So many slashdotters like typing because their handwriting sucks. Yet if they had adequate practice writing at a young age their handwriting wouldn't suck so bad. Don't complain about a lack of coordination because you can type which requires more hand eye coordination than writing does. Unless you have flippers instead of hands there is little preventing you from having decent handwriting except maybe your lack of effort. I can type pretty fast but I find it more comfortable to write with a pen.
While a minority of computer users are graphic artists a large number of Mac users are graphic artists. Thus a large number of Mac users need the features of photoshop to do their job or hobby. Huge numbers of PS copies are sold to Mac users, about as many as Windows copies. A large number of copies sold to a small number of users is pretty good market penetration. GIMP for all it can do is like MSPaint on steroids.
Am I the only one who don't think the theme of F451 was about censorship? I've read it several times and I think it is more a work on sociological decay than censorship. The concept of censorship manifested through the burning of books is not really a central theme. It is merely a derivitive of the enforcement of the society's weird form of socialism. The secondary and tertiary events in the book have more to do with the central theme rather than the primary actions of the primary characters. Clarisse being killed by a wreckless driver and Millie not concerning herself enough to tell Montag for over a week conveys an idea of humanism being supplanted in their society by secular socialistic consumerism. The little things like the lack of porches on houses, 200' billboards because cars go over a hundred miles an hour, televisions that take up four walls of your house, ect.. Those are the thematic elements of the book in my opinion. F451's society is a not so far out extension of American society in the 1950's. The act of censorship was just another tool used to pacify the human spirit in their society. If you wanted to use a real censorship piece 1984 would be a much better candidate. Censorship in that society was an end rather than just a means to an end.
I think if you want to add a tech twist to studying F451 have students examine things from the novel (like houses built without porches) and have them find them in real life. When I first read it forever ago I'd never seen a house with a porch except on TV when they showed some old house in some old part of the country. Then my friend rented a house with a porch on the front in a pretty old part of town. We spent a lot of time out there and met several of her naighbors just by being outside. Every time I went to her house I was reminded of the book. It isn't every day a book makes such a big impression on me that I think about it for years after reading it. Activities like that might make for a pretty cool way to study the book. Consorship issues in the tech sector might apply if you were reading The Wealth of Nations but I don't think intellectual property fits in well with F451. I'm envious of your position right now, I'd love to be able to teach that book to kids.
An eBook is just an electronic print of a physical book in all but the rarest cases. The costs included in the price of the paper book still apply. Editing is a arduous job because you can't just run a book through a spell checker and be done with it. You need to proof read the manuscript several times and correct dozens of errors in every chapter. Like fixing bugs in code the more you fix the harder it is to fix. Editors have to read over stuff several times to catch all the errors. There's continuity errors, spelling errors, grammarical errors, arrangement problems, ect. It isn't merely running a manuscript through spell check in Word and saving it as an eBook file. Adter editing comes setting by a talented person using programs like QuarkXpress that turns your shamefully formatted Word file into something worth printing. Even if the output of the setting goes to an electronic file formatting work still needs to be done on it.
Advertising electronically is a joke. Books in stores get advertising just being on shelves. Books on Amazon don't get a dozen people a day looking at the covers. Cover art is advertising in itself, a big name in bold gothic letters like Tom Clancy or Stephen King in big Impact letters draws a far amount of attention on a shelf. On Amazon you can't make a badass cover to draw the eyes of store patrons. Sale for Amazon are generally high but many specific prints sell few to no copies at all. The publisher still has to pay the production cost but then doesn't make anything back on it.
Limiting yourself to thinking about paperbacks is a joke. They don't make much money. Go to a book store soon and wander over to the paperback fiction section. You'll see a handful of books with several copies on the shelf and the rest of them there will be one or two copies at the most. The small percentage of titles with multiple copies available are the big sellers. The rest sell one copy a month if they are lucky (from that particular store mind you). Books that didn't hit hardcover before going to softcover don't make much money for publishers or authors. Margins on paperbacks are horrible. The cost of sales takes up a sizable percentage of their cover price while the cost of goods being recudes by making them electronic isn't nearly enough to drop the price by a signifigant fraction. The 10% discount on a eBook PB over a physical PB is pretty much the production savings by not having to print and ship the book. The savings on the hard cover is pretty similar. There is a reason eBooks don't cost the dime they cost you transfer to you. The costs of their production is usually far higher than the returns they make. Don't admit to not knowing how books are priced only to make an argument that books ought to be cheaper because they aren't printed on paper.
That is another matter entirely. The original poster was complaining about the "powers" of the BSA which are pretty much non-existant. If people would stand up for themselves and make an agressor jump through hoops to attack them on a justifiable legal basis the BSA would become toothless. They wouldn't try to audit anybody if there was a hassle whenever they tried. In a civil case the burden of proof is STILL on the accuser. They have to make a convincing argument to a judge that you're broken their contract.
