Jerry: Louise! That's what's doin' it. You're no longer pre-occupied with sex, so your mind is able to focus.
George: You think?
Jerry: Yeah. I mean, let's say this is your brain. (Holds lettuce head) Okay, from what I know about you, your brain consists of two parts: the intellect, represented here (Pulls off tiny piece of lettuce), and the part obsessed with sex. (Shows the rest of the lettuce) Now granted, you have extracted an astonishing amount from this little scrap. But with no-sex-Louise, this previously useless lump, is now functioning for the first time in its existence. (Eats tiny piece of lettuce)
*sigh* of course the intelligence always fails at some point.
Jerry: Where have you been? You know, you're on next.
George: I got lost on the way over.
Jerry: Got lost? We went to school here for three years.
George: What are these? (Holds test tubes to his head like antennae) Take me to your leader.
Jerry: Oh my God. You had sex. You had sex with Louise!
George: No, the Portuguese waitress.
Jerry: The Portuguese waitress?
George: I calculated my odds of ever getting together with a Portuguese waitress. Mathematically, I had to do it, Jerry.
Again though you're own evalutation falls a little short. You have little information on how much power each processor requires (in either case, NEC and Hitachi) therefore effeciency is only measurable in the context of what effecient means to the one doing the measuring. Perhaps the Hitachi chips require 10 times more power than the NEC chips... I mean hopefuly NEC wouldn't design an environmental analysis machine that is, itself, a drain on energy sources. Well it would be rather funny.
Actually this is the most valid point I've seen so far. I think it's important that we have some perspective on matters like these. Not that arguing about a Disney movie is all that important, we all know the Disney horror stories with NDAs and confining contracts etc. Nevertheless it is wise for us to not just jumpt the gun, even though past behaviour of such companies make make such jumps the most plausible ones.
With movies such as this the script and dialog are usually completed well before the animation so it would make this lawsuit look merely like someone trying to take advantage of similarities which may solely be due to coincidence.
I got to thinking yesterday that we've nearly come full circle with audio technology. Thanks in part to the public's desire to "steal" that which is not theirs, and thanks in part to the greedy record labels who's only focus is to "steal" all they can from the public. I'm not going to go into detail on this, I'm sure you can all figure it out. What I do find rather amusing is a lack of perspective (more often than not, though this doesn't apply to everyone) on both extremes of the debate.
What I really wanted to talk about though, is how the audio industry spent years making conumer and professional audio gear with increasing fidelity and sound quality. Mono went to stereo then surround. The recorded mediums went from records, to 8 tracks, to cassette tapes (1/8"), to CDs. Now we have SACDs and DVD-Audio. The later is simply a much higher resolution PCM format while the former is a totaly new and actually quite exciting DSD format (Direct Stream Digital.) The DSD format is supposedly (though I have never heard an SACD for myself) of such high quality that it does make a noticeable difference. What makes these formats interesting, is that if we can't provide the players with quality digital to analog converters (which can be very expensive) then the whole point of the formats is lost because the system itself can't reproduce the streams properly. A more ideal setup for our increasingly digital-only entertainment systems would be that the signal remained digital up until the speakers, at which point the self-powered speakers could handle the conversion and amplification of the signal. Analog signal degredation (noise, interference, etc. although these can be problems with digital signals too but that's another story) would only occur for a short period of time and would be negligible. It would, in fact, be less expensive to implement such a system than to start the conversion process at the player and attempt to have high-quality, RF shielded analog components, and high quality connections all the way through the system to keep the audio pristine.
In essence, and in the end, we have both side shooting themselves in the proverbial foot. One industry (the record labels, which have several hands and a few feet in the consumer audio industry) are so terrified of ever increasing bandwidth at home, and millions of P2P users, they will stop at nothing to find a way to prevent end users from using their music with the fair rights that owning your own copy of Britney Spears' "So what if they're fake?" entitles you to.
Of course, the really funny thing is. The majority of consumers couldn't give, as Eminem puts it, "two squirts of piss" about SACD and DVD-Audio. Much of the world is happy downloading or compiling their music in MP3 format (yes there are OGG fans out there, and sheep who are hearded into WMA) and the fact remains that MP3 is not and will never be Red Book CD-Audio quality. So if we're happy listening to music in a format that degrades stereo imaging and has increased sibilance and harmonic distortion rather than a format made popular in the late 80s, it's the record companies and consumer audio companies who will loose in the long term because their focus remains on maintaining their empires, and that is one of the wonderful things world history has taught us, those who fail to adapt to the changes of the masses are ultimately overthrown by their own lust for control. That is not to say that the companies can't phase out CDs and DVDs, in order to replace them with formats that are so restrictive one can't even use them. In the end, and like any really good story, the people will prevail. We always do. Although I can't believe I just wasted 30 minutes typing this crap on/.
I too buy many CDRs, almost always in packs of 50 or more. For the most part, those CDs are used for music. It's not music I paid for, it's music I created, and recorded with my bands. I own the rights to that music and the rights to distribute it. So you can take my share out of your "pulled out of some wanker's ass" stastistics too!. Secondly I also use P2P. I use it to SHARE MY MUSIC. And in this case I do mean MY music. So although the majority of P2P users out there aren't doing the same thing, the blanket statements were made only serve the ignorant and the media (the parallels are so similar I won't even go there.) Besides, I don't buy your Inflatable Teen Doll of the Week hits anyway. Nuff Said.
