I wonder whether the language in a typical contract specifically mentions the term "CD" or "Compact Disc", because an artist that wanted out of their contract might have some leverage if the record label released an album as a so-called "copy protected music disc" instead of a "Compact Disc." (They can't use "Compact Disc" for a copy-protected disc that doesn't meet CD specs because Philips won't allow it.)
That's a very interesting point about the angle of incidence between the focused light and the sensor. Would film also have similar issues of reflection, diffraction and scattering, especially considering that color film has multiple emulsion layers?
Silicon Film has been promising an interchangeable digital back for 35mm SLR cameras for several years. As far as I know, it's still vaporware. One source indicates that the company ceased operations in 2001. The web site still exists, but seems to have nothing more than an "about us" page.
The article started out okay, although taking a whole page to say little more than "DSLRs are big", but on the second page I came to this statement as a justification for using smaller lenses in DSLRs:
The sensor only receives the light that passes through the center of the lens, while the light on the outer region simply falls to the side of the sensor.
That's fundamentally wrong. A light ray that falls on any part of the lens can be refracted to any point on the focal plane. What gets focused onto the sensor in the center of the focal plane is not just the light that passed through the center of the lens, but part of the light passing through the entire lens.
The author is right that a range of smaller lenses would help reduce camera size, but with a smaller lens comes less light gathering ability and reduced ability to take advantage of depth of field when composing a photo, so smaller lenses would be a compromise in photo quality.
Consider many other forms of business communication that have come and gone (or are at least in decline). Some of these are already all but dead and most likely none of them, except perhaps 800 numbers, will have a 100-year useful life span. Why should a.com domain name be any different? Even postal address forms change more often than that.
TELEX Numbers -- there was a Telex machine at my first employer (circa 1987) and it was a relic even then.
AOL Keywords -- a few years ago in the dot com boom, ads for www.FOO.com would also include "AOL Keyword: FOO" (or worse, "AOL Keyword: FOO.COM") as if nobody could figure it out otherwise. Is that still common or on the decline?
RealNames Keywords -- the same thing in a browser plug-in from some start-up.
800 Numbers -- still going strong but at one time this was the only way to run a mail-order business. Now you can have a huge mail-order business without a phone. (Ever tried to find a phone number on Amazon's web site?)
900 Numbers -- initially promoted as useful for all kinds of information delivery, orders, etc. Now nearly unheard of except for phone sex lines.
FAX Numbers -- being replaced by email, more or less
"Bang" email addresses -- e.g. "uunet!batcomputer!kremvax!joe" Try to send one of those today.
Compuserve user ids -- remember when high-tech companies would actually offer support via a Compuserve account number like "71432,651"?
"Enterprise" Phone Numbers -- forerunners to 800 toll free numbers. I think these died out at least 30 years ago.
700 MB out of 40 GB is still less than 2%, which is pretty negligible. In fact, it's less than a quarter of the difference between 40x2^30 and 40x10^9, which is the difference between what a lot of people think they have and what they've really got. System vendors could hide several CDs of extra junk on most hard drives with less need for a footnote in the specs than explaining the difference between gigabytes and gibibytes.
DMCA is irrelevant here. The copyright on a document created in Office belongs to the author of that document, not Microsoft. If that same author wants to switch over to OpenOffice, he is not circumventing anyone else's rights by opening his own documents. End of story.
A trademark search for "cantenna" comes up empty, so either it's abandoned, or perhaps Heathkit never bothered to register it, but for anyone exposed to ham radio back in the pre-PC days, a cantenna will always be that dummy load made from a paint can filled with oil and a 50 ohm resistor.
This reminds me of the Noval 760, a Z-80 based computer-in-a-desk from the mid/late '70s. 25 years ago, I really wanted one. Can anybody locate a better picture? The one linked above is from an eBay auction and is due to drop off the face of the web soon.
One could probably make a case that gasoline-powered automobiles have had much more devastating negative effects on the world than nuclear weapons and nuclear energy put together: pollution, global warming, urban decay, and so on. If you buy that argument, then it's denigrating to nuclear testing to depict it on an auto license plate.
It's funny to hear some people's reactions as if this is the first time anyone has disturbed the pristine timing of their television shows.
