Posts by FutureShock999 310 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Nov 2011
I am not an immediate fan of the cloud (that is, use it when it makes sense, but sometimes it doesn't).
But let me answer you with a bit of history. I remember a HUGE data warehousing project at a large bank in Boston more than a few years ago. While in build of this totally secure, non-cloud system, the lead DBA confused his environments and ended up deleting the entire LIVE database of master dev customer data, rather than a test environment. He is someone that used to work with me, this story is not fiction. Gone. The back-ups were out of synch and didn't reload properly. WEEKS of this data warehouse being down, development staff stopped, hundreds of thousands of dollars lost to development time...and that was a very simple mistake, made by a usually very skilled individual.
If you don't know more stories like that, they you haven't worked in IT very long. Cloud, in-house, mainframe, SOA, or client-server...these are all just technologies. But the fundamental fuck-ups are usually human in nature, and they will always happen. And I have seen them happen about equally on all of those platforms, even to good staffs.
@RISC OS - you are suffering from a perspective that only recognises what is flashy and disastrous over a short period of time...such as a nuclear accident.
To date, nuclear accidents have regrettably killed probably 5000 to 6000 thousand people, including Chernobyl, Fukushima, TMI, and others. If the liquid sodium reactor near Detroit had actually gone critical (it came very close), many more would have been added to that list. If Indian Point had ever had a massive accident that it has always seemed close to...more yet again.
But those thousands are NOTHING with how many people fossil fuels already kill. From their crude extraction, to the poisoning of the air and water with their use...the death toll from the current "status quo" energy sources are killing many, many thousands every year. The difference is that the deaths from fossil fuels are usually slow and lingering...it takes a massive calamity like Deepwater Horizon to really make the slow deaths from fossil fuels stand out. But Deepwater Horizon was, pardon the expression, a drop in the bucket.
And if you think renewables will be a magic bullet, consider the likely death toll from a few "pumped storage" alpine valley dams failing over the years.
The point is, there is NO energy source that is 99% risk and death free, except for hydro and thermo. But those just are not useful in very many places on the planet. It is OK to say that nuclear is dangerous if poorly engineered and/or poorly regulated (watch that "regulatory capture!"), but in comparison, so is everything else....
Tell me where I can get a phone that can store 180gigs of FLAC/ALAC uncompressed music, as my iPod Classic can do for my car? My Chinese-sourced HTC One has 32gigs internal, and I can add a TF card for another 64gigs (and dual-SIMs)...and THAT'S the largest I know about (and is rather hard to come by and a bit expensive).
The other fact is that there is a huge youth market - many people buy iPod Touches to allow their kids to play iOS games on without running up a phone bill.
And is also a huge market for iPod Nano's and Shuffles for the gym and running set. There are places you don't want to take a £500 smartphone.
I just don't see iPods going away anytime soon...
I actually do not believe that documents that have not ever been publicly shared can be considered trademarked, unless they have had a trademark formally applied for - and precious few of any Wikileaks document fit that description. They could be considered copywrit, yes, if they are a creative product. But I am not sure that old shopping lists, military plans, and private emails that are not creative product can even be considered copywritten. Moreover, you would face a very difficult task to even judge on which legal jurisdiction should such a copywrite consideration would be granted. (which is my same answer to why Assange isn't a "traitor" or a "spy" - he isn't a US citizen to start with...)
"Dolby NR required calibration that couldn't be provided by any consumer equipment, especially cassette tape players."
Really? I am pretty sure my old Nakamichi BX-125 could calibrate it pretty accurately. I know the Nak Dragon (which I lusted after but couldn't make the jump to) could get it to near studio accuracy.
In my opinion, what you are remarking on is that, back in the analogue days, the difference between cut-rate consumer electronics and top-end consumer electronics was MUCH more pronounced than it has become with digital. And Dolby B and C were mainstays of that analogue history, and suffered from that as much as anything else. One manufacturer could implement the Dolby circuitry cheaply, and another could use triple the components and get a more accurate playback curve. The point is, you can't blame Dolby for that, you have to blame cheapskate audio manufacturers, and the fact that you presumably spent your money on other pursuits like chasing women or buying drugs, than buying a Nakamichi (or similar) for your dorm room.. ;-).
