As they say..."The BBC Special Effects department. Neither special nor effective".
Well, that's really really nice of you.
Hitch hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was unique in a lot of ways because of the ingenuity they showed in making it. Amongst other things:
It was the first mainstream use of computer graphics other than TRON and The Last Starfighter. (Mainly in the Heart of Gold renormalizing sequence).
It was the first use (at least in television) of bluescreen techniques to create virtual sets, and pre-dates Babylon 5 and the new Star Wars movies by... well... a decade.
The things you thought were computer graphics were actually hand drawn animation, from the guy who went on to do Max Headroom.
The Guide itself could be seen playing on the small handheld device Ford (and then Arthur) was carrying. This was over a decade before portable LCD screens would allow you the same kind of experience on your PDA. How was it done? Rear projection onto a window on the back of the "Guide" from projector on the floor running the animations. The guide had a stabilizer arm on the back which kept the projector tracked with the arm, and they used perspective and angle tricks to hide the arm itself.
And it worked like a charm. Beautifully done.
All in all, the special effects were pretty damn amazing for the time. The only low points were Zaphod's other head (which, even though it had cool points for being one of the first animatronic mobile puppets used, looked like crap), and some of the rubber suits for the aliens -- but they didn't have a lot of the compounds then that they do now (like 'Hot Flesh').
Tell ya what. Show me any other show with better special effects from the same time period. I dare you. And no, "Sapphire and Steel" doesn't count.
Microsoft spends so much time fighting OSS and badmouthing it, but I haven't heard them get a hint on the obvious: Their customers want it. I personally use Windows and have been employed for a decade as a Windows programmer. However, with every passing season, I trust MS less and use OSS more on my own. At some point I will break away from them for one reason: MS has not responded to me as a customer.
MS adds features that their large clients want, so why can't they respond with the source as well? Rather than fighting OSS so much, they should realize they're not losing so much based on the price of the product, but on the license and the source. As a customer that has spent thousands on MS software, I have lately done it grudgingly because I do not yet know enough to migrate everything I do to an open-source OS.
Most customers don't give a damn whether the source is available. The reason they're switching is because Open Source Software is FREE in the FINANCIAL sense, and has to be so by definition for it to be considered OSS.
But nice try. Because then, after MS releases the source to all its customers, the OSS crowd can come in and copy *more* functionality.
Nope. The luma resolution is three times the chroma resolution. Imagine if you were color blind. Given the sequence of fully illuminated segments: (segment color)
RGBRGBRGBRGBRGBRGB
* * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * (where '*' represents an illuminated segement)
This would appear to someone with color vision as an alternating sequence of magenta and green stripes (ack!) three of each. To a colorblind person, it appears as nine each alternating light and dark stripes. Same thing applies to displaying an Apple II composite video signal on a monochrome monitor -- instead of magenta and green stripes, you get a tighter pattern of white (or amber or green, depending on the monitor) and black stripes
However, the width of the individual color pixels is the same as the that of the luma information.
Not in a composite signal, it's not. Hence the name -- it's a composite of the chroma and luma signals, and with high luma spatial frequencies you get chroma artifacts -- that was the whole point of Woz's video circuitry. As far as the rest of the computer was concerned, you sent a color pixel value to the video circuitry and got a color pixel on the screen (assuming composite color TV). But because of the implementation detail, if you were using a monochrome screen you could send a color pixel to the video circuitry and get a specific set of subpixels illuminated.
High luma spacial frequencies do not mean that the luminance signal is a melange of chroma and luma. It's not. However, when you push the frequency of the luma signal into the chroma band, you get color. That's nothing but a decoder artifact. You can try this yourself; take a black & white NTSC television. It displays the *same* signal as the color television; it just doesn't have the hardware to filter and process the chroma data. Similarly, if you were to take a light meter and measure the luminance of the screen at each pixel on both a color and a black & white set showing the same image, you'd get the same luminance back. It's independent of the color signal.
The color signal is sent as phase encoded data on top of the luma signal, on a separate carrier. You couldn't send true color data using it on the Apple II machines; that's why you were limited to magenta and green, as they're 180 degrees apart on the carrier. The only data passed out was luma; the Apple II didn't have any true concept of color.
