That is Darl McBride the lawyer behind the whole SCO vs IBM sitcom? That guy to seemed to display an extremely poor grasp of the law.
Although the cases are nothing alike the way they both rage on against reason, use only those quotes they like, are extremely selective with their "facts". It sounds like the two could be twins.
Is there something in legal briefs that drives lawyers insane?
It is true that London can be a bit... dirty. It is a busy town and so when you enter a restaurant that has been open close to 20 hours at night it is going to be less then clean.
McD is not the same all over the world and as a bit of a traveller I have had a lot of fun sampling the local McD. No, the food is never GREAT. Nor is it ever cheap. BUT there are real differences between countries, not just in taste but in how they are used and in how classy they are. Try an McD in a more rural area and you will have wooden chairs and tables with real plants. Go to the heart of london and it looks designed to be hoosed down during the 2 hours it actually closes.
Unless worded wrong the number of times the king can turn the chalice K is never limited in anyway. So it becomes useless as you say.
When the numbers become meaningless look at the meaning behind words.
The setup is a central room (the king room) with cells around it. Basically a lot of the story keeps pointing out that the room with the king is central to the setup with the cells surrounding it. Since cells are typically only build with 1 door it then becomes logic to assume that each prisoner as he was led to his cell has had to pass through this central chamber.
So every prisoner simply has to say "yes".
Some discount this simple answer but if you read the problem carefully I think it is the only real answer. The math solution can't work. Not when you got no limits, you can only calculate X if X is the only unknown.
So then ask yourselve why spend all this time discussing setting up the layout when it is not needed. The king could have set himself up in an empty cell or have the prisoners brought from the dungeon to his throne room. But no, he sits in a central room with the cells around its perimeter.
I would like to do the same experiment. BUT I select a sample of people from say retired office people who in their time of employment worked with the first office computers. You know, mainframes, unix machines and all the other NON-windows hardware that for so long dominated IT.
See how they manage to work with the Linux CLI.
You might be suprised how many people grew up with the CLI and who think that vi is a horribly modern app and can't they please have good old ed back.
Just because you know have a generation of kids who can't handle a task if it doesn't involve clicking on shiny buttons does not mean all computer users are brain dead zombies.
With OSX Apple gave Mac users the CLI and MS is hard at work improving their own CLI to be able to compete better with Unix.
At a certain point you have to dare to ask the following question: Is it possible that this person is just to stupid to handle this piece of software? If a person shoots himself in the foot with a gun, is the fault with the design of the gun or with the person shooting himself?
Let them buy Mac's. Easier, simpler and we can leave Linux to those people who can be bothered to read a manual.
I don't want userfriendly crap. I want control.
I am getting fucking tired of every single piece of software having to be designed to the greatest possible fucktard of humanity. The main reason I switched from windows to linux is not because of stability or security it is because windows is now with XP a fisher price product. To make it easy for drones to use it becomes impossible hard to do tasks that MS decided was to hard for its average user.
If you can't figure out how to use linux, take the hint. It isn't for you. Now go away.
Suse can do what they want with their product but stop including all of linux. Fine if Suse wants to make their desktop into an other dumbed down gui for the drooling. They got a reason to want to attract the largest group of customers wich is ofcourse the morons. A lot of other opensource projects have no such motivation. They are projects developed by their own user who thought that maybe others might have some use for it.
The real spirit of opensource is not programmers writing for users. It is users being their own programmers. Don't like it? Chance it youreselve. Now I am going back to coding an app with 10000 command line switches in japanese with 1 status feedback.
You misunderstand tolerance of acceptance.
on
Why Do You Block Ads?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Or perhaps what you describe has no word. Tolerance has a certain amount of "putting up with something", a very definete note of you not liking something but for now accepting it.
I think the huge amount of immigrants were tolerated like that. Sure some of the so called intellectuals just LOVED it all. Although I am one of those cynical people who happens to note that none of these so called intellectuals happen to live in immigrant neighbourhoods. Or even travel there.
Same as with ads, only a tiny percentage of people enjoy ads. For most of us, certainly myself they were never more then a necesarry evil, something to be tolerated because there really wasn't an alternative.
Just as there was no way to vote against immigrants before Pim Fortuyn arrived there was no way to not watch commercials before the arrival of tv torrents. Or indeed before the internet gave an alternative way to vegetate in front of a glowtube.
I think in both cases the irritation was tolerated until a certain treshhold was reached. Then when that was broken it just all burst out.
As to you calling Pim Fortuyn a right wing extremist. Most right wing extremist are well known for their hatred of Jews, Homosexuals and Women rights. Pim does certainly not qualify for hating any of them. Muslims do. The new extreme right does not wear jack boots, they were head scarfs. Only a true racist would claim that only white people can be racist.
The only reason I linked the two was because I think both are clear examples of people mistakingly believing people liked them and suddenly hated them. I think these kind of things fester for a long time until they suddenly erupt and then all the powers that be stand around scratching their heads and wondering what caused it. 10-30yrs of not regonizing enough is enough.
Simpler reason: The overcame my inertia.
on
Why Do You Block Ads?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Like most people I am basically a lazy fat slob. Something may irretate me BUT in order for me to do something about it it must reach a certain level.
This is apparently a very complex social issue as very few people seem to regonize that this treshhold exists. Certainly not those in power, it explains why our "leaders" are so often confused when we suddenly rebel against something we have quitely accepted before.
It happens in all sorts of places in our society, from important to trivial, the resistance against immigrants (muslims mostly) that "suddenly" came to a rise in europe. Has politicians totally baffled. The young male "suddenly" no longer watching tv (and more important tv commercials) has tv bosses claiming the world is coming to an end.
What has simply happened that a constant level of annoyance has grown to the point where people are no longer just content to let it lie.
When that "okay" radio starts cranking out ad-blocks of more then 5 minutes it perhaps becomes rewarding enough to simply switch the radio off and take the effort to bring in your own music. When that tv program you sorta watch is interrupted beyond the point where you can actually remember what you where watching then perhaps you don't switch back (is there any human out there who can watch a full dutch tv ad-block?). Perhaps you don't switch the tv on at all when all you ever watch are half of a tv-show.
So I block ads EVERYWHERE because they have grown to irritating. They reached my treshhold where I go from simply being irritated to taking action.
And just as the current backlash against muslims in europe went from tolerance to hatred in a flash I am now very extreme in my ad blocking. ALL image ads are blocked and screw even those sides where I can fully understand they need ad income to survive.
My current solution is getting a bit old but for now the ads that do slip through are not yet irritating enough to make me spend an hour or two finding a better solution and implementing it. When it does my browser will once again be totally ad free and many a free site will loose yet another tiny slice of income.
Then again who cares about sites like those game sites with bloody redirects to full page ads? Or slashdot with it showing a linux user MS ads? Geez talk about adding insult to injury.
Will I ever go back to unblocking ads? Perhaps. Someday I will buy a new computer and install a clean version of my OS on it and then I will probably be to lazy to install an ad blocker immidiatly (then again the blocker is part of squid so this is only when I replace my "server") and if I find that the ads then are not irritating enough I may not bother.
Lets face it, that is not very likely eh?
The response by marketing to the increasing resistance against ads is to make the ads bigger and more intrusive.
I don't code in java so my only experience with it is through applications. Most notably Freenet and Azureus and Eclipse. All are brilliant apps that absolutly excell at what they do. There is however not a single person that can with a straight face claim that these programs do not hog resourcers like a.... well like a java app.
