Q5: Will planned product releases for Alias or Autodesk be affected and will
Autodesk continue to support Alias' products?
A5: We do not anticipate any changes with respect to planned product releases for
both companies. And yes, Autodesk plans to continue to develop Alias
products and utilize the strength of the combined organization to provide
customers with continued innovation and technology development.
Q18: Will Autodesk sell all of Alias' products?
A18: After the transaction closes, Autodesk plans to continue to sell all of the
products currently offered by both organizations.
Q23: What platforms do the Autodesk® 3ds Max® and Alias' Maya software
support?
A23: 3ds Max and Maya software products differ greatly in supported platforms.
Maya software supports Linux®, Windows® and Macintosh® operating systems,
making it the top choice for platform-sensitive segments like high-end film,
whereas 3ds Max software is a Windows application that is used most often in
world-building for games.
We expect customers to benefit from the wide range of platforms upon which
the combined company will offer its products.
From this info, it looks like they consider Maya and 3DS Max to be in separate market segments - which indeed they are. For cryin' out loud, Pixar uses parts of Maya in their workflow. Who would want to kill that? Maya's the crown jewel of Alias. You can't compare this to the Macromedia acquisition. This would be more akin to Macromedia buying out Adobe to get Photoshop.
There is also the argument that pouring our culture into Russia ended the Cold War and brought down the iron curtain, and so sharing with China in whatever ways they will allow should similarly bring about a free China.
I'd like to echo this sentiment. By participating with Chinese censorship, these corporations are keeping the door open. The last thing we want is for China to put up an iron curtain and block access to anything outside of China. It's a delicate balance.
Look at it this way. Technology always finds a way. You just can't stop the avalanche of information. We may not be giving the Chinese access to the highest quality information, but at least we're still peppering them with little bits here and there. It may not be overt, but it still seeps into the unconscious. That's much better than nothing.
You should still be pissed of at Google, et al. for rolling over, but be thankful that they've still got their foot in the door. The world is grey.
A daemon or agent launched by launchd SHOULD:
oo Launch on demand given criteria specified in the XML property list.
What does cron do? Launch programs! Clearly this means that launchd can be used to replace cron.
Not only that but looking at the rest of the plist syntax reveals that this thing is waaay cooler than cron. It allows you to set user, group, chroot, check dependencies, designate where to send input and output, set resource limits and whole crapload of other things. Sure you can do this all from within a script, but this thing gives you all that for free.
Obviously there are better solutions to handle the syndication problem. There's no question about it.
The reason why RSS took off is because everyone has a friggin' web server. Most ISPs throw in some web space with your dial-up/DSL account.
They don't throw in a multicast server.
RSS wasn't orignally invented to handle InfoWorld's traffic. It was a blogging thang. Most blogs don't get that much traffic so it's a fine solution.
This isn't about making cool browsers...
on
Browser Wars 2004
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
These guys
aren't talking about making cool browsers, they're talking about using
browser-based technology to make cool applications.
It's much easier to write UI code in HTML with some JavaScript that it
is to write the same UI code with C++ or any other language for that
matter. Instead of scoffing at the notion of web apps, people should embrace it as
a new paradigm. Faster, cheaper, cross-platform, what could be better?
Microsoft was headed down this road with IE, but suddenly they
realized that they couldn't continue or they would make the Windows
API monopoly irrelevant.
IE development came to a screeching halt and
they decided to come up with a perverted proprietary work-around to implement the
same thing in a way that wouldn't threaten Windows (XAML and Avalon).
XAML is essentially a fancy mark-up language (like HTML) that, coupled
with C# (instead of JavaScript) creates rich client applications that
are compiled windows apps. Throw in a little Indigo to make the apps web-aware and you've successfully recreated the wheel.
It only seems natural that someone else would want to carry the torch
of rich browser-based apps. Most of the things these guys are talking
about are already possible in IE. They're just trying to standardize
it so people can roll up their sleeves and start writing cool apps.
As Sun was the major complaining competitor in the EU case, this gives M$ a lot of fire support when trying to challenge the record fine.