Sure, as I illustrated above. You pick the color to affect the luma at a specific location. If you couldn't, then Microsoft's subpixel antialiasing wouldn't work.
Nope... Microsoft's subpixel antialiasing has nothing to do with NTSC signals. Read more carefully. You cannot pick a color to affect the luma of an NTSC signal. You can create a chroma carrier by generating a high enough luma frequency, but you can't affect the luma signal by doing *anything* to the chroma.
As for the subpixel thing -- you're getting hung up on the hardware, which is irrelevant because in both cases, the hardware existed before the method. The hardware is not designed to allow sub-pixel addressing (and the Apple II video is certainly based on pixels, it's the force-fit of pixelated video into an NTSC waveform that makes the trick work), the method (same in both cases) just takes advantage of the fact that in both an NTSC signal and an LCD screen, the luma resolution is higher than the chroma resolution, and there is a fixed relationship between the two. The method of picking a particular chroma value to address the luminence component of the display "pixel" will work for any display technology where that is true.
Ummm... two things...
1. The Luma resolution of an LCD display is the *same* as the chroma resolution. You're just deterministically limited as to which color appears at which spatial frequency. Also, strictly speaking, the luma resolution is variant and less for an LCD display than for NTSC, because the Luma band width for blue is lower than it is for green or red.
2. "picking a chroma value to address the luminence component of the display"... what kind of crack are you smoking? Under NTSC, luminance is constant and independent of chroma. It's only when you deliberately go outside the definitions of the standard that you get effects such as luminance affecting chroma. And it doesn't work the other way around. You can't pick a color and get it to affect the luma at all.
You know, I really can't see the Microsoft community banding together like this. Kudos to the open source community, you should really feel proud of everything you've accomplished so far and about the direction you're heading.
That's because Microsoft already has a massive array of accessibility tools and support for it built into every version of Windows, and every application.
You don't need the 'community' to support something which has been an as-standard feature for the past 10 years.
Oh, how I wish I was making that up, but that is how Fox cleansed the catch phrase "Yippie-kay-ay, motherfucker." from Die Hard. Who is Mister Falcon, and what the hell does he have to do with Roy Rogers, barefoot NYC cops, or unsubtle German thieves pretending to be terrorists? Please! Speed Racer was dubbed better than that. Put a big, dumb, obvious [bleep] in there and move on.
I always found it amusing, growing up in the UK, to hear Mel Gibson running around in Lethal Weapon calling people "Melon Farmers"... or "Mother Funsters".
Certainly. Leave a machine sitting idle, it's pointless to leave the memory empty. So it pre-loads and caches data from the drive in case it might be needed later. Also, with low loads, until you run out of memory and start swapping you don't need to trim the working set of a process, so as it allocates and deallocates memory, the memory footprint of it will expand. When memory pressure increases, the working set is trimmed, reducing its footprint to just what it's using.
That's an assumption of course; the original poster didn't give any inkling as to *what* memory was being used, which you can get from the system diagnostics.
In other words, it's not a memory leak in the first place, which I believe was my point. The original poster is more than welcome to prove me wrong by telling me which process is doing the leaking, and what that memory is used for.
I can't say it much more plain than that. I'm sorry you don't agree with me, but it's not going to hurt you to town down the over-the-top-use-them-as-normal-words-and-in-every -other-sentence cursing that we are speeding head on towards.
1. It's tone, not town. 2. Do you get out much? I hear much worse in a pub, bar, or workplace every day than I do on TV. Heck, I heard much worse in the schoolyard growing up.
I haven't had KDE crash in years. NT4 at work blue-screens several times a month. I'll admit that's an improvement; Win9.x crashed several times a DAY!
How many years has it been since KDE has crashed on you? The only reason I ask is because NT4 is a 7 year old OS... so if your version of KDE is any newer than that, perhaps you might want to compare it to a recent version of Windows. Like one that was released in this century.
How about this: Win2K box. Nothing running. After a reboot, it's using about 64MB for the system. Two days of idling later, it's using nearly 150MB. 150% increase in memory usage, and absolutely nothing has happened to cause it. Except Windows has been running.
So what's the system using that memory for? You can find out you know.
