For those not paying attention: Remember those bands they threw together on TV? 5 girls? and the 3 girls, 2 guys? Scandalous? Well, the members of the BAND paid for the music video to be made. This includes the food on the set, costumes, and everything. This is why they didn't make a cent. They slogged their asses off for weeks and came out of it with next to nothing. They even had to give back the flashy clothes. This is how it works. The money is recouped, yes, but it is the artist who pays for it - and they have no say in making it or promoting it.
What about unrelease songs?
on
Online Revenge
·
· Score: 1
Okay, let's change this a little: Let's say you buy a musician's laptop and it has an UNRELEASED song on it. Who ownes it? Who guy who made the song? or you? Released songs.. sure. Whomever claims the copyright first. You just have a copy. Unreleased works.. not sure, I am not a lawyer.
In other news, the Microsoft automotive line was revealed today. The cars run great when they run (which is occasionally) and come with an optional $50 annual subscription fee that provides
door and boot locks.
Well, close enough. The software to cars analogies never really work. I wonder how much power locks and a zapper would cost?
I'm glad you asked! (I didn't have time to go into it earlier)
We (the developers) did not notice because the websrv process only went to 100% capacity (30% of the CPU) when the SAS websrv crashed - which is not often. Also, this process was 'low priority' and was constantly trumped by most other jobs. A situation where during the day programmer compiles take a lot of the CPU (plus online systems), and at night.. no one noticed 30% of the CPU not being available.
On the old machine it did not *cost* too much for this process to be running wild. However.. when we upgraded the machine (and got slugged by software vendors for increases in *their* cut) the amount of CPU (Read: money) that this application was taking was finally noticed. Around this time we actually got a hold of a few people to come together in a 'performance management team' to look into these problems.
This highlights another point: When you scale your server up (in terms of CPU's, ram, etc) some software houses will demand more from you to run their software. See Oracle and SQL Server for good examples here. While most software can only scale so far you will find that software vendors will say anything to get you to increase your licences.
Thanks for the troll! I forgot that I was going to get back to this comment:)
And now, since no one's going to read this post anyway since this topic is long gone.. let's continue..
Since the Performance Management guys joined our team I've seen a lot more of the 'other side' of programming than I ever knew existed. We outsource to IBM for everything not directly related to what we need to program with (they supply the desktops, upgrade the utilities, maintain the mainframe and midrange boxes, etc etc etc. We program applications). There's a whole world of tweaking and tinkering that goes on around the corner from us programmers. The question originally asked here was 'how does your application scale and what does it use'. This is the question that our Performance guys ask every day.. however they don't say 'let's add another 8 CPU's!'.. they are more likely to say 'which program can be fix so that it is more efficient. What can we tweak to make better use of what we have got now?'. It's these guys that management go to before they upgrade a machine. This post is dedicated to Tony and The Guys - Thanks for the education. It's because of these guys that I am no longer a programmer and I am enjoying life in Operations.
If someone left their terminal open (and we had nice 19" sun monitors too - Solaris 5 box back then) it was granted that for a first offense someone would change your background picture or similar.
For a second offense your window scheme would be reset or changed to a very garlish effect.. think neon pink on aqua. A message may be left in a text window noting that the terminal was left unlocked.
For people who continually left their terminal unlocked when they left the room the usual treatment was to randomly rebind keys. eg: bind vi exit.. and so on. They would also find that their logon script had 'exit' at the end of it (force quit them):) They would then have to use FTP to grab their.cshrc, change it and put it back:)
When you do this (after the third time) you'd usually leave a logon message for them (similar to MOTD) noting that they have left their terminal unlocked (again!!):P - but only if you were a nice person. Those random key bindings could be a lot of fun.
Rules for doing this: 1) Don't ever get caught (I can't remember offhand of anyone ever been caught - it only takes a couple of minutes to apply the education needed) 2) Don't ever let someone else know it was you that did it (in our labs you didn't say who did the reconfigure.. mostly because *anyone* would have:P) 3) Don't ever do it to someone.. and then leave your terminal unlocked. It's just asking for it:) 4) Don't actually damage their files, delete stuff or do anything really bad
You do have an on-topic point there: What happens to humans when we use advanced technology?