My first question is, does this mean we have to buy new mobile phones? Will all of them be compatible with this forced frequency range? I know my current phone, like many others, works on the following frequencies: 800Mhz for analog and digital, and 1.9GHz for digital. Are they going to force my phone into analog mode? Etc. And how, may I ask will an external system limit my cell phone's power? Are planes going to be specially shielded in some way, because as far as I know a phone doesn't regulate it's own output power, though of that I'm not absolutely certain. Another thing that seems to be left out of the article, is that even if it was possible to lower output and use a few phones safely on a plane, imagine what would happen if even half the compliment of, say 200 passengers, have their cell phones... that's a lot of radio signal emission in a very small area. Planes haven't exactly been known for their system's reliability when exposed to other sources of RF interference. My phone for example emits tons of interference, I can it hear when it's lying next to the phone (landline), it affects un-shielded audio equipment and it has even reduced a TV hooked up to an Xbox to simply static while I was talking, and the thing is a brand new model! I don't see how something like this could really fly, or at least the article is too vague to answer any of my questions.
Here in Quebec they've found a way to avoid charging for basic cable directly when you sign up for high-speed cable internet.
Basically, if you are not a cable television subscriber but want cable internet service, they charge you an additional 10$ (well they claim that you get 10$ off if you are a cable subscriber) and thus they basically offset the cost of also providing basic cable television service to those who will splice the line and route it to their tvs as well. They've been doing this for years.
We currently use a/d converters from the Echo line of converters. Between drivers and latency issues with linux, there is no hope of getting low latency, low CPU usage, and stable operation on WINE. Honestly, we did not even try. We need all the DSP horsepower we can get from our systems which are used almost exclusively with such applications. Either way... if anyone wants to e-mail me, I'd be happy to have a more involved discussion on the issue.
I think we can all agree about linux's importance in a wide range of computing environments. Unfortunately it is clear from the review of SuSE 8.0 that it's place on the home-desktop remains limited to those who have a developed and decent understanding of computer systems, and the related issues, as well as the time to carefully customise / fix their installations. Linux distros still force users to deal with issues that many users don't or won't want to deal with. This is not necessarily a drawback, as many of us would like to know exactly what's going on. It does remain clear however, that destop linux solutions remain, at best, a niche market.
We used to use linux on many of our desktops here. As business moved away from web site-oriented things to audio production, we had to slowly move back to windows, a painful process but one which was aboslutely necessary, as our main application was designed solely for high-end film / video work on windows-based machines (hopefully they will port it to OSx). The Linux-kernel has remained an important part of our business environment as a router, http and ftp server and much more, ensuring it a lasting presence in our daily lives. More seriously, one that has never failed us, averaging over 180 days of uptime, interupted solely by extended powerfailures. Let's see windows, any version, do that. Long live the penguin.
I agree with the fact that models date less quickly. Also the guy saying they can do more with CG than models doesn't know the state of animatronics today. The best part of models is that they have real texture and their presence on film (or DV whatever) during the actual scene makes a tremendous impact on actors, lighting and overall atmosphere. CG does date quickly and there is a lot of bad / cheap CG out there. That's not to say CG doesn't have it's place, scenes like the ones in the upcomming AotC would be impossible without CG and on a large scale it can look very real, but detailed characters up close almost always look superimposed. I can't speak for AotC though and I hear the CG is spectacular so my tune may change. So it goes;-)
Although it might seem odd that, at the moment, only 19 theaters support digital projection, if the whole industry is going to eventually move that way, it will facilitate the transition by having such a large film behind it. Also, DVD production and other digital media formats will be much eaier to provide content for. The will be no film transfers involved, and it will be simpler for them to produce alternate edits for poor suckers like me.
To give Lucas the benefit of the doubt, I would hope that it is us reading in these stereotypes. Even the most creative of folks need some foundation for their creations, most of that comes from what we know. Perhaps there are similarities that go beyond simple attitudes, maybe the inflections that were used in the film (actually TPM was more of a popcorn movie than a film) were too close to home. Nonetheless we should be a little more open and realise that there are people who portray such behavioural patterns in the world, and they are hardly delineated by ethnic or racial origins. That is our prejudism showing through, and our desire to see in those fictional characters something we believe about those around us. Even, in the end if it was some sort of racism or stereotyping done by the writers and director of this film, telling our kids about it will only help to get them adopting racist and prejudicial tendencies at an increased rate; something I believe they will, unfortunately discover in their lives anyway, so why speed it up?!
I need to rid some Karma anyway... but hey dude... I thought I made it clear in my post that it wasn't DoS or DDoS attacks. You should read what people say. The first sentence is indicative that I understood this before I even began to rant in a fragmented and train-of thought fashion.
Through by no means has our little webserver been hit by DoS attacks (it is way to low profile, and not listed under any search engines), we nonetheless get about 3000 hits monthly trying to exploit a windows-based webserver.
We have been lucky that we run Apache on a Linux box, which also happens to be on a DSL line, limiting upstream bandwidth. And although 3k hits is minimal, there are only about 10 regular users of the website, which is maintained for downloading test files for music production inside our group only. All the exploits are rediculously similar, each one trying to access C:\ or D:\ or a Windows NT directory. I'm sure that this must be very common... and I can't image what these major sites must deal with on an hourly basis.
