There is no reason for the state to force any standards.
How about saving money? Merely by standardizing they will save money, even if they choose the most expensive option. Or are you also against saving tax dollars?
As for your repetitive licensing mantra: Your customers are uninformed, and apparantly so are you. You might want to do a little basic research before you go spouting off about things. Or, you know, you could try actually reading the responses you get.
OK, in general I agree, but in this context this is a completely asinine thing to say. The government SHOULD have the power to decide what file formats work best for their purposes, and they should NOT be expected to simply accept whatever format any citizen decides they want to use.
To be honest, it really isn't clear what side you're arguing for, and frankly you're really just coming off as a raving lunatic and conspiracy theorist.
I fully support ODF as long as the licensing allows incorporation into closed source software.
Um, ODF is an open STANDARD, which means there is no licensing. It's just a specification, which you are free to implement under any license you like.
How much is that warranty actually worth? In my experience, I doubt it actually saves you anything. Your employees still end up doing all the troubleshooting they'd be doing on a white box, plus the time dealing with the idiots the big name has answering their phones, all of which is on your dime, of course. Oh, and you're paying the big name for the privelege as well. Then your system is offline at least overnight while you wait for them to send you the replacement part, which probably isn't a big deal because you have a hot spare (with equivalent warranty, right)? But still, it's inconvenient, and again all the actual work is probably being done by someone on your payroll anyway.
I've got a 21" CRT that'll do 1600x1200 at well over 60Hz, but I run it at 1280x1024 because that puts the text at a comfortable size for me. The problem with enlarging the fonts is that many of the widgets don't scale properly, which leaves the UI as a whole looking totally jacked up. And then, of course, there are those situations where an app doesn't seem to care how you've set things, completely ignoring font size, color, etc.
Well, I forked out the money for a rear-projection set (about $1k for 40"), but it wasn't because I really care about HDTV. Mostly, I just wanted a largish wide-screen for watching movies (it really bugs me that they chop off a third or more of the picture to make it "full screen"). I don't see any reason to pay extra for HD cable when I can get all the shows I'm interested in in SD for cheap.
I spent 3 of the last 5 years repairing high-end TV production equipment, so my lack of care isn't from lack of familiarity. I fully admit that the first time I saw our 1080p test loop it was chin-meet-floor beautiful, but I don't watch TV for the visual quality (unless I'm getting paid too). I watch because I want to be told an interesting story. Good actors with a good script can compensate for almost any lack of visual quality, but the converse isn't true.
You didn't say why you decided to resign. Did you tell your employer? If not, they probably just assumed the worst. If so, well, then I guess maybe it depends on the reason you gave.
I resigned from my last job, gave them ample notice, and ended up working a month beyond my planned departure date. Of course, I didn't really want to leave that job, but my wife had to relocate about 500 miles away for her job and I wanted to be with her more. So, I gave about 2 months notice, and offered to help find and train my replacement. Found the perfect guy, too, but the asshat VP wouldn't sign the req to hire him until about 2 weeks after I left (for the math impaired, that's 3.5 months after I gave notice, which coincidentally was about how long it took me to get fully up to speed when I started there.)
Anyway, without knowing exactly what you said it's impossible to say what you might have done to make them suspicious of you. Maybe it was nothing at all, and that's just SOP? I have to agree with all the people saying "enjoy your free 2 weeks pay." If they're shooting themselves in the foot, that's their choice, and no longer your problem.
I was thinking the same thing. I can't count how many times I've opened up a file to correct a single word or even single character error. I would be mighty pissed to not have some way to make sure that such a correction were saved immediately.
To answer the origional (stupid) question: Why do we have a "Save" button? Because users want that function and that's the name under which they expect to find it. Same with "Save As". Nothing about their existence prevents autosave from being implemented, but there's just no way the computer can always know exactly what it is I want to do with my data.
Do your own homework. NTSC is actually 720x480 at 4/3, hence the resolution of NTSC DVDs.
Do your own homework. NTSC is 525 horizontal lines, which at 4:3 means 700x525, and what amount of that is viewable depends on the device you're using.
I never said corporations are at fault for human failings, but the fact remains that the sole reason for incorporation is to obtain protection from the legal and financial repercussions of ones choices. Every single other benefit you attribute to incorporation can be achieved without it, albeit with perhaps a bit more effort required.
people with means will always run things. This has been true since the dawn of civilization, and it's not a situation that will change.
And so I should just sit down, shut up, and take it? What a moronic thing to suggest!
No, grumbling doesn't get anything done. Only doing is meaningful, and grumbling is as far from doing as you can get.
