Don't count on animation to eliminate star power from the equation. In Japan, where animation is a lot more common than the US, top seiyuu (voice actors) can become big stars for their vocal talents. If anything, can allow a single actor to be a bigger star than they might be in conventional movies or TV simply because it takes less time to record the voice track for an animated feature than it does to do the equivalent filming. That means that a top voice actor can appear in many more features than a conventional actor can, possibly enhancing their star power.
The other thing to consider is that it might just shift the star power to other positions in the production. The movie will still need a script writer, director, character designer, lead animator, etc. and the top people in those areas will still command big salaries. If for instance, top character designs make as big a difference in a movie's success as top actors do today, you can expect that top designers will start pulling down salaries that are competitive with today's top actors.
Any real animation fan will tell you that using CGI (or conventional cell animation) doesn't eliminate the need for good actors. The quality of the voice acting in an animated feature can make a huge difference in its overall quality.
To take a particularly strong negative example, consider JarJar Binks. His antics in Phantom Menace were certainly distracting, but it was the awful voice acting that made him so utterly annoying. On the positive side, look at your examples of Shrek and Toy Story. Both movies had top name actors providing the voices for key characters. In Japan, the best seiyuu (voice actors) in anime can be nationally famous just for their vocal talents.
Unlikely. The flow that you can get through a very small channel is absolutely tiny. Over a large range, the backpressure goes up as one over the square of cross-sectional area, so a large array of small channels can allow substantially less flow at a given pressure drop than a single large channel of the same area. Using channels the size that you can make using this kind of process you simply aren't going to be able to get enough flow to make much difference.
(BTW, I do have some idea of what I'm talking about; I've worked in microfluidics and still work in a closely related field.)
It might seem like and obvious step, but don't throw away the old system until you're sure that the new one works! Keep somebody minding the existing, working system so that if/when your attempt to completely rework it fails you won't be stuck. Once you have rewritten it, try setting it up on a trial basis in parallel to the working system so you can find the crippling bugs before they take down your system.
While it's not a perfect example, Slashdot is actually a decent example with their switch to their new system. They kept the old, crufty version as the primary and set up a beta site with the new software. They knew that there would be problems and got some of their more loyal users to test the new system and only switched over it after they were pretty confident that they had gotten the worst problems out of the way.
You can afford to take a few more risks as long as you keep a known working system around as a fallback.
But being available for x86 isn't the whole game. That might give you the ability to move easily from x86 to Sparc, provided that you had been running Solaris x86 to start out with. But hardly anyone is going to be starting with Solaris on x86 with the intention of making it easy to move to Sun's big iron when the need comes, especially because reviews of Solaris for x86 seem to be generally negative compared to Linux and *BSD.
And even if you had started on Solaris for x86, that still doesn't solve the issue of migrating from one big iron vendor to another. What happens if it turns out that you really want to be running on one of IBM's POWER-based systems, or a S390? Then you'll have a vendor to vendor migration problem. The advantage of Linux is that it's comparatively vendor agnostic. Once the kernel works on a given processor, it's likely to keep working there, and its range currently seems to be better than any of the proprietary Unixes. The big reason to use those proprietary Unixes is that they support "big iron" features; if and when Linux does the same there will be no reason not to use it instead.
I'm not trolling, I mean it. What does Linux offer me that Solaris doesn't?
The primary thing that Linux offers is the ability to run on non-Sun hardware. That's actually bigger than you might think. Consider the following ways that it might be nice:
Your system is growing. You've been using Linux on comodity x86 hardware to this point, but you now need a bigger machine. Having a bigger machine available that can run Linux should make the transition easier.
You wish to avoid vendor lock-in. Yes, Sun makes nice machines, but so do other manufacturers like IBM, HP, etc. If every manufacturer has Linux available as an OS, it's much easier to jump to another vendor if circumstances dictate.
You anticipate that IA64 will be competitive with SPARC in the near future, so you're going to buy comodity IA64 hardware instead of single vendor Sun stuff. Since Solaris is only available for Sun platforms, it won't be an option.
