You means a do it yourself EZ overclocking kit like the Turbo button on old PC/AT systems? Overclocking is a hardware hack only geeks did? Everyone used to press than little Turbo button and got the tiny speed improvement. Besides you push your processor to the max everytime you fire up anything bought from the Games section of Best Buy or Circuit City. Like the other dude said, how is a Quake3 test not indicitive of playing Quake3 in normal usage? Shit man, every increase in processing power means that 19" or 21" monitor you shelled out big bucks for just became more useful since you can run games at the monitor's highest resolution and really have a awesome looking game running. If that 10% speed increase means I can run a game I like well at 1600x1200 resolution or it takes five minutes less to composite some video or means you can finally run MS Bob then it might be a worthwhile 10%.
I really wonder how many people are going to fork over an extra X amount of dollars just to play FF11 online. Granted these are probably similar to people that bought a 250$ GeForce2 just to get an extra handful of frames in Quake3 but will they be willing to spend that sort of mula on their PS2? If you don't already have a PS2 will you be willing to spend 2X amount of money to get everything needed to play FF11 on top of the cost of the game's subscription? I'm not so sure. I'm half tempted to go buy a PS2 just to play FF10 since I've played and beat all the FF games up to 10.
Personally MMO games don't appeal to me, the only halfway appealing aspect of FF11 is the FF part of it. The problem I've found with them is that despite all the hype about interaction and community, they are static worlds. You can't change the game by playing day after day. You can't get a bunch of characters together to break up some big boss guy's kegger and actually make a dent in the world. If you could I would be more receptive to them. Playing AD&D you can kill some evil leader of the Red Wizards or a Lichlord and blamo you brought peace and harmony to the land, you can do so whilst being a butcher turned adventurer walking around with a magical meat cleaver. Maybe I'm a small percentage of the MMO target audience but I wan't REALLY involving stories. I don't want to get really involved in building up my level so I can use a masterwork sword of +1 bashing. That and paper is relatively cheap which means I can play AD&D for about 50 years for the cost of all the stuff needed just to play FF11. Added bonus to using dice is you can actually raise money to further the period of game play by gambling in back alleys.
I'm not totally positive this is entirely true but I've noticed an anomoly whilst running LimeWire on Windows. When it launches a little 2x2 pixel entity pops up in the top left corner of the screen. It can be clicked and moved around the screen but doesn't respond to anything else I've tried except Alt+F4 which makes it go away (I assume closes it). It also doesn't shot up in task manager as an individual process so I'm further assuming it is a thread in the LimeWire process contained in the JVM. I haven't cared enough to further try to figure out what it is. Is it mentioned in LimeWire's literature and has anybody else seen it?
Did anybody count the number of call to arms posts on this thread? I nearly pissed myself laughing. Not only is the article not really up on details but Sony flat out denied they were working on an OS. Sounds like somebody was speaking engrish on one end of the line and got somebody else confused.
Another item on your list can be carrier grade communication systems. Do you think the next generation of networking systems are going to be provided by a bunch of parallel 8 bit processors? Hell no. In order to move several terabits of data at crazy speeds we're going to need really fast switching technology to do it. Yet another is post production work. After you render all of your CG sequences somebody else with their ungodly number of processors computer edits it all together into a final product. The faster the processor is and the more memory it has the faster you can composite your video and audio and polish it up.
Uh..my point was Sony still gets the guy's money no matter what he is doing. Not that you use Sony's technology to break stuff they ultimately own the rights to. In fact using a Sony Memory Stick to listen to MP3s made from Sony Music produced CDs would be pretty stupid if you're aiming to fuck over Sony. Not only is Sony making a buck off the media itself (the memory stick) they're making a buck off the reader/writer as well as at some point the CD some guy ripped to MP3. The guy just gave Sony a bunch of money for listening to MP3s on a memory stick based MP3 player. Congrats!
Weird, I just got home from seeing this thing. Luckily I got in for free. When I heard about this movie like two years ago I expected a Blade Runner with ten times the quality of special effects and acting on par to BR because you won't want your new movie to suck ass compared to a movie based on a story by the same author. Then this piece of crap came out.
No the special effects aren't cool, I was more impressed watching the Babylon 5 pilot in terms of CG shots. Fancy fly overs of a city to give a sense of scale only work if the city is believable. Now why would a society protecting itself with dome shields build skyscrapers, and fancy ass ones at that? It was sort of sad some effects shots looked good (the medical print outs) while the news broadcasts and interface for the scanner thingie were just sad.
The outdoor shots were sort of cool to watch because I've been to alot of those buildings. A good number of exterior shots were filmed at CS Pomona in or on the CompSci building. The building with the weird looking triangular points is said building, the stairs they first walk up I broke my ankle on. You'll notice this is the same building in Gattaca. Same with the "walls of the city" which you'll notice is the same place Ethan Hawke's character in Gattaca watched rockets launching.
The acting was pretty decent but the screenwriters sure did add alot of stuff from the like four page short story originally written.