I find it sad though, that altogether too many webservers are managed by people who just aren't worried about this type of happening. The web remains the wild-west of the electronic frontier, brothels;-) and all. Since many of us are against a global policing body, we, at the very least, need to make sure the alarms and defences on our own properties are capable and effective.
Even if one blows up by accident it will have been less expensive than loosing a trained soldier. Seriously though, my brother who is in the Army Reserves here in Canada (we have an Army?) took a three-week basic trainning course. Apparently the course cost the Canadian government $30 000 CDN (currently 18,869.11 USD thanks to Bloomberg) for each to-be-infantry-unit. The scary thing is that it's only the first of several courses which get him to the rank of private (the lowest rank in case you didn't know.) I can't image what the cost is for the highly-trained enlisted men, especially the engineers who continue to search for landmines in person.
As always, and more importantly than cost, if it can save lives, it's a worthwhile piece of gear. It will be interesting to see, if these robots are a success, just how much the units, the robots are "posted to," mod their little mine finders. "Mine serves beer too!" (It's even a pun! Forgive me.)
The software vulnerabilities could be exploited to varying effect, Lindner added. In some cases, PCs, routers and other devices could be shut down or cut off from the Internet. "In the extreme case, you could exploit a buffer overflow to take control of the device," Lindner said.
Unfortunately the article is of provides too little information to know what's actually going on. A search on Google, as of yet, provides equally little information on this or these "bugs." Funny how much the above vagueness sounds like behaviour people used to engage in order to take over IRC channels. Perhaps some of the solutions that have been implemented in other areas can benefit this one... DoS attacks on http servers anyone? The CERT advisory, on the other hand provides the necessary information, but how many people are really going to read that?
The one thing I dislike reading ZDNet, is how they state it could affect "PC's." Perhaps people who haven't figured out IPTables or who fail to use ZoneAlarm are at risk. With the extent of today's always-on internet connections it seems that most of the problems facing the end user, ie: worms, viruses, stolen data, wrecked systems, etc., are the result of insufficient knowledge concerning the tool they are using. Now if you can't drive a car without a license.... ?? Well think about it.
From what the reviewer writes it does seem like the idea is a good one. Everyone hates late fees anyway, so right off the bat it seems like it's bound to succeed. One thing the reviewer mentions is the added hassle of dropping the movies off at a mailbox. I would think that, in many circumstances, mailboxes are closer than the rental stores the films would be returned to anyway; besides the films come right to your door. Not bad?
Unfortunately the idea can't fly. In these weak iEconomic times it seems like another dot com idea claiming to make the most simple of things (renting a movie) simpler, would be discounted quickly if not ignored at all. People, in general, (and I'm stereotyping here,) enjoy the experience of renting a movie. When done as a group it can be an additional source of entertainment itself. Additionally the flat rate $20/month subscription fee, ultimately desired as the most profitable source of income, will quickly get tiresome... especially those months where you fail to rent a movie. As the final straw it should be noted that renting a movie often involves (at least in paraphased forms) the following request, "Do you want to get a movie tonight?"
"Sorry, it takes two days for them to come in the mail..." Well, it just won't cut it.
The THG article indicates that for all intents and purposes, the average home-computer user still has enough power in his 700-1000MHz machine that upgrading to the rediculously overpowered 2GHz P4s and Athlon XP 2000+ etc, just isn't worth it for them (unless of course their livelihood is dependant upon computing time). I believe the same is starting to happen in the GPU field as well. A brother of mine recently bought a GeForce 3 card, just after the introduction of the whole Ti 500/200 updates. To this day it's still more power than he needs and should be able to outlast the TNT2 Ultra card he replaced it with. The main point being that except for those people that crave "the fastest," and there's nothing wrong with that;-) , these incremental increases in performance are going to mean less and less to the consumer, most of whom go to the biggest electronics store around and say "my kid needs a special 3d thingy to play this new game." Although I honestly believe people would be happier if they informed themselves a little, it's impossible to think that they will and in the end it doesn't matter. We've been years away from any new device that shows real promise, instead the best some people can come up with is an integrated cell-phone / PDA. Hmmm... who would have thought... until something does show up... I'll be playing Quake on an 8MB single-head graphics card. Humiliation!
At least Apple has done well in the last few months. Although I don't think I would purchase an Apple desktop computer, their Powerbooks running OSX would make me reconsider buying an x86 compatible laptop.
Unfortanately for us, the mainstay of application toolkit consists of programs designed exclusively for Windows. On the background side, we have confugured our network services exlcusively around linux servers. Sure, maybe OSX is capable of handling such things in the near future, maybe even now; I really don't need a (reasonably) expensive Apple computer to the work an old PII can.
On a more positive side, I have seen the grass on the other side of the fence. My first subject revolves around a family, who for several years used windows. First 95, then 98 then ME. This family had so many issues with their computer system, and no idea how to correct them that they just went out and bought an iMac because "everything worked." Now they want iPod's, iBooks, and the likes because Apple products work both for those without an inkling of knowledge as well as those who know exactly what they're doing.
It is also my opinion that the best applications for sound recording (please read audio, not MIDI sequncing, not waveform generation ala Max/MSP,) but straight recording are available only for the PC (Samplitude 2496 and Sequoia.) As always you are free to disagree. Our studio uses such software exclusively, but a young woman asked us for advice on buying her first computer. We suggested an Athlon-based PC and an inexpensive but high quality recording card (M-Audio, Echoaudio, Terratek etc.) So she buys a Socket 423 P4, with a SoundBlaster live. Needless to say things didn't work right from the start. The system came preloaded with ME, and when we helped her switch to 2K for stabilitie's sake, Dell informed us the warranty was void without the original OS supplied with the system. On top of that this woman's knowledge of computers was non-existent (not necessarily a bad thing, just a drawback.) She is the type of demographic for which the Macintosh is perfect, and it was silly of us to recommned otherwise because we've been back there setting up the computer on many occasions.
