"why short kodak"
Because they are just one of 100s of companies working in the space, and they need to compete with
everyone else there. They have no intrinsic advantage, as they do in chemical imaging. Without the revenue base of consumer photography, how can they possibly support their curent size?
-db
Geez, increase your reading comprehension and learn to spot context. The reporter didn't buy Jack's line, or say he "friendly to consumers of movies". He said that Valenti comes off well TO THE PEOPLE AT THE MEETING, "consuming" his performance of "aw shucks" compared to those loony fair-use geeky reprobates who do disservice to their own cause.
The economics of distribution say theatres will go digital, sometime, probably in the 5-15 year window.
There's a few things we should hope for before it happens. (1) projector resolution much higher than we have now. Extracting 1:85:1 doesn't give you many pixels out of a 1280x1024 display matrix. You really want to be seeing on the order of 3000x1500 pixels. This requires another step up in DLP resolution, and the mass acceptance of 16x9 displays for powerpoint to result in (2) much lower cost for the projectors, unless the studios are going to capitalize the projectors in some way. The theatre chains are going broke now under their debt loads at current interest rates, so they cannot front the bill.
Those with long term betting interests would short Kodak. Chemical film, good as it is, is going to vanish except for specialty applications as theatrical and consumer imaging goes nearly totally digital.
This
presentation describes how MS uses SourceDepot,
which sounds like Perforce. This
article suggests it is Perforce too, and that it was silver bullet.
Too bad I'm stuck with clearcase, which is only tolerable if you have less than 50 local developers and someone full time to mind the CM system. Yuck.
"Texaco owned the patent for fuel injection systems in cars. Until that patent expired (patents used to expire), no cars had fuel injection."
And as soon as that patent expired, the black helicopters flew off with the formula that turned water into gasoline.
This is a specious claim by Mr. AC. Diesel engines have been fuel injection since their creation; Mechanical fuel injection was used in cars in the 30s, but was generally too complicated for mass production-- but see the 1957 Corvette for an example. It was used in aircraft, see the DB601 that powered the Bf109 from the 30s through the end of the Reich. Alfa Romeo used MFI in the 60's just to make life especially hard
for rare US Giulia owners for whom Weber carbs would be even more fiddly.
Electonic injection was invented in the UK in 1966,
according to this;
on the other hand,
Ford says Bendix patented it in the early 60's (maybe the same?). Porsche started using FI in
1968.
EFI wasn't widely popular until there were cheap computers to do the thinking. This wave started in the 80's and was basically over by 1990. It had nothing to do with patents, and everything to do with regulations that made it effectively impossible to meet cold-start emission limits with carbs anymore. (The same thing that killed air-cooled VW engines in the 70s, and Porsche boxers more recently.)
I was sent to an integration site with another programmer to resolve a problem being seen under stress test load. A client program would start a server on another machine using rexec, and then communicate with it using messages. If there was an interrupt event, rexec sends a message over another channel, then signals the remote client. If a user hit ^C, it sent an interrupt to the remote server using this, then they traded messages to clear out what was in progress.
What was being seen is that the two sides sometimes appeared to be getting out of sync with each other during this interrupt exchange, and then get hung; this only happened when the load average on the server side got to 10 or 20. The other programmer watched a test run for an hour, declared victory, and flew home. I stayed, and ran the test case over and over, with more and more logging to get a clue.
What turned out to be the problem was this: The client side would send it's interrupt, then it would send it's 'clear' message. The server was
supposed to get the interrupt, send it's clear, then look for the clear message from the client. What was happening was that the server was getting the client clear message, ignoring it because it was noise in a normal exchange, -then- get the signal. Why? Whafo? Because the rexecd
program processing the signal had been paged out, while the server reading the normal message stream was not. While the signal message got to the server first, it sat queued while the rexecd paged in; in the meantime, the 'clean' message was processed by the application server. Then, when the rexecd had been paged in, it would read it's signal message and happily signal the application server process.
The fix was to have the client wait to send it's
clear until the server sent it's clear, acknowledging the interrupt first.
