As an astute poster pointed out on OSNews, they cannot collect on any damages anyway.
They distribute(ed) a version of Linux under the GPL, a licence that legally permits people to copy and branch the code assuming they put it under the GPL. Unfortunately for SCO, whether or not they knew they were distributing their own IP under the GPL or not is irrelevant to the rather compelling argument that they did put their IP under the GPL, and now that they continued to distribute linux after they found the alleged infringements means that no court would declare that licence invalid.
They have knowingly distributed what is potentially their own code under the GPL for nearly a year now. The GPL licence should hold, infringement-free.
Video Gaming and movies are very, very different entertainment mediums, with the best games relying upon great play mechanics rather than a great story. John Woo has a wonderful sense of rhythm, timing, and camera angles but those things are controlled by the player in any game. His movies are also strongly character based, whereas videogames are concept based.
The one thing that Woo will be able to bring to the table is his ability to connect good and bad characters in such a way that they find themselves intractably bound to eachother... But as games require hundreds of faceless, nameless mooks, such character on character interaction would be less important.
Unfortunately, this is just another example of the hollywood types trying to get into something they don't understand. Nobody expects Stephen King to be able to cross over mediums from books to movies, why do people make that assumption from movies to videogames? Simply saying that they are both visual mediums and are on some sort of "convergence" shows just how little Woo understands this industry.
This reminds me of Sony's attempt to have Aibo enthusiast sites shut down because they were doing things with the Aibo that Sony hadn't intended.
At some point, every manager and every CEO needs to stop and think "I can sue, but should I?" Lyric sites keep songs in the public eye, raise interest in their back catalog, and embed the product further into the cultural dialog. Is it a violation of copyright law? Yes, the same way that publishing screenshots of videogames is a violation of copyright law. But it makes no business sense for any videogame company to attack the publicity they recieve through the gaming news sites. And it makes no business sense to attack lyric sites which only serve to drum up interest in the music.
Sims Online: Hi! I have a great licence! I'm a game you can play while going to get a sandwich. My creator appologized for me, but we promise I will get better! Wanna play? I'm only $10 per month.
Consumer: Umm... So I sit around and click on a book for six hours until my character gets reading +3? No thanks.
Sims Online: No really, I will be a great game someday. You will be able to pick your character's color while clicking. Yay! Doesn't that sound like fun? Hey, where are you going? Awww....
Analyist 1: Hmm. The Sims Online is a terrible failure, only raking in one million dollars per month. I wonder what it could be?
Analyist 2: They have a great licence. They're positioned well to get the elusive 20 to 40 year old female market. We spent 20% of the budget on advertising. Yet we aren't seeing the return expected.
Consumer [knocking on window]: Dude, your game sucks!
Analyist 1: The market must not be ready to support online gaming. Everquest, Asheron's Call, and all of Korea must be a fluke.
Consumer [knocking on window]: Dude, take this crappy thing back!
Analyist 2: People just aren't prepared to pay monthly fees. Perhaps if we abandoned the service-provider model and moved to a cable TV model we could see synergies dwarfing those of AOL Time Warner.
Analyist 1: A 50 dollar a month fee to play a catalog of online titles... That just might fly. We just need to hire a college intern to program an emulator in Java and we will have all of the content we need!
Consumer: Dude, this Sims thing is worse than Clippy. Get it off me!
Sims Online: No, just give me one more chance! I swear I can change!
Analyist 1: Yes, the industry is headed for dark times indeed. How's your golden parachute looking?
Agreed. To be an ubergeek one must do things that ensure one never sees the light of day. Not that I'm biased, I just happen to be friends with several people from the M.I.T. Grad school program.
At least, I was last time they came out of their labs. They'll probably re-emerge around Christmas time, and I'll have to tell them all about the Iraqi war.
Actually, Flourescent lighting doesn't get anywhere near as hot as filament lighting.
Using the old finger-o-meter, of the three spread spectrum flourescent lights running in the apartment currently, all three can be touched for 5 seconds before the onset of physical discomfort. The relative lumen to filament conversion puts them at 60 watts, 60 watts, and 90 watts.
Tupperware is also very difficult to set on fire, being plastic. That doesn't mean it is incapable of becoming so hot as to cause a system outage, but fire would not be the primary consideration.
The cool idea is not the use of UV light as a transmittive medium, but the realization that you can put a wireless access point in a perfect location by combining a powerline ethernet circuit and your overhead lighting system. Now, whether or not that will bake your electronics is unimportant, as this is a "neat idea" rather than a "revolutionary product."
Wesley Crusher was the boy on Star Trek, the son of Doctor Beverly crusher (the younger doctor from the 3rd season on), whose father was killed by a painful choice Picard made to save more lives. Wesley Crusher was a 16 year old character written by a 60 year old man to resemble how 10 year old boys looked at the world in the 50's. Ironically, Wil Wheaton played, in Stand By Me, a 10 year old character in the 50's written by a 60 year old man to resemble how a 16 year old boy looks at the world in the 80's.
