actually i was talking to something along this topic the other day.
the first time i read LoTR, i did so with only my imagination as a guide - i had not seen either cartoon or heard a book on tape, or an audio broadcast, nothing. it was quite enjoyable.
then after having seen the animated versions, i re-read the book. it was an entirely different experience, with definitive visuals and voices to go along with the story. when you read that gandalf said something, you could hear in your mind John Huston's voice. this made the books a bit more enjoyable, at least to me.
now, after having seen the previews, etc, i have a new cast of voices and visuals to go along with my imagination as i read the book. completely different experience, and again even more enjoyable, as now the characters have grown out of animation into something a bit more tangible.
uh... chill out. the point i was trying to make was that yes, the deer population needs the wolves. and the children-eating was a joke, which most people seemed to get. and your comment about the wolves being native... read where i said 'introduce back into' not 'introduce for the first time'.
my comment pisses you off? your comment makes me sad:(
as to not knowing anything about the subject, you probably have me there. grew up on a farm where deer which deer tried to overrun, had formal training in deer hunting, yup, i have absolutely no idea what i am talking about.
unfortunately hunting won't work, at least where i am. the deer are in a heavily populated area, and so hunting would not be so good, there are apartment complexes all around the deer areas. the only solution would be wolves or some other natural predator, of course then instead of hitting deer on the way home from work, i'd be hitting wolves, or the joggers they are chasing into the road.
having never heard of the rabbit case, but having seen many references to it in this story, i took a look at the Rabbit case. it is almost too amazing to believe, and not helping matters is the similarity to the old children's song, 'there was an old lady who swallows a fly'. if it wasn't so serious a problem, it would be insanely comical. it sounds like a joke:
basically, over a century ago wealthy englishmen brought rabbits to AUS so that they might hunt them. eventually the rabbit population boomed to well over 200 million, becoming more than a nuisance, rather an extremely ferocious natural disaster. they brought in a virus (myxo) to kill the rabbits, and it almost worked, but eventually the rabbits became resistant.
and this is where it gets almost too weird to believe.
they bring in ferrets to hunt the rabbits down. however, the ferrets are found to be carrying bovine tuberculoses. so they release a different strain of myxo to get rid of the ferrets.
so finally they are researching a new virus to kill the rabbits, but the virus escapes the labs and spreads through australia and new zealand. so they come up with a vaccine...
and the saga continues.
on a more USian note, how about introducing a few hundred wolves back into the ecosystem to at least nibble at the incredible deer population? what's a few small children, anyway?
MP3 finally has a video counterpart - a file-compression algorithm that makes it possible to send large multimedia files over the Internet on demand. VP3 is the first open-source video codec to truly support VHS-quality video at bandwidths as low as 200 kbps.
isn't MP3 a patented, non-free algorithm? isn't that why Ogg Vorbis exists? so the only reason Intel is comparing VP3 to MP3 is marketing crap, right?
either that, or they are hoping people will compress millions of DVDs into VP3 and set up giant file-swapping services, that would be a video counterpart to MP3.
in other news, are there any side-by-side comparisons of VP3 and DivX? and how does Ogg Tarkin fit into all of this, now that there is an 'open source' codec?
let's run them down, shall we? plot writeups and ratings by leonard maltin, quoted from IMDB.
star trek: the motion picture.
"The crew of the Enterprise is reunited to combat a lethal force field headed toward Earth. Slow, talky, and derivative, somewhat redeemed by terrific special effects and majestic Jerry Goldsmith score; still, mainly for purists."
RATING: 2.5 stars.
star trek: the wrath of khan.
"Kirk and the Enterprise crew must do battle with the nefarious villain of 1967's ``Space Seed'' episode. A bit hokey and pretentious at times, but a likable adventure overall, with nice touches of warmth and humor."
RATING: 3 stars.
star trek iii: the search for spock.
