I believe that's just a normal ramdrive - they've been around forever with software emulation.
Very observant. Except;
It doesn't need software emulation, it's transparent to the OS, in fact, you can boot off of it.
It has battery power back-up, so if the computer shuts off or the grid goes down, the data is retained.
Seeing as it doesn't use emulation, even if the OS goes down for some other reason; data still there. You can even do without write-behind cache (seeing as the cache would only be in system DRAM anyway), so you never have dirty data to flush!
The RAM used on the PCI card doesn't come from the systems's RAM, no need to worry about bios/OS/architecture memory limitations (4GB?).
These cards are intended as a hard drive replacement for very demanding applications; for example high-volume transactional systems. Transactional means you want persistence, even in the face of power-outages or OS failure, but high-volume means that you can get quite a boost if random access is nice and fast (near zero seektimes). If your whole database won't fit in a few GB (pretty likely) and you're not distributing this sort of thing, it would still be great for transaction logs, temporary databases, sessions, etc. Or how about using them for message queues? Any message sent is persisted, but not written to a slow hard drive or database.
NAND drives I'm not too sure about. But for demanding applications, battery-back-upped-DRAM-drives are way cool.
putty for SSH (even commandline SCP which rules), wget for sucking down the web, opera if you don't like firefox, and some form of bittorrent client, like bitcomet.
This move might be another step in the wrong direction. If i'm not mistaken in a NPR radio show an expert said that some current commercial frequencies would be extremely useful for emergency responders since they can reach deeper inside buildings.
The article mentions this is about the 1710- to 1755-MHz band. This is a slightly lower frequency than current GSM-1900 or CDMA-2000 handsets use. As such, I can tell you it doesn't reach too far into buildings. Expect bad or no coverage in the basement, or in elevators.
For emergency services, there are a lot more attractive pieces of spectrum than this one.
In fact, emergency services in The Netherlands are finding this out just now, as they're trying to implement c2000, better known as TETRA. TETRA operates in the 380-383 MHz or 390-393 MHz range, yet these are still high enough frequencies to neccesitate a dense network of repeaters, and still it doesn't penetrate too far into buildings, which is of great concern to e.g. firefighters. Of course, since it's already cost billions to partially implement (so far), they can hardly call the whole thing off.
BUT according to this analysis, the real fault lies with gdi32.dll ! How the hell do you get rid of that? It's about as deeply embedded in windows as, say, glibc is in Linux distributions..
RSS is no more push than pressing F5 on the homepage; it's just that the RSS reader presses F5 again and again for you. If you hit the slashdot RSS url too often, you even get blocked. One of the reasons RSS isn't really that sexy is that you still have to go through a list to see of any of it is interesting, and for the full "push" effect (even though it's just automated pull) you'd have to keep your PC on all the time. RSS readers on mobile phones might change this (which makes a bit more sense since an RSS XML document will be easier to display on there than a fully fledged homepage), but only if you don't have to pay for data by the byte.
They already went from A to Z and started at the beginning. I think they have gone through A and Z twice already.
After the female names run out, they use letters from the Greek alphabet. (alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta,..) Zeta is only the 6th letter, making for the 26+6=32nd storm of the year.
A 5-10 increase in tracking is almost completely imperceptable to the human eye on 10 pt text, but will help make an article perfectly "fill" its intended space.
Also of note is the fact that CSS does in fact support a letter-spacing, and even a word-spacing property, and the text-align: justify property. You could even specify a content-area's width and height in absolute terms (e.g. 120pt or even 112px where px means pixels). With some browsers, font-embedding will even work (it's a CSS2 property). So you can be pretty certain of what the end result looks like.
Or, you could embrace the new media and simply not mind too much about accurate-to-the-pixel layout, and let the browser display stuff the way the user likes best, and if that means they want to scroll a lot, more power to them.
Think of how cheap their boxes could be if they didn't force you top buy Intel and Windows.
Dell machines with AMD processors would be incredibly cheap. You'd just have to pay $350 shipping. And $87 handling. And fees. And don't forget to plug in some more RAM, doubling your 512MB to a gig will only set you back $125. And a 8ms TFT screen suitable for gaming for $200 extra. Then you'd be set. Hella cheap.