A corporation is a legal fiction. Period. Without the legal framework to support it, there is no such thing as a corporation. Thus, any corporation, no matter how powerful, is, at its base, a fictitious entity.
If you insist on describing everything in terms of people, that's fine: a corporation is a group of people avoiding taking responsibility for their decisions by hiding behind a legal fiction.
Laws can, and do, change. Whole legal systems get torn down a rebuilt from scratch, sometimes better than they were before, and if you think ours will last forever you are a fool, and should study your history. The best we can hope for is gradual change and not violent overthrow.
But, you're right: I'm not going to change it, but that doesn't mean I have to accept it either, nor does it mean things won't change. There are a lot of options between acceptance and "raging against it til the end of my strength". My choice is to add my voice to the others grumbling about the situation. Grumbling is infectious, you know, and the nice thing about living in a democracic system is that if enough people start grumbling, things get done. You could substitute "capitalist" for "democratic" if you like, either is capable of achieving the desired end, more or less by the same means.
Understanding it is easy, but I'm curious to hear your argument as to why I should accept it. Tell me: does Microsoft, as an entirely fictitious entity, have some special right to persue its best interests that I, as an actual person, do not?
I have a couple people who would want to play, but it might be a sporadic monthly thing at best.
So go with that. If you only play once a month or so, so what, as long as you enjoy it. I've got characters I play maybe once every year or two, but I still enjoy it on those rare occasions. The only real trick is the recordkeeping: not just taking notes on things that your character did or might remember, but also keeping all that stuff where you can find it again when the time comes.
Another good solution that some of my friends have come up with is sort of a non-campaign: basically a series of one-offs with continuing characters. Anyone who has an idea for a quick game can run, and anyone available can play. I don't think that would work well in a strongly "leveled" game like D&D, as someone who misses a couple games would fall seriously behind. FWIW, we used a modified version of the old White Wolf system, but there are plenty of alternatives.
I recently bought a new PC for $350. Adding up the prices of the components I know about (100GB hd, 3000+ AMD proc, mobo, modem, case, CD burner, 256mb ram, mouse, keyboard, etc) comes to around $200-250. I'm sure they make some profit (lets say $50) and I'm sure Best Buy wanted their cut too (maybe another $50?). I'm now struggling to see where the supposed $100 for XP Home comes from, never mind MS Works which was also included.
So you say there are volume discounts for software, but not hardware? A more reasonable approach might be to add up what it would cost you to buy everything (use "OEM" prices if you like), and assume the larger manufacturers get about the same discount on everything.
Yeah, they pay a lot less for each copy of Windows than we do, but it isn't $0.
I don't know about Red Hat, as I haven't used it, but yast has a curses interface, so in fact you do not need X to use the graphical tools on Suse. I'd be surprised if RH didn't have something similar.
Hmmm, my experience has been that a Linux box is much faster and easier to update than a similarly configured Windows box. When I'm done with my (SuSE) Linux update, I'm done. When I'm done with my Windows update I still have to update all my apps, even Microsoft apps like Office aren't done automatically.
And the difference is only magnified when you're talking about a version upgrade. Again, with Linux everything is done at once, and with Windows I'm stuck doing the CD shuffle to update, or more likely reinstall, all my apps. Plus, once hardware's supported in Linux it tends to stay supported (I ran into my first exception just a couple of weeks ago: GeForce2 cards aren't supported by the current nvidia drivers). Windows has had a pretty bad record with legacy hardware in my experience, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
So what? Your storage needs alone preclude a low-power solution, at least on the level you're talking about.
FWIW, I spent 3 years at Thomson Grass Valley repairing video servers, and I've also spent roughly half my life living off-grid. I feel pretty confident that I have experience relevant to your problem, but what I dont have is the solution you're looking for.
I suggest you invest in some serious power filtering, and be prepared to use your generator a lot. Do as much of your work as possible on sunny days, and be extra dilligent about backups, as the frequent shutdowns and startups are going to seriously effect the reliability of your HDDs.
When I was contemplating which distro to put on their machine, it was down to a choice of Ubuntu or SuSE. Even though I regard Ubuntu as a fine distribution, SuSE won out. The well implemented KDE interface combined with YaST made it the ideal choice for introducing them to Linux. A MS Windows-like environment and killer config tools.
Indeed. My experience has been that people who start their Linux experience with SuSE invariably stick with Linux, using it as their primary, and in many cases exclusive, OS within 2 years. They may not all stick with SuSE, but they do all stick with Linux.
More to the point, I suppose, is everyone I've ever met who called Linux a "toy OS" or said it "isn't ready for primetime" hadn't tried SuSE.