Apple's current efforts to provide not just an alternative but a viable one should be applauded. Though Apple is, in business models, equaly monopolistic as/.'s archnemesis (no name required,) the amount of options people have, especially in the day-to-day tasks of word processing, spreadsheets, collecting SPAM etc., are much better now that Apple is putting out products everyone wants to use.
It's strange that companies can try to find such outlandish uses for such useless devices. This device, if it is inexpensive, migh be alright for sound design students who want a quick copy to review their work in live arenas but seriously, Minidisc players are widely available, and include a TOSlink interface, alowing for recording and playback without using cheap A/D and D/A converters typically found in consumer audio gear. With the wide availablitiy of Sony's Portable DAT walkmans, ( not to mention the zip drive size of Tascams professional DAT recorders), and the increasing number of main-mix-down digital outs on live sound boards, what we see here is a chunk of plastic barely ready for use by anyone other than a highschool journalist with a cheap microphone. Luckily a lot of the well thought-out live venues will include some sort of stereo or multrack device for capturing any performance.
It astounds me still that as soon as a company marks "professional" on a box that some people continue to assume that such devices really work better, or worse, are better than others. From the already mentioned-above point of low-bitrate encoding, lack of information on which (and I think those of you who compile a lot of mp3s would find this very important) on which CODEC is used. Add to that relatively skimpy 18 bit converters, and thin 3.5" jacks, and we're off to a wonderful start. Heck, if this is how we're going to start recording anything, why didn't we just stick with analog tapes. They're cheaper than flash memory cards.
And aren't we tired of reading about the company to come up with the latest, lightly modified MP3 player anyway?
I was at a Pub one evening (I live in Montreal) and I happened to meet their sales manager... ms. Jen Goldfinch. Although I had seen the Hyperchip building on many occasions, I had never inquired as to what they do. After meeting this woman, I was given the impression that their routers are actually in use by some of the big players in the digital pipelines game. She was actually pretty clear on that, although I can't seem to find any exact information concerning their customers on their website. Perhaps some questions to nortel, and qwest folks might clear this up. The only thing that make me dubious about her claim of widespread adoption, would be that if their products are so much "better" (for the lack of a better word) than the competitions, then why is abilene using cisco products? Unfortunately I don't have that kind of time on my hands.
Whenever I watch one of these first episodes, I feel like they were trying so hard, yet it just didn't come out right. There were cheesy props, outlandish plot lines, and the thoughtful issues that made later episodes a success weren't yet developed. I enjoy it more when the stories and cast were subtle and nuanced. These episodes stand out like an ugly sore in TNG's generally good later work.
Why is it that people always seem to forget how it was that they first learned to like and expect certain behaviours from characters. It seems that for many shows, especially STTNG and The Simpsons, even the most diehard fans hate the first seasons. I still love the first seasons, at times badly done and off the wall, it was during the first two seasons of these shows which people fell in love with; becoming 7 (and 13 respectively) season fans. Admittedly the budgets got higher and since the characters were more developed and understood by the audience there was more room for plot, but it was those critical first few episodes, when we were introduced to our heroes. They are still valuable in this respect.
I must appologize in advance for this comment. It's late and I'm already over the edge.
I haven't read the article but this/. story, or at least the/. brief is outright bullshit. I have never been this upset at a slashdot story. IT? Give me a ----ing break. My current university's computer science deparment (wtf is IT in the real word anyway but a tag for jerks who think that IT is, like, a way cool job, dude) relies on Linux day in a day out. 7 Dell linux server providing SSH access to hundreds of student for their assignments, websites, and so much more.
The Math and CS labs all run linux and if you don't know how to use it... the answer is LEARN.
My last university where I was a Sys Admin was also heavily reliant upon Linux where all the servers for deparments (even linguistics for which no client applications exist) were all Linux servers. Profs and students alike were all very aware of Linux.
As limited as this comment is, I'm sure there are more like IT (pun darn well intended). Nothing like/. to get us riled up. I don't what CS students you are talking about but they should be round up and tortured by piping zsh into their brains.
I find it really strange to hear about all these high speed service provider bankruptcies in the US. It seems like every few days or so,/. is running another story about a failed Cable or DSL provider.
What puzzles me even more is the widespread success, at least here in Montreal, Quebec, of high speed internet (both G.lite DSL and Cable.) In fact the biggest provider, Bell Canada, is going to RAISE it's dial-up rates in January, lower it's DSL rates (via a few special sign up offers) and attempt to force the remaining dial-up users over to domesticated dedicated internet connections. It must be getting to costly to keep up all those modem pools with fewer and fewer users on them.
Slashdot Mirror
Jerry: Louise! That's what's doin' it. You're no longer pre-occupied with sex, so your mind is able to focus.
George: You think?
Jerry: Yeah. I mean, let's say this is your brain. (Holds lettuce head) Okay, from what I know about you, your brain consists of two parts: the intellect, represented here (Pulls off tiny piece of lettuce), and the part obsessed with sex. (Shows the rest of the lettuce) Now granted, you have extracted an astonishing amount from this little scrap. But with no-sex-Louise, this previously useless lump, is now functioning for the first time in its existence. (Eats tiny piece of lettuce)
*sigh* of course the intelligence always fails at some point.
