Compared to the old episodes, 1970's sci-fi F/X would have been an improvement.
All things have to be kept in perspective. Those older episodes looked like they were filmed on a budget of about 200 quid. Per season. They could barely afford properly colored gaffer tape to cover up the inverted "Wesco" logo on the garbage bins they used for the first Daleks. The advert for the casting call probably went something like: "Wanted: middle aged gent to portray zany but brilliant scientist. Costumes not provided, please wear your own shabby brown coat; we'll supply the scarf. Pay is eternal fan glory plus 5 pounds 20 per episode."
In other words, they couldn't spruce them up too much, or they'd have lost their roots. But now they can fly!
"Hindsight is always 20/20." It's always easy to say "if only we had done this." The thing was, back when this all started there was no talking. None. Nobody could walk across the border, go visit uncle Ivan, nothing. There was no internet, of course. Any international phone calls had to be pre-approved, and were routed directly through KGB headquarters. Any American was under constant surveillance from the moment he stepped through the Iron Curtain. And with reason, from the KGB's perspective - any traveler to the Eastern Bloc was debriefed by the CIA, who was starved for information as to what was going on. We were basing our ideas of Soviet leadership on photographs taken of who sat next to Khrushchev or Brezhnev at the May Day parades! And you're claiming that we armed ourselves unnecessarily "if only we had talked instead." Talking simply wasn't possible in those conditions.
Later on in the Cold War, defensive spending actually became a key part of the strategy that evolved into what we called "containment". If the Soviets wanted isolation, then fine - isolate them, and let the pressures inside rise. If we claim to have "Star Wars" weapons, then they'll have to spend to create their own Star Wars weapons. They spent huge amounts of money trying to defend against the perceived American threat. Putting Ronnie Raygun in the White House scared the hell out of them, because the hardliners actually believed he'd push the button. Call it saber rattling, call it out of control spending, but it caused the paranoid Soviet leadership to spend an even more disproportionate amount of their economy on defense (over 20% of their GDP!), instead of on the domestic issues that they needed to spend it on. And that spending hastened their collapse by applying tremendous pressure on the Russian people.
Maybe you're trying to claim that only the last few years of the Cold War were poisoned by the industrialists. Given the history of Russia from the October Revolution through 1982 or so, we knew there was no way these attitudes were going to change overnight through diplomacy alone. Remember, at the time Gorbachev was promising glasnost, he was also trying to implement perestroika, ostensibly to free things up but still keep control in the hands of the Communist party ("free, but not too free" was the joke of the day.) Ultimately, pressures from everywhere were what caused the Soviet Union to collapse. The election of Pope John Paul II, the collapse of their internal economy due to their unchecked military spending, Solidarity, the Afghan war, uskoreniye, democratization, the breakaways by Estonia and Lithuania, the destruction of the Berlin wall. No one piece of this ended the Cold War all by itself. It took the combination of all these factors and many, many more.
So don't say "oh, glasnost would have taken care of everything, and we wasted our money." Glasnost wasn't offered for no reason. It wouldn't even have happened at all without the pressures of these external forces.
People want to believe in flying saucers or flying spaghetti monsters can look at a "secret government installation" and blame whatever they want on it. This article is not about those idiots, nor is it about other self-delusional idiots such as Harold Camping. Nobody's giving them attention in this article. This article is about what actually took place at Groom Lake, as told by one of the former workers at the site. Area 51 is where the CIA tested their top secret spy planes. It's no more (or less) exciting than that.
When cold war started to calm, information would purposefully leak about real or imaginary weapons in order to get things moving again, keep that money train rolling.
I would suggest you do some reading of cold war history before dismissing it as a profiteering gambit by the military industrial complex. If you're interested in what the KGB was doing, I recommend you start with "The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB", by Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin, as it was written by Mitrokhin, who was the senior historian of the KGB archives. Then, move on to "Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America", by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. Both of these sources validate the stories we heard about the KGB during the Cold War, as told from the point of view of the Russians. TS&tS tells what the KGB was actually doing, while V:DSEiA tells what the Americans learned about the KGB from decrypting Russian messages. "The Main Enemy", by Milt Bearden and James Risen, is a history of the final years of the Cold War, and might address some of your skepticism. There are plenty of other books on the topic, but they all record the same thing from several different vantage points. And for the most part, they all agree and confirm each other.
