But Bill Wyman runs a fansite about the Rolling Stone musician! Come on. I expected to go to his site and find a site about a journalist named Bill Wyman and see his work.
Wait... The C&D Letter from former Rolling Stone member Bill Wyman's Lawyers doesn't mention a web site... The ACJ article doesn't mention a web site... The Slashdot article doesn't either... billwyman.com is owned by a media group in London, not somebody in Atlanta. What are you talking about??
There's one small problem: this installation is illegal! 47-CFR-15.203
You might want to read 47-CFR-15.23 - The device does not violate section 203 because it is exempted by section 23.
High power, long range links deny service to other users of the spectrum. That's why they require licensing and use a licensed spectrum allocation. If you need a long range microwave link, get licensed! Don't hog a shared resource.
They aren't hogging a shared research. That's why they have parabolic dishes at both ends. They aren't omnidirectional transmitters. The FCC encourages unidirectional point to point links and has relaxed regulations for them.
The FCC is more lenient when it comes to p2p links because their directional nature spams the airwaves less. The rule is for every 3dB over a 6dBi antenna you must reduce total power output 1dB. 24dB of gain is permissible if your TPO is 1/4 watt. I know the article says their TPO is 1 watt, but it isn't a quote. The link may be illegal, but it's only 4 times the legal limit, not 200.
1.) In Dune, the hero is names after a biblical person, Paul, while in Star Wars the hero is named after a biblical person too (Luke).
That is really reaching... That bible thing has dominated the culture of western civilization for over a thousand years... the names of biblical figures permeates our literature.
6.) In Dune, the galaxy is made up of an Empire with a demotractic power base (The Lansraad (Spelling?)). In SW you have an Empire with a democratic power base (The Senate).
That is a natural extensions of an existing political systems which is found in generous quantities in western civilizations.
7.) In Dune, you have both energy weapon based warfare, and melee (swords and knives) combat. Most combat takes place with energy or projectile weaponry, but key battles are fought melee. In SW, you have both energy based combat, and melee combat (swords). Most combat takes place with energy weapons, while key battles are fought melee.
I thought in dune not a lot of fighting took place with energy weapons because Laser + Shield = Nuke. Fights in star wars ALWAYS involved energy weapons, except those between Jedi/Sith.
I'll love it when they give me free channel listings over the dish and a good user interface.:) Is there a Tivo with dual tuners?
I'm not sure what you mean by free channel listings over the dish. The DirecTivo unit will pull guide information from the sat. When I first plugged mine in, it got the current listings in a minute, the days listings in about 15, the next week's over a couple hours, and so on. Using the DirecTivo is not free unless you buy their platinum package. But this month they dropped me to $5/month for service. The unit itself cost me $99 at Circuit City a year ago (sadly I don't think you can get this good a deal anymore).
DirecTivo does have two tuners, but requires you to run two wires from the satellite to the unit or buy a digital signal stacker/destacker. That stacking hardware isn't cheap though. It was cheapier and more convenient for me to just run a second cable.
I'm not sure there's a tivo unit that compares.
That's possible, but I'm not sure what features yours has that you're not sure Tivo has too. If you list them someone could give you a yes/no.
The one thing I saw in the link you gave that I would say the DirecTivo does not have (at least not the first generation one I have) is speed. Compared to my RCA DirecTV receiver, the DirecTivo is sluggish.
The dbstalk reviewer also mentioned he wished there was an easy way to jump between the two receivers. I'm not sure if Dish PVR has this yet, but DirecTivo does - you press "down" then "right" and you'll be looking at the second receiver's feed.
Even if there's only one layer of tiles, so you can see the entire state of the game at the start, determining whether it is possible to remove all the tiles is NP-complete.
Given that there will be very many solutions to the problem (removing all tiles) and each solution will be equally as good as all other solutions - thus not all pairing possibilities would have to be considered - are you sure the problem is NP-complete?
Of course they can. Or with any other language. With Java it is a lot less work though.
Is it? The only benefit to Java over C++ here is Swing. And Swing is painfully slow (I once had the discomfort of using a swing-based Java app running on solaris over exceed... the memory still makes me cringe)
If you thought you can go with Java and do not need experienced people to use it effectively, then you have made choices based on wrong assumptions.
