The way I read the article, Compaq were being very careful about their performance figures and it doesn't compete well with the other procssors that will appear shortly after the EV7 launch. However, to be fair the article does make the point that it is normal for designers to be a little down about performance just before launch possibly due to yield issues. Until they get the full yield, it is difficult to get the full performance out of all the chips.
I like the Alpha though and have been using it since it first appeared. I will be very sorry to see it go.
Most of the current piracy happens in China, not the Ukraine. They may be identifying CDs but what with? Any number can be placed anywhere.
However, there are some very strong interests that want Trade with China, and frankly Ukraine doesn't have very much. Therefore China continues with Govt endorsed counterfeiting (some plants are under military control) and the Ukraines gets hit.
Re:Target Demographic: Lovelorn Teenage Girls
on
Attack of the Clones
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Um, these girls made the Titanic. If those girls come back and rewatch the movie, then it is going to make some serious money. However, did you see the famous "Breathing" trailer? That was much better and showed a lot more action.
LOTR:FOTR has some modifications to widen the audience, but that was just to give a little more female identification. However, it is generating a lot of people who want to see it again who are far from being either traditional movie goers (teens) or LOTR fans. You don't have to bend over just to get a large fan-base if the starting material is good. The film wasn't even that expensive to make (if you divide the total budget by 3)
Please could someone explain this to Mr. Lucas.
Re:Umm, right. And Alec Guinness was from where?
on
Attack of the Clones
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Hamil may have sucked but Guinness was there with a very impressive history of appearences and IMDB being far from reliable, it omits his work as Smiley in the award-winning cold war espionage TV series based on Le Carre's books. He may have made more from Star Wars after historically agreeing to a percentage than anything else but his other stuff is definitely worth a look.
Good actors do not make a movie, look at The Phantom Menace. Once we get away from Jar-Jar Binks (I don't blame the actor, Ahmed Best there), we have some heavies like Liam Neeson and Terence Stamp assisted by Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman. All of these have done some good work, but this was not it! I often feel that having a script directed by its author is not the best idea. A director supervises the editing and must be able to say what gets left out. It always difficult to scrap something that you spent a lot of time on and frankly, Jar-Jar should have been left sitting on the cutting room floor.
Maybe Lucas was more objective with himself in Star Wars 4: A New Hope. He was new (only one major film out, American Graffiti), and under a tight budget. His other film in the genre, THX1138
was well thought of but not widely distributed.
If somone wants to be an extra and be shot at, I don't care. It is if they actually have lines then I start to get concerned.
Ok, we have known that Alpha will die for some time now, I even have my doubts about the EV7. Digital was shipping their 64-bit micoprocessors before other people were and there previous forays into RISC gave them some good insights on the architectural problems.
With Digital being sold to Compaq and then Alpha being sold to Intel and Compaq possibly merging with HP, the future there is clouded. I have been working with Alphas and have been told that the future is Itanium coloured, but sorry, I don't really like the chip. EV7 will come out, but so far its performance doesn't look so competitive.
With a lot of former Digital talent working at AMD, I think this will be the better option. However, the K8 is not a clean design, it seems to be a 64-bit version of the K7 with some extras on the pipelineing. I guess hat the chip is not ging to be the easiest to get the best performance from.
I just don't buy the voices when I go to an animated flick. I just relistened to the radio version of the LOTR produced by the BBC. They had some significant talent involved but none that were really 'stars'. All, however, had good voices and a lot of stage expertise (helps the voice projection) - but this applies to a large number of the profession outside Hollywood.
Yes, what you say about the star power shift, well I would hope and expect for that but I can see some studios trying to go the animation path 'because it is cheaper' - this is what scares me.
I think many other comics could have done the donkey. I don't think that the character had 'Eddie Murphy' stamped all over it, so any comic with good delivery could have done it.
I know that Shrek had a big name or two (Cameron Diaz, Mike Myers, John Lithgow and Eddie Murphy) doing the voices, but I guess they were somewhat cheaper than a physical appearance by the same stars.
