Exactly. It's the reason I download a 'all cars - all tracks' patch for all the racing games I get. I want to jump into a game for thirty minutes of hard-core action, with the car and track I want, rather than play some stupid ladder that's designed simply to make the game take longer, all for the privellege of playing the parts that I really want to play.
If I wanted to replay with same crap over and over for hours to get to each tiny bit of content, I'd play Zelda 64, or some other crap Nintendo game.
Yeah, I love Neverwinter. No other game drags you through a linear storyline in quite so facist a manner. No other game sticks to the "every map is a perfect square" design quite so faithfully. I love how choices of which four NPCs to talk to first constitutes open gameplay.
Bleh, might as well play a spreadsheet. Keep upping the number in the 'Orcs Killed' box until it says you've levelled up.
Even Pool of Radiance (the early '90s game, not the recent remake) was more open than this, with a larger area to explore and more choice for the characters to make.
NWN is so far from original that it's not even funny. Unfortunately it left fun a long way behind too. The only thing is has going for it is the quest creator - unfortunately for it, Dungeon Siege and many other games are doing this too.
Open Source doesn't rely on copyrights. If there were no copyrights there'd be private code for sure, but you'd be able to copy it if you could find it and the company couldn't stop you. Open Source (tm) wouldn't exist, but the code sharing of the '60s would be the rule, not the exception.
In a world with Copyright, Open Source's use of copyright is just a tool to make companies share code - one that wouldn't be needed if copying it without permission was legal.
Also, copyright does prevent free markets. While this may be a good thing, it merely proves the point of the socialist, guided-economy supporters. As long as copyright (or patents, etc) prevent a company from building a better product at a better price, they prevent the free market. Get it, *free* market. As in, without restrictions. For better or worse, copyright is anti-free. Without value judgements, you should be able to agree that restrictions (copyright and patents) are non-free.
Now, copyright *is* also holding us back. Look at Disney for the proof. They're copying old works left and right - rarely producing anything new - and they're relying on the laws to prevent anyone from copying their works, even those directly derived from public-domain works. Is some retardation of the markets okay, in trade for boosting other markets? Probably. But is copyright designed to actually increase the incentive for businesses to create, or to enrich the entrenched players like Disney at the expense of everyone else?
There have been many articles over the years about MS's questionable accounting (read, illegal) that has kept their earnings up, even in quarters where it was obvious that they didn't make as much money. They did this by borrowing from the future and paying it back in profitable times. Now they finally hit the end - they couldn't keep their earnings artificially hyped and investors are freaking out. They'd gotten comfortable with the idea that an investment in Microsoft *couldn't* fail. Now that it's been shown to be just another stock, and an artificially inflated one that was playing accounting games, people are going to bail.
When MS takes a dive it'll pull the indexes (heavily weighted to Microsoft to take advantage of MS's accounting games) down with it. When that happens it'll be open season on MS execs. The market will be looking for scapegoats, to explain how this could have happened. Behaviour that was swept under the carpet last year will stop to be accepted, and shortly after will be prosecuted.
Actually Gates isn't that bright. No, wait. He's succeeded, sure. But that doesn't mean he's smart. He had stuff *handed* to him. He was rich to begin with and IBM flubbed up huge in handing him control of the OS.
Since then he's gone out of his way to demolish the competition, even when it cost him or the customers to do so. From DR-DOS to the recent incident where they served broken MSN pages to Opera (and I saw the code - and verified Opera functioning correctly on the non-modified page myself). If Bill hadn't alienated everyone he wouldn't be up against Sun, SGI, IBM, Compaq/HP, Apple, TiVo, Sony, Nintendo, Palm, and pretty much every other company that makes a product with a CPU in it. They've pissed people off to the point where IBM has used nukes - they've promoted Linux, thus destroying the profitable OS market forever - just to stop Microsoft.
If Bill wasn't simply vengance-motivated he'd have cashed out long ago. Unfortunately for him, he's in it to demolish people who challenge him. Revenge is dangerous and it's starting to backfire on him.
Bill's genius, if there is any, is in illegal market manipulation. It's been documented for years that MS plays trick to keep their earnings up every quarter. Tricks that would get other companies investigated. IMHO it's because MS is such a large part of various indexes. If they collapsed the economy would take a huge (paper) hit. Now that MS has finally hit a point where they can't sustain endless growth, even through fraud, their stock will drop and they people who were protecting them are going to get out. The golden goose has stopped laying golden eggs and investors aren't happy with regular eggs.
Expect a lot more legal trouble, not for soft issues like monopoly abuse that are hard to prove, but for specific illegal acts. Enron has brought the issue to the public's attention. They aren't going to stand for this sort of behaviour going unpunished much longer.
Well, sure, they don't lose money, but except for R&D which is pretty easy for products which are just incremental upgrades of something they bought, it doesn't cost anything to produce them.
So no, I doubt SQL Server is losing money, but how much does it make?
It, like all MS products other than their OS and office suite exist primarily to keep competition out, making sure that no other software company gets big enough that it has real pull on the industry. They saw what even little id Software could do, demanding OpenGL support, and they were afraid of what a company that was actually competing with them would be able to do with that sort of clout. They developed IE simply to kill Netscape. Once Netscape was dead they almost abandoned IE.
Microsoft's whole strategy is based on stomping on other software companies, which leaves them as the only choice, instead of actually building products that people want. It's why Linux confounds them. Who do they buy out? Nobody, even Linus, could stop Linux now if they wanted, so Microsoft can't buy anyone (effectively). It's why they're playing dirty - continuing their pattern of illegal actions - like funding SCO, bribing politicians to call Linux a Communist product, etc.
