"and I thought ntldr had something to do with the kernal"
Not sure if you're serious or not, but I'm trying to avoid getting any real work done, so:
NTLDR is the NT boot loader. It gets loaded by the boot strap in the PBR (partition boot record, AKA boot block). It does things like present the OS choices menu, and load critical NT files using BIOS INT13 calls.
NTDETECT.COM is a low-level hardware detection routine that gets invoked by NTLDR. The details I'm fuzzy on.
NTOSKRNL.EXE contains the NT microkernel and the NT executive. Virtual memory, threads, cache, I/O scheduling, system objects, all that sort of stuff happens here.
HAL.DLL is the Hardware Abstraction Layer (of which there are several choices available). The HAL, in theory, contains the platform-specific parts of the NT core. It was more interesting when NT actually ran on more then Intel hardware. Today, mainly interesting with APM vs ACPI issues (and, I suppose, 64-bit beta releases).
SMSS.EXE is the Session Manager Subsystem. SMSS manages device names and does a lot of initialization and hardware interface work.
LSASS.EXE is the Local Security Authority Subsystem. LSA is responsible for the SAM (Security Account Manager) database, local SIDs and RIDs, and other security-related gunk.
CSRSS.ESE is the Win32 Subsystem (Client/Server Runtime Subsystem). This provides the Windows userland interface and runtime environment. This is what programs see as "Windows".
KERNEL32.DLL contains kernel interface routines, similar to the way glibc on Linux contains interfaces to Linux syscalls.
GDI32.DLL is the user-mode portion of the Graphics Device Interface, which handles low-level drawing primitives (like X11, but without the network bits).
USER32.DLL is the user-mode portion of the Windows GUI (kind of like an X11 toolkit plus a window manager).
WIN32K.SYS is the kernel-mode portion of the Win32 subsystem and libraries (including parts of the GDI and GUI).
WINLOGON.EXE generates the logon dialog box and handles logins, obviously.
EXPLORER.EXE is the current default Windows GUI shell (desktop icons, task bar, file manager).
And finally, SOL.EXE and WINMINE.EXE are the two most important programs on the system, of course.;-)
"How exactly does Notes/Domino compare with Exchange ? Outlook/Exchange is a groupware suite, Notes/Domino is a platform... "
FWIW, Outlook/Exchange does have all sorts "platform" features, both server and client. From what people say, I gather Notes/Domino is still better at it. I don't deal with app development, myself, so I can't really say for sure.
"Notes has had three - count 'em, 3 - major releases since that stuff was put up there, and many, if not all of the points it makes have been addressed."
Notes has some incredibly cool uses and features. Database power is good. But, IMNSHO, the UI still sucks dead rats through a silly-straw. Even in the latest release. Blech! And it makes even Outlook look light-weight in terms of resource use. Eeesh.
I'll admit to some over-simplifications in what I wrote, mainly because I didn't want to get down to a bit-by-bit comparison of Exchange/Outlook vs the world. But since we're here...
I was definately biasing the first "anything else out there" comment. IME, most lusers seem to like the UI in Outlook a lot better then GroupWise (which is clunky at best) and Notes (which is horrid). Maybe it's just a matter of what they are used to. *shrug*
I did some time with GroupWise in the distant past... it was version 4 or 5, I think. At the time, I thought it sucked worse then Exchange (which, given the state of Exchange at the time, is saying something). The server was cranky and the client didn't have half of what Outlook did. Things could easily have improved since then. (It would be hard for them to get worse.)
I've worked with Lotus Notes on the client side before. I've got a colleague who loves it. Myself, I found the UI to be, as you say, horrid, and pretty much left it at that. Never touched the server.
As for whether end-users like it, Outlook can be used with Groupwise...
I thought Novell had discontinued MAPI support in GroupWise. No?
... courier IMAP/exim with Maildir on reiserfs...
I prefer Cyrus over Maildir (persistent mailbox indexes rock), but yah, that's a great combo. We've got customers using similar. The problems, as has been noted, generally stem from a reluctance to part with Outlook. PST files suck mud. Outlook, while not the worst IMAP client out there, is far from the best. *sigh*
I will reiterate my statement that I don't know of anything in wide-spread use that does Single Instance Storage the way Exchange does. SIS means that the 20 megabyte MPEG movie (or 2 megabyte Excel spreadsheet) that everybody has to forward to everybody else only gets stored once. Is that available in Notes or GroupWise?
