The BBC tech section had an article about crackers a while back, pointing out to just how screwed up paypal is. People don't trust paypal, and with good reason. Not to mention you might get your account hacked yourself. Other than that, read the rest of the comments.
1) In Europe, wherever I find a suitable job. Or in Japan. Doesn't have to be someplace where I'm a citizen, just where I'm happy with what's going on, and where I have a chance of making a happy living, not necessarily rich, but at least enjoying my lifestyle.
2) Haven't finished my degree in school yet. Don't want to bother transferring to a foreign country.
I would recommend, like a poster above, to read company policies, and see whether you report to department managers or to HR only. Also, look at whether employees have an expectation to privacy or not, as that is important. Personally, I would say that allowing department managers to track down their subordinates is only going to end up in a witch hunt that's going to get everyone pissed off. The managers are going to want more productivity, while the employees are going to be unhappy that there's such a "big brother", this will in turn lower the morale in the company, and with people leaving with such a bad impression, prospective workers will think twice about signing a contract. Talk it over with people higher up in the company, the HR division, and figure out what kind of atmosphere you want in the company. It's a good thing to have the logs for some cases, but you might want to try and not use them unless required to. Just my $0.02 of opinion on this, based on the very few corporate environments I've been in so far.
Only downside to Mplayer is that it needs serious improvement on the playlist management side... Not trying to troll, but even WMP has better playlist functionality... On the other hand, combining Mplayer with a playlist management program might be very doable. Especially with cron to do the background job, you could have someone fiddle with the playlists, set them up right and have some script go through each entry in the playlist and start mplayer appropriately. Make sure that your files are complete and not corrupted, else Mplayer will quit, and you'll be left with no broadcast... An amarok style approach would be perfect for this, but I don't recall seeing one around... Browse freshmeat and sourceforge?
I agree with both parent and grandparent posts. I graduated high school in France, only to move to the US 3 weeks later, and having to go through yet another senior year of high school. Took the SATs unprepared. Assuming the UK high schools are decent, which they should be, you don't need to study anything extra, you already know much of what you're going to have to deal with. I took the test not knowing how it was graded, nor much of what was going to happen on it, and ended up at 1250, because my written english basically sucked (gotten better since!), but I was fresh off the boat from a country where the language isn't the same. Now, watch out, because some words have radically different meanings in this country. That's just a friendly reminder that it wasn't just tea leaves we dunked in Boston, but also most grammar books!
Knowing how the test works is all you need to know, the rest your instructors have done a very fine job of hammering down to your brain, usually. So don't worry about what to study, just know HOW THE TEST WORKS! That's what matters.
It did have multiplayer, and in fact the experience you gained online affected your offline play, but not the other way around. Very very creative game. I just wish I could run it on cedega...
Having seen a few presentations about network standards, and especially wireless network standards, I think that Nokia is just trying to enhance the existing technology. Granted, there may not be a strong commercial gain to it, but the fact remains that bluetooth has been a more or less static protocol since its inception. Wifi on the other hand went through several revisions: 802.11a, b/g, now the upcoming n... There's a lot of development put into wifi. I attended a conference from Intel researchers saying they were working on enhancing the 802.11 protocol to work in a de-centralized manner, so I'm looking at this, and I'm thinking: well Wibre might just push Bluetooth further than it is. Using the same hardware base is also good, because it'll bring down manufacturing costs. I'm willing to bet we'll see the Bluetooth consortium jump on the bandwagon and help nokia widespread Wibre under a label like "Bluetooth 2.0" or something similar. Hardware and software updates all the time, why wouldn't protocols?
the difference with these is that they're tracking where you're going, facial cameras need more computational power (algorithms are tougher to recognize a face than they are to read a license plate), so there's bound to be a lot less of them, and/or they'll be less accurate than the plate tracking. Thus I do believe that getting your face tracked is less of an issue, because in most cases they'll know where you've been, not where you're going. Thus it becomes more of a headache for them. And, in case of a massive increase in pedestrians, those cameras will have a tough time tracking one person in particular. Imagine such a system in NYC, how many pedestrians on a busy street in a day? How long to analyze a frame and figure who's who? Just ain't gonna work too well.
