The box cover was a picture that claimed to be an actual screen shot from the game. They made a big deal about it, as few games had graphics worth sticking on a box at the time. Buit it wasn't actual game graphics. There were weapons and ships on the HUD that didn't exist in the game. There were also asteroids featured prominently in the shot, and they were much more detailed than the asteroids in the game. It's about time the ad monkeys got called on their BS.
People have been wanting 16-bit color and CMYK support in the gimp since the previous century. FilmGimp aka Cinepaint was the gimp with 16-bit years ago. Why does the gimp still not have 16-bit color when the code has been around for years?
The answer is GEGL, a non-existant "shiny geek toy". GEGL is supposed to be some amazing framework that will handle image operations the Right Way. It will make 16-bit color, CMYK, and adjustment layers appear by magic. It will be fast and generalized and light-years beyond anything Adobe has and wash your windows for you. Who knows what it is supposed to do now? Unlike the codebase of GEGL, the legend of GEGL grows by leaps and bounds.
It you read the gimp devel list archives, you'll see many cases of people saying, "I want to code CMYK", or, "I have 16 bit support". The
developers always send them away, "You are doing things the Wrong Way, you must work on GEGL instead!" The result is, development is killed.
What of GEGL? Years go by and it's nothing more a "design document" aka Musings of a Lotus-Eater, that hasn't been updated since the Clinton administration. A CVS repository that goes eight months at a time between commits. No code that actually compiles and does anything. It's still just a pipe-dream shiny geek toy.
Mark Shutteworth tried to fund someone to work on GEGL. I imagine nothing ever came of it.
Why not take a look at the top500 list? They have a nice piechart by processor family. We can see that there are more AMD X86-64 systems than IA-64 systems. You also have to keep in mind that there is a large lag time from when a top500 system is planned and when it's actually purchased, installed, and makes it on the list. Opteron is a newer processor and adoption takes times. Expect to see a huge increase in the number of opteron systems on the next list.
You can get RAID cases where each drive has a hot-swap carrier that lets you remove them to carry to a new location. For SATA drives the carriers are nothing more than simple frames and don't need connectors and electronics like SCSI drives do. The gigabytes per volume/mass of high-capacity IDE drives is around that of LTO-1 tapes, so it's not like it's a lot more to move. The disk is of course a lot more fragile than a tape, no way around that.
Disk backups are a lot cheaper, faster, and easier than tape based though. So you have to consider what's better, a disk backup with twice-daily snapshots going back a month, that are online for users to grab files they deleted or messed up whenever they want, or a more physically robust tape system, which only has weekly snapshots, and requires an operator to deal with loading tapes into a library and slow retrevial times to get back a file.
You can always transport your backup to an offsite NAS over a network, even safer than moving tapes. The network bandwidth costs money, but the man hours involved in managing and transporting tapes add up fast too.
Their old system was a DLT7000 tape drive. I used one of these for backup around five years ago. They hold 35GB uncompressed per tape and have a trasfer speed of 5 MB/sec. Think about trying to backup a 350 GB drive on one of these things. DLT7000 was replaced by LTO-1 and SDLT about four plus years ago. These systems get 100 GB on a tape. I guess they skipped that generation and went to LTO-2, 200 GB on a tape.
Last time I was buying this stuff, a 24 tape auto-loader was around $15,000 and the tapes were $50 each. That's only about 6 terrabytes before you have to manually change tapes. If you look at how much it costs to build a multi-terrabyte NAS server with 250GB+ SATA drives (way less), and how much faster and easier to deal with it is, you have to wonder what the point of tape is nowdays.
Of course the South Park people's data isn't very big at all. They've only got two terra-bytes to deal with! That's nothing by today's standards. I built a system five times that size two years ago. For less than they paid for the Apple Xservers today too.
Except the 4:3 aspect was the standard film aspect before TV was even invented. In fact wide screen movies started as a way to provide something extra to keep people going to theaters AFTER television came out.
