And as its "law", then how about the CCTV's all making a noise when they photograph everyone. If they want everyone to respect their law, they should lead by example and prevent their CCTVs from filming without people knowing.
There's a small loophole there - CCTV's do not use film!
Here in my car -- I make analogies It is handy because -- you can relate to them In cars...
And here I thought my sig was a reach.:)
Have you ever watched the video for "Cars"? Gary Numan's all rocking out on the Tambourine like he means it. Great stuff. It was truly a different era.:D
Took me a minute (plus some Google searching) to get yours... Not well versed on Dune, I'm afraid...
Dethklok? Bah, they've got nothing on Detroit Metal City! Krauser-san is the demon-lord of metal, summoned forth from the fiery pits of hell by his many followers so he can spread his message of rape and slaughter.
They also have a rpgoram which syncs up the DVDs and tracks automatically.
Ah, yes... Some nerd shows up at your door wearing a cape, says "Mellon!" as he comes in, and then gives you your damn message in some weird script written out on graph paper, and makes you roll 1D20 to see if you can "decode" it - RPG-o-grams were kind of fun but really not an effective or reliable way of getting a message to somebody...
The final fourth season is nearly over, and when the final episode airs, television will never be the same again.
I'm sure it's a good show, but get real here. Television will be pretty much the same after BSG than it was before BSG.
Now, I wouldn't say that...
I mean, for one thing, BSG apparently has allowed for the possibility of more than one fourth season. How many have they had now? I guess after this final fourth season they'll finally move on to season 5.
Not nearly far enough. What we can now see with this epiphany is that all children are hiding their naked bodies under their clothes, and therefore can only be regarded as mobile child pornography factories. Obviously, only banning children entirely will stop this perverted scourge and allow us to finally achieve a healthy society.
Besides, you know people, they have to keep re-inventing the wheel, in their favorite color.
Its why we never get anywhere.
Well, really, the reason why we never seem to get anywhere is because accomplishing meaningful tasks is hard. Putting together a good app is a lot of work. Getting people to use it is more work. And without clear leadership, there could be a dozen people trying to solve the same task - and as a result, coming up with different solutions and competing with each other. "Getting somewhere" depends on clear leadership. Someone has to be able to take the available coding talent and steer it into a useful direction. That's very hard to establish when the coders in question aren't being paid.:)
It's not quite true to say we "never get anywhere", though. These days, on Linux, we can play all kinds of different video formats, we've got word processors, vector and raster graphics editors, modeling software... we didn't always have all that.
As for writing JS to make GTK+ code... if you've ever coded a GUI by hand, you know it's a pain. I realize that tools like Visual Studio, Eclipse, et al are supposed to take care of this, but some people like to code GUIs from the CLI for some perverted reason. I only had to for a class, and I never want to do so again.
I feel like the tough part is simply working out the layout of the thing - the nested containers, the widgets that go into 'em, etc. From there, hooking up code to the widgets seems like not such a big deal.
You can get through the layout phase with a tool like Glade... Or you can code it by hand. I'd agree that coding it by hand is a real chore, but it's only really awful if you have the code/compile/test/fail/repeat cycle in there. (If it's just code/test/fail/repeat, that's not so bad... But I'd still sooner use Glade.)
Batteries dont matter as much as you think, because it's okay to leave the thing plugged in, like digital picture frames. In fact, that's how I read in bed: with an old LCD monitor connected to the desktop next to me, in my hands, with the power and VGA cables going off to the side. (I scroll with the mouse, in my other hand). I am your real target market.
Some people leave the house from time to time. Personally, I find no point in dragging around a 3 pound device all day if it's only going to give me one hour worth of power. Even the 2-3 hours one would get from a decent laptop is pretty spare when you're talking about taking it places. And if I can't rely on being able to use a portable device, it becomes dead weight.
Making the thing work only with external power would be pretty much a joke nowadays.
And you don't need RAM. You need video RAM.
I don't know what video chipset they're using - but usually the cheap ones these days share system RAM. Such is the case with all the cheap netbooks out there now - most of them use Intel GMA 945 graphics, which feed on system RAM.
