Either I don't get what you're saying or you don't get what the GP was saying.
The reason the chip-based authentication method was invented is because the old-style authentication was insecure. BUT the old-style authentication method still works, even on cards that have the chip. Danish ATMs need to be able to read cards issued from places other than Denmark, and Danes need to be able to use foreign ATMs. So anyone who wants to attack a card just needs to ignore the chip-based authentication, hack the cards the same as they do anywhere else, and they're fine.
But Ridley Scott's version, while more artistic and interesting was not the box office smash that Aliens was.
Are you sure? The way I remember it, Alien was a very talked-about, very popular film in 1979. And if IMDB is to be believed, it pulled in $60 million by the end of its run that year.
Apocalypse Now won the best picture Oscar in 1979. IMDB's info here is a little scanty, but apparently it grossed $79 million that year. Other nominees included All That Jazz, which grossed $38 million, and Breaking Away, which grossed $16 million. Kramer vs. Kramer was also nominated, though it apparently wasn't actually released until 1980, and it went on to gross in excess of $100 million. Still -- Alien was no slouch. If it wasn't a "box office smash," maybe that's cuz the studio was expecting the next Star Wars or something. And be fair: Aliens was an action movie. Those have always sold better than horror movies.
Correction: Alien is a horror movie. Characters stumble down dark hallways, things jump out and get 'em. It's your basic haunted house flick, shifted to take place in outer space -- as many critics have observed. What made it great was that it was well-directed, well-paced, had an incredibly original visual style, and took its science fiction aspects seriously.
Here's another idea that would be sort of original: Push the Giger aliens into the background a little bit. Make it a "first contact" type of movie. The humans have, for the first time, encountered an alien race. They are the giant aliens that were found in the downed spaceship in the original movie. Humans have made tentative first contact... stuff seems OK... they've met up on a couple of occasions... it's a bold new era in the history of humanity... and that's most of the focus of the film. But there's a problem. The aliens, it seems, while apparently friendly, have a problem with parasites...
OR, here's another one. Why were there all those eggs on the alien spaceship, laid out in such neat rows? Why was there that protective fog-layer over them? We never saw that fog in the second movie. Maybe the giant aliens put the fog there on purpose. Maybe the alien spaceship was a munitions ship. The Giger-aliens were actually manufactured by the giant aliens as weapons, and when the ship crashed, one of the aliens got loose and did what it did best. Humans were aware of these weapons based on their previous (top secret) contacts with the giant aliens... and they wanted those weapons, which is why they diverted the Nostromo to the planet. And that would put a different spin on it as well: Instead of "evil, greedy corporation wants these weapons no matter what the cost," it could now come to light that the potential cost of NOT obtaining the weapons would be the destruction of the entire human race at the hands of the marauding giant aliens. No matter what, we have to find a way to capture and control the Giger-aliens, to balance the scales against what we now know is out there in the galaxy...
I swear; they're doing it on purpose. Modern 3D movies aren't impressive because they don't want them to be. I know, because I've seen a bunch of them.
The prevailing opinion in Hollywood seems to be that releasing movies in 3D is a good way to get asses back into theater seats -- so much so that they want to be able to release all of their movies in 3D if they can. In order to achieve that aim, they need to get rid of the stigma of 3D being a gimmick. So a lot of the modern 3D movies avoid having things pop out of the screen in obvious ways, choosing instead to shoot for a subtler effect. Disney's "Up," for instance, went for an effect where the scene seems to mostly recede away from the screen; nothing pops out at all.
Now, like you, I find this to be a big rip-off. I have good vision. I do not wear glasses. I do not want to have be forced to wear glasses to go to the movies if doing so is not going to add anything appreciably to the experience of watching the movie. I've seen "Coraline" in both 2D and 3D, and I'm telling you, you lose absolutely nothing by not seeing it in 3D. I'm sure the same is true of "Up."
But like I said, the problem is not the technology. Modern 3D is WAAAYYYYYY more impressive than the stuff they had in the old days. It really is. Don't believe me? You should have gone out of your way to see "My Bloody Valentine 3D" when it was in the theaters. This was a movie that absolutely reveled in the idea of 3D as a gimmick. It had pickaxes flying at you, body parts lopping off, eyeballs out, everything. If you like 80s slasher movies, this was a really awesome throwback -- and more importantly, it was 3D as all get-out. Clean, clear, rock-stable, eye-popping 3D.
Yay, I say. 3D is a gimmick. The studios should either treat it as the gimmick it is or else keep it out of our theaters. Unless you're going to give me a spectacle, I'm going to be perfectly happy to save my money and see movies in 2D for the foreseeable future.