The key piece of data is, really, how MANY cheap fondleslabs did they ever really have in stock? If it was 0, or 10, or even 50, it sounds like bait and switch.
If they had a few hundred or more, and they sold those out...then it really seems like a case of "Tough Luck Charlie", they sold out, and this is what they had left.
But without knowing the amount in stock and on order, it is impossible to say if it was intentional.
I don't think it was cost-cutting. The designers already were using made-up temporary numbers in their comms, and so didn't think that encrypting them was really worth the overhead of encrypting a temporary, made-up ID. They could have achieved the same result simply by having the handset negotiate a new ID on a rotating, frequent basis.
As others have pointed out below, this is a mere annoyance at worst...
So...it would appear that corelets are really slightly altered nodes from the old "Data Flow Architecture" that was so cutting edge...about 15 years ago.
Don't get me wrong...the world is FULL of IT "ideas" that have been re-invented and re-named. I mean really, ever since Ted Nelson published "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" in 1974 it's all just been rehashed versions of most of what he wrote in that seminal book. (And yeah, I keep a copy on hand just to remind myself when computing was really, really INTERESTING.)
But I digress....if IBM gets this right, it will be very powerful, because fundamentally linear code sucks for emulating the brain. An interesting side note....I think one of the HARDEST things about this new paradigm is TESTING. How can you prove that such and such a program is actually "production ready"? Maybe such coding eliminates the whole terminology of "testing". It seems a lot like verifying the correctness of genetic algorithms...and for many of the same reasons. (HINT: many applications of GAs have gone back to more traditional methods because of the inherent inability to prove that they had reached the best solution in actual fact).
In my best Spock voice, I just want to say "Fascinating....fascinating". And it is that, for real.
I expect it will have an impact on my life in the same way that the supercomputers that developed the new engines for the A380 did - a lot quieter experience at 38,000 ft due to the super efficient blade and compressor design, that makes my semi-frequent flights from London to Melbourne a lot more bearable. And a raft of other hidden, tech-driven design improvements that we take for granted, but required someone doing a whole lot of calculations that we never see or think about. Computational Flow Dynamics and other simulations (weather, climate, etc.) take massive cycles, and the more cycles you can throw at the models the quicker you can develop accurate models, and the finer grain simulation you can run.
Totally correct - I once (1997) installed and configured an entire football pitch of SP/2 hardware buried deep under the United Airlines World HQ parking lot for customer demand simulation...the models it ran took 18 hours to run in a single batch cycle, and had to be run every day...we installed several terabytes of RAID 1 disk with the drives being ultra-fast Fibre Channel 4Gig drives. People bought SP/2s to do SERIOUS work.
Interesting fact - the very normal-looking employee parking lot of United Air WHQ has reinforced concrete/macadam that is about 6 feet thick, for bomb resistance to protect their underground data centre from truck bombs. Or crashing planes...
To all of the above that couldn't figure out what you use Power for - you use it when you have SERIOUS need for compute cycles with a relatively advanced instruction set. It's not about power efficiency a la ARM, it's not about Windows compatibility a la Intel...it's simply a very good architecture for high workload compute-intensive tasks. Yes, so is Intel, but the PowerPC arch and instruction set are in many ways cleaner, and always have been. This can be important if you are going to use them as building blocks, say by designing your own CPU/GPU hybrid on-die. This is the stuff you take as a core building block if you are going to design your own HPC modules - a solid, well-documented architecture that is pretty clean and scales well.
I highly applaud IBM's thinking on this - MIPS was always underpowered (after the 90s at least), SPARC in many ways too...but PowerPC has always kind of deserved that name. It's exactly what a chip designer needs if they are going to build the hardware for the next Deep Thought. It's a niche market, but it's where the excitement is in terms of cool HPC applications, particularly if someone closely-couples it with GPU parallelism on-die. "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of..." indeed. The ONLY part of this that is surprising is that IBM is not opening up AIX to run on the resultant customer-derived chips...AIX could really be leveraged on some of the resultant architectures to provide a solid HPC platform. But overall, good show IBM!! Let's see what gets born from this...
