The next stage of the research is to work out how to make the glass stable at room temperature and pressure.
That's easy - just remove the oxygen from the lattice!
Reminds me of the cartoon of the scientist at the blackboard with a series of equations on one side and concluding equation on the other with "And then a miracle happens." in between.
I have some training documentation (on Ericsson AXE node switches) from my ex-employer with a diagram including that exact phrase. For all intents and purposes, it's a pretty good explanation of what goes on at that stage...
Guess what? I do not want my advertizing to be entertaining. I want it to be informative.
Guess what? I don't even want that. I want my advertising to be invisible, unless I actually want a product in that domain. Anything else wastes my time and the advertisers money.
That's the Holy Grail of advertising...
(I'm well aware that some people want advertising, though. Hell, I have a neighbour who, whenever I see her, asks for all the crap-mail out of my letterbox - because she wants two copies of it. And, as far as I know, she doesn't have a budgie cage to line or anything...)
Read it like this: The press release is the teaser; it gets people reading, it gets SCO back in the news, and on the face of it they look like the good guy.
But the disclaimer is the real story they want to get out there - Caldera Linux, and by inference all versions of Linux, are suspect; reliant on the whims of non-paid developers, released under a suspect licence, and quite probably in violation of copyright and IP laws.
Under those conditions, what sane company would base any part of their business on it?
In other words, the whole statement is carefully-crafted FUD...
So is "cuntline"*, but you don't want to go using it too often...
(* A nautical term, used to describe either the spiral groove between adjacent strands of rope, or the gap formed when two barrels are laid side by side - stacking another barrel on top of this is placing the barrels "bilge to cuntline", the bilge being the wider hip of the barrel.
Sailors had fertile, if basic, imaginations, as well as lots of time on their hands...)
That's the usual last-ditch argument of the discredited, marginalized Left, as they survey the wreckage and human suffering their ideas brought upon the last century: "Well, REAL Communism has never been tried yet! Next time we'll get it right!"
And that's the usual argument of the raving, indoctrinated, "communism is evil!" Right, oblivious to the wreckage of unfettered badly-implemented capitalism.
And both are right - real communism has never been tried, and neither has real capitalism. Doubt the last half of that sentence? Go and read - and I mean, actually read, not "read what somebody else says about" - Smith, Keynes, Sraffa, Hayek, et al.
(Hell, you could probably gain a deeper understanding than your current level of knowledge just by readingtheirWikipediaentries...)
No thanks. Never again. You had your chance and it will NEVER come again.
I hope there are people around in 200 years time to say this about our current "capitalist" system. That is, if it isn't a trademark of the RIAA, MPAA, Coke, Pepsi,...
Yes, because nothing protects your bookmarks more from the prying eyes of the world's biggest web-crawler than dropping "bookmarks.html" into a publicly-viewable web directory...
(I just tried it on your site, Roberto Sanchez; noticed you haven't done it;-)
Yes, because as everyone knows, businesses being able to more effectively communicate and accurately target the right customers is the worst thing that can happen.
It's a bit hard to explain without rising to hyperbole - but imagine if we'd all been happily using riaasearch.com for the last few years. Everyone has riaasearch textads all over their blogs, torrent sites ask you to click one before entering, and every second person has a riaasearch toolbar in their browser.
Now, imagine if riaasearch turned evil...
Really, marketing is not a dirty word...
You're right. It's not a dirty word; it's a weasel word...
Like those cat parasite things; Toxoplasma. Supposedly makes some people feel good, more outgoing and warmhearted. But a parasite is still a parasite...
Agree totally - but then the question comes back to "where to start?"
I learned asm on a Z80 CP/M machine, then moved to DOS on 8086. Wrote a few things for starters (the usual "add two numbers then write result to screen" stuff), then developed from there. The last thing I wrote in asm was a utility to calculate the optimum interleave on MFM/RLL drives (remember those?;-) by timing track reads & writes while changing the interleave. Yes, there were other programs that did the same, but they didn't work with the (IIRC) Seagate drives of the time.
