Maybe someday studios will realize that CG blows no matter how good it is-- it will never make a film "worth seeing". Granted, good CG brings people into the box office. That's probably all studios care about.
OTOH, I would rather see a nice CG recreation of Richard Harris as Albus Dumbledore than the guy they have now. The difference is so striking as to be disconcerting-- for a Potter fan, that is. Harris was the bomb.
Slashdot is now entering the field of discriminating against conservative news sources by tagging them as such.
It's called context, shit-for-brains. It's like if some pro-alien-invasion newspaper said that NASA was hiding information about aliens. You would think differently about it if the Wall St. Journal said the same, thing, no? It's still up to the reader to decide if the information is reputable or not. You'll notice that the editor's comment simply says that the article comes from a periodical that is a "wee bit conservative", not that it is conservative trash (which it is). Nor did they outright reject the story submission, which I suppose you could spin as "censorship".
Fact is, the conservative press has pounded this idea into the heads of conservatives that the "mainstream press", which is arguably conservative itself, censors and distorts the truth in favor of "the liberals". This is a fabrication in order to make sure you get your news from the vetted talking heads-- the channels and conservative talkers who stick to the party-line. You sure as shit don't hear much anymore from the traditional (fiscal-responbility, states' rights, and so on) conservatives anymore, do you? That's because they don't stick to the Republican party-line.
If anyone should be accused of discriminating against sources it's Fox News, which screams "liberal!" (like you) any time someone disagrees with them, like it's a crime to have a different opinion.
I've worked with Indian outsourcing firms, and they make up for their lack of understanding of the problem with 14 hour work days and no complaints about how low their pay is. Compare that to workers in the US, who waste their whole day grumbling about their pay and are completely lazy.
Hang on there! Sure, this is why Indian labor is competitive with US labor-- but you make it sound like the US is just a bunch of lazy fatcats. I'm not an economist, but US productivity has been on the rise for a long time. This is the result of many factors, but I doubt that laziness is one of them. 14 hour workdays smacks of desperation. Neither I nor anyone I work with is lazy, but thank God I am not in their shoes!
I suspect that you are right in your first statement, though, that Intel is moving work into India because the talent is there. And if what others say is correct-- that the cost of researchers pales in comparison to the cost of the facilities-- I suspect that they're going to look for intellectual capital where they can find it. Why not India? I wouldn't be surprised if Intel had R&D facilities all over the world. Follow the talent.
Do you think that proprietary software development is different? There are large projects and small ones, just like in OSS, and many times, there's a lead programmer who is indispensible. I'm sure there are a number of hackers out there whose absence would break a company.
Besides, it's not like my fileserver is going to spontaneously combust if the guy who wrote Samba bit the dust. If anything, the argument is stronger for OSS. If the lead programmer disappears and a company goes out of business, what happens to the code? In OSS, if it is important enough, somebody else will pick it up. If it is important enough from a business perspective, you hire someone to maintain it.
Ii was under the impression that all of the information on the card is taken together as a unique identifier: CC #, name, issuer, CVC, and expiry date. If that is indeed the case, there are a lot of possible combinations. So even if I use all of the available CC #'s, there's still my name on the card and all of the other info, so it should never conflict (or it is unlikely to, anyway). Good question, though. I'm curious to see if my guess is correct.
I've been getting into Neverwinter Nights lately, but that required "bitching out" my ancient Mac with slightly less ancient hardware. 3D games just don't feel so snuggly to me, so this is not a comfort game.
Even better-- MBNA has a service attached to its credit card accounts called "ShopSafe". This allows you to generate a unique CC number for each purchase you make, set a maximum withdrawal amount, and set an expiration date for use. This way, if an employee of some vendor steals your number, he's out of luck. It won't work.
I mention this in connection to bill payments (pull payments, in your terminology) because you can also create something like an "open purchase order"-- that is, a vendor can withdraw from a card (which is a uniquely generated number) once a month up to a certain amount. I use it, e.g., to pay Netflix bills, and so on. Unfortunately you still have to trust the CC company-- but you have to trust someone, somewhere. I've been using ShopSafe for about 5 years, and I'm quite happy with it.
