It's similar in the 3D animation world. There are a lot of 'free' models out on the web which have some wacko license saying that you can use them freely but must provide attribution to the author... the end result is that I just won't use any such item because if I create a scene with a hundred objects I might end up having to provide attribution for fifty people and if I miss one then theoretically they could come whining. That basically makes them useless and requires people to make their own models for the same objects... it's just pointless and silly.
Then again, 3D modellers have a big stick up their ass about free use, when compared to GPL programmers.
"They're having a hissy fit over a license that requires you to acknowledge if/when you use xfree86 and that tells you to incluse that acknowledgement in the same place you include other acknowledgements about your software?"
Yes. Because if every app required that then the back of the box would be filled with 0.01 point fonts listing every single piece of software that was included in the distribution. It's just silly.
Also, as has been pointed out, there's probably GPL-ed code in XFree86. Now, I don't really care what people do with the GPL code I've released, _OTHER_ than change the license on me. Anyone who takes my GPL code and tries to release it under a different license -- particularly, like this, a more restrictive license -- would deserve a swift kick in the ass.
"The same thing can happen to an idiot running Mozilla under Linux as root,"
Except:
a) as far as I'm aware, most or all Linux distributions will create you a new non-admin user account rather than logging you on as a root user by default.
b) thanks to the wonder of modern miraculous setuid technology, there's no log on as root to run the majority of programs. About the only time I log on as root on Linux is to install apps or update kernels.
c) thanks to the wonder of modern miraculous 'su' technology, you can run as root in one window while logged on as your normal user account. As far as I'm aware, that's impossible in Windows, requiring you to log out and log back on as Administrator.
Those are just three reasons why most people run as Administrator on Windows and don't on Linux.
Yep. Even for video editing I have to run as Administrator, and I really don't want to have to keep changing users in order to run different programs. I did try to set up a non-Administrator user for my GF to use on the same PC, but half the programs she wanted to run wouldn't work without Administrator priviledge, so I gave up.
"Security" in Windows is just broken, it's that simple.
"This is slow... a lot slower then we were led to believe when this was first coming to market."
LOL. AGP is now eight times faster than it was when it first came to market. The problem is that on-board GPU memory is more like forty times faster than it was when AGP first came to market... so there's no way that AGP access to system memory could keep up.
"The idea is to cut costs by removing the large hubble ground support--and the $500 Million cost of a shuttle mission."
In reality though, cutting a shuttle mission saves you at most about $150 million in per-flight costs, plus a few million in training costs. The shuttle program costs something like $3 billion a year to run regardless of whether a single shuttle flies, plus about $150 million on top for each launch, plus the costs of training and special equipment and payloads for each mission.
"High-end 11-megapixel digital cameras are generally considered to be slightly inferior to 35mm film."
Remember: 35mm _still_ frames go along the film, whereas 35mm _movie_ frames go across the film. Also, only a fraction of the frame is actually used in movies, due to the widescreen aspect ratio. That means a lot less pixels are required to get the same resolution.
A lot of 35mm movie effect shots are rendered at around 2048x1024-ish resolutions, so while 2 megapixels is a little low for the full 35mm movie resolution, it's not far off.
Indeed. The 'Holiday Special' has to be one of the most mindboggling stupid things I have ever seen in my life... so bad, in fact, that many people seem unable to believe that it even exists. Perhaps 'Indiana Jones and the Star Wars Holiday Special' would be a good candidate for the next Indie movie?
That's precisely what I plan to do. I might buy the Sucky Editions when they're released on HD-DVD if they're the only option available other than bootlegs, but I certainly won't buy the Sucky Editions on DVD and then buy them again on HD-DVD.
""What George did in 1997," Ward explains, "was [to] make the movie he originally wanted to make.""
