And let's be clear. They can't really stop you. What they can do is bar you from playing the game or block your addon from working. There's no real control that they can place of the authoring of LUA code that has calls out to their API.
Blizzard is entirely within their rights to take these steps, and frankly I think I'm happier with this kind of restriction than not, right now. At some point there will be many platforms like WoW, where you can re-write most of the UI of a virtual world, but right now, most of the attempts to do this have been sad comparisons (EQ let you design some XML-based elements and Second Life lets you design in-game objects that act UI-like, but aren't actually part of the UI).
When this becomes widespread among virtual worlds, I'm sure that there will be more room for competing business models, but where we're at the early stages it works out very well to promote a cohesive community by preventing the isolation of discrete paid services.
On the other hand, it would really be smart of Blizzard to start cutting a small sliver of their profits to these projects (perhaps in a Summer of Code fashion). They've done some things like award beta keys to authors in the past, but more of this would further increase the developer base.
TFA specifically says you can solicit donations on your website for your work, you just can't charge for it or advertise in game.
So, you didn't read his post, or are you just being obtuse?
He already addressed that point, making it clear that, no requesting donations on the Web site doesn't work (which is rather obvious if you realize that most users of many addons use an addon manager, and never visit the site anyway, much the way Linux users almost never visit the Gnome site or the GCC site).
If you disagree with his points, be constructive and say so. Defend your point of view even, but don't just blindly re-state the premise. That wastes your time and ours.
Seriously. Why do actors and actresses who pretend to be politicans and soldiers for tv and movies get more influence over "real world" politics like the UN than I do?
Well, there are some obvious reasons. I'd say chief among them being the fact that we, for lack of a better metric, associate popularity with the relevance of a message to the population, and of all of the TV shows that delve into the topics that BSG does (hint: there aren't any other on TV right now), it's the most popular.
That said, I don't see why the *actors* are the people you invite per se. It's really the writers who had something to say. Then again, Olmos certainly did make a strong point for his being involved, even if he made the guy next to him squirm like a bug.
My point wasn't to write a great commercial, but to demonstrate that you don't have to follow the Mac/PC model in order to make an "I'm a Linux" ad. You can deconstruct their assumptions just as easily as you can respond in a like manner the way Microsoft did. Here's another:
Linux: Hi, I'm a computer. Mac: What operating system do you run? Linux: At the moment, Linux, but why does that matter in an age of virtualization and cloud computing? PC: You have to be kidding! It's all about branding! Linux: What it it wasn't? Wouldn't it be interesting if people just chose the right tool for the job rather than fetishizing the lowest-level and least interesting software in the world? Mac/PC: No! Mac: Fetishizing the OS is pretty much our business model. It's what made a smart phone without cut-and-paste last through two major revisions. PC: And where do you get off calling the OS uninteresting? Linux: Isn't it? Can it edit a photograph or play a web video, or is it just the glue that allows the programs that CAN do those things to talk to the hardware which is essentially universal at this point? Mac/PC: We're out. [walk off together] Linux: Welcome to the future folks, and enjoy the ride.
I don't think it's really a matter of the relative financials. Shell employs more energy-production engineers and pure-research scientists than just about any other organization on Earth. They're uniquely qualified to come to the determination that these alternative technologies simply won't become practical in the near-term.
Keep in mind that wind, solar and other "clean" power sources work very well on a small scale, but when you get to the level of a city, there's nothing that can come within an order of magnitude of the power-output of current carbon-based fuels. The best we can do is currently geothermal, and that's very location-specific (though a huge leap in semiconductor materials might make exporting power from such areas practical in the not-too-distant future).
The only place that spending large amounts of money really looks like it might get us a new power source is a space elevator, but we're not talking about a tiny amount of money there. This is the kind of expenditure which would really require the G8 rather than any one member to do the materials research, testing and construction. There's no way that Shell could build such a thing on their own, much less build the solar infrastructure in space to feed power back down.
Regardless of what any contract says, regardless of who actually owes what, screenplay writers are the major breadwinners yet get paid virtually nothing for their efforts. Nobody got rich writing scripts, but many many rich actors and movie moguls got rich from bloody good stories.
