It was a good and decent website who brought joy to many. With it's passing it shall be missed. Let us all join hands and pray for it's resurrection with the adding of bandwith or mirrors. Amen.
Why not make them economically responsible? If they cause fifty million in damages they must pay fifty million in restitution. Virus writers would find themselves little more than indentured servants. Also life time bans on computer access with stiff jail sentences for accessing computers. Juries would hesitate to ever impose life sentences let alone death for such crimes but would view loss of access and compensation as fair. Do you let child molesters work in child daycare centers? Loss of computer rights would hit them where they live and repaying damages is fair eventhough the payment in many cases would be a token amount. Large numbers still risk it because they are hard to catch and tend to get a slap on the wrist when they are caught. You have to make the punishment hurt. Then again you could sentence them to write code patches for Windows and not release them until all the holes are patched and it doesn't crash. A life sentence in hell without the possiblity of parole.
I work in the industry and the need for large render farms is going away soon. Workstation level video cards are capible of rendering scenes at or near real time. The big problem has been software support. The first commercial product to do this is already on the market. It's called Gelato. It comes from NVidia and works with most of their workstation level cards. It'll take a few years for the new technology to settle and support all the animation packages and operating systems but eventually everyone will have some form of card support for rendering. Each artist will simply render the final scene at their workstation. The two biggest technical problems, rendering and storage, are rapidly becoming nonissues.
The article seems incomplete. What he's describing isn't that unusual except for the size of negative and that's not record setting. Stat cameras have operated with vaccuum assist like he describes form decades. I used to use one in the mid 70s and it was an old machine. I'm sure he had difficulty working with files of that size at first but technology has caught up with him and a workstation board running 8 gigs of ram would handle an image that size quite easily and other than a beefy video card not require any special or custom equipment. It's not a digital image so I'm not sure what he's doing that is so landmark. As the article points out others have worked with much larger negatives. I recall one who even turned a van into a camera for shooting large format landscapes. Most did B&W but it was primarily for artistic reasons. The images sound stunning but there's nothing new as far a technology. He basically updated an old aerial camera then scanned the neg like everyone else.
Isn't that like a rapist billing the rape victim for sexual favors? Or an oil company having a pipeline burst and flood a farmer's field so they charge the farmer for the oil rather than clean up the mess? In what sick and twisted Universe does this make any sense? Justice isn't blind it's a drooling moron.
He's asking for the extreme view point. The comment actually excludes the average Slashdot reader. He primarily wants to hear from the paranoid extreme because the average person won't be the ones making the the fuss if he does it. Better to know clearly the objections of the extreme minority. He's asking for the downsides. Do you have any idea how many millions of dollars are wasted each year looking for hikers that wandered off? If you're really worried wear a bear costume when you walk in the woods.
By the way you look quite dashing in your tinfoil hat. Not the least bit silly.
First they are confiscating fingernail clippers next it'll be eye drops. Will using eye drops in an airport mean an automatic strip search? People with contacts beware.
With a collection that size a raid system with several terrabyte hard drives may be the the better option. Duplicating a couple of hard drives is far easier than duplicating several thousand disks. Just make sure the drives mirror. Whenever you get a new disk rip it to the hard drive and duplicate your saved files to the hard drive array. You'll have a few weeks/months to catch up but at least once they are archived you can do searches for specific files. It's a lot easier to find a driver on a file marked drivers than five hundred CDs marked Drivers. Up until this year, I just had three hard drives die on me, I had very good luck with hard drives. I have horror stories concerning zip drives, Jazz Drives and CDs. Mirrored hard drives are far more reliable. Even if the format, NTFS or Fat32, changes you should be able to copy the files across to a new system. Hard drive prices are dropping at a frightening rate. I remember 1 gig drives going for 5 grand and now you can get a terrabyte drive for a grand. I also remember wondering how you could ever fill a 20 meg drive. Now I can now fill a 250 gig drive in a few weeks. Let's hear it for computer graphics.
I run into hard drive bottlenecks all the time working with large graphic files. They could be interesting for a "C" drive. 5 to 10 gig is adequate for operating system, basic software and the file you are working with. Just store your saved files on another drive. The big downside is safety. I haven't read the article yet but these systems rely on batteries to keep the ram active. If you loose power you loose the infomation and have to start from scratch. I've had hard drives setting on the shelf for over a year plugged them in and pulled off files. I'm sure the batteries have a long life but they are still another risk to data. If the ram drives get large enough, 100 gig+, they would be excellent for editing film. You could run full res 35mm captures real time. If the software was rewritten you wouldn't need to load a scene to edit it could be done right off the drive. As some one else pointed out the bus system on the motherboard would have to be improved as well. I guess the real question is there any reason the C drive can't be ultimately replaced by ram? Other than the fact most use Microsoft. Can you say reboot to clear ram?
