Am I the only one who thinks that a shot-by-shot remake of a movie is far from ingenious? Hell, when Gus Van Sant did it with Psycho, he was criticized for making it too identical. It's cool that they did it, and were able to manage it on what we must assume is a fairly small budget, but I think the hype over this thing is getting way out of hand.
Whoa now, I'm not arguing against Linux, I'm pointing out a part of the cost that people sometimes leave out. Personally, I suspect that hiring a small development team to maintain/develop alongside the OSS developers would be more cost effective--in the long run. But in the immediate-term, it may look more cost effective to go with Microsoft.
A service contract with Microsoft doesn't usually include accountability.
And that doesn't necessarily preclude a successful lawsuit, should the government choose to persue it. If a root exploit were discovered and widely used, and it affected government servers, and Microsoft chose not to do anything about it, I suspect they would be sued and the US would win.
True, the core Linux maintainers could die or quit at any time. So could a software company drop a given application or operating system.
But not for the duration of the service contract or, again, there would be repercussions. While this is part of the way Microsoft controls the market, it is also a guarantee of service. If the OSS developer drops the project, there is no guarantee that anyone will pick it back up. It may be likely, but that's not good enough for many officials. Without something in writing, there's no real security in your purchase/training.
Skipping around: And yes, we had a service contract.
Sounds like your legal department didn't do their job. Either the contract had some holes or PeopleSoft should have had their asses sued off.
What's the value of having assurance that there will be bugfixes and updates? With Microsoft, and under contract, you know that's going to happen. It may not happen as quickly as with open source software, but under a service agreement, the government has someone to sue should "service" not be provided.
OSS? Linus and software maintainers could stop development at any moment, and a contract with Redhat isn't going to change that. The government would have no contract with Linus to continue development, no contract with the KDE developers to continue development, etc. Sure, they could hire someone to track down and fix bugs, but this is a cost that's almost never included in OSS advocate estimates.
Don't get me wrong. I'm all for laws and policies that require OSS to be considered when when the time comes to renew contracts/upgrade/whatever. But there are hidden costs that you just don't always see.
Almost all "service" fees in a college are paid by the entire student body. The reason is that laws require that these institutions show where every dollar that a student pays is going. Tuitition is $8000 per student per semester (for example), no matter what services the student uses. But they have to break it down so the student can see exactly where his dollar is going.
This was one of the most frequent questions asked at orientation at my old school. Every year, without fail, people would ask why they had to pay a lab access fee if they were going to have their own computer in their dorm room, wanted to know if they could not pay an internet fee and just use dial up from an external source, etc. They never understood that everyone paid these fees simply as part of tuition, and that meant the services were available for the student to take advantage of, whether they wanted to or not.
And none of those except maybe the Decoy/Valk are effective to any degree in Nightmare or Hell. Don't forget you have to get TO your body, with all your scare techniques, which can sometimes mean travelling a fair distance from a waypoint.
And then there's the little tidbit that says, "You can no longer equip items if you have a corpse." making corpse retrieval all but impossible for any class that's not a Sorceress. Even for her it will be difficult. Sure, it solves a bug in the game, but geez, talk about a serious handicap....
Actually, the reason KaZaA hasn't taken the fall is that the paper trail is extremely difficult to follow. Their servers are housed in a different country than the corporation, which is in a different country than the board, which is in....
You get the picture? Who do you sue? Even if you get an injunction in Austrailia against Sharman, the servers are elsewhere.
in a nutshell, i like gentoo, i use gentoo, i wouldn't really think of using anything else, but i need to keep window around for whem my system gets fubarred from a simple upgrade. re-installing a system including kde/xfree takes literally days.
That's why I burned a copy of my initial filesystem to a CD. Frequent backups aren't a bad idea either.
Can't get to the site...does it not use a standard 2.5" hard drive? If so, it should be trivial to replace.
Re:You have no idea what you are talking about
on
AAC vs. OGG vs. MP3
·
· Score: 1
Shouldn't even bother feeding the troll, but oh well....
If we're talking about compression, we're talking about taking data removing redundancy to make the file smaller. There are two types of compression: lossy and lossless. Lossy means that the original data cannot be recovered perfectly. There will be some amount of lost data. The hope is that the data will be imperceptible. Lossless means that the original data can be recovered perfectly. The terms lossy and lossless can only apply to the compression scheme, which has an input and an output. Where the input comes from doesn't matter. You could have lossy compressed information 1000 times, but on that 1001th time, if you use lossless compression, you'd better be able to recreate the input of that 1001th time (which happens to be the output of the 1000th time).