Those actors who get rich typically don't get rich from a good script. At least not directly. They get the same shaft that writers get until they've ALREADY been in something that was successful. Then they're considered "proven," and can start to demand marginally better terms. After being in many successful films or a small number of highly successful films, an actor may be able to swing really good terms.
Paradoxically, what they make "the big bucks" for has no real guarantee of being worth watching. I'd be much happier if we revised the whole system so that writers, actors, directors and everyone else involved were payed a decent wage for their work and given a share in the real (not Hollywood-fudged) profits of the film.
Now, onto the crux of what he says. It is well-known that money brought in through lawsuits, etc, via the MPAA and RIAA have not been forwarded to artists. It is also well-known that artists repeatedly sue managers, producers and studios for payment of royalties. Is it too hard to imagine the studios rip off those who are respected and heard even less?
Not at all. A great reference for this is, "The Complete Book of Scriptwriting," by J. Michael Straczynski whose views on the industry are very similar to his friend, Harlan Ellison.
The totals are probably exaggerated a little. A Star Trek FAQ from the 1990s suggested the annual turnover of Star Trek merchandise was around 60 million dollars.
That number is probably very, very low now if you're including video games and licensing for toy brands such as Lego across all of the world markets.
Of course, legally, all that matters is what the contract says. If the contract says he should be paid X amount and he has been paid less than that (a common enough experience with artists, so why not writers?), then he has not just a moral argument but a legal argument.
The problem is not so cut-and-dry. These things are couched in terms of "profit." Here's a fictional scenario to explain the complications, here:
What profit does the show make when rights to show it are sold for $10 from one CBS-owned company (Paramount) to another (The CW, say) and the second company makes $100m on advertising?
Answer? Nothing. In fact, $10 isn't enough to cover the transaction, so it's a huge loss. Tough break for those who don't own a piece of CBS. Good thing National Amusements owns controlling voting interest in CBS/Paramount, giving them access to both sides of that deal.
That's only one of the ways that studios creatively describe how much they make.
Mac: Hi, I'm a Mac Linux: Well, you're not really a Mac, right? Mac: Of course I am. Linux: "Macs" [using air-quotes, here] now use PC processors and an operating system that's based on Unix and a user-interface that's derived from NeXT. They have about as much connection to the Mac that Apple introduced in 1984 as MTV has to music on television. PC: Heh Linux: And what are you laughing at? PC: Well, I'm a PC, so that just seemed sort of funny. Linux: You're not a PC. PC: OK, that's just not funny. I'm *the* PC Linux: A PC is a hardware platform. In fact, it's the same hardware platform that your friend, here, runs on. You're just Windows. PC: Alright smart guy; what are you then? Linux: I'm Linux PC/Mac: [unison] What's a Linux? Linux: I'm a clone of the Unix operating system that Mac is based on, but I run on just about anything more powerful than a calculator, including some of the most powerful supercomputers on Earth. Mac: Sounds like you're spread sort of thin. Linux: I wouldn't talk. You have versions that run on music players and cell-phones these days. [Mac shuffles feet] PC: Aren't you written by a bunch of college kids? Linux: I suppose the employees of IBM, the NSA, Oracle and Google were in college once, yeah. Weren't you the product of a college drop out? PC: No, he just stole the... er... nevermind!
In the case of NFS for instance, hasn't there been a performance improvement? Isn't that the thing that matters?
I guess that depends on why you care. If you're lumping Linux into an end-user distro, then you probably think that's a good thing. If you're looking at long-term growth of complexity and thinking of that as a metric for maintainability... then it might be a bad sign.
Welcome to the way laws get made in this country, circa your entire lifetime.
To quote the LoC on the matter:
The conference committee is sometimes popularly referred to as the "Third House of Congress". Although the managers on the part of each House meet together as one committee they are in effect two separate committees, each of which votes separately and acts by a majority vote. For this reason, the number of managers from each House is largely immaterial.
The House conferees are strictly limited in their consideration to matters in disagreement between the two Houses. Consequently, they may not strike out or amend any portion of the bill that was not amended by the other House. Furthermore, they may not insert new matter that is not germane to or that is beyond the scope of the differences between the two Houses.
The key issue here is that an amendment that was removed is technically a "matter in disagreement," so simply introducing an amendment and then revoking it allows you (if you have enough sway to get into conference) to bring it up during conference as a bargaining chip.
