Take Two's management woes are not automatically Rockstar's problem. They're a subsidiary, not a department.
It's the same company. Read the article. Rockstar is not just a subsidiary, and the problems are not only Take 2's.
I used to work there, so I'm saying this from first-hand experience as well. The article is pretty much dead-on, and while a lot of the "former employees" are not named, their quotes sound 100% believable to me (and I have my suspicions who they are).
Implicit in the article but not fully explored is the fact that nearly 100% of the company has turned over in the past 4 years (including myself). Some of us left because we saw the writing on the wall, others for personal reasons. But almost all of the people that made that company what it originally was are now gone.
SKU stands for "stock keeping unit". It has an actual meaning and proper use, but it's always struck me as ludicrous to use it outside of a store stockroom.
When I was in high school (and this was 20 years ago now), I worked as a stockboy in an electronics store. We used "SKU" the way it was intended, just as stockboys probably still do now. Every product has a "SKU number" used like a UPC code to track stock counts, and that eventually got shorthanded to refer to the product itself. (Note that I'm not contradicting you, just adding a little more info.)
It's always annoyed me when I see this in regular life, just like I see games now referred to as "IP's". In most cases, it's a vain attempt at looking "hip", as if you're cool enough to throw around industry-speak. Usually, though, the true origins of such terms come from marketdroids, lawyers, or worse.
There's no reason even for an analyst to use the term "SKU". They're not tracking stock. It actually would make somewhat more sense to use UPC as a generic term meaning "product model". I think terms like this are always annoying, though, and would much prefer it if everybody could just settle on plain English outside of their work environment. Why do all of our casual conversations have to include so much meaningless industry jargon?
"Model" is a perfectly fine word to use. #7 definition at dictionary.com: "a style or design of a particular product". There's no reason to repurpose industry acronyms when we have perfectly meaningful English words already. Unless you REALLY don't have time to utter that extra syllable.
A better description would have been the "mythical '640k' remark", because he never said it.
Nobody can ever cite a source for this alleged quote, and in the absence of such a source, you have to take his word for it. It's impossible to prove a negative; that's how urban legends start in the first place.
(If he did say it, don't you think someone would have figured out the where and when?)
Well, that sounds nice, and maybe even sounds intuitive. However, is there really any evidence that a human can land a plane without engines any better than a computer can?
Not the issue.
The issue is machines are only as perfect as the humans that design, build, and program them. Did you know that right now, the software that controls all of the computerized system on every airplane you fly is operating with a series of documented, unpatched bugs? All of them have workarounds and none have been judged dangerous or the airplane would have been grounded. But there have been cases where software bugs have caused incidents and even accidents. There have been many more cases where design or manufacturing flaws in some other non-computerized airplane system has caused an incident or accident. It's the pilots job in those cases to take over and save lives.
One of the examples I can give you is United flight 232, which was caused by a manufacturing defect that led to the loss of all three hydraulic systems - something the airplane's designers thought would be impossible. It also happened while in a turn, locking the plane's ailerons in a turn position and almost causing the plane to nose over within the first 30 seconds. In such a case, no computer would even be able to diagnose the problem, let alone come up with an undocumented solution to controlling the airplane as the pilots did. In the end, because of the pilots' actions in figuring out how to get to an airport (and almost making a clean landing), 174 out of 285 people survived what would surely have been a nosedive into the ground under computer control.
Computers can only be programmed to anticipate problems that the software designers themselves have anticipated, and to use an airplane's systems in the way the software designers tell it to in advance. The problem is, mechanical or software problems that lead to an accident can never be anticipated - if they could have been, the plane wouldn't be flying. There was no procedure for what to do in the case of full hydraulic loss in a DC-10; the pilots made one up as they went along. A pilot's advantage is being able to use reason in diagnosing problems and coming up with solutions to those problems. Decision-making is what a pilot is paid to do. Computers don't make decisions; they follow instructions, and that only works when those instructions can actually be applied to any given situation.
It's probably worth noting what the auto-pilot does when there's a problem with the plane: it shuts itself off. That's what it's programmed to do.
The point YOU keep making is there are more features on the TiVo.
The point I am making is that those extra features aren't important.
They are important when you're dealing with video rather than music.
The really important thing that either Apple failed to realize or just discounted for whatever reason is that while there has always been something of a defacto standard in music formats (mp3), there has never been a similar standard in video formats. They are now trying to impose h.264 as a standard, while supporting their own earlier QuickTime formats, but seriously - other than stuff you've purchased on iTunes (which can't be that much because they don't offer that much), how much video do you really have stored in these formats?
Mac owners probably have more than PC owners but even they probably have all sorts of.wmv and other files lying around. PC owners have a mixture of divx, xvid,.wmv, avi files of various types, some quicktimes, some mp4's, some mpeg1 and 2's, etc.
What would be "easiest" for most people would be to have a device that supports all of these formats equally, so they don't even need to think about video formats anymore. What Apple is doing is not easy; they're forcing you to ensure that all of your video is in a format that they support, either through transcoding or by purchasing it from them.
If the Apple TV supported all of these formats and supported up to 1080p through HDMI, then yes, you'd have a useful device there. As it is, it is not a very useful device, nor is it particularly easy to use for anybody that already has a lot of video on their computers.
I mean, when you have to hack the thing to get it to recognize the most popular downloadable video format on PC, something is not right.
Actually, from every source I've ever read/watched, etc. militarily we were winning the war (read: kicking some serious ass).
We were "militarily" winning the war by our standards, which were not the same as either the Viet Cong's or the NVA's standards. They were also winning the war by their standards. Their military goal was to kill as many of us as possible and eventually drive us out. Which they did.
Military is strategic as well as tactical. What you're forgetting is the strategic element, which is different from the political element. Tactically, we were running rampant all over the battlefield, and that convinced some that we were winning. But our military strategy was fatally flawed in the face of an enemy whose counter-strategy was to feign retreat and then infiltrate and kill using sneak attacks. We thought we were winning; they knew we weren't. It was in fact their strategy to convince us we were winning in order to provide them with easier targets, and they were pretty successful at it.