Jerry: Where have you been? You know, you're on next.
George: I got lost on the way over.
Jerry: Got lost? We went to school here for three years.
George: What are these? (Holds test tubes to his head like antennae) Take me to your leader.
Jerry: Oh my God. You had sex. You had sex with Louise!
George: No, the Portuguese waitress.
Jerry: The Portuguese waitress?
George: I calculated my odds of ever getting together with a Portuguese waitress. Mathematically, I had to do it, Jerry.
Again though you're own evalutation falls a little short. You have little information on how much power each processor requires (in either case, NEC and Hitachi) therefore effeciency is only measurable in the context of what effecient means to the one doing the measuring. Perhaps the Hitachi chips require 10 times more power than the NEC chips... I mean hopefuly NEC wouldn't design an environmental analysis machine that is, itself, a drain on energy sources. Well it would be rather funny.
Check out Nvidia's data centers. Beware... windows media format warning.
Notice how many times the word linux is used...
Actually this is the most valid point I've seen so far. I think it's important that we have some perspective on matters like these. Not that arguing about a Disney movie is all that important, we all know the Disney horror stories with NDAs and confining contracts etc. Nevertheless it is wise for us to not just jumpt the gun, even though past behaviour of such companies make make such jumps the most plausible ones.
With movies such as this the script and dialog are usually completed well before the animation so it would make this lawsuit look merely like someone trying to take advantage of similarities which may solely be due to coincidence.
eye no eye maid sum gram are miss steaks
begin ramble
/.
I got to thinking yesterday that we've nearly come full circle with audio technology. Thanks in part to the public's desire to "steal" that which is not theirs, and thanks in part to the greedy record labels who's only focus is to "steal" all they can from the public. I'm not going to go into detail on this, I'm sure you can all figure it out. What I do find rather amusing is a lack of perspective (more often than not, though this doesn't apply to everyone) on both extremes of the debate.
What I really wanted to talk about though, is how the audio industry spent years making conumer and professional audio gear with increasing fidelity and sound quality. Mono went to stereo then surround. The recorded mediums went from records, to 8 tracks, to cassette tapes (1/8"), to CDs. Now we have SACDs and DVD-Audio. The later is simply a much higher resolution PCM format while the former is a totaly new and actually quite exciting DSD format (Direct Stream Digital.) The DSD format is supposedly (though I have never heard an SACD for myself) of such high quality that it does make a noticeable difference. What makes these formats interesting, is that if we can't provide the players with quality digital to analog converters (which can be very expensive) then the whole point of the formats is lost because the system itself can't reproduce the streams properly. A more ideal setup for our increasingly digital-only entertainment systems would be that the signal remained digital up until the speakers, at which point the self-powered speakers could handle the conversion and amplification of the signal. Analog signal degredation (noise, interference, etc. although these can be problems with digital signals too but that's another story) would only occur for a short period of time and would be negligible. It would, in fact, be less expensive to implement such a system than to start the conversion process at the player and attempt to have high-quality, RF shielded analog components, and high quality connections all the way through the system to keep the audio pristine.
In essence, and in the end, we have both side shooting themselves in the proverbial foot. One industry (the record labels, which have several hands and a few feet in the consumer audio industry) are so terrified of ever increasing bandwidth at home, and millions of P2P users, they will stop at nothing to find a way to prevent end users from using their music with the fair rights that owning your own copy of Britney Spears' "So what if they're fake?" entitles you to.
Of course, the really funny thing is. The majority of consumers couldn't give, as Eminem puts it, "two squirts of piss" about SACD and DVD-Audio. Much of the world is happy downloading or compiling their music in MP3 format (yes there are OGG fans out there, and sheep who are hearded into WMA) and the fact remains that MP3 is not and will never be Red Book CD-Audio quality. So if we're happy listening to music in a format that degrades stereo imaging and has increased sibilance and harmonic distortion rather than a format made popular in the late 80s, it's the record companies and consumer audio companies who will loose in the long term because their focus remains on maintaining their empires, and that is one of the wonderful things world history has taught us, those who fail to adapt to the changes of the masses are ultimately overthrown by their own lust for control. That is not to say that the companies can't phase out CDs and DVDs, in order to replace them with formats that are so restrictive one can't even use them. In the end, and like any really good story, the people will prevail. We always do. Although I can't believe I just wasted 30 minutes typing this crap on
end ramble
I too buy many CDRs, almost always in packs of 50 or more. For the most part, those CDs are used for music. It's not music I paid for, it's music I created, and recorded with my bands. I own the rights to that music and the rights to distribute it. So you can take my share out of your "pulled out of some wanker's ass" stastistics too!. Secondly I also use P2P. I use it to SHARE MY MUSIC. And in this case I do mean MY music. So although the majority of P2P users out there aren't doing the same thing, the blanket statements were made only serve the ignorant and the media (the parallels are so similar I won't even go there.) Besides, I don't buy your Inflatable Teen Doll of the Week hits anyway. Nuff Said.
Yes eye no eye maid sum gram are miss steaks.
