If they'd used 4.7GB plain ol' single-layer DVDs, it would have been 200/6.714... = just under 30 full DVDs. Which would have fit on a single spool. My "Babylon 5" collection takes up more space. And they chose to, what, put two hundred CDs in jewel cases to take them across the street? What a buncha maroons.
Master's degree in a year and a half. I got sick of being in school, and now I answer the phone all day while reading Slashdot.
I was really, really confused reading that you're in "grade" school---perhaps a time traveller is replying to me? No, just someone who clearly didn't go to grad school for English...
What makes you think there's going to be an OS XI? Perhaps it'll be like the X11R7, or TeX 3.2, or Linux 3.0... well, damn it, I'm sure there's a lot of software that stops making major version number changes.
Kinda like Intel had their 'Pentium' name that they kept milking through what, four significant processor generations?
Yes, complaining about how good the April Fool's Slashdot posts were back in the day has become even more of a Slashdot tradition than the silly fake news itself.
The machine I'm typing this on had one significant upgrade since I got it in high school. (I finished grad school a few months ago.) That was my 300MHz to 750MHz CPU upgrade. Man, I was livin' large back then, telling myself I'd just get a doubled CPU speed every year and a half. That kinda stopped when I didn't have the spare cash, and hasn't started up since.
Well, and that 20GB hard drive I splurged on. My root partition is still on the original 2GB, though.
I'd like to have a few new things, like USB 2.0 (though I could just get a card for that) or Serial ATA so I never have to see a fucking ribbon cable again. I may not play World of Warcraft on it, but it does the same thing it did years ago---runs Opera, runs my little perl programs, and runs gaim. Old gaim.
Though, because PCs are so modular, you get into a "best axe I ever had, three new handles, five new blades" thing. If you upgrade the RAM, the video card, the CPU and the disks, it's not really the same machine that it was. I doubt I'll buy an entirely new machine in the foreseeable future. So you could consider $2000 in parts spent over six years to be the cost of keeping the machine stocked with quality upgrades. I think it all works out evenly.
Remember how huge Computer Shopper used to be? It was like a phone book every month. Now, it's smaller than PC Magazine. (Which they've probably renamed, who knows?) I know it's been largely replaced by Pricewatch, but I miss it in some weird way.
Whoa, sailor. Doctor Who ran for an incredibly variable per-series runtime. But let's say they averaged twenty, 25-minute eps per season (some look like they were around ten). For runtime, that's about a third of what Trek did. For episode numbers, that's about two-thirds.
Now, TOS had 55-minute episodes, because advertising was, I dunno, less popular back then. But still, they pushed through twenty-six episodes a season from TNG onwards.
I think the OP was indulging in some hyperbole, well-deserved at that. And yet thirty seasons of Star Trek is a tremendous library. (Counting each movie as two episodes for runtime, hell, let's call it thirty-one seasons.) Discounting daytime soaps, is there a single cohesive fictional universe which has received that much screentime?
Why would you waste jms on Star Trek? Trek is hobbled by years upon years of crufty retcon and ideas that sounded good at the time, but pile up to make an insane backlog of crap. Not to mention a pretty poorly done founding ideology.
jms can, and should, do better on his own. There's no reason for him to shackle himself to a sinking ship, not when he's proved that he can do the lion's share of making a kickass SF universe from scratch. It'd be a step down for him.
Wait, since when is there an AP course in "Computer Graphics/Advanced Comp Graphics"? I remember there being an AP computer science course, but I couldn't take it because my school didn't offer computer science; our shiny new Pentium labs were solely for learning typing.
Of course, that was six years ago. Goddamn, I'm old.
Yeah, but I'd like to run transcode, which is a notoriously complex and bleeding-edge piece of software. And I don't want to wait a year to run software which is available now.
I like having my apps packaged in a standardized format. Compare, if you will, gPhoto against the software that comes with your average $19.99 Wal-Mart digicam. gPhoto offers a standard interface for any camera, whereas the Mart software uses its own look and feel, its own interface, its own installation system, and if you get a different camera, you need another multi-megabyte install. Pfah!
I like having software that's written from the user's perspective and not the hardware manufacturer's. I like having a great big list of all the packages which exist in the "world" as my distribution sees it.
Installing software under Linux is, for me, as a rule, nicer than installing under Windows.