Okay, this is one important point with Java... You need just as much talent with Java as with C++, so Java sees no savings in hiring costs.
Everyone doing serious Java development does extensive testing on the platforms they expect to use the most
Yes, this is because each JVM has its own peculiarities and bugs. So you can't "write once". You "write once" then refactor for each platform you run on. So Java doesn't save that much time there.
Every project I've seen (whether I worked on it or not) that has used Java for its "run anywhere" promise has paid the gains in time of not having to port to another platform with trying to improve their business logic so that the software isn't so slow it offends users, and working around JVM bugs of different platforms (or dealing with UIs that suddenly look hideous when using Sun's braindead selection of fonts on Solaris).
The web is full of benchmarks comparing different math algorithms
I doubt there is any math algorithm that can be written in Java that cannot be written in C++.
(which are a special case btw, most programming problems involve business logic, not mathematical calculations).
Okay, how about you take the scrabble dictionary as a plain text file, and put each entry in some sort of height balanced binary search tree (go ahead and use a pre-made collection if you want). Then do 40 or 50 thousand unique searches. Profile time to create tree (wow! That's several hundred thousand object instantiations... not Java's strong suit) and time to search tree. My experience has been that C++ will slam the equivalent Java code.
In some cases Java is faster due to the modern runtime compilers such as Hotspot that are able to re-adjust the runtime code to dynamically allocated data structures.
You've got to be kidding me... Hotspot optimizes methods based on usage. A heavily used method may get recompiled with a higher optimization because the time penalty of optimized compiling is offset by the time savings of the optimized result. C++ starts out with the best optimization hotspot could hope for.
Of course, WORA is easily broken by a newbie programmer
Well we don't call them newbies, we call them "Junior Engineers". But yes my job was come along behind them and fix anything that was causing problems moving over to Solaris.
so it does require a competent team of Java developers to be able to achieve it.
A competent team of developers can write C++ code that is portable between Windows and Solaris with forks for the UI. What good is Java if it still requires a team of senior engineers to avoid all the landmines? As many have said before, that isn't write once run anywhere, it's write once test everywhere. All of our software had to be thoroughly tested on both Windows and Solaris. I'm not clear that Java saved us anything in time spent in development, but cost us a lot in performance.
In what circumstance do the speed differences in C++ and Java justify not having the broad compatibility and stable free API's of java?
In any circumstance where you want:
1) A responsive user interface. 2) High speed code execution. 3) Parameterized classes. 4) Stable APIs.
I was laid off a year ago from a company that was an all-java shop. For years I had written software exclusively in Java. I believe the reason we couldn't get customers for our product was because our product was 100% Java and was SLOW. After leaving the company and going back to C/C++, it was quite a hit on the head to see just how much faster C/C++ was in comparison. Pure logic and method invocation easily felt like an order of magnitude faster.
I'd go back to Java if I had the chance, but all that "write once run anywhere" speak is just crap. I can't tell you how many hours I spent at a Solaris box trying to make code that worked perfectly under NT/2K to work under Solaris.
Companies are not only perpetuating the problem of insufficient women in technical fields, but are also missing a huge market by failing to make an effort to find games that interest women.
Do you *really* think companies are uninterested in developing games for women? *really*? Do you think gaming companies sit around and say "Oh forget that market segment which is responsible for actually spending most household income..." They actively choose to miss a huge market with little competition? You make the problem sound so easy "Oh just make an effort to find games that interest women"... That's the holy-f'ing-grail of a whole segment of the industry. It's damned hard, and usually when it does happen, it was by mistake.
When I worked in the industry, it was usually accepted as fact that whatever your expected sales were, if women liked your game you'd double that forecast - if not triple. The potential of that market is well known... The desires of that market are not.
She also told us that her son managed to make himself nice and sick to his stomach by drinking some fairly concentrated (like 6 molar) hydrochloric acid. See she used the little plastic chem bottles for water bottles in her house. For some reason, she had some HCl there one day, in the same bottle (storing acid was a common use for them in the lab). He didn't look at the lable and took a nice swig. Now HCl won't burn you like some, it's stomach acid, but that concentrated will cause a fair amount of dsicomfort.
