"Humbug, m'dear; my taste is always impeccable. After all, I married you." =)
She doesn't know about the Carnivale 4' x 6' bus stop sized poster...
Heh. I used to have an ID4 theatre lobby promo stand in my basement-- with the 12' wide mothership blowing up the White House. I was going to Ebay it when I moved to a (much) smaller place, but it turned out to have gotten some water damage I hadn't noticed-- enoughthat I decided it wasn't worth the hassle, and so it mostly became dumpster fodder... although when I left the saucer next to the dumpster between trips, it vanished. Hopefully it found a good home.
Your farscape boxed set does that include all 4 seasons and also the peacekeeper wars?
"Boxed sets" I said-- 4 seasons, 4 boxes. Admittedly, Peacekeeper Wars is preordered via Amazon, and not due to arrive next week. However, I did record the broadcast on my computer, trim out the commercials, and burn it to DVD+ and -R already; made my own box, too, so I feel comfortable standing by my statement. The one gotten through Amazon should have a nicer box, though, and more extra features on the DVD. =)
PS do you already have the extended extended (4 dvd) edition of the ROTK?
The Platinum? Yes; having incriminating evidence on the local video store manager is helpful sometimes. I did skip the "collector's gift sets"; I'm underpaid as geeks go, the sculptures weren't that great, and you only need bookends if your books don't fill your shelves. Also, since I have the Platinum on the other two, I don't plan to get the monster LOTR all-in-one-box set either-- although I might reconsider had I more slack in my budget.
Re:Sci-fi/fantasy
on
Top 50 DVDs
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Geeks tend to have higher-than-average disposable incomes, and a willingness to apply that to their daft obsessions.
(Says a man who own the Matrix, LOTR, and complete Farscape boxed sets....)
costs dimes to make but sells for dollars, is addicting, legal, and non-fattening.
Which industry was the only industry for a long time acually delivering profits selling stuff on the web during a time when all other industries promised a lot but only delivered losses? [...]The porn industry will decide which format will be used.
Yah, porn comes pretty close if you watch out for silly Tennesee postmasters.
True we have found limits to materials hence we need to think out of the box and find new materials.
They're working on it, and progress will be made as a result, but the difficulty finding such is the reason CPU speed increases have slowed. I expect that there may be one more breakthrough in my lifetime allowing another factor of 10 Moore's law style increase in single CPU speed with an 18-30 month doubling period. One. After that, we need to go *MP-- and probably before that, too.
And, kook that I am ("Energy Profit Ratio!" "Hubbert Peak!" "Club of Rome Report!"), I suspect the energy demands of the increased speed CPUs may render them uneconomical outside of the most limited high-end demanding server applications.
But.torrent file could be a text file. Or a propietary file of any kind:)
Well, yes, and a.scr file could well have a spreadsheet, but I doubt you tried using Quattro on the last.scr file that was e-mailed to you. Normally, a file with a.torrent extension contains the information needed to link into the BitTorrent that the.torrent describes, for the purpose of downloading (and uploading) it.
A.torrent file may well link to a BitTorrent for a text file, executable, ISO CD image, or any other type of tile-- call it a.foo file. But the.torrent file itself (containing information about file creation date, number of pieces, final size, etc.) is not the.foo file pointed to, it is a smaller file pointing to it. And handing out that.torrent file is, to give a poor analogy, like handing out a key to a stamping plant with thousands of copies of whatever the.foo file is; if the.foo is distributed with permission of the owner, all's well, but if not, then making and taking a copy from the stamping plant is a copyright violation, and the person who handed you the key is an accessory, and (depending on national law) prosecutable accordingly.
If you were ignorant about the presence of the.torrent file on your web server, most nations have laws protecting you up to the point when you are notified. However, once you are told, you either take it down or are an accessory to the copyright "piracy".
A possible, if not bulletproof defense... provided you remove the.torrent file when requested by the copyright holder. If you refuse, you'll need a skilled lawyer for any meaningful defense-- that old "aiding and abetting" issue again.