The "we would have won if not for all the hippies" argument is not one that has ever held any water. We could have stayed there forever and we would have never secured that country. Imagine Iraq today, only around 10 times worse (and statistically, it was), and actually devolving rather than improving the more years went by, the more troops we poured in and the more bombs we dropped. After 30 continuous years of escalating conflict, what military strategy would have changed that result?
With an Apple product, "no word" definitely means it doesn't play them.
Well, but there's not "no word". There's specific word that it doesn't play them direct from Apple itself. It syncs with iTunes; that's what it does. It supports h.264 and QuickTime, which is what iTunes supports. That's what it plays.
Maybe eventually somebody will figure out how to hack it to play divx, but out of the box, it definitely doesn't. A simple look at the AppleTV product page would tell you that. The submitter apparently doesn't know how to read.
Telling them 'go ask the old guys how they used to do it' is NOT the answer.
Bullshit. That's always the answer.
What you're saying is exactly the same thing as all those "new media" types who in 2000 said "oh, the economy works different now" and "we don't need profits to be successful" because that was the old way of doing things.
I mean, not to equate economics with rocket science (although they actually are similar in some ways) but the point is in almost every field you get people who come in and think they can do better with no experience and only a little knowledge than guys who have been doing it for decades and have both extensive knowledge and tons of real-world experience. But real life does not work like that. Experience does count, almost certainly more than even book knowledge.
NASA has obviously had their share of failures, but they've also had thousands more successes than any private space enterprise. People forget that. How many payloads have been successfully launched into space by any private company to this point? How many by NASA? NASA's got about a 99.5% success rate with their manned missions and probably around a 95% success rate with their unmanned missions.
I'm not saying private entities shouldn't try. I do agree with you on that. But the answer is not to keep trying to reinvent the wheel, nor is the answer throwing away 50 years of experience in successful space flight simply because you'd have to ask a bunch of "old guys" how they "used to do it". These guys should be trying to build upon NASA's success and emulating what they can while streamlining the rest; they shouldn't be ignoring all we've learned about space flight to this point.
For the couple of hundreds of dollars and a bit of time, it will increase the value of your home by more than a 1000 AND make it easier to sell.
No it won't. There's no return on an investment in wiring your house for ethernet. Everybody knows these days that they can just run wireless. If anything, it can even decrease the value of your house, because people don't like to see a bunch of extra jacks and wires cluttering up every room, especially if they're not planning to use them. It's not one of those neutral to good upgrades, it can be a negative.
I just bought my house last year so I'm saying this from both first-hand and second-hand experience. A couple of houses we looked at had a lot of holes drilled in their walls and they said it was for ethernet cable; we told them that was a negative for us and our agent said we were not the only ones who felt that way. People just don't like seeing either holes or unfamiliar wall jacks; even with a jack, a lot of older people just don't even know how they'd use it.
Anyway, unless you have a newer house and do it all yourself, it's going to be more than a "couple hundred" dollars to wire your house regardless. My house has thick, 80 year old plaster walls. It took a master electrician several hours of hard drilling and digging just to run a power line along one of my walls shortly after we first moved in. And then I had a bunch of big holes in my wall that needed to be resurfaced. Wiring a house like this up yourself would take quite a while and be really hard work. Paying somebody to do it would cost thousands, making it an even worse investment.
If you do wire your house, do it for yourself, not for a potential buyer.
I've got a few Ethernet cables lying around the living room, so I can plug in wherever.
Doesn't sound like your house is gonna win any design awards.
I mean look, people. Not all of us want wires "lying around the room", in literally every room of the house. With wireless, both my wife and I (that'd be two cables per room at least) can use our computers in the living room, the dining room, all bedrooms, the office, the backyard, the kitchen, the basement, and the front porch. And we do. And we do it without having a bunch of extra clutter and without having to spend thousands of dollars ripping down our plaster walls (not drywall) to run wires. That'd be one of the worst home improvement investments I could think of; you're never getting that money back. I'd rather spend that money towards a new kitchen or bathroom.
100 lines, 12000000 lines, 10 lines, SCO wasn't flat out lying. They found something. That something might be enough to win the suit (maybe not a billion).
They only win the suit if they can somehow convince the judge that none of IBM's licenses apply, including the GPL. And if they convince the judge that the GPL doesn't apply, then they are now liable for the 700,000 lines of IBM code that SCO has appropriated.
If criminals are mostly stupid, why do most crimes go unsolved?
Because most crimes are not serious enough to devote the manpower to solving. It may sound crass, but that's the reality. If you wake up one day and find some kids have knocked your mailbox off its post with a baseball bat overnight, do you expect your local police to form a task force to solve the crime through DNA evidence? These types of crimes make up the bulk of crime in this country - petty offenses that often get an afternoon's worth of investigation by a cop knocking on doors, if that.
Serious crimes have a higher clearance rate, though still too low - again, because our crime rates are higher than other industrialized countries and we don't have the manpower to clear them all. Our clearance rate for murder, for example, is around 64% - still well over 50% (your "most" crimes threshold) but below Japan's 96% clearance rate for the same crime.
I think the latter, though, pretty conclusively proves that most criminals are dumb enough to get caught - unless you believe Japanese criminals are dumber than American ones (wouldn't their cops be too, then?). The vast majority of criminal cases could be solved through simple effort and legwork, but often those are resources that are not readily available.
Imaging all the Japanese who don't know English, but have to learn/type english domain names. Very unintuitive for them.
Bad example.
The Japanese are probably the *least* likely of any non-English speaking country to use non-roman url's. The fact is the standard Japanese keyboard is the same exact QWERTY keyboard we use. They can type Japanese through software, which is how they normally work when writing to each other, but there's nothing "non-intuitive" in using an English keyboard in the way that it was intended. In fact, most of them write Japanese using romanizations, then select the correct kanji through a list. So they're universally familiar with romanized url's, and like any habit, it's not going to change just because an alternative became available. Typing kanji is harder on a Japanese computer than typing a romanization.
