>>Does this mean I can play real audio/real >>video files without realone?
No. SMIL is a language for describing how different media elements relate. It looks kind of like this:
(CAVEAT: I haven't used SMIL since we played around with it doing webcasting in 1999; it may have changed since then)
It defines spatial and temporal relations between multimedia elements. The media elements themselves, like the Real Audio file you mentioned, still need to have a player that can play them.
it's a simple "include our language with your OS" which makes no sense. Java isn't magical or anything, it's a langauge and compiler
Actually, this ruling has nothing to do with any compiler or language, but rather a virtual machine which is (at least nominally) language-independent (and more-than-nominally language agnostic). The Java VM is a program that interprets.class bytecode files and produces an execution environment from them.
Nothing is forcing anybody to distribute a compiler or JDK with Windows, and MS is more than welcome to develop their own bytecode compiler that uses Java or any other language they want (not bloody likely to, though)
are we going to have Fortran, Forth, Lisp and Logo ship with it too?
Man, wouldn't that be awesome? As it is, the only language that comes with a Windows/Office bundle is VBA (neat for what it does, I suppose, but a bad first language for a hobbyist).
Could someone please tell me what's so friggin' "hard to use" about a distro like RedHat or Mandrake? Is it *that* hard to click on "have Disk Druid automatically partition for you"? Is it *that* hard to click on "automatically configure monitor"? Is it *that* hard to click on a big G-shaped foot rather than a green button labeled "start"? Honestly the only complaint I've had with the user-obsequious distros is trying to get a software modem to work.
Honestly, I'm getting a little tired of this old saw. Unless you've got some seriously obscure hardware or a seriously obsolete distro, I just don't see what all the "difficulty" is.
In case anyone is actually curious, US Patent #1 was issued to Samuel Hopkins in 1790 for a new apparatus and process to make potash.
#2 was something about candles, and #3 was a flour mill
The patent was signed by George Washington himself (government was much smaller back then; that same year, Washington and Hamilton personally reviewed the bids for the first ever Federal construction project, a lighthouse near Norfolk, VA).
Has anyone else had similar problems to this and how did you solve them and what recommendation can you give me in order to solve the problems we are faced?
Yes, that story is disturbingly familiar. I've contracted with several small companies to write resource management software (even the slickest salesman can't convince the owner of a 60-employee company that she needs a million-dollar ERM package).
After a few successes and a few disasters I've learned that you simply cannot automate knowledge that employees are unable to articulate in the first place.
IMO there's only one decent way out, which is what I've learned to do: write up a list of every single decision you need made by the departments. Give that list to the relevant PHB for your project and say, "Computers only know exactly what we tell them. If you want the computers to be able to manage your resources, department X needs to decide what processes it uses, as I outline here."
You might get handed your hat, but it's a much cleaner end than watching a project drag on weeks past its deadline and drown in a sea of indecision.
Well, the fact that the MLB strike zone has been creeping steadily outwards and downwards for the past decade or so is a long-standing rant of mine that I won't subject/. to.
But I think there's an instructive example in a sport I participate in, fencing. A few years ago, they (the US Fencing Association) tried to add accelerometers to the sabers because there was a feeling that judges were calling whipover-vs.-remise too subjectively. The rule said a saber needed to be accelerating at X cm/s^2 to be a valid touch, and this was fairly easy to measure with a mercury switch in the pommel (though getting those switches to work reliably was another story...)
Problem was, it really changed how the sport was played. It turns out judges had been calling hits that were moving far too slowly for years, and whole styles of fencing were no longer viable (particularly point-in-line wrist stops, which I tend to use). And, just like way back when they added the electric box and sensors, it made the whole thing a little bit less "flashy"; there was no more trying to impress the judge. It gained some standardization but lost a lot of finesse. The fencers didn't like it, the judges didn't like it, and after about a year they got rid of them.
Umps strike me as being in a somewhat similar situation: they have to make irrevocable decisions about events that happen 6 feet away at hundreds of miles per hour. Nobody likes all their calls, and a certain part of the game comes to be playing "to the judge", as it were. And that becomes part of your strategy, part of what the game is; it makes it a little richer and more interesting, even if you occasionally lose from an obviously wrong call.
Anyways, just an old fencer's advice: don't take away the subjective aspects of the game. They're sometimes some of the best parts.
as I understand it, Linus created the GPL to get Linux out there
Richard Stallman created the GPL in the late 1980's after Gosling forked EMACS and made his version proprietary. Linus didn't start working on his Minix workalike until several years later.
However, by making the linux kernal open source, Linus does not really retain any rights either. Essentially the Linux Kernel is really not owned by anyone individual or group.