The "Welcome to the real world" comment was mainly aimed at the second-to-last paragraph -- that retraining and other migration costs often keep an organization from replacing an existing system that works "good enough".
Finally, don't get me wrong -- I'd much prefer it if I never had to touch MS-Exchange -- or MS-Windows, for that matter. But I've got too many customers who want it.
When it comes to people making purchase decisions, perception is reality. A lot of people are convinced they need the Outlook/Exchange combo. How good or bad of a decision that is does not matter -- they are convinced. If I (as a systems integrator) don't offer Exchange as an option, customers go somewhere else, I go out of business, and Microsoft gains more traction.
Now, as far as pros and cons go, the Exchange/Outlook combo has a number of things in the "pro" category. For one, I'm honestly not aware of anything out there that offers that level of integration in one package. Mail, tasks, schedule, and contacts all wrapped up in one interface is something a lot of people like. (Whether or not you or I like it, again, does not matter. We're not talking you or I, we're talking everybody.)
Exchange, done properly (note: this is expensive) is very stable and reliable. As long as you can throw the hardware at it, it can handle gobs of data. That is important. I'm continually amazed by the number of people who keep every single message they have ever received in their inbox. People with 5000 or more messages in their inbox is common. I think it's crazy, but apparently some people like it that way.
Aside from large numbers of messages in one folder, we also have large attachments. Today's 20 megabyte MPEG movie that everyone has to forward to everyone else. Or maybe just a big MS Excel spreadsheet. Exchange has a feature called Single Instance Storage which makes this very efficient. I'm not aware of anything in wide-spread use that offers the same functions.
Sure, with retraining and different work habbits, you could get the same thing done with a lot less IT resources. It might even be more generally efficient in the long run. But in the short term, it would mean a lot of retraining and a lot of procederal changes, and that's not gonna fly in many organizations.
This is mainly an implementation issue; there are many *nix implementations which let you "force" an umount. That will usually nuke whatever process(es) had inodes on that filesystem open, but presumably that is considered an acceptable loss if one is using the "force" option in the first place.
"why the hell there is a 'D' run state that is completely uninterruptable"
D has been recon'ed to mean "uninterruptable sleep". It means that a process has made a syscall, and the scheduler is waiting for that syscall to return before it can wake the process back up. Processes sleep on syscalls all the time. The "uninterruptible" aspect generally indicates part of the system (such as an interrupt handler or bus master DMA hardware) needs to finish something before the syscall can return. For example, maybe a buffer in memory is going to be written to. You can't just kill the process off, then -- it's being used to track that resource.
The details of this are an implementation issue. Traditionally, *nix implementations have tended to schedule nearly all system processing as part of the user process which triggered the need for the system processing in the first place. This has a number of benefits (e.g.: keeps complexity down, uses fewer resources, makes resource tracking and accounting a lot easier). There's no userland API reason for this, though; you could handle everything using separate kernel threads and a lot more interfacing. Whether or not that is a Good Thing depends on the beholder.
"Another thing that I see as "broken" in UNIX is that there is no normal/standardized/sane way of installing software."
These days, when people say "Unix", they generally don't mean the AT&T(TM) Unix(TM) System (or whatever it's called today). They mean systems that derive code from AT&T or BSD Unix, or implement the same set of userland interfaces, or implement POSIX, or otherwise resemble all that. (I use the term "*nix*" for this meaning, avoiding the ambiguous "Unix".)
It is true that there is no standard package system that works over all *nix systems, but you have to look at what a huge field that is. There is also no standard package system that works on both Mac OS X and my Palm Pilot. You're asking a lot, more then human engineering is possible of providing, I think.
*nix actually does remarkably well. Within a particular implementation (say, Red Hat Linux, Debian GNU/Linux, OpenBSD, Sun Solaris), one generally finds there is a "native" package system. Quality varies, of course, but most work well.
Outside of the "native environment", where just about anything goes, the "five-step install" is surprising portable:
tar -xzf package-x.y.z.tar.gz cd package-x.y.z.tar.gz ./configure make make install
Sure, it's not point-and-click, but compare that to, say, Windows or Mac OS, where every version of every programs uses its own install routine, shared system files are routinely trampled, and things are generally messy. Microsoft defines "portable" as "runs on more then one version of Windows". That's a fair bit less then what we have in the *nix world.
