FOTR is a good flick, but it isn't high art and it isn't Best Picture.
What's high art got to do with it? Oscars should be given to the film that will have the greatest lasting impact. Reasonably often it is, sometimes they get it wrong - can you name the film that beat out Star Wars in 78? In 10 years time no one will even remember ABM, FOTR is likely to be considered a classic. But if TTT is a disaster it will drag FOTR down and that is probably a large part of why FOTR didn't get the nod.
If you're going to say stupid things you should be modded down. The MPAA has nothing to do with the Oscars.
Yes, films do get ignored, and yes some of the awards are contentious. The Oscars are voted on by people in the particular field relevant to the award. I.e. the cinematography Oscar is voted on by cinematographers. So in theory the results should be fairly reasonable. Unfortunately there does seem to be a lot of sentimentality and politics involved. One thing to remember is that we don't know how close the voting is - Oscars are often portrayed as being a unanimous decision when they are not.
Cats that have been raised from kittenhood as pets retain many of the characteristics of kittens - essentially they never grow up mentally. They are more playful than kittens raised in the wild and they continue to use sounds that "naturally" raised kittens stop using when they reach adulthood. Kittens do bring prey back to their mothers when they are learning to hunt, too.
What cats are doing when they bring dead or nearly-dead animals to the house is they are trying to teach the slow-witted and lazy humans that they live with to hunt!!
I think it's the other way round - most cats see us as the parents, especially if they've been raised from kittens. When they bring live animals to you they are looking for recognition that they are hunting properly. Apparently if you make a point of playing with the prey for a while they stop doing it.
You and the other reply have both made the same mistake - you've assumed compression for the down-the-wire stuff but not for the CD based stuff. My baseline CDROM does 40x so with 4:1 compression it'd be 160x. Last game I bought - Diablo II - came on 3 CDs of which one is movies that definitely won't get 4:1 compression anyway. And of course everyone will want to get the game the second it's released so good luck in getting that 200KB/s.
So I'm dubious about both the 4:1 ratio and the viability of transmitting that amount of data to large numbers of people when they want it.
The Motorolla 68000 did have a 32-bit design, but it only had 24-bit addressing when it came out, which was the same as Intel was attempting to provide with the 80286.
That 32 bit design is the key. The MC68000 had a 24 bit address bus but the instruction set handled 32 bit addresses and the address registers where 32 bits (data registers where also 32 bits even though the MC68k only had a 16 bit data bus). So while systems built with the MC68k where 24 bit systems the software was all 32 bit. The point is that Motorola thought ahead when designing their instruction set.
Exactly. No one is asking you to pay for Slashdot. You are being given the option of paying to avoid seeing advertising. Big difference. You want Slashdot to be something it isn't, e.g. a service where the editors check the facts of the stories. That's fine but it's got nothing to do with the subscription model.
Frankly we doubt that 3% will really pay us at all.
You're probably right. But isn't that an argument for flat rate pricing? Since the people that you want to have pay more aren't going to why have metered pricing at all?
I don't think it would make any difference in terms of a law suit. The government has other options though: they could legislate or go after MS on other grounds.
In your amusing scenario you mentioned a death. That would change everything. The warranty disclaimers in software licenses don't allow a company to ignore the laws of the land so they could still be found to be responsible for any injury or death caused by a software bug. I imagine it would be very hard to prove a software company was criminally negligent in such a case though.
However, if party A's sevevers start attacking party B's servers, and party B never had a contract with Microsoft, there's nothing legally stopping them from trying to sue Microsoft.
They could sue MS, sure. It wouldn't be successful though because MS did not damage party B, party A did. Party B might be able to successfully sue party A who would then be screwed as they couldn't recoup any damages by suing MS. A couple of results like that would certainly cause people to think twice about (a) adopting MS products, and (b) having computers connected to the net.
No, invalid. If the GPL is the sole license of a piece of code and the courts find the GPL is invalid there would be no license covering that code and all rights would default to the copyright holder. Thus, you would lose all rights to distribute that code and any derivative work based on that code.
The one interesting thing here I observe is that once you have been found in violation of the GPL only the holder of the copyright can reinstate your ability to distribute derivative works-- and there is no obligation to do so.
Exactly. This is cause of the whole "RMS forgives KDE" incident of a few years ago. Most people felt he was just being an asshole when infact he was doing what he felt needed to from a legal point of view.
Well I'm betting Will's not a lawyer. I'm sure he meant to include IANAL somewhere in the interview. But you're right, it is a problem that he, as a game designer, feels that is an issue. A simple license clause stating that the game is available for free without waranty but all characters and other ip remains the property of the publisher would be sufficient to avoid any problems.
