I would be interested in knowing if anyone who has seen the movie actually agrees that it is worth seeing. While I don't like to avoid seeing a flick just because of someone's bad review, when I go onto it's Rotten Tomatoes page and see:
"If you're looking for anything beyond flashy entertainment, Behind Enemy Lines feels out of whack from the start."
-- Stephanie Zacharek, SALON.COM
"The exhausting obsession with gizmos and gotchas only accentuates a baffling disinterest in the story's emotional crux."
-- Jessica Winter, VILLAGE VOICE
"The Bosnian War becomes a video game, Gene Hackman turns into a pseudo-John Wayne, and Owen Wilson and Vladimir Mashkov impersonate The Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote."
-- Michael Wilmington, CHICAGO TRIBUNE
"Pro forma stuff, so much so that you start to wonder why no fetching femme resistance fighter materializes to help the Americans on the ground."
-- Kenneth Turan, LOS ANGELES TIMES
"An implausible military technology adventure that takes about 10 minutes to get started, then climaxes for an hour-and-a-half."
-- Paul Tatara, CNN
as the top five reviews I have to wonder. Couple that with the fact that Film Threat (with whom I agree about 90% of the time) gave it one star, and the sleaziness factor from knowing they moved the release date up to cash in on the September 11th bombing and I think I will be taking this review with more than a grain of salt:)
Film is not short lived. Check out the pictures at
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/
Those images were not taken on film! Please read the site. Film begins getting discolored after a decade or so and must be stored in a room with excellent climate control to prevent degradation; Universal stores all it's negatives in a stone vault carved into Mount Weather, and they still need massive restoration when brought out.
The others who replied already dealt with your other points.
I get really disapointed when people critique the divx codac saying it looks crapy but that is probably because you have been download lowres interlaced, 550b/s crap off of p2p networks or other sorces that don't have any level of quality contorl
I typically watch 700MB-1GB DIVX files, as that is about what is practical for me to store, but I have also played with short high-bitrate clips. I can honestly say that they look terrible. I think DIVX is a good technology, and yes it does have potential, but it is completely unsuitable for storing movies; it can't handle motion and you end up with too many compression artifacts. MPEG-4 will probably become a good alternative for streaming video (why the hell does anyone still use the Real and Windows Media formats?), and is great for producing very small files, but Sorenson still has the best codec when you need very clean video without artifacts, although even it doesn't do a very elegant job hadlind motion; many companies still use the original QuickTime video codec for that.
DVDs, which, while they don't suffer from hard-drive style crashes, still get scratches and also deteriorate over time
A scratch does not damage the information on a piece of optical media, only the clear plastic that is protcting the information; that is why the plastic is there, you can get a scratch kit to fix it. If you need to record something for extremely long term archival, you can get silver, gold, or platinum CDs. Most commercial DVDs are burned on silver or gold, so unlike your VHSs, they should be usable many generations from now.
When he says hard drives are not a permanent medium he is referring more to the fact that they have moving parts and are prone to data corruption than their archival value. Overall, I think we should be glad we are moving from extremely short lived products, i.e. magnetic tape, and short lived products, i.e. film, to store our multimedia art on.
This product is, IMO, not something worth buying, but it is a step in the direction of a cool new concept for a set-top box that archives nearly all your media in one place. One major problem I see is that DIVX is not a useable technology for archiving your movies in the way that high quality MP3s are. MP3s, along with bigger and cheaper storage, have reached the point where they are the only format 99.5% of people need: a good VBR MP3 (averaging 200-240kbps) sounds extremely close to the uncompressed song, but even an extremely large DIVX looks downright crappy compared to the original, and a good Sorenson 3 encoded movie would be huge, require processing power in excess of what a cheap set-top box would use to decode, still have some quality problems in high-motion scenes, and will not receive the kind of adoption as MP3 due licensing costs.
There is also less need to keep all your 1.5-3 hour movies in one device that can play them all without switching media as there is for your 2-15 minute songs; I see DIVX more as the result of the fact that most computers don't have DVD burners.
It is also noteworthy that when Apple realized they had to use a fan in the G4 tower, they did a very good job of engineering an especially efficient and quiet cooling system. It is not possible for me to hear the fan on my G4 tower, sitting approx. 6 inches from my left foot, over the noise from the god only knows how many fans in my roommate's HP, sitting about 20 feet away.