The Soviets were absolutely convinced that America was plotting to wipe them out, because that's what the Russian leaders would have done if they were in the same position. They simply did not believe that an actual "democracy" could work without a secret politburo controlling everything that Congress was saying publicly, so they expended tremendous amounts of effort trying to uncover the group of secret leaders that were running the U.S. The more they looked and didn't find them, the more convinced they were that they must have been an ultra-excellent secret bureaucracy, and the more paranoid they became. They were so terrified that they didn't know when we were going to launch H-bombs at them that they ended up deploying their missiles in Cuba and aimed them at the eastern seaboard (more recently the Russians revealed that their Cuban missile capabilities were easily adequate to reach New York and Washington, despite the claims at the time that they had a more limited range.) Read up on the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis to learn more about how that was resolved.
It may have seemed like Spy vs. Spy to the casual observer, but it was a very real conflict, driven by a series of very real, extremely paranoid tyrants. If we'd been even one quarter as good at it as the Soviets imagined we were, it probably would have become a hot war.
It's much easier to hide things in an underground cavern than in a building on the surface.
Perhaps "safer", but definitely not "easier". They needed to get their prototype spy planes in and out of hiding quickly to run their tests before the next soviet satellite was scheduled to come overhead. (They posted a daily list of all the soviet satellites' orbit schedules.) To get the planes underground would have required giant elevators and big caverns. To get them into buildings required nothing more than a tow dolly and a truck.
Actually, you should RTFA because it's really interesting. For example, when they knew the soviets were using satellites with infrared imaging cameras, they'd use big cardboard sheets cut out in "jet shapes" to shade the tarmac from the hot sun, then removed the cardboard before the satellite arrived. The bird would photograph the cool spot of the shadow, recording the outline of the ersatz plane. They even occasionally used heaters to scorch the tarmac behind the cardboard, simulating recent engine burn tests!
And people say the U.S. government doesn't know how to have a good time.
Another important point here is the router does not care what kind of data it is transferring. A packet is a packet is a packet. Packet comes in, packet goes out. It is a neutral tool that does its job, regardless of content or purpose.
The allegation is that Cisco altered the routers to add functions custom tailored to aid the Chinese police in tracking suspects. As far as the data goes they may be "specific crime neutral" but they're definitely "oppressive police state friendly."
However, in a testimony in April to the US House International Relations Committee, Ethan Gutmann, a former business consultant in China, alleged that Cisco had sold a specially designed firewall to the Chinese government and deployed a "Policenet" for the state security forces.
"Cisco... denies selling any special configuration. Chinese engineers who actually worked on the firewall project are equally adamant that it was custom-made," Gutmann told the Committee.
"By 2003, Cisco's 'Policenet' was deployed as the Internet backbone of the Chinese State Security system... Zhou Li, a systems engineer from Cisco's Shanghai Branch, explained to me that... a policeman or PSB agent using Cisco equipment could now stop any citizen on the street and, simply by scanning an ID card, remotely access his danwei (work unit files): political behavior, family history, fingerprints, and other images. The agent could also access his surfing history for the last 60 days, and read his email. All in real-time," said Gutman.
Gutmann claimed this has led to the arrests of pro-democracy campaigners and other peaceful protest groups.
"Any assertion that Chinese censorship is purely a government-to-government issue is premature until these companies dare to — explicitly and systematically — test the limits of Chinese laws. And until they perform that test, they should not be viewed as simply following Chinese law, but as working for Chinese Communist Party objectives," Gutmann said.
Amnesty has laid into Cisco's human rights record in the past, claiming in November 2002 that Cisco had provided "important technology which helps the Chinese authorities censor the Internet". Nortel was also alleged to be supplying technology to enable deeper packet inspection.
1. Agreed. I think that's because the projectionists stand the to gain the most from this (extra hours in their paychecks for swapping lenses.) The viewer experience is secondary.
2. At least this is a real difference in quality, unlike the differences "audiophiles" claim come from using $7,000 speaker cables and porcelain cable stands.
