Nothing makes me happier than to hear this. Each and every day one more clueless CEO jumps on the bandwagon against Napster. Little do they know that MP3 was here long before Napster and it will be here long after. If they want to squander their resources defeating a service which, techinically, is legal, while more and more just like it grow in size, then I'm all for sacrificing Napster to further the cause...
This didn't really strike me as a true "Mission: Impossible" story. Rather, as Taco mentioned, it was more of a creative outlet for John Woo. The stunts are _great_ - but after awhile there's only so many ways you can kill a guy. This movie started wearing on me at about the 1:15 mark, and never came around after that.
If you ask me, the first M:I was a lot better. For starters, it was true to its roots: it had an actual team of people doing all sorts of cool secret agenty stuff the whole time. There was a mission. It was impossible. And so on.
MI2 really wasn't like this at all. There are three competing strands or directions in which this movie meanders: Woo's fetish with windy slo-mos and 2x Berettas, Cruise's totally incongruous, undying love for Thandie Newton (more on that later), and same vague, yarn about diseases and Greek gods. They take precedence in that order.
Now, if you ask me, that is just stupid. The original MI never dealt with sex in the manner this film does. Nor did it have such incomprehensible plots. I don't deny the directors a little creative freedom here, but through the whole movie I kept thinking about how they were trying to turn Ethan Hunt into a James Bond, minus the smarm. Cruise literally gets smitten (in the span of three minutes, another hiccup in the plot), and from there out his whole motivation is to get this girl back and screw the pants off of her. There are a few cool gadgets, but nothing like the first movie.
The final straw was the portrayal of Ving Rhames. Now, I thought he really stole the show in the first movie. His swagger was the perfect foil to Cruise's cold, calculating, "Kittridge - you have never seen me upset" demeanor. Compare that to this movie, and he is reduced to an annoying caricature of himself, kind of an amalgam of John Shaft and a corner street pimp. He utters lines like "That bastard put a hole in my Armani" with total seriousness. Ugh.. I found myself yearning for the much cooler, much geekier Rhames in M:I, the guy who drooled over kickass hardware and didn't seem to worry too much about his suit.
Okay I've been wondering since the first M:I and seeing the second one brought the question back. How do they make those "fake high tech" operating systems that Hunt uses on the Powermacs. You know what I'm talking about - the sweet looking window manager and apps that he uses to do things like interface with the satellite, etc. It has tons of beeps and clicking and lots of cool features - 3D rotating heads, etc. etc. Any ideas?
Oh, I heartily disagree. There are certain fundamentals you need to get down before you start toying with the "most powerful" tool available. You don't throw someone into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to teach them how to swim. People need to be learning procedural programming before they jump into the quagmire that is OOP. I saw a lot of people on this thread telling the guy to start them right out with object oriented fundamentals, Python, Java, C++, etc. This is just totally wrong. I know this because I tried; I have been learning C++ from age ten until present (17) and I still don't have a clue what I'm doing half the time. It's not like I had bad teachers or anything; there are just a few things that kids are too young to get. I don't think I've ever met an 11-year old that could fully grok on the concepts of operator overloading, data hiding, and (especially) inheritance and polymorphism. I'm sure that there are a few that do, but these are/not/ the things to be learning as a first foray into programming. Give the kids BASIC or Logo and allow them to learn at their own pace. Hell - give them Algebra. I can't think of a more valuable skill to know that understanding the significace of variables, functions, return values, and the like.
Because Ebay makes their money from ad revenues. To use an analogy: Slashdot is cool and harbors extrememly libertarian views about the web, but everytime someone views their headlines on www.redhat.com or any one of a million other places that posts them, they are deprived of a hit to their homepage. Which means that advertisers pay them for one less impression. Over time, these can add up - they probably have cost/. a nice chunk of change in the long run.
This is the same exact thing that happened to ebay. By mirroring only the content of their site (the ad listings), less people are going to www.ebay.com to see that information. Hence, less are viewing the ads on www.ebay.com, which means they get less money in the long run.
Very true, very true. It's the form factor that sells the thing. Try building yourself something as compact as this - good luck. My current home network is two NICS, a hard drive, a 32mb SIMM, a Pentium 90, a floppy drive, and integrated graphics. I could easily fit that in a small, cuboidal boxy type thing - assuming I could find one. Instead I'm enslaved to this massive AT case with a huge AT power supply and room for 3 more expansion cards that I'm not going to use. It's all kind of pointless, but going smaller costs a lot of money. Hence they can charge over a thousand dollars for a mediocre box with 32mb of RAM. I mean come on - I could build something like that for under $300 if I was so inclined.