This got me a two week trip to London to solve, and a big fat bonus for fixing.
So the power supply on the server dies, and Milton from Office Space burns down the building, but Oracle keeps on running! Go Larry! Please, show me the car that keeps running when the f**king powertrain falls out of the hood. Puh-leeze
Whoever owns the root name servers should control the delegation of all the top-level domains. Period.
Yes, and they should delegate ccTLDs to the appropriate entities as determined by the current government of the country to which the TLD has been assigned. Period.
Which is a reasonable position, and may be the only tenable one. However, it does offer some chaos if the govt changes in ways that could cause choaos, like one that voided all previous registrations. Say for sake of argument there were new regimes in Tuvalu and Tonga, who demanded back control of the.tv and.to domains, which have been delgated to others for more profitable use than as a useful country codes. That would irk a lot of people.
However, I don't see what ICANN is going to about it if SA takes over.ZA; If ICANN refuses to point to the registry, that will be untenable; if they point to this extra-governmental agency instead of the govenment controlled one, they are the ones sowing the chaotic seeds. There is nothing for ICANN to do but roll over and play along with the government. Maybe we should hope that they don't, as that would be another example of their intolerable arrogance and stupidity. CANN they be that dumb? Even I doubt it. It just proves that their rulebook is untenable when faced with reality.
In the long term, the economics are going to drive thatrical projection and production into digital. Here's one reason: when Kodak and Fuji stop having a consumer business to keep up the scale of chemical film production, the costs of film and chemistry are going to go through the roof. This happens sometime in the next 10 years. Added to the distribution costs of all those boxes of reels, and the studios have immense incentive to change -- if they can get the theatres to convert, and solve the "piracy problem".
The gating issue is really are the capital costs to theaters, who are on thin ice, with many approaching bankruptcy as it is. Theatrical projectors aren't likely to get all that much cheaper over time. Consumer/conference room
DLPs will have problems taking the heat from a lamphouse that is bright enough to deliver reasonable foot candles to a 30' screen.
The current resolution sucks. You'd want at least 1680x1024 (well, really 1820x1024 for 16:9)
native resolution on the display mechanism, and they haven't started to make anything like that yet. Until the world adopts HDTV 16:9 format for
home display of TV and computers, there won't be the demand/market to develop the panels, and then harden (cool) them for theatrical use.
If we are lucky, the economics drivers of the conversion will be delayed until there are higher resolution panels available. If not, we will have SXGA resolution at the plex, and may lose a lot of business.
It is a true fact that good 35mm projection can look better than DP; but DP is likely to hold up better and tolerate popcorn cooker operators.
full of really whacko ersatz libertarian cluelessness.
You write a program to do X, and it has a backing store, and you come up with some format for it. You choose not to open source any of it, which you are allowed to do. The file format is embedded in your
code somewhere, or many somewheres, and may not be coherently defined anywhere. Your program becomes popular -- people like what it does, and they use it and buy it. You come out with many revisions of your program, adding features, and you work our many/most of the backward compatibility issues with your older formats.
If someone wants to reverse engineer your file format, they can do so. They have to figure out your datastructures, and the algorithms used to encode/decode them, and the way you make choices when confronted with optional ways of doing something.
Let me repeat: it's not just the structure, it's the algorithms used on those structures that need to be discovered to understand/properly interpret the file.
I don't think anyone can argue that implementations of algorithms are not protected under copyright, and sometimes under trade secret.
Thus, usefully 'documenting proprietary file formats' leads pretty directly to revelation of proprietary algorithmics, for most interesting files.
This is one of the things that Microsoft is antsy about in the SMB interoperability area. There is no protocol definition (akin to a file format), only piles of copyrighted, trade secret code that uses it and deals with all the necessary (and unnecessary) special cases.
The problem is that there are unanticipataed results from failure to use documented, open formats from the outset. People can't use other programs to use their data, which is a double edged sword. If the users didn't realize they made this choice, they could be screwed if the vendor goes under. If the vendor didn't think about it, and potential customers don't buy the program because they understand the implications, that is bad for the vendor.
