Cameras are getting cheaper in part because better, more expensive cameras are coming out. CPU time required for a given scene is dropping, but they're churning out more complex scenes with every movie. Models can be reused, but those models still need to be customized and improved for specific "roles". 3D tools are improving productivity, but the artists are being asked to produce more than ever.
CGI is one of those areas that will always expand to fill computing power. Movie makers will always want to eat up new cycles with a slightly more realistic algorithm, or a few more objects.
Also note that all of those things have been improving for the last 100 years, yet movies are still more expensive than ever.
With copyright out of the way, it might not take $50 million to make a "blockbuster" movie.
How do you figure? Are actors going to start working for free? Will the camera and lighting equipment stop being so expensive? Are the racks and racks of servers they use to generate the CGI going to just appear out nowhere? Are the CGI guys going to start donating their time? Are they going to magically "duplicate" the props, instead of renting or buying them?
Without copyright they might have an easier time picking the sound track, but very rarely is that a large percentage of the budget.
If there was no copyright law nobody would sell VHS/DVD/BluRay because it would be impossible to make money from them.
Fredie Mac, Fannie Mae and the *Federal* Reserve are government backed, held up by the government. The exact opposite of a free market.
I love the propaganda, though. "Those evil corporate CEOs, screwing the poor and getting rich by... uh... loaning poor people money they can't pay back. Um... They just keep giving money away to make themselves rich."
Clue: It only works when the corporate CEOs know the government will bail them out.
Perhaps you missed the part about independent. Almost all R and D issues are intended to keep your attention away from important issues in the first place. But just the same, D biased sources tend to present a logical argument for their views and R biased sources tend to present rhetoric. That isn't to say that there aren't reasoned arguments to support many R stances as well (as long as you exclude those related to moral and/or religious issues) the R's simply choose to use rhetoric rather than solid reason to support them.
I'd love to hear the logical arguments in favor of Obama's "tax the rich" plan? Isn't a big part of his platform equality and fairness?
It's all just observation. Again, the entire two party system is designed to make you focus on two equally bad choices. I think you'll discover that the corruption and abuse of power that both sides want you to ignore is a completely bi-partisan affair. Neither side lifts the power abuses imposed by the previous politicians, they simply enact laws that abuse you where their own philosophy allows. Repubs don't lift gun bans imposed by Dems, they only impose abuses of police power and remove your right to free speech. The reverse is equally true.
Here I agree with you. I just don't want people to forget that when they see the bias of CNN constantly ignored, but the bias of Fox News constantly pointed out.
What's with all the Fox News hate? They're biased, but CNN and MSNBC are at least as bad, and nobody ever complains about them. Hell, one of the hosts on CNN was wearing an Obama pin *on the air* on election day.
Are most consumers of CNN too narrow-minded to realize this? Or maybe being hugely biased is okay when it's in their favor?
In the shell, a lot of people (myself included) use "perl -e 'script...'" instead of awk, grep, sed, and the rest once the processing gets complicated enough. Maintainability is irrelevant because the script is specifically meant to be run one time to get the particular results you need.
In other words, instead of:
ps... | grep... | awk... | sed... | xargs... |...
Just:
ps... | perl -e '...'
If Ruby has something similar to the Perl's '-e' command line option it would probably work just as well.
You might want to think really hard before bragging that your candidate was supported by Nazis and Black Panthers.
There were at least two socialist parties that would (supposedly) be more in line with their views, but they still decided to vote for Obama. Just something to think about.
I guess we have a different opinion on the meaning of "out of the box".
If you pick the "Desktop environment" "task" during a Debian net install, you get GNOME by default. That's what I meant by "out of the box". I'd say going with the base install and using apt-get to install what you need to be "extra work" and require "extra" knowledge. That's not a bad thing, but somebody expecting a lightweight install might be surprised.
On the other hand, the default installs for distros like Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux include lightweight window managers (JWM, Fluxbox, XFCE) automatically.
I want Linux to succeed as much as anyone (see e.g. my other posts on how I've tried it many times over the years and admire its ideals), but pretending like there's no problems with its usability is not helping the cause.
I think somebody here has the signature: "UNIX is very user friendly, it's just very picky about its friends." I can't speak for the EEE PC, but I use Linux every day on several computers, and I'm honestly not seeing many usability problems. Certainly none that rule out its use entirely. If anything, it comes down to difference of opinion.
