Those people who are close enough to the garage to hear the radio, are obviously within range of the radio station and could use their own radio to listen to it if they wanted.
That's really it. If there are 20 people in a room, and each of them has a radio, all tuned to the same station, this is apparently fine. The absurdity of this claim is that if they all listen to exactly the same content but from one radio instead of 20 radios, that's copyright infringement.
The ubiquitous nature of windows makes it very easy to fix your machine should something go wrong.
Bwahahahahaha. Oh, man. I'm wiping tears from my eyes.
So when you connect 3 Windows machines to a local network and put a printer on one of them, and neither of the other two can print on that printer, and nobody knows why, and nobody can even suggest a fix other than rebooting all 3 computers (which doesn't work), and it consumes 3 or 4 days of time of people trying unsuccessfully to solve the problem...I guess that is "very easy" in Windows-speak.
Oh wait, how about when Mom's laptop gets too flaky for her to tolerate anymore, and she asks for help on an online forum, and they all tell her to re-install Windows. So she pops in a Windows install disk, struggles past the license key and the impossible-to-answer questions (which involve a lot of phone calls), and finally gets to the end of the install, only to find that virtually none of the laptop's hardware works due to missing drivers, including the network driver, so there is no way for her to download the missing components. I guess that is "very easy" in Windows-speak too.
In the interest of balance, I will say this, as an example: almost no one wants to try installing bleeding-edge video drivers under Linux. I understand how to do it just fine, but I know that 95% of people don't. What I'm getting at is that after using Linux and Windows on the desktop for the last 5 years, the number of intractable problems have been equal. Don't paint this kind of overly-rosy picture for Windows about how it's so "easy" to fix things. It isn't any easier than any other system.
I am split on whether it would be better or worse for the defense to have Mr. Sherman on the stand. I mean, my legal experience is more-or-less limited to doing Mock Trial in high school, but even I can think of ways to absolutely shred Mr. Sherman on cross. Surely during direct the counsel for plaintiff would simply open the door for him to preach and then get out of the way. Mr. Sherman's rant would probably include the old favorites, like "Internet piracy is to the music industry what the Boston Strangler is to women" etc.
So on cross you take it all apart:
You base your claims of harm from piracy on empirical research, correct?
So surely you know that there have been many impartial studies that show piracy is not, in fact, harming the music industry?
(Sherman gets evasive. Will witness please answer the question, yes or no. He opts for what he sees as the lesser of two evils and says No.)
Oh, you don't know that? Given that your responsibilities as RIAA president involve making statements to the public that can affect the share price of RIAA member companies, wouldn't it be your job to be aware of all the available research?
(Sherman gets evasive again. Will witness please answer the question, yes or no. It doesn't matter which way he answers. If he says No, then we get to explore why he ignores scholarly research on the subject. If he says Yes, then we also get to explore why he ignores scholarly research on the subject.)
At that point, you've got him by the balls and can play it any way you like. I suppose Mr. Toder may not feel up to the task of going head-to-head with Mr. Sherman. Or maybe there is some calculation of legal risk that I am not seeing, e.g., Mr. Toder already feels like his case is in great standing, but I don't perceive that as an outside observer. I would have preferred to see all the RIAA bull trotted out and slaughtered in front of the jury.
Let me start by saying if anyone ports good RPGs to the DS, I will buy them. I love RPGs and I love my DS. (I am a non-philandering geek who does business travel. Enough said.)
So: call me crazy, but didn't Blue Dragon get rated rather poorly for the 360? What is the business case for them porting a mediocre-selling title?
I do not agree with this. I think Tycho of Penny Arcade said it best:
I think that for most PC users, particularly gamers with no genuine recourse, their "choice" of platform isn't really what you'd call an act of volition. It's the default. I mean, right? It's what emerges from the tap. All we ask is that it be wet.
Gamers don't care about Windows. They just care about getting the maximum experience from their games. If this happens to be on Windows, so be it. But there is no allegiance.
The fundamental problem here is that OpenOffice just isn't as good as MS Office.
So, I guess you missed the part where IBM is adding 35 developers to the project? I would guess that instead of picking their noses, they'll be closing any feature gaps that exist.
If all you want is something to type a letter or a quick table of calculations, sure, it's fine.
Now you're just sinking yourself. This is precisely what 95% of Office users do. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the majority of Office users have never used any part of it except Word, and only for typing memos, letters, and short papers. Even users who do use the other parts are entirely concerned with simple sum-the-column spreadsheets and rudimentary, crappy-looking presentations (virtually all of which are just bulleted lists). For these users OOo offers all the functionality they need, right now.
