As a number of people have noted, There is no compelling, need to upgrade to HDTV. The higher resolution is not comparable to the switch from black and white to color.
This reminds me of an old quote from, I think, Gallagher. "I wish there were a way to increase the intelligence of the programming on television. There's a knob called 'brightness,' but it doesn't work."
Even so, the FCC has not chosen (I believe) standards that are backward compatible, as was color to black and white.
I'm afraid you believe incorrectly. A circa-1990 TV set can't receive digital broadcasts, period. If you had a way to receive them, a circa-1990 set couldn't display them.
None of the production equipment in a TV studio or station is compatible between analog SD and digital HD. None. You'd expect to have to buy new cameras and decks, of course, but do you realize that you even need new switchers, even new sync generators! The only thing that's compatible between analog SD and digital HD is the coaxial cable that the station is already wired with. And that's a blessing. For a long time, it was parallel HD only, not serial. Bleah.
In short, HD is about as incompatible with SD as it can be without being three-D or smell-o-vision or something.
The digital broadcasts done OTA are not compressed in any way.
Regrettably false. Uncompressed 1080i requires somewhere around 1.3 Gbps-- it's early, and I'm drawing a blank on the exact figure. But the broadcast spectrum allocated for HDTV is only wide enough to transmit about 19 Mbps per channel. So OTA HDTV is compressed at roughly 5-to-1 with MPEG-2 before it ever hits the transmitter.
That's not to say that OTA HD is a bad thing. It's beautiful. In a living room on consumer-grade equipment, it's practically indistinguishable from the uncompressed original.
Re:HDTV already has a killer App
on
I STILL Want My HDTV
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Lets face it when you're pulling the waves out of the air, static at 1080 is still static.
No, it isn't. There is no static on an HDTV broadcast, any more than there's static on digital cable or DBS or any other digital TV delivery mechanism.
If something interrupts your data stream, you'll get flickers or brief interruptions, but you'll never see static.
You are clearly uninformed. Most of CBSs prime-time schedule is simulcast in HDTV. ABC airs all their movies in HDTV, as well as a lot of their regular programming like "NYPD Blue" and "The Practice." NBC broadcasts Leno and most of their Olympics coverage in HD (although the HD broadcast of the Games isn't live).
This omits all-HD networks like HDNet and HBO-HD.
HD content isn't exactly coming out of our ears, but it's false to say that there is almost none.
Actually that quote from Khrushchev, "Whether you like it our not, history is on our side. We will bury you." Is considered inaccurate and is the fault of our translators. The real quote (considered by some) is, "Whether you like it our not, history is on our side. We will leave you in the dust!"
"Ya vam pokazhyu kuzkinu mat!" is a fairly common Russian idiom. It literally means, "I'll show you Kuzma's mother!" Like many idioms, its literal meaning is, well, kinda meaningless. But it's used pretty much the same way as the English phrase, "I'll dance on your grave," meaning I'll outlive or outlast you.
Khrushchev's "My vam pokazhim kuzkinu mat!" can't be literally translated, but it can be idiomatically translated as "We will bury you." The translation was not faulty.
The interpretation, however, has been pretty loose. Many have interpreted "We will bury you" as a threat of harm. In fact, it means, "We'll be around longer than you, and we'll attend your funeral."
The oft-quoted "we will leave you in the dust" simply has no basis in fact.
Even if Apple doesn't have grand designs to take over the enterprise server market, they're definitely going to gain mindshare in the grad student/corporate researcher community with tactics like this.
Hmm. I don't think it's about gaining mindshare. Apple already has mindshare in the sciences. There are more Macs at a nearby medical school and center for research in molecular biology* than there are anything else.
I think this is more about Apple continuing to focus on its core markets: consumers buying computers for the first time (the iMacs and iBooks), creative arts pros, scientists, and other similar segments (the Power Mac G4), and snobs with too much money (the TiBook).
Okay, that last one was a joke born out of jealousy for my friends TiBook.
