Afterall, I never get spam mail in my snail mail where it costs like $.40 to send. All those ads and various other junkmail are my imagination.
Maybe they should do it auction style like Google with the profits split between the users and the companies. Let the advertisers set the most they're willing to spend per message and users set the least they're willing to make per spam message they get.
I'd maybe go for that. Anyone willing to give me $1 a message to read their ad I'll be willing to see what they have to say.
I'm not entirely against socialism but I think the US is ass backwards. We copy the worst elements of socialism but throw out the better elements as being to socialist. We're becoming a hybrid of the worst elements of capitalism and socialism which seems a bad idea. Nobody seems to have the ability to see the long term results of their decisions or maybe they just don't care. Let's all be sensitive of everyones feelings, and get those damn votes come election, and screw the future.
I've tried it. It doesn't work that well. I've had thousands of people send me thank you notes. I can count the number of people that've made donations on my fingers and none of those were from the period I tried that carrot method. It might have worked for Harry Potter but not as well as having a publishing company has worked for her. I downloaded a couple of the HP books before buying them but I still bought them (expensive editions too.. not paperback) because I just wanted a nice printed copy. Having the books available for free have hardly seemed to dent the profits from the series. We crave packaging and something to show off.
Funny enough most the companies I've seen hire illegals give them $10/hr. That's without any taxes coming out of it. That's better money than a lot of people I know that have degrees are making. Really I have no problem with them hiring illegals as long as they are paying them this kind of fair wage and for temp positions it really makes sense for a company.
Unemployment rates are only low if you believe the stupid method the government uses to count the unemployed. Anyone over age X or under age Y pretty much doesn't count. Anyone that's been unemployed more than Z number of months doesn't count. That kind of bullshit. They can still be starving and living in a box but they no longer count as unemployed. From what I've seen they also don't seem to do much of a comparison between the number of jobs available and the number of unemployed. Last time I looked at a state listing the state had somewhere around 200,000 officially unemployed people and about 2,000 open job positions (most of which were crappy low paying jobs). You do the math there. 200,000 people needing jobs in a month. 2,000 jobs available. After six months (maybe not the right length of time - I'm going from memory) you just get dropped from the official numbers. To me that would seem to leave 188,000 people unemployed after six months that are no longer counted. Seems not to be a very realistic way of counting.
It seems they are going to regulate this country to the point where it's impossible to find a job. When's the last time any of the people making all these stupid laws actually tried to get a job? In the olden days you could walk into a place with a help wanted sign and get a job that day and just work - maybe for just that day or maybe for twenty years. Now it's so expensive for companies to hire people and such a risk for them to give someone a try that they often don't fill vacancies for great periods of time and only then when they find an applicant that has exactly the needed skills and referenced. No more picking someone with some skills and the ability to learn and just training them. God no - they could turn out to be a moron or lazy and you can't fire them because it's such a nightmare to do so. The number of unemployed in this country is pretty huge and the time a lot of people can go unemployed can be many months and it all comes down to all the red-tape involved.
It's great to protect people from shitty employers but not a good idea to create so much red tape that you're keeping a significant number of your citizens from finding work. All this red tape is a good part of the reason temps and illegals are so popular as employees.
Without free expression of information all you're managing to do is slow down the rate at which humans, as a species, can create and grow. Anything that stops that sharing without causing more to be shared as a result is a bad concept. The premise of copyright seems to be that by keeping people from sharing we encourage new creation. That is a rather foolish idea that stems from people being used to material goods for which there is a limited supply. Ideas, and the expression of ideas, don't work that way. Rather than running out as they are used they generate more as they are used. If you've ran out of ideas it probably means your dead.
Now the real problem with doing away with copyrights is that while ideas don't run out they can become a dillute asset. People are still greedy, selfish, and shortsighted as a whole and just because they use your ideas or expression of those ideas doesn't mean they will have the foresight to keep you alive, healthy, and happy so that you can keep cranking out the ideas they need and want. They aren't going to seek you out to give you money. On the other hand my experience is that just because they can have your ideas for free doesn't mean they won't pay you money for those ideas if you make it clear that they need too.
