Seriously, unless you're trying to maintain some sort of artificial professional distance between you and your underlings (or superiors if you're a secretary), consult with your users. They know if they work in pairs, trios, have cross-functional needs (2 engineers, 1 creative on any given team), or if all 15 engineers work alone and only need to talk with sales every month, while the creative guys are the support for sales.
Start by evalutaing the space you have, and the company needs. Make sure you have some expansion room if you think your company can become healthy inside of 5 years. Make sure you don't have to turn the break room into an office if you hire that 16th engineer. If your company (or division, or branch, or what have you) necessitates customer NDAs -- or might ever, don't go with any kind of open cubicle arrangement. Even if you do lots of intercommunication, enclosed single or double offices provide a degree of privacy that makes the employee feel trusted. Consider making your offices or spaces such that nobody has to sit with his or her backs to the opening (door or otherwise). There are plenty of metrics for productivity that don't involve sneaking up from behind someone. I've seen studies inside of my company that concluded cubicles didn't save the space anticipated once you factored in the space requirements of break out rooms so people could actually have some discussions.
Furniture is less important. Give everybody a whiteboard and handle ergonomic needs as they arise. Consider using LCDs (if color realism isn't necessary) for clarity and space efficiency (energy savings are exaggerated, although measurable). Have some flexible policies regarding people decorating their own spaces, and you're probably set. Some people covet windows, others loathe the day-star entirely.
As with any problem, a customer is involved (this time, your workers). Consult with your customer and make sure you understand the problems they think you'll solve. Listen to their suggestions on how to solve the problems, but make no promises until you've worked something out. Julius Caesar always asked even the lowliest of troops for advice before a battle-- he always had other plans in place, and the troops' advice rarely had any impact at all, but the illusion was that he cared about their opinions. Because they felt like their opinions were valued, they fought harder and won many battles that they should have lost by all accounts. If your workers feel valued, they will work harder for you.
I see lots of conversation comparing this generation of processor to space heaters, wisecracks about Longhorn minimum systems (that actual article was about the predicted "average", not minimum). Not much about actual multi-cores. They're an interesting direction to go.
The current direction of single core CPUs is basically running into the most they can do with XUs, MPUs, caches, etc. Sure, you can decrease the pipeline depth below the 18FO4 that the PentiumIV supposedly has, and that can help you with serial data paths, and that makes simple XUs, MPUs, etc. faster, but the branch mispredict is still horrendous -- perhaps too high for a general purpose processor found in our PCs. The more complicated logic is possible to do, but there's only so much you can do with the data and sub-Angstrom logic.
Beyond the geek factor, multiple cores on a single die attack the same problems as putting SMP did in the first place (plus a few race conditions that otherwise may have been very rare), allowing much less manpower to design a processor that is still much faster in the end. A single threaded application will seem slower, and that will place more burden on the developers to see the light of multiple threads. Instead of allowing an XU to munge through and deal with a single thread at a time, which may be a misuse of incredible resource (like a thread that said "go to grocery store" and the XU was a race car), multiple die have correspondingly multiple XUs each with their own resources, so hard tasks can be spread across multiple cores, or simple ones can get executed in parallel with others (like a thread can take a Kia to the grocery store while another Kia goes to the Post Office). Of course, problems that cannot be divided into multiple threads do not see the advantage of multiple cores, but other tasks remain responsive without requiring a monster task to context switch.
I've read about multiple cores that share a single L2 outperforming multiple cores with dedicated L2s in specific tasks, basically one core essentially acts like a pre-fetch core under a workload and the second core can reap the benefits.
Don't let your email address appear in a public forum of any kind that is or can be crawled. I have employed this technique and can say with a straight face that in six months I have not received ONE piece of spam.
That's great for you. That works for some people. Additional tips: never give your e-mail address to any friends who mass mail jokes / family news with you in the to: field or cc: field -- only bcc:, because you never know who it gets forwarded to. Also, skip people who may get viruses who send e-mail to people in their address books. More? Keep your e-mail address non-dictionary guessable, that's even including multiple words especially for the big ISPs. Don't even think of putting your e-mail address on business cards and then giving them out to potential customers / clients. Even this is a partial list. Merely keeping your e-mail off public forums (especially Usenet) isn't good enough. Heck, the address that owns your vanity domain name is just as susceptible. Oh, jeez, and the friends who send those silly free e-postcards to a personal (intentionally spamfree) address cannot be chastized enough.
My personal address is very well protected. I don't get many, but I do get the occasional non-dictionary, non-forum, non-anything spam. All businesses get their unique address, like so many other/.ers do. My point is this: your 6 months are great. They were like my first 18 months, but the last 41 months of being roughly as careful as you don't yield 100% success due to external uncontrollable factors.
Professional addresses, however, require filtering because they need to go out to potential business contacts who may not be curteous with my address.
This discussion is perhaps more suited to ArsTechnica, as the issue at hand is whether or not x86 is the best instruction set for a low power budget chip maker to pursue. I hope you don't hold that Alpha would be a more suitable instruction set for that -- I don't even want to think of what packages aren't available for Alpha, let alone ask a vendor for a program ported to my "Alpha-Compatible". Academically speaking, however, I will reply to your PowerPC attacks. Regretfully, all my college textbooks are 300 miles away, and I have not looked through my senior textbooks in 5 years, so my rebuttal cannot cite specific Alpha shortfalls beyond anecdotal recollection.
PPC is nicer than X86 but it's hardly a "lovely architecture." In fact, it's one of the uglier RISC designs.
4 precise detractors against the PPC ommitted, I concede that these are 4 of very many
As far as RISC architectures go, Alpha was probably the best by far, and the actual implementation was great starting with the EV6.
The Alpha processor team spent years learning that many of the architecturally correct ideals they had held needed to be thrown out when it came to the real world. According to Torvalds, "And all the RISC stuff that tried to avoid it was just a BIG WASTE OF TIME. Because the _only_ thing the RISC approach ended up showing was that eventually you have to do the hard stuff anyway, so you might as well design for doing it in the first place."
Make no mistake, I make no claims about the Alpha deserving the fate that we all foresaw when DEC made the deal with the Devil. Alpha had its share of problems (remember the quick race to 500MHz, then the hard stop for a long time while they straightened out their unbuffered cross chip clock signal?). The RISC/CISC debate ended long ago when Intel effectively merged them. Since then, the two different schools have borrowed from each other so much that we expect chips to have some cruft to reflect their original intents. For this reason, we'll see all Itanium derivatives reflecting that they were made for pre-defined behavior where a compiler can make predictions of the instruction ordering, and likely this will continue to be in intensely predictable math operations. At this time, anyone who insists that modern PPC, x86, Alpha or Sparc chips are exclusively RISC or CISC hasn't taken the time to realize that there is a very blurry line between the RISC and CISC lately. Many have argued that this line is effectively erased and that the definitions have only had meaning in college courses for the past decade.
