As for the movie thing this doesn't compare to movie posts of real substance IMHO. The modding is interesting in itself, there are a couple of mods up for 'interesting' and two mods down for being 'overrated' and a mod down for being troll (or was it flamebait). Clearly opinion is divided here, equally clearly moderators are voting based on whether they agree with the post and not on whether the subject is valid and should be discussed.
Oscar _nominations_! Next we'll be getting reports from John Catz' proctologist.
I read the books when you were wearing a nappy, but this is about nominations for the chance to be voted best film. It's about as far off the mark as you can get.
There are several possible reasons. First and foremost it is not incumbent upon a patent holder to defend it against everyone or even defend it immediately against infringement, it may not be worth their while, for example you breach their patent but they won't care unless you start making enough money to make it worth their while hiring lawyers. One other possible explanation is that they may have already been in discussions with Microsoft and Sony for many months over this, but ultimately couldn't agree on a settlement, filing suit is a clear escalation perhaps because of a breakdown in negotiations. Finally, inside companies not everyone is hawkish about suing people over patent infringements, there is a risk that you'll lose the patent and lawyers can be expensive, and some people are just gun shy or have moral reservations, so when there is an opportunity to sue, it doesn't always happen even when there is an apparently strong case and clear violation, this can delay the decision to sue through internal conflict within senior management.
This is true, but there will be dyes & filters involved which will limit the light and I assume there will be some undesirable crosstalk between color channels since it's unlikely the colors will be perfectly filtered. This is still an awesome development. It should greatly reduce the blue and red channel noise which seems to plague color CCDs.
We can have lasers right next to each other at the same wavelenght and they won't interfere with eachother within reasonable limits. It's inherently point to point, not broadcast.
They weren't "profitable from day one", that claim implies they continued to be profitable since there is no limit to the "from", I don't contradict myself anywhere. You should learn to read properly instead of reading your desired interpretation into what people say. As for your ad hominem about my failure, what do you mean? My/. post 'failed'? Oh no, shock, horror! I'm not a VC, typical nonsense, any dissenting opinion is called conspiracy, I'm a programmer. The unhappy truth is that ArsDigita went to VCs for one thing, their cash, Why? they got greedy for their own growth. Did it ever seem strange to you that a profitable company with lots of cash in the bank needed a cash injection from a VC? If they were so profitable with big cash reserves why would they need this? Eve makes it sound like they were raking in the cash, obviously they weren't. Next time think before you buy into someones victimhood, Eve et.al. got greedy, and at least one founder sold out and walked away with $7 million at the worst possible time. She makes him sound like a victim here.
There's one principal reason someone goes to a VC, they want their money. Usually it's to help grow the company quickly. It is misleading to suggest that you're full of noble ideas which benefit the world when you need $40 million from VC's to help fuel your ambitions for growth. Growing a company is one of the most difficult things you can do with it. Sure a garage outfit can be profitable, that's easy there are no overheads, but ArsDigita was not profitable from Day1, it lost $40million, it used to be profitable when it was small, then the founders got greedy, went to VCs and messed up their growth plan and became extremely unprofitable. For someone so greedy and apparently unqualified Eve is doing a lot of complaining about what others did to cause the problem. Where's the Mea Culpa?
I don't give a hoot what that web site thinks about graphics design. People who understand graphics hardware design work for companies like NVIDIA and ATI, they don't run web sites. The fact that NVIDIA is fastest right now is inescapable. The clock comparrisons you and others make is moronic, as I have said, and you ignored, clock is an integral part of a design. High clock is a design decision, a choice, not simply something you can increase at will. You ignore that fact, and fundamentally misunderstand these design issues, that is why you are wrong. Your comments are nothing but an emotional appeal to design things your pet favourite way, the problem is you are clueless about fundamental design issues and should keep your comments about NVIDIA to yourself. To criticize them for leading but not doing things your way merely indicates how clueless you are.
No you're just wrong, face it. Me pointing out that NVIDIA is winning on performance and that you are wrong in not da hominem. Look at the substance of my post, you have completely ignored what I said and called it emotion. Standing on the sidelines and bleating that NVIDIA doesn't design their graphics card the way you want it designed, is assenine (and that's being generous). Their card is the fastest, designing it your way it would not be.