3. At some point the reporter has spent enough time, and the story has to be published (or killed.) There is no set quantity of facts that have to be dug up. Getting stonewalled by anyone who could offer a plausible explanation is a fact all by itself. The reporter also spoke to a cofounder of a projection company, in addition to the projectionists. It seemed like a reasonable amount of effort for what is likely to be a tempest in a teapot.
4. With a title like "V.P. for Sight and Sound" I think that if he didn't have his pulse on the quality of the film experience, he wouldn't have a job.
5. By "Avatar", do you mean "FernGully: The Last Rainforest 3D"? Holy crap, you should watch them back to back some day. Even the scenery is identical! At least FernGully has Robin Williams keeping it entertaining. And no, fixing the problem in the field is simply a question of money. Do the theaters want to pay projectionists for the extra time it takes for them to swap lenses?
It all boils down to economics. Perhaps Regal will advertise "we have brighter pictures than AMC because we swap our polarizing lenses properly, and AMC doesn't." Perhaps they'll figure out that not enough people care. Perhaps they already have.
Investigative journalism would have got more out of Sony and the theater owners before going to press.
Did you even RTFA? Here's the relevant paragraph:
Though the issue is widespread, affecting screenings at AMC, National Amusements, and Regal cinemas, executives at all these major movie theater chains, and at the corporate offices of the projector’s manufacturer, have refused to directly acknowledge or comment on how and why it’s happening. Asked where his company stands on the matter, Dan Huerta, vice president of sight and sound for AMC, the second-biggest chain in the US, said only that “We don’t really have any official or unofficial policy to not change the lens.’’
They contacted people. The right people, in the case of AMC. All these people uniformly shut the hell up, because that's what corporate executives are trained to do when there's a controversy that would cost them money to fix (yes, changing the lenses would be a big expense for these theaters.) They've been given their chance, and now that they've established there's a stone wall of silence, it's time for the reporter to let the story out. If it pisses off the fickle moviegoing audiences even more, well, the theater owners had their chance to speak.
Maybe this story will get them to set a policy to change lenses. Or maybe it won't. When you consider the dreck that so many of these movies are, counting on the taste of the moviegoing public to concern themselves over projection quality seems unrealistically optimistic.
If we didn't have it in place already, I'd be using those hours to bring in a static code analysis tool like Fortify or Coverity or Klocwork to begin scanning my source code repositories for security flaws. Could I fix them all in that time? Highly doubtful. It mostly depends on the size of the codebase, but once you get millions of lines of code that have never been scanned before, the tools will likely identify hundreds or even thousands of vulnerabilities, including many false positives that would have to be weeded out. I just saw a presentation where the vendor estimated each XSS bug identified by a code scan takes about 94 minutes to fix, after he factored in testing and everything else.
Parameterized queries by themselves aren't the panacea that people make them out to be. They still allow attack code to be stored in the database. Bad handling of the data deeper in the application stack, where protections aren't expected, might still choke on the code. You need 100% of the SQL queries in the system to be parameterized. Even then, they do nothing to prevent other language injection attacks to pass through, such as XSS attacks.
As you say, it's a solved problem, if the programmers use it. And parameterized queries absolutely protect those particular queries from the malicious bastards, so I'm not knocking them in any way. I'm just saying that someone shouldn't naïvely claim "we're secure" based solely on that premise.
Lag shouldn't be even a part of the consideration of "where" to host it. If he's looking at development and testing efforts, they'll all be on local servers (probably VMs on his machine.) Bandwidth, well, if he's got millions of users he's not going to be running them all over a DSL modem.
I think the real answer is: how much effort can he spare from his main task of developing the application to maintaining his own hosting site? He's a one-man shop. Can he afford to divert X hours per week building a server farm, hiring electricians, installing HVAC systems, and once it's running doing the maintenance tasks like recovering from disk errors, doing backups, etc? How much would that slow him down from getting his app operational? Remember, his app won't make him a dime until it's fully up and running.
A hosting provider takes a lot of that crap away - for a monthly fee. To get his first system up on a shoestring budget, he could self-host on a PC in his basement. When it's time to grow, he could consider expansion to a hosting provider, and if his site is as wildly successful as he's imagining, he could build his own data center next year once the cash is pouring in the door, and he understands how big his systems will need to be.