The Alpha may be your ultimately pure holy processor, but I will continue to find PPC to be a great balance between theory and real world needs and heritage. If nothing else, x86 has taught us that we can have incredibly high performance architectures based on 1970s vintage processors like the 4004.
Is an x86 or clone really the best chip to take to markey this way? Linux will run on other processors and the x86 isnt' the best archicecture. There are processors that are more efficient, use less power and can run linux
Give PPC a try. I love my LinuxPPC machines, they're wonderful. I honestly fell in love with the PPC in college, first in real world x86 emulation (VirtualPC) and then in Computer Architecture and Computer Hardware Design. It's a lovely architecture, and you can see its low power uses in the iBook. I've read that the 750 in the iBook used less power than the southbridge, but I don't have references to back that up. Suffice it to say, the PPCs have been traditionally pretty low power, and have pretty good desktop acceptance as far as non-x86 processors go on desktop machines.
After you get through the base packages of a useful distro, like Debian or a multitude of others, you'll start to find x86 only packages-- retail packages usually don't even acknowledge that Linux runs on non-x86 hardware! Is x86 compatible really the architecture to target for Linux acceptance? If I didn't love PPC and have a source of cheap old Macs, I'd rather be running a VIA / Cyrix derivative because of how cool they run. Since the Pentium class, x86 hasn't been about the native instruction set, it's been about the state machine that re-orders, re-names and actually issues native instructions on a pretty nice, flexible RISC inside anyway. So, Centaur's problem is basically updating their RISC core and keeping their x86 runtime emulator tuned. That way you don't have to bend anybody's mindset to make packages for some off the wall architecture, or beat another architecture at their own game.
When I saw GNOME under development, I never thought to myself, "self, now that GNOME thing looks to speed things up". Never once did it even occur to me that all that PrettyFactor would be light on memory or CPU. Is the Linux Desktop getting heavier and slower? If you use GNOME or KDE or any other "user friendly" desktop environment, yes.
I've got a 486/66 at home running a mail / web / name / shell server. He's keeping up pretty well, but I must admit that console dselect takes a minute longer than I would prefer to start up. For his every day tasks, even keeping up with updates, it's more than enough-- so really, this is a question of the GUI end of things.
I wonder how well it would work to introduce one of those reviewers to a very well set up and themed tvtwm2 or whatnot. You know, without all the Kapps or Gapps. I bet the reviewer says it's snappy as a rubber band, but it doesn't do anything (most of those setups don't have any easy to find buttons, you have to click on a blank background to start anything). I think under that environment, Moz, OO, Wine, etc. work, but the plethora of free apps that make Linux interesting to the hobbyist seem to take advantage of the easy to use Glibs and Klibs. The reason for the "bloat" (i.e. heavier and slower) is the added functionality and eye candy.
You can take your lean and mean Linux Desktop, but don't expect it to run all the pretty apps nor expect it to have anti-aliasing and PrettyFactor3.0.
My dad got Vonage to use with his residential Cox cable modem in Phoenix. My experiences are exclusively those of the other end, a normal POTS phone. I expect to read many perspectives of owners, but probably few from my end.
Normal quality was a bit better than a digital cell phone. Those don't bother most people. I happened to have been pretty sensitive to the digitization that happens with digital cell phones, so I wasn't terribly impressed. There were periods, however, when it seemed like the VOIP stream paused (packet loss is my assumption), and it would buffer several seconds of conversation (5-10 seconds) and then play them back very rapidly once the stream was reestablished. This was not a problem when I talked to my dad, who is a very consistant speaker, although I didn't understand why he acted like he couldn't hear me during the buffer times, but it was a problem with my mother. My mother sometimes speaks in bursts, rapidly clearing out her own buffer when multiple trains of thought arrive at the station simultaneously-- when the VOIP buffers clearing out at the same time, I had to ask her to back the trains out and bring them back in slower, which was frustrating for both of us.
With a good ISP, perhaps with a business class DSL connection (I'm in the "shared cable systems are bad" religion, although there are fewer of us left), I would imagine that most people wouldn't experience my father's buffering problems, and perhaps a quality setting could be adjusted up for more bandwidth and increased verbal clarity.
1) IBM is the largest services company out there. When IBM goes out to a corporate site and they discuss how many copies of Office they can buy, and how long they expect that version to be available and useful, that translates into a cost per year. Sure, the product may still be productive after a certain point, but there may be features in 200X+3 that a critical part of the userbase requires, and it's difficult to support more than one version for a large company. Therefore, whether or not the subscription model is spelled out, it's basically a subscription anyway-- just that all 3-4 years of Office 2000 were paid for up front. 2) Sure, the web goes down. Nobody is willing to state that the wires will never break or that someone won't back hoe through a fibre line. Personally, when my intranet goes down, I'm dead in the water. I can't get e-mail from critical people, can't send e-mail to critical people (same for IMing), can't use the centralized databases that make my life, can't use networked drives for my data that must be backed up, etc. Big companies already depend on their intranet being up 99% of the time, and they lose money / productivity when they aren't. Adding one more tool to the pile won't have that big of an impact. 3) Raise your hand if you've ever depended on your users to apply a patch! In a web subscription model, even if a web service cluster is deployed to each major corporate site, it's not only a smaller number of computers to receive the patch, but those machines should be controlled by the site admins instead of lusers who get so many requests each day that learning how to apply a patch and verify that it was applied correctly between taking their laptops to meetings never seems to happen. 4) Value added ISPs. TV is filled with ISPs who are selling their transparent proxies that will translate all graphics into heavily compressed JPGs because it's a value added service, consider a case down the line where a vendor can have Corporate Web Office Suite slimmed down to the same interface, but with Home Version features only. That gets the kids at home something they can use that's like what Dad uses at work at a minimal cost to the ISP (just storage of the local machine host[s], keep all the bandwidth in house where it's cheap). The Web Office Suite Lite company gets to indoctrinate all the home users as a nice benefit.
So at any given time, 60% of dialup users do not want to switch. 40% do switch. Next year, 60& want to switch => some of the original 60% must have switched sides to the 40%.
Consider as an alternative, however, that the system is an open system. Perhaps 40% want to switch, and all of them do. Perhaps those 40% are all replaced by new users, plus an additional 10%. Of the new 50%, 40% want to switch. Suddenly, the modem ISP business is growing.