The presence of the two documents would clearly be proof that foul play was involved. It's also known that the same person created both documents. All the employee needs to prove is that the company is the one who created the document he signed.
Many modern SATA drives are physically identical to the SCSI disks in terms of the disk components,
Maybe this way true 10 years ago, but it hasn't been the case for a long time. If you look at the physical parameters, SCSI and ATA/SATA drives are completely different. Different spindle speeds, different number of platters, different capacities, different noise levels, etc. The only drives I know of that are the same are western digital's Raptor 10k SATA drives, which are the same (including cost) as some of their SCSI drives.
You can get 10k SATA drives now. There are 15k SCSI drives, but they have small capaciticies and are very expensive. There are a small number of applications that actually want to use them. For most uses, a 300 GB 7200 RPM drive is better than a 73 GB 10,000 RPM drive that costs four times as much.
Third is SATA only lets you have *one* drive. SCSI lets you have 15.
You're off in two ways here. One is that your ignoring the topology difference between SATA and SCSI. SATA uses a star, you have a controller with multiple ports, with one drive on each port. SCSI use a bus, with a single port controler and multiple drives on each port. The star topology is a lot nicer in many ways, one of the reasons twisted pair ethernet with hubs replaced the bus like coax ethernet.
Secondly, you can't connect 15 drives to a single SCSI bus and run at ultra-160 or ultra-320 speed. You're only allowed to connect something like 4 drives to remain in spec at those speeds.
A 3ware 12 port SATA card and a three port U320 SCSI card with four drives on each port both support the same number of drives. Except the SATA card will probably be 1/3 the price, the SATA drives will be 1/10 the cost per GB, and have higher transfer rates.
SATA does have real command queuing. There are real hotswap SATA drive bays. It's true the cables can't be as long, but since you only need to connect once device per cable instead of 4 or more, it's usually easier to connect. And believe me, I know my way around a SCSI cable.
At my previous job I built a number of RAID systems, from hardward SCSI to software ATA to hardware SATA.
I can't tell how many drives they are using (4?) or what raid level, but their benchmark results just aren't correct. They should be able to get bonnie++ read bechmarks in the 200 MB/sec range. They're getting in the 8 to 60 MB/sec range. The single character I/O benchmarks don't make sense either, they should be nearly the same with CPU usage at 99%. For some reason their disks are running much much slower than they should be. Just connecting two of those maxtor drives into the motherboard IDE controller and using linux software raid should be able to beat all their benchmarks.
Only where "use" is defined as reproduction, public display, redistribution, etc, namely the exclusive rights of the copyright holder as spelled out in copyright law. The moment you sell a tangible copy of your work to another, you lose the right to tell that other person he can't use it in its normal sense
That is old-style copyright law, with its quaint and outdated ideas like "first sale" and "fair use". It only applies to legacy formats, like words printed on paper. As these formats disappear, it will be nothing but a footnote in history books.
The DMCA changed everything and created a new concept, the super-copyright. Basically if you have work that is digital and encrypted, you have a non-expiring super-copyright, and can create any restrictions you want. You can say a book can't be re-sold, can't be read in certain countries, expires after a certain time, self-destructs if you give it a bad review, can't be touched by people of a certain color skin, or anything else you dream up. If you are able to make a passable attempt with technological means to enforce the restriction you create, your non-expiring DMCA super-copyright will envoke the force of law to do anything that is necessary to enforce your restriction.
Actually they want $15.05 for it. The $9.95 price includes a $5.10 discout for not getting a normal digital converter box. I kept my normal digital box when I got a DVR and comcast told me it would be $9.95 extra, like they said in the add. Then when the bill came, they had changed me $15.05 for it. I hate comcast.
That a circular justification if I ever saw one. Static linking doesn't work, therefor static linking isn't allowed, therefor it's ok that static linking doesn't work, since it's not allowed.
