but slogging and churning on an Athlon XP with a GeForce card today would be hard work for even the worse game programmer
You know I truly think that people VASTLY over-estimate the power of today's PCs (as they have done for years now): It is EASY to make a current system beg for mercy, and the reality is that most current games make huge compromises to allow them to run reasonably on the current crop of PCs. Sure, maybe a texture-mapped tunnel looks great and runs at 200fps, but go to and outdoor scene and things can start to slog to a crawl. I love the game Operation Flashpoint, yet on my GF3 Ti200 it is noticably stuttering at times : Before you disparage the authors -> This is by far the most complex and impressive graphics I've ever seen in a game, yet still it leaves a massive, gigantic opening for improvements (which I'm sure they'll do as the hardware improves).
Flight Sim 2002 has the ability to model unbelievably complex scenarios, including hundreds of other planes, buildings, ground traffic, weather patterns, ATC, etc. Don't underestimate what is possible in a flight sim. Falcon 4 is a tremendous game, and is a couple of years old, yet still it makes my system groan for mercy when I get near the FLOT : They tried to partly simulate reality without as many shortcuts and the hardware just wasn't there.
I agree that a lot of people grossly overpay, however you mentioned that he plays flight sims: These are among the most hardware intensive games available (i.e. A machine that can kick ass in Quake 3 might slog and churn playing Flight Sim 2002). Sure you can turn down the features, but he if he spends lots of time playing then he might be exactly the sort of person to appreciate having every slider near the max, with extensive ground traffic, clouds, weather, etc.
Agreed. It wasn't the best movie I've ever seen, but it wasn't all THAT inplausable : For instance the ventilation system wasn't self contained because the room was never intended for long term living : During a home invasion you hop in and stay there until the police arrive - at most maybe 15 minutes : You don't hope that the invaders don't pump noxious fumes in over a 24 hour stay. The phone didn't work, as was explained in the movie, because as new tenants she didn't get around to hooking it up. And exactly as you explained: Would it have been a good movie if it were over in 10 minutes as the police arrive and drag the criminals away?
Ouch! Touche! I apologize for doubting source code reading, and should correct myself: I meant to say that I've hand audited every line of the kernel and have my own custom build of Apache running.
Bah. As mentioned, I am not an administrator : I am a software developer (and quite a good one too, thanks), and one thing that I learned early on in this hobby turned education turned career is that only trivial implementations are quick and easy to understand. All others require a pretty good time investment (otherwise you're more dangerous than helpful), and that's time that most people don't have. It's the reason that security faults have found to exist in open source products, used by thousands of people, for years: Who has the time to know the code? Yeah I'm sure there's one or two, but the overwhelming majority have better things to do.
This makes no sense. Already people can watch nationwide news if they want, and the reason that local news exists right now is because it's local : You might not think much happens in Ass End if your criteria is murders and collapsing buildings, but I'm sure the local inhabitants tune in to find out what happened in the big pumpkin contest, or how the beauty pageant went : Local coverage already has hefty competition, and that's why local coverage does best when they make it actually local.
I think the same thing goes for digital radio from satellites : While I enjoy the radio most of all, truth be told I like hearing an announcer that I know is from my region, ready to tell me about the conditions of the highway that I'm driving on. Abstract it too much and I'd rather just listen to a CD.
It appears to me that the fight is to allow them to broadcast local stations OUTSIDE of the local viewing area, not to obtain the right to not broadcast local stations (phew...don't do what johnny don't does!) to the local viewing area. In other words it seems to be largely the opposite of Taco's take on it. Maybe I'm reading it wrong though...
The vast majority of what people do in situations that would require a cellular modem would be largely downstream, so I doubt there are many customers at all that would find the 153Kbps upstream limiting (especially given that most cellular connections nowadays are about 14Kbps at best). i.e. I don't think many people want to host Quake3 games from their laptops over a cellular connection, but with those speeds you could play a game on another host just fine.
You'd lose that wager. I look at source code all the time to solve problems. I haven't had a problem yet that I haven't been able to discover exactly why it happened.
