I joined EFF a few months back (shortly after September 11, actually) and they only just now sent me the T-shirt they said I'd be getting. All I can say is this:
Why come up with a new 'Mebibyte' system? What does 'kilo-' and 'mega-' actually mean? Answer: 1000 and 1,000,000, not the perversion of the computer scientists.
Oh, that's just great. If you don't like the way somebody talks, call them a pervert.
To me, that plan sounds like it's more likely to hurt the retailers than it is the record labels. The retailers will see initial sales of the CD go up, possibly prompting re-orders. Then, as "fake" sales to people trying to make a statement taper off, those same retailers end up with a bunch of capital tied up in bogus CDs, capital they could otherwise have spent on product you actually want to buy. And then the returns start coming in.
Meanwhile, the label can trot around to Hollywood and advertisers and point to the amazing sell-through the CD is having (ignoring statistics on returns completely). After having proven how popular the artist is, they get all the movie and TV tie-ins, product sponsorships, licensing, cereal box covers etc., etc... which, as anybody knows, is where all real money in the music industry comes from anyway. Or did you really think the Backstreet Boys were getting rich off royalties from CD sales?
Of course, with any translated work, no two versions are identical, and are not necessarily of equal quality. Thus, the least expensive translation is not necessarily going to be the best (or even adequate) one.
It may be interesting to note that Heany's "Beowulf" made the New York Times bestseller list -- a pretty impressive feat for a book a that's over 1,000 years old.
That's interesting. I once read that some scholars postulate that, in a lot of Norse folk tales and myths, whenever the central character encounters some sort of being that's essentially a "wizard" or "weird faery folk," they're probably talking about somebody from Finland. The Finns (or the Lapps at least) had that reputation even at the time, apparently.
Stop. Ponder that. Consider that Apple is now pushing their own OS's ability to capture, edit, and burn DVD video. In MPEG2 no less.
That's a little misleading. Last I checked, Apple was pushing their own OS's ability to capture, edit, and burn DVD video using Quicktime. For the consumer iDVD product, at least, encoding to MPEG2 is really one of the last steps in the process. If DVD players didn't all use MPEG2, they probably wouldn't bother.
The majority of users have a hard time... understanding the difference between closing an application and quitting it
And they're not alone. What, pray tell, would that difference be?
Well I know that Mac OS X, for one, has this awesome feature where you can close every single window of the foremost application (say, for example, the application called System Preferences) and it keeps running until you explicitly quit it with a Command-Q. It's another Apple first -- they've managed to completely separate the functions of quitting an application and closing it. No more worries about accidentally quitting out of System Preference there! And god forbid you can't keep a TextEdit process running at all times...
Just imagine... what if we built a Beowulf cluster of Linux boxes that would automatically handle all our First Posts, Natalie Portman references, and whiny posts about how every article posted to Slashdot shouldn't have been? If we gave every node on the cluster its own account, the cluster could automatically mod its own posts up to 5!
I wonder what other admin's call their servers that work 24/7, pulling in the orders and dealing with attacks by virii, worms, and other pests?
Say there, mister... speaking as someone who helped to popularize the term in my own w@r3z d00d days, I can say with reasonable conviction that there is no such word as virii. The plural for virus is viruses.
Actually, Pixar does use Maya for basic model creation etc. But you are correct, they export those models to RenderMan for all the shading (the hard part). I doubt they'd be ready to switch over to Linux in any major way for another year or two. And it doesn't have anything to do with "Not Invented Here" syndrome, it's like you say -- they wrote their software, it's good, they don't want to have to re-write it for a system that hasn't proven itself in terms of stability.
'I have fought since the beginning of the Web for its openness: that anyone can read Web pages with any software running on any hardware. This is what makes the Web itself. This is the environment into which so many people have invested so much energy and creativity. When I see any Web site claim to be only readable using particular hardware or software, I cringe - they are pining for the bad old days when each piece of information need a different program to access it.'
So I'm not sure I get it. If Tim Berners-Lee is all about a free and open Web can be viewed by any software running on any hardware, then why start a company based around a proprietary language where the business model is to charge companies for the amount of content they serve? To quote Pamela Hart, Curl Corporation's controller:
"Curl is in a strong financial position. The company has prominent investors who believe Curl has the ability to change the way people use the Internet. I am committed to expanding and strengthening the company's financial position and long term success."
Hmmmm.... that doesn't sound a lot like a philosophy of "openness." And as far as running on any software and any hardware, let's see what the Curl press releases have to say, circa July 2001:
"The Surge(TM) 1.1 software environment, which includes the Surge(TM) browser plug-in and the Curl(TM) content language, is available immediately for Microsoft® Windows® operating systems (Windows® 95/98, Windows NT®, Windows® ME and Windows® 2000). Support for other platforms will be announced later this year."
Whatever Berners-Lee says, I think his company's statements speak for themselves.
