People such as moon landing hoaxers, 9/11 truthers etc. are so far gone that you could methodically tear down each and every one of their assertions, employing evidence, science, logic to beat it to a pulp and they'd still start right up with the first one again.
That's why I said the "official" store should be a subsiduary that buys its stuff wholesale like every other store. Then they can put whatever margin they like to turn a profit and they don't have to worry about what other retailers think.
I guess the problem that Apple & Sony demonstrate is that going to the manufacturer doesn't necessarily get you a better price even without a middleman. They just use it as an excuse to have bigger margins.
The proper form of competition would see the manufacturer required to sell its products at a wholesale price in a transparent and unbiased way. If the manufacturer wants to sell its own product it would have to set up a subsiduary company which would be subject to the same rules as everyone else.
I think I'd have more sympathy for dealers if they sold cars for the price on the sticker with no negotiations, no hidden extras, no hidden fees. The price you see is the price you pay. It would be better yet if they did this online where they can't bamboozle people with figures or promises they won't keep or with high pressure sales for extras.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say a 3D printer SHOULDN'T require any skill on the part of the user. That is assuming the hardware and software are up to snuff. The software shouldn't accept impossible shapes and the hardware / firmware should be reliable enough to accurately print what its told to print. The only reason it shouldn't is if it suffers a jam or runs out of material.
When that actually happens and we see reliable printers it'll move from being a niche thing into the mainstream. The problem I see for Makerbot et al is if they don't pull their fingers out soon then someone like Canon, HP, Brother etc. will surely make such a machine and they'll probably have the brand recognition to dominate the market.
Actually the first thing you need is a giant plastic ball. Let your robot run inside the ball like a hamster. Then you don't have to worry about half of this stuff.
With greater quality and accuracy, yes, but not far less time. 40 large mold sets would take quite some time to produce and be massively more expensive. Once the molds are made, they would be faster, but the break even point in time would probably be a couple to a dozen cars, the break even point on cost would probably be in the thousands.
Most cars would be sold in the thousands and besides, nobody would buy a car if the finish was as bad as this. They only achieved the speed at all by rushing the printing, extruding from a wide nozzle. If they were to use high precision nozzles to achieve makerbot quality finish it'd take 100x the time and it still wouldn't look great. It's just not practical except for the crudest of prototypes.
Most extruded plastic 3D printers look bad, but this particular one looks terrible. The flaws are big enough to see in the promo video in SD. It's like a lumpy coil pot.
As usual 3D printing is being used as an excuse for free publicity. Most of the parts could have been injection moulded with far greater quality & accuracy in far less time, assuming plastic was the best material to make them with in the first place.
The US was bitching that Apple paid a really low rate of tax in Ireland just recently while Ireland was claiming it was all above board. I'm not sure if it was or not but Ireland has always insisted their taxation scheme is transparent - it's just that it allows big corps to launder their profits through a few countries to shake off the tax liabilities.
I'm guessing that if Amazon had added it to Google Play Store, rentals would have had to use Google payments where Google gets 30% instead of Amazon. That or it'd work only with Prime, not rentals.
The requirement to use their payment system probably doesn't apply to Amazon. Their Play policy
has an exemption which says "where payment is for digital content or goods that may be consumed outside of the app itself (e.g., buying songs that can be played on other music players)". As long as Amazon lets rentals play through other apps then they're probably perfectly okay.
A more likely reason it hasn't appeared until now have been Amazon's own ambitions to run an app store and tablets/phones that are tied to it. They're holding back the goodies to make their own platform more attractive by comparison. Google did it with YouTube to Microsoft, Blackberry did it with BBM and so on.
I suspect it is to some degree (even if that means Samsung flavoured phones of some kind) and it'll suck for battery life like all the rest.
BTW I think it looks like a nice watch but looks should never be at the expense of doing watchy things like telling the time. A watch design that turns off to save battery is a fundamentally broken design.
Apple have launched a smart watch which is technically indistinct all the other smart watches.