That said, it would be nice if they had some sort of baseline standard for library version or whatnot, something along the lines of "this app will run on Generic Standard Linux 1.1", which would be a set of, say, glibc this and libfoo that and so forth. Might be a useful way to get the same baseline that people coding to Windows 2000 have to work with.
To who does Alan Moore give away his mad American cheese? I can believe the first part, but I have a hard time believing that anyone would give away the proceeds from having their beloved artworks molested in such a fashion.
I think the thing that bugs me about stories with real potential ("I, Robot", for instance) being butchered is that they preclude the making of a better film from the same source material for at least a decade. Supposedly there's a Harlan Ellison script for it floating around out there, but we'll never see it because some turd in a suit got the bright idea to graft a thin sheen of Asimov onto a previously unrelated script.
And that, really, is why I'm so pleased to hear good things about Sin City. Because if it turns out terribly, we're going to get the same old "comics are crap---just look at that 'LXG' movie!" argument, and what can one say to that?
Oh, thank you. I've been worrying that, despite the trailers and the awesome cast and pretty much the best team you could ask for working on it, this would be terrible on the level of "LXG". Anyone remember that? What fabulous source material. What an awful movie made from it.
Alan Moore must be kicking himself after that one, saying "Never again, you American fuckers!". No, wait, he's probably rolling in a large pile of money, and more power to him for it. If it means he's fed and clothed and able to write more comics, it doesn't matter how many movies butcher his work.
I suppose they'll fuck up "V for Vendetta" (ten to one gets you they show V's face) or "Watchmen" next. And yet, hope springs eternal from this. Perhaps they can get Johnny Depp to play Wallace in "Hell and Back" if this does well. Perhaps.
I remember jms mentioning that he's an awful speller and can't do math. (Some usenet post un the Lurker's Guide.) Normally, I'd read that as "my brain is useless", but I already was so impressed by the man's work that I realized---if the man can write and direct a story like that, who cares if he can multiply in his head?
I was a twit. But I think I've become less of a twit now. Thank you, jms!
It's not possible for you to view 4:4:4 video at home, and will be at least a decade before that might change.
What? No. You're wrong. Many formats use color subsampling, true, but many still formats don't. JPEG defaults to 4:2:2 subsampling in all of the implementations I've seen, but I think it supports 4:4:4. And lossless formats, like PNG or TGA or (shudder) TIFF, clearly support full color inclusion.
A thought experiment: render some CGI scene, or do time-lapse photography with a still digital camera in RAW mode, and turn it into an uncompressed AVI. Hey, you're watching 4:4:4 video!
Now, 4:4:4 video production may be a ways off. But it's certainly possible to view the resulting video, though I don't know how many popular codecs support it.
And there is a difference, at least when you're picking out stills and doing CMYK separations on them. Look how blocky and crapulent the yellow channel looks when you separate out an MPEG still or a JPEG image, and how sharp the black channel looks. A significant part of that is subsampling at work.
Have you ever seen someone's hundred and fifty page thesis, diagrams and all, fit onto a 3.5" floppy? People who wrote their theses in TeX or LaTeX, with a few postscript diagrams. I was impressed by how tiny the code for a real, well-produced book could be.
'Course, the problem is that these representations work if you're entering in the content with that method in the first place.
It always amazes me that nihilists and strict deconstructionists (you know, the "saying it's better to be alive than dead is a value judgment!" folks) haven't all been used as target practice by now.
If you ask folks in mainland China, I think they'd have a pretty strong opinion on which is better, male or female.
But no, by "better", I meant healthier, hardier, less likely to keel over and die from Tay-Sachs before age ten. Which, actually, is what they're talking about doing in the original article.
Unless you're implying that there's no advantage to not dying of Tay-Sachs over dying of it.
Slashdot Mirror
If they'd used 4.7GB plain ol' single-layer DVDs, it would have been 200/6.714... = just under 30 full DVDs. Which would have fit on a single spool. My "Babylon 5" collection takes up more space. And they chose to, what, put two hundred CDs in jewel cases to take them across the street? What a buncha maroons.
--grendel drago
No---the return of Jon Katz!
"In this post-Iraq war society..."
--grendel drago
Master's degree in a year and a half. I got sick of being in school, and now I answer the phone all day while reading Slashdot.
I was really, really confused reading that you're in "grade" school---perhaps a time traveller is replying to me? No, just someone who clearly didn't go to grad school for English...
