno's!).

Ads are not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, they can be a good thing! They can make a game feel even more 'realistic', a common mantra of many gamers desire. It's ultimately going to be up to the game developers choice to how to implement ads. I can tell you, ad revenue will not be enough to compensate a crappy game and it won't sell a game, and that's the primary purpose of a game company, to sell games.

Now... I'll be waiting for the companies listed above to send me some money for all the advertisement I just gave them. =P

Cheers,
Fozzy

It's supplanted Apache+FastCGI as the preferred way of deploying Rails apps in a very short time and seems to be a much better solution all around. "gem install mongrel mongrel_cluster" sure beats the steps necessary to get FCGI running.

I wonder how many people have upgraded to Apache 2.2 in order to get mod_proxy_balancer to balance between Mongrel instances... that's why I did it for indi.

> They compare PostgreSQL 8.2 vs MySQL 4.1.20 and MySQL 5.1.20a.

Mod parent up and all that. We're using PostgreSQL 8.2 for a small (18 million records) database and are pleased as punch with it. And here, too.

Looks like somebody woke up on the wrong side of the rock

But in all seriousness even the free package is pretty awesome. You can do time-domain rigid-body simulation at your computer, before building your robot to spec. This isn't just software to control a robot (it is that, too ... but that's easy. People have been doing that for years. Parallax, MIT's BOTboard, etc.) This is a prototyping environment whose resulting code can be directly used in your robotic project. It's a step forward in integration, and quite slick in my humble opinion.

I've got a fairly busy email server and this sounds like a great thing for the queue files... lots of little files, lots of random access.

Of course, the other posts about flash memory degrading after n writes would be something to watch, too.

> This looks liike an opportunity for Postgres

Right on. And with the excellent performance of the newly-released PostgreSQL 8.2, it's a good time to make the switch.

The AP gets caught falsify sources and admits they have "talking points".
Reuters gets caught photoshopping (cut-n-paste, clone tool, etc.) photos.
It has been shown that most of the reporting about Katrina was false.

Really why trust them?

from: http://shrinkwrapped.blogs.com/blog/2005/11/revisi ting_less.html
posted Nov 15, 2005

Lessons from Vietnam: The Credibility Gap

The MSM* was permanently changed by the Vietnam war and its aftermath, including the Watergate scandal and the Nixon impeachment. [As commenter Jon Ravin points out in the interest of accuracy, Nixon was never actually impeached, but resigned when his impeachment became inevitable. This correction was made at the time of the original post-SW] The experiences of that time explain much of the agenda journalism of the MSM today, but I would submit that they have not only forgotten the most crucial lesson from Vietnam, but their failure to remember will ultimately destroy them as a uniquely important and powerful force in our society.

First some history:

During the years of the troop escalation in Vietnam, ultimately topping out at over 550,000 American military personal, the Pentagon and the White House, still fighting the last war in terms of Public Relations, continually measured our success in the war by pointing to "body counts". Using an outdated model of war in which the media play the role of conveyors of information controlled by the Pentagon and the administration, daily body counts of enemy combatants were touted as evidence, in the infamous words of General Westmoreland, that we could see "the light at the end of the tunnel." From 1965 on, we were, according to the daily body counts, winning the Vietnam war. When the Tet offensive took place in January of 1968, the reason the public was so shocked and ready to see our military victory as a defeat was that the expectations of victory "right around the corner" were crushed. We never knew that the North Vietnamese, post-Tet, were ready to sue for peace; all we knew was that an enemy who was supposedly being decimated was able to launch a major offensive. The conclusion was that either our military and the administration were incompetent, or that they had been lying to us all along. This lead to the "Credibility Gap". No longer would our press, feeling with some justification that they had been used and lied to, allow themselves to be so gullible. From this point on , the press almost universally saw themselves in an adversarial role against the military and the Executive branch of government.

It is important to note that the Pentagon and White House were only doing what had always been done in war time. The purpose of news in war time is to support the morale of the home front and to that end, propaganda has always been an important aspect of warfare. Unfortunately for the Johnson and Nixon administrations, while the nature of war hadn't really changed, the nature of our media had. We had close to real time news emanating from the battlefields of Vietnam. Reporters could see that there were attacks not being reported, injuries and deaths of Americans being swept under the rug, and constant reports of impending victory which were easily refuted.

This is extremely relevant to our war effort today. The military realizes that we are fighting a new kind of war, which includes a significant public relations aspect on the home front. [The military may have recognized this, but there has been precious little evidence that the Bush Administration has caught on to this aspect of the Information War.] The MSM does not yet recognize that fact; they are still fighting the last war.

We are winning in Iraq and have been for some time. When the Iraqis vote on their Constitution, with significant voting from the Sunni areas, the MSM will not be able to disguise the fact. [Though they "buried the lead" and the story as quickly as pos

> Writing a lexer/parser is easy,

And even more so since there's a JavaCC grammar for COBOL.

> 8.2 is positioned as a performance release.

We've only got a small database (17 million records or so), and PostgreSQL 8.1 has been handling it fine. But I'm still looking forward to seeing how 8.2 improves things.

And we're using it in another production system, too, which is going to get pretty big (I hope). Lively times!

> as a big corporation, you can leech the efforts of
> thousands of unpaid but experienced contractors and
> never once feel the need to give back. (e.g., Thanks Apache!)

True, but an open source project doesn't take much to run - just a server and some bandwidth, and the bandwidth needs can be minimized via judicious mirroring.

But I agree that corporations should support the developers of the open source projects they're using.... +1 on that.

I recently upgraded RubyForge to Apache 2.2 and it's been such an improvement. mod_cache is great, the worker MPM is solid, and now I can run ViewVC under mod_python. And there's mod_proxy and mox_proxy balancer for making Rails apps work nicely with Mongrel. If you're still back on 1.3, I highly recommend 2.2.

I recently upgraded RubyForge to Apache 2.2 and it's been such an improvement. mod_cache is great, the worker MPM is solid, and now I can run ViewVC under mod_python. And there's mod_proxy and mox_proxy balancer for making Rails apps work nicely with Mongrel. If you're still back on 1.3, I highly recommend 2.2.