To compare to your house analogy, when you compute your net worth, you add the value of the house and subtract the amount of the mortgage.
Ah, but I have positive cash flow. Which means I have some cash to pay off my debts.
What you're thinking about would be the balance sheet. Im no Chartered Accountant, but it does seem to mention "Net Tangible Assets ($567,700)" (that's a negative number), as well as a ludicrously high amount of goodwill. Now, the goodwill was listed a lot higher in 2002, which looks to me like they're writing it off - probably at the behest of their creditors. That means that in their own eyes, the company's value (or, the parts of the company they bought prior to 2002) is diminishing.
Their quarterly report is fun reading. Notice how they're paying 7% interest on their debt.
On the up side, their stock hasn't been this low for ages, and they're estimates for next year show a profit. But.. That may just be wishful thinking. Seeing as how BBI is hardly a company racking up debt to do really innovative investments, you're probably better off investing in a company that is (or one that isn't investing as much as actually turning a profit year-on-year).
You hit the nail on the head with that one... I guess it's marketing, but I notice that everything I install first goes into a directory with the company name, and then puts the software in a accurately named directory under that.
Actually, it's one of the rare instances of a Microsoft useability guideline actually being followed by manufacturers. (The Microsoft guidelines of course being an expanded version of IBM's CUA guidelines.
The reason is quite simple; you can't have 10 programs calling themselves The Image Editor (ironically, Microsoft has since been forced to make it possible for non-Microsoft applications to claim the title of The Internet Browser instead of internet explorer). This same convention (publisher/application) can be found in Program Files, the registry, and even the documents and settings\user foo\application data folder (that one's hidden btw).
Originally the idea would have been for the user to move and rename application shortcuts (as was easily done in the Program Manager in windows 3.1) however few people know how to customize their start menu, even though it's just a folder in Documents and Settings!
Erm, I recall watching stuff like this on Kid's TV. Sure, the products were more related to average kid's lives (how are cars made, how is bread made, things you see every day), but still.
Also, I seem to remember them not just from Dutch TV, but for some reason also off the German telly (Der Sendung mit Der Maus, IIRC).
just create a law banning the sale of video games, marked rated M or Adult, from being sold.
They can't do that. That would be giving legislative powers to a non-governmental agency, which is illegal.
Try buying a powerstrip that's not been tested by Underwriters Laboratories. All sorts of crap I buy in Europe has US safety and compliance marks on them, all put there by labs independent of the US government, but to comply with sundry US laws.
In fact, having a third party give out ratings, and having a law requiring ratings, is a shade more constitutional (in theory) than the government itself outright banning games. Just like the V-chip, for example. It's required to be there, but its use isn't filled in by government itself.
The V-chip doesn't convey legislative powers to the National Association of Broadcasters, the National Cable Television Association and the Motion Picture Association of America.
Great post! I think the heavy reliance on precedent in the U.S. legal system is one of the things that confuses many European observers, who are used to a system based on the Napoleanic Code.
I often wonder where comments like these come from. I happen to live in The Netherlands, which isn't a "common law" country, and which was succesfully invaded by Napoleon, who then established codified civil law. The big deal about the Napoleonic code wasn't that it superceded all precedent, but rather that it harmonized laws. within the entire Napoleonic empire, the rules for establishing contracts, sales, etc. would henceforth be uniform. Subsequent penal codes also decriminalized certain acts by excluding them as offenses. However, this doesn't in the slightest way diminish the role of the judiciary to interpret laws in a manner consistent with expectation; where such expectation is established by rulings of other courts (precedent) as well as custom (much like common law) and even the de facto status quo.
For example, I build a home in some zone where building laws prohibit it, but the authorities tolerate it for the time being; if this goes on for ages (well, 5 years), and then suddenly they decide to enforce building laws, I can claim that the law is rendered void by non-practice. This entire construct has no basis in codified law, but is a rule that comes entirely from precedent and the base principles of law according to which codified laws are interpreted (just&reasonable etc.). In essence, the Law is what the Court decides it is, not what happens to be written down on a piece of paper. Especially in civil cases judges often deviate from codified law and written contract in the interest of fairness and reason. For example, there's nothing explicitely codified to prohibit a contract from containing a clause that requires you to sign over your firstborn's soul to Satan, however it is quite likely a court would find such a clause to be null and void.
