"Castro has probably been in power longer than any other leader in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world."
Actually, he is number 2 in North America and 4 in the world, behind the King of Thailand (1946), an Emir in the United Arab Emirates (1948), and the Queen of the United Kingdom (1952).
I would expect an internal, covert change like that would be classified to a very high level."
I wouldn't. In fact it would be just the opposite. There would be policies in place at the export control, securities, customs, travel, currency, and dog catching agencies telling them to lean on every company and push them in a given direction. All very public and open. Just at such a low bureaucratic level that no one pays much attention to it.
US government policy isn't a secret (usually), any more than Chinese government policy is. You know what the bureaucrats on Pier 76 will do because you know what the bosses are saying in Washington and Peking. You may not know the exact regulation, chapter, and verse, but the gist of it is no secret at all.
I worked a simulator project that was based on SGI/Irix once. One of the software guys got the Linux bug and started experimenting. We put a Dell P4 dual processor running Linux up against an SGI O2 MIPS processor running Irix. Best options we could find on both, both running the same code compiled natively. The Dell beat the SGI box about three to one on performance, and about 6 to 1 on cost ($6000 vs $40000). It came out to 20:1 over all price-performance gain.
The customer was already highly invested in SGI, so we had to continue in that direction, but the development team started seriously investigating Linux clusters as SGI replacements from that point forward.
"introducing artificial scarcity in an economy basically undermines and damages the economy as a whole."
Which pretty much explains why the diamond market collapsed so long ago, and people today consider them worthless pieces of rock.
And I've noticed the oil market teetering on the edge for some time now. Those cartels just never learn. When will they see that they'd make more money by opening the spigots and letting the oil gush freely ?
"And a responsible media outlet takes those press releases, along with the opinions of others outside the organization, and writes a balanced article."
I agree, they should do those things. But take a look at local papers, and listen to local radio news readers. Hot off the press from the AP and onto the front page, with barely a cut or paste to slow it down. Go to Google News and search for a topic of the past few days. You get page after page of the same article, written once and published dozens of times across the country by different papers. I looked up something related to the football player killed in Afghanistan once and found that basically four articles had been published in over 30 places. Word for word identical. Sometimes the paragraphs were rearranged, sometimes not.
It isn't like they don't know how to write a balanced article, they just don't bother to do it. Pre-chewed and pre-digested is easier to deal with than actual original reporting. And since most people just swallow it anyway, why not?
And as for reprehensible - if the brick wall between editorial and advertising is really more like a paper partion, and it can be seen and demonstrated as such (Ever notice who the biggest advertiser in the Car of the Year issues of MT, C&D, R&T are?) then who is pointing the finger at whom, and on what basis? "its terrible for you to take that money for those articles just like we do. It is a horrible practice we've been engaged in for years and it will corrupt you just as we have been."
OK, $1000 wouldn't get you far in the US, true. But then again there are a lot of Mom and Pop weeklies that would love a little spare cash and a preprocessed story they don't have to work on.
That is along my point. The reporters at the big outlets want to feel outraged in some way. But in reality the same sort of thing happens all the time. The independence of the news side from the money side of a publication is a sham. Not all the time, but enough to be noticiable.
Don't expect to see many stories on the dangers of cosmetics in women's magazines. Men's magazines encourage prostate health, but they don't quite drop the liqour and tobacco ads.
Re:If they have a software workaround
on
Hopes Rise for RIM
·
· Score: 1
"then why not implment it and end the whole mess?"
Because they have eaten too many crackers and can't whistle past the grave yard yet.
"we shortcircut their right to freedom of the press?"
Disagree. We aren't short cicuiting anything. Every major enterprise in the world has a public relations function of some kind. The isn't just governments, that is large corporations, small buisnesses, and individuals. At least the ones that have any money to gain or lose based on popular opinion. They do these things called "Press Releases" that put the organization's spin on events. Why the refinery explosion isn't as bad as it seems, how the layoffs are going to help the economy, why discovering the tainted baby formula shows the system really works. The US government is no different in that respect at all.
The only "legs" in this story is that it somehow offends US media sensibility to find out that newsies in other countries accept money for stories. It wasn't so long ago in the US that newspapers and radio were radically and obviously partisan (W R Hearst anyone? How about Rupert Murdoch?). If you walk into some strugling paper in Iraq or elsewhere and plunk down $1000 and say "run this", most will bite. I suspect you can still do it in the US too, but the Gods of Media have decreed it to be impossible and immoral and therefore nonexistent.