Self-hosting will suck if he's as quickly successful as he thinks: he won't be able to simply drop in a dozen more boxes into his basement. With the cloud, you simply write your provider a bigger check and the resources are there.
Actually, moving up to the credit card companies would hugely narrow the bottleneck. You convince VISA, Mastercard, Discover, and Amex to adopt a policy of refusing transactions from any institution knowingly processing spammers' requests, and you're pretty much done.
Let me see if I understand this idea well enough to hear one side of the phone call. Us: "Hi, Visa, it's us, and we're fighting spam. Please shut off these following merchants who sell via spam." Us: "Why yes, we do believe you're correct in that they do $80,000,000.00 per year of business with you." Us: "Yes, we know you take 3% of that money in interchange fees." Us: "Well, no, we're not going to make up the $2,400,000.00 in lost revenue, we just want you to help us end spam." Us: "Um, because you care about the problem of spam?" Us: "Hello?" Hmm... I think AT&T dropped the connection.
The idea is that you get someone else to shut them off for a different reason: bandwidth, inability to pay hosting provider, whatever.
However, retroworks' idea is likely to be too risky for a bank to try. If a bank "approves" an authorization, they are contractually taking on the obligation to pay. They can't lie about it, or they can be sued. Even by a spammer.
The problem I have is that a lot of what I like about Gibson's books is his writing. He uses analogies in clever ways: "The switch on Damien's Italian floor lamp feels alien: a different click, designed to hold back a different voltage, foreign British electricity. Mirror-world. The plugs on appliances are huge, triple-pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in America. Cars are reversed, left to right, inside; telephone handsets have a different weight, a different balance; the covers of paperbacks look like Australian money."
Once he's established the setting, the phrase "mirror-world" invokes it anywhere in the book. 230 pages later: "She follows Ngemi toward the nearest mirror-world trailer. It has a shallow, centrally peaked roof that reminds her of drawings of Noah's ark in books for children, and on its back a square, faded mirror-world license plate, "LOB" and four numerals."
He has this way of capturing the essence of a very big thing in a very few words. It's all stylistic writing, which does not translate to the screen.
That's pretty much true for all cyberpunk. As long as the author avoids anything technical, and focuses on the people, it holds up better. But as soon as he says "3MB of hot RAM chips", there's another fault line in the willing suspension of disbelief. Snow Crash did OK with some predictions: we still don't have Rat Things, and the neurally controlled prosthetic hands that are just coming into being sound like the inferior ones the Russian veterans wore in his story. I still want smart spokes. Gibson was not so good with the tech, but I like his writing better.
Hey, I actually bought the Johnny Mnemonic DVD, and in some way contributed to that success.
When Circuit City was going out of business, they had a heaping pile of unsold/unsellable DVDs in a large basket with a $1.00 EACH sign, I spotted Johnny Mnemonic and figured "I'd buy that for a dollar."
I got fair value out of that deal, unlike anyone who paid for full price tickets to see it.
That's the argument in TFA. "If there's demand, it will sell" and there's no pressing demand. USB 3.0 is fast enough for most peripherals. Thudderbolt is a crippled (non-optical) incompatible version of Light Peak, which WOULD have been a sweet, optical, backward plug compatible extension to USB.
All the video people who couldn't use USB 2.0 have no problems with USB 3.0, so much so that Firewire 800 is now effectively dead.
I think Apple simply wants to follow their previous pattern of providing proprietary interfaces to lock in more users. But they seem to have forgotten that their past successes were based entirely on their providing something useful to satisfy a need. We'll, so far they've created no new needs. There's no 3D video editing hardware, no 10GB/sec crystalline storage units, no sensory nerve array inputs. Just expensive stuff that's incompatible with everyone's existing expensive stuff.
if they simply ignored Apple? If someone came around to shut them down, they'd say "Really? You think our app store is confusingly called an App Store? Go away and grow some common sense."
You may be the only one of us who hasn't made a "fool-killer". It's a 120V plug on one end connected to alligator clips on the other. Great for connecting ANYTHING to a power outlet, especially things that shouldn't be.
Slashdot Mirror
Compared to the old episodes, 1970's sci-fi F/X would have been an improvement.