Consider all theatrical releases and most high-budget television drama that's shot on 24fps film: when shown at 30fps NTSC, it goes through 3:2 pulldown, which out of necessity assigns a varying number of video fields to each frame. Oddly enough, the resulting effect gives the material a "film look" that is usually considered a good thing. In fact, some processes exist that attempt to give a similar look to shows that are shot on video.
And when the same 24fps film is broadcast in a PAL country at 25fps, all the broadcaster usually does is just speed up the film! That's much more drastic than removing selected frames, yet does playing the film 4% faster destroy it's dramatic value? Probably not, although it seems like musicals would suffer.
Many commenters have wondered why prosecution was involved rather than just a reprimand or dismissal. It's all a matter of degree. Here's an analogy that came to mind: making personal phone calls is usually against company policy (the phone is there for business use only, and so on), but everybody does it.
If you make the occasional personal call, and don't make too many long-distance ones, nobody but the most anal-retentive employer will care.
If you make so many calls that the cost starts to be an issue, you'll probably get a reprimand and may be asked for a reimbursement.
If you spend all day calling 900 sex lines, you'll probably get dismissed.
If you hack the company's PBX into running your own sex chat lines, the company's probably going to get the lawyers--and perhaps even law enforcement--involved.
So if installing non-business programs across all machines in a network is something like the last case, then perhaps the employer's reaction wasn't terribly out of line.
Concorde is "the world's dirtiest and loudest aircraft?" That's pretty sloppy reporting. It's probably true for commercial airliners, but there are probably many military planes that are louder and belch more smoke. I'll bet that the B-52 is dirtier and the SR-71 is louder.
``But of course we've consistently urged the [government] to promptly resolve all these cases and allow [the detainee(s)] to be reunited with their families.''
That's a recent quote from U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, regarding an academic being held by the government. I've obscured a couple of words only to remove any identification, because in this case it's the Chinese government and the academic in question is someone the Chinese have accused of spying.
So is the double standard apparent yet? When other countries imprison foreigners without promptly filing charges, they're "detainees" and the media coverage in the U.S. is spun accordingly. When the U.S. government imprisons a foreigner, nobody pays attention.
I am working for a research group that develops a tool for checking software *automatically*.
[...much deleted...]
Our tool is still very very buggy and limited.
Doesn't that basically sum up what happens when new 'silver bullet' software technologies hit the real world? I don't mean to knock valuable research, because I know there's much room for improvement in software development tools and techniques, but when you have to apply them to the fuzzy requirements and deadlines of the real world, the results aren't as revolutionary as one would hope.
This is merely my superficial impression, but whenever I watch the NASA feed on TV, I don't get any sense that I'm watching The Right Stuff. Instead, what it looks like are a bunch of corporate middle managers on a packaged junket. Plus, there's too much pomp and circumstance and not enough real progress going on: at every mission launch, NASA has a new sound bite slogan describing the mission in 10 words or less; each "morning" the astronauts are awakened by some special song chosen for some dumb reason. That's the kind of crap that NASA makes available to the public, while at the same time it seems they've been less than forthcoming about difficulties with the ISS.
From the press release: "...167 Silicon Graphics® Octane® visual workstations and other SGI systems were used to create the film."
That statement cleverly lumps together all SGI systems including anything from Onyx2 (high 6 figures), Octane (mid 5 figures) to perhaps SGI1100 Linux systems (low 4 figures). Without knowing the breakdown, it's hard to even guess at the order of magnitude of the investment here.
According to the press release, we're talking about 40 Octanes and 4 Origin 200s. That's interesting, but it's not a very large number; I doubt that it makes Square the "world's largest consumer of SGI machines" as one of the fan sites claims. If so, then perhaps that explains why, as I write this, SGI's stock price is at 53 cents.
It's against FCC rules to use a phone from a hot-air baloon, and from parachutes - both of which are not regulated by the FAA.
Minor corrections here: first, balloons are definitely regulated by the FAA, and second, the FCC restrictions specifically mention cellular phones. Portable phones using other technology (do the old pre-cellular radio telephones still exist?) wouldn't have or need such restrictions.
The PC industry (in the form of Microsoft) will be happy to deliver a system that prevents cheating by refusing to run unapproved drivers. The same system will prevent you from ripping any copyrighted audio or video with hacked drivers, too. So decide which is more important to you: control over your own hardware or online trust.