I'm looking forward to x86-64 because the benchmarks I've seen suggest that sound and video encoding are much faster when compiled for 64 bit.
I run Linux so finding a 64 bit flavor to run shouldn't be hard, and with a short recompile, the few CPU-bound things I do will get faster.
And yes, mp3 (ogg now) encoding is something I wait on. My Barton 2500+ encodes at about 4x realtime for oggs, but I can rip CDs at 12x, so my temp directory fills up. When I run two simultaneous copies of Grip it gets even worse.
I don't do this all the time, but when I do it usually has to be quick. I'll get to borrow my friend's 100-disc collection, but only over a weekend, or something.
Not enough to buy a new machine for, but certainly worth an extra $50 or so to play around with for my next system. Supposedly it'll be easier to make dual-CPU machines too, so maybe I can go to dual Athlon64s for $200 extra, or so. Well within a play budget.
We all know what SCO is worth, in an assets of the company sense, but the share price is artificially high because many people hope that they're going to cash in against IBM. To short SCO based on the merit of the case would be reasonable, but you have to consider the actions of the greedy who want to ride the lie to a huge settlement and are willing to pay quite a bit to do so.
Unfortunately, the USA legal system is a bit of a lottery. Get a stupid judge (or a crooked one like Kaplan) and who knows what'll happen. It encourages fruad like this SCO thing, or RAMBUS's actions.
Robocop was okay, but even idiots get lucky. He was so stupid in his commentary about Starship Troopers that I can't believe he did anything right except by accident.
Don't put some people's words in other people's mouths. Just because some people wanted the RIAA to sue individuals doesn't mean that everyone here now wanted it.
That said, they should sue people for reasonable damages. They're attempting to make an example out of some people to scare everyone else. This isn't very fair - charge people for their own crimes, don't go harder on them to make up for other people.
If you're asking why people think movie copying is more harmful than music copying perhaps it's because actors actually get paid well for their roles, usually, as compared to musicians who are getting ripped off because of Enron-esque accounting tricks.
Finally, there are those who feel that creators deserve compensation, but who don't support copyright law in its current form. I am of this group.
It makes me think of a Reverend Lovejoy quote, roughly, "When they make it legal, it's no-longer immoral." In other words, people let the law guide their sense of right and wrong.
I support *a* copyright, but not the excessive one we have today. How can continually and retroactively extending copyright encourage the creation of works that are already created? How can limiting the use of existing works (which would have become public domain) encourage the creation of more? Disney existed in a time when popular culture was available to be expanded upon - now they themselves lobby for laws that would have made their earlier actions illegal. I see no reason to support the current form of copyright just because I supported the original.
And unfortunately, the RIAA and MPAA see your ability to violate some of the excessive copyright restrictions as your intent (and action) to violate all of copyright. I support DeCSS because it pisses me off that my copy of Sixth Sense forces me to watch ten minutes of trailers. In Linux this isn't a problem, but I'm breaking the DMCA by watching the movie. Why can't I be free to do what I want with my posessions?
The studios (lying) claim that DeCSS is purely for piracy - not only is this only one use of a tool, like bludgeoning is one use of a hammer - but they ignore the fact that the real infringers, asian black-marketers, have never needed to break the encryption; they simply copy the whole disk bit-for-bit.
If they insist on making it an all-or-nothing fight, where I either passively sit back and let them dictate my usage, or where I'm a criminal, they're forcing my hand. I'm not going to be walked over, and if the only way I have to fight the studios is financial, so be it. When the RIAA's member companies are out of business, they'll stop their abuses. When the MPAA is bankrupt they won't be able to bribe any more politicians. If they insist on taking this all the way, making it an us-or-them, to the bankruptcy, they'll get their fight.
That said, I support darn near anything that costs the studios money. The more the better. They'll spend every dollar they have preventing me from playing my DVD the way I want it, so let's make sure they don't have many dollars.
Do you really think the RIAA would change, even if all unauthorized copying stopped overnight?
DVD region codes were added to protect a business model, not to stop piracy. (I know that's the MPAA not the RIAA.) They didn't pay for laws like the DMCA to stop people copying, that was already actionable. They paid for these laws to force people to watch commercials at the beginning of disks, and keep from importing movies from North America to other regions before the theatrical release. In other words, they wanted the government to pass laws protecting their lazy business models. "We don't want to spend to money to make the product available in a timely fashion - please prevent anyone from filling this niche before we get to it."
The RIAA is just as scuzzy in different ways. They pay the radio stations to play their music, but they also provide extra incentives for stations that only play RIAA content. They're actively involved in shutting out any competition, they complain about how expensive their business is and how they can't afford to pay artists much, yet the music industry is fantastically profitable - they complain when the industry doesn't keep growing at the expected rate. They use accounting tricks to make it appear that they lost money, yet if you believe their figures they should be billions in the hole, not incredibly rich.
That's why I don't feel sorry for the effects of this - they could have played fair and they'd have gotten much more respect and cooperation for everyone.
As to why I feel it's fair to use a copyright (the GPL for instance) to protect code designed to break copyright it two-fold.
First, we must be free to break the law, or uphold it, or we have no freedoms. Many times, the actions seen as 'right' in a historical context have been illegal. The Boston tea party, the American revolution, the underground railroad, the underground railroad in Nazi Germany, the French Revolution. Some of these were undertaken for no more than financial concerns - the American revolution for example, but it ended up allowing a nation to self-govern.