All things have to be kept in perspective. Those older episodes looked like they were filmed on a budget of about 200 quid. Per season. They could barely afford properly colored gaffer tape to cover up the inverted "Wesco" logo on the garbage bins they used for the first Daleks. The advert for the casting call probably went something like: "Wanted: middle aged gent to portray zany but brilliant scientist. Costumes not provided, please wear your own shabby brown coat; we'll supply the scarf. Pay is eternal fan glory plus 5 pounds 20 per episode."
In other words, they couldn't spruce them up too much, or they'd have lost their roots. But now they can fly!
"Hindsight is always 20/20." It's always easy to say "if only we had done this." The thing was, back when this all started there was no talking. None. Nobody could walk across the border, go visit uncle Ivan, nothing. There was no internet, of course. Any international phone calls had to be pre-approved, and were routed directly through KGB headquarters. Any American was under constant surveillance from the moment he stepped through the Iron Curtain. And with reason, from the KGB's perspective - any traveler to the Eastern Bloc was debriefed by the CIA, who was starved for information as to what was going on. We were basing our ideas of Soviet leadership on photographs taken of who sat next to Khrushchev or Brezhnev at the May Day parades! And you're claiming that we armed ourselves unnecessarily "if only we had talked instead." Talking simply wasn't possible in those conditions.
Later on in the Cold War, defensive spending actually became a key part of the strategy that evolved into what we called "containment". If the Soviets wanted isolation, then fine - isolate them, and let the pressures inside rise. If we claim to have "Star Wars" weapons, then they'll have to spend to create their own Star Wars weapons. They spent huge amounts of money trying to defend against the perceived American threat. Putting Ronnie Raygun in the White House scared the hell out of them, because the hardliners actually believed he'd push the button. Call it saber rattling, call it out of control spending, but it caused the paranoid Soviet leadership to spend an even more disproportionate amount of their economy on defense (over 20% of their GDP!), instead of on the domestic issues that they needed to spend it on. And that spending hastened their collapse by applying tremendous pressure on the Russian people.
Maybe you're trying to claim that only the last few years of the Cold War were poisoned by the industrialists. Given the history of Russia from the October Revolution through 1982 or so, we knew there was no way these attitudes were going to change overnight through diplomacy alone. Remember, at the time Gorbachev was promising glasnost, he was also trying to implement perestroika, ostensibly to free things up but still keep control in the hands of the Communist party ("free, but not too free" was the joke of the day.) Ultimately, pressures from everywhere were what caused the Soviet Union to collapse. The election of Pope John Paul II, the collapse of their internal economy due to their unchecked military spending, Solidarity, the Afghan war, uskoreniye, democratization, the breakaways by Estonia and Lithuania, the destruction of the Berlin wall. No one piece of this ended the Cold War all by itself. It took the combination of all these factors and many, many more.
So don't say "oh, glasnost would have taken care of everything, and we wasted our money." Glasnost wasn't offered for no reason. It wouldn't even have happened at all without the pressures of these external forces.
My favorite Buckaroo Bonzai bit: the sign reading "Trespassers will be Violated"
People want to believe in flying saucers or flying spaghetti monsters can look at a "secret government installation" and blame whatever they want on it. This article is not about those idiots, nor is it about other self-delusional idiots such as Harold Camping. Nobody's giving them attention in this article. This article is about what actually took place at Groom Lake, as told by one of the former workers at the site. Area 51 is where the CIA tested their top secret spy planes. It's no more (or less) exciting than that.
I wish, but had I been that clever I would have come up with a backronym for TSAR, as that's how I spell it. :-)
When cold war started to calm, information would purposefully leak about real or imaginary weapons in order to get things moving again, keep that money train rolling.
I would suggest you do some reading of cold war history before dismissing it as a profiteering gambit by the military industrial complex. If you're interested in what the KGB was doing, I recommend you start with "The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB", by Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin, as it was written by Mitrokhin, who was the senior historian of the KGB archives. Then, move on to "Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America", by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. Both of these sources validate the stories we heard about the KGB during the Cold War, as told from the point of view of the Russians. TS&tS tells what the KGB was actually doing, while V:DSEiA tells what the Americans learned about the KGB from decrypting Russian messages. "The Main Enemy", by Milt Bearden and James Risen, is a history of the final years of the Cold War, and might address some of your skepticism. There are plenty of other books on the topic, but they all record the same thing from several different vantage points. And for the most part, they all agree and confirm each other.
