If you want your main character to be a criminal for instance, the easy way to do things is to have the criminal succeed and get rich off his crimes. With the code you can't do that, a criminal can't profit from his crimes, so what to do? You have to come up with other ways of having him 'win', through personal relationships, character growth, overcoming adversity, etc.
When Chester Gould began Dick Tracy in the thirties, he quite deliberately set out to strip his villains of all romance and promise. Memorably caricatured physically - but also easily recognizable criminal types.
"Top of the world, Ma!" You know how the story ends.
What matters is how you get there.
Characters like LeChuck, The Joker and The Phantom Blot take you the realms of madness. Motiveless malevolence. Pure evil. In real life or in fantasy there is no greater challenge to the reader's sense of how the world works.
At the trial, the expert who had done the evaulation was not cross examined, and in the appeal the OSG attempted to impeach the expert using general information from Wikipedia.
The court of appeals is a court of law.
It does not like to see either party blind-sided by issues that were not raised at trial.
Issues that cannot be fairly adjuidicated without sending the case back to the trial courts - something it really, really doesn't want to do because of the burden of uncertainty and expense to everyone involved.
As much as Dr. Dickhead and Congress should be excoriated appropriately, let's not forget that the Comics industry bent over backwards to censor itself. If they'd shown a little more backbone, imagine what Lee and Kirkby could have done with the "Marvel Way" in the sixties. Imagine not having that fucking glut of saccharine Archie products.
The comic book was on the fast track to extinction after World War Two.
Mikey Spillane was in paperback and so, for that matter, was Dashiell Hammett. Trash or class for 25 cents. The kids were watching television.
The crime and horror comic was the stop-gap, quick-buck, solution.
Pretty much every commercial artist serves his apprenticeship in the sub-basements of his profession. The Civil War artist Mort Künstler churned out Nazi sex-slave bondage covers for men's magazines like Stag.
The problem is that critics weren't looking at what the comic book might become - but what old pros like Al Capp, Hal Foster and Milton Caniff and newcomers like Walt Kelly had made of the newspaper comic strip.
Without a ratings system in place, Tales From The Crypt could be sold off the same racks as Scrooge McDuck and Casper.
The comic book did not have an independent distribution channel but tended to end up in places like your neighborhood cigar store - a strictly male preserve, like the old time saloon, and often a front for pornography sales, bookmaking and the numbers racket. It was not a place you wanted to see a kid.
Call it guilt by association, if you like, but the connection hurt the comics industry and hurt it badly.
Now that there is Ogg, WebM, HTML5 video, the 'Ubuntu' video editor for Gnome and the Kdenlive video editor for KDE4, all HD camera's are still recording to h.264 by default.
Of course they are.
Just about the only place you will find WebM video is on YouTube. Transcoded from H.264.
HTML5 doesn't specify a video codec.
H.264 is used in such applications as players for Blu-ray Discs, videos from YouTube and the iTunes Store, web software such as the Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight, broadcast services for DVB and SBTVD, direct-broadcast satellite television services, cable television services, and real-time videoconferencing.H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
H.264 is mobile devices. The cell phone. The Flip pocket HD camcorder. H.264 is industrial and security video. The world is larger than the web - and H.264 has been out there for almost ten years.
A casual search of Google Shopping for "H.264" will return 42,000 hits.
Is open hardware really that big a problem? It's not like opening a Fab is cheap.
The optical and mechanical requirements of a production-grade camera are demanding. Three - large - HD sensors are the norm. I don't see the savings here.
And won't need the training the OP is talking about.
Your definition of IT - and of careers in IT - strikes me as too narrow for the ninth grade classroom. I am not even sure it is the proper focus of study.
One prime candidate for the largest piston-driven aircraft engine ever built, the Lycoming R-7755
You think you have oil consumption problems? Meet the Lycoming R-7755, a 36-cylinder, 5000-hp, turbosupercharged monster displacing 7,755 cubic inches (bore/stroke 6.375 X 6.75 in.) and weighing a mere three tons, give or take a beer keg.