I get the impression your teacher was just spinning a fanciful yarn. The pH of your stomach is usually not less than 1, and your stomach has enzymes that protect it from being melted away by the acid that is in there. 6M is something like 60 times the concentration of acid in your stomach - you think throwing up burned the back of your throat? This will be excrutiating! A swig of fairly concentrated HCl would probably taste disgustingly sour. A person would realize immediately that something seriously wrong had occurred (and more appropriately would probably have spat it out before swallowing).
Hopefully she administered copious amounts of water with a little baking soda in it by mouth until his stomach hurt from being so full.
Step 1: Create Sourceforge account. Step 2: Place project into "Planning" phase. Step 3: Wait 3 months. Step 4: Purchase 3D Studio Max using the money you've been saving for 3 months.
That's a HUGE assumption. Do you have access to something that can read 10 year old 5.25" disks now?
That is a big assumption, but I don't think it is that unreasonable an expectation. About 75-ish years ago someone put video on a phonograph and about 1-ish years ago, someone figured out how to get the video back off.
You can still buy vinyl record players, but if all of them suddenly disappeared from the earth, somebody already figured out how to scan them and reconstruct the audio from that.
There are geeks now who are into high tech ways to work with antique tech, I'm assuming the same will be true 100 years from now. Even if no CD reader exists, somebody will figure out how the data is stored, and come up with a way to lay the CD data side down on a scanner and reconstruct the data from that.
If this is wrong, and the dye-stabilized gold-backed CD-R's are still in production, then... HOORAY! It's a good thing to have more than option in the market. Here's to hoping I'm wrong...
A true archival CD-R consists of a high quality stabilized dye, and a non-corroding reflective surface. The best stabilized CD-R dye on the market is Pthalocyanine, a formula patented by Mitsui. The best non-corroding reflective surface is gold.
There used to be a choice for customers in this niche: Kodak Ultima Gold and Mitsui Gold.
While I like Kodak a lot, and they generally make quality products, they have a serious case of the jitters and I've always been under the impression that they pull a good thing out of production too quickly. Thus, Kodak stopped making Ultima Gold CD-R's.
If you want an archival CD-R, look for Mitsui Gold. According to Mitsui's literature, the estimated life span of these guys is 200 years.
How much extra do you pay for this quality? One disc will run you about $1.50. A small price to pay for priceless photos, but more than 10x the price of the cheap bulk CD-Rs.
The 100 year old photos of your great grandmother are probably black and white photos on fiber based paper. Because that is an archival print process.
If you had color film photos of your kids, 100 years from now those would probably be gone too because color negative film is not archival quality. The only archival color film process that I'm aware of is Kodak's K-14 "Kodachrome" process. It will keep for 100 years in dark storage, but it is a slide film ("color reversal"). The good aspect to this is that in 100 years, provided humans still have eyes, the technology to view this will still exist.
Black and white negatives *are* archival. Black and white prints today generally are not. Resin coated B&W photo papers will not last that long.
Now in defense of digital...
Dye stabilized CD-R's *are* archival. Most CD-R's are not dye stabilized, you have to pay a little extra for those (the non-dye stabilized have an expected shelf life of about 5 years). So assuming something that can read a CD exists in 100 years, digital photos stored in this medium will be available then.
NASA's problem is that they have photos stored on magnetic tape, a process that was known to be non-archival when they implemented it. It can take an hour or more to get all the data off one tape. In comparison a 700MB 80Min CD-R can be read in under 5 minutes.
So, if you want color pictures of your kids to last 100 years, you can:
a) have them transferred to Kodachrome slides (a cost of about $0.50/picture) b) put them on dye stabilized CD-R (a cost of about $0.01/picture)
Makes digital look like a very attractive option for archival purposes.
That is exactly the background I was looking for. (not that the long miracleman background story was bad, but I wasn't able to figure out the McFarlane/Gaiman relationship from it) Now why isn't this post modded +5 yet?
To the poster that called Gaiman the "little guy," that's a little distorted. Gaiman is about as big a name is comics as they come-- but he's also a reasonable fellow, and wished it wouldn't have come to this.