Did it ever occur to you that their approach is difficult to clock as highly? Clock speed is a function of design, deep pipelines with many stages lead to faster clocks. It's not the case that you can take any design and clock it to the performance of any other. The NVIDIA chips are designed intentionally to support high clock speed. Your kryo2 with a lower clock is not an innate benefit, look at the overall performance. I wish people would stop spreading this ad hominem rubbish about graphics design, anyone can look at the benchmark results and see what the facts are. NVIDIA wins on performance, why some people look at NVIDIA (the winner) ans say, you should design your chips like Kryo(the looser) is a mystery. If they designed like kryo, they'd perform like kryo, and you'd all be complaining about ATI being fastest using the 'wrong' technology.
Nonsense, who moded this to 5?? This guy doesn't have a clue. This card is the fastest, the policy of whatever works should apply, and will ultimately win in the market, people have tried deferred shading and tiled approaches, and while the NVIDIA system is not a scanline approach, it is not the scheme you probably envision that's WHY it's the fastest. The other approaches failed, and many of the people who worked on them now work for NVIDIA. There are hundreds of engineers at NVIDIA who make these design decisions based on what will work in terms of power requirements, implementation, programmability, speed and a host of other reasons. NVIDIA leads in performance because they get this right. Programmers DO know how to use the programmable shaders, but there are other more traditional ways to use this hardware, and the other pixel pipeline will help even simple multitexture applications too. Even scanline systems can scale very nicely, so the scalability of the tiled approach is just not true, you seem to have forgotten Voodoo SLI, but there are other ways to scale graphics systems too. Your post is a plea to support your pet favourite graphics scheme, but there are detailed technical issues to be considered beyone the glib appeal to emotion. The facts and NVIDIAs performance speaks for itself, and your post is the graphics equivalent of complaining that Ford doesn't make water powered cars.
OK, but for posterity's sake I'll mention that at the end of the upper stage is a big old payload weighing a few tons, and if it's inside a failed upper stage there's little to no control over it. Just like the deorbiting derelict that made the headlines.
Evolution is an emergent property of reproduction. It is unstoppable, unless you stop sexual reproduction. Neither society nor mixing will stop exolution, you merely change the environment and the rates of sharing genetic material. New traits will emerge in the long term, those may have nothing to do with fitness in the classic sense.
I thought the modelling and texturing was very impressive in FF, but the character animation, the actual gestures and body motion, was much better in Shrek.
This was the biggest flaw in FF IMHO, the characters looked wooden, their faces seemed rigid which led to very impressive stills but when they spoke or 'acted' you knew you were looking at CGI, the facial muscle controls just weren't there.
Space junk deorbits all the time. It just doesn't get the same publicity, some of the junk includes upper stage boosters including tons of fuel and a payload. The amount of rock naturally falling out of the sky is still more than the deorbiting garbage but nobody seems to worry about that, despite it destroying the occasional roof or car like these incidents:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/ pe rseids_shower_sidebar_000809.html
There is more to resolution than the size of an image. There are features clearly visible in the Hubble image that are not visible in the VLT image. It simply looks sharper, not to mention that the larger ESO image covers a wider field. The VLT image does seem to have better contrast in some of the darker regions than the Hubble image, but sharper and higher resolution? At best it seem on par with the HST image, not higher resolution. The NOAO images are MUCH lower resolution than both, they look pretty, but certainly not even close to the quality of either the HST or VLT.
NASA didn't just review the hatch & capsule design after this incident, they reviewed every aspect of the Saturn V design and made many improvements. Engineers who worked on the project have since said that without this review the Apollo missions would not have made it to the moon.
I agree with some of this. As you say things turned nasty after the large contingent of US troops were removed, but the film actually covers this in the preamble, almost verbatim with your post. That does not mean this mission was not humanitarian in nature. If the country had decended into the earlier chaos many more would have died, and the remaining peacekeepers were there primarily to ensure the safe delivery of aid, which before the US arrival used to get stolen off the dockside as the ships arrived. If the foreign peacekeepers were allowed to become target practice for Aidid's gang their mission would have failed, they were not present in sufficient numbers to fight a war.