The Netherlands also has a Supreme court (and intermediate courts of appeal) whose decisions are strong precedent to lower courts. And in general, all EU member states (even the UK with their silly Law Lords) defer ultimate judicial jurisdiction in matters concerning Human and Civil rights to the European High Court; which establishes binding precedent.
In EU guidelines (and Dutch laws) you'll even find places where precedent is later incorporated in law, or even clauses that explicitely reference "local custom". (For example; terms&conditions of sale have to be either put in writing at the time of sale, be available from the courthouse, or be according to local custom - so if you sell a pig at the local market, and the custom is to be paid in cash, without any written contract/T&Cs or codified law, you can demand cash).
So really, are there so many differences between countries with a Napoleonic code and those with common law? Both have courts of recourse, precedent, a judiciary interpreting the code according to custom. Probably "common law" is only made such a big deal of, because judges who have to deal with juries deciding the actual case in criminal procedings just need to feel a bit more important.;-)
Market value and debt don't really tell enough. Earnings and cashflow are bigger tools to gauge the success of the companies.
How about some good old-fashioned "profit"? (And we'll have none of the EBITDA crap either!). A quick look at the charts on Yahoo reveals a $603.30M loss.
Inexplicably their market cap is also about $600M, with a $1200M debt. Now, I have a debt that's more than my income or savings, sure, but it's a mortgage, so my creditors can sell my house and reclaim the money. If they sold the company in parts, assuming that strip-raiding it adds 25% in value over market cap, that still leaves $450M in bad debt.
Of course, it might be that all debt is really from one division (say, the DVD posting division) that they're looking to get rid of. But still, things look pretty bleak, seeing as that debt isn't doing anything right now, and their last investment pretty much failed. This kind of company is usually propped up by their creditors to salvage what potential is left.
The distinction made between uploading and merely making it available for download is who's pushing the buttons. So, sending music to your mate on msn messenger would be Bad, since you're pushing the upload button. Having an FTP server would be legal. Etc.
As the concert date approached, both companies became concerned that the new products would be neither as original nor as commercially appealing as products already available to consumers. In an effort to shield the new products from competition, Warner and PolyGram agreed not to discount and not to advertise certain of their catalog products for a limited period of time, the complaint says
So they decided not to advertise about previous releases?Well,dont many companies do this?Only here,seems both of them decided together.& what competition are they talking about,when they own the rights.?
1. Had there been actual competition, instead of a oligopoly of a few major labels, a decision to market older products less wouldn't have given the Three Tenors any competitive advantage, seeing as how 100 other record labels wouldn't hold back on the promotion.
2. The record companies screwed all other artists that weren't the Three Tenors.
3. Copyright is a (prohibition) right granted under the theory that allowing creators to benefit of their works stimulated them to make more works. If artists didn't get properly compensated, the reasoning goes, we would all be stuck with the same old tripe. In this case, the record companies clearly intended to delude the consumer into thinking, yes, the same old Three Tenor tripe is all that's out there to buy. 4. Pooling two companies' promotion clout allowed them to come on top of the Three Tenor deal. Had they not colluded, they would have taken a loss, to the benefit of their competitors, and the market (the invisible hand should smack down on crappy business, should it not). Competitors that (hypothetically) would play fair wouldn't be able to recoup bad investments in the same way, they'd be SOL - cf. Standard Oil's pricedumping.
So, they screwed the artists, the consumers, competitors, and the Constitution. Not a bad run.
The more important thing to realize is that not only can you use evolution to predict things happening, it also explains why. It might be a fairly trivial theory (survival of the fittest (by-and-large), some mutation here and there, and you're there), but it has actual applications. It explains why germs become resistent to antibiotics, rather than simply saying "things change, so, well, they changed, right?". Having an explanation makes it easier to deal with real life phenomenon like these (e.g. use restraint in using anti-biotics, rather than splashing them all about; use cocktails in the worst cases, but actively discourage using a few "back-up" anti-biotics; all strategies straight from survival of the fittest).
