The economic benefits of digital projection go almost totally to the studios -- no prints to distribute. But the theater chains are expected to bear the cost of new equipment. Given that they are hurting right now, due to a glut of screens, this is not likely.
Anyway, film is still better than digital -- in resolution, and more importantly, in color and contrast ranges. Its response to light is not just greater, it's totally different (logarithmic rather than linear; there is no clipping). Digital may catch up eventually, but not soon. Unfortunately, if the industry can shaft us with inferior imaging technology, they will.
The "Cold War" was an effort by the Plutocratic West to destroy a political movement that it was threatened by.
News flash: the Soviet Union oppressed and slaughtered millions of its own people, and openly espoused a worldwide process of revolution -- really a form of imperialism -- to bring the whole world under their control.
The Cold War was a response to this. The West did make mistakes, go overboard, and make some nasty allies at times, but they never did anything to compare to the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, and their successors.
If you can't see any differences between the Soviet Union and the free Western democracies, you need to read more history.
I also believe War is perpetrated on The People by a powerful elite (in every nation-state). We should do away with Nation-States and do away with all National Armies That will really brand me a lunatic, Im not, just an idealist because I refuse to believe we aren?t capable of solving the world's problems.
Why will doing away w/ nation states and having a world gov't. solve anything? You would prefer one global elite ruling us all, to a bunch of different elites in different parts of the world?
We have no idea what we're getting into. And we have no idea what we don't know yet about the natural gestation process.
It is a silly and frankly stupid notion that everyone has a right to reproduce biologically, and that that right must be enabled by expensive new technology. If you can't make a child naturally, you can adopt one. God knows there are enough already who need to be adopted.
The "repeaters" in this case can be placed indoors, in front of a window. One of the reasons for developing this system was to bypass the trouble and expense of rooftop transmitters.
And note that even in my summary I mentioned redundancy -- multiple IR beams are designed to compensate for bad atmospheric conditions -- and each hop in the network is a short distance for the same reason.
Once again, Katz gives us "The Outside Scoop"
on
Collateral Damage
·
· Score: 2
Schwarzenegger has made some first-rate action stuff. His Terminator series was great (he's making another).
Gee whiz, thanks for the news flash, Jon! The rest of the world has known for the last year or so that Terminator 3 is in development and production.
I used to think the Katz-bashing was overreaction, but I've come to realize his columns really are so much hot air, with no original insights.
He reminds me of
Jackie Harvey, the Onion's Hollywood columnist...
Speculative fiction, that is. Thomas Pynchon writes about the 18th British scientists Mason and Dixon, who eventually became famous for a massive work of surveying -- laying out the Mason-Dixon line that defines the southern border of Pennsylvania, and separates the northern US from the southern US.
He turns it into a stunningly brilliant, witty, profound "buddy" story. It's written in an amazing pseudo-18th century English, a mix of high class diction and lower class slang, that is actually quite readable and entertaining. The two guys (one a surveyor, one an astronomer) are first teamed up by the Royal Society in London, to go to South Africa and observe a transit of Venus (this really did happen). Eventually they get the commission to survey the famous Line in America.
Along the way there is much detail about astronomical history -- the discovery of Uranus, the struggle to figure out how to use the stars to determine latitude from on board a ship, and how astronomy and land surveying complement each other -- and also stuff about the intense rivalries among the most prominent (real) 18th century British scientists. There is also a lot of humor, some of it based on wordplay and anachronisms, some of it based on a kind of "magic realist" approach (there is a funny Talking Dog character, and an old astronomer/alchemist who shows his students how to levitate and fly around the country along "ley lines").
Oh, don't let me forget the Chinese feng shui master who somehow ends up in North America, accompanying the surveying expedition (and introducing them to the Asian sauce called k'tsiap, which evolves into a condiment we all know well today), and the crazed French chef, pursued by a vengeful robotic duck built in Paris years before. It sounds nuts, but it all works beautifully. And in places the book is profoundly moving, as Mason and Dixon's friendship deepens, and they deal with their own tragedies -- the early death of Mason's beloved wife, Dixon's separation from his father.