Well it's not like he could have checked Wikipedia
on
Tetraktys
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· Score: 1
Uhhh, yeah. And pretty good, thanks. I guess it must have had something to do with my recognizing my own value to the organization and approaching management honestly and openly, instead of skulking around like a venal little creep. But by the same token, if they didn't want to pay what I was worth (to a viable competitor) then there was little reason for me to continue working there.
But they would be even stupider not to ask for a counter-offer from Oracle before formally jumping ship. To me the "current climate" includes economic contraction, mass unemployment, and fly-by-night companies dropping out of business left and right. If they have families, as TFA suggests, you'd think the stability of working at a large, deep-pockets organization would have been an attractive option. TFA makes it sound like they didn't even bother to to try to clarify their situation at Oracle, and opted for a big press release about the move instead. Presumably they have been offered a stake in their new company and plugging it only sweetens the stakes for them. Good luck with that.
Do you really think it would be easier to set up (and periodically reinstall) a million copies of Windows vs. telling Linux to virtualize a million instances?
I'm assuming they would do both. If they didn't have to individually license each Windows instance, it would be trivial to clone a million virtualized instances of a fresh Windows install. (I'm sure he's right that this would make resource management more difficult/costly than using WINE, however.)
Well Ron, since you're here, I'm curious whether you had in fact tried to approach Microsoft for a free site license. You could explain to them that you're doing security research in a unique environment and that you'd be willing to share your results with them, etc. I could even imagine a distorted PR spin where the fact that all this major security research is being done on Windows shows that Windows is clearly the dominant operating system, blah blah...
Or if Microsoft doesn't see the value of the kind of information your research could yield, maybe someone like Symantec would be willing to buy a license and donate it to you (if that's even possible, given EULAs etc.)?
Or do what I did and buy a cheap (£20 / $30), generic*, DVD player that doesn't pay any attention to the 'force watch' nonsense.
Plus, if you buy one that's cheap enough, it will probably allow you to play AVI/DivX/MP4 files from ripped DVDs that will let you skip all that nonsense for real. In fact, a friend of mine just bought a name-brand LCD TV that will play all of the above *and* MKV files in high definition from any filesystem connected to the USB port.
Uhhh... dude? It's called being an adult. Life is full of stuff that sucks, no matter what you might "want to hear." You can stick your head in the sand and cry for your mommy or you can grow up and learn about the world around you. But I'm pretty sure the solution is not to take the uncomfortable message out of things so that people will feel OK when they see them. I'm not going to twist anybody's arm to watch 1984 (and God forbid they should actually read it). But I'm sure as shit not going to have any respect for them if they think V for Vendetta is an adequate substitute, either.
I agree with your first paragraph. However, many people, including one of the posters in this thread, have turned off 1984 after a short time because they don't want to feel like shit. I have a feeling that some of them, not all, may go and try 1984 again someday if they watch a "lite" version of it in one of the remakes then hear how the underlying theme is based on 1984.
That's just crazy. That's like saying people might get bummed watching World War II movies because Hitler keeps killing all these Jews and it's really sad, so we should make a "lite" version where Hitler doesn't kill anyone. 1984 has a message and a purpose. You can't neuter those aspects of it and pretend to have anything of the original left. And ironically, this is one of things Orwell talked about in 1984...
Actually, I remember hearing that Gene Roddenberry had a rule about Star Trek, where all aliens had to look more-or-less human. It was just something he believed in.
They announced simulating the brain of a rat the other day.
No they didn't. A group of researchers has claimed to emulate portions of a rat brain for years. I'm sure they do have a model that exhibits some properties that are similar to a brain. But does the computer get hungry? Does it want to have sex? Until the answer is yes, they have a partial model and nothing more.
Personally, I think their biggest mistake was not selling it to first world consumers. I know a lot of people who would have liked to buy one, but couldn't. This was a fatal mistake since their plan required being able to produce large enough amounts of these to be able to sell them cheaply, and they were turning away the people who were willing and able to buy at the time.
I think this is only a symptom of the biggest mistake, which was a flawed vision of how this project needed to work. Negroponte thought he could swan into the offices of big-time politicians in third-world countries and just talk them into buying these computers en masse, even while he insisted they were not really computers (and could not run Windows) but educational tools. Educational tools? At $100 a head (and climbing)? How many of these countries are investing $100 per student to build schools? What's more, how well has this model ever worked for vaccines, or malaria nets, or cooking stoves? The only way Western countries have managed to bring these things to the poorest people of the world is for independent charities to strap on their boots and go deliver them by hand. Governments are not going to do it for you.
