I'm getting fed up with not being thought of as a customer, but as a consumer. Granted, my purchases (or not) doesn't make a single dent in how well a company does. But that doesn't mean I should be treated like sh*t, or have to deal with rules that make it more convenient for the vendor than myself.
If the web site said midnight, and the tickets read noon, then that's plain and simple fraud regardless of their rules. Tell 'em if you don't get satisfaction from them, then your next call is to your lawyer, followed by the attorney general.
Given it's spherical, it may not have an internal structure (think weather baloon), but it would have to be under its own power. IIRC, that would make it a dirigible. Blimps have internal cells of gas along with an internal structure (think hindenberg and goodyear).
I went to a presentation yesterday by Platform (the guys that make LSF) who talked about grid computing. Each person that spoke gave a different definition of what 'grid computing' is: It's clusters of clusters, it's clusters plus processing on individual machines, etc.
The upside is that such processing using PCs is already taking place, in the form of distributed.net, folding@home and seti@home among many others. If gateway wants to use its spare cycles to create a supercomputer capable of many teraflops, then go for it.
On the other hand, apps that are well suited to such distributed computing are those that require little I/O and more number crunching. That is, you don't want to use BLAST (comparing gene sequences) as the data sets are on the order of GB. But simple number crunching, like the examples already given, do not require sending much data to the clients for processing.
BTW, LSF has software to do the same thing with desktop boxes.
It's not GPL'd, but Hypercam rocks. I used it for creating two computer-based-training CDs. Accepts mic input, can caputre the entire screen, a window, or a measured part of the screen, can add a starburst and click for mouse events, and uses the codecs built into Windows. The cost is $30, so while it's not free as in beer or speech, it's the best thing I found.
Your best bet is to encode the videos at the highest quality (assuming your machine can keep up), then edit/cut quality later on. There's no way you will be able to encode DiVX or any of the more complex codecs in realtime, so just make unencoded AVIs and worry about the codecs later with VirtualDub.
There was no central organization that handled the networking for the associated hospitals, so more networks just got bolted on until it couldn't handle the load.
So what's the lessons?
1) Make sure your solution scales, and be ready in case it doesn't. 2) Make sure some overall organization can control how networks get connected.
It made James Bond American and put him in the CIA. (I saw a tape of that episode in Best Buy years ago, before I knew what it was, and I'm still kicking myself for not buying it.)
Mmm...1950's TV. I actually have the videotape.
It was live and he was being called "Jimmy" all the time. It's painful to watch, but certainly something for a Bond collector to have.
Did you know that Ian Fleming also did the concept development work for The Man From U.N.C.L.E.?
Go read "The Spy Who Loved Me". It's a drastic departure for what you expect from Bond. For one thing, it takes place in upstate NY (Lake George area). For another, it is written from the perspective of a Canadian woman who was educated in England and was driving from Canada to Florida and got stuck...in Lake George.
For those of you that think Fleming wrote most of the movies, it WAS true for a little while. Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and most of Goldfinger were true to the novels. Even Thunderball and On Her Majesty's Secret Service. But most of the rest were either very different from the books, or were short enough to be reduced to the opening sequence (The Living Daylights). Go spend the time to hunt through E-Bay or your local used bookstore to find them. It's worth it.
If you read the Fleming novels, Bond drank and moked too much, and was pretty often using amphetamines (speed) to stay awake during various missions.
I keep saying that Timothy Dalton was actually the most accurate Bond, but he was too accurate. Brosnan comes second, if only for attitude. Connery is third, but only for the first few movies.
That being said, Dalton sucked on screen and Connery was the best.
That means if there were any discount it would only be $15 at most.
That's fine with me. It's the principle of the thing I'm worried about. What about companies that buy thousands of machines per year, only to reinstall Windows on them using their volume license agreement? $15 may not be much to you and me, but if you're buying 100 identical machines, then it starts to add up.
That means a computer with no OS costs MORE to make, that means that you actually get a discount for ordering your computer the same way that a billion other users ordered it.
Fine. Ship me the box without that goofy Windows sticker on it. It will have Windows on it, but it won't work.
It's hard to describe, but I guess I'll give the advantages of Tivo over an analog VCR:
30 hr capacity (or more) On screen guide with info for two weeks Season pass (record all instances of a show, with a number of options like only new shows, etc.) Thumbs Up/Down of shows, used to record 'extra' shows. Notification of change in lineup (new or deleted channels, change in number of a channel, etc.) Immediate access (no rewind) Record and play at the same time
On the one hand, you have people who say "I don't watch TV", when what they mean to say is "I don't watch CRAPPY TV". There's a lot of good shows on that are on at times when people normally wouldn't watch them. I can't stay up late to watch all of Adult Swim on Cartoon Network, so I have my Tivo record it and I can watch it the next day.