Wesley Crusher had a few flirting romantic spats with girls, was nearly executed for walking on the grass, helmed the starship through far to many dangerous encounters, and was eventually canned due to near universal revilement of his character. Quite frankly, Wesley Crusher was insulting to the teenage audience of the show, as he was written with all of the deep understanding of the turmoils of youth shown in "The Family Circus". If it were set in modern times, the writers would have given Wesley Yu-Gi-oh cards.
His character walked off with the traveler after 4 seasons, never to be seen from again (until Nemesis, which I haven't yet seen). The void left by that departure was shortly thereafter filled by Lt. Barkley, another character whose sole purpose was to have blundering errors of judgement.
Wil Wheaton, on the other hand, is a very personable guy. He's honest and open, and his acting in Stand by Me and Toy Soldiers reflects this. He's also a nice guy in person, as friends working at A Wrinkle in Time have said. He's done his penance, and deserves to be taken as a serious actor outside of the Trek universe.
It has been said that 99% of all applicants into the industry have no value whatsoever. Good programmers, dedicated testers, artists with demonstratable talents at low-poly modeling, and others with skills committed to disk can get in without more trouble than into any other industry, if not less. People without demonstrated skills have as hard of a time as those lost souls wandering the streets of ventura boulevard desperate to become famous actors and models but who never actually do any acting or modeling.
That being said, this person is trying to get into the hardware side of the industry. That is probably very difficult, as there is maybe six consoles in development at any given time, and a few additional arcade cabinets (though certainly not enough). I have no advice for him, as I have never worked with a hardware guru... but good luck! If you are looking for an in, ATI is hiring...
Beautiful graphics engines seem to be the anthesis of flexible gaming engines. Asheron's Call II, for example, sacrificed the flexibility and dynamic world changes of Asheron's Call 1, but in exchange recieved some very pretty, rediculously high-res textures. SecondLife has some truly, truly hideous vistas, but allows any player to create and script any object they may desire in-game. Worms 3D has fully deformable terrain that resemble lumpy marshmallows.
Personally, I would prefer to keep Counterstrike or earlier level graphics and create fully dynamic worlds that are fun to play in. Otherwise, what is the point? Hopefully soon we will have both, but as Hollywood blockbusters dominate with hundred million dollar special effects and a six hundred dollar script, so too will the back end engine of many major releases be ignored.
You forget the stereotype of those Slashdot users who lump all slashdot users into one big group, and then become confused when the free software anti-Microsoft group suddenly likes the new, $50 release of Age of Empires.
These Slashdot users tend to see things in black and white, as in "all contracts are contracts" or "the law is the law." They also tend to be the type that at some point fell in with the slashdittoheads, but have come to the realization that this is not the ultimate source for moral certitude.
I'm glad to see that you have come to that realization, but the black-or-white golden-or-damned bifurcation is a fallacy, but neither does Slashdot deserve to be in the category of the damned nor will your quest for the ultimate source of moral certitude bear fruit, for there is no such thing.
Slashdot is a diverse community, and like any diverse community the extreme viewpoints are always the loudest. Some believe strongly that all software should be Open Source and free. Some believe that building your own cruise missile is a good idea. Some believe that all government surveillance will be misused. Many people here don't believe in one or more of the above, but if you aren't passionate about a subject why post?
This reminds me of an issue faced in my High School years back. Shortly after the quake of '89, despite years of resistance the administrators finally approved funding for a revision of the chemistry labs storage area. This included such radical design ideas as lips on the shelves to prevent them from falling off and pooling together on the floor: an event that the science department estimated would cause an explosion large enough to destroy the entire city block the school (and surrounding businesses and homes) were located on.
Within weeks of the new lab opening, a group of students had crept in, made vials of acid, and in retaliation for an unrelated incident, spiked the coffee of the entire department with LSD. The next teacher to get a cup of coffee sniffed the pot, decided that it was too old, and threw it out to brew a fresh batch.
During the reconstruction of the lab, they neglected to put any locks on the shelves. Not that it would matter tremendously, as lock-picking is rather trivial on most of those security systems. The students, if they so chose, could have caused a catastrophy of the highest proportions. The power to level a city block stored in a notoriously insecure system shows just how much risk we must accept if we aren't going to all go mad.
If someone wanted to walk up to you and shoot you in the head, there would be nothing you could do to prevent it. Anyone can walk into a crowded location with a gun and start firing. Anyone can load a bomb into a gym bag and detonate it in the middle of your mall. Making bombs and acquiring weapons only seems difficult to those who haven't tried to do it. There is no 100% security solution, and anyone trying to sell you one just wants your money.
There are a few things wrong with the system as he describes it.
First of all, trained or untrained, it would be very easy to "pass" on a security camera as a bunch of curious college kids with backpacks (full of C4). Even a well-made bear costume would be indistinguishable from the real thing on a webcam.
