The reason they can afford to make DVDs for so cheap is probably because they've already factored the cost of promotion and other expenses into the movie itself and that is usually recovered in the box office long before it hits store shelves.
Not at all. Plenty of films don't do well at the box office, or don't even make it to the theater because of lack of demand, and when they are distributed on DVD, those films typically sell for less than the popular films.
From what I can tell, the movie industry lets the winning films pay the production costs of the losers to some degree. But selling DVDs is pure gravy: if you've paid to produce the movie, you might as well spend the money to put it on a DVD.
I don't know, but I think the music labels are both more risk-averse and more greedy than the movie studios. Which is saying a lot.
Spending less money for the military and frist-strike wars is a better answer.
This is the same thing said by almost every Democrat in the last 30-odd years. Yeah, let's just weaken our defenses.
Of course, using the amount of money spent on any given area as a guide to government effectiveness is a pretty dreadful notion. Politicians do it all the time: "I increased spending on homeland security, don't you feel safer? We increased spending on education, now we're really dealing with the problem!"
It's a nice way for politicians to dazzle people with bullshit. Doesn't mean anything beyond that.
Unless you have faith that something, anything, will happen after that, your goal should be to live forever while maintaining a certain level of stimulation
It's not an either/or thing. In general, you ought to live as long and as well as you reasonably can, regardless of your religious beliefs.
And it's worth pointing out that plenty of religious doctrines would frown upon you NOT taking advantage of life-extension technologies if they ever become as universal as the (somewhat silly) article describes. It's more of a dillemma when you start talking about the semiconscious, filled-with-tubes existence that some people live while they're still technically alive, but not really there.
Look, you guys just can't get it through your heads that the reason why OS X works so well is because it runs on such a limited pool of hardware-- this allows the engineers coding OS X to make assumptions THAT CANNOT BE MADE in the x86 world, where a machine could be using one of thousands of motherboards, network cards, graphics cards, sound cards, etc. Windows developers have to code for the lowest common denominator. OS X developers code for specific hardware.
Why do OS X developers "code for hardware" at all? Doesn't OS X have device drivers?
When I said "simple" I meant the protocol should be simple to conserve resources and reduce the potential for exploits. If you're having problems with a particular implementation I don't think that qualifies as an argument against the protocol.
That would be a fair point except that all the implementations suck. It's not like there are just a few places where you can point the finger.
Using an XML/HTTP based implementation isn't necessarily going to be easier.
My question is: what is broken about it particularly? I am a programmer, so dont make the answer too "dumbed down".
Oh, easy answer then. Go download net-snmp (it's free!) and try to do something useful with it, talk to one of your snmp-enabled devices or something. While doing so remember that it's all supposed to be quite "simple" and robust.
but, this will probably work out well for intel... i mean, you'll probably need (by the time it comes out) at least a 3.8Ghz P4 and 2G of RAM
What an amazingly "Score: 5, Insightful" observation. It's almost enough to make a person believe that Intel doesn't sell more chips for networking and embedded applications than they do desktop CPUs. Which they do.
I think anyone who has used SNMP in applications enough to acquire a nice, healthy hatred for it would agree: it's not fixable. I'm not saying this is the solution, but SNMP really does belong in the garbage.
System monitoring should be as small and SIMPLE as possible to reduce the possibility for exploits as it will likely be running with a high level of anonymous access on almost every workstation, server, and router in the organization.
Too bad SNMP and its implementations have utterly failed to live up to all of that.
Excuse me, I need to go upgrade the firmware in my printer...
But publishing home addresses, phone numbers, etc., strikes me as going beyond the bounds of legitimate disclosure of public information.
Illegitimate disclosure of public information seems like an awfully odd form of wrongdoing. Since, well, it's public information.
There's this amendment to the constitution that you might not know about...
The distribution of lists such as these, with detailed personal information, serves no legitimate purpose and can easily lead to criminal activity.
I can think of a few completely legitimate purposes offhand. Peaceful protesting in front of the hotel hosting delegates whose attention you want to get is entirely legitimate. (Perhaps you think all protesters in the city ought to be required to stay in the barbed-wired "free speech zones," so as not to offend the dignity of these political figures?)
And just about any information can "lead to criminal activity," so that is also meaningless. Clearly inciting violent activity is something else entirely.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but these are precisely the kind of tactics of intimidation and fear that the Nazis relied on to stay in power.
The SS put the names of political delegates and the names of the hotels they were staying in on webpages? How dreadful of them.
I've heard this said before and wondered why they don't use a combination of SDL/Alsa/OpenGL to keep it cross platform. I've been doing that and have a single code base that compiles to Linux, Windows, and Mac with no nasty piles of #ifdef'ed code.
Isn't surround sound in SDL still pretty ghetto? With DirectX everything is already supported and working for them.
although I could swear it felt smoother and sharper somehow.
Probably because you wanted it to be better, so you perceived it to be so, even if it wasn't. Don't worry, it's a common thing for humans to do.
It's a pretty common perception, though. I would have guessed that it was becuase XFree86 is a little better at mouse sampling but if it's showing even in demos, it's probably something else.
Couldn't they just take up a few large, tightly-knit cargo nets and tie the junk to the outside of the station? It's only a problem if it gets loose, and hey, they might need that shit for something someday!
A few objections to that spring to mind. The big one is, spacewalks become a lot harder when the outside of the ship no longer looks like what the astronauts train for on Earth. That was apparently a problem on Mir, which underwent many little changes over the years.
We're empirialists out to make everyone do what we want them to
Who said that? Not me. Please stop lying, thanks.
The "And we've got other problems." seems to be a cop-out for non-action.