*SPOILER*
I guess I missed in the movie where the mention the passphrase for the bomb. I was waiting for somebody to bring it up considering it is a major plot device in the story. Am I the only one who missed it or did anybody else sort of fail to catch the single line in the whole movie making reference to it?
*END SPOILER*
With Gary Sinise I you don't know what to expect. He does such a damn good job in some good movies and then pulls of a stinker like Reindeer Games and the Imposter. Overall I rate it pretty low and I'm glad I didn't pay to see it. Like the original review says, people ecpecting Blade Runner will be disappointed. Maybe next time I'll go see A Beautiful Mind: Romper Stomper 2.
Multiple nodes with the same information only relieve traffic if they are close in terms of the network. Lets say you've got five mirrors up and serving some file. The load on each of these individual mirrors is going to be less than having a single server but if all of those mirrors are on the same connection (in the same data center), the stress on the pipe between the data center and the rest of the internet is the same. Now if these mirrors were like you suggest actually housed at a local POP there'd be next to no added traffic on external links. One big problem is a majority of internet traffic eventually moves over a handful of high speed lines. In theory the internet is a giant web of connections but in reality it is a bunch of small webs all connected by fat links. Anytime data has to travel over these fat links no matter how many nodes you've got on either side, the bandwidth over those links is stressed. That's actually where Akamai comes in, they get mirrors stuck up all over the place so no matter what file is requested it usually exists close (in network terms) to any node requesting it.
Sony owns the license for the Memory Stick technology so anybody who isn't Sony that produces them has to pay Sony a cut for making them. Sony also owns Sony Music which is one of the big three of the RIAA.
But what you're not picking up is that your 10mbit connection ONLY exists between you and the CO which is probably only a few miles from where you live. To the rest of the internet your connection is just a branch off of a T3 that goes from your CO to somewhere with an OC-3 or something. When you download anything from anywhere not directly connected to your CO you're using up bandwith on someone's pipe somewhere. Granted, if the CO provided a means for all users connected to the CO to talk to each other without involving the rest of the internet you'd have a point.
However your point about the comics is a bit flawed, if the server at your ISP has the comic image cached and you download it from that ISP that image still has to travel over a trunk line between the ISP's POP and your local CO. This does cost money. It costs money in terms of space required to cache it and the trunk bandwidth used to send it to you. The only way you'd get away with nearly free bandwidth was if your local phone company was also an ISP and housed its computer equipment in the CO building itself. With cable or DSL you don't have a whatever megabit connection to the internet, you've got a whatever megabit connection to a DLC and are lucky if that bandwidth is maintained once it goes out to the rest of the world. Letting you personally cache stuff would only work if you could talk directly to others on the local loop. No cable or DSL provider I know of does this because they're all structured to connect you to the internet, not connect you to your neighbor.
As an exercise for the poster figure out how much heat would be generated by a craft followed by a ball of air shooting down 32km of pipe accelerating to 2260m/s. Friction is a bitch and would tear the fuck out of anything launched from a big gun like that. One of the caveats of using a railgun to launch stuff is there's only air friction to deal with, not a bunch of mechanical friction which builds up and overwealms your propulsive force. You've also got the explosive force of the air when exiting the tube affecting the trajectory of the craft you just fired. See musket.
Getting something into orbit isn't about altitude it's about velicoity, specifically overcoming the Earth's escape velocity. You need to be able to shoot something from a point inside the atmosphere up so fast that the pull of the Earth is always less than the current velocity of the craft. At sea level this is about 7 miles per second or 25k miles per hour. A aircraft flying around 20k feet above sea level is only a little bit above sea level compared to the altitude of say the ISS which is about 175 miles or so above sea level right now. So shooting it from a conventional airplane doesn't give you much of a boost since launching it from the ground gives it more time to accelerate.
Launching a rocket horizontally is actually less efficient than launching it vertically because when launched horizontally and having aerofoils to create lift the rocket has to expend some of its burn time building lift to get the craft off the ground. Launching a rocket vertically means it doesn't have to waste precious burn time creating aerodynamic lift.
If I'm using a wired system and need more bandwidth because my userbase just doubled. I put a new router in and run some more wiring and hook those users up to a separate DLC and blamo. Caveat being there can't be more users than those connected to the DLC so I know how much bandwidth I need on the trunk between the DLC and CO.
Somebody then proposes I switch to a wireless scheme. It gets set up in a cell structure like the cell phone system. One merely replaces the DLC and wires with a WiFi tranceiver to serve the people formerly served with wires. I gain the advantage of not having to tear up pavement in order to connect end users to a trunk line. However there are disadvantages. When more nodes exist in a cell than planned for either 1) the tranceiver is saturated by either having to maintain X number of nodes as active links or 2) because bandwidth is spread too thin to effectively serve all the nodes. In either case I'm lucky if the least of my problem is some users get network busy messages. Try making a cell phone call in midtown San Fransisco and you'll see the limits of cellular networks. On a wireless network a given cell has X bandwidth on a given band. If the number of nodes in a cell doubles you can't merely add a tranceiver to double your bandwidth. You're very limited on how scalable your bandwidth can be. With a wired setup you can add another trunk line or replace an low bandwidth trunk line with a high bandwidth trunk line (and associated DLC[s]).