Opera sells their browser because it adds a feature - speed. IE and Netscape have been locked in a battle of one-upsmanship for years. One adds a cool feature, the other mimics it and adds something else. Iterate. IE has captured market share, but only because it is bundled and integrated into the shell. Neither browser is noticeably better than the other. Don't think for a minute that people wouldn't switch in droves to Netscape when faced with the prospect of paying money.
An IE-only company could make money perhaps by offering a different product. IE Lite, along the lines of Opera for example. Something - anything. But I never seen Microsoft innovate in such a way, and I wouldn't expect its ilk to..
Correct me if I'm wrong but exactly what would the Internet Explorer company sell? All Microsoft does now is give it away free. There is literally no revenue coming in from IE or anything related to it (right?). If this judge thinks MS is going to be able to sell a browser, when there are hundreds available for free, I think he's sadly mistaken.
Okay not mine - I actually like it for the challenge - but a lot of people's. A pretty interesting story nonetheless, so even if you hate my stylish implicit linkage check it out...
5-10% speed improvement? Wha? I have talked to at least twenty people who have done this and have not seen that result. All had a drop in performance. I'd like to know where you got your numbers. Gamecenter shows 98 beating 2000 by 13fps and 10fps on identical machines. That roughly matches my own tests. The only game I've heard of even posting an increase was UT, and it was by 3fps - negligable.
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Re:Cool... is this the modernized Amiga?
on
AtheOS
·
· Score: 2
I realized about 2ns after posting this how much flack I'd get for omitting the even more obvious choice. So, obligatorily, here goes:
This shouldn't be surprising. Windows 98 simply does not have the amount of overhead that Linux or any multiuser OS with a good security model has. Things like that just take more CPU cycles, period. Windows will always have a bit of a performance edge for anything, but at the same time it will be a lot easier to crash it, write to memory that you're not supposed to, etc. Hardcore gamers will almost always stick with Win 98/ME. For the rest of us, it seems like Linux really is coming along. Again, it's just a measure of driver support, this test. Obviously Nvidia has more of it right now. Given two mature drivers for Linux and Windows, though, and Windows ought to win.
On a related note, I urge you to take the time and mail (as in snail) your representatives. Having volunteered at the office of a congressman before, I can assure you that in terms of public feedback, hardcopy letters from constituents take priority over e-mail. Demonstrating that this issue is important enough to you to make you take time out of your busy day and write a letter has a lot more sway than firing off an e-mail, or even worse some sort of fill-in-the-blanks form letter. And another thing - be sure to mention that you are a constituent who will be deciding if this person gets reelected or not. Letters from people in the district also take priority, obviously.
This may be a moot point. I do not know the nature of your specific case, but it seems like if you were running a business in the US you could still be found libel. Hence even if Napster relocated their servers to some obscure island nation, they would still be out of San Mateo and still be in trouble. I seem to recall reading something on this before but can't quite remember. Anyone want to add anything?
Hrm it just occured to me that the folding keyboard you were talking about occupies the Hotsync port on the Palm. Unless it has some sort of passthru, which wouldn't really make any sense anyways, you're going to be stuck with Graffiti. My advice would be to use a handheld with a builtin keyboard.
I highly reccomend a Palm for this application simply because there's no point in having color for serial interfacing. With that in mind you'll get way better battery life out of a Palm. There are plenty of good serial apps for PalmOS; I use ptelnet and it's great. Using handwriting rec can be arduous, especially if you do a lot of tabs for command line completion (IOS has this IIRC), but a foldable keyboard would pretty much solve this problem.
As for the Hotsync cradle problem, you can buy a Hotsync cable here for 20 bucks which has just a serial connector on one side and the proprietary connector on the other. It's way, way easier to use than a cradle for things like this because you can hold the Palm in your hand and still write.
This has been my setup and it's worked perfectly. For anyone out there who has a Palm laying around and wants to full with this, just stick a getty on a com port, download a serial program for the Palm, and login to your box. It's kind of cool:)
I find this intriguing, considering that of all people daytraders need stability above all else. They are the ones who always call and complain when the cable modem service dies out, at least according to my friend to who works in tech support and a cable ISP. I can't think of a more inopportune time for a BSoD than when you've got your finger over the enter key for a purchase order:) Especially now that we are starting to see major manufacturers come out with special systems solely for the purpose of daytrading (Dell just announced a dual-head system with lots of daytrading customizations), it seems logical that many would want to choose an OS that meets their needs (BSD would be my choice for stability). It seems like of all the OSs Linux or BeOS would be the most logical choice. I wouldn't write them off just yet..