All smart watches suck. They suck for being tied to a phone. They suck for being tied to specific phone OS and models. They suck for their battery life. They suck for their displays which turn off to save battery. Maybe if someone was upgrading from a fitbit or similar they'd be useful but I just don't see the mass market appeal in these things until they fix these issues.
Or similar bullshit by people who think "scripting" languages are appropriate for base system tools. Now you will have python dependency hell every-time you want to do something simple like repartition your disks. Oh, and is that project python 2 or python 3? On and on..
gparted is a graphical tool for editing partitions and already has a raft of dependencies. One more won't make a difference especially since python is used increasingly in core distributions for scripting instead of bash.
Secondly, perhaps the reason that gparted is considered a mess is precisely because it mixes up the graphical parts and the low level stuff in one package, a problem compounded because the installer also has its own partition editor. Fedora appears to have written a layer called blivet to abstract out partitioning from the installer GUI and therefore it makes sense that they use it in the desktop also.
It's a neat idea but what happens if a fish gets stuck in one of these things, or if a tear develops and they're unceremoniously dumped onto a concrete sidewalk? What sort of pressures are involved if there are 30 or 40 fish in them at once? What's the maximum incline that can carry them? If the incline is low, are the fish going to shoved up a big spiral to reach the top in one go or are there staging pools? The tech in its current form seems more useful for fish farming where the need to move fish around is probably an every day issue.
Given that many dams (including the Three Gorges) have a boat lift and locks, perhaps the answer is to adapt these so that they also transport fish at the same time. Or adapt fish stairs so that they apply a principle similar to a lock where sections automatically raise and fall to give fish some respite and assistance to reach the top.
A better reaction - state you are not interested. Don't explain or elaborate, state. Don't give reasons that will be turned against you "Too expensive? Well what about if we...". Just say not interested and prepare to wrap it up. Better yet, don't go to a sales pitch in the first place. Anything that involves attending a "free seminar" or a "presentation" to collect some cold called prize is probably a scam.
I'm not even sure why anyone thinks the resale market is any better either. Yeah you avoid paying a full lump sum but you're still whacked with fees and hidden charges and have to deal with shysters. What's the point?
I can't see why anyone would agree to timeshare or possibly contemplate it representing good value. It's easy to book a hotel or rent apartments virtually anywhere in the world, usually from private owners for reasonable fees according to time of year and location.
All these timeshare deals involve a very large lump sum down up front and then resort management fees and other hidden charges. And I'm sure they'd be pushing to loan this lump sum for usurious rates. By the time it's all added up it's probably far more expensive than booking somewhere and that's before considering the lump sum is in the bank or there is no debt to furnish.
It's a scam pure and simple. Even "reputable" timeshare companies are pushing a bad value product. I don't quite understand why the rules governing it aren't stricter or the practice outright banned.
I suspect it will be enough for them to rebrand themselves. They probably run several brands already. The sad part is the way they are allowed to operate that way at all.
I used to read books on a Palm Pilot and I still read them on my phone. Handy for a train other idle moments although nowhere close to ideal.
Anyway, I see a $20 e-reader as something which is viable and useful particularly if governments started issuing them to kids instead of a heap of text books. It's not even clear to me why governments pay (or expect parents to pay) for text books from publishers when they could use the same money to commission the text books and then distribute them electronically and DRM-free for nothing.
On Windows services.msc is the snap-in GUI for services. It's the thing that tells you what is running, has options to stop / start them and property sheet to see what user they're run as and what they depend on. It's not a pretty GUI but it does its job. The biggest issue with Windows services is there are too damned many of them. I think Microsoft should implement some kind of higher level grouping so that it's easier to figure out what can be safely turned off. Another tangential peeve is MMC isn't hi-dpi aware which means all the snap-ins are blurry on my laptop.
I don't see that it has much bearing to systemd or init beyond implementing the same basic concept of having system processes that can be started and stopped (and a manual or automatic method of ordering their launch). Unix daemon monitoring GUIs have had start/stop buttons and status for the fundamental reason that Windows does.