"Just watch the documentary "Under pressure: Making of The Abyss" that comes on the special edition of The Abyss DVDs"
Already have. I own the DVD, BTW. I consider The Abyss to be one of the unsung great films in Hollywood history. The level of research, detail, and realism, as you note, are simply incredible. Plus it's a rocking great story.
The link to the people who took a day-trip to the still-existing abandonded set is very interesting, and something I was unaware of. Very cool. Thanks for that.
"You mean they actually built and blew up an entire planet?"
Yah, that's obviously what I meant./SARCASM
I said they actually built something. I figured it was obvious that they built models, and not real space ships. Sorry if that point slipped past you.
"Or did they do it with scale models, and if you'd look closely, you could almost always spot the scale models?"
You can spot the scale models in most cases, I admit. However, I prefer the look of a scale model over a perfectly smooth CG model. You can prolly call that personal preference if you like.
"I think SFX weren't better when you were younger"
You'll notice that I never said the SFX in Star Wars were better. I was commenting mainly on the superior appearance real models have over CG models, especially when it comes to detail and transformation (i.e., explosions, crashes, etc.). As others in this subthread have pointed out, real models still get used extensively for this very reason.
Also, my analysis is based on current viewings, not childhood nostalgia, thank-you-very-much.
Remember the transparent snowspeeders in Empire Strikes Back? Or that lovely outline around the stop-motion creatures?
I explictly stated that manual compositing detracted from overall quality. I was thinking of those same artifacts, not to mention a few really nasty spaceship scenes, when I wrote that caveat.
"Pardon me, but I beg to differ. If one watches the LOTR trilogy, it was jammed pack full of CGI. The only way one knows if it is CGI or not is if you watch the making of the film, other-wise, there is no way to tell."
Maybe there is no way for you to tell. I generally have a fairly easy time spotting most CGI. Of course, I know what to look for. Computing power isn't quite to the point yet where the computer can include enough detail to get all the imperfections and subtleties real life stuff has. It isn't so much what you see, but what you don't see.
I imagine we're not too far off from the point where a computer model can include chaos-level detail, though. The depth of detail is already quite astonishing.
Ooops, got so caught up in my explanation I forgot your question had two parts.
The critical element is that the key color not appear on the actors or props. Bright blue works well for many indoor scenes and bright lighting, but does poorer in "outdoor" and low-light conditions, where blues are more common. That green color can provide better contrast then. I've also seen them use an orange screen for spaceship models which contained blues and greens. Again, the computer can key on any color; the important part is that the color not be present on the "real" stuff. I imagine bright purple or yellow would also work well in some cases.
"Man are you confused. World War One was 1914-1918."
Right. And until they had another one, it was called "The Great War" or "The World War". They didn't know to call it "World War One" until there was a second one.
This reminds me of the gag with the guy who finds a coin dated "50 BC".
"You're telling me that Star Wars used only computer-generated sets?"
Yah, I thought that statement was bogus.
The interesting part is I've always maintained that the signature look of the original three Star Wars films (Episodes 4, 5, and 6) comes about because they didn't have all the special effects tech they have these days. Computer generated imagery didn't really exist; chromakey didn't exist. Everything was done with models (and paintings for large stuff) and then manually compositited. Even today's best computer models still don't manage to get all the details of a "real" scene completely right. If you look closely, you can still almost always spot the CG models. But in the original Star Wars, every time they blew something up, they actually built something and blew it up.
(Of course, the artifacts resulting from inaccurate hand compositing detracts from the overall quality, but hey, you can't have everything.)
I imagine CG models will eventually catch up, but right now, you still can't beat the "real thing".
"So why did green take over? Is green dye just cheaper or is there a technical reason behind it?"
The technology of blue/green/organge/whatever screens is called "chroma key". The computer knows that anything of the key color is "background" and should be replaced with other imagery. They use those bright, stand-out colors for that reason -- those colors are unlikely to conflict with real actors or props. The computer could replace another color, e.g., black, just as well, but black appears normally all over the place.
