You mean like reducing actors' pay to $500 and filming the movies at the director's house in a single day?
Surely there's a happy medium. Armagedden cost $140 million to make. Pi cost $68,000. Sure, Armageddon grossed 62 times as much, but it cost 2000 times as much to make.
With digital photography, the costs to make a movie are going down dramatically. The top actors might not be willing to take a pay cut, but there are plenty of excellent actors that would work for less than $10 million.
Because the difference in the number of movies made, the budgets for each movie, and the number of copies that need to be viewed/sold to make a profit, there's no way the film industry can model itself after the porn industry.
Sure they could. They could make more movies, have smaller budgets, and release on cheap media like DVD.
Netflix has 3 million subscribers. HBO has 30 million. People are willing to pay for movies, just not the $10 or whatever theatres are charging these days (I wouldn't know, I have Netflix).
Depending how broadly you want to look at it, DRM would have positive uses too. Smart cards with digital e-cash? That'd require DRM, in my view. Of course, at the moment the technology just isn't there, as all current DRM schemes can be hacked given enough time and energy.
At first this looks like DECSS all over again but with the key on an RFID tag.
DeCSS could have worked years ago, when writable DVDs were expensive. But now that I can get a dual layer writable DVD for 3 or 4 bucks, it's too easy to just bit copy the whole damn thing.
RFID tags are even cheaper, more like 30 or 40 cents. The writers themselves are expensive, but if this plan actually goes into action I bet you'll see the price of RFID writers come down real quick, which, hey, at least there'll be good to come out of it.
This technology could conceivably be used for good. Imagine a player with a hard disk as well as a network card. It could auto-download interviews, making-of documentaries and so on as they get released after the DVD ships.
You don't need RFID technology to do that. And without tamper-proof hardware, which is allegedly physically impossible, you're not going to stop piracy, because it only takes one person to break into the device and reverse engineer it.
Of course this is the end of privacy. The RFID tag has to be unique to each copy of the disk, otherwise you could copy it wholesale.
I seriously doubt the RIAA is going to be able to outlaw paying for DVDs with cash.
When the player phones home with the RFID info, they know who bought the disk and maybe even how often it gets played.
I also doubt they're going to force DVD manufacturers to build players that "phone home".
Ah, lemme think on that one...how about knowing something about the product they're pitching at you?
The booth babes don't do any of the pitching.
In fact, I'd actually like to know how they get away with this in the first place. Hiring someone with no relevant jobs skills, and no knowledge of the product based on how they look IS discrimination.
Sure it is, but discrimination isn't illegal unless you're discriminating based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Uh, no. Say I apply for a job at NASA, and they reject my application because I have no education in or of rocket science. Is that discrimination?
Of course it is. You're discriminating against people with no eduction in or of rocket science. You don't seem to know what discrimination means. What do you think it means?
Just a guess by your comments of feeling worthless. So why do you feel worthless, exactly?
I win when women stop being treated like pieces of meat by the gaming industry.
How does that make you win?
I specified women, because the article was about women, not men. Show me an article about the way men are mistreated and used and ignored by the gaming industry...
First you show me an article about the way women are mistreated and used and ignored by the gaming industry. All I see is some women who are hired because of their attractiveness or lack of attractiveness. You seem to imply that women are being treated "like pieces of meat". If all you mean is that some women are hired because they are attractive, well, I don't see the problem with that. It's no worse than hiring someone because they're smart, or can run fast, or can lift heavy objects.
That said, I really don't see what the problem is.
Well, according to the story, the problem is not that women are being exploited, but that "booth babes take attention away from the games". Having never been to an expo I'm not sure if I agree or not, but I can see the theory - people go around saying "wow, look at that booth babe" instead of "wow, look at those graphics".
Aww, but you got your +4, Insightful, so now you must feel worthy again.
Give me a break. For one thing, I don't see "dumb" or "smart" anywhere in the story, that's your own prejudice coming out. And why did you say they should hire women, not people? In fact, the job of the "booth babe" could probably be eliminated completely, if not the entire Expo. The whole thing is just a marketing scheme. Don't take it so seriously.
