In Rochester, where my parents live, everyone they know who works for Kodak prefaces their statements in meetings with "If I'm still here..."
That company is going downhill so fast, it's no real surprise they're turning to other sources for revenue. But it is depressing that such a former juggernaut couldn't keep their innovation once their old technology started becoming obsolete...sad they couldn't leverage their older skills and technology. Uh...by sad, I mean, not sad at all, sorry, take another number.
Or maybe leveraging their older technology is what they're trying to do with these patent suits, I guess...
Yeah, I would say in defense of this guy, that extortion and locking him up was probably a little extreme. But it really seems like everyone was behaving badly in this case.
Wait, please RTFA. He OFFERED to run the site for free initially, I quote:
Richard, a former reserve deputy in the sheriff's marine division, more than three years ago offered to provide the Web site at no cost to the county as an in-kind contribution. Hackel, who enthusiastically supported it, said Richard agreed to operate it in exchange for publicity for his company.
Doesn't sound like he was getting screwed to me. Sounds like he pulled a turnaround when he asked the county for $300,000 all of a sudden.
I've actually been in a situation when we've had to shut someone's site down because they wouldn't pay. It took us more than 6 months to do it though, because we were professional and considerate, and it wasn't even a big site, just one of our small clients. But we had to do it after a while because he was just totally ignoring our bills and communications. He did eventually pay a reduced sum that we agreed to through negotiations. We then surrendered his domain gladly. But my point is, we gave him a long time and we tried really hard to communicate with him before shutting him down. It was the most drastic thing I've EVER done to a client, and I still feel a little weird about it.
This sounds different. Sounds like ye old bait and switch to me. And it doesn't really sound like they were out of communication--something I'm sure should have been worked out before the drastic step of shutting down their site happened. ESPECIALLY considering this guy offered to do it for free initially. You don't just shut down someone's site, especially not a high profile client like this. You just don't. There are other avenues way before that happens.
"I'm not going to argue that there isn't one person in forty million who didn't subscribe," Richter says. "But we document where the addresses come from, and when people complain, we remove them from our list. What people don't understand is that the Internet isn't free. I make my money by signing you up at my Web site, getting your information, and using that information to figure out what you like."
Here we see a prime example of self-delusion and self-righteousness substituting for morality. Right, the Internet isn't free. But I didn't realize that I was paying Scott Richter to get online--I thought I was paying Verizon for DSL service.
It is entertaining to see how much these people hate Steve Linford though.
It's really simple folks: if what you are doing is legit, why do you have to forge your headers? Why do you have to hide behind false email addresses? If it is legit, why do you have such a hard time getting legitimate ISPs to sell you bandwidth? Figure it out.
...and a better performance not even all of the time, especially on a 32-bit platform, I choose GCC.
However, I'd like to see a well-thought out criticism of this piece. It seems like someone always has a good counterpoint to any given set of benchmarks.
On a more pragmatic level, the novelist John Gardner reports a study where a number of professional African musicians were exposed to Western Classical music, & their opinions about which works were better than others tended to confirm what the Classical music buffs thought. Or as T.S. Eliot once stated, one is not born with good taste, one is acquired through education.
Well, as a deconstructionist might ask, what sort of cross-culture interactions--or shared ancestries--were present between Western Classical musical culture and African musical culture at the time of the study? In what terms was the study's questions for the participants couched--were the questions leading or biased? In the end, what do we learn--if musical taste is 'taught,' then where lies the objective grounding for it that it seems like you are implying? Who/what establishes taste? What accounts for the phenomenon of a musician diverging wildly from the normal realm of taste, only to have his or her styles picked up by the mainstream and become banal years later (say, John Coltrane's 'difficult' sax techniques developed in the 60s, used by Kenny G. now, or the challenging pan-tonality of Stravinsky or serial techniques of Schoenberg, used much later compositionally in car commercials and movie soundtracks). Keeping in mind that taste shifts within a culture fairly quickly, where is the objective basis of taste? Show me!
Are my questions above bullshit? I don't know, I guess it's subjective.
...what exactly are the issues that Joerg has with Linux's SCSI layer? I've heard about this in bits and pieces for years, but never really understand what the beef is. I've heard it mentioned that he wants to only talk to devices as if they are SCSI, but I don't know how true this is, nor what the real issues he has beyond this are. Anyone?
