While I don't disagree about the restrictive use of copyright in general, there is really no way that file sharing or fan collections could save this kind of material since (a) it isn't material that is easily reproducable, and (b) the only way it would wind up in the hands of collectors would be if Aardman felt it had no significance at all, which means it would most likely have been destroyed anyway rather than warehoused (like many other production houses do with their obsolete props).
In fact this is an example of a company attempting to preserve its technical history (not even the finished works) and failing to do so because of an unfortunate accident. Copyright doesn't come into it because we're talking about the physical property of Aardman, which nobody except Aardman can claim a right to, even in principle.
The parent might be a nice anti-copyright rave, but it really is off-topic (except that it mentions Wallace and Gromit in passing).
Being able to easily make redundant copies of electronic data does not mean the same capability exists when dealing with physical objects made by artisans (I would have thought this was obvious, but apparently not...). The only way around this is to build everything twice, which is simply impractical; if it takes n months to make one, it takes 2n months to make two, which means you're doubling the construction budget without adding anything to the actual production (and contrary to popular belief, film makers do not have unlimited budgets. Aardman isn't Disney, and even Disney has limits). So forget about redundancy; not even NASA, the US center of redundancy, has a method of making backups of historically significant objects, but if you know of one I'm sure they and the Smithsonian would like to hear about it.
As to the wisdom of storing everything in the one place: the options are (1) break up the collection in the hope that any disaster that strikes is only going to affect one site, and add the problems of tracking inventory and aquiring property for little practical value (we're not talking a box of floppies here, this is stuff that needs non-trivial amounts of space to store...think "15 foot wide miniature set for a single 3 minute sequence" and you'll begin to get the idea), or (2) put everything you don't need for current productions in the one place so you know where to look for it* if you need it, minimize your real estate and inventory expenses and work on the assumption that buildings generally don't catch fire.
So Aardman went for the second option, and were wrong about the fire part. Has it affected current productions, destroyed final masters of previous productions or damaged the company's future in any way? No, the items in question were being stored for historical value, they weren't critical financial records, customer databases or the like; different security paradigm. So really you're suggesting that they should have spent probably more than ten times what equivalent digital archives would cost for less than one tenth the benefit. I know trying to keep a business afloat equates to evil around here, but do you seriously think Aardman would still be around after thirty years if they didn't do the cost/benefit analysis of these kind of things?
Just because a backup strategy makes sense for cheap, portable and easily reproducable digital data, that doesn't mean the same strategy is possible in the physical world for expensive, large, or fragile items that must be individually made by hand. If you can't see a difference then I suggest you backup your house and its contents immediately...not because its in any immediate danger, I'm just intrigued to find out how you make an off-site copy without it costing as much as the original.
*This isn't stuff you can easily sort by alphabetic order, size or any other arbitrary attribute, so there is a limit to how organized storage can be; if you've never visited a props store, you seriously don't have any idea how chaotic they are even when well organized.
Plasticine melts above around 50 degrees C, then catches fire once it starts boiling. All that remains when cooled is a hardened puddle of carbon.
Geez, for a site full of nerds I'm really surprised how many posts in this topic equate plasticine with ceramics (or others), when its a non-Newtonian synthetic polymer.
My experience with ion generators comes from use in recording studios with large 24 track two-inch tape machines, which have rubber pinch rollers exposed to the air. After a decade there was no tangible degradation (the playback head had been re-lapped twice in the same period due to wear), though admittedly the rubber formulation may be superior in those machines to the average 5 cent grommet.
I've never heard anything that suggests an electrically inert material like rubber would be affected by ionized air (heat and humidity seem to be more dangerous), but I too am interested if anyone else has found otherwise.
I've found negative ion generators are good for reducing the amount of airborne dust. Obviously not a solution by themselves, but they could substantially increase the time between changing/cleaning filters.
Disclaimer: I'm not going to insist negative ion generators have any other benefits, but I have seen dust and cigarette smoke drop like a stone with one switched on, and I've serviced equipment run for nearly ten years in a room with one that looked almost pristine inside. And no, it wasn't because the room was cleaned often (the vacuum was one of last items I fixed, and had been out of commission for some time judging by the amount of grit in the carpet). Like all anecdotal evidence, take with caution, YMMV, etc.
Crest is an independent private company that supplies (primarily) A/V equipment and accessories; they do not sell any Microsoft products or have any direct affiliation with MS apart from being an end client (you could have Googled this info in less than two minutes, my dear Anonymous Chicken Little). Although the story was in all probability fed to the press by MS' PR department precisely because it does support their arguements, who in their right mind would say no to a free mention in the tech section of a national newspaper?
That statement they made was almost word for word from the Microsoft playbook...
