I just finished reading Errand of Vengeance: The Edge of the Sword by Kevin Ryan. He made the unfortunate choice to use many ST:TNG period Klingon attributes that read like speed bumps in a Star Trek novel. You're cruising along and then, bang, "Sho vo kor", speed bump. OK, I'm getting into the book again and, bang, "Kahless", speed bump. Rolling again, gaining speed, bang, "Klingon honor", speed bump. None of these would be out of place at all in a TNG novel and wouldn't cause me problems, but having them in s Star Trek (or Star Trek, The Original Series as Paramount insists on calling it) is a real distraction since they don't belong.
The same thing happened with the lamentable "Star Trek: The Eugenics Wars". Everything was fine with the first book until the pointless addition of many TNG/DS9 characters. Even worse, the author decided that we couldn't possibly differentiate between reality and science fiction and tried to hide the events of the Eugenics Wars in our modern milieu. Ugh.
OK, I'll admit that I don't think Enterprise is very good. I also don't think TNG, DS(, or Voyager were very good either.
That being said, I really like John Billingsley and fell he is the only redeeming feature of Enterprise.
As for the Romulans, I can only assume it will be the Romulans of TNG/DS9/Voyager and not the Romulans of Star Trek. I'm still unsure why it was necessary to swap the virutes of the Romulans and Klingons, but that's just one of the major changes Berman/Pillar have made to the Trek universe.
Interestingly, the vast majority of gem grade diamonds never make it to market. They're warehoused to keep the cost of diamonds high. Otherwise, diamonds would be significantly cheaper than they are. This doesn't even include the tons of industrial grade diamonds that are stored in the former Soviet Union.
So, to answer your question. Are they worth (the price)? No. Does your girlfriend expect one? Probably, due to the massive marketing campaigns that you mentioned.
For more bang for the buck, look into colored gem stones. They are generally priced closer to what they are actually worth and, frankly, look nicer. Of course, the same ethical quandaries may apply.
OK, I'll admit it. I'm not the best grammarian or speller, but has anyone noticed the glaring errors that always show up on geek prepared sites?
Here's a good example from the BMW Chair site:
"Misquitos were terrible in my garage on a hot Texas summer evening but progress prevailed and the whelps diminished over time."
First, it's mosqito, not misqito. And I can only guess he meant "welt" (lump on the body) rather than whelp, which is generally a puppy. Unless his garage was in fact infested with puppies, in which case diminishing whelps might be a good thing.;)
And how progress can prevail over mosquitos is anyones guess.
I have to agree with this "diatribe". Emulating Windows has made Gnome and KDE (more so KDE) worthless in my opinion. If I wanted something that worked like Windows, why wouldn't I just use Windows.
Frankly, the best interface I've ever used was IBM's Workplace Shell for OS/2. It was well designed, had a great feature set, consistent application interfaces (including GUI methods), etc. Applications that were Workplace Shell aware were a joy to work with.
As part of IBM's open source strategy, it would be nice if they gave us the Workplace Shell (which would most likely require SOM/DSOM as well). While they're at it, how about OS/2-style extended attributes for the filesystem? This is somethiing that is sorely lacking in Linux (as well as Windows, and, going forward, OS X since Apple wants to drop resource forks).
I have to agree. Not showing the rating of the control in the charts makes the chart pointless. It would be interesting to see how the user ratings for the control line up against the codecs.
It's possible that the data from the control showed that the listener preference had little to do with how the rated the codec reproduced the original.
Lugaru has been making Epsilon for a long time, though their supported platforms have changed from time to time. Currently, they sell it for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, DOS, and OS/2.
It's very Emacs-like and highly configurable. On Windows, it has some nice integration features and I've used it since about '92 when writing code on Windows.
One of the features is that it supports Brief-style keyboard bindings, in addition to the default Emacs bindings.
You get binaries for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OS/2 & DOS for one price.
You can get more info and a demo at Lugaru's website.
So his argument appears to be, "Gosh, I was providing a chip that allowed people to use pirated software but I had no idea that was illegal."
Uh-huh. We see how far that defense got him. About as valid as a person driving a 2002 Chevy blazer that a guy on the street sold them for $200 and claiming they had no idea it might be stolen.
You'll note that I never said Be was doing well, just that they were in good shape. Had they continued their plan for selling their proprietary hardware/software to the content creators, they would have had a niche captive audience the same way Apple does.