Second, such a system might not have a fast enough response time. A five second window is a long time to run through a security camera. Assuming the first camera captures you, it might take 30 seconds for 3 people on the internet to recieve the image, and another 30 for the next 10 people, and 60 seconds for a person in the emergency responce headquarters to review, find, interrogate, and notify the authorities on campus. Let's assume the security responce people take 2 minutes to find these terrorists... They now have had 4 minutes to poison the water, plant a bomb, or take an opera full of people hostage.
Third, like all motion detectors there must be an amount of accepted variance. If terrorists walked really slowly or very slowly obstructed the camera they could walk right in front of it. Being wireless, the cameras' locations would be easy to detect. If the system compared this 5 second picture to one 10 minutes ago they could detect such changes, but such a system would consume large amounts of resources to store those backphotos. This problem is sticky but not unsolvable.
Overall this is an interesting idea. In essence, it automates most unnecessary parts of security screening (staring at unchanging images) and taps groups of affordable internet personnel to do the easy but non-automatable task of deciding if a moving object is a person or a blowing trash bag. Once those two criteria have been passed, the real security specialists can respond, thus lowering the number of security personnel needed and the overall cost per camera monitered. And reducing cost for the same service is always a good thing.
"You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. "
Actually, these cameras come equipped with Infra-red.
You know, a similar thing happened to my playstation. It was a very old unit, and in order to play games properly I had to open the top (the cd_lid_closed toggle was controlled by a switch) and spin the disk backwards. Without spinning backwards the disk would only spin up for a second before stopping. I have no theory why it did this.
It also overheated a lot in the LA summer, and required manual cooling. Unfortunately, due to being electronic liquid water was out of the question. My roommate was quite amused the first few times she walked into the living room to find the poor thing surrounded by frozen peas.
Thank you for saying the thing which Slashdot seems to be trying to avoid.
Microsoft has taken a few good turns recently.
Microsoft working closer with hardware vendors to get faster implemented USB 2.1 support or even a radical simplification of the PC specification is a great thing. Combine this with the previously announced reduction in the number of API calls from 79k to 8k, and the drastically needed updating of the file system, and you have the makings of a Monopoly realizing that what it sells is garbage and it was time that was fixed.
Quite frankly, it is far less insulting to be enslaved to an evil monopoly with a *good* product.
I do, however, wish they didn't start this initiative with HP, the company built by the lowest bidder. I guess I'll have to wait for the next revision for them to get it right.
I can tell you though, if you spend more money to get a qualified, competent, hard-working systems administrator, it is twice as good as spending that money on your OS and skimping on your employee quality.
Indeed. Our administrator just converted an underutilized webhosting box to a much needed mail-server while 500 miles away on a business trip, over nothing more than his Ibook. That kind of remote-managament is unheard of in the Windows world. "Apt-get install mysql-server"?
The funny thing is, qualified, competent, hard-working systems administrators with years of experience are surprisingly available these days, and are going for far less than people might expect. A friend with 20 years of experience managing Unix networks summed up the problem like this. "All applications are filtered through the HR person. The HR person knows what Javascript is. The HR person has no idea what AWK is. The HR person is going to pass on the resume of the person with Javascript experience."
Of course the issue of the *number* of qualified personnel required should also be brought up. I run in a pure Linux / BSD shop, so I will bring up the experience of a colleague who interned in a Mac / Windows QA shop. For most projects, there were 12 PC's, 12 Macs, 3 PC Technicians, and 1 Mac technician on setup. Generally speaking, the Mac technician would finish configuring and installing the software on all of his 12 machines before the 3 PC technicians. This was quite some time ago and is not directly linked to the Linux / Windows debate, but the point is that the choice of OS can have a tremendous effect on the number of people required to administer the network. In this case if the more expensive employee were paid 2x what the cheaper ones were, you would only be paying 2/3's of what you would with the cheaper ones, and would have a much happier employee to boot.
Having seen what a competent linux administrator can achieve quickly and remotely, for example quickly knocking out scripts to do specific tasks (like migrating datapaths) that would otherwise take hours to do manually, it seems pretty clear that you would require fewer administrators for Linux than for Windows. Anybody either technically competent or extremely well trained can setup an IIS server, but it will take either of them quite some time.
So your choices (if money is an issue): 1) a higher paid employee running linux/bsd/etc. 2) several lower paid employees running win2k. and if you are sufficiently small 3) a regular employee taking over the win2k work.
(note: this is not attempting to knock the technically competent Windows administrators amongst you, people for whom I have the utmost respect. But even you must admit that setting up a SOHO file server in Windows doesn't exactly tax your abilities).
Carnegie Mellon University has established "The Robot Hall of Fame(TM)" to honor noteworthy robots, both real and fictional, along with their creators.
Perhaps they shouldn't all die (T'Pol is scheduled to play a historical role in the Vulcan empire). Perhaps the studio should take all of the bridge crew, put them in a Shakespearan play, a broadway revival, and a modern introspective sex monologue, and have them judged by an impartial panel of actors. The half that score the lowest, lose their spot, with their character being killed or irrecoverably lost sometime during the next season. Redshirts should also weave their way through several episodes then perish, to keep people on their toes about who is going to die and who is going to take the helm.