Does it mean a lot to have a 'name' when it is just a voice? Not really, there are plenty of other lower profile (and cheaper) actors who can do the voices.
The current star system is getting a little bit out of order and this could provide an excellent antidote.
Unfortunately, I guess this will go the say of modern SFX. Wow, great, it looks good, lets have lots of it! Whoops, shame about the plot, direction and acting. Those good films like Shrek came about because some people (i.e., Dreamworks in this case) did a lot of work. Pixar are good too, but let us hope that the industry does not become led by the idea of turning out CGI dross.
This has been used by the British Govt for leak detection for cabinet memos. The document tracking ensutres that nobody can pass the document to a newspaper and have it quoted verbatim.
The apparent procedure now is for a British newspaper to paraphrase and then destroy any documents that they receive.
You are quite right, but I would like to add this.
Back in the old days, we had methylated spirits, an ethanol/methanol mixture. Some people drank it and went blind.
However, at least one legitamate use was lighting the Tilley Storm Lantern, a pressurised parrafin lanp. To get the mantle up to temperature to burn the parrafin mist/vapour, you had to light a heater composed of wad of cloth which had been soaked in meths. The stuff was also often used as a solvent for cleaning, less so now, but it still gets used.
Your transmitter probably isn't that powerful, and the dish not that big after all, the main factors are cost and reliability.
All I need is another 3db or so either by a larger dish or a more powerful transmitter and I can flood most receivers. PLLs will tend to capture my signal rather than yours.
There are radio amateurs with 10m dishes who can put out a few kilowatts. The dish is hard to hide though in an inhabited area. Note that an uplink for a TV remote vehicle is relatively small at about a couple of metres.
There are transmission design techniques, such as that used by GPS that make the signal far more difficult to swamp. The receiver is 'looking' for a pattern in the signals and will reject signals that do not fit that pattern. Such a receiver is far more difficult to swamp.
Sizes are not a major issue. It recent times, the guilotining of bank notes has been far from perfect. Our ticket machines have previously accepted DM10 and DM20, but have not accepted DM50. Perhaps that was a worry about vulnerability to counterfeiting? Anyway, the season ticket machines didn't take cash, rather direct debit. I have no idea which Euro notes will be accepted.
The problem is with the coins because we have about half a dozen or more regional mints. Sometimes the physical characteristics have upset the (Swiss made) ticket machines.
Now we have coins carrying differing designs and being sourced from throughout the Euro-zone. I hope this works.
I should add after another visit into town this afternoon that there is a higher than normal demand for cash in the banks and from the ATMs, and paying is generally a little slower as people get used to the currency and the prices, but otherwise it is ok and the currency seems popular.
Re:More notes from Frankfurt
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
Just went into Frankfurt today to pick a visa for a short break in Egypt. The Egyptian consulate was only accepting Euros. Two persons were sent back to get some Euros before they could submit their visa applications. The price increased!!!!!!
Sorry for the misinformation, I only got it from the Economist!
The issue here is that a price of DM199 should be converted to €101.75. Of course, the shop doesn't want such prices, so they call it €104, or even worse €109.
Price creep on majo items isn't so bad percentage
wise but on small items in the supermarket, whoa!!!!! We are seeing an average increase of about 5% or so.
Actually most places have been working overtime to get their vending machines updated. With limited availability of coins for checking, I'm sure there are going to be some real fun problems. Some of the RMV automats were extremely picky about German currency, so heaven knows how they will cope with the slightly differring
As noted, I usually work in Frankfurt, most recently at the Boerse but I live up in the Taunus at Oberursel.
Old notes are not demonitised, but not everyone accepts them. Same applies to US currency, try using some old $100 notes outside a major bank.
Newer money is preferred because of the reduce risk of counterfeiting.
Notes from Frankfurt
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I live just outside Frankfurt am Main, home of the European Central Bank. I mostly do systems work for financial securities houses and exchanges. I am a Brit with experience of living and working in various EU countries as well as further afield.