They use the same technology for the "magic weather maps" you see the meteorologist stand in front of during modern TV weather reports. The map isn't really there; the meteorologist stands in front of a color screen, and the map is composited in electronically. You can occasionally see a goof where some part of the meteorologist's wardrobe is too close to the screen's color, and the map "bleeds through" and the person appears "hollow".
"Except that if it is publicly disclosed by yourself or anyone else more than one year before you FILE, it doesn't matter if you invented it first, you can't patent it. Disclosure can consist of USING the patent publicly, even if you don't disclose how you're doing it."
Ahhhh. Interesting. I didn't know that. Thanks for the info. Of course, IANAL, I expect you're not either, and it isn't like Slashdot is a legal forum, but hey, still good to know.:-)
After all your talk about PLATO, I had to follow your journal link, and just spent a good hour reading about cool old computer systems. Neat stuff. Sometimes I regret that a lot of that stuff came before my time.
Who in the world decided that radians were more intuitive to work with than degrees?
Well, given that radians are based on the actual mathamatics of angles (i.e., one radian is a "straight angle"), I guess God did. Or whatever deity you believe in. Athiests will have to blame it on random chance, and I'm not sure about agnostics.
Seriously, degrees (and minutes and seconds) are just like other "traditional" units of measure (like yards and feet and inches), in that some humans in the past cooked them up based on something pretty arbitrary. Working with them is a pain. The SI units make much more sense.
Only people who grew up with non-SI units prefer non-SI units. That's why I sometimes use inches rather then centimeters, and still think of temperatures in Fahrenheit and not Celsius. It's not that the non-SI units are "more intuitive"; they're simply what I'm used to.
Obviously, you're used to degrees. I am too. However, you and I and everyone else here at Slashdot today will not be around forever. As the time passes, more and more people will grow up on SI. Better that this standard use units based on something relevant to the subject, rather then the arbitrary decisions of old.
The thing that really gets me is that most people can generally blame themselves for this problem. If you put two near-identical computers side-by-side, with the only difference being that one costs $300 more but includes much better after-sales support, the vast majority people will buy the cheaper PC every time.
Consumer price pressure has pushed base model prices down to the $500 mark. Microsoft Windows sucks up 20% of that right off the bat. The hardware is already near zero margin. The only place left to cut cost is in services.
I work for an IT services company in the small business sector. We use Dell a lot, but we always strongly recommend the OptiPlex models over the Dimension models. Customers always complain that the OptiPlex costs significantly more then the Dimension does. The first time they call tech support, they find out why. Everyone who has overrode our recommendation and gone with a Dimension has lived to regret it. Some even learn from the experience.
A little "collateral damage" does not cause a business to go "out-of-business".
It depends on the business. I base my statements on the several dozen small businesses I consult for as part of my job. If they blocked mail the way the original poster did -- specifically, if they required everybody to have forward and reverse DNS entries for their MXes -- they would lose huge volumes of legitimate mail.
I do note that your checks don't include that one. That may have something to do with your disagreement.
We configure intelligent anti-spam systems, based on weighted rules with multiple inputs. Third-party blacklists, custom blacklists, technical analysis, content analysis, all with user feedback components, result in a workable anti-spam solution that does not result in lost business.
"If the filter uses a challenge response instead of dropping the message on failure"
Google for "spam backscatter" and "spam joe job" and learn about just what a huge problem that is. As you point out, spammers tend to use forged return addresses. So sending a DSN in response to spam results in nearly double the amount of problem mail that the spam alone causes.
Challenge/response systems make the spam problem worse.
While your techniques will all stop spam, they will also stop a great deal of legitimate mail (ham). Stopping spam is not the hard problem Stopping spam while letting ham through is the hard problem.
If businesses did what you did, most of them would go out-of-business.
"So, the patent is filed for August 10th, 2004... it looks like SUDO dates back to 1980."
Under US patent law, it is when the idea was first throught of, and not when the patent was filed, that counts. Not that I really think Microsoft thought of this first.
Slashdot Mirror
"Additional note: He wrote a VB6 app that had to do alot of file access"
;-)
Well, that's one error right there....
"and I thought ntldr had something to do with the kernal"
;-)
Not sure if you're serious or not, but I'm trying to avoid getting any real work done, so:
NTLDR is the NT boot loader. It gets loaded by the boot strap in the PBR (partition boot record, AKA boot block). It does things like present the OS choices menu, and load critical NT files using BIOS INT13 calls.