1GB RAM may sound like a lot (and even they acknowledge it was more than they needed) but remember that even if this thing had a fast CPU (it doesn't by today's standards), if it winds up having to do a lot of swapping or caching that will kill the thing's performance more effectively than anything. This is especially true given that the only available storage for swap (the 4GB SSD) is most likely very slow, even compared to hard drives.
Lower your standards until you can squeeze this thing out for $200. Have a $199 version with a sucky battetry (or none at all if you must), no camera, or accelerometer. And then a $299 version with all that, if you want to.
I would say the camera can go (some would disagree, I'm sure) - they probably wouldn't save much money by ditching the accelerometer (maybe a few dollars, tops) Cutting the battery seems like a really dumb idea, though. The thing probably already only gets 3-4 hours on that 4-cell battery...
Low-end netbooks (that is, left-over flash-based models from last year) currently sell in the $200-$300 range - from that perspective I'd say they do need to get the cost of this thing down to be competitive. It does have a higher-resolution display than the netbooks, but otherwise it has no real advantage over them. I do like tablets and pen computing in general, but there are lots of times where a keyboard is pretty much necessary. Like right now, for instance.
They're going to make Ed sexy, one way or another. It's just what they do.
No they won't. Ed was the wacky genius/comic relief character. Ed was also intentionally androgynous (several jokes about it throughout the series). Faye and Julia were the sex appeal.
What, you think they care about trifling details about how a character was or wasn't portrayed in the original work?
How can this thing not have bluetooth? Bluetooth is incredibly cheap to add and it would open a lot of applications, such as adding a keyboard and tethering to your phone.
The user could plug a USB bluetooth dongle into a port on the device, but that is much less convenient and it sticks out.
Actually, bluetooth dongles are really frikkin' small these days. They hide almost the entire thing within the USB connector itself - it only protrudes about 2mm from the port.
Seven is deemed "enough" (ie they could theoretically see the previous 6 writes worth fo information) so hit 10+ if your seriousley paranoid. Using random bits and not just zeros means whatever they pickup they cannot be sure really means anything.
The government overdoing something based on a popular misconception? I am shocked and appalled!
Last time I cared about government standards for this sort of thing, I got the NSA document describing standards for the government. It basically reduced down to "take the hard drive platters, and grind them to dust".
While I may doubt the government in general, if NSA says wiping isn't sufficient, I'm inclined to agree with them.
Well, that kind of a recommendation doesn't mean that wiping a drive isn't sufficient - it just means they can't prove a wipe will be sufficient - they have to allow for the possibility that someone will manage to find a way to read a wiped drive...
Of course, if you look at it as a matter of liability - the known cost of destroying a drive (pretty cheap - even if you factor in the cost of replacing it) versus the potential cost of not adequately destroying your data - depending on the data it may be well worth physically destroying the drive. That's the other thing - there's a lot more on the line with the data the NSA's got, and there's more people out there to whom that data is worth the cost of attempting to recover it...
I want to see Milla Jovovich as Ed. That would be perfect.
Milla might be too big to play Ed.
If you stick to the source material, then yeah, Ed's basically a kid and Milla is too old.
But do you really think that's going to happen? No way in hell. They're going to make Ed sexy, one way or another. It's just what they do.
Milla as "Ed" wouldn't be terribly true to the original - but at least it'd be a fun choice. I can see her playing Ed with a bit more eccentricity - not just a "mousy nerd" or "greasemonkey hacker" but as a character with a real bend to their brain: but still with the requisite tasty-liciousness for a Hollywood role... It could work. I like that.
But they won't do it, I'm sure. They'll decide that Ed's character will be responsible for explaining things like hyperspace gates and ship malfunctions to the audience...
and utter disappointment. why doesn't somebody just staple a 'fro to a wooden plank and let that be Spike. micheal clark duncan can be miscast as Jet and the hot chick from transformers and try acting as Faye. Ein will be CG and Ed will be any female actress...using CG to reduce their size.
and dont get me started on what a catastrophe the soundtrack will be.