It is not uncommon for users concerned about these sorts of things to demand escrow of source code to cover cases where the vendor does go under, and it is necessary to recover user data. How far such a demand will get you with Autodesk and Microsoft is hard to say-- probably not far. If you think they are going away, or are going to extort you for access to your data, maybe you should choose an alternative.
But the idea of forcing release of 'formats' is just absurd. They do embody significant intellectual property, and you can't make people give that up without cause and due process.
If you can convince them it is moral, and a good thing to do for business, that is a different thing altogether.
call things 'prudent' and 'effective' that amateurs and romantics call 'cowardly'
If you come at a professional with a knife, he wants to shoot you with a gun, at a distance; if you have a gun, he wants a morter. If you have a morter, he wants artillery; if you have artillery, he wants air support. It's about making some other dumb son of a bitch die for his country. A misaimed UAV isn't much worse than a
short round from a 155mm gun. Stop hand wringing-- once you decide to be in a shooting war, it's ugly.
The stick and rudder guys in the pointy planes may not like UAVs, but they understand the motivations. They probably don't want to be flying a lot of the missions that they are (or will be) assigned to perform.
When I was in school, a teacher once said to the class, "if we're at war, I want killers on my side." That's the job, if it comes to that. The military people I know don't want to fight, but they'll do it for us when required.
It's nearly memorial day. Go hug a serviceman, servicewoman, or vetern you know.
-dB
bucky domes are/were the perfect thing for protecting radar antennas from the elements, and for covering the tops of large otherwise open tanks.
they're not so good for building houses, though, as a retrospective shows -- the labor to fit drywall, the impossibility of making windows and roofing that don't leak, the impedence mismatches of standard rectanglar building materials and furniture; all make life with a dome a pain and not very cost effective.
but cool, man. the big dome in montreal for expo 70 was awsome; it too fell into disrepair.
that makes ginger even mildly useful is all of the wheelchair-accessibility ramps that have been built into side walks over the last 30 years.
From a regulatory point of view, it seems not much different than a motorized wheelchair, at 2-3x the privice. This is within other the vanity price range speaking, a motorized chair seems more useful, as there's some cargo capacity. You could imagine a "motor platform" with four wheels like a wheelchair, and it wouldn't have ginger's gyro complications (or coolness).
Why might ginger cost more to manufacture than a wheel chair? I dunno. Composites? Gyros? Amortised cost of molds? (Ignoring development
cost)
-dB
I have the advantage to be
40 years old, and so I remember what the interviews said. Basically, Lucas' money from THX-1138 was
running out, and he didn't want to get a job. So he made Star Wars
Gee, I remember it has his having just made American Graffiti, which had lurched to the top-10 all time moneymakers. He'd at one point planned on doing Miliu's Apocalypse Now in the Sacramento Delta, but that wasn't going to work along with a falling out with Coppola. Coppola says that George decided to make "Apocalypse Now" in space and came up with Star Wars. Given the intellectual aspirations of SF filmmakers at the time, it's not unreasonable that they thought about Myth stuff; they were readers too, after all. At the same time, it's obvious a lot of old SF stories and books had been occupying the synapses of the brain. Already we've identified influences: Hidden Fortress, Hell's Angels, every Saturday cliffhanger, Dam Busters, etc., etc. But most stories are derivative in one way or another, it's how they are handled.
At some point in post-event rationalization, it's easy to belief yourself that some influences were stronger than others. Whether it was really true at the time is hard to say, but it can effect your future work. Is "Attack of the Clones" more consciously Campbell/Myth centric than the original? Almost certainly. Whether that is good or bad is a different question.
If you really want light, buy a Lotus: Colin Chapman once said he designed Lotus race
cars with the following in mind: "The perfect car disintegrates as it crosses the finish line." *That's*
performance optimization, gentlemen.