Exactly. There are plans afoot to build an array of wind turbines near my house, in the North-West of Scotland. We certainly have enough wind - AMEC (the contractors) put up a weather monitoring post, about 40' high. It blew over four times.
The thing is, each turbine (there will be 30 or so in total) requires a 400 cubic metre concrete foundation. Now, 1cu.m. of concrete weighs 7 tonnes. Making 1 tonne of concrete releases 1 tonne of carbon dioxide (damn slashcode, no sub tag). That means that casting each foundation will release 2,800 tonnes of CO2 (again, imagine the "2" subscripted), a total of 84,000 tonnes of CO2. That doesn't include the exhaust gases from the machinery used to dig the founds. And that's only for the founds, never mind the cast concrete masts that will be built.
An important thing to note is that with wind turbines, there can be other problems too. Such as the fact that, for example, the beat frequencies from the wind farm's turbines can travel for hundreds of miles. (I heard of one such case in Washington state, but can't find a reference right now).
Nuclear isn't bad. Fusion, however, would be better:-)
Anders was basically the brains behind TurboPascal - one of the fastest development environments around.
It was one of the first compilers where it was quicker to compile the code and have the compiler tell you where your typos were, instead of having a separate parser to do a pre-flight check, or examining by hand.
Truly a wonderful tool. (I used to work in an office across the hall from him - he's a cool guy... although he did have a rather worrying ever-growing stack of empty Coke cans in his office... by now he's probably got a good version of the Cheops pyramid).
My Cingular (Chicago-area) phone quit receiving calls 10 days ago. After 3 days of their horrible tech support, I finally found a rep who said that their system had no record of my SIM card, and that the records must have "gotten lost." He re-entered them, and all was well for two days, and then the problem recurred. This time, I was told that it was a national problem that had occurred a couple of days earlier. During all of this, I've called *611 dozens of times, and the hold times are well above average. I used to work in one of Cingular's Call Center IT departments; I just emailed a friend who's still there to see what's going on...
That's odd... one of the guys I work with has Cingular (we're in Seattle), and when he was in Florida two weeks ago, he couldn't get reception out there at all.
I really think the ideal would be if there were some sort of British Josh Whedon to write this. With the sense of humor and darkness of Buffy, Doctor Who could be back with Tom Baker-level quality. But it would have to be a Brit, much as it stings my imperial running dog fascist American pride to say so.
On the plus side, Joss Wheedon is a poor copy of Russell T. Davies when it comes to sci-fi.
That would be a good idea, but I don't think that the BBC would put on the Prisoner (as excellent as it is), because the Prisoner was made by ITC (Sir Lew Grade's company), not the BBC.
Why not? BBC America put Cracker on, and that's Granada. And Graham Norton - and that's Channel 4 (IIRC).
agree but only to a certain extent. I'm learning c++ on linux lately to expand my horizons and pass the time during my unemployment. While reading books and getting other code to reference as examples I noticed that...well....there's just a limited number of ways to make a computer do a specific task with a single programming language.
That may well sometimes be the case, but the wholesale copying of DLL files from other operating systems and applications is not a simple case of independent evolution of code.
If you don't believe me, crack open the Win32 Codec package, and look at those files. They're not just tiny segments that work the same way their original counterparts do - they're explicit copies. Do a binary diff.
Re:Not to ruin the mood...
on
Knoppix 3.3 Is Out
·
· Score: 2, Informative
But what is with the sites "protesting" software patents when all they do it have a link directly to their site in the index file? If you are protesting I think it would be more effective to shut the site down rather than to make an annoying index page
Agreed. Although the MPlayer site is rather amusing.
Not in the usual way - I mean, not because they're protesting patents and doing the same thing. But because they're protesting patents affecting their ability to produce software, yet at the same time they feel no problem in copying other people's intellectual property - that is, copyright infringement.
If you don't believe me, run a diff on the files in their win32 codec package on the files from a Windows or other distribution. They're the same. And that, folks, is illegal.
What's really amusing is that the thing that will eventually shut them down is not patent infringement - it's their own wholesale piracy of other peoples' code.
Microsoft is 100% to blame for the fact that some programs use Alt and some use Ctrl for the shortcuts. When the GUI programs were being developed, they copied the Mac. Now LOOK at a Mac, and check where the Command key is. Nobody in their right mind would use any key other than Alt to emulate that. But Microsoft is not in their right mind. Almost all MSDOS programs and most early Windows programs were "inconsistent" too and used Alt instead of the Microsoft standard of Ctrl.
