Unbelievable. You actually got modded up for that troll.
Firstly, a name is just a name. A tool for association. It's not supposed to be a description of something. As another poster said, how about C, Pascal, Outlook, Excel, Apache, blah blah. Hell, how about your own name? Dancing Santa? That name describes you? "It's just a nick" you say? Well, how about David or William or Veronica or whatever your real name - does that describe you?
"creative" names are most likely to lead to confusion while simple names are easier to remember, spell, and identify the programs they label
What rot! Creative names are easier to remember. Would it be easier to remember names like Gentoo, Debian, RedHat, Mandrake, etc., or names like MyLinux, YourLinux, HisLinux, YetAnotherLinux?
End result: The public won't know or won't care until a massive mistake is uncovered after the person enters office and everyone realizes that they've been living under the authority of a false representative.
There's another theory which states that this has already happened.
And on the flip side, many movies are not linear. The article writer obviously hasn't seen any Tarantino movies.
I think the reason why so many movie games suck is simply a question of quality of thought and design put into them. A mere association with a brand/character name isn't going to work magic. This is true in general. For example, a "Spiderman drink" isn't going to become wildly successful if it tastes like crap even though it has the Spiderman name on it.
Likewise with games. Put some thought into creating a good game, and it won't matter whether it was based on a movie or not. In fact, the only thing that the name-association will get you is some free publicity.
Re:State of the art?
on
Shrek 2 How-To
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have to agree with the parent.
I just came back from watching the movie. I loved the original, and went into this sequel without a thought in my head other than "Cool!".
But I was less than impressed. It's not just that the detail was lacking at times. There were serious defects in animation. There are scenes where the donkey is all out of proportion (as in, his "width" (z-axis in profile view) would be wrong). Other creatures too. For example, when Shrek and co. enter the "far, far away" kingdom, the horses look terribly "two-dimensional" at times. You know, as though they were made of cardboard cut-outs.
Mind you, I wasn't even looking for these mistakes. The defects are just too apparent and make you do a double-take even while engrossed in the story.
To be fair, other parts of the movie are stellar. For instance, I thought the Queen especially was very well done and very life-like (within the realm of the animation).
And oh, while the latter half of the movie was thoroughly enjoyable (starting with the appearance of the Puss in Boots), I thought the first part was a bit lame and lacking in momentum.
Yes, the movie is doing very well in the box-office (and it has my vote too), but the overall animation is hardly superlative.
Everything the grandparent said is true. The parent is just skipping around the truth.
For the record, I love OpenBSD. Apart from Windows (required by my employer and for some games), my OS of choice is OpenBSD. It runs my server, and I also use it a desktop as much as I can, even at work. I have also put my money where my mouth is (i.e., bought their CDs and donated).
However, the claim of "8 years with only one remote hole" is highly misleading. The "default install" counts only those services that are on by default. Ftpd, httpd, X and pf are all turned off. Yes, they are installed, but they are off. They are not counted. Sendmail is enabled, but listens only on the loopback interface (so no "remote" holes in sendmail, how convenient!).
In fact, the only service that listens on the network by default is sshd. And, as you would expect, it had a remote hole, and they had to finally admit it.
They have learnt from that experience. Now, for the first time (in this 3.5 release), the installation asks you whether to disable sshd. Great! Now you can have a "default install" which has absolutely nothing listening on the network, thus ensuring that the "no remote hole" claim will be valid forever. Bah!
This only shows that their scare tactics have worked. Remember, there used to be some uncertainty there. In the beginning, when RIAA launched the suits, the estimated number of P2P users dropped dramatically, but after a while, it stabilized (or increased; I don't recall).
This is as clear a signal as any that the RIAA's lawsuit-mongering works for them.
about the difficulties and successes in running a free hosting provider using OpenBSD
I didn't see anything negative in that article. Nor any major "difficulties". He made it sound like it was a breeze - just put together a bunch of scripts and it's all done.