Reminds me of the natural gas fuel cell / heat exchanger that claimed 300% efficiency. Naysayers pointed out how impossible it was. When you dug down into it, the transfer was like 75% from natural gas to electricity, of which waste heat was used to heat the building to be powered (basically increasing the 75%), and part of the electricity was used to run a ground source heat pump. Sure, the overall efficienty was lower than 100%, but with a ground source heat pump, the system is larger than anybody cares about.
Come on, there is no legitimate "fair use" excuse for bringing a video cam into a theater and filming the movie. Exactly who is the "ass-hat" here?
I believe the argument is a standard one of copyright opposers -- that nobody is harmed by violating copyright. When a value is added to the work, like a sound system and big high res wide screen movie theater, the work generates plenty of money on its own. People see it for the atmosphere and wouldn't want to see it at home. They believe the premise that everyone would watch the movies at home exclusively to be false. Furthermore, the editorial statement is poking fun at how they're arresting someone who presumably paid to enter instead of the people who don't pay and download.
My opinions on this matter are secondary, this is how I understand the argument that copyrights should not have the penalties they do.
Say I'm a tourist (where doesn't really matter) and decide to take a 2 hour break from walking around and entertain myself by taking in a movie. Out of mistrust for my fellow man, I take my possessions inside, instead of leaving them in the lobby. As a tourist, I happen to have a video camera. Maybe I set it on the armrest beside me so I can keep a firm grasp on it and out of a thief's hands.
Would a projectionist have a duty to interrupt the movie and ask me why my camera is there? A duty to question my answer? Say the fuzz shows up and decides to do the questioning for the projectionist, who is at fault for the false accusation? Or am I resonably considered guilty for merely having a camera?
So then, let's take it a step further: would you people also be willing to put up with a totally closed-source kernel, and a closed-source C compiler, if the hardware manufacturers demanded it? In that case, why not just use Windows?
Seriously, I fail to understand why you people want to use Linux, only to complain about the lack of hardware support, since the Linux world requires everything to be open source.
Yup. You're right. We slashdotters are all of one heritage, all of one mindset, all of one ideology. We are hypocritical in that we believe in multiple things that contradict, on one hand preaching GPL and prosecuting GPL infringements, and simultaneously begging nVidia to port their driver to Linux and telling SCO that their intellectual property that's in the kernel is so long gone that it needs to be forgotten. We believe that iBooks are evidence of the second coming of Christ, and at the same time Microsoft is the metaphorical apple in the Garden of Eden. We are all out of work programmers who made it rich during the dot-com boom, and now that we've squandered our riches on trinkets, we're begging for the few jobs that haven't been exported to India.
Perhaps there is another website out there for people who can enjoy the casual uses of open source Linux kernels, patching only when necessarily, and accepting as a compromise the need to have open source video drivers. Perhaps in this hypothetical website, they can have people who like Linux for the community, for the CLI and GUI (ha!), and don't like the way Windows feels or how much it costs.
Let's just get it straight. If you read Slashdot, you only like Linux because it's GPL, and you must despise closed source drivers that enable hardware to do their thing. Don't you remember it was part of the click through agreement when you signed up for your Slashdot Union membership! We must act together!
I have mixed feelings about backwards compatibility. While being able to play current games on the next Xbox would be nice; too often, hardware/software is seriously crippled because of backwards compatibility
Have you ever seen VirtualPC run on a Mac? I've seen instances where VPC is able to emulate code pretty close to the x86 equivalent speed. Now if we're talking about a multi-way PPC, (tri? dual?) 970 class processor, even if you penalize one of the 1GHz processors 50%, it should be able to handle the 700MHz P3 that's in the XBox.
I found it fishy when Microsoft purchased VirtualPC. Sure, they can create virtual instances of Windows on top of Windows, but that's not very mass market. On the other hand, if they can use the technologies that VPC perfected to make their software basically architecture independant (backwards compatibility on any reasonably equipped processor), then that really gives them a bargaining chip. Of course, the Mac community felt that Microsoft was going to box VPC up in a small piece of pine and we'd never see it again, but that was not cunning enough.
I've heard that the G5 doesn't have VPC running on it because it's missing one instruction that the G4 had, and although I don't know what that is, I imagine that Microsoft can pay IBM enough to put that instruction in for the XBox2 version of the chip. Heck, Microsoft and IBM can work out a way to make custom logic interface with VPC better instead of it being exclusively modifying VPC (within reason of course).
I think, in true Microsoft fashion, we'll see the new VPC changed slightly and then become the foundation of their (gaming) business.
Since you're talking about a TiVo, I'll assume you're not in the market for 4DTV or any other C band sattellites. The TiVo can't control a decoder that needs to move the dish to point to a new sattelite.
I entered the satellite market when I moved to an area of Burlington, VT (the biggest city, if you can call it that, in the state) that was not serviced by Adelphia (the regional cable operator). I priced my two satellite options with the idea of going for the cheapest plan that had my needed subset of channels, namely SciFi, Comedy Central, History, CNNHN, etc. I found that I could get Dish Network's America's Top 50 plan for $19.95/month (or close to that). Currently, that plan is $24.99/month. Dish's AT100 plan competed with the base offering from DirecTV, but I really didn't need to fork over the extra dough for that. I've since moved to an area of the country that allows me to pay extra to get local channels over my satellite feed, so I pay $29.99/month for AT50 Plus Locals (or something like that), still with Dish Network.
Before you look at your options, sit down and record the channels you need, and the channels you want. Then go find a plan that you can live with at a price that makes you happy.
Quality: I read the specs long ago, but have not found them repeated-- Dish and DirecTV have higher horizontal resolutions than any analog solution, but I've never actually noticed this in practice; I assume the MPEG compression makes blocks that can't take good advantage of the extra pixels. In good weather, they will compare favorably to digital cable, which it seems like everyone has seen. In bad weather (heavy snow, rain), sattelite signal will degrade, meaning that the MPEG blocks will get bigger, sometimes the wrong colors, and the MPEG sound will be distorted-- if it's bad enough, the entire image may pause or give you a "lost signal" message. On the other hand, I've had cable outages that last for days, unexplained cable downtime that the companies never acknowledge, etc., so I don't fall for the cable ads that say how bad sattelite reception is. If you've ever been to Northern Vermont in January through March, it tells you something that I only lost my satellite signals once or twice a month that I acutally noticed. Aiming the dish is very key to keeping the signal through bad weather.