Funny, the standard windows shortcuts were Shift+Insert, Shift+Delete, Ctrl+Delete originally. They then became Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. Where do you get this "Alt key" idea from?
I thought Microsoft had already convinced the courts that you couldn't strip these "vital components" of the OS out.
Yes they did. About 5 years ago. Note, that would be just around half a decade ago. You know, back when Windows 98 had only just been released.
Oh, and just FYI, their argument wasn't that you couldn't strip them out - it was that the functionality was necessary for third party apps, and a whole plethora of win32 platform tools. With an embedded OS, this isn't an issue; you're only going to be running 1 application on it, and you know exactly what functionality you need.
Big flipping deal. (24W * 24 hours * 30 days)/1000 is 17.28 KW used per month. On my last electricity bill adding up all the charges I pay just over 10 cents per KWhour. So you pay $1.73 a month to keep your computer on standby. I think you should be able to swing that.
Until we have fusion power, I think everyone should conserve energy at least when convenient, if not proactively.
Do the math. If 1,000,000 people have a computer on standby, that's 24,000,000 or 24MW.
Your average coal-fired power station puts out 120MW. So 1/6th of the output of a typical powerstation will go into powering computers on standby.
That's not a good thing. Never mind all the different devices in your house that are *also* on standby. Such as your microwave, VCR, television, cordless phone, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
As they say..."The BBC Special Effects department. Neither special nor effective".
Well, that's really really nice of you.
Hitch hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was unique in a lot of ways because of the ingenuity they showed in making it. Amongst other things:
It was the first mainstream use of computer graphics other than TRON and The Last Starfighter. (Mainly in the Heart of Gold renormalizing sequence).
It was the first use (at least in television) of bluescreen techniques to create virtual sets, and pre-dates Babylon 5 and the new Star Wars movies by... well... a decade.
The things you thought were computer graphics were actually hand drawn animation, from the guy who went on to do Max Headroom.
The Guide itself could be seen playing on the small handheld device Ford (and then Arthur) was carrying. This was over a decade before portable LCD screens would allow you the same kind of experience on your PDA. How was it done? Rear projection onto a window on the back of the "Guide" from projector on the floor running the animations. The guide had a stabilizer arm on the back which kept the projector tracked with the arm, and they used perspective and angle tricks to hide the arm itself.
And it worked like a charm. Beautifully done.
All in all, the special effects were pretty damn amazing for the time. The only low points were Zaphod's other head (which, even though it had cool points for being one of the first animatronic mobile puppets used, looked like crap), and some of the rubber suits for the aliens -- but they didn't have a lot of the compounds then that they do now (like 'Hot Flesh').
Tell ya what. Show me any other show with better special effects from the same time period. I dare you. And no, "Sapphire and Steel" doesn't count.
Bill Joy could join Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune or Pluto.
...)
:)
(Oddly enough, there isn't a company that bears the name of the missing planet you're thinking of
Actually though, a friend of mine set up a startup called Planet 7. Took a while for people to get it.
Microsoft spends so much time fighting OSS and badmouthing it, but I haven't heard them get a hint on the obvious: Their customers want it. I personally use Windows and have been employed for a decade as a Windows programmer. However, with every passing season, I trust MS less and use OSS more on my own. At some point I will break away from them for one reason: MS has not responded to me as a customer.
MS adds features that their large clients want, so why can't they respond with the source as well? Rather than fighting OSS so much, they should realize they're not losing so much based on the price of the product, but on the license and the source. As a customer that has spent thousands on MS software, I have lately done it grudgingly because I do not yet know enough to migrate everything I do to an open-source OS.
Most customers don't give a damn whether the source is available. The reason they're switching is because Open Source Software is FREE in the FINANCIAL sense, and has to be so by definition for it to be considered OSS.
But nice try. Because then, after MS releases the source to all its customers, the OSS crowd can come in and copy *more* functionality.
... in it, the main characters are playing Halo on an XBOX. I'm not sure if that's marketing, or a tip of the hat.