Which is an interesting comment. While the 'special editions' suck less than the prequels, they do suck almost as bad as the original 'Star Wars' scripts before Lucas read Joseph Campbell's books, so we can conclude from this that if Lucas hadn't been kept in check by the studio he'd have released a 'Star Wars' movie that sucked in 1977 and would have vanished without a trace.
Of course, having seen the prequels, the fact that Lucas' "artistic vision" sucks shouldn't really be a surprise.
Again, kids don't _need_ Disney movies, they're just perfect candidates for Disney hype. Many parents may be unable to say no to the spoilt little brats that pass for kids today, but at some point the price of not saying no becomes more than the benefit... if 'Disney's Little Aardvark' was a $10 a play rental over the web, there'd be a lot less kids getting to watch it fifteen times in a weekend.
No-one _needs_ Disney movies: we need to eat, we need to drink, we don't _need_ to watch 'Disney's Little Aardvark'... any demand that exists is pure hype and marketing. You're making the fatal mistake of assuming that just because Disney have a monopoly on Disney movies, that people don't have a choice as to whether they watch them or not.
"There's a reason why most studios use Quicktime, windows MP blows chunks."
IMHO the reason why most studios use Quicktime is because they're clueless Mac users: as bad as Media Player is, the Quicktime player is far, far worse. I absolutely hate going to a movie site and finding that they only have trailers in Quicktime rather than a real video format like MPEG or AVI.
There are a lot of things that big business wants, but that doesn't mean that consumers will go for it. No consumer benefits from DRM, so if it makes their life harder they just won't buy: to work at all it needs to be a non-DRM DRM like Apple's iTunes, where you can still burn DRM-free copies to CDs to listen to.
As for producing our own DRM, why? We don't want it, Joe Sixpack doesn't want it, just let it crash and burn in the marketplace like all those other bad inventions that big business tried to push on us (like the DIVX disks and self-destructing DVDs).
"Throw these antisocial delinquents in the slammer for 10 years for each offense."
I believe the average sentence for murder in America is about eight years. Are you really suggesting that writing a virus is a more serious crime than murder?
(Ok, I'd agree, if that virus caused infrastructure damage that killed people... but then they should be jailed for manslaughter, not virus writing)
And nuclear power would be a whole lot cheaper without a government to impose silly regulations on them and prevent new plants being built: I believe that most nuclear plants in the UK are old ones that have pretty much reached their planned lifetime, and many were built primarily to produce plutonium for British bombs, with power just a useful sideline.
"Yeah, you can't see it, but that's because it's really dangerous,"
Yeah, that nuclear waste might just come creeping through my bedroom window and night and murder me, or shoot me in the head to steal my mobile phone.
Dealing with highly radioactive nuclear waste is easy, since so little is produced each year. Stick it in a stable desert somewhere, surround it with minefields, automated machineguns and anti-aircraft missiles and otherwise basically forget about it. For all we know your grandkids may even be thankful to us for leaving them such a rich source of exotic materials to be mined to energise their dilithium crystals, or whatever.
"The Van Allen belts have their lower edge up around 1200-1400 km."
That very much depends on your definition of "edge": it's not as though one meter below you're taking no radiation and one meter above you're dying... the radiation dose increases significantly with altitude, and even at 500km the dose is several times larger than at 400km. You just can't fly much higher than ISS for months at a time without being exposed to a dangerous amount of radation.
No, but by far the biggest risk comes from solar flares. Normal cosmic radiation might give you cancer a decade later, but solar flares will give you death in a few hours or days.
Pretty much, but they wouldn't have given up until they were dead, as a small chance of survival was always better than absolutely none. It was a known risk and NASA picked flight dates to minimise the risk... and got lucky.
Slashdot Mirror
It's similar in the 3D animation world. There are a lot of 'free' models out on the web which have some wacko license saying that you can use them freely but must provide attribution to the author... the end result is that I just won't use any such item because if I create a scene with a hundred objects I might end up having to provide attribution for fifty people and if I miss one then theoretically they could come whining. That basically makes them useless and requires people to make their own models for the same objects... it's just pointless and silly.