Actually in your case of company A if there was a click through license as in "read this before proceding" they ARE indeed contractually bound by the terms of the license. If you click through a license in bad faith a civil judge is going to throw the book at you and award the BSA anything they want. The terms of EULAs are pretty straitforward if you take the time to read them. By clicking the "accept" button you are contractually bound by the EULA's terms. Your example of company B is pretty easy as well. To convince a judge you need permission to do a physical audit you can bring public records up like finacial reports, news article, industry documents, just about anything in the public domain as evidense. You'd say "company B bought 20 new computers of such and such quality, we only sold them licenses for the 20 computers they already had, we believe they may have broken our license agreement by installing software on them they didn't pay for". The judge will then allow company B to give a statement "these are computers for accounting so they don't need [software package] that the accusor sells thus we did not install it on those systems". Unless the judge things Company B is full of shit he/she is probably going to tell the BSA to go fuck itself ever so politely. Civil courts don't take kindly to business organizations trying to fuck over other businesses. There are some districts where the opposite is true but these judges are usually owned by said business organization. Most districts however will look at the situation logically, if there's reason to believe the small company is pirating software rampantly they'll be punished for it if a case is brought against them. If the BSA is just trying to nickel and dime a company they'll get a whoopin.
Why do people stupidly bring up the disposable camera and cell phone thing as waste? What part of recycle don't you fucking understand? You don't take pictures with a disposable camera and then throw it out. The camera chassis gets sent back to the manufacturer to be repackaged and resold. Same with those limited use cell phones. You're supposed to either buy more minutes on the phone (for a lower price than the cost of a new phone) or sned it someplace that is going to send it back to the manufacturer for reprogramming. Disposable diapers are pretty crappy (funny huh) but if you've got such a problem get a job with a diaper cleaning service. I hope you enjoy it.
My narrowband provider is Charter Communications with Earthlink as the ISP. I pay $24.95 for service and $4.95 for modem rental (with the option to buy my own DOCSIS compliant modem from anybody I want). I get 256 down and 64 up which for me isn't too bad. For $39.95 I can upgrade to 512d/128u and then the last upgrade is like $60/mo for 1.5mb symmetrical. For my $24 I get pretty good ping times playing just about anything and consistant download speeds. Their service has gotten MUCH better than it used to be, they actually answer the phone now when you've got a problem.
The BSA isn't a government fucking agency and thus requires not a warrant to performa an audit. If you signed a contract saying they could perform and audit you're fucked. Besides in civil cases involving contracts all you need is a vague clause saying something to the effect "if we think you've broken the contract we can tear you a new asshole" and then your signature. A civil court can't do anything to protect you because your John Hancock is on the contract. The legal system protecting people from government doesn't mean you're protected from other people. Be more careful about the contracts you sign. There is a big difference between civil courts and criminal courts. Why is that so hard to understand?
I'm sorry to burst the collective slashdot bubble but the price of books is NOT entirely dependent on the cost of the medium. The actual physical putting of ink on paper and binding and all that jazz is about 17% of the net amount received from a particular publication. In a business you've got alot of costs before you get to the profit. There's the cost of goods which in the case of a book includes editorial and production costs (books need spell checking, formatting, proof reading, ect), design work needs to be done, and then finally the pesky cost of paying the author for their work. Then comes cost of sales which covers advertising and promotion which suprisingly can be fairly expensive for some books (think about all the cardboard displays you see when a novel comes out from a popular writer those aren't free). Then finally overhead which includes the actual cost of operating a business. Then FINALLY you get to profit but then it is still tricky. When you talk percentages you're talking the net of what you actually make off a product, not the list price. If a particular book sells a thousand copies little to no profit is made. Reducing the cost of goods price by making a book electronic saves you a couple bucks but not so much than you can wipe your ass with a hundred dollar bill. Getting the same content on a different medium doesn't make the cost of that content go down. Suprise suprise this is how most content producers do business whether they print books, CDs, or DVDs.
I played Diablo2 for 14 hours straight on my PowerBook with one break in the middle to go to the bathroom and stretch. When we were finished the dinner tray I had the PB on was pretty warm to the touch but the system was running just fine. It isn't one of those metal encased G4 models either, it is a slightly aged Lombard 333 with a fairly new IBM TravelStar in it.
Your single box for 2000$ doesn't take into consideration the fact Google needs to make their tons of information available to everyone at once. With a search engine like Google it is going to be rare information is just going to sit around and never be used. This means that by conventional database architecture logic you keep it cached in RAM. Hard drives are useful when you're cutting power to a computer, how often does Google reboot?
Final Fantasy was a game turned movie. It would have been a big hit had it remained a game. It didn't fail in theaters because it was an art movie trying to get a point across that no one got, it was a block buster that busted. They could have saved some money and just taken tiles from FF1 to tell their story like they do at 8-bit theater.
Seriously they threw millions of dollars into FF:TSW only to learn that movie going audiences don't go for "My name is Daryl, I'm a dancer" dialog and delivery reminicent of a student directed documentary about red blood cells. There were scenes of the movie that looked like a live action sequence, these usually took place inbetween scenes where you could actually see the character or the character was talking. I love seeing James Woods in movies, he has definite style when he delivers lines and when he is intense you can tell he is being intense. There was NONE of that in General Hein. Neil didn't exactly fit in with the image you associate with Steve Buscemi's dialog. More effort was put into realistic hair movement than realistic portayal of emotions. Same for the story which was weak at best. They could have just used the story from FF6 it would have been ten times more involving and probably got them a couple million more dollars. Due to Square fucking the donkey with FF George Lucas is going to have a much tougher time pitching his load about replacing actors with computer models. I think this is a good thing (even if actors aren't pushing technological limits) because I want to see a movie with more substance than freckles and relistic moving hair. When Donny died in The Big Lebowski you feel at least a little remorse at him dying. When Neil dies in FF:TSW you're lucky to notice. That's not going to sell movie audiences.