Of course, taking a market where you already are doing well and just trouncing your competition is great for company, customer, and shareholder morale. So yeah, it's definitely good business.
I'm just glad Apple is continuing to spread the message that there's more to desktop computing than salespeople with PCs running Act, Word, and Excel.
* I have omitted the name of the school to preserve my last shreds of privacy.
I just found out this morning that IE 6 on Windows 2000 keeps a record of all the web sites I've visited! Microsoft doesn't tell anybody about this, but you can see if for yourself if you click that mysterious button on the toolbar that looks kind of like a sundial. There it is, a list of all the sites you've visited, sorted by domain and by date!
The worst part is, Microsoft doesn't deny that they could use this information for marketing!
The only way these customer-hostile corporations will get the message is if we vote with our wallets. Don't use IE! Use only browsers that don't maintain this so-called "History" log! Power to the people!
</sarcasm>
By now, everyone knows that this behavior inside WMP is just CDDB lookup caching. Every CD player I've ever seen has done the same thing. For that matter, so does every program that caches anything, from your web browser to your email program to... well, anything.
You can all stand down from red alert now. Cancel the march on Washington.
It seems like management at this company is just winging it.
They are. That is to say, we are. I recently was promoted from senior engineering to management. It's a different perspective, to say the least. But your basic impression is the right one: we're making this up as we go along.
The people in management aren't smarter than you. They're just people, like everybody else. They make some good choices and some bad ones. They go home at the end of the day and complain about you to their wives and neighbors. They feel bad when the company is doing badly, and they feel good when things are going well.
In other words, they're just like you.
I find myself putting all my energy, both mental and emotional, into a project only to be disappointed by decisions made by management.
I think that's kind of the point. Way back in high school, us American kids were taught that our government is basically, and deliberately, adversarial. The various parts of government argue and bicker all the time for a reason: out of the arguing and bickering comes a consensus that is the vector sum of all the separate factors that went into the decision. At least, that's the idea.
Companies work the same way. Marketing says, "Deliver all features, immediately!" Engineering says, "We need six months for quality assurance testing." This isn't a symptom of something wrong with the system. This is, in fact, a sign that everything is as it should be.
If we all put our egos away for a minute, we could admit that a company run solely by engineers probably wouldn't do very well. Either it would go out of business before it could ship a product (if the engineers were anal retentive about QC and testing) or it would fail because its products were shabby (if your engineers were mavericks who aren't interested in QC and testing).
Engineers and managers, like cats and dogs, will always be at cross purposes. If you're disappointed by management's decisions, that may not necessarily be a bad thing.
Of course, it you take it too seriously, and find yourself believing that you could do things better than your management could, then maybe it's not the right job for you. Or, more accurately, maybe you're not the right person for that job.
The number of cache lines you get in your caches isn't necessarily connected with whether your CPU is a 32-bit or 64-bit CPU.
Of course, you're right. I wrote "cache lines" when I meant to say "pointers." If your CPU uses 64-bit pointers or 64-bit ints, you get fewer pointers or ints per cache line, which means more misses.
Sorry for the confusion. I should know better than to post and talk on the phone at the same time....
maybe not a digital still camera, but definiatly a digital movie camera needs as much CPU as you can throw at it.
It's a common (ridiculously so, apparently) misconception that 64-bit CPUs are inherently faster than 32-bit CPUs. Not so. In fact, code compiled for a 64-bit chip will be slower than the same code compiled for a 32-bit chip, because you get fewer cache lines in your caches, so you have to go back to main memory more often.
If and when we see the day that 2 GB of addressable memory is not enough for most applications, 64-bit CPUs will be really important. Until then, they're just not that big a deal.
Apple could do it though if the included an "Apple Only" bios, or made the system non-standard. They could get the cheap Intel comodity hardware, but still maintain their hardware lock in.
Which would change nothing. An iMac doesn't cost $1200 because of the CPU.