Thus finally wireless is only cheaper in some cases where you've got a hard limit on the number of nodes on the network. If you've got a fairly dense population in an area you're going to have so many wireless tranceivers it is going to cost you just as much as using wires. Besides the fact that almost anywhere you go has a form of wiring going from it to somewhere else.
Network bandwidth I'm sorry to say does not aggregate when you add nodes to it. You having a 10mbit line to a CO doesn't mean the internet's got an extra 10mbit of bandwidth flying around. That means you've got a 10mbit link to a CO which is sharing a connection to a bigger switch.If anything you've decreased everyone else's available bandwidth. If everyone hooked to your CO decides they want to be a Debian mirror you're all going to have to split the bandwidth available to the CO which is most likely alot less than the combined bandwidth of all of your 10mbit links. Server bandwidth isn't a scarce commodity, you just need to be willing to pay for it because somebody else is paying for it and selling it to you.
My bank uses an end to end IBM solution, OS2 on the front end with I can only assume AIX systems on the backend. None of the tellers had much of a problem learning to use the new systems when they got them in. If I was the manager I wouldn't expect them to because they're fucking professionals. If your credit union is such a piece of shit the managers don't offer training for new employyes on the system then I wouldn't be putting my money in there. If you were to put Linux or anything else on the front end systems you wouldn't give someone a damn command line or fire up X and twm and let them go to work. People aren't as stupid as you assume, down at my town's city hall most records are stored on a really old and very large Sun mainframe. Walking around the offices you see a whole bunch of xterms with phosphors a glowin. Sure alot of people have Windows machines on or under their desks but most of these are used for Office and such. The sort of stuff it'd be dumb to stick on a mainframe for everyone to use. Nobody I know has any trouble working with any of it.
Trouble with caps lock? I'm not defending the RIAA for fuck sake, learn to fucking read. What I'm saying is there is always going to be a middle man no matter what. Walmart and Kmart aren't going to buy stuff to sell from somebody who can't stick a box of CDs in 80% of their stores. Reason why independant labels aren't sold at either Walmart or Kmart. In my scenario Warehouse cut a deal of 3000 copies which is a pretty legitimate number of sales for a local band. Walmart and Kmart would never cut a small number of CDs like this for one and two would never actually produce anything themselves. Everything with a Sam's Choice logo on it is made by third parties under non-exclusive agreements. So since Walmart and Kmart would never cut a deal where they actually handled the production of someone's records that leaves...wow fuck me, Warehouse Music! That was a pretty easy conclusion, how exactly did you miss out on it? If Warehouse Music got the rights to stamp out copies of someone's record the price would not be much lower than under the aegis of the RIAA, people will buy a 13$ CD, there's no reason for Warehouse to sell it for less. The artist is still getting a small cut of the pie as well as having to go through the hassle of handling their own fucking business arangement.s What about that aspect don't you fucking get. How many guitarists do you think passed an accounting class ever in their lives? Hence middlemen again. Professionals that only concern themselves with the operations of business. They are going to take a cut for all albums sold. Is that so hard to imagine. Fuck you can't be right on slashdot without some free market jackass thinking the internet is somehow going to solve everyone's problems.
Oh yeah, your painter example is inherently flawed because painters sell the master copies of their work, not merely reprints. Those that DO sell reprints hire someone to han dle all of the work of distribution for them because as artists they are ill equipped professionally to handle the business transactions entailed. If you're a musician selling the master DAT of your work your example might work but otherwise it's just plain wrong. Middlemen exist in all industries. If you want to tell the RIAA to fuck off you better have a better distribution model than merely saying "I'll promote my music over the internet".
Have you ever tried to get a gig at a club to hopefully make money. Ask anybody who has, you make shit doing it. And for fuck sake, record companies do offer signing bonuses. They meet with bands they want to sign with cashiers checks and hand them over when the contract is signed. What the fuck are you thinking? Thinking the internet removes distribution mechanisms means you're either high or naturally have no grasp on reality. If you make a song you recorded into an MP3 and stick it on a portal which sells it for you...like MP3.com. You have to sign over the rights to the song or they will not sell it. Thus you're in the same situation as a regular recording contract. If you happen to have the equipment to master your own CD you've got the problem of where to sell it. If you sell it yourself you spend more time doing the business work than making music. Most musicians I know do not have a head for this. Hiring someone else to do marketing and distribution for you means they're taking a cut of what you're selling something for. Weird how marketing always seems to make that 30%. As for anyone going direct to the artist, do you know what the legal ramifications are for that? In order to legally sell someone else's work it has to be unsolicited. Someone also needs to own the rights to it. If the artist maintains the right an intelligent vendor isn't going to sign a deal with them without some form of exclusivity. Warehouse Music can't call up Metallica and ask to burn 3000 copies of a record without alot of signatures all over the place saying Warehouse are the only ones who can make copies of the record. Otherwise Smallass Records calls up Metallica and asks to make 3000 copies of the new record but sells them for half of what Warehouse does meaning Warehouse loses money. At which point their management says they will only sign production deals for exclusivity. To hire a legal and business team to handle the rights to their music Metallica hires someone who charges them a parcentage of everything they make off their services. So the middleman always has his foot in the door. You don't go do everything yourself because it is bad business to try to do something you don't know anyhting about. Florists don't offer oil changes. You don't try to sell the music you make, these people are called street performers and make next to nothing performing their music. Stop being a Linux zealot and thinking open source software, the internet, and (insert shit idea here) is going to overrun the world and change the infrastructure of everything.