Laws were in place that specificially banned indescriminate copying of copyrighted material. RIAA wasn't capitalizing on the vagueness of the law. The practise of pirating music was banned and most people were aware of it. The intent of the law in Florida was to tax long distance use of LAN systems that avoided using local or long distance phone charges, not inner home use. The one thing that could get hit legitimately are web based phone calls. They avoid the tax and would in theory fall under the law. It's kind of like the ban on using farm use gasoline in cars. It avoids the road tax. Most farms actually pay a gas tax on a percentage of the fuel they store so they can use it in their road vehicles.
I use removeables instead. You can get 40 gig 7200 HD drives for $50, larger ones are cheaper per gig. Enclosures are $10 to $20 with the trays running $5 to $10. Overall cheaper and you are spared the $400 initial purchase. I'm curious what speed the new drives run at? Also I'm still stinging from all the corrupted Zip disks not to mention a bunch of Jazz disks that died young. Iomega has just had too much trouble with reliability. My removables may be bigger and heavier but they are cheap, fast and reliable. Not to mention I can get up to a gig in storage.
I notice you mentioned switching the power supplies. Do be careful when you come to the States. I did a location in New Zealand and took my systems with me. I asked around and everyone said no problem switching the power supplies from 110 to 220. When I hooked everything up it fried two out of three motherboards and cooked one CPU. When I came back to the States I didn't take any chances and switched the power supplies. Power supplies are a lot cheaper than motherboards. I'd do it and call it cheap insurance. For under a hundred bucks US you can swap off three power supplies if you do the work yourself.
Most companies that sell wind generators and such have equipment for generating 60 cycle AC current. Check with the power company for two way meters. They allow you flow power back into the grid and keep track of whether you are providing more than you are taking. You may not get much money per watt for what you are selling back but the big thing is you don't need battery back up. A huge savings and far less maintence. You'll need an electrician to do the hook up and sync you to the grid.
The real issue is transportation of something that size. Even broken down the sections would be incredibly heavy and would exceed the limits on traditional roads. Doesn't matter the value of the material if transportation exceeds it's value. Actually seems like a good scam for getting rid of a useless hunk of scrap metal. Why pay a small fortune to dispose of it when you can get some one to pay you to take it away? My guess is the buyer will default once reality sets it.
I was in New Zealand when they dropped the TV tax. I bought a TV while it still applied but the seller said they weren't even bothering to collect the tax because it was being dropped in a month anyhow.
It's amazing how short sighted we've become as a species. So long as it doesn't happen in our lifetimes, who cares? Most species will die defending their children. We leave them to deal with our messes. They mention one small satelite. What about the space station? One day it won't be cost effective to maintain and it will come down. Of course it'll be dumped in the ocean where we dump the rest of our trash. Mercury levels in fish are already becoming dangerous. That's just one heavy metal.
A problem that I've never heard mentioned is what do we do with all the skyscrapers? September 11th should have made it painfully clear implosion isn't an attractive solution. It'll be a few hundred years before most are ready to come down. What then? Like nuclear waste hopefully the next generation will figure out an answer. What do we care we'll all be dead. It'd be interesting to see what happened to attitudes if a means was devised to prolong life to 300 to 500 years. Suddenly all this crap becomes our problem again.
If there's one thing more important than how to do a thing it's how to undo it.
When's the last time you flew over Washington state? It looks like a big checkerboard. They're sneaky and leave a strip along the road to fool you into thinking there are trees. It's a myth that the trees are replanted. Until recently the lumber companies argued that clear cutting was good for a forest. Kind of like extinction is good for a species. Some trees are planted because they are forced to but most of the forest are lost and we'll never see them come back in our lifetimes. Most lumber companies operate as strip miners and will keep cutting trees until there aren't any. They'll simply move onto the next resource when they run out. It doesn't make sense but blind greed rarely does.
McDonalds actually tried suing a Scotsman who had a family resturant named McDonalds. Turns out he was the head of the McDonald clan. Another case involved Dolby Studios suing Thomas Dolby for infringing trademark. Turns out he was born with the name and predated the Dolby trademark. Not much research or common sense is used in defending trademarks.
