It *is* the real world if you want to eat food instead of stock options.
I've been in the "fun to work, high pressure, do everything your self, personally rewarding" high stakes game of small startups, and I've been in the boring stodgy world of big companies with massively inflexible procedures and billions of pages of required documents. And I've been in the massive chaos when the small start up gets big and hires a bunch more people and everybody starts messing with everybody else's code and nobody knows what anybody else is doing and stuff gets done twice and other stuff doesn't get done at all and stuff gets lost because half the new hires don't understand CVS and so on. Trust me, after a while a bit of procedure becomes a good thing. Plus those sorts of companies rarely tell you that they can't meet payroll this month, but stick around and maybe we'll pay you next month.
Now I program at a big well funded company to keep my daughters in college, and I fiddle with open source in the evenings for myself.
You've obviously had very limited experience in the real world. Big companies don't work like garage shops. Generally, the bigger the company, the more likely you are to be bombarded with documents written in Word, Power Point presentations, MS Project files, etc, from the ever increasing levels of management above you, secretaries below you, and ancilliary support personell (graphic designers, QA departments, documentation, tech support, etc) beside you. 50% of it is crap that you can safely ignore, 35% of it is crap that you can't tell if it's crap until you read it, and the other 15% actually applies to you.
Besides MS Office files, my current nightmare consists of Lotus Notes, the single worst computer application ever written, and Photoshop. Thankfully, Office, Notes and now Photoshop all run under Crossover Office.
And right after you figure out how to use a VPN to log in from on the road to check your email, some bozo, possibly the CEO, will send out a 50Mb power point presentation with sound and cutesy clip art and animations to tell you what could have easily fit in a 1K ascii text file.
And if you do this to somebody whose web server *could* handle the load, you've just lost him the banner ad revenue (ok, I'm showing my age there - do you kiddies remember when banner ads were going to make money?) or the ego boost of seeing his hit count go through the roof?
I still get a pang of regret every time I see a hit in my Apache logs for somebody looking for that picture of a computer case made out of a beer box that I posted to Slashdot about 3 years ago. Why did I remove that picture?
There is a java implementation for PPC Linux? Where?
I have a TiBook, and it's easily the best laptop on the market. Huge screen, light weight, 5 hour battery life. But I use Linux at home as my main desktop environment (even though it means I have to drag out the laptop every time somebody sends me the URL for a quicktime movie or something).
A long time ago, I ran Linux on an Alpha, and it was extremely annoying. There was no decent native web browser (this was pre-Mozilla), the Java was pre-alpha quality at best, none of the Linux apps was as stable as the Intel Linux equivalents. I swore to never do that again. But now that there is a decent open source web browser and maybe a JDK available, I'm wavering.
You misunderstand. He's talking about NT/2000/XP, where you have privilege and non-privilege accounts, and where even as a non-privilege account, you can have stuff running as the Windows equivalent of "root", and you can use any window that "setuid root" application pops up to root the box yourself.
The example he gave is the anti-virus program that runs with administrator privs (because it has to do stuff to the registry), when you're logged in as Joe User without admin privs. The anti-virus program pops up a window, and bam, you've hijacked the window, given yourself admin privs, made a new administrator login for yourself, and you're away to the races.
My point is that if the only stories on Slashdot are going to be ones taken from The Reg, there isn't any point reading Slashdot. The whole point of "open source news" is to collect news from multiple sources that the readership might not encounter otherwise, not just rip off the entire contents of another news site.
As for it being off-topic, what the hell do you think "META" means, anyway?
3 of the last 4 articles on Slashdot were lifted directly from The Register. If I want to read The Register (and I do), I'll read The Register, I won't come looking for The Register articles on Slashdot.
Come on guys, how about finding your own news for a change?
(And don't tell me to find my own and submit it - I've submitted about 5 articles in the past to have them rejected, only to see the exact same link in an article the next day. I can take a hint.)
*Looks lovingly at his 24V DeWalt industrial cordless drill kit* Are ya feeling lucky, punk? Well are ya? Well ok, that's one for the projector engineers, rather than the coders.:)
And when the engineers come around to do maintenance on your projector and find a drill hole in it, how long do you think your theatre will stay in business after it's been blacklisted by all the major distributors?