Re:Reality: Love it or Hate it....
on
Slashdot Updates
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· Score: 2
I'd like to just point out that Slashdot is an amazing accomplishment, and everyone who keeps it running deserves to get paid for it.
Would you be interested in becoming a (scifi/hollywoood/?) contributor to Slashdot (a la Jon Katz)?
I believe you're confusing Jon Katz with Wesley Crusher. Unlike Crusher (who is a figment of Hollywood's imagination), believe it or not Katz really exists. No, I'm serious.
I can't believe I'm posting to this stupid nerdy thread, but...
...it makes sense. In The Undiscovered Country their blood was purple, but it was also floating around in a depressurized, gravity-free space craft, if I remember right. Human blood is also bluish purple when it doesn't contain oxygen (as when it's traveling through your veins back to your heart... just take a look at the underside of your forearm). So I imagine that's what it'd look like when it's floating around in a vacuum?
Boy, I never thought I'd say something like this, but...
Digital Rights Management (DRM). And for once, we would mean that literally.
At the Seybold Seminar in San Francisco this week I saw a couple of demos of how DRM software works to protect things like MP3s, movies, etc. The licensing server can offer various forms of contracts with the user -- you can rent information, sell it outright, offer it for a limited time or perpetually, offer a free preview of part of the content, expire it at will, offer incentives to users for passing it along, etc. etc.
Seems to me the only single logon system that would be acceptable to most of us here would be one that offered all these possibilities to EVERY USER -- applied to ANY AND ALL personal data associated with his/her profile.
Q: What are the objectives of the Liberty Alliance Project? A: The Alliance has three main objectives. 1) To enable consumers and businesses to maintain personal information securely. 2) To provide a universal, open standard for single sign-on with decentralized authentication and open authorization from multiple providers. 3) To provide an open standard for network identity spanning all network-connected devices.
Q: Who are the members of the Liberty Alliance Project?
A: Charter members include ActivCard, American Airlines, the Apache Software Foundation, Bank of America, Bell Canada Enterprises, Cingular Wireless, Cisco Systems, CollabNet, Dun and Bradstreet, eBay, Entrust, Fidelity Investments, Gemplus, GM, Global Crossing, i2, Intuit, Liberate Technologies, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, OpenWave, O'Reilly and Associates, RealNetworks, RSA Security, Sabre, Schlumberger, Sony Corporation, Sprint, Sun Microsystems, Travelocity, United Airlines, Verisign, Vodafone and More.
...
So it seems it's more than just a Sun effort, and they claim it's not about another company holding onto everyone's personal info. The goal appears to be a method for single sign-on where each individual company maintains customer data relevant to its own business. They describe it as a decentralized, federated system built on an open standard.
I've been doing some research on alternatives to MS-DOS in the last week or two, because I'm trying to build a bare-bones system that boots from a small hard drive into a Citrix client. Sure, this could be done with Linux - but you still have to boot into X and deal with configuring systems differently depending on their video card.
Oh my lord, has it come to this? No wonder there's so much debate over KDE vs. Gnome... today's Linux users don't even realize that the Linux OS is not based on a GUI!
If you send somebody a message specifying exactly how to generate the "one-time pad" needed to decrypt a given message, how exactly is that "hard to detect"? The problem is not how you share one-time pads, it's how you share them without the pads themselves being intercepted. Sending a plaintext message that says "the secret is on the third floor, room 306, under the third floorboard on the right" doesn't cut it.
After World War II, the family of J.R.R. Tolkien, who was teaching philology at Oxford at the time, encouraged him to use his intense imagination for mythology to deal with more wordly topics.
...seems to carry on the oft-cited belief that LotR was some kind of symbolic parable of the events of World War II (or, more accurately, it would have been of World War I). Tolkien himself of course refutes this idea in his preface. (Was it the "Preface to the Second Edition"?) He goes as far as to explicitly state how much he detests allegory, in general.
Slashdot Mirror
...wait until they start using servlets!
God damn, is that an ugly shirt!
To me, that plan sounds like it's more likely to hurt the retailers than it is the record labels. The retailers will see initial sales of the CD go up, possibly prompting re-orders. Then, as "fake" sales to people trying to make a statement taper off, those same retailers end up with a bunch of capital tied up in bogus CDs, capital they could otherwise have spent on product you actually want to buy. And then the returns start coming in.
Meanwhile, the label can trot around to Hollywood and advertisers and point to the amazing sell-through the CD is having (ignoring statistics on returns completely). After having proven how popular the artist is, they get all the movie and TV tie-ins, product sponsorships, licensing, cereal box covers etc., etc... which, as anybody knows, is where all real money in the music industry comes from anyway. Or did you really think the Backstreet Boys were getting rich off royalties from CD sales?