So lossless compression/is/ possible, but you will only get results as good as your source, which, in the case of a CD, is digitally sampled and therefore lossy to a very small extent. When you losslessly compress a CD, you expect to get the exact same data back when you decompress it, but no one thinks that you should get back the original analog data.
a black pixel rarely follows a white pixel in a photograph, 300hz at 100% is rarely followed by 301hz at 0%
But that doesn't mean that it/can't/ happen. Unless something in the file or data format actually requires that these rules be adhered to, you can't guarantee that they will be adhered to.
What did the grand-parent post say? Guarantees 8:1 compression losslessly? That's pretty amazing...I have ripped wav file of a song. It's 30 megs. At the/guaranteed/ 8:1 compression ratio, that means I can losslessly compress this file to 3.75 megs maximum. That's only slightly larger than the 128kbps mp3. Sorry, I don't buy it.
As has been pointed out, you can filter out news stories about the star wars prequels. Not a bad idea if you're trying to avoid spoilers. Now that I know, I can stop bitching when they post that Anakin goes over to the dark side.
There are lots of people intentionally avoiding all information about Star Wars. It's not particularly hard to do for movie trailers and television spots, especially if you don't see that many movies to begin with. The first movie that will have the trailer is always highly publicized and you can avoid it fairly easily. After that, you've had warning and can avoid future trailers. For TV, it's a matter of turning it off while the commercial is on. But when you aren't expecting it and slashdot posts a spoiler as a headline (again), then it's kind of hard to avoid it. Sure, it's a relatively minor thing, but the editors have taken a lot of flak over the past year or so over posting spoilers in headlines. You'd think they'd learn, especially with something as big as this that a lot of people are intentionally avoiding.
WHY can't the editors realize that there are people who don't want these spoilers, even seemingly minor ones like this? It's extremely inconsiderate. Presumably they don't want people to stop reading their site, right?
The first step you should take is contacting the seller and explaining the situation. He may not even realize that he's violating the terms of the license. Don't make the mistake that so many corporations do of thinking/hitting with your lawyers first.
If he refuses change the auctions, contact Ebay. Forward them copies of the emails you and he have exchanged and explain the situation. Let them handle it.
Licenses are there to protect our works. It's not bad juju to go after violators, it's just bad juju to abuse the law and licenses, and (in my opinion) to not even try to settle the issue without lawyers.
I've already discovered this with comic books turned into movies. Finding synopses of the comic book X-Men is nigh impossible. Finding syopses of the movies is much, much easier. Damn near every site online about X-Men, Spiderman, The Hulk, Batman, etc. deal with the movies, and sifting through the cruft is not easy. And that's just comic books. Other topics can be just as hard to find, and this doesn't even touch upon fake search results that only turn up porn or worse, a blank page (happens frequently).
Searching for MORE stuff isn't going to help. Searching better is the key. Google goes a long way towards this, but even it has the same problems of finding too much crud.
Here's the problem. A lot (and I mean a lot) of money went into researching the type of music people like. The idea being you want to play what people like so that they'll listen to the station and hear the commercials. Every song that differs too far from this norm is another hundred people who are just gonna change the station or pop in a CD when that song comes on. Diversity on a radio station is a bad thing, because it means losing viewers when something they don't like comes on.
So they start churning out the same type of music. The artists all start running together, sounding alike. Maybe CD sales are in a decline because all the music sounds the same? Everyone's had their flil.
That's one of my aversions to TiVo. Last I checked (admittedly over a year ago) the unit was virtually worthless without a subscription. I remember reading that you could record 30 minutes at a time, on one touch, and not schedule recordings (even manually). So if TiVo were to go out of business, I'm left with a hunk of junk.
Some games can take advantage of progressive scan, too. Although I think it's unlikely that any game will be released that requires it, there is a quality difference and that could be a motivation.
That said, buying a new PS2 would not be worth the quality difference, so they are probably targetting people who don't yet have a PS2.. "Look at all these nifty new features, and for barely any price difference!"
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one who thinks that a shot-by-shot remake of a movie is far from ingenious? Hell, when Gus Van Sant did it with Psycho, he was criticized for making it too identical. It's cool that they did it, and were able to manage it on what we must assume is a fairly small budget, but I think the hype over this thing is getting way out of hand.
