Movie theaters are the retailers for the movie studios' product. The studios won't make a movie unless they know they can sell it to the theaters.
In fact, studios generally *pre-sell* their product to the theaters. They go around to theater owners showing them pre-production clips and asking them to front a share of the production costs. If the studio can't raise enough cash from the theaters, they don't make the movie.
If theaters don't want to deal with digital projection, all they have to do is add a rider saying they will only invest in a movie if they get the finished product on film.
Part of the strength of the Club of Rome argument was that they did lots of runs with their simulator with lots of different parameters, and although the details varied, the model just about always predicted environmental catastrophy. The conclusion was that we were all in Big Trouble.
The simulator was a mainframe program when it was written in the 1970s, and only the High Priests could run it. Eventually, it was ported to PC, and anyone could play with it.
I read an article (Dr. Dobbs Journal?) a few years ago by someone who spent some time running the simulator with various assumptions. He found that the model was *very* sensitive to a single parameter--I think it was pollution per capita. If that parameter was set above certain value, then the model predicted environmental catastrophy, pretty much independently of everything else.
This led me to discount the predictive value of the model.
If
it takes three minutes for a response, it is not really HTTP any more," Box said.
The
problem...is that the intermediaries--that is, the companies that own the routers
and cables between the client and server--will not allow single transactions that take this
long.
Nonsense
Transactions comprise state, and the state is on the clients and the servers, not the routers.
Routers just move packets.
And cables...cables just carry electical fields.
A long, incisive, and--in its own way--funny essay by sci-fi author Neal Stephenson. Nominally about the OS wars, it has an interesting analysis of the way our culture has traded in text (books) for media (videos, movies, TV, music, theme parks, etc). It is a different take on many of the issues raised by Fahrenheit 451.
Now, I let them go through their speil.
It's sort of a random act of kindness thing: time spent talking to me is time they can't spend harassing my neighbors.
If everyone did this, it would raise their costs significantly.
I had a friend who bought old machines, mostly video, but sometimes pinball.
He had one that he was trying to fix; it had a field of (incandescent!) lights addressed by a row/column driver matrix. The driver circuits ran *real* hot--they scorched adjacent components.
He showed me the schematics, and I traced out the driver circuits. Turns out they were *supposed* to run hot. The problem is that to turn on a bulb, you had to turn on 2 transistors: a row driver to pull down to ground, and a column driver to pull up to +15V.
Turning on the row driver is easy: all you need is a couple of volts above ground to drive the base. Turning on the column driver is hard. You need a couple of volts *below* +15 to sink the base current, and then that current has to return all the way to ground, and it generates a lot of heat on the way down.
I'd seen essentially the same problem in the drivers for ultrasound transducers many years before.
As best I could tell, the reason this pinball machine shipped is that the drivers weren't quite hot enough to catch fire.
Up until 10 or 20 years ago, all computer programs were, so to speak, innocent. The execution of a computer program per se had no legal, ethical, or moral consequences.
Now we have software patents, and computer crime laws, and the DMCA, and (shudder) the SSSCA, all making it a crime to execute one or another kind of program.
People who used computers before around 1990 typically regard these laws as unnecessary, unnatural, and offensive to their own rights.
most everyone...seems to agree that the only reason you got in trouble...was because of your inability...to communicate properly...with the admins within Intel.
If this is true, there there are serious problems with the law in Oregon. Poor communication shouldn't be a felony offense.
I wanted to buy the Roguelet's ABC for my kids, and was disappointed to discover that not only was it never printed as a book, but only a few letters of the alphabet were ever written.
Maybe completing the alphabet could become a collaborative literary project. SourceForge, anyone?
T:
One big monster, he called TROLL.
He don't rock, and he don't roll;
Drink no wine, and smoke no stogies.
He just Love To Eat Them Roguies.
-- The Roguelet's ABC
FCC regs used to prohibit computer devices (like modems and answering machines) from emiting sound for (IIRC) 2 seconds after picking up an incoming call.
This was to prevent the device from interfering with call setup/billing info, which used to be sent in-band (blue boxing).
Those regs were in force as of ca. 1983. I don't know if they were ever repealed.
The federal law mandating lo-flow tiolets did the same thing. When it was first passed, no one noticed: their toilets kept flushing.
But after that, every time someone built a house, our added a bathroom, or just needed to replace a toilet, they discovered that the kind of tiolet that had worked for the last 100 years was no longer available: all they could buy was the lo-flo kind.
And one by one, all across America, the tiolets stopped flushing, and the people used plungers to unclog them.
