Amen to that. Again, I must be missing something, but I fail to see how being a tube driver nets you a £35,000pa salary. Especially when nurses and teachers here get such a raw deal. Evidently there are some incredibly tricky skills in mastering the difference between red and green, the door open/close buttons and the "train go forward" stick;)
And no, not surprised you moved out:) I'm just lucky in that my job and my home are a stones throw from two of the Thameslink stations, and I do alot of work form home, else I would have scarpered as well.
It has some effect at reducing opportunist crime in areas with CCTV. The muggers just tend to move elsewhere.
CCTV is also frequently of such exceptionally poor quality that facial recognition is all but impossible. Typically we're shown a grainy black and white and asked if we know anyone who was wearing a dark top with a white stripe across it.
My main problem with the CCTV thing however is that most of them are staffed by private companies which are not under direct governmental control.
Maybe I'm just being blind, but I've not noticed any appreciable upgrades to the tube system in line the congestion charge. Rush hour now lasts from 7:30 to 10:00, and the tube is *unbearable*, especially in the hot weather.
Buses are a little more frequent then they were, but slow (little to no enforcement of bus lanes and priority routes) and (again) utterly overcrowded during rush hours. Then there's the bus drivers who can't be arsed to stop at the bus stop for you even when the bus is almost empty - the bus stops around London Bridge seem highly partial to this.
If money from the congestion charge is making an improvement, I've yet to see it. Last time I heard the C charge was running at a loss.
Agreed, but I'm sure theer are plenty of Linux vendors within US jurisdiction that distribute mplayer that could potentially come under fire. Chances are you'll see them pulling a RedHat/Debian; i.e. removing all traces of anything remotely incriminating from their distribution, and leaving it to third parties to install themselves.
There's also the embedded market. Don't KiSS' DVD players use embedded Linux and mPlayer code for playback? Granted, they're based in Denmark, but if the MPAA can get Norway to go to war with DVD Jon, I think shutting things like this down will be childs play.
In order to be used for next-gen media, VC-1 has to be OPEN SPEC. Therefore, no-one needs to do any reverse engineering in order to get it to play back, like with the MPEG1-4 family. The bitstream specs are available for anyone to look at. However, like MPEG, VC-1 will be haevily patented.
What is interesting is how MS will handle things when someone *does* write and open source encoder/decoder. While the MPEG patent holders (Fraunhofer and Thomson IIRC) don't seem to mind too much when people write MPEG codecs* without paying royalties, something strikes me that MS are going to be alot less liberal with their patent portfolio once it gets bundled into the version X of mPlayer and Xine. Expect them to get driven away from US and other shores to have their pages located in somewhere that doesn't give a crap about US patents.
*Most of you will note that in order to remain semi-immune to patents, all the popular open source MPEG codecs I know of (LAME, XviD) are distributed as source-only, and they leave it to third parties to (semi-illegally) build them into binaries.
I don't think they're really ashamed of it; I just don't think they expected their dedicated desktop chips to be such poor performers (with regards to clockspeed and leakage) in this regard.
IIRC Intel already scrapped Tejas (the even more absurdly clocked successor to the P4 Prescott) and are basing at least some of their future desktop chips offof the P4-M core, simply because it isn't plagued by the leakage/heat issues of the current P4 line.
So I think "ashamed" is a bit of a misnomer... unprepared would be better.
US President Bill Gates was imprisoned for seven years for his involvement in a racial intolerance campaign, popularly known as Gateshategate.
Serisouly, what is it with naming every single political scandal "$gate"? I guess we can be thankful Watergate didn't take place in the Binions Horeshoe Hotel...
By far the major problem with flash-based tech is the severely limited write cycles. Current flash drive sectors crap out after about 10,000-100,000 writes; you can get around this with specialised filesystems such as used in embedded components which minimise writes (and spread them out over the drive), but it's patently clear that flash isn't a useful technology for consumer storage; your average windows PC would eat through 100,000 writes to pagefile within a few days.
Currently the most promising technology is MRAM, which is essentially non-volatile RAM. Once this makes it's way into prosumer storage, we're made, but it's still pretty much a cute concept at the moment.
Research is already there, RAMdrive products just need volume to become economical.