Microsoft should absolutely fall under trademark but common use terms should not and there are plenty of court presedents reguarding this. Some one in the film effects industry actually got a trademark issued on the term "Waldo", as in a type of control system. The silly thing was the term was in common use since before the individual was born. He won several lawsuits reguarding the use of the term until I believe a court finally removed his trademark.
Traditionally a hostile bid would be inexcess of the stock value unless the stock was over valued and mired in debt. They were formally asking if the board would take a legitimate offer seriously in a public and open fashion. Disney's response was they would take a bid that benefited their shareholders very seriously. It's like a suitor asking coyly if he happened to propose marriage would the offer be accepted or rejected? The stock just upped the anty but I'd be surprised if they didn't respond with a bid that was $3 to $5 dollars a share over current value. Even if the stock jumped by that much in the meantime Disney might go for it since the increase was a short term reaction to the offer and would likely drop again in the coming months. It's very telling that they stated public interest. Eisner might want to pack a few boxes and load up on office supplies.
The case was a bit rediculous. The elements were supposedly taken from "Demon with a Glass Hand" and "Soldier". Demon dealt with a robot going into the past and Soldier dealt with two fighters from the future going into the past. I believe the term "Time Mirror" was used in both "Demon" and "Terminator" and it threw the case his way. I normally side with the original artist but this way insane. No portions of either story were used. He should have lost. "The Truman Show" was one of the most blatant rip-offs in the history of film and no case was even brought. Paul Bartel did two verions of something called "Secret Cinema". One in 1968 and he did a new version for Amazing Stories, probably where the writer got the idea. The original version is a bit obscure. A number of people made the comparison but no acknowledgement was made. Sadly Paul has died since and never got the recognition he deserved. I wouldn't fault Harlan's zero tolerance policy if the lawsuits weren't driven more by ego than substance. He has literally stated that he is the "only" writer with original ideas. Apparently he's claiming credit for works done even before he was born. H.G Wells was the first science fiction writer to use the concept of time travel. I didn't notice his estate suing Harlan over his use of Well's concepts.
Slashdot Mirror
It was a good and decent website who brought joy to many. With it's passing it shall be missed. Let us all join hands and pray for it's resurrection with the adding of bandwith or mirrors. Amen.
Why not make them economically responsible? If they cause fifty million in damages they must pay fifty million in restitution. Virus writers would find themselves little more than indentured servants. Also life time bans on computer access with stiff jail sentences for accessing computers. Juries would hesitate to ever impose life sentences let alone death for such crimes but would view loss of access and compensation as fair. Do you let child molesters work in child daycare centers? Loss of computer rights would hit them where they live and repaying damages is fair eventhough the payment in many cases would be a token amount. Large numbers still risk it because they are hard to catch and tend to get a slap on the wrist when they are caught. You have to make the punishment hurt. Then again you could sentence them to write code patches for Windows and not release them until all the holes are patched and it doesn't crash. A life sentence in hell without the possiblity of parole.
I work in the industry and the need for large render farms is going away soon. Workstation level video cards are capible of rendering scenes at or near real time. The big problem has been software support. The first commercial product to do this is already on the market. It's called Gelato. It comes from NVidia and works with most of their workstation level cards. It'll take a few years for the new technology to settle and support all the animation packages and operating systems but eventually everyone will have some form of card support for rendering. Each artist will simply render the final scene at their workstation. The two biggest technical problems, rendering and storage, are rapidly becoming nonissues.
The article seems incomplete. What he's describing isn't that unusual except for the size of negative and that's not record setting. Stat cameras have operated with vaccuum assist like he describes form decades. I used to use one in the mid 70s and it was an old machine. I'm sure he had difficulty working with files of that size at first but technology has caught up with him and a workstation board running 8 gigs of ram would handle an image that size quite easily and other than a beefy video card not require any special or custom equipment. It's not a digital image so I'm not sure what he's doing that is so landmark. As the article points out others have worked with much larger negatives. I recall one who even turned a van into a camera for shooting large format landscapes. Most did B&W but it was primarily for artistic reasons. The images sound stunning but there's nothing new as far a technology. He basically updated an old aerial camera then scanned the neg like everyone else.
Isn't that like a rapist billing the rape victim for sexual favors? Or an oil company having a pipeline burst and flood a farmer's field so they charge the farmer for the oil rather than clean up the mess? In what sick and twisted Universe does this make any sense? Justice isn't blind it's a drooling moron.