The interesting bit here is whether or not Microsoft just fell on their own sword. They've just set a precedent with a $2bn settlement over anti-trust and intellectual property!
If indeed this was a tactic to evade censure by the EU, they may have just openened themselves up to much bigger problems by providing a rock-solid precedent to other competitors.
In my opinion they have nothing to lose and plenty to gain. With Java open-sourced, Sun could get:
1) lots of performance optimizations - there's plenty of room for performance gains in Java. Java performance varies widely from platform to platform. More eyeballs on the code is a good thing.
2) lots of bug fixes - that lame-assed bug that's driving you crazy on one of the platform implementations? fix it and submit a patch. Security holes could be identified and fixed. More eyeballs on the code is a good thing.
3) ports of Java to new platforms - I would imagine that being able to install Java on legacy OS's would be a huge boon to Sun. They would get more Java penetration into the enterprise market. I'm sure there's some Commodore 64 freak out there who desperately wants to write Java apps for his antique.:)
Also, no one around here seems to understand that Open Source does not necessarily equal FREE. There are many fine commercial products out there with restrictive licenses that are open source e.g. Resin. Sun could open source Java without giving up their licensing rights.
I also don't buy the argument that Java would fragment from too much forking. Smart engineers stick to standards because deviating from standards almost always ends in huge amounts of pain and suffering.
Least qualified? Not by comparison to some other recent presidents.
Education != qualifications
I'm stunned that you would even posit such broken metric for "qualification". There's no amount of formal education that can teach you how to be the president. Being a good politician is a "soft skill" that can't really be taught. Bush has a rapport with the people... but that's about all I can say for his qualifications.
>Bush squandered the greatest chance for peace in our time by calling all of the world "Evil"
It was 3 countries, and those countries are either state sponsors of terrorism, genocidal regimes, or rogue nations pursuing WMD. If that's not evil, I'd love to see how you define "good."
I think both commentaries above are specious. There's been some good that's come out of Bush's finger-pointing. Many of those rogue nations have given up their WMD programs. However, it's not clear whether Bush's rhetoric has harmed the US in more intangible ways: there are a lot more people who hate the US now. I'm way more worried about terrorists than WMDs.
If those "rules" include reining in WMD proliferators and demolishing terrorist states, screw the opposition; The Right Thing (TM) isn't always the easy or popular thing. If finding and killing terrorists before they can strike is wrong, I don't want to be right.
I would agree with you if I thought that anything Bush has done has netted us positive results. There are some small victories, but the overall picture looks much, much, grimmer than prior to 9/11. Going after terrorists isn't a bad idea, it's just that Bush's methods are questionable. Bush has fumbled on execution time and time again.
Taking down rogue nations is only good if it somehow improves our situation. News flash here: "terrorists don't respect borders". If you take down Iraq, they just move to the next country that's willing to give them safe harbor.
You have to treat the disease, not the symptoms. Terrorism is a symptom, not a disease. Killing terrorists doesn't work. There will always be more terrorists to recruit to fill their places. You have to remove the reason why these people feel so much hatred towards us - yes, there is a reason! There has to be.
>Not to mention the fact that he wants to hold Americans without trial or due process indefinitely
If they're terrorists, they have almost no rights. To be considered lawful combatants and thus entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention, you must meet four conditions: have a responsible chain of command (autonomous terrorist "cells" don't qualify), carry weapons openly, have a distinctive uniform or insignia, and follow the laws of war... Al-Queda meets NONE of these (the commentary I cited above is interesting... I recommend reading it).
This is one of the most egregious developments in the erosion of our civil liberties. I don't care if those people being held are terrorists or not. They deserve a speedy trial. Holding someone for two years without even charging them is a horrible crime - it goes against everything this country was founded on. In addition, it's well known that most of the detainess in Guantanmo Bay aren't terrorists. How would you feel if you were put in prison for two years for no good reason? and you didn't even have a charge against you? and there was no trial date set for you? and most people acknowledged that you shouldn't be there?
On a en even more disturbing level, this gives the Bush administr
After the Anti-trust suit, microsoft also does not insist that no other media be installed by OEM.