Further, and more to your point, so you put a $199 laptop into the hands of a child of a family that doesn't earn $199 in six months. What then? How much is that kid going to learn about computer programming, open source, and all that other good stuff, when the fields need to be ploughed? One of the main reasons people in third-world countries have lots of kids is that they need them, particularly in areas where people are regularly knocked out of commission by malaria for half the year. So how long is it going to be before that family sells the OLPC?
And then what? Exactly. The OLPC ends up in the hands of... someone who can afford to buy it. This is Negroponte's real biggest mistake: Denying the basic forces of economics.
If, on the other hand, he had put them into every Wal-Mart -- or screw that, Walgreen's -- and every souk and ever bazaar, in the teeming millions, it might have had a shot. The only way to counteract the economic forces in the poorer regions is for not just the cost, but the value of the device to be low... and the only way to do that is to bump up supply. Keep focused on making the devices virtually ubiquitous, as commonplace as bicycles. In short, the OLPC project needed a lot more people on board and a lot more money backing it. It needed the participation of international charities and it needed to be subsidized by people buying the devices here (at a "novelty" markup, even).
Instead, they went with the "I just need to go shake hands with Nice General Abouda, and he'll help us out" model. Seems like a recipe for failure, to me.
I don't know about you, but with every couple I know of the guy is the cook.
Funny! I'll second that, but I assumed my experience was an anomaly.
I think, though, that it may be fashionable among women not to appear to be too "domestic," or not to fall into stereotypes, so they avoid things like cooking on purpose. Which is a shame, cuz most people I know like to eat, or at least do it regularly.
20th Century Fox Television claims the voice actors wanted 75,000 dollars per episode. Which is apparently close to ten times as much as usual.
According to whom? The Simpsons actors reportedly earn $400,000 per episode. Sure, $75,000 might be ten times what a voice actor earns for an episode of an afternoon kids' cartoon, but we're talking about a prime time show.
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McD sells you mayo for your fries as an extra, that is sensible. Selling you the salt as extra isn't and would just turn customers away.
Any kind of mayo for my fries would turn me away, but fortunately here in the U.S. of A they give us ketchup for our fries for free.
Either I don't get what you're saying or you don't get what the GP was saying.
The reason the chip-based authentication method was invented is because the old-style authentication was insecure. BUT the old-style authentication method still works, even on cards that have the chip. Danish ATMs need to be able to read cards issued from places other than Denmark, and Danes need to be able to use foreign ATMs. So anyone who wants to attack a card just needs to ignore the chip-based authentication, hack the cards the same as they do anywhere else, and they're fine.
But Ridley Scott's version, while more artistic and interesting was not the box office smash that Aliens was.
Are you sure? The way I remember it, Alien was a very talked-about, very popular film in 1979. And if IMDB is to be believed, it pulled in $60 million by the end of its run that year.
Apocalypse Now won the best picture Oscar in 1979. IMDB's info here is a little scanty, but apparently it grossed $79 million that year. Other nominees included All That Jazz, which grossed $38 million, and Breaking Away, which grossed $16 million. Kramer vs. Kramer was also nominated, though it apparently wasn't actually released until 1980, and it went on to gross in excess of $100 million. Still -- Alien was no slouch. If it wasn't a "box office smash," maybe that's cuz the studio was expecting the next Star Wars or something. And be fair: Aliens was an action movie. Those have always sold better than horror movies.
Ridley Scott produces movies that he does not direct, so this isn't much of an indication of anything.
Alien is a suspense/thriller.
Correction: Alien is a horror movie. Characters stumble down dark hallways, things jump out and get 'em. It's your basic haunted house flick, shifted to take place in outer space -- as many critics have observed. What made it great was that it was well-directed, well-paced, had an incredibly original visual style, and took its science fiction aspects seriously.
Here's another idea that would be sort of original: Push the Giger aliens into the background a little bit. Make it a "first contact" type of movie. The humans have, for the first time, encountered an alien race. They are the giant aliens that were found in the downed spaceship in the original movie. Humans have made tentative first contact... stuff seems OK... they've met up on a couple of occasions... it's a bold new era in the history of humanity... and that's most of the focus of the film. But there's a problem. The aliens, it seems, while apparently friendly, have a problem with parasites...