Basically, Apple makes almost all of its money from hardware sales. Obviously if they sold OSX for x86 systems, thats a sizeable chunk of cash that they'd lose.
I agree completely, but I just wanted to throw in a slightly different interpretation. Microsoft has become an amazing success based on their sales of the Windows operating systems. I can't think of another company that has been that successfull selling primarily operating systems.
They did it in two ways: diversification and licensing, licensing, licensing.
If Microsoft sold only Windows XP, they couldn't be as successful as they are. But because they also sell Office, and SQL Server, and all that other crap^H^H^H^H valuable stuff, they can make a bundle.
Also, Microsoft licenses the heck out of Windows, so for (almost) every computer sold, MS gets a few bucks. To do this, they've had to make some questionable business decisions.
So, given these two facts, Apple can produce OS X for Intel and be successful if one of two things happens:
1. Apple diversifies into an applications company and starts selling stuff like "Mac OS X SQL Server" or "Mac OS X Groupware Product" to keep the cash flowing. Probability: almost zero.
2. Apple gets somebody serious, like Dell, to license OS X for Intel to sell on their PCs. Probability: even less than zero. This actually has negative probability! The very existence of this option makes other things more probable!
So yeah, pretty much releasing OS X for Intel would be a death sentence, either for Apple as a whole, or at least for Apple as we know it.
The almost religious "must please the shareholders" attitude is particularly irritating. Fuck the shareholders if they don't like the way you run YOUR business!
People like you just don't seem to get it. Producing quality products and all that other great stuff is a goal. You can't accomplish your goals if you're not in business. No investment means no money which means no products, quality or otherwise.
If you don't have a "must please the shareholders" attitude at all times, you won't be in business long. I know. I've been there. I've blown it, learned my lesson, and tried again.
Trying to judge the decisions a business makes without understanding their context is ultimately futile. "Announcing products before they're ready is deceitful, and wrong! Doing it makes you unethical!"
How about this: my company employs about 30 people. If I run this thing into the ground because I was unwilling to issue an optomistic-sounding press release to keep my investors happy, all 30 of those people will be out of work. I will be directly harming thirty people that I care about very much. How ethical is that?
I love reading the comments that say things like, "MIPS will revolutionize the embedded market!" and "Maybe there's hope for SGI yet!"
MIPS microprocessors are everywhere, and have been for years and years. They're in your TV, your cell phone, your microwave oven. They're in those cool little GPS receivers that everybody wants for Christmas. They're in the PlayStation 2, Replay TV PVRs, and most of Cisco's routers.
Look around your office. There are probably half a dozen MIPS processors within about twenty feet of you right now.
This is nothing new or revolutionary, and it has nothing to do with the MIPS R10K, R12K, and R14K processors that SGI uses in their computers. Everybody calm down.
I presonally believe you should not accounce a product (or whatever) until it's pretty much ready for release.
Never been in business, have you?
I've worked for a few start-ups, including one that has lasted for almost four years now. In the early stages, a company isn't fueled by sales, usually because there isn't really anything to sell yet. In the early stages, a company is fueled by investment and good press.
The only way to keep investors interested in your company, so they'll keep giving the money you use to keep the lights on and pay your people, is to keep the buzz coming. Investors-- an I'm not talking about VCs here-- want to invest in companies that have a lot of potential in the marketplace, and you generate that potential through press releases, demos, and (sometimes) unsubstantiated announcements.
It's not vaporware at that stage; vaporware is a product that purports to be ready, but isn't.
There are many types of problem where communications load goes up very rapidly with the number of processors, which makes a cluster (with its relatively poor communications bandwidth) impractical. This is what Big Iron is designed to be useful for.
Also, some problems are inherently serial, and can't be easily parallelized. When single-threaded performance is important, you need the fastest single CPU you can get your hands on.
In the writer's outline section he has a few bullet-points that scream "XML!"
I spent most of last week screaming "XML!" myself.