Chapman was also a manufacturer who, when given the option of using a Lucas-like part that would disintegrate in 18 months that cost X, or a Bosch-like part that would last forever at X+30% asked, "how long is our warranty?" One man's optimization...
but you need a Farnsworth Fusor to do it. Unfortunately, you can't replenish the fuel, because it has to work in a vacuum, so it doesn't
scale well either.
The rate in the publication is $0.07 per performance, seemingly defined as "per stream". Inasmuch as the RIAA was only asking for $0.004 per stream, the rate announced is out of whack. It is somewhat consistant with the radio rates where a "performance" is for everyone, not per unique listener. Could this be a typo or definitional erratum?
When the government gets out of the tax-regulate-and-subsidize business, and sticks to preventing and punishing theft,
injury, etc., then it will be performing its proper role. As long as a corporation can buy an advantage in the marketplace
-- including shielding itself from liability -- then there will be a place for lobbying, bribes, etc.
The problem is that lack of regulation becomes theft and injury pretty quickly.
Just because it is "white collar" doesn't make it any less a crime, and the investigation requires more than Officer Friendly walking the beat to investigate.
let me be the wet blanket that says Futurama should be let go quietly. It was past it's due date, and well, sometimes you have to let go.
-dB
cold + malnutrition + stupidity + foolishness
on
The Coldest March
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The Huntford book is in print as
The Last Place on Earth . There was an adaptation for "Masterpiece Theatre" available on
DVD.
There have been discussions about the weather findings. Not surprisingly, Huntford largely dismisses them as a complication Scott should have been more prepared for. Let's itemize some of the things Scott did wrong. (1) He didn't have his team learn to ski; (2) He didn't believe in dogs; (3) He sent someone who didn't know horses to get them, and left behind someone who did (poor Oates); (4) He didn't lay adequate supplies -- His "one ton depot" was half the size of Amundsen's, and was to support larger parties; (4) He chose to bring an unqualified crony in P.O Evans, who should have been discharged for drunkeness.; (5) He brought along physically unqualified Cpt. Oates (war injury) to keep "the army" involved; (6) He broght along Bowers at the last minute, complicating the distribution of provisions; (7) His final party had 4 on skis, and Bowers on foot, having had Bowers leave his skis the day before; (8) he did not mark his depots well, and lost time looking for them; (9) He didn't supervise unloading of his motor sledges, and two of three fell into the ocean when non-qualified people didn't recognize the weak ice; (10) he left behind the motor sledge development engineer, so they had little expertise when the last one broke down. (11) Dragged 50 punds of rocks around when his party was in desparate straights.
On the positive side, he wrote a beautiful diary blaming it all on the weather, not the plan, execution or personnel decisions he had made. This made him the poster child of the "noble failure" for 60 years, and the very model of the upright Englishman who would walk into the trenches of WWI.
Bah. Proving he did have bad luck with the weather doesn't excuse the other suicidal decisions he made.
-dB
ObBias, My great-great-uncle Charlie liked Amundsen, and had some credentials from which to form an opinion.
Since 1986, I have used the "sim" program from comp.sources.unix to detect redundant code in programs. See the uunet archive
While originally written as a "cheat" detector, it also does a good job of identifying similar structures in systems that are good candidates for refactoring. It helps find things that should be functions rather than cut-and-paste-with-trivial-or-no-change.
Travis is a transport base, home mainly to C5s and C-17s. The only 52 there is at the museum. They usually fly one in for the annual airshow.
The main NoCal B52 base was Mather outside Sacramento, and it's been closed down pending industrial conversion. Another was Castle near Atwater, also shut down with a museum (including a rare B36, which is MUCH BIGGER).
There's only two bases now flying 52s, I think, Barksdale LA, and someplace else (Minot ND?)
If you are seeing 52s, it's a transit flight, an airshow, or some other training/currency mission.
1) End user maintenance. Why can't the car tell you why the check engine light is on?
Because the dealers want you to come down to the shop and pay them $40 just to do a
diagnosis.