But now, in a world of Windows, OS X, & Linux, I wouldn't know where to start - for one thing, direct hardware access is frowned upon, if not totally banned by the OS. You can still write speed-critical routines in asm, but good C is nearly as fast - besides which, you're just writing a component for another app written in a higher-level language which you also have to learn. The opportunities for writing a whole program in asm have pretty much disappeared - though I guess you could write a CLI calculator or CD player in asm, why would you want to?
Though, I shouldn't talk - these days, I think people should learn JavaScript before anything else;-). It's a nice simple language, can be used for object-oriented programming (though it doesn't force it), and can be run in any browser for immediate results. And the fact that it can also be used to create a total dog's breakfast of code is incentive enough to learn to write properly;-)
No, it was a High Court decision (the so-called "Sony Case" I mentioned); an interpretation of existing laws. And not even copyright law - the case was argued by the ACCC, the Australian Competition and Consumer Comission, and won on the basis of competition law, not copyright law.
In Australia - don't know about the US - it's a relatively simple and common occurrance to have new legislation trump judicial interpretation of existing law. So imagine if you will, what would happen if copyright law was re-written to allow the inclusion of, for example, "technologies with the purpose of restricting distribution of copyright material to one or more copyright domains"?
Reason 1: Despite what the media and politicians have said over the past couple of weeks, no laws have been changed - hell, no new legislation has been tabled, or even formulated! What has been done is an issues paper has been released for public discussion. That's it. The Attorney-General, the rest of the government, and the media have all been misleading you.
... does that mean I can legally shift my Region locked DVDs to region free?
Reason 2: The options presented in the aforementioned issues paper don't include a blanket "fair use" option. It only canvasses various specific exclusions from blanket copyright coverage - format & time shifting, for example.
And then there's the 3rd of 2 reasons : There is and will be no exemption that allows breaking of DRM for even the specifically-allowed exclusions. CSS, pissweak as it is, is still DRM. So no, you won't be able to DeCSS your DVDs.
Furthermore I woudn't be surprised, after the fallout of the Sony decision last year, if region-coding becomes enshrined in the resulting legislation as a form of DRM. So, copy one of your R2 DVDs and you'll probably be breaking the law twice!
On the other hand, the Australians may be lagging behind, but at least they're moving in the right direction.
You're missing something here. Admittedly it's not in the story, which is just a Sunday paper feel-good puff-piece, but it's there nonetheless.
This is all part of the Australian Government's responsibilities under the so-called "Free Trade Agreement" signed last year. The other part - which they inexplicably fail to mention in that story, or any other currently on-line - is the introduction of DMCA-like legislation to go with it. Over the past few weeks there's been the occasional story in the media about this, mostly mentioning the benefits to Australians, but occasionally stating how the US government has been pressuring the Australian government to "align" their copyright laws with those of the US.
Or in a few words: We're finally getting legislated "fair-use" rights - along with a DMCA.
The situation here in Australia is interesting. Basically, the Gov't talks about ethanol blends ("it'll help the struggling cane industry!"), and there are 10% ethanol fuel blends available - but they can be a bit hard to find.
Example: I've just come back from filling up the car. Was planning on putting 10% ethanol blend in it, but the local Shell don't sell it (in fact, it seems Shell don't sell 10% at all in Australia). They do have a 5% ethanol / 95% premium blend. The prices are like this:
Regular unleaded : 121.9c/L
Premium unleaded : 128.9c/L
5% ethanol premium unleaded : 138.9c/L
Or, in other words, 10c/L dearer than premium, and a whopping 17c/L dearer than regular!
When the "enter password" prompt came up, I looked at the secretary and said in all honesty, "That's all I can do, please let me know if it's not working for him."
This "Power Secretary" became furious...
Well, as a person who has had absolutely NO customer service training of any kind yet deals daily with potentially-irate customers, I'm going to say this :
If that's anything close to what you actually said, you handled that very very badly.
From her point of view, you wandered in, fiddled a bit, then jumped straight to telling her you can't do the job. By the time you asked if she had the password, that opinion had already been formed and she was pissed - and some people when they're pissed off won't back down whatever you do.