Then again, 3D modellers have a big stick up their ass about free use, when compared to GPL programmers.
"They're having a hissy fit over a license that requires you to acknowledge if/when you use xfree86 and that tells you to incluse that acknowledgement in the same place you include other acknowledgements about your software?"
Yes. Because if every app required that then the back of the box would be filled with 0.01 point fonts listing every single piece of software that was included in the distribution. It's just silly.
Also, as has been pointed out, there's probably GPL-ed code in XFree86. Now, I don't really care what people do with the GPL code I've released, _OTHER_ than change the license on me. Anyone who takes my GPL code and tries to release it under a different license -- particularly, like this, a more restrictive license -- would deserve a swift kick in the ass.
And if you want to fly it yourself, at least on your PC, there's an N1 add-on for Orbiter (www.orbitersim.com).
Cool... I'd never seen that before. Thanks.
"The same thing can happen to an idiot running Mozilla under Linux as root,"
Except:
a) as far as I'm aware, most or all Linux distributions will create you a new non-admin user account rather than logging you on as a root user by default.
b) thanks to the wonder of modern miraculous setuid technology, there's no log on as root to run the majority of programs. About the only time I log on as root on Linux is to install apps or update kernels.
c) thanks to the wonder of modern miraculous 'su' technology, you can run as root in one window while logged on as your normal user account. As far as I'm aware, that's impossible in Windows, requiring you to log out and log back on as Administrator.
Those are just three reasons why most people run as Administrator on Windows and don't on Linux.
Yeah, agreed: I tried running with that option on for a while, and IE was basically unusable. Of course that was before I switched to Mozilla.
Yep. Even for video editing I have to run as Administrator, and I really don't want to have to keep changing users in order to run different programs. I did try to set up a non-Administrator user for my GF to use on the same PC, but half the programs she wanted to run wouldn't work without Administrator priviledge, so I gave up.
"Security" in Windows is just broken, it's that simple.
"This is slow... a lot slower then we were led to believe when this was first coming to market."
LOL. AGP is now eight times faster than it was when it first came to market. The problem is that on-board GPU memory is more like forty times faster than it was when AGP first came to market... so there's no way that AGP access to system memory could keep up.
"The idea is to cut costs by removing the large hubble ground support--and the $500 Million cost of a shuttle mission."
In reality though, cutting a shuttle mission saves you at most about $150 million in per-flight costs, plus a few million in training costs. The shuttle program costs something like $3 billion a year to run regardless of whether a single shuttle flies, plus about $150 million on top for each launch, plus the costs of training and special equipment and payloads for each mission.
"High-end 11-megapixel digital cameras are generally considered to be slightly inferior to 35mm film."
Remember: 35mm _still_ frames go along the film, whereas 35mm _movie_ frames go across the film. Also, only a fraction of the frame is actually used in movies, due to the widescreen aspect ratio. That means a lot less pixels are required to get the same resolution.
A lot of 35mm movie effect shots are rendered at around 2048x1024-ish resolutions, so while 2 megapixels is a little low for the full 35mm movie resolution, it's not far off.
Indeed. The 'Holiday Special' has to be one of the most mindboggling stupid things I have ever seen in my life... so bad, in fact, that many people seem unable to believe that it even exists. Perhaps 'Indiana Jones and the Star Wars Holiday Special' would be a good candidate for the next Indie movie?
That's precisely what I plan to do. I might buy the Sucky Editions when they're released on HD-DVD if they're the only option available other than bootlegs, but I certainly won't buy the Sucky Editions on DVD and then buy them again on HD-DVD.
""What George did in 1997," Ward explains, "was [to] make the movie he originally wanted to make.""