While I think there is some point to the article I think the conclusions reached by Prof. Jones are a bit off. The whole survival of the fittest concept comes from an uncivilized and untamed natural world. You survived because you ran fast or had poisonous fangs or defensive quills or the ability to hunt in groups. Civilization puts an end to much of the struggle of the human condition (as the article mentions by quoting Peter Ward). You don't need to run fast or be strong in order to eat. With developments in medicine you don't need to be particularly strong in order to survive illness, genetic or otherwise. I'd even say modern people have more immunities than all of our forebearers combined. I think in many ways we have stopped developing as a species. Maybe in a million years we'll have fewer toes and longer fingers (our fingers will tend towards dexterity and we don't need the number of toes we have to walk upright as we do) but we are pretty stagnant.
The conclusion doctor Jones comes up with is we are the best result of natural selection. That is complete crap. We've got far too many genetic problems to be considered the best result of natural selection. Pick any detrimental attribute you can think of and picture a hunter gatherer with that trait. Do you think he'd survive long enough to have kids? It is highly doubtful. All of us four eyed slashdotters would be a mid-afternoon snack if it weren't for a civilized society. Concluding we've reached evolutionary stagnation because there are less adolecent and pre-adolecent deaths in London is pretty dumb. Our kids haven't become any better since 1890, we just no longer put them in factories and actually have cures for childhood diseases besides heavy prayer sessions and burning incense. Monkeys carrying HIV and not being affected by it is a similarly bad conclusion drawn from a dumb case. Chimpanzees don't have an anti-HIV gene, they have enough genetic descrepancy not to be affect by the HUMAN imunodeficiency virus. Humans in Africa in a thousand years won't have a anti-HIV gene any more than Chimpanzees have one today. Anyone left alive in Africa will be those who learned from the mistakes of the peers and practiced safe sex even if their religion or tradition forbode it.
I think this also brings into question: where do biologists learn math? If you look at statistics or studies done by any number of biologists you see REALLY fuzzy conclusions based on some really fuzzy logic and even fuzzier math. To put it into slashdot perspective, imagine somebody does benchmarking of Linux and Windows. They run web server tests using Linux 2.0 on a single processor serving 100 client machines connected to the server with a second hand D-Link hub serving out dynamically generated pages while comparing it to a Windows2k Advanced Server box with four processors connected to 25 client machines connected to the server by a cost-equals-the-GNP-of-a-small-nation router using gold plated Cat-5 cabling serving static web pages. The Windows computer beats the shit out of the Linux system (like...Netcraft) and it is concluded that Windows is superior in every way to Linux. Slashdotters would blow a collective gasket. That is the accuracy with which most biological studies are conducted. If you think I'm full of shit, you can pass a sugar pill through clinical trials and sell it as a anti-anything pill.
Wow...a file sharing client has an HTTP server on a non-standard port. I hope for the slashdot editors sake that they don't perform in bed like they perform at their jobs. "No no don't go baby I'm sorry. Let's try again this time I'll hold it in."
What economics course are you fucking talking about. How is cost of production not related to final selling price? Every economic text I've ever read says selling price is intrinsically linked to the cost of production. The whole point of conducting business is to make enough money to cover expenses plus profit. Economic dictates that operating at a loss (not covering production costs) is retarded and an unsound business practice. Being the business owner his production costs cover everything from his education down the the price of an office plant. Giving software (product) away for free (a selling price not linked to production cost) would mean an income of nothing and would not be economically viable.
Aside from that insulting someone's CS degree is a bit retarded in its own right. Do you have to pat yourself on the back often to make yourself feel special because you learned to program on your own? Maybe you just regret the complete lack of a life you have and product your spite for yourself onto others.
That is not going to solve anyone's fucking problem. That has got to be one of the most ludicrous suggestions posted on slashdot in a long time. If everyone pays an even amount you assume that they all use something an even amount. Well more people DON'T use software than DO use software. This means poor people who aren't using any software at all are getting fucked by paying for the software some non poor person is deciding they don't want to pay full price for. I don't get how you think that is reasonable. As for distribution to software authors what is construed as a software author? If I write a Hello World in VB can I register as a software author and get a fat check from the government? A software tax (or any tax that goes into the pockets of a few people) is just putting the onus of paying for something on people who don't even use it. It is also giving people already making a nice living off writing software even more money. That's like welfare for people making over 50k a year.
So your point is...what? Microsoft is evil and they are going to come to my house sodomize me? How exactly is Mono supporting Microsoft? Mono is an open implimentation of a closed source project. This is the original fucking intend of the GNU project. Are you retarded? None of your comments about Microsoft even pertain to the subject of Miguel de Icaza supporting the use of an ECMA standard. Actually from the gist of your retarded spouting I think you've got some issues with unconventional sex. I think you need to admit to the world that you're a pillow biter. You're only going to keep this projection nonsense up which doesn't do anything but make you look like a complete idiot. Take your anti-Microsoft zealotry as well as your discomfort with your sexual leanings and go tell someone who gives a fuck.
Why is it so easy to hate members of the "Linux community"? Is it because they are the whiniest bunch of computer users ever? Is it because they kick and scream like the children they are when they don't get their way? Is it because they are just fucking stupid? I don't really know which one to pick. Two years ago Linux geeks were complaining about not getting corporate support. Now they are complaining about actually having corporate support. Now when somebody suggests they have a method to interact with the rest of the world they kick and scream because the great satan was the one who came up with the buzz words. What the fuck?
