And yet, as many of the comments attached to that article pointed out, the paragraph you quoted didn't appear in any of the original reporting but only in versions published on IndyMedia. No sourcing for it, no evidence for it, most likely to be nothing other than the usual Jew Hating you'll find all over IndyMedia.
I love their games, even if the learning curve looks somewhat like a cliff...
It's important to realize though, that they're publishers and well as developers. Of the five games that are listed for 2010 release on their wikipedia page, only Victoria 2, and perhaps Magna Mundi are actually developed by Paradox themselves (I say perhaps for Magna, since there's nothing on their website, and I can't imagine it's going be released in 2010).
The games that they're best known for developing are the Europa Universalis series, Hearts of Iron series and games like Victoria and Crusader Kings that fit into the same universe. They're all grand strategy games with huge amounts of detail - and they've all got Mac ports as well!
I doubt we are seeing anything new here. I assume they just use the accelerometers to determine how much they should crop away from the current sample, and then in the end stitch everything together.
It doesn't do anything like that - what you're talking about is a form of image stabilization where each frame is sharp, but the frames move slightly compared to the frame before and after since the camera is moving slightly.
This is about deblurring by working out how the camera moved while the picture was being taken and then reversing that effect back out, which isn't very simple at all.
Think about a picture of black circle on a white background. Then apply a directional blur to it. Now work out how to get from that blurred photo back to the original. By knowing how the camera moved while the picture was being taken you now know the direction of the blur, which makes the problem a lot simpler, but it's still pretty hard to try to get to the unblurred version while losing as little data from the picture as possible.
I think that after reading quite a few of the very anti-copyright posts above, I took an overly negative reading of your post - which reading it again is not the case.
On most levels I think that we pretty much agree with each other, we're just coming at it from slightly different points of view. However, I think that you're confusing copyrights with patents to an extent.
Copyright isn't meant to help creators at all, except in an incidental manner. The goal of copyright is to promote the progress of science, which consists of 1) causing works to be created and published that otherwise would not have been, and 2) having any restrictions on the public with regard to those works be as minimal and as short-lived as possible.
The above is the purpose of patents - to ensure the progress of science by ensuring that works are created and published such that they end up in the public domain after a period of time. This, as it turns out, is in many ways the opposite of what copyright was designed to achieve.
Copyright law as we think of it now, came into being in 1710 in England. At that point, it was intended to protect an author's 'natural right' to benefit from his works first, and for the work to be placed into the public domain second. This came into being as both a reaction to the monopolistic practices of the Publisher's Guild (the Stationers' Company) at the time, and as a response to the unregulated copying of texts at a time when printing was seen as a threat to monarchy.
When the Statue of Anne was passed in 1710, the right to have exclusive control over the publication of a work was moved from the Guild to the Author, and a limit was placed (initially 14 years plus 14 years) on how long that right would last. There was no mention of the limit existing for the good of the public - it would seem that the view was that after that exclusive right had expired, other people should be able to make money from it as well.
None the less, I think that we're mostly on the same wavelength here - especially when it comes to the point of view that copyright as it stands is in sore need of reform.
But what you've just described there =is= copyright!
You're saying that the creator of the work - the author, should be given the chance to profit from the work for a period of time, but that if he doesn't, then it's in the public interest for someone else to publish it.
Seems to me that that is exactly what the copyright system exists to do. To ensure that the creator can benefit from their works, but also to ensure that the work reverts to the public after a period of time.
So it would seem that you agree with copyright, you just think that the period of time which it lasts for is too long - which is something I'd definitely agree with.
So the question has to be, what is the optimal length of time that copyright should last so that it ensures that a content creator has a fair chance of being rewarded for his work (thus providing the incentive to create said work), whilst also maximizing the gain to culture as a whole by ensure that it reverts to the public in a timely enough manner.
What Bloomberg also has going for it is that everyone on it is contactable through their terminal - everyone has a Bloomberg e-mail address as it were.
The reason why that's important is because brokers and traders are gossips, it's an information driven business so everyone talks to each other. A lot.
