We had a massive failure of our primary database server while I was out of the country. (Trust me, nothing puts a damper on your day more than having one of your techs call you at midnight from 7,000 miles away.) I blame Reiser. Not because it caused the outage (it was hardware), but because it was so good, it made us a bit lax.
We're just a small grant lab at a university, so it's not like this was a corporate system or anything, and there had been hardware problems before. Given that most of the people are not techies, they did not know how to ssh in and shutdown -r now, so they would just hit the reset button whenever they thought something was wrong and I wasn't around.
Anyway, because of Reiser's journalling, the system would come right back up after a forced reboot. I think that the guys in the lab cut the power a couple of times to many and the hard drive just gave out.
By the way, I just had a tech install a new drive, and Debian base with ssh. I knew the password he would use for root, and I was able to rebuild the entire system and restored 250,000 records in half a day.... From North Africa.
I once heard someone compare the bump on top of the Lego to a well designed API. He said that later generations of Lego blocks became very specialized, but the interface (the bump) remained the same.
Homer trying to connect his own phone because the phone comapny cut off their service because of an unpaid bill of a call to Breazil (made by Lisa).
Homer: Let's try.. the red one! SHOCK! Homer: Ok. Let's try.. the blue one! SHOCK! Homer: Ooooh. The green one? SHOCK! Homer: Nope. Let's try.. the red one! SHOCK!
Cut to Homer, on family couch, clothes ripped and burnt. Lisa: We found you smouldering in the bushes.
The score from LOTR is truely one of the best I've heard in some time. As an example of its depth, try listening to the end of the Balrog scene from Fellowship. There is a rather climactic rise to the music and then, as Gandalf falls, the music first is a stunned silence and then slowly moves into mourning as the film follows the rest of the fellowship from the mines.
Now listen to the first track of the Two Towers. There is the rise, and fall with Gandalf, but instead of becoming a mournful piece, since the movie this time follows Gandalf and the Balrog, the battle chants from earlier in Moria are reprised.
In essence, Howard Shore forked his music across two movies like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel.
Have you ever tried to pull up online documentation in an airport in a third world country? Or how about on an airplane? Nothing sucks worse than being on an 11-hour flight and realizing that you don't know something that's going to halt your coding binge worse than having to change your laptop battery.
Or how about on a boardwalk in Southern California, trying to code something quick enough that the Mrs. doesn't get mad at you for interrupting the vacation?
I've been in these situations, and that's why I carry the first edition of this book. Well, I used to, when I was first getting into PHP/MySQL.
I'm not saying that online tutorials is not enough. I'm teaching a class in these technologies next semester, and I am requiring the students to use online references. There are just times that you do not have access to the web and must have some info.
I work at a university, and over two years ago, they asked me to help evaluate authoring systems for online courses. One of their requirements was that the company we chose needed to be willing to partner with the institution to extend the capabilities of their software to meet our needs. We gave several suggestions, but I told them they should get on board with MIT's OKI and OpenCourseWare.
They had two concerns about open source solutions: 1. There is no company behind most open source solution. No company means no tech support. 2. OKI was just getting off the ground and would not be ready for prime time for a while.
Over a year later, the university finally chose a company to go with for their authoring system. We paid for a 30-day trial and got 5 days into it before we realized their marketing people had straight-up lied about its feature set.
So, we went with the company our university had ranked number two on the list. We worked with them for 6 months, hired one of their people to work for them on a university paycheck, and gave them a substantial fee every month for licensing. Then the company decided to get out of the authoring systems market, pulled our license and left us with nothing.
In the meantime, OKI has picked up steam, and the 11 universities that got on early with them have been developing solutions that will soon be GPLed.
The long-short is that having a company behind the product is a double-edged sword. Sure, they could give you tech support, but what happens if/when they're gone?
I'm working on a PhD in foreign language education, and I had intented on doing research into learner-sequenced instruction. Specifically I wanted to use DVDs random access ability to allow the user to view different media at will.
However, after reviewing current DVD packages (Intermedia, EFRaid, etc.) I realized that I would have to write my own code, but I could not secure a license to do this without paying outrageous fees.
So, I'm now looking at sound-symbol relations and cognitive distance theory. Too bad, since my system would have used off-the-shelf DVDs.
If he doesn't want to film the clone wars, or other necessary plot devices, that's fine (a shame, but fine) - just allude to them in the movie.
You hit on an interesting point:
Why were the first Star Wars movies so cool? I'll give you a hint: It also has to do with the attraction of Dune, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings.