In a lot of cases, XML can be convenient for either humans or for parsers, but not both. I'm working on a web front-end to a database-like program that outputs XML, and you would not believe the headaches that come from trying to parse poorly designed XML. And I turned myself positively crosseyed trying to read the XML output as I debugged my programs, but at least in my case once I get my parser written I won't have to deal with the XML stuff myself anymore. If we're talking about system configuration files, these are things that humans have to deal with every day. Speaking personally, that would drive me apeshit.
Basically I've formed this opinion: in situations where data will be parsed by a general purpose parser that has no built-in knowledge of that data format, XML can be a good thing if used properly.
But that's not what we're talking about here. Configuration files aren't free-form self-describing data. They're very specific, and the programs that read them will have intimate knowledge of their formats.
To see my point of view, just compare setting up an Apache instance to setting up a Jabber instance. I have the Apache httpd.conf syntax pretty well memorized-- keyword whitespace value-- so I can set up Apache very easily. But for pretty much the same job, Jabber uses a needlessly complex XML config file. Every time I want to make a change, I have to pull out the API reference!
I remember the owner of junk.com, which seems to no longer exist, posting complaints about people type "whatever@junk.com" when they register software. It seems his servers were hit or something.
A good alternative is to use the domain "example.com." IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) holds the names "example.*" in reserve for use as (you guessed it) examples. It's been that way since at least 1995.
So an email of the form "foo@example.com" is perfectly valid... and can never be the recipient of email.
With the right tools, a director could modify the digital print to be soft, harsh, or distorted as the story dictates.
Actually, that's not the job of a director. That happens in visual effects, or sometimes in editing.
Discreet's Inferno product costs upwards of US$500,000, and one of its major selling points is its grain management tools. You can pick a particular film stock and apply grain to your footage that looks like it came from that kind of stock.
The idea, of course, is to match the look of digitally created effects shots to the look of the rest of the film. But the same tools can be used to add grain to HD footage to make it look more "filmic."
There's something to be said for *grain*. It's part of the analog richness of film.
I know you were trying to be sarcastic, but in point of fact, you're right.
The presence of film grain adds a completely different feel. The same scene shot of HD video and on Super-35 will look dramatically different when projected on a DLP projector.
While opinions vary, many creative types (including myself) prefer 24 FPS film for movies and other entertainment programs, even while 30 FPS (or higher) video is better for things like news. Movies shot on film at 24 FPS have a certain softness, a certain surreality, that makes the moviegoing experience much more enjoyable. Without the softness and grain, the movie is too harsh and jarring.
There's a great mailing list discussion on this subject archived at this site.
Oh, okay. Perils of not reading the article. In that case, there certainly are problems with that business plan. Like you said, at that point cloning becomes a very expensive form of breeding.
[A]rguing that it's bad BECAUSE that species is already plentiful is just plain silly.
Of course it isn't. It's humane. The poster believes that destroying cats because we can't find owners for them is bad. Widespread cloning of cats would exacerbate that problem. Therefore widespread cloning of cats would be bad.
The math is pretty simple.
As I said before, the CopyCat project isn't about the widespread cloning of cats (I think) so this argument is at best inapplicable. But it's not silly.
In fact, I think it raises a pretty interesting question. Let's assume that cloning is here; the genie is out of the bottle and we're going to have to deal with it. In some situations cloning might be justified, while in others it might not be, not because it's cloning qua cloning, but rather because of the effects that that particular application of cloning technology has on other aspects of society.
At that point, we're moving beyond "cloning is bad" into "cloning in certain situations is bad."
In other words, we've gone from "What can we eat?" to "Where shall we have lunch?"
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As a number of people have noted, There is no compelling, need to upgrade to HDTV. The higher resolution is not comparable to the switch from black and white to color.
This reminds me of an old quote from, I think, Gallagher. "I wish there were a way to increase the intelligence of the programming on television. There's a knob called 'brightness,' but it doesn't work."
Even so, the FCC has not chosen (I believe) standards that are backward compatible, as was color to black and white.
