Nonsense. It was GPL. It belonged to everyone, to do what they want with it, as long as they abide by the GPL. The only thing wrong that happened here is that some bully and crybaby wanted to control what other people did because of something he did in the past, and, of course, the mistake of trying to appease him.
Selling the app and giving away the source code is NOT in violation of the letter or spirit of the GPL. Being a bully and telling others what they are allowed and not allowed to do with code after you have made it available by the GPL, just to suit your own desires and narrow view of the world, is in sharp conflict with the word and intent of the GPL.
Anything that screws the electronic bay of thieves makes my day. It does seem pretty sleazy that a couple of hackers could sell something for 2.6 billion bucks and then have the right to tell e-bay that they can't use it, but if e-bay was so stupid to make that deal, so be it. Of course, everyone except e-bay realized that they had overpaid for Skype at the time, but I for one did not realize that they over paid and bought something that they didn't have a right to use. I hope some lawyer looses his over compensated job over this one.
NO. Not file size. File size would be a potential test if all images were from the same original source and if they were only ever jpeg compressed once. Unfortunately, quite often one will come across images that have been jpeg compressed and re-compressed, and the final re-compression was done at "high quality', So the file is large for the image, but it still contains all of the jpeg artifacts from the lower quality compression. You can also see extra artifacts when one file has only been compressed once but another file has been compressed repeatedly, even if the second file is the same size as the file that was only compressed once.
There are, of course, other issues that come into question too, such as original color depth and color depth of every intermediate image.
The poster asked a good question, but you did not provide a helpful answer.
Well, the way that I head it was Life without Walls, from the same advertisement. And a Google search of both terms will seem to confirm that the tag line that I'm using is the one that M$ has been hyping in their promotions. Although I haven't heard it lately, and I expect that the lack of a need for Windows in a Life without walls was pointed out to them and they dropped it nearly as fast as they dropped those non-funny advertisements with Jerry Steinfield and Bill Gates. Also, I noted the date on your blog article, I had been using this tag line for a considerable time before you posted that.
Planck has been sent to an observation position around the second Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system, L2, some 1.5 million km from Earth
Wait a second, the earth is roughly 93 million miles from the Sun. It's orbit should cover about about a 584 million mile circumference. And yet this claims a Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system is only 1.5 million km from Earth (.932 million miles). How can I have faith in anything this says when it reports the location of a Lagrange point so incorrectly? It's off by over 2 orders of magnitude!
and we should have right to deplane if we don't like the answer
What kind of a statement is that? You think that you have the "right" to board the plane, tie up seats that could have been sold to other people, delay things as it suits you, and deplane when you finally get around to asking something that you should have asked long before you got on the plane? You certainly have the right to not buy the ticket in the first place. But do your research, decide if the plane and airline suit your "needs" before you get on the plane, and certainly pay attention to any last minute equipment changes, don't board and then demand the "right" to suddenly get off at the last minute. The crew and the other passengers have a lot more reason to be concerned about you and just what you might be up to than about the aircraft control system if you act that way.
Microsoft will selectively degrade the performance of pages to small sets of users so that they can see how various amounts of delay at different times and places affect user behavior.
Why this is completely absurd. It would be like some moron deciding that people at Slashdot only read the top of the page and, rather than simply making a smaller page with a link to the rest of the information, only loading the top of the page until you try to scroll down and read more. Then suddenly things would jump around and muck up your concept of where you were on the page. The only thing that would be worse is if the put something cute or interesting at the bottom of the page to encourage you to scroll down to see it, and trigger this very undesirable behavior frequently.
They say they had backups, and put them on the Internet where any hacker could get to them, under the same security the originals were stored under. If that's all they cared about their data, I don't see why the Slashdot community should care any more than they did.
Servers you right for flying on an unnamed airline. I've flown a lot and have flown on some really bad airlines, but at least they all had names. The fact that this airline was unnamed should have been your first clue to avoid it.
I would not suggest that, if another Trek movie has to be made, that McCoy be left out. Just that a different story be told, one that doesn't have to play fast and loose with the established story history. Why even bother to base the story on the Trek franchise if you don't keep with the established story line? Quite frankly I don't need to see a movie that spends a significant part of the time to establish needless back stories for the characters.