2) Mechanics will get the machines that they need to read the computer codes. The car
companies make money indirectly by working with the folks who build these boxes. The
mechanics make money because they can charge somebody $40 because a light came on.
Right, but wrong set of conspirators.
The OBD II system was mandated by the Feds, not the manufacturers or the dealers. The Feds required that the diagnostics not be readable by mere mortals. The reason was to keep bozos with screwdrivers from mucking with emissions-sensitive stuff. Requiring knowledge of where the standard OBD II connector is on the car, and presence of an OBD II reader is an intentional barrier to clowns who don't really know what they are doing.
It is a known unfortunate side effect that it requires you to take it someplace qualified every time the 'check engine' light comes on. This doesn't need to be a dealer. This was seen as an acceptable tradeoff by those nasty bureucrats.
There are now plenty of OBD II readers now available reasonably cheap for those who want the visibility.
It's better now than it was before OBD II, because there were lots of different diagnostic systems, and it was more expensive for 3rd party garages to get a set of readers that would work with everything. With OBD II, one box works for all cars. That is one of the reasons they've gotten cheap.
if you lock your wheels, (turn them all the way to one side) so that the wheel can't move, tow trucks can't move it...
(1) wheel dolly; (2) flatbed truck.
Don't you think they can tow away wrecks with smashed in frontends and no wheels? What naivete to think that locked, curbed wheels are even a nuisance!
Can anyone think of an example where a technology company/organization with market momentum behind them created and started pushing a new "standard", a consortium formed to create a competing standard, and the consortium won out?
Sure, compare MSN version 1.0 vs W3C. The first MSN was a dialup competing against Prodigy and AOL.
Or IP vs. Novell IPX, or X vs. NeWS. One can argue reasaonably that these aren't clones, but are things that "changed the game" compared to the proprietary thing. But that is one of the advantages of the open-ness.
The question is whether the closed thing can get a knockout before the open thing gains footing.
Slashdot Mirror
"why short kodak" Because they are just one of 100s of companies working in the space, and they need to compete with everyone else there. They have no intrinsic advantage, as they do in chemical imaging. Without the revenue base of consumer photography, how can they possibly support their curent size? -db
-dB
There's a few things we should hope for before it happens. (1) projector resolution much higher than we have now. Extracting 1:85:1 doesn't give you many pixels out of a 1280x1024 display matrix. You really want to be seeing on the order of 3000x1500 pixels. This requires another step up in DLP resolution, and the mass acceptance of 16x9 displays for powerpoint to result in (2) much lower cost for the projectors, unless the studios are going to capitalize the projectors in some way. The theatre chains are going broke now under their debt loads at current interest rates, so they cannot front the bill.
Those with long term betting interests would short Kodak. Chemical film, good as it is, is going to vanish except for specialty applications as theatrical and consumer imaging goes nearly totally digital.
-dB
Too bad I'm stuck with clearcase, which is only tolerable if you have less than 50 local developers and someone full time to mind the CM system. Yuck.
-dB
And as soon as that patent expired, the black helicopters flew off with the formula that turned water into gasoline.
This is a specious claim by Mr. AC. Diesel engines have been fuel injection since their creation; Mechanical fuel injection was used in cars in the 30s, but was generally too complicated for mass production-- but see the 1957 Corvette for an example. It was used in aircraft, see the DB601 that powered the Bf109 from the 30s through the end of the Reich. Alfa Romeo used MFI in the 60's just to make life especially hard for rare US Giulia owners for whom Weber carbs would be even more fiddly.
Electonic injection was invented in the UK in 1966, according to this; on the other hand, Ford says Bendix patented it in the early 60's (maybe the same?). Porsche started using FI in 1968.
EFI wasn't widely popular until there were cheap computers to do the thinking. This wave started in the 80's and was basically over by 1990. It had nothing to do with patents, and everything to do with regulations that made it effectively impossible to meet cold-start emission limits with carbs anymore. (The same thing that killed air-cooled VW engines in the 70s, and Porsche boxers more recently.)
