I happened to be in Japan when this film was released, and went to see it opening night. It was ok, but not spectacular. BTW it's NOT a Miyazaki Hayao film, just a Studio Ghibli film.
I thought the most interesting part was the really strange series of short animated films (also produced by Studio Ghibli) they played before the main feature started. I hope they play those here in the US, some of them were funny.
BTW the name of the film in Japanese is "Neko no Ongaeshi" -- "The Cat Returns a Favor". Which is actually what the film is about, as opposed to a cat just returning (which makes no sense in the context of the film).
I can't wait until "My Computer" actually looks like my computer. Oh, and the "Recycling Bin" looks like a REAL recycling bin. Will they EVER stop innovating at Microsoft?
I think Intel's Explorer 2 SDK used to have 128 MB on board, which is useful for Assembly programming.
Are you fscking KIDDING me? I could spend YEARS trying to fill up 128MB with assembly instructions. Unless you are doing something that involves large amounts of data, then only maybe. I could see 3D graphics, possibly, or perhaps engineering applications like CFD, but to be honest I haven't seen anyone use extensive amounts of assembly to do that stuff in years...compilers are much, much better nowadays and for any application where you'd have that much RAM, and presumably that fast of a CPU, you'd be better off spending time optimizing your code at a higher level, and rewriting critical sections in assembly if you're not happy with what the compiler gives you after turning on all the optimizations.
Did it occur to you that perhaps UPS didn't write their own software, and are limited by their license agreement with the vendor? That's what it sounds like to me.
Holy crap I totally glossed over that line. Well, let's hope the research eventually makes its way into things that benefit the country. That's what those grants are for, after all.
Thanks to the tax hike not passing, the state of Oregon closed several homes for the disabled and elderly, leaving thousands of clinically insane Oregon residents with no treatment. But maybe you don't care about those folks, since they are clearly "parasite classes".
In addition, eight prisons were forced to close, releasing over 4,000 convicted inmates onto those lovely Oregon streets. At the same time, over 300 state policemen were fired from the force. The parole board program was revamped so that neither former victims nor police are notified when criminals with particularly bad records are released.
So, I hope you enjoy your new roads. You certainly paid for them.
There are also rips taken directly off the DigiBeta which are absolutely stunning. Again, this is an internal studio problem, and $2 million in taxpayer money will do NOTHING to stop that.
Taxpayer money? You make it sound like the MPAA is a branch of the federal government. I'd prefer to think of it as a tax on stupid people. All those folks that went to see Titanic 12 times in the theaters have payed for this stunt.
Also, from a devil's advocate position, I'm thinking this is akin to the hiring of former insider-traders to work on preventing further cheating. Basically, we're inviting the dog back into the pantry.
Yes, by all means don't let people learn from their mistakes, which are often committed in the folly of youth. Are you saying you never got drunk and/or did something stupid as a teenager or while in college? I know I did, and I'd like to consider myself a responsible professional.
More to the point, the people who successfully break the rules for long periods of time have much more practical expertise than the more conservative "white hat" folks. Take, for example, Frank Abangale, Jr., subject of the recent movie "Catch Me If You Can", who is widely considered the world's leading expert in forgery and secure documents. He invented the security used on checks today, based on his experience defeating it for many years.
As anyone familiar with SGI's recent business strategy will tell you, they realized CGI was a dead horse and gave up on that market years ago.
SGI has been pushing high performance computing for engineering and science as of the last couple of years, and they have had a few high-profile sales in this arena.
NASA Ames (not too far from SGI BTW) has purchased a 1024 processor Origin. I saw the guy in charge of this lab at an HPC conference, and he was very gung-ho about the Origin's shared-memory architecture, and provided some extensive benchmarks to demonstrate his point.
They've also made several large sales into universities, as well as the currently booming aerospace and defense market.
And, lest you think it's all "government institutions" buying these Origins, I happened to have spotted Origins at a few different auto makers as well.
So, while I'm certain they'll miss the revenue from the entertainment industry, they have done well enough in the HPC market to compensate.