Curtis SSD http://www.curtisssd.com/products/drives/ make solid state hard drives that appear as a SCSI hard drive. They're phenomenally fast, and I imagine phenomenally expensive.
However, they are of course volatile, so you need to stream your OS and data from a tape of HDD into cache before you boot the machine. And again, capacities are limited to ~15GB, so they're only of any real use as swap and/or database filesystems (possibly as root FS if you're looking for very snappy applications as well... hell, you could even RAID0 the bastards;).
As mentioned above, MRAM (non-volatile RAM with pretty much unlimited write, unlike flash based technologies) is an attempt to do away with the "load your OS before you boot" problem, but I don't think it'll appear in the consumer arena for awhile yet, and I imagine it'll be similarly priced to the Curtis drives today.
My dad is a technical desiner for an orthotics unit, and I was brought up surrounded by bits of interesting electronics, and love making them into little trinkets.
I use alot of old DIMMs and SIMMs as zip tags, and have a truckload of old 486's and Pentiums that I'd love to turn into keychains (if only I could find a drill bit that can punch through that ceramic!)
My old mouse mat was a recycled PCB (no components) that was about the size of an ATX mobo, but it doesn't work nicely with optical mice.
Incidentally, the PCB was bought from a guy going under the name of Electrickery. For those of you who live in London, he has a stall on the Spitalfields Market (nr. Liverpool Street) where he sells a pretty amazing collection of lamps made from recycled PCB's of every shape, colour and description - well worth a visit (no website I can find unfortunately) if you're looking for an interesting light feature to hide that CRT-tan;)
Yea, that's exactly the kind of approach I'd like to see. I was just a bit wary about the "KDE plans...". I've got no problem with the Kdevs (or GNOME, or anyone) spearheading it, I just think that integrated metadata searching is something too imprtant for the Linux desktop (well, for those who have the need for it) to be left to a single DE.
Maybe they could have a CLI frontend called goorep...
I don't really think freedesktop would be the place for this kinda thing.
Surely, the best and most flexible application of this idea would be a background indexing daemon and database (accessible and operable from the CLI), with native frontends tacked on as per your desktop environment...?
When you think of all those GUI confugulators there are, you'll know that most of them are all slightly different version of each other tailored for different environments; but the one thing they have in common is that they fall back on a system-independent "standard", such as Samba, iptables, XF86Config... the last thing we need is KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Enlightenment and Blackbox all implementing their own indexing/search tools.
Get both KDE and GNOME to co-operate on a database schema (IIRC there's a GNOME project called Beagle with very similar goals) and store it in an embedded DB.
Then just allow the world and his wife to make WM/DE-specific frontends as well as a CLI tool. IMHO this is the perfect way to make a modular system with a solid core and a multitude of user-pickable frontends.
There are a million and one frontends for Linux firewall configurators, but every single last man jack of them all alter the same iptables scripts.
Don't bother downloading the video, it's a five minute fanfare with Corey's head floating in the middle of the screen whilst intense orchestral music plays.
Words like "Microsoft beta tester!" and "Smug Microsoft schill!" float past his head whilst women in the backround swoon as they see his manly fingers caress the smooth, polished surface of the iPod killer whilst Windows XP icons zoom around his chiselled features. Corey's disembodies head then goes on a rampage, takes a bite out of a giant apple, and spits it at Steve Jobs, who then begs at Bill Gates' diamond studded shoes for rights to license such a kewl device. Bill and Corey then laugh, and hug each other. The camera pulls back, and we see the entire scene taking place inside a snowglobe on someones mantlepiece. Fade to black. Fin.
Seriously, that's gotta be one of the most irritatingly smug and information-free reviews I have ever had the misfortune to read.
Alien was the first sci-fi flick that I fell in love with. To me it was the first to portray space as *not* being this huge beautiful place full of utopian humans postulating about the meaning of life. It was just like your everyday common or garden factory, just like today. To me, this made it incredibly "real" feeling in a way that I couldn't associate with any other movies I'd seen, which added to the scare factor an awful lot.
Although I think Alien is pushing the sci-fi angle a bit. It's much more of a horror/haunted house syndrome than pure sci-fi.