PVR. Yeah, you can go for a non-TiVo PVR, maybe your cable company will get one soon, maybe you'll try out the one from Dish, but you will be disappointed. If you go DirecTV, your quality and recording times will be better getting the DirecTiVo-- it just records the raw stream, it doesn't need to encode. If you go Dish, like I did, the TiVo still works great. There's a doohickey (technical term) that fits over the IR receiver so the TiVo basically is its own remote (IR LEDs hooked up to long wires). I was very satisfied with the quality from the DIsh through the TiVo.
Cable companies are becoming great broadband utilities, but I don't like their FUD and sometimes outright lies about the satellite providers, so anymore, I can't bring myself to support them for TV service.
I want filesystem priorities. A background task that is grinding the hard drive, should only do so when a high priority task isn't using the drive, or when its data is adjacent to the high priority data the head is next to anyway.
With a compression algorithm like that (millions of lines to 60+ pages)
SCO's IP license would be worth $699...but since that compression ratio is impossible (except in Utah) SCO is pretty much done.
As an engineer, I need to look at the edge conditions. Consider the case where the recipient already has a copy of the source code. The compression / decompression algorithm could be smart enough to say "Yup, that's it" and have the entire payload be "1" or "Nope, here's a gzipped version" and have the payload be a "0" followed by a general purpose compression payload. There are points in between that make this compression be specifically tuned but slightly more useful, for example, each paragraph gets its own fingerprint to follow a "1" and non-SCO paragraphs get bzipped, or whatever. In any event, it is not impossible to compress millions of lines of text onto 60 pages for any reasonably arbitrary font size when the programmer has adequate knowledge of the application.
Not that SCO will let any trained programmers worth their weight in carbon dioxide to look at the application conditions, but it was fun to think about.
did you actually use the official client? It has the ability to cap uploads, but be a nice kid and share. All you have to do is press the button to the upper right, and there you go. Sometimes I sympathize with unfriendly linux-folk, just RTFM, it's not like it's big.
Sometimes I sympathize with the non-Linux folk, because when RTFM doesn't pan out, there's nothing much to do except ask a message board for other options. RTFM is nice and all, but between that and the condescending attitude, you've managed to irritate me personally and my problem still exists.
Your idea sounds like a great one, and I can do it, but I'm looking for something that works. Sure, I can cap it to 7KiB/s, but that has no impact. Even when I take it down to 2KiB/s and 1 upload, the bloody application (3.3a by the way) still runs like it's uncapped.
I asked for a solution that works, and Carrafix gets me part way, but there are times when Bittorrent is too smart and uses ports I've not capped or explicitly blocked with my firewall. Also, while I've had trouble isolating to be sure, I believe Carrafix goes wild after multiple days of use and loses (some of?) its capping abilities. All I want is a way to run Bittorrent 24/7 and still leave the internet connection available for family members.
This reminds me. Anybody seen a Bittorrent client for MacOSX that will allow caps on uploads? I'm using the official reference client from Bram and I have to use Carrafix to cap my uploads. Carrafix is a kludge, and I don't like having to use two programs when one should work -- but this is the only solution I've been able to find.
I have a dual 500MHz G4 with a 15" LCD screen. According to my Kill-A-Watt (not a referrer link), that machine pulls down 110-130W when on and actively doing stuff, and ~33W when sleeping. When I'm not using it, I hit the power button (which puts a Mac to sleep within 10 seconds and can wake up in less time than that). For any who are curious, with my usage profile (an hour in the morning, a few in the evening), that machine cost me 10 cents a day to use. Those figures also included a UPS trickle charging (or whatever they do when power is relatively clean.
If you have some time, I recommend visiting friends with setups similar to the computers you're considering, and plugging a Kill-A-Watt in to them and finding out how much power they'll use in your situation.
Some interesting details
on
Global Dimming
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The few experts who have studied the effect believe it's down to air pollution. Tiny particles of soot or chemical compounds like sulphates reflect sunlight and they also promote the formation of bigger, longer lasting clouds. "The cloudy times are getting darker," says Cohen, at the Volcani Centre. "If it's cloudy then it's darker, but when it's sunny things haven't changed much."
Please note here, much of this 10% is being reflected. There are people in this thread pointing out how untrue the observations must be because if 10% of the sun's energy was being absorbed by the atmosphere, the Earth would be getting a heck of a lot warmer than it is. Instead, the Earth should be getting 10% brigher from the moon or anywhere else in space. Particulates are reflecting and clouds are forming (which look very bright to me when I fly over them).
I've been wondering about this. Would global warming end up creating enough clouds to reflect enough energy from the sun that it balances itself out after a few decades? Or will global warming cause an imbalance in the sun's reflected energy after a few decades that causes a swing on the cold side? How much does the CO2 green house effect compare to the particulate / cloud reflector effect?
Let's suppose someone decided to turn around and sue you or something for manipulating their product
I see your point. However, if you actually buy the product, it's not illegal. If you're merely licensing the product, then you're altering someone else's equipment. Alternatively, perhaps the author of the HOWTO could be prosecuted for advocating destruction of property.
To use your analogy, I'm in trouble if I pimp out a Hertz rental car and then fail to return it. If I buy a Kia, however, and then put in BMW accessories that I purchased, neither Kia nor BMW will care (although some BMW employees may get heartache).
The new Battlestar Galacica is like Monet's water lilies... It reminds you of the original series, but it's certainly its own creation. Or perhaps like building a car out of Legos-- you get the shape of the car right, but it's not a precise rendition.
There are countless tips of the hat to the 1979 version, from pictures of what the Cylon Centurions looked like in the original series to explanations of why the Galactica used 1970s technology during a time where man could create Cylons and advanced space travel. Purists who expected the series to be faithful to the original should have learned their lesson from Jar Jar Binks. If they were going to be faithful, why not just "digitally remaster" the originals as has been popular for a decade? Maybe they could replace all the guns with walkie talkies or the Cylons could shoot first all the time?
The premise has changed somewhere between a lot and a little, depending on what was important to you. The sex has been kicked up a notch, but I believe it's as sexy in contemporary times as the original was in 1979. I really enjoyed this flick and would enjoy seeing a new series built around the four hour effort.
If you ever played Starflight or Starflight 2, then the new Cylon ships may remind you of the Uhlek / Uhl-Leghk ships.
And while Torvalds and Linux have recently faced legal issues about whether Linux might have some proprietary code embedded in it, that distraction is dwarfed by the time and energy Gates has devoted to battling the U.S. Justice Dept.
Now, all of us here are aware that the 2 cases are pretty much polar opposites. The former is the little guy being picked on by a big, greedy coporation. The latter is the little guys (us, represented by the govenment) picking on the big, greedy coporation.
I agree that this is a very interesting comparison. However, I disagree on the details.
