Re:I can't stand it anymore!
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Insightful? Ugh.
OK, I hate microsoft as much as the next/.er, but implying that spam comes from Microsoft because malware writers target MS programs/OS's is just FUD.
MS products are the targets of malware simply because of the market penetration. When linux becomes used on 90% of the world's machines, it too will be targetted by malware.
I get plenty of spam on my Irix machine. Is that somehow SGI's fault?
They aren't porting anything new since these are production machines, not render nodes. Maya, photoshop, shake, pixlet, backed by a top-notch interface and bsd....
Actually, they will need to port some software, but I don't think it will be a hard port. Maya is only used for modeling and some dynamics simulations. The actual animation and lighting is done in custom software.
Sadly, you can expect to see a lot more of this. The advertising industry has been in a tizzy for the last few years about the so-called "death of the TV commercial" - that between personal DDRs and DVDs of a series' season, people are noticably watching less commercials. Ad execs worried about losing their careers (and lush expense accounts) are trying to come up with more creative ways to put brands in front of eyeballs. This is why you are seeing things like BMW Films, which are really just long commercials, and "dial 6969 on your Verizon phone to vote for your favorite [insert reality idiot here]".
Product placement has been in film for years, to the point where most of the time you don't even notice it. Any time you see a brand on screen, someone paid to put it there. The same will happen to video games very quickly as marketing weenies realize how many people play games.
I, for one, whizz right by those 7-Up billboards in SSX Tricky with nary a second thought, comfortable in the knowledge that I haven't made 7-Up mine in years.
I know you meant this as humor, but the internet has actually increased the incidence of plagiarizing work and passing it off as a research essay. My father is a college professor and he frequently complains about the problems he faces trying to prevent his students from downloading a term paper and handing it in. Of course, there was the one time two students downloaded the same paper and handed it in....
I know this is a MS product with potential privacy concerns, and therefore likely to get slammed into the ground around here, but it raises some interesting notions that keep gnawing at me when I see tourists literally just walking around Times Square with a video camera.
What is the inherent value in recording your life in such minute detail? Isn't that what our memory is supposed to be for? What happens to your life when it becomes about recording your life? Is that a meta-life? What about recording yourself watching earlier recorded activities? Is it possible to become consumed with recording your life that you stop living it?
It's getting too stressful worrying about layoff-this, RSI-that. I work in an industry (3D animation) that in ten years will probably be smaller than it is now. When I change careers it will probably be because I'm too tired of being one of the rats clinging to Titanic's rigging. This used to be a job that I loved (and you're right, I never worked a day), but that has changed and it's a job now.
I'll switch careers when I find something that will make me as happy as doing 3d work did five years ago.
I was wondering what had happened to film gimp. Thanks for the tip.
As for photoshop, we're trying to avoid it - the licensing structure is node locked, which is a pain for us since most of the fifty people who need it need it for about 3% of the time. We're also a linux-only shop for production artists, which means that the few people who really do need to use photoshop have to also run a windows emulation package.
Does anyone know if v2 will support floating point or 16-bit image formats? We in the CG business could use a quality non-8bit paint package and properly supporting finer bit-depth data would go a long way towards making Gimp a standard production tool.
gimp16 looked promising, but it never went anywhere. Photoshop's 16-bit implementation is pretty weak; it can read it, but can't write it in any format other than a photoshop file and (last time I checked), it still only painted in 8-bit.
One of the solutions is to try to help mitigate some of the socioeconomic conditions that tend to make people want to drink. Why is there so much alcoholism on reservations? Answer that question (and take the necessary steps to reduce the problem), and the incidence of DUI will also decline.
I agree - this is a quick fix that won't work. In part, I suspect that a significant portion, although certainly not all, of DUI offenders don't drive new cars. Also, locking the ignition of a car because the driver may be drunk does little to discourage the practice of driving while drunk. After all, if the system correctly locks the ignition, that driver has already made the moral choice to get hammered and then try to drive (and any bystanders have let him/her do so). As with all crime, the best solution for reduction and prevention is to educate people to the point where they choose not to commit the crime (and eliminate any outside factors which tend to encourage the crime).
As a former ambulance worker who also lost a friend to a DUI accident, I've seen the horrible consequences of DUI and I find its occurence abhorrent. I too would like to see the problem eliminated, but this is not the way.
Eyal's computer gets upgraded (because he's a bigwig and gets new toys as a perk). Person who recycles computers for Mainsoft either doesn't erase the disk or perhaps only erases the partition that doesn't have this data. The old disk is "recycled". Two years later, someone gets the recycled computer and when looking for credit card numbers and passwords stumbles upon windows source code...
Or, maybe he downloads this on to his laptop and forgets his laptop at an airport security checkpoint after 9/11. Two years later, nobody claims it so it's auctioned by the TSA on e-bay...