However, experimentation does not science make. It's a bit infeasible to go out and try to recreate life in a dish, take away selective pressure, and see if it turns out in humans or not. (Anti-evolutionists will claim you need to do this to "prove" evolution.) Rather, it only shows that evolution is a pretty darn good model, and one you should consider adopting, much like the theory of gravity is pretty neat, but, as Einstein showed, not quite perfect.
What does mark non-science is simply this; non-falsifiability. You can never prove some Almighty Intelligent Being isn't behind Creation. He might even have Created evolution! He's hiding, changing the fossil record to test our faith, etc. etc. etc. The existence of an Almighty Being can never be disproven! (He could prove He exists by the usual means of a bellowing voice from the parting clouds, etc., but disprove, no.)
No way to prove it isn't so = not a theory, not science. I haven't read the judgement, but it should be in there. (Interesting aside; the word I need to type in to login is quagmire..)
Actually, if you read the page you're linking to, you should really find it makes perfect sense. Either you store the password in such a way that you need user interaction to retrieve it, or you use some sort of obscurity approach which is worse than nothing. As it is, gaim stores it in plain text, yes, but there's nothing to keep you from either not storing the password OR using file-system or file based encryption - which is actually perfectly feasible. If you're using windows XP for example, just right-click the accounts.xml, properties, advanced, encrypt. (The encryption key is linked to your XP login password)
On the other hand, yes, some sort of OS specific hooks to make this easier would be sensible. For example, using Mac OS's "keychain", or Windows XP's "secure storage".
Still, even using these built-in encrypted storages only protect against a very very short list of threats.
Now, if you just stored accounts.xml on a hard-ware level encrypted harddrive that needs a smart-card and a passphrase to work, you'd be getting somewhere..
Just don't publish programs in magazines. That really was a painful and stupid way to distrubute software.
It also happened to be the only viable way to distribute software, economically atleast.
Actually, in The Netherlands there was a programme on radio that broadcast data tapes (!). Just tape the radio show to cassette, run a translator from BASICODE (which was the "univeral" basic dialect the broadcasts were in) to your home computer's very own basic dialect, and you were in business. The show was called NOS HobbyScoop if I recall correctly.
Also, I recollect (fondly) an issue of MSX Magazine which had a flexi disc record (you know, like one of them vinyl records your grandaddy used to have, but the flexi disc was a superthin version of this) which you also copied onto cassette to load onto your machine.
Later on I even became aware of broadcasts of computer data using Teletext pages on Rai Uno (Italian tv - teletext is broadcast in the superfluent scanlines of PAL television, much like closed captioning is broadcast in the extra scanlines of NTSC); these were also targetted, at first, at home computer user, and only later at PC users (but by then, BBSes were the norm).
They're, again, blaming "piracy" (on the high seas, Arrrr) for destroying record sales. But how many stockings are filled with "illegally" (not in Canada) downloaded MP3s? Would you consider giving a CD-R full of major record label "artist"'s music to some one as a Christmas gift? Nope, you wouldn't. Because that would be being a cheap ass, and besides, the real article is just a little bit nicer, what with a booklet and all of that marketing crap. So, blaming "piracy" on lower holiday-season sales DOES NOT COMPUTE. Really, they must get tired themselves of always blaming "piracy" (Ra-men).
There are a total of 2,300,000 LEDS at 122x48 feet. That equates roughly to a resolution of 2418x951 give or take a few:)
However, those LEDs are probably just the one color. Presumably they're using 4 LEDs per pixel - one red, one blue, two green; just like the colors in LCD/TFT displays. Which would then yield a resolution of 1209x475.5
Since 475 is eerily close to the number of scanlines in an NTSC picture (480), I'd go with NTSC resolution, perhaps stretched out a bit faux-widescreen, or with some sidebars etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Very observant. Except;
These cards are intended as a hard drive replacement for very demanding applications; for example high-volume transactional systems. Transactional means you want persistence, even in the face of power-outages or OS failure, but high-volume means that you can get quite a boost if random access is nice and fast (near zero seektimes). If your whole database won't fit in a few GB (pretty likely) and you're not distributing this sort of thing, it would still be great for transaction logs, temporary databases, sessions, etc. Or how about using them for message queues? Any message sent is persisted, but not written to a slow hard drive or database.