Stapled floppies containing pirated software? Two years ago? Nonsense. Even in the thirdest world places of the third world, there is no way anyone was using 5.25 or 8 inch floppies two years ago.
On the one hand, it is possible to staple 3.5" floppies together, although a bit of a challenge. And on the other hand, I only dragged the last of my department's users off 5.25 floppies in summer of 2003... and this at a respectable US state school. (Of course, none of the school maintained labs have had a 5.25 since 1994, but not all of the users migrated their old data when the drives started vanishing.)
There's still a few floppy, flimsy, and flappy (3.5, 5.25, 8) users out there, but thank Ghu they're getting rarer.
While hosting the tracker file (which yes, most trackers I've seen actually do have the.torrent file itself on their web server, although not any pieces of the torrent itself) is not itself distributing restricted copyrighted material, that doesn't put them in the clear. Tell me, ever heard of the phrase "aiding and abetting"? The only use for a.torrent file is for downloading a torrent. If the torrent is for copyrighted material being without permission, it will take a damn fine lawyer to justify any legal purpose for having or distributing the corresponding.torrent file.
Am i missing something? How does this work? It's pretty obvious to me that the daughter wouldn't be able to see the dot on a star.
It's the beam, dude. While a standard cheapo red beam laser pointer does not usually have a beam visible unless there's enough fog to prevent seeing stars, the higher-end pricey green lasers have a beam that can be seen with just the normal trace of dust in the air, since it's about 50 times brighter than the usual red ones. Perfectly good for a pointer for astronomy lessons.
The writing advice, for example, is good for all engineers (and possibly anyone), not just CS types. According to one of my two sisters and to her husband (both Engineers), being able to express yourself in an effective manner with the written word easily adds 10-20% to the rise in your salary over the first five years, compared with raises given to less eloquent peers. Of course, there is a risk there: you are much more likely to be considered a candidate for management training or promotion-- which, if you just want to work on the "cool" part of the problems, rather than the warm-and-fuzzy people aspects to engineering, may necessitate digging your feet in, or even a job hop. The ability to communicate in spoken form has similar benefits. (If you just plain work well with people to boot, it will be nigh impossible to avoid a fate in management, so you may as well take the money, too.)
I'd also agree with the microeconomics suggestion. Mind you, you need not actually waste a semester (and tuition) on a course; reading the textbook from the Econ Intro Micro class can suffice, and saves a lot of time. (Libraries will oft have reserve copies of the class text, or you may make freinds with someone in the class.) The essence boils down to the old joke: "You can make turn a parrot into a passable economist, if you can only train it to say 'Supply and Demand!' any time someone asks it a question." The trick, of course, is figuring out what things are being supplied and demanded in any transaction.
There is a point to not blowing off the boring classes. Of course, there is also merit to the complementary idea of not letting an obsession with grades get in the way of your education. If you face the choice of an easy project that will give you an easy A, or a more challenging project that you'll learn something doing but risk only getting a B- on, you should stretch yourself at least some of the time. But he's right: sluffing off just because you're bored is a bad thing.
The "Learn C" is pretty specific to CS folk; most non CS folk these days will find Java more useful. It's more true to say that you shouldn't get out of CS without having mastered at least two programming languages, and learned half a dozen others. C should be one of the one's you choose-- if nothing else, the 30 year span of it's use should be a warning that it has something. Fortran should be learned, if only because it's not that hard, and you WILL encounter the damned thing at some point. Perl, Java, Ruby... there's a whole list of languages you ought to run through the equivalent of Intro CS exercises with, and which ones are in the short list would ptobably have a dozen or so that people would argue over. But C would be on almost everyone's list.
For the last three... yeah, they're pretty specific.
And only idiots believe what what is proven as false.
According to a November 22 CBS News poll, 55% of the American public believe that God made man (and woman) in much their present from some time in the last 10,000 years, and that evolution is so much hooey.
Given that there is evidence that the principles of evolution apply to social organisms like countries, as well as biological organisms like fruit flies, I fear for my country.