"Picking up where #2 left off, Kirk reassembles his crew and shanghais the Enterprise to try and rescue Spock--in whatever form he may still be alive--while both he and the rapidly destructing Genesis Planet are endangered by a Klingon warship (led by Lloyd, in an ineffectual performance). Subdued sci-fi outing very much in keeping with tone of the original TV series... and therefore, recommended most heartily to Star Trek fans."
RATING: 3 stars.
star trek iv: the voyage home.
"The Enterprise crew takes a sharp left turn toward comedy in this uncharacteristic--and very entertaining--movie. Story has the familiar characters time-traveling back to the 20th century in order to save the Earth of the future, with the help of some humpback whales. Sheer novelty of the comic tone excuses some forays into the obvious; it's all in fun."
RATING: 3.5 stars.
star trek v: the final frontier.
"The Enterprise crew takes off on an emergency mission when an apparent madman takes over a distant planet and holds its interstellar ambassadors hostage; his motives, however, turn out to be anything but terroristic. Dramatically shaky trek starts off with a case of the cutes, and gets worse before it (finally) gets better. A weak entry in the series. Shatner's feature-film directing debut; he also shares story credit."
RATING: 2 stars.
star trek vi: the undiscovered country.
"The Enterprise crew is assigned to negotiate truce with Klingon leader, only to fall prey to a trap set by one of his renegade cohorts (Plummer, in a deliciously flamboyant performance). Entertaining saga cowritten by director Meyer. Nimoy helped concoct the story and also executive produced."
RATING: 3 stars.
star trek: generations.
"The old guard gives way to the new, as Capt. Kirk (Shatner) passes the baton to a new Starfleet commander, Capt. Picard (Stewart). Episodic adventure yarn plays like an elongated segment of the Next Generation TV series; not inspired, perhaps, but entertaining just the same, with some impressive special effects. Oddly enough, the weakest segment is the climactic teaming of Picard and Kirk, which seems like a leftover from an old Saturday matinee serial. Whoopi Goldberg appears unbilled as Guinan."
RATING: 3 stars.
star trek: first contact.
"Capt. Picard lives his worst nightmare as the villainous Borg (who almost overtook him in a two-part TV episode) land on earth with domination their goal. The solution: the crew travels back in time to 2063 to make sure a cockeyed scientist (Cromwell) fulfills his role in history with a precedent-setting rocket flight. Story goes on a bit, following two concurrent threads, but series fans will have no complaints. Krige is a standout as the seductive Borg Queen. Feature directing debut for Frakes, better known as Riker."
RATING: 3 stars.
star trek: insurrection.
"Good entry in the long-running series has the crew befriending the eternally youthful residents of a Shangri-La-like planet whose existence is threatened by the vengeful Ru'afo (Abraham). Picard (Stewart) even has a dalliance with one of the women there (Murphy). Reliably entertaining for Star Trek fans."
RATING: 3 stars.
yup, i'm sure michael personally looks at your post and thinks, 'oh gee this needs to be censored. the slashdot readership should not be allowed to view this opinion.'
moderation is not censorship, it is moderating the crap (i.e., posts like yours which did not seem to say anything of importance) down so people can read the good stuff, like good old-fashioned 'hot grits' and flamebaits and trolls.
and i have to add, nowhere will you find on slashdot any mention that many of the editors think they are either 'good journalists' or 'objective'. if you want that try a different website, but be warned that the two are nearly mutually exclusive in 'the wild', because good journalists get noticed, and nearly everyone has a price.
i'll agree that it's too bad we can't have at least ONE of those traits here:) but hey, this is free, at least.
so welcome to the real world, where yes, your opinion may be unpopular. but i seriously doubt many moderation points are wasted because 'oh! he doesn't like michael!' it is more like 'jeez, this post doesn't say a damn thing of interest. moving on...'
what is the state of broadband kits for the PS2 or GameCube? things become infinitely more fun when an actual person is involved, rather than just the cheesy, predictable game AI.