On the other, Tivo does have a problem with explaining how it works. It's a lot more than saying "it's a really good VCR!". That's where the existing user base comes in, as it's a lot easier to show someone how it works and what it does than listen to the PFY at BestBuy practically reading off the sales sheet and not know anything more about it.
Except for the fact that AT&T broadband and DirectTV are already rebranding Tivo for their set top boxes. There aren't any real competitors yet aside from ReplayTV.
Ooh...but I like the list of related articles:
"Without advertising, we will damage this country" "72.3% of Tivo viewers skip commercials"
Then again, this is like MSFT reporting that Linux is pretty much dead.
I wouldn't call that a benefit, especially if the govt is essentially giving MSFT the right to maintain their monopoly.
It is irrelevant if average consumers don't write code. In fact, it stresses the point. MSFT opening its APIs doesn't help anyone, since those that do need it worked around it.
A standard OS/browser is pretty irrelevant too. I can get into a Honda, a Saturn, or Ford pickup and still be able to drive it on the road. After I get familiar with the controls, I can drive it easily. Linux and Windows are the same way. If people would take the 15 minutes required to figure out what the differences are, they would be fine.
Both Bill Gates and John Ashcroft talked about how the decision benefits consumers. But there's nothing really in the decision that changes the way MSFT does business. I can't call IBM and get a discount on a system without Windows installed, if I load XP onto a machine, MSFT can take it over and install software without my permission, and the APIs can be buried in MSDN, forcing OSS software developers to not only subscribe to MSDN, but also follow whatever licensing MSDN forces on users. For the most part, this is MSFT business as usual.
Where, in this decision, do the consumers benefit? If you could put yourself in CKK's shoes, what would you say?
If you have done business with the company, it's not illegal, but if you have never done business with them, it's illegal for them to call your cell phone.
This "it still costs $18 20 years later" is getting pretty old. You're missing two important parts.
First off is this little thing called inflation. All the kickbacks the record studios charge costs a lot of money. If records are sold anything like books, they get sold by RIAA members for 50% (so if a CD sells in the store for $18, the RIAA member sells it for $9). Things cost money. When they first started, CDs were barely more than a copy of the record with the liner notes. Now you have interactive CDs with video or flash animation, more liner notes, etc. To be honest, I'm suprised they haven't gone UP in cost over the past 20 years.
The other thing is....well...CDs don't really sell for $18 anymore. I bought a stack of new releases and none was over $17. Most were $16 (well, $15.99, but you know..). That little thing of the RIAA forcing record stores to sell for the same minimum cost seems to taken care of that item.
Don't get me wrong. The "why pay $16 if I only like one song?" still works, as does "if it only costs $.25 to make, why are artists being shafted?". But this argument just isn't as valid as you think.
I've been in company after company where the founder has a great idea, gets the company started, then can't manage or build the company for beans. They all wound up in the scrapheap.
A sign of a good company is one where the founder(s) realize they can't do any more good for the company and step down in favor of someone with real business sense who can grow the company from there. A better sign is when the founder(s) stay either on the board or as CTO/corporate visionary.
Sun and Oracle's success are probably flukes. Two success stories does not prove anything. Not when I have 4 stories that prove otherwise.
> You mean the oversized 40-conductor ribbon cables are solved by 68 conductor ones?
No, I'd guess the 80 pin ones that include power and configure the drive's ID, and allow you to just slap the drive in and let it go. IDE has NOTHING with that configurability.
> You are the first SCSI fanboy I've ever seen.
Now you've seen two.
Don't get me wrong - for home use, SCSI is overpowered. But if you're talking anything bigger than a desktop, make mine SCSI.
Ford gave you a car 4 years ago and says "don't worry about the payments, we can work that out later in good faith". Okay (you think) so you use it to haul orphans to school and so on.
Yesterday, Ford shows up and says "well, since you're using this for transporting people, we're going to charge you...$10/person over the past 4 years". Now you might have had your own number in your head ($2, you don't get much money acting like a bus). You would love to try and negotiate a better rate, but taxi drivers instead got to the table first, negotated $8/person, and tells you it's a great deal. And noone bothered to ask you your opinion of it.
That being said, I really only listen to DI, and they're for the bill *shrug*.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably more the principle of the thing.
I'm getting fed up with not being thought of as a customer, but as a consumer. Granted, my purchases (or not) doesn't make a single dent in how well a company does. But that doesn't mean I should be treated like sh*t, or have to deal with rules that make it more convenient for the vendor than myself.
