A typical movie production cost? $30 million on up, depending on whether or not you get a name brand actor with a big salary..
A typical CD production cost? I'd guestimate there are very few CD recordings that cost anything more than $1 million, and many independent CD's are done in basement studios with under 5 grand worth of gear. Anyone have any solid figures on this?
Not really, it's been almost a complete ice flow since the last ice age, except for two narrow and deep fjords that the Norse settled in for several generations before finally dying off (and/or giving up) from many different causes.
See pages 211, 212 from "Collapse" by Jared Diamond, a facinating read about the historic collapse of civilizations, and of the indicators for our current ones.
My favourite quote from the book is "What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?" - "did he shout - Jobs not Trees!"?
Actually, this is a great way to fight back, start referring to Balmer as the new McCarthy, paint them with that nasty brush, it's a PR nightmare if it catches hold. Emphasize the chair tossing, all the nasty things MS has done to the competitors over the years, what politician/lawmaker would want to be identified with the new McCarthy?
Say, Apple OSX has BSD unix under the hood, but I bet they don't go after apple with this smear campaign. Much easier scare small businesses out of using linux.
Oh, and Hah!, to the novell people who claim they didn't sell out.
At my first job out of tech school, I was given a user account on a Vax running unix, and we had a couple of Sun 2 workstations in the building (68012 processor, windowing system, mice, network, users and a root account).
Nobody there "ran as root" or admin, this was 1984. I'd guess that no serious unix users ever ran as root 24/7.
I mean, seriously, how far back in history have office admin staff been keeping the corporate records and personel files in locked cabinets to keep the regular employees out of the secured files? 1930's ?? Egyptian times?
This is the problem of a flamebait in a nutshell. People with moderate opinions are not motivated to join the discussion with all the immature rants from the fanatics - on both sides of an argument - cluttering things up.
It would be interesting if slashdot added more headroom in the rating system, from it's current 5 levels (which is a dynamic range of less than 18 db) to something more like 96 db. Adding emotion tags would be interesting too, so that moderators could tag the emotional feel of a comment (angry, happy, funny, ironic, etc) to further divide the flames from the other forms of discussion. Users could then set their preferences so that if they liked flame wars, they could wallow in angry discussions, while others could discuss their interests in other emotional (or not) threads..
True, real images have noise in them, but you don't need the camera adding extra noise that is not there in the "real" image. There are many types of noise from an image sensor. If the camera has a fixed pattern noise, then yes one could take a shot of a uniform white background, lower it's digital intensity until the lowest value is zero, and then subtract that noise pattern image from a digital photo, (at the same exposure duration as the noise pattern image) to clean out the pattern noise. Perhaps some of the higher end cameras already do this?
The other noise sources are typically random, therefore can not be subtracted out with the same method.
A good CCD (in a well designed camera) is typically lower noise than a CMOS sensor, but I'm talking scientific grade cameras. I have no idea if consumer grade CCD cameras are noticably better than the CMOS cameras..
No camera in the world will give you exactly the same level in each pixel, given even a high quality uniform light source, (which you need expensive gear to attain).
In the grand scheme of things, it's a pretty small evil, but a spade is a spade. I'm guessing the mainstream press won't even bother with this, in the rush to sell magazines with Vista reviews. Does anyone outside of slashdot even care? You would hope that the bad press generated by Microsoft "up to their usual standards as a corporate citizen" would not be worth the patent, but their actions speak volumes..
Interesting! I went hunting the web to back up my armchair theory - that the Yucatan impact CAUSED the India lava flows directly (think bullet thru a ripe tomato).. India is currently about opposite the Yucatan, but I'm not sure where the two sites were located 65 million years ago (How much continental drift?). BUT on the way to try to track down some semblance of support for my pet theory I found this article about a very large potential impact crater right beside India that hasn't yet made the impact database (it's not been decided either way):
But Chatterjee believes the geologic activity in India is best explained by a massive meteorite impact. For further proof, he points to alkaline igneous rock spires that are encased in the Deccan Traps. These spires are rich in iridium, but the Deccan lava did not contain iridium. How else, he asks, could the spires have formed if not by a nearby meteorite impact?