This only works if 1)everyone accepts song credit from X company, X being the company you bought credit from and 2) the company doesn't go under. This means a song credit will cost you lets say a dollar plus some percentage to make the creditors money. Buying 10 song credits costs me now 12$. If a distribution site doesn't take my credit I have to either buy more credit from someone else or go without. Go look up all the cyber-cash companies that failed miserably. Beanz and Flooz ought to start you off on the hunt.
The artist has never gotten paid. Once you realize that you'll understand everything else. Direct payment schemes are complete horseshit because you can't live off donations. Ask any bum asking for a quarter on the street. One month your single might be a hit and you'll make 2500$ easy but then for the next three months you get maybe 100$ worth of downloads. You could sell sperm and make more money in four months if you're verile. Hence record companies. They show up with a paper that says "we'll pay you some up front signing bonus and you'll make a percentage of all money made from your work under the condition that 1) we retain the right to charge you for certain costs of promotion henceforth known as "recoupables" 2) you make as many records and perform as many shows as we decide at the signing of the contract 3) you work will belong to us though we will always give you credit for being the creator". This works for alot of artists which is why you go to the store and find CDs on the racks for sale. These artists said they wanted a chance to make money performing their music and signed over the rights to their work. Having a middleman in the music business is always going to be inevitable. If you've ever worked on commission you'd understand why this is so. They can give an artist a 50k signing bonus so they don't have to go hungry whilst waiting for their music to sell. Once an album is released and promotion is paid for by record sales (recoupables) the artist starts making their money and can then afford the extravagances of the rock star lifestyle or whathaveyou. The artist isn't going to get anywhere asking for handouts on a website. Yet again, ask your nearest bum on the street if he makes enough to live off of while waiting for his music to take off. He'll probably fucking mug you.
Say you only buy a single song? That's 1$ charged to your credit card. Most credit card issuers will not support such small transactions. Not only that but banks offering marchent accounts charge money for the processing of a credit card for a fucking dollar. In some cases merchant banks charge several dollars in transaction fees for transactions under 15 to 20$. So with a minimum of 15$ for buy anything from a pay per play website I'm STILL paying as much as I am for a CD from the local retailer. No one saves any money and the artist still doesn't see a dime of my money until they make the record company enough money to cover recoupables. That also excludes record companies' bumper crop, teenagers. Snot nosed kids buy more music than anybody and they don't have credit cards and it is rare they have access to their parent's credit cards. They either get mom and dad to give them cash to buy it, make the money themselves, or get CDs as gifts from ma and pa. My teenage brother's bought enough CDs to have bought himself a Ferrari. He didn't buy it with a credit card though. As for asking for a parent's credit card every time Jonny Jackass and Susy Screwme want to buy the new Linkn Logs or Sync'N single that won't fly with most people. "Hey mom can I pay a dollar for this single and then have your bank charge you an additional 15%?" For a dollar? Right. Further stressing a households credit is no way to try to make money on music.
A good example of what you point out as the twilight of the latex/foam rubber monster special effects would be the Jurasic Park series. In the first movie there was a scale T-Rex built that fully interacted with the characters. It LOOKED real which was the important thing. In JP2 there was the scene with the raptors fighting and rolling around whilst the actors tried to avoid them. That was also fairly impressive because the raptors made dust fly and moved objects the real actors interacted with. Two different mathods of making dinosaurs with pretty much the same effect on film. On the otherhand look at the difference between the technology used between SW:ANH and SW:TPM. Specifically in the last fight scene between in both movies. In ANH they used some blue screens overlayed with glass matte paintings in post production. It gave the same sense of scope that the same technique using computers did 20 years later. The goal is realism by whatever means, I don't think all filmmakers are going to abandon their old style of making realistic images just because of new wizbang technology.
Tranitioning a bunch of CG tools from one OS to another is pretty low on the to do lists of major CG production houses. It isn't like they're going to hit up pricewatch and then debian.org and get themselves a bunch of cheap computers to make a movie with. The expensive part of CG animation are the animators themselves. Prosumer grade stuff like Maya and Lightwave ain't free though it wouldn't be too difficult to port them to some other OS besides what they currently run on. If more production houses go with Linux it isn't like some big win for anybody in particular. Alot of people use Windows NT workstations with a bunch of high priced hardware and software in them. Moving to Linux saves you the 50$ Windows NT OEM fee. Big whoop.
Slashdot Mirror
Or more specifically an Appleseed cluster of these...
