What makes you think I made up my mind in advance? The reason I watched the film is because I've heard good arguments on both sides of the copyright debate and was hoping to learn something new that would help me decide one way or the other. I was unsatisfied in this regard. Not trying to be harsh, but the movie just seemed shallow to me.
Sorry to disappoint you regarding your impression of "Slashdotters". At my age (40), I may be a bit older than the audience you are trying to reach.
Technically, you may be right. There are some very good photographers out there who need this level of sophistication. However, I think that many technophiles think they need this when they don't. (I looked at your photos, and frankly I suspect this category may include you.)
98% of the people who use Photoshop don't need this. For the small number who do, RAW works, right? I can't see camera makers investing the effort into a standard RAW-like format for such a small audience, since they can't make any additional money from doing so. That's why I suspect HD Photo won't catch on.
I disagree with you about RAW in particular and Ken Rockwell in general. He is a bit of a windbag, but much of what he says is spot-on artistically. Of course technophiles are going to disagree with him, because he goes out of his way to make fun of them. But his position is valid (if exaggerated) - a camera is just a tool, and it doesn't make the picture for you any more than a hammer builds a house for you.
FWIW, I'm a serious amateur photographer and I use JPEG format. RAW isn't worth the hassle for me.
I don't know much about HD Photo, but I do think that Rockwell is right philosophically - an incremental improvement that no one needs (yes, like AM Stereo) will tend to fail.
There is conflicting popular opinion on whether there is any meaningful difference between nigga and nigger as a spoken term. Many people consider the terms to be equally pejorative.
I went and download the film using Bit Torrent. I felt very cutting edge doing this! I could feel my hipness level rising.
I watched the first third of the film, then skipped around in the rest of the film. The first section of the film discussed an important copyright infringement case surrounding the use of samples. However, in spite of the clever editing employed, the movie didn't illuminate the issue very well. I was left wanting to understand more about the sample itself (which I couldn't hear well at all), and whether it fell under fair use.
The second section of the file discussed another important musical work based on sampling: DJ DangerMouse's Grey Album, which combines vocals from Jay-Z over samples from the Beatles' White Album. The interview with DangerMouse intrigued me, but the movie again left me wanting to understand in more depth. I decided to cut to the chase and listen to the Grey Album itself.
Back to BitTorrent I went, and downloaded the Grey Album from the Pirate Bay. I felt even cooler this time around! While the album downloaded, I watched a bit more of the movie, in which the Pirate Bay guys talked about their site. To be honest, I found their position to be nearly incomprehensible, but I couldn't tell if this was because of the movie being vague or the Pirate Bay guys themselves being hard to understand (language issues, maybe?). But when they invoked Freedom of the Press in defense of the Pirate Bay, I decided I had seen enough.
By then, the album was nearly downloaded. When it finished, I cued it up in Winamp (how cool am I now!!!), and started it playing. The Beatles samples were very nicely done (I'm a big Beatles fan), but every time Jay-Z opened his mouth, I cringed. Hearing him sing/talk about N*ggers over the intro to While My Guitar Gently Weeps was nearly more than I could bear.
I thought to myself: What does Paul McCartney think of this? He probably doesn't like it much (and who could really blame him). What does Jay-Z think of this? He probably loves it! Is that enough to give DangerMouse the right to distribute Jay-Z's vocals with the Beatles as backup musicians? Interesting idea, but not persuasively executed. It's just not compelling enough to overthrow the existing paradigm.
And that's pretty much how I felt about the movie as well.
I used to work at a consulting firm populated mostly by men who wouldn't be caught dead putting a smile icon in an email. Still, the usefulness of a way to indicate a light-hearted comment could not be denied. This was done by putting the word "grin" in angle-brackets, thusly:
You are an idiot.<grin> This evolved rapidly into a little tag that was trivial to type:
You are an idiot.<g> Interestingly, the practice declined after a particular employee abused it by repeatedly trying to disguise/excuse his anti-social tendencies with grins. I thought of this as the email equivalent of "smiling through gritted teeth".
The crux of the problem is that the OS uses statistical sampling to account for CPU usage by user processes. Since the sampling occurs at regular intervals, it can be avoided by a cheating program. I can see two possible defenses against this:
Modify the sampling mechanism so that it occurs at irregular intervals. This makes it difficult (but probably not impossible) for the cheater to avoid the sampler. (Apparently, the Mac OS uses this technique, although not for security reasons.)
Modify the accounting algorithm so that it is not statistical. Since the OS is responsible for waking/sleeping all processes, it can know exactly how much CPU time each one is using. This would completely eliminate the problem.
The cheat program hogs the CPU by using it when the host OS isn't looking. As a result, it avoids the scrutiny of the OS's scheduler and is actually given a priority boost by some schedulers because of its good behavior.
This is accomplished by sleeping for a fixed amount in between OS clock ticks. The timeline looks like this:
Hardware is set to generate a "tick" event every N milliseconds.
Tick event occurs, which is handled by the OS.