Until Google gives them all ways to find each other (Bloomberg also has a directory to look everyone else up), as well as news feeds (don't forget that Bloomberg is also a financial news company), and does IPTV (Bloomberg streams video), you're not going to pry it out of the hands of anyone in the industry.
Oh, and don't forget that a lot of pricing isn't shown on things like stock tickers, but on Bloomberg and Reuters pages full of bid/offer pairs for whatever that company is actively trading in. See, for example, BGC21 on BBG or Kobra.
Yes there is - you just download your e-mail from gMail with a local client as well using POP.
I do that the whole time, I like gMail's web interface for checking new mail, especially since I don't need to be running yet-another-piece-of-software the whole time, but I use Evolution when I want to find my mail because I find that a non-Web cliet is a lot easier for filtering and sorting e-mail automagically.
You've missed a rather large point in your argument - the word "Loans".
You have $100 of real money, everything else is debt. All the money, plus all the debt has to be $100 in the end.
You're ignoring (or just don't realize) the fact that C# can be used with managed C++, which in effect means that most libraries written in C++ can be used with C#.
Where I work (financial technology for a big 3 brokerage firm) we're moving our front office development into C# over the next year. This is moving from using Excel as a development platform (its strange but true - with the right set of technologies running =underneath= Excel, it makes for a very workable enviroment in which to build financial models, with the main win being very short develop-test-release cycles). The way our system works is with three layers, on the bottom you've got tibco at the transport level, our custom built libraries on top of that which provide the services and which in turn get called by the application(s) running on top of that.
Since the middle layer is all C++, and since we use MS on the brokers' desks, it made perfect sence for us to move into C# as the requests we're getting are going beyond what we're capable of doing in Excel (and believe me, we're doing things right now that MS has claimed are 'impossible').
From what the senior dev's on my team (and we're talking about global enterprise networks type of development, valued in the $100mils), no one loves C++ because its a bitch of a bitch to use well, and (like with C) its easy to make mistakes and write very ugly code. Java seems to be rapidly falling out of fashion, its just got a lot of software written in it right now - I can't speak for the rest of the world, but I do know that the one set of software which consistently causes problems for the users are the ones written in Java. I make no claim that either of those are representitive, just the way that I'm seeing things right now.
From my own experience in learnina Java while at school, and C# now while working, I've found that I significantly prefer C# to Java.
Java to me always felt quite constrictive and overly verbose, and I always felt as though I had to jump through hoops compared to C. On the other hand I find using C# a breath of fresh air. It feels like a well designed language which feature which, although aren't innovative, are well polished - and to be honest Visual Studio is one hell of a powerful tool. I've used Eclipse in the past and enjoyed it, but VS, to me at least, just feels a little bit more intuitive and easier to use. Just like C# feels a little bit more intuative and easier to use than Java ever did to me.
While they might share the same names you'll find that the Music and Film sides of these companies are very seperate biz units and so what one does often won't relate to the other.
At least thats how it was when I worked for Warner Music, we'd trade favours with Warner Video just to avoid having to put a request up our side of the corporate ladder and back down the other side - which would take a =really= long time....
Correct w/ regard to the definition of a semite, but wrong for the definition of an anti-semite.
Anti-Semitism was term coined to specificaly refer to hatred against Jews, not semites in general. Read that for more info than I can be bothered to type.
Maybe these camera's have better CPU's than you imagine.
No they don't - they have very specialized CPUs that are designed to only pull raw data out of the image sensor and to process it into one of a limited number of formats. You're not talking about a general purpose CPU here.
In any case, Digital SLRs (which is what you'll find your high quality pictures taken with...) work in a different way to a camera like your CoolPix. An SLR isn't continuously reading data from the image sensor because the sensor is protected by both a shutter and a mirror except during the brief periods of time where a picture is actually being taken.
One of the major reasons why this is important (and higher bandwidth is good) is for scientific data. Things like data from CERN and other particle accelerator. These produce -huge- amounts of data every time they run and this will allow researchers to be able to access this data without actually having to go to places like CERN.