The point is that freedom requires the freedom to do the wrong thing, and that that wrong thing may end up being right in retrospect. We can't allow a circumstance where people aren't allowed to tinker with their belongings, as is currently the case with DVDs. To tolerate this is to tolerate much greater future injustice.
Second, while I respect the stated intention of copyrights, "to encourage creators to create by providing a financial incentive", I see that this isn't free to society. Providing an unnatural monopoly (Unnatural in that it's natural to see what someone is doing or saying and incorporate those actions or words into your own. Ideas flow naturally.) costs society. We're intended to get "paid" for this by the new works being created which will eventually enter into the public domain.
Copyright law as it stands today is untrue to those stated goals and unfair to one half of the equation - the citizens who pay for these protections and yet see absolutely no benefit. Current copyrights last so long that nobody who is alive today's children will be alive when the copyright on this post expires. How is this supposed to "give back" when you could be slapped down in court for quoting more than a line, even in direct response to me? The protections are too long, the punishments for violation are unreasonble, and the agreement is getting even more lop-sided.
For these reasons I fight against the modern view of copyright as the divine right of big corporations to borrow any pre-existing content, yet forbid everyone from even thinking of basing anything on their content.
I'm not anti-copyright, nor are most people, but we are anti-overboard-american-copyright-and-dmca.
I'm not rich, so my voice on this issue is worthless in Hollywood and in government. I'm one person, and one vote (unless I get a job at Diebold), so nobody cares what I have to say. I have to act, and if that req
The commentary on Clancy's latest - the one with Aflek and the nuke in the USA - was hilarious. He says essentially "Not bad for a movie based only loosely on my book". Then, at a few points "What were you thinking?!" to the director who was with him. You realize that Clancy was barely consulted and had never actually talked to the director.
Listening to Clancy run down all the dumb artistic crap, "well, we gave the bad guys this equipment because it looked better, and did this for the composition", that changes critical bits of story.
I like commentaries. Even for movies I despise (Starship Troopers) I like knowing just what went through the director's head. Or, in the case of ST, what didn't go through the director's head. What a drooler. Paul Verhoven, a director to avoid.
But it was interesting to know that it wasn't someone honest interpretation of the movie - the director hated it and went in to mangle it, because it was easier to mock if everyone was a caricature.
Then with movies I like, LotR for example, it's interesting seeing how they made it and all the effort they put into things I didn't notice (custom props) but that I now see are tailored very well to every scene they're in, instead of using the same props scene after scene.
And it's interesting hearing Jackson explain why he made the cuts and changes that he did, some I agree with, some I don't, but he usually has a reason that goes beyond "Well, Saruman's character was somewhat fascist, so I stuck him in a Nazi uniform to make this very clear, while changing his lines to reflect the fact that he's in a Nazi uniform and thus fascist..." Jackson at least is a fan of the books he's doing and I can see that it's hard to cut - if he was king, each part would have been well over six hours and contained all the minutae.
I applied Win2K patches (via Windows Update) and it rendered my system unbootable. Something about path expansion(?) and msgina.dll... Not worth investigating when Ghost is so handy.
Luckily it was only the spare computer, but still...
But it doesn't mean you shouldn't avoid a company where nobody has thought to write up a policy saying that all web-published documents should be made available in a web-friendly form.
At least one person needs to understand technology, unless it's a lawn-care company or something, but even then they should have hired a web designer who knew what they were doing.
I'd agree that new photographers should stick with manual, except that digital cameras are all auto-everything (free CPU power) and I can't imagine going back to film, or wishing it on anyone.
And yeah, I find a lot of cases where AF makes the shot possible. Photographing flying birds just a little bit overhead, where the distance changes dramatically. Or squirrels running in trees. As long as the camera is pointed in the right direction and the light isn't really bad, you're going to get a sharp shot. I've played with MF a bit though and it's very usable, though modern lenses don't have much play between macro and infinity so it tends to be touchy.
A manual camera can teach you how a manual camera works, and can avoid distracting you with gizmos, but a digital camera can teach you composition by letting you take all the pictures and review them minutes later to see what worked. And while they have a ton of bells and whistles, you get immediate feedback as to the effect of that feature. Changing exposure compensation makes the live view (on a P&S digital) get lighter or darker. This teaches you how to use a camera, and keeps the bells and whistles from interfering - you don't end up with a whole roll of bad pictures because you accidently clicked a doodad into the on position.
So, because there's a.SIT decompressor somewhere on shareware.com, I should package up my Windows software with in.sit.hqx?
Anyone can open a text or html file, not everyone can open a.doc file. At least, not without buying or finding a seperate package to view it.
Further,.doc files have no benefits over other formats. A text file is easier to read on any platform, an HTML is more platform independent, and a PDF preserves layout better and is still more platform independent. All, even the PDF, are likely to be smaller.
Using a.doc file for publishing indicates a complete lack of understanding of the technology.
A photographer famous (mainly - in view of his collected works - yawn) for shoving a riding crop up his ass and taking a picture. This was apparently bold, daring, and liberating.
He took other pictures too, but none of them come near being worth what people pay for them.
You're the perfect example of a pretentious artist. Congrats.
You're also proving with every post that you don't understand the point of the zone system. The elaborate system wasn't designed to teach you what to shoot, it was designed to let you figure out how to best capture a given shot. You can talk about how you're an artist and we're missing the point, but every real pro photographer (you know, making money from it, critically acclaimed, etc) agrees with my take on it. Number of dissenters, one (you - a Slashdot wank with an art degree.)