Thank you, I couldn't have put it better. I started using Linux with Suse6.1, and I've been a loyal customer ever since. I used WindowMaker for a while, during the KDE2.x days, due to the performance and stability issues KDE had at the time, but since KDE3 I stopped doing that. My few, brief forays into Gnome territory have been quite disappointing, and I guess it's not just me, nor just a Suse thing.
The only thing I could think of off the top of my head while I was writing that was k3b, otherwise I would have made a list like that myself.
For Novell to work on one interface isn't saying "Oh, Gnome is the Hawt and KDE is not!" - it's just a cost saving move, and I can agree with that.
No, it's a lot more than that. Suse has been a KDE-based distro forever. Many of the KDE developers are Suse employees, and while Gnome has been included pretty much as long as it's been available, it's been practically unusable. (I don't know if it's just been a Suse thing, or if the Gnome tools really are that much more primitive.)
This is a sea change.
The question is: will this help lead to a "one Linux Desktop" future where the de-facto standard is Gnome.
I wouldn't be surprised if this were actually Novell's intention. I'm sure there are plenty of vendors who will be quite pleased with this decision. Unfortunately, I think a lot of Suse customers will not be so pleased. Maybe it's the Novell curse striking again?
I've checked it out, even got it running... I think. Actually using it, well, I can't really say I've done that. Lets just say it's less intuitive then Blender.
It costs nothing, is sometimes beneficial, and doesn't preclude you from taking legal action later on.
Maybe they aren't looking after our interests, but I'll bet they are looking after their own. If they ignore all complaints, then the BBB sticker would quickly become meaningless. Honest businesses (and yes, there are honest businesses out tere) would have no reason to join; why pay the fees if your membership means nothing to potential customers, or, even worse, if membership associates you with shady businesses? Or does BBB membership include some special benefits other than PR?
The solution you presented had already been discovered and found inapplicable, which was made quite clear in the origional problem statement. Of course, I don't know why I'm bothering to write this response either, as you clearly haven't bothered to actually read my previous posts either.
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There is no reason for the state to force any standards.
How about saving money? Merely by standardizing they will save money, even if they choose the most expensive option. Or are you also against saving tax dollars?
As for your repetitive licensing mantra: Your customers are uninformed, and apparantly so are you. You might want to do a little basic research before you go spouting off about things. Or, you know, you could try actually reading the responses you get.
Government has too much power
OK, in general I agree, but in this context this is a completely asinine thing to say. The government SHOULD have the power to decide what file formats work best for their purposes, and they should NOT be expected to simply accept whatever format any citizen decides they want to use.
To be honest, it really isn't clear what side you're arguing for, and frankly you're really just coming off as a raving lunatic and conspiracy theorist.
I fully support ODF as long as the licensing allows incorporation into closed source software.
Um, ODF is an open STANDARD, which means there is no licensing. It's just a specification, which you are free to implement under any license you like.
How much is that warranty actually worth? In my experience, I doubt it actually saves you anything. Your employees still end up doing all the troubleshooting they'd be doing on a white box, plus the time dealing with the idiots the big name has answering their phones, all of which is on your dime, of course. Oh, and you're paying the big name for the privelege as well. Then your system is offline at least overnight while you wait for them to send you the replacement part, which probably isn't a big deal because you have a hot spare (with equivalent warranty, right)? But still, it's inconvenient, and again all the actual work is probably being done by someone on your payroll anyway.
So, what have you actually saved?
I've got a 21" CRT that'll do 1600x1200 at well over 60Hz, but I run it at 1280x1024 because that puts the text at a comfortable size for me. The problem with enlarging the fonts is that many of the widgets don't scale properly, which leaves the UI as a whole looking totally jacked up. And then, of course, there are those situations where an app doesn't seem to care how you've set things, completely ignoring font size, color, etc.
Well, I forked out the money for a rear-projection set (about $1k for 40"), but it wasn't because I really care about HDTV. Mostly, I just wanted a largish wide-screen for watching movies (it really bugs me that they chop off a third or more of the picture to make it "full screen"). I don't see any reason to pay extra for HD cable when I can get all the shows I'm interested in in SD for cheap.
I spent 3 of the last 5 years repairing high-end TV production equipment, so my lack of care isn't from lack of familiarity. I fully admit that the first time I saw our 1080p test loop it was chin-meet-floor beautiful, but I don't watch TV for the visual quality (unless I'm getting paid too). I watch because I want to be told an interesting story. Good actors with a good script can compensate for almost any lack of visual quality, but the converse isn't true.
You didn't say why you decided to resign. Did you tell your employer? If not, they probably just assumed the worst. If so, well, then I guess maybe it depends on the reason you gave.