I think a comparison to Neal Stephenson is valid and interesting. Stephenson's broad imagination, and tendency to mix serious, satirical and highly technical/speculative ideas into one big collage make him similar to Pynchon. Personally, I think Pynchon is more talented -- after all, he's been writing brilliant novels since the 1960s. But I enjoy both writers, and I imagine many on/. would as well.
Oh, I should briefly mention Pynchon's most famous work: Gravity's Rainbow. It's a staggering, challenging, amazingly huge novel published in the 70s, about the German V2 project during WW2 (and, since it's Pynchon, about many other things too).
If it's a GIF/JPG/PNG I could easily right-click and save it, or just do a screen-capture and slice the seal out. Then I slap it on some spam and send it out!
More to the point, what about those of us who may choose not to receive HTML e-mail? How will text-only messages be certified? With an ASCII-art rendition of the seal? Please.
You just spend about 3 times as many words chewing me out as I did in my original post.
Who's whining?
I pointed out a story which you admit was interesting, and which had been rejected -- twice actually -- by/.'s editors months ago. Yes, I know how many stories they receive, Mr. Anonymous Coward. I still fault the editors for being sloppy --have you noticed how much double-posting goes on lately?
Volume of submissions is no excuse for bad editing.
All my submissions have short, relevant subject lines (like "A look at MS' future plans for Windows") that a competent editor could figure out in 1 second.
Maybe next time, take your own advice before you give it others.
I submitted this story on Blackcomb in AUGUST:
on
A Quick Peek at Longhorn
·
· Score: 5, Informative
For some reason,/. didn't consider a story on future MS operating systems important.
I've noticed a number of older shows in recent years that have seemed "compressed" or sped up in some unnatural way. Often the dialog doesn't even sync with the picture any more. It's very disconcerting to watch...you keep feeling something is subtly wrong, and it gives you a headache in a short time.
Just like the parent poster, I no longer watch shows that have been mangled in this way.
...is that those who make them secret often won't even divulge what it is they've made secret. This is a major problem in a democratic society. In the US we are still dealing with decades of Cold-War-era documents that are difficult to get at. The Freedom of Information Act provides some help, but if you don't know a secret exists, how can you file a request to have it released to you? Also, the gov. is increasingly putting people on trial with secret evidence, that even the defendant and/or their attorney cannot see. This is the sort of thing this country was founded in reaction against.
I sympathize with our Aussie friends on this. At least the USA doesn't have this sort of regime on the Internet (yet).
Speaking of government secrets: ever wonder what the true story is about Bush and the "pretzel?"
I've been waiting to see when M$ would launch an all-out assault on Adobe and Macromedia, with their own graphics and video editing software apps.
Maybe this will be the opportunity they've been waiting for...
Of course, M$ suffers from massive piracy in Asia too.
THE "SINGULARITY" IS PURE SCIENCE FICTION
on
True Names
·
· Score: 2
I'm amazed at how many geeks buy into this without question! It's pure mythology that Vinge dreamed up. I love his novels, but the "Singularity" is indeed the Rapture for atheists. People who lack a belief in any form of supernatural transcendence still have a very human hunger for it...and so they create a version of it that superficially conforms to their worldview (science, or more accurately "scientism," the belief that science is the ultimate way to describe all reality).
No one has ever offered any shred of proof of the Singularity scenario. AI research has not gotten very far, and we can't even agree on what "intelligence" or "consciousness" are. There is NO evidence that we will create "AIs," whatever they are (here's hoping they look nothign like Haley Joel Osment:) ), and there's no evidence that they will start some sort of ever-accelerating self-improvement process, culminating in some kind of movement into a higher plane of existence.
I haven't read any of Vinge's "non-fiction" writings on this subject, but I must say it sounds suspiciously like something that Stanislaw Lem dreamed up a few decades ago. He has some stuff (in a book called _Imaginary Magnitude_) about a series of self-aware computers called the GOLEMs. Each new GOLEM is capable of higher forms of thought, and creates new languages and metalanguages to convey its ideas. Finally the GOLEMs are communicating with each other on a level totally inaccessible to humans.
