Sadly, the telco-owned ISPs are now doing their best to shit all over CityLink; Telstra has its ISP charging high differentials to get traffic to CityLink customers compared to customers buying E1s from Telstra; other Telco owned ISPs are refusing to play nice on the peering arrangements,
None of which detracts from Richard's accomplishments, of course.
Oh, yeah, Cisco security. I hear they even discovered SSH recently, so perhaps in the future they won't want to telnet in to maintain your Internet visible routers.
And you think a city run fiber link that appears to be free will bend over backwards to get you up and running
The typical connection time to CityLink is a few days, compared to the 2-6 weeks it takes to get a line out of any NZ telco, and outages are resolved in less time than it takes to make a telco admit they have a problem with their network.
Actually, they already had. The JVM environment in Nav 3 was supposed to make the operating system redundant. Netscape trumpeting this was one of the reasons that MS got so heavy on browsers around that time.
Oooh! A legal requirement! No-one ever breaks the law! Especially not companies. They would never, for example, misreport profits, set up shell companies to hide debt from investors, and shred documents in the face of court and Congressional orders.
Re:what about B5, Buffy, Simpsons
on
Star Trek TNG DVDs
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I've been waiting in eager anticipation of the Babylon 5 DVD sets, but Warners have started releasing everything in Region 4 as cheap, shittily made NTSC DVDs, for chrissake.
Pocket battleships; Hitler objected and planned to have monster battleships. Donitz was opposed to most of the revisions Hitler imposed on milltary strategy.
Goering's success in undermining Naval building for the Air Force didn't help, but again, that was before the Nazis put Germany on a war footing.
Um, the US didn't use particularly sophisticated technology in Vietnam.
Compared to the North Vietnamese, yes. The B52 was comparitively modern; and the whole war was fought on the principles espoused by the likes of McNamara that if the US used modern industrial priciples, they would win.
Nor did they conduct terror campaigns,
Oh, so the use of Agent Orange in civilian areas wasn't a terror weapon? Bombing noncombatant countries? Well documented civilian massacres? Covert operations in North Vietnam, some of which were aimed at US soldiers as well as Vietnamese millitary and civillian targets?
And that's before considering the behaviour of the US's South Vietnamese allies.
...terrified the hell out of the Allies
The V1 certainly worried the UK population, although they had already survived the Blitz. The V2s impact was pretty minimal, given that something in the order of one tenth the number of V2s were ever launched as V1s.
The capactity used to build the V weapons may well have been better deployed elsewhere; the V weapons might have been effective, from a millitary perspective, had they been capable of either being used against millitary targets on the Eastern Front or equipped with chemical weapons when delivered to the UK - but the latter was never going to be an option.
To reiterate: industrial capacity was never a problem for Germany once it was allowed to use its capacity on a war basis, which didn't happen until Barbarossa failed, and Allied raids still failed to crimp overall production of war goods until mainland Germany was invaded. Indeed, Germany arguably never reached peak capacity since Hitler refused to allow women to work, as happened in the UK, let alone fight as happend in the Soviet Union. Much of that mobilisation happend too late.
Part of the problem is that many of the programs were mismanaged due to Hitler's personal interventions; his early successes in the fact of expert advice led him to assume he was always right.
The U-Boat example is a good one; Hitler diverted Navy building into turn of the century type battleships, which had shown in WWII they were largely obsolete in the fact of submarines and aircraft carriers; likewise, the Me262 was set back when Hitler repeatedly demanded jet powered bombers large enough to reach the United States - the impact of the Me262 would have been much higher had it arrived in, say, 1943.
Finally, Hitler, like the US in Vietnam, over-estimated the value of sophisticated technology and terror campaigns against civilians; the V weapons were a millitary dissapointment, for example.
The Reich would not have been able to build an atomic bomb because they couldn't have set up the infrastructure without it being bombed to support the atomic bomb creation.