He's asking for the extreme view point. The comment actually excludes the average Slashdot reader. He primarily wants to hear from the paranoid extreme because the average person won't be the ones making the the fuss if he does it. Better to know clearly the objections of the extreme minority. He's asking for the downsides. Do you have any idea how many millions of dollars are wasted each year looking for hikers that wandered off? If you're really worried wear a bear costume when you walk in the woods. By the way you look quite dashing in your tinfoil hat. Not the least bit silly.
First they are confiscating fingernail clippers next it'll be eye drops. Will using eye drops in an airport mean an automatic strip search? People with contacts beware.
With a collection that size a raid system with several terrabyte hard drives may be the the better option. Duplicating a couple of hard drives is far easier than duplicating several thousand disks. Just make sure the drives mirror. Whenever you get a new disk rip it to the hard drive and duplicate your saved files to the hard drive array. You'll have a few weeks/months to catch up but at least once they are archived you can do searches for specific files. It's a lot easier to find a driver on a file marked drivers than five hundred CDs marked Drivers. Up until this year, I just had three hard drives die on me, I had very good luck with hard drives. I have horror stories concerning zip drives, Jazz Drives and CDs. Mirrored hard drives are far more reliable. Even if the format, NTFS or Fat32, changes you should be able to copy the files across to a new system. Hard drive prices are dropping at a frightening rate. I remember 1 gig drives going for 5 grand and now you can get a terrabyte drive for a grand. I also remember wondering how you could ever fill a 20 meg drive. Now I can now fill a 250 gig drive in a few weeks. Let's hear it for computer graphics.
I run into hard drive bottlenecks all the time working with large graphic files. They could be interesting for a "C" drive. 5 to 10 gig is adequate for operating system, basic software and the file you are working with. Just store your saved files on another drive. The big downside is safety. I haven't read the article yet but these systems rely on batteries to keep the ram active. If you loose power you loose the infomation and have to start from scratch. I've had hard drives setting on the shelf for over a year plugged them in and pulled off files. I'm sure the batteries have a long life but they are still another risk to data. If the ram drives get large enough, 100 gig+, they would be excellent for editing film. You could run full res 35mm captures real time. If the software was rewritten you wouldn't need to load a scene to edit it could be done right off the drive. As some one else pointed out the bus system on the motherboard would have to be improved as well. I guess the real question is there any reason the C drive can't be ultimately replaced by ram? Other than the fact most use Microsoft. Can you say reboot to clear ram?
Laws were in place that specificially banned indescriminate copying of copyrighted material. RIAA wasn't capitalizing on the vagueness of the law. The practise of pirating music was banned and most people were aware of it. The intent of the law in Florida was to tax long distance use of LAN systems that avoided using local or long distance phone charges, not inner home use. The one thing that could get hit legitimately are web based phone calls. They avoid the tax and would in theory fall under the law. It's kind of like the ban on using farm use gasoline in cars. It avoids the road tax. Most farms actually pay a gas tax on a percentage of the fuel they store so they can use it in their road vehicles.
I use removeables instead. You can get 40 gig 7200 HD drives for $50, larger ones are cheaper per gig. Enclosures are $10 to $20 with the trays running $5 to $10. Overall cheaper and you are spared the $400 initial purchase. I'm curious what speed the new drives run at? Also I'm still stinging from all the corrupted Zip disks not to mention a bunch of Jazz disks that died young. Iomega has just had too much trouble with reliability. My removables may be bigger and heavier but they are cheap, fast and reliable. Not to mention I can get up to a gig in storage.
I notice you mentioned switching the power supplies. Do be careful when you come to the States. I did a location in New Zealand and took my systems with me. I asked around and everyone said no problem switching the power supplies from 110 to 220. When I hooked everything up it fried two out of three motherboards and cooked one CPU. When I came back to the States I didn't take any chances and switched the power supplies. Power supplies are a lot cheaper than motherboards. I'd do it and call it cheap insurance. For under a hundred bucks US you can swap off three power supplies if you do the work yourself.
Most companies that sell wind generators and such have equipment for generating 60 cycle AC current. Check with the power company for two way meters. They allow you flow power back into the grid and keep track of whether you are providing more than you are taking. You may not get much money per watt for what you are selling back but the big thing is you don't need battery back up. A huge savings and far less maintence. You'll need an electrician to do the hook up and sync you to the grid.