There's a way to approach these people. Their job is to solve problems, and don't like people who won't support them in their job. Put it back on them - if they can supply the password, you can complete your job; if they can't, then they see for themselves that the onus is on them to come up with a suitable solution.
See the difference? It's "I can't do this" vs "I can do this, but I need something from you - have you got it?". The latter projects a professional attitude; the former doesn't.
I will say, however, that the bitch-queen type (and yes, they're almost exclusively women; I'll leave the pondering of why that is to other posts on other forums*) you're talking about is very hard to read, and even harder to deal with. It's the one time I change from my usual laid-back, "yep, no worries mate" style to the ultra-professional.
(* Well, maybe not. My personal theory is men are task-oriented, and women are goal-oriented. Men see you doing a task, and understand. Women see you doing a task, and only see what the end result should be. Throw in some ultra-aggression born from having to compete in a male world, and if you can't reach the goal they expect, well...)
This is how we define public corporations in today's laws. However, the laws that create and govern coorporations have been made by regular people, and we can change the laws if we want.
And who's going to do that? The 90+ percent of people who are happy to sit back and believe when they're told (by corporations!) that a corporation has the right to make money; that as long as they're not being screwed and the (boss | President | Prime Minister | Great And Glorious Saviour Of The People And Supreme Leader For Life) tells them that their (neverending) short-term pain is for the greater good, that everything is OK?
No. And the fragmented -10% who believe otherwise are unable to open the eyes of the other +90%. Maybe they should band together in order to pool their resources and get their message across? Unify, like in, y'know, a union?
Look, I understand that the average American believes unions are evil - some notable bad examples, plus 70 years of anti-union propaganda, have seen to that. Funnily enough, much of the population in most of the rest of the developed world doesn't see it that way. In fact, some might see it that America swapped rampant corrupt unionism for rampant corrupt corporatism and government...
Being unionised doesn't mean you have to get paid the same as the dickhead down the corridor who can't do his job even with a set of written step-by-step instructions. It doesn't mean that come 5 o'clock you have to down tools and leave because some corrupt official has deemed "them's the rules, boyo, and you'd better follow them if youse knows what's good for you". It means that, when they come gunning for you because total profits are up but ROI is down, you won't be trying to argue against them alone - that there's an organised group behind you who believes in doing the right thing by you and your kind, rather than doing what's right for a psychopathic monolith who's only driving principle is a rapacious greed for more money.
Usually it's because it wants write access to something in Program Files, which isn't writeable under normal circumstances by restricted users. I think quux on freenode said it best (I may have misquoted):
thou shalt not write session data to the program directory!
Damn right - this is Windows we're talking about!
The correct place to write session data to is the registry...
Consumers making copies of legitimate films that they bought is legally protected fair use.
Is it? I understand your DMCA makes circumventing copy-protection illegal (except in a few extremely specific cases), so the only legitimate copying of purchased DVDs can be from non-CSS'd titles. Are there many of those on the US market?
An additional $529 million in losses came from consumers making copies of legitimate films they bought on DVD or VHS.
So what they're saying is that their figures are inflated by $529 million, or almost 60%.
Really, I think that's possibly the most defensible of their figures - if they've actually done the legwork and uncovered figures that show "the average person buys x DVDs, and, of those people, y% make z copies", they could justify the figure quite easily - at least, as lost opportunities for sale if not an actual lost sales.
Last year, according to a person familiar with the matter, copies of movies downloaded or received from people who had downloaded them cost the studios $447 million in the U.S., whereas copies stemming from professional bootleggers cost the studios $335 million.
See, this is where their figures really fall down. They're playing mind-games, trying to cement the belief that a lost opportunity for sale is the same as an actual lost sale. For these figures to be believeable, they'd have to factor in the number of people who would buy the movie at full retail, compared to the number of people who will just grab a copy from a friend or pay $cheap for a pirate copy. Knowing quite a few people who have piles of DVDs they've never watched just because they were free from a mate or "$3 each, 5 for $10" at the back of the local chinese market, I'd say that number is pretty bloody close to 0%.