I don't want to call you a liar, but if indeed this is true then you are an EXTREMELY rare case. Indeed, as a professional software developer I find this hard to believe : I find it difficult and time consuming to understand my own code 3 days after I've written it, so I find it incredibly hard to believe that someone can jump into any of the open source code, most of which could best be described as spaghetti code of complex relationships and undocumented correlations, and just "fix up something" (without a MASSIVE investment of time). Could you tell me an instance where you had a problem and went in the code and fixed it?
Psychological addiction is a personality thing, and ANYTHING can be `addictive' psychologically: Reading books, running, swimming, gambling, watching TV, watching soap operas or Jenny Jones. Of course we come to the point of defining what "addiction" is, and contrary to many people's opinions: Addiction is not that someone spends more time doing an activity than you would enjoy -> Your opinion of the enjoyment of something is not relevant to someone else's enjoyment. Addiction is also not when someone spends so much time doing something that they neglect the things that you feel are important : i.e. Maybe they don't WANT to work 60 hours a week, or get an MBA, or read the combined works of Chaucer. Maybe they don't like going to the bar on Friday nights, and maybe they actually enjoy the social atmosphere of an online game. Hell, it is fair to say that someone might be living the dream life working at Burger King, playing EQ all night : If they're happy and that's their goal, then that's fantastic, and that's more than can be said about many people who live very productive lives, miserably slogging along until the day they die.
Instead, addiction (at least to the generally mentally healthy) is personally defined: If someone spends so much time at something that they feel personal shame about letting other things slide, and this turns into a cycle of shame and procrastination, then that can be called addiction. At some point all of us have gotten into this "funk", and it's just a part of life.
I guess my point is this: I see all the "this guy had no life" comments and that disturbs me: This guy probably had a more active social life than 90% of the people out there who spend their lives in a stupor watching TV, but as I mentioned: It's not my position to judge them. Growing up my favourite hobby was computers, and it astounded me how often people would give me their opinion of how wrong it was to spend hours in front of the computer, but rather I should be doing more socially accepted time suckage wasters like watching football or the latest episode of the Cosby Show. The sad thing is how many people buy into this "life is conformity" mentality.
Ummm. Why the hell would would you want to run "big iron" and data centers with under-educated and non-knowledgeable personnel using silly point and click interfaces?
This is an unfair simplification, and can be qualified as FUD. There are Windows NT/2000 experts who know more about the system than many UNIX admins. Having said that I _do_ find it disturbing that the push of Microsoft's and Unisys seems to include the fallacy that there is lots of talent that can administer NT/2000 machines, because they're using the ignorant masses as a selling tool, when just like with UNIX boxes you should get only the best who know their stuff.
The people are non-knowledgeable because, due to the closed nature of their envirenment, they are not free to investigate problems to their lowest level.
Contrary to popular opinion, most everything in Windows is completely scriptable, and you can get behind the scenes. Now of course you can't "look at the source", however I'd wager that about, oh, zero UNIX admins look at sourcecode to solve a problem.
Start adding features and a web site quickly turns into a data center.
I agree, which is why I clarified that they're not trying to sell basic webservers. Of course demanding websites can become some of the most complex applications existing.
Microsoft *is* bashing people to conform to their ways-- that's what the whole "wayout" site is about. They are being mocked now because they are bashing people to do things the MS way when even they aren't doing it themselves.
It's just marketing: Nothing more, nothing less. Unisys wants to sell some multiprocessor 2000/XP machines, and they co-market with Microsoft. It's not really that evil or astounding.
However this isn't "Microsoft" running Apache on FreeBSD (though that is a superb platform), it's some random third-party static website host.
In any case, even if there were a mixed attitude, that should be no surprise. There are a lot of different people who post to/.
Agreed, and it is unfair to request a common view from a disparate group of people. However honestly I've seen the same people ebb and flow between diametrically opposed opinions as long as it supports their argument (ex. Microsoft is evil) : That is BAD with a capital B. You have to believe in ideas, not positions.