NTDETECT.COM is a low-level hardware detection routine that gets invoked by NTLDR. The details I'm fuzzy on.
NTOSKRNL.EXE contains the NT microkernel and the NT executive. Virtual memory, threads, cache, I/O scheduling, system objects, all that sort of stuff happens here.
HAL.DLL is the Hardware Abstraction Layer (of which there are several choices available). The HAL, in theory, contains the platform-specific parts of the NT core. It was more interesting when NT actually ran on more then Intel hardware. Today, mainly interesting with APM vs ACPI issues (and, I suppose, 64-bit beta releases).
SMSS.EXE is the Session Manager Subsystem. SMSS manages device names and does a lot of initialization and hardware interface work.
LSASS.EXE is the Local Security Authority Subsystem. LSA is responsible for the SAM (Security Account Manager) database, local SIDs and RIDs, and other security-related gunk.
CSRSS.ESE is the Win32 Subsystem (Client/Server Runtime Subsystem). This provides the Windows userland interface and runtime environment. This is what programs see as "Windows".
KERNEL32.DLL contains kernel interface routines, similar to the way glibc on Linux contains interfaces to Linux syscalls.
GDI32.DLL is the user-mode portion of the Graphics Device Interface, which handles low-level drawing primitives (like X11, but without the network bits).
USER32.DLL is the user-mode portion of the Windows GUI (kind of like an X11 toolkit plus a window manager).
WIN32K.SYS is the kernel-mode portion of the Win32 subsystem and libraries (including parts of the GDI and GUI).
WINLOGON.EXE generates the logon dialog box and handles logins, obviously.
EXPLORER.EXE is the current default Windows GUI shell (desktop icons, task bar, file manager).
And finally, SOL.EXE and WINMINE.EXE are the two most important programs on the system, of course.
"Requiring it to be GPL'ed is like requiring that the files I read and write be GPL'ed because they passed thru the kernel."
Don't give RMS any ideas.
(I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I actually think the concept of copyleft is a Good Thing. But I take the shot when I see it.)
"How exactly does Notes/Domino compare with Exchange ? ... "
Outlook/Exchange is a groupware suite, Notes/Domino is a platform
FWIW, Outlook/Exchange does have all sorts "platform" features, both server and client. From what people say, I gather Notes/Domino is still better at it. I don't deal with app development, myself, so I can't really say for sure.
"Notes has had three - count 'em, 3 - major releases since that stuff was put up there, and many, if not all of the points it makes have been addressed."
Notes has some incredibly cool uses and features. Database power is good. But, IMNSHO, the UI still sucks dead rats through a silly-straw. Even in the latest release. Blech! And it makes even Outlook look light-weight in terms of resource use. Eeesh.
I'll admit to some over-simplifications in what I wrote, mainly because I didn't want to get down to a bit-by-bit comparison of Exchange/Outlook vs the world. But since we're here...
...
... courier IMAP/exim with Maildir on reiserfs ...
I was definately biasing the first "anything else out there" comment. IME, most lusers seem to like the UI in Outlook a lot better then GroupWise (which is clunky at best) and Notes (which is horrid). Maybe it's just a matter of what they are used to. *shrug*
I did some time with GroupWise in the distant past... it was version 4 or 5, I think. At the time, I thought it sucked worse then Exchange (which, given the state of Exchange at the time, is saying something). The server was cranky and the client didn't have half of what Outlook did. Things could easily have improved since then. (It would be hard for them to get worse.)
I've worked with Lotus Notes on the client side before. I've got a colleague who loves it. Myself, I found the UI to be, as you say, horrid, and pretty much left it at that. Never touched the server.
As for whether end-users like it, Outlook can be used with Groupwise
I thought Novell had discontinued MAPI support in GroupWise. No?
I prefer Cyrus over Maildir (persistent mailbox indexes rock), but yah, that's a great combo. We've got customers using similar. The problems, as has been noted, generally stem from a reluctance to part with Outlook. PST files suck mud. Outlook, while not the worst IMAP client out there, is far from the best. *sigh*
I will reiterate my statement that I don't know of anything in wide-spread use that does Single Instance Storage the way Exchange does. SIS means that the 20 megabyte MPEG movie (or 2 megabyte Excel spreadsheet) that everybody has to forward to everybody else only gets stored once. Is that available in Notes or GroupWise?
