The would be Brazil. Except of course we won't have to move there. Brazil's economy will come to us.
I think it's just big companies in death throes. Frankly if EVERYONE is that desperate, no one is making a profit, and the whole industry is about to take a collective shot between the eyes.
With open source code is going to become a cottage industry. John's hardware store does not care what software is POS and inventory control system uses, Jane's coffee shop is as content using a Linux firewall to meter net access as those $600 off-the-shelf jobbers.
We all have skills. We live around the corner. Quit your bitching, see the writing on the wall, and start drumming up business.
Hell, at the rate high paying jobs are moving overseas, they are going to start elevating their standard of living so much that the whol e advantage will cancel itself out.
And might I add that in the ensuing chaos intend to position myself as dread lord, feared by men, adored by women, and known far and wide for my cardigan sweaters!
Re:Before all the flamers get in.
on
Qt On DirectFB
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· Score: 1
(Yummy, yummy humble pie. Always sugar coat your words, you will probably have to eat them at some point...)
To tell you the truth, crappy monitors bother me too. So do flourescent lights. (I can see them blinking at 60 Hz.)
You are right that not all people percieve the world in the same way. When I said people see 12 frames per second, I should have noted that "on average" people see only 12 frames per second. When figuring things like this out psychologists developed a battery of tests, and they measured the point at which 50% of the population can still detect the phenominon and 50% of the population cannot detect the phenominon.
So the average human sees the world at 12 frames per second, has a range of hearing between 60 Hz and 22,000 Hz, has color vision, and can't tell the difference between a 300DPI printout and a 600DPI printout (black and white.)
That doesn't tell you didly about any individual person though, and I should have noted that.
For what it's worth, low refresh rates drive me nuts too. Mostly it's the noise and moire patterns generated from dirty power sources. On an LCD the frequency is meaningless because all of the pixels are updated at once... if you are using a straight digital out. (Look at a computer screen with a video camera, nifty patterns.)
I would have told you the LCD's are easy on the eyes, but I just ran into a dentist who gets a headache and eyestrain working with them. If your LCD is connected to an analog jack it's still being painted like a CRT. The problem with CRT displays is that the beam is always moving, repainting the screen a pixel at a time. At least it's not eating your desk.
Goes to show you can't can't generalize about people. No wait, that's a generalization isn't it...
Re:Before all the flamers get in.
on
Qt On DirectFB
·
· Score: 1
You sound like the same sort of person that thinks backing up to an external hard drive is suffiecient because tapes are "so slow, expensive and bulky" aren't you?
You addressed the problem yourself. The problem is NOT X-windows, it is the drivers it sits upon. Starting from scratch with a brand new system is only going to put you further in a development whole. Frankly, there is a REASON X exists.
I would like to also point out that the human eye can only see 12 frames per second. Motion pictures are shot at 24 frames per second. The picture on your CRT refreshes 60 times per second. Any difference you percieve in frame rates above 24 are in your head, above 60 are REALLY in your head because you aren't seeing them.
As much as I love Open Source (I'm typing this via Moz on FreeBSD!), I don't think I could recommend it to Sally Secretary quite yet. Its still got a bit more polishing to do. In Gnome, for example, I occasionally get a dialog box that says " occurred. For more information, click on the help button." Naturally there is no help button.
First off, not all secretaries are female you insensitive clod! Secondly, most secretaries are adept at whatever you tell them to use.
This is the same labor pool that used to do their work on:
IBM Typewriters
Electronic Word processors
WordStar under DOS
WordPerfect under DOS/Windows
Claris Works on the Macintosh
MS Office (95, 97, 2000, XP)
And who can forget all those green-screen applications on the mainframe, manual filing systems, etc.
Give the folks who file your paperwork credit. They have been savvy since before Savvy was cool.
Some distribution, I'm thinking of gentoo, have a user submission feature for new packages.
Just submit a new ebuild as a bug report. (No, that IS actually the proper way.) After a few weeks in the mill, your package will be out and about and happily rsynced in with every gentoo user. Gentoo are working on porting portage, their source distribution mechanism, to MacOSx and Window (running CygWin).
Of course, instant gratification is not a hallmark of the portage system.