Right now people are trialling mobile phones to see if they damage our ears or brains. We quite possibly could be mutated by the radiation emmited by all of this technology - even by what we use right now (do NOT use a Nokia 5110 for more than a 10 minute conversation!). Who knows what future devices will do to us.
- Going on with the book - Yes, I agree, it was a rather weak conclusion to a rather excellent series. I was really hoping for a tighter ending. You could see a lot of it coming, including the Orlando Incident.. but I can't fault the author. I think he was searching for a 'nice' way to tie up all of the plot threads and bring them together.
In terms of how he represented the 'net: I really like the news exerpts and extra details. Sometimes it is the scenery that makes the story far more immersable. I see how Second Life could be the start of the 'net as he saw it. The only difference is that they have Nodes they cross; otherwise it's basically there - you just need the VR immersion now:)
We had a small (Os/390) Dev box that was upgraded recently. One thing we noticed was that one application (SAS Websrv) was taking 30% CPU at some times. When we upgraded the box (and moved to ZOS) this was much more noticable. (please don't ask why it wasn't noticed before the upgrade). Funnily enough.. no one really noticed on the older machine, but we noticed pretty quickly on the new one.
The moral of the story is: You're not just scaling up your effeciency / work load. You are also scaling up the other variables as well.
If you think it's fun watching a little OS/390 LPAR flogging itself silly (max 30% for the Websrv task), just wait until you see the look on the Performance Team's faces when that 30% finally gets noticed:-) **
** FYI: A task hogging 30% of an LPAR all of the time after the application has crashed is quite significant effect on your budget if left unchecked!
Is anyone else waiting for the 'total immersion' described in Gibson's novels and in Otherland?
I particularily liked how in Otherland they used 'old tech' that was basically a tank of gel that you had to lie in. It reinforced the gradients that the VR technology went through to get to the 'plug yourself in and go' option that most people just use everywhere (mostly - still expensive enough that not all people have it).
I'd like to disagree. MI3 was a most worthy game. I've played it through a few times now. I was hoping MI4 would be more of the same. Monkey Island 4 was a dissapointment. The game did not need to be redone in 3D. There are other issues with the game, but the inability to easily navigate around the game soon got to me and I never really got into it. I'd still like to see a 2D version of MI4... and I hope they go 2D in MI5.
I just posted saying that $54,000 is a large chunk of change to be giving up. You've just counteredd that point extremely well! Compared to the 5M other players.. yes.. this is just drop in the ocean. Here I was.. thinking that altruism may shine through.. when in reality they won't lose much at all.. and if these players are actually gold miners they will just create more accounts (meaning x2 or more times the money for the same period of time the banned accounts had left in them).
Any bets on them 'hammering' 10,000+ players?
In a related point.. how much time/effort/overhead is there in tracking them down? How come Blizzard doesn't just log how much cash is sent through the mail system or transferred from player to player? (perhaps that's how they found this lot and banned them)
Have you watched Futurama in the correct order and from the start? It's worth doing - and this is not something you can do by watching it on TV.
I've given up on TV completely. The last time I saw anything it was the first 2 episodes of Prison Break. After the third week I missed the show and am only now catching up.
A good friend of mine I used to play with used to play Quake2, Jedi Knight etc on the net and be called a bot. However, this guy is good.. really good. He goes to LANs around where he lives (small island south of Australia) and has been known to wipe the floor with an entire room full of people. It's kind of hard to claim someone is cheating when your mates are _standing behind the guys watching him_. It's a pity that some people can't handle it when a player simply is that good. I can understand them thinking you are a bot though:) Watching Jakka play is about as close to watching an AI as you could care to get. Cheers to the guys at NexusLAN and fond memories to FragMania / TerraFracta.
