Right. BTW, it originally was MS's threat to stop selling Windows (probably Windows 95, then) to IBM's PC division which made them stop actively marketing OS/2 for the home and small business market in the mid-nineties. At a time when the battle was not yet won for MS, IBM gave in, not having enough confidence in their own, much better product.
It's good to have someone remembering from time to time that our problem with microsoft has to do with their illegal and anti-ethical behaviors, behaviors who had the intent to monopolize the market, at the cost of destroying innovation. You may praise him for that, but still both of you don't see that such behaviour is in fact quite mandatory; nothing else can be expected from a company which has become so successful that there is a chance to build a monopoly with one or more of their products. Everything else would be strictly against shareholders' interests and thereby out of question. That's how capitalism works, and this is the more true the more globalized it gets.
About seven or eight years ago, when StarOffice 5.x was still around, shortly after it was acquired by Sun, I remember some Sun/StarOffice guys showing StarOffice as a real client-server version implemented in Java, not as a remote-GUI (VNC) based "normal" app like the one in TFA. The server portion was running on a Solaris server, while the client app ran on any OS; I think they were showing it on OS/2 since the event was a OS/2 users' conference. They claimed to have implemented some kind of sophisticated load balancing between client and server. The functionality was the same as that of the ordinary office suite, the GUI looked not much different and evrerything seemed quite performant.
For a very short time, German telco Mobilcom used to offer it to their customers as a web-based service.
I wonder what became of it. The same what became of the vast and really useful feature set that was ripped out of StarOffice 5.x when it was crippled to become OpenOffice 1/StarOffice 6, probably.
What they are doing is still unethical because the have not come to an agreement with the copyright holders So, radio is "unethical" as well? Radio has no agreement with the copyright holders either, instead radio settles with the representing organizations. Russian law simply puts distribution on the net under similar regulations as broadcasting by radio. What makes that "unethical"? Just the fact that the profits for the music industry are by far lower under such circumstances?
"TV Stations need to understand that Wikipedia, and any other web service is NOT their own personal plaything, for them to run 'experiments' on" - isn't that to some extent what Wikpedia is by design, a "plaything" for every person who somehow feels the urge to play with it? Anything else would have had to include a more selective and more restrictive decision of who is allowed to contribute in the first place, instead of the concept of allowing everyone everything.
Although the reported activities of course have to be criticized, it's no wonder they happen. And the suggestion they could be likened to vandalizing a closed private business is way out of proportion, because Wikipedia's concept actually invites such activities and has no effective security measures against them.
Right, same goes for German ("zu", having even more meanings, like "closed" or "intoxicated" [slang]).
Of course Dutch and German speakers are used to it, whereas English speakers are used to and subconsciously relying on the different spellings of "to" and "too" (and "two"), when reading.
None the less, the energy regularly wasted on nagging about and discussing misspellings like "to" instead of "too" to me seems larger by some orders of magnitude than the energy needed to simply and silently auto-correct while reading;-)
These are not learned fears. They are innate. Are you sure? Of course man still has some inborn predisposition to fear, but the term "learned fears" may mistakenly suggest that it might need some time of schooling to acquire the fear, which is not the case. A small, single event, may it be happening to the individual or may it just be observed, is often enough. And you might not be able to notice such an event happening to a child, even if you're a parent.
Your own "fear of combat and confrontation" may eventually lead back to an inborn predisposition, but the specificity of it is undoubtedly the outcome of all your experiences and observations related to combat and confrontation, be it "live" in your own environment or what you've seen on TV and in movies or read in books. Such influences start already inside the mother's womb; from all I know, stress, conflict and trauma in the mother's world can already significantly influence the child's development, especially relating to fear, making even such fear learned, not innate.
I know some people have real budget constraints, but not that many... But their numbers are increasing in the Western world. And at the same time their "budget constraints" are getting more and more severe, up to the point of poverty, in many countries, even in immensely rich ones (by international comparison of national economies), through more and more drastically slashed social security plans alongside increasing unemployment rates.