If you think that Democrats and Republicans are any different, you haven't been paying attention. There are good Democrats and good Republicans, but their party affiliation has nothing to do with it.
Yeah, there are many levels of spoilers one can give for Primer. It starts with "it's a science fiction movie" (not obvious from the start, though one might guess). From there, you can tell someone it's time-travel based. That breaks some of the suspense from the first act. Then you can say what's said above. That's giving away one of the central plot points of the first two-thirds of the movie.
HOWEVER, after that you then get into the really strange bits, and frankly, knowing that the start of the movie isn't the first timeline is just introducing the plot.
There's a reason people see that movie dozens of times. It's not for a thrill ride or to watch the beautiful actors. It's because the plot really is that twisted. I wasn't kidding. GIANT GANT CHART. Really.
Yep, every time I run iTunes, it seems, I'm asked to install some new piece of the MacOS desktop. The real problem is that Apple is refusing to port iTunes to Windows. Instead, they're just adding the APIs and support services that they rely on under MacOS to Windows, which means that nothing performs well, as it's all a redundant layer over the Windows functionality that does the same thing.
All of which is entirely fair, and should apply equally to iTunes for Windows, which forever wants to keep installing more and more of the MacOS desktop instead of fixing the fact that it's by an order or magnitude (no exaggerating, here, really) the least responsive app on my desktop.
Re:Why people watch movies..
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Daemon
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People watch movies for entertainment, or for thrills - not for technological enlightenment.
Yes, absolutely! However, it's possible to be accurate without being dogmatic, while being entertaining as well. It's rare and a breath of fresh air when it happens.
There's nothing wrong with dramatic license. I don't think anyone who plays World of Warcraft, for example, watched the South Park episode about it and thought, "that's my life!"... at least, I hope not. Then again, it was mostly spot-on and had clearly been written by someone who played the game. Hyperbole and simplification are one thing. Showing something on the screen that makes no sense to someone who knows what you're talking about (fly-by Unix in Jurasic Park) is just ignorance for ignorance's sake.
Re:Just two words
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Daemon
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Well, Andromeda Strain was for a less TV-indulged generation.;-)
But seriously, there's lots of good tech written by people who know their stuff. In some cases, they're even popular.
Authors include:
Michael Crichton
Neal Stephenson
Vernor Vinge
Also, there's some good movies out there when it comes to technical realism. My favorite is a science fiction film by the name of Primer. It was shot on a $7000 budget, and is the only movie I know of that literally requires a giant Gant chart to figure out.
Worse, it's an outright lie. The record companies are freaking out about uncontrolled downloads, not because their music is being copied around (it is), but because of Free Albums Galore, headphonica, Jamendo, Internet Archive Audio and so on.... There are dozens of places to get completely free music and this is the single most terrifying use the Internet can be put to, from the big label perspective. It has the potential to break the spine of the industry's decades-cultivated promotional and sales lock-in.
Yes, there's sharing of big-label music, but I share a half dozen freely distributable albums and no big-label music at all. I'm sure that bothers them a lot more than if I were serving up the manufactured pop of the week.
It seems they're getting it slowly, though. More and more songs are distributed for free as a loss-leader on iTunes and Amazon every day. If they keep that up, they might even figure out a business plan that treats their customers like people... but I'm not holding my breath.
While you're right, and Google tries to reign in its footprint, I think it's worth calling the while article into question first, before going at Google with pitchforks and torches.
7g of carbon? How do they measure that? On a server that's almost certainly servicing dozens or hundreds of queries in a rack that's minimizing power requirements by centralizing AC-DC conversion (Rackable's design which Google has some long-standing, complex relationship with). How are we measuring the power requirements for that query? Are we including the power requirements for the client computer and networking infrastructure that Google doesn't own or have any control over? Are we, in fact, arm-waving so broadly that we could have come up with any number at all? What are the error bars? What are the sources?
No. And in fact, whenever you read a Slashdot summary in lieu of actually reading a patent, you're pretty much guaranteed to have no idea what you're talking about.
In Mac pre-OS/X terminology (and I use Mac terminology because it might actually represent prior art, here, if they were ever used this way), this patent covers something like a resource fork which contains security information that describes what kind of container environment (think BSD jail) the program should be run in every time it's executed.
