"People will probably start asking the same questions:"
No they won't. The vast majority of people do not even know what kind of CPU is inside their computers, couldn't explain what a CPU is, and wouldn't care even if they did know. You're making the same mistake that every other DIY PC user makes: you think the average user is just like you. They aren't. Mac users may be a minority, but that's nothing compared to the tiny, miniscule minority of people who would never ask the questions you listed. I'm sure Apple is quite happy to ignore that tiny handful of DIY people (who would never buy a Mac anyway) and go after everyone else. As the above poster pointed out, so far it seems to be working.
In the video the guy keeps saying "Apple" over and over and flashes the logo of the Macbook at the camera, but never says the brand of the third party hardware he's using. Obviously he wanted the word "Apple" to stick in people's minds, and he makes the reasons for that "abundantly clear" with that juicy cigarette stab quote in the Washington Post (which actually did point out that the flaw was in third party drivers, not Apple's, how about that).
And yeah, I know, his excuse for not mentioning the vendor of the third party hardware was his disclosure "policy". That's a lame excuse. The guy was trying to grab publicity by slyly picking on a high-profile target, and it backfired.
"...their ire about the Mac community in general..."
When did they display that?
I guess you missed this little gem from the Washington Post, a direct quote from one of the dudes:
...if you watch those 'Get a Mac' commercials enough, it eventually makes you want to stab one of those users in the eye with a lit cigarette or something.
As you said, ire indeed (only this time, it actually applies).
They made it EXPLICITY clear that they were using a 3rd party wireless card, I mean, they said it like four times (as if it wasn't obvious from the video anyway).
And yet they had to add the statement on their website. Obviously they weren't being quite as clear as they could have been. Given their cigarette-stabbing-in-face bias, I wouldn't be surprised if they were deliberately trying to mislead people.
Re:/proc on steroids
on
Driving Plan 9
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you're referring to surrogate pairs, those are a result of the insistence by Microsoft and IBM at including so many thousands of compatibility characters for their existing character sets. Everything currently in Unicode could have easily fit within 65k chars if it weren't for those two companies. The original vision of Unicode as pushed by engineers from Xerox and Apple (I know some of them) did not include surrogates.
Also, you talk as though UTF-8 were inherently superior to UTF-16 because of the smaller space taken up by ASCII-rage characters. However, for data that is say... east Asian, UTF-8 is actually larger (characters in the unified Han range take up 3 bytes instead of 2).
Not everyone in the world speaks English, and UTF-8 is not optimal for everyone and every situation. There is more to life that ASCII compatibility.
You don't bank online, but you do allow recurring automatic withdrawals? Okay...
Also, putting everything into one account with a debit card attached to it puts you at risk of being wiped out if someone gets ahold of your number. Yeah, yeah, you can get it all put back through fraud reversal, BUT, until you do, you are temporarily out of money! Using a no-fee credit card will sheild you from that sort of thing, as the money is NOT immediately withdrawn from your account whenever a purchase is made. Real credit cards also make it easier to rent a car and other simple transactions, due to their built-in protections.
Also, look into a credit union instead of a bank. Better interest rates and lower fees.
Also, put that 50% you never touch into a 6 month CD, and renew it each time it expires. More interest for you, and it's easy to get at in an emergency. If you're really worried, make it a 3 month CD.
It's not kool aid, it was the plan all along. I worked at HP from 95 to 97, when Lew Platt was CEO, and even then the roadmap being preached all over the company was to use the new intel VLIW arch (which didn't have the Itanium name yet) while PA-RISC was going to be end-of-life'd.
I agree with everything you said, however this jumped out at me:
Your testers (if you have any)
That "if" shouldn't really exist. Projects without official testers still end up having testers, except they end up being the customers. This is bad. A good tester can be hard to find, but once you get your hands on one, keep them happy and get them to help you hire more like them.