Exactly, The whole point of the film (the dirs. cut anyway) is that a) Tyrell is sufficiently advanced to create replicants that are identical to humans and that b) Deckard and Rachel are both these news types of replicants. They both have human memories, but they're implanted, as shown with the VK test with Rachel. It's only at the end of the film that Deckard knows for certain he's a replicant when he finds Chu's unicorn.
It's a pretty good paradox thing really. Replicants are getting too smart for humans, so the humans have to make special replicants to work for them to hunt the replicants, but they have to make sure the replicants think they're human.
It's probably a mistake to compare the film and the book. The film is based pretty much only on the book's concept and imagery, the storyline is very different.
As noted in other posts, beside the basic concepts the book and the film have very little in common.
UK's channel 4 did a very good documentary called "On the Edge of Bladerunner" which interviewed pertty much everyone except Harrison Ford. Ridley Scott says it was the complete ruination of the film in the theatrical release that put the icing on the cake; up until then, lots of people were plain pissed off because Scott was being a complete perfectionist, time was running out, budget was empty, etc etc etc.
As someone who read "Do Androids...?" before I saw the film, I was much better equipped to understand what was going on without the voiceover, and to me the theatrical release seems lame and forced by comparison. As another poster pointed out, it made Deckard far too obvious, and there was practically no room for the viewer to make up their own mind about his personality. The directors cut was alot more difficult to get into, but it actually had a story I could get my teeth into.
If anyone can find "On the Edge of Bladerunner" knocking about P2P, I can heartily recommend the download, if nothing else then for the sole deleted scene where Deckard visits Holden in hospital.
Probably going out on a limb, but I think that half the point was to make the offworld colonies seem more "human" than they really were; with humanoid replicants intermingling with the humans (hence why Pris was a prostitute drone), and slave labour to do all the shitty things that the humans didn't want to do. And part of getting the replicants to act as slave labourers was to make the replicants think they were human; cos we all know what happens when they find out they're actually assembly line drones:)
Another aspect is the very real possibility that the film totally ignores AI and robotics; it could easily be that tech hadn't advanced sufficiently to provide menial robots, and that genetic design was far easier and more reproducible.
I think the human replica makes sense when you look at it in the context of the universe they were trying to portray. But then again, I may just be a fanboy;)
If you were *really* serious about alerting devs to breaking the code, you wouldn't bother wiring it up to lava lamps.
No. Wire it up to an actual lava volcano and place vents and valves linked to it inside everyone's cubes. If it ain't fixed in 1 hour, the coder resposible gets (literally) fried.
P.S. in my experience, it might be a good idea to invest in ejector seats for everyone. Once the volcano went out of control and we lost the whole widget team.
Lets say it's 6GB of so-so MP3. This has a compression ratio of about 10:1, so we're at 60GB of music already. Add to that that they're both using 2GHz processors, which can decompress this music much faster (ohh, about 20 times faster) than a 100MHz processor, and you'll soon see that they actually have over 1.2TB of music! Oh... wait...! It's in *stereo* - make that 2.4TB. And what's this...? Both of them have another computer networked up *and* a portable MP3 player, all of which are capable of playing the same music at the same time! So we're up to a whopping 7.2TB!
You gotta love RIAA's fuzzy maths. That petabyte number from yesterday was ridiculous.
As I've said above in another post, the Magnetbox DB is pretty US-centric. There's lots of music in there listed as RIAA-unsafe, simply because it's distributed by the RIAA labels in America, whereas elsewhere it may be distributed by the originating (indie) label.
I use Aphex Twin and Warp Records as my prime exmaple. Warp are probably one of the most independent labels around (you can buy and download non-DRM MP3's from their website and buy CD's straight from their store), but in the US they're distributed by all the usual suspects.
If you don't live in the US, take Magnetbox with a pinch of salt - do your research! If you can buy straight from an indie label, do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen to that. Again, I must be missing something, but I fail to see how being a tube driver nets you a £35,000pa salary. Especially when nurses and teachers here get such a raw deal. Evidently there are some incredibly tricky skills in mastering the difference between red and green, the door open/close buttons and the "train go forward" stick ;)
:) I'm just lucky in that my job and my home are a stones throw from two of the Thameslink stations, and I do alot of work form home, else I would have scarpered as well.
