Actually, Harley claimed to trademark the distinctive "potato,potato" sound of its engine and threated legal action when either Yamaha or Honda introduced an engine with the same cylinder timing and sound.
But they didn't get full coverage, so Harley's sound like poh-tah-toh-poh-tah-toh and the japanese bikes sound like poh-tay-toh-poh-tay-toh...
He sure was a total ass-kicker during that season of Ellen when he bought her bookstore. What? You think I'm making that up? Well, maybe the ass-kicking part, but check it out for yourself look up the character "Ed Billik."
For those who don't know or are too young to know, Don Coscarelli is the man behind the Phantasm movies which are sadly lacking in DVD distribution (only the first and the fourth are out on disc). Phantasm is the story of the Tall Man who takes dead people, turns them into jawas and sends them to another dimension to work as slaves, he also has a flying silver ball that hunts down and then drills into his enemies' heads.
Like all horror movies, there is no universal praise for the Phantasm movies. But they do tend rank up near the top of a lot of people's lists, including mine. Despite it's age (must be over 20 years now) Phantasm is still a genuinely creepy movie and totally worth seeing, even if all of the innovation has now been copied a thousand times in more recent horror flicks.
If impedence is too high, just bump up his voltage a little bit. Make sure to do it in small increments, and you may need to upgrade his headware to a beanie with a propellor to maintain adequete cooling and if he still gets too hat, water-cooling at the swimming pool may be necessary.
PS, all meant in jest, like most others I know with handicaps you seem well adjusted and able to appreciate the humor.
On the point that governemnt should not discriminate in favor of Free software, I fully disagree. That attitude is way too short-sighted. It assumes that the upgrade-cycle that at least 90% of the closed-source market relies upon to stay afloat is in the best interests of "the people." I say it is not. I say that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But companies, like oh, Microsoft, force obsolence on their customers so as to maintain that income flow from upgrades. You can't buy NT4 today, it borders on the impossible to get a support contract for NT4 too. And MS is not alone, look at Oracle, ain't no way you can get support for Oracle 7, and you will find it pretty tough to even buy an Oracle 8 license today.
Free software developers, particularly those who rely on selling support contracts rather than selling "shrink-wrap" products don't have the same restrictions. Even though companies like RedHat do obsolete their older releases, at least there is the opportunity for a third party to step in and provide the support that RedHat won't. You won't find such an option with the likes of MS or Oracle or SAP. Now it might actually be cheaper for the client to upgrade than to stick with the current version and buy support for another source, but only Free software has this option.
Before this gets beyond too long, let me finish by saying that buying trends in the free/closed software market are feedback loops. The more that buy free software, the more options there are in the secondary support market, the more buying of closed software, and the less and less opportunity there is for the development of a secondary support market of Free software (there is almost nil chance of a secondary support market for closed software). Thus even if today's version of a Free software package isn't quite as well qualified as a closed package, if it is in "good enough" range (which must be decided on a per case basis) then over the long run it can be made to be fundamentally cheaper and more cost effective and in doing so, it will also increase the value of any similar Free implementation used in another part of the govt.
If some one fails to deliver, another vendor can pick up where they left off with minimum disruption.
And maximum cost. This is about taxpayers dollars. If corporations want to do such things with private cash, be my guest.
You don't seem to be thinking that through very well. Do you really think that third party clean-up after the failure of a company providing a closed-source implementation is going to somehow be cheaper because no one has access to the source?
With open source, at least you have a chance of multiple vendors having experience with the guts of the system (not to mention actually having the guts themselves) allowing you to move forward without having to reimplement from the start. But if a company like SAP goes belly-up, you have no choice but to movie to another ground-up implementation, if you want continuing support that is.
Or, sometimes one is able to make a point a thousand times more effectively through one dramatic action than through a bunch of politically correct consensus building.
As told, the action does sound a bit silly, but the story is short enough on details that it makes it just about impossible to really decide either way from the context. The only detail that might lead one to make a judgement is that the CEO decided that he liked the behaviour enough to keep the guy around.
Believe it or not, some CEOs actually prefer not to surround themselves with yes-men. Such an action could easily turn out to be very good for the OP's career, if the CEO decides the guy is a no-nonsense, technically astute guy, he may even end up becoming the CEO's "second opinion" guy for computer/tech issues.
My advice to the OP -- learn to play golf, you may need it soon. If the sharks with frickin laserguns don't get you first.
I think the only fair solution is obvious. Ban all political speech in the media. It is too subversive and dangerous. And get the Gammatron Clerics to enforce that ban. Any media organization carrying political speech will be shut down with extreme gun-kata-toting prejudice as deemed necessary by the cleric on the scene.