Firstly, the ad campaign is about data centers and "big iron", not web servers (i.e. Unisys isn't really about selling low end web serving machines). As such the deployed HTTP platform becomes irrelevant.
Secondly, Unisys apparently contracted an outside vendor, and that vendor just happened to use Apache (and for static content it really, truly doesn't matter. Static HTTP is about as complex as notepad.exe). It's odd that there's a seemingly mixed attitude on Slashdot: One says that Microsoft is an evil beast bashing the world to conform to its ways, and another is a mocking when Microsoft isn't bashing people to conform to their ways. Which do you want?
Unrelated story, but a few days ago someone just down the street (here in a sleepy suburb in the Toronto area) was stabbed, and from police reports it went something like this: A guy answers the door and a man is there holding an envelope, pretending to be a delivery man. The "delivery man" asks the occupant to confirm his identity, and when he does he proceeds to stab the occupant several times. When I read about that, I couldn't help but think "Now there's a case where security through obscurity would have worked...."
Anyways, since then I only identify myself as I.P. Freely...
Seriously, though, the promised "killer application" for over a decade now has been voice recognition, and we're STILL at a point where the inaccuracy rate leads to it being generally useless in anything other than "ooh, isn't that neat" kinds of demos (for instance it was a laugh to see voice recognition as a hyped feature of Office XP : Now tell me how many people on the planet are actually using it? While I applaud them for adding it for the handicapped, of the general public it seems neat, but when you have to babysit every word it dictates you relegate it to the unused feature list).
So we've barely gotten voice recognition down, despite being "just a wee bit more" type of promise for so long now, and someone is claiming that they'll read your lips? Fat chance in hell, is all I can say. Unless we concatenate our language to about 4 words, there isn't a chance.
Well it's a cycle that will go on for some time : Soon enough the average public will get their dual-density burner, but at that time the media outlets will have switched to a much higher resolution (i.e. a DVD-2. As it is DVD is underpowered for HDTV screens) system, again giving the natural technological anti-piracy solution.
Really, eh? Perhaps soon we'll see remarkable breakthroughs like "Right-handed Man has trouble writing with his left hand, but after 15 days can do so with some trouble." "Lady churns gears on her manual transmission : Is an automatic transmission ingrained in her mind?"
However personally when I read the article I thought it was much more intriguing : I thought it was saying that the astronauts were having flashbacks of some ball slowly coming towards them 15 days later....
While I don't know the specifics of it, if they were burning these DVDs using computer equipment, it is likely that they were burning single layer DVDs, which would mean, given that almost every commercial DVD produced is dual-layer, that they must have pulled the original media, compressed it further to fit in 1/2 the space, and then burned that. If that is the case then it is an inferior copy. The other option is that they either used a two-sided disc, or put the movie on two discs, but either of those options is inferior from a convenience perspective (i.e. having to flip/swap the disc like old sk00l laser discs).
I could be wrong though. Is there such a thing as a dual-layer burner?
I think if you read it's quite obviously humor, however the poster does have a point: It seems a little stupid of them to codename something (esp. a software product which people are naturally very nervous about) after a much-maligned broken encryption standard.
I get up to and past 500kb/sec on my broadband connection.. With 4:1 compression, a 650 mb cd becomes a 162mb download. That's about a 324 second download, or roughly 5 1/2 minutes. Faster than a lot of CD installs I've done.
500Kb/sec = approximately 50 KB/second. Therefore 162MB = 162000 KB / 50 KB/s = 3240 seconds/60(m) = 54 minutes. If, on the other hand, you actually have a 500KB/second (or 5000Kb/second) cable modem, then you are a very lucky, and very rare, person : Most of us are capped at either 1.5Mbps or 2.0Mbps.
I truthfully didn't read the article, however my presumption from the Slashdot post was the CPU and network utilization was during transferring, so it's basically saying "We easily maxed out the pipe with our proprietary compression technology, and could run many multiples faster if the net connection allowed it, given the low CPU utilization. Regarding CD installs, it is interesting to consider that a 1x CD is about 176KB/second, or just a bit faster than a T1.
imagine a person working on code at work then coming home and doing the same thing.
