I bought a Panasonic camcorder back in the day when I had a Windows PC, and installed the video editing software that came with it. It had all the usual crap - non-standard buttons, "cool" non-rectangular windows, menus that weren't where they were supposed to be, etc.
But the worst bit was that the video time bar was under the video window and was consequently about 300 pixels long. The most common thing to do was to snarf in a whole tape of video (1 hour) and then chop it up. But at 300 pixels, a 1 pixel change is 30 seconds of video. And the only other controls were play/stop/pause and single frame forward/back.
Yes, that's right. To change your cut point you had two choices: forward/back by 30 seconds, or forward/back by 1/25 second. God forbid your kid ever did anything interesting starting at 15 or 45 seconds past the minute...
"Afraid how our words and actions may be perceived years later and taken out of context, the lack of forgetting may prompt us to speak less freely and openly"
I'm not worried about computers doing this - the same thing applies to my wife. <rimshot/>
(Note to prospective employer in 2041: The above is a joke. Please give me a job.)
I'm not a big music buyer - I usually get CDs and rip them (now not legal in the UK, but decriminialized - wow, that's kind of everyone). For me, DRM is like nuclear waste - no use to anyone and you don't want to get any on you.
Anyway, I bought my first piece of music online from Synth Music Direct (google it), a small independent music store who publishes their download albums cheaper than regular CDs, and you can download in FLAC or MP3, DRM free.
The site's a bit primitive, but they have excellent service (I have exchanged email with the proprietor a couple of times), and they have a wide selection of synth-based music for electronic music fans like me.
So, Nemesis, you got your money for at least one copy of "Gigahertz" because it wasn't covered in DRM. Well done.
Well this lead to stuff like persecution of minority.
And what many theocratic advocates fail to realise is that, if you're in the USA, and you're not Catholic or Baptist, then you're more of a minority than non-religious people are (source: American Religious Identification Survey, 2001)
...probably not to PJ herself, obviously, but in terms of the material facts on the Groklaw website.
Every substantive article on Groklaw has had extensive reference to the original court sources (Pacer, etc.). The facts are a matter of public record, and can be checked. And are checked by the members of the Groklaw community.
This reminds me of the conversation in Dark Star, where Doolittle is trying to convince Bomb Number 20 not to explode by using solipsist reasoning:
Doolittle:...all you remember is merely a series of sensory impulses which you now realize have no real, definite connection with outside reality.
Bomb #20: True. But since this is so, I have no real proof that you're telling me all this.
Doolittle: That's all beside the point. I mean, the concept is valid no matter where it originates.
This is why the PJ question is, for our purposes, also beside the point. For SCO, as for Bomb Number 20, the concepts are valid, no matter there they originate.
The big thing I learned was that programming isn't everything.
Absolutely, you need to read "Writing Solid Code" and "Code Complete" and the other coding books, and write lots of code to spec and to deadline, but remember that getting a good program is a lot more than just writing good code.
Understand the requirements. Look behind the requirements to see what the customer really needs. Learn to distinguish "good" from "cool". Write tests! Write documentation (even if it's just documentation comments). Know how the delivery process works. Use a source code control system. Talk to people! Work in a team. Understand how the user thinks about the task that's going on. Study usability!
Oh, and google for "How to Write Unmaintanable Code", have a good laugh, and then resolve never to do anything that you have just seen.
The vibrational states of the enantiomers should be identical, but this is only true when measured in isolation.
Remember that the "measurement" happens when the compound is attached to the receptor protein. The binding site will very likely be asymmetric and thus bind differently to the two enantiomers, and this will affect the vibration / electron tunneling properties differently for each. This should allow them to be distinguished.
A BBC article suggests that 1mg would be enough to kill Alexander Litvinenko, given the time and symptoms he experienced.
If you grind through the math, then this is equivalent to approximately 100 GBq (100 billion decays/second) of Polonium. Other sources have suggested 1 GBq would do as well.
The needle sources sold contain 0.1 microCuries (what is it with America and obsolete units anyway) which is about 3.7kBq, or less than 1/1000 of a percent of 1 GBq.
Like so many things, predicted by the late, great, Douglas Adams. But for shoes.
From Wikipedia:
In the critical condition, demand for shoes rises faster than the capacity to make good quality footwear. As shoe quality decreases, the demand increases further because shoes wear out faster and need to be replaced more often; as the demand for shoes increases, cheap mass production causes shoe quality to drop even more. What results is a spiral of increasing shoe demand and decreasing shoe quality. Eventually, this destabilises the economy to the point where it is "no longer economically viable to build anything other than shoe shops", and planetary society collapses.