In addition, Chatterjee says there is an underwater mountain as high as Mount Everest within the Shiva crater. He says this structure has been dated to be 65 million years old, and he thinks it could be the central peak that is often seen within large impact craters.
Finally, Chatterjee says the crater contains shocked quartz, a key sign of impact. And because the K-T clay boundary layer in India is one meter thick - the thickest in the world - Chatterjee thinks a meteorite impact must have been close by.
There is also mention of another impact crater in the Ukraine that is also 65 million years old.
So it sounds like we had more than 1 big meteor event, potentially cooking the atmosphere instantly, the shock waves might have instantly caused massive cracks in the earth's crust, and/or the kinetic energy absorbed from these could possibly warm up the earth's core enough to cause massive lava flows, the resulting gasses and or dust released in all these events would have yanked the temperature up and down, in short, the Dinosaurs had it from many interrelated sources effectively at the "same time" give or take a half a million years.
When you look at a cross section of the planet and see how thin the crust is, (http://www.seismo.unr.edu/ftp/pub/louie/class/100 /interior.html) it's like an eggshell protecting us from hot liquid rock. Lucky for us the outside radiates heat away fast enough to keep the crust from melting..(!?)
My question is, say the crust is 50 kilometers (30 miles) thick (on average?) http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/interior/ How much thinner will it get if we raise the temperature of the atmosphere by 1 degree C? Good thing rock is a decent insulator!
The other baffling thing is why we need to use greenhouse gasses to heat our homes when we are living on a ball of molten rock with a wafer thin coating on it? Is geothermal heat really too expensive to compete?
Unfortunately this seems to be a non partisan mental gap in our politicians - the Liberals were just as off key when implementing new laws protecting the music companies - they gave us the blank disc fine (uh tax?) since we're all guilty of pirating music we should all pay up front. Ironically, they messed up by giving us the (debated) right to copy whatever we want in the meantime. My guess is that loophole was just sheer incompetence.. (Sheila "I'll quit if we don't repeal the GST" Copps gave us that loophole - need I say more?)
Maybe we should set up a local branch of the PirateBay Party for our next election - sure would be more fun than the boring Marijuana Party!
Did you actually read the article? Cringely never implies that it's sinister, or even negative. He's just commenting on possibilities based on google's business activities.
The submitter is the one who applied the sinister label to it (Nice try, Mr. Gates!) and thus would be worthy of your scorn..
I agree with the poster above who stated that so far Google has offered some very cool software for free and hasn't generally screwed anyone (afaik), so I give them the benefit of doubt (that they'll continue to do no evil).
I was wondering when the tired "no software is perfect" excuse for Windows would show up. You forgot the (bs) part about how virus writers only target Windows cause it's number one.
Thankfully for victims of Microsoft's incompetence, they finally get the "install as root, run as user" model from Unix, in Vista. It's only taken them 20 years (or so).
No it's not a perfect solution, yes, linux/unix can be cracked, but this one little insulating layer makes all the difference in the world between a rampant epidemic and a handful of isolated virus outbreaks.
Condoms are not perfect, they can be broken, but nobody suggests that using condoms is a total waste of time for protecting against disease and pregnancy.
If you read the article (I read a couple pages worth anyway) the main complaint is that users who download games to Vista will have to supply an admin password for the game to install (Oh no, that's Terrible!). The alternative is what you have now, where pretty much any software can install whenever it wants including trojans, viruses etc, and you have a severly infected windows PC population as a direct result.
How many kids have infected the family PC by connecting up to the smiley face downloads? No kidding(!) you want to forbid your kids from installing whatever they bump into on the net. Next this guy will be complaining that parents don't leave their credit cards out where the kids can find them to support his gaming download business!
Now the MS gang finally get the "install as root, run as user" security model from the Unix world.
A bunch of polygons IN FULL PUBLIC VIEW by anyone signed on to second life were rendered near other polygons that look like a cartoon stage that doesn't exist.
This whole treatment of second life as if it were reality is completely silly.