-dB
What was being seen is that the two sides sometimes appeared to be getting out of sync with each other during this interrupt exchange, and then get hung; this only happened when the load average on the server side got to 10 or 20. The other programmer watched a test run for an hour, declared victory, and flew home. I stayed, and ran the test case over and over, with more and more logging to get a clue.
What turned out to be the problem was this: The client side would send it's interrupt, then it would send it's 'clear' message. The server was supposed to get the interrupt, send it's clear, then look for the clear message from the client. What was happening was that the server was getting the client clear message, ignoring it because it was noise in a normal exchange, -then- get the signal. Why? Whafo? Because the rexecd program processing the signal had been paged out, while the server reading the normal message stream was not. While the signal message got to the server first, it sat queued while the rexecd paged in; in the meantime, the 'clean' message was processed by the application server. Then, when the rexecd had been paged in, it would read it's signal message and happily signal the application server process.
The fix was to have the client wait to send it's clear until the server sent it's clear, acknowledging the interrupt first.
This got me a two week trip to London to solve, and a big fat bonus for fixing.
-dB
3 words: "offsite standby database"
3 more: "disaster recovery site"
thanks for playing.
-dB
Yes, and they should delegate ccTLDs to the appropriate entities as determined by the current government of the country to which the TLD has been assigned. Period.
Which is a reasonable position, and may be the only tenable one. However, it does offer some chaos if the govt changes in ways that could cause choaos, like one that voided all previous registrations. Say for sake of argument there were new regimes in Tuvalu and Tonga, who demanded back control of the .tv and .to domains, which have been delgated to others for more profitable use than as a useful country codes. That would irk a lot of people.
However, I don't see what ICANN is going to about it if SA takes over .ZA; If ICANN refuses to point to the registry, that will be untenable; if they point to this extra-governmental agency instead of the govenment controlled one, they are the ones sowing the chaotic seeds. There is nothing for ICANN to do but roll over and play along with the government. Maybe we should hope that they don't, as that would be another example of their intolerable arrogance and stupidity. CANN they be that dumb? Even I doubt it. It just proves that their rulebook is untenable when faced with reality.
-dB
The gating issue is really are the capital costs to theaters, who are on thin ice, with many approaching bankruptcy as it is. Theatrical projectors aren't likely to get all that much cheaper over time. Consumer/conference room DLPs will have problems taking the heat from a lamphouse that is bright enough to deliver reasonable foot candles to a 30' screen.
The current resolution sucks. You'd want at least 1680x1024 (well, really 1820x1024 for 16:9) native resolution on the display mechanism, and they haven't started to make anything like that yet. Until the world adopts HDTV 16:9 format for home display of TV and computers, there won't be the demand/market to develop the panels, and then harden (cool) them for theatrical use.
If we are lucky, the economics drivers of the conversion will be delayed until there are higher resolution panels available. If not, we will have SXGA resolution at the plex, and may lose a lot of business.
It is a true fact that good 35mm projection can look better than DP; but DP is likely to hold up better and tolerate popcorn cooker operators.
The film contingent has this argument regularly in rec.arts.movies.tech
-dB
If someone wants to reverse engineer your file format, they can do so. They have to figure out your datastructures, and the algorithms used to encode/decode them, and the way you make choices when confronted with optional ways of doing something.
Let me repeat: it's not just the structure, it's the algorithms used on those structures that need to be discovered to understand/properly interpret the file.
I don't think anyone can argue that implementations of algorithms are not protected under copyright, and sometimes under trade secret.
Thus, usefully 'documenting proprietary file formats' leads pretty directly to revelation of proprietary algorithmics, for most interesting files.
This is one of the things that Microsoft is antsy about in the SMB interoperability area. There is no protocol definition (akin to a file format), only piles of copyrighted, trade secret code that uses it and deals with all the necessary (and unnecessary) special cases.
The problem is that there are unanticipataed results from failure to use documented, open formats from the outset. People can't use other programs to use their data, which is a double edged sword. If the users didn't realize they made this choice, they could be screwed if the vendor goes under. If the vendor didn't think about it, and potential customers don't buy the program because they understand the implications, that is bad for the vendor.