Absolutely correct, for streaming transfers those 6 disks have an aggregate transfer rate on the order of 160MB/s, putting them behind a single firewire interface is strangling them.
So when I put 6 individual disks on my 3ware controller in a 2x 64-bit slot inside my computer case why don't I get to be on the front page of slashdot? It runs way faster than this guy's setup and it was probably cheaper to put together.
Fsck speed is almost completely dependent on the number of inodes, not necessarily the size of the drive. So, if you really wanted to use a non-journalling FS and were storing primarily large files, like say 700MB DiVX rips, then by creating the filesystem with a signficantly reduced number of inodes (like 100th of the original inode density) your could FSK a terabyte or so in a reasonable amount of time.
Why would you want to do this instead of using one of the many journaling filesystems available for linux? I dunno, but you could.
Sorry for harshing on you then, chalk it up to typically poor emtional transmissiveness of the medium and a overfull 10 hour workday today. I stay logged in, got cookies and a filter that only gives them to specific designated sites instead of everybody and his dog.
You sure have your antennas all aquiver in the wrong directions. You claimed I hadn't read the article, my point was I had gone beyond simply reading the article to actually thinking about it. You too can be on a first name basis with people at the Inq, I get the impression that hundreds of people send them email every day. This is the internet get used to the flat topology.
Meanwhile, you too can also harness the power of the net to do a little research. Here's some footprints that took me about 10 minutes to dig up when the GC Air registration showed and, well another 3 or 4 to redig just for you:
Find the listing for GC Air LLC as a registered business in Rhode Island. Note the owner's name, note all the other business that the same owner has registered in the state. 2002 Corporate Registrations
Find the owner of GC Air LLC listed in the NBAA's list of companies that do aircraft leasing. Notice he is listed as contact for "GE Corporate Aircraft Group Commercial Finance." NBAA
Think about that name for a second: GE Corporate Aircraft... GC Air, what a coinkydink! Follow up on that website, and see that, surprise, they provide financing for aircraft purchases. GC Air, LLC
Why would HP need financing, they've plenty of cash in the bank to spend if they wanted to buy a fleet of aircraft. Ergo they either leased it, or they took out a loan. Either way, it isn't HP money being spent willy-nilly.
Furthermore, why don't you take a look at what Gulfstream has to say about their very good buddy, el Jefe Supremo, Jorge Bush: Flying Pigs
Wow! 50% depreciation in the first year. What a huge barrel of pork! Yeah, that sure will help out employment, el Jefe. Not! But regardless, HP would be fiscally irresponsible to not make use of this enormous tax break. Anyone who has paid attention to (or done much of any research on) civil aviation knows that the real market value of private aircraft has a very low rate of depreciation -- sometimes that shiznat actually appreciates. Even if the IRS plays dumb to that fact, best case is probably (yes probably, aircraft depreciation is actually fairly complicated unlike, say, automobile) the 5 year MACRS schedule, so average 20% per year. That means, at the very best, HP's only going to see about 20% depreciation out of their current fleet this year. But under el Jefe's plan, they can realize 50% right off the bat for no more money than they were paying out before. Since the real market depreciation on private aircraft is probably much less than the 20% the IRS might normally let HP max out, the real cost of the lease or loan is going to be relatively small, plus you can be pretty confident that interest rates are less today than they were 3 years ago, so HP could easily end up with a smaller monthly payment and a huge increase in tax-writeoffs by making these transactions.
So put that in your pipe and fark it.
PS, if I wanted to respond and pretend I was someone else, I would just use a sockpuppet, that's at least twice as sexy as doing it AC.
Actually, no. They LEASED them. I've been reading the stories since they were first put up and I've emailed Charlie a couple of times. Charlie is exaggerating for effect, that's kind of what The Inq and the The Reg do. No non-airline company in the USA buys jets, the tax and accouting (read fooling wallstreet) advantages of leasing are far too great to do otherwise.
The thing is, those 3 year old jets were leased. These new jets are leased. The lease probably expired and just like HP does with its leased fleet of cars every year, they leased the latest models.
So, on the surface it looks stupid. It looks even stupider to switch the registered titles to a generic lease holding company in response to all the publicity. But it is really no more egregious behaviour than any other company that has private jets.
It has been done before, probably the most recent incarnation is hypertransport from AMD. The only difference at the 50,000ft view is that the speeds and feeds are faster. This is an evolutionary step, not revolutionary or innovationary,
Funny you should mention watching Gilligan's on an HDTV. Mark Cuban, owner of HDnet broadcasting company (and the Dallas Mavericks and otherwise.com bazillionare) has announced that he is acquiring the rights to the original film stock for shows like Gilligan's and I Dream of Genie, etc and will be making high-def remasters of those show for broadcast on HDnet. Myself, I can't wait to see Mary-Ann's short shorts in hi-def.