Which is why the system I'm working on does the decryption and DRM in the projector - you can't tap into it, because there is no place outside of the projector with a playable version of the content. And the content will be watermarked so we'll know which projector you stole it from if you tamper with a projector to grab it.
ptomblin: You say that you work on these systems. What are the chances that I as a consumer would be able to legally get hold of the movies in this kind of format? I would love to have a great projector at home for my home cinema, but playing DVDs on large screens are not nearly as fun as it could be.
I'm trying to be a bit cagey about the details, because while the company I work for has announced that they're working on a digital cinema system, we haven't finalized the details of the projector (which is why I said it might have a Linux board in it) or who is going to build it for us. It seems right now that the projector is going to be based on somebody else's projector, with our Digital Rights Management stuff and remote control stuff grafted onto it.
I doubt there would be any need for our DRM technology in a home theatre setting. The whole point of DRM in the cinema world is to make sure nobody uses the content without paying for it. So the DVD of Matrix Reloaded intended for Cinema A won't play in Cinema B, and definitely won't play in Joe Warez D00d's DVD duplicator. We haven't worked out the details, but we might even have expiry times on them so you can't play them after x number of weeks without renewing the licence.
This is obviously not the sort of restrictive technology you want pervading the home market. At least I sure as hell don't.
Considering I saw "Imax Showscan" (which was Imax with double the frame rate) at Expo 86 in Vancouver 16 years ago,this is hardly startling new technology or a startling new idea.
Besides, the shift to digital isn't about quality it's about distribution costs. A movie print costs between $1500 and $2500 PER SCREEN, just for the film, plus you've got to courier it to the theatre, and the projectionist has to make up platter by splicing the 5 or 6 spools that make up a feature along with trailers, ads, etc. The theatres would much rather get a couple of DVDs containing all their content for the week.
And yes, we're working on better compression and encryption technology to make sure that the movies still look good, and nobody can steal the DVD and sell a million copies on the black market. On the system I'm working on, the projectors themselves may have a small single-board Linux computer inside to do the decryption, so the movies won't be playable anywhere but on the projectors they're meant for.
I've solved some important real-world problems using Quantify and Purify, especially when dealing with a huge system with a lot of developers fingers in the pie. One of the programs was handling 100,000+ transacations a day, and Quantify helped shaved enough off so we didn't have to force all of our customers to upgrade their hardware.
Faced with a similar problem in Linux, I'd probably port the program to Solaris, Quantify it there, and hope the results are similar under Linux.
Thanks to the wonder of USB, you can use any USB mouse around (well, I've tried three or four) on an Apple. I have a Logitech optical, which I love for the wheel (yes, most OS X applications handle the wheel) and the good tracking. However, I think the LED sucks down the juice so I don't use an external mouse when I'm on batteries. When you're not using the external mouse, there are lots of modifier keys on the keyboard.
As for the original question, I am doing development for my hobby application (Postgres, perl and apache) and for my work (java and Postgres) on the laptop. It's great to be able to move around the house and sit where I want to instead of at the computer desk all the time. When I'm hooked up to the network, I can even NFS mount my Linux home directory on the laptop and work on it directly instead of sshing files back and forth.
Ok, now I'm just mad. My followup was before this one, and mine was moderated down as "redundant" and this one was marked up as "funny". Before, I thought the moderators are on crack, now I think they're mostly just assholes.
(Well, there goes another couple of karma points. Like I care any more.)
...that Silicon Grail uses a whole bunch of code that they licensed from Kodak's Cineon product, and which Grail has no transfer rights to? Knowing Kodak, they won't do anything about it, but it would be interesting if they withdrew the license entirely and left Apple holding the bag on a much less interesting product.
Of course, the guy three cubes over who is porting other bits of Cineon code to Linux would probably be out of a job if that happened, so I hope it doesn't happen.
3 years ago I was working on a project that took film, scanned it at 4kx3k resolution with laser scanners, did digital post production at that resolution, and then printed it back on film at 4kx3k resolution. The powers that be at this company canned the project, even though it's still the best in its class, because it was expensive and slow compared to the lower resolution competition. People who care about quality, like the people doing post production on all three Lord of the Rings movies, are still using our software even though we pretty much abandoned them.
3 years later, I'm back at the same company, and now we're working on a way of delivering digital movies to theatres, and presenting those movies on the screens. Guess what the resolution for the first generation is? 1280x1024. A resolution I consider barely adequate on a 17 inch monitor, and wouldn't even put on a 21 inch monitor, and they've going to blow it up to a huge theatre screen. Yuck.