You seem to have missed a lot of history here. Historically, ARM cores have fewer pieces, parts, and transistors than Intel, and have therefore run slower, but with much less power. ARM isn't about speed - it is about work per watt. Intel comes from a desktop background where it was always about having the faster processor, period.
To address their relatively low power (in both ways) cores, ARM has gone multi-core in a big way. Whereas Intel has gone down the power-saving route in a big way - reducing clock, idling parts of the chip, etc. And they have developed some very cool tech for that.
I personally think that the ARM approach is simpler, and will therefore yield a more cost-efficient solution. For a phone, or tablet even, there are a lot of tasks that are limited by the speed of the communications interface, checking for email in the background, even downloading a web page, etc. That will be slower on mobile than a laptop or desktop for quite some time, even with LTE. ARM's approach is optimised for that kind of slow, steady work.
Improving the per core performance would help on games, etc., but even with power saving, it still isn't as efficient as a slower, but steady engine. Think of driving your car - you CAN take an F1 engine, put it in your car, accelerate madly to 150 mph, and then coast back down to below the speed limit, repeat, repeat, repeat, and get an average speed of 80 mph. Or, you can put your bog standard production-line auto engine, and steadily maintain 80 mph - which do you think is more efficient really?
Seriously, show me how installing carbon dioxide scrubbers on every coal power plant, continuing to cut emissions on autos, and building more nuke plants than coal plants over the next 40 years will "cripple" the world economy.
Because THAT right there gets you a big CHUNK of improvement. And it's all technology that we know, have relatively mastered (with "clean" diesels and hybrid cars, and 4th Gen nuclear plants), and is available right now, in the marketplace.
Yes, it might cost a few million per power plant to install and service scrubbers - but out of the total cost of the life of that powerplant, it's a pittance.
What you are succumbing to is CORPORATE NOISE...that ANY single cent they have to spend that affects their stock price (and exec compensation) one millionth of one percent is ECONOMIC DOOM FOR US ALL. And that's just SELF-SERVING CORPORATE BULLSHIT - designed by business to ensure that it doesn't have to suffer even the _slightest_ impact on it's stockprice (and thus exec compensation, which is usually linked to it). Despite a multi-year recession, America has cut joblessness from over 9% to 7.4% over the past few years. CORPORATE PROFITS and WALL STREET are at an all time high - higher even than before the crash.
Do you really, really believe their FUCKING BULLSHIT that "oh, we can't afford to save the planet, and it isn't necessary anyway....blah blah blah"???
Sucker.
Do you know how LITTLE the seas have to rise to basically wipe out the harbours and shipping terminals that the world relies upon for global trade? And nearly every major city is built on a waterfront. You worry about the costs of lessening CO2? Worry about the cost of relocating many major cities away from their current locations, and doing it relatively fast - say in a 50 year timespan. TRILLIONS of dollars wouldn't even start to cover it.
Those CEOs who's noise you believe will be on their private, secured, ranches in Montana, or on the hilltops of their private islands, when it all goes to shit. Where will you or your children be?
No, they were buying more BMW 3-Series, which includes a whole lot of different engine sizes, especially the diesels. The M3 is the high-performance, insanely powerful version, and is very, very expensive, and doesn't outsell the Mondeo..they couldn't make that many if they tried. The 3 Series outsells the Mondeo in large part because it has a very low CO2 diesel option, which makes it the PERFECT company car, and has such a high resale it is actually available at the same price as a Mondeo on company car schemes, and also probably via leasing deals. For most buyers, the BMW 3-Series diesel (or small petrol) was actually a very, very sensible option over a Mondeo for these reasons. (And I think the Mondeo is a good car overall, too).