You means a do it yourself EZ overclocking kit like the Turbo button on old PC/AT systems? Overclocking is a hardware hack only geeks did? Everyone used to press than little Turbo button and got the tiny speed improvement. Besides you push your processor to the max everytime you fire up anything bought from the Games section of Best Buy or Circuit City. Like the other dude said, how is a Quake3 test not indicitive of playing Quake3 in normal usage? Shit man, every increase in processing power means that 19" or 21" monitor you shelled out big bucks for just became more useful since you can run games at the monitor's highest resolution and really have a awesome looking game running. If that 10% speed increase means I can run a game I like well at 1600x1200 resolution or it takes five minutes less to composite some video or means you can finally run MS Bob then it might be a worthwhile 10%.
I really wonder how many people are going to fork over an extra X amount of dollars just to play FF11 online. Granted these are probably similar to people that bought a 250$ GeForce2 just to get an extra handful of frames in Quake3 but will they be willing to spend that sort of mula on their PS2? If you don't already have a PS2 will you be willing to spend 2X amount of money to get everything needed to play FF11 on top of the cost of the game's subscription? I'm not so sure. I'm half tempted to go buy a PS2 just to play FF10 since I've played and beat all the FF games up to 10.
Personally MMO games don't appeal to me, the only halfway appealing aspect of FF11 is the FF part of it. The problem I've found with them is that despite all the hype about interaction and community, they are static worlds. You can't change the game by playing day after day. You can't get a bunch of characters together to break up some big boss guy's kegger and actually make a dent in the world. If you could I would be more receptive to them. Playing AD&D you can kill some evil leader of the Red Wizards or a Lichlord and blamo you brought peace and harmony to the land, you can do so whilst being a butcher turned adventurer walking around with a magical meat cleaver. Maybe I'm a small percentage of the MMO target audience but I wan't REALLY involving stories. I don't want to get really involved in building up my level so I can use a masterwork sword of +1 bashing. That and paper is relatively cheap which means I can play AD&D for about 50 years for the cost of all the stuff needed just to play FF11. Added bonus to using dice is you can actually raise money to further the period of game play by gambling in back alleys.
I'm not totally positive this is entirely true but I've noticed an anomoly whilst running LimeWire on Windows. When it launches a little 2x2 pixel entity pops up in the top left corner of the screen. It can be clicked and moved around the screen but doesn't respond to anything else I've tried except Alt+F4 which makes it go away (I assume closes it). It also doesn't shot up in task manager as an individual process so I'm further assuming it is a thread in the LimeWire process contained in the JVM. I haven't cared enough to further try to figure out what it is. Is it mentioned in LimeWire's literature and has anybody else seen it?
Did anybody count the number of call to arms posts on this thread? I nearly pissed myself laughing. Not only is the article not really up on details but Sony flat out denied they were working on an OS. Sounds like somebody was speaking engrish on one end of the line and got somebody else confused.
How is it the biggest semiconductor manufacturer in the solar system is on its last legs?
Another item on your list can be carrier grade communication systems. Do you think the next generation of networking systems are going to be provided by a bunch of parallel 8 bit processors? Hell no. In order to move several terabits of data at crazy speeds we're going to need really fast switching technology to do it. Yet another is post production work. After you render all of your CG sequences somebody else with their ungodly number of processors computer edits it all together into a final product. The faster the processor is and the more memory it has the faster you can composite your video and audio and polish it up.
Uh..my point was Sony still gets the guy's money no matter what he is doing. Not that you use Sony's technology to break stuff they ultimately own the rights to. In fact using a Sony Memory Stick to listen to MP3s made from Sony Music produced CDs would be pretty stupid if you're aiming to fuck over Sony. Not only is Sony making a buck off the media itself (the memory stick) they're making a buck off the reader/writer as well as at some point the CD some guy ripped to MP3. The guy just gave Sony a bunch of money for listening to MP3s on a memory stick based MP3 player. Congrats!
Weird, I just got home from seeing this thing. Luckily I got in for free. When I heard about this movie like two years ago I expected a Blade Runner with ten times the quality of special effects and acting on par to BR because you won't want your new movie to suck ass compared to a movie based on a story by the same author. Then this piece of crap came out.
No the special effects aren't cool, I was more impressed watching the Babylon 5 pilot in terms of CG shots. Fancy fly overs of a city to give a sense of scale only work if the city is believable. Now why would a society protecting itself with dome shields build skyscrapers, and fancy ass ones at that? It was sort of sad some effects shots looked good (the medical print outs) while the news broadcasts and interface for the scanner thingie were just sad.
The outdoor shots were sort of cool to watch because I've been to alot of those buildings. A good number of exterior shots were filmed at CS Pomona in or on the CompSci building. The building with the weird looking triangular points is said building, the stairs they first walk up I broke my ankle on. You'll notice this is the same building in Gattaca. Same with the "walls of the city" which you'll notice is the same place Ethan Hawke's character in Gattaca watched rockets launching.
The acting was pretty decent but the screenwriters sure did add alot of stuff from the like four page short story originally written.