Be produced some very interesting OS features, but what did it buy them in the face of the MSFT juggernaut? Nothing. Had they switched CPU architectures but, and this is the key, still built it themselves and that was the only way to run BeOS, I don't think they would have imploded as rapidly as they did. They couldn't even give BeOS away free to manufacturers for a couple of good reasons. Those manufacturers were/are/will be under significant contractual obligations from MSFT that make it economically impractical to provide a competing OS. Secondly, when your average Joe walks into the store, he's going to want a Windows machine (unfortunate as that is) because that's what his friends have and his friends have offered free (pirated) software. If this weren't the case, why didn't people flock to OS/2 when it was available as an option? It was arguably better than Windows, yet Joe Sixpack had no interest in it.
It all boils down to one thing: when you play in the Intel world you're playing in Microsoft's sandbox and they are more than willing to play the bully. I don't see that changing.
If Apple ever did switch CPUs (I don't see this happening with the investment all their big name software vendors have in AltiVec code), it would be on their own machines. You'd still have to buy an Apple to run OS X. I own a couple of nice G4s and have no complaints about the price or performance.
There is a concrete example that exists to show why it would be a terrible mistake for Apple to move to Intel hardware in general, rather than Apple built Intel hardware --- Be. When Be was concentrating on building hardware (does anyone remember the BeBox) and software to match, they were in good shape. It was only when they dropped their PowerPC hardware and moved to generic Intel that they began to have problems. Distribution channels are locked up by Microsoft licensing (this won't change), they had to deal with everyone's $10 NICs and video cards, etc.
Frankly, anyone who has actually seen a digital projection of a film sourced production can't help but see that it is nowhere near the quality one gets from straight film production. It does make sense to perhaps project video projects (like the recent Star Wars video sci-fi) in a digital projection center, but it makes no sense to digitally project something that originated on film.
As to the economics, that $150K(US) is an estimate (low in my opinion) per screen. So, for each of your 20 screen theatres you're talking 3mil.
Why do you pay $6(US) for 50 cents worth of popcorn? Because that $6 pays for real estate, salaries, food, benefits, etc. Basically, the concession income pays for virtually all of the construction and operating costs of a theatre. Theatres make virtually no money on ticket sales since the vast majority is paid to the distributor. The only reason they even show the film is to get you to come in and buy concessions. The $6 price also helps defray the losses (yes losses) from people who sneak their own food and beverages into the theatre. If everyone would buy one bucket of popcorn and one soda, theatres wouldn't have to charge $6 for popcorn.
I know, I managed a movie theatre for a number of years.
If people were really interested in archiving their pictures, they would shoot film and have a Kodak Photo CD made at the same time. This gives you both a physical storage medium (modern film stocks are incredibly stable) and an electronic version. If you're happy with the resolution of digital cameras, you could ask for a Picture CD which is cheaper than Photo CD, but not as high a storage resolution and uses a lossy compression format (jpeg) instead of the proprietary (but immensely better) Image PAC format.
Picture CD gives you 1.5 megabinary pixels of resolution, while a Photo CD gives you multiple resolutions on a single CD ranging from 24 kilobinary pixels to 6 megabinary pixels. Pro Photo CD has a maximum resolution of 24 megabinary pixels! And keep in mind that this is electronically scanned from the original negative or slide. One couldn't possibly hope to duplicate this at home.
Now, if you have existing prints for which you have no negatives or slides, then you need to scan at the highest resolution you can and store it in a non-lossy format, high bit-depth format. Note that this is for poor man's "archiving". If you just want to store a representation of the picture to use for printing or something, then you could use a low end compression algorithm like JPEG.
The title for this article is patently misleading, as CC is phasing out the sale of pre-recorded video tapes, not the VHS format in general. They will continue to carry blank media and decks.
It makes sense to phase out the pre-recorded VHS items since the primary pre-recorded rental/sale market is obviously tilting to DVD.
It would make no sense to phase out VHS hardware or blank tapes since those are still (and will be for the foreseeable future) the primary means of recording material in the consumer space.
In fact, CC has started carrying blank D-VHS tape. I don't know that they carry the decks yet, but there's always Best Buy for that.
Re:Luke, use the source...
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 2
"RedHat needs a compile from source package format that most people can figure out. srpms may do it, but I have no clue how to use them."
Hmmm, man rpm worked for me the first time I tried to build from a source RPM.
Hmm, now we'll have three non-DVD high-density optical media formats:
DVD+RW (and DVD+R) AVD EVD
Maybe I should come up with one as it seems to be all the rage.
Actually, the funny part of this are some of the same people who support DVD+RW (a non-DVD format) are now saying that the Asians should not be allowed to come up with their own competing technology as it will confuse the market!
