...but Desert Combat was done as a portfolio piece for a startup game dev shop with 9 employees. In other words, for $$$, not as an open-source project. Keep in mind which kind of free you're talking about.
First of all, the TPS report analogy is exactly backwards. Why would you pay 1.5 times as much for the 9th hour of report-writing as for the 8th? Those extra TPS reports are not more valuable to the company. Unless the timeliness of those TPS reports are what create the value. Providing overtime is paying extra because the employee is doing more per day, and sacrificing quality of life in the process.
Now, about your painter - if she's been in the business for any length of time, she's pricing the painting based on how long it'll take her to do, and she's probably right. If you add the requirement that a painting commissioned on Friday be completed Monday morning, though, your painter will charge you a rush fee, typically a 100%-300% markup over the asking price. Same with photographers, illustrators, copywriters, musicians, and freelance creative professionals of every stripe.
Creative professionals build overtime into their pricing models. I think that second category is laughing right back.
The poor slobs at EA are being treated like a third category - nonunion exploited labor.
OTOH, high profile cases that end in settlements where neither party admits fault and the details of the settlement are sealed... RRRGGGHHH! Those bug the heck out of me. But if the settlement is out of court and both parties drop their claim, the public doesn't really have a right to know anymore as it's become a private matter.
You do realize the Groklaw got the USL vs. BSDI settlement unsealed and posted on the internet like 2 days ago, right? If not, hop over and take a look. It's only been the boogeyman of UNIX/Linux IP conjecture for ten years or so.
The only thing that makes sense is to drop the insurance policy that you lose out on, and get a cheaper policy that only covers the big stuff. Then pay the little stuff yourself.
1. Where do I get such a policy?
2. The little stuff isn't so little when you pay out of pocket. The amount on the bill is 5-10x what the insurance company actually pays the doctor, but you get to pay the whole thing when it's out-of-pocket.
That's what the U.S. did. They told England, "This is ours". It doesn't matter what they declared as what before the colonists came over, it's all been changed since then.
In that analogy, then, they're proposing setting up "smallpox and pillaging-free" zones in North America so that when the Jamestown colonists arrive in a couple of decades, they won't wipe out the natives...
The first volume of Robert Caro's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Lyndon Johnson contains an absolutely harrowing chapter entitled "The Sad Irons" devoted to describing what life was like for a poor Texas farm wife in the early 1930s before rural electrification.
I recommend giving it a read and then thinking a bit more about the joys of doing laundry by hand.
Not that I don't see the Amish's point regarding the sometimes questionable benefits of modernity, but that's a terrible example.
Other way around. Glossy TV dramas are shot on film in the first place to get more expensive-looking motion and better color, so they're inherently progressive.
Interlaced video is better for showing rapid motion such as sports, because the frame rate is doubled, which also has the effect of reducing motion blur. Plus, it makes the slow-motion look that much better with twice the time slices to to play back.
It'll be interesting to see which way TV news outfits go in terms of interlacing as they actually get a choice. I imagine they'll stay interlaced so that the cheap consumer video footage they sometimes need to use (e.g. Rodney King) looks better.
I support 3D graphics workstations from time to time (dual monitors and/or multiple video cards; the whole 9 yards)as part of my job, and I suggest 3 avenues of troubleshooting:
1. Get your PCI interrupts in order. There are only actually 4 PCI interrupts (A,B,C, and D) which are assigned to PCI/AGP slots in hardware by the motherboard (and some of which are assigned to onboard stuff like the IDE/USB controller - chack your motherboard manual). If it can possibly be helped, don't have anything sharing the AGP slot's PCI interrupt (requires moving cards from slot to slot in the case). Stay away especially from a sound card and the AGP on the same PCI interrupt - Sound cards like to open up long bus mastering sessions that the AGP port absolutely hates.
2. Cooling/Power issues. An overheating card or underpowered PSU (or dust-clogged intake) can cause a lot of flakiness with graphics cards that suck up obscene amounts of power. Make sure not only that your wattage is correct overall, but that the 12V, 5v, and 3.3v rails all are capable of the load being placed on them individually. This information can be dug up on the benchmarking sites. One more thing - I once troubleshot a problem like this that came down to a failing fan inside the PSU - any funny noises in the case?
