Re:What about Pixar's Software Arm?
on
Pixar For Sale?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Umm, I don't mean to nitpick but PRMan actually stands for PhotoRealistic Renderman. Its just another name for the same product. At least that what the chief of the Renderman division (I'm sorry but I can't remember his name) said at an industry event I attended 3 weeks ago.
By standard I think you're referring to the Renderman Shading Language, a component of the larger renderer, not the renderer itself.
What about Pixar's Software Arm?
on
Pixar For Sale?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If Disney buys Pixar what would happen to its software arm? For the uninitiated, they make a world class renderer called RenderMan.
Somehow I can't see Disney getting into software...
Re:IMDb is a complete waste of time!
on
IMDb Turns 15
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· Score: 1
Don't get me wrong, I love IMDb but I can not think of many single sites that can kill as much time as IMDb.
I thought it was really ironic that this revelation came out just a couple of days after Mr. McBride enlightened (entertained) us with his reasons why his offering was better than Linux.
If I recall right one of his main issues with Linux was that there was no single corporate entity developing it...making the OS inherently insecure and unstable....but not unstable enough to prevent SCO from helping themselves to it!
I'm as happy as the next person that the shuttle landed safely and things went OK. However the success (?) of this mission does not change the hard reality that the Shuttle is a piece of outdated, unsafe and overpriced hardware. It guzzles up valuable resources in terms of manpower, time and money and has precious little to show for all the efforts.
I only hope that some bureaucrat in Washington doesn't feel that "Alls well that ends well. A little more money and the shuttle program can be up and running again."
Personally I feel that NASA should focus on whats its good at which is space research. Lets leave the manned bit of things to the private sector.
Ever been in the situation where a certain expensive piece of equipment would be ideal to do the job at hand, but you would probably never ever need it to use it again, thus making the purchase/rental of equipment prohibitive?
Then he outsourced the design to India and the Star Trek crew got bangalored...
Bob Bemer was a major contributor to the computer industry as a whole and not merely a single corporate. So wouldn't it have been more appropriate and respectful to place the article in Hardware or News rather than relegating it to the IBM section...? Besides the man did work in other companies like RAND Corp. and Honeywell.
I really don't see what the entire fuss is about. All the law states is that you're supposed to state your name if any law enforcement officer asks you for it...mind you merely state it, not confirm it by showing ID.
With all respect to civil libertarians, I wish they'd realise that opposing every new law with ominous sounding phraseology like `Big Brother' , `assault on civil liberties' , `belief in the constitution' yada yadda is counterproductive. By doing so they're indulging in stereotypical behaviour.
As a result people are less likely to take you seriously when the next DMCA comes around or another Skylarov is arrested for speaking freely..Ever heard the story about the boy who cried wolf?
These days you only find true irony in songs or poems. Here are some examples
Liam Lynch - United States of Whatever George Michael - Kill the dog
Maybe we should count the last decade or so as a new era in irony. The era in which irony more or less disappeared from mainstream text media but increasingly appeared in musical form...
In this whole discussion about NEW media and OLD media, folks seem to have lost track of a simple fact...media of any kind is merely an outlet for the dissemation of information and views on any subject. To make a distinction between OLD media outlets (newspapers, magazines etc) and NEW media outlets (blogs etc) is simply stupid. Everyone knows that newspapers criticise people freely but they also give them a forum to present their points of view (usually the letters to the editor column) Just because blogs are decentralised does not mean that they can simply slander anybody all day long without at leat letting their target present his/her ideas to the same audience
Practically also I feel the EU rule is a good idea. At least it'll give affected parties a forum to hit back without reaching out for their phone to call their lawyer and filing for defamation. I mean which option would you prefer giving your target a little space to express his counterpoint or having your blog shut down by his smooth talking legal team (and then making a big fuss on right wing forums like/.)
And whats this talk in the CNET article about European lawmakers not "Getting" the Net. At least they don't come up with trash like the DMCA...