I tried twice to do that, and crashed Firefox both times! (Version 1.5.0.8 on KUbuntu)
Seems like the hash input code is to the right of the html encoded image, the HTML encoded image is all one one line, so the view source window is now very wide virtually.
To crash: 1. View source 2. Search for the word "hash" 3. See firefox lock up till KUbuntu pops up a kill box for it.. 4. Profit! (umm?)
Global warming has been going on since the industrial revolution.
There is a lot of real science left to do, and if our CO2 output is contributing we need to deal with it.
With fanatics making wild claims on both sides of the argument, it is extremely difficult for anyone to come to a reasonable understanding of the current state of research.
It's (almost) funny how many times the "Hockey Stick" graph has been discredited, credited, repeatedly, but it seems fairly obvious that 1: World population has exploded, and 2: People generate CO2 gas both directly and through surviving. So duh, there's more CO2 going into the air from humans than ever before.
Point well taken, but I do wonder how often these kind of exploits actually happen in the wild on linux or on commercial unixen. It's been a point of frustration to me to hear the "No system is secure, and people only write viruses for the number one OS" mantra, and finally with Vista MS has set it up to actually recommend users only install as admin but run at user level privileges that has been standard procedure in Unix for decades. XP has this potential, but many XP apps require write access to c:\windows to just operate.
I wonder if the Vista registry is still writable by all?
How would an unauthorized person get write access to my kernel or operating system files? I keep them all password protected, and I only allow root login on the console.
I believe the only way marketing can sell something more complex than required, is when the customers are uninformed. A good percentage of the population are still new to the whole computer business, so when someone offers them "more" for their money, it seems like a reasonable decision. Once you understand the product, then the useless features become apparent, and once you learn that overly complex products are far more likely to have bugs or just be poorly thought out, you start to desire simpler versions.
I read a recent article about an experience with a new "computerized" washer and dryer (those things us guys pretend to not know how to use). Apparently each attribute of every state in the washing cycle is programmable, and it wasn't clear from the article if there were even reasonable defaults. The reviewer ended up calling the support guy in to teach her how to program the washing machine, just so she could wash some clothes.
At the other end of the scale, our office has a new microwave oven - the ultimate user interface - only two rotary knobs - power, and time, and the time knob winds down mechanically. There's not even a start button! My next home one will be like this. (My current home one has dozens of default settings, like the popcorn setting you can't use cause it burns any microwave popcorn you put in it).
But, except for artists left over from the supergroup era who also managed to start their own labels, the average "successful" musician barely makes a living on those measly 3 cents a CD royalty payment, and that's only when the CD is not on sale. http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/l ove/
However, the music industry has lost it's grip on the industry, and it's internet chat that's doing it. I have three teens in the house, computer literate, and not one of them ever really listens to the radio at all. They and all their peers find out about music/bands etc directly from their private online communities. They have a very widespread eclectic taste in music, from the 1960's to current, drawing from mainstream to obscure. This is what I beleive has the industry running scared - they can promote the next low talent Britney Spears with as many millions as they want, but the teens are not listening. This is very different from the last 80 years of industry - the loss of a broadcast audience is a loss of control and of money.
So, I respectfully disagree: the industry have never been good at paying musicians - unless the musicians had enough business sense to sue for control of their own catalog, and now they have lost the broadcast audience.
I went from using Framemaker on Sun OS to office on win 95. I remember when templates actually did something, and paragraph numbering actually worked..
Slashdot Mirror
A typical movie production cost? $30 million on up, depending on whether or not you get a name brand actor with a big salary..
A typical CD production cost? I'd guestimate there are very few CD recordings that cost anything more than $1 million, and many independent CD's are done in basement studios with under 5 grand worth of gear. Anyone have any solid figures on this?
* Greenland use to be green.
Not really, it's been almost a complete ice flow since the last ice age, except for two narrow and deep fjords that the Norse settled in for several generations before finally dying off (and/or giving up) from many different causes.
See pages 211, 212 from "Collapse" by Jared Diamond, a facinating read about the historic collapse of civilizations, and of the indicators for our current ones.
