I saw it last night, and I liked it. Actually, I really liked it.
It's entirely possible that one of the reasons for this was that I'd never seen the original series. What it came down to for me was that it was a Hollywood action flick with a bit less straightforwardness than ordinary. Yes, the plot was a bit confusing at first, because they didn't give you all the answers right at the beginning, but by the end, they gave you everything, and there was the thrill of discovery along the way. I found that the special effects didn't overwhelm the rest of the movie, and while it may have been a little emotionally detached, it built a kind of atmosphere which at the very least was honest to itself. And yes, Charlize was hot with a capital T. It was an action flick that was worth the popcorn, and better than most.
My full disclosure statement here is that I did see Punisher on TMN the night before, it's possible that pretty much anything would look good in comparison.
The bulbs use an integral reflector, which bumps the price up as well. The reflectors in high intensity/high heat units like this have a limited life span, and while it's probably longer than just a bulb, the manufacturers think that it's better to have you replace it at the same time as the actual lamp. So they make it all as a unit. Instead of just being a simple capsule then, you have a whole assembly (makes you think of printer ink schemes...)
The other issue is that the projector manufacturers keep on redesigning the projectors to take different shaped bulb/reflector assemblies. This is partly because new projectors need slightly different specs on the capsule and on the shape/size/focal distance of the reflector and partly so they can keep selling you new bulbs.
To expand though, it's not just the fact that Acrobat and document management is where income is now, it's that that is where they see the growth. Graphics and the creative market will grow, but only at the rate of the economy. They dominate that market, so they can't get more market share, and that sector isn't exactly outstripping the rest of the economy.
Document and information management is a place where they can really grow exponentially. As far as I can tell, (I'm in government) the PDF tools really hold the most promise of any technology to really save us money, time, and management costs as far as reducing the amount of paper we have to move around. Plus, done right, it can really make things easier and more convenient for our clients.
(Of course, this opinion is my own, not necessarily my employer's)
I was in a meeting with a couple sales people from Adobe. Now, we have to take this with a grain of salt, since they were trying to sell us on a massive document and information management system, but the main reason for the purchase is so that Adobe could have Macromedia's presentation tools for forms and paper management.
Right now, a massive portion of Adobe's income comes from the Acrobat/PDF/LiveCycle products, and it's the part that is growing the fastest. Macromedia had been developing 'Flash Paper' and had done great work on making things usable and portable on mobile devices and more lightweight on more platforms.
Expect to see Flash Paper die, and expect to see some of the Flash plug-in multiple platform technologies be leveraged to provide more and better portability of PDFs.
John Galt? Well, he was an employee of the Canada Company, a fairly successful novelist and the founder of Guelph, Ontario. Theres a city named after him a few minutes drive away from Guelph. Why do you ask?
I don't know what he has to do with a mean-spirited and nasty political/economic philosophy, but there you go.
I do find it funny that after years of badgering by the community MS is finally doing something about security and they're getting in trouble for it from the EU.
I mean, they could have just made their system more secure, and while that probably would have impacted Symantec's business as well, they wouldn't have been in doodoo about it, but we take what we can get I suppose...
"That will change now that software will be tied to a single computer."
Which was always kind of the case, especially with software that came as OEM with the computer. The licence goes with the computer.
The fun thing was when I was upgrading a Dell with a new motherboard because I liked the case and giving the motherboard to someone else to use. I called up Microsoft, and ended up talking to four different people for well over an hour trying to figure out if the OEM Windows and Office licences stayed with the case, drives, and assorted other hardware(because that was where the hologram stickers were) went with the motherboard and CPU to the other person, or just disappeared. Nobody could really tell me, and just kept on telling me that the licences stayed 'with the computer' and not telling me what they considered the 'computer'.
I ended up continuing to use the software myself since I had the stickers. The black helicopters from the BSA haven't come to get me yet.
I know this is Slashdot, so you didn't rtfm, but how about reading even the summay: "Also, Intel's mammoth production capacity erases any supply worries."
Nobody else in the industry has the capacity to produce like Intel does. Transmeta least of all because they're a fabless house.
The same goes in Canada. We use MSN pretty much exclusively, and I have yet to meet anyone who uses anything else - at least in the last few years since people stopped using ICQ.
It's simple to see that since the services only work amongst themselves why once you have a critical mass it's almost impossible for someone else to get into the market. I might want to try Yahoo or AIM, but if nobody else uses it it's just one more thing on my taskbar that takes up memory but doesn't provide any benefit whatsoever.
I've been trying to figure out why we evolved into MSN while the US is AIM, and whatever other kind of regional variations are out there, but I've never been able to come up with any satisfactory answers.