A typical illustration of the tools in the story is when Waldo needs to do micro-dissection on the scale of cellular walls. He uses human-sized waldos to make smaller waldos, then those to make even smaller waldos, and continues the series until he has some small enough to work at the cellular scale. It doesn't occur to him to use conventional fabrication techniques to skip straight down to the smallest size.
The primary application for these hands is obvious: build even smaller ones!
I'm currently gradually replacing many of my non-critical mains halogen bulbs with warm white LEDs. Instant-on, warm white colour, but not as bright as the 50W incandesent. They are about 20W equivalent light output, and take about 2w of electrical power.
You can get a pack of 6 of these for £24 (that's about $40 for those on the left hand side of the Atlantic), from i-estore.co.uk.
Disclaimer: I'm not associated with these guys - just pointing out a nice solid-state alternative to CF bulbs that is getting more affordable all the time.
This experiment is very poorly controlled (who's to say that two people aren't also on the phone to one another, for example), and some startlingly accurate correlations will occur. These will be debunked as the players come under scrutiny and the communication channels between players are detected.
However, after these have been removed, some correlations between players will still remain, below the level of staistical significance. Rather than being dismissed as insignificant, the woo-woo crowd will seize on these random correlations as "proof of need of more research".
This prediction is not the result of clairvoyance, rather it is an educated guess based on previous observations of this kind of setup.
I am ashamed to see that we in the UK are lagging behind at only 11.65%, behind even France. Could this be due to the very quick uptake of broadband in the UK by novice users? Or just a lack of awareness of the alternatives?
So, why doesn't the player remember the last subtitle setting? That would be good.
I had a disk the other day (Batman Begins, IIRC) where there were about 25 audio tracks, and you were forced to choose one every time you play the disk, before all the tedious copyright notices. You don't choose by language, though. You choose by country (presumably so that you can be served the appropriate tedious copyright notices), and the UK is on the THIRD SCREEN of choices. Have these producers ever actually sat down and tried to watch this disk?
I want to be paid for my time for non-skippable content.
At present that's only on DVDs, so let's say it's a conservative 1 minute per DVD, 5 DVDs per week. That's 4 hours per year. My standard business charge-out rate is $250/hour, so that's about $1000 the DVD alliance owes me per year.
Worth claiming? Maybe. Will they pay? No chance.
Here's an idea - you put the DVD in, it just plays the damn movie. If I want a menu, extras, commentary, whatever, I'll press the "menu" button. And the copyright warning is on the packaging so it's in plain sight but doesn't take up my valuable time.
Snow Crash is something that should have been stamped on. Not the book, all the wannabe 3D interactive environment fans that came out of it. On the 2D web, I can get from Google to anywhere in 1 click. In Snow Crash, I have to schlep about on a virtual motorbike. No thanks.
This was always a big problem with the 3D environments, that it's so easy to mimic the real world, including all the spatial problems of the real world. I am not saying that 3D will not replace 2D at some point, but that point will not be recreating virtual malls or whatever.
BTW, does anyone remember the Virtual World Wide Web (vwww.com) from the mid-90's?
"For personal use, you'd be copying it anyway, so it wouldn't matter."
Speak for yourself, bub. When my various sets of MSDN subscriptions expired, that's when I switched to Linux. I don't have any software on any of my machines which is in breach of license, as far as I know.
I think that it is hypocritical to use M$'s questionable business tactics as an excuse for copyright violation.
As for your other points, fair enough. But this will change.
You're probably right. But for me, there are three killer points about OOo:
1. Price. There's no way I'm going to shelling out £100+ for something I use occasionally. 2. Open Document Support. I am very wary about storing things in proprietary formats. 3. It's not Microsoft. Well, I am a Slashdot reader, after all:-)
For these, I'm prepared to stick with it; as others have said it's improving fast.
Sorry to reply twice to the same post, but I was struck by one of the headings on the site (follow the About HD DVD link from the home page):
"Designed to meet Hollywood's highest expectations"
Aha. Not the Customer's highest expectations. Hollywood's. That makes me, the customer, feel so much better, since we know how customer-focussed Hollywood are. I'm so much happier without the temptation of skipping the copyright notice for Finland on my DVDs, and I'm glad of the sense of suspense waiting for stuff to come out on a region 2 disk.
Hollywood's highest expectations, as always, seem to be "Make money. Make more money. Make other people produce so as to make more money." (Hmm. Sounds familiar...) Maybe that should be "consume", not "produce".
"There's a case of a pot calling the kettle black for yah..."
True, but OSDL, as the open-source kettle, should not have released a study like this and blackened itself. Many of the criticisms levelled at the original MS-funded study can be levelled right back again at this one, and the OSDL should have seen them coming.
Never wrestle with a pig. You get covered in dirt, and the pig enjoys it.
Anyone with something to really hide will use a third-party encryption system, and "lose" the keys to that instead.