Two of these babies were built in 1946 (one carbureted, one fuel-injected), for the Convair B-36. Pratt & Whitney won the engine contract, ultimately, with its 28-cylinder R-4360 after the Lycoming proved too unreliable. Had Lycoming gotten the contract, the B-36 would have gone into the air with 216 cylinders and 432 spark plugs. Imagine trying to keep 432 spark plugs clean, operating on postwar 115/145 avgas.
The R-7755 was innovative in a number of ways. It was liquid-cooled, which is why the cylinders line up in a perfect line (in 9 rows of 4). Each bank of cylinders had an overhead camshaft. (I don't know of another radial with an overhead cam, do you?) Each cam, in turn, had two sets of lobes: one for high power, the other for long-distance economy cruise. When the pilot chose a different setting, the entire cam would slide lengthwise a couple inches to engage the other set of lobes.
The Air Force spent 10 years battling engine problems in the B-36, many of them related to poor cylinder cooling, others involving carb ice and carburetor fires. None of which would have been a problem with the Lycoming R-7755.Largest Lycoming
the Court held: "obtaining by...technology any information regarding the interior of the home that could not otherwise have been obtained without physical "intrusion into a constitutionally protected area," constitutes a search-- at least where...the technology in question is not in general public use." (A discussion of how the protection of a car differs from a house, legally, is beyond the scope of this post;)
I think it would be unwise to frame the argument around "technology not in general public use."
It will never be easy for a court to deny the police a tool to counter an imminent and out-sized threat.
The truck bomb on the move. Human trafficking along the border.
The driver found with two kids locked in his trunk is probably not going to win on search and seizure.
Slyvania's 1968 "Color Slide Theater" built a color flying-spot scanner and Kodak Carousel slide changer into a $995 color TV console.
You could record and synchronize a slide show with the built in audio cassette recorder.
It eliminated the projection screen and hot, high-intensity, projection lamp.
Just as suggestively, it introduced the notion of instant - responsive - manual or semi-automatic adjustment of hue, brightness and contrast, a kind of on-the-fly photo editing that never been possible outside the photo lab.
For the foreseeable future, user generated content will be H.264. The HD "Flip" camcorder at $150. Professional content as well - supported by Flash, Netflix, the iPhone, etc.
In other word, if Canonical would like to give all regular ubuntu users the codec it would cost a shitload of money?
10 or 20 cents a copy to a max of $5 million a year.
Canonical is interested in revenues from online services and media sales. It would like to become the iTunes of the Linux market. H.264 is one way to get there.
This is basically to get the people hooked on h264 so that streaming sites in the future need to pay roaylities. This is a common problem with "defacto" standards.
The geek has a real problem remembering that there is a multiverse of tech that evolves outside the web.
H.264 is deeply entrenched in medical, industrial and military applications, broadcast, cable and satellite distribution, theatrical production and home video.
Google Shopping alone returns 42,000 hits for "H.264." 127 pages, all with relevant results.
The hook is already set - and it no longer matters whether H.264 is a "real" or "defacto" standard.
Licensors, about 30, including global industrial heavyweights like JVC, Mitsubishi, NTT, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba.
Licensees, about 900, and, for all practical purposes, it reads like the Asian Fortune 500 in Tech.
More importantly, developers of H.264 encoders/decoders are still are required to pay patent licenses, regardless of whether they make money or not. This makes it impossible to have legal open source implementations of H.264 in the US anywhere that respects our patents.
Canonical licenses H.264 for distribution to its OEM Ubuntu partners.
Explain to me how "open source" translates as "free-as-in-beer."