Because the vast majority of those people producing works are raking it in, right? I work for a publishing company, and I can tell you man, that it ain't so. There really are fat cats out there. The people who run the publishing companies are absolutely filthy rich. Authors and musicians regularly get stiffed, mostly because they sign away all their rights-- those are the only terms that most publishers will accept.
On the other hand, every time he writes something like this, he gets his way, because he motivates his user base to help him out. What you're missing is that the OpenBSD devs have been privately trying to get this information for years. When do you get pissed? If Theo publicly flaming Intel motivates 1000 people to write in to Intel, and then Intel finally caves to pressure, I say that's a job well done.
I personally couldn't give a shit about how he sounds. He's a part of a group of people who write a fantastic operating system. The software speaks for itself.
I think you can draw the line when a bug in the blob can result in an attacker exploiting the system.
That's a legitmate gripe, but I think Theo's main concern here is that the BSDs can't even freely distribute the blob-- a blob which only works with one piece of hardware, and which does not reveal any trade secrets (since it's in binary form). Yet these very same vendors go to OSS conferences and preach about their "openness". That's when it becomes apparent that their real goal is getting cheap, if not free, labor. Intel's presentation slides that Theo mentions in his email to misc@ all but come out and say this.
I wish Tesco plenty of success in their attempt to undercut software in this fashion. If they can use their brand-name to get people to realize that software needn't be so expensive (and moreover to realize that alternatives are viable), this is a net positive.
Oh, no, Microsoft's prices are totally justified. Have you ever seen how mind-bogglingly fucked-up Active Directory is? It takes legions of programmers to write software that bad. That there's some expensive shit.
I'm not sure if the DVD-screenshot problem is because Apple wants to prevent you from taking them. Apple's DVD player renders the image differently than most apps, sending the video stream directly to the video card, which then overlays the image in the rectangle defined by the player window. I was under the impression that this was so that DVD Player could take advantage of specific features of the video card, like MPEG acceleration.
Anyway, you can work around this easily. Download VLC. Take screenshots to your heart's content. It does not use the same compositing method.
Great post. Parents tend to forget that two minds are better than one, and if you teach children to rely on their own judgement, with your help they'll be better suited to deal with any problems that pop up in life. They'll be on their own at some point, regardless. Why not give them a head start?
Before you do the grammar-nazi thing, you should look the word up yourself.
intractable/ntræktbl/
-adjective
1. not easily controlled or directed; not docile or manageable; stubborn; obstinate: an intractable disposition.
2. (of things) hard to shape or work with: an intractable metal.
3. hard to treat, relieve, or cure: the intractable pain in his leg.
-noun
4. an intractable person.
In the context of computer science it means "computationally difficult", sometimes to the point where it is not feasible to solve with a computer-- but not impossible.
1st point: election officials should keep the voting record. This way they can compare the printout with the vote recorded in the database in the event of a recount. We want to allow for the possibility of recounts, right?
2nd point: if voting machines can't be trusted to keep accurate records, we shouldn't be using them. IMHO, considering that the financial sector has been using computers for nearly 40 years with a relatively high degree of accuracy makes me believe that the problem of accurate voting machines, while intractable, is not impossible. Do I need to point out that we have two robots on Mars at the moment?
I suppose you think that birth certificates are a flawed concept, too. After all, people make mistakes. They couldn't possibly be useful, right?
I don't think it can only work one way. If art and literature is important because it can convey powerful messages then it is only logical that it convey powerful negative messages.
Precisely, and this is why I think we should rid finally ourselves of Wagner, whose #1 fan was, after all, Adolf Hitler.
Jesus! The article mentions a guy whose laptop started smoking as he boarded a plane.
The safety of Lenovo's batteries was called into question in mid-September after an IBM ThinkPad caught fire at the Los Angeles International Airport. A passenger who had charged his laptop at the airport boarded his plane and then realized his computer bag was smoking. He ran off the plane onto the jetway, and the overheated notebook computer began throwing off sparks, Lenovo said.