What I think Mr. Stallman needs to do if he doesn't want to be shrugged off by most of us that make our living from our ideas is to create a structure by which we can make our ideas available for free but still get money in return. I use the GPL for my work. For doing so he should provide direction for my work, find a market for my work, sell my work, and give me a fair share of the profits from my work. He needs to work with others to create the sort of production company - sort of a record label for free flowing information. He has the connections to set up such an entity where most of us don't. I believe in his concept of free flowing information, perhaps more than he himself does, so let him make it practical for me to follow those beliefs. The vast majority of people out there will buy a product even if it's available for free which is the main reason piracy doesn't put companies like Microsoft out of business. People want the ease of picking something up off a shelf and they want the sensation of going somewhere and buying a shiny box. If prices are kept reasonable and the product easily purchased, in retail outlets, it will be bought rather than taken as a free download.
Say if I write an edutainment program and make it available under the GPL. Why does the FSF not help me with testing, collecting feedback, packaging, and distribtion. They could keep half the money from the sales for financing the program, and other FSF programs, and divide the other half among the programmers of the project. They could even go so far as to take a tithe out of each sale for the programmers of the programming tools used in the development of the project and making sure the developers of those tools got the money. RMS has done a lot for everyone with the creation of the GPL and the many free software projects he's been involved in but if he wants to see his creation really succeed he needs to make it financially viable for us that don't have the resources or disposition to become our own companies - the vast majority of creative types.
Ahh but some clever people use flash memory for more interesting things like their server's base filesystem. For us this kind of comparison is very useful so that we can see which CF cards are going to give us the best results. Flash-based computing is only going to grow as prices go down and sizes go up. It's fast, small, low power, low heat, quiet, and hard to break. Much better than a hdd for many uses.
Actually that is on my wishlist. Can we not figure out how to make nuke powered batteries that can power our devices for years at a time? I'm certainly not an expert on nuke power but I'd think you could capture the power from the radioactive isotopes breaking down. That'd be awesome so long as it didn't cause cancer or some such nasty stuff.
Good suggestion but I thought the point of this article was about consumer grade cameras which means anything more than $500 is probably not what people are buying. I love to drool over $3000 cameras but I've yet to make myself spend that much on one.:) If I found something that did everything I wanted I might spend the money.
Of course I could probably find something in between but I'd rather either go affordable or go with top of the line and not in between.
I like Sky Pirates. Skies of Arcadia was a great game. I like more realistic models in games but little anime touches to give it a fantasy feel isn't bad. As long as it isn't over done.
You think credit card companies or banks have sane TOS? Hahahaha. My experience is that any company that has your money is going to rape you whenever possible.
I was thinking more along methods of indexing data and search algorithms etc. As for what kind of db to use and stuff I guess really that depends on what kind of search you're trying to do. A normal db is good enough for many problems but not good at many other problems. Is sort of like asking what makes a good program.
Photoshop itself sucks. If you have an equal amount of experience in it and GIMP then most of the time GIMP will be easier to use in my experience. Where Photoshop shines isn't in itself but in all the add-on's that are available for it. If GIMP could make those add-on's work with it then it'd be a killer program but even so for the vast majority of graphic work you don't need all those add-ons to get things done.
Photoshop is mostly asked for because most graphic arts people have trained on it, and only on it, and lack the ability to adapt. It does have some capabilities Gimp lacks but likewise Gimp has some capabilities Photoshop lacks.
Of course my opinion may be twisted as I'm the kind of person that thinks a good drawing program should have a command-line option. Still, with no formal graphic arts training, I can produce graphics of equal or better quality as most 'real' graphic artists I've worked with in less time than they take to do the job and I think a lot of that has to do with using Gimp rather than Photoshop and just knowing a lot of tricks to gettings things done. I'm often amazed at how many graphic artists don't really understand how their tools work and therefore don't think of a lot of possible uses and shortcuts. I've found that when you find a graphic artist that has both talent (knowing what looks good) and knows their tools then you better keep hold of them because they aren't easy to replace.
An oft unmentioned paint program I like but rarely use is Paint Shop Pro. For quick and dirty stuff that isn't overly involved it is really good. I'd rather have it ported to Linux than Photoshop.
I don't want pictures to be 1MB though. I'd be okay with 100MB per picture, as an option, if it'd catch the picture in the best quality possible. Drive space is cheap and I can scale it down myself to whatever use I want. 13MP, if I remember correctly, is about what a 35mm camera takes. A digital camera that takes pictures of less quality than a $20 35mm won't cut it for me.