WALK for short distances! Or use public transportation, and in the meanwhile, keep your car in your garage. The problem in this country is that you have to fight for your privacy, if you want any privacy at all you have to become paranoid. If people started walking, using bicycles, rollerblades or any other form of transportation besides cars, then there would be a massive problem for the marketing people: their data wouldn't hold up, and stalkers would find other ways anyway. Stalkers are not the problem, marketing people are. Stalkers you let the cops know about. Marketing people are doing things legally though... The only difference between a stalker and marketeers is that marketeers do it by the thousands and make lots of money doing it, so it has to be legal...
There is a way to download the.exe for SP2, and then burn that to a disk. Search for SP2 on multiple computers, or something along those lines. And when SP3 comes out, do the same thing. I remember I had to do that for a friend whose laptop was in german, and the campus wouldn't let her get on the web without SP2 installed... I downloaded it, burned it, and installed it from the CD without so much as scoffing from either MS or Windows. I do suppose you have CD-Rs lying around?
But what kind? I can imagine why a thumb-based trackball solution would make her situation worse. The best trackball I've used is the MS Trackball Explorer. It's just one of the best. That trackball uses a ball that's about 2 1/2" in diameter under the index and middle fingers, and has two buttons on the right side for your ring finger and pinky, along with a 2 button + scroll wheel combo on the left side. Sure, the thumb is now responsible for the left click, but with the MS software you can swap those assignments around, and she could just let her thumb rest 90% of the time. Also, I would suggest observing her setup, you want to make sure her keyboard/mouse aren't 3 miles apart, the closer the better, and that she's not in a bad wrist position. When I started getting pains from using a keyboard too much, I bought a MS Natural Ergonomic Pro 4000 keyboard, from Newegg. WHile a tad pricey, it was probably the best investment I've made. I like it so much I take it with me to the campus computer labs. As simple as that. Also, you can find lots of ergonomic guides on the web to see how to improve that employee's situation. Sometimes the hardware isn't at fault, simply the posture the user puts him/herself in.
What format will the movies be in? And will it work without my having to switch platforms? Bittorrent currently functions with linux, and that's most of the reason I use it. I truly hope that their service will let me watch those movies LEGALLY on linux. Nothing else besides a true lockout of given platforms would piss me off more!
Motion capture isn't new, that is a fact. However, it's still the most used technology for CG animation of big projects mostly because it's the cheapest way of achieving realistic results. Quality animators are hard to find in the CG market, thus they cost more, and they take more time to get the same realism into movements, it's a fact, and it will remain so for a while. That's why the article says that the actors animating those CG chars are the ones who deserve the props. Also, there will always be some sort of animation on top of the captured data, to adapt the human actor's movements to the CG character's body, mostly when there's size difference (imagine a 6 foot actor animating for a 4 foot CG char). So really it's teamwork, but the actors still give life in a way CG animators need to catch up to.
you're not getting this right. The recording industry has done so in THIS country. Not in Europe. The limitations came from the US, not France. What France is trying to do is to counter balance what the US industry has done, by making the DRM inter-operable between software and hardware clients from different providers, in effect opening up the DRM. What this COULD mean imo is that we'll see a US version of ITMS/iTunes/iPod and another version in most of the rest of the world, where the DRM is not that locked up, and where consumers would still have rights to their music. Now let's see how Apple reacts to this international set of pressures. Other companies have localized their products' specs to meet the demands of each country, I wonder how soon Apple will do the same. The French law is not saying that DRM is illegal, just that the content should be accessible from multiple platforms, not only iTunes. If you want to buy music from the ITMS but listen to it with Realplayer, VLC or whatever other player, you should be able to, without having to brun a CD in the process, that's all the law is trying to accomplish, to unlock the content from the vendor, and I fully support it. It's about time a government did something for the consumers!