Whoa now, I'm not arguing against Linux, I'm pointing out a part of the cost that people sometimes leave out. Personally, I suspect that hiring a small development team to maintain/develop alongside the OSS developers would be more cost effective--in the long run. But in the immediate-term, it may look more cost effective to go with Microsoft.
A service contract with Microsoft doesn't usually include accountability.
And that doesn't necessarily preclude a successful lawsuit, should the government choose to persue it. If a root exploit were discovered and widely used, and it affected government servers, and Microsoft chose not to do anything about it, I suspect they would be sued and the US would win.
True, the core Linux maintainers could die or quit at any time. So could a software company drop a given application or operating system.
But not for the duration of the service contract or, again, there would be repercussions. While this is part of the way Microsoft controls the market, it is also a guarantee of service. If the OSS developer drops the project, there is no guarantee that anyone will pick it back up. It may be likely, but that's not good enough for many officials. Without something in writing, there's no real security in your purchase/training.
Skipping around:
And yes, we had a service contract.
Sounds like your legal department didn't do their job. Either the contract had some holes or PeopleSoft should have had their asses sued off.
What's the value of having assurance that there will be bugfixes and updates? With Microsoft, and under contract, you know that's going to happen. It may not happen as quickly as with open source software, but under a service agreement, the government has someone to sue should "service" not be provided.
OSS? Linus and software maintainers could stop development at any moment, and a contract with Redhat isn't going to change that. The government would have no contract with Linus to continue development, no contract with the KDE developers to continue development, etc. Sure, they could hire someone to track down and fix bugs, but this is a cost that's almost never included in OSS advocate estimates.
Don't get me wrong. I'm all for laws and policies that require OSS to be considered when when the time comes to renew contracts/upgrade/whatever. But there are hidden costs that you just don't always see.
Almost all "service" fees in a college are paid by the entire student body. The reason is that laws require that these institutions show where every dollar that a student pays is going. Tuitition is $8000 per student per semester (for example), no matter what services the student uses. But they have to break it down so the student can see exactly where his dollar is going.
This was one of the most frequent questions asked at orientation at my old school. Every year, without fail, people would ask why they had to pay a lab access fee if they were going to have their own computer in their dorm room, wanted to know if they could not pay an internet fee and just use dial up from an external source, etc. They never understood that everyone paid these fees simply as part of tuition, and that meant the services were available for the student to take advantage of, whether they wanted to or not.
How much higher quality are you going to get than tape? Radio is pretty low as it is.
And none of those except maybe the Decoy/Valk are effective to any degree in Nightmare or Hell. Don't forget you have to get TO your body, with all your scare techniques, which can sometimes mean travelling a fair distance from a waypoint.
And then there's the little tidbit that says, "You can no longer equip items if you have a corpse." making corpse retrieval all but impossible for any class that's not a Sorceress. Even for her it will be difficult. Sure, it solves a bug in the game, but geez, talk about a serious handicap....
Because "crusade" referred to a religious war (in this case, Christians), not "movie in a franchise".
Actually, the reason KaZaA hasn't taken the fall is that the paper trail is extremely difficult to follow. Their servers are housed in a different country than the corporation, which is in a different country than the board, which is in....
You get the picture? Who do you sue? Even if you get an injunction in Austrailia against Sharman, the servers are elsewhere.
in a nutshell, i like gentoo, i use gentoo, i wouldn't really think of using anything else, but i need to keep window around for whem my system gets fubarred from a simple upgrade. re-installing a system including kde/xfree takes literally days.
That's why I burned a copy of my initial filesystem to a CD. Frequent backups aren't a bad idea either.
Can't get to the site...does it not use a standard 2.5" hard drive? If so, it should be trivial to replace.
Shouldn't even bother feeding the troll, but oh well....
/is/ possible, but you will only get results as good as your source, which, in the case of a CD, is digitally sampled and therefore lossy to a very small extent. When you losslessly compress a CD, you expect to get the exact same data back when you decompress it, but no one thinks that you should get back the original analog data.
If we're talking about compression, we're talking about taking data removing redundancy to make the file smaller. There are two types of compression: lossy and lossless. Lossy means that the original data cannot be recovered perfectly. There will be some amount of lost data. The hope is that the data will be imperceptible. Lossless means that the original data can be recovered perfectly. The terms lossy and lossless can only apply to the compression scheme, which has an input and an output. Where the input comes from doesn't matter. You could have lossy compressed information 1000 times, but on that 1001th time, if you use lossless compression, you'd better be able to recreate the input of that 1001th time (which happens to be the output of the 1000th time).