PS: I love OpenBSD. Like Daniel, I also use it as both a server and a desktop workstation. I just wish people would RTFA.
As the byline says, if this is what they call healthcare, you'd be better off seeking treatment elsewhere. Take a holiday, a flight and get your body fixed. Then you can consider suing your employer or HMO.
Lotus is far from a dead weight for IBM. See, your personally not having seen Lotus around recently doesn't represent the whole world.
The Singapore government, for example, is completely on Lotus. The government issued a mandate a few years back to "standardize" their IT infrastructure. They chose Lotus. Today, all government organizations (such as ministries), statutory bodies (such as the housing/economic/trade/etc development boards), fully-government-funded institutions (such as schools and polytechnics) and many others are completely on Lotus. No Microsoft Exchange or other competitors. Some are deploying Active Directory Services in addition, but Lotus is the core platform.
Even though Singapore is geographically small, that's a pretty massive IT market. I would venture that Lotus similarly has clients worldwide.
I get your general point, which is something I didn't dispute in the first place - that a DB gives you many more features than Excel.
But, what I don't get is people completely denying the use of Excel as a DB, and I don't even mean "simplistic DB". Excel really does have plenty of stuff for most common end-user DB needs.
For example, you (and others) complain that Excel doesn't provide strong typing of data. Quite the contrary. You can specify that a column can only contain dates, or numbers, or one of a predefined list of items, etc. Look under the "Data -> Validation" menu. Your specific example of product colours is easily handled by this.
There are already a lot of posts berating the use of Excel as a database. Yet, I have not seen a single clear argument why this is a Bad Thing. The closest someone has gotten to is saying how users might inadvertently delete columns or add unwanted formatting, etc.
That's really just the fault of the WYSIWYG mentality of MS Office applications (in certain cases, the formatting is a bonus, as you'll see below). I don't see anything inherently wrong with the "spreadsheet as a DB" concept.
Seriously, a spreadsheet IS a DB. Its rows and columns perform exactly the same functions as a DB's rows and columns. While a DB might have more features, such as primary keys, indexing and fancy querying, a spreadsheet fits the role if you don't want those extra features.
I should know. I use DBs extensively (MySQL and Oracle). I also use Excel quite a lot. I am in the statistics and decision analysis field, so I use DBs and Excel for a lot of number crunching.
But I also use Excel to store small lists. For example, I have in front of me a sheet containing conferences and journals (that are relevant to me), ordered by due date. Excel's conditional formatting allows me to highlight those conferences that are due soon and grey out those that are past. With a single click, I can sort based on other columns, such as ranking.
I fail to see why I should be forced to use the cumbersome SQL interface to do this. Unless I spend much time writing the necessary scripts, webpages and CGIs, I am not likely to get the same flexibility I have with Excel for manipulating the list. Excel does the job for me, with minimal effort.
I think a lot of people complaining here are doing so knee-jerk. Somehow, the attitude is that a DB is "sacred" and Excel is a bastard child. This is wrong. A DB is just whatever fits your purpose for storing data (or lists or whatever). It can be an Excel spreadsheet, an RDBMS, a flat text file or even an opaque file (think Data.fs in Zope). The wise man uses the right tools for the job, and doesn't slavishly adhere to misguided prejudices.
The only thing I hate is that it's the "Search News" button that grabs the <Enter> key by default (when you type something into the text box). I hate being forced to use my mouse and click on the "Search Web" button.
I don't have their toolbar (and refuse to install it). I wish they would allow a preference setting to change the default search. I mean, come on, how many people search for news items, even from news.google.com?
companies are going to be slowly start losing market share because... they will have no reservior of new ideas.
America does not have a monopoly on creativity and new ideas. Yeah, recent history has seen you guys dominate the market. But, you know what? Things are going to change.
It's a matter of opportunity. Indians today are getting opportunities their fathers couldn't dream of. As resources and technologies penetrate deeper into India and spread wider, you'll see great stuff coming out from there.