I have seen statements which directly contradict what you are claiming about the close air support.
The denial of close air support is well documented in this case. The AC-130 gunships were requested and denied, and there's no question they would have saved American lives. The former Sec Def is now dead and his close associates when interviewed say that regret over his decision drove him to an early grave. You don't get any of this from the film, you have to do your own research and see the interviews.
If there's a real political point to be made it's about the handling of the whole situation of declaring Aidid the enemy with a handful of forces exposed in country. The film did not even touch that subject except in the most obtuse manner.
The denial of air support is just obvious historical fact, but the film had about one line of dialog covering it immediately after the mission briefing. It didn't dwell on it for such a major issue, it barely mentioned it.
On the substance of your complaint, it seems self evident that when you're putting troops at risk that you give them the support they need, and 'appearances' should take a back seat. America will be criticized reguardless. If you disagree, let's take a vote on it, we're a democracy. The fact is we both know that this is a given with the American paople and diplomats who interfere with these principals are almost universally disliked. It doesn't need propaganda, Americans almost universally already agree with the position you claim the movie was trying to propagandize. That makes no sense, the movie was just giving you the facts.
So now when we wander over pristine territory we can get inundated with "first post" messages from the usual cretins. At least they'll be wandering around the planet with GPS units and will have less time to infest slashdot. Maybe we can look forward to the occasional 'first post' adventurer getting eaten by a wild animal.
Slashdot Mirror
P.S.
Moderation motivated by your disagreement with the poster's opinion IS censorship.
It's self evident I missed the google story.
As for the movie thing this doesn't compare to movie posts of real substance IMHO. The modding is interesting in itself, there are a couple of mods up for 'interesting' and two mods down for being 'overrated' and a mod down for being troll (or was it flamebait). Clearly opinion is divided here, equally clearly moderators are voting based on whether they agree with the post and not on whether the subject is valid and should be discussed.
Oscar _nominations_! Next we'll be getting reports from John Catz' proctologist.
I read the books when you were wearing a nappy, but this is about nominations for the chance to be voted best film. It's about as far off the mark as you can get.
I appreciate the movie & books being of interest, but this story is about the number of nominations for eligibility to win a little gold statue.
What the heck has happened to /.
/. to recalibrate it's priorities before the readers recalibrate their web browsers.
Now we're getting stories on Oscar NOMINATIONS!
If I want this pap I can visit CNN or any other news outlet.
Meanwhile real news like Google's Linux based search engine appliance passes without even a mention.
It's time for
There are several possible reasons. First and foremost it is not incumbent upon a patent holder to defend it against everyone or even defend it immediately against infringement, it may not be worth their while, for example you breach their patent but they won't care unless you start making enough money to make it worth their while hiring lawyers. One other possible explanation is that they may have already been in discussions with Microsoft and Sony for many months over this, but ultimately couldn't agree on a settlement, filing suit is a clear escalation perhaps because of a breakdown in negotiations. Finally, inside companies not everyone is hawkish about suing people over patent infringements, there is a risk that you'll lose the patent and lawyers can be expensive, and some people are just gun shy or have moral reservations, so when there is an opportunity to sue, it doesn't always happen even when there is an apparently strong case and clear violation, this can delay the decision to sue through internal conflict within senior management.
They have patented this:
= PT O2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r =3&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ft00&s1='5,965,875'&OS="5,96 5,875"&RS="5,965,875"
United States Patent number 5,965,875
"Color separation in an active pixel cell imaging array using a triple-well structure"
It's on uspto.gov here:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1
This is true, but there will be dyes & filters involved which will limit the light and I assume there will be some undesirable crosstalk between color channels since it's unlikely the colors will be perfectly filtered. This is still an awesome development. It should greatly reduce the blue and red channel noise which seems to plague color CCDs.
We can have lasers right next to each other at the same wavelenght and they won't interfere with eachother within reasonable limits. It's inherently point to point, not broadcast.