Simply put there may be fast efficient tiny java programs out there but I don't see them. I don't really care about how garbage is collected. All I care is that a simple editor gobbles up memory like it was some kind of FPS. Sure I love the fact that I can use the same editor with the same extensions (to a point) on my home linux machines and work evil OS machines BUT it comes at a price and that is a lot of memory.
Perhaps Sun has indeed improved java massivly over those horribly slow and crashing java applets we had a few years ago that were so going to take over the net by storm. Perhaps all the problems are just due to certain public java programs being badly written.
It doesn't matter, java is slow, c is fast. Instead of having written this article perhaps the author should have examined some common java memory hog programs and analyzed wether the fault lies with java OR the coding in question OR and this is an option few consider, that JAVA apps and C apps are often compared like apple and oranges. Azureus vs Bittorrent (a tiny and far simpler app) Eclipse vs VI etc etc.
A lot of languages deal with mis-reprensatation. I don't exactly feel sorry for the bad rep that java has as many java fanboys happily spread un-truths themselves. Like java vs PHP vs ASP for web development. Judging from my own experiences all this is just one giant "Your mom is so fat...." competition.
We all know how well drm works at the moment. NOT AT ALL.
Hell in australia consoles can now be legally modded to avoid drm so might this mean blue-ray drm will also be legally circumvented down under?
The simple question is this. Will there be a blu-ray player that can be connected to a linux/mac machine? Will someone figure out how to access that player? Will someone figure out how to decrypt any content on the disc?
DRM is a difficult thing to enforce on a open system like a pc. It is like building your banksafe in the middle of a wreckers yard owned by the mafia. No matter how safe you make the safe it is still in a place filled with people with all the tools and desire to crack it.
To have effective DRM you have to have complete control over the entire path from creation to reception. If a copy can be stolen from the cutting room drm becomes pointless, if people can just capture a copy of the screen it becomes pointless. We have all this talk recently about Vista "needing" drm monitors. Because even at this stage you could simply hook up a "recorder" to the dvi exit of your vidcard and record everything coming out.
Even with a drm monitor what is to stop someone from putting that drm monitor on a scanning table and just scan the output?
I think we are currenty in a really weird period in time and that the future will probably go to a system where there will be far less DRM as content will be just offered so cheaply that pirating it becomes meaningless. If I can watch a movie instantly for say 0.50 cents why should I spend time scouring the net for it?
How many of us do copyright infringement because of the following reasons:
Insane costs of DVD's (why is a dvd that is cheaper in every aspect more expensive then a VHS)
Wanting to watch a movie/tv series NOW vs when the content owner/distributor deems <insert your residence> ready to receive it.
No fricking ads, don't want them before or during. I pay a license fee so I don't do commercials. EVER.
All that is needed is for content owners to realize that you can make more money by making a billion 1 penny profits then a million 10 cent profits.
It seems an impossible lesson to learn. Just look at phone companies and their rates for data exchange. Yet I am hopefull that one day we can just access the servers of the various content owners and download any of their content for a tiny fee without drm because only a tiny percentage of people will bother with the hassle of pirating when the "profit" for doing so is minimal.
Currently I save a small fortune that I do not in fact even have to spend in the first place by not paying for 99% of my content. I can't pay both my internet AND buy dvd's. Guess wich one I choose?
I hope someday soon MS will realize that it will have to make a stand. I see the x-box as a suicide move by MS. Why?
There are a lot of people who are talking about Linux or Mac killing MS. Yeah right, I run linux and love it but lets be honest, we are tiny. Yet when people talk about getting people to use a different OS then Windows for somer reason people never include the PS2 and gamecube's and other consoles.
With the introduction of the next generation of consoles both sony and MS seem to want to introduce a multifunction entertainment device into each and every household. Can you say PC replacement? No of course not a pc replacement for the typical/. reader BUT again lets be honest, we are a tiny portion of the total populace.
With the x-box MS has in some way's introduced a non-branded pc. Bear with me for a second. Although there are a lot of logos and a lot of attempts to have exclusive content for each console compare the difference between say owning a gamecube/ps2/xbox to say owning a mac/linux/windows pc. As the original playstation has shown it is extremely easy for people to switch consoles. Although consoles have 100% lockin compared to pc's (have you ever tried inserting a PS2 disc into a gamecube, where as I can read MS doc's on both mac and linux) this does not translate into consumers being locked into the consoles. I am even willing to bet there are a lot more people who have multiple consoles compared to multiple OS'es.
So why is the x-box then such a bad move? Simple. It has to a large extent undermined the position of the PC as a gaming device reducing that platform even further in the hopes of generating more x-box sales. The story of Halo is the most blatant example.In return for generating rather bad x-box sales they showed the world that MS itself did not seem to think its OWN pc market was a prime gaming market anymore.
MS owns the PC but instead choose to back the console wich nobody owns, just ask nintendo or atari or sega about how quickly you can go from owning the current generation to being last. Nintendo is surviving at the moment purely because of its brilliant handhelds.
This current spat about blu-ray seems to be MS suddenly realizing that IF consoles really are the way of the future then MS may have dug its own grave. If it allows the kind of DRM nightmares that consoles are (we will have to see if this really happens considering recent legal developments in australia and before in france) then there might be a future where people will no longer want a PC because it doesn't allow them do anything anyway.
MS may have to do some soul searching but someday it might realize that like ISP's and the telecom industry its business is piracy and porn. Philips already realized this to an extent. It sold its media company and now is pure hardware. Does a maker a burners really have an intrest in making it impossible to make your own copies off cd/dvd's? Of course not.
Same with MS, exactly how many of its home pc's are used mostly for copyright infringement? I am not just talking pure simple copying of dvd's here. The big movie companies all have tried time and time again to claim that making your own fan website about a property they own infringes on their copyright. If this becomes accepted practice then who needs a pc, if you can't do anything with it.
Imagine this, no game mods because the game companies don't want you to, no fan sites because the property owners don't want you to, no content because copyright owners don't allow it to be copied to pc. Exactly what reasons remain to own a pc then? Oh sure. Wordprocessing but I got news for you that is something people could do at the library/work/school instead of owning an expensive piece of hardware. ANd you hardly need Windows Vista to type the occasional CV.
Exactly how is MS going to sell Windows Vista to the home user is the home user can't do anything with it.
I think MS has a serious case of a split personality. On the one hand you got this
I think you need to be informed that the financial services in the US are for a large part in foreign hands. Check who really does own your bank/insurance company/investment house.
The US is in hog to the rest of the world. For now this works for everybody. When it doesn't. Well, we will just see won't we?
I know just that at the moment the US is powerfull because of high-tech weapons but exactly where are the parts for these weapons made nowadays?
Well I don't know about other countries but both dutch tv and the bbc have made the mistake of deleting old tv series from their archives only to realize decades later that much loved programs have become lost forever.
In the netherlands it is the series "Kunt u me de weg naar hamelen vertellen" wich has most episodes missing in action. For the beeb it is early episodes of Dr Who and Dad's army.
Or maybe not. Some of these eps have been found again when viewers reported they had some old tapes from pre-vhs days. ILLEGAL copies by the standards of Fox executives but also the ONLY copies still in existance.
Sure hopefully now the BBC and other content producers know better then to delete old shows just because they need to reuse the tapes (this was the reason the dutch eps were lost, a move to new fangled magnetic tapes for recording the shows instead of film but wich were so expensive they were reused) and simply store EVERYTHING because one day a series intended to be shown just once MIGHT have become part of your countries culture.
Still wich such a well proven need for viewer made copies I would love it if one of the bbc reporters brought this point up. Can BBC execs that made this choice ensure that in future we will not regret it?
RAID obviously protects against complete harddisk failure. This protects against dataloss during other hardware failure like powerloss BUT is there anything that protects against data loss due to slight defects on the hard disk?