Now, the Chinese, Russians, etc. I don't know about, so there could be better examples out there of people who would take advantage of this.
But the thing that was most ridiculous about this scene was that it was a bus. It's one thing when a Charger jumps a gap with a ramp. A bus, even going very fast, is going to have plenty of time where its front end is falling while the back end is still supported and even going up on the ramp. The result is going to be angular momentum imparted to the bus. So what should have happened is the front end of the bus dipped down faster than the center of mass, causing it to miss the lower section and end up landing upside down on the ground below.
Well, but you do realize they did actually jump a bus, right? This scene was not done through CGI or with a helicopter towing a bus over the gap. The bus really jumped through speed and momentum alone. The gap was not there - it was added later digitally (or rather, the freeway was erased) - but the bus did jump that distance.
Granted, it was a) a specially modified stunt bus on a ramp, and b) pretty much totally destroyed by the jump. But it's proof that you can jump a bus. It would not behave exactly as you describe. Keep in mind most buses are back-heavy, so with enough speed to keep the bus relatively level as it went over the ramp, the rear would actually drop as it moved through the air, not the front. With a short enough jump (as is all a bus is really capable of), the bus would probably come close to landing on all four wheels when all is said and done.
(Side-note - according to Wikipedia, they actually had to shoot the jump twice because on the first shot, the bus made the jump too smoothly, which supports what I'm saying above.)
If I punch a punching bag, the bag moves but I don't. That is because my fist has the energy which transfers to the bag.
But an equal amount of energy is transferred back to you in the opposite direction (remember "equal and opposite reaction"). When you hit something, which side is traveling at what speed doesn't matter, only their energy relative to each other. So you're absorbing the same amount of energy as you're dishing out. That's why your hand hurts when you hit the punching bag too.
With a small amount of force, you can easily brace yourself against the ground and your body and the ground then absorb that energy. With enough force to knock somebody across the room, though, you'd probably break a few bones before you'd get the ground to absorb all that energy. More likely, though, you'd lose your own balance and go flying yourself. Either way, it's not going to be pretty for you.
This is one of those things where it's easy enough to suspend disbelief, though, because a trained fighter knows the proper bracing techniques, and the line where it gets to be impossible isn't completely clear. At a certain point, though, it does get a little ridiculous.
Sure, he's a noob. That DT-MRI of gray matter paths in your brain based on diffusion tensors is purely the stuff of rank amateurs!
Being a research scientist doesn't necessarily qualify someone as having a photographer's eye. Nobody's saying the guy couldn't research circles around any of us. What the parent poster said is his de-noise filter is way too aggressive and obscures image detail. That appears to be true, at least judging by the settings he's using for his demo shots.
Sufficiently advanced noise is indistinguishable from the stuff that comes out of a cheap imaging device
Not really true, because the noise that comes out of any imaging device (cheap or otherwise) is not random. It fits a particular profile that's unique to that model of device, or even that particular unit. Advanced photo filtering algorithms (including those used in the in-camera processors that convert raw image data to jpg image files) use that individual profile to filter noise. They're not trying to figure out what's noise and what isn't on the fly, which is at best an imperfect science, and that's being charitable. They have a good idea before they even look at an image what the noise is going to look like, so they do a better job of removing it without sacrificing detail.
The more advanced filters like NeatImage are also almost infinitely configurable in what noise they go after and where, and how aggressive they are. Now, this guy's algorithm seems to be pretty configurable as well, so maybe he just didn't use very good settings himself on most of his image demos, and the algorithm is actually capable of better results. He does seem like he's a better scientist than image-maker so that's entirely possible.
It would be interesting to see what could be done with this if it was given an intuitive GUI and put in the hands of some real photographers. (Yes, even real photographers have to shoot at ISO 800 and above occasionally, and would benefit from noise reduction that actually works without sacrificing detail.)
The description in the summary did have me wondering. Wasabi is not really a "paste", and the real Japanese condiment does not exhibit the properties of a liquid. It's more like the consistency of slightly damp clay powder. It would almost seem like the perfect condiment to take into space because it's not liquid enough to spill, nor is it solid or powdery enough for the granules to get into anything (like, say, salt would).
But if it's really just colored horseradish, that would explain things. Horseradish doesn't need to be a liquid either but it typically is when packaged as a condiment.
I guess my point is, it sounds like the solution to this problem is for NASA to upgrade the quality of their wasabi!
I bought the Samsung player exactly for that reason. OGG support was a great thing - at 64kbps it sounds better than a 128kbps mp3 (IMHO). That means I can stick twice the music on the player!
I suppose if you're happy, that's all that matters, but your personal opinion doesn't really hold up against a double blind test. The summary:
The first (obvious) conclusion is: No codec delivers the marketing plot of same quality as MP3 at half the bitrates. Lame MP3 at 128kbps wins, followed by Ahead/Nero HE AAC on 2nd place, CodingTechnologies' MP3pro on 3rd place, Ogg Vorbis on 4th place, Real Audio, QuickTime AAC and WMA9 tied near the middle of the graph, and FhG MP3 definitely at the bottom.
I just get sick of this continuing myth that any modern lossy compression format can sound "twice as good" as any other, or "just as good" at half the bit rate. No proper test has ever borne any of that out, and in fact, it seems like more often than not the formats touted as the best end up doing the worst in these tests. mp3 always seems to come out near the top even when comparing at the same bit rate, at worst in the middle, despite being among the "oldest" formats of the bunch.
I still only buy used CDs, they are cheaper and still let me make DRM free MP3s.
Exactly. The DRM argument, in my opinion, has really mostly been one about value. You have this thing called music, which you then need to turn into a commercial product. That means either creating a physical thing that contains the music, or making a file that can be downloaded/streamed/stored/whatever. How you do either or both of those things determines the resulting worth, and what you then charge for the end product determines the value of a purchase. In other words, it's the set price in relation to the product's worth that determines value.