It doesn't matter. Real can go after Microsoft for past grievances and injustices. And it'll be that much easier now that they have a precedent to lean on.
Several TLD administrators* already support wildcard functionality in their zones, demonstraiting that the concept works in practice. The applications provided by these administrators to support wildcard functionality vary, but in all cases the administrators provide a web page to inform the human web users that they have reached a destination as a result of attempting to resolve a non-existent domain name. In most cases, the web page informs the user that the domain is available for registration. In one case the web page helps the user find web sites associated with delegated subdomains.
*The zones for.cc,.cx,.io,.mp,.museum,.nu,.ph,.td,.tk,.tv, and.ws support wildcard functionality.
They've been watching others do this for a long time... just waiting for a critical mass so they can point to everyone else and say, "They're all doing it, why can't I?"
The reason why WinFS was slated for the desktop first (and then later considered for server deployment) is because it was considered a usability enhancement -- not a performance enhancer. Most/. readers won't understand this because they think Linux is easy to use (it's not).
Usability engineers looked at what users were doing in Windows and they saw that tons of people weren't using the filesystem - at least not directly. They were just putting everything on the desktop. If it was on the desktop, they could find it. They kept folder structures to a minimum and organized things visually (or not at all).
This posed a significant problem, so indexing and searching and abstracting the filesystem was one of the solutions. Instead of having to navigate a filesystem (hard for many users), you just type in what you're looking for and *poof* it appears. Not sure what you're looking for? Start describing it... *poof* it appears.
I'm not saying this is the right solution, but technology is not always about cluster size and performance - especially if the system isn't usable. It will be interesting to see how user friendly this WinFS thing is...
AT&T contracts were unusual, in that they were perpetual....courts prefer sunset contracts, and usually insist that
any IP rights lapse unless they are continually and consistently enforced.
In my mind this is going to make it very hard for SCO to get anywhere. They even called their UNIX IP a "sleeping giant".
This is already off-topic, but NT is has some POSIX compatibility so that Microsoft can sell it to the government. The US government requires POSIX compatability for all its OS's. And, btw, the POSIX subsystem in NT is totally broken -- MS made sure it will never run anything but the most basic stuff.
This is a serious question: what books talk about the philosophy/naming conventions behind the *nix file systems?
Please suggest some to me.
I have at least half a dozen *nix books on my shelf and none of them talk about it. They might tell you what the top level directories are for, but the other 300 mysterious sub-directories are left out. This has been one of the most befuddling aspects of switching to Linux. Whenever I compile programs, I just have to basically guess at where stuff should go.
Reading the threads on this article has been the most information I've gotten on this subject.
The transit can't be seen with the naked eye because Mercury is so small - only about 1/160 of the Sun's diameter. But anyone with an Internet connection can
watch it live from the SOHO spacecraft.
Myth: Linux Means No Forced Upgrades
"Many users complain that Microsoft forces them to upgrade to newer releases of Windows," Silver wrote. "However, we believe that things will not be that much different in a Linux environment."
Linux vendors only support their consumer releases (and free distributions) for a maximum of two years, Silver noted.
Yes, you may be forced to upgrade, but it's FREE!!! There are some costs associated with rolling out the new version, but they aren't licensing costs. And upgrades can automated fairly easily with scripts, and the like.
The only reason people bitch about forced upgrades is because the licenses cost money. And, in his scenario, your paid support costs don't change just because you're upgrading - support is independent of OS version.
This is exactly right. Music is NOT a commodity market. Efficiencies in production just mean more money for the biz. They charge what the market will bear and for really good music, the market will pay a lot.
From the extremetech article on the differences between the various BSDs:
"FreeBSD has the largest development team, the largest user base, the largest number of ported applications, and the largest collection of active e-mail lists. It also has the best documentation..."
It also points out that installation is easier. In short, you use FreeBSD because it has the richest feature set and greatest ease-of-use. You use OpenBSD when security is your first priority and you don't mind struggling a little bit.