I'm afraid you believe incorrectly. A circa-1990 TV set can't receive digital broadcasts, period. If you had a way to receive them, a circa-1990 set couldn't display them.
None of the production equipment in a TV studio or station is compatible between analog SD and digital HD. None. You'd expect to have to buy new cameras and decks, of course, but do you realize that you even need new switchers, even new sync generators! The only thing that's compatible between analog SD and digital HD is the coaxial cable that the station is already wired with. And that's a blessing. For a long time, it was parallel HD only, not serial. Bleah.
In short, HD is about as incompatible with SD as it can be without being three-D or smell-o-vision or something.
The digital broadcasts done OTA are not compressed in any way.
Regrettably false. Uncompressed 1080i requires somewhere around 1.3 Gbps-- it's early, and I'm drawing a blank on the exact figure. But the broadcast spectrum allocated for HDTV is only wide enough to transmit about 19 Mbps per channel. So OTA HDTV is compressed at roughly 5-to-1 with MPEG-2 before it ever hits the transmitter.
That's not to say that OTA HD is a bad thing. It's beautiful. In a living room on consumer-grade equipment, it's practically indistinguishable from the uncompressed original.
Lets face it when you're pulling the waves out of the air, static at 1080 is still static.
No, it isn't. There is no static on an HDTV broadcast, any more than there's static on digital cable or DBS or any other digital TV delivery mechanism.
If something interrupts your data stream, you'll get flickers or brief interruptions, but you'll never see static.
Hmm. Need coffee, now. That clearly should have been "You're thinking of," not "you're thinking you."
The "Preview" button does no good whatsoever. There should be three buttons: Submit, Preview, and Think.
With almost no content to view in the HDTV format
You are clearly uninformed. Most of CBSs prime-time schedule is simulcast in HDTV. ABC airs all their movies in HDTV, as well as a lot of their regular programming like "NYPD Blue" and "The Practice." NBC broadcasts Leno and most of their Olympics coverage in HD (although the HD broadcast of the Games isn't live).
This omits all-HD networks like HDNet and HBO-HD.
HD content isn't exactly coming out of our ears, but it's false to say that there is almost none.
I know another meaning for the word mat, isnt it the four letter word that begins with F?
You're thinking you "Yob tvoyu mat'." It means "F*** your mother."
Actually that quote from Khrushchev, "Whether you like it our not, history is on our side. We will bury you." Is considered inaccurate and is the fault of our translators. The real quote (considered by some) is, "Whether you like it our not, history is on our side. We will leave you in the dust!"
"Ya vam pokazhyu kuzkinu mat!" is a fairly common Russian idiom. It literally means, "I'll show you Kuzma's mother!" Like many idioms, its literal meaning is, well, kinda meaningless. But it's used pretty much the same way as the English phrase, "I'll dance on your grave," meaning I'll outlive or outlast you.
Khrushchev's "My vam pokazhim kuzkinu mat!" can't be literally translated, but it can be idiomatically translated as "We will bury you." The translation was not faulty.
The interpretation, however, has been pretty loose. Many have interpreted "We will bury you" as a threat of harm. In fact, it means, "We'll be around longer than you, and we'll attend your funeral."
The oft-quoted "we will leave you in the dust" simply has no basis in fact.
In other words, ya vam pokazhyu kuzkinu mat.
Even if Apple doesn't have grand designs to take over the enterprise server market, they're definitely going to gain mindshare in the grad student/corporate researcher community with tactics like this.
Hmm. I don't think it's about gaining mindshare. Apple already has mindshare in the sciences. There are more Macs at a nearby medical school and center for research in molecular biology* than there are anything else.
I think this is more about Apple continuing to focus on its core markets: consumers buying computers for the first time (the iMacs and iBooks), creative arts pros, scientists, and other similar segments (the Power Mac G4), and snobs with too much money (the TiBook).
Okay, that last one was a joke born out of jealousy for my friends TiBook.