All of these franchises have stories that begin long before we are first introduced to them. Part of their allure is that the reader/viewer is discovering things along the way.
Forgive my including this in with the others, but "Sweet Home Alabama" drew much on this same principle. The whole story was made possible by choices the main character had made years before the "story" began. And the viewers were left to discover it, just like the love interest of the film.
Now with the Star Wars prequels, we are no longer guessing or inferring what happened so many years ago, exactly how Luke was related to Lars, or what kind of service Obi Wan was during the Clone Wars. It really kind of spoils it.
Now, by jumping past the Clone Wars into Episode 3, Lucas might recapture some of that mystery. But by releasing it as a TV comic book, he supplys the rabid fans (are there any left) with all the info they crave, but leaves most of us to enjoy putting the peices together between Episode II and Episode III. Much like Lord of the Rings fans can read the Silmarillion.
I can't remember the numbers, but I posted a link from/. to my box about a year ago. In six hours, I got hit 200 times more from that than from six months of code red.
There is a saying in educational technology (yes, that is my field), that computers will never replace teachers, but teachers who know computers will replace teachers that don't.
Well, a European associate turned that around: If you can be replaced by a computer, you should be.
I started my undergrad in graphic design, and there is a rightly prevailing attitude in that field that the computer is no more than a tool, and knowing a few graphics program does not make you a designer. The same holds true in education.
We have seen too many educational packages put together by business, marketing, and computer peopl,e and not enough with real instructional theory behind them. Most educators are not capableof that.
Computers are just tools, and if they've failed, it is not the computer's fault, but the people who used them incorrectly.
I for one am using computers to teach lesser-taught foreign languages (Arabic, Swahili, Korean, Chinese, etc.) to people I will never meet, and who do not have the time or resources to attend school. Computers have not failed here because: a) we are getting as good results as in-class equivalents, and b) these students would otherwise be left without this education.
I like this thing, but, as a professional DVD author, I have to warn you that not all encoders produce equal quality video streams.
You only have to look as far as QuickTime's encoder. Yeah, it's a software encoder that works at 2X, but it does not produce anywhere near the quality most people want, especially at low bit rate.
Of course, this could have hardware encoding, but the real quality, either software or hardware, comes from multiple passes. If this is recording to DVD in real time, it has no chance of doing VBR.
On pass VBR is worse that CBR.
So, I guess you could record, but only at VHS quality.
I will buy the first player that can record to mp3. The reason: I am a college student who does not always get everything out of a lecture onto my notepad. It would be great to have something like this.
However, I am not one who shuts out the world so I can listen to music on for two hours more a day. That, I do not understand, but to each his own.
Back in the 80's somebody wrote a program to act like a rosiarian psychologist. Someone else wrote a program to act like a paranoid patient. These were done separately, but someone had the bright idea to hook them together and see what happened.
In the end, they took the printouts and some actual transcripts of real psychologists and patients to some PhDs, and they couldn't tell which ones were the computers and which ones were real.
Yesterday, I was leaving a deptartment meeting when I saw an undergrad friend of mine with his Ti Powerbook in the Mac lab (I'm in education). I asked if he was running Jaguar, to which he replied by showing me his screen. He was still running OS 9.
I was a bit taken back, given Apple's heavy pushing of OS X and Jaguar, but he said it still had "problems" and that he didn't like the interface (for usability).
We use Jaguar on our two video stations in my office, and I think they rock. I'll never run it at home (academics can't afford the hardware), but I find it interesting that even some who can afford it (read: already own a Mac), and might even own a license to OS X, don't use it.
However, another diss on OS X (non-server) is that they have removed, or chosen not to include some of the group scripts (like groupmod).
CVP can be acheived without editing the film... if it's on DVD. Think about it: Someone describes the film in a standard format (say, an XML file). This format does not say "This part is bad", but just describes the content.
The user can then use a DVD player that recognizes this file format to play only the parts they want to see. The media is never modified.
This has uses outside of over-protective parents. Think: Only watch the good parts of a Jackie Chan flick. Or in education, a foreign language teacher could show clips of a foreign film that so the language function they're trying to teach.
Anyway, I hope that people remember that this is bigger than Johnny's mom not wanting him to see the "bad" parts of Titanic.
I've been touting OKI and OpenCourseWare since we first heard about it. I'm working on a PhD in Instructional Tech, and I have to deal with people from SCORM, BlackBoard, and WebCT all the time.