I am probably not the only one to come back to an old file saved years ago only to find a glitch in it. I noticed it with a couple of movies. Movies I know were perfect as I watched them without copying them. So the only explanation is that part of the disk got corrupted.
The solution is availbale manually in the form of PAR or other recovery software but wouldn't it be nice if this was part of the OS or hardware itself? I would happily add another disk to my raid this one loaded with data to help check that the data is 100% correct.
Thanks to being nerds AND locked in country with extreme muslim laws we are never EVER going to loose our virginity, not even to the goats, so we are going to bug harmless sites to convince the rest of the world that not only we shouldn't have nuclear reactors, we shouldn't have internet access either.
Got some really weird attempts to login on ssh from egypt. Nothing special except it did seem odd to try to do this with SSH seeing has how any sensible person would use keys, if you still have to guess the username AND then a 3kb key I wish you good luck.
Goes to show that you always need to check your machine. I had no need for remote ssh access so why did I leave it enabled.
Oh well, luckily I have no business with the arab nations so they are now all banned. Blame the ISP in question for not reacting.
Actually it was an anti-fishing bill, but you know with arnies accent people got confused.
What the hell? What do you think an autopilot is?
on
Airbus A380 Under Fire
·
· Score: 1
This isn't R2D2 you know. The earliest "autopilots" simply kept the controls steady. If your aircraft is big enough this allows it to keep a rougly steady course if the weather isn't to bad.
More modern systems can actually "fly" the aircraft but only according to a strict program. So a modern airliner can be setup to follow a set of nav points, altering height etc as needed BUT it is still extremely simple stuff. If it "detects" that it is dropping below the desired altitude it will increase power (easiest and smoothest way for an airliner to climb). But it doesn't KNOW that it is dropping below height let alone the reason.
The autopilot no more knows about the internal pressure then it knows about what its REAL altitude is. It is not a human being, it can't reason.
For an autopilot to do what you suggest would require a leap in AI that is impossible at the moment. Do we really want aircraft to decide on their own where they are going to fly?
There has been one spectacular failure when an airbus decided it was landing while the pilot wanted to do a touch and go. Result crash and a dead crew.
That is even assuming the autopilot in question was even a computer. It could have been one of the old systems that do nothing except keep the aircraft on a steady course.
You may have heard about auto-pilots that can land an aircraft. This is true HOWEVER these autopilots just follow a fairly simple routine by making sure they are in the middle of two beams that present the a proper glide angle. Follow that and push the right buttons at the right time and you will land. But there is no intelligence in it. If the guide beams are out of alignment the autopilot will happily try to land on top of the airport terminal. There may be some advanced models now that correlate its expected altitude according to the guide beams with its own readings but basically there is a bloody good reason aircraft come with seats for TWO pilots.
Don't be to sure about having all this technology. Just imagine the scenario you describe. I am flying at 3km and the autopilot detects a massive presure drop. So it drops altitude automaticlly and plows straight into a 2km high mountain.
Then again, the solution is obvious, simply require crew to wear pressure masks constantly.
The language doesn't help. I have no troubles following subs and have watched my fair share off, to me, foreign language shows from germany, france, italy, asia etc. I just can't seem to get into finnish. If you are going to spend 7 years on a movie learn english. It is not that hard.
The special effects are sorta okay. Oh the space scenes are okay but the problem is with the take off scene. We have had similar scenes in all the real Star Trek movies with one tiny little difference. Humans. For a long time now shots of spaceships taking off have included human beings. The famous shot off the Millenium Falcon taking off with stormtroopers in the foreground now close to two decades ago makes the star wreck scene look, well look like a nicely rendered 3d studio scene. It is a nice 3d model but it is also extremely clear that it is no more. Remember that Final Fantasy that was so beautifull but lacked live? This is worse.
Decor, there was or maybe still is a fad for showing news programs in a virtual studio so they can all kinds of fancy decors without actually having to build them. Star Wreck is filled with them, especially the star trek bridges. THEY LOOK HUGE. Gigantic. Also grainy and empty. All the elements are there but for some reason it just doesn't seem to connect. It doesn't LOOK trek in the way even a cheap skit from the BBC or Saturday Night Life does.
The battles. Mmmm, I think someone wanted to show off how many star ships could be rendered at the same time. Showy, flashy but well lacking. None of the explosions are followed up by interior shots showing the effects. The Babylon fighters don't dogfight. In short it lacks the spark that we have seen in tv episodes with the real thing.
The plot. Perhaps there is something I missed but I just couldn't get involved. This is personal, especially since humor is involved and what one person finds hilarious others find not. Good parody for me comes very close to the original. Simply put, this is not how the star trek crew would behave not even if you take them to extremes of their character. Exactly WHY does picard choose to rule the world? I must have missed that.
The cutting. Cutting makes or breaks a movie. A scene can be made or broken by lasting just a few seconds to long. There are to many pauses, to many wasted moments. CUT CUT CUT. Most home movies suffer from this. Learn from the pros. Cut fast and cut often, it stops the viewer from getting bored. It also stops them from noticing pixalation in your background or badly stitched uniforms.
The acting. Well as said the finnish didn't exactly help me to "read" the emotions. It all sounded like they were permantly angry and drunk. Granted knowing fins this might be actually true.
The cutting also made some scenes drag out to long where you had several seconds of the cast just standing around after everything had been said wasting any quality acting.
Truly this movie is a huge achievement but at the same time I think it also shows a direction Home movies SHOULD not go. Learn to walk before you learn to run. First learn to direct and cut basic acting on regular set before you try to add hollywood type effects.
Simply put this seems awfully similar to those parodie porn movies, just with slightly better cgi. For a 7 years production I expected better acting. After watching this I am finally ready to face the last chapter of Star Wars. At least George Lucas knows how to really direct quality actors. (Well he does compared to the fins).
It is mean to be hard but basically I seen better star trek spoofs on various comedy shows over the years.
Perhaps I should explain that I am a late comer to geekdom. I spend most of my youth and younger years in a completly different jobfield. I was a baker and you can imagine that in your average family bakery there is little room for office politics. Hell when you are already there and the family slowly wakes up above you and comes down to the bakery itself in their various morning attire to get bread and stuff it kinda tears down the walls of management.
So IT came as a bit of a culture shock to me. Lines of communication were alien to me.
Nonetheless there was this whole internet bubble effect that even before the boom itself meant that anyone who had a brain could be hired and trained as a developer. I have a brain and have become a reasonable programmer. I am not brilliant, I will never develop the next killer app but I have setup several quality apps that have proven their worth.
After initial training I was put to detached to a dutch temp agency company that also owned a teaching institute. Some person smarter then me had decided that these two companies needed a new application to do their work in, the temp agency one to keep track of jobs and temps, the teaching institute to schedule classes and students. For some reason that I think goes against the basic off all IT development (keep it simple) these two entirely seperate activities were to be done in one application.
This obvious leads to trouble as it means if one is down for maintance, the other is too. That is if you ever get it developed in the first place.
The development did not go smoothly but that was the task of another company. You all probably know them, giganctic IT companies that are famous for never deliviring on time or on budget but that always get the next project because they so totally screwed up the last one that any manager that dares to suggest that they are crap will be undermining every other managers position.
It was a fixed price deal. Another INSTANT problem alert because this means that the longer the project is delayed the less profit the development company is going to make until finally they are only going to make a loss on it. So they cut top staff and replace them by idiots reasoning perhaps that if they are not going to make profit they might as well try to make it a learning experience.
So two+ years and the software is in a state that you could barely call alpha.