I guess it matters what your interpretation of "the same thing" is. Do you mean "programming"? Do you mean "programming Web applications"? Do you mean "programming Web applications for the oil sector, communicating with G7527 devices"? If someone spends 9-5 contributing for his employer, and then spends 6-11 of sweat and tears on "his big break", then please realize that that is the spirit of innovation, and that's what all societies needs to encourage more: Every big company was founded when someone broke the chains from a restrictive engagement. In an ironic twist, these employers who try to strong-arm their employee's personal projects should realize that most employees bring skills TO work FROM their personal project (i.e. usually people work on wideranging things that they'd never get a chance to in the daily grind, but once they've perfected it they can leverage those skills in the workplace). I'd like retroactive 24-hour a day pay instituted for any organization that feels that it owns its employees. As a sidenote: Organizations that fairly compensate ingenious contributions, product ideas, etc, never seem to have this problem: They realize that their employees are what brings in the paycheque, and if Bob thinks up a $40,000,000 idea while mowing the lawn, well then it might be in their best interest to offer conditions that reward him for it. Instead, most of these companies with unbelievably overpaid upper management, CEOs with golden parachutes (who often sit on dozens of boards at different companies), want to be able to say : YOINK! There, now get back to doing that COBOL code. FUCK THAT.
However, the crux of the matter is this: We live in a capitalist society. Capitalism is an eat and be eaten atmosphere, and it's one where EVERYONE is ALWAYS a free agent : You are always an entrepreneur - No company EVER owns you. This (at least where I live) is not slavery, and no one can conscript you into bondage (well, unless you're into that sort of thing). The fact that anyone would even CONSIDER signing contracts like that (or that they are legally allowable or at all enforceable, or even morally comprehensible), is disturbing. Employers pay an employee for the known work that they contribute on company projects, and they compensate the employee for the work that they contribute: If someone is spending their mental energy on personal projects and doesn't contribute to their employer, then naturally they won't get raises, and they might even get fired : That's the entrepreneurial spirit of a capitalist society. Never would I justify an employee stealing code from work projects (nor do I think anyone else is), or stealing proprietary technologies, but for anyone to claim that the spirit and upward potential of someone is constrained because they have a 9-5 gig disturbs me, and if that's what the idea behind our society is then bring on the revolution. Did I nap through when we warped into the communist regime of the USSR?
If you get spam then you almost certain have posted on a newsgroup, or have the hotmail account listed on a webpage somewhere (or alternately list yourself in one of the "white pages", which is sometimes a default option that people don't uncheck). I have a hotmail account that gets about 20 pieces of spam a day because I've used it as a reply in newsgroup postings, but I have another that has never gotten a single spam.
Of course, once you get on one spam list then virtually instantly you're on them all.
Well, I'm from the Toronto area, so that is Canada, isn't it?:-) (yes that's a joke based on another stereotype). However, friends from the West Coast sound "normal" to me, and my accent is termed "neutral" when I travel. Of course minor nuances abound, but when someone "sounds" weird, it's says as much about the listener as it says about the speaker, which is why making fun of regionalisms (South Park style) is just ridiculous. I remember some time back when No Doubt was a popular band, and in an interview with MuchMusic the lead singer harshly proclaimed "It's No Doubt Canada, not No Doot". Uh huh...
You know, I have never heard anyone but East Coasters or Minnesotans say "about" as "aboot", and the fact that this stereotype perpetuates boggles the mind, especially as applied to a country of ten million square km and thirty+ million people. Eh is in common use throughout North America, but again you'll find it more commonly used in Minnesota than in Canada. I have a feeling that when the executive at WNC (Whatever Network Corporation) got his profile of "stereotypes that define Canada", he was actually in Minnesota but was a little confused by the snow into thinking it was Canada.
Anyways, I gotta go out and shovel the "ruff" of my igloo.
