Too many Slashdot stories are coming from other blogs. Quote from original content, please.
Re:SCOX at $5.15 - Where's the bottom
on
Groklaw Turns One
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· Score: 3, Informative
SCO doesn't automatically go away if their stock drops to penny levels.
True. But SCOX went from nowhere to 22, and then back down to nowhere, all on hype. That's a classic speculative bubble. Live by the momentum, die by the momentum. It's not like their revenue numbers are any good, except for that cash infusion from Microsoft.
SCOX at $5.15 - Where's the bottom
on
Groklaw Turns One
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Groklaw has done a great job in dispelling Darl's FUD. Nobody takes SCO's threats seriously any more. Of course, Cravath and IBM are doing the heavy work, but nobody would notice without Groklaw. It's not at all common for pre-trial motions to be followed this closely.
The remaining question for SCOX is "how low can it go"? Except for that bump in early April, when SCO tried, unsuccessfully, a stock buyback to prop up the price, the decline from 14 to 5 has been close to linear.
If you just project the line out, SCOX goes to zero around late summer. It probably won't go to penny stock levels for a while, though; they have some cash left. But with no licensing revenue and a huge legal burn rate, they can't go on for all that long.
The real question at this point, and it's one the players in the Open Source industry need to think about, is, who ends up with the rights to UNIX when SCO is gone? Sun? IBM? Red Hat? Boies?
It's sad, in a way, to realize that the best thing the original UNIX can do is go away.
What you're seeing is a small version of this picture. Note the overhead tether leading up and to the right. In the previous picture, you can see the large crane holding up the Skycar.
In the words of the SEC complaint filed with the U.S. District Court, "As of late 2002, MI's approximately 40 years of development has resulted in a prototype Skycar capable of hovering about fifteen feet above the ground."
OK, how do I use this with Adobe Premiere?
on
XVID 1.0 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The basic instructions only cover decoding. You're referred to another site for encoding. That site assumes you're stealing content from a commercial DVD.
So how do I encode my old Cinepak-encoded animation work, which I have as an Adobe Premiere project, without encoding it twice with two different codecs, with all the attendant problems.
Moller has been hyping his flying cars for a long time. We just put his 1974 brochure on line. Back then, it was three months from flight test, and production was scheduled for the end of 1976. Yes, 1976.
More recently, he's been in trouble with the SEC for selling $5.1 million in unregistered securities over the Internet.
As the SEC's formal complaint puts it, "As of late 2002, MI's approximately 40 years' of development has resulted in a prototype Skycar capable of hovering about fifteen feet above the ground." That seems to say it all.
Re:Is anyone else disturbed by this?
on
E3 Wrapup Documented
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· Score: 2, Informative
"America's Army", the game, is a recruiting tool for the U.S. Army, paid for and run by the U.S. Army.
Much of the operation is outsourced, but the whole point is to recruit people into the U.S. Army.
"Going to the next level" has a special meaning there.
First, despite all the whining for Federal subsidies, broadband Internet access is at 45.9% this month. It just passed 56Kb/s modem access.
(There are still a reasonable number of users at lower speeds. Amusingly, the fraction of 14.4 Kb/s users has been relatively constant for years.)
High speed home Internet access is growing at about 8% per year. Korea is at about 70%, and Canada is at about 64%. Korea saturated at around 70%, and Canada seems to be levelling off around 70%. The US should hit 70% broadband in about three years.
That's higher than cable TV ever reached. Cable TV has been stuck at roughly 65% for many years. And it's way above book and newspaper penetration. Far more people have Internet access than buy books. Newspaper penetration is down to 55% or so, and has dropped about 10% per decade since 1950.
Remember, the US has flat rate local phone service, but many other countries don't. So dialup access was and is cheap to buy.
So this isn't a problem.
As for the "layering" business, we've had that ever since telephone deregulation. You can buy bulk bandwidth cheaply if you can get it to your site, or go to where it terminates. Look how little bandwidth costs for a colo server. Bulk long-haul bandwidth is incredibly cheap.
The GAO should make NASA put their general ledger on the web. Their summary data is so obfusicated that it doesn't make any sense, but the transaction list of payments might be subject to analysis.
For years, broadcasters have been insisting on "adjacent channel protection", to "protect" TV sets with crappy tuners from interference. That's the main reason TV bandwidth utilization is so low.
Now it's coming back to bite them.
Outside of biotech, it's hard to find any major large scale R&D operations left in the US. In the computer/electronics field, who is doing innovative work? PARC is moribund. Bell Labs is dying. IBM Almaden is cutting back. RCA sold off Sarnoff Labs years ago. DEC is gone. HP Labs has downsized.