What the people whose employments are threatened by open course stuff say is that MIT is doing this to force their faculty to create new stuff. Bullocks!
I personally do not care where it comes from, or why it's being distributed for free, but, if the quality is high, it will cause some change to the field.
PS - If you're looking for an Open Source prokect that's up this alley, look into textweaver.
I remember when I lived in California, I read a newspaper article about a girl who was sitting in a church listening to her mom practice the organ.
A bullet was fired during a gang fight two blocks away. It traveled down the streen, through the large oak door of the chapel, and hit the girl in the shoulder, popping it out of joint, but not penetrating the skin.
The newspaper called her lucky.
I dunno, but if a gunshot I didn't even travels two blocks and then hits me, or (to stay on topic) a space rock hits me in the foot, I would not consider myself lucky.
I did the same to my athlon 1.4.... Orb heatsink, heard a crack when I put it on. "Oh $#it!. I guess we'll see."
It ran for about six weeks. I was copying a DVD to it (I make DVDs), playing mp3s from it, plus I was getting moderate httpd hits and suddenly - POOF!!
It rebooted partitally, but it was pretty much toast. I upgraded to an XP1700+, and bought a better heat sink. The Orb is still my desk drawer.
More seriously, these lawsuits represent a serious threat to innovation in this country.
I think this may be the only way to fix the problem. The more outrageous it gets, the more attention it will eventually get, the sooner congress can address it.
When I was an undergrad, I had to take an American History/PoliSci class. I was a French Lit major, having spent several years living in Bordeaux, and I found some things the teacher said interesting.
Showing how unrealistic the expectations of the French Revolutionaries were, he mentioned how they changed the months around so that they were metric.
Oddly, he didn't comment on the metric system for volume, distance, weight, or mass. I began to wonder what makes time so different.
I think, as it has been pointed out already, that we want to confine time to measures that have some meaning to us, like days, but also to standards that are easy to work with. We cannot have it both ways. There are 365 days to a year. That's not a multiple of ten.
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We had a massive failure of our primary database server while I was out of the country. (Trust me, nothing puts a damper on your day more than having one of your techs call you at midnight from 7,000 miles away.) I blame Reiser. Not because it caused the outage (it was hardware), but because it was so good, it made us a bit lax.
We're just a small grant lab at a university, so it's not like this was a corporate system or anything, and there had been hardware problems before. Given that most of the people are not techies, they did not know how to ssh in and shutdown -r now, so they would just hit the reset button whenever they thought something was wrong and I wasn't around.
Anyway, because of Reiser's journalling, the system would come right back up after a forced reboot. I think that the guys in the lab cut the power a couple of times to many and the hard drive just gave out.
By the way, I just had a tech install a new drive, and Debian base with ssh. I knew the password he would use for root, and I was able to rebuild the entire system and restored 250,000 records in half a day.... From North Africa.
Try that with a non-*nix.
I once heard someone compare the bump on top of the Lego to a well designed API. He said that later generations of Lego blocks became very specialized, but the interface (the bump) remained the same.
Homer trying to connect his own phone because the phone comapny cut off their service because of an unpaid bill of a call to Breazil (made by Lisa).
Homer: Let's try.. the red one!
SHOCK!
Homer: Ok. Let's try.. the blue one!
SHOCK!
Homer: Ooooh. The green one?
SHOCK!
Homer: Nope. Let's try.. the red one!
SHOCK!
Cut to Homer, on family couch, clothes ripped and burnt.
Lisa: We found you smouldering in the bushes.
The score from LOTR is truely one of the best I've heard in some time. As an example of its depth, try listening to the end of the Balrog scene from Fellowship. There is a rather climactic rise to the music and then, as Gandalf falls, the music first is a stunned silence and then slowly moves into mourning as the film follows the rest of the fellowship from the mines.
Now listen to the first track of the Two Towers. There is the rise, and fall with Gandalf, but instead of becoming a mournful piece, since the movie this time follows Gandalf and the Balrog, the battle chants from earlier in Moria are reprised.
In essence, Howard Shore forked his music across two movies like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel.
Have you ever tried to pull up online documentation in an airport in a third world country? Or how about on an airplane? Nothing sucks worse than being on an 11-hour flight and realizing that you don't know something that's going to halt your coding binge worse than having to change your laptop battery.
Or how about on a boardwalk in Southern California, trying to code something quick enough that the Mrs. doesn't get mad at you for interrupting the vacation?