If you look at the comments on the blog he linked to, someone already posted that quote (along with a link to its source). Didn't stop the parks department from sending cops out to harass photographers anyway.
Grain is not "useless" or "noise", it's what carries the image.
Besides, modern filmstocks, when properly exposed, produce grain too small to be seen at HDTV resolution. If you see grain that big, it's either intentional, sloppy, or cheap.
Re:monopolies to commodities: won't get fooled aga
on
Net Neutrality or Not?
·
· Score: 1
People don't want content from the ISPs, they want packets pushed around, and that means a commodity market for packet delivery. Telecommunication companies that can adapt to a commodity market will survive. Ones that can't will talk about how they need to charge people for their "enhanced content".
They are doing more than talk about it. They have successfully gotten Congress on their side. The commodity market you speak of is dead, dead, dead.
Back in the mid 90s, at the beginning of the dot-com boom, there was a certain class of starry-eyed fool running around saying the internet "can't be controlled". This was the same set of people who also kept proclaiming companies which didn't give all their stuff away online for free didn't "get it". At the time, I recall wondering how these people could be so naive. Once the internet became too big, everyone would be dependent on a small handful of very large companies which controlled all the major links in the internet. Those companies could then get together and begin to... control the internet.
Here we are 10 years later, and sure enough, the vast majority of net traffic in the US passes through one of the big three telcos. And those three big telcos have now had the last laugh against the starry-eyed prognosticators. Last week's Congress vote was the final nail in the coffin of any notion of an internet which "can't be controlled". It's over, it's done. The end.
You've never worked at a big company in the upper levels, have you?
CEOs and other execs ask for personal favors from people under them all the time, even when it doesn't make sense. You can bet that Steve B. didn't call the support line, he just went down the hall to whatever engineer he happened to think of off the top of his head and said "hey, can you take a look?" Sounds like a casual request, but since he's the CEO, the guy will have to drop everything and do it. And because it's his ass on the line if it doesn't get done, he's not going to just hand it off to support either. He's going to fix it himself, or at the most get someone he works closely with and trusts to help him.
I doubt Steve B. assigned a whole department to it or anything, but I find it 100% believable that he would ask someone fairly high up to look at it, because that's who he knows.
You are completely missing the point. You even stated his point explicitly ("If you want the artist to be paid, you need to find another way"), but didn't seem to recognize its significance.
Even if the payment is "mixed in" with other stuff, there should still be some record of the royalties specifically from allofmp3.com. Maybe it's not in the form of a check, but there must be some record of it somewhere. That's all he's asking for. His assertion is that it can't be provided because it doesn't exist (i.e., no royalties are being paid). So far no one has proven him wrong.
I dunno, the language on this page makes it sound like it was an experimental demo which existed first, and then someone saw and decided would look cool in the movie, not the other way around.
I was also a bit surprised that the HD-DVD of 'Samurai' sported stronger colors and better blacks than the standard DVD version, even though they appear minted from the same master. The considerably increased detail of the HD-DVD format also gives the image a better sense of contrast, as distinct picture elements like the glint on a blade or fine clothing textures now "pop" off the screen more, as opposing areas of light and dark are now more pronounced.
The author sounds utterly confused, as if he expected the only difference to be the number of pixels. If he actually knew anything about video, he would know that most modern HD formats define a different colorspace than most SD formats. The difference in color is expected.
Instead of wasting money on IMAX, they could bring back 5-perf 70mm, which was popular in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. It would cost a fraction of what all these wasteful IMAX blowups cost. The quality would still be miles ahead of anything a person could get in regular 35mm or especially at home. And since it can be installed in a regular auditorium, they could get back to showing feature films in a large, high quality format but without the horrible sightlines IMAX theaters typically have. That would also take care of two of the biggest problems with IMAX, namely shutter flicker (only one pulse per frame in IMAX, ugh), and hotspots (screen is brighter in the middle than at the edges because most IMAX theaters have "gain" screens for 3D, which are mathematically impossible to evenly light).