Another great thing about the G4 case is that the cables are routed along the edge out of the way. You look at that Dell case somebody posted the URL for, and you still have IDE cables hanging in the air between the two halves. Not so with the G4, you don't even see the IDE cables unless you're looking for them.
The downside though is that when adding hard drives to a G4, you don't get the inadvertent blood sacrifice to make sure it works. All my PC cases seem designed to make sure you can't add a hard/cd/tape drive without bleeding on it, which ensures the black magic works.
...It's just like Old Man Murry but without the gratiuitous overuse of the word "fuck". Man, I miss OMM - and before you say it's still there, they've done, what, about 3 updates since September? Might as well take down the site with that sort of update rate.
- MP3: I've given before. DRM means special app on windows to convert your MP3 to Sony homebrew format with copy protection. So it's not really MP3. First you need another OS to do the conversion with their crappy app (Jukebox if I remember correctly), next you can't transfer more than once and in one direction.
Yes, I believe you have posted this misinformation before. And it's still bullshit. I have a Sony Clie PEG760N, and it takes standard MP3s. I can mount the memory stick as a USB hard drive on Linux, copy MP3s from my KDE Media Player directory into the memory stick, umount it, and play them just fine on the Clie. If I wanted to, I could also copy them back. No "other OS", no "homebrew format", no "can't transfer more than once".
Or more often, you are asked to provide "your SIN number" - at least that's my experience. I tell them I have to go to the ATM machine and use my PIN number so I can withdraw enough money to get an MRI image of my ACL ligament.
A properly designed web page should work even if the user sets his fonts to be way bigger than yours. Too many sites don't seem to understand that - but if you're a 25 year old whiz kid designing on a 800x600 screen, then your choice of font isn't going to appeal to my 40 year old eyes on a 1280x1024 or 1172x768 screen, so stop using absolute font sizes, and stop sizing boxes and stuff around the text by pixels so they are unreadable with other font sizes.
Slashdot Mirror
It *is* the real world if you want to eat food instead of stock options.
I've been in the "fun to work, high pressure, do everything your self, personally rewarding" high stakes game of small startups, and I've been in the boring stodgy world of big companies with massively inflexible procedures and billions of pages of required documents. And I've been in the massive chaos when the small start up gets big and hires a bunch more people and everybody starts messing with everybody else's code and nobody knows what anybody else is doing and stuff gets done twice and other stuff doesn't get done at all and stuff gets lost because half the new hires don't understand CVS and so on. Trust me, after a while a bit of procedure becomes a good thing. Plus those sorts of companies rarely tell you that they can't meet payroll this month, but stick around and maybe we'll pay you next month.
Now I program at a big well funded company to keep my daughters in college, and I fiddle with open source in the evenings for myself.
You've obviously had very limited experience in the real world. Big companies don't work like garage shops. Generally, the bigger the company, the more likely you are to be bombarded with documents written in Word, Power Point presentations, MS Project files, etc, from the ever increasing levels of management above you, secretaries below you, and ancilliary support personell (graphic designers, QA departments, documentation, tech support, etc) beside you. 50% of it is crap that you can safely ignore, 35% of it is crap that you can't tell if it's crap until you read it, and the other 15% actually applies to you.
Besides MS Office files, my current nightmare consists of Lotus Notes, the single worst computer application ever written, and Photoshop. Thankfully, Office, Notes and now Photoshop all run under Crossover Office.
And right after you figure out how to use a VPN to log in from on the road to check your email, some bozo, possibly the CEO, will send out a 50Mb power point presentation with sound and cutesy clip art and animations to tell you what could have easily fit in a 1K ascii text file.
And if you do this to somebody whose web server *could* handle the load, you've just lost him the banner ad revenue (ok, I'm showing my age there - do you kiddies remember when banner ads were going to make money?) or the ego boost of seeing his hit count go through the roof?
I still get a pang of regret every time I see a hit in my Apache logs for somebody looking for that picture of a computer case made out of a beer box that I posted to Slashdot about 3 years ago. Why did I remove that picture?
There is a java implementation for PPC Linux? Where?
I have a TiBook, and it's easily the best laptop on the market. Huge screen, light weight, 5 hour battery life. But I use Linux at home as my main desktop environment (even though it means I have to drag out the laptop every time somebody sends me the URL for a quicktime movie or something).
