Did you mean RMS there? JMS wrote/directed/produced Babylon 5 (and probably made the coffee for everyone on set as well...)
Oops, you're absolutely right. I can't believe I made that mistake, considering B5 was one of my favorite shows. At least you knew what I really meant.;)
Slashdot editors announced today the addition of new, ground-breaking features to their SlashCode system, which is the heart of their article and comment system.
Among the changes are new features such as:
Capture-the-flag style moderating system, where the users compete as teams for titles such as First Poster, Chief Troll, Offtopic Extraordinaire, and the Comic Relief. Other titles such as Informant and Intruiger were immediately done away with as soon as it was determine that they were no fun.
A virtual language interpreter, which is used to parse any and all pseudo-code posted by users to prove that they know absolutely nothing about programming (or at least are only good at writing code for typical CS textbooks).
Amulets with modifiers that increase a user's skill rating in Zealotry, Fanaticsm, and Smite.
A real-time spellchecker that eventually gives up on users who routinely mispell words and filters out their entire message.
A close-source server administered by John Carmack, in order to make sure that nobody cheats at any above features.
An open-source server administered by JMS, to make sure that all ping statistics are free.
A poll that teleports any users who vote for CowboyNeal to Afghanistan (to meet Jon Katz's e-mail friend).
An OSDN top, side, bottom, and floating Flash bar that dances around the user's screen. Disabling this in their preferences will cause increased sensitivity in the lameness filter when the user posts a comment.
Lameness filter automatically filters out content that includes the worlds "M$", "goatse.xc", "IMO", "INAL", "IRDCWYSBITYAWSIKE" (I really don't care what you say because I think you are wrong since I know everything).
The Force is a bit more versatile than most give it credit for. Just look at Yoda. Have we even seen him lift a lightsaber even one time? No. Yet he is believed to be the strongest Jedi of the bunch (Qwi-Gon compared Anikin's medichlorian count to Yoda, afterall), and is a favorite character among fans.
I'm sure a limbless creature can be a formidible Jedi, assuming that they have the mental capacity to harness the Force.
There may have been some movie companies that purposefully destroyed film, but most film has been destroyed by neglect or events such as fire. It would be hard to come up with a figure of how many movies have been lost forever, but it's certainly in the hundreds, and is increasing every day. There are films literally sitting in archives rotting away as we speak, with no real effort to restore them, except with bigger movies that still have profit potential.
Just think about how bad of shape just the Star Wars movies were when they digitally remastered them. The Special Edition VHS tapes have a little documentary at the beginning comparing the visual quality of the movie from the original print and the digital remaster, and the difference was astounding. The 1977 prints were horribly faded and would have been lost in just another couple of decades. And this is just from 25 years ago.
Also consider the other types of property destroyed on purpose, such as unused scenes (Charlie Chaplin is known to have ordered outtakes to be destroyed) or movie sets and designs. Stanley Kubrick had the Discovery models destroyed for fear that it would be reused in future movies.
A lot of movies have been lost by accidents or other means (such as acts of war). The biggest problem is that there is only one original copy of a movie with no real backup archives of it, mostly because of space consideration (keeping warehouse space does cost money, and that cost just increases the more movies a company makes). On a sad note, I saw on CNN the other night a piece about a documentary series about New York, which has some episodes about the World Trade Center. The man who was in charge of the series said that they had the only known footage of the construction of the World Trade Center, since the New York Port Authority's own archive of the construction was located within one of the towers.
Perhaps this movie venture was doomed to fail, anyway. Upon further consideration, it looks like our researchers have run into the crux of the problem with our male lead role. They carefully analysed the name of Nostradamus to reveal that is sounds like:
"No stars, damn us."
Thank you for your interest in this venture. We hope to offer other options for "popularity" movies. In the meantime, have a happy new year.
-- Faux Director of "Oops, I'm Harry Potter Again XP in Amazon/Nikon Studio for Release by CNN with Anna Kournikova".
(maybe we should have gone with a shorter title, anyway)
Just because somebody is dead doesn't mean they can't put him in a major motion picture.
Unfortunately, all prior footage and photo stills of Nostradamus in our archive vault has deteriorated too much to be useful for digital recreation.
At least if Osama dies before the movie is made, he's given us plenty of footage to go on! And we still have five more live people left on the Top 10 list, so not to worry!
If the "people" are to be trusted, than perhaps a combination of their top picks may mean great commercial success.