That way, the surviving characters can have depth to them, the crew can explore role dynamics and charcter issues in uncertain times, and new blood will be injected into the series to mix in interesting ways with old blood.
My guess is that Trip, T'pol, Hoshi, and Billingsley survive.
1. Throttle P2P traffic until it is unusably slow. The number of students using it will diminish, and those with real need to access such a network will still be able to. (It's not a violation of free speech if we force you to talk reeeeeeeeeeeeeeealllllllllyyyyy ssssssssllllllloooooowwwwwwllllllyyyyyy).
2. Block off P2P traffic to the world outside of the campus network.
3. Find out what your legal obligations are to the RIAA, and satisfy them. Use form letters wherever appropriate.
4. Punish students.
You're not going to be able to convince students to stop trading files willingly. Our university was full of people trading MP3 files in the Pre-Napster days. Attempts to curb such behavior were impossible due to the intersection of the percieved anonymity of the internet, the percieved injustices perpetuated by the record companies against the artists, a sense of entitlement due to record company pricing abuses, and a general desire to have more music on a college student's budget. The risk is low, the activity is not only morally justified but is a moral crusade, and the results are overwhelmingly positive for the student with minimal effort.
To counteract these 4 factors, record companies have been trying to flood the network, justify their pricing scheme, justify their treatment of the artists, and (recently) increase the risk to students. None of the above have been effective in convincing students to change their behavior. The various P2P networks are too large to flood with junk data, their pricing structure makes them one of the most grossly profitable industries in the US, the artists themselves complain about the treatment they recieve with many major acts filing for bankruptcy, and the RIAA has been hesitant to bring down the PR nightmare that full-scale prosecution of students and navy shipmen would create.
The best alternative to pirating copyrighted music is turning students on to public-domain or freely distributed music which a number of artists encourage as a form of advertising for live shows. But sadly the best place to find works from those artists are on P2P networks, and so the activity comes full circle.
Throttle them or block them... In this case until legal and social options are explored at a higher level, the best solution is technological.
Remember this game is Kojima's baby, and with the legendary Miyamoto, both fiercely japanese developers where the Cube is doing exceedingly well. Likewise, with one of the producers on the project being the Holy Messiah of Nintendo, it is likely that lawyers were paid tens of thousands of dollars to draw up contracts preventing any sort of MGS 1.2 on competing systems.
If the problem is dust inside of the machine, perhaps that would be the most efficient thing to filter?
I know people who use clipped stretched pantyhose as intake filters on their machines. Not only do they not impede airflow as much as other solutions thereby reducing noise, but they are very budget efficient. On the other hand, while very effective at reducing large particles such as pet hair they would not likely pass the HEPA standard. If noise is not an issue, a standard computer filtration system might be the best option for you and your laboratory. Some are washable / reusable.
Of course, your lab shouldn't get that dirty to begin with. If you have lab attendents, you should teach them regular maintenence procedures during their downtime... such as spraying compressed air through the bodies of the computers and keeping the surfaces of the lab pristine.(refillable compressed air canisters are available for $15 and can be refilled with any bicycle pump) If the computers are outright clogged with dust, they obviously aren't getting even the most occasional of maintenence. There isn't a fire-and-forget solution to the problem of computer dust: Even with a great filter you still have to open them up occasionally and give them a spritz.
I don't mean to be another impolite theoretical poster responding to your actually researched arguments, but wouldn't dust, etc be removed in a perfect filtration system by simple chemical dispersion? For example, in a plate of water, a drop of colored liquid will disperse and color the entire liquid even if there is no regular current in the liquid. Lacking such a movement, there is always the random but real movement of molecules known as heat...
I am not a HEPA engineer, but I would expect a perfect filter in any given room would reduce the airborne particulate matter as a function of the ambient temperature and the amount of particles entering the room. Personally I would attach a fan as a precautionary measure as X times.001 is a lot smaller than X times 1, but for sufficiently large values of X the air could remain reasonably clean.
Not to be a smartypants, but if the universe were rotating you would be able to detect it by A: the lack of gravitational pull experienced by the orbiters and B: the additional speed of rotation of the internally orbiting masses.
But it is a pointless measurement.
The fact of the matter is, no matter what timekeeping methodology we choose, in 2 thousand years we will have necessarily evolved a different one due to exploration / appropriation of space. Whether or not a clock is accurate in millions of years is somewhat academic compared to what to do when encountering daylight hours that don't at all resemble earthbound ones. In that sense, universal and local times will probably continue as in this model, but with great differences in the rate with which days change, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
As an astute poster pointed out on OSNews, they cannot collect on any damages anyway.