In order to reach a large fraction of Linux users with binaries, you either need to use libc5, or have a dozen different binaries. New binaries are needed on a monthly basis. Trying to distribute binary software of Linux is a nightmare (now, it was fine pre-glibc), much worse than for other operating systems.
Of course the glibc maintainers and the distribution providers don't like binary software, so they consider this a good thing for political reasons.
Re:This is a troll, right?
on
GCC 4.0 Preview
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Incompatible syntax changes
Such as...?
For inline assembly code, non-Lvalue parameters can no longer be given an "m" contraint. It used to be possible to have a parameter like (x+1) and use the most general contraint "m", register or memory. This way gcc could leave x+1 in a register, or spill it onto the stack if it ran out of registers.
In gcc 4 you have to define a variable to hold x+1 and gcc is forced to write the value into memory, even if it could be left in a register.
Re:and how many times...
on
GCC 4.0 Preview
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· Score: 3, Informative
C binary compatability is broken constantly, with every version of glibc. Anything compiled statically will crash using NSS if you compile statically and use a sligtly different gblic version. If you compile dynamically, then anyone who doesn't have this weeks version of glibc can't run your binaries.
The 18 ATSC formats are 18 different resolutions and framesrates. 1080i, 720p, 480p in several different framerates and a few horizontal resolutions. This is at the MPEG-TS layer, when you have a digital bitstream. Before you get digital bits, you need to demodulate the channel using something like VSB or QAM. OTA signals use VSB, while digital cable systems use QAM. I have both digital cable and HD-3000 card, and the tuner on the HD-3000 card can not de-modulate QAM.
There is a card that can do QAM, but it doesn't have linux support.
In real (pirate) life, if I was a low-ranking pirate in this logic game, I'd walk away with 25 gold and leave behind one dead senior pirate because I know how to make a side-deal which includes, "And after we kill the blighter, we stop messing around with this stupid voting nonsense. It's this way, or we all get screwed by so-called, 'logic'."
At which point three of the remaining pirates decide to kill you and split the gold into 3rds. Then two of the three that are left kill the 3rd and split the gold 50/50, then one of two who are left kills the other and keeps all the gold, but dies himself from his wounds.
Of course, this would never happen, as the pirates realize that as soon as they throw out the rules, they'll turn on each other and end up being killed. Being intelligent, greedy, and not wanting to die, the pirates have formed a society with laws. Their law is to follow the voting nonsense or you get killed.
In this case, the most senior pirate gives himself 98%, the 3rd most senior 1% and the fifth most senior 1%.
The four less senior pirates accept this and wait for their chance at the top, since to do otherwise would degenerate into anarchy and they would all be killed and get nothing.
The most senior accepts the 2% he had to give away as tax, knowing that paying taxes to keep a civil society is better than trying to keep it all and getting stabbed in the back by his mates.
It's how the movie was shot. Check the technical specs on IMDB. Live and Let Die was shot spherical aka flat. That means the original negative isn't widescreen. The widescreen version is created by cutting off the top and bottom. On Her Majesty's Secret Service on the other hand was shot anamorphic. That means the original negative is widescreen, with a "squished" imaged that is expanded when the movie is shown.
This lawsuit is just a money grab by some lawyers. There isn't anything wrong with the DVDs. MGM had a description of what widescreen meant that was correct for anamorphic movies, not movies shot open matte.
Hopefully a huge land grab for IP will turn India's software industry into a litigation industry.
India won't be able to start a software industry of it's own, when American companies "own" all the ideas software is based on. They'll just keep being a source of cheap labor to make American CEO's richer.
You're right about that, it was a pilot for a possible new B5 series on sci-fi. The didn't buy crusade becaue it wasn't bad enough, sci-fi only buys crap series. So JMS came up with a new series that was worse than crusade, but it still wasn't bad enough for sci-fi. So they bought Andromeda, Scare Tactics, and the 3rd season of Lexx instead.