A long time ago, I ran Linux on an Alpha, and it was extremely annoying. There was no decent native web browser (this was pre-Mozilla), the Java was pre-alpha quality at best, none of the Linux apps was as stable as the Intel Linux equivalents. I swore to never do that again. But now that there is a decent open source web browser and maybe a JDK available, I'm wavering.
You misunderstand. He's talking about NT/2000/XP, where you have privilege and non-privilege accounts, and where even as a non-privilege account, you can have stuff running as the Windows equivalent of "root", and you can use any window that "setuid root" application pops up to root the box yourself.
The example he gave is the anti-virus program that runs with administrator privs (because it has to do stuff to the registry), when you're logged in as Joe User without admin privs. The anti-virus program pops up a window, and bam, you've hijacked the window, given yourself admin privs, made a new administrator login for yourself, and you're away to the races.
can you hear me now?
If you've got a computer that an ordinary mortal could pedal power, would adding Lance Armstrong overclock it?
My point is that if the only stories on Slashdot are going to be ones taken from The Reg, there isn't any point reading Slashdot. The whole point of "open source news" is to collect news from multiple sources that the readership might not encounter otherwise, not just rip off the entire contents of another news site.
As for it being off-topic, what the hell do you think "META" means, anyway?
3 of the last 4 articles on Slashdot were lifted directly from The Register. If I want to read The Register (and I do), I'll read The Register, I won't come looking for The Register articles on Slashdot.
Come on guys, how about finding your own news for a change?
(And don't tell me to find my own and submit it - I've submitted about 5 articles in the past to have them rejected, only to see the exact same link in an article the next day. I can take a hint.)
*Looks lovingly at his 24V DeWalt industrial cordless drill kit* Are ya feeling lucky, punk? Well are ya? Well ok, that's one for the projector engineers, rather than the coders. :)
And when the engineers come around to do maintenance on your projector and find a drill hole in it, how long do you think your theatre will stay in business after it's been blacklisted by all the major distributors?
Which is why the system I'm working on does the decryption and DRM in the projector - you can't tap into it, because there is no place outside of the projector with a playable version of the content. And the content will be watermarked so we'll know which projector you stole it from if you tamper with a projector to grab it.
ptomblin: You say that you work on these systems. What are the chances that I as a consumer would be able to legally get hold of the movies in this kind of format? I would love to have a great projector at home for my home cinema, but playing DVDs on large screens are not nearly as fun as it could be.
I'm trying to be a bit cagey about the details, because while the company I work for has announced that they're working on a digital cinema system, we haven't finalized the details of the projector (which is why I said it might have a Linux board in it) or who is going to build it for us. It seems right now that the projector is going to be based on somebody else's projector, with our Digital Rights Management stuff and remote control stuff grafted onto it.
I doubt there would be any need for our DRM technology in a home theatre setting. The whole point of DRM in the cinema world is to make sure nobody uses the content without paying for it. So the DVD of Matrix Reloaded intended for Cinema A won't play in Cinema B, and definitely won't play in Joe Warez D00d's DVD duplicator. We haven't worked out the details, but we might even have expiry times on them so you can't play them after x number of weeks without renewing the licence.
This is obviously not the sort of restrictive technology you want pervading the home market.
At least I sure as hell don't.
Considering I saw "Imax Showscan" (which was Imax with double the frame rate) at Expo 86 in Vancouver 16 years ago,this is hardly startling new technology or a startling new idea.
Besides, the shift to digital isn't about quality it's about distribution costs. A movie print costs between $1500 and $2500 PER SCREEN, just for the film, plus you've got to courier it to the theatre, and the projectionist has to make up platter by splicing the 5 or 6 spools that make up a feature along with trailers, ads, etc. The theatres would much rather get a couple of DVDs containing all their content for the week.
And yes, we're working on better compression and encryption technology to make sure that the movies still look good, and nobody can steal the DVD and sell a million copies on the black market. On the system I'm working on, the projectors themselves may have a small single-board Linux computer inside to do the decryption, so the movies won't be playable anywhere but on the projectors they're meant for.
I've solved some important real-world problems using Quantify and Purify, especially when dealing with a huge system with a lot of developers fingers in the pie. One of the programs was handling 100,000+ transacations a day, and Quantify helped shaved enough off so we didn't have to force all of our customers to upgrade their hardware.