They didn't port Win32 - far be it from Microsoft to do something truly challenging and innovative. Rather; they bought a competing API called MainWin IIRC to do the trick.
On a related do, do you really want to see Office's dominance extended to other platforms? I don't. I'd love to see StarOffice become a viable competitor (or KOffice - don't want to start any more GUI jihads here) to Office, considering it is responsible for a disproportionately large part of their bottom line...
1947504180 Here is your navigator : Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98) Just a security hole of Slashdot. You can find this kind of hole in all sites which has a forum. I think that in site like e-trade you can make some people asks for stocks. You can contact me there : Krakus.Irus à voila.com If you want to retry. If you want to know more.
My question is who is behind this? I'm really curious what Metallica will have to say if/when they ever respond to the interview. IIRC their manager has been extremely vocal against MP3s for a long time. One wonders if it isn't Metallica proper that is behind this as much as their label/etc. As for Dre, I'm not as surprised. Listen to any of his stuff all the way back to NWA - all he talk's about is making tons of money and fucking lots of women:) Oh yeah, and he talks a lot about stealing things too, which strikes me as a bit hypocritical in light of recent developments.
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Re:This book revamped my Perl OO module creation
on
Object Oriented Perl
·
· Score: 2
I'm curious how you learned OOP. I'm a self-taught Perl/C hacker who has just never been able to make the leap to object orientation. I know that one of the major benefits of OO is that ideally it is easier to program in because the coding process for objects is a bit more like how we think. For me though, procedural programming just clicks. It's way easier and less muckier than OO, and wierdly enough a lot more intuitive. Mebbe I've just trained myself to think 'procedurally' after all these years. I gather it takes a long time for OOP to fully sink in? It doesn't sound like something I could just sit down and learn, effectively. At any rate, I'm starting EECS at Berkeley next year, so I'm sure after being beat with it for 4 years I'll figger some things out...
Just how does one generate 40 gigabits - 5 gigabytes - of data per second? That's well above the throughput of any bus system I'm aware of, let alone RAM or hard drive. Any idea how they do this?
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing makes me happier than to hear this. Each and every day one more clueless CEO jumps on the bandwagon against Napster. Little do they know that MP3 was here long before Napster and it will be here long after. If they want to squander their resources defeating a service which, techinically, is legal, while more and more just like it grow in size, then I'm all for sacrificing Napster to further the cause...
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This didn't really strike me as a true "Mission: Impossible" story. Rather, as Taco mentioned, it was more of a creative outlet for John Woo. The stunts are _great_ - but after awhile there's only so many ways you can kill a guy. This movie started wearing on me at about the 1:15 mark, and never came around after that.
If you ask me, the first M:I was a lot better. For starters, it was true to its roots: it had an actual team of people doing all sorts of cool secret agenty stuff the whole time. There was a mission. It was impossible. And so on.
MI2 really wasn't like this at all. There are three competing strands or directions in which this movie meanders: Woo's fetish with windy slo-mos and 2x Berettas, Cruise's totally incongruous, undying love for Thandie Newton (more on that later), and same vague, yarn about diseases and Greek gods. They take precedence in that order.
Now, if you ask me, that is just stupid. The original MI never dealt with sex in the manner this film does. Nor did it have such incomprehensible plots. I don't deny the directors a little creative freedom here, but through the whole movie I kept thinking about how they were trying to turn Ethan Hunt into a James Bond, minus the smarm. Cruise literally gets smitten (in the span of three minutes, another hiccup in the plot), and from there out his whole motivation is to get this girl back and screw the pants off of her. There are a few cool gadgets, but nothing like the first movie.
The final straw was the portrayal of Ving Rhames. Now, I thought he really stole the show in the first movie. His swagger was the perfect foil to Cruise's cold, calculating, "Kittridge - you have never seen me upset" demeanor. Compare that to this movie, and he is reduced to an annoying caricature of himself, kind of an amalgam of John Shaft and a corner street pimp. He utters lines like "That bastard put a hole in my Armani" with total seriousness. Ugh.. I found myself yearning for the much cooler, much geekier Rhames in M:I, the guy who drooled over kickass hardware and didn't seem to worry too much about his suit.
--
Okay I've been wondering since the first M:I and seeing the second one brought the question back. How do they make those "fake high tech" operating systems that Hunt uses on the Powermacs. You know what I'm talking about - the sweet looking window manager and apps that he uses to do things like interface with the satellite, etc. It has tons of beeps and clicking and lots of cool features - 3D rotating heads, etc. etc. Any ideas?
