If one is seeking innovation and style in an aluminium case, visit Soldam and have a look at their Alcadia-X cases for micro ATX, ATX. and extended ATX cases.
I've never used one, I don't know how well they work. But they certainly differ substantially from the run of the mill (*cough*) aluminium case in terms of airflow design, and look much smarter than most.
They should also include the water vapour in their climate models and this is something else they have not done. They include the 5th most abundant gas at 370 ppm (CO2) and ignore the 3rd most abundant gas which is at an average in excess of 10,000 ppm (H2O). Nevertheles it is true that H2O is quite variable and ranges from close to zero to over 70,000 PPM mostly dependant on temperature and available liquid water. Nevertheless the H2O in the atmosphere is responsible for the planet being about 30 degrees warmer than it would be if it were not present. And it is NOT is the climate models used by the IPCC.
Where on Earth did you hear that these climate models do not incorporate water vapour? That's nonsense. Of course they include water vapour. A two second google search for example brings up this paper on climate model sensitivity, which includes statements such as the following, right on the first page:
The importance of water vapour feedback was clearly demonstrated in early radiative convective model
climate change experiments. For example, in the late 1960s Manabe and Wetherald (1967) showed that
under assumptions of fixed relative humidity in models, water vapour changes roughly doubled the 1C
warming caused by a doubling of CO2 alone. Indeed, so important is the water vapour feedback, that it is
generally appreciated that without this feedback climate change would be relatively small for all credible
emission scenarios.
Why are you so quick to denounce researchers investigating global warming? Why would they not have paleoclimatologists among their numbers?
There are a great number of things one can do, that are not necessarily what one should do. There are even many both easy and legal things one can do that are ethically reprehensible.
I see no hypocrisy in Google's actions. Why deal with a group of people who have demonstrated they have no scruples?
Actually, I read in the (English language) paper today that the various iPods are positioned at ranks 1, 2 and 4 in current sales of portable mp3 players. At least in one sense, one could make the case that iPod is #1 in Japan.
And what's more, many of them are not even marked. I noticed two combini at least -- one of which is a 7-11 -- not marked on tha map near where I live. However, they did show three others that are within five minutes walk.
I think that the dropping of atomic bombs on Japanese cities were the 2 greatest war crimes of all time.
It's hard not to regard the Nazi Holocaust as a whole as one of the most horrific acts in recent history. Regarding the US though, one should probably also consider the firebombing of Tokyo. Again, the action was performed with the express intent of maximising civilian casualties, and was horrifically successful.
A topologist walks into a bar, and orders a drink. However, the bartender, being a number theorist, says, "I'm sorry, but we don't serve topologists here."
So the topologist leaves the bar and walks outside. She performs Dehn surgery upon herself, comes back in, and again orders a drink.
The bartender does not recognise her, as she is a different manifold, and serves her. Yet there is something familiar about her, or at least, locally similar. The bartender asks, "Wait, aren't you that topologist who came in here before?"
If it weren't for this 'we're better than workers who have to form a union' attitude amongst programmers and other technical workers, there'd already be a union for people in the game industry, and this sort of problem would have already been resolved.
Right now programmers and artists are being exploited in industry. They are working severe overtime without compensation. It is structual, in the sense that those responsible for managing and renumerating these employees know and plan for this unpaid overtime. Any copyright on created art or code is transfered without any particular compensation, for use of the company in perpetuity. People are literally being worked sick, and most receive a relative pittance in return, when compared with the profits of publishers.
Very occasionally there may be a royalty component offered to employees, but this is often not paid, or comes after the publisher skims off the top and is horribly meagre.
These people can be abused so easily because there is pride involved. People take pride in their work: they want to be associated with something with quality, that people will enjoy. There is also the belief that working for in the industry is an intrinsically cool thing to do. Employers and publishers then turn around and exploit that pride and belief.
What is the shame in forming a union? Do you think people started unions because it might be a fun lark on weekends? The current situation will remain until there is a force present to reverse it. And that force isn't about to come from the Tooth Fairy.
The point isn't just the success or failure to communicate an idea.
Depending on the language chosen, outside from any 'factual content', there is also conveyed:
the writer's opinion of the reader;
the writer's opinion of themselves;
ancillary flavour; and more besides.
Text that is ungrammatical reads as sloppy thinking, or causes the reader to expend undue effort to decode the content, which can be irritating. It can gives the impression that the writer doesn't care at all about the reader, making the writer look careless, conceited or arrogant.