*SPOILER*
I guess I missed in the movie where the mention the passphrase for the bomb. I was waiting for somebody to bring it up considering it is a major plot device in the story. Am I the only one who missed it or did anybody else sort of fail to catch the single line in the whole movie making reference to it?
*END SPOILER*
With Gary Sinise I you don't know what to expect. He does such a damn good job in some good movies and then pulls of a stinker like Reindeer Games and the Imposter. Overall I rate it pretty low and I'm glad I didn't pay to see it. Like the original review says, people ecpecting Blade Runner will be disappointed. Maybe next time I'll go see A Beautiful Mind: Romper Stomper 2.
Multiple nodes with the same information only relieve traffic if they are close in terms of the network. Lets say you've got five mirrors up and serving some file. The load on each of these individual mirrors is going to be less than having a single server but if all of those mirrors are on the same connection (in the same data center), the stress on the pipe between the data center and the rest of the internet is the same. Now if these mirrors were like you suggest actually housed at a local POP there'd be next to no added traffic on external links. One big problem is a majority of internet traffic eventually moves over a handful of high speed lines. In theory the internet is a giant web of connections but in reality it is a bunch of small webs all connected by fat links. Anytime data has to travel over these fat links no matter how many nodes you've got on either side, the bandwidth over those links is stressed. That's actually where Akamai comes in, they get mirrors stuck up all over the place so no matter what file is requested it usually exists close (in network terms) to any node requesting it.
Sony owns the license for the Memory Stick technology so anybody who isn't Sony that produces them has to pay Sony a cut for making them. Sony also owns Sony Music which is one of the big three of the RIAA.
But what you're not picking up is that your 10mbit connection ONLY exists between you and the CO which is probably only a few miles from where you live. To the rest of the internet your connection is just a branch off of a T3 that goes from your CO to somewhere with an OC-3 or something. When you download anything from anywhere not directly connected to your CO you're using up bandwith on someone's pipe somewhere. Granted, if the CO provided a means for all users connected to the CO to talk to each other without involving the rest of the internet you'd have a point.
However your point about the comics is a bit flawed, if the server at your ISP has the comic image cached and you download it from that ISP that image still has to travel over a trunk line between the ISP's POP and your local CO. This does cost money. It costs money in terms of space required to cache it and the trunk bandwidth used to send it to you. The only way you'd get away with nearly free bandwidth was if your local phone company was also an ISP and housed its computer equipment in the CO building itself. With cable or DSL you don't have a whatever megabit connection to the internet, you've got a whatever megabit connection to a DLC and are lucky if that bandwidth is maintained once it goes out to the rest of the world. Letting you personally cache stuff would only work if you could talk directly to others on the local loop. No cable or DSL provider I know of does this because they're all structured to connect you to the internet, not connect you to your neighbor.
As an exercise for the poster figure out how much heat would be generated by a craft followed by a ball of air shooting down 32km of pipe accelerating to 2260m/s. Friction is a bitch and would tear the fuck out of anything launched from a big gun like that. One of the caveats of using a railgun to launch stuff is there's only air friction to deal with, not a bunch of mechanical friction which builds up and overwealms your propulsive force. You've also got the explosive force of the air when exiting the tube affecting the trajectory of the craft you just fired. See musket.
Getting something into orbit isn't about altitude it's about velicoity, specifically overcoming the Earth's escape velocity. You need to be able to shoot something from a point inside the atmosphere up so fast that the pull of the Earth is always less than the current velocity of the craft. At sea level this is about 7 miles per second or 25k miles per hour. A aircraft flying around 20k feet above sea level is only a little bit above sea level compared to the altitude of say the ISS which is about 175 miles or so above sea level right now. So shooting it from a conventional airplane doesn't give you much of a boost since launching it from the ground gives it more time to accelerate.
Launching a rocket horizontally is actually less efficient than launching it vertically because when launched horizontally and having aerofoils to create lift the rocket has to expend some of its burn time building lift to get the craft off the ground. Launching a rocket vertically means it doesn't have to waste precious burn time creating aerodynamic lift.
If I'm using a wired system and need more bandwidth because my userbase just doubled. I put a new router in and run some more wiring and hook those users up to a separate DLC and blamo. Caveat being there can't be more users than those connected to the DLC so I know how much bandwidth I need on the trunk between the DLC and CO.
Somebody then proposes I switch to a wireless scheme. It gets set up in a cell structure like the cell phone system. One merely replaces the DLC and wires with a WiFi tranceiver to serve the people formerly served with wires. I gain the advantage of not having to tear up pavement in order to connect end users to a trunk line. However there are disadvantages. When more nodes exist in a cell than planned for either 1) the tranceiver is saturated by either having to maintain X number of nodes as active links or 2) because bandwidth is spread too thin to effectively serve all the nodes. In either case I'm lucky if the least of my problem is some users get network busy messages. Try making a cell phone call in midtown San Fransisco and you'll see the limits of cellular networks. On a wireless network a given cell has X bandwidth on a given band. If the number of nodes in a cell doubles you can't merely add a tranceiver to double your bandwidth. You're very limited on how scalable your bandwidth can be. With a wired setup you can add another trunk line or replace an low bandwidth trunk line with a high bandwidth trunk line (and associated DLC[s]).