NAND drives I'm not too sure about. But for demanding applications, battery-back-upped-DRAM-drives are way cool.
You missed some!
Network
putty for SSH (even commandline SCP which rules), wget for sucking down the web, opera if you don't like firefox, and some form of bittorrent client, like bitcomet.
Utilities
gvim, unxutils or in a pinch some downloads from the gnuwin32 tools, tools from SysInternals.
Multimedia
Don't forget Mediaplayer classic (MPC) which by happy coincedence is included in the k-lite mega codec pack (from codecpack.nl).
Security
grisoft AV, tools from SysInternals.
This move might be another step in the wrong direction. If i'm not mistaken in a NPR radio show an expert said that some current commercial frequencies would be extremely useful for emergency responders since they can reach deeper inside buildings.
The article mentions this is about the 1710- to 1755-MHz band. This is a slightly lower frequency than current GSM-1900 or CDMA-2000 handsets use. As such, I can tell you it doesn't reach too far into buildings. Expect bad or no coverage in the basement, or in elevators.
For emergency services, there are a lot more attractive pieces of spectrum than this one.
In fact, emergency services in The Netherlands are finding this out just now, as they're trying to implement c2000, better known as TETRA. TETRA operates in the 380-383 MHz or 390-393 MHz range, yet these are still high enough frequencies to neccesitate a dense network of repeaters, and still it doesn't penetrate too far into buildings, which is of great concern to e.g. firefighters. Of course, since it's already cost billions to partially implement (so far), they can hardly call the whole thing off.
Microsoft recommends, for the time being to just
regsvr32 -u %windir%\system32\shimgvw.dll
BUT according to this analysis, the real fault lies with gdi32.dll ! How the hell do you get rid of that? It's about as deeply embedded in windows as, say, glibc is in Linux distributions..
RSS is no more push than pressing F5 on the homepage; it's just that the RSS reader presses F5 again and again for you. If you hit the slashdot RSS url too often, you even get blocked. One of the reasons RSS isn't really that sexy is that you still have to go through a list to see of any of it is interesting, and for the full "push" effect (even though it's just automated pull) you'd have to keep your PC on all the time. RSS readers on mobile phones might change this (which makes a bit more sense since an RSS XML document will be easier to display on there than a fully fledged homepage), but only if you don't have to pay for data by the byte.
They already went from A to Z and started at the beginning. I think they have gone through A and Z twice already.
..) Zeta is only the 6th letter, making for the 26+6=32nd storm of the year.
After the female names run out, they use letters from the Greek alphabet. (alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta,
A 5-10 increase in tracking is almost completely imperceptable to the human eye on 10 pt text, but will help make an article perfectly "fill" its intended space.
Also of note is the fact that CSS does in fact support a letter-spacing, and even a word-spacing property, and the text-align: justify property. You could even specify a content-area's width and height in absolute terms (e.g. 120pt or even 112px where px means pixels). With some browsers, font-embedding will even work (it's a CSS2 property). So you can be pretty certain of what the end result looks like.
Or, you could embrace the new media and simply not mind too much about accurate-to-the-pixel layout, and let the browser display stuff the way the user likes best, and if that means they want to scroll a lot, more power to them.
Think of how cheap their boxes could be if they didn't force you top buy Intel and Windows.
Dell machines with AMD processors would be incredibly cheap. You'd just have to pay $350 shipping. And $87 handling. And fees. And don't forget to plug in some more RAM, doubling your 512MB to a gig will only set you back $125. And a 8ms TFT screen suitable for gaming for $200 extra. Then you'd be set. Hella cheap.
To compare to your house analogy, when you compute your net worth, you add the value of the house and subtract the amount of the mortgage.
Ah, but I have positive cash flow. Which means I have some cash to pay off my debts.
What you're thinking about would be the balance sheet. Im no Chartered Accountant, but it does seem to mention "Net Tangible Assets ($567,700)" (that's a negative number), as well as a ludicrously high amount of goodwill. Now, the goodwill was listed a lot higher in 2002, which looks to me like they're writing it off - probably at the behest of their creditors. That means that in their own eyes, the company's value (or, the parts of the company they bought prior to 2002) is diminishing.
