Did you actually mean this? Helix is a player created and maintained by Real. They'd only have themselves to blame if Helix put them out of business...
No I meant Dirac and the free streaming codecs the BBC has been working on (I got the names mixed up for a mo)
I pay a hell of a lot of money to the BBC every year*, all I want in return is that all of their digital content to be available through open source technology... this is a step in the wrong direction, or at best a side step. Why can't they also make it work with something like Helix player?
One reason is that if the BBC does anything that damages commercial interests, it gets into trouble. It is part of the 10-yearly charter review process that the BBC needs to avoid damaging the marketplace. It nearly got into trouble because newspaper publishers complained the free provision of http://news.bbc.co.uk/ was hurting newspaper sales in the UK. If Helix were to become particularly successful and drove Real out of the market, Real would be complaining to the UK government rather quickly about public interference in the marketplace.
As it stands the BBC is pretty much required by parliament not to provide you with too good value for money. Dumb, but the person to bring it up with is your MP, not the BBC. Especially the Conservatives, since they are the ones who keep threatening to dismantle the BBC so commercial rivals can do a bit better.
There are graveyards of companies that have signed "memos of understanding" with Microsoft.
Given that the BBC is a publically funded content provider (and not a technology selling business) it would be pretty tough for MS to damage their business model! It appears more akin to the deals Microsoft strikes with universities and governments than to the deals Microsoft strikes with other businesses.
Clarification before anyone gets confused by my vague wording in the above post - Mark Ashdown and Yoichi Sato (authors of that paper) are not affiliated with Microsoft.
* Mouse tracking across multiple, big displays is slow or inaccurate unless you've got the twitch muscles of a fifteen year old first-person gamer. I want trackers on top of each screen that can monitor where I'm looking and move the mouse cursor to that spot.
Yes people have been looking at that, but it'll no doubt take quite some time yet to make it into any mainstream products. (As with Mary Czerwinski's research -- even Microsoft's own research lab have a tough time persuading the product designers to include their innovations)
Never underestimate the power of a catchy name. AJAX's underlying technologies have been around for a while, but it wasn't until someone slapped the acronym onto it that it's really taken off.
You mistake synchronicity for causation. The term AJAX was coined when the first very-widely-used "cool app" to use the technique (Google Maps) was noticed by the online public. Many dozens of other organisations were already developing their "cool apps" using this technique before Google Maps was released, and much before the name "AJAX" was coined. It's just much quicker to coin a buzzword than to finish building a software product, which is why all those other sites appear to have only emerged after the buzzword was coined.
The actual trigger was more likely that cross-browser support for it had become good enough, and the version of IE that supported it had been out long enough that developers could reasonably count on users to have that version and not an older unsupporting version of IE [users before Windows XP might not have upgraded their browser, so WinXP needed to have been around for a couple of years to have gained usershare]. Then add to that a delay to prototype, build and release an application.
Fundamentally the difference between a co-operative business and a publically traded company is that in a co-operative every "shareholder" has exactly and only one vote, not a number of vote depending on how many shares he buys or is given as part of his signing incentive. That certainly does make everyone much more equal than in a publically traded company: at Random Multinational, Inc, an incoming executive will usually be given a number of shares that outweighs the share-ownership of thousands of longstanding but lower-graded employees; at Random Co-operative Group, the CEO has the same number of votes at the AGM as the cleaner does: one.
I wouldn't think that co-ops would scale well. It is not all that hard to get 2 to 5 people to agree on a course of action. Much harder , but still doable with 10. But it is nearly impossible with 100 or 1,000.
The Co-operative Group in the UK has some 50,000 employees, and many many more members (even customers can be members of the co-operative, and given they run the largest corner-store chain in the UK they have a lot of them). It also has a handy list of other UK co-operatives of various sizes http://www.co-op.co.uk/corporate/index.php?pageid_ grp=79.
So it seems co-operatives do indeed scale reasonably well.
Did I read that right? So if we want to get rid of the real Tom Cruise and only use a virtual Tom for, say, 30 minutes of a film, that will run us... $2000 * 60 sec * 30 mins = $3.6 million
Given that the top stars regualarly charge $20million for a movie, that actually is a bargain.