If the web site said midnight, and the tickets read noon, then that's plain and simple fraud regardless of their rules. Tell 'em if you don't get satisfaction from them, then your next call is to your lawyer, followed by the attorney general.
Airships refer to any lighter-than-air vehicle.
Given it's spherical, it may not have an internal structure (think weather baloon), but it would have to be under its own power. IIRC, that would make it a dirigible. Blimps have internal cells of gas along with an internal structure (think hindenberg and goodyear).
Thank you R. Lee Ermey.
I went to a presentation yesterday by Platform (the guys that make LSF) who talked about grid computing. Each person that spoke gave a different definition of what 'grid computing' is: It's clusters of clusters, it's clusters plus processing on individual machines, etc.
The upside is that such processing using PCs is already taking place, in the form of distributed.net, folding@home and seti@home among many others. If gateway wants to use its spare cycles to create a supercomputer capable of many teraflops, then go for it.
On the other hand, apps that are well suited to such distributed computing are those that require little I/O and more number crunching. That is, you don't want to use BLAST (comparing gene sequences) as the data sets are on the order of GB. But simple number crunching, like the examples already given, do not require sending much data to the clients for processing.
BTW, LSF has software to do the same thing with desktop boxes.
OGG isn't GPL'd. It has a BSD license.
Your best bet is to encode the videos at the highest quality (assuming your machine can keep up), then edit/cut quality later on. There's no way you will be able to encode DiVX or any of the more complex codecs in realtime, so just make unencoded AVIs and worry about the codecs later with VirtualDub.
You can't afford it if they don't sing (play).
With apologies to Groucho.
There was no central organization that handled the networking for the associated hospitals, so more networks just got bolted on until it couldn't handle the load.
So what's the lessons?
1) Make sure your solution scales, and be ready in case it doesn't.
2) Make sure some overall organization can control how networks get connected.
Mmm...1950's TV. I actually have the videotape.
It was live and he was being called "Jimmy" all the time. It's painful to watch, but certainly something for a Bond collector to have.
Did you know that Ian Fleming also did the concept development work for The Man From U.N.C.L.E.?
He also wrote Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang
Go read "The Spy Who Loved Me". It's a drastic departure for what you expect from Bond. For one thing, it takes place in upstate NY (Lake George area). For another, it is written from the perspective of a Canadian woman who was educated in England and was driving from Canada to Florida and got stuck...in Lake George.
For those of you that think Fleming wrote most of the movies, it WAS true for a little while. Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and most of Goldfinger were true to the novels. Even Thunderball and On Her Majesty's Secret Service. But most of the rest were either very different from the books, or were short enough to be reduced to the opening sequence (The Living Daylights). Go spend the time to hunt through E-Bay or your local used bookstore to find them. It's worth it.
Ecch.
If you read the Fleming novels, Bond drank and moked too much, and was pretty often using amphetamines (speed) to stay awake during various missions.
I keep saying that Timothy Dalton was actually the most accurate Bond, but he was too accurate. Brosnan comes second, if only for attitude. Connery is third, but only for the first few movies.
That being said, Dalton sucked on screen and Connery was the best.
I submitted this last week!
2002-11-09 13:33:48 TiVo/SONICBlue drop Patent Lawsuits (articles,tv) (accepted)
That means if there were any discount it would only be $15 at most.
That's fine with me. It's the principle of the thing I'm worried about. What about companies that buy thousands of machines per year, only to reinstall Windows on them using their volume license agreement? $15 may not be much to you and me, but if you're buying 100 identical machines, then it starts to add up.
That means a computer with no OS costs MORE to make, that means that you actually get a discount for ordering your computer the same way that a billion other users ordered it.
Fine. Ship me the box without that goofy Windows sticker on it. It will have Windows on it, but it won't work.
It's hard to describe, but I guess I'll give the advantages of Tivo over an analog VCR:
30 hr capacity (or more)
On screen guide with info for two weeks
Season pass (record all instances of a show, with a number of options like only new shows, etc.)
Thumbs Up/Down of shows, used to record 'extra' shows.
Notification of change in lineup (new or deleted channels, change in number of a channel, etc.)
Immediate access (no rewind)
Record and play at the same time
On the one hand, you have people who say "I don't watch TV", when what they mean to say is "I don't watch CRAPPY TV". There's a lot of good shows on that are on at times when people normally wouldn't watch them. I can't stay up late to watch all of Adult Swim on Cartoon Network, so I have my Tivo record it and I can watch it the next day.