OR, here's another one. Why were there all those eggs on the alien spaceship, laid out in such neat rows? Why was there that protective fog-layer over them? We never saw that fog in the second movie. Maybe the giant aliens put the fog there on purpose. Maybe the alien spaceship was a munitions ship. The Giger-aliens were actually manufactured by the giant aliens as weapons, and when the ship crashed, one of the aliens got loose and did what it did best. Humans were aware of these weapons based on their previous (top secret) contacts with the giant aliens ... and they wanted those weapons, which is why they diverted the Nostromo to the planet. And that would put a different spin on it as well: Instead of "evil, greedy corporation wants these weapons no matter what the cost," it could now come to light that the potential cost of NOT obtaining the weapons would be the destruction of the entire human race at the hands of the marauding giant aliens. No matter what, we have to find a way to capture and control the Giger-aliens, to balance the scales against what we now know is out there in the galaxy...
What was AIDS about?
Clichéd horror. Everybody dies.
I swear; they're doing it on purpose. Modern 3D movies aren't impressive because they don't want them to be. I know, because I've seen a bunch of them.
The prevailing opinion in Hollywood seems to be that releasing movies in 3D is a good way to get asses back into theater seats -- so much so that they want to be able to release all of their movies in 3D if they can. In order to achieve that aim, they need to get rid of the stigma of 3D being a gimmick. So a lot of the modern 3D movies avoid having things pop out of the screen in obvious ways, choosing instead to shoot for a subtler effect. Disney's "Up," for instance, went for an effect where the scene seems to mostly recede away from the screen; nothing pops out at all.
Now, like you, I find this to be a big rip-off. I have good vision. I do not wear glasses. I do not want to have be forced to wear glasses to go to the movies if doing so is not going to add anything appreciably to the experience of watching the movie. I've seen "Coraline" in both 2D and 3D, and I'm telling you, you lose absolutely nothing by not seeing it in 3D. I'm sure the same is true of "Up."
But like I said, the problem is not the technology. Modern 3D is WAAAYYYYYY more impressive than the stuff they had in the old days. It really is. Don't believe me? You should have gone out of your way to see "My Bloody Valentine 3D" when it was in the theaters. This was a movie that absolutely reveled in the idea of 3D as a gimmick. It had pickaxes flying at you, body parts lopping off, eyeballs out, everything. If you like 80s slasher movies, this was a really awesome throwback -- and more importantly, it was 3D as all get-out. Clean, clear, rock-stable, eye-popping 3D.
Yay, I say. 3D is a gimmick. The studios should either treat it as the gimmick it is or else keep it out of our theaters. Unless you're going to give me a spectacle, I'm going to be perfectly happy to save my money and see movies in 2D for the foreseeable future.
I mean, it's a non-authoritative source and everything. Totally unreliable. Useless.
Uhhh, yeah. And pretty good, thanks. I guess it must have had something to do with my recognizing my own value to the organization and approaching management honestly and openly, instead of skulking around like a venal little creep. But by the same token, if they didn't want to pay what I was worth (to a viable competitor) then there was little reason for me to continue working there.
But they would be even stupider not to ask for a counter-offer from Oracle before formally jumping ship. To me the "current climate" includes economic contraction, mass unemployment, and fly-by-night companies dropping out of business left and right. If they have families, as TFA suggests, you'd think the stability of working at a large, deep-pockets organization would have been an attractive option. TFA makes it sound like they didn't even bother to to try to clarify their situation at Oracle, and opted for a big press release about the move instead. Presumably they have been offered a stake in their new company and plugging it only sweetens the stakes for them. Good luck with that.
Do you really think it would be easier to set up (and periodically reinstall) a million copies of Windows vs. telling Linux to virtualize a million instances?
I'm assuming they would do both. If they didn't have to individually license each Windows instance, it would be trivial to clone a million virtualized instances of a fresh Windows install. (I'm sure he's right that this would make resource management more difficult/costly than using WINE, however.)
Well Ron, since you're here, I'm curious whether you had in fact tried to approach Microsoft for a free site license. You could explain to them that you're doing security research in a unique environment and that you'd be willing to share your results with them, etc. I could even imagine a distorted PR spin where the fact that all this major security research is being done on Windows shows that Windows is clearly the dominant operating system, blah blah...
Or if Microsoft doesn't see the value of the kind of information your research could yield, maybe someone like Symantec would be willing to buy a license and donate it to you (if that's even possible, given EULAs etc.)?
Or do what I did and buy a cheap (£20 / $30), generic*, DVD player that doesn't pay any attention to the 'force watch' nonsense.
Plus, if you buy one that's cheap enough, it will probably allow you to play AVI/DivX/MP4 files from ripped DVDs that will let you skip all that nonsense for real. In fact, a friend of mine just bought a name-brand LCD TV that will play all of the above *and* MKV files in high definition from any filesystem connected to the USB port.