Though, I can say for me at least the sales they've lost because they movies are just unavailable in my market (R4) and/or in the right format (PAL) is growing. Off the top of my head, I can name 3 or 4 movies (one notable example being "The Professional" aka "Leon") which I would buy - if only they would sell them to me...
I believe it would be better if someone founded a cottage industry and made their own high-end graphics cards, making and selling them on weekends or other free time
This is possibly the stupidest thing I have ever heard. You can't make high end graphic cards in your spare time, the time investment is too great. By the time you were ready to mask, nVidia would be selling the equivalent card for $50. This ain't tea cozys.
It's funny because, while reminiscing about a particularly unpleasant time in videocard history, I wondered what it'd be like to do something like this.
You start by doing what every 2nd-tier video card manufacturer is doing - using the nVidia/ATI reference designs. Tweak the internal clock and data timings right out to the limit of the spec, disassemble the reference BIOS and cut out all those pesky bits that look like they'll slow the card down - timing loops, clock waits, etc. Finally, bolt something that looks like a Zalman CNPS9000 to the GPU - after all, if a card fouls 3 other slots and is danger of ripping the bus connector off the motherboard, then it must be good!
Get it made in some Chinese shit-shop, give it a name like "Ling-Lik PenUltima 12000+ Black Taipan Exxxxxxtreme Edition", and slap a $700+ price tag on it. Step (what are we up to - 7?) - Profit!
The thing is, by the time the reviews bagging the product come in, you have made your profit and are busy with your next scam.
(I was going to ask "whatever happened to Diamond Multimedia?", but I just discovered that somehow they're still in the graphic card market...)
Slashdot Mirror
I have some training documentation (on Ericsson AXE node switches) from my ex-employer with a diagram including that exact phrase. For all intents and purposes, it's a pretty good explanation of what goes on at that stage...
That's the Holy Grail of advertising...
(I'm well aware that some people want advertising, though. Hell, I have a neighbour who, whenever I see her, asks for all the crap-mail out of my letterbox - because she wants two copies of it. And, as far as I know, she doesn't have a budgie cage to line or anything...)
... it's a strategic ploy?
Read it like this: The press release is the teaser; it gets people reading, it gets SCO back in the news, and on the face of it they look like the good guy.
But the disclaimer is the real story they want to get out there - Caldera Linux, and by inference all versions of Linux, are suspect; reliant on the whims of non-paid developers, released under a suspect licence, and quite probably in violation of copyright and IP laws.
Under those conditions, what sane company would base any part of their business on it?
In other words, the whole statement is carefully-crafted FUD...
(* A nautical term, used to describe either the spiral groove between adjacent strands of rope, or the gap formed when two barrels are laid side by side - stacking another barrel on top of this is placing the barrels "bilge to cuntline", the bilge being the wider hip of the barrel.
Sailors had fertile, if basic, imaginations, as well as lots of time on their hands...)
And both are right - real communism has never been tried, and neither has real capitalism. Doubt the last half of that sentence? Go and read - and I mean, actually read, not "read what somebody else says about" - Smith, Keynes, Sraffa, Hayek, et al.
(Hell, you could probably gain a deeper understanding than your current level of knowledge just by reading their Wikipedia entries...)
I hope there are people around in 200 years time to say this about our current "capitalist" system. That is, if it isn't a trademark of the RIAA, MPAA, Coke, Pepsi,
Yes, because nothing protects your bookmarks more from the prying eyes of the world's biggest web-crawler than dropping "bookmarks.html" into a publicly-viewable web directory...
;-)
(I just tried it on your site, Roberto Sanchez; noticed you haven't done it
Now, imagine if riaasearch turned evil...
You're right. It's not a dirty word; it's a weasel word...
Like those cat parasite things; Toxoplasma. Supposedly makes some people feel good, more outgoing and warmhearted. But a parasite is still a parasite...
(Seriously, though, a lot of rfc 1323 could apply just as well to high-latency links like that.)
Agree totally - but then the question comes back to "where to start?"