Good thing there wasn't a trigger happy air marshall there! If only he had some water to put out the... oh, wait. If I were this guy I'd be thankful to be alive.
It's been made clear throughout the last three decades that people who should know better don't change the default password. Routers, firewalls have had this problem. Various incarnations of Unix have had this problem. VMS had this problem! Yes, people should change the default password, but in the interest of security, we should make them do it on first boot. OpenBSD makes you set up a complex root password after install.
People don't wear seatbelts, either, which is why we have such seemingly inane things like seatbelt laws. This is clearly a test for rationality. Because apparently dying isn't bad enough but being punished is. People are stupid.
Gentoo is a step up from rolling your own distro. You learn a hell of a lot while you do it, and in general, Gentoo is not easy to install or configure. Granted, the install process has come a long way, but IMHO, if you're going to use one of the easier methods, why are you using Gentoo in the first place? The whole point is control. Sorry, you just need to know what you're doing.
The upside to the steep learning curve is that the Gentoo community discussion boards are outstanding. Having come from the BSD world (and subsequently gone back-- more on that later), this was a breath of fresh air (as compared to, say, OpenBSD-misc). There's no "RTFManpages, shithead!" and so forth. Not that you're not going to get called out if you're trying to get someone else to do the thinking for you, but there's definitely a lot of hand-holding.
The reason why I gave up on Gentoo really wasn't Gentoo-specific. I just got tired of the general broken-ness of software in the Linux world. The Gentoo ports system is good, but not that good. Maybe my experience was worsened by the fact that I was running on the PPC arch, but I found that I had to run many unstable packages just to have a desktop system. I moved back to BSD. I may not have the bleeding-edge applications anymore, but I rarely find an application in OpenBSD ports and packages that doesn't work. That's good enough for me. And finding documentation on BSD for the system or apps is a piece of cake (which is why the community is so hostile when you don't bother looking before asking).
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe someday studios will realize that CG blows no matter how good it is-- it will never make a film "worth seeing". Granted, good CG brings people into the box office. That's probably all studios care about.
OTOH, I would rather see a nice CG recreation of Richard Harris as Albus Dumbledore than the guy they have now. The difference is so striking as to be disconcerting-- for a Potter fan, that is. Harris was the bomb.
Slashdot is now entering the field of discriminating against conservative news sources by tagging them as such.
It's called context, shit-for-brains. It's like if some pro-alien-invasion newspaper said that NASA was hiding information about aliens. You would think differently about it if the Wall St. Journal said the same, thing, no? It's still up to the reader to decide if the information is reputable or not. You'll notice that the editor's comment simply says that the article comes from a periodical that is a "wee bit conservative", not that it is conservative trash (which it is). Nor did they outright reject the story submission, which I suppose you could spin as "censorship".
Fact is, the conservative press has pounded this idea into the heads of conservatives that the "mainstream press", which is arguably conservative itself, censors and distorts the truth in favor of "the liberals". This is a fabrication in order to make sure you get your news from the vetted talking heads-- the channels and conservative talkers who stick to the party-line. You sure as shit don't hear much anymore from the traditional (fiscal-responbility, states' rights, and so on) conservatives anymore, do you? That's because they don't stick to the Republican party-line.
If anyone should be accused of discriminating against sources it's Fox News, which screams "liberal!" (like you) any time someone disagrees with them, like it's a crime to have a different opinion.
Whaddya mean? I was sold on the wet crinkles.
I've worked with Indian outsourcing firms, and they make up for their lack of understanding of the problem with 14 hour work days and no complaints about how low their pay is. Compare that to workers in the US, who waste their whole day grumbling about their pay and are completely lazy.
Hang on there! Sure, this is why Indian labor is competitive with US labor-- but you make it sound like the US is just a bunch of lazy fatcats. I'm not an economist, but US productivity has been on the rise for a long time. This is the result of many factors, but I doubt that laziness is one of them. 14 hour workdays smacks of desperation. Neither I nor anyone I work with is lazy, but thank God I am not in their shoes!