And therein the analogy becomes obvious. Find some elitist niche of the car world, or the plane world, or anywhere else where the choice is self assembly or buying something off the shelf and you will find people looking down on you. It's fine for them that they enjoy building their "thing" (whatever it may be) from scratch. It doesn't mean people who choose to buy something ready made with the intent of using it for something are somehow sheep.
The typical reason that the word "sheep", "sheeple" etc. comes into a conversation is because the person throwing the word around has already decided they are morally and intellectually superior and cannot countenance another point of view.
Oh dear oh dear. Just because someone buys a PC and expects it to work out of the box (the horror), does not make them a "sheep". Are you a "sheep" for buying an assembled car instead of building one from parts?
Besides that, I bet most Linux users tend to be quite conservative in their hardware choices. They know that new hardware + Linux is a recipe for disaster and it's better to wait and see what works reliably. Some may even only run Linux on older or even hand-me-down hardware which is known to work.
That might change if Steambox / SteamOS took off and became a viable choice for gamers. Perhaps then the likes of Intel / NVidia / AMD and the board makers may pay more attention to supporting Linux properly from the beginning. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
i think if there were a pyroclastic flow heading toard me I would hop in my pool and hold my breath at the bottom. then after the heat wave had passed I would climb on my roof so I don't get buried by the ash. would that work?
No, it would just turn you into a delicious pool sized bowl of soup.
Slashdot Mirror
People such as moon landing hoaxers, 9/11 truthers etc. are so far gone that you could methodically tear down each and every one of their assertions, employing evidence, science, logic to beat it to a pulp and they'd still start right up with the first one again.
That's why I said the "official" store should be a subsiduary that buys its stuff wholesale like every other store. Then they can put whatever margin they like to turn a profit and they don't have to worry about what other retailers think.
The proper form of competition would see the manufacturer required to sell its products at a wholesale price in a transparent and unbiased way. If the manufacturer wants to sell its own product it would have to set up a subsiduary company which would be subject to the same rules as everyone else.
I think I'd have more sympathy for dealers if they sold cars for the price on the sticker with no negotiations, no hidden extras, no hidden fees. The price you see is the price you pay. It would be better yet if they did this online where they can't bamboozle people with figures or promises they won't keep or with high pressure sales for extras.
When that actually happens and we see reliable printers it'll move from being a niche thing into the mainstream. The problem I see for Makerbot et al is if they don't pull their fingers out soon then someone like Canon, HP, Brother etc. will surely make such a machine and they'll probably have the brand recognition to dominate the market.
Actually the first thing you need is a giant plastic ball. Let your robot run inside the ball like a hamster. Then you don't have to worry about half of this stuff.
With greater quality and accuracy, yes, but not far less time. 40 large mold sets would take quite some time to produce and be massively more expensive. Once the molds are made, they would be faster, but the break even point in time would probably be a couple to a dozen cars, the break even point on cost would probably be in the thousands.
Most cars would be sold in the thousands and besides, nobody would buy a car if the finish was as bad as this. They only achieved the speed at all by rushing the printing, extruding from a wide nozzle. If they were to use high precision nozzles to achieve makerbot quality finish it'd take 100x the time and it still wouldn't look great. It's just not practical except for the crudest of prototypes.
As usual 3D printing is being used as an excuse for free publicity. Most of the parts could have been injection moulded with far greater quality & accuracy in far less time, assuming plastic was the best material to make them with in the first place.
The US was bitching that Apple paid a really low rate of tax in Ireland just recently while Ireland was claiming it was all above board. I'm not sure if it was or not but Ireland has always insisted their taxation scheme is transparent - it's just that it allows big corps to launder their profits through a few countries to shake off the tax liabilities.
I'm guessing that if Amazon had added it to Google Play Store, rentals would have had to use Google payments where Google gets 30% instead of Amazon. That or it'd work only with Prime, not rentals.
The requirement to use their payment system probably doesn't apply to Amazon. Their Play policy
has an exemption which says "where payment is for digital content or goods that may be consumed outside of the app itself (e.g., buying songs that can be played on other music players)". As long as Amazon lets rentals play through other apps then they're probably perfectly okay.