The fee is scarcely a back-breaker:
For branded encoder and decoder products sold on an OEM basis for incorporation into personal computers as part of a computer operating system, a legal entity may pay for its customers as follows: 0 - 100,000 units/year = no royalty (available to one legal entity in an affiliated group); US $0.20 per unit after first 100,000 units/year; above 5 million units/year, royalty = US $0.10 per unit. The maximum annual royalty ("cap") for an enterprise (commonly controlled legal entities) is $5 million a year in 2010.SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS
Ok. Looks like Google wins this one. Basically, for ~100 million, was it, for On2, they get some tech that might possibly be interesting, and they get a bargaining chip that just made youtube immune to MPEG LA royalties.
The enterprise cap on H.264 royalties is $5 million a year. Bandwidth for YouTube - 75 billion video streams a year - costs $1 million a day. YouTube May Lose $470 Million In 2009
The Hollywoodization of the games industry has killed it in my opinion. I've seen more quality and had more fun from games coming from companies like Valve and publishers like Paradox in the last 5 years than I have from EA or Activision or any other big name.
Half-Life is in many ways the definitive "Hollywood" game. Strong narrative delivering a much richer and more satisfying experience for the player than "Doom." Excellent production values for its time.
Really? Get some perspective. About 3000 americans were killed by terrorists in the past ten years. In that same period about 300,000 died from suicide, while about 350,000 died on the roads.
350,000 traffic deaths.
The full weight of which is carried by 300 million people spread across an entire continent.
No single incident is likely to involve more than one or two deaths or have any long term economic or political consequences. Death on a retail scale is something we've known how to deal with for thousands of years.
The population of the WTC complex at mid-day was something like 100-150 thousand.
16 acres of Manhattan Island. Ten million square feet of office space in the twin towers alone.
This being Manhattan, the tenants included some very important names in global trade and finance. There are very few cities strong enough to recover from an attact on such a scale. The only mistake the terrorists made was one of timing.
Should anything happen to that car, its driver or passengers, the GPS will lead the police straight back to you.
The least worst outcome is that you will have earned a reputation as an all-around "wise ass." Not a good place to be if you have been tentatively cast as the lead in a felony investigation.
Surely, you don't really think that's what it's all about, do you? Who cares if Windows has more market share? The purpose of free software projects is to produce quality free software, and as long as we continue to do that we could care less whether more people are using it than the proprietary alternative.
Market share is a measure of quality.
If your app is still widely regarded as second rate, and not worth the price even when distributed free-as-in-beer, you have a problem that needs fixing.
Re:I finally could tell my friend to go to hell
on
Windows 95 Turns 15
·
· Score: 1
Your buddy was right and you still are clueless. OS/2 was a much better OS than Windows 95. It had a better UI, it was a lot more stable, and was really a very modern OS.Windows 95 was cheap. That was it's only real benefit.
It's disingenuous to complain that Win 95 had the pricing and behavior of a mass-market consumer OS.
Win 95 was a mass-market consumer OS.
The Microsoft OS typically runs well on hardware that is mid-line at introduction and entry-level a year or so later.
Retailers love this - and so do shoppers.
There is lots of product on the shelves, it moves quickly, and there are good deals to be had at every price point.
Microsoft had fifteen years of experience in the home and SOHO markets.
The OEM system install is all-important here.
Users are on a tight budget - backwards compatibility inspires the confidence to make a big new investment in hardware and software.
The latter is particularly relevant in terms of creating a game that's competitive with modern commercial offerings; you need a seriously large number of artists, sound technicians, animators etc.
You need writers and story editors as well: "Red Dead Redemption" is the "Deadwood" of console video games.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want your main character to be a criminal for instance, the easy way to do things is to have the criminal succeed and get rich off his crimes. With the code you can't do that, a criminal can't profit from his crimes, so what to do? You have to come up with other ways of having him 'win', through personal relationships, character growth, overcoming adversity, etc.
When Chester Gould began Dick Tracy in the thirties, he quite deliberately set out to strip his villains of all romance and promise. Memorably caricatured physically - but also easily recognizable criminal types.
"Top of the world, Ma!" You know how the story ends.
What matters is how you get there.
Characters like LeChuck, The Joker and The Phantom Blot take you the realms of madness. Motiveless malevolence. Pure evil. In real life or in fantasy there is no greater challenge to the reader's sense of how the world works.