Of course, taking a market where you already are doing well and just trouncing your competition is great for company, customer, and shareholder morale. So yeah, it's definitely good business.
I'm just glad Apple is continuing to spread the message that there's more to desktop computing than salespeople with PCs running Act, Word, and Excel.
* I have omitted the name of the school to preserve my last shreds of privacy.
I just found out this morning that IE 6 on Windows 2000 keeps a record of all the web sites I've visited! Microsoft doesn't tell anybody about this, but you can see if for yourself if you click that mysterious button on the toolbar that looks kind of like a sundial. There it is, a list of all the sites you've visited, sorted by domain and by date!
The worst part is, Microsoft doesn't deny that they could use this information for marketing!
The only way these customer-hostile corporations will get the message is if we vote with our wallets. Don't use IE! Use only browsers that don't maintain this so-called "History" log! Power to the people!
</sarcasm>
By now, everyone knows that this behavior inside WMP is just CDDB lookup caching. Every CD player I've ever seen has done the same thing. For that matter, so does every program that caches anything, from your web browser to your email program to... well, anything.
You can all stand down from red alert now. Cancel the march on Washington.
The stick in the mud here seems to be Irix along with afs...we can do integrated logins on linux and sun, due to pam, but irix has no pam.
Rumor has it that IRIX 6.5 has support for LDAP authentication. Try the nsd(1M) and ldap(7P) man pages, for starters.
At least in theory, this might allow you to use NDS or some other robust LDAP implementation to provide login authentication to your IRIX systems.
It seems like management at this company is just winging it.
They are. That is to say, we are. I recently was promoted from senior engineering to management. It's a different perspective, to say the least. But your basic impression is the right one: we're making this up as we go along.
The people in management aren't smarter than you. They're just people, like everybody else. They make some good choices and some bad ones. They go home at the end of the day and complain about you to their wives and neighbors. They feel bad when the company is doing badly, and they feel good when things are going well.
In other words, they're just like you.
I find myself putting all my energy, both mental and emotional, into a project only to be disappointed by decisions made by management.
I think that's kind of the point. Way back in high school, us American kids were taught that our government is basically, and deliberately, adversarial. The various parts of government argue and bicker all the time for a reason: out of the arguing and bickering comes a consensus that is the vector sum of all the separate factors that went into the decision. At least, that's the idea.
Companies work the same way. Marketing says, "Deliver all features, immediately!" Engineering says, "We need six months for quality assurance testing." This isn't a symptom of something wrong with the system. This is, in fact, a sign that everything is as it should be.
If we all put our egos away for a minute, we could admit that a company run solely by engineers probably wouldn't do very well. Either it would go out of business before it could ship a product (if the engineers were anal retentive about QC and testing) or it would fail because its products were shabby (if your engineers were mavericks who aren't interested in QC and testing).
Engineers and managers, like cats and dogs, will always be at cross purposes. If you're disappointed by management's decisions, that may not necessarily be a bad thing.
Of course, it you take it too seriously, and find yourself believing that you could do things better than your management could, then maybe it's not the right job for you. Or, more accurately, maybe you're not the right person for that job.
The number of cache lines you get in your caches isn't necessarily connected with whether your CPU is a 32-bit or 64-bit CPU.
Of course, you're right. I wrote "cache lines" when I meant to say "pointers." If your CPU uses 64-bit pointers or 64-bit ints, you get fewer pointers or ints per cache line, which means more misses.
Sorry for the confusion. I should know better than to post and talk on the phone at the same time....
maybe not a digital still camera, but definiatly a digital movie camera needs as much CPU as you can throw at it.
It's a common (ridiculously so, apparently) misconception that 64-bit CPUs are inherently faster than 32-bit CPUs. Not so. In fact, code compiled for a 64-bit chip will be slower than the same code compiled for a 32-bit chip, because you get fewer cache lines in your caches, so you have to go back to main memory more often.
If and when we see the day that 2 GB of addressable memory is not enough for most applications, 64-bit CPUs will be really important. Until then, they're just not that big a deal.