No, no, no... Clearly Michael Ironside was born to play the role of Jet Black in the live-action Cowboy Bebop... It will also be one more film to add to his repertoire of crap sci-fi movies...
Ed will be played by a hot girl with big boobs. Instead of talking in rhymes and nonsense she'll be a hacker/greasemonkey/tomboy type character - everyone will recognize her as the character who would be totally hot if she just stopped talking about computers for a minute. They won't bother sticking to the original story, certainly not about little details like Ed's age...
Seriously, how can any fan of the original be excited about this news? I expect a disaster of "Aeon Flux" proportions, personally...
When it comes to TV technology (especially in terms of complexity), less is better than more. "minus" "more important than" "plus", abbreviated as "->+", geddit? When it comes to the actual programmes (in terms of variety), more is better than less. "minus" "less important than" "plus".
Do you see it now?
Ah, thanks for explaining that...
I still think it's a grievous misuse of symbols, meanings abused and twisted into something at best tenuously linked to their original meanings ("less than" means "worse"? "minus" means "less" - but doesn't mean "worse"? And "->" isn't an arrow meaning "yields"?) but at least I understand the intent behind it now.
Re:Kills any idea of using Qt in our products
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
However, the company has a strict policy of no LGPL or GPL software. Nothing more restrictive than BSD or Apache when it comes to using free software.
Your company has a very silly policy. I've worked in quite a few places that did commercial closed-source development, and none of them had any problems with LGPL; after all, it was written precisely so that closed-source apps can use it! Why waste time re-writing the code somebody has already written before, and allowed you to use?
They may have been feeling very cautious about the possible issue of developers not only "linking with" but actually "deriving from" LGPL code...
Basically when code is open-source, but with a license restrictive enough to make the lawyers uncomfortable, there's a bit of a liability there - the developers, of course, have total freedom to read and learn from that code. But not all of them will be disciplined enough, when reading a piece of code which does exactly what they need a closed part of their app to do, to not reuse that information inappropriately.
Some would be careless enough to misinterpret the LGPL and either link it improperly or reuse it within closed portions of the code. Aggressively warning employees to avoid GPL/LGPL code is easier that teaching the proper discipline in handling it - and even if a violation didn't wind up costing them a lot of money, it does tend to raise a bit of a stink when it's discovered...
Yeah, which would be great if everybody liked KDE. Which clearly isn't the case, since a whole lot of people still use GNOME.
Personally, I can't think of anything that would get me to use KDE.
I want to start by saying that I have no interest in bashing one package or the other...
But I have to say that I have always preferred KDE. Getting Debian packages has been an issue sometimes (due to licensing, or just Debian not keeping up with releases) but it's always just seemed like it's had its act together much better than GNOME. It's got a pretty good selection of applications, too. GNOME doesn't seem to have kept up with application development - I guess probably it's just assumed everyone uses OpenOffice these days...
You could start with making a Qt version of The GIMP.
It is called Krita. And actually has usable GUI as a bonus.
Usable GUI is a standard feature with GIMP, though, why is it a "bonus" with Krita?:D
Ah, but I kid. I don't share people's complaints with the GIMP UI but I am familiar with the complaints.
I would say other features of Krita are more significant - things GIMP sorely lacks like 16 bit color channels. Even if a person doesn't have the need to output their files with that kind of color resolution, it's simple math to realize that the extra resolution is helpful if you're doing any transformations of the data - and if you're not doing transformations of the data, then why use the app in the first place?
Slashdot Mirror
There's a small loophole there - CCTV's do not use film!
Neither does the digital camera built into your phone.
Right. So how do you "film" anything with such a device?
"because it's a law"
And as its "law", then how about the CCTV's all making a noise when they photograph everyone. If they want everyone to respect their law, they should lead by example and prevent their CCTVs from filming without people knowing.
There's a small loophole there - CCTV's do not use film!
Here in my car -- I make analogies
It is handy because -- you can relate to them
In cars...