--grendel drago
What makes you think there's going to be an OS XI? Perhaps it'll be like the X11R7, or TeX 3.2, or Linux 3.0... well, damn it, I'm sure there's a lot of software that stops making major version number changes.
Kinda like Intel had their 'Pentium' name that they kept milking through what, four significant processor generations?
--grendel drago
Hey, I think you're the first!
Yes, complaining about how good the April Fool's Slashdot posts were back in the day has become even more of a Slashdot tradition than the silly fake news itself.
So, you win "First Crotchety Old Post". Go you!
--grendel drago
The machine I'm typing this on had one significant upgrade since I got it in high school. (I finished grad school a few months ago.) That was my 300MHz to 750MHz CPU upgrade. Man, I was livin' large back then, telling myself I'd just get a doubled CPU speed every year and a half. That kinda stopped when I didn't have the spare cash, and hasn't started up since.
Well, and that 20GB hard drive I splurged on. My root partition is still on the original 2GB, though.
I'd like to have a few new things, like USB 2.0 (though I could just get a card for that) or Serial ATA so I never have to see a fucking ribbon cable again. I may not play World of Warcraft on it, but it does the same thing it did years ago---runs Opera, runs my little perl programs, and runs gaim. Old gaim.
Though, because PCs are so modular, you get into a "best axe I ever had, three new handles, five new blades" thing. If you upgrade the RAM, the video card, the CPU and the disks, it's not really the same machine that it was. I doubt I'll buy an entirely new machine in the foreseeable future. So you could consider $2000 in parts spent over six years to be the cost of keeping the machine stocked with quality upgrades. I think it all works out evenly.
--grendel drago
Remember how huge Computer Shopper used to be? It was like a phone book every month. Now, it's smaller than PC Magazine. (Which they've probably renamed, who knows?) I know it's been largely replaced by Pricewatch, but I miss it in some weird way.
--grendel drago
Whoa, sailor. Doctor Who ran for an incredibly variable per-series runtime. But let's say they averaged twenty, 25-minute eps per season (some look like they were around ten). For runtime, that's about a third of what Trek did. For episode numbers, that's about two-thirds.
Now, TOS had 55-minute episodes, because advertising was, I dunno, less popular back then. But still, they pushed through twenty-six episodes a season from TNG onwards.
Trek: 30*26*50 = 650 hours.
Doctor Who: 26*20*25 = 217 hours.
Not even close.
--grendel drago
I think the OP was indulging in some hyperbole, well-deserved at that. And yet thirty seasons of Star Trek is a tremendous library. (Counting each movie as two episodes for runtime, hell, let's call it thirty-one seasons.) Discounting daytime soaps, is there a single cohesive fictional universe which has received that much screentime?
--grendel drago
"Now that, my friend, is a rabbit. Denny Crane."
If I weren't already a human being, that show would make me want to go out and sign up for lawyering school.
--grendel drago
Why would you waste jms on Star Trek? Trek is hobbled by years upon years of crufty retcon and ideas that sounded good at the time, but pile up to make an insane backlog of crap. Not to mention a pretty poorly done founding ideology.
jms can, and should, do better on his own. There's no reason for him to shackle himself to a sinking ship, not when he's proved that he can do the lion's share of making a kickass SF universe from scratch. It'd be a step down for him.
--grendel drago
Wait, since when is there an AP course in "Computer Graphics/Advanced Comp Graphics"? I remember there being an AP computer science course, but I couldn't take it because my school didn't offer computer science; our shiny new Pentium labs were solely for learning typing.
Of course, that was six years ago. Goddamn, I'm old.
--grendel drago
Yeah, but I'd like to run transcode, which is a notoriously complex and bleeding-edge piece of software. And I don't want to wait a year to run software which is available now.
--grendel drago
Don't forget the vast influx of conspiracy-minded Lizards moving away from Google. I mean, were I Sergey Brin, I'd be tremblin' in my booties.
--grendel drago
I like having my apps packaged in a standardized format. Compare, if you will, gPhoto against the software that comes with your average $19.99 Wal-Mart digicam. gPhoto offers a standard interface for any camera, whereas the Mart software uses its own look and feel, its own interface, its own installation system, and if you get a different camera, you need another multi-megabyte install. Pfah!
I like having software that's written from the user's perspective and not the hardware manufacturer's. I like having a great big list of all the packages which exist in the "world" as my distribution sees it.