I've been in these situations, and that's why I carry the first edition of this book. Well, I used to, when I was first getting into PHP/MySQL.
I'm not saying that online tutorials is not enough. I'm teaching a class in these technologies next semester, and I am requiring the students to use online references. There are just times that you do not have access to the web and must have some info.
I work at a university, and over two years ago, they asked me to help evaluate authoring systems for online courses. One of their requirements was that the company we chose needed to be willing to partner with the institution to extend the capabilities of their software to meet our needs. We gave several suggestions, but I told them they should get on board with MIT's OKI and OpenCourseWare.
They had two concerns about open source solutions: 1. There is no company behind most open source solution. No company means no tech support. 2. OKI was just getting off the ground and would not be ready for prime time for a while.
Over a year later, the university finally chose a company to go with for their authoring system. We paid for a 30-day trial and got 5 days into it before we realized their marketing people had straight-up lied about its feature set.
So, we went with the company our university had ranked number two on the list. We worked with them for 6 months, hired one of their people to work for them on a university paycheck, and gave them a substantial fee every month for licensing. Then the company decided to get out of the authoring systems market, pulled our license and left us with nothing.
In the meantime, OKI has picked up steam, and the 11 universities that got on early with them have been developing solutions that will soon be GPLed.
The long-short is that having a company behind the product is a double-edged sword. Sure, they could give you tech support, but what happens if/when they're gone?
I'm working on a PhD in foreign language education, and I had intented on doing research into learner-sequenced instruction. Specifically I wanted to use DVDs random access ability to allow the user to view different media at will.
However, after reviewing current DVD packages (Intermedia, EFRaid, etc.) I realized that I would have to write my own code, but I could not secure a license to do this without paying outrageous fees.
So, I'm now looking at sound-symbol relations and cognitive distance theory. Too bad, since my system would have used off-the-shelf DVDs.
If he doesn't want to film the clone wars, or other necessary plot devices, that's fine (a shame, but fine) - just allude to them in the movie.
You hit on an interesting point:
Why were the first Star Wars movies so cool? I'll give you a hint: It also has to do with the attraction of Dune, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings.
All of these franchises have stories that begin long before we are first introduced to them. Part of their allure is that the reader/viewer is discovering things along the way.
Forgive my including this in with the others, but "Sweet Home Alabama" drew much on this same principle. The whole story was made possible by choices the main character had made years before the "story" began. And the viewers were left to discover it, just like the love interest of the film.
Now with the Star Wars prequels, we are no longer guessing or inferring what happened so many years ago, exactly how Luke was related to Lars, or what kind of service Obi Wan was during the Clone Wars. It really kind of spoils it.
Now, by jumping past the Clone Wars into Episode 3, Lucas might recapture some of that mystery. But by releasing it as a TV comic book, he supplys the rabid fans (are there any left) with all the info they crave, but leaves most of us to enjoy putting the peices together between Episode II and Episode III. Much like Lord of the Rings fans can read the Silmarillion.
I can't remember the numbers, but I posted a link from /. to my box about a year ago. In six hours, I got hit 200 times more from that than from six months of code red.
Hacking DVD Region coding is the same idea. The DMCA covers ecryption for copy protection.
Region codes are neither encryption, nor for copy protection.
There is a saying in educational technology (yes, that is my field), that computers will never replace teachers, but teachers who know computers will replace teachers that don't.
Well, a European associate turned that around: If you can be replaced by a computer, you should be.
I started my undergrad in graphic design, and there is a rightly prevailing attitude in that field that the computer is no more than a tool, and knowing a few graphics program does not make you a designer. The same holds true in education.
We have seen too many educational packages put together by business, marketing, and computer peopl,e and not enough with real instructional theory behind them. Most educators are not capableof that.
Computers are just tools, and if they've failed, it is not the computer's fault, but the people who used them incorrectly.
I for one am using computers to teach lesser-taught foreign languages (Arabic, Swahili, Korean, Chinese, etc.) to people I will never meet, and who do not have the time or resources to attend school. Computers have not failed here because: a) we are getting as good results as in-class equivalents, and b) these students would otherwise be left without this education.
I should have been more specific. I was speaked of MPEG2 encoding.
I like this thing, but, as a professional DVD author, I have to warn you that not all encoders produce equal quality video streams.
You only have to look as far as QuickTime's encoder. Yeah, it's a software encoder that works at 2X, but it does not produce anywhere near the quality most people want, especially at low bit rate.