I have a brand new dell sitting on the desk next to me. My GF bought it one month ago. I can't hear it at all. Mine, on the other hand, drones on and on in the background.
Yep, looks good... if you have the materials, time and skill. Unfortunately I don't.. for a few reasons (starting with the hardware:) ). Right now I'm standing back to see if any new consoles will support older consoles (NES,SNES,ATARI) directly. I know it's been said many times here before.. but I'm hanging out to see what Sony and (especially) Nintendo will do. I'm willing to wait another year to see what happens. As much as I love MAME on the PC.. there's nothing like playing these games on the PC in your spare time (if you have any).
This is where Kazaa and LimeWire are actually useful. Take the pictures down from the website. Upload them to tor. Link to the TOR url. Posting to usenet is also useful, but not as good as having the images floating in P2P space.
I used to have a large collection of AMcC 'fan art'. Except for book covers and pictures I didn't have any 'official' pieces in there.
Of course, this only has 10 games on it.. but I'd expect in the future (when these games come out of copyright.. or whatever is holding them back) to see a 100 or more. I'd love to finish Pitfall2!
This quest has a combination of interesting parts. It primarily involves returning TwoFlower's luggage to him (Discorld Mud here) and as a reward he gives you the Wyrm Sword (considered quite a good weapon at the time).
The Klang quest is also worth the effort. Although.. you need to complete several quests just to attempt it, in an area you seriously wouldn't want to die in (and you can't use magic there either:) ).
These days you go to the flicks and get hammered with spoliers for 6 to 7 movies plus ads. I'm sorry I missed several good flicks because of this (I refuse to go if I've already seen all the 'good' parts). I would have liked to have seen several movies, including Go and HellBoy at the movies.. but never did. Ah well. Never mind. One day soon I'll have a home cinema and not think about it ever again.
I'd really like to see a return of the old style of advertising... where they give you an indication of what the movie is about without completely spoiling it. This is especially true when they are doing something (Superman anyone?) that everyone already knows and recognises.
While I was on holiday I picked up 'Runaway - A road adventure'. It looks like a Monkey Island type game and it was $20 so I put down some cash (as did a friend of mine) and took it home. After installing it on my SO's new computer a screen came up 'Starforce blah blah blah driver blah blah blah'. Here is where this got fun.
The new computer is a Dell. My SO decided to buy one herself and it mostly went ok. The computer arrived and she turned it on. A nice screen comes up saying 'by pressing a key you agree to Dell's EULA'. My SO works in IT. She has a two degrees. This uselss message really concerned her. The only thing that I could say to reassure her was 'no one has ever enforced an EULA in a court - so at the moment it doesn't hold water'. I dealt with this bullshit in the usual manner.
Now, getting back to this game. I got this game for her. I had to, once again, determine what this software was doing and how it would affect her PC. The new PC only has one drive - a burner. After hearing that the drive this malware 'needed' to install *may* damage it she said 'no! get rid of it!'. At this point I took the route of 'I own the game. I have the box in front of me. It's installed. Screw you assholes." and now the game works:-)
Good one Dell. Scare the hell out of people by making them think that they are going to be sued. Good one Starforce. I really should return that game to EB to make a point here. However, I do want to play the game (when she's finished:) ) and I don't think EB is at fault here, so I won't.
Thanks for the tipoff. Before I buy the Australian version I will check to see if this is also the case here. It appears that at least one of the DVD players in my house does not allow the skipping of useless junk before the movie.
Strange, since I *paid* for the DVD. It's mine. I don't see any reason why anyone should be able to prevent me from fast forwarding, skipping, or whatever at any time during playing a DVD.
If this is the case I probably won't buy it. I'll do without it thanks. I see enough of that crap at the cinema (although not so much anymore - I rarely go these days. I hate it how they show whole movies in the previews + other annoyances).
Slashdot Mirror
For those not paying attention:
Remember those bands they threw together on TV? 5 girls? and the 3 girls, 2 guys? Scandalous? Well, the members of the BAND paid for the music video to be made. This includes the food on the set, costumes, and everything. This is why they didn't make a cent. They slogged their asses off for weeks and came out of it with next to nothing. They even had to give back the flashy clothes. This is how it works. The money is recouped, yes, but it is the artist who pays for it - and they have no say in making it or promoting it.