JMS says lengend of the rangers was killed by Osama bin Laden. After 9/11, the NFL postponed their games. That meant the football season ended later. Which caused B5:LotR to go up against a football game on the east coast. This game just so happened to be the most watched football game ever. So the east cost ratings weren't good enough for a series, but on the west coast, with no game, they were.
You understand wrong, see this
If you could drink gas, you would get over 1,000 miles per gallon on a bicycle.
If cars could eat big macs, it would take about 2.46 to go a mile.
A human on a bicycle is the most efficient means of active transportation in existence, including machines and animals. The only way to get more efficient is to float and let water or air currents take you where they will.
Lexx had four movies that ran on Showtime, then just three seasons. The first two for showtime, then the third for the sci-fi channel. I liked the first season, but the third was just terrible.
The sci-fi channel passed on buying Babylon 5: Crusade when TNT canceled it. They didn't pick up the Babylon 5: Legend of the Rangers spinoff. They canceled Farscape! But they did buy the third season of Lexx (crap) and Andromeda (crap after 1st season). Plus their reality show, John Edwards, Scare Tactics, etc. double plus crap.
Sci-Fi Channel: Stuff so bad, we get it really cheap.
Cars kill around 40,000 people each year in the US alone. Just a bit more than a jumbo jet, wouldn't you say?
You know what the most dangerous form of power is, based on real disasters that actually happened and not ignorant peoples' imaginations? Hydroelectric power. On August 8th 1975, the Banqiao and Shimantan dams in China burst during a storm. The flooding, water born diseases, and destruction of farm land is estimated to have killed over 200,000.
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The box cover was a picture that claimed to be an actual screen shot from the game. They made a big deal about it, as few games had graphics worth sticking on a box at the time. Buit it wasn't actual game graphics. There were weapons and ships on the HUD that didn't exist in the game. There were also asteroids featured prominently in the shot, and they were much more detailed than the asteroids in the game. It's about time the ad monkeys got called on their BS.
The answer is GEGL, a non-existant "shiny geek toy". GEGL is supposed to be some amazing framework that will handle image operations the Right Way. It will make 16-bit color, CMYK, and adjustment layers appear by magic. It will be fast and generalized and light-years beyond anything Adobe has and wash your windows for you. Who knows what it is supposed to do now? Unlike the codebase of GEGL, the legend of GEGL grows by leaps and bounds.
It you read the gimp devel list archives, you'll see many cases of people saying, "I want to code CMYK", or, "I have 16 bit support". The developers always send them away, "You are doing things the Wrong Way, you must work on GEGL instead!" The result is, development is killed.
What of GEGL? Years go by and it's nothing more a "design document" aka Musings of a Lotus-Eater, that hasn't been updated since the Clinton administration. A CVS repository that goes eight months at a time between commits. No code that actually compiles and does anything. It's still just a pipe-dream shiny geek toy.
Mark Shutteworth tried to fund someone to work on GEGL. I imagine nothing ever came of it.
Why not take a look at the top500 list? They have a nice piechart by processor family. We can see that there are more AMD X86-64 systems than IA-64 systems. You also have to keep in mind that there is a large lag time from when a top500 system is planned and when it's actually purchased, installed, and makes it on the list. Opteron is a newer processor and adoption takes times. Expect to see a huge increase in the number of opteron systems on the next list.
You can get RAID cases where each drive has a hot-swap carrier that lets you remove them to carry to a new location. For SATA drives the carriers are nothing more than simple frames and don't need connectors and electronics like SCSI drives do. The gigabytes per volume/mass of high-capacity IDE drives is around that of LTO-1 tapes, so it's not like it's a lot more to move. The disk is of course a lot more fragile than a tape, no way around that.
Disk backups are a lot cheaper, faster, and easier than tape based though. So you have to consider what's better, a disk backup with twice-daily snapshots going back a month, that are online for users to grab files they deleted or messed up whenever they want, or a more physically robust tape system, which only has weekly snapshots, and requires an operator to deal with loading tapes into a library and slow retrevial times to get back a file.