You are competing with everybody else's widget in portage. So just make sure you get in cahoots with the folks who write the install docs, and have your software be made the subject of a few ZDnet articles. Writing a HOWTO based around your product is also a good idea.
Re:Before all the flamers get in.
on
Qt On DirectFB
·
· Score: 1
Frankly, science and technology have long taken blind turns and dead ends, only to find themselves back where they started.
No one said progress was a linear path. Indeed, history is littered with the debris of technology that had a few decades of fad only to be supplanted by its predacessor.
Look at naval warfare. During the 2 world wars they built bigger and bigger battleships. Governments wanted them like bad toys. By the end of the second world war, Battleships were found to be sitting ducks for aircraft and submarines. Aside from coastal bombardments, about the only thing a battleship WAS useful for was battling other battleships. And battleships were not cheap.
If X is so bulky, why were all of the top-end graphics workstations running it? Before 1999, just about every serious CAD box was an HP, SGI, or Sun workstation.
I also have a hard time figuring out what the hell you mean by "memory footprint". I have X running on machines with 20Mb of RAM.
Re:Before all the flamers get in.
on
Qt On DirectFB
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Network transparency is a beautiful thing. I admit, my needs are a little exotic, but I happily run my computer from several dumb terminals (stripped down laptops).
Why maintain a stable of computers when you can have one ubermachine (and of course a few cruddy ones for DNS and webcaching.) The wife has a copy of Win4Lin for Quicken and Office. And I never have to worry about being booted off the "good" computer.
Hell, with my cable tuner in the big computer I can actually watch TV over the wireless. That is of course, if I had cable. I'm practicing living on Internet and DVD's alone. Apparently I missed something called "Reality TV."
The issues only get sticky if you try to use a specially chipped X-Box to play pirated games and/or develop emulation hardware for a conventional PC that allows it to play X-Box games without the Xbox.
Now, would Microsoft like you to believe that tampering with the devices is verboten entirely: sure. But part of having rights is a) knowing about them and b) standing up to bullies. Our constitution only gaurentees the persuit of happiness, not happiness itself.
that the atmosphere is a hell of a lot thinner at 70,000 feet.
Rocket motors are REALLY innefficient at low speed.
Air travels differently around a craft traveling at supersonic speed. If you can start the craft off at nearly the speed of sound you can optimize the design better by ignoring the sub-sonic properties.
If you look at a graph
showing mass, velocity, and altitude of the Saturn V, you see that half the fuel in the first stage got the vehicle up to 3000 feet at 500m/s. Granted, you are replacing that mass with more mass in aircraft (not to mention the aircraft's fuel). At least the aircraft doesn't need to carry oxidizer, which is pretty heavy.
Getting back to the spacecraft, the less weight spent getting it of the ground means more weight for payload, fuel, etc.
Indeed. Not only that, but since the line between OS and IE is so blurry, its so easy to wright these click and "oh shit" scripts.
Some Operating Systems simply run the OS as a userspace program, the way it was meant to be.
Of course, certainotheroperatingsystems limit what software users can install in the first place.
Working with PHD's and scientist, let me tell you the computer savvy is no measure of intellect. You and I take for granted that we can field strip a linux box or make a webserver from a toaster, an AOL CD, 2 paper clips, and a sheet of tinfoil. Most folks are just happy to be able to use email.
These goons (the DoubleClick advertisors) deliberately designed their items to trick people. They left "presents" behind for admins like myself to clean up after. The only reason they were able to do that was by having a large, ubiquitous, and utterly unscrupulous delivery service plastering adds in useful sites everywhere.
Frankly, this shit is a virus by any other standard. I just wish MicroShaft was included in it for designing an web browser that allowed people to transparently install this shit.
Microsoft is under threat of lawsuit from numerous people who can't understand that a "Standard" is different than a "Convention." Microsoft's sales pitches stressed that its software was an industry standard, when in fact it was simply a convention, and not based on any kind of specifications from an industry board at all.
Oh, and every product now will have to be geared toward those of limited intellect and/or small children.
It's more like this scenario: A police car flashes you. Do you pull over? Of course. An officer gets out and walks to your car and only when he gets to your car window and begins to try to sell you Chanel copies do you realize that his badge reads "great scents", that the logo on the side of his car reads "To Scent and Perfect" and that the thing on his belt is a credit card reader, not a baton.