And studies indeed seem to keep showing that obesity problems are more significant for the lower social classes. And while less money to buy healthy food is one problem, educational deficiencies about what is healthy and what isn't are another. Imposing the question to which extent access to education is a matter of social class as well, which shows another potential link between social class and such a society's obesity problem.
So the fact that the majority of Americans believe in a higher power hurts America? It not only hurts America, it hurts the whole world, given that America as the world's major military power is being led by people starting wars based on reasons strongly affected by religion. About as much as the fact that a significant amount of Muslims believe in their "higher power", ready to "defend" their beliefs against "disbelievers" through war and terrorism.
On a lower level, religion is harmful since it massively influences how we (i.e. too many of us) think and live as a society, what is allowed and accepted and what not. This leads, for example, to rigid bans of natural and healthy ways to develop and practice a natural and sane sexuality, especially in America, with laws allowing the police to prosecute and arrest children for simply touching each other.
In a similar way, it makes us adhere to inhumane, archaic forms of work ethic, keeping us thinking in ways like "only one who works should eat", while modern economy needs less and less manpower to produce what is needed, more and more expanding the armies of "useless" people, on whose poverty the kings of economy feed, whose accumulated riches are getting more and more obscene, and astoundingly small numbers of people thinking wrong of it.
On a still lower level, the system of religion and the principle of belief are inherently harmful, because they brainwash people into an unnatural readiness to accept things without questioning, well serving also the political system and its governments. And since religion is a mass phenomenon, the effects are vast.
Interesting! This page gives an overview on the history of the drug and shows how it was produced by combining the synthesized frog poison Epibatidine with Nicotine, thereby getting rid of the enormous toxicity. It is said that it even "appears to be non-addictive", although nicotine is addictive.
Legally, the denegation of facts is not necessarily a right according to the freedom of opinion or speech, see libel.
Analyzing the path from the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany, which included continued hate-speech propaganda which was not been properly dealt with by the authorities, democratic post-war Germany (and other European countries) made laws banning hate-speech which would be classifiable as "incitement of the people" ("Volksverhetzung"), in order to hamper such developments in the future.
There are other German anti-nazi laws, one of which bans the public bearing of "anti-constitutional signs" like the swastika and other nazi signs, flags and emblems. Their purpose is to see to it that nazi victims, their families, friends, and their offspring do not publicly get confronted again with the symbols of their murderers and torturers.
Seeing that German neo-nazi parties are gaining popularity, especially in the eastern parts, where they even obtain regional-parliament seats, while at the same time open violence by neo-nazi groups on the streets is increasing, one might think that existing anti-nazi laws are too little, not too much. What is happening there is a much bigger threat to freedom (or what some like to think as freedom, given that such "freedom" usually consists of having to work for others all day long, until you're of old age, with all the nice "democracy" shut out from the workplace), especially to the freedom of those traditionally endangered by nazi violence, than the restrictions on free speech imposed by anti-nazi laws.
By the way, regarding "freedom of opinion", many people think of fascism and nazi ideology as "a crime, not an opinion".
And, funniest of all: for one not at all in need of any of the new "enhancements", all this "totally new API and GDI" exactly behaves as XP, just slower.
Especially where annoying differences cannot be switched off at all. On moderately performing hardware without 3D stuff, the Vista UI is slower than XP even with all features and gadgets switched off, sometimes nearly to the point of becoming unusable.
Re:Countdown until AoMP3 reappears in China/Brasil
on
Allofmp3 Shut Down, Again
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
dont even know what the WTO does The WTO is an international organization designed to supervise and "liberalize" international trade, led by the wealthy, industrialized states. One of its primary purposes is to exert pressure on less-developed countries in order to turn them into good marketplaces for the big first-world companies and industries. Often such pressure includes coercion to privatize resources like water and electricity, making more and more people unable to afford them, and thereby worsening poverty in these countries even more.
So, the pressure we see being exerted on Russia to change their laws just to make their markets more open for the western music industry, is a good example of what the WTO is about, although a rather minor one. Your wish for the WTO to go away (it won't, though) would be supported by many people for much stronger reasons.