you know this actually is not the worst idea ever.
they have broadband connectors, and after you've got NetBSD (okay, Linux, sorry) set up, they all can run as diskless net clients. these are 200 MHz 64-bit RISC chips, getting 360 MIPS (source: howstuffworks) each.
i know, even at 50 bucks it is not cost effective at all. but for once a beowulf post conjures up something interesting instead of obligatory.
in general, if you leave the project, it will die. this is sad but true: unless there is someone other than you who has a substantial personal investment in the project in terms of blood, sweat, and tears, the project will fade away fairly quickly once people realise there is no committed leadership.
iirc, the main difference between grid computing and distributed computing is that for grid computing, it works like a utility company, you pay for the processing power as you use it. either that, or some networking professor wanted to write a book with a new title.
or just write it all as it comes in and analyze it later.
1 GB per 10 ms comes out to 100 GB per second. after 24 hours of experimentation, you find yourself with 8.6 million gigabytes. hard drives are cheap, but not THAT cheap. and even if you had LOTS of 100 GB hard drives, you still need to find a place to PUT 86 thousand of them.
every 24 hours.
after 1 week's worth of data collection, you have 600 thousand 100 GB hard drives of data.
this is why 'store now, analyze later' is not as good of an option for collision data. you have to take that 100 GB of data per second, and first filter and say, 'which of these collisions might be interesting to look at? which ones produced the particles we are trying to study?'
here's a gigabyte, you have 10 milliseconds to pull whatever's valuable out of it before the next gigabyte arrives.
let's see. 1 GB in 10 ms works out to 100 GB per second. how recently did GB ethernet come about? and what would the average bandwidth of users be? i would guess much less, but let us assume 100KB per second.
so you have 107374182400 bytes of data per second. your users can take 102400 bytes per second each. even if everyone was connected directly to your network (no delays or bottlenecks... ha!) you would still require 1048576 users (that is over 1 million).
and this is not taking into effect sending any data BACK to the source or actual computation time on the users.
well considering this is not the DOJ case, instead this is a class action case for those who were overcharged for windows licenses, who is president becomes much less of an issue. it is being prosecuted by lawyers, not the government.
what IS interesting is that this settlement separates the attorney's fees from the amount of the settlement - microsoft pays money on top of the settlement fee to a tune of whatever amount the judge decides the attorneys should be paid.
my vote? the judge accepts the settlement, prescribes normal attorney's fees, and another couple billion in 'miscellaneous court costs'.
i agree, schools getting free computers and software is a good thing. but what i do not understand is how this is supposed to punish Microsoft or deter them from doing it all again. it is like distracting a small child (the US government) with something shiny (money for schools) while you take the rest of their toys away. okay, so it's nothing like that. but anyway...
At least all the money is directed toward a good cause.
that's interesting, because jamie said that Of that $1.1 billion, $0.9 billion will be software presumably valued at whatever Microsoft wants to charge . so i would say that nearly all the money is directed back to Microsoft.
but i guess whether or not that is a good cause is up for debate.
Slashdot Mirror
actually i was talking to something along this topic the other day.
the first time i read LoTR, i did so with only my imagination as a guide - i had not seen either cartoon or heard a book on tape, or an audio broadcast, nothing. it was quite enjoyable.
then after having seen the animated versions, i re-read the book. it was an entirely different experience, with definitive visuals and voices to go along with the story. when you read that gandalf said something, you could hear in your mind John Huston's voice. this made the books a bit more enjoyable, at least to me.
now, after having seen the previews, etc, i have a new cast of voices and visuals to go along with my imagination as i read the book. completely different experience, and again even more enjoyable, as now the characters have grown out of animation into something a bit more tangible.
-sam
uh... chill out. the point i was trying to make was that yes, the deer population needs the wolves. and the children-eating was a joke, which most people seemed to get. and your comment about the wolves being native... read where i said 'introduce back into' not 'introduce for the first time'.