Why not just slap a $10 tax on the sale of all new computers an earmark it for end-of-life recycling? The thing will have to be recycled eventually, why not pay for it up front?
You could probably even do it for cheaper if every computer sold was taxed. That way the federal/state/local/whatever government can offer recycling for computers.
People won't be tempted to illegaly dump since recycling costs are already paid.
Throw your computer parts in your curb side recylcing bin... done!
does a cursory search for prior patents (not prior art)
if no prior patents show up, it issues the patent
Nowhere in this process is that "value" of the patent weighed. Nowhere is the "validity" of the patent weighes. It's just too much for the patent office to handle. The onus is on the public at large to overthrow crappy patents, not the USTPO. Just because you have a patent on something doesn't mean that patent is worth a damn.
First of all, patents usually cover implementations, not ideas. You cannot patent a lightbulb, you have to patent an implementation of a lightbulb. Just because you have a patent on an implementation of a widget doesn't mean that someone else can't come up with a NEW implementation of that widget and get a patent on their NEW implementation.
"DMT" is an implementation. No one uses "DMT" for their digital media compression. They use any one of a handful of other technologies that probably all have patents, too.
Second of all, you can't sue the people using the content delivery systems. You have to sue the people who made the content delivery systems (ie. Real, Microsoft, etc.). This would be like suing all the people who bought Vanilla Ice CD's because Vanilla Ice violated copyright laws by sampling someone else's music without getting permission or giving credit.
This is a non-issue. The only reason people are coughing up money is because it's probably such a laughably small licensing fee that it is cheaper than paying lawyers to go to trial over this.
When they make a statement like "It's a command-line-focused approach that's not particularly designed to be user friendly", you shouldn't think they actually *believe* that.
It's like telling everyone that the president was wrapped up in a kiddie porn ring. It doesn't matter if he was or wasn't, just what people believe. People believe what you tell them.
These Microsoft guys are willing to come across as stupid to 1% of the public if they can achieve their goals with the other 99%.
What's more, MS bought it's minority stake in Sendo in order to buy it's way into the cell phone software market. The heart of MS's cell phone problems runs way deeper than the fact that they make crappy software:
If you look at profit margins for cell phone hardware, Nokia makes about a 50% profit on it's handsets. By contrast, Dell makes somewhere in the high teens (~18%) for it's PC hardware. This is largely due to the fact that MS is sucking up all the extra profit. No cell phone maker on the planet wants to let MS muscle in on their hardware profits - MS was forced to buy their way in.
Slashdot Mirror
From this info, it looks like they consider Maya and 3DS Max to be in separate market segments - which indeed they are. For cryin' out loud, Pixar uses parts of Maya in their workflow. Who would want to kill that? Maya's the crown jewel of Alias. You can't compare this to the Macromedia acquisition. This would be more akin to Macromedia buying out Adobe to get Photoshop.
Look at it this way. Technology always finds a way. You just can't stop the avalanche of information. We may not be giving the Chinese access to the highest quality information, but at least we're still peppering them with little bits here and there. It may not be overt, but it still seeps into the unconscious. That's much better than nothing.
You should still be pissed of at Google, et al. for rolling over, but be thankful that they've still got their foot in the door. The world is grey.
Not only that but looking at the rest of the plist syntax reveals that this thing is waaay cooler than cron. It allows you to set user, group, chroot, check dependencies, designate where to send input and output, set resource limits and whole crapload of other things. Sure you can do this all from within a script, but this thing gives you all that for free.
I'm not sure how this is appeasement. Please notice that #2 above is all about throwing someone in jail.
- a list of machines that need to be cleaned up
- a bank account or other information that can be used to track down the spammers/crackers
I guarantee $3k is cheaper than what it would actually cost tax payers if the authorities did their job with normal investigative work.The reason why RSS took off is because everyone has a friggin' web server. Most ISPs throw in some web space with your dial-up/DSL account. They don't throw in a multicast server.
RSS wasn't orignally invented to handle InfoWorld's traffic. It was a blogging thang. Most blogs don't get that much traffic so it's a fine solution.