I know you were probably joking, but anyone who actually sold their shares at those high prices will have to give back the money (actually, they never got the money in the first place, as settlement is 3 days after the actual trade).
NASDAQ has a policy on "Clearly Erroneous Transactions".
Huh? I thought the price in the blurb said how high the exaggerated prices were listed. And even if $950 isn't unheard of, there aren't 1680 stocks that high. (You also might have figured it out by the fact that it said the prices were exaggerated, or by reading the article)
So which is it? "Work towards something better" or "live with the fact"?
It's both. We have to work towards something better, and in the mean time make the best with what we've got.
You switched to a broker with inferior online service (to err is human--I've done the same).
For a 90% lower commission, hell yeah.
IMHO you did the wrong thing...instead of complaining about the non-compliant website and moving to another broker if there was no action taken to correct the deficiency, you decided to resurrect a buggy, insecure browser to use for your (most likely critical) financial transactions.
Once again you seem to see things as all or nothing. Life just doesn't work that way. Yes, I'd like to have $1 trades and be able to use firefox with an HTML trading platform, but I can't have both. So in the end, I go with $1 trades and I'll use the java trading platform, and I'll work on building my own HTML platform using the API that IB offers. In the end I'm better off using the API and building my own platform anyway, it's one of the reasons I switched. This way, I can set up a system which I can use at work without typing my password into my work computer. That's more secure anyway, and I think it's a little bit paranoid to worry about someone somehow stealing money from my brokerage just because I use IE.
When my bank updated their website a couple years ago and broke some of the functionality I let them know I was no longer going to use their online services until the problem was resolved--then I opened up an account with a competing bank that not only had a branch 2 blocks away, but also had a web banking site that worked with Mozilla browsers
That's good, and if it was just a matter of a bank account I'd do the same thing. Banks are a dime a dozen, it's easy to find a bank with no fees or minimums that supports Firefox. But finding a brokerage firm that offers trading for $0.01 a share with only $1/trade minimum that works with Firefox is a whole lot harder (well, sort of, IB works with Firefox if you use the Java applet, and they also have a standalone java program, I would just prefer not to use java).
With the money I'm saving in commissions, I could buy a computer just for trading, and run just IE on it and nothing else. I'm not going to do that, because I'm not that paranoid about IE, but I could.
By "living with the fact" of the current situation, rolling over and using IE you condone those sloppy practices.
I guess I do. If the company can save money by not offering a version of their WebTrader that works with Firefox, then I'm fine with that. Like I said, I'd rather use the API anyway. But until I've got that up and running, it's between using IE and java, and I'm not sure which I'm going to choose - both suck.
I hope in the very least you made Interactive Broker aware of the problem.
They're already aware of it. They specifically say that "This service currently requires Internet Explorer 6 to operate."
If anything in OSS can be complained about, it's the relatively poor amount of testing that seems to get done.
I'm not sure that's true of OSS any more than any other software, at least not for released products. The difference with OSS is that it's pretty much impossible to have a limited alpha/beta/prelease product, since once you've distributed the product to one person there's nothing stopping them from redistributing it to everyone on the planet.
Things like the dual-boot bug in Fedora last year should not happen.
I don't use Fedora, so I just know what I've read from a quick google search, but it seems like this was a case of prerelease code. If you're running prerelease code, then you shouldn't expect it to be bug free, in fact, you should fully expect it to destroy everything you have on your system.
Where does Slashdot say that it will provide a fair and balanced view of technology? Where does the site claim to be a source of unbiased journalistic excellence?
I believe that's right next to the place that it says that no one may comment negatively about anything that Slashdot does.
Isn't it incumbent upon all readers of all internet media to identify bias and understand what they're reading, and the viewpoint that it's coming from?
Of course it is, but that doesn't mean that all internet media should add in as much bias as possible. And it certainly doesn't mean that one shouldn't point out bias when one sees it.
Generally, Firefox is significantly better at rendering pages as they are intended as it complies much better with the CSS standard than IE.
You say that as though the two are synonymous. They're not. People don't design websites to comply with standards, they design websites to look right in the web browsers.