Their quarterly report is fun reading. Notice how they're paying 7% interest on their debt.
On the up side, their stock hasn't been this low for ages, and they're estimates for next year show a profit. But.. That may just be wishful thinking. Seeing as how BBI is hardly a company racking up debt to do really innovative investments, you're probably better off investing in a company that is (or one that isn't investing as much as actually turning a profit year-on-year).
Pentium Processor Extreme 955
Price: $1,112.37 - $1,393.49
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ 2.4GHz, Toledo, Dual-Core, 2x1MB L2 Cache, Socket 939, 64-bit Processor
Price: $780.74 - $1,185.00
More run, less money, it would appear.
You hit the nail on the head with that one... I guess it's marketing, but I notice that everything I install first goes into a directory with the company name, and then puts the software in a accurately named directory under that.
Actually, it's one of the rare instances of a Microsoft useability guideline actually being followed by manufacturers. (The Microsoft guidelines of course being an expanded version of IBM's CUA guidelines.
The reason is quite simple; you can't have 10 programs calling themselves The Image Editor (ironically, Microsoft has since been forced to make it possible for non-Microsoft applications to claim the title of The Internet Browser instead of internet explorer). This same convention (publisher/application) can be found in Program Files, the registry, and even the documents and settings\user foo\application data folder (that one's hidden btw).
Originally the idea would have been for the user to move and rename application shortcuts (as was easily done in the Program Manager in windows 3.1) however few people know how to customize their start menu, even though it's just a folder in Documents and Settings!
Erm, I recall watching stuff like this on Kid's TV. Sure, the products were more related to average kid's lives (how are cars made, how is bread made, things you see every day), but still.
Also, I seem to remember them not just from Dutch TV, but for some reason also off the German telly (Der Sendung mit Der Maus, IIRC).
just create a law banning the sale of video games, marked rated M or Adult, from being sold.
They can't do that. That would be giving legislative powers to a non-governmental agency, which is illegal.
Try buying a powerstrip that's not been tested by Underwriters Laboratories. All sorts of crap I buy in Europe has US safety and compliance marks on them, all put there by labs independent of the US government, but to comply with sundry US laws.
In fact, having a third party give out ratings, and having a law requiring ratings, is a shade more constitutional (in theory) than the government itself outright banning games. Just like the V-chip, for example. It's required to be there, but its use isn't filled in by government itself.
The V-chip doesn't convey legislative powers to the National Association of Broadcasters, the National Cable Television Association and the Motion Picture Association of America.
Great post! I think the heavy reliance on precedent in the U.S. legal system is one of the things that confuses many European observers, who are used to a system based on the Napoleanic Code.
;-)
I often wonder where comments like these come from. I happen to live in The Netherlands, which isn't a "common law" country, and which was succesfully invaded by Napoleon, who then established codified civil law. The big deal about the Napoleonic code wasn't that it superceded all precedent, but rather that it harmonized laws. within the entire Napoleonic empire, the rules for establishing contracts, sales, etc. would henceforth be uniform. Subsequent penal codes also decriminalized certain acts by excluding them as offenses. However, this doesn't in the slightest way diminish the role of the judiciary to interpret laws in a manner consistent with expectation; where such expectation is established by rulings of other courts (precedent) as well as custom (much like common law) and even the de facto status quo.
For example, I build a home in some zone where building laws prohibit it, but the authorities tolerate it for the time being; if this goes on for ages (well, 5 years), and then suddenly they decide to enforce building laws, I can claim that the law is rendered void by non-practice. This entire construct has no basis in codified law, but is a rule that comes entirely from precedent and the base principles of law according to which codified laws are interpreted (just&reasonable etc.). In essence, the Law is what the Court decides it is, not what happens to be written down on a piece of paper. Especially in civil cases judges often deviate from codified law and written contract in the interest of fairness and reason. For example, there's nothing explicitely codified to prohibit a contract from containing a clause that requires you to sign over your firstborn's soul to Satan, however it is quite likely a court would find such a clause to be null and void.