Everyone else* will have a computer with a guaranteed back door, which I am willing to bet will be open to hackers on about Day 3 after Vista's launch.
* - Well, everyone else who's not running Linux, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you just been reading "The Sheep Look Up" by John Brunner?
I bought a Panasonic camcorder back in the day when I had a Windows PC, and installed the video editing software that came with it. It had all the usual crap - non-standard buttons, "cool" non-rectangular windows, menus that weren't where they were supposed to be, etc.
But the worst bit was that the video time bar was under the video window and was consequently about 300 pixels long. The most common thing to do was to snarf in a whole tape of video (1 hour) and then chop it up. But at 300 pixels, a 1 pixel change is 30 seconds of video. And the only other controls were play/stop/pause and single frame forward/back.
Yes, that's right. To change your cut point you had two choices: forward/back by 30 seconds, or forward/back by 1/25 second. God forbid your kid ever did anything interesting starting at 15 or 45 seconds past the minute...
"Afraid how our words and actions may be perceived years later and taken out of context, the lack of forgetting may prompt us to speak less freely and openly"
I'm not worried about computers doing this - the same thing applies to my wife. <rimshot/>
(Note to prospective employer in 2041: The above is a joke. Please give me a job.)
I'm not a big music buyer - I usually get CDs and rip them (now not legal in the UK, but decriminialized - wow, that's kind of everyone). For me, DRM is like nuclear waste - no use to anyone and you don't want to get any on you.
Anyway, I bought my first piece of music online from Synth Music Direct (google it), a small independent music store who publishes their download albums cheaper than regular CDs, and you can download in FLAC or MP3, DRM free.
The site's a bit primitive, but they have excellent service (I have exchanged email with the proprietor a couple of times), and they have a wide selection of synth-based music for electronic music fans like me.
So, Nemesis, you got your money for at least one copy of "Gigahertz" because it wasn't covered in DRM. Well done.
And what many theocratic advocates fail to realise is that, if you're in the USA, and you're not Catholic or Baptist, then you're more of a minority than non-religious people are (source: American Religious Identification Survey, 2001)
...probably not to PJ herself, obviously, but in terms of the material facts on the Groklaw website.
Every substantive article on Groklaw has had extensive reference to the original court sources (Pacer, etc.). The facts are a matter of public record, and can be checked. And are checked by the members of the Groklaw community.
This reminds me of the conversation in Dark Star, where Doolittle is trying to convince Bomb Number 20 not to explode by using solipsist reasoning:
This is why the PJ question is, for our purposes, also beside the point. For SCO, as for Bomb Number 20, the concepts are valid, no matter there they originate.
Seconded, wholeheartedly.
The big thing I learned was that programming isn't everything.
Absolutely, you need to read "Writing Solid Code" and "Code Complete" and the other coding books, and write lots of code to spec and to deadline, but remember that getting a good program is a lot more than just writing good code.
Understand the requirements. Look behind the requirements to see what the customer really needs. Learn to distinguish "good" from "cool". Write tests! Write documentation (even if it's just documentation comments). Know how the delivery process works. Use a source code control system. Talk to people! Work in a team. Understand how the user thinks about the task that's going on. Study usability!
Oh, and google for "How to Write Unmaintanable Code", have a good laugh, and then resolve never to do anything that you have just seen.
The vibrational states of the enantiomers should be identical, but this is only true when measured in isolation.
Remember that the "measurement" happens when the compound is attached to the receptor protein. The binding site will very likely be asymmetric and thus bind differently to the two enantiomers, and this will affect the vibration / electron tunneling properties differently for each. This should allow them to be distinguished.
A BBC article suggests that 1mg would be enough to kill Alexander Litvinenko, given the time and symptoms he experienced.
If you grind through the math, then this is equivalent to approximately 100 GBq (100 billion decays/second) of Polonium. Other sources have suggested 1 GBq would do as well.
The needle sources sold contain 0.1 microCuries (what is it with America and obsolete units anyway) which is about 3.7kBq, or less than 1/1000 of a percent of 1 GBq.
Like so many things, predicted by the late, great, Douglas Adams. But for shoes.
From Wikipedia:
In the critical condition, demand for shoes rises faster than the capacity to make good quality footwear. As shoe quality decreases, the demand increases further because shoes wear out faster and need to be replaced more often; as the demand for shoes increases, cheap mass production causes shoe quality to drop even more. What results is a spiral of increasing shoe demand and decreasing shoe quality. Eventually, this destabilises the economy to the point where it is "no longer economically viable to build anything other than shoe shops", and planetary society collapses.
10 posts and no-one's mentioned "Waldo" yet?
From Wikipedia (Waldo (short story)):
The primary application for these hands is obvious: build even smaller ones!