Do you have any more information on why they last better behind glass and how much longer (any sources)? No figures or sources at hand, while I've seen, though not followed, some potentially useful links in other postings; personally, I'd expect around three years or even more based on my own experience, modern dry ink prints possibly a lot longer (my old Epson still uses liquid ink). As to why, I suspect it will be a combination of less UV radiation and less contact with air, making the dyes less vulnerable to degradation (oxidation).
Unfortunately, for a specific camera, dcraw and dcraw-based converters are only as good as the camera profile that exists for that specific camera. Which are not too good at all for Olympus DSLRs, for example. And, in contrast to the manufacturer's solutions and to some of the better commercial converters, results may look completely different when coming from two different camera models even of the same manufacturer. Which is no fun when you tend to do shootings with those two cameras side by side. In other words, for me, the 'camera profile' part of the problem is already there for some converters, including dcraw and derivates.
Will I be able to view/convert today's RAW files in 50 years time? No way, and I'd be willing to place a bet on this. The best you can do is to store them to a lossless format. I know, you will loose information through this process, but usefully processing RAW images requires much out-of-band bespoke knowledge that is unlikely to survive 50 years. That's what I'm suspecting as well. Even if I was going to convert all my manufacturer-specific RAWs to Adobe DNG (and thereby already losing some manufacturer-specific EXIF data) and even if DNG would be around 50 years from now, I'd still be in need of a converter with a proper camera profile for the specific camera the RAW was made with. Which is why the "Open RAW" initiative, too, seems to be addressing only half of the problem...
I have never understood people's desire to print their photos at home using current technology. Two reasons for me. One, instant availability. This is for the occasional small print, which I usually do on heavy glossy paper. But for larger quantities I do indeed order small prints on proper photographic paper through online services. Unfortunately, there's no developer in my neighborhood whose service would be faster than them.
Reason two, reliable output. This is for larger prints, mostly I do 30x40cm/12x16", which I do on inexpensive 'office photo' type paper. After having tried a couple of online photo services, the last of which came back to me with the same picture looking completely different on a large print than on a small print, I gave up and went back to my old Epson Stylus Photo 1270. The printer sure has its problems, and the colours last only when put behind glass, but that's where they'll be, and, most important, after I've seen the picture on the screen I know what it will look like on paper and that it won't be randomly under- or overexposed, as long as I'm staying with the same brand and type of paper.
Will my files survive 50 years of moving between storage media? Will I be able to view JPEG files in 50 years time? And, maybe even more critical: Will I be able to view/convert today's RAW files in 50 years time?
Well, the flaws in the approach of TFA were already discussed exhaustively, so I'm only going to quote a sign I saw in a leftist flat share's bathroom a couple of years ago:
STAND UP FOR YOUR RIGHTS, BUT SIT DOWN FOR YOUR PISS!
Yes, they do. While systems are getting more complex faster and faster, we seem to have come from a "know one language, know them all" paradigm, which had some truth in it twenty years ago and earlier, to a situation in which you cannot even be thoroughly proficient throughout one single "language", like with Java, you even need to specialize in areas of it because it's become too complex a field.
And when your assignment changes, or when the next new big thing in software development comes, it's back to school again. The problem is, indeed, the more you're specialized, the less universally you're suited for jobs in case you need to apply. On a side note, that's why especially in IT it would get more and more important to insist that employers provide for one's further training...
Ok, as far as I can see the matter seems to be quite extensively discussed, I sure won't be able to put more esprit into it. Especially since I fully stopped playing about six or seven years ago (except maybe for things like the occasional, recreational deck of solitaire at work, maybe once in a couple of weeks), for reasons I won't go into here. Which leads straight to my request, because in my two or three short attempts to find something I might like to play I did not find anything at all.
Some of what I used to play back then, in random order: the occasional RPG, Golf, Diablo, Descent, Starcraft. No idea though if I could still have fun playing them, but I liked them at the time. Of all those games, I think it was only Diablo (I and II) and Golf (the Links series) which I could play quite excessively, within a suited round of co-players.