It's your own folly if you hold on to a false belief that nobody can topple your intellectual regime. There are smart people everywhere. Give them the right tools and time, they'll prove themselves. And your ivory tower will crash and crumble.
I use VirtualDub only for editing home videos (i.e., not on a professional scale). But from what I can see, it is immensely powerful. Also, while it may not have the high-level features like fading-in/out that you seek (someone correct me if VDub can do these too), it does kick ass for low level editing (there is a ton of filters included within).
These dumbass companies seem to have forgotten what a CD is all about (same goes for RIAA). They seem to think of a CD as proof of something - ownership, legitimate copy, etc.
It's not. It's just a distribution medium. Like floppies, analog tapes, radio-over-airwaves and other media, it's just a convenient means of getting the game/goods from them (the publishers) to us (the consumers). Once the goods have been delivered, forget about the medium already!
When the medium becomes outdated or cumbersome, people will look to other media. It is stupid (and ultimately their ruin) to try and lock us into their media of choice.
RIAA should accept that ftp/file-sharing and the Internet in general are more convenient media for music delivery. Stop forcing CDs on us. Learn to deal with the new delivery mechanisms.
Equally well, UbiSoft should also accept that the huge hard-disks we have are more convenient to store games and game images. Stop forcing CDs on us.
I personally find it extremely inconvenient to keep swapping CDs in and out (I play many games). I have only one physical CD drive, but I can have many virtual drives! Not to mention that the hard-disk is MUCH faster than a CD drive.
Opening the source does not NECESSARILY allow people to take advantage of it. You claim that you could guarantee top rankings for your clients if you knew how the search engine worked. Really? Okay, here's my search engine: It ranks pages randomly. What you gonna do?
The point here is that, even if you know the algorithm, there are many factors that you either (1) may not know, or (2) cannot control. A well designed algorithm will be robust in the face of such things.
In the above example, the seed used for the random number generator is unknown to you. Just like how knowing how public key encryption works is not enough to break it if you don't know the key.
More to the point, there are many things you cannot control. Supposing the ranking algorithm depended on the exact set of websites in the engine's index. Can you control all the URLs in the world and how they get indexed? Supposing the ranking varies dynamically based on the query. Even if you know exactly how it works, can you control all the people of this world and what they type into the search box?
Opening up the algorithm need not compromise robustness (unless the algorithm is poorly designed).
To all those bitching about PJ not being a good director (for having left out this or that element in the books):
The director's role is in bringing a book to life. I say PJ has done it exceedingly well.
I read the books before I saw the movies, and I had this mental picture of Legolas - you know, being an elf and all, especially in the Misty Mountains, where he was the only one who could run atop the snow and such.
Orlando Bloom has more than delivered. The way he runs lithely across the mountains (in the beginning part of TTT) is amazing. No-one could have done it better. His dexterity with the bow (remember the rapid fire arrows in FotR where he kills the Uruk-Hai?) is also fantastic (of course, thanks to excellent editing too).
Usually, I am prepared to be disappointed that actors don't do my mental pictures justice. LotR has been a pleasant exception.
As has been pointed out many times already, you know that this "new math" of calculating damages (by multiplying the retail value with the number of infringing copies) is absurd. There's another aspect to this, which is kinda obvious, but hasn't really been pointed out:
Consider for a moment that this "new math" is not absurd. I.e., assume that everyone who copied the stuff illegally would actually have bought a copy. Who's to say that the retail price in such a situation would be the same as it is now? When there's demand for a product, and plenty of copies waiting to be bought, there might be new market dynamics, more retail competitors, etc. The retail price could be significantly lower (competitors undercutting each other?). If you are going to hypothesize the retail value of infringing goods, you ought to hypothesize the market scenario as well.
In the case of music CDs, the icing on the cake is that the current retail price of CDs has been found to be the "fixing" of an illegal cartel. The DoJ should be looking at the "actual" (non-cartel) retail price for their valuation.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that hard.