Okay, let's change this a little:
Let's say you buy a musician's laptop and it has an UNRELEASED song on it.
Who ownes it?
Who guy who made the song? or you?
Released songs.. sure. Whomever claims the copyright first. You just have a copy. Unreleased works.. not sure, I am not a lawyer.
door and boot locks.
Well, close enough. The software to cars analogies never really work. I wonder how much power locks and a zapper would cost?
They invented Transparent Aluminum a while back.
I'm glad you asked! (I didn't have time to go into it earlier)
:)
We (the developers) did not notice because the websrv process only went to 100% capacity (30% of the CPU) when the SAS websrv crashed - which is not often. Also, this process was 'low priority' and was constantly trumped by most other jobs. A situation where during the day programmer compiles take a lot of the CPU (plus online systems), and at night.. no one noticed 30% of the CPU not being available.
On the old machine it did not *cost* too much for this process to be running wild. However.. when we upgraded the machine (and got slugged by software vendors for increases in *their* cut) the amount of CPU (Read: money) that this application was taking was finally noticed. Around this time we actually got a hold of a few people to come together in a 'performance management team' to look into these problems.
This highlights another point: When you scale your server up (in terms of CPU's, ram, etc) some software houses will demand more from you to run their software. See Oracle and SQL Server for good examples here. While most software can only scale so far you will find that software vendors will say anything to get you to increase your licences.
Thanks for the troll! I forgot that I was going to get back to this comment
And now, since no one's going to read this post anyway since this topic is long gone.. let's continue..
Since the Performance Management guys joined our team I've seen a lot more of the 'other side' of programming than I ever knew existed. We outsource to IBM for everything not directly related to what we need to program with (they supply the desktops, upgrade the utilities, maintain the mainframe and midrange boxes, etc etc etc. We program applications). There's a whole world of tweaking and tinkering that goes on around the corner from us programmers. The question originally asked here was 'how does your application scale and what does it use'. This is the question that our Performance guys ask every day.. however they don't say 'let's add another 8 CPU's!'.. they are more likely to say 'which program can be fix so that it is more efficient. What can we tweak to make better use of what we have got now?'. It's these guys that management go to before they upgrade a machine. This post is dedicated to Tony and The Guys - Thanks for the education. It's because of these guys that I am no longer a programmer and I am enjoying life in Operations.
If someone left their terminal open (and we had nice 19" sun monitors too - Solaris 5 box back then) it was granted that for a first offense someone would change your background picture or similar.
.. and so on. They would also find that their logon script had 'exit' at the end of it (force quit them) :) They would then have to use FTP to grab their .cshrc, change it and put it back :)
:P - but only if you were a nice person. Those random key bindings could be a lot of fun.
:P) :)
For a second offense your window scheme would be reset or changed to a very garlish effect.. think neon pink on aqua. A message may be left in a text window noting that the terminal was left unlocked.
For people who continually left their terminal unlocked when they left the room the usual treatment was to randomly rebind keys. eg:
bind vi exit
When you do this (after the third time) you'd usually leave a logon message for them (similar to MOTD) noting that they have left their terminal unlocked (again!!)
Rules for doing this:
1) Don't ever get caught (I can't remember offhand of anyone ever been caught - it only takes a couple of minutes to apply the education needed)
2) Don't ever let someone else know it was you that did it (in our labs you didn't say who did the reconfigure.. mostly because *anyone* would have
3) Don't ever do it to someone.. and then leave your terminal unlocked. It's just asking for it
4) Don't actually damage their files, delete stuff or do anything really bad
We had lots of fun at uni.
You do have an on-topic point there: What happens to humans when we use advanced technology?