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Oh, I heartily disagree. There are certain fundamentals you need to get down before you start toying with the "most powerful" tool available. You don't throw someone into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to teach them how to swim. People need to be learning procedural programming before they jump into the quagmire that is OOP. I saw a lot of people on this thread telling the guy to start them right out with object oriented fundamentals, Python, Java, C++, etc. This is just totally wrong. I know this because I tried; I have been learning C++ from age ten until present (17) and I still don't have a clue what I'm doing half the time. It's not like I had bad teachers or anything; there are just a few things that kids are too young to get. I don't think I've ever met an 11-year old that could fully grok on the concepts of operator overloading, data hiding, and (especially) inheritance and polymorphism. I'm sure that there are a few that do, but these are /not/ the things to be learning as a first foray into programming. Give the kids BASIC or Logo and allow them to learn at their own pace. Hell - give them Algebra. I can't think of a more valuable skill to know that understanding the significace of variables, functions, return values, and the like.
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Because Ebay makes their money from ad revenues. To use an analogy: Slashdot is cool and harbors extrememly libertarian views about the web, but everytime someone views their headlines on www.redhat.com or any one of a million other places that posts them, they are deprived of a hit to their homepage. Which means that advertisers pay them for one less impression. Over time, these can add up - they probably have cost /. a nice chunk of change in the long run.
This is the same exact thing that happened to ebay. By mirroring only the content of their site (the ad listings), less people are going to www.ebay.com to see that information. Hence, less are viewing the ads on www.ebay.com, which means they get less money in the long run.
The fourth clause for fair usage under the copyright act states "(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." Obviously, fair use has to end here - what this site was doing obviously drove down the "market value" of Ebay advertising, because it lowered their impression count. The fact that it is publicly accessable has nothing to do with it; there are plenty of publicly accessable things out there that are still copyrighted. At the bottom of every page you still find "Copyright © 1995-2000 eBay Inc. All Rights Reserved."
There has been a widescale trend by the courts in narrowing the scope of commercial fair use recently, and this case fights right in with that trend.
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Very true, very true. It's the form factor that sells the thing. Try building yourself something as compact as this - good luck. My current home network is two NICS, a hard drive, a 32mb SIMM, a Pentium 90, a floppy drive, and integrated graphics. I could easily fit that in a small, cuboidal boxy type thing - assuming I could find one. Instead I'm enslaved to this massive AT case with a huge AT power supply and room for 3 more expansion cards that I'm not going to use. It's all kind of pointless, but going smaller costs a lot of money. Hence they can charge over a thousand dollars for a mediocre box with 32mb of RAM. I mean come on - I could build something like that for under $300 if I was so inclined.
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Opera sells their browser because it adds a feature - speed. IE and Netscape have been locked in a battle of one-upsmanship for years. One adds a cool feature, the other mimics it and adds something else. Iterate. IE has captured market share, but only because it is bundled and integrated into the shell. Neither browser is noticeably better than the other. Don't think for a minute that people wouldn't switch in droves to Netscape when faced with the prospect of paying money.
An IE-only company could make money perhaps by offering a different product. IE Lite, along the lines of Opera for example. Something - anything. But I never seen Microsoft innovate in such a way, and I wouldn't expect its ilk to..
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Correct me if I'm wrong but exactly what would the Internet Explorer company sell? All Microsoft does now is give it away free. There is literally no revenue coming in from IE or anything related to it (right?). If this judge thinks MS is going to be able to sell a browser, when there are hundreds available for free, I think he's sadly mistaken.
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Okay not mine - I actually like it for the challenge - but a lot of people's. A pretty interesting story nonetheless, so even if you hate my stylish implicit linkage check it out...
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5-10% speed improvement? Wha? I have talked to at least twenty people who have done this and have not seen that result. All had a drop in performance. I'd like to know where you got your numbers. Gamecenter shows 98 beating 2000 by 13fps and 10fps on identical machines. That roughly matches my own tests. The only game I've heard of even posting an increase was UT, and it was by 3fps - negligable.
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I realized about 2ns after posting this how much flack I'd get for omitting the even more obvious choice. So, obligatorily, here goes:
Wouldn't it now?
:)
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A UNIX-like OS designed from the ground up around a solid GUI could be really nice.
Wouldn't it now?
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This shouldn't be surprising. Windows 98 simply does not have the amount of overhead that Linux or any multiuser OS with a good security model has. Things like that just take more CPU cycles, period. Windows will always have a bit of a performance edge for anything, but at the same time it will be a lot easier to crash it, write to memory that you're not supposed to, etc. Hardcore gamers will almost always stick with Win 98/ME. For the rest of us, it seems like Linux really is coming along. Again, it's just a measure of driver support, this test. Obviously Nvidia has more of it right now. Given two mature drivers for Linux and Windows, though, and Windows ought to win.