The situation is this, you have the customer who I shall Temp Agency A and Teaching Institure B. They have so little to do with each other that people from B are not at the site of A. Makes communication REAL easy. Further more company A is so uptodate that the internet is restricted to one solitary computer unconnected to the rest of the network.
Big Development company C has pulled people who made the original design (wich while basically flawed had some intresting ideas) and even taken back development from the site of A. They are now losing money on the deal and so really want to now deliver and see any more work to be a new contract item. This means that every bug fix is instead classified as a feature request.
Now enter the tiny company I work for,.they got several people already there doing some unrelated development, doing a rollout of some new desktops (NT4 yeah this is back when dinosaurs walked the earth young ones) AND doing testing of the new application.
The testing was being run by one of my seniours with the actual testers made up out of girls from the actual temp agency's, these girls would prove to be angels descended from heaven later on.
I am brought in with just basic training and a little experience maintaining an existing app for another cusomter. Basically I am a green but smart developer and a complete virgin to the office enviroment. My job? To convert the data from the two existing applications to the new application.
But only if you ever had a program "freeze" on you. I hate that. When one app having to do a bit of work brings the entire system to a crawl. Cue dual CPU. No more of that since now you will always have a second CPU to run the other stuff while say your java app is running wild.
On both windows (only ever tried it at home with XP) and of course linux it makes a huge difference. Neither does it have to break the bank. You will be suprised how many old dell P3's are are dual ready. Just buy 2 of them second hand, canabalize them and voila, high mem, big HD, dual CPU desktop that is far more responive than the fastest single cpu machine.
I do now only use linux on my dual machines, since I only keep windows for games and that is mostly single CPU until recently, but I tried XP for about a month and found it amazing stable. XP on a far faster P4 was far less stable, having those all to familiar freezes when explorer hangs on something and takes the entire desktop with it.
I think the most important elements of a good desktop are dual cpu, lots of memory, fast HD and only then the speed of the actual cpu. Lets face it, the days when your cpu wasn't fast enough to handle that mp3 are long gone.
Dare to buy second hand and enjoy stable, low heat dual cpu goodness.
I know for a fact that with some mopeds you get a definite recommendation as to wich brand fuel to buy. But it is just that a recommendation (It was the advice of the mechanic selling me the moped not the moped company so I doubt very much it was part of some huge conspiracy).
No car company would dare to release car wich would only drive on Shell Petrol. The car simply wouldn't sell even though Shell owns, in holland, most of the highway fuel stations so that it is in fact hard not to buy Shell Petrol.
Why oh why has business who certainly know about the dangers of being locked into one supplier ALLOWED proprietary formats to develop allowing IT to lock them in. It is truly insane.
Car company's would love it if they could lock customers, they certainly trye their hardest with dealers. I don't know if this is true in the US but in europe it is very very hard to see a dealer with more then 1 brand of car. Those dealers that try to sell more then one brand are being obstructed at every turn. Repair shops are the same deal. With the increasing use of cpu managed cars it is very hard for an independent repairshop to get all the diagnostic tools needed to service all the brands.
The only reason the consumer is not locked into a brand of car maker so far is that the consumer is to smart. We would not allow a road to be build that can only be driven with Ford cars. We would not buy a car that can only be fuelled by Exxon. So how did MS and for that matter Wordperfect ever get away with making a wordprocessor that only worked with their own files?
Exactly what kinda attorny do you think she got? The message here is simple, the court WILL spank both sides if they misbehave. She tried apparently to pull something that was not to the courts liking so the judge send a message by making her pay her laywer. Had she not obstructed the case then the RIAA would probably have had to cough up the dough to pay her lawyer. Idoubt the bill comes to more then a couple hundred bucks. This was not a long complex drawn out case.
Just because your innocent does not make it all right for you to not obey the law to the full. It is something an awfull lot of people seem to forget and it is a judges job to remind them.
Pity the article does not make clear exactly what she did. but the message still remains clear, obey the law. You have some leeway and big company's can't just steamroll you but neither can you steamroll the law.
This particulair tale is nothing new, I heard it relating to many different logistics companies, in fact any company that buys cars in large numbers.
I do however know for a fact that some are true because I seen the result.
The story is simple, large trucking company A finds it is time to replace its fleet of trucks from brand B. However the salesrep from B is for some reason not all to willing to give the discount company A wants. So company A makes sure when the salesrep visits that there are a couple of trucks just parked outside the company of brand C. If the salesrep still doesn't get the message, they usually do, then brand C will be the brand company A drives around in for the next 3 yrs (average truck live) unless salesrep C is smart enough to give a company buying a 100 trucks a big enough discount.
There are plenty of versions of this story from big to small. Everyone knows you can always talk down the price when buying even the smallest car. When your purchase order comes into the millions the sales people WILL have to bend over backwards, plenty of other truck manufacturers.
But I noticed something very strange, when talking to some smaller transporters who pulled the same trick but with a mere 10 or so trucks being part of the purchase order and therefore getting far smaller discounts, I found that it was very difficult to get them to accept the idea that a similar stunt could be pulled when it comes time to upgrade their PC's.
That just forking over whatever MS demands is like just forking over what your truck seller wants.
Business men who would think nothing of buying a handfull of different brand trucks (trucks are EXPENSIVE) just to make a point could nonetheless not understand that having a handfull of linux machines might make the next purchase from MS a little cheaper.
Directors who would never EVER allow their operation to become locked into ONE truck brand nonetheless happily say that they can't switch from MS because of lockin.
It is amazing, it is like when it comes to IT, the best brains in business suddenly loose their intelligence, as if different rules apply when it comes to computers.
So I have the following suggestions to any business leader:
When a salesrep visits and sees competitor brands being used, salesrep will instantly offer extra discounts just for you. This works ALWAYS and EVERYWHERE. Even in IT, I know for a fact that some of the biggest companies on purpose have both SUN and IBM servers just to keep the sales people on their toes.
If your excuse against using non-ms software is that your locked in then you got only 1 choice. UNLOCK NOW. The longer you wait the more locked in you will be. If it is bad business sense to be locked into one supplier for ANY other need be it your trucks, your supplies, your employees, your customers then why would it be good sense to have your IT, often the glue that holds everything together, be dependant on just one company.
If your excuse is that your employees would find it hard to adjust, FIRE THEM AND GET BETTER ONES. Would you consider hiring for one second a truck driver who can only drive MAN trucks? A repair mechanic who can only handle DAF? Of course not. So why hire IT people who can only handle windows?
At the moment MS has a chokehold on business. It can demand whatever it wants and you will just have to cough up. It is insanity. Install a few macs, install a few linux boxes, then call your IT salesrep and tell him to give you a discount or to get out.
Get out of the lock-in and make IT subject to the same rules as you do all your other purchases.
Yeah right, and you are seeing exactly what you want to see. Like those massive protests about the iraq war. I don't call a few hundred protesters massive.
The fast majority of the west doesn't give a damn about iraq. All they know is that europe is being overrun by muslims and that they are not happy with it. Oh and that gas prices are going through the roof.
It is very easy to look at the media and see a definite slant to events in the world. I seen pro-muslims claim that newspaper X was anti-muslim and anti-muslims claim the exact same newspaper was pro-muslim. A good example was todays dual story of hamas attacking israel with missles and the assasination of a hamas leader in response.
Basically both the cheap free newspapers here reported both facts, but the assasination was mentioned on the front page and the hamas attack was just 1 sentence in the main article. Also it featured a photograph that was not directly related to the story of a massive explosion.
So was this article pro-palestine? Well the hamas attack had no fatalisties, "only" 5 wounded. While the assasination killed. The purely objective thing to note here is that Israeli's are obviously better shots.
