Also, the lenses used are much cheaper and would distort badly, again, at that distance.
When I bought optics for a cinema projector 10 years ago the best ones available ran to $750 apiece. Even an animorph only cost me $1,500
The real reason the cinema projectors cost a heck of a lot more is heat and production volume. You need to send all that light that is not going to the screen somewhere and that creates a lot of heat. Then you have the fact that the thing you get from staples is made in a production run of 50,000 plus and no digital cinema projector is likely to be made in runs of more than a hundred at present.
I was told by a professional projectionist that the resolution was actually something like 1310 pixels wide. In any case, it is certainly less than the 1900 or so pixels wide that is HDTV.
That depends on the model of projector you are talking about. There are models that cost $150K but I suspect that the ones in the majority of cineplexes are the somewhat cheaper ones.
The talk of price and resolution is all somewhat off mark since the costs are almost exclusively development costs. There are tens of thousands of cinema screens to be updgraded. Once a standard is decided on and the upgrade process looks like a sure thing the cost of the projector will fall quickly, once it reaches $20K expect most screens to be digital as the studios will not be striking many prints and those they do strike will cost more to rent than before. Expect the resolution chosen to be entirely adequate.
The film world will then divide into geeks who want to stick to 35mm and those who have their own private cinema quality setups.
I find the discussion of audiophilia and the like irritating beyond belief. Just as the guy earlier in the thread thought that a 35mm print had higher resolution than the digital source there are audiophiles who pay $5,000 for a $250 Philips CD player in a different box - and will still wax lyrical as to the quality of the drive mechanism making the difference.
What I am suprised folk have not discussed is the range of new content that can be brought to the cinema screen at low cost. For example all night screenings of Seinfeld or the X-Files. We will probably see more rock concert movies.
I saw Star Wars Episode 2 at the Cinerama digital theatre here in Seattle. There was definitely something off...it was the sound, by about.5 seconds from the picture.
Sounds like the dweebs didn't calibrate the dolby properly. The cinema setups have the ability to delay each sound channel by a specific amount so that the time it takes the sound to travel to various parts of the theatre is accounted for.
The other delay introduced in a 35 mm setup is that the sound pickup is a variable distance from the shutter. The soundtrack is 1.5 seconds away from the picture on the film but there is always an adjustment available (which you need since the adjustment in the dolby only allows a positive delay so you need the sound from the film to be slightly ahead of the picture so you can slow it in the dolby)
So if the sound pickup was off when they set up the dolby the dolby will have a compensating delay. Then when you stick the digital input in the picture and sound are precisely synchronized and the compensation in the dolby is way off.
In the US, all products must carry an implied warranty of merchantability [google.com]. If the product can be disabled for any reason, wouldn't that violate the agreement? Thus, this product cannot be sold in the us? Any lawyers care to comment?
IANAL but you are correct, I spent a fair bit of time wih lawyers who write such stuff and they wory a lot about enforceability.
Many shrinkwrap products disclaim merchantability but it is unlikely that the courts would consider the clause enforceable and bar a claim on the basis of it.
The more relevant consideration is in what circumstances would ReplayTV activate the clause? I suspect that if they get that desperate that there is not much ReplayTV left to go sue.
These stupid clauses do however have material effect, but not the one you think. They allow ReplayTV to recognise revenue that otherwise they would have to defer since there is an ongoing service commitment. No 'commitment', no need to defer the revenue.
Allwell set top box - metallic version - $325.00
cheap bt878 video capture card
Hollywood+ mpeg playback card
DVD rom
Going to the allwell web site the box looks OK but only has two PCI slots so using them well is going to be critical.
I would really like to be able to put a firewire card into at least one of the slots so that the device can output to an external disk. There is a version of the box that comes with an MPEG2 decoder which looks a better option in that case.
Also I would probably look for a satelite TV interface card as I use dish TV. I have seen ads for such but they are pricier than normal interface cards. This choice may well mean going the windows XP route since I have no intention of writing my own drivers (been there, done that).
The problem with this build is that it doesn't leave space for a radio card as well. The problem we have found with the Dishplayer PVR (based on ultimate TV we think) is that we keep wanting to rewind and playback radio as well...
To activate you have to click through the agreement. To do that you accept the terms. It's legal if the terms are legal.
I am not a lawyer, but you don't have a clue.
The courts are the ultimate arbiters of contract law. If the courts decline to enforce contract terms then they are void.
Shrinkwrap type 'contracts' are problematic in many ways, not least because there is unequal bargaining power. It is a unilateral declaration by one side of what the terms of the agreement are. Such can be declared 'contracts of adhesion' and considered invalid by the courts. Invalid does not mean illegal, a term may be perfectly legal in a contract negotiated between two parties but not legal when it is unilaterally imposed.
I often use the example of car parking stations. You generally just drive in and get a ticket and there are no terms obvious. Somewhere just inside the carpark will be a big sign with the terms of use displayed. If you don't like the terms you can generally go back out without payment but continuing on implies your acceptance of the terms. That's settled law in Australia at least.
Actually it is settled law but not the way you think. In contract law it is impossible to exclude claims in negligence. So if a multi story car park collapses due to lack of maintenance the owner/operator is liable irregardless of what he put on the ticket. In fact there can even be a contract term stating that the owner is not liable in that precise circumstance and it is still invalid.
Incidentally that is why legal constructs such as bills of lading and letters of credit are so interesting, they are not contracts and are not subject to contract law and cannot in fact be constructed using contract law. That is why the digital signature acts were required to recognise the legality of digital signatures on such documents.
Clauses that attempt to restrict remedies were almost always thrown out by the US courts 20 years ago. Today clauses that restrict redress to arbitration are sometimes recognised, but by no means in every case. I suspect however that the provisions put in to many cell phone contracts that prohibit class action lawsuits are unenforceable.
Unlike Germany of course who is doing their share... By counting a bunch of 1970's communist-era coal plants that were shut down in the 90's. They've already had almost all their cutbacks for free..