Too bad Hollywood seems to have arbitrarily decided 70mm is a "thing of the past" (you can actually hear a producer say that during a commentary track on the Die Hard 3 DVD). They could learn a thing or to from this "past" they like to denigrate so much.
3. Start to use digital projectors. (Make the experience better with better looking films.)
Uh, no. Not unless you want the quality to be worse. The contrast and resolution still aren't there. The quality of a good, properly projected film print far exceeds that of any currently available video projector. In the future there might be something that can compete, but not today.
Instead, studios should just spend the extra 5% or so it would cost to print on Kodak 2393 stock. That would vastly improve quality. A few movies each year are printed this way, but really, all of them should be. And don't get me started on 5 perf 70mm, wet-gate, and other well known technologies that have been worked in the past and would make the film expreience as good as it could and should be. Installing video projectors in theaters is not the answer. "Digital" is not a magic bullet.
Don't understimate the importance of this. It will cost you more up front, but having a thinner, lighter laptop will make it much more enjoyable to use. Get one that's too heavy and clunky, and you may find yourself not wanting to use it very much, and even wishing you hadn't bought it.
That's an interesting idea, but it introduces a whole set of problems that could ruin the atmosphere.
If a story takes place in an alternate universe, you can just ignore or alter the laws of physics at will. But when it takes place in the "real world", you have a lot of explaining to do, and it takes your imaginary fantasy universe and grounds it, limiting the freedom of it. It might be cool, but it would be very hard to pull it off without killing the fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, that "never" shouldn't be there. Oops.
No they won't. The vast majority of people do not even know what kind of CPU is inside their computers, couldn't explain what a CPU is, and wouldn't care even if they did know. You're making the same mistake that every other DIY PC user makes: you think the average user is just like you. They aren't. Mac users may be a minority, but that's nothing compared to the tiny, miniscule minority of people who would never ask the questions you listed. I'm sure Apple is quite happy to ignore that tiny handful of DIY people (who would never buy a Mac anyway) and go after everyone else. As the above poster pointed out, so far it seems to be working.
And yeah, I know, his excuse for not mentioning the vendor of the third party hardware was his disclosure "policy". That's a lame excuse. The guy was trying to grab publicity by slyly picking on a high-profile target, and it backfired.
When did they display that?
I guess you missed this little gem from the Washington Post, a direct quote from one of the dudes:
As you said, ire indeed (only this time, it actually applies).And yet they had to add the statement on their website. Obviously they weren't being quite as clear as they could have been. Given their cigarette-stabbing-in-face bias, I wouldn't be surprised if they were deliberately trying to mislead people.
Also, you talk as though UTF-8 were inherently superior to UTF-16 because of the smaller space taken up by ASCII-rage characters. However, for data that is say ... east Asian, UTF-8 is actually larger (characters in the unified Han range take up 3 bytes instead of 2).
Not everyone in the world speaks English, and UTF-8 is not optimal for everyone and every situation. There is more to life that ASCII compatibility.
Also, putting everything into one account with a debit card attached to it puts you at risk of being wiped out if someone gets ahold of your number. Yeah, yeah, you can get it all put back through fraud reversal, BUT, until you do, you are temporarily out of money! Using a no-fee credit card will sheild you from that sort of thing, as the money is NOT immediately withdrawn from your account whenever a purchase is made. Real credit cards also make it easier to rent a car and other simple transactions, due to their built-in protections.
Also, look into a credit union instead of a bank. Better interest rates and lower fees.
Also, put that 50% you never touch into a 6 month CD, and renew it each time it expires. More interest for you, and it's easy to get at in an emergency. If you're really worried, make it a 3 month CD.
It's not kool aid, it was the plan all along. I worked at HP from 95 to 97, when Lew Platt was CEO, and even then the roadmap being preached all over the company was to use the new intel VLIW arch (which didn't have the Itanium name yet) while PA-RISC was going to be end-of-life'd.