The exchanges and markets have been working in Euros for the last year. This makes a unified market within the Euro-zone countries. However, until we had a real currency, there was a crisis of confidence.
I duely went out and got my 20DM worth of Euro coins in December. This was part of the so-called familiarity and to try to front-load the system to help with the problem of small change.
A couple of days ago, I had a guy at a bookshop at Frankfurt airport try to pass me off with two 10 year old banknotes of a withdrawn design. I objected because the notes could only be changed at a bank, and he gave me modern notes. The old bank notes were in very good condition and probably genuine, but I still refused.
Well I was out last night, spending Deutschmarks in a pub all night. Did I rush out to get my Euros, no as I anticipated a queue at the cash-points. I stayed away from the ECB because I didn't like the crush.
In the morning, I noted that the region transport company, the RMV seemed to have a lot of ticket machines out of order. However, I was able to get money from an ATM w/o queueing and without problem.
We are relatively lucky in that the exchange rate is set close enough to 2 at 1.95583. However, the retailers have been given a little too much leeway in setting their prices, so there is a lot of retail price inflation (already apparent during December). In France, they introduced a price freeze for three months to prevent this.
In real terms, it will probably start being useful on my next ski-trip. No more currencies to worry about apart from the Swiss Franc, and already, some resorts in Switzerland are saying that they will accept the Euro. Many have been taking Deutschmarks and French Franks already for things like lift-passes.
I expect that there may be some problems tomorrow when the first real business day for the shops starts, probably with availability of change as the public have practically none. Shops should give change in Euros, even if you spend DM.
The conversion rates fluctuate constantly. What's to say that one day, we charge 500 for a gold ring, and then going to the bank to exchange it, it's then worth 90% of that? That's lost money to us. We can't afford to be dealing in currency fluctuations. Both the pound and the US Dollar are stable enough to be dealing with, but I won't put my corporation's trust into the Euro.
First of all, if you are wanting to fix an exchange rate, then just talk to your bank. If not, then just take the Euro at the daily adjusted price. You only have a single transaction at the bank and that is end of day when you bank thr currencies. Expect anyway that the cost of Euro cash handling will be driven down by competition and demand.
Many organisations dealing with visitors, such as souvenir shops and museums have already promised to take the Euro. You will find that this will create a demand for cheap cash handling facilities.
As a final point, the pound/dollar are not stable in relation to each other.
Re:One simple reason why it won't work:
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
I have known several Frenchmen willingly learn German. However the working language in the large international organisations tends to be English. Many French professionals have no problems with that.
In this context, if Microsoft wanted to stop selling Win 3.1, we should require that they make the code public domain (excluding any stuff owned by third parties that Microsoft was licensing).
This is one area where I like Software Patents, but only if they were done properly. The original idea of the patent was a limited monoply on an idea in return for
full disclosure
of the idea. The concept was to foster innovation because the details of the innovation had to be disclosed and others could base their own inventions on that.
Note that the IP issue on opening the source would then largely dissappear because the version of the libraries used by the openned source would have the same limit on protection.
Actually what does really happen with closed source projects that have been openned is that the open substitues are found or developed for the closed source components.
With large companies such as Microsoft or more actually with regards to Open Source, HP, they use patented technology which they cross-license. That is HP may have a patent in something that Compaq want and vice vera so a deal is made for licensing Compaq's technology. This is great for closed source projects but it can't work for Open Source. A company like HP has lots of patents of its own so it is easy for them to cross-license. This may not even be noted in the code, so the overhead of checking what is subject to which deal is a headache.
The RIAA/MPAA are not so worried about 1st Gen copies. Until it was stolen, I had this lovely Nakumichi Cassette Deck. It was fiddly to use (you needed to calibrate it) but the recordings were excellent. Copies of copies were never as good as the original or even the first gen copy.
With blank-tape levies and the quality drop for multiple copies, the music and vdeo publishers could live with the situation of home taping. Companies that could do high quality multiple dupes were relatively few and far between thus easy to control.