I have a copy of Moller's 1974 brochure, Yes, 1974. Back then, he was going to have a test flight Real Soon Now, and commercial sales were a year or two away. Thirty years later, he's going to have a test flight Real Soon Now, and commercial sales are a year or two away.
There's no reason this can't be done. After all,
the Hiller Flying Platform did it fifty years ago. But Moller has no credibility left.
The animated superhero genre has been overdone.
Even the overage superhero genre has been overdone.
Pixar's previous work was more original.
With Spider-Man 2 and Shrek 2 coming out first, they face very tough competition.
Pixar's "All Renderman All the Time" house style is getting old, too. Everybody has good renderers now.
The area of "exactly what constitutes a measurement that causes uncertainty to collapse" has been getting some experimental attention lately. Not just by Afshar, either. It's going to be interesting to see how this unwinds.
Presumably the FBI wants to keep it a secret because it will be embarassing when it comes out. It's probably some overbroad order against an ISP or telco.
OSU's handbook has this to say about public record requests:
The Ohio Public Records Act defines a "record" as any document, device, or item, regardless of physical form or characteristic, created or received by, or coming under the jurisdiction of, any public office of the state or its political subdivisions, which serves to document the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations, or other activities of the office.
Such records shall be promptly prepared and made available for inspection to any persons at all reasonable times during regular business hours. Upon request, a person responsible for public records shall make copies available at cost, within a reasonable period of time.
OSU lost in court the last time they tried to fight this.
SCOX at $5.30 today and dropping
on
SCO Caught Copying
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· Score: 5, Interesting
SCO stock continues to drop. The chart for the last three months is almost linear,
going from 14 to 5. The bump in April was apparently SCO's announced "stock buyback" program, which had little long-term effect.
Two more points down, and SCOX will be back where it was before all the lawsuits, down around 3. That level looks likely within a month.
Yes, you too can have a College Degree for the low, low price of only $110.
Includes diploma, verification by the "college" in case anybody calls, and a copy of the college's accreditation certificate.
Additional services include transcripts
and "professorships".
Hamburger University issues a "Bachelor of Hambergerology" degree.
Here's the resume
of someone who has both a Bachelor of Hamburgerology degree and an "A+" certification.
You can judge from this how much either is worth.
Take the Tri-State Tollway to I-88 west. Exit at the McDonald's Plaza exit and turn right onto 22nd St.
Turn right at Jorie Boulevard, then left at Ronald Lane. Hamburger University is on your right.
Imagery from Keyhole Corporation
Keyhole Corporation doesn't have those problems.
The Keyhole viewer is very impressive. They have the whole planet available. Resolution varies; for much of the world it's low-res satellite imagery. But for most urban areas in the developed world, the imagery is quite good.
The imagery is overlaid on height data, so you can get a 3D view from any angle. The height data is too coarse to show buildings.
UPDATE:
The current implementation splits the screen in half, assigning rendering for each half to one of two cards using a software load balancer to try and ensure proper synchronization....
Alienware is currently saying that they expect users to see a ~50% performance boost over single card implementations.
So that's a dual head graphics system mapped onto one display. Like picture-in-picture TVs.
This is just a motherboard with two slots for graphics boards. Period. This is not about somehow using two GPUs on separate cards to run one display faster.
It's possible to design and build GPUs that will play together to provide higher performance graphics.
The Apple 3D Quickdraw Accelerator Card, from the early PowerPC days, does exactly that. If you get two, drawing speed nearly doubles. That device was more of a coprocessor, closer to the CPU than a modern GPU. It didn't drive the display; it just pushed bits into display memory elsewhere.
Dynamic Pictures, before they tanked, made the Oxygen line of boards, with one to four GPUs. Those units tiled the screen, with each GPU working on different tiles. The screen would break up into a checkerboard when the device was having problems, so the division of labor was quite clear.
Softimage, in their heyday, once showed a system at SIGGRAPH which was running the mental ray renderer on two 6' racks of machines with custom accelerator chips, so you could do final-quality rendering in real time. That was too pricey even for Hollywood, but very nice to watch.
The terms and conditions sound like something AOL would dream up.
Google owns your words.
Rights Google gets:
By posting communications on or through the Service, you automatically grant Google a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, edit, translate, distribute, perform, and display the communication alone or as part of other works in any form, media, or technology whether now known or hereafter developed, and to sublicense such rights through multiple tiers of sublicensees.