Slashdot Mirror
but slogging and churning on an Athlon XP with a GeForce card today would be hard work for even the worse game programmer
You know I truly think that people VASTLY over-estimate the power of today's PCs (as they have done for years now): It is EASY to make a current system beg for mercy, and the reality is that most current games make huge compromises to allow them to run reasonably on the current crop of PCs. Sure, maybe a texture-mapped tunnel looks great and runs at 200fps, but go to and outdoor scene and things can start to slog to a crawl. I love the game Operation Flashpoint, yet on my GF3 Ti200 it is noticably stuttering at times : Before you disparage the authors -> This is by far the most complex and impressive graphics I've ever seen in a game, yet still it leaves a massive, gigantic opening for improvements (which I'm sure they'll do as the hardware improves).
Flight Sim 2002 has the ability to model unbelievably complex scenarios, including hundreds of other planes, buildings, ground traffic, weather patterns, ATC, etc. Don't underestimate what is possible in a flight sim. Falcon 4 is a tremendous game, and is a couple of years old, yet still it makes my system groan for mercy when I get near the FLOT : They tried to partly simulate reality without as many shortcuts and the hardware just wasn't there.
I agree that a lot of people grossly overpay, however you mentioned that he plays flight sims: These are among the most hardware intensive games available (i.e. A machine that can kick ass in Quake 3 might slog and churn playing Flight Sim 2002). Sure you can turn down the features, but he if he spends lots of time playing then he might be exactly the sort of person to appreciate having every slider near the max, with extensive ground traffic, clouds, weather, etc.
Agreed. It wasn't the best movie I've ever seen, but it wasn't all THAT inplausable : For instance the ventilation system wasn't self contained because the room was never intended for long term living : During a home invasion you hop in and stay there until the police arrive - at most maybe 15 minutes : You don't hope that the invaders don't pump noxious fumes in over a 24 hour stay. The phone didn't work, as was explained in the movie, because as new tenants she didn't get around to hooking it up. And exactly as you explained: Would it have been a good movie if it were over in 10 minutes as the police arrive and drag the criminals away?
Microsoft's claim is completely ungrounded - nothing written by a third-party can take away Microsoft's intellectual property rights.
Strangely reminds me of Richard Stallman's claims about the GPL...
Ouch! Touche! I apologize for doubting source code reading, and should correct myself: I meant to say that I've hand audited every line of the kernel and have my own custom build of Apache running. Bah. As mentioned, I am not an administrator : I am a software developer (and quite a good one too, thanks), and one thing that I learned early on in this hobby turned education turned career is that only trivial implementations are quick and easy to understand. All others require a pretty good time investment (otherwise you're more dangerous than helpful), and that's time that most people don't have. It's the reason that security faults have found to exist in open source products, used by thousands of people, for years: Who has the time to know the code? Yeah I'm sure there's one or two, but the overwhelming majority have better things to do.
This makes no sense. Already people can watch nationwide news if they want, and the reason that local news exists right now is because it's local : You might not think much happens in Ass End if your criteria is murders and collapsing buildings, but I'm sure the local inhabitants tune in to find out what happened in the big pumpkin contest, or how the beauty pageant went : Local coverage already has hefty competition, and that's why local coverage does best when they make it actually local. I think the same thing goes for digital radio from satellites : While I enjoy the radio most of all, truth be told I like hearing an announcer that I know is from my region, ready to tell me about the conditions of the highway that I'm driving on. Abstract it too much and I'd rather just listen to a CD.
It appears to me that the fight is to allow them to broadcast local stations OUTSIDE of the local viewing area, not to obtain the right to not broadcast local stations (phew...don't do what johnny don't does!) to the local viewing area. In other words it seems to be largely the opposite of Taco's take on it. Maybe I'm reading it wrong though...
The vast majority of what people do in situations that would require a cellular modem would be largely downstream, so I doubt there are many customers at all that would find the 153Kbps upstream limiting (especially given that most cellular connections nowadays are about 14Kbps at best). i.e. I don't think many people want to host Quake3 games from their laptops over a cellular connection, but with those speeds you could play a game on another host just fine.
You'd lose that wager. I look at source code all the time to solve problems. I haven't had a problem yet that I haven't been able to discover exactly why it happened.