Like I said before: Linux is not, and will never be Windows. There are fundamental differences between the two that aren't going away just because a lot of people only know Windows. Making Linux more "user friendly" for Windows users would likely turn off a lot of the existing users and developers. The power and flexibility that makes the learning curve so steep is part of what's drawn so many people to Linux in the first place.
That's like saying Sprint should pay me to peer with my tiny home network because Sprint would have more connections being initiated. It doesn't make any sense.
Cogent should pay Sprint to peer with them because Sprint has more to offer than Cogent does. It's more likely Cogent customers want access to Sprint's larger network than it is Sprint's customers want access to Cogent's smaller network. At least that's the theory.
At this point it's basically down to who's customers scream about it loudest. If enough Sprint customers up and leave over it I'm sure they'll change their mind.
There's a usability gap because you already know the Windows way of doing it. I'm used to the Linux way of doing it, so I would consider the Windows way just as cryptic and unusable. The difference is that I'm not going out and buying Windows products and then complaining about it when they're unfamiliar to me.
Use Linux. Or don't. I honestly don't care. But when you come on Slashdot and dump on Linux simply because you're unfamiliar with it, I'm going to say something.
You're right, I'm sure if I poured a few hundred hours into it, I could become extremely comfortable in Linux. However, I just wasn't (and am not) willing to attempt the learning curve, not when it's this steep.
Then what the hell is your point? Here's a clue: Linux isn't Windows. It's never going to be Windows. If you don't want to learn something new, stick with Windows and stop whining.
Your entire complaint basically boils down to, "I don't know Linux, and I don't want to, but now I know it's not Windows." Good fucking job! I just always figured Linux and Windows were exactly the same, but now, thanks to your incredible insight, I'm aware that Linux and Windows are in fact different! Wow!
Don't take this the wrong way, but if you can't get Linux to run on a legacy PC, it's almost certainly a lack of effort on your part.
People seem to get confused by the fact that it's technically possible (and IMO relatively easy) to strip down Linux and make it run on old crap hardware. They seem to get the idea that Linux distros are aiming for that old crap hardware, so Linux will run on them out of the box. That's not true, and with few exceptions all of the popular distros are aiming for the relatively new PC market. So yes, you CAN strip them down to run on a given machine, but it's not likely to work well out of the box. You're going to have to do a little work. There are distros where the base install is meant for old hardware, but Xubuntu isn't one of them.
Trying to run Ubuntu or Xubuntu on an ancient crap machine is like trying to run the latest greatest version of Vista on it. I'm sure you can do it, but you'll need to spend some time tweaking things. The advantage of using Linux for old machines is that Linux makes that tweaking easy and offers more tuning knobs than Windows.
There's sufficient information available so that the "authorized" players don't need to brute force AES-256, so it must be possible for open players to find that information and play the movie. There's nothing "magic" about the authorized code.
There's a module in CPAN for this. It rips out the images and runs them through Tesseract. It's worked well the few times I've tried it. Certainly well enough for search engine indexing.
Also, my understanding of the "dark web" concept was that it refered to sites that had no links going to them, so no spiders are able to access them. I'm not seeing how any of this would fix the "problem".
The only news here is that Google doesn't already index form content in drop down boxes and selection menus. Seems that would have been a fairly obvious extension.
Moryath said nothing about personally buying the game. The problem is that people buy from EA in good faith and get screwed. That is the problem. Sometimes I think people miss the point of what the hell they're reading.
Yeah. They buy games from EA again and again and again and (supposedly) get screwed every time. It's hard to feel sorry for people who keep making the same mistake over and over again.
The first time sucks. But when you buy another game from the same company that's screwed you in the past - a company that has a well known reputation for buggy, DRM infested crap - then you're not getting screwed, you're getting what you deserve.
EA doesn't make games without DRM, so you're basically shit out of luck. It's like saying "I hate the GPL, but I want to sell a modified version of Linux." It's unfortunate, but it's not your decision to make.
I never said that.
You said:
With music and movie's if you don't want to be treated as a criminal you simply download everything and there's no harm done.
I took it that you meant you can just download music and movies from The Pirate Bay or some P2P network when you don't like the DRM/license/whatever, which would violate copyright law. If you meant something else then I apologize.