So the "real" story is that hamas is an organization that has vowed to wipe Israel from the face of the earth and that Israel has chosen to wipe out Hamas before that happens. Or is it the other way around? At this point in time it is like trying to figure out who started the northern ireland conflict.
You report that 95% of non-americans saw the whole WMD thing as a sham, I doubt that figure but you seem to link that automatically with those same people being against the invasion. Nice leap but I don't see that on the workfloor. An awfull lot of working class people here in holland have just one question if they even think about it. How come they have to pay for iraq refugees who flee their so called oppressive goverment but when that goverment is then overthrown all those so called refugees are against it? Either you are for a goverment or you are against.
But I agree most media is incredibly bad at investigating the real story. It is easier to make some sensation story. Massive headlines about how EU agriculture subsidies are causing hunger in 3rd world countries, followed by massive headlines how cuts in EU agriculture subsidies are putting farmers out of work. WTF? Take a bloody side!
I think the worst mistake Bush made was the whole WMD nonsense. Had he simply gone for "Saddam is a ticking timebomb for his own people, the minorities in his country and the rest of the world and we are no longer going to wait for sanctions wich the entire world is ignoring to work." he might have had a lot more support.
The sad thing is that I am old and I remember the same blind sheep like you complain that the world wasn't doing anything when Saddam gassed the koerds.
Hell some guy send in a letter recently to the "spits" complaining that America deserved New Orleans for invading Iraq and why wasn't the west doing anything in Dafur (muslims killing blacks and vice versa). In the same letter the guy complained that America had invaded iraq AND was complaining they hadn't invaded Dafur.
What is a goverment supposed to do with people like you. They are damned if they do and they are damned if they don't.
So how does this relate to china? Well lets face it, china needs only look at russia to see what happens to a superpower who lets the west dictate what it should do. So china will happily continue with its current policy knowing that with each passing year America and the west will be more and more dependant and less able to take a stand against it.
Mainstream media does not see this but frankly neither does the alternative media. The only way to get true unbiased news is to make your own by getting it from multiple sources. If you are only reading news stories that condemn the war in Iraq then you are not well informed. Don't then complain that other people aren't either.
At least the chinese know they are getting a 1-sided version of the news. You do not.
Slashdot Mirror
Although the cases are nothing alike the way they both rage on against reason, use only those quotes they like, are extremely selective with their "facts". It sounds like the two could be twins.
Is there something in legal briefs that drives lawyers insane?
McD is not the same all over the world and as a bit of a traveller I have had a lot of fun sampling the local McD. No, the food is never GREAT. Nor is it ever cheap. BUT there are real differences between countries, not just in taste but in how they are used and in how classy they are. Try an McD in a more rural area and you will have wooden chairs and tables with real plants. Go to the heart of london and it looks designed to be hoosed down during the 2 hours it actually closes.
When the numbers become meaningless look at the meaning behind words.
The setup is a central room (the king room) with cells around it. Basically a lot of the story keeps pointing out that the room with the king is central to the setup with the cells surrounding it. Since cells are typically only build with 1 door it then becomes logic to assume that each prisoner as he was led to his cell has had to pass through this central chamber.
So every prisoner simply has to say "yes".
Some discount this simple answer but if you read the problem carefully I think it is the only real answer. The math solution can't work. Not when you got no limits, you can only calculate X if X is the only unknown.
So then ask yourselve why spend all this time discussing setting up the layout when it is not needed. The king could have set himself up in an empty cell or have the prisoners brought from the dungeon to his throne room. But no, he sits in a central room with the cells around its perimeter.
See how they manage to work with the Linux CLI.
You might be suprised how many people grew up with the CLI and who think that vi is a horribly modern app and can't they please have good old ed back.
Just because you know have a generation of kids who can't handle a task if it doesn't involve clicking on shiny buttons does not mean all computer users are brain dead zombies.
With OSX Apple gave Mac users the CLI and MS is hard at work improving their own CLI to be able to compete better with Unix.
At a certain point you have to dare to ask the following question: Is it possible that this person is just to stupid to handle this piece of software? If a person shoots himself in the foot with a gun, is the fault with the design of the gun or with the person shooting himself?
I don't want userfriendly crap. I want control.
I am getting fucking tired of every single piece of software having to be designed to the greatest possible fucktard of humanity. The main reason I switched from windows to linux is not because of stability or security it is because windows is now with XP a fisher price product. To make it easy for drones to use it becomes impossible hard to do tasks that MS decided was to hard for its average user.
If you can't figure out how to use linux, take the hint. It isn't for you. Now go away.
Suse can do what they want with their product but stop including all of linux. Fine if Suse wants to make their desktop into an other dumbed down gui for the drooling. They got a reason to want to attract the largest group of customers wich is ofcourse the morons. A lot of other opensource projects have no such motivation. They are projects developed by their own user who thought that maybe others might have some use for it.
The real spirit of opensource is not programmers writing for users. It is users being their own programmers. Don't like it? Chance it youreselve. Now I am going back to coding an app with 10000 command line switches in japanese with 1 status feedback.
I think the huge amount of immigrants were tolerated like that. Sure some of the so called intellectuals just LOVED it all. Although I am one of those cynical people who happens to note that none of these so called intellectuals happen to live in immigrant neighbourhoods. Or even travel there.
Same as with ads, only a tiny percentage of people enjoy ads. For most of us, certainly myself they were never more then a necesarry evil, something to be tolerated because there really wasn't an alternative.
Just as there was no way to vote against immigrants before Pim Fortuyn arrived there was no way to not watch commercials before the arrival of tv torrents. Or indeed before the internet gave an alternative way to vegetate in front of a glowtube.
I think in both cases the irritation was tolerated until a certain treshhold was reached. Then when that was broken it just all burst out.
As to you calling Pim Fortuyn a right wing extremist. Most right wing extremist are well known for their hatred of Jews, Homosexuals and Women rights. Pim does certainly not qualify for hating any of them. Muslims do. The new extreme right does not wear jack boots, they were head scarfs. Only a true racist would claim that only white people can be racist.
The only reason I linked the two was because I think both are clear examples of people mistakingly believing people liked them and suddenly hated them. I think these kind of things fester for a long time until they suddenly erupt and then all the powers that be stand around scratching their heads and wondering what caused it. 10-30yrs of not regonizing enough is enough.
This is apparently a very complex social issue as very few people seem to regonize that this treshhold exists. Certainly not those in power, it explains why our "leaders" are so often confused when we suddenly rebel against something we have quitely accepted before.
It happens in all sorts of places in our society, from important to trivial, the resistance against immigrants (muslims mostly) that "suddenly" came to a rise in europe. Has politicians totally baffled. The young male "suddenly" no longer watching tv (and more important tv commercials) has tv bosses claiming the world is coming to an end.
What has simply happened that a constant level of annoyance has grown to the point where people are no longer just content to let it lie.
When that "okay" radio starts cranking out ad-blocks of more then 5 minutes it perhaps becomes rewarding enough to simply switch the radio off and take the effort to bring in your own music. When that tv program you sorta watch is interrupted beyond the point where you can actually remember what you where watching then perhaps you don't switch back (is there any human out there who can watch a full dutch tv ad-block?). Perhaps you don't switch the tv on at all when all you ever watch are half of a tv-show.
So I block ads EVERYWHERE because they have grown to irritating. They reached my treshhold where I go from simply being irritated to taking action.
And just as the current backlash against muslims in europe went from tolerance to hatred in a flash I am now very extreme in my ad blocking. ALL image ads are blocked and screw even those sides where I can fully understand they need ad income to survive.