I don't want to call you a liar, but if indeed this is true then you are an EXTREMELY rare case. Indeed, as a professional software developer I find this hard to believe : I find it difficult and time consuming to understand my own code 3 days after I've written it, so I find it incredibly hard to believe that someone can jump into any of the open source code, most of which could best be described as spaghetti code of complex relationships and undocumented correlations, and just "fix up something" (without a MASSIVE investment of time). Could you tell me an instance where you had a problem and went in the code and fixed it?
Entertainment is not supposed to be addictive.
Psychological addiction is a personality thing, and ANYTHING can be `addictive' psychologically: Reading books, running, swimming, gambling, watching TV, watching soap operas or Jenny Jones. Of course we come to the point of defining what "addiction" is, and contrary to many people's opinions: Addiction is not that someone spends more time doing an activity than you would enjoy -> Your opinion of the enjoyment of something is not relevant to someone else's enjoyment. Addiction is also not when someone spends so much time doing something that they neglect the things that you feel are important : i.e. Maybe they don't WANT to work 60 hours a week, or get an MBA, or read the combined works of Chaucer. Maybe they don't like going to the bar on Friday nights, and maybe they actually enjoy the social atmosphere of an online game. Hell, it is fair to say that someone might be living the dream life working at Burger King, playing EQ all night : If they're happy and that's their goal, then that's fantastic, and that's more than can be said about many people who live very productive lives, miserably slogging along until the day they die.
Instead, addiction (at least to the generally mentally healthy) is personally defined: If someone spends so much time at something that they feel personal shame about letting other things slide, and this turns into a cycle of shame and procrastination, then that can be called addiction. At some point all of us have gotten into this "funk", and it's just a part of life.
I guess my point is this: I see all the "this guy had no life" comments and that disturbs me: This guy probably had a more active social life than 90% of the people out there who spend their lives in a stupor watching TV, but as I mentioned: It's not my position to judge them. Growing up my favourite hobby was computers, and it astounded me how often people would give me their opinion of how wrong it was to spend hours in front of the computer, but rather I should be doing more socially accepted time suckage wasters like watching football or the latest episode of the Cosby Show. The sad thing is how many people buy into this "life is conformity" mentality.
Ummm. Why the hell would would you want to run "big iron" and data centers with under-educated and non-knowledgeable personnel using silly point and click interfaces?
This is an unfair simplification, and can be qualified as FUD. There are Windows NT/2000 experts who know more about the system than many UNIX admins. Having said that I _do_ find it disturbing that the push of Microsoft's and Unisys seems to include the fallacy that there is lots of talent that can administer NT/2000 machines, because they're using the ignorant masses as a selling tool, when just like with UNIX boxes you should get only the best who know their stuff.
The people are non-knowledgeable because, due to the closed nature of their envirenment, they are not free to investigate problems to their lowest level.
Contrary to popular opinion, most everything in Windows is completely scriptable, and you can get behind the scenes. Now of course you can't "look at the source", however I'd wager that about, oh, zero UNIX admins look at sourcecode to solve a problem.
Start adding features and a web site quickly turns into a data center.
I agree, which is why I clarified that they're not trying to sell basic webservers. Of course demanding websites can become some of the most complex applications existing.
Microsoft *is* bashing people to conform to their ways-- that's what the whole "wayout" site is about. They are being mocked now because they are bashing people to do things the MS way when even they aren't doing it themselves.
It's just marketing: Nothing more, nothing less. Unisys wants to sell some multiprocessor 2000/XP machines, and they co-market with Microsoft. It's not really that evil or astounding.
However this isn't "Microsoft" running Apache on FreeBSD (though that is a superb platform), it's some random third-party static website host.
In any case, even if there were a mixed attitude, that should be no surprise. There are a lot of different people who post to /.
Agreed, and it is unfair to request a common view from a disparate group of people. However honestly I've seen the same people ebb and flow between diametrically opposed opinions as long as it supports their argument (ex. Microsoft is evil) : That is BAD with a capital B. You have to believe in ideas, not positions.