Not true. In fact, German infrastructure was in fine fettle throughout the war until the invasion of Germany proper. One reason for this is that the Nazis refused to allow Germany to be put on a war footing until after the initial thrust of Barbarossa failed, in 1941. From that time, German industrial production more than tripled, reaching a peak in late 1944/early 1945.
Because then people in the US whine and bitch about how flat rate is a Constitutional right.
Well, perhaps that's an exaggeration, but a glance over the history of Cable/xDSL stories on/. will reveal the outrage whenever a company attempts to make their offering profitable with caps and volume charging.
...the consumer market. Wonderful. Of course, we had a foreetaste of this with the DVD market (gratuitously incompatable movies, buggy players, buggy titles), and it will no doubt get worse. Soon, desktop software manufacturers will no longer have to suffer unfavourable comparisons between their buggy, unreliable products because they'll have invaded the market which has reliable ones!
Re:Has anyone ever gotten something reasonably pri
on
Be Gear Up For Auction
·
· Score: 2
Auction psychology 101: People are convinced that if they buy something at an auction, they'll get a bargain, so they spend a fortune on getting their 'bargain'.
Re:Problem: this happened in the 1930's...
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 2
Actually, if you study a little on Mossad's record of hunting escaped Nazis, you'll see that prosecutionm of the Nazis continued until 40-50 years after the end of the Nazi regime. Google on Klaus Barbie, for example.
Unfortunately, publishers already have experience in defeating any abandonware type clause; you will find (if you like books by older authors) that many, many volumes in the 50s and 60s, for example, are listed as in-print, but unobtainable in practise; this is because it used to be common that book publishers would sign an exclusive license with a writer with a proviso that the license would expire if the publisher allowed a work to go out of print, so that the author could negotiate with another publisher.
Fair enough, right?
In practise, though, publishers claim books are in print; perhaps they even fulfill one or two orders per year, but they are not actually printing those books - they may have a small stockpile somewhere. Unfortunately, it's virtually impossible for the author to prove this is just a ploy, and it's also impossible for fans of the author to get the damn books.
Much the same thing would happen under the abandonware clause - publishers would make it prohibitively hard to get work they didn't feel like releasing, but claim it was still technically being published.
Also, one other weakness in this: much of the old work is available of media which is scarce; it's unlikely such a provision would have much force if, for example, you wanted a movie but the publisher refused to release the only remaining prints (you're welcome to the copyright, you just can't get a copy).
I guess you didn't actually read the rest of Joel's comment. He's interesting in writing commercially successful software. Lots of people still use Win95.
Joel is interested in making commercially successful software. That's why he doesn't care about bloat - he wants the customers an extra feature captures, and he's not too worried if it makes things a bit slower for his existing customers.
I don't agree with it from an elegance point of view, but there are a lot more people turning a crust with VB/VBScript than there are with LISP.
OK, so which multi-billion dollar commercial software projects have you led up that have helped build the foundations of one of the most powerful software companies around?
Because sometimes code which looks bad to the casual observer is bad for a reason, usually to do with the peculiarities of and environment - a buggy standard c lib, a braindead app server or somesuch. Good commenting makes it clear that this is broken by design and attempts to fix it will cause more problems than they solve.
Likewise, I've left comments in code to the effect of, "I know this is broken, but we had to have it yesterday. It should be written better using x, y, and z techniques"; this flags to future developers (and me) that it's a FIXME and points a route for the fix.
If you'd bothered quoting in context, you'd note that Cringley is referring to C# as Java in drag, hence Bill betting on Java. But I guess you're interesting in rigging quotes to attack someone for having the temerity to question the all-powerful edifice of Java.
And, FWIW, when Sun released Java, they made no distinction between the various components of Java - the language, the standard library, or the VM. Referring to it as "buggy" is no more inaccurate than Sun's own ongoing failure to distinguish between the language and the standard libraries.
Actually, you'll mostly be chastised for getting what Weta are doing wrong - they are doing both what you describe as visual effects and character animation, since a number of characters (Balrogs, trolls, etc) are animated from scratch.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, the telco-owned ISPs are now doing their best to shit all over CityLink; Telstra has its ISP charging high differentials to get traffic to CityLink customers compared to customers buying E1s from Telstra; other Telco owned ISPs are refusing to play nice on the peering arrangements,
None of which detracts from Richard's accomplishments, of course.