I suspect that you are right in your first statement, though, that Intel is moving work into India because the talent is there. And if what others say is correct-- that the cost of researchers pales in comparison to the cost of the facilities-- I suspect that they're going to look for intellectual capital where they can find it. Why not India? I wouldn't be surprised if Intel had R&D facilities all over the world. Follow the talent.
Do you think that proprietary software development is different? There are large projects and small ones, just like in OSS, and many times, there's a lead programmer who is indispensible. I'm sure there are a number of hackers out there whose absence would break a company.
Besides, it's not like my fileserver is going to spontaneously combust if the guy who wrote Samba bit the dust. If anything, the argument is stronger for OSS. If the lead programmer disappears and a company goes out of business, what happens to the code? In OSS, if it is important enough, somebody else will pick it up. If it is important enough from a business perspective, you hire someone to maintain it.
"Sunny Oh" is a distant cousin of "Sunny D". It's sort of like fried fake OJ.
Ii was under the impression that all of the information on the card is taken together as a unique identifier: CC #, name, issuer, CVC, and expiry date. If that is indeed the case, there are a lot of possible combinations. So even if I use all of the available CC #'s, there's still my name on the card and all of the other info, so it should never conflict (or it is unlikely to, anyway). Good question, though. I'm curious to see if my guess is correct.
Ah. I see the logic in Big Brother now.
1. Spaceward Ho!
2. Exile series
3. Maelstrom
4. Escape Velocity series
5. and the "new" one, Alpha Centauri.
I've been getting into Neverwinter Nights lately, but that required "bitching out" my ancient Mac with slightly less ancient hardware. 3D games just don't feel so snuggly to me, so this is not a comfort game.
Even better-- MBNA has a service attached to its credit card accounts called "ShopSafe". This allows you to generate a unique CC number for each purchase you make, set a maximum withdrawal amount, and set an expiration date for use. This way, if an employee of some vendor steals your number, he's out of luck. It won't work.
I mention this in connection to bill payments (pull payments, in your terminology) because you can also create something like an "open purchase order"-- that is, a vendor can withdraw from a card (which is a uniquely generated number) once a month up to a certain amount. I use it, e.g., to pay Netflix bills, and so on. Unfortunately you still have to trust the CC company-- but you have to trust someone, somewhere. I've been using ShopSafe for about 5 years, and I'm quite happy with it.
Hey, did you notice? You were drooling. Stop.
Because the vast majority of those people producing works are raking it in, right? I work for a publishing company, and I can tell you man, that it ain't so. There really are fat cats out there. The people who run the publishing companies are absolutely filthy rich. Authors and musicians regularly get stiffed, mostly because they sign away all their rights-- those are the only terms that most publishers will accept.
On the other hand, every time he writes something like this, he gets his way, because he motivates his user base to help him out. What you're missing is that the OpenBSD devs have been privately trying to get this information for years. When do you get pissed? If Theo publicly flaming Intel motivates 1000 people to write in to Intel, and then Intel finally caves to pressure, I say that's a job well done.
I personally couldn't give a shit about how he sounds. He's a part of a group of people who write a fantastic operating system. The software speaks for itself.
I think you can draw the line when a bug in the blob can result in an attacker exploiting the system.
That's a legitmate gripe, but I think Theo's main concern here is that the BSDs can't even freely distribute the blob-- a blob which only works with one piece of hardware, and which does not reveal any trade secrets (since it's in binary form). Yet these very same vendors go to OSS conferences and preach about their "openness". That's when it becomes apparent that their real goal is getting cheap, if not free, labor. Intel's presentation slides that Theo mentions in his email to misc@ all but come out and say this.
I wish Tesco plenty of success in their attempt to undercut software in this fashion. If they can use their brand-name to get people to realize that software needn't be so expensive (and moreover to realize that alternatives are viable), this is a net positive.
Oh, no, Microsoft's prices are totally justified. Have you ever seen how mind-bogglingly fucked-up Active Directory is? It takes legions of programmers to write software that bad. That there's some expensive shit.