I think that was me. It wasn't so much that I was characterizing or criticizing Gaiman, I just had no idea who any of the players were. In extrapolating from the information I did have it resembled a David vs. Goliath copyright battle, so I thought Gaiman was the David and McFarlane was the Goliath.
Could someone provide some background on this matter... The slashdot article, and the two links it provides all speak in a manner that can only be deciphered by someone who is familiar with the case... I'm having trouble figuring out exactly what went on... Something about little guy writing something, big guy using it, little guy suing... All existing in the comic book world (hmmm, does this really fit in the legal category?)
So could someone give me a run up on who the players are? (i.e. "Gaiman" "McFarlane" "Image" "Medieval Spawn" "Cagliostro" "Miracle Man")
I make a product, I can design it to work however I want. If I build the thing to play advertisements, and you still want to buy the thing, that's my decision.
Your copyright only gives you the rights to: production, distribution, public display and public performance.
Regardless of how you build it, once I legally obtain a copy of said information, I'm supposed to be allowed to use it however I please, including viewing partial portions thereof provided I do not infringe upon your rights to copy.
TCPA/Palladium does *not* do this, dammit. You can use Linux and do whatever you want to with it. No one is forcing you to use Windows, and no one will ever force you to use Windows.
Can I use Linux to watch a Disney DVD I've legally purchased on open source DVD playing software? Is there anything which artificially restricts Linux' ability to do so? (Here in the US there certainly is)
There have been many 256 byte game competitions for dos (Here's a google for some of them, many of the sites are dead any more)... I'm betting 1K is plenty for a dos game (though the next step after 256bytes seems to be 4K games)
Slashdot Mirror
But Bill Wyman runs a fansite about the Rolling Stone musician! Come on. I expected to go to his site and find a site about a journalist named Bill Wyman and see his work.
Wait... The C&D Letter from former Rolling Stone member Bill Wyman's Lawyers doesn't mention a web site... The ACJ article doesn't mention a web site... The Slashdot article doesn't either... billwyman.com is owned by a media group in London, not somebody in Atlanta. What are you talking about??
There's one small problem: this installation is illegal! 47-CFR-15.203
You might want to read 47-CFR-15.23 - The device does not violate section 203 because it is exempted by section 23.
High power, long range links deny service to other users of the spectrum. That's why they require licensing and use a licensed spectrum allocation. If you need a long range microwave link, get licensed! Don't hog a shared resource.
They aren't hogging a shared research. That's why they have parabolic dishes at both ends. They aren't omnidirectional transmitters. The FCC encourages unidirectional point to point links and has relaxed regulations for them.
The FCC is more lenient when it comes to p2p links because their directional nature spams the airwaves less. The rule is for every 3dB over a 6dBi antenna you must reduce total power output 1dB. 24dB of gain is permissible if your TPO is 1/4 watt. I know the article says their TPO is 1 watt, but it isn't a quote. The link may be illegal, but it's only 4 times the legal limit, not 200.
1.) In Dune, the hero is names after a biblical person, Paul, while in Star Wars the hero is named after a biblical person too (Luke).
That is really reaching... That bible thing has dominated the culture of western civilization for over a thousand years... the names of biblical figures permeates our literature.
6.) In Dune, the galaxy is made up of an Empire with a demotractic power base (The Lansraad (Spelling?)). In SW you have an Empire with a democratic power base (The Senate).
That is a natural extensions of an existing political systems which is found in generous quantities in western civilizations.
7.) In Dune, you have both energy weapon based warfare, and melee (swords and knives) combat. Most combat takes place with energy or projectile weaponry, but key battles are fought melee. In SW, you have both energy based combat, and melee combat (swords). Most combat takes place with energy weapons, while key battles are fought melee.
I thought in dune not a lot of fighting took place with energy weapons because Laser + Shield = Nuke. Fights in star wars ALWAYS involved energy weapons, except those between Jedi/Sith.
I'll love it when they give me free channel listings over the dish and a good user interface. :) Is there a Tivo with dual tuners?