Glad I'm not the only one that's happened to. I swear on the beltway that between the unmarked police cars and the policecar salesmen it's a miracle anyone can tell who is who. Though I will say, the Chanel knock offs are great at removing engine deposits and removing gum from the bottom of shoes.
Hell, I'm envisioning a french language translator proxy. All it does it take the words used to describe something everywhere else (English, German, Italian, etc) and does a simple search and replace with the santioned French term.
Granted, you still have to get the grammer right, but it would at least act as a sort of "Spell" check.
The standard way of patenting in recent years has been to take [insert any ancient or commonplace activity here] and do it "on the Internet!"
Now these guys have created a revolutionary method for patenting! Just take [insert any ancient or commonplace activity here] and do it "internationally!"
You should patent that method of generating patents.
i am writing you of a wonderful business oppertunity in nigeria. my father was gumbo aiduiuda creator of the patent for e-commerce.
i am the rightful heir to the fortune that has become him. but being persecuted by the regime of douy, cheetum and howe, i cannot move the money out of nigeria.
in exchange for the use your bank account i am willing to share 20% of the sum of $3 billion dollars.
You can get sued by SCO!
None of your friends will know how to use your computer - security by fucking obnoxious UI!
You'll miss out on all the latest games!
As far as games go, the REALLY good ones are ported to the consoles.
And while I may be missing out on all the latest games, I'm also missing out on all the viruses too.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's just big companies in death throes. Frankly if EVERYONE is that desperate, no one is making a profit, and the whole industry is about to take a collective shot between the eyes.
With open source code is going to become a cottage industry. John's hardware store does not care what software is POS and inventory control system uses, Jane's coffee shop is as content using a Linux firewall to meter net access as those $600 off-the-shelf jobbers.
We all have skills. We live around the corner. Quit your bitching, see the writing on the wall, and start drumming up business.
Think of it, ASCII art in counted cross stitch, wire wrap baskets, hammocks made of fiber-optic cable.
And might I add that in the ensuing chaos intend to position myself as dread lord, feared by men, adored by women, and known far and wide for my cardigan sweaters!
To tell you the truth, crappy monitors bother me too. So do flourescent lights. (I can see them blinking at 60 Hz.)
You are right that not all people percieve the world in the same way. When I said people see 12 frames per second, I should have noted that "on average" people see only 12 frames per second. When figuring things like this out psychologists developed a battery of tests, and they measured the point at which 50% of the population can still detect the phenominon and 50% of the population cannot detect the phenominon.
So the average human sees the world at 12 frames per second, has a range of hearing between 60 Hz and 22,000 Hz, has color vision, and can't tell the difference between a 300DPI printout and a 600DPI printout (black and white.)
That doesn't tell you didly about any individual person though, and I should have noted that.
For what it's worth, low refresh rates drive me nuts too. Mostly it's the noise and moire patterns generated from dirty power sources. On an LCD the frequency is meaningless because all of the pixels are updated at once... if you are using a straight digital out. (Look at a computer screen with a video camera, nifty patterns.)
I would have told you the LCD's are easy on the eyes, but I just ran into a dentist who gets a headache and eyestrain working with them. If your LCD is connected to an analog jack it's still being painted like a CRT. The problem with CRT displays is that the beam is always moving, repainting the screen a pixel at a time. At least it's not eating your desk.
Goes to show you can't can't generalize about people. No wait, that's a generalization isn't it...
You addressed the problem yourself. The problem is NOT X-windows, it is the drivers it sits upon. Starting from scratch with a brand new system is only going to put you further in a development whole. Frankly, there is a REASON X exists.
I would like to also point out that the human eye can only see 12 frames per second. Motion pictures are shot at 24 frames per second. The picture on your CRT refreshes 60 times per second. Any difference you percieve in frame rates above 24 are in your head, above 60 are REALLY in your head because you aren't seeing them.
First off, not all secretaries are female you insensitive clod! Secondly, most secretaries are adept at whatever you tell them to use.
This is the same labor pool that used to do their work on:
Give the folks who file your paperwork credit. They have been savvy since before Savvy was cool.