Actually believe it or not, the elimination of the Trabant alone Germany managed to meet its entire obligations for reductions in sulphur, nitrous oxide, Co etc. emissions. This is none too suprising when you learn that the Trabants output of pollutants were 10 to twenty times higher than those of Western cars, so the Trabants alone created as much of those types of pollution as all the cars in Western Europe put together.
However such anecdotes aside, better fuel efficiency is not just good for the environment, it is good for America. Making SUVs meet the same fuel efficiency standards as other cars would save more oil each year than the entire reserves in ANWR. If finding new oil resources is good for national security then so is conservice those we already have. Making air conditioners meet higher efficiency standards means lower running costs for owners and needing to build fewer power stations. Quite important in states like california where air conditioning is 30% of peak load and Bush affiliated companies like Enron have been gouging the state by manipulating the energy market.
Re:Can We Callanmge the SEC and FAASB?
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
Spot the straw man time, anyone who disagrees with US policy is anti-american, if not a member of Al-Qaeda!
Well, I must bow to you on this one. You are so good at it that you can spot strawmen that even the poster wasn't aware of. Bravo!
Have fun nursing your hatred... it's coming along really well.
Republican spin technique at work here. First you claim that anyone who disagrees with Bush administration policy 'hates America', then when called on it you deny the accusation while simultaneously repeating it.
I note that you don't dispute the facts of the post, all you do is resort to name calling.
Napster's business model was very simple.
1) Get millions of users through providing an illegal service.
2) Force the RIAA to turn over a cut of all online music distribution sales.
3) Use P2P to sell (now legal) content provided by other users with very low overhead.
The Napster service effectively made it impossible to sell music online because Napster was making it available for free.
Using peer to peer to sell content is a quite bizare notion. If I want to buy a music track I don't want to have to wait for someone with the right track to log in so I can download it. Bandwidth just isn't that expensive. If local caching is necessary that can be provided in Akamai type fashion.
Now the that the 'respectable' attempts at P2P like Napster are gone, all the RIAA has to do is sit back and wait for secure online networks and hardware to be developed, and they get to keep all the marbles.
What marbles? Looks to me like the RIAA is watching its business model evaporate. CD sales were already slowing before Napster went online. Classical sales had already stagnated after people had completed transition from vinyl to CD. There were signs that this was happening in the pop area although the effect was somewhat masked by an expansion of the mid 30s to 40s market as the pop market ceased to be a purely youth phenomena.
The recording industry has failed to work out a strategy to sell content in a format that can be consumed by the next generation distribution format - bits not atoms. Anyone who has a hard disk based MP3 player knows that it is a vastly superior format to CD, within a few years it will be the dominant format, yet the recording industry has no idea how to market to that format, except to sell me a CD and have me rip it (which they are doing their damndest to stop).
What is really stupid is that none of the schemes proposed for DRM address the real issue - raising revenue. The RIAA is like Louis Freeh who spent his time at the FBI chasing laws to make use of encryption illegal rather than working out strategies to combat terrorism, in the RIAA's case they are spending their energy making piracy illegal but have no interest in establishing mechanisms so consumers can actually buy their product.
Re:Can We Callanmge the SEC and FAASB?
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Data Quality Act
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· Score: 2
Since the pollution is a product of production and not the size of the population, it doesn't make much sense to measure it per capita. Measuring it against production would obviously provide a much better indication of how "environmentally efficient" a nation is. In fact, if you measure it by how much the US produces, the US is not the biggest polluter of all.
If you are looking at the effect a given country has on the planetary ecosystem harm done per person does seem a reasonable way to measure things.
Dividing by 'economic output' is a deceit when the increase in economic output is in information products.
Comparing as the original post did the proposed 8% reduction in real terms by the EU with the 7% reduction per unit of economic activity by the US without stating the different basis is a deceit. The 'reduction' in output rate under the Bush plan comes exclusively from economic growth.
Constantly casting everything like the US is the Great Satan isn't going to be very convincing to the people who don't already agree with you.
Spot the straw man time, anyone who disagrees with US policy is anti-american, if not a member of Al-Qaeda! It is quite possible to be pro-US and anti-George W. Bush. The fact that the Bush camp constantly try shroud and flag waving makes them opportunists, not patriots. I don't think anyone needs lessons in patriotism from someone who hid from the draft in the National guard and was AWOL if not a deserter for much of it.
Since when did patriotism mean accepting without argument an energy policy written by Keneth Lay?
Napster was, at worst, a means for the long-standing fact of exploitation of artists by record labels to become common knowledge. Even teeny-boppers are familiar with the concepts of mechanical royalties, publishing contracts, and "recoupment".
Napster had good effects as performance art, however I always thought that the idea that Napster would make money out of the scheme was kinda wierd.
Napster became popular by offering people something for nothing. While a lot of the criticism of the record industry is valid the justification of Napster rapidly became an exercise in rationalisation 'the record industry rips off artists, so I am morally justified in ripping them off as well'.
The recording industry did not help in their response which completely failed to understand that the principle mechanisms that cause laws to be respected are psychological and not technical.
However the business plans that Napster dreamt up to 'monetize' the user base they built up were pretty slimy, and it is no suprise that their replacements all specialize in propagating scumware that will report your every move to advertisers (and with the recent Ashcroft changes J. Edgar Mueller's FBI), bring up pop up ads at every turn and redirect your DNS to an Idealab! startup so that if and when new.net goes the way of Pets.com your machine will stop working and you won't know how to fix it.
Napster as a political statement worked, but as a business it was never going to survive. Even if it had won the copyright case the inevitable outcome would have been a change in copyright law to outlaw their business - which inevitably would contain even more clauses to push copyright law in the direction of Disney and Time Warner against the public interest.
Those put options are two things. Stock splits and stock in employee buy back/employee stock options. Look at his own charts and you will see two obvious things.
