What other use is there for music and movies other than personal?
Commercial: You can play music at a dance and sell tickets, you can play music in your restaurant, etc. You can play movies in a theatre, or sell DVD's from a booth.
Educational: You can use music and movies as part of educational presentations, research, demonstrations and experiments.
they use GNOME by default in the vain hope that commercial software developers will have easier time releasing closed-source binaries for their distros
That, in a nutshell, is my personal concern/problem with KDE. I have difficulty with the concept that a single company (Trolltech) has the potential to become the "toll collector" for commercial software development on Linux.
Even on Microsoft platforms, you can purchase compilers from third parties that can talk to the Windows API and use them without having to pay anything extra to Microsoft.
The 'Commodore' branded monitor is a little fuzzy now,
Really? I still use a Commodore 1701 monitor for my television set. (Actually, I just watch occasional DVD's on it as I gave up on TV in the mid-80's, but same idea.)
I learned to type on old Underwood manual typewriters in high school typing class, but somehow never became good at typing the number keys until I started typing in MLX programs out of Compute's Gazette.
Of course, today I still never touch the numeric keypad on a keyboard; I always type numbers using the top row.
Man, I later had "turbo tape", which was basically a binary packer(I guess?)
Actually, it wasn't. The default and usual method for a C64 to save data to tape was to save it twice. Then on reading the data back, it read both copies and compared them for verification.
Turbo Tape simply forced the machine to write and use once copy.
A guy I used to know owned a house that was on the outside of a curve in the road. A few times every year, someone driving too fast missed the curve and ended up in his front yard. He was afraid that one of them would end up in his living room sometime, so he looked into getting a reinforced cement wall built around his property on that side.
A lawyer advised him that since the obvious purpose of the wall would be to keep vehicles out of his yard, he could be sued by anyone who hit the wall, and ghawd-help-him if anyone was killed by hitting that wall.
Are you telling me that the cost to print, ship, and warehouse a 784 page book is only $3
It may not be much more than that. I'm familiar with a guy who owns a print shop that prints, binds and boxes a spiral-bound 280-page textbook that is sold in college and university bookstores for $88. He gets $3 per copy.
I keep an abacus on the shelf with my ready-to-hand reference books, right beside my Linux computer. Does that count?
No joke. I use my abacus to do binary arithmetic, counting, and other calculations. Really. It makes it easy to visualize the operations and makes errors a bit more obvious than trying to figure it out in my head or by using a calculator.
I used to have a tiny little abacus, but I got a really nice 13-rod Chinese abacus last year as a gift and love it.
So you think we should have left Saddam in power in Iraq
I'm certainly not any kind of an expert on Iraq, but from what I read in the news it seems to me that the average man-on-the-street was better off under Saddam than he is now. The streets were safe(r), utilities like water and electricity worked like they're supposed to, and there was a lot less unemployment and a lot more food and other necessities.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, because as I said, all I know about Iraq is what I read in the papers...
Could you build a crossbow? How hard would it be for you to even FIND a person that could buid you a crossbow?
I have a set of Popular Mechanics Do-it-Yourself Encyclopedias that has complete instructions, photos and diagrams for building a powerful crossbow using a leaf spring out of a car. The copyright date is 1955, so the books aren't THAT old.
Because programming is producing a "good" not a service,
And the plumber installing your new toilet is doing exactly what that's different than you installing my new software? One way I get something I can flush, the other way I get something I can count the flushes with.
Actually, you might be surprised. There is actually a reasonable-sized IT industry here. Relatively speaking, of course.
It's my understanding that we have some of the cheapest, most reliable and "best" Internet access anywhere in North America -- almost every small town with a population over about 300 or 400 people has high-speed unlimited DSL service available from Sask Tel for about $45 per month.
What makes you think the majority cost of publishing is in distribution and printing?
I don't know about distribution, but I was talking to a chap who owns a printing company the other day. He prints and spiral-binds a 210-page book for university bookstores. He gets paid $3 for each book he prints. They sell the book for $88.
I own and operate a movie theatre. Accordingly, I spend a lot of time sitting in my lobby waiting for shows to be over, waiting for crowds to show up before the show, waiting for people to leave after the show... I spend a lot of time waiting.
About a year ago I set up a Neoware Capio 616 terminal using LTSP. I made a special, narrow computer desk on wheels with slide-out keyboard tray and put the terminal, a 17" LCD monitor and a keyboard and mouse on it. It lives behind my ticket counter and I read all sorts of ebooks in PDF format on it. (And browse Slashdot.)
I was using Acrobat Reader for reading books but just updated my main computer to Fedora 8/x86_64 and since acroread isn't available in a x86_64 version I've been using evince for the past week or so.
(Yes, I know I could install the i386 libraries on this computer and use acroread that way -- I'm trying to avoid that if I can.)
I spent a year or so reading books on a Palm Tungsten E with Weasel Reader, but now that I have my 17" monitor I can get my books on-screen either one or two pages at a time. Times New Roman font, 15 point text seems to work the best for me.