Basically, the fact that big iron manufacturers already have their own OSes is not a strong argument about adding big-iron features to Linux. That's especially true if I'm a manufacturer and I want to break into that very lucrative market. It may very well be cheaper for me to help to develop the needed features in Linux and put that on my new hardware than to develop my own OS. By making those things available in a comodity OS you have the potential to convert big iron into a comodity market, just as comodity OSes for desktop systems helped turn them into comodity goods.
Not necessarily. Arguing that spam must work because people keep trying it is like arguing that "Make money fast" must work because people keep sending it (or variants on it). All that's required for people to keep spamming it is that they think that it works, not that it actually does work. My guess is that the only spam that actually gets a big enough response rate to justify sending it is the kind that advertizes spamming services. Unfortunately, we'll only know for sure in 10 or 20 years when everyone who's unscrupulous enough to try spamming has done so. If they all give up because it doesn't work, we'll know that it was a failure and people were just trying it because they didn't know any better. If it keeps up indefinitely, we'll know that it does work and we'll have to start revoking net access of anyone dumb enough to reply.
Most casual users don't want all of this complexity - heck, to most the idea that they need to login to their home system seems absurd.
But this represents both a problem and an opportunity. The truth is that there are real world advantages of having separate logons for each user (to pick the specific example you give) and it's only necessary to show those reasons to people to get them to consider the advantages. Once people get the idea that they can customize their system to be just the way they want it without having the next user screw it up, they'll accept the tiny inconvenience of logging on. When they realize that having separate home directories (and a little bit of fiddling) will keep other people from looking at their personal files without permission, they won't want to go back.
And from a user design standpoint, the system fails - unlike windows, 3 different Linux boxes can have 3 different interfaces - each of which confusing to the new user.
This is the most overhyped disadvantage I've ever heard of. As long as the different desktops are all installed, it's just a matter of setting which one is your default and you can get the same behavior everywhere. Disk space is no longer a serious objection to doing this, so it should be a non-issue.
If your code isn't written well enough to make it obvious to another programmer what it does, then no amount of documentation will help the poor sop who comes along after you and has to maintain your code.
This is frequently true, but not always. Code that is heavily optimized for speed may wind up using some really nasty and non-obvious tricks to get the job done faster. Those are a small minority of cases, but they are an instance where good documentation of both purpose and method is important.
A key question is exactly how you deal with your codec. If you have a definitive external specification for the codec, so that your code is just a reference implementation, I'd recommend a BSD-style license. In that case, any implementation of the code must comply with the specification. That limits the ability of companies to create proprietary extensions and damage users of the free version, so a permissive license makes sense. I'd only go to a LGPL-type license if the code is the only specification for the codec.
This is what I've done for the handful of software that I've released. All of my programs are associated with papers that describe the function of the program in enough detail that a motivated, competent programmer could re-implement them without looking at my code. Since anyone could rewrite them from scratch and avoid any license I put on the code, I don't see a whole lot of point in putting on a restrictive licence in the first place.
Actually, one of the greatest benefits of radioimmunotherapy compared to conventional radiation therapy is that it's much better at treating metastatic cancers. Since the radiation is attached to antibodies, it will circulate through the blood and attach to cancerous cells wherever they happen to be. That makes it a great technique for treating cancer that's spread beyond its initial tumor. A slight modification to the technique can also be used for diagnosis; they use a different isotope, one that emits gama-rays rather than alphas, and then use a gama-ray sensitive camera to image where the isotopes wind up. That lets them find out where the cancer has spread.
Actually, this is discussed explicitly in his paper on the topic. It sounds as though broad applicability to the general problem of complex configurations was one of his goals:
Another decision I made early was to have no information or constraints specific to the Linux-kernel configuration problem in the code of the system. Thus, a CML rules file contains not just the menu declarations, visibility predicates, validity constraints, and derivations derived above; it includes various auxiliary declarations including the locations of help files, a common prefix to be added when writing out symbols, and even the image to be used when the configurator iconifies under X.
Thus, CML2 is designed to conveniently be used for a much larger class of configuration-management problems than just Linux kernels. It could be used, in particular, for configuring systems from libraries of programs or libraries with `requires' dependencies on each other. All this would require would be a custom rules file expressing the dependencies.