Sorry for the late reply (it was damn nice not seeing a computer for a long weekend), but, given that assuming the computer stored licensed source code, I consider both of those scenarios dangerously negligent. I was talking to someone once who had worked at Los Alamos; when they got rid of hard drives, the drives were subjected to a cycle of re-formatting and filling with random noise (which happened three times) and then a giant electromagnet was passed over them. Any IT officer who doesn't take strong measures to ensure confidential data stays that way when a computer moves on deserves to be publicly humiliated.
The CTO of a software company leaving his laptop at an airport? C'mon....
Further investigation by BetaNews revealed the machine was likely used by Mainsoft's Director of Technology, Eyal Alaluf.
Ouch. Somebody's career is going gently into the good night. Either Alaluf, or the person who set up Mainsoft's security, was pretty dangerously negligent.
I know GE has also sold US approved crypto hardware to other countries, gear which was found to have back doors or known weaknesses that have allowed the US to eavesdrop on their supposed "friends" with ease.
Any form of physical evidence can be tampered with. That's why the chain of custody is such an important concept.
That is also why I applaud the Oregon State Police's efforts at ensuring chain of custody by keeping an encrypted version of the original image locked away on CD. It also makes any mods reproducible in front of a jury, if necessary.
The potential for modification doesn't scare me as much as the ability to permanently archive evidence. I can go back to a negative shot in 1930 and print it (provided it hasn't decomposed too badly). Will the same be true of digital formats?
Basically, the 9th just gave the OK for rogue organizations within the U.S. to give Al Qaida strategic information about oh... nuclear plants or chemical plants... without the risk of penalty.
Not to pick nits, but the 9th said no such thing. The essence of the ruling is that that provision of the PATRIOT act was too broad: it was impossible to differentiate so-called "good" advice from so-called "bad" advice. The 9th (and it was a signle judge, BTW, not the whole circuit) is only pointing out that "I advise you to stop bombing our country" is just as illegal as "I advise to put a bomb here, here and here."
Well, with my State (New York) Computer Crime laws, there are separate crimes for stealing computer Data (that's a Class E felony) and merely bypassing a password to gain access to a computer system (that's only a Misdemeanor). Clearly (at least in the eyes of NY) it's a worse crime to steal data then it is to bypass a password and get into a computer system.
Thanks for the info. My revulsion to the alleged crime continues to be justified.
So if they leave a filing cabinet unlocked with private memos that gives the other side permission to steal them and leak them to the media?
For the record, no it doesn't. If you read my post carefully, I clearly state that I find the behavior unethical. My disclaimer merely points out that I don't know the details of the intrusion within the context of computer theft law (as much out of my ignorance of the details of computer theft law as anything else).
Trespassing? Perhaps. Spying? That's a stretch. But BURGLARY??
I'm sure further investigation will help determine whether any laws were broken (the knuckleheads left the files unprotected, after all), but at the very least, the Republican staffers' behavior was highly unethical. Considering that the staffers are part of the system that makes sure justice is being properly served, it's very disappointing.
Actually, my personal experience with mouse gestures has been the opposite. I have been using them fairly extensively in Maya for about six years now without problems. Because the gestures need only be approximate, I can execute them with a much more ergonomic arm movement than I can when I need to get the cursor to a specific pixmap to open a menu. In addition, the mouse actually travels considerably less distance when gesturing.
Granted, Maya can be an incredibly complex interface, with common tools appearing on a sub-menu of a sub-menu of a menu. You could make a strong case that a browser is a much simpler interface that doesn't need it, but I've found that I do start to develop wrist problems when I'm repeatedly using that nested menu item I'm too lazy to make a gesture for. When I'm gesturing, everything is fine.
For a pure coder, who spends a majority of their time pounding keys, gestures might seem frivolous, but if you mainly mouse, as is the case in graphics work, gestures can actually help reduce RSI.
The woman in question only sued for $800 in medical compensation after contacting McDonald's directly.
The jury, of its own volition, assessed the $2.7 million in punitive damages.
On appeal, the punitive damages were reduced to $480,000.
Although the McDonald's case is frequently brought up as justification for tort reform, major FUD is distributed when people don't mention the appelate decision.
The government has been announcing both an increase in total jobs and a decrease in unemployment filings for a few months now. Neither necessarily precludes a reduction in high-tech jobs. The spin-meisters claim the economy is improving, just not for us.
The problem with getting a honest accounting of the state of our economy is that there is no measure which is not inherently politicized. It is very easy to consider/ignore factors to bolster your numbers. That fact itself has become highly politicized, as Paul Krugman of the New York Times (watch as my liberal bias comes out) has reported recently.
It's difficult to say. Recent figures indicate that the real GDP, consumer income, and corporate profits all rose inq3 2003, but at the same time, the dollar is falling to new lows against other major currencies, which will eventually make it difficult to attract the foreign investing the US needs to balance the trade deficit.