The Soviets were absolutely convinced that America was plotting to wipe them out, because that's what the Russian leaders would have done if they were in the same position. They simply did not believe that an actual "democracy" could work without a secret politburo controlling everything that Congress was saying publicly, so they expended tremendous amounts of effort trying to uncover the group of secret leaders that were running the U.S. The more they looked and didn't find them, the more convinced they were that they must have been an ultra-excellent secret bureaucracy, and the more paranoid they became. They were so terrified that they didn't know when we were going to launch H-bombs at them that they ended up deploying their missiles in Cuba and aimed them at the eastern seaboard (more recently the Russians revealed that their Cuban missile capabilities were easily adequate to reach New York and Washington, despite the claims at the time that they had a more limited range.) Read up on the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis to learn more about how that was resolved.
It may have seemed like Spy vs. Spy to the casual observer, but it was a very real conflict, driven by a series of very real, extremely paranoid tyrants. If we'd been even one quarter as good at it as the Soviets imagined we were, it probably would have become a hot war.
It's much easier to hide things in an underground cavern than in a building on the surface.
Perhaps "safer", but definitely not "easier". They needed to get their prototype spy planes in and out of hiding quickly to run their tests before the next soviet satellite was scheduled to come overhead. (They posted a daily list of all the soviet satellites' orbit schedules.) To get the planes underground would have required giant elevators and big caverns. To get them into buildings required nothing more than a tow dolly and a truck.
Actually, you should RTFA because it's really interesting. For example, when they knew the soviets were using satellites with infrared imaging cameras, they'd use big cardboard sheets cut out in "jet shapes" to shade the tarmac from the hot sun, then removed the cardboard before the satellite arrived. The bird would photograph the cool spot of the shadow, recording the outline of the ersatz plane. They even occasionally used heaters to scorch the tarmac behind the cardboard, simulating recent engine burn tests!
And people say the U.S. government doesn't know how to have a good time.
Why was it called Area 51?
Because calling it "CIA Secret Aircraft Research Area" might have given the wrong idea to the Soviets?
Another important point here is the router does not care what kind of data it is transferring. A packet is a packet is a packet. Packet comes in, packet goes out. It is a neutral tool that does its job, regardless of content or purpose.
The allegation is that Cisco altered the routers to add functions custom tailored to aid the Chinese police in tracking suspects. As far as the data goes they may be "specific crime neutral" but they're definitely "oppressive police state friendly."
From http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/security-management/2006/06/01/amnesty-condemns-tech-firms-over-human-rights-39272429/
However, in a testimony in April to the US House International Relations Committee, Ethan Gutmann, a former business consultant in China, alleged that Cisco had sold a specially designed firewall to the Chinese government and deployed a "Policenet" for the state security forces.
"Cisco... denies selling any special configuration. Chinese engineers who actually worked on the firewall project are equally adamant that it was custom-made," Gutmann told the Committee.
"By 2003, Cisco's 'Policenet' was deployed as the Internet backbone of the Chinese State Security system... Zhou Li, a systems engineer from Cisco's Shanghai Branch, explained to me that... a policeman or PSB agent using Cisco equipment could now stop any citizen on the street and, simply by scanning an ID card, remotely access his danwei (work unit files): political behavior, family history, fingerprints, and other images. The agent could also access his surfing history for the last 60 days, and read his email. All in real-time," said Gutman.
Gutmann claimed this has led to the arrests of pro-democracy campaigners and other peaceful protest groups.
"Any assertion that Chinese censorship is purely a government-to-government issue is premature until these companies dare to — explicitly and systematically — test the limits of Chinese laws. And until they perform that test, they should not be viewed as simply following Chinese law, but as working for Chinese Communist Party objectives," Gutmann said.
Amnesty has laid into Cisco's human rights record in the past, claiming in November 2002 that Cisco had provided "important technology which helps the Chinese authorities censor the Internet". Nortel was also alleged to be supplying technology to enable deeper packet inspection.
1. Agreed. I think that's because the projectionists stand the to gain the most from this (extra hours in their paychecks for swapping lenses.) The viewer experience is secondary.