The Netherlands also has a Supreme court (and intermediate courts of appeal) whose decisions are strong precedent to lower courts. And in general, all EU member states (even the UK with their silly Law Lords) defer ultimate judicial jurisdiction in matters concerning Human and Civil rights to the European High Court; which establishes binding precedent.
In EU guidelines (and Dutch laws) you'll even find places where precedent is later incorporated in law, or even clauses that explicitely reference "local custom". (For example; terms&conditions of sale have to be either put in writing at the time of sale, be available from the courthouse, or be according to local custom - so if you sell a pig at the local market, and the custom is to be paid in cash, without any written contract/T&Cs or codified law, you can demand cash).
So really, are there so many differences between countries with a Napoleonic code and those with common law? Both have courts of recourse, precedent, a judiciary interpreting the code according to custom. Probably "common law" is only made such a big deal of, because judges who have to deal with juries deciding the actual case in criminal procedings just need to feel a bit more important.
Market value and debt don't really tell enough. Earnings and cashflow are bigger tools to gauge the success of the companies.
How about some good old-fashioned "profit"? (And we'll have none of the EBITDA crap either!). A quick look at the charts on Yahoo reveals a $603.30M loss.
Inexplicably their market cap is also about $600M, with a $1200M debt. Now, I have a debt that's more than my income or savings, sure, but it's a mortgage, so my creditors can sell my house and reclaim the money. If they sold the company in parts, assuming that strip-raiding it adds 25% in value over market cap, that still leaves $450M in bad debt.
Of course, it might be that all debt is really from one division (say, the DVD posting division) that they're looking to get rid of. But still, things look pretty bleak, seeing as that debt isn't doing anything right now, and their last investment pretty much failed. This kind of company is usually propped up by their creditors to salvage what potential is left.
The distinction made between uploading and merely making it available for download is who's pushing the buttons. So, sending music to your mate on msn messenger would be Bad, since you're pushing the upload button. Having an FTP server would be legal. Etc.
As the concert date approached, both companies became concerned that the new products would be neither as original nor as commercially appealing as products already available to consumers. In an effort to shield the new products from competition, Warner and PolyGram agreed not to discount and not to advertise certain of their catalog products for a limited period of time, the complaint says
So they decided not to advertise about previous releases?Well,dont many companies do this?Only here,seems both of them decided together.& what competition are they talking about,when they own the rights.?
1. Had there been actual competition, instead of a oligopoly of a few major labels, a decision to market older products less wouldn't have given the Three Tenors any competitive advantage, seeing as how 100 other record labels wouldn't hold back on the promotion.
2. The record companies screwed all other artists that weren't the Three Tenors.
3. Copyright is a (prohibition) right granted under the theory that allowing creators to benefit of their works stimulated them to make more works. If artists didn't get properly compensated, the reasoning goes, we would all be stuck with the same old tripe. In this case, the record companies clearly intended to delude the consumer into thinking, yes, the same old Three Tenor tripe is all that's out there to buy.
4. Pooling two companies' promotion clout allowed them to come on top of the Three Tenor deal. Had they not colluded, they would have taken a loss, to the benefit of their competitors, and the market (the invisible hand should smack down on crappy business, should it not). Competitors that (hypothetically) would play fair wouldn't be able to recoup bad investments in the same way, they'd be SOL - cf. Standard Oil's pricedumping.
So, they screwed the artists, the consumers, competitors, and the Constitution. Not a bad run.
The more important thing to realize is that not only can you use evolution to predict things happening, it also explains why. It might be a fairly trivial theory (survival of the fittest (by-and-large), some mutation here and there, and you're there), but it has actual applications. It explains why germs become resistent to antibiotics, rather than simply saying "things change, so, well, they changed, right?". Having an explanation makes it easier to deal with real life phenomenon like these (e.g. use restraint in using anti-biotics, rather than splashing them all about; use cocktails in the worst cases, but actively discourage using a few "back-up" anti-biotics; all strategies straight from survival of the fittest).