From other postings here it seems Abrams also made the villain a Romulan, ignoring that no one in the Federation ever saw a Romulan until well after the Stardate of this movie. By why? Was there really any need to label this character a Romulan? Couldn't Abrams have created some other race for him to be? Seems like just another case of the film maker wanting to get the benefits of the franchise but not be bothered by the pesky details of the story history.
J.J. Abrams was on TV just last night talking about he wasn't a real trekie, and that this movie was aimed at a broader audience (Hollywood talk for "everyone should buy a ticket for my movie and the trekies should buy several") . But from what little I've seen of the previews, this retelling isn't true to the Trek history.
McCoy was a beloved character in the show and movies. But as anyone who watched the original shows in the 60's (even those of us who don't consider ourselves trekies, don't go to conventions, have never made a starfleet uniform or a tricorder, and who don't live in our parent's basements), he wasn't the original ship's doctor and didn't come on board when Kirk did. There were two other ship's doctors in "Where no man has gone before" (not to mention the earlier failed pilot that was later incorporated into the trek history as a back story). To retell things with McCoy joining with Kirk as he takes command of the ship is just pandering as far as I'm concerned, handy to let the film focus on a bunch of backstory for these characters, and lets just ignore established "facts". After all, it's just a movie. We'll play off the fan loyalty and immense popularity of the franchise where it suits us, but we can ignore it when it get in the way of the film we want to make.
Yes, I know the file will be a huge hit. That was a given before the first scene was ever filmed or the first characters were cast. But I think it's a shame that Abrams decided just to throw something together based on the Trek franchise, film it in a spectacular way and profit, ignoring the existing trek history when it got in his way.
And in some ways I think that imposing the Trek franchise on his film making may have been a major mistake. I really think he could have done better if he didn't go for the quick and big bucks that the Trek franchise promises but rather had made something original in the Science-fiction area. In truth he's quite a talented film-maker, and he could have made something truly unique rather than just number 11 in a series. The original Starwars (despite what it has become) was a great movie, and one of the main reasons for that is that Lucas was free to tell an original story (even with all of the cliche's). Imagine how much less of a movie it would have been in the 70's if George Lucas had decided, or been told, that in order to make a science fiction movie and get it onto the big screen he could do all of the great special effects he envisioned and he could pretty much do the same story, but the main character had to be either Flash Gordon or Buck Rodgers, because they were established and no one wanted to risk a big movie on a new story.
Correction, it wasn't a 1 gig device, it was a 500 meg device. Here's a link to one of the early hypes about it: http://www.howstuffworks.com/ces20012.htm . This device will be just as popular as the Data Play disc has become. And no one will care that the sconomy of scale has not kicked in because no one will use it.
So your whole collection would fit on one disc, what is the point in wanting to carry around a pile of such discs?
At a cost of $50 a disc to produce, how much do you think that disc will cost in the stores? Hint: Everything else you buy in the computer store costs 3-4 times the cost of production, do you think that GE is going to change that, particularly if people have already paid an outrageous price for a burner and so are willing to pay the price? How much would that pile of discs you plan to carry around in a sack have set you back?
Where are you going to carry this expensive pile of over priced optical discs to? With a hard drive (1.5 tb is often available at just over $100 now, and you could even put it in a e-SATA case for a total cost less than 1 piece of this hyped media. And a portable 1.5 TB drive in an e-sata case could be used on many modern systems. But this media is only useful where a very expensive drive can access it, and these will be few and far between. So don't start throwing thousands of dollars of holographic media into your backpack just yet.
I guess you're just playing dumb, but the point isn't about some mythical future, it's about how viable the device will be when it comes out. If it can't compete when it comes out, then economy of scale will never kick in and it will not get cheaper to produce or sell. The stated price of the media TO PRODUCE is $50 a disc. That's going to equate at a minimum to a $100 street price, maybe as high as $200. And that is just for the media, imagine what the hardware that deals with $100-200 media costs. And obviously hard drive prices are already dropping fast and will continue to drop, a 1.5 TB drive with 3x the capacity can already be bought for what one.5 tb piece of media can be projected to cost if it ever makes it to market, wouldn't need an extra multi-hundred dollar drive, and would be compatible with far more computers.