Question: How does this look on a legal front? How can a distributer say that the location of a store is grounds for not distributing to that store? I don't know anything about the relevent laws and thought someone might.
This will be determined entirely by the reseller agreement. Most agreements of this nature have to be renewed periodically anyway (e.g. once a year, the CEO has to sign on a dotted line to say they're still doing business with XYZ Internet Reseller) so it could be that they will simply choose to not renew the agreements when they expire.
Same thing happened recently with Apple not renewing iPod reseller's agreements.
Now, while this does not legally preclude a company from buying GW products and reselling them outside of an agreement, the reseller is no longer getting favorable pricing (or a percentage of every sale, in other terms). So, they'd end up having to pay the same retail prices you and I would pay if we went to the store, making it hard to sustain a profitable business reselling those products.
I think you're missing the part where this technology is completely different from what IBM developed. The NASA research is referring to the interconnects between different parts of the IC, not the transistors themselves. So far as I know this is the first process that addresses interconnect technology with carbon nanotubes.
It seems like a researcher working on a PhD thesis would be the *perfect* test case for this law, if folks were really interested in getting it curbed or thrown out entirely.
It also seems that if his university were really interested in fostering research (as most pretend to be, at least), they'd back him with their own lawyers.
So, I have to ask why he hasn't consulted with UM administration to see about keeping his PhD thesis where it belongs.
Especially if it comes bundled with the server. I know plenty of people who are tired of the way you have to pay $230+ for MS Office per machine. This definitely is a threat to MS.
I'm not so sure about this. If IBM guarantees that it is 100% compatible with MS Office products, I can see this happening, but that's probably not the case. The problem as I see it is that MS Office is the defacto "standard" exchange format for office documents. Even if your whole company changes over to a new suite of office tools, you still have the odious problem of sending and receiving "standard" MS office documents to all the people you do business with.
If you haven't worked in "real" office setting before, trust me on this. I can't count the number of office documents I have to send and receive every single day. Personally, I always try to stick to vanilla text files or HTML instead of word documents, since the extra formatting word allows for is important only occasionally. And, in the past I've done my best to use OpenOffice to work with other office documents, but there's always little glitches that are noticible enough that I'd hesitate to use it on something critical, lest a time-consuming and potentially expensive problem arise. If there were some other standard I could use for spreadsheets and powerpoint slides that I'd be *sure* was going to work on the other guy's computer, I'd be all over it. However, the fact remains that there isn't, and no matter what, people will continue to send me documents in MS format, which I'd better be able to read properly or risk going out of business.
So, in summation, I offer a challenge to IBM: I want to see your entire company (and in particular your services division) dump any copies of MS Office, and stick to using your own office suite for document exchange. If you can pull this off for without any hitches (especially after Office 2003 is being OEM'ed with new computer sales), THEN I'll be convinced it's safe to switch.
You know that the Wachowski brothers based the entire idea of The Matrix on anime, right? That's how they also sold the idea to producers; they showed the guy this anime movie (the producer didn't specify exactly which one in the interview) and said "we want to make a live-action version of this". But they also knew that in order to make the movie they *really* wanted to do (where the protagonist had incredible super powers), they needed to establish a universe where such a thing would be possible. So, The Matrix was written in order to establish that universe, and the subsequent movies will now show the story they originally wanted to tell. Let's hope it's a good one.
The immediate future of wireless Webcasting, according to face2face, involves talking heads rather than full-bodied characters
I don't know the "Full-Bodied Characters" but I know who Talking Heads is. I'm sure David Byrne will be pleased to hear that his band is so important to the future of wireless technology.
Actually, I think it was a smart move, but for a different reason:
They are effectively removing some of the complaints that could come up in future legal action. First, they can rightfully claim that Windows Media is no longer tied to their operating system, enforcing a monopoly. Second, they can also (well, at least try to) claim that those mangy open-source hackers have no good reason to reverse-engineer their software under the DMCA, since there's already a compatible player available for Linux.