And the Council still own a chunk.
Oh, yeah, Cisco security. I hear they even discovered SSH recently, so perhaps in the future they won't want to telnet in to maintain your Internet visible routers.
The reasons people buy Cisco are:
1/ Support.
2/ Everyone else does.
The typical connection time to CityLink is a few days, compared to the 2-6 weeks it takes to get a line out of any NZ telco, and outages are resolved in less time than it takes to make a telco admit they have a problem with their network.
Actually, they already had. The JVM environment in Nav 3 was supposed to make the operating system redundant. Netscape trumpeting this was one of the reasons that MS got so heavy on browsers around that time.
Oooh! A legal requirement! No-one ever breaks the law! Especially not companies. They would never, for example, misreport profits, set up shell companies to hide debt from investors, and shred documents in the face of court and Congressional orders.
More likely BSA harrasment.
I've been waiting in eager anticipation of the Babylon 5 DVD sets, but Warners have started releasing everything in Region 4 as cheap, shittily made NTSC DVDs, for chrissake.
Shitheads.
The Matrix, especially in non-R1 releases, was an excellent test of DVD platers, having many problems; likewise RCE discs cause problems.
I suspect a lot of the DVD compatability problems affect non-R1 discs more than R1 masters, though.
Pocket battleships; Hitler objected and planned to have monster battleships. Donitz was opposed to most of the revisions Hitler imposed on milltary strategy.
Goering's success in undermining Naval building for the Air Force didn't help, but again, that was before the Nazis put Germany on a war footing.
Um, the US didn't use particularly sophisticated technology in Vietnam.
Compared to the North Vietnamese, yes. The B52 was comparitively modern; and the whole war was fought on the principles espoused by the likes of McNamara that if the US used modern industrial priciples, they would win.
Nor did they conduct terror campaigns,
Oh, so the use of Agent Orange in civilian areas wasn't a terror weapon? Bombing noncombatant countries? Well documented civilian massacres? Covert operations in North Vietnam, some of which were aimed at US soldiers as well as Vietnamese millitary and civillian targets?
And that's before considering the behaviour of the US's South Vietnamese allies.
The V1 certainly worried the UK population, although they had already survived the Blitz. The V2s impact was pretty minimal, given that something in the order of one tenth the number of V2s were ever launched as V1s.
The capactity used to build the V weapons may well have been better deployed elsewhere; the V weapons might have been effective, from a millitary perspective, had they been capable of either being used against millitary targets on the Eastern Front or equipped with chemical weapons when delivered to the UK - but the latter was never going to be an option.
To reiterate: industrial capacity was never a problem for Germany once it was allowed to use its capacity on a war basis, which didn't happen until Barbarossa failed, and Allied raids still failed to crimp overall production of war goods until mainland Germany was invaded. Indeed, Germany arguably never reached peak capacity since Hitler refused to allow women to work, as happened in the UK, let alone fight as happend in the Soviet Union. Much of that mobilisation happend too late.
Part of the problem is that many of the programs were mismanaged due to Hitler's personal interventions; his early successes in the fact of expert advice led him to assume he was always right.
The U-Boat example is a good one; Hitler diverted Navy building into turn of the century type battleships, which had shown in WWII they were largely obsolete in the fact of submarines and aircraft carriers; likewise, the Me262 was set back when Hitler repeatedly demanded jet powered bombers large enough to reach the United States - the impact of the Me262 would have been much higher had it arrived in, say, 1943.
Finally, Hitler, like the US in Vietnam, over-estimated the value of sophisticated technology and terror campaigns against civilians; the V weapons were a millitary dissapointment, for example.
Not true. In fact, German infrastructure was in fine fettle throughout the war until the invasion of Germany proper. One reason for this is that the Nazis refused to allow Germany to be put on a war footing until after the initial thrust of Barbarossa failed, in 1941. From that time, German industrial production more than tripled, reaching a peak in late 1944/early 1945.