I'm not saying that Ansel didn't try to teach composition. I'm saying that the zone system was for figuring out your exposure to best capture the view that you want.
It is interesting how your argument devolved into repeating yourself and saying "You aren't an artist - you couldn't understand." That's very... artsy. You know, people who run around talking about the rule of thirds and other crap as if following a set of guidelines is supposed to make you creative.
As for what you think the point is - Yes, Ansel was into visualizing the scene before taking the picture. Anyone who wants to capture their image, not what the camera gives them, is into this. But you need to understand the science behind the gizmo or you'll always be at its mercy. You need to understand the light response of your film so you know how to expose and get maximum subject detail and yet not lose all detail at either end.
So yes, Ansel was into seeing the scene before taking the picture, that's exactly why he spent all this time on learning how to shoot the scene he saw internally. He didn't compose the shot with the zone system, he took the shot with the zone system. Worlds of difference there, Art Boy.
Canon's 1Ds I believe can be configured to sign the raw file. I don't know the strength of the encryption. You could do this manually - take the MD5 sum of the image, date it, and sign with PGP. Then send this off to someone trusted. It doesn't *prove* ownership, but it proves that you had the raw file the day it was taken, which should go far.
You could simply keep the RAW file, pre-sharpening etc, and use this demonstate ownership. Assuming you process all of your shots, even in an automated way, you can show how one-way processing (sharpening or blurring) when done to your raw image result in the exact published image.
Don't forget that negatives can be copied too, it's possible to tell but not easily.
A digital P&S on a tripod can capture a wider Gamut than a single B&W film exposure and with half an hour in photoshop you can start combining the two images.
Just bracket by a few stops on either side of the main image and overlay the best of each onto the final image.
As for resolution, the 1:1 comparison has been done - film by a nose, but with so much grain that it's not worth it for art photos. (If you need every last bit of detail to identify something in a spy-plane photo it might be worth it - if you want the photo to look nice on the wall you need to consider grain.)
Everyone laughs at Vinyl die-hards because we know they lose more in the "warmth" than CDs do by limiting to a 22khz signal, but they'll never give up. In such a way, film will always be with us.
Film loses detail in the shoulder areas. It's only where the response if mostly linear that you really get the detail. Sure, you can "rescue" the highlights and keep them from being a white blob, but you don't get quality even approaching what you would if it was properly exposed.
All digital needs to do to match (and far exceed) film in this regard is place ND filters over a twentieth of the pixels, allowing these pixels to capture detail in an otherwise over-exposed area. Then, then the software detects overexposure using the main sensors it gives extra weight to the highlight sensors.
Trivial. So trivial in fact that there's already one DSLR out that is doing something like this. (Using large and small sensors, but essentially the same thing.)
As the resolution of digital increases (My 6MP DRebel has much better noise at ISO1600 than most film at ISO200 - for a sensor half the size of 35mm film. It produces results that equal the best I've seen from 35mm film.) you'll be able to dedicate more and more pixels to this gamut-extension.
Sure, you can just focus on the HFD and get the equivalent of the P&S camera, but this requires a smaller aperture and thus more light. It also means you can't select your DoF for the shot. You lose flexibility in light and composition, but you can get focused shots of fast-moving objects...
Owners of MF cameras talk about how MF is hard on new cameras - partly true - but they don't realize that it's because nobody cares about manual focusing. With all but a few odd specialty lenses (Tilt and Shift, extreme macro, etc) the auto-focus is really good. You can tweak this, good lenses let you manually adjust focus even while in auto, but you rarely have to.
A user who wants to show how auto-focus is bad will compose a shot with the focus point on the subject's nose and complain about how the eyes are out of focus. An AF user will either position the AF point over the eye when focusing and recompose, of let the AF lock in on the face and give the focus ring a quick nudge to bring the eyes into focus.
You don't think pro photographers would have gone to cameras without great manual-focus setups if there was a problem using auto-focus?
Using a manual camera is probaly worth doing, for a day or two in a course. For either long-term use you'll get a lot more good shots with a camera that handles the fiddly stuff for you. It's why digital is taking off, less fuss, more shooting, and now, better quality.
They probably didn't keep the original packaging for all of their MS software, along with the receipts. The BSA doesn't accept receipts, so if they audit you they treat software without the packaging as pirated and tell you to repurchase it.
That's probably what they were scared of. The whole prove-your-innocence thing can be pretty scary.
I'd disregard Microsoft apps for many jobs, not because they're closed source, but because they're non-standard and MS intentionally makes them this way.
If there's ever a chance that you'll want to change platform, or change software, you don't want to get locked in with one vendor.
At my work we aren't switching everyone to Linux, but we're switching away from MS Office and Outlook to allow some desktops to be switched to Linux. We wanted to be able to build $250 PCs for use in the warehouse, for reception, etc. Anyone who doesn't need a full business suite, but who might be required to open a document every now and then. If we'd stuck with Windows we'd have been paying as much for the OS as the hardware on these PCs. If we'd stuck with MS lock-in apps, we'd have been stuck with MS.
Besides, there's no MS app I've *ever* seen that was the best in the market. The most consistent, maybe, but there are better word processors, better database creator apps, better page layout programs, better web servers, better SQL servers, etc. If you had to pick a single vendor to buy software from, MS might look good. If you get to pick and choose, their "Best for the job" status is quickly shown to be an illusion.