Well, you do need to leave at least a little bit of blood inside each computer you build - I know I do, from either sharp corners on the case or just a slipping screwdriver. It's like voodoo - an offering to the dark gods of computers smile on your machine when it has been sanctified with your lifeblood and protect it from failure.
Anyway, my only big computer mishap is when one cold winter day I was going to school with my laptop in my backpack and I got to the trunk of my car to put the backpack in only to discover I had left my keys inside the house. I then put the backpack down on the ground leaning on the back of the car so I could run back in to the house and get my keys.
After a couple minutes of searching for my keys in the house and coming back out, I got in the car and started reversing down the driveway. (Did you notice the important omission there boys and girls? I didn't at the time!) As I was reversing, I thought to myself, "Hey self, it seems as though the car isn't reversing quite as smoothly as it usually does." I put it down to the fact that there was snow on the ground that I hadn't shoveled, and continued to reverse. After reversing down my 20' long driveway out onto the street and straightening up the car, I finally realised what was causing the holdup.
Yelling a curse, I jumped out of my car and went to look under the car where I, of course, discovered my backpack which had caught itself under the rear axle and been dragged 30 feet down the driveway, over the curb, and a little bit down the street. Trying to pull it out did no good either - it was stuck in there real good. I finally got it out by having my girlfriend hold on to it while I pulled the car forward a few feet.
The surprising thing is that even though it wasn't really in a padded case or anything, it survived pretty well. A few scratches on the lid and a broken screen - remedied by a quick purchase of a new one on eBay. It's still working perfectly to this day.
Telus provides broadband via DSL, which they get through Bell anyway. When I moved to Toronto, I could chose from a dozen or so DSL providers, of which Telus was one. They have the same status with Bell as any of the others.
I'm glad now that I didn't go with them. Almost did.
No, but Apple could, and probably would in the bizzaro world where this kind of thing actually took place, require by contract a certain minimum quality and specification standard which would require Dell to sell at or above a certain price unless they wanted to lose money.
Well, it's entirely possible that the only real reason Apple doesn't want OSX run on commodity hardware is that they don't want the support headache. Supporting OSX on a single hardware platform is an entirely different beast from supporting it on every piece of hardware from joe's network card place and the like.
It may be quite easy to hack OSX to run on commodity hardware, but since it's a hack and unsupported by the EULA, they get the extra people running the software, but don't have the headache and expense of actually doing tech support for it. It's all pissing into the wind until we see the stuff on the street, but it's an interesting question
Ok, I know nothing about chip design and hardware and such, but if you were to implement this JIT compiler/translator in silicon, say a chip that sits beside the main CPU, could you not boost the performance of the on-the-fly recompilation?
It would also help the "we don't want our OS running on Windows boxes" problem too.
It makes sense totally. And it's exactly what Dell, HP et. al. do for their corporate lines of machines.
If you look at the Lattitude laptops, or the Optiplex workstations, you'll notice that they stay pretty much the same over several years as far as overall design, enabling businesses to purchase the machines over the course of a long time with variations on speed, RAM, etc and keep spare parts that work for the whole line.
My company, for example, has a bunch of C series lattitude laptops. We can swap out the bay devices around all of them from the thin and light c400s to the desktop replacement ones. Docking stations are common too.
So yeah, just good business, and a practice that is shared across most large manufacturers.
From what I know, which isn't much, a lot of the reseoning around it is simply the amount of time put in to validation of the systems. If they spend 5 years to validate a system to work in a particular mission, then every system is going to be at least 5 years old. Then when you've done that, you really don't want to do it again when what you have works just fine.
There used to be a comment on Blockbuster's site somewhere saying that while they do not censor their movies themselves, and they do not require the studios to do so, that studios oftentimes make available two different versions of a movie: One uncut, and one cut to a lower rating. In these cases, they will purchase the more family oriented version. If a studio does not make two versions, they will just buy the normal one.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that enough? I mean, it is for me.
20" Screens are dinky now?
Oh man, Here I thought I was pretty 'with it' when it came to technology. Apparently I'm not.
Wow. You just gave me my chuckle of the day. Let this be a lesson to all who get in to arguments on /.:
"Watch who you talk smack about, the person who you are arguing with may have literally written the book about it".
Well, you have to look at who said that: Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities
What the heck does a Securities analyst know about gaming? Looking at his comments, I'd say not a whole heck of a lot.
The technology started at Stanford, where they were PHD students, but the Company, I.E. the commercial entity, started in a Garage.
So, like the earlier discussion about Schrodinger's Cat, you are at the same time both correct and incorrect.