Obviously consumer durables fail much faster these days. Case in point: My family owned the same television for 11 years but are now shopping around for a audio system 5 years after they bought the previous one. Electronic items fail faster these days because modern assembly lines are optimised for speed. Ever looked at a 15 year old television or tape player. The first thing you'd notice is that the cover is screwed onto the main body. Now pick up your MP3 player and look for any screws on the body! You'd think this is a trivial difference but the point I'm trying to make here is that product manufacturing cycles are reducing so theres bound to be a consequent decrease in quality. Car production is another great example. Before the Ford T and its assembly lines each car coming out of the plant was a masterpiece in itself. Thats the reason you still see the Rolls Royce Silver Ghosts and the Bentleys rolling around. We have effectively sacrificed quality for greater speed and efficiency. But customers haven't exactly lost out in the bargain. Assembly lines are the reason that product costs have dropped to an extent that replacing them say every 5 years or so is a viable option. Sure with modern electronics you end up buying a new item every now and then but you don't have to save for 10 years to buy that sexy DVD player you saw in that catalogue. I still remeber my folks skimping for 3 years before they finally bought that TV! Would anyone have the patience to wait that long now? Customers demand instant gratifaction and this way they get it.The minority who want (or can afford) top notch quality can always go in for the BOSEs or ONKYOs. So blaming the loss of quality on manufacturers and terming it a corporate conspiracy is unfair.
At the outset I want to say that I sympathise with the families of the dead in this attack. I know a lot of you are going to flame me for this but the truth is that the USA had this sort of an attack coming for it. Consider the reasons below...
1) America now lists Osama Bin Laden in its most wanted list. However in the 70s the US ACTUALLY supplied him and his men with weapons - helicopters, Stinger missiles etc. At that time he was fighting the former USSR occupation of Afghanistan. In fact he was considered to be a friend of the US. In order to fulfil short-terms goals the US always arms merceneries in different parts of the world. Then it has no right to complain if the same nuts turn against it.
2) Lets face it! Israel treatment of the Palestinians is totally unfair. It has occupied territories which belong to them. When the Palestinians rebel the Israelis use Tanks, gunships etc to mercilessly slaughter them.(In case your wondering, No I'm not Arab)
But America continues to support the Israelis. Even in the negotiations America tends to side with Israel. In such a scenario its natural for Arabs to be frustrated with the United States and resort to things like this.
Maybe the American government should re-evalute its own policy before passing judgement on the Intifada
Well! As far as I know no American spy has ever worked for Iraq. As for China, try to be a little objective. Yes the Chinese government has a bad human-rights track record. Yes they treat dissenters badly. Yes they supress harmless people like the Falun Gong. But also consider it from their culture viewpoint. What may seem like a police state to us is simply their way of enforcing law and order. Their culture, psychology, viewpoints and ideologies are entirely different. Besides there hasn't been an anti-government protest since Tianmmen. Americans will argue that the Chinese have been supressed but people power can topple any government. See what happened to the USSR! Besides even the US the so called `bastion of freedom' has treated its dissenters badly. Remember the McCarthy era when hundreds of bright people had their careers destroyed simply because they were thought to be Communist sympathisers? What about Vietnam? Did America have any right to stick its nose into an affair that did not concern it? More recently what about Skylarov? His imprisonment and subsequent indictment would give any Communist apparatchik an inferiority complex! American history has a way of obscuring its misdeeds while highlighting the fallacies of the rest of the world.
That said and done I believe that a person who betrays his country is the worst kind of scumbag. The guy deserves whatever he gets!!
Re:This sounds like...
on
IBM Wants Linux
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yes Linux does perform badly is multi-processor environments such as the RS/6000 series. However this should be seen in perspective. AIX is a Unix flavor ESPECIALLY designed for such environments. Put AIX in any desktop or mid-level server and it won't do well at all. However Linux is flexible. You can run it on a wide range of systems right from 486s to top of the line AMDs. You can run it on diskless nodes and you can run it on server farms. IMHO I feel this flexibility is more important than being able to give stellar performance in high end machines which are not used by more than a handful of research workers. Agreed it would be pretty glamorous to announce that Linux is used in ASCI White. But practically it wouldn't mean much...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there's always the Tardis
And this friendly guy in Nairobi gave me a new year gift of a million dollars.