They distribute(ed) a version of Linux under the GPL, a licence that legally permits people to copy and branch the code assuming they put it under the GPL. Unfortunately for SCO, whether or not they knew they were distributing their own IP under the GPL or not is irrelevant to the rather compelling argument that they did put their IP under the GPL, and now that they continued to distribute linux after they found the alleged infringements means that no court would declare that licence invalid.
They have knowingly distributed what is potentially their own code under the GPL for nearly a year now. The GPL licence should hold, infringement-free.
Video Gaming and movies are very, very different entertainment mediums, with the best games relying upon great play mechanics rather than a great story. John Woo has a wonderful sense of rhythm, timing, and camera angles but those things are controlled by the player in any game. His movies are also strongly character based, whereas videogames are concept based.
The one thing that Woo will be able to bring to the table is his ability to connect good and bad characters in such a way that they find themselves intractably bound to eachother... But as games require hundreds of faceless, nameless mooks, such character on character interaction would be less important.
Unfortunately, this is just another example of the hollywood types trying to get into something they don't understand. Nobody expects Stephen King to be able to cross over mediums from books to movies, why do people make that assumption from movies to videogames? Simply saying that they are both visual mediums and are on some sort of "convergence" shows just how little Woo understands this industry.
This reminds me of Sony's attempt to have Aibo enthusiast sites shut down because they were doing things with the Aibo that Sony hadn't intended.
At some point, every manager and every CEO needs to stop and think "I can sue, but should I?" Lyric sites keep songs in the public eye, raise interest in their back catalog, and embed the product further into the cultural dialog. Is it a violation of copyright law? Yes, the same way that publishing screenshots of videogames is a violation of copyright law. But it makes no business sense for any videogame company to attack the publicity they recieve through the gaming news sites. And it makes no business sense to attack lyric sites which only serve to drum up interest in the music.
Question your lawyers.
Spiderman is all about suffering. This one is just suffering from narcolepsy.
Sims Online: Hi! I have a great licence! I'm a game you can play while going to get a sandwich. My creator appologized for me, but we promise I will get better! Wanna play? I'm only $10 per month.
Consumer: Umm... So I sit around and click on a book for six hours until my character gets reading +3? No thanks.
Sims Online: No really, I will be a great game someday. You will be able to pick your character's color while clicking. Yay! Doesn't that sound like fun? Hey, where are you going? Awww....
Analyist 1: Hmm. The Sims Online is a terrible failure, only raking in one million dollars per month. I wonder what it could be?
Analyist 2: They have a great licence. They're positioned well to get the elusive 20 to 40 year old female market. We spent 20% of the budget on advertising. Yet we aren't seeing the return expected.
Consumer [knocking on window]: Dude, your game sucks!
Analyist 1: The market must not be ready to support online gaming. Everquest, Asheron's Call, and all of Korea must be a fluke.
Consumer [knocking on window]: Dude, take this crappy thing back!
Analyist 2: People just aren't prepared to pay monthly fees. Perhaps if we abandoned the service-provider model and moved to a cable TV model we could see synergies dwarfing those of AOL Time Warner.
Analyist 1: A 50 dollar a month fee to play a catalog of online titles... That just might fly. We just need to hire a college intern to program an emulator in Java and we will have all of the content we need!
Consumer: Dude, this Sims thing is worse than Clippy. Get it off me!
Sims Online: No, just give me one more chance! I swear I can change!
Analyist 1: Yes, the industry is headed for dark times indeed. How's your golden parachute looking?
Agreed. To be an ubergeek one must do things that ensure one never sees the light of day. Not that I'm biased, I just happen to be friends with several people from the M.I.T. Grad school program.
At least, I was last time they came out of their labs. They'll probably re-emerge around Christmas time, and I'll have to tell them all about the Iraqi war.
Actually, Flourescent lighting doesn't get anywhere near as hot as filament lighting.
Using the old finger-o-meter, of the three spread spectrum flourescent lights running in the apartment currently, all three can be touched for 5 seconds before the onset of physical discomfort. The relative lumen to filament conversion puts them at 60 watts, 60 watts, and 90 watts.
Tupperware is also very difficult to set on fire, being plastic. That doesn't mean it is incapable of becoming so hot as to cause a system outage, but fire would not be the primary consideration.
The cool idea is not the use of UV light as a transmittive medium, but the realization that you can put a wireless access point in a perfect location by combining a powerline ethernet circuit and your overhead lighting system. Now, whether or not that will bake your electronics is unimportant, as this is a "neat idea" rather than a "revolutionary product."
Still, neat idea.
a search for "hand in the cookie jar" and "microsoft" returns 355 pages on everything ranging from Java to BSD, FBI proves and Real Networks.
I give up. Where is the evidence?
Wesley Crusher was the boy on Star Trek, the son of Doctor Beverly crusher (the younger doctor from the 3rd season on), whose father was killed by a painful choice Picard made to save more lives. Wesley Crusher was a 16 year old character written by a 60 year old man to resemble how 10 year old boys looked at the world in the 50's. Ironically, Wil Wheaton played, in Stand By Me, a 10 year old character in the 50's written by a 60 year old man to resemble how a 16 year old boy looks at the world in the 80's.
