You're not supposed to buy it. It's like VHS now. They come out with most movies in a rental window. The tape costs $80, but the only people who buy it are places like Blockbuster (actually, not even them; they have special deals, but you get the point).
Then, in most cases, they come out with the video for $19 a few months later, and people buy them. But as things are now, the Blockbusters of the world get their DVDs for $19 and rent them out, depriving the studios of the money they previously got by selling "rental copies" for $80.
So not great, but it doesn't mean that they'll ALWAYS be at $80.
Wow, I can't believe it. This guy read my mind. All summer I've been going around with the "Fizgig for Anakin Campaign" (using my real name, of course). Besides the true stuff such as actually being 19, blonde, tall, pretty smart in my own right, not all that ugly (my momma says so!), and an actor (college theater is acting too!), I have the following other qualifications:
1. I have seen all four Star Wars movies. (Took me a while to get around to Empire) 2. I am easily swayed to the dark side. It happens all the time. 3. I can choke people with my mind. Ok, not really, but I can tickle their throats . . . did you feel that? I bet you did.
Trust me, George, the Force is strong in this one. Where do I sign up?
I bought a subscription to Wired after reading some nice articles linked from Slashdot. WOW, that's a lot of ads! I was very disappointed. If I have to search for the text, I throw it away.
Also, did you notice that on the webpage linked to in this story, it's actualy quite difficult to find the ads! What a PLEASANT surprise!
I know, but I've been on the glx-dev mailing list since it was created, and when ATI released the specs to their chipsets about 3 weeks ago, The Great Carmack said, "When we're done with Matrox, let's do this." And lo, they agreed and it was good.
only 3 chipsets that have OpenGL support in hardware (Nvidia, 3Dfx, and Matrox)
But a 4th, ATI, will be supported next (openly, at that). With those 4 your have basically 75% of the graphics card market anyway, don't you? You're missing Intel, Number9, and Permidia, but those are all pretty small now. I guess S3 is the only thing left to worry about.
Don't get me wrong. I didn't dislike the movie. I thought it was good, but I question a lot of the choices made, mostly the weirding modules one. I don't question the voice-over decision. I don't see how you could make the film without those. But the weirding modules, even if they were a small part of the book, did not need to be such a big deal in the movie. In the book, the Fremen are amazing warriors and fight basically hand-to-hand. But presumably the script-writer did not feel that this was believable, and so the weirding modules became the major catalyst of victory for the Fremen. This was understandably confusing for me reading the book later.
Do you happen to know where the weirding modules were mentioned? I know they mentioned "the weirding way" quite often, since that was how they were all such great warriors. But I don't remember anything about sonic weapons in the book.
The greatest failing of the movie, in mine honest opinion, was that it attempted to achieve its atmosphere through whiz-bang special effects instead of through good storytelling.
Two words: Weirding Modules
I guess it was inconceivable that the Fremen were such good warriors on their own, so they needed those weird things. Unfortunately, I saw the movie first and was very much confused reading the books till I figured out those weren't in there.
But what if the teacher says the exact same thing he writes in his textbook and the student writes that down and it gets published? Is it now ok to reproduce that because it was spoken aloud?
Some people have the wrong impression about what notes really are and what they can be used for. True, you can use the IDEAS you learn in a class and publish them to your heart's content, because ideas are not copyrighted. This mean that if I take CS101 from Prof. Smith, I can use the ideas he teches me and give them to others however I want. What I cannot use are the specific ways that Prof. Smith tought me the things. For instance, if Prof. Smith has a wonderful diagram which explains what recursion means, that diagram can have a copyright, which means I can't draw my own rendition of that diagram and then sell it. And if he has a really good original description or definition, and the student writes down the bulk of it verbatim and that gets published, that's also a copyright violation. I think everyone who's gone to college or ever had a teacher period knows that the words of a teacher who can explain something in a creative way are far more valuable than a teacher who just gives you facts. Facts are not copyrightable, nor are they particular to a teacher. Interpretations are.
I know these online notes places require that the students not copy down pictures the teacher draws or take notes verbatim, but do you think anyone actually does that? Teachers who work hard on coming up with good lectures should be rewarded with the right to determine who can hear them. In some cases, they want to publish their notes on the web; in some cases not. Is that so wrong?
If this File System is a good thing and can be integrated with *BSD
It can't. It specifically says in the readme that you can't use it with a kernel that's not GPL'd without the authors' permission. That would generally be the case with GPL'd code anway, though (you don't link gcc with the FreeBSD kernel, so it's ok; but you can't take video4linux, which is GPL'd and in the kernel, and include it in the FreeBSD kernel).
ReiserFS looks like it has a similar problem. It can't be mounted *at all*, not even read-only, if it was not cleanly unmounted (see the FAQ). So it can't be used for a root partition either.
That has to be old, doesn't it? I mean, what even the point of a JFS if it's going to be like that?!
This is now a "fact". I don't think this is true in the slightest. I don't think MS's customers would put up with a significant rise in it's prices.