You can always transport your backup to an offsite NAS over a network, even safer than moving tapes. The network bandwidth costs money, but the man hours involved in managing and transporting tapes add up fast too.
Their old system was a DLT7000 tape drive. I used one of these for backup around five years ago. They hold 35GB uncompressed per tape and have a trasfer speed of 5 MB/sec. Think about trying to backup a 350 GB drive on one of these things. DLT7000 was replaced by LTO-1 and SDLT about four plus years ago. These systems get 100 GB on a tape. I guess they skipped that generation and went to LTO-2, 200 GB on a tape.
Last time I was buying this stuff, a 24 tape auto-loader was around $15,000 and the tapes were $50 each. That's only about 6 terrabytes before you have to manually change tapes. If you look at how much it costs to build a multi-terrabyte NAS server with 250GB+ SATA drives (way less), and how much faster and easier to deal with it is, you have to wonder what the point of tape is nowdays.
Of course the South Park people's data isn't very big at all. They've only got two terra-bytes to deal with! That's nothing by today's standards. I built a system five times that size two years ago. For less than they paid for the Apple Xservers today too.
Except the 4:3 aspect was the standard film aspect before TV was even invented. In fact wide screen movies started as a way to provide something extra to keep people going to theaters AFTER television came out.
The presence of the two documents would clearly be proof that foul play was involved. It's also known that the same person created both documents. All the employee needs to prove is that the company is the one who created the document he signed.
A 3ware 12 port SATA card and a three port U320 SCSI card with four drives on each port both support the same number of drives. Except the SATA card will probably be 1/3 the price, the SATA drives will be 1/10 the cost per GB, and have higher transfer rates.
SATA does have real command queuing. There are real hotswap SATA drive bays. It's true the cables can't be as long, but since you only need to connect once device per cable instead of 4 or more, it's usually easier to connect. And believe me, I know my way around a SCSI cable.
At my previous job I built a number of RAID systems, from hardward SCSI to software ATA to hardware SATA.
I can't tell how many drives they are using (4?) or what raid level, but their benchmark results just aren't correct. They should be able to get bonnie++ read bechmarks in the 200 MB/sec range. They're getting in the 8 to 60 MB/sec range. The single character I/O benchmarks don't make sense either, they should be nearly the same with CPU usage at 99%. For some reason their disks are running much much slower than they should be. Just connecting two of those maxtor drives into the motherboard IDE controller and using linux software raid should be able to beat all their benchmarks.
That is old-style copyright law, with its quaint and outdated ideas like "first sale" and "fair use". It only applies to legacy formats, like words printed on paper. As these formats disappear, it will be nothing but a footnote in history books.
The DMCA changed everything and created a new concept, the super-copyright. Basically if you have work that is digital and encrypted, you have a non-expiring super-copyright, and can create any restrictions you want. You can say a book can't be re-sold, can't be read in certain countries, expires after a certain time, self-destructs if you give it a bad review, can't be touched by people of a certain color skin, or anything else you dream up. If you are able to make a passable attempt with technological means to enforce the restriction you create, your non-expiring DMCA super-copyright will envoke the force of law to do anything that is necessary to enforce your restriction.
Actually they want $15.05 for it. The $9.95 price includes a $5.10 discout for not getting a normal digital converter box. I kept my normal digital box when I got a DVR and comcast told me it would be $9.95 extra, like they said in the add. Then when the bill came, they had changed me $15.05 for it. I hate comcast.
In order to reach a large fraction of Linux users with binaries, you either need to use libc5, or have a dozen different binaries. New binaries are needed on a monthly basis. Trying to distribute binary software of Linux is a nightmare (now, it was fine pre-glibc), much worse than for other operating systems.
Of course the glibc maintainers and the distribution providers don't like binary software, so they consider this a good thing for political reasons.