:)
Right now people are trialling mobile phones to see if they damage our ears or brains. We quite possibly could be mutated by the radiation emmited by all of this technology - even by what we use right now (do NOT use a Nokia 5110 for more than a 10 minute conversation!). Who knows what future devices will do to us.
- Going on with the book - Yes, I agree, it was a rather weak conclusion to a rather excellent series. I was really hoping for a tighter ending. You could see a lot of it coming, including the Orlando Incident.. but I can't fault the author. I think he was searching for a 'nice' way to tie up all of the plot threads and bring them together.
In terms of how he represented the 'net: I really like the news exerpts and extra details. Sometimes it is the scenery that makes the story far more immersable. I see how Second Life could be the start of the 'net as he saw it. The only difference is that they have Nodes they cross; otherwise it's basically there - you just need the VR immersion now
We had a small (Os/390) Dev box that was upgraded recently. One thing we noticed was that one application (SAS Websrv) was taking 30% CPU at some times. When we upgraded the box (and moved to ZOS) this was much more noticable. (please don't ask why it wasn't noticed before the upgrade). Funnily enough.. no one really noticed on the older machine, but we noticed pretty quickly on the new one.
:-) **
The moral of the story is:
You're not just scaling up your effeciency / work load. You are also scaling up the other variables as well.
If you think it's fun watching a little OS/390 LPAR flogging itself silly (max 30% for the Websrv task), just wait until you see the look on the Performance Team's faces when that 30% finally gets noticed
** FYI: A task hogging 30% of an LPAR all of the time after the application has crashed is quite significant effect on your budget if left unchecked!
Is anyone else waiting for the 'total immersion' described in Gibson's novels and in Otherland?
I particularily liked how in Otherland they used 'old tech' that was basically a tank of gel that you had to lie in. It reinforced the gradients that the VR technology went through to get to the 'plug yourself in and go' option that most people just use everywhere (mostly - still expensive enough that not all people have it).
I'd like to disagree.
MI3 was a most worthy game. I've played it through a few times now. I was hoping MI4 would be more of the same.
Monkey Island 4 was a dissapointment. The game did not need to be redone in 3D. There are other issues with the game, but the inability to easily navigate around the game soon got to me and I never really got into it. I'd still like to see a 2D version of MI4... and I hope they go 2D in MI5.
I just posted saying that $54,000 is a large chunk of change to be giving up.
You've just counteredd that point extremely well! Compared to the 5M other players.. yes.. this is just drop in the ocean. Here I was.. thinking that altruism may shine through.. when in reality they won't lose much at all.. and if these players are actually gold miners they will just create more accounts (meaning x2 or more times the money for the same period of time the banned accounts had left in them).
Any bets on them 'hammering' 10,000+ players?
In a related point.. how much time/effort/overhead is there in tracking them down? How come Blizzard doesn't just log how much cash is sent through the mail system or transferred from player to player? (perhaps that's how they found this lot and banned them)
$54,000+ is a large chunk of change to be giving up for the 'good and moral path'
Have you watched Futurama in the correct order and from the start? It's worth doing - and this is not something you can do by watching it on TV.
I've given up on TV completely. The last time I saw anything it was the first 2 episodes of Prison Break. After the third week I missed the show and am only now catching up.
A good friend of mine I used to play with used to play Quake2, Jedi Knight etc on the net and be called a bot. However, this guy is good.. really good. He goes to LANs around where he lives (small island south of Australia) and has been known to wipe the floor with an entire room full of people. It's kind of hard to claim someone is cheating when your mates are _standing behind the guys watching him_. It's a pity that some people can't handle it when a player simply is that good. I can understand them thinking you are a bot though :) Watching Jakka play is about as close to watching an AI as you could care to get. Cheers to the guys at NexusLAN and fond memories to FragMania / TerraFracta.
I have a brand new dell sitting on the desk next to me. My GF bought it one month ago. I can't hear it at all. Mine, on the other hand, drones on and on in the background.