I can sit back and read my book effortlessly, just push a key to go to the next page. The computer holds my book for me, it remembers where I left off the last time and re-opens the book to that page, and I can just push the whole works off to the side (wheels, remember?) when someone walks in the door.
You'd essentially be giving the game away, and hope people would pay you.
That actually worked pretty well for me, back in the late 80's/early 90's. I wrote a fax cover sheet generating program, mostly for my own use and the use of the people in the office where I worked at the time. Just to see what would happen, I released it as $20 shareware. Somewhat to my surprise, over the course of the next few years I had a fairly substantial number of outfits send me $20. Mostly lawyers offices, travel agencies and manufacturing plants.
One thing I don't understand is why ISPs don't try to get some deals with AV vendors to bundle it with their access.
The ISP that I do some occasional tech work for has a deal with F-secure to resell their "AV solution" to their customers. I think they charge $6 per month for the service.
For one thing, they are making it necessary to have mailservers that can handle a much larger amount of traffic than what would be required if the spam was not present. "Much larger" being about ten times larger, actually. And those machines aren't free of charge.
If you don't directly have to purchase and operate your own mailserver, you still pay through higher fees to your ISP.
What's more disruptive to your inability to handle interruptions: me receiving an IM on vibrate or an usher pausing the movie, turning on the lights, and paging (as in literally, sending a page, or message carrier) to fetch me?
Pardon me?
I own a movie theatre. I have people "on call" (fire department, doctors, the electricity utility guy) come to the show regularly. "I'm on call and I'm sitting in the third row from the back, second seat from the aisle."
It's not that hard to deal with. I can tap you on the shoulder if there is a call for you.
I have only stopped a movie in the middle and turned on the lights twice, and I've been doing this for a long time. The first time was when there was a car on fire in front of the lobby doors. The second was when the police showed up to arrest someone who was at the movie.
non-commercial open source software only? So any commercial use of that software will still open you up to infringement claims? If so, what's the point. MS is not worried about little Joey using FOSS in his basement for "non-commerical purposes". The use of that same software in a data center is apparently not covered by this agreement, so again... what's the point?
Slashdot Mirror
Snapper
What other use is there for music and movies other than personal?
Commercial: You can play music at a dance and sell tickets, you can play music in your restaurant, etc. You can play movies in a theatre, or sell DVD's from a booth.
Educational: You can use music and movies as part of educational presentations, research, demonstrations and experiments.
And so on.
they use GNOME by default in the vain hope that commercial software developers will have easier time releasing closed-source binaries for their distros
That, in a nutshell, is my personal concern/problem with KDE. I have difficulty with the concept that a single company (Trolltech) has the potential to become the "toll collector" for commercial software development on Linux.
Even on Microsoft platforms, you can purchase compilers from third parties that can talk to the Windows API and use them without having to pay anything extra to Microsoft.
The 'Commodore' branded monitor is a little fuzzy now,
Really? I still use a Commodore 1701 monitor for my television set. (Actually, I just watch occasional DVD's on it as I gave up on TV in the mid-80's, but same idea.)
I learned to type on my C=64.
I learned to type numbers (top row) on my C64.
I learned to type on old Underwood manual typewriters in high school typing class, but somehow never became good at typing the number keys until I started typing in MLX programs out of Compute's Gazette.
Of course, today I still never touch the numeric keypad on a keyboard; I always type numbers using the top row.
Man, I later had "turbo tape", which was basically a binary packer(I guess?)
Actually, it wasn't. The default and usual method for a C64 to save data to tape was to save it twice. Then on reading the data back, it read both copies and compared them for verification.
Turbo Tape simply forced the machine to write and use once copy.
I wonder about liability issues.
A guy I used to know owned a house that was on the outside of a curve in the road. A few times every year, someone driving too fast missed the curve and ended up in his front yard. He was afraid that one of them would end up in his living room sometime, so he looked into getting a reinforced cement wall built around his property on that side.
A lawyer advised him that since the obvious purpose of the wall would be to keep vehicles out of his yard, he could be sued by anyone who hit the wall, and ghawd-help-him if anyone was killed by hitting that wall.
He never did build it.
Are you telling me that the cost to print, ship, and warehouse a 784 page book is only $3
It may not be much more than that. I'm familiar with a guy who owns a print shop that prints, binds and boxes a spiral-bound 280-page textbook that is sold in college and university bookstores for $88. He gets $3 per copy.
do the abacuses run Linux?
I keep an abacus on the shelf with my ready-to-hand reference books, right beside my Linux computer. Does that count?
No joke. I use my abacus to do binary arithmetic, counting, and other calculations. Really. It makes it easy to visualize the operations and makes errors a bit more obvious than trying to figure it out in my head or by using a calculator.
I used to have a tiny little abacus, but I got a really nice 13-rod Chinese abacus last year as a gift and love it.