My current solution is getting a bit old but for now the ads that do slip through are not yet irritating enough to make me spend an hour or two finding a better solution and implementing it. When it does my browser will once again be totally ad free and many a free site will loose yet another tiny slice of income.
Then again who cares about sites like those game sites with bloody redirects to full page ads? Or slashdot with it showing a linux user MS ads? Geez talk about adding insult to injury.
Will I ever go back to unblocking ads? Perhaps. Someday I will buy a new computer and install a clean version of my OS on it and then I will probably be to lazy to install an ad blocker immidiatly (then again the blocker is part of squid so this is only when I replace my "server") and if I find that the ads then are not irritating enough I may not bother.
Lets face it, that is not very likely eh?
The response by marketing to the increasing resistance against ads is to make the ads bigger and more intrusive.
Simply put there may be fast efficient tiny java programs out there but I don't see them. I don't really care about how garbage is collected. All I care is that a simple editor gobbles up memory like it was some kind of FPS. Sure I love the fact that I can use the same editor with the same extensions (to a point) on my home linux machines and work evil OS machines BUT it comes at a price and that is a lot of memory.
Perhaps Sun has indeed improved java massivly over those horribly slow and crashing java applets we had a few years ago that were so going to take over the net by storm. Perhaps all the problems are just due to certain public java programs being badly written.
It doesn't matter, java is slow, c is fast. Instead of having written this article perhaps the author should have examined some common java memory hog programs and analyzed wether the fault lies with java OR the coding in question OR and this is an option few consider, that JAVA apps and C apps are often compared like apple and oranges. Azureus vs Bittorrent (a tiny and far simpler app) Eclipse vs VI etc etc.
A lot of languages deal with mis-reprensatation. I don't exactly feel sorry for the bad rep that java has as many java fanboys happily spread un-truths themselves. Like java vs PHP vs ASP for web development. Judging from my own experiences all this is just one giant "Your mom is so fat ...." competition.
Lets face it a PC with XP is anybody's. I wonder if this system comes in a white box to indicate its virgin status.
Hell in australia consoles can now be legally modded to avoid drm so might this mean blue-ray drm will also be legally circumvented down under?
The simple question is this. Will there be a blu-ray player that can be connected to a linux/mac machine? Will someone figure out how to access that player? Will someone figure out how to decrypt any content on the disc?
DRM is a difficult thing to enforce on a open system like a pc. It is like building your banksafe in the middle of a wreckers yard owned by the mafia. No matter how safe you make the safe it is still in a place filled with people with all the tools and desire to crack it.
To have effective DRM you have to have complete control over the entire path from creation to reception. If a copy can be stolen from the cutting room drm becomes pointless, if people can just capture a copy of the screen it becomes pointless. We have all this talk recently about Vista "needing" drm monitors. Because even at this stage you could simply hook up a "recorder" to the dvi exit of your vidcard and record everything coming out.
Even with a drm monitor what is to stop someone from putting that drm monitor on a scanning table and just scan the output?
I think we are currenty in a really weird period in time and that the future will probably go to a system where there will be far less DRM as content will be just offered so cheaply that pirating it becomes meaningless. If I can watch a movie instantly for say 0.50 cents why should I spend time scouring the net for it?
How many of us do copyright infringement because of the following reasons:
All that is needed is for content owners to realize that you can make more money by making a billion 1 penny profits then a million 10 cent profits.
It seems an impossible lesson to learn. Just look at phone companies and their rates for data exchange. Yet I am hopefull that one day we can just access the servers of the various content owners and download any of their content for a tiny fee without drm because only a tiny percentage of people will bother with the hassle of pirating when the "profit" for doing so is minimal.
Currently I save a small fortune that I do not in fact even have to spend in the first place by not paying for 99% of my content. I can't pay both my internet AND buy dvd's. Guess wich one I choose?
There are a lot of people who are talking about Linux or Mac killing MS. Yeah right, I run linux and love it but lets be honest, we are tiny. Yet when people talk about getting people to use a different OS then Windows for somer reason people never include the PS2 and gamecube's and other consoles.
With the introduction of the next generation of consoles both sony and MS seem to want to introduce a multifunction entertainment device into each and every household. Can you say PC replacement? No of course not a pc replacement for the typical /. reader BUT again lets be honest, we are a tiny portion of the total populace.
With the x-box MS has in some way's introduced a non-branded pc. Bear with me for a second. Although there are a lot of logos and a lot of attempts to have exclusive content for each console compare the difference between say owning a gamecube/ps2/xbox to say owning a mac/linux/windows pc. As the original playstation has shown it is extremely easy for people to switch consoles. Although consoles have 100% lockin compared to pc's (have you ever tried inserting a PS2 disc into a gamecube, where as I can read MS doc's on both mac and linux) this does not translate into consumers being locked into the consoles. I am even willing to bet there are a lot more people who have multiple consoles compared to multiple OS'es.
So why is the x-box then such a bad move? Simple. It has to a large extent undermined the position of the PC as a gaming device reducing that platform even further in the hopes of generating more x-box sales. The story of Halo is the most blatant example.In return for generating rather bad x-box sales they showed the world that MS itself did not seem to think its OWN pc market was a prime gaming market anymore.
MS owns the PC but instead choose to back the console wich nobody owns, just ask nintendo or atari or sega about how quickly you can go from owning the current generation to being last. Nintendo is surviving at the moment purely because of its brilliant handhelds.
This current spat about blu-ray seems to be MS suddenly realizing that IF consoles really are the way of the future then MS may have dug its own grave. If it allows the kind of DRM nightmares that consoles are (we will have to see if this really happens considering recent legal developments in australia and before in france) then there might be a future where people will no longer want a PC because it doesn't allow them do anything anyway.
MS may have to do some soul searching but someday it might realize that like ISP's and the telecom industry its business is piracy and porn. Philips already realized this to an extent. It sold its media company and now is pure hardware. Does a maker a burners really have an intrest in making it impossible to make your own copies off cd/dvd's? Of course not.
Same with MS, exactly how many of its home pc's are used mostly for copyright infringement? I am not just talking pure simple copying of dvd's here. The big movie companies all have tried time and time again to claim that making your own fan website about a property they own infringes on their copyright. If this becomes accepted practice then who needs a pc, if you can't do anything with it.
Imagine this, no game mods because the game companies don't want you to, no fan sites because the property owners don't want you to, no content because copyright owners don't allow it to be copied to pc. Exactly what reasons remain to own a pc then? Oh sure. Wordprocessing but I got news for you that is something people could do at the library/work/school instead of owning an expensive piece of hardware. ANd you hardly need Windows Vista to type the occasional CV.
Exactly how is MS going to sell Windows Vista to the home user is the home user can't do anything with it.
I think MS has a serious case of a split personality. On the one hand you got this
The US is in hog to the rest of the world. For now this works for everybody. When it doesn't. Well, we will just see won't we?
I know just that at the moment the US is powerfull because of high-tech weapons but exactly where are the parts for these weapons made nowadays?
Well I don't know about other countries but both dutch tv and the bbc have made the mistake of deleting old tv series from their archives only to realize decades later that much loved programs have become lost forever.
In the netherlands it is the series "Kunt u me de weg naar hamelen vertellen" wich has most episodes missing in action. For the beeb it is early episodes of Dr Who and Dad's army.
Or maybe not. Some of these eps have been found again when viewers reported they had some old tapes from pre-vhs days. ILLEGAL copies by the standards of Fox executives but also the ONLY copies still in existance.