They can... only in THIS country. Lobbying is illegal in France. And in fact in most of Europe. In the UK, it's not illegal, but highly frowned upon, and any company that does it and is found out is susceptible to very quickly being boycotted. In France they would be prosecuted! So what was that again about corporations buying legislation? The French simply want iPod users to be able to manage their music on the iPod without having to use iTunes, which would be VERY friendly for, say, Linux or *BSD users, which don't have a port of iTunes. The law requires that Apple provide the necessary documentation to create software and/or drivers capable of interfacing with their hardware products. Now what's wrong with that? Apple itself claims it's a hardware company only! If Apple pulls out of France, they're going to prove that they're just as interested in locking people into DRM than anyone else on the market, and in that sense they're no better than any DRMed music provider.
Then I feel sorry for you. If you intend to wear a mask all your life to stay healthy, then your immune system becomes useless, and, should you mask fall off accidentall *gasp*, you'll be so affected by the first thing that comes by you could die from it. Sorry, but the human body is adaptive, we're supposed to expose our bodies to all sorts of threats that are non-damaging. Sort of like vaccines, but it's a passive way of doing it. Vaccines only work for bacteria and virii anyway. And exposing yourself to particles and whatnot does NOT mean being a gross hippie. Sure you can live that way if you wish, but that's not the point. You need to expose yourself as a kid to the world around you, so your body knows what's out there and how to deal with what might come its way. So you go live in a hospital room if you like, I prefer the fresh air. Always have, I grew up in farm country, between a horse barn and corn fields, and I'm not allergic to anything. So guess what: you can rant all you want about not wanting to live in dirt, but it's not about being dirty or living in shit, it's about being around it so you get immune to what's in it.
Sorry guys, this just doesn't seem like a good idea. For HD to make a good debut you can't take something that's been filmed digitally on a camera designed around the NTSC standard and then just enhance the video by making the resolution bigger. Unless you've done lots of research into image sharpening algorithms, this just CANNOT work. Try taking the slashdot banner and expanding it to print on a poster-size piece of paper... The printout will be disgusting. That's exactly what they're doing by taking old movies and releasing them HD or BluRay. Seriously, if you want to get a good quality HD image, you have to start at the source: the studios must use cameras that have resolutions greater than or equal to those of HD/BluRay DVDs. Otherwise there's just no point in even trying. Release X3 on HD/BluRay and I guarantee people will buy it! But don't re-release titles in a new format, it's just NOT WORTH IT. The quality was accepted when it was released, and as far as I know, the players are backwards compatible anyway. So why bother? To make $$? Idiotic fools. You're going to scare people away doing that, not win their wallets! What they really should do is set a date after which all movies are going to be released in BluRay/HD, and then we'll see massive adoption of HDTVs and HD/BR players. Oh and importantly, release the HD/BR discs at the SAME PRICE POINT as the older DVDs, so people think they're getting more for their money. Some companies just never seem to get it... =/
I'm assuming you're probably asking about a migration tool? I haven't heard of one. However, I would recommend using Eclipse with the CDT plugin to import all your existing code, and then using that to write the same code using java and at that point, use JUnit for unit testing. That will tremendously help you. Eclipse is a great tool for java (dunno much about using it with C/C++), and JUnit is now critical in any of the code I write that is beyond 150 lines, it just makes things a lot clearer. Also, as someone else mentioned, refactoring when you can is a good idea, and eclipse will help you a lot with that. And, best of all, Eclipse is FREE! That's the best price your management could ask for. There's also a couple of books about Eclipse which might be worth investigating to get started. Good luck, I've encountered a few systems that were FDA approved, and I can tell you that it's a pain in the butt to write code for it if you don't have unit testing. Go with JUnit and part of your pain will be alleviated, and paradoxically, writing that much more code will make you more productive as you'll spend less time debugging (the bugs will become evident as soon as the code is written!). Cheers
Yet Another Stupid Government Measure That Won't Work: If it gets past and the millions of voters that download using bittorrent, kazaa and so forth, can someone try to calculate how much storage all this will require? If I'm not mistaken, that means you'd have to have more than 3 times the amount of data going through the US network already: one that gets stored by the originating ISP, one that is stored by the receving customer's ISP, and one for whoever's the carrier in the middle. WHY OH WHY CAN'T THEY REALIZE THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE? You'd need a few thousand Terabytes of storage for a single month! This law is complete insanity on the technical level, that is if they want to know who accessed what content, since the content on the web is never constant. There is no safeguard that it'll always be there. They'd have to save the content with the customer data to safeguard the integrity of their data. It's just plain STUPID! Even the internet archive wouldn't try this! Anyone else feel the same way?