Huh?
Unbelievable. You actually got modded up for that troll.
Firstly, a name is just a name. A tool for association. It's not supposed to be a description of something. As another poster said, how about C, Pascal, Outlook, Excel, Apache, blah blah. Hell, how about your own name? Dancing Santa? That name describes you? "It's just a nick" you say? Well, how about David or William or Veronica or whatever your real name - does that describe you?
What rot! Creative names are easier to remember. Would it be easier to remember names like Gentoo, Debian, RedHat, Mandrake, etc., or names like MyLinux, YourLinux, HisLinux, YetAnotherLinux?
There's another theory which states that this has already happened.
I agree.
And on the flip side, many movies are not linear. The article writer obviously hasn't seen any Tarantino movies.
I think the reason why so many movie games suck is simply a question of quality of thought and design put into them. A mere association with a brand/character name isn't going to work magic. This is true in general. For example, a "Spiderman drink" isn't going to become wildly successful if it tastes like crap even though it has the Spiderman name on it.
Likewise with games. Put some thought into creating a good game, and it won't matter whether it was based on a movie or not. In fact, the only thing that the name-association will get you is some free publicity.
I have to agree with the parent.
I just came back from watching the movie. I loved the original, and went into this sequel without a thought in my head other than "Cool!".
But I was less than impressed. It's not just that the detail was lacking at times. There were serious defects in animation. There are scenes where the donkey is all out of proportion (as in, his "width" (z-axis in profile view) would be wrong). Other creatures too. For example, when Shrek and co. enter the "far, far away" kingdom, the horses look terribly "two-dimensional" at times. You know, as though they were made of cardboard cut-outs.
Mind you, I wasn't even looking for these mistakes. The defects are just too apparent and make you do a double-take even while engrossed in the story.
To be fair, other parts of the movie are stellar. For instance, I thought the Queen especially was very well done and very life-like (within the realm of the animation).
And oh, while the latter half of the movie was thoroughly enjoyable (starting with the appearance of the Puss in Boots), I thought the first part was a bit lame and lacking in momentum.
Yes, the movie is doing very well in the box-office (and it has my vote too), but the overall animation is hardly superlative.
... called "features".
The author was seen beating the sh*t out of the robot. It had folded his academic papers meant for publication.
Everything the grandparent said is true. The parent is just skipping around the truth.
For the record, I love OpenBSD. Apart from Windows (required by my employer and for some games), my OS of choice is OpenBSD. It runs my server, and I also use it a desktop as much as I can, even at work. I have also put my money where my mouth is (i.e., bought their CDs and donated).
However, the claim of "8 years with only one remote hole" is highly misleading. The "default install" counts only those services that are on by default. Ftpd, httpd, X and pf are all turned off. Yes, they are installed, but they are off. They are not counted. Sendmail is enabled, but listens only on the loopback interface (so no "remote" holes in sendmail, how convenient!).
In fact, the only service that listens on the network by default is sshd. And, as you would expect, it had a remote hole, and they had to finally admit it.
They have learnt from that experience. Now, for the first time (in this 3.5 release), the installation asks you whether to disable sshd. Great! Now you can have a "default install" which has absolutely nothing listening on the network, thus ensuring that the "no remote hole" claim will be valid forever. Bah!
... with a huge HURRAH!
This only shows that their scare tactics have worked. Remember, there used to be some uncertainty there. In the beginning, when RIAA launched the suits, the estimated number of P2P users dropped dramatically, but after a while, it stabilized (or increased; I don't recall).
This is as clear a signal as any that the RIAA's lawsuit-mongering works for them.
I didn't see anything negative in that article. Nor any major "difficulties". He made it sound like it was a breeze - just put together a bunch of scripts and it's all done.
PS: I love OpenBSD. Like Daniel, I also use it as both a server and a desktop workstation. I just wish people would RTFA.