Firstly, the ad campaign is about data centers and "big iron", not web servers (i.e. Unisys isn't really about selling low end web serving machines). As such the deployed HTTP platform becomes irrelevant.
Secondly, Unisys apparently contracted an outside vendor, and that vendor just happened to use Apache (and for static content it really, truly doesn't matter. Static HTTP is about as complex as notepad.exe). It's odd that there's a seemingly mixed attitude on Slashdot: One says that Microsoft is an evil beast bashing the world to conform to its ways, and another is a mocking when Microsoft isn't bashing people to conform to their ways. Which do you want?
Unrelated story, but a few days ago someone just down the street (here in a sleepy suburb in the Toronto area) was stabbed, and from police reports it went something like this: A guy answers the door and a man is there holding an envelope, pretending to be a delivery man. The "delivery man" asks the occupant to confirm his identity, and when he does he proceeds to stab the occupant several times. When I read about that, I couldn't help but think "Now there's a case where security through obscurity would have worked...."
Anyways, since then I only identify myself as I.P. Freely...
Seriously, though, the promised "killer application" for over a decade now has been voice recognition, and we're STILL at a point where the inaccuracy rate leads to it being generally useless in anything other than "ooh, isn't that neat" kinds of demos (for instance it was a laugh to see voice recognition as a hyped feature of Office XP : Now tell me how many people on the planet are actually using it? While I applaud them for adding it for the handicapped, of the general public it seems neat, but when you have to babysit every word it dictates you relegate it to the unused feature list).
So we've barely gotten voice recognition down, despite being "just a wee bit more" type of promise for so long now, and someone is claiming that they'll read your lips? Fat chance in hell, is all I can say. Unless we concatenate our language to about 4 words, there isn't a chance.
Well it's a cycle that will go on for some time : Soon enough the average public will get their dual-density burner, but at that time the media outlets will have switched to a much higher resolution (i.e. a DVD-2. As it is DVD is underpowered for HDTV screens) system, again giving the natural technological anti-piracy solution.
Really, eh? Perhaps soon we'll see remarkable breakthroughs like "Right-handed Man has trouble writing with his left hand, but after 15 days can do so with some trouble." "Lady churns gears on her manual transmission : Is an automatic transmission ingrained in her mind?"
However personally when I read the article I thought it was much more intriguing : I thought it was saying that the astronauts were having flashbacks of some ball slowly coming towards them 15 days later....
While I don't know the specifics of it, if they were burning these DVDs using computer equipment, it is likely that they were burning single layer DVDs, which would mean, given that almost every commercial DVD produced is dual-layer, that they must have pulled the original media, compressed it further to fit in 1/2 the space, and then burned that. If that is the case then it is an inferior copy. The other option is that they either used a two-sided disc, or put the movie on two discs, but either of those options is inferior from a convenience perspective (i.e. having to flip/swap the disc like old sk00l laser discs).
I could be wrong though. Is there such a thing as a dual-layer burner?
I think if you read it's quite obviously humor, however the poster does have a point: It seems a little stupid of them to codename something (esp. a software product which people are naturally very nervous about) after a much-maligned broken encryption standard.
Well adding in the overhead of Ethernet, IP, TCP, and then presumably FTP : The general number that I've come to trust is /10.
I get up to and past 500kb/sec on my broadband connection.. With 4:1 compression, a 650 mb cd becomes a 162mb download. That's about a 324 second download, or roughly 5 1/2 minutes. Faster than a lot of CD installs I've done.
500Kb/sec = approximately 50 KB/second. Therefore 162MB = 162000 KB / 50 KB/s = 3240 seconds/60(m) = 54 minutes. If, on the other hand, you actually have a 500KB/second (or 5000Kb/second) cable modem, then you are a very lucky, and very rare, person : Most of us are capped at either 1.5Mbps or 2.0Mbps.