Ok, so I might get flamed for this, but who cares. I'm currently on gentoo, with firefox, and browsing Windows Live Mail beta without any trouble! I've had a hotmail account for about 4 years now, and honestly, I like the live beta interface a lot more. However, it's still FAR behind Gmail's. But it's cleaner and not as clunky to navigate (at least under firefox, dunno what kind of crap IE pulls out of it's butt on that one). Also, FYI, the beta version of windows live mail DOES have a Forward button. I don't know where that kind of idiocy came about, but PLEASE don't try and make it worse than it is. It's already crap, no need to put it down more! As for colleges who won't run their own mail servers I can only say that they're: 1) stupid. running a mail server is easy, if you've got servers running already, there are plenty of OSS mail servers that do just fine, with a webmail interface that support both POP and IMAP. 2) already sold on MS software. It's just a fact. If you're afraid of students using MS software for life, then use OpenOffice, or AbiWord, or Lotus Notes, or some other office suite! There's plenty out there. But no. Campuses will almost always be using MS Office and MS formats.
My campus uses MS Office for both it's Windows and Mac machines, and we're split about 50-50 for wintels/macs on campus, but we do have an IT department that's not afraid of running their own servers, and if students insist long enough and nicely enough for features, they'll eventually get implemented over the summer.
So honestly, that idea of going with windows live mail (BETA still!) is a bad idea. Why would you want MS servers running your mail? And not only that, but MS Servers controlled by MS? That stinks privacy violation to me! What happens if the DoJ wants to peek at a student's emails? They don't have to subpoena the school anymore, since the school isn't hosting that email server, they subpoena MS, who's more than likely to not give a crap and just let them have whatever they want! I'm more worried about the privacy implications for the students' whose campuses have signed that deal. Not to mention that MS is going to have one hell of a pain of tech support calls because of crashes as their system is still beta.
Like I say in the title, I've played for 13 years. The best tools to learn are 1: your ear, you've got to be able to tell if you're on or off tune. Not everyone can do it. It's discriminatory, but not everyone has an ear sensitive enough. And I never listen to music from a portable player to keep mine intact. 2: a metronome. It's cheap (somewhere around $5 or $10) and lets you adjust the tempo as you need it. 3: time. You've gotta practice over and over and over and over again. There's no two ways around it. It gets repetitive, and neighbours might start throwing things at you, but that's the only way you'll get better. 4: a teacher is almost quintessential. A book cannot look at your stance and tell you if it's right or not. It can't tell you if you're doing all the variations properly either. Or teach you vibratos, or tremolos, or pizzicato techniques.
My advice: don't try to use a computer for learning music. The web is a great tool to find scores, but not to learn music. Music is done by live things, interaction between people, be it that of a teacher and his student. Don't try and denature music, it's really not worth it.
Ok, so that's cool that now people notice the bad hardware available here. Now let's hope it'll move on to the next stage: the SHITTY SERVICES! Hell, why would I have to pay to RECEIVE a phone call? In every other country on the globe you pay only when you call! Might be a tad more expensive, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper in the long run. The US unfortunately has a history of not cracking down on monopolies when it should, and the limitations for cell phone service here are just insane. That's why I vote with my wallet: I refuse to get a cellphone. It's so simple really. Just abandon cell phones. It'll probably result in a hell of a lot less traffic accidents anyway! And not paying the companies will force them to re-evaluate what they're thinking. My $0.02 worth of opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
The BBC tech section had an article about crackers a while back, pointing out to just how screwed up paypal is. People don't trust paypal, and with good reason. Not to mention you might get your account hacked yourself. Other than that, read the rest of the comments.