Windows started supporting this kind of thing in XP I think, but Vista relies on it for everything, so I can see why this particular patent troll would go after MS first.
1992 is quite early, and it's going to be interesting finding the appropriate prior-art. I do think there is prior art, but like I say, not trivial to find.
OK, I just retired my nearly 10-year-old Linux device that watches TV for me to replace it with the next generation from the same company. I'm using a BSD-based phone, but planning on switching to a Linux-based one at some point in the future. My company develops a product that targets both Linux and Windows (among other platforms), and is one of the few software products which is selling well in the recession.
I haven't had a job with anything but a Linux desktop for 10 years.
What the heck are we talking about here? The year of Linux was over a long time ago... we're wrapping up the DECADE of Linux. To those who thought the success of Linux was going to mean that the competition went way, well that was just silly.
UDP is used for online gaming, VoIP, etc. They will just start to deprioritize UDP, which is bad. 99% of customers won't notice the difference, but we will.
99% of customers are made up statistics;-)
A couple of things on this: 1) I don't know of any games (not saying they don't exist) that use UDP. The largest Internet-connected player base out there right now is World of Warcraft, and I know for a fact that that traffic is TCP-based.
VOIP is easy enough to recognize and prioritize.
The real issue that will be hitting ISPs (actually, already is) is the fact that they've been selling pipe to users that the users can't use... and suddenly everyone and his brother Skippy is selling an Internet-connected video device. This means that customers will not only be using all of their allotted bandwidth, but they will be doing so during an ever-increasing percentage of the day (as their video devices automatically download subscription programming). I can already subscribe to a "season pass" for programming on my TiVo that is downloaded from Amazon, and sometime this month, Netflix is claiming they'll have the same TiVo integration. Sling, Blockbuster and many others are also sucking up your ISP's bandwidth.
Simply put, these networks were never provisioned for this much usage, and I'll be surprised if there aren't massive growing pains along the way. Complaining about P2P traffic is a random thing that they feel they can control, not the core of their concerns.
This man was clearly wronged. I suggest that we all write to the court, asking in polite terms that this defendant be awarded the sum of 1 million gold for his pain and stupidity, er suffering!
Exactly. However, there's always a trade-off between usability and security, and many in the military rely on the public internet for routine work (accessing contractor Web sites, presentation of information to the public, recruiting, etc.) They're also responsible for defending the public infrastructure in the same way that they're responsible for defending the physical nation.
These are the concerns that I think they're talking about, and those that spurred the creation of this new group.
It's too easy to shoot this down here, but I'll just state for the record that you could easily have found someone to speak who would have said anything, so the source isn't really interesting. You're really just stating your own opinion, here. Had you said that, it might have sounded a bit better.
he made some very good points, but he told us to stay away from open source because (shortened version) if we wanted to be well-known in the open source world then we'd have to slog it out full-time, fighting amongst other egos working for free just trying to get our names known.
I have not stayed away from open source. I've not had to "log it out full-time." I've not had to "fight amongst other egos." I've never even worried about how well-known my name is.
Open source software provides, for the engineer, three things:
* Very low barrier-to-entry exposure to sophisticated tools * Exposure to the kinds of practical coding concerns that you will face elsewhere * The ability to not only claim that you've worked with a technology, but to demonstrate the fruits of your work
If your goal from day one is to be a core contributor to a project, then yes, it will be a lot of work. You might even decide that that's worth it someday, but no one has to make that level of commitment in order to contribute to open source.
What's more, this is the same thing we hear every 2 years. "Browser X is really fast!" Then six months later you hear, "Browser X was lagging behind the pack because it didn't have support for A, B and C, but now it's getting them." After that you get, "Why is Browser X so slow these days?" And inevitably, "Browser Y is really fast!"
When are we going to realize that browser maturity and performance are going to be on opposing curves and jumping ship to an immature browser just sets you up to lose functionality for a short period of time until the performance can be gobbled up by it.
This is exactly why I'm not using Chrome. Chrome is very nice, but it doesn't have most of what I require of a browsing experience. Once it does, THEN I'll evaluate its competitiveness, not before.
Slashdot Mirror
And let's be clear. They can't really stop you. What they can do is bar you from playing the game or block your addon from working. There's no real control that they can place of the authoring of LUA code that has calls out to their API.