The "Welcome to the real world" comment was mainly aimed at the second-to-last paragraph -- that retraining and other migration costs often keep an organization from replacing an existing system that works "good enough".
Finally, don't get me wrong -- I'd much prefer it if I never had to touch MS-Exchange -- or MS-Windows, for that matter. But I've got too many customers who want it.
"Managerial groupthink does not count."
When it comes to people making purchase decisions, perception is reality. A lot of people are convinced they need the Outlook/Exchange combo. How good or bad of a decision that is does not matter -- they are convinced. If I (as a systems integrator) don't offer Exchange as an option, customers go somewhere else, I go out of business, and Microsoft gains more traction.
Now, as far as pros and cons go, the Exchange/Outlook combo has a number of things in the "pro" category. For one, I'm honestly not aware of anything out there that offers that level of integration in one package. Mail, tasks, schedule, and contacts all wrapped up in one interface is something a lot of people like. (Whether or not you or I like it, again, does not matter. We're not talking you or I, we're talking everybody.)
Exchange, done properly (note: this is expensive) is very stable and reliable. As long as you can throw the hardware at it, it can handle gobs of data. That is important. I'm continually amazed by the number of people who keep every single message they have ever received in their inbox. People with 5000 or more messages in their inbox is common. I think it's crazy, but apparently some people like it that way.
Aside from large numbers of messages in one folder, we also have large attachments. Today's 20 megabyte MPEG movie that everyone has to forward to everyone else. Or maybe just a big MS Excel spreadsheet. Exchange has a feature called Single Instance Storage which makes this very efficient. I'm not aware of anything in wide-spread use that offers the same functions.
Sure, with retraining and different work habbits, you could get the same thing done with a lot less IT resources. It might even be more generally efficient in the long run. But in the short term, it would mean a lot of retraining and a lot of procederal changes, and that's not gonna fly in many organizations.
Welcome to the real world.
This is mainly an implementation issue; there are many *nix implementations which let you "force" an umount. That will usually nuke whatever process(es) had inodes on that filesystem open, but presumably that is considered an acceptable loss if one is using the "force" option in the first place.
"why the hell there is a 'D' run state that is completely uninterruptable"
D has been recon'ed to mean "uninterruptable sleep". It means that a process has made a syscall, and the scheduler is waiting for that syscall to return before it can wake the process back up. Processes sleep on syscalls all the time. The "uninterruptible" aspect generally indicates part of the system (such as an interrupt handler or bus master DMA hardware) needs to finish something before the syscall can return. For example, maybe a buffer in memory is going to be written to. You can't just kill the process off, then -- it's being used to track that resource.
The details of this are an implementation issue. Traditionally, *nix implementations have tended to schedule nearly all system processing as part of the user process which triggered the need for the system processing in the first place. This has a number of benefits (e.g.: keeps complexity down, uses fewer resources, makes resource tracking and accounting a lot easier). There's no userland API reason for this, though; you could handle everything using separate kernel threads and a lot more interfacing. Whether or not that is a Good Thing depends on the beholder.
"Another thing that I see as "broken" in UNIX is that there is no normal/standardized/sane way of installing software."
These days, when people say "Unix", they generally don't mean the AT&T(TM) Unix(TM) System (or whatever it's called today). They mean systems that derive code from AT&T or BSD Unix, or implement the same set of userland interfaces, or implement POSIX, or otherwise resemble all that. (I use the term "*nix*" for this meaning, avoiding the ambiguous "Unix".)
It is true that there is no standard package system that works over all *nix systems, but you have to look at what a huge field that is. There is also no standard package system that works on both Mac OS X and my Palm Pilot. You're asking a lot, more then human engineering is possible of providing, I think.
*nix actually does remarkably well. Within a particular implementation (say, Red Hat Linux, Debian GNU/Linux, OpenBSD, Sun Solaris), one generally finds there is a "native" package system. Quality varies, of course, but most work well.
Outside of the "native environment", where just about anything goes, the "five-step install" is surprising portable:Sure, it's not point-and-click, but compare that to, say, Windows or Mac OS, where every version of every programs uses its own install routine, shared system files are routinely trampled, and things are generally messy. Microsoft defines "portable" as "runs on more then one version of Windows". That's a fair bit less then what we have in the *nix world.