FTA,
Symantec didn't confess of their own accord. This vulnerability was publicised by a "security researcher" called Alex Wheeler.
how do you get any work done...
Umm, I don't mean to nitpick but PRMan actually stands for PhotoRealistic Renderman. Its just another name for the same product. At least that what the chief of the Renderman division (I'm sorry but I can't remember his name) said at an industry event I attended 3 weeks ago.
By standard I think you're referring to the Renderman Shading Language, a component of the larger renderer, not the renderer itself.
Somehow I can't see Disney getting into software...
Evidently you don't visit slashdot too often
MECHANIC:Creative set up us the worm
WULLIK:How are you gentlemen?
WULLIK:All your Zen are belong to us...
And you can read all about it on...no prizes for guessing www.net.google.com
Well thats rather premature considering that GDS is only for the Windows platform.
I thought it was really ironic that this revelation came out just a couple of days after Mr. McBride enlightened (entertained) us with his reasons why his offering was better than Linux.
If I recall right one of his main issues with Linux was that there was no single corporate entity developing it...making the OS inherently insecure and unstable....but not unstable enough to prevent SCO from helping themselves to it!
Enough said
I'm as happy as the next person that the shuttle landed safely and things went OK. However the success (?) of this mission does not change the hard reality that the Shuttle is a piece of outdated, unsafe and overpriced hardware. It guzzles up valuable resources in terms of manpower, time and money and has precious little to show for all the efforts.
I only hope that some bureaucrat in Washington doesn't feel that "Alls well that ends well. A little more money and the shuttle program can be up and running again."
Personally I feel that NASA should focus on whats its good at which is space research. Lets leave the manned bit of things to the private sector.
Then he outsourced the design to India and the Star Trek crew got bangalored...
Shouldn't this article be in `Its Funny Laugh'?
300 million years? Might be a little stale...
Bob Bemer was a major contributor to the computer industry as a whole and not merely a single corporate. So wouldn't it have been more appropriate and respectful to place the article in Hardware or News rather than relegating it to the IBM section...? Besides the man did work in other companies like RAND Corp. and Honeywell.
Just a passing thought...
I really don't see what the entire fuss is about. All the law states is that you're supposed to state your name if any law enforcement officer asks you for it...mind you merely state it, not confirm it by showing ID.
With all respect to civil libertarians, I wish they'd realise that opposing every new law with ominous sounding phraseology like `Big Brother' , `assault on civil liberties' , `belief in the constitution' yada yadda is counterproductive. By doing so they're indulging in stereotypical behaviour.
As a result people are less likely to take you seriously when the next DMCA comes around or another Skylarov is arrested for speaking freely..Ever heard the story about the boy who cried wolf?
Choose your battles wisely guys!
These days you only find true irony in songs or poems. Here are some examples
Liam Lynch - United States of Whatever
George Michael - Kill the dog
Maybe we should count the last decade or so as a new era in irony. The era in which irony more or less disappeared from mainstream text media but increasingly appeared in musical form...
Practically also I feel the EU rule is a good idea. At least it'll give affected parties a forum to hit back without reaching out for their phone to call their lawyer and filing for defamation. I mean which option would you prefer giving your target a little space to express his counterpoint or having your blog shut down by his smooth talking legal team (and then making a big fuss on right wing forums like
And whats this talk in the CNET article about European lawmakers not "Getting" the Net. At least they don't come up with trash like the DMCA...
Obviously consumer durables fail much faster these days. Case in point: My family owned the same television for 11 years but are now shopping around for a audio system 5 years after they bought the previous one.
Electronic items fail faster these days because modern assembly lines are optimised for speed. Ever looked at a 15 year old television or tape player. The first thing you'd notice is that the cover is screwed onto the main body. Now pick up your MP3 player and look for any screws on the body!