Uhhh... dude? It's called being an adult. Life is full of stuff that sucks, no matter what you might "want to hear." You can stick your head in the sand and cry for your mommy or you can grow up and learn about the world around you. But I'm pretty sure the solution is not to take the uncomfortable message out of things so that people will feel OK when they see them. I'm not going to twist anybody's arm to watch 1984 (and God forbid they should actually read it). But I'm sure as shit not going to have any respect for them if they think V for Vendetta is an adequate substitute, either.
I agree with your first paragraph. However, many people, including one of the posters in this thread, have turned off 1984 after a short time because they don't want to feel like shit. I have a feeling that some of them, not all, may go and try 1984 again someday if they watch a "lite" version of it in one of the remakes then hear how the underlying theme is based on 1984.
That's just crazy. That's like saying people might get bummed watching World War II movies because Hitler keeps killing all these Jews and it's really sad, so we should make a "lite" version where Hitler doesn't kill anyone. 1984 has a message and a purpose. You can't neuter those aspects of it and pretend to have anything of the original left. And ironically, this is one of things Orwell talked about in 1984...
Actually, I remember hearing that Gene Roddenberry had a rule about Star Trek, where all aliens had to look more-or-less human. It was just something he believed in.
They announced simulating the brain of a rat the other day.
No they didn't. A group of researchers has claimed to emulate portions of a rat brain for years. I'm sure they do have a model that exhibits some properties that are similar to a brain. But does the computer get hungry? Does it want to have sex? Until the answer is yes, they have a partial model and nothing more.
Yeah, I don't understand how even possessing that kind of database is legal, let alone trying to charge people for access to it.
Uhhh...because a world in which it was a crime simply to possess certain information would be very scary? I'm just guessing, here.
And here I thought we were going to get to hear some 15th century hip-hop!
I think you must be responding to someone else's post, pal, cuz you sure didn't read mine.
Personally, I think their biggest mistake was not selling it to first world consumers. I know a lot of people who would have liked to buy one, but couldn't. This was a fatal mistake since their plan required being able to produce large enough amounts of these to be able to sell them cheaply, and they were turning away the people who were willing and able to buy at the time.
I think this is only a symptom of the biggest mistake, which was a flawed vision of how this project needed to work. Negroponte thought he could swan into the offices of big-time politicians in third-world countries and just talk them into buying these computers en masse, even while he insisted they were not really computers (and could not run Windows) but educational tools. Educational tools? At $100 a head (and climbing)? How many of these countries are investing $100 per student to build schools? What's more, how well has this model ever worked for vaccines, or malaria nets, or cooking stoves? The only way Western countries have managed to bring these things to the poorest people of the world is for independent charities to strap on their boots and go deliver them by hand. Governments are not going to do it for you.
Further, and more to your point, so you put a $199 laptop into the hands of a child of a family that doesn't earn $199 in six months. What then? How much is that kid going to learn about computer programming, open source, and all that other good stuff, when the fields need to be ploughed? One of the main reasons people in third-world countries have lots of kids is that they need them, particularly in areas where people are regularly knocked out of commission by malaria for half the year. So how long is it going to be before that family sells the OLPC?
And then what? Exactly. The OLPC ends up in the hands of ... someone who can afford to buy it. This is Negroponte's real biggest mistake: Denying the basic forces of economics.
If, on the other hand, he had put them into every Wal-Mart -- or screw that, Walgreen's -- and every souk and ever bazaar, in the teeming millions, it might have had a shot. The only way to counteract the economic forces in the poorer regions is for not just the cost, but the value of the device to be low... and the only way to do that is to bump up supply. Keep focused on making the devices virtually ubiquitous, as commonplace as bicycles. In short, the OLPC project needed a lot more people on board and a lot more money backing it. It needed the participation of international charities and it needed to be subsidized by people buying the devices here (at a "novelty" markup, even).
Instead, they went with the "I just need to go shake hands with Nice General Abouda, and he'll help us out" model. Seems like a recipe for failure, to me.
I don't know about you, but with every couple I know of the guy is the cook.
Funny! I'll second that, but I assumed my experience was an anomaly.
I think, though, that it may be fashionable among women not to appear to be too "domestic," or not to fall into stereotypes, so they avoid things like cooking on purpose. Which is a shame, cuz most people I know like to eat, or at least do it regularly.
20th Century Fox Television claims the voice actors wanted 75,000 dollars per episode. Which is apparently close to ten times as much as usual.
According to whom? The Simpsons actors reportedly earn $400,000 per episode. Sure, $75,000 might be ten times what a voice actor earns for an episode of an afternoon kids' cartoon, but we're talking about a prime time show.
And BTW, isn't this what most of us do already when we're searching Google Images?