1) In Europe, wherever I find a suitable job. Or in Japan. Doesn't have to be someplace where I'm a citizen, just where I'm happy with what's going on, and where I have a chance of making a happy living, not necessarily rich, but at least enjoying my lifestyle.
2) Haven't finished my degree in school yet. Don't want to bother transferring to a foreign country.
I would recommend, like a poster above, to read company policies, and see whether you report to department managers or to HR only. Also, look at whether employees have an expectation to privacy or not, as that is important. Personally, I would say that allowing department managers to track down their subordinates is only going to end up in a witch hunt that's going to get everyone pissed off. The managers are going to want more productivity, while the employees are going to be unhappy that there's such a "big brother", this will in turn lower the morale in the company, and with people leaving with such a bad impression, prospective workers will think twice about signing a contract. Talk it over with people higher up in the company, the HR division, and figure out what kind of atmosphere you want in the company. It's a good thing to have the logs for some cases, but you might want to try and not use them unless required to.
Just my $0.02 of opinion on this, based on the very few corporate environments I've been in so far.
Only downside to Mplayer is that it needs serious improvement on the playlist management side... Not trying to troll, but even WMP has better playlist functionality... On the other hand, combining Mplayer with a playlist management program might be very doable. Especially with cron to do the background job, you could have someone fiddle with the playlists, set them up right and have some script go through each entry in the playlist and start mplayer appropriately. Make sure that your files are complete and not corrupted, else Mplayer will quit, and you'll be left with no broadcast...
An amarok style approach would be perfect for this, but I don't recall seeing one around... Browse freshmeat and sourceforge?
I agree with both parent and grandparent posts. I graduated high school in France, only to move to the US 3 weeks later, and having to go through yet another senior year of high school. Took the SATs unprepared. Assuming the UK high schools are decent, which they should be, you don't need to study anything extra, you already know much of what you're going to have to deal with. I took the test not knowing how it was graded, nor much of what was going to happen on it, and ended up at 1250, because my written english basically sucked (gotten better since!), but I was fresh off the boat from a country where the language isn't the same. Now, watch out, because some words have radically different meanings in this country.
That's just a friendly reminder that it wasn't just tea leaves we dunked in Boston, but also most grammar books!
Knowing how the test works is all you need to know, the rest your instructors have done a very fine job of hammering down to your brain, usually.
So don't worry about what to study, just know HOW THE TEST WORKS! That's what matters.
It did have multiplayer, and in fact the experience you gained online affected your offline play, but not the other way around. Very very creative game. I just wish I could run it on cedega...
Having seen a few presentations about network standards, and especially wireless network standards, I think that Nokia is just trying to enhance the existing technology. Granted, there may not be a strong commercial gain to it, but the fact remains that bluetooth has been a more or less static protocol since its inception. Wifi on the other hand went through several revisions: 802.11a, b/g, now the upcoming n... There's a lot of development put into wifi. I attended a conference from Intel researchers saying they were working on enhancing the 802.11 protocol to work in a de-centralized manner, so I'm looking at this, and I'm thinking: well Wibre might just push Bluetooth further than it is. Using the same hardware base is also good, because it'll bring down manufacturing costs. I'm willing to bet we'll see the Bluetooth consortium jump on the bandwagon and help nokia widespread Wibre under a label like "Bluetooth 2.0" or something similar. Hardware and software updates all the time, why wouldn't protocols?
Then let's just pray we can elect a Congress that'll oust our current president and pass a privacy amendment in the constitution, else we're doomed...
the difference with these is that they're tracking where you're going, facial cameras need more computational power (algorithms are tougher to recognize a face than they are to read a license plate), so there's bound to be a lot less of them, and/or they'll be less accurate than the plate tracking.
Thus I do believe that getting your face tracked is less of an issue, because in most cases they'll know where you've been, not where you're going. Thus it becomes more of a headache for them. And, in case of a massive increase in pedestrians, those cameras will have a tough time tracking one person in particular. Imagine such a system in NYC, how many pedestrians on a busy street in a day? How long to analyze a frame and figure who's who? Just ain't gonna work too well.