I'm currently gradually replacing many of my non-critical mains halogen bulbs with warm white LEDs. Instant-on, warm white colour, but not as bright as the 50W incandesent. They are about 20W equivalent light output, and take about 2w of electrical power.
You can get a pack of 6 of these for £24 (that's about $40 for those on the left hand side of the Atlantic), from i-estore.co.uk.
Disclaimer: I'm not associated with these guys - just pointing out a nice solid-state alternative to CF bulbs that is getting more affordable all the time.
Here's my prediction of what will happen.
This experiment is very poorly controlled (who's to say that two people aren't also on the phone to one another, for example), and some startlingly accurate correlations will occur. These will be debunked as the players come under scrutiny and the communication channels between players are detected.
However, after these have been removed, some correlations between players will still remain, below the level of staistical significance. Rather than being dismissed as insignificant, the woo-woo crowd will seize on these random correlations as "proof of need of more research".
This prediction is not the result of clairvoyance, rather it is an educated guess based on previous observations of this kind of setup.
I am ashamed to see that we in the UK are lagging behind at only 11.65%, behind even France. Could this be due to the very quick uptake of broadband in the UK by novice users? Or just a lack of awareness of the alternatives?
So, why doesn't the player remember the last subtitle setting? That would be good.
I had a disk the other day (Batman Begins, IIRC) where there were about 25 audio tracks, and you were forced to choose one every time you play the disk, before all the tedious copyright notices. You don't choose by language, though. You choose by country (presumably so that you can be served the appropriate tedious copyright notices), and the UK is on the THIRD SCREEN of choices. Have these producers ever actually sat down and tried to watch this disk?
I want to be paid for my time for non-skippable content.
At present that's only on DVDs, so let's say it's a conservative 1 minute per DVD, 5 DVDs per week. That's 4 hours per year. My standard business charge-out rate is $250/hour, so that's about $1000 the DVD alliance owes me per year.
Worth claiming? Maybe. Will they pay? No chance.
Here's an idea - you put the DVD in, it just plays the damn movie. If I want a menu, extras, commentary, whatever, I'll press the "menu" button. And the copyright warning is on the packaging so it's in plain sight but doesn't take up my valuable time.
Snow Crash is something that should have been stamped on. Not the book, all the wannabe 3D interactive environment fans that came out of it. On the 2D web, I can get from Google to anywhere in 1 click. In Snow Crash, I have to schlep about on a virtual motorbike. No thanks.
This was always a big problem with the 3D environments, that it's so easy to mimic the real world, including all the spatial problems of the real world. I am not saying that 3D will not replace 2D at some point, but that point will not be recreating virtual malls or whatever.
BTW, does anyone remember the Virtual World Wide Web (vwww.com) from the mid-90's?
Double
Blind
Controlled
Trial
"For personal use, you'd be copying it anyway, so it wouldn't matter."
Speak for yourself, bub. When my various sets of MSDN subscriptions expired, that's when I switched to Linux. I don't have any software on any of my machines which is in breach of license, as far as I know.
I think that it is hypocritical to use M$'s questionable business tactics as an excuse for copyright violation.
As for your other points, fair enough. But this will change.
You're probably right. But for me, there are three killer points about OOo:
:-)
1. Price. There's no way I'm going to shelling out £100+ for something I use occasionally.
2. Open Document Support. I am very wary about storing things in proprietary formats.
3. It's not Microsoft. Well, I am a Slashdot reader, after all
For these, I'm prepared to stick with it; as others have said it's improving fast.
Sorry to reply twice to the same post, but I was struck by one of the headings on the site (follow the About HD DVD link from the home page):
"Designed to meet Hollywood's highest expectations"
Aha. Not the Customer's highest expectations. Hollywood's. That makes me, the customer, feel so much better, since we know how customer-focussed Hollywood are. I'm so much happier without the temptation of skipping the copyright notice for Finland on my DVDs, and I'm glad of the sense of suspense waiting for stuff to come out on a region 2 disk.
Hollywood's highest expectations, as always, seem to be "Make money. Make more money. Make other people produce so as to make more money." (Hmm. Sounds familiar...) Maybe that should be "consume", not "produce".
I also sent them a communication. It feels like spitting into the wind, but so what? It's my vote with my wallet that really counts.
"There's a case of a pot calling the kettle black for yah..."
True, but OSDL, as the open-source kettle, should not have released a study like this and blackened itself. Many of the criticisms levelled at the original MS-funded study can be levelled right back again at this one, and the OSDL should have seen them coming.
Never wrestle with a pig. You get covered in dirt, and the pig enjoys it.
Anyone with something to really hide will use a third-party encryption system, and "lose" the keys to that instead.
Everyone else* will have a computer with a guaranteed back door, which I am willing to bet will be open to hackers on about Day 3 after Vista's launch.
* - Well, everyone else who's not running Linux, of course.