So lossless compression
a black pixel rarely follows a white pixel in a photograph, 300hz at 100% is rarely followed by 301hz at 0%
/can't/ happen. Unless something in the file or data format actually requires that these rules be adhered to, you can't guarantee that they will be adhered to.
/guaranteed/ 8:1 compression ratio, that means I can losslessly compress this file to 3.75 megs maximum. That's only slightly larger than the 128kbps mp3. Sorry, I don't buy it.
But that doesn't mean that it
What did the grand-parent post say? Guarantees 8:1 compression losslessly? That's pretty amazing...I have ripped wav file of a song. It's 30 megs. At the
But you don't get to pick and choose if you buy the CD. You have to take any crap that goes along with anything good.
Why do you say that? If Lucas himself came out and gave the entire plot of the movie, that would be a spoiler, even if it was "official".
As has been pointed out, you can filter out news stories about the star wars prequels. Not a bad idea if you're trying to avoid spoilers. Now that I know, I can stop bitching when they post that Anakin goes over to the dark side.
There are lots of people intentionally avoiding all information about Star Wars. It's not particularly hard to do for movie trailers and television spots, especially if you don't see that many movies to begin with. The first movie that will have the trailer is always highly publicized and you can avoid it fairly easily. After that, you've had warning and can avoid future trailers. For TV, it's a matter of turning it off while the commercial is on. But when you aren't expecting it and slashdot posts a spoiler as a headline (again), then it's kind of hard to avoid it.
Sure, it's a relatively minor thing, but the editors have taken a lot of flak over the past year or so over posting spoilers in headlines. You'd think they'd learn, especially with something as big as this that a lot of people are intentionally avoiding.
WHY can't the editors realize that there are people who don't want these spoilers, even seemingly minor ones like this?
It's extremely inconsiderate. Presumably they don't want people to stop reading their site, right?
The first step you should take is contacting the seller and explaining the situation. He may not even realize that he's violating the terms of the license. Don't make the mistake that so many corporations do of thinking/hitting with your lawyers first.
If he refuses change the auctions, contact Ebay. Forward them copies of the emails you and he have exchanged and explain the situation. Let them handle it.
Licenses are there to protect our works. It's not bad juju to go after violators, it's just bad juju to abuse the law and licenses, and (in my opinion) to not even try to settle the issue without lawyers.
The 13th Floor was actually inspired by Simulacron-3 by Daniel Galouye. Published 1964. Probably predates whatever game/games you were thinking of.
...as the web gets larger and more cluttered.
I've already discovered this with comic books turned into movies. Finding synopses of the comic book X-Men is nigh impossible. Finding syopses of the movie s is much, much easier. Damn near every site online about X-Men, Spiderman, The Hulk, Batman, etc. deal with the movies, and sifting through the cruft is not easy. And that's just comic books. Other topics can be just as hard to find, and this doesn't even touch upon fake search results that only turn up porn or worse, a blank page (happens frequently).
Searching for MORE stuff isn't going to help. Searching better is the key. Google goes a long way towards this, but even it has the same problems of finding too much crud.
Here's the problem. A lot (and I mean a lot) of money went into researching the type of music people like. The idea being you want to play what people like so that they'll listen to the station and hear the commercials. Every song that differs too far from this norm is another hundred people who are just gonna change the station or pop in a CD when that song comes on. Diversity on a radio station is a bad thing, because it means losing viewers when something they don't like comes on.
So they start churning out the same type of music. The artists all start running together, sounding alike. Maybe CD sales are in a decline because all the music sounds the same? Everyone's had their flil.
That's one of my aversions to TiVo. Last I checked (admittedly over a year ago) the unit was virtually worthless without a subscription. I remember reading that you could record 30 minutes at a time, on one touch, and not schedule recordings (even manually). So if TiVo were to go out of business, I'm left with a hunk of junk.
Some games can take advantage of progressive scan, too. Although I think it's unlikely that any game will be released that requires it, there is a quality difference and that could be a motivation.
That said, buying a new PS2 would not be worth the quality difference, so they are probably targetting people who don't yet have a PS2.. "Look at all these nifty new features, and for barely any price difference!"