I would call this an opinion piece rather than a review. The author took the short way out by simply commenting on what he thought of the film, not by providing any critical analysis of the faults of the film or providing context/justification of his opinions.
But, since this is also what is done by that bozo Harry Knowles, people probably don't know any better any longer.
I would call this a small company, but that actually makes the proposition easier.
First, evaluate the alternatives. What applications can be replaced with Linux equivalents and which can't. For the ones that can't, would it be cost-effective to consider limited licensing for those apps and running them from a Windows terminal service with Citrix Metaframe installed? Or would it be cheaper to by VMWare licenses for those users who absolutely have to run some esoteric Windows app.
When the alternatives have been considered, propose a pilot targetting a limited group of users to see whether the can continue their normal work routine on the new platform.
These are all starting points. The tough one is what to do about apps that only exist on Windows and are critical to the job the person is doing.
You're right, you should do the best you can. My point wasn't clear, but I was really trying to say "work even if costs you that 4.0 average".
We've found that grades rarely have anything to do with a person's capabilities other than demonstrating a better than average memory. In fact, the people with the better grades are generally the ones who are the most inflexible and least tolerant of changes within the workplace.
I work for a large, multinational telecommunications company. The amount of money and the position you can ultimately achieve within many companies is limited by your educational background, while getting a good job to start with is generally more dependant on your work history.
Here are my suggestions:
Go to school and don't sweat the grades (so long as you at least come out of it wth a C). The important part is the piece of paper that said you stuck with something for four years.
Work fulltime or parttime, ideally in the field you're targetting. If that's not possible, take almost any job and hold on to it. Nothing looks worse on a resume than someone who shops around. Holding even the worst of jobs for a long period of time shows that you are more interested in actually working than finding the next bigger/better paycheck.
Almost as bad as not going to school is not working while you're going to school. Holding a job and getting a degree at the same time shows that you can manage your time and handle pressure.
Don't depend on certifications to get a job. Except for the meanest of positions (eg. Microsoft Exchange admins), a plethora of certifications on a resume is an automatic bit-bucket sentence at many companies, including ours. It usually indicates that you have little practical experience with a product and are basically milking the companies you've already worked for out of free training. Certs are good for getting entry level jobs in some type of customer service. Only consider them as a last resort. A degree looks better as it shows that you had the fortitude to stick with something for four years.
It's interesting, because the only format that is readily playable on all platforms that I use (OS X, Linux, Solaris, Win32, OS/2) is MPEGI, yet you rarely see anyone post MPEGI files.
Before anyone jumps in with "but what about format Z", note that I said readily playable. This means I only have to download a legally licensed app without having to search out some oddball DLL that is only available on a changing series of east European servers.
According to Sorenson, the codec they provided to Macromedia is not the same codec they developed for Apple. According to Sorenson, the codec they developed for Macromedia is for relatively low bandwidth applications, while the codec for Apple was designed for the best quality for visual media (movies, trailers, etc.) on the web.
I always enjoy any QuickTime article on Slashdot because it invariably turns into some big debate on why Apple is deliberately keeping Sorenson from licensing the codec to Linux developers, blah, blah, blah.
First off, Apple claims to have an exclusive license to what are commonly known as the Sorenson and Sorenson 3 codecs. Even if Apple decided to waive their exclusive right to this codec, who in the Linux world could afford the licensing fee that would have to be paid to Sorenson? Mark Podlipec? I doubt he has the (undoubtedly) thousands of dollars the license would cost.
As to the vast market available for a native Linux version of the QT player, that's relatively unimportant to Apple. They make their money on the production tools. So, for a platform to be attractive to Apple, it's one that production houses would be using day to day to produce content.
For now, there is no real content creation platform on Linux (and I'm not talking about digital animation or rendering).
Slashdot Mirror
The same thing happened with the lamentable "Star Trek: The Eugenics Wars". Everything was fine with the first book until the pointless addition of many TNG/DS9 characters. Even worse, the author decided that we couldn't possibly differentiate between reality and science fiction and tried to hide the events of the Eugenics Wars in our modern milieu. Ugh.
OK, I'll admit that I don't think Enterprise is very good. I also don't think TNG, DS(, or Voyager were very good either.
That being said, I really like John Billingsley and fell he is the only redeeming feature of Enterprise.
As for the Romulans, I can only assume it will be the Romulans of TNG/DS9/Voyager and not the Romulans of Star Trek. I'm still unsure why it was necessary to swap the virutes of the Romulans and Klingons, but that's just one of the major changes Berman/Pillar have made to the Trek universe.