That's different from what the judge said. He said "a price for Windows substantially above that which could be charged in a competitive market", which they are charging. The cost of computers have gone done (in nominal terms) about 50% in the last 2 years, yet the cost of Windows stay the same. In a competive market, the price would go down (ok, it's possible it would go up because of that whole complimentary product thing, but that's negligible compared to this). It is a great enigma why the price stays the same. But MS says "No. We're not budging". So even though the price hasn't gone up, it is an example of what Judge Jackson is talking about.
Someone on the livid-dev mailing list pointed out that he told the author this but he said he had already decided his slant on the story and wouldn't change it. Alax Cox then responded that that was sadly typical of Wired "reporters".
I admit it would have been better if they did this with the help of teh authors (or helped the authors from the get-go), but it's not as bad as you make it sound. They're not really claiming credit for it. The closest thing I've seen to an official announcement by Creative was the post of the creative.linux newsgroup by an employee, in which he acknowledged who had written the code and said they hadn't. If you look at opensource.creative.com you can't find a direct link to the Dxr2 stuff anyway.
I admit they've been doing things wrong for a while, and they could have done this slightly better, but it's not like what they're doing hurts anybody.
by way of MP3's and digital movies, the people have been given the personal technology to avoid paying for things that are overpriced
You misunderstand. The way these help liberate people is because they can be their own distributors, not so you can distribute their wares without their permission. Big difference.
And there are no monopolies on music and movie distrubution. Oligopolies maybe, but the barriers to entry aren't that great. Otherwise there wouldn't be any independent films or artists. But there are---hence no monopolies. You need to sit down with an econ textbook for a few hours and come back when you're done. I think a lot of this stuff would be a lot clearer. Or have you actually used this argument to convince a rational, educated adult of your viewpoint who didn't already agree with you?
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$80 is just gouging.
You're not supposed to buy it. It's like VHS now. They come out with most movies in a rental window. The tape costs $80, but the only people who buy it are places like Blockbuster (actually, not even them; they have special deals, but you get the point).
Then, in most cases, they come out with the video for $19 a few months later, and people buy them. But as things are now, the Blockbusters of the world get their DVDs for $19 and rent them out, depriving the studios of the money they previously got by selling "rental copies" for $80.
So not great, but it doesn't mean that they'll ALWAYS be at $80.
Wow, I can't believe it. This guy read my mind. All summer I've been going around with the "Fizgig for Anakin Campaign" (using my real name, of course). Besides the true stuff such as actually being 19, blonde, tall, pretty smart in my own right, not all that ugly (my momma says so!), and an actor (college theater is acting too!), I have the following other qualifications:
1. I have seen all four Star Wars movies. (Took me a while to get around to Empire)
2. I am easily swayed to the dark side. It happens all the time.
3. I can choke people with my mind. Ok, not really, but I can tickle their throats . . . did you feel that? I bet you did.
Trust me, George, the Force is strong in this one. Where do I sign up?
I bought a subscription to Wired after reading some nice articles linked from Slashdot. WOW, that's a lot of ads! I was very disappointed. If I have to search for the text, I throw it away.
Also, did you notice that on the webpage linked to in this story, it's actualy quite difficult to find the ads! What a PLEASANT surprise!
I know, but I've been on the glx-dev mailing list since it was created, and when ATI released the specs to their chipsets about 3 weeks ago, The Great Carmack said, "When we're done with Matrox, let's do this." And lo, they agreed and it was good.
only 3 chipsets that have OpenGL support in hardware (Nvidia, 3Dfx, and Matrox)
But a 4th, ATI, will be supported next (openly, at that). With those 4 your have basically 75% of the graphics card market anyway, don't you? You're missing Intel, Number9, and Permidia, but those are all pretty small now. I guess S3 is the only thing left to worry about.
Don't get me wrong. I didn't dislike the movie. I thought it was good, but I question a lot of the choices made, mostly the weirding modules one. I don't question the voice-over decision. I don't see how you could make the film without those. But the weirding modules, even if they were a small part of the book, did not need to be such a big deal in the movie. In the book, the Fremen are amazing warriors and fight basically hand-to-hand. But presumably the script-writer did not feel that this was believable, and so the weirding modules became the major catalyst of victory for the Fremen. This was understandably confusing for me reading the book later.
Do you happen to know where the weirding modules were mentioned? I know they mentioned "the weirding way" quite often, since that was how they were all such great warriors. But I don't remember anything about sonic weapons in the book.
The greatest failing of the movie, in mine honest opinion, was that it attempted to achieve its atmosphere through whiz-bang special effects instead of through good storytelling.
Two words: Weirding Modules
I guess it was inconceivable that the Fremen were such good warriors on their own, so they needed those weird things. Unfortunately, I saw the movie first and was very much confused reading the books till I figured out those weren't in there.
And Tim gives away a major point in a book I was reading in the first paragraph! Ouch.
BTW: Has Transmeta gone public ?
No, that requires all sorts of public documents which go against being so secretive.
But isn't that Hawking Radiation you're talking about? Isn't that particle/anti-particle collision too, just a special form?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the only way to get 100% efficient energy production particle/anti-particle annihilation?
