His movies may suck, but at least he is using the money and tax laws as they were intended!
I thought they were intended to promote German arts at home and abroad, while establishing a strong local foothold for the industry. His legacy to the German film industry is a string of bombs and just awful films that the world will be deriding for years. Not only that, he has failed to help the German film industry become self-sustaining, as is evidenced by the recent announcement of returns to tiny budgets for the filmmaker.
He didn't explicitly cheat the system like most people, true, but it is pretty obvious that what he was doing was exploitive.
Switching to first-to-file is actually kind of a good idea. The whole "*we* started working on it first, look at these suspiciously backdated memos" thing is immediately resolved if it simply rests on the stamp by the patent department.
If it is the Patent Reform Act of 2007 (still going through) that you're talking about, it also expands protections for prior-use, and allows unaffiliated 3rd parties to petition for patent cancelation. So it's definitely not all bad. It still doesn't solve the examiner crunch which is at the core of the current meltdown, though.
...And a thousand other companies saw what happened here today. A thousand drafts have already been started for ISO standards for iTunes file protection, arbitrary file compression, and so forth.
Do parts of your brain communicate with each other or do you let them lead their own lives?
You mean, like the US intelligence agencies and the white house?
Look at the date. Look at what is being discussed. You have a 5-digit id: you should know better than to look for serious social commentary in a Slashdot post slathered with sarcasm.
The ridiculousness of the situations we find ourselves seem endemic and pervasive. I don't mean to sound like a gibberish-spouting anarchist, but I can't help feeling like the problems in our government have escalated beyond individual policies.
I should have seen that one coming from a mile off. I pretty much painted a target at it and sang the ancient Danish love song "I would like a good trampling and your mother is fat."
Oh come on. Who would believe that a company would intentionally work soon-to-be patented technology into widely-accepted standards without telling anyone, then extract patent royalties at gunpoint? That would imply that companies behave in money-grubbing corrupt fashions, the patent system is broken, anti-fraud and anti-monopoly laws have no teeth, and we didn't have an exit strategy from Iraq.
A widget is basically a shell-integrated, usually web-aware program, created in a series of simple high-level scripting languages.
What you're asking for, then, is a java-style cross platform language, but one that has been well integrated into the shell. I can't really see that coming from 1st parties (well, one in particular). So you'd need to turn to 3rd party support... which as you've seen is difficult to get an IT department to agree to, but means that your best bet currently is probably google.
It's like heading out on a romantic interlude while whispering "my wife will never find us here." This page simply could not have been served, by basic comedy rules of the universe.
I wish I could find the studies offhand, but alas it has been a while. There are studies showing that while what you say is true earlier on in life, the situation reverses later. As men become older, they're more able to take care of women (financially, emotionally, etc), and as such their attractability increases and they can afford to be picky. At the same time, women are reaching the end of their procreatory age, and must find mates.
Hence, through the early 20's, women have a strong upper hand in negotiation. Through the 30's, men tend to.
People will still choose MS Office because they like it, not because it does or does not save documents in a government mandated open specification. Microsoft could simply add a new "Save As" filter following the Open Specification.
There are certain government regulations about acceptable file specifications. This is to preserve interoperability, facilitate competition between vendors, and to guarantee accessibility in one or two hundred years.
By getting this sham declared a "standard," they can continue to sell to certain government agencies, who can continue to produce docs that are only readable on proprietary Microsoft software and platforms.
Microsoft could most definitely offer a valid save-as file filter to create ODF documents. But it is in their best financial interest to retain user lock-in as much as possible. Ironically, this is exactly the sort of thing that standards bodies like the ISO are supposed to prevent. If this goes through, one must seriously reconsider the weight attached to an ISO certification.
The problem is if they put them out for bidding as fixed price contracts they probablly wouldn't get any bids and if they did those bids would be very high.
And the difference between a high bid and routine 400% cost overruns is...?
"Yeah, that Hamburger you wanted? Well, the menu says one dollar, but you're paying us two now, and another two when we hand it to you. Which will be in a month, maybe two... You'll still be hungry then, right?"