Sure hopefully now the BBC and other content producers know better then to delete old shows just because they need to reuse the tapes (this was the reason the dutch eps were lost, a move to new fangled magnetic tapes for recording the shows instead of film but wich were so expensive they were reused) and simply store EVERYTHING because one day a series intended to be shown just once MIGHT have become part of your countries culture.
Still wich such a well proven need for viewer made copies I would love it if one of the bbc reporters brought this point up. Can BBC execs that made this choice ensure that in future we will not regret it?
I am probably not the only one to come back to an old file saved years ago only to find a glitch in it. I noticed it with a couple of movies. Movies I know were perfect as I watched them without copying them. So the only explanation is that part of the disk got corrupted.
The solution is availbale manually in the form of PAR or other recovery software but wouldn't it be nice if this was part of the OS or hardware itself? I would happily add another disk to my raid this one loaded with data to help check that the data is 100% correct.
Does such a solution exist?
Goes to show that you always need to check your machine. I had no need for remote ssh access so why did I leave it enabled.
Oh well, luckily I have no business with the arab nations so they are now all banned. Blame the ISP in question for not reacting.
Actually it was an anti-fishing bill, but you know with arnies accent people got confused.
More modern systems can actually "fly" the aircraft but only according to a strict program. So a modern airliner can be setup to follow a set of nav points, altering height etc as needed BUT it is still extremely simple stuff. If it "detects" that it is dropping below the desired altitude it will increase power (easiest and smoothest way for an airliner to climb). But it doesn't KNOW that it is dropping below height let alone the reason.
The autopilot no more knows about the internal pressure then it knows about what its REAL altitude is. It is not a human being, it can't reason.
For an autopilot to do what you suggest would require a leap in AI that is impossible at the moment. Do we really want aircraft to decide on their own where they are going to fly?
There has been one spectacular failure when an airbus decided it was landing while the pilot wanted to do a touch and go. Result crash and a dead crew.
That is even assuming the autopilot in question was even a computer. It could have been one of the old systems that do nothing except keep the aircraft on a steady course.
You may have heard about auto-pilots that can land an aircraft. This is true HOWEVER these autopilots just follow a fairly simple routine by making sure they are in the middle of two beams that present the a proper glide angle. Follow that and push the right buttons at the right time and you will land. But there is no intelligence in it. If the guide beams are out of alignment the autopilot will happily try to land on top of the airport terminal. There may be some advanced models now that correlate its expected altitude according to the guide beams with its own readings but basically there is a bloody good reason aircraft come with seats for TWO pilots.
Don't be to sure about having all this technology. Just imagine the scenario you describe. I am flying at 3km and the autopilot detects a massive presure drop. So it drops altitude automaticlly and plows straight into a 2km high mountain.
Then again, the solution is obvious, simply require crew to wear pressure masks constantly.
The language doesn't help. I have no troubles following subs and have watched my fair share off, to me, foreign language shows from germany, france, italy, asia etc. I just can't seem to get into finnish. If you are going to spend 7 years on a movie learn english. It is not that hard.
The special effects are sorta okay. Oh the space scenes are okay but the problem is with the take off scene. We have had similar scenes in all the real Star Trek movies with one tiny little difference. Humans. For a long time now shots of spaceships taking off have included human beings. The famous shot off the Millenium Falcon taking off with stormtroopers in the foreground now close to two decades ago makes the star wreck scene look, well look like a nicely rendered 3d studio scene. It is a nice 3d model but it is also extremely clear that it is no more. Remember that Final Fantasy that was so beautifull but lacked live? This is worse.
Decor, there was or maybe still is a fad for showing news programs in a virtual studio so they can all kinds of fancy decors without actually having to build them. Star Wreck is filled with them, especially the star trek bridges. THEY LOOK HUGE. Gigantic. Also grainy and empty. All the elements are there but for some reason it just doesn't seem to connect. It doesn't LOOK trek in the way even a cheap skit from the BBC or Saturday Night Life does.
The battles. Mmmm, I think someone wanted to show off how many star ships could be rendered at the same time. Showy, flashy but well lacking. None of the explosions are followed up by interior shots showing the effects. The Babylon fighters don't dogfight. In short it lacks the spark that we have seen in tv episodes with the real thing.
The plot. Perhaps there is something I missed but I just couldn't get involved. This is personal, especially since humor is involved and what one person finds hilarious others find not. Good parody for me comes very close to the original. Simply put, this is not how the star trek crew would behave not even if you take them to extremes of their character. Exactly WHY does picard choose to rule the world? I must have missed that.
The cutting. Cutting makes or breaks a movie. A scene can be made or broken by lasting just a few seconds to long. There are to many pauses, to many wasted moments. CUT CUT CUT. Most home movies suffer from this. Learn from the pros. Cut fast and cut often, it stops the viewer from getting bored. It also stops them from noticing pixalation in your background or badly stitched uniforms.
The acting. Well as said the finnish didn't exactly help me to "read" the emotions. It all sounded like they were permantly angry and drunk. Granted knowing fins this might be actually true.
The cutting also made some scenes drag out to long where you had several seconds of the cast just standing around after everything had been said wasting any quality acting.
Truly this movie is a huge achievement but at the same time I think it also shows a direction Home movies SHOULD not go. Learn to walk before you learn to run. First learn to direct and cut basic acting on regular set before you try to add hollywood type effects.
Simply put this seems awfully similar to those parodie porn movies, just with slightly better cgi. For a 7 years production I expected better acting. After watching this I am finally ready to face the last chapter of Star Wars. At least George Lucas knows how to really direct quality actors. (Well he does compared to the fins).
It is mean to be hard but basically I seen better star trek spoofs on various comedy shows over the years.
Perhaps I should explain that I am a late comer to geekdom. I spend most of my youth and younger years in a completly different jobfield. I was a baker and you can imagine that in your average family bakery there is little room for office politics. Hell when you are already there and the family slowly wakes up above you and comes down to the bakery itself in their various morning attire to get bread and stuff it kinda tears down the walls of management.
So IT came as a bit of a culture shock to me. Lines of communication were alien to me.
Nonetheless there was this whole internet bubble effect that even before the boom itself meant that anyone who had a brain could be hired and trained as a developer. I have a brain and have become a reasonable programmer. I am not brilliant, I will never develop the next killer app but I have setup several quality apps that have proven their worth.
After initial training I was put to detached to a dutch temp agency company that also owned a teaching institute. Some person smarter then me had decided that these two companies needed a new application to do their work in, the temp agency one to keep track of jobs and temps, the teaching institute to schedule classes and students. For some reason that I think goes against the basic off all IT development (keep it simple) these two entirely seperate activities were to be done in one application.
This obvious leads to trouble as it means if one is down for maintance, the other is too. That is if you ever get it developed in the first place.
The development did not go smoothly but that was the task of another company. You all probably know them, giganctic IT companies that are famous for never deliviring on time or on budget but that always get the next project because they so totally screwed up the last one that any manager that dares to suggest that they are crap will be undermining every other managers position.
It was a fixed price deal. Another INSTANT problem alert because this means that the longer the project is delayed the less profit the development company is going to make until finally they are only going to make a loss on it. So they cut top staff and replace them by idiots reasoning perhaps that if they are not going to make profit they might as well try to make it a learning experience.
So two+ years and the software is in a state that you could barely call alpha.
The situation is this, you have the customer who I shall Temp Agency A and Teaching Institure B. They have so little to do with each other that people from B are not at the site of A. Makes communication REAL easy. Further more company A is so uptodate that the internet is restricted to one solitary computer unconnected to the rest of the network.
Big Development company C has pulled people who made the original design (wich while basically flawed had some intresting ideas) and even taken back development from the site of A. They are now losing money on the deal and so really want to now deliver and see any more work to be a new contract item. This means that every bug fix is instead classified as a feature request.