Ditching DRM instantly raises the value of any downloadable track because you can now do more things with it for the same price. You can keep a copy in your car, another at your office and another in your living room. You can transfer it to any number of portable devices. The music industry hates this, but for the consumer, that makes the file a lot more valuable than if it were locked down. That means there should be more sales.
The problem is downloadable files still need to compete with CD's, which despite a few high profile cases are still relatively DRM-free and as close to archival quality as you're going to get. Their intrinsic worth is higher than even a DRM-free downloadable track for most people, both because of the physical packaging (including liner notes, photos, etc.) and because of the quality. So you can't take a CD album and a downloadable album and charge the same amount, even without DRM on either one. The CD will win out every time.
Ditching DRM is a good first step in raising the value of downloadable music. But there is still a disconnect between the amount that's normally being charged for downloaded tracks and the amount that they're actually worth. That's somewhat subjective but also somewhat not, because we do have the CD to compare to, and CD's are often less than $10 these days with 10-15 tracks or more. (Of course, that's assuming you want all those songs, but a lot of us still like to buy full albums.)
In order for me to really start buying downloaded music, one of two things (or probably a bit of both) will have to happen:
a) the prices will have to come down significantly
and/or
b) the quality and included features will have to go up significantly.
(That's assuming no DRM; the inclusion of DRM is a deal-breaker regardless of anything else.)
But I think the fact is those of us who have been railing against DRM have put our money where our mouths are, by continuing to buy CD's. The question is if the music industry realizes that the DRM argument is less a political or idealistic argument than a value argument. If they do, then they will know that this is just the first step in righting their sinking ship. If they don't, then they're going to continue to wonder why music sales are in the toilet, throw up their hands and say "we tried!" and get even more militant about converting their business model into one of endless litigation rather than music promotion.
Call me a pessimist, but I think I know which answer's gonna turn out to be true.
I suspect that the problem actors have is with the fact that as the effects people get better, will they be necessary at all?
I think from the actors' point of view, there's a more immediate and realistic concern. The fact is actors are judged based on their performances, and this directly affects their ability to find work. When you mess with an actors' performance after the fact, you're directly messing with their livelihood.
It's like if you had any other job, you do your work properly and your boss comes in and makes a whole bunch of changes to it but then still presents it to the board of directors as your work. The changes your boss made may or may not have been improvements, but would you feel comfortable having it still presented as yours? What if he went through and replaced all the instances of the term "CEO" in your presentation with the word "Asshole"? I mean you have no way of knowing, nor do you have any control over it. But your name is still attached to it.
Now, you can look at a guy like Tom Cruise, who for whatever reason makes $20 million per movie, and say "boo-hoo, cry me a river." But the fact is most actors don't make that much money. A lot of smaller actors barely make more than scale, and they may only work part of the year (the rest of the year, they're looking for work). So I can definitely see where they'd be uncomfortable with a director "altering" their performance after the film was shot.
To an extent, you can argue that this has always been done through editing, through lighting or other special effects (some of which are applied in post-production), or whatever, but up to this point, none of these things have been applied *directly* to an actor's performance, i.e. if you wanted a limp out of an actor, then that actor had better learn to limp convincingly. That's his/her job. Now the question is not whether or not the actor is doing his/her job well, but whether the effects guys are doing theirs - except that the actor's the one that's still going to bear responsibility for the performance in the end, and it's going to be hard to judge what is and isn't actually part of that performance.
Miyamoto use to be absolutely godlike in his ability to come up with enduring gameplay elements in his games. It is so sad to see him now pretty much just towing the Nintendo line
It's pretty difficult to be a rebel when you are the one in authority.
As Miyamoto says, he's no longer a Nintendo employee. He's on the board of directors. He's also the head of EAD.
He's not "toeing Nintendo's line", Nintendo's toeing his line. I don't think some people realize how powerful he is. He has nearly as much authority on paper as Iwata and probably more in practice, because CEO's come and go but the loss of Miyamoto would be devastating to the company. He is not just a game designer. He is one of Nintendo's top executives, and he oversees all game development for the entire company as well as most hardware development.
The buyer (customers) clearly knew that this deal was too good and an error. Any reasonable person would think so. In this case, the buyer is at fault for knowingly taking advantage of the seller (Amazon) and the seller's unintended sale at this discount. Any judge would find in favor of the seller in this situation.
Doubtful. The FTC considers an order "properly completed" when payment is made based on the invoice price. At that point, no unilateral changes can be made - it's a binding contract accepted by both sides. (Mail order companies are free to make price changes and correct mistakes *before* a card is charged and the order shipped, but not after.)
I'm not exactly sure how or when orders with an invoice price of "0.00" are considered properly completed, but I would guess at the time the order ships. That would constitute acceptance of the contract. Obviously, any order shipped based on some "small amount" (as mentioned in the article summary) would be properly completed at the time of the original charge.
I don't see that legally Amazon has much of a leg to stand on here. You can't assume every customer was knowingly out to rip off Amazon, and even if they were, it was Amazon's mistake in not catching their own pricing error before completing these orders. It would be one thing if they put a stop on all the orders before shipping and emailed everybody that they'd need to adjust the prices - that happens all the time, and is the legal way to fix mistakes - but that's not what happened here. Amazon legally accepted these orders as correct and shipped the merchandise. At that point, the legal onus is no longer on the customer.
If they are smart (and if the MPAA even give them another chance), the powerdvd/windvd authors will reimplement their AACS decryption code to never store the keys in memory. Without double-checking, I believe the keys are only 128 bits, they could be loaded into the SSE registers in encrypted form and then decrypted on chip. The authors will still need to take measures to prevent an OS context switch from storing the registers in kernel-private memory during the period in which the device keys are present, but that is not an extended period of time, presumably they can kick their priority up high enough that it won't happen without hurting the system much.
And the solution the Doom9 guys will use to defeat this?
Don't upgrade to the new PowerDVD.
The cat's out of the bag. You can't put it back in now. The new key will be discovered even more easily than the old key, so there's no point even bothering with a key revocation.