I'm not one for single-player, I don't care for massively multiplayer either. I've always been in favour of small, private rounds, since multiplayer gaming came up.
I have no liking left for games which simulate or re-play the questionable ways in which this world has developed, continues to develop and to work, like Civilization, or any games playing with the subject of bourgeois governance or even business and commerce in capitalism. I see too much of it in real life already, understanding the concepts as being the main reason for most of the world's problems.
First person shooters? No way, regardless in what surroundings they're set.
I definitely won't be able to play excessively anymore, there's not enough time. Turns of half an hour or an hour in play should be possible and still be fun.
Ah, yes, my PC hardware is quite limited (the currently biggest machines are around 1,3~1,5 GHz,.75~1 GB, no real 3D acceleration), and I'm not able or inclined to invest too much in improving it for the purpose.
Is there anything at all, or am I at a loss? Do I have to go on spending my spare time with real people, in pubs and such? Any hints, a game's name I might want to look deeper into?
From one of the comments below TFA: "Out of 28 notebook LCDs manufactured by Samsung, only 2 can display 16.7M colors natively, a 15.4-inch panel with a lowish resolution of 1,280 x 800 (part number LTN154X5) and a 19-inch panel (part number LTN190W1). The rest, 26 LCDs, are 6-bit and can display 262,144 colors natively, without dithering, and millions of colors with dithering. [...] At LG.Philips, all of the 15 notebook LCDs are 6-bit and can display 262,144 colors natively, without dithering, and millions of colors with dithering."
So it seems virtually no laptop LCD can display 16.7M colors without dithering. It's a problem which affects the whole industry, and all laptop manufacturers seem to be, well, somewhat "optimistic" in their advertising claims.
Which doesn't make it better that Apple does so, too, and as far as I'm concerned, the suit is well justified.
The things the police is allowed to do should be well-defined Yes, and they should be well-warranted and not carried out haphazardly on innocent people. Which is why, for example, police need a search warrant to search. And prerequisites of that kind, measures to protect citizens from unsubstantiated prosecution, which unmistakenly have to be part of every system calling itself democracy, have constantly been watered down in western nations since the post-9/11 "war on terror" started. Not that they would have been really too much a protection beforehand, everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
So what? Just superclass them with the same class!
Right. BTW, it originally was MS's threat to stop selling Windows (probably Windows 95, then) to IBM's PC division which made them stop actively marketing OS/2 for the home and small business market in the mid-nineties. At a time when the battle was not yet won for MS, IBM gave in, not having enough confidence in their own, much better product.
Cheers,
d. d.
About seven or eight years ago, when StarOffice 5.x was still around, shortly after it was acquired by Sun, I remember some Sun/StarOffice guys showing StarOffice as a real client-server version implemented in Java, not as a remote-GUI (VNC) based "normal" app like the one in TFA. The server portion was running on a Solaris server, while the client app ran on any OS; I think they were showing it on OS/2 since the event was a OS/2 users' conference. They claimed to have implemented some kind of sophisticated load balancing between client and server. The functionality was the same as that of the ordinary office suite, the GUI looked not much different and evrerything seemed quite performant.
For a very short time, German telco Mobilcom used to offer it to their customers as a web-based service.
I wonder what became of it. The same what became of the vast and really useful feature set that was ripped out of StarOffice 5.x when it was crippled to become OpenOffice 1/StarOffice 6, probably.
Cheers,
d. d.
"TV Stations need to understand that Wikipedia, and any other web service is NOT their own personal plaything, for them to run 'experiments' on" - isn't that to some extent what Wikpedia is by design, a "plaything" for every person who somehow feels the urge to play with it? Anything else would have had to include a more selective and more restrictive decision of who is allowed to contribute in the first place, instead of the concept of allowing everyone everything.
Although the reported activities of course have to be criticized, it's no wonder they happen. And the suggestion they could be likened to vandalizing a closed private business is way out of proportion, because Wikipedia's concept actually invites such activities and has no effective security measures against them.