Ah well.
Interestingly, the vast majority of gem grade diamonds never make it to market. They're warehoused to keep the cost of diamonds high. Otherwise, diamonds would be significantly cheaper than they are. This doesn't even include the tons of industrial grade diamonds that are stored in the former Soviet Union.
So, to answer your question. Are they worth (the price)? No. Does your girlfriend expect one? Probably, due to the massive marketing campaigns that you mentioned.
For more bang for the buck, look into colored gem stones. They are generally priced closer to what they are actually worth and, frankly, look nicer. Of course, the same ethical quandaries may apply.
Yep. I had inadvertently swapped the q and u, but never put the u back when I retyped it. And I was trying to be so careful.
Doh!
OK, I'll admit it. I'm not the best grammarian or speller, but has anyone noticed the glaring errors that always show up on geek prepared sites?
;)
Here's a good example from the BMW Chair site:
"Misquitos were terrible in my garage on a hot Texas summer evening but progress prevailed and the whelps diminished over time."
First, it's mosqito, not misqito. And I can only guess he meant "welt" (lump on the body) rather than whelp, which is generally a puppy. Unless his garage was in fact infested with puppies, in which case diminishing whelps might be a good thing.
And how progress can prevail over mosquitos is anyones guess.
I have to agree with this "diatribe". Emulating Windows has made Gnome and KDE (more so KDE) worthless in my opinion. If I wanted something that worked like Windows, why wouldn't I just use Windows.
Frankly, the best interface I've ever used was IBM's Workplace Shell for OS/2. It was well designed, had a great feature set, consistent application interfaces (including GUI methods), etc. Applications that were Workplace Shell aware were a joy to work with.
As part of IBM's open source strategy, it would be nice if they gave us the Workplace Shell (which would most likely require SOM/DSOM as well). While they're at it, how about OS/2-style extended attributes for the filesystem? This is somethiing that is sorely lacking in Linux (as well as Windows, and, going forward, OS X since Apple wants to drop resource forks).
I have to agree. Not showing the rating of the control in the charts makes the chart pointless. It would be interesting to see how the user ratings for the control line up against the codecs.
It's possible that the data from the control showed that the listener preference had little to do with how the rated the codec reproduced the original.
It's very Emacs-like and highly configurable. On Windows, it has some nice integration features and I've used it since about '92 when writing code on Windows.
One of the features is that it supports Brief-style keyboard bindings, in addition to the default Emacs bindings.
You get binaries for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OS/2 & DOS for one price.
You can get more info and a demo at Lugaru's website.
So his argument appears to be, "Gosh, I was providing a chip that allowed people to use pirated software but I had no idea that was illegal."
Uh-huh. We see how far that defense got him. About as valid as a person driving a 2002 Chevy blazer that a guy on the street sold them for $200 and claiming they had no idea it might be stolen.
You'll note that I never said Be was doing well, just that they were in good shape. Had they continued their plan for selling their proprietary hardware/software to the content creators, they would have had a niche captive audience the same way Apple does.
Be produced some very interesting OS features, but what did it buy them in the face of the MSFT juggernaut? Nothing. Had they switched CPU architectures but, and this is the key, still built it themselves and that was the only way to run BeOS, I don't think they would have imploded as rapidly as they did. They couldn't even give BeOS away free to manufacturers for a couple of good reasons. Those manufacturers were/are/will be under significant contractual obligations from MSFT that make it economically impractical to provide a competing OS. Secondly, when your average Joe walks into the store, he's going to want a Windows machine (unfortunate as that is) because that's what his friends have and his friends have offered free (pirated) software. If this weren't the case, why didn't people flock to OS/2 when it was available as an option? It was arguably better than Windows, yet Joe Sixpack had no interest in it.
It all boils down to one thing: when you play in the Intel world you're playing in Microsoft's sandbox and they are more than willing to play the bully. I don't see that changing.
If Apple ever did switch CPUs (I don't see this happening with the investment all their big name software vendors have in AltiVec code), it would be on their own machines. You'd still have to buy an Apple to run OS X. I own a couple of nice G4s and have no complaints about the price or performance.
There is a concrete example that exists to show why it would be a terrible mistake for Apple to move to Intel hardware in general, rather than Apple built Intel hardware --- Be. When Be was concentrating on building hardware (does anyone remember the BeBox) and software to match, they were in good shape. It was only when they dropped their PowerPC hardware and moved to generic Intel that they began to have problems. Distribution channels are locked up by Microsoft licensing (this won't change), they had to deal with everyone's $10 NICs and video cards, etc.