;-) by timing track reads & writes while changing the interleave. Yes, there were other programs that did the same, but they didn't work with the (IIRC) Seagate drives of the time.
;-). It's a nice simple language, can be used for object-oriented programming (though it doesn't force it), and can be run in any browser for immediate results. And the fact that it can also be used to create a total dog's breakfast of code is incentive enough to learn to write properly ;-)
I learned asm on a Z80 CP/M machine, then moved to DOS on 8086. Wrote a few things for starters (the usual "add two numbers then write result to screen" stuff), then developed from there. The last thing I wrote in asm was a utility to calculate the optimum interleave on MFM/RLL drives (remember those?
But now, in a world of Windows, OS X, & Linux, I wouldn't know where to start - for one thing, direct hardware access is frowned upon, if not totally banned by the OS. You can still write speed-critical routines in asm, but good C is nearly as fast - besides which, you're just writing a component for another app written in a higher-level language which you also have to learn. The opportunities for writing a whole program in asm have pretty much disappeared - though I guess you could write a CLI calculator or CD player in asm, why would you want to?
Though, I shouldn't talk - these days, I think people should learn JavaScript before anything else
No, it was a High Court decision (the so-called "Sony Case" I mentioned); an interpretation of existing laws. And not even copyright law - the case was argued by the ACCC, the Australian Competition and Consumer Comission, and won on the basis of competition law, not copyright law.
In Australia - don't know about the US - it's a relatively simple and common occurrance to have new legislation trump judicial interpretation of existing law. So imagine if you will, what would happen if copyright law was re-written to allow the inclusion of, for example, "technologies with the purpose of restricting distribution of copyright material to one or more copyright domains"?
Reason 1: Despite what the media and politicians have said over the past couple of weeks, no laws have been changed - hell, no new legislation has been tabled, or even formulated! What has been done is an issues paper has been released for public discussion. That's it. The Attorney-General, the rest of the government, and the media have all been misleading you.
Reason 2: The options presented in the aforementioned issues paper don't include a blanket "fair use" option. It only canvasses various specific exclusions from blanket copyright coverage - format & time shifting, for example.
And then there's the 3rd of 2 reasons : There is and will be no exemption that allows breaking of DRM for even the specifically-allowed exclusions. CSS, pissweak as it is, is still DRM. So no, you won't be able to DeCSS your DVDs.
Furthermore I woudn't be surprised, after the fallout of the Sony decision last year, if region-coding becomes enshrined in the resulting legislation as a form of DRM. So, copy one of your R2 DVDs and you'll probably be breaking the law twice!
To follow up my own post :
There's no official statement on the government website yet. Here's a link to the "Fair Use and other Copyright Exceptions" discussion paper.
Refer to sections 4, 10, 12, and Attachment B (article 17.4.7. of the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement).
This is all part of the Australian Government's responsibilities under the so-called "Free Trade Agreement" signed last year. The other part - which they inexplicably fail to mention in that story, or any other currently on-line - is the introduction of DMCA-like legislation to go with it. Over the past few weeks there's been the occasional story in the media about this, mostly mentioning the benefits to Australians, but occasionally stating how the US government has been pressuring the Australian government to "align" their copyright laws with those of the US.
Or in a few words: We're finally getting legislated "fair-use" rights - along with a DMCA.
But that's still not the hardware vendor's problem, is it?
Example: I've just come back from filling up the car. Was planning on putting 10% ethanol blend in it, but the local Shell don't sell it (in fact, it seems Shell don't sell 10% at all in Australia). They do have a 5% ethanol / 95% premium blend. The prices are like this:
- Regular unleaded : 121.9c/L
- Premium unleaded : 128.9c/L
- 5% ethanol premium unleaded : 138.9c/L
Or, in other words, 10c/L dearer than premium, and a whopping 17c/L dearer than regular!Needless to say, I bought regular unleaded...
If that's anything close to what you actually said, you handled that very very badly.
From her point of view, you wandered in, fiddled a bit, then jumped straight to telling her you can't do the job. By the time you asked if she had the password, that opinion had already been formed and she was pissed - and some people when they're pissed off won't back down whatever you do.