Apple could do it though if the included an "Apple Only" bios, or made the system non-standard. They could get the cheap Intel comodity hardware, but still maintain their hardware lock in.
Which would change nothing. An iMac doesn't cost $1200 because of the CPU.
Basically, Apple makes almost all of its money from hardware sales. Obviously if they sold OSX for x86 systems, thats a sizeable chunk of cash that they'd lose.
I agree completely, but I just wanted to throw in a slightly different interpretation. Microsoft has become an amazing success based on their sales of the Windows operating systems. I can't think of another company that has been that successfull selling primarily operating systems.
They did it in two ways: diversification and licensing, licensing, licensing.
If Microsoft sold only Windows XP, they couldn't be as successful as they are. But because they also sell Office, and SQL Server, and all that other crap^H^H^H^H valuable stuff, they can make a bundle.
Also, Microsoft licenses the heck out of Windows, so for (almost) every computer sold, MS gets a few bucks. To do this, they've had to make some questionable business decisions.
So, given these two facts, Apple can produce OS X for Intel and be successful if one of two things happens:
1. Apple diversifies into an applications company and starts selling stuff like "Mac OS X SQL Server" or "Mac OS X Groupware Product" to keep the cash flowing. Probability: almost zero.
2. Apple gets somebody serious, like Dell, to license OS X for Intel to sell on their PCs. Probability: even less than zero. This actually has negative probability! The very existence of this option makes other things more probable!
So yeah, pretty much releasing OS X for Intel would be a death sentence, either for Apple as a whole, or at least for Apple as we know it.
The almost religious "must please the shareholders" attitude is particularly irritating. Fuck the shareholders if they don't like the way you run YOUR business!
People like you just don't seem to get it. Producing quality products and all that other great stuff is a goal. You can't accomplish your goals if you're not in business. No investment means no money which means no products, quality or otherwise.
If you don't have a "must please the shareholders" attitude at all times, you won't be in business long. I know. I've been there. I've blown it, learned my lesson, and tried again.
Trying to judge the decisions a business makes without understanding their context is ultimately futile. "Announcing products before they're ready is deceitful, and wrong! Doing it makes you unethical!"
How about this: my company employs about 30 people. If I run this thing into the ground because I was unwilling to issue an optomistic-sounding press release to keep my investors happy, all 30 of those people will be out of work. I will be directly harming thirty people that I care about very much. How ethical is that?
I love reading the comments that say things like, "MIPS will revolutionize the embedded market!" and "Maybe there's hope for SGI yet!"
MIPS microprocessors are everywhere, and have been for years and years. They're in your TV, your cell phone, your microwave oven. They're in those cool little GPS receivers that everybody wants for Christmas. They're in the PlayStation 2, Replay TV PVRs, and most of Cisco's routers.
Look around your office. There are probably half a dozen MIPS processors within about twenty feet of you right now.
This is nothing new or revolutionary, and it has nothing to do with the MIPS R10K, R12K, and R14K processors that SGI uses in their computers. Everybody calm down.
I presonally believe you should not accounce a product (or whatever) until it's pretty much ready for release.
Never been in business, have you?
I've worked for a few start-ups, including one that has lasted for almost four years now. In the early stages, a company isn't fueled by sales, usually because there isn't really anything to sell yet. In the early stages, a company is fueled by investment and good press.
The only way to keep investors interested in your company, so they'll keep giving the money you use to keep the lights on and pay your people, is to keep the buzz coming. Investors-- an I'm not talking about VCs here-- want to invest in companies that have a lot of potential in the marketplace, and you generate that potential through press releases, demos, and (sometimes) unsubstantiated announcements.
It's not vaporware at that stage; vaporware is a product that purports to be ready, but isn't.
There are many types of problem where communications load goes up very rapidly with the number of processors, which makes a cluster (with its relatively poor communications bandwidth) impractical. This is what Big Iron is designed to be useful for.