Language use is also a social marker. Phrases such as 'could care less', and 'lol' in written text are shibboleths, just as much as using the word 'shibboleth' is.
So if you wish to appear uneducated and arrogant, and annoy your readers, feel free to be slack with grammar.
Why do people complain so about poor grammar use? I think mainly because they feel that these extra channels of communication, and the fine distinctions that precise grammar use can distinguish, are important parts of the language. People clamouring for the acceptance of sloppy writing are seen as barbarians massing at the gate, wanting to loot and sack the culture while blind to the things that make it worthwhile. It's not just the ignorance which is affronting, but the way that such ignorance is seen to be becoming acceptable, with the concomitant blurring of expressive power and subtlety. It's like being forced to use Windows 95, because it's "good enough for everyone else".
Seriously, there is no sound evidence to indicate that he did any such thing. Weapons inspectors at the time found no such evidence. Investigations after the invasion have found no such evidence.
Before the invasion, members of the Australian and British intelligence organisations, of whom some resigned in protest at having their informed opinions overriden by their respective governments, were stating that it was unlikely that Iraq had any significant remaining store of NBC weapons, and that the posturing and ambiguity presented by Hussein was primarily to keep Iran in check.
Recently, this point has been made anew by US analysts (where were they before the war?!).
Maybe it is difficult to get access to media sources in the US which are not pro-government which might explain why you seem to be so convinced of something which outside the US is widely thought to be nonsense and retroactive arse covering.
By 'recompiling on the fly', the grandparent poster is probably refering to a process where library or hardware interfaces are emulated, and the code itself is translated as needed, with the results being cached somewhere (like the hard disk.)
The most famous example of this sort of thing would have to be Digital's FX!32 for the Alpha, which according to reports, would run x86 Windows code under NT for Alpha at approximately 40% the speed of natively compiled code. Not too shabby!
A lot of software wouldn't get developed if someone weren't paid to do it - after all, most people, given a choice, would rather "scratch an atch" - do what they enjoy working on - instead of working on stuff they find boring. So the boring stuff ends up having to be either paid "work for hire", or "contracted out", or "proprietary".
You are casually conflating "work for hire" and "non-free"!
Almost all the programming work I do is for a private company. It is work for hire in that sense. Some of it incorporates GPL software and thus is by necessity GPL licensed itself. The other software could just as well have been licensed as free software as well. It doesn't matter. Being free or non-free is orthogonal to being payed or not for programming.
It is only an issue when it comes to selling software itself, unenhanced by other software, as a product. Because it is what makes the Microsofts of the world, and because it is very visible, it feels like this is what programming is all about. But it really carries a disproportionate impact.
On your other point: we all have a choice, it is true. But you could say it is a choice to be antisocial:) Just like other behaviour which supports institutions which are bad in the long-term, such as wasteful use of energy, water, etc., there is some degree of culpability. As to how antisocial it is to support non-free software, or for that matter, to drive SUVs in an urban environment, is a separate but important question. Personally, I am no environmental saint, but I am aware that I am choosing not to be one. This is a form of antisocial behaviour, just a very pallid and common one.
2. If a job is based upon antisocial behaviour, one should get some other job
Personally I can't see how you could argue against 2, unless you are in fact antisocial and just don't care. RMS has been making a case for point 1 for years now, and the recent news with regards to BK is more supporting evidence for his argument.
Reading your comment to the interview, I can't understand your vehemence. It's irrational. If you have a choice of doing something bad or doing something good, why insist that it's okay to do the something bad? I don't want to put words into RMS' mouth, but I get the impression that when he states something like: "It is better not to program at all than to program non-free software", it's not a statement about the utility of free versus non-free software -- as you noted in your comment, a lot of non-free software is very useful -- but instead it is a statement concerning how programming as a practice in today's society should be carried out. Programming non-free software is not bad because it makes useful software -- that would be silly. It's bad because it supports a system in which non-free software proliferates and causes huge amounts of waste. It is essentially the same point as the one you quote.
The horrible irony of it all is that most non-free software is non-free by default, not because the owners of that software are profiting significantly by having it be non-free. Most software is written for internal use for internal projects. Embedded software is usually specialised to its hardware and of limited use to competing manufacturers. In as much as it is not limited, a culture of free software allows the programmers to write original software, not re-write what others have done hundreds of times before.
If hypothetically free software were to become the only legal form of software as of tomorrow, the vast majority of programmers would still be in a job. And those jobs would be better.