Consider a Harry Potter movie that starred Britney Spears and Nostradamus (hmm, he's dead, we'll have to go with the next choice, Osama Bin Laden as the male lead), with the two remaining Beatles composing the music (which will be simultaneously released on Morpheus), utilizing Windows XP as the OS for the animation effects with the CounterStrike rendering engine. Nokia and Amazon will be major sponsors, with their logos splashed on all attire and walls. CNN will be the primary media outlet for press releases regarding this movie, with tennis star Anna Kournikova doing the reporting.
If any producers are interested in doing this, give me a call. It'll be just fab, baby!
Looks like the article exhibits what a lot of companies practice in order to keep negative PR low. The company doesn't want to investigate or prosecute a hack-in because that would suggest that their site was insecure, making their customers have some doubt. It's all about perception, like sweeping the dust under the rug.
I think the 33 MB/sec. limitation is based on the fact that most consumer hard drives run at 7200 rpm, unlike the fastest SCSI drives, which spin at around 16,000 rpm (and sound like jet engines).
I agree... it seems that hard drives are mostly dictated by their rotational speed, and I've also noticed buffer sizes help too. I upgraded from an IBM 7200RPM drive with 512k cache to a Maxtor 7200RPM drive with 2MB cache, and it made a world of difference. I would guess there would be a point of diminision return for cache size as well... there are 120GB drives out with 8MB cache, but I would guess that's more because of the higher density platters. But I have noticed no difference between 7200RPM 2MB cache drives going from ATA-33 to ATA-100.
Hard drives are already pretty fast, especially now with ATA-100/133 IDE connections.
Yeah, the latest ATA-133 interface may be fast (up to 133MB/sec), but the (consumer) hard drives have hardly caught up with it. It's just another one of those big buzzwords that computer salesmen use to make a computer seem like it's super-duper-fast.
Current hard drives can just about sustain 33MB/sec transfer rates right now, and not very much more. Hard drives are still the bottleneck in our systems, otherwise Windows and the latest games would start up in a flash and you wouldn't have to watch the hard drive light blink for a few minutes.
Hey dumbass: the movie was released two weeks ago in New Zealand and the UK.
Eh? I didn't say exactly two weeks ago, I said about. I had specifically checked the Release Dates section at the time, and the few hundred votes existed before the UK release date (by perhaps two or three days, I don't exactly recall).
I remember looking up the IMDB entry for LotR about two weeks ago... it already had a few hundred votes. Huh? Yeah, exactly: a bunch of proud folk have voted favorably on the movie even before seeing it.
Not that the movie wasn't bad, I would even consider it as part of my top 20 (I'll have to wait to see the next two movies to figure out how high on that list of mine it is).
I was impressed how they pulled off digitally altering the actors' sizes according to their races (i.e., Gandalf standing taller than Frodo). It was kinda freaky, because at first I didn't realize just how short Elija was in the movie until seeing a few minutes into the film. It was distracting at first (I like dissecting the technical effects sometimes), but it was done well enough that I forgot about it and started imagining everybody as hobbits, elves, dwarfs, etc.
After only seeing one prior Peter Jackson movie, that being Dead Alive (aka Brain Dead), I was worried about how well he could do LotR. I shouldn't have doubted him, he pulled it off probably better than any other director can.
Re:Speaking of laptop power savings: LED backlight
on
Via One-ups Transmeta
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· Score: 1
Because they look crappy?
timothy is talking about using white LEDs as a backlight, not of a screen made up of white LEDs. Your LCD screens will look exactly the same, only with a difference in the brightness adjustment. One laptop I've used was very dim even at the highest brightness, I guess that's to guarantee the battery life... but is hardly a solution to me when I have to turn off all the lights in the room and squint at the screen. I myself would like to see white LEDs utilized for backlights.
The trouble is that for marketing reasons ISPs want to offer nominally flat-rate services (even though in reality they'll kick you off for going above some arbitrary limit) but hosting companies charge for actual usage. And there is AFAIK no payment structure to decide who is 'responsible' for a connection - just packet counting. Billing the side which initiates a TCP connection would be a reasonable first approximation.
I see a few problems with this billing method:
Authentication: People are known to perform IP spoofing, and IP addresses will be hijacked and people will be billed for connections they never initiated (yes, I know this is supposed to be harder to do when using IPv6, but what about physically hijacked connections, such as stolen logins at college computer labs, etc).
Administration: I can see it now, ISPs will start charging an administrative fee per connection for having to itemize the connection charges in the customer's bill.