Granted, machines nowadays have more off-the-shelf capabilities than ever before (modem, networking, and Dolby sound, etc.) but... they still have slots.
Looking at Apple, Higher end machines still have slots. Lower end machines may only have firewire and USB connections... which still gives some expandability.
Steve Jobs' vision has consistently been 10 years ahead of the market-- one of the reasons he does so badly. I suspect that this is another area where his vision is ahead of schedule.
First, as an earlier respondent noted, bandwidth is shared between all users. Since laptop users are increasing, that 54Mbps peak (which realistically is more like 40) gets divided up more ways. Working IT at a university, I've already heard complaints that the wireless in the classrooms seems to be getting slower. This is because more and more students are connecting. So, what was once 11Mbps for just one user is now 54Mbps for a dozen.
Second, while wireless speeds do continue to increase, there are hard physical limits on the throughput, and only one spectrum, mostly already allocated for various purposes. While there may be some reallocation, this will mostly just keep per-user bandwidth more-or-less where it is now. Moore's law applies tollerably to many aspects of system performance, until the physical limits get close. But wireless technology has been working on those limits for a long time, just not from a computer standpoint.
And if you don't believe the impact of those limits, tell me: which do you watch more of these days, broadcast television... or cable TV?
For free access to documents by citizens, PDF is pretty good. There are viewers for most platforms (I don't know about BSD or Solaris, but Mac/PC/Linux all are OK); and there are non-Acrobat print-to-PDF knockoffs at economical prices. Requiring PDF publication of all publicly available printed documents in, say, PDFv1.2, PDFv1.3 or PDFv1.4 would be a useful and not overly onerous step. (Adding forms-completion ability to the PDF requirement might well be too much.) The PDF standards are public, although copyrighted.
M$ Office has free viewers for older versions on Windows, but the Mac version isn't native on the current Apple OS, and OpenOffice is the only viewer I know for.DOC under Linux. =)
As far as permanence of data, nothing beats the long term unkillability of a bare TXT file; it also allows improved handicapped accessibility to the data in the process. For databases (w/o queries) and single-page spreadsheets, CSV comma-separated text format is similarly hard to destroy. Most Office Suites will read in such applications. For charts and other pictures, JPG may eventually be replaced, but will probably be readable for a long time. Of course, data corruption is always a risk (especially for JPG), so backups should be made redundantly, and be prepared for at least one major media format migration (EG: CD to DVD-Blue, or whatever). Requiring that any software be able to import from and export to these as relevant would be a reasonable and not overly onerous step.
Security is a more problematic issue. Some documents are meant to be kept non-public, barring (or even given) FOIA requests. Were it in my desmene to do so, I would still require the creation of the files for archive purposes, but storage off-site at a secure abandoned-salt-mine-type facility. Given that Security is oft diametrically opposed to Accesibility and/or Permanence, this may be a problem.
Oh... and PDF has some built-in security features. Requiring them to be used only when such security is mandatory might be worth thinking about.
The first question is not what, or how; the first question is WHY. As in, why do this? And therefore, is there a better way to achieve this goal?
Are they doing this to save money? to clamp down on the uppity workers? because the CEO got emailed an AppleWorks attachment with no file extension from some Mac user? to avoid the risks of single vendor lock-in?
Many documents formats can be converted back-and-forth with some degree of effectiveness. Yes, if you open a document from WordPerfect in Microsoft Office, the word spacing may change a little. However, this happens if you move from a machine connected with a HP4000 printer to a HP2100 printer as well. However, some formats give different feature capabilities; saving from DOC to RTF will cause (as an example) tables to shift about a bit. TXT format is readable by most anything, but the formatting capabilites are nigh nonexistant. (Ooh! Tabs!) While WordPerfect and Word will each open the others documents, they aren't so good for saving in open formats
What formats are currently used? Why are they needed? Will everyone need to be able to write to them, or are pay-writer/free-reader combos acceptable? And, *ARE* there any "vendor neutral" formats out there? (For desktop publishing, the real answer is "no". Publisher is a joke, and while Adobe and Quark maintain some import compatibilties, the formats AREN'T neutral.)
