Local government is still government. GP said "via government order...in my neighborhood"; it's fair to assume he meant his local government. GP didn't even say "the" government; if he had, your mistake would be more understandable.
Nobody said that the size or overbearingness of a government had anything to do with the size of the area it governs. North Korea has a similarly sized population to Texas, so the N. Korean government has the same sized area of authority as the Texan state local government. And yet I don't think many people would argue that N. Korea has anything other than a very big, very overbearing government...
You haven't really understood it. You take crude oil, and you refine it by essentially splitting it up into constituent parts. Diesel is one of the things you end up with, petrol is another. One is not the waste product while the other is the "true" product- they're both just products of refining crude oil.
You are right that you can't create one without the other- so if we all went diesel, you'd have a lot of petrol going unused. But realistically there's no danger of that ever happening; the demand for all oil products is huge and dynamic- whenever something gets cheaper due to a drop in demand, someone else quickly finds a use for it at the new price point.
Maybe the US is different, but over hear you need the same expensive exhaust system (a catalytic converter) for a petrol car as you do a diesel car.
Diesel engines themselves can be a little pricey (turbo-charger as standard and all that), but that just translates into a slightly higher retail cost for the car overall.
I can't figure out what you're trying to say. The original result on Siri (which recommended the Nokia) was a Wolfram Alpha result. The Wolfram Alpha result was based on products on Best Buy in the mobile phone category ranked by customer review; which seems like a pretty valiant attempt at answering the question helpfully. Apple then went out of their way to kill this attempt at answering the question usefully and replace it with a fairly lame joke.
I couldn't care less what the actual result was (HTC is now the top one, followed by a couple of iPhones). I just think it's a dick move to remove functionality just because it hurts your ego.
UK has datacaps on landlines too. I'm a young, download-happy, HD video watching, gaming young professional, and yet I've only ever hit my cap once. All that happened is they added an extra £1 to my bill and 10GB to my cap. It certainly beats "fair usage" throttling.
If I ask for smartphone reviews, I expect smartphone reviews. It does bill itself as your big internet helper. If I wanted jokes when I asked for smartphone reviews, I'd download an app called "smartass jokes".
It's one thing to have jokes in there for when people ask blatantly daft things, like "will you marry me Siri", or "find me a restaurant on Mars". But when you ask a common question with a simple answer, you expect to get an answer.
Exactly! Just like the pizza joint down-street have a monopoly of selling pizzas from their shop. Damn those monopolies.
This is a fun analogy. If you buy a pizza from Frankie's Pizzeria, and instead of eating it you decided to resell it, you could. If you wanted to put it in a different box before you re-sell it, you could. If you wanted to add some extra sauce before you resell it, that's allowed too. Frankie can't say a damned thing about it- the pizza is yours to do with as you will.
That's basically the first sale doctrine. The equivalent here is that Apple sold pizzas (software licenses) to Psystar, but telling them that the only thing they can do with them is eat them; any other activities, and any reselling, is banned.
Re:Diablo III servers down for maintenance...
on
Diablo III Released
·
· Score: 1
Planned downtime, theoretically at least, can be placed in non-critical timeslots. My company's just bought into a service with something like four nines uptime, but with fairly chunky "planned downtime" allowances. The mitigating factor is that it's a mostly employee-facing service, and planned downtimes can only be late at night and on weekends. Bearing in mind the users could tolerate considerably worse than four nines (it's a non-critical system), it's not a bad trade-off for such tight SLAs.
I'd guess the real reason- they don't want you to share your copy with your friends.
I have dozens of games- and I have only one copy of each, with only very few exceptions. I can play these, my fiance can play these, my sister played these back when we lived together, my kids will be able to play these. There is usually absolutely no limit to how many concurrent save-games can be held at any one time, so any number of us can share the same game install.
10 characters seems to be the smallest number they could limit it too while still having some arithmetic to back up their reasoning (5 class times 2 genders). But it's enough that a hardcore player would be inconvenienced sharing with a friend, and even casual players would get irritated sharing with two others, with 3.3 character slots to use...