It is not uncommon for users concerned about these sorts of things to demand escrow of source code to cover cases where the vendor does go under, and it is necessary to recover user data. How far such a demand will get you with Autodesk and Microsoft is hard to say-- probably not far. If you think they are going away, or are going to extort you for access to your data, maybe you should choose an alternative.
But the idea of forcing release of 'formats' is just absurd. They do embody significant intellectual property, and you can't make people give that up without cause and due process.
If you can convince them it is moral, and a good thing to do for business, that is a different thing altogether.
-dB
call things 'prudent' and 'effective' that amateurs and romantics call 'cowardly' If you come at a professional with a knife, he wants to shoot you with a gun, at a distance; if you have a gun, he wants a morter. If you have a morter, he wants artillery; if you have artillery, he wants air support. It's about making some other dumb son of a bitch die for his country. A misaimed UAV isn't much worse than a short round from a 155mm gun. Stop hand wringing-- once you decide to be in a shooting war, it's ugly. The stick and rudder guys in the pointy planes may not like UAVs, but they understand the motivations. They probably don't want to be flying a lot of the missions that they are (or will be) assigned to perform. When I was in school, a teacher once said to the class, "if we're at war, I want killers on my side." That's the job, if it comes to that. The military people I know don't want to fight, but they'll do it for us when required. It's nearly memorial day. Go hug a serviceman, servicewoman, or vetern you know. -dB
bucky domes are/were the perfect thing for protecting radar antennas from the elements, and for covering the tops of large otherwise open tanks.
they're not so good for building houses, though, as a retrospective shows -- the labor to fit drywall, the impossibility of making windows and roofing that don't leak, the impedence mismatches of standard rectanglar building materials and furniture; all make life with a dome a pain and not very cost effective.
but cool, man. the big dome in montreal for expo 70 was awsome; it too fell into disrepair.
-dB
that makes ginger even mildly useful is all of the wheelchair-accessibility ramps that have been built into side walks over the last 30 years. From a regulatory point of view, it seems not much different than a motorized wheelchair, at 2-3x the privice. This is within other the vanity price range speaking, a motorized chair seems more useful, as there's some cargo capacity. You could imagine a "motor platform" with four wheels like a wheelchair, and it wouldn't have ginger's gyro complications (or coolness). Why might ginger cost more to manufacture than a wheel chair? I dunno. Composites? Gyros? Amortised cost of molds? (Ignoring development cost) -dB
Gee, I remember it has his having just made American Graffiti, which had lurched to the top-10 all time moneymakers. He'd at one point planned on doing Miliu's Apocalypse Now in the Sacramento Delta, but that wasn't going to work along with a falling out with Coppola. Coppola says that George decided to make "Apocalypse Now" in space and came up with Star Wars. Given the intellectual aspirations of SF filmmakers at the time, it's not unreasonable that they thought about Myth stuff; they were readers too, after all. At the same time, it's obvious a lot of old SF stories and books had been occupying the synapses of the brain. Already we've identified influences: Hidden Fortress, Hell's Angels, every Saturday cliffhanger, Dam Busters, etc., etc. But most stories are derivative in one way or another, it's how they are handled.
At some point in post-event rationalization, it's easy to belief yourself that some influences were stronger than others. Whether it was really true at the time is hard to say, but it can effect your future work. Is "Attack of the Clones" more consciously Campbell/Myth centric than the original? Almost certainly. Whether that is good or bad is a different question.
-dB
Chapman was also a manufacturer who, when given the option of using a Lucas-like part that would disintegrate in 18 months that cost X, or a Bosch-like part that would last forever at X+30% asked, "how long is our warranty?" One man's optimization...
-dB
See for example this, or this.
"I'm not hot doggin ya!"
-dB
The rate in the publication is $0.07 per performance, seemingly defined as "per stream". Inasmuch as the RIAA was only asking for $0.004 per stream, the rate announced is out of whack. It is somewhat consistant with the radio rates where a "performance" is for everyone, not per unique listener. Could this be a typo or definitional erratum?