And here I thought my sig was a reach. :)
Have you ever watched the video for "Cars"? Gary Numan's all rocking out on the Tambourine like he means it. Great stuff. It was truly a different era. :D
Took me a minute (plus some Google searching) to get yours... Not well versed on Dune, I'm afraid...
Mmm... Dethklok is good.
Dethklok? Bah, they've got nothing on Detroit Metal City! Krauser-san is the demon-lord of metal, summoned forth from the fiery pits of hell by his many followers so he can spread his message of rape and slaughter.
They also have a rpgoram which syncs up the DVDs and tracks automatically.
Ah, yes... Some nerd shows up at your door wearing a cape, says "Mellon!" as he comes in, and then gives you your damn message in some weird script written out on graph paper, and makes you roll 1D20 to see if you can "decode" it - RPG-o-grams were kind of fun but really not an effective or reliable way of getting a message to somebody...
www.rifftrax.com is the home of Mike, Kevin (Tom Servo), and the false Crow.
Josh is the true Mighty Voice of Tom Servo! :D
Slashdot says the body of my message is missing - so I've provided a second one. Here it is:
Josh is the true Mighty Voice of Tom Servo! :D
Joel gets the props for creating the show, but Mike's wise-ass delivery was always funnier.
Wait wait... I thought Joel got the show for creating the props? Have I had it backwards this whole time?
The final fourth season is nearly over, and when the final episode airs, television will never be the same again.
I'm sure it's a good show, but get real here. Television will be pretty much the same after BSG than it was before BSG.
Now, I wouldn't say that...
I mean, for one thing, BSG apparently has allowed for the possibility of more than one fourth season. How many have they had now? I guess after this final fourth season they'll finally move on to season 5.
Yes, Dick Cheney was temporarily acting President.
Ah, so it's like Acting Captain Wesley Crusher...
Not nearly far enough. What we can now see with this epiphany is that all children are hiding their naked bodies under their clothes, and therefore can only be regarded as mobile child pornography factories. Obviously, only banning children entirely will stop this perverted scourge and allow us to finally achieve a healthy society.
And then our children will finally be safe!
Oh, wait...
Same thing, different flavor.
Besides, you know people, they have to keep re-inventing the wheel, in their favorite color.
Its why we never get anywhere.
Well, really, the reason why we never seem to get anywhere is because accomplishing meaningful tasks is hard. Putting together a good app is a lot of work. Getting people to use it is more work. And without clear leadership, there could be a dozen people trying to solve the same task - and as a result, coming up with different solutions and competing with each other. "Getting somewhere" depends on clear leadership. Someone has to be able to take the available coding talent and steer it into a useful direction. That's very hard to establish when the coders in question aren't being paid. :)
It's not quite true to say we "never get anywhere", though. These days, on Linux, we can play all kinds of different video formats, we've got word processors, vector and raster graphics editors, modeling software... we didn't always have all that.
As for writing JS to make GTK+ code... if you've ever coded a GUI by hand, you know it's a pain. I realize that tools like Visual Studio, Eclipse, et al are supposed to take care of this, but some people like to code GUIs from the CLI for some perverted reason. I only had to for a class, and I never want to do so again.
I feel like the tough part is simply working out the layout of the thing - the nested containers, the widgets that go into 'em, etc. From there, hooking up code to the widgets seems like not such a big deal.
You can get through the layout phase with a tool like Glade... Or you can code it by hand. I'd agree that coding it by hand is a real chore, but it's only really awful if you have the code/compile/test/fail/repeat cycle in there. (If it's just code/test/fail/repeat, that's not so bad... But I'd still sooner use Glade.)
Batteries dont matter as much as you think, because it's okay to leave the thing plugged in, like digital picture frames. In fact, that's how I read in bed: with an old LCD monitor connected to the desktop next to me, in my hands, with the power and VGA cables going off to the side. (I scroll with the mouse, in my other hand). I am your real target market.