Do try to remember that the presidency is decided by democracy. I know the college system is a little arcane, but I don't know of a single president in recent years who won without a majority (or in Bush Jr's case, a presumed majority and a result close enough as to cause confusion).
Even if the Republican Party went absolutely nuts and said "forget about those 50 really expensive and viciously fought elections we held, lets just give the job to the guy who came fourth", what makes you think the electorate would buy it? The Republican voters have already said who they'd prefer, by almost 5 votes to 1 (in a Romney versus Paul comparison); do you think Paul would have as strong a Republican vote behind him as Romney would? And who do you think is better positioned to poach Democrat and swing voters from Obama- safe centrist Romney, or radical right-winger Paul? At least Romney could hope for some "anyone but Obama" protest votes...
Nintendo famously don't sell the Wii at a loss- the console sales price makes a profit, and they get a chunk of the games sales too in the same way as the other players.
Even if Sony and MS were trouncing Nintendo on market share, they're unlikely to be beating them in terms of return on investment. Which, from a shareholder/investor point of view, is the metric which matters.
The Xbox division is indeed doing great, but Ballmer seems to undermine it every time he can. There were some big losses last year due to some acquisitions (Skype? not sure...) and they "balanced the books" by punishing a lot of divisions, the Xbox division I understand was hit hard and would had shined had they not done that.
It's like Ballmer is ashamed of anything that does not have a big Windows brand in the box, when perhaps he should be doing the opposite.
Can you imagine how well Apple would had fared had they called their iPhone a MacPhone instead? I bet it would have been a flop just due to the horrible unmarketable name.
It’s time Microsoft realizes their future is in the Metro/Xbox brands, not in the Windows/Office ones. Ballmer's resistance is slowly going to kill Microsoft.
To be fair to Microsoft, they abandoned their Windows brand on one of their major at-the-time-new products. And yet for some reason the Zune still didn't take off...
I don't know what you're thinking with the "Metro brand". Are you suggesting they drop the Windows brand from their still market leading desktop OS (the only place where the Windows brand makes sense)? Are you suggesting they replace it with a brand which has so far attracted ample scorn from the internet's chattering classes, and is completely unknown to anybody else?
I don't really mean to be championing Unity- I dumped it for XFCE on my main machines, and have only kept it on my small-screen netbook- but it isn't all bad.
The taskbar on the left can now be set to only pop up when you whack your cursor into the side of the screen with some force. It has completely stopped the irritating "pop up every time I try to click anything on the left of the screen" syndrome, which nearly made me ditch it from my last machine.
Automatic maximisation- it does that whenever a window tries to open at more than 75% of screen size. This is a setting that can be changed in the conventional way.
The window menu being at the top edge is still irritating on a big screen, but it's no hardship on 9".
If unity is the most irritating, least intuitive scheme you've ever tried, I recommend steering clear of Gnome3:)
Perhaps my comment about the primary maintainer taking something closed. That's a concern with software (regardless of license, including the GPL) because whenever an organization or company that owns a project's copyright (or enough of the copyright that they can easily rewrite the rest) decides to create a closed-source fork of that project, it generally results in the death of the open source fork of the project, for all intents and purposes.
This will always be the case where a project has significant corporate backers. If you have a large corporate backer, you are always at risk of them pulling the plug, forking, or in other ways derailing the project. If you don't have significant corporate backers this is not a problem- but you're also far less likely to have a seriously competitive piece of software.
The same problem applies similarly to GPL works, seeing as corporate backers can still pull the plug. For example, if Canonical were to drop Ubuntu, the distro would start to suffer very quickly. GPL just closes off the one possible line of attack, in that the company can't have their cake and eat it too- they can either abandon the open source project (and drop their favourite software at the same time), or they can keep their favourite software (and inevitably keep the open source project too). Under a BSD license, having cake and eating it is very possible- they can drop the open source project, but still keep their shiny software (including the work of all the lovely folk who are no-longer invited to play).
What this clause really does is say that the FSF can at any time change the details of the license you are giving to your users.