The challenge, though, would be to get your virtual actor to that star status (so much harder without the chat shows and celebrity magazine stories about who he might marry).
Kids actually **need** socialization around adults and they need it much more than they need "socialization" around other kids. Two kids by themselves teaching each other how to behave is like one blind man trying to lead another.
They need both - you can't learn how to interact with peers (people on the same social standing as you) by mixing only with your elders/betters/superiors. Role models are important; but so is practice.
There's more involved in a university environment than just the final degree. A lot of the value is in being surrounded by other intelligent folks and interacting with professors who know their stuff. In a middle school kids are forced to be there, so there's less benefit (if any) from peer groups, and we all know what happens when you have math or science being taught by someone whose only degree is in "education".
Slashdot might be the wrong place to point this out, but a lot of middle school students' learning of social and communication skills also occurs while interacting with peers and teachers at school...
I'm confused here. The sun is (pretty much) unmoving, and emits a (pretty much) spherically symmetrical gravitational field. So wherever the Earth is, the 'gravitational attraction vector' is going to be pointing to the sun - as that's the direction of the gravitational field. As the mass of the sun is (pretty much) unchanging, there will be no changes to the gravitational field over time, and things continue just as in newtonian physics.
I wonder if what he's getting at is that in an orbital situation, X does not orbit around Y but around a centroid whose location depends on the relative masses of X and Y. For the earth and the sun, this is pretty dang close to the centre of the sun (since it is so much more massive), but for a pair of bodies more similar in mass (binary stars) the larger body much more obviously does move relative to the centroid - and there the gravitational propagation effects might make a more noticeable difference.
But of course IANAAP (IANA AstroPhysicist) and YLYMV (Your Light-Yearage May Vary)
Not to mention tesco.com and ocado.com in the UK (Very successful national online grocery stores run by... two of the UK's biggest grocery store chains), and the many online organic food delivery box companies running in the UK. Honestly, guys, if "online groceries" gives you flashbacks to 2000 then you are about six years behind the times...
Many US newspaper readers (and many slashdot readers) seem to be under the misapprehension that so long as you only report facts, your reporting is therefore unbiased and objective. UK broadsheet newspapers are generally more open about the fact that the decision of which stories to run (which facts to report) is as much an editorial slant as the language used to write about them. Thus US readers complain that UK newspapers appear biased in their reporting [rather than just their opinion columns], while UK readers complain right back "so are US newspapers, it's just the UK newspapers are at least open and frank about their editorial position".
And here on Slashdot we have the sudden realisation that in deciding which stories to report and which not to, Google necessarily ends up taking an editorial line.
I'm curious to see how these same people would react if Google started indexing sites lambasting Christianity and calling Christ a false prophet and pedophile and whatnot. I'm willing to bet that they'd launch a "Boycott Google" campaign if those sites weren't immediately removed.
What uninformed rubbish. Google does index a lot of sites that denegrate Christianity and "these people" are yet to launch a single "Boycott Google" campaign. Christians are by and large extraordinarily tolerant of disparaging comments.
In fact, lets use one that didn't just get reported on Google but on Slashdot as an example. Richard Dawkin's response to The Edge's annual question, in which he responded "An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as 'atonement' for 'sin'.". Any sign of that "Boycott Google" or "Boycott Slashdot" campaign? No. Christians let it drift by with a shrug of "Dawkins is off on a rant again".
Now try labelling anything about Islamic belief as "warped and disgusting", and see how many milliseconds elapse before you are accused of a hate crime.
...this sounds a little like a political stunt to me.
AFAIK, the word "detrimental" almost never features in the title of research proposals. "Study into the effects of..." yes, "Study into the detrimental effects of..." no.
IANAP (I am not a professor), but it seems to me that if you put a presupposition like "the detrimental effects of..." into the title of your research proposal, then you are begging the research council to reject it on the grounds that you have presupposed that the effect is detrimental before you have carried out your research, so you are less likely to produce objective results. Regardless of what you are studying. If he had simply put titled his research "an investigation into the effects of belief in intelligent design on Canadian science" (simply dropping the presupposition "detrimental"), I'm not so sure it would have been rejected.