The MSFT puts are neither of those things as you would know had you read their annual report. Stock splits have no effect on options, most employee stock plans eork from stock issued for that purpose.
The real purpose of the MSFT puts was as a means of fulfilling their promise to buy back MSFT shares. The way that MSFT did this was to sell in-the money puts for the shares in question. This is a highly efficient method of buying back company stock as it means that the purchase price of the stock is discounted by the option price.
This is the method used by almost all the companies that have done stock buy backs. The only time when it is a really bad idea is when a company is buying back stock using capital rather than income. RSA made a major blunder when it decided to use half its reserves to buy back stock at what turned out to be the peak of the market. Investment bankers tend not to like companies accumulating money, especially if there is a financial bubble, they would like to be the only ones left with cash at the trough so they can buy back stuff for cheap.
Re:Can We Callanmge the SEC and FAASB?
on
Data Quality Act
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· Score: 5, Informative
No, this will have a major good effect. Right now, the US didn't sign the new greenhouse gas emission reduction treaty. Everyone else agreed to an 8% reduction, yet the US only agreed to 7%. This is a big deal. The EU is now saying that we don't make an adequate effort to protect the environment
You have accepted the Bush admin spin, oh sorry it was the Clinton whitehouse that did spin, the hero of Air Force One on 9/1 does not spin.
The real difference is that the Kyoto treaty mandates an actual reduction of greenhouse gases of 8% for the biggest polluters - which includes the US which is per capita the biggest polluter of all.
What the Bush admin 'committed' to was to reduce greenhouse emissions per unit of economic output by 7%. Why is this different? Well if we lived in the Victorian age when economic output was output of physical stuff the commitment might mean something. The US economy grew by 3-4% each year under Clinton but the actual manufacturing base was almost unchanged, the economic growth comes in industries that do not produce much in the way of greenhouse gases, mainly IT.
So in fact comparing like for like the EU is cutting emissions by 8% while the Bush admin is allow itself to increase them by 30%. So don't be suprised if the EU say that the US is not doing its share.
It will be interesting to see what the car industry does with this act since the recent increase in US steel tarifs will cost them (and consumers who buy cars) hundreds of millions. The data on which the tarif was justified is pretty flimsy, not all of the US steel industry is having dificulties. The mini-mill manufacturers in the US are as competative as the ones in the EU or anywhere and can sell steel to the auto industry for less than anyone because of shipping costs. The uncompetative steel producers are operating the old integrated plants
MS is loosing ground rapidly in the server market.
That is an interesting claim, until four years ago MSFT did not exist in the server market. They did not really believe in the model, Bill is a peer to peer sorta guy who hates mainframes.
Sun and EMC do not appear to agree with you. According to them MSFT is to blame for their current woes and threatens their survival. Personaly I think Linux is killing Sun and the EMC model of charging mainframe prices for disk storage was bound to fail sooner or later as network atached storage was comoditized.
My expereience suggests that MSFT servers rarely compete with UNIX. Most NT servers are serving a domain of Windows boxen, few unix boxes serve that role.
The one area of competition is in Web Servers and there Microsoft appears to have a pretty strong hold. Mainly through Frontpage and Active Server Pages.
Anyone who says *opensource* is doomed to fail, then say "oh yea, obviously, that whole HTML thing was just a fluke, sure glad it died out in the earily 90's after every READ EVERYONE ELSE'S CODE, LEARNED HTML AND MADE THEIR OWN PAGES!"
HTML was not open source. It is an open specification. There are open source browsers writen to that specification but the specification is not the code.
Also the libwww code written at CERN is not open source, it is public domain. There is a big difference. If you modify libwww there are no limits on what you do with it, you can make the modification closed source.
We did not write the license that way because we were ignorant of RMS's politics, far from it. The license was written that way so that companies such as Spyglass and Microsoft could build systems built on our code if they wanted to.
As for reading people's HTML to write code - thats a bug not a feature. The original idea was that the browsers would have the ability to edit Web pages so the end users did not have to learn HTML. Also HTML was originally much cleaner than the current spec which has countless enhancements added in by Netscape in an attempt to make the spec proprietary during the pre-Microsoft browser wars against Spyglass and the Web Consortium. Thats why we have six incompatible mechanisms to change fonts but none of the standard browsers support math markup - bit of a lose for a technology meant to be for scientific publication eh?
You use VB for RAD, you use C when you need power, doesn't mean one is better than the other, they have different purposes and solve different problems.
Once this was the case, however the real importance of C# is that it finaly merges the Basic and C code development lines. At this point C# provides the full power of C (with some bizare omissions like structure initializers) plus the convenience of VB. The market perception that C# is about Java is only really 40% right, C# is pitched against Java because Java is the language to beat, but the real target audience is Visual Basic programmers who would like a programming language that is as easy to prototype in as a scripting language while still allowing very large projects to be supported.
Equally the suggestion in the intro to the article that Microsoft should switch from IIS to Apache is amazingly clueless. Apache is a great Web server for UNIX boxes, but IIS is a better Web server for NT. IIS is integrated into the O/S at a very fundamental level so that for example the Web server can use the system level file protections to control access to Web resources.
The features that have caused security problems with both Apache and IIS are active code. In the case of IIS three scripting langauages are integrated into the Web server (and more can be added). In the case of Apache the security weaknesses inherent in the CGI design (particularly when a CGI module is written in csh) leads to predictable problems. I don't see that a real difference can be made between the OSS and Microsoft approach here, both groups adopted what is an intrinsically insecure architecture for reasons of expediency and ignorance. Once the feature was in there was no way for the grown ups to take it out again because people used the feature.
I recently started using Visual C#, its the best program development environment I have seen since the VAX LSE. The editor does have some iritating features (like the lack of mouse-less editing), but it does have a lot of cool features like bringing up the template for a method as you enter it - even for user defined methods. The IDE looks and feels like a professional tool, there are few traces of ego-centric features that looked cool to the designer but are not so great for the user - although as with XMLSpy the editor makes the bizare assumption that my preference for editing XML Schemas is through some bizare graphical language of the authors invention rather than as XML schema.