So you think we should have left Saddam in power in Iraq
I'm certainly not any kind of an expert on Iraq, but from what I read in the news it seems to me that the average man-on-the-street was better off under Saddam than he is now. The streets were safe(r), utilities like water and electricity worked like they're supposed to, and there was a lot less unemployment and a lot more food and other necessities.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, because as I said, all I know about Iraq is what I read in the papers...
Could you build a crossbow? How hard would it be for you to even FIND a person that could buid you a crossbow?
I have a set of Popular Mechanics Do-it-Yourself Encyclopedias that has complete instructions, photos and diagrams for building a powerful crossbow using a leaf spring out of a car. The copyright date is 1955, so the books aren't THAT old.
Because programming is producing a "good" not a service,
And the plumber installing your new toilet is doing exactly what that's different than you installing my new software? One way I get something I can flush, the other way I get something I can count the flushes with.
Actually, you might be surprised. There is actually a reasonable-sized IT industry here. Relatively speaking, of course.
It's my understanding that we have some of the cheapest, most reliable and "best" Internet access anywhere in North America -- almost every small town with a population over about 300 or 400 people has high-speed unlimited DSL service available from Sask Tel for about $45 per month.
We have had 5% Provincial Sales Tax on computer programming services in Saskatchewan for a few years now. And the 6% Federal GST as well.
What makes you think the majority cost of publishing is in distribution and printing?
I don't know about distribution, but I was talking to a chap who owns a printing company the other day. He prints and spiral-binds a 210-page book for university bookstores. He gets paid $3 for each book he prints. They sell the book for $88.
I own and operate a movie theatre. Accordingly, I spend a lot of time sitting in my lobby waiting for shows to be over, waiting for crowds to show up before the show, waiting for people to leave after the show... I spend a lot of time waiting.
About a year ago I set up a Neoware Capio 616 terminal using LTSP. I made a special, narrow computer desk on wheels with slide-out keyboard tray and put the terminal, a 17" LCD monitor and a keyboard and mouse on it. It lives behind my ticket counter and I read all sorts of ebooks in PDF format on it. (And browse Slashdot.)
I was using Acrobat Reader for reading books but just updated my main computer to Fedora 8/x86_64 and since acroread isn't available in a x86_64 version I've been using evince for the past week or so.
(Yes, I know I could install the i386 libraries on this computer and use acroread that way -- I'm trying to avoid that if I can.)
I spent a year or so reading books on a Palm Tungsten E with Weasel Reader, but now that I have my 17" monitor I can get my books on-screen either one or two pages at a time. Times New Roman font, 15 point text seems to work the best for me.
I can sit back and read my book effortlessly, just push a key to go to the next page. The computer holds my book for me, it remembers where I left off the last time and re-opens the book to that page, and I can just push the whole works off to the side (wheels, remember?) when someone walks in the door.
You'd essentially be giving the game away, and hope people would pay you.
That actually worked pretty well for me, back in the late 80's/early 90's. I wrote a fax cover sheet generating program, mostly for my own use and the use of the people in the office where I worked at the time. Just to see what would happen, I released it as $20 shareware. Somewhat to my surprise, over the course of the next few years I had a fairly substantial number of outfits send me $20. Mostly lawyers offices, travel agencies and manufacturing plants.
One thing I don't understand is why ISPs don't try to get some deals with AV vendors to bundle it with their access.
The ISP that I do some occasional tech work for has a deal with F-secure to resell their "AV solution" to their customers. I think they charge $6 per month for the service.
For one thing, they are making it necessary to have mailservers that can handle a much larger amount of traffic than what would be required if the spam was not present. "Much larger" being about ten times larger, actually. And those machines aren't free of charge.
If you don't directly have to purchase and operate your own mailserver, you still pay through higher fees to your ISP.
Drive to Mexico, take a plane from one of how-many airports there to Russia. Or Panama. Or Brazil...
Shouldn't that be a determination for the jury to make?
What's more disruptive to your inability to handle interruptions: me receiving an IM on vibrate or an usher pausing the movie, turning on the lights, and paging (as in literally, sending a page, or message carrier) to fetch me?
Pardon me?
I own a movie theatre. I have people "on call" (fire department, doctors, the electricity utility guy) come to the show regularly. "I'm on call and I'm sitting in the third row from the back, second seat from the aisle."
It's not that hard to deal with. I can tap you on the shoulder if there is a call for you.
I have only stopped a movie in the middle and turned on the lights twice, and I've been doing this for a long time. The first time was when there was a car on fire in front of the lobby doors. The second was when the police showed up to arrest someone who was at the movie.
Mixing powdered iron into the paint used on the walls will greatly decrease RF signal strength across much of the spectrum
What about the ceiling? Wouldn't you have to coat that as well?
The whole point of FOSS is that I can fix it myself if I want to.
non-commercial open source software only? So any commercial use of that software will still open you up to infringement claims? If so, what's the point. MS is not worried about little Joey using FOSS in his basement for "non-commerical purposes". The use of that same software in a data center is apparently not covered by this agreement, so again... what's the point?