Control: Not only will employers be logging their employees' web usages, but now they have to pay active attention to it because they have to bill them for non-business-related surfing, or firewall all sites except those that the employee is authorized to use.
Privacy: All middle-men sites will have a neatly itemized (see above) bill of the user's web surfing. They can resell this information to marketting companies (not to say that this isn't happening now, but it's less effort for the ISP to do so now... they don't even have to reformat and filter their connection logs).
Accessibility: The digital divide will widen, and only the richer people will be able to surf more than a couple of Web sites. Public libraries and schools will no longer be able to offer the same amount of access as before.
Cost: Who's going to regulate how much a host will charge for its bandwidth usage? Will one host providing ad banners for more popular web sites charge more per GB than one that has relatively little? How is the user to know what they're getting charged?
Abuse: People can now put up huge bloated web sites just to slam users, and not have to pay for it.
Demos: Software companies will inevitably lose revenue that is generated from purchases that are made after using a trial version of their software, such as game demos (I know of at least 10 games off the top of my head that I bought because I was impressed by the demos I played). It won't be a free trial anymore, it'll cost us for the bandwidth. By the same token, those free patches we can get for software will now also cost us money.
... ad infinitum...
I also can name a lot of advantages from this, such as responsible sites creating tighter HTML code and graphics, etc. But the disadvantages far outweight these.
Also, the decreasing die sizes of new CPUs are detrimental to cooling as well. If shrinking a CPU die decreases cost (can make more CPUs off one wafer than before), but if better cooling equipment is required to build a system with smaller CPU dies, then where is the cost and noise savings?
Just manufacture CPU dies at larger sizes. Its harder to cool something that is not only thermally hotter, but has a smaller surface area. You can't extract the heat fast enough, and a lot of internal parts of the CPU get extremely hot with indirect cooling and being surrounded by other hot transistors and such. Just spread everything out a little. Just because you have smaller trace widths doesn't mean you have to shrink everything down. Intermix different trace widths depending on the length of the traces (so that you don't lose a lot of juice to resistance). And I'm willing to bet that it's easier to design a CPU that's more spread out.
Of course, I'm not an EE, and I could be just talking out of my ass. I understand that there are a lot of economic issues involved and other design considerations. But come on, how much smaller are our CPU dies going to go? Pretty soon we'll have a 1mm^2 surface area on a CPU with no good way to cool it.:P
Dude, you can buy the Don Post Vader helmet for around $1,000.
Just search Goggle for "Don Post" "Star Wars" helmet, you'll see a variety of Star Wars helmet replicas that you can use for your next Halloween costume (I have Boba Fett's helmet in my collection).
If a game defers that payoff and continues to promise it, it will become more and more of a time-sink.
Nice observation. I'll have to say, based upon my own gaming experiences, that this is pretty accurate.
I've played EverQuest. I spent entire days and nights just trying to "level". Each time I incremented my level, it would become harder to get to the next level, almost on an exponential scale. So the first couple of levels were easy and pretty rewarding. I was able to beat up slightly badder monsters, gain enough money to buy new equipment, and go on quests. Eventually, though, I noticed a drop-off in the rewards. I had to work much harder for a longer time just to attain the next level. After wasting a month doing this, I uninstalled the game and packed it away. I haven't touched it since.
Before and after I was "addicted" to EverQuest, I mostly played FPS's, with some strategy games here and there. Now I'm back to them. Why? Playing games like Counter-Strike and RTCW only had short-term goals: to get as many frags in the current level/map as possible. Once the map time limit or objective was achieved, the game was over and we start anew. The only long-term goal involved is the motor-skill improvement by practice.
Sometimes I play into the late hours playing a multiplayer FPS, but that's only because it was fun for me to continue to play, not because I absolutely had to keep playing to achieve something. For the most part, when a map is over and a new map started, I have the choice to leave or stay, and weigh the consequences. In a game like EverQuest, this is much harder to do, because you know that time away from the game is time lost in trying to attain the next level.
The reason why the iMac isn't "flat on the front" is because spherical CRTs are cheaper to manufacture than flatter ones. Therefore, the cheap iMac gets a rounded screen, and the box design is obviously to correlate with the screen. Furthermore, yes, a flat-panel iMac will need a new design.
I think it's important to bring up these discussions every now and again because of the ever-changing state of the Linux desktop environment, especially within the last 5 years.
Five years ago, asking whether Linux was ready for the desktop in businesses and homes was a no-brainer answer for the most part. The answer has been changing since then on a year-by-year basis (and even shorter timespans for certain developments).