Faced with a similar problem in Linux, I'd probably port the program to Solaris, Quantify it there, and hope the results are similar under Linux.
Thanks to the wonder of USB, you can use any USB mouse around (well, I've tried three or four) on an Apple. I have a Logitech optical, which I love for the wheel (yes, most OS X applications handle the wheel) and the good tracking. However, I think the LED sucks down the juice so I don't use an external mouse when I'm on batteries. When you're not using the external mouse, there are lots of modifier keys on the keyboard.
As for the original question, I am doing development for my hobby application (Postgres, perl and apache) and for my work (java and Postgres) on the laptop. It's great to be able to move around the house and sit where I want to instead of at the computer desk all the time. When I'm hooked up to the network, I can even NFS mount my Linux home directory on the laptop and work on it directly instead of sshing files back and forth.
Ok, now I'm just mad. My followup was before this one, and mine was moderated down as "redundant" and this one was marked up as "funny". Before, I thought the moderators are on crack, now I think they're mostly just assholes.
(Well, there goes another couple of karma points. Like I care any more.)
Why not fit a lot more Gb on a regular sized CD?
They did that once. It's called "DVD".
...that Silicon Grail uses a whole bunch of code that they licensed from Kodak's Cineon product, and which Grail has no transfer rights to? Knowing Kodak, they won't do anything about it, but it would be interesting if they withdrew the license entirely and left Apple holding the bag on a much less interesting product.
Of course, the guy three cubes over who is porting other bits of Cineon code to Linux would probably be out of a job if that happened, so I hope it doesn't happen.
I hope he had a wonderful life.
3 years ago I was working on a project that took film, scanned it at 4kx3k resolution with laser scanners, did digital post production at that resolution, and then printed it back on film at 4kx3k resolution. The powers that be at this company canned the project, even though it's still the best in its class, because it was expensive and slow compared to the lower resolution competition. People who care about quality, like the people doing post production on all three Lord of the Rings movies, are still using our software even though we pretty much abandoned them.
3 years later, I'm back at the same company, and now we're working on a way of delivering digital movies to theatres, and presenting those movies on the screens. Guess what the resolution for the first generation is? 1280x1024. A resolution I consider barely adequate on a 17 inch monitor, and wouldn't even put on a 21 inch monitor, and they've going to blow it up to a huge theatre screen. Yuck.
Another great thing about the G4 case is that the cables are routed along the edge out of the way. You look at that Dell case somebody posted the URL for, and you still have IDE cables hanging in the air between the two halves. Not so with the G4, you don't even see the IDE cables unless you're looking for them.
The downside though is that when adding hard drives to a G4, you don't get the inadvertent blood sacrifice to make sure it works. All my PC cases seem designed to make sure you can't add a hard/cd/tape drive without bleeding on it, which ensures the black magic works.
...It's just like Old Man Murry but without the gratiuitous overuse of the word "fuck". Man, I miss OMM - and before you say it's still there, they've done, what, about 3 updates since September? Might as well take down the site with that sort of update rate.
- MP3: I've given before. DRM means special app on windows to convert your MP3 to Sony homebrew format with copy protection. So it's not really MP3. First you need another OS to do the conversion with their crappy app (Jukebox if I remember correctly), next you can't transfer more than once and in one direction.
Yes, I believe you have posted this misinformation before. And it's still bullshit. I have a Sony Clie PEG760N, and it takes standard MP3s. I can mount the memory stick as a USB hard drive on Linux, copy MP3s from my KDE Media Player directory into the memory stick, umount it, and play them just fine on the Clie. If I wanted to, I could also copy them back. No "other OS", no "homebrew format", no "can't transfer more than once".
I have to provide my Social Insurance Number.
Or more often, you are asked to provide "your SIN number" - at least that's my experience. I tell them I have to go to the ATM machine and use my PIN number so I can withdraw enough money to get an MRI image of my ACL ligament.
BIG fat fonts
A properly designed web page should work even if the user sets his fonts to be way bigger than yours. Too many sites don't seem to understand that - but if you're a 25 year old whiz kid designing on a 800x600 screen, then your choice of font isn't going to appeal to my 40 year old eyes on a 1280x1024 or 1172x768 screen, so stop using absolute font sizes, and stop sizing boxes and stuff around the text by pixels so they are unreadable with other font sizes.