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Exactly. It's the reason I download a 'all cars - all tracks' patch for all the racing games I get. I want to jump into a game for thirty minutes of hard-core action, with the car and track I want, rather than play some stupid ladder that's designed simply to make the game take longer, all for the privellege of playing the parts that I really want to play.
If I wanted to replay with same crap over and over for hours to get to each tiny bit of content, I'd play Zelda 64, or some other crap Nintendo game.
Yeah, I love Neverwinter. No other game drags you through a linear storyline in quite so facist a manner. No other game sticks to the "every map is a perfect square" design quite so faithfully. I love how choices of which four NPCs to talk to first constitutes open gameplay.
Bleh, might as well play a spreadsheet. Keep upping the number in the 'Orcs Killed' box until it says you've levelled up.
Even Pool of Radiance (the early '90s game, not the recent remake) was more open than this, with a larger area to explore and more choice for the characters to make.
NWN is so far from original that it's not even funny. Unfortunately it left fun a long way behind too. The only thing is has going for it is the quest creator - unfortunately for it, Dungeon Siege and many other games are doing this too.
Open Source doesn't rely on copyrights. If there were no copyrights there'd be private code for sure, but you'd be able to copy it if you could find it and the company couldn't stop you. Open Source (tm) wouldn't exist, but the code sharing of the '60s would be the rule, not the exception.
In a world with Copyright, Open Source's use of copyright is just a tool to make companies share code - one that wouldn't be needed if copying it without permission was legal.
Also, copyright does prevent free markets. While this may be a good thing, it merely proves the point of the socialist, guided-economy supporters. As long as copyright (or patents, etc) prevent a company from building a better product at a better price, they prevent the free market. Get it, *free* market. As in, without restrictions. For better or worse, copyright is anti-free. Without value judgements, you should be able to agree that restrictions (copyright and patents) are non-free.
Now, copyright *is* also holding us back. Look at Disney for the proof. They're copying old works left and right - rarely producing anything new - and they're relying on the laws to prevent anyone from copying their works, even those directly derived from public-domain works. Is some retardation of the markets okay, in trade for boosting other markets? Probably. But is copyright designed to actually increase the incentive for businesses to create, or to enrich the entrenched players like Disney at the expense of everyone else?
There have been many articles over the years about MS's questionable accounting (read, illegal) that has kept their earnings up, even in quarters where it was obvious that they didn't make as much money. They did this by borrowing from the future and paying it back in profitable times. Now they finally hit the end - they couldn't keep their earnings artificially hyped and investors are freaking out. They'd gotten comfortable with the idea that an investment in Microsoft *couldn't* fail. Now that it's been shown to be just another stock, and an artificially inflated one that was playing accounting games, people are going to bail.
When MS takes a dive it'll pull the indexes (heavily weighted to Microsoft to take advantage of MS's accounting games) down with it. When that happens it'll be open season on MS execs. The market will be looking for scapegoats, to explain how this could have happened. Behaviour that was swept under the carpet last year will stop to be accepted, and shortly after will be prosecuted.
Look for Microsoft to do an Enron.
Actually Gates isn't that bright. No, wait. He's succeeded, sure. But that doesn't mean he's smart. He had stuff *handed* to him. He was rich to begin with and IBM flubbed up huge in handing him control of the OS.
Since then he's gone out of his way to demolish the competition, even when it cost him or the customers to do so. From DR-DOS to the recent incident where they served broken MSN pages to Opera (and I saw the code - and verified Opera functioning correctly on the non-modified page myself). If Bill hadn't alienated everyone he wouldn't be up against Sun, SGI, IBM, Compaq/HP, Apple, TiVo, Sony, Nintendo, Palm, and pretty much every other company that makes a product with a CPU in it. They've pissed people off to the point where IBM has used nukes - they've promoted Linux, thus destroying the profitable OS market forever - just to stop Microsoft.
If Bill wasn't simply vengance-motivated he'd have cashed out long ago. Unfortunately for him, he's in it to demolish people who challenge him. Revenge is dangerous and it's starting to backfire on him.
Bill's genius, if there is any, is in illegal market manipulation. It's been documented for years that MS plays trick to keep their earnings up every quarter. Tricks that would get other companies investigated. IMHO it's because MS is such a large part of various indexes. If they collapsed the economy would take a huge (paper) hit. Now that MS has finally hit a point where they can't sustain endless growth, even through fraud, their stock will drop and they people who were protecting them are going to get out. The golden goose has stopped laying golden eggs and investors aren't happy with regular eggs.
Expect a lot more legal trouble, not for soft issues like monopoly abuse that are hard to prove, but for specific illegal acts. Enron has brought the issue to the public's attention. They aren't going to stand for this sort of behaviour going unpunished much longer.
Well, sure, they don't lose money, but except for R&D which is pretty easy for products which are just incremental upgrades of something they bought, it doesn't cost anything to produce them.
So no, I doubt SQL Server is losing money, but how much does it make?
It, like all MS products other than their OS and office suite exist primarily to keep competition out, making sure that no other software company gets big enough that it has real pull on the industry. They saw what even little id Software could do, demanding OpenGL support, and they were afraid of what a company that was actually competing with them would be able to do with that sort of clout. They developed IE simply to kill Netscape. Once Netscape was dead they almost abandoned IE.
Microsoft's whole strategy is based on stomping on other software companies, which leaves them as the only choice, instead of actually building products that people want. It's why Linux confounds them. Who do they buy out? Nobody, even Linus, could stop Linux now if they wanted, so Microsoft can't buy anyone (effectively). It's why they're playing dirty - continuing their pattern of illegal actions - like funding SCO, bribing politicians to call Linux a Communist product, etc.