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The problem is that lack of regulation becomes theft and injury pretty quickly. Just because it is "white collar" doesn't make it any less a crime, and the investigation requires more than Officer Friendly walking the beat to investigate.
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let me be the wet blanket that says Futurama should be let go quietly. It was past it's due date, and well, sometimes you have to let go.
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There have been discussions about the weather findings. Not surprisingly, Huntford largely dismisses them as a complication Scott should have been more prepared for. Let's itemize some of the things Scott did wrong. (1) He didn't have his team learn to ski; (2) He didn't believe in dogs; (3) He sent someone who didn't know horses to get them, and left behind someone who did (poor Oates); (4) He didn't lay adequate supplies -- His "one ton depot" was half the size of Amundsen's, and was to support larger parties; (4) He chose to bring an unqualified crony in P.O Evans, who should have been discharged for drunkeness.; (5) He brought along physically unqualified Cpt. Oates (war injury) to keep "the army" involved; (6) He broght along Bowers at the last minute, complicating the distribution of provisions; (7) His final party had 4 on skis, and Bowers on foot, having had Bowers leave his skis the day before; (8) he did not mark his depots well, and lost time looking for them; (9) He didn't supervise unloading of his motor sledges, and two of three fell into the ocean when non-qualified people didn't recognize the weak ice; (10) he left behind the motor sledge development engineer, so they had little expertise when the last one broke down. (11) Dragged 50 punds of rocks around when his party was in desparate straights.
On the positive side, he wrote a beautiful diary blaming it all on the weather, not the plan, execution or personnel decisions he had made. This made him the poster child of the "noble failure" for 60 years, and the very model of the upright Englishman who would walk into the trenches of WWI.
Bah. Proving he did have bad luck with the weather doesn't excuse the other suicidal decisions he made.
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ObBias, My great-great-uncle Charlie liked Amundsen, and had some credentials from which to form an opinion.
While originally written as a "cheat" detector, it also does a good job of identifying similar structures in systems that are good candidates for refactoring. It helps find things that should be functions rather than cut-and-paste-with-trivial-or-no-change.
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The main NoCal B52 base was Mather outside Sacramento, and it's been closed down pending industrial conversion. Another was Castle near Atwater, also shut down with a museum (including a rare B36, which is MUCH BIGGER).
There's only two bases now flying 52s, I think, Barksdale LA, and someplace else (Minot ND?)
If you are seeing 52s, it's a transit flight, an airshow, or some other training/currency mission.
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The OBD II system was mandated by the Feds, not the manufacturers or the dealers. The Feds required that the diagnostics not be readable by mere mortals. The reason was to keep bozos with screwdrivers from mucking with emissions-sensitive stuff. Requiring knowledge of where the standard OBD II connector is on the car, and presence of an OBD II reader is an intentional barrier to clowns who don't really know what they are doing.
It is a known unfortunate side effect that it requires you to take it someplace qualified every time the 'check engine' light comes on. This doesn't need to be a dealer. This was seen as an acceptable tradeoff by those nasty bureucrats.
There are now plenty of OBD II readers now available reasonably cheap for those who want the visibility.
It's better now than it was before OBD II, because there were lots of different diagnostic systems, and it was more expensive for 3rd party garages to get a set of readers that would work with everything. With OBD II, one box works for all cars. That is one of the reasons they've gotten cheap.
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Don't you think they can tow away wrecks with smashed in frontends and no wheels? What naivete to think that locked, curbed wheels are even a nuisance!
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Sure, compare MSN version 1.0 vs W3C. The first MSN was a dialup competing against Prodigy and AOL.
Or IP vs. Novell IPX, or X vs. NeWS. One can argue reasaonably that these aren't clones, but are things that "changed the game" compared to the proprietary thing. But that is one of the advantages of the open-ness.
The question is whether the closed thing can get a knockout before the open thing gains footing.
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