I love it. I can write and compile code using a c integer type on a Sun Sparc and then re-compile it for my intel x86 box at home and I don't have to worry about whether I'm *actually* getting an int or a short, and if I'm...wait, what? Phone numbers?
You are implying that nothing Netscape could have done would have helped their cause. Which, maybe, is true. However, that doesn't mean Netscape didn't still mess up. And it might still be an important exercise to say, "Well, when Netscape did this, MS did that, and Netscape could have come back and done this, but instead they did that, and that hastened their fall." Etc.
Testing a human vs. a machine in terms of chess is really, as far as I can tell, a way to see whether or not that specific computer (program) can beat that specific human at chess at a specific point in time. It doesn't tell us that much about superiority or the intelligence of one over the other. I would say once we understand what intelligence is really really well, then we can start to say these sorts of things. But intelligence doesn't equal who wins the game of chess.
Can the computer cook an omelete with the ingredients it has on hand in the fridge? Can it change the baby's diaper when it is crying? Can it say soothing things to the baby when it is crying, and remember that the baby hasn't slept well the last few days, so it should probably give it some extra whatever, and then can the computer give its mother-in-law a call and gracefully decline and invitation to hang out and play bridge or something, using a little white lie? Can you tell me what intelligence is?
Actually, China is a fascist capitalist state. And one of the reasons we have it so good in the U.S. is that we offload a lot of our shit work to organizations in China--where they don't require the pesky 'unions' that we here in the states have to protect the health and wellbeing of our workers. That's where all those cheapo plastic American flags come from, fellow patriot! Ain't capitalism grand!
So, actually, we could do something about it if we wanted to--hit 'em where it hurts--in the pocketbook. But, that ain't gonna happen, 'cause it'd probably hurt our pocketbooks just as much!
I'm using 10.2 right now and when I alt-tab through my open apps, I can alt-tab back and forth between the two I have been most recently using. I don't know why you think it only cycles through the apps in the dock without any intelligence; it does exhibit the behavior you describe in 10.2, from what I can tell.
Xen lets you run multiple operating system images at the same time on the same PC hardware, with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation.
Ha. That's easy for you to say. Every time I try to run in Xen I have to dodge Headcrabs and be on the look out for Vortigaunts, not to mention the dreaded Gonarch.
in this case. I wasn't specifically addressing the issue at hand. I might even agree that it is not worth it, I'd have to think harder on it to decide.
Thanks for the harsh insults, by the way. Remember, you are posting on Slashdot as well.
That distinguishes some people from others. It's what creates heroes. Of course, I'm ready to admit there is a sordid side to this--some people sacrifice their relationships and families and martyr themselves to prove a point--nothing wonderful about that. But at the core of making a statement about what you believe is sometimes the necessity of making a sacrifice. Like I suggested, it's not always going to be an easy sacrifice or a fair one, but that's what it takes. This is always the case, whether the economy is wonderful or not. If people were only ready to make a sacrifice when it was convenient to do so, it wouldn't be that meaningful then, would it?
This is not out of touch with reality; actually this is the nature of reality. It seems like you are actually just not acknowledging this.
Good point; you are correct there was a narrative going on, but I could argue that maybe there were two movies going on here as far as that is concerned: one that tracked the 'progress' of Wiley Wiggins character through the film, and another, which I would argue contains the more 'complete movement and meaning' of the film which is the series of soliloquys (I guess not really soliloquys, as it appeared in most cases that the speaker was addressing another, or otherwise that there was actually a conversation going on between two or more speakers) which made up the body of the film, and which were to a great extent not connected more than thematically; they didn't really track a narrative so much as provide a multifaceted--cubist even--exploration of all of reality.
What do you think?
It seems like a lot of what he is talking about
on
Cubism For CG And Movies
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
...is achieved conventionally already with a split screen effect. I think the most important thing to judge here is what is the perception of the audience going to be? What sort of 'cubist film' precedents have been set to provide a cinematic language for this sort of technique (I dunno, but I don't necessarily think the matrix is it...).
Another item I wanted to bring up was Richard Linklater's movie Waking Life. Aside from being one of my favorite flicks of all time, the film cast aside a traditional narrative structure along with using some really interesting visual techniques to emphasize the experiences of the characters. I'm not knowledgeable enough to accurately describe these techniques, but they involved to a large extent moving perspectives around, showing characters faces and bodies distort themselves depending on what they were feeling or saying, or having objects appear out of nowhere to provide a sort of running commentary on the current scene. I believe the majority of the film was filmed digital and then overlayed with animation 'effects,' for the lack of a more superlative word...effects doesn't approach what this movie is. Check it out if you haven't seen it (and if you like rambling philosophical non-linear films with a lot of visual beauty).