Of course, this could have hardware encoding, but the real quality, either software or hardware, comes from multiple passes. If this is recording to DVD in real time, it has no chance of doing VBR.
On pass VBR is worse that CBR.
So, I guess you could record, but only at VHS quality.
I will buy the first player that can record to mp3. The reason: I am a college student who does not always get everything out of a lecture onto my notepad. It would be great to have something like this.
However, I am not one who shuts out the world so I can listen to music on for two hours more a day. That, I do not understand, but to each his own.
You reminded me of something OT, but funny.
Back in the 80's somebody wrote a program to act like a rosiarian psychologist. Someone else wrote a program to act like a paranoid patient. These were done separately, but someone had the bright idea to hook them together and see what happened.
In the end, they took the printouts and some actual transcripts of real psychologists and patients to some PhDs, and they couldn't tell which ones were the computers and which ones were real.
DEATH TO INFIDELS!!! DEATH TO NON INFIDELS!!!
Uh, NON INFIDELS? Do you mean "FIDELS" meaning "faithful"?
Yesterday, I was leaving a deptartment meeting when I saw an undergrad friend of mine with his Ti Powerbook in the Mac lab (I'm in education). I asked if he was running Jaguar, to which he replied by showing me his screen. He was still running OS 9.
I was a bit taken back, given Apple's heavy pushing of OS X and Jaguar, but he said it still had "problems" and that he didn't like the interface (for usability).
We use Jaguar on our two video stations in my office, and I think they rock. I'll never run it at home (academics can't afford the hardware), but I find it interesting that even some who can afford it (read: already own a Mac), and might even own a license to OS X, don't use it.
However, another diss on OS X (non-server) is that they have removed, or chosen not to include some of the group scripts (like groupmod).
CVP can be acheived without editing the film... if it's on DVD. Think about it: Someone describes the film in a standard format (say, an XML file). This format does not say "This part is bad", but just describes the content.
The user can then use a DVD player that recognizes this file format to play only the parts they want to see. The media is never modified.
This has uses outside of over-protective parents. Think: Only watch the good parts of a Jackie Chan flick. Or in education, a foreign language teacher could show clips of a foreign film that so the language function they're trying to teach.
Anyway, I hope that people remember that this is bigger than Johnny's mom not wanting him to see the "bad" parts of Titanic.
I've been touting OKI and OpenCourseWare since we first heard about it. I'm working on a PhD in Instructional Tech, and I have to deal with people from SCORM, BlackBoard, and WebCT all the time.
What the people whose employments are threatened by open course stuff say is that MIT is doing this to force their faculty to create new stuff. Bullocks!
I personally do not care where it comes from, or why it's being distributed for free, but, if the quality is high, it will cause some change to the field.
PS - If you're looking for an Open Source prokect that's up this alley, look into textweaver.
A bullet was fired during a gang fight two blocks away. It traveled down the streen, through the large oak door of the chapel, and hit the girl in the shoulder, popping it out of joint, but not penetrating the skin.
The newspaper called her lucky.
I dunno, but if a gunshot I didn't even travels two blocks and then hits me, or (to stay on topic) a space rock hits me in the foot, I would not consider myself lucky.
Region codes are neither encryption nor copy protection. Ergo, breaking it does not constitutes a DMCA violation.
I did the same to my athlon 1.4.... Orb heatsink, heard a crack when I put it on. "Oh $#it!. I guess we'll see."
It ran for about six weeks. I was copying a DVD to it (I make DVDs), playing mp3s from it, plus I was getting moderate httpd hits and suddenly - POOF!!
It rebooted partitally, but it was pretty much toast. I upgraded to an XP1700+, and bought a better heat sink. The Orb is still my desk drawer.
Read this on /., read this
from drudge.
I think this may be the only way to fix the problem. The more outrageous it gets, the more attention it will eventually get, the sooner congress can address it.
When I was an undergrad, I had to take an American History/PoliSci class. I was a French Lit major, having spent several years living in Bordeaux, and I found some things the teacher said interesting.
Showing how unrealistic the expectations of the French Revolutionaries were, he mentioned how they changed the months around so that they were metric.
Oddly, he didn't comment on the metric system for volume, distance, weight, or mass. I began to wonder what makes time so different.
I think, as it has been pointed out already, that we want to confine time to measures that have some meaning to us, like days, but also to standards that are easy to work with. We cannot have it both ways. There are 365 days to a year. That's not a multiple of ten.