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Insightful? Ugh.
/.er, but implying that spam comes from Microsoft because malware writers target MS programs/OS's is just FUD.
OK, I hate microsoft as much as the next
MS products are the targets of malware simply because of the market penetration. When linux becomes used on 90% of the world's machines, it too will be targetted by malware.
I get plenty of spam on my Irix machine. Is that somehow SGI's fault?
They aren't porting anything new since these are production machines, not render nodes. Maya, photoshop, shake, pixlet, backed by a top-notch interface and bsd....
Actually, they will need to port some software, but I don't think it will be a hard port. Maya is only used for modeling and some dynamics simulations. The actual animation and lighting is done in custom software.
Sadly, you can expect to see a lot more of this. The advertising industry has been in a tizzy for the last few years about the so-called "death of the TV commercial" - that between personal DDRs and DVDs of a series' season, people are noticably watching less commercials. Ad execs worried about losing their careers (and lush expense accounts) are trying to come up with more creative ways to put brands in front of eyeballs. This is why you are seeing things like BMW Films, which are really just long commercials, and "dial 6969 on your Verizon phone to vote for your favorite [insert reality idiot here]".
Product placement has been in film for years, to the point where most of the time you don't even notice it. Any time you see a brand on screen, someone paid to put it there. The same will happen to video games very quickly as marketing weenies realize how many people play games.
I, for one, whizz right by those 7-Up billboards in SSX Tricky with nary a second thought, comfortable in the knowledge that I haven't made 7-Up mine in years.
I know you meant this as humor, but the internet has actually increased the incidence of plagiarizing work and passing it off as a research essay. My father is a college professor and he frequently complains about the problems he faces trying to prevent his students from downloading a term paper and handing it in. Of course, there was the one time two students downloaded the same paper and handed it in....
I know this is a MS product with potential privacy concerns, and therefore likely to get slammed into the ground around here, but it raises some interesting notions that keep gnawing at me when I see tourists literally just walking around Times Square with a video camera.
What is the inherent value in recording your life in such minute detail? Isn't that what our memory is supposed to be for? What happens to your life when it becomes about recording your life? Is that a meta-life? What about recording yourself watching earlier recorded activities? Is it possible to become consumed with recording your life that you stop living it?
It's getting too stressful worrying about layoff-this, RSI-that. I work in an industry (3D animation) that in ten years will probably be smaller than it is now. When I change careers it will probably be because I'm too tired of being one of the rats clinging to Titanic's rigging. This used to be a job that I loved (and you're right, I never worked a day), but that has changed and it's a job now.
I'll switch careers when I find something that will make me as happy as doing 3d work did five years ago.
I was wondering what had happened to film gimp. Thanks for the tip.
As for photoshop, we're trying to avoid it - the licensing structure is node locked, which is a pain for us since most of the fifty people who need it need it for about 3% of the time. We're also a linux-only shop for production artists, which means that the few people who really do need to use photoshop have to also run a windows emulation package.
Does anyone know if v2 will support floating point or 16-bit image formats? We in the CG business could use a quality non-8bit paint package and properly supporting finer bit-depth data would go a long way towards making Gimp a standard production tool.
gimp16 looked promising, but it never went anywhere. Photoshop's 16-bit implementation is pretty weak; it can read it, but can't write it in any format other than a photoshop file and (last time I checked), it still only painted in 8-bit.
Why does the military always get to beta test the cool gaming setups?
One of the solutions is to try to help mitigate some of the socioeconomic conditions that tend to make people want to drink. Why is there so much alcoholism on reservations? Answer that question (and take the necessary steps to reduce the problem), and the incidence of DUI will also decline.
I agree - this is a quick fix that won't work. In part, I suspect that a significant portion, although certainly not all, of DUI offenders don't drive new cars. Also, locking the ignition of a car because the driver may be drunk does little to discourage the practice of driving while drunk. After all, if the system correctly locks the ignition, that driver has already made the moral choice to get hammered and then try to drive (and any bystanders have let him/her do so). As with all crime, the best solution for reduction and prevention is to educate people to the point where they choose not to commit the crime (and eliminate any outside factors which tend to encourage the crime).
As a former ambulance worker who also lost a friend to a DUI accident, I've seen the horrible consequences of DUI and I find its occurence abhorrent. I too would like to see the problem eliminated, but this is not the way.
Eyal's computer gets upgraded (because he's a bigwig and gets new toys as a perk). Person who recycles computers for Mainsoft either doesn't erase the disk or perhaps only erases the partition that doesn't have this data. The old disk is "recycled". Two years later, someone gets the recycled computer and when looking for credit card numbers and passwords stumbles upon windows source code...
Or, maybe he downloads this on to his laptop and forgets his laptop at an airport security checkpoint after 9/11. Two years later, nobody claims it so it's auctioned by the TSA on e-bay...