If all web browsers followed web standards and good design practices we would have just a small fraction of the problems we hae today.
If all web browsers always followed web standards we probably wouldn't have a web today. Where do you think we'd be if the makers of Mosaic had waited for the official adoption of the div tag before they implemented center?
Linux is inferior at games compared to Windows, and "we live in a Windows world" so should we just give up on Linux, sit back and deal with a virus infested, poorly architected system like Windows?
Of course not. We should work toward a better system, but in the mean time we have to live with the fact that Linux is not a complete solution.
Firefox is almost there. There are still a few sites which won't work in it, though. I just recently disabled IE on my system, and I'm about to re-enable it, because the brokerage firm I just switched to (Interactive Brokers) doesn't support anything but IE. I'll try getting my agent string to lie, but if that doesn't work I'm gonna have to re-enable IE.
However, if I've got a robogun on MY property, it's none of YOUR business.
Whether or not it is your property in the first place is my business. Just because your great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather stuck a flag in some plot of land doesn't mean that you can do anything you want with any creature that happens to wander onto that plot of land. The concept of real property itself is a social agreement involving laws against doing certain things which don't necessarily harm anyone.
Farming, yes, but not raising of animals for slaughter. Most of us would have to change our diets, as meat would become a delicacy as it was in the past, but there's no reason elimination of farm-raised meat products would cause society to starve.
Therefore, interestingly enough, conservation demands that we hunt more deer.
In other words, we're the cure for the problem we've created. People don't want to live next to a pack of wolves, so they kill all the wolves. Then the deer become a problem so they kill all of them. All this so they can live in the country, with all the wildlife.
Another poster is right that you're missing other alternatives. Not killing the wolves and still living there is one. Not living in the forest in the first place is another. Yes, killing everything in the forest and turning it into a sprawling metropolis is one option, but it's not the one which would be characterized as conservation-friendly.
You're talking about Timothy. I don't think he ever looked at the links. Anyway, I wonder what else the Slashdot editors have to do, and how much they're getting paid for this. Even if they do a good job they do what, sort through a bunch of spam and pick out 5-10 interesting stories a day? Sounds like 1 or 2 hours of work a day which could be done from anywhere in the world that has internet access, and that's assuming really quality due diligence (which I highly doubt we see). Moreover, there is very little skill involved and lots of people would be willing to do this for free. I really hope subscription payments aren't going to pay these people.
Anyway, I still like slashdot over all. It's not really the official editors that make the site, it's everyone else who submits the content for free. It'd be nice if we could convince everyone to switch to some other site, a free one of course, but it'd be hard to make that happen.
I know Slashdot isn't a shining example of HTML compliance either
Nuff said.
That "Logout" link has a side effect of going to it, and it's a GET.
I'll say it anyway. It shouldn't.
At the most basic level, even tracking "how many people have seen this page" is an effect of loading it, that is affected by undesired prefetching. Keeping track of which pages are most recently accessed to handle server side caching of dynamic content is an effect of loading a page, even when no data on the page is changed. At what point do you draw the line between when a request changes something or not?
I'd draw the line somewhere between incrementing a counter and deleting content. Counters and server side cashing hints are known to be approximate measures. Sure, you're breaking the spec, but you're doing so knowing full well that it might mess things up, and that's OK.
All that said, I don't like what google is doing with the precashing either. I'd consider it a violation of the Robot Exclusion Standard to visit links without checking robots.txt first. This is arguable, as precashing isn't exactly the same as other web spiders, but I'd say it falls under the standard.
If you can delete content by following a link, then this is a major security hole. Any website could easily embed such a link into java, javascript, even just an image link. Someone could send you an email with an image referencing the link. This is one place you should be following the spec. If you're making an important side-effect, use POST.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean like reducing actors' pay to $500 and filming the movies at the director's house in a single day?
Surely there's a happy medium. Armagedden cost $140 million to make. Pi cost $68,000. Sure, Armageddon grossed 62 times as much, but it cost 2000 times as much to make.