It's the higher-end functionality, where e.g. a business builds an "application" on top of Excel, that OOo needs to catch up, but this is by no means the mainstream use of Office.
Yeah, there are some funny comments about it already, but I would like to say how this is a bit sad for me. Me and friends played some seriously neat Mech games, with me acting as GM. We read all the books and noted the makes and models of the parts, and I'd invent "issues" that the techs needed to solve to make certain parts work with other parts, and garage facilities that they needed in order to implement various repairs. The players always had to be thinking about risking their mechs because of repair issues, and when they got damaged it spawned mini-quests to secure the necessary parts to make things right again, or mini-mini-quests for parts to fix the interoperability problems.
So although the main game revolved around mech pilots, I focused on the repair techs, ammo specialists, tankers, cooks, construction teams, radar ops, MASH units, etc. that made the expeditions a success, and threatened them and the adventures practically wrote themselves. Really good times.
Re:Back when people could actually code..
on
DOS 5 Upgrade Video
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· Score: 2, Funny
About a year ago, a client of mine gave me a PDF and some source files and said "We can't edit this. Please fix the problem." The document itself was in Word 2.0. The graphics were WMFs. This thing had been originally created in Windows 3.1 and updated (with the WMFs) in Windows 95. The client couldn't open up any of it.
The Word file was basically a non-starter. I just ignored it and stripped the text out of the PDF instead. The graphics, though...The PDF refused to be opened properly in Illustrator, so I couldn't recover them that way. I also could not open the WMFs directly -- it was something about how they were tied to the original platform. What I ended up doing was digging up an ancient copy of Windows and and ancient copy of Illustrator, building a custom machine just for this operation, and recovering the files that way. The client paid about $3,000 for the privilege of being able to update one of their own files. Just one file, mind, and it had yet to be actually updated -- this was simply establishing the ability to update. All because they were couldn't see what a bad idea it was to invest their data in lock-in formats.
When I explained to the client how they had gotten into this mess, and how they could avoid it in the future, they stared blankly back. We use up-to-date versions of Word now, they said.
Oh, well, I thought, here comes another few grand in my pocket. But then again, in another few years, maybe nobody has these old copies of Windows and old copies of Illustrator anymore, and then they are SOL.
This is something that is pretty well understood in jobs that are creative like programming or writing. You simply cannot be creative all the time. When something grabs you, and you're inspired by it, you might go all night without sleep in order to keep working on it. At other times, things are flat. You might force yourself to hammer out 2 or 3 hours worth of material, but it's not great output even then.
After being in that kind of business for a number of years, you learn to find a way to become moderately creative more or less every day. The presence or absence of inspiration is still a factor though. So we put ping pong tables up at work and just accept that we're not going to be 100% creative 100% of the time.
It's not that non-creative jobs have higher productivity, it's that lapses in productivity aren't understood or recognized. People I talk to who work in non-creative jobs are often astonished at the all the time we "waste" at my company. They just don't think about how much of their day is spent BSing at the coffee station, or surfing eBay, or any number of other time wasters people do.
It's a lot more distorted than that. When Joe Teenager takes the $20 he would have spent on a CD and spends it on ricing out his car, that money is not lost to the economy. People still make sales. It is still taxed. It only shifts to a different sector. The argument that money not spent on my own company is somehow "lost" to the economy is completely absurd.
That's great that you can choose how (or whether) you want to respond. The problem I have (and I think many people have) is that there are a lot of PHBs in the world who think every email they send should be replied to instantly. About 1 hour is the maximum time they will tolerate. When your paycheck depends on keeping said PHBs happy, you really have no choice except to play ball. If I just deleted email I deemed unworthy of a reply, I doubt that would go over too well with my clients.
getting us into a war in Iraq that I still fail to see how it benefits the US citizen. I have taken a bit of criticism from my friends by asking that question, but my response is and has been "When you spend US solders lives and Billions of US dollars, it seems to me that there should be an answer to the 'What did we purchase?' question."
When people say it was "oil," they are not too far off the mark. It wasn't oil exactly, but rather the assurance that the U.S. dollar will continue to be the reigning transaction currency for oil. This assurance plays a fairly big role in the U.S. credit-money system, and securing such things by military fiat has been a common practice among all nations for a long time now. Not that I'm giving a tip of the hat to the practice; it's abhorrent. I'm just saying it's a common thing nations do.
The only thing that makes Iraq different than any other credit-money fiat is that Hussein was perhaps the sole individual who could keep a country like Iraq from ripping itself apart. Removing him from the equation results in a very strong tendency toward civil war, which so far is only kept (barely) in check through massive police action by the U.S. military, which the American people tired of long ago.