Now that HTPC has finally taken off, one more curve ball is coming: the final HDTV conversion in the US, this coming Dec! There are not that many direct HDTV capture cards out there, and there aren't many homebrew software packages that work with them. Not MythTV, not WinMCE, not any of the others. A year from now we'll have the coolest pices of obsolete hardware on the block.
And while we're at it, who is working on the digital cable capture and the DVB dish problems? Proprietary hardware, encryption and signalling, means we pay the $$$ to see and record what they want us to see.
I agree to some extent. If anything, we need to see individual sensors and sensor arrays get a bit larger to improve S/n ratios. The ability to pack a large number of sensors into a tiny package only helps if the overall array has more elements in it. That increases the spatial sampling and thus the image quality. Very few manufacturers have moved into the direction of directly duplicating film. They seem to be following the direction of electronic manufacturers, where smaller is better.
100 lp/mm is a little strict. The top slide film (Velvia) only does 80 lp/mm and the negative films are down around 60-63 lp/mm. And a stop is basically a bit (factor of 2), so 10 stops would be 10 bits x3 for RGB.
Of course, that still means 63*2 * 63*2 * 24 * 36 = 13,716,864 pixels * 3*10 / 8 = 49MB for a 35mm frame. The largest I know of is the Kodak DCS at 13MP, and it is said to have software color shoft problems.
Doesn't matter, digital is going to win. No one cares about quality.
As a business decision, going digital can't be beat. The cameras cost a bit more, but you cna make that up in processing a few hundred rolls of film. Enlargements up to 8x10 are nearly indistiguishable. To a working pro, it is an easy move, assuming you get naything close to reasonable pixel count.
For a manufacturer, it is mor complicated, but much the same. The basic camera costs the same to make, but film camera sales are dropping. Digital is on the rise. Get out while the getting is good and save yourself running a production line at a loss.
The problem, as any good computer person should know, is Moore's Law as applied to camera sensors. Every 2 years or so they get a lot better. For a pro, it is a business move. Just buy a better camera every 2-3 years. For an amateur, its like buying a Pentium Pro and watching the P4s roll out. Yours works, but you lust after the best. 3MP - 6MP - 12MP+ But upgrading is $1000 ! Not an easy move to make, but doing it will dramatcally effect your picture quality (assuming you care about quality).
In the film camera world, it was easy to bypass most camera improvements. As long as the basic box was light tight, kept the film flat and the lens in focus, you were OK. Upgrades were at the lens or the film. Both of which were modular upgrades. It is common to see photographers with lenses stretching across decades. And of course film is as good as research can make it today. Not so with digital cameras. You are locked into the tech of the day you bought the camera. Some ROMs are upgradeable, but you won't be changing pixel count or fixing sensitivity issues that way. It is like buying a lifetime supply of film when you buy the camera. Cheaper, but you better love it.
Overall, the digital wave is a financial hit on the amateur and prosumer. A better medium exists, but it is economically unfeasable for a market that small. Going digital will lock these folks into something that is *almost* good enough, but will never be quite right. They have to ride the planned obsolescense train until Moor's Law takes them back to where they already are, at real film resolution, color, and contrast.
And This doesn't even address the problems of proprietary formats, memory, processing, etc.
With all respect to Whedon, the Serenity WAS a made for TV movie. There were scene transitions that practically shouted INSERT COMMERCIAL HERE. He's a great story producer, but he's still rough around the edges where cinema is concerned.
If only something could have been worked out, the money that went into Serenity could have funded a 2 - 3 episode miniseries, maybe more. More screen time for everyone, more time to lay out a bettr plot, more time to build word of mouth among the fanb... cognoscenti. If only Fox had brains.
It is news because Jimmy Wales is George Bush's alter ego in the Open community. Start a few initiatives that should be good in principle, but break down when the rubber hits the road. Make some rational explanations and you end up looking even worse. A few embarassing faux pas later and pretty soon you look bad just trying to tie your shoes.
I'm assuming there is some way to dig out of this public relations mess, but neither one seems able to do it.
When Jack Paar came back on the Tonight Show after a "hiatus" forced by NBC execs. His opening line was "As I was saying before I was interupted..."
Futurama should do some riff on coming back from a time warp / black hole.
and still be vulnerable? I am shocked and appalled. As is well known, any reputable software vendor would release flaw free code that could not possibly cause hidden attacks such as this. Clearly they are the scum of the earth and should be shunned for foisting such shoddy products off on the public.
And if you believe THAT, I have this bridge for sale in a ratehr profitable location of a well known American city.