The Kernel should not be at the mercy of one compiler.
"At the mercy of" one compiler is a rather strange description, don't you think? After all, both Linux and gcc are released under the GPL, which means that anyone who wants to use Linux will already be willing to accept what many people view as the most obnoxious feature of gcc (the license). And it's not as though the gcc developers can yank the rug out from under Linux by making it proprietary, refusing to distribute old versions, etc. If anything it would be crazy to make serious modifications to Linux to take advantage of a compiler like Intel's that could be taken away at any minute.
The problem is that this is the natural response to people's attempt to filter out advertizing. First it was just getting up and going to the fridge when commercials were on, then channel surfing, now TiVo. People aren't watching regular commercials anymore, so advertizers feel that they need to adopt more and more intrusive methods to force their ads into your attention. Obscuring part of the program with an ad is the next logical step, since you're forced to watch the ad if you watch the program (at least until someone comes up with a blocker).
The thing that you really need to watch out for is the next logical step in the progression- product placement. Once the product is deeply intertwined with the program there will be no way to remove it except to stop watching the show. IMO the TV news has already been completely taken over this way. There are a lot of "news" spots that are nothing but advertizements for shows from the same conglomerate, and there's no telling how much impact corporate ownership has had on coverage of stories relevant to corporate interests.
I'm currently dressed as a Jedi Knight. I have the shirt, vest, belt, robe, light saber, etc. One advantage of being a Jedi is that they're expected to have all kinds of techno-doodads on their utility belts, which provides a convenient excuse for including things like cellphones and pagers in a costume. Just try that with your medaeval outfit.
Memory cards are not cheap, in some cases the cost of the higher-capacity cards can easily exceed the cost of the digital camera.
Not for the professional quality cameras that professional photojournalists are likely to use. Those things are several times as expensive as high-end consumer-grade cameras. Besides, by the time you start talking about the cost of a bunch of high-capacity cards, you can start thinking about using higher capacity storage. There are already cameras that burn straight to 8 cm CD-Rs. They'd make a decent choice for this kind of thing because they're large capacity, cheap, write-once (so the only way to destroy a written photo is to destroy the disk), and should save the data for at least as long as photo negatives (which do degrade over time). If that doesn't give you enough storage, you could amost certainly rig up a system built around a laptop hard-drive, much like the portable MP3 players. You could build it straight into the camera, connect it with a cable such as USB or firewire, or just build a system to let you download the cards onto it easily. That would give you a capacity of 20 GB with the drives available today, which is a hell of a lot of pictures.
and the thumb is the one bit, the pointer finger the three bit, the middle finger the nine bit...
But what position of the finger or thumb represents one vs. two? The standard two positions used in regular finger counting adapt nicely to binary, but a half extended finger (much less a half extended thumb) is a bit trickier to do.
Think about it. If they were called digits from di- for two, don't you think that it would be called dinary instead of binary? And people still talk about digits even when they're talking in decimal, so it's not something that's restricted to binary, anyway.
IIRC, the origin of digit is not from di- meaning two, but from digit meaning finger or toe. This makes some sense if you think about where numbering systems came from. FWIW, one advantage of binary is that it's very easy to count in binary on your fingers; your thumb is the ones bit, index finger twos bit, middle finger fours bit, etc. Not quite as easy to do in ternary.
It's a good thing that other browsers let you manipulate the user-agent string and trick stupid sites like this into believing that you're using IE. Of course that won't help the majority of users who don't know about features like that, but at least the option is there.
I loved this book when I was growing up. I have no idea where my parents got a copy- it must have been well out of print by the time I read it- but it's wonderfully funny book. It's great to read that it's back in print; I think I'll pick up a copy to give to my niece.
Re:Please inact a subscription service!
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Apparently somebody does. The current Karma Kap was put in place specifically because there was a group of Karma whores who saw boosting their Karma as the most interesting thing to do on Slashdot. Capping Karma at 50 was instituted to make the game less fun- what's the point if you can't keep score- and seems to have been moderately successful. The most notorious Karma whores, like Signal11, seem to have given up, which was the point. I was being at least a little facetious by suggesting relaxing the Kap for subscribers, but I suspect that there are some people who might be willing to pay if extra, non-advertizing inducements were added to the basic advantage of not seeing advertizing.