If you read the article before you post, you will notice that Google doesn't plan to make the user opinions a large factor in their relevance equation, if it applies to individual sites at all:
Rather than using the votes to tinker with the specific rankings of particular pages or sites, he said, the feature would most likely be used to bolster the relevance of overall results.
"It will most likely have more of an aggregate impact," Krane said. "We have indexed more than 1.6 billion Web pages, so it is extremely inefficient to go after individual pages."
Also remember that this is only one of many of Google's tools to improve relevance. You can already do your part to stop spammers by reporting them to search-quality@google.com.
The new system is more geared toward lowereing the relevance of just plain low-quality sites; you can already report outright spamming, cloaking, and other abuse to search-quality@google.com.
...ruled that consumers can resell bundled software, no matter what the EULA, or End User License Agreement, stipulates.
So would this ruling also protect those people that want to sell their bundled copies of Windows or donate them to charity? If so, this could be an even more significant ruling than it appears, as MS's business strategy relies on those copies being worthless to get people to buy more licenses or buy newer versions than they want.
The settlement wasn't just written by a prosecutor and accepted by MS, it was the result of much negotiation. I agree that there is much ignorance about the origin of the idea, however, it is even inferred in the story.
At the same time, the fact that it was the idea of a prosecutor doesn't make it a logical remedy, which is the real issue here. The attorney's fees are irrelevant to MS if they can get the low settlement cost; an important issue the CA lawyers raise is that the $10 figure is based on a very conservative estimate of how much MS has overcharged consumers. As I am sure you read he alleges overcharges in CA to be $3-5 billion.
I personally want my kids to understand Word and Excell and possibly how to use Photoshop and applications like that for when they go to work. I would want linux to be an afterthought, as it has never occured to me to run it as a core os.
Yes, but the school should teach kids how to use Office on Windows and teach them how to use Photoshop on Macs. They should also be offering programming classes earlier, and be teaching them on Linux by the high school level, allowing them to use $300 built-from-scratch PCs and saving hundreds by not having to buy Windows licenses. Mac and Windows platforms should be available at all levels, Linux machines in high school and above, along with basic classes in using them. They should be running school servers on Linux at all levels.
The real issue (if you read the article) is whether you think a charitable donation is an acceptable remedy for an antitrust case.
It seems to me the quote simply means that if MS had not standardized the PC desktop into the typical Dos/Win setup, there would have been no reason for us weirdo geeks to so zealously pursue an alternative, ie Linux.
That is how we interpret it, being rational and fairly knowledgeable people, but Gates was saying that he influenced the creation of the IBM PC as a standard, open architecture and that is why we have open source. I don't see how you can say that, "Anyway, I don't thinkg anyone tried to make the point that Open Source means everything should be standardized." when Gates said,
"Let me start out, really the reason that you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines, and the BIOS of that should be open to everybody to use, and all the extensibility should be there."
True, but I thought it was relevant since people were complaining about how bad the FireWire support in Linux distros was after the iPod came out. It is also noteworthy that Darwin is not Apple's only open source software, they have QuickTime streaming server for instance, and OpenPlay would do wonders for cross-platform gaming if anyone would implement it;)
I think we are all tired of hearing this. How many times must we set the story straight:
"Apple worked with Xerox openly to bring their developments to a mass audience. That's what Steve portrayed Apple as being good at."
"Steve Jobs made the case to Xerox PARC execs directly that they had great technology but that Apple knew how to make it affordable enough to change the world. This was very open. In the end, Xerox got a large block of Apple stock for sharing the technology. That's not stealing outright.
Apple didn't get any stock from Microsoft. Nor was Apple dealt with openly in this area by Microsoft."
There is a big difference between something not being your idea and stealing it; this was perhaps the most glaring example of Microsoft ethics. You also have to look at which of those three companies implemented it best.
What he said was that if it hadn't been for M$ standardizing computing with DOS, there wouldn't be a market for Open Source now.
Open source doesn't require that everything be standard as in the same, it only requires that everything be open; look at how many platforms open source OSes run on.
$5000 for an Apple 2?... Apple is enforcing a closed source policy which improves the quality of the machines, but hampers development.
The Apple II was an open machine. Sorry if you didn't like the software, it was the first mass-adopted personal computer, and did give rise to some of the killer apps that put the computer in offices and homes, and had the first games written in BASIC.