Right, same goes for German ("zu", having even more meanings, like "closed" or "intoxicated" [slang]).
;-)
Of course Dutch and German speakers are used to it, whereas English speakers are used to and subconsciously relying on the different spellings of "to" and "too" (and "two"), when reading.
None the less, the energy regularly wasted on nagging about and discussing misspellings like "to" instead of "too" to me seems larger by some orders of magnitude than the energy needed to simply and silently auto-correct while reading
Your own "fear of combat and confrontation" may eventually lead back to an inborn predisposition, but the specificity of it is undoubtedly the outcome of all your experiences and observations related to combat and confrontation, be it "live" in your own environment or what you've seen on TV and in movies or read in books. Such influences start already inside the mother's womb; from all I know, stress, conflict and trauma in the mother's world can already significantly influence the child's development, especially relating to fear, making even such fear learned, not innate.
And studies indeed seem to keep showing that obesity problems are more significant for the lower social classes. And while less money to buy healthy food is one problem, educational deficiencies about what is healthy and what isn't are another. Imposing the question to which extent access to education is a matter of social class as well, which shows another potential link between social class and such a society's obesity problem.
On a lower level, religion is harmful since it massively influences how we (i.e. too many of us) think and live as a society, what is allowed and accepted and what not. This leads, for example, to rigid bans of natural and healthy ways to develop and practice a natural and sane sexuality, especially in America, with laws allowing the police to prosecute and arrest children for simply touching each other.
In a similar way, it makes us adhere to inhumane, archaic forms of work ethic, keeping us thinking in ways like "only one who works should eat", while modern economy needs less and less manpower to produce what is needed, more and more expanding the armies of "useless" people, on whose poverty the kings of economy feed, whose accumulated riches are getting more and more obscene, and astoundingly small numbers of people thinking wrong of it.
On a still lower level, the system of religion and the principle of belief are inherently harmful, because they brainwash people into an unnatural readiness to accept things without questioning, well serving also the political system and its governments. And since religion is a mass phenomenon, the effects are vast.
Interesting! This page gives an overview on the history of the drug and shows how it was produced by combining the synthesized frog poison Epibatidine with Nicotine, thereby getting rid of the enormous toxicity. It is said that it even "appears to be non-addictive", although nicotine is addictive.
Legally, the denegation of facts is not necessarily a right according to the freedom of opinion or speech, see libel.
Analyzing the path from the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany, which included continued hate-speech propaganda which was not been properly dealt with by the authorities, democratic post-war Germany (and other European countries) made laws banning hate-speech which would be classifiable as "incitement of the people" ("Volksverhetzung"), in order to hamper such developments in the future.
There are other German anti-nazi laws, one of which bans the public bearing of "anti-constitutional signs" like the swastika and other nazi signs, flags and emblems. Their purpose is to see to it that nazi victims, their families, friends, and their offspring do not publicly get confronted again with the symbols of their murderers and torturers.
Seeing that German neo-nazi parties are gaining popularity, especially in the eastern parts, where they even obtain regional-parliament seats, while at the same time open violence by neo-nazi groups on the streets is increasing, one might think that existing anti-nazi laws are too little, not too much. What is happening there is a much bigger threat to freedom (or what some like to think as freedom, given that such "freedom" usually consists of having to work for others all day long, until you're of old age, with all the nice "democracy" shut out from the workplace), especially to the freedom of those traditionally endangered by nazi violence, than the restrictions on free speech imposed by anti-nazi laws.
By the way, regarding "freedom of opinion", many people think of fascism and nazi ideology as "a crime, not an opinion".
And, funniest of all: for one not at all in need of any of the new "enhancements", all this "totally new API and GDI" exactly behaves as XP, just slower.
Especially where annoying differences cannot be switched off at all. On moderately performing hardware without 3D stuff, the Vista UI is slower than XP even with all features and gadgets switched off, sometimes nearly to the point of becoming unusable.
So, the pressure we see being exerted on Russia to change their laws just to make their markets more open for the western music industry, is a good example of what the WTO is about, although a rather minor one. Your wish for the WTO to go away (it won't, though) would be supported by many people for much stronger reasons.