Rights users get:
Google authorizes you to view and download a single copy of the Materials solely for your personal, non-commercial use. You may not sell or modify the Materials or reproduce, display, publicly perform, distribute, or otherwise use the Materials in any way for any public or commercial purpose without the written permission of Google.
Google can censor, but does not have to.
Google does not control the information delivered to the Groups, and Google has no obligation to monitor the Groups. However, Google reserves the right at all times to disclose any information as necessary to satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or governmental request, or to edit, refuse to post or to remove any information or materials, in whole or in part, for any reason whatsoever, in Google's sole discretion.
Google can change the rules at any time, including retroactively.
Google may, in its sole discretion, modify or revise these terms and conditions at any time by updating this web page, and you agree to be bound by these modifications or revisions.
Stick with Netnews. Nobody owns it. The protocols are open. The source is open. And it works.
It's certainly possible to botch a configuration system. It's quite hard to get one right.
Nobody has really done it well yet, but there are examples in other fields, notably databases, of keeping data consistent that are worth looking at.
Properly, configuration should work like a database that enforces invariants. You can try changes, but you can't commit them unless they're consistent. Some of that consistency involves checking with other parts of the system.
Only once you have a sanity-checking engine underneath is it appropriate to put a GUI on top.
Otherwise, it will inevitably get out of sync.
With a reasonable database, you don't have the same information in more than one place. If you need another view of it, that's obtained by query. For example, if installed programs export to the database the file suffixes they understand, finding which programs can read a given file is a lookup operation. You don't want to have a separate list of "who understands what".
The Windows registry is not a database. It's a tree of tuples, with no mechanism to insure consistency or security. That's not a good example to look at.
Look at how major databases (not,sadly, MySQL) manage consistency.
You don't need a full scale database engine, though, because writes are infrequent and the database is small.
Slashdot Mirror
Too many Slashdot stories are coming from other blogs. Quote from original content, please.
True. But SCOX went from nowhere to 22, and then back down to nowhere, all on hype. That's a classic speculative bubble. Live by the momentum, die by the momentum. It's not like their revenue numbers are any good, except for that cash infusion from Microsoft.
The remaining question for SCOX is "how low can it go"? Except for that bump in early April, when SCO tried, unsuccessfully, a stock buyback to prop up the price, the decline from 14 to 5 has been close to linear. If you just project the line out, SCOX goes to zero around late summer. It probably won't go to penny stock levels for a while, though; they have some cash left. But with no licensing revenue and a huge legal burn rate, they can't go on for all that long.
The real question at this point, and it's one the players in the Open Source industry need to think about, is, who ends up with the rights to UNIX when SCO is gone? Sun? IBM? Red Hat? Boies?
It's sad, in a way, to realize that the best thing the original UNIX can do is go away.
In the words of the SEC complaint filed with the U.S. District Court, "As of late 2002, MI's approximately 40 years of development has resulted in a prototype Skycar capable of hovering about fifteen feet above the ground."
So how do I encode my old Cinepak-encoded animation work, which I have as an Adobe Premiere project, without encoding it twice with two different codecs, with all the attendant problems.
More recently, he's been in trouble with the SEC for selling $5.1 million in unregistered securities over the Internet. As the SEC's formal complaint puts it, "As of late 2002, MI's approximately 40 years' of development has resulted in a prototype Skycar capable of hovering about fifteen feet above the ground." That seems to say it all.
"America's Army", the game, is a recruiting tool for the U.S. Army, paid for and run by the U.S. Army. Much of the operation is outsourced, but the whole point is to recruit people into the U.S. Army. "Going to the next level" has a special meaning there.
That's higher than cable TV ever reached. Cable TV has been stuck at roughly 65% for many years. And it's way above book and newspaper penetration. Far more people have Internet access than buy books. Newspaper penetration is down to 55% or so, and has dropped about 10% per decade since 1950.
Remember, the US has flat rate local phone service, but many other countries don't. So dialup access was and is cheap to buy.
So this isn't a problem.
As for the "layering" business, we've had that ever since telephone deregulation. You can buy bulk bandwidth cheaply if you can get it to your site, or go to where it terminates. Look how little bandwidth costs for a colo server. Bulk long-haul bandwidth is incredibly cheap.
The GAO should make NASA put their general ledger on the web. Their summary data is so obfusicated that it doesn't make any sense, but the transaction list of payments might be subject to analysis.