Wireless is very different from USB. USB means you have to think about transfering files and monitoring disk space. If you had a camera that could take 100MB pics of wonderous quality then you would need to be able to store GB's of files. Or you might want to take video.
Good point. It's annoying that even decent digital cameras aren't good at taking motion pictures or low/weird lighting pics. It's frustrating that I press the button and there is a slight delay before my picture is taken - making me miss the shot half the time if things are moving. Almost as bad is that I try to take an outdoor photo at dusk and the camera isn't able to capture anything but gray. Understandable problems but I'd love to see some improvements there in cameras affordable by the average consumer.
Now that we have cameras of a decent MP maybe we could stop saving as jpeg and instead use a lossless format? That combined with a decent optical zoom and something like a 13MP camera would be good. That leaves us with the primary worry of storage. I'd suggest making cameras able to wirelessly connect to another portable device you could carry in a pocket of purse that acts like a hard disk and could store 100GB of files or more. That and improved batteries would be great.
Good point although I think you can infer the one from the other. I actually am fairly good at SEO and a lot of that is due simply to understanding how the Internet and search engines work. I've always had a thing for studying ways of indexing and searching data as well as things like AI so it's not as mysterious a field for me as it is for a lot of people.
I'm not that great at math but my conception of time has always been that time is our movement through dimensions that we can't directly sense. Probably a naive concept but it always worked for me and probably not as silly as the idea of flat one directional time.
It still takes time to find them and implement your workarounds so yes it still takes time. Most developers simplify the process by just not doing some things that are possible in other browsers. That is a pretty crappy way of working. It leaves you designing to the lowest standard. If you do something advanced it is not especially easy to make it look decent in IE. There are more workarounds needed and the workarounds become more involved.
So if you create blah pages then yes it won't take much time to do a couple workarounds. If you create something engaging then it can take much longer regardless of your experience. I've been making websites since people were connecting with 2400 baud modems. It still takes time to do it well despite my experience.
It looks nice but it still is avoiding some of the more interesting position options it seems. It's the little details that make it hard to implement some layouts for IE.
Slashdot Mirror
Afterall, I never get spam mail in my snail mail where it costs like $.40 to send. All those ads and various other junkmail are my imagination.
Maybe they should do it auction style like Google with the profits split between the users and the companies. Let the advertisers set the most they're willing to spend per message and users set the least they're willing to make per spam message they get.
I'd maybe go for that. Anyone willing to give me $1 a message to read their ad I'll be willing to see what they have to say.
I'm not entirely against socialism but I think the US is ass backwards. We copy the worst elements of socialism but throw out the better elements as being to socialist. We're becoming a hybrid of the worst elements of capitalism and socialism which seems a bad idea. Nobody seems to have the ability to see the long term results of their decisions or maybe they just don't care. Let's all be sensitive of everyones feelings, and get those damn votes come election, and screw the future.
I've tried it. It doesn't work that well. I've had thousands of people send me thank you notes. I can count the number of people that've made donations on my fingers and none of those were from the period I tried that carrot method. It might have worked for Harry Potter but not as well as having a publishing company has worked for her. I downloaded a couple of the HP books before buying them but I still bought them (expensive editions too.. not paperback) because I just wanted a nice printed copy. Having the books available for free have hardly seemed to dent the profits from the series. We crave packaging and something to show off.
Funny enough most the companies I've seen hire illegals give them $10/hr. That's without any taxes coming out of it. That's better money than a lot of people I know that have degrees are making. Really I have no problem with them hiring illegals as long as they are paying them this kind of fair wage and for temp positions it really makes sense for a company.
Unemployment rates are only low if you believe the stupid method the government uses to count the unemployed. Anyone over age X or under age Y pretty much doesn't count. Anyone that's been unemployed more than Z number of months doesn't count. That kind of bullshit. They can still be starving and living in a box but they no longer count as unemployed. From what I've seen they also don't seem to do much of a comparison between the number of jobs available and the number of unemployed. Last time I looked at a state listing the state had somewhere around 200,000 officially unemployed people and about 2,000 open job positions (most of which were crappy low paying jobs). You do the math there. 200,000 people needing jobs in a month. 2,000 jobs available. After six months (maybe not the right length of time - I'm going from memory) you just get dropped from the official numbers. To me that would seem to leave 188,000 people unemployed after six months that are no longer counted. Seems not to be a very realistic way of counting.