Mr. Torvalds retains ownership and copyright of the code he wrote (check the AUTHORS file; in addition, several files contain "copyright [whatever year] Linus Torvalds"). To my knowledge, the other Linux programmers all retained copyright to their code as well. The fact that they have adopted a particular distribution license scheme does not change this fact.
For example, you could not take part of the Linux kernel and publish it claiming you wrote it (for that matter, you can't even do that with BSD). And, if you decide to fork the kernel and start making your own changes, you can't call it Linux (which is a trademark of Linus Torvalds).
architect's speech means almost nothing but is written in such a way that the vast majority of people who see the movie will not be able to decipher its meaning (or the lack thereof)
I agree with you there. After Neo's first question and the architect's first rant, Neo says, "You didn't answer my question" (which, if I follow the architect's speech right, he didn't: Neo asked "Why am I here?" and the architect instead talked about what Neo is). The architect even admits "No, I didn't."
Personally I think Trinity is an agent and the outside world is another Matrix, but we'll just have to wait and see.
If a student copies Shakespeare, and claims it as their own original work, it is plaigerism, and by tradition, they will get a failure on whatever assignment they plagierized on. Here, the public domain appears at first glance to be open to legal plagiarism.
That's an academic setting, where instructors have every right to enforce plagiarism rules.
But by today's copyright standards, every single play Shakespeare (or de Vere, or Bacon, or whoever) ever wrote would be an infringing work (playz?). He ripped off, sometimes verbatim, every single author he could get his hands on. And he did it brilliantly, producing some of the best literature in human history.
So, yes, the public domain is completely open to "piracy", and this is a Good Thing.
This means that the cost of creating a work must be less than the cost of extracting a pirate master. In the days of $100-million-plus blockbuster films, that ain't gonna happen.
To defeat this argument, refute my assumption that copyright owners and pirates incur comparable costs of distribution.
Marginal. Marginal. Marginal cost is defined as the amount that total cost goes up by producing one more unit. So in fact, a large studio would have significantly lower marginal costs than a copyright infringer, since your average war3z d00d doesn't have access to massive CD/DVD presses but has to burn them one at a time.
And, unfortunately, suckage is not a zero-sum system.
Brill (yeah, I know, just bear with me) had a neat idea about conglomerate corporations. He was dealing specifically with media but it seems to apply to telco, too. He called it "antergy".
Generally whenever you get a company as large as Verizon, they talk about "synergy", meaning that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. They believe in the second law of suckodynamics, which states that delta suck ~ 1 / delta size.
Brill, OTOH, has pointed to several examples of antergy, where the whole is less than the sum of its parts (for example, ABC news refuses to run bad stories about Disney, but will cover Britney Spears' every move). This seems to be the alternate second law of suckodynamics, delta suck ~ delta size (there's an even more pessimistic version, which is simply that for any epsilon, delta suck >= 0).
Verizon in particular, I think, is a living monument to antergy, and a shining testament to the fact that Bell got broken up the wrong way. Rather than making several regional monopolies, what we need is publicly owned infrastructure and completely open competition for any companies that want to supply service on that infrastructure.
IANAA, but it sounds like maybe that's what the Aussies need too
DeCSS is a tool, just like a hammer, or an alligator.
More to the point (AFAIC), it's an expression of an algorithm. It's simply a description of a mathematical process.
Come to think of it, the *source* to DeCSS is not really a tool at all. You can't use the source to watch DVDs. I could maybe see justification for classifying DeCSS binaries like lockpicks and slimjims, but the source is more like the description of how to make a lockpick.
No, C# to F# is a perfect fourth ascending. A perfect fourth from F# is B. So maybe their next language will be B (which, as I understand, was a bad enough language that even C seemed like a good alternative).
Then again, maybe all these fourths mean that they want us to use the Forth implementation for the CLR, DeltaForth.NET.
Now, as silly as the particulars of the.NET CLR may be, the idea of a truly language-neutral runtime is something I've been hoping for for a long time, and I'm really glad to see languages I enjoy like Forth and ML getting in on it. Now, if they would just make a Lisp.NET...
F# and g form a dissonance, called a minor second. It happens though that I like g-f#, a major seventh. But maybe a listen to too much contemporary music.
Not to re-hash (heh heh) the temperament thread above, but I've always thought the major seventh between the mediant and subdominant was a lot more pleasing than the major seventh between the leading tone and tonic; I think IV - III is about a comma smaller than I -- VII. So maybe F# and G only sound good in D.
Now the C# scale has 7 sharps, but it's the same as a Db (D flat) which only has 5 flats.
GAH!!! Even temperment has ruined modern musical ears. Listen to an old organ, or a good string quartet, and you'll definitely hear the difference between C# and Db.