For years, broadcasters have been insisting on "adjacent channel protection", to "protect" TV sets with crappy tuners from interference. That's the main reason TV bandwidth utilization is so low. Now it's coming back to bite them.
Outside of biotech, it's hard to find any major large scale R&D operations left in the US. In the computer/electronics field, who is doing innovative work? PARC is moribund. Bell Labs is dying. IBM Almaden is cutting back. RCA sold off Sarnoff Labs years ago. DEC is gone. HP Labs has downsized.
I have a copy of Moller's 1974 brochure, Yes, 1974. Back then, he was going to have a test flight Real Soon Now, and commercial sales were a year or two away. Thirty years later, he's going to have a test flight Real Soon Now, and commercial sales are a year or two away.
There's no reason this can't be done. After all, the Hiller Flying Platform did it fifty years ago. But Moller has no credibility left.
Pixar's "All Renderman All the Time" house style is getting old, too. Everybody has good renderers now.
The area of "exactly what constitutes a measurement that causes uncertainty to collapse" has been getting some experimental attention lately. Not just by Afshar, either. It's going to be interesting to see how this unwinds.
"We sold the Inaniums! We sold the Inaniums!"
Presumably the FBI wants to keep it a secret because it will be embarassing when it comes out. It's probably some overbroad order against an ISP or telco.
Such records shall be promptly prepared and made available for inspection to any persons at all reasonable times during regular business hours. Upon request, a person responsible for public records shall make copies available at cost, within a reasonable period of time.
OSU lost in court the last time they tried to fight this.
Two more points down, and SCOX will be back where it was before all the lawsuits, down around 3. That level looks likely within a month.
Additional services include transcripts and "professorships".
I'd like to see a "transcript".
Here's the resume of someone who has both a Bachelor of Hamburgerology degree and an "A+" certification. You can judge from this how much either is worth.
Take the Tri-State Tollway to I-88 west. Exit at the McDonald's Plaza exit and turn right onto 22nd St. Turn right at Jorie Boulevard, then left at Ronald Lane. Hamburger University is on your right.
The Keyhole viewer is very impressive. They have the whole planet available. Resolution varies; for much of the world it's low-res satellite imagery. But for most urban areas in the developed world, the imagery is quite good. The imagery is overlaid on height data, so you can get a 3D view from any angle. The height data is too coarse to show buildings.
UPDATE: The current implementation splits the screen in half, assigning rendering for each half to one of two cards using a software load balancer to try and ensure proper synchronization. ...
Alienware is currently saying that they expect users to see a ~50% performance boost over single card implementations.
So that's a dual head graphics system mapped onto one display. Like picture-in-picture TVs.
With a really wide display, it might be worth it.
It's possible to design and build GPUs that will play together to provide higher performance graphics. The Apple 3D Quickdraw Accelerator Card, from the early PowerPC days, does exactly that. If you get two, drawing speed nearly doubles. That device was more of a coprocessor, closer to the CPU than a modern GPU. It didn't drive the display; it just pushed bits into display memory elsewhere.
Dynamic Pictures, before they tanked, made the Oxygen line of boards, with one to four GPUs. Those units tiled the screen, with each GPU working on different tiles. The screen would break up into a checkerboard when the device was having problems, so the division of labor was quite clear.
Softimage, in their heyday, once showed a system at SIGGRAPH which was running the mental ray renderer on two 6' racks of machines with custom accelerator chips, so you could do final-quality rendering in real time. That was too pricey even for Hollywood, but very nice to watch.
Rights users get: Google authorizes you to view and download a single copy of the Materials solely for your personal, non-commercial use. You may not sell or modify the Materials or reproduce, display, publicly perform, distribute, or otherwise use the Materials in any way for any public or commercial purpose without the written permission of Google.
Stick with Netnews. Nobody owns it. The protocols are open. The source is open. And it works.
Properly, configuration should work like a database that enforces invariants. You can try changes, but you can't commit them unless they're consistent. Some of that consistency involves checking with other parts of the system. Only once you have a sanity-checking engine underneath is it appropriate to put a GUI on top. Otherwise, it will inevitably get out of sync.
With a reasonable database, you don't have the same information in more than one place. If you need another view of it, that's obtained by query. For example, if installed programs export to the database the file suffixes they understand, finding which programs can read a given file is a lookup operation. You don't want to have a separate list of "who understands what".
The Windows registry is not a database. It's a tree of tuples, with no mechanism to insure consistency or security. That's not a good example to look at.
Look at how major databases (not,sadly, MySQL) manage consistency. You don't need a full scale database engine, though, because writes are infrequent and the database is small.