Nope. The luma resolution is three times the chroma resolution. Imagine if you were color blind. Given the sequence of fully illuminated segments:
(segment color)
RGBRGBRGBRGBRGBRGB
* * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * *
(where '*' represents an illuminated segement)
This would appear to someone with color vision as an alternating sequence of magenta and green stripes (ack!) three of each. To a colorblind person, it appears as nine each alternating light and dark stripes. Same thing applies to displaying an Apple II composite video signal on a monochrome monitor -- instead of magenta and green stripes, you get a tighter pattern of white (or amber or green, depending on the monitor) and black stripes
However, the width of the individual color pixels is the same as the that of the luma information.
Not in a composite signal, it's not. Hence the name -- it's a composite of the chroma and luma signals, and with high luma spatial frequencies you get chroma artifacts -- that was the whole point of Woz's video circuitry. As far as the rest of the computer was concerned, you sent a color pixel value to the video circuitry and got a color pixel on the screen (assuming composite color TV). But because of the implementation detail, if you were using a monochrome screen you could send a color pixel to the video circuitry and get a specific set of subpixels illuminated.
High luma spacial frequencies do not mean that the luminance signal is a melange of chroma and luma. It's not. However, when you push the frequency of the luma signal into the chroma band, you get color. That's nothing but a decoder artifact. You can try this yourself; take a black & white NTSC television. It displays the *same* signal as the color television; it just doesn't have the hardware to filter and process the chroma data. Similarly, if you were to take a light meter and measure the luminance of the screen at each pixel on both a color and a black & white set showing the same image, you'd get the same luminance back. It's independent of the color signal.
The color signal is sent as phase encoded data on top of the luma signal, on a separate carrier. You couldn't send true color data using it on the Apple II machines; that's why you were limited to magenta and green, as they're 180 degrees apart on the carrier. The only data passed out was luma; the Apple II didn't have any true concept of color.
Sure, as I illustrated above. You pick the color to affect the luma at a specific location. If you couldn't, then Microsoft's subpixel antialiasing wouldn't work.
Nope... Microsoft's subpixel antialiasing has nothing to do with NTSC signals. Read more carefully. You cannot pick a color to affect the luma of an NTSC signal. You can create a chroma carrier by generating a high enough luma frequency, but you can't affect the luma signal by doing *anything* to the chroma.
As for the subpixel thing -- you're getting hung up on the hardware, which is irrelevant because in both cases, the hardware existed before the method. The hardware is not designed to allow sub-pixel addressing (and the Apple II video is certainly based on pixels, it's the force-fit of pixelated video into an NTSC waveform that makes the trick work), the method (same in both cases) just takes advantage of the fact that in both an NTSC signal and an LCD screen, the luma resolution is higher than the chroma resolution, and there is a fixed relationship between the two. The method of picking a particular chroma value to address the luminence component of the display "pixel" will work for any display technology where that is true.
Ummm... two things...
1. The Luma resolution of an LCD display is the *same* as the chroma resolution. You're just deterministically limited as to which color appears at which spatial frequency. Also, strictly speaking, the luma resolution is variant and less for an LCD display than for NTSC, because the Luma band width for blue is lower than it is for green or red.
2. "picking a chroma value to address the luminence component of the display"... what kind of crack are you smoking? Under NTSC, luminance is constant and independent of chroma. It's only when you deliberately go outside the definitions of the standard that you get effects such as luminance affecting chroma. And it doesn't work the other way around. You can't pick a color and get it to affect the luma at all.
You know, I really can't see the Microsoft community banding together like this. Kudos to the open source community, you should really feel proud of everything you've accomplished so far and about the direction you're heading.
That's because Microsoft already has a massive array of accessibility tools and support for it built into every version of Windows, and every application.
You don't need the 'community' to support something which has been an as-standard feature for the past 10 years.
Oh, how I wish I was making that up, but that is how Fox cleansed the catch phrase "Yippie-kay-ay, motherfucker." from Die Hard. Who is Mister Falcon, and what the hell does he have to do with Roy Rogers, barefoot NYC cops, or unsubtle German thieves pretending to be terrorists? Please! Speed Racer was dubbed better than that. Put a big, dumb, obvious [bleep] in there and move on.