Compare Visual Studio with the UNIX - Emacs - Make IDE and I am afraid the comparison is not favorable to open source.
I am much less interested in open source than I am in extensibility. Unless you want to do a security audit the only reason to want source is to maintain or extend a program. I much prefer a well written and supported extension mechanism than someone chucking a few meg of code at me. The.NET extension mechanisms allow me to write my own language and then use Visual Studio as my IDE for it - and get all the debugging, assistant etc. features for free. That seems somewhat better to me than creating a fork of the emacs and gcc tree for my new language and recreating all those features.
YMMV, but those people who believe that OSS is the one true faith are wrong. There is plenty of room for both models in the market of ideas.
The whole point of the M100 and M105 line is that they are ultra-cheap so that people who would not normally buy one will get into the market.
Remember the Ford Pinto? It would have cost less than $30/car to fix the defect that made them blow up in rear end collissions but they wanted the car to sell for less than $2k/unit.
Casio appears to have worked out how to make pocket calculators that are both cheap and reliable. If Palm can't work out how to make its products more reliable they have big problems. This is not the only quality problem I have heard reported.
The real problem is that palm has done very little of significance since the Palm VII came out almost three years ago. All the interesting stuff on PalmOS has come from Sony, Handspring and the cellular companies. Some day the dragonball processor Palms will be on the store shelves, however this is likely to be too little too late.
Palm appear to have an Apple complex. They believe they know what customers want better than their customers. Problem there is that such companies have a habit of getting overly ideological about irrelevances.
I recently acquired a Zaurus 5000, even though the device is first generation it has a much more useful feature set than the Palm. There are plenty of things wrong with it (memory management is hopeless, a 32Mb machine should be able to run a Web browser without any difficulty, the machines we used to design the Web all had less memory.), however the rate of progress has been pretty good. They fixed the problem with the image viewer that meant that it could now view pictures from 2 Megapixel cameras pretty quick.
I suspect that the Zaurus and PocketPC lines will both develop quickly because they are in direct competition.
In VMS you will have to consult the manual for "TYPE" to find out that it has the option "/PAGE". Now, it might be a common convention, but are you really sure every program has a "/PAGE" option?
I can't think of any that does not. But if you really want to you can always run BASH as your VMS shell. On the other hand you can't run the VMS shell on a UNIX box for reasons explained below.
VMS does have equivalent mechanisms to pipes. However I must say that I have never found pipes to be especially usefull. Sure it is cute to be able to do ls * | grep foo. However at least 95% of the times I need to use a pipe in UNIX it is to construct a command feature that VMS provides for free.
Small tools fitting well together strikes me as something more fitting for the label of "logical", than something that is user-friendly only for beginners, and becomes a mess for more advanced users.
The difference between VMS and UNIX is how the tools are structured. In UNIX the command line handling is built into each program separately, so each command has code to extract flags and deal with them. If you want to change the flag assignments you have to recompile the program.
In VMS each command has a CLD definition that specifies the command, the arguments, program file to run etc. This has a lot of useful side effects, if you want to find out the arguments for any VMS command you can enter the command VERB [Command] to dump out the CLD definition.
This structure has a lot of advantages, not least being that if you want to produce a french language version of VMS you can. You can also generate GUI interfaces that will work with any VMS shell command, they simply query the CLD interface to find out all the commands supported and the arguments supported. The GUI will then work with new commands written after it, or user defined commands.
VMS was certainly not a beginner system, the expertise level of you average VMS user is likely to be much higher than that of your average UNIX user. Just because UNIX is dreadful for beginners does not mean it is good for experts. JCL is also dreadful for beginners but only JCL jocks think it is a powerful and elegant system, most impartial observers think that CP/M and MSDOS were a marked improvement over JCL.
Well, from what he said, NT was nearly there, but not quite. It does have an advanced threading model.
NT does not have the UNIX thread model, or rather it has pthreads but the system apps all use a different model.
This is not suprising if you know about thread models. pthreads is not generally considered the acme of good design. It is based on Tony Hoare's monitor design which is almost thirty years old now and Hoare introduced a much better design only a few years after monitors. However MULTICS was designed in the intervening years and when SMP Unix systems started to emerge in the late 80s the work was largely driven by the MULTICS work.
Opinionated is my middle name. However, I have to take his word for it. The guy is very experience in such matters and has written a lot of kernel-level networking code.
I don't know who your lecturer was but I'll bet he wasn't Tony Hoare, my Oxford Tutor who along with Per Brich Hansen and Dijkstra invented most of the concepts on which all modern O/S concurrency models are based. If Microsoft thought there was a problem with their threading model I guess they would call him up since he now works for them.
The contract or "commercial relationship" is between the Spammer and its clients. He can argue that the ISP and the blackilst provider is tortiously interfering with that contract or commercial relationship
In what way is he inducing either party to break the terms of the agreement?
If a building contractor undertakes to build a house next to mine and makes exessive noise he may well have difficulties that cause him to fail to complete the work per the contract if I complain to the council about the noise. But that is not an interference in the contractual relationship.
don't think it is a great case but I can see it surviving a motion to dismiss for facial insufficency of pleadings (at least under US law).
US law is broken when it comes to motions to dismiss. Because of the idiotic notion that juries are the only legitimate deciders of fact almost any case can be kept going simply by asserting a claim that depends on a question of fact. You can't do that in Oz or Britain, juries were abolished in most civil trials a century ago. So the doctrine that judges cannot decide issues of fact does not apply.
Another claim one could make in the US would be for unfair trade practices, but that is statutory so I am not sure they have something similar in Australia.
I don't see that one sticking either since unfair trade practices would generally apply to the actions of a competitor.