With music and movie's if you don't want to be treated as a criminal you simply download everything and there's no harm done.
I think you misunderstood me. I wasn't suggesting that the OP should break the law. And when did it become okay to say, "I don't like this law, so I'm just going to ignore it." Idiot.
But with multiplayer games you NEED to connect to a server and its this "phone home" nature of online games that gets people.
I know this is going to blow your mind, but you don't NEED to play video games. If you think the game sucks because it's buggy and filled with DRM, don't fucking play it. It's not rocket science.
And of course, they'll ban anyone who complains about the constant bugs and shoddy coding in their games and wants to see a patch to make the game usable. Why should they care? They already got what they wanted (your money), you got screwed because they sold a crappy product that doesn't work and can't be returned to the store... they're happy, you're not, but they don't give a crap about the customer.
Who's holding a gun to your head and making you buy EA games? Bad news: if you continually buy games you know have "constant bugs", "shoddy coding" and horrible DRM, you're an idiot. The funny thing is, that buying the games when you know they're bad is reinforcing EA's behavior. They're releasing crap, and still making a ton of money. Why should they put in the extra effort to release quality games when people will knowingly buy up the crap just as well? EA doesn't care about your crybaby whining - they care about money in their bank account.
I know it's a tragedy you may have to go without the latest revision of the same crappy football game or the newest Doom rip-off, but if you're not going to be happy with it anyway, why do you get it at all?
Welcome to soviet russ....er EA-Land, Where Game Plays You.
Sometimes I think people miss the point of Soviet Russia jokes.
Well I'm not suggesting people go buy a new multi-core machine just for a tiny TrueCrypt speedup, but since most new machines have multiple cores they might as well take advantage of it.
As for modifying the software, it probably depends on how much effort was required to get the speedup.
That is interesting - if the overhead was really 1%, then why even bother with optimizations for multi cores?
Because then the overhead would be even less than 1%? Seems fairly obvious to me. Some of us actually like our brand new machines to run faster than the machines being replaced. Go figure.
If the Pentagon wants something that has been developed overseas, they'll import it. Or their contractor will. There are amendments to ITAR that allow this if the technology is not available in the USA. Contractors like Boeing and Lockheed have been bitten enough times for export problems that they've moved their R&D offshore, particularly for dual use technology (stuff used in commercial aviation and space programs).
You're kind of missing the point. The technologies that are illegal to export are developed here, in the US, under DoD contracts. If Boeing tried telling them that they planned on doing all their classified development work in China, they wouldn't get the contract. Hell, most of the contracts are written so that the work doesn't even belong to the contractor, it belongs to the government. The DoD will never let classified R&D be done in foreign countries, and that's most likely the export restricted technology the article is talking about.
There will come a time that if the US military wants to fight with anything more than pointed sticks, it will have to be imported.
LOL! Don't hold your breath. The US spends more on defense than the next 80 something countries combined, and that's not going to change any time soon. If the DoD says "We want made in America," it'll be made in America.
I'd guess about 99% of the violations involve military related technology and research. There's no way that development is ever going to be out sourced. In fact, most of it probably only exists because the government is paying for it in the first place.
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If people are willing to pay them that much, then yes, they should make that much money.
Get back to me when actors and movie studios start putting guns to people's heads, forcing them to cough up money and sit through movies.
You're trolling right? Or are you really that stupid?
That's not true for a number of reasons.
Cameras are getting cheaper in part because better, more expensive cameras are coming out. CPU time required for a given scene is dropping, but they're churning out more complex scenes with every movie. Models can be reused, but those models still need to be customized and improved for specific "roles". 3D tools are improving productivity, but the artists are being asked to produce more than ever.
CGI is one of those areas that will always expand to fill computing power. Movie makers will always want to eat up new cycles with a slightly more realistic algorithm, or a few more objects.
Also note that all of those things have been improving for the last 100 years, yet movies are still more expensive than ever.
How do you figure? Are actors going to start working for free? Will the camera and lighting equipment stop being so expensive? Are the racks and racks of servers they use to generate the CGI going to just appear out nowhere? Are the CGI guys going to start donating their time? Are they going to magically "duplicate" the props, instead of renting or buying them?