Miguel de Icaza wanting to add real functionality to Linux is not a damning offence. Half the fucking posts on this thread seem to think Miguel is off his rocker or Bill Gates' bitch or something. That is just fucking retarded. He's a damn good programmer who knows Linux is way behind the times when it comes to interacting with the real business world. Stateful RPC methods need to hit the road. They don't fit into topologies where you have multiple servers behind a single address that are all processing requests for the sake up upping your throughput. Stuff like the LVSP isn't going to work with FTP or rsh connections though works well with HTTP. XML based RPC (or any stateless RPC method) are much more efficient in modern networks because I don't need to fuck with my external network configuration to add capacity. SOAP and the whole.NET system is based around stateless XML based RPC methods. This is a GOOD THING for interoperability. As long as you conform to the SOAP your program can talk with another program not matter what sort of machine it is running on or where it is running. A common runtime for languages isn't so bad either. You can write a program on any architecture and run it on any other architecture that has a compliant runtime environment and bytecode translator. Don't use the CLR if you wahnt to preserve certain functionality for a given language. It would be cool though to be able to write apps for GNOME that would run on any OS and architecture that has the CLR compliant GNOME libraries. No recompiling required. A house that does all C/C++ development doesn't need to learn Java in order to write a program they can sell to just about anybody running just about any computer. Just because the idea proposed by microsoft doesn't make it evil. In fact I'd say Miguel is doing the GNU thing by writing a free implimentation of non-free software. This is what the whole GNU crap is about. Slashdotters seem too fucking stupid to understand this point.
Charter Communications in some areas where they offer digital cable are doing this. I don't know if this has been rolled out yet but they've been advertising the service for a while now. Considering my cable modem has been losing its connection pretty frequently lately I don't know how good the service they're offering would be.
Re:Did anybody actually built /configured a cluste
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Using SMP machines doesn't REQUIRE you thread your applications thus fucking up your MPI performance. You could have your program fork itself as a separate process or just run a separate instance from another directory or some such and the kernel on the SMP system will load balance and keep each process running on a different processor. This approach is of course going to work alot better with Monte Carlos than differencial equations. Anyway to answer your question if you use pooch you can use any library you've got available on your Macs. Just like building Beowulf apps you load the nodes up with whatever libraries you need for the application and it will go ahead and use them as needed. If you're using OSX you can use Cocoa or Java as an object passing system to get data from somewhere to somewhere else although this isn't exactly ideal for heavy math applications.
Yeah most every Hubble image you see is a multi-spectrum composite image. Most images are several colour plates combined with infrared and ultra-violet plates combined as a single RGB colour image. The crappy part is all the Hubble images that look so pretty and badass actually don't look that pretty and badass in real life. Hubble gets colour images by putting a filter over the light sensor and holding the apeture open for a long period of time (it is more complex than this really but it is essencially how it works) and then later in a computer that greyscale image is assigned some RGB values and composited into a three colour image. If you were to see a nebula up close and personal (you'd probably not be able to tell you were getting close to one) it would look very grey and bland. You'd also have trouble seeing it because the sheer lack of density. Atoms and molecules in nebulae are really really far apart and in a cubic kilometer of space there might only be a handful of matter. The farther you get your pixel is picking up the radiation from many more cubic kilometers of space giving you a higher average amount of radiation making for better imaging. As you get closer your sensor pixel is seeing less and less cubic kilometers of space and thus gets less radiation making it more difficult to see the large structure you're flying inside of. So Hubble imagry is just ellaborate faking. The stuff you get from space.com is processed more than Kraft singles.
In actuality it IS a cheap computer rendition. The Saturn image was done in the H and K bands (both in the infrared region) which people can't see. The sensors store an 8-bit sample for each pixel. If you looked at a rasterized image from one of these sensors it would just be an 8-bit greyscale image. These are rather boring to look at so the astonomers apply these grayscale images to colour channels of an RGB image. SO what they are doing is assigning a band you can't normally see (infrared) to bands you can see so you're impressed. This leads to confusion though because the final images don't LOOK anything like they would through a normal telescope. Saturn for example, the rings are super bright and crappy looking. This is because they are formed of ice crystals and dust which relfects infrared radiation pretty well. The original greyscale raster would look just as bright but the ring would be a really light shade pretty close to white in both the H and K bands. Older pictures of Saturn have usually been visual spectrum pictures so they look pretty natural. Cheaper computers have led to many a misleading space photograph.
Actually even this is off. ApplesScript since OS9 has had network support. You can make an AppleScript that will run on every Mac node on your network and do whatever task you want it to. It isn't too difficult to have this script run Software Update or grab the installer for the latest OS upgrade off a file server and update the system. OSX makes it even easier because you can use cron to run a shell script at whatever designated time to do whatever. Any administration you're going to do with Linux on 1024 nodes can be ported to OSX with I don't imagine too much difficulty. If that isn't enough remote access I don't know what is.
Uh...why do you need to know the nature of the beast in order to run a highly parallel program on a computer? Do you need to be an expert in the construction of computer clusters in order to be an engineering grad student who wants to run a CFD program you wrote for your thesis? It makes alot more sense to ask your local cluster guru "hey I want to run this CFD program I wrote in FORTRAN on your cluster, any particulars I need to know?" and the cluster guru says "hey just make sure it complies with yadda yadda...". It is going to be far more likely people know how to write heavy computational jobs in some language than it is for people to know the intricacies of building and maintaining a cluster. It seems like a common misconception among Linux users that user and administrator ought to be interchangable words.