Thus finally wireless is only cheaper in some cases where you've got a hard limit on the number of nodes on the network. If you've got a fairly dense population in an area you're going to have so many wireless tranceivers it is going to cost you just as much as using wires. Besides the fact that almost anywhere you go has a form of wiring going from it to somewhere else.
Network bandwidth I'm sorry to say does not aggregate when you add nodes to it. You having a 10mbit line to a CO doesn't mean the internet's got an extra 10mbit of bandwidth flying around. That means you've got a 10mbit link to a CO which is sharing a connection to a bigger switch.If anything you've decreased everyone else's available bandwidth. If everyone hooked to your CO decides they want to be a Debian mirror you're all going to have to split the bandwidth available to the CO which is most likely alot less than the combined bandwidth of all of your 10mbit links. Server bandwidth isn't a scarce commodity, you just need to be willing to pay for it because somebody else is paying for it and selling it to you.
My bank uses an end to end IBM solution, OS2 on the front end with I can only assume AIX systems on the backend. None of the tellers had much of a problem learning to use the new systems when they got them in. If I was the manager I wouldn't expect them to because they're fucking professionals. If your credit union is such a piece of shit the managers don't offer training for new employyes on the system then I wouldn't be putting my money in there. If you were to put Linux or anything else on the front end systems you wouldn't give someone a damn command line or fire up X and twm and let them go to work. People aren't as stupid as you assume, down at my town's city hall most records are stored on a really old and very large Sun mainframe. Walking around the offices you see a whole bunch of xterms with phosphors a glowin. Sure alot of people have Windows machines on or under their desks but most of these are used for Office and such. The sort of stuff it'd be dumb to stick on a mainframe for everyone to use. Nobody I know has any trouble working with any of it.
N'Synch shows up at which time Samuel L cuts loose with his light saber and gives further reason for a shrine devoted to his bad ass.
Trouble with caps lock? I'm not defending the RIAA for fuck sake, learn to fucking read. What I'm saying is there is always going to be a middle man no matter what. Walmart and Kmart aren't going to buy stuff to sell from somebody who can't stick a box of CDs in 80% of their stores. Reason why independant labels aren't sold at either Walmart or Kmart. In my scenario Warehouse cut a deal of 3000 copies which is a pretty legitimate number of sales for a local band. Walmart and Kmart would never cut a small number of CDs like this for one and two would never actually produce anything themselves. Everything with a Sam's Choice logo on it is made by third parties under non-exclusive agreements. So since Walmart and Kmart would never cut a deal where they actually handled the production of someone's records that leaves...wow fuck me, Warehouse Music! That was a pretty easy conclusion, how exactly did you miss out on it? If Warehouse Music got the rights to stamp out copies of someone's record the price would not be much lower than under the aegis of the RIAA, people will buy a 13$ CD, there's no reason for Warehouse to sell it for less. The artist is still getting a small cut of the pie as well as having to go through the hassle of handling their own fucking business arangement.s What about that aspect don't you fucking get. How many guitarists do you think passed an accounting class ever in their lives? Hence middlemen again. Professionals that only concern themselves with the operations of business. They are going to take a cut for all albums sold. Is that so hard to imagine. Fuck you can't be right on slashdot without some free market jackass thinking the internet is somehow going to solve everyone's problems.
Oh yeah, your painter example is inherently flawed because painters sell the master copies of their work, not merely reprints. Those that DO sell reprints hire someone to han dle all of the work of distribution for them because as artists they are ill equipped professionally to handle the business transactions entailed. If you're a musician selling the master DAT of your work your example might work but otherwise it's just plain wrong. Middlemen exist in all industries. If you want to tell the RIAA to fuck off you better have a better distribution model than merely saying "I'll promote my music over the internet".
Have you ever tried to get a gig at a club to hopefully make money. Ask anybody who has, you make shit doing it. And for fuck sake, record companies do offer signing bonuses. They meet with bands they want to sign with cashiers checks and hand them over when the contract is signed. What the fuck are you thinking? Thinking the internet removes distribution mechanisms means you're either high or naturally have no grasp on reality. If you make a song you recorded into an MP3 and stick it on a portal which sells it for you...like MP3.com. You have to sign over the rights to the song or they will not sell it. Thus you're in the same situation as a regular recording contract. If you happen to have the equipment to master your own CD you've got the problem of where to sell it. If you sell it yourself you spend more time doing the business work than making music. Most musicians I know do not have a head for this. Hiring someone else to do marketing and distribution for you means they're taking a cut of what you're selling something for. Weird how marketing always seems to make that 30%. As for anyone going direct to the artist, do you know what the legal ramifications are for that? In order to legally sell someone else's work it has to be unsolicited. Someone also needs to own the rights to it. If the artist maintains the right an intelligent vendor isn't going to sign a deal with them without some form of exclusivity. Warehouse Music can't call up Metallica and ask to burn 3000 copies of a record without alot of signatures all over the place saying Warehouse are the only ones who can make copies of the record. Otherwise Smallass Records calls up Metallica and asks to make 3000 copies of the new record but sells them for half of what Warehouse does meaning Warehouse loses money. At which point their management says they will only sign production deals for exclusivity. To hire a legal and business team to handle the rights to their music Metallica hires someone who charges them a parcentage of everything they make off their services. So the middleman always has his foot in the door. You don't go do everything yourself because it is bad business to try to do something you don't know anyhting about. Florists don't offer oil changes. You don't try to sell the music you make, these people are called street performers and make next to nothing performing their music. Stop being a Linux zealot and thinking open source software, the internet, and (insert shit idea here) is going to overrun the world and change the infrastructure of everything.