Karl Rove is a master of politics and for good or for badad
This is precisely why privatized health care cannot work. Health insurance companies are in the business of making profit for their shareholders. Profit follows the formula that premiums are greater than payouts. Therefore, maximum profit comes from charging healthy people high premiums but not paying out anything in return.
What should be obvious about this is that healthy people don't need health care (other than minimum preventative checkups). The people who do need health care are not profitable. The more care you need, the more the system shuns you. And we get a system in which the people who need care the most desperately are the least likely to receive such care. I once had a conversation with a professor in college who said to me this: "Prenatal care is the most-needed care of all. Without it, you produce problematic individuals. Yet our system denies prenatal care to tens of millions of women. How can that be a good idea?" The answer is that it's not a good idea, but it is profitable to deny care to them.
Any profit-seeking system of health care will fail to provide the care it is tasked with providing.
I am a huge fan of KDE, so please do not consider this a troll, flamebait, etc. I appreciate all of the componentization of KDE4, and frankly KDE3 does some things that are remarkable, like the way it handles file access to FTP volumes. But what I want to know is this: Why does it seem like the KDE screen widgets are "flimsy"? For some reason, everything seems thin and breakable. This seems to have perpetuated into KDE4. Am I the only one that notices this?
I still think this is the funniest portrayal of South Korea's reaction to Starcraft II.
Re:Oh wow what a worthless site
on
Microsoft FUD Watch
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· Score: 2, Informative
FUD has kinda of lost all meaning
No "kinda" about it. Few people understand this term anymore. The term FUD originally indicated a specific marketing technique popularized by IBM in the 1970s and 1980s but now has been diluted to mean anything that is untrue or which has a disagreeable agenda. (I liken it to the use of "unique," which no longer means "one of a kind" but instead seems to mean "rare.")
I don't. You could have done at least a minute amount of research before fabricating your opinion.
The standard internal combustion engine (ICE) has an efficiency of about 20%. In other words, 20% of the energy stored in fuel is converted into useful work, and the rest is lost to waste heat, friction, etc. Electricity-generating plants, even coal-fired ones, can do tricks like cogeneration and combined heat and power (CHP) to get their efficiencies up around 70%. The typical transmission loss of electric power to the end consumer is just over 7%. Of course, an electric engine isn't perfectly efficient either. It's around 90%, though.
So that means an electric vehicle (EV) is around 53% efficient. EV wins. In fact, the EV is 2 or even 3 times more efficient in its power usage than the ICE. Actually, it's worse for the ICE than this shows, because while we have accounted for losses in electricity generation and transmission, we have not accounted for the refining and distributing of gasoline. I don't know what those numbers are, but we can be sure it pushes that 20% figure lower.
Slashdot Mirror
That's really it. If there are 20 people in a room, and each of them has a radio, all tuned to the same station, this is apparently fine. The absurdity of this claim is that if they all listen to exactly the same content but from one radio instead of 20 radios, that's copyright infringement.
The ubiquitous nature of windows makes it very easy to fix your machine should something go wrong.
Bwahahahahaha. Oh, man. I'm wiping tears from my eyes.
So when you connect 3 Windows machines to a local network and put a printer on one of them, and neither of the other two can print on that printer, and nobody knows why, and nobody can even suggest a fix other than rebooting all 3 computers (which doesn't work), and it consumes 3 or 4 days of time of people trying unsuccessfully to solve the problem...I guess that is "very easy" in Windows-speak.
Oh wait, how about when Mom's laptop gets too flaky for her to tolerate anymore, and she asks for help on an online forum, and they all tell her to re-install Windows. So she pops in a Windows install disk, struggles past the license key and the impossible-to-answer questions (which involve a lot of phone calls), and finally gets to the end of the install, only to find that virtually none of the laptop's hardware works due to missing drivers, including the network driver, so there is no way for her to download the missing components. I guess that is "very easy" in Windows-speak too.
In the interest of balance, I will say this, as an example: almost no one wants to try installing bleeding-edge video drivers under Linux. I understand how to do it just fine, but I know that 95% of people don't. What I'm getting at is that after using Linux and Windows on the desktop for the last 5 years, the number of intractable problems have been equal. Don't paint this kind of overly-rosy picture for Windows about how it's so "easy" to fix things. It isn't any easier than any other system.