OS notes which process is current running on the CPU and bills it for this tick.
OS wakes up cheating process, which is currently sleeping, and allows it to run.
Cheating process runs for M (< N) milliseconds, then requests to go to sleep for 0 milliseconds. This causes the cheating process to sleep until just after the next tick.
You might be interested to know that Common Sense by Thomas Paine (just as an example) was written anonymously. You think that should have been illegal?
Valid points. I suspect that few proprietary formats maintain high compatibility across decades, so it's more of an industry-wide problem than Microsoft alone. Heck, most software companies from that era (early 90's) don't even exist any more. BTW, you may not be aware that Microsoft has made Word 5.5 for DOS available for free. Perhaps that would've solved your problem.
If you really want longevity, though, I suppose that standardized formats such as HTML and ASCII are your best bet. I guess that's one reason that MS is trying to standardize the Word format.
Is it greedy to want to retain control to your own work? I might disagree with Paul Mcartney on the law, but I wouldn't call his position greedy. I (and you) would probably feel the same way in his situation.
We can't know, or even imagine, non-existance, because we've never experienced it.
Of course we can. Before you were conceived, you did not exist. How was that "experience" for you? I think it's safe to say that death will be like that too.
This is a sincere question, not a troll: What's the appeal of the iPod in the first place?
I'm 40 years old, so it goes without saying that I'm completely uncool, out of touch, etc... but I don't get it.
I bought my wife a little Sony MP3 player for roughly $100. It does pretty much everything that an iPod does, at half the price but with less "style". So why do people pay the premium for an iPod? Just to look cool? Or is there something truly unique about the iPod that I don't understand. I mean it's basically a CF card hooked to a D-A converter with a bit of software glue, right? What magic does Apple add that makes the iPod so appealing?
Without even needing to RTFA, I think we can say with high confidence that "detecting crime" is an AI-complete problem. That is, any system capable of detecting crime must also have the full intelligence of a person in order to make the complex ethical/legal judgments involved. This implies as well that the system will likely have all the accompanying quirks of personhood, including (but not limited to) a favorite baseball team and a strong desire to be on American Idol.
Thus, we can conclude that a) the supposed system is 95% bunk, and b) anyone who eventually invents such a system for real will win the Nobel Prize and be immortalized in human history.
Let's say you have a pool of 10,000 prognosticators. You ask each one to pick the winner of 10 football games. The odds of getting all 10 correct are 1 in 2^10=1024. So out of the pool of 10,000 people, by random chance alone you're likely to get about 10,000/1024 = 10 people who pick all 10 games correctly. Are these people "geniuses"? No, they just got lucky during this particular trial. The odds of them getting game #11 correct are just 50-50.
BTW, this can be used as the basis of a scam against the "geniuses" if you can convince them that they have special powers as a result of the trial.
Moral of the story: Be very careful with statistics.
Slashdot Mirror
What makes you think I made up my mind in advance? The reason I watched the film is because I've heard good arguments on both sides of the copyright debate and was hoping to learn something new that would help me decide one way or the other. I was unsatisfied in this regard. Not trying to be harsh, but the movie just seemed shallow to me.
Sorry to disappoint you regarding your impression of "Slashdotters". At my age (40), I may be a bit older than the audience you are trying to reach.
Technically, you may be right. There are some very good photographers out there who need this level of sophistication. However, I think that many technophiles think they need this when they don't. (I looked at your photos, and frankly I suspect this category may include you.)
98% of the people who use Photoshop don't need this. For the small number who do, RAW works, right? I can't see camera makers investing the effort into a standard RAW-like format for such a small audience, since they can't make any additional money from doing so. That's why I suspect HD Photo won't catch on.
I disagree with you about RAW in particular and Ken Rockwell in general. He is a bit of a windbag, but much of what he says is spot-on artistically. Of course technophiles are going to disagree with him, because he goes out of his way to make fun of them. But his position is valid (if exaggerated) - a camera is just a tool, and it doesn't make the picture for you any more than a hammer builds a house for you.
FWIW, I'm a serious amateur photographer and I use JPEG format. RAW isn't worth the hassle for me.
I don't know much about HD Photo, but I do think that Rockwell is right philosophically - an incremental improvement that no one needs (yes, like AM Stereo) will tend to fail.
I didn't say the movie was biased, I said that it was unpersuasive. It did little to illuminate the issues it raised.
Here's a quote from the very article you link to:
Ken Rockwell has a very good article about this.
I went and download the film using Bit Torrent. I felt very cutting edge doing this! I could feel my hipness level rising.
I watched the first third of the film, then skipped around in the rest of the film. The first section of the film discussed an important copyright infringement case surrounding the use of samples. However, in spite of the clever editing employed, the movie didn't illuminate the issue very well. I was left wanting to understand more about the sample itself (which I couldn't hear well at all), and whether it fell under fair use.