Wesley Crusher had a few flirting romantic spats with girls, was nearly executed for walking on the grass, helmed the starship through far to many dangerous encounters, and was eventually canned due to near universal revilement of his character. Quite frankly, Wesley Crusher was insulting to the teenage audience of the show, as he was written with all of the deep understanding of the turmoils of youth shown in "The Family Circus". If it were set in modern times, the writers would have given Wesley Yu-Gi-oh cards.
His character walked off with the traveler after 4 seasons, never to be seen from again (until Nemesis, which I haven't yet seen). The void left by that departure was shortly thereafter filled by Lt. Barkley, another character whose sole purpose was to have blundering errors of judgement.
Wil Wheaton, on the other hand, is a very personable guy. He's honest and open, and his acting in Stand by Me and Toy Soldiers reflects this. He's also a nice guy in person, as friends working at A Wrinkle in Time have said. He's done his penance, and deserves to be taken as a serious actor outside of the Trek universe.
It has been said that 99% of all applicants into the industry have no value whatsoever. Good programmers, dedicated testers, artists with demonstratable talents at low-poly modeling, and others with skills committed to disk can get in without more trouble than into any other industry, if not less. People without demonstrated skills have as hard of a time as those lost souls wandering the streets of ventura boulevard desperate to become famous actors and models but who never actually do any acting or modeling.
That being said, this person is trying to get into the hardware side of the industry. That is probably very difficult, as there is maybe six consoles in development at any given time, and a few additional arcade cabinets (though certainly not enough). I have no advice for him, as I have never worked with a hardware guru... but good luck! If you are looking for an in, ATI is hiring...
Beautiful graphics engines seem to be the anthesis of flexible gaming engines. Asheron's Call II, for example, sacrificed the flexibility and dynamic world changes of Asheron's Call 1, but in exchange recieved some very pretty, rediculously high-res textures. SecondLife has some truly, truly hideous vistas, but allows any player to create and script any object they may desire in-game. Worms 3D has fully deformable terrain that resemble lumpy marshmallows.
Personally, I would prefer to keep Counterstrike or earlier level graphics and create fully dynamic worlds that are fun to play in. Otherwise, what is the point? Hopefully soon we will have both, but as Hollywood blockbusters dominate with hundred million dollar special effects and a six hundred dollar script, so too will the back end engine of many major releases be ignored.
You forget the stereotype of those Slashdot users who lump all slashdot users into one big group, and then become confused when the free software anti-Microsoft group suddenly likes the new, $50 release of Age of Empires.
These Slashdot users tend to see things in black and white, as in "all contracts are contracts" or "the law is the law." They also tend to be the type that at some point fell in with the slashdittoheads, but have come to the realization that this is not the ultimate source for moral certitude.
I'm glad to see that you have come to that realization, but the black-or-white golden-or-damned bifurcation is a fallacy, but neither does Slashdot deserve to be in the category of the damned nor will your quest for the ultimate source of moral certitude bear fruit, for there is no such thing.
Slashdot is a diverse community, and like any diverse community the extreme viewpoints are always the loudest. Some believe strongly that all software should be Open Source and free. Some believe that building your own cruise missile is a good idea. Some believe that all government surveillance will be misused. Many people here don't believe in one or more of the above, but if you aren't passionate about a subject why post?
This reminds me of an issue faced in my High School years back. Shortly after the quake of '89, despite years of resistance the administrators finally approved funding for a revision of the chemistry labs storage area. This included such radical design ideas as lips on the shelves to prevent them from falling off and pooling together on the floor: an event that the science department estimated would cause an explosion large enough to destroy the entire city block the school (and surrounding businesses and homes) were located on.
Within weeks of the new lab opening, a group of students had crept in, made vials of acid, and in retaliation for an unrelated incident, spiked the coffee of the entire department with LSD. The next teacher to get a cup of coffee sniffed the pot, decided that it was too old, and threw it out to brew a fresh batch.
During the reconstruction of the lab, they neglected to put any locks on the shelves. Not that it would matter tremendously, as lock-picking is rather trivial on most of those security systems. The students, if they so chose, could have caused a catastrophy of the highest proportions. The power to level a city block stored in a notoriously insecure system shows just how much risk we must accept if we aren't going to all go mad.
If someone wanted to walk up to you and shoot you in the head, there would be nothing you could do to prevent it. Anyone can walk into a crowded location with a gun and start firing. Anyone can load a bomb into a gym bag and detonate it in the middle of your mall. Making bombs and acquiring weapons only seems difficult to those who haven't tried to do it. There is no 100% security solution, and anyone trying to sell you one just wants your money.
Live your life, but mitigate risks intelligently.
There are a few things wrong with the system as he describes it.