Because then people in the US whine and bitch about how flat rate is a Constitutional right.
/. will reveal the outrage whenever a company attempts to make their offering profitable with caps and volume charging.
Well, perhaps that's an exaggeration, but a glance over the history of Cable/xDSL stories on
...the consumer market. Wonderful. Of course, we had a foreetaste of this with the DVD market (gratuitously incompatable movies, buggy players, buggy titles), and it will no doubt get worse. Soon, desktop software manufacturers will no longer have to suffer unfavourable comparisons between their buggy, unreliable products because they'll have invaded the market which has reliable ones!
Auction psychology 101: People are convinced that if they buy something at an auction, they'll get a bargain, so they spend a fortune on getting their 'bargain'.
Actually, if you study a little on Mossad's record of hunting escaped Nazis, you'll see that prosecutionm of the Nazis continued until 40-50 years after the end of the Nazi regime. Google on Klaus Barbie, for example.
Unfortunately, publishers already have experience in defeating any abandonware type clause; you will find (if you like books by older authors) that many, many volumes in the 50s and 60s, for example, are listed as in-print, but unobtainable in practise; this is because it used to be common that book publishers would sign an exclusive license with a writer with a proviso that the license would expire if the publisher allowed a work to go out of print, so that the author could negotiate with another publisher.
Fair enough, right?
In practise, though, publishers claim books are in print; perhaps they even fulfill one or two orders per year, but they are not actually printing those books - they may have a small stockpile somewhere. Unfortunately, it's virtually impossible for the author to prove this is just a ploy, and it's also impossible for fans of the author to get the damn books.
Much the same thing would happen under the abandonware clause - publishers would make it prohibitively hard to get work they didn't feel like releasing, but claim it was still technically being published.
Also, one other weakness in this: much of the old work is available of media which is scarce; it's unlikely such a provision would have much force if, for example, you wanted a movie but the publisher refused to release the only remaining prints (you're welcome to the copyright, you just can't get a copy).
You can get them now. ARM CPUs, for example. If you're willing to stick at a 233 MHz CPU.
Google uses over 8000 Linux systems distributed over (4? 6?) geographically and topologically diverse locations.
/.
Google's engineers know their shit. They probably barely notice a visit from
I guess you didn't actually read the rest of Joel's comment. He's interesting in writing commercially successful software. Lots of people still use Win95.
Joel is interested in making commercially successful software. That's why he doesn't care about bloat - he wants the customers an extra feature captures, and he's not too worried if it makes things a bit slower for his existing customers.
I don't agree with it from an elegance point of view, but there are a lot more people turning a crust with VB/VBScript than there are with LISP.
OK, so which multi-billion dollar commercial software projects have you led up that have helped build the foundations of one of the most powerful software companies around?
Because sometimes code which looks bad to the casual observer is bad for a reason, usually to do with the peculiarities of and environment - a buggy standard c lib, a braindead app server or somesuch. Good commenting makes it clear that this is broken by design and attempts to fix it will cause more problems than they solve.
Likewise, I've left comments in code to the effect of, "I know this is broken, but we had to have it yesterday. It should be written better using x, y, and z techniques"; this flags to future developers (and me) that it's a FIXME and points a route for the fix.
If you'd bothered quoting in context, you'd note that Cringley is referring to C# as Java in drag, hence Bill betting on Java. But I guess you're interesting in rigging quotes to attack someone for having the temerity to question the all-powerful edifice of Java.
And, FWIW, when Sun released Java, they made no distinction between the various components of Java - the language, the standard library, or the VM. Referring to it as "buggy" is no more inaccurate than Sun's own ongoing failure to distinguish between the language and the standard libraries.
There's still the small matter of the animators and systems support staff. Neither of who come cheap.
Actually, you'll mostly be chastised for getting what Weta are doing wrong - they are doing both what you describe as visual effects and character animation, since a number of characters (Balrogs, trolls, etc) are animated from scratch.