My first question is, does this mean we have to buy new mobile phones? Will all of them be compatible with this forced frequency range? I know my current phone, like many others, works on the following frequencies: 800Mhz for analog and digital, and 1.9GHz for digital. Are they going to force my phone into analog mode? Etc. And how, may I ask will an external system limit my cell phone's power? Are planes going to be specially shielded in some way, because as far as I know a phone doesn't regulate it's own output power, though of that I'm not absolutely certain. Another thing that seems to be left out of the article, is that even if it was possible to lower output and use a few phones safely on a plane, imagine what would happen if even half the compliment of, say 200 passengers, have their cell phones... that's a lot of radio signal emission in a very small area. Planes haven't exactly been known for their system's reliability when exposed to other sources of RF interference. My phone for example emits tons of interference, I can it hear when it's lying next to the phone (landline), it affects un-shielded audio equipment and it has even reduced a TV hooked up to an Xbox to simply static while I was talking, and the thing is a brand new model! I don't see how something like this could really fly, or at least the article is too vague to answer any of my questions.
Here in Quebec they've found a way to avoid charging for basic cable directly when you sign up for high-speed cable internet.
Basically, if you are not a cable television subscriber but want cable internet service, they charge you an additional 10$ (well they claim that you get 10$ off if you are a cable subscriber) and thus they basically offset the cost of also providing basic cable television service to those who will splice the line and route it to their tvs as well. They've been doing this for years.
We currently use a/d converters from the Echo line of converters. Between drivers and latency issues with linux, there is no hope of getting low latency, low CPU usage, and stable operation on WINE. Honestly, we did not even try. We need all the DSP horsepower we can get from our systems which are used almost exclusively with such applications. Either way... if anyone wants to e-mail me, I'd be happy to have a more involved discussion on the issue.
I think we can all agree about linux's importance in a wide range of computing environments. Unfortunately it is clear from the review of SuSE 8.0 that it's place on the home-desktop remains limited to those who have a developed and decent understanding of computer systems, and the related issues, as well as the time to carefully customise / fix their installations. Linux distros still force users to deal with issues that many users don't or won't want to deal with. This is not necessarily a drawback, as many of us would like to know exactly what's going on. It does remain clear however, that destop linux solutions remain, at best, a niche market.
We used to use linux on many of our desktops here. As business moved away from web site-oriented things to audio production, we had to slowly move back to windows, a painful process but one which was aboslutely necessary, as our main application was designed solely for high-end film / video work on windows-based machines (hopefully they will port it to OSx). The Linux-kernel has remained an important part of our business environment as a router, http and ftp server and much more, ensuring it a lasting presence in our daily lives. More seriously, one that has never failed us, averaging over 180 days of uptime, interupted solely by extended powerfailures. Let's see windows, any version, do that. Long live the penguin.
I agree with the fact that models date less quickly. Also the guy saying they can do more with CG than models doesn't know the state of animatronics today. The best part of models is that they have real texture and their presence on film (or DV whatever) during the actual scene makes a tremendous impact on actors, lighting and overall atmosphere. CG does date quickly and there is a lot of bad / cheap CG out there. That's not to say CG doesn't have it's place, scenes like the ones in the upcomming AotC would be impossible without CG and on a large scale it can look very real, but detailed characters up close almost always look superimposed. I can't speak for AotC though and I hear the CG is spectacular so my tune may change. So it goes ;-)
Although it might seem odd that, at the moment, only 19 theaters support digital projection, if the whole industry is going to eventually move that way, it will facilitate the transition by having such a large film behind it. Also, DVD production and other digital media formats will be much eaier to provide content for. The will be no film transfers involved, and it will be simpler for them to produce alternate edits for poor suckers like me.
To give Lucas the benefit of the doubt, I would hope that it is us reading in these stereotypes. Even the most creative of folks need some foundation for their creations, most of that comes from what we know. Perhaps there are similarities that go beyond simple attitudes, maybe the inflections that were used in the film (actually TPM was more of a popcorn movie than a film) were too close to home. Nonetheless we should be a little more open and realise that there are people who portray such behavioural patterns in the world, and they are hardly delineated by ethnic or racial origins. That is our prejudism showing through, and our desire to see in those fictional characters something we believe about those around us. Even, in the end if it was some sort of racism or stereotyping done by the writers and director of this film, telling our kids about it will only help to get them adopting racist and prejudicial tendencies at an increased rate; something I believe they will, unfortunately discover in their lives anyway, so why speed it up?!
I need to rid some Karma anyway... but hey dude... I thought I made it clear in my post that it wasn't DoS or DDoS attacks. You should read what people say. The first sentence is indicative that I understood this before I even began to rant in a fragmented and train-of thought fashion.
Through by no means has our little webserver been hit by DoS attacks (it is way to low profile, and not listed under any search engines), we nonetheless get about 3000 hits monthly trying to exploit a windows-based webserver.
;-) and all. Since many of us are against a global policing body, we, at the very least, need to make sure the alarms and defences on our own properties are capable and effective.
We have been lucky that we run Apache on a Linux box, which also happens to be on a DSL line, limiting upstream bandwidth. And although 3k hits is minimal, there are only about 10 regular users of the website, which is maintained for downloading test files for music production inside our group only. All the exploits are rediculously similar, each one trying to access C:\ or D:\ or a Windows NT directory. I'm sure that this must be very common... and I can't image what these major sites must deal with on an hourly basis.