I'm looking forward to x86-64 because the benchmarks I've seen suggest that sound and video encoding are much faster when compiled for 64 bit.
I run Linux so finding a 64 bit flavor to run shouldn't be hard, and with a short recompile, the few CPU-bound things I do will get faster.
And yes, mp3 (ogg now) encoding is something I wait on. My Barton 2500+ encodes at about 4x realtime for oggs, but I can rip CDs at 12x, so my temp directory fills up. When I run two simultaneous copies of Grip it gets even worse.
I don't do this all the time, but when I do it usually has to be quick. I'll get to borrow my friend's 100-disc collection, but only over a weekend, or something.
Not enough to buy a new machine for, but certainly worth an extra $50 or so to play around with for my next system. Supposedly it'll be easier to make dual-CPU machines too, so maybe I can go to dual Athlon64s for $200 extra, or so. Well within a play budget.
We all know what SCO is worth, in an assets of the company sense, but the share price is artificially high because many people hope that they're going to cash in against IBM. To short SCO based on the merit of the case would be reasonable, but you have to consider the actions of the greedy who want to ride the lie to a huge settlement and are willing to pay quite a bit to do so.
Unfortunately, the USA legal system is a bit of a lottery. Get a stupid judge (or a crooked one like Kaplan) and who knows what'll happen. It encourages fruad like this SCO thing, or RAMBUS's actions.
Robocop was okay, but even idiots get lucky. He was so stupid in his commentary about Starship Troopers that I can't believe he did anything right except by accident.
Don't put some people's words in other people's mouths. Just because some people wanted the RIAA to sue individuals doesn't mean that everyone here now wanted it.
That said, they should sue people for reasonable damages. They're attempting to make an example out of some people to scare everyone else. This isn't very fair - charge people for their own crimes, don't go harder on them to make up for other people.
If you're asking why people think movie copying is more harmful than music copying perhaps it's because actors actually get paid well for their roles, usually, as compared to musicians who are getting ripped off because of Enron-esque accounting tricks.
Finally, there are those who feel that creators deserve compensation, but who don't support copyright law in its current form. I am of this group.
It makes me think of a Reverend Lovejoy quote, roughly, "When they make it legal, it's no-longer immoral." In other words, people let the law guide their sense of right and wrong.
I support *a* copyright, but not the excessive one we have today. How can continually and retroactively extending copyright encourage the creation of works that are already created? How can limiting the use of existing works (which would have become public domain) encourage the creation of more? Disney existed in a time when popular culture was available to be expanded upon - now they themselves lobby for laws that would have made their earlier actions illegal. I see no reason to support the current form of copyright just because I supported the original.
And unfortunately, the RIAA and MPAA see your ability to violate some of the excessive copyright restrictions as your intent (and action) to violate all of copyright. I support DeCSS because it pisses me off that my copy of Sixth Sense forces me to watch ten minutes of trailers. In Linux this isn't a problem, but I'm breaking the DMCA by watching the movie. Why can't I be free to do what I want with my posessions?
The studios (lying) claim that DeCSS is purely for piracy - not only is this only one use of a tool, like bludgeoning is one use of a hammer - but they ignore the fact that the real infringers, asian black-marketers, have never needed to break the encryption; they simply copy the whole disk bit-for-bit.
If they insist on making it an all-or-nothing fight, where I either passively sit back and let them dictate my usage, or where I'm a criminal, they're forcing my hand. I'm not going to be walked over, and if the only way I have to fight the studios is financial, so be it. When the RIAA's member companies are out of business, they'll stop their abuses. When the MPAA is bankrupt they won't be able to bribe any more politicians. If they insist on taking this all the way, making it an us-or-them, to the bankruptcy, they'll get their fight.
That said, I support darn near anything that costs the studios money. The more the better. They'll spend every dollar they have preventing me from playing my DVD the way I want it, so let's make sure they don't have many dollars.
Do you really think the RIAA would change, even if all unauthorized copying stopped overnight?
DVD region codes were added to protect a business model, not to stop piracy. (I know that's the MPAA not the RIAA.) They didn't pay for laws like the DMCA to stop people copying, that was already actionable. They paid for these laws to force people to watch commercials at the beginning of disks, and keep from importing movies from North America to other regions before the theatrical release. In other words, they wanted the government to pass laws protecting their lazy business models. "We don't want to spend to money to make the product available in a timely fashion - please prevent anyone from filling this niche before we get to it."
The RIAA is just as scuzzy in different ways. They pay the radio stations to play their music, but they also provide extra incentives for stations that only play RIAA content. They're actively involved in shutting out any competition, they complain about how expensive their business is and how they can't afford to pay artists much, yet the music industry is fantastically profitable - they complain when the industry doesn't keep growing at the expected rate. They use accounting tricks to make it appear that they lost money, yet if you believe their figures they should be billions in the hole, not incredibly rich.
That's why I don't feel sorry for the effects of this - they could have played fair and they'd have gotten much more respect and cooperation for everyone.
As to why I feel it's fair to use a copyright (the GPL for instance) to protect code designed to break copyright it two-fold.
First, we must be free to break the law, or uphold it, or we have no freedoms. Many times, the actions seen as 'right' in a historical context have been illegal. The Boston tea party, the American revolution, the underground railroad, the underground railroad in Nazi Germany, the French Revolution. Some of these were undertaken for no more than financial concerns - the American revolution for example, but it ended up allowing a nation to self-govern.