"The scary thing is, it's spread across not one but two desktops.. when my second display's nearly full I know I can't really put it off much longer"
That just means you need to buy a third screen!
"Just watch the documentary "Under pressure: Making of The Abyss" that comes on the special edition of The Abyss DVDs"
Already have. I own the DVD, BTW. I consider The Abyss to be one of the unsung great films in Hollywood history. The level of research, detail, and realism, as you note, are simply incredible. Plus it's a rocking great story.
The link to the people who took a day-trip to the still-existing abandonded set is very interesting, and something I was unaware of. Very cool. Thanks for that.
Cheers,
"You mean they actually built and blew up an entire planet?"
/SARCASM
Yah, that's obviously what I meant.
I said they actually built something. I figured it was obvious that they built models, and not real space ships. Sorry if that point slipped past you.
"Or did they do it with scale models, and if you'd look closely, you could almost always spot the scale models?"
You can spot the scale models in most cases, I admit. However, I prefer the look of a scale model over a perfectly smooth CG model. You can prolly call that personal preference if you like.
"I think SFX weren't better when you were younger"
You'll notice that I never said the SFX in Star Wars were better. I was commenting mainly on the superior appearance real models have over CG models, especially when it comes to detail and transformation (i.e., explosions, crashes, etc.). As others in this subthread have pointed out, real models still get used extensively for this very reason.
Also, my analysis is based on current viewings, not childhood nostalgia, thank-you-very-much.
Remember the transparent snowspeeders in Empire Strikes Back? Or that lovely outline around the stop-motion creatures?
I explictly stated that manual compositing detracted from overall quality. I was thinking of those same artifacts, not to mention a few really nasty spaceship scenes, when I wrote that caveat.
"Pardon me, but I beg to differ. If one watches the LOTR trilogy, it was jammed pack full of CGI. The only way one knows if it is CGI or not is if you watch the making of the film, other-wise, there is no way to tell."
Maybe there is no way for you to tell. I generally have a fairly easy time spotting most CGI. Of course, I know what to look for. Computing power isn't quite to the point yet where the computer can include enough detail to get all the imperfections and subtleties real life stuff has. It isn't so much what you see, but what you don't see.
I imagine we're not too far off from the point where a computer model can include chaos-level detail, though. The depth of detail is already quite astonishing.
"So why did green take over?"
Ooops, got so caught up in my explanation I forgot your question had two parts.
The critical element is that the key color not appear on the actors or props. Bright blue works well for many indoor scenes and bright lighting, but does poorer in "outdoor" and low-light conditions, where blues are more common. That green color can provide better contrast then. I've also seen them use an orange screen for spaceship models which contained blues and greens. Again, the computer can key on any color; the important part is that the color not be present on the "real" stuff. I imagine bright purple or yellow would also work well in some cases.
"Man are you confused. World War One was 1914-1918."
Right. And until they had another one, it was called "The Great War" or "The World War". They didn't know to call it "World War One" until there was a second one.
This reminds me of the gag with the guy who finds a coin dated "50 BC".
"You're telling me that Star Wars used only computer-generated sets?"
Yah, I thought that statement was bogus.
The interesting part is I've always maintained that the signature look of the original three Star Wars films (Episodes 4, 5, and 6) comes about because they didn't have all the special effects tech they have these days. Computer generated imagery didn't really exist; chromakey didn't exist. Everything was done with models (and paintings for large stuff) and then manually compositited. Even today's best computer models still don't manage to get all the details of a "real" scene completely right. If you look closely, you can still almost always spot the CG models. But in the original Star Wars, every time they blew something up, they actually built something and blew it up.
(Of course, the artifacts resulting from inaccurate hand compositing detracts from the overall quality, but hey, you can't have everything.)
I imagine CG models will eventually catch up, but right now, you still can't beat the "real thing".
"So why did green take over? Is green dye just cheaper or is there a technical reason behind it?"
The technology of blue/green/organge/whatever screens is called "chroma key". The computer knows that anything of the key color is "background" and should be replaced with other imagery. They use those bright, stand-out colors for that reason -- those colors are unlikely to conflict with real actors or props. The computer could replace another color, e.g., black, just as well, but black appears normally all over the place.