As the byline says, if this is what they call healthcare, you'd be better off seeking treatment elsewhere. Take a holiday, a flight and get your body fixed. Then you can consider suing your employer or HMO.
It's Timothy Roberts and Robert Shambro.
These geniuses picked the name "Phantom". Their parents didn't pick good names either.
Lotus is far from a dead weight for IBM. See, your personally not having seen Lotus around recently doesn't represent the whole world.
The Singapore government, for example, is completely on Lotus. The government issued a mandate a few years back to "standardize" their IT infrastructure. They chose Lotus. Today, all government organizations (such as ministries), statutory bodies (such as the housing/economic/trade/etc development boards), fully-government-funded institutions (such as schools and polytechnics) and many others are completely on Lotus. No Microsoft Exchange or other competitors. Some are deploying Active Directory Services in addition, but Lotus is the core platform.
Even though Singapore is geographically small, that's a pretty massive IT market. I would venture that Lotus similarly has clients worldwide.
I get your general point, which is something I didn't dispute in the first place - that a DB gives you many more features than Excel.
But, what I don't get is people completely denying the use of Excel as a DB, and I don't even mean "simplistic DB". Excel really does have plenty of stuff for most common end-user DB needs.
For example, you (and others) complain that Excel doesn't provide strong typing of data. Quite the contrary. You can specify that a column can only contain dates, or numbers, or one of a predefined list of items, etc. Look under the "Data -> Validation" menu. Your specific example of product colours is easily handled by this.
Could you kindly expand on your argument?
There are already a lot of posts berating the use of Excel as a database. Yet, I have not seen a single clear argument why this is a Bad Thing. The closest someone has gotten to is saying how users might inadvertently delete columns or add unwanted formatting, etc.
That's really just the fault of the WYSIWYG mentality of MS Office applications (in certain cases, the formatting is a bonus, as you'll see below). I don't see anything inherently wrong with the "spreadsheet as a DB" concept.
Seriously, a spreadsheet IS a DB. Its rows and columns perform exactly the same functions as a DB's rows and columns. While a DB might have more features, such as primary keys, indexing and fancy querying, a spreadsheet fits the role if you don't want those extra features.
I should know. I use DBs extensively (MySQL and Oracle). I also use Excel quite a lot. I am in the statistics and decision analysis field, so I use DBs and Excel for a lot of number crunching.
But I also use Excel to store small lists. For example, I have in front of me a sheet containing conferences and journals (that are relevant to me), ordered by due date. Excel's conditional formatting allows me to highlight those conferences that are due soon and grey out those that are past. With a single click, I can sort based on other columns, such as ranking.
I fail to see why I should be forced to use the cumbersome SQL interface to do this. Unless I spend much time writing the necessary scripts, webpages and CGIs, I am not likely to get the same flexibility I have with Excel for manipulating the list. Excel does the job for me, with minimal effort.
I think a lot of people complaining here are doing so knee-jerk. Somehow, the attitude is that a DB is "sacred" and Excel is a bastard child. This is wrong. A DB is just whatever fits your purpose for storing data (or lists or whatever). It can be an Excel spreadsheet, an RDBMS, a flat text file or even an opaque file (think Data.fs in Zope). The wise man uses the right tools for the job, and doesn't slavishly adhere to misguided prejudices.
Me, too.
The only thing I hate is that it's the "Search News" button that grabs the <Enter> key by default (when you type something into the text box). I hate being forced to use my mouse and click on the "Search Web" button.
I don't have their toolbar (and refuse to install it). I wish they would allow a preference setting to change the default search. I mean, come on, how many people search for news items, even from news.google.com?
Oh, lay off it already!
America does not have a monopoly on creativity and new ideas. Yeah, recent history has seen you guys dominate the market. But, you know what? Things are going to change.
It's a matter of opportunity. Indians today are getting opportunities their fathers couldn't dream of. As resources and technologies penetrate deeper into India and spread wider, you'll see great stuff coming out from there.