Why don't you stop using Google, too? They have a "monopoly" in the search engine market. I don't know anyone who uses another search engine anymore, except as a last resort.
The reason Tivo and Google have a "monopoly" as you put it is because they sell a good product, and others have yet to introduce another product that can compete with it effectively.
Nobody is locked out of the PVR market at this point in time, especially since this is a brand new market, and anything can happen. Several big players (e.g. Microsoft, with UltimateTV) have already gone up against Tivo, and failed. It could be in near the future that the perfect PVR will appear that completely destroys Tivo's current dominance, but telling people not to use a product because there are no decent competitors is just wrong. It's still a free market, not a monopoly.
It matters not to a big company. They could easily spend 100 times the cost of licensing MS Office on porting their existing applications to work with OpenOffice, and that's not taking into consideration additional IT expenses that would come up, down time for employees during the switchover, or additional training that would probably be required.
If there isn't a concrete plan that shows a dramatically high ROI (Return On Investment) you will not convince the necessary people to take that kind of plunge, because it's simply too risky.
I agree, it is a good step, but there are still some *major* technical barriers that must be overcome before this will really be accepted as an alternative in business applications.
The main problem as I see it is that MS Office products support a COM automation API right out of the box. Now, I know a lot of folks may not think this is such a big deal, and the OpenOffice folks do provide a lot of similar functionality, but let me tell you why COM support is so important:
There are literally thousands upon thousands of business applications that already exist, written in VB and MS active scripting languages (VBScript, JScript, etc.) that depend on being able to access these other applications pretty much natively.
And, if the API isn't *exactly* the same, no company that depends on MS Office's API for business apps will be willing to spend that kind of development money just to make things the work same as they already do without OpenOffice.
The only chance I see (without OpenOffice implementing a perfect mirror of the MS Office API, and making it work natively with COM) is if somehow OpenOffice offered some amazing new functionality that a business couldn't possibly achieve using MS Office. Given MS's uncanny ability to steal good ideas and integrate them into their own products, that doesn't seem very likely to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I happened to be in Japan when this film was released, and went to see it opening night. It was ok, but not spectacular. BTW it's NOT a Miyazaki Hayao film, just a Studio Ghibli film.
I thought the most interesting part was the really strange series of short animated films (also produced by Studio Ghibli) they played before the main feature started. I hope they play those here in the US, some of them were funny.
BTW the name of the film in Japanese is "Neko no Ongaeshi" -- "The Cat Returns a Favor". Which is actually what the film is about, as opposed to a cat just returning (which makes no sense in the context of the film).
Really? Great!
I can't wait until "My Computer" actually looks like my computer. Oh, and the "Recycling Bin" looks like a REAL recycling bin. Will they EVER stop innovating at Microsoft?
Are you fscking KIDDING me? I could spend YEARS trying to fill up 128MB with assembly instructions. Unless you are doing something that involves large amounts of data, then only maybe. I could see 3D graphics, possibly, or perhaps engineering applications like CFD, but to be honest I haven't seen anyone use extensive amounts of assembly to do that stuff in years...compilers are much, much better nowadays and for any application where you'd have that much RAM, and presumably that fast of a CPU, you'd be better off spending time optimizing your code at a higher level, and rewriting critical sections in assembly if you're not happy with what the compiler gives you after turning on all the optimizations.
That's the same reason I enjoy watching Alias. Except for:
s/Trinity/Jennifer Garner/
s/breasts/ass/
Oh, who am I kidding? I like the breasts too.
Did it occur to you that perhaps UPS didn't write their own software, and are limited by their license agreement with the vendor? That's what it sounds like to me.
Holy crap I totally glossed over that line. Well, let's hope the research eventually makes its way into things that benefit the country. That's what those grants are for, after all.
Thanks to the tax hike not passing, the state of Oregon closed several homes for the disabled and elderly, leaving thousands of clinically insane Oregon residents with no treatment. But maybe you don't care about those folks, since they are clearly "parasite classes".