I resigned from my last job, gave them ample notice, and ended up working a month beyond my planned departure date. Of course, I didn't really want to leave that job, but my wife had to relocate about 500 miles away for her job and I wanted to be with her more. So, I gave about 2 months notice, and offered to help find and train my replacement. Found the perfect guy, too, but the asshat VP wouldn't sign the req to hire him until about 2 weeks after I left (for the math impaired, that's 3.5 months after I gave notice, which coincidentally was about how long it took me to get fully up to speed when I started there.)
Anyway, without knowing exactly what you said it's impossible to say what you might have done to make them suspicious of you. Maybe it was nothing at all, and that's just SOP? I have to agree with all the people saying "enjoy your free 2 weeks pay." If they're shooting themselves in the foot, that's their choice, and no longer your problem.
I was thinking the same thing. I can't count how many times I've opened up a file to correct a single word or even single character error. I would be mighty pissed to not have some way to make sure that such a correction were saved immediately.
To answer the origional (stupid) question: Why do we have a "Save" button? Because users want that function and that's the name under which they expect to find it. Same with "Save As". Nothing about their existence prevents autosave from being implemented, but there's just no way the computer can always know exactly what it is I want to do with my data.
Do your own homework. NTSC is actually 720x480 at 4/3, hence the resolution of NTSC DVDs.
Do your own homework. NTSC is 525 horizontal lines, which at 4:3 means 700x525, and what amount of that is viewable depends on the device you're using.
I never said corporations are at fault for human failings, but the fact remains that the sole reason for incorporation is to obtain protection from the legal and financial repercussions of ones choices. Every single other benefit you attribute to incorporation can be achieved without it, albeit with perhaps a bit more effort required.
people with means will always run things. This has been true since the dawn of civilization, and it's not a situation that will change.
And so I should just sit down, shut up, and take it? What a moronic thing to suggest!
No, grumbling doesn't get anything done. Only doing is meaningful, and grumbling is as far from doing as you can get.
The existence of Rush Limbaugh proves you wrong.
A corporation is a legal fiction. Period. Without the legal framework to support it, there is no such thing as a corporation. Thus, any corporation, no matter how powerful, is, at its base, a fictitious entity.
If you insist on describing everything in terms of people, that's fine: a corporation is a group of people avoiding taking responsibility for their decisions by hiding behind a legal fiction.
Laws can, and do, change. Whole legal systems get torn down a rebuilt from scratch, sometimes better than they were before, and if you think ours will last forever you are a fool, and should study your history. The best we can hope for is gradual change and not violent overthrow.
But, you're right: I'm not going to change it, but that doesn't mean I have to accept it either, nor does it mean things won't change. There are a lot of options between acceptance and "raging against it til the end of my strength". My choice is to add my voice to the others grumbling about the situation. Grumbling is infectious, you know, and the nice thing about living in a democracic system is that if enough people start grumbling, things get done. You could substitute "capitalist" for "democratic" if you like, either is capable of achieving the desired end, more or less by the same means.
Understanding it is easy, but I'm curious to hear your argument as to why I should accept it. Tell me: does Microsoft, as an entirely fictitious entity, have some special right to persue its best interests that I, as an actual person, do not?
I have a couple people who would want to play, but it might be a sporadic monthly thing at best.
So go with that. If you only play once a month or so, so what, as long as you enjoy it. I've got characters I play maybe once every year or two, but I still enjoy it on those rare occasions. The only real trick is the recordkeeping: not just taking notes on things that your character did or might remember, but also keeping all that stuff where you can find it again when the time comes.
Another good solution that some of my friends have come up with is sort of a non-campaign: basically a series of one-offs with continuing characters. Anyone who has an idea for a quick game can run, and anyone available can play. I don't think that would work well in a strongly "leveled" game like D&D, as someone who misses a couple games would fall seriously behind. FWIW, we used a modified version of the old White Wolf system, but there are plenty of alternatives.
I thought Turbo was part of UnitedLinux. Don't they use Yast?
The media stuff is very interesting, though. I wonder why Suse hasn't gone that way? Does Turbo have some kind of funky licensing around that stuff?
I recently bought a new PC for $350. Adding up the prices of the components I know about (100GB hd, 3000+ AMD proc, mobo, modem, case, CD burner, 256mb ram, mouse, keyboard, etc) comes to around $200-250. I'm sure they make some profit (lets say $50) and I'm sure Best Buy wanted their cut too (maybe another $50?). I'm now struggling to see where the supposed $100 for XP Home comes from, never mind MS Works which was also included.