I'm not sure what you mean by free channel listings over the dish. The DirecTivo unit will pull guide information from the sat. When I first plugged mine in, it got the current listings in a minute, the days listings in about 15, the next week's over a couple hours, and so on. Using the DirecTivo is not free unless you buy their platinum package. But this month they dropped me to $5/month for service. The unit itself cost me $99 at Circuit City a year ago (sadly I don't think you can get this good a deal anymore).
DirecTivo does have two tuners, but requires you to run two wires from the satellite to the unit or buy a digital signal stacker/destacker. That stacking hardware isn't cheap though. It was cheapier and more convenient for me to just run a second cable.
I'm not sure there's a tivo unit that compares.
That's possible, but I'm not sure what features yours has that you're not sure Tivo has too. If you list them someone could give you a yes/no.
The one thing I saw in the link you gave that I would say the DirecTivo does not have (at least not the first generation one I have) is speed. Compared to my RCA DirecTV receiver, the DirecTivo is sluggish.
The dbstalk reviewer also mentioned he wished there was an easy way to jump between the two receivers. I'm not sure if Dish PVR has this yet, but DirecTivo does - you press "down" then "right" and you'll be looking at the second receiver's feed.
(uhh BTW Ellen Fiess is 14)
She's like bleep-beep-beep-bleep-beep 14. It was a really good 14 years. Her not being 18 it's kind of... a bummer.
Even if there's only one layer of tiles, so you can see the entire state of the game at the start, determining whether it is possible to remove all the tiles is NP-complete.
Given that there will be very many solutions to the problem (removing all tiles) and each solution will be equally as good as all other solutions - thus not all pairing possibilities would have to be considered - are you sure the problem is NP-complete?
Of course they can. Or with any other language. With Java it is a lot less work though.
Is it? The only benefit to Java over C++ here is Swing. And Swing is painfully slow (I once had the discomfort of using a swing-based Java app running on solaris over exceed... the memory still makes me cringe)
If you thought you can go with Java and do not need experienced people to use it effectively, then you have made choices based on wrong assumptions.
Okay, this is one important point with Java... You need just as much talent with Java as with C++, so Java sees no savings in hiring costs.
Everyone doing serious Java development does extensive testing on the platforms they expect to use the most
Yes, this is because each JVM has its own peculiarities and bugs. So you can't "write once". You "write once" then refactor for each platform you run on. So Java doesn't save that much time there.
Every project I've seen (whether I worked on it or not) that has used Java for its "run anywhere" promise has paid the gains in time of not having to port to another platform with trying to improve their business logic so that the software isn't so slow it offends users, and working around JVM bugs of different platforms (or dealing with UIs that suddenly look hideous when using Sun's braindead selection of fonts on Solaris).
The web is full of benchmarks comparing different math algorithms
I doubt there is any math algorithm that can be written in Java that cannot be written in C++.
(which are a special case btw, most programming problems involve business logic, not mathematical calculations).
Okay, how about you take the scrabble dictionary as a plain text file, and put each entry in some sort of height balanced binary search tree (go ahead and use a pre-made collection if you want). Then do 40 or 50 thousand unique searches. Profile time to create tree (wow! That's several hundred thousand object instantiations... not Java's strong suit) and time to search tree. My experience has been that C++ will slam the equivalent Java code.
In some cases Java is faster due to the modern runtime compilers such as Hotspot that are able to re-adjust the runtime code to dynamically allocated data structures.
You've got to be kidding me... Hotspot optimizes methods based on usage. A heavily used method may get recompiled with a higher optimization because the time penalty of optimized compiling is offset by the time savings of the optimized result. C++ starts out with the best optimization hotspot could hope for.
Of course, WORA is easily broken by a newbie programmer
Well we don't call them newbies, we call them "Junior Engineers". But yes my job was come along behind them and fix anything that was causing problems moving over to Solaris.
so it does require a competent team of Java developers to be able to achieve it.
A competent team of developers can write C++ code that is portable between Windows and Solaris with forks for the UI. What good is Java if it still requires a team of senior engineers to avoid all the landmines? As many have said before, that isn't write once run anywhere, it's write once test everywhere. All of our software had to be thoroughly tested on both Windows and Solaris. I'm not clear that Java saved us anything in time spent in development, but cost us a lot in performance.