Slashdot Mirror
In Rochester, where my parents live, everyone they know who works for Kodak prefaces their statements in meetings with "If I'm still here..."
That company is going downhill so fast, it's no real surprise they're turning to other sources for revenue. But it is depressing that such a former juggernaut couldn't keep their innovation once their old technology started becoming obsolete...sad they couldn't leverage their older skills and technology. Uh...by sad, I mean, not sad at all, sorry, take another number.
Or maybe leveraging their older technology is what they're trying to do with these patent suits, I guess...
Yeah, I would say in defense of this guy, that extortion and locking him up was probably a little extreme. But it really seems like everyone was behaving badly in this case.
Wait, please RTFA. He OFFERED to run the site for free initially, I quote:
Doesn't sound like he was getting screwed to me. Sounds like he pulled a turnaround when he asked the county for $300,000 all of a sudden.
I've actually been in a situation when we've had to shut someone's site down because they wouldn't pay. It took us more than 6 months to do it though, because we were professional and considerate, and it wasn't even a big site, just one of our small clients. But we had to do it after a while because he was just totally ignoring our bills and communications. He did eventually pay a reduced sum that we agreed to through negotiations. We then surrendered his domain gladly. But my point is, we gave him a long time and we tried really hard to communicate with him before shutting him down. It was the most drastic thing I've EVER done to a client, and I still feel a little weird about it.
This sounds different. Sounds like ye old bait and switch to me. And it doesn't really sound like they were out of communication--something I'm sure should have been worked out before the drastic step of shutting down their site happened. ESPECIALLY considering this guy offered to do it for free initially. You don't just shut down someone's site, especially not a high profile client like this. You just don't. There are other avenues way before that happens.
Saw this recently on memepool.com:
http://www.utexas.edu/admin/utpd/atm.html
Bruce Campbell as...Zaphod.
Here we see a prime example of self-delusion and self-righteousness substituting for morality. Right, the Internet isn't free. But I didn't realize that I was paying Scott Richter to get online--I thought I was paying Verizon for DSL service.
It is entertaining to see how much these people hate Steve Linford though.
It's really simple folks: if what you are doing is legit, why do you have to forge your headers? Why do you have to hide behind false email addresses? If it is legit, why do you have such a hard time getting legitimate ISPs to sell you bandwidth? Figure it out.
...and a better performance not even all of the time, especially on a 32-bit platform, I choose GCC.
However, I'd like to see a well-thought out criticism of this piece. It seems like someone always has a good counterpoint to any given set of benchmarks.
Well, as a deconstructionist might ask, what sort of cross-culture interactions--or shared ancestries--were present between Western Classical musical culture and African musical culture at the time of the study? In what terms was the study's questions for the participants couched--were the questions leading or biased? In the end, what do we learn--if musical taste is 'taught,' then where lies the objective grounding for it that it seems like you are implying? Who/what establishes taste? What accounts for the phenomenon of a musician diverging wildly from the normal realm of taste, only to have his or her styles picked up by the mainstream and become banal years later (say, John Coltrane's 'difficult' sax techniques developed in the 60s, used by Kenny G. now, or the challenging pan-tonality of Stravinsky or serial techniques of Schoenberg, used much later compositionally in car commercials and movie soundtracks). Keeping in mind that taste shifts within a culture fairly quickly, where is the objective basis of taste? Show me!
Are my questions above bullshit? I don't know, I guess it's subjective.
He was poking fun. Relax.
...what exactly are the issues that Joerg has with Linux's SCSI layer? I've heard about this in bits and pieces for years, but never really understand what the beef is. I've heard it mentioned that he wants to only talk to devices as if they are SCSI, but I don't know how true this is, nor what the real issues he has beyond this are. Anyone?
I love it. I can write and compile code using a c integer type on a Sun Sparc and then re-compile it for my intel x86 box at home and I don't have to worry about whether I'm *actually* getting an int or a short, and if I'm...wait, what? Phone numbers?
Sorry, nevermind!