Some people leave the house from time to time. Personally, I find no point in dragging around a 3 pound device all day if it's only going to give me one hour worth of power. Even the 2-3 hours one would get from a decent laptop is pretty spare when you're talking about taking it places. And if I can't rely on being able to use a portable device, it becomes dead weight.
Making the thing work only with external power would be pretty much a joke nowadays.
And you don't need RAM. You need video RAM.
I don't know what video chipset they're using - but usually the cheap ones these days share system RAM. Such is the case with all the cheap netbooks out there now - most of them use Intel GMA 945 graphics, which feed on system RAM.
1GB RAM may sound like a lot (and even they acknowledge it was more than they needed) but remember that even if this thing had a fast CPU (it doesn't by today's standards), if it winds up having to do a lot of swapping or caching that will kill the thing's performance more effectively than anything. This is especially true given that the only available storage for swap (the 4GB SSD) is most likely very slow, even compared to hard drives.
Lower your standards until you can squeeze this thing out for $200. Have a $199 version with a sucky battetry (or none at all if you must), no camera, or accelerometer. And then a $299 version with all that, if you want to.
I would say the camera can go (some would disagree, I'm sure) - they probably wouldn't save much money by ditching the accelerometer (maybe a few dollars, tops) Cutting the battery seems like a really dumb idea, though. The thing probably already only gets 3-4 hours on that 4-cell battery...
Low-end netbooks (that is, left-over flash-based models from last year) currently sell in the $200-$300 range - from that perspective I'd say they do need to get the cost of this thing down to be competitive. It does have a higher-resolution display than the netbooks, but otherwise it has no real advantage over them. I do like tablets and pen computing in general, but there are lots of times where a keyboard is pretty much necessary. Like right now, for instance.
They're going to make Ed sexy, one way or another. It's just what they do.
No they won't. Ed was the wacky genius/comic relief character. Ed was also intentionally androgynous (several jokes about it throughout the series). Faye and Julia were the sex appeal.
What, you think they care about trifling details about how a character was or wasn't portrayed in the original work?
How can this thing not have bluetooth? Bluetooth is incredibly cheap to add and it would open a lot of applications, such as adding a keyboard and tethering to your phone.
The user could plug a USB bluetooth dongle into a port on the device, but that is much less convenient and it sticks out.
Actually, bluetooth dongles are really frikkin' small these days. They hide almost the entire thing within the USB connector itself - it only protrudes about 2mm from the port.
Seven is deemed "enough" (ie they could theoretically see the previous 6 writes worth fo information) so hit 10+ if your seriousley paranoid. Using random bits and not just zeros means whatever they pickup they cannot be sure really means anything.
No no no... Eight is Enough.
microwave your hard drive. Be forewarned, the ensuing fire may not be worth it.
I can't believe you said 'ensuing' and meant it, Sam...
Last time I cared about government standards for this sort of thing, I got the NSA document describing standards for the government. It basically reduced down to "take the hard drive platters, and grind them to dust".
While I may doubt the government in general, if NSA says wiping isn't sufficient, I'm inclined to agree with them.
Well, that kind of a recommendation doesn't mean that wiping a drive isn't sufficient - it just means they can't prove a wipe will be sufficient - they have to allow for the possibility that someone will manage to find a way to read a wiped drive...
Of course, if you look at it as a matter of liability - the known cost of destroying a drive (pretty cheap - even if you factor in the cost of replacing it) versus the potential cost of not adequately destroying your data - depending on the data it may be well worth physically destroying the drive. That's the other thing - there's a lot more on the line with the data the NSA's got, and there's more people out there to whom that data is worth the cost of attempting to recover it...
The problem there is occasionally the drive wins or claims a draw by destroying the child as well.
Part of most if not all HDDs fall well under the "choking hazard" category.
Problem? I really don't see a down-side here...
I want to see Milla Jovovich as Ed. That would be perfect.
Milla might be too big to play Ed.
If you stick to the source material, then yeah, Ed's basically a kid and Milla is too old.
But do you really think that's going to happen? No way in hell. They're going to make Ed sexy, one way or another. It's just what they do.