Yep, looks good... if you have the materials, time and skill. Unfortunately I don't.. for a few reasons (starting with the hardware :) ). Right now I'm standing back to see if any new consoles will support older consoles (NES,SNES,ATARI) directly. I know it's been said many times here before.. but I'm hanging out to see what Sony and (especially) Nintendo will do. I'm willing to wait another year to see what happens. As much as I love MAME on the PC.. there's nothing like playing these games on the PC in your spare time (if you have any).
This is where Kazaa and LimeWire are actually useful. Take the pictures down from the website. Upload them to tor. Link to the TOR url. Posting to usenet is also useful, but not as good as having the images floating in P2P space.
I used to have a large collection of AMcC 'fan art'. Except for book covers and pictures I didn't have any 'official' pieces in there.
When in doubt ask google.
I feel sorry for the artist in this case (if this is true).
Can we rate people 'Grammar Nazi' - perhaps have their name highlighted in red and underlined with a wavey line?
... and here's the link: http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules/
:)
Now, the only question is..
Does it run linux? (so it can emulate Big Iron)
Right here: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000645DD/ 103-2487623-3561400
Of course, this only has 10 games on it.. but I'd expect in the future (when these games come out of copyright.. or whatever is holding them back) to see a 100 or more. I'd love to finish Pitfall2!
This quest has a combination of interesting parts. It primarily involves returning TwoFlower's luggage to him (Discorld Mud here) and as a reward he gives you the Wyrm Sword (considered quite a good weapon at the time).
:) ).
The Klang quest is also worth the effort. Although.. you need to complete several quests just to attempt it, in an area you seriously wouldn't want to die in (and you can't use magic there either
These days you go to the flicks and get hammered with spoliers for 6 to 7 movies plus ads. I'm sorry I missed several good flicks because of this (I refuse to go if I've already seen all the 'good' parts). I would have liked to have seen several movies, including Go and HellBoy at the movies.. but never did. Ah well. Never mind. One day soon I'll have a home cinema and not think about it ever again.
I'd really like to see a return of the old style of advertising... where they give you an indication of what the movie is about without completely spoiling it. This is especially true when they are doing something (Superman anyone?) that everyone already knows and recognises.
Try it sometime.
Luckily, you can just copy the whole game dir and play.
Yes, I own this game. $99 at the time.
While I was on holiday I picked up 'Runaway - A road adventure'. It looks like a Monkey Island type game and it was $20 so I put down some cash (as did a friend of mine) and took it home. After installing it on my SO's new computer a screen came up 'Starforce blah blah blah driver blah blah blah'. Here is where this got fun.
:-)
:) ) and I don't think EB is at fault here, so I won't.
The new computer is a Dell. My SO decided to buy one herself and it mostly went ok. The computer arrived and she turned it on. A nice screen comes up saying 'by pressing a key you agree to Dell's EULA'. My SO works in IT. She has a two degrees. This uselss message really concerned her. The only thing that I could say to reassure her was 'no one has ever enforced an EULA in a court - so at the moment it doesn't hold water'. I dealt with this bullshit in the usual manner.
Now, getting back to this game. I got this game for her. I had to, once again, determine what this software was doing and how it would affect her PC. The new PC only has one drive - a burner. After hearing that the drive this malware 'needed' to install *may* damage it she said 'no! get rid of it!'. At this point I took the route of 'I own the game. I have the box in front of me. It's installed. Screw you assholes." and now the game works
Good one Dell. Scare the hell out of people by making them think that they are going to be sued. Good one Starforce. I really should return that game to EB to make a point here. However, I do want to play the game (when she's finished
Thanks for the tipoff.
Before I buy the Australian version I will check to see if this is also the case here. It appears that at least one of the DVD players in my house does not allow the skipping of useless junk before the movie.
Strange, since I *paid* for the DVD. It's mine. I don't see any reason why anyone should be able to prevent me from fast forwarding, skipping, or whatever at any time during playing a DVD.
If this is the case I probably won't buy it. I'll do without it thanks. I see enough of that crap at the cinema (although not so much anymore - I rarely go these days. I hate it how they show whole movies in the previews + other annoyances).