On the other, Tivo does have a problem with explaining how it works. It's a lot more than saying "it's a really good VCR!". That's where
the existing user base comes in, as it's a lot easier to show someone how it works and what it does than listen to the PFY at BestBuy practically reading off the sales sheet and not know anything more about it.
Except for the fact that AT&T broadband and DirectTV are already rebranding Tivo for their set top boxes. There aren't any real competitors yet aside from ReplayTV.
Ooh...but I like the list of related articles:
"Without advertising, we will damage this country"
"72.3% of Tivo viewers skip commercials"
Then again, this is like MSFT reporting that Linux is pretty much dead.
Linux's mission statement has been the same for 10+ years:
World Domination. Fast.
Then again, 10 years isn't bad for that kind of goal.
I wouldn't call that a benefit, especially if the govt is essentially giving MSFT the right to maintain their monopoly.
It is irrelevant if average consumers don't write code. In fact, it stresses the point. MSFT opening its APIs doesn't help anyone, since those that do need it worked around it.
A standard OS/browser is pretty irrelevant too. I can get into a Honda, a Saturn, or Ford pickup and still be able to drive it on the road. After I get familiar with the controls, I can drive it easily. Linux and Windows are the same way. If people would take the 15 minutes required to figure out what the differences are, they would be fine.
Both Bill Gates and John Ashcroft talked about how the decision benefits consumers. But there's nothing really in the decision that changes the way MSFT does business. I can't call IBM and get a discount on a system without Windows installed, if I load XP onto a machine, MSFT can take it over and install software without my permission, and the APIs can be buried in MSDN, forcing OSS software developers to not only subscribe to MSDN, but also follow whatever licensing MSDN forces on users. For the most part, this is MSFT business as usual.
Where, in this decision, do the consumers benefit? If you could put yourself in CKK's shoes, what would you say?
If you have done business with the company, it's not illegal, but if you have never done business with them, it's illegal for them to call your cell phone.
The new one is "The Ripping Friends", done by John K of "Ren and Stimpy" fame. Spumco lives!
Whine whine whine...
This "it still costs $18 20 years later" is getting pretty old. You're missing two important parts.
First off is this little thing called inflation. All the kickbacks the record studios charge costs a lot of money. If records are sold anything like books, they get sold by RIAA members for 50% (so if a CD sells in the store for $18, the RIAA member sells it for $9). Things cost money. When they first started, CDs were barely more than a copy of the record with the liner notes. Now you have interactive CDs with video or flash animation, more liner notes, etc. To be honest, I'm suprised they haven't gone UP in cost over the past 20 years.
The other thing is....well...CDs don't really sell for $18 anymore. I bought a stack of new releases and none was over $17. Most were $16 (well, $15.99, but you know..). That little thing of the RIAA forcing record stores to sell for the same minimum cost seems to taken care of that item.
Don't get me wrong. The "why pay $16 if I only like one song?" still works, as does "if it only costs $.25 to make, why are artists being shafted?". But this argument just isn't as valid as you think.
I've been in company after company where the founder has a great idea, gets the company started, then can't manage or build the company for beans. They all wound up in the scrapheap.
A sign of a good company is one where the founder(s) realize they can't do any more good for the company and step down in favor of someone with real business sense who can grow the company from there. A better sign is when the founder(s) stay either on the board or as CTO/corporate visionary.
Sun and Oracle's success are probably flukes. Two success stories does not prove anything. Not when I have 4 stories that prove otherwise.
Haven't seen 64bit PCI busses running at 66 or 133 Mhz, have you?
> You mean the oversized 40-conductor ribbon cables are solved by 68 conductor ones?
No, I'd guess the 80 pin ones that include power and configure the drive's ID, and allow you to just slap the drive in and let it go. IDE has NOTHING with that configurability.
> You are the first SCSI fanboy I've ever seen.
Now you've seen two.
Don't get me wrong - for home use, SCSI is overpowered. But if you're talking anything bigger than a desktop, make mine SCSI.
Aaah...not quite. To have a better comparison:
Ford gave you a car 4 years ago and says "don't worry about the payments, we can work that out later in good faith". Okay (you think) so you use it to haul orphans to school and so on.
Yesterday, Ford shows up and says "well, since you're using this for transporting people, we're going to charge you...$10/person over the past 4 years". Now you might have had your own number in your head ($2, you don't get much money acting like a bus). You would love to try and negotiate a better rate, but taxi drivers instead got to the table first, negotated $8/person, and tells you it's a great deal. And noone bothered to ask you your opinion of it.
That being said, I really only listen to DI, and they're for the bill *shrug*.