And no, not surprised you moved out
It has some effect at reducing opportunist crime in areas with CCTV. The muggers just tend to move elsewhere.
CCTV is also frequently of such exceptionally poor quality that facial recognition is all but impossible. Typically we're shown a grainy black and white and asked if we know anyone who was wearing a dark top with a white stripe across it.
My main problem with the CCTV thing however is that most of them are staffed by private companies which are not under direct governmental control.
Maybe I'm just being blind, but I've not noticed any appreciable upgrades to the tube system in line the congestion charge. Rush hour now lasts from 7:30 to 10:00, and the tube is *unbearable*, especially in the hot weather.
Buses are a little more frequent then they were, but slow (little to no enforcement of bus lanes and priority routes) and (again) utterly overcrowded during rush hours. Then there's the bus drivers who can't be arsed to stop at the bus stop for you even when the bus is almost empty - the bus stops around London Bridge seem highly partial to this.
If money from the congestion charge is making an improvement, I've yet to see it. Last time I heard the C charge was running at a loss.
Agreed, but I'm sure theer are plenty of Linux vendors within US jurisdiction that distribute mplayer that could potentially come under fire. Chances are you'll see them pulling a RedHat/Debian; i.e. removing all traces of anything remotely incriminating from their distribution, and leaving it to third parties to install themselves.
There's also the embedded market. Don't KiSS' DVD players use embedded Linux and mPlayer code for playback? Granted, they're based in Denmark, but if the MPAA can get Norway to go to war with DVD Jon, I think shutting things like this down will be childs play.
Does no-one read TFA?
In order to be used for next-gen media, VC-1 has to be OPEN SPEC. Therefore, no-one needs to do any reverse engineering in order to get it to play back, like with the MPEG1-4 family. The bitstream specs are available for anyone to look at. However, like MPEG, VC-1 will be haevily patented.
What is interesting is how MS will handle things when someone *does* write and open source encoder/decoder. While the MPEG patent holders (Fraunhofer and Thomson IIRC) don't seem to mind too much when people write MPEG codecs* without paying royalties, something strikes me that MS are going to be alot less liberal with their patent portfolio once it gets bundled into the version X of mPlayer and Xine. Expect them to get driven away from US and other shores to have their pages located in somewhere that doesn't give a crap about US patents.
*Most of you will note that in order to remain semi-immune to patents, all the popular open source MPEG codecs I know of (LAME, XviD) are distributed as source-only, and they leave it to third parties to (semi-illegally) build them into binaries.
I don't think they're really ashamed of it; I just don't think they expected their dedicated desktop chips to be such poor performers (with regards to clockspeed and leakage) in this regard.
IIRC Intel already scrapped Tejas (the even more absurdly clocked successor to the P4 Prescott) and are basing at least some of their future desktop chips offof the P4-M core, simply because it isn't plagued by the leakage/heat issues of the current P4 line.
So I think "ashamed" is a bit of a misnomer... unprepared would be better.
News from 2012...
US President Bill Gates was imprisoned for seven years for his involvement in a racial intolerance campaign, popularly known as Gateshategate.
Serisouly, what is it with naming every single political scandal "$gate"? I guess we can be thankful Watergate didn't take place in the Binions Horeshoe Hotel...
By far the major problem with flash-based tech is the severely limited write cycles. Current flash drive sectors crap out after about 10,000-100,000 writes; you can get around this with specialised filesystems such as used in embedded components which minimise writes (and spread them out over the drive), but it's patently clear that flash isn't a useful technology for consumer storage; your average windows PC would eat through 100,000 writes to pagefile within a few days.
Currently the most promising technology is MRAM, which is essentially non-volatile RAM. Once this makes it's way into prosumer storage, we're made, but it's still pretty much a cute concept at the moment.
Research is already there, RAMdrive products just need volume to become economical.
;).
Curtis SSD http://www.curtisssd.com/products/drives/ make solid state hard drives that appear as a SCSI hard drive. They're phenomenally fast, and I imagine phenomenally expensive.