The former is actually SCO who has filed suit against IBM. Relatively speaking, this is the little guy picking on the big guy. If this were an issue unrelated to Linux or perhaps open source in general, we would be rooting for David, not Goliath. The latter being the government picking on Microsoft, I would argue is the big guy picking on the little guy. Honestly, no small organization, or band of small organizations, could make Microsoft move like they did. Arguably, little to nothing changed, but Microsoft sure acted like the other end of the stick was held by the bigger kid.
Backing off, Microsoft was accused of incorporating something that their competition did better (a web browser) into their operating system. When you look at it this way, it's not that different from IBM incorporating Unix code into Linux. I don't mean to imply that I believe Microsponge illegally took a competitor's code (which is not really relevant anyway), nor that I believe IBM actually illegally put code into Linux.
Additionally, Microsoft was accused of creating contracts that really put vendors in a bad place by being too exclusive or by denying them freedom to implement a desktop that they felt was best for their customers. SCO states that their contract was so exclusive that IBM people who looked at Unix code could never work on Linux without making Linux a derivative work.
Okay. I loved the Alien movies (well, the first two).
Predator was way cool.
When you take the bad guys from one movie and the bad guys from another, what's the attraction? I'm going to want to see a stalemate, where the Predator guys blow up the planet to keep anybody from winning. I can't imagine any kind of script writing where I'm going to want to see one side win. Is this just going to be an actionfest slaughterhouse?
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, unless you're trying to maintain some sort of artificial professional distance between you and your underlings (or superiors if you're a secretary), consult with your users. They know if they work in pairs, trios, have cross-functional needs (2 engineers, 1 creative on any given team), or if all 15 engineers work alone and only need to talk with sales every month, while the creative guys are the support for sales.
Start by evalutaing the space you have, and the company needs. Make sure you have some expansion room if you think your company can become healthy inside of 5 years. Make sure you don't have to turn the break room into an office if you hire that 16th engineer. If your company (or division, or branch, or what have you) necessitates customer NDAs -- or might ever, don't go with any kind of open cubicle arrangement. Even if you do lots of intercommunication, enclosed single or double offices provide a degree of privacy that makes the employee feel trusted. Consider making your offices or spaces such that nobody has to sit with his or her backs to the opening (door or otherwise). There are plenty of metrics for productivity that don't involve sneaking up from behind someone. I've seen studies inside of my company that concluded cubicles didn't save the space anticipated once you factored in the space requirements of break out rooms so people could actually have some discussions.
Furniture is less important. Give everybody a whiteboard and handle ergonomic needs as they arise. Consider using LCDs (if color realism isn't necessary) for clarity and space efficiency (energy savings are exaggerated, although measurable). Have some flexible policies regarding people decorating their own spaces, and you're probably set. Some people covet windows, others loathe the day-star entirely.
As with any problem, a customer is involved (this time, your workers). Consult with your customer and make sure you understand the problems they think you'll solve. Listen to their suggestions on how to solve the problems, but make no promises until you've worked something out. Julius Caesar always asked even the lowliest of troops for advice before a battle-- he always had other plans in place, and the troops' advice rarely had any impact at all, but the illusion was that he cared about their opinions. Because they felt like their opinions were valued, they fought harder and won many battles that they should have lost by all accounts. If your workers feel valued, they will work harder for you.
I see lots of conversation comparing this generation of processor to space heaters, wisecracks about Longhorn minimum systems (that actual article was about the predicted "average", not minimum). Not much about actual multi-cores. They're an interesting direction to go.
The current direction of single core CPUs is basically running into the most they can do with XUs, MPUs, caches, etc. Sure, you can decrease the pipeline depth below the 18FO4 that the PentiumIV supposedly has, and that can help you with serial data paths, and that makes simple XUs, MPUs, etc. faster, but the branch mispredict is still horrendous -- perhaps too high for a general purpose processor found in our PCs. The more complicated logic is possible to do, but there's only so much you can do with the data and sub-Angstrom logic.
Beyond the geek factor, multiple cores on a single die attack the same problems as putting SMP did in the first place (plus a few race conditions that otherwise may have been very rare), allowing much less manpower to design a processor that is still much faster in the end. A single threaded application will seem slower, and that will place more burden on the developers to see the light of multiple threads. Instead of allowing an XU to munge through and deal with a single thread at a time, which may be a misuse of incredible resource (like a thread that said "go to grocery store" and the XU was a race car), multiple die have correspondingly multiple XUs each with their own resources, so hard tasks can be spread across multiple cores, or simple ones can get executed in parallel with others (like a thread can take a Kia to the grocery store while another Kia goes to the Post Office). Of course, problems that cannot be divided into multiple threads do not see the advantage of multiple cores, but other tasks remain responsive without requiring a monster task to context switch.
I've read about multiple cores that share a single L2 outperforming multiple cores with dedicated L2s in specific tasks, basically one core essentially acts like a pre-fetch core under a workload and the second core can reap the benefits.
That's great for you. That works for some people. Additional tips: never give your e-mail address to any friends who mass mail jokes / family news with you in the to: field or cc: field -- only bcc:, because you never know who it gets forwarded to. Also, skip people who may get viruses who send e-mail to people in their address books. More? Keep your e-mail address non-dictionary guessable, that's even including multiple words especially for the big ISPs. Don't even think of putting your e-mail address on business cards and then giving them out to potential customers / clients. Even this is a partial list. Merely keeping your e-mail off public forums (especially Usenet) isn't good enough. Heck, the address that owns your vanity domain name is just as susceptible. Oh, jeez, and the friends who send those silly free e-postcards to a personal (intentionally spamfree) address cannot be chastized enough.
My personal address is very well protected. I don't get many, but I do get the occasional non-dictionary, non-forum, non-anything spam. All businesses get their unique address, like so many other /.ers do. My point is this: your 6 months are great. They were like my first 18 months, but the last 41 months of being roughly as careful as you don't yield 100% success due to external uncontrollable factors.
Professional addresses, however, require filtering because they need to go out to potential business contacts who may not be curteous with my address.
This discussion is perhaps more suited to ArsTechnica, as the issue at hand is whether or not x86 is the best instruction set for a low power budget chip maker to pursue. I hope you don't hold that Alpha would be a more suitable instruction set for that -- I don't even want to think of what packages aren't available for Alpha, let alone ask a vendor for a program ported to my "Alpha-Compatible". Academically speaking, however, I will reply to your PowerPC attacks. Regretfully, all my college textbooks are 300 miles away, and I have not looked through my senior textbooks in 5 years, so my rebuttal cannot cite specific Alpha shortfalls beyond anecdotal recollection.