Okay troll... let's take a simple case, how would I write a mandelbrot algorithm (heavy use of pure logic) in Java such that it was as fast as my C++?
In what circumstance do the speed differences in C++ and Java justify not having the broad compatibility and stable free API's of java?
In any circumstance where you want:
1) A responsive user interface.
2) High speed code execution.
3) Parameterized classes.
4) Stable APIs.
I was laid off a year ago from a company that was an all-java shop. For years I had written software exclusively in Java. I believe the reason we couldn't get customers for our product was because our product was 100% Java and was SLOW. After leaving the company and going back to C/C++, it was quite a hit on the head to see just how much faster C/C++ was in comparison. Pure logic and method invocation easily felt like an order of magnitude faster.
I'd go back to Java if I had the chance, but all that "write once run anywhere" speak is just crap. I can't tell you how many hours I spent at a Solaris box trying to make code that worked perfectly under NT/2K to work under Solaris.
Companies are not only perpetuating the problem of insufficient women in technical fields, but are also missing a huge market by failing to make an effort to find games that interest women.
Do you *really* think companies are uninterested in developing games for women? *really*? Do you think gaming companies sit around and say "Oh forget that market segment which is responsible for actually spending most household income..." They actively choose to miss a huge market with little competition? You make the problem sound so easy "Oh just make an effort to find games that interest women"... That's the holy-f'ing-grail of a whole segment of the industry. It's damned hard, and usually when it does happen, it was by mistake.
When I worked in the industry, it was usually accepted as fact that whatever your expected sales were, if women liked your game you'd double that forecast - if not triple. The potential of that market is well known... The desires of that market are not.
They did refund $100 to all those who bought divx boxes... That was the difference in cost between a regular DVD player and a divx player.
If TiVo goes out of business, they *could* just convert the TiVo into a glorified VCR before ending service.
She also told us that her son managed to make himself nice and sick to his stomach by drinking some fairly concentrated (like 6 molar) hydrochloric acid. See she used the little plastic chem bottles for water bottles in her house. For some reason, she had some HCl there one day, in the same bottle (storing acid was a common use for them in the lab). He didn't look at the lable and took a nice swig. Now HCl won't burn you like some, it's stomach acid, but that concentrated will cause a fair amount of dsicomfort.
I get the impression your teacher was just spinning a fanciful yarn. The pH of your stomach is usually not less than 1, and your stomach has enzymes that protect it from being melted away by the acid that is in there. 6M is something like 60 times the concentration of acid in your stomach - you think throwing up burned the back of your throat? This will be excrutiating! A swig of fairly concentrated HCl would probably taste disgustingly sour. A person would realize immediately that something seriously wrong had occurred (and more appropriately would probably have spat it out before swallowing).
Hopefully she administered copious amounts of water with a little baking soda in it by mouth until his stomach hurt from being so full.
Step 1: Create Sourceforge account.
Step 2: Place project into "Planning" phase.
Step 3: Wait 3 months.
Step 4: Purchase 3D Studio Max using the money you've been saving for 3 months.
I wish there was another moderation option:
+1 Sad, but true.
I was using my experience as an avid photographer, but a fairly cursory google search turned up exactly what I said, so yes I stand by what I said.
That's a HUGE assumption. Do you have access to something that can read 10 year old 5.25" disks now?
That is a big assumption, but I don't think it is that unreasonable an expectation. About 75-ish years ago someone put video on a phonograph and about 1-ish years ago, someone figured out how to get the video back off.
You can still buy vinyl record players, but if all of them suddenly disappeared from the earth, somebody already figured out how to scan them and reconstruct the audio from that.
There are geeks now who are into high tech ways to work with antique tech, I'm assuming the same will be true 100 years from now. Even if no CD reader exists, somebody will figure out how the data is stored, and come up with a way to lay the CD data side down on a scanner and reconstruct the data from that.
Well, here's the closest to a press release I could find.
If this is wrong, and the dye-stabilized gold-backed CD-R's are still in production, then... HOORAY! It's a good thing to have more than option in the market. Here's to hoping I'm wrong...
