While I appreciate the point you're trying to make (I've lived in Canada and the US too -- hi Rene), the difference in tax rates you cite just about matches (at least in the mid-range) what I paid for private medical insurance back when I was doing that.
What you don't point out is the huge cost of living differences (much of that due to all the other taxes -- although with some variations due to specific locale). It's been 16 years since I lived in Canada, and I recall paying more for e.g. gas there then than I do here (Denver) now, adjusting for exchange rate and metric conversion. Some years back my brother, then working as a senior mission analyst for Telesat, in Ottawa, was offered a job at Hughes in California. I was amused at his comment about in part being tempted because of the low taxes in California. (Only in Canada, eh?)
And that is the difference between the Apollo astronauts and the idiots playing with highly combustible liquids in fragile glass tubes.
The former (and their fellow engineers in the Apollo project) carefully calculated risks, redesigned systems where necessary, designed in backups and failsafes. Yeah, sometimes they blew it (doing a plugs-out test in an Apollo spacecraft pressurized to 16 PSI with pure O2, for example) and people suffered for it. (They thought the material was fireproof -- mostly it was, at normal partial pressures of O2).
I sincerely doubt that any calculation of risk at all was involved with the latter idiots, though. And that is what makes them idiots.
(Which is how I tend to answer silly questions like that. It usually has the desired effect of causing the other person to pause and re-think what they asked, because they weren't expecting a yes or no answer.)
It's the old "correlation does not equal causation" thing. Back when I was doing statistics support, a co-worker liked to explain it something like:
"Throughout the year, we tend to see a high correlation between the number of leaves falling from trees and the number of deer being shot. Which is not to say that one causes the other."
Quite right, the actual link is a "hidden" cause that manifests -- through a complicated chain of events -- two different effects.
Re:Low end Itanium possible - Apple software stack
on
Apple to Use Intel Chips?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's not really that crazy. I hypothesized the Itanium idea in another message before I'd read the parent.
The code base isn't that much of an issue. At the base, it's Unix, and porting Unix-based apps from one architecture to another is relatively painless. (Endianness is an issue, but the IA-64 can handle either big- or little-endian data (instructions are always little-endian)). Of course, a PPC emulator would be required for migration, more easily done on IA-64 than x86[-64].
The Itanium had speed issues, but this has been addressed with the Itanium2. As far as floating point goes, the IA64 has always been a screamer. Virtualizing an x86 PC would be a breeze.
There are still plenty of other explanations for Apple and Intel to be talking (if indeed they are) which make more sense, explanations that have nothing to do with Mac CPUs, but the Itanium idea isn't that whacky. Going to the PPC in the first place was pretty much an inspired leap, Apple may be gearing up for another one.
That we'll see Mac OS X - IA64. Itanium-based Macs, anyone?
(No, I'm not serious, but it makes about as much sense as an x86 based Mac -- maybe more sense. Why would Apple talk with Intel instead of AMD if they wanted to go x86? Why make such a radical architecture change anyway? But if you're going to make a radical change...I'm sure Intel would be willing to offer a good deal to try to rescue the image of the Itanic. If you happen to hear of an Apple project nicknamed "Carpathian", you'll know what's up.)
No, not pictures of another spacecraft, but the Viking lander team testing the (scanning) camera system had it take a group shot of the team out in the desert. As the camera scanned past individual team members, they'd run around and join the group from the other end. Several people show up in that picture two and three times.
We've been making high quality synthetic rubies (red sapphires, aka crystalline aluminum oxide doped with chromium) for nearly a half-century (flux process, commercially since 1958) and lower quality for over a century (different processes, since 1902). The first lasers, in 1960, used optical quality synthetic ruby rods as the lasing medium.
(Historically, any red gem was called a ruby and many named "rubies" are really garnets, spinels, or other stones. The big ruby ("Black Prince's Ruby") in the British Crown is in fact a spinel. However, the Crown Jewels also contain the largest diamonds ever cut, from the 3000+ carat Cullinan found a century ago. Here's a link with more history and also pix of the Crown with the Black Prince's Spinel.)