I use linux on all of my systems because it is the easiest form of unix, the easiest operating system on earth. VMS has funky commands, and we all know the problems with windos. Linux is the most logical system, and roadblocks like licensing fees may kill it.
The author does not appear to be making a joke here but it sure is funny as heck. Letsee:
VMS command to get help is HELP, UNIX command, man, or if you want to get useful information try man -k
VMS command to print a file to the console TYPE, UNIX command cat. If you want paged output TYPE/PAGE, UNIX command cat | more
VMS command to list a directory DIRECTORY, UNIX command ls. If you want to get particular info returned in the directory the flags change according to the UNIX variant.
When I first used UNIX the command to get a useful list of current processes was ps -aux. If the UNIX commands were so good why did they change?
Of course if the only system you have ever used is X you may well think that X is the easiest system in the world to use.
I spent absolutely zero time studying the NT internals, however my lectured did and he gave us quite a comprehensive description of NT, VMS, Solaris, SysV R3 SysV R4 and some of the really old stuff.
So you think your second hand account of some unspecified lecturer's opinions on O/S internals gives you the authority to pontificate on the issue?
I have first hand experience of VMS, NT and Unix internals. I suspect that either the lecturer was as opinionated as yourself, or more likely you didn't spend very much time listening to him either.
As for being a troll, if as you claim you are at Karma 50 and post at zero it sounds to me if a member of the slashcrew has come to an uncomplimentary opinion of you.
The cause of action may be for tortious interference witha commercial relationship (or the Australian equivalent thereof). But I haven't really looked into it
I don't see that sticking, the English common law tort is inducement to breach of contract. But where is the contract? There is not one between the spam blacklist service and the ISP. There is not one between the ISP and the ISPs that are using the spam blacklist.
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When I bought optics for a cinema projector 10 years ago the best ones available ran to $750 apiece. Even an animorph only cost me $1,500
The real reason the cinema projectors cost a heck of a lot more is heat and production volume. You need to send all that light that is not going to the screen somewhere and that creates a lot of heat. Then you have the fact that the thing you get from staples is made in a production run of 50,000 plus and no digital cinema projector is likely to be made in runs of more than a hundred at present.
Why not? Hey people go to DisneyWorld to queue for 3 hours to go on Star Tours.
So live projection of the Doom 3 combat zone championship match could be a winner...
That depends on the model of projector you are talking about. There are models that cost $150K but I suspect that the ones in the majority of cineplexes are the somewhat cheaper ones.
The talk of price and resolution is all somewhat off mark since the costs are almost exclusively development costs. There are tens of thousands of cinema screens to be updgraded. Once a standard is decided on and the upgrade process looks like a sure thing the cost of the projector will fall quickly, once it reaches $20K expect most screens to be digital as the studios will not be striking many prints and those they do strike will cost more to rent than before. Expect the resolution chosen to be entirely adequate.
The film world will then divide into geeks who want to stick to 35mm and those who have their own private cinema quality setups.
I find the discussion of audiophilia and the like irritating beyond belief. Just as the guy earlier in the thread thought that a 35mm print had higher resolution than the digital source there are audiophiles who pay $5,000 for a $250 Philips CD player in a different box - and will still wax lyrical as to the quality of the drive mechanism making the difference.
What I am suprised folk have not discussed is the range of new content that can be brought to the cinema screen at low cost. For example all night screenings of Seinfeld or the X-Files. We will probably see more rock concert movies.
Sounds like the dweebs didn't calibrate the dolby properly. The cinema setups have the ability to delay each sound channel by a specific amount so that the time it takes the sound to travel to various parts of the theatre is accounted for.
The other delay introduced in a 35 mm setup is that the sound pickup is a variable distance from the shutter. The soundtrack is 1.5 seconds away from the picture on the film but there is always an adjustment available (which you need since the adjustment in the dolby only allows a positive delay so you need the sound from the film to be slightly ahead of the picture so you can slow it in the dolby)
So if the sound pickup was off when they set up the dolby the dolby will have a compensating delay. Then when you stick the digital input in the picture and sound are precisely synchronized and the compensation in the dolby is way off.
IANAL but you are correct, I spent a fair bit of time wih lawyers who write such stuff and they wory a lot about enforceability.
Many shrinkwrap products disclaim merchantability but it is unlikely that the courts would consider the clause enforceable and bar a claim on the basis of it.
The more relevant consideration is in what circumstances would ReplayTV activate the clause? I suspect that if they get that desperate that there is not much ReplayTV left to go sue.
These stupid clauses do however have material effect, but not the one you think. They allow ReplayTV to recognise revenue that otherwise they would have to defer since there is an ongoing service commitment. No 'commitment', no need to defer the revenue.
cheap bt878 video capture card
Hollywood+ mpeg playback card
DVD rom
Going to the allwell web site the box looks OK but only has two PCI slots so using them well is going to be critical.
I would really like to be able to put a firewire card into at least one of the slots so that the device can output to an external disk. There is a version of the box that comes with an MPEG2 decoder which looks a better option in that case.
Also I would probably look for a satelite TV interface card as I use dish TV. I have seen ads for such but they are pricier than normal interface cards. This choice may well mean going the windows XP route since I have no intention of writing my own drivers (been there, done that).
The problem with this build is that it doesn't leave space for a radio card as well. The problem we have found with the Dishplayer PVR (based on ultimate TV we think) is that we keep wanting to rewind and playback radio as well...
I am not a lawyer, but you don't have a clue.
The courts are the ultimate arbiters of contract law. If the courts decline to enforce contract terms then they are void.
Shrinkwrap type 'contracts' are problematic in many ways, not least because there is unequal bargaining power. It is a unilateral declaration by one side of what the terms of the agreement are. Such can be declared 'contracts of adhesion' and considered invalid by the courts. Invalid does not mean illegal, a term may be perfectly legal in a contract negotiated between two parties but not legal when it is unilaterally imposed.