However, they are of course volatile, so you need to stream your OS and data from a tape of HDD into cache before you boot the machine. And again, capacities are limited to ~15GB, so they're only of any real use as swap and/or database filesystems (possibly as root FS if you're looking for very snappy applications as well... hell, you could even RAID0 the bastards
As mentioned above, MRAM (non-volatile RAM with pretty much unlimited write, unlike flash based technologies) is an attempt to do away with the "load your OS before you boot" problem, but I don't think it'll appear in the consumer arena for awhile yet, and I imagine it'll be similarly priced to the Curtis drives today.
My dad is a technical desiner for an orthotics unit, and I was brought up surrounded by bits of interesting electronics, and love making them into little trinkets.
;)
I use alot of old DIMMs and SIMMs as zip tags, and have a truckload of old 486's and Pentiums that I'd love to turn into keychains (if only I could find a drill bit that can punch through that ceramic!)
My old mouse mat was a recycled PCB (no components) that was about the size of an ATX mobo, but it doesn't work nicely with optical mice.
Incidentally, the PCB was bought from a guy going under the name of Electrickery. For those of you who live in London, he has a stall on the Spitalfields Market (nr. Liverpool Street) where he sells a pretty amazing collection of lamps made from recycled PCB's of every shape, colour and description - well worth a visit (no website I can find unfortunately) if you're looking for an interesting light feature to hide that CRT-tan
Yea, that's exactly the kind of approach I'd like to see. I was just a bit wary about the "KDE plans...". I've got no problem with the Kdevs (or GNOME, or anyone) spearheading it, I just think that integrated metadata searching is something too imprtant for the Linux desktop (well, for those who have the need for it) to be left to a single DE.
Maybe they could have a CLI frontend called goorep...
I don't really think freedesktop would be the place for this kinda thing.
Surely, the best and most flexible application of this idea would be a background indexing daemon and database (accessible and operable from the CLI), with native frontends tacked on as per your desktop environment...?
When you think of all those GUI confugulators there are, you'll know that most of them are all slightly different version of each other tailored for different environments; but the one thing they have in common is that they fall back on a system-independent "standard", such as Samba, iptables, XF86Config... the last thing we need is KDE, GNOME, XFCE, Enlightenment and Blackbox all implementing their own indexing/search tools.
I couldn't agree more.
Get both KDE and GNOME to co-operate on a database schema (IIRC there's a GNOME project called Beagle with very similar goals) and store it in an embedded DB.
Then just allow the world and his wife to make WM/DE-specific frontends as well as a CLI tool. IMHO this is the perfect way to make a modular system with a solid core and a multitude of user-pickable frontends.
There are a million and one frontends for Linux firewall configurators, but every single last man jack of them all alter the same iptables scripts.
Don't bother downloading the video, it's a five minute fanfare with Corey's head floating in the middle of the screen whilst intense orchestral music plays.
Words like "Microsoft beta tester!" and "Smug Microsoft schill!" float past his head whilst women in the backround swoon as they see his manly fingers caress the smooth, polished surface of the iPod killer whilst Windows XP icons zoom around his chiselled features. Corey's disembodies head then goes on a rampage, takes a bite out of a giant apple, and spits it at Steve Jobs, who then begs at Bill Gates' diamond studded shoes for rights to license such a kewl device. Bill and Corey then laugh, and hug each other. The camera pulls back, and we see the entire scene taking place inside a snowglobe on someones mantlepiece. Fade to black. Fin.
Seriously, that's gotta be one of the most irritatingly smug and information-free reviews I have ever had the misfortune to read.
Alien was the first sci-fi flick that I fell in love with. To me it was the first to portray space as *not* being this huge beautiful place full of utopian humans postulating about the meaning of life. It was just like your everyday common or garden factory, just like today. To me, this made it incredibly "real" feeling in a way that I couldn't associate with any other movies I'd seen, which added to the scare factor an awful lot.
Although I think Alien is pushing the sci-fi angle a bit. It's much more of a horror/haunted house syndrome than pure sci-fi.
Exactly, The whole point of the film (the dirs. cut anyway) is that a) Tyrell is sufficiently advanced to create replicants that are identical to humans and that b) Deckard and Rachel are both these news types of replicants. They both have human memories, but they're implanted, as shown with the VK test with Rachel. It's only at the end of the film that Deckard knows for certain he's a replicant when he finds Chu's unicorn.