4 precise detractors against the PPC ommitted, I concede that these are 4 of very many
ReferenceMake no mistake, I make no claims about the Alpha deserving the fate that we all foresaw when DEC made the deal with the Devil. Alpha had its share of problems (remember the quick race to 500MHz, then the hard stop for a long time while they straightened out their unbuffered cross chip clock signal?). The RISC/CISC debate ended long ago when Intel effectively merged them. Since then, the two different schools have borrowed from each other so much that we expect chips to have some cruft to reflect their original intents. For this reason, we'll see all Itanium derivatives reflecting that they were made for pre-defined behavior where a compiler can make predictions of the instruction ordering, and likely this will continue to be in intensely predictable math operations. At this time, anyone who insists that modern PPC, x86, Alpha or Sparc chips are exclusively RISC or CISC hasn't taken the time to realize that there is a very blurry line between the RISC and CISC lately. Many have argued that this line is effectively erased and that the definitions have only had meaning in college courses for the past decade.
The Alpha may be your ultimately pure holy processor, but I will continue to find PPC to be a great balance between theory and real world needs and heritage. If nothing else, x86 has taught us that we can have incredibly high performance architectures based on 1970s vintage processors like the 4004.
Give PPC a try. I love my LinuxPPC machines, they're wonderful. I honestly fell in love with the PPC in college, first in real world x86 emulation (VirtualPC) and then in Computer Architecture and Computer Hardware Design. It's a lovely architecture, and you can see its low power uses in the iBook. I've read that the 750 in the iBook used less power than the southbridge, but I don't have references to back that up. Suffice it to say, the PPCs have been traditionally pretty low power, and have pretty good desktop acceptance as far as non-x86 processors go on desktop machines.
After you get through the base packages of a useful distro, like Debian or a multitude of others, you'll start to find x86 only packages-- retail packages usually don't even acknowledge that Linux runs on non-x86 hardware! Is x86 compatible really the architecture to target for Linux acceptance? If I didn't love PPC and have a source of cheap old Macs, I'd rather be running a VIA / Cyrix derivative because of how cool they run. Since the Pentium class, x86 hasn't been about the native instruction set, it's been about the state machine that re-orders, re-names and actually issues native instructions on a pretty nice, flexible RISC inside anyway. So, Centaur's problem is basically updating their RISC core and keeping their x86 runtime emulator tuned. That way you don't have to bend anybody's mindset to make packages for some off the wall architecture, or beat another architecture at their own game.
When I saw GNOME under development, I never thought to myself, "self, now that GNOME thing looks to speed things up". Never once did it even occur to me that all that PrettyFactor would be light on memory or CPU. Is the Linux Desktop getting heavier and slower? If you use GNOME or KDE or any other "user friendly" desktop environment, yes.
I've got a 486/66 at home running a mail / web / name / shell server. He's keeping up pretty well, but I must admit that console dselect takes a minute longer than I would prefer to start up. For his every day tasks, even keeping up with updates, it's more than enough-- so really, this is a question of the GUI end of things.
I wonder how well it would work to introduce one of those reviewers to a very well set up and themed tvtwm2 or whatnot. You know, without all the Kapps or Gapps. I bet the reviewer says it's snappy as a rubber band, but it doesn't do anything (most of those setups don't have any easy to find buttons, you have to click on a blank background to start anything). I think under that environment, Moz, OO, Wine, etc. work, but the plethora of free apps that make Linux interesting to the hobbyist seem to take advantage of the easy to use Glibs and Klibs. The reason for the "bloat" (i.e. heavier and slower) is the added functionality and eye candy.
You can take your lean and mean Linux Desktop, but don't expect it to run all the pretty apps nor expect it to have anti-aliasing and PrettyFactor3.0.
My dad got Vonage to use with his residential Cox cable modem in Phoenix. My experiences are exclusively those of the other end, a normal POTS phone. I expect to read many perspectives of owners, but probably few from my end.
Normal quality was a bit better than a digital cell phone. Those don't bother most people. I happened to have been pretty sensitive to the digitization that happens with digital cell phones, so I wasn't terribly impressed. There were periods, however, when it seemed like the VOIP stream paused (packet loss is my assumption), and it would buffer several seconds of conversation (5-10 seconds) and then play them back very rapidly once the stream was reestablished. This was not a problem when I talked to my dad, who is a very consistant speaker, although I didn't understand why he acted like he couldn't hear me during the buffer times, but it was a problem with my mother. My mother sometimes speaks in bursts, rapidly clearing out her own buffer when multiple trains of thought arrive at the station simultaneously-- when the VOIP buffers clearing out at the same time, I had to ask her to back the trains out and bring them back in slower, which was frustrating for both of us.
With a good ISP, perhaps with a business class DSL connection (I'm in the "shared cable systems are bad" religion, although there are fewer of us left), I would imagine that most people wouldn't experience my father's buffering problems, and perhaps a quality setting could be adjusted up for more bandwidth and increased verbal clarity.
1) IBM is the largest services company out there. When IBM goes out to a corporate site and they discuss how many copies of Office they can buy, and how long they expect that version to be available and useful, that translates into a cost per year. Sure, the product may still be productive after a certain point, but there may be features in 200X+3 that a critical part of the userbase requires, and it's difficult to support more than one version for a large company. Therefore, whether or not the subscription model is spelled out, it's basically a subscription anyway-- just that all 3-4 years of Office 2000 were paid for up front.
2) Sure, the web goes down. Nobody is willing to state that the wires will never break or that someone won't back hoe through a fibre line. Personally, when my intranet goes down, I'm dead in the water. I can't get e-mail from critical people, can't send e-mail to critical people (same for IMing), can't use the centralized databases that make my life, can't use networked drives for my data that must be backed up, etc. Big companies already depend on their intranet being up 99% of the time, and they lose money / productivity when they aren't. Adding one more tool to the pile won't have that big of an impact.
3) Raise your hand if you've ever depended on your users to apply a patch! In a web subscription model, even if a web service cluster is deployed to each major corporate site, it's not only a smaller number of computers to receive the patch, but those machines should be controlled by the site admins instead of lusers who get so many requests each day that learning how to apply a patch and verify that it was applied correctly between taking their laptops to meetings never seems to happen.
4) Value added ISPs. TV is filled with ISPs who are selling their transparent proxies that will translate all graphics into heavily compressed JPGs because it's a value added service, consider a case down the line where a vendor can have Corporate Web Office Suite slimmed down to the same interface, but with Home Version features only. That gets the kids at home something they can use that's like what Dad uses at work at a minimal cost to the ISP (just storage of the local machine host[s], keep all the bandwidth in house where it's cheap). The Web Office Suite Lite company gets to indoctrinate all the home users as a nice benefit.