I often use the example of car parking stations. You generally just drive in and get a ticket and there are no terms obvious. Somewhere just inside the carpark will be a big sign with the terms of use displayed. If you don't like the terms you can generally go back out without payment but continuing on implies your acceptance of the terms. That's settled law in Australia at least.
Actually it is settled law but not the way you think. In contract law it is impossible to exclude claims in negligence. So if a multi story car park collapses due to lack of maintenance the owner/operator is liable irregardless of what he put on the ticket. In fact there can even be a contract term stating that the owner is not liable in that precise circumstance and it is still invalid.
Incidentally that is why legal constructs such as bills of lading and letters of credit are so interesting, they are not contracts and are not subject to contract law and cannot in fact be constructed using contract law. That is why the digital signature acts were required to recognise the legality of digital signatures on such documents.
Clauses that attempt to restrict remedies were almost always thrown out by the US courts 20 years ago. Today clauses that restrict redress to arbitration are sometimes recognised, but by no means in every case. I suspect however that the provisions put in to many cell phone contracts that prohibit class action lawsuits are unenforceable.
They may in the US. The classical concert halls I am familiar with use live performers without amplification of any kind...
Actually believe it or not, the elimination of the Trabant alone Germany managed to meet its entire obligations for reductions in sulphur, nitrous oxide, Co etc. emissions. This is none too suprising when you learn that the Trabants output of pollutants were 10 to twenty times higher than those of Western cars, so the Trabants alone created as much of those types of pollution as all the cars in Western Europe put together.
However such anecdotes aside, better fuel efficiency is not just good for the environment, it is good for America. Making SUVs meet the same fuel efficiency standards as other cars would save more oil each year than the entire reserves in ANWR. If finding new oil resources is good for national security then so is conservice those we already have. Making air conditioners meet higher efficiency standards means lower running costs for owners and needing to build fewer power stations. Quite important in states like california where air conditioning is 30% of peak load and Bush affiliated companies like Enron have been gouging the state by manipulating the energy market.
Well, I must bow to you on this one. You are so good at it that you can spot strawmen that even the poster wasn't aware of. Bravo!
Have fun nursing your hatred... it's coming along really well.
Republican spin technique at work here. First you claim that anyone who disagrees with Bush administration policy 'hates America', then when called on it you deny the accusation while simultaneously repeating it.
I note that you don't dispute the facts of the post, all you do is resort to name calling.
1) Get millions of users through providing an illegal service.
2) Force the RIAA to turn over a cut of all online music distribution sales.
3) Use P2P to sell (now legal) content provided by other users with very low overhead.
The Napster service effectively made it impossible to sell music online because Napster was making it available for free.
Using peer to peer to sell content is a quite bizare notion. If I want to buy a music track I don't want to have to wait for someone with the right track to log in so I can download it. Bandwidth just isn't that expensive. If local caching is necessary that can be provided in Akamai type fashion.
Now the that the 'respectable' attempts at P2P like Napster are gone, all the RIAA has to do is sit back and wait for secure online networks and hardware to be developed, and they get to keep all the marbles.
What marbles? Looks to me like the RIAA is watching its business model evaporate. CD sales were already slowing before Napster went online. Classical sales had already stagnated after people had completed transition from vinyl to CD. There were signs that this was happening in the pop area although the effect was somewhat masked by an expansion of the mid 30s to 40s market as the pop market ceased to be a purely youth phenomena.
The recording industry has failed to work out a strategy to sell content in a format that can be consumed by the next generation distribution format - bits not atoms. Anyone who has a hard disk based MP3 player knows that it is a vastly superior format to CD, within a few years it will be the dominant format, yet the recording industry has no idea how to market to that format, except to sell me a CD and have me rip it (which they are doing their damndest to stop).
What is really stupid is that none of the schemes proposed for DRM address the real issue - raising revenue. The RIAA is like Louis Freeh who spent his time at the FBI chasing laws to make use of encryption illegal rather than working out strategies to combat terrorism, in the RIAA's case they are spending their energy making piracy illegal but have no interest in establishing mechanisms so consumers can actually buy their product.
If you are looking at the effect a given country has on the planetary ecosystem harm done per person does seem a reasonable way to measure things.
Dividing by 'economic output' is a deceit when the increase in economic output is in information products.
Comparing as the original post did the proposed 8% reduction in real terms by the EU with the 7% reduction per unit of economic activity by the US without stating the different basis is a deceit. The 'reduction' in output rate under the Bush plan comes exclusively from economic growth.
Constantly casting everything like the US is the Great Satan isn't going to be very convincing to the people who don't already agree with you.
Spot the straw man time, anyone who disagrees with US policy is anti-american, if not a member of Al-Qaeda! It is quite possible to be pro-US and anti-George W. Bush. The fact that the Bush camp constantly try shroud and flag waving makes them opportunists, not patriots. I don't think anyone needs lessons in patriotism from someone who hid from the draft in the National guard and was AWOL if not a deserter for much of it.
Since when did patriotism mean accepting without argument an energy policy written by Keneth Lay?
Napster had good effects as performance art, however I always thought that the idea that Napster would make money out of the scheme was kinda wierd.
Napster became popular by offering people something for nothing. While a lot of the criticism of the record industry is valid the justification of Napster rapidly became an exercise in rationalisation 'the record industry rips off artists, so I am morally justified in ripping them off as well'.
The recording industry did not help in their response which completely failed to understand that the principle mechanisms that cause laws to be respected are psychological and not technical.
However the business plans that Napster dreamt up to 'monetize' the user base they built up were pretty slimy, and it is no suprise that their replacements all specialize in propagating scumware that will report your every move to advertisers (and with the recent Ashcroft changes J. Edgar Mueller's FBI), bring up pop up ads at every turn and redirect your DNS to an Idealab! startup so that if and when new.net goes the way of Pets.com your machine will stop working and you won't know how to fix it.