Without copyright they might have an easier time picking the sound track, but very rarely is that a large percentage of the budget.
If there was no copyright law nobody would sell VHS/DVD/BluRay because it would be impossible to make money from them.
Fredie Mac, Fannie Mae and the *Federal* Reserve are government backed, held up by the government. The exact opposite of a free market.
I love the propaganda, though. "Those evil corporate CEOs, screwing the poor and getting rich by ... uh... loaning poor people money they can't pay back. Um... They just keep giving money away to make themselves rich."
Clue: It only works when the corporate CEOs know the government will bail them out.
I'd love to hear the logical arguments in favor of Obama's "tax the rich" plan? Isn't a big part of his platform equality and fairness?
Here I agree with you. I just don't want people to forget that when they see the bias of CNN constantly ignored, but the bias of Fox News constantly pointed out.
What's with all the Fox News hate? They're biased, but CNN and MSNBC are at least as bad, and nobody ever complains about them. Hell, one of the hosts on CNN was wearing an Obama pin *on the air* on election day.
Are most consumers of CNN too narrow-minded to realize this? Or maybe being hugely biased is okay when it's in their favor?
I think you missed the OP's point.
In the shell, a lot of people (myself included) use "perl -e 'script...'" instead of awk, grep, sed, and the rest once the processing gets complicated enough. Maintainability is irrelevant because the script is specifically meant to be run one time to get the particular results you need.
In other words, instead of:
ps ... | grep ... | awk ... | sed ... | xargs ... | ...
Just:
ps ... | perl -e '...'
If Ruby has something similar to the Perl's '-e' command line option it would probably work just as well.
You might want to think really hard before bragging that your candidate was supported by Nazis and Black Panthers.
There were at least two socialist parties that would (supposedly) be more in line with their views, but they still decided to vote for Obama. Just something to think about.
Disclaimer: I didn't vote for Obama or McCain.
I guess we have a different opinion on the meaning of "out of the box".
If you pick the "Desktop environment" "task" during a Debian net install, you get GNOME by default. That's what I meant by "out of the box". I'd say going with the base install and using apt-get to install what you need to be "extra work" and require "extra" knowledge. That's not a bad thing, but somebody expecting a lightweight install might be surprised.
On the other hand, the default installs for distros like Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux include lightweight window managers (JWM, Fluxbox, XFCE) automatically.
Sigh. Once the customer pays Sprint, it's not the customer's money any more.
I think somebody here has the signature: "UNIX is very user friendly, it's just very picky about its friends." I can't speak for the EEE PC, but I use Linux every day on several computers, and I'm honestly not seeing many usability problems. Certainly none that rule out its use entirely. If anything, it comes down to difference of opinion.
Like I said before: Linux is not, and will never be Windows. There are fundamental differences between the two that aren't going away just because a lot of people only know Windows. Making Linux more "user friendly" for Windows users would likely turn off a lot of the existing users and developers. The power and flexibility that makes the learning curve so steep is part of what's drawn so many people to Linux in the first place.
That's like saying Sprint should pay me to peer with my tiny home network because Sprint would have more connections being initiated. It doesn't make any sense.
Cogent should pay Sprint to peer with them because Sprint has more to offer than Cogent does. It's more likely Cogent customers want access to Sprint's larger network than it is Sprint's customers want access to Cogent's smaller network. At least that's the theory.
At this point it's basically down to who's customers scream about it loudest. If enough Sprint customers up and leave over it I'm sure they'll change their mind.
There's a usability gap because you already know the Windows way of doing it. I'm used to the Linux way of doing it, so I would consider the Windows way just as cryptic and unusable. The difference is that I'm not going out and buying Windows products and then complaining about it when they're unfamiliar to me.
Use Linux. Or don't. I honestly don't care. But when you come on Slashdot and dump on Linux simply because you're unfamiliar with it, I'm going to say something.
Then what the hell is your point? Here's a clue: Linux isn't Windows. It's never going to be Windows. If you don't want to learn something new, stick with Windows and stop whining.
Your entire complaint basically boils down to, "I don't know Linux, and I don't want to, but now I know it's not Windows." Good fucking job! I just always figured Linux and Windows were exactly the same, but now, thanks to your incredible insight, I'm aware that Linux and Windows are in fact different! Wow!