Now enter the tiny company I work for,.they got several people already there doing some unrelated development, doing a rollout of some new desktops (NT4 yeah this is back when dinosaurs walked the earth young ones) AND doing testing of the new application.
The testing was being run by one of my seniours with the actual testers made up out of girls from the actual temp agency's, these girls would prove to be angels descended from heaven later on.
I am brought in with just basic training and a little experience maintaining an existing app for another cusomter. Basically I am a green but smart developer and a complete virgin to the office enviroment. My job? To convert the data from the two existing applications to the new application.
I now encounter the following problems:
On both windows (only ever tried it at home with XP) and of course linux it makes a huge difference. Neither does it have to break the bank. You will be suprised how many old dell P3's are are dual ready. Just buy 2 of them second hand, canabalize them and voila, high mem, big HD, dual CPU desktop that is far more responive than the fastest single cpu machine.
I do now only use linux on my dual machines, since I only keep windows for games and that is mostly single CPU until recently, but I tried XP for about a month and found it amazing stable. XP on a far faster P4 was far less stable, having those all to familiar freezes when explorer hangs on something and takes the entire desktop with it.
I think the most important elements of a good desktop are dual cpu, lots of memory, fast HD and only then the speed of the actual cpu. Lets face it, the days when your cpu wasn't fast enough to handle that mp3 are long gone.
Dare to buy second hand and enjoy stable, low heat dual cpu goodness.
No car company would dare to release car wich would only drive on Shell Petrol. The car simply wouldn't sell even though Shell owns, in holland, most of the highway fuel stations so that it is in fact hard not to buy Shell Petrol.
Why oh why has business who certainly know about the dangers of being locked into one supplier ALLOWED proprietary formats to develop allowing IT to lock them in. It is truly insane.
Car company's would love it if they could lock customers, they certainly trye their hardest with dealers. I don't know if this is true in the US but in europe it is very very hard to see a dealer with more then 1 brand of car. Those dealers that try to sell more then one brand are being obstructed at every turn. Repair shops are the same deal. With the increasing use of cpu managed cars it is very hard for an independent repairshop to get all the diagnostic tools needed to service all the brands.
The only reason the consumer is not locked into a brand of car maker so far is that the consumer is to smart. We would not allow a road to be build that can only be driven with Ford cars. We would not buy a car that can only be fuelled by Exxon. So how did MS and for that matter Wordperfect ever get away with making a wordprocessor that only worked with their own files?
Just because your innocent does not make it all right for you to not obey the law to the full. It is something an awfull lot of people seem to forget and it is a judges job to remind them.
Pity the article does not make clear exactly what she did. but the message still remains clear, obey the law. You have some leeway and big company's can't just steamroll you but neither can you steamroll the law.
I do however know for a fact that some are true because I seen the result.
The story is simple, large trucking company A finds it is time to replace its fleet of trucks from brand B. However the salesrep from B is for some reason not all to willing to give the discount company A wants. So company A makes sure when the salesrep visits that there are a couple of trucks just parked outside the company of brand C. If the salesrep still doesn't get the message, they usually do, then brand C will be the brand company A drives around in for the next 3 yrs (average truck live) unless salesrep C is smart enough to give a company buying a 100 trucks a big enough discount.
There are plenty of versions of this story from big to small. Everyone knows you can always talk down the price when buying even the smallest car. When your purchase order comes into the millions the sales people WILL have to bend over backwards, plenty of other truck manufacturers.
But I noticed something very strange, when talking to some smaller transporters who pulled the same trick but with a mere 10 or so trucks being part of the purchase order and therefore getting far smaller discounts, I found that it was very difficult to get them to accept the idea that a similar stunt could be pulled when it comes time to upgrade their PC's.
That just forking over whatever MS demands is like just forking over what your truck seller wants.
Business men who would think nothing of buying a handfull of different brand trucks (trucks are EXPENSIVE) just to make a point could nonetheless not understand that having a handfull of linux machines might make the next purchase from MS a little cheaper.
Directors who would never EVER allow their operation to become locked into ONE truck brand nonetheless happily say that they can't switch from MS because of lockin.
It is amazing, it is like when it comes to IT, the best brains in business suddenly loose their intelligence, as if different rules apply when it comes to computers.
So I have the following suggestions to any business leader:
At the moment MS has a chokehold on business. It can demand whatever it wants and you will just have to cough up. It is insanity. Install a few macs, install a few linux boxes, then call your IT salesrep and tell him to give you a discount or to get out.
Get out of the lock-in and make IT subject to the same rules as you do all your other purchases.
The fast majority of the west doesn't give a damn about iraq. All they know is that europe is being overrun by muslims and that they are not happy with it. Oh and that gas prices are going through the roof.
It is very easy to look at the media and see a definite slant to events in the world. I seen pro-muslims claim that newspaper X was anti-muslim and anti-muslims claim the exact same newspaper was pro-muslim. A good example was todays dual story of hamas attacking israel with missles and the assasination of a hamas leader in response.
Basically both the cheap free newspapers here reported both facts, but the assasination was mentioned on the front page and the hamas attack was just 1 sentence in the main article. Also it featured a photograph that was not directly related to the story of a massive explosion.
So was this article pro-palestine? Well the hamas attack had no fatalisties, "only" 5 wounded. While the assasination killed. The purely objective thing to note here is that Israeli's are obviously better shots.
So the "real" story is that hamas is an organization that has vowed to wipe Israel from the face of the earth and that Israel has chosen to wipe out Hamas before that happens. Or is it the other way around? At this point in time it is like trying to figure out who started the northern ireland conflict.
You report that 95% of non-americans saw the whole WMD thing as a sham, I doubt that figure but you seem to link that automatically with those same people being against the invasion. Nice leap but I don't see that on the workfloor. An awfull lot of working class people here in holland have just one question if they even think about it. How come they have to pay for iraq refugees who flee their so called oppressive goverment but when that goverment is then overthrown all those so called refugees are against it? Either you are for a goverment or you are against.
But I agree most media is incredibly bad at investigating the real story. It is easier to make some sensation story. Massive headlines about how EU agriculture subsidies are causing hunger in 3rd world countries, followed by massive headlines how cuts in EU agriculture subsidies are putting farmers out of work. WTF? Take a bloody side!
I think the worst mistake Bush made was the whole WMD nonsense. Had he simply gone for "Saddam is a ticking timebomb for his own people, the minorities in his country and the rest of the world and we are no longer going to wait for sanctions wich the entire world is ignoring to work." he might have had a lot more support.
The sad thing is that I am old and I remember the same blind sheep like you complain that the world wasn't doing anything when Saddam gassed the koerds.
Hell some guy send in a letter recently to the "spits" complaining that America deserved New Orleans for invading Iraq and why wasn't the west doing anything in Dafur (muslims killing blacks and vice versa). In the same letter the guy complained that America had invaded iraq AND was complaining they hadn't invaded Dafur.
What is a goverment supposed to do with people like you. They are damned if they do and they are damned if they don't.
So how does this relate to china? Well lets face it, china needs only look at russia to see what happens to a superpower who lets the west dictate what it should do. So china will happily continue with its current policy knowing that with each passing year America and the west will be more and more dependant and less able to take a stand against it.
Mainstream media does not see this but frankly neither does the alternative media. The only way to get true unbiased news is to make your own by getting it from multiple sources. If you are only reading news stories that condemn the war in Iraq then you are not well informed. Don't then complain that other people aren't either.
At least the chinese know they are getting a 1-sided version of the news. You do not.