Of course, with any translated work, no two versions are identical, and are not necessarily of equal quality. Thus, the least expensive translation is not necessarily going to be the best (or even adequate) one.
It may be interesting to note that Heany's "Beowulf" made the New York Times bestseller list -- a pretty impressive feat for a book a that's over 1,000 years old.
That's interesting. I once read that some scholars postulate that, in a lot of Norse folk tales and myths, whenever the central character encounters some sort of being that's essentially a "wizard" or "weird faery folk," they're probably talking about somebody from Finland. The Finns (or the Lapps at least) had that reputation even at the time, apparently.
Just imagine ... what if we built a Beowulf cluster of Linux boxes that would automatically handle all our First Posts, Natalie Portman references, and whiny posts about how every article posted to Slashdot shouldn't have been? If we gave every node on the cluster its own account, the cluster could automatically mod its own posts up to 5!
A: "Life... don't talk to me about life."
So I'm not sure I get it. If Tim Berners-Lee is all about a free and open Web can be viewed by any software running on any hardware, then why start a company based around a proprietary language where the business model is to charge companies for the amount of content they serve? To quote Pamela Hart, Curl Corporation's controller:
"Curl is in a strong financial position. The company has prominent investors who believe Curl has the ability to change the way people use the Internet. I am committed to expanding and strengthening the company's financial position and long term success."
Hmmmm.... that doesn't sound a lot like a philosophy of "openness." And as far as running on any software and any hardware, let's see what the Curl press releases have to say, circa July 2001:
"The Surge(TM) 1.1 software environment, which includes the Surge(TM) browser plug-in and the Curl(TM) content language, is available immediately for Microsoft® Windows® operating systems (Windows® 95/98, Windows NT®, Windows® ME and Windows® 2000). Support for other platforms will be announced later this year."
Whatever Berners-Lee says, I think his company's statements speak for themselves.
So where's my cut?
The best place is clearly in the right hand or in the forehead. This has been well documented for centuries.
I think it was a typo; he meant "a very OLD child."
BA-DA-BING!
I can't believe I'm posting to this stupid nerdy thread, but...
...it makes sense. In The Undiscovered Country their blood was purple, but it was also floating around in a depressurized, gravity-free space craft, if I remember right. Human blood is also bluish purple when it doesn't contain oxygen (as when it's traveling through your veins back to your heart... just take a look at the underside of your forearm). So I imagine that's what it'd look like when it's floating around in a vacuum?
Boy, I never thought I'd say something like this, but ...
Digital Rights Management (DRM). And for once, we would mean that literally.
At the Seybold Seminar in San Francisco this week I saw a couple of demos of how DRM software works to protect things like MP3s, movies, etc. The licensing server can offer various forms of contracts with the user -- you can rent information, sell it outright, offer it for a limited time or perpetually, offer a free preview of part of the content, expire it at will, offer incentives to users for passing it along, etc. etc.
Seems to me the only single logon system that would be acceptable to most of us here would be one that offered all these possibilities to EVERY USER -- applied to ANY AND ALL personal data associated with his/her profile.
This, from the Libery Alliance FAQ:
Q: What are the objectives of the Liberty Alliance Project?
A: The Alliance has three main objectives. 1) To enable consumers and businesses to maintain personal information securely. 2) To provide a universal, open standard for single sign-on with decentralized authentication and open authorization from multiple providers. 3) To provide an open standard for network identity spanning all network-connected devices.
Q: Who are the members of the Liberty Alliance Project? A: Charter members include ActivCard, American Airlines, the Apache Software Foundation, Bank of America, Bell Canada Enterprises, Cingular Wireless, Cisco Systems, CollabNet, Dun and Bradstreet, eBay, Entrust, Fidelity Investments, Gemplus, GM, Global Crossing, i2, Intuit, Liberate Technologies, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, OpenWave, O'Reilly and Associates, RealNetworks, RSA Security, Sabre, Schlumberger, Sony Corporation, Sprint, Sun Microsystems, Travelocity, United Airlines, Verisign, Vodafone and More.
...
So it seems it's more than just a Sun effort, and they claim it's not about another company holding onto everyone's personal info. The goal appears to be a method for single sign-on where each individual company maintains customer data relevant to its own business. They describe it as a decentralized, federated system built on an open standard.
If you send somebody a message specifying exactly how to generate the "one-time pad" needed to decrypt a given message, how exactly is that "hard to detect"? The problem is not how you share one-time pads, it's how you share them without the pads themselves being intercepted. Sending a plaintext message that says "the secret is on the third floor, room 306, under the third floorboard on the right" doesn't cut it.
Errr... Laserdiscs have never supported as high-resolution images as DVD, especially when you take into account anamorphic enhancement.
No, I'm sorry, it was a good attempt, but just too opaque for most readers. Try something like this:
"Man, wouldn't it be cool if you could set up a Beowulf cluster of those OS/390 boxes!"