I saw it last night, and I liked it. Actually, I really liked it.
It's entirely possible that one of the reasons for this was that I'd never seen the original series. What it came down to for me was that it was a Hollywood action flick with a bit less straightforwardness than ordinary. Yes, the plot was a bit confusing at first, because they didn't give you all the answers right at the beginning, but by the end, they gave you everything, and there was the thrill of discovery along the way. I found that the special effects didn't overwhelm the rest of the movie, and while it may have been a little emotionally detached, it built a kind of atmosphere which at the very least was honest to itself. And yes, Charlize was hot with a capital T. It was an action flick that was worth the popcorn, and better than most.
My full disclosure statement here is that I did see Punisher on TMN the night before, it's possible that pretty much anything would look good in comparison.
Ha!
a ux&nompdf=metro&fm=gif
That's nothing. If you want confusing, try Paris's Metro system: http://www.ratp.info/orienter/f_plan.php?loc=rese
That's just the subway BTW... If you want busses as well, it gets even more confusing.
The bulbs use an integral reflector, which bumps the price up as well. The reflectors in high intensity/high heat units like this have a limited life span, and while it's probably longer than just a bulb, the manufacturers think that it's better to have you replace it at the same time as the actual lamp. So they make it all as a unit. Instead of just being a simple capsule then, you have a whole assembly (makes you think of printer ink schemes...)
The other issue is that the projector manufacturers keep on redesigning the projectors to take different shaped bulb/reflector assemblies. This is partly because new projectors need slightly different specs on the capsule and on the shape/size/focal distance of the reflector and partly so they can keep selling you new bulbs.
Ah, but incorrectly specked software isn't the fault of the software, it's the fault of the person who made the specification.
Wow. Someone agrees with me. Weird.
To expand though, it's not just the fact that Acrobat and document management is where income is now, it's that that is where they see the growth. Graphics and the creative market will grow, but only at the rate of the economy. They dominate that market, so they can't get more market share, and that sector isn't exactly outstripping the rest of the economy.
Document and information management is a place where they can really grow exponentially. As far as I can tell, (I'm in government) the PDF tools really hold the most promise of any technology to really save us money, time, and management costs as far as reducing the amount of paper we have to move around. Plus, done right, it can really make things easier and more convenient for our clients.
(Of course, this opinion is my own, not necessarily my employer's)
I was in a meeting with a couple sales people from Adobe. Now, we have to take this with a grain of salt, since they were trying to sell us on a massive document and information management system, but the main reason for the purchase is so that Adobe could have Macromedia's presentation tools for forms and paper management.
Right now, a massive portion of Adobe's income comes from the Acrobat/PDF/LiveCycle products, and it's the part that is growing the fastest. Macromedia had been developing 'Flash Paper' and had done great work on making things usable and portable on mobile devices and more lightweight on more platforms.
Expect to see Flash Paper die, and expect to see some of the Flash plug-in multiple platform technologies be leveraged to provide more and better portability of PDFs.
John Galt? Well, he was an employee of the Canada Company, a fairly successful novelist and the founder of Guelph, Ontario. Theres a city named after him a few minutes drive away from Guelph. Why do you ask?
I don't know what he has to do with a mean-spirited and nasty political/economic philosophy, but there you go.
I do find it funny that after years of badgering by the community MS is finally doing something about security and they're getting in trouble for it from the EU.
I mean, they could have just made their system more secure, and while that probably would have impacted Symantec's business as well, they wouldn't have been in doodoo about it, but we take what we can get I suppose...
"That will change now that software will be tied to a single computer."
Which was always kind of the case, especially with software that came as OEM with the computer. The licence goes with the computer.
The fun thing was when I was upgrading a Dell with a new motherboard because I liked the case and giving the motherboard to someone else to use. I called up Microsoft, and ended up talking to four different people for well over an hour trying to figure out if the OEM Windows and Office licences stayed with the case, drives, and assorted other hardware(because that was where the hologram stickers were) went with the motherboard and CPU to the other person, or just disappeared. Nobody could really tell me, and just kept on telling me that the licences stayed 'with the computer' and not telling me what they considered the 'computer'.
I ended up continuing to use the software myself since I had the stickers. The black helicopters from the BSA haven't come to get me yet.
I know this is Slashdot, so you didn't rtfm, but how about reading even the summay: "Also, Intel's mammoth production capacity erases any supply worries."
Nobody else in the industry has the capacity to produce like Intel does. Transmeta least of all because they're a fabless house.
The same goes in Canada. We use MSN pretty much exclusively, and I have yet to meet anyone who uses anything else - at least in the last few years since people stopped using ICQ.