There have been other magical disc formats hyped. I remember a few years ago a 1 gig optical disc the size of a quarter was shown at CES. There was all kinds of hype in the media about it, how it was going to change everything and be everywhere. I'm not sure if it ever really made it to market, but if it did those early adopters were screwed, invested in expensive equipment that they can't even get media for now. The disc was bright and shiny and had quite a "wow factor", but realistically you could look at the technology and see that it wasn't going to win, while flash drives and flash memory were no where near a competitive size at the time, it was apparent that they were headed that way and that this new optical technology would not be able to compete without the hype. In this case we don't even have to project where hard drive prices will be when this turkey comes out, they already have it beat. It's just not going to make it in the market, and so there will never be a price improvement, unless you want to buy a burner in the close out sale and not be able to get media later.
No, you missing the point. It will cost 10 cents / gig TO PRODUCE. It will sell at a lot more than that. Why would you not want to buy into a new technology when it is much more expensive than the terabyte hard drives that you could buy and use today?
Not just that, but you confirmed to the spammers that you were stupid enough to believe something they said. Consider the advice of the great philosophers Mr. T and Nelson.
My thoughts exactly. Just another form of expression of a basic truth. The fact that a key investor was a former Microsofter only makes this a little sweeter. Consider the words of the great philosophers Mr. T and Nelson.
Personally I won't run a system that requires periodic product activation, but that's a political rather than technical reason.
I have parents who are still not on the Internet and don't want it. They do use a computer for writing and a few other things though. Sometimes it would make life handy for me, but given their approach to computers it may overall be better that they stay off the Internet than expose themselves to the dangers. So from my point of view periodic product activation is a political, technical, emotional, and personal issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense. It was GPL. It belonged to everyone, to do what they want with it, as long as they abide by the GPL. The only thing wrong that happened here is that some bully and crybaby wanted to control what other people did because of something he did in the past, and, of course, the mistake of trying to appease him.
Selling the app and giving away the source code is NOT in violation of the letter or spirit of the GPL. Being a bully and telling others what they are allowed and not allowed to do with code after you have made it available by the GPL, just to suit your own desires and narrow view of the world, is in sharp conflict with the word and intent of the GPL.
Anything that screws the electronic bay of thieves makes my day. It does seem pretty sleazy that a couple of hackers could sell something for 2.6 billion bucks and then have the right to tell e-bay that they can't use it, but if e-bay was so stupid to make that deal, so be it. Of course, everyone except e-bay realized that they had overpaid for Skype at the time, but I for one did not realize that they over paid and bought something that they didn't have a right to use. I hope some lawyer looses his over compensated job over this one.
One can only hope that those who wrote the compiler that Wolfram used to write their code realize that they now have claim to the Wolfram program.
NO. Not file size. File size would be a potential test if all images were from the same original source and if they were only ever jpeg compressed once. Unfortunately, quite often one will come across images that have been jpeg compressed and re-compressed, and the final re-compression was done at "high quality', So the file is large for the image, but it still contains all of the jpeg artifacts from the lower quality compression. You can also see extra artifacts when one file has only been compressed once but another file has been compressed repeatedly, even if the second file is the same size as the file that was only compressed once.
There are, of course, other issues that come into question too, such as original color depth and color depth of every intermediate image.
The poster asked a good question, but you did not provide a helpful answer.
Well, the way that I head it was Life without Walls, from the same advertisement. And a Google search of both terms will seem to confirm that the tag line that I'm using is the one that M$ has been hyping in their promotions. Although I haven't heard it lately, and I expect that the lack of a need for Windows in a Life without walls was pointed out to them and they dropped it nearly as fast as they dropped those non-funny advertisements with Jerry Steinfield and Bill Gates. Also, I noted the date on your blog article, I had been using this tag line for a considerable time before you posted that.
Well, they can certainly say "come and see where you tax money is being wasted", one needs look no farther than the website.