I agree that you have a right to believe what you want - but you have no RIGHT to religion that extends past your personal space. If you want to believe in sky fairy tales, I cannot stop you, nor would I if they make you happier. HOWEVER - the second you take that believe and use it to influence society in ANY WAY - then you have to prove it. You have to prove - in a re-creatable, verifiable manner that your assertions about this set of beliefs is valid.
That includes influencing healthcare for anyone but yourself, that includes fiscal policy, that includes tax policy (and should include that nice non-taxable religious exemption), defence policy, education policy, legal policy, and a host of other areas. Once you want to use your "beliefs" to influence any of these, you have to PROVE THEIR VALIDITY - and saying some old guy(s) wrote a book 2000 years ago doesn't cut it.
Don't quote from The Ten Commandments, unless you can SCIENTIFICALLY PROVE there were stone tablets and they were actually handed down from a superior being to guide us. (HINT: you probably can't). Don't quote from a Bible for policy reasons, unless you can prove that it actually IS the word of a superior being meant as guidance to the human race. You can read them and believe all you want, but the second you expect your reading of them to affect MY LIFE, or the life of society in general, THEN they have to pass some pretty tough scrutiny - at least to the same standards of proof that Evolution and the Theory of Relativity have passed.
Believe what you want - but you should not be TAX EXEMPT for having those beliefs (or leading the discussion of them), and you cannot use them to influence what I or my family do in society. Do not limit my wife's reproductive freedoms because "your god" said so. Do not preach hatred towards my gay brother "because our lord said it was a sin". Do not oppose gay marriage merely because "your lord wouldn't like it". Do not deny even your own children medical care because "your religion said it was unclean". Etc, etc., etc. Unless of course, you can categorically PROVE the existence of your sky fairies. Happy to have their wisdom once they are proven to exist - until then they should stay in your brain and your brain only.
"if I have faith in something without scientific evidence I may or may not be right, not having evidence doesn't automatically mean I am wrong!"
Actually, it violates the scientific principle called Occam's Razor, which basically "states that among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected. In other words, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. " (yeah, Wikipedia's definition).
So by adding all of these make-believe friends and fictional events into any explanation, you are by default adding complexity that cannot be verified experimentally, proven via evidence, nor replicated. In short, exactly the kinds of things that make it very, very, very LIKELY that you are wrong. You are correct - you are not PROVABLY wrong - because it is hard to prove a negative. But you are very likely to be so.
So the past few months have shown the Aussies to be absolute crap at any sports that matter (rugby, cricket, and some might even include Mark Webber's retirement as signs), but it appears that they now excel in advanced boffinrey involving photons.
Well, it IS sunnier there...maybe that's the secret. In any event, congratulations to our young Phd....this is cracking good stuff to have achieved!
You read it here first - he still has a term to serve!!!
Seriously, my uncle, a US Army Colonel from Georgia (WWII to Vietnam) knew him personally. And of James Carter, he said "he is the smartest man I have ever met, and certainly the smartest President we have ever had". Considering how well travelled my uncle was in his career, that SAYS something (particularly as so many Republican chicken hawks hated Carter - a REAL military man thought the world of him).
Carter is old, out of favour, and will never be elected. But RIGHT NOW - the US could use a brilliant, moralistic leader that is beyond reproach....what would have happened if he had won a second term?
Really? Tell that to bands like Steely Dan, who only were ever a studio act for over a decade (they never trusted the sound quality of the live performance to meet their studio polish). Tell that to XTC, who's frontman suffered a nervous breakdown after one album and they never toured again. And countless other examples of studio-only bands that produced great music but never toured.
More importantly, tell that to all the small bands that cannot make ends meet just playing concerts....the only ones that can are fairly large acts. Which is kind of the point of this article - the current schemes for digital only reward acts with large back catalogues, the same ones that can fill large enough venues to actually live off the concert revenue.
As I have written above - show me ONE "Islamic leader" that has strapped on HIS OWN suicide vest in the pursuit of his god... Funny enough, it is always some poor 16 -24 year old kids being told to do it. There is a hint there as to how well the religious and Islamic political leaders think heaven is supplied with 72 virgins for each of them. Even OBL hid in caves and built a massively secure compounds because he feared death of HIMSELF. So basically the theory that "they will commit suicide in attacking us" is bunk - the leaders always want to live.