First of all, trained or untrained, it would be very easy to "pass" on a security camera as a bunch of curious college kids with backpacks (full of C4). Even a well-made bear costume would be indistinguishable from the real thing on a webcam.
Second, such a system might not have a fast enough response time. A five second window is a long time to run through a security camera. Assuming the first camera captures you, it might take 30 seconds for 3 people on the internet to recieve the image, and another 30 for the next 10 people, and 60 seconds for a person in the emergency responce headquarters to review, find, interrogate, and notify the authorities on campus. Let's assume the security responce people take 2 minutes to find these terrorists... They now have had 4 minutes to poison the water, plant a bomb, or take an opera full of people hostage.
Third, like all motion detectors there must be an amount of accepted variance. If terrorists walked really slowly or very slowly obstructed the camera they could walk right in front of it. Being wireless, the cameras' locations would be easy to detect. If the system compared this 5 second picture to one 10 minutes ago they could detect such changes, but such a system would consume large amounts of resources to store those backphotos. This problem is sticky but not unsolvable.
Overall this is an interesting idea. In essence, it automates most unnecessary parts of security screening (staring at unchanging images) and taps groups of affordable internet personnel to do the easy but non-automatable task of deciding if a moving object is a person or a blowing trash bag. Once those two criteria have been passed, the real security specialists can respond, thus lowering the number of security personnel needed and the overall cost per camera monitered. And reducing cost for the same service is always a good thing.
"You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. "
Actually, these cameras come equipped with Infra-red.
You know, a similar thing happened to my playstation. It was a very old unit, and in order to play games properly I had to open the top (the cd_lid_closed toggle was controlled by a switch) and spin the disk backwards. Without spinning backwards the disk would only spin up for a second before stopping. I have no theory why it did this.
It also overheated a lot in the LA summer, and required manual cooling. Unfortunately, due to being electronic liquid water was out of the question. My roommate was quite amused the first few times she walked into the living room to find the poor thing surrounded by frozen peas.
Thank you for saying the thing which Slashdot seems to be trying to avoid.
Microsoft has taken a few good turns recently.
Microsoft working closer with hardware vendors to get faster implemented USB 2.1 support or even a radical simplification of the PC specification is a great thing. Combine this with the previously announced reduction in the number of API calls from 79k to 8k, and the drastically needed updating of the file system, and you have the makings of a Monopoly realizing that what it sells is garbage and it was time that was fixed.
Quite frankly, it is far less insulting to be enslaved to an evil monopoly with a *good* product.
I do, however, wish they didn't start this initiative with HP, the company built by the lowest bidder. I guess I'll have to wait for the next revision for them to get it right.
I can tell you though, if you spend more money to get a qualified, competent, hard-working systems administrator, it is twice as good as spending that money on your OS and skimping on your employee quality.
Indeed. Our administrator just converted an underutilized webhosting box to a much needed mail-server while 500 miles away on a business trip, over nothing more than his Ibook. That kind of remote-managament is unheard of in the Windows world. "Apt-get install mysql-server"?
The funny thing is, qualified, competent, hard-working systems administrators with years of experience are surprisingly available these days, and are going for far less than people might expect. A friend with 20 years of experience managing Unix networks summed up the problem like this. "All applications are filtered through the HR person. The HR person knows what Javascript is. The HR person has no idea what AWK is. The HR person is going to pass on the resume of the person with Javascript experience."
Of course the issue of the *number* of qualified personnel required should also be brought up. I run in a pure Linux / BSD shop, so I will bring up the experience of a colleague who interned in a Mac / Windows QA shop. For most projects, there were 12 PC's, 12 Macs, 3 PC Technicians, and 1 Mac technician on setup. Generally speaking, the Mac technician would finish configuring and installing the software on all of his 12 machines before the 3 PC technicians. This was quite some time ago and is not directly linked to the Linux / Windows debate, but the point is that the choice of OS can have a tremendous effect on the number of people required to administer the network. In this case if the more expensive employee were paid 2x what the cheaper ones were, you would only be paying 2/3's of what you would with the cheaper ones, and would have a much happier employee to boot.
Having seen what a competent linux administrator can achieve quickly and remotely, for example quickly knocking out scripts to do specific tasks (like migrating datapaths) that would otherwise take hours to do manually, it seems pretty clear that you would require fewer administrators for Linux than for Windows. Anybody either technically competent or extremely well trained can setup an IIS server, but it will take either of them quite some time.
So your choices (if money is an issue):
1) a higher paid employee running linux/bsd/etc.
2) several lower paid employees running win2k.
and if you are sufficiently small
3) a regular employee taking over the win2k work.
(note: this is not attempting to knock the technically competent Windows administrators amongst you, people for whom I have the utmost respect. But even you must admit that setting up a SOHO file server in Windows doesn't exactly tax your abilities).
Carnegie Mellon University has established "The Robot Hall of Fame(TM)" to honor noteworthy robots, both real and fictional, along with their creators.