It's your own folly if you hold on to a false belief that nobody can topple your intellectual regime. There are smart people everywhere. Give them the right tools and time, they'll prove themselves. And your ivory tower will crash and crumble.
Of course, it is open source.
These dumbass companies seem to have forgotten what a CD is all about (same goes for RIAA). They seem to think of a CD as proof of something - ownership, legitimate copy, etc.
It's not. It's just a distribution medium. Like floppies, analog tapes, radio-over-airwaves and other media, it's just a convenient means of getting the game/goods from them (the publishers) to us (the consumers). Once the goods have been delivered, forget about the medium already!
When the medium becomes outdated or cumbersome, people will look to other media. It is stupid (and ultimately their ruin) to try and lock us into their media of choice.
RIAA should accept that ftp/file-sharing and the Internet in general are more convenient media for music delivery. Stop forcing CDs on us. Learn to deal with the new delivery mechanisms.
Equally well, UbiSoft should also accept that the huge hard-disks we have are more convenient to store games and game images. Stop forcing CDs on us.
I personally find it extremely inconvenient to keep swapping CDs in and out (I play many games). I have only one physical CD drive, but I can have many virtual drives! Not to mention that the hard-disk is MUCH faster than a CD drive.
Mod parent down. It is absolute bunk.
Opening the source does not NECESSARILY allow people to take advantage of it. You claim that you could guarantee top rankings for your clients if you knew how the search engine worked. Really? Okay, here's my search engine: It ranks pages randomly. What you gonna do?
The point here is that, even if you know the algorithm, there are many factors that you either (1) may not know, or (2) cannot control. A well designed algorithm will be robust in the face of such things.
In the above example, the seed used for the random number generator is unknown to you. Just like how knowing how public key encryption works is not enough to break it if you don't know the key.
More to the point, there are many things you cannot control. Supposing the ranking algorithm depended on the exact set of websites in the engine's index. Can you control all the URLs in the world and how they get indexed? Supposing the ranking varies dynamically based on the query. Even if you know exactly how it works, can you control all the people of this world and what they type into the search box?
Opening up the algorithm need not compromise robustness (unless the algorithm is poorly designed).
To all those bitching about PJ not being a good director (for having left out this or that element in the books):
The director's role is in bringing a book to life. I say PJ has done it exceedingly well.
I read the books before I saw the movies, and I had this mental picture of Legolas - you know, being an elf and all, especially in the Misty Mountains, where he was the only one who could run atop the snow and such.
Orlando Bloom has more than delivered. The way he runs lithely across the mountains (in the beginning part of TTT) is amazing. No-one could have done it better. His dexterity with the bow (remember the rapid fire arrows in FotR where he kills the Uruk-Hai?) is also fantastic (of course, thanks to excellent editing too).
Usually, I am prepared to be disappointed that actors don't do my mental pictures justice. LotR has been a pleasant exception.
As has been pointed out many times already, you know that this "new math" of calculating damages (by multiplying the retail value with the number of infringing copies) is absurd. There's another aspect to this, which is kinda obvious, but hasn't really been pointed out:
Consider for a moment that this "new math" is not absurd. I.e., assume that everyone who copied the stuff illegally would actually have bought a copy. Who's to say that the retail price in such a situation would be the same as it is now? When there's demand for a product, and plenty of copies waiting to be bought, there might be new market dynamics, more retail competitors, etc. The retail price could be significantly lower (competitors undercutting each other?). If you are going to hypothesize the retail value of infringing goods, you ought to hypothesize the market scenario as well.
In the case of music CDs, the icing on the cake is that the current retail price of CDs has been found to be the "fixing" of an illegal cartel. The DoJ should be looking at the "actual" (non-cartel) retail price for their valuation.
Maybe it was just a typo. He really meant RMS but didn't type gnu-nut properly :)
Information wants to be pure!
Who is notorious for their cookies, but cannot possibly violate the "1-click" patent?
These folks of course... :)
Sreeram.