It absolutely does not. The license you give to your user is whatever words you put in the license you give to your user. You can make this up yourself, or you can use a license someone else has written for you. All the FSF does is provide legally tested templates to you to use, and they put a new version number in whenever they release a new one. If they said one day "we've decided to change the GPL v2 to be [something madly different]" it would have no effect on any software, except those that chose to adopt the new licence. You, as a user, are not bound to anything other than the license that was in place when you first purchased/downloaded/received the software.
If the FSF took a mad one and decided to write a new license, they would call it "GPL v4" and software distributors would be free to adopt it or not as they see fit. And you would be equally free to leave the license as it is, or change it in some other way that suits you, or switch to another well-known license, or write a new one from scratch, or commission a lawyer to write one for you...
I agree with most of what you say but equally how sad is it that the world judges someone's suitability to run a multinational based on their qualifications rather than the many years of experience they have had since then and / or how good they are at their job. That bit of paper doesn't make someone better suited to run a company than Steve Jobs or Bill Gates etc. just because they didn't complete their courses.
I think he was fired for attempting to defraud his employer. The actual thing he was lying about (the degree) is almost immaterial.
To be an absurdly high paid CEO, you need to have proved yourself to be better, in every way, than the competition. "Lies to us about trivial things and has been for years" is probably not high on the list of desirable traits for "leader of multi-billion pound company which I own".
I'm not claiming that Unity did it first or that it's unique, by the way. I was just saying that the new feature for menu items (which is the topic in hand) in Unity is pretty decent, in response to someone blaming Unity for bad menus. I've nothing against Ubuntu stealing Apple's good ideas (or vice versa)- a good idea is a good idea, and you'd have to be stupid not to use a good idea when you see one (patents and other nonsense aside). Don't forget that the whole desktop paradigm was a good idea by Xerox- if other companies hadn't recognised that good idea when they saw it, we wouldn't have had Mac, Windows, KDE, GNOME, Acorn RISCOS, OS2, Amiga...
In that case, this should be a hugely good thing for you. The HUD is optional- the clicky-mouse menus are still there, exactly as they've always been.
This means that if you're using your mouse and you need a menu item, you can select them without taking your hand off your mouse (i.e., as normal). But if you're typing away with your hands on the keyboard, you can select menu items without taking your hands off the keyboard (which has never been easy before now- mucking around with the "menu" key and tabbing, or whatever you need to do).
It's nothing like the Start Menu in Windows, or the rest- that would be the Unity Dash. The HUD is a way of searching for specific menu items in active programmes- which I'm not aware of a way of doing that in Windows or Android.
(Not that I've got anything against copying features- either Linux copying other OSs, or other OSs copying Linux. Someone has to have a good idea first, and I don't see why other people shouldn't pick up a good idea when they see one. To intentionally ignore a good idea just because someone thought of it before you would be to cut off your nose to spite your face.)
One thing to remember about the HUD is that it's optional. It's essentially a search facility for drop down menu items, but the drop down menus are still there.
I've found it useful for hunting for the odd obscure menu item that I'm not familiar with, but I don't use it a lot; mostly I stick with the GUI menus. Helpfully, the search results in the HUD also contain the full list of where the item was in the drop down menus, meaning it's a useful learning tool for finding menu items for later.
I've been using GNOME up until now, but will likely transition to KDE when I upgrade to 12.04. KDE does seem to be a resource pig, but hey RAM is cheap these days, all my desktops have at least 8GB.
Try XFCE (via Xubuntu). Looks like Gnome2, and is not a resource hog.
YMMV. There're still TVs with set-top aerials around here. They're quite common in blocks of flats which charge for access to the building's communal satellite/cable service, or rental houses where the landlord is too cheap to install a proper rooftop aerial (student housing comes to mind).
When trying to kill someone with a bow and arrow, it's slightly more pressing that you're able to identify someone quickly and at a great distance. Unless you're trying to kill your office suite with a bow and arrow from 50 feet, the same logic probably doesn't apply (although to be fair, if you're using MS Office 2010 this may actually be a valid use case).