$0.17 Musicians' unions *Typical $0.80 Packaging/manufacturing $0.82 Publishing royalties *e.g The rights to the song itself $0.80 Retail profit *Poor bastards. No wonder they're going out of business. $0.90 Distribution $1.60 Artists' royalties $1.70 Label profit *Hmmmmmm. $2.40 Marketing/promotion *So why don't 20 year old albums cost any less? $2.91 Label overhead *Upgrade your equipment, jesus. $3.89 Retail overhead *Because if it weren't for music, they'd be selling crack in that space.
4 dollars retail overhead? Maybe I'm simplifying the distribution issues inherent in specialized retail, but how could they afford to restock and oversee 50c pencils if they're getting 4 dollar overheads on CD's?
I may as well shut down the Ubuntu partition since coming out of hibernation is no faster than just starting it up normally (which takes a lot longer than 30 seconds) and occasionally hibernation fails to resume correctly.
Failed Hybernations were also endemic for me in XP, but Vista seems to have solved that issue.
On the other hand, it really does run about 20% slower than XP, even with bells and whistles turned off.
I tend to think that the next generation of viable wireless data transmission backbones is already being built... by cellphone companies. Say what you will about the pokey speeds, the edge network is pretty widely available and quite useful. The same with Verizon's data services. 3G is just getting a rollout here in the US, but it is proven and solid abroad.
ISP's have a lot of experience with wired networking, but I just don't see them having the experience or the impetus to compete with companies whose lifeblood is competing in the wireless space. And, of course, 4G is already well in development.
Let's also not forget that clicking is not required... all that's required is pre-fetching. I suspect these links are buried somewhere deep in the land of ugly stuff, but it is still a frightening concept that clicking a link = get raided. Does the same idea apply to clicking through the more questionable personals on Craigslist? Or following a link for cialis from an e-mail?
Of course, the law still technically sends anyone to jail who receives unsolicited child pornography in the mail. The laws around this particular area are kind of silly.
A lot of people leave their networks unsecured to help out passers-by and guests. There are at least four businesses on this block who have unsecured wireless networks with the hope of enticing customers in. Similarly, many of the businesses here which don't have fully unsecured wireless networks have ones which allow you to log on as normal, but serve up screens offering to let you get further if you pay for the service or tip your waiter. Network resources like this are left open all of the time for legitimate reasons.
Really, the metaphor should be that you have a building in a strip mall. It's a strip mall, so people assume they can walk into any building and see what they're offering. If you bothered to lock your door, everyone would know that *this* area of the strip mall is off limits. But you didn't take the "yummy chocolate here" signs down, and you're too lazy to spend the five minutes to lock the door (EVERY wireless router has password protection available). So you call the police on anyone who wanders in.
Furthermore, the router is configured to act in your stead, similar to a secretary. The router *actively* recieves connection requests, processes them, and either confirms or denys based upon criteria that you set. Not only that, but you're BROADCASTING an SSID. Which is to say, your router is sending out signals which by design says "I'm here waiting for connections." If you told your secretary (either through action or inaction) to not only let everyone in your building, but to smile and open the door as people walked by, would you really be shocked to find people in your building?
The web has functioned for years on the principle that anything which isn't password protected... I.E. web servers, gopher servers, FTP servers, chat clients, etc, is implicitly OK to access. If you had to get explicit permission before connecting to anything, the web would crumble. And for what? Because certain people know enough about networks to know when other people are sharing their bandwidth, but don't know the easy actions to take down the universally accepted "enter here" signs? That tradeoff is a fool's game.
If you want a wireless network, you should spend the five minutes to figure out how it works. Or live with the mild inconvieniences that sprout from refusing to learn. Otherwise you're re-engineering and crippling the concept of server protocols for people who are sending out the wrong messages and refuse to learn to send the right ones.
Apple has had lots of success foraging out into new territory. The iMac, iPod(s), and iTunes had no direct Microsoft competition when they got there. The iPhone has arguably some competition in the space, but anyone who has used a Microsoft mobile knows why they're called "wince." Similarly, a lot of the recent success of the OS can be tied to the brilliant move of allowing OSX and Windows to run on the same hardware. Thus the OS isn't a direct rejection of the windows world, so much as facilitating the old Windows uses while still bathing in the lessened annoyances of OSX.
If being that Anti-MS OS was enough, BeOS, AmigaOS, SkyOS, or one of a hundred others would fit the bill. Apple has has found some great market needs, and filled them admirably. At this point the OS itself is kind of secondary.