I actually used to do something similar to this.
I used to work in a kitchen and spent a lot of time doing things like washing vegetables. Since I didn't want to get my phone wet everytime it rang, and I didn't want to drop it in the water by mistake, I used to tie it into a surgical glove. The glove was just thin enough to make out the screen and see the buttons.
This lo-tech approach worked fine - even saved my phone when I droped into the sink. The only downsides were that it was hard to get it out of the glove (they're supprisingly strong) and that you like really fucking stupid with a glove up against your ear.
In the UK there is a company called Homechoice which has been providing Video on Demand services for close on five years now, all be in it in a fairly limited area at the begining. Currently it's available in most of the UK, as far as I can tell.
I've been using it since it's inception as Video Networks. They offer a huge variety of TV Shows, Films, Music Videos, News Programs etc. all on-demand with different fees applying depending what you watch (for example you can subscribe to various 'channels' like drama or comedy for TV shows, either per-month or just for a 24 hour period) and have a range of rates on different films - at pretty much the same prices you'd be paying at a video store, or for premium channels on cable. They also provide 1Mbs internet access at a rate which is fairly comparable to any ADSL provider.
It works by them having a very fast fibre-optic network to various exchanges from their streaming servers (which, by-the-way run Linux:):):) ) and then a 2.4Mbs connection to their set-top box. They stream the video as a MPEG-2 stream which is decompressed at the set-top box. They also run the internet connection along the same cable, with out the two distrupting each other.
I've been using it for a pretty long time now and I'd have to say that its a decent service. Its only downfall is not having enough big films when it started - but I think this problem has been reduced now. For what I could tell they had problems with licencing the films to be streamed.
There is however one very large problem with the assumption the article makes though. Its going to be a pretty long time before everyone has fast broadband (2Mbs up) straight into their homes....
This has nothing to do with any operating systems or computers.
You can easily criple companys and national infrastructure just by knowing the few substations and fibre switchs that need to be brought down. No power, no phone, no net.... oh dear.
And there's an obvious metaphor that's been with us for years: The highway system. In most of the world, it is "free", and all you have to buy out of your own money is a vehicle.
Its not free at all. It's existence might be 'free' in the sense that it came out of your taxes, but in most of the developed world you need to pay extra to use it. In the UK its Road Tax, in the US its a tax on your licence plates (i think, I'm not 100% about how US road tax works). You also pay taxes on the gas you use to run your car. So lets say that you're paying $150 a year in road taxes and petrol taxes. Wait! Thats almost the same as you would pay each year for dial-up access. Hardly free is it.
In all parts of the world, bandwidth is legally "public" property, i.e., owned by the government.
Do you actually know what bandwidth is? Bandwidth is a technical term which has come into common usage to mean the amount of data that can be transmitted over a communications channel in a set period of time. Its impossible to 'own' bandwidth - it isn't a real thing.
I think what you actually meant was radio spectrum. However, radio spectrum is less dominated by comercial interests than it is by military interests. So I guess the publics (goverments) 'property' is being used by the goverment (BTW there are plans to more some of the military spectrums around to make room for more unlicenced bands like are used for Wi-Fi).
A company spending millions of dollars laying fibre and installing equipment doesn't use up bandwidth, nor does it use up the public radio spectrum.
There is one very very big problem with this whole idea anyway. Bandwidth saturation. Since bandwidth is a function of the transmission method and medium, any given medium has an upper limit on its bandwidth. In the case of wireless transmitions its been shown that with the commonly available technologies we have at current (various Wi-Fi forms) it isn't very hard to saturate the available bandwidth. This is why you need those very very expensive fibre links with all the high speed switching equipment, along with all their expensive upkeep. Unless there is suddenly a cheap way to get around that then the question at the top was written by someone who was smoking crack.
BTW - given the inefficiency of a goverment, especially when it comes to contractors to the goverment, I reckon that we're getting our internet connections far cheaper now than if the gov. was to take over....
