That's correct. Though I intentionally left it out above of the above post (I'm longwinded enough and it was less relevant there), I've commented in the past (e.g. in this post and several others in that thread) that TNG's effects shots were at best (AFAIK) composited on SD video from film sources, if not entirely generated on SD video.

Hence a 100% authentic HD transfer of the original unmodified TNG episodes would be impossible, purely because certain shots only ever existed in SD.

(If they were to be upscaled- as I understood they did for some regular scenes were they couldn't locate the original footage- they would stand out like a sore thumb among the HD-scanned shots, as ST:TNG's analogue NTSC video was soft and crappy even in SD and there's no way on earth they'd be able to convincingly upscale it).

Funny you should say this. A while back I was thinking that- for this reason- MS should have "partnered" with a Japanese company for the original XBox launch there, paying them a cut of the profits there in exchange for "contributing" some token (but easily played-up) role in its "development" and the agreement to use that company's name prominently in marketing the product.

In reality they'd actually be paying the Japanese company near-free royalties in exchange for the right to use them as a trojan horse for the notoriously hard-to-break Japanese market. Yes, it might grate slightly, but 80% of ten times as much profit is still preferable in the long term. The exaggerated "development" role would be a way of countering accusations that the Japanese company were doing little more than marketing an American console... of course they weren't, it's well-known that they contributed significantly to the XBox joint-venture!

The agreement would have to have been drawn up carefully in advance (without being overly explicit about its cynical intent) to avoid MS being held hostage later on, and ultimately the XBox brand is the one that should be being promoted- the Japanese company's name being a means to get a foot in the door, and possibly phased out or reduced later on.

I'm sure that Xzibit would have something canine-related to say about that.

This touches on something I've mentioned previously- namely, why older TV shows shot and mastered entirely on film still aren't necessarily "HD", even though the medium itself *happens* to be capable of resolving that much detail.

An HD production requires *everything* to have been done to HD standards. If not, it's quite possible that props, makeup et al that were only ever expected to look good on a standard-definition set of the time will show their deficiencies far more obviously under the scrutiny of HD.

There were no doubt good reasons for shooting on film- either technical or aesthetic (film converted to standard-def video for transmission still looks different to natively-shot video)- but decades before HD was even a twinkle in anyone's eye, I doubt they were going to waste their limited TV budget on detailing they (reasonably) assumed no-one was ever going to see.

I suspect that the original Enterprise model was more detailed as it would have been used a lot, and having a higher-quality model in the first place would give them more flexibility in terms of close-ups, etc.

Bingo. I bet the one-off single-show models were done as well as required- and no more. (Particularly as ST:TNG was from the shot-on-film-but-mastered-on-video era that- ironically- gave poorer quality than the all-film ST:TOS).

"Also some of the science and tech courses are very demanding but the teachers don't simplify it leading to many whooshing sounds for the student throughout the courses. Such courses could benefit from a simplified overview of the course material."

How many employers would like to hire people that can't understand the actual content and need "simplified overview" to get a grade? If you really don't grasp it to the point where you can actually apply the math for new, novel problems, then you don't actually know it, do you?

MOOCs have a serious credibility problem already. The very last thing they need is to dumb things down. If it becomes common knowledge that, say, an engineering MOOC graduate can't even handle a system of differential equations in an intelligent manner, or don't understand the implication of Green's function, then the credits will become truly worthless.

I accept what you're saying, but the point was that he mirrored the OP's comment in order to make a point- presumably- that this form of "seeing" was just as valid as seeing with the eyes, or rather that, if that wasn't seeing, then "touching" with the fingers wasn't "touching" either.

But it doesn't work because putting "touching" in quotes implies that this isn't actually touching, when it *is* in effect the definition of touching- there's no more direct way you can "touch" something with your own fingers, and it's arguable whether it's meaningful to argue what constitutes touching below that scale.

The "seeing" example quite plainly *was* more indirect, and that's the point I was making.

No- you're trying to be a smartass here, but it doesn't really work, because there isn't any more direct form of "touch"- i.e. the sensation- than that. Insofar as the sensation of "touch"- or the mechanism underlying it- has any meaning when you examine it at such a close, microscopic level, that *is* what "touching" is.

This contrasts with the OP's example of scientists "seeing" on the screen on an electron microscope, where there quite obviously *is* a level of abstraction from directly seeing something (via the interaction of photons with the object and then one's own eyes). So, no- you didn't make a point.

As far as I'm aware, you don't need 'dump' with ZFS. You create a snapshot, then 'zfs send' that snapshot off to your backup storage. Can be done on a live filesystem. Delete the local snapshot when you're done copying it off. ( http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E187... )

I dunno about ZFS for Linux, but FreeNAS's ZFS has NFSv4 ACLs. Are these not sufficient?

...federal officials forced American tech companies to participate in the NSA's controversial PRISM program.

You misspelled "illegal." HTH. HAND.

Attention-deficit-rebranding so that no-one knows what the **** is what has long been an apparent obsession with Microsoft, and going by this story, they don't seem to be improving.

I already posted this elsewhere a couple of years back and re-posted it at least once on Slashdot- but no point reinventing the wheel so:-

Further thoughts on this are that it may be a reflection of Microsoft's internal political structure and culture, and power struggles, with every newcomer needing to stamp his or her identity on the product, regardless of whether that's beneficial. Either that and/or the environment is conducive to horrendously expensive branding and marketing consultants topping up their cocaine money by suggesting rebrandings at regular intervals- again, regardless of whether it's really needed or not.

Yes. Alas, this is a consequence of ZFS's COW (copy on write) design.

In a filesystem like EXT3, if you open a file, seek to some offset, and write new data, EXT3 will write the new data to the existing disk block in place. ZFS, however, will allocate a new block for that offset (copy on write), write the modified data to it, and update the block chain. The result is that it's apparently very easy to badly fragment a ZFS file (do a Google search for "ZFS fragmentation" to see various stories and tests people have written).

You can apparently mitigate the problem by occasionally copying the entire affected file -- Oracle's own whitepaper on the subject apparently reads, "Periodically copying data files reorganizes the file location on disk and gives better full scan response time."

Bottom line: ZFS is not a panacea, nor is it simple. There are myriad options, and trade-offs to all of them.

It does depend on the size of the field as well, though, as well as the funding. I can well imagine astronomy having major problems; everybody has heard of astronomy, and lots of people dream of being astronomers.

A friend of mine is working in paleogeology. As you might imagine there's not a huge amount of money in the field. On the other hand, few people have heard of it either, and there aren't that many people dreaming of working there. There's no movies starring daring paleogeogists with hat and bullwhip in hand ducking poison arrows and swinging across pits of snakes in order to determine the local sea bed temperature during the cambrian. The end result is that funding is pretty stable and dependable. People that are qualified and willing find funding. I bet there's a fair amount of other obscure fields in a similar situation.

You could write an open source application in C++ rather than the much less mainstream R language and you'd have lots of people ready skilled to maintain it.

You may be right in general. But R is not a general-purpose language. It's a programmable tool for statistical computing; you'd have to spend a lot of time to reimplement a set of high-quality statistical libraries to do the same. Doing that correctly is very non-trivial and not quick. Very similar to saying you can replace Matlab with your own C++ code.