Now the nightmare has happened, a tenth gen copy is as good as the first and multiple dupe technology is an expensive as having mutiple SCSI-2 CD-Writers. So it is cheap to go into professional piracy.
P2P further hurts them because that single digital original can be made available simultaneously to thousands of potential users. Note that this is why some P2P networks try to limit the bit rate on MP3s.
Re:Alternative to microkernel
on
Hurd: H2 CD Images
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Unfortunately, this has become the original chicken and egg situation. Hardware designers had made four distinct privilege rings back to the early days (think for example, about the VAX architecture). Under VAX/VMS, RMS (the record orienatted file system) and databases ran in an intermediate mode (Executive). The fourth mode wasn't used. This gave them some extra capabilities without letting them crash the OS (Ok, they ocassionally did, but nor very often). The OS was fairly monolithic, but extremely stable.
Under VAX/VMS, you didn't jump directly to the code though. The resulting page access fault would take to long to execute. You did a call that triggered a change-mode which went through a dispatcher. However this was relatively fast as no process switches were involved. Also, it meant that the argument list was always passed in a checked form (however, not the contents of the list, that was up to the system service).
Unfortunately, Unix concentrated on the two levels only, User and Kernel. Some RISC microprocessor designers then decided that all this extra stuff was superfluous so they dumped the support from the MMU.
So if you design for the lowest common denominator, then ok, you have two levels only. The uKernel makes it difficult because you have to context switch to process requests. If this is a heavily used system service, do you really want to do this? However, modern processors combined with a modern Unix, can context switch pretty fast.
What the MPAA, the RIAA are scared of is not analog data, because quality degrades during the copying process. Digital data with ECC, is copied without degradation. This upsets these guys a lot, to put it mildly.
They want to create a premium product, but they fail to understand that they can not protect the path between the media and the d/a conversion process, well not unless they could get away with shipping sealed boxes as CD-players, which I guess they would prefer. Unfortunately for them, they can't.
Look, I know that there is supposed to be a big difference between the error correction on Audio-CD players and the normal CD-R drive, let alone a DVD drive, but in the end, it is a digital bit stream. Bits can be copied, end of story.
Another point is that many drives have maingenance modes which allow the host computer to see exactly what is on the disk without correction. This is normally used for testing, but again would be very useful for breaking the DMCA. Just read track w/o correction and aply the correction at software level ignoring the bad bits.
I guess that a DVD-rom drive is more sensitive to errors on conventional CD's as they have much finer bit resolutions for DVDs so they alreasy have the modified error recovery built in.
Protection of CDs is pointless and it interferes with customers' own rights and annoys the customer. The original article mentions a class action against Universal about Unplayable CDs.
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I like the Alpha though and have been using it since it first appeared. I will be very sorry to see it go.
However, there are some very strong interests that want Trade with China, and frankly Ukraine doesn't have very much. Therefore China continues with Govt endorsed counterfeiting (some plants are under military control) and the Ukraines gets hit.
LOTR:FOTR has some modifications to widen the audience, but that was just to give a little more female identification. However, it is generating a lot of people who want to see it again who are far from being either traditional movie goers (teens) or LOTR fans. You don't have to bend over just to get a large fan-base if the starting material is good. The film wasn't even that expensive to make (if you divide the total budget by 3)
Please could someone explain this to Mr. Lucas.
Maybe Lucas was more objective with himself in Star Wars 4: A New Hope. He was new (only one major film out, American Graffiti), and under a tight budget. His other film in the genre, THX1138 was well thought of but not widely distributed.
If somone wants to be an extra and be shot at, I don't care. It is if they actually have lines then I start to get concerned.
With Digital being sold to Compaq and then Alpha being sold to Intel and Compaq possibly merging with HP, the future there is clouded. I have been working with Alphas and have been told that the future is Itanium coloured, but sorry, I don't really like the chip. EV7 will come out, but so far its performance doesn't look so competitive.
With a lot of former Digital talent working at AMD, I think this will be the better option. However, the K8 is not a clean design, it seems to be a 64-bit version of the K7 with some extras on the pipelineing. I guess hat the chip is not ging to be the easiest to get the best performance from.