Napster as a political statement worked, but as a business it was never going to survive. Even if it had won the copyright case the inevitable outcome would have been a change in copyright law to outlaw their business - which inevitably would contain even more clauses to push copyright law in the direction of Disney and Time Warner against the public interest.
The MSFT puts are neither of those things as you would know had you read their annual report. Stock splits have no effect on options, most employee stock plans eork from stock issued for that purpose.
The real purpose of the MSFT puts was as a means of fulfilling their promise to buy back MSFT shares. The way that MSFT did this was to sell in-the money puts for the shares in question. This is a highly efficient method of buying back company stock as it means that the purchase price of the stock is discounted by the option price.
This is the method used by almost all the companies that have done stock buy backs. The only time when it is a really bad idea is when a company is buying back stock using capital rather than income. RSA made a major blunder when it decided to use half its reserves to buy back stock at what turned out to be the peak of the market. Investment bankers tend not to like companies accumulating money, especially if there is a financial bubble, they would like to be the only ones left with cash at the trough so they can buy back stuff for cheap.
You have accepted the Bush admin spin, oh sorry it was the Clinton whitehouse that did spin, the hero of Air Force One on 9/1 does not spin.
The real difference is that the Kyoto treaty mandates an actual reduction of greenhouse gases of 8% for the biggest polluters - which includes the US which is per capita the biggest polluter of all.
What the Bush admin 'committed' to was to reduce greenhouse emissions per unit of economic output by 7%. Why is this different? Well if we lived in the Victorian age when economic output was output of physical stuff the commitment might mean something. The US economy grew by 3-4% each year under Clinton but the actual manufacturing base was almost unchanged, the economic growth comes in industries that do not produce much in the way of greenhouse gases, mainly IT.
So in fact comparing like for like the EU is cutting emissions by 8% while the Bush admin is allow itself to increase them by 30%. So don't be suprised if the EU say that the US is not doing its share.
It will be interesting to see what the car industry does with this act since the recent increase in US steel tarifs will cost them (and consumers who buy cars) hundreds of millions. The data on which the tarif was justified is pretty flimsy, not all of the US steel industry is having dificulties. The mini-mill manufacturers in the US are as competative as the ones in the EU or anywhere and can sell steel to the auto industry for less than anyone because of shipping costs. The uncompetative steel producers are operating the old integrated plants
That is an interesting claim, until four years ago MSFT did not exist in the server market. They did not really believe in the model, Bill is a peer to peer sorta guy who hates mainframes.
Sun and EMC do not appear to agree with you. According to them MSFT is to blame for their current woes and threatens their survival. Personaly I think Linux is killing Sun and the EMC model of charging mainframe prices for disk storage was bound to fail sooner or later as network atached storage was comoditized.
My expereience suggests that MSFT servers rarely compete with UNIX. Most NT servers are serving a domain of Windows boxen, few unix boxes serve that role.
The one area of competition is in Web Servers and there Microsoft appears to have a pretty strong hold. Mainly through Frontpage and Active Server Pages.
HTML was not open source. It is an open specification. There are open source browsers writen to that specification but the specification is not the code.
Also the libwww code written at CERN is not open source, it is public domain. There is a big difference. If you modify libwww there are no limits on what you do with it, you can make the modification closed source.
We did not write the license that way because we were ignorant of RMS's politics, far from it. The license was written that way so that companies such as Spyglass and Microsoft could build systems built on our code if they wanted to.
As for reading people's HTML to write code - thats a bug not a feature. The original idea was that the browsers would have the ability to edit Web pages so the end users did not have to learn HTML. Also HTML was originally much cleaner than the current spec which has countless enhancements added in by Netscape in an attempt to make the spec proprietary during the pre-Microsoft browser wars against Spyglass and the Web Consortium. Thats why we have six incompatible mechanisms to change fonts but none of the standard browsers support math markup - bit of a lose for a technology meant to be for scientific publication eh?
Once this was the case, however the real importance of C# is that it finaly merges the Basic and C code development lines. At this point C# provides the full power of C (with some bizare omissions like structure initializers) plus the convenience of VB. The market perception that C# is about Java is only really 40% right, C# is pitched against Java because Java is the language to beat, but the real target audience is Visual Basic programmers who would like a programming language that is as easy to prototype in as a scripting language while still allowing very large projects to be supported.
Equally the suggestion in the intro to the article that Microsoft should switch from IIS to Apache is amazingly clueless. Apache is a great Web server for UNIX boxes, but IIS is a better Web server for NT. IIS is integrated into the O/S at a very fundamental level so that for example the Web server can use the system level file protections to control access to Web resources.
The features that have caused security problems with both Apache and IIS are active code. In the case of IIS three scripting langauages are integrated into the Web server (and more can be added). In the case of Apache the security weaknesses inherent in the CGI design (particularly when a CGI module is written in csh) leads to predictable problems. I don't see that a real difference can be made between the OSS and Microsoft approach here, both groups adopted what is an intrinsically insecure architecture for reasons of expediency and ignorance. Once the feature was in there was no way for the grown ups to take it out again because people used the feature.
I recently started using Visual C#, its the best program development environment I have seen since the VAX LSE. The editor does have some iritating features (like the lack of mouse-less editing), but it does have a lot of cool features like bringing up the template for a method as you enter it - even for user defined methods. The IDE looks and feels like a professional tool, there are few traces of ego-centric features that looked cool to the designer but are not so great for the user - although as with XMLSpy the editor makes the bizare assumption that my preference for editing XML Schemas is through some bizare graphical language of the authors invention rather than as XML schema.
Compare Visual Studio with the UNIX - Emacs - Make IDE and I am afraid the comparison is not favorable to open source.
I am much less interested in open source than I am in extensibility. Unless you want to do a security audit the only reason to want source is to maintain or extend a program. I much prefer a well written and supported extension mechanism than someone chucking a few meg of code at me. The .NET extension mechanisms allow me to write my own language and then use Visual Studio as my IDE for it - and get all the debugging, assistant etc. features for free. That seems somewhat better to me than creating a fork of the emacs and gcc tree for my new language and recreating all those features.