If Namco are hoping to push the eye-candy any further than they did with SC2, they're going to have a very hard time limiting themselves to the PS2.
Of the three console versions of Soul Calibur 2, it is worth noting that only the PS2 version has very noticable slow downs on some stages when 'big effect' moves are performed. Try playing with, or against, an Ivy on an animated stage and revel in the frustration of missed frames and distorted timing.
So I really do hope that if it is an exclusive release, it is indeed only for six months or so.
I was given a similar IP agreement to sign at one point. And their stated concern was indeed for the protection of the company against future IP claims.
So, given that, I was able to have the agreement ammended to state that the company has a perpetural, transferable, non-exclusive right to use and make derivative works from any such previous software that was not explicitly excluded.
I was much happier with this, and the company had the same protection that they claimed they needed the clause for.
Let me add that Australia, who was very gung-ho about following the US into Iraq, also had people from ASIO (the Australian intelligence organisation) resigning over the fact that their analyses were being ignored in favour of bogus and ill-supported assertions from the USA.
I don't know where you are getting your information from, but I suspect it's coming from some very odd sources. Hardly a soul outside the US for example would put any credence to what you say, based simply what was being reported in the news just prior to the invasion, and what has transpired since.
You may be a victim of government-influenced media: I'd recommend looking at your sources with a very critical eye.
It's worth comparing this box with some of the Pentium M machines/barebone systems available based on miniITX motherboards with integrated video and no AGP. If you're not doing 3-D gaming, then these guys are very attractive.
In particular, look at some of the designs coming out of Soldam, such as the Alphia, Lepty and Rhapsody.
On the other hand, if you're looking for 3-D gaming with the best performance in the smallest possible package, it's hard to go past something like Iwill's ZPC64.
And when Searle does so reply, he's still making a level confusion error! It doesn't matter where you put the bits of the system, even if it happens to be inside the head of a human being. He is still confusing the system with its components, or the system with its container.
I can't believe Searle's argument gets as much respect as it does.
Personal SP2 upgrade trial: gigabit ethernet card suddenly fails to work. Removing, reinstalling drivers completely fails to change the situation. Two different versions of the vendor's driver update application fail to change anything while reporting success; OEM drivers fail to install.
The card had to be physically removed from the machine, drivers removed, reinserted, and then have drivers re-installed.
Luckily this machine is not a critical one for me (it's mainly for dealing with Word documents, scanning of sheet music scores, and game playing.) But this is a joke. Linux, with drivers often developed with insufficient hardware documentation by coders in their spare time, is vastly superior in comparison.
Now if only this had been my only Windows story...
Searle's "Chinese room" argument is completely bogus. It relies on level confusion hand waving with a "so obviously there is no understanding" flourish at the end. It's really weak.
As a parallel argument: imagine you have a Windows machine running VMware, which in turn is hosting Linux. You can attach this box to the network and have it act as an NFS server. It does NFS. However, how can it be an NFS server if Windows doesn't understand the NFS protocol? Oh no, a paradox!
Slashdot Mirror
If one is seeking innovation and style in an aluminium case, visit Soldam and have a look at their Alcadia-X cases for micro ATX, ATX. and extended ATX cases.
I've never used one, I don't know how well they work. But they certainly differ substantially from the run of the mill (*cough*) aluminium case in terms of airflow design, and look much smarter than most.
Why are you so quick to denounce researchers investigating global warming? Why would they not have paleoclimatologists among their numbers?
There are a great number of things one can do, that are not necessarily what one should do. There are even many both easy and legal things one can do that are ethically reprehensible.
I see no hypocrisy in Google's actions. Why deal with a group of people who have demonstrated they have no scruples?
Actually, I read in the (English language) paper today that the various iPods are positioned at ranks 1, 2 and 4 in current sales of portable mp3 players. At least in one sense, one could make the case that iPod is #1 in Japan.
Certainly see a lot of iPods on the street.
Have to agree about CD rentals though.
You say,
Yet I meet these people all the time.And what's more, many of them are not even marked.
I noticed two combini at least -- one of which is a 7-11 -- not marked on tha map near where I live. However, they did show three others that are within five minutes walk.
A topologist walks into a bar, and orders a drink. However, the bartender, being a number theorist, says, "I'm sorry, but we don't serve topologists here."
So the topologist leaves the bar and walks outside. She performs Dehn surgery upon herself, comes back in, and again orders a drink.