Then please, tell us your industry so that the rest of us can steer clear of it,
Game development, which inherits software methodology from the broader software industry, but munges it through the wringer of crunch hell.
See, some of us grew up with the concept that eliminating or avoiding bugs was more important than adding features.
Right. And so after you add any given feature, you will have bugs to squash, as one inevitably leads to the other. So your last phase will inevitably involve bug squashing.
Otherwise you're saying that when you enter your beta period, you have zero unexpected (early adopter) bugs. That must be some sweet beta period. What do you do?
This is informative? In my industry, alphas are pretend feature complete, with tons of obvious problems. Betas have more suble problems, but are in the process of getting ready. Betas should also be actually feature complete, with the only issues remaining being bugs (and easy tweaks) rather than functionality.
You should never expect the early adopter problems to go away until release (or, well, sometime after release). By process definition if it were bug free, it wouldn't be in beta.
It seems like people either believe that all present and future spaceflight will be manned, or all present and future spaceflight will be robotic.
It's not an either-or situation. Why not run with robotic spaceflight for a while, until technology advances to the point where it becomes valuable to send people? We've already got airtight sub-orbital airlines on the drawing board, and actual colonization is miles away. Why not just use robots for a while, until people become more feasible to send?
If one takes the British position that 'man has no business in space' then there isn't a point to sending robots beyond geostationary orbit either. The whole point of sending robots is that they are cheaper and more expendable to send than humans, thus they are good for the early scouting missions. But if humans aren't eventually going, what is the freaking point?
Aren't we pretty much in the "early scouting missions" phase for at least the next 20 years? Why not let other countries learn the hard and expensive lessons about sending people into space, while you send robots and get real scientific work done?
Slashdot Mirror
His movies may suck, but at least he is using the money and tax laws as they were intended!
I thought they were intended to promote German arts at home and abroad, while establishing a strong local foothold for the industry. His legacy to the German film industry is a string of bombs and just awful films that the world will be deriding for years. Not only that, he has failed to help the German film industry become self-sustaining, as is evidenced by the recent announcement of returns to tiny budgets for the filmmaker.
He didn't explicitly cheat the system like most people, true, but it is pretty obvious that what he was doing was exploitive.
AAAAnd that's when we force Harris Corp to pick up their own bill, as they massively failed to deliver on time.
Switching to first-to-file is actually kind of a good idea. The whole "*we* started working on it first, look at these suspiciously backdated memos" thing is immediately resolved if it simply rests on the stamp by the patent department.
If it is the Patent Reform Act of 2007 (still going through) that you're talking about, it also expands protections for prior-use, and allows unaffiliated 3rd parties to petition for patent cancelation. So it's definitely not all bad. It still doesn't solve the examiner crunch which is at the core of the current meltdown, though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_Reform_Act_of_2007
...And a thousand other companies saw what happened here today. A thousand drafts have already been started for ISO standards for iTunes file protection, arbitrary file compression, and so forth.
Do parts of your brain communicate with each other or do you let them lead their own lives?
You mean, like the US intelligence agencies and the white house?
Look at the date. Look at what is being discussed. You have a 5-digit id: you should know better than to look for serious social commentary in a Slashdot post slathered with sarcasm.
The ridiculousness of the situations we find ourselves seem endemic and pervasive. I don't mean to sound like a gibberish-spouting anarchist, but I can't help feeling like the problems in our government have escalated beyond individual policies.
I should have seen that one coming from a mile off. I pretty much painted a target at it and sang the ancient Danish love song "I would like a good trampling and your mother is fat."
Oh come on. Who would believe that a company would intentionally work soon-to-be patented technology into widely-accepted standards without telling anyone, then extract patent royalties at gunpoint? That would imply that companies behave in money-grubbing corrupt fashions, the patent system is broken, anti-fraud and anti-monopoly laws have no teeth, and we didn't have an exit strategy from Iraq.
oh. right. carry on then.
A widget is basically a shell-integrated, usually web-aware program, created in a series of simple high-level scripting languages.
What you're asking for, then, is a java-style cross platform language, but one that has been well integrated into the shell. I can't really see that coming from 1st parties (well, one in particular). So you'd need to turn to 3rd party support... which as you've seen is difficult to get an IT department to agree to, but means that your best bet currently is probably google.