The real issue is transportation of something that size. Even broken down the sections would be incredibly heavy and would exceed the limits on traditional roads. Doesn't matter the value of the material if transportation exceeds it's value. Actually seems like a good scam for getting rid of a useless hunk of scrap metal. Why pay a small fortune to dispose of it when you can get some one to pay you to take it away? My guess is the buyer will default once reality sets it.
Brings to mind a Beetles song.
I was in New Zealand when they dropped the TV tax. I bought a TV while it still applied but the seller said they weren't even bothering to collect the tax because it was being dropped in a month anyhow.
It's amazing how short sighted we've become as a species. So long as it doesn't happen in our lifetimes, who cares? Most species will die defending their children. We leave them to deal with our messes. They mention one small satelite. What about the space station? One day it won't be cost effective to maintain and it will come down. Of course it'll be dumped in the ocean where we dump the rest of our trash. Mercury levels in fish are already becoming dangerous. That's just one heavy metal. A problem that I've never heard mentioned is what do we do with all the skyscrapers? September 11th should have made it painfully clear implosion isn't an attractive solution. It'll be a few hundred years before most are ready to come down. What then? Like nuclear waste hopefully the next generation will figure out an answer. What do we care we'll all be dead. It'd be interesting to see what happened to attitudes if a means was devised to prolong life to 300 to 500 years. Suddenly all this crap becomes our problem again. If there's one thing more important than how to do a thing it's how to undo it.
When's the last time you flew over Washington state? It looks like a big checkerboard. They're sneaky and leave a strip along the road to fool you into thinking there are trees. It's a myth that the trees are replanted. Until recently the lumber companies argued that clear cutting was good for a forest. Kind of like extinction is good for a species. Some trees are planted because they are forced to but most of the forest are lost and we'll never see them come back in our lifetimes. Most lumber companies operate as strip miners and will keep cutting trees until there aren't any. They'll simply move onto the next resource when they run out. It doesn't make sense but blind greed rarely does.
Actually it's about adult diapers. The aging execs at Universal thought it'd be hip and now.
In related news the government has fired all accountants in an effort to end budget deficits. "What we don't know can't hurt us."
McDonalds actually tried suing a Scotsman who had a family resturant named McDonalds. Turns out he was the head of the McDonald clan. Another case involved Dolby Studios suing Thomas Dolby for infringing trademark. Turns out he was born with the name and predated the Dolby trademark. Not much research or common sense is used in defending trademarks. Microsoft should absolutely fall under trademark but common use terms should not and there are plenty of court presedents reguarding this. Some one in the film effects industry actually got a trademark issued on the term "Waldo", as in a type of control system. The silly thing was the term was in common use since before the individual was born. He won several lawsuits reguarding the use of the term until I believe a court finally removed his trademark.
Would a service for sharing those songs be called Nampster?
Traditionally a hostile bid would be inexcess of the stock value unless the stock was over valued and mired in debt. They were formally asking if the board would take a legitimate offer seriously in a public and open fashion. Disney's response was they would take a bid that benefited their shareholders very seriously. It's like a suitor asking coyly if he happened to propose marriage would the offer be accepted or rejected? The stock just upped the anty but I'd be surprised if they didn't respond with a bid that was $3 to $5 dollars a share over current value. Even if the stock jumped by that much in the meantime Disney might go for it since the increase was a short term reaction to the offer and would likely drop again in the coming months. It's very telling that they stated public interest. Eisner might want to pack a few boxes and load up on office supplies.
The case was a bit rediculous. The elements were supposedly taken from "Demon with a Glass Hand" and "Soldier". Demon dealt with a robot going into the past and Soldier dealt with two fighters from the future going into the past. I believe the term "Time Mirror" was used in both "Demon" and "Terminator" and it threw the case his way. I normally side with the original artist but this way insane. No portions of either story were used. He should have lost. "The Truman Show" was one of the most blatant rip-offs in the history of film and no case was even brought. Paul Bartel did two verions of something called "Secret Cinema". One in 1968 and he did a new version for Amazing Stories, probably where the writer got the idea. The original version is a bit obscure. A number of people made the comparison but no acknowledgement was made. Sadly Paul has died since and never got the recognition he deserved. I wouldn't fault Harlan's zero tolerance policy if the lawsuits weren't driven more by ego than substance. He has literally stated that he is the "only" writer with original ideas. Apparently he's claiming credit for works done even before he was born. H.G Wells was the first science fiction writer to use the concept of time travel. I didn't notice his estate suing Harlan over his use of Well's concepts.
Yeah but will it protect against blue ice falling from airliners?