It's simple to see that since the services only work amongst themselves why once you have a critical mass it's almost impossible for someone else to get into the market. I might want to try Yahoo or AIM, but if nobody else uses it it's just one more thing on my taskbar that takes up memory but doesn't provide any benefit whatsoever.
I've been trying to figure out why we evolved into MSN while the US is AIM, and whatever other kind of regional variations are out there, but I've never been able to come up with any satisfactory answers.
Anyone out there have any ideas?
Well, you do need to leave at least a little bit of blood inside each computer you build - I know I do, from either sharp corners on the case or just a slipping screwdriver. It's like voodoo - an offering to the dark gods of computers smile on your machine when it has been sanctified with your lifeblood and protect it from failure.
Anyway, my only big computer mishap is when one cold winter day I was going to school with my laptop in my backpack and I got to the trunk of my car to put the backpack in only to discover I had left my keys inside the house. I then put the backpack down on the ground leaning on the back of the car so I could run back in to the house and get my keys.
After a couple minutes of searching for my keys in the house and coming back out, I got in the car and started reversing down the driveway. (Did you notice the important omission there boys and girls? I didn't at the time!) As I was reversing, I thought to myself, "Hey self, it seems as though the car isn't reversing quite as smoothly as it usually does." I put it down to the fact that there was snow on the ground that I hadn't shoveled, and continued to reverse. After reversing down my 20' long driveway out onto the street and straightening up the car, I finally realised what was causing the holdup.
Yelling a curse, I jumped out of my car and went to look under the car where I, of course, discovered my backpack which had caught itself under the rear axle and been dragged 30 feet down the driveway, over the curb, and a little bit down the street. Trying to pull it out did no good either - it was stuck in there real good. I finally got it out by having my girlfriend hold on to it while I pulled the car forward a few feet.
The surprising thing is that even though it wasn't really in a padded case or anything, it survived pretty well. A few scratches on the lid and a broken screen - remedied by a quick purchase of a new one on eBay. It's still working perfectly to this day.
In a word, yes. (At least in Toronto)
Telus provides broadband via DSL, which they get through Bell anyway. When I moved to Toronto, I could chose from a dozen or so DSL providers, of which Telus was one. They have the same status with Bell as any of the others.
I'm glad now that I didn't go with them. Almost did.
No, but Apple could, and probably would in the bizzaro world where this kind of thing actually took place, require by contract a certain minimum quality and specification standard which would require Dell to sell at or above a certain price unless they wanted to lose money.
Well, it's entirely possible that the only real reason Apple doesn't want OSX run on commodity hardware is that they don't want the support headache. Supporting OSX on a single hardware platform is an entirely different beast from supporting it on every piece of hardware from joe's network card place and the like.
It may be quite easy to hack OSX to run on commodity hardware, but since it's a hack and unsupported by the EULA, they get the extra people running the software, but don't have the headache and expense of actually doing tech support for it. It's all pissing into the wind until we see the stuff on the street, but it's an interesting question
Ok, I know nothing about chip design and hardware and such, but if you were to implement this JIT compiler/translator in silicon, say a chip that sits beside the main CPU, could you not boost the performance of the on-the-fly recompilation?
It would also help the "we don't want our OS running on Windows boxes" problem too.
It makes sense totally. And it's exactly what Dell, HP et. al. do for their corporate lines of machines.
If you look at the Lattitude laptops, or the Optiplex workstations, you'll notice that they stay pretty much the same over several years as far as overall design, enabling businesses to purchase the machines over the course of a long time with variations on speed, RAM, etc and keep spare parts that work for the whole line.
My company, for example, has a bunch of C series lattitude laptops. We can swap out the bay devices around all of them from the thin and light c400s to the desktop replacement ones. Docking stations are common too.
So yeah, just good business, and a practice that is shared across most large manufacturers.
From what I know, which isn't much, a lot of the reseoning around it is simply the amount of time put in to validation of the systems. If they spend 5 years to validate a system to work in a particular mission, then every system is going to be at least 5 years old. Then when you've done that, you really don't want to do it again when what you have works just fine.
And using the word "gay" as a derogatory term is exactly the kind of crap that causes hate to begin with. Damn I hate that.
Unless you're anthromoporphising Windows and saying that it is sexually attracted to same-sex people, in which case it's ok.
There used to be a comment on Blockbuster's site somewhere saying that while they do not censor their movies themselves, and they do not require the studios to do so, that studios oftentimes make available two different versions of a movie: One uncut, and one cut to a lower rating. In these cases, they will purchase the more family oriented version. If a studio does not make two versions, they will just buy the normal one.