Slashdot Mirror
They've got a licence from Microsoft that lets them do so - they'd be swiftly sued otherwise.
And yet, as many of the comments attached to that article pointed out, the paragraph you quoted didn't appear in any of the original reporting but only in versions published on IndyMedia. No sourcing for it, no evidence for it, most likely to be nothing other than the usual Jew Hating you'll find all over IndyMedia.
Shift-3 is the pound (currency) symbol on UK keyboards, which is probably why it's Option-3.
I love their games, even if the learning curve looks somewhat like a cliff...
It's important to realize though, that they're publishers and well as developers. Of the five games that are listed for 2010 release on their wikipedia page, only Victoria 2, and perhaps Magna Mundi are actually developed by Paradox themselves (I say perhaps for Magna, since there's nothing on their website, and I can't imagine it's going be released in 2010).
The games that they're best known for developing are the Europa Universalis series, Hearts of Iron series and games like Victoria and Crusader Kings that fit into the same universe. They're all grand strategy games with huge amounts of detail - and they've all got Mac ports as well!
I doubt we are seeing anything new here. I assume they just use the accelerometers to determine how much they should crop away from the current sample, and then in the end stitch everything together.
It doesn't do anything like that - what you're talking about is a form of image stabilization where each frame is sharp, but the frames move slightly compared to the frame before and after since the camera is moving slightly.
This is about deblurring by working out how the camera moved while the picture was being taken and then reversing that effect back out, which isn't very simple at all.
Think about a picture of black circle on a white background. Then apply a directional blur to it. Now work out how to get from that blurred photo back to the original. By knowing how the camera moved while the picture was being taken you now know the direction of the blur, which makes the problem a lot simpler, but it's still pretty hard to try to get to the unblurred version while losing as little data from the picture as possible.
I think that after reading quite a few of the very anti-copyright posts above, I took an overly negative reading of your post - which reading it again is not the case.
On most levels I think that we pretty much agree with each other, we're just coming at it from slightly different points of view. However, I think that you're confusing copyrights with patents to an extent.
Copyright isn't meant to help creators at all, except in an incidental manner. The goal of copyright is to promote the progress of science, which consists of 1) causing works to be created and published that otherwise would not have been, and 2) having any restrictions on the public with regard to those works be as minimal and as short-lived as possible.
The above is the purpose of patents - to ensure the progress of science by ensuring that works are created and published such that they end up in the public domain after a period of time. This, as it turns out, is in many ways the opposite of what copyright was designed to achieve.
Copyright law as we think of it now, came into being in 1710 in England. At that point, it was intended to protect an author's 'natural right' to benefit from his works first, and for the work to be placed into the public domain second. This came into being as both a reaction to the monopolistic practices of the Publisher's Guild (the Stationers' Company) at the time, and as a response to the unregulated copying of texts at a time when printing was seen as a threat to monarchy.
When the Statue of Anne was passed in 1710, the right to have exclusive control over the publication of a work was moved from the Guild to the Author, and a limit was placed (initially 14 years plus 14 years) on how long that right would last. There was no mention of the limit existing for the good of the public - it would seem that the view was that after that exclusive right had expired, other people should be able to make money from it as well.
None the less, I think that we're mostly on the same wavelength here - especially when it comes to the point of view that copyright as it stands is in sore need of reform.
But what you've just described there =is= copyright!
You're saying that the creator of the work - the author, should be given the chance to profit from the work for a period of time, but that if he doesn't, then it's in the public interest for someone else to publish it.
Seems to me that that is exactly what the copyright system exists to do. To ensure that the creator can benefit from their works, but also to ensure that the work reverts to the public after a period of time.
So it would seem that you agree with copyright, you just think that the period of time which it lasts for is too long - which is something I'd definitely agree with.
So the question has to be, what is the optimal length of time that copyright should last so that it ensures that a content creator has a fair chance of being rewarded for his work (thus providing the incentive to create said work), whilst also maximizing the gain to culture as a whole by ensure that it reverts to the public in a timely enough manner.