They use the same technology for the "magic weather maps" you see the meteorologist stand in front of during modern TV weather reports. The map isn't really there; the meteorologist stands in front of a color screen, and the map is composited in electronically. You can occasionally see a goof where some part of the meteorologist's wardrobe is too close to the screen's color, and the map "bleeds through" and the person appears "hollow".
"Except that if it is publicly disclosed by yourself or anyone else more than one year before you FILE, it doesn't matter if you invented it first, you can't patent it. Disclosure can consist of USING the patent publicly, even if you don't disclose how you're doing it."
:-)
Ahhhh. Interesting. I didn't know that. Thanks for the info. Of course, IANAL, I expect you're not either, and it isn't like Slashdot is a legal forum, but hey, still good to know.
After all your talk about PLATO, I had to follow your journal link, and just spent a good hour reading about cool old computer systems. Neat stuff. Sometimes I regret that a lot of that stuff came before my time.
"Pi radians is a straight angle."
Oops. Yah. You're right. That was from memory and I'm not a math guy. My bad. Thanks for the correction.
Who in the world decided that radians were more intuitive to work with than degrees?
Well, given that radians are based on the actual mathamatics of angles (i.e., one radian is a "straight angle"), I guess God did. Or whatever deity you believe in. Athiests will have to blame it on random chance, and I'm not sure about agnostics.
Seriously, degrees (and minutes and seconds) are just like other "traditional" units of measure (like yards and feet and inches), in that some humans in the past cooked them up based on something pretty arbitrary. Working with them is a pain. The SI units make much more sense.
Only people who grew up with non-SI units prefer non-SI units. That's why I sometimes use inches rather then centimeters, and still think of temperatures in Fahrenheit and not Celsius. It's not that the non-SI units are "more intuitive"; they're simply what I'm used to.
Obviously, you're used to degrees. I am too. However, you and I and everyone else here at Slashdot today will not be around forever. As the time passes, more and more people will grow up on SI. Better that this standard use units based on something relevant to the subject, rather then the arbitrary decisions of old.
The thing that really gets me is that most people can generally blame themselves for this problem. If you put two near-identical computers side-by-side, with the only difference being that one costs $300 more but includes much better after-sales support, the vast majority people will buy the cheaper PC every time.
Consumer price pressure has pushed base model prices down to the $500 mark. Microsoft Windows sucks up 20% of that right off the bat. The hardware is already near zero margin. The only place left to cut cost is in services.
I work for an IT services company in the small business sector. We use Dell a lot, but we always strongly recommend the OptiPlex models over the Dimension models. Customers always complain that the OptiPlex costs significantly more then the Dimension does. The first time they call tech support, they find out why. Everyone who has overrode our recommendation and gone with a Dimension has lived to regret it. Some even learn from the experience.
Penny wise, pound foolish.
A little "collateral damage" does not cause a business to go "out-of-business".
It depends on the business. I base my statements on the several dozen small businesses I consult for as part of my job. If they blocked mail the way the original poster did -- specifically, if they required everybody to have forward and reverse DNS entries for their MXes -- they would lose huge volumes of legitimate mail.
I do note that your checks don't include that one. That may have something to do with your disagreement.
We configure intelligent anti-spam systems, based on weighted rules with multiple inputs. Third-party blacklists, custom blacklists, technical analysis, content analysis, all with user feedback components, result in a workable anti-spam solution that does not result in lost business.
"If the filter uses a challenge response instead of dropping the message on failure"
Google for "spam backscatter" and "spam joe job" and learn about just what a huge problem that is. As you point out, spammers tend to use forged return addresses. So sending a DSN in response to spam results in nearly double the amount of problem mail that the spam alone causes.
Challenge/response systems make the spam problem worse.
While your techniques will all stop spam, they will also stop a great deal of legitimate mail (ham). Stopping spam is not the hard problem Stopping spam while letting ham through is the hard problem.
If businesses did what you did, most of them would go out-of-business.
"So, the patent is filed for August 10th, 2004 ... it looks like SUDO dates back to 1980."
Under US patent law, it is when the idea was first throught of, and not when the patent was filed, that counts. Not that I really think Microsoft thought of this first.