For myself, working in a small department, "Let a thousand flowers bloom" is just fine. I accept that I will occaisionally get forwarded an e-mail with an attachement that the user can't figure out how to open-- usually Mac/PC file extension name issues solved easily by renaming. Once in a blue moon I have to explain to someone that no, not everyone has FooBarBaz market research organizer, since for most the $800 license cost for it would be more beneficially used for other things, and they will probably need to examine such data files once in their career, if that.
Perhaps a list of universally accepted formats-- that is, formats that must be used for wide distribution-- would be more appropriate, after considering what features are needed in said formats. After all, Photoshop.PSD documents are harder to view outside Photoshop, but far more useful for subtle graphics work than JPEGs.
I suspect you are being sent out on a project inadequately considered. Depending on the pointy-hairyness of the person who assigned it to you, you may find some substantial benefit to reconsidering the ground assumptions.
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"Humbug, m'dear; my taste is always impeccable. After all, I married you." =)
She doesn't know about the Carnivale 4' x 6' bus stop sized poster...
Heh. I used to have an ID4 theatre lobby promo stand in my basement-- with the 12' wide mothership blowing up the White House. I was going to Ebay it when I moved to a (much) smaller place, but it turned out to have gotten some water damage I hadn't noticed-- enoughthat I decided it wasn't worth the hassle, and so it mostly became dumpster fodder... although when I left the saucer next to the dumpster between trips, it vanished. Hopefully it found a good home.
"Boxed sets" I said-- 4 seasons, 4 boxes. Admittedly, Peacekeeper Wars is preordered via Amazon, and not due to arrive next week. However, I did record the broadcast on my computer, trim out the commercials, and burn it to DVD+ and -R already; made my own box, too, so I feel comfortable standing by my statement. The one gotten through Amazon should have a nicer box, though, and more extra features on the DVD. =)
PS do you already have the extended extended (4 dvd) edition of the ROTK?
The Platinum? Yes; having incriminating evidence on the local video store manager is helpful sometimes. I did skip the "collector's gift sets"; I'm underpaid as geeks go, the sculptures weren't that great, and you only need bookends if your books don't fill your shelves. Also, since I have the Platinum on the other two, I don't plan to get the monster LOTR all-in-one-box set either-- although I might reconsider had I more slack in my budget.
(Says a man who own the Matrix, LOTR, and complete Farscape boxed sets....)
Which industry was the only industry for a long time acually delivering profits selling stuff on the web during a time when all other industries promised a lot but only delivered losses? [...]The porn industry will decide which format will be used.
Yah, porn comes pretty close if you watch out for silly Tennesee postmasters.
While that might help the revenue stream, such would mostly be limited to certain jurisdictions in Nevada.
They're working on it, and progress will be made as a result, but the difficulty finding such is the reason CPU speed increases have slowed. I expect that there may be one more breakthrough in my lifetime allowing another factor of 10 Moore's law style increase in single CPU speed with an 18-30 month doubling period. One. After that, we need to go *MP-- and probably before that, too.
And, kook that I am ("Energy Profit Ratio!" "Hubbert Peak!" "Club of Rome Report!"), I suspect the energy demands of the increased speed CPUs may render them uneconomical outside of the most limited high-end demanding server applications.
Well, yes, and a .scr file could well have a spreadsheet, but I doubt you tried using Quattro on the last .scr file that was e-mailed to you. Normally, a file with a .torrent extension contains the information needed to link into the BitTorrent that the .torrent describes, for the purpose of downloading (and uploading) it.
A .torrent file may well link to a BitTorrent for a text file, executable, ISO CD image, or any other type of tile-- call it a .foo file. But the .torrent file itself (containing information about file creation date, number of pieces, final size, etc.) is not the .foo file pointed to, it is a smaller file pointing to it. And handing out that .torrent file is, to give a poor analogy, like handing out a key to a stamping plant with thousands of copies of whatever the .foo file is; if the .foo is distributed with permission of the owner, all's well, but if not, then making and taking a copy from the stamping plant is a copyright violation, and the person who handed you the key is an accessory, and (depending on national law) prosecutable accordingly.