Installing software under Linux is, for me, as a rule, nicer than installing under Windows.
That said, it would be nice if they had some sort of baseline standard for library version or whatnot, something along the lines of "this app will run on Generic Standard Linux 1.1", which would be a set of, say, glibc this and libfoo that and so forth. Might be a useful way to get the same baseline that people coding to Windows 2000 have to work with.
--grendel drago
To who does Alan Moore give away his mad American cheese? I can believe the first part, but I have a hard time believing that anyone would give away the proceeds from having their beloved artworks molested in such a fashion.
I think the thing that bugs me about stories with real potential ("I, Robot", for instance) being butchered is that they preclude the making of a better film from the same source material for at least a decade. Supposedly there's a Harlan Ellison script for it floating around out there, but we'll never see it because some turd in a suit got the bright idea to graft a thin sheen of Asimov onto a previously unrelated script.
And that, really, is why I'm so pleased to hear good things about Sin City. Because if it turns out terribly, we're going to get the same old "comics are crap---just look at that 'LXG' movie!" argument, and what can one say to that?
--grendel drago
Oh, thank you. I've been worrying that, despite the trailers and the awesome cast and pretty much the best team you could ask for working on it, this would be terrible on the level of "LXG". Anyone remember that? What fabulous source material. What an awful movie made from it.
Alan Moore must be kicking himself after that one, saying "Never again, you American fuckers!". No, wait, he's probably rolling in a large pile of money, and more power to him for it. If it means he's fed and clothed and able to write more comics, it doesn't matter how many movies butcher his work.
I suppose they'll fuck up "V for Vendetta" (ten to one gets you they show V's face) or "Watchmen" next. And yet, hope springs eternal from this. Perhaps they can get Johnny Depp to play Wallace in "Hell and Back" if this does well. Perhaps.
--grendel drago
I remember jms mentioning that he's an awful speller and can't do math. (Some usenet post un the Lurker's Guide.) Normally, I'd read that as "my brain is useless", but I already was so impressed by the man's work that I realized---if the man can write and direct a story like that, who cares if he can multiply in his head?
I was a twit. But I think I've become less of a twit now. Thank you, jms!
--grendel drago
It's not possible for you to view 4:4:4 video at home, and will be at least a decade before that might change.
What? No. You're wrong. Many formats use color subsampling, true, but many still formats don't. JPEG defaults to 4:2:2 subsampling in all of the implementations I've seen, but I think it supports 4:4:4. And lossless formats, like PNG or TGA or (shudder) TIFF, clearly support full color inclusion.
A thought experiment: render some CGI scene, or do time-lapse photography with a still digital camera in RAW mode, and turn it into an uncompressed AVI. Hey, you're watching 4:4:4 video!
Now, 4:4:4 video production may be a ways off. But it's certainly possible to view the resulting video, though I don't know how many popular codecs support it.
And there is a difference, at least when you're picking out stills and doing CMYK separations on them. Look how blocky and crapulent the yellow channel looks when you separate out an MPEG still or a JPEG image, and how sharp the black channel looks. A significant part of that is subsampling at work.
--grendel drago
See: chroma subsampling. It's even got diagrams. Though it could use a bit of cleanup.
Wikipedia to the rescue again!
--grendel drago
Man, you're appealing to malice a lot more than laziness and stupidity, when the latter is a much, much more likely culprit.
--grendel drago
Have you ever seen someone's hundred and fifty page thesis, diagrams and all, fit onto a 3.5" floppy? People who wrote their theses in TeX or LaTeX, with a few postscript diagrams. I was impressed by how tiny the code for a real, well-produced book could be.
'Course, the problem is that these representations work if you're entering in the content with that method in the first place.
--grendel drago
It always amazes me that nihilists and strict deconstructionists (you know, the "saying it's better to be alive than dead is a value judgment!" folks) haven't all been used as target practice by now.
--grendel drago
If you ask folks in mainland China, I think they'd have a pretty strong opinion on which is better, male or female.
But no, by "better", I meant healthier, hardier, less likely to keel over and die from Tay-Sachs before age ten. Which, actually, is what they're talking about doing in the original article.
Unless you're implying that there's no advantage to not dying of Tay-Sachs over dying of it.
--grendel drago
Can anyone tell me how this "open printing project" differs from or interacts with CUPS?
--grendel drago