My favourite quote from the book is "What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?" - "did he shout - Jobs not Trees!"?
Actually, this is a great way to fight back,
start referring to Balmer as the new McCarthy, paint them with that nasty brush, it's a PR nightmare if it catches hold.
Emphasize the chair tossing, all the nasty things MS has done to the competitors over the years, what politician/lawmaker would want to be identified with the new McCarthy?
Say, Apple OSX has BSD unix under the hood, but I bet they don't go after apple with this smear campaign.
Much easier scare small businesses out of using linux.
Oh, and Hah!, to the novell people who claim they didn't sell out.
At my first job out of tech school, I was given a user account on a Vax running unix, and we had a couple of Sun 2 workstations in the building (68012 processor, windowing system, mice, network, users and a root account).
Nobody there "ran as root" or admin, this was 1984. I'd guess that no serious unix users ever ran as root 24/7.
I mean, seriously, how far back in history have office admin staff been keeping the corporate records and personel files in locked cabinets to keep the regular employees out of the secured files? 1930's ?? Egyptian times?
This is the problem of a flamebait in a nutshell. People with moderate opinions are not motivated to join the discussion with all the immature rants from the fanatics - on both sides of an argument - cluttering things up.
It would be interesting if slashdot added more headroom in the rating system,
from it's current 5 levels (which is a dynamic range of less than 18 db) to something more like 96 db.
Adding emotion tags would be interesting too, so that moderators could tag the emotional feel of a comment (angry, happy, funny, ironic, etc)
to further divide the flames from the other forms of discussion.
Users could then set their preferences so that if they liked flame wars, they could wallow in angry discussions, while others could discuss their interests in other emotional (or not) threads..
That's no lightweight system, and it comes with a serious set of development tools who's big brother version is used in the real world.
p p/14149.html
Looks like they offer an educational version too:
http://www.arm.com/markets/embedded_solutions/arm
True, real images have noise in them, but you don't need the camera adding extra noise that is not there in the "real" image.
There are many types of noise from an image sensor. If the camera has a fixed pattern noise, then yes one could take a shot of a uniform white background, lower it's digital intensity until the lowest value is zero, and then subtract that noise pattern image from a digital photo, (at the same exposure duration as the noise pattern image) to clean out the pattern noise. Perhaps some of the higher end cameras already do this?
The other noise sources are typically random, therefore can not be subtracted out with the same method.
A good CCD (in a well designed camera) is typically lower noise than a CMOS sensor, but I'm talking scientific grade cameras. I have no idea if consumer grade CCD cameras are noticably better than the CMOS cameras..
No camera in the world will give you exactly the same level in each pixel, given even a high quality uniform light source, (which you need expensive gear to attain).
In the grand scheme of things, it's a pretty small evil, but a spade is a spade.
I'm guessing the mainstream press won't even bother with this, in the rush to sell magazines with Vista reviews.
Does anyone outside of slashdot even care?
You would hope that the bad press generated by Microsoft "up to their usual standards as a corporate citizen" would not be worth the patent,
but their actions speak volumes..
Interesting!
0 /interior.html) it's like an eggshell protecting us from hot liquid rock. Lucky for us the outside radiates heat away fast enough to keep the crust from melting..(!?)
I went hunting the web to back up my armchair theory - that the Yucatan impact CAUSED the India lava flows directly (think bullet thru a ripe tomato)..
India is currently about opposite the Yucatan, but I'm not sure where the two sites were located 65 million years ago (How much continental drift?). BUT on the way to try to track down some semblance of support for my pet theory I found this article about a very large potential impact crater right beside India that hasn't yet made the impact database (it's not been decided either way):
But Chatterjee believes the geologic activity in India is best explained by a massive meteorite impact. For further proof, he points to alkaline igneous rock spires that are encased in the Deccan Traps. These spires are rich in iridium, but the Deccan lava did not contain iridium. How else, he asks, could the spires have formed if not by a nearby meteorite impact?