If you were ignorant about the presence of the .torrent file on your web server, most nations have laws protecting you up to the point when you are notified. However, once you are told, you either take it down or are an accessory to the copyright "piracy".
Me: PWn3d.
What, you thought the upkeep on females became cheaper after marriage?
A possible, if not bulletproof defense... provided you remove the .torrent file when requested by the copyright holder. If you refuse, you'll need a skilled lawyer for any meaningful defense-- that old "aiding and abetting" issue again.
On the one hand, it is possible to staple 3.5" floppies together, although a bit of a challenge. And on the other hand, I only dragged the last of my department's users off 5.25 floppies in summer of 2003... and this at a respectable US state school. (Of course, none of the school maintained labs have had a 5.25 since 1994, but not all of the users migrated their old data when the drives started vanishing.)
There's still a few floppy, flimsy, and flappy (3.5, 5.25, 8) users out there, but thank Ghu they're getting rarer.
The issue is ignorance. Ignorance is oft curable. Stupidity is for life. The permanance of poverty you may take on faith or not.
Are you implying that they may be a missing link? Or just noting that it was from the "too-bright-therefore-not-so-bright" department editor?
Eh. Errare humanum est.
It's the beam, dude. While a standard cheapo red beam laser pointer does not usually have a beam visible unless there's enough fog to prevent seeing stars, the higher-end pricey green lasers have a beam that can be seen with just the normal trace of dust in the air, since it's about 50 times brighter than the usual red ones. Perfectly good for a pointer for astronomy lessons.
I'd also agree with the microeconomics suggestion. Mind you, you need not actually waste a semester (and tuition) on a course; reading the textbook from the Econ Intro Micro class can suffice, and saves a lot of time. (Libraries will oft have reserve copies of the class text, or you may make freinds with someone in the class.) The essence boils down to the old joke: "You can make turn a parrot into a passable economist, if you can only train it to say 'Supply and Demand!' any time someone asks it a question." The trick, of course, is figuring out what things are being supplied and demanded in any transaction.
There is a point to not blowing off the boring classes. Of course, there is also merit to the complementary idea of not letting an obsession with grades get in the way of your education. If you face the choice of an easy project that will give you an easy A, or a more challenging project that you'll learn something doing but risk only getting a B- on, you should stretch yourself at least some of the time. But he's right: sluffing off just because you're bored is a bad thing.
The "Learn C" is pretty specific to CS folk; most non CS folk these days will find Java more useful. It's more true to say that you shouldn't get out of CS without having mastered at least two programming languages, and learned half a dozen others. C should be one of the one's you choose-- if nothing else, the 30 year span of it's use should be a warning that it has something. Fortran should be learned, if only because it's not that hard, and you WILL encounter the damned thing at some point. Perl, Java, Ruby... there's a whole list of languages you ought to run through the equivalent of Intro CS exercises with, and which ones are in the short list would ptobably have a dozen or so that people would argue over. But C would be on almost everyone's list.
For the last three... yeah, they're pretty specific.
According to a November 22 CBS News poll, 55% of the American public believe that God made man (and woman) in much their present from some time in the last 10,000 years, and that evolution is so much hooey.
Given that there is evidence that the principles of evolution apply to social organisms like countries, as well as biological organisms like fruit flies, I fear for my country.
Yes, but you should be working harder on updating your resume than on the project.
I found all of the problems interesting, both then and now. Of course, I usually vote libertarian, further marking me as an oddity.
"Correct you were, Obi Wan; much improvement Anakin's piloting needs. Tell me, my kidneys around here have you seen ?"
Looking at Apple, Higher end machines still have slots. Lower end machines may only have firewire and USB connections... which still gives some expandability.
Steve Jobs' vision has consistently been 10 years ahead of the market-- one of the reasons he does so badly. I suspect that this is another area where his vision is ahead of schedule.