Slashdot Mirror
So many slashdotters like typing because their handwriting sucks. Yet if they had adequate practice writing at a young age their handwriting wouldn't suck so bad. Don't complain about a lack of coordination because you can type which requires more hand eye coordination than writing does. Unless you have flippers instead of hands there is little preventing you from having decent handwriting except maybe your lack of effort. I can type pretty fast but I find it more comfortable to write with a pen.
While a minority of computer users are graphic artists a large number of Mac users are graphic artists. Thus a large number of Mac users need the features of photoshop to do their job or hobby. Huge numbers of PS copies are sold to Mac users, about as many as Windows copies. A large number of copies sold to a small number of users is pretty good market penetration. GIMP for all it can do is like MSPaint on steroids.
Am I the only one who don't think the theme of F451 was about censorship? I've read it several times and I think it is more a work on sociological decay than censorship. The concept of censorship manifested through the burning of books is not really a central theme. It is merely a derivitive of the enforcement of the society's weird form of socialism. The secondary and tertiary events in the book have more to do with the central theme rather than the primary actions of the primary characters. Clarisse being killed by a wreckless driver and Millie not concerning herself enough to tell Montag for over a week conveys an idea of humanism being supplanted in their society by secular socialistic consumerism. The little things like the lack of porches on houses, 200' billboards because cars go over a hundred miles an hour, televisions that take up four walls of your house, ect.. Those are the thematic elements of the book in my opinion. F451's society is a not so far out extension of American society in the 1950's. The act of censorship was just another tool used to pacify the human spirit in their society. If you wanted to use a real censorship piece 1984 would be a much better candidate. Censorship in that society was an end rather than just a means to an end.
I think if you want to add a tech twist to studying F451 have students examine things from the novel (like houses built without porches) and have them find them in real life. When I first read it forever ago I'd never seen a house with a porch except on TV when they showed some old house in some old part of the country. Then my friend rented a house with a porch on the front in a pretty old part of town. We spent a lot of time out there and met several of her naighbors just by being outside. Every time I went to her house I was reminded of the book. It isn't every day a book makes such a big impression on me that I think about it for years after reading it. Activities like that might make for a pretty cool way to study the book. Consorship issues in the tech sector might apply if you were reading The Wealth of Nations but I don't think intellectual property fits in well with F451. I'm envious of your position right now, I'd love to be able to teach that book to kids.
An eBook is just an electronic print of a physical book in all but the rarest cases. The costs included in the price of the paper book still apply. Editing is a arduous job because you can't just run a book through a spell checker and be done with it. You need to proof read the manuscript several times and correct dozens of errors in every chapter. Like fixing bugs in code the more you fix the harder it is to fix. Editors have to read over stuff several times to catch all the errors. There's continuity errors, spelling errors, grammarical errors, arrangement problems, ect. It isn't merely running a manuscript through spell check in Word and saving it as an eBook file. Adter editing comes setting by a talented person using programs like QuarkXpress that turns your shamefully formatted Word file into something worth printing. Even if the output of the setting goes to an electronic file formatting work still needs to be done on it.
Advertising electronically is a joke. Books in stores get advertising just being on shelves. Books on Amazon don't get a dozen people a day looking at the covers. Cover art is advertising in itself, a big name in bold gothic letters like Tom Clancy or Stephen King in big Impact letters draws a far amount of attention on a shelf. On Amazon you can't make a badass cover to draw the eyes of store patrons. Sale for Amazon are generally high but many specific prints sell few to no copies at all. The publisher still has to pay the production cost but then doesn't make anything back on it.
Limiting yourself to thinking about paperbacks is a joke. They don't make much money. Go to a book store soon and wander over to the paperback fiction section. You'll see a handful of books with several copies on the shelf and the rest of them there will be one or two copies at the most. The small percentage of titles with multiple copies available are the big sellers. The rest sell one copy a month if they are lucky (from that particular store mind you). Books that didn't hit hardcover before going to softcover don't make much money for publishers or authors. Margins on paperbacks are horrible. The cost of sales takes up a sizable percentage of their cover price while the cost of goods being recudes by making them electronic isn't nearly enough to drop the price by a signifigant fraction. The 10% discount on a eBook PB over a physical PB is pretty much the production savings by not having to print and ship the book. The savings on the hard cover is pretty similar. There is a reason eBooks don't cost the dime they cost you transfer to you. The costs of their production is usually far higher than the returns they make. Don't admit to not knowing how books are priced only to make an argument that books ought to be cheaper because they aren't printed on paper.
That is another matter entirely. The original poster was complaining about the "powers" of the BSA which are pretty much non-existant. If people would stand up for themselves and make an agressor jump through hoops to attack them on a justifiable legal basis the BSA would become toothless. They wouldn't try to audit anybody if there was a hassle whenever they tried. In a civil case the burden of proof is STILL on the accuser. They have to make a convincing argument to a judge that you're broken their contract.