The book you describe may be wonderful. I wish I'd seen one as I was trying to learn (am still trying to learn) Unix.
And again, it points out that there still is not a good way to manage a system from a GUI. Like it or not, the GUI paradigm should be the way to go. I was raised on command line interfaces (real no kidding TeleType and DEC Writer machines). It is great for encouraging the user to have a mental picture of what is going on with the system. To have a Masterly grasp of the commands needed to administer the system. Being able to invoke the right command line incantations on cue is probably where the whole "wizard programmer" idea came from. But there is no substitute for a real on-screen picture to get the state of the system quickly and accurately. Less interpretation of cryptic messages on the part of the user means more accurate decision making and fewer configuration errors. Which means more reliable systems that can be handled by less trained people and deployed to more diverse places.
In other words, good GUI gets us further from the Cathedral. But, Hopefully not closer to the Bizarre.
No, no, no. If we allow the UN to manage the time for us, next thing you know it will be just like the ocean mining treaty or the Use of Outer Space treaty. They will declare time to be the "common heritage of all mankind" and everyone will want their own fair share. The UN will have to license clock manufacturing, to be sure all clocks conform to the regime. Leap second rationing will be imposed and of course that will lead to shortages and official corruption. Whenever a weathly nation buys a high precision clock, they will have to donate one to underdeveloped countries that can't afford them. Similarly, sundial time will be imposed on every developed nation in an effort to promote international understanding.
And once they start shoving Metric System timedown our throats, we'll all have to figure out how to convert back and forth from Regular time.
It is simply a nghtmare waiting to happen. Just say No.
Good idea, but it only solves half the ad revenue problem. The network is happy, it gets the national ads put into place. But the affiliates don't get to sell the local ads.
Us old time satelite dish guys still remember the dead air "holes" the networks leave in place for the locals to insert local spots in. You can tell the locals, they are the ones with real prices, real dates, locations you recognize, etc. Sometimes you can hear the little tweedle-chirp that triggers the local tape players on and off.
Slashdot Mirror
"Castro has probably been in power longer than any other leader in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world."
Actually, he is number 2 in North America and 4 in the world, behind the King of Thailand (1946), an Emir in the United Arab Emirates (1948), and the Queen of the United Kingdom (1952).
I wouldn't. In fact it would be just the opposite. There would be policies in place at the export control, securities, customs, travel, currency, and dog catching agencies telling them to lean on every company and push them in a given direction. All very public and open. Just at such a low bureaucratic level that no one pays much attention to it.
US government policy isn't a secret (usually), any more than Chinese government policy is. You know what the bureaucrats on Pier 76 will do because you know what the bosses are saying in Washington and Peking. You may not know the exact regulation, chapter, and verse, but the gist of it is no secret at all.
How many times do we have to say it? "Don't Experiment on Yourself!" That is what Igor and the unsuspecting villagers are for.
Doesn't this guy READ the Journal of Mad Scientists and Eccentric Inventors?
I worked a simulator project that was based on SGI/Irix once. One of the software guys got the Linux bug and started experimenting. We put a Dell P4 dual processor running Linux up against an SGI O2 MIPS processor running Irix. Best options we could find on both, both running the same code compiled natively. The Dell beat the SGI box about three to one on performance, and about 6 to 1 on cost ($6000 vs $40000). It came out to 20:1 over all price-performance gain.
The customer was already highly invested in SGI, so we had to continue in that direction, but the development team started seriously investigating Linux clusters as SGI replacements from that point forward.
"introducing artificial scarcity in an economy basically undermines and damages the economy as a whole."
Which pretty much explains why the diamond market collapsed so long ago, and people today consider them worthless pieces of rock.
And I've noticed the oil market teetering on the edge for some time now. Those cartels just never learn. When will they see that they'd make more money by opening the spigots and letting the oil gush freely ?
"And a responsible media outlet takes those press releases, along with the opinions of others outside the organization, and writes a balanced article."
I agree, they should do those things. But take a look at local papers, and listen to local radio news readers. Hot off the press from the AP and onto the front page, with barely a cut or paste to slow it down. Go to Google News and search for a topic of the past few days. You get page after page of the same article, written once and published dozens of times across the country by different papers. I looked up something related to the football player killed in Afghanistan once and found that basically four articles had been published in over 30 places. Word for word identical. Sometimes the paragraphs were rearranged, sometimes not.
It isn't like they don't know how to write a balanced article, they just don't bother to do it. Pre-chewed and pre-digested is easier to deal with than actual original reporting. And since most people just swallow it anyway, why not?