3. Try a total driver reinstallation using one of the 3rd-party driver removal utilities like Detonator Destroyer (now deprecated in favor of something else - I haven't needed to do this in a while).
Oh, and never, never listen to windows update when it tells you you have an Nvidia driver update - it'll roll back the version to something over a year old and probably hose the driver in the process.
I suggest you read up on how debaathification is going. Specifically, how the US essentially fired and blacklisted everyone in the former iraqi civil service who had the slightest clue how to do their jobs. Tens of thousands of people who had a comparatively high standard of living under Saddam, and who know in great detail how the infrastructure works are forcibly unemployed for the forseeable future. The foreign fighters may be responsible for some, but debaathification has created a homegrown movement.
A professional drum scan of a low-ISO 4"x5" chrome from a medium format camera tops out at about 8000 pixels in the long dimension. Beyond that you just get bigger and sharper film grain in the scan.
A 35mm negative is much smaller, and I can't see getting more than 3500 pixels or so of detail out of one no matter how good the scanner is. There simply isn't that much emulsion.
Consider for a moment; they have a tremendous amount of catch-up to do, in terms of software and 3D animation know-how. Would they be able to produce something straight from cold that was a barnstorming success? I doubt it.
They had a top-notch 3D shop. The Secret Lab. You know, the people that did Dinosaur, the digital dogs in 102 Dalmatians, and lots of other VFX and animation for Disney's features. They shut the division down a couple of years ago. Now they're starting over again.
Marvel's theory may be that by charging a subscription fee to third parties that enables them to view (in-game) the infringing material your client created, you are profiting off their infringing act through distribution.
Still seems bogus given that Cryptic is enforcing anti-infringement policies in good faith.
The shiny mylar-n-foil bags that new computer parts sometimes come in are what's being talked about. In NY, the EZPass toll-paying system gives you one with your new tag so that you can carry it in someone else's car without paying their tolls.
For X-ray impermeability, you need a lead-lined pouch (available at larger camera stores). I've heard that the screeners simply turn up the machine when encountering one until the contents can be read, so they're not much good.
Isn't 720p the same resolution as on regular DVDs now? In fact, if the player does the pulldown and the data is at 24fps, isn't it about 5/6ths of the file size as 30 fps NTSC video?
Cheaper than volunteers counting the vote? Were the lawyers in 2000 cheaper? Was automated voting with punchcards faster than hand tabulation of paper ballots in 2000? What's the time pressure, anyway, with the inauguration in 2005?
does it justify the lack of reliability?
Walking is more reliable than driving a car, but I still commute to work.
There's a compelling reason to commute to work. Where's the compelling reason for electronic voting? I would change that analogy to a comparison between commuting by car and train. Car gives a feeling of greater speed and control, but is more expensive and dangerous. The train is unglamorous, but functional, cheap, reliable, and safe. And if you rely only on your car by living out in the country (no paper trail in our analogy), a breakdown really screws you, while a broken train can be worked around (recounts).
Does it justify the lack of transparency?
Do you keep your life savings under your mattress for the sake of transparency?
That's a terrible analogy. Hiding money under the mattress is the opposite of transparency, instead relying on nobody knowing where the money is for security. Banks are audited and regulated in the interests of transparency, and when transparency is compromised (e.g. Arthur Andersen), companies go under and people go to prison.
Let's say you're riding a rollercoaster. Would you equip all of the passengers with parachutes for fear of the train going off the tracks? After all, reliability is infinitely more important than efficiency, right?
Are you seriously suggesting that someone would design a rollercoaster with an anticipated number of deaths per passenger mile that was nonzero?! Who the hell would insure them?
We live in a world with calculated risks
and calculating the cost/benefit of e-voting makes it a clear loser.
I'm an American, and I have to say that I've never given more than a fleeting thought to any of these terrorist alert levels. And further, I've never heard anyone mention them in any conversation I've been involved in.