Milla as "Ed" wouldn't be terribly true to the original - but at least it'd be a fun choice. I can see her playing Ed with a bit more eccentricity - not just a "mousy nerd" or "greasemonkey hacker" but as a character with a real bend to their brain: but still with the requisite tasty-liciousness for a Hollywood role... It could work. I like that.
But they won't do it, I'm sure. They'll decide that Ed's character will be responsible for explaining things like hyperspace gates and ship malfunctions to the audience...
and utter disappointment. why doesn't somebody just staple a 'fro to a wooden plank and let that be Spike. micheal clark duncan can be miscast as Jet and the hot chick from transformers and try acting as Faye. Ein will be CG and Ed will be any female actress...using CG to reduce their size.
and dont get me started on what a catastrophe the soundtrack will be.
No, no, no... Clearly Michael Ironside was born to play the role of Jet Black in the live-action Cowboy Bebop... It will also be one more film to add to his repertoire of crap sci-fi movies...
Ed will be played by a hot girl with big boobs. Instead of talking in rhymes and nonsense she'll be a hacker/greasemonkey/tomboy type character - everyone will recognize her as the character who would be totally hot if she just stopped talking about computers for a minute. They won't bother sticking to the original story, certainly not about little details like Ed's age...
Seriously, how can any fan of the original be excited about this news? I expect a disaster of "Aeon Flux" proportions, personally...
When it comes to TV technology (especially in terms of complexity), less is better than more. "minus" "more important than" "plus", abbreviated as "->+", geddit?
When it comes to the actual programmes (in terms of variety), more is better than less. "minus" "less important than" "plus".
Do you see it now?
Ah, thanks for explaining that...
I still think it's a grievous misuse of symbols, meanings abused and twisted into something at best tenuously linked to their original meanings ("less than" means "worse"? "minus" means "less" - but doesn't mean "worse"? And "->" isn't an arrow meaning "yields"?) but at least I understand the intent behind it now.
Your company has a very silly policy. I've worked in quite a few places that did commercial closed-source development, and none of them had any problems with LGPL; after all, it was written precisely so that closed-source apps can use it! Why waste time re-writing the code somebody has already written before, and allowed you to use?
They may have been feeling very cautious about the possible issue of developers not only "linking with" but actually "deriving from" LGPL code...
Basically when code is open-source, but with a license restrictive enough to make the lawyers uncomfortable, there's a bit of a liability there - the developers, of course, have total freedom to read and learn from that code. But not all of them will be disciplined enough, when reading a piece of code which does exactly what they need a closed part of their app to do, to not reuse that information inappropriately.
Some would be careless enough to misinterpret the LGPL and either link it improperly or reuse it within closed portions of the code. Aggressively warning employees to avoid GPL/LGPL code is easier that teaching the proper discipline in handling it - and even if a violation didn't wind up costing them a lot of money, it does tend to raise a bit of a stink when it's discovered...
Yeah, which would be great if everybody liked KDE. Which clearly isn't the case, since a whole lot of people still use GNOME.
Personally, I can't think of anything that would get me to use KDE.
I want to start by saying that I have no interest in bashing one package or the other...
But I have to say that I have always preferred KDE. Getting Debian packages has been an issue sometimes (due to licensing, or just Debian not keeping up with releases) but it's always just seemed like it's had its act together much better than GNOME. It's got a pretty good selection of applications, too. GNOME doesn't seem to have kept up with application development - I guess probably it's just assumed everyone uses OpenOffice these days...
You could start with making a Qt version of The GIMP.
It is called Krita. And actually has usable GUI as a bonus.
Usable GUI is a standard feature with GIMP, though, why is it a "bonus" with Krita? :D
Ah, but I kid. I don't share people's complaints with the GIMP UI but I am familiar with the complaints.
I would say other features of Krita are more significant - things GIMP sorely lacks like 16 bit color channels. Even if a person doesn't have the need to output their files with that kind of color resolution, it's simple math to realize that the extra resolution is helpful if you're doing any transformations of the data - and if you're not doing transformations of the data, then why use the app in the first place?