The musical sign for double sharp looks a bit like a Greek "chi" but I can't seem to find a unicode glyph for it.
And while I love to make fun of C#, I think that "sharp" as a metaphor for improvement is no more silly than "++" as a metaphor for improvement (especially since "C++" would seem to mean "add some stuff to C without changing the actual result you get").
Slashdot Mirror
The tags appeared when I previewed... grrr...
SMIL looks like this, I meant to say:
<par>
<img src="foo.gif">
<seq>
<video src="bar.ram">
<img src="quux.png">
</seq>
</par>
Only imagine lots more attributes specifying duration, position, z-index, alpha, etc...
>>Does this mean I can play real audio/real
>>video files without realone?
No. SMIL is a language for describing how different media elements relate. It looks kind of like this:
(CAVEAT: I haven't used SMIL since we played around with it doing webcasting in 1999; it may have changed since then)
It defines spatial and temporal relations between multimedia elements. The media elements themselves, like the Real Audio file you mentioned, still need to have a player that can play them.
Not really, once you remember that the *printf *scanf families have return values.
Actually, this ruling has nothing to do with any compiler or language, but rather a virtual machine which is (at least nominally) language-independent (and more-than-nominally language agnostic). The Java VM is a program that interprets .class bytecode files and produces an execution environment from them.
Nothing is forcing anybody to distribute a compiler or JDK with Windows, and MS is more than welcome to develop their own bytecode compiler that uses Java or any other language they want (not bloody likely to, though)
Man, wouldn't that be awesome? As it is, the only language that comes with a Windows/Office bundle is VBA (neat for what it does, I suppose, but a bad first language for a hobbyist).
Could someone please tell me what's so friggin' "hard to use" about a distro like RedHat or Mandrake? Is it *that* hard to click on "have Disk Druid automatically partition for you"? Is it *that* hard to click on "automatically configure monitor"? Is it *that* hard to click on a big G-shaped foot rather than a green button labeled "start"? Honestly the only complaint I've had with the user-obsequious distros is trying to get a software modem to work.
Honestly, I'm getting a little tired of this old saw. Unless you've got some seriously obscure hardware or a seriously obsolete distro, I just don't see what all the "difficulty" is.
Congrats, guys. This may have been the most effective troll in the history of /.
In case anyone is actually curious, US Patent #1 was issued to Samuel Hopkins in 1790 for a new apparatus and process to make potash.
#2 was something about candles, and #3 was a flour mill
The patent was signed by George Washington himself (government was much smaller back then; that same year, Washington and Hamilton personally reviewed the bids for the first ever Federal construction project, a lighthouse near Norfolk, VA).
I'm sorry... that phrase just made my brain explode.
Oh yeah, and who cares about this patent, since they never mentioned mounting the laser on a frigging big shark.
Yes, that story is disturbingly familiar. I've contracted with several small companies to write resource management software (even the slickest salesman can't convince the owner of a 60-employee company that she needs a million-dollar ERM package).
After a few successes and a few disasters I've learned that you simply cannot automate knowledge that employees are unable to articulate in the first place.
IMO there's only one decent way out, which is what I've learned to do: write up a list of every single decision you need made by the departments. Give that list to the relevant PHB for your project and say, "Computers only know exactly what we tell them. If you want the computers to be able to manage your resources, department X needs to decide what processes it uses, as I outline here."
You might get handed your hat, but it's a much cleaner end than watching a project drag on weeks past its deadline and drown in a sea of indecision.
Well, the fact that the MLB strike zone has been creeping steadily outwards and downwards for the past decade or so is a long-standing rant of mine that I won't subject /. to.
But I think there's an instructive example in a sport I participate in, fencing. A few years ago, they (the US Fencing Association) tried to add accelerometers to the sabers because there was a feeling that judges were calling whipover-vs.-remise too subjectively. The rule said a saber needed to be accelerating at X cm/s^2 to be a valid touch, and this was fairly easy to measure with a mercury switch in the pommel (though getting those switches to work reliably was another story...)
Problem was, it really changed how the sport was played. It turns out judges had been calling hits that were moving far too slowly for years, and whole styles of fencing were no longer viable (particularly point-in-line wrist stops, which I tend to use). And, just like way back when they added the electric box and sensors, it made the whole thing a little bit less "flashy"; there was no more trying to impress the judge. It gained some standardization but lost a lot of finesse. The fencers didn't like it, the judges didn't like it, and after about a year they got rid of them.
Umps strike me as being in a somewhat similar situation: they have to make irrevocable decisions about events that happen 6 feet away at hundreds of miles per hour. Nobody likes all their calls, and a certain part of the game comes to be playing "to the judge", as it were. And that becomes part of your strategy, part of what the game is; it makes it a little richer and more interesting, even if you occasionally lose from an obviously wrong call.