A simple statement of fact. There are only so many American soldiers to go around, which is fairly important if you aim to do anything more sophisticated than just bombing the fuck out of an area.
I worked specifically for MSN Ads, and everywhere I looked (I also talked to my friends in other departments) I found sloppy coding practices, FUD, and general CYA-motivated B.S.
You expected the ad department to house the really competant and moral people in the organization? Besides, you're talking about the ad department of a branch of Microsoft that is essentially an afterthought. You were working with the losers.
Eeerrrr, if they really wanted to do something about it why not change the way the write software so that it is not so easy for outsiders to hack into their products and dump unwanted code onto their clients machines? This would efectively cut down on virii as well as spyware, trojans etc... Why do they chose to leave so many doors open?
Perhaps it's because they realize that whatever doors you're talking about do not matter, and that most users install malware on their computers themselves, often after clicking through the EULA for it.
Many of the world's governments are filled with evil people. They don't want the UN to take action in Sudan. After all, they would be next.
The problem is that the smaller countries can't do fuckall about it themselves. And we've got other problems.
That's what multilateralism & working with the UN will get you.
More like, that's what you get when the great powers that ought to be steering the UN are too busy working on silly problems of their own making, like Iraq.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you know?
Not at all. Plenty of films don't do well at the box office, or don't even make it to the theater because of lack of demand, and when they are distributed on DVD, those films typically sell for less than the popular films.
From what I can tell, the movie industry lets the winning films pay the production costs of the losers to some degree. But selling DVDs is pure gravy: if you've paid to produce the movie, you might as well spend the money to put it on a DVD.
I don't know, but I think the music labels are both more risk-averse and more greedy than the movie studios. Which is saying a lot.
Of course, using the amount of money spent on any given area as a guide to government effectiveness is a pretty dreadful notion. Politicians do it all the time: "I increased spending on homeland security, don't you feel safer? We increased spending on education, now we're really dealing with the problem!"
It's a nice way for politicians to dazzle people with bullshit. Doesn't mean anything beyond that.
If you really have a lot of "extra" money, donate it to worthy organizations regardless of how you feel about tax policy.
It's not an either/or thing. In general, you ought to live as long and as well as you reasonably can, regardless of your religious beliefs.
And it's worth pointing out that plenty of religious doctrines would frown upon you NOT taking advantage of life-extension technologies if they ever become as universal as the (somewhat silly) article describes. It's more of a dillemma when you start talking about the semiconscious, filled-with-tubes existence that some people live while they're still technically alive, but not really there.
Why do OS X developers "code for hardware" at all? Doesn't OS X have device drivers?
Shut up!
Let me guess. You're a big Bill O'Reilly fan?
That would be a fair point except that all the implementations suck. It's not like there are just a few places where you can point the finger.
Now that, I certainly agree with.
Oh, easy answer then. Go download net-snmp (it's free!) and try to do something useful with it, talk to one of your snmp-enabled devices or something. While doing so remember that it's all supposed to be quite "simple" and robust.
I don't recall seing any great primers on SNMP.
Are you fucking kidding?
What an amazingly "Score: 5, Insightful" observation. It's almost enough to make a person believe that Intel doesn't sell more chips for networking and embedded applications than they do desktop CPUs. Which they do.
I think anyone who has used SNMP in applications enough to acquire a nice, healthy hatred for it would agree: it's not fixable. I'm not saying this is the solution, but SNMP really does belong in the garbage.
Too bad SNMP and its implementations have utterly failed to live up to all of that.
Excuse me, I need to go upgrade the firmware in my printer...
The votes of these delegates are neither a personal nor an anonymous decision.
Illegitimate disclosure of public information seems like an awfully odd form of wrongdoing. Since, well, it's public information.
There's this amendment to the constitution that you might not know about...
I can think of a few completely legitimate purposes offhand. Peaceful protesting in front of the hotel hosting delegates whose attention you want to get is entirely legitimate. (Perhaps you think all protesters in the city ought to be required to stay in the barbed-wired "free speech zones," so as not to offend the dignity of these political figures?)
And just about any information can "lead to criminal activity," so that is also meaningless. Clearly inciting violent activity is something else entirely.
The SS put the names of political delegates and the names of the hotels they were staying in on webpages? How dreadful of them.
Not really, it's a matter of objective fact. Unless you have a different word for what they do?
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=censor
Well, I'd say both you and whoever moderated me down to -1 are "held back" in the old sense-of-humor department.
Isn't surround sound in SDL still pretty ghetto? With DirectX everything is already supported and working for them.
Well, upgrading Macs is pretty difficult, often nearly impossible. Maybe give that a try.
It's a pretty common perception, though. I would have guessed that it was becuase XFree86 is a little better at mouse sampling but if it's showing even in demos, it's probably something else.
A few objections to that spring to mind. The big one is, spacewalks become a lot harder when the outside of the ship no longer looks like what the astronauts train for on Earth. That was apparently a problem on Mir, which underwent many little changes over the years.
Who said that? Not me. Please stop lying, thanks.
A simple statement of fact. There are only so many American soldiers to go around, which is fairly important if you aim to do anything more sophisticated than just bombing the fuck out of an area.
You expected the ad department to house the really competant and moral people in the organization? Besides, you're talking about the ad department of a branch of Microsoft that is essentially an afterthought. You were working with the losers.
Perhaps it's because they realize that whatever doors you're talking about do not matter, and that most users install malware on their computers themselves, often after clicking through the EULA for it.
The problem is that the smaller countries can't do fuckall about it themselves. And we've got other problems.
More like, that's what you get when the great powers that ought to be steering the UN are too busy working on silly problems of their own making, like Iraq.
I have nothing against the guy, but he was by definition a "political appointee," that's the job. Which isn't a pejoritive.