The difference is that under the SSSCA, use of a plunger will be a felony.
The British used to quarter their soldiers in colonists homes, to make sure that the colonists did not do anything that the King of England did not approve of.
The Soviet Union used to post guards at all copying machines, to make sure that its citizens did not copy anything that the Communisty party did not approve of.
The U.S. government now proposes to install software in all computers, to make sure that its citizens do not make any copies that large corporations do not approve of.
The last time the federal government got seriously involved in software development, it tried to write an air-traffic control system.
The project was written off as a dead loss after spending something like 5 years and $9B (Maybe someone can supply the exact figures; too many zeros makes me dizzy...)
Do they think that they can do any better designing OS APIs and security systems?
It seems like there is a conceptual problem in writing standards for
patented technology.
If a technology is truly deserving of a patent, then we shouldn't need
standards for its use: the patent will instruct us in the use of the
technology, and there won't be any alternatives.
If there are implementation details that need be specified, then the
patent holder--as both the owner and the beneficiary of the
patent--should specify them, as Phillips did for the audio cassette
format, and Sony did for the CD format.
If a technology isn't truly innovative; if it shouldn't have been
patented in the first place, but it was, because, well, because the
U.S. patent system is broken, then there will be other ways to solve
the problem. In this case, we need a standard to specify which of the
available alternatives we will use. Obviously, we should choose an
alternative which is not patented.
In short, a standards body should regard patents as damage, and route
around them.
It isn't clear what wristslap, errr, remedy the Justice Department will
seek instead.
Here's a suggestion: require Microsoft to publish all their license agreements, including the ones that prohibit OEMs from shipping PCs that dual-boot Windows and another OS.
NPR had Salman Rushdie on The Connection today. A caller asked why some of his novels were, or were not, set in India. After circling around the question a bit, Rushdie said
In the end, you write the book that grabs
you by the throat and demands to be written.
That's more or less how I feel about writing open source software.
Slashdot Mirror
Movie theaters are the retailers for the movie studios' product. The studios won't make a movie unless they know they can sell it to the theaters.
In fact, studios generally *pre-sell* their product to the theaters. They go around to theater owners showing them pre-production clips and asking them to front a share of the production costs. If the studio can't raise enough cash from the theaters, they don't make the movie.
If theaters don't want to deal with digital projection, all they have to do is add a rider saying they will only invest in a movie if they get the finished product on film.
A tale of unrequited love
Part of the strength of the Club of Rome argument was that they did lots of runs with their simulator with lots of different parameters, and although the details varied, the model just about always predicted environmental catastrophy. The conclusion was that we were all in Big Trouble.
The simulator was a mainframe program when it was written in the 1970s, and only the High Priests could run it. Eventually, it was ported to PC, and anyone could play with it.
I read an article (Dr. Dobbs Journal?) a few years ago by someone who spent some time running the simulator with various assumptions. He found that the model was *very* sensitive to a single parameter--I think it was pollution per capita. If that parameter was set above certain value, then the model predicted environmental catastrophy, pretty much independently of everything else.
This led me to discount the predictive value of the model.
- SWM
I ran Life on a teletype back in, um, .
It was all we had...
- SWM
The gov't still gets its cut.
It gets it from all the companies that have higher profits because they aren't paying the Microsoft tax.
The problem...is that the intermediaries--that is, the companies that own the routers and cables between the client and server--will not allow single transactions that take this long.
Nonsense
Transactions comprise state, and the state is on the clients and the servers, not the routers.
Routers just move packets.
And cables...cables just carry electical fields.
A long, incisive, and--in its own way--funny essay by sci-fi author Neal Stephenson. Nominally about the OS wars, it has an interesting analysis of the way our culture has traded in text (books) for media (videos, movies, TV, music, theme parks, etc). It is a different take on many of the issues raised by Fahrenheit 451.
You can get a taste of it from this cookie file.
I used to hang up on telemarketers immediately.
Now, I let them go through their speil.
It's sort of a random act of kindness thing: time spent talking to me is time they can't spend harassing my neighbors.
If everyone did this, it would raise their costs significantly.
I had a friend who bought old machines, mostly video, but sometimes pinball.
He had one that he was trying to fix; it had a field of (incandescent!) lights addressed by a row/column driver matrix. The driver circuits ran *real* hot--they scorched adjacent components.
He showed me the schematics, and I traced out the driver circuits. Turns out they were *supposed* to run hot. The problem is that to turn on a bulb, you had to turn on 2 transistors: a row driver to pull down to ground, and a column driver to pull up to +15V.