They're talking laptops here, not desktops or servers. There is no "prevailing h/w standard" for laptops -- or rather, if there is it's a couple of years out of date. Laptop manufacturers constantly have to push the edge regarding battery life, display resolution, battery life, weight, battery life, wireless and bluetooth capabilities, and did I mention battery life? (Battery life, of course, implies finding low power versions of the other technologies, as well as the other innards.) And of course some of that cutting edge hardware comes from third-parties with NDAs limiting how open they can make the drivers.
As far as HP desktops and servers go, they're pretty much supported out of the box by most distros, with most of the drivers for HP/Compaq hardware being GPL'd. (Except perhaps for some server-only features on high-end hardware, like the remote lights-out management system that'll let me power-cycle a box in Singapore from my desk in Colorado.)
I hear you. I'd heard enough positive buzz about Firefly (and there's Joss Whedon's reputation) to buy the DVD set blind (I'd never seen an episode). Some other shows I'd want to see a few episodes first, one way or another.
I think you're posting to the wrong thread, but just to steer it back to this one, you can buy all the Firefly episodes ever made for less than the cost of a couple months of Tivo. And you can transfer those even quicker to your laptop (assuming it has a DVD drive, most do these days).
I've got no love for MPAA or RIAA, and I rarely watch broadcast TV. I buy the episodes of shows I like (Stargate, Smallville, Firefly, as well as some ancient stuff that just isn't shown anymore) as they come out on DVD. This does make a difference -- I have no doubt that the sales of the Firefly DVD played a big part in making the movie Serenity possible, by proving the market.
By the way, do you watch the commercials that come with those downloaded broadcast episodes?
No, the war was won when the VHS format was introduced. Sony didn't give up until after the ELP formats came out, true, but they were fighting a losing battle the whole way.
Sure, there were other factors (licensing issues, as mentioned by others above), but not being able to put a commercial movie on one cassette SP format was the killer.
(I was there too. My first VCR cost over CDN $1500, but it including audio dubbing -- a feature I used maybe twice.)
As for CD vs cassette tape, you can put 90 minutes of audio on a C90 tape (and theoretically, 120 min on a C120, but those tend to be jam and tangle prone because of the thinner tape, and are harder to find (ditto T180 VHS cassettes)), but it is definitely of lower quality than the 70 minutes of (uncompressed) audio you can put on a CD. However, since both were replacing the dominant vinyl LP medium, which could only hold 20-25 minutes a side (depending on how loud the music was, which affected groove spacing), that was pretty much a non-issue. Recordability aside, cassettes were entrenched before CDs and had the advantage of ubiquity and cheaper players -- but CDs have pretty much replaced cassettes as an audio distribution medium except for a few niches. (Eg, books on tape are probably still more popular than books on CD, partly because tape is more than adequate for the audio range of the spoken voice, and partly because more cars have tape players than CD players.)
It seems to me that the consumer market is unlikely to select the "best" technical solution (cf. Betamax versus VHS).
Not that old canard again. The consumer did select the best technical solution (VHS) because at the time, technically Betamax couldn't store a 2-hour movie on a single cassette.
When you say "X is the best solution", you'd better be sure it's solving the right problem.
You left out the third possibility: the two (camera) shots were edited together like that just for the trailer, but in the movie there's more going on between those two shots.
It's not uncommon to splice together stuff for a trailer that never happens that way in the movie (or TV episode).
If they do have "sounds in space" in the movie, I hope the DVD has an optional soundtrack without them.
I say "they" instead of "Joss" above because there's always additional influence. Whedon certainly has more clout now than he did then, but recall that the original "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" movie was rather different than what Whedon had in mind.
Don't get me wrong, I'm thankful to Marc Miller for creating Traveller, but he did get many of his ideas from the SF of the time; in particular, E. C. Tubb's "Earl Dumarest" series. (Including low, middle, and high passage, air rafts, and much else, although not specific characters or organizations (eg Cyclan)).
I wouldn't worry at all about the music on the trailer -- that is frequently radically different from anything in the movie (sometimes, the movie score isn't yet finished when they're putting out the trailers). Sounds in space...well, we'll see.
where she shoots several men straight with amazing accuracy.