Planck has been sent to an observation position around the second Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system, L2, some 1.5 million km from Earth
Wait a second, the earth is roughly 93 million miles from the Sun. It's orbit should cover about about a 584 million mile circumference. And yet this claims a Lagrange point of the Sun-Earth system is only 1.5 million km from Earth (.932 million miles). How can I have faith in anything this says when it reports the location of a Lagrange point so incorrectly? It's off by over 2 orders of magnitude!
for M&Ms. Besides, I haven't bought them since they banished Tan and brought in that gay Blue one.
and we should have right to deplane if we don't like the answer
What kind of a statement is that? You think that you have the "right" to board the plane, tie up seats that could have been sold to other people, delay things as it suits you, and deplane when you finally get around to asking something that you should have asked long before you got on the plane? You certainly have the right to not buy the ticket in the first place. But do your research, decide if the plane and airline suit your "needs" before you get on the plane, and certainly pay attention to any last minute equipment changes, don't board and then demand the "right" to suddenly get off at the last minute. The crew and the other passengers have a lot more reason to be concerned about you and just what you might be up to than about the aircraft control system if you act that way.
Microsoft will selectively degrade the performance of pages to small sets of users so that they can see how various amounts of delay at different times and places affect user behavior.
Why this is completely absurd. It would be like some moron deciding that people at Slashdot only read the top of the page and, rather than simply making a smaller page with a link to the rest of the information, only loading the top of the page until you try to scroll down and read more. Then suddenly things would jump around and muck up your concept of where you were on the page. The only thing that would be worse is if the put something cute or interesting at the bottom of the page to encourage you to scroll down to see it, and trigger this very undesirable behavior frequently.
Do not taunt happy fun ball and chain.
They say they had backups, and put them on the Internet where any hacker could get to them, under the same security the originals were stored under. If that's all they cared about their data, I don't see why the Slashdot community should care any more than they did.
Servers you right for flying on an unnamed airline. I've flown a lot and have flown on some really bad airlines, but at least they all had names. The fact that this airline was unnamed should have been your first clue to avoid it.
I would not suggest that, if another Trek movie has to be made, that McCoy be left out. Just that a different story be told, one that doesn't have to play fast and loose with the established story history. Why even bother to base the story on the Trek franchise if you don't keep with the established story line? Quite frankly I don't need to see a movie that spends a significant part of the time to establish needless back stories for the characters.
From other postings here it seems Abrams also made the villain a Romulan, ignoring that no one in the Federation ever saw a Romulan until well after the Stardate of this movie. By why? Was there really any need to label this character a Romulan? Couldn't Abrams have created some other race for him to be? Seems like just another case of the film maker wanting to get the benefits of the franchise but not be bothered by the pesky details of the story history.
J.J. Abrams was on TV just last night talking about he wasn't a real trekie, and that this movie was aimed at a broader audience (Hollywood talk for "everyone should buy a ticket for my movie and the trekies should buy several") . But from what little I've seen of the previews, this retelling isn't true to the Trek history.
McCoy was a beloved character in the show and movies. But as anyone who watched the original shows in the 60's (even those of us who don't consider ourselves trekies, don't go to conventions, have never made a starfleet uniform or a tricorder, and who don't live in our parent's basements), he wasn't the original ship's doctor and didn't come on board when Kirk did. There were two other ship's doctors in "Where no man has gone before" (not to mention the earlier failed pilot that was later incorporated into the trek history as a back story). To retell things with McCoy joining with Kirk as he takes command of the ship is just pandering as far as I'm concerned, handy to let the film focus on a bunch of backstory for these characters, and lets just ignore established "facts". After all, it's just a movie. We'll play off the fan loyalty and immense popularity of the franchise where it suits us, but we can ignore it when it get in the way of the film we want to make.
Yes, I know the file will be a huge hit. That was a given before the first scene was ever filmed or the first characters were cast. But I think it's a shame that Abrams decided just to throw something together based on the Trek franchise, film it in a spectacular way and profit, ignoring the existing trek history when it got in his way.