:)
I always found it amusing, growing up in the UK, to hear Mel Gibson running around in Lethal Weapon calling people "Melon Farmers"... or "Mother Funsters".
There's a certain je ne le crois pas about that
and why? you think that's fine then?
Certainly. Leave a machine sitting idle, it's pointless to leave the memory empty. So it pre-loads and caches data from the drive in case it might be needed later. Also, with low loads, until you run out of memory and start swapping you don't need to trim the working set of a process, so as it allocates and deallocates memory, the memory footprint of it will expand. When memory pressure increases, the working set is trimmed, reducing its footprint to just what it's using.
That's an assumption of course; the original poster didn't give any inkling as to *what* memory was being used, which you can get from the system diagnostics.
In other words, it's not a memory leak in the first place, which I believe was my point. The original poster is more than welcome to prove me wrong by telling me which process is doing the leaking, and what that memory is used for.
I can't say it much more plain than that. I'm sorry you don't agree with me, but it's not going to hurt you to town down the over-the-top-use-them-as-normal-words-and-in-every -other-sentence cursing that we are speeding head on towards.
1. It's tone, not town.
2. Do you get out much? I hear much worse in a pub, bar, or workplace every day than I do on TV. Heck, I heard much worse in the schoolyard growing up.
I haven't had KDE crash in years. NT4 at work blue-screens several times a month. I'll admit that's an improvement; Win9.x crashed several times a DAY!
How many years has it been since KDE has crashed on you? The only reason I ask is because NT4 is a 7 year old OS... so if your version of KDE is any newer than that, perhaps you might want to compare it to a recent version of Windows. Like one that was released in this century.
How about this:
Win2K box. Nothing running. After a reboot, it's using about 64MB for the system. Two days of idling later, it's using nearly 150MB.
150% increase in memory usage, and absolutely nothing has happened to cause it. Except Windows has been running.
So what's the system using that memory for? You can find out you know.
Though let me guess... disk cache.
Exactly. There are plans afoot to build an array of wind turbines near my house, in the North-West of Scotland. We certainly have enough wind - AMEC (the contractors) put up a weather monitoring post, about 40' high. It blew over four times.
:-)
The thing is, each turbine (there will be 30 or so in total) requires a 400 cubic metre concrete foundation. Now, 1cu.m. of concrete weighs 7 tonnes. Making 1 tonne of concrete releases 1 tonne of carbon dioxide (damn slashcode, no sub tag). That means that casting each foundation will release 2,800 tonnes of CO2 (again, imagine the "2" subscripted), a total of 84,000 tonnes of CO2. That doesn't include the exhaust gases from the machinery used to dig the founds. And that's only for the founds, never mind the cast concrete masts that will be built.
An important thing to note is that with wind turbines, there can be other problems too. Such as the fact that, for example, the beat frequencies from the wind farm's turbines can travel for hundreds of miles. (I heard of one such case in Washington state, but can't find a reference right now).
Nuclear isn't bad. Fusion, however, would be better
Sure looks like it. XP takes 30 seconds to start up, and another 30 before you can run any apps without them locking up the system.
You go girl! Abandon your XP Desktop and have fun checking your email on your... toaster.
This, if you hadn't noticed, is for Embedded Linux.
Anders was basically the brains behind TurboPascal - one of the fastest development environments around.
It was one of the first compilers where it was quicker to compile the code and have the compiler tell you where your typos were, instead of having a separate parser to do a pre-flight check, or examining by hand.
Truly a wonderful tool. (I used to work in an office across the hall from him - he's a cool guy... although he did have a rather worrying ever-growing stack of empty Coke cans in his office... by now he's probably got a good version of the Cheops pyramid).
...that unoriginality and the borrowing of characters and concepts is what it takes to get noticed in the film world these days.
Tell me about it. I've spent the last 6 months looking for funding to get a short film made... and so far, nada.
I'm even thinking of setting up a CafePress store with merchandising to fund it. Might work, actually.
My Cingular (Chicago-area) phone quit receiving calls 10 days ago. After 3 days of their horrible tech support, I finally found a rep who said that their system had no record of my SIM card, and that the records must have "gotten lost." He re-entered them, and all was well for two days, and then the problem recurred. This time, I was told that it was a national problem that had occurred a couple of days earlier. During all of this, I've called *611 dozens of times, and the hold times are well above average. I used to work in one of Cingular's Call Center IT departments; I just emailed a friend who's still there to see what's going on...