Just submit a new ebuild as a bug report. (No, that IS actually the proper way.) After a few weeks in the mill, your package will be out and about and happily rsynced in with every gentoo user. Gentoo are working on porting portage, their source distribution mechanism, to MacOSx and Window (running CygWin).
Of course, instant gratification is not a hallmark of the portage system.
You are competing with everybody else's widget in portage. So just make sure you get in cahoots with the folks who write the install docs, and have your software be made the subject of a few ZDnet articles. Writing a HOWTO based around your product is also a good idea.
No one said progress was a linear path. Indeed, history is littered with the debris of technology that had a few decades of fad only to be supplanted by its predacessor.
Look at naval warfare. During the 2 world wars they built bigger and bigger battleships. Governments wanted them like bad toys. By the end of the second world war, Battleships were found to be sitting ducks for aircraft and submarines. Aside from coastal bombardments, about the only thing a battleship WAS useful for was battling other battleships. And battleships were not cheap.
Probably threatened to audit their network.
I also have a hard time figuring out what the hell you mean by "memory footprint". I have X running on machines with 20Mb of RAM.
Why maintain a stable of computers when you can have one ubermachine (and of course a few cruddy ones for DNS and webcaching.) The wife has a copy of Win4Lin for Quicken and Office. And I never have to worry about being booted off the "good" computer.
Hell, with my cable tuner in the big computer I can actually watch TV over the wireless. That is of course, if I had cable. I'm practicing living on Internet and DVD's alone. Apparently I missed something called "Reality TV."
The issues only get sticky if you try to use a specially chipped X-Box to play pirated games and/or develop emulation hardware for a conventional PC that allows it to play X-Box games without the Xbox.
Now, would Microsoft like you to believe that tampering with the devices is verboten entirely: sure. But part of having rights is a) knowing about them and b) standing up to bullies. Our constitution only gaurentees the persuit of happiness, not happiness itself.
If you look at a graph showing mass, velocity, and altitude of the Saturn V, you see that half the fuel in the first stage got the vehicle up to 3000 feet at 500m/s. Granted, you are replacing that mass with more mass in aircraft (not to mention the aircraft's fuel). At least the aircraft doesn't need to carry oxidizer, which is pretty heavy.
Getting back to the spacecraft, the less weight spent getting it of the ground means more weight for payload, fuel, etc.
Indeed. Not only that, but since the line between OS and IE is so blurry, its so easy to wright these click and "oh shit" scripts. Some Operating Systems simply run the OS as a userspace program, the way it was meant to be. Of course, certain other operating systems limit what software users can install in the first place.
In any case there is a specific clause in the DMCA that allows for reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability.
These goons (the DoubleClick advertisors) deliberately designed their items to trick people. They left "presents" behind for admins like myself to clean up after. The only reason they were able to do that was by having a large, ubiquitous, and utterly unscrupulous delivery service plastering adds in useful sites everywhere.
Frankly, this shit is a virus by any other standard. I just wish MicroShaft was included in it for designing an web browser that allowed people to transparently install this shit.
Microsoft is under threat of lawsuit from numerous people who can't understand that a "Standard" is different than a "Convention." Microsoft's sales pitches stressed that its software was an industry standard, when in fact it was simply a convention, and not based on any kind of specifications from an industry board at all.
Oh, and every product now will have to be geared toward those of limited intellect and/or small children.
Glad I'm not the only one that's happened to. I swear on the beltway that between the unmarked police cars and the policecar salesmen it's a miracle anyone can tell who is who. Though I will say, the Chanel knock offs are great at removing engine deposits and removing gum from the bottom of shoes.
I fart in your general direction.
Now go away or I shall have to taunt you a second time!
Hell, I'm envisioning a french language translator proxy. All it does it take the words used to describe something everywhere else (English, German, Italian, etc) and does a simple search and replace with the santioned French term.
Granted, you still have to get the grammer right, but it would at least act as a sort of "Spell" check.
The expression "Patently Obvious" takes on a whole new meaning.
Now these guys have created a revolutionary method for patenting! Just take [insert any ancient or commonplace activity here] and do it "internationally!"
You should patent that method of generating patents.
All your base are now belong to us.
As far as games go, the REALLY good ones are ported to the consoles.
And while I may be missing out on all the latest games, I'm also missing out on all the viruses too.
Besides, Linux is fun to play with on its own.