The bartender does not recognise her, as she is a different manifold, and serves her. Yet there is something familiar about her, or at least, locally similar. The bartender asks, "Wait, aren't you that topologist who came in here before?"
She replies: "No, I'm a frayed knot."
Brilliant :)
If it weren't for this 'we're better than workers who have to form a union' attitude amongst programmers and other technical workers, there'd already be a union for people in the game industry, and this sort of problem would have already been resolved.
Right now programmers and artists are being exploited in industry. They are working severe overtime without compensation. It is structual, in the sense that those responsible for managing and renumerating these employees know and plan for this unpaid overtime. Any copyright on created art or code is transfered without any particular compensation, for use of the company in perpetuity. People are literally being worked sick, and most receive a relative pittance in return, when compared with the profits of publishers.
Very occasionally there may be a royalty component offered to employees, but this is often not paid, or comes after the publisher skims off the top and is horribly meagre.
These people can be abused so easily because there is pride involved. People take pride in their work: they want to be associated with something with quality, that people will enjoy. There is also the belief that working for in the industry is an intrinsically cool thing to do. Employers and publishers then turn around and exploit that pride and belief.
What is the shame in forming a union? Do you think people started unions because it might be a fun lark on weekends? The current situation will remain until there is a force present to reverse it. And that force isn't about to come from the Tooth Fairy.
The point isn't just the success or failure to communicate an idea. Depending on the language chosen, outside from any 'factual content', there is also conveyed: the writer's opinion of the reader; the writer's opinion of themselves; ancillary flavour; and more besides.
Text that is ungrammatical reads as sloppy thinking, or causes the reader to expend undue effort to decode the content, which can be irritating. It can gives the impression that the writer doesn't care at all about the reader, making the writer look careless, conceited or arrogant.
Language use is also a social marker. Phrases such as 'could care less', and 'lol' in written text are shibboleths, just as much as using the word 'shibboleth' is.
So if you wish to appear uneducated and arrogant, and annoy your readers, feel free to be slack with grammar.
Why do people complain so about poor grammar use? I think mainly because they feel that these extra channels of communication, and the fine distinctions that precise grammar use can distinguish, are important parts of the language. People clamouring for the acceptance of sloppy writing are seen as barbarians massing at the gate, wanting to loot and sack the culture while blind to the things that make it worthwhile. It's not just the ignorance which is affronting, but the way that such ignorance is seen to be becoming acceptable, with the concomitant blurring of expressive power and subtlety. It's like being forced to use Windows 95, because it's "good enough for everyone else".
Seriously, there is no sound evidence to indicate that he did any such thing. Weapons inspectors at the time found no such evidence. Investigations after the invasion have found no such evidence.
Before the invasion, members of the Australian and British intelligence organisations, of whom some resigned in protest at having their informed opinions overriden by their respective governments, were stating that it was unlikely that Iraq had any significant remaining store of NBC weapons, and that the posturing and ambiguity presented by Hussein was primarily to keep Iran in check.
Recently, this point has been made anew by US analysts (where were they before the war?!).
Maybe it is difficult to get access to media sources in the US which are not pro-government which might explain why you seem to be so convinced of something which outside the US is widely thought to be nonsense and retroactive arse covering.
It's not hardware, but: real-time AC3 encoding for JACK might do the trick!
Of course, not so useful for playing games under Windows.
By 'recompiling on the fly', the grandparent poster is probably refering to a process where library or hardware interfaces are emulated, and the code itself is translated as needed, with the results being cached somewhere (like the hard disk.)
The most famous example of this sort of thing would have to be Digital's FX!32 for the Alpha, which according to reports, would run x86 Windows code under NT for Alpha at approximately 40% the speed of natively compiled code. Not too shabby!
You are casually conflating "work for hire" and "non-free"!
Almost all the programming work I do is for a private company. It is work for hire in that sense. Some of it incorporates GPL software and thus is by necessity GPL licensed itself. The other software could just as well have been licensed as free software as well. It doesn't matter. Being free or non-free is orthogonal to being payed or not for programming.
It is only an issue when it comes to selling software itself, unenhanced by other software, as a product. Because it is what makes the Microsofts of the world, and because it is very visible, it feels like this is what programming is all about. But it really carries a disproportionate impact.
On your other point: we all have a choice, it is true. But you could say it is a choice to be antisocial
So which do you take issue with?