A true archival CD-R consists of a high quality stabilized dye, and a non-corroding reflective surface. The best stabilized CD-R dye on the market is Pthalocyanine, a formula patented by Mitsui. The best non-corroding reflective surface is gold.
There used to be a choice for customers in this niche: Kodak Ultima Gold and Mitsui Gold.
While I like Kodak a lot, and they generally make quality products, they have a serious case of the jitters and I've always been under the impression that they pull a good thing out of production too quickly. Thus, Kodak stopped making Ultima Gold CD-R's.
If you want an archival CD-R, look for Mitsui Gold. According to Mitsui's literature, the estimated life span of these guys is 200 years.
How much extra do you pay for this quality? One disc will run you about $1.50. A small price to pay for priceless photos, but more than 10x the price of the cheap bulk CD-Rs.
The 100 year old photos of your great grandmother are probably black and white photos on fiber based paper. Because that is an archival print process.
If you had color film photos of your kids, 100 years from now those would probably be gone too because color negative film is not archival quality. The only archival color film process that I'm aware of is Kodak's K-14 "Kodachrome" process. It will keep for 100 years in dark storage, but it is a slide film ("color reversal"). The good aspect to this is that in 100 years, provided humans still have eyes, the technology to view this will still exist.
Black and white negatives *are* archival. Black and white prints today generally are not. Resin coated B&W photo papers will not last that long.
Now in defense of digital...
Dye stabilized CD-R's *are* archival. Most CD-R's are not dye stabilized, you have to pay a little extra for those (the non-dye stabilized have an expected shelf life of about 5 years). So assuming something that can read a CD exists in 100 years, digital photos stored in this medium will be available then.
NASA's problem is that they have photos stored on magnetic tape, a process that was known to be non-archival when they implemented it. It can take an hour or more to get all the data off one tape. In comparison a 700MB 80Min CD-R can be read in under 5 minutes.
So, if you want color pictures of your kids to last 100 years, you can:
a) have them transferred to Kodachrome slides (a cost of about $0.50/picture)
b) put them on dye stabilized CD-R (a cost of about $0.01/picture)
Makes digital look like a very attractive option for archival purposes.
Thank you!
That is exactly the background I was looking for. (not that the long miracleman background story was bad, but I wasn't able to figure out the McFarlane/Gaiman relationship from it) Now why isn't this post modded +5 yet?
To the poster that called Gaiman the "little guy," that's a little distorted. Gaiman is about as big a name is comics as they come-- but he's also a reasonable fellow, and wished it wouldn't have come to this.
I think that was me. It wasn't so much that I was characterizing or criticizing Gaiman, I just had no idea who any of the players were. In extrapolating from the information I did have it resembled a David vs. Goliath copyright battle, so I thought Gaiman was the David and McFarlane was the Goliath.
Could someone provide some background on this matter... The slashdot article, and the two links it provides all speak in a manner that can only be deciphered by someone who is familiar with the case... I'm having trouble figuring out exactly what went on... Something about little guy writing something, big guy using it, little guy suing... All existing in the comic book world (hmmm, does this really fit in the legal category?)
So could someone give me a run up on who the players are? (i.e. "Gaiman" "McFarlane" "Image" "Medieval Spawn" "Cagliostro" "Miracle Man")
I make a product, I can design it to work however I want. If I build the thing to play advertisements, and you still want to buy the thing, that's my decision.
Your copyright only gives you the rights to: production, distribution, public display and public performance.
Regardless of how you build it, once I legally obtain a copy of said information, I'm supposed to be allowed to use it however I please, including viewing partial portions thereof provided I do not infringe upon your rights to copy.
TCPA/Palladium does *not* do this, dammit. You can use Linux and do whatever you want to with it. No one is forcing you to use Windows, and no one will ever force you to use Windows.
Can I use Linux to watch a Disney DVD I've legally purchased on open source DVD playing software? Is there anything which artificially restricts Linux' ability to do so? (Here in the US there certainly is)
There have been many 256 byte game competitions for dos (Here's a google for some of them, many of the sites are dead any more)... I'm betting 1K is plenty for a dos game (though the next step after 256bytes seems to be 4K games)