In addition, eight prisons were forced to close, releasing over 4,000 convicted inmates onto those lovely Oregon streets. At the same time, over 300 state policemen were fired from the force. The parole board program was revamped so that neither former victims nor police are notified when criminals with particularly bad records are released.
So, I hope you enjoy your new roads. You certainly paid for them.
Taxpayer money? You make it sound like the MPAA is a branch of the federal government. I'd prefer to think of it as a tax on stupid people. All those folks that went to see Titanic 12 times in the theaters have payed for this stunt.
Yes, by all means don't let people learn from their mistakes, which are often committed in the folly of youth. Are you saying you never got drunk and/or did something stupid as a teenager or while in college? I know I did, and I'd like to consider myself a responsible professional.
More to the point, the people who successfully break the rules for long periods of time have much more practical expertise than the more conservative "white hat" folks. Take, for example, Frank Abangale, Jr., subject of the recent movie "Catch Me If You Can", who is widely considered the world's leading expert in forgery and secure documents. He invented the security used on checks today, based on his experience defeating it for many years.
As anyone familiar with SGI's recent business strategy will tell you, they realized CGI was a dead horse and gave up on that market years ago.
SGI has been pushing high performance computing for engineering and science as of the last couple of years, and they have had a few high-profile sales in this arena.
NASA Ames (not too far from SGI BTW) has purchased a 1024 processor Origin. I saw the guy in charge of this lab at an HPC conference, and he was very gung-ho about the Origin's shared-memory architecture, and provided some extensive benchmarks to demonstrate his point.
They've also made several large sales into universities, as well as the currently booming aerospace and defense market.
And, lest you think it's all "government institutions" buying these Origins, I happened to have spotted Origins at a few different auto makers as well.
So, while I'm certain they'll miss the revenue from the entertainment industry, they have done well enough in the HPC market to compensate.
This will be determined entirely by the reseller agreement. Most agreements of this nature have to be renewed periodically anyway (e.g. once a year, the CEO has to sign on a dotted line to say they're still doing business with XYZ Internet Reseller) so it could be that they will simply choose to not renew the agreements when they expire.
Same thing happened recently with Apple not renewing iPod reseller's agreements.
Now, while this does not legally preclude a company from buying GW products and reselling them outside of an agreement, the reseller is no longer getting favorable pricing (or a percentage of every sale, in other terms). So, they'd end up having to pay the same retail prices you and I would pay if we went to the store, making it hard to sustain a profitable business reselling those products.
I think you're missing the part where this technology is completely different from what IBM developed. The NASA research is referring to the interconnects between different parts of the IC, not the transistors themselves. So far as I know this is the first process that addresses interconnect technology with carbon nanotubes.
11:15, restate my assumptions:
1. Mathematics is the language of nature.
2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers.
3. If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge. Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature.
It seems like a researcher working on a PhD thesis would be the *perfect* test case for this law, if folks were really interested in getting it curbed or thrown out entirely.
It also seems that if his university were really interested in fostering research (as most pretend to be, at least), they'd back him with their own lawyers.
So, I have to ask why he hasn't consulted with UM administration to see about keeping his PhD thesis where it belongs.
I'm not so sure about this. If IBM guarantees that it is 100% compatible with MS Office products, I can see this happening, but that's probably not the case. The problem as I see it is that MS Office is the defacto "standard" exchange format for office documents. Even if your whole company changes over to a new suite of office tools, you still have the odious problem of sending and receiving "standard" MS office documents to all the people you do business with.
If you haven't worked in "real" office setting before, trust me on this. I can't count the number of office documents I have to send and receive every single day. Personally, I always try to stick to vanilla text files or HTML instead of word documents, since the extra formatting word allows for is important only occasionally. And, in the past I've done my best to use OpenOffice to work with other office documents, but there's always little glitches that are noticible enough that I'd hesitate to use it on something critical, lest a time-consuming and potentially expensive problem arise. If there were some other standard I could use for spreadsheets and powerpoint slides that I'd be *sure* was going to work on the other guy's computer, I'd be all over it. However, the fact remains that there isn't, and no matter what, people will continue to send me documents in MS format, which I'd better be able to read properly or risk going out of business.