It seems they are going to regulate this country to the point where it's impossible to find a job. When's the last time any of the people making all these stupid laws actually tried to get a job? In the olden days you could walk into a place with a help wanted sign and get a job that day and just work - maybe for just that day or maybe for twenty years. Now it's so expensive for companies to hire people and such a risk for them to give someone a try that they often don't fill vacancies for great periods of time and only then when they find an applicant that has exactly the needed skills and referenced. No more picking someone with some skills and the ability to learn and just training them. God no - they could turn out to be a moron or lazy and you can't fire them because it's such a nightmare to do so. The number of unemployed in this country is pretty huge and the time a lot of people can go unemployed can be many months and it all comes down to all the red-tape involved.
It's great to protect people from shitty employers but not a good idea to create so much red tape that you're keeping a significant number of your citizens from finding work. All this red tape is a good part of the reason temps and illegals are so popular as employees.
Without free expression of information all you're managing to do is slow down the rate at which humans, as a species, can create and grow. Anything that stops that sharing without causing more to be shared as a result is a bad concept. The premise of copyright seems to be that by keeping people from sharing we encourage new creation. That is a rather foolish idea that stems from people being used to material goods for which there is a limited supply. Ideas, and the expression of ideas, don't work that way. Rather than running out as they are used they generate more as they are used. If you've ran out of ideas it probably means your dead.
Now the real problem with doing away with copyrights is that while ideas don't run out they can become a dillute asset. People are still greedy, selfish, and shortsighted as a whole and just because they use your ideas or expression of those ideas doesn't mean they will have the foresight to keep you alive, healthy, and happy so that you can keep cranking out the ideas they need and want. They aren't going to seek you out to give you money. On the other hand my experience is that just because they can have your ideas for free doesn't mean they won't pay you money for those ideas if you make it clear that they need too.
What I think Mr. Stallman needs to do if he doesn't want to be shrugged off by most of us that make our living from our ideas is to create a structure by which we can make our ideas available for free but still get money in return. I use the GPL for my work. For doing so he should provide direction for my work, find a market for my work, sell my work, and give me a fair share of the profits from my work. He needs to work with others to create the sort of production company - sort of a record label for free flowing information. He has the connections to set up such an entity where most of us don't. I believe in his concept of free flowing information, perhaps more than he himself does, so let him make it practical for me to follow those beliefs. The vast majority of people out there will buy a product even if it's available for free which is the main reason piracy doesn't put companies like Microsoft out of business. People want the ease of picking something up off a shelf and they want the sensation of going somewhere and buying a shiny box. If prices are kept reasonable and the product easily purchased, in retail outlets, it will be bought rather than taken as a free download.
Say if I write an edutainment program and make it available under the GPL. Why does the FSF not help me with testing, collecting feedback, packaging, and distribtion. They could keep half the money from the sales for financing the program, and other FSF programs, and divide the other half among the programmers of the project. They could even go so far as to take a tithe out of each sale for the programmers of the programming tools used in the development of the project and making sure the developers of those tools got the money. RMS has done a lot for everyone with the creation of the GPL and the many free software projects he's been involved in but if he wants to see his creation really succeed he needs to make it financially viable for us that don't have the resources or disposition to become our own companies - the vast majority of creative types.
Ahh but some clever people use flash memory for more interesting things like their server's base filesystem. For us this kind of comparison is very useful so that we can see which CF cards are going to give us the best results. Flash-based computing is only going to grow as prices go down and sizes go up. It's fast, small, low power, low heat, quiet, and hard to break. Much better than a hdd for many uses.
So fix it and make mucho money.
Actually that is on my wishlist. Can we not figure out how to make nuke powered batteries that can power our devices for years at a time? I'm certainly not an expert on nuke power but I'd think you could capture the power from the radioactive isotopes breaking down. That'd be awesome so long as it didn't cause cancer or some such nasty stuff.
Good suggestion but I thought the point of this article was about consumer grade cameras which means anything more than $500 is probably not what people are buying. I love to drool over $3000 cameras but I've yet to make myself spend that much on one. :) If I found something that did everything I wanted I might spend the money.
Of course I could probably find something in between but I'd rather either go affordable or go with top of the line and not in between.
I like Sky Pirates. Skies of Arcadia was a great game. I like more realistic models in games but little anime touches to give it a fantasy feel isn't bad. As long as it isn't over done.