You are implying that nothing Netscape could have done would have helped their cause. Which, maybe, is true. However, that doesn't mean Netscape didn't still mess up. And it might still be an important exercise to say, "Well, when Netscape did this, MS did that, and Netscape could have come back and done this, but instead they did that, and that hastened their fall." Etc.
Well, maybe not, but they could still tell another person to do it, most likely. Unless they had other problems.
Testing a human vs. a machine in terms of chess is really, as far as I can tell, a way to see whether or not that specific computer (program) can beat that specific human at chess at a specific point in time. It doesn't tell us that much about superiority or the intelligence of one over the other. I would say once we understand what intelligence is really really well, then we can start to say these sorts of things. But intelligence doesn't equal who wins the game of chess.
Can the computer cook an omelete with the ingredients it has on hand in the fridge? Can it change the baby's diaper when it is crying? Can it say soothing things to the baby when it is crying, and remember that the baby hasn't slept well the last few days, so it should probably give it some extra whatever, and then can the computer give its mother-in-law a call and gracefully decline and invitation to hang out and play bridge or something, using a little white lie? Can you tell me what intelligence is?
But I still love you, because you are like me! *sigh*
Always a step ahead. Always innovating!!
Actually, China is a fascist capitalist state. And one of the reasons we have it so good in the U.S. is that we offload a lot of our shit work to organizations in China--where they don't require the pesky 'unions' that we here in the states have to protect the health and wellbeing of our workers. That's where all those cheapo plastic American flags come from, fellow patriot! Ain't capitalism grand!
So, actually, we could do something about it if we wanted to--hit 'em where it hurts--in the pocketbook. But, that ain't gonna happen, 'cause it'd probably hurt our pocketbooks just as much!
I'm using 10.2 right now and when I alt-tab through my open apps, I can alt-tab back and forth between the two I have been most recently using. I don't know why you think it only cycles through the apps in the dock without any intelligence; it does exhibit the behavior you describe in 10.2, from what I can tell.
"A Christmas Story?"
Xen lets you run multiple operating system images at the same time on the same PC hardware, with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation.
Ha. That's easy for you to say. Every time I try to run in Xen I have to dodge Headcrabs and be on the look out for Vortigaunts, not to mention the dreaded Gonarch.
Microsoft bad! Gates bad! Standards good! What going on? Help!
in this case. I wasn't specifically addressing the issue at hand. I might even agree that it is not worth it, I'd have to think harder on it to decide.
Thanks for the harsh insults, by the way. Remember, you are posting on Slashdot as well.
That distinguishes some people from others. It's what creates heroes. Of course, I'm ready to admit there is a sordid side to this--some people sacrifice their relationships and families and martyr themselves to prove a point--nothing wonderful about that. But at the core of making a statement about what you believe is sometimes the necessity of making a sacrifice. Like I suggested, it's not always going to be an easy sacrifice or a fair one, but that's what it takes. This is always the case, whether the economy is wonderful or not. If people were only ready to make a sacrifice when it was convenient to do so, it wouldn't be that meaningful then, would it?
This is not out of touch with reality; actually this is the nature of reality. It seems like you are actually just not acknowledging this.
Good point; you are correct there was a narrative going on, but I could argue that maybe there were two movies going on here as far as that is concerned: one that tracked the 'progress' of Wiley Wiggins character through the film, and another, which I would argue contains the more 'complete movement and meaning' of the film which is the series of soliloquys (I guess not really soliloquys, as it appeared in most cases that the speaker was addressing another, or otherwise that there was actually a conversation going on between two or more speakers) which made up the body of the film, and which were to a great extent not connected more than thematically; they didn't really track a narrative so much as provide a multifaceted--cubist even--exploration of all of reality.
What do you think?
Another item I wanted to bring up was Richard Linklater's movie Waking Life. Aside from being one of my favorite flicks of all time, the film cast aside a traditional narrative structure along with using some really interesting visual techniques to emphasize the experiences of the characters. I'm not knowledgeable enough to accurately describe these techniques, but they involved to a large extent moving perspectives around, showing characters faces and bodies distort themselves depending on what they were feeling or saying, or having objects appear out of nowhere to provide a sort of running commentary on the current scene. I believe the majority of the film was filmed digital and then overlayed with animation 'effects,' for the lack of a more superlative word...effects doesn't approach what this movie is. Check it out if you haven't seen it (and if you like rambling philosophical non-linear films with a lot of visual beauty).