Oh come on, that doesn't do it justice. River sees the three men (who are shooting in her direction), has the gun, but doesn't want to see them get shot. So she turns away and, not looking at them, takes the three of them out with three well-placed shots. Kaylee is there (she'd dropped the gun), and that's the event that makes Kaylee a little afraid of River in the subsequent shows.
You do it exactly as was done in the miniseries: Ford tells Arthur to look up "babelfish" in the Guide, and we cut do the animation plus voice-over of the Guide's entry. (The book and the radio program also treat this as a Guide excerpt, but I don't recall if they segue this by having Ford tell Arther to look it up.)
The accompanying cheezy "computer graphic" animation adds an element of humor and keeps the voice over from being too heavy-handed.
The problem you do run into is length. Most books -- especially these days with the customer demand for thicker books for the buck -- are far too long to squeeze everything into a two-hour movie. (The rule of thumb for screenplays is that each page of the screenplay translates to a minute of film time. That rule doesn't necessarily hold for a book because of differences in writing style (description vs dialog, etc).
Michael Chrichton, of course, has written both books and screenplays, and directed movies (eg "Westworld"), so knows intimately how to write a book that will translate to a movie -- but large chunks of his books get left out of the movie version anyway. Marshall McLuhan may not have been absolutely right ("the medium is the message"), but he certainly raised a valid point about how the medium affects the message (content).
Lord preserve us from a BBC sci-fi miniseries (or series) that actually had good special effects. That would kill the whole flavour, and the writers might start relying on SFX instead of good writing.
In the case of HHGTTG, the whole thing was supposed to be a spoof, a farce. You don't dress up that with effects that are too good, or people won't be sure if you're trying to be funny or not.
No, actually, I meant "criticize", since I'm posting from the US to a US-hosted board. Anywhere else I'd have used the spelling that the rest of the English-speaking world uses.
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While I appreciate the point you're trying to make (I've lived in Canada and the US too -- hi Rene), the difference in tax rates you cite just about matches (at least in the mid-range) what I paid for private medical insurance back when I was doing that.
What you don't point out is the huge cost of living differences (much of that due to all the other taxes -- although with some variations due to specific locale). It's been 16 years since I lived in Canada, and I recall paying more for e.g. gas there then than I do here (Denver) now, adjusting for exchange rate and metric conversion. Some years back my brother, then working as a senior mission analyst for Telesat, in Ottawa, was offered a job at Hughes in California. I was amused at his comment about in part being tempted because of the low taxes in California. (Only in Canada, eh?)
They took a calculated risk
And that is the difference between the Apollo astronauts and the idiots playing with highly combustible liquids in fragile glass tubes.
The former (and their fellow engineers in the Apollo project) carefully calculated risks, redesigned systems where necessary, designed in backups and failsafes. Yeah, sometimes they blew it (doing a plugs-out test in an Apollo spacecraft pressurized to 16 PSI with pure O2, for example) and people suffered for it. (They thought the material was fireproof -- mostly it was, at normal partial pressures of O2).
I sincerely doubt that any calculation of risk at all was involved with the latter idiots, though. And that is what makes them idiots.
Well, the correct answer would have been "Yes".
(Which is how I tend to answer silly questions like that. It usually has the desired effect of causing the other person to pause and re-think what they asked, because they weren't expecting a yes or no answer.)
It's the old "correlation does not equal causation" thing. Back when I was doing statistics support, a co-worker liked to explain it something like:
"Throughout the year, we tend to see a high correlation between the number of leaves falling from trees and the number of deer being shot. Which is not to say that one causes the other."
Quite right, the actual link is a "hidden" cause that manifests -- through a complicated chain of events -- two different effects.
It's not really that crazy. I hypothesized the Itanium idea in another message before I'd read the parent.
The code base isn't that much of an issue. At the base, it's Unix, and porting Unix-based apps from one architecture to another is relatively painless. (Endianness is an issue, but the IA-64 can handle either big- or little-endian data (instructions are always little-endian)). Of course, a PPC emulator would be required for migration, more easily done on IA-64 than x86[-64].