They weren't "profitable from day one", that claim implies they continued to be profitable since there is no limit to the "from", I don't contradict myself anywhere. You should learn to read properly instead of reading your desired interpretation into what people say. As for your ad hominem about my failure, what do you mean? My /. post 'failed'? Oh no, shock, horror! I'm not a VC, typical nonsense, any dissenting opinion is called conspiracy, I'm a programmer. The unhappy truth is that ArsDigita went to VCs for one thing, their cash, Why? they got greedy for their own growth. Did it ever seem strange to you that a profitable company with lots of cash in the bank needed a cash injection from a VC? If they were so profitable with big cash reserves why would they need this? Eve makes it sound like they were raking in the cash, obviously they weren't. Next time think before you buy into someones victimhood, Eve et.al. got greedy, and at least one founder sold out and walked away with $7 million at the worst possible time. She makes him sound like a victim here.
There's one principal reason someone goes to a VC, they want their money. Usually it's to help grow the company quickly. It is misleading to suggest that you're full of noble ideas which benefit the world when you need $40 million from VC's to help fuel your ambitions for growth. Growing a company is one of the most difficult things you can do with it. Sure a garage outfit can be profitable, that's easy there are no overheads, but ArsDigita was not profitable from Day1, it lost $40million, it used to be profitable when it was small, then the founders got greedy, went to VCs and messed up their growth plan and became extremely unprofitable. For someone so greedy and apparently unqualified Eve is doing a lot of complaining about what others did to cause the problem. Where's the Mea Culpa?
P.S.
I don't give a hoot what that web site thinks about graphics design. People who understand graphics hardware design work for companies like NVIDIA and ATI, they don't run web sites. The fact that NVIDIA is fastest right now is inescapable. The clock comparrisons you and others make is moronic, as I have said, and you ignored, clock is an integral part of a design. High clock is a design decision, a choice, not simply something you can increase at will. You ignore that fact, and fundamentally misunderstand these design issues, that is why you are wrong. Your comments are nothing but an emotional appeal to design things your pet favourite way, the problem is you are clueless about fundamental design issues and should keep your comments about NVIDIA to yourself. To criticize them for leading but not doing things your way merely indicates how clueless you are.
No you're just wrong, face it. Me pointing out that NVIDIA is winning on performance and that you are wrong in not da hominem. Look at the substance of my post, you have completely ignored what I said and called it emotion. Standing on the sidelines and bleating that NVIDIA doesn't design their graphics card the way you want it designed, is assenine (and that's being generous). Their card is the fastest, designing it your way it would not be.
Did it ever occur to you that their approach is difficult to clock as highly? Clock speed is a function of design, deep pipelines with many stages lead to faster clocks. It's not the case that you can take any design and clock it to the performance of any other. The NVIDIA chips are designed intentionally to support high clock speed. Your kryo2 with a lower clock is not an innate benefit, look at the overall performance. I wish people would stop spreading this ad hominem rubbish about graphics design, anyone can look at the benchmark results and see what the facts are. NVIDIA wins on performance, why some people look at NVIDIA (the winner) ans say, you should design your chips like Kryo(the looser) is a mystery. If they designed like kryo, they'd perform like kryo, and you'd all be complaining about ATI being fastest using the 'wrong' technology.
Nonsense, who moded this to 5?? This guy doesn't have a clue. This card is the fastest, the policy of whatever works should apply, and will ultimately win in the market, people have tried deferred shading and tiled approaches, and while the NVIDIA system is not a scanline approach, it is not the scheme you probably envision that's WHY it's the fastest. The other approaches failed, and many of the people who worked on them now work for NVIDIA. There are hundreds of engineers at NVIDIA who make these design decisions based on what will work in terms of power requirements, implementation, programmability, speed and a host of other reasons. NVIDIA leads in performance because they get this right. Programmers DO know how to use the programmable shaders, but there are other more traditional ways to use this hardware, and the other pixel pipeline will help even simple multitexture applications too. Even scanline systems can scale very nicely, so the scalability of the tiled approach is just not true, you seem to have forgotten Voodoo SLI, but there are other ways to scale graphics systems too. Your post is a plea to support your pet favourite graphics scheme, but there are detailed technical issues to be considered beyone the glib appeal to emotion. The facts and NVIDIAs performance speaks for itself, and your post is the graphics equivalent of complaining that Ford doesn't make water powered cars.