Re:Please inact a subscription service!
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Slashdot Updates
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· Score: 1
If you really want to get people to pay, simply let subscribers exceed the Karma Kap. Or maybe subscribers could get some other benefits not available to non-subscribers, like being able to view others' Karma, extra filtering options, advantages when posting articles, or the like.
I generally agree that the new feature isn't so hot, but my feeling is that it's more of an issue because it's unnecessary than because it's bad. Anyone who wants to skip the ACs because so many of them post penis birds and goatse.cx links can do so quite effectively by setting their threshold at 1 instead of 0. It's not as though the regular posts that wind up getting modded down to 0 (or come from posters with karma low enough to default to 0) are particularly worth reading anyway. OTOH, some AC posts are actually worth reading and get modded up, so setting all ACs to -1 will wind up removing some worthwhile comments. All in all a stupid setting, and one I plan to avoid.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't count on animation to eliminate star power from the equation. In Japan, where animation is a lot more common than the US, top seiyuu (voice actors) can become big stars for their vocal talents. If anything, can allow a single actor to be a bigger star than they might be in conventional movies or TV simply because it takes less time to record the voice track for an animated feature than it does to do the equivalent filming. That means that a top voice actor can appear in many more features than a conventional actor can, possibly enhancing their star power.
The other thing to consider is that it might just shift the star power to other positions in the production. The movie will still need a script writer, director, character designer, lead animator, etc. and the top people in those areas will still command big salaries. If for instance, top character designs make as big a difference in a movie's success as top actors do today, you can expect that top designers will start pulling down salaries that are competitive with today's top actors.
Any real animation fan will tell you that using CGI (or conventional cell animation) doesn't eliminate the need for good actors. The quality of the voice acting in an animated feature can make a huge difference in its overall quality.
To take a particularly strong negative example, consider JarJar Binks. His antics in Phantom Menace were certainly distracting, but it was the awful voice acting that made him so utterly annoying. On the positive side, look at your examples of Shrek and Toy Story. Both movies had top name actors providing the voices for key characters. In Japan, the best seiyuu (voice actors) in anime can be nationally famous just for their vocal talents.
Unlikely. The flow that you can get through a very small channel is absolutely tiny. Over a large range, the backpressure goes up as one over the square of cross-sectional area, so a large array of small channels can allow substantially less flow at a given pressure drop than a single large channel of the same area. Using channels the size that you can make using this kind of process you simply aren't going to be able to get enough flow to make much difference.
(BTW, I do have some idea of what I'm talking about; I've worked in microfluidics and still work in a closely related field.)
It might seem like and obvious step, but don't throw away the old system until you're sure that the new one works! Keep somebody minding the existing, working system so that if/when your attempt to completely rework it fails you won't be stuck. Once you have rewritten it, try setting it up on a trial basis in parallel to the working system so you can find the crippling bugs before they take down your system.
While it's not a perfect example, Slashdot is actually a decent example with their switch to their new system. They kept the old, crufty version as the primary and set up a beta site with the new software. They knew that there would be problems and got some of their more loyal users to test the new system and only switched over it after they were pretty confident that they had gotten the worst problems out of the way.
You can afford to take a few more risks as long as you keep a known working system around as a fallback.
But being available for x86 isn't the whole game. That might give you the ability to move easily from x86 to Sparc, provided that you had been running Solaris x86 to start out with. But hardly anyone is going to be starting with Solaris on x86 with the intention of making it easy to move to Sun's big iron when the need comes, especially because reviews of Solaris for x86 seem to be generally negative compared to Linux and *BSD.
And even if you had started on Solaris for x86, that still doesn't solve the issue of migrating from one big iron vendor to another. What happens if it turns out that you really want to be running on one of IBM's POWER-based systems, or a S390? Then you'll have a vendor to vendor migration problem. The advantage of Linux is that it's comparatively vendor agnostic. Once the kernel works on a given processor, it's likely to keep working there, and its range currently seems to be better than any of the proprietary Unixes. The big reason to use those proprietary Unixes is that they support "big iron" features; if and when Linux does the same there will be no reason not to use it instead.