But again, none of this is SCIENCE. There is no hard basis for any of it, folks. It is FICTION. More accurately, it is MYTHOLOGY...mythology for our technological society, especially for a technologically-obsessed subculture of it. I enjoy it as such, in the same way I enjoy reading alt.conspiracy -- as a student of human nature and culture, not as a "true believer."
In NY state now, you have to have 6 points of proof of name to get a DL. You get certain amounts of points for each of various docs -- out of state license, credit card, ATM card, etc.
You also have to have proof of date of birth, which is the tough one. Basically you need a passport, military ID or birth certificate. I have no passport or military ID, so I have to somehow track down my birth certificate (an original, not a copy) before I can get my NY state license.
I believe all this is post-Sep.-11. It used to be much easier...
It's already the standard photo ID. It makes sense for the feds to require standardization of state IDs, so that all states have to meet the same requirments. E.g., I've lived in NY for a few years, and my wife has an NY state license...but my 4-year-old Florida license is much higher tech (plastic, digital photo, holograms) than the low-tech laminated paper NY state licenses.
You already have to show your license or something similar when flying. The chances of fraud will be reduced if we have common standards for all state ID cards.
With WIPO and others creating interlocking treaties to enforce "intellectual property rights" across national borders, our own 1st Amendment rights may be increasingly threatened.
Things that we'd regard as valid speech may offend other governments or piss off multinational corporations -- I just hope they won't gain the leverage to suppress them across borders. Certainly in areas connected to copyrighted, trademarked and patented material, the big corporations are trying to gain global power to suppress speech they don't like.
Time Canada is owned by AOL-Time Warner. Who do both Apple and AOL-TW see as one of their biggest competitors? Microsoft.
They are natural allies. Maybe Apple is letting them start the buzz a little early. Anyway, I doubt that such a major media outlet would post a big story like this early by mistake. And if they had, I think it would already have been taken down by now.
This is not "censorship" or "oppression." Maybe the tactics used seem heavy handed, but these people were producing and trafficking pirated goods. This is not some new draconian consequence of the DMCA or the WIPO. It has ALWAYS been illegal to pirate other people's creations.
Frankly, I've used pirated software and am happy I was able to get it. But these folks knew the risks they were taking. They got caught. Let's not whine and complain as if it was somehow sneaky or unfair of the government to enforce basic copyright law.
Although we had planned for no one outside of this company to ever use, let alone see the source code, we were now put in a difficult position.
Yes, you realized the solution you chose was incompatible with the plan you'd made. Was that the fault of Linux, or the fault of your bad planning?
We could either give away our hard work, or come up with another solution. Although it was tought to do, there really was no option: We had to rewrite the code, from scratch, for Windows 2000.
There WAS an option: "give away" your hard work. Lots of people gave you the hard work they put into developing Linux. The deal you made by using it was that you'd do the same. Your own mindset -- that all your work had to remain secret for economic reasons -- was the problem here. In fact, the GPL license was rendering tremendous benefits to you, by letting you use the collective work of others for free. The "price" of the free software you used was that you would share your own work, and you chose not to pay it. That was your loss.
Obviously we don't interact with our PCs the same way we interact with television or video game consoles. So I can't really see using one monitor, for example, to surf the net and work and also to watch TV and movies.
But as home networking becomes increasingly common, people may have one "box" that can handle all their computing and audiovisual/entertainment needs. There will be a "workstation" (monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.) and an "entertainment center" (large widescreen TV, audio console, game console), maybe in separate rooms. In fact there may be multiple control/input/output systems, all over the house.
This could be a good thing...we've been hearing about the benefits of the smart house for years. But let's keep an eye on who is going to control and sell us this technology. Apple is clearly interested in the "digital lifestyle" niche, but there's another company that seems far more likely to use its monopoly power and vast cash reserves to dominate in this area. Yes, I mean the owner of WebTV, XBox, and Windoze...Micro$oft.
Slashdot Mirror
The economic benefits of digital projection go almost totally to the studios -- no prints to distribute. But the theater chains are expected to bear the cost of new equipment. Given that they are hurting right now, due to a glut of screens, this is not likely.