Unfortunately, for a specific camera, dcraw and dcraw-based converters are only as good as the camera profile that exists for that specific camera. Which are not too good at all for Olympus DSLRs, for example. And, in contrast to the manufacturer's solutions and to some of the better commercial converters, results may look completely different when coming from two different camera models even of the same manufacturer. Which is no fun when you tend to do shootings with those two cameras side by side. In other words, for me, the 'camera profile' part of the problem is already there for some converters, including dcraw and derivates.
Reason two, reliable output. This is for larger prints, mostly I do 30x40cm/12x16", which I do on inexpensive 'office photo' type paper. After having tried a couple of online photo services, the last of which came back to me with the same picture looking completely different on a large print than on a small print, I gave up and went back to my old Epson Stylus Photo 1270. The printer sure has its problems, and the colours last only when put behind glass, but that's where they'll be, and, most important, after I've seen the picture on the screen I know what it will look like on paper and that it won't be randomly under- or overexposed, as long as I'm staying with the same brand and type of paper.
Well, the flaws in the approach of TFA were already discussed exhaustively, so I'm only going to quote a sign I saw in a leftist flat share's bathroom a couple of years ago:
STAND UP FOR YOUR RIGHTS,
BUT SIT DOWN FOR YOUR PISS!
Yes, they do. While systems are getting more complex faster and faster, we seem to have come from a "know one language, know them all" paradigm, which had some truth in it twenty years ago and earlier, to a situation in which you cannot even be thoroughly proficient throughout one single "language", like with Java, you even need to specialize in areas of it because it's become too complex a field.
And when your assignment changes, or when the next new big thing in software development comes, it's back to school again. The problem is, indeed, the more you're specialized, the less universally you're suited for jobs in case you need to apply. On a side note, that's why especially in IT it would get more and more important to insist that employers provide for one's further training...
- Some of what I used to play back then, in random order: the occasional RPG, Golf, Diablo, Descent, Starcraft. No idea though if I could still have fun playing them, but I liked them at the time. Of all those games, I think it was only Diablo (I and II) and Golf (the Links series) which I could play quite excessively, within a suited round of co-players.
- I'm not one for single-player, I don't care for massively multiplayer either. I've always been in favour of small, private rounds, since multiplayer gaming came up.
- I have no liking left for games which simulate or re-play the questionable ways in which this world has developed, continues to develop and to work, like Civilization, or any games playing with the subject of bourgeois governance or even business and commerce in capitalism. I see too much of it in real life already, understanding the concepts as being the main reason for most of the world's problems.
- First person shooters? No way, regardless in what surroundings they're set.
- I definitely won't be able to play excessively anymore, there's not enough time. Turns of half an hour or an hour in play should be possible and still be fun.
- Ah, yes, my PC hardware is quite limited (the currently biggest machines are around 1,3~1,5 GHz,
.75~1 GB, no real 3D acceleration), and I'm not able or inclined to invest too much in improving it for the purpose.
Is there anything at all, or am I at a loss? Do I have to go on spending my spare time with real people, in pubs and such? Any hints, a game's name I might want to look deeper into?Thx,
d. d.
From one of the comments below TFA: "Out of 28 notebook LCDs manufactured by Samsung, only 2 can display 16.7M colors natively, a 15.4-inch panel with a lowish resolution of 1,280 x 800 (part number LTN154X5) and a 19-inch panel (part number LTN190W1). The rest, 26 LCDs, are 6-bit and can display 262,144 colors natively, without dithering, and millions of colors with dithering. [...] At LG.Philips, all of the 15 notebook LCDs are 6-bit and can display 262,144 colors natively, without dithering, and millions of colors with dithering."
So it seems virtually no laptop LCD can display 16.7M colors without dithering. It's a problem which affects the whole industry, and all laptop manufacturers seem to be, well, somewhat "optimistic" in their advertising claims.
Which doesn't make it better that Apple does so, too, and as far as I'm concerned, the suit is well justified.