At the trial, the expert who had done the evaulation was not cross examined, and in the appeal the OSG attempted to impeach the expert using general information from Wikipedia.
The court of appeals is a court of law.
It does not like to see either party blind-sided by issues that were not raised at trial.
Issues that cannot be fairly adjuidicated without sending the case back to the trial courts - something it really, really doesn't want to do because of the burden of uncertainty and expense to everyone involved.
The comic book was on the fast track to extinction after World War Two.
Mikey Spillane was in paperback and so, for that matter, was Dashiell Hammett. Trash or class for 25 cents. The kids were watching television.
The crime and horror comic was the stop-gap, quick-buck, solution.
Pretty much every commercial artist serves his apprenticeship in the sub-basements of his profession. The Civil War artist Mort Künstler churned out Nazi sex-slave bondage covers for men's magazines like Stag.
The problem is that critics weren't looking at what the comic book might become - but what old pros like Al Capp, Hal Foster and Milton Caniff and newcomers like Walt Kelly had made of the newspaper comic strip.
Without a ratings system in place, Tales From The Crypt could be sold off the same racks as Scrooge McDuck and Casper.
The comic book did not have an independent distribution channel but tended to end up in places like your neighborhood cigar store - a strictly male preserve, like the old time saloon, and often a front for pornography sales, bookmaking and the numbers racket. It was not a place you wanted to see a kid.
Call it guilt by association, if you like, but the connection hurt the comics industry and hurt it badly.
Now that there is Ogg, WebM, HTML5 video, the 'Ubuntu' video editor for Gnome and the Kdenlive video editor for KDE4, all HD camera's are still recording to h.264 by default.
Of course they are.
Just about the only place you will find WebM video is on YouTube. Transcoded from H.264.
HTML5 doesn't specify a video codec.
H.264 is used in such applications as players for Blu-ray Discs, videos from YouTube and the iTunes Store, web software such as the Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight, broadcast services for DVB and SBTVD, direct-broadcast satellite television services, cable television services, and real-time videoconferencing. H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
H.264 is mobile devices. The cell phone. The Flip pocket HD camcorder. H.264 is industrial and security video. The world is larger than the web - and H.264 has been out there for almost ten years.
A casual search of Google Shopping for "H.264" will return 42,000 hits.
127 pages of relevant results.
Is open hardware really that big a problem? It's not like opening a Fab is cheap.
The optical and mechanical requirements of a production-grade camera are demanding. Three - large - HD sensors are the norm. I don't see the savings here.
sight unseen, i bet Wikipedia."
Which is why you are not a judge who has to decide what evidence can be used to impeach an expert witness.
Then this person should not work in IT.
And won't need the training the OP is talking about.
Your definition of IT - and of careers in IT - strikes me as too narrow for the ninth grade classroom. I am not even sure it is the proper focus of study.
In 1999 the NRC made a useful distinction between teaching "computer skills" and "fluency with technology" - inspiring critical thinking about the uses of technology. Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education
The GUI based server is still a server.
Is teaching command line skills really more important than teaching what a server does - how it is used and abused?
You think you have oil consumption problems? Meet the Lycoming R-7755, a 36-cylinder, 5000-hp, turbosupercharged monster displacing 7,755 cubic inches (bore/stroke 6.375 X 6.75 in.) and weighing a mere three tons, give or take a beer keg.
Two of these babies were built in 1946 (one carbureted, one fuel-injected), for the Convair B-36. Pratt & Whitney won the engine contract, ultimately, with its 28-cylinder R-4360 after the Lycoming proved too unreliable. Had Lycoming gotten the contract, the B-36 would have gone into the air with 216 cylinders and 432 spark plugs. Imagine trying to keep 432 spark plugs clean, operating on postwar 115/145 avgas.