A more likely reason it hasn't appeared until now have been Amazon's own ambitions to run an app store and tablets/phones that are tied to it. They're holding back the goodies to make their own platform more attractive by comparison. Google did it with YouTube to Microsoft, Blackberry did it with BBM and so on.
BTW I think it looks like a nice watch but looks should never be at the expense of doing watchy things like telling the time. A watch design that turns off to save battery is a fundamentally broken design.
On the plus side, if your credit card is hacked it's unlikely that someone will reveal pictures of it covered in semen.
All smart watches suck. They suck for being tied to a phone. They suck for being tied to specific phone OS and models. They suck for their battery life. They suck for their displays which turn off to save battery. Maybe if someone was upgrading from a fitbit or similar they'd be useful but I just don't see the mass market appeal in these things until they fix these issues.
Or similar bullshit by people who think "scripting" languages are appropriate for base system tools. Now you will have python dependency hell every-time you want to do something simple like repartition your disks. Oh, and is that project python 2 or python 3? On and on..
gparted is a graphical tool for editing partitions and already has a raft of dependencies. One more won't make a difference especially since python is used increasingly in core distributions for scripting instead of bash.
Secondly, perhaps the reason that gparted is considered a mess is precisely because it mixes up the graphical parts and the low level stuff in one package, a problem compounded because the installer also has its own partition editor. Fedora appears to have written a layer called blivet to abstract out partitioning from the installer GUI and therefore it makes sense that they use it in the desktop also.
Given that many dams (including the Three Gorges) have a boat lift and locks, perhaps the answer is to adapt these so that they also transport fish at the same time. Or adapt fish stairs so that they apply a principle similar to a lock where sections automatically raise and fall to give fish some respite and assistance to reach the top.
I'm not even sure why anyone thinks the resale market is any better either. Yeah you avoid paying a full lump sum but you're still whacked with fees and hidden charges and have to deal with shysters. What's the point?
All these timeshare deals involve a very large lump sum down up front and then resort management fees and other hidden charges. And I'm sure they'd be pushing to loan this lump sum for usurious rates. By the time it's all added up it's probably far more expensive than booking somewhere and that's before considering the lump sum is in the bank or there is no debt to furnish.
It's a scam pure and simple. Even "reputable" timeshare companies are pushing a bad value product. I don't quite understand why the rules governing it aren't stricter or the practice outright banned.
I suspect it will be enough for them to rebrand themselves. They probably run several brands already. The sad part is the way they are allowed to operate that way at all.
Anyway, I see a $20 e-reader as something which is viable and useful particularly if governments started issuing them to kids instead of a heap of text books. It's not even clear to me why governments pay (or expect parents to pay) for text books from publishers when they could use the same money to commission the text books and then distribute them electronically and DRM-free for nothing.
I don't see that it has much bearing to systemd or init beyond implementing the same basic concept of having system processes that can be started and stopped (and a manual or automatic method of ordering their launch). Unix daemon monitoring GUIs have had start/stop buttons and status for the fundamental reason that Windows does.
The typical reason that the word "sheep", "sheeple" etc. comes into a conversation is because the person throwing the word around has already decided they are morally and intellectually superior and cannot countenance another point of view.
Yup I guess I did - not sure how since I posted it in the same window as another post I made which ended up in the correct thread.
Besides that, I bet most Linux users tend to be quite conservative in their hardware choices. They know that new hardware + Linux is a recipe for disaster and it's better to wait and see what works reliably. Some may even only run Linux on older or even hand-me-down hardware which is known to work.
That might change if Steambox / SteamOS took off and became a viable choice for gamers. Perhaps then the likes of Intel / NVidia / AMD and the board makers may pay more attention to supporting Linux properly from the beginning. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
It neglects to say which cities, which direction the ash is likely to spread, or provide a diagram to aid in that understanding.
i think if there were a pyroclastic flow heading toard me I would hop in my pool and hold my breath at the bottom. then after the heat wave had passed I would climb on my roof so I don't get buried by the ash. would that work?
No, it would just turn you into a delicious pool sized bowl of soup.