It's important to reevaluate our options at least every year. Can Linux sufficiently support Company ABC's office environment, and increase net profit? Is it worth it for a home user to switch from their current software base in a Windows/Mac environment to what Linux/KDE/Gnome currently offers? The answer is always changing. Granted, each user has their own needs; but as time goes by, more and more homes and businesses will find that Linux offers more of what they need at the present than in prior years.
Therefore, this topic will be brought up multiple times, despite it making some people irate about having to read about it again.
and the fact that now all MSIE browser windows say "Microsoft Internet Explorer provided by AT&T Broadband Internet" in the title bar. God only knows what other crap they dumped into my registry, but I was planning a re-install this week anyway.
I'm sure you already know how to fix that, but for those of you who experience IE title bar tamperings by AT&T or whomever (I experienced this while I used their dial-up service), it's just a simple registry hack.
Here are instructions to fix it, or change it to whatever you want .
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot editors announced today the addition of new, ground-breaking features to their SlashCode system, which is the heart of their article and comment system.
Among the changes are new features such as:
I'm sure a limbless creature can be a formidible Jedi, assuming that they have the mental capacity to harness the Force.
Just think about how bad of shape just the Star Wars movies were when they digitally remastered them. The Special Edition VHS tapes have a little documentary at the beginning comparing the visual quality of the movie from the original print and the digital remaster, and the difference was astounding. The 1977 prints were horribly faded and would have been lost in just another couple of decades. And this is just from 25 years ago.
Also consider the other types of property destroyed on purpose, such as unused scenes (Charlie Chaplin is known to have ordered outtakes to be destroyed) or movie sets and designs. Stanley Kubrick had the Discovery models destroyed for fear that it would be reused in future movies.
A lot of movies have been lost by accidents or other means (such as acts of war). The biggest problem is that there is only one original copy of a movie with no real backup archives of it, mostly because of space consideration (keeping warehouse space does cost money, and that cost just increases the more movies a company makes). On a sad note, I saw on CNN the other night a piece about a documentary series about New York, which has some episodes about the World Trade Center. The man who was in charge of the series said that they had the only known footage of the construction of the World Trade Center, since the New York Port Authority's own archive of the construction was located within one of the towers.
Collector's DOOM Bundle
Final Quake: BFG
"No stars, damn us."
Thank you for your interest in this venture. We hope to offer other options for "popularity" movies. In the meantime, have a happy new year.
-- Faux Director of "Oops, I'm Harry Potter Again XP in Amazon/Nikon Studio for Release by CNN with Anna Kournikova".
(maybe we should have gone with a shorter title, anyway)
At least if Osama dies before the movie is made, he's given us plenty of footage to go on! And we still have five more live people left on the Top 10 list, so not to worry!
Consider a Harry Potter movie that starred Britney Spears and Nostradamus (hmm, he's dead, we'll have to go with the next choice, Osama Bin Laden as the male lead), with the two remaining Beatles composing the music (which will be simultaneously released on Morpheus), utilizing Windows XP as the OS for the animation effects with the CounterStrike rendering engine. Nokia and Amazon will be major sponsors, with their logos splashed on all attire and walls. CNN will be the primary media outlet for press releases regarding this movie, with tennis star Anna Kournikova doing the reporting.
If any producers are interested in doing this, give me a call. It'll be just fab, baby!
Looks like the article exhibits what a lot of companies practice in order to keep negative PR low. The company doesn't want to investigate or prosecute a hack-in because that would suggest that their site was insecure, making their customers have some doubt. It's all about perception, like sweeping the dust under the rug.
Or...
I don't think that's sweat he's got on his palms... <badum-ching!>
Current hard drives can just about sustain 33MB/sec transfer rates right now, and not very much more. Hard drives are still the bottleneck in our systems, otherwise Windows and the latest games would start up in a flash and you wouldn't have to watch the hard drive light blink for a few minutes.
Go back to your hobbit hole, AC. :thbbbt:
Not that the movie wasn't bad, I would even consider it as part of my top 20 (I'll have to wait to see the next two movies to figure out how high on that list of mine it is).
After only seeing one prior Peter Jackson movie, that being Dead Alive (aka Brain Dead), I was worried about how well he could do LotR. I shouldn't have doubted him, he pulled it off probably better than any other director can.
Don't forget MediaOne. ;)
- Authentication: People are known to perform IP spoofing, and IP addresses will be hijacked and people will be billed for connections they never initiated (yes, I know this is supposed to be harder to do when using IPv6, but what about physically hijacked connections, such as stolen logins at college computer labs, etc).