With digital photography, the costs to make a movie are going down dramatically. The top actors might not be willing to take a pay cut, but there are plenty of excellent actors that would work for less than $10 million.
Because the difference in the number of movies made, the budgets for each movie, and the number of copies that need to be viewed/sold to make a profit, there's no way the film industry can model itself after the porn industry.
Sure they could. They could make more movies, have smaller budgets, and release on cheap media like DVD.
Netflix has 3 million subscribers. HBO has 30 million. People are willing to pay for movies, just not the $10 or whatever theatres are charging these days (I wouldn't know, I have Netflix).
I don't see anything there that allows me to exercise fair-use.
If by fair-use you mean making a perfect digital copy, well, that's the point.
Depending how broadly you want to look at it, DRM would have positive uses too. Smart cards with digital e-cash? That'd require DRM, in my view. Of course, at the moment the technology just isn't there, as all current DRM schemes can be hacked given enough time and energy.
At first this looks like DECSS all over again but with the key on an RFID tag.
DeCSS could have worked years ago, when writable DVDs were expensive. But now that I can get a dual layer writable DVD for 3 or 4 bucks, it's too easy to just bit copy the whole damn thing.
RFID tags are even cheaper, more like 30 or 40 cents. The writers themselves are expensive, but if this plan actually goes into action I bet you'll see the price of RFID writers come down real quick, which, hey, at least there'll be good to come out of it.
This technology could conceivably be used for good. Imagine a player with a hard disk as well as a network card. It could auto-download interviews, making-of documentaries and so on as they get released after the DVD ships.
You don't need RFID technology to do that. And without tamper-proof hardware, which is allegedly physically impossible, you're not going to stop piracy, because it only takes one person to break into the device and reverse engineer it.
Of course this is the end of privacy. The RFID tag has to be unique to each copy of the disk, otherwise you could copy it wholesale.
I seriously doubt the RIAA is going to be able to outlaw paying for DVDs with cash.
When the player phones home with the RFID info, they know who bought the disk and maybe even how often it gets played.
I also doubt they're going to force DVD manufacturers to build players that "phone home".
Ah, lemme think on that one...how about knowing something about the product they're pitching at you?
The booth babes don't do any of the pitching.
In fact, I'd actually like to know how they get away with this in the first place. Hiring someone with no relevant jobs skills, and no knowledge of the product based on how they look IS discrimination.
Sure it is, but discrimination isn't illegal unless you're discriminating based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Uh, no. Say I apply for a job at NASA, and they reject my application because I have no education in or of rocket science. Is that discrimination?
Of course it is. You're discriminating against people with no eduction in or of rocket science. You don't seem to know what discrimination means. What do you think it means?
How do mod points constitute winning?
Just a guess by your comments of feeling worthless. So why do you feel worthless, exactly?
I win when women stop being treated like pieces of meat by the gaming industry.
How does that make you win?
I specified women, because the article was about women, not men. Show me an article about the way men are mistreated and used and ignored by the gaming industry...
First you show me an article about the way women are mistreated and used and ignored by the gaming industry. All I see is some women who are hired because of their attractiveness or lack of attractiveness. You seem to imply that women are being treated "like pieces of meat". If all you mean is that some women are hired because they are attractive, well, I don't see the problem with that. It's no worse than hiring someone because they're smart, or can run fast, or can lift heavy objects.
That said, I really don't see what the problem is.
Well, according to the story, the problem is not that women are being exploited, but that "booth babes take attention away from the games". Having never been to an expo I'm not sure if I agree or not, but I can see the theory - people go around saying "wow, look at that booth babe" instead of "wow, look at those graphics".
Aww, but you got your +4, Insightful, so now you must feel worthy again.
Give me a break. For one thing, I don't see "dumb" or "smart" anywhere in the story, that's your own prejudice coming out. And why did you say they should hire women, not people? In fact, the job of the "booth babe" could probably be eliminated completely, if not the entire Expo. The whole thing is just a marketing scheme. Don't take it so seriously.
In case IHBT, good job, you win.
That's not only an insult, it's also discrimination. How about just hiring people who are qualified for the job?
Wouldn't that be discrimination?