Anyway, film is still better than digital -- in resolution, and more importantly, in color and contrast ranges. Its response to light is not just greater, it's totally different (logarithmic rather than linear; there is no clipping). Digital may catch up eventually, but not soon. Unfortunately, if the industry can shaft us with inferior imaging technology, they will.
The "Cold War" was an effort by the Plutocratic West to destroy a political movement that it was threatened by.
News flash: the Soviet Union oppressed and slaughtered millions of its own people, and openly espoused a worldwide process of revolution -- really a form of imperialism -- to bring the whole world under their control.
The Cold War was a response to this. The West did make mistakes, go overboard, and make some nasty allies at times, but they never did anything to compare to the crimes of Lenin, Stalin, and their successors.
If you can't see any differences between the Soviet Union and the free Western democracies, you need to read more history.
I also believe War is perpetrated on The People by a powerful elite (in every nation-state). We should do away with Nation-States and do away with all National Armies That will really brand me a lunatic, Im not, just an idealist because I refuse to believe we aren?t capable of solving the world's problems.
Why will doing away w/ nation states and having a world gov't. solve anything? You would prefer one global elite ruling us all, to a bunch of different elites in different parts of the world?
You are so right.
We have no idea what we're getting into. And we have no idea what we don't know yet about the natural gestation process.
It is a silly and frankly stupid notion that everyone has a right to reproduce biologically, and that that right must be enabled by expensive new technology. If you can't make a child naturally, you can adopt one. God knows there are enough already who need to be adopted.
The "repeaters" in this case can be placed indoors, in front of a window. One of the reasons for developing this system was to bypass the trouble and expense of rooftop transmitters.
And note that even in my summary I mentioned redundancy -- multiple IR beams are designed to compensate for bad atmospheric conditions -- and each hop in the network is a short distance for the same reason.
Schwarzenegger has made some first-rate action stuff. His Terminator series was great (he's making another).
Gee whiz, thanks for the news flash, Jon! The rest of the world has known for the last year or so that Terminator 3 is in development and production.
I used to think the Katz-bashing was overreaction, but I've come to realize his columns really are so much hot air, with no original insights.
He reminds me of Jackie Harvey, the Onion's Hollywood columnist...
Are 11 months not enough?
Speculative fiction, that is. Thomas Pynchon writes about the 18th British scientists Mason and Dixon, who eventually became famous for a massive work of surveying -- laying out the Mason-Dixon line that defines the southern border of Pennsylvania, and separates the northern US from the southern US.
/. would as well.
He turns it into a stunningly brilliant, witty, profound "buddy" story. It's written in an amazing pseudo-18th century English, a mix of high class diction and lower class slang, that is actually quite readable and entertaining. The two guys (one a surveyor, one an astronomer) are first teamed up by the Royal Society in London, to go to South Africa and observe a transit of Venus (this really did happen). Eventually they get the commission to survey the famous Line in America.
Along the way there is much detail about astronomical history -- the discovery of Uranus, the struggle to figure out how to use the stars to determine latitude from on board a ship, and how astronomy and land surveying complement each other -- and also stuff about the intense rivalries among the most prominent (real) 18th century British scientists. There is also a lot of humor, some of it based on wordplay and anachronisms, some of it based on a kind of "magic realist" approach (there is a funny Talking Dog character, and an old astronomer/alchemist who shows his students how to levitate and fly around the country along "ley lines").
Oh, don't let me forget the Chinese feng shui master who somehow ends up in North America, accompanying the surveying expedition (and introducing them to the Asian sauce called k'tsiap, which evolves into a condiment we all know well today), and the crazed French chef, pursued by a vengeful robotic duck built in Paris years before. It sounds nuts, but it all works beautifully. And in places the book is profoundly moving, as Mason and Dixon's friendship deepens, and they deal with their own tragedies -- the early death of Mason's beloved wife, Dixon's separation from his father.