As to the economics, that $150K(US) is an estimate (low in my opinion) per screen. So, for each of your 20 screen theatres you're talking 3mil.
Why do you pay $6(US) for 50 cents worth of popcorn? Because that $6 pays for real estate, salaries, food, benefits, etc. Basically, the concession income pays for virtually all of the construction and operating costs of a theatre. Theatres make virtually no money on ticket sales since the vast majority is paid to the distributor. The only reason they even show the film is to get you to come in and buy concessions. The $6 price also helps defray the losses (yes losses) from people who sneak their own food and beverages into the theatre. If everyone would buy one bucket of popcorn and one soda, theatres wouldn't have to charge $6 for popcorn.
I know, I managed a movie theatre for a number of years.
I hate to make a big tsimmes out of this, but it's spelled bupkis (or sometimes bobkes) in English.
Picture CD gives you 1.5 megabinary pixels of resolution, while a Photo CD gives you multiple resolutions on a single CD ranging from 24 kilobinary pixels to 6 megabinary pixels. Pro Photo CD has a maximum resolution of 24 megabinary pixels! And keep in mind that this is electronically scanned from the original negative or slide. One couldn't possibly hope to duplicate this at home.
Now, if you have existing prints for which you have no negatives or slides, then you need to scan at the highest resolution you can and store it in a non-lossy format, high bit-depth format. Note that this is for poor man's "archiving". If you just want to store a representation of the picture to use for printing or something, then you could use a low end compression algorithm like JPEG.
"Developer Release" maybe?
It makes sense to phase out the pre-recorded VHS items since the primary pre-recorded rental/sale market is obviously tilting to DVD.
It would make no sense to phase out VHS hardware or blank tapes since those are still (and will be for the foreseeable future) the primary means of recording material in the consumer space.
In fact, CC has started carrying blank D-VHS tape. I don't know that they carry the decks yet, but there's always Best Buy for that.
It seems as though Nolan has taken the Brian De Palma route (why come up with something new, when you can just remake something else).
Hmm, now we'll have three non-DVD high-density optical media formats:
DVD+RW (and DVD+R)
AVD
EVD
Maybe I should come up with one as it seems to be all the rage.
Actually, the funny part of this are some of the same people who support DVD+RW (a non-DVD format) are now saying that the Asians should not be allowed to come up with their own competing technology as it will confuse the market!
-David
But, since this is also what is done by that bozo Harry Knowles, people probably don't know any better any longer.
I would call this a small company, but that actually makes the proposition easier.
First, evaluate the alternatives. What applications can be replaced with Linux equivalents and which can't. For the ones that can't, would it be cost-effective to consider limited licensing for those apps and running them from a Windows terminal service with Citrix Metaframe installed? Or would it be cheaper to by VMWare licenses for those users who absolutely have to run some esoteric Windows app.
When the alternatives have been considered, propose a pilot targetting a limited group of users to see whether the can continue their normal work routine on the new platform.
These are all starting points. The tough one is what to do about apps that only exist on Windows and are critical to the job the person is doing.
-David
We've found that grades rarely have anything to do with a person's capabilities other than demonstrating a better than average memory. In fact, the people with the better grades are generally the ones who are the most inflexible and least tolerant of changes within the workplace.
Almost as bad as not going to school is not working while you're going to school. Holding a job and getting a degree at the same time shows that you can manage your time and handle pressure.
Before anyone jumps in with "but what about format Z", note that I said readily playable. This means I only have to download a legally licensed app without having to search out some oddball DLL that is only available on a changing series of east European servers.
I always enjoy any QuickTime article on Slashdot because it invariably turns into some big debate on why Apple is deliberately keeping Sorenson from licensing the codec to Linux developers, blah, blah, blah.
First off, Apple claims to have an exclusive license to what are commonly known as the Sorenson and Sorenson 3 codecs. Even if Apple decided to waive their exclusive right to this codec, who in the Linux world could afford the licensing fee that would have to be paid to Sorenson? Mark Podlipec? I doubt he has the (undoubtedly) thousands of dollars the license would cost.
As to the vast market available for a native Linux version of the QT player, that's relatively unimportant to Apple. They make their money on the production tools. So, for a platform to be attractive to Apple, it's one that production houses would be using day to day to produce content.
For now, there is no real content creation platform on Linux (and I'm not talking about digital animation or rendering).