In the case of terrorists, you retaliate against THE MAJOR STATE THAT SUPPLIED THEM THE BOMB. Which you can tell, due it is's fissile fingerprint. And the major states that have the bombs know this.
Oh, and lastly - without nukes, NATO couldn't reduce Russia's cities to rubble. Their air defences are simply too good against planes, and non-nuclear cruise missiles carry a very paltry warhead compared to a B-52 dropping tons of conventional bombs per plane. Cruise missiles are great at targeting precision military targets, but pretty useless at levelling cities. We would have to hope that the cruise missiles could tear up the entirely of Russia's air defences first, thus allowing larger bombers to fly though unopposed. By the time that happens, it would have gone nuclear anyway, at least at a tactical battlefield level.
Basically, EVERY scenario you describe is bunk, poorly thought through, and shows a massive lack of understanding of basic military and political knowledge. Keep the day job, which hopefully does not involve politics.
Show me ONE major Shia cleric that has strapped on a suicide vest HIMSELF and detonated it? Or show me a senior Sunni cleric that has done so?
NO - they use poor 16-24 year old boys and girls for a reason - like ALL religious leaders, it is "do as I say, not as I do". (idiots that follow these "branded mythologies" DO set themselves up to be used this way....)
To stop a supposed Iranian nuclear threat, you don't bomb Natanz. You don't threaten Tehran and it's huge pro-Western population of middle-class Iranians. NO - you point a nuclear-tipped missile at the holy city of Qum, where the large body of Shia clerics resides...and you LET THEM KNOW that is your strategy. See if they will be willing to find their 72 virgins en masse then...
You say that the threat of a large Soviet-style aggressor is gone? I think you are daft. The ONLY reason the threat is gone is because of Mutual Assured Destruction. No one will risk an all-out nuclear war if everyone is armed to the hilt. Large aggressor states historically can only survive by growing...they actually are terrible if static, and constrained over time. That is in large part why the Soviet threat faded.
But remove MAD, and the rise of such states is inevitable. The germs of such a state exist in today's Russian, and to a lesser extent China, and possibly the Gulf. And removing Trident is the beginning of the removal of MAD.
Worse, the removal of a purely British deterrent would be the effective rise in power of the US in specifying the UK's foreign and even domestic policy. While we traditionally have been close friends, the rise of religious extremism in the US (as judged by the gradual outlawing of abortions, new swearing of allegiance to God as part of high school graduations in Arizona state high schools, etc.) should VERY much make you wonder where that trend will be by 2030, and how much power you would want them to have. Suppose an Evangelical-dominated political scene in the US made continued US "nuclear umbrella" coverage contingent upon eliminating UK abortion choice, changes to the Anglican Church, and other religious and social interference?
Otherwise, you forget about Pakistan. Suppose a fundamentalist Islam government came to power in Pakistan (NOT a stretch of the imagination, is it?), and simply said that the UK had to open our borders and permit the massive immigration of millions of Pakistanis into the UK, under Pakistani nuclear threat if we have disarmed? It would essentially allow a take-over of Britain from forced immigration. Such a threat would not even have to be made public, but routed through diplomatic channels quietly.
One of the worst things that a successful nation can do is FORGET WHAT MADE IT SUCCESSFUL. In the case of the UK, that has been a continued ability to defend itself. Why we think that ANY better use for the money for Trident can be found is a blatant example of FORGETTING WHAT GOT US HERE. In any military cost calculus, nuclear weapons are cheap, cheap, cheap - compare the new missile's costs to fighting in Afghanistan for example. Or WWII.
I hate to be THAT Star Trek nerd, BUT it was the formula for transparent aluminium (from Scotty to the materials scientist and company owner) which PAID for huge sections of normal acrylic "from stock", and it was the acrylic that was used to build the whale tanks, not the transparent aluminium.