It was that expansion which resulted in so many educated, trained, computer users that people started being able to program their own systems. If we still had to use machine language and punch cards, there wouldn't be open source.
Woz was the person that most directly created the human-usable computer; Gates did some work in it but all the original Apple IIs used Woz's code, including his completely original implementation of BASIC.
Now I must say that I agree with the more balanced viewpoint the article puts out, you are just trying to spin it to make it look like Gates invented things he didn't. I'm afraid it is all to common now for everyone to assume that Gates must have invented the computer and everything on it.
This argument is based on the fact that the IBM PC is "special". As the author pointed out, there were many open hardware platforms long before the IBM PC; there was nothing innovative about making the IBM PC open as well, it was just the pricing and marketing that made it the "standard".
Mac OS X isn't open source, but Darwin, the OpenBSD-based foundation of X is. This still means that Apple donates all of its low-level code back to the OSS community (Darwin has one of the best FireWire implementations around, just to cite one example), and is, IMO, a great example of how a commercial company and the OSS community can coexist.
But the patent also covers "control elements" that are operated over a period of time, such as scroll arrows, which do have sounds in many products. But in any event I'm sure if you cared to read all the patents (of any company, for that matter) you'd find many more of this kind.
This post did a good job of answering the root question of why they have a patent they don't intend to enforce. Go look through their 1500-odd patents; you will see many interesting ideas that they tend to protect, but also many of the kind of patents that poster was describing. No ones seems to worried about getting sued for using a Graphical user interface having sound effects for operating control elements and dragging objects;)
Not only does it cost them next to nothing to make $900 mil of software, they said it had a retail value of 900 mil, but they are giving it to educational institutions which would otherwise have received an educational discount. So even the actual value of the software is only about $400 mil.
Misinformation on this matter has caused many open-source advocates to incorrectly accuse Apple of holding back Open Web technologies.
Let's hope that cooler heads prevail and that fear-debunking articles such as this one are more widely read."
It is amazing how worked up everyone got in November when they learned that a company that supports web standards and has a public policy of royalty-free licensing for them (as of October) had responded in June to a call to disclose all patents to the PNG group that they should be aware of for infringement issues in the future.
Anyone else notice how many of the IMDB's 100 Worst Films have been on MST3K? Of course many of them are probably there because MST3K has gotten the required 20 people to watch them. Manos: the Hands of Fate is #2;)
That was indeed a great concept in 1997
on
Concept PC 2001
·
· Score: 1
"The system box is tethered to the display unit by a cable up to 200ft long. The Box contains the HD, processor, display card, etc. The flat panel display contains the CD/DVD drive, camera and a speaker."
This is exactly the same concept Apple implemented in the 20th Anniversary Mac in 1997, and they actually sold the thing! It had a box on the floor for the power supply and subwoofer to complement its Bose sound system (where is the audio on this box?), and it thethered to a flat monitor that integrated the motherboard, CD drive, and speakers. The concept of placing the power supply outside the enclosure to save space and increase cooling efficeincy was used again in the Cube. The wireless keyboard and mouse are also very old news; if you wanted them you would have bought them months ago.
"Will we see these new PC's on shelves soon? Not likely"
Yes, the fact that HP is far too safe/non-innovative (they weren't always that way, either) a company to actually introduce it makes this even more of a non-event.
But I suppose we are resigned to see another box shop make some half-assed copy of an Apple idea and be lauded by the technologically-illiterate press once again.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you're looking for anything beyond flashy entertainment, Behind Enemy Lines feels out of whack from the start."
-- Stephanie Zacharek, SALON.COM
"The exhausting obsession with gizmos and gotchas only accentuates a baffling disinterest in the story's emotional crux."
-- Jessica Winter, VILLAGE VOICE
"The Bosnian War becomes a video game, Gene Hackman turns into a pseudo-John Wayne, and Owen Wilson and Vladimir Mashkov impersonate The Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote."
-- Michael Wilmington, CHICAGO TRIBUNE
"Pro forma stuff, so much so that you start to wonder why no fetching femme resistance fighter materializes to help the Americans on the ground."
-- Kenneth Turan, LOS ANGELES TIMES
"An implausible military technology adventure that takes about 10 minutes to get started, then climaxes for an hour-and-a-half."