Blizzard is entirely within their rights to take these steps, and frankly I think I'm happier with this kind of restriction than not, right now. At some point there will be many platforms like WoW, where you can re-write most of the UI of a virtual world, but right now, most of the attempts to do this have been sad comparisons (EQ let you design some XML-based elements and Second Life lets you design in-game objects that act UI-like, but aren't actually part of the UI).
When this becomes widespread among virtual worlds, I'm sure that there will be more room for competing business models, but where we're at the early stages it works out very well to promote a cohesive community by preventing the isolation of discrete paid services.
On the other hand, it would really be smart of Blizzard to start cutting a small sliver of their profits to these projects (perhaps in a Summer of Code fashion). They've done some things like award beta keys to authors in the past, but more of this would further increase the developer base.
TFA specifically says you can solicit donations on your website for your work, you just can't charge for it or advertise in game.
So, you didn't read his post, or are you just being obtuse?
He already addressed that point, making it clear that, no requesting donations on the Web site doesn't work (which is rather obvious if you realize that most users of many addons use an addon manager, and never visit the site anyway, much the way Linux users almost never visit the Gnome site or the GCC site).
If you disagree with his points, be constructive and say so. Defend your point of view even, but don't just blindly re-state the premise. That wastes your time and ours.
Seriously. Why do actors and actresses who pretend to be politicans and soldiers for tv and movies get more influence over "real world" politics like the UN than I do?
Well, there are some obvious reasons. I'd say chief among them being the fact that we, for lack of a better metric, associate popularity with the relevance of a message to the population, and of all of the TV shows that delve into the topics that BSG does (hint: there aren't any other on TV right now), it's the most popular.
That said, I don't see why the *actors* are the people you invite per se. It's really the writers who had something to say. Then again, Olmos certainly did make a strong point for his being involved, even if he made the guy next to him squirm like a bug.
Define "big jerk" for me.
I think I'd buy, "pedantic," though.
My point wasn't to write a great commercial, but to demonstrate that you don't have to follow the Mac/PC model in order to make an "I'm a Linux" ad. You can deconstruct their assumptions just as easily as you can respond in a like manner the way Microsoft did. Here's another:
Linux: Hi, I'm a computer.
Mac: What operating system do you run?
Linux: At the moment, Linux, but why does that matter in an age of virtualization and cloud computing?
PC: You have to be kidding! It's all about branding!
Linux: What it it wasn't? Wouldn't it be interesting if people just chose the right tool for the job rather than fetishizing the lowest-level and least interesting software in the world?
Mac/PC: No!
Mac: Fetishizing the OS is pretty much our business model. It's what made a smart phone without cut-and-paste last through two major revisions.
PC: And where do you get off calling the OS uninteresting?
Linux: Isn't it? Can it edit a photograph or play a web video, or is it just the glue that allows the programs that CAN do those things to talk to the hardware which is essentially universal at this point?
Mac/PC: We're out. [walk off together]
Linux: Welcome to the future folks, and enjoy the ride.
I don't think it's really a matter of the relative financials. Shell employs more energy-production engineers and pure-research scientists than just about any other organization on Earth. They're uniquely qualified to come to the determination that these alternative technologies simply won't become practical in the near-term.
Keep in mind that wind, solar and other "clean" power sources work very well on a small scale, but when you get to the level of a city, there's nothing that can come within an order of magnitude of the power-output of current carbon-based fuels. The best we can do is currently geothermal, and that's very location-specific (though a huge leap in semiconductor materials might make exporting power from such areas practical in the not-too-distant future).
The only place that spending large amounts of money really looks like it might get us a new power source is a space elevator, but we're not talking about a tiny amount of money there. This is the kind of expenditure which would really require the G8 rather than any one member to do the materials research, testing and construction. There's no way that Shell could build such a thing on their own, much less build the solar infrastructure in space to feed power back down.
Regardless of what any contract says, regardless of who actually owes what, screenplay writers are the major breadwinners yet get paid virtually nothing for their efforts. Nobody got rich writing scripts, but many many rich actors and movie moguls got rich from bloody good stories.
Those actors who get rich typically don't get rich from a good script. At least not directly. They get the same shaft that writers get until they've ALREADY been in something that was successful. Then they're considered "proven," and can start to demand marginally better terms. After being in many successful films or a small number of highly successful films, an actor may be able to swing really good terms.