Second, while wireless speeds do continue to increase, there are hard physical limits on the throughput, and only one spectrum, mostly already allocated for various purposes. While there may be some reallocation, this will mostly just keep per-user bandwidth more-or-less where it is now. Moore's law applies tollerably to many aspects of system performance, until the physical limits get close. But wireless technology has been working on those limits for a long time, just not from a computer standpoint.
And if you don't believe the impact of those limits, tell me: which do you watch more of these days, broadcast television... or cable TV?
For free access to documents by citizens, PDF is pretty good. There are viewers for most platforms (I don't know about BSD or Solaris, but Mac/PC/Linux all are OK); and there are non-Acrobat print-to-PDF knockoffs at economical prices. Requiring PDF publication of all publicly available printed documents in, say, PDFv1.2, PDFv1.3 or PDFv1.4 would be a useful and not overly onerous step. (Adding forms-completion ability to the PDF requirement might well be too much.) The PDF standards are public, although copyrighted. .DOC under Linux. =)
M$ Office has free viewers for older versions on Windows, but the Mac version isn't native on the current Apple OS, and OpenOffice is the only viewer I know for
As far as permanence of data, nothing beats the long term unkillability of a bare TXT file; it also allows improved handicapped accessibility to the data in the process. For databases (w/o queries) and single-page spreadsheets, CSV comma-separated text format is similarly hard to destroy. Most Office Suites will read in such applications. For charts and other pictures, JPG may eventually be replaced, but will probably be readable for a long time. Of course, data corruption is always a risk (especially for JPG), so backups should be made redundantly, and be prepared for at least one major media format migration (EG: CD to DVD-Blue, or whatever). Requiring that any software be able to import from and export to these as relevant would be a reasonable and not overly onerous step.
Security is a more problematic issue. Some documents are meant to be kept non-public, barring (or even given) FOIA requests. Were it in my desmene to do so, I would still require the creation of the files for archive purposes, but storage off-site at a secure abandoned-salt-mine-type facility. Given that Security is oft diametrically opposed to Accesibility and/or Permanence, this may be a problem.
Oh... and PDF has some built-in security features. Requiring them to be used only when such security is mandatory might be worth thinking about.
Are they doing this to save money? to clamp down on the uppity workers? because the CEO got emailed an AppleWorks attachment with no file extension from some Mac user? to avoid the risks of single vendor lock-in?
Many documents formats can be converted back-and-forth with some degree of effectiveness. Yes, if you open a document from WordPerfect in Microsoft Office, the word spacing may change a little. However, this happens if you move from a machine connected with a HP4000 printer to a HP2100 printer as well. However, some formats give different feature capabilities; saving from DOC to RTF will cause (as an example) tables to shift about a bit. TXT format is readable by most anything, but the formatting capabilites are nigh nonexistant. (Ooh! Tabs!) While WordPerfect and Word will each open the others documents, they aren't so good for saving in open formats
What formats are currently used? Why are they needed? Will everyone need to be able to write to them, or are pay-writer/free-reader combos acceptable? And, *ARE* there any "vendor neutral" formats out there? (For desktop publishing, the real answer is "no". Publisher is a joke, and while Adobe and Quark maintain some import compatibilties, the formats AREN'T neutral.)
For myself, working in a small department, "Let a thousand flowers bloom" is just fine. I accept that I will occaisionally get forwarded an e-mail with an attachement that the user can't figure out how to open-- usually Mac/PC file extension name issues solved easily by renaming. Once in a blue moon I have to explain to someone that no, not everyone has FooBarBaz market research organizer, since for most the $800 license cost for it would be more beneficially used for other things, and they will probably need to examine such data files once in their career, if that.
Perhaps a list of universally accepted formats-- that is, formats that must be used for wide distribution-- would be more appropriate, after considering what features are needed in said formats. After all, Photoshop .PSD documents are harder to view outside Photoshop, but far more useful for subtle graphics work than JPEGs.
I suspect you are being sent out on a project inadequately considered. Depending on the pointy-hairyness of the person who assigned it to you, you may find some substantial benefit to reconsidering the ground assumptions.