That's odd... one of the guys I work with has Cingular (we're in Seattle), and when he was in Florida two weeks ago, he couldn't get reception out there at all.
Strange things are afoot, methinks...
I really think the ideal would be if there were some sort of British Josh Whedon to write this. With the sense of humor and darkness of Buffy, Doctor Who could be back with Tom Baker-level quality. But it would have to be a Brit, much as it stings my imperial running dog fascist American pride to say so.
On the plus side, Joss Wheedon is a poor copy of Russell T. Davies when it comes to sci-fi.
That would be a good idea, but I don't think that the BBC would put on the Prisoner (as excellent as it is), because the Prisoner was made by ITC (Sir Lew Grade's company), not the BBC.
Why not? BBC America put Cracker on, and that's Granada. And Graham Norton - and that's Channel 4 (IIRC).
It's the matrix trying to confuse you.
Bush: Born with a silver spoon up his ass.
One-Hundred-Twenty-Four people have made me a foe! Join today!
Waitaminute... Bush born with a silver spoon up his ass? I thought there was no spoon...
agree but only to a certain extent. I'm learning c++ on linux lately to expand my horizons and pass the time during my unemployment. While reading books and getting other code to reference as examples I noticed that...well....there's just a limited number of ways to make a computer do a specific task with a single programming language.
That may well sometimes be the case, but the wholesale copying of DLL files from other operating systems and applications is not a simple case of independent evolution of code.
If you don't believe me, crack open the Win32 Codec package, and look at those files. They're not just tiny segments that work the same way their original counterparts do - they're explicit copies. Do a binary diff.
But what is with the sites "protesting" software patents when all they do it have a link directly to their site in the index file? If you are protesting I think it would be more effective to shut the site down rather than to make an annoying index page
Agreed. Although the MPlayer site is rather amusing.
Not in the usual way - I mean, not because they're protesting patents and doing the same thing. But because they're protesting patents affecting their ability to produce software, yet at the same time they feel no problem in copying other people's intellectual property - that is, copyright infringement.
If you don't believe me, run a diff on the files in their win32 codec package on the files from a Windows or other distribution. They're the same. And that, folks, is illegal.
What's really amusing is that the thing that will eventually shut them down is not patent infringement - it's their own wholesale piracy of other peoples' code.
Microsoft is 100% to blame for the fact that some programs use Alt and some use Ctrl for the shortcuts. When the GUI programs were being developed, they copied the Mac. Now LOOK at a Mac, and check where the Command key is. Nobody in their right mind would use any key other than Alt to emulate that. But Microsoft is not in their right mind. Almost all MSDOS programs and most early Windows programs were "inconsistent" too and used Alt instead of the Microsoft standard of Ctrl.
Funny, the standard windows shortcuts were Shift+Insert, Shift+Delete, Ctrl+Delete originally. They then became Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. Where do you get this "Alt key" idea from?
I thought Microsoft had already convinced the courts that you couldn't strip these "vital components" of the OS out.
Yes they did. About 5 years ago. Note, that would be just around half a decade ago. You know, back when Windows 98 had only just been released.
Oh, and just FYI, their argument wasn't that you couldn't strip them out - it was that the functionality was necessary for third party apps, and a whole plethora of win32 platform tools. With an embedded OS, this isn't an issue; you're only going to be running 1 application on it, and you know exactly what functionality you need.
Big flipping deal. (24W * 24 hours * 30 days)/1000 is 17.28 KW used per month. On my last electricity bill adding up all the charges I pay just over 10 cents per KWhour. So you pay $1.73 a month to keep your computer on standby. I think you should be able to swing that.
Until we have fusion power, I think everyone should conserve energy at least when convenient, if not proactively.
Do the math. If 1,000,000 people have a computer on standby, that's 24,000,000 or 24MW.
Your average coal-fired power station puts out 120MW. So 1/6th of the output of a typical powerstation will go into powering computers on standby.
That's not a good thing. Never mind all the different devices in your house that are *also* on standby. Such as your microwave, VCR, television, cordless phone, etc.