Paradoxically, what they make "the big bucks" for has no real guarantee of being worth watching. I'd be much happier if we revised the whole system so that writers, actors, directors and everyone else involved were payed a decent wage for their work and given a share in the real (not Hollywood-fudged) profits of the film.
Now, onto the crux of what he says. It is well-known that money brought in through lawsuits, etc, via the MPAA and RIAA have not been forwarded to artists. It is also well-known that artists repeatedly sue managers, producers and studios for payment of royalties. Is it too hard to imagine the studios rip off those who are respected and heard even less?
Not at all. A great reference for this is, "The Complete Book of Scriptwriting," by J. Michael Straczynski whose views on the industry are very similar to his friend, Harlan Ellison.
The totals are probably exaggerated a little. A Star Trek FAQ from the 1990s suggested the annual turnover of Star Trek merchandise was around 60 million dollars.
That number is probably very, very low now if you're including video games and licensing for toy brands such as Lego across all of the world markets.
Of course, legally, all that matters is what the contract says. If the contract says he should be paid X amount and he has been paid less than that (a common enough experience with artists, so why not writers?), then he has not just a moral argument but a legal argument.
The problem is not so cut-and-dry. These things are couched in terms of "profit." Here's a fictional scenario to explain the complications, here:
What profit does the show make when rights to show it are sold for $10 from one CBS-owned company (Paramount) to another (The CW, say) and the second company makes $100m on advertising?
Answer? Nothing. In fact, $10 isn't enough to cover the transaction, so it's a huge loss. Tough break for those who don't own a piece of CBS. Good thing National Amusements owns controlling voting interest in CBS/Paramount, giving them access to both sides of that deal.
That's only one of the ways that studios creatively describe how much they make.
Well, then that's your angle, right?
Mac: Hi, I'm a Mac ... er ... nevermind!
Linux: Well, you're not really a Mac, right?
Mac: Of course I am.
Linux: "Macs" [using air-quotes, here] now use PC processors and an operating system that's based on Unix and a user-interface that's derived from NeXT. They have about as much connection to the Mac that Apple introduced in 1984 as MTV has to music on television.
PC: Heh
Linux: And what are you laughing at?
PC: Well, I'm a PC, so that just seemed sort of funny.
Linux: You're not a PC.
PC: OK, that's just not funny. I'm *the* PC
Linux: A PC is a hardware platform. In fact, it's the same hardware platform that your friend, here, runs on. You're just Windows.
PC: Alright smart guy; what are you then?
Linux: I'm Linux
PC/Mac: [unison] What's a Linux?
Linux: I'm a clone of the Unix operating system that Mac is based on, but I run on just about anything more powerful than a calculator, including some of the most powerful supercomputers on Earth.
Mac: Sounds like you're spread sort of thin.
Linux: I wouldn't talk. You have versions that run on music players and cell-phones these days.
[Mac shuffles feet]
PC: Aren't you written by a bunch of college kids?
Linux: I suppose the employees of IBM, the NSA, Oracle and Google were in college once, yeah. Weren't you the product of a college drop out?
PC: No, he just stole the
In the case of NFS for instance, hasn't there been a performance improvement? Isn't that the thing that matters?
I guess that depends on why you care. If you're lumping Linux into an end-user distro, then you probably think that's a good thing. If you're looking at long-term growth of complexity and thinking of that as a metric for maintainability... then it might be a bad sign.
Welcome to the way laws get made in this country, circa your entire lifetime.
To quote the LoC on the matter:
The conference committee is sometimes popularly referred to as the "Third House of Congress". Although the managers on the part of each House meet together as one committee they are in effect two separate committees, each of which votes separately and acts by a majority vote. For this reason, the number of managers from each House is largely immaterial.
The House conferees are strictly limited in their consideration to matters in disagreement between the two Houses. Consequently, they may not strike out or amend any portion of the bill that was not amended by the other House. Furthermore, they may not insert new matter that is not germane to or that is beyond the scope of the differences between the two Houses.
The key issue here is that an amendment that was removed is technically a "matter in disagreement," so simply introducing an amendment and then revoking it allows you (if you have enough sway to get into conference) to bring it up during conference as a bargaining chip.