Anyways, just an old fencer's advice: don't take away the subjective aspects of the game. They're sometimes some of the best parts.
OK, I smell troll, but I'll bite anyways:
Richard Stallman created the GPL in the late 1980's after Gosling forked EMACS and made his version proprietary. Linus didn't start working on his Minix workalike until several years later.
Mr. Torvalds retains ownership and copyright of the code he wrote (check the AUTHORS file; in addition, several files contain "copyright [whatever year] Linus Torvalds"). To my knowledge, the other Linux programmers all retained copyright to their code as well. The fact that they have adopted a particular distribution license scheme does not change this fact.
For example, you could not take part of the Linux kernel and publish it claiming you wrote it (for that matter, you can't even do that with BSD). And, if you decide to fork the kernel and start making your own changes, you can't call it Linux (which is a trademark of Linus Torvalds).
IHBT. IHL. HAND.
I agree with you there. After Neo's first question and the architect's first rant, Neo says, "You didn't answer my question" (which, if I follow the architect's speech right, he didn't: Neo asked "Why am I here?" and the architect instead talked about what Neo is). The architect even admits "No, I didn't."
Personally I think Trinity is an agent and the outside world is another Matrix, but we'll just have to wait and see.
Wow... that must have been a big company.
An exponential series ~ K^x while a geometric one ~ x^K. So 1/(x^2) would be geometric (and it's 2, incidentally, not 3).
Because by this point we'd probably have to execute the Duke Nukem Forever team and that just seems unfortunate...
That's an academic setting, where instructors have every right to enforce plagiarism rules.
But by today's copyright standards, every single play Shakespeare (or de Vere, or Bacon, or whoever) ever wrote would be an infringing work (playz?). He ripped off, sometimes verbatim, every single author he could get his hands on. And he did it brilliantly, producing some of the best literature in human history.
So, yes, the public domain is completely open to "piracy", and this is a Good Thing.
Marginal. Marginal. Marginal cost is defined as the amount that total cost goes up by producing one more unit. So in fact, a large studio would have significantly lower marginal costs than a copyright infringer, since your average war3z d00d doesn't have access to massive CD/DVD presses but has to burn them one at a time.
Marginal.
And, unfortunately, suckage is not a zero-sum system.
Brill (yeah, I know, just bear with me) had a neat idea about conglomerate corporations. He was dealing specifically with media but it seems to apply to telco, too. He called it "antergy".
Generally whenever you get a company as large as Verizon, they talk about "synergy", meaning that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. They believe in the second law of suckodynamics, which states that delta suck ~ 1 / delta size.
Brill, OTOH, has pointed to several examples of antergy, where the whole is less than the sum of its parts (for example, ABC news refuses to run bad stories about Disney, but will cover Britney Spears' every move). This seems to be the alternate second law of suckodynamics, delta suck ~ delta size (there's an even more pessimistic version, which is simply that for any epsilon, delta suck >= 0).
Verizon in particular, I think, is a living monument to antergy, and a shining testament to the fact that Bell got broken up the wrong way. Rather than making several regional monopolies, what we need is publicly owned infrastructure and completely open competition for any companies that want to supply service on that infrastructure.
IANAA, but it sounds like maybe that's what the Aussies need too
I'm sure there's a LISP function for that somewhere
More to the point (AFAIC), it's an expression of an algorithm. It's simply a description of a mathematical process.
Come to think of it, the *source* to DeCSS is not really a tool at all. You can't use the source to watch DVDs. I could maybe see justification for classifying DeCSS binaries like lockpicks and slimjims, but the source is more like the description of how to make a lockpick.
Actually I think you mean GNU/HP/Compaq. HP is just a kernel, you see.
Then again, maybe all these fourths mean that they want us to use the Forth implementation for the CLR, DeltaForth.NET.
Now, as silly as the particulars of the .NET CLR may be, the idea of a truly language-neutral runtime is something I've been hoping for for a long time, and I'm really glad to see languages I enjoy like Forth and ML getting in on it. Now, if they would just make a Lisp.NET...
Not to re-hash (heh heh) the temperament thread above, but I've always thought the major seventh between the mediant and subdominant was a lot more pleasing than the major seventh between the leading tone and tonic; I think IV - III is about a comma smaller than I -- VII. So maybe F# and G only sound good in D.
GAH!!! Even temperment has ruined modern musical ears. Listen to an old organ, or a good string quartet, and you'll definitely hear the difference between C# and Db.
And while I love to make fun of C#, I think that "sharp" as a metaphor for improvement is no more silly than "++" as a metaphor for improvement (especially since "C++" would seem to mean "add some stuff to C without changing the actual result you get").