Consider as an alternative, however, that the system is an open system. Perhaps 40% want to switch, and all of them do. Perhaps those 40% are all replaced by new users, plus an additional 10%. Of the new 50%, 40% want to switch. Suddenly, the modem ISP business is growing.
Reminds me of the natural gas fuel cell / heat exchanger that claimed 300% efficiency. Naysayers pointed out how impossible it was. When you dug down into it, the transfer was like 75% from natural gas to electricity, of which waste heat was used to heat the building to be powered (basically increasing the 75%), and part of the electricity was used to run a ground source heat pump. Sure, the overall efficienty was lower than 100%, but with a ground source heat pump, the system is larger than anybody cares about.
I believe the argument is a standard one of copyright opposers -- that nobody is harmed by violating copyright. When a value is added to the work, like a sound system and big high res wide screen movie theater, the work generates plenty of money on its own. People see it for the atmosphere and wouldn't want to see it at home. They believe the premise that everyone would watch the movies at home exclusively to be false. Furthermore, the editorial statement is poking fun at how they're arresting someone who presumably paid to enter instead of the people who don't pay and download.
My opinions on this matter are secondary, this is how I understand the argument that copyrights should not have the penalties they do.
Say I'm a tourist (where doesn't really matter) and decide to take a 2 hour break from walking around and entertain myself by taking in a movie. Out of mistrust for my fellow man, I take my possessions inside, instead of leaving them in the lobby. As a tourist, I happen to have a video camera. Maybe I set it on the armrest beside me so I can keep a firm grasp on it and out of a thief's hands.
Would a projectionist have a duty to interrupt the movie and ask me why my camera is there? A duty to question my answer? Say the fuzz shows up and decides to do the questioning for the projectionist, who is at fault for the false accusation? Or am I resonably considered guilty for merely having a camera?
Yup. You're right. We slashdotters are all of one heritage, all of one mindset, all of one ideology. We are hypocritical in that we believe in multiple things that contradict, on one hand preaching GPL and prosecuting GPL infringements, and simultaneously begging nVidia to port their driver to Linux and telling SCO that their intellectual property that's in the kernel is so long gone that it needs to be forgotten. We believe that iBooks are evidence of the second coming of Christ, and at the same time Microsoft is the metaphorical apple in the Garden of Eden. We are all out of work programmers who made it rich during the dot-com boom, and now that we've squandered our riches on trinkets, we're begging for the few jobs that haven't been exported to India.
Perhaps there is another website out there for people who can enjoy the casual uses of open source Linux kernels, patching only when necessarily, and accepting as a compromise the need to have open source video drivers. Perhaps in this hypothetical website, they can have people who like Linux for the community, for the CLI and GUI (ha!), and don't like the way Windows feels or how much it costs.
Let's just get it straight. If you read Slashdot, you only like Linux because it's GPL, and you must despise closed source drivers that enable hardware to do their thing. Don't you remember it was part of the click through agreement when you signed up for your Slashdot Union membership! We must act together!
Have you ever seen VirtualPC run on a Mac? I've seen instances where VPC is able to emulate code pretty close to the x86 equivalent speed. Now if we're talking about a multi-way PPC, (tri? dual?) 970 class processor, even if you penalize one of the 1GHz processors 50%, it should be able to handle the 700MHz P3 that's in the XBox.
I found it fishy when Microsoft purchased VirtualPC. Sure, they can create virtual instances of Windows on top of Windows, but that's not very mass market. On the other hand, if they can use the technologies that VPC perfected to make their software basically architecture independant (backwards compatibility on any reasonably equipped processor), then that really gives them a bargaining chip. Of course, the Mac community felt that Microsoft was going to box VPC up in a small piece of pine and we'd never see it again, but that was not cunning enough.
I've heard that the G5 doesn't have VPC running on it because it's missing one instruction that the G4 had, and although I don't know what that is, I imagine that Microsoft can pay IBM enough to put that instruction in for the XBox2 version of the chip. Heck, Microsoft and IBM can work out a way to make custom logic interface with VPC better instead of it being exclusively modifying VPC (within reason of course).
I think, in true Microsoft fashion, we'll see the new VPC changed slightly and then become the foundation of their (gaming) business.
Since you're talking about a TiVo, I'll assume you're not in the market for 4DTV or any other C band sattellites. The TiVo can't control a decoder that needs to move the dish to point to a new sattelite.
I entered the satellite market when I moved to an area of Burlington, VT (the biggest city, if you can call it that, in the state) that was not serviced by Adelphia (the regional cable operator). I priced my two satellite options with the idea of going for the cheapest plan that had my needed subset of channels, namely SciFi, Comedy Central, History, CNNHN, etc. I found that I could get Dish Network's America's Top 50 plan for $19.95/month (or close to that). Currently, that plan is $24.99/month. Dish's AT100 plan competed with the base offering from DirecTV, but I really didn't need to fork over the extra dough for that. I've since moved to an area of the country that allows me to pay extra to get local channels over my satellite feed, so I pay $29.99/month for AT50 Plus Locals (or something like that), still with Dish Network.
Before you look at your options, sit down and record the channels you need, and the channels you want. Then go find a plan that you can live with at a price that makes you happy.
Quality: I read the specs long ago, but have not found them repeated-- Dish and DirecTV have higher horizontal resolutions than any analog solution, but I've never actually noticed this in practice; I assume the MPEG compression makes blocks that can't take good advantage of the extra pixels. In good weather, they will compare favorably to digital cable, which it seems like everyone has seen. In bad weather (heavy snow, rain), sattelite signal will degrade, meaning that the MPEG blocks will get bigger, sometimes the wrong colors, and the MPEG sound will be distorted-- if it's bad enough, the entire image may pause or give you a "lost signal" message. On the other hand, I've had cable outages that last for days, unexplained cable downtime that the companies never acknowledge, etc., so I don't fall for the cable ads that say how bad sattelite reception is. If you've ever been to Northern Vermont in January through March, it tells you something that I only lost my satellite signals once or twice a month that I acutally noticed. Aiming the dish is very key to keeping the signal through bad weather.
PVR. Yeah, you can go for a non-TiVo PVR, maybe your cable company will get one soon, maybe you'll try out the one from Dish, but you will be disappointed. If you go DirecTV, your quality and recording times will be better getting the DirecTiVo-- it just records the raw stream, it doesn't need to encode. If you go Dish, like I did, the TiVo still works great. There's a doohickey (technical term) that fits over the IR receiver so the TiVo basically is its own remote (IR LEDs hooked up to long wires). I was very satisfied with the quality from the DIsh through the TiVo.