WALK for short distances! Or use public transportation, and in the meanwhile, keep your car in your garage. The problem in this country is that you have to fight for your privacy, if you want any privacy at all you have to become paranoid.
If people started walking, using bicycles, rollerblades or any other form of transportation besides cars, then there would be a massive problem for the marketing people: their data wouldn't hold up, and stalkers would find other ways anyway. Stalkers are not the problem, marketing people are. Stalkers you let the cops know about. Marketing people are doing things legally though...
The only difference between a stalker and marketeers is that marketeers do it by the thousands and make lots of money doing it, so it has to be legal...
There is a way to download the .exe for SP2, and then burn that to a disk.
Search for SP2 on multiple computers, or something along those lines. And when SP3 comes out, do the same thing.
I remember I had to do that for a friend whose laptop was in german, and the campus wouldn't let her get on the web without SP2 installed... I downloaded it, burned it, and installed it from the CD without so much as scoffing from either MS or Windows.
I do suppose you have CD-Rs lying around?
But what kind?
I can imagine why a thumb-based trackball solution would make her situation worse.
The best trackball I've used is the MS Trackball Explorer. It's just one of the best.
That trackball uses a ball that's about 2 1/2" in diameter under the index and middle fingers, and has two buttons on the right side for your ring finger and pinky, along with a 2 button + scroll wheel combo on the left side. Sure, the thumb is now responsible for the left click, but with the MS software you can swap those assignments around, and she could just let her thumb rest 90% of the time.
Also, I would suggest observing her setup, you want to make sure her keyboard/mouse aren't 3 miles apart, the closer the better, and that she's not in a bad wrist position.
When I started getting pains from using a keyboard too much, I bought a MS Natural Ergonomic Pro 4000 keyboard, from Newegg. WHile a tad pricey, it was probably the best investment I've made. I like it so much I take it with me to the campus computer labs. As simple as that.
Also, you can find lots of ergonomic guides on the web to see how to improve that employee's situation. Sometimes the hardware isn't at fault, simply the posture the user puts him/herself in.
What format will the movies be in?
And will it work without my having to switch platforms?
Bittorrent currently functions with linux, and that's most of the reason I use it.
I truly hope that their service will let me watch those movies LEGALLY on linux.
Nothing else besides a true lockout of given platforms would piss me off more!
Motion capture isn't new, that is a fact. However, it's still the most used technology for CG animation of big projects mostly because it's the cheapest way of achieving realistic results.
Quality animators are hard to find in the CG market, thus they cost more, and they take more time to get the same realism into movements, it's a fact, and it will remain so for a while.
That's why the article says that the actors animating those CG chars are the ones who deserve the props.
Also, there will always be some sort of animation on top of the captured data, to adapt the human actor's movements to the CG character's body, mostly when there's size difference (imagine a 6 foot actor animating for a 4 foot CG char).
So really it's teamwork, but the actors still give life in a way CG animators need to catch up to.
you're not getting this right.
The recording industry has done so in THIS country. Not in Europe. The limitations came from the US, not France.
What France is trying to do is to counter balance what the US industry has done, by making the DRM inter-operable between software and hardware clients from different providers, in effect opening up the DRM. What this COULD mean imo is that we'll see a US version of ITMS/iTunes/iPod and another version in most of the rest of the world, where the DRM is not that locked up, and where consumers would still have rights to their music.
Now let's see how Apple reacts to this international set of pressures. Other companies have localized their products' specs to meet the demands of each country, I wonder how soon Apple will do the same.
The French law is not saying that DRM is illegal, just that the content should be accessible from multiple platforms, not only iTunes. If you want to buy music from the ITMS but listen to it with Realplayer, VLC or whatever other player, you should be able to, without having to brun a CD in the process, that's all the law is trying to accomplish, to unlock the content from the vendor, and I fully support it. It's about time a government did something for the consumers!
They can... only in THIS country. Lobbying is illegal in France. And in fact in most of Europe. In the UK, it's not illegal, but highly frowned upon, and any company that does it and is found out is susceptible to very quickly being boycotted. In France they would be prosecuted!