-- Paul Tatara, CNN
as the top five reviews I have to wonder. Couple that with the fact that Film Threat (with whom I agree about 90% of the time) gave it one star, and the sleaziness factor from knowing they moved the release date up to cash in on the September 11th bombing and I think I will be taking this review with more than a grain of salt :)
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/
Those images were not taken on film! Please read the site. Film begins getting discolored after a decade or so and must be stored in a room with excellent climate control to prevent degradation; Universal stores all it's negatives in a stone vault carved into Mount Weather, and they still need massive restoration when brought out.
The others who replied already dealt with your other points.
I typically watch 700MB-1GB DIVX files, as that is about what is practical for me to store, but I have also played with short high-bitrate clips. I can honestly say that they look terrible. I think DIVX is a good technology, and yes it does have potential, but it is completely unsuitable for storing movies; it can't handle motion and you end up with too many compression artifacts. MPEG-4 will probably become a good alternative for streaming video (why the hell does anyone still use the Real and Windows Media formats?), and is great for producing very small files, but Sorenson still has the best codec when you need very clean video without artifacts, although even it doesn't do a very elegant job hadlind motion; many companies still use the original QuickTime video codec for that.
A scratch does not damage the information on a piece of optical media, only the clear plastic that is protcting the information; that is why the plastic is there, you can get a scratch kit to fix it. If you need to record something for extremely long term archival, you can get silver, gold, or platinum CDs. Most commercial DVDs are burned on silver or gold, so unlike your VHSs, they should be usable many generations from now.
When he says hard drives are not a permanent medium he is referring more to the fact that they have moving parts and are prone to data corruption than their archival value. Overall, I think we should be glad we are moving from extremely short lived products, i.e. magnetic tape, and short lived products, i.e. film, to store our multimedia art on.
There is also less need to keep all your 1.5-3 hour movies in one device that can play them all without switching media as there is for your 2-15 minute songs; I see DIVX more as the result of the fact that most computers don't have DVD burners.
It is also noteworthy that when Apple realized they had to use a fan in the G4 tower, they did a very good job of engineering an especially efficient and quiet cooling system. It is not possible for me to hear the fan on my G4 tower, sitting approx. 6 inches from my left foot, over the noise from the god only knows how many fans in my roommate's HP, sitting about 20 feet away.
Rather than using the votes to tinker with the specific rankings of particular pages or sites, he said, the feature would most likely be used to bolster the relevance of overall results.
"It will most likely have more of an aggregate impact," Krane said. "We have indexed more than 1.6 billion Web pages, so it is extremely inefficient to go after individual pages."
Also remember that this is only one of many of Google's tools to improve relevance. You can already do your part to stop spammers by reporting them to search-quality@google.com.
The new system is more geared toward lowereing the relevance of just plain low-quality sites; you can already report outright spamming, cloaking, and other abuse to search-quality@google.com.
So would this ruling also protect those people that want to sell their bundled copies of Windows or donate them to charity? If so, this could be an even more significant ruling than it appears, as MS's business strategy relies on those copies being worthless to get people to buy more licenses or buy newer versions than they want.
The hardware was 128-bit capable for several months before the software came out, so it may still work. If not, just hold out for an 802.11g card ;)
At the same time, the fact that it was the idea of a prosecutor doesn't make it a logical remedy, which is the real issue here. The attorney's fees are irrelevant to MS if they can get the low settlement cost; an important issue the CA lawyers raise is that the $10 figure is based on a very conservative estimate of how much MS has overcharged consumers. As I am sure you read he alleges overcharges in CA to be $3-5 billion.
Yes, but the school should teach kids how to use Office on Windows and teach them how to use Photoshop on Macs. They should also be offering programming classes earlier, and be teaching them on Linux by the high school level, allowing them to use $300 built-from-scratch PCs and saving hundreds by not having to buy Windows licenses. Mac and Windows platforms should be available at all levels, Linux machines in high school and above, along with basic classes in using them. They should be running school servers on Linux at all levels.
The real issue (if you read the article) is whether you think a charitable donation is an acceptable remedy for an antitrust case.
That is how we interpret it, being rational and fairly knowledgeable people, but Gates was saying that he influenced the creation of the IBM PC as a standard, open architecture and that is why we have open source. I don't see how you can say that, "Anyway, I don't thinkg anyone tried to make the point that Open Source means everything should be standardized." when Gates said,
"Let me start out, really the reason that you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines, and the BIOS of that should be open to everybody to use, and all the extensibility should be there."