Will people sue that their 56k modems are not 56kilobytes/second? Or that their DSL line is 1.5Mbits and not bytes?
I know this is not what you meant, but in case anyone was wondering, telecommunications speeds (e.g. bits per second) are always measured in base-10 too.
As a rule of thumb, if the medium is inherently binary or otherwise base-2 then it gets measured in base-2 -- like RAM and, oddly enough, filesystem space (because filesystem space is broken up into blocks that are almost always base-2 like 512 or 1024 or 2048 bytes) -- otherwise it gets measured in base-10.
Why do you even accept his premise that a context switch causes a cache flush? That's just silly. So his process wakes up, and runs a short loop or two that hits maybe 5-10 pages and then goes back to sleep. That's easily less than 64K that needs to moved back and forth for most wakeups. Trivial.
Are you kidding? The FCC total regulates cable. Ever hear of "must carry?" The FCC, like all gov agencies exists to get bigger and is constantly pushing the boundries of what it is involved with so as to justify larger and larger budgets.
Re:Welcome To The New World, Geek Fewl...
on
RIAA Bits
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You did a good job of describing the basics for the economics of plenty vs the economics of scarcity. But your idea of a brick & mortar record shop with infinite inventory will never happen, for two reasons:
1) The RIAA and Co exist because they hold a monopoly and are able to abuse that monopoly position to suck big dollars out of the system through what looks like inefficiencies. Your proposed system is way too efficient, there isn't enough cover for the RIAA to hide their cash extraction activities. So, it means death to the RIAA just as much as unchecked napster.
2) If you can provide infinite inventory to a brick & mortar store via the internet, you can do it to people's homes too. Digital music isn't tied to the physical CD medium anymore (as you yourself already explained), mp3 players are smaller, lighter and play longer than cd players and that trend will only continue. So you don't even need a cd burner to effectively "buy" music.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it isn't the same Kibo. Personally, I'm waiting for B1FF!! to show up.
If this saves the life of just one child it will all be worth it!
Actually, Harley claimed to trademark the distinctive "potato,potato" sound of its engine and threated legal action when either Yamaha or Honda introduced an engine with the same cylinder timing and sound.
But they didn't get full coverage, so Harley's sound like poh-tah-toh-poh-tah-toh and the japanese bikes sound like poh-tay-toh-poh-tay-toh...
He sure was a total ass-kicker during that season of Ellen when he bought her bookstore. What? You think I'm making that up? Well, maybe the ass-kicking part, but check it out for yourself look up the character "Ed Billik."
For those who don't know or are too young to know, Don Coscarelli is the man behind the Phantasm movies which are sadly lacking in DVD distribution (only the first and the fourth are out on disc). Phantasm is the story of the Tall Man who takes dead people, turns them into jawas and sends them to another dimension to work as slaves, he also has a flying silver ball that hunts down and then drills into his enemies' heads.
Like all horror movies, there is no universal praise for the Phantasm movies. But they do tend rank up near the top of a lot of people's lists, including mine. Despite it's age (must be over 20 years now) Phantasm is still a genuinely creepy movie and totally worth seeing, even if all of the innovation has now been copied a thousand times in more recent horror flicks.
If impedence is too high, just bump up his voltage a little bit. Make sure to do it in small increments, and you may need to upgrade his headware to a beanie with a propellor to maintain adequete cooling and if he still gets too hat, water-cooling at the swimming pool may be necessary.
PS, all meant in jest, like most others I know with handicaps you seem well adjusted and able to appreciate the humor.
On the point that governemnt should not discriminate in favor of Free software, I fully disagree. That attitude is way too short-sighted. It assumes that the upgrade-cycle that at least 90% of the closed-source market relies upon to stay afloat is in the best interests of "the people." I say it is not. I say that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But companies, like oh, Microsoft, force obsolence on their customers so as to maintain that income flow from upgrades. You can't buy NT4 today, it borders on the impossible to get a support contract for NT4 too. And MS is not alone, look at Oracle, ain't no way you can get support for Oracle 7, and you will find it pretty tough to even buy an Oracle 8 license today.
Free software developers, particularly those who rely on selling support contracts rather than selling "shrink-wrap" products don't have the same restrictions. Even though companies like RedHat do obsolete their older releases, at least there is the opportunity for a third party to step in and provide the support that RedHat won't. You won't find such an option with the likes of MS or Oracle or SAP. Now it might actually be cheaper for the client to upgrade than to stick with the current version and buy support for another source, but only Free software has this option.