Your solution may make some future DRM scheme for a new media format a little more secure, but it's effectively over for AACS.
Slashdot Mirror
Take Two's management woes are not automatically Rockstar's problem. They're a subsidiary, not a department.
It's the same company. Read the article. Rockstar is not just a subsidiary, and the problems are not only Take 2's.
I used to work there, so I'm saying this from first-hand experience as well. The article is pretty much dead-on, and while a lot of the "former employees" are not named, their quotes sound 100% believable to me (and I have my suspicions who they are).
Implicit in the article but not fully explored is the fact that nearly 100% of the company has turned over in the past 4 years (including myself). Some of us left because we saw the writing on the wall, others for personal reasons. But almost all of the people that made that company what it originally was are now gone.
...just not a common term for it.
SKU stands for "stock keeping unit". It has an actual meaning and proper use, but it's always struck me as ludicrous to use it outside of a store stockroom.
When I was in high school (and this was 20 years ago now), I worked as a stockboy in an electronics store. We used "SKU" the way it was intended, just as stockboys probably still do now. Every product has a "SKU number" used like a UPC code to track stock counts, and that eventually got shorthanded to refer to the product itself. (Note that I'm not contradicting you, just adding a little more info.)
It's always annoyed me when I see this in regular life, just like I see games now referred to as "IP's". In most cases, it's a vain attempt at looking "hip", as if you're cool enough to throw around industry-speak. Usually, though, the true origins of such terms come from marketdroids, lawyers, or worse.
There's no reason even for an analyst to use the term "SKU". They're not tracking stock. It actually would make somewhat more sense to use UPC as a generic term meaning "product model". I think terms like this are always annoying, though, and would much prefer it if everybody could just settle on plain English outside of their work environment. Why do all of our casual conversations have to include so much meaningless industry jargon?
"Model" is a perfectly fine word to use. #7 definition at dictionary.com: "a style or design of a particular product". There's no reason to repurpose industry acronyms when we have perfectly meaningful English words already. Unless you REALLY don't have time to utter that extra syllable.
Like the now-legendary '640k' remark
A better description would have been the "mythical '640k' remark", because he never said it.
Nobody can ever cite a source for this alleged quote, and in the absence of such a source, you have to take his word for it. It's impossible to prove a negative; that's how urban legends start in the first place.
(If he did say it, don't you think someone would have figured out the where and when?)
Well, that sounds nice, and maybe even sounds intuitive. However, is there really any evidence that a human can land a plane without engines any better than a computer can?
Not the issue.
The issue is machines are only as perfect as the humans that design, build, and program them. Did you know that right now, the software that controls all of the computerized system on every airplane you fly is operating with a series of documented, unpatched bugs? All of them have workarounds and none have been judged dangerous or the airplane would have been grounded. But there have been cases where software bugs have caused incidents and even accidents. There have been many more cases where design or manufacturing flaws in some other non-computerized airplane system has caused an incident or accident. It's the pilots job in those cases to take over and save lives.
One of the examples I can give you is United flight 232, which was caused by a manufacturing defect that led to the loss of all three hydraulic systems - something the airplane's designers thought would be impossible. It also happened while in a turn, locking the plane's ailerons in a turn position and almost causing the plane to nose over within the first 30 seconds. In such a case, no computer would even be able to diagnose the problem, let alone come up with an undocumented solution to controlling the airplane as the pilots did. In the end, because of the pilots' actions in figuring out how to get to an airport (and almost making a clean landing), 174 out of 285 people survived what would surely have been a nosedive into the ground under computer control.
Computers can only be programmed to anticipate problems that the software designers themselves have anticipated, and to use an airplane's systems in the way the software designers tell it to in advance. The problem is, mechanical or software problems that lead to an accident can never be anticipated - if they could have been, the plane wouldn't be flying. There was no procedure for what to do in the case of full hydraulic loss in a DC-10; the pilots made one up as they went along. A pilot's advantage is being able to use reason in diagnosing problems and coming up with solutions to those problems. Decision-making is what a pilot is paid to do. Computers don't make decisions; they follow instructions, and that only works when those instructions can actually be applied to any given situation.
It's probably worth noting what the auto-pilot does when there's a problem with the plane: it shuts itself off. That's what it's programmed to do.
The point YOU keep making is there are more features on the TiVo.
.wmv and other files lying around. PC owners have a mixture of divx, xvid, .wmv, avi files of various types, some quicktimes, some mp4's, some mpeg1 and 2's, etc.
The point I am making is that those extra features aren't important.
They are important when you're dealing with video rather than music.
The really important thing that either Apple failed to realize or just discounted for whatever reason is that while there has always been something of a defacto standard in music formats (mp3), there has never been a similar standard in video formats. They are now trying to impose h.264 as a standard, while supporting their own earlier QuickTime formats, but seriously - other than stuff you've purchased on iTunes (which can't be that much because they don't offer that much), how much video do you really have stored in these formats?
Mac owners probably have more than PC owners but even they probably have all sorts of
What would be "easiest" for most people would be to have a device that supports all of these formats equally, so they don't even need to think about video formats anymore. What Apple is doing is not easy; they're forcing you to ensure that all of your video is in a format that they support, either through transcoding or by purchasing it from them.
If the Apple TV supported all of these formats and supported up to 1080p through HDMI, then yes, you'd have a useful device there. As it is, it is not a very useful device, nor is it particularly easy to use for anybody that already has a lot of video on their computers.
I mean, when you have to hack the thing to get it to recognize the most popular downloadable video format on PC, something is not right.
Actually, from every source I've ever read/watched, etc. militarily we were winning the war (read: kicking some serious ass).
We were "militarily" winning the war by our standards, which were not the same as either the Viet Cong's or the NVA's standards. They were also winning the war by their standards. Their military goal was to kill as many of us as possible and eventually drive us out. Which they did.