Slashdot Mirror
Local government is still government. GP said "via government order...in my neighborhood"; it's fair to assume he meant his local government. GP didn't even say "the" government; if he had, your mistake would be more understandable.
Nobody said that the size or overbearingness of a government had anything to do with the size of the area it governs. North Korea has a similarly sized population to Texas, so the N. Korean government has the same sized area of authority as the Texan state local government. And yet I don't think many people would argue that N. Korea has anything other than a very big, very overbearing government...
If that were true, they probably gave Apple the license for ActiveSync on the cheap; in which case Apple would really be laughing.
You haven't really understood it. You take crude oil, and you refine it by essentially splitting it up into constituent parts. Diesel is one of the things you end up with, petrol is another. One is not the waste product while the other is the "true" product- they're both just products of refining crude oil.
You are right that you can't create one without the other- so if we all went diesel, you'd have a lot of petrol going unused. But realistically there's no danger of that ever happening; the demand for all oil products is huge and dynamic- whenever something gets cheaper due to a drop in demand, someone else quickly finds a use for it at the new price point.
Maybe the US is different, but over hear you need the same expensive exhaust system (a catalytic converter) for a petrol car as you do a diesel car.
Diesel engines themselves can be a little pricey (turbo-charger as standard and all that), but that just translates into a slightly higher retail cost for the car overall.
It means "I agree with this" or "this is true", or some variation on that theme. Referring specifically to the parent post.
The more you know.
I can't figure out what you're trying to say. The original result on Siri (which recommended the Nokia) was a Wolfram Alpha result. The Wolfram Alpha result was based on products on Best Buy in the mobile phone category ranked by customer review; which seems like a pretty valiant attempt at answering the question helpfully. Apple then went out of their way to kill this attempt at answering the question usefully and replace it with a fairly lame joke.
I couldn't care less what the actual result was (HTC is now the top one, followed by a couple of iPhones). I just think it's a dick move to remove functionality just because it hurts your ego.
UK has datacaps on landlines too. I'm a young, download-happy, HD video watching, gaming young professional, and yet I've only ever hit my cap once. All that happened is they added an extra £1 to my bill and 10GB to my cap. It certainly beats "fair usage" throttling.
If I ask for smartphone reviews, I expect smartphone reviews. It does bill itself as your big internet helper. If I wanted jokes when I asked for smartphone reviews, I'd download an app called "smartass jokes".
It's one thing to have jokes in there for when people ask blatantly daft things, like "will you marry me Siri", or "find me a restaurant on Mars". But when you ask a common question with a simple answer, you expect to get an answer.
Exactly! Just like the pizza joint down-street have a monopoly of selling pizzas from their shop. Damn those monopolies.
This is a fun analogy. If you buy a pizza from Frankie's Pizzeria, and instead of eating it you decided to resell it, you could. If you wanted to put it in a different box before you re-sell it, you could. If you wanted to add some extra sauce before you resell it, that's allowed too. Frankie can't say a damned thing about it- the pizza is yours to do with as you will.
That's basically the first sale doctrine. The equivalent here is that Apple sold pizzas (software licenses) to Psystar, but telling them that the only thing they can do with them is eat them; any other activities, and any reselling, is banned.
Planned downtime, theoretically at least, can be placed in non-critical timeslots. My company's just bought into a service with something like four nines uptime, but with fairly chunky "planned downtime" allowances. The mitigating factor is that it's a mostly employee-facing service, and planned downtimes can only be late at night and on weekends. Bearing in mind the users could tolerate considerably worse than four nines (it's a non-critical system), it's not a bad trade-off for such tight SLAs.
I'd guess the real reason- they don't want you to share your copy with your friends.
I have dozens of games- and I have only one copy of each, with only very few exceptions. I can play these, my fiance can play these, my sister played these back when we lived together, my kids will be able to play these. There is usually absolutely no limit to how many concurrent save-games can be held at any one time, so any number of us can share the same game install.
10 characters seems to be the smallest number they could limit it too while still having some arithmetic to back up their reasoning (5 class times 2 genders). But it's enough that a hardcore player would be inconvenienced sharing with a friend, and even casual players would get irritated sharing with two others, with 3.3 character slots to use...