So, in summation, I offer a challenge to IBM: I want to see your entire company (and in particular your services division) dump any copies of MS Office, and stick to using your own office suite for document exchange. If you can pull this off for without any hitches (especially after Office 2003 is being OEM'ed with new computer sales), THEN I'll be convinced it's safe to switch.
is actually called combat sumo. I would pay good money to see actual tanks do that in real life. I'd laugh my ass off.
I thought, "That movie with Steve Martin? WTF does that have to do with anything?" Then I realized it was referring to a book.
You know that the Wachowski brothers based the entire idea of The Matrix on anime, right? That's how they also sold the idea to producers; they showed the guy this anime movie (the producer didn't specify exactly which one in the interview) and said "we want to make a live-action version of this". But they also knew that in order to make the movie they *really* wanted to do (where the protagonist had incredible super powers), they needed to establish a universe where such a thing would be possible. So, The Matrix was written in order to establish that universe, and the subsequent movies will now show the story they originally wanted to tell. Let's hope it's a good one.
I don't know the "Full-Bodied Characters" but I know who Talking Heads is. I'm sure David Byrne will be pleased to hear that his band is so important to the future of wireless technology.
Actually, I think it was a smart move, but for a different reason:
They are effectively removing some of the complaints that could come up in future legal action. First, they can rightfully claim that Windows Media is no longer tied to their operating system, enforcing a monopoly. Second, they can also (well, at least try to) claim that those mangy open-source hackers have no good reason to reverse-engineer their software under the DMCA, since there's already a compatible player available for Linux.
Why don't you stop using Google, too? They have a "monopoly" in the search engine market. I don't know anyone who uses another search engine anymore, except as a last resort.
The reason Tivo and Google have a "monopoly" as you put it is because they sell a good product, and others have yet to introduce another product that can compete with it effectively.
Nobody is locked out of the PVR market at this point in time, especially since this is a brand new market, and anything can happen. Several big players (e.g. Microsoft, with UltimateTV) have already gone up against Tivo, and failed. It could be in near the future that the perfect PVR will appear that completely destroys Tivo's current dominance, but telling people not to use a product because there are no decent competitors is just wrong. It's still a free market, not a monopoly.
Why, do you lick your browser window?
It matters not to a big company. They could easily spend 100 times the cost of licensing MS Office on porting their existing applications to work with OpenOffice, and that's not taking into consideration additional IT expenses that would come up, down time for employees during the switchover, or additional training that would probably be required.
If there isn't a concrete plan that shows a dramatically high ROI (Return On Investment) you will not convince the necessary people to take that kind of plunge, because it's simply too risky.
I agree, it is a good step, but there are still some *major* technical barriers that must be overcome before this will really be accepted as an alternative in business applications.
The main problem as I see it is that MS Office products support a COM automation API right out of the box. Now, I know a lot of folks may not think this is such a big deal, and the OpenOffice folks do provide a lot of similar functionality, but let me tell you why COM support is so important:
There are literally thousands upon thousands of business applications that already exist, written in VB and MS active scripting languages (VBScript, JScript, etc.) that depend on being able to access these other applications pretty much natively.
And, if the API isn't *exactly* the same, no company that depends on MS Office's API for business apps will be willing to spend that kind of development money just to make things the work same as they already do without OpenOffice.
The only chance I see (without OpenOffice implementing a perfect mirror of the MS Office API, and making it work natively with COM) is if somehow OpenOffice offered some amazing new functionality that a business couldn't possibly achieve using MS Office. Given MS's uncanny ability to steal good ideas and integrate them into their own products, that doesn't seem very likely to me.
I just got here, and now you're telling me I'm due for a huge earthquake?
Well, I suppose on the bright side, if it's true I might be able to afford buying that house after all.