Military is strategic as well as tactical. What you're forgetting is the strategic element, which is different from the political element. Tactically, we were running rampant all over the battlefield, and that convinced some that we were winning. But our military strategy was fatally flawed in the face of an enemy whose counter-strategy was to feign retreat and then infiltrate and kill using sneak attacks. We thought we were winning; they knew we weren't. It was in fact their strategy to convince us we were winning in order to provide them with easier targets, and they were pretty successful at it.
The "we would have won if not for all the hippies" argument is not one that has ever held any water. We could have stayed there forever and we would have never secured that country. Imagine Iraq today, only around 10 times worse (and statistically, it was), and actually devolving rather than improving the more years went by, the more troops we poured in and the more bombs we dropped. After 30 continuous years of escalating conflict, what military strategy would have changed that result?
Read your history.
Indeed.
With an Apple product, "no word" definitely means it doesn't play them.
Well, but there's not "no word". There's specific word that it doesn't play them direct from Apple itself. It syncs with iTunes; that's what it does. It supports h.264 and QuickTime, which is what iTunes supports. That's what it plays.
Maybe eventually somebody will figure out how to hack it to play divx, but out of the box, it definitely doesn't. A simple look at the AppleTV product page would tell you that. The submitter apparently doesn't know how to read.
Telling them 'go ask the old guys how they used to do it' is NOT the answer.
Bullshit. That's always the answer.
What you're saying is exactly the same thing as all those "new media" types who in 2000 said "oh, the economy works different now" and "we don't need profits to be successful" because that was the old way of doing things.
I mean, not to equate economics with rocket science (although they actually are similar in some ways) but the point is in almost every field you get people who come in and think they can do better with no experience and only a little knowledge than guys who have been doing it for decades and have both extensive knowledge and tons of real-world experience. But real life does not work like that. Experience does count, almost certainly more than even book knowledge.
NASA has obviously had their share of failures, but they've also had thousands more successes than any private space enterprise. People forget that. How many payloads have been successfully launched into space by any private company to this point? How many by NASA? NASA's got about a 99.5% success rate with their manned missions and probably around a 95% success rate with their unmanned missions.
I'm not saying private entities shouldn't try. I do agree with you on that. But the answer is not to keep trying to reinvent the wheel, nor is the answer throwing away 50 years of experience in successful space flight simply because you'd have to ask a bunch of "old guys" how they "used to do it". These guys should be trying to build upon NASA's success and emulating what they can while streamlining the rest; they shouldn't be ignoring all we've learned about space flight to this point.
For the couple of hundreds of dollars and a bit of time, it will increase the value of your home by more than a 1000 AND make it easier to sell.
No it won't. There's no return on an investment in wiring your house for ethernet. Everybody knows these days that they can just run wireless. If anything, it can even decrease the value of your house, because people don't like to see a bunch of extra jacks and wires cluttering up every room, especially if they're not planning to use them. It's not one of those neutral to good upgrades, it can be a negative.
I just bought my house last year so I'm saying this from both first-hand and second-hand experience. A couple of houses we looked at had a lot of holes drilled in their walls and they said it was for ethernet cable; we told them that was a negative for us and our agent said we were not the only ones who felt that way. People just don't like seeing either holes or unfamiliar wall jacks; even with a jack, a lot of older people just don't even know how they'd use it.
Anyway, unless you have a newer house and do it all yourself, it's going to be more than a "couple hundred" dollars to wire your house regardless. My house has thick, 80 year old plaster walls. It took a master electrician several hours of hard drilling and digging just to run a power line along one of my walls shortly after we first moved in. And then I had a bunch of big holes in my wall that needed to be resurfaced. Wiring a house like this up yourself would take quite a while and be really hard work. Paying somebody to do it would cost thousands, making it an even worse investment.
If you do wire your house, do it for yourself, not for a potential buyer.
I've got a few Ethernet cables lying around the living room, so I can plug in wherever.
Doesn't sound like your house is gonna win any design awards.
I mean look, people. Not all of us want wires "lying around the room", in literally every room of the house. With wireless, both my wife and I (that'd be two cables per room at least) can use our computers in the living room, the dining room, all bedrooms, the office, the backyard, the kitchen, the basement, and the front porch. And we do. And we do it without having a bunch of extra clutter and without having to spend thousands of dollars ripping down our plaster walls (not drywall) to run wires. That'd be one of the worst home improvement investments I could think of; you're never getting that money back. I'd rather spend that money towards a new kitchen or bathroom.
Why wouldn't you run wireless?
100 lines, 12000000 lines, 10 lines, SCO wasn't flat out lying. They found something. That something might be enough to win the suit (maybe not a billion).
They only win the suit if they can somehow convince the judge that none of IBM's licenses apply, including the GPL. And if they convince the judge that the GPL doesn't apply, then they are now liable for the 700,000 lines of IBM code that SCO has appropriated.
So, no, they can't win.
If criminals are mostly stupid, why do most crimes go unsolved?
Because most crimes are not serious enough to devote the manpower to solving. It may sound crass, but that's the reality. If you wake up one day and find some kids have knocked your mailbox off its post with a baseball bat overnight, do you expect your local police to form a task force to solve the crime through DNA evidence? These types of crimes make up the bulk of crime in this country - petty offenses that often get an afternoon's worth of investigation by a cop knocking on doors, if that.
Serious crimes have a higher clearance rate, though still too low - again, because our crime rates are higher than other industrialized countries and we don't have the manpower to clear them all. Our clearance rate for murder, for example, is around 64% - still well over 50% (your "most" crimes threshold) but below Japan's 96% clearance rate for the same crime.
I think the latter, though, pretty conclusively proves that most criminals are dumb enough to get caught - unless you believe Japanese criminals are dumber than American ones (wouldn't their cops be too, then?). The vast majority of criminal cases could be solved through simple effort and legwork, but often those are resources that are not readily available.
Imaging all the Japanese who don't know English, but have to learn/type english domain names. Very unintuitive for them.
Bad example.