Sorry for the late reply (it was damn nice not seeing a computer for a long weekend), but, given that assuming the computer stored licensed source code, I consider both of those scenarios dangerously negligent. I was talking to someone once who had worked at Los Alamos; when they got rid of hard drives, the drives were subjected to a cycle of re-formatting and filling with random noise (which happened three times) and then a giant electromagnet was passed over them. Any IT officer who doesn't take strong measures to ensure confidential data stays that way when a computer moves on deserves to be publicly humiliated.
The CTO of a software company leaving his laptop at an airport? C'mon....
Further investigation by BetaNews revealed the machine was likely used by Mainsoft's Director of Technology, Eyal Alaluf.
Ouch. Somebody's career is going gently into the good night. Either Alaluf, or the person who set up Mainsoft's security, was pretty dangerously negligent.
I know GE has also sold US approved crypto hardware to other countries, gear which was found to have back doors or known weaknesses that have allowed the US to eavesdrop on their supposed "friends" with ease.
\
And this was a bug how exactly?
\
Any form of physical evidence can be tampered with. That's why the chain of custody is such an important concept.
That is also why I applaud the Oregon State Police's efforts at ensuring chain of custody by keeping an encrypted version of the original image locked away on CD. It also makes any mods reproducible in front of a jury, if necessary.
The potential for modification doesn't scare me as much as the ability to permanently archive evidence. I can go back to a negative shot in 1930 and print it (provided it hasn't decomposed too badly). Will the same be true of digital formats?
Basically, the 9th just gave the OK for rogue organizations within the U.S. to give Al Qaida strategic information about oh... nuclear plants or chemical plants... without the risk of penalty.
Not to pick nits, but the 9th said no such thing. The essence of the ruling is that that provision of the PATRIOT act was too broad: it was impossible to differentiate so-called "good" advice from so-called "bad" advice. The 9th (and it was a signle judge, BTW, not the whole circuit) is only pointing out that "I advise you to stop bombing our country" is just as illegal as "I advise to put a bomb here, here and here."
Well, with my State (New York) Computer Crime laws, there are separate crimes for stealing computer Data (that's a Class E felony) and merely bypassing a password to gain access to a computer system (that's only a Misdemeanor). Clearly (at least in the eyes of NY) it's a worse crime to steal data then it is to bypass a password and get into a computer system.
Thanks for the info. My revulsion to the alleged crime continues to be justified.
So if they leave a filing cabinet unlocked with private memos that gives the other side permission to steal them and leak them to the media?
For the record, no it doesn't. If you read my post carefully, I clearly state that I find the behavior unethical. My disclaimer merely points out that I don't know the details of the intrusion within the context of computer theft law (as much out of my ignorance of the details of computer theft law as anything else).
Trespassing? Perhaps. Spying? That's a stretch. But BURGLARY??
I'm sure further investigation will help determine whether any laws were broken (the knuckleheads left the files unprotected, after all), but at the very least, the Republican staffers' behavior was highly unethical. Considering that the staffers are part of the system that makes sure justice is being properly served, it's very disappointing.
Actually, my personal experience with mouse gestures has been the opposite. I have been using them fairly extensively in Maya for about six years now without problems. Because the gestures need only be approximate, I can execute them with a much more ergonomic arm movement than I can when I need to get the cursor to a specific pixmap to open a menu. In addition, the mouse actually travels considerably less distance when gesturing.
Granted, Maya can be an incredibly complex interface, with common tools appearing on a sub-menu of a sub-menu of a menu. You could make a strong case that a browser is a much simpler interface that doesn't need it, but I've found that I do start to develop wrist problems when I'm repeatedly using that nested menu item I'm too lazy to make a gesture for. When I'm gesturing, everything is fine.
For a pure coder, who spends a majority of their time pounding keys, gestures might seem frivolous, but if you mainly mouse, as is the case in graphics work, gestures can actually help reduce RSI.
Although the McDonald's case is frequently brought up as justification for tort reform, major FUD is distributed when people don't mention the appelate decision.
The government has been announcing both an increase in total jobs and a decrease in unemployment filings for a few months now. Neither necessarily precludes a reduction in high-tech jobs. The spin-meisters claim the economy is improving, just not for us.
The problem with getting a honest accounting of the state of our economy is that there is no measure which is not inherently politicized. It is very easy to consider/ignore factors to bolster your numbers. That fact itself has become highly politicized, as Paul Krugman of the New York Times (watch as my liberal bias comes out) has reported recently.
It's difficult to say. Recent figures indicate that the real GDP, consumer income, and corporate profits all rose inq3 2003, but at the same time, the dollar is falling to new lows against other major currencies, which will eventually make it difficult to attract the foreign investing the US needs to balance the trade deficit.