I hate MS as much as anyone, but has it occurred to you that poor support from Red Hat/IBM may have made the statement completely valid? Is it really so surprising that a parts wholesaler doesn't see any value in aquiring permanent extensive IT expertise when it isn't part of their core business, and that ruled out further experimentation with Linux? Oh, of course not, just because this particular company's experience happens to concur with the Microsoft anti-Linux line it must be a conspiracy!!!
Kindly loosen your tin foil hat. It appears to be cutting off the blood circulation to your brain.
Allow me to share a monorail experience. We built one in Sydney for Australia's bicentennary in 1988. Of course, it wasn't up and running fully until 1989.
Quieter? Marginally. Though the wheels are indeed rubber, the track is a long steel box which acts as a remarkably efficient resonating chamber, so you can hear the things coming from some distance. Over daytime traffic. On one of the busiest streets in the city.
Aesthetically pleasing? Well, they don't run on ground level, true, only the steel supports embedded in concrete blocks plastered with the (now defunct) TNT logo are visible. But if you look up, you see a greasy track covered with the remains of anything-but-sky-blue paint. The carriages themselves look like gigantic go-fast catterpillers with excessive corporate sponsorship.
Safer? Marginally. Less likely to derail, perhaps, but probably worse in the event (depending on speed) since the only way to go is down. And although the train itself can't hit anything (unless it derails into an office block), other things can hit the support structures.
Less expensive? HAH! The problem with monorails is that the complexity of track construction makes them too expensive for large scale use. Monorails are essentially all bridge; bridges (and tunnels) are the most expensive parts of any rail system because of the engineering, otherwise you just have to keep the ground reasonably flat and the rails x feet apart. And that's not even counting the complexity of the switching yards (conventional trains use points that can be switched manually with a single lever if necessary, wheras monorails need an entire segment of track to slide sideways, in Sydney's case with the train on the segment: impossible without heavy machinery). Unless someone has invented a way of building stuctures that don't collapse, I can't see how a suspended rail will cost less to service over time than a ground level track (although the weight of the trains is a serious consideration here, so compared to an eight two-storey carriage conventional electric train they would cause less wear, but then considering a single monorail train has about 5% of the passenger capacity I doubt that works out cheaper per passenger).
A monorail will only be useful if it is being designed to service an entire city or to fully integrate with existing public transport. The former isn't possible because the track is too expensive, the latter is simply unlikely since it involves competent planning.
People who think smut has no place in culture have never discovered the joy of stick figure drawings and finger puppets!
I'd never made the connection. I suppose it explains those odd rubber finger puppets with no eyes and the nose in the wrong place you can get from dispensing machines in night clubs...
If you're so poor you can't afford the one of myriad of cheap gadgets available nowdays, chances are you won't be able to pay your cell phone bill either, especially when all the 3G extras are added at the current exhorbitant rates. So if $200 was all I could scrape together and was likely to be all the spare money I'd have in the forseeable future, I'd either go for a basic cell phone with no expensive extras if I really needed it, or a good MP3 player or decent digital camera (assuming I could afford a PC to connect them to; this is also a consideration when thinking about the phone's extra features).
Of course, if I were genuinely poor I probably wouldn't be considering making any such purchase at all. That's what "poor" means.
...we've decided to flag popular browsers as evil.
Interestingly, I've found ClamAV on OSX flags Norton AntiVirus support files as infected. Which seems fair: NAV for Mac seems to spread uncontrollably (people keep installing it, no matter how many times you warn them not to) and it is known to cause data loss...
But seriously, what if we compare the same number of vulnerabilities that IE had in its first year? That would be a better comparison.
Probably not: I'd expect IE 1.0 had significantly fewer vulnerabilities purely because it wasn't built into the OS and there was no ActiveX (to name but two reasons); old browsers simply lack a lot of the "features" that introduce the problems. Even if you include some compensating metric (like number of vulnerabilities per kilobyte of code), its still ignoring the higher relative risk of combining the OS and browser, so any comparison before Win95 is totally meaningless.
Trying to refute one meaningless statistic with another is a waste of effort. Its a pity Symantec get so much milage out of it...
Slashdot Mirror
While I don't disagree about the restrictive use of copyright in general, there is really no way that file sharing or fan collections could save this kind of material since (a) it isn't material that is easily reproducable, and (b) the only way it would wind up in the hands of collectors would be if Aardman felt it had no significance at all, which means it would most likely have been destroyed anyway rather than warehoused (like many other production houses do with their obsolete props).
In fact this is an example of a company attempting to preserve its technical history (not even the finished works) and failing to do so because of an unfortunate accident. Copyright doesn't come into it because we're talking about the physical property of Aardman, which nobody except Aardman can claim a right to, even in principle.
The parent might be a nice anti-copyright rave, but it really is off-topic (except that it mentions Wallace and Gromit in passing).