And as for reprehensible - if the brick wall between editorial and advertising is really more like a paper partion, and it can be seen and demonstrated as such (Ever notice who the biggest advertiser in the Car of the Year issues of MT, C&D, R&T are?) then who is pointing the finger at whom, and on what basis? "its terrible for you to take that money for those articles just like we do. It is a horrible practice we've been engaged in for years and it will corrupt you just as we have been."
OK, $1000 wouldn't get you far in the US, true. But then again there are a lot of Mom and Pop weeklies that would love a little spare cash and a preprocessed story they don't have to work on.
That is along my point. The reporters at the big outlets want to feel outraged in some way. But in reality the same sort of thing happens all the time. The independence of the news side from the money side of a publication is a sham. Not all the time, but enough to be noticiable.
Don't expect to see many stories on the dangers of cosmetics in women's magazines. Men's magazines encourage prostate health, but they don't quite drop the liqour and tobacco ads.
"then why not implment it and end the whole mess?"
Because they have eaten too many crackers and can't whistle past the grave yard yet.
Disagree. We aren't short cicuiting anything. Every major enterprise in the world has a public relations function of some kind. The isn't just governments, that is large corporations, small buisnesses, and individuals. At least the ones that have any money to gain or lose based on popular opinion. They do these things called "Press Releases" that put the organization's spin on events. Why the refinery explosion isn't as bad as it seems, how the layoffs are going to help the economy, why discovering the tainted baby formula shows the system really works. The US government is no different in that respect at all.
The only "legs" in this story is that it somehow offends US media sensibility to find out that newsies in other countries accept money for stories. It wasn't so long ago in the US that newspapers and radio were radically and obviously partisan (W R Hearst anyone? How about Rupert Murdoch?). If you walk into some strugling paper in Iraq or elsewhere and plunk down $1000 and say "run this", most will bite. I suspect you can still do it in the US too, but the Gods of Media have decreed it to be impossible and immoral and therefore nonexistent.
Now that HTPC has finally taken off, one more curve ball is coming: the final HDTV conversion in the US, this coming Dec! There are not that many direct HDTV capture cards out there, and there aren't many homebrew software packages that work with them. Not MythTV, not WinMCE, not any of the others. A year from now we'll have the coolest pices of obsolete hardware on the block.
And while we're at it, who is working on the digital cable capture and the DVB dish problems? Proprietary hardware, encryption and signalling, means we pay the $$$ to see and record what they want us to see.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/micro_stories.pl ?ACCT=130907&TICK=NIKON&STORY=/www/story/01-11-200 6/0004247596&EDATE=Jan+11,+2006
Nikon USA press release says the same thing in a watered down and wimpy way. "Digital is where the market is going, so we are following".
I agree to some extent. If anything, we need to see individual sensors and sensor arrays get a bit larger to improve S/n ratios. The ability to pack a large number of sensors into a tiny package only helps if the overall array has more elements in it. That increases the spatial sampling and thus the image quality. Very few manufacturers have moved into the direction of directly duplicating film. They seem to be following the direction of electronic manufacturers, where smaller is better.
100 lp/mm is a little strict. The top slide film (Velvia) only does 80 lp/mm and the negative films are down around 60-63 lp/mm. And a stop is basically a bit (factor of 2), so 10 stops would be 10 bits x3 for RGB.
Of course, that still means 63*2 * 63*2 * 24 * 36 = 13,716,864 pixels * 3*10 / 8 = 49MB for a 35mm frame. The largest I know of is the Kodak DCS at 13MP, and it is said to have software color shoft problems.
Doesn't matter, digital is going to win. No one cares about quality.
As a business decision, going digital can't be beat. The cameras cost a bit more, but you cna make that up in processing a few hundred rolls of film. Enlargements up to 8x10 are nearly indistiguishable. To a working pro, it is an easy move, assuming you get naything close to reasonable pixel count.
For a manufacturer, it is mor complicated, but much the same. The basic camera costs the same to make, but film camera sales are dropping. Digital is on the rise. Get out while the getting is good and save yourself running a production line at a loss.
The problem, as any good computer person should know, is Moore's Law as applied to camera sensors. Every 2 years or so they get a lot better. For a pro, it is a business move. Just buy a better camera every 2-3 years. For an amateur, its like buying a Pentium Pro and watching the P4s roll out. Yours works, but you lust after the best. 3MP - 6MP - 12MP+ But upgrading is $1000 ! Not an easy move to make, but doing it will dramatcally effect your picture quality (assuming you care about quality).