Don't take this the wrong way, but if you can't get Linux to run on a legacy PC, it's almost certainly a lack of effort on your part.
People seem to get confused by the fact that it's technically possible (and IMO relatively easy) to strip down Linux and make it run on old crap hardware. They seem to get the idea that Linux distros are aiming for that old crap hardware, so Linux will run on them out of the box. That's not true, and with few exceptions all of the popular distros are aiming for the relatively new PC market. So yes, you CAN strip them down to run on a given machine, but it's not likely to work well out of the box. You're going to have to do a little work. There are distros where the base install is meant for old hardware, but Xubuntu isn't one of them.
Trying to run Ubuntu or Xubuntu on an ancient crap machine is like trying to run the latest greatest version of Vista on it. I'm sure you can do it, but you'll need to spend some time tweaking things. The advantage of using Linux for old machines is that Linux makes that tweaking easy and offers more tuning knobs than Windows.
There's sufficient information available so that the "authorized" players don't need to brute force AES-256, so it must be possible for open players to find that information and play the movie. There's nothing "magic" about the authorized code.
There's a module in CPAN for this. It rips out the images and runs them through Tesseract. It's worked well the few times I've tried it. Certainly well enough for search engine indexing.
Also, my understanding of the "dark web" concept was that it refered to sites that had no links going to them, so no spiders are able to access them. I'm not seeing how any of this would fix the "problem".
The only news here is that Google doesn't already index form content in drop down boxes and selection menus. Seems that would have been a fairly obvious extension.
Yeah. They buy games from EA again and again and again and (supposedly) get screwed every time. It's hard to feel sorry for people who keep making the same mistake over and over again.
The first time sucks. But when you buy another game from the same company that's screwed you in the past - a company that has a well known reputation for buggy, DRM infested crap - then you're not getting screwed, you're getting what you deserve.
EA doesn't make games without DRM, so you're basically shit out of luck. It's like saying "I hate the GPL, but I want to sell a modified version of Linux." It's unfortunate, but it's not your decision to make.
You said:
I took it that you meant you can just download music and movies from The Pirate Bay or some P2P network when you don't like the DRM/license/whatever, which would violate copyright law. If you meant something else then I apologize.
I think you misunderstood me. I wasn't suggesting that the OP should break the law. And when did it become okay to say, "I don't like this law, so I'm just going to ignore it." Idiot.
I know this is going to blow your mind, but you don't NEED to play video games. If you think the game sucks because it's buggy and filled with DRM, don't fucking play it. It's not rocket science.
Who's holding a gun to your head and making you buy EA games? Bad news: if you continually buy games you know have "constant bugs", "shoddy coding" and horrible DRM, you're an idiot. The funny thing is, that buying the games when you know they're bad is reinforcing EA's behavior. They're releasing crap, and still making a ton of money. Why should they put in the extra effort to release quality games when people will knowingly buy up the crap just as well? EA doesn't care about your crybaby whining - they care about money in their bank account.
I know it's a tragedy you may have to go without the latest revision of the same crappy football game or the newest Doom rip-off, but if you're not going to be happy with it anyway, why do you get it at all?
Sometimes I think people miss the point of Soviet Russia jokes.
Well I'm not suggesting people go buy a new multi-core machine just for a tiny TrueCrypt speedup, but since most new machines have multiple cores they might as well take advantage of it.
As for modifying the software, it probably depends on how much effort was required to get the speedup.
Because then the overhead would be even less than 1%? Seems fairly obvious to me. Some of us actually like our brand new machines to run faster than the machines being replaced. Go figure.
You're kind of missing the point. The technologies that are illegal to export are developed here, in the US, under DoD contracts. If Boeing tried telling them that they planned on doing all their classified development work in China, they wouldn't get the contract. Hell, most of the contracts are written so that the work doesn't even belong to the contractor, it belongs to the government. The DoD will never let classified R&D be done in foreign countries, and that's most likely the export restricted technology the article is talking about.
LOL! Don't hold your breath. The US spends more on defense than the next 80 something countries combined, and that's not going to change any time soon. If the DoD says "We want made in America," it'll be made in America.
You're not thinking about the right technology.
I'd guess about 99% of the violations involve military related technology and research. There's no way that development is ever going to be out sourced. In fact, most of it probably only exists because the government is paying for it in the first place.