You think credit card companies or banks have sane TOS? Hahahaha. My experience is that any company that has your money is going to rape you whenever possible.
I was thinking more along methods of indexing data and search algorithms etc. As for what kind of db to use and stuff I guess really that depends on what kind of search you're trying to do. A normal db is good enough for many problems but not good at many other problems. Is sort of like asking what makes a good program.
Photoshop itself sucks. If you have an equal amount of experience in it and GIMP then most of the time GIMP will be easier to use in my experience. Where Photoshop shines isn't in itself but in all the add-on's that are available for it. If GIMP could make those add-on's work with it then it'd be a killer program but even so for the vast majority of graphic work you don't need all those add-ons to get things done.
Photoshop is mostly asked for because most graphic arts people have trained on it, and only on it, and lack the ability to adapt. It does have some capabilities Gimp lacks but likewise Gimp has some capabilities Photoshop lacks.
Of course my opinion may be twisted as I'm the kind of person that thinks a good drawing program should have a command-line option. Still, with no formal graphic arts training, I can produce graphics of equal or better quality as most 'real' graphic artists I've worked with in less time than they take to do the job and I think a lot of that has to do with using Gimp rather than Photoshop and just knowing a lot of tricks to gettings things done. I'm often amazed at how many graphic artists don't really understand how their tools work and therefore don't think of a lot of possible uses and shortcuts. I've found that when you find a graphic artist that has both talent (knowing what looks good) and knows their tools then you better keep hold of them because they aren't easy to replace.
An oft unmentioned paint program I like but rarely use is Paint Shop Pro. For quick and dirty stuff that isn't overly involved it is really good. I'd rather have it ported to Linux than Photoshop.
I don't want pictures to be 1MB though. I'd be okay with 100MB per picture, as an option, if it'd catch the picture in the best quality possible. Drive space is cheap and I can scale it down myself to whatever use I want. 13MP, if I remember correctly, is about what a 35mm camera takes. A digital camera that takes pictures of less quality than a $20 35mm won't cut it for me.
Wireless is very different from USB. USB means you have to think about transfering files and monitoring disk space. If you had a camera that could take 100MB pics of wonderous quality then you would need to be able to store GB's of files. Or you might want to take video.
Good point. It's annoying that even decent digital cameras aren't good at taking motion pictures or low/weird lighting pics. It's frustrating that I press the button and there is a slight delay before my picture is taken - making me miss the shot half the time if things are moving. Almost as bad is that I try to take an outdoor photo at dusk and the camera isn't able to capture anything but gray. Understandable problems but I'd love to see some improvements there in cameras affordable by the average consumer.
Now that we have cameras of a decent MP maybe we could stop saving as jpeg and instead use a lossless format? That combined with a decent optical zoom and something like a 13MP camera would be good. That leaves us with the primary worry of storage. I'd suggest making cameras able to wirelessly connect to another portable device you could carry in a pocket of purse that acts like a hard disk and could store 100GB of files or more. That and improved batteries would be great.
Good point although I think you can infer the one from the other. I actually am fairly good at SEO and a lot of that is due simply to understanding how the Internet and search engines work. I've always had a thing for studying ways of indexing and searching data as well as things like AI so it's not as mysterious a field for me as it is for a lot of people.
I'm not that great at math but my conception of time has always been that time is our movement through dimensions that we can't directly sense. Probably a naive concept but it always worked for me and probably not as silly as the idea of flat one directional time.
I find that IE makes it hard to implement non-squarish designs where elements overlap a lot.
Try the web. I have a short intro to search engines on my website. Many others exist. The basics aren't hard and are very effective.
It still takes time to find them and implement your workarounds so yes it still takes time. Most developers simplify the process by just not doing some things that are possible in other browsers. That is a pretty crappy way of working. It leaves you designing to the lowest standard. If you do something advanced it is not especially easy to make it look decent in IE. There are more workarounds needed and the workarounds become more involved.
So if you create blah pages then yes it won't take much time to do a couple workarounds. If you create something engaging then it can take much longer regardless of your experience. I've been making websites since people were connecting with 2400 baud modems. It still takes time to do it well despite my experience.
It looks nice but it still is avoiding some of the more interesting position options it seems. It's the little details that make it hard to implement some layouts for IE.
I'll give it another try. Did you have a link to any helpful information to getting the installer etc to work?