Do try to remember that the presidency is decided by democracy. I know the college system is a little arcane, but I don't know of a single president in recent years who won without a majority (or in Bush Jr's case, a presumed majority and a result close enough as to cause confusion).
Even if the Republican Party went absolutely nuts and said "forget about those 50 really expensive and viciously fought elections we held, lets just give the job to the guy who came fourth", what makes you think the electorate would buy it? The Republican voters have already said who they'd prefer, by almost 5 votes to 1 (in a Romney versus Paul comparison); do you think Paul would have as strong a Republican vote behind him as Romney would? And who do you think is better positioned to poach Democrat and swing voters from Obama- safe centrist Romney, or radical right-winger Paul? At least Romney could hope for some "anyone but Obama" protest votes...
Nintendo famously don't sell the Wii at a loss- the console sales price makes a profit, and they get a chunk of the games sales too in the same way as the other players.
Even if Sony and MS were trouncing Nintendo on market share, they're unlikely to be beating them in terms of return on investment. Which, from a shareholder/investor point of view, is the metric which matters.
The Xbox division is indeed doing great, but Ballmer seems to undermine it every time he can. There were some big losses last year due to some acquisitions (Skype? not sure...) and they "balanced the books" by punishing a lot of divisions, the Xbox division I understand was hit hard and would had shined had they not done that.
It's like Ballmer is ashamed of anything that does not have a big Windows brand in the box, when perhaps he should be doing the opposite.
Can you imagine how well Apple would had fared had they called their iPhone a MacPhone instead? I bet it would have been a flop just due to the horrible unmarketable name.
It’s time Microsoft realizes their future is in the Metro/Xbox brands, not in the Windows/Office ones. Ballmer's resistance is slowly going to kill Microsoft.
To be fair to Microsoft, they abandoned their Windows brand on one of their major at-the-time-new products. And yet for some reason the Zune still didn't take off...
I don't know what you're thinking with the "Metro brand". Are you suggesting they drop the Windows brand from their still market leading desktop OS (the only place where the Windows brand makes sense)? Are you suggesting they replace it with a brand which has so far attracted ample scorn from the internet's chattering classes, and is completely unknown to anybody else?
I don't really mean to be championing Unity- I dumped it for XFCE on my main machines, and have only kept it on my small-screen netbook- but it isn't all bad.
The taskbar on the left can now be set to only pop up when you whack your cursor into the side of the screen with some force. It has completely stopped the irritating "pop up every time I try to click anything on the left of the screen" syndrome, which nearly made me ditch it from my last machine.
Automatic maximisation- it does that whenever a window tries to open at more than 75% of screen size. This is a setting that can be changed in the conventional way.
The window menu being at the top edge is still irritating on a big screen, but it's no hardship on 9".
If unity is the most irritating, least intuitive scheme you've ever tried, I recommend steering clear of Gnome3 :)
Perhaps my comment about the primary maintainer taking something closed. That's a concern with software (regardless of license, including the GPL) because whenever an organization or company that owns a project's copyright (or enough of the copyright that they can easily rewrite the rest) decides to create a closed-source fork of that project, it generally results in the death of the open source fork of the project, for all intents and purposes.
This will always be the case where a project has significant corporate backers. If you have a large corporate backer, you are always at risk of them pulling the plug, forking, or in other ways derailing the project. If you don't have significant corporate backers this is not a problem- but you're also far less likely to have a seriously competitive piece of software.
The same problem applies similarly to GPL works, seeing as corporate backers can still pull the plug. For example, if Canonical were to drop Ubuntu, the distro would start to suffer very quickly. GPL just closes off the one possible line of attack, in that the company can't have their cake and eat it too- they can either abandon the open source project (and drop their favourite software at the same time), or they can keep their favourite software (and inevitably keep the open source project too). Under a BSD license, having cake and eating it is very possible- they can drop the open source project, but still keep their shiny software (including the work of all the lovely folk who are no-longer invited to play).
What this clause really does is say that the FSF can at any time change the details of the license you are giving to your users.