In the film camera world, it was easy to bypass most camera improvements. As long as the basic box was light tight, kept the film flat and the lens in focus, you were OK. Upgrades were at the lens or the film. Both of which were modular upgrades. It is common to see photographers with lenses stretching across decades. And of course film is as good as research can make it today. Not so with digital cameras. You are locked into the tech of the day you bought the camera. Some ROMs are upgradeable, but you won't be changing pixel count or fixing sensitivity issues that way. It is like buying a lifetime supply of film when you buy the camera. Cheaper, but you better love it.
Overall, the digital wave is a financial hit on the amateur and prosumer. A better medium exists, but it is economically unfeasable for a market that small. Going digital will lock these folks into something that is *almost* good enough, but will never be quite right. They have to ride the planned obsolescense train until Moor's Law takes them back to where they already are, at real film resolution, color, and contrast.
And This doesn't even address the problems of proprietary formats, memory, processing, etc.
Besides temperature and humidity, you could throw high Oxygen environment at it, and high UV. That would definitely increase aging.
With all respect to Whedon, the Serenity WAS a made for TV movie. There were scene transitions that practically shouted INSERT COMMERCIAL HERE. He's a great story producer, but he's still rough around the edges where cinema is concerned.
If only something could have been worked out, the money that went into Serenity could have funded a 2 - 3 episode miniseries, maybe more. More screen time for everyone, more time to lay out a bettr plot, more time to build word of mouth among the fanb... cognoscenti. If only Fox had brains.
If only pigs had wings...
It is news because Jimmy Wales is George Bush's alter ego in the Open community. Start a few initiatives that should be good in principle, but break down when the rubber hits the road. Make some rational explanations and you end up looking even worse. A few embarassing faux pas later and pretty soon you look bad just trying to tie your shoes.
I'm assuming there is some way to dig out of this public relations mess, but neither one seems able to do it.
When Jack Paar came back on the Tonight Show after a "hiatus" forced by NBC execs. His opening line was "As I was saying before I was interupted..." Futurama should do some riff on coming back from a time warp / black hole.
Do you expect the Slashdot Editors to actually Read Slashdot? That is asking far too much!
A little more poking around takes you to the abstract at Science Direct
and still be vulnerable? I am shocked and appalled. As is well known, any reputable software vendor would release flaw free code that could not possibly cause hidden attacks such as this. Clearly they are the scum of the earth and should be shunned for foisting such shoddy products off on the public. And if you believe THAT, I have this bridge for sale in a ratehr profitable location of a well known American city.
The book you describe may be wonderful. I wish I'd seen one as I was trying to learn (am still trying to learn) Unix.
And again, it points out that there still is not a good way to manage a system from a GUI. Like it or not, the GUI paradigm should be the way to go. I was raised on command line interfaces (real no kidding TeleType and DEC Writer machines). It is great for encouraging the user to have a mental picture of what is going on with the system. To have a Masterly grasp of the commands needed to administer the system. Being able to invoke the right command line incantations on cue is probably where the whole "wizard programmer" idea came from. But there is no substitute for a real on-screen picture to get the state of the system quickly and accurately. Less interpretation of cryptic messages on the part of the user means more accurate decision making and fewer configuration errors. Which means more reliable systems that can be handled by less trained people and deployed to more diverse places.
In other words, good GUI gets us further from the Cathedral. But, Hopefully not closer to the Bizarre.
No, no, no. If we allow the UN to manage the time for us, next thing you know it will be just like the ocean mining treaty or the Use of Outer Space treaty. They will declare time to be the "common heritage of all mankind" and everyone will want their own fair share. The UN will have to license clock manufacturing, to be sure all clocks conform to the regime. Leap second rationing will be imposed and of course that will lead to shortages and official corruption. Whenever a weathly nation buys a high precision clock, they will have to donate one to underdeveloped countries that can't afford them. Similarly, sundial time will be imposed on every developed nation in an effort to promote international understanding.
And once they start shoving Metric System timedown our throats, we'll all have to figure out how to convert back and forth from Regular time.
It is simply a nghtmare waiting to happen. Just say No.
Good idea, but it only solves half the ad revenue problem. The network is happy, it gets the national ads put into place. But the affiliates don't get to sell the local ads.
Us old time satelite dish guys still remember the dead air "holes" the networks leave in place for the locals to insert local spots in. You can tell the locals, they are the ones with real prices, real dates, locations you recognize, etc. Sometimes you can hear the little tweedle-chirp that triggers the local tape players on and off.