Because their contract w/ MS (which lets them be on the desktop of Windows when you install it) hasn't expired yet.
But what if the teacher says the exact same thing he writes in his textbook and the student writes that down and it gets published? Is it now ok to reproduce that because it was spoken aloud?
Some people have the wrong impression about what notes really are and what they can be used for. True, you can use the IDEAS you learn in a class and publish them to your heart's content, because ideas are not copyrighted. This mean that if I take CS101 from Prof. Smith, I can use the ideas he teches me and give them to others however I want. What I cannot use are the specific ways that Prof. Smith tought me the things. For instance, if Prof. Smith has a wonderful diagram which explains what recursion means, that diagram can have a copyright, which means I can't draw my own rendition of that diagram and then sell it. And if he has a really good original description or definition, and the student writes down the bulk of it verbatim and that gets published, that's also a copyright violation. I think everyone who's gone to college or ever had a teacher period knows that the words of a teacher who can explain something in a creative way are far more valuable than a teacher who just gives you facts. Facts are not copyrightable, nor are they particular to a teacher. Interpretations are.
I know these online notes places require that the students not copy down pictures the teacher draws or take notes verbatim, but do you think anyone actually does that? Teachers who work hard on coming up with good lectures should be rewarded with the right to determine who can hear them. In some cases, they want to publish their notes on the web; in some cases not. Is that so wrong?
I guess you're right. I was working under the pretty-valid assumption that the BSD people would rather die than license their kernel under the GPL.
On second thought, that had the smallest difference in the cited benchmarks, so it's a bad test. But nevermind.
Oh, that's true. I guess I didn't think of a filesystem as a system, but more as a bunch of .c files :)
Ok, some independent things:
/usr/local to new ext2 and reiserfs partitions on a brand new harddrive. First thing of note, from df:
/newdrive /ext2
I copied
/dev/hdb1 7823372 442980 7380392 6%
/dev/hdb2 5283091 410343 4599242 8%
Newdrive is the reiserfs one. They contain the same data, but the reiserfs one is 30MB bigger.
Now for some stuff.
Running find . -exec wc {} \; on an installation of StarOffice on the Reiserfs one gives:
9.94user 21.02system 0:53.46elapsed 57%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (177778major+32241minor)pagefaults 0swaps
On ext2:
9.78user 17.41system 0:50.85elapsed 53%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (205151major+32581minor)pagefaults 0swaps
Reiserfs loses. Just one data point, however. And I may have it set up wrong. For reference, the reiserfs has lower cylinder numbers.
If this File System is a good thing and can be integrated with *BSD
It can't. It specifically says in the readme that you can't use it with a kernel that's not GPL'd without the authors' permission. That would generally be the case with GPL'd code anway, though (you don't link gcc with the FreeBSD kernel, so it's ok; but you can't take video4linux, which is GPL'd and in the kernel, and include it in the FreeBSD kernel).
ReiserFS looks like it has a similar problem. It can't be mounted *at all*, not even read-only, if it was not cleanly unmounted (see the FAQ). So it can't be used for a root partition either.
That has to be old, doesn't it? I mean, what even the point of a JFS if it's going to be like that?!
This is now a "fact". I don't think this is true in the slightest. I don't think MS's customers would put up with a significant rise in it's prices.
That's different from what the judge said. He said "a price for Windows substantially above that which could be charged in a competitive market", which they are charging. The cost of computers have gone done (in nominal terms) about 50% in the last 2 years, yet the cost of Windows stay the same. In a competive market, the price would go down (ok, it's possible it would go up because of that whole complimentary product thing, but that's negligible compared to this). It is a great enigma why the price stays the same. But MS says "No. We're not budging". So even though the price hasn't gone up, it is an example of what Judge Jackson is talking about.
Someone on the livid-dev mailing list pointed out that he told the author this but he said he had already decided his slant on the story and wouldn't change it. Alax Cox then responded that that was sadly typical of Wired "reporters".
I admit it would have been better if they did this with the help of teh authors (or helped the authors from the get-go), but it's not as bad as you make it sound. They're not really claiming credit for it. The closest thing I've seen to an official announcement by Creative was the post of the creative.linux newsgroup by an employee, in which he acknowledged who had written the code and said they hadn't. If you look at opensource.creative.com you can't find a direct link to the Dxr2 stuff anyway.
I admit they've been doing things wrong for a while, and they could have done this slightly better, but it's not like what they're doing hurts anybody.
FYI, they succeeded. Copyrights now last 95 years.
by way of MP3's and digital movies, the people have been given the personal technology to avoid paying for things that are overpriced
You misunderstand. The way these help liberate people is because they can be their own distributors, not so you can distribute their wares without their permission. Big difference.
And there are no monopolies on music and movie distrubution. Oligopolies maybe, but the barriers to entry aren't that great. Otherwise there wouldn't be any independent films or artists. But there are---hence no monopolies. You need to sit down with an econ textbook for a few hours and come back when you're done. I think a lot of this stuff would be a lot clearer. Or have you actually used this argument to convince a rational, educated adult of your viewpoint who didn't already agree with you?