You don't live in New York, do you? Although it's obvious the terrorist alert levels don't mean jack, a lot of people who remember what the WTC smelled like still get startled by low-flying planes, or anxious seeing the concrete barriers and cops with machineguns around tourist and religious sites. People are jumpy here, and terrorism is very close to the surface in a lot of minds. The alert level pushes that button, if nothing else.
More people may have died at Bhopal, but the long-term effects at Chernobyl are most certainly worse - it depopulated an entire REGION ferchrissake.
PCBs are bad shit, but dioxin only has a half life on the order of 50 years under the worst conditions (and 6 weeks or so under better ones). God help the archaeologists who explore the Chernobyl plant. Not to mention a much larger amount and variety of material was released at Chernobyl.
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Amorphium? Also a subscriber to the "let's make the interface look like computers do in the movies - who cares it it's usable?" school of UI design.
...but Desert Combat was done as a portfolio piece for a startup game dev shop with 9 employees. In other words, for $$$, not as an open-source project. Keep in mind which kind of free you're talking about.
Now, about your painter - if she's been in the business for any length of time, she's pricing the painting based on how long it'll take her to do, and she's probably right. If you add the requirement that a painting commissioned on Friday be completed Monday morning, though, your painter will charge you a rush fee, typically a 100%-300% markup over the asking price. Same with photographers, illustrators, copywriters, musicians, and freelance creative professionals of every stripe.
Creative professionals build overtime into their pricing models. I think that second category is laughing right back.
The poor slobs at EA are being treated like a third category - nonunion exploited labor.
You do realize the Groklaw got the USL vs. BSDI settlement unsealed and posted on the internet like 2 days ago, right? If not, hop over and take a look. It's only been the boogeyman of UNIX/Linux IP conjecture for ten years or so.
1. Where do I get such a policy?
2. The little stuff isn't so little when you pay out of pocket. The amount on the bill is 5-10x what the insurance company actually pays the doctor, but you get to pay the whole thing when it's out-of-pocket.
You wrote the Roomba firmware and they fired all the janitors? Cool.
In that analogy, then, they're proposing setting up "smallpox and pillaging-free" zones in North America so that when the Jamestown colonists arrive in a couple of decades, they won't wipe out the natives...
I recommend giving it a read and then thinking a bit more about the joys of doing laundry by hand.
Not that I don't see the Amish's point regarding the sometimes questionable benefits of modernity, but that's a terrible example.
Interlaced video is better for showing rapid motion such as sports, because the frame rate is doubled, which also has the effect of reducing motion blur. Plus, it makes the slow-motion look that much better with twice the time slices to to play back.
It'll be interesting to see which way TV news outfits go in terms of interlacing as they actually get a choice. I imagine they'll stay interlaced so that the cheap consumer video footage they sometimes need to use (e.g. Rodney King) looks better.
I'm sure Apple will make you pay through the nose.
1. Get your PCI interrupts in order. There are only actually 4 PCI interrupts (A,B,C, and D) which are assigned to PCI/AGP slots in hardware by the motherboard (and some of which are assigned to onboard stuff like the IDE/USB controller - chack your motherboard manual). If it can possibly be helped, don't have anything sharing the AGP slot's PCI interrupt (requires moving cards from slot to slot in the case). Stay away especially from a sound card and the AGP on the same PCI interrupt - Sound cards like to open up long bus mastering sessions that the AGP port absolutely hates.
2. Cooling/Power issues. An overheating card or underpowered PSU (or dust-clogged intake) can cause a lot of flakiness with graphics cards that suck up obscene amounts of power. Make sure not only that your wattage is correct overall, but that the 12V, 5v, and 3.3v rails all are capable of the load being placed on them individually. This information can be dug up on the benchmarking sites. One more thing - I once troubleshot a problem like this that came down to a failing fan inside the PSU - any funny noises in the case?
3. Try a total driver reinstallation using one of the 3rd-party driver removal utilities like Detonator Destroyer (now deprecated in favor of something else - I haven't needed to do this in a while). Oh, and never, never listen to windows update when it tells you you have an Nvidia driver update - it'll roll back the version to something over a year old and probably hose the driver in the process.