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On a related note, I urge you to take the time and mail (as in snail) your representatives. Having volunteered at the office of a congressman before, I can assure you that in terms of public feedback, hardcopy letters from constituents take priority over e-mail. Demonstrating that this issue is important enough to you to make you take time out of your busy day and write a letter has a lot more sway than firing off an e-mail, or even worse some sort of fill-in-the-blanks form letter. And another thing - be sure to mention that you are a constituent who will be deciding if this person gets reelected or not. Letters from people in the district also take priority, obviously.
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This may be a moot point. I do not know the nature of your specific case, but it seems like if you were running a business in the US you could still be found libel. Hence even if Napster relocated their servers to some obscure island nation, they would still be out of San Mateo and still be in trouble. I seem to recall reading something on this before but can't quite remember. Anyone want to add anything?
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Hrm it just occured to me that the folding keyboard you were talking about occupies the Hotsync port on the Palm. Unless it has some sort of passthru, which wouldn't really make any sense anyways, you're going to be stuck with Graffiti. My advice would be to use a handheld with a builtin keyboard.
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It's one of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter, along with Europa, Ganymede & Callisto. It's very, very far away :)
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I highly reccomend a Palm for this application simply because there's no point in having color for serial interfacing. With that in mind you'll get way better battery life out of a Palm. There are plenty of good serial apps for PalmOS; I use ptelnet and it's great. Using handwriting rec can be arduous, especially if you do a lot of tabs for command line completion (IOS has this IIRC), but a foldable keyboard would pretty much solve this problem.
:)
As for the Hotsync cradle problem, you can buy a Hotsync cable here for 20 bucks which has just a serial connector on one side and the proprietary connector on the other. It's way, way easier to use than a cradle for things like this because you can hold the Palm in your hand and still write.
This has been my setup and it's worked perfectly. For anyone out there who has a Palm laying around and wants to full with this, just stick a getty on a com port, download a serial program for the Palm, and login to your box. It's kind of cool
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I find this intriguing, considering that of all people daytraders need stability above all else. They are the ones who always call and complain when the cable modem service dies out, at least according to my friend to who works in tech support and a cable ISP. I can't think of a more inopportune time for a BSoD than when you've got your finger over the enter key for a purchase order :) Especially now that we are starting to see major manufacturers come out with special systems solely for the purpose of daytrading (Dell just announced a dual-head system with lots of daytrading customizations), it seems logical that many would want to choose an OS that meets their needs (BSD would be my choice for stability). It seems like of all the OSs Linux or BeOS would be the most logical choice. I wouldn't write them off just yet..
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They didn't port Win32 - far be it from Microsoft to do something truly challenging and innovative. Rather; they bought a competing API called MainWin IIRC to do the trick.
On a related do, do you really want to see Office's dominance extended to other platforms? I don't. I'd love to see StarOffice become a viable competitor (or KOffice - don't want to start any more GUI jihads here) to Office, considering it is responsible for a disproportionately large part of their bottom line...
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1947504180
Here is your navigator : Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)
Just a security hole of Slashdot. You can find this kind of hole in all sites which has a forum. I think that in site like e-trade you can make some people asks for stocks.
You can contact me there : Krakus.Irus à voila.com
If you want to retry.
If you want to know more.
--
My question is who is behind this? I'm really curious what Metallica will have to say if/when they ever respond to the interview. IIRC their manager has been extremely vocal against MP3s for a long time. One wonders if it isn't Metallica proper that is behind this as much as their label/etc. As for Dre, I'm not as surprised. Listen to any of his stuff all the way back to NWA - all he talk's about is making tons of money and fucking lots of women :) Oh yeah, and he talks a lot about stealing things too, which strikes me as a bit hypocritical in light of recent developments.
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I'm curious how you learned OOP. I'm a self-taught Perl/C hacker who has just never been able to make the leap to object orientation. I know that one of the major benefits of OO is that ideally it is easier to program in because the coding process for objects is a bit more like how we think. For me though, procedural programming just clicks. It's way easier and less muckier than OO, and wierdly enough a lot more intuitive. Mebbe I've just trained myself to think 'procedurally' after all these years. I gather it takes a long time for OOP to fully sink in? It doesn't sound like something I could just sit down and learn, effectively. At any rate, I'm starting EECS at Berkeley next year, so I'm sure after being beat with it for 4 years I'll figger some things out...
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Just how does one generate 40 gigabits - 5 gigabytes - of data per second? That's well above the throughput of any bus system I'm aware of, let alone RAM or hard drive. Any idea how they do this?
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Freenet is what you want...
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