:(
my comment pisses you off? your comment makes me sad
as to not knowing anything about the subject, you probably have me there. grew up on a farm where deer which deer tried to overrun, had formal training in deer hunting, yup, i have absolutely no idea what i am talking about.
-sam
unfortunately hunting won't work, at least where i am. the deer are in a heavily populated area, and so hunting would not be so good, there are apartment complexes all around the deer areas. the only solution would be wolves or some other natural predator, of course then instead of hitting deer on the way home from work, i'd be hitting wolves, or the joggers they are chasing into the road.
-sam
having never heard of the rabbit case, but having seen many references to it in this story, i took a look at the Rabbit case. it is almost too amazing to believe, and not helping matters is the similarity to the old children's song, 'there was an old lady who swallows a fly'. if it wasn't so serious a problem, it would be insanely comical. it sounds like a joke:
basically, over a century ago wealthy englishmen brought rabbits to AUS so that they might hunt them. eventually the rabbit population boomed to well over 200 million, becoming more than a nuisance, rather an extremely ferocious natural disaster. they brought in a virus (myxo) to kill the rabbits, and it almost worked, but eventually the rabbits became resistant.
and this is where it gets almost too weird to believe.
they bring in ferrets to hunt the rabbits down. however, the ferrets are found to be carrying bovine tuberculoses. so they release a different strain of myxo to get rid of the ferrets.
so finally they are researching a new virus to kill the rabbits, but the virus escapes the labs and spreads through australia and new zealand. so they come up with a vaccine...
and the saga continues.
on a more USian note, how about introducing a few hundred wolves back into the ecosystem to at least nibble at the incredible deer population? what's a few small children, anyway?
-sam
jeez, people. just take the freely available directx api and code and compile a port for windows 95.
oh wait... you mean this is proprietary code? why are you using it in the first place?
-sam
MP3 finally has a video counterpart - a file-compression algorithm that makes it possible to send large multimedia files over the Internet on demand. VP3 is the first open-source video codec to truly support VHS-quality video at bandwidths as low as 200 kbps.
isn't MP3 a patented, non-free algorithm? isn't that why Ogg Vorbis exists? so the only reason Intel is comparing VP3 to MP3 is marketing crap, right?
either that, or they are hoping people will compress millions of DVDs into VP3 and set up giant file-swapping services, that would be a video counterpart to MP3.
in other news, are there any side-by-side comparisons of VP3 and DivX? and how does Ogg Tarkin fit into all of this, now that there is an 'open source' codec?
-sam
Progeny Linux was working on just such a thing. too bad they canned Progeny Debian.
-sam
luckily cingular is buying 4 billion dollars of european cell (nokia, ericsson, siemens) tech to bring 3G to the states. zdnet carries the story.
-sam
let's run them down, shall we? plot writeups and ratings by leonard maltin, quoted from IMDB.
looks pretty random to me.
-samyup, i'm sure michael personally looks at your post and thinks, 'oh gee this needs to be censored. the slashdot readership should not be allowed to view this opinion.'
:) but hey, this is free, at least.
moderation is not censorship, it is moderating the crap (i.e., posts like yours which did not seem to say anything of importance) down so people can read the good stuff, like good old-fashioned 'hot grits' and flamebaits and trolls.
and i have to add, nowhere will you find on slashdot any mention that many of the editors think they are either 'good journalists' or 'objective'. if you want that try a different website, but be warned that the two are nearly mutually exclusive in 'the wild', because good journalists get noticed, and nearly everyone has a price.
i'll agree that it's too bad we can't have at least ONE of those traits here
so welcome to the real world, where yes, your opinion may be unpopular. but i seriously doubt many moderation points are wasted because 'oh! he doesn't like michael!' it is more like 'jeez, this post doesn't say a damn thing of interest. moving on...'