Most trading networks have in place some sort of clearly erroneous trade policy, so that the trade can be cancelled before settlement.
I know you were probably joking, but anyone who actually sold their shares at those high prices will have to give back the money (actually, they never got the money in the first place, as settlement is 3 days after the actual trade).
NASDAQ has a policy on "Clearly Erroneous Transactions".
Huh? I thought the price in the blurb said how high the exaggerated prices were listed. And even if $950 isn't unheard of, there aren't 1680 stocks that high. (You also might have figured it out by the fact that it said the prices were exaggerated, or by reading the article)
So which is it? "Work towards something better" or "live with the fact"?
It's both. We have to work towards something better, and in the mean time make the best with what we've got.
You switched to a broker with inferior online service (to err is human--I've done the same).
For a 90% lower commission, hell yeah.
IMHO you did the wrong thing...instead of complaining about the non-compliant website and moving to another broker if there was no action taken to correct the deficiency, you decided to resurrect a buggy, insecure browser to use for your (most likely critical) financial transactions.
Once again you seem to see things as all or nothing. Life just doesn't work that way. Yes, I'd like to have $1 trades and be able to use firefox with an HTML trading platform, but I can't have both. So in the end, I go with $1 trades and I'll use the java trading platform, and I'll work on building my own HTML platform using the API that IB offers. In the end I'm better off using the API and building my own platform anyway, it's one of the reasons I switched. This way, I can set up a system which I can use at work without typing my password into my work computer. That's more secure anyway, and I think it's a little bit paranoid to worry about someone somehow stealing money from my brokerage just because I use IE.
When my bank updated their website a couple years ago and broke some of the functionality I let them know I was no longer going to use their online services until the problem was resolved--then I opened up an account with a competing bank that not only had a branch 2 blocks away, but also had a web banking site that worked with Mozilla browsers
That's good, and if it was just a matter of a bank account I'd do the same thing. Banks are a dime a dozen, it's easy to find a bank with no fees or minimums that supports Firefox. But finding a brokerage firm that offers trading for $0.01 a share with only $1/trade minimum that works with Firefox is a whole lot harder (well, sort of, IB works with Firefox if you use the Java applet, and they also have a standalone java program, I would just prefer not to use java).
With the money I'm saving in commissions, I could buy a computer just for trading, and run just IE on it and nothing else. I'm not going to do that, because I'm not that paranoid about IE, but I could.
By "living with the fact" of the current situation, rolling over and using IE you condone those sloppy practices.
I guess I do. If the company can save money by not offering a version of their WebTrader that works with Firefox, then I'm fine with that. Like I said, I'd rather use the API anyway. But until I've got that up and running, it's between using IE and java, and I'm not sure which I'm going to choose - both suck.
I hope in the very least you made Interactive Broker aware of the problem.
They're already aware of it. They specifically say that "This service currently requires Internet Explorer 6 to operate."
If anything in OSS can be complained about, it's the relatively poor amount of testing that seems to get done.
I'm not sure that's true of OSS any more than any other software, at least not for released products. The difference with OSS is that it's pretty much impossible to have a limited alpha/beta/prelease product, since once you've distributed the product to one person there's nothing stopping them from redistributing it to everyone on the planet.
Things like the dual-boot bug in Fedora last year should not happen.
I don't use Fedora, so I just know what I've read from a quick google search, but it seems like this was a case of prerelease code. If you're running prerelease code, then you shouldn't expect it to be bug free, in fact, you should fully expect it to destroy everything you have on your system.
Where does Slashdot say that it will provide a fair and balanced view of technology? Where does the site claim to be a source of unbiased journalistic excellence?
I believe that's right next to the place that it says that no one may comment negatively about anything that Slashdot does.
Isn't it incumbent upon all readers of all internet media to identify bias and understand what they're reading, and the viewpoint that it's coming from?
Of course it is, but that doesn't mean that all internet media should add in as much bias as possible. And it certainly doesn't mean that one shouldn't point out bias when one sees it.
Generally, Firefox is significantly better at rendering pages as they are intended as it complies much better with the CSS standard than IE.