And $40,000 seems a small sum for a research grant too, making me wonder if the submission's value might have been as much political as monetary. (Acceptance gives a chance to say "see, even the research council agrees ID is detrimental"; rejection gives the opportunity to rail against the influence of ID on the research council...)
But then it might just be me being a cynic because the whole ID debate in the continent of North America is so politically-infused.
"If I pirate will my life be easier than going the legitimate route" should be the one question that these media content owners need to answer. And they fail over and over again
At first glance it seems to me it's not just "will my life be easier" - with these silly rules if you're the owner of an older HD-TV then pirate copies (without the protection and consequent 'down-rezzing' of the component video) could potentially give you 4 times the resolution of what you'd get from the legit version. Way to give the pirates a competitive advantage on quality as well as price, guys!
It may be true that Moore's law became the industry expectation, but given the winner-take-all nature of semiconductor manufacturing I have a hard time believing that IBM/AMD/Intel etc are simplying "developing to the timeline".
Specifically they are developing to the International Technological Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), which is produced by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), of which Intel, AMD, IBM, etc are members. This is the little-known [by the public] pre-competitive stage of the semi-conductor industry in which they all get together and collaborate on developing a "best available industrial consensus" on the way that the industry should move forward (choice of semiconductor technologies, etc).
Why do you go to church on Sunday instead of the Sabbath, or Saturday?
Church services traditionally occur on Sunday mornings not because of the sabbath, but to celebrate Christ's resurrection which is the centre of Christian faith. In this way, every Sunday morning church service reminds us of Easter Sunday.
I think we're starting to see the inevitable dilution of the GTA franchise. GTASA was a good game, but I'm not sure really how much further they can go with the same idea over and over. It's not enough to have better graphics and stuff, they need to evolve the gameplay, and not just in minor tweaks.
I think you're one iteration short of true. GTA:SA sold rather well simply by being "bigger, and with more vehicles". That on its own won't work again, but MTA:SA (multiplayer race mod) is a very popular mod and seems like a very different game because of the pickups. A version of GTA for PS3 with vastly better graphics plus a level of internet multiplayer would probably sell like hotcakes. What can drive sales for the iteration after that it the tricky question.
(And hopefully the Hot Coffee incident will persuade them that the sales aren't best improved by jimmying in extra salaciousness to the story for the sake of it, but by the fun of hurtling round with vehicles and weapons with no real life consequences - so they don't need to work to push the censorial envelope for the sake of it)
Without Sun's beneficient guidance, how will OpenOffice truely embrace the awesome power and control that can only be offered by Java(TM)!!?
That's not as dumb as it seems - for office applications there's not much to be lost in running within a VM, and delegating garbage collection and a few other things to the VM, and eventually gaining more portable binaries by publishing bytecode rather than machine code. (So you no longer have to publish binaries per OS/processor combo, but only per OS. I'm assuming you probably will still be making some OS-specific calls). The objection to Java is simply that the FOSS implementations of the VM are not up to scratch yet.
Why have Creative Commons at all then? We have a scheme for figuring out what a license is that's called "reading the license". It seems to me that it's utterly useless to come up with some random label for the license when that label has no meaning other than "Hey, you can read the license to figure out what the license means!"
You could also work out the approximate calorie content of foodstuffs by examining the ingredients list (assuming they give you the percentage as well as the order), looking them up in a pocket compendium, whipping out your calculator, and totting them up. But people tend to find it easier just to look at the nice clear label of it on a nutritional information panel. Similarly, people tend to find it easier to look at a clear label for license permissions than to read a long document written for lawyers.
IMHO, if you're going to have some sort of umbrella for licenses to be put under, it should mean something. Near as I can tell, Creative Commons has no real criteria for deciding whether or not a license is acceptable.