In the dark past of Frenchkind, there is only war...
I suggest you read up on how debaathification is going. Specifically, how the US essentially fired and blacklisted everyone in the former iraqi civil service who had the slightest clue how to do their jobs. Tens of thousands of people who had a comparatively high standard of living under Saddam, and who know in great detail how the infrastructure works are forcibly unemployed for the forseeable future. The foreign fighters may be responsible for some, but debaathification has created a homegrown movement.
A 35mm negative is much smaller, and I can't see getting more than 3500 pixels or so of detail out of one no matter how good the scanner is. There simply isn't that much emulsion.
They had a top-notch 3D shop. The Secret Lab. You know, the people that did Dinosaur, the digital dogs in 102 Dalmatians, and lots of other VFX and animation for Disney's features. They shut the division down a couple of years ago. Now they're starting over again.
Still seems bogus given that Cryptic is enforcing anti-infringement policies in good faith.
Actually, both terms are deprecated. The DSM-IV contains no reference to either word. Antisocial Personality Disorder is the current terminology.
'nuff said.
The way people talk about water, you'd think it was mixed from hydrogen and oxygen shortly before coming out of the tap...
The shiny mylar-n-foil bags that new computer parts sometimes come in are what's being talked about. In NY, the EZPass toll-paying system gives you one with your new tag so that you can carry it in someone else's car without paying their tolls. For X-ray impermeability, you need a lead-lined pouch (available at larger camera stores). I've heard that the screeners simply turn up the machine when encountering one until the contents can be read, so they're not much good.
Isn't 720p the same resolution as on regular DVDs now? In fact, if the player does the pulldown and the data is at 24fps, isn't it about 5/6ths of the file size as 30 fps NTSC video?
Yes, that's the idea.
Cheaper than volunteers counting the vote? Were the lawyers in 2000 cheaper? Was automated voting with punchcards faster than hand tabulation of paper ballots in 2000? What's the time pressure, anyway, with the inauguration in 2005?does it justify the lack of reliability?
Walking is more reliable than driving a car, but I still commute to work.
There's a compelling reason to commute to work. Where's the compelling reason for electronic voting? I would change that analogy to a comparison between commuting by car and train. Car gives a feeling of greater speed and control, but is more expensive and dangerous. The train is unglamorous, but functional, cheap, reliable, and safe. And if you rely only on your car by living out in the country (no paper trail in our analogy), a breakdown really screws you, while a broken train can be worked around (recounts).Does it justify the lack of transparency?
Do you keep your life savings under your mattress for the sake of transparency?
That's a terrible analogy. Hiding money under the mattress is the opposite of transparency, instead relying on nobody knowing where the money is for security. Banks are audited and regulated in the interests of transparency, and when transparency is compromised (e.g. Arthur Andersen), companies go under and people go to prison.
Let's say you're riding a rollercoaster. Would you equip all of the passengers with parachutes for fear of the train going off the tracks? After all, reliability is infinitely more important than efficiency, right?
Are you seriously suggesting that someone would design a rollercoaster with an anticipated number of deaths per passenger mile that was nonzero?! Who the hell would insure them?
We live in a world with calculated risks
and calculating the cost/benefit of e-voting makes it a clear loser.
You don't live in New York, do you? Although it's obvious the terrorist alert levels don't mean jack, a lot of people who remember what the WTC smelled like still get startled by low-flying planes, or anxious seeing the concrete barriers and cops with machineguns around tourist and religious sites. People are jumpy here, and terrorism is very close to the surface in a lot of minds. The alert level pushes that button, if nothing else.
Running AutoCAD or Quickbooks, for two. So at a typical architecture firm, every box with business-critical data runs as Admin.
PCBs are bad shit, but dioxin only has a half life on the order of 50 years under the worst conditions (and 6 weeks or so under better ones). God help the archaeologists who explore the Chernobyl plant. Not to mention a much larger amount and variety of material was released at Chernobyl.