If you think that Democrats and Republicans are any different, you haven't been paying attention. There are good Democrats and good Republicans, but their party affiliation has nothing to do with it.
Yeah, there are many levels of spoilers one can give for Primer. It starts with "it's a science fiction movie" (not obvious from the start, though one might guess). From there, you can tell someone it's time-travel based. That breaks some of the suspense from the first act. Then you can say what's said above. That's giving away one of the central plot points of the first two-thirds of the movie.
HOWEVER, after that you then get into the really strange bits, and frankly, knowing that the start of the movie isn't the first timeline is just introducing the plot.
There's a reason people see that movie dozens of times. It's not for a thrill ride or to watch the beautiful actors. It's because the plot really is that twisted. I wasn't kidding. GIANT GANT CHART. Really.
http://neuwanstein.fw.hu/primer_timeline.html
Yep, every time I run iTunes, it seems, I'm asked to install some new piece of the MacOS desktop. The real problem is that Apple is refusing to port iTunes to Windows. Instead, they're just adding the APIs and support services that they rely on under MacOS to Windows, which means that nothing performs well, as it's all a redundant layer over the Windows functionality that does the same thing.
All of which is entirely fair, and should apply equally to iTunes for Windows, which forever wants to keep installing more and more of the MacOS desktop instead of fixing the fact that it's by an order or magnitude (no exaggerating, here, really) the least responsive app on my desktop.
People watch movies for entertainment, or for thrills - not for technological enlightenment.
Yes, absolutely! However, it's possible to be accurate without being dogmatic, while being entertaining as well. It's rare and a breath of fresh air when it happens.
There's nothing wrong with dramatic license. I don't think anyone who plays World of Warcraft, for example, watched the South Park episode about it and thought, "that's my life!" ... at least, I hope not. Then again, it was mostly spot-on and had clearly been written by someone who played the game. Hyperbole and simplification are one thing. Showing something on the screen that makes no sense to someone who knows what you're talking about (fly-by Unix in Jurasic Park) is just ignorance for ignorance's sake.
Well, Andromeda Strain was for a less TV-indulged generation. ;-)
But seriously, there's lots of good tech written by people who know their stuff. In some cases, they're even popular.
Authors include:
Also, there's some good movies out there when it comes to technical realism. My favorite is a science fiction film by the name of Primer. It was shot on a $7000 budget, and is the only movie I know of that literally requires a giant Gant chart to figure out.
Worse, it's an outright lie. The record companies are freaking out about uncontrolled downloads, not because their music is being copied around (it is), but because of Free Albums Galore, headphonica, Jamendo, Internet Archive Audio and so on.... There are dozens of places to get completely free music and this is the single most terrifying use the Internet can be put to, from the big label perspective. It has the potential to break the spine of the industry's decades-cultivated promotional and sales lock-in.
Yes, there's sharing of big-label music, but I share a half dozen freely distributable albums and no big-label music at all. I'm sure that bothers them a lot more than if I were serving up the manufactured pop of the week.
It seems they're getting it slowly, though. More and more songs are distributed for free as a loss-leader on iTunes and Amazon every day. If they keep that up, they might even figure out a business plan that treats their customers like people... but I'm not holding my breath.
While you're right, and Google tries to reign in its footprint, I think it's worth calling the while article into question first, before going at Google with pitchforks and torches.
7g of carbon? How do they measure that? On a server that's almost certainly servicing dozens or hundreds of queries in a rack that's minimizing power requirements by centralizing AC-DC conversion (Rackable's design which Google has some long-standing, complex relationship with). How are we measuring the power requirements for that query? Are we including the power requirements for the client computer and networking infrastructure that Google doesn't own or have any control over? Are we, in fact, arm-waving so broadly that we could have come up with any number at all? What are the error bars? What are the sources?
In short: why should we believe this data at all?
No. And in fact, whenever you read a Slashdot summary in lieu of actually reading a patent, you're pretty much guaranteed to have no idea what you're talking about.
In Mac pre-OS/X terminology (and I use Mac terminology because it might actually represent prior art, here, if they were ever used this way), this patent covers something like a resource fork which contains security information that describes what kind of container environment (think BSD jail) the program should be run in every time it's executed.