It's much easier to write UI code in HTML with some JavaScript that it is to write the same UI code with C++ or any other language for that matter. Instead of scoffing at the notion of web apps, people should embrace it as a new paradigm. Faster, cheaper, cross-platform, what could be better?
Microsoft was headed down this road with IE, but suddenly they realized that they couldn't continue or they would make the Windows API monopoly irrelevant.
IE development came to a screeching halt and they decided to come up with a perverted proprietary work-around to implement the same thing in a way that wouldn't threaten Windows (XAML and Avalon). XAML is essentially a fancy mark-up language (like HTML) that, coupled with C# (instead of JavaScript) creates rich client applications that are compiled windows apps. Throw in a little Indigo to make the apps web-aware and you've successfully recreated the wheel.
It only seems natural that someone else would want to carry the torch of rich browser-based apps. Most of the things these guys are talking about are already possible in IE. They're just trying to standardize it so people can roll up their sleeves and start writing cool apps.
The interesting bit here is whether or not Microsoft just fell on their own sword. They've just set a precedent with a $2bn settlement over anti-trust and intellectual property!
If indeed this was a tactic to evade censure by the EU, they may have just openened themselves up to much bigger problems by providing a rock-solid precedent to other competitors.
1) lots of performance optimizations - there's plenty of room for performance gains in Java. Java performance varies widely from platform to platform. More eyeballs on the code is a good thing.
2) lots of bug fixes - that lame-assed bug that's driving you crazy on one of the platform implementations? fix it and submit a patch. Security holes could be identified and fixed. More eyeballs on the code is a good thing.
3) ports of Java to new platforms - I would imagine that being able to install Java on legacy OS's would be a huge boon to Sun. They would get more Java penetration into the enterprise market. I'm sure there's some Commodore 64 freak out there who desperately wants to write Java apps for his antique. :)
Also, no one around here seems to understand that Open Source does not necessarily equal FREE. There are many fine commercial products out there with restrictive licenses that are open source e.g. Resin. Sun could open source Java without giving up their licensing rights.
I also don't buy the argument that Java would fragment from too much forking. Smart engineers stick to standards because deviating from standards almost always ends in huge amounts of pain and suffering.
Education != qualifications
I'm stunned that you would even posit such broken metric for "qualification". There's no amount of formal education that can teach you how to be the president. Being a good politician is a "soft skill" that can't really be taught. Bush has a rapport with the people... but that's about all I can say for his qualifications.
Out of the above list, I think looking at vacation days taken during presidency is a much more interesting comparison of qualifications.
I think both commentaries above are specious. There's been some good that's come out of Bush's finger-pointing. Many of those rogue nations have given up their WMD programs. However, it's not clear whether Bush's rhetoric has harmed the US in more intangible ways: there are a lot more people who hate the US now. I'm way more worried about terrorists than WMDs.
I would agree with you if I thought that anything Bush has done has netted us positive results. There are some small victories, but the overall picture looks much, much, grimmer than prior to 9/11. Going after terrorists isn't a bad idea, it's just that Bush's methods are questionable. Bush has fumbled on execution time and time again.
Taking down rogue nations is only good if it somehow improves our situation. News flash here: "terrorists don't respect borders". If you take down Iraq, they just move to the next country that's willing to give them safe harbor.
You have to treat the disease, not the symptoms. Terrorism is a symptom, not a disease. Killing terrorists doesn't work. There will always be more terrorists to recruit to fill their places. You have to remove the reason why these people feel so much hatred towards us - yes, there is a reason! There has to be.
This is one of the most egregious developments in the erosion of our civil liberties. I don't care if those people being held are terrorists or not. They deserve a speedy trial. Holding someone for two years without even charging them is a horrible crime - it goes against everything this country was founded on. In addition, it's well known that most of the detainess in Guantanmo Bay aren't terrorists. How would you feel if you were put in prison for two years for no good reason? and you didn't even have a charge against you? and there was no trial date set for you? and most people acknowledged that you shouldn't be there?