I find it sad though, that altogether too many webservers are managed by people who just aren't worried about this type of happening. The web remains the wild-west of the electronic frontier, brothels
Even if one blows up by accident it will have been less expensive than loosing a trained soldier. Seriously though, my brother who is in the Army Reserves here in Canada (we have an Army?) took a three-week basic trainning course. Apparently the course cost the Canadian government $30 000 CDN (currently 18,869.11 USD thanks to Bloomberg) for each to-be-infantry-unit. The scary thing is that it's only the first of several courses which get him to the rank of private (the lowest rank in case you didn't know.) I can't image what the cost is for the highly-trained enlisted men, especially the engineers who continue to search for landmines in person.
As always, and more importantly than cost, if it can save lives, it's a worthwhile piece of gear. It will be interesting to see, if these robots are a success, just how much the units, the robots are "posted to," mod their little mine finders. "Mine serves beer too!" (It's even a pun! Forgive me.)
Peace.
The software vulnerabilities could be exploited to varying effect, Lindner added. In some cases, PCs, routers and other devices could be shut down or cut off from the Internet. "In the extreme case, you could exploit a buffer overflow to take control of the device," Lindner said.
:-)
Unfortunately the article is of provides too little information to know what's actually going on. A search on Google, as of yet, provides equally little information on this or these "bugs." Funny how much the above vagueness sounds like behaviour people used to engage in order to take over IRC channels. Perhaps some of the solutions that have been implemented in other areas can benefit this one... DoS attacks on http servers anyone? The CERT advisory, on the other hand provides the necessary information, but how many people are really going to read that?
The one thing I dislike reading ZDNet, is how they state it could affect "PC's." Perhaps people who haven't figured out IPTables or who fail to use ZoneAlarm are at risk. With the extent of today's always-on internet connections it seems that most of the problems facing the end user, ie: worms, viruses, stolen data, wrecked systems, etc., are the result of insufficient knowledge concerning the tool they are using. Now if you can't drive a car without a license.... ?? Well think about it.
What! You don't think computers can kill?
From what the reviewer writes it does seem like the idea is a good one. Everyone hates late fees anyway, so right off the bat it seems like it's bound to succeed. One thing the reviewer mentions is the added hassle of dropping the movies off at a mailbox. I would think that, in many circumstances, mailboxes are closer than the rental stores the films would be returned to anyway; besides the films come right to your door. Not bad?
Unfortunately the idea can't fly. In these weak iEconomic times it seems like another dot com idea claiming to make the most simple of things (renting a movie) simpler, would be discounted quickly if not ignored at all. People, in general, (and I'm stereotyping here,) enjoy the experience of renting a movie. When done as a group it can be an additional source of entertainment itself. Additionally the flat rate $20/month subscription fee, ultimately desired as the most profitable source of income, will quickly get tiresome... especially those months where you fail to rent a movie. As the final straw it should be noted that renting a movie often involves (at least in paraphased forms) the following request, "Do you want to get a movie tonight?"
"Sorry, it takes two days for them to come in the mail..." Well, it just won't cut it.
The THG article indicates that for all intents and purposes, the average home-computer user still has enough power in his 700-1000MHz machine that upgrading to the rediculously overpowered 2GHz P4s and Athlon XP 2000+ etc, just isn't worth it for them (unless of course their livelihood is dependant upon computing time). I believe the same is starting to happen in the GPU field as well. A brother of mine recently bought a GeForce 3 card, just after the introduction of the whole Ti 500/200 updates. To this day it's still more power than he needs and should be able to outlast the TNT2 Ultra card he replaced it with. The main point being that except for those people that crave "the fastest," and there's nothing wrong with that ;-) , these incremental increases in performance are going to mean less and less to the consumer, most of whom go to the biggest electronics store around and say "my kid needs a special 3d thingy to play this new game." Although I honestly believe people would be happier if they informed themselves a little, it's impossible to think that they will and in the end it doesn't matter. We've been years away from any new device that shows real promise, instead the best some people can come up with is an integrated cell-phone / PDA. Hmmm... who would have thought... until something does show up... I'll be playing Quake on an 8MB single-head graphics card. Humiliation!
At least Apple has done well in the last few months. Although I don't think I would purchase an Apple desktop computer, their Powerbooks running OSX would make me reconsider buying an x86 compatible laptop.
/.'s archnemesis (no name required,) the amount of options people have, especially in the day-to-day tasks of word processing, spreadsheets, collecting SPAM etc., are much better now that Apple is putting out products everyone wants to use.
Unfortanately for us, the mainstay of application toolkit consists of programs designed exclusively for Windows. On the background side, we have confugured our network services exlcusively around linux servers. Sure, maybe OSX is capable of handling such things in the near future, maybe even now; I really don't need a (reasonably) expensive Apple computer to the work an old PII can.
On a more positive side, I have seen the grass on the other side of the fence. My first subject revolves around a family, who for several years used windows. First 95, then 98 then ME. This family had so many issues with their computer system, and no idea how to correct them that they just went out and bought an iMac because "everything worked." Now they want iPod's, iBooks, and the likes because Apple products work both for those without an inkling of knowledge as well as those who know exactly what they're doing.