Before this gets beyond too long, let me finish by saying that buying trends in the free/closed software market are feedback loops. The more that buy free software, the more options there are in the secondary support market, the more buying of closed software, and the less and less opportunity there is for the development of a secondary support market of Free software (there is almost nil chance of a secondary support market for closed software). Thus even if today's version of a Free software package isn't quite as well qualified as a closed package, if it is in "good enough" range (which must be decided on a per case basis) then over the long run it can be made to be fundamentally cheaper and more cost effective and in doing so, it will also increase the value of any similar Free implementation used in another part of the govt.
If some one fails to deliver, another vendor can pick up where they left off with minimum disruption.
And maximum cost. This is about taxpayers dollars. If corporations want to do such things with private cash, be my guest.
You don't seem to be thinking that through very well. Do you really think that third party clean-up after the failure of a company providing a closed-source implementation is going to somehow be cheaper because no one has access to the source?
With open source, at least you have a chance of multiple vendors having experience with the guts of the system (not to mention actually having the guts themselves) allowing you to move forward without having to reimplement from the start. But if a company like SAP goes belly-up, you have no choice but to movie to another ground-up implementation, if you want continuing support that is.
Or, sometimes one is able to make a point a thousand times more effectively through one dramatic action than through a bunch of politically correct consensus building.
As told, the action does sound a bit silly, but the story is short enough on details that it makes it just about impossible to really decide either way from the context. The only detail that might lead one to make a judgement is that the CEO decided that he liked the behaviour enough to keep the guy around.
Believe it or not, some CEOs actually prefer not to surround themselves with yes-men. Such an action could easily turn out to be very good for the OP's career, if the CEO decides the guy is a no-nonsense, technically astute guy, he may even end up becoming the CEO's "second opinion" guy for computer/tech issues.
My advice to the OP -- learn to play golf, you may need it soon. If the sharks with frickin laserguns don't get you first.
Noone wanted to talk about it. My assumption is that noone I got to wanted to rock the boat, and noone responsible trusted the employees.
Damn, now only if Mr Noone had a more important position in the company than mailroom guy, maybe things would have changed!
Neither did he, after the first 30 seconds of being posted!
I think the only fair solution is obvious. Ban all political speech in the media. It is too subversive and dangerous. And get the Gammatron Clerics to enforce that ban. Any media organization carrying political speech will be shut down with extreme gun-kata-toting prejudice as deemed necessary by the cleric on the scene.
Absolutely correct, for streaming transfers those 6 disks have an aggregate transfer rate on the order of 160MB/s, putting them behind a single firewire interface is strangling them.
So when I put 6 individual disks on my 3ware controller in a 2x 64-bit slot inside my computer case why don't I get to be on the front page of slashdot? It runs way faster than this guy's setup and it was probably cheaper to put together.
Fsck speed is almost completely dependent on the number of inodes, not necessarily the size of the drive. So, if you really wanted to use a non-journalling FS and were storing primarily large files, like say 700MB DiVX rips, then by creating the filesystem with a signficantly reduced number of inodes (like 100th of the original inode density) your could FSK a terabyte or so in a reasonable amount of time.
Why would you want to do this instead of using one of the many journaling filesystems available for linux? I dunno, but you could.
Sorry for harshing on you then, chalk it up to typically poor emtional transmissiveness of the medium and a overfull 10 hour workday today. I stay logged in, got cookies and a filter that only gives them to specific designated sites instead of everybody and his dog.
You sure have your antennas all aquiver in the wrong directions. You claimed I hadn't read the article, my point was I had gone beyond simply reading the article to actually thinking about it. You too can be on a first name basis with people at the Inq, I get the impression that hundreds of people send them email every day. This is the internet get used to the flat topology.
... GC Air, what a coinkydink! Follow up on that website, and see that, surprise, they provide financing for aircraft purchases.
Meanwhile, you too can also harness the power of the net to do a little research. Here's some footprints that took me about 10 minutes to dig up when the GC Air registration showed and, well another 3 or 4 to redig just for you:
Find the listing for GC Air LLC as a registered business in Rhode Island. Note the owner's name, note all the other business that the same owner has registered in the state.
2002 Corporate Registrations
Find the owner of GC Air LLC listed in the NBAA's list of companies that do aircraft leasing. Notice he is listed as contact for "GE Corporate Aircraft Group Commercial Finance."
NBAA
Think about that name for a second: GE Corporate Aircraft
GC Air, LLC
Why would HP need financing, they've plenty of cash in the bank to spend if they wanted to buy a fleet of aircraft. Ergo they either leased it, or they took out a loan. Either way, it isn't HP money being spent willy-nilly.