2. At least this is a real difference in quality, unlike the differences "audiophiles" claim come from using $7,000 speaker cables and porcelain cable stands.
3. At some point the reporter has spent enough time, and the story has to be published (or killed.) There is no set quantity of facts that have to be dug up. Getting stonewalled by anyone who could offer a plausible explanation is a fact all by itself. The reporter also spoke to a cofounder of a projection company, in addition to the projectionists. It seemed like a reasonable amount of effort for what is likely to be a tempest in a teapot.
4. With a title like "V.P. for Sight and Sound" I think that if he didn't have his pulse on the quality of the film experience, he wouldn't have a job.
5. By "Avatar", do you mean "FernGully: The Last Rainforest 3D"? Holy crap, you should watch them back to back some day. Even the scenery is identical! At least FernGully has Robin Williams keeping it entertaining. And no, fixing the problem in the field is simply a question of money. Do the theaters want to pay projectionists for the extra time it takes for them to swap lenses?
It all boils down to economics. Perhaps Regal will advertise "we have brighter pictures than AMC because we swap our polarizing lenses properly, and AMC doesn't." Perhaps they'll figure out that not enough people care. Perhaps they already have.
Investigative journalism would have got more out of Sony and the theater owners before going to press.
Did you even RTFA? Here's the relevant paragraph:
They contacted people. The right people, in the case of AMC. All these people uniformly shut the hell up, because that's what corporate executives are trained to do when there's a controversy that would cost them money to fix (yes, changing the lenses would be a big expense for these theaters.) They've been given their chance, and now that they've established there's a stone wall of silence, it's time for the reporter to let the story out. If it pisses off the fickle moviegoing audiences even more, well, the theater owners had their chance to speak.
Maybe this story will get them to set a policy to change lenses. Or maybe it won't. When you consider the dreck that so many of these movies are, counting on the taste of the moviegoing public to concern themselves over projection quality seems unrealistically optimistic.
If we didn't have it in place already, I'd be using those hours to bring in a static code analysis tool like Fortify or Coverity or Klocwork to begin scanning my source code repositories for security flaws. Could I fix them all in that time? Highly doubtful. It mostly depends on the size of the codebase, but once you get millions of lines of code that have never been scanned before, the tools will likely identify hundreds or even thousands of vulnerabilities, including many false positives that would have to be weeded out. I just saw a presentation where the vendor estimated each XSS bug identified by a code scan takes about 94 minutes to fix, after he factored in testing and everything else.
i'm sorry, but was the phrase: "world's largest public penetration test?" really necessary?
Sony acts like the world's largest orifice so it's only fitting.
Parameterized queries by themselves aren't the panacea that people make them out to be. They still allow attack code to be stored in the database. Bad handling of the data deeper in the application stack, where protections aren't expected, might still choke on the code. You need 100% of the SQL queries in the system to be parameterized. Even then, they do nothing to prevent other language injection attacks to pass through, such as XSS attacks.
As you say, it's a solved problem, if the programmers use it. And parameterized queries absolutely protect those particular queries from the malicious bastards, so I'm not knocking them in any way. I'm just saying that someone shouldn't naïvely claim "we're secure" based solely on that premise.
and the rest come for what? To read the articles?
I just read Slashdot for the pictures.
Lag shouldn't be even a part of the consideration of "where" to host it. If he's looking at development and testing efforts, they'll all be on local servers (probably VMs on his machine.) Bandwidth, well, if he's got millions of users he's not going to be running them all over a DSL modem.
I think the real answer is: how much effort can he spare from his main task of developing the application to maintaining his own hosting site? He's a one-man shop. Can he afford to divert X hours per week building a server farm, hiring electricians, installing HVAC systems, and once it's running doing the maintenance tasks like recovering from disk errors, doing backups, etc? How much would that slow him down from getting his app operational? Remember, his app won't make him a dime until it's fully up and running.
A hosting provider takes a lot of that crap away - for a monthly fee. To get his first system up on a shoestring budget, he could self-host on a PC in his basement. When it's time to grow, he could consider expansion to a hosting provider, and if his site is as wildly successful as he's imagining, he could build his own data center next year once the cash is pouring in the door, and he understands how big his systems will need to be.