I am split on whether it would be better or worse for the defense to have Mr. Sherman on the stand. I mean, my legal experience is more-or-less limited to doing Mock Trial in high school, but even I can think of ways to absolutely shred Mr. Sherman on cross. Surely during direct the counsel for plaintiff would simply open the door for him to preach and then get out of the way. Mr. Sherman's rant would probably include the old favorites, like "Internet piracy is to the music industry what the Boston Strangler is to women" etc.
So on cross you take it all apart:
At that point, you've got him by the balls and can play it any way you like. I suppose Mr. Toder may not feel up to the task of going head-to-head with Mr. Sherman. Or maybe there is some calculation of legal risk that I am not seeing, e.g., Mr. Toder already feels like his case is in great standing, but I don't perceive that as an outside observer. I would have preferred to see all the RIAA bull trotted out and slaughtered in front of the jury.
It's funny how fast the IDs grew. Mine is almost 150K and I started reading in 1998.
Let me start by saying if anyone ports good RPGs to the DS, I will buy them. I love RPGs and I love my DS. (I am a non-philandering geek who does business travel. Enough said.)
So: call me crazy, but didn't Blue Dragon get rated rather poorly for the 360? What is the business case for them porting a mediocre-selling title?
Shen-- Ow!
I do not agree with this. I think Tycho of Penny Arcade said it best:
Gamers don't care about Windows. They just care about getting the maximum experience from their games. If this happens to be on Windows, so be it. But there is no allegiance.
Why is this comment rated +5 Insightful? Do you not realize that to make a Mac port they have to do it in OpenGL?
So, I guess you missed the part where IBM is adding 35 developers to the project? I would guess that instead of picking their noses, they'll be closing any feature gaps that exist.
Now you're just sinking yourself. This is precisely what 95% of Office users do. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the majority of Office users have never used any part of it except Word, and only for typing memos, letters, and short papers. Even users who do use the other parts are entirely concerned with simple sum-the-column spreadsheets and rudimentary, crappy-looking presentations (virtually all of which are just bulleted lists). For these users OOo offers all the functionality they need, right now.
It's the higher-end functionality, where e.g. a business builds an "application" on top of Excel, that OOo needs to catch up, but this is by no means the mainstream use of Office.
On which you installed a pirated version of Windows XP, I suppose.
Yeah, there are some funny comments about it already, but I would like to say how this is a bit sad for me. Me and friends played some seriously neat Mech games, with me acting as GM. We read all the books and noted the makes and models of the parts, and I'd invent "issues" that the techs needed to solve to make certain parts work with other parts, and garage facilities that they needed in order to implement various repairs. The players always had to be thinking about risking their mechs because of repair issues, and when they got damaged it spawned mini-quests to secure the necessary parts to make things right again, or mini-mini-quests for parts to fix the interoperability problems.
So although the main game revolved around mech pilots, I focused on the repair techs, ammo specialists, tankers, cooks, construction teams, radar ops, MASH units, etc. that made the expeditions a success, and threatened them and the adventures practically wrote themselves. Really good times.
Get offa ma lawn!
Anecdote time.
About a year ago, a client of mine gave me a PDF and some source files and said "We can't edit this. Please fix the problem." The document itself was in Word 2.0. The graphics were WMFs. This thing had been originally created in Windows 3.1 and updated (with the WMFs) in Windows 95. The client couldn't open up any of it.
The Word file was basically a non-starter. I just ignored it and stripped the text out of the PDF instead. The graphics, though...The PDF refused to be opened properly in Illustrator, so I couldn't recover them that way. I also could not open the WMFs directly -- it was something about how they were tied to the original platform. What I ended up doing was digging up an ancient copy of Windows and and ancient copy of Illustrator, building a custom machine just for this operation, and recovering the files that way. The client paid about $3,000 for the privilege of being able to update one of their own files. Just one file, mind, and it had yet to be actually updated -- this was simply establishing the ability to update. All because they were couldn't see what a bad idea it was to invest their data in lock-in formats.
When I explained to the client how they had gotten into this mess, and how they could avoid it in the future, they stared blankly back. We use up-to-date versions of Word now, they said.
Oh, well, I thought, here comes another few grand in my pocket. But then again, in another few years, maybe nobody has these old copies of Windows and old copies of Illustrator anymore, and then they are SOL.
This is something that is pretty well understood in jobs that are creative like programming or writing. You simply cannot be creative all the time. When something grabs you, and you're inspired by it, you might go all night without sleep in order to keep working on it. At other times, things are flat. You might force yourself to hammer out 2 or 3 hours worth of material, but it's not great output even then.
After being in that kind of business for a number of years, you learn to find a way to become moderately creative more or less every day. The presence or absence of inspiration is still a factor though. So we put ping pong tables up at work and just accept that we're not going to be 100% creative 100% of the time.