There is a major difference between FMD and Blu-ray: FMD will only be ROM and WORM, Blu-ray will be re-writable. That alone could kill FMD.
Blu-ray may not be 10x the capacity of existing DVD-RAM/RW but it's probably close enough: 27GB versus 4.7GB. Cringley's 10x rule assumes similar pricing for the competing technologies. Blu-ray is evolutionary rather than revolutionary and will have similar costs to existing technology. OTOH FMD may be more than 10x the capacity but it almost certainly be significantly more expensive. Finally, industry support seems to be behind Blu-ray rather than FMD.
Even the comparatively mundane predictions are incredibly optimistic: 2002 will see the introduction of 200GB hard drives an P4 laptops yet by 2003 we'll have 11TB credit card sized storage (only an increase by a factor of 55), memory with access time of 1ns (an improvement by a factor of at least 5).
Him trying BitKeeper is huge considering his previous professed hatred of source control systems.
Also, it's big news because of all the problems that were plaguing 2.4 for so long, many of which were attributable to him not accepting important patches from people. So BitKeeper was news because it's a step towards resolving those problems.
Professed where? He has said that he doesn't like CVS and that he doesn't think any source control system will help much but he's never said he hates them generally. He has been promising Larry McVoy he'd give BitKeeper a try for more than two years. If he sticks with BK then it'll be news, but at the moment he hasn't changed his mind about source control. And if you think this will make any difference to the issue with dropped patches you're sadly mistaken. That's a seperate problem that has nothing to do with source control.
I had a look at some of the other petitions on that site. Save Family Guy seems to have about 10 times as many signatures as save Futurama. Any indication it's working for them?
Two reasons I can immediately think of:
Efficiency: obvious.
Some language features require VM support which then imposes requirements on all users of the VM. I'm thinking about reflection etc in this case.
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Annie Hall may have been a great commedy but I doubt you'll find many people here who would believe it deserved the nod over Star Wars.
Yes, films do get ignored, and yes some of the awards are contentious. The Oscars are voted on by people in the particular field relevant to the award. I.e. the cinematography Oscar is voted on by cinematographers. So in theory the results should be fairly reasonable. Unfortunately there does seem to be a lot of sentimentality and politics involved. One thing to remember is that we don't know how close the voting is - Oscars are often portrayed as being a unanimous decision when they are not.
So what you're saying is that NASA have spent $2.6M trying to disprove this "crackpottery" and haven't yet managed to do it?
Cats that have been raised from kittenhood as pets retain many of the characteristics of kittens - essentially they never grow up mentally. They are more playful than kittens raised in the wild and they continue to use sounds that "naturally" raised kittens stop using when they reach adulthood. Kittens do bring prey back to their mothers when they are learning to hunt, too.
So I'm dubious about both the 4:1 ratio and the viability of transmitting that amount of data to large numbers of people when they want it.
I'm sure Sen to Chichiro is very good but let's not get too fan-boyish about it, eh?
In your amusing scenario you mentioned a death. That would change everything. The warranty disclaimers in software licenses don't allow a company to ignore the laws of the land so they could still be found to be responsible for any injury or death caused by a software bug. I imagine it would be very hard to prove a software company was criminally negligent in such a case though.
Btw, IANAL of course.
No, invalid. If the GPL is the sole license of a piece of code and the courts find the GPL is invalid there would be no license covering that code and all rights would default to the copyright holder. Thus, you would lose all rights to distribute that code and any derivative work based on that code.
Well I'm betting Will's not a lawyer. I'm sure he meant to include IANAL somewhere in the interview. But you're right, it is a problem that he, as a game designer, feels that is an issue. A simple license clause stating that the game is available for free without waranty but all characters and other ip remains the property of the publisher would be sufficient to avoid any problems.
True.
I'd say the key part of the laser acronym is "amplification". That eliminates glow in the dark toys, light bulbs, etc from the definition.
Blu-ray may not be 10x the capacity of existing DVD-RAM/RW but it's probably close enough: 27GB versus 4.7GB. Cringley's 10x rule assumes similar pricing for the competing technologies. Blu-ray is evolutionary rather than revolutionary and will have similar costs to existing technology. OTOH FMD may be more than 10x the capacity but it almost certainly be significantly more expensive. Finally, industry support seems to be behind Blu-ray rather than FMD.
Even the comparatively mundane predictions are incredibly optimistic: 2002 will see the introduction of 200GB hard drives an P4 laptops yet by 2003 we'll have 11TB credit card sized storage (only an increase by a factor of 55), memory with access time of 1ns (an improvement by a factor of at least 5).
My personal favourite is this one.
Two reasons I can immediately think of:
Efficiency: obvious.
Some language features require VM support which then imposes requirements on all users of the VM. I'm thinking about reflection etc in this case.