YMMV, but those people who believe that OSS is the one true faith are wrong. There is plenty of room for both models in the market of ideas.
Casio appears to have worked out how to make pocket calculators that are both cheap and reliable. If Palm can't work out how to make its products more reliable they have big problems. This is not the only quality problem I have heard reported.
The real problem is that palm has done very little of significance since the Palm VII came out almost three years ago. All the interesting stuff on PalmOS has come from Sony, Handspring and the cellular companies. Some day the dragonball processor Palms will be on the store shelves, however this is likely to be too little too late.
Palm appear to have an Apple complex. They believe they know what customers want better than their customers. Problem there is that such companies have a habit of getting overly ideological about irrelevances.
I recently acquired a Zaurus 5000, even though the device is first generation it has a much more useful feature set than the Palm. There are plenty of things wrong with it (memory management is hopeless, a 32Mb machine should be able to run a Web browser without any difficulty, the machines we used to design the Web all had less memory.), however the rate of progress has been pretty good. They fixed the problem with the image viewer that meant that it could now view pictures from 2 Megapixel cameras pretty quick.
I suspect that the Zaurus and PocketPC lines will both develop quickly because they are in direct competition.
I can't think of any that does not. But if you really want to you can always run BASH as your VMS shell. On the other hand you can't run the VMS shell on a UNIX box for reasons explained below.
VMS does have equivalent mechanisms to pipes. However I must say that I have never found pipes to be especially usefull. Sure it is cute to be able to do ls * | grep foo. However at least 95% of the times I need to use a pipe in UNIX it is to construct a command feature that VMS provides for free.
Small tools fitting well together strikes me as something more fitting for the label of "logical", than something that is user-friendly only for beginners, and becomes a mess for more advanced users.
The difference between VMS and UNIX is how the tools are structured. In UNIX the command line handling is built into each program separately, so each command has code to extract flags and deal with them. If you want to change the flag assignments you have to recompile the program.
In VMS each command has a CLD definition that specifies the command, the arguments, program file to run etc. This has a lot of useful side effects, if you want to find out the arguments for any VMS command you can enter the command VERB [Command] to dump out the CLD definition.
This structure has a lot of advantages, not least being that if you want to produce a french language version of VMS you can. You can also generate GUI interfaces that will work with any VMS shell command, they simply query the CLD interface to find out all the commands supported and the arguments supported. The GUI will then work with new commands written after it, or user defined commands.
VMS was certainly not a beginner system, the expertise level of you average VMS user is likely to be much higher than that of your average UNIX user. Just because UNIX is dreadful for beginners does not mean it is good for experts. JCL is also dreadful for beginners but only JCL jocks think it is a powerful and elegant system, most impartial observers think that CP/M and MSDOS were a marked improvement over JCL.
NT does not have the UNIX thread model, or rather it has pthreads but the system apps all use a different model. This is not suprising if you know about thread models. pthreads is not generally considered the acme of good design. It is based on Tony Hoare's monitor design which is almost thirty years old now and Hoare introduced a much better design only a few years after monitors. However MULTICS was designed in the intervening years and when SMP Unix systems started to emerge in the late 80s the work was largely driven by the MULTICS work.
Opinionated is my middle name. However, I have to take his word for it. The guy is very experience in such matters and has written a lot of kernel-level networking code.
I don't know who your lecturer was but I'll bet he wasn't Tony Hoare, my Oxford Tutor who along with Per Brich Hansen and Dijkstra invented most of the concepts on which all modern O/S concurrency models are based. If Microsoft thought there was a problem with their threading model I guess they would call him up since he now works for them.
In what way is he inducing either party to break the terms of the agreement?
If a building contractor undertakes to build a house next to mine and makes exessive noise he may well have difficulties that cause him to fail to complete the work per the contract if I complain to the council about the noise. But that is not an interference in the contractual relationship.
don't think it is a great case but I can see it surviving a motion to dismiss for facial insufficency of pleadings (at least under US law).
US law is broken when it comes to motions to dismiss. Because of the idiotic notion that juries are the only legitimate deciders of fact almost any case can be kept going simply by asserting a claim that depends on a question of fact. You can't do that in Oz or Britain, juries were abolished in most civil trials a century ago. So the doctrine that judges cannot decide issues of fact does not apply.
Another claim one could make in the US would be for unfair trade practices, but that is statutory so I am not sure they have something similar in Australia.
I don't see that one sticking either since unfair trade practices would generally apply to the actions of a competitor.
The author does not appear to be making a joke here but it sure is funny as heck. Letsee:
VMS command to get help is HELP, UNIX command, man, or if you want to get useful information try man -k
VMS command to print a file to the console TYPE, UNIX command cat. If you want paged output TYPE /PAGE, UNIX command cat | more
VMS command to list a directory DIRECTORY, UNIX command ls. If you want to get particular info returned in the directory the flags change according to the UNIX variant.
When I first used UNIX the command to get a useful list of current processes was ps -aux. If the UNIX commands were so good why did they change?
Of course if the only system you have ever used is X you may well think that X is the easiest system in the world to use.
So you think your second hand account of some unspecified lecturer's opinions on O/S internals gives you the authority to pontificate on the issue?
I have first hand experience of VMS, NT and Unix internals. I suspect that either the lecturer was as opinionated as yourself, or more likely you didn't spend very much time listening to him either.
As for being a troll, if as you claim you are at Karma 50 and post at zero it sounds to me if a member of the slashcrew has come to an uncomplimentary opinion of you.
I don't see that sticking, the English common law tort is inducement to breach of contract. But where is the contract? There is not one between the spam blacklist service and the ISP. There is not one between the ISP and the ISPs that are using the spam blacklist.
No contract, no interference.