I truthfully didn't read the article, however my presumption from the Slashdot post was the CPU and network utilization was during transferring, so it's basically saying "We easily maxed out the pipe with our proprietary compression technology, and could run many multiples faster if the net connection allowed it, given the low CPU utilization. Regarding CD installs, it is interesting to consider that a 1x CD is about 176KB/second, or just a bit faster than a T1.
imagine a person working on code at work then coming home and doing the same thing.
I guess it matters what your interpretation of "the same thing" is. Do you mean "programming"? Do you mean "programming Web applications"? Do you mean "programming Web applications for the oil sector, communicating with G7527 devices"? If someone spends 9-5 contributing for his employer, and then spends 6-11 of sweat and tears on "his big break", then please realize that that is the spirit of innovation, and that's what all societies needs to encourage more: Every big company was founded when someone broke the chains from a restrictive engagement. In an ironic twist, these employers who try to strong-arm their employee's personal projects should realize that most employees bring skills TO work FROM their personal project (i.e. usually people work on wideranging things that they'd never get a chance to in the daily grind, but once they've perfected it they can leverage those skills in the workplace). I'd like retroactive 24-hour a day pay instituted for any organization that feels that it owns its employees. As a sidenote: Organizations that fairly compensate ingenious contributions, product ideas, etc, never seem to have this problem: They realize that their employees are what brings in the paycheque, and if Bob thinks up a $40,000,000 idea while mowing the lawn, well then it might be in their best interest to offer conditions that reward him for it. Instead, most of these companies with unbelievably overpaid upper management, CEOs with golden parachutes (who often sit on dozens of boards at different companies), want to be able to say : YOINK! There, now get back to doing that COBOL code. FUCK THAT.
However, the crux of the matter is this: We live in a capitalist society. Capitalism is an eat and be eaten atmosphere, and it's one where EVERYONE is ALWAYS a free agent : You are always an entrepreneur - No company EVER owns you. This (at least where I live) is not slavery, and no one can conscript you into bondage (well, unless you're into that sort of thing). The fact that anyone would even CONSIDER signing contracts like that (or that they are legally allowable or at all enforceable, or even morally comprehensible), is disturbing. Employers pay an employee for the known work that they contribute on company projects, and they compensate the employee for the work that they contribute: If someone is spending their mental energy on personal projects and doesn't contribute to their employer, then naturally they won't get raises, and they might even get fired : That's the entrepreneurial spirit of a capitalist society. Never would I justify an employee stealing code from work projects (nor do I think anyone else is), or stealing proprietary technologies, but for anyone to claim that the spirit and upward potential of someone is constrained because they have a 9-5 gig disturbs me, and if that's what the idea behind our society is then bring on the revolution. Did I nap through when we warped into the communist regime of the USSR?
If you get spam then you almost certain have posted on a newsgroup, or have the hotmail account listed on a webpage somewhere (or alternately list yourself in one of the "white pages", which is sometimes a default option that people don't uncheck). I have a hotmail account that gets about 20 pieces of spam a day because I've used it as a reply in newsgroup postings, but I have another that has never gotten a single spam.
Of course, once you get on one spam list then virtually instantly you're on them all.
Well, I'm from the Toronto area, so that is Canada, isn't it? :-) (yes that's a joke based on another stereotype). However, friends from the West Coast sound "normal" to me, and my accent is termed "neutral" when I travel. Of course minor nuances abound, but when someone "sounds" weird, it's says as much about the listener as it says about the speaker, which is why making fun of regionalisms (South Park style) is just ridiculous. I remember some time back when No Doubt was a popular band, and in an interview with MuchMusic the lead singer harshly proclaimed "It's No Doubt Canada, not No Doot". Uh huh...
You know, I have never heard anyone but East Coasters or Minnesotans say "about" as "aboot", and the fact that this stereotype perpetuates boggles the mind, especially as applied to a country of ten million square km and thirty+ million people. Eh is in common use throughout North America, but again you'll find it more commonly used in Minnesota than in Canada. I have a feeling that when the executive at WNC (Whatever Network Corporation) got his profile of "stereotypes that define Canada", he was actually in Minnesota but was a little confused by the snow into thinking it was Canada.
Anyways, I gotta go out and shovel the "ruff" of my igloo.