Whatever comes out of this, I keep being impressed with Ubuntu's and more importantly Shuttleworth's vision and striving to do SOMETHING about the moribund state of Linux on the desktop.
For everyone that wants standardisation, there is Debian. Go for it.
But Shuttleworth is the wild card - he is like a gambler in Vegas that will keep trying to beat the system, and GET Linux on the desktop (and every other device) successful, somehow. It will take risks, beating his own drum to his own tune...and will quite possibly, quite probably, fail.
BUT MAN do I respect him for it, and I've been in this computer business for a long, long time.
ledswinger is right - FAST broadband is only really useful for data-intensive businesses (like data centres or very large corporate offices) and home entertainment uses.
It is INCONVENIENT to use a slower internet service to process government interactions, but not NEARLY as inconvenient as standing in line for an hour at Wandsworth Town Hall. Or the DVLA, anywhere.
I bought my first dial-up modem in 1982 - a Radio Shack 300 baud acoustically coupled modem connected to my 6502 single-board computer. I got on JUST FINE with BBSes all over the globe. Yes, I even downloaded p0rn, er, images. How much bandwidth did you say you need?
And I walked up-hill to school - BOTH WAYS DAMMIT!
Have you forgotten what is under the Straker movie studios outside Slough?
Just because they wiped out the first threat doesn't mean they closed the base. And when we find some more, it will be "Interceptors, immediate launch. Interceptors, immediate launch" all over again...
R.I.P. Gerry...you gave a whole generation miraculous machines and wondrous futures to contemplate.
At present you have been downvoted 28 tims - do you know why? Because you wrote something retarded.
MAKING A JOKE IS NOT A SOCIAL CRIME. PERIOD. When you end a line of text with "j/k" and "lol", it is known to all and sundrey on the internet (especially 19 year old gamers!) that this mean "I AM FUCKING JOKING AND LAUGHING OUT LOUD EVEN AS I SAY THIS, MEANING I AM PROBABLY BEING IRONIC".
There is NO debating that - it is STANDARD internet speak. I am 50 years old and even I know that is the way gamer kidz talk online (thank Eve Online).
When you declare that what you are writing is a joke, probably ironic, and flag that appropriately - ALL you can be accused of is having bad taste. Now, the proper punishment for social bad taste would usually be a few stern words from Dad or Mom, telling a child why that was inappropriate (i.e., making light of the terrible tragedies that have occured and hurting families that have lost loved ones, etc.). In today's society, we farm this stuff out to "professionals", so a session or three with a youth counsellor would probably be given. Or a few stern words (accompanied by a smile at the end) from the local police,asking him to ensure that they don't have to pay him a visit again.
But a SOCIAL CRIME?!?!? You are out of your self-important mind, or are so detached from today's youth culture as to not have a valid opinion.
Nike Hercules WORKED - no need to be that accurate when you hit the incoming nuke with a wave of saturating neutrons and enough explosive force to probaly turn it to pebbles.
Of course, in the event of a Soviet strike, we would be launching basically all of the Nike Hercules that we had, creating a curtain of death around the borders of the US, and hoping that not too much of the resulting radioactivity landed on our cities and farmland. BUT - this was the era of Hermann Kahn's "On Thermonuclear War" - and thinking like this was very real and very hotly debated.
In the end, we decided that setting off a few dozen 30kt nukes around our own cities was a bad idea. So Ronald Reagan decided that we would do it "smarter", and developed Star Wars using beams, brilliant pebbles, etc. But no nukes.
Star Wars was a dud, never really working as planned due to targetting issues that STILL persist, decades later. And I doubt that I will see it work in my lifetime.
But the old Nike Hercules idea might be JUST the ticket for lone North Korean nukes. I think most people living on the West Coast would prefer a single 30kt blast over the Pacific to a 500kt blast with LA or San Fran as ground zero. The politics are hard to sell, but from a simple logical perspective (Kahn all over again), it would be better to have a workable defense system that you never want to use except as a measure of last resort, to what we have now - a multi-billion dollar boondoggle.