Yes, what you say about the star power shift, well I would hope and expect for that but I can see some studios trying to go the animation path 'because it is cheaper' - this is what scares me.
I think many other comics could have done the donkey. I don't think that the character had 'Eddie Murphy' stamped all over it, so any comic with good delivery could have done it.
Does it mean a lot to have a 'name' when it is just a voice? Not really, there are plenty of other lower profile (and cheaper) actors who can do the voices.
The current star system is getting a little bit out of order and this could provide an excellent antidote.
Unfortunately, I guess this will go the say of modern SFX. Wow, great, it looks good, lets have lots of it! Whoops, shame about the plot, direction and acting. Those good films like Shrek came about because some people (i.e., Dreamworks in this case) did a lot of work. Pixar are good too, but let us hope that the industry does not become led by the idea of turning out CGI dross.
The apparent procedure now is for a British newspaper to paraphrase and then destroy any documents that they receive.
Back in the old days, we had methylated spirits, an ethanol/methanol mixture. Some people drank it and went blind.
However, at least one legitamate use was lighting the Tilley Storm Lantern, a pressurised parrafin lanp. To get the mantle up to temperature to burn the parrafin mist/vapour, you had to light a heater composed of wad of cloth which had been soaked in meths. The stuff was also often used as a solvent for cleaning, less so now, but it still gets used.
All I need is another 3db or so either by a larger dish or a more powerful transmitter and I can flood most receivers. PLLs will tend to capture my signal rather than yours.
There are radio amateurs with 10m dishes who can put out a few kilowatts. The dish is hard to hide though in an inhabited area. Note that an uplink for a TV remote vehicle is relatively small at about a couple of metres.
There are transmission design techniques, such as that used by GPS that make the signal far more difficult to swamp. The receiver is 'looking' for a pattern in the signals and will reject signals that do not fit that pattern. Such a receiver is far more difficult to swamp.
The problem is with the coins because we have about half a dozen or more regional mints. Sometimes the physical characteristics have upset the (Swiss made) ticket machines.
Now we have coins carrying differing designs and being sourced from throughout the Euro-zone. I hope this works.
I should add after another visit into town this afternoon that there is a higher than normal demand for cash in the banks and from the ATMs, and paying is generally a little slower as people get used to the currency and the prices, but otherwise it is ok and the currency seems popular.
Just went into Frankfurt today to pick a visa for a short break in Egypt. The Egyptian consulate was only accepting Euros. Two persons were sent back to get some Euros before they could submit their visa applications. The price increased!!!!!!
The issue here is that a price of DM199 should be converted to €101.75. Of course, the shop doesn't want such prices, so they call it €104, or even worse €109.
Price creep on majo items isn't so bad percentage wise but on small items in the supermarket, whoa!!!!! We are seeing an average increase of about 5% or so.
As noted, I usually work in Frankfurt, most recently at the Boerse but I live up in the Taunus at Oberursel.
Newer money is preferred because of the reduce risk of counterfeiting.
The exchanges and markets have been working in Euros for the last year. This makes a unified market within the Euro-zone countries. However, until we had a real currency, there was a crisis of confidence.
I duely went out and got my 20DM worth of Euro coins in December. This was part of the so-called familiarity and to try to front-load the system to help with the problem of small change.
A couple of days ago, I had a guy at a bookshop at Frankfurt airport try to pass me off with two 10 year old banknotes of a withdrawn design. I objected because the notes could only be changed at a bank, and he gave me modern notes. The old bank notes were in very good condition and probably genuine, but I still refused.
Well I was out last night, spending Deutschmarks in a pub all night. Did I rush out to get my Euros, no as I anticipated a queue at the cash-points. I stayed away from the ECB because I didn't like the crush.
In the morning, I noted that the region transport company, the RMV seemed to have a lot of ticket machines out of order. However, I was able to get money from an ATM w/o queueing and without problem.