OK, but for posterity's sake I'll mention that at the end of the upper stage is a big old payload weighing a few tons, and if it's inside a failed upper stage there's little to no control over it. Just like the deorbiting derelict that made the headlines.
Evolution is an emergent property of reproduction. It is unstoppable, unless you stop sexual reproduction. Neither society nor mixing will stop exolution, you merely change the environment and the rates of sharing genetic material. New traits will emerge in the long term, those may have nothing to do with fitness in the classic sense.
I thought the modelling and texturing was very impressive in FF, but the character animation, the actual gestures and body motion, was much better in Shrek.
This was the biggest flaw in FF IMHO, the characters looked wooden, their faces seemed rigid which led to very impressive stills but when they spoke or 'acted' you knew you were looking at CGI, the facial muscle controls just weren't there.
Space junk deorbits all the time. It just doesn't get the same publicity, some of the junk includes upper stage boosters including tons of fuel and a payload. The amount of rock naturally falling out of the sky is still more than the deorbiting garbage but nobody seems to worry about that, despite it destroying the occasional roof or car like these incidents:
/ pe rseids_shower_sidebar_000809.html
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy
There is more to resolution than the size of an image. There are features clearly visible in the Hubble image that are not visible in the VLT image. It simply looks sharper, not to mention that the larger ESO image covers a wider field. The VLT image does seem to have better contrast in some of the darker regions than the Hubble image, but sharper and higher resolution? At best it seem on par with the HST image, not higher resolution. The NOAO images are MUCH lower resolution than both, they look pretty, but certainly not even close to the quality of either the HST or VLT.
NASA didn't just review the hatch & capsule design after this incident, they reviewed every aspect of the Saturn V design and made many improvements. Engineers who worked on the project have since said that without this review the Apollo missions would not have made it to the moon.
I agree with some of this. As you say things turned nasty after the large contingent of US troops were removed, but the film actually covers this in the preamble, almost verbatim with your post. That does not mean this mission was not humanitarian in nature. If the country had decended into the earlier chaos many more would have died, and the remaining peacekeepers were there primarily to ensure the safe delivery of aid, which before the US arrival used to get stolen off the dockside as the ships arrived. If the foreign peacekeepers were allowed to become target practice for Aidid's gang their mission would have failed, they were not present in sufficient numbers to fight a war.
I have seen statements which directly contradict what you are claiming about the close air support.
The denial of close air support is well documented in this case. The AC-130 gunships were requested and denied, and there's no question they would have saved American lives. The former Sec Def is now dead and his close associates when interviewed say that regret over his decision drove him to an early grave. You don't get any of this from the film, you have to do your own research and see the interviews.
If there's a real political point to be made it's about the handling of the whole situation of declaring Aidid the enemy with a handful of forces exposed in country. The film did not even touch that subject except in the most obtuse manner.
The denial of air support is just obvious historical fact, but the film had about one line of dialog covering it immediately after the mission briefing. It didn't dwell on it for such a major issue, it barely mentioned it.
On the substance of your complaint, it seems self evident that when you're putting troops at risk that you give them the support they need, and 'appearances' should take a back seat. America will be criticized reguardless. If you disagree, let's take a vote on it, we're a democracy. The fact is we both know that this is a given with the American paople and diplomats who interfere with these principals are almost universally disliked. It doesn't need propaganda, Americans almost universally already agree with the position you claim the movie was trying to propagandize. That makes no sense, the movie was just giving you the facts.
No I'm not, and I'm not posting anonymously either. Someone disagrees with you and they're a shill? No, it's called freedom, get used to it.
So now when we wander over pristine territory we can get inundated with "first post" messages from the usual cretins. At least they'll be wandering around the planet with GPS units and will have less time to infest slashdot. Maybe we can look forward to the occasional 'first post' adventurer getting eaten by a wild animal.