Two of my nominations (VMS and AS/400, both of which I learned to program on) have been mentioned, but I will add:
1) BeOS
2) NeXT
3) Plan 9 (running on a Raspberry Pi, of course)
4) I've listened to all of the Commodore 64 and other ancient PC nominations with a laugh. Too common. You want secure? Ohio Scientific Synmon OS for their C1P model. I still have mine in the loft...now THAT is secure.
If you can write that, then it is obvious that you did not watch the video in the article - they showed the hackers using a PC to DIRECTLY use the bus to control the steering wheel (and wheels) of a Ford SUV. Both left and right turns, and straight, on their command.
Yes, you may be powerful enough to re-centre it, but if you are travelling at 70 mph and your wheel flips hard right, your car will be rolling before you can probably react. Most people do NOT maintain a death grip on the wheel when driving on motorways, nor would they expect their wheel to suddenly flip out like that - in most cases, it would likely slip through their hands.
At highway/motorway speeds, the wheel only has to deflect very, very briefly before you are into the barriers or off the road, especially if heading into a curve.
The danger here is that an attacker can easily gain entry into your engine compartment, attach a device to the bus, and crash your car at high speed. And unfortunately, most police would have no idea what to look for in the wreckage, especially if you smear a little dirt and oil on your box to weather it like the rest of the engine. In the case of a bomb, police KNOW it was suspect, but a crash? So, undetectable crashes, with no evidence to speak of, that most likely would be missed because the police would treat it as a accident not a crime.
And they wondered why BlackHat didn't want them to present?
You don't strictly need an initiator for a uranium fission bomb, but yes, you do for a plutonium. And uranium bombs benefit from one, certainly, with higher yields and greater reliability. There is even a clue in the article you linked : "A different initiator (code named ABNER) was used for the Little Boy uranium bomb. Its design was simpler and it contained less polonium. It was activated by the impact of the uranium projectile to the target. It was added to the design as an afterthought and was not essential for the weapon's function."
The least expensive movie to produce that I can think of, that was any good, was Robert Rodriguez's "El Mariachi", in which he basically used his friends to act in the streets of Mexico. The problem was, it was so BAD they eventually had to get real actors in, with real cameras, to re-make it for the American market. I happen to like both versions, btw. But most American viewers wanted NOTHING to do with the original.
The least expensive hit Hollywood movie I know of (and love) was "The Usual Suspects", which was made, almost blindly, for $6 million at the time. With a bunch of "out of favour" or "has been" actors working for less than scale, produced from a script written in a few weeks, from an idea that was a random story made-up while standing in line for the Academy Awards, it is hard to get more results for less. But STILL - $6 million for basic production costs. Then they had to market it, which cost them initially almost as much as the film to produce.
Now...that's the LOW end of what it costs to produce a movie and bring it to market. The producers were out $10 million before it was ever shown in a theatre - on a risk that people would even want to watch Chazz Palimintery as a star (and that was a loooong shot). So how you get "a few pence to produce" is way beyond me...are you buying media, or the art that is ON the media? Because is sounds like you are confusing the two, badly....
Stop me from laughing on the floor!!!
"Overcharge those living in more affluent areas?!?!?!" What, you think that without Region coding the labels would suddenly drop the prices in affluent countries?! Yet at the same time you try to "tell me" that companies exist to make money - wtf are you thinking, because you are contradicting yourself.
Without Region Coding, ALL consumers would pay just about the the maximum cost - because they make so much more in revenue from 1st World sales than 3d World sales. The only "money maximising" strategy is to raise the price to nearly 1st World levels, shaving off a little bit so that it is JUST not worth it to ship disks from Mexico City to London. That would earn the labels a leeeeetle less than they make now, however, because they would earn more per disk, but sell fewer 3d World disks. But if they set prices equally near 3d World levels, that earns them a LOT less than they make now, because there will be no real surge in buying in the 1st World if you drop the prices by even a third. So in the end, Region Coding has fuck all effect on pricing in the 1st World. It stays the same. But 3d World countries get killed.