Being able to easily make redundant copies of electronic data does not mean the same capability exists when dealing with physical objects made by artisans (I would have thought this was obvious, but apparently not...). The only way around this is to build everything twice, which is simply impractical; if it takes n months to make one, it takes 2n months to make two, which means you're doubling the construction budget without adding anything to the actual production (and contrary to popular belief, film makers do not have unlimited budgets. Aardman isn't Disney, and even Disney has limits). So forget about redundancy; not even NASA, the US center of redundancy, has a method of making backups of historically significant objects, but if you know of one I'm sure they and the Smithsonian would like to hear about it.
As to the wisdom of storing everything in the one place: the options are (1) break up the collection in the hope that any disaster that strikes is only going to affect one site, and add the problems of tracking inventory and aquiring property for little practical value (we're not talking a box of floppies here, this is stuff that needs non-trivial amounts of space to store...think "15 foot wide miniature set for a single 3 minute sequence" and you'll begin to get the idea), or (2) put everything you don't need for current productions in the one place so you know where to look for it* if you need it, minimize your real estate and inventory expenses and work on the assumption that buildings generally don't catch fire.
So Aardman went for the second option, and were wrong about the fire part. Has it affected current productions, destroyed final masters of previous productions or damaged the company's future in any way? No, the items in question were being stored for historical value, they weren't critical financial records, customer databases or the like; different security paradigm. So really you're suggesting that they should have spent probably more than ten times what equivalent digital archives would cost for less than one tenth the benefit. I know trying to keep a business afloat equates to evil around here, but do you seriously think Aardman would still be around after thirty years if they didn't do the cost/benefit analysis of these kind of things?
Just because a backup strategy makes sense for cheap, portable and easily reproducable digital data, that doesn't mean the same strategy is possible in the physical world for expensive, large, or fragile items that must be individually made by hand. If you can't see a difference then I suggest you backup your house and its contents immediately...not because its in any immediate danger, I'm just intrigued to find out how you make an off-site copy without it costing as much as the original.
*This isn't stuff you can easily sort by alphabetic order, size or any other arbitrary attribute, so there is a limit to how organized storage can be; if you've never visited a props store, you seriously don't have any idea how chaotic they are even when well organized.
Danger Mouse was a Cosgrove-Hall production (http://www.chf.co.uk/). Wrong company.
Plasticine melts above around 50 degrees C, then catches fire once it starts boiling. All that remains when cooled is a hardened puddle of carbon.
Geez, for a site full of nerds I'm really surprised how many posts in this topic equate plasticine with ceramics (or others), when its a non-Newtonian synthetic polymer.
Surely that should be:
locate girlfriend: fille not found
Seriously though, I close my eyes and things aren't perfectly black, so I'm not sure 10^6:1 is all that useful.
Time to upgrade your eyelids.
More to the point, will he?
Considering what happened to Apollo 1, which was built to spec, this is possibly not the best example.
Sounds great, then we could call the moon Starbuck!
That would put a certain chain of coffee shops would be over the...um...
My experience with ion generators comes from use in recording studios with large 24 track two-inch tape machines, which have rubber pinch rollers exposed to the air. After a decade there was no tangible degradation (the playback head had been re-lapped twice in the same period due to wear), though admittedly the rubber formulation may be superior in those machines to the average 5 cent grommet.
I've never heard anything that suggests an electrically inert material like rubber would be affected by ionized air (heat and humidity seem to be more dangerous), but I too am interested if anyone else has found otherwise.
Considering both stories were posted by the same editor, that's a new low in fractured communications.
I don't care who controls the internet...as long as it isn't Zonk, otherwise we'll be seeing every web page and email twice.
I've found negative ion generators are good for reducing the amount of airborne dust. Obviously not a solution by themselves, but they could substantially increase the time between changing/cleaning filters.
Disclaimer: I'm not going to insist negative ion generators have any other benefits, but I have seen dust and cigarette smoke drop like a stone with one switched on, and I've serviced equipment run for nearly ten years in a room with one that looked almost pristine inside. And no, it wasn't because the room was cleaned often (the vacuum was one of last items I fixed, and had been out of commission for some time judging by the amount of grit in the carpet). Like all anecdotal evidence, take with caution, YMMV, etc.
and who funds Crest?
Crest is an independent private company that supplies (primarily) A/V equipment and accessories; they do not sell any Microsoft products or have any direct affiliation with MS apart from being an end client (you could have Googled this info in less than two minutes, my dear Anonymous Chicken Little). Although the story was in all probability fed to the press by MS' PR department precisely because it does support their arguements, who in their right mind would say no to a free mention in the tech section of a national newspaper?
That statement they made was almost word for word from the Microsoft playbook...