I think a comparison to Neal Stephenson is valid and interesting. Stephenson's broad imagination, and tendency to mix serious, satirical and highly technical/speculative ideas into one big collage make him similar to Pynchon. Personally, I think Pynchon is more talented -- after all, he's been writing brilliant novels since the 1960s. But I enjoy both writers, and I imagine many on
Oh, I should briefly mention Pynchon's most famous work: Gravity's Rainbow. It's a staggering, challenging, amazingly huge novel published in the 70s, about the German V2 project during WW2 (and, since it's Pynchon, about many other things too).
If it's a GIF/JPG/PNG I could easily right-click and save it, or just do a screen-capture and slice the seal out. Then I slap it on some spam and send it out!
More to the point, what about those of us who may choose not to receive HTML e-mail? How will text-only messages be certified? With an ASCII-art rendition of the seal? Please.
*laugh*
/.'s editors months ago. Yes, I know how many stories they receive, Mr. Anonymous Coward. I still fault the editors for being sloppy --have you noticed how much double-posting goes on lately?
You just spend about 3 times as many words chewing me out as I did in my original post.
Who's whining?
I pointed out a story which you admit was interesting, and which had been rejected -- twice actually -- by
Volume of submissions is no excuse for bad editing.
All my submissions have short, relevant subject lines (like "A look at MS' future plans for Windows") that a competent editor could figure out in 1 second.
Maybe next time, take your own advice before you give it others.
For some reason, /. didn't consider a story on future MS operating systems important.
0 738,2802585,00.html
Read it yourself:
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,1
My stepfather-in-law has almost ruined his marriage with this. It's all he does when he isn't at work.
Don't know what can/should be done about it. The question is, who is benefiting from sucking money out of so many people's wallets?
I've noticed a number of older shows in recent years that have seemed "compressed" or sped up in some unnatural way. Often the dialog doesn't even sync with the picture any more. It's very disconcerting to watch...you keep feeling something is subtly wrong, and it gives you a headache in a short time.
Just like the parent poster, I no longer watch shows that have been mangled in this way.
...is that those who make them secret often won't even divulge what it is they've made secret. This is a major problem in a democratic society. In the US we are still dealing with decades of Cold-War-era documents that are difficult to get at. The Freedom of Information Act provides some help, but if you don't know a secret exists, how can you file a request to have it released to you? Also, the gov. is increasingly putting people on trial with secret evidence, that even the defendant and/or their attorney cannot see. This is the sort of thing this country was founded in reaction against.
I sympathize with our Aussie friends on this. At least the USA doesn't have this sort of regime on the Internet (yet).
Speaking of government secrets: ever wonder what the true story is about Bush and the "pretzel?"
with a very early post. (#1?)
Now if only Tom Ridge could figure out which end is up...
And Bush would come clean about the "pretzel" incident.
I've been waiting to see when they'd do it. Adobe and Macromedia are some of the only major producers of desktop apps that M$ hasn't yet gone after.
This may be the moment Bill's been waiting for. Of course, he has his own piracy troubles in Asian markets...
I've been waiting to see when M$ would launch an all-out assault on Adobe and Macromedia, with their own graphics and video editing software apps.
Maybe this will be the opportunity they've been waiting for...
Of course, M$ suffers from massive piracy in Asia too.
I'm amazed at how many geeks buy into this without question! It's pure mythology that Vinge dreamed up. I love his novels, but the "Singularity" is indeed the Rapture for atheists. People who lack a belief in any form of supernatural transcendence still have a very human hunger for it...and so they create a version of it that superficially conforms to their worldview (science, or more accurately "scientism," the belief that science is the ultimate way to describe all reality).
:) ), and there's no evidence that they will start some sort of ever-accelerating self-improvement process, culminating in some kind of movement into a higher plane of existence.
No one has ever offered any shred of proof of the Singularity scenario. AI research has not gotten very far, and we can't even agree on what "intelligence" or "consciousness" are. There is NO evidence that we will create "AIs," whatever they are (here's hoping they look nothign like Haley Joel Osment
I haven't read any of Vinge's "non-fiction" writings on this subject, but I must say it sounds suspiciously like something that Stanislaw Lem dreamed up a few decades ago. He has some stuff (in a book called _Imaginary Magnitude_) about a series of self-aware computers called the GOLEMs. Each new GOLEM is capable of higher forms of thought, and creates new languages and metalanguages to convey its ideas. Finally the GOLEMs are communicating with each other on a level totally inaccessible to humans.