Slashdot Mirror
Remove trailing slash from URL to make it work:
http://www.ahleman.com/ElectriClerk.html
Somebody has already done one, based on an Underwood typewriter and a Macintosh SE: http://www.ahleman.com/ElectriClerk.html/
I wonder whether the language in a typical contract specifically mentions the term "CD" or "Compact Disc", because an artist that wanted out of their contract might have some leverage if the record label released an album as a so-called "copy protected music disc" instead of a "Compact Disc." (They can't use "Compact Disc" for a copy-protected disc that doesn't meet CD specs because Philips won't allow it.)
That's a very interesting point about the angle of incidence between the focused light and the sensor. Would film also have similar issues of reflection, diffraction and scattering, especially considering that color film has multiple emulsion layers?
Silicon Film has been promising an interchangeable digital back for 35mm SLR cameras for several years. As far as I know, it's still vaporware. One source indicates that the company ceased operations in 2001. The web site still exists, but seems to have nothing more than an "about us" page.
The sensor only receives the light that passes through the center of the lens, while the light on the outer region simply falls to the side of the sensor.
That's fundamentally wrong. A light ray that falls on any part of the lens can be refracted to any point on the focal plane. What gets focused onto the sensor in the center of the focal plane is not just the light that passed through the center of the lens, but part of the light passing through the entire lens.
The author is right that a range of smaller lenses would help reduce camera size, but with a smaller lens comes less light gathering ability and reduced ability to take advantage of depth of field when composing a photo, so smaller lenses would be a compromise in photo quality.
Consider many other forms of business communication that have come and gone (or are at least in decline). Some of these are already all but dead and most likely none of them, except perhaps 800 numbers, will have a 100-year useful life span. Why should a .com domain name be any different? Even postal address forms change more often than that.
TELEX Numbers -- there was a Telex machine at my first employer (circa 1987) and it was a relic even then.
AOL Keywords -- a few years ago in the dot com boom, ads for www.FOO.com would also include "AOL Keyword: FOO" (or worse, "AOL Keyword: FOO.COM") as if nobody could figure it out otherwise. Is that still common or on the decline?
RealNames Keywords -- the same thing in a browser plug-in from some start-up.
800 Numbers -- still going strong but at one time this was the only way to run a mail-order business. Now you can have a huge mail-order business without a phone. (Ever tried to find a phone number on Amazon's web site?)
900 Numbers -- initially promoted as useful for all kinds of information delivery, orders, etc. Now nearly unheard of except for phone sex lines.
FAX Numbers -- being replaced by email, more or less
"Bang" email addresses -- e.g. "uunet!batcomputer!kremvax!joe" Try to send one of those today.
Compuserve user ids -- remember when high-tech companies would actually offer support via a Compuserve account number like "71432,651"?
"Enterprise" Phone Numbers -- forerunners to 800 toll free numbers. I think these died out at least 30 years ago.
700 MB out of 40 GB is still less than 2%, which is pretty negligible. In fact, it's less than a quarter of the difference between 40x2^30 and 40x10^9, which is the difference between what a lot of people think they have and what they've really got. System vendors could hide several CDs of extra junk on most hard drives with less need for a footnote in the specs than explaining the difference between gigabytes and gibibytes.
DMCA is irrelevant here. The copyright on a document created in Office belongs to the author of that document, not Microsoft. If that same author wants to switch over to OpenOffice, he is not circumventing anyone else's rights by opening his own documents. End of story.
A trademark search for "cantenna" comes up empty, so either it's abandoned, or perhaps Heathkit never bothered to register it, but for anyone exposed to ham radio back in the pre-PC days, a cantenna will always be that dummy load made from a paint can filled with oil and a 50 ohm resistor.
This reminds me of the Noval 760, a Z-80 based computer-in-a-desk from the mid/late '70s. 25 years ago, I really wanted one. Can anybody locate a better picture? The one linked above is from an eBay auction and is due to drop off the face of the web soon.
If you want to hear those lyrics, stick around through the credits.
One could probably make a case that gasoline-powered automobiles have had much more devastating negative effects on the world than nuclear weapons and nuclear energy put together: pollution, global warming, urban decay, and so on. If you buy that argument, then it's denigrating to nuclear testing to depict it on an auto license plate.
Actually it's not. Some film material might have been posted in Europe at 25fps, with the intent of slowing it down to 24 for showing in America.