I hate MS as much as anyone, but has it occurred to you that poor support from Red Hat/IBM may have made the statement completely valid? Is it really so surprising that a parts wholesaler doesn't see any value in aquiring permanent extensive IT expertise when it isn't part of their core business, and that ruled out further experimentation with Linux? Oh, of course not, just because this particular company's experience happens to concur with the Microsoft anti-Linux line it must be a conspiracy!!!
Kindly loosen your tin foil hat. It appears to be cutting off the blood circulation to your brain.
This would be the same Navy that decided the best software to run an entire battle group was Windows, correct?
Are they stupid enough to keep armed dolphins? You tell me.
I pity you, fool.
Allow me to share a monorail experience. We built one in Sydney for Australia's bicentennary in 1988. Of course, it wasn't up and running fully until 1989.
Quieter? Marginally. Though the wheels are indeed rubber, the track is a long steel box which acts as a remarkably efficient resonating chamber, so you can hear the things coming from some distance. Over daytime traffic. On one of the busiest streets in the city.
Aesthetically pleasing? Well, they don't run on ground level, true, only the steel supports embedded in concrete blocks plastered with the (now defunct) TNT logo are visible. But if you look up, you see a greasy track covered with the remains of anything-but-sky-blue paint. The carriages themselves look like gigantic go-fast catterpillers with excessive corporate sponsorship.
Safer? Marginally. Less likely to derail, perhaps, but probably worse in the event (depending on speed) since the only way to go is down. And although the train itself can't hit anything (unless it derails into an office block), other things can hit the support structures.
Less expensive? HAH! The problem with monorails is that the complexity of track construction makes them too expensive for large scale use. Monorails are essentially all bridge; bridges (and tunnels) are the most expensive parts of any rail system because of the engineering, otherwise you just have to keep the ground reasonably flat and the rails x feet apart. And that's not even counting the complexity of the switching yards (conventional trains use points that can be switched manually with a single lever if necessary, wheras monorails need an entire segment of track to slide sideways, in Sydney's case with the train on the segment: impossible without heavy machinery). Unless someone has invented a way of building stuctures that don't collapse, I can't see how a suspended rail will cost less to service over time than a ground level track (although the weight of the trains is a serious consideration here, so compared to an eight two-storey carriage conventional electric train they would cause less wear, but then considering a single monorail train has about 5% of the passenger capacity I doubt that works out cheaper per passenger).
A monorail will only be useful if it is being designed to service an entire city or to fully integrate with existing public transport. The former isn't possible because the track is too expensive, the latter is simply unlikely since it involves competent planning.
People who think smut has no place in culture have never discovered the joy of stick figure drawings and finger puppets!
I'd never made the connection. I suppose it explains those odd rubber finger puppets with no eyes and the nose in the wrong place you can get from dispensing machines in night clubs...
Allow me to submit a realistic working definition of pornography, since no one else seems to be able to:
I prefer the old definition: anything that gives a judge an erection.
(Sexist? Only if you've never met a female judge...)
Close family?
If you're so poor you can't afford the one of myriad of cheap gadgets available nowdays, chances are you won't be able to pay your cell phone bill either, especially when all the 3G extras are added at the current exhorbitant rates. So if $200 was all I could scrape together and was likely to be all the spare money I'd have in the forseeable future, I'd either go for a basic cell phone with no expensive extras if I really needed it, or a good MP3 player or decent digital camera (assuming I could afford a PC to connect them to; this is also a consideration when thinking about the phone's extra features).
Of course, if I were genuinely poor I probably wouldn't be considering making any such purchase at all. That's what "poor" means.
They're on the lookout for terrorists, not ninjas.
googleBrowser development has temporarily stalled because they're having a bit of difficulty working out how to make it a web delivered app.
...we've decided to flag popular browsers as evil.
Interestingly, I've found ClamAV on OSX flags Norton AntiVirus support files as infected. Which seems fair: NAV for Mac seems to spread uncontrollably (people keep installing it, no matter how many times you warn them not to) and it is known to cause data loss...
But seriously, what if we compare the same number of vulnerabilities that IE had in its first year? That would be a better comparison.
Probably not: I'd expect IE 1.0 had significantly fewer vulnerabilities purely because it wasn't built into the OS and there was no ActiveX (to name but two reasons); old browsers simply lack a lot of the "features" that introduce the problems. Even if you include some compensating metric (like number of vulnerabilities per kilobyte of code), its still ignoring the higher relative risk of combining the OS and browser, so any comparison before Win95 is totally meaningless.
Trying to refute one meaningless statistic with another is a waste of effort. Its a pity Symantec get so much milage out of it...
Norton AntiVirus for Macintosh 10.0 Norton Personal Firewall for Macintosh 3.0.3 which both work on tiger????
What, Symantec have released a version of NAV that actually works?
Norton Internet Security for Macintosh Symantec Administration Console for Macintosh which haven't yet been fixed to work w/ tiger
Ah, that's the Symantec I know.