Too bad they'll never catch him.
If you look at the comments on the blog he linked to, someone already posted that quote (along with a link to its source). Didn't stop the parks department from sending cops out to harass photographers anyway.
Besides, modern filmstocks, when properly exposed, produce grain too small to be seen at HDTV resolution. If you see grain that big, it's either intentional, sloppy, or cheap.
Back in the mid 90s, at the beginning of the dot-com boom, there was a certain class of starry-eyed fool running around saying the internet "can't be controlled". This was the same set of people who also kept proclaiming companies which didn't give all their stuff away online for free didn't "get it". At the time, I recall wondering how these people could be so naive. Once the internet became too big, everyone would be dependent on a small handful of very large companies which controlled all the major links in the internet. Those companies could then get together and begin to ... control the internet.
Here we are 10 years later, and sure enough, the vast majority of net traffic in the US passes through one of the big three telcos. And those three big telcos have now had the last laugh against the starry-eyed prognosticators. Last week's Congress vote was the final nail in the coffin of any notion of an internet which "can't be controlled". It's over, it's done. The end.
There was also the Atanosoff Berry Computer at around the same time as the Z3. Work first began on it in 1935.
CEOs and other execs ask for personal favors from people under them all the time, even when it doesn't make sense. You can bet that Steve B. didn't call the support line, he just went down the hall to whatever engineer he happened to think of off the top of his head and said "hey, can you take a look?" Sounds like a casual request, but since he's the CEO, the guy will have to drop everything and do it. And because it's his ass on the line if it doesn't get done, he's not going to just hand it off to support either. He's going to fix it himself, or at the most get someone he works closely with and trusts to help him.
I doubt Steve B. assigned a whole department to it or anything, but I find it 100% believable that he would ask someone fairly high up to look at it, because that's who he knows.
Does your "enterprise" not know about DHCP?
But if sales aren't good enough, they'll say: "See! Nobody wants that old junk any more -- we're never releasing again!"
Even if the payment is "mixed in" with other stuff, there should still be some record of the royalties specifically from allofmp3.com. Maybe it's not in the form of a check, but there must be some record of it somewhere. That's all he's asking for. His assertion is that it can't be provided because it doesn't exist (i.e., no royalties are being paid). So far no one has proven him wrong.
I dunno, the language on this page makes it sound like it was an experimental demo which existed first, and then someone saw and decided would look cool in the movie, not the other way around.
But you'll bitch and moan about broken PNG support in IE?
Also, have you unblocked the W3C validator yet?
Too bad Hollywood seems to have arbitrarily decided 70mm is a "thing of the past" (you can actually hear a producer say that during a commentary track on the Die Hard 3 DVD). They could learn a thing or to from this "past" they like to denigrate so much.
Uh, no. Not unless you want the quality to be worse. The contrast and resolution still aren't there. The quality of a good, properly projected film print far exceeds that of any currently available video projector. In the future there might be something that can compete, but not today.
Instead, studios should just spend the extra 5% or so it would cost to print on Kodak 2393 stock. That would vastly improve quality. A few movies each year are printed this way, but really, all of them should be. And don't get me started on 5 perf 70mm, wet-gate, and other well known technologies that have been worked in the past and would make the film expreience as good as it could and should be. Installing video projectors in theaters is not the answer. "Digital" is not a magic bullet.
Don't understimate the importance of this. It will cost you more up front, but having a thinner, lighter laptop will make it much more enjoyable to use. Get one that's too heavy and clunky, and you may find yourself not wanting to use it very much, and even wishing you hadn't bought it.
If a story takes place in an alternate universe, you can just ignore or alter the laws of physics at will. But when it takes place in the "real world", you have a lot of explaining to do, and it takes your imaginary fantasy universe and grounds it, limiting the freedom of it. It might be cool, but it would be very hard to pull it off without killing the fun.