1. Writing non-free software is antisocial
or
2. If a job is based upon antisocial behaviour, one should get some other job
Personally I can't see how you could argue against 2, unless you are in fact antisocial and just don't care. RMS has been making a case for point 1 for years now, and the recent news with regards to BK is more supporting evidence for his argument.
Reading your comment to the interview, I can't understand your vehemence. It's irrational. If you have a choice of doing something bad or doing something good, why insist that it's okay to do the something bad? I don't want to put words into RMS' mouth, but I get the impression that when he states something like: "It is better not to program at all than to program non-free software", it's not a statement about the utility of free versus non-free software -- as you noted in your comment, a lot of non-free software is very useful -- but instead it is a statement concerning how programming as a practice in today's society should be carried out. Programming non-free software is not bad because it makes useful software -- that would be silly. It's bad because it supports a system in which non-free software proliferates and causes huge amounts of waste. It is essentially the same point as the one you quote.
The horrible irony of it all is that most non-free software is non-free by default, not because the owners of that software are profiting significantly by having it be non-free. Most software is written for internal use for internal projects. Embedded software is usually specialised to its hardware and of limited use to competing manufacturers. In as much as it is not limited, a culture of free software allows the programmers to write original software, not re-write what others have done hundreds of times before.
If hypothetically free software were to become the only legal form of software as of tomorrow, the vast majority of programmers would still be in a job. And those jobs would be better.
His right to party?
If Namco are hoping to push the eye-candy any further than they did with SC2, they're going to have a very hard time limiting themselves to the PS2.
Of the three console versions of Soul Calibur 2, it is worth noting that only the PS2 version has very noticable slow downs on some stages when 'big effect' moves are performed. Try playing with, or against, an Ivy on an animated stage and revel in the frustration of missed frames and distorted timing.
So I really do hope that if it is an exclusive release, it is indeed only for six months or so.
I was given a similar IP agreement to sign at one point. And their stated concern was indeed for the protection of the company against future IP claims.
So, given that, I was able to have the agreement ammended to state that the company has a perpetural, transferable, non-exclusive right to use and make derivative works from any such previous software that was not explicitly excluded.
I was much happier with this, and the company had the same protection that they claimed they needed the clause for.
Let me add that Australia, who was very gung-ho about following the US into Iraq, also had people from ASIO (the Australian intelligence organisation) resigning over the fact that their analyses were being ignored in favour of bogus and ill-supported assertions from the USA.
I don't know where you are getting your information from, but I suspect it's coming from some very odd sources. Hardly a soul outside the US for example would put any credence to what you say, based simply what was being reported in the news just prior to the invasion, and what has transpired since.
You may be a victim of government-influenced media: I'd recommend looking at your sources with a very critical eye.
It's worth comparing this box with some of the Pentium M machines/barebone systems available based on miniITX motherboards with integrated video and no AGP. If you're not doing 3-D gaming, then these guys are very attractive.
In particular, look at some of the designs coming out of Soldam, such as the Alphia, Lepty and Rhapsody.
On the other hand, if you're looking for 3-D gaming with the best performance in the smallest possible package, it's hard to go past something like Iwill's ZPC64.
And when Searle does so reply, he's still making a level confusion error! It doesn't matter where you put the bits of the system, even if it happens to be inside the head of a human being. He is still confusing the system with its components, or the system with its container.
I can't believe Searle's argument gets as much respect as it does.
Personal SP2 upgrade trial: gigabit ethernet card suddenly fails to work. Removing, reinstalling drivers completely fails to change the situation. Two different versions of the vendor's driver update application fail to change anything while reporting success; OEM drivers fail to install.
...
The card had to be physically removed from the machine, drivers removed, reinserted, and then have drivers re-installed.
Luckily this machine is not a critical one for me (it's mainly for dealing with Word documents, scanning of sheet music scores, and game playing.) But this is a joke. Linux, with drivers often developed with insufficient hardware documentation by coders in their spare time, is vastly superior in comparison.
Now if only this had been my only Windows story
Searle's "Chinese room" argument is completely bogus. It relies on level confusion hand waving with a "so obviously there is no understanding" flourish at the end. It's really weak.
As a parallel argument: imagine you have a Windows machine running VMware, which in turn is hosting Linux. You can attach this box to the network and have it act as an NFS server. It does NFS. However, how can it be an NFS server if Windows doesn't understand the NFS protocol? Oh no, a paradox!
The Chinese Room argument is just as facile.