The R-7755 was innovative in a number of ways. It was liquid-cooled, which is why the cylinders line up in a perfect line (in 9 rows of 4). Each bank of cylinders had an overhead camshaft. (I don't know of another radial with an overhead cam, do you?) Each cam, in turn, had two sets of lobes: one for high power, the other for long-distance economy cruise. When the pilot chose a different setting, the entire cam would slide lengthwise a couple inches to engage the other set of lobes.
The Air Force spent 10 years battling engine problems in the B-36, many of them related to poor cylinder cooling, others involving carb ice and carburetor fires. None of which would have been a problem with the Lycoming R-7755. Largest Lycoming
Yes and while your at it toss out the mouse and the graphical UI. Learn how to use the computer first. Then learn how to enjoy the computer later.
The child of five who began with Win 95 is twenty years old with a child of their own.
You are not going to hold the attention of a ninth grader with tech that they will never see in use outside your classroom.
Learn how to enjoy the computer later?
I would be interested in knowing what books you would assign as requited reading in "English Lit."
the Court held: "obtaining by...technology any information regarding the interior of the home that could not otherwise have been obtained without physical "intrusion into a constitutionally protected area," constitutes a search-- at least where...the technology in question is not in general public use." (A discussion of how the protection of a car differs from a house, legally, is beyond the scope of this post ;)
I think it would be unwise to frame the argument around "technology not in general public use."
It will never be easy for a court to deny the police a tool to counter an imminent and out-sized threat.
The truck bomb on the move. Human trafficking along the border.
The driver found with two kids locked in his trunk is probably not going to win on search and seizure.
Slyvania's 1968 "Color Slide Theater" built a color flying-spot scanner and Kodak Carousel slide changer into a $995 color TV console.
You could record and synchronize a slide show with the built in audio cassette recorder.
It eliminated the projection screen and hot, high-intensity, projection lamp.
Just as suggestively, it introduced the notion of instant - responsive - manual or semi-automatic adjustment of hue, brightness and contrast, a kind of on-the-fly photo editing that never been possible outside the photo lab.
Now - See Your Slides on This New Color TV
there might be a backdoor for internet radio by including a very low bitrate blank video stream in their stream
Why blank?
Why not cover art or other still video content?
If Flash or Silverlight is your container, why not a link to your website or online store?
If licensing the proprietary standard ends up costing more than the bandwidth/time it saves, I can't see it being a very popular choice.
Google paid $106 million for On2.
The enterprise cap on H.264 licensing is $5 million a year.
Bandwidth for YouTube costs $1 million a day. Do You Think Bandwidth Grows on Trees?
For the foreseeable future, user generated content will be H.264. The HD "Flip" camcorder at $150. Professional content as well - supported by Flash, Netflix, the iPhone, etc.
That implies a cost for storage and trans-coding.
I don't see any savings in WebM.
In other word, if Canonical would like to give all regular ubuntu users the codec it would cost a shitload of money?
10 or 20 cents a copy to a max of $5 million a year.
Canonical is interested in revenues from online services and media sales. It would like to become the iTunes of the Linux market. H.264 is one way to get there.
Compare W7 to something like this [flickr.com]
God that thing is ugly.
This is basically to get the people hooked on h264 so that streaming sites in the future need to pay roaylities. This is a common problem with "defacto" standards.
The geek has a real problem remembering that there is a multiverse of tech that evolves outside the web.
H.264 is deeply entrenched in medical, industrial and military applications, broadcast, cable and satellite distribution, theatrical production and home video.
Google Shopping alone returns 42,000 hits for "H.264." 127 pages, all with relevant results.
The hook is already set -
and it no longer matters whether H.264 is a "real" or "defacto" standard.
Licensors, about 30, including global industrial heavyweights like JVC, Mitsubishi, NTT, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba.
Licensees, about 900, and, for all practical purposes, it reads like the Asian Fortune 500 in Tech.
More importantly, developers of H.264 encoders/decoders are still are required to pay patent licenses, regardless of whether they make money or not. This makes it impossible to have legal open source implementations of H.264 in the US anywhere that respects our patents.