The second section of the file discussed another important musical work based on sampling: DJ DangerMouse's Grey Album, which combines vocals from Jay-Z over samples from the Beatles' White Album. The interview with DangerMouse intrigued me, but the movie again left me wanting to understand in more depth. I decided to cut to the chase and listen to the Grey Album itself.
Back to BitTorrent I went, and downloaded the Grey Album from the Pirate Bay. I felt even cooler this time around! While the album downloaded, I watched a bit more of the movie, in which the Pirate Bay guys talked about their site. To be honest, I found their position to be nearly incomprehensible, but I couldn't tell if this was because of the movie being vague or the Pirate Bay guys themselves being hard to understand (language issues, maybe?). But when they invoked Freedom of the Press in defense of the Pirate Bay, I decided I had seen enough.
By then, the album was nearly downloaded. When it finished, I cued it up in Winamp (how cool am I now!!!), and started it playing. The Beatles samples were very nicely done (I'm a big Beatles fan), but every time Jay-Z opened his mouth, I cringed. Hearing him sing/talk about N*ggers over the intro to While My Guitar Gently Weeps was nearly more than I could bear.
I thought to myself: What does Paul McCartney think of this? He probably doesn't like it much (and who could really blame him). What does Jay-Z think of this? He probably loves it! Is that enough to give DangerMouse the right to distribute Jay-Z's vocals with the Beatles as backup musicians? Interesting idea, but not persuasively executed. It's just not compelling enough to overthrow the existing paradigm.
And that's pretty much how I felt about the movie as well.
But I think it's the space that makes first-class seats so expensive. Surely the food isn't THAT much better. What other "frills" are you thinking of?
-- Brian
This is accomplished by sleeping for a fixed amount in between OS clock ticks. The timeline looks like this:
Seems to come from the owner of the company, although it's hard to be sure.
No, a better analogy is that he knocked on the door with his DHCP request and it let him in.
MOD PARENT UP for reading the TOS correctly.
You might be interested to know that Common Sense by Thomas Paine (just as an example) was written anonymously. You think that should have been illegal?
Valid points. I suspect that few proprietary formats maintain high compatibility across decades, so it's more of an industry-wide problem than Microsoft alone. Heck, most software companies from that era (early 90's) don't even exist any more. BTW, you may not be aware that Microsoft has made Word 5.5 for DOS available for free. Perhaps that would've solved your problem.
If you really want longevity, though, I suppose that standardized formats such as HTML and ASCII are your best bet. I guess that's one reason that MS is trying to standardize the Word format.
I know you're trolling, but just for the record:
.doc format if you want users of prior versions to be able to use them.
Scenario 1. There's a free Word viewer you can download if you don't want to pay for Office.
Scenario 2. You can still save Word documents in good old
Actually, I use SQL Server every day, but thanks for standing up for me :)
I'm a developer, but I've never used MySQL.
Isn't MySQL already open source? If so, how does the Falcon storage engine differ from the "regular" storage engine that comes with MySQL?
Why support their greed?
Is it greedy to want to retain control to your own work? I might disagree with Paul Mcartney on the law, but I wouldn't call his position greedy. I (and you) would probably feel the same way in his situation.
I'd go if I could. NASA's a bit more careful when lives are at stake. They haven't lost anyone in space yet.
We can't know, or even imagine, non-existance, because we've never experienced it.
Of course we can. Before you were conceived, you did not exist. How was that "experience" for you? I think it's safe to say that death will be like that too.
This is a sincere question, not a troll: What's the appeal of the iPod in the first place?
I'm 40 years old, so it goes without saying that I'm completely uncool, out of touch, etc... but I don't get it.
I bought my wife a little Sony MP3 player for roughly $100. It does pretty much everything that an iPod does, at half the price but with less "style". So why do people pay the premium for an iPod? Just to look cool? Or is there something truly unique about the iPod that I don't understand. I mean it's basically a CF card hooked to a D-A converter with a bit of software glue, right? What magic does Apple add that makes the iPod so appealing?
Without even needing to RTFA, I think we can say with high confidence that "detecting crime" is an AI-complete problem. That is, any system capable of detecting crime must also have the full intelligence of a person in order to make the complex ethical/legal judgments involved. This implies as well that the system will likely have all the accompanying quirks of personhood, including (but not limited to) a favorite baseball team and a strong desire to be on American Idol.
Thus, we can conclude that a) the supposed system is 95% bunk, and b) anyone who eventually invents such a system for real will win the Nobel Prize and be immortalized in human history.
Let's say you have a pool of 10,000 prognosticators. You ask each one to pick the winner of 10 football games. The odds of getting all 10 correct are 1 in 2^10=1024. So out of the pool of 10,000 people, by random chance alone you're likely to get about 10,000/1024 = 10 people who pick all 10 games correctly. Are these people "geniuses"? No, they just got lucky during this particular trial. The odds of them getting game #11 correct are just 50-50.
BTW, this can be used as the basis of a scam against the "geniuses" if you can convince them that they have special powers as a result of the trial.
Moral of the story: Be very careful with statistics.