Creative Commons is a license labelling scheme. As such, of course seeing "ZippyProduct is licensed under Creative Commons" is not a meaningful description of a license - any more than hearing that "Packs of Sainsbury's cheddar have a nutritional information panel" tells you what their fat content is. You have to at least look at the label!!
On the other hand, this also means that Stallman's comment that he can't endorse Creative Commons because some of their license marks are restrictive is equivalent to saying he can't endorse UK standard nutritional information panels on food packaging because they make it possible to put a clear label of the fat content on products that are high in fat.
Slashdot Mirror
One reason is that if the BBC does anything that damages commercial interests, it gets into trouble. It is part of the 10-yearly charter review process that the BBC needs to avoid damaging the marketplace. It nearly got into trouble because newspaper publishers complained the free provision of http://news.bbc.co.uk/ was hurting newspaper sales in the UK. If Helix were to become particularly successful and drove Real out of the market, Real would be complaining to the UK government rather quickly about public interference in the marketplace.
As it stands the BBC is pretty much required by parliament not to provide you with too good value for money. Dumb, but the person to bring it up with is your MP, not the BBC. Especially the Conservatives, since they are the ones who keep threatening to dismantle the BBC so commercial rivals can do a bit better.
Clarification before anyone gets confused by my vague wording in the above post - Mark Ashdown and Yoichi Sato (authors of that paper) are not affiliated with Microsoft.
Yes people have been looking at that, but it'll no doubt take quite some time yet to make it into any mainstream products. (As with Mary Czerwinski's research -- even Microsoft's own research lab have a tough time persuading the product designers to include their innovations)
Link to a CHI paper on that combined head tracking / mouse technique for multiple monitors.
http://www.mark.ashdown.name/research/Ashdown-CHI
You mistake synchronicity for causation. The term AJAX was coined when the first very-widely-used "cool app" to use the technique (Google Maps) was noticed by the online public. Many dozens of other organisations were already developing their "cool apps" using this technique before Google Maps was released, and much before the name "AJAX" was coined. It's just much quicker to coin a buzzword than to finish building a software product, which is why all those other sites appear to have only emerged after the buzzword was coined.
The actual trigger was more likely that cross-browser support for it had become good enough, and the version of IE that supported it had been out long enough that developers could reasonably count on users to have that version and not an older unsupporting version of IE [users before Windows XP might not have upgraded their browser, so WinXP needed to have been around for a couple of years to have gained usershare]. Then add to that a delay to prototype, build and release an application.
Fundamentally the difference between a co-operative business and a publically traded company is that in a co-operative every "shareholder" has exactly and only one vote, not a number of vote depending on how many shares he buys or is given as part of his signing incentive. That certainly does make everyone much more equal than in a publically traded company: at Random Multinational, Inc, an incoming executive will usually be given a number of shares that outweighs the share-ownership of thousands of longstanding but lower-graded employees; at Random Co-operative Group, the CEO has the same number of votes at the AGM as the cleaner does: one.
The Co-operative Group in the UK has some 50,000 employees, and many many more members (even customers can be members of the co-operative, and given they run the largest corner-store chain in the UK they have a lot of them). It also has a handy list of other UK co-operatives of various sizes http://www.co-op.co.uk/corporate/index.php?pageid
So it seems co-operatives do indeed scale reasonably well.
Given that the top stars regualarly charge $20million for a movie, that actually is a bargain.
The challenge, though, would be to get your virtual actor to that star status (so much harder without the chat shows and celebrity magazine stories about who he might marry).
Slashdot might be the wrong place to point this out, but a lot of middle school students' learning of social and communication skills also occurs while interacting with peers and teachers at school...
I wonder if what he's getting at is that in an orbital situation, X does not orbit around Y but around a centroid whose location depends on the relative masses of X and Y. For the earth and the sun, this is pretty dang close to the centre of the sun (since it is so much more massive), but for a pair of bodies more similar in mass (binary stars) the larger body much more obviously does move relative to the centroid - and there the gravitational propagation effects might make a more noticeable difference.