It's not that non-creative jobs have higher productivity, it's that lapses in productivity aren't understood or recognized. People I talk to who work in non-creative jobs are often astonished at the all the time we "waste" at my company. They just don't think about how much of their day is spent BSing at the coffee station, or surfing eBay, or any number of other time wasters people do.
The fact that this gets +Insightful makes me laugh all the more.
It's a lot more distorted than that. When Joe Teenager takes the $20 he would have spent on a CD and spends it on ricing out his car, that money is not lost to the economy. People still make sales. It is still taxed. It only shifts to a different sector. The argument that money not spent on my own company is somehow "lost" to the economy is completely absurd.
/p.
As if anyone could deny it! This episode resolved the ambiguity at last.
That's great that you can choose how (or whether) you want to respond. The problem I have (and I think many people have) is that there are a lot of PHBs in the world who think every email they send should be replied to instantly. About 1 hour is the maximum time they will tolerate. When your paycheck depends on keeping said PHBs happy, you really have no choice except to play ball. If I just deleted email I deemed unworthy of a reply, I doubt that would go over too well with my clients.
When people say it was "oil," they are not too far off the mark. It wasn't oil exactly, but rather the assurance that the U.S. dollar will continue to be the reigning transaction currency for oil. This assurance plays a fairly big role in the U.S. credit-money system, and securing such things by military fiat has been a common practice among all nations for a long time now. Not that I'm giving a tip of the hat to the practice; it's abhorrent. I'm just saying it's a common thing nations do.
The only thing that makes Iraq different than any other credit-money fiat is that Hussein was perhaps the sole individual who could keep a country like Iraq from ripping itself apart. Removing him from the equation results in a very strong tendency toward civil war, which so far is only kept (barely) in check through massive police action by the U.S. military, which the American people tired of long ago.
I think you made up a new word there.
badad, adj., really f'ing bad.
This is precisely why privatized health care cannot work. Health insurance companies are in the business of making profit for their shareholders. Profit follows the formula that premiums are greater than payouts. Therefore, maximum profit comes from charging healthy people high premiums but not paying out anything in return.
What should be obvious about this is that healthy people don't need health care (other than minimum preventative checkups). The people who do need health care are not profitable. The more care you need, the more the system shuns you. And we get a system in which the people who need care the most desperately are the least likely to receive such care. I once had a conversation with a professor in college who said to me this: "Prenatal care is the most-needed care of all. Without it, you produce problematic individuals. Yet our system denies prenatal care to tens of millions of women. How can that be a good idea?" The answer is that it's not a good idea, but it is profitable to deny care to them.
Any profit-seeking system of health care will fail to provide the care it is tasked with providing.
I am a huge fan of KDE, so please do not consider this a troll, flamebait, etc. I appreciate all of the componentization of KDE4, and frankly KDE3 does some things that are remarkable, like the way it handles file access to FTP volumes. But what I want to know is this: Why does it seem like the KDE screen widgets are "flimsy"? For some reason, everything seems thin and breakable. This seems to have perpetuated into KDE4. Am I the only one that notices this?
I still think this is the funniest portrayal of South Korea's reaction to Starcraft II.
No "kinda" about it. Few people understand this term anymore. The term FUD originally indicated a specific marketing technique popularized by IBM in the 1970s and 1980s but now has been diluted to mean anything that is untrue or which has a disagreeable agenda. (I liken it to the use of "unique," which no longer means "one of a kind" but instead seems to mean "rare.")
I don't. You could have done at least a minute amount of research before fabricating your opinion.
The standard internal combustion engine (ICE) has an efficiency of about 20%. In other words, 20% of the energy stored in fuel is converted into useful work, and the rest is lost to waste heat, friction, etc. Electricity-generating plants, even coal-fired ones, can do tricks like cogeneration and combined heat and power (CHP) to get their efficiencies up around 70%. The typical transmission loss of electric power to the end consumer is just over 7%. Of course, an electric engine isn't perfectly efficient either. It's around 90%, though.
So that means an electric vehicle (EV) is around 53% efficient. EV wins. In fact, the EV is 2 or even 3 times more efficient in its power usage than the ICE. Actually, it's worse for the ICE than this shows, because while we have accounted for losses in electricity generation and transmission, we have not accounted for the refining and distributing of gasoline. I don't know what those numbers are, but we can be sure it pushes that 20% figure lower.
I'd rather endure projectile diarrhea to the chest than see another link to the Maddox iPhone review.
(Note to mods: you see, I used Maddox-style humor to express false irritation about Maddox links. It's funny. Mod me up.)