Cable companies are becoming great broadband utilities, but I don't like their FUD and sometimes outright lies about the satellite providers, so anymore, I can't bring myself to support them for TV service.
I want filesystem priorities. A background task that is grinding the hard drive, should only do so when a high priority task isn't using the drive, or when its data is adjacent to the high priority data the head is next to anyway.
As an engineer, I need to look at the edge conditions. Consider the case where the recipient already has a copy of the source code. The compression / decompression algorithm could be smart enough to say "Yup, that's it" and have the entire payload be "1" or "Nope, here's a gzipped version" and have the payload be a "0" followed by a general purpose compression payload. There are points in between that make this compression be specifically tuned but slightly more useful, for example, each paragraph gets its own fingerprint to follow a "1" and non-SCO paragraphs get bzipped, or whatever. In any event, it is not impossible to compress millions of lines of text onto 60 pages for any reasonably arbitrary font size when the programmer has adequate knowledge of the application.
Not that SCO will let any trained programmers worth their weight in carbon dioxide to look at the application conditions, but it was fun to think about.
Sometimes I sympathize with the non-Linux folk, because when RTFM doesn't pan out, there's nothing much to do except ask a message board for other options. RTFM is nice and all, but between that and the condescending attitude, you've managed to irritate me personally and my problem still exists.
Your idea sounds like a great one, and I can do it, but I'm looking for something that works. Sure, I can cap it to 7KiB/s, but that has no impact. Even when I take it down to 2KiB/s and 1 upload, the bloody application (3.3a by the way) still runs like it's uncapped.
I asked for a solution that works, and Carrafix gets me part way, but there are times when Bittorrent is too smart and uses ports I've not capped or explicitly blocked with my firewall. Also, while I've had trouble isolating to be sure, I believe Carrafix goes wild after multiple days of use and loses (some of?) its capping abilities. All I want is a way to run Bittorrent 24/7 and still leave the internet connection available for family members.
This reminds me. Anybody seen a Bittorrent client for MacOSX that will allow caps on uploads? I'm using the official reference client from Bram and I have to use Carrafix to cap my uploads. Carrafix is a kludge, and I don't like having to use two programs when one should work -- but this is the only solution I've been able to find.
I have a dual 500MHz G4 with a 15" LCD screen. According to my Kill-A-Watt (not a referrer link), that machine pulls down 110-130W when on and actively doing stuff, and ~33W when sleeping. When I'm not using it, I hit the power button (which puts a Mac to sleep within 10 seconds and can wake up in less time than that). For any who are curious, with my usage profile (an hour in the morning, a few in the evening), that machine cost me 10 cents a day to use. Those figures also included a UPS trickle charging (or whatever they do when power is relatively clean.
If you have some time, I recommend visiting friends with setups similar to the computers you're considering, and plugging a Kill-A-Watt in to them and finding out how much power they'll use in your situation.
Please note here, much of this 10% is being reflected. There are people in this thread pointing out how untrue the observations must be because if 10% of the sun's energy was being absorbed by the atmosphere, the Earth would be getting a heck of a lot warmer than it is. Instead, the Earth should be getting 10% brigher from the moon or anywhere else in space. Particulates are reflecting and clouds are forming (which look very bright to me when I fly over them).
I've been wondering about this. Would global warming end up creating enough clouds to reflect enough energy from the sun that it balances itself out after a few decades? Or will global warming cause an imbalance in the sun's reflected energy after a few decades that causes a swing on the cold side? How much does the CO2 green house effect compare to the particulate / cloud reflector effect?
Does anybody else remember the day when NT stood for "Not There" instead of "New Technology?
I see your point. However, if you actually buy the product, it's not illegal. If you're merely licensing the product, then you're altering someone else's equipment. Alternatively, perhaps the author of the HOWTO could be prosecuted for advocating destruction of property.
To use your analogy, I'm in trouble if I pimp out a Hertz rental car and then fail to return it. If I buy a Kia, however, and then put in BMW accessories that I purchased, neither Kia nor BMW will care (although some BMW employees may get heartache).
The new Battlestar Galacica is like Monet's water lilies... It reminds you of the original series, but it's certainly its own creation. Or perhaps like building a car out of Legos-- you get the shape of the car right, but it's not a precise rendition.
There are countless tips of the hat to the 1979 version, from pictures of what the Cylon Centurions looked like in the original series to explanations of why the Galactica used 1970s technology during a time where man could create Cylons and advanced space travel. Purists who expected the series to be faithful to the original should have learned their lesson from Jar Jar Binks. If they were going to be faithful, why not just "digitally remaster" the originals as has been popular for a decade? Maybe they could replace all the guns with walkie talkies or the Cylons could shoot first all the time?
The premise has changed somewhere between a lot and a little, depending on what was important to you. The sex has been kicked up a notch, but I believe it's as sexy in contemporary times as the original was in 1979. I really enjoyed this flick and would enjoy seeing a new series built around the four hour effort.
If you ever played Starflight or Starflight 2, then the new Cylon ships may remind you of the Uhlek / Uhl-Leghk ships.
I agree that this is a very interesting comparison. However, I disagree on the details.
The former is actually SCO who has filed suit against IBM. Relatively speaking, this is the little guy picking on the big guy. If this were an issue unrelated to Linux or perhaps open source in general, we would be rooting for David, not Goliath. The latter being the government picking on Microsoft, I would argue is the big guy picking on the little guy. Honestly, no small organization, or band of small organizations, could make Microsoft move like they did. Arguably, little to nothing changed, but Microsoft sure acted like the other end of the stick was held by the bigger kid.
Backing off, Microsoft was accused of incorporating something that their competition did better (a web browser) into their operating system. When you look at it this way, it's not that different from IBM incorporating Unix code into Linux. I don't mean to imply that I believe Microsponge illegally took a competitor's code (which is not really relevant anyway), nor that I believe IBM actually illegally put code into Linux.
Additionally, Microsoft was accused of creating contracts that really put vendors in a bad place by being too exclusive or by denying them freedom to implement a desktop that they felt was best for their customers. SCO states that their contract was so exclusive that IBM people who looked at Unix code could never work on Linux without making Linux a derivative work.
Interesting parallels indeed.
Okay. I loved the Alien movies (well, the first two).
Predator was way cool.
When you take the bad guys from one movie and the bad guys from another, what's the attraction? I'm going to want to see a stalemate, where the Predator guys blow up the planet to keep anybody from winning. I can't imagine any kind of script writing where I'm going to want to see one side win. Is this just going to be an actionfest slaughterhouse?