So what was that again about corporations buying legislation? The French simply want iPod users to be able to manage their music on the iPod without having to use iTunes, which would be VERY friendly for, say, Linux or *BSD users, which don't have a port of iTunes. The law requires that Apple provide the necessary documentation to create software and/or drivers capable of interfacing with their hardware products. Now what's wrong with that?
Apple itself claims it's a hardware company only! If Apple pulls out of France, they're going to prove that they're just as interested in locking people into DRM than anyone else on the market, and in that sense they're no better than any DRMed music provider.
Then I feel sorry for you. If you intend to wear a mask all your life to stay healthy, then your immune system becomes useless, and, should you mask fall off accidentall *gasp*, you'll be so affected by the first thing that comes by you could die from it.
Sorry, but the human body is adaptive, we're supposed to expose our bodies to all sorts of threats that are non-damaging. Sort of like vaccines, but it's a passive way of doing it. Vaccines only work for bacteria and virii anyway.
And exposing yourself to particles and whatnot does NOT mean being a gross hippie. Sure you can live that way if you wish, but that's not the point. You need to expose yourself as a kid to the world around you, so your body knows what's out there and how to deal with what might come its way.
So you go live in a hospital room if you like, I prefer the fresh air. Always have, I grew up in farm country, between a horse barn and corn fields, and I'm not allergic to anything. So guess what: you can rant all you want about not wanting to live in dirt, but it's not about being dirty or living in shit, it's about being around it so you get immune to what's in it.
Sorry guys, this just doesn't seem like a good idea.
For HD to make a good debut you can't take something that's been filmed digitally on a camera designed around the NTSC standard and then just enhance the video by making the resolution bigger. Unless you've done lots of research into image sharpening algorithms, this just CANNOT work. Try taking the slashdot banner and expanding it to print on a poster-size piece of paper... The printout will be disgusting. That's exactly what they're doing by taking old movies and releasing them HD or BluRay.
Seriously, if you want to get a good quality HD image, you have to start at the source: the studios must use cameras that have resolutions greater than or equal to those of HD/BluRay DVDs. Otherwise there's just no point in even trying. Release X3 on HD/BluRay and I guarantee people will buy it! But don't re-release titles in a new format, it's just NOT WORTH IT. The quality was accepted when it was released, and as far as I know, the players are backwards compatible anyway. So why bother? To make $$? Idiotic fools. You're going to scare people away doing that, not win their wallets!
What they really should do is set a date after which all movies are going to be released in BluRay/HD, and then we'll see massive adoption of HDTVs and HD/BR players. Oh and importantly, release the HD/BR discs at the SAME PRICE POINT as the older DVDs, so people think they're getting more for their money.
Some companies just never seem to get it... =/
I'm assuming you're probably asking about a migration tool? I haven't heard of one.
However, I would recommend using Eclipse with the CDT plugin to import all your existing code, and then using that to write the same code using java and at that point, use JUnit for unit testing. That will tremendously help you.
Eclipse is a great tool for java (dunno much about using it with C/C++), and JUnit is now critical in any of the code I write that is beyond 150 lines, it just makes things a lot clearer.
Also, as someone else mentioned, refactoring when you can is a good idea, and eclipse will help you a lot with that.
And, best of all, Eclipse is FREE! That's the best price your management could ask for. There's also a couple of books about Eclipse which might be worth investigating to get started.
Good luck, I've encountered a few systems that were FDA approved, and I can tell you that it's a pain in the butt to write code for it if you don't have unit testing. Go with JUnit and part of your pain will be alleviated, and paradoxically, writing that much more code will make you more productive as you'll spend less time debugging (the bugs will become evident as soon as the code is written!).
Cheers
Yet Another Stupid Government Measure That Won't Work:
If it gets past and the millions of voters that download using bittorrent, kazaa and so forth, can someone try to calculate how much storage all this will require?
If I'm not mistaken, that means you'd have to have more than 3 times the amount of data going through the US network already: one that gets stored by the originating ISP, one that is stored by the receving customer's ISP, and one for whoever's the carrier in the middle.