The Itanium had speed issues, but this has been addressed with the Itanium2. As far as floating point goes, the IA64 has always been a screamer. Virtualizing an x86 PC would be a breeze.
There are still plenty of other explanations for Apple and Intel to be talking (if indeed they are) which make more sense, explanations that have nothing to do with Mac CPUs, but the Itanium idea isn't that whacky. Going to the PPC in the first place was pretty much an inspired leap, Apple may be gearing up for another one.
That we'll see Mac OS X - IA64. Itanium-based Macs, anyone?
(No, I'm not serious, but it makes about as much sense as an x86 based Mac -- maybe more sense. Why would Apple talk with Intel instead of AMD if they wanted to go x86? Why make such a radical architecture change anyway? But if you're going to make a radical change...I'm sure Intel would be willing to offer a good deal to try to rescue the image of the Itanic. If you happen to hear of an Apple project nicknamed "Carpathian", you'll know what's up.)
No, not pictures of another spacecraft, but the Viking lander team testing the (scanning) camera system had it take a group shot of the team out in the desert. As the camera scanned past individual team members, they'd run around and join the group from the other end. Several people show up in that picture two and three times.
High quality natural rubies, perhaps.
We've been making high quality synthetic rubies (red sapphires, aka crystalline aluminum oxide doped with chromium) for nearly a half-century (flux process, commercially since 1958) and lower quality for over a century (different processes, since 1902). The first lasers, in 1960, used optical quality synthetic ruby rods as the lasing medium.
(Historically, any red gem was called a ruby and many named "rubies" are really garnets, spinels, or other stones. The big ruby ("Black Prince's Ruby") in the British Crown is in fact a spinel. However, the Crown Jewels also contain the largest diamonds ever cut, from the 3000+ carat Cullinan found a century ago. Here's a link with more history and also pix of the Crown with the Black Prince's Spinel.)
They're talking laptops here, not desktops or servers. There is no "prevailing h/w standard" for laptops -- or rather, if there is it's a couple of years out of date. Laptop manufacturers constantly have to push the edge regarding battery life, display resolution, battery life, weight, battery life, wireless and bluetooth capabilities, and did I mention battery life? (Battery life, of course, implies finding low power versions of the other technologies, as well as the other innards.) And of course some of that cutting edge hardware comes from third-parties with NDAs limiting how open they can make the drivers.
As far as HP desktops and servers go, they're pretty much supported out of the box by most distros, with most of the drivers for HP/Compaq hardware being GPL'd. (Except perhaps for some server-only features on high-end hardware, like the remote lights-out management system that'll let me power-cycle a box in Singapore from my desk in Colorado.)
Heh, been there, pulled the battery too.
I hear you. I'd heard enough positive buzz about Firefly (and there's Joss Whedon's reputation) to buy the DVD set blind (I'd never seen an episode). Some other shows I'd want to see a few episodes first, one way or another.
I think you're posting to the wrong thread, but just to steer it back to this one, you can buy all the Firefly episodes ever made for less than the cost of a couple months of Tivo. And you can transfer those even quicker to your laptop (assuming it has a DVD drive, most do these days).
I've got no love for MPAA or RIAA, and I rarely watch broadcast TV. I buy the episodes of shows I like (Stargate, Smallville, Firefly, as well as some ancient stuff that just isn't shown anymore) as they come out on DVD. This does make a difference -- I have no doubt that the sales of the Firefly DVD played a big part in making the movie Serenity possible, by proving the market.
By the way, do you watch the commercials that come with those downloaded broadcast episodes?
Excellent point.
No, the war was won when the VHS format was introduced. Sony didn't give up until after the ELP formats came out, true, but they were fighting a losing battle the whole way.
Sure, there were other factors (licensing issues, as mentioned by others above), but not being able to put a commercial movie on one cassette SP format was the killer.
(I was there too. My first VCR cost over CDN $1500, but it including audio dubbing -- a feature I used maybe twice.)