True, but I thought it was relevant since people were complaining about how bad the FireWire support in Linux distros was after the iPod came out. It is also noteworthy that Darwin is not Apple's only open source software, they have QuickTime streaming server for instance, and OpenPlay would do wonders for cross-platform gaming if anyone would implement it ;)
Definitely agree on those points.
I think we are all tired of hearing this. How many times must we set the story straight:
"Apple worked with Xerox openly to bring their developments to a mass audience. That's what Steve portrayed Apple as being good at."
"Steve Jobs made the case to Xerox PARC execs directly that they had great technology but that Apple knew how to make it affordable enough to change the world. This was very open. In the end, Xerox got a large block of Apple stock for sharing the technology. That's not stealing outright.
Apple didn't get any stock from Microsoft. Nor was Apple dealt with openly in this area by Microsoft."
There is a big difference between something not being your idea and stealing it; this was perhaps the most glaring example of Microsoft ethics. You also have to look at which of those three companies implemented it best.
Open source doesn't require that everything be standard as in the same, it only requires that everything be open; look at how many platforms open source OSes run on.
$5000 for an Apple 2? ... Apple is enforcing a closed source policy which improves the quality of the machines, but hampers development.
The Apple II was an open machine. Sorry if you didn't like the software, it was the first mass-adopted personal computer, and did give rise to some of the killer apps that put the computer in offices and homes, and had the first games written in BASIC.
It was that expansion which resulted in so many educated, trained, computer users that people started being able to program their own systems. If we still had to use machine language and punch cards, there wouldn't be open source.
Woz was the person that most directly created the human-usable computer; Gates did some work in it but all the original Apple IIs used Woz's code, including his completely original implementation of BASIC.
Now I must say that I agree with the more balanced viewpoint the article puts out, you are just trying to spin it to make it look like Gates invented things he didn't. I'm afraid it is all to common now for everyone to assume that Gates must have invented the computer and everything on it.
Also take care not to regard anything in Pirates of Silicon Valley as factual.
Mac OS X isn't open source, but Darwin, the OpenBSD-based foundation of X is. This still means that Apple donates all of its low-level code back to the OSS community (Darwin has one of the best FireWire implementations around, just to cite one example), and is, IMO, a great example of how a commercial company and the OSS community can coexist.
But the patent also covers "control elements" that are operated over a period of time, such as scroll arrows, which do have sounds in many products. But in any event I'm sure if you cared to read all the patents (of any company, for that matter) you'd find many more of this kind.
This post did a good job of answering the root question of why they have a patent they don't intend to enforce. Go look through their 1500-odd patents; you will see many interesting ideas that they tend to protect, but also many of the kind of patents that poster was describing. No ones seems to worried about getting sued for using a Graphical user interface having sound effects for operating control elements and dragging objects ;)
Not only does it cost them next to nothing to make $900 mil of software, they said it had a retail value of 900 mil, but they are giving it to educational institutions which would otherwise have received an educational discount. So even the actual value of the software is only about $400 mil.
"Fear Itself
Misinformation on this matter has caused many open-source advocates to incorrectly accuse Apple of holding back Open Web technologies.
Let's hope that cooler heads prevail and that fear-debunking articles such as this one are more widely read."
It is amazing how worked up everyone got in November when they learned that a company that supports web standards and has a public policy of royalty-free licensing for them (as of October) had responded in June to a call to disclose all patents to the PNG group that they should be aware of for infringement issues in the future.
Anyone else notice how many of the IMDB's 100 Worst Films have been on MST3K? Of course many of them are probably there because MST3K has gotten the required 20 people to watch them. Manos: the Hands of Fate is #2 ;)
This is exactly the same concept Apple implemented in the 20th Anniversary Mac in 1997, and they actually sold the thing! It had a box on the floor for the power supply and subwoofer to complement its Bose sound system (where is the audio on this box?), and it thethered to a flat monitor that integrated the motherboard, CD drive, and speakers. The concept of placing the power supply outside the enclosure to save space and increase cooling efficeincy was used again in the Cube. The wireless keyboard and mouse are also very old news; if you wanted them you would have bought them months ago.
"Will we see these new PC's on shelves soon? Not likely"
Yes, the fact that HP is far too safe/non-innovative (they weren't always that way, either) a company to actually introduce it makes this even more of a non-event.
But I suppose we are resigned to see another box shop make some half-assed copy of an Apple idea and be lauded by the technologically-illiterate press once again.