The Japanese are probably the *least* likely of any non-English speaking country to use non-roman url's. The fact is the standard Japanese keyboard is the same exact QWERTY keyboard we use. They can type Japanese through software, which is how they normally work when writing to each other, but there's nothing "non-intuitive" in using an English keyboard in the way that it was intended. In fact, most of them write Japanese using romanizations, then select the correct kanji through a list. So they're universally familiar with romanized url's, and like any habit, it's not going to change just because an alternative became available. Typing kanji is harder on a Japanese computer than typing a romanization.
Now, the Chinese, Russians, etc. I don't know about, so there could be better examples out there of people who would take advantage of this.
But the thing that was most ridiculous about this scene was that it was a bus. It's one thing when a Charger jumps a gap with a ramp. A bus, even going very fast, is going to have plenty of time where its front end is falling while the back end is still supported and even going up on the ramp. The result is going to be angular momentum imparted to the bus. So what should have happened is the front end of the bus dipped down faster than the center of mass, causing it to miss the lower section and end up landing upside down on the ground below.
Well, but you do realize they did actually jump a bus, right? This scene was not done through CGI or with a helicopter towing a bus over the gap. The bus really jumped through speed and momentum alone. The gap was not there - it was added later digitally (or rather, the freeway was erased) - but the bus did jump that distance.
Granted, it was a) a specially modified stunt bus on a ramp, and b) pretty much totally destroyed by the jump. But it's proof that you can jump a bus. It would not behave exactly as you describe. Keep in mind most buses are back-heavy, so with enough speed to keep the bus relatively level as it went over the ramp, the rear would actually drop as it moved through the air, not the front. With a short enough jump (as is all a bus is really capable of), the bus would probably come close to landing on all four wheels when all is said and done.
(Side-note - according to Wikipedia, they actually had to shoot the jump twice because on the first shot, the bus made the jump too smoothly, which supports what I'm saying above.)
If I punch a punching bag, the bag moves but I don't. That is because my fist has the energy which transfers to the bag.
But an equal amount of energy is transferred back to you in the opposite direction (remember "equal and opposite reaction"). When you hit something, which side is traveling at what speed doesn't matter, only their energy relative to each other. So you're absorbing the same amount of energy as you're dishing out. That's why your hand hurts when you hit the punching bag too.
With a small amount of force, you can easily brace yourself against the ground and your body and the ground then absorb that energy. With enough force to knock somebody across the room, though, you'd probably break a few bones before you'd get the ground to absorb all that energy. More likely, though, you'd lose your own balance and go flying yourself. Either way, it's not going to be pretty for you.
This is one of those things where it's easy enough to suspend disbelief, though, because a trained fighter knows the proper bracing techniques, and the line where it gets to be impossible isn't completely clear. At a certain point, though, it does get a little ridiculous.
Sure, he's a noob. That DT-MRI of gray matter paths in your brain based on diffusion tensors is purely the stuff of rank amateurs!
Being a research scientist doesn't necessarily qualify someone as having a photographer's eye. Nobody's saying the guy couldn't research circles around any of us. What the parent poster said is his de-noise filter is way too aggressive and obscures image detail. That appears to be true, at least judging by the settings he's using for his demo shots.
Sufficiently advanced noise is indistinguishable from the stuff that comes out of a cheap imaging device
Not really true, because the noise that comes out of any imaging device (cheap or otherwise) is not random. It fits a particular profile that's unique to that model of device, or even that particular unit. Advanced photo filtering algorithms (including those used in the in-camera processors that convert raw image data to jpg image files) use that individual profile to filter noise. They're not trying to figure out what's noise and what isn't on the fly, which is at best an imperfect science, and that's being charitable. They have a good idea before they even look at an image what the noise is going to look like, so they do a better job of removing it without sacrificing detail.
The more advanced filters like NeatImage are also almost infinitely configurable in what noise they go after and where, and how aggressive they are. Now, this guy's algorithm seems to be pretty configurable as well, so maybe he just didn't use very good settings himself on most of his image demos, and the algorithm is actually capable of better results. He does seem like he's a better scientist than image-maker so that's entirely possible.
It would be interesting to see what could be done with this if it was given an intuitive GUI and put in the hands of some real photographers. (Yes, even real photographers have to shoot at ISO 800 and above occasionally, and would benefit from noise reduction that actually works without sacrificing detail.)
FYI Most space wasabi is actually horseradish.
The description in the summary did have me wondering. Wasabi is not really a "paste", and the real Japanese condiment does not exhibit the properties of a liquid. It's more like the consistency of slightly damp clay powder. It would almost seem like the perfect condiment to take into space because it's not liquid enough to spill, nor is it solid or powdery enough for the granules to get into anything (like, say, salt would).
But if it's really just colored horseradish, that would explain things. Horseradish doesn't need to be a liquid either but it typically is when packaged as a condiment.
I guess my point is, it sounds like the solution to this problem is for NASA to upgrade the quality of their wasabi!
I suppose if you're happy, that's all that matters, but your personal opinion doesn't really hold up against a double blind test. The summary:
I just get sick of this continuing myth that any modern lossy compression format can sound "twice as good" as any other, or "just as good" at half the bit rate. No proper test has ever borne any of that out, and in fact, it seems like more often than not the formats touted as the best end up doing the worst in these tests. mp3 always seems to come out near the top even when comparing at the same bit rate, at worst in the middle, despite being among the "oldest" formats of the bunch.
I still only buy used CDs, they are cheaper and still let me make DRM free MP3s.
Exactly. The DRM argument, in my opinion, has really mostly been one about value. You have this thing called music, which you then need to turn into a commercial product. That means either creating a physical thing that contains the music, or making a file that can be downloaded/streamed/stored/whatever. How you do either or both of those things determines the resulting worth, and what you then charge for the end product determines the value of a purchase. In other words, it's the set price in relation to the product's worth that determines value.
Ditching DRM instantly raises the value of any downloadable track because you can now do more things with it for the same price. You can keep a copy in your car, another at your office and another in your living room. You can transfer it to any number of portable devices. The music industry hates this, but for the consumer, that makes the file a lot more valuable than if it were locked down. That means there should be more sales.