As for CD vs cassette tape, you can put 90 minutes of audio on a C90 tape (and theoretically, 120 min on a C120, but those tend to be jam and tangle prone because of the thinner tape, and are harder to find (ditto T180 VHS cassettes)), but it is definitely of lower quality than the 70 minutes of (uncompressed) audio you can put on a CD. However, since both were replacing the dominant vinyl LP medium, which could only hold 20-25 minutes a side (depending on how loud the music was, which affected groove spacing), that was pretty much a non-issue. Recordability aside, cassettes were entrenched before CDs and had the advantage of ubiquity and cheaper players -- but CDs have pretty much replaced cassettes as an audio distribution medium except for a few niches. (Eg, books on tape are probably still more popular than books on CD, partly because tape is more than adequate for the audio range of the spoken voice, and partly because more cars have tape players than CD players.)
Why, exactly, do we need a rack-mountable laptop?
It seems to me that the consumer market is unlikely to select the "best" technical solution (cf. Betamax versus VHS).
Not that old canard again. The consumer did select the best technical solution (VHS) because at the time, technically Betamax couldn't store a 2-hour movie on a single cassette.
When you say "X is the best solution", you'd better be sure it's solving the right problem.
You left out the third possibility: the two (camera) shots were edited together like that just for the trailer, but in the movie there's more going on between those two shots.
It's not uncommon to splice together stuff for a trailer that never happens that way in the movie (or TV episode).
If they do have "sounds in space" in the movie, I hope the DVD has an optional soundtrack without them.
I say "they" instead of "Joss" above because there's always additional influence. Whedon certainly has more clout now than he did then, but recall that the original "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" movie was rather different than what Whedon had in mind.
Marc Miller (Traveller et al)
Don't get me wrong, I'm thankful to Marc Miller for creating Traveller, but he did get many of his ideas from the SF of the time; in particular, E. C. Tubb's "Earl Dumarest" series. (Including low, middle, and high passage, air rafts, and much else, although not specific characters or organizations (eg Cyclan)).
I wouldn't worry at all about the music on the trailer -- that is frequently radically different from anything in the movie (sometimes, the movie score isn't yet finished when they're putting out the trailers). Sounds in space...well, we'll see.
where she shoots several men straight with amazing accuracy.
Oh come on, that doesn't do it justice. River sees the three men (who are shooting in her direction), has the gun, but doesn't want to see them get shot. So she turns away and, not looking at them, takes the three of them out with three well-placed shots. Kaylee is there (she'd dropped the gun), and that's the event that makes Kaylee a little afraid of River in the subsequent shows.
For some small values of "work".
You do it exactly as was done in the miniseries: Ford tells Arthur to look up "babelfish" in the Guide, and we cut do the animation plus voice-over of the Guide's entry. (The book and the radio program also treat this as a Guide excerpt, but I don't recall if they segue this by having Ford tell Arther to look it up.)
The accompanying cheezy "computer graphic" animation adds an element of humor and keeps the voice over from being too heavy-handed.
The problem you do run into is length. Most books -- especially these days with the customer demand for thicker books for the buck -- are far too long to squeeze everything into a two-hour movie. (The rule of thumb for screenplays is that each page of the screenplay translates to a minute of film time. That rule doesn't necessarily hold for a book because of differences in writing style (description vs dialog, etc).
Michael Chrichton, of course, has written both books and screenplays, and directed movies (eg "Westworld"), so knows intimately how to write a book that will translate to a movie -- but large chunks of his books get left out of the movie version anyway. Marshall McLuhan may not have been absolutely right ("the medium is the message"), but he certainly raised a valid point about how the medium affects the message (content).
Lord preserve us from a BBC sci-fi miniseries (or series) that actually had good special effects. That would kill the whole flavour, and the writers might start relying on SFX instead of good writing.
In the case of HHGTTG, the whole thing was supposed to be a spoof, a farce. You don't dress up that with effects that are too good, or people won't be sure if you're trying to be funny or not.
No, what you're saying is "assume a spherical cow..."
No, actually, I meant "criticize", since I'm posting from the US to a US-hosted board. Anywhere else I'd have used the spelling that the rest of the English-speaking world uses.