The primary thing that Linux offers is the ability to run on non-Sun hardware. That's actually bigger than you might think. Consider the following ways that it might be nice:
Basically, the fact that big iron manufacturers already have their own OSes is not a strong argument about adding big-iron features to Linux. That's especially true if I'm a manufacturer and I want to break into that very lucrative market. It may very well be cheaper for me to help to develop the needed features in Linux and put that on my new hardware than to develop my own OS. By making those things available in a comodity OS you have the potential to convert big iron into a comodity market, just as comodity OSes for desktop systems helped turn them into comodity goods.
Not necessarily. Arguing that spam must work because people keep trying it is like arguing that "Make money fast" must work because people keep sending it (or variants on it). All that's required for people to keep spamming it is that they think that it works, not that it actually does work. My guess is that the only spam that actually gets a big enough response rate to justify sending it is the kind that advertizes spamming services. Unfortunately, we'll only know for sure in 10 or 20 years when everyone who's unscrupulous enough to try spamming has done so. If they all give up because it doesn't work, we'll know that it was a failure and people were just trying it because they didn't know any better. If it keeps up indefinitely, we'll know that it does work and we'll have to start revoking net access of anyone dumb enough to reply.
But this represents both a problem and an opportunity. The truth is that there are real world advantages of having separate logons for each user (to pick the specific example you give) and it's only necessary to show those reasons to people to get them to consider the advantages. Once people get the idea that they can customize their system to be just the way they want it without having the next user screw it up, they'll accept the tiny inconvenience of logging on. When they realize that having separate home directories (and a little bit of fiddling) will keep other people from looking at their personal files without permission, they won't want to go back.
This is the most overhyped disadvantage I've ever heard of. As long as the different desktops are all installed, it's just a matter of setting which one is your default and you can get the same behavior everywhere. Disk space is no longer a serious objection to doing this, so it should be a non-issue.
This is frequently true, but not always. Code that is heavily optimized for speed may wind up using some really nasty and non-obvious tricks to get the job done faster. Those are a small minority of cases, but they are an instance where good documentation of both purpose and method is important.
A key question is exactly how you deal with your codec. If you have a definitive external specification for the codec, so that your code is just a reference implementation, I'd recommend a BSD-style license. In that case, any implementation of the code must comply with the specification. That limits the ability of companies to create proprietary extensions and damage users of the free version, so a permissive license makes sense. I'd only go to a LGPL-type license if the code is the only specification for the codec.
This is what I've done for the handful of software that I've released. All of my programs are associated with papers that describe the function of the program in enough detail that a motivated, competent programmer could re-implement them without looking at my code. Since anyone could rewrite them from scratch and avoid any license I put on the code, I don't see a whole lot of point in putting on a restrictive licence in the first place.
Actually, one of the greatest benefits of radioimmunotherapy compared to conventional radiation therapy is that it's much better at treating metastatic cancers. Since the radiation is attached to antibodies, it will circulate through the blood and attach to cancerous cells wherever they happen to be. That makes it a great technique for treating cancer that's spread beyond its initial tumor. A slight modification to the technique can also be used for diagnosis; they use a different isotope, one that emits gama-rays rather than alphas, and then use a gama-ray sensitive camera to image where the isotopes wind up. That lets them find out where the cancer has spread.
Actually, this is discussed explicitly in his paper on the topic. It sounds as though broad applicability to the general problem of complex configurations was one of his goals:
"At the mercy of" one compiler is a rather strange description, don't you think? After all, both Linux and gcc are released under the GPL, which means that anyone who wants to use Linux will already be willing to accept what many people view as the most obnoxious feature of gcc (the license). And it's not as though the gcc developers can yank the rug out from under Linux by making it proprietary, refusing to distribute old versions, etc. If anything it would be crazy to make serious modifications to Linux to take advantage of a compiler like Intel's that could be taken away at any minute.
The problem is that this is the natural response to people's attempt to filter out advertizing. First it was just getting up and going to the fridge when commercials were on, then channel surfing, now TiVo. People aren't watching regular commercials anymore, so advertizers feel that they need to adopt more and more intrusive methods to force their ads into your attention. Obscuring part of the program with an ad is the next logical step, since you're forced to watch the ad if you watch the program (at least until someone comes up with a blocker).