The problem is downloadable files still need to compete with CD's, which despite a few high profile cases are still relatively DRM-free and as close to archival quality as you're going to get. Their intrinsic worth is higher than even a DRM-free downloadable track for most people, both because of the physical packaging (including liner notes, photos, etc.) and because of the quality. So you can't take a CD album and a downloadable album and charge the same amount, even without DRM on either one. The CD will win out every time.
Ditching DRM is a good first step in raising the value of downloadable music. But there is still a disconnect between the amount that's normally being charged for downloaded tracks and the amount that they're actually worth. That's somewhat subjective but also somewhat not, because we do have the CD to compare to, and CD's are often less than $10 these days with 10-15 tracks or more. (Of course, that's assuming you want all those songs, but a lot of us still like to buy full albums.)
In order for me to really start buying downloaded music, one of two things (or probably a bit of both) will have to happen:
a) the prices will have to come down significantly
and/or
b) the quality and included features will have to go up significantly.
(That's assuming no DRM; the inclusion of DRM is a deal-breaker regardless of anything else.)
But I think the fact is those of us who have been railing against DRM have put our money where our mouths are, by continuing to buy CD's. The question is if the music industry realizes that the DRM argument is less a political or idealistic argument than a value argument. If they do, then they will know that this is just the first step in righting their sinking ship. If they don't, then they're going to continue to wonder why music sales are in the toilet, throw up their hands and say "we tried!" and get even more militant about converting their business model into one of endless litigation rather than music promotion.
Call me a pessimist, but I think I know which answer's gonna turn out to be true.
I suspect that the problem actors have is with the fact that as the effects people get better, will they be necessary at all?
I think from the actors' point of view, there's a more immediate and realistic concern. The fact is actors are judged based on their performances, and this directly affects their ability to find work. When you mess with an actors' performance after the fact, you're directly messing with their livelihood.
It's like if you had any other job, you do your work properly and your boss comes in and makes a whole bunch of changes to it but then still presents it to the board of directors as your work. The changes your boss made may or may not have been improvements, but would you feel comfortable having it still presented as yours? What if he went through and replaced all the instances of the term "CEO" in your presentation with the word "Asshole"? I mean you have no way of knowing, nor do you have any control over it. But your name is still attached to it.
Now, you can look at a guy like Tom Cruise, who for whatever reason makes $20 million per movie, and say "boo-hoo, cry me a river." But the fact is most actors don't make that much money. A lot of smaller actors barely make more than scale, and they may only work part of the year (the rest of the year, they're looking for work). So I can definitely see where they'd be uncomfortable with a director "altering" their performance after the film was shot.
To an extent, you can argue that this has always been done through editing, through lighting or other special effects (some of which are applied in post-production), or whatever, but up to this point, none of these things have been applied *directly* to an actor's performance, i.e. if you wanted a limp out of an actor, then that actor had better learn to limp convincingly. That's his/her job. Now the question is not whether or not the actor is doing his/her job well, but whether the effects guys are doing theirs - except that the actor's the one that's still going to bear responsibility for the performance in the end, and it's going to be hard to judge what is and isn't actually part of that performance.
Yeah. At best they are SO.
I'm pretty sure you mean SOL.
Or is it SOB?
Miyamoto use to be absolutely godlike in his ability to come up with enduring gameplay elements in his games. It is so sad to see him now pretty much just towing the Nintendo line
It's pretty difficult to be a rebel when you are the one in authority.
As Miyamoto says, he's no longer a Nintendo employee. He's on the board of directors. He's also the head of EAD.
He's not "toeing Nintendo's line", Nintendo's toeing his line. I don't think some people realize how powerful he is. He has nearly as much authority on paper as Iwata and probably more in practice, because CEO's come and go but the loss of Miyamoto would be devastating to the company. He is not just a game designer. He is one of Nintendo's top executives, and he oversees all game development for the entire company as well as most hardware development.
The buyer (customers) clearly knew that this deal was too good and an error. Any reasonable person would think so. In this case, the buyer is at fault for knowingly taking advantage of the seller (Amazon) and the seller's unintended sale at this discount. Any judge would find in favor of the seller in this situation.
Doubtful. The FTC considers an order "properly completed" when payment is made based on the invoice price. At that point, no unilateral changes can be made - it's a binding contract accepted by both sides. (Mail order companies are free to make price changes and correct mistakes *before* a card is charged and the order shipped, but not after.)
I'm not exactly sure how or when orders with an invoice price of "0.00" are considered properly completed, but I would guess at the time the order ships. That would constitute acceptance of the contract. Obviously, any order shipped based on some "small amount" (as mentioned in the article summary) would be properly completed at the time of the original charge.
I don't see that legally Amazon has much of a leg to stand on here. You can't assume every customer was knowingly out to rip off Amazon, and even if they were, it was Amazon's mistake in not catching their own pricing error before completing these orders. It would be one thing if they put a stop on all the orders before shipping and emailed everybody that they'd need to adjust the prices - that happens all the time, and is the legal way to fix mistakes - but that's not what happened here. Amazon legally accepted these orders as correct and shipped the merchandise. At that point, the legal onus is no longer on the customer.
Source?
Here: http://www.emusic.com/
If they are smart (and if the MPAA even give them another chance), the powerdvd/windvd authors will reimplement their AACS decryption code to never store the keys in memory. Without double-checking, I believe the keys are only 128 bits, they could be loaded into the SSE registers in encrypted form and then decrypted on chip. The authors will still need to take measures to prevent an OS context switch from storing the registers in kernel-private memory during the period in which the device keys are present, but that is not an extended period of time, presumably they can kick their priority up high enough that it won't happen without hurting the system much.
And the solution the Doom9 guys will use to defeat this?
Don't upgrade to the new PowerDVD.
The cat's out of the bag. You can't put it back in now. The new key will be discovered even more easily than the old key, so there's no point even bothering with a key revocation.
Your solution may make some future DRM scheme for a new media format a little more secure, but it's effectively over for AACS.