For inline assembly code, non-Lvalue parameters can no longer be given an "m" contraint. It used to be possible to have a parameter like (x+1) and use the most general contraint "m", register or memory. This way gcc could leave x+1 in a register, or spill it onto the stack if it ran out of registers.
In gcc 4 you have to define a variable to hold x+1 and gcc is forced to write the value into memory, even if it could be left in a register.
C binary compatability is broken constantly, with every version of glibc. Anything compiled statically will crash using NSS if you compile statically and use a sligtly different gblic version. If you compile dynamically, then anyone who doesn't have this weeks version of glibc can't run your binaries.
The 18 ATSC formats are 18 different resolutions and framesrates. 1080i, 720p, 480p in several different framerates and a few horizontal resolutions. This is at the MPEG-TS layer, when you have a digital bitstream. Before you get digital bits, you need to demodulate the channel using something like VSB or QAM. OTA signals use VSB, while digital cable systems use QAM. I have both digital cable and HD-3000 card, and the tuner on the HD-3000 card can not de-modulate QAM.
There is a card that can do QAM, but it doesn't have linux support.
Because OTA signals use 8VSB modulation, while digital cable uses QAM. The PCHD card doesn't have a QAM tuner and can't receive digital cable.
At which point three of the remaining pirates decide to kill you and split the gold into 3rds. Then two of the three that are left kill the 3rd and split the gold 50/50, then one of two who are left kills the other and keeps all the gold, but dies himself from his wounds.
Of course, this would never happen, as the pirates realize that as soon as they throw out the rules, they'll turn on each other and end up being killed. Being intelligent, greedy, and not wanting to die, the pirates have formed a society with laws. Their law is to follow the voting nonsense or you get killed.
In this case, the most senior pirate gives himself 98%, the 3rd most senior 1% and the fifth most senior 1%.
The four less senior pirates accept this and wait for their chance at the top, since to do otherwise would degenerate into anarchy and they would all be killed and get nothing.
The most senior accepts the 2% he had to give away as tax, knowing that paying taxes to keep a civil society is better than trying to keep it all and getting stabbed in the back by his mates.
This lawsuit is just a money grab by some lawyers. There isn't anything wrong with the DVDs. MGM had a description of what widescreen meant that was correct for anamorphic movies, not movies shot open matte.
I think the parent proposed enforcement via something involving a whip and bare asses.
That's a start. Maybe something involving goats as the next step...
Hopefully a huge land grab for IP will turn India's software industry into a litigation industry.
India won't be able to start a software industry of it's own, when American companies "own" all the ideas software is based on. They'll just keep being a source of cheap labor to make American CEO's richer.
JMS says lengend of the rangers was killed by Osama bin Laden. After 9/11, the NFL postponed their games. That meant the football season ended later. Which caused B5:LotR to go up against a football game on the east coast. This game just so happened to be the most watched football game ever. So the east cost ratings weren't good enough for a series, but on the west coast, with no game, they were.
If cars could eat big macs, it would take about 2.46 to go a mile.
A human on a bicycle is the most efficient means of active transportation in existence, including machines and animals. The only way to get more efficient is to float and let water or air currents take you where they will.
Lexx had four movies that ran on Showtime, then just three seasons. The first two for showtime, then the third for the sci-fi channel. I liked the first season, but the third was just terrible.
The sci-fi channel passed on buying Babylon 5: Crusade when TNT canceled it. They didn't pick up the Babylon 5: Legend of the Rangers spinoff. They canceled Farscape! But they did buy the third season of Lexx (crap) and Andromeda (crap after 1st season). Plus their reality show, John Edwards, Scare Tactics, etc. double plus crap.
Sci-Fi Channel: Stuff so bad, we get it really cheap.
You know what the most dangerous form of power is, based on real disasters that actually happened and not ignorant peoples' imaginations? Hydroelectric power. On August 8th 1975, the Banqiao and Shimantan dams in China burst during a storm. The flooding, water born diseases, and destruction of farm land is estimated to have killed over 200,000.