It's a pretty good paradox thing really. Replicants are getting too smart for humans, so the humans have to make special replicants to work for them to hunt the replicants, but they have to make sure the replicants think they're human.
It's probably a mistake to compare the film and the book. The film is based pretty much only on the book's concept and imagery, the storyline is very different.
Damnit, I've watched this film too many times...!
As noted in other posts, beside the basic concepts the book and the film have very little in common.
UK's channel 4 did a very good documentary called "On the Edge of Bladerunner" which interviewed pertty much everyone except Harrison Ford. Ridley Scott says it was the complete ruination of the film in the theatrical release that put the icing on the cake; up until then, lots of people were plain pissed off because Scott was being a complete perfectionist, time was running out, budget was empty, etc etc etc.
As someone who read "Do Androids...?" before I saw the film, I was much better equipped to understand what was going on without the voiceover, and to me the theatrical release seems lame and forced by comparison. As another poster pointed out, it made Deckard far too obvious, and there was practically no room for the viewer to make up their own mind about his personality. The directors cut was alot more difficult to get into, but it actually had a story I could get my teeth into.
If anyone can find "On the Edge of Bladerunner" knocking about P2P, I can heartily recommend the download, if nothing else then for the sole deleted scene where Deckard visits Holden in hospital.
Probably going out on a limb, but I think that half the point was to make the offworld colonies seem more "human" than they really were; with humanoid replicants intermingling with the humans (hence why Pris was a prostitute drone), and slave labour to do all the shitty things that the humans didn't want to do. And part of getting the replicants to act as slave labourers was to make the replicants think they were human; cos we all know what happens when they find out they're actually assembly line drones :)
;)
Another aspect is the very real possibility that the film totally ignores AI and robotics; it could easily be that tech hadn't advanced sufficiently to provide menial robots, and that genetic design was far easier and more reproducible.
I think the human replica makes sense when you look at it in the context of the universe they were trying to portray. But then again, I may just be a fanboy
Hell yeah. That fantastic CGI sequence at the beginning as all our radio waves zoom off into the universe gives me shivers every time I see it.
Best thing I liked is the human aspect, especially the juxtapostion of the fiercely rational scientist with the preacher.
Hopefully it serves as a fitting epitaph to Carl Sagan. Certainly one of my favourite SF movies.
"He hardly seems to be someone who can't stand his job."
Possibly because he was programmed that way?
(Cue huge original theatrical release vs. directors cut flamewar)
If you were *really* serious about alerting devs to breaking the code, you wouldn't bother wiring it up to lava lamps.
No. Wire it up to an actual lava volcano and place vents and valves linked to it inside everyone's cubes. If it ain't fixed in 1 hour, the coder resposible gets (literally) fried.
P.S. in my experience, it might be a good idea to invest in ejector seats for everyone. Once the volcano went out of control and we lost the whole widget team.
You forgot about compression!
Lets say it's 6GB of so-so MP3. This has a compression ratio of about 10:1, so we're at 60GB of music already. Add to that that they're both using 2GHz processors, which can decompress this music much faster (ohh, about 20 times faster) than a 100MHz processor, and you'll soon see that they actually have over 1.2TB of music! Oh... wait...! It's in *stereo* - make that 2.4TB. And what's this...? Both of them have another computer networked up *and* a portable MP3 player, all of which are capable of playing the same music at the same time! So we're up to a whopping 7.2TB!
You gotta love RIAA's fuzzy maths. That petabyte number from yesterday was ridiculous.
Crapola, should have used the preview...
http://www.crackbaby.com/article.php?sid=10093
Yes.
0 93
http://http//www.crackbaby.com/article.php?sid=10
Not tried it myself yet, but it replaces all calls to IE with calls to the browser of your choice.
As I've said above in another post, the Magnetbox DB is pretty US-centric. There's lots of music in there listed as RIAA-unsafe, simply because it's distributed by the RIAA labels in America, whereas elsewhere it may be distributed by the originating (indie) label.
I use Aphex Twin and Warp Records as my prime exmaple. Warp are probably one of the most independent labels around (you can buy and download non-DRM MP3's from their website and buy CD's straight from their store), but in the US they're distributed by all the usual suspects.
If you don't live in the US, take Magnetbox with a pinch of salt - do your research! If you can buy straight from an indie label, do so.