But again, none of this is SCIENCE. There is no hard basis for any of it, folks. It is FICTION. More accurately, it is MYTHOLOGY...mythology for our technological society, especially for a technologically-obsessed subculture of it. I enjoy it as such, in the same way I enjoy reading alt.conspiracy -- as a student of human nature and culture, not as a "true believer."
In NY state now, you have to have 6 points of proof of name to get a DL. You get certain amounts of points for each of various docs -- out of state license, credit card, ATM card, etc.
You also have to have proof of date of birth, which is the tough one. Basically you need a passport, military ID or birth certificate. I have no passport or military ID, so I have to somehow track down my birth certificate (an original, not a copy) before I can get my NY state license.
I believe all this is post-Sep.-11. It used to be much easier...
It's already the standard photo ID. It makes sense for the feds to require standardization of state IDs, so that all states have to meet the same requirments. E.g., I've lived in NY for a few years, and my wife has an NY state license...but my 4-year-old Florida license is much higher tech (plastic, digital photo, holograms) than the low-tech laminated paper NY state licenses.
You already have to show your license or something similar when flying. The chances of fraud will be reduced if we have common standards for all state ID cards.
With WIPO and others creating interlocking treaties to enforce "intellectual property rights" across national borders, our own 1st Amendment rights may be increasingly threatened.
Things that we'd regard as valid speech may offend other governments or piss off multinational corporations -- I just hope they won't gain the leverage to suppress them across borders. Certainly in areas connected to copyrighted, trademarked and patented material, the big corporations are trying to gain global power to suppress speech they don't like.
Time Canada is owned by AOL-Time Warner. Who do both Apple and AOL-TW see as one of their biggest competitors? Microsoft.
They are natural allies. Maybe Apple is letting them start the buzz a little early. Anyway, I doubt that such a major media outlet would post a big story like this early by mistake. And if they had, I think it would already have been taken down by now.
This is not "censorship" or "oppression." Maybe the tactics used seem heavy handed, but these people were producing and trafficking pirated goods. This is not some new draconian consequence of the DMCA or the WIPO. It has ALWAYS been illegal to pirate other people's creations.
Frankly, I've used pirated software and am happy I was able to get it. But these folks knew the risks they were taking. They got caught. Let's not whine and complain as if it was somehow sneaky or unfair of the government to enforce basic copyright law.
Although we had planned for no one outside of this company to ever use, let alone see the source code, we were now put in a difficult position.
Yes, you realized the solution you chose was incompatible with the plan you'd made. Was that the fault of Linux, or the fault of your bad planning?
We could either give away our hard work, or come up with another solution. Although it was tought to do, there really was no option: We had to rewrite the code, from scratch, for Windows 2000.
There WAS an option: "give away" your hard work. Lots of people gave you the hard work they put into developing Linux. The deal you made by using it was that you'd do the same. Your own mindset -- that all your work had to remain secret for economic reasons -- was the problem here. In fact, the GPL license was rendering tremendous benefits to you, by letting you use the collective work of others for free. The "price" of the free software you used was that you would share your own work, and you chose not to pay it. That was your loss.
</lecture>
Yes, I know the original post was a troll...
Obviously we don't interact with our PCs the same way we interact with television or video game consoles. So I can't really see using one monitor, for example, to surf the net and work and also to watch TV and movies.
But as home networking becomes increasingly common, people may have one "box" that can handle all their computing and audiovisual/entertainment needs. There will be a "workstation" (monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.) and an "entertainment center" (large widescreen TV, audio console, game console), maybe in separate rooms. In fact there may be multiple control/input/output systems, all over the house.
This could be a good thing...we've been hearing about the benefits of the smart house for years. But let's keep an eye on who is going to control and sell us this technology. Apple is clearly interested in the "digital lifestyle" niche, but there's another company that seems far more likely to use its monopoly power and vast cash reserves to dominate in this area. Yes, I mean the owner of WebTV, XBox, and Windoze...Micro$oft.