-sam
same here - the best buy has tons of XBox and PS2 consoles, zero gamecubes. sold out.
-sam
apparently you don't care about ping time.
all you need is a valid form of ID.
or alternatively, an ID which appears to be valid.
-sam
isn't that a bit like saying, take the number of Americans who live in Chicago with a cross-section of those who live in Illinois?
-samwell after a bit of google searching i found that supposedly a 39.99 broadband adapater is being shipped this month for the PS2.
details at gaming-age.com.
-sam
what is the state of broadband kits for the PS2 or GameCube? things become infinitely more fun when an actual person is involved, rather than just the cheesy, predictable game AI.
you know this actually is not the worst idea ever.
they have broadband connectors, and after you've got NetBSD (okay, Linux, sorry) set up, they all can run as diskless net clients. these are 200 MHz 64-bit RISC chips, getting 360 MIPS (source: howstuffworks) each.
i know, even at 50 bucks it is not cost effective at all. but for once a beowulf post conjures up something interesting instead of obligatory.
-sam
in general, if you leave the project, it will die. this is sad but true: unless there is someone other than you who has a substantial personal investment in the project in terms of blood, sweat, and tears, the project will fade away fairly quickly once people realise there is no committed leadership.
-sam
iirc, the main difference between grid computing and distributed computing is that for grid computing, it works like a utility company, you pay for the processing power as you use it. either that, or some networking professor wanted to write a book with a new title.
-sam
or just write it all as it comes in and analyze it later.
1 GB per 10 ms comes out to 100 GB per second. after 24 hours of experimentation, you find yourself with 8.6 million gigabytes. hard drives are cheap, but not THAT cheap. and even if you had LOTS of 100 GB hard drives, you still need to find a place to PUT 86 thousand of them.
every 24 hours.
after 1 week's worth of data collection, you have 600 thousand 100 GB hard drives of data.
this is why 'store now, analyze later' is not as good of an option for collision data. you have to take that 100 GB of data per second, and first filter and say, 'which of these collisions might be interesting to look at? which ones produced the particles we are trying to study?'
-sam
here's a gigabyte, you have 10 milliseconds to pull whatever's valuable out of it before the next gigabyte arrives.
let's see. 1 GB in 10 ms works out to 100 GB per second. how recently did GB ethernet come about? and what would the average bandwidth of users be? i would guess much less, but let us assume 100KB per second.
so you have 107374182400 bytes of data per second. your users can take 102400 bytes per second each. even if everyone was connected directly to your network (no delays or bottlenecks... ha!) you would still require 1048576 users (that is over 1 million).
and this is not taking into effect sending any data BACK to the source or actual computation time on the users.
-sam
the fate was sealed for this entire case
well considering this is not the DOJ case, instead this is a class action case for those who were overcharged for windows licenses, who is president becomes much less of an issue. it is being prosecuted by lawyers, not the government.
what IS interesting is that this settlement separates the attorney's fees from the amount of the settlement - microsoft pays money on top of the settlement fee to a tune of whatever amount the judge decides the attorneys should be paid.
my vote? the judge accepts the settlement, prescribes normal attorney's fees, and another couple billion in 'miscellaneous court costs'.
-sam
those are just a start. and okay, so number 3 was not noble at all... can't blame me for trying, right?
-samyou have to see this as a good thing for schools.
i agree, schools getting free computers and software is a good thing. but what i do not understand is how this is supposed to punish Microsoft or deter them from doing it all again. it is like distracting a small child (the US government) with something shiny (money for schools) while you take the rest of their toys away. okay, so it's nothing like that. but anyway...
-sam
At least all the money is directed toward a good cause.
that's interesting, because jamie said that Of that $1.1 billion, $0.9 billion will be software presumably valued at whatever Microsoft wants to charge . so i would say that nearly all the money is directed back to Microsoft.
but i guess whether or not that is a good cause is up for debate.
-sam