Actually in your case of company A if there was a click through license as in "read this before proceding" they ARE indeed contractually bound by the terms of the license. If you click through a license in bad faith a civil judge is going to throw the book at you and award the BSA anything they want. The terms of EULAs are pretty straitforward if you take the time to read them. By clicking the "accept" button you are contractually bound by the EULA's terms. Your example of company B is pretty easy as well. To convince a judge you need permission to do a physical audit you can bring public records up like finacial reports, news article, industry documents, just about anything in the public domain as evidense. You'd say "company B bought 20 new computers of such and such quality, we only sold them licenses for the 20 computers they already had, we believe they may have broken our license agreement by installing software on them they didn't pay for". The judge will then allow company B to give a statement "these are computers for accounting so they don't need [software package] that the accusor sells thus we did not install it on those systems". Unless the judge things Company B is full of shit he/she is probably going to tell the BSA to go fuck itself ever so politely. Civil courts don't take kindly to business organizations trying to fuck over other businesses. There are some districts where the opposite is true but these judges are usually owned by said business organization. Most districts however will look at the situation logically, if there's reason to believe the small company is pirating software rampantly they'll be punished for it if a case is brought against them. If the BSA is just trying to nickel and dime a company they'll get a whoopin.
Why do people stupidly bring up the disposable camera and cell phone thing as waste? What part of recycle don't you fucking understand? You don't take pictures with a disposable camera and then throw it out. The camera chassis gets sent back to the manufacturer to be repackaged and resold. Same with those limited use cell phones. You're supposed to either buy more minutes on the phone (for a lower price than the cost of a new phone) or sned it someplace that is going to send it back to the manufacturer for reprogramming. Disposable diapers are pretty crappy (funny huh) but if you've got such a problem get a job with a diaper cleaning service. I hope you enjoy it.
My narrowband provider is Charter Communications with Earthlink as the ISP. I pay $24.95 for service and $4.95 for modem rental (with the option to buy my own DOCSIS compliant modem from anybody I want). I get 256 down and 64 up which for me isn't too bad. For $39.95 I can upgrade to 512d/128u and then the last upgrade is like $60/mo for 1.5mb symmetrical. For my $24 I get pretty good ping times playing just about anything and consistant download speeds. Their service has gotten MUCH better than it used to be, they actually answer the phone now when you've got a problem.
The BSA isn't a government fucking agency and thus requires not a warrant to performa an audit. If you signed a contract saying they could perform and audit you're fucked. Besides in civil cases involving contracts all you need is a vague clause saying something to the effect "if we think you've broken the contract we can tear you a new asshole" and then your signature. A civil court can't do anything to protect you because your John Hancock is on the contract. The legal system protecting people from government doesn't mean you're protected from other people. Be more careful about the contracts you sign. There is a big difference between civil courts and criminal courts. Why is that so hard to understand?
I'm sorry to burst the collective slashdot bubble but the price of books is NOT entirely dependent on the cost of the medium. The actual physical putting of ink on paper and binding and all that jazz is about 17% of the net amount received from a particular publication. In a business you've got alot of costs before you get to the profit. There's the cost of goods which in the case of a book includes editorial and production costs (books need spell checking, formatting, proof reading, ect), design work needs to be done, and then finally the pesky cost of paying the author for their work. Then comes cost of sales which covers advertising and promotion which suprisingly can be fairly expensive for some books (think about all the cardboard displays you see when a novel comes out from a popular writer those aren't free). Then finally overhead which includes the actual cost of operating a business. Then FINALLY you get to profit but then it is still tricky. When you talk percentages you're talking the net of what you actually make off a product, not the list price. If a particular book sells a thousand copies little to no profit is made. Reducing the cost of goods price by making a book electronic saves you a couple bucks but not so much than you can wipe your ass with a hundred dollar bill. Getting the same content on a different medium doesn't make the cost of that content go down. Suprise suprise this is how most content producers do business whether they print books, CDs, or DVDs.
I played Diablo2 for 14 hours straight on my PowerBook with one break in the middle to go to the bathroom and stretch. When we were finished the dinner tray I had the PB on was pretty warm to the touch but the system was running just fine. It isn't one of those metal encased G4 models either, it is a slightly aged Lombard 333 with a fairly new IBM TravelStar in it.
Your single box for 2000$ doesn't take into consideration the fact Google needs to make their tons of information available to everyone at once. With a search engine like Google it is going to be rare information is just going to sit around and never be used. This means that by conventional database architecture logic you keep it cached in RAM. Hard drives are useful when you're cutting power to a computer, how often does Google reboot?
Final Fantasy was a game turned movie. It would have been a big hit had it remained a game. It didn't fail in theaters because it was an art movie trying to get a point across that no one got, it was a block buster that busted. They could have saved some money and just taken tiles from FF1 to tell their story like they do at 8-bit theater.
Seriously they threw millions of dollars into FF:TSW only to learn that movie going audiences don't go for "My name is Daryl, I'm a dancer" dialog and delivery reminicent of a student directed documentary about red blood cells. There were scenes of the movie that looked like a live action sequence, these usually took place inbetween scenes where you could actually see the character or the character was talking. I love seeing James Woods in movies, he has definite style when he delivers lines and when he is intense you can tell he is being intense. There was NONE of that in General Hein. Neil didn't exactly fit in with the image you associate with Steve Buscemi's dialog. More effort was put into realistic hair movement than realistic portayal of emotions. Same for the story which was weak at best. They could have just used the story from FF6 it would have been ten times more involving and probably got them a couple million more dollars. Due to Square fucking the donkey with FF George Lucas is going to have a much tougher time pitching his load about replacing actors with computer models. I think this is a good thing (even if actors aren't pushing technological limits) because I want to see a movie with more substance than freckles and relistic moving hair. When Donny died in The Big Lebowski you feel at least a little remorse at him dying. When Neil dies in FF:TSW you're lucky to notice. That's not going to sell movie audiences.