It's funny to hear some people's reactions as if this is the first time anyone has disturbed the pristine timing of their television shows.
Consider all theatrical releases and most high-budget television drama that's shot on 24fps film: when shown at 30fps NTSC, it goes through 3:2 pulldown, which out of necessity assigns a varying number of video fields to each frame. Oddly enough, the resulting effect gives the material a "film look" that is usually considered a good thing. In fact, some processes exist that attempt to give a similar look to shows that are shot on video.
And when the same 24fps film is broadcast in a PAL country at 25fps, all the broadcaster usually does is just speed up the film! That's much more drastic than removing selected frames, yet does playing the film 4% faster destroy it's dramatic value? Probably not, although it seems like musicals would suffer.
Many commenters have wondered why prosecution was involved rather than just a reprimand or dismissal. It's all a matter of degree. Here's an analogy that came to mind: making personal phone calls is usually against company policy (the phone is there for business use only, and so on), but everybody does it.
If you make the occasional personal call, and don't make too many long-distance ones, nobody but the most anal-retentive employer will care.
If you make so many calls that the cost starts to be an issue, you'll probably get a reprimand and may be asked for a reimbursement.
If you spend all day calling 900 sex lines, you'll probably get dismissed.
If you hack the company's PBX into running your own sex chat lines, the company's probably going to get the lawyers--and perhaps even law enforcement--involved.
So if installing non-business programs across all machines in a network is something like the last case, then perhaps the employer's reaction wasn't terribly out of line.
Yeah, but cut-and-paste is the antithesis of proper OO reuse. Closer to OO would be to #include or exec() the files from a classmate's directory.
Concorde is "the world's dirtiest and loudest aircraft?" That's pretty sloppy reporting. It's probably true for commercial airliners, but there are probably many military planes that are louder and belch more smoke. I'll bet that the B-52 is dirtier and the SR-71 is louder.
That's a recent quote from U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, regarding an academic being held by the government. I've obscured a couple of words only to remove any identification, because in this case it's the Chinese government and the academic in question is someone the Chinese have accused of spying.
So is the double standard apparent yet? When other countries imprison foreigners without promptly filing charges, they're "detainees" and the media coverage in the U.S. is spun accordingly. When the U.S. government imprisons a foreigner, nobody pays attention.
I am working for a research group that develops a tool for checking software *automatically*.
[...much deleted...]
Our tool is still very very buggy and limited.
Doesn't that basically sum up what happens when new 'silver bullet' software technologies hit the real world? I don't mean to knock valuable research, because I know there's much room for improvement in software development tools and techniques, but when you have to apply them to the fuzzy requirements and deadlines of the real world, the results aren't as revolutionary as one would hope.
This is merely my superficial impression, but whenever I watch the NASA feed on TV, I don't get any sense that I'm watching The Right Stuff. Instead, what it looks like are a bunch of corporate middle managers on a packaged junket. Plus, there's too much pomp and circumstance and not enough real progress going on: at every mission launch, NASA has a new sound bite slogan describing the mission in 10 words or less; each "morning" the astronauts are awakened by some special song chosen for some dumb reason. That's the kind of crap that NASA makes available to the public, while at the same time it seems they've been less than forthcoming about difficulties with the ISS.
That statement cleverly lumps together all SGI systems including anything from Onyx2 (high 6 figures), Octane (mid 5 figures) to perhaps SGI1100 Linux systems (low 4 figures). Without knowing the breakdown, it's hard to even guess at the order of magnitude of the investment here.
According to the press release, we're talking about 40 Octanes and 4 Origin 200s. That's interesting, but it's not a very large number; I doubt that it makes Square the "world's largest consumer of SGI machines" as one of the fan sites claims. If so, then perhaps that explains why, as I write this, SGI's stock price is at 53 cents.
It's against FCC rules to use a phone from a hot-air baloon, and from parachutes - both of which are not regulated by the FAA. Minor corrections here: first, balloons are definitely regulated by the FAA, and second, the FCC restrictions specifically mention cellular phones. Portable phones using other technology (do the old pre-cellular radio telephones still exist?) wouldn't have or need such restrictions.
The PC industry (in the form of Microsoft) will be happy to deliver a system that prevents cheating by refusing to run unapproved drivers. The same system will prevent you from ripping any copyrighted audio or video with hacked drivers, too. So decide which is more important to you: control over your own hardware or online trust.