You'd think this is a trivial difference but the point I'm trying to make here is that product manufacturing cycles are reducing so theres bound to be a consequent decrease in quality.
Car production is another great example. Before the Ford T and its assembly lines each car coming out of the plant was a masterpiece in itself. Thats the reason you still see the Rolls Royce Silver Ghosts and the Bentleys rolling around. We have effectively sacrificed quality for greater speed and efficiency.
But customers haven't exactly lost out in the bargain. Assembly lines are the reason that product costs have dropped to an extent that replacing them say every 5 years or so is a viable option. Sure with modern electronics you end up buying a new item every now and then but you don't have to save for 10 years to buy that sexy DVD player you saw in that catalogue. I still remeber my folks skimping for 3 years before they finally bought that TV! Would anyone have the patience to wait that long now? Customers demand instant gratifaction and this way they get it.The minority who want (or can afford) top notch quality can always go in for the BOSEs or ONKYOs. So blaming the loss of quality on manufacturers and terming it a corporate conspiracy is unfair.
At the outset I want to say that I sympathise with the families of the dead in this attack. I know a lot of you are going to flame me for this but the truth is that the USA had this sort of an attack coming for it. Consider the reasons below...
1) America now lists Osama Bin Laden in its most wanted list. However in the 70s the US ACTUALLY supplied him and his men with weapons - helicopters, Stinger missiles etc. At that time he was fighting the former USSR occupation of Afghanistan. In fact he was considered to be a friend of the US. In order to fulfil short-terms goals the US always arms merceneries in different parts of the world. Then it has no right to complain if the same nuts turn against it.
2) Lets face it! Israel treatment of the Palestinians is totally unfair. It has occupied territories which belong to them. When the Palestinians rebel the Israelis use Tanks, gunships etc to mercilessly slaughter them.(In case your wondering, No I'm not Arab)
But America continues to support the Israelis. Even in the negotiations America tends to side with Israel. In such a scenario its natural for Arabs to be frustrated with the United States and resort to things like this.
Maybe the American government should re-evalute its own policy before passing judgement on the Intifada
If you have any old components I'll take them. No I can't offer you any tax rebates. But hey I cook pretty well :)
Well! As far as I know no American spy has ever worked for Iraq. As for China, try to be a little objective. Yes the Chinese government has a bad human-rights track record. Yes they treat dissenters badly. Yes they supress harmless people like the Falun Gong. But also consider it from their culture viewpoint. What may seem like a police state to us is simply their way of enforcing law and order. Their culture, psychology, viewpoints and ideologies are entirely different. Besides there hasn't been an anti-government protest since Tianmmen. Americans will argue that the Chinese have been supressed but people power can topple any government. See what happened to the USSR! Besides even the US the so called `bastion of freedom' has treated its dissenters badly. Remember the McCarthy era when hundreds of bright people had their careers destroyed simply because they were thought to be Communist sympathisers? What about Vietnam? Did America have any right to stick its nose into an affair that did not concern it? More recently what about Skylarov? His imprisonment and subsequent indictment would give any Communist apparatchik an inferiority complex! American history has a way of obscuring its misdeeds while highlighting the fallacies of the rest of the world.
That said and done I believe that a person who betrays his country is the worst kind of scumbag. The guy deserves whatever he gets!!
Yes Linux does perform badly is multi-processor environments such as the RS/6000 series. However this should be seen in perspective. AIX is a Unix flavor ESPECIALLY designed for such environments. Put AIX in any desktop or mid-level server and it won't do well at all. However Linux is flexible. You can run it on a wide range of systems right from 486s to top of the line AMDs. You can run it on diskless nodes and you can run it on server farms. IMHO I feel this flexibility is more important than being able to give stellar performance in high end machines which are not used by more than a handful of research workers. Agreed it would be pretty glamorous to announce that Linux is used in ASCI White. But practically it wouldn't mean much...