While I think there is some point to the article I think the conclusions reached by Prof. Jones are a bit off. The whole survival of the fittest concept comes from an uncivilized and untamed natural world. You survived because you ran fast or had poisonous fangs or defensive quills or the ability to hunt in groups. Civilization puts an end to much of the struggle of the human condition (as the article mentions by quoting Peter Ward). You don't need to run fast or be strong in order to eat. With developments in medicine you don't need to be particularly strong in order to survive illness, genetic or otherwise. I'd even say modern people have more immunities than all of our forebearers combined. I think in many ways we have stopped developing as a species. Maybe in a million years we'll have fewer toes and longer fingers (our fingers will tend towards dexterity and we don't need the number of toes we have to walk upright as we do) but we are pretty stagnant.
The conclusion doctor Jones comes up with is we are the best result of natural selection. That is complete crap. We've got far too many genetic problems to be considered the best result of natural selection. Pick any detrimental attribute you can think of and picture a hunter gatherer with that trait. Do you think he'd survive long enough to have kids? It is highly doubtful. All of us four eyed slashdotters would be a mid-afternoon snack if it weren't for a civilized society. Concluding we've reached evolutionary stagnation because there are less adolecent and pre-adolecent deaths in London is pretty dumb. Our kids haven't become any better since 1890, we just no longer put them in factories and actually have cures for childhood diseases besides heavy prayer sessions and burning incense. Monkeys carrying HIV and not being affected by it is a similarly bad conclusion drawn from a dumb case. Chimpanzees don't have an anti-HIV gene, they have enough genetic descrepancy not to be affect by the HUMAN imunodeficiency virus. Humans in Africa in a thousand years won't have a anti-HIV gene any more than Chimpanzees have one today. Anyone left alive in Africa will be those who learned from the mistakes of the peers and practiced safe sex even if their religion or tradition forbode it.
I think this also brings into question: where do biologists learn math? If you look at statistics or studies done by any number of biologists you see REALLY fuzzy conclusions based on some really fuzzy logic and even fuzzier math. To put it into slashdot perspective, imagine somebody does benchmarking of Linux and Windows. They run web server tests using Linux 2.0 on a single processor serving 100 client machines connected to the server with a second hand D-Link hub serving out dynamically generated pages while comparing it to a Windows2k Advanced Server box with four processors connected to 25 client machines connected to the server by a cost-equals-the-GNP-of-a-small-nation router using gold plated Cat-5 cabling serving static web pages. The Windows computer beats the shit out of the Linux system (like...Netcraft) and it is concluded that Windows is superior in every way to Linux. Slashdotters would blow a collective gasket. That is the accuracy with which most biological studies are conducted. If you think I'm full of shit, you can pass a sugar pill through clinical trials and sell it as a anti-anything pill.
Wow...a file sharing client has an HTTP server on a non-standard port. I hope for the slashdot editors sake that they don't perform in bed like they perform at their jobs. "No no don't go baby I'm sorry. Let's try again this time I'll hold it in."
What economics course are you fucking talking about. How is cost of production not related to final selling price? Every economic text I've ever read says selling price is intrinsically linked to the cost of production. The whole point of conducting business is to make enough money to cover expenses plus profit. Economic dictates that operating at a loss (not covering production costs) is retarded and an unsound business practice. Being the business owner his production costs cover everything from his education down the the price of an office plant. Giving software (product) away for free (a selling price not linked to production cost) would mean an income of nothing and would not be economically viable.
Aside from that insulting someone's CS degree is a bit retarded in its own right. Do you have to pat yourself on the back often to make yourself feel special because you learned to program on your own? Maybe you just regret the complete lack of a life you have and product your spite for yourself onto others.
That is not going to solve anyone's fucking problem. That has got to be one of the most ludicrous suggestions posted on slashdot in a long time. If everyone pays an even amount you assume that they all use something an even amount. Well more people DON'T use software than DO use software. This means poor people who aren't using any software at all are getting fucked by paying for the software some non poor person is deciding they don't want to pay full price for. I don't get how you think that is reasonable. As for distribution to software authors what is construed as a software author? If I write a Hello World in VB can I register as a software author and get a fat check from the government? A software tax (or any tax that goes into the pockets of a few people) is just putting the onus of paying for something on people who don't even use it. It is also giving people already making a nice living off writing software even more money. That's like welfare for people making over 50k a year.
So your point is...what? Microsoft is evil and they are going to come to my house sodomize me? How exactly is Mono supporting Microsoft? Mono is an open implimentation of a closed source project. This is the original fucking intend of the GNU project. Are you retarded? None of your comments about Microsoft even pertain to the subject of Miguel de Icaza supporting the use of an ECMA standard. Actually from the gist of your retarded spouting I think you've got some issues with unconventional sex. I think you need to admit to the world that you're a pillow biter. You're only going to keep this projection nonsense up which doesn't do anything but make you look like a complete idiot. Take your anti-Microsoft zealotry as well as your discomfort with your sexual leanings and go tell someone who gives a fuck.
Why is it so easy to hate members of the "Linux community"? Is it because they are the whiniest bunch of computer users ever? Is it because they kick and scream like the children they are when they don't get their way? Is it because they are just fucking stupid? I don't really know which one to pick. Two years ago Linux geeks were complaining about not getting corporate support. Now they are complaining about actually having corporate support. Now when somebody suggests they have a method to interact with the rest of the world they kick and scream because the great satan was the one who came up with the buzz words. What the fuck?