Windows started supporting this kind of thing in XP I think, but Vista relies on it for everything, so I can see why this particular patent troll would go after MS first.
1992 is quite early, and it's going to be interesting finding the appropriate prior-art. I do think there is prior art, but like I say, not trivial to find.
The year of Linux?! Where are people living?!
OK, I just retired my nearly 10-year-old Linux device that watches TV for me to replace it with the next generation from the same company. I'm using a BSD-based phone, but planning on switching to a Linux-based one at some point in the future. My company develops a product that targets both Linux and Windows (among other platforms), and is one of the few software products which is selling well in the recession.
I haven't had a job with anything but a Linux desktop for 10 years.
What the heck are we talking about here? The year of Linux was over a long time ago... we're wrapping up the DECADE of Linux. To those who thought the success of Linux was going to mean that the competition went way, well that was just silly.
UDP is used for online gaming, VoIP, etc. They will just start to deprioritize UDP, which is bad. 99% of customers won't notice the difference, but we will.
99% of customers are made up statistics ;-)
A couple of things on this: 1) I don't know of any games (not saying they don't exist) that use UDP. The largest Internet-connected player base out there right now is World of Warcraft, and I know for a fact that that traffic is TCP-based.
VOIP is easy enough to recognize and prioritize.
The real issue that will be hitting ISPs (actually, already is) is the fact that they've been selling pipe to users that the users can't use ... and suddenly everyone and his brother Skippy is selling an Internet-connected video device. This means that customers will not only be using all of their allotted bandwidth, but they will be doing so during an ever-increasing percentage of the day (as their video devices automatically download subscription programming). I can already subscribe to a "season pass" for programming on my TiVo that is downloaded from Amazon, and sometime this month, Netflix is claiming they'll have the same TiVo integration. Sling, Blockbuster and many others are also sucking up your ISP's bandwidth.
Simply put, these networks were never provisioned for this much usage, and I'll be surprised if there aren't massive growing pains along the way. Complaining about P2P traffic is a random thing that they feel they can control, not the core of their concerns.
This man was clearly wronged. I suggest that we all write to the court, asking in polite terms that this defendant be awarded the sum of 1 million gold for his pain and stupidity, er suffering!
Exactly. However, there's always a trade-off between usability and security, and many in the military rely on the public internet for routine work (accessing contractor Web sites, presentation of information to the public, recruiting, etc.) They're also responsible for defending the public infrastructure in the same way that they're responsible for defending the physical nation.
These are the concerns that I think they're talking about, and those that spurred the creation of this new group.
We had a consultant come in for show-and-tell
It's too easy to shoot this down here, but I'll just state for the record that you could easily have found someone to speak who would have said anything, so the source isn't really interesting. You're really just stating your own opinion, here. Had you said that, it might have sounded a bit better.
he made some very good points, but he told us to stay away from open source because (shortened version) if we wanted to be well-known in the open source world then we'd have to slog it out full-time, fighting amongst other egos working for free just trying to get our names known.
I have not stayed away from open source. I've not had to "log it out full-time." I've not had to "fight amongst other egos." I've never even worried about how well-known my name is.
Open source software provides, for the engineer, three things:
* Very low barrier-to-entry exposure to sophisticated tools
* Exposure to the kinds of practical coding concerns that you will face elsewhere
* The ability to not only claim that you've worked with a technology, but to demonstrate the fruits of your work
If your goal from day one is to be a core contributor to a project, then yes, it will be a lot of work. You might even decide that that's worth it someday, but no one has to make that level of commitment in order to contribute to open source.
Keep in mind that this was also true at one point of Firefox vis Mozilla....
What's more, this is the same thing we hear every 2 years. "Browser X is really fast!" Then six months later you hear, "Browser X was lagging behind the pack because it didn't have support for A, B and C, but now it's getting them." After that you get, "Why is Browser X so slow these days?" And inevitably, "Browser Y is really fast!"
When are we going to realize that browser maturity and performance are going to be on opposing curves and jumping ship to an immature browser just sets you up to lose functionality for a short period of time until the performance can be gobbled up by it.
This is exactly why I'm not using Chrome. Chrome is very nice, but it doesn't have most of what I require of a browsing experience. Once it does, THEN I'll evaluate its competitiveness, not before.