Which is an interesting comment. While the 'special editions' suck less than the prequels, they do suck almost as bad as the original 'Star Wars' scripts before Lucas read Joseph Campbell's books, so we can conclude from this that if Lucas hadn't been kept in check by the studio he'd have released a 'Star Wars' movie that sucked in 1977 and would have vanished without a trace.
Of course, having seen the prequels, the fact that Lucas' "artistic vision" sucks shouldn't really be a surprise.
It would certainly make a difference to me, particularly where Leia's metal bikini is concerned... :)
I refer the honorable gentlemen to my previous post to someone who said precisely the same thing.
Again, kids don't _need_ Disney movies, they're just perfect candidates for Disney hype. Many parents may be unable to say no to the spoilt little brats that pass for kids today, but at some point the price of not saying no becomes more than the benefit... if 'Disney's Little Aardvark' was a $10 a play rental over the web, there'd be a lot less kids getting to watch it fifteen times in a weekend.
No-one _needs_ Disney movies: we need to eat, we need to drink, we don't _need_ to watch 'Disney's Little Aardvark'... any demand that exists is pure hype and marketing. You're making the fatal mistake of assuming that just because Disney have a monopoly on Disney movies, that people don't have a choice as to whether they watch them or not.
"There's a reason why most studios use Quicktime, windows MP blows chunks."
IMHO the reason why most studios use Quicktime is because they're clueless Mac users: as bad as Media Player is, the Quicktime player is far, far worse. I absolutely hate going to a movie site and finding that they only have trailers in Quicktime rather than a real video format like MPEG or AVI.
"Content providers want DRM,"
There are a lot of things that big business wants, but that doesn't mean that consumers will go for it. No consumer benefits from DRM, so if it makes their life harder they just won't buy: to work at all it needs to be a non-DRM DRM like Apple's iTunes, where you can still burn DRM-free copies to CDs to listen to.
As for producing our own DRM, why? We don't want it, Joe Sixpack doesn't want it, just let it crash and burn in the marketplace like all those other bad inventions that big business tried to push on us (like the DIVX disks and self-destructing DVDs).
"Throw these antisocial delinquents in the slammer for 10 years for each offense."
I believe the average sentence for murder in America is about eight years. Are you really suggesting that writing a virus is a more serious crime than murder?
(Ok, I'd agree, if that virus caused infrastructure damage that killed people... but then they should be jailed for manslaughter, not virus writing)
And nuclear power would be a whole lot cheaper without a government to impose silly regulations on them and prevent new plants being built: I believe that most nuclear plants in the UK are old ones that have pretty much reached their planned lifetime, and many were built primarily to produce plutonium for British bombs, with power just a useful sideline.
"Yeah, you can't see it, but that's because it's really dangerous,"
Yeah, that nuclear waste might just come creeping through my bedroom window and night and murder me, or shoot me in the head to steal my mobile phone.
Dealing with highly radioactive nuclear waste is easy, since so little is produced each year. Stick it in a stable desert somewhere, surround it with minefields, automated machineguns and anti-aircraft missiles and otherwise basically forget about it. For all we know your grandkids may even be thankful to us for leaving them such a rich source of exotic materials to be mined to energise their dilithium crystals, or whatever.
"don't know how reliable the facts are on this site though"
It's apparently a site for 'moon hoax' nuts: I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
"The Van Allen belts have their lower edge up around 1200-1400 km."
That very much depends on your definition of "edge": it's not as though one meter below you're taking no radiation and one meter above you're dying... the radiation dose increases significantly with altitude, and even at 500km the dose is several times larger than at 400km. You just can't fly much higher than ISS for months at a time without being exposed to a dangerous amount of radation.
No, but by far the biggest risk comes from solar flares. Normal cosmic radiation might give you cancer a decade later, but solar flares will give you death in a few hours or days.
"You have no chance to survive make your time."
Pretty much, but they wouldn't have given up until they were dead, as a small chance of survival was always better than absolutely none. It was a known risk and NASA picked flight dates to minimise the risk... and got lucky.