WHY OH WHY CAN'T THEY REALIZE THIS IS IMPOSSIBLE?
You'd need a few thousand Terabytes of storage for a single month!
This law is complete insanity on the technical level, that is if they want to know who accessed what content, since the content on the web is never constant. There is no safeguard that it'll always be there. They'd have to save the content with the customer data to safeguard the integrity of their data.
It's just plain STUPID!
Even the internet archive wouldn't try this!
Anyone else feel the same way?
Ok, so I might get flamed for this, but who cares.
I'm currently on gentoo, with firefox, and browsing Windows Live Mail beta without any trouble!
I've had a hotmail account for about 4 years now, and honestly, I like the live beta interface a lot more. However, it's still FAR behind Gmail's. But it's cleaner and not as clunky to navigate (at least under firefox, dunno what kind of crap IE pulls out of it's butt on that one).
Also, FYI, the beta version of windows live mail DOES have a Forward button. I don't know where that kind of idiocy came about, but PLEASE don't try and make it worse than it is. It's already crap, no need to put it down more!
As for colleges who won't run their own mail servers I can only say that they're:
1) stupid. running a mail server is easy, if you've got servers running already, there are plenty of OSS mail servers that do just fine, with a webmail interface that support both POP and IMAP.
2) already sold on MS software. It's just a fact. If you're afraid of students using MS software for life, then use OpenOffice, or AbiWord, or Lotus Notes, or some other office suite! There's plenty out there. But no. Campuses will almost always be using MS Office and MS formats.
My campus uses MS Office for both it's Windows and Mac machines, and we're split about 50-50 for wintels/macs on campus, but we do have an IT department that's not afraid of running their own servers, and if students insist long enough and nicely enough for features, they'll eventually get implemented over the summer.
So honestly, that idea of going with windows live mail (BETA still!) is a bad idea. Why would you want MS servers running your mail? And not only that, but MS Servers controlled by MS? That stinks privacy violation to me! What happens if the DoJ wants to peek at a student's emails? They don't have to subpoena the school anymore, since the school isn't hosting that email server, they subpoena MS, who's more than likely to not give a crap and just let them have whatever they want!
I'm more worried about the privacy implications for the students' whose campuses have signed that deal. Not to mention that MS is going to have one hell of a pain of tech support calls because of crashes as their system is still beta.
Just a student's $0.02 of opinion on this one.
Like I say in the title, I've played for 13 years. The best tools to learn are 1: your ear, you've got to be able to tell if you're on or off tune. Not everyone can do it. It's discriminatory, but not everyone has an ear sensitive enough. And I never listen to music from a portable player to keep mine intact.
2: a metronome. It's cheap (somewhere around $5 or $10) and lets you adjust the tempo as you need it.
3: time. You've gotta practice over and over and over and over again. There's no two ways around it. It gets repetitive, and neighbours might start throwing things at you, but that's the only way you'll get better.
4: a teacher is almost quintessential. A book cannot look at your stance and tell you if it's right or not. It can't tell you if you're doing all the variations properly either. Or teach you vibratos, or tremolos, or pizzicato techniques.
My advice: don't try to use a computer for learning music. The web is a great tool to find scores, but not to learn music. Music is done by live things, interaction between people, be it that of a teacher and his student. Don't try and denature music, it's really not worth it.
I love bash.org...
http://bash.org/?431786
nah, I wouldn't have posted it on /. if I intended to make money with my opinions...
Ok, so that's cool that now people notice the bad hardware available here. Now let's hope it'll move on to the next stage: the SHITTY SERVICES! Hell, why would I have to pay to RECEIVE a phone call? In every other country on the globe you pay only when you call! Might be a tad more expensive, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper in the long run. The US unfortunately has a history of not cracking down on monopolies when it should, and the limitations for cell phone service here are just insane. That's why I vote with my wallet: I refuse to get a cellphone. It's so simple really. Just abandon cell phones. It'll probably result in a hell of a lot less traffic accidents anyway! And not paying the companies will force them to re-evaluate what they're thinking.
My $0.02 worth of opinion.