You say that as though the two are synonymous. They're not. People don't design websites to comply with standards, they design websites to look right in the web browsers.
If all web browsers followed web standards and good design practices we would have just a small fraction of the problems we hae today.
If all web browsers always followed web standards we probably wouldn't have a web today. Where do you think we'd be if the makers of Mosaic had waited for the official adoption of the div tag before they implemented center?
Linux is inferior at games compared to Windows, and "we live in a Windows world" so should we just give up on Linux, sit back and deal with a virus infested, poorly architected system like Windows?
Of course not. We should work toward a better system, but in the mean time we have to live with the fact that Linux is not a complete solution.
Firefox is almost there. There are still a few sites which won't work in it, though. I just recently disabled IE on my system, and I'm about to re-enable it, because the brokerage firm I just switched to (Interactive Brokers) doesn't support anything but IE. I'll try getting my agent string to lie, but if that doesn't work I'm gonna have to re-enable IE.
Because it's good troll fodder to elicit the response "see, IE sucks, use something secure like Firefox".
However, if I've got a robogun on MY property, it's none of YOUR business.
Whether or not it is your property in the first place is my business. Just because your great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather stuck a flag in some plot of land doesn't mean that you can do anything you want with any creature that happens to wander onto that plot of land. The concept of real property itself is a social agreement involving laws against doing certain things which don't necessarily harm anyone.
Farming is the only way to feed a civilization.
Farming, yes, but not raising of animals for slaughter. Most of us would have to change our diets, as meat would become a delicacy as it was in the past, but there's no reason elimination of farm-raised meat products would cause society to starve.
Banning a robotic gun is just like banning steroids in baseball.
You mean, something which the government shouldn't get involved in?
Therefore, interestingly enough, conservation demands that we hunt more deer.
In other words, we're the cure for the problem we've created. People don't want to live next to a pack of wolves, so they kill all the wolves. Then the deer become a problem so they kill all of them. All this so they can live in the country, with all the wildlife.
Another poster is right that you're missing other alternatives. Not killing the wolves and still living there is one. Not living in the forest in the first place is another. Yes, killing everything in the forest and turning it into a sprawling metropolis is one option, but it's not the one which would be characterized as conservation-friendly.
You're talking about Timothy. I don't think he ever looked at the links. Anyway, I wonder what else the Slashdot editors have to do, and how much they're getting paid for this. Even if they do a good job they do what, sort through a bunch of spam and pick out 5-10 interesting stories a day? Sounds like 1 or 2 hours of work a day which could be done from anywhere in the world that has internet access, and that's assuming really quality due diligence (which I highly doubt we see). Moreover, there is very little skill involved and lots of people would be willing to do this for free. I really hope subscription payments aren't going to pay these people.
Anyway, I still like slashdot over all. It's not really the official editors that make the site, it's everyone else who submits the content for free. It'd be nice if we could convince everyone to switch to some other site, a free one of course, but it'd be hard to make that happen.
I know Slashdot isn't a shining example of HTML compliance either
Nuff said.
That "Logout" link has a side effect of going to it, and it's a GET.
I'll say it anyway. It shouldn't.
At the most basic level, even tracking "how many people have seen this page" is an effect of loading it, that is affected by undesired prefetching. Keeping track of which pages are most recently accessed to handle server side caching of dynamic content is an effect of loading a page, even when no data on the page is changed. At what point do you draw the line between when a request changes something or not?
I'd draw the line somewhere between incrementing a counter and deleting content. Counters and server side cashing hints are known to be approximate measures. Sure, you're breaking the spec, but you're doing so knowing full well that it might mess things up, and that's OK.
All that said, I don't like what google is doing with the precashing either. I'd consider it a violation of the Robot Exclusion Standard to visit links without checking robots.txt first. This is arguable, as precashing isn't exactly the same as other web spiders, but I'd say it falls under the standard.
If you can delete content by following a link, then this is a major security hole. Any website could easily embed such a link into java, javascript, even just an image link. Someone could send you an email with an image referencing the link. This is one place you should be following the spec. If you're making an important side-effect, use POST.