Does anyone else find this image ironic?
http://www.chriscanfield.net/Offsite/slashdoterror.gif
It's like heading out on a romantic interlude while whispering "my wife will never find us here." This page simply could not have been served, by basic comedy rules of the universe.
I wish I could find the studies offhand, but alas it has been a while. There are studies showing that while what you say is true earlier on in life, the situation reverses later. As men become older, they're more able to take care of women (financially, emotionally, etc), and as such their attractability increases and they can afford to be picky. At the same time, women are reaching the end of their procreatory age, and must find mates.
Hence, through the early 20's, women have a strong upper hand in negotiation. Through the 30's, men tend to.
People will still choose MS Office because they like it, not because it does or does not save documents in a government mandated open specification. Microsoft could simply add a new "Save As" filter following the Open Specification.
There are certain government regulations about acceptable file specifications. This is to preserve interoperability, facilitate competition between vendors, and to guarantee accessibility in one or two hundred years.
By getting this sham declared a "standard," they can continue to sell to certain government agencies, who can continue to produce docs that are only readable on proprietary Microsoft software and platforms.
Microsoft could most definitely offer a valid save-as file filter to create ODF documents. But it is in their best financial interest to retain user lock-in as much as possible. Ironically, this is exactly the sort of thing that standards bodies like the ISO are supposed to prevent. If this goes through, one must seriously reconsider the weight attached to an ISO certification.
The problem is if they put them out for bidding as fixed price contracts they probablly wouldn't get any bids and if they did those bids would be very high.
And the difference between a high bid and routine 400% cost overruns is...?
"Yeah, that Hamburger you wanted? Well, the menu says one dollar, but you're paying us two now, and another two when we hand it to you. Which will be in a month, maybe two... You'll still be hungry then, right?"
$0.17 Musicians' unions *Typical
$0.80 Packaging/manufacturing
$0.82 Publishing royalties *e.g The rights to the song itself
$0.80 Retail profit *Poor bastards. No wonder they're going out of business.
$0.90 Distribution
$1.60 Artists' royalties
$1.70 Label profit *Hmmmmmm.
$2.40 Marketing/promotion *So why don't 20 year old albums cost any less?
$2.91 Label overhead *Upgrade your equipment, jesus.
$3.89 Retail overhead *Because if it weren't for music, they'd be selling crack in that space.
4 dollars retail overhead? Maybe I'm simplifying the distribution issues inherent in specialized retail, but how could they afford to restock and oversee 50c pencils if they're getting 4 dollar overheads on CD's?
Alternative breakdowns:
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/entertainment/0101/cd.price/frameset.exclude.html
http://deancollinsblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/cd-costs-breakdown.html
http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
I may as well shut down the Ubuntu partition since coming out of hibernation is no faster than just starting it up normally (which takes a lot longer than 30 seconds) and occasionally hibernation fails to resume correctly.
Failed Hybernations were also endemic for me in XP, but Vista seems to have solved that issue.
On the other hand, it really does run about 20% slower than XP, even with bells and whistles turned off.
I tend to think that the next generation of viable wireless data transmission backbones is already being built... by cellphone companies. Say what you will about the pokey speeds, the edge network is pretty widely available and quite useful. The same with Verizon's data services. 3G is just getting a rollout here in the US, but it is proven and solid abroad.
ISP's have a lot of experience with wired networking, but I just don't see them having the experience or the impetus to compete with companies whose lifeblood is competing in the wireless space. And, of course, 4G is already well in development.
I can't wait until the FBI raids the CEOS.
Let's also not forget that clicking is not required... all that's required is pre-fetching. I suspect these links are buried somewhere deep in the land of ugly stuff, but it is still a frightening concept that clicking a link = get raided. Does the same idea apply to clicking through the more questionable personals on Craigslist? Or following a link for cialis from an e-mail?
Of course, the law still technically sends anyone to jail who receives unsolicited child pornography in the mail. The laws around this particular area are kind of silly.
At least the hooker is open about screwing you out of your money.
This sounds a lot like google's server needs. Truly random access at high speeds.
Ram disks were available on the mac in 1990. You can get specialized rocket drives that are entirely RAM. How is this so "far off" again?