Furthermore, why don't you take a look at what Gulfstream has to say about their very good buddy, el Jefe Supremo, Jorge Bush:
Flying Pigs
Wow! 50% depreciation in the first year. What a huge barrel of pork! Yeah, that sure will help out employment, el Jefe. Not! But regardless, HP would be fiscally irresponsible to not make use of this enormous tax break. Anyone who has paid attention to (or done much of any research on) civil aviation knows that the real market value of private aircraft has a very low rate of depreciation -- sometimes that shiznat actually appreciates. Even if the IRS plays dumb to that fact, best case is probably (yes probably, aircraft depreciation is actually fairly complicated unlike, say, automobile) the 5 year MACRS schedule, so average 20% per year. That means, at the very best, HP's only going to see about 20% depreciation out of their current fleet this year. But under el Jefe's plan, they can realize 50% right off the bat for no more money than they were paying out before. Since the real market depreciation on private aircraft is probably much less than the 20% the IRS might normally let HP max out, the real cost of the lease or loan is going to be relatively small, plus you can be pretty confident that interest rates are less today than they were 3 years ago, so HP could easily end up with a smaller monthly payment and a huge increase in tax-writeoffs by making these transactions.
So put that in your pipe and fark it.
PS, if I wanted to respond and pretend I was someone else, I would just use a sockpuppet, that's at least twice as sexy as doing it AC.
Actually, no. They LEASED them. I've been reading the stories since they were first put up and I've emailed Charlie a couple of times. Charlie is exaggerating for effect, that's kind of what The Inq and the The Reg do. No non-airline company in the USA buys jets, the tax and accouting (read fooling wallstreet) advantages of leasing are far too great to do otherwise.
The thing is, those 3 year old jets were leased. These new jets are leased. The lease probably expired and just like HP does with its leased fleet of cars every year, they leased the latest models.
So, on the surface it looks stupid. It looks even stupider to switch the registered titles to a generic lease holding company in response to all the publicity. But it is really no more egregious behaviour than any other company that has private jets.
It has been done before, probably the most recent incarnation is hypertransport from AMD. The only difference at the 50,000ft view is that the speeds and feeds are faster. This is an evolutionary step, not revolutionary or innovationary,
Funny you should mention watching Gilligan's on an HDTV. Mark Cuban, owner of HDnet broadcasting company (and the Dallas Mavericks and otherwise .com bazillionare) has announced that he is acquiring the rights to the original film stock for shows like Gilligan's and I Dream of Genie, etc and will be making high-def remasters of those show for broadcast on HDnet. Myself, I can't wait to see Mary-Ann's short shorts in hi-def.
Will people sue that their 56k modems are not 56kilobytes/second? Or that their DSL line is 1.5Mbits and not bytes?
I know this is not what you meant, but in case anyone was wondering, telecommunications speeds (e.g. bits per second) are always measured in base-10 too.
As a rule of thumb, if the medium is inherently binary or otherwise base-2 then it gets measured in base-2 -- like RAM and, oddly enough, filesystem space (because filesystem space is broken up into blocks that are almost always base-2 like 512 or 1024 or 2048 bytes) -- otherwise it gets measured in base-10.
Gibibyte -- still getting used to that one ...
Not to mention the Giglibite, recently introduced Si unit of measurement for how badly a movie bites.
Why do you even accept his premise that a context switch causes a cache flush? That's just silly. So his process wakes up, and runs a short loop or two that hits maybe 5-10 pages and then goes back to sleep. That's easily less than 64K that needs to moved back and forth for most wakeups. Trivial.
Are you kidding? The FCC total regulates cable. Ever hear of "must carry?" The FCC, like all gov agencies exists to get bigger and is constantly pushing the boundries of what it is involved with so as to justify larger and larger budgets.
You did a good job of describing the basics for the economics of plenty vs the economics of scarcity. But your idea of a brick & mortar record shop with infinite inventory will never happen, for two reasons:
1) The RIAA and Co exist because they hold a monopoly and are able to abuse that monopoly position to suck big dollars out of the system through what looks like inefficiencies. Your proposed system is way too efficient, there isn't enough cover for the RIAA to hide their cash extraction activities. So, it means death to the RIAA just as much as unchecked napster.
2) If you can provide infinite inventory to a brick & mortar store via the internet, you can do it to people's homes too. Digital music isn't tied to the physical CD medium anymore (as you yourself already explained), mp3 players are smaller, lighter and play longer than cd players and that trend will only continue. So you don't even need a cd burner to effectively "buy" music.