On a en even more disturbing level, this gives the Bush administr
Usability engineers looked at what users were doing in Windows and they saw that tons of people weren't using the filesystem - at least not directly. They were just putting everything on the desktop. If it was on the desktop, they could find it. They kept folder structures to a minimum and organized things visually (or not at all).
This posed a significant problem, so indexing and searching and abstracting the filesystem was one of the solutions. Instead of having to navigate a filesystem (hard for many users), you just type in what you're looking for and *poof* it appears. Not sure what you're looking for? Start describing it... *poof* it appears.
I'm not saying this is the right solution, but technology is not always about cluster size and performance - especially if the system isn't usable. It will be interesting to see how user friendly this WinFS thing is...
This is already off-topic, but NT is has some POSIX compatibility so that Microsoft can sell it to the government. The US government requires POSIX compatability for all its OS's. And, btw, the POSIX subsystem in NT is totally broken -- MS made sure it will never run anything but the most basic stuff.
Please suggest some to me.
I have at least half a dozen *nix books on my shelf and none of them talk about it. They might tell you what the top level directories are for, but the other 300 mysterious sub-directories are left out. This has been one of the most befuddling aspects of switching to Linux. Whenever I compile programs, I just have to basically guess at where stuff should go.
Reading the threads on this article has been the most information I've gotten on this subject.
The only reason people bitch about forced upgrades is because the licenses cost money. And, in his scenario, your paid support costs don't change just because you're upgrading - support is independent of OS version.
This is exactly right. Music is NOT a commodity market. Efficiencies in production just mean more money for the biz. They charge what the market will bear and for really good music, the market will pay a lot.
"FreeBSD has the largest development team, the largest user base, the largest number of ported applications, and the largest collection of active e-mail lists. It also has the best documentation..."
It also points out that installation is easier. In short, you use FreeBSD because it has the richest feature set and greatest ease-of-use. You use OpenBSD when security is your first priority and you don't mind struggling a little bit.
Why not just slap a $10 tax on the sale of all new computers an earmark it for end-of-life recycling? The thing will have to be recycled eventually, why not pay for it up front?
You could probably even do it for cheaper if every computer sold was taxed. That way the federal/state/local/whatever government can offer recycling for computers.
People won't be tempted to illegaly dump since recycling costs are already paid. Throw your computer parts in your curb side recylcing bin... done!
- the USTPO looks at the patent application
- does a cursory search for prior patents (not prior art)
- if no prior patents show up, it issues the patent
Nowhere in this process is that "value" of the patent weighed. Nowhere is the "validity" of the patent weighes. It's just too much for the patent office to handle. The onus is on the public at large to overthrow crappy patents, not the USTPO. Just because you have a patent on something doesn't mean that patent is worth a damn."DMT" is an implementation. No one uses "DMT" for their digital media compression. They use any one of a handful of other technologies that probably all have patents, too.
Second of all, you can't sue the people using the content delivery systems. You have to sue the people who made the content delivery systems (ie. Real, Microsoft, etc.). This would be like suing all the people who bought Vanilla Ice CD's because Vanilla Ice violated copyright laws by sampling someone else's music without getting permission or giving credit.
This is a non-issue. The only reason people are coughing up money is because it's probably such a laughably small licensing fee that it is cheaper than paying lawyers to go to trial over this.
When they make a statement like "It's a command-line-focused approach that's not particularly designed to be user friendly", you shouldn't think they actually *believe* that.
It's like telling everyone that the president was wrapped up in a kiddie porn ring. It doesn't matter if he was or wasn't, just what people believe. People believe what you tell them.
These Microsoft guys are willing to come across as stupid to 1% of the public if they can achieve their goals with the other 99%.
What's more, MS bought it's minority stake in Sendo in order to buy it's way into the cell phone software market. The heart of MS's cell phone problems runs way deeper than the fact that they make crappy software:
If you look at profit margins for cell phone hardware, Nokia makes about a 50% profit on it's handsets. By contrast, Dell makes somewhere in the high teens (~18%) for it's PC hardware. This is largely due to the fact that MS is sucking up all the extra profit. No cell phone maker on the planet wants to let MS muscle in on their hardware profits - MS was forced to buy their way in.