A lot of people leave their networks unsecured to help out passers-by and guests. There are at least four businesses on this block who have unsecured wireless networks with the hope of enticing customers in. Similarly, many of the businesses here which don't have fully unsecured wireless networks have ones which allow you to log on as normal, but serve up screens offering to let you get further if you pay for the service or tip your waiter. Network resources like this are left open all of the time for legitimate reasons.
Really, the metaphor should be that you have a building in a strip mall. It's a strip mall, so people assume they can walk into any building and see what they're offering. If you bothered to lock your door, everyone would know that *this* area of the strip mall is off limits. But you didn't take the "yummy chocolate here" signs down, and you're too lazy to spend the five minutes to lock the door (EVERY wireless router has password protection available). So you call the police on anyone who wanders in.
Furthermore, the router is configured to act in your stead, similar to a secretary. The router *actively* recieves connection requests, processes them, and either confirms or denys based upon criteria that you set. Not only that, but you're BROADCASTING an SSID. Which is to say, your router is sending out signals which by design says "I'm here waiting for connections." If you told your secretary (either through action or inaction) to not only let everyone in your building, but to smile and open the door as people walked by, would you really be shocked to find people in your building?
The web has functioned for years on the principle that anything which isn't password protected... I.E. web servers, gopher servers, FTP servers, chat clients, etc, is implicitly OK to access. If you had to get explicit permission before connecting to anything, the web would crumble. And for what? Because certain people know enough about networks to know when other people are sharing their bandwidth, but don't know the easy actions to take down the universally accepted "enter here" signs? That tradeoff is a fool's game.
If you want a wireless network, you should spend the five minutes to figure out how it works. Or live with the mild inconvieniences that sprout from refusing to learn. Otherwise you're re-engineering and crippling the concept of server protocols for people who are sending out the wrong messages and refuse to learn to send the right ones.
They charge so little for bandwidth that it's hard to resist picking them as your #2.
Coincidentally, they've also chosen you for their #2.
Apple has had lots of success foraging out into new territory. The iMac, iPod(s), and iTunes had no direct Microsoft competition when they got there. The iPhone has arguably some competition in the space, but anyone who has used a Microsoft mobile knows why they're called "wince." Similarly, a lot of the recent success of the OS can be tied to the brilliant move of allowing OSX and Windows to run on the same hardware. Thus the OS isn't a direct rejection of the windows world, so much as facilitating the old Windows uses while still bathing in the lessened annoyances of OSX.
If being that Anti-MS OS was enough, BeOS, AmigaOS, SkyOS, or one of a hundred others would fit the bill. Apple has has found some great market needs, and filled them admirably. At this point the OS itself is kind of secondary.
Then please, tell us your industry so that the rest of us can steer clear of it,
Game development, which inherits software methodology from the broader software industry, but munges it through the wringer of crunch hell.
See, some of us grew up with the concept that eliminating or avoiding bugs was more important than adding features.
Right. And so after you add any given feature, you will have bugs to squash, as one inevitably leads to the other. So your last phase will inevitably involve bug squashing.
Otherwise you're saying that when you enter your beta period, you have zero unexpected (early adopter) bugs. That must be some sweet beta period. What do you do?
This is informative? In my industry, alphas are pretend feature complete, with tons of obvious problems. Betas have more suble problems, but are in the process of getting ready. Betas should also be actually feature complete, with the only issues remaining being bugs (and easy tweaks) rather than functionality.
You should never expect the early adopter problems to go away until release (or, well, sometime after release). By process definition if it were bug free, it wouldn't be in beta.
It seems like people either believe that all present and future spaceflight will be manned, or all present and future spaceflight will be robotic.
It's not an either-or situation. Why not run with robotic spaceflight for a while, until technology advances to the point where it becomes valuable to send people? We've already got airtight sub-orbital airlines on the drawing board, and actual colonization is miles away. Why not just use robots for a while, until people become more feasible to send?
If one takes the British position that 'man has no business in space' then there isn't a point to sending robots beyond geostationary orbit either. The whole point of sending robots is that they are cheaper and more expendable to send than humans, thus they are good for the early scouting missions. But if humans aren't eventually going, what is the freaking point?
Aren't we pretty much in the "early scouting missions" phase for at least the next 20 years? Why not let other countries learn the hard and expensive lessons about sending people into space, while you send robots and get real scientific work done?