The point is that freedom requires the freedom to do the wrong thing, and that that wrong thing may end up being right in retrospect. We can't allow a circumstance where people aren't allowed to tinker with their belongings, as is currently the case with DVDs. To tolerate this is to tolerate much greater future injustice.
Second, while I respect the stated intention of copyrights, "to encourage creators to create by providing a financial incentive", I see that this isn't free to society. Providing an unnatural monopoly (Unnatural in that it's natural to see what someone is doing or saying and incorporate those actions or words into your own. Ideas flow naturally.) costs society. We're intended to get "paid" for this by the new works being created which will eventually enter into the public domain.
Copyright law as it stands today is untrue to those stated goals and unfair to one half of the equation - the citizens who pay for these protections and yet see absolutely no benefit. Current copyrights last so long that nobody who is alive today's children will be alive when the copyright on this post expires. How is this supposed to "give back" when you could be slapped down in court for quoting more than a line, even in direct response to me? The protections are too long, the punishments for violation are unreasonble, and the agreement is getting even more lop-sided.
For these reasons I fight against the modern view of copyright as the divine right of big corporations to borrow any pre-existing content, yet forbid everyone from even thinking of basing anything on their content.
I'm not anti-copyright, nor are most people, but we are anti-overboard-american-copyright-and-dmca.
I'm not rich, so my voice on this issue is worthless in Hollywood and in government. I'm one person, and one vote (unless I get a job at Diebold), so nobody cares what I have to say. I have to act, and if that req
The commentary on Clancy's latest - the one with Aflek and the nuke in the USA - was hilarious. He says essentially "Not bad for a movie based only loosely on my book". Then, at a few points "What were you thinking?!" to the director who was with him. You realize that Clancy was barely consulted and had never actually talked to the director.
Listening to Clancy run down all the dumb artistic crap, "well, we gave the bad guys this equipment because it looked better, and did this for the composition", that changes critical bits of story.
Very funny.
I like commentaries. Even for movies I despise (Starship Troopers) I like knowing just what went through the director's head. Or, in the case of ST, what didn't go through the director's head. What a drooler. Paul Verhoven, a director to avoid.
But it was interesting to know that it wasn't someone honest interpretation of the movie - the director hated it and went in to mangle it, because it was easier to mock if everyone was a caricature.
Then with movies I like, LotR for example, it's interesting seeing how they made it and all the effort they put into things I didn't notice (custom props) but that I now see are tailored very well to every scene they're in, instead of using the same props scene after scene.
And it's interesting hearing Jackson explain why he made the cuts and changes that he did, some I agree with, some I don't, but he usually has a reason that goes beyond "Well, Saruman's character was somewhat fascist, so I stuck him in a Nazi uniform to make this very clear, while changing his lines to reflect the fact that he's in a Nazi uniform and thus fascist..." Jackson at least is a fan of the books he's doing and I can see that it's hard to cut - if he was king, each part would have been well over six hours and contained all the minutae.
I applied Win2K patches (via Windows Update) and it rendered my system unbootable. Something about path expansion(?) and msgina.dll... Not worth investigating when Ghost is so handy.
Luckily it was only the spare computer, but still...
But it doesn't mean you shouldn't avoid a company where nobody has thought to write up a policy saying that all web-published documents should be made available in a web-friendly form.
At least one person needs to understand technology, unless it's a lawn-care company or something, but even then they should have hired a web designer who knew what they were doing.
I'd agree that new photographers should stick with manual, except that digital cameras are all auto-everything (free CPU power) and I can't imagine going back to film, or wishing it on anyone.
And yeah, I find a lot of cases where AF makes the shot possible. Photographing flying birds just a little bit overhead, where the distance changes dramatically. Or squirrels running in trees. As long as the camera is pointed in the right direction and the light isn't really bad, you're going to get a sharp shot. I've played with MF a bit though and it's very usable, though modern lenses don't have much play between macro and infinity so it tends to be touchy.
A manual camera can teach you how a manual camera works, and can avoid distracting you with gizmos, but a digital camera can teach you composition by letting you take all the pictures and review them minutes later to see what worked. And while they have a ton of bells and whistles, you get immediate feedback as to the effect of that feature. Changing exposure compensation makes the live view (on a P&S digital) get lighter or darker. This teaches you how to use a camera, and keeps the bells and whistles from interfering - you don't end up with a whole roll of bad pictures because you accidently clicked a doodad into the on position.
So, because there's a .SIT decompressor somewhere on shareware.com, I should package up my Windows software with in .sit.hqx?
.doc file. At least, not without buying or finding a seperate package to view it.
.doc files have no benefits over other formats. A text file is easier to read on any platform, an HTML is more platform independent, and a PDF preserves layout better and is still more platform independent. All, even the PDF, are likely to be smaller.
.doc file for publishing indicates a complete lack of understanding of the technology.
Anyone can open a text or html file, not everyone can open a
Further,
Using a
A photographer famous (mainly - in view of his collected works - yawn) for shoving a riding crop up his ass and taking a picture. This was apparently bold, daring, and liberating.
He took other pictures too, but none of them come near being worth what people pay for them.
Google for info, there's a lot written about him.
You're the perfect example of a pretentious artist. Congrats.
... artsy. You know, people who run around talking about the rule of thirds and other crap as if following a set of guidelines is supposed to make you creative.