- Administration: I can see it now, ISPs will start charging an administrative fee per connection for having to itemize the connection charges in the customer's bill.
- Control: Not only will employers be logging their employees' web usages, but now they have to pay active attention to it because they have to bill them for non-business-related surfing, or firewall all sites except those that the employee is authorized to use.
- Privacy: All middle-men sites will have a neatly itemized (see above) bill of the user's web surfing. They can resell this information to marketting companies (not to say that this isn't happening now, but it's less effort for the ISP to do so now... they don't even have to reformat and filter their connection logs).
- Accessibility: The digital divide will widen, and only the richer people will be able to surf more than a couple of Web sites. Public libraries and schools will no longer be able to offer the same amount of access as before.
- Cost: Who's going to regulate how much a host will charge for its bandwidth usage? Will one host providing ad banners for more popular web sites charge more per GB than one that has relatively little? How is the user to know what they're getting charged?
- Abuse: People can now put up huge bloated web sites just to slam users, and not have to pay for it.
- Demos: Software companies will inevitably lose revenue that is generated from purchases that are made after using a trial version of their software, such as game demos (I know of at least 10 games off the top of my head that I bought because I was impressed by the demos I played). It won't be a free trial anymore, it'll cost us for the bandwidth. By the same token, those free patches we can get for software will now also cost us money.
- ... ad infinitum
...
I also can name a lot of advantages from this, such as responsible sites creating tighter HTML code and graphics, etc. But the disadvantages far outweight these.Just manufacture CPU dies at larger sizes. Its harder to cool something that is not only thermally hotter, but has a smaller surface area. You can't extract the heat fast enough, and a lot of internal parts of the CPU get extremely hot with indirect cooling and being surrounded by other hot transistors and such. Just spread everything out a little. Just because you have smaller trace widths doesn't mean you have to shrink everything down. Intermix different trace widths depending on the length of the traces (so that you don't lose a lot of juice to resistance). And I'm willing to bet that it's easier to design a CPU that's more spread out.
Of course, I'm not an EE, and I could be just talking out of my ass. I understand that there are a lot of economic issues involved and other design considerations. But come on, how much smaller are our CPU dies going to go? Pretty soon we'll have a 1mm^2 surface area on a CPU with no good way to cool it. :P
Just search Goggle for "Don Post" "Star Wars" helmet, you'll see a variety of Star Wars helmet replicas that you can use for your next Halloween costume (I have Boba Fett's helmet in my collection).
I've played EverQuest. I spent entire days and nights just trying to "level". Each time I incremented my level, it would become harder to get to the next level, almost on an exponential scale. So the first couple of levels were easy and pretty rewarding. I was able to beat up slightly badder monsters, gain enough money to buy new equipment, and go on quests. Eventually, though, I noticed a drop-off in the rewards. I had to work much harder for a longer time just to attain the next level. After wasting a month doing this, I uninstalled the game and packed it away. I haven't touched it since.
Before and after I was "addicted" to EverQuest, I mostly played FPS's, with some strategy games here and there. Now I'm back to them. Why? Playing games like Counter-Strike and RTCW only had short-term goals: to get as many frags in the current level/map as possible. Once the map time limit or objective was achieved, the game was over and we start anew. The only long-term goal involved is the motor-skill improvement by practice.
Sometimes I play into the late hours playing a multiplayer FPS, but that's only because it was fun for me to continue to play, not because I absolutely had to keep playing to achieve something. For the most part, when a map is over and a new map started, I have the choice to leave or stay, and weigh the consequences. In a game like EverQuest, this is much harder to do, because you know that time away from the game is time lost in trying to attain the next level.
(as everybody else said, duh).
Five years ago, asking whether Linux was ready for the desktop in businesses and homes was a no-brainer answer for the most part. The answer has been changing since then on a year-by-year basis (and even shorter timespans for certain developments).
It's important to reevaluate our options at least every year. Can Linux sufficiently support Company ABC's office environment, and increase net profit? Is it worth it for a home user to switch from their current software base in a Windows/Mac environment to what Linux/KDE/Gnome currently offers? The answer is always changing. Granted, each user has their own needs; but as time goes by, more and more homes and businesses will find that Linux offers more of what they need at the present than in prior years.
Therefore, this topic will be brought up multiple times, despite it making some people irate about having to read about it again.
Here are instructions to fix it, or change it to whatever you want .