The thing that you really need to watch out for is the next logical step in the progression- product placement. Once the product is deeply intertwined with the program there will be no way to remove it except to stop watching the show. IMO the TV news has already been completely taken over this way. There are a lot of "news" spots that are nothing but advertizements for shows from the same conglomerate, and there's no telling how much impact corporate ownership has had on coverage of stories relevant to corporate interests.
I'm currently dressed as a Jedi Knight. I have the shirt, vest, belt, robe, light saber, etc. One advantage of being a Jedi is that they're expected to have all kinds of techno-doodads on their utility belts, which provides a convenient excuse for including things like cellphones and pagers in a costume. Just try that with your medaeval outfit.
Not for the professional quality cameras that professional photojournalists are likely to use. Those things are several times as expensive as high-end consumer-grade cameras. Besides, by the time you start talking about the cost of a bunch of high-capacity cards, you can start thinking about using higher capacity storage. There are already cameras that burn straight to 8 cm CD-Rs. They'd make a decent choice for this kind of thing because they're large capacity, cheap, write-once (so the only way to destroy a written photo is to destroy the disk), and should save the data for at least as long as photo negatives (which do degrade over time). If that doesn't give you enough storage, you could amost certainly rig up a system built around a laptop hard-drive, much like the portable MP3 players. You could build it straight into the camera, connect it with a cable such as USB or firewire, or just build a system to let you download the cards onto it easily. That would give you a capacity of 20 GB with the drives available today, which is a hell of a lot of pictures.
But what position of the finger or thumb represents one vs. two? The standard two positions used in regular finger counting adapt nicely to binary, but a half extended finger (much less a half extended thumb) is a bit trickier to do.
Think about it. If they were called digits from di- for two, don't you think that it would be called dinary instead of binary? And people still talk about digits even when they're talking in decimal, so it's not something that's restricted to binary, anyway.
IIRC, the origin of digit is not from di- meaning two, but from digit meaning finger or toe. This makes some sense if you think about where numbering systems came from. FWIW, one advantage of binary is that it's very easy to count in binary on your fingers; your thumb is the ones bit, index finger twos bit, middle finger fours bit, etc. Not quite as easy to do in ternary.
That's just their friendly way of forcing you to upgrade to IE6.
It's a good thing that other browsers let you manipulate the user-agent string and trick stupid sites like this into believing that you're using IE. Of course that won't help the majority of users who don't know about features like that, but at least the option is there.
I loved this book when I was growing up. I have no idea where my parents got a copy- it must have been well out of print by the time I read it- but it's wonderfully funny book. It's great to read that it's back in print; I think I'll pick up a copy to give to my niece.
Apparently somebody does. The current Karma Kap was put in place specifically because there was a group of Karma whores who saw boosting their Karma as the most interesting thing to do on Slashdot. Capping Karma at 50 was instituted to make the game less fun- what's the point if you can't keep score- and seems to have been moderately successful. The most notorious Karma whores, like Signal11, seem to have given up, which was the point. I was being at least a little facetious by suggesting relaxing the Kap for subscribers, but I suspect that there are some people who might be willing to pay if extra, non-advertizing inducements were added to the basic advantage of not seeing advertizing.
If you really want to get people to pay, simply let subscribers exceed the Karma Kap. Or maybe subscribers could get some other benefits not available to non-subscribers, like being able to view others' Karma, extra filtering options, advantages when posting articles, or the like.
I generally agree that the new feature isn't so hot, but my feeling is that it's more of an issue because it's unnecessary than because it's bad. Anyone who wants to skip the ACs because so many of them post penis birds and goatse.cx links can do so quite effectively by setting their threshold at 1 instead of 0. It's not as though the regular posts that wind up getting modded down to 0 (or come from posters with karma low enough to default to 0) are particularly worth reading anyway. OTOH, some AC posts are actually worth reading and get modded up, so setting all ACs to -1 will wind up removing some worthwhile comments. All in all a stupid setting, and one I plan to avoid.