In addition, Chatterjee says there is an underwater mountain as high as Mount Everest within the Shiva crater. He says this structure has been dated to be 65 million years old, and he thinks it could be the central peak that is often seen within large impact craters.
Finally, Chatterjee says the crater contains shocked quartz, a key sign of impact. And because the K-T clay boundary layer in India is one meter thick - the thickest in the world - Chatterjee thinks a meteorite impact must have been close by.
Astrobiology Magazine - http://www.astrobio.net/news/print.php?sid=1281
There is also mention of another impact crater in the Ukraine that is also 65 million years old.
So it sounds like we had more than 1 big meteor event, potentially cooking the atmosphere instantly, the shock waves might have instantly caused massive cracks in the earth's crust, and/or the kinetic energy absorbed from these could possibly warm up the earth's core enough to cause massive lava flows, the resulting gasses and or dust released in all these events would have yanked the temperature up and down, in short, the Dinosaurs had it from many interrelated sources effectively at the "same time" give or take a half a million years.
When you look at a cross section of the planet and see how thin the crust is, (http://www.seismo.unr.edu/ftp/pub/louie/class/10
My question is, say the crust is 50 kilometers (30 miles) thick (on average?) http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/interior/
How much thinner will it get if we raise the temperature of the atmosphere by 1 degree C?
Good thing rock is a decent insulator!
The other baffling thing is why we need to use greenhouse gasses to heat our homes when we are living on a ball of molten rock with a wafer thin coating on it? Is geothermal heat really too expensive to compete?
There, feeling safer now?
I guess that was the "Collateral Damage" of google's older scheme..
Unfortunately this seems to be a non partisan mental gap in our politicians - the Liberals were just as off key when implementing new laws protecting the music companies - they gave us the blank disc fine (uh tax?) since we're all guilty of pirating music we should all pay up front. Ironically, they messed up by giving us the (debated) right to copy whatever we want in the meantime. My guess is that loophole was just sheer incompetence.. (Sheila "I'll quit if we don't repeal the GST" Copps gave us that loophole - need I say more?)
Maybe we should set up a local branch of the PirateBay Party for our next election - sure would be more fun than the boring Marijuana Party!
Did you actually read the article? Cringely never implies that it's sinister, or even negative. He's just commenting on possibilities based on google's business activities.
The submitter is the one who applied the sinister label to it (Nice try, Mr. Gates!) and thus would be worthy of your scorn..
I agree with the poster above who stated that so far Google has offered some very cool software for free and hasn't generally screwed anyone (afaik),
so I give them the benefit of doubt (that they'll continue to do no evil).
Here's the basic script for you - hope to see it on youtube shortly!
Mac guy:
"Whoa, what's happening to you?"
PC guy:
"I don't know, I was busy trying to run my virus scanner when the FBI broke in and arrested me for Child Porn!"
Mac guy:
"Wow, good thing the virus didn't load you up with terrorist plans too!"
Just then Jack Bauer breaks the door down....
I was wondering when the tired "no software is perfect" excuse for Windows would show up. You forgot the (bs) part about how virus writers only target Windows cause it's number one.
Thankfully for victims of Microsoft's incompetence, they finally get the "install as root, run as user" model from Unix, in Vista. It's only taken them 20 years (or so).
No it's not a perfect solution, yes, linux/unix can be cracked, but this one little insulating layer makes all the difference in the world
between a rampant epidemic and a handful of isolated virus outbreaks.
Condoms are not perfect, they can be broken, but nobody suggests that using condoms is a total waste of time for protecting against disease and pregnancy.
Talk about an effective marketing campain - sue the users for an incredibly inept operating system.
If you read the article (I read a couple pages worth anyway) the main complaint is that users who download games to Vista
will have to supply an admin password for the game to install (Oh no, that's Terrible!).
The alternative is what you have now, where pretty much any software can install whenever it wants including trojans, viruses etc,
and you have a severly infected windows PC population as a direct result.
How many kids have infected the family PC by connecting up to the smiley face downloads? No kidding(!) you want to forbid your kids from installing whatever they bump into on the net. Next this guy will be complaining that parents don't leave their credit cards out where the kids can find them to support his gaming download business!