There's a way to approach these people. Their job is to solve problems, and don't like people who won't support them in their job. Put it back on them - if they can supply the password, you can complete your job; if they can't, then they see for themselves that the onus is on them to come up with a suitable solution.
See the difference? It's "I can't do this" vs "I can do this, but I need something from you - have you got it?". The latter projects a professional attitude; the former doesn't.
I will say, however, that the bitch-queen type (and yes, they're almost exclusively women; I'll leave the pondering of why that is to other posts on other forums*) you're talking about is very hard to read, and even harder to deal with. It's the one time I change from my usual laid-back, "yep, no worries mate" style to the ultra-professional.
(* Well, maybe not. My personal theory is men are task-oriented, and women are goal-oriented. Men see you doing a task, and understand. Women see you doing a task, and only see what the end result should be. Throw in some ultra-aggression born from having to compete in a male world, and if you can't reach the goal they expect, well
No. And the fragmented -10% who believe otherwise are unable to open the eyes of the other +90%. Maybe they should band together in order to pool their resources and get their message across? Unify, like in, y'know, a union?
Look, I understand that the average American believes unions are evil - some notable bad examples, plus 70 years of anti-union propaganda, have seen to that. Funnily enough, much of the population in most of the rest of the developed world doesn't see it that way. In fact, some might see it that America swapped rampant corrupt unionism for rampant corrupt corporatism and government...
Being unionised doesn't mean you have to get paid the same as the dickhead down the corridor who can't do his job even with a set of written step-by-step instructions. It doesn't mean that come 5 o'clock you have to down tools and leave because some corrupt official has deemed "them's the rules, boyo, and you'd better follow them if youse knows what's good for you". It means that, when they come gunning for you because total profits are up but ROI is down, you won't be trying to argue against them alone - that there's an organised group behind you who believes in doing the right thing by you and your kind, rather than doing what's right for a psychopathic monolith who's only driving principle is a rapacious greed for more money.
The correct place to write session data to is the registry...
Really, I think that's possibly the most defensible of their figures - if they've actually done the legwork and uncovered figures that show "the average person buys x DVDs, and, of those people, y% make z copies", they could justify the figure quite easily - at least, as lost opportunities for sale if not an actual lost sales.
See, this is where their figures really fall down. They're playing mind-games, trying to cement the belief that a lost opportunity for sale is the same as an actual lost sale. For these figures to be believeable, they'd have to factor in the number of people who would buy the movie at full retail, compared to the number of people who will just grab a copy from a friend or pay $cheap for a pirate copy. Knowing quite a few people who have piles of DVDs they've never watched just because they were free from a mate or "$3 each, 5 for $10" at the back of the local chinese market, I'd say that number is pretty bloody close to 0%.
Though, I can say for me at least the sales they've lost because they movies are just unavailable in my market (R4) and/or in the right format (PAL) is growing. Off the top of my head, I can name 3 or 4 movies (one notable example being "The Professional" aka "Leon") which I would buy - if only they would sell them to me...
(Yes, I know. And now you know, and I know you know...
You start by doing what every 2nd-tier video card manufacturer is doing - using the nVidia/ATI reference designs. Tweak the internal clock and data timings right out to the limit of the spec, disassemble the reference BIOS and cut out all those pesky bits that look like they'll slow the card down - timing loops, clock waits, etc. Finally, bolt something that looks like a Zalman CNPS9000 to the GPU - after all, if a card fouls 3 other slots and is danger of ripping the bus connector off the motherboard, then it must be good!
Get it made in some Chinese shit-shop, give it a name like "Ling-Lik PenUltima 12000+ Black Taipan Exxxxxxtreme Edition", and slap a $700+ price tag on it. Step (what are we up to - 7?) - Profit!
The thing is, by the time the reviews bagging the product come in, you have made your profit and are busy with your next scam.
(I was going to ask "whatever happened to Diamond Multimedia?", but I just discovered that somehow they're still in the graphic card market...)