The reason why that's important is because brokers and traders are gossips, it's an information driven business so everyone talks to each other. A lot.
Until Google gives them all ways to find each other (Bloomberg also has a directory to look everyone else up), as well as news feeds (don't forget that Bloomberg is also a financial news company), and does IPTV (Bloomberg streams video), you're not going to pry it out of the hands of anyone in the industry.
Oh, and don't forget that a lot of pricing isn't shown on things like stock tickers, but on Bloomberg and Reuters pages full of bid/offer pairs for whatever that company is actively trading in. See, for example, BGC21 on BBG or Kobra.
Yes there is - you just download your e-mail from gMail with a local client as well using POP. I do that the whole time, I like gMail's web interface for checking new mail, especially since I don't need to be running yet-another-piece-of-software the whole time, but I use Evolution when I want to find my mail because I find that a non-Web cliet is a lot easier for filtering and sorting e-mail automagically.
You've missed a rather large point in your argument - the word "Loans". You have $100 of real money, everything else is debt. All the money, plus all the debt has to be $100 in the end.
Bob? Is that you in there?
You're ignoring (or just don't realize) the fact that C# can be used with managed C++, which in effect means that most libraries written in C++ can be used with C#.
Where I work (financial technology for a big 3 brokerage firm) we're moving our front office development into C# over the next year. This is moving from using Excel as a development platform (its strange but true - with the right set of technologies running =underneath= Excel, it makes for a very workable enviroment in which to build financial models, with the main win being very short develop-test-release cycles). The way our system works is with three layers, on the bottom you've got tibco at the transport level, our custom built libraries on top of that which provide the services and which in turn get called by the application(s) running on top of that.
Since the middle layer is all C++, and since we use MS on the brokers' desks, it made perfect sence for us to move into C# as the requests we're getting are going beyond what we're capable of doing in Excel (and believe me, we're doing things right now that MS has claimed are 'impossible').
From what the senior dev's on my team (and we're talking about global enterprise networks type of development, valued in the $100mils), no one loves C++ because its a bitch of a bitch to use well, and (like with C) its easy to make mistakes and write very ugly code. Java seems to be rapidly falling out of fashion, its just got a lot of software written in it right now - I can't speak for the rest of the world, but I do know that the one set of software which consistently causes problems for the users are the ones written in Java. I make no claim that either of those are representitive, just the way that I'm seeing things right now.
From my own experience in learnina Java while at school, and C# now while working, I've found that I significantly prefer C# to Java.
Java to me always felt quite constrictive and overly verbose, and I always felt as though I had to jump through hoops compared to C. On the other hand I find using C# a breath of fresh air. It feels like a well designed language which feature which, although aren't innovative, are well polished - and to be honest Visual Studio is one hell of a powerful tool. I've used Eclipse in the past and enjoyed it, but VS, to me at least, just feels a little bit more intuitive and easier to use. Just like C# feels a little bit more intuative and easier to use than Java ever did to me.
While they might share the same names you'll find that the Music and Film sides of these companies are very seperate biz units and so what one does often won't relate to the other.
At least thats how it was when I worked for Warner Music, we'd trade favours with Warner Video just to avoid having to put a request up our side of the corporate ladder and back down the other side - which would take a =really= long time....
Correct w/ regard to the definition of a semite, but wrong for the definition of an anti-semite.
Anti-Semitism was term coined to specificaly refer to hatred against Jews, not semites in general. Read that for more info than I can be bothered to type.
You mistyped - clearly its "all of your bass belong to us"
No they don't - they have very specialized CPUs that are designed to only pull raw data out of the image sensor and to process it into one of a limited number of formats. You're not talking about a general purpose CPU here.
In any case, Digital SLRs (which is what you'll find your high quality pictures taken with...) work in a different way to a camera like your CoolPix. An SLR isn't continuously reading data from the image sensor because the sensor is protected by both a shutter and a mirror except during the brief periods of time where a picture is actually being taken.
Its not speed for its own sake.