Now the MS gang finally get the "install as root, run as user" security model from the Unix world.
No, "She" wasn't.
A bunch of polygons IN FULL PUBLIC VIEW by anyone signed on to second life were rendered near other polygons that look like a cartoon stage that doesn't exist.
This whole treatment of second life as if it were reality is completely silly.
I tried twice to do that, and crashed Firefox both times!
(Version 1.5.0.8 on KUbuntu)
Seems like the hash input code is to the right of the html encoded image,
the HTML encoded image is all one one line, so the view source window is now very wide virtually.
To crash:
1. View source
2. Search for the word "hash"
3. See firefox lock up till KUbuntu pops up a kill box for it..
4. Profit! (umm?)
Global warming has been going on since the industrial revolution.
There is a lot of real science left to do,
and if our CO2 output is contributing we need to deal with it.
With fanatics making wild claims on both sides of the argument, it is
extremely difficult for anyone to come to a reasonable understanding of the current state of research.
It's (almost) funny how many times the "Hockey Stick" graph has been discredited, credited, repeatedly, but it seems
fairly obvious that 1: World population has exploded, and 2: People generate CO2 gas both directly and through surviving.
So duh, there's more CO2 going into the air from humans than ever before.
Point well taken, but I do wonder how often these kind of exploits actually happen in the wild on linux or on commercial unixen.
It's been a point of frustration to me to hear the "No system is secure, and people only write viruses for the number one OS" mantra,
and finally with Vista MS has set it up to actually recommend users only install as admin but run at user level privileges that has been
standard procedure in Unix for decades. XP has this potential, but many XP apps require write access to c:\windows to just operate.
I wonder if the Vista registry is still writable by all?
How would an unauthorized person get write access to my kernel or operating system files? I keep them all password protected, and I only allow root login on the console.
Hear hear!
I believe the only way marketing can sell something more complex than required, is when the customers are uninformed. A good percentage of the population are still new to
the whole computer business, so when someone offers them "more" for their money, it seems like a reasonable decision.
Once you understand the product, then the useless features become apparent, and once you learn that overly complex products are far more likely to have bugs or just be poorly thought out, you start to desire simpler versions.
I read a recent article about an experience with a new "computerized" washer and dryer (those things us guys pretend to not know how to use).
Apparently each attribute of every state in the washing cycle is programmable, and it wasn't clear from the article if there were even reasonable defaults.
The reviewer ended up calling the support guy in to teach her how to program the washing machine, just so she could wash some clothes.
At the other end of the scale, our office has a new microwave oven - the ultimate user interface - only two rotary knobs - power, and time, and the time knob winds down mechanically. There's not even a start button! My next home one will be like this. (My current home one has dozens of default settings, like the popcorn setting you can't use cause it burns any microwave popcorn you put in it).
But, except for artists left over from the supergroup era who also managed to start their own labels, the average "successful" musician barely makes a living on those measly 3 cents a CD royalty payment, and that's only when the CD is not on sale.l ove/
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/
However, the music industry has lost it's grip on the industry, and it's internet chat that's doing it. I have three teens in the house, computer literate, and not one of them ever really listens to the radio at all. They and all their peers find out about music/bands etc directly from their private online communities. They have a very widespread eclectic taste in music, from the 1960's to current, drawing from mainstream to obscure.
This is what I beleive has the industry running scared - they can promote the next low talent Britney Spears with as many millions as they want, but the teens are not listening. This is very different from the last 80 years of industry - the loss of a broadcast audience is a loss of control and of money.
So, I respectfully disagree: the industry have never been good at paying musicians - unless the musicians had enough business sense to sue for control of their own catalog, and now they have lost the broadcast audience.
Arg - stupid laptop mouse pad!
Perhaps if we all changed our sig to this?
"There is no truth to the rumour that Adobe is going to Open Source the Framemaker product line."
Hear hear!
I went from using Framemaker on Sun OS to office on win 95. I remember when templates actually did something, and paragraph numbering actually worked..
Perhaps if we all changed