So you say there are volume discounts for software, but not hardware? A more reasonable approach might be to add up what it would cost you to buy everything (use "OEM" prices if you like), and assume the larger manufacturers get about the same discount on everything.
Yeah, they pay a lot less for each copy of Windows than we do, but it isn't $0.
I don't know about Red Hat, as I haven't used it, but yast has a curses interface, so in fact you do not need X to use the graphical tools on Suse. I'd be surprised if RH didn't have something similar.
Hmmm, my experience has been that a Linux box is much faster and easier to update than a similarly configured Windows box. When I'm done with my (SuSE) Linux update, I'm done. When I'm done with my Windows update I still have to update all my apps, even Microsoft apps like Office aren't done automatically.
And the difference is only magnified when you're talking about a version upgrade. Again, with Linux everything is done at once, and with Windows I'm stuck doing the CD shuffle to update, or more likely reinstall, all my apps. Plus, once hardware's supported in Linux it tends to stay supported (I ran into my first exception just a couple of weeks ago: GeForce2 cards aren't supported by the current nvidia drivers). Windows has had a pretty bad record with legacy hardware in my experience, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
And if you use Suse, you can get it from Packman (be sure to also grab the win32codecs, which may not be listed under the dependencies).
Of course, if all else fails you could try running interactual under wine.
Unless he's a total dumbass, his fridge, water heater, stove, and as many other "essentials" as possible will be gas-powered.
Yes, they do make gas refridgerators.
So what? Your storage needs alone preclude a low-power solution, at least on the level you're talking about.
FWIW, I spent 3 years at Thomson Grass Valley repairing video servers, and I've also spent roughly half my life living off-grid. I feel pretty confident that I have experience relevant to your problem, but what I dont have is the solution you're looking for.
I suggest you invest in some serious power filtering, and be prepared to use your generator a lot. Do as much of your work as possible on sunny days, and be extra dilligent about backups, as the frequent shutdowns and startups are going to seriously effect the reliability of your HDDs.
When I was contemplating which distro to put on their machine, it was down to a choice of Ubuntu or SuSE. Even though I regard Ubuntu as a fine distribution, SuSE won out. The well implemented KDE interface combined with YaST made it the ideal choice for introducing them to Linux. A MS Windows-like environment and killer config tools.
Indeed. My experience has been that people who start their Linux experience with SuSE invariably stick with Linux, using it as their primary, and in many cases exclusive, OS within 2 years. They may not all stick with SuSE, but they do all stick with Linux.
More to the point, I suppose, is everyone I've ever met who called Linux a "toy OS" or said it "isn't ready for primetime" hadn't tried SuSE.
Thank you, I couldn't have put it better. I started using Linux with Suse6.1, and I've been a loyal customer ever since. I used WindowMaker for a while, during the KDE2.x days, due to the performance and stability issues KDE had at the time, but since KDE3 I stopped doing that. My few, brief forays into Gnome territory have been quite disappointing, and I guess it's not just me, nor just a Suse thing.
The only thing I could think of off the top of my head while I was writing that was k3b, otherwise I would have made a list like that myself.
For Novell to work on one interface isn't saying "Oh, Gnome is the Hawt and KDE is not!" - it's just a cost saving move, and I can agree with that.
No, it's a lot more than that. Suse has been a KDE-based distro forever. Many of the KDE developers are Suse employees, and while Gnome has been included pretty much as long as it's been available, it's been practically unusable. (I don't know if it's just been a Suse thing, or if the Gnome tools really are that much more primitive.)
This is a sea change.
The question is: will this help lead to a "one Linux Desktop" future where the de-facto standard is Gnome.
I wouldn't be surprised if this were actually Novell's intention. I'm sure there are plenty of vendors who will be quite pleased with this decision. Unfortunately, I think a lot of Suse customers will not be so pleased. Maybe it's the Novell curse striking again?
I've checked it out, even got it running... I think. Actually using it, well, I can't really say I've done that. Lets just say it's less intuitive then Blender.
It costs nothing, is sometimes beneficial, and doesn't preclude you from taking legal action later on.
Maybe they aren't looking after our interests, but I'll bet they are looking after their own. If they ignore all complaints, then the BBB sticker would quickly become meaningless. Honest businesses (and yes, there are honest businesses out tere) would have no reason to join; why pay the fees if your membership means nothing to potential customers, or, even worse, if membership associates you with shady businesses? Or does BBB membership include some special benefits other than PR?
The solution you presented had already been discovered and found inapplicable, which was made quite clear in the origional problem statement. Of course, I don't know why I'm bothering to write this response either, as you clearly haven't bothered to actually read my previous posts either.