You're also proving with every post that you don't understand the point of the zone system. The elaborate system wasn't designed to teach you what to shoot, it was designed to let you figure out how to best capture a given shot. You can talk about how you're an artist and we're missing the point, but every real pro photographer (you know, making money from it, critically acclaimed, etc) agrees with my take on it. Number of dissenters, one (you - a Slashdot wank with an art degree.)
I'm not saying that Ansel didn't try to teach composition. I'm saying that the zone system was for figuring out your exposure to best capture the view that you want.
It is interesting how your argument devolved into repeating yourself and saying "You aren't an artist - you couldn't understand." That's very
As for what you think the point is - Yes, Ansel was into visualizing the scene before taking the picture. Anyone who wants to capture their image, not what the camera gives them, is into this. But you need to understand the science behind the gizmo or you'll always be at its mercy. You need to understand the light response of your film so you know how to expose and get maximum subject detail and yet not lose all detail at either end.
So yes, Ansel was into seeing the scene before taking the picture, that's exactly why he spent all this time on learning how to shoot the scene he saw internally. He didn't compose the shot with the zone system, he took the shot with the zone system. Worlds of difference there, Art Boy.
Canon's 1Ds I believe can be configured to sign the raw file. I don't know the strength of the encryption. You could do this manually - take the MD5 sum of the image, date it, and sign with PGP. Then send this off to someone trusted. It doesn't *prove* ownership, but it proves that you had the raw file the day it was taken, which should go far.
You could simply keep the RAW file, pre-sharpening etc, and use this demonstate ownership. Assuming you process all of your shots, even in an automated way, you can show how one-way processing (sharpening or blurring) when done to your raw image result in the exact published image.
Don't forget that negatives can be copied too, it's possible to tell but not easily.
A digital P&S on a tripod can capture a wider Gamut than a single B&W film exposure and with half an hour in photoshop you can start combining the two images.
Just bracket by a few stops on either side of the main image and overlay the best of each onto the final image.
As for resolution, the 1:1 comparison has been done - film by a nose, but with so much grain that it's not worth it for art photos. (If you need every last bit of detail to identify something in a spy-plane photo it might be worth it - if you want the photo to look nice on the wall you need to consider grain.)
Everyone laughs at Vinyl die-hards because we know they lose more in the "warmth" than CDs do by limiting to a 22khz signal, but they'll never give up. In such a way, film will always be with us.
Film loses detail in the shoulder areas. It's only where the response if mostly linear that you really get the detail. Sure, you can "rescue" the highlights and keep them from being a white blob, but you don't get quality even approaching what you would if it was properly exposed.
All digital needs to do to match (and far exceed) film in this regard is place ND filters over a twentieth of the pixels, allowing these pixels to capture detail in an otherwise over-exposed area. Then, then the software detects overexposure using the main sensors it gives extra weight to the highlight sensors.
Trivial. So trivial in fact that there's already one DSLR out that is doing something like this. (Using large and small sensors, but essentially the same thing.)
As the resolution of digital increases (My 6MP DRebel has much better noise at ISO1600 than most film at ISO200 - for a sensor half the size of 35mm film. It produces results that equal the best I've seen from 35mm film.) you'll be able to dedicate more and more pixels to this gamut-extension.
Sure, you can just focus on the HFD and get the equivalent of the P&S camera, but this requires a smaller aperture and thus more light. It also means you can't select your DoF for the shot. You lose flexibility in light and composition, but you can get focused shots of fast-moving objects...
Owners of MF cameras talk about how MF is hard on new cameras - partly true - but they don't realize that it's because nobody cares about manual focusing. With all but a few odd specialty lenses (Tilt and Shift, extreme macro, etc) the auto-focus is really good. You can tweak this, good lenses let you manually adjust focus even while in auto, but you rarely have to.
A user who wants to show how auto-focus is bad will compose a shot with the focus point on the subject's nose and complain about how the eyes are out of focus. An AF user will either position the AF point over the eye when focusing and recompose, of let the AF lock in on the face and give the focus ring a quick nudge to bring the eyes into focus.
You don't think pro photographers would have gone to cameras without great manual-focus setups if there was a problem using auto-focus?
Using a manual camera is probaly worth doing, for a day or two in a course. For either long-term use you'll get a lot more good shots with a camera that handles the fiddly stuff for you. It's why digital is taking off, less fuss, more shooting, and now, better quality.
They probably didn't keep the original packaging for all of their MS software, along with the receipts. The BSA doesn't accept receipts, so if they audit you they treat software without the packaging as pirated and tell you to repurchase it.
That's probably what they were scared of. The whole prove-your-innocence thing can be pretty scary.
I'd disregard Microsoft apps for many jobs, not because they're closed source, but because they're non-standard and MS intentionally makes them this way.
If there's ever a chance that you'll want to change platform, or change software, you don't want to get locked in with one vendor.
At my work we aren't switching everyone to Linux, but we're switching away from MS Office and Outlook to allow some desktops to be switched to Linux. We wanted to be able to build $250 PCs for use in the warehouse, for reception, etc. Anyone who doesn't need a full business suite, but who might be required to open a document every now and then. If we'd stuck with Windows we'd have been paying as much for the OS as the hardware on these PCs. If we'd stuck with MS lock-in apps, we'd have been stuck with MS.
Besides, there's no MS app I've *ever* seen that was the best in the market. The most consistent, maybe, but there are better word processors, better database creator apps, better page layout programs, better web servers, better SQL servers, etc. If you had to pick a single vendor to buy software from, MS might look good. If you get to pick and choose, their "Best for the job" status is quickly shown to be an illusion.