We are relatively lucky in that the exchange rate is set close enough to 2 at 1.95583. However, the retailers have been given a little too much leeway in setting their prices, so there is a lot of retail price inflation (already apparent during December). In France, they introduced a price freeze for three months to prevent this.
In real terms, it will probably start being useful on my next ski-trip. No more currencies to worry about apart from the Swiss Franc, and already, some resorts in Switzerland are saying that they will accept the Euro. Many have been taking Deutschmarks and French Franks already for things like lift-passes.
I expect that there may be some problems tomorrow when the first real business day for the shops starts, probably with availability of change as the public have practically none. Shops should give change in Euros, even if you spend DM.
First of all, if you are wanting to fix an exchange rate, then just talk to your bank. If not, then just take the Euro at the daily adjusted price. You only have a single transaction at the bank and that is end of day when you bank thr currencies. Expect anyway that the cost of Euro cash handling will be driven down by competition and demand.
Many organisations dealing with visitors, such as souvenir shops and museums have already promised to take the Euro. You will find that this will create a demand for cheap cash handling facilities.
As a final point, the pound/dollar are not stable in relation to each other.
I have known several Frenchmen willingly learn German. However the working language in the large international organisations tends to be English. Many French professionals have no problems with that.
- full disclosure
of the idea. The concept was to foster innovation because the details of the innovation had to be disclosed and others could base their own inventions on that.Note that the IP issue on opening the source would then largely dissappear because the version of the libraries used by the openned source would have the same limit on protection.
Actually what does really happen with closed source projects that have been openned is that the open substitues are found or developed for the closed source components.
With large companies such as Microsoft or more actually with regards to Open Source, HP, they use patented technology which they cross-license. That is HP may have a patent in something that Compaq want and vice vera so a deal is made for licensing Compaq's technology. This is great for closed source projects but it can't work for Open Source. A company like HP has lots of patents of its own so it is easy for them to cross-license. This may not even be noted in the code, so the overhead of checking what is subject to which deal is a headache.
With blank-tape levies and the quality drop for multiple copies, the music and vdeo publishers could live with the situation of home taping. Companies that could do high quality multiple dupes were relatively few and far between thus easy to control.
Now the nightmare has happened, a tenth gen copy is as good as the first and multiple dupe technology is an expensive as having mutiple SCSI-2 CD-Writers. So it is cheap to go into professional piracy.
P2P further hurts them because that single digital original can be made available simultaneously to thousands of potential users. Note that this is why some P2P networks try to limit the bit rate on MP3s.
Under VAX/VMS, you didn't jump directly to the code though. The resulting page access fault would take to long to execute. You did a call that triggered a change-mode which went through a dispatcher. However this was relatively fast as no process switches were involved. Also, it meant that the argument list was always passed in a checked form (however, not the contents of the list, that was up to the system service).
Unfortunately, Unix concentrated on the two levels only, User and Kernel. Some RISC microprocessor designers then decided that all this extra stuff was superfluous so they dumped the support from the MMU.
So if you design for the lowest common denominator, then ok, you have two levels only. The uKernel makes it difficult because you have to context switch to process requests. If this is a heavily used system service, do you really want to do this? However, modern processors combined with a modern Unix, can context switch pretty fast.
They want to create a premium product, but they fail to understand that they can not protect the path between the media and the d/a conversion process, well not unless they could get away with shipping sealed boxes as CD-players, which I guess they would prefer. Unfortunately for them, they can't.
Another point is that many drives have maingenance modes which allow the host computer to see exactly what is on the disk without correction. This is normally used for testing, but again would be very useful for breaking the DMCA. Just read track w/o correction and aply the correction at software level ignoring the bad bits.
I guess that a DVD-rom drive is more sensitive to errors on conventional CD's as they have much finer bit resolutions for DVDs so they alreasy have the modified error recovery built in.
Protection of CDs is pointless and it interferes with customers' own rights and annoys the customer. The original article mentions a class action against Universal about Unplayable CDs.
I agree, Thompson seems to have been doing some really wierd stuff recently. I mean, single electon gate design with genetic algorithms?