Perhaps they shouldn't all die (T'Pol is scheduled to play a historical role in the Vulcan empire). Perhaps the studio should take all of the bridge crew, put them in a Shakespearan play, a broadway revival, and a modern introspective sex monologue, and have them judged by an impartial panel of actors. The half that score the lowest, lose their spot, with their character being killed or irrecoverably lost sometime during the next season. Redshirts should also weave their way through several episodes then perish, to keep people on their toes about who is going to die and who is going to take the helm.
That way, the surviving characters can have depth to them, the crew can explore role dynamics and charcter issues in uncertain times, and new blood will be injected into the series to mix in interesting ways with old blood.
My guess is that Trip, T'pol, Hoshi, and Billingsley survive.
1. Throttle P2P traffic until it is unusably slow. The number of students using it will diminish, and those with real need to access such a network will still be able to. (It's not a violation of free speech if we force you to talk reeeeeeeeeeeeeeealllllllllyyyyy ssssssssllllllloooooowwwwwwllllllyyyyyy).
2. Block off P2P traffic to the world outside of the campus network.
3. Find out what your legal obligations are to the RIAA, and satisfy them. Use form letters wherever appropriate.
4. Punish students.
You're not going to be able to convince students to stop trading files willingly. Our university was full of people trading MP3 files in the Pre-Napster days. Attempts to curb such behavior were impossible due to the intersection of the percieved anonymity of the internet, the percieved injustices perpetuated by the record companies against the artists, a sense of entitlement due to record company pricing abuses, and a general desire to have more music on a college student's budget. The risk is low, the activity is not only morally justified but is a moral crusade, and the results are overwhelmingly positive for the student with minimal effort.
To counteract these 4 factors, record companies have been trying to flood the network, justify their pricing scheme, justify their treatment of the artists, and (recently) increase the risk to students. None of the above have been effective in convincing students to change their behavior. The various P2P networks are too large to flood with junk data, their pricing structure makes them one of the most grossly profitable industries in the US, the artists themselves complain about the treatment they recieve with many major acts filing for bankruptcy, and the RIAA has been hesitant to bring down the PR nightmare that full-scale prosecution of students and navy shipmen would create.
The best alternative to pirating copyrighted music is turning students on to public-domain or freely distributed music which a number of artists encourage as a form of advertising for live shows. But sadly the best place to find works from those artists are on P2P networks, and so the activity comes full circle.
Throttle them or block them... In this case until legal and social options are explored at a higher level, the best solution is technological.
Remember this game is Kojima's baby, and with the legendary Miyamoto, both fiercely japanese developers where the Cube is doing exceedingly well. Likewise, with one of the producers on the project being the Holy Messiah of Nintendo, it is likely that lawyers were paid tens of thousands of dollars to draw up contracts preventing any sort of MGS 1.2 on competing systems.
Sorry, you're SOL.
If the problem is dust inside of the machine, perhaps that would be the most efficient thing to filter?
I know people who use clipped stretched pantyhose as intake filters on their machines. Not only do they not impede airflow as much as other solutions thereby reducing noise, but they are very budget efficient. On the other hand, while very effective at reducing large particles such as pet hair they would not likely pass the HEPA standard. If noise is not an issue, a standard computer filtration system might be the best option for you and your laboratory. Some are washable / reusable.
Of course, your lab shouldn't get that dirty to begin with. If you have lab attendents, you should teach them regular maintenence procedures during their downtime... such as spraying compressed air through the bodies of the computers and keeping the surfaces of the lab pristine.(refillable compressed air canisters are available for $15 and can be refilled with any bicycle pump) If the computers are outright clogged with dust, they obviously aren't getting even the most occasional of maintenence. There isn't a fire-and-forget solution to the problem of computer dust: Even with a great filter you still have to open them up occasionally and give them a spritz.
I don't mean to be another impolite theoretical poster responding to your actually researched arguments, but wouldn't dust, etc be removed in a perfect filtration system by simple chemical dispersion? For example, in a plate of water, a drop of colored liquid will disperse and color the entire liquid even if there is no regular current in the liquid. Lacking such a movement, there is always the random but real movement of molecules known as heat...
.001 is a lot smaller than X times 1, but for sufficiently large values of X the air could remain reasonably clean.
I am not a HEPA engineer, but I would expect a perfect filter in any given room would reduce the airborne particulate matter as a function of the ambient temperature and the amount of particles entering the room. Personally I would attach a fan as a precautionary measure as X times
Not to be a smartypants, but if the universe were rotating you would be able to detect it by A: the lack of gravitational pull experienced by the orbiters and B: the additional speed of rotation of the internally orbiting masses.
But it is a pointless measurement.
The fact of the matter is, no matter what timekeeping methodology we choose, in 2 thousand years we will have necessarily evolved a different one due to exploration / appropriation of space. Whether or not a clock is accurate in millions of years is somewhat academic compared to what to do when encountering daylight hours that don't at all resemble earthbound ones. In that sense, universal and local times will probably continue as in this model, but with great differences in the rate with which days change, etc.