Canonical licenses H.264 for distribution to its OEM Ubuntu partners.
Explain to me how "open source" translates as "free-as-in-beer."
The fee is scarcely a back-breaker:
For branded encoder and decoder products sold on an OEM basis for incorporation into personal computers as part of a computer operating system, a legal entity may pay for its customers as follows: 0 - 100,000 units/year = no royalty (available to one legal entity in an affiliated group); US $0.20 per unit after first 100,000 units/year; above 5 million units/year, royalty = US $0.10 per unit. The maximum annual royalty ("cap") for an enterprise (commonly controlled legal entities) is $5 million a year in 2010. SUMMARY OF AVC/H.264 LICENSE TERMS
Ok. Looks like Google wins this one. Basically, for ~100 million, was it, for On2, they get some tech that might possibly be interesting, and they get a bargaining chip that just made youtube immune to MPEG LA royalties.
The enterprise cap on H.264 royalties is $5 million a year. Bandwidth for YouTube - 75 billion video streams a year - costs $1 million a day. YouTube May Lose $470 Million In 2009
Which would win in a fight, the Millennium Falcon or the Enterprise?
The Falcon was an aging smuggler tricked up for speed and maybe stealth. It had no business engaging a cap ship.
The Hollywoodization of the games industry has killed it in my opinion. I've seen more quality and had more fun from games coming from companies like Valve and publishers like Paradox in the last 5 years than I have from EA or Activision or any other big name.
Half-Life is in many ways the definitive "Hollywood" game. Strong narrative delivering a much richer and more satisfying experience for the player than "Doom." Excellent production values for its time.
Really? Get some perspective. About 3000 americans were killed by terrorists in the past ten years. In that same period about 300,000 died from suicide, while about 350,000 died on the roads.
350,000 traffic deaths.
The full weight of which is carried by 300 million people spread across an entire continent.
No single incident is likely to involve more than one or two deaths or have any long term economic or political consequences. Death on a retail scale is something we've known how to deal with for thousands of years.
The population of the WTC complex at mid-day was something like 100-150 thousand.
16 acres of Manhattan Island. Ten million square feet of office space in the twin towers alone.
This being Manhattan, the tenants included some very important names in global trade and finance. There are very few cities strong enough to recover from an attact on such a scale. The only mistake the terrorists made was one of timing.
2. Attach it to another car at random
It's a roll of the dice.
Should anything happen to that car, its driver or passengers, the GPS will lead the police straight back to you.
The least worst outcome is that you will have earned a reputation as an all-around "wise ass." Not a good place to be if you have been tentatively cast as the lead in a felony investigation.
Surely, you don't really think that's what it's all about, do you? Who cares if Windows has more market share? The purpose of free software projects is to produce quality free software, and as long as we continue to do that we could care less whether more people are using it than the proprietary alternative.
Market share is a measure of quality.
If your app is still widely regarded as second rate, and not worth the price even when distributed free-as-in-beer, you have a problem that needs fixing.
Your buddy was right and you still are clueless.
OS/2 was a much better OS than Windows 95. It had a better UI, it was a lot more stable, and was really a very modern OS.Windows 95 was cheap. That was it's only real benefit.
It's disingenuous to complain that Win 95 had the pricing and behavior of a mass-market consumer OS.
Win 95 was a mass-market consumer OS.
The Microsoft OS typically runs well on hardware that is mid-line at introduction and entry-level a year or so later.
Retailers love this - and so do shoppers.
There is lots of product on the shelves, it moves quickly, and there are good deals to be had at every price point.
Microsoft had fifteen years of experience in the home and SOHO markets.
The OEM system install is all-important here.
Users are on a tight budget - backwards compatibility inspires the confidence to make a big new investment in hardware and software.
Video and sound must work out of the box.
The latter is particularly relevant in terms of creating a game that's competitive with modern commercial offerings; you need a seriously large number of artists, sound technicians, animators etc.
You need writers and story editors as well: "Red Dead Redemption" is the "Deadwood" of console video games.