But of course IANAAP (IANA AstroPhysicist) and YLYMV (Your Light-Yearage May Vary)
Not to mention tesco.com and ocado.com in the UK (Very successful national online grocery stores run by ... two of the UK's biggest grocery store chains), and the many online organic food delivery box companies running in the UK. Honestly, guys, if "online groceries" gives you flashbacks to 2000 then you are about six years behind the times...
Many US newspaper readers (and many slashdot readers) seem to be under the misapprehension that so long as you only report facts, your reporting is therefore unbiased and objective. UK broadsheet newspapers are generally more open about the fact that the decision of which stories to run (which facts to report) is as much an editorial slant as the language used to write about them. Thus US readers complain that UK newspapers appear biased in their reporting [rather than just their opinion columns], while UK readers complain right back "so are US newspapers, it's just the UK newspapers are at least open and frank about their editorial position".
And here on Slashdot we have the sudden realisation that in deciding which stories to report and which not to, Google necessarily ends up taking an editorial line.
What uninformed rubbish. Google does index a lot of sites that denegrate Christianity and "these people" are yet to launch a single "Boycott Google" campaign. Christians are by and large extraordinarily tolerant of disparaging comments.
In fact, lets use one that didn't just get reported on Google but on Slashdot as an example. Richard Dawkin's response to The Edge's annual question, in which he responded "An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as 'atonement' for 'sin'.". Any sign of that "Boycott Google" or "Boycott Slashdot" campaign? No. Christians let it drift by with a shrug of "Dawkins is off on a rant again".
Now try labelling anything about Islamic belief as "warped and disgusting", and see how many milliseconds elapse before you are accused of a hate crime.
...this sounds a little like a political stunt to me.
AFAIK, the word "detrimental" almost never features in the title of research proposals. "Study into the effects of..." yes, "Study into the detrimental effects of..." no.
IANAP (I am not a professor), but it seems to me that if you put a presupposition like "the detrimental effects of..." into the title of your research proposal, then you are begging the research council to reject it on the grounds that you have presupposed that the effect is detrimental before you have carried out your research, so you are less likely to produce objective results. Regardless of what you are studying. If he had simply put titled his research "an investigation into the effects of belief in intelligent design on Canadian science" (simply dropping the presupposition "detrimental"), I'm not so sure it would have been rejected.
And $40,000 seems a small sum for a research grant too, making me wonder if the submission's value might have been as much political as monetary. (Acceptance gives a chance to say "see, even the research council agrees ID is detrimental"; rejection gives the opportunity to rail against the influence of ID on the research council...)
But then it might just be me being a cynic because the whole ID debate in the continent of North America is so politically-infused.
Specifically they are developing to the International Technological Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), which is produced by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), of which Intel, AMD, IBM, etc are members. This is the little-known [by the public] pre-competitive stage of the semi-conductor industry in which they all get together and collaborate on developing a "best available industrial consensus" on the way that the industry should move forward (choice of semiconductor technologies, etc).
This lecture by Sir Maurice Wilkes http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mvw1/Progress_in_Compute
I think you're one iteration short of true. GTA:SA sold rather well simply by being "bigger, and with more vehicles". That on its own won't work again, but MTA:SA (multiplayer race mod) is a very popular mod and seems like a very different game because of the pickups. A version of GTA for PS3 with vastly better graphics plus a level of internet multiplayer would probably sell like hotcakes. What can drive sales for the iteration after that it the tricky question.
(And hopefully the Hot Coffee incident will persuade them that the sales aren't best improved by jimmying in extra salaciousness to the story for the sake of it, but by the fun of hurtling round with vehicles and weapons with no real life consequences - so they don't need to work to push the censorial envelope for the sake of it)
Creative Commons is a license labelling scheme. As such, of course seeing "ZippyProduct is licensed under Creative Commons" is not a meaningful description of a license - any more than hearing that "Packs of Sainsbury's cheddar have a nutritional information panel" tells you what their fat content is. You have to at least look at the label!!
On the other hand, this also means that Stallman's comment that he can't endorse Creative Commons because some of their license marks are restrictive is equivalent to saying he can't endorse UK standard nutritional information panels on food packaging because they make it possible to put a clear label of the fat content on products that are high in fat.