And if you don't know why labels have varying release schedules for blockbusters, you probably shouldn't be posting on this topic, because it indicates a lack of basic media knowledge. HINT: they time the major releases around when families and students have free time to SEE them in the theatres....summer holidays and Christmas holidays, sometimes Easter. BUT - that CHANGES around the world, notably on either side of the equator. So they always invert the release schedules for the North and South hemispheres for major blockbusters. The OTHER reason they do that is for movies still shown on actual film, not digital releases. Staggering the openings allow them to print a lot fewer copies of expensive movie-grade film to project in theatres, as they can show it in Europe, ship those copies to the US/Canada, and then ship them to Asia. WIth more movies heading towards digital projection, that will diminish as a reason for major releases, but will still be important for art-house films and foreign films, because smaller theatres are not going digital projection too soon, nor is much of Asia due to costs.
"I hate to tell you" - don't try to school me on business, especially media, advertising, or marketing. It's something I have done for, oh, a few decades. I am happy to have discussions, but not in a condescending tone - it will be answered in kind.
Let me point out that there are valid reasons for Region coding that actually benefit consumers...
1) it allows labels to sell content at variable price points - meaning that a DVD can (and usually does) sell for less in poor 3d world countries than it does in London. Given the huge disparity in income between say, London and Mexico City, isn't that morally just? Why should poorer countries have to spend a higher portion of their incomes on entertainment? Region coding ALLOWS variable pricing, so that poorer countries can be charged less, and yet not have those same disks re-imported to richer countries - because if that happened, labels would be forced to resort to one, world-wide price. You may not LIKE paying a higher price - but I kind of think there is some social justice there. Most people reading this English-language, techie site come from what are very privileged backgrounds in a global context - if we can't see that perhaps we should be charged more, then perhaps we should take a long look in the mirror.
2) It allows differing release schedules around the globe, which allows content to be released on DVD earlier without messing up the theatrical releases in other regions (like Southern Hemishere). WIthout region coding, many blockbusters would be released onto DVD only AFTER they had run in all major regions, which basically would add months onto the DVD release schedule. So having Region coding allows us that hate theatres to actually get it (legally) on DVD several months earlier.
Yeah, I move around a LOT, and I have to buy unlocked DVD players from Oppo to play a lot of my stuff. It is inconvenient, and a pain. But MOST people don't move as much as I do (3 continents in the last 8 years), and the benefits to most DVD-lovers of not having to wait more months for a release onto DVD, and of paying prices that are perhaps more appropriate for their locality, kind of make sense if you think about them.
The problem is that most people haven't thought these trade-offs through. One is moral, and one is self-benefiting. But at least recognise that there are trade-offs...
Ask boy-band JLS how "evil and corrupt" those Sony practices are. JLS has gotten very, very rich off their Sony deal, and are in the Sony London offices managing their own marketing and publicity much of the week. The fact that they do it themselves means that Sony takes a smaller cut, but provides them help when the ask (such as tour organisation, etc.). The point is that JLS and Sony _agreed_ to a complex set of terms that worked for both of them.
WIth the easy availability of alternative distribution models for music (i.e., ANY band can host their own website and have content available for download to their fans, and many do), no band HAS to sign to a major label - or any label. Labels now have to offer some value to the artists...otherwise their is no reason to sign up with them.
Not sure how merely doing what makes the most money for the artists that sign with them, and even taking an agreed-up cut, is "corrupt". It might be monopolistic, it might be unkind to your wallet, etc. But you have to remember that the labels represent THE ARTISTS, not the consumers, and their behaviour needs to be judged against that. It is true that labels and artists do have differences that end up in court, but the same can be said of many, many business dealings...
I love mobile - I've worked in mobile space myself quite a bit.
But...honestly...there is a MAJESTY to these ultra-high resolution images that frankly will never show on any mobile device. I don't care how high the resolution is...it will be looking through a porthole.
I think NASA did you a favour by not supporting mobile - it would be like viewing a postage stamp of the Mona Lisa, rather than the real thing. Go dig out your 27" screen, and then have a gander...
Paris, because of the Mona Lisa reference....
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