And in some ways I think that imposing the Trek franchise on his film making may have been a major mistake. I really think he could have done better if he didn't go for the quick and big bucks that the Trek franchise promises but rather had made something original in the Science-fiction area. In truth he's quite a talented film-maker, and he could have made something truly unique rather than just number 11 in a series. The original Starwars (despite what it has become) was a great movie, and one of the main reasons for that is that Lucas was free to tell an original story (even with all of the cliche's). Imagine how much less of a movie it would have been in the 70's if George Lucas had decided, or been told, that in order to make a science fiction movie and get it onto the big screen he could do all of the great special effects he envisioned and he could pretty much do the same story, but the main character had to be either Flash Gordon or Buck Rodgers, because they were established and no one wanted to risk a big movie on a new story.
Correction, it wasn't a 1 gig device, it was a 500 meg device. Here's a link to one of the early hypes about it: http://www.howstuffworks.com/ces20012.htm . This device will be just as popular as the Data Play disc has become. And no one will care that the sconomy of scale has not kicked in because no one will use it.
So your whole collection would fit on one disc, what is the point in wanting to carry around a pile of such discs?
At a cost of $50 a disc to produce, how much do you think that disc will cost in the stores? Hint: Everything else you buy in the computer store costs 3-4 times the cost of production, do you think that GE is going to change that, particularly if people have already paid an outrageous price for a burner and so are willing to pay the price? How much would that pile of discs you plan to carry around in a sack have set you back?
Where are you going to carry this expensive pile of over priced optical discs to? With a hard drive (1.5 tb is often available at just over $100 now, and you could even put it in a e-SATA case for a total cost less than 1 piece of this hyped media. And a portable 1.5 TB drive in an e-sata case could be used on many modern systems. But this media is only useful where a very expensive drive can access it, and these will be few and far between. So don't start throwing thousands of dollars of holographic media into your backpack just yet.
I guess you're just playing dumb, but the point isn't about some mythical future, it's about how viable the device will be when it comes out. If it can't compete when it comes out, then economy of scale will never kick in and it will not get cheaper to produce or sell. The stated price of the media TO PRODUCE is $50 a disc. That's going to equate at a minimum to a $100 street price, maybe as high as $200. And that is just for the media, imagine what the hardware that deals with $100-200 media costs. And obviously hard drive prices are already dropping fast and will continue to drop, a 1.5 TB drive with 3x the capacity can already be bought for what one .5 tb piece of media can be projected to cost if it ever makes it to market, wouldn't need an extra multi-hundred dollar drive, and would be compatible with far more computers.
There have been other magical disc formats hyped. I remember a few years ago a 1 gig optical disc the size of a quarter was shown at CES. There was all kinds of hype in the media about it, how it was going to change everything and be everywhere. I'm not sure if it ever really made it to market, but if it did those early adopters were screwed, invested in expensive equipment that they can't even get media for now. The disc was bright and shiny and had quite a "wow factor", but realistically you could look at the technology and see that it wasn't going to win, while flash drives and flash memory were no where near a competitive size at the time, it was apparent that they were headed that way and that this new optical technology would not be able to compete without the hype. In this case we don't even have to project where hard drive prices will be when this turkey comes out, they already have it beat. It's just not going to make it in the market, and so there will never be a price improvement, unless you want to buy a burner in the close out sale and not be able to get media later.
No, you missing the point. It will cost 10 cents / gig TO PRODUCE. It will sell at a lot more than that. Why would you not want to buy into a new technology when it is much more expensive than the terabyte hard drives that you could buy and use today?
Don't treat the parasites, kill them. The parasites are the problem, and the last thing we need is to treat them. Treat the bees, kill the parasites.
Not just that, but you confirmed to the spammers that you were stupid enough to believe something they said. Consider the advice of the great philosophers Mr. T and Nelson.
Pity that it will be MicroSofts' customers, not MS .....
It will be those who support ans enrich MS that are punished. This does not seem a pity to me.
My thoughts exactly. Just another form of expression of a basic truth. The fact that a key investor was a former Microsofter only makes this a little sweeter. Consider the words of the great philosophers Mr. T and Nelson.
Personally I won't run a system that requires periodic product activation, but that's a political rather than technical reason.
I have parents who are still not on the Internet and don't want it. They do use a computer for writing and a few other things though. Sometimes it would make life handy for me, but given their approach to computers it may overall be better that they stay off the Internet than expose themselves to the dangers. So from my point of view periodic product activation is a political, technical, emotional, and personal issue.