Self-hosting will suck if he's as quickly successful as he thinks: he won't be able to simply drop in a dozen more boxes into his basement. With the cloud, you simply write your provider a bigger check and the resources are there.
Actually, moving up to the credit card companies would hugely narrow the bottleneck. You convince VISA, Mastercard, Discover, and Amex to adopt a policy of refusing transactions from any institution knowingly processing spammers' requests, and you're pretty much done.
Let me see if I understand this idea well enough to hear one side of the phone call. ... I think AT&T dropped the connection.
Us: "Hi, Visa, it's us, and we're fighting spam. Please shut off these following merchants who sell via spam."
Us: "Why yes, we do believe you're correct in that they do $80,000,000.00 per year of business with you."
Us: "Yes, we know you take 3% of that money in interchange fees."
Us: "Well, no, we're not going to make up the $2,400,000.00 in lost revenue, we just want you to help us end spam."
Us: "Um, because you care about the problem of spam?"
Us: "Hello?"
Hmm
The idea is that you get someone else to shut them off for a different reason: bandwidth, inability to pay hosting provider, whatever.
However, retroworks' idea is likely to be too risky for a bank to try. If a bank "approves" an authorization, they are contractually taking on the obligation to pay. They can't lie about it, or they can be sued. Even by a spammer.
The problem I have is that a lot of what I like about Gibson's books is his writing. He uses analogies in clever ways: "The switch on Damien's Italian floor lamp feels alien: a different click, designed to hold back a different voltage, foreign British electricity. Mirror-world. The plugs on appliances are huge, triple-pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in America. Cars are reversed, left to right, inside; telephone handsets have a different weight, a different balance; the covers of paperbacks look like Australian money."
Once he's established the setting, the phrase "mirror-world" invokes it anywhere in the book. 230 pages later: "She follows Ngemi toward the nearest mirror-world trailer. It has a shallow, centrally peaked roof that reminds her of drawings of Noah's ark in books for children, and on its back a square, faded mirror-world license plate, "LOB" and four numerals."
He has this way of capturing the essence of a very big thing in a very few words. It's all stylistic writing, which does not translate to the screen.
That's pretty much true for all cyberpunk. As long as the author avoids anything technical, and focuses on the people, it holds up better. But as soon as he says "3MB of hot RAM chips", there's another fault line in the willing suspension of disbelief. Snow Crash did OK with some predictions: we still don't have Rat Things, and the neurally controlled prosthetic hands that are just coming into being sound like the inferior ones the Russian veterans wore in his story. I still want smart spokes. Gibson was not so good with the tech, but I like his writing better.
Hey, I actually bought the Johnny Mnemonic DVD, and in some way contributed to that success.
When Circuit City was going out of business, they had a heaping pile of unsold/unsellable DVDs in a large basket with a $1.00 EACH sign, I spotted Johnny Mnemonic and figured "I'd buy that for a dollar."
I got fair value out of that deal, unlike anyone who paid for full price tickets to see it.
That's the argument in TFA. "If there's demand, it will sell" and there's no pressing demand. USB 3.0 is fast enough for most peripherals. Thudderbolt is a crippled (non-optical) incompatible version of Light Peak, which WOULD have been a sweet, optical, backward plug compatible extension to USB.
All the video people who couldn't use USB 2.0 have no problems with USB 3.0, so much so that Firewire 800 is now effectively dead.
I think Apple simply wants to follow their previous pattern of providing proprietary interfaces to lock in more users. But they seem to have forgotten that their past successes were based entirely on their providing something useful to satisfy a need. We'll, so far they've created no new needs. There's no 3D video editing hardware, no 10GB/sec crystalline storage units, no sensory nerve array inputs. Just expensive stuff that's incompatible with everyone's existing expensive stuff.
if they simply ignored Apple? If someone came around to shut them down, they'd say "Really? You think our app store is confusingly called an App Store? Go away and grow some common sense."
You may be the only one of us who hasn't made a "fool-killer". It's a 120V plug on one end connected to alligator clips on the other. Great for connecting ANYTHING to a power outlet, especially things that shouldn't be.
I like how "...and how patients can be treated." falls at the very end.
Treated...with a machete.