Turning on the row driver is easy: all you need is a couple of volts above ground to drive the base. Turning on the column driver is hard. You need a couple of volts *below* +15 to sink the base current, and then that current has to return all the way to ground, and it generates a lot of heat on the way down.
I'd seen essentially the same problem in the drivers for ultrasound transducers many years before.
As best I could tell, the reason this pinball machine shipped is that the drivers weren't quite hot enough to catch fire.
Up until 10 or 20 years ago, all computer programs were, so to speak, innocent. The execution of a computer program per se had no legal, ethical, or moral consequences.
Now we have software patents, and computer crime laws, and the DMCA, and (shudder) the SSSCA, all making it a crime to execute one or another kind of program.
People who used computers before around 1990 typically regard these laws as unnecessary, unnatural, and offensive to their own rights.
If this is true, there there are serious problems with the law in Oregon. Poor communication shouldn't be a felony offense.
So it appears that the position of the judge is that Felton received bad legal advice from Princeton University's lawyers.
First guess is all the right braces.
Strip them out and try posting again.
Your rebuttal deserves a wide audience.
I wanted to buy the Roguelet's ABC for my kids, and was disappointed to discover that not only was it never printed as a book, but only a few letters of the alphabet were ever written.
Maybe completing the alphabet could become a collaborative literary project. SourceForge, anyone?
T:
One big monster, he called TROLL.
He don't rock, and he don't roll;
Drink no wine, and smoke no stogies.
He just Love To Eat Them Roguies.
-- The Roguelet's ABC
The review quotes up to $150 for a used copy, but that's probably for a hard cover in good condition.
My wife told the dealer she didn't care about condition, and got a dog-eared paperback copy for something like $30 or $50.
OTOH, the slashdot effect could drive prices considerably higher.
FCC regs used to prohibit computer devices (like modems and answering machines) from emiting sound for (IIRC) 2 seconds after picking up an incoming call.
This was to prevent the device from interfering with call setup/billing info, which used to be sent in-band (blue boxing).
Those regs were in force as of ca. 1983. I don't know if they were ever repealed.
- SWM
The SSSCA grandfathers existing equipment.
The federal law mandating lo-flow tiolets did the same thing. When it was first passed, no one noticed: their toilets kept flushing.
But after that, every time someone built a house, our added a bathroom, or just needed to replace a toilet, they discovered that the kind of tiolet that had worked for the last 100 years was no longer available: all they could buy was the lo-flo kind.
And one by one, all across America, the tiolets stopped flushing, and the people used plungers to unclog them.
The difference is that under the SSSCA, use of a plunger will be a felony.
The British used to quarter their soldiers in colonists homes, to make sure that the colonists did not do anything that the King of England did not approve of.
The Soviet Union used to post guards at all copying machines, to make sure that its citizens did not copy anything that the Communisty party did not approve of.
The U.S. government now proposes to install software in all computers, to make sure that its citizens do not make any copies that large corporations do not approve of.
The last time the federal government got seriously involved in software development, it tried to write an air-traffic control system.
The project was written off as a dead loss after spending something like 5 years and $9B (Maybe someone can supply the exact figures; too many zeros makes me dizzy...)
Do they think that they can do any better designing OS APIs and security systems?
- SWM
If a technology is truly deserving of a patent, then we shouldn't need standards for its use: the patent will instruct us in the use of the technology, and there won't be any alternatives.
If there are implementation details that need be specified, then the patent holder--as both the owner and the beneficiary of the patent--should specify them, as Phillips did for the audio cassette format, and Sony did for the CD format.
If a technology isn't truly innovative; if it shouldn't have been patented in the first place, but it was, because, well, because the U.S. patent system is broken, then there will be other ways to solve the problem. In this case, we need a standard to specify which of the available alternatives we will use. Obviously, we should choose an alternative which is not patented.
In short, a standards body should regard patents as damage, and route around them.
- SWM
I think he means the death toll from the attack on the WTC.
Here's a suggestion: require Microsoft to publish all their license agreements, including the ones that prohibit OEMs from shipping PCs that dual-boot Windows and another OS.
NPR had Salman Rushdie on The Connection today. A caller asked why some of his novels were, or were not, set in India. After circling around the question a bit, Rushdie said
In the end, you write the book that grabs
you by the throat and demands to be written.
That's more or less how I feel about writing open source software.
Long subroutines are run-on sentences discusses one aspect of this problem.
- one of my professors, ca 1983