One of the major reasons why this is important (and higher bandwidth is good) is for scientific data. Things like data from CERN and other particle accelerator. These produce -huge- amounts of data every time they run and this will allow researchers to be able to access this data without actually having to go to places like CERN.
*sigh*
In Soviet Russia....
This lo-tech approach worked fine - even saved my phone when I droped into the sink. The only downsides were that it was hard to get it out of the glove (they're supprisingly strong) and that you like really fucking stupid with a glove up against your ear.
In the UK there is a company called Homechoice which has been providing Video on Demand services for close on five years now, all be in it in a fairly limited area at the begining. Currently it's available in most of the UK, as far as I can tell.
I've been using it since it's inception as Video Networks. They offer a huge variety of TV Shows, Films, Music Videos, News Programs etc. all on-demand with different fees applying depending what you watch (for example you can subscribe to various 'channels' like drama or comedy for TV shows, either per-month or just for a 24 hour period) and have a range of rates on different films - at pretty much the same prices you'd be paying at a video store, or for premium channels on cable. They also provide 1Mbs internet access at a rate which is fairly comparable to any ADSL provider.
It works by them having a very fast fibre-optic network to various exchanges from their streaming servers (which, by-the-way run Linux :) :) :) ) and then a 2.4Mbs connection to their set-top box. They stream the video as a MPEG-2 stream which is decompressed at the set-top box. They also run the internet connection along the same cable, with out the two distrupting each other.
I've been using it for a pretty long time now and I'd have to say that its a decent service. Its only downfall is not having enough big films when it started - but I think this problem has been reduced now. For what I could tell they had problems with licencing the films to be streamed.
There is however one very large problem with the assumption the article makes though. Its going to be a pretty long time before everyone has fast broadband (2Mbs up) straight into their homes....
Seems to be working for Duke Nukem Forever....
Its an interesting read.
I think you failed to notice the joke....
I don't think you really got the point here.
This has nothing to do with any operating systems or computers.
You can easily criple companys and national infrastructure just by knowing the few substations and fibre switchs that need to be brought down. No power, no phone, no net.... oh dear.
Ummmmmm. No. You're talking out of your ass.
And there's an obvious metaphor that's been with us for years: The highway system. In most of the world, it is "free", and all you have to buy out of your own money is a vehicle.
Its not free at all. It's existence might be 'free' in the sense that it came out of your taxes, but in most of the developed world you need to pay extra to use it. In the UK its Road Tax, in the US its a tax on your licence plates (i think, I'm not 100% about how US road tax works). You also pay taxes on the gas you use to run your car. So lets say that you're paying $150 a year in road taxes and petrol taxes. Wait! Thats almost the same as you would pay each year for dial-up access. Hardly free is it.
In all parts of the world, bandwidth is legally "public" property, i.e., owned by the government.
Do you actually know what bandwidth is? Bandwidth is a technical term which has come into common usage to mean the amount of data that can be transmitted over a communications channel in a set period of time. Its impossible to 'own' bandwidth - it isn't a real thing.
I think what you actually meant was radio spectrum. However, radio spectrum is less dominated by comercial interests than it is by military interests. So I guess the publics (goverments) 'property' is being used by the goverment (BTW there are plans to more some of the military spectrums around to make room for more unlicenced bands like are used for Wi-Fi).
A company spending millions of dollars laying fibre and installing equipment doesn't use up bandwidth, nor does it use up the public radio spectrum.
There is one very very big problem with this whole idea anyway. Bandwidth saturation. Since bandwidth is a function of the transmission method and medium, any given medium has an upper limit on its bandwidth. In the case of wireless transmitions its been shown that with the commonly available technologies we have at current (various Wi-Fi forms) it isn't very hard to saturate the available bandwidth. This is why you need those very very expensive fibre links with all the high speed switching equipment, along with all their expensive upkeep. Unless there is suddenly a cheap way to get around that then the question at the top was written by someone who was smoking crack.
BTW - given the inefficiency of a goverment, especially when it comes to contractors to the goverment, I reckon that we're getting our internet connections far cheaper now than if the gov. was to take over....