It absolutely does not. The license you give to your user is whatever words you put in the license you give to your user. You can make this up yourself, or you can use a license someone else has written for you. All the FSF does is provide legally tested templates to you to use, and they put a new version number in whenever they release a new one. If they said one day "we've decided to change the GPL v2 to be [something madly different]" it would have no effect on any software, except those that chose to adopt the new licence. You, as a user, are not bound to anything other than the license that was in place when you first purchased/downloaded/received the software.
If the FSF took a mad one and decided to write a new license, they would call it "GPL v4" and software distributors would be free to adopt it or not as they see fit. And you would be equally free to leave the license as it is, or change it in some other way that suits you, or switch to another well-known license, or write a new one from scratch, or commission a lawyer to write one for you...
I agree with most of what you say but equally how sad is it that the world judges someone's suitability to run a multinational based on their qualifications rather than the many years of experience they have had since then and / or how good they are at their job. That bit of paper doesn't make someone better suited to run a company than Steve Jobs or Bill Gates etc. just because they didn't complete their courses.
I think he was fired for attempting to defraud his employer. The actual thing he was lying about (the degree) is almost immaterial.
To be an absurdly high paid CEO, you need to have proved yourself to be better, in every way, than the competition. "Lies to us about trivial things and has been for years" is probably not high on the list of desirable traits for "leader of multi-billion pound company which I own".
Maybe- I've never heard of that feature before.
I'm not claiming that Unity did it first or that it's unique, by the way. I was just saying that the new feature for menu items (which is the topic in hand) in Unity is pretty decent, in response to someone blaming Unity for bad menus. I've nothing against Ubuntu stealing Apple's good ideas (or vice versa)- a good idea is a good idea, and you'd have to be stupid not to use a good idea when you see one (patents and other nonsense aside). Don't forget that the whole desktop paradigm was a good idea by Xerox- if other companies hadn't recognised that good idea when they saw it, we wouldn't have had Mac, Windows, KDE, GNOME, Acorn RISCOS, OS2, Amiga...
In that case, this should be a hugely good thing for you. The HUD is optional- the clicky-mouse menus are still there, exactly as they've always been.
This means that if you're using your mouse and you need a menu item, you can select them without taking your hand off your mouse (i.e., as normal). But if you're typing away with your hands on the keyboard, you can select menu items without taking your hands off the keyboard (which has never been easy before now- mucking around with the "menu" key and tabbing, or whatever you need to do).
It's nothing like the Start Menu in Windows, or the rest- that would be the Unity Dash. The HUD is a way of searching for specific menu items in active programmes- which I'm not aware of a way of doing that in Windows or Android.
(Not that I've got anything against copying features- either Linux copying other OSs, or other OSs copying Linux. Someone has to have a good idea first, and I don't see why other people shouldn't pick up a good idea when they see one. To intentionally ignore a good idea just because someone thought of it before you would be to cut off your nose to spite your face.)
One thing to remember about the HUD is that it's optional. It's essentially a search facility for drop down menu items, but the drop down menus are still there.
I've found it useful for hunting for the odd obscure menu item that I'm not familiar with, but I don't use it a lot; mostly I stick with the GUI menus. Helpfully, the search results in the HUD also contain the full list of where the item was in the drop down menus, meaning it's a useful learning tool for finding menu items for later.
I've been using GNOME up until now, but will likely transition to KDE when I upgrade to 12.04. KDE does seem to be a resource pig, but hey RAM is cheap these days, all my desktops have at least 8GB.
Try XFCE (via Xubuntu). Looks like Gnome2, and is not a resource hog.
YMMV. There're still TVs with set-top aerials around here. They're quite common in blocks of flats which charge for access to the building's communal satellite/cable service, or rental houses where the landlord is too cheap to install a proper rooftop aerial (student housing comes to mind).
When trying to kill someone with a bow and arrow, it's slightly more pressing that you're able to identify someone quickly and at a great distance. Unless you're trying to kill your office suite with a bow and arrow from 50 feet, the same logic probably doesn't apply (although to be fair, if you're using MS Office 2010 this may actually be a valid use case).