However, experimentation does not science make. It's a bit infeasible to go out and try to recreate life in a dish, take away selective pressure, and see if it turns out in humans or not. (Anti-evolutionists will claim you need to do this to "prove" evolution.) Rather, it only shows that evolution is a pretty darn good model, and one you should consider adopting, much like the theory of gravity is pretty neat, but, as Einstein showed, not quite perfect.
What does mark non-science is simply this; non-falsifiability. You can never prove some Almighty Intelligent Being isn't behind Creation. He might even have Created evolution! He's hiding, changing the fossil record to test our faith, etc. etc. etc. The existence of an Almighty Being can never be disproven! (He could prove He exists by the usual means of a bellowing voice from the parting clouds, etc., but disprove, no.)
No way to prove it isn't so = not a theory, not science. I haven't read the judgement, but it should be in there. (Interesting aside; the word I need to type in to login is quagmire..)
Actually, if you read the page you're linking to, you should really find it makes perfect sense. Either you store the password in such a way that you need user interaction to retrieve it, or you use some sort of obscurity approach which is worse than nothing. As it is, gaim stores it in plain text, yes, but there's nothing to keep you from either not storing the password OR using file-system or file based encryption - which is actually perfectly feasible. If you're using windows XP for example, just right-click the accounts.xml, properties, advanced, encrypt. (The encryption key is linked to your XP login password)
On the other hand, yes, some sort of OS specific hooks to make this easier would be sensible. For example, using Mac OS's "keychain", or Windows XP's "secure storage".
Still, even using these built-in encrypted storages only protect against a very very short list of threats.
Now, if you just stored accounts.xml on a hard-ware level encrypted harddrive that needs a smart-card and a passphrase to work, you'd be getting somewhere..
Just don't publish programs in magazines. That really was a painful and stupid way to distrubute software.
It also happened to be the only viable way to distribute software, economically atleast.
Actually, in The Netherlands there was a programme on radio that broadcast data tapes (!). Just tape the radio show to cassette, run a translator from BASICODE (which was the "univeral" basic dialect the broadcasts were in) to your home computer's very own basic dialect, and you were in business. The show was called NOS HobbyScoop if I recall correctly.
Also, I recollect (fondly) an issue of MSX Magazine which had a flexi disc record (you know, like one of them vinyl records your grandaddy used to have, but the flexi disc was a superthin version of this) which you also copied onto cassette to load onto your machine.
Later on I even became aware of broadcasts of computer data using Teletext pages on Rai Uno (Italian tv - teletext is broadcast in the superfluent scanlines of PAL television, much like closed captioning is broadcast in the extra scanlines of NTSC); these were also targetted, at first, at home computer user, and only later at PC users (but by then, BBSes were the norm).
They're, again, blaming "piracy" (on the high seas, Arrrr) for destroying record sales. But how many stockings are filled with "illegally" (not in Canada) downloaded MP3s? Would you consider giving a CD-R full of major record label "artist"'s music to some one as a Christmas gift? Nope, you wouldn't. Because that would be being a cheap ass, and besides, the real article is just a little bit nicer, what with a booklet and all of that marketing crap. So, blaming "piracy" on lower holiday-season sales DOES NOT COMPUTE. Really, they must get tired themselves of always blaming "piracy" (Ra-men).
Our company is a Windows shop but we do have one Red Hat 7 server run by a Windows admin. When they gave me root access, the first thing I did:
:-P
$ ps -e | grep X | kill -9 `awk '{ print $1 }'`
Server immediately started running noticeably faster.
Well, it would, not running xinetd anymore..
There are a total of 2,300,000 LEDS at 122x48 feet. That equates roughly to a resolution of 2418x951 give or take a few :)
However, those LEDs are probably just the one color. Presumably they're using 4 LEDs per pixel - one red, one blue, two green; just like the colors in LCD/TFT displays. Which would then yield a resolution of 1209x475.5
Since 475 is eerily close to the number of scanlines in an NTSC picture (480), I'd go with NTSC resolution, perhaps stretched out a bit faux-widescreen, or with some sidebars etc.
XXX is however the major constituent of the city seal of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
If you look carefully, you'll find a lot of older TV content was shot on film,
Damnit. Now I find myself whistling the tune to the A-team.. (I always noticed the image's a bit filmy-grainy)