I'm not sure if the DVD-screenshot problem is because Apple wants to prevent you from taking them. Apple's DVD player renders the image differently than most apps, sending the video stream directly to the video card, which then overlays the image in the rectangle defined by the player window. I was under the impression that this was so that DVD Player could take advantage of specific features of the video card, like MPEG acceleration.
Anyway, you can work around this easily. Download VLC. Take screenshots to your heart's content. It does not use the same compositing method.
Great post. Parents tend to forget that two minds are better than one, and if you teach children to rely on their own judgement, with your help they'll be better suited to deal with any problems that pop up in life. They'll be on their own at some point, regardless. Why not give them a head start?
Before you do the grammar-nazi thing, you should look the word up yourself.
/ntræktbl/
intractable
-adjective
1. not easily controlled or directed; not docile or manageable; stubborn; obstinate: an intractable disposition.
2. (of things) hard to shape or work with: an intractable metal.
3. hard to treat, relieve, or cure: the intractable pain in his leg.
-noun
4. an intractable person.
In the context of computer science it means "computationally difficult", sometimes to the point where it is not feasible to solve with a computer-- but not impossible.
1st point: election officials should keep the voting record. This way they can compare the printout with the vote recorded in the database in the event of a recount. We want to allow for the possibility of recounts, right?
2nd point: if voting machines can't be trusted to keep accurate records, we shouldn't be using them. IMHO, considering that the financial sector has been using computers for nearly 40 years with a relatively high degree of accuracy makes me believe that the problem of accurate voting machines, while intractable, is not impossible. Do I need to point out that we have two robots on Mars at the moment?
I suppose you think that birth certificates are a flawed concept, too. After all, people make mistakes. They couldn't possibly be useful, right?
As a friend of mine in Germany once discovered, "the Internet is closed on weekends." Or so said the guy running the computer lab. Yeah, clueless.
Wrong Wagner.
I don't think it can only work one way. If art and literature is important because it can convey powerful messages then it is only logical that it convey powerful negative messages.
Precisely, and this is why I think we should rid finally ourselves of Wagner, whose #1 fan was, after all, Adolf Hitler.
(Godwin's Law, yada yada. Can we move on now?)
Good thing there wasn't a trigger happy air marshall there! If only he had some water to put out the... oh, wait. If I were this guy I'd be thankful to be alive.
It's been made clear throughout the last three decades that people who should know better don't change the default password. Routers, firewalls have had this problem. Various incarnations of Unix have had this problem. VMS had this problem! Yes, people should change the default password, but in the interest of security, we should make them do it on first boot. OpenBSD makes you set up a complex root password after install.
People don't wear seatbelts, either, which is why we have such seemingly inane things like seatbelt laws. This is clearly a test for rationality. Because apparently dying isn't bad enough but being punished is. People are stupid.
Gentoo is a step up from rolling your own distro. You learn a hell of a lot while you do it, and in general, Gentoo is not easy to install or configure. Granted, the install process has come a long way, but IMHO, if you're going to use one of the easier methods, why are you using Gentoo in the first place? The whole point is control. Sorry, you just need to know what you're doing.
The upside to the steep learning curve is that the Gentoo community discussion boards are outstanding. Having come from the BSD world (and subsequently gone back-- more on that later), this was a breath of fresh air (as compared to, say, OpenBSD-misc). There's no "RTFManpages, shithead!" and so forth. Not that you're not going to get called out if you're trying to get someone else to do the thinking for you, but there's definitely a lot of hand-holding.
The reason why I gave up on Gentoo really wasn't Gentoo-specific. I just got tired of the general broken-ness of software in the Linux world. The Gentoo ports system is good, but not that good. Maybe my experience was worsened by the fact that I was running on the PPC arch, but I found that I had to run many unstable packages just to have a desktop system. I moved back to BSD. I may not have the bleeding-edge applications anymore, but I rarely find an application in OpenBSD ports and packages that doesn't work. That's good enough for me. And finding documentation on BSD for the system or apps is a piece of cake (which is why the community is so hostile when you don't bother looking before asking).