It is also my opinion that the best applications for sound recording (please read audio, not MIDI sequncing, not waveform generation ala Max/MSP,) but straight recording are available only for the PC (Samplitude 2496 and Sequoia.) As always you are free to disagree. Our studio uses such software exclusively, but a young woman asked us for advice on buying her first computer. We suggested an Athlon-based PC and an inexpensive but high quality recording card (M-Audio, Echoaudio, Terratek etc.) So she buys a Socket 423 P4, with a SoundBlaster live. Needless to say things didn't work right from the start. The system came preloaded with ME, and when we helped her switch to 2K for stabilitie's sake, Dell informed us the warranty was void without the original OS supplied with the system. On top of that this woman's knowledge of computers was non-existent (not necessarily a bad thing, just a drawback.) She is the type of demographic for which the Macintosh is perfect, and it was silly of us to recommned otherwise because we've been back there setting up the computer on many occasions.
Apple's current efforts to provide not just an alternative but a viable one should be applauded. Though Apple is, in business models, equaly monopolistic as
ALGORITHM
ISO/MPEG1 Audio Layer III (MP3)
DATA RATES
32, 64, 96, 128 kbps
AUDIO MODES
Mono, Stereo
SAMPLE FREQUENCIES
16, 32, 44.1, 48 kHz
MICROPHONE AUDIO INPUT
Input Level: Adjustable -60 to -40 dBu
Impedance: unbalanced 600 ohms
A/D Conversion: 18-bit.
Connector: 3.5mm Stereo Mini-Jack
It's strange that companies can try to find such outlandish uses for such useless devices. This device, if it is inexpensive, migh be alright for sound design students who want a quick copy to review their work in live arenas but seriously, Minidisc players are widely available, and include a TOSlink interface, alowing for recording and playback without using cheap A/D and D/A converters typically found in consumer audio gear. With the wide availablitiy of Sony's Portable DAT walkmans, ( not to mention the zip drive size of Tascams professional DAT recorders), and the increasing number of main-mix-down digital outs on live sound boards, what we see here is a chunk of plastic barely ready for use by anyone other than a highschool journalist with a cheap microphone. Luckily a lot of the well thought-out live venues will include some sort of stereo or multrack device for capturing any performance.
It astounds me still that as soon as a company marks "professional" on a box that some people continue to assume that such devices really work better, or worse, are better than others. From the already mentioned-above point of low-bitrate encoding, lack of information on which (and I think those of you who compile a lot of mp3s would find this very important) on which CODEC is used. Add to that relatively skimpy 18 bit converters, and thin 3.5" jacks, and we're off to a wonderful start. Heck, if this is how we're going to start recording anything, why didn't we just stick with analog tapes. They're cheaper than flash memory cards.
And aren't we tired of reading about the company to come up with the latest, lightly modified MP3 player anyway?
I was at a Pub one evening (I live in Montreal) and I happened to meet their sales manager... ms. Jen Goldfinch. Although I had seen the Hyperchip building on many occasions, I had never inquired as to what they do. After meeting this woman, I was given the impression that their routers are actually in use by some of the big players in the digital pipelines game. She was actually pretty clear on that, although I can't seem to find any exact information concerning their customers on their website. Perhaps some questions to nortel, and qwest folks might clear this up. The only thing that make me dubious about her claim of widespread adoption, would be that if their products are so much "better" (for the lack of a better word) than the competitions, then why is abilene using cisco products? Unfortunately I don't have that kind of time on my hands.
Whenever I watch one of these first episodes, I feel like they were trying so hard, yet it just didn't come out right. There were cheesy props, outlandish plot lines, and the thoughtful issues that made later episodes a success weren't yet developed. I enjoy it more when the stories and cast were subtle and nuanced. These episodes stand out like an ugly sore in TNG's generally good later work.
Why is it that people always seem to forget how it was that they first learned to like and expect certain behaviours from characters. It seems that for many shows, especially STTNG and The Simpsons, even the most diehard fans hate the first seasons. I still love the first seasons, at times badly done and off the wall, it was during the first two seasons of these shows which people fell in love with; becoming 7 (and 13 respectively) season fans. Admittedly the budgets got higher and since the characters were more developed and understood by the audience there was more room for plot, but it was those critical first few episodes, when we were introduced to our heroes. They are still valuable in this respect.
And for laughs.
I must appologize in advance for this comment. It's late and I'm already over the edge.
/. story, or at least the /. brief is outright bullshit. I have never been this upset at a slashdot story. IT? Give me a ----ing break. My current university's computer science deparment (wtf is IT in the real word anyway but a tag for jerks who think that IT is, like, a way cool job, dude) relies on Linux day in a day out. 7 Dell linux server providing SSH access to hundreds of student for their assignments, websites, and so much more.
/. to get us riled up. I don't what CS students you are talking about but they should be round up and tortured by piping zsh into their brains.
I haven't read the article but this
The Math and CS labs all run linux and if you don't know how to use it... the answer is LEARN.
My last university where I was a Sys Admin was also heavily reliant upon Linux where all the servers for deparments (even linguistics for which no client applications exist) were all Linux servers. Profs and students alike were all very aware of Linux.
As limited as this comment is, I'm sure there are more like IT (pun darn well intended). Nothing like
I find it really strange to hear about all these high speed service provider bankruptcies in the US. It seems like every few days or so, /. is running another story about a failed Cable or DSL provider.
What puzzles me even more is the widespread success, at least here in Montreal, Quebec, of high speed internet (both G.lite DSL and Cable.) In fact the biggest provider, Bell Canada, is going to RAISE it's dial-up rates in January, lower it's DSL rates (via a few special sign up offers) and attempt to force the remaining dial-up users over to domesticated dedicated internet connections. It must be getting to costly to keep up all those modem pools with fewer and fewer users on them.