.NET system is based around stateless XML based RPC methods. This is a GOOD THING for interoperability. As long as you conform to the SOAP your program can talk with another program not matter what sort of machine it is running on or where it is running. A common runtime for languages isn't so bad either. You can write a program on any architecture and run it on any other architecture that has a compliant runtime environment and bytecode translator. Don't use the CLR if you wahnt to preserve certain functionality for a given language. It would be cool though to be able to write apps for GNOME that would run on any OS and architecture that has the CLR compliant GNOME libraries. No recompiling required. A house that does all C/C++ development doesn't need to learn Java in order to write a program they can sell to just about anybody running just about any computer. Just because the idea proposed by microsoft doesn't make it evil. In fact I'd say Miguel is doing the GNU thing by writing a free implimentation of non-free software. This is what the whole GNU crap is about. Slashdotters seem too fucking stupid to understand this point.
Miguel de Icaza wanting to add real functionality to Linux is not a damning offence. Half the fucking posts on this thread seem to think Miguel is off his rocker or Bill Gates' bitch or something. That is just fucking retarded. He's a damn good programmer who knows Linux is way behind the times when it comes to interacting with the real business world. Stateful RPC methods need to hit the road. They don't fit into topologies where you have multiple servers behind a single address that are all processing requests for the sake up upping your throughput. Stuff like the LVSP isn't going to work with FTP or rsh connections though works well with HTTP. XML based RPC (or any stateless RPC method) are much more efficient in modern networks because I don't need to fuck with my external network configuration to add capacity. SOAP and the whole
9. Linux users. Puh-leeeze!
Charter Communications in some areas where they offer digital cable are doing this. I don't know if this has been rolled out yet but they've been advertising the service for a while now. Considering my cable modem has been losing its connection pretty frequently lately I don't know how good the service they're offering would be.
Using SMP machines doesn't REQUIRE you thread your applications thus fucking up your MPI performance. You could have your program fork itself as a separate process or just run a separate instance from another directory or some such and the kernel on the SMP system will load balance and keep each process running on a different processor. This approach is of course going to work alot better with Monte Carlos than differencial equations. Anyway to answer your question if you use pooch you can use any library you've got available on your Macs. Just like building Beowulf apps you load the nodes up with whatever libraries you need for the application and it will go ahead and use them as needed. If you're using OSX you can use Cocoa or Java as an object passing system to get data from somewhere to somewhere else although this isn't exactly ideal for heavy math applications.
Yeah most every Hubble image you see is a multi-spectrum composite image. Most images are several colour plates combined with infrared and ultra-violet plates combined as a single RGB colour image. The crappy part is all the Hubble images that look so pretty and badass actually don't look that pretty and badass in real life. Hubble gets colour images by putting a filter over the light sensor and holding the apeture open for a long period of time (it is more complex than this really but it is essencially how it works) and then later in a computer that greyscale image is assigned some RGB values and composited into a three colour image. If you were to see a nebula up close and personal (you'd probably not be able to tell you were getting close to one) it would look very grey and bland. You'd also have trouble seeing it because the sheer lack of density. Atoms and molecules in nebulae are really really far apart and in a cubic kilometer of space there might only be a handful of matter. The farther you get your pixel is picking up the radiation from many more cubic kilometers of space giving you a higher average amount of radiation making for better imaging. As you get closer your sensor pixel is seeing less and less cubic kilometers of space and thus gets less radiation making it more difficult to see the large structure you're flying inside of. So Hubble imagry is just ellaborate faking. The stuff you get from space.com is processed more than Kraft singles.
In actuality it IS a cheap computer rendition. The Saturn image was done in the H and K bands (both in the infrared region) which people can't see. The sensors store an 8-bit sample for each pixel. If you looked at a rasterized image from one of these sensors it would just be an 8-bit greyscale image. These are rather boring to look at so the astonomers apply these grayscale images to colour channels of an RGB image. SO what they are doing is assigning a band you can't normally see (infrared) to bands you can see so you're impressed. This leads to confusion though because the final images don't LOOK anything like they would through a normal telescope. Saturn for example, the rings are super bright and crappy looking. This is because they are formed of ice crystals and dust which relfects infrared radiation pretty well. The original greyscale raster would look just as bright but the ring would be a really light shade pretty close to white in both the H and K bands. Older pictures of Saturn have usually been visual spectrum pictures so they look pretty natural. Cheaper computers have led to many a misleading space photograph.
Actually even this is off. ApplesScript since OS9 has had network support. You can make an AppleScript that will run on every Mac node on your network and do whatever task you want it to. It isn't too difficult to have this script run Software Update or grab the installer for the latest OS upgrade off a file server and update the system. OSX makes it even easier because you can use cron to run a shell script at whatever designated time to do whatever. Any administration you're going to do with Linux on 1024 nodes can be ported to OSX with I don't imagine too much difficulty. If that isn't enough remote access I don't know what is.
Uh...why do you need to know the nature of the beast in order to run a highly parallel program on a computer? Do you need to be an expert in the construction of computer clusters in order to be an engineering grad student who wants to run a CFD program you wrote for your thesis? It makes alot more sense to ask your local cluster guru "hey I want to run this CFD program I wrote in FORTRAN on your cluster, any particulars I need to know?" and the cluster guru says "hey just make sure it complies with yadda yadda...". It is going to be far more likely people know how to write heavy computational jobs in some language than it is for people to know the intricacies of building and maintaining a cluster. It seems like a common misconception among Linux users that user and administrator ought to be interchangable words.