This only works if 1)everyone accepts song credit from X company, X being the company you bought credit from and 2) the company doesn't go under. This means a song credit will cost you lets say a dollar plus some percentage to make the creditors money. Buying 10 song credits costs me now 12$. If a distribution site doesn't take my credit I have to either buy more credit from someone else or go without. Go look up all the cyber-cash companies that failed miserably. Beanz and Flooz ought to start you off on the hunt.
The artist has never gotten paid. Once you realize that you'll understand everything else. Direct payment schemes are complete horseshit because you can't live off donations. Ask any bum asking for a quarter on the street. One month your single might be a hit and you'll make 2500$ easy but then for the next three months you get maybe 100$ worth of downloads. You could sell sperm and make more money in four months if you're verile. Hence record companies. They show up with a paper that says "we'll pay you some up front signing bonus and you'll make a percentage of all money made from your work under the condition that 1) we retain the right to charge you for certain costs of promotion henceforth known as "recoupables" 2) you make as many records and perform as many shows as we decide at the signing of the contract 3) you work will belong to us though we will always give you credit for being the creator". This works for alot of artists which is why you go to the store and find CDs on the racks for sale. These artists said they wanted a chance to make money performing their music and signed over the rights to their work. Having a middleman in the music business is always going to be inevitable. If you've ever worked on commission you'd understand why this is so. They can give an artist a 50k signing bonus so they don't have to go hungry whilst waiting for their music to sell. Once an album is released and promotion is paid for by record sales (recoupables) the artist starts making their money and can then afford the extravagances of the rock star lifestyle or whathaveyou. The artist isn't going to get anywhere asking for handouts on a website. Yet again, ask your nearest bum on the street if he makes enough to live off of while waiting for his music to take off. He'll probably fucking mug you.
Say you only buy a single song? That's 1$ charged to your credit card. Most credit card issuers will not support such small transactions. Not only that but banks offering marchent accounts charge money for the processing of a credit card for a fucking dollar. In some cases merchant banks charge several dollars in transaction fees for transactions under 15 to 20$. So with a minimum of 15$ for buy anything from a pay per play website I'm STILL paying as much as I am for a CD from the local retailer. No one saves any money and the artist still doesn't see a dime of my money until they make the record company enough money to cover recoupables. That also excludes record companies' bumper crop, teenagers. Snot nosed kids buy more music than anybody and they don't have credit cards and it is rare they have access to their parent's credit cards. They either get mom and dad to give them cash to buy it, make the money themselves, or get CDs as gifts from ma and pa. My teenage brother's bought enough CDs to have bought himself a Ferrari. He didn't buy it with a credit card though. As for asking for a parent's credit card every time Jonny Jackass and Susy Screwme want to buy the new Linkn Logs or Sync'N single that won't fly with most people. "Hey mom can I pay a dollar for this single and then have your bank charge you an additional 15%?" For a dollar? Right. Further stressing a households credit is no way to try to make money on music.
A good example of what you point out as the twilight of the latex/foam rubber monster special effects would be the Jurasic Park series. In the first movie there was a scale T-Rex built that fully interacted with the characters. It LOOKED real which was the important thing. In JP2 there was the scene with the raptors fighting and rolling around whilst the actors tried to avoid them. That was also fairly impressive because the raptors made dust fly and moved objects the real actors interacted with. Two different mathods of making dinosaurs with pretty much the same effect on film. On the otherhand look at the difference between the technology used between SW:ANH and SW:TPM. Specifically in the last fight scene between in both movies. In ANH they used some blue screens overlayed with glass matte paintings in post production. It gave the same sense of scope that the same technique using computers did 20 years later. The goal is realism by whatever means, I don't think all filmmakers are going to abandon their old style of making realistic images just because of new wizbang technology.
Tranitioning a bunch of CG tools from one OS to another is pretty low on the to do lists of major CG production houses. It isn't like they're going to hit up pricewatch and then debian.org and get themselves a bunch of cheap computers to make a movie with. The expensive part of CG animation are the animators themselves. Prosumer grade stuff like Maya and Lightwave ain't free though it wouldn't be too difficult to port them to some other OS besides what they currently run on. If more production houses go with Linux it isn't like some big win for anybody in particular. Alot of people use Windows NT workstations with a bunch of high priced hardware and software in them. Moving to Linux saves you the 50$ Windows NT OEM fee. Big whoop.