Also, some problems are inherently serial, and can't be easily parallelized. When single-threaded performance is important, you need the fastest single CPU you can get your hands on.
In the writer's outline section he has a few bullet-points that scream "XML!"
I spent most of last week screaming "XML!" myself.
In a lot of cases, XML can be convenient for either humans or for parsers, but not both. I'm working on a web front-end to a database-like program that outputs XML, and you would not believe the headaches that come from trying to parse poorly designed XML. And I turned myself positively crosseyed trying to read the XML output as I debugged my programs, but at least in my case once I get my parser written I won't have to deal with the XML stuff myself anymore. If we're talking about system configuration files, these are things that humans have to deal with every day. Speaking personally, that would drive me apeshit.
Basically I've formed this opinion: in situations where data will be parsed by a general purpose parser that has no built-in knowledge of that data format, XML can be a good thing if used properly.
But that's not what we're talking about here. Configuration files aren't free-form self-describing data. They're very specific, and the programs that read them will have intimate knowledge of their formats.
To see my point of view, just compare setting up an Apache instance to setting up a Jabber instance. I have the Apache httpd.conf syntax pretty well memorized-- keyword whitespace value-- so I can set up Apache very easily. But for pretty much the same job, Jabber uses a needlessly complex XML config file. Every time I want to make a change, I have to pull out the API reference!
That's just wrong.
I remember the owner of junk.com, which seems to no longer exist, posting complaints about people type "whatever@junk.com" when they register software. It seems his servers were hit or something.
A good alternative is to use the domain "example.com." IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) holds the names "example.*" in reserve for use as (you guessed it) examples. It's been that way since at least 1995.
So an email of the form "foo@example.com" is perfectly valid... and can never be the recipient of email.
With the right tools, a director could modify the digital print to be soft, harsh, or distorted as the story dictates.
Actually, that's not the job of a director. That happens in visual effects, or sometimes in editing.
Discreet's Inferno product costs upwards of US$500,000, and one of its major selling points is its grain management tools. You can pick a particular film stock and apply grain to your footage that looks like it came from that kind of stock.
The idea, of course, is to match the look of digitally created effects shots to the look of the rest of the film. But the same tools can be used to add grain to HD footage to make it look more "filmic."
There's something to be said for *grain*. It's part of the analog richness of film.
I know you were trying to be sarcastic, but in point of fact, you're right.
The presence of film grain adds a completely different feel. The same scene shot of HD video and on Super-35 will look dramatically different when projected on a DLP projector.
While opinions vary, many creative types (including myself) prefer 24 FPS film for movies and other entertainment programs, even while 30 FPS (or higher) video is better for things like news. Movies shot on film at 24 FPS have a certain softness, a certain surreality, that makes the moviegoing experience much more enjoyable. Without the softness and grain, the movie is too harsh and jarring.
There's a great mailing list discussion on this subject archived at this site.
This is where you are wrong.
Oh, okay. Perils of not reading the article. In that case, there certainly are problems with that business plan. Like you said, at that point cloning becomes a very expensive form of breeding.
Bad CopyCat! Go lay down!
[A]rguing that it's bad BECAUSE that species is already plentiful is just plain silly.
Of course it isn't. It's humane. The poster believes that destroying cats because we can't find owners for them is bad. Widespread cloning of cats would exacerbate that problem. Therefore widespread cloning of cats would be bad.
The math is pretty simple.
As I said before, the CopyCat project isn't about the widespread cloning of cats (I think) so this argument is at best inapplicable. But it's not silly.
In fact, I think it raises a pretty interesting question. Let's assume that cloning is here; the genie is out of the bottle and we're going to have to deal with it. In some situations cloning might be justified, while in others it might not be, not because it's cloning qua cloning, but rather because of the effects